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player ready...When Tonya Harding publicly confessed to hiding knowledge of the attack on Nancy Kerrigan, she said, “Many of you will be unable to forgive me for that. It will be difficult to forgive myself.” And “I know I have let you down, but I have also let myself down.”
As a longtime student of the American way of confession, I find this one fascinating. The themes are self-betrayal and self-forgiveness. They reflect perfectly a culture in which one no longer sins against God, natural law, the moral order, society or even one’s fellow man-to take them in descending metaphysical order-but against oneself.
In a zeitgeist that worships self above all, you may have let other people down but the ultimate sin is to have let yourself down. It follows that the ultimate virtue is to make peace not with your victims but with yourself. Thus Jane Alpert, a ’60s radical jailed for several bombings, reflects on her years in prison: “Ultimately, I spent many years in therapy, learning to understand, to tolerate and forgive both others and myself.”
This from a woman who participated in bombings that injured 21 people. And why not? In a culture of grotesque self-absorption, the criminal’s psychic restoration is at least as important as the victim’s, and-in a culture of obsessive spectatorship-far more interesting.
When Lorena Bobbitt was acquitted for the admitted sexual mutilation of her husband, her lawyer came before the microphones and called the verdict “a giant step forward for Lorena in the healing process. She really needs healing.” She?
Four days later, Michael Jackson’s lawyer announced a multimillion dollar settlement for alleged child molestation with: “Michael wants to get on with his life and let the healing process begin.” Michael’s healing. And the kid’s?
When everyone is a victim-in need of “healing”-no one is a victim. We have come to the reductio ad absurdum of the “root cause” explanation for crime. Once, the root causes were said to be poverty, joblessness, poor housing, discrimination-the usual excuses you hear thrown around after an inner city riot.
But how are the middle classes to get away with murder? Easy. The “root causes” turn out now to go far deeper than the social and the economic. They are psychological. And since there is not a living soul who has not suffered some psychological trauma-and criminals are certainly less likely to have sailed through life untraumatized-it becomes harder and harder to hold anyone responsible for anything.
This is not to say that there is never a psychological derangement that merits acquittal, even empathy. I thought appropriate the acquittal of John Hinckley. He was clearly deranged and delusional, so crazy that he could reasonably be thought not responsible for his actions.
But the Menendez brothers? These young men, who shot their rich parents and then belatedly but tearfully claimed to have done so because of child
abuse, have won two hung juries. If they get away with murder, it is time for us to return to the caves.
Their trial has elevated therapeutic expiation to truly comic proportions. The classic definition of chutzpah is a person who murders his parents and then demands mercy from the court on the grounds that he is an orphan. This is meant to be a joke.
Yet the following occurred at the Menendez trial: The prosecutor, cross-examining a psychologist brought by the defense, pointed out that Lyle Menendez bought $15,000 worth of Rolex watches and money clips after murdering his parents and then wore one of the Rolexes to his parents’ funeral. “Was that an act of respect?” the prosecutor asked.
“He had this strong love for his father,” replied the psychologist. “And the conditions that had been produced meant he had lost his father. He no longer had this person he loved.” We are meant to feel sorry for Lyle because, after all, he had just lost his father. How did he lose him? Owing to “the conditions that had been produced”-a spectacular euphemism for patricide. So we are to explain this apparent act of disrespect (flaunting inherited wealth at father’s funeral) as the response of a despondent child who had just been orphaned-from parents he had just murdered!
As Yogi Berra said upon learning that the mayor of Dublin was Jewish, “Only in America.”
But this joke is dangerous. Our obsession with the psychic welfare of the victimizer leaves us philosophically defenseless against crime. When the victimizer is nothing more than another victim, justice becomes impossible. Bobbitt walks. The Menendez brothers prove impossible to convict. Tonya Harding, I wager, is already preparing a double whammy defense: child and spouse abuse.
The president and Congress can climb all over each other to be tough on crime. But as long as the only real crimes are crimes against oneself, as long as psychic injury turns criminals into victims, the task is hopeless.