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Jewish World Review June 13, 2001 / 23Sivan 5761
Philip Terzian
"I think I maybe expected more of a sense of closure or release or
something like that," said Larry Whicher, "but it doesn't really provide as
much as I thought it would." McVeigh's lawyer, Rob Nigh Jr., described his
client as a "a soldier, a brother, a son and a friend," and lamented "that I
could not successfully help Tim express words of reconciliation that he did
not perceive to be dishonest."
Inside were more pages of reporting, more full-color pictures of
survivors, camp followers, the Murrah Federal Building after the blast,
massed media, shouting ministers, and a candlelight vigil by foes of capital
punishment ("I'm sorry, Tim," read one sign). There was analysis by a
Buffalo reporter who co-wrote a book on the case, and a terse statement from
President Bush about the first federal prisoner to be put to death since
1963: "The victims ... have been given not vengeance, but justice ....
[E]very living person who was hurt by the evil done in Oklahoma City can
rest in the knowledge that there has been a reckoning."
Television, of course, offered no relief. The federal penitentiary at
Terre Haute was surrounded by trailers, banks of microphones and huge
satellite dishes, as well as high chairs to accommodate the available
talking heads. Even on the morning after McVeigh's execution the tube was
still saturated with victim-relative statements, film of witnesses stepping
off a bus, file footage of McVeigh in his orange prison jumpsuit, and more
thought and reflection from camera-ready pundits. The warden's terse
statement that McVeigh was dead shared air time with views of sobbing
Oklahomans. The witnesses described McVeigh's demeanor on the gurney, and
the relatives agreed that lethal injection would not restore their loved
ones to life.
It is difficult to reconcile solemn moments in the history of justice
with the circus atmosphere that the media seem to generate in these
instances. On the one hand we are admonished to turn away in horror from
evil and Timothy McVeigh, but on the other we are invited to wallow in his
deed. Yet the chicken and the egg are not so easy to distinguish. While I
can certainly understand the conflicted attitudes of victim-relatives, and
could find no reason to deny them the opportunity to watch McVeigh die, I am
not so sure where coverage ends and exploitation begins. Was it really
necessary for people whose close relations had been killed to stand before a
bank of microphones and articulate their thoughts? And if, as certain media
interlocutors seem to think, McVeigh's renown invites imitation, why are
they inclined to add to the merriment?
To be sure, McVeigh's crime was unprecedented in its ferocity, and
unlike certain recent famous murder cases (the Menendez brothers, Pamela
Smart) there was never any ambiguity about his guilt. Nor was McVeigh the
standard run-of-the-mill mass murderer. His motive was not money or sex, but
politics. He did not strike in the heat of passion, but with cool
deliberation. He was, by jailhouse standards, comparatively literate. He
seems to have fooled at least one TV correspondent into thinking that W.E.
Henley's "Invictus" -- which he copied out by hand to serve as his final
statement -- had been written by McVeigh himself.
Not least, in the great tradition, he attracted the attention of a
literary admirer: Perry Smith enjoyed the patronage of Truman Capote; Norman
Mailer attached himself to Gary Gilmore; and McVeigh found a soulmate in
Gore Vidal. Once the wellprings of fiction run dry, it would seem, the muse
may be found on Death Row, of all places.
It would be nice if events such as these could be handled rather
differently, and the engines of publicity reserved for better use. But
dignity is not the hallmark of popular culture, and our national thirst for
a tragedy with a happy ending, mixed with the scourge of celebrity culture,
makes a powerful combination. There will always be an audience for traffic
accidents and hangings, but why does the press feel compelled to join the
mob? Spectacles such as the McVeigh execution amount to a kind of civic
pornography, exalting the guilty and demeaning the innocent. The same people
who recognize that the presence of cameras prompts bystanders to riot seem
puzzled by the willingness of mourners to gab, spectators to cheer, and
publicity hounds to seek more
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