Washington Post

By RICHARD COHEN 

While watch­ing the movie ​“Gladiator” recent­ly, I kept won­der­ing about the ancient Romans — what sort of peo­ple were they? It occurred to me that they were very much like us. The thrill of hor­ror, the hor­ror of the thrill, the val­i­da­tion of life through the death of oth­ers — this has not changed. Thumbs up, thumbs down. When it comes to deal­ing with our basest feel­ings, we are still all thumbs.

Ancient Rome was, of course, ancient. But it was not that long ago when Americans gath­ered by the riv­er to watch a good lynch­ing, prefer­ably one pre­ced­ed by some tor­ture — and snap­shots were tak­en and made into post­cards. Say cheese. These pic­tures, mount­ed for an exhi­bi­tion and con­tained in a book (“Without Sanctuary”), also make you won­der who we are: What do those hap­py peo­ple at the lynch­ing have to do with me?

This brings me (sor­ry for the delay) to the per­fect­ly pre­dictable deci­sion by Attorney General John Ashcroft to per­mit the sur­vivors of the Oklahoma City bomb­ing, as well as rel­a­tives of the dead, to watch Timothy McVeigh’s exe­cu­tion by way of closed-cir­cuit tele­vi­sion. The only thing more pre­dictable than Ashcroft’s deci­sion was the cer­tain­ty that oth­ers, in a vain attempt at irony, would call for the pub­lic tele­cast­ing of McVeigh’s death. Let us have a true pub­lic exe­cu­tion. These peo­ple do not, as my grand­moth­er used to say, know their customers.

The prob­lem with a pub­lic exe­cu­tion, aside from its sheer improb­a­bil­i­ty, is that it would nei­ther sick­en most peo­ple nor cause them to ques­tion cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. It would enter­tain. It would gar­ner huge rat­ings and become the ulti­mate in real­i­ty pro­gram­ming. (One pay-per-view ser­vice has already asked for the rights to charge $1.95 to view the exe­cu­tion over the Internet.) We would dis­cov­er that not much has changed since whole fam­i­lies posed for pic­tures with the some­times-charred body of a black man hang­ing in the background.

When Ashcroft was a U.S. sen­a­tor from Missouri, he opposed a judi­cial nom­i­na­tion because the nom­i­nee, a home state judge named Ronnie White, had not always upheld the death penal­ty. So it was fol­ly from the first to think that Ashcroft would ever have denied the request of McVeigh’s vic­tims to see the killer die with their own eyes. This is the only way, some of the vic­tims say, they will get this thing we call closure.

But a mob of jour­nal­ists will be camped out­side the fed­er­al pen­i­ten­tiary at Terre Haute, Ind. Another 10 will be up front and close, able to eye­ball McVeigh’s death. Still oth­ers — state offi­cials and vic­tims — will also be able to wit­ness the exe­cu­tion in Terre Haute. The like­li­hood of McVeigh some­how mak­ing it out of the exe­cu­tion cham­ber alive and unno­ticed is not great.

I do not mean to mock the emo­tions of the vic­tims. I have not walked in their shoes, and so I have no idea how I would feel under sim­i­lar cir­cum­stances. I do know, though, that those who seek this sort of ​“clo­sure” are a mere minor­i­ty of the vic­tims, about 15 per­cent. And I do know that it is the solemn oblig­a­tion of gov­ern­ment offi­cials to use their heads, not just their emo­tions, when mak­ing pol­i­cy in the name of the American peo­ple. A polite ​“no” would have dig­ni­fied us all.

Ashcroft, how­ev­er, is an American Taliban who retired his mind from active duty years ago. If he would think about what he has autho­rized, he would real­ize that clo­sure — clos­ing the cir­cle — is not what we need. It must be bro­ken. The end­less cycle of a life tak­en for a life tak­en — on and on — must be shattered.

McVeigh’s exe­cu­tion only val­i­dates McVeigh’s think­ing. He got even for Waco, and now we will get even with him. His most severe pun­ish­ment would not be death but, instead, a repu­di­a­tion of his think­ing — life in prison, no parole, no hope and, after a while, the rock-break­ing fatigue of obscu­ri­ty. In this way, his think­ing would be mocked, his soapbox crushed.

McVeigh waived all appeals. His death, which he sees as his mar­tyr­dom, is his last, grand act. If he is true to his word, he will recite the kitschy poem ​“Invictus” by William Ernest Henley (“I am the mas­ter of my fate/​I am the cap­tain of my soul”), and he will die as he has cho­sen to, expe­di­tious­ly and, in his infan­tile imag­i­na­tion, with a final, Wagnerian state­ment. Closure for him, just the depress­ing con­tin­u­a­tion of the cycle for everyone else.