‘A Little Authoritarianism’ Is Dangerous

The other day, the mail brought the meanest-spirited letter I’ve ever received .

My reader had been enraged by a column I’d written on random violence. The column had described how one of my daughters had been beaten with a hammer by a burglar while she was sleeping in our house. I received many letters and phone calls after the piece appeared. All of them were supportive except this one.

The man, whose name I don’t want to use, said I was guilty of “liberal naivete.” He called me “a clown.” He said, “You are responsible for your daughter being beaten, let there be no mistake about that.” The letter went on, single-spaced, for three pages.

I sent him a note. I told him he was the kind of man who hurled insults from the safety of his word processor. If he was able to conduct a conversation in a civil manner, I wrote, he could call me.

I had wondered what kind of a man would write such a letter. I found out when he phoned a few days later. I asked him why he said those things. “To get your attention,” he replied. “It worked.”

I get a lot of letters and phone calls, I said. I try to answer them all. You don’t have to be insulting to get a reply.

*

As we talked, I could see what had set him off.

I had said that when the cops make arrests in cases such as my daughter’s, I didn’t think it eased the pain of victims and families.

Don’t get me wrong. I want criminals punished. I favor the death penalty. They should lock up violent criminals and throw away the key.

But I don’t think it is a contradiction to hold those beliefs and still be puzzled by the families of murder victims who attend every session of the killer’s trial. I’m baffled when I watch them on television afterward saying the conviction gives them satisfaction or closes the book.

They’re wrong. The book never closes. Conviction, or even execution, won’t bring back their murdered child or end their sorrow.

My reader had wrongly taken this to mean that I didn’t care whether the assailant was caught.

There was something else in his letter that troubled me even more--words that pleaded for an answer. It was a section of the letter that represents a growing and dangerous sentiment among people in this crime-ridden society.

“What you should be fighting for, Mr. Boyarsky, is . . . retribution so strong, so intense, so sure and so certain that the violent criminal will be so afraid that if he gets caught, that he’s going to meet a terrible end. That kind of fear could have stopped the person that burglarized your house and almost killed your daughter. That kind of fear is possible. That kind of fear exists in other countries and I’ll tell you something, where it exists the crime rates are virtually zero in comparison to this country.

“OK, there is a little authoritarianism. I think we need that desperately in this country about now so we can take back our country for law-abiding (people) such as yourself and myself.”

*

A little authoritarianism. That was the phrase that caught my attention. A little authoritarianism to counter his fears.

Interestingly, to reinforce this point, he reached back into his memory to the school nuclear-attack drills of the ‘50s and ‘60s. “When I was a child, I dove under a desk every Friday at 10 o’clock,” he said. “For years . . . as long as I could remember, when I would hear a jet airplane overhead, I would sort of flinch a little bit and look up. Always worried we were going to be hit with an ICBM or something. . . . That fear I had as a child from being attacked by a foreign country is a hundred times stronger now from the people that live within the borders of our own country.”

I remember those drills, too, although I never took them as seriously as did my reader. At my junior high school, it was just another excuse to fool around.

I have other recollections of the Cold War days: the San Leandro city librarian who objected to me taking out a book by a left-wing novelist; stories of blacklisted writers and actors; UC security cops photographing students when we went to a Berkeley rally for the Progressive Party presidential candidate.

All of this was provoked by fear--a fear that destroyed constitutional protections and deadened intellectual life.

I’ll tell you something else about fear and how it affects people like my reader. They’re so consumed by it that they assume the administrators of “a little authoritarianism” will share their values.

But what if a kid in my reader’s family is busted by an incompetent cop who won’t believe the white pills are for asthma, prescribed by a doctor. It happens.

Then my reader would be struck by another fear--the fear of unjust arrest and conviction. I don’t imagine this occurred to him, consumed as he was by venomous indignation.