Death Penalty

In following online writings and comments this week touching on the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings and charges against the younger Tsarnaev brother, it bothered me - a lot - to read so many demands for Dzhohkar Tsarnaev to receive the death penalty. Having spent most of my life in Britain, actually in England, where capital punishment was abolished for murder in 1965, it feels, for me, like a step back into the dark ages. Last time the subject came up here, in 2011, regarding a GOP primary debate when the audience gave a rousing ovation to Texas governor Rick Perry's stance on the death penalty, his record number of 234 executions, and his response that he "does not struggle" with the possibility of executing an innocent person, I wrote: "Ye gods!!!! Blood pressure rising......What is this, the New Old West or what? Don't these people evolve at all? They don't believe in evolution do they? That answers a lot."

What shocks me, too, is that politicians I'd looked on as more evolved, such as Al Gore and Chuck Schumer, have voiced open support for retaining capital punishment in the USA. What is wrong with these people? It seems like some disease of which a symptom is chronic blood-lust.

There is no doubt at all that Dzhohkar Tsarnaev should be imprisoned for life. There would be some hope that during his imprisonment he could realise how evil his actions had been, and over the years he might possibly be in a position to, say, write a book or in other ways convince other young would-be terrorists against supporting further atrocities.

Abominable Events Took Place Last Week, Not 1 But 3.

There were three monstrous events in the USA last week, one of them took up most media space and time, the others remained largely buried beneath what were seen as more screen-worthy dramas.
Pierre Tristam pinpointed one of the other two abominations; here's the last paragraph of his piece Gun Worship’s Perversion: Just Don’t Call 10,000 Murders a Year “Terrorism”,

Last week’s enduring moral isn’t authorities’ swift and commendable ability to hunt down two amateur terrorists. It’s the shame of a nation that has perverted the meaning of violence. There is the unacceptable kind. That’s “terrorism.” And there is the acceptable kind. That’s the 30 daily murders by gun. The kind the Senate said there’s no need to do anything about. The kind we cannot allow to interfere with gun worship and the NRA’s five-times-a-day call to prayer.

Gary Younge's piece at Common Dreams echoed the same feelings:
snip:

On Wednesday the Senate declined to pass even the most anaemic gun control measures in response to the Newtown shootings. Twenty children, aged between six and seven, are slaughtered in school and the American polity takes five months to decide do nothing. Unable to break the filibuster limit, it didn't even come to a vote. Hiding behind the National Rifle Association's (NRA) talking points, gun rights senators cloaked themselves in the constitution, insisting support for gun control would violate the second amendment "right to bear arms".
The greatest threat to US citizens is not one-off terror attacks, but the menace that comes with mass gun-ownership.

Hat tip to http://thepoliticalcarnival.net/tag/u-s-senate/ for illustration

We could not do even "the least we could do", could we? Why? Because our representatives no longer represent us.


The third tragedy was highlighted by Dave Lindorff: The Real Terrorists are the Corporate Execs Who’ve Bought the Regulators.
Excerpt:

The way I see it, we had two acts of terrorism in the US this week. The first took place at the end of the historic Boston Marathon, when two bombs went off near the finish line, killing three and seriously injuring dozens of runners and spectators. The second happened a couple days later in the town of West, Texas, where a fertilizer plant blew up, incinerating or otherwise killing at least 15, and injuring at least 150 people, and probably more as the search for the dead and the injured continues. The villains in the West Fertilizer Co. explosion can be much more easily identified: the managers and owners of the plant.

West Fertilizer was built starting back in 1962 in the middle of the small town of West, TX, a community founded in the 19th century and named after the first local postmaster, T.M. West. It makes no sense, of course, to locate such a facility that uses highly toxic anhydrous ammonia as a primary feed stock (a compound that burns the lungs and kills on contact, and that, because it must be stored under pressure, is highly prone to leaks and explosive releases), and one that makes as its main product ammonium nitrate fertilizer, around lots of people. Ammonium nitrate, recall, is the highly explosive compound favored by truck bombers like the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. It was the fertilizer, vast quantities of which were stored at the West Fertilizer plant site, which caused the colossal explosion that leveled much of the town of West.

Building such a dangerous facility in the midst of a residential and business area, and allowing homes, nursing homes, hospitals, schools and playgrounds to be built alongside it, is the result of a corrupt process that is commonplace in towns and cities across America, where business leaders routinely have their way with local planning and zoning commissions, safety inspectors and city councils. Businesses small and large also have their way with state and federal safety and health inspectors too.

I gleaned from comments at a blog called Lawyers Guns and Money where the issue was being discussed a few days ago, that the owner of the plant is a man in his 80s, he bought it a decade ago. He is a well respected member of the community and owns other businesses in the area. Obviously the plant owner, unlike the terrorists in Boston, had no intention of killing people - and yet, and yet - he, or his managers, did not appear to have the safety of people in their community high on their list of essentials.

What happened in West, bad as it was, now known to have killed 14 first responders, voluntary firefighters and medics, could have been very, very much worse had local people not received early warning of a disaster about to happen. On another occasion in another place, in a similar situation a warning might not be possible. Terrorists of the known kind are a known danger - this is an equally dangerous but largely hidden situation which would benefit from a similar amount of attention and force of authority as was seen in Watertown last week.

Thank Goodness for the "All Clear".

I doubt I'd have normally been drawn into media coverage of events later in the week, following bombings at the Boston Marathon. I went off TV news presentation and talking heads some time ago. On Thursday night, though, we went to bed 15 after midnight, but I was unable to sleep - it happens occasionally. At around 2.30 AM, I got up. On such occasions I switch on either the computer or the TV, to make my eyes so tired they can't stay open a moment longer. This time, for no particular reason, I chose the TV. A random choice of channel brought up scenes of all hell breaking loose on city streets somewhere. Information appeared on screen about a manhunt taking place in the outskirts of Boston, and a female presenter doing her best to get a grip on the situation. So....three and a half hours later I was still wide awake, Watertown and other surrounding areas were in complete lock-down, the place looked like a war zone with SWAT teams, hundreds/thousands of police, sniffer dogs and goodness knows what else. I flicked channels regularly and found that most commentators were not at all sure what was what. Conflicting reporting and opinion added to the fascination. I eventually fell asleep on the sofa for a couple of hours. When I woke, things on the muted TV screen were much the same. City still in lock-down, house to house searches being carried out by teams of police. Now I was hooked on what would happen next, even though suspecting all the while that what was unfolding seemed like so much overkill when just one single 19-year-old guy was either hiding, possibly wounded, maybe even dead, or maybe had escaped altogether out of the area. Hours of searching every house threw up not a single clue. One 19-year old guy could cause all of this? Lock-down was eventually lifted sometime after 5 PM.

We went to the flicks Friday evening to see "42" - good movie by the way - and a pleasant release from TV and internet coverage of "events" in Watertown upon which I'd become fixated by their utter hysteria and media saturation. When we got home around 9.30PM - relief - second suspect was in custody, in hospital, after being found, bloodied, just outside the lock-down area hiding in a boat in somebody's yard. The "all clear" had sounded! A reporter was extolling how brave "we" had been, how calm in the face of danger and terrorism. Ahem! If that was calm I'd hate to see it when "we're" frenzied!

Now will come the wait for clarity, which might ensue if second suspect lives. First the "whys?" Answers to such questions as why did they target the Boston Marathon? Were they connected to some terrorist group? Is this about Chechnya or Islam or some personal issue? What had turned the brothers, who had been in the USA for around 10 years, from reasonably normal-seeming guys into terrorists?

Friday's drama blocked out virtually all other news for almost 48 hours, even drowning most reporting of the explosion near Waco, Texas which had killed many more people. I hope they'll be doing some catch-up on that matter soon.

Unwittingly Prophetic Authors

An article by novelist Tom Lonergan at Huffington Post this week, My Novel Predicted Boston Marathon Attack reminded me of an old post of my own. Synopsis from cover of Lonergan's Heartbreak Hill (2002):

"The trouble with most terrorists is they think too small. This is the message Boston police receive days before fifteen thousand runners and two and a half million spectators descend on the city for the marathon........."

An edited version of my 2006 post follows:


ACCIDENTAL PROPHETS

James Michener seemed to have amazing foresight. Several of his novels featuring a particular country, in depth, were each followed some years later by the same countries coming into prominence on the world stage. In a long interview here: , he said

"I think that some of us have a deep seated sensitive antennae about what is going to happen. And somebody the other day, a fine professor, made an introduction of me, which I had not thought about, but which I had thought about a great deal since. At that time, in the world, there were about a half dozen trouble spots: the Near East, the Jewish-Arab relationships, South Africa, revolution in Poland, the emergence of Japan, the absorption in the United States of two outlying territories like Hawaii and Alaska and four or five other things. And he pointed out that I had written full-length books about all these areas before they came into prominence. And I did! There they are. Look at the dates. Now this cannot be because I was exceptionally brilliant. I am not brilliant. I'm something else. I don't know what the word would be, but it isn't brilliant."

Nevil Shute, author of one of my favourite books A Town Like Alice, wrote a couple of novels which later seemed to have been prophetic. No Highway, published in 1948 dealt with what might happen due to metal fatigue in aircraft. His ideas came close to fact with the Comet disasters of the 1950s. Another novel, What Happened to the Corbetts also published as Ordeal was written just before the start of WorldWar 2. It tells how badly aerial bombing affected a town similar to Southampton, in the south of England, and how the bombing of civilians became a major part of the war. British people of a certain age will have no trouble recognising this as fact! His novel On the Beach, a story of the world ending as a result of the explosion of atomic bombs, thankfully has not yet proved prophetic. It could still be "pending", should people forget the warning bells it rang! Shute also touched on a slightly supernatural theme in a novel called Round the Bend in which an aircraft mechanic becomes the mystical leader of a religious movement.

Seeing some correspondence between Michener and Shute, I searched around for other instances of novels which, without purporting to be science fiction, portray events which later came to pass in real life.

American author Morgan Robertson produced an early example in his story Futility. He told of a ship called Titan which sank in a way eerily similar to The Titanic sinking, 14 years later. When this book was written there were no ships of such enormous size being built. Robertson also appeared to be crystal-gazing when he later(1914) wrote Beyond the Spectrum in which he described a war in the future, fought using aircraft which dropped "sun bombs" on their targets. These were powerful enough for a single bomb to destroy a city. When this book was written, aircraft were small, flimsy, and unreliable machines capable of carrying one person. Nuclear weapons were still unimagined. Robertson's war began in the month of December, as did the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which brought the USA into World War 2.

Michener was born 1907, Shute 1899 and Robertson 1861.

There are, of course, common sense explanations for the authors' seeming futuristic vision. These writers were not deliberately trying to predict events, as far as we know.

Michener didn't foresee actual events, but was drawn or inspired to write about countries which later came to prominence for one reason or another. He was widely travelled, highly intelligent, politically minded and had lived in all the countries he wrote about. Common sense would say that he was intuitively "putting two and two together"

Shute was a skilled aeronautical engineer as well as novelist. He had technical knowledge more than sufficient to foresee possible outcomes where the area of his expertise was involved. "An accident waiting to happen", in the case of metal fatigue, and some extrapolation of known facts in the case of aerial warfare ?

Robertson was the son of a ship's captain and spent some time as a cabin boy himself, so the sea was "in his blood", he had no doubt heard some tall tales from the old salts he must have encountered. These, with a little embroidery, might have helped him to invent his ship Titan. His Beyond the Spectrum published in 1914 is harder to explain.

Open-minded readers, sensitive to peculiar coincidences like these, might see different explanations. Novelists and short story writers continually tap into vast resources of imagination. For hours at a time, on a regular basis, their minds are "elsewhere", concentrating outside of the mundane. Isn't this akin to meditation? Could it be that as they concentrate so intently in realms of the imaginary, coloured by factual knowledge stored in their memory banks, they somehow inadvertently seep through a time barrier or into another dimension?

"For Hate is Strong"

It never ends does it? Man's inhumanity to man. The dreadful events, deaths and horrible injuries in Boston yesterday are the latest addition to a blood-soaked list of tragedies here in the USA, and let us not forget, in countries abroad - some at our own hands.

I've written before about the darkness of this month in recent US history: 19 April 1995, the Oklahoma City bombing when 168 people, including children, died at the hands of home-grown terrorists; then the shootings at Columbine High School, Colorado on 20 April 1999; and April 16 2007 was the date of the Virginia Tech. massacre when 32 people were killed by a gunman, fellow student of those he murdered.

There's no rational explanation for this growing cluster of horror in what ought to be a happy and optimistic time of year, long winter behind us, trees greening - but .......

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"
(From Longfellow's Christmas Bells)