The View From the Fence

Right—time to get straight down to work and settle once and for all the vexing question of the death penalty.

I’ve never particularly bought into the standard liberal line, you see, nor do I do well with the standard Puerto Rican line. Why? Because if you ask about the death penalty here on the island, you will almost certainly be told: “only God can take a life.”

Guys? Can we just call it a theocracy and stop the pretense of separation of church and state?

I felt, for most of my life, that there were some crimes so unspeakably heinous that a nice, swift execution was the best thing to do. Consider these savory characters, who come to you from Wikipedia’s article on Sister Helen Prejean:

In addition to Sonnier, the account is based on the inmate Robert Lee Willie who, with his friend Joseph Jesse Vaccaro, raped and killed 18-year-old Faith Hathaway on May 28, 1980, eight days later kidnapping a Madisonville couple from alongside the Tchefuncte River in Louisiana and driving them to Alabama. They raped the 16-year-old girl, Debbie Morris (née Cuevas), who would later become the author of her book Forgiving the Dead Man Walking[4] and then stabbed and shot her boyfriend, 20-year-old Mark Brewster, leaving him tied to a tree paralyzed from the waist down.

You’ll have guessed—Sister Helen Prejean is the author of Dead Man Walking, and very likely you’ll have seen the movie. So it won’t be news to you—as it was to me—that Sister Helen wrote Dead Man about her experiences with guys on death row. She champions the abolition of the death penalty as ardently as the pope champions priestly celibacy.

Here’s my problem—I follow all the rules (well, mostly) and as a consequence am expected to fork over 20% or so of my annual salary to the government. That money goes to support guys who haven’t followed the rules, but who have committed crimes that often have devastated the lives of innocent people. These people are rotting in prison, doing nobody any good. Oh, and they don’t even want to be there. 

I know—that’s not the way I’m supposed to think. But that 30 grand we spend annually because “only God can take a life?” I’d really like to put that money to work beefing up education, treating PTSD in our veterans, or supporting opera companies. And those guys on death row? Well, couldn’t they be doing something?

Am I arguing for the return of the chain gang?

Look, it makes more sense than what we’re doing now….

OK—let’s back this car up.

One of the things about a blogger’s life is that you have to go sifting around, looking for things to write about, and then things get tied together in ways that you don’t expect. Because I had been watching—for reasons I no longer remember—a remarkable video of an interview with Stephen Levine, who for many years worked with dying people. And one of the stories he told was of an angry, bitter woman—a woman who had driven everyone away.

It was a problem—the woman was so negative, so hostile, that the nurses had to force themselves to work with her. But it was hardly just the nurses; her own daughters were estranged from her, and wanted nothing to do with her, even though she was dying.

One daughter, however, took on the challenge: could she go and sit down at her mother’s deathbed and, with an open heart, accept her mother as she was.  Could she wish her well? Could she—if not forgive—at least move away from what Levine calls a “business model” of human relationships? You give me love and nurturing and I’ll give you love back. You hurt me and I’m outta here….

So the daughter—a Zen Buddhist, and she’d have to be—sat and let her mother into her heart, without expecting or asking or even wanting her mother to change. Which was fortunate, since on the day of the mother’s death, she looked at her child and said, “I hope you have the most miserable life ever!”

Levine’s point? The daughter had done what she did for herself, not for her mother. The daughter didn’t want to carry the anger, the bitterness around forever. And so she had endured abuse up until the very end—in order to free herself of it.

As you’ll see in the clip below, Dead Man Walking became an opera as well, and I can tell you that because, in my nightly forage for carbohydrates, I found myself eating jellybeans and watching—who else?—Joyce DiDonato.

I might as well confess it—I am electronically stalking DiDonato. How bad has the obsession become? Well, fully as bad as last year’s obsession with Martha Argerich, and to tell you how bad that was, I give you the fact that the computer has not put a red squiggle under Argerich. The computer, you see, not only knows perfectly well who she is, but is totally bored with it.

Oh—another fact. I’m so desperate for any new video of Didonato that I watched an interview of her in French. And when was the last time I spoke French? Well, let’s see, I graduated from High School in ’74….

So there I was, looking at Joyce Didonato and Jake Heggie talking about their upcoming—well, as of two years ago—Carnegie Hall recital. And you know what? I am not going to introduce the computer to Heggie, because I don’t like him.

OK—be fair, I’m envious because, besides being handsome, intelligent, way-talented, and having his opera Dead Man Walking presented over 40 times in five continents—I mean, how much stuff can one have in life—he’s also a friend of Joyce DiDonato.

But here’s where I’m at: if I were the relative, the father of a murdered child, how would I react? Impossible to say—but here’s what I’d hope.

I hope—like the daughter of the bitter mother—that I’d forgive, that I’d say no to the hatred and the desire for vengeance. But on a societal level?

Damn, still haven’t figured it out….