NO FEAR OF RETRIBUTION
Herb Greer offers a possible
explanation of the Arkansas school deaths
PROBABLY the most original response to the child murderers in Arkansas appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, under the byline of a Mississippi gal, Julia Reed. The head- line of her piece was, 'We're like that in Dixie'. I paraphrase her message, with accent: `Evrabudeh got lotsa gu-u-uhns down hyeah in the Sahyuth, an' we jus' lahk tuh shyoot each uthuh now and theyun. Sheeeeeyit, thain't nuthin y'all kin do abaht thayut.'
Ms Reed expresses amusement at a red- neck wife who shot her husband through the heart because he liked to drink beer, and avers that this lady is much like the Arkansas children who mowed down their classmates. It is an interesting, if repellent point of view — an example, perhaps, of the new American feminism.
Born and brought up in Santa Fe, I lived with an Anglo psychology not that differ- ent from the deep South. We too had lotsa guns. At four I first fired a weapon, and was allowed to shoot a Colt 45 when I was ten. But there was one important distinc- tion between our situation and Ms Reed's. We were aware that, guns or no guns, young kids are not the same as adults.
Other reactions to the murders have been predictable enough: horror, puzzle- ment, moans about 'gun culture', and the inevitable idiot in Washington who wants to ban firearms. A more thoughtful response to a roughly similar situation was expressed over half a century ago by the American advocate Clarence Darrow, defending the boy murderers Leopold and Loeb:
Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the expe- rience. They killed him ... Because some- where in the infinite processeses that go into the making up of the boy or the man some- thing slipped, and these unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the com- munity shouting for their blood ... There is no man on earth who can mention any pur- pose for it all or any reason for it all. It is one of those things that happened, and it calls not for hate, but for kindness, for chari- ty, for consideration.
A moving plea; it saved his clients from execution, if not from prison. But the atti- tude which it embodies may well be a fac- tor in the current and apparently inexpli- cable tendency of children to take up guns and kill.
Leopold and Loeb were teenagers, act- ing through arrogance and, they said, an overdose of Nietzsche. The Arkansas chil- dren were younger, and did harbour ele- ments of spite, bullying and hatred, and though the boys are said to be contrite now — they clearly knew that what they were doing was wrong. The problem was that this did not matter to them at the time. Something did not just slip, it was altogether missing. But what?
Most children in my community, and certainly I myself, grew up with a sense of process that bred wariness about doing bad things. It was a sort of instinct, not taught or indoctrinated, but absorbed from the social atmosphere, that if you went too far you incurred retribution, and this could be dangerous — to you. It was also taken for granted that retribution was just and proper in such cases. Like the Arkansas boys, I felt vengeful sometimes, as kids do, and thought of borrowing one of my grandfather's 14 guns. But that peculiar sense of process held me back, which is why I am writing this instead of cell-wall graffiti in the Santa Fe peniten- tiary.
The sense of retribution as just and proper is very weak today, if it exists at all. It was already decaying when Darrow made his speech, which could well have Has he got his guard of honour yet?' helped his successful defence of Leopold and Loeb. It is taken for granted today that punishment is essentially flawed in itself because it contains an element of retribu- tion. This received idea is often deployed, for example, in arguments opposing the death penalty.
In the Sixties our social atmosphere thickened with the assumption that consti- tuted authority (suspect anyway) becomes positively evil and illegitimate if its treat- ment of the wrongdoer carries echoes of retribution. In this context the word `revenge' is uttered with spitting contempt. Of course retribution did not vanish. It was simply taken out of the hands of constitut- ed authority, where it was circumscribed by due process of law, and dumped into the hands of unstable individuals; it was then trivialised beyond all restraint. That con- tamination of the social mood has been around long enough for a whole generation of children to absorb it; the result is the loss of a necessary sense of individual dan- ger about going too far. That, precisely, is what seems to have been missing in Arkansas and the other cases of children suddenly deciding to kill. Those Jonesboro boys were exacting lethal retribution for playground slights.
I doubt that this explains everything about the homicidal children in America. (And here, actually. Remember the boys who beat Jamie Bulger to death? One must not call them little scroats; that smacks too much of retribution.) Even very young human beings rarely function as simply as that. But awareness and general acceptance of retribution is undoubtedly an important factor in these matters.
There are also signs, some of them grim, that the social mood is swinging back again. Americans are now executing their most egregious murderers, though I doubt this will extend to minors. But those deaths may well usefully darken that line almost wiped out since the Sixties — which the normal adult, and more especially the child, senses he cannot pass without great danger. In Britain too there seems to be a fresh feeling in the air that tolerance is all very well, but it cannot be infinite or arbi- trary; that divine forgiveness and redemp- tion are best left to God, while we deal with our worst criminals in other ways.
None of this will 'solve the problem' of evil or wipe out the human tendency to occasional homicide. It may change a cer- tain sneaking feeling that no matter what you do, nothing really bad is going to hap- pen to you. At worst you may spend some time as the guest of the state, with free medical care, sport and hobbies, television, and the occasional chance to demonstrate for the right to be treated as generously and tolerantly as anybody else. If these ter- rible events confirm that those who blithely commit such horrors are not at all like any- body else, and should not have that right, then at least the victims may have died to some purpose.
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