What are your town's demons? Looking at the people next door

Today, I've been trying to write something about separatist movements, but I keep coming back to the Fritzl case, and then the Ellis case, and then this torrent of wonderings about the people who compose our society; the people we think we know.

I don't know how much coverage the Fritzl case got in the U.S., but they manage to keep it in the Euro headlines every day, and out of some grotesque fascination, I keep following it.

In summary: Josef Fritzl, of the quiet little town of Amstetten, Austria, built an underground dungeon in his home. When his daughter Elisabeth was 18, he forced her down there, where she bore 7 of his children over the years. Some of them were kept down in the dungeon, one died and was incinerated by Fritzl, and others came to live upstairs after being adopted by Fritzl, who "found" them on his doorstep. ... One of the children from the dungeon -- Kerstin, 19 by this time -- was sick, and so Fritzl took her to the hospital, and that's how the 42-year-old Elisabeth came to be freed, too.

Fritzl says he is not a monster:

"When I went into the bunker, I brought flowers for my daughter, and books and toys for the children, and I watched adventure videos with them while Elisabeth was cooking our favourite dish," News magazine quoted him as saying.

"And then we all sat around the table and ate together."

It is the details of this case which are distressing; the details which paint a parody of normal life. From the Guardian:

On the grimy white bathroom tiles are a painted yellow snail with green shell, a purple octopus, a child's drawing of a flower and a fish, and stickers of stars and the sun - all of them things her 'cellar children' had never seen, except on the television, which was on all day.

...

He bought Elisabeth clothes. Sometimes she chose them out of a catalogue. On other occasions he would choose them himself. Friends he holidayed with in Thailand saw him picking out a glittering evening dress and lingerie at a market - clearly much too small for his rotund, ageing wife. When he realised that he had been spotted, he joked about 'having a bit on the side'. Not for one minute did they suspect it could be his daughter.

But it is clear that he wanted Elisabeth, whom he called his Liesl, to dress up and parade around for him in the squalid, miserable cell he forced her to call home. Then, after raping her, he would settle down at the table while she prepared a meal and they would discuss the children's upbringing.

It is these details which make the whole story so twisted; if the circumstances had been farther out-there, they would have belonged in some imaginary land. No, this was entirely planet earth in 2008: the cell with electronically locking doors that was allegedly equipped with poison gas; the mimicry of normal family life.

The people in the community of Amstetten are asking how they didn't notice this was going on for the past 24 years -- not to mention how a person with a rape conviction could legally adopt children, or how building plans for the elaborate dungeon could be approved.

The people of Austria as a nation are engaged in soul-searching, too. Natascha Kampusch made headlines when she was freed from a dungeon after eight years; she had been snatched on her way to school as a girl. From the BBC:

She also suggested Austria's history had played some part in the cases of abuse which had taken place there.

"I think this exists worldwide, but I think it's also a ramification of the Second World War and its connection to education and so on," she said.

"I think it can happen everywhere and it also exists everywhere, not just in Austria."

She went on to explain: "At the time of National Socialism the suppression of women was propagated. An authoritarian education was very important."

What in his environment, in or his society, turned this man sick? From the Belfast Telegraph:

"Josef grew up without a father. His mother raised him with her fists," Mrs R said. "She used to beat him black and blue almost every day. Something must have been broken in him because of that. He was unable to feel any kind of sympathy for other people. He humiliated my sister for most of her life."

Fritzl was born in 1935 and would have been four years old at the start of the Second World War. It was not clear whether he lost his father during the war, but, when the war ended, he would, as a nine-year-old, have experienced first hand the invasion of Austria by the Soviet Red Army in 1945. Reports in the Austrian media have claimed that as a child he "suffered badly" during this post-war occupation which was notorious for the high incidence of rape perpetrated by Russian soldiers on civilian German and Austrian women.

And there were Nazi death camps in Amstetten, "a short stroll" from Fritzl's home, as reported in The Sun.

Austrian academic and social commentator Martin Reiter, 45, says the Fritzl case highlights the “dark underbelly” of Austrian society.

Mr Reiter, who grew up 30 miles from Amstetten, said his countrymen became insular and adopted an “ask no questions” policy after the war. He added: “Austria needs to face up to her demons. When I lived near Amstetten you could sense the paranoia in the air. It was like living in a Hitchcock film.

"No one wanted to know what their neighbours had done in the past, no one wanted to talk about the dark history.”

Our criminals can tell us something about the ills of our societies; they are the agents of our society's ills.

So you don't live in a quiet town with former Nazi death camps. What are your town's demons?

A few days ago I flew into the town where I grew up. As I usually do, I flipped through the pages of the paper which lands on everyone's driveway for free each Thursday: the Columbia Flier. The first story I read was about one of my former classmates, who used to be in my "Gifted and Talented" classes throughout middle and high school: Ex-teacher gets 5 years for sex abuse of student.

Don't you occasionally wonder about those people that you used to do projects with in school when you were forced into "group work", the kids that your friends had crushes on, the names and faces of people who you never really cared about but saw every day, the names and faces that exist somewhere in deep memory? Well, it seems good old Joey Ellis went to college and became a social studies teacher and coach in the same county we went to school in. At the age of 25, he emailed nude photos to a 17-year-old student, sent her sexually explicit text messages, and on one occasion exposed himself to her during an after-school visit in the classroom. After a painful trial, he's got five years in jail -- the district attorney requested that he get nine.

Sick? I would not call this sick (especially when compared to the above case), but I would call it absolutely moronic. If we were talking about a seven-year-old, that would be sick. I don't think Ellis was sexually sick, but I think he was stuck in high school, in some adolescent mentality where a 25-year-old thinks it would be hot to score with a 17-year-old high-school senior. He probably had the fantasies that most men have-- that our culture kind of encourages-- and, with the lack of impulse control of an adolescent, was stupid enough to act on them. This was a lame suburban crime, a produce of the lame suburban society that Joey grew up in.

"The former student victim's statement .. described how the incident has left her unable to trust men and the effect it has had on her and her family, leading her parents to the brink of divorce ... 'I never though I'd be one of those girls with crazy psychological issues, but now I am,' the student said in her statement."

Well, it's a shame. And, controversially, I think it's a shame he'll have to spend five years in jail for it. I definitely believe the guy deserves some kind of repercussions that might make him less moronic, but is he going to be a better person after five years in the U.S. jail system? No, he'll likely be much more fucked up after that experience, and maybe even genuinely sick, maybe even a genuine menace to society. The crime is so born of suburban America and the reaction to it is so typically suburban-American; it all gives me a headache.

What would I suggest for Fritzl, for Ellis, for all of us? I don't suggest that we all go around wondering who the normal people next door are, afraid. If we want to live in healthy societies, we should be trying to learn from our criminals, instead of treating them as sick aberrations and objects of curiosity. They might have clues to what is wrong with us as a whole, and instead of sequestering them and "punishing" them, we should be trying to help them understand themselves and heal. Putting people in prison is not going to cure anything; it's treating the symptoms instead of the causes. Imprison only those who are truly a danger, but help them; in doing so, we all will be helped.