On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (3 page)

A torture bed in the Khmer Rouge prison S21. Seventeen thousand Cambodians lost their lives in this monstrous place. The building is now a memorial museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Photo by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.

The term
monster
is often applied to human beings who have, by their own horrific actions, abdicated their humanity. In
The Fragility of Goodness
Martha Nussbaum makes the Aristotelian argument that our humanity is indeed a fragile mantle, one that can be corrupted by forces internal and external to us.
¹³
Like Hecuba in the Greek tragedy, who finds her child dead, a human being can lose so much that is precious to her, through war or persecution or chance, that she sinks to the level of an animal, or worse. Everyone has the potential to become monstrous.
¹⁴

In Cambodia I walked the dusty dirt roads to the uneventful-looking compound S21. It looked uneventful because before 1975 it was simply known as the Tuol Svay Prey High School. It was converted into Security Prison 21 by Pol Pot’s security forces, and it became the central detention center for suspected enemies of Angkar, the mysterious and authoritative higher organization or party of the Khmer Rouge.
¹⁵
By 1976 approximately twenty-five hundred prisoners had passed through the bloody corridors of S21, and each year that followed saw increased numbers of tortured prisoners, until they totaled around seventeen thousand by 1979, when the Vietnamese Army liberated Phnom Penh. When Vietnamese soldiers stormed S21 they were horrified by the carnage they discovered
there. Only seven survivors were found alive in the compound; no one else who entered S21—not one of the seventeen thousand people—made it out alive.

My guide for the tour was Ladin, a small woman in her thirties with a broad and somewhat sad face. She smiled and gestured for me to walk with her across a small field of dust and burned grass. We were the only people moving through the compound. All the classrooms of this former high school had been converted into prison cells and torture chambers. Iron bars were installed over the windows and doors and barbed wire snaked everywhere. On the ground floor little brick cells had been fabricated to hold one prisoner each, with not even enough space to lie down. Larger rooms held hundreds of prisoners chained together, unable to move— starving, dehydrated, injured from their interrogations, dying.

Ladin led me to one of the torture chambers. The floor was checkered with tile, and the walls were mottled and dirty. A battered bed frame sat in the center of the room; shackles and chains lay on the bed. Underneath the bed was a huge dried stain of blood that had pooled there from countless victims. The room was left just as it was found when S21 finally fell in 1979. The last victim, tortured to death as the Vietnamese were entering Phnom Penh, was discovered here and photographed. The gruesome photo now hangs over the bed. It shows a mangled man lying in this bed before me, his head caved in, his throat slit, blood everywhere, a rooster standing on the body picking at the corpse. I left the room quickly.

The phenomenon of this torture prison is a testament to human depravity, because the vast majority of the men, women, and children who were brought here had done absolutely nothing wrong and were as mystified by their imprisonment as you or I would be if someone dragged us out of bed tonight and charged us with bogus crimes. Hearsay, suspicion, and paranoia led the Khmer Rouge’s Security Office, Central Committee, and Ministry of Defense to descend violently upon innocent farmers, teachers, engineers, students, workers, and whole families, accusing them of being enemies of the revolution.
¹⁶

My guide, Ladin, explained to me that she was ten years old when the Khmer Rouge came to her home, forcibly removed her father and brother, and sent her to work in the fields from sunrise to sunset until she almost starved to death. She never saw her father and brother again and still has no knowledge of their fate. I wondered how she could come to this wretched place day after day and offer tours of events that had shred her own life. Perhaps walking these terrible hallways had some paradoxical therapeutic effect on her. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand any of it.

One aspect of the monster concept seems to be the breakdown of intelligibility. An action or a person or a thing is monstrous when it can’t be processed by our rationality, and also when we cannot readily relate to the emotional range involved. We know what it’s like to hate, for example, but when we designate a monstrous hate, we are acknowledging that it is off our chart. We don’t have to go all the way to Pol Pot’s Cambodia to find modern monsters. Many more are very close to home.

On May 11, 2005, thirty-four-year-old Jerry Hobbs was charged in Lake County, Illinois, with the brutal murder of his eight-year-old daughter, Laura, and her best friend, Krystal Tobias. In a videotaped confession, Hobbs described killing the girls after he argued with his daughter in Beulah Park in Zion, Illinois. Hobbs, who had only recently been released from a Texas jail for an unrelated 2001 aggravated assault (chasing a guy with a chainsaw), believed that his daughter had stolen money from her mother. According to him, Laura was supposed to be grounded, but she had gone to the park to play and Hobbs followed her there. When his daughter argued with him and refused to come home, he said, he attacked her. According to his confession, Laura’s friend produced a small “potato knife” to defend herself, but Hobbs wrestled it away from her and used it to stab the children repeatedly until they were dead.

This story achieved national attention in the spring of 2005, and Hobbs is currently awaiting trial in Lake County. He now claims that his confession was coerced by police and that he is innocent. In addition, many of the facts of his story don’t add up. There doesn’t appear to be physical evidence linking him to the crime, and the defense claims there is some physical evidence linking a different, unnamed person to the crime scene.

The principal investigator for Hobbs’s defense team is my brother, David Asma, one of the investigators for the Lake County Public Defender’s Office. Like dozens of previous grisly crimes, this one ended up on his desk within hours of the formal charge. My first reaction to hearing about the case was to recoil at the very sight of “monster Hobbs,” so dubbed by the strident CNN legal commentator Nancy Grace, but my second reaction was “How can anyone defend this monster?”

The Public Defender’s Office, and in particular my brother’s job, is a gruesome world of mutilated bodies, rape, insanity, arson, guns, drugs, mendacity, and sadism. It is a place where the most monstrous of human behaviors are on display. But my brother’s position is that “monsters” are matters of perception. A person is demonized, according to him, by people who stand to benefit from the derogatory labeling. Monsters are
“constructed” and serve as scapegoats for expedient political agendas. He, and most other public defenders, make a heuristic commitment to the innocence of their clients. My brother assumes that everybody he defends is (at least from 9 to 5) misunderstood. Hobbs’s defense team argued, for example, that his confession was coerced by police who kept him awake and under questioning for an unhealthy stretch of time. The recent spate of death row pardons based on DNA evidence (even when there were confessions) makes this a more reasonable position than it first appears. Whether or not Hobbs committed the murder is something for a jury to decide. But his defenders cannot think of him as a monster if they are to do their jobs effectively. In addition, Dave must emotionally distance himself, for professional reasons, from the murders themselves. “I have looked at photos,” he explains, “of the most grisly murders—sometimes for a whole year straight, everyday—but I cannot look at the victims as little girls or whatever the case may be. I must look at them, study them forensically, as
evidence
.” When I press my brother, he admits that, yes, whoever did kill these little girls is a monster, but
on the job
he must adopt the working hypothesis that the killer is not his client (or in other cases, that his client may have done the deed but has mitigating issues).

It’s worth noting, too, that the nature of most client-council relations would tend to bring the humanity of the accused to the forefront, would tend to de-monster them. The defender always sees another side of the accused than the wider public does. This is not, I suspect, the result of some deep moral mission or heart-of-gold goodwill on the part of the defender, but rather the result of mundane daily interactions and conversations. Over the course of many interviews and meetings, accused criminals and their counsel often end up sharing cigarettes and chatting about everything from recent sports scores to their similar musical tastes. The person you are defending may or may not actually be a monster, but it must be harder and harder to see him as such if you get to know him.
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Of course not all monsters are evil. Dragons in China, for example, are so loved that the Chinese consider themselves to be the “children of the dragon.”
¹⁸
Some monsters start out harmless, but their own nature forces a turn toward malevolence. Mary Shelley’s creature in
Frankenstein
is perhaps the most famous of the gentle-hearted giants gone bad. It is the failure of Victor Frankenstein and society generally to provide a space for him in the human family that turns the creature into a monster. “Shall
each man,” the creature bitterly asks, “find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?”
¹⁹
The creature is so alienated that he cannot even find solidarity with the nonhuman animals. This novel gives us a glimpse into the subjective interior of the monster’s life and gives us a tragic archetype of the misunderstood outcast.

The Golem is a bumbling monster of Jewish folklore. The clay creature was animated by Rabbi Judah Loew to protect the Jewish ghetto but could not be controlled and wreaked havoc in Prague. Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.

Long before
Frankenstein
we had the Jewish version: the bumbling, innocent, but also dangerous Golem of Prague.
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Versions of the legend differ somewhat, but one iteration tells of a giant creature fashioned out of clay by a sixteenth-century rabbi, Judah Loew. At a time when the Jewish ghetto of Prague was regularly under anti-Semitic attacks, Rabbi Loew brought the giant clay sculpture to life by writing the word
emet
(Hebrew for “truth”) on his forehead. The animated monster was to protect the Jewish people from outside aggression. It was strong and powerful, but it was also stupid and followed directions too literally or incorrectly. The Golem began by protecting the Jews, but its clumsy nature eventually led to its
accidentally harming them, sending the community into greater chaos. In the original Golem story the rabbi is able to shut down the bumbling giant and prevent further disaster by erasing the
e
from
emet
to create the Hebrew word for
death
. According to legend, the Golem’s body still lies dormant in the attic of the Altneuschul temple in Prague, awaiting reanimation should the need arise.

In the stories of the Frankenstein creature and the Golem we see another important version of the monster concept: a creature or person who is dangerous to us, but not intentionally so. We might call them “accidental monsters.” They’ve had a significant rebirth in recent science fiction that considers our possible encounter with alien life forms.
²¹

Monster
derives from the Latin word
monstrum
, which in turn derives from the root
monere
(to warn). To be a monster is to be an omen. Sometimes the monster is a display of God’s wrath, a portent of the future, a symbol of moral virtue or vice, or an accident of nature. The monster is more than an odious creature of the imagination; it is a kind of
cultural category
, employed in domains as diverse as religion, biology, literature, and politics.