Never Tragic – S
The story of the guy who killed four police officers in Seattle is tragic, for all kinds of reasons. First, the obvious one. There are few things more horrifying than the murder of those tasked with preserving the peace. You don’t have to think the operation of the criminal justice system in general or a lot of cops in particular is just and fair (and believe me, I don’t) to still feel incredibly disconcerted about something like this.
There’s a lot to dislike about the system, but those who serve on the front line are stand-ins for our highest ideals. That the system isn’t designed to actually achieve those goals – and often rewards individual bad behavior by those it employs – doesn’t change that basic fact.
It’s the reason I think the decision to make Mumia a face of the anti-death penalty movement is so insane. I find the death penalty to be completely unjustifiable in any circumstances – but if there WERE any situations where it could be valid, killing a cop would rank pretty close to the top. You’re not going to generate a lot of sympathy for the injustice of capital punishment if you start with Mumia.
But there’s another element to this tragedy, captured in this piece by Jason Zengerle (who I slagged last week, but – as I said then – is usually spot-on):
The fact that the suspected gunman is a convicted felon from Arkansas whose 95-year prison sentence was commuted by then-Governor Mike Huckabee in 2000 is a tragedy for anyone currently in prison in Arkansas who might hope to one day receive executive clemency. Just consider what happened in Massachusetts after Willie Horton.
It’s the problem of collective action in yet another form. The issue is that the breakdowns are incredibly obvious and horrific – while the routine and everyday elements (where a guy gets clemency and goes on to lead a productive life) aren’t news. In other words, the benefits are below the radar and widely-dispersed (every minute out of prison is a tiny little bit of freedom and life that is granted) while the costs are explicit and violent.
Another example is the recent dust-up over mammograms. The women who die from cancer at 45 are real, tangible, powerful. The millions who suffer in tinier bits from false positives, unnecessary treatments, and so on are hard to sell.
In both of these cases, there is obviously an argument for valuing either side over the other. Just because small gains are dispersed doesn’t make them MORE important than a few big costs. You could obviously make an argument that more suffering is worth it to prevent some deaths.
The problem is just that having a discussion about that sort of thing is almost impossible because of this problem of framing. Our current mechanisms of public reason are often simply incapable of sustaining a debate on these issues. The horrific, the story that bleeds, and so on have almost an automatic trump card. And the result is a lot of suffering that flies below the radar because it doesn’t SEEM exceptional.
Like I said, there’s no “right” answer absent a prior discussion about what sorts of things we want to value, but the way that things get sensationalized is precisely what prevents that debate from ever leaving the ground. And that’s a shame. If we could be confident that there was in fact a good case to be made for some of this stuff, it would be tolerable, but when it prevails based simply on the breakdown of our society’s ability to think about itself…it seems like useless suffering.
And that’s hard to take.