Editorials

Thanksgiving is upon us, and the traditional jocular soft news press releases about the president’s annual pardoning of a turkey are being prepared for distribution. Particularly with the current president, believed by many to be the real turkey, the subject lends itself to a lot of levity in the media, but this year a serious story about a human facing death at the hands of fellow humans has dominated the news instead. 

The state of California plans to kill a man in cold blood on Dec. 13. It won’t be self-defense, because the man is safely locked up, so he poses no threat to anyone. War is not the excuse—here in California we’re still a civil society, at peace at home if not abroad. And it’s well established that capital punishment does not reduce the murder rate. It’s not even certain that vengeance is involved in this case, since the man whom the state plans to kill denies having killed the victims, but for the purposes of this discussion let’s say that murders took place, he’s a likely suspect, and a jury convicted him. Stanley Tookie Williams freely admits that he has committed many crimes, if not the ones for which he faces being killed. So retribution is the last remaining putative justification for killing him. 

Most of the world now believes that government-sponsored retributive killing is morally wrong, even in cases where the criminal does not admit guilt or show remorse. The United States, as one of the last bastions of capital punishment, is regarded with horror by most of what is commonly called the civilized world, as well as most of the rest of the world, countries which have shown themselves to be more civilized than we are by renouncing the death penalty. 

Last week we saw the San Francisco Opera’s production of Beethoven’s Fidelio, an uplifting saga about a prisoner who escapes execution at the last minute through the heroism of his wife and the timely arrival of a government minister who saves him. It’s especially relevant at a time when Americans are learning about all the jailing and torture being done in our name. 

The jailer, Rocco, is a good-humored man of the people who reluctantly agrees to dig the grave for a man he’s come to know and like, but refuses to do the actual killing himself. The part was played by a singer named Arthur Woodley, who has a gorgeous voice and is also a fine actor. Rocco’s ambivalence is sometimes played for laughs, but Woodley managed to humanize Rocco’s moral dilemma effectively with no slapstick.  

Over the weekend we were lucky to be invited to a party where we got a chance to meet Arthur Woodley in person. We talked about how he got where he is today. He told us that he’d been raised in the South Bronx in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, back when it was considered a trackless wasteland. “But we had programs,” he said, all kinds of programs, the noble endeavors that grew out of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society agenda. As a black youth, he was supposed to be headed for trouble, but instead he was drawn first into theater and then into music, and he hasn’t looked back. He mentioned in particular the South Bronx Community Theater as a home away from home for a kid looking for excitement.  

Someone in one of his programs steered him to the city of Bologna, in Italy, at that time run by Communists who believed in government support for the arts, and he spent ten years getting his musical training at the conservatory there. When he came back to the United States, he expected to step right on to the opera stage, but he learned that parts for African-American singers were still few and far between. He spent a few years at the Dance Theater of Harlem, where the legendary Arthur Mitchell insisted that everyone learn to dance and act. Now he’s finally gotten to be a regular on the opera circuit, one of the increasingly small number of singers who fly around the world to take roles in major opera houses.  

Arthur Woodley is about the same age as Tookie Williams, or perhaps a bit older. The programs he remembers so fondly and his gift for singing put him on a different path. For Williams then, and for most of today’s kids in the South Bronx, in California and in the rest of the U.S., there were and are no such programs.  

This is not to excuse murder, if indeed Williams did commit murder, but we all share responsibility for a society that is now geared to produce more criminals like Williams than educated and productive citizens like Woodley. And killing Williams won’t change that. It will be nothing more than another murder, this one state-sponsored. 

Like the government minister in Fidelio, Arnold Schwarzenegger has it in his power to prevent a death. Like the jailer Rocco, he probably believes in his heart that state killing is morally wrong. His wife Maria Shriver certainly knows this, and perhaps she has some influence over him. They both claim to be Catholics, educated as such and now church-going. The teaching of the church they profess to believe in is clear: Capital punishment is wrong.  

They might ponder an e-mail which my cousin forwarded to me this morning. It was written by William J. Phelan, an ex-Jesuit seminarian, after he took part in the recent protest at the School of the Americas, which has trained hundreds of jailers, torturers and killers: 

I realized that I am proud to have been educated in Catholic schools (kindergarten through 1st year of graduate school) and to find that the lessons learned stay with me.  

And I was almost tearful remembering that commitment to social justice was the way I was brought up in the Catholic faith. It was a major emphasis at LeMoyne, and at Fordham, but I also remember it from high school. This was the church I knew and loved—a radical caring for the downtrodden, the poor, the vulnerable, for working families. But this was before the church took that all-consuming, energy-sapping, money-draining detour into matters reproductive, or non-reproductive. (Jesus, as you know, said nothing about abortion, birth control, homosexuality or heterosexuality, but had plenty to say about loving one’s neighbor and one’s enemy, and about social justice.)  

“Who would Jesus bomb?” said one bumper sticker I saw. Another said: “When Jesus said ‘Love your enemies,’ he probably meant not to kill them.” Pro-life is not limited to fetal life for some Catholics. 

Something for Arnold and Maria to think about when they go to church this week. And they should catch the last production of Fidelio over the weekend too.