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In a "the food stinks and such small portions" sort of way, I'm not sure what to think about the fact that there's going to be a televised execution tonight and my cable is out. Or how my position on the matter would be affected were the condemned a human and not a baseball.
Yes, Dear Readers from outside the nine-county Chicago area, a sentence of death has been pronounced upon the infamous baseball that arguably cost the Cubs their first trip to the World Series in ninety-odd years. It's to be destroyed publicly at about 7:30 CST tonight, on every channel locally, I'm sure, and MSNBC for out-of-area relations of the victim. I'd thought myself indifferent to this until I woke up just now to find that RCN, already suspected locally of being in league with the Devil, is having massive outages across the area and I'm getting nothing but snow.
This wouldn't be nearly so bizarre an episode in American public life if the cable-news gigglebots hadn't not two days ago floated a trial balloon about whether it would be appropriate to televise the theoretical executions of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, if said persons were convicted under a judicial system that would sentence them to same. You'd think that a sane country would laugh this down in a heartbeat, but this is GWB's America we're talking about... And people are having heart attacks just watching the cinematic reconstruction of a public execution! Much as people might think they'd be happy to see SH or ObL scourged through the streets of Baghdad or New York, I suspect the reality would be something else again, even as inured to violence as we think TV has rendered us.
My own position on capital punishment, in the interests of Full Disclosure, is, hopefully, consistent with my position on abortion, which is to say, something along the lines of "safe, legal, and rare"; there are instances when execution seems to be the most humane of the available alternatives, but we're not as diligent as we ought to be about addressing the conditions that give rise to the question in the first place. Nor have we managed to reconcile the contradictions between justice and revenge that arise in even an "ordinary" capital case, much less ones involving terrorism and/or heads of state which drag questions of security and intelligence into the equation. (I happen to think that even the execution of our homegrown terrorist McVeigh was a flawed decision, in that it seems like a tactical mistake to have disposed of him on such an expedited schedule -- even if he was genuinely a lone nut with no coconspirators to account for, you don't want to give the tinfoil-beanie crowd he himself sprang from cause to start breeding the "what were they so afraid he might say?" rumors, for one thing, just look at how long the Oswald/Ruby theories have been grubbing around for instance.)
Which brings us back to the Bartman Ball: will I be watching, if the cable comes back on by tonight? Well, it is just a baseball, and given the superstitious nature of sports fans in general and this cursed franchise in particular, I wouldn't want to think that my absence at this collective exorcism might do anything to jinx the upcoming season, even if I could generally give a toss for the entire concept of things-involving-running-about-outside- that-aren't-the-Olympics-or-World-Cup-Soccer. I mean, look at what happened to Bartman...
Yes, Dear Readers from outside the nine-county Chicago area, a sentence of death has been pronounced upon the infamous baseball that arguably cost the Cubs their first trip to the World Series in ninety-odd years. It's to be destroyed publicly at about 7:30 CST tonight, on every channel locally, I'm sure, and MSNBC for out-of-area relations of the victim. I'd thought myself indifferent to this until I woke up just now to find that RCN, already suspected locally of being in league with the Devil, is having massive outages across the area and I'm getting nothing but snow.
This wouldn't be nearly so bizarre an episode in American public life if the cable-news gigglebots hadn't not two days ago floated a trial balloon about whether it would be appropriate to televise the theoretical executions of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, if said persons were convicted under a judicial system that would sentence them to same. You'd think that a sane country would laugh this down in a heartbeat, but this is GWB's America we're talking about... And people are having heart attacks just watching the cinematic reconstruction of a public execution! Much as people might think they'd be happy to see SH or ObL scourged through the streets of Baghdad or New York, I suspect the reality would be something else again, even as inured to violence as we think TV has rendered us.
My own position on capital punishment, in the interests of Full Disclosure, is, hopefully, consistent with my position on abortion, which is to say, something along the lines of "safe, legal, and rare"; there are instances when execution seems to be the most humane of the available alternatives, but we're not as diligent as we ought to be about addressing the conditions that give rise to the question in the first place. Nor have we managed to reconcile the contradictions between justice and revenge that arise in even an "ordinary" capital case, much less ones involving terrorism and/or heads of state which drag questions of security and intelligence into the equation. (I happen to think that even the execution of our homegrown terrorist McVeigh was a flawed decision, in that it seems like a tactical mistake to have disposed of him on such an expedited schedule -- even if he was genuinely a lone nut with no coconspirators to account for, you don't want to give the tinfoil-beanie crowd he himself sprang from cause to start breeding the "what were they so afraid he might say?" rumors, for one thing, just look at how long the Oswald/Ruby theories have been grubbing around for instance.)
Which brings us back to the Bartman Ball: will I be watching, if the cable comes back on by tonight? Well, it is just a baseball, and given the superstitious nature of sports fans in general and this cursed franchise in particular, I wouldn't want to think that my absence at this collective exorcism might do anything to jinx the upcoming season, even if I could generally give a toss for the entire concept of things-involving-running-about-outside- that-aren't-the-Olympics-or-World-Cup-Soccer. I mean, look at what happened to Bartman...