Kafka and the guillotine

The fiasco in Oklahoma suggests that maybe we took a wrong turn back in 1792. If we are to have capital punishment, there is something to be said for the old-fashioned methods. The sword is indeed too aristocratic for a republic such as France’s or our own, and our already over-titled public sector does not need a High Executioner. But there is something to be said for the sword, and for the high executioner. Execution is a job for a man, not a machine. The power to take a life is profound, and it must be undertaken with the highest degree of sobriety and responsibility. The intimacy of the sword in the hands of the executioner communicates that power and responsibility much more directly than our own relatively bloodless bureaucracy of death ever could. The plodding American mode of bureaucracy if anything subtracts from the profundity of an execution, being organized around a principle of dehumanization that in a sense makes the actual taking of life anticlimactic, almost — but only almost — beside the point. In truth, the unique terrors of the American practice of capital punishment are, the occasional botched job to one side, mainly bureaucratic: the endless legal proceedings, the apparently arbitrary imposition of the capital sanction, the strange little rituals we maintain to give a manageable shape to the horror. Though no one can say so with any authority, it seems to me that the last five minutes of the condemned man’s life must be something of a relief compared with the last five weeks of it or the last five hours — the last meal, the last sunrise and sunset (probably unseen), the long walk down the hall, the restraints, the connection to the sterile machinery. It is not surprising that the condemned occasionally complain that they wish that the state would just get on with it.

Arbitrary, dehumanizing, time-consuming: The terrors of an American execution are a great deal like other encounters with American government, with the obvious exception of how it ends.

Except when that’s not an exception.