Turkey pardon? How about pardons for jailed innocent people instead?

By David McElroy · November 23, 2011

Barack Obama pardoned a couple of turkeys named Liberty and Peace this morning, sparing them from becoming Thanksgiving dinner for someone on Thursday. This lighthearted tradition is good holiday PR, but it must ring hollow with the human beings in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

Some presidents have used pardons in questionable ways, such as the flurry of 140 pardons granted by Bill Clinton on his last day in office. In Clinton’s case, many of the people involved had personal or political connections to Clinton or other Democrats. That’s still not as many as the 204 people who Richard Nixon pardoned in one day near the end of his checkered time in office. (And remember that Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for his Watergate-related crimes even before Nixon was charged.) More recently, George W. Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence was controversial because Libby was an administration official convicted of leaking information for political purposes.

The evidence is clear that presidents don’t mind using pardons to help their friends and politically connected associates, so why aren’t they willing to use the power to help people in this country who are in prison despite the fact that it’s clear they’re innocent?

If you don’t believe we have a problem with wrongfully convicted people, you’re wrong. That’s not an opinion. It’s a fact. We have example after example of people who have spent years in prison despite not having been guilty of the crimes they were convicted of. If you’d like details, you’ll find plenty of harrowing examples at the website of the Innocence Project, which works to help release people who are demonstrably innocent.

My best guess is that presidents don’t use their constitutional pardon power to help innocent people because they’re afraid of looking soft on crime. After all, the people they do grant pardons to are generally nice upper-middle class people who look “safe” on the news. Many of the innocent are black or Hispanic or poor — and many look the part of thugs. So presidents play it safe. They release the smiling people in coats and ties. They let the poor and minorities rot in prison.

The next time you see a smiling president and happy children at the annual Thanksgiving day turkey pardon, remember that there are human beings who deserve to be there instead of the turkeys.

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Six years ago this evening, a scared young dog came to live with me. She was so terrified on the ride to my house that she pooped in the back seat of the car. She had originally lived her life on a chain as a puppy. Then she lived among far too many other animals in a cramped apartment, where she was pushed around by bigger dogs. I was told she would always be a “special needs dog” and would probably never be much more than the scared girl she was then. But with a lot of love and patience, a very different dog emerged in the coming months. Now that she’s been with me for six years, it’s hard to imagine her any way other than she is today — as the World’s Happiest Dog®. One day, she’s going to tell her own story on her own podcast. You’ll subscribe when she gets started, won’t you? This loving girl deserves it.

It was obvious to me in the late 1990s that western society is heading toward social and economic collapse. When I told other people back then, most thought I was crazy, because they saw their society as stable and booming. But more and more people have slowly been coming to the same conclusion. And now, even the wealthy and powerful seem concerned. A new report from the World Economic Forum says the erosion of “social cohesion” is what we should fear right now. (Full report here.) Although I disagree with a lot of political spin that these elites put on the dangers ahead, I feel certain that we are headed toward social collapse. And most people will not prepare for it. The book that started me down the road of thinking about this came out in 1993. I thought its reasoning was impeccable, but that the time frame would be longer than the book expected. I still find that book a useful foundation for thinking about the issue — “The Great Reckoning,” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg — even though its predictions are out of date. Dark days are coming. Smart people are going to have a plan to get out of the way of what’s coming. Will you?

Since I posted my audio discussion a couple of nights ago about some recent realizations I’ve had about myself, several people have asked for more about what I quoted from Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychologist is controversial to some — and I don’t always agree with him — but I’ve found his lectures about art and its relation to psychological archetypes very useful. You can find him here talking about art being more about process than just result, which contains the material I quoted. Here’s another video from a lecture in which he discusses how artists mediate for the rest of society between the known and the unknown. And here’s another portion of a lecture at an art exhibition in which he talks about the necessity of artists for society. And if you missed my audio from two nights ago, here’s a link to my discussion about some things I’ve learned about myself and some things I need to change about myself as a result.

I just realized it was four years ago today when I came uncomfortably close to dying. I don’t remember how blunt I was publicly about this at the time, but the surgeon who operated on me made it clear afterward that I had been much worse than he had thought. My gallbladder was inflamed and I had been in tremendous pain, but what the doctors didn’t know until they started is that the organ was close to rupturing. Surgery that was supposed to take half an hour took two or three hours, because my gallbladder was so diseased — the surgeon’s word — was falling apart as he tried to remove it. I had gone to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital (the same one where I was born) and was kept for emergency surgery the next morning. I should have been home that night, but I had to stay in the hospital three days instead. The weird thing is that I never really believed I could have died. Maybe it was just denial, but I didn’t feel as though it was my time. I thought I still had a lot of life left to live. Four years later, I’m grateful to be alive, but I feel as though my life is still on pause. It’s been a blur. I still feel as though I’m waiting for “the rest of my life” to start.

Is “The Nightmare Before Christmas” really a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie? It’s both, making it a delightful mashup of themes and images from two very different holidays. Although Danny Elfman’s score was nominated for several different awards, Elfman wasn’t a typical composer for film scores. Up until he started working on films with Tim Burton, Elfman had been a rock-and-roll artist best known as the leader of the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the 1980s. Just this week, I heard an interview on the podcast Song Exploder on which Elfman explains how he came to write the music for the movie, including why he approached the music for the film very differently than he had approached writing rock music. I enjoyed the 20-minute interview and if you happen to love the film, this Christmas would be the perfect time to learn more about how the score came to be. Tap or click below to listen. Listen here.

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