Word: mcveigh
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...Timothy McVeigh is dead. If it is true that blood cannot restore blood - not one of the 168 people killed at the Murrah Building rose from the dead on Monday morning - and if it is true that Government cannot, or should not, act for revenge... then what exactly were we doing, as a people, out there on the banks of the Wabash...
...execution had originally been scheduled for May 16, but it was delayed after the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that it had failed to produce thousands of documents during McVeigh's trial. But an appeals court judge decided that the documents did not alter McVeigh's guilt, and ordered the execution to proceed...
...Eight a.m. (eastern time) approached. Computer generated animations showed the death house rooms and the leather gurney on which McVeigh would lie, to go to sleep, as if to have his appendix out - but not to wake. There was an atmosphere of subdued media circus - not satisfactorily macabre, however, since the entire performance was concealed behind a weird scrim of discretion and vagueness, none of us knowing exactly the moment when Timothy McVeigh died. His life winked out unobserved by the millions. This was capital punishment as a sort of Zen, the sound of one hand clapping...
...After it was anticlimactically over, the television people nattered on and on about whether McVeigh had been arrogant, or proud, or scared, at the moment he slipped so gently off. A witness named Gloria Chipman reported she saw "no remorse...
...many people around the globe died, equally hidden from the eyes of the world, at the same moment McVeigh died? How many were born? What's the arithmetic of what the world gained and what it lost in these teeming exchanges of life and death? Or, if that thought is too pointlessly metaphysical, consider the money: The U.S. spent about $100 million on trying Timothy McVeigh. I can think of ways in which the money might have been better used. But we are profligate with both our money and our lives...