There is a boring, snooty, self-righteous school of thought that the judicial killing of a human being is a grave and dignified sacrament of the state. It says that where the law provides for the government to take a life, that is about as serious a decision as, in peacetime, it gets. This school of thought has it that the preceding judicial process must be exhaustive; that the condemned, no matter how repulsive their crimes, should be treated with respect by virtue of their status as human beings; that the whole punitive apparatus must see the process through with the sort of impersonal solemnity appropriate to its momentous arrogation of the right to take a life. Black caps, drawn curtains, ceremonious and exact procedures, shuffling clergymen…all that stuffy malarkey.
Why should any public execution be given away for free when it could be pay-per-view?
This is not the school of thought to which Pete Hegseth subscribes. The peppy go-getter who so inspiringly parlayed a gig as a Brylcreemed himbo on cable news into becoming Defence Secretary of the world’s only hyperpower has decided that if we’re going to execute our wrong ‘uns, we might as well have fun while we’re doing it. F*** em, right? They’re sinners. It’s what Our Lord – who had his own brush with public execution – would have wanted.
Hegseth has announced that the execution of the Fort Hood killer – the former US Army Major Nidal Hasan, who admitted to killing thirteen unarmed comrades in the medical building at Fort Hood, in Texas, in 2009 – will take place by a method of execution not used since 1945: “He’s gonna get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be.” Hegseth added that the time and place of the execution (at Fort Hood on the anniversary of the crime) was “a no-brainer” and that, what’s more, they would livestream the execution on the internet: “We’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public. Because people need to understand that…there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”
Can people be trusted to understand that there are serious consequences for mass murder without watching the perpetrators shot to death live on the internet? Can people feel confident that an execution has taken place if they haven’t seen it with their own eyes? Who can say? Better to be safe than sorry.
Can we can feel confident that the people who log on to that livestream will be watching it for solemn moral edification rather than, say, pornographic curiosity? Can we be confident that any potential jihadis who tune in, moreover, will see the bullet-riddled body of the killer as that of a man who didn’t think through the serious consequences of his actions, rather than that of a man who craved and achieved a glorious martyrdom? As Hegseth says, it’s a “no-brainer”.
It strikes me, though, that our man is missing a trick. Why should any execution be private when it could be public? And why should any public execution be given away for free when it could be pay-per-view? It is, after all, jolly expensive to put someone to death – the lawyers for all those appeals don’t come cheap and they don’t give lethal injection drugs or electric chairs free in cornflake packets. At a time when diesel is six bucks a gallon, why should the tax-dollars of hardworking Christian Americans be wasted on wasting these scumbags? If you get the pricing right, or leverage some potential synergies with Netflix or Amazon, though, these executions would pay for themselves. Odd that so business-friendly an administration wouldn’t already have recognised the opportunity here.
Consider the potential inherent in the botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee. That episode, which saw the Tennessee Department of Corrections first try twice to kill her by lethal injection, then rush her to hospital to save her life, then return her to prison to await another go when, to everyone’s surprise and delight, she turned out not to be brain-dead, was painted as an embarrassment to the state.
Couldn’t we think of it, rather, as a priceless live entertainment? Woman vs Phenobarbital: like Tyson vs Joshua only with a less scripted feel and more plot twists. Imagine how fun it would be for everyone to watch the next round on live TV. Viewers at home could have a flutter with spread-betting companies on how long it will take her to stop twitching – I’m imagining dynamic odds, flickering across the bottom of the live feed. And think of the merch: “I was supposed to be executed by lethal injection and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”
We live, as we’re often told, in an attention economy – one in which abstractions like the impersonal administration of justice, legal principle and human dignity are a poor second to the visceral thrill of spectacle, ragebait, and the latest viral atrocity; one where the logic of terrorism and the logic of political communication and the logic of pornography are becoming near indistinguishable. Public executions for macho thrills are just the next step along the road, and public executions for profit are the step after that. It’s, y’know, a no-brainer.
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