P A Y B A C K | PAGE 2 V E N G E A N C E_is a tricky business, though. Several years ago Butterworth's statement would have driven me into a righteous rage. Now the best I can manage is a muted irritation. Butterworth, after all, was merely giving voice to feelings shared by many -- including me. It's not that I approve of using prisoners, even vicious murderers, as state-sanctioned scapegoats. It's just that I do understand, perhaps better than I'd care to admit, the seductive allure that vengeance can hold to an angry mind. The satisfaction Butterworth takes in the "justice" he helps to administer isn't that different from the satisfaction I've sometimes taken in the misfortunes of my foes. True, I haven't strapped any of them into electric chairs, antique or modern. But I have imagined for many of them fates far worse than death.
I admit it: I've thought about revenge. Indeed, I've not only thought about it, I've positively luxuriated in it, imagining elaborate fantasies of retribution against those who've done me wrong, from tyrannical bosses to ideological enemies to a certain teacher I had back in high school. I've pictured them dead. I've pictured the ways they might die. I've taken pleasure in their troubles, and have thought at length, and in detail, about ways to increase them. Broken-off toothpicks in their locks. Sugar in the gas tank. Anonymous late-night phone calls. Signing them up to the mailing lists of NAMBLA and the Ku Klux Klan.
I am aware, of course, how vicious and petty this all sounds. And I hasten to add that I have never put any of my little plans into action, and wouldn't dare to -- indeed, looking back on my fantasies today, I find them vaguely repellent. (Well, most of them; some of the milder scenarios still seem quite reasonable.) But I recognize that for all their sordidness, my fantasies were, in their own way, quite healthy. In my lowest moments, when the only alternatives to anger were despair and self-loathing, it undoubtedly did me good to latch onto fantasies of vengeance -- though I'm happy I no longer need this particular crutch. Well, not as often as I used to, anyway.
Americans are notoriously ambivalent about the notion of revenge. We look down upon the merely malicious. But when there is even the slightest opportunity to dress up our fantasies of revenge as something more ennobling than mere payback, we jump at the chance. We cheer for cinematic vigilantes, from Clint Eastwood to Jackie Chan, with the enthusiasm of fans at a cockfight. We wish we, too, could go "above the law" (the phrase served as the title of a Steven Seagal movie several years back) to wreak havoc on wrongdoers and the just plain irritating. Vengeance cuts across neat ideological boundaries: Many on the right hailed Bernhard Goetz as a vigilante hero, while many of their counterparts on the left cheered on the L.A. rioters as Robin Hoods of the 'hood.
For the most part, this sort of cheering on the sidelines is harmless. Very few of Goetz's admirers took to carrying loaded guns in their briefcases on the subway. Very few leftists would know how to find their way to a riot. And Jackie Chan movies injure no one besides Jackie Chan himself.
In our criminal justice system, though, the seductive power of the notion of revenge has done some real damage. In the past, as former trial judge Lois Forer writes in "A Rage to Punish: The Unintended Consequences of Mandatory Sentencing," judges focused on the goals of "rehabilitation, education, and crime prevention." Today, by contrast, "retribution or vengeance is now recognized as a legitimate motivation in sentencing." Indeed, the most common reason Americans give for supporting the death penalty, over and above the traditional rationale of "deterrence," is "vengeance." It is not enough, proponents of this view argue, that the criminal pay for his crimes; he must also undergo sufficient punishment to meet the victims' thirst for vengeance.
In purely practical terms, this has been a disaster. Criminologists agree that the real-world results of such desires -- mandatory sentencing laws, "three strikes you're out" legislation and so on -- haven't done much to reduce crime, but have contributed mightily to prison overcrowding and judicial gridlock.
These criminological consequences illustrate a more general law: In the real world, schemes of revenge end up being far messier than they are in the realms of imagination or ideology. Putative avengers get themselves into more trouble than those they wish to punish. Innocent victims suffer collateral damage. The nastiness escalates into an endless feud. Few avengers, successful or otherwise, are able to walk away cleanly in the end. It's no wonder so many revenge dramas -- like the "revenge tragedies" popular in Elizabethan times -- end not with triumph but with bloodletting and misery all around. Revenge, as Francis Bacon once observed, "is a kind of wild justice," promising injured innocents a way to deliver payback to those who've done them wrong. But its very wildness makes it impossible to control.
Perhaps the best way to understand both the tenacity, and the ultimate futility, of the revenge fantasy is to take a long look at the numerous how-to books on the subject -- deliberately vicious little things, put out by obscure publishers, with titles like "Getting Even" and "Fighting Back on the Job." These instructive books make revenge schemes seem at least as easy as building a bookshelf in the basement. And, like most how-to's, they almost always have a happy ending, at least on paper.
Anyone wishing to assemble their own library on the subject would be well advised to start by procuring for themselves the mail order catalog of Loompanics Unlimited ("Publishers [and] Sellers of Unusual Books"), which features a wide assortment of books on the art of revenge -- among them a guide to postal harassment titled "Your Revenge is in the Mail," which promises "more than 5 dozen different examples of letters you can use to get even with someone you hate." More advanced dirty tricksters can turn to the catalog's more specialized sections on "Bombs and Explosives" and "Murder, Death and Torture." ("Being forced to kill somebody in justifiable self-defense is a sad reality of today's violent society," explains the blurb for A.R. Bowman's "Be Your Own Undertaker: How to Dispose of a Dead Body." "You may consider this book disgusting, sacrilegious, and abominable (and it is), but you may wish you had read it should you ever be faced with a most unpleasant situation someday.")
Of course, most revenge-related information is disseminated outside the normal channels, through word-of-mouth and through a kind of samizdat literature now distributed widely on the Internet through Web sites like "The Avenger's Front Page," which offers up thousands of kilobytes of information on everything from "The Fixer's Collection of Pranks, Revenge and General Mayhem" to "How to Turn the Work Life of a Local 7-Eleven Employee Into a Living Hell." And then, of course, there's the newsgroup alt.revenge, devoted to the endless discussion of the hows and whys of this particular dark art.
This moderately-trafficked group offers up innumerable "practical" suggestions for what one putative avenger called "legal, but very very nasty" tricks to play on select enemies. On one visit several months back, I discovered a number of ingenious, if at times somewhat bizarre, schemes to foil lunch thieves at work. Some contributors kept their advice fairly straightforward -- adding hot red pepper or a spoonful of sand to a kind of decoy sandwich set up for the "mark" to steal. Another suggested putting "small dead rodents (or cockroaches) in a salad or sandwich."
Still others went further. One reader suggested that the properly "sick" response to the lunch situation would be "defecating between two slices of bread, sticking it into a sandwich bag and hoping for the guy to have that for lunch." Never mind that merely preparing this trick would itself be something of an ordeal. And never mind that no one in their right mind would simply take a giant bite of a mystery sandwich that, quite literally, looked and smelled like shit.
To read this newsgroup is to remind yourself, if you need such reminding, that there are few creatures as extravagantly malicious as human beings with a grudge. And yet it would appear that most of the contributors to this group are considerably less destructive than they sound. One notices almost immediately that very few of those giving advice have actually tried any of the various schemes they suggest. And the newsgroup regulars are forever trying to talk others out of various crackpot campaigns of revenge -- particularly ones that seem excessive and petty, or that seem to target the wrong people.
After one person described what they admitted was a "pretty disgusting (but also fascinating)" form of revenge a "friend" was said to have perpetrated on a convenience store he disliked -- the friend, it seems, had "defecated into a paper bag ... (then) put the crap-filled bag in the microwave, set it for a good ten minutes, and turned it on high" -- he found himself upbraided by some more conscientious alt.revenge regulars, who brought him back to reality at once. "I imagine that the only person who got burned was the poor schmuck who works there for minimum wage, and had to clean the shit up," one commented. "Not really a good target for revenge, hmmm?"
Still, for every skeptic such as this there's at least one quasi-stalker, someone who's allowed their thoughts of revenge to become a desperately unhealthy obsession. Many of the "dirty tricks" you can find in the revenge manuals and floating about on the Internet quite literally cause more trouble than they're worth. "If you can get to the mark's food supply, switch and reglue some of the labels, e.g. Campbell's Beef Chunks and Alpo could switch labels," George Hayduke suggests in "Get Even 2: More Dirty Tricks from the Master of Revenge." "If you can't get it to the mark's home, try to slip the switched dog food labeled as Beef Chunks into his or her shopping cart after he or she has checked out of the local market." Even if the "mark" in this case deserves all that you can dish out, it's hard to imagine what possible good could come out of such a dogged, relentless, and (one suspects) joyless campaign of revenge.
And there's the rub. Most of those who embark upon schemes of revenge hope that the act will bring them some sort of closure -- once they've given as good as they've got, there isn't much point in fretting or obsessing anymore, is there? In real life, it's never so simple. Acts of "retribution" have a way of inciting further violence. And in some cases -- like that of our label-switcher above -- the very act of planning for revenge helps to keep the wounds raw. Those who obsess for months over an elaborate plan for revenge aren't likely to be satisfied no matter how it comes out in the end; even if their plan succeeds beyond their wildest dreams, what then? Success doesn't necessarily leave the avenger feeling satiated; it can leave him feeling empty.
In her provocative book "Sadomasochism in Everyday Life," sociologist and criminologist Lynn Chancer suggests that sadists and masochists are bound together (in some ways quite literally) in a circle of mutual need. The masochist needs the sadist, of course, but so too does the sadist need a victim. Sadists tie up their victims not simply to assert their dominance over them, but to ensure this dominance. "It is all too apparent that the dependence of the sadist on the masochist is so enormous, so intrinsic, that nothing can be left to chance," Chancer writes. "The very act of binding attests to this dependency."
Similarly, the putative avenger can grow addicted to the art of revenge -- drawing a certain bitter satisfaction from the abuse he must take before the revenge is exacted, as well as a cruel pleasure from the planning for and the exacting of revenge itself. The avenger gets the chance to play both victim and victimizer, to enjoy a strange but powerfully charged relationship with the "mark" that he isn't likely to want to give up once, say, the sugar goes into the tank.
That's one reason why the victims' rights movement is ultimately self-defeating. At its root, the movement is an attempt to restore the same sort of psychological equilibrium an ad-hoc avenger seeks by spiking a lunch-thief's stolen sandwich with cockroaches or sand. One way the victims' rights movement does this is by demanding harsher and harsher sentences; another is asserting a "right" to the formal participation of victims in criminal trials -- even if such participation potentially conflicts with the rights of the accused to a fair trial in front of an impartial jury. "I got mad when the trial was moved to Denver," a relative of one of the Oklahoma City bombing victims told Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker recently. "I just want to see justice done. It's part of a closure for me."
As many critics have argued, the attempt to transform the legal system into a quasi-therapeutic dispensary of "closure" has undercut the ideal of justice. "From the victim's perspective, the trial is, in part, a therapeutic process," legal critic Wendy Kaminer has written. "They seek 'healing' in the resolution of the case, which seems appropriate to the citizenry of a therapeutic culture ... But if feelings are facts in a therapist's office, where subjective realities reign, feelings are prejudices in a court of law ... Justice is not a form of therapy, meaning that what is helpful to a particular victim, or defendant, is not necessarily what is just and what is just may not be therapeutic."
To align the judicial system so baldly with the desire for vengeance is dangerous, and in some ways almost literally barbaric. The legal system should strive to protect the rights of all, including those of criminals; it shouldn't put itself at the service of the bloodiest impulses of those who have been wronged. A lynch mob offers crime victims a kind of brute satisfaction the law can never attempt to duplicate. But it also transforms victims into murderers, and reduces the aspiration for justice to the lust for blood. When Bacon suggested that revenge offered "wild justice," he was hardly endorsing the notion; his point was that law was, and should be, designed to stand in place of the vendetta. "The more man's nature runs" to revenge, Bacon wrote, "the more ought law to weed it out."
But the thirst for therapeutic vengeance is destructive to the avenger as well. It's hard to see how any kind of "justice" -- whether legal or "wild," coldly objective or therapeutically subjective -- can really and truly deliver any kind of closure worthy of the name. In many ways the new legal theorists of victims' rights are not only treading on the rights of the accused, they are also preaching a false hope to the victims themselves -- and exacerbating the turmoil they promise to help contain. No amount of punishment can, of course, undo a crime. And those victims whose sense of closure depends on the confinement (or even, ultimately, the execution) of a reputed criminal have put themselves at the mercy of a legal system over which they have little control. They must, first, believe that the police have found the right man; that this man deserves the harshest punishment the law can mete out; that he deserves to be denied every opportunity for parole, to lose every appeal.
But by making the criminal a hostage to their sense of closure, they have made themselves hostage as well. Far better to let justice take the course it will, and to seek closure elsewhere. How easy it is to begin by seeking revenge, only to find out that this hopeless quest has taken a kind of revenge upon you.
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