Doing Odd Things to Get Even: Revenge

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“When I can’t find my shoes, I turn The Holy Mother to the wall.”—Anonymous

“Vengeance belongs to time and the Lord.”—Doris Betts

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—8/8/11—Near the beginning, Yahweh said, “Kill the sinners,” and then dispassionately drowned every human except Noah’s family and, of course, the sinless fish.

A few books later, the deity apparently thinks better of that rash injunction and decrees, “An eye for an eye.”

But that left so many blind beggars that the Son of God was sent with still another revision: “Turn the other cheek.”

This was truly revolutionary, and many demurred. In the former Soviet Republic, Nikita Khrushchev said, “Anyone who slaps us on the cheek will get his head knocked off,” and humanity found itself right back where it started.

Even the Church was conflicted because, for centuries, priests told a battered wife if one cheek is bruised, offer your other cheek to the brute. When Adolf Eichmann was captured, many Jews and Christians wondered whether turning a collective cheek to a mass murderer wouldn’t insult the memory of millions, so he was hanged, cremated, and scattered at sea. Unconflicted, Gandhi favored turning the Indian cheek even to the point of inviting the Nazis in if their expansion reached the subcontinent. Eventually, Gandhi reasoned, the Nazis would tire of killing, but there was never any sign of that.

Watching Steven Spielberg’s film, “Munich,” recently, the story of revenge that followed the murder of eleven Olympic athletes, I began to think of my old culture hero. Surely, Gandhi would not have sent a team of assassins in search of eleven terrorists, especially after Israeli air strikes had already killed 60 Arabs who had nothing to do with the slayings. Gandhi, I believe, would have preferred tactics more like the following:

In 1803, Napoleon sold the Louisiana Purchase to the United States at a bargain price saying, “. . . I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.”

In 1826, James Smithson, a wealthy chemist, willed his fortune to the United States to found a museum in a country he’d never visited, largely because his native England had snubbed him for his illegitimate birth.

In 1864, the Northern Army turned the grounds belonging to Robert E. Lee into Arlington National Cemetery preventing Lee and his family from ever returning to his beloved home overlooking the capital of a nation he’d betrayed.

Fourteen of the 17 US Navy ships sunk by the Japanese in 1941 were raised, repaired, and eventually played a significant role in winning the war in the Pacific.

Fifty years later, the Pentagon decided to use 7.5 tons of steel salvaged from the wreckage of the Twin Towers to build the USS New York, an amphibious transport dock specially designed to fight terrorists.

In 1960, Abdullah al-Tariki helped to create OPEC in part because of the discrimination he encountered at the University of Texas in the 1930s.

Despite the fatwa placed on his head by the Ayatollah Khomeini, Salman Rushdie quietly sent $8,600 to Iran after an earthquake killed 40,000 in 1990.

And having lost several members of his family in the Holocaust, Mel Brooks wrote musical numbers like “Springtime for Hitler” in the belief that laughter and success are the best payback.

None of the eight decisions briefly summarized above directly involved any violence, and they all helped to satisfy the need to do something beyond turning the other cheek, which most of us are incapable of anyway.

Doing the unexpected two millennia after Jesus urged his followers away from the blood vengeance sanctioned in the Old Testament still raises eyebrows and captures the attention of the press. When a gunman killed five Amish children in Pennsylvania in 2006, the world watched in guilty admiration when the Amish community took up a collection for the gunman’s family. Many, such as myself, thought, “That’s a beautiful gesture, but I doubt I’d be capable of it.”

Too many of us are like a former colleague who suspected a student of making a phony excuse to avoid a test. The professor, I’ll call him Stuart, realized he had no recourse but to grant the student a make-up, which he duly scheduled. However, when the student came to take the test, Stuart said he was sorry; he had a conflict and would have to reschedule. This scheduling and cancelling at the last moment went on for over a month. Said Stuart, “I never had any more trouble from him!”

“Well, no,” I thought, “but the semester is over, you have an ulcer, and the kid’s excuse may have been legitimate.”

Another colleague handled a bad situation much better. Dick had pulled into a dead-end parking lot hoping to find a spot closer to the office entrance because his gout had been bothering him. When he found nothing available near the English building, he started backing toward a place he’d seen as he entered the lot. Just as he was starting to turn in, a co-ed zipped into the slot, hopped from her Mustang, and began walking away. Rolling down his window, Dick yelled, “Hey, this is a faculty lot,” but the student shrugged and hustled off to class. The professor then calmly called the campus police, waited until a wrecker had towed the woman’s car to the impound area, and then took his rightful place. Said Dick when it was all over, “I’ve never killed anyone, but I do take pleasure in reading certain obituaries.”

After two African-American men in the 1698^th Engineer Combat Battalion were hanged for raping a pregnant White woman in England in 1944, my father assembled his troops and told them, prior to their departure for France, that no one in his outfit should be seeking revenge on enemy non-combatants. Although he didn’t tell his troops this, Dad felt as I do that the executions were excessive when a suitable prison term would have sufficed. Furthermore, the decision was racist at a time when Whites were generally not executed for sexual assault. To take issue with the Judge Advocate’s decision would have left Dad open to charges of insubordination. He closed the door on this incident over 60 years ago, but there’s still an uncomfortable draft.

I’ve long admired the ways revenge has been taken by “primitive” cultures such as the Anglo-Saxon wergild, the Pacific Northwest potlatch, and the South Pacific Kula rings. I don’t have room to go into detail, but I doubt that they would work in a culture as diverse and far flung as ours.

What does work is passive aggression.

A few years ago, when our Provost announced that students would be able to graduate with only 120 instead of 130 hours, I was disappointed, because several of those hours were coming from English and the last thing Clemson students need is less reading and writing. I’ve long resented authority figures but, this time, my contempt went into overdrive.

I searched my files for a visual expression of what I thought and began posting copies of my favorite in places the Dean and others in our building would see them. Charles Barsotti’ single-panel drawing shows two rabbits and a bespectacled crocodile seated around a conference table. One seat nearest the chairman is conspicuously empty. Says the Crocodile-Provost with two feet on the table, “Any other objections?”

The minimum number of hours remained 120, but I did feel much better.