WASHINGTON REPORT: Speculative Spectaculars
Getlein, Frank
8 million unemployed are between the ages of 18 and 24. For those over 25 the unemployment rate is 6 percent; for those in their teens it is almost 20 percent. Millions of youngsters are not...
...What may surprise them is to learn that Feeney, almost 80, is alive and active, that his community is still grouped around him, and that their storymwhich began so hopefully and turned so sordid--is close to having a surprise happy ending...
...The Feeney story is the story, of course, of St...
...What strung Feeney and his followers out, it will be Commonweal: 5...
...Naturally, the execution programs should take place in the family hour, the young being so much more impressionable, it is thought...
...The present waste of our greatest resource is a national disgrace...
...Gratifying as is the thought of the ex-Chief swinging in the breeze from that yardarm, the actual spectacle probably wouldn't have much effect on that average eight-year-old so accustomed to so much gaudier takings off...
...Honest-anthentic murders tend to be committed by people driven over the edge of calm, rational planning, the sort of thing envisioned in deterrence theory...
...Carter has i]a mind...
...To supplement inadequate private efforts we need an imaginative, far-reaching program of service to the local community and to the nation--not a make-work, dead-end affair but one th~kt could render invaluable service and at the same time offer learning potential for later private employmenlt...
...Connally, no small boon...
...That's what I call deterrence...
...That last phrase is a key to the possible social usefulness of former Secretary Connally's suggestioz, despite its demonstrated dubiety at present...
...What ve know about capital punishment, after all, is not that it does not work as a deterrent, but only that it does not work as a deterrent against the crimes now punishet or proposed to be punished by the death penalty...
...Credibility is one...
...In electrocution, apparently the most widely used, or non-used, form, the celebrity just sits in a chair, suddenly stiffens, then just as suddenly slumps...
...The poor desperate sod sees suddenly the chance not only to settle accounts with his spouse, his boss, his brother, his hated classmate, but to become a national celebrity in the process...
...Is it any wonder that packs of wild youths prowl our inner cities...
...As things are, they most likely will simply acquire the best literary agent available and plunge into crime...
...It's no good telling a person in that state that he had better not strangle because he will shortly be strangled himself...
...Avery Dulles, for instance...
...Indeed, there is every reason to believe they do not...
...Connally probably has hit upon the one issue around which all of the right right can rally, but the proposal itself raises several questions which demand consideration, possibly resolution, before one can whole-heartedly endorse the Connally program for programming live, so to speak, TV...
...on the contrary, as with the poor man in Utah, it may even be a positive incentive to crime, the one possibility of getting everything settled at once...
...One's spouse has simply become so impossible that strangling seems the only sensible way to cut off the flow of invective from that oncebeloved throat...
...murder and rape, the crimes most widely punished b/ death, are indeed the product of desperation more oftel than not, there are crimes that are the sole product ~f calculation, and calculation, of course, is just what s counted on in the deterrent theory of capital punislment, on television or not...
...The other stuff, putting the killers and rapists to death on the tube, won't deter a thing, will merely lull people into a false sense of security by making them think the murderers and rapists in our midst are being deterred while the honest folk are enjoying an evening's entertainment...
...As to deterrence, capital punishment does not seem to have deterred many people from capital crimes, although it must be conceded that reliable figures in the field are hard to come by...
...These questions divide themselves neatly into two broad categories, those arising from the nature of the deterrence of crime and those arising from the nature of television as a social phenomenon...
...WASHINGTON REPORT SPECULATIVE SPECTACULARS John Counally of Texas, in a brilliant mo~ve to rally support among the right wing of the Republican right wing, has come out in favor not only of restoring capital punishment as a deterrent to crime but of televising executions to make the deterrent more deterrent still...
...The inquirer must also keep in mind that these two sets of considerations do not merely add up when placed together, but at the very least multiply and possibly go into geometric progression...
...Throw television coverage into that situation and yea get the geometric progression effect...
...Benedict's and make lives of their own...
...The future political criminal tempted to Nixonism, as things have worked out, has no deterrent consideration at all: except at the very lowest level of the actual burglars, the Nixonites have gone on to fame and fortune, becoming famous authors and richly rewarded celebrities...
...Second to Nixonism proper would come crimes that partake of the spirit of Nixonism, including most so-classed white collar crimes and cost overruns in military contracts...
...It's all so dull, the way it's done now...
...We may therefore begin to sketch out a revised theory of televised executions as crime deterrents with the idea that Nixonism in all of its many manifestations should be the prime crime for prime time family viewing executions...
...Had the nation seen Ehrlichman and Haldeman swinging from the end of a yardarm of a man-owar tied up at the Anacostia naval yard, it is reasonble to suppose that embryo Nixonians would think seriously about going into some other line of work...
...Any theatrical producer I know would say: It just needs something in the second act, maybe we can work it out in Boston...
...The television function brings its own problems...
...the trap-door opens, the mummy drops...
...Ths is for the reasons cited above, but there is no reasm at all to believe that those considerations--personal desperation and all thatmapply to all crimes...
...Such crimes, for example, are those committed by D many of John Connally's former associates in the Nixcl administration...
...Capital punishment is no deterrent to him...
...Far from being a deterrent, televised executions may actually increase the incidence of capital crimes, ss those crimes are now constituted...
...The Utah method of a volunteer firing squad summons up memories of the Old West, perhaps, but still, essentially, the celebrity is standing there---or even sitting there----suddenly jerks taut, falls over...
...If public televised executions are to have any deterrent effect ---or indeed any effect at all other than to move people to switch channels to "Kojak" or other more satisfyingly violent shows---the methods of execution are going to have to be rethought with an eye on the ratings...
...some of whom were lucky or wise enough to escape St...
...It's the kind of thing Samuel Beckett can get away with because he writes the lines to go with it...
...Leonard Feeney was the Center's gurumlecturing, entertaining ('he was a marvelous mimic), preaching, making converts, at the same time building a dazzling, if superficial, reputation as a poet and author...
...It's action, no doubt, but not very much...
...The whole Watergate fugue of crim~, while perhaps derived from some passionate convicticl of Richard Nixon--that he was above the law, f~r example, as indeed he turned out to be--were nevetheless preeminently crimes of calculation...
...We hope such a program is what Mr...
...The short range is overwhelming...
...It is like the CIA's implicit claim that by steaming open Bella Abzug's mail, the Agency was able to prevent a Russian invasion of the east coast...
...The agents did steam open the Congresswoman's mail, after all, and the Russians did not land on Staten Island: dare we take the risk of not steaming open her mail in the future...
...He thinks, on the one hand, that that doesn't matter, anything is better than the situation as it exists...
...If the Wategate calculators were capable of calculating that th0/ could cook the election by breaking into Larry O'Briem office, that they could lie to Congress and the publ~ and get away with it, that they could destroy evidene in criminal proceedings, that they could spirit Spi~ out of the vice-presidency with no punishment for crims 7 January 1977:4 evidently committed, and so on through a congeries of calculations, they were no less capable of calculating that if the possible end result of all this was getting hung, or electrocuted, or shot, or garroted and in short killed, the game wasn't worth the candle and the hell with it...
...the binding has eliminated the lively dances in the air once common to the form...
...Millions of youngsters are not being successfully integrated into American society...
...The trouble with capital crimes is that most of them are committed out of some kind of personal desperation which renders the capital criminal insensitive to long-range considerations of personal welfare...
...Television, then, may he counted on speedily to bring back the rack, drawing-and-quartering, the auto-da-f~, the axe, perhaps---although quick, it is marvelously bloody--flaying and stoning...
...In hanging, the celebrity simply stands on a platform, all bound up like a mummy...
...Dulled senses are another...
...A whole new generation of Catholics has grown up without knowing his name or the events that made him and his militants the "bad boys" of the American church, the ogres of the budding ecumenical movement, the frightening Jew-baiters, who for some evoked nightmares of the holocaust and for a few momentarily stirred fears that the impossible might leap an ocean...
...But the now-middle and senior generations will not have forgotten Leonard Feeney...
...Benedict Center, the student headquarters in Cambridge that was gathering place in the 1940s for Catholics attending Harvard, Radcliffe and other nearby "secular" colleges...
...If all these are applied as they ought to be, we may count on future protection from the friends of Mr...
...Had we executed the entire crew of Nixonians, not to mention other criminals, the total would hardly have compared with the carnage, slaughter and all around violent death the average eight-year-old sees in the course of a week's watching on the tube...
...Benedict's was a stimulating place, and the Center attracted as habitu~ the best and the brightest on campus---some of whom got hooked on Feeney and are with him still...
...FRANK GETI~iN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 An Update on Leonard Feeney It is thirty years count them--since Leonard Feehey, the Boston Jesuit, was the problem priest of American Catholicism...
...And so on...
Vol. 104 • January 1977 • No. 1
