their words. Take Salman Rushdie. How many people have actually read his works? I have read The Satanic Verses, also Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I cannot speak for a Muslim, of course, yet I found him fascinating, funny, and an extremely good writer. I can understand why the state felt threatened by his work. What I don’t understand is why they would think of doing something that will only immortalize it.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in two thousand years, it’s that you cannot kill a book. One of the greatest science-fiction films I have ever seen, Fahrenheit 451 (that’s the point at which paper combusts spontaneously), which is based on a Ray Bradbury novel, portrays a futuristic society in which books are banned and people cannot hold unorthodox ideas. In this society there are subversives—people who read books. The subversives keep their books hidden in attics, in basements, and behind false walls. And this old lady in the film tells a young girl that she likes books and has some hidden in her attic. Somehow the word gets out, and when it does, the alarms start ringing and they call the fire department. The fire brigade rushes to the house, axes the doors, and starts a fire: they burn the house to the ground. Finally all the subversives or rebels flee the country to a place where people become books. In a sense, the film tries to show how far the state will go to ban books, or anything it perceives to be dangerous, for that matter. But it also shows how useless all those measures are.
You cannot kill a book.
Capitl Punishment
THE DEATH PENALTY is a creation of the State, and politicians justify it by using it as a stepping stone to higher political office. It’s very popular to use isolated cases—always the most gruesome ones—to make generalizations about inmates on death row and justify their sentences. Yet it is deceitful; it is untrue, unreal. Politicians talk about people on death row as if they are the worst of the worst, monsters and so forth. But they will not talk about the thousands of men and women in our country serving lesser sentences for similar and even identical crimes. Or others who, by virtue of their wealth and their ability to retain a good private lawyer, are not convicted at all. The criminal court system calls itself a justice system, but it measures privilege, wealth, power, social status, and—last but not least—race to determine who goes to death row.
Why is it that Pennsylvania’s African-Americans, who make up only 9 percent of its population, comprise close to two-thirds of its death row population?1 It is because its largest city, Philadelphia, like Houston and Miami and other cities, is a place where politicians have built their careers on sending people to death row. They are not administering justice by their example. They are simply revealing the partiality of justice.
Let us never forget that the overwhelming majority of people on death row are poor. Most of them cannot afford the resources to develop an adequate defense to compete with the forces of the state, let alone money to buy a decent suit to wear in court. As the O.J. Simpson case illustrated once again, the kind of defense you get is the kind of defense you can afford. In Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, in Florida, in Texas, in Illinois, in California—most of the people on death row are there because they could not afford what O.J. could afford, which is the best defense.
One of the most widespread arguments in favor of the death penalty is that it deters crime. Study after study has shown that it does not. If capital punishment deters anything at all, it is rational thinking. How else would it be conceivable in a supposedly enlightened, democratic society? Until we recognize the evil irrationality of capital punishment, we will only add, brick by brick, execution by execution, to the dark temple of Fear. How many more lives will be sacrificed on its altar?
1. See Abu-Jamal, Live from Death Row, xvii.
Remembering Moser
RECENTLY I CAME across words from Gibran, one of my boyhood heroes, and reflected on them as I hadn’t in more than a generation. What reader of this passage from The Prophet can but pause for thought?
Oftentimes have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you,
So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.
And as a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree,
So the wrong-doer cannot do wrong without the hidden will of you all.
Like a procession you walk together towards your god-self.
You are the way and the wayfarers.
And when one of you falls down he falls for those behind him, a caution against the stumbling stone.
Ay, and he falls for those ahead of him, who though faster and surer of foot, yet removed not the stumbling stone.
Here I sat, on death row, of all places, and not only on death row, but on Phase II, beside men who, like me, had a few weeks left to live.
One of them, a middle-aged, frog-voiced Vietnam vet, would rather die, than live in this Hell of cells, and, refusing all appeals, did die by lethal injection; by judicial murder, by state diktat. His name was Leon Moser.
Two doors down from me, I tried to get him to fight for his life, to get him to battle the political whores who were using his life, and his very death, as stepping stones to higher political office such as elected judgeship:
“Look, man. I understand how you feel. Hell, if I was a middle-aged white dude from the boondocks stuck down here in this black ‘n’ Spanish village, well—hey—I might do the same thing, or feel like it. Graterford must make you feel as if you were in a foreign country.
“Also, wouldn’t it be good to beat those slimy lawyers in the D.A.’s office, who owe their careers to your life—and your death? I know you hate lawyers!”
“I think lawyers are sleazy, yes. But I don’t really care about being executed. As far as I’m concerned the man they sentenced to death died over ten years ago. To execute me won’t mean nothing, ’cause that man ain’t alive no more. To kill me, Jamal, is just like puttin’ out garbage.”
Moser welcomed death like a long-lost lover, and the State, thirsty for his blood, rushed him off into eternity, ignoring even the attempted telephonic intercession of a federal judge. Defense lawyers criticized his execution as a rush to death.
In those few times I saw him in that dark, humid, and stifling Phase II, Moser appeared fifteen years older than he really was; his hair more white than brown, his beard a whitened, chest-long brush, his visage a stark contrast to pictures published in the daily press, which showed a younger, browner-haired, less furtive face.
He walked with a permanent hump, as if a demon the size of a rogue elephant rode his back, bending him down, down, and still farther down.
For such a one, might not death bring the hope of a respite?
PEOPLE SAY they don’t care about politics; they’re not involved or don’t want to get involved, but they are. Their involvement just masquerades as indifference
