Bring down the devil

It would appear the man is mad. Time spent down a hole with mice and almost a million dollars presumably isn't stabilizing, of course. But probably he was like this before.

It's a classic problem in moral psychology. Take the following remarks by Chalabi. Do you take the final sentence as evidence for the truth of the first two, or as a reductio on them?

Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, said: "He was quite lucid. He had command of his faculties. He would not apologize to the Iraqi people. He did not deny any of the crimes he was confronted with having done. He tried to justify them."

Has any villain, in the history of the political world, ever done the Shakespearean/super-villian thing and just said: I did it because I am a villain. Villains like doing evil.

Here is the most over-the-top villain-at-bay speech in all of Shakespeare. Coming from the man who brought you Richard III and Iago, that is saying something. The speech is from Titus Andronicus, a preposterous play. But it would hardly be enough to get Saddam started, would it, if he decided to take this sort of line? So I suppose: delusional justifications it will be.

LUCIUS Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

AARON
Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day - and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,-
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

Comments

[red]

Excellently said. "I did it because I am a villain."

[bryan]

I believe Ted Bundy talked in a similar vein.

[bryan]

"It would appear the man is mad. Time spent down a hole with mice and almost a million dollars presumably isn't stabilizing, of course"

listen buddy, I don't think the love life of Walt Disney should be any concern of yours.

[Ophelia Benson]

"listen buddy, I don't think the love life of Walt Disney should be any concern of yours."

Very good.

There are quite a few tragedies of the same period as Titus (early '90s, possibly late '80s) where the villains talk like that. The Spanish Tragedy, The Jew of Malta. Probably the ur-Hamlet was like that. And the Duchess of Malfi almost went back to that style, though not quite. I think there was a heavy Seneca-influence at that time, which wore away as they had more practice (real, urban, theatrical drama was new in the late '80s) and got more sophisticated and artful. I wonder to what extent Seneca based characters like that on the writing of Tacitus and Suetonius. Caligula and Nero were that kind of self-relishing villain, in the portrayals of them by the highly partial later generation.