‘Dead Man Walking’ Returns, With No Chance of Meeting a New National Moment

For the past week, the U.S. government has demanded that Americans support a blatant contradiction: to honor the memory of a right-wing icon who promoted free speech by attacking and firing those who exercise their right to free speech.

That’s the TLDR of it, anyway — I’m glossing over all the parts about bullets etched with furry lingo, comparisons between abortion and the holocaust, a future assassin cosplaying as Pepe the Frog, the ongoing demonization of trans people, the qualifications of Black women and an encroaching takeover of American news media by a thin-skinned authoritarian president.

The central contradiction of the opera Dead Man Walking, which opened this week at San Francisco Opera, seems quaint by comparison. Is there a moral argument for a government that kills its own