June 13, 2001, 2:47 p.m.
It amazes me (well, not really "amazes," considering governmentality, hegemony, et cetera) that in the six years
since McVeigh's act of domestic terrorism, there has been no
sustained national discussion about the social forces that led him to
either that decision or moment. His dismissal as a lunatic, "lone gunman"
(barring the relatively silent Terry Nichols), or mere extremist seems to dangerously elide the politics of
resentment the U.S. nation-state both foments and displaces onto its minoritized populations, and for which the nation-state itself
(and all its coercive apparatuses) becomes a target. I hardly endorse McVeigh's brand of Angry
White Male, but I think it's crucial to understand the processes
and convergences and apparatuses by which he came to (literally) perform his
alterity with such violence.
June 12,
2001, 10:31 a.m.
In airports across the country I read
the headlines: "MCVEIGH PREPARES TO DIE." On front pages there are photographs of vendors in
Terre Haute selling fifteen-dollar t-shirts emblazoned with, "DIE DIE DIE," and
other vengeful sentiments. Oklamhoma governor Frank Keating, U.S. Attorney
General John Ashcroft, and a variety of "men on the
street" suggest that McVeigh's execution will provide closure for "the victims' families"
and the presumably also-victimized "America," momentarily shaken by the angry white men
it has produced in abundance.
The politics of
resentment run deep, and the politics of capital punishment
promises vindication. Where the nation-state has failed to be accountable
to its responsibilities (social welfare, economic equity, cultural justice),
the nation-state seeks to veil its failures with a show of
might and muscle.
The language of psychoanalysis notes
that the fetish is a fragment that promises wholeness in place of lack,
presence where absence has been perceived. Sitting on the plane, I
wonder, does the vengeful fetish for capital punishment, for blood,
then veil the continuing absence of justice?
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"Capital punishment has become a weapon of cultural war on
several levels: it coarsens broad sections of the population, preparing
them to accept punitive campaigns against a variety of disturbing
constituencies; it foments political divisions favorable to the Right by
associating liberal 'relativism' and 'weaknes' with the 'savagery' of
implacable killers; it fosters the politics of forgetting by translating
'moral proportionality' from an uncertain attempt to match penalty to
crime into a politically potent equation between the level of social
resentment felt by disaffected constituencies and the level of violence
taken by the state against convicted murderers; it displays the state as
an awesome theater of force in one domain during a time when its
effective accountability is otherwise shaky; and it organizes a set of
cultural anxieties about the place of death in life." --William
Connolly, "The Will, Capital Punishment, and Cultural War"
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Visit the Guardian UK for their critical (and droll) reporting on Bush in Europe.