Public brutality brings on a personal death

Hold your breath, steel your heart and look away for one of our number dies today (Thursday, September 22).

Troy Davis

The U.S. pardons board on Tuesday rejected a last-ditch plea for clemency from death row inmate, Troy Davis. He will be put to death today at 9am by lethal injection at a prison in Jackson, south of Atlanta.
News’ readers may well be remote in geographical terms, but in a psychological sense, alarming close as if it is happening here in Shepparton, particularly if we allow ourselves to think about the rather brutal death of Davis.
Tired clichés about “state sanctioned murder” and “racial injustice” (Davis is black and the police officer it is alleged he murdered is white) leap to mind, but deeper issues about capital punishment warrant our attention, and thought.
Capital punishment had never troubled me much, one way or the other, until I read George Orwell’s “A hanging” and through that short essay he ignited in me a revulsion that another should, or could, die at my say so.

George Orwell

Orwell wrote about the “unspeakable wrongness” of hanging a man, in this case it’s a lethal injection, but the result, however, is the same.
An image from Orwell’s essay cemented in my thoughts emerges from a description of Orwell, then a police officer in India, walking to the gallows with the condemned fellow only to have the man step around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet.
That very human thing was strangely important to a man who was just minutes from dying – that rich image lives with me, emphasizing the unnerving disconnect between what is human and death.
Capital punishment was finally abolished in all Australian states in 1984 and Ronald Ryan was hanged in 1967, finding a sad niche in our history to be the last to die at the direction of the state.
Considerable doubt exists about the guilt of Davis and even the former US president Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI have joined the campaign to spare his life, a life that ends today after more than two decades of legal manoeuvering.
Davis’s death will be witnessed by those required by law and with them will be the dead police officer’s widow and children.
As much as we might like, we can’t hide in the anonymity of the crowd as it is in fact the “crowd” that is putting Davis to death, not some impersonal piece of machinery.
Fortunately, Australians have shown the exceptional good sense to step aside from capital punishment and now, in another move that will further enhance our mental health, we need to consider our behaviour in the Middle East and how it equates with capital punishment.

We need to watch and learn from our front row seat

Goulburn Valley people, and their Australian fellows, have a front row seat to watch the removal of another rivet in the superstructure supporting the U.S.

America's President,
Mr Barack Obama.

U.S. president, Barack Obama, has argued for a package of tax cuts and government spending aimed at invigorating his country’s economy.
The package, worth about $US447 billion ($A421 billion), is ill-directed, being aimed at a return to business as usual and in doing so appeasing most Americans who see their comfort in living as they have for many decades.
Rather than spend the country’s wealth on a way of life that is unquestionably unsustainable, Mr Obama and those around him, should overtly embrace the hope, audacity and the idea of change that saw him elected in 2008.
America is staring at economic collapse; a societal breakdown that will end its world hegemony and is the natural outcome of what former political philosophy professor and noted author, Sheldon Wolin, has described as “inverted totalitarianism”.
Wolin sees decided danger in the dysfunctional marriage between government and the corporate world, a union that he argues has routed democracy leaving America with a militarized, industrial complex.
Survival of that complex hinges on an obedient populace, one, which in Wolin’s terms, is distracted and titillated by such things as sport, entertainment and discussion and debates about what are ultimately unimportant matters.
And so while democracy survives in name, what America has, and Australia trails along behind, is inverted totalitarianism – a facade claiming social equity, but which is really a process favouring a few.
Mr Obama’s plan does have tax cuts for both employee and employers and billions to prevent teacher lay-offs and hire more police and fire officers, and it would spend $50 billion to improve highways, railroads, transit and aviation.
Examined, however, through the prism of climate change and seriously depleted energy resources, the plan’s outline quickly becomes distorted and dated.
Rather than grasp at exhausted ideas, the Americans need to abandon what once worked, and failed, allowing them to embark on an adventurous and exciting new project that would fundamentally change the fabric of its society.
Such systemic change is resisted by an American elite that appears unable to comprehend the fraying of its empire and beyond that is so misled by its own beliefs and values, that its impending doom goes unseen.
Rather than rescuing flailing and failing companies, the U.S. should be advancing concepts that call for the localization of communities and employing the idea of late author and influential economist and statistician, E.F. Schumacher that “small is beautiful”.
America is the world’s biggest and most influential economy and as its collapse will render ours destitute; we need to watch attentively, and learn, from our front row seat.