Television Dances With the Reaper

By LANCE MORROW

Welcome to American Moral Blood Sports -- live and in color. On the program: from Buffalo, the Pro-Choicers meet the Pro-Lifers for another in-your-face metaphysical infuriator. And from San Quentin, Calif., after a 14-year legal preliminary, a night of ghastly last-minute appeals and strap-him-in-take-him- out action as double-murderer Robert Alton Harris flirts with cyanide and exhales death-row doggerel. (Close-up. Harris, macho-sardonic: "You can be a king or a street sweeper,/ But everybody dances with the Grim Reaper.") Back after this . . .

TELEVISION HAS ALL BUT SWALLOWED AMERICAN POLItics and sport. Now it is closing in on the nation's moral dilemmas. Debates of the toughest questions (abortion, the death penalty, for example) look like wrestling or professional football. When Robert Harris was executed in California last week, the event had a strange gaudy quality, somehow commercial and electronic. Perhaps one day prisoners will go to the gas chamber with product- endorsement logos on their prison pajamas.

Americana: Harris' last meal was two large pizzas, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a six-pack of Pepsi, a bag of jelly beans, a pack of Camel cigarettes. Junk food was a sort of surreal motif in the case. In 1978 Harris murdered two teenage boys in order to steal their car for a bank robbery, and, having killed them, he finished the burgers they had been eating. (My theory is that Harris would be alive today if he had not eaten the burgers. That detail must have struck the jurors as the cool, novelistic touch of Satan.)

The state of California might as well have executed Harris on the 50-yd. line at half time of the Super Bowl -- the two moral constituencies, pro-death penalty and con, cheering or shrieking from either side of the stadium, the federal judiciary hovering overhead like a black blimp. When Harris was finally dead, America saw the postgame show: witnesses to the execution describing how the prisoner may or may not have mouthed the words "I'm sorry" to the father of one of the victims; breathed the fumes; convulsed and drooled; then died.

Socrates did not say the untelevised life is not worth living. He said the unexamined life. The unexamined death is a waste too. Socrates spent the hours before his execution by hemlock in 399 B.C. discussing the immortality of the soul. Reflection is not television's strong suit. The medium is a fairly crude moral filter, a kind of brilliant, overstimulated cretin. Its brain waves are discontinuous.

Leave aside the question of whether capital punishment is right or wrong. If the people choose to execute a criminal, how should it be done? Before what audience? In full video, as a kind of Islamic-electronic retribution spectacle?

The Eighth Amendment forbids "cruel and unusual punishments." Some of the witnesses last week thought the cyanide, which took some minutes to kill Harris, was barbaric. That is an insult to centuries of creative barbarians, who have administered capital punishment by boiling in oil, burning at the stake, flaying to death, crushing, impaling, drowning, crucifying, drawing and quartering, disemboweling, gibbeting, garroting, throwing to lions and much, much worse. Cyanide, by comparison, is a sweet pink poof of cessation. Would last week's witnesses have been happier if California had used a neat bullet to the base of the brain (the method the Chinese authorities favor now)? Or if the state had injected Harris with a lethal shot of cocaine so that he would depart in a blinding rush of pleasure? What was truly cruel and unusual -- virtually sadistic -- was the way that the quarreling judicial stage managers jerked Harris in and out of the gas chamber, the man not knowing whether he was to die or be spared. In that long night, he died several deaths.

Executions in past centuries were public events -- part ritual of citizenship, part savage entertainment. Every self-respecting English town had its gallows. As prisoners were carted from jail to noose, their friends along the route passed them strong drink and might turn the last mile into a macabrely hilarious rolling party. Later, the decorous 19th century thought it more humane and seemly to execute people out of sight, behind the prison walls.

Maybe that was a mistake. In a poem, Robert Lowell wrote, "My eyes have seen what my hand did." Does the public have a right, even a duty, to watch its executions, to see exactly what its hand has done? What would be the effect?

If TV cameras had been present during the American Civil War to record the slaughters of Cold Harbor, say, or the Wilderness, the public might have been so sickened that it would have abandoned the struggle. The country might have split into the United States and the Confederate States; slavery might have survived a long time. Some think seeing executions on television would so repel the public that it would abolish capital punishment. Some believe showing such vivid evidence of the punishment would deter people from committing the crimes. Perhaps. Or would televised executions become something like what they were once -- grisly popular entertainments?

The answer is all of the above. Emphasis on the entertainment. People pay millions to watch terminators and terminations. They have a taste for it. The distinction between actual death and special effects gets blurry in this culture. It thins to vanishing. Reality and unreality become ugly, interchangeable kicks. Perhaps if Harris had been spared, he might, like Audie Murphy, have been hired to play himself in the docudrama.