On: Fort Hood shooter to be executed by firing squad - a first for US military...

A firing squad. Thirteen dead, and now the machinery of justice prepares to make the number fourteen - or so the critics will say. Let me do the drill before my judgment does anything foolish.

What is in my power here? Nothing about the sentence. Nothing about the man’s life or his death. Not the generals’ decision, not the method chosen, not the delay of sixteen years. What is in my power is this: to ask what the execution is for, and whether anyone involved remembers.

I was owned once. I know what it is to have your body held at another’s disposal. So I do not tremble at the word “execution” the way comfortable men do - they tremble because they have never considered that their own breathing was always on loan. The soldier who died at that base did not choose his death either. The soldier holding the rifle at the execution does not choose his orders. Both are actors assigned a part. The difference is that one part can be played with understanding.

Here is what troubles me, and I will say it plainly: a society that waits sixteen years, then kills a man by rifle fire and calls it a first since another war, is not avenging anyone. The thirteen are not restored. The thirty-two scars do not close. The execution serves the living - and the question is whether it serves them as justice or as theater. A spectacle. An audience gathered so that someone can feel the ledger balanced.

The ledger is never balanced. Death does not pay debts; it only closes the account so no one has to keep reading it.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not plead for the man. He took what was not his to take, thirteen times over. Let the sentence fall. But let no one watching believe the watching makes them good. The wrestler is judged by how he wrestles, not by attending the match.