Vengeance

Mike Tyson's ear-biting may have been provoked by just plain meanness, but to speak of the ''dissolution of the veneer of civilization'' is a bit much (Op-Ed, July 3). Civilizations have uniformly been subject to violence -- with or without veneer.
Contrary to Joyce Carol Oates's assertions, biting an opponent's ears violated not a ''taboo,'' but a rule. Winning within the rules is what distinguishes boxing at its best, two individuals fighting for one prize, from mere thuggery -- one individual aiming to destroy another for vengeance or evil intent.



Vengeance for Polly

There were all sorts of small things that drew public attention to the killing of Polly Klaas. Her quiet, suburban hometown of Petaluma, Calif., had been seen in the movie ''American Graffiti.'' The actress Winona Ryder had grown up there, too, and joined in the search after Polly was taken at knifepoint from a slumber party at her home. And there was always the shy, innocent smile of a 12-year-old girl that kept connecting to people for weeks after she was kidnapped in October 1993 and for months after her body was found. When jurors decided the fate of Polly's confessed killer last week, they, too, seemed to have had that photographed smile in mind.

A defense lawyer described Richard Allen Davis as a troubled man who had done horrible things but ought to be spared because he had himself been mistreated as a child. But after several days of debate, the jurors in San Jose decided a death sentence was ''the proper thing,'' their foreman said. Polly's death and Mr. Davis's criminal past helped bring California's tough ''three strikes'' sentencing law into being in 1994. But holding a large photograph of his daughter's smiling face, Marc Klaas chose to remind people after the verdict of what would not change, even with Mr. Davis's eventual execution. TIM GOLDEN

Re ''What Clinton Can Do'' (column, Dec. 18): Many of those who advocate President Clinton's resignation often cite moral reasons. But there is a compelling argument against his resignation. The President's predicament has resulted from a long campaign of political vengeance that becomes more fervent with each passing day. Were he to resign, that vengeance would would turn on others, unleashing a two-year interregnum of partisanship that could cripple the democratic process.

Kosovar Vengeance Has Roots in West

Published: August 07, 1999

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To the Editor:

Re ''Kosovo's Costly Disorder'' (editorial, Aug. 6):

Vengeance may be a natural outcome of a decade of oppression, imprisonment and torture of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs, followed by two months of rape, slaughter and ethnic cleansing. But it is also an outcome of Western indifference to the events of the decade since the annulment of Kosovo's self-rule and the West's inaction during the two months of atrocities while war criminals in the Serbian military fled unpunished to Serbia. Most crucially, the West allowed Serbia to maintain sovereignty over Kosovo.

How do we expect people to behave after watching their tormentors walk free? How do we expect them to behave toward a minority they view as a source of past horrors as well as future threats?

George Rivero, the silver-haired star of ''Fistfighter,'' looks far too mature for the role of a man who can whip to a quivering pulp anything that stands in his way. As C. J. Thunderbird, a muscle-bound drifter who sets out to avenge the death of a boxer friend, he creams several fighting machines that are younger, meaner and hulkier than he is.

In fulfilling his mission, C. J. journeys from Arizona to a South American town where barehanded boxing seems to be the only thing happening and where the evil local overlord is a crooked fight promoter. Thrown into prison, C. J. endures slave labor on a chain gang and solitary confinement in a metal box without a murmur of complaint. And in the sweatiest sequence of a movie drenched in perspiration and blood, he overcomes a savage giant who breaks people's limbs as though they were toothpicks.

''Fistfighter,'' which opens today at the Criterion and other theaters, doesn't even offer the visceral charge of good fight sequences. The appearance of gore is the only thing suggesting that all the flurries of thrown punches (with crudely overdubbed thuds and smacks) might be landing on something. Throughout the movie, the monosyllabic star, who when photographed from certain angles bears an odd resemblance to Keith Richards, maintains the same fixed expression - the self-satisfied glare of an invincible comic-book hero. Pow! Zap! Bam! FISTFIGHTER, directed by Frank Zuniga; written by Max Bloom, from a story by Carlos Vasallo; director of photography, Hans Burman; edited by Drake Silliman; music by Emilio Kauderer; produced by Mr. Vasallo; released by Taurus Entertainment. At Criterion, Broadway and 45th Street, and other theaters. Running time: 96 minutes. This film is rated R. C. J. Thunderbird ... George Rivero Billy Vance ... Mike Connors Harry (Punchy) Moses ... Edward Albert Ellen ... Brenda Bakke

The United States Supreme Court has done more than overturn recent precedent (editorial, June 30) by ruling that relatives of victims of capital offenses may testify to influence sentencing: the Court has legitimized vengeance as a purpose, rather than as a consequence, of criminal justice.

The enormity of this atavistic pronouncement may escape most Americans familiar with the description of our public morality as the product of a Judeo-Christian ethic. The alternatives seem stark: forgive the offender or exact an eye for an eye.

There is a third course, traceable to our legacy of self-government from ancient Greece. Aristotle taught that justice is reason without passion. More than a century earlier, Aeschylus presented the ultimate civilized truth in the "Oresteia": justice is not vengeance, but a process that serves the ends of society.

The problem with vengeance is that it creates the expectation of satisfaction where there can be none. No measure of retribution can compensate for the worst crimes that beset our country. All of the cruelty of history, from the devices of the Middle Ages to the "death of a thousand cuts" in imperial China, could not repay the grief of a single family that has lost a loved one to violence.

Re ''Volpe's Father Says Warlike Stress Led to Violent Outburst'' (news article, June 2): Robert Volpe says that his son ''just lost it'' because of the warlike conditions he faced as a police officer on the street the night he tortured Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant. Many people ''just lose it'' in the face of the stresses of life these days. We have a name for such people: we call them criminals, and recently we have been locking them up for increasingly long periods of time.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines vengeance as "punishment inflicted in retaliation for an injury or offense." Many people going through a divorce are seeking vengeance. They feel like they have been wronged. They feel like they have suffered injury as a result of a spouse's conduct. They believe that their spouse deserves to be severely punished through the legal system in a divorce.

The situations in which people believe they are entitled to vengeance or retribution are numerous. In some cases, there has been an actual physical injury for which a party deserves compensation. In other cases, there have been injuries of the psyche as a result of a spouse's conduct. In some cases, people believe that they are entitled to retribution simply because their spouse is asking for a divorce.

People want vengeance because their spouse had an affair; because their spouse drank too much; because their spouse spent all of his/her spare time hunting or fishing; because he/she took care of his/her spouse when he/she was sick, because he/she feels like he/she gave up his/her career; etc.

In these cases, is a person likely to be successful seeking vengeance and retribution through the legal system? Probably not. Instead, a tremendous amount of money will be spent on attorney's fees, and a great deal of emotional energy will be wasted all without merit in the end.

The vast majority of people that are going through a divorce have suffered some degree of emotional stress. The reason they are seeking a divorce is to bring an end to the pain. The courts see these cases from a different perspective -- the courts are primarily concerned with how to end the pain, divide the property, and provide for the children in the future. If the courts punish one or both parents, it will only hurt the children in the end. Furthermore, the courts do not view the facts as all one-sided -- they frequently see that there are two sides to a situation, and feel that the person seeking vengeance is not being fair to the other party.

From an attorney's standpoint it is quite easy to convince most clients to head down the course of seeking vengeance or retribution. Here is an example: Ms. Jones comes in, is 37 years of age, hasn't worked in five years, has a one-year-old child, and has just found out her husband has had an affair with a colleague at work. It is very easy to phrase the questions along the following lines:

Ms. Jones, your husband really hurt you by having an affair with a co-worker, didn't he?

Answer: Yes, very much.

Ms. Jones, your husband was really wrong to have an affair with a co-worker. Wasn't he?

Answer: Yes.

Ms. Jones, you must feel really bad to find out that the person you married, that you loved, that you made a baby with, is having an affair with another woman?

Answer: I just feel horrible.

Ms. Jones, you must really feel insecure now knowing that you must raise a one-year-old baby and knowing that the baby's father has been having an affair with another woman?

Answer: I feel so bad for my poor child. My poor child just doesn't deserve this.

Your husband really ought to pay for the wrong that he has done to you and your child through this affair.

Answer: Yes, he should.

ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGY about vengeance killings among the clans of the New Guinea Highlands. Tells of a highlander whose uncle was killed in a battle against a neighboring clan and to whom responsibility for arranging revenge fell. 

The Papua New Guinea Highlands have been of interest to anthropologists since the 1930s, when the Australians and the Dutch discovered tribespeople living in the Highlands. Describes the origins of a particular clan war. Explains nature of a “public fight,” which is fought in the open between large groups of warriors separated by a considerable distance. It’s often impossible to tell who’s responsible for a kill.

For that reason, the target of revenge is not the actually killer but the organizer, or “owner,” of the fight. The highlander explained that people in his clan are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. His first attempt at revenge was a failure, so he hired men from other villages as allies for his next attempt. Mentions intermarriage between enemy clans.

In a battle, each warrior faces dozens or hundreds of enemy warriors, many of whom he’s related to, and some of whom he’s not permitted to kill. The highlander stressed the clear thinking necessary for fighting well. Eventually, a battle arranged by him succeeded in achieving revenge against the man held responsible for his uncle’s death. The highlander was unapologetic and enthusiastic about this outcome, although he himself was now, of course, a target for revenge. Fortunately for him, several years later a shift in clan enmities and alliances ended the whole cycle of revenge killings and united both clans against a common enemy, a neighboring tribe.

The highlander said, “I admit that the New Guinea Highland way to solve the problem posed by a killing isn’t good…we are always in effect living on the battlefield.” Nearly all human societies today have given up the personal pursuit of justice in favor of impersonal systems operated by state governments. Without state government, war between local groups is chronic. Explains the origin of state governments. The writer describes the experiences of his late father-in-law, Jozef, who passed up the opportunity for vengeance and lived to regret it.

Jozef was a Polish Jew who was captured by the Soviets in 1939 and sent to a Siberian camp before becoming an officer in a Polish division of the Red Army. In the summer of 1945, he led an armed platoon to Klaj, Poland, to discover what had happened to his mother, his sister, and his niece. There he learned that an armed gang had shot them, but when he was face-to-face with the man who led the gang, he hesitated to shoot. Instead, he delivered him to the police, who investigated the crime and then, after about a year, released the murderer. Until his death, Jozef remained tormented by regret at his failure to take vengeance.

We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. The writer’s conversations in Papua New Guinea made him understand what humans have given up by leaving justice to the state.

Wendy Kroy (not her real name) is an executive assistant at a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. She is also author of the blog “Sand Hill Slave.” (Sand Hill is a road in Menlo Park, Calif., that is home to the largest concentration of venture capital firms in the world.) Kroy’s boss tends to read his e-mail and talk on the phone at the same time. On many occasions, this multitasking has led him to open email attachments with viruses, which wreck his computer. He then pesters Kroy to fix his computer.

Fed up with her boss’s thoughtlessness, Kroy recently decided to get revenge. “I subscribed his work e-mail address to multiple porn sites,” she writes in an e-mail. “I bookmarked several bestiality sites on his computer at work as well.” Embarrassed by the influx of pornographic spam, Kroy’s boss ferried his computer to the IT department himself, rather than asking her to do it for him.

Workplace revenge is common, but it need not be, reports a recent article in the Journal of Applied Psychology (vol. 91, no. 3). When workplaces have fair and just procedures, wronged employees are less likely to exact revenge and more likely to offer forgiveness and reconciliation, says lead author Karl Aquino of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia. The article’s other authors were Thomas M. Tripp of Washington State University Vancouver and Robert J. Bies of Georgetown University.

To explore how employees’ perceptions of organizational justice affect their reactions to offenses, the authors first asked 257 public utility employees to retell their tales of workplace woe. These employees also rated the fairness of their employers’ policies for evaluating, promoting, paying, disciplining, and terminating employees. The results were clear: When worker bees felt that their place of business was not just, they were more likely to sting when upset. The authors found similar results in an experiment involving 148 MBA students.

As the name of her blog indicates, Kroy finds her workplace quite unjust. “The partners think they are gods. … They definitely don’t follow the ‘Golden Rule’ on how to treat people,” she writes. And unlike many companies, “VC firms tend to stay small, and more often than not the HR function is delegated to an office manager who is not very qualified or is very power hungry and wants things his or her way,” she adds.

Aquino suggests several steps that Kroy’s boss and other leaders can follow to avoid their employees’ wrath. The first is to be more forgiving and conciliatory themselves. “People hardly ever talk about forgiveness and reconciliation in business school,” he notes. “They like the ideas, but they don’t understand [these ideas’] place in organizations where they’re striving to succeed.” But anger and undercutting are debilitating both to individuals and to organizations. By modeling forgiveness and reconciliation, leaders set the tone for a more peaceful and harmonious workplace.

A second step toward a vendettafree workplace is to make sure that procedures are fair and fairly enforced. “When people believe that laws are enacted fairly, they are less likely to take the law into their own hands,” says Aquino. “It’s when you live in places with corrupt police that you get the Mafia.”