Oct. 22
USA:
The Death Penalty and the True Measure of George Bush's Character
Unmerciful Judge, Merry Executioners
As the 2004 election looms, the incumbent President's detractors and
defenders have returned their attention to Mr. Bush's equivocal stint in
the Texas Air National Guard during the early 1970s. As has been
repeatedly pointed out, his service record-or non-record-in a capacity
that allowed him to avoid combat in the Viet Nam conflict was remarkably
little investigated during his first run for President. The documentation
relevant to that service remains somewhat ambiguous, in part because some
of it seems to have been destroyed or concealed while he was in the Texas
Governor's Mansion. There is another aspect of the President's past,
however, little emphasized during the election of 2000, that is perfectly
unambiguous in documentation and at least as revealing of Mr. Bush's
character. It may be found in his handling of the numerous death sentence
reviews that reached his desk as a part of his governorship.
During George W. Bush's 1st campaign for the presidency, reporters
actually uncovered considerable information about executions in Texas and
about Governor Bush's performance as the final reviewer of those
sentences. What they learned was often ghastly: incompetent public
defenders, oblivious judges, mentally retarded defendants, patently
unreliable testimony, prosecutorial perjury, and so forth. Reporters'
discoveries about Bush's role were also unsettling, and fell broadly into
two categories: obvious lies about the system and his oversight of it; and
his evident indifference to justice and human life. Although Governor Bush
claimed to have spent significant time and energy on the appeals that came
to his desk, and although he repeatedly assured voters that he could vouch
for the care and accuracy of the judicial system that condemns the
convicted to death in Texas, investigations showed only too clearly that
he could not have given much thought to the condemned persons whose cases
came before him; nor could he have plausibly claimed that death sentencing
in Texas was remotely equitable, let alone carefully and dependably
administered.
The national electorate-and, with the exception of a few enterprising
reporters, most of the media-took little interest in these matters. The
Democratic candidate, Vice-President Gore, favored capital punishment and
thus was in no very good position to make an issue of Bush's and Texas's
record of state killing; a majority of U.S. voters at that time favored
capital punishment; Bush's role appeared to be essentially
bureaucratic-that is to say, mechanical, mindless, automatic. And so we
wound up with ("elected" has never seemed the right word) a President and
an Administration whose penchant for shedding blood has led the U.S. down
paths that are bellicose and costly, dismissive of other nations, and
manifestly dangerous to our own.
What might we have learned had we taken more notice of George W. Bush's
supervision of his state's executions? Could we have predicted the
character of the future President and the kind of actions influential
members of his administration would promote (despite their
self-description as practitioners of "compassionate conservatism")? To
help answer these questions, let us turn to a thinker few Americans have
ever read (although he won the Novel Prize for Literature in 1981), Elias
Canetti.
When Canetti published his great meditation on human nature, Masse und
Macht (1960, trans. Crowds and Power 1962), he identified as humankind's
most dangerous inheritance, "its curse and perhaps its destruction," a
kind of leader that he called "der berlebende." Usually translated as
"Survivor," but perhaps more accurately rendered as "Outliver," die
berlebenden wish not just to survive, but also to outlive all those around
them. Consciously or not, they wish, Canetti wrote, "to survive alone."
To achieve this outliving, die berlebenden embrace power. Their particular
conception of power pivots on a fulcrum of paranoia. The world of the
Outliver teems with enemies, often disguised, who must be exposed, judged,
and crushed. Ultimately, Canetti argues, even allies of Outlivers will be
classified as enemies, because they will have been subjected to and resent
the Outliver's commands. "Beneath every command, the death sentence and
its pitiless horror show through" (358). Those who have obeyed rulers'
commands, then, have suffered the threat of a death sentence and the
rulers must assume that the commanded will seize any opportunity to
retaliate against that threat. As the orders that rulers have given
accumulate, so too does what Canetti calls "the anxiety of command." In
particular, "whoever gets hold of such a system [of command] through too
brief a service or to whom it has otherwise been given, is by the very
nature of his position burdened with the anxiety of command and must seek
to free himself of it. [One recalls how little time George W. Bush has
spent in lower echelon jobs.] The means of his release, which he seizes
with some hesitation but which he can nonetheless not do without, is to
issue a sudden command for mass death" (558-9).
Since assuming power through a disputed and bizarrely concluded election,
the second Bush Administration has consistently made choices and exhibited
behavior characteristic of Canetti's Outlivers-of Outlivers, moreover,
heavily laden with the anxiety of command. It has preferred modalities of
power to judicial or legislative processes, and has reflexively acted out
a mania for secrecy. Mistrustful of other nations, it has withdrawn from,
defied, and refused to participate in numerous international treaties.
With the curious exception of North Korea, it has preferred bilateral to
multilateral diplomacy, and it has cooperated with multi-national
organizations like NATO and the UN only as long as those groups endorse
conclusions it has already reached. It has unhesitatingly put at risk
hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel and has hardly seemed to
notice the thousands of foreign nationals it has killed, wounded, and
imprisoned.
Individually, these actions have various explanations: a pronounced bias
toward supporting the interests of large corporations-from which many in
the Administration come and to which it is indebted for massive financial
support; a desire to assert more U.S. control over the huge oil reserves
of the Middle East (now all but openly treated as a recalcitrant American
protectorate); distrust of science, especially when it brings commercial
or industrial practices into question; the imperial ideology of "The
American Century"; and so forth. Such individual tactical and strategic
inclinations, however, do not fully explain the consistency and coherence
of the pattern of decisions and actions taken by the current
Administration. To account for that pattern we need to look more deeply
and to consider what we might call the personality of the G. W. Bush
Administration.
Concealment, the desire to "go it alone," and a predisposition to regard
difference or dissent as enmity have, from January 2000, characterized
this Administration. Since 9/11/2001, numerous arrests and detentions
without charges or legal recourse have been executed in the name of the
war on terrorism. These actions reflect both the raw exercise of force and
the paranoid supposition that others wear the masks and pursue the
conspiracies that power knows intimately from its own practices. Consonant
with this mind-set is the desire for an enlarged "Patriot Act," in order
to uncover the multitude of enemies presumed to be concealed among us.
That the U.S. faces serious dangers is indisputable; that the actions of
the Bush Administration are effective, safe, or legal responses to that
danger is profoundly doubtful.
Prominent in the personality of this Administration is its obsession with
the power of governments to kill. Discussing "The Ruler as Outliver,"
Canetti observed that his "first and decisive feature is his legal power
over life and death. It is the seal of his power, which is absolute only
as long as his right to impose death remains undisputed" (273). The
eagerness of the Bush Administration that the death penalty should be more
widely and frequently sought in federal courts reflects the Outliver's
craving for absolute power. In pursuit of more death-penalty prosecutions,
Attorney General Ashcroft has repeatedly overruled recommendations of his
own prosecutors; and the executions already accomplished under Ashcroft's
urging are the first of federal death row prisoners in thirty-eight years.
Equally suggestive is the Administration's fondness, when speaking of
foreign enemies, to promise, "They will be captured, or killed." To make
the latter more probable, Administration warriors urge development of
tactical nuclear weapons designed to inflict lethal American might upon
those who try to escape in mountain caves or buried concrete bunkers.
Whether such actions violate international law and assumptions of
innocence, or re-escalate a nuclear arms race, does not seem to merit
discussion.
The assassination of Uday and Qusay Hussein offered a vivid example of
this Administration's passion for killing. The attack on the home in which
they were trapped was simply murderous-overwhelming cannon fire and
rockets against a few cornered opponents. As Peter Davis noted in The
Nation, there was "no waiting them out, no disabling gas lobbed into the
house At the end they were impotent, helpless, and the order of the
day-which no one here doubts came from Washington-was Exterminate the
Brutes." When given a choice between capture and kill, those in charge
evidently hardly considered the former.
For the paranoid leader, "every execution for which he is responsible
bestows some strength. He obtains the power of the Outliver" (274). Given
that no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq (as of
September, 2004) and that, if they eventually appear, they are unlikely to
have posed a substantial threat to the U.S., Canetti's next sentences are
especially germane: "His victims may not have actually been lined up
against him, but they might have been able to do so. His fear transforms
them, at first retrospectively perhaps, into enemies that have struggled
against him. He has sentenced them; they have been brought low; he has
outlived them" (274). Unself-consciously, Bush gloated in his 2003 State
of the Union address, "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have
been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate.
Let's put it this way-they are no longer a problem." The implications of
the adjective "suspected" for the imprisonment and killing seem to have
escaped him (and applauding legislators). Similarly, the regime of Saddam
Hussein, whether it had weapons of mass destruction or not, is "no longer
a problem." So we have been told; but ongoing casualties render
increasingly questionable the famous "mission accomplished" boast.
Since declaring that the U.S. is engaged in a global war on terrorism, the
President has shown fondness for his alternative title,
"Commander-in-Chief." Considering that he evaded the hazards of Vietnam by
enrolling in (and perhaps deserting) the Texas Air National Guard, his
identification of himself with those who actually bomb and shoot is
incongruous. Arriving by fighter jet for his triumphal speech on the
aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, "Bush emerged in a green flight suit,
carrying his helmet, and shouted to reporters, 'Yes, I flew it!'" As
Commander, Bush can order soldiers to kill the enemy or-almost as
satisfying-to die in the attempt. Moreover, soldiers, and such enemy
combatants as he chooses to designate, may themselves be sentenced to
death through military courts, for which the Bush Administration has shown
unambivalent enthusiasm.
A sentence of death is easier to achieve in such courts than in civil
ones, since they have relaxed rules of evidence and do not require
judicial unanimity to win a sentence to kill. Such courts are now
threatened for some of the persons caged in Guantanamo. Captive there,
incommunicado and without legal representation or advice, their plight
must be especially gratifying for the Administration's Outlivers. Beyond
reach of the outside world, the prisoners are as if dead. Yet they
nonetheless await sentencing, as by God on the Day of Final Judgment. They
can be killed-again, so to speak-or restored to life. The power of
resurrection, Canetti observed, is the greatest power imaginable. For the
Outliver, having that power but refusing to exercise it may well be its
ultimate expression.
This brings us back to Governor Bush and his record of reviewing and
granting-or, virtually always, not granting-clemency for the 152 condemned
persons whose cases came before him in Texas. The score: thumbs up, 1;
thumbs down, 151. Long before he entered the White House, George W. Bush
exhibited what Chris Matthews of MSNBC observed about him after his
ascension-that he has "an almost giddy readiness to kill." That proclivity
had not gone unnoticed with respect to Bush's actions and attitudes in the
Texas Governor's mansion. Time observed in August, 2000, that "George W.
Bush, who has had more executions during his 5-year tenure in Austin than
any other governor in the nation since capital punishment was reinstated,
has made his support for executing mentally retarded inmates clear."
According to CNN, Bush was criticized for laughing during a televised
debate when asked about a pending execution. Reporting on his interview
with Bush for Talk magazine, Tucker Carlson described him mimicking a
woman's final plea for her life: " 'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips
pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.' " The woman whose plea Bush
was mocking was Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted murderer whose conversion
to Christianity led her to become a spiritual leader for other death row
inmates and on whose behalf many individuals and organizations-including
the Pope, Amnesty International, the UN, and the European Parliament-had
petitioned Governor Bush to mitigate her sentence to life imprisonment.
But, as in 99.3% of the other cases that came before this man, the command
to kill prevailed.
As startling as Bush's "smirking" about the plea of a woman whom he had
consigned to execution, is the fact that the exchange between Larry King
and Tucker that Bush recreated for his interviewer "never took place, at
least on television"-which is where Bush claimed to have seen it. Tucker's
groveling answer to Larry King's "hard questions" appears to be a creation
of Bush's imagination. To the query, "What would you say to Governor
Bush?"-if King ever asked it-the Governor invents the reply most
satisfying to an all-powerful berlebende, "Please don't kill me." Uday and
Qusay couldn't have said it better.
As slangy adolescents, my friends and I liked to refer to favorite things
and people as "killers." "That's a killer car your Dad's got," for
example. Now I find myself wondering if the U.S. has a killer President.
Have we in the White House "humankind's curse and perhaps its
destruction"? Have the extraordinary events of the last presidential
election left us with the sort of leader Canetti warned of? Is the
President of the United States such a person; and has he surrounded
himself with kindred spirits, kindred berlebenden?
Obviously, one very much hopes not, but the evidence has been
distressingly consistent. Because George W. Bush and many of his key
officers lean strongly toward the type that Canetti called Outlivers,
American citizens and the world must take seriously the threats they pose.
As the U.S. electorate confronts the claims and counter-claims of another
presidential election, the incessant assertions of the Bush Administration
that dire circumstances exist, that "bad guys" abound and will continue to
exist indefinitely, must be viewed with vigilant skepticism. For Outlivers
find nothing more convenient to justify the exercise of their power than
the specter of omnipresent enemies.
Denouncing bombings in Baghdad, the President declared of the
perpetrators, "They hate freedom, they love terror." (October 28, 2003) As
one whose speeches constantly parade various threats before his countrymen
and who urges Congress to pass another, even more intrusive and confining
"Patriot Act," Bush's typically simple formulation would seem to apply at
least as revealingly to his Administration as to those who carried out the
attacks in Iraq.
What can we who unhappily watch the spectacle of our bellicose government
and its nominated enemies do about all this? For starters, we must still
remember-whether George Bush manages to claim the White House again or
not-to cherish the civil liberties that remain to us and to guard against
the unstinting promoters of "fear itself," be they foreign or domestic.
For die berlebende must by their very nature truly "hate freedom love
terror."
(source: Leslie Brill is a professor and former Chair in the Department of
English at Wayne State University; Counterpunch)
