By Elton Brawn▸
A man has been arrested after
threatening to kill his neighbor with kindness.
During an altercation over a noise
complaint, Mr. Bryan Stewart of Milton, Florida threatened his
neighbor with a machete that had the word "Kindness"
written on its blade. Stewart apparently had named the machete
Kindness, a clever double-entendre that wound up earning him an
aggravated assault charge, with bail set at $10 000.
But while Mr. Stewart's pet-name for
his machete is admittedly hilarious, it also raises a few questions.
For one, why did Stewart not receive an
attempted murder charge? It would seem that the act of naming the
machete Kindness speaks directly to motive. The expression, after
all, is not "to hurt somebody with kindness" or "to
aggravatedly assault somebody with kindness." It's "to
kill." So it seems obvious that when some deranged reprobate
lunges out with a machete named Kindness, his intention is murder.
Otherwise, the joke just wouldn't work.
Is it possible that the police (and/or
public prosecutor) were tittering so archly at the wry wit that they
failed to put two and two together?
 |
| The accused (right) and his intellectual predecessor (left) |
Secondly, and more importantly, were
Mr. Stewart's actions even intended as a joke at all? It's easy to
interpret his nicknaming of the machete as humorous, but a little
reflection reveals that it's actually much, much more. It's a
profound philosophical statement about the relationship between power
and morality. Most people probably laugh or scoff when they read
about Stewart in the headlines, but I really think he was trying to
get at some of the same things articulated by Nietzsche a century and
a half before him.
What does it really mean to "kill
someone with kindness"? It suggests that revenge is petty. It
suggests that revenge lowers you and that the best alternative to
revenge is to take the higher road and to live well and to rise above
the impulse to retaliate. And by writing "Kindness" on his
machete's blade, Stewart is responding to that suggestion. He's
saying that vengeance and "the higher road" aren't mutually
exclusive. It's not either/or. And, by implication, the choice to
take the proverbial higher road doesn't have anything to do with
being civilized or some kind of lofty idealism. It has to do with
being weak and cowardly.
It's a rationalization used by people
who are too scared to take revenge.
Nietzsche, recall, made a distinction
between "slave morality," which congratulates itself on its
meekness, and "master morality," which takes what it wants
from the world and makes no apologies. Stewart, similarly, 150 years
later, articulates a distinction between those who let their
neighbors make noise complaints against them (slaves) and
those who assertively take revenge on neighbors who slight them by
asking them to make less noise (masters).
The word "Kindness," written
on his machete blade, is actually an argument. It's Stewart's thesis
that morality merely evolved as a mechanism for coping with
powerlessness. And it went right over everybody's head.
Perhaps Mr. Stewart wanted to end up in
jail. Perhaps, being low-income, he realized that imprisonment would
be the only way for him to access the resources needed to develop his
ideas. Prisons, after all, have libraries and offer PhD equivalency
programs (which I'm sure somebody as smart as Stewart would tear
through in three to six).
***
Elton Brawn is the pen-name of a very famous, very flamboyant singer who has been knighted.
Image Credits: Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office (the photo that's not Nietzsche)
Image Credits: Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office (the photo that's not Nietzsche)
