On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  “I can safely say,” he states, “that I’ve seen the worst. My colleagues and I in the criminal justice system are some of the select few that really know what a shotgun can do to the human body, or what a butcher knife can do. But no, I’ve never doubted the humanity of the criminals. In fact, I usually see the opposite. More often, someone has already been labeled a monster by the state or the media, and then I discover lots of humanity.” Usually complex factors lead to violent crimes, and though that complexity doesn’t make the crimes less tragic, our understanding of these factors helps us to see the human being behind the vitriol. “Here’s a trivial example, off the top of my head,” Judge Brodsky offers.

  When I was a defense attorney, we had this teenage kid, who the prosecution was making out to be “monster.” He was part of a group of skinheads who had been arrested after a fight at the beach. He was not at the fight and was not arrested for that. His mates beat two girls. The girls were lesbians and these skinheads were charged with a hate crime. The boy was mentally disabled, and the skinheads were the only kids who would accept him as a friend, so that’s really why he was a skinhead. Anyway, he goes to his friends’ hearing and after the hearing, as the skinheads are being led away in custody, he gives his buddies the Nazi salute. The prosecutor happens to see this and gets really offended, halting the next case and bringing what he saw to the attention of the judge. He has the kid arrested and they hold him in contempt of court, and they basically demonize him in the heat of the moment. Much later the charges were dropped, because he was not in violation of the law. But it’s a simple example of how complexities are passed over for caricatures of good and evil.

  To my mind, there’s a difference between a person who does monstrous deeds and a monstrous person. For example, we represented a guy—a very sweet and normally gentle guy—who’s a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. One day he killed a kid, chopped him up, and buried him in his backyard. He did a very monstrous thing. But I know this guy, and he is definitely not in control of his actions. He’s not a monster. Now, he was a clear-cut case of insanity—even the state had to recognize it, but unfortunately most such cases involve people who are further along on the continuum and that makes it harder to determine the issues of free agency.

  Brodsky acknowledged that many of the murder cases he’s seen involved relatively isolated explosions of rage. People perceived themselves to be in some desperate, trapped, or affronted state, and then violently lashed out with ruinous result. That doesn’t make them any less culpable for their actions, but it diminishes the tendency to label them monsters. These cases of explosive but relatively uncharacteristic fits of rage (often triggered by drug use) and the capricious actions of the certifiably insane are monstrous deeds. But what about the just plain evil? “Well, ‘evil’ is a lot like the word ‘monstrous,’” Brodsky replied,

  in the sense that I’d use it to describe specific actions, but not people.55 And I’d probably not even use that term because of its many religious connotations. When I was a defense attorney, I had my clients referred to as “evil” hundreds of times—it’s very common in a trial. Sometimes in the enhancement of a statute, the prosecution and even the legislator will use the language of “brutal and heinous” or “shockingly evil” to describe the acts, and I guess there really is something being communicated by this language. They’re trying to indicate that what they want to punish is the malignant heart.

  Malignant heart is a term that appears in many state laws defining the charge of murder. The term is often used to help demarcate murder proper from manslaughter. The State of California, for example, retains the language of “malice aforethought,” but under section 188 of the California Penal Code malice is divided into two forms: express and implied. Express malice exists “when there is manifested a deliberate intention unlawfully to take away the life of a fellow creature.” Malice may be implied by a judge or jury “when no considerable provocation appears, or when the circumstances attending the killing show an abandoned and malignant heart.”

  Perhaps a criminal monster is one who chronically acts from a malignant heart. In that case the difference between a monstrous action and a monstrous person can be detected by the mark of recidivism or recurrence. The law recognizes, albeit with a very high burden, the insanity defense, and even recognizes voluntary intoxication as grounds for denying a malignant heart. A malignant heart suggests that a person’s crimes were not so much situational as character-based.56 One criminal act by itself, even a brutal one, is very difficult to read. If that act is a single page in a whole book of weird and crazy behaviors (attested to by credible witnesses), it would indicate something quite different from a case of built-up rage (e.g., the Columbine massacre), and that kind of brutal act would look different still against the backdrop of a repeatedly mean and abusive pattern of behaviors.

  IN THIS CHAPTER I HAVE articulated the major contours of a twentieth-century view of criminal monsters. Instead of fading away in the light of clinical, pharmaceutical, and psychological theory improvements, the concept of monster has kept going strong, doing significant work for us. Although the term monster is overused and often obfuscates important complexities, the more professional semantic contenders, such as psychopath, are not exactly great leaps forward. Even the law is still using wonderful terms like malignant heart. We are still very much at the descriptive phase of the science of the criminal mind, not yet at the underlying causation phase. Some people like to point to the astounding complexity of the brain and the nature-nurture dialectic to undermine the quest for scientific certainty. But perhaps it’s not the complexity of a criminal mind that makes many of us despair of scientific comprehension. Perhaps instead, when we think about the horrific crimes of our day, we lose the desire to comprehend.

  PART

  5

  Monsters Today and Tomorrow

  14

  Torturers, Terrorists, and Zombies

  The Products of Monstrous Societies

  Situational forces can work to transform even some of the best of us into Mr. Hyde monsters, without the benefit of Dr. Jekyll’s chemical elixir.

  PHILIP ZIMBARDO

  XENOPHOBIA AND RACE

  AFTER THE MODERN-DAY MEDEA, Susan Smith, drowned her children in 1994, she went to authorities claiming that an African American man had stolen her car and driven off with her children. America was all too willing to accept this bogus story, and tearful entreaties and national manhunts ensued for almost two weeks, until Smith confessed to driving her kids into a lake. The carjacking, kidnapping black monster tapped into a barely submerged fear in mainstream America.

  In 1899 Stephen Crane wrote a short story titled “The Monster.” In this sad novella, a small-town doctor named Trescott almost loses his son in a house fire, but a black man named Henry Johnson bravely saves the boy’s life. In the rescue, Johnson is horribly burned and deformed by the fire, but he lives and eventually rejoins society. Society, however, is not ready to receive him. His casual appearance at a neighbor’s home causes genuine terror and flight; his attempt to sit quietly in the town square brings the jeers and taunts of children. At one point he is thrown in jail and a mob forms simply because the town is so frightened of his appearance. Dr. Trescott, who gratefully took Johnson under his care and protection, begins to feel the sting of social rejection himself. The novella ends without resolution but with the suggestion that Trescott and his family will share Johnson’s pariah status interminably. Henry Johnson may be interpreted as a symbol of the monstrous black male, a creature composed largely of projected fears and anxieties. Dr. Trescott represents the attempt to see beyond such demonization to the humanity of the black man, and he is punished for his goodwill by the mob, which clings to its convenient enemy.

  The story is even more poignant when we consider it in light of the 1892 lynching of Robert Lewis in Port Jervis, New York. Stephen Crane’s brother William was a judge living in Port Jervis; on June 2 he heard a mob forming in the street outside
his house. Robert Lewis had been accused of raping a white woman named Lena McMahon, and his police wagon was attacked by a vengeful mob on its way to the jail. Lewis was dragged to East Main Street and a rope was thrown around William Crane’s front tree. When Crane rushed out of his house “the body was going up” and he saw that “the negro’s hands were tied and his elbows were crooked.” Crane shouted, “Let go of that rope!” and the crowd quieted slightly, letting Lewis’s body descend somewhat. “Again I shouted,” Crane explained at the inquest, “and gave a jerk on the rope and it came loose in my hands and the negro fell into the gutter on his back. I pulled the rope down from the tree and loosened the noose from his neck and took it off.”1

  Crane then enlisted the help of a nearby policeman to “protect that man.” But the mob began to grow bold again and move in on Lewis and his few protectors. “I could see that he was alive,” Crane reported later. “He was gasping for breath and his whole body was quivering. His face was covered with blood and I did not recognize him.” A doctor emerged, and after a lightning-quick examination suggested to Crane that Lewis would survive if they could get him to a hospital. At this point a member of the mob, Robert Carr, stepped forward and shouted, “He ought to be hung.” Crane recounted that “the crowd then took up the cry, ‘hang him!’ ‘don’t let the doctor touch him!’ hang all the niggers!’ ” At this point a fight broke out, a struggle to get possession of the rope. Crane resisted, but the crowd was too strong and the noose ended up around Lewis’s neck again. Crane said, “The next I saw of it, it was over the branch of the tree again. I sprang to the tree and caught hold of the rope and tried to pull it down but there were too many at the other end.” Crane was overpowered and Robert Lewis was lynched a second time.

  As in many other lynchings, this vigilante justice appears to be as symbolic as it is literal. In his essay “The Dramaturgy of Death” Gary Wills argues that most public executions of criminals throughout history have been motivated by obscure emotional impulses rather than rational theories such as deterrence. The community sees the killing as a kind of cleansing. Lynch mobs, for example, project impure traits onto a surrogate monster or further vilify real criminality so that it stands for all things impure and then seek to destroy and cleanse the impurity. Wills explains that “forms of extrusion require society’s purification by destruction of a polluted person. Unless society or its agents effect this purification, the pollution continues to taint them.”2 As the scholar Elaine Marshal describes the lynching of Robert Lewis, a single black man becomes a stand-in for the impurities that social prejudice accuses the entire black male population of embodying: “For the crowd Lewis is more than ‘a negro’ in this scene; he becomes ‘the negro,’ the faceless representative of the whole ‘race.’ That is the clear import of the transition in the mob’s cry from ‘hang him’ to ‘hang all the niggers.’”3

  Demonization and race. The Ku Klux Klan lynches the black character “Gus” (played by actor Walter Long in blackface) in D. W. Griffith’s inflammatory film The Birth of a Nation (1915). Image courtesy of Photofest.

  The myth of the black monster has had a prosperous career in the twentieth century, first in the Jim Crow era of public lynchings, then in the reactions to the civil rights struggle, and now in the well-known statistics that one in every twenty black men over the age of eighteen is incarcerated in the U.S. prison system.4 But the myth itself is very old. Recall that the medievals tended to blend the extreme monstrous races (e.g., Blemmyae, Sciopodes) with the foreign ethnicities of Africa, India, and the Middle East. Debra Higgs Strickland points out that “Ethiopians were often idealized as a pious and ‘blameless’ people in the writings of the ancient Greeks, such as Homer. But in European Christian eyes, Ethiopians were monstrous principally owing to their black skin, which was considered a demonic feature.”5

  One of the main reasons black-skinned people were more maligned in medieval Europe than in Mediterranean antiquity is that there were fewer of them around to serve as counterevidence to the unchecked gossip and fear-mongering; very few Africans lived in Europe before the twelfth century. But as I traced earlier in my discussion of the Christian Table of Nations, there were theological prejudices at work as well. “Black was a color,” explains Strickland, “associated with evil, sin, and the devil, especially in patristic writings. For example…St. Jerome stated that Ethiopians will lose their blackness once they are admitted to the New Jerusalem, meaning that their external appearance will change once they become morally perfect.”

  By this point we have already seen many of the negative associations that a hostile imagination can produce for any perceived other (e.g., unclean, barbaric, sexually illicit, spiritually deformed). Demonizing or monstering other groups has even become part of the cycle of American politics. The social construction of an enemy is built into the generational dynamic of a melting-pot democracy. According to the sociologist James A. Aho, any sample of American history will reveal a redundant dynamic between three generations: those currently in power, a second generation that’s waiting to take the reins, and the children of the first group. The first group rules for approximately fifteen years, “focusing on the foreign or domestic enemy that provides it, by negation, with that generation’s identity as ‘good Americans’: niggers, fags, papists, spics, commies, nips, Nazis, huns, Satanists, or dope-crazed sex fiends, all drawn from the storehouse of American demonology.”6 But because these “enemies” are largely collective projections and not real causes of social ills, the policies aimed at fixing them fail. The next generation, disgusted by the empty posturing of the first, eventually comes into power and replaces the elders with “visionaries” who can penetrate down to the true causes of social problems, and those true causes tend to be identified as the policies of the predecessors. But the third generation, the children of the first, get their turn at power thirty years after their parents. That third generation, Aho claims, now begins “reciting publicly the myths of evildoers first heard at the feet of their now-deposed fathers.” And the cycle starts over.

  Obviously race has played a large role in this sociopolitical dynamic. Seeing other races and ethnicities as monstrous has not just helped cynical domestic politics, but has also aided much of the international warfare of the twentieth century. The Jews were reconstructed as monstrous vermin by the Nazis, the Vietnamese were reconstructed as soulless gooks, and according to one U.S. soldier, Mike Prysner, the Iraqis and Afghanis are regularly referred to by military personnel as “camel jockeys,” “towel heads,” and “sand niggers.”7 A Vietnam veteran in the documentary Faces of the Enemy says, “You’re trained as a soldier to see your enemy as an abstraction. You have to. The soldier’s most powerful weapon is not his weapon, but his idea of the enemy.”8

  Demonization and race. David Lean, the director, and Alec Guinness, the actor, received many charges of anti-Semitism after their grotesque portrayal of Fagin in the 1948 version of Oliver Twist (Independent Producers). Unflattering shots of Fagin were edited out of the film before it was released in the United States. Image courtesy of Photofest.

  In the medieval era the monstrous races were conceptualized as cursed by God, but such theological thinking became less available to Westerners in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After Darwin, race became a predominantly scientific issue, but this only meant that some prejudices took on a new nomenclature. Anthropology in the early twentieth century was still assuming the old hierarchy of races, but now the bogus declension was supposed to be a product of evolution rather than theological fiat. Underneath the new anthropology was a deeper debate about the nature of the self.

  THEORETICAL XENOPHOBIA

  The influential philosopher Descartes argued that the human self or soul was completely independent of the body. Like a diamond in a dung heap, the real me maintains its purity inside my transient material body. To the question Who am I really? the rationalist Cartesians answered, The soul or the mind, which has no gender, no class, no race. But the
empiricists of the following generation, including John Locke and then David Hume, argued against this idea, claiming that there is no such inner diamond mind; in fact, there is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses (nihil in intellectu nisiprius in sensu). Unlike the Cartesian internalist view, externalist empiricism held that if the body can be affected by its particular environment, then so can the mind.

  Some think that the Cartesian internalist view, with its genderless and raceless pure self, represents a kind of theoretical bar to racism. This has a certain plausibility. Edward Said, for example, claims that the racist stereotypes of Orientalism rest on the presupposition of empiricist theories of self. He suggests that racism is fueled by the empiricist belief “that mind and body were interdependent realities, both determined originally by a given set of geographical, biological, and quasi-historical conditions.”9 Noam Chomsky points out the racist tendency toward social manipulation buried in empiricist theory. “The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”10