Uvalde, Buffalo, Babi Yar, a Fictional Future Red Bank, NJ — And Mass Murder

            As I write, the last two large-scale multiple murders in the United States were at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, following "roughly a week after a racist mass shooter killed 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y." People ask how such horrors can happen, and some parts of the answer are straight-forward and often repeated: to start with, too many angry, sometimes suicidal Americans with too easy access to rapid-fire firearms with large-capacity magazines.

 

            Another part can be summed up with the names of some locations: Wounded Knee, Katyn Forest, Babi Yar, My Lai, and many, far too many, locations of truly massive mass shootings and mass burials in pits, with some 22,000 Polish officers and other POWs killed by the Soviet NKVD (mostly) at Katyn in spring of 1940 and "some 33,771 Jews " murdered at the Babi Yar Ravine in Kyiv, 29–30 September 1941.

 

            Significant here, the murders at Babi Yar were carried out not only by specialists of Einsatzgruppe C but by more ordinary men of the German "Order Police," Wehrmacht, and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. And the victims, as at My Lai (March 1968), included — in the words of a once-famous interview of US Army Pfc Paul Meadlo by Mike Wallace  — "Men, women, children, babies."

            Basic principle: Under some circumstances human beings are capable of committing large-scale atrocities, and have done so.

 

            But these historical shooters were men in social circumstances that might explain their behavior: being in a group and all men for one thing, in wartime (or close to it at Wounded Knee), usually under military discipline and ordered to kill, and, in the case of the NKVD and Nazis feeling — if thoroughly indoctrinated — that the murders were necessary in a life-and-death struggle for class or race survival, doing the patriotic dirty work for a better world ("You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" / "Look at the baby, not at the blood"). The shooters in 20^th- and 21^st-century America have been in different circumstances; and so we need more general analysis.

 

            Here's an indirect suggestion from a book you should know for other reasons: one of the great mid-20^th-century dystopias, Frederik Pohl C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952/53). The setting is mostly America on a near-future Earth: overpopulated, polluted, and run by Advertising Agencies whose leaders and workers worship (figuratively) "the god of Sales."

 

 

Mitch Courtney of Fowler Schocken Associates is being held prisoner by the rival Taunton agency (the rivalry including competing for the Venus project: bringing Ad-Agency rule to our so-far unexploited sister planet). Regaining consciousness Mitch complains to his most immediate guards,

 

            I struggled again. "They'll brainburn you, I said. Are you people crazy? Who wants to be brainburned?"

            The face said nonchalantly: "You'd be surprised." […]

            B. J. Taunton lurched in, drunk.

 

Taunton expresses his anger at Mitch for avoiding getting killed in their earlier attempts, and then disappearing (which wasn't Mitch's doing: this is the second time he's been kidnapped).

 

            His glassy eyes glared at me: "You bastard!" he said. "Of all the low-down, lousy, unethical, cheap-jack stunts ever pulled on me, yours was the rottenest. I —" he thumped his chest […]. "I figured out a way to commit a safe commercial murder, and you played possum like a scared yellow rat. You ran like a rabbit, you dog."

                        […]

            He sat down unconcernedly. [….] With an expansive gesture B. J. Taunton said to me: "Courtenay, I am essentially an artist."

                        […]

            "Essentially," he brooded, "essentially an artist. […]" "I wanted Venus […], and I shall have it. Schocken stole it from me, and I am going to repossess it. Fowler Schocken's management of the Venus project will stink to high heaven. No rocket under Schocken's management is ever going to get off the ground, if I have to corrupt every one of his underlings and kill every one of his section heads. For I am essentially an artist."

            "Mr. Taunton," I said steadily, "you can't kill section heads as casually as all that. You'll be brainburned. They'll give you cerberin. You can't find anybody who'll take the risk for you. Nobody wants twenty years in hell."

            He said dreamily: "I got a mechanic to drop that 'copter pod on you, didn't I? I got an unemployable bum to plug at you through your apartment window, didn't I? Unfortunately both missed. And then you crossed us up with that cowardly run-out on the glacier."

            I didn't say anything. The run-out on the glacier had been no idea of min. God only knew whose idea it had been to have [a rival, Matt] Runstead club me, shanghai me, and leave a substitute corpse in my place.

            "Almost you escaped," Taunton mused. "If it hadn't been for a few humble loyal servants […]. But I have my tools, Courtenay." [* * *] You say to me: 'Nobody wants to be brainburned.' That is because you are mediocre. I say: 'Find someone who wants to be brainburned and use him.' That is because I am great."

            "Wants to be brainburned," I repeated stupidly. "Wants to be brainburned."

            "Explain," said Taunton to one aide." […]

            One of his men told me dryly: "It's a matter of population, Courtenay. Have you ever heard of Albert Fish?"

            "No."

            "He was a phenomenon of the dawn; the earliest days of the Age of Reason — 1920 or thereabouts. Albert Fish stuck needles into himself, burned himself with alcohol-saturated wads of cotton, flogged himself — he liked it. He would have liked brainburning, I'll wager. It would have been twenty delightful subjective years of being flayed, suffocated, choked, and nauseated. It would have been Albert Fish's dream come true.

            "There was only one Albert Fish in his day. Pressures and strains of a very high order are required to produce an Albert Fish. It would be unreasonable to expect more than one to be produced out of the small and scattered population of the period — less than three billion. With our vastly larger current population there are many Albert Fishes wandering around. You have only to find them." […]

            It had a bloodcurdling truthful ring to it. Our generation must be inured to wonder. The chronicles of fantastic heroism and abysmal wickedness that crowd our newscasts — I knew from research that they didn't have such courage or such depravity in the old days. The fact had puzzled me. We have such people as Malone, who quietly dug his tunnels for six years and then one Sunday morning blew up Red Bank, New Jersey. A Brink's traffic cop had got him sore. Conversely we have James Revere, hero of the White Cloud disaster. A shy, frail, tourist-class steward, he had rescued on his own shoulders seventy-six passengers, returning again and again into the flames […]. It was true. When there are enough people you will always find somebody who can and will be any given thing." (pp. 94-96; ch. 11)

 

Very basic principle: With enough pressure on enough people with few social supports, "you will always find somebody who […] will be any given thing" and a small percentage, but enough, people who will do "any given thing," including great good and great evil. Including shooting their own grandmother, and then children.

(And on US regulation of firearms, Babi Yar and the history of the Stalinists and Nazis cuts at least two ways. The Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising could have used more guns; more guns in the hands of the general European population could have been just more guns killing Jews and others over the burial pits.)

Dysphemism: Sodomites and Breeders (and Gay Marriage in America)

            If "eutopia" is a good place, a dystopia is a bad one. If "euphemism" is saying things way too delicately — "fallen warrior" as opposed to "dead soldier," "collateral damage" for "killed, wounded, maimed civilians" — dysphemism is saying something overly crudely.

            So in direct language, people die; in euphemism they pass on or, frequently nowadays, just pass; and in dysphemism they might croak. In my years and decades teaching writing, I advised sticking with direct forms most of the time and (usually) to avoid both euphemism and vulgarity — and just about always to avoid derogatives for ethnicities and other human groups. I'll stick with that position, but discuss here an exception.

            As we move from gay marriage into disputing broader issues, it would be well for a few impolite folk to throw into the debate the derogatory term "sodomite" for homosexual and "breeder" for (married, reproducing) hetero. Such words will stop intelligent discussion in its figurative tracks for a bit, but in the long run getting the nasty terms out into the argument would be useful.

            It'll start some fights, but "Sodomites" and "breeders" will aid keeping the conflict clear.

            "Sodomite" comes from the story in the Biblical Book of Genesis of the destruction of the Cities of the Plain of Sodom and Gomorrah (18.17-19.29): by fire and brimstone — directly sent by the Lord — because "the outcry against" them "is great, and their sin is very grave" (18.20). Now what the sin of Sodom (and Gomorrah) is, or sins are, has long been a matter for debate and, in LitCrit terms, narrative elaboration by the early rabbis on down. Still, in moral and political Christian usage — and in old legal statutes — "sodomy" means sexual "sins against nature," excluding masturbation but capable of applying to all non-reproductive sex, but centrally sex acts of a homosexual variety.

            One probable sin of Sodom in the Biblical story is demanding a violation of the laws of courtesy to guests by demand two of them to be gang-raped by "the men of Sodom, young and old — all the people to the last man" (19.4). Now, the guests were angels, but they were gendered male and thought to be men by their host, the Hebrew Lot, and the mob of (male) Sodomites. Also, Lot offers instead his two virgin daughters as preferable to surrendering his male-gendered guests, so, especially in ages that don't rank the obligation of hospitality up there with "Honor father and mother" — and the Jewish morning prayers do so rank it — especially in later ages, the issue here was less rape than indeed, homosexuality.

            And this makes sense since Hebrew Scriptures are important in the great tradition of pronatalism — "Be fruitful and multiply" and all that — and in keeping the classifications of the world in order: emphatically including the binary oppositions (and sometimes complements) of male/female and Israelites/gentiles.

            One way to encourage fruitfulness, strongly, is to forbid all sex except the reproductive, and the Mosaic Torah pretty well does that. And, indeed, later interpreters even got around to including masturbation by tweaking a bit the story of Onan (Genesis 38.8-11), and the Roman Catholic Church came to forbid even heterosexual vaginal sex between a married couple — if they used contraception.

            Homosexual sex was among "The Abominations of Leviticus" because it undermined what were considered proper male/female roles, thereby undermining patriarchy in Israelite society — and because it was seen, with some justice, as popular among the gentiles — and because it wasn't reproductive.

            "Sex is a great mana," as Ursula K. Le Guin says in a major essay, and therefore "there is always a code" for sex in any society. An "immature society" or immature individual psyche will set "great taboos about it. The maturer culture, or psyche, can integrate these taboos or laws into an internal ethical code," with true maturity allowing "great freedom" but forbidding "the treatment of another person as an object" ("Is Gender Necessary?" Language of the Night [1979]: 166).

            Sex is controlled by strong taboos in the Mosaic Torah, and in some ways got even stronger taboos in the more puritanical of the sects that evolved from it. Throwing in a body/soul opposition that would've seemed an Egyptian hang-up to Moses, later sects got sex associated with the corruptible and corrupted mortal body as opposed to the soul: indeed, the body was the prison of the soul and temptress. Sex became something not only to be regulated by taboo but in dire need of justification and redemption.

            "Be fruitful and multiply" — okay. Sex within marriage for reproductive purposes … redeemable (if barely in some views); any other sex was either natural in the sense of brutish or an unnatural act: sodomy.

            "Breeders!" was never thrown about to the extent of "sodomites!" and never got backed up with threats of execution or jail. But if you listened carefully in the right conversations, it was a possible epithet, and, as should now be clear, a kind of complement to "sodomites."

            Gay marriage in the US is more settled as a legal issue than abortion and more settled as a cultural issue than, say, the significance of the US Civil War. The continuing fights over sexuality will be over the larger issues the gay marriage debate has raised.

            Paul the Apostle and much of Christian doctrine following him stressed Christian freedom from Torah, with Torah a word Christians consistently translated "Law." But — but there were a lot of "but's." The ancient equivalent of shrimp wrapped in bacon (Leviticus 11.7-11) coming from a pagan sacrifice, would be okay for a Christian to eat at a baptism feast for a son emphatically left uncircumcised. Or you might be offered to eat blood pudding at an Anglican Church breakfast, even though God forbids blood-eating not just to the children of Abraham but also to all the descendants of Noah — i.e., in Biblical terms, everybody. But homosexuality … maybe not. For some of Paul's long-range spiritual descendants, definitely not.

            A rigorous Calvinist nowadays can learn that homosexual orientation has a large genetic component and find that appropriate: some of the damned majority of humankind can be justly damned for homosexuality programmed into their bodily genes.

            Well, etc.

            In a world of competing tribes and nationalisms, in which "People are the riches of a nation" and numerous people are the strength of a nation, pronatalist policies can make secular, national-interest/national-security sense. In our world of competing tribes and nationalism and over seven billion people, encouraging "breeding" is some place between "problematic" and just a horrible idea — and taboos on homosexuality can be defended only as taboos, only on religious grounds.

            So the first question in the US is the First Amendment one of what extent, if at all, religious taboos are to be incorporated into American law and custom and enforced by the power of the State, and the second question is the other half of the First Amendment as to what accommodations are to be made to people's strongly-held taboos.

            The third question is, if marriage is to be open to all US adults and not centered on "breeders," what options do we want to make for marriage as a society and how much should we continue to bring in the State (and tax codes) in the process?

            Like, okay, some county clerks don't want to grant marriage licenses to sodomites (including female ones). Beyond asking "Should they be required to?" we should start asking whether marriages should be licensed by the State at all or just registered with the State, or maybe something different.

            Perhaps we should go for a situation where some Americans see gays as sodomites and state that outright — and then mind their business and let their sinning fellow citizens of all varieties quietly go to Hell in our own ways (as long as we at worst only annoy, not harm, the neighbors). And given environmental and resources issues to come, the breeders out there should be happy with their life choices but have to start defending all claims to tax breaks and other privileges.

            In those cultural battles, "sodomite!" and "breeder!" may be among the milder terms thrown around.

Allowing Four Lawyers to Marry

         The truly serious issue on marriage in the US and elsewhere isn't on gay marriage as such but the issues implied in Justice Samuel Alioto's asking if four lawyers could marry. 

         The core system on marriage for the last few millennia centers on a sexually reproducing heterosexual couple. And this makes excellent sense if "The world must be peopled!" Over those millennia, society and then the State came to reward heterosexual marriage out of "pronatalist" policy: "People are the riches of a nation," and the idea was to increase the number of people.

         Okay, but what about nowadays, when the world's been peopled and then some, with seven billion of us and counting, and a strain on the environment and on resources? If we want to be less "natalist," we want to encourage arrangements that are not sexually reproductive at all, or less so, but which might allow raising adopted children — plus providing companionship and economic advantage.

         Soooo ... Mr. Alioto perhaps spoke better than he knew. We need to look at alternatives to reproducing couples and we need to rethink the incentives given to people to form reproducing couples and then reproduce. Such rethinking, and then acting, could include shifting tax burdens away from the childless and more toward those overly enthusiastic about reproduction, celebrating Childless People's Day once a year (or twice, to balance out Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day), toning down the praise of families and family values, noting that the nuclear family sucks for raising kids — putting too much burden upon one couple — and moving toward the old extended family.

         I'm not sure I'd like to see four lawyers raising a puppy, let alone children, but we do need to start talking about allowing such relationships the privileges and advantages of married folk.

         And with that we can start our serious arguments over marriage: the mostly economic ones that will seriously question who gets what, just how much, and for how long and for how many offspring.