I’m glad from the bottom of my heart I wasn’t a friend or part of a family of the victims of Timothy McVeigh’s misanthropy, waiting and hoping to see if June 11, 2001 would bring closure, satisfaction, relief or any other positive emotion. Because whatever else it might have been, the media with their Barnum & Bailey-like abilities, turned it into a public spectacle, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the middle ages.

A day after the McVeigh circus no longer occupied the first ten pages of every publication (online and offline), I told a friend, “Now there’s a smart move President Bush has made by attracting flak from the EU on mundane issues like global warming. That definitely takes the heat off the United States and its renewal of the centuries-old argument about the pros and cons of capital punishment.”

But a circus it most definitely was. Today, Terre Haute has probably put even the infamous Tower of London in the backseat across the world. “McVeighmania” meant that every moment of his last few days became a sordid drama for some, a countdown to closure for others, and a riveting rigmarole of media-incited debates, arguments, perspectives and biases.

You could get a blow-by-blow account of what McVeigh did those final days – what he ate at his last meal, whether he slept in a fetal, semi-fetal or sphinx-like position his last night alive, what kind of pen he used to write his last statement, how many times he batted his eyelids while strapped to the gurney.

For centuries, death has drawn a crowd where there has been a public execution, with a life being taken in the only other legal circumstance than war. Those same European countries that point fingers today at the United States once walked the same “barbaric, bloodthirsty, sad, pathetic and wrong” path they accuse the U.S. of treading.

Someone being burnt at the stake, getting drawn and quartered, being hanged publicly or guillotined were occasions for public gatherings in most European nations until the last century. But the point is, capital punishment is a matter of the past in those countries and is not so in the United States.

The United States is a country that actively practices capital punishment, like 98 other nations (according to Amnesty International), a little like 21 others who have capital punishment but do not practice it, and unlike 55 other countries who do not practice capital punishment at all (such as most of Europe).

McVeigh had the distinction of being No. 341 among those facing extinction since the time Congress included capital punishment in a crime bill in 1790.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (www.deathpenaltyinfo.org), there have been over 700 executions since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, apart from the federal executions mentioned above. Those are not small numbers.

So what exactly is it that fuels this contemporary thirst for blood?

Defenders of capital punishment argue that the death penalty serves two purposes – to mete out adequate punishment to criminals, and to deter other criminals in the future.

If deterrence were truly the goal, then torture and other accompanying barbarism should be even better deterrents, applying the same logic.

Some questions to ask ourselves are: Have we, as individuals and as a society, eliminated the need for vengeance? Doesn’t an eye for an eye eventually make everybody blind? Have we as a society outgrown our liking for public, spectacular death?

How else, other than through the death penalty, should society extract justice from individuals who have no respect for the happiness of others in that society? What is the social and individual cost of pursuing this path?

According to Mark Costanzo, author of “Just Revenge: Costs and Consequences of the Death Penalty,” unlike in the olden days when execution would swiftly follow conviction and sentencing, on average today it takes up to eight and a half years before a criminal is executed from the day of his or her incarceration.

Consider this also in the light of the fact that it costs over $75,000 per annum per person of taxpayers’ money to keep such felons in maximum security prisons; that there is an incredible amount of overcrowding in prisons in the U.S. today; that due to a “revolving door” policy, serious offenders often get off early in their sentence to make room for minor offenders who are larger in number; that over $30 billion is spent in just “making room” for more and more prisoners, without too much thought to their rehabilitation.

So even putting aside Europeans’ comments about the death penalty being barbaric and pathetic, capital punishment still doesn’t make sense.

At the end of churning all these thoughts for a long time, I tried to put myself in the shoes of a survivor or friend or family of a victim of the McVeigh bombing.

I cannot imagine how logic or debate or argument or execution can even come close to bringing closure to something that only death itself can bring a closure to. And meanwhile, the media juggernaut rolls on, looking for fresh spectacles to shock a sleepy public for a few more days.

Narayan Devanathan is a graduate student in journalism and mass communication from Hyderabad, India.