TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050492/0504640.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 5.8 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 84

Television Dances With the Reaper


By Lance Morrow


    Welcome to American Moral Blood Sports -- live and in
color. On the program: from Buffalo, the Pro-Choicers meet the
Pro-Lifers for another in-your-face metaphysical infuriator. And
from San Quentin, Calif., after a 14-year legal preliminary, a
night of ghastly last-minute appeals and
strap-him-in-take-him-out action as double-murderer Robert Alton
Harris flirts with cyanide and exhales death-row doggerel.
(Close-up. Harris, macho-sardonic: "You can be a king or a
street sweeper,/ But everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.")
Back after this . . .

    Television has all but swallowed American politics and
sport. Now it is closing in on the nation's moral dilemmas.
Debates of the toughest questions (abortion, the death penalty,
for example) look like wrestling or professional football. When
Robert Harris was executed in California last week, the event
had a strange gaudy quality, somehow commercial and electronic.
Perhaps one day prisoners will go to the gas chamber with
product-endorsement logos on their prison pajamas.

    Americana: Harris' last meal was two large pizzas, a
bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a six-pack of Pepsi, a bag of
jelly beans, a pack of Camel cigarettes. Junk food was a sort
of surreal motif in the case. In 1978 Harris murdered two
teenage boys in order to steal their car for a bank robbery,
and, having killed them, he finished the burgers they had been
eating. (My theory is that Harris would be alive today if he had
not eaten the burgers. That detail must have struck the jurors
as the cool, novelistic touch of Satan.)

    The state of California might as well have executed Harris
on the 50-yd. line at half time of the Super Bowl -- the two
moral constituencies, pro-death penalty and con, cheering or
shrieking from either side of the stadium, the federal judiciary
hovering overhead like a black blimp. When Harris was finally
dead, America saw the postgame show: witnesses to the execution
describing how the prisoner may or may not have mouthed the
words "I'm sorry" to the father of one of the victims; breathed
the fumes; convulsed and drooled; then died.

    Socrates did not say the untelevised life is not worth
living. He said the unexamined life. The unexamined death is a
waste too. Socrates spent the hours before his execution by
hemlock in 399 B.C. discussing the immortality of the soul.
Reflection is not television's strong suit. The medium is a
fairly crude moral filter, a kind of brilliant, overstimulated
cretin. Its brain waves are discontinuous.

    Leave aside the question of whether capital punishment is
right or wrong. If the people choose to execute a criminal, how
should it be done? Before what audience? In full video, as a
kind of Islamic-electronic retribution spectacle?

    The Eighth Amendment forbids "cruel and unusual
punishments." Some of the witnesses last week thought the
cyanide, which took some minutes to kill Harris, was barbaric.
That is an insult to centuries of creative barbarians, who have
administered capital punishment by boiling in oil, burning at
the stake, flaying to death, crushing, impaling, drowning,
crucifying, drawing and quartering, disemboweling, gibbeting,
garroting, throwing to lions and much, much worse. Cyanide, by
comparison, is a sweet pink poof of cessation. Would last week's
witnesses have been happier if California had used a neat bullet
to the base of the brain (the method the Chinese authorities
favor now)? Or if the state had injected Harris with a lethal
shot of cocaine so that he would depart in a blinding rush of
pleasure? What was truly cruel and unusual -- virtually sadistic
-- was the way that the quarreling judicial stage managers
jerked Harris in and out of the gas chamber, the man not knowing
whether he was to die or be spared. In that long night, he died
several deaths.

    Executions in past centuries were public events -- part
ritual of citizenship, part savage entertainment. Every
self-respecting English town had its gallows. As prisoners were
carted from jail to noose, their friends along the route passed
them strong drink and might turn the last mile into a macabrely
hilarious rolling party. Later, the decorous 19th century
thought it more humane and seemly to execute people out of
sight, behind the prison walls.

    Maybe that was a mistake. In a poem, Robert Lowell wrote,
"My eyes have seen what my hand did." Does the public have a
right, even a duty, to watch its executions, to see exactly what
its hand has done? What would be the effect?

    If TV cameras had been present during the American Civil
War to record the slaughters of Cold Harbor, say, or the
Wilderness, the public might have been so sickened that it would
have abandoned the struggle. The country might have split into
the United States and the Confederate States; slavery might have
survived a long time. Some think seeing executions on television
would so repel the public that it would abolish capital
punishment. Some believe showing such vivid evidence of the
punishment would deter people from committing the crimes.
Perhaps. Or would televised executions become something like
what they were once -- grisly popular entertainments?

    The answer is all of the above. Emphasis on the
entertainment. People pay millions to watch terminators and
terminations. They have a taste for it. The distinction between
actual death and special effects gets blurry in this culture.
It thins to vanishing. Reality and unreality become ugly,
interchangeable kicks. Perhaps if Harris had been spared, he
might, like Audie Murphy, have been hired to play himself in the
docudrama.