The Second Coming

Maybe it's because I did jury duty once and I feel I could have done a better job if I had a better understanding of the law and how lawyers operate. Maybe it’s because I like courtroom dramas. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had a certain, inexplicable fascination with outlaws, bank robbers and wise guys, con men and gunslingers. Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Butch Cassiday and The Sundance Kid. Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone. Maybe it’s because there are so many stupid laws. Maybe it’s because the current administration flaunts constitutional laws – which are anything but stupid - with the flagrant disdain and mockery of the bandits in Treasure of the Sierra Madre: “Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!" Maybe it’s because for the past few months a federal paramilitary force has been attacking, kidnapping, and murdering its own citizens without the slightest restraint or concern for breaking constitutional laws. Maybe because our current president has been flouting international and constitutional laws with a breathtaking cavalier indifference, has kidnaped the president Venezuela and put him in one of our jails, killed Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – a religious leader with the equivalent prominence of the Pope - without any congressional or judicial restraint, and has attacked Iran without any plausible cause or a clearly stated objective, an attack that has so far killed at least 3,332 Iranian citizens. I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen the law so utterly disregarded, or felt so anguished and vulnerable without its protection. The value of life is keyed to the preservation and respect for the law. Without the law to protect each individual, one’s life feels as valued as an armadillo on a Texas highway with an eighteen-wheel rig barreling straight toward your scaly little ass at 90 mph.

And so I wonder. Has Yeats’s “rough beast” been awakened? Is the apocalyptic monster slouching toward Bethlehem to be born? Because there can be no doubt: Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some new revelation is at hand.

Recently, I watched a French TV show which airs weekly called La Grand Librairie hosted by Augustin Trapenard, whose primary focus is to excite interest in books and literature. Authors are invited to come on the show and talk about their books, all of which are related to the topic at hand. The topic of the show I watched was Pour quoi est-ce qu'on est fasciné par le mal? (Why Are We Fascinated by Evil?). Of the five guests, the one that provoked the most fascination – and distress – was an attractive, 54-year-old woman named Constance Debré, who was elegantly dressed in a pinstriped blazer and pants with a black shirt and a buzz-cut that reminded me of Sinead O’Connor’s strategy for downplaying her femininity and beauty. Debré – who, for many years had been a criminal defense lawyer before leaving the profession to become an author, was there to talk about her recent novel Protocoles, a work of autofiction described as “a stark and clinical account exploring the detailed procedures of capital executions in the United States,” in which Debré “analyzes the ritual of the death penalty, contrasting administrative rigor with the chaotic and violent reality of the execution.”

Debré’s true focus is on exploring our relationship to law and its approach to evil. How does the law protect its citizens without exercising too much restraint? How does the law manage to protect our freedoms while protecting us from the abuses of psychopaths and sharks, from the abuses of propaganda and misinformation? What does the law have to say about the nature of evil, its motivations and sources? What is evil? Is everyone capable of doing evil? Is there anything like a true state of innocence? Is silence in the face of genocide a form of complicity in evil, or may it be pardoned as an act of self-preservation? Is it criminal to voice an opposition to a perceived injustice in public? Is vengeance evil? Is revenge evil? Is killing someone in a fit of rage evil, or may it be justifiably deemed a temporary insanity? Are people inherently good, possessing a natural compassion and innocence that is often corrupted by the influence of society and conceptions of private property as Rousseau argued, or are people inherently self-interested, competitive, and fearful, driven by a desire for power and survival, as Thomas Hobbes argued?

What did Bob Dylan mean when he wrote “to live outside the law you must be honest?”

What did Hanna Arendt mean when she said “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil?”

What did Albert Einsten mean when he said “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”

Or Edmund Burke, anticipating Einstein: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Or Mahatma Ghandi: “I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.”

Humanity’s one true weapon against evil is law. But – as Dylan implies – is the law always honest? Justice (to quote the AI Overview on Google) “is depicted as blind (often wearing a blindfold) to symbolize impartiality, objectivity, and fairness in the legal system. This suggests that justice should be administered without fear, favor, prejudice, or regard for a person's identity, wealth, or social status. It ensures decisions are based solely on evidence and law.”

Then there’s the golden rule: those with the gold, make the rules.

And then there’s literature. The old and new testaments of the Bible. Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow. To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. The Firm, by John Grisham. The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare. The Verdict, by Barry Read. Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo. Billy Budd, Sailor, by Herman Melville. The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Stranger, by Albert Camus. Native Son, by Richard Wright. The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk. Snow Falling On Cedars, by David Guterson.  The Code of Hammurabi, proclaimed and enacted by Hammurabi,  the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, who ruled from approximately 1792 to 1750 B.C.

I’m sure there are many others, all wrestling with the dilemmas of good and evil. The darker turmoil of the human unconscious. Loki, the Norse trickster god who creates chaos. Ravana, the ten-headed Hindu demon king of Lanka, symbolizing ego and lust. Apophis, the ancient Egyptian serpent deity who represents chaos and attempts to devour the sun god Ra every night. Lamashtu, the female Mesopotamian demon notorious for her malevolence toward pregnant women, mothers and children. Beelzebub, a.k.a. Lord of the Flies, originally a Philistine god from Ekron, located in the Judean lowlands of Israel, often considered another name for Satan, and associated with the deadly sin of gluttony in Christian demonology, a disgusting, bloated,  humanoid entity with flashing eyes, bat-like membranous wings and webbed, duck-like feet, who embodies pride and envy, and is notorious for inciting war, lust, and idolatry.

The law approaches evil one way. Literature approaches evil another way. The law attempts to be objective. Surgical, precise, leaving no room for doubt. Whereas literature goes for salvation, aberration, contrast, paradox, messy incongruities, and drama. Law calls for evidence. Literature calls for theater. Bloody battles and witch’s cauldrons. Dragons and fog. Fjords echoing with the groans and laughter of Norse warrior gods. Cities of sin and corruption buried in volcanic ash. God’s wrath. Faustian bargains. Scapegoats and sacrifices. Human hearts tumbling down Aztec temples. Genocides. Massacres. Annihilation. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Dresden. Auschwitz.

During Debré’s opening remarks, she made one highly provocative statement that I’m still pondering, still trying to unravel and understand more deeply. She said “La loi rend toute littérature obsolète,” (“The law renders all literature obsolete”). 

The law operates according to a strict code of facts. There’s no room for nuance and metaphor, no accommodating stage for eloquent justifications, verbal acrobatics incarnating our existential and moral dilemmas à la Hamlet and King Lear, or moving, probing, piercing explorations of what makes people do the things they do, including rape and murder, à la Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy. The law is as sharply and coldly defined as a surgical instrument. Literature is designed to provoke thought. The law is designed to punish, and to act as a preventative measure. Literature illumines. The law casts shadows.

Elsewhere – on a YouTube channel called Maison de la Poésie, Scène littéraire  -  I listened to Debré read an opening passage from Protocoles describing, in graphic detail, the grisly details of a public execution. It was profoundly disturbing. I was also struck by the clinical explicitness of her description. Her attention to accuracy and the minutiae of this grisly procedure can’t really be described as a description; it was too clinical for that, too precise, too literal, too clear-cut to be called a description. The ghastliness of what occurred was even more dreadful in the raw, fact-based, unadorned sterility of its operation.

I was all the more struck by her statement at the end of La Grand Librairie. Each emission of La Grand Librairie ends with a two or three-minute statement of eloquence and power titled Droit dans les yeux, in English “right in the eyes.” Debré’s Droit dans les yeux may be accessed on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. It’s in French, but I translated it into English:

There isn't the world on one side and literature on the other. There isn't reality on one side and fiction on the other. Reality without books, and this shattered, refracted, illegible matter. This succession of strange, mechanical, confused events. A machine that always seems to be one step ahead, that cancels us out, swallows us, separates us from one another. Keeps us bewildered in a feeling of absurdity, solitude, and madness. Books, for their part, are not the stories, the little stories they tell. Books are not this enclosed space, closed in on itself, on the sentences and what they seem to say. A possibility of escape, a way out of reality. To the question of what reality compels us to do, what its senseless mechanics demand as an answer. And they are not a shelter for the thick-skinned, made of their sentences alone, a place to forget reality and what we do within it. There is no escape, no way out of the world, no refuge. That's more or less what books tell us. They don't offer solutions; they wrench us from the idea that existence is a contradiction to be resolved, an enigma to be cracked. They place us before our destiny, our shared destiny, all of us who are alive, neither entirely separate nor entirely together, but simultaneously. Books are our only chance to become aware of this: that we are not beings without cause or purpose, absurd and lost in the chaos of the world, but rather figures of something greater than ourselves, something called humanity.

I found her statement surprising and impactful for several reasons. I was astonished by the power of her eloquence, especially considering how clinical and sterile her description of an execution had been, but also her attitude toward literature. I could more easily understand why she had exchanged her profession as a criminal defense lawyer for the purviews of literature. Literature isn’t, as a lot of people assume, particularly those who surrender to the infantilizing charms of J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series, or Tolkien’s Hobbit adventures, a place of refuge, an escape from the rigors of existence. But she doesn’t make it out to be a dark, nihilistic habitation of impotence and futility either. Elsewhere in her appearance on La Grand Libraire, she cited authors like Camus, Dostoyevsky and Kafka. She lauds its grasp on the reality of our situation, its unflinching gaze at destiny. On the other hand, and this is where my thoughts about literature differ, I can’t remember a single book that didn’t in some way try to unravel the mystery of existence, or offer a solution for ameliorating its inevitable losses and tragedies, find humor and redemption in the lushness of its mysteries. This would, of course, include Camus, Dostoyevsky and Kafka, Kafka especially. I have to wonder what she would make of Rimbaud’s mysterious flip flop, his strange reversal from visionary poet to caravaneer and import/export clerk. Rimbaud’s correspondence in his later years bear the same stark, barren grasp of existence, his letters to his mother and sister full of burdensome grievances, with maybe a small glint of humor now and then.

As for evil, I see it as a form of madness, a satanic rebellion against the natural order of things. I’ve never been particularly religious, but I’ve never been hostile toward religion either. There’s a scene in True Detective, Season one, episode 3 with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson that I find highly relatable. They visit an evangelist revival meeting in a tent somewhere in rural Texas, looking for information on a suspect. McConaughey, as the dour, world-weary, cynical Detective Cohle, utters disparagingly to his partner Marty, played with embattled, conflicted intensity by Woody Harrelson, “What do you think the average IQ of this group is, huh?...I see a propensity for obesity, poverty, a yen for fairy tales, folks putting what few bucks they do have into little, wicker baskets being passed around. I think it's safe to say that nobody here is gonna be splitting the atom, Marty.” Marty, who staunchly adheres, believes in, and champions the value of religion, responds in stern opposition: “can you imagine if people didn't believe, what things they'd get up to?”

I’m with Marty on that one. Religion is one of the few things that keep people from destroying one another. The one reason anyone aspires to be honest, aspires to be caring and compassionate, aspires to do good work, aspires to be faithful, aspires to do the right thing. The obvious irony, as McConaughey’s nihilistic Cohle would gleefully point out, is that religion is also the central reason that people do destroy one another. And thereby, saith the bard, hangs a tale.