The Night the Lights Went Out

The Night the Lights Went Out

No, this is not another Santa Ana wind emergency or a story about SDG&E and my struggles with Tesla Power Walls and the solar/battery system installed by Baker Electric. That has “resolved” itself by virtue of a simple call from Baker to me on a calm morning when I did not feel like getting crosswise with another vendor. They have done nothing to physically alter my system or its programming, despite all the failures during our last power outage. What the events and my discussions with them have done is to educate me better about how the system works and what to do to work around the weaknesses of the system. Specifically, I now know what causes my system to shut down, how to reboot it, and how to best insure that I don’t overload it when we are in backup mode. This should all be automatic and out of my hands, but until that functionality is available, I am prepared to be on my own and have written instructions handy (for me, for Kim and/or for anyone trying to deal with an outage). I only wish the real topic of this story could be so easily resolved and compromised as that.

If I asked you if you remember the song The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia, you would most certainly say yes with an emphasis that strangely accompanies this murderous ballad. If I asked you who sang it you might say Reba McEntire (she covered it in 1991) or maybe Tanya Tucker (she rewrote the original to fit the revised plot of the Dennis Quaid movie with the same title). But it was none other than Carol Burnett Show co-star, buck-toothed Vicki Lawrence, who recorded the song in 1972 and took it to #1 on Billboard for two weeks until Tony Orlando took it down with the Vietnam Veteran favorite, Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree. An interesting side note is that the song was written by Bobby Russell, Lawrence’s husband at the time, who wrote the song for Cher, but when Cher turned it down as too potentially controversial, he had his wife record it to career-making success. One of the reasons for the controversy is that the lights go out in Georgia because the song’s protagonist gets executed by electrocution and the song’s narrator admits that they are killing the wrong person because she was, indeed, the perpetrator of the murder. Executions are controversial even though, historically, executions are public displays intended to thrill and satisfy the population as a supposedly visible symbol of justice. Ever since man has walked this earth, or at least recorded his views on walking this earth, he has expressed the primordial sense that justice is achieved through an “eye for an eye” credo, the ultimate law of retaliation (lex talionis), as it is known. It should be noted that legally, this is intended as a victim compensation methodology for purposes of restricting compensation to the amount of the harm, not to extract vindication. I think that last point is often lost in translation as people use the war-cry of “eye for an eye” out of vengeance.

Georgia is one of those states where capital punishment has waged its historic and long-lasting battle in the United States judicial system. I have seen a chart compiled that shows all of the official executions in the country since 1608, long before this was a country. While there is no adjustment for population size, this chart shows in absolute terms that executions rose from the formation of our country pretty starkly and steadily until about 1935, despite the existence of the “cruel and unusual punishment” provision in the Eighth Amendment, and then fell precipitously after WWII and until the Supreme Court ruling in Furman v. Georgia in 1972. In that narrowly won decision (5-4), the court ruled to suspend the death sentence on all existing capital cases in the U.S. The basis of the ruling was the “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society”, according to the court.

As we all know, that view was reversed in just four years in Gregg v. Georgia. 37 of the United States rewrote their capital punishment statutes to satisfy the technicalities of the Furman ruling, so this shift in 1976 was not just a fickle court, but a majority of states seeking to maintain their rights to execute deviants as they adjudicated them. The first restarted execution was of Gary Gilmore of Utah, who was killed by firing squad (a pretty dramatic return to executions). So, while the U.S. executions quickly rose again (but still to only half their 1935 levels), the Council of Europe and its 47 members (including Russia) prohibited capital punishment as a symbol of their belief in a maturing and enlightened society. There were further narrowing moves in Coker v. Georgia and then Godfrey v. Georgia by the Supreme Court that refined and limited the cases where the death penalty could be imposed. Still, it was all about the lights going out specifically in Georgia, strangely enough.

Since 1976 a total of 21 states have now abolished the death penalty, meaning 29 states have not done so on their own, though 7 of those have suspended executions, leaving 22 “active” executioners. Georgia is among this harsh last group. Vermont, while not one of the 21, has abolished it for all crimes except treason. By my count, that means somewhere between 29-30 states are uneasy with capital punishment (60% of states by count, but probably 75+% by population). At the federal level, since 1976 there have been thirteen executions. Three included Timothy McVeigh (domestic terrorism), Juan Raul Garza (drug cartel murderer) and Louis Jones (kidnapping, rape and murder). The other ten have all occurred in 2020 in a rush by the Trump Administration to execute all federal death row inhabitants. There remain 52 federal death row prisoners composed of 22 black men, 21 white men, 7 Latino men, 1 Asian man and 1 white woman. Trump is cutting a swath through this group even though the norm during a lame duck session is for the outgoing administration to defer the issue of executions to the new incoming administration. Of course, the 29 states are heavily dominated (even more so the states that are actively executing prisoners rather than in a suspension moment of reflection) by core Trump states, including Georgia.

All eyes are currently focused on Georgia, not so much due to a pending executions, but due to a pair of senatorial election run-offs next week. Georgia is the new national battlefield for the division of our country during this deeply troubled time. We all know why we are troubled and we all know the stories that have brought us to this place. We are all pretty sick and tired of it all was well, but for some reason, this morning, while listening to the latest news from the Georgia battleground, this old Vicki Lawrence hit came to mind. My thoughts run less to the run-off and more to the notion that I have long been against the death penalty. I simply don’t believe anyone has the right to play God. What really bothers me is that Donald Trump is prepared to play God just to flex the little bit of presidential power he retains in his waning weeks in office. That is the worst kind of governance and the worst example of soullessness I can imagine. Georgia wants to be in a leadership position for this country. They have a long history of going down the wrong paths and while the state’s composition has changed a great deal and it is getting closer to getting it right, we will learn next week whether it has turned the corner or not. Let’s all hope that there are no more nights when the lights go out in Georgia and we put behind us the judge with bloodstains on his hands. It is time for us to evolve our standards of decency that mark our progress to being a maturing society (credit that thought to the U.S. Supreme Court before Mitch McConnell got his hands on it).