Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Meanness in this World

2009; RELX Group (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

1556-5068

Garrett Epps,

Race, History, and American Society

As part of a symposium on Bruce Springsteen and American law, this essay considers themes explored by Springsteen in his song Nebraska, which was inspired by story of Charles Starkweather and Caril Anne Fugate, two young lovers who indulged in a remarkable course of violence in Nebraska during 1950s. The essay asks to what extent song, and story, echo themes of emigration and displacement that are key elements in history and current reality of American West. The essay compares story of Starkweather and Fugate with current case of Christian Longo, convicted and sentenced to death in Oregon for murdering his wife and three children and disposing of their bodies in a shallow watercourse on Pacific Coast. The crime of annihilation seems as unfathomable as do random murders committed by Starkweather and Fugate; but author considers an episode from his own emigration from East to West, and searing and peculiar pain caused by an injury to his daughter, as a means of considering basic narcissism of parenthood, exacerbated by separation from extended family and community occasioned by trek west, which is a fearsome one even in era of airliners and automobiles. It concludes that only imagination of artist can lead us to confront darkness that lies inside us -- what Ernest Hemingway in his story A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, called the nada. If a mild-mannered law professor can glimpse nada inside himself from small traumas and partial, inevitable dissolution of his family, then perhaps even a killer like Longto, and by extension, Starkweather, is not beyond realm of human solidarity and even understanding.