I
don’t have a position on capital punishment. But I find the hubbub over the
recent “botched execution” in Oklahoma both gruesomely funny and politically
instructive. As is often the case, the ostensible issue is not the real one—and
everybody knows it. But since the real issue can’t be addressed, we have shadow
debates about phony issues.
The
phony issue here is “How much pain should a person feel whilst being executed?”
Assuming the execution isn’t particularly grotesque—drawing and quartering, say—I
doubt if the object of the exercise much cares. Offered a choice between a
harrowing hour-long ordeal that he’ll survive and a peaceful voyage to the
undiscovered country, the condemned would no doubt opt for painful survival.
The pain is in the execution, not the method.
But
the execution can’t be legally attacked, so death-penalty opponents try to stop
it by insisting on a condition—absolute painlessness—that seems reasonable but may
prove impossible to guarantee. (Which explains why they labor so hard to make
unavailable any drugs that could make lethal injection painless.) Judges who may
themselves be opposed to the death penalty go along with the subterfuge.
Speaking
as a layman, I don’t see why it’s so hard to kill someone painlessly. After
all, surgeons cut people open without the patients feeling anything, and people
painlessly shuffle off with sleeping pills. What did Dr. Kevorkian know that
eludes our current bumbling executioners?
There’s
an analogy here with the debate over marijuana legalization. The people who
support legalizing medical marijuana argue that it can provide an effective
treatment for the pain of chemotherapy. Perhaps they’re right, but that’s a sideshow.
Where medical marijuana is legalized, it predictably becomes easy for the
healthy to indulge, perhaps with a nod and a wink from an assisting doctor. That
was always the real object. And sure enough, legalizing medical marijuana has now
led to the general legalization of marijuana in some states (which, as a policy
matter, I’m all for).
What’s
interesting is the politics. In both cases, frontal assaults on the center were
easily beaten back, but guerilla raids on vulnerable flanks succeeded. Those small
victories then changed the terms of the larger debate. The lesson? Perhaps the surest
way to change opinions is not to challenge them directly—people just dig in—but
to work on the fringes where people are less committed: Let’s keep executions,
just make them less painful; let’s not legalize marijuana, just allow it where
there’s a medical need. As people get comfortable with the small changes, it
becomes easier to move them on the big ones. Persuasion is usually a process of
step-by-step familiarization with the previously unacceptable view.
On
The West Wing grand political values
clashed, with one side (usually the liberals) convincing the other through sheer
force of argument. But that’s just television politics—a dramatic confrontation
leads to a resolution that confirms the audience’s (and Aaron Sorkin’s) pre-existing
moral views. I loved The West Wing—Sorkin
wrote marvelous comic dialogue for a gifted team of actors—but I never confused
it with real politics, where dramatic shifts of opinion seldom happen. Outside
of television, democratic politics is largely persuasion and accommodation.
—Stan
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