Misanthrope's Corner March 9, 1998

F L O R E N C E

K I N G

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

THE Karla Faye Tucker case was a defeat for conservatives, the latest example of the many-splintered thing our movement has become and more proof that our ranks are heavy with people who either cannot or will not think.
On the clemency side was the Christian Right, who wanted to save her because she had found God. On the execution side were the Law 'n' Orders who wanted to kill her because they ``believe in capital punishment'' period-paragraph, and the populist yahoos who chanted ``Use a pickax!'' outside the death house. But this was only the official scorecard. To fully understand conservative thinking we must consult the Tacits, those fearless mainstream Republicans who never say what they think. Presented with a white woman on death row, the clemency Tacits wanted to save her because she was a woman but were afraid of being called sexists, while the execution Tacits wanted to kill her to prove they weren't racists.
We could have extracted a political benefit from the case if we had approached it not as a controversy with sides, but as a chess problem with moves: the clemency move or the execution move? My own views on capital punishment are nothing less than bloodthirsty, but as soon as I started thinking like a chess player everything changed.
The clemency move would have checkmated feminists with a double standard of death and handed conservatives a valuable fait accompli in the debate over women in combat. But the execution move checkmated conservatives with an equal right to die and handed feminists a government-sanctioned ``body bag.''
Unfortunately for Karla Faye Tucker, thinking like a chess player takes time and concentration, always at a premium in America and even scarcer than usual during the last week of her life. Had we not been so obsessed with Monicagate we could have concentrated on Karla Faye, but timing, as they say, is everything.
Ideally, an ax murderess should be a pillar of the church before the fact, like Lizzie Borden, but we can't have everything to our taste. On the matter of Karla Faye's religious conversion, I was of two minds. I was leery of her Born Againism purely on aesthetic grounds because I oppose the separation of church and stateliness. Unbelieving writers nearly always harbor this high-church tic. As my fellow agnostic, H. L. Mencken, put it: ``One might easily imagine an intelligent man yielding himself to the voluptuous Roman lure but there is surely nothing to seduce him in Protestantism. . . . The news that a poet had been converted to Presbyterianism would be first-page stuff anywhere.''
Faith, hope, and snobbery aside, I believe Karla Faye's conversion was sincere, in part because the Born Again stance is so exhausting that no one could fake it for very long. Remember, she was Saved in 1985 and spent 12 years witnessing, praising, and thumping, not to mention perfecting the Pat Robertson art of smiling, laughing, and talking all at the same time. ``Protestantism,'' said Mencken, ``converts the gentle and despairing Jesus into a YMCA secretary, brisk, gladsome, and obscene.'' Without the lube job of sincerity working in mysterious ways she would have dislocated her jawbone.
Her conversion could have won her much more general sympathy if only Robertson & Company had been willing and able to take it beyond its strictly Christian meaning. Savvy conservative supporters could have connected it to the magic word that has always underpinned the American Dream and now drives Bill Clinton's politics and the self-help industry: change. Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps; Go West, Young Man; Don't Stop Thinking about Tomorrow; Ten Ways to a New You! are all secular versions of being Born Again that are calculated to make Americans' identification juices flow.
Her irreparable mistake was boasting that she had orgasms while killing. A woman can get away with murder or she can get away with sex, but if she tries to get away with both she collides with the male idee fixe that Tacitus articulated when he wrote: ``A woman who has lost her chastity will shrink from no crime.'' Monica Lewinsky is now bearing the brunt of this on the lesser levels of perjury and obstruction of justice, but did it describe Karla Faye? True, she was a prostitute, but the orgasm claim was surely a lie.
THE murder occurred in 1983 when the multiple-orgasm craze was going full-tilt, when it was impossible to turn on the TV without hearing feminists talking about the female's ``superior capacity,'' or read Cosmopolitan without finding an article on the mighty G-spot. I would bet anything that enough of this pop carnality filtered through to Karla Faye to inspire the trendy lie that sealed her doom.
The fresh-faced sexual desirability of her last days thrust feminist columnists into one of those guarded situations when everyone knows everyone is thinking the same thing. Judging from the tension that crept into their prose, they knew men were thinking what men know women know they think whenever they see a pretty nun, a pretty lesbian, or a pretty condemned prisoner: ``What a waste!''
I was taken by her looks, perhaps because she fit one of my favorite lost words: ``winsome.'' Believers attributed her physical metamorphosis to the glow of salvation but it's more likely that it came from the regularity of prison life and the first normal routine she had ever known. Alarm clocks and mealtimes are next to godliness.
She reminded me of a girl in high school who was always volunteering to wash the blackboards, beat the erasers, empty the pencil sharpener, fill the inkwells, and water the plants, earning the teachers' affection and straight A's in ``citizenship'' to balance her dismal academic record. At first I despised her because she was so ``sweet,'' but then I discovered she really was sweet.
So, finally, was Karla Faye. May she rest in peace.

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