Cruel and Unusual: A President’s ‘Pardon’ as Dark Parody

"We are seeking to retain capital punishment in a system that has already done away with corporal punishment."

In just a few days, we will once again endure the annual spectacle of the president of the United States pardoning a turkey that would otherwise have been fated for the Thanksgiving table. This event is typically covered in the media as a light-hearted bit of fluff — and fluff is what it might well be, if there were not actual humans on death row awaiting similar intervention. In the current American context, however, the turkey pardon is a distasteful parody of the strange power vested in politicians to decide the earthly fates of death-row prisoners. There is in it an implicit acknowledgment that the killing of these prisoners is a practice that bears real, non-jocular comparison to the ritual slaughter of birds for feasts.

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Source: Op-ed by Justin E. H. Smith, The New York Times, The Opinion Pages, November 20, 2011. Mr. Smith teaches philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.