Word count: 1090 | Reading time: 5 min read
Pretzel Logic
Death-and-drug rhetoric keeps ’em happy at the GOP’s big bash.
The natty Republicans in their fine suits and dresses stood on the balcony of the Wyndham Franklin Plaza Hotel grand ballroom and smiled.
They smiled at the crowd of bedraggled left wing leftovers who looked quite the rabble in their nose rings and dreadlocks as they stood outside in the wilting heat chanting that Gov. Tom Ridge, who just finished giving a speech, was a “motherfucker” for signing accused cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal’s death warrant.
Mumia’s Minions — led by Pam Africa, the little woman with the big voice — returned those smiles from on high with the international hand signal for sexual intercourse. The chanters chanted, the sign wavers waved their signs, the angry young men and women became ever angrier as they sweltered in the choking furnace of a Philadelphia Friday in July.
But the Republicans kept smiling.
It was the smile that you smile when you visit the monkey house and watch the chimps do something funny.
It was the smile that you smile when you visit your friends with kids and watch as the kids smear peanut butter all over the wall.
It was the kind of smile you can afford to smile when you are sitting in air-conditioned rooms listening to every party boss try to outdo the other party bosses with chest-thumping speeches about how they are the true believers in the death penalty.
Standing in the middle of all this, like some kind of line judge at the Battle of the Marne, I could not help but notice that nearly all of the smiling faces were white faces and most of the angry faces were black faces.
Or, that if the smiling faces get their way and more prisoners are sentenced to die, it will be mostly black and brown faces that do the dying.
While it was Ridge whom Mumia’s Minions most wanted to impress, and while it was Ridge who’d just finished telling the gathered Republicans how only he had the stones to finally ink Abu-Jamal’s life away, it was Newt Gingrich who really chewed up the killing field.
“If you sell drugs to our children, we will kill you,” he told a group of entranced RNC delegates who sat and listened in awe as Gingrich proved that he is the party’s strongest voice.
It was then that Riverboat Newt laid down an interesting bet on the table.
After excoriating the Washington press corps for being dumber than the kids who quizzed him on MTV and joking that he “turned down Beavis and Butt Head” because he has to draw the line somewhere, Gingrich told the audience that playtime was over.
“Either we legalize drugs or we get serious,” he said.
Afterward, surrounded by a throng of reporters, many of whom were the ones dumber than the MTV quislings, Gingrich elaborated on his idea.
There would be a national referendum in those states that would allow it. Voters could either vote to legalize drugs, or to make it a capital offense to bring them into the country.
Smiling the smile of the smug, Gingrich guessed that the results would be 80-20 in favor of killing drug importers.
Not a bad bet if you are a Republican drooling at the thought of yet another excuse to kill someone, most likely a black or Latino someone, and almost always a poor someone who cannot afford to attend functions like the RNC summer meeting in Philadelphia.
If Gingrich’s morning line is correct, the odds are a little shakier for people like me, who believe in some form of drug legalization while opposing the death penalty.
I’ve bet on plenty of long shots greater than 4-1, which are the odds Gingrich has given against drug legalization under his proposed referendum.
But those were horses, not people, and those horses didn’t face instant death if they lost, which they usually did.
I really do wish that Gingrich wasn’t so smug about his referendum, putting it out there only because, in his mind, there is no way that there will be any legalization of drugs.
This is a country where drug use is illegal, where billions of dollars are invested in stemming the flow of drugs into the country, yet if I wanted, I have only to stroll a half block to obtain whatever I crave from well-armed teenagers.
Killing importers will not stop that.
What will stop kids from selling drugs on street corners is a more mature solution than execution.
I’ve seen what happens when a government realizes that prohibiting drug use is not going to make it go away. While drug selling is still illegal in Holland, the Dutch government does not enforce laws prohibiting the possession of small amounts of so-called soft drugs like pot and hash. And instead of driving needle drug users underground with threats of long-term incarceration, the Dutch bring those people into the health system. The result is that Holland has one of the lowest AIDS and HIV rates in the world. And a decrease in the number of young people using heroin and cocaine.
While it is true that crime has increased in Amsterdam in the last few years, a figure local officials attribute in large measure to the influx of non-Dutch drug users seeking “safe haven,” the murder rate there is far less than in a city like Boston, which has the same population.
And, speaking of murder, I really don’t know if Mumia Abu-Jamal killed police officer Danny Faulkner in 1981. From the evidence that I have read about, it seems likely that he did.
But his guilt or innocence is not the point.
If he did do it, I really don’t think concern over being executed would have stopped him, even if, as Republicans want, the appeal process is reduced to one year.
And, if he did do it, killing Abu-Jamal will not bring back Danny Faulkner.
Of course, if Abu-Jamal is as innocent as his supporters who were shouting at the Republicans claim, then his death would be as much a crime as Faulkner’s.
The draconian measures being touted by the Republicans during three hot days in July will solve nothing and serve no one, except those who are in the business of building prisons and electric chairs and, in this state, the needles used to dispatch the damned.
It’s too bad that Gingrich, a truly brilliant man and a hell of an orator, is too busy smiling to realize that.
