David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

“I mean ideology in the Marxist sense. The way in which culture produces the illusion of normative reality. Social discourse tells us what’s real, and our perception of reality depends as much on that discourse as it does on our senses. Sometimes even more. You have to understand that we’re all peering at the world through a gauze, a haze, a filter- and that filter is ideology. We see not what’s there, but what we’re supposed to believe is there. Ideology makes some things invisible and makes some things that aren’t there seem like they’re visible. It’s true not just of political discourse, but of everything. Like stories. Why do stories always have to have a love component? It seems natural, right? But it’s only natural because we think it is. Or fashion. Ideology is why people in one era might think their clothes look normal and neutral, but twenty years later they’re absurd. One minute striped jeans are cool, the next they’re a joke.”

“So, you’re above all that?” I asked.

“The striped jeans? Yes. But for the most part, I’m bound up in ideology the same as everyone else. Yet knowing that it’s there grants us some small power over ideology, and if you squint, you can see a little more clearly than most. That’s really the best you can hope for. Because we’re all the products of ideology, none of us, even the smartest and the most aware, most revolutionary, can escape it- but we can try. We have to always try. And maybe you can try, too, so when I see you squinting, I’ll tell you.”

“That sounds like an awful lot of crap to me.” I wished I could take it back the minute I said it.

“Look, I know it’s bogus to just leave you in the dark, so let me ask you a question. I don’t think you’ll be able to answer it right now, but when you can, I’ll know that you are able to see past our cultural blinders. Then I’ll be able to tell you why I did what I did. Okay?… Good. Now, prisons have been around for many centuries, right?”

“Is that your question?”

“No, there’ll be a whole bunch of little questions. They’ll be leading up to the big question. I’ll tell you when we get there. So, prisons, right? Why do we send criminals to prisons?”

I peered out the window into the darkness. Dark houses, dark streets rolling by in the middle of the night. People quietly sleeping, watching TV, having sex, eating late night snacks. I sat in a car talking about prisons with a crazy man. “For doing things like killing people in their mobile homes?” I ventured. It was like the grammar lesson in the convenience store. I needed to learn to shut up.

“You’re a funny guy, Lemuel. We send them to prisons to punish them, right? But why? Why that punishment?”

“What else do you want to do with them?”

“Hell, you could do lots of stuff. Let’s say someone is a housebreaker, slips into homes, takes jewelry, money, whatever. Doesn’t hurt anyone, but just takes stuff. There are lots of ways to deal with him. You could kill him, you could cut off his hands, you could make him wear special clothes or give him a special tattoo, you could make him do community service, you could provide him with counseling or religious training. You could look at his background and decide he needs more education. You could exile him. You could send him to study with Tibetan monks. Why do we use prisons?”

“I don’t know. That’s what we use.”

Melford took a hand off the steering wheel for a moment so he could point at me. “Correct. Because that’s what we use. Ideology, my friend. From the moment of birth, we are trained to see things a certain way, and that way seems natural and inevitable, not worth questioning. We look at the world and we think we see the truth, but what we see is what we are supposed to see. We turn on the television and happy people are eating at Burger King or drinking Coke, and it makes perfect sense to us that burgers and Coke are the path to happiness.”

“That’s just advertising,” I said.

“But advertising is part of the social discourse, and it shapes our minds, our identities, as much as- if not more so than- anything our parents or schools teach us. Ideology is more than a series of cultural assumptions. It makes us subjects, Lemuel. We are subject to it, so that we serve culture rather than culture serving us. We see ourselves as autonomous and free, but the limits of our freedom have always already been delineated by the ideology that provides the border of our tunnel vision.”

“And who controls the ideology? The Freemasons?”

He smirked at me. “I love conspiracy theories. The Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Jesuits, the Jews, the Bilderberg Group, and my personal favorite: the Council on Foreign Relations. Great stuff. But where these conspiracy theorists go wrong is that they see the result as evidence of schemers. To them, because there’s a conspiracy, there must be conspirators.”

“And that’s wrong?”

“Dead wrong. The machinery of cultural ideology is on autopilot, Lemuel. It is a force- like a boulder going down a hill. It is going somewhere, picking up speed, and damn close to unstoppable, but there is no intelligence behind the boulder. It is beholden to physical laws, not its own will.”

“What about the rich guys in smoke-filled rooms who plot to make us eat more fast food and drink more sodas?”

“They’re not driving the boulder. They’re being crushed by it, just like the rest of us.”

I took a polite moment to consider this idea, and then I moved on. “This isn’t helping me with the prison question.”

“It’s pretty basic, really. Because of our ideology, sending criminals to prison strikes us as inevitable. Not as a choice, one option of many, but as the thing. Now, let’s go back to our hypothetical housebreaker. What is supposed to happen to him in prison?”

I shook my head and smiled at the absurdity of it all, playing this peripatetic game with a killer. And it was absurd, but the thing was, I enjoyed it. For the few seconds that I could forget who Melford Kean really was, what I had seen him do earlier that evening, I enjoyed talking to him. Melford held himself as if he were important, as if he knew things, really knew them, and this whole business with prisons might not make sense, but I felt sure it would lead to something, and to something interesting, too.

“I guess he’s supposed to consider his crimes and feel miserable about his imprisonment so that when he gets out he won’t do it again.”

“Okay, sure. Punishment. Go to your room for talking fresh. Next time you want to talk fresh, you won’t since you know what’ll happen to you. Punishment, yes, but also punishment as rehabilitation. Take a criminal and turn him into a productive citizen. So, when you take a housebreaker and you send him to jail, what do you think happens to him? What does he learn?”

“Well, I guess in reality he doesn’t really rehabilitate. I mean, it’s pretty common knowledge that if you send a housebreaker to prison, he comes back an armed robber or a murderer or a rapist or something.”

Melford nodded. “Okay, so criminals go to prison and learn how to become better criminals. Does that sound about right?”

“Yeah.”

“You think President Reagan knows that?”

“Probably.”

“What about our senators and representatives and governors? They know?”

“I guess. How could they not?”

“Wardens? Prison guards? Policemen?”

“They probably know better than most.”

“Okay, are you ready for the big question? Everybody knows that prisons don’t work to rehabilitate. If, in fact, we know they do just the opposite, which is to say they turn minor criminals into major ones, why do we have them? Why do we send our social outcasts to criminal academies? There’s your question. When you can answer it, and you know the answer is right, I’ll tell you why I had to do what I did.”