Two executions

James Byrd has been dead 13 years. Mark MacPhail has been dead for 22 years. Both men were murdered and their killers were executed last night. This morning, both men are still dead and justice remains out of reach.

It's a funny phrase: "were executed." It's passive voice. We don't say "the state of Texas executed Lawrence Brewer." A state is a abstract concept not capable of action on its own. We don't say "the people of Texas killed Lawrence Brewer," although we damn sure did, through our viciousness and apathy. And we don't say "Jailer X and Dr. Y, who administered the 'lethal cocktail' (quickly becoming my favorite cliche) killed him," because, after all, they were only following orders.

Of course, the world is no worse off for the loss of Lawrence Brewer, truly a piece of shit if there ever was one. He was a racist, coked up caracature of a man and a great danger to the general public. His death will draw none of the angst that Troy Davis' has. Unlike Davis, there is no doubt about Brewer's guilt. There is no question of a truly guilty murderer wondering the streets.

But if you are truly against the death penalty — and I mean against it because it is wrong, not because it's applied racistly, costs more money, doesn't deter crime and runs the risk of killing an innocent man — if you are against it because the state doesn't give life and thus has no right to take it, then you should be as outraged at Lawrence Brewer's death as you are at Troy Davis'.

Davis' case is easy. There was no physical evidence to tie him to MacPhail's murder. No murder weapon every surfaced, no DNA, no blood. Nothing. There were witnesses, nine in all who testified against Davis. He was convicted quickly and sentenced to death in seven hours. But seven of those witnesses recanted, some saying they were threatened by police with jail time of their own if they didn't identify Davis. Of the two remaining witnesses, one was supposedly overheard bragging about the murder.

It's easy to be outraged that the people of Georgia killed Troy Davis last night. His guilt remains in doubt and the system simply said, "innocence or guilt is irrelevant." Davis' is the kind of case death penalty opponent dream about.

But the death of Brewer is no less wrong. There is no justice for James Byrd. His wife and children don't want to see Brewer executed. Doing so doesn't bring Byrd back. And, worse, it implies equality between the two. This ultimately is why I think we are so adamant about the death penalty in this country. We cannot abide a tragedy in which no one is responsible. We cannot stand loose ends. So we tell ourselves that once we stick the needle in the murderer the books are cleared and we can pat ourselves on the back for doing so. In the meantime we're telling the world that the two lives are the same, they are interchangeable. And most importantly we are absolving ourselves from any guilt. If you wipe the slate clean there is no need to look and see if society failed to protect the victim before he was killed.

And after all, that is when it would have mattered. We should have cared more about James Byrd when he was alive.

Romo revisted

But first a note. Today starts my new policy of beginning each post with the phrase "live nude girls" to see if it spikes my page views. Sorry, no photos, but we will speak of the manly arts today.

Romo was remarkable yesterday, from what I can tell from the highlights and the media coverage. (I'd like to thank the NFL, Congress and the idiotic, unAmerican policy of blacking out the Cowboys in Houston). Broken ribs are tough and I think he took a small step forward. As I said last week, it's easy to like this guy and it's easy to see why his teammates like him and his performance will help in the locker room.

Will it help him with the fans? Who cares? Doesn't matter what you think, doesn't matter what I think. What matters is if its really a step forward and if Romo will learn that winning can be painful, but it's worth going through that pain. He gave a Meredith-esque performance yesterday. Let's see if he keeps it going.

Romo

There are two kinds of Cowboys fans. There are those who scream "How 'bout them Cowboys" seriously consider the notion that Johnson might have been a better coach than Landry and wear jerseys to games. These guys disappear when the going gets tough, whether its losing or the sale of the team to Jones.

Then there are those of us who were raised Cowboy fans the way people in Iran are raised Muslim. We rarely scream anything. We don't get excited when Dallas wins, because that's what's expected. We go crazy when they lose (remind me one day to tell the story of Earl Wright, no relation). I suppose all of us who feel this way were fans in Staubach era, or at least the White era.

And that segs us nicely into the current era. Tony Romo has been reaped all the benefits of the Cowboy quarterback, as pointed out in this piece on the utterly wretched website Grantland. (I'll be writing about this tomorrow). Romo has dated pretty and famous women. He's grown to great fame himself, garnering invites to celebrity events that no other athlete in Texas gets and getting covered by national media for his hobbies.

Romo even carries himself like a Cowboy quarterback. His poise, his easy smile and his charm are that of a man comfortable with his place on top of the mountain. But one must look at this particular mountain. This is Romo's sixth year as the starter. Only two other quarterbacks have started as many years. They are both in the Hall of Fame. They won five Super Bowls between them.

Romo often talks of his desire to be in the Staubach/Aikman class and does so with an attitude that leads me to infer that he sees himself as approaching that level, just needing a couple of breaks here and there to make it. But Romo's not in that league and he's not in the Meredith/White league. He's closer to Hogeboom than White, to tell you the truth.

Which brings us to last night. I think my class of Dallas fans (we'll call us Landry fans) learned their lesson from the White/Hogeboom debacle (and our parents likely learned it from the Morton/Staubach debacle before it). My biggest gripe about Romo has always been that he seems like he's trying to be a good guy, rather than a good quarterback. Whenever someone kills a drive by making a boneheaded mistake, Romo has this goofy grin, as if to say "it's okay, it's just a silly game. I'm still your buddy." No one who has seen the clip of Aikman telling his line the previous series was a "Goddamn embarrassment" can imagine that Romo's approach is paying off.

When Staubach retired, Tony Hill said he was enjoying Danny White, because White was one of the guys. Hill said the pickup basketball games at Staubach's house always found Roger and Drew on the same, an attitude that carried over to the field when Roger would always look for Drew in the clutch. When Hogeboom was pushing White, one of the factors in Gary's favor was he was the kind of guy who would go drink a beer with the team. White was aloof. Meredith, of course, would drink a beer with anybody, but Meredith's hauling his rotting carcass out of bed to even play was enough to stamp him as something apart from the normal human being.

Simply put, one cannot simply imagine Romo telling the huddle what Seth Maxwell does at the :35 mark of this clip. And one senses that this is exactly what this team has needed for about 10 years.

Of course there is more to being a leader than being an asshole at the right time. And Romo certainly commands the loyalty of his players as Dez Bryant demonstrated last night in a clip I cannot find at the moment. But Bryant's defense is an indictment. One cannot imagine Butch Johnson needing to defend Staubach. Think about it. It boggles the mind.

If Romo wants to be a great quarterback in Dallas he needs to first realize what the standard is. Two Super Bowls, minimum. He's not close and he's not progressing. Last night was just the latest example. The Johnson-era Cowboy fans have been calling for Romo's head for a couple of years. But that's not a thoughtful move. Who is going to replace him? McGee? Kitna? Favre? Dallas has to start looking at what comes after Romo and it needs to start looking quickly. Unless he changes something about his fundamental approach to the game, he will never win in Dallas.

I'm not sure what it means

I am strangely uncomfortable with the commemorations of the attacks on Washington and New York. I'm not sure exactly what it is we're supposed to commemorate. I watched on television as 4,000 people were murdered in an act of madness so obscene it took Letterman to add any perspective. I keep reading admonitions to "never forget" as if I could somehow forget what I saw that day and what I learned about human nature since.

As I write this, a man is singing the national anthem at the Chicago-Atlanta game, a rendition that will surely be described as "stirring" (it was). I muted the TV and turned up Springsteen's "The Rising." The giant American flag, crisp and bright against Soldier Fields pastoral green seems to me an attempt to sanitize what's happened, as America always sanitizes its history. What's missing are the shots of desperate people leaping from the towers, taking a chance (in my mind) that a wind gust or an awning will give them the miracle that never comes. Perhaps if Marvin Gaye was singing the anthem it would seem less sterile. Where are the images of the dead. It seems its okay that we remember them as a prop to our greatness, but to show the awful ugliness is too much.

My memories of 9/11 are blurred because I was working at a newspaper that was literally in the shadows of a massive petrochemical complex, a complex that, to this day, could easily be lit up by one loon with an RPG. What I remember most is coming home about 2 a.m. and turning on the BBC coverage. After 18 hours of hysterical American reporting in my ear all day the BBC was strangely reassuring. It made no attempt to minimize the horror and the evil of what happened, but there was a perspective lacking. The overall theme seemed to be "Welcome, America, to the real word. It's horrible that you had to arrive, but know that we are with you." (Tony Blair's presence in Congress days later as Bush spoke re-emphasized this feeling). Britain had been through this. It had survived. Despite the '93 attacks, despite McVeigh and Koresh (who were after all loony Americans, familiar to anyone in the South who has more six relatives), America and never quite admitted that it too was vulnerable to acts of madness.

But we didn't join the rest of world, even though it was so desperate for us to do so (can anyone forget Iranians singing our national anthem outside the embassy they had stormed just 20 years prior). We instead gave in to that ugly anti-intellectual emotional streak that pervades so much of our history. Terrorists killed more Americans in the last 10 years than they did Sept. 11. Are we going to mourn them today as well?

So I am not sure what to commemorate. Because a group of madmen executed an act of madness, we turned our back on what made us great. The government can now spy on its citizens without cause and without an easily obtainable warrant. Our president approved "methods of interrogation" that would trigger an invasion if another nation used them on our citizens. Some of those methods, in fact, led to the execution of perpetrators when used against our soldiers. We have tortured innocent men, and we have gained nothing from the guilty ones we tortured, but we have given up a part of our soul in the process. Perhaps emboldened by the law's inability to be applied to those in power, the governor of Texas gleefully executed a man who is surely innocent and is fighting to execute a man who might or might not be cleared by DNA tests which haven't been performed.

Our national debate coarsened over the past 10 years. A president with a resume that reads like a Horatio Alger story is vilified as an alien, a traitor and worse by a significant segment of our population, a segment that once held respect for the presidency as a sacred. A large portion of the House of Representatives believes compromise (on which this nation was built) is a sign of weakness. Political differences are no longer treated as political difference, but as heresy. Something that must be rooted out and destroyed.

Not all of this is a result of 9/11. Much of the coarsening took place long before. (No one could be uglier than the Clintons). Many have used 9/11 to justify a massive expansion of the government's power and reach.

So I'm not sure what to commemorate today. The lose of 4,000 lives grieves me, but it grieves me no more than the 5,000 or so who were lost avenging 9/11 in a place that had no connection. The loss of our civil liberties grieves me even more. In a sense, Bin Laden has won. He never posed, nor do his followers now pose, an existential threat to this nation. But he has forced us to turn on ourselves. He has convinced us to give up our sacred protections against the government, a government that is a far, far greater threat to our freedoms than anything Al Qaeda ever did.

As we cast this as a religious war, and make no mistake, the wars that we are fighting are, at this point, nothing but Crusades, how long before the religious strife turns inward. Once the warmongers lose the ability to convince us that Islam is a threat, how long before various Christian sects are excluded from the big tent (I'm looking at you Gov. Perry). I will pray today. I will pray for those who lost their lives and for their families. I will remain in awe, as I have always been, of the men who raced into Armageddon to save others. But I won't pray that God is on our side.

Ultimately, 9/11 isn't about this country. It's about the individuals such as the one pictured above (the picture accompanied Tom Junod's remarkable story in Esquire)

I will pray that we are on His.