Alabama’s nitrogen-gassing: the descent of mankind

Sometimes in a society, to borrow the title of one of the world’s most influential novels written by Chinua Achebe—whom The Guardian wrote “was Africa’s best-known novelist and the founding father of African fiction—“Things Fall Apart.” Achebe was himself alluding to W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” a poem whose eloquence speaks to us now more than ever as Alabama continues to torture more and more condemned men via the abominable execution method called “nitrogen hypoxia”—a method which has, so far, resulted in four gruesome-and-gasping Alabama executions (as well as one in Louisiana, too).

In his masterful poem, Yeats wrote:

“Things fall apart; the centre

cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon

the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is

Loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is

drowned;

The best lack all conviction,

while the worst

Are full of passionate

intensity.”

I can’t compete with Yeats, but I do want to point out—with Alabama’s fifth nitrogen-gassing execution scheduled for June 10—that before Alabama began gassing humans to death, I wrote (with Dr. Joel Zivot) that “Alabama’s Nitrogen Gas Execution[s] Will Be Cruel and Unusual Punishment.” And not only that, I insisted also that “Alabama’s Plan to Execute Prisoners With Nitrogen Gas Is Immoral”; I warned “If a nitrogen gassing execution ever takes place in this country, and worse, should nitrogen gassing executions become routine, the direction of our American spirit, our very morality, will be worse than sullied; it will be irretrievably lost.”

I want to reiterate something important I wrote at the end of January about “Leadership abdication and Alabama’s next execution”:     

“The problem we have—we who know any kind of state-killing is wrong, and especially a method where humans are gassed to death — is an abdication and a yawning vacuum of leadership. And I don’t just mean political leadership, though I do mean that, too, and did just publish a column recently in The Times of Israel, The Montgomery Advertiser, and USA Today about Biden’s failed death penalty legacy in Alabama. Biden, other national politicians, and all of Alabama’s state legislators surely will share blame in the historical accounting that will undoubtedly, one day, take place for all of Alabama’s repeated gassing tortures[.]”

I insisted at that time, before Alabama gas-tortured to death my former client Demetrius Frazier:

“Alabama’s continued use of nitrogen gas to torture human beings to death has to be stopped. Who will do it? But before that question can be answered: Who will speak out publicly against it first? Religious leaders, professional athletes, actors, big and small business owners, doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers, students — everyone has a responsibility to get involved.”

As Alabama officials ready themselves to again gas-torture another human being with nitrogen despite objective evidence that all previous nitrogen gas executions have been torturous, and, as this happens despite plentiful prison cells in which Alabama could house the worst of the worst, isn’t it worth asking whether Alabama’s gas-torturing addiction is yet another further sign, in our society’s current mass of pressing problems, of the current descent of mankind?

To try to answer that it’s worth it, I submit, to turn back to Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.” New York reporter Nick Tabor observed, in April 2015, in The Paris Review, it “may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English,” and I want to pillage it yet more. Here’s another snippet of Yeats’ prose to think about as our society—and our government, our courts, and our people—continues to allow Alabama and other states to use nitrogen gas in executions:

“Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

Tabor writes that “The narrator suggests something like the Christian notion of a ‘second coming’ is about to occur, but rather than earthly peace, it will bring terror.” This terror is evident in the way Yeats describes:

“A shape with lion body and

the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as

the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs,

while all about it

Wind shadows of the

indignant desert birds.”

And the terror only increases the way that the poem closes:

“The darkness drops again but

now I know

That twenty centuries of

stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a

rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its

hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem

to be born?”

Relevant to Alabama’s gas-torturing addiction and the question as to whether it is a marker of the current descent of mankind, Tabor concludes that: “As for the slouching beast, the best explanation is that it’s not a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, compromising the technological, the ideological, and the political. A century later, we can see the beast in the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and all manner of systematized atrocity.”