Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Maybe we became less willing to kill in the '60s, but we sure as hell became more willing to kill after that. What happened?
Well, a lot of things. The politics of fear, basically. Look, people go to law school in order to become prosecutors. You become a prosecutor in order to become district attorney, you become district attorney in order to become attorney general, you become attorney general in order to become governor. It's the fastest track from law school into politics, and the death penalty has been the hot-button issue.
First, you scare the fuck out of everybody, you know? You participate in making people afraid to go to their cars at night, and then you offer them the solution. It's really amazing what people will believe, because no one's ever been able to prove that there's any correlation between the death penalty and any deterrence of violent crime. Right now, murders are up 10 percent in Tennessee, right after we executed the first guy we've executed since the early '60s. It's not because we executed him, there just isn't any correlation at all. People that commit those kinds of crimes are not going, "Oh, they might execute me. I might get caught and they might execute me." That's ludicrous.
In the play, even though you accept Karla Faye Tucker's religious faith, you really don't let her off too easily for the horrible crime she committed.
Here was the biggest leap for me as a writer: I couldn't find any evidence that Karla Faye Tucker ever really dealt with what she did. I don't doubt her faith, but I do think there was a lot of denial there. So you're seeing Karla deal with it. That's what the play's about, more than anything else. Karla actually finally deals with what she does. Because in life, she didn't.
Do you believe we have to deal with what we've done after we die?
I'm not sure about that. I don't personally believe in heaven or hell, but I believe that Karla, when she went through the door, went to heaven. I believe that when Karla reaches that door at the end of the play, Jesus is there waiting.
To switch to another topic, can I assume you oppose any U.S. war against Iraq?
Look, the United States doesn't operate well without a bogeyman, and we haven't had a big one for a while. We're trying to make Saddam that bogeyman right now because we don't know where Osama bin Laden is and he might be dead. If he's dead, then we need another one. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, we've been searching for our identity.
Right now the Iraq thing isn't really working out, but they're gonna do it anyway. It's not even happening because of Sept. 11. They were trying to make it look like it was, and people aren't buying that. There was a plan to attack Iraq on Bush's desk before Sept. 11; I think that's fairly common knowledge. It's Dick Cheney who wants to attack Iraq, and he has reasons and they're all about money. It's not just oil. There's a lot of money to be made in war.
It was Dick Cheney who ran in what we called an election two years ago. It never was George W. Bush. You know, Dick Cheney was unelectable. He's not what we elect, but he is what gets things done. He is the most effective type of personality in this culture.
The lie about this whole thing that makes me the sickest is "They hate us because we're free." Well, let's forget about making judgments and just consider our adversary. Jeffersonian democracy? The Arab world doesn't even know what the fuck that is. They want a leader who's clear-cut and who stays with them until he dies. That's what they're comfortable with. That's what makes them sleep well at night. And in some ways they have a point, you know? [Laughs.]
We're completely missing the point. Yeah, we are in danger of drawing a line on the sand and declaring a war on Islam. And if we do that it ain't gonna be dropping a couple of bombs and it'll be over with. If we attack Iraq, it's on. They hate us because we support Israel and we support the House of Saud, which is one of the most repressive regimes that has ever existed anywhere on the planet. And we do it because of money. And until that changes ...
In Salon, we recently ran an interview with Christopher Hitchens, who argues that the old-guard foreign policy establishment, people like Henry Kissinger, would basically agree with you. They don't want to disturb the current balance of power or destabilize the Saudi regime.
Keep in mind that Christopher Hitchens wants to attack Iraq. What's happening with Christopher Hitchens, who I think is a brilliant cat, is that his drinking has finally gotten the best of him. When that disease reaches a certain place your behavior becomes antisocial and your judgment is impaired. Christopher Hitchens' judgment is impaired. I do believe what he's saying about those people, but the reasons for not attacking Iraq are not killing Iraqi civilians, and the fact that we do not have the right to pay less for oil than everybody else in the world does. We pay 25 percent of what the rest of the world pays for oil. It's a rigged game.
We don't need to start a war anywhere. It goes back to the Cuban missile crisis, you know, when Bobby Kennedy said, "We can't just attack somebody. That's not who we are." You know, OK, he was being naive. We attacked the fuck out of Mexico. We attack people all the time. But for me, I aspire to an America that doesn't ever strike first. Franklin Roosevelt, for all of its faults, aspired to an America that didn't strike first. That's what happened to us at Pearl Harbor. We knew it was coming, but we couldn't strike first. We didn't know that they would do what they did, where they did it or how devastating it would be. Franklin Roosevelt was unwilling to strike first. I'm OK with that.
You know what? We're not going to be the most powerful country in the world forever. So what? That's what the song "Ashes to Ashes" is about, I guess. The difference between us and Europe is that nearly every country in Western Europe has been the most powerful country in the world for at least 30 seconds. They've lived through it. They've gotten through that to the other side and they know that there's life after that. With the possible exception of Britain, who are totally defined by their postcolonial self. That's who they are. They're like fucking Blanche DuBois. They're just sort of living in this world where everybody else is like, "Yeah, we know you had an empire. We heard about your empire."
I want to ask you about the song "Jerusalem." At the end of this album that seems unremittingly pessimistic, suddenly you've got this inspiring, seemingly impossible vision of hope and peace.
That's called faith. That's called believing in something even though you have absolutely no evidence that it exists.
That part of the world, we keep turning back to it. I'm a recovering addict and recovering addicts don't believe in accidents. We keep turning back to Jerusalem. When the peace talks fell apart, it was over Jerusalem. Palestinians were unwilling to walk away from Jerusalem. The Christians in the Middle East -- which is us, because Israel does not have the power to determine anything in the Middle East, the Palestinians do not have the power to determine anything in the Middle East -- we're unwilling to walk away from Jerusalem. All three parties are unwilling to walk away from Jerusalem.
Our attention has been turning back to Jerusalem for 2,000 years. Some of the holiest sites of these three closely related belief systems are in this one area, and three of the most sacred are in one piece of real estate smaller than this little neighborhood here. We keep turning back to Jerusalem for a reason. So I believe we'll get it right, or else. I believe we'll eventually do the right thing in that part of the world. I believe that our future, our existence as a species, will be determined in Jerusalem. I don't believe it's an accident that our attention keeps going back there. We have to get it right. If we don't, we're completely and totally fucked. So there's nothing left for me to do but have faith.
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