There always is reasonable doubt

We can judge a society by how it deals with its most vulnerable.

And no one is more vulnerable than a man on death row hours away from execution.

Georgia executed Troy Davis last night, who was convicted of killing a Savanna cop nearly 20 years ago. The conviction has stood numerous court challenges, but Davis’ guilt was placed into doubt because seven of the nine eyewitnesses that testified against Davis recanted in a case that had little physical evidence to support the conviction.

I have no idea whether Davis was innocent or not. What bothers me about the case, however, is that there remained some doubt — which means that Georgia may have executed an innocent man.

And that should be unacceptible. That it’s not, that Americans are unwilling to see that the death penalty submerges us in a moral swamp, that it taints everyone of us who lives in the United States.

The death penalty is a barbaric failure. It offers no deterrence (otherwise why would Texas, the execution capital of the nation, have 17 percent more murders per capita than the death-penaltyless New Jersey). The machinery erected to try suspects is as rickety as America’s decaying bridges, with the ultimate, irreversible penalty being imposed and no way of guaranteeing that the person being sent to death is guilty. There always is reasonable doubt.

Albert Camus called it premeditated murder in which society is complicit. When we put anyone to death, we are all guilty of murder.

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  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Thoughts on R.E.M. as the band calls it quits

Photo from R.E.M. Website: http://remhq.com/photo_gallery_detail.php?id=1586&gallery_id=118

I guess I was 19 or so when I first heard R.E.M. on college radio — most likely WRSU at Rutgers or WPRB in Princeton, though it could have been on the Penn. State station, where I was still in school.

“Radio Free Europe” came out on an independent label in 1981, received more widespread attention in the year that followed and then became the centerpiece (in a more polished version) of the band’s first full-length album, Murmur, in 1983.

The jangly guitar and muffled vocals that created an odd sense of mystery, and a title referring to the U.S. funded radio station piped into communist countries — it was a revelatory sound that, along with the remnants of punk, helped set me on a musical path that I have hued closely to ever since.

Now, 30 years after the song came out on Hib-Tone, the band is calling it quits. I can’t really blame them. The band’s first 15 years were a blur of perfection, a collection of remarkable releases that saw its stylistic pallet grow. Murmur was pure low-fi indie, as were the next few albums to follow. The band’s sound grew to fill stadiums with Document — which I think is their finest, a cross between their low-fi past and stadium present/future.And then it softened with the exquisite Automatic for the People and grew outsized and harsh with Monster. What followed was less consistently good, though had some other unknown or less-well-regarded band had produced them, albums like New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Up and Around the Sun might have been seen as the solid recordings that they were.

Accelerate was somewhat of a return to form for the band, and included songs that looked back at R.E.M.’s heyeday, but Collapse into Now, a solid effort, fell flat and it was clear that R.E.M. had probably run out of gas — a sense that was reinforced by Mike Mill’s comments on the band’s Web site:

During our last tour, and while making Collapse Into Now and putting together this greatest hits retrospective, we started asking ourselves, ‘what next’? Working through our music and memories from over three decades was a hell of a journey. We realized that these songs seemed to draw a natural line under the last 31 years of our working together.

 I feel lucky to have been a fan of the band throughout the career, to watch it grow and change and adapt. And I feel even luckier to have gotten to see them live three times at different points in their career. I wish the members well and hope their new projects are fulfilling for them and produce music that strikes a cord with the listener.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Hungry for real change

The numbers are horrific — highest poverty rates in years — and the efforts on the table are just not good enough.

New Jersey, for instance, is looking to institute mobile farmers’ markets, which as I said yesterday, can be useful but really are nothing more than a Band-Aid.

Even the very good proposals offered by Katrina vanden Heuvel today on The Nation Web site — including an increase in food stamp allocations — will do nothing to address the larger causes of poverty.

To really make a dent in this problem, we need to do more. We need to upend our economic system and rebuild it. We need to realize that corporations are not the best of most efficient providers of services, that they exist only to build profit and nothing else — and they do that by charging as much as they can get away with while doing everything they can to keep costs down.

Enough is enough. Our well-being is more important than the corporate order.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Taking to the road to help the hungry

Mobile food markets are a good idea, but flawed in the proposed form. Relying on the nonprofit sector once again to provide for the poor leaves the plan — and the poor who we are supposed to be helping — at the whim of donors. Hunger is society’s problem and efforts to address it should be paid for by the society as a whole, which means it should be a government program.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.

Read their lips, no new taxes — on the rich; the rest of you, you’re on your own

The Republican plan for addressing the long-term deficit can be summed up this way: Leave the rich alone and pass along the costs to the rest of us.

As Ryan Grimm of the Huffington Post reports:

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said on Sunday that House Republicans would oppose President Barack Obama’s payroll tax cuts for both employers and employees, arguing that the policy had already failed to provide a sufficient boost to the economy. “It hasn’t worked,” Ryan said, suggesting the current temporary tax cut should be allowed to expire, which will amount to a 50 percent tax hike on workers making less than $106,000 per year.

He also said he opposes the president’s proposal to require millionaires to pay the same tax rate as the middle class, known as the Buffett plan. “Class warfare might make for good politics, but it makes for rotten economics,” Ryan said.

Again, to sum things up: Raise taxes on the middle class and oppose any hike in taxes for the rich. And gut so-called entitlement programs.

  • Send me an e-mail.
  • Read poetry at The Subterranean.
  • Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
  • Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.