
I recently discovered a website called deadmaneating.com, a macabre affair that chronicles the last meals of the condemned while offering armchair commentary regarding their crimes and culinary preferences.
While a site that sells trucker hats in the service of discussing death hardly grants the subject of executions the gravity it deserves, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the site is certainly on to something.
In Texas, according to the Department, last meal requests constitute the number one inquiry from the public with regard to administration of the death penalty. And if any state should be an expert on death penalty administration, it's Texas. By my calculation, they've done it more than four times as much as runner-up, Virginia.
Why Texas puts so many more people to death than any other state is beyond the scope of this essay; but the rationale behind the public's fascination with last meals certainly bears some investigation here.
I personally think, and some sociologists have agreed, that information about the last meal has the effect of humanizing the condemned. As one journalist points out, "We may not be mass murderers, but we like cheeseburgers too."
It occurs to me (rather eerily, I might add) that this real, yet tacit connection isn't really that much different from the kind people receive by friending Al Gore on MySpace or following Demi and Ashton's Twitter. Chances are you are never going to meet these people and have the opportunity to sit down with them over lunch to establish a genuine connection. Hence, we settle for connection by proxy.
In the case of death penalty inmates, the desire to physically break bread with them seldom exists, but a morbid, verdant curiosity survives our initial revulsion of the crimes they committed. We want to know why - what could have possibly been running through their heads? - and, not having lived their lives, we may never come to know that any more than we know why we do all of the things that we do.
But we do know why we like french fries (salt), apple pie (comfort food) and butter (fat), at least on some remote level. And so we call on these commonalities to form enough of a connection for us to try and understand.
Britney updated her blog on MySpace. Your favorite band just posted a note on Twitter that their tour bus broke down. Facebook reports that the Jonas Brothers are off to see the new Star Trek movie, which is the exact same thing you're going to do that night.
Suddenly the distant seems closer; the mysterious and aloof, more familiar and engaging.
Before Gary Gilmore was executed in 1976, he dined on a last meal of a hamburger, eggs, potatoes and contraband bourbon. "Hey, I would have tried to sneak something in there, too" I mused - and for a moment the thought of Gilmore slaying two service employees that complied with his demands slipped a bit further back in the maw of my consciousness.
If a kernel of relatablity can do that for a convicted spree killer, just imagine what it can do to bring you and your customers or employees a little closer together - no lethal injection, electric chair or firing squad required.