Film director Allison Anders got me going. A few weeks ago we did a FIVE EASY PIECES and toward the interview end to a question about a gang rape she endured when she was a kid, she laid out that “justice has very little to do with revenge. Revenge is only temporarily empowering. Justice is forever.” And like a sore tooth, I’ve been probing this, pushing it, forgetting about it, but returning again to it. Partially because I’m not sure I really believe it, but even more so because I wonder how true it is.
There are instances where “justice” is served: football star Michael Vick killed dogs, was arrested for killing dogs, tried and convicted, and eventually released from prison for the dog killings. But even if you like dogs more than you like Michael Vick I don’t imagine that there are many of you who believe that Michael Vick should have drawn the death penalty for dog murder.
And yet for some of you Michael Vick will always be a dog murderer. Even in the face of what might be actual contrition, or restorative action, he’s done. So, is justice forever? And how would revenge have worked in this case?
Like the elephant poacher who was recently killed by elephants while poaching elephants, there’s a certain elegance to this kind of conclusion.
Well, karma, a philosophical revenge variant would have dictated that Vick somehow get killed by dogs. Like the elephant poacher who was recently killed by elephants while poaching elephants, there’s a certain elegance to this kind of conclusion. The knowing eyebrow raise that indicates that payback is both a bitch and imminently satisfying.
But Vick soldiers on, the dogs remain dead, very few with opinions on either side of the imbroglio have been persuaded to switch those opinions and, like it or not, we abide by the just conclusion of his case. Insofar as we give a shit about either Michael Vick or dogs in the court of public opinion.
However it was also the court of public opinion where we were when a friend of mine came running in, near breathless, and said to our assembled group of friends “Shorty tried to rape me.” I’ve written about this before in an article entitled “Stomping Out Rape. Literally.”
While the original article was full of detail, word counts prevented me from delivering all of detail. Like the fact that in the full fever of a rising bloodlust we would have most assuredly killed Shorty for attempting to rape Lisa. Given how many murders New York saw in the early ‘80s, this murder would have gone unpunished, and all that would have remained would have been whether it sat well enough for us to have lived life after/beyond it sans regret.
We were stopped from murdering him, as detailed in the article, by a greater force of arms — sported by local drug dealers — but we left him with a warning to make himself scarce. Scarce, since if we saw him again, he might not be so “lucky”.
Well, we saw him again. And he was beaten again. But this time was different. This time it was less an emotional reaction to an upsetting event and more the establishment of “law”: he had been told to leave town on pain of some future beating. He had clearly calculated that whatever possible beating he would endure was not worth him upending his business — dealing drugs — and certainly not enough for him to move away from the Lower East Side.
[I]t didn’t take long before pro-rape commenters attempted a mid-court check, deriding me for pointless vigilantism.
Our car screeched to the curb on 6th Street and people piled out. Tire irons and baseball bats waved aloft, he was knocked to the ground and a beating ensued. But something was wrong and while the others beat him I remember watching dispassionately from the hood of the car where I now sat.
Rob had a tire iron and while he held the rapist’s head, raised it in order to deliver a blow. As the tire iron came down right before it hit the rapist’s skull, Rob stopped. This caught my eye. He did this a second time. Raised the tire iron higher, but still stopped short of delivering the shot. The third time Rob had decided to deliver the shot and veered away from the bowed head and delivered a glancing blow off of the rapist’s back.
No one stopped the beating this time but the beating just stopped.
Everybody climbed back in the car, the rapist was spread on the sidewalk. Still breathing. We never saw him again.
When the original article came out in 2017, it didn’t take long before pro-rape commenters attempted a mid-court check, deriding me for pointless vigilantism. They called Lisa a slut who was probably so drugged she didn’t know what was going on. I first ignored them, then castigated them for being wrong but the point remained in the light of a full reckoning, and like Henry James would have wondered: what did we achieve?
Revenge? Well, no one says revenge has to match punishment with crime. But yes, the beating was revenge for the attempted rape. It was emotionally satisfying. The first time. The second time? It was just…a thing.
What does justice look like in this instance though? Since over 60 percent of sex assault cases don’t ever see the inside of a court, it’s hard to tell. But presumably we can measure worth or value here very simply: the course of action that generates the greatest amount of harmony.
[T]he lure of the tire iron to the head is eternal…
Did the attempted rapist go on to attempt rape again? If criminologists are to be believed, probably. Was he more or less likely to do so, as a result of our beatings? He was likely to be more circumspect at the very least, it’s easy to imagine. But more or less than if he had been sentenced to a prison term for it?
Unknown.
But Lisa? Well Lisa, after a life of many curious twists and turns, ultimately underwent gender reassignment and, then, sadly, died last year from cancer, survived by a wife and a daughter.
So revenge, as applied here, was quicker, and satisfying, even if ultimately ineffective. And justice? Not that we would have known but, yeah, slower, less satisfying, and probably also, ineffective.
No version of closing the barn door after the horses have left seems to work and the daisy chain of shit and circumstance that has horrible things happen to us all the time will never be redressed as effectively as if we chose harmony the first time out. But we sometimes don’t and given that harmony is about order, might not justice be better suited to dealing with all of the ways that we suck?
I don’t know. The lure of the tire iron to the head is eternal though…as is, the lure of no tire iron to the head.
But I think about both Rob and Lisa fondly these days. I think about the rapist not very much at all. And that’s just about the best that I can do.
It might be good to define justice, first. If you consider justice as only punishment of the guilty party without considering who holds the baseball bat, then yes, revenge can lead to justice. But that's not how human society defines justice. The whole point of justice in a functioning society is to have a judge substituting to individuals to decide the punishment and enforce it. Breaking the revenge cycle comes as an immediate benefit: there is a difference between society killing someone for what he did and an individual doing the killing and placing the family and friends of the now deceased in a position to take revenge. Unfortunately, when human society is not in a position to deliver justice, we are left with revenge.