Human Capital

Twenty-five years ago today, John Lennon was shot and killed outside The Dakota, his apartment building at One West 72nd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan . The Dakota was a logical choice for the famous couple. It offered enhanced security, a bakery and wine cellar, all the amenities and a courtyard that provided ample and protected access to light and air.

It had been a gamble of capital, both human and financial, when it was built. The Upper West Side was considered to be so far from the center of town that it might as well have been in the Dakota Territory .

It was a full-service building, one of the first in the growing city. That permitted a reduction in domestic staff for the residents, a unique savings of human capital that signified the changing times. The facade of the nine-story building is decorated in a baroque collision of German Gothic, French Renaissance and English Victorian details, and topped by a steep slate-and-copper roof.

I looked at the satellite image of the building this morning. From overhead, the interior courtyard, accessible from a single guarded door, provided a quotation of open space from Central Park across the street.

On the last day of John Lennon’s life, a lunatic named Mark David Chapman waited patiently near the entrance to the elegant gothic building for the famous couple to return to their home. Earlier in the day, he had waited equally patiently in line for John to autograph his new album, the first he had recorded in five years.

When John and his beloved Yoko emerged from a cab, Chapman approached them, saying “Hey John!” Then he shoot Lennon five times. As the mortally wounded musician lay dying, Chapman casually laid down his gun, sat on the step and read a book as he waited for the police to arrive.

I don’t claim to understand it, and frankly haven’t wasted any time in the last quarter century trying to. I think Chapman should have been executed, since he is apparently sane enough to know what he did. He has issued statements over the years from his cell, and I think he has written a book. I consider the man a deranged publicity seeker, and would never contribute a thing to him, particularly out of morbid curiosity.

As best I can determine, the murder was a sort of exchange: Lennon’s brilliant life for Chapman’s eternal notoriety. John was not consulted, of course, and it was an awful waste of human capital.

Something changed in America with John’s murder. Celebrities became more distant. The Paparazzi got more insistent. The killings seemed to end after the carnage that seemed to me to have started with John Kennedy. I’m sure you could add to the list, but Marylyn, John, Martin, Bobby, George, and John all died in sequence. President Ford was shot at, and Reagan took a bullet that damn near killed him.

John Hinkley is the guy who shot him. He is still around town, someplace, and his parents keep trying to get him released for weekend visits. It is a confusing business; they say he is “better,” and can be trusted. But I think that if he is better, they ought to try him for attempted murder and throw him in the general population of a bad prison.

I can’t think of an assassination since, unless you include the frantic chase that killed Diana, but that might be myopia on my part.

People seem to have hired better security, though from what I see in tabloids in the check-out lane of the supermarket, they are still pretty vulnerable.

Arnold, the celebrity Governator of California, is contemplating human capital, too. There is a clemency hearing on the life and death of a man who has been on death row for two decades. By turn, Stanley “Tookie” Williams, co-founder of the perfidious Crips gang, is either a mass murderer or a Nobel Laureate. The decision that Arnold has to make hurts the head.

Is there redemption, or should he die for what he did long ago? Should his fate be based on his younger savage self, or the man who renounced his gang past and authored children’s books teaching against gang violence?

Is there redemption?

The authorities in Yemen think so. They have launched a campaign of religious dialogue with jihadis in their custody. They are willing to duel with the young men with verses from the holy Koran. If the jihadi can convince the Imam that murder of non-combatants, women and children is justified, he will be permitted to stay his course.

If, on the other hand, the young man can be convinced that the path of terror is a corruption of the True Faith, he will be judged redeemed, and released.

Critics say that the jidhadis might figure it out, and say whatever it takes to get free.

Critics say that about Tookie Williams, too, and that the redemption is about the conversion of image, not soul.

This is a hard one to unravel.

I wish it were as simple as saying that justice should be speedy. Mark David Chapman should not have had the opportunity to write a book. The Jihadis should just be sent swiftly to their Paradise . And Tookie should have been handed over to the families of the young men he killed.

But none of that accounts for redemption. On the whole, I think I vote for speed. The passing of time complicates everything, since even human capital appears to compound with interest.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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