Violence - What is it Good For?

 Mary Gaitskill is a writer whose name I often see nowadays. I think Demonic Force (The Point Magazine) is the first thing I have read by her. 

Everyone knows in a basic way what violence is for. Even my mother, a housewife who grew up on a farm. Even me, a small seventy-year-old woman who makes her living with written words. Violence is for getting your way; for asserting your existence as an individual or a group; for venting torrential feeling; for sadistic pleasure. Sometimes, I think, it’s to assuage existential terror. Because if you’re doing the violence, at the moment anyway, it’s not being done to you.

She bases her essay on two books:  Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne and The Basement: Meditations on a Human Sacrifice by Kate Millett. The latter is about the sadistic murder of Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis back in 1965. The other is about the Comanches, but does not turn Ms. Gaitskill's stomach as much as the Indianapolis murder. 

I don’t want to go into detail about what was done to Likens; you can find out if you want but I strongly suggest you don’t. It’s unbearably sadistic, possibly the worst thing I’ve ever heard of. I believe the Comanche would’ve been aghast—because the victim was not an enemy but a child from the same “tribe,” entrusted by her parents to her torturer, and also because what happened was completely at odds with the (stated) social ethos of the community. I see what was done by the Comanche as acts of war consistent with their ethos in that historical moment. What was done to Sylvia Likens was a grotesque betrayal of intimate trust, of family and community; the child went to school with her murderer’s kids, she was friends with one of them. According to the testimony of the Comanche captives I have quoted, their deep cruelty was counterpointed by their deep tenderness. There does not seem to have been anything like tenderness in the murder house.

As it should.

I did not know about it until decades ago. There was a film about the case. Otherwise, this case seems to have been swept under the bed. Information can be found online.

Back to Gaitskill:

What is violence for? Still trying to answer the question, I recall the words of another child killer, Myra Hindley of the U.K., who, with her lover, raped and murdered five children whom they buried in Saddleworth Moors. Hindley, who was a lapsed Catholic, is said to have remarked to someone who visited her in prison, “Evil can be a spiritual experience too.”1 The words are perhaps fatuous, but to me they are also imaginatively powerful. Because they evoke what I’ve felt in some of my terrible dreams, what I called the “inhuman mechanism.” They also suggest a sordid version of what I imagined the Comanche felt: an alignment with a force of destruction that briefly exalts those who become its conduit. Such “exaltation” in the form of crude power might be intoxicating to a woman like Baniszewski; indeed such “exaltation” could have something like demonic force.

It seems to me this exaltation can be broadened: to the Nazi brownshirts stomping their boots into Jewish faces; NKVD officers doing their midnight raids; and to ICE agents rounding up Spanish-speaking, brown-skinned people regardless of their being American citizens.

sch 8/15