Evil in both fact and fiction

Buck v. Bell was the landmark Supreme Court case a century ago that legalized sterilizing the “feebleminded,” with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sneering that “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” In IMBECILES: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, Adam Cohen shows what a monstrous miscarriage of justice this was.

Carrie Buck was a perfectly normal woman (not that it would be okay to sterilize her if she had been mentally handicapped) whose foster parents sent her to a colony for the feebleminded and epileptic (RFK Jr.’s talk of shipping people out to farms has a long tradition) because she was oversexed and had a kid out of wedlock (mental disability=uncontrollable sex drive is a stereotype of long standing). In reality one of their relatives raped her and they wanted to avoid scandals. The eugenics movement was losing steam and so various officials hit on the idea of a court case that would set a precedent, and picked Buck. In a kangaroo court hearing they presented her as one in a chain of low-IQ individuals without even testing her daughter or telling Buck what was at stake.

The result is an impressively awful account of the authorities failing the most vulnerable. It also shows Holmes was a generally horrible justice and person who wrote to a friend once about how nauseated he felt at people saying we should feel compassion and sympathy for the weak.

TheMy Genre Book Club’s October pick was Thriller/Horror which led me to reread USHER’S PASSING by Robert MacCammon, which opens with one of the “real” Ushers confronting Edgar Allan Poe over turning rumors he’d heard about the family and the Usher Malady into fiction. Fast-forward to now (i.e., 1984) when angsty, frustrated writer Rix Usher returns to the munitions-manufacturing family’s North Carolina estate where his father lies dying of the Malady (it gets them all eventually). What follows is a Southern Gothic with a helping of Tennessee Williams — the family includes a mom clinging to old-school proprieties, junkie daughter, wimpy Rix, drunken jock brother and sexually frustrated wife. Mixed in with it all we have a strange mutant panther stalking the nearby woods, telekinetic poor whites, the murderous Pumpkin Man — and what is the horror in the unused building on the estate?

This was a lot of fun but the last 20 percent starts to get way overstuffed as MacCammon keeps throwing stuff in — an Usher doomsday weapon they’re about to put on the market gets squeezed in and treated as a B-plot (or maybe a C-plot). Still, I enjoyed rereading it.

I reread C.S. Lewis’ THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS after reading Dr. Laura Robinson’s critique of why Lewis’ story works when imitators fall flat — and she’s spot on.

The story concerns the eponymous Screwtape, a demon bureaucrat instructing his nephew Wormwood in how to tempt and corrupt Wormwood’s human “patient.” Screwtape understands much about human weakness though he’s baffled by love and decency; the number one rule of the universe is to look out for number one and nobody else so how can “the Enemy” possibly care about humans? What’s his real game?

As Robinson says, one of the reasons the book works is that it focuses so much on human weakness. It doesn’t matter which church the patient goes to; it might matter a great deal that they’re contemptuous of other churches, or that Wormwood convinces the patient to look down his nose at his fellow parishioners. It doesn’t matter what the patient reads; it’s very bad that he reads for pleasure rather than, say, to impress his friends or because all the cool kids are reading it. Genuine pleasure is a thing of the Enemy and should be fought at all times, like serious thought or moral questioning. The Enemy wants people thinking whether a course of action is good and attainable; better for Hell that they ask “Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time?” (which seems to be how the sensible centrists roll).

This stuff is timeless in a way that specific Thou Shalts and Thou Shalts Nots wouldn’t have been. As witness when Lewis does get away from that — discussing the nature of marriage, for instance — I find myself in disagreement (in fairness our concept of a good marriage has changed a lot in 85 years). The later essay includec with this book, Screwtape Proposes a Toast drives that home by falling flat on its face. In this follow-up Screwtape gives a long toast at an infernal banquet that boils down to What’s Wrong With Kids These Days. Even though the complaints are timeless — 50 years later, Screwtape would have been whining about participation trophies — the essay isn’t. And it’s only intermittently funny.

The original remains brilliant.

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