Crime and Punishment

Capital punishment has always been for me a subject of intense interest. Fifteen years ago, a close friend of mine ended up on Death Row in Florida (For an account of this see “Deceitful Above All Things” on my blog, Declarations, Explanations, Execrations) for murdering his ex-girlfriend.  She was not the first woman he had killed.

The reading of a newspaper article some years ago, however, had a profound and permanent influence on my feeling and thinking about this topic.  It was a short piece about two young men who had been apprehended after slaying a ten year old girl.  They had kidnapped her, raped her and then stuffed her panties down her throat thus chocking her to death.

After experiencing what I think would be the intense levels of revulsion and anger of most normal people at contemplating such a staggering piece of sadism, I began to think about what should be done with these men, what likely would be done with them and the vast disparity between the two scenarios.

I attempted a thought experiment and tried to imagine what might have followed a crime like this 100 or 150 years ago in an age of simpler jurisprudence.   Upon apprehension it seems likely that these two men would have been brought before a judge, given a quick trial, within days, and then hanged. No psychologists to consider their psychological limitations and produce relevant psychometrics, no psychiatrists to opine on their sanity and no social workers to lament their miserable family histories.  No one then would be much interested in learning about how bad their childhoods were.  Many people have rough childhoods.

Also, in this earlier time there would be few if any delays and no protracted system of appeals. The hideous crime and the harsh penalty would have occurred in very close succession creating a strong association of moral causality between the particularly brutal murder and the severe and swift punishment.

The child’s family would never forget or fully recover from the event, but, and this is a very big “but,”… they would not have to think about or occupy themselves with the future of the monsters who had done this to their daughter.  That part was quickly taken care of and done in a way that clearly, and some might say, appropriately, symbolized both the revulsion of the community with the crime and the importance of the victims and their terrible, unrelenting suffering.

Now the future for the two murders and the family of the victim would be quite different.  From beginning to end everything would be more civilized, more humane. Or would it?  Months, possibly years would pass before the trial took place. Between the conclusion of the trial and the sentencing, weeks, more likely months, would pass.  The sentence would be followed by a long, protracted review with appeal after appeal unfolding and lasting years, decades.  The process would crawl haltingly along and the victim’s family would follow the deliberations and decisions, relive the horror and feel the pain, over and over again.  The murder for them would remain for many years constantly in the present tense. Knowing that the men who inflicted this senseless horror on their daughter are alive, and, that their fate is still uncertain would arouse the worst sort of anger and confusion: how, remembering what they had done to an innocent, defenseless child, could these men be so wrapped in so many procedural and forensic layers of consideration and protection?

Also it is highly probably that the child torturers would have little or no money and so the state would bear the costs for the attorneys to represent them, a cost that would persist for many years as they make their way through the system of appeals.  Also the tax payers would bear the expenses for all of the psychiatric evaluations and examinations.   In fact, prior to the murder these two men would have never had so much attention paid to them and so many resources expended on their behalf. When, if ever, they finally faced an executioner, outside the prison there would be a vigil conducted by people protesting the execution and lamenting the death of the child slayers.

Is this modern way a better one to deal with people who do unspeakably horrible things to other people?  I have an observation which I believe points to a deeply disturbing pathology in our criminal justice system.

Consider the torture the families of the victims undergo as they wait endlessly and helplessly for the criminal justice “system” to hold the murderers of their love ones to account.  The state of Ohio just recently (November 2011) executed a man who had shot his three sons to death while they were sleeping in 1982.  So it takes three decades to execute a man who kills his sons.  What kind of a system puts the loved ones of a victim of a crime like this through decades of misery and anguish?  It is in my opinion a barbaric and cruel one, created and maintained by those who can no longer comprehend an act of depravity and evil and can no longer make a moral separation between real victims and those who made them into victims.     

Criminals have increasingly come to be viewed as ill rather than bad and as such fall under the care and supervision of mental health professionals. You do not punish sick people, you diagnose the illnesses. Diagnosis and punishment are in any practical setting incompatible activities.  You feel sympathy for people who are ill and excuse or at least consider their limitations; you punish people who are bad.  And when they are really bad, as those two mentioned above, you punish them severely not because you love to punish but to show the world how seriously you view the suffering of their victims.  But you cannot do both. Our system tries to do both and that is why it takes twenty or thirty years to execute an unrepentant mass murderer.

Thinking About the Twentieth Century

I have proved by my life that I am more competent than the dwarfs, my predecessors, who bought this country to destruction.” 

                                 Adolf Hitler, 1938

 

The mass-murdering, war-ravaged twentieth century now rapidly recedes in its temporal distance from present times.  Those salient moments and events that are destined to be the era’s distinctive historical moments occupy the living memories of a daily diminishing few individuals.  The World War I veterans are all dead. The youngest soldiers who fought in World War II still alive are in their 80s. They are a fading, frail handful. The shots from Lee Harvey Oswald’s thirteen dollar Mannlicher-Carcano at the motorcade in Dallas, Texas that slew President Kennedy and wounded  Governor Connelly were fired nearly a half century ago. A minority now of Americans can recall that dark and horrible day.  The adolescent experience and perspectives of American university students are largely shaped and informed by the “big” events of the early, media-soaked twenty-first century – 9-11, the great recession of 2008, and the election of the first black American to the Presidency, Barack Obama.

  Relatively soon the twentieth century will be a fully completed historical epoch with all the living witnesses extinct. The vast recorded documentation, however, will remain. It will be the material culled by historians to catalogue the horrors, build their own interpretive narratives, recalculate the millions of victims, and contemplate the careers of the criminal-despots who made destitution and death the order of the day for millions across the globe. 

            The twentieth century as a historical tableau offers considerable advantages over previous periods. The extensive multi-media documentation that now exists and the tools of contemporary information technology are so much more powerful in compiling, analyzing, storing, and rapidly retrieving and delivering material from the source documentation.

            The twentieth century dawned with an abundance of optimism and confidence. Quickly it descended into chaos. August 1914 began an unfathomable, titanic conflagration.  The war, blundered into by the diplomats of the great empires, smashed a self-confident, world-dominating European civilization into pieces. It ended with millions of dead and crippled young soldiers, dismantled empires, hungry and disillusioned people and ravaged economies.  The conclusion was a mere interlude. The Great War would soon become the first World War.  No one had anticipated the magnitude of the death and destruction.

World War I also spawned two virulent ideologies. It brought to the world stage and gave vast power to some of the most brutal and despicable men who have ever walked the earth. To contemplate fully the volume of misery they created and the vast range of their destruction and to comprehend the meaning of it would test the powers of a God.  

These ideologies and the recollection of the men of great resentment who crafted and unleashed them still inflame the polemics of contemporary political debate. Their legacies and memories continue to haunt us.  Nazism and Communism were as the French historian François Furet observed, “children of World War I.” [Francois Furet, Passing of an Illusion: the Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, Chicago, 1999, 19] 

The  seizure of power by the Bolshevik’s in the world’s largest country in October 1917 stunned the outside world and immediately aroused fear and loathing. Then there followed violent opposition and reaction.  Winston Churchill, wrote David Lloyd George, then British Prime Minister, “had no doubt a genuine distaste for Communism. He was horrified, as we all were, at the savage murder of the Czar, the Czarina and their helpless children.”[David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference, New Haven 1937, Volume I, page 214]  The anti-Communism of Mitchell Palmer, Woodrow Wilson’s Attorney General, makes that of Joseph McCarthy, decades later seem restrained. He rounded up 10,000 “Reds” in the U.S. whom he then attempted to deport.  The Bolsheviks were “maggots” on the carcass of Russia, as one of the generals of the German High Command remarked when negotiating with Leon Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk.

The world, really, had never seen anything quite like the Bolsheviks with their sheer audacity, their messianic sense of entitlement to power, fanaticism and enmity for the old order.     “The urgency of Bolshevism created an urgency for anti-bolshevism,” wrote Furet.  [Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 23] Indeed, these Russian Communists openly and vehemently proclaimed their intentions to take their “revolution” to the rest of the world. The captains of industry were put on notice.  Capitalism was rotten, they confidently affirmed, and ready to be toppled.  Russia was merely the beginning, the “weak link” in the capitalist chain. The vast ambitions, fanatical determination and ruthless methods of history’s first successful Communist revolutionaries could not help but provoke an extreme reaction and a counterbalancing fanatical opposition.  Fanatics – people who need people.  They always find each other.  They feed off of each other.

Nazism, the other virulent post-World War I ideology, was cobbled out of the festering resentment of German humiliation and defeat by embittered, disillusioned German war veterans – from generals to corporals – who sincerely believed that they had been “stabbed in the back” by German Jews and Socialists.   It was richly and intensely anti-Bolshevik even as the National Socialists imitated and admired the methods and resolve of the Russian Communists.   The Communists and the Nazi’s studied and learned from each other.  Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives impressed the always observant and calculating Stalin and perhaps provided the model for his own carefully orchestrated purges of his old Bolshevik colleagues in the wake of the Sergei Kirov murder in December 1934.  Hitler was able to take care of business with his old close associate, Ernst Röhm, and selected other inter-party rivals in the SA. Neither Stalin nor Hitler had the slightest qualms over disposing of close friends and working partners if they suddenly became suspect or obstacles to their ambition.  Neither Hitler nor Stalin ever let a crisis go to waste. 

 Communists and Nazis fed off of and stoked the violent fanaticism of one another.  Nazis and Communists fought each other, at times collaborated with each other, and copiously imitated each other.  They claimed, as Furet points out, the same enemy – bourgeois democratic liberalism – that they disparaged for different reasons. [Fascism and Bolshevism were: interdependent, were mutually declared enemies, were colluding enemies, had the same enemy, rejecting that enemy for different reasons but with equal radicality.  Furet, Passing of an Illusion, 24]

It is worth stressing that the Fascists dictators in the 1930s learned a great deal from the Bolshevik chiefs. Stalin and Lenin were role models and mentors for Mussolini and Hitler.  The historian Stanley Payne observed and noted the four major precedents set by the Bolsheviks that the Fascists took over: a massive manipulation of crowds with extreme and irresponsible demagoguery based upon sweeping falsehoods; a rejection of all political alternatives; a one-party dictatorship with control of all institutions; and a dictatorship based upon total opportunism. [Stanley G. Payne,  “Soviet Anti-Fascism: Theory and Practice, 1921-1945” in Totalitarian  Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Autumn 2003), pp. 1-62, p. 2-3, italics added]   Over the course of time Nazis and Communists became increasingly indistinguishable from each other in their affinity for violence, disdain for the rule of law, the unscrupulousness of their methods and the cruel and brutal conduct administered to those they perceived as their opposition.      

Nazis and Communists organized, carried out and ideologically rationalized extensive programs of slave labor, expropriation of private property, forced deportations of entire peoples, genocide and mass murder. They physically destroyed their political opposition.  Against their own populations they practiced a pitiless terror.  Unrestrained by custom or law, they conducted mass shootings of innocent people, and bundled millions of people including women, children, the old and infirmed into concentration camps and forcefully extracted whatever labor they could from those whom they did not immediately kill. 

The twentieth century was an orgy of mass murder, human experimentation by monsters with vast power, guided by poisonous ideology.  The twenty-first century promises to be no different.

Thinking About the Victims

November 16^th, 2011  Dayton Daily News

Father Who Killed his 3 Sleeping Sons is Executed

“Mental Competency Claim Denied”

“Lucasville, Ohio – A man who fatally shot his three sleeping sons in 1982, shortly after his wife had filed for divorce, was executed Tuesday with each of hands clenched in an obscene gesture…. Sister Helen Prejean, a nationally known advocate for ending the death penalty, attended a Tuesday vigil outside the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.”

In the “Local” section of the newspaper was this brief account of the grotesque departure of Reginald Brooks, age 66 from this world.   The short, back page article is another bleak and depressing commentary on the current state of American justice.  According to the law Brooks was supposed to die for what he had done.  But the law kept him alive for a very long time. Herein lies a massive moral and legal confusion.

Within the story are the seeds of an argument, but to what conclusion?   For one inclined toward lex talonis the conclusion is that a criminal justice system that takes almost thirty years to carry out its sentence is all system and no justice.

Consider for just a moment the Kafkaesque name of the place where Mr. Brooks resided for twenty nine years, then died: The Southern Ohio Correctional Facility.  It would be enlightening no doubt, to hear the Ohio overseers of this ghastly and costly dormitory delineate the “correctional” progress of Mr. Brook during his long stay, or, for that matter of any of his colleagues awaiting a similar means of departure. Given Brooks’ goodbye posture, I think is safe to conclude that he left this correctional facility with the same…perspective, he had on the day he entered.     

For those who like Sister Prejean, conduct the vigils, carry the candles and weep for the condemned, the system itself is criminal. Death Rows are living hells designed to torture the pathetic, broken (mostly) men most of whom never had much a chance to start with in life. Executing them solves nothing and does nothing to relieve the anguish of the pain they inflicted on their way to holding cells -- killing added to killing.

The sad reality is that the death penalty as a piece of the U.S. criminal justice system serves no defensible purpose and it wreaks of disfunction.  It is very unlikely, given the completely arbitrary application and long delays in finishing it, that it deters anyone anywhere.  The families of the murdered victims like the convicted murderers twist in the wind for decades waiting for the lawyers, the courts and the psychiatrists to jump through the procedural hoops and fill out the paper work.  A sentence for a hideous crime that is carried out after a twenty-nine year delay is not an application of justice – it is a travesty, a mockery of justice.      

Should someone like Brooks have been executed?  In my view, yes.  But only after certification of mental competence?  If it takes ten, twenty or thirty years to answer this question, then I doubt that it is a question that will ever have a satisfactory answer.  Rightly or wrongly criminals have increasingly come to be regarded as subjects of medicine, patients, if you will, under the supervision of physicians as ill or impaired.  When this transition to patienthood is completed, and I believe that it will be soon, the death penalty will be gone. Doctors do not deliberately kill their patients.    

Whatever one’s view of capital punishment, however, it is deeply lamentable that an appreciation for the innocence and suffering of the victims has been lost or at least intolerably diminished. When we think of murder in this country, how depressingly common it is, how endlessly and pervasively it is featured as a theme of popular entertainment, how extremely protracted and arbitrary the legal process is for determining and exacting punishment, a perverse and ignominious social equation seems to be apparent: the victims lose their lives and the families lose their loved ones; those that take them are the recipients of vast amounts of time, attention and resources.    

The story of Mr. Brooks is a perfect case in point. There is a single mention of his “wife” whose sons he killed after she attempted to divorce him.   It is difficult to fathom the anguish and horror of her life after what he did.  Did she even survive?  The grandparents – how did they fare? From this report, we do not know. None of these human beings seem to be highly relevant to the way these things are discussed.  The story is in fact all about Brooks.  And, it has been all about Brooks since he destroyed the lives of his sons.  How much time (hours, days, months) from lawyers, social workers, mental health workers have been expended for him?  How much care and attention has he gotten?  And yet for all of it he leaves the world his three murdered children, shattered lives, giving everyone around him the finger.    Bon voyage, Mr. Brooks.

The Insanity of Anti-Communism

HISS.  Would you tell me how you reconcile your negative answers with this affirmative answer?

CHAMBERS.  Very easily, Alger. I was a Communist and you were a Communist.

               
(Hearing:  Special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Un-American Activities)

Stalinism has always exhibited an absolutism and dogmatism.  Stalin, Mao, Castro never appeared uncertain about anything. Self-doubt, a sense of fallibility, openness to other points of view—these were not part of the universe they inhabited. Whatever one might say about Stalinists, then and now, never have they been humble.

 Of course, no one but fanatically certain men could apply the kind of massive coercion that they did with its disruptive and lethal consequences to the millions of souls in Russia, China, Eastern Europe and Cuba. This kind of collective, ideologically justified misery could only be inflicted by individuals devoted to the mindless celebration of their own genius and moral perfection.

These were individuals for whom ideological abstractions and utopian fantasies were more real than the actual incalculable suffering and misery of those on whose behalf they took power and ruled over.  With their conviction of intellectual infallibility these egotistical “wrecking balls” would not only pulverize any active opposition, but also pressed down very hard on anyone who seemed remotely unenthused about life in the paradise under construction.  For whoever failed to fall in line and cheer…abuse. Those who administered it were justified; those who felt it deserved it.               

A special form of abuse, a medical ad hominem disqualifier for dissidents, was developed by Brezhnev and his gang during their own step down to a softer, gentler Stalinism.  Instead of simply shooting or jailing dissenters, as J.S. and Lavrenti did prior to 1953, after the Great Oarsman’s passing, the authorities would arrange for State psychiatrists to certify the uncooperative and unenthusiastic as “mentally ill.’  They could then be locked away, drugged and dismissed as “sick.”

This was a move away from the early and primitive days of the “merciless extermination of the opposition-Stalinism” that built and populated the Gulag and staged the Show Trials.  It was a feint toward both the prestige and authority of scientific medicine and procedural legality.  The authorities were simply applying the expertise of modern medicine to deal compassionately with sick people and in accordance with the law to protect them from themselves and others. 

So in the later half period of the Soviet Union, psychiatry came into alignment with the coercive organs of the Soviet state and Soviet citizens who were in any way perceived to be critical of the government found themselves as psychiatric patients incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals.

A person who is certifiably mentally ill or deranged, of course, has no credibility and is subject to the intrusive and coercive measures characteristic of prisons but in many ways worse.  A crazy critic is not a critic at all. A mentally ill person is completely at the mercy of his physician.  But when the physician is owned and operated by the State the “patient” can expect a certain kind of “treatment.”   

Once the doctor affirms the diagnosis, the patient no longer has an independent voice. No one should or will take what a mentally ill person says seriously other than as a measure of his own pathological severity. A medical label is a particularly potent form of disqualification because it carries the authority of modern medical science. What the patient thinks, says or does is in the exclusive domain of experts.  One does not reason with, refute or polemically engage with the mentally ill.  Except for the doctors who have them in their charge, they are ignored.    

            In the early 1970s two Soviet dissidents, a historian and a biologist, Roy and Zhores Medvedev wrote a book entitled, A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union. In it the Medvedevs related how the Soviet authorities used psychiatry as a way to punish individuals of whom they simply disapproved. “[P]ersons who aroused the displeasure of the authorities without actually breaking the law could suddenly be made to undergo psychiatric examinations.”

An extraordinarily stunning application of the political-ideological use of psychiatry was attempted in the U.S. during the second trial of Alger Hiss in 1950.  This was not a run-of-the-mill legal proceeding. The Alger Hiss—Whittaker Chambers, mid-century trials were nothing less than a head on collision of world-stage ideological forces.  For decades, the Hiss-Chambers confrontation was a polemical fault line of America’s Left and Right.  

  Hiss’s attorney hired a prominent psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Binger, who personally observed Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, during the two trials and subsequently testified as a defense witness in the second one with the aim of discrediting Chamber’s testimony.   Chambers, Dr. Binger claimed, was a mentally unbalanced man. (Dr. Binger on the witness stand:  “I think Mr. Chambers is suffering from a condition known as psychopathic personality, which is a disorder of character, of which the outstanding features are behavior of what we call amoral or asocial and delinquent nature.”)  [Thomas Murphy’s Cross-Examination of Dr. Carl. A. Binger in U.S. vs Alger Hiss (Hiss II, Minnetonka, MN: Professional Education Group, [1987], 45.]  

Hiss’s strategy in this trial early on in the Cold War came to be used frequently by anti-anti-Communists to discredit anti-Communism. Anti-Communism was unmasked by doctors of psychiatry as a mental illness or derangement. The Frankfurt Marxist, Theodor Adorno, at around this time had published a much ballyhooed, now disregarded book, The Authoritarian Personality that rendered as pathologic anyone who might be considered conservatively political. Chamber, as Dr. Binger had hoped to convince the jury, was to be dismissed as a psychopath, a social misfit who was striking out irrationally at a prominent figure in order to get attention and act out his anti-social impulses.

            Thomas Murphy, the government prosecutor, however, routed Dr. Binger under cross-examination.  Binger comes off as a fool. Murphy’s masterful cross-examination remains as a textbook illustration for how to impeach the testimony of an “expert witness.” Still, Binger’s clinically fabricated defamation of Chamber’s character and personality became a model for the Left to use to hammer their critics.  From the “proof” of the pathologies of their personalities flows the automatic nullification of their ideas and their arguments.  Hiss we know now falsely denied his guilt and over the decades persisted to the end with the lies.  The dumpy, frumpy, fat, anti-Communist Chambers, bad teeth and all, was the truth-teller. The urbane, Ivy league, elegant, Hiss, protégé of Felix Frankfurter and liege man for FDR, was the liar, and a traitor.

Throughout those years Hiss’s partisans continued the assault on Chamber’s character and continued to deny the fact of Hiss’s guilt.  The Leftist U.S. journal Nation for forty years insisted on the innocence of Hiss. When finally, Hiss’s guilt was no longer in question, the response was altered to say that it did not really matter. Victor Navasky, the Nation’s editor for many years and professor of journalism at Columbia University, shifted the entire moral proposition that had been in play for decades: “Espionage, is it really so wrong?”

 [Quoted from: Lawrence Helm, “The Alger Hiss Chair at Bard College,”

 www.lawrencehelm.com/2008/12/alger-hiss-chair-at-bard-college.html]  

Al Gore, Our Tromfim Lysenkso

He considered that rumors of his being very dangerous to his scientific opponents and resorting habitually to police methods and denunciations were, in all likelihood, exaggerated.  
                                  Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing  
It seems to me that there is a remarkable resemblance between Al Gore and Trofim Lysensko.  Lysenkso was a quack Russian agronomist whose “acquired characteristics” approach to plant genetics so impressed his boss, Joseph Stalin, as to shutdown scientific debate, ruin Soviet agriculture, and put biology in the Soviet Union into a thirty year deep freeze.   Lysenko rose from obscurity to dominate life science and genetics in the Soviet Union for decades.   “He [Lyskenko] had no postgraduate  training or higher degree, no formal claim to the title of scientist, yet he aspired to the theoretical heights from which, as he told a Pravda correspondent in 1927, practical problems could be solved by a few calculations ‘on a little old scrap of paper.’” [David Jorasky, The Lysenko Affair, Chicago, 1970, 189]  Lysenko was, in sum, completely unqualified for the role he played, a fraud who “talked” science but acted as hard core ideologue and with his Party patrons intimidated critics and bullied the real scientists. To question the Lysenkoists was to be labeled a traitor, an enemy of the Soviet Union.

Al Gore and the resemblance to comrade Lysenko?   Gore fulminates regularly about the “global warming deniers” (hint: they are in the same category for Gore as holocaust deniers) and insists that the “science” of it all is “settled.” So what are Gore’s academic, scientific credentials?   He was a mediocre, C- graduate of Harvard with a degree in Government.  He went to Divinity school and Law school at Vanderbilt University -- didn’t finish either program.   He went on to be a newspaper reporter, then used his father's name to vault into politics. He became a congressman, Senator and Vice President with likely little contact with meteorology or climate science.   Yet at some point he became an authority on global warming.  Like Lysenko he talks science but is a science ignoramus, a pure ideologue who responds to reasonable  criticism and opposition with denunciation and vilification. Those who disagree are either neanderthals or  Nazi's. In recent years he compared global warming skeptics to people who believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona.   In 2007 Robert Kennedy Jr. bested Gore in  perfect Stalinist-style by saying of global warming skeptics: “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.”

 

Like Mr. Gore, Mr. Kennedy is politician, not a scientist.  Treason is still a capital offense in the United States.  The fact that such an outrageous comment from a mainstream politician received so little attention and push back is a depressing indication of how Stalinist the Democrat Party has become and how no one has seemed to notice it.

People….People who Hate People…are?

The catalogue of GWB’s crimes against America and the planet is virtually endless.

     (From, The I Hate George W. Bush Reader, edited by Clint Willis, 2004)

One evening some years ago in those dark days when George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were making America into a 21^st-century imitation of the Third Reich, I was in a Barnes & Noble book store slouched in front of the “Politics” section. There I came upon a remarkable publisher series, a collection of I Hate titles. Really. For sale were: The I Hate George W. Bush Reader, The I Hate Republicans Reader, The I Hate Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Condi Rice. . . Reader: Behind the Bush Cabal's War on America, and The I Hate Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity. . . Reader: The Truth about America's Ugliest Conservatives.  No redeeming qualities for the boys and girls on the right – ugly as well as stupid and immoral.  Ann Coulter?  

I was bowled over by the irony.  These “hate” books came from the Left, the same folks in in recent years who have criminalized hate and smeared their opposition as haters.  The Left exudes compassion and toleration, the Right? –  “antipathy for people who are not like them.”

Thus, we are now in the age of the hate smear, a variant of the Fascist-smear invented by the Stalinists in the late 1920s and 1930s.  During the Spanish Civil War, the Left perfected this smear and passed it on to their progeny.  Today those on the Left routinely resort to the F-word or its equivalent to describe those who displease them.

The Fascist-smear tactic of the Stalinist Comintern became the model for today’s hate-smear. It works like this. The accuser attaches to the opponent an opprobrious label (e.g., Fascist, Nazi, or hate monger) while at the same assuming the opposite mantle of virtue.  The attack creates morally and politically dichotomous spaces occupied by the virtuous and the villainous. The morally opprobrious villain then gets turned into a cretin, a criminal, a mental case, and as such can be marginalized and excluded from any conversation or civil exchange. You don’t talk to cretins or criminals. You ignore them or lock them up.

The hate smear is a handy way to soil the opposition for a host of reasons.  First of all, hatred is an ugly, visceral emotion – even physically distorting. It is easily associated with mental derangement and emotional unbalance and thus signals the presence of a personality both irrational and dangerous who is loose and at large. 

Hatred is also closely associated with racial and other forms of bigotry and prejudice. The Nazi imagery with all of its rich hate-drenched propaganda and rituals is a quick and easy link. People who hate people, as the Nazis did, therefore are likely to be bigoted, dangerous, and crazy. What they say and think must not be taken seriously as rational comment or opinion, but very seriously as an indication of clinical aberration or even criminal inclination. Thus, there is no place in the political or social arena for people who hate: if dangerous, they should be sequestered and forcibly separated from “normal” people. If not they should be scorned and ridiculed, then ignored and marginalized.

The hate smear also covertly slides into an insidious “medical” ad hominem attack to use against the opposition.  Haters, it is argued, are mentally ill. Their antics are betrayed by emotions which suggest that they are unstable or possess defective personalities.  The hate smear aims to eliminate opposition and dissent without having to deal with it on a rational, polemical plane.  To the extent that the accusers can make their case and convict their critics of irrational hatred, they are not required to persuade and do not have to articulate and defend their own principles and ideas with arguments and facts. From their own lofty perches of sanity and normality they condescend to attach the irrational disqualification to their critics and move back to their protected regions of normality and high principle.  

            Second, by tarring the opposition as irrational haters, today’s Leftists artfully counterpoise themselves as the morally immaculate, the party of compassion, people of tolerance, moderation and reason.  This is consistent with the self-presentation of the Stalinoid Left from their beginnings as they have always claimed to be a historically destined vanguard, leading the march of humanity into the new and morally immaculate world they want to create.  The critics in marked contrast are deeply flawed -- irremediably so. Their thinking, perceptions, and judgment cannot be other than distorted by the untoward emotions of hatred and fear.  When in power, as we have seen with GWB, unlimited crimes, the planet groans.  

“Deceitful above all Things” – Meditation on a Fatal Friendship

Everything is mixed up for me forever,

And who is a man and who a beast

Will never now be clear….”

                                      Anna Akhmatova, Requiem, 1937

It was an unexpected phone call, the kind that etches itself in your memory and changes your life. I was in Phoenix at an academic computing conference. From the shaky tone of my wife’s voice calling from home in Michigan I knew that the message would not be good.  Something had happened to one of my elderly parents who lived in Grand Rapids, I thought.

The bad news came from a completely unexpected place, Ft Lauderdale, Florida, home of my long time, good friend Bill.  My wife, Barbara, called to tell me that a homicide detective had just phoned our house and asked to speak with me. Ft Lauderdale Police were searching for William Coday Jr. They had recently found the stabbed and bludgeoned body of his ex-girlfriend in his apartment, one I had helped him pick out on a visit I had made about a year earlier. My name and phone number were in some of Bill’s papers.  The detective asked Barbara to have me call if we had any contact from Bill or any ideas of where he might be.  Shortly afterwards, Ft Lauderdale newspaper reporters began to call our house.  

Shaken, I first imagined that my friend had fallen victim to drug dealers.  He liked to date exotic South American women—particularly Columbians—and my fear was that he had turned up at the wrong party, encountered the wrong people and with his ex-girl friend had gotten himself murdered or perhaps kidnapped.  That he was directly responsible for the murder of anyone was unthinkable.

            Over the next several days a different and far more awful picture took shape, one I envisioned with the greatest reluctance.  Bill’s ex-girl friend was dead—killed in his apartment—and Bill had disappeared.  The police recovered her car at the Miami airport parking garage. Bill had driven it from his apartment to the airport after the slaying, abandoned it, and then purchased a one way airplane ticket to New York City.  More ominous, a day or two before her murder Bill had emptied out his bank account.  My good friend, it appeared, had committed a horrifically violent, premeditated murder and then fled.

            Over the next several weeks, I diligently tracked the events from the newspapers on the Internet.  It was a sensational story and got national attention in part because of the starkly incongruent picture of someone like Bill—a man of books and erudition—committing such a primitively violent crime.  His personal history was indeed a remarkable departure from that of the typical slayer of ex-girlfriends: marks of social and economic privilege, impressive educational credentials, extraordinary intellectual attainment.  Bill’s life had been considerably advantaged. His father was a highly successful attorney, first in St Louis, then in California. A cum laude graduate from Washington University-St Louis, Bill had completed a law degree at St Louis University and a master’s degree in information science from the University of Michigan.  An experienced world traveler—urbane, cultured, and fluent in four languages—Bill was a man of extraordinary charm, intelligence and thoughtfulness.  Imaginative, outrageously funny, often boisterous and dramatic, Bill injected energy and life into almost any gathering in which he found himself.

Bill was not some glib Cliff Notes intellectual. The range and depth of his knowledge was truly phenomenal. He could converse insightfully about the influence of Kantian ethics on German legal positivism, help you fathom the aesthetics of Arnold Schoenberg’s atonalism, and substantively compare English translations of pre-Socratic philosophers.  He had read Cervantes in Spanish, Goethe in German and Voltaire in French.  An intense, engaging conversationalist, he could draw out the best ideas and observations in others. He understood classical music, knew its history, and evinced an extremely sophisticated appreciation of poetry and literature.

            At the time of the murder Bill was employed as a foreign language librarian at the Broward County Public Library in Ft Lauderdale.  He had gotten the job in part because the library had a large Spanish-speaking clientele and Spanish was one of the languages in which he was fluent.  According to the newspaper accounts, it was at the library where Bill met Columbian-born Gloria Gomez, whom he dated and whose battered body the police later discovered in his apartment.  Gloria had broken off the relationship and become engaged to another man.  Distraught, Bill called her repeatedly and tried to persuade her to reunite. Finally, he concocted a story calculated to take advantage of her sympathy. He phoned to say that he had been diagnosed with cancer and needed desperately to see her.  Her friends strongly advised her not to go. But her feeling of compassion for him fatally trumped her caution. When she entered his apartment, he exploded in rage and murdered her. 

The news got worse. Gloria’s murder was a repeat performance.  An investigation into Bill’s distant past by Florida officials produced an appalling, eerie piece of personal history that he had successfully concealed. Bill had killed another woman, Lisa Hullinger, in Germany nineteen years earlier. At that time he was a DePauw University exchange college student.  His victim, Lisa, was a fellow exchange student from Cincinnati, a former girlfriend.  Like Gloria, Lisa had broken off with him shortly before the fatal encounter.  Like Gloria, Lisa had been bludgeoned, an object of murderous rage.  Bill’s German attorneys successfully plea bargained the charge down to what in the United States would be comparable to manslaughter.  So the young American exchange student served sixteen months in a German prison, greatly improving his German language skills. He then returned to the United States where he completed three university degrees and eventually settled into the library profession, my own, one which I had encouraged him to enter.       

Weeks went by. I daily consulted the newspapers to see if the police had apprehended my friend. Bill’s initial flight from Ft Lauderdale was to New York City, and from there, the authorities learned, he had flown to Paris. A Ft Lauderdale police detective told me that he thought that Bill would remain in Western Europe where, if apprehended, extradition would probably not be granted to a jurisdiction such as Florida where sentences of death are imposed. The detective also relayed an additional item of information from the investigation to round out the horror of the picture. This murder, he told me, was the most brutal he had seen in his twenty years as a homicide officer.

Interpol was searching for Bill.  His photo appeared on the FBI’s web site: “Wanted by the FBI – Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution – Murder.”  The story was also featured on television’s “America’s Most Wanted.”  The Atlantic Monthly did a cover story on a nation-wide support group, Parents of Murdered Children, whose members gave mutual comfort to families of murder victims.  The founders of the group were the family members of Bill’s first victim, Lisa Hullinger.  When they learned that Bill had done to another woman what he had done to their daughter, they were once again shattered.

This man had been my friend for fifteen years.  We met when he was a first year law student at St Louis University in 1982.  I was a librarian at the law school, teaching part time and finishing a dissertation for a Ph. D. in philosophy.   Bill worked as a student in the law school library and after a couple of initial encounters we became friends.  Few friendships in my life formed so quickly and with such intensity, in part because we shared a passion for systematic and voracious historical and philosophical reading. He had read more and knew more than any other person even close to his age that I had ever met. His personality was ebullient, gentle and almost sweet.  He was big and boyishly disheveled but handsome and charming. 

            Bill finished law school but never took the bar examination.   His application to the Missouri Bar at the end of his second year automatically triggered a criminal background investigation that turned up the sixteen month sentence he served in Germany for the manslaughter conviction when he was an exchange student.  He had lied on his application to law school, specifically denying that he had ever been convicted of a felony. 

The Missouri Bar refused to let him take the exam and the Dean of the Law School was set to expel him, but Bill got an attorney and negotiated a deal that let him finish the final year with the assurance that he would never attempt to practice law, anywhere.  At the time he told me that he had gotten into legal trouble when he was an exchange student in Germany but did not elaborate.  I assumed that it was one of those youthful indiscretions, perhaps a fling with illegal drugs.  To me Bill had always appeared completely normal, even conservative in his personal habits, orientation and behavior.  He seemed almost indifferent to many of the usual sorts of things that entice so many of us into excess: food, alcohol, and popular entertainment.

 After he finished law school, Bill worked for a time as a claims adjuster for an insurance company and was often gloomy and frustrated.  For all of his gifts and talents, he was struggling to find a purpose or direction.   He had married Nishi, a sweet and quiet woman, a Sikh he had met on a trip he took to India just before entering law school.  The marriage, however, began to flounder and they both often seemed to be depressed and unhappy.              

            I left St. Louis with my wife and daughters and eventually returned to Michigan where most of my family lived and took a position as a librarian and administrator at Central Michigan University in Mt Pleasant.  Bill and I kept in touch over the years, and, when he asked me about the possibilities of becoming a librarian, I enthusiastically encouraged him and wrote a glowing recommendation to the University of Michigan’s School of Information to support his application.  Michigan gave him a scholarship, and he moved to Ann Arbor from St Louis, much to my delight since we were able to get together over weekends.

            When he finished his degree, the country was mired in the recession of the early 1990s, and Bill struggled to find a job.  I wrote many recommendation letters for librarian positions primarily at colleges and universities, but he never found a position at a university library. Because he could speak Spanish, Bill eventually got a job at a branch library of the New York Public Library in Queens where the clientele was largely Puerto Rican. By then he had split from his wife, Nishi.  After a couple of years he interviewed at the Broward County Public Library in Ft Lauderdale and again because of his Spanish fluency was hired and moved there. It was at that library where he met Gloria Gomez, whom he eventually murdered.  In the early spring of 1996 I went to visit him in Ft Lauderdale.  It was the last time that I saw him. 

             After I learned of the Ft Lauderdale homicide, and then the first one in Germany, for some time I could think of little else. I began to pose to myself what, I suppose, was a series of inevitable but unanswerable questions.  How could this extraordinary man I had known for so long and for whom I had so much affection, commit such horrible crimes? He had killed two young women. I had two young daughters. Their bedrooms had served as temporary guest rooms when he visited my home.  I had proudly shared with Bill the stories of their achievements and adventures over the years, and he was an attentive, enthusiastic listener. My wife adored him and thought he was one of the funniest, wittiest people she had ever known.  She was distraught with the news of the murders.  We could only faintly conceive of the unrelieved anguish of the families of the victims.

How could I not over the years have seen any indications that he was capable of such murderous fits of rage?  Did my friendship mean anything genuine to him, or was I a kind of social prop who served a darker pathological purpose?  Was there a flaw in my character not to have recognized the malignancy in his?   My friends reacted with insinuations and inflections signaling suspicions that I was tainted by this friendship.  “What’s with you, with friends like that”? Of course!  How could the character of such a treacherous individual not eventually become apparent to someone who had been so close?

            Two Bills emerged for me. One was built from my many memories, a delightful, warm and gentle friend. The other was formed in my imagination by the contemplation of the recently acquired details of his crimes, a monster who brutally murdered two defenseless, young women, someone’s beloved daughters.  Were all of the wonderful qualities I remembered of him—the ironic humor, the concern for other people, the profound appreciation for human frailty—consciously, cynically, carefully crafted poses made to conceal a deep self-aware absence of certain basic human feelings or impulses?   I could not begin to put these two men together, and I came to realize that the capacities that I had refined and developed over the years, capacities that I confidently used to gauge the character of people I met, were terribly flawed.  Never again would I trust my instincts and intuitions when I made a judgment about someone.   

Approximately three months went by and Bill remained at large, presumably in Europe.  The story eventually dropped out of the news and I began to think that Bill might be permanently successful in evading capture. Perhaps he would assume a new identity, settle into some obscure corner of the world, live out his days, and never be held to account for the wreckage.  Gregarious and insinuating, Bill had a remarkable capacity to find and engage people and to make friends.  I could envision him, with his charm, intelligence and adaptability, creating a new life, never to return to the United States.

One evening I went to my office and found a message on my voice mail from Tooska, an Iranian woman calling from her apartment in New York City. Tooska was Bill’s second ex-wife. When I returned her call, she told me that Bill had returned to the United States and had appeared at her apartment the night before. There he was eventually taken into custody by the police.  She was distraught and asked me if I thought that Bill would be executed.   She told me that the FBI had been tapping her phone during the time Bill was a fugitive.  In our conversation another dark revelation emerged. When I asked her if Bill had ever threatened or abused her, she answered that he had nearly strangled her one night in a fit of rage. 

Bill met Tooska when he was a graduate student in Ann Arbor and eventually married her.  I had been with them several times over the years and was somewhat puzzled by the relationship.  When I had last seen Bill in Florida, he told me that he had married Tooska in order to help her secure a green card and thereafter divorced her. He did not want to see her deported to Iran, he told me, where it was difficult for Westernized women to live. Tooska was an extremely sympathetic person, an intelligent and attractive woman. I did not have the impression, though, that he loved her, and also the slightly uneasy sense that he was somehow using her. To this day I do not know why he married her and why he divorced her. Tooska, though, was in love with him.

            The Florida authorities extradited Bill from New York and put him in the Broward County jail to await trial for the murder of Gloria Gomez. There he remained for nearly five years before his case came to trial.  Why it took so long I don’t know.  He never denied the murder.  In fact, he had written about it.  During the three months he was in Europe evading the authorities, he had maintained a diary he called, appropriately enough, “Crepusculo,” Spanish for “twilight.” I suspect that there was a great deal of legal maneuvering by his attorneys and Bill himself had a law degree. He attempted suicide twice when he was in custody, which no doubt raised questions about the state of his mental health and his competency to stand trial.  

When the case finally came to trial, the local papers gave it intense coverage. The jury deliberated for eight hours and returned a verdict of “guilty” of premeditated murder, which made him eligible for the death penalty.  Bill’s attorneys tried to convince the jury to no avail that the killing was not planned, that he had just erupted in a jealous, uncontrollable rage.  The trial then moved into the penalty phase.  The jury had to decide whether the state of Florida should execute my friend or imprison him for life.

In an attempt to keep their client off of death row, Bill’s attorney’s successfully fought to shield the jurors from the knowledge of the manslaughter conviction in Germany nineteen years prior.  In the same endeavor the attorneys also painted a picture of Bill for the jury that bore little resemblance to the person I had known for so many years.  They said Bill was a socially inept, maladjusted loner, a man who had been irreparably damaged by an indifferent and emotionally distant father.  About his upbringing I have no direct knowledge, but I do remember over the years how consistently he spoke with respect and admiration of his father, particularly his basic decency and integrity.  Bill had many long term friendships, some of them reaching back to his days in high school.  

            As I followed the accounts in the newspapers and contemplated this part of the trial, for the first time in my life the subject of murder and the justice or injustice of the death penalty became more than an abstraction, more than a “controversial social issue,” suitable for high school debates and college term papers with the predictable pros and cons.  I have changed my view of it and have come to believe that the moral dilemmas of capital punishment notwithstanding, an appreciation for the innocence of the victims has been lost or at least intolerably diminished. When we think of murder in this country, how depressingly common it is, how endlessly and pervasively it is featured as a theme of popular entertainment, how extremely protracted and arbitrary the legal process is for determining and exacting punishment, a perverse and ignominious social equation seems to be apparent: the victims lose their lives and the families lose their loved ones; those that take them are the recipients of vast amounts of time, attention and resources.

            The jury concluded the penalty phase of Bill’s trial with the recommendation of death. The judge sentenced him to die. Bill, however, eluded the executioner. Some time ago, a friend e-mailed me with news that he had picked up over the internet.  Somehow, even with the vigilance of death row security, Bill put an end to himself. His third attempt since his arrest to take his own life was successful.  He was fifty-one.

            Bill’s story is now indelibly marked in our own family history. My oldest daughter has childhood recollections of him. We remember the large reproduction of the Monet painting he brought her once when she was very young because he knew that she liked it. In my visits to my daughters when they were students at the University of Michigan, I would drive past the apartment on Liberty Street in Ann Arbor where he lived as a graduate student and where I stayed when I went to see him. His friendship and his involvement with our family haunt us and always will.  My wife and I still think and talk about him and punctuate these conversations with professions of incomprehension and exclamations of anger and sadness.  All of the many good memories of him are intermingled and ultimately stained with the horrible images in our minds of what he did to the two young women and their families, and hence a deep and melancholy ambivalence as we reflect on his life and how it touched us over the years.

             

In thinking about this friend whom I never really knew, I remember as a boy when my Father told me that the essence of human nature was best expressed by the Hebrew Prophet, Jeremiah.  “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it?”  I grew up with this notion and for years resisted it as harsh and benighted.  But now, I think that my Father had it right. Jeremiah’s wisdom, I believe, resides in the simple question he poses with its vast epistemological and moral implications: who, really, can “know” the heart of any individual and its capacity for wickedness?  Who can tell with certainty from even the most thoughtful and intimate engagements we may make with someone—from the experience of the words, the gestures, the visible emotions we take away—what darkness or emptiness is within? The deceit we all practice at times to conceal our inner selves, our hearts, from others is understandable, protective and necessary even, and usually forgivable. But there are among us those with terrible holes in their human core, who harbor a fundamental wickedness that puts them apart. No scientist, no philosopher or theologian, no one, can predict who they are or explain how or why they come to be so flawed.     

            I was asked by friends, who knew about my relationship with Bill, if I had any desire to communicate with him, perhaps to ask him how all this could have happened.  After I learned about what he had done, I never sought any contact with him, nor desired any. There were no questions he could answer for me.  He was either mentally ill or wicked, depending, I suppose, on your world view.  His lawyers, to keep him off of death row, opted for mental illness. Making that case required clinical attention from the experts and a medical certification of psychic injury for the jury to entertain. He did not, the doctors opined, emerge from childhood with quite the right emotional-psychological equipment intact and hence was never able to “manage” anger.

During the penalty-phase of the trial, psychologist Alan Goldstein was asked if he thought Bill was conscious of the pain he was inflicting on Gloria while he was killing her. “He was focusing on his own pain as he was hurting her” was his response. I think not. It is outrageous, obscene even to equate Bill’s “pain”—an after-the-event clinical construct—with the excruciating flesh-shattering, terror-filled agony of Gloria’s final moments.  The outrage of such an equation is that it inevitably collapses the profound moral gulf between killer and victim. Both are reduced to people to whom bad things happen, morally and spiritually indistinguishable. Gloria’s victimhood was real. Bill’s was contrived.

To my knowledge Bill never expressed any genuine sorrow or remorse for what he did. He permitted or encouraged his lawyers to present him as the victim, and victims don’t need to be sorry. They need to be felt sorry for.  They need to be, well, victims.  With the second slaying, though, Bill was held to account in Florida, not Germany, and somewhere in the future there might be an executioner waiting.  The Germans gave him a free pass the first time around and a second chance.  Gloria Gomez paid the bill nineteen years later in his apartment in Ft Lauderdale.  As for the real victims he left in his wake, the women and their families, I continue through the years to imagine the senseless, pitiless violence they experienced as it exploded from his dark and raging soul.  It is them I think of when I contemplate the desperate wickedness of this man who was once my friend.