The Other White Meat

I recently watched Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog for maybe the tenth time. I think this movie is much underrated; while not nearly Allen’s best work, it has a combination of menace and irony which I find appealing, and nothing is more neurotic than a neurotic in a fog shrouded village with a strangler on the loose. The movie has literally a dozen “A” list stars playing minor parts; even Madonna has a role commensurate with her meager skills. Woody Allen is truly a genius.

Having said this, I am only using Woody Allen as a segue into a more morbid avenue of thought. There is a line in the aforementioned movie where one of the characters contemplates the recent crimes and muses, “where does madness end and evil begin?” I was indulging my fascination with all things horrific, as I periodically do, when I came across a list of particularly gruesome criminals and crimes. Many of the references were familiar, although some I had either forgotten or never been aware of. America, it seems, has a rich history of homicidal maniacs and it gave me pause to consider the previous question; is there really such a force as evil, or are the behaviors we perceive as evil just the result of insanity? You could, of course, write a doctoral dissertation on the subject, and I have neither the stamina nor the commitment to explore the subject in such detail, but it is an important question in the context of trying to explain ourselves to ourselves. If it is perhaps true that neuroscientists have a better handle on what drives men to senseless brutality than the Priests do, then why do we continue to look at the world in terms of good and evil?

For example, there is the repulsive yet curious case of Albert Fish. I am much surprised that I was not already familiar with Mr. Fish’s disturbing adventures, but I suppose he wasn’t prominently mentioned in most American History texts. Fish was something of a monster, having molested and/or raped an unknown number of young boys in the 1920’s and 1930’s, slowly progressing to murder and cannibalism. He is known to have killed three children and was suspected in at least three more deaths, but his extensive movements throughout the country made it almost impossible to state with certainty what the extent of his crimes were.

Fish was undoubtedly a sadist and a pedophile and a certified douche-bag. Six years after he murdered and ate a 10-year old girl, he wrote a letter to her parents describing in unpleasant detail how the girl met her fate. He was ultimately apprehended due to the paper trail left by his vicious missive, and was tried for the girl’s murder. Fish had basically been a freaking weirdo most of his life and he had a long family history of serious mental illness; he had been previously committed for mental treatment, in addition to his history of criminal incarcerations. He had long claimed to hear voices, including those of God, and engaged in masochistic self-impalement, among other socially unacceptable habits.

None of this made much difference to the jury and Fish was electrocuted in 1936 in Sing Sing Prison. If one defines evil as indulging one’s own desires and compulsions with complete disregard for the wants and needs of others, then Albert Fish was certainly an evil man. Not only did his victims suffer, but he actively sought to increase the suffering of the victim’s loved ones by, much like a credit card disclosure statement, tormenting them with unnecessary information. What pleasure he derived from this is difficult to imagine, but he was, after all, nuts, which is of course the whole point.

I know there are people who truly believe that there is a dark, malevolent force in our world which thrives on human suffering and despair. It goes by many names, but in America we typically refer to it as Satan (or the Republican Party, depending on your point of view). This is the easy explanation for Ted Bundy, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Charlie Manson, Josef Stalin, Jeffery Dahmer, Vlad Tepes, Karl Rove, Michelle Bachmann and Carrot Top, but the reality is almost certainly more complex. Evil, I propose, is comprised of strands of DNA, unique and specific patterns of neurons, and the electro-chemical activity that is the foundation of consciousness. Evil is born of both random chance and every act of carelessness, unkindness and neglect that we perpetrate. Albert Fish killed because he had bad genes and bad luck and there was no mechanism in society to identify or prevent the evolution of his madness. Albert Fish ate children because his mind was dysfunctional and McDonald’s was not yet invented. Albert Fish was crazy as hell. No demons are necessary to explain this.