Essay: Toasting Mr. Goetz

Rarely, apart from assassinations of the famous, has the act of a single anonymous person caused such a stir. Mild-mannered Bernhard Goetz gets on a New York City subway. Four young toughs surround him, asking first for a match, next a cigarette, then $5. He pulls a gun, shoots them all, two in the back. He runs away, then nine days later turns himself in. The town goes wild for him. Dubbed the subway vigilante, he is the talk, the toast, of every radio call-in show from Miami to San Diego. The outpouring of popular support becomes a story in itself. Mayors, Governors and editorialists express dismay.

How can good, decent citizens react this way?

The short answer is rage, directed first at Goetz’s harassers. It is hard for anyone to muster much sympathy for them or their Miranda rights. The loathing for these villains/victims is universal. Columnist Jimmy Breslin says it is because of race. The four youths are black, Goetz is white. There may be some truth to that, but it does not begin to explain things. Millions of blacks and Hispanics ride the New York subways. Interviews with most show them to be as sympathetic to Goetz and as hostile to his attackers as whites.

Curtis Sliwa, leader of the Guardian Angels, gives a better clue. Interrupting a string of choice entomological epithets by which he characterizes the “muggers,” he observes that they were not stealing for food. The $5 they wanted was to play video games.

This is violence of a special kind, not “brother, can you spare a dime” stuff but anarchic, pointless, Clockwork Orange violence. It is particularly reviled because it is perfectly senseless. We tend to call serial murders senseless, but we know that buried deep inside a Wayne Williams lies a horrible, though perhaps unfathomable, purpose. We suspect a reason, some powerful, twisted logic. Anomic violence, on the other hand, is truly senseless. Thus crimes of madness elicit from us revulsion; crimes of need (like Jean Valjean’s) sympathy; but crimes for fun, for a video game, for no purpose, elicit rage. John Hinckley Jr. did more damage in a minute than these four combined had done in a lifetime. But there could be no satisfaction in blowing him away. Blow these four away, and you are ready to run for mayor.

The other object of rage is the New York subway, and the authorities for permitting it to deteriorate to its current sinister, menacing state. The New York subway is a place where the rules nominally apply, but only nominally. The problem is more than the breakdown of law. It is the breakdown of order. “The absolute amount of serious subway crime is small–38 reported felonies per day,” editorializes the New York Times. “The larger problem” is “graffiti, vandalism, harassing passengers for handouts. The pervasiveness of that mischief generates fear that a system millions must ride has slipped out of control.” The subway has become a place where 14,000 felonies per year are the lesser problem. People are upset.

The celebration of Goetz is understandable–he took on the punks and the system–but it retains a curiously surreal quality: the characters, hero and villains alike, are all abstract, marquee characters. Indeed, the whole Goetz phenomenon is life gone to the movies. The tabloids call the hero the Death Wish vigilante. The bad guys are out of A Clockwork Orange. The subway set is borrowed from Escape from New York. And now the audience picks up the chant from Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.”

This slightly mad reaction to a grisly burst of violence owes much to the fact that the story instantly took on the form of a morality play. (In fact two columnists, on the same day, headlined their comments on the shooting with that phrase.) SYMBOL OF SUBTERRANEAN VENGEANCE, the Washington Post called Goetz. But no one remains a symbol, no story remains abstract forever. Mayors and editorialists can take heart: as soon as reality sets in, the glamour will fade, and the people will come to their senses.

The fade has begun. Consider the hero.

Like all romantic leads, the subway avenger looked better on paper. Until the real one stood up at a New Hampshire police station and confessed, we could imagine him a star. Charles Bronson. Gary Cooper as Wyatt Earp. Better still, Cooper in High Noon, citizen-lawman, doing his duty, Grace Kelly at his side.

Reality has a way of turning heroism to tragedy, even pathos. The real gunman is Bernhard Goetz, electronic whiz and loner. His was “a life of quiet desperation,” concluded the New York Post. (It should know. It put 13 reporters on the story.) He has been described as moody and unstable. He certainly was frightened. He told his sister after the shooting that he did it out of fear. “A scared individual, vulnerable and fragile,” a neighbor called him. When the movie is made, Goetz will be played not by Charles Bronson but by Donald Pleasence. Or better, by Anthony Perkins.

If the hero’s glamour fades under scrutiny, so does the act.

Consider it in two parts, pulling the gun and shooting. The first can plausibly be said to be an act of self-defense. The second is freelance law enforcement. And wrong for all the obvious reasons. Proportionality, to start with: the death penalty, which is what Goetz tried and failed to administer, is reserved for greater crimes than a $5 shakedown. Lack of necessity, for another. Pulling the gun ended the threat. The boys ran. Pulling the trigger was superfluous. Two had to be shot in the back.

Perhaps worst, the punishment was collective. Goetz had been mugged four years ago and had brooded ever since over the lenient treatment his attackers received. These four were paying for more than their own sins. A whole class of muggers got theirs on the downtown express. But the law, which still prevails aboveground, does not permit trial by class. Everyone pays for his sins only. Even criminals cannot remain abstract.

As justice proceeds, facts will emerge and, with them, a sense of reality. And that sense is more enduring, though less exhilarating, than the thrill we feel when someone does what we all dream of doing. We are, after all, an experienced audience. We know a dream, a movie, when we see one. Even fantasy has its limits. Goetz is applauded but not emulated. Soon he may be pitied. POWER TO THE VIGILANTE! NY LOVES YA! says the spray-painted salutation on Manhattan’s East River Drive. But when the gavel falls, it will be The People vs. Bernhard Goetz.