As a result he (and any who agree with him) can continute to set two sentimentalities against each other: mere weeping for the criminal vs. mere weeping for the victim. Notice how quick he was to reduce Guthrie's song to such mush. He can answer that, but he can't answer (or at least hasn't tried to answer) any serious political arguments.>
Nobody who offers Woodie Guthrie & Langston Hughes ought to be objecting to sentimentalism. But that aside, I freely plead guilty to sentimentalism. What's the alternative?
I'm wracking my brain to reconstruct what the "serious political argument" was. I suppose it is that the institution of capital punishment is primarily an artifact of class struggle, a way of sustaining the domination of Capital. In miscarriages of justice, for which we obviously don't lack, this effect of capital punishment is plain enough. These days, I would say such cases are more the exception than the rule. We're a long way from the "United States of Lyncherdom." That some can't tell the difference between 1998 and 1928 is testimony to their anti-Marxist, ahistorical rage, nothing more. And it fits well with an utter lack of politics.
Aside from cases with more-or-less explicit political or race overtones (by far the minority, I would say), it seems that the only political argument derives from the Skinnerian principle previously invoked: those who commit heinous crimes are rendered blameless by virtue of their conditioning by an inhumane, irrational social/economic system.
In this vein, Sam seems to be dancing on both sides of the line. Both genetic endowment and social conditioning, in a complex way, determine behavior, but "there is no autonomous self." Sounds pretty mechanical to me, as well as reductionist and demeaning to the dignity of the person, and not the only interpretation of Marx, for what that's worth. Without trying to demonstrate it, I'll just assert that human beings have free will, that they operate within social and economic constraints, that sometimes their powers of reason are faulty, but in the end, for those in possession of basic faculties, THERE IS NO REASON WHY THEY HAVE TO DRAG A MAN UNTIL HIS HEAD SEPARATES FROM HIS BODY. Call me sentimental if you like, but those dudes (and many others) deserve only One Thing.
That one's likelihood of being executed rises if perpetrator is minority and victim is not is surely obscene. But this says nothing about what the current occupants of death row deserve. If one in three has been wrongly convicted, as somebody suggested, this to me is obvious grounds for ending capital punishment. But that's not exactly a moral argument; it leaves open the practice if the selection process is perfected.
Justice is the issue. For our ultimatists, both Wobbly and surrealist in orientation, the only justice is a mob of proletarians chasing me through a shopping mall on The Day The Shit Comes Down. For those with both feet planted on Terra Firma, matters of right and wrong cannot be postponed until then. Life has to go on, with or without a revolution.
mbs