Homo Sacer
- By Michael Thurston
Just back from the AWP in Minneapolis, I’d love to be writing this morning about the fun of chatting with writers—some we have published, some we would love to publish, some we look forward to getting to know—or about the splendid haul of books and magazines that pushed my carry-on to the limit, or even about the strange physics of the book fair, fluorescent lights sapping the soul even as the palpable commitment to literature re-energizes it. But at the other end of the state right now, lawyers are telling jurors they should authorize a killing in my name.
Last week, this jury—as expected—rendered guilty verdicts on the thirty charges laid against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It is clear that Tsarnaev participated in the bombing at the 2013 Boston Marathon, that he carried a pressure cooker packed with shrapnel in a backpack and set this bomb amidst the crowd near the finish line. It is clear that Tsarnaev killed and maimed people in a terrorist attack and that he was complicit in further violence in the attack’s aftermath. For this, the federal government would like to see him dead.
The arguments for and against capital punishment are old and well known and there is not space to rehearse them again here. You’ll say “deterrence,” and I’ll say “prove it” (you can’t). You’ll say “justice,” and I’ll say “vengeance.” You’ll say “eye for eye” and “intent of the founders,” and I’ll ask whether we’d rather be like Saudi Arabia in this regard or Britain, France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Spain, and Canada. We’ve spun those wheels before, we’ll spin them again, and they still won’t get us anywhere. So how about I say this: “human sacrifice.”
Capital punishment is an act informed by magical thinking. It serves no positive social purpose, but it holds out an illusory promise: if we perform this butchery, we can keep the darkness at bay. The victim is the goat onto which we load our fears—of sudden death, disorder, and destruction, of, perhaps, our own innate capacity for mayhem—and which we then kill to propitiate the demons and dark gods. In a world more full of weapons than we can comprehend, a world we have no power to order to our liking, we can take comfort in the ritual of sacrifice, saying, praying, that if we just do this one thing then we will have made ourselves safe for another day.
In sum, a state-sponsored slaughter of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would resemble US foreign policy since 2001. Atavistic drives never yield a lasting solution. The killing harms us all.
