A Colossal Wreck

by Alexander Cockburn

  September 22

  First, a simple rule for killers: If you are going to murder someone in the United States, don’t try to get the job done in Texas. Keep your captive alive in the car till New Mexico, which recently banned the death penalty, or press on to California, which retains the death penalty but makes available very large sums of state money—potentially, hundreds of thousands of dollars—for a capable death penalty defense.

  Business is correspondingly brisk in the lethal injection chamber in Huntsville, Texas. There are currently 413 on death row, and at the time of writing, 475 have been executed since 1976, 235 of them during Rick Perry’s decade-long stint as governor.

  It turned out Thursday we won’t have to adjust the numbers yet. On September 15, the scheduled execution day for Duane Edward Buck, the US Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Buck (who on September 12 had his clemency request turned down by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles) while it reviews the case.

  No one claims that Buck, forty-eight, didn’t shoot to death his former girlfriend and her male companion and wound a third in Houston in 1995. He himself admits his crimes. At issue is what an expert witness told the court during the sentencing hearing, where the jury decides whether the convicted murderer should go to prison for a life term or get lodgings on death row. To get Buck lined up for the lethal needle, his prosecutors needed to prove “future dangerousness.” How might Buck behave in the event he ever got out of prison?

  Dr. Walter Quijano, a psychologist practicing in Conroe, a town just south of Huntsville, had actually been called by the defense, who hoped he would testify that Buck’s killing spree was an act of rage unlikely to be repeated. Under cross-examination, however, the prosecutors asked Quijano: “The race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons; is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Quijano answered, probably out of sheer force of habit, because usually he was the prosecution’s expert, and he had testified in similar fashion for the prosecution in six other cases, racially profiling the defendants into the Huntsville death house. His “yes” was enough for the jury, which cut smartly through all uncertainty about Buck’s future decisions by saying he should die, thus rendering speculation unnecessary.

  In 2000, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn (now a Republican US Senator), recognizing the constitutional abuse for what it was, called for Buck and the other six to receive a retrial. Buck is the only condemned man who hasn’t gotten one. On September 13, Linda Geffin, one of Buck’s prosecutors in 1995, joined the chorus of voices calling on Gov. Perry to stay his execution.

  Of course, it doesn’t help anyone on death row, headed for the injection chamber and amid last-ditch appeals, that we’re in campaign mode and right after Perry issued a fervent endorsement of the death penalty, earning him hearty cheers in the auditorium of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, when he stressed that imposing it has never lost him a moment’s sleep.

  October 12

  Even by the forgiving standards of American credulity, the supposed Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US is spectacularly ludicrous. Why would Iran want to kill the Saudi envoy—the mild-mannered functionary, Adel al-Jubeir? I could understand an inclination to dispose of the irksome Prince Bandar who held the job for twenty-two years, from 1983 to 2005—simply in the spirit of “change.” But to kill any ambassador—particularly a Saudi ambassador—is to invite lethal retaliation, even war. Iran doesn’t want war with the US.

  Suppose the CIA leaks a secret national security review concluding that the moon is actually made of cheese, and the Chinese are planning to send up a pair of gigantic bio-engineered rats to breed in numbers sufficient to eat the cheese and thus sabotage US plans for Missile Defense radar deployment on the moon’s dark side.

  The headlines will initially proclaim “Doubts on Chinese Rat Threat Widespread. Many scoff.” The lead paragraphs in news stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal will quote the scoffers, but then “balance” will mandate respectful quotation from “intelligence sources,” faculty professors, think-tank “experts” and the like, all eager to dance to the government’s tune: “Many say rat scenario ‘plausible,’ ” etc., etc.

  Lo and behold, by the end of a couple of days of such news stories, the Chinese rat plot is firmly ensconced as a credible proposition. News reports then turn to respectful discussion of the US government’s options in confronting and routing the Chinese rat threat: “Vice President says ‘all options are on the table,’ ” etc.

  October 28

  Denied post-mortem imagery of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the world now has at its disposal photographs of Muammar Gaddafi, dispatched with a bullet to the head after being wounded by NATO’s ground troops outside Sirte. Did the terminal command, Finish Him Off, come via cell phone from the US State Department, whose Secretary, Hillary Clinton, had earlier called for his death, or by dint of local initiative? At all events, since Gaddafi was a prisoner at the time of his execution, it was a war crime, and I trust that in the years of her retirement Mrs. Clinton will be detained amid some foreign vacation and handed a subpoena.

  My friend and neighbor in Petrolia, Joe Paff, wrote a response to a dreadful story about Gaddafi’s killing on Yahoo’s site, commenting “This kind of gloating is bound to come back and bite your butt. Imagine how many people in the world would like to see Netanyahu or Obama dragged from their hiding holes and tortured. It will take about six months for everyone to regret the ‘new’ Libyan ‘democrats.’ ”

  Yahoo’s initial electronic response was to write to Joe, “Oops! Try again.” So he checked “post” a second time. Yahoo then rewrote his comment, complete with misspellings, stripped of any mention of Netanyahu or Obama, and “posted” it as: “This is the kind of gloating that comes back and bites you on the butt. Just imagine how many peopel in the world would like to see Americans dragged through the streets and tortured to death.” As Joe wrote me, “Just another small episode in artificial intelligence and the present taboos.”

  October 29

  Remember Tilikum, kidnapped by whale-slavers off Iceland at the age of two in 1983? Deliberately starved as part of his “training” in a Sealand tank in Victoria, Canada, Tilikum has spent the past nineteen years at the SeaWorld marine park in Orlando, Florida. The whale has been involved in three lethal onslaughts on his captors, the most recent being an attack on Dawn Brancheau, a trainer he dragged into his tank and drowned in February 2010.

  Why was Tilikum spared? Big whale, big money.

  There’s a lot riding on the slave orcas toiling away, giving as many as eight performances per day, 365 days a year, as the star attractions in these marine parks. Tilikum’s asset value is enhanced by his duties as a sperm donor. He’s a breeding “stud” often kept in solitary, away from the other orcas, and has fathered thirteen killer whales.

  Earlier this week, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed a lawsuit against SeaWorld for “enslaving” five orcas. Tilikum is one of the plaintiffs. PETA’s suit invokes the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing and prohibiting slavery, and demands the orcas’ release under the Amendment’s terms. “All five of these orcas were violently seized from the ocean and taken from their families as babies,” says PETA’s President Ingrid Newkirk, echoed by PETA’s lawyer, Jeff Kerr, who told AP: “By any definition, these orcas are slaves—kidnapped from their homes, kept confined, denied everything that’s natural to them and forced to perform tricks for SeaWorld’s profit.”

  Will the orcas get legal standing?

  Animals currently have no rights recognized in US law, but many groups of lawyers are working to strengthen laws that protect animals and many individuals have successfully brought lawsuits to protect the welfare of animals. Animal rights, or animal liberation, are one of the oldest forms of Animal Law.

  Three years ago the DC Bar journal ran a very useful survey by Kathryn Alfisi who point
ed out that it was the Michael Vick case “that allowed for just the right atmosphere to push for state and federal legislation that would strengthen dog-fighting and animal cruelty laws.” Vick was the Atlanta Falcons quarterback who pulled a twenty-three-month sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to run a dog-fighting ring on his property in Surry County, Virginia.

  Some animal lawyers flee the term “animal rights” while others question the whole concept of legal boundaries between animals and humans. Several state bars have animal law sections or committees. In 2005 the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section created its Animal Law Committee. More than 100 animal law courses are being taught at law schools across the States.

  The legal system, Alfisi reckons, is beginning “to reflect the increasingly complex relationship between people and their pets in our society.”

  The phrase “increasingly complex” does the Middle Ages a grave injustice. Just read my CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St. Clair’s marvelous introduction to Jason Hribal’s Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden Story of Animal Resistance: “In medieval Europe (and even colonial America) thousands of animals were summoned to court and put on trial for a variety of offences, ranging from trespassing, thievery and vandalism to rape, assault, and murder. The defendants included cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, slugs, swallows, oxen, horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, wolves, bears, bees, weevils, and termites. These tribunals were not show trials or strange festivals like Fools Day. The tribunals were taken seriously by both the courts and the community.”

  Humans and animals often ended up in the same courtroom as co-conspirators, especially in cases of bestiality. The animals were given their own lawyers at public expense. “Sometimes, particularly in cases involving pigs,” St. Clair writes, “the animal defendants were dressed in human clothes during court proceedings and at executions.”

  The animal trials peaked in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, then faded away, done in by the Enlightenment and by René Descartes, who argued that animals were mere physical automatons. They lacked the power of cognition, the ability to think and reason. At Port Royal the Cartesians cut up living creatures with fervor, and in the words of one of Descartes’ biographers, “kicked about their dogs and dissected their cats without mercy, laughing at any compassion for them and calling their screams the noise of breaking machinery.”

  Across the Channel, Francis Bacon declared in his Novum Organum that the proper aim of science was to restore the divinely ordained dominance of man over nature, “to extend more widely the limits of the power and greatness of man” and so to endow him with “infinite commodities.” Bacon’s doctor, William Harvey, was a diligent vivisector of living animals.

  Thus, at the dawn of capitalism, the materialistic view of history left no room for either the souls or consciousness of animals. They were no longer our fellow beings. They had been rendered, philosophically and literally, resources for guiltless exploitation, turned into objects of commerce, labor, food—and entertainment. Tilikum should get his day in court.

  November 2

  I have to admit, writing these lines at the start of November, that after digesting the daily reports from our national battlefield (Zuccotti Park, Oscar Grant Plaza, Austin, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Nashville, Portland …), my eyes flicker across the world map to Greece, and my heart beats a lot faster. Now there, surely, we can savor the whiff of a pre-revolutionary situation!

  It must be the dratted Leninist in me, even after years of therapy. Surfeited with somewhat turgid paeans to the democratic gentility of the OWSers, I clamber up to the dusty top shelf, furtively haul down Vladimir Ilyich’s “April Theses” of 1917 and dip in: end the war, confiscate the big estates, immediately merge all the banks into one general national bank … The blood flows back into my cheeks, my eyes sparkle. Then, hearing my daughter’s footfall outside the library, I shove Lenin back into place, scuttle back down the ladder and pluck a copy of E. F. Schumacher, even though I’m not at all sure what is on the OWSers’ reading lists or Twitter menus.

  Now take an arc of Greek history, as evoked in a photo that landed in my inbox at the end of October, featuring a group of Greek demonstrators in front of the Parthenon holding a white banner with “OXI 1940–2011” written on it in red and black letters. In Greek “OXI” means “no.” The email reminded me that the “no” of 1940 was the answer, given on October 28, to the Italian ambassador relaying Mussolini’s demand that Greece open its borders to the Italian army. The “no” thus marked Greece’s entry into World War II. Annual ceremonies have officially commemorated this response to fascism.

  This year, on the morning of October 28, a group of artists, authors, and academics smuggled a big OXI sign onto the Acropolis, “wrapped up around the body of an excellent theater actress under a very large coat. And we managed to demonstrate for more than half an hour on the Acropolis itself!” The group could do this because “all policemen were at the parades’ battlegrounds at Syntagma and everywhere in Attiki [district] and none managed to climb the Acropolis in time.”

  OXI in 1940 to Mussolini. OXI in 2011 to the bankers seeking to plant their neoliberal jackboots on the neck of the Greek people. OXI to the bankers’ local collaborators.

  Like Greece, the strength of the OWS movement lies in the simplicity and truth of its basic message: the few are rich, the many are poor. In terms of its pretensions the capitalist system has failed. Nearly six million manufacturing jobs in the United States have disappeared since 2000, and more than 40,000 factories have closed. African Americans have endured what has been described as the greatest loss of collective assets in their history. Hispanics have seen their net worth drop by two-thirds. Millions of whites have been pitchforked into penury and desperation.

  But for all its simplicity and truth, how much staying power does the OWS message have as presently deployed? In terms of its powers of repression, the system has not failed. To date, the OWS movement has not even confronted the moneyed elite with a threat on the scale of the 1999 protests in Seattle. There are many options lying ahead for the OWSers to ponder, though they should remember Lenin: there is never a final collapse of capitalism unless there is an alternative.

  Having briefly tasted batons and pepper spray, OWSers should know that when capital feels it is being pushed to the wall, it will stop at nothing to crush any serious challenge. The cop puts away his smile. The indulgent mayor imposes a curfew. “Exemplary” sentences are handed down. The prisons fill up. Organized repression can be defeated only by organized resistance, nationwide. How to mount this is the OWSers’ urgent, immediate challenge.

  November 8

  As he prepares to follow Gov. Rick Perry into the oubliette of campaign history, Herman Cain can at least console himself that as an alleged harasser of women, his was certainly a classier act than that of a man who not only got elected President in 1992 but was triumphantly reelected in 1996, each time by about forty-five million Americans armed with the knowledge that if you left your wife at the table next to Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas in McDonald’s, by the time you got back from ordering more fries Bill would be ensconced in your seat, his hand already hovering above your wife’s thigh.

  So Obama’s opponent in 2012 will surely be Mitt Romney, a Mormon millionaire reminiscent in style, and utter lack of any fixed political conviction beyond knee-jerk conservatism, to George Bush Sr. There’s no point in trying to sketch in “the real Mitt Romney,” because there isn’t one. He’s been campaigning for the Republican nomination for eight solid years, and his brain has been washed clean years ago of anything approaching an original or useful thought about America’s condition.

  November 16

  What next? Thus far the OWS movement has mostly been evoked by its participants in terms of self-education and consciousness-raising about the nature of America’s political economy. There’s been a lot of talk about a brave new world being born. One fellow chided me for not writing
more about the movement which he hailed as “the most militant upsurge from the Left since the Vietnam War, the most frontal assault on the worst features of capitalism since the Great Depression.” This is a vast overstatement. In terms of substantive achievements, OWS has a long way to go, which is scarcely a reason for reproof since it only really got going in September. “The most frontal assault on the worst features of capitalism since the Great Depression?” Scarcely.

  Today, the OWSers have registered a presence and won considerable public support, which should not be surprising because America is in poor shape, the rich unpopular, and politicians despised. But, as yet, there is no sign of any material political consequence deriving from this popularity.

  November 24

  It’s Thanksgiving here in America, a day of infamy for turkeys. At my place in Humboldt County, northern California, turkeys learned their lesson a few years ago, when five fine specimens of Meleagris gallopavo—wild turkey to you—wandered onto my property. I assume they forgot to check the calendar. Under California fish and game regulations, you can shoot them legally for two weeks around Thanksgiving.

  Out came my 12-gauge, and I loosed off a shot that at some 100 feet did no discernible damage, and after a brief bout of what-the-hell-was-that the turkeys continued to forage. A fusillade of two more shots finally brought down a fourteen-pounder. I hung him for four days, plucked him and by Thanksgiving’s end he was history.

  Wild turkeys hadn’t been seen in California since earlier in the Cenozoic era, but in recent years two ranchers in my valley imported a few and now they’ve begun to appear in our neighborhood in substantial numbers. I’ve heard reports of flocks of up to 100 wild turkeys fifteen miles up the Mattole River around Honeydew, an impressive quantity though still far short of the thousand birds counted in one day by two hunters in New England in the 1630s. The taste of wild turkey? Between you, me, the drumstick and my dog Jasper, it was markedly similar to farm-raised turkeys, though of course superior to the flanges of blotting paper consequent upon the familiar overroasting of store-bought turkey at low temperatures for ten hours. I’m for high heat and about three-and-a-half hours for a turkey of average size, though not for the dirigibles they use to raise on a farm in Loleta, near here, which turned the scales at forty pounds.