Blank State by The Blank Slate

Author:The Blank Slate [Slate, The Blank]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-05-16T00:22:59+00:00

competitively disadvantaged in society and find themselves at home in a group of other antisocial peers.

The possibility that some individuals are born with a weak conscience runs squarely against the doctrine of the Noble

Savage. It calls to mind the old-fashioned notions of born criminals and bad seeds, and it was blotted out by

twentieth-century intellectuals and replaced with the belief that all wrongdoers are victims of poverty or bad

parenting. In the late 1970s Norman Mailer received a letter from a prisoner named Jack Henry Abbott, who had

spent most of his life behind bars for crimes ranging from passing bad checks to killing a fellow prisoner. Mailer was

writing a book about the murderer Gary Gilmore, and Abbott offered to help him get into the mindset of a killer by

sharing his prison diaries and his radical critique of the criminal justice system. Mailer was dazzled by Abbott's prose

and proclaimed him to be a brilliant new writer and thinker — “an intellectual, a radical, a potential leader, a man

obsessed with a vision of more elevated human relations in a better world that revolution could forge.” He arranged

for Abbott's letters to be published {262} in the New York Review of Books and then as a 1980 book, In the Belly of the Beast. Here is an excerpt, in which Abbott describes what it is like to stab someone to death:

You can feel his life trembling through the knife in your hand. It almost overcomes you, the gentleness

of the feeling at the center of a coarse act of murder.... You go to the floor with him to finish him. It is

like cutting hot butter, no resistance at all. They always whisper one thing at the end: “Please.” You get

the odd impression he is not imploring you not to harm him, but to do it right.

Over the objections of prison psychiatrists who saw that Abbott had psychopath written all over his face, Mailer and

other New York literati helped him win an early parole. Abbott was soon feted at literary dinners, likened to

Solzhenitsyn and Jacobo Timerman, and interviewed on Good Morning America and in People magazine. Two

weeks later he got into an argument with an aspiring young playwright who was working as a waiter in a restaurant

and had asked Abbott not to use the employees’ restroom. Abbott asked him to step outside, stabbed him in the chest,

and left him to bleed to death on the sidewalk. 73

Psychopaths can be clever and charming, and Mailer was only the latest in a series of intellectuals from all over the

political spectrum who were conned in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1973 William F. Buckley helped win the early release

of Edgar Smith, a man who had been convicted of molesting a fifteen-year-old cheerleader and crushing her head

with a rock. Smith won his freedom in exchange for confessing to the crime, and then, as Buckley was interviewing

him on his national television program, he recanted the confession. Three years later he was arrested for beating

another young woman with a rock, and he is now serving a life sentence for attempted murder.

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