Witness and remember

Christian Century, May 2, 2001 by Thomas Lynch

AFTER 30 YEARS of directing funerals, I've come to believe in open caskets. A service to which everybody but the deceased is invited, like a wedding without the bride or a baptism without the baby, denies the essential reality of the occasion, misses the focal point. It is why we comb wreckage, drag rivers and bring our war dead home. Knowing is better than not knowing, no matter how difficult the facts; and seeing, it turns out, is believing. That's what hurts, the heart-sore widow says of the body in the blue suit in the box. Births, deaths, marriages--the fashions of these passages change, but the fundamental obligations of witness and remembrance remain. And whether we bear witness to the joy or sadness, the love or grief, the life or death, the sharing of it makes the bearing of it better.

Which is why we searched the devastation in Oklahoma City--to return the bodies of the dead to the families they belonged to. To deal with loss, we must confront our losses. Witness and remembrance are akin.

The same is so for executions. Knowing is better than not knowing. Seeing is believing. Such an extreme exercise of the public will and the state's power demands a public witness.

For people of faith, witness and remembrance are essential stations in their pilgrimage. Passover and Crucifixion, Crusade and Holocaust--these are flesh-and-blood events that call upon the flesh-and-blood faithful to "see and believe," to "watch and not forget." They are not pleasant, but they are compelling. And while Christ chided Thomas for his famous doubt, two millennia later we are glad to have his unambiguous testimony: "My Lord!" he said, changed utterly by the moment, "My God? We might reasonably wonder if those first Jewish Christians would have embraced the meaning of Christ's execution if Pilate had decided to do it behind closed doors, or if Thomas and his co-religionists had never seen the dead man raised to life.

Scripture and liturgy are the record and replay of what was seen and heard. Nowadays we watch for signs and wonders on TV.

When Timothy McVeigh is put to death by lethal injection on May 16, it will be the first federal execution in nearly 40 years. For most Americans alive today, it will be the first time in our adult lives that one of our own kind--human kind--will be capitally punished by the government to which we pledge our allegiance and pay our taxes. And yet, except for a select few, none of us will be allowed to watch. The suggestion that this execution be televised is dismissed out of hand by the powers that be for reasons never clearly articulated, and in doing so they substantially undermine the rights and duties of citizens in a democracy to scrutinize the exercise of a government's lethal powers.

When we bomb Iraqis or Serbians, when we send troops into harm's way with weapons that kill, we send along the cameras too, because it is our right--some would say our duty--to witness the killing that is done in our names. If that is so in Kosova, why oughtn't it be so in Indianapolis when a legal, justifiable and state-sanctioned dose of homicide is visited upon the Oklahoma City Bomber on behalf of We the People?

For most of history the public square has been where these things were done--it's the place for politicos and preachers, the sideshows and snake oil, the floggings and the hangings, the public spectacles and entertainments and civic business. The public square is now the TV screen where candidates and con artists, circus and sales pitch, pundits and the evening news all get aired, for all to see. We may choose not to watch, but should we be denied access?

So why not public executions?

"Bad taste," it is argued, as if Temptation Island or Jerry Springer were benchmarks of culture. To be sure, if we only televised what edified, the screen would be blank most hours of most days. That "it might make him a martyr" seems unlikely. A vicious dog put down does not become a much-missed pet. And seeing an evil man put to death will neither add to nor subtract from the terrible math: 19 children, 149 adults--168 innocents murdered by his horrific evil. Those mistaken enough to regard McVeigh as a martyr will not be disabused of their ignorance by his death, seen or unseen. Those who know evil when they see it will not confuse McVeigh with Martin Luther King Jr. or St. Catherine of Sienna. "It might be turned into a spectacle" is another caution, as if the medium cannot distinguish between witness and entertainment, as if the terrorism McVeigh visited upon Oklahoma City and the society at large was not "spectacular." Television does Senate hearings and superbowls, the World Wrestling Federation and Book TV. It does not entirely confuse the death of princes or the burial of princesses with Bowling for Dollars' or The Dating Game. It could, quite conceivably, get an execution "fight." But getting it wrong is still better than not getting it at all.

OF COURSE, the real concern is that a country that claims to be "for" the death penalty mightn't have the stomach to see exactly what it is that it is "for." Is it possible that the idea of the thing is less disturbing than the thing itself, the abstract more palatable than the actual fact in the way that "a woman's right to choose" is a tidier concept than jars of dead fetuses that look like us? Is it likely that our bravery and braggadocio might wither a little by watching someone put down, more or less like a cocker spaniel or Cheshire cat--not because of what is done to McVeigh, but because of what is done to us?