Dialogue: Executions these days so nice and hygenic

By GORDON McLAUGHLAN

When Timothy McVeigh is put to sleep next month, the concept of the execution of criminals as an act of justice will have taken another insidious step forward. His death will be watched by at least a few hundred people and perhaps even by millions - depending on whether the first amendment to the United States constitution can be stretched to further absurdities.

Freedom of speech has already accommodated the notion that obscene thoughts should be publicly lanced like boils for the benefit of all of us through the lyrics of entertainers like Eminem. Consequently, it might seem reasonable to accept the idea that vile deeds should be matched by equally vile public deeds.

And it will all seem so easy, so hygienic. McVeigh will be strapped to the "gurney" (a friendly word that, also meaning hospital stretcher), say a few self-important words and take a permanent nap.

No clattering gallows and a body wrenched into a slack bag of skin. No hacking at the guts followed by spilling intestines. No high-arcing sword to hack a head into a basket. No barking of firearms and a bloodying figure slumping at a stake. Just a man going gently to sleep like the ageing cat with cancer we reluctantly had put down a few years ago as gently and painlessly as possible.

The lethal injection is without fuss, without apparent violence, without the unseemliness of gore and of bodies behaving badly, without even a true sense of death - more a kind of moral cleansing. The death penalty and euthanasia may soon come together in the interests of ending odious social embarrassments.

Perhaps one day soon these gentle public judicial murders will have their own pay channel and become a kind of soft porn for psychopaths.

No one - even in Texas, the capital punishment capital of the US - seems to be urging a return to the lash or the cane as instruments of justice. Is this because it's impossible to administer it without the victim revealing agony, without the ugly sight of tearing flesh offending the sensibilities of the just and forcing them to examine their consciences?

I have tried to climb into the minds of those Americans who want to watch McVeigh die to see "justice" done. Is their justice that kind of elemental revenge of the Old Testament, a book so revered as a literal code of conduct by so many of them? Or is it a hangover from the Old West with its recurring myth that order is imposed on anarchy only by good guys killing bad guys? If you've ever been to Texas you'll have noticed that many men there affect a kind of male swank and hubris.

I used to think all people in any community that legislated for capital punishment should be forced to watch it, but I fear too many Americans might enjoy the experience, especially now that it's without havoc.

And what about Timothy McVeigh? Does he fit the comforting (for capital punishment fans) image of the reckless, blood-lusting monster? I'd say the opposite is true - that he's an insensate psychopath, an emotional cripple incapable of compassion for himself or anyone else, without anything like the normal range of human feelings. He's shown no remorse for even the children he so casually killed and he wants to die, too. I'd say it wasn't extreme hate that drove McVeigh but the lack of any feeling, the cold, warped, self-obsessed rationality of the fanatic.

If you examine his beliefs you'll find they're not all that different from the philosophy of a substantial minority of right-wing Americans who believe the Government, although democratic, is the enemy against whom they should be ready to bear arms in defence of some deluded vision of freedom. If you listen carefully you'll find it has much to do with the freedom to oppress those who disagree. McVeigh just reduces these beliefs to his own horrendous banality.

Fanatics don't arise spontaneously. They don't know who they are and in trying to define themselves join other groups of the lost and become mentally and morally cramped up by notions of racial, national, intellectual or religious superiority.

There is gathering opposition to executions in the US among the many millions of intelligent and compassionate American people because of the number of victims who have been inadequately represented in court (including one whose counsel nodded off to sleep on occasions during the trial), who have been severely intellectually handicapped, and because of the proportion of the white and well-off who escape the death penalty compared with those who are black and poor. All this is giving executions a bad name again.

In the meantime, I would like to ask the grief-stricken (to whom my heart goes out): why do you want to assuage your anguish at all those murders with yet another? I would like to ask the voyeurs, the "just" and those who, despite all the evidence think this is a deterrent: will some Great Truth be honoured by this killing of McVeigh, will the anger of your Old Testament God be propitiated by the sacrifice? Will we be bigger, better people for this revenge, or will we all be diminished?