On A Public Execution

While the proposal did get officially shot down, I wrote this piece on the matter on October 13 while on the bus and what would be little more than mere moral aestheticism being defended in the denunciation towards the idea. Case in point being I would rather it be available to see, rather than an open secret of an autocratic decree.  

I'm listening to the audio put on Spotify as a podcast of Real Time With Bill Maher. The topic of discussion on this recent episode is that of the announced possibility of a publicly viewable livestreamed execution by firing squad this coming December 3rd. To die is Nidal Malik Hasan, a former psychiatrist for the Army Medical Corps now death row inmate; incarcerated for perpetrating the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, killing 13 people and leaving 32 others with injuries; committed in opposition to deployment. It's an idea which has stirred up quite a ruckus. Much of what is being said to the matter is vocal distaste, and with what seems a notably bipartisan denunciation.

Public execution is a tradition which is quite rich in history, its vacancy in the Western Hemisphere coming about only in the last century of cultural development. Abroad, this culminated in France with the beheading of the criminal Hamida Djandoubi via the guillotine before an audience in September of 1977. The final sanctioned public spectacle of death in the United States occurred in 1934 with the hanging of convicted rapist Rainey Bethea. Nevertheless while the event ceased happening in public ceremony, there has been executions done, mainly with the method of lethal injection; itself with its own brewing controversy currently due to a death botched not once but an unheard of two times. Beyond that, depending on ones perspective the occasions of public execution only ceased in a way gilded by state-approval, and that the act persisted and perpetuates in ways even to this day; with such murderous intent before, or with, a mob like lynchings or, more recently, the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Appearing as guests on Real Time in opposition to the announced death webcam event the soon to be retired US Senator Thom Tillis and Sara Eisen, in conversation with host Bill Maher, expressed their disapproval in convergence on the optics of it. Tillis not being against the whole of the idea, but finding it ill-conceived to be livestreamed for all to see; to which Eisen agrees, likening the possible broadcast to an ISIS beheading video. The essence of the discussion is that of presented moral aesthetics; a mirroring power move and little else.

Undeniably, the act would be an intentional display of power enacted in a way that imitated the public executions more common in the Islamic sphere of the world, given the current war between the US and Iran, as well as he who is to be killed having exclaimed, "Allahu Ackbar!" when he enacted his defiant massacre. That said, and with a diverging similarity to the opinion given by Senator Tillis: if the death sentence is going to be carried out anyway, why not let it be on optionally viewed display? Doing so would be a clear documentation stained into the mind of the broader society. Of course on another hand it does open to the possible creation of martyrs; or campaigns of fear enacted onto the populus; or stirring the masses up into bloodthirsty Hate-Week-style frenzies. Much to do with the last one seems a projected fear of personally longed for proclivities.