FOR SOME reason, my Geography master at the grammar school incited the wrath of the person I sat next to in class. It was something to do with “Pedro”, as he was known, being teased about his red hair, glasses and lack of fitness on the field trip to Dartmoor.
To my shame I was an accomplice to a crime. I was told to extract a strand of Sir’s hair from a dirty on comb he kept on his desk. It still plagues my conscience that I did this, I think for some reason I was curious what the demonic Pedro intended to do with it. Pedro was known to be into the “dark arts” and I was deeply sceptical of his ability.
The hair, of course, was to be used in a plasticine voodoo figure, which was ritually stuck with pins. I was not at this ceremony, already feeling queasy about my role in satanic rituals, but the following week our master was indeed off work sick and Pedro’s reputation became unassailable.
I never really believed that the voodoo had worked. I always believed it much more likely caused by the flu bug decimating the staff room, but nevertheless it raised the worrying issue of revenge, wishing someone ill: that Iago-quality born of jealousy and feeling wronged. As Shakespeare wrote in the Merchant of Venice “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
Last month, a 47 yr old British woman, admitted that she had put dog poo in a curry she cooked for her husband, believing he was having an affair. When I told this to friends here they laughed, which made me realise that for some people revenge has become fashionable.
This is the lighter end of the scale but it seems revenge in all its forms is on the increase again. Revenge killings, revenge attacks, revenge takeover bids, revenge animal liberationists, revenge against society, revenge against whole nations and I find it scary. Not least because in today’s hi-tech, internet society there are so many ways that one can hack into people’s lives to hurt them, but also because much revenge is born of hate and a lack of engagement.
So it is in the US with high school massacres. How can it happen they ask? Anyone who has seen Natural Born Killers will know. It happens when revenge justifies behaviour. The same may apply for the planning of a terrorist attack or being a suicide bomber. The act is seen as defendable because its perpetrator believes himself victimised and often powerless. That cocktail of emotions from anger to fear, hurt to envy, self-righteousness to the moral justification of “eye-for-an-eye” fuels revenge.
I can never understand why people find it so difficult to understand how these things happen.
Each day in our own, small ways we use the same tactics: how many of us have never been hurt by a colleague, lover or family member and taken our revenge by refusing to talk to them, or shouting at them, or running them down to others? Not many.
We are all capable of revenge; it’s probably the least noble of all human behaviour because it is calculated to cause pain. Its only reward the pleasure in people suffering.
Getting even, payback, the antipathy of the Christian turn the other cheek, is becoming a norm. Whole websites like payback.com exists on ways to wreak vengeance. “Don’t get mad; get even”.
Working this week in Naples, perhaps, nowhere is the fear of revenge used so powerfully as social control. The camorra, people whisper sotto voce. As if even the hearing of the word might unleash the forces of retaliation. Nope, revenge is not sweet, it’s as bitter as hell. And if anyone with red hair asks for a lock of mine, tell him he was always my favourite classmate.
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