Taking Out the Bad Ones

 

One of President Trump’s recent executive orders calls for ending the moratorium on the death penalty in federal criminal cases, speeding up their prosecution, and allowing the use of historical methods like the firing squad, electrocution, and the gas chamber.

Let me start by saying that I am viscerally opposed to the death penalty, but I’m not going to begin here with a debate about its propriety, but instead, about how it’s...um…executed. Over time in this country, we mostly sidelined the older methods as cruel and unusual. I guess my position is, if we must have the death penalty, let’s use methods that get the job done as quickly as possible.

Lethal injection was designed to be humane, but it hasn’t always worked well. My macabre joke is that if the cocktail of drugs employed in some states had a commercial on TV it would have to carry a warning that one of the side effects was LIFE. Injection with pentobarbital is allowed federally now, but death can take up to 10 minutes.

Electrocution is about the same as injection, it appears, while the gas chamber might not induce death for almost 20 minutes, according to reports. Even a firing squad would not always produce the immediate death of the target. Strictly from a layman’s point of view, I would imagine the guillotine or the executioner’s axe seem most efficient, though unpleasantly messy. OK, I’ll stop with this part now.

At one time, executions were very public events, the idea being that they served as deterrent, as in, “Look what will happen to you if you do what this person did!” I’m not sure the death penalty now accomplishes that purpose. It’s also argued that a disproportionate number of minority people are on death rows because of unfair convictions.

But I’d be willing to bet that most victims’ families are not all that interested in revenge in the form of seeing the perpetrator suffer. They just want the security of knowing that they no longer have to share space on this planet with that individual, and they get it with an execution. No chances of the perp being sprung on appeal or through a pardon.

However, there are also stories about lifers being rehabilitated in prison, truly repenting their crimes. Beyond that, there are even accounts of perpetrators meeting victims’ family members and being forgiven.

As for the death penalty, though, we might consider that one of the Ten Commandments is Thou Shalt Not Kill. There is a period after the last word. We have added a whole bunch of “unlesses” since Moses brought down those stone tablets from the mountain.

Playing with Fire, or Using It

 

I have a relationship with AI. I’ve tried to fight it. But it’s really useful. I ask my phone a question, and a lovely female voice answers it. Now I know it’s not human and I could change the voice, but I guess the system understood me well enough to know I would prefer the female.

All of that said, I know the limits here. When I ask a question, it’s almost always about a fact, a date in history, is someone dead or alive, or how to do something very practical and specific. If I have a question about Microsoft Word, for example, in the old days of a few years ago, I would have had to watch a 20-minute YouTube and hope the producer would cover the topic. Or my query would have brought back 50 different links to scroll through. But the AI woman instantly gives me the solution. Now, she could be wrong, but if it sounds logical, I might at least try it. MY choice.

What I don’t do is ask her questions on higher-level topics, for example, what is the meaning of life? Her answer might be interesting, but I know she is not qualified to handle such a question.

I don’t ask AI to write things for me, or even speak for me in my own voice, which it could easily do now. I guess it just wouldn’t feel genuine, which is important to me.

Many of us are afraid of AI and think it could spell the end of our civilization. Maybe. The good news is, humans have learned to live with, and harness, destructive forces like fire. We use it for heat and cook with it, and for millennia, used it for light too. We don’t stick our hand in it, that hurts.

OK, but can we learn to manage the new monster that we have created? We have done OK with fire and electricity, and even TV, all of which were said to be major threats to our well-being. Will this new thing take our jobs, drain our energy, and render us useless before destroying our species?

All these new things change us, and not always for the better. But none of them master us, unless we allow it, and that’s where the problem is. Even when solutions are in front of us, as with climate change, we ignore them.

But we are humans, dammit, and we’re pretty smart, albeit a little slow. I’m still optimistic. Why, I don’t know. But I’m not gonna ask HER.

Collateral Damage

 

The recent resignations of Republican Congressman Tony Gonzales of Texas and Democrat Eric Swalwell of California have shocked us but likely not surprised us. It’s a continuation of the theme of powerful men alleged to have taken sexual advantage of the women who worked for them.  We may be wondering if this is a common pattern for male members of Congress. One of my Facebook friends posted that if all the sexual offenses committed by Congressmen were brought to light, the legislative buildings would be pretty empty.

One thing to understand is the shame and the damage – it goes way beyond an offender’s reputation. Those of us of a certain age may remember the case of Wilbur Mills, the Arkansas Democrat who was chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and his connection with a stripper named Fanne Foxe. One night in October 1974, Mills, with Ms. Foxe in his car, was pulled over by police near the DC Tidal Basin for having his headlights off. He was said to be drunk. She, meanwhile, got out of the car and jumped into the water, apparently to avoid the cops. She was rescued. It was so close to Election Day that Mills was easily re-elected to Congress but lost his committee chairmanship.

I read that this saga had serious implications in Congress, as Ways and Means’ ability to appoint Congressional committee members was lost. Mills himself had been thought of as a careful shepherd of US tax legislation, and it’s said that our tax system became a lot messier without his leadership.

Swalwell was a rising star in the Democratic Party, but the distraction of the sexual case forced him not only to leave Congress but to drop his bid for California governor. Now I never especially liked him and got rather tired of seeing his face on cable TV panels all the time. But does it all mean he was a bad legislator? It could certainly be argued that his resignation caused the voters of his district to lose a powerful representative.

In our culture, there is special contempt for those alleged to have committed sexual offenses, especially now. After MeToo, a few of the rich, famous, and powerful offenders have seen their former reputations somewhat revived, but it is a very few.

We probably can’t expect sainthood from our elected officials. But while consensual sexual indiscretion is one thing, exercising power that harms someone else is quite another. In the end, a lot of people lose.

On a brighter note, though, Mr. Mills recovered from alcoholism, became a prominent recovery speaker, and helped found Arkansas’ Wilbur D. Mills (rehabilitation) Center for Alcoholism. He died in 1992 at age 82, while Fanne Foxe lived until she was 84.