Private Execution

 So I guess, per Trump's remarks yesterday, our nation will not in fact be live-streaming the gruesome death by firing squad of a human being for the delectation of howling social media mobs, despite Pete Hegseth's earlier pledge. Even Trump appears to have blanched at the optics of lining up rifles to shoot down a semi-paralyzed man who uses a wheelchair to get around.

But it's only the live-streaming that's been called off, keep in mind. Not the execution itself. That means a group of U.S. soldiers will still be lining up, presumably, with rifles at the ready, and gunning to death a disabled man. The bullets will still tear through his flesh and blot out his life. He will still void his bowels in the final moment of agony. 

The only difference now is that the public at large will not see it happen—so it need not trouble our conscience.

I'm suddenly back again on the Albert Camus side of this argument. Maybe it is better for our character as human beings not to sadistically and voyeuristically watch the state murder of a human being. But better still would be to not execute people at all. And if we will—ought we not at least to be forced to see it happen? Ought we not to have to behold the actions our government is doing in our name? 

If we are really going to shoot to death a man paralyzed from the waist down, ought we not to be confronted with what that actually means? 

Many senators and military officials and religious leaders protested over the last few days that to live-stream an execution is a violation of human dignity. Doubtless, they are right. But that doesn't mean that there is any dignity either in what happens in the death chamber once it's behind closed doors, once the cameras have been turned off and the social media influencers banished. 

As Christopher Logue once wrote of execution by hanging: 

[B]e it a man 

or a woman they shit 

and they come

as they swing and the soul goes adrift. 

"Was their end noble and tragic[? ...] / Indeed it was not," to quote Kenneth Rexroth ("Thou Shalt Not Kill"). Their death will be more like an image from Gottfried Benn's "Morgue." 

Arthur Koestler paints the scene, in his Reflections on Hanging: "some prisoners struggle both in the condemned cell and under the noose, [...] some have to be carried tied to a chair, others dragged to the trap, limp, bowels open [...] and [...] still other things happen which should only happen in nightmare dreams."

That is what will actually be happening this December, when they drag Nidal Hasan to the firing squad. And they will literally have to drag him by one conveyance or another—the man cannot walk. 

The only difference yesterday's announcement made is that the rest of the world will not see it happen. We will be permitted to go blissfully about our peaceful day—erased from own conscious awareness and memories the fact that a man is about to be killed in our name, in an archaic blood rite of vengeance. 

He will die because people like us do not see it, and do not have to see it, and do not want to see it. He will die, like so many other screaming victims on gallows and stakes and altars down through the millennia: 

Because of the unconcern of men and women, 

Respectable and respected and professedly Christian, 

Idle-busy among the flowers of their gardens here

Under the gay-tipped rays of the sun[.] (MacDiarmid).