Goode's Jury

NEARLY A YEAR after the Philadelphia inferno, the smoke shrouding the actions of Mayor W. Wilson Goode and his overlings has begun to clear. Or so we might be led to believe by the report released last month by Goode's self-appointed investigation committee on the Move disaster.

This Monday the one surviving adult member of the Move household, Ramona Africa, is scheduled to be sentenced. She faces seven to 14 years in prison after an "old-fashioned political trial," as The Nation put it, in which Ramona--who it appears had taken a course in law and worked as a paralegal, dread locks and all--caught the judge on judicial procedure and made him eat his own words.

While Ramona's trial may have descended to farce at times, the only justice the other six now-dead adult Move members received was last year's Dantesque trial by fire and water. Unfortunately the report last month of the Special Investigation Committee enshrines that verdict.

"Investigation committees" like this one have become a permanent landmark in American political hindsight. When things get out of control, we need a scientific study to set the record straight. But "fact finding" is somewhat of a delusion. No matter what you call it, such a committee--with its inevitable crossection of experts and laymen--looks like a jury.

Eleven people died. But the committee sees only five of them--the deaths of the five children--as "unjustified homicides." Were the deaths of the six adults then "justified" homicides?

Although it condemns the actions of the city for the deaths of the children and recommends a trial by grand jury, the report just categorically notes the deaths of the adults--like an obituary. Passing judgment only on the homicides of the children, the committee also passes judgment on the adults--by not saying anything. Through the language of the report, their deaths have erased them from--rather than embedding them in--the conscience of the city's officials.

BUT THERE'S something else about the report of the investigation committee: like many others of its species, it's codified common sense. For all its forbidding, numbered paragraphs and important conclusions, the report leaves all the big questions unanswered.

When it gets right down to the nitty gritty of laying blame and answering the elusive question "why?," the report comes as the authoritative, official "Oh my God!"--the stamped-in-ink echo of last year's uproar. The report gets stuck in a set of stock condemnations--hasty, unreasonable, reckless--that don't tell us anything new.

Or better yet, it runs up against a brick wall: how can the quiet rationality of a policy investigation make sense of police who machine gun like gangsters, a city that drops a bomb on itself, firemen who start fires and watch them burn? The whole thing is a demonic inversion.

For each of these actions, the committee found the same word, "unconscionable."

Clearly the actions of Goode and of the Police and Fire Commissioners lacked conscience, lacked a sense of right and wrong. That much was evident a year ago when an entire neighborhood burned down, leaving 11 dead and 250 homeless.

But the other connotation of the word, unconscious, could throw some light on why.

Goode and others described the bomb dropped from a helicopter as an "entry device." Aside from the fact that some cop appears to have loaded the bomb with extra explosive above and beyond the call of sanity, the idea of using a small explosive just to gain entry is strategically sound. If it had worked, if it had dislodged the armored bunker on top of the row house, the whole thing might have ended a swift, successful anti-terrorist strike.

It didn't work. And inevitably, as we've seen time and time again--in President Carter's handling of the Iranian hostage crisis, for example--a failed strategy becomes a moral wrong.

Even more so than the bomb, the committee found "unconscionable" the use of the fire as a "tactical weapon." Yet, what is so demonic, so "unconscionable" about the tactics of letting the fire burn to force the people out of the building, is that it's so rational. So pathologically rational. So...unconscious. The strategic rationality of standing around on the scene, walkie-talkie in hand, and issuing orders to let the fire burn runs right over into unreason, into the unconscious in "unconscionable."

YET THERE WAS another, more insidious element. The report concludes that police fired on Move members trying to flee the blazing building. They were caught between fire and gunfire. As one member of the committee said, "It's not human to run back into a raging inferno." For Move, it was not a question of surrender.

A year ago, Newsweek headlined the question "Did it have to happen?" Invoking inevitability as an explanation begs the question of why Move didn't just surrender in the first place. The report concludes that the city bungled negotiations with the group. The only way Move could talk to the city was through a bullhorn. The only way the city could talk to Move is epitomized in the final words of the city's ambassadors to the besieged people--"Come on, cut the shit."

To excise carefully what the city's leaders saw as the cancer of Move, the city needed a "magic bullet." All it had was a giant shotgun--10,000 rounds of ammunition and a huge blaze, an excess like the impotent overkill of nuclear weapons.

With no magic bullet to shoot them through the heart, the city burned the modern heretics at the stake. The water washed the city's hands. As Ramona said to the judge at her trial, "The whole city of Philadelphia is trying to wash the blood of Move people off their hands and they're using you as the water."