Riffs From The Row

By William Van Poyck - October 10, 2005

Here in the Commonwealth of Virginia it’s the election season. In November the citizens will elect a new governor and the choice is between two men, the Republican Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, and the Democrat Tim Kaine, currently the lieutenant governor. In at least one respect they are more similar than different in that both vow to vigorously enforce the death penalty (as if it isn’t already being enforced to the maximum extent in this particularly bloodthirsty state). Both candidates, in their barrage of television ads, purport to be “tough on crime”, which is the universally understood code term for someone who is eager to execute lots of people, and eager to sentence lots more to life in prison. In America it is understood, particularly in the south, that to be elected you must boast about being “tough on crime” and you must never, ever question the priority of capital punishment. To do otherwise is to allow your opponent to stigmatize you with the abhorrent label “soft on crime” or, just as bad, “liberal.” Either term, if it sticks, is the potential kiss of death in America’s political arena. So, opponents spend their time and money trying to “out tough” the other guy on the issue of capital punishment, mouthing all of the appropriate, if hackneyed phrases. In America this is very much a macho thing, with your willingness and ability to execute your fellow man being a test of your manhood. It is part of the creation myth of this nation. To be called “soft on crime” is really just a roundabout way of being labeled a coward, a sissy, a weak-spined punk, or, as our ex-actor turned California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger would proclaim, a “girlie-man.” Of course, nowhere in this verbal rumble is there any room for a calm, thoughtful dialogue on the subject, no time to be wasted on issues of morality, philosophy, equality or even spirituality, on what it means to take another human’s life as a matter of state policy. No cause to stick a sharp pin in the smug, complacent conscience of this self righteous society. No need to look beyond the cliché, the snappy slogans that frame life-and-death issues in stark terms of black and white, devoid of shadings of gray, devoid of any doubt. It must be reassuring to be so supremely infallible.

And so each night, on my little television, I watch these hectoring political ads dance on the screen, full of venom and negativism. Neither candidate bothers to mention anything positive; there’s no discussion of heath care, or schools, or even infrastructure, nothing about roads, bridges or dams. Nothing about the environment, or about energy self-sufficiency. In stead each man hurls accusations at his opponent (“he’s unreliable” or “untruthful” or “a tax-raiser”; and, he certainly “cannot be trusted”) and each man promises to execute more “criminals” than his opponent. This is what politics has been reduced to in Virginia, and America in general. There’s no room for talks about hopes and dreams, about equality, love or even compassion. It’s all about killing. Men promising to kill men for killing men. These are our leaders and this is their vision. This is our future! It is a theater of the absurd, but one which most Americans seem to enjoy, or at least accept as the best that we can do. This is a time of low expectations, a grand failure of imagination. The stage is occupied by small-minded politicians flogging those time-tested dual themes, fear and hate, the scent of which should be like smoke in our noses. The bible promises that you reap what you sow, a maxim most of us can subscribe to. Like Karma, it applies equally to nations and men. Collectively and individually, which give us pause as we consider what the future holds for this once noble, now blood-drenched Republic. As I watch these vacuous political ads flicker across my TV screen I wonder, not for the first time, if this is what the Roman Empire smelled like in its twilight years.

William Van Poyck was sentenced to death in Florida but was transferred to Virginia’s death row by the governor of Florida after Florida State Prison guards murdered Van Poyck’s codefendant, Frank Vales, in his death row cell in 1999.

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