Surrender at the outset any expectation that public life in America will be anything other than show business. Is it too much to hope that it could at least rise above the level of soap opera?
To be fair to public life in America, the last hours of Robert Alton Harris were a combination of soap opera, vulgarity and farce. The farce, a nobler genre, was provided by the judicial system. The vulgarity came from the pro-execution demonstrators carrying a ”plop-plop, fizz-fizz” sign, comparing the gas chamber to indigestion. To support executions as a necessary option is defensible. To make bad jokes about killing someone is the opposite. The soap opera was the product of (what else?) television, which did the two things it does best. One is to provide live coverage of a correspondent standing outside a wall. The wall separates the correspondent from an event. All are grateful for this separation because nobody wants to see the event, but one result is to magnify the significance of other onlookers, advocates of one faction or another who show up because the cameras are there.
Television`s other talent is the gall to ask citizens whose private suffering intersects with public events this cosmic question: ”How do you feel about (fill in the tragedy)?”
These citizens were the relatives of the two teenage boys Harris murdered in San Diego 14 years ago. Their common sentiment, understandable because any sentiment they expressed would be, was that they wanted to get the thing over with, less because they sought revenge than because getting it over with would bring them peace.
Members of the television audience-supporters of the death penalty, opponents and those of us without firm conviction either way-were probably grateful that the anchorpersons did not pose two other obvious questions:
Wouldn`t it have been ”over with” years ago had Harris been cleanly sentenced to life imprisonment without parole? And how can they be sure that his execution will in fact bring them peace? The tristesse that follows so many other long-awaited events might well intrude here.
There were two other question that the anchorpersons did not ask, because they would have had to ask themselves or their bosses. One was: What`s the big deal? Harris was not the first but the 169th person to be executed since the U.S. Supreme Court restored the constitutionality of capital punishment in 1976.
Harris was just the first one in California. Why this was so much more worthy of attention than, say, the first one in Illinois last Sept. 12
(Charles Walker was the person executed) is a question that was given every answer except the true one, which is that Californians are more adept at hype and manipulation.
The other question was why so much public time was being spent on the examination of private anguish. The relatives were willing enough
participants, and their sorrows were properly part of the story. But turning their sorrows into the focus of the story trivialized the event, even as the hype and manipulation bloated it.
The criminal law does not exist primarily to comfort victims or their survivors, however desirable that comfort might be. It exists to punish the guilty and to protect society. If the wisest means of accomplishing those ends also comforts the relatives of murdered boys, so much the better. If it doesn`t, that`s a price that must be paid. Considering that nothing will bring their kin back to life, it is likely that neither they nor anyone else really know what will help them.
But even if they do, public policy should be based on something sterner than pity. Public policy about violent crime should recognize the sadness of the families of young boys cruelly murdered in the past. But it should concentrate on doing whatever might prevent murders in the future.
Even having a rational discussion about this problem becomes more difficult when the way the problem is addressed bears little relationship to the real choices before the public. To accuse the networks of concentrating on soap opera for the sake of ratings might be unfair. Then again, it might be too kind. Cynical exploitation of sad citizens for commercial gain is less objectionable than believing sincerely that soap opera is more important than discussion.
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As it is, the public is twice removed from reality. Presenting the death penalty dispute as one between pity for the survivors and pity for the murderer interferes with sober reflection about the wisdom of executions. And presenting the death penalty itself as the most important element, or at least the central symbol, of crime policy is even less useful. It serves only to provide opportunities for two competing tribes of self-righteous moralists to mouth their slogans.
They aren`t even very good slogans. The least we can expect from show business is decent entertainment.