The Temptations of Revenge

By LANCE MORROW

Life being what it is," said Baudelaire, "one thinks of revenge." Americans found themselves thinking about it a little more than usual last week as they watched Iranians displaying charred American bodies in front of the Tehran embassy that the dead had been sent to liberate. They thought of it again when Moussavi Garmoudi, the Iranian President's "cultural affairs adviser," appeared before cameramen, reached into a box and brought out a burned human foot (American), which he laid on a table before them.

Such scenes open a little trap door at the base of the brain. From that ancient root cellar they summon up dark, flapping fantasies of revenge. During the six-month imprisonment of their hostages, Americans have on the whole reacted with a surprising forbearance toward the Iranians. But beneath the surface they have marinated in an odd, atavistic cross-cultural rage. Their anger has been ripened by the long spectacle of their nation's ineffectuality and the humiliation of the failed rescue raid, by the nightly TV pageant of Iranian mobs pumping their fists in the air and screaming death threats in Farsi, and by the image of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh's cretinous smirk. Dark impulses that normally stay below, like Ahab's harpooners, begin to straggle up on deck.

If aggression is the most basic and dangerous of human impulses, revenge gains a step on it by being premeditated. The urge for lurid, annihilating retaliation--vindication, satisfaction, the no-good bastard's head upon a plate--fetches far back to a shrouded moment when the spontaneous animal reflex of self-protection turned to a savage brooding. The human mind, newly intelligent, began to dream of the barbarously fitting ways in which it would get even. Emanating from hurt and the pain of failure and unfairness, the fantasy of revenge became, it may be, even stronger than the imperative of sex.

The gods of man's myths were elaborately, even bizarrely, vengeful. In the Inferno, Dante's Deity was satanically inventive in making the vengeance fit the crime. The best tragic theater (Hamlet, for example) and some of the worst has been built around the deep urge to settle someone's hash. In an orgy of horrific finality and emotional overstatement, Medea murders her two sons and hurls their corpses at Jason. That, God knows, ought to teach him.

History has been just as imaginative as theater and myth. The South American Tupinamba tribe would take a prisoner of war, make him consort with a woman of their tribe, then allow the woman to bear a child so that they could increase the tragedy by slaughtering both the prisoner and his baby. Sometimes in New Zealand, when a chieftain was killed during a war between two tribes, hostilities were broken off while the body of the leader was chopped up by his opponents, roasted and devoured. Among the southern Slavs a mother has been known to ay her infant son down in the cradle to sleep upon the bloodstained shirt of his murdered father. The child was raised to avenge; it became his vocation.

Under the protocols of the blood feud, one act of revenge begot another, so that violence originating in some forgotten crime or slight could reverberate for generations. Eventually he old brutal arrangement was superseded by the laws of the tate, which undertook to end the freelance savageries of personal revenge by meting out justice uncomplicated by private passion. When the state assumed the responsibility for punishing an offense, the matter, in theory, ended there.

Revenge detonates a little explosion of doom for the sake of personal--and usually rather temporary -- satisfaction. But some say the practice of vengeance has its salutary, cleansing effect. Better for the circulation, they say, to liberate that maniacal little Nietzsche doll that jumps up and down inside all of us than to let him tear apart his cage.

Furthermore, revenge has its practical uses. The Mafia, first tutored in the exquisitely touchy finishing schools of Sicily, practices who as a matter of dispassionate business; the man who ordered the hit sends a horseshoe of flowers. Athletes have some instinct for keeping retaliatory accounts as a practical matter. Reggie Jackson of the New York Yankees was brushed back by two pitches last year by Mike Caldwell of the Milwaukee Brewers. Jackson went out and throttled him. Strictly business, Jackson explained later. If he had let the pitcher get away with it twice, he would have subtly lost respect and a competitive edge on the field.

Is there a practical counterpart in relations among nations? At the end of World War II the U.S. wisely declined to exact vengeance upon Japan and Germany, but in stead helped to rebuild them, turning them at last, ironically, into the real economic victors of war. In the nuclear era, revenge may be too hairy a form of redress and self-gratification to be endured. Yet a cautionary super-revenge, in the latent form of a cataclysmic threat, is the governing principle of the nuclear age. Revenge, of course, some times achieves an air of respectability, of Realpolitik, if it is called retaliation or, even more innocently, response--as in "nuclear response." The global balance of power is maintained by a threat of revenge that is designed by its sheer unthinkable horror to forestall the first blow.

Revenge is especially dangerous when it lumbers around shaggily between two cultures--like those of Iran and the U.S. -- that profoundly misunderstand each other, that in some ways inhabit different centuries. The Iranians consider that they are exacting revenge for the years of America's association with the Shah. Thus grievances and countergrievances accumulate in some evolutionary rhythm, the way that grazing animals over the millenniums developed better teeth and, simultaneously, nutritional plants evolved harder thorns.

The cycle of revenge and counterrevenge should be broken, but not by the abject submission of Americans in an Iranian psychodrama. In the first place, American meekness invites contempt not only in Iran but elsewhere in the world. Without acting with the pathological ferocity of revenge, Americans might want to administer a little of what psychologists call negative the when the time is right, something like the message that a hot stove delivers to someone who tries to sit on it. Both sides should remember, if they can, the Persian prov erb: "Blood cannot be washed away with blood." Revenge has its undeniable satisfactions. It is a primal scream that shatters glass. But revenge is not an intelligent basis for a foreign policy. This century has already fulfilled its quota of smoke and rage and survivors, gray with bomb dust, staggering around in the rub ble, seeking what is left of the dead they loved.

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