the wrong font

On December 9, Fox News‘ Jesse Watters opined, during a segment on Luigi Mangione, who killed UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson,

“This guy was obviously looking for notoriety. And good, he’s got it. Now, he’s a prep school kid. He’s politically connected in Maryland. But this guy’s not ready. He’s way too soft. He’s gonna get annihilated on the inside and good. If he’s not gonna get the death penalty, maybe someone will do him justice behind bars. That’s all I have to say about that.”

Now, apart from the fact that Watters is openly calling for murder, this scenario is absurd. First of all, it’s based on an internal contradiction: that everyone in prison is at once animalistic and rational, murderous and justice-minded. Granted, I don’t know what our students’ lives are like when they’re not in class—outside of whatever stories they choose to tell—but there is ample evidence in class of their rationality, decency and, yes, kindness. Secondly, it’s hard to imagine that prisoners—of all people—are going to act as the extra-judicial arm of an insufficiently-violent court system by exacting vengeance on the killer of a wealthy CEO.

In short, Watters seems…uninformed. And this very ignorance allows him to invent a dark fantasy and project it onto a population about whom most of his viewers are no more knowledgable than he is. El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.

I, too, have my projections. “What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.” However, mine have come through exposure, not its opposite, and it’s part of my job—as it is, I would imagine, for most of my colleagues—to spread knowledge about the prison and to humanize those compelled to live in it. In his 1963 essay, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Albert Camus writes,

The survival of such a primitive rite has been made possible among us only by the thoughtlessness or ignorance of the public, which reacts only with the ceremonial phrases that have been drilled into it. When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning; a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. But if people are shown the machine, made to touch the wood and steel and to hear the sound of a head falling, then public imagination, suddenly awakened, will repudiate both the vocabulary and the penalty.

One would hope, but I have my doubts about certain people.