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started 6/10/2001; 7:51:35 AM - last post 6/10/2001; 7:51:35 AM
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Doc Searls - 
6/10/2001; 11:51:35 AM (reads: 2409, responses: 0)
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Bye, Tim 
| | At 7am tomorrow morning in Indiana, the United States will kill Timothy McVeigh. Most of us won't miss the guy. Worse, most Americans polled on the subject — and we are polled often — believe it is right for the U.S. to kill McVeigh. After all, McVeigh willfully killed more people in one instant than any civilian in U.S. history. Worse, he believes he killed those people for good cause and appears to have no remorse about it. |
| | I think often about capital punishment. I've been against it for as long as I've been capable of holding a defensible opinion about it. I remember arguing with my father about Caryl Chessman, a famous and controversial character who was put to death by California in May, 1960, when I was twelve years old. I was against the execution. Pop was for it. |
| | Pop was a Good Man who believed in punishment, in retribution, in eye-for-eye justice. Pop was born in 1908. He credited many of his beliefs to his father, another Good Man by all accounts. Pop also remembered his father fondly as a man nobody crossed more than once. This would be in character with my grandfather's time. He was born in 1863 and by the time my father was born had led a colorful life as a frontiersman in the old West and an engineer who helped build the Panama Canal. Rough justice was the standard back then. It's still the standard now. Incarceration is at an all-time high. The humane destruction of Timothy McVeigh, with its galleries of witnesses culled from the ranks of the bereaved, points our culture back toward public executions. |
| | There are nostalgists who inveigh in favor of public executions, in faith that the effects would be instructive to potential perpetrators. Yet through the formative years of our civilization public executions were more a form of entertainment than instruction. In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes reports that England in the early Industrial Age attempted to control rampant crime by extending the list of capital offenses until they included such petty crimes as pickpocketing. The practice became a proven failure when it became apparent that the best places to find pickpockets were at public executions of other pickpockets. |
| | Three years ago I wrote this to Dave in response to his own stated opposition to the death penalty. I can only improve on that by providing a link to a piece about Hal Crowther, whose brilliant writing about this hideous practice still can't be found by search engines. |
| | It was from Crowther I learned that Louis Mumford traced war to the neolithic practice of human sacrifice. Today I believe the same is true of capital punishment. |
Maybe she thinks I have the answer
| | It's almost midnight and the only sound outside comes from the talking cat who lives downstairs. It speaks in a remarkably humanoid voice, and, according to its owner, is not in heat or anthing like that. She just vocalizes. Mostly she asks questions. Rowr? Arrowr? Herrowrr? Nowr? Arr arorwr arrowwwwr ar? And so on. Six to ten trains come through between midnight and dawn every day, about 300 feet from our open bedroom window. Some of them are freignt trains with horns that blast long and hard. I rarely hear them any more. But I always hear the cat. |
Why I love Deborah
| | The title of her piece on Microsoft's smart tags makes me feel validated just by reading it: Edit This, Bucko. |
Shack up
| | More positive reports on particular Radio Shacks. One reader writes from North Carolina: |
| | The Burlington (Colonial Mall) Radio Shack rocks, too. Particularly the manager on Duty, Todd. |
| | Meanwhile Dean, who knows the cellular phone business inside out (he used to be in, now he's out — but still he's somehow in another part of the phone business) told me today on the phone that the good service Joyce got yesterday is definitely not Policy for Radio Shack. At least I think that's what he said. He was on the Tappan Zee bridge on his way to a Yankees game, calling my cell phone from his cell phone; and the two of us said "What?" more than anything else. Anyway, he can correct me. Bloggers do that a lot. |
| | As it happens (or happened) I managed a Radio Shack store thirty years ago. (It was actually a department in Bambergers, a big department store at Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey.) As I recall it was then Policy to give managers a lot of leeway in doing favors for customers. I would think this is still the case. But does anybody know for sure? |
Worst new flavor
| | Walking behind me yesterday Jeffrey called out, "Papa! I have discovered lemon-flavored boogers!" |
| | "Really," I replied without looking back. "How can you tell?" |
| | "What do you think? That's how they taste!" |
| | Later he was disgusted by all the gross stuff the lead character ate in the movie Shrek. When I asked him why he didn't object to the taste of boogers, Jeffrey replied, "I don't eat boogers on purpose. When my nose runs I can't help noticing the flavor." |
| | "Is that how you noticed some boogers taste like lemon?" |
| | "Where do you think the lemon flavor comes from?" |
| | "I thought you knew the answer." |
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