Sermon: Assassinating the Assassin

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Assassinating the Assassin

By Rev Tom Reiber

June 24, 2001

ough today's sermon is about the death penalty, I'm not going to be going into a lot of detail concerning its flaws as it's currently practiced here in the US. We've been bombarded by information and statistics lately. I think we probably all know that, if you're Black or Latino, the deck is stacked against you. If you're poor, the deck is stacked against you. And if you're innocent, we may not find out until after you've been executed. I just learned that the State of Virginia denied a request to supply DNA evidence on two people it has executed—and instead destroyed it. That's disturbing.

But my purpose here today is not to critique the flaws with the system as it currently stands. That runs the risk of implying we just need to shore it up here and there, then we can get on with the business of killing. My aim is to demystify the killing ritual itself, and talk openly about the role it plays in western civilization.

In November of 1849, Charles Dickens took an early morning stroll in London. He came upon a large crowd of several thousand people that had gathered for a hanging. As he got there, the crowd was jeering and taunting the woman to be hanged, a Mrs. Manning. The whole thing was so disturbing to Dickens, he came home and wrote a letter to the London Times, much as we would write one to the New York Times. He wrote that as the morning sun rose it lit “thousands and thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth of callousness that a man had [reason] to feel ashamed of the shape he wore.” (Violence Unveiled, p. 78).

We get another glimpse of the crowd's fascination through the eye-witness accounts of UCLA Professor of Psychiatry, Louis West, who assisted at a hanging in 1952. It took the man twelve and a half minutes to die, during which time West watched the crowd. He says about the experience, “There was a kind of glitter in their eye that I found strange, some of them, as though this was a fascinating kind of entertainment” (as found in Violence Unveiled, p. 80).

Then there's Florida, 1989. A journalist reporting on that experience wrote: “The scene outside [the] state Prison at the execution of serial killer Theodore Bundy was one of the wildest. Parents brought children, men brought wives. Hundreds of reporters camped out in a pasture. It was like a tailgate party, someone said, …or Mardi Gras” (Los Angeles Times journalist Janny Scott as found in Gil Bailie's, Violence Unveiled, p. 79).

Lately we've begun to question the death penalty. We ask, “What's your opinion on it? Are you for or against it?” But by putting the question that way, we've let Gallup formulate the question. And there's a great deal of power in the ability to shaping the question.

When we stop to consider the thousands of victims of public executions, whether they were crucified in Rome, beheaded in France, or hanged in America, the question that arises is not necessarily “Are you for or against the death penalty?” The more far reaching question is why do humans everywhere show such an eerie fascination with ritualized killing?

To understand this fascination requires that we take a look at the dark side of human nature.

We are a violent species. Over the course of the twentieth century alone we killed over one hundred million fellow human beings. British Philosopher Jonathon Glover notes that that comes out to roughly one hundred people per hour, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, for ninety years. If the twenty-first century is to be any different, we need to speak honestly about our propensity for killing and the methods by which we've tried to control it.

Historian of religion Rene Girard has argued that in order to control mass outbreak of violence, human beings created the sacrificial system. The purpose of sacrificial systems is to contain violence and stop it from spreading by making certain violence sacred. That's why the instructions in the Hebrew Scriptures pertaining to sacrifice are so exacting. And that's why our executions of human beings are so carefully ritualized. The danger is always that violence will spread and we are desperate to control it. We saw a dramatic example of what happens when it breaks loose back in 1994 in Rwanda, when 800,000 people were killed in the span of a few months. Once violence spills its containing walls, we simply stand back and watch in terror.

We'll never understand the death penalty unless we understand that, for better and for worse, that it is what separates us from the spread of violence. It is our sacrificial system.

Now, for a sacrificial system to work, people have to believe its violence is sacred. Hence those in charge of the killing are invested in protecting the sanctity of the killing ritual. Early on in this country when most executions were public, that wasn't too tough to do. People for the most part showed the same kind of mirthful glee that Dickens described in the London crowds. But now and then a hanging would go wrong, the person's head would come off or the death would take a long time. That kind of experience throws the whole ritual off and makes people uncomfortable.

So by 1937 all the executions in the US had been hidden away inside prisons. But our fascination with the killing ritual kept peaking behind the curtain. In 1960 a journalist who had access to the execution of Caryl Chessman worked out a system whereby the Chessman could signal her through the glass. Girardian scholar Gil Bailie describes what happened. “As the cyanide pellets mingled with the sulfuric

acid, the convicted murderer brought his head up and down violently in a last nod. ‘Yes,' he was saying, ‘it hurts.' The journalist wrote: “Whatever medicine says, the eyes said Chessman did not die quickly, not even gracefully, after his twitching reflexes took over from a dead brain. It is probably for the best that only 60 shaken witnesses have to know exactly how it happened” (from Violence Unveiled, pp. 81-82).

It's best if we don't want to upset the applecart. But if we want to get real about the extent to which our culture is based on the notion of sacrifice, it's best for us all to know that Chessman died twitching.

When people start to see through the justifications masking the killing ritual, it ushers in a crisis in the sacrificial system. Our belief in the government's claim that it has the right to kill functions like the stones around a campfire. When we start to remove those stones, there's a danger of the fire spreading. Violence that was once contained within the killing ritual, begins to seep out into the culture at large. Girardian scholar Gil Bailie notes that as a sacrificial system collapses, those who were most entranced by its power are most likely to act out.

Bailie was anticipating the appearance of someone just like Tim McVeigh. Tim grew up aspiring to be a Green Beret. He was completely under the spell of the mystique of the special forces. His fascination took him through boot camp and landed him in Iraq, at which point he went through what a lot of vets go through: a period of disillusionment in which he saw through the justifications that veiled the killing.

In his 60 Minutes interview produced by Christ Church member Mike Radutzky, Tim McVeigh says: “I went over there hyped up, just like everyone else. Not only is Sadaam evil, all Iraqis are evil. What I experienced, though, was an entirely different ball game. And being face to face with these people, in close personal contact, you realize that they're people just like you.” Striking words coming from the Oklahoma City Bomber.

It's impossible to understand how a cold blooded killer could be saying these words, without accepting that his confusion is an extension of our own. We get a glimpse of this in the 60 Minutes interview when Ed Bradley says to McVeigh: “It's hard for some people to come to grips with you as the same person who was commended by the Army, who received the Bronze Star, who received a combat medal, as being the same person who was convicted in the Oklahoma City bombing. They can't put the two together. Do you understand that?”

McVeigh replied that many people had in effect said to him: “Now Tim, imagine the paradox: in the Gulf War, you were given medals for killin' people….”

Bradely says, “And how do you explain it?
McVeigh replies: “At that point, usually I just, uh, leave it at that and say it is an interesting paradox.”

But we can't leave it at that. We've got to take this all the way if we are going to be honest about what's going on here. In the midst of a crisis in our sacrificial system, our own violence is spilling outside its bounds. We're trying to gather it back in. We're doing it the only way we know how: by human sacrifice. But to restore people's faith in the sacrificial system, we have to convince people that our killing of him is somehow right and good, that our violence is different from his violence.

I think this is what was precisely what was at stake when the Ed Bradley asks McVeigh: “What do you say to people who say, ‘Yeah, what happened there [meaning Ruby Ridge and Waco] was wrong. But those are isolated incidents.'” The question expressed what most of us would like to think: That McVeigh was an irrational nut, that he was looking for an excuse to do something terrible and the events of Ruby Ridge and Waco gave him the excuse he was looking for. We want to distance ourselves from him so we can go on believing our violence is still sacred and justifiable.

But we can't let America off the hook that easy. In addition to Ruby Ridge and Waco, we would have to add the genocide of the Native Americans. And we would want to mention the millions of Africans who died on the Middle Passage and in the brutal world of slavery. And we have the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the women and young girls in Mai Lai who were gang raped and murdered. We wouldn't want to forget them.

I'm not trying to vindicate Tim McVeigh. He killed people and I'm opposed to killing. My intention is to call into question our claim to moral authority. We did to him exactly what he did to those 168 innocent civilians in Oklahoma. I think most of us can see that. A couple of days after killing him, we killed another man. The sacrificial system is revving back up. The real question is, Why can't we stop doing it? The answer is actually pretty simple once you see it: we are trapped by the logic of the sacrificial system, even as it collapses all around us.

The film Apocalypse Now, captures this moment in evolution of western civilization like no other film ever had. It's telling that when Orsen Wells first proposed making it, none of the major studios wanted to take it on. Francis Ford Coppola had the same problem, so he used his own profits from the Godfather movies. Apocalypse Now is loosely based on Joseph Conrad's classic novella, Heart of Darkness. In the modern version, Martin Sheen plays Capt. Willard, an Army Green Beret sent up river to assassinate another Green Beret officer named Kurtz. Colonel Kurtz has broken off contact with the Army's infrastructure and begun to run his own rebel-like commando group. The generals back home fear Kurtz has gone insane.

The trip up the river to find Kurtz is a symbol for the long journey into the Heart of Darkness, the heart of human evil. The man taking that journey is Captain Willard, a disillusioned assassin who accepts the mission simply to get back out into the jungle. On his way up river he reviews Kurtz' record and marvels at his many accomplishments. Kurtz had sailed through West Point and could have no doubt had his picks of choice positions, but instead he volunteered for Special Forces training and then insisted on being sent to Vietnam.

Once there, he attempted to one up the enemy in an escalating game of horror, much like the one that actually took place in Vietnam. Marlin Brando plays the character of Kurtz brilliantily, depicting a man driven mad by the strength of his own insights. He accepts the young assassin into his camp and engages him in dialogue, opening up the darkness of his mind for us all to see. Willard finally decides he should in fact kill him, saying “even the jungle wanted him dead.”

We don't know what to do with people who go too far other than to kill them.

They weren't sure how to end to the movie. Coppola was on the brink of financial disaster. The screenwriter he was working with suggested a final battle against the Vietnamese in which Willard and Kurtz would fight together, side by side. But Coppola realized that would be succumbing to a John Wayne kind of mentality which sidestepped the culpability of America's bloodlust.

Then one day on the set in the Philippines the indigenous tribe serving as extras began to ritually kill a water buffalo. Coppola's wife saw what was unfolding and ran to get him. “You've got to see this,” she said. He came out and watched, transfixed. He had the end of the movie. The ending of the film shows the indigenous group of followers Kurtz had acquired re-enacting the killing of the water buffalo. Juxtaposed to the killing of the animal, is the assassination of Kurtz by Captain Willard. He rises up out of the water like the personification of our own murderous impulses rising up from the waters of the unconscious. He makes his way toward the victim, stalking him like we all stalked Tim McVeigh. The killing of the animal and the killing of the man are joined as one, revealing the horror of killing in all its animalistic brutality. At times we see only the silhouettes of the two men, making the film the cultural equivalent of Plato's cave.

After the killing, Willard walks out from the house of horrors and faces the tribe. They sense on some intuitive level that the King has been killed and this man is their new leader. There's a profound moment of silence, broken by the sound of Willard dropping his weapon. The people follow suit, unleashing a cacophony of sound as rifles and swords and knives all fall to the ground. Then Willard walks through their midst in silence, the blood from the kill still on his hands. He goes back to his boat and calls for the air-strike that will destroy the village.

That's as far as the film can take us. True to its name—Apocalypse, which literally means revelations—it reveals that the only end awaiting a civilization trapped by its own violence is more violence. Well, that's just Hollywood, we say. But then Senator Bob Kerry confesses to killing women and children while on special forces missions in Vietnam, and we realize it's not just Hollywood, it's the truth.

If there's hope for our species, we need to find our way out of this sacrificial system. I believe the way out is found in our sacred scriptures. Do you think the Gospel has anything relevant to say about the sacrificial system? Think about it, John the Baptist, who paved the way for Jesus, gets his head chopped off and literally served up on a silver platter. Then there's Jesus. In the wake of John's execution he goes on to preach and teach a message of love, even of one's enemies. He's arrested, tried and executed. The Bible repeats the story four times. We have traditionally viewed it all as the ultimate sacrifice ordained by God. But a new wave of biblical scholarship is suggesting it's an anthropological revelation of the sacrificial system: of our need for blood.

In other words, they're saying maybe Jesus didn't have to die, but we killed him anyway. That idea changes everything. It has the potential to breathe new life into our Christian teaching.

There's a curious detail in the Biblical account of Jesus' actual death. The earth shakes and the curtain dividing the holy space in the temple devoted the sprinkling of blood is torn in two. The traditional take on that is that there is no longer a need for sacrifice, since Jesus was the last. But there's another possibility. It could be symbolic language describing the power of the Gospel to pull back the curtain on the sacrificial system at the heart of the world.

Our Gospel story today promises to do just that. In it an angry mob brings a woman to Jesus who, according to the law of their day, was deserving of death. Jesus sees right through the sacrificial system of his day and interrupted the killing machine by waking up the individuals making up the crowd. In so doing, he was in effect pointing to a new ethical plane of existence. Two thousand years later, we're just beginning to understand what he was trying to say.

The difference between the film and our Gospel story today is a crucial one. In the Gospel text, the stones are dropped before the victim is killed. Jesus broke the spell of the killing frenzy by appealing to the individual spiritual conscience of each person within earshot. We are standing before the victim with stones in our hands. What are you going to do? What am I going to do? We each have to answer that question alone before God. May we all go and sin no more.

Amen.