Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

By Roger Rosenblatt

Two matters of the heart fill the news these weeks, both firsts and quickly related. In Utah, Dr. Barney Clark was fitted for an artificial heart, and in Texas, the heart of Charles Brooks Jr. was stopped by doses of sodium thiopental, pavulon and potassium chloride administered by the department of corrections. One can muse on the irony of medical inventiveness being used for two antipodal purposes, but irony is not the mood with which the public is left. For Clark one feels apprehension, appreciation and a passing sense of social advancement. For Brooks one feels a vast emptiness and impotence, in spite of the fact that the nation has freed itself of a man who with his partner casually murdered an innocent. Curious. Was this not the cleanest and kindest execution ever? Have we not at last achieved the sanitized death?

Then again, why should one strive for humane executions in the first place? Three stated reasons for capital punishment are social vengeance, the affirmation of civilization's standards and the deterrence of future crimes. The last has never been proved, unfortunately, but if vengeance is what society seeks, a gentle execution would seem counterproductive. Better to use the garrote or the guillotine, surely, whereby the full pound of flesh may be reclaimed. Better still to do as the Romans in cases of parricide. The criminal, judged guilty, would be bound and sealed in a sack with a dog and a chicken, then dumped into the water. Eventually he would suffocate or drown, if he was not first scratched to death by the panicked animals.

As for the satisfaction of civilization, precious little would seem to be gained by conducting an execution in so private a manner as was Brooks'. Four reporters were allowed in, and it is to them that we are indebted for the descriptions of Brooks' yawning, wheezing and clutching for air. Otherwise the public, unlike the audiences at old-fashioned hangings and beheadings, would have had to rely on its imagination. Granted, the imagination was boosted by sketches in newspapers showing exactly how the execution room looked, with Brooks stretched out on a hospital gurney rolled up beside a brick wall with a square hole and tubes looping through. But this was hardly the same as being there. For those who craved particulars, the appetite was merely whetted.

In this regard it was instructive to compare the newspaper diagrams of Clark's new heart with Brooks' operation. The pump looked moderately interesting, as did the hookup of the prosthesis to the atria, but the picture held none of the force of the scene in the Texas prison. One sketch showed clearly, in cartoon style, where Brooks' girlfriend was standing, the position of the chaplains, the precise spot where the catheters entered the arms. Of course, the dramatic content of the events was in inverse proportion to the excitement of the settings. In Clark's case, society asked him, as Dylan Thomas asked his father in a villanelle, not to succumb to death placidly, but to "rage, rage against the dying of the light." In the case of Brooks, society found a way for him to "go gentle into that good night."

Or so one wishes to believe, there being no first-person accounts of the pain in such circumstances. Yet we are never quite so eager for the painless execution that we do not, by circuitous routes like news reports, somehow manage to witness the events. This is our way of seeing the killing and of not seeing it too, of inflicting capital punishment and disapproving of it. For distraction one concentrates on the details: the contents of the final dinner, the prisoner's last words, the murmurings of the clergymen whose presence absolves the citizenry as much as it does the condemned. In Brooks' execution, the body of the prisoner absolved us as well, showing no scars, no holes, no blood.

The idea of the swift and palatable death is why the lethal injection came into being, after all. As the electric chair and the gas chamber were conceived as improvements over the noose and the blade, so this silent fluid would advance the cause further. The trouble is that our feelings upon apprehending this matter do not seem to have advanced apace. It seems so hard to shake off the guilt, the communal savagery one senses; so difficult to view revenge as anything more virtuous than active malice. Ah well, the device is new. Perhaps we only need time.

In the interim will ensue a lively debate on the medical ethics involved. One has begun already, the Brooks case occasioning some exquisite drawing of lines. True, Dr. Ralph Gray, of the Texas department of corrections, examined Brooks to ascertain that the prisoner's veins were large enough for the needle. But no physician actually placed the drugs in the tube, no physician either ordered or sanctioned the execution, and it was a humble medical assistant who inserted the catheters. Thus, exculpation, if one seeks it. The doctors will work things out.

In fact the medical profession could not have chosen a better time for its debate, coming as it did in the week after Clark's implantation. At least there the doctors could point with unadulterated pride to an experiment that succeeded because the patient lived, and not because the victim died. One realizes that Clark may not survive long, but eventually, thanks to his bravery, someone else may walk from a hospital room like his, untethered to a machine on wheels, his metal, cloth and plastic heart ticking like a metronome. From a general professional viewpoint, the life of this man almost exonerates those involved in the death of Brooks. If the doctors are searching for selfesteem, they need not look beyond Utah.

Which leaves only the rest of us to find some peace of mind. What exculpation is available to the public, or is any really necessary? In Brooks the technological nation has come up with a technological solution to the thorniest of problems. Do you feel proud, patriotic, relieved, requited? Or do you instead reel with shame? For as everyone knows perfectly well, there is no such thing as a gentle killing, nor is gentleness, at heart, our real desire. After all is said and proved about the needles and the tubes, what we want is death, pure death, the spectacle of a life removed. There lies the thrill, a thrill dressed up by history and legal blessing, but a thrill all the same. Only the thrill is cheap, and the regret benumbing, the massive judgmental power of the people reduced to a wheeze and a yawn.

This is the season of the dying of the light, the winter solstice when Jews and Christians pit their faith against the cold shortening days and hold away the night. One day we may pit ourselves against ourselves as well, and drive out the barbarians. Too late for Brooks. Too late for Caryl Chessman and Gary Gilmore and all the other killers reaching back into our dark and modern history. But not yet too late for those who, at this time of year, would wish to celebrate Clark's brand-new heart, or the Festival of Lights, or the child who outlived all his eager executioners.

--By Roger Rosenblatt

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