Monday, March 16, 2009

"What Will Be Will Be"

Incestuous barbarity. It wasn't just that he repeatedly raped his own daughter, forcing her into an eternity of confinement, and impregnating her repeatedly. It was his creating of an unspeakable future for those children whom he forced into the world, defying even the most primitive abhorrence of incest, and in the process submitting them to the atrocious condition by which they too were forced to live, as prisoners, mutant beings.

One supposes, given the Vatican's recent support - then recantation - of the Archbishop of Brazil expounding on the level of sins, those acceptable and those so unacceptable that they were deserving of excommunication, that this Austrian, Josef Fritzl, would never be shunned out of his church but for the murder through deliberate neglect of one of the youngest child he fathered with his agonized daughter.

He is prepared to plead guilty to holding his daughter Elisabeth - a wayward and intransigently-independent woman in his estimation - his personal prisoner and rape-object for twenty-four unutterable, untenable years of pathetic squalor and forlorn hope. He is not prepared to plead guilty to murder of one of his seven children by his daughter. He was, he claims, a 'good father'.

The good father was a barbarically grotesque monster, but because he is very aware of the penalty for murder, this one charge he will not lay claim to. The others; abducting and closeting his daughter in a subterranean set of chambers, repeatedly raping her, and violating the most fundamental needs of children, another thing altogether.

He denies having enslaved that segment of his family. One can be forgiven for asking, politely, of course, how it might be that there were no questions from those closest to him - say his wife, for example - at his lengthy absences in that hidden, forbidden bunker. Nothing suspicious about the regular conveyance of food and other necessities, and the removal of waste products from an otherwise-observant wife?

Would the mother of a young woman not wonder why it might be that her daughter suddenly disappeared and then chose at random intervals over the years, to contact her father, depositing with him her offspring? Which the good wife then obediently undertook to raise as her own? What manner of distorted loyalty might that represent, and to whom?

The three middle children who were raised above-ground, permitted to see the light of the sun, breathe fresh clean air, run about as normal children do, attend school, feel themselves valued, must yet come to their personal dilemma of their parenthood, and surmount it to succeed in advancing their lives beyond the trauma of guilt. Guilt that they represent a biological shibboleth.

Guilt that what was permitted them in freedom and the pursuit of youthful happiness was denied their incarcerated siblings. Whose physical and mental state is so unlike their own, though they too represent society's most whispered condemnations. Rotting teeth and gums, friable immune systems and frail physiques; ghostly apparitions of the underworld incapable of communicating with the denizens of the real world.

What restitution is even remotely possible to enable these horribly inflicted individuals to embrace the normality of life? What forgiveness might be possible from daughter to mother to bridge that razor-thin gap of responsible parenthood? What penalty might come close to representing society's will to judge and to penalize an inhumane and unrepentant monster?

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posted by Pieface @ Monday, March 16, 2009

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