Friday, December 5, 2014

Slap in Face

America: the country where you can be considered too mentally ill to execute after murdering your in-laws, but you can be lawfully murdered by the police for selling loose cigarettes.

The best comment I read about the state sanctioned street execution of Eric Garner was when one Conservative scumbag wrote, "Garner wasn't exactly the picture of health."

A bleeding-heart Liberal kiss-ass responded, "Yeah, a healthy person could have survived the beating."


Hahaha.

Comply or Die!


I've written a few essays on this topic that I can't bring myself to publish. Let Edward Snowden hack my account and publish them. Of course, the main point I defend is that the 2nd amendment has propagated an environment that requires police to carry guns. And there will be collateral damage in any violent war. That's a given. Since it is too late to disarm America then we must accept collateral damage. I don't see a solution. All the scenarios that put guns in everyone's hands end up with collateral damage. Innocent pedestrians will be shot, random people will be killed accidentally, the wrong people will be shot, people will be suspected of things that aren't true, and then killed. It's the consequence of police and it's a consequence of the 2nd amendment. We need guns because we allow guns...and we allow guns because we need guns. No training or gun safety classes will mitigate the collateral damage. I don't think it will increase or decrease if everyone had guns, the same proportion of accidental shootings or overkill scenarios will happen. The same proportion of stray bullets. It's like the English Patient quote: 
Caravaggio: Hundreds of people could have died.
Almasy: Hundreds of people did die. Just different people.

It's nice to live in a fantasy world where because you have not yet been shot accidentally by the police that means all is well. But it's fantasy. All is not well. Everyone is immune to Cancer up until the moment they are diagnosed with cancer and that selective perspective is probably a defense mechanism to help us survive so who am I to discredit it?

I look at the two different cases of a guy, Garner, selling loose cigarettes and failing to comply 100% with a cop's demands (not the same as resisting) and being killed on the street, and the other case of a guy, Panetti, who murdered his in-laws and was sentenced to death by a jury...but later is spared because he's considered too insane to kill. In Garner's case a Grand Jury opted to decide the cops can't be faulted. In Panetti's case, a jury decided to sentence him to die. Guess in which case a Court of Appeals has decided to show the criminal mercy? Yep, the one involving the brutal assassination of Panetti's ex-wife's parents. I'd expect these two scenarios to play out in two vastly different countries, like Abu Dhabi and Tibet. But no, it's all the product of America. For some reason a guy can be sane enough to plan and carry out the assassination of his in-laws, but not be sane enough to understand why he himself is being executed. It sets up a situation where the whole goal of his medical treatment will now be to cure him enough so he can be executed. For some reason that makes sense...and makes the justice system more moral? Because we want the criminal to fully accept and understand the pain we are about to inflict on him? It sounds more like the mind of a twisted fucking psychopath. "No, we don't want to kill you until you spend some more time in jail and we make sure you fully grieve and suffer while we kill you. We don't want you to be under any delusions that we're sending you to a Beatles Reunion. No, we want you to understand that we are definitely killing you." My god. That's a definition of compassion? If you have a sick dog who has recently mauled two people to death do you keep it alive longer and medicate it so you can look into its eyes and see a recognition that it realizes how badly you hate it and are going to kill it? You want the dog to whimper before killing it? So, the measuring stick for someone being sane is that they cry when you go to kill him? And that makes you compassionate? Because executing someone when they are so crazy they don't know why you are executing them isn't compassionate? The guy rants for 5-6 hours in a row about spaceships and the cowboys who inhabit his brain, and it's compassionate to let him live? He is tortured already. Executing him is compassionate. Keep him alive only if you believe in torture.

"Prohibition's good if 'tis conducted right,
There's no sense in shooting a man 'til he shows flight.
Officers kill without a cause,
They complain about funny laws --
Tell me how can a poor man stand such times and live?"
How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live - song by Blind Alfred Reed - 1929


But Garner fails to comply with the cops and they choke him out, hold his arms down while they make sure he's dead, make sure no one comes to his aid, then arrest the guy who took the video showing the execution....and the same system decides that was perfectly OK? What the Fuck! How can we show 'compassion' for a convicted double murderer, but not for a guy selling loose cigarettes? I'd love to point out that Panetti is white and Garner is black and suggest a crazy white double murderer is shown more mercy than a black street hustler, but I don't really believe race is a factor. You know why? Because a justice system that can come up with two decisions as fucked up as the ones I just described is WAY BEYOND RACIST. Racism doesn't begin to describe how fucked up this system is. It's delusional. In the same week, you can not sanction a street execution of a guy for failing to comply with cops and then postpone the execution of a guy who murdered two people...because he's too crazy, on the grounds that it's cruel and unusual. If executing a crazy and convicted double murderer is cruel and unusual then what do you call executing a sane and suspected petty tax evader? How about TOTALLY DIABOLICAL.
No. Those two scenarios can't happen in the same week in the same country without all logic and precedent being vanquished. If Garner were only a little more crazy and homicidal he'd be alive today. Whatever 'moral points' earned by keeping Panetti alive are lost when Garner's execution was sanctioned.

Of course there are details to each that allow this to happen and deserve mention. Garner wasn't technically executed; he was merely murdered by default when the cops decided the only way to make him comply was to render him dead. And Panetti is still in jail so it's not like he's set free. And if Panetti didn't comply when they arrested him they would've definitely killed him too. But my point is that if 'Compassionate Executions' are our goal and 'Default Executions' are our reality then the dream world has me building Lego castles to house my gas chamber for the insects who tell me what to do.

1 comment:

est said...

well said
and written

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.