Dialogue: Mercy, I thought, endured forever

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Heaven must be a battlefield of warring, competitive, tribal gods because so many people down here claim ownership of altogether different sorts of deities.

Take Jason Clark, of Massey, who, responding to my plea for the life of Timothy McVeigh, wrote: "Justice will be done, remorseless and inevitable. Then McVeigh will stand before Almighty God who will likewise judge him guilty and condemn him to Hell. Justice will be done."

Here is a guy convinced he has a direct line to God. His is a cast of mind that saves him the trouble of thinking - a sedulous insistence that he knows absolutely what God knows and, therefore, he must always be right on moral issues. It is characteristic of God-botherers that they have slogans extracted from "holy" books that cannot, in their minds, be argued.

Clark says the execution of McVeigh is about justice. Justice pure and simple. Justice neither cruel nor kind, devoid of mercy. Justice that is summed up in the words, "He that sheds the blood of man, by man his blood shall be shed."

Oh dear, oh dear! This kind of faith-based sloganeering can be used to justify almost anything, and the fact that it is unreasoning and unreasonable is so often of no concern to its perpetrators. For example, Clark says justice should be devoid of mercy, and adds, "As for mercy? 'The merciful shall obtain mercy'." Where does this leave Clark and the executioners then?

Religious sloganeering can get like a tennis match with one player serving an eye-for-an-eye and the other backhanding with a turn-the-other-cheek. A mate of mine recently reread the Old Testament and we had a hilarious conversation about rape, murder, mayhem and human sacrifice in a book some poor sods with literal minds regard as a handbook for clean and decent living.

Christians, Clark says, are my "pet peeve." Well, my peevability rating is nothing compared with that of Christians among themselves.

I was once in a small American town which had 18 churches - one for every 26 inhabitants - because of a chain reaction of schisms among the Protestant inhabitants. Some of the churches were small and closed, with no congregations any more, because, someone told me only partly in jest, that people couldn't remember what the original point of being peeved was.

And, far from being peeved, I cannot tell you how much compassion and admiration I have for the father, a Catholic, whose only daughter was a victim of the Oklahoma City bombing and who rings McVeigh's father a couple of times a week to comfort him.

"He's going to lose a son," says Bud Welch, and executing the murderer "isn't going to bring Julie Marie back."

This very human man said his feelings of rage and vengeance were so strong immediately after the bombing that he would best describe it as a period of "temporary insanity." What infinite charity and love that Christian has.

From what I have read, most of the other victims' relatives who oppose the execution do so because of their Christian beliefs. So their God and Jason Clark's must be at least snubbing each other at the moment.

Far from being "pure and simple," justice is a complex and difficult problem at all levels, and one that's concerning many imaginative and sensitive Americans. In a review of a new book about crime and punishment, Christian Parenti likens the American prison system to the Vietnam War.

He writes: "Vietnam eventually ended but the insanity and racism of the prison boom - we have 4 per cent of the world's population but 25 per cent of all prisoners, and half of US prisoners are black - are still in a 'pre-Tet' stage of escalation."

The prison population is growing at an unmanageable rate mainly because of the incarceration of people convicted of drug offences, most of them without any record of violence, a fact millions of white, middle-class Americans could reflect on while indulging the recreational drug use that economically feeds the industry.

And some prison conditions are appalling. A federal judge in Alabama visited a county jail designed to hold 96, which now has 256 inmates. He was so angered that he wrote a blistering report ordering that the state prisoners be removed by the middle of this month and the jail cleaned.

The reason the Alabama county jails are packed is that the state saves $150,000 a day by avoiding moving them to state prisons. The New York Times reports that Alabama's rate of incarceration is rising by 130 prisoners a month as the state legislature has increased drug penalties and reduced parole. The paper says: "Judges are getting angry, and even county sheriffs are threatening legal action if their jail populations are not reduced."

Those who think that even New Zealand's drug-enforcement laws are sensible and that increased jail sentences are always socially productive are deluding themselves. The Government seems amenable to changes in the drug laws but it knows as well as I do that nothing in this area of policy is as "pure and simple" as ideologues would insist.

My experience suggests that for most people a job and decent wage are a much more effective deterrent to crimes such as drug abuse than jail will ever be. But providing full employment seems beyond the economic ingenuity of modern man.