Revenge: A family affair

In the eyes of assorted peaceniks and mass-media oracles, George Bush’s desire to confront Saddam Hussein isn’t primarily about secret weapons, an Al Qaeda connection or the grinding imperatives of Middle East realpolitik. It’s about Daddy.

A Boston Globe columnist recently pondered in print whether the president was “driven by primitive desires of revenge” related to unfinished family business from the Persian Gulf War. Political commentator Kevin Phillips raised a similar question about “a Bush family vendetta” in an op-ed piece in The Times. And Bill Minutaglio, a biographer of George W. Bush, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that although he doesn’t think the president is “sitting in the Oval Office” plotting a war to avenge his father -- “that would be too much like Michael Corleone” -- he does think that President Bush “really views things through the prism of his family and his father.”

Saddam is said to speak frequently of “Bush the Son” being driven to avenge “Bush the Father’s” failure to take him out once and for all in 1991. For the notoriously vindictive Iraqi dictator, the political is usually personal. After all, he tried to assassinate the elder Bush two years later. The Bushes have repaid the sentiment: George H.W. frankly admitted this fall that “I have nothing but hatred in my heart” for Saddam. And at a September gathering in Houston, George W. said, “There’s no doubt he can’t stand us. After all, this is the guy that tried to attack my dad.”

In countries where America is considered the Great Satan, allegations of a Bush-Saddam blood feud ring louder still. “You definitely see it in the media, and it’s often said in a sort of snickering way that ‘oh yeah, Saddam insulted his father,” says Khaled Abou El Fadl, a UCLA professor and expert on Islamic law. “And the more pessimistic types, they even say that ‘see? No matter how much people pretend to be civilized, in their essence they remain barbaric.’ I remember a couple articles I read in Kuwaiti papers and Egyptian papers that made this point.”

Of course, unless you’ve got a good friend working in the West Wing, speculation about whether the president is motivated by revenge is mere psychobabble. But the obsessive quest to settle an old family score isn’t necessarily a crude, Cro-Magnon impulse unworthy of a civilized people, some argue. In fact, the desire to avenge a family grudge may be central to affirming our identities, our place within our families, society and the cosmos at large. Call it score-settling, tit for tat, even-steven, quid pro quo, holy war, or by its high-minded alias, Justice. In its most primal and visceral form, some say, it’s all revenge, however we may rationalize, codify, justify, Nuremberg-ize or otherwise spin it.

And from the Hatfields and McCoys to the Capulets and Montagues, revenge is “all about family,” says Laura Blumenfeld, a Washington Post reporter whose memoir “Revenge: A Story of Hope” (Simon & Schuster, 2002) chronicles her attempt to exact nonviolent revenge on a Palestinian man who shot and wounded her rabbi father a decade earlier.

“Revenge developed to preserve the integrity of the family, because out in the isolation of the desert or in the jungle or in the grasslands, no one could defend himself alone,” Blumenfeld says. “And so revenge ensured survival. It was Darwinian. It’s the ultimate instrument of collective identity in terms of giving everybody in the group an identity. But it also helps preserve the group.”

In aboriginal Siberia, Blumenfeld says, revenge is so embedded in the concept of kinship that the word for kindred families means “a collection of those who take part in blood revenge.” In Albania, she writes, “revenge is not a choice but a sacred duty” tied to family loyalty.

Evolutionary psychologists maintain that revenge is an essential human passion, hard-wired into our DNA. But William Maurer, an associate anthropology professor at UC Irvine, insists that revenge is more of a social construct than a genetic mandate. “People want to believe that we’re still in the Serengeti,” Maurer says. “At the same time, people want to believe that we’re better than that.”

Maurer thinks that modern Western society has trouble channeling its vengeful impulses. The 18th century Enlightenment and the ideals enshrined in the American and French revolutions were supposed to put an end to things like tribal vendettas and rule by petty, inbred monarchies. The revolutionaries were going to replace the paradigm of the clan and the tribal-instigated bloody payback with the idea of objective rule by law and the universal brotherhood of man. Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!

Alas, what America got in the short term was another 100 years of slavery followed by one of the bloodiest wars in history, while the young French republic put thousands to death on the guillotine.

“I think that we’re like ‘Forbidden Planet,’ ” Maurer says, referring to the 1956 sci-fi film classic based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” in which a highly evolved society is undone by its failure to harness its monstrous Id. “We want to think that we’re not a vengeful people, but at the same time we’re fascinated with that base of vengeance inside. And I think the reason is the Enlightenment doesn’t give us anything to do with that.”

In Western culture, the link between revenge, family and self-knowledge is the backbone of such masterpieces as Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle, the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, and Shakespeare’s great tragedies. It also propels epic melodramas like “The Count of Monte Cristo,” prestige hoodlum flicks like “The Godfather” trilogy and Martin Scorsese’s upcoming “Gangs of New York,” and practically every Italian opera.

“Who’s there?” goes the opening line in “Hamlet,” a query that reverberates through the play about a gloomy Danish prince seeking to avenge his father’s poisoning by his stepfather. Only at the end of five long acts, mortally wounded and with most of the court slain at his feet, does Hamlet lay to rest his father’s ghost and fulfill his destiny.

Which isn’t to say that Shakespeare was urging his audiences to try this stuff at home. What “Hamlet” and other Bard works do suggest is that, for better and frequently worse, the sense of responsibility that human beings feel to repay a harm inflicted on a loved one is not easily shirked. The Furies must be placated. The ancestral gods must have their pound of flesh.

But Shakespeare was careful to distinguish among different types of revenge, says Harry Keyishian, an English professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and author of “The Shapes of Revenge: Victimization, Vengeance, and Vindictiveness in Shakespeare” (Humanity Books, 1995). Hamlet’s revenge against his stepfather, the new king Claudius, is a morally justified, unwanted duty that must be carried out to correct a Danish state gone rotten. That’s a far cry from, say, Iago’s malicious, self-serving revenge against Othello, Keyishian says.

The question, perhaps, then becomes whether to follow Hamlet’s example and settle the matter with a bare bodkin -- that’s “blunt weapon” to you -- or search for a less sanguineous alternative. For Blumenfeld, physical violence was never a real option. The attacker, after all, hadn’t killed her father, only injured him. But she wanted the assailant and his family to know, as she confides to a friend in her book, “that you can’t [mess] with the Blumenfelds.” In taking action, she believed, she “wasn’t only avenging my father but reasserting our unity.”

Ultimately Blumenfeld settled on an unusual form of retribution, halfway between Mohandas Gandhi and Genghis Khan. Using her reporter’s credentials but disguising her true identity at first, she sought out and eventually made contact with the assailant, Omar Khatib, who belonged to the Abu Musa gang, a violent PLO faction. Then she ambushed him in dramatic but peaceful fashion. At Khatib’s parole hearing in 1999, Blumenfeld revealed her identity and asked that the prisoner, who had asthma, be granted parole on medical grounds. Her reward, she says, was his acknowledgment of the pain he had caused her father and family, his recognition of her father’s humanity.

Just as there can be more than one motive for taking revenge, Blumenfeld says, there are lots of ways to get even. She’s proud that most Americans responded to the Sept. 11 attacks not simply by baying for Taliban blood, but also by baking cookies for firefighters and attending benefit concerts. This, she thinks, was a very American, “constructive” form of revenge.

“It’s about success and pushing toward the future,” she says, “and building yourself up rather than tearing your enemy down: Living well is the best revenge. As opposed to other places in the world where revenge is sort of slugging it out, back and forth, sinking into the mud of history and the past, America’s about the future.”

It remains to be seen if a second U.S.-Iraq war would play more like a lofty Greek classic or a mud-wrestling match between extended families of nations. Funny thing about revenge: Once the fists start flying, you may discover your enemy has more kinfolk than you thought.