My computer happened to be displaying the lesson plan for that afternoon’s moral-psych class, in which I was planning to cite the study of Princeton seminary students who, while rushing to give a presentation on the parable of the Good Samaritan, passed by a man slumped over in an alleyway, ignoring him because they were in a hurry.
Practice what you teach, I always say. “All right. Count me in.”
Shortly after I came off the Jetway into the international terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, I went into a little shop to buy a bottle of Coke Zero—here, in Atlanta, headquarters of Coca-Cola, there was no sign of Pepsi anywhere. Without thinking, I handed the woman at the cash register a Canadian five.
“What’s this?” she said, taking it.
“Oh! Sorry.” I dug into my wallet—I always have to carefully look at US bills to make sure of the denomination, since they’re all the same color—and found one with Abe Lincoln’s face on it.
There was no one else waiting to buy anything, and the woman seemed intrigued by the blue polymer banknote I’d handed her. After examining it carefully, she looked up at me, and said, “There’s no mention of God. Ain’t you a God-fearing country up there?”
“Um, well, ah, we believe in the separation of church and state.”
She handed the bill back to me. “Honey,” she said, “there ain’t no such thing.” She frowned, as if recalling something. “Y’all are socialists up there, right?”
Actually, until recently, Canada had had a much more conservative leader than the United States did. When Stephen Harper came to office in 2006, George W. Bush had been in the White House and, to liberal Canadian sensibilities—the kind found on university campuses—he seemed the lesser of two evils. But once Barack Obama was elected, Canada had by far the more right-wing leader. Harper managed to hold on to power for almost a decade, but Canada was now ruled by a minority coalition between the Liberal Party and the socialist New Democratic Party.
“Kind of,” I said, although I suspected her understanding of the term “socialism” was different from mine. I handed her the American five, got my Canadian bill back plus my change, and took my pop, or soda, or whatever it was here.
This was my first time flying in the States since Quinton Carroway had been sworn in as president, and I was surprised to hear that the constant warnings about terrorist threats over the public-address system were back; they’d disappeared under Obama but had returned with a vengeance. The old wording had invariably been, “The Homeland Security threat level is orange”—which was only semi-effective propaganda because you had to have memorized the code to know that orange was the new black—the thing white folk were supposed to fear most—being one step shy of an imminent attack. The new message, which played every three minutes or so, was much more direct, and, unless I missed my guess, the voice was the president’s own distinctive baritone: “Be on guard! A terrorist attack can occur at any time.”
And speaking of propaganda, despite Atlanta also being home to CNN, Fox News was on the big-screen TV hanging down like a steam-shovel scoop from the ceiling as I arrived at baggage claim. Orwell had been right that mind-controlling messages would be pumped twenty-four hours a day through telescreens, and he’d have recognized the ones in the airport with no way to turn them off. What would have astounded him is that many millions of people would voluntarily tune into them in their own homes, often for hours on end.
I recognized Megyn Kelly although I usually only saw her in unflattering clips on The Daily Show. “Look,” she said, “it is a fact that this guy was in our country illegally.”
“And for that he should have died?” said a man—clearly the day’s sacrificial liberal lamb.
“I’m not saying that,” said Kelly. “Obviously, what these three men did was not the way to handle it.”
“No?” said the man. “What they did was exactly what Governor McCharles intended, isn’t it?”
“Oh, come on!” snapped the other woman on the panel. “The Texas governor simply meant—”
“The whole point of the McCharles Act,” said the man, “was to provoke attacks like this. Redefining homicide as the killing of a legal resident! What is that, except a wink-and-a-nod to every yahoo out there that the cops will look the other way if an undocumented immigrant turns up dead?”
“The point,” said the same woman, “was merely that these illegal aliens can’t flout the law and then expect to be protected by it.”
“For God’s sake!” said the man, who was getting red in the face. “McCharles is setting things up for a pogrom!”
I grabbed my bag, then headed off to find a taxi, grateful to be leaving the arguing panelists behind.
I beheld the monster.
One of them, anyway. There were six according to the indictments; nine, if you believed the Huffington Post, which argued that three other corrections officers who should also have been charged had gotten off scot-free. But this one, everyone agreed, had been the ringleader: Devin Becker was the man who had incited the other guards—and he was the only one who had actually killed somebody.
“Thirty minutes,” said a burly sergeant, as Becker folded his lanky form onto the metal seat. The irony wasn’t lost on me: Becker himself was now in the care of a prison guard. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who indeed watches the watchers?
Becker had high cheekbones, and the weight he’d lost since the notorious video had been recorded made them even more prominent. That the skin pulled taut across them was bone white only added to the ghastly appearance; put a black hood over his head, and he could have played chess for a man’s soul. “Who are you?” he asked, a slight drawl protracting his words.
“Jim Marchuk. I’m a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg.”
Becker curled his upper lip. “I don’t wanna be part of any damn experiment.”
I thought about saying, “You already have been.” I thought about saying, “The experiment has been done time and again, and this is just another pointless replication.” I even thought about saying, “If only this were an experiment, we could pull the plug on it, just like Zimbardo finally did at Stanford.” But what I actually said was, “I’m not here to conduct an experiment. I’m going to be an expert witness at your trial.”
“For the defense or the prosecution?”
“The defense.”
Becker relaxed somewhat, but his tone was suspicious. “I can’t afford fancy experts.”
“Your father is paying, I’m told.”
“My father.” He sneered the words.
“What?”
“If he really cared, it’d be him, not you, sitting there.”
“He hasn’t come to see you?”
Becker shook his head.
“Has any of your family?”
“My sis. Once.”
“Ah,” I said.
“They’re ashamed.”
Those words hung in the air for a moment. The New York Times front-page article about the Savannah Prison guards had been headlined “America’s Shame.”
“Well,” I said gently, “perhaps we can convince them not to be.”
“With psychological bullshit?” He made a “pffft!” sound through thin lips.
“With the truth.”
“The truth is my own lawyer says I’m a psychopath. Norman Fucking Bates.” He shook his head. “What the hell kind of defense is that, anyway? Y’all must be out of your minds.”