Survival of the Fittest
Page 22
The psychologist. Those active eyes . . .
He'd had to notify Zev about being found out, but Zev had been decent about it. Bigger things on his mind. Since Irit's murder everyone said he was a different man.
Daniel understood the difference: craving only one thing.
What was the chance of delivering?
Listening in on Sturgis and Delaware had produced one good outcome: He'd learned that Sturgis was bright and focused, exactly the type of detective he enjoyed working with. He'd known a few guys like that. One with a brilliant future but he'd died horribly for no good reason. . . .
Sturgis's history— his LAPD file full of complaints, striking out at the superior— had prepared Daniel for an outburst. But no fireworks tonight.
Delaware had remained very quiet, the eyes going constantly.
The quintessential psychologist. Though he had spoken up from time to time.
Asking about Daniel's accent, wanting to know about Daniel's family.
Like an intake at a therapy session. In the Rehab Center, after his first injuries, he'd spent time with psychologists and hated it less than he'd expected. Years later, on the job, he'd consulted them. On the Butcher case, Dr. Ben David had proved of some usefulness.
It had been a while since he'd been analyzed, though.
Those active, blue eyes, pale, appraising, yet not as cold as they might have been.
Sturgis's were green, almost unhealthily bright. What effect would they have on a suspect, so much intensity?
The two of them, so different, and yet they had a history of working together efficiently.
Friends, too, according to reports.
A homosexual and a heterosexual.
Interesting.
Daniel knew only one gay policeman, and not well. A sergeant major working out of Central Region. Nothing effeminate or overt about the man but he'd never married, never dated women, and people who knew him from the Army said he'd been spotted one night going onto the beach in Herzliyya with another man.
Not a brilliant policeman, that one, but competent. No one bothered him, but the other officers shunned him and Daniel was certain he'd never advance.
Sturgis was shunned, too.
For Daniel, the issue was a religious one, and that made it an abstraction.
For Daniel, religion was personal— his relationship to God. He cared nothing about what others did, if their habits didn't infringe upon his liberties or those of his family.
His family . . . in Jerusalem it was morning, but too early to call Laura. Like many artists, she was a nocturnal creature, stifling her internal clock for years to raise babies and coddle her husband. Now that the kids were older, she'd permitted herself to revert: staying up late sketching and painting and reading, sleeping in until eight or nine.
Feeling guilty about it, too; sometimes Daniel still had to reassure her he was fine making his own coffee.
He drew his knees up, closed his eyes, and thought about her soft blond hair and beautiful face, swaddled in topsheet, puffy with sleep, as he stopped to kiss her before leaving for headquarters.
Oh . . . I feel like such a bum, honey. I should be up cooking your breakfast.
I never eat breakfast.
Still . . . or I should give you other things.
Tugging him down for a kiss, then stopping herself.
My breath stinks.
No, it's sweet.
Pressing his lips upon hers, feeling her mouth parting, the wedding of tongue with tongue.
He opened his eyes, looked around the bare room.
In his Talbieh apartment, the walls were alive with color. Laura's paintings and batiks and the creations of her friends.
Her artsy friends, whom he seldom spoke to.
Painting with blood . . .
What would Laura say about that kind of art?
He never told her anything beyond the most general facts.
For twenty years of marriage, that had worked fine.
Twenty years. By today's standards, longevity.
Not mazal. Or the result of some amulet or chant or blessing from a Hakham.
God's grace and hard work.
Submerging your ego to be half of a pair.
Doing the right thing.
He wished he knew what that meant in this case.
28
The following morning as I drove to the U, I realized Helena still hadn't called.
Put Nolan's suicide to rest. I had plenty to do.
Snagging a Biomed computer terminal, I logged into Medline, Psych Abstracts, the periodicals index, every other database I could find, pulling up references on eugenics but finding none with any relationship to homicide.
Collecting handfuls of bound journals, I went looking for The Brain Drain. The book was filed under Intelligence, Measurement, three copies, two checked out. The one left was thick, re-bound in crimson, squeezed between manuals on IQ testing. A few books down the shelf I noticed a slim softcover entitled Twisted Science: The Truth Behind The Brain Drain, and I took that, too.
Finding a quiet corner desk on the tenth floor, I searched every source for a DVLL citation.
Absolutely nothing. But what I was learning kept me turning pages.
Because the idea that some lives were to be nurtured and others eliminated for the good of society hadn't begun with the Race Hygiene Program of the Third Reich.
Nor had it died there.
Selective breeding had appealed to the elite for centuries, but it had earned scientific respectability in the Europe and America of the late nineteenth century after being championed by a very respectable figure: British mathematician Francis Galton.
Unable to produce children himself, Galton had strong beliefs about survival of the ethnically fittest. Qualities such as intellect, zeal, and industriousness, he reasoned, were simple traits, much like height or hair color, and governed by basic rules of inheritance. In order to improve society, the state needed to collect detailed mental, physical, and racial information on every citizen, issue certificates to the superior and pay them for breeding, and encourage inferiors to remain celibate. In 1883, Galton coined the term eugenics, from the Greek meaning “well-born,” to describe this process.
Galton's simplistic theories of intelligence were undermined by a rebirth of the works of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk who bred thousands of plants and found that some traits were dominant, others recessive. Later research showed that most defective genes were carried by outwardly normal parents.
Even vegetables didn't follow Galton's simplistic model.
But Mendel's ability to measure patterns of inheritance spurred on Galton's disciples, and eugenics took hold of the academic mainstream, so that by the twenties and thirties nearly all geneticists assumed mentally retarded people and other “degenerates” should be actively prevented from breeding.
These views made their way into public policy on both sides of the Atlantic, and by 1917, a Harvard geneticist named East was actively promoting the reduction of “defective germ plasm” through segregation and sterilization.
One of East's main influences was someone I'd considered a sage of my chosen field.
I'd been taught that Henry H. Goddard, of the Vineland Training School in New Jersey, had been a pioneer of psychological testing. What I hadn't known was that Goddard claimed “feeblemindedness” was due to a single defective gene and enthusiastically volunteered to administer IQ tests to thousands of immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in order to weed out undesirables.
Goddard's bizarre finding— that over 80 percent of Italians, Hungarians, Russians, and Jews were mentally retarded— was accepted without question by a wide range of intellectuals and legislators, and in 1924 the U.S. Congress approved an immigration act curtailing the entry of Southern and Eastern Europeans. The bill was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, who declared, “America must be kept American. Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.”
According to Terman, intellectual weakness was “very, very common among Spanish-Indians and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among Negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial . . . children of this group should be segregated in special classes . . . They cannot master abstractions, but they can often be made efficient workers . . . from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding.”
But the prime mover of the U.S. eugenics movement was University of Chicago professor Charles Davenport, who believed that prostitutes chose their profession because of a dominant gene for “innate eroticism.”
Davenport's method of preserving the future of white America was castration of males of inferior ethnic groups.
Castration, not vasectomy, he emphasized, because while the latter prevented breeding, it also encouraged sexual immorality.
Davenport's views influenced the law well beyond immigration statutes, embraced as they were by many social-welfare groups, including some pioneers of the family-planning movement. The term final solution was first used by the National Association of Charities and Corrections in the 1920s, and between 1911 and 1937, eugenic sterilization laws were passed in thirty-two American states, and in Germany, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark.
Most enthusiastic among the self-appointed genetic janitors was the State of California, where in 1909, an order to compulsorily sterilize all inmates of state hospitals judged “sexually or morally perverted, mentally ill or feebleminded” got scalpels clicking. Four years later, the law was broadened to include noninstitutionalized people suffering from “marked departure from normal mentality.”
In 1927, forced sterilization reached its highest sanction when a young unwed mother named Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will in Virginia, by virtue of a U.S. Supreme Court decision, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes's decision not only allowed the procedure to be carried out, but also praised it “in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence . . . the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Carrie Buck's baby— the “third generation of imbeciles” in question— grew up to be an honor student. Carrie Buck, herself, was eventually paroled from the Virginia Colony for Feebleminded and Epileptics, and lived out her life quietly as the wife of a small-town sheriff. She was later found out not to be retarded.
The Buck decision sped up the pace of forced sterilization and more than sixty thousand people, mostly residents of state hospitals, were operated on all across the U.S., as late as the 1970s.
In 1933, the Carrie Buck opinion was adopted as law in Germany and within one year, fifty-six thousand German “patients” had been sterilized. By 1945, under the aegis of the Nazis, the number had climbed to two million. For as Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, “the right of personal freedom recedes before the duty to preserve the race. The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind.”
After World War II, the tide began turning. Revulsion at the Nazi atrocities— but more important, the demands of wartime service upon surgeons— slowed down the rate of eugenic sterilization, and though the practice continued for decades, most eugenics laws were eventually reversed in the face of scientific debunking.
But the cause hadn't been abandoned.
Far from it.
And sterilization seemed tame compared to some of the ideas being tossed about now. I found myself swimming in an ethical cesspool.
Calls for assisted suicide sliding quickly into recommendations that those with nothing to live for be put out of their misery.
A report from Holland, where physician-assisted suicide had been liberalized, that as many as one-third of euthanasias—“mercy killings”— had been carried out without patients' consent.
An Australian “bioethicist” proclaiming religion no longer the basis for making moral judgments and the sanctity of human life no longer a valid concept. His alternative: Fellow ethicists should assign numerical “quality of life” measurements to people and parcel out health care based upon scores.
The retarded, the handicapped, the elderly, the infirm, would find themselves low on the list and be treated accordingly. In the case of deformed and retarded babies, a twenty-eight-day waiting period would be offered so parents could choose infanticide for “a life that has begun very badly.”
Anyone who fell short on objective criteria of “personhood: rational thought and self-consciousness,” could be killed without fear of penalty. Humanely.
Gentle strangulation, indeed.
Britain's National Health Insurance had recently put forth a policy offering free abortions to mothers of genetically defective babies— rescinding the usual twenty-four-week limit and allowing termination til shortly before birth.
Also in England, the Green party's annual conference proposed a very deliberate 25 percent reduction in the U.K.'s population in the name of saving the planet, leading critics to evoke memories of the Nazi party's infatuation with ecology, natural purity, and antiurbanism.
The government of China was ahead of all this, having long enforced population control through coerced abortion, sterilization, and starving orphans to death in state-run facilities.
In the U.S., calls for prioritizing health-care services in the age of tight dollars and managed care had led many to question whether the seriously ill and the genetically disadvantaged should be allowed to “dominate” health-care expenditure.
I found a U.S. News and World Report article detailing the struggle of a thirty-four-year-old woman with Down's syndrome to receive a life-saving heart-lung operation. Stanford University Medical Center had rejected her because “We do not feel that patients with Down's syndrome are appropriate candidates for heart-lung transplantation,” as had the University of California at San Diego because it judged her incapable of cooperating with the medical regimen. Her doctor disagreed and the publicity had forced both hospitals to reconsider. But what of others, languishing outside the media spotlight?
It reminded me of a case I'd seen years ago, while working with child cancer patients at Western Pediatrics Hospital. A fourteen-year-old boy diagnosed with acute leukemia, by then a treatable disease with an excellent prognosis for remission. But this leukemia patient was retarded and several interns and residents began grumbling about wasting their precious time.
I lectured to them, with meager results— because I wasn't an M.D., wouldn't be administering chemotherapy and radiotherapy, simply didn't understand what was involved. The attending physician, a passionate and dedicated man, caught wind of the protest and delivered a diatribe about Hippocrates and morality that silenced the grumblers. But it had been a begrudging compliance.
What kind of doctors had those interns become?
Who were they judging, now?
Quality of life.
I'd worked with thousands of children with birth defects, deformities, mental retardation, learning disabilities, chronic and painful and fatal diseases.
Most experienced a full range of emotions, including joy.
I remembered one little girl, eight years old, a thalidomide casualty. No arms, stunted flipper feet, shining eyes, an eagerness to embrace life.
Better quality of life than some face-lifted psychopaths I'd known.
Not that it mattered, for it wasn't my role to judg
e, either.
The eugenecists argued that society's progress could be measured by the achievement of the gifted, and in part, that was true. But what good was progress if it led to callousness, cruelty, cold judgments about deservedness, a degradation of the godly spark in all of us?
Who'd be the new gods? Geneticists? Ethicists?
Scientists had flocked to Nazism in record numbers.
Politicians?
HMO executives with bottom-line obsessions?
And after we cleansed the world of one group of “degenerates,” who'd be next on the chromosomal hit list?
The flabby? The charmless? The boring? The ugly?