The American Way

I'm proud of myself. I resisted watching the insipid drivel of the Tyra Banks show this morning at the gym and instead watched forty minutes of the documentary that Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's granddaughter made, Heir to an Execution.

Of course, now I have to add it to my Netflix list so I can watch the whole thing.

Fascinating. Horrifying.

Most of what I know about the Rosenberg's (and about Roy Cohn) came from Angels in America, so it's Kushner-ized. Which doesn't make it inaccurate, just, more dramatically interesting.

Not that their story needs much primping to make it dramatic. I had no idea about the storyline involving Ethel's brother. What was going on in that family? And the fact that family members refused to adopt the two orphaned sons? Something so dark and insidious courses through the whole story.

And that our country could have strapped this woman, with her sad eyes and her hint of a smile, into an electric chair and watched as the smoke came out of her ears? What a country.

I have no informed opinion about whether they, or she, or he, was actually guilty, or how guilty, or guilty of what. But to give them the electric chair? To let our nation's climate of fear and rank Nationalism lead to the inevitable conclusion of these two people dying? All to prove a point? To show we won't back down? To illustrate our commitment to the survival of "truth, justice and the American way"? Wait, what?

We left those two boys without parents. We let that happen.

Not that we don't do that everyday. Leaving children without parents, without brothers, without grandmothers, without siblings, without fingers, without feet, without limbs.