On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (62 page)

At the end, what can we say about Saddam? That he was a monster? A madman? A malignant narcissist? All of these labels and more have been applied. In the run up to the second Gulf War, the author and columnist Thomas Friedman framed the paradox of Saddam in a different and more subtle way, asking whether Iraq was the way it was because of Saddam? Or was Saddam the way he was because of Iraq? In reality there are no monsters, only men. And it was as a man Saddam went to the gallows, not as a cipher. Those who called him a “madman”—as so many did—were lazy. He was too complex and contradictory a figure for that, as those who tried to profile him discovered. But if there are identifiable hallmarks of narcissistic personality disorder, then Saddam had them times over.

1
. Quotations are from Elaine Marshall, “Crane’s ‘the Monster’ Seen in Light of Robert Lewis’s Lynching,”
Nineteenth Century Literature
51, no. 2 (1996). Marshall argues convincingly that Crane took some imaginative inspiration for his Henry Johnson character from his brother William’s firsthand account of Robert Lewis.

2
. Gary Will, “The Dramaturgy of Death,”
New York Review of Books
48, no. 10 (2001).

3
. Quotations are taken from Elaine Marshall’s article “Crane’s ‘the Monster’ Seen in Light of Robert Lewis’s Lynching,”
Nineteenth Century Literature
51, no. 2 (1996).

4
. Bureau of Justice, Correctional Populations in the United States, 1996 report, and Bureau of Census, quoted on the Human Rights Watch Web site,
www.hrw.org
. In the 1990s the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that one in every three black men in their twenties was either in prison, in jail, or on parole or probation. See Sasha Abramsky,
American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment
(Beacon Press, 2007), introduction.

5
. Debra Higgs Strickland, “Monsters and Christian Enemies,”
History Today
, February 2000.

6
. James Aho,
This Thing of Darkness
(University of Washington Press, 1994),
chapter 6
, “Who Shall Be the Enemy.”

7
. Mike Prysner, video testimony, Iraq Veterans against the War Web site,
http://ivaw.org/
.

8
.
Faces of the Enemy
, a film by Bill Jersey and Jeffrey Friedman, a Quest Production, 1987, based on the book by Sam Keen.

9
. Edward Said,
Orientalism
(Random House, 1978).

10
. Noam Chomsky,
Reflections on Language
(Pantheon, 1975).

11
. John Locke,
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Dover Publications, 1959), vol. 1, chapter 33.

12
. Quoted in Daniel Boorstin,
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson
(Henry Holt, 1948).

13
. Edward Drinker Cope, “The Developmental Significance of Human Physiognomy,”
American Naturalist
17 (1883).

14
. Contrary to Chomsky and Said, the philosopher John Searle recognized the potential racism contained within Cartesian rationalism. He points out, “Once you believe that there are innate human mental structures it is only a short step to argue that the innate mental structures differ from one race to another.” This “short step” was in fact taken by Nazi racial theorists, and I suspect this step was facilitated by the internalist metaphors (e.g., noumenon, will) that pervade the intellectual tradition from Kant through Nietzsche. John Searle, “The Rules of the Language Game,”
Times Literary Supplement
, September 10, 1976.

15
. George Mosse,
The Crisis of German Ideology
(Schocken Books, 1981).

16
. Adolf Hitler,
Mein Kampf
, translated by Ralph Manheim (Houghton Mifflin, 1971).

17
. I’m aware that adaptationist evolutionary explanations of instincts may share some of the same questionable assumptions of the more conscious explanations. One such assumption may be that a trait or behavior exists because it is useful. There is a teleological structure that operates in most adaptationist explanations of trait survival, but I don’t think it’s circular, nor do I think it falls prey to the charge of Panglossian optimism.

18
. Frans de Waal,
Our Inner Ape
(Riverhead Books, 2005),
chapter 4
.

19
. See Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,”
Foreign Affairs
(Summer 1993), and his more developed argument in
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order
(Simon and Schuster, 1998). Things have changed so radically in the decade or so after Huntington forwarded his thesis that much of his specific writing about China and the Middle East is rendered out of date. But the general idea of a clash of civilizations has perhaps grown and flourished in the nonacademic popular culture.

20
. One of the most famous Muslim creators of the American caricature was the Egyptian scholar and Muslim Brotherhood apologist Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966). Qutb’s writings, including “The America I Have Seen,” have become especially inspirational for terrorist groups like Al-Qaida. Qutb’s anxiety about American debauchery, especially the sexually aggressive American woman, is almost humorous now, because he drew his conclusions from attending a chaste-sounding 1949 Colorado State College dance. “The dance is inflamed by the notes of the gramophone,” Qutb laments, “the dancehall becomes a whirl of heels and thighs, arms enfold hips, lips and breasts meet, and the air is full of lust.” His anxiety about licentious sexuality was only a piece of a larger-scale cultural disgust, an abhorrence that has intensified in the Islamism of recent years. See Sayyid Qutb, “The America I Have Seen,” in
America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature
, edited by Kamal Abdel-Malek (Palgrave, 2000).

21
. See Brian Whitaker, “Saudi Textbooks ‘Demonize West,’ ”
The Guardian
, July 14, 2004.

22
. See Ruth Goldberg, “ ‘In the Church of the Poison Mind’: Adapting the Metaphor of Psychopathology to Look Back at the Mad, Monstrous 80s,” in
Monstrous Adaptations: Generic and Thematic Mutations in the Horror Film
, edited by Richard J. Hand and Jay McRoy (Manchester University Press, 2007).

23
. Of course, we in the United States also have strongly hierarchic fundamentalist Christian traditions. We, too, have traditions that are accommodating modern ism with varying degrees of success. And our tribal and hierarchic sects of the major monotheisms make uneasy company in the egalitarian American democracy. The ostensibly secular playing field of American public life (won by the Disestablishment Clause) thinly veils our private spiritual lives. These private inner lives, whether they are Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, pulse with autocratic deities and submissive devotees, but they are necessarily stunted in the public context of egalitarian tolerance.

24
. Dana Steven, “A Movie Only a Spartan Could Love,”
Slate.com
, March 8, 2007.

25
. Touraj Daryaee, “Go Tell the Spartans,”
Iranian.com
, March 14, 2007.

26
. The work of Frank M. Snowden Jr., for example
Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks
(Harvard University Press, 1983), offers compelling evidence that ancient Mediterranean cultures were not prejudiced about skin color. Instead, the ancients organized their xenophobia around cultural prejudices against language, art, and religion.

27
. Perhaps it’s appropriate to acknowledge an even earlier defining moment of this structuralism, namely, Marx’s theory that the structures of capitalist political economy “alienate” the worker and transform him into a kind of zombie. See Marx’s Paris manuscripts in
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto
(Prometheus Books, 1988).

28
. Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
(Penguin Classics, 2006), epilogue.

29
. See Milgram’s
Obedience to Authority
.

30
. Philip Zimbardo,
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
(Random House, 2007).

31
. Unfortunately for Zimbardo’s thesis, there is some evidence that some of the U.S. soldiers were in fact bad apples. Specialist Charles Graner, who was sentenced to ten years in prison, has a checkered past, with allegations of domestic abuse and even inmate abuse, when he worked (before Abu Ghraib) as a corrections officer in Greene County, Pennsylvania.

32
. Philip Zimbardo, “Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: A Lesson in the Power of Situation,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, March 30, 2007.

33
. Gardner, introduction to Leopold,
Life Plus 99 Years
.

34
. Quoted in James Dobson,
Fatal Addiction: Pornography and Sexual Violence
, video documentary of the Bundy interview, available from Dobson’s conservative nonprofit Focus on the Family.

35
. Mark Ames trolls the Web for disgruntled former NIU students complaining about the “shittiest,” “ugliest,” even the “windiest” campus they’ve, like, ever seen. From this dubious method of data collection he concludes that DeKalb and NIU represent “a very familiar, flat sort of American Hell,” a Middle American place so dreadful that anybody who lives there should be on psychiatric medication: “Indeed, someone who wouldn’t turn to antidepressants would, in my opinion, be the sick one.” He suggests that the real villain in the massacre was not Kazmierczak, but the oppressively dull and mediocre NIU campus and community. Sadly, this kind of extreme structural theory of monsters can be found everywhere in our contemporary discourse. Ames’s argument strikes me as so implausible that I’ll offer only the following brief response.
First, disgruntled students can be found decrying the evils of their school in every city and rural town in America. Nothing interesting about mass murderers can be concluded, as far as I can tell, from students grousing about their campus and faculty. The leap in logic here is deplorable. Second, after living amid real poverty in the developing world (as I did in Cambodia), one finds such pretended despair (common among such railers against the system) truly pusillanimous. Ames describes Kazmierczak’s home town of Elk Grove, Illinois, which is not far from the odious DeKalb, as a terrifying place of white people, businesses, highways, “and, yes, suburban tract homes.” My goodness, one wonders why everybody from such dreadful places isn’t killing their neighbors with automatic weaponry. Finally, I myself attended NIU for four years of undergraduate study and two years of graduate work, and, though it was clearly no Paris, I rarely if ever felt the desire to buy some guns and shoot my classmates. As far as I can tell, none of the other hundreds of thousands of NIU graduates who endured the same “bleak” and of course windy campus ever wrestled much with murderous impulses.

36
. Eldridge Cleaver, “On Becoming,” in
Soul on Ice
(McGraw Hill, 1968).

37
. One simple counterargument will sufficiently unmask the hypocrisy and insincerity of Cleaver’s explanation for his raping women. He claimed that his goal in raping white women was a form of vengeance because of the historical ill treatment of black women. If this is true, then one wonders why he started out his rape agenda by “practicing on black girls in the ghetto.” He admits in
Soul on Ice
that raping black girls would be good “training” to get ready for “The Ogre.” Cleaver’s incoherent and hypocritical logic makes it clear that some redistributions of criminal culpability, from individual to society, are nothing more than convenient subterfuges.

38
. Quoted in Rose, “Crime.”

39
. Quotes and information from Xavier McElrath-Bey are taken from his presentation in my spring 2008 course “Doing Time in America: The Prison System” at Columbia College, and from his autobiographical sketch in Gordon Mclean’s
Too Young to Die
(Tyndale House, 1998). In addition to Xavier, I am also indebted to my coteachers, Professors Garnett Kilberg-Cohen and Sara Livingston.

40
. This impersonal aspect of the criminal justice system, among other things, has led Xavier to work with BARJ, the nationwide movement for Balanced and Restorative Justice, which attempts to introduce community justice mechanisms that hold of fenders, instead of the abstract “state,” directly accountable to their victims. One of the goals of this movement is to humanize criminal justice by contextualizing it in the real lives of those directly effected. BARJ sees the current paradigm as alienating and unhelpful for both victims and offenders.

41
. When he was sentenced as an adult and sent to prison for murder, he continued the gang-banger lifestyle inside the even more primitive “jungle atmosphere” of the penitentiary. “At first,” Xavier explained, “I blamed the system. I read Marx and I became a communist in prison. I read Nietzsche too, and I came to see myself and my people as ‘victims.’ ” Society was to blame. Gang life was an alternative society, one where he and other disenfranchised men could hold power. Later, after long stretches of what he called “existential isolation” and reflection, Xavier took a more balanced approach and accepted personal responsibility for his actions.