There's much for us to chew on in Camus' discomfit. I share his departure
from the truck of much liberal and progressive thinking which posits a Rousseau-like
vision of human beings. The big question remains unanswered: How did essentially
good and pristine men come to build bad institutions in the first place?
For Camus, men are not social animals, but have need of society's laws for
their physical survival. He places law's final justification in its reasonability
and workability; in the good it does or fails to do in the society of a
given place and time.
Reel forward through a highlight morsel of the past 40 years of victims
and victimizers on the American criminal landscape: Kitty Genovese; the
Three Charlies: Whitman, Starkweather and Manson; Cheney, Schwerner and
Goodman; Fred Hampton; Juan Corona; John Wayne Gacy; Polly Klaas; assorted
other serial and mass murderers; childkillers and pedophilic dismemberment
specialists; twisty, television-fed drug-trade pogromists. An emergent electronic
media pinioned viewers nightly with the latest carnage, politicians deftly
utilized it, and the retaliatory inclination, in turn, assumed a peculiarly
American fervor -- one whose possibilities invite consideration.
Imagine televising death penalty proponents assembled in a bar at half-time
of Monday Night Football games, the way visiting teams' fans are often shown.
TV monitors along the walls display, in split-screen, the barroom and the
inside of a prison gas chamber. These people are a select group, publicly
representing a nationwide audience, gathered to witness an execution --
carried out not by the state but by the family of a murder victim.
What has occasioned this situation is an idea that has been obscured by
the larger debate over capital punishment, and one we are obliged to examine:
The possibility that, perhaps, as a consequence of one of these grisly and
heinous murders, the only way the family of a victim can ever regain
psychological equilibrium is to see the perpetrator executed. And that the
state, concurrently acknowledging that deterrence is a sham, would permanently
turn over to next-of-kin the ability to salve their grief. Revenge reclaims,
if you will, integrity by becoming personal.
Whether the condemned will in fact die is the decision of each family,
and its alone; no one will know until the appointed moment. A determinate
date of six months after imposition of sentencing should be established;
time enough for the family to fully comprehend the nature of its ordeal
and options, a process in many ways analogous to that of the counterpart
with whom it is locked in symbiotic embrace.
The barroom witnesses should certainly include children, and they should
be encouraged to ask questions of their parents about the proceedings. They
will view the face of the condemned on one half of the monitor's screen,
and view themselves on the screen's other half. The nationwide audience
will be afforded a similar perspective, and the condemned will be able to
see the crowd on a chamber monitor.
A country overwhelmingly disposed to retribution is thus enabled to view
itself celebrating its solidarity for what it believes is a just and equivalent
act. It watches itself instructing its children, in real time on Monday
nights, on the efficacy of capital punishment. The aura of secrecy and darkness
associated with the state-as-executioner is replaced by open national camaraderie
and family values.
Would such an ongoing spectacle exacerbate our sadistic instincts or induce
revulsion? Would an aggrieved family who might ultimately decline to deliver
reprisal then suffer the displaced and instantly visible rage of a nation
which expected its sense of justice to be honored? Or would we eventually
come to glimpse ourselves as codependent participants in the equivalent
of yet another afternoon talk show?
Clearly, here, we're afforded an opportunity to learn much about who we
are, as distinct from who we believed we were. At the very least, transferring
the privilege to execute from the domain of bureaucrats to the victim's
family deprives the act of its abstract status. It is no longer merely something
the state does in our name. It is ours, finally and truly, to deal with,
and the debate and our character as a people can only be clarified as a
consequence.