Here’s a hint you might be on the wrong side of history — when your government officials have to pretend to be someone else when contracting with chemical companies that make killer cocktails.
(Shutterstock)
By Lee Camp
Special to Consortium News
The first person to receive the electric chair in America was not a person.
It was an elephant named Topsy, and honestly, I believe he was falsely convicted. But we’ll get back to that in a moment.
With a quarter million Americans either killed or seriously maimed by Covid-19 and a U.S. drone bomb being dropped overseas roughly every 12 minutes, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department recently thought to themselves, “You know what we need in this country? More killing. There aren’t enough murders going on.” I guess I can’t blame their logic. If you’re headed for hell anyway, why not make it worth it? Swing for the fences.
So in the quest for more deaths, the federal government recently carried out their first official execution in close to 20 years. (That number of course does not include the thousands of innocent men, women and children they obliterate overseas every year.) But they couldn’t partake in their execution fun-time without the tacit approval of the Supreme Court. SCOTUS as it’s called cleared the way for the execution by declining to hear a case.
Lethal Injection
This first execution in 17 years was performed by lethal injection because hanging has a bad rep these days. It feels too Wild West, though it is carbon neutral. And electrocution has been on the outs because I imagine the environmentalists were furious the electricity was coming from coal power plants. (Don’t quote me on that.)
I mean, if you’re going to turn a guy into a shish kabob, don’t use dirty energy to do it, okay? Maybe he could pedal a bike that powers his own murder. That’s eco-friendly. Or how about death by wind turbine? I’m sure if you got a guy close enough to one of those things, the blades would knock his head clean off. That would be completely environmentally sustainable and fun for the whole family.
Quick tangent: The electric chair owes its existence to Thomas Edison being an asshole. Edison funded the creation of the first e-chair in order to crush his business rival, George Westinghouse. The famed inventor refused to take Nikola Tesla’s advice that alternating current was the way of the future.
As Business Insider reported, “Edison decided that there was only one thing to do: to prove that Westinghouse’s [alternating current] generators were more dangerous than Edison’s direct current. In order to prove his claim, Edison held public executions — oftentimes in front of reporters — of animals such as dogs and horses.”
Esteemed Inventor
Portrait of Thomas Edison by Abraham Archibald Anderson (1890), National Portrait Gallery. (Wikimedia Commons)
At one such event in Coney Island, N.Y., he zapped and killed an adult circus elephant named Topsy. (To this day many believe Topsy was framed.) So, if you’re a teenager and you kill a squirrel, they call you a Satanist and send you to juvie. But Edison deep-fried a fucking elephant and he’s an esteemed inventor??
Edison also sought to prove his wonderful new toy worked on a human. Convicted murderer William Kemmler was the lucky contestant for this particular episode of “What’s That Burning Smell?!” After they sent a few thousand volts through him, Arthur Southwick, the creator of the electric chair — which Edison helped fund — spoke to the crowd.
“…just as Southwick announced: ‘This is the culmination of ten years’ work and study. We live in a higher civilization today,’ everyone noticed that Kemmler was still alive.”
As the poor man groaned in pain, Southwick thought, “Oh Shit! We didn’t cook him long enough!” They proceeded to electrocute him for many more minutes until his head started smoking.
Welcome to higher civilization. …Please ignore the stench of burning hair.
Anyway, we basically don’t use the electric chair anymore. Now we use the highly civilized lethal injection. There’s only one problem. We can’t get our hands on the drugs to murder people because the EU banned export of the lethal-injection drugs we need. The countries that manufacture the drugs don’t want them used for our barbaric Medieval experiments in human indecency.
Keep Trying
Elephants crossing the Luangwa River, South Luangwa National Park, Zambia. (Geoff Gallice, Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
But the Trump administration will not be deterred. Certainly not. When it comes to bailing out average Americans struggling during a pandemic, Trump gives up pretty easy. But when it comes to killing people, his motto is “If at first they can still breathe, try try again!”
So these recent federal executions mark, as Reuters reported, “the culmination of a three-year campaign to line up a secret supply chain to make and test lethal injection drugs.”
A secret three-year campaign.
To obtain the murder drugs you need.
Because every nation is trying to stop you.
Isn’t it a strong sign you’re an alcoholic when your friends start hiding the alcohol from you? Well, what is it when your friends are hiding the murder cocktails from you? “Hey, buddy, don’t you think you’ve killed enough people this week? Yes, I know you can stop anytime you want. Of course. But why don’t you just take a break? See how one night feels without killing someone, you know?”
Apparently, the administration has been working on this secret protocol since 2017, and it’s designed to obscure who supplies and tests the drugs — but many of the sources have now been uncovered. As the Reuters investigation noted, “In some cases, even the companies involved in testing the deadly pentobarbital said they didn’t know its intended purpose. … All three firms told Reuters the Justice Department did not hire them directly, saying they were contracted by a compounding pharmacy …”
Here’s a hint you might be on the wrong side of history — when your government officials have to pretend to be someone else when contracting with chemical companies that make killer cocktails because if those companies found out the purpose of the drugs, they would refuse to work with you on moral grounds.
Second tangent: Despite refusing to create killer chemicals, making U.S. bombs that kill innocent people overseas is not something companies hide from. No, they take pride in it – as seen in this fawning CNN segment touring the Raytheon facility that makes Tomahawk missiles.
Heartwarming Story
One of the companies testing Trump’s new murder cocktail is called DynaLabs. And the co-founder, Michael Pruett, would like you to know that your government testing murder-chemicals is truthfully a heartwarming story. He said quote, “I’d rather know, if someone I knew was being put to death with lethal injection, that the injection was tested by a qualified laboratory.”
Yes, if a friend of mine were being murdered, I’d like to know the chemicals were really top notch. I want my buddy to enjoy the Grey Goose of death. Spare no expense if you’re killing my pals! Kinda like if I were watching my best mate strangled to death, I would want it to be strong professional hands — you know, like an auto mechanic or a drummer of a moderately successful rock band. (They wouldn’t have to play stadiums, but they should have a Twitter account with over 10,000 followers.)
Here are a few other fun facts before we close the book on this horror show: Careful estimates by the National Academy of Sciences find that over 4 percent of those executed are completely innocent. A much larger number are severely mentally ill. So really America has simply created a reliable procedure for executing mentally disabled people. That’s lovely. Maybe we should add a verse about that to the National Anthem.
And then there’s the racist aspects of capital punishment. The No. 1 determinant of whether someone is sentenced to the death penalty is race of the victim — meaning killing a white person is a much bigger deal in our society than killing a black person.
Anyway, in the interest of avoiding a 32-page column, I won’t go through all the other reasons the death penalty remains an idiotic, barbaric, flawed, pointless waste of human life. …But on the plus side, at least the elephants now understand who’s boss.
Lee Camp is the host of the hit comedy news show Redacted Tonight. His new book Bullet Points and Punch Lines is available at LeeCampBook.com and his stand-up comedy special can be streamed for free at LeeCampAmerican.com.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Right on, Lee. This made me laugh until I spit up my coffee and also pissed me off so much I nearly lost my breakfast. Keep it up.
Great satire. Will post on FB. heh heh
The diversion of such chemicals for execution purposes may, of course, deny them to people who need them for medical purposes. And so they might die also.
As a policeman in Burma, George Orwell shot what he believed to be an innocent (because provoked) elephant. At least he felt bad about having to do it.
That Orwell story came to mind when writing the headline for this article. It is called “Shooting an Elephant.”
Thank you Lee for this illuminating *and* deeply distressing piece. (I suspect my deepest distress is for the animals that that B****** Edison had slaughtered to prove his direct current theory right – well, right for killing, anyway.) And then one wonders with much conscience how many other poor non-consenting non-humanimals have died in order for the barbaric, immoral, grotesque US murder squad (legal, of course) to have these chemicals to hand?
And we have the bloody nerve to call out the Chinese? The Iranians (not the Saudis, ho no)? Mentally ill? (I also think that some that have been executed have been intellectually disabled… and that even now an intellectually disabled person can be executed if the state in question declares him/her intellectually able.) As for juveniles several every decade till the 1920s and then 3 between 1977 and 1986….!!!
And we are *the civilized beacon to the world.* Right.
Stick to comedy, your running social commentary misses the mark on so many points it borders on sick satire.
Should we go with chemicals or electricity? It depends. When I sprayed my flies with bleach they succumbed to it only reluctantly. I realized that to spare them from unnecessary suffering I needed a fly zapper. I want to do the best I can for my flies. But the next morning the flies were gone. God told them to leave and showed them a way out. It spared us all a lot of trouble. Thank you God.
What is wrong with insects? We, the so superior humanimal llt, need them…we appear, in a majority (certainly in the USA) to loathe and detest them (but then so doing makes mucho buckos for the so called “vermin” slaughterer companies).
Perhaps it was because I grew up in the Brit countryside (daughter of a cowman – milker and carer of cows, that is), poor, lower working class. Perhaps it was because I consider other animal species a whole lot more moral, ethical (in an abstract, unthinking manner) than any bloody humanimal.
Having lived in the US (my late husband’s borrowed homeland) for many years, I have become attuned to how most Americans view beetles, flies, bees and whatnot – in a word: Kill ‘Em.
Bizarre. Cruel. And, frankly, shortsighted.