Well, now we know

Breaking news—the Norwegian court has declared Anders Behring Breivik sane.

Great! My question over the last year has been answered! The guy’s not nuts!

That means, apparently, that he will have to be rehabilitated. That’s the focus of theNorwegian prison system. They take rehabilitation very seriously, unlike the US.

So they’re gonna spend pots of money on this guy. 

Well, Norway is hardly a poor country, but is it, well…SANE?

Look, I believe in rehabilitation too. 

To a point.

But I also think that we have to be realistic. Can everyone be rehabilitated? Does it make sense for even a rich nation to spend millions of dollars over possibly half a century trying to reason with a fanatic?

And what Breivik did is still almost unfathomable, even today. How many lives did he shred, that Friday afternoon in June 2011?

How would I feel, if I were the father of one of the victims, paying my taxes year after year, and knowing some part of it was going not just to sustain but pamper the killer?

Exercise room, computer, and special visits by the pastor!

Wow! 

I wonder as well about vengeance. Not a pretty word, maybe not a pretty concept. We talk about justice and feel good about it. But the shadow is vengeance.

You have torn my life apart. Now you will suffer.

No. I think about a person I once hated, and the rot and rage it did…

…to me.

But I don’t think, as well, that this is justice—spending millions on the very dim chance that a fanatic can be rehabilitated.

I think that the guy should be put to work.

Look, presumably all the victims’ families are working, right? They’re all getting up every Monday morning, putting on the work clothes, putting on the smile they don’t feel.

Why should Breivik be different?

He’s clearly a guy with energy. Writing a 200 page memoir exhausted me—his screed was 1500 pages. Oh, and by the way, he apparently is going to use his free time to add MORE!

OK—remember that dictum: don’t come to me with problems, come to me with solutions!

(Ahh, how I miss the corporate world!)

Here’s what I’d do. First, isolate him. He’s toxic and cannot be exposed to others. Second, find the thing that he can do that will be most valuable economically to society. If it’s folding laundry, let him fold laundry. If it’s designing computer software, let him do that. Monday through Friday, nine to five.

Oh, and after dinner? He goes for two hours into a small room, is put in a chair in front of a screen, and watches—night after night, decade after decade—the videotaped stories of the victims’ families, talking about their lost children, their ruined marriages, their nightmares, their alcoholism, their loss.

Night after night, decade after decade.

That, I think, is justice.

Ooooops

OK—first a word of reassurance to the international audience of this blog, who must be anxiously waiting at their computer screens for word from the battered blogger.

Survived the storm!

What I didn’t do was, well…

…detect the storm.

It did rain hard for five minutes at about 4:30 PM yesterday. So I closed the window. And then? 

Well, Raf came home, we ate, it was warmish, we went to bed. Expecting to get up when the bashing began.

Slept through the night!

Storm apparently weakened and dropped south. Instead of 58 miles south of Ponce, it’s a couple hundred miles.

“Totally exaggerated,” claims a critic of the governor, speaking of the 96 million dollars per day lost in productivity by closing down the island these last two days.

Gentle Readers, welcome to the Caribbean, where even a storm can be politicized!

Let’s be fair. No one can predict these things. The waters of the Caribbean are hot—a perfect source of fuel for a hurricane. The National Hurricane Center was predicting intensification. It’s not the wind, it’s the water that kills. Forty-five percent of Puerto Ricans live in flood zones.

And it’s not over yet. The tail of a storm can do bad damage, and this is a wet storm.

But it’s cool and overcast today. The banana kwit is chirping across the street. Elvin, the guy from La Perla, is continuing his work next door. And I?

Comparing and contrasting—as they made me do those many years ago in high school.

The sober Norse have constructed a special psychiatric cell for the mas murderer, just in the event he gets declared insane tomorrow. Yup, cost a cool million bucks, but that’s not unusual. The cost of keeping highly weird guys away from society in Norway is routinely over a million dollars a year.

Has to be done, because they have rights!

Yeah?

It’s a little hard for me to get my head around this. I don’t think he should be put on the wrack and tortured—though I’m also not the father of any one of the victims. Might think differently if I were.

But a million bucks? When my cousin’s husband had to wait over a month in agonizing pain for a very much-needed surgery? 

Still, you have to respect the Norwegians, that good sober earnestness. Doing the right thing. Playing fair, even with a guy who very much did not. Refusing to give in to any base instinct.

Well, well, it’s all rather different in Spain! There, the nation is going crazy making jokes on a poor 80 year old lady who gave her time and talent to the church!

How can they!

Shame on them! It may be true that the results were less felicitous than hoped. Celia Giménez has asked pardon, but also points out that she wasn’t able to finish the work. And no, it’s not a masterpiece. The artist dashed it off in two hours a century ago. Here’s how it looked….

Well, and here’s the restoration!

And now, of course, the entire world is laughing at this poor dear! This lovely lady who went into the church and got right down to work! The press is dubbing the work—originally called Ecce Homo, behold the man—as Ecce Mono, behold the monkey.

That’s just not right!

All right, drop the ironic tone. Admit it, come clean. 

I couldn’t stop laughing. The storm brings many things—salchichas, beer, anxiety. No, I didn’t go as crazy as before. But the general hysteria works its way into you. And when it’s released?

I get punchy.  

Well, Jack wouldn’t think Ecce mono was funny at all. He’d have some sympathy for that good Spanish lady that all the world is laughing at. He’d run to her defense!

He was a better man than I.

I can’t stop laughing….

Extreme Something

“In our family, when we don’t know what to do, we have a cup of coffee. When we don’t know what to think, we write.” Words I once wrote in Iguanas.

Well, I’m doing both.

The coffee is next to my computer. But where is Anders Behring Breivik, the source of my confusion and need to write?

In Oslo, awaiting sentencing.

You remember the guy—the extremist who blew up a government building in Oslo, drove to Utoya, crossed by boat to the island, and shot up and killed 60 students involved in a political youth camp. It happened on a Friday in July, 2011. I was at “work”—quotation marks because I was really just waiting to be laid off, and hence doing nothing. So I devoted the day to reading the news of the atrocities as it came in.

Madness or evil, I wondered at the time.

And it’s a case where knowing more means understanding less. Two court-ordered psychiatric evaluations have been done—they disagree. The first stated he was psychotic—both at the time of the killings and at the time of the evaluation. The second report claims he’s sane. The trial has just ended, and it riveted Norway. Sentencing will be on or before August 24.

The prosecution claims he’s crazy—and with good reason. Norway’s jails focus on rehabilitation—but they really mean it, unlike the US. (One-third of black American males between 20 and 50 are in prison? Ouch!)* Oh, and maximum sentence length in Norway is “only” 21 years. Breivik is 33—that means he’d be in his mid-fifties when he got out. Still time to do some real damage. Some more real damage, I mean….

The other problem is the other prisoners. The concern is that Breivik could start spouting off his militant anti-Islamic rhetoric, and form right-wing cells (sorry, couldn’t help it) in prison. So the Norwegians—bless them—are seriously considering putting him is isolation. But there’s a problem—it denies him his basic human rights. So, with paradoxically the same logical-to-the-edge-of-craziness that characterizes Breivik, the authorities are proposing to hire “friends” who will come in several times a day to…

…play chess with him.

(It’s a digression but I can’t help it. Does anyone remember Laura Hernández who got stuck in a Dominican jail for a couple of years? And the jail, with the dirt floors and no food—the family had to bring that in….)

OK—prosecution says he’s crazy. Defense says he’s sane. Anders argues—among other things (apparently he wrote a 1500 page manifesto—remember Mein Kampf?—that lays it all out)—that this violence was a necessary wake-up call to Norway. Their culture, their very identity is under attack! No, not openly—but slowly, insidiously by you-know-who, the folks in the burkas and the head shawls.

Hey, sorry, but someone had to do it.

Well—Norwegian thoroughness. I spent some time—though admittedly as a kid—in Norway. Norwegian women—charmers! Norwegian men?

Well, guys, just a little…

…dull.

But organized. And Breivik was that—renting the farm, buying the six tons of fertilizer needed for his bomb, laying the groundwork for what he hoped would be his message to the world. He may have had a thinking disorder, but clearly not a planning disorder.

But sane?

There was an accepted standard in 19^th century British law for determining legal sanity: would the prisoner have committed the same actions if he had had a policeman standing next to him? (Think it was Burke’s Rule—damn, wish I had Internet!)

Well, Breivik called the Norwegian police twice from Utoya, attempting to surrender. The police, for whatever reason, blew him off. So he kept wandering around the island, killing kids.

OK—so he’s sane. 21 years of playing chess with paid friends and he’s out. What happens if he’s declared insane? 

Paradoxically, because in Norway some psychiatric disorders are considered incurable, Breivik could be held for the rest of his life in a psychiatric unit. So it’s 21 years in prison if sane, potentially life in a madhouse if he’s nuts.

Well, in Puerto Rico we might see it in another way. I once, in an unthinking moment, confessed that I was suicidal to a student.

“Ah,” she said. “That just means you’re not listening to God. And do you know why! You have a demonio! I know, my sister-in-law had one!”

It was therapeutic, actually. Made me so mad I stopped being depressed….

OK—maybe extreme. But one does get the feeling—since psychiatry seems to tell us so little here—that we should turn elsewhere.

Like where Breivik turned? Because he’s an arch-Christian (my apologies to Christians, who could rightly argue that he’s anything but!). But no matter, it could indeed be that there is malevolence, as there is madness. Seventy dead kids is a pretty strong argument for evil.

As well, there’s the real question—does it matter? Sane / insane—who cares? What does it matter why he did it? Stick him somewhere—anywhere!—and forget about him! Sure, Norway is a rich country—but the rich don’t stay rich by spending foolishly. Like hiring chess players for killers….

No good answers, here. So then the question becomes…

…have we asked the right questions?

*No, dammit, I haven’t checked this fact—no Internet. But it’s something outrageous….