The Reckonings

by Lacy M. Johnson

  “Twenty-two years we’ve been going through this”: See “Even After Execution, No Finality for Mother” by Moni Basu at CNN.com, including embedded video interviews; and “Troy Davis, Victim of Judicial Lynching” by Amy Goodman, writing for The Guardian.

  “the contention that violence is inevitable”: See Stephen P. Wink and Walter Wink’s “Domination, Justice and the Cult of Violence” in St. Louis University Law Journal.

  “a kindly and pleasant sleep”: See Book II, “To the King,” in Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning.

  “but when it may serve to make a fair and easy passage”: On April 26, 1990, Dr. Jack Kevorkian appeared on The Phil Donahue Show to debut an invention: the Thanatron, or “death machine,” the purpose of which was to facilitate suicide for patients in the final stages of crippling disease. The Thanatron was engineered so that the patient could pull a trigger that initiated a sequence, beginning with a drip of saline solution; another push of the button began releasing thiopental, which would put the patient into a deep coma; sixty seconds later, the machine would release a dose of potassium chloride sufficient enough to stop the patient’s heart. After the State of Michigan revoked his medical license in 1991, Kevorkian no longer had access to the drugs required for the Thanatron, and thus the Mercitron was born: a simple suicide machine that employed a gas mask fed by a canister of carbon monoxide. Kevorkian would often counsel his patients to take muscle relaxers or sedatives before the procedure began so that they would not panic or feel pain while gasping for air.

  we don’t treat what ails their bodies: There is some debate about this. According to the Gate Control Theory of Pain, authored by Ronald Melzack (the same Ronald Melzack as the one who developed the McGill Pain Questionnaire with Warren Torgerson) and Patrick David Wall in 1965, pain messages originate in the body and flow along the nerves to the spinal cord and on up to the brain, where they encounter “nerve gates” in the spinal cord that may be open or closed depending on a number of factors, including whether any messages are at that time “coming down” from the brain. These pain messages are influenced by emotion and cognition, and because creative expression work on and by these same forces, one theory proposes that art therapy may assist in pain management, though this theory remains largely untested.

  I think there are different kinds of mercy: I owe credit for this idea to Arthur Chu’s discussion of “big faith” and “little faith” in “How ‘Orange Is the New Black’ Found God” in the Daily Beast.

  “It didn’t bring me any sense of peace or relief”: In “A Hanging,” George Orwell writes:

  It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working—bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming—all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned—reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone—one mind less, one world less.

  He wishes the state would have shown his father’s killer mercy: “It’s not that I believe people don’t deserve to die for the crimes that they commit,” Bryan Stevenson often says in his public lectures. “It’s just that I think that we don’t deserve to kill.” The entire argument over capital punishment hinges on what each of us deserves: a victim deserves peace, and if necessary, retribution, or so the argument goes; murderers deserve nothing less than death, and certainly nothing more.

  “Poetry has its uses for despair”: From Christian Wiman, “Mortify Our Wolves,” in The American Scholar.

  SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER

  Speak Truth to Power: An earlier version of this essay was delivered as the John F. Eberhardt Memorial Lecture at the University of Kansas on April 23, 2015. I had been invited to speak on this subject after it was revealed that the university was being investigated for Title IX violations.

  she curses Tereus and vows to tell everyone what he has done: See, in particular, Metamorphosis (the Slavitt translation), Book Six, lines 817–824, in which Philomela is speaking:

  My self, abandon’d, and devoid of shame,

  Thro’ the wide world your actions will proclaim;

  Or tho’ I’m prison’d in this lonely den,

  Obscur’d, and bury’d from the sight of men,

  My mournful voice the pitying rocks shall move,

  And my complainings eccho thro’ the grove.

  Hear me, o Heav’n! and, if a God be there,

  Let him regard me, and accept my pray’r.

  I learn first from social media: The Steubenville case probably would have become like every other case were it not for the early efforts of Alexandria Goddard, a crime blogger who once lived in Steubenville and began following the case only after seeing tweets making death threats toward the girl after the arrest of the football players on August 22. She followed those tweets back to the night of the party, when those same football players were posting explicit photos and jokes about a “dead girl.” “Within about two hours, I had a pretty decent outline of what was going on that night,” Ms. Goddard told the New York Times. “I was sickened. . . . It was amazing the stuff that was out there and that so many people who saw what was going on recorded it in real time and yet not one person stopped it.”

  “The finest trick of the devil”: See Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen: “La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.”

  a sixteen-year-old girl known simply as “Jada”: See Jezebel, CNN.com, The Guardian, the Houston Chronicle, and Houstonia for original coverage of this story.

  some kind of James Frey reference: When, in 2005, Oprah chose James Frey’s 2003 memoir, A Million Little Pieces, for her book club, it shot to the top of bestsellers lists. Several months later, reports exposed parts of the book as false, fictionalized, fabricated, and the media responded with uproar. Oprah confronted Frey on her daytime talk show: “I don’t know what is true, and I don’t know what isn’t,” she told him before asking him to apologize to her, and to the world. Despite this scandal, the book (now marketed as a semi-fictional novel) remains a strong seller, fifteen years after its original release.

  “No advanced step taken by women”: See “Fifty Years of Work for Woman,” Independent.

  The insults boys learn: Consider, for example, the following abbreviated list: pussy, bitch, twat, sissy, cunt, faggot, girl.

  Cosby’s language is playful: Denial itself could entail a pleasurable act if, as Freud maintains, the logic of the pleasure principle acknowledges only what has the narcissistically pleasing characteristics of being good and everything else must remain unacknowledged. See Wilfried Ver Eecke’s Denial, Negation, and the Forces of the Negative, especially “The Complex Phenomenon of Denial.”

  an allegation, a suggestion, a rumor: After every atrocity, one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies, writes Judith Lewis Herman in Trauma and Recovery: “It never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it on herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.”

  The lawyers for Owen Labrie: See the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vice, Jezebel, and the Concord Monitor for original coverage of this story.

  “may have been a little carried away”: He is thinking, perhaps, of the play between the word rape and its Latin root, raptus, for “seized,” from rapere, “to seize.”
Not like forcible sex, the word for that being stuprum: “disgrace.” But like the word raptio refers to the seizures of women by Zeus. Like the way property is seized and carried off. Like rapture, or the transport of one’s soul.

  I was fourteen the first time a man raped me: This section of this essay has appeared in a different form as “Trigger” in Guernica and in Brian Turner, ed., The Kiss: Intimacies from Writers.

  “Power”: This quote from Michel Foucault comes from an interview conducted by Michael Bess on November 3, 1980, “Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual,” and transcribed for the journal History of the Present; both the Voltaire and the Arendt quotes on power appear in Hannah Arendt’s On Violence.

  “speak truth to power”: See I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Letters.

  WHAT WE PAY

  when news that the Deepwater Horizon had exploded: On the morning of April 20, 2010, news reports said there had been an explosion on an oil rig out at sea and the fire had been burning all night. Eleven people were missing, and the Coast Guard was searching the Gulf in boats and from helicopters. All day long, the crews battled the fire that threatened to consume the rig: wide streams of water shooting into the blaze from every direction, while a pillar of black smoke billowed upward and upward until the wind caught it and carried it darkly to the east. The fire burned the next night too, and in the morning the rig began creaking—cranes falling over, whole decks collapsing, explosions sending debris into the air. Within minutes there was only a ring of fire, the wreckage sinking toward the ocean floor.

  Reports emerged of a five-mile-long oil slick extending away from the sunken rig. Three Norwegian crews sent remotely operated underwater vehicles to the seabed to locate the source of the spill. They found giant plumes of oil—much larger than the oil company or the Coast Guard admitted publicly—but no evidence of oil leaking from the rig itself, which they discovered upside down on the ocean floor. The next day, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry told CBS News’s Harry Smith, “At this time, there is no crude emanating from that well-head at the ocean floor.” That afternoon the search for the eleven missing crew members was called off. The oil company executive expressed his condolences in a press release: “On behalf of all of us at BP, my deepest sympathies go out to the families and friends who have suffered such a terrible loss.”

  Rear Admiral Landry claimed the situation was “contained,” that disaster had been “narrowly averted,” that there would be “zero environmental impact.” People watching television breathed a collective sigh of relief. A BP spokesperson claimed perhaps up to five thousand barrels of oil had been spilled. The Coast Guard offered a higher estimate, maybe eight thousand barrels. Meanwhile, the oil company set up a command post on the Louisiana coast to “prepare for potential release.”

  The slick continued to grow. In the morning, the broken wellhead was discovered by a pair of remotely operated underwater exploring vehicles. At that time Rear Admiral Landry said, “This is a very serious spill.”

  Ships set up containment booms to try to capture what they could of the oil: a sheen covering 580 square miles, now 100 miles long, now approaching the coast of Louisiana. Booms were placed along the coast to protect delicate ecosystems, though oil washed ashore anyway in giant, slopping waves.

  After weeks of pressure, the oil company released a live feed of the leaking well. Mud-colored crude gushed from the broken pipe in plumes so vast they boggle the mind. Spokespeople for the oil company insisted it looked worse than it actually was, sticking with the initial estimate of a thousand barrels a day. The company’s top executive asked the public to remember that the spill is “relatively tiny” in comparison to the size of the “very big” Gulf. Scientists analyzing the video said, no, the leak must be at least sixty thousand barrels a day, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand barrels a day. The president’s adviser on climate and energy said, “This is probably the biggest environmental disaster we have ever faced in this country.”

  The oil company tried to close the well, to cap the well, to contain the leak, it pumped oil from the leaking wellhead to a ship at sea; to several ships at sea; it placed a smaller pipe inside the larger broken pipe; it drilled a second well, and a third; it jammed drilling mud into the well to stop its flow; someone suggested blowing the whole thing up with a nuclear bomb.

  But the oil kept gushing and gushing and gushing. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration created a no-fishing zone in the Gulf, and then a larger one. Dead sea turtles washed ashore. Dead dolphins washed ashore. Oil washed ashore and covered the wetlands: birds and frogs and grasses. Experts said up to 1 million gallons of oil were flowing into the Gulf every day, which meant that the equivalent of the Exxon Valdez disaster repeated itself once every eleven days. After eighty-seven days, when crews finally succeeded in capping and sealing the broken wellhead, the oil spill covered an area the size of Oklahoma, drifting on the surface of the Gulf toward the coast, where it had already devastated entire ecosystems and economies. Miles-long oil plumes drifted under the surface of the Gulf toward underwater rain forests, toward reefs and canyons, toward currents that have since carried them who knows where. “Never in my career have I used the word hopeless,” environmentalist John Wathen told Tuscaloosa News, “but I think this is absolutely hopeless.”

  See also the New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, CBS News, Mother Jones, the Houston Chronicle, the Times-Picayune, Propublica, Rolling Stone, and Smithsonian for original coverage of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

  never really their dream in the first place: The Dream, writes Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me, “is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is treehouse and Cub Scouts. The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”

  “they were putting poison in the ocean”: The data are spotty, but it appears that BP employed roughly 140,000 people in cleanup work related to the spill; of those, nearly 90,000 workers were exposed to the controversial dispersant Corexit. Despite BP’s assurances that Corexit is “safe enough to drink,” the dispersant contains five chemicals associated with cancer and ten chemicals that are or may be toxic to kidneys; the label states it can cause red blood cells to burst and kidney and liver problems. Studies have found that Corexit causes damage to respiratory and nervous systems; skin irritation, burning and lesions, and in some cases temporary paralysis. BP sprayed 1.8 million gallons of that into the Gulf of Mexico.

  See “Cleanup in the Gulf: Oil Spill Dispersants and Health Symptoms in Deepwater Horizon Responders” in Environmental Health Perspectives and “The Gulf Study: A Prospective Study of Persons Involved in the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Response and Clean-Up” in Environmental Health Perspectives. See also Dahr Jamail’s feature article, “BP’s ‘Widespread Human Health Crisis,’ ” in Al Jazeera.

  a number of dangerous chemicals into the air: Among these chemicals are ammonia, benzene, acetaldehyde, allyl alcohol, carbon disulfide, chlorine, hydrochloric acid, lead, mercury compounds, methanol, methadone sodium salt, sulfuric acid, tert-Butyl alcohol, vanadium compounds, vinyl acetate, and butadiene. Butadiene in particular has been linked over and over again to rare forms of leukemia and other aggressive cancers.

  The ship channel is, for instance, home to Rhodia Eco Services, a chemical company that produces sulfuric acid, the most widely used chemical in industry—used, at least, in unleaded gasoline, automobile batteries, paper bleaching, sugar bleaching, water treatment, fertilizers, steel manufacturing, and dye. Rhodia Eco Services is the leading producer of sulfuric acid in North America.

  Less than a mile away from Rhodia Eco Services stands J. R. Harris Elementary School, named after John Richardson Harris, the founder of Harrisburg, the namesake
of Harris County, Texas. The J. R. Harris Elementary School was originally known as the Harrisburg School and operated out of a different facility that was built in 1895, nearly sixty years after General Santa Anna burned the city of Harrisburg and twenty years before Texas Chemical Company built the plant that has now become the single greatest source of pollution on the Houston Ship Channel. The Harrisburg School was rebuilt as J. R. Harris Elementary in 1958, at which time the Texas Chemical Company had been operating from its location on the Houston Ship Channel for more than forty years. Today, there are laws that can deny air permits to any chemical facility built within three thousand feet of a school, but there are no regulations preventing a school from operating within three thousand feet of a toxic chemical facility.

  This means there are no regulations protecting the 693 students between the ages of five and eleven currently enrolled at the J. R. Harris Elementary School: 97 percent are Hispanic, 3 percent are black; 94 percent are considered economically disadvantaged; and all live within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel, which means they too have a 56 percent greater chance of developing leukemia than kids who live anywhere else. And though this is a staggering fact in itself, the health risks from the plants and refineries that are located along the Houston Ship Channel are not limited exclusively to leukemia.

  than for people who live anywhere else: See “A Preliminary Investigation of the Association between Hazardous Air Pollutants and Lymphohematopoietic Cancer Risk among Residents of Harris County Texas,” a report to the Houston Department of Health and Human Services, by Kristina M. Walker, Ann L. Coker, Elaine Symanski, and Philip J. Lupo.

  why are we okay with it for anyone else?: “Why are some citizens exposed to intense pollution while the vast majority of Americans can afford to avoid this contamination?” environmental activist Steve Lerner asks in his book Zones. He continues, “There are no comfortable answers to these questions because sacrifice zones do not exist by accident.” Reverend Benjamin Chavis, who coined the term environmental racism, describes what activists often mean by the term environmental justice: “The environmental justice movement is a movement that confronts the ‘immorality of upper- and middle-class people consuming the most energy and producing the most waste, while it is the health of the poor that is most affected by the resulting pollution.’ ” This definition is echoed by Robert D. Bullard, in some circles considered the father of environmental justice, who adds: “Low income and minority communities continue to bear greater health and environmental burdens, while more affluent whites receive the bulk of the benefits.”