BLOGGING TIPS: Jonathan Weiler: The New American Ethos: Death and Indifference

Jonathan Weiler: The New American Ethos: Death and Indifference

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Jonathan WeilerGlobal Studies, UNC Chapel Hill

GET UPDATES FROM Jonathan Weiler Like 87 The New American Ethos: Death and IndifferencePosted: 9/23/11 10:46 AM ET React

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I have no special insight into the Troy Davis case. I only know what has been repeated far and wide -- that there was no physical evidence tying Davis to the murder scene; that the murder weapon was never found; that Davis was convicted based more or less exclusively on the eyewitness testimony of nine people; that seven of those people have recanted, several saying they were pressured or coerced into fingering Davis by the police; that one of the two remaining eyewitnesses who has not recanted was said to have bragged about having himself committed the crime. What I do know is that we live in a sick time, a time when to be poor, downtrodden or otherwise marginalized is to be worthy of indifference, if not scorn and contempt. A time when a new political movement has emerged that revels in death, as witnessed by the sickening displays at the last two Republican debates. We live in a time when what it means to be wise and an adult, and not shrill and unserious -- is to counsel that the least among us must languish in misery more than they already have. We live in a time when a president, we've now learned in intimate and depressing detail, wrings his hands and equivocates in the face of the suffering of millions of Americans, but acts with decisiveness and clarity when, as Jon Stewart recently noted, it comes to violating international law and authorizing death abroad. We live in a time when the vast resources of a selectively powerful state apparatus can be mobilized quickly and with great purpose and determination to secure the interests of the most powerful, while shrugging its collective shoulders at its incapacity to act to ameliorate privation among the disfavored. We live in a time when the irresistible force that is the machinery of death on the one hand and the immovable object that is the indifference to the fate of the least among us on the other -- conspired in the execution of Troy Davis Wednesday night, in a depressingly illustrative display of 21st century America.

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#ad_bottom_article_text {margin-bottom: 15px} GOPTroy DavisBarack ObamaJon StewartI have no special insight into the Troy Davis case. I only know what has been repeated far and wide -- that there was no physical evidence tying Davis to the murder scene; that the murder weapon was n...I have no special insight into the Troy Davis case. I only know what has been repeated far and wide -- that there was no physical evidence tying Davis to the murder scene; that the murder weapon was n... More in Politics...

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Jonathan Weiler: The New American Ethos: Death and Indifference

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