OCTOBER 9, 2026 – Recently, after having read True Grit by Charles Portis, I watched the Coen brothers’ award-winning 2003 remake of the movie. Near the outset of the story, the inhabitants of Fort Smith, Arkansas gather to witness the hanging of three convicted murderers. All we know about them is what each imparts with his last words—except the Native American, who gets the short end of the stick. All he is allowed are the words, “Before I hang I’d like to say, although . . .” At precisely that moment, the gruff executioner yanks the black hood down hard over the poor guy’s head, cutting off any further words.
When the lever is pulled, three living, breathing human beings become corpses. The crowd applauds, much as I suppose countless voyeurs did during the Reign of Terror in France, while they picnicked on grounds surrounding public beheadings. The rest of True Grit, along with much of history, is replete with “frontier justice,” and we modern folk—appalled as we are by the old law of the hangman’s noose—are commensurately relieved that we live in more civilized times.
Or do we? We can no longer be so sure we live in a civilized land, given the recent announcement by Secretary of DEFENSE Pete Hegseth—with Trump’s enthusiastic blessing—that Nidal Hasan, the convicted shooter of nine service members at Fort Hood, would be executed by firing squad. Moreover, the spectacle will be live-streamed for all to see online.
When I first heard of this, I thought it was a leftie joke lampooning Secretary Hubris Testosterone. Soon, however, the truth came roaring forth: Hegseth meant exactly what he said. This on the heels of another abomination: the botched attempt to execute Tennessee death row convict Christa Gail Pike by lethal injection.
I’m not sure of a lot of things, but one about which I am absolutely convinced is that outside of killing combatants in morally and ethically justified defensive warfare, the state has no moral standing to take a person’s life irrespective of the crime, no exceptions. Today, the vast majority of sovereign nations—113 out of 145—have completely abolished the death sentence; doesn’t matter how heinous the crime involved, most states subscribe to the basic moral principle that two wrongs don’t make a right. Countries that do impose and carry out the death sentence are not places we Americans should want to emulate—assuming we value membership among civilized nations.
What Hegseth has directed—and the bombastic way in which he has promoted the planned execution—ought to send Americans into an apoplectic fit. But it hasn’t. The fact that it hasn’t is disturbing evidence that we’ve taken our eyes off the ball; that we’ve lost sight of the fundamentals of our democracy and the essentials of a civilized society.
How did this happen? Was our commitment to those essentials and fundamentals so tenuous all along that we’ve now so easily reverted to “frontier justice”? Or have we been ground down so far by one outrage after another that our exhaustion has blinded us to savage vengeance? If so, how are we to prevent our wholesale reduction to a state of cruelty governed by tyrants?
How might we recover our standing as a beacon of hope in the world? And how long will it take? These questions beg a third, which is deeply troubling: is America out of step with itself or am I, along with people who share my sentiments here, out of step with America? If the latter, where do we go from here?
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
