Waupun
Friday, January 8, 2010 at 07:51PM 
A local publisher recently announced themes for this years' anthology.
The themes for the 2010 anthology are (1) imaginary worlds and (2) evil and villains.
I've only written one "fantasy" or "sci-fi" story ever, and it was published online last year. It was a pretty good story, and maybe I'll post it here sometime. But speculative fiction is not my forte.
As for evil, as for villains, that's a tough one. I initially attempted a story based on a woman I used to work for. At the time, she struck me as about the coldest, greediest person I'd ever met head on. After I quit working for her, she was disbarred and lost her job. I have to admit, I thought she had it coming. But looking back on it, Carolyn seems less evil to me and more pathetic than anything.
Of course, the obvious story would be about a terrorist or serial killer. But because it's so obvious, there will be hundreds of submissions to Scott's anthology that involve terrorists and serial killers going about their business.
After reflecting long and hard, I realized that the more interesting and subtle issue about Scott's theme involved the nature of evil itself. What is evil? Does it exist? How does is manifest itself, not in the obvious, but in the shrewd, the devious, the insinuating.
So, casting my initial effort at a story about Carolyn aside, I made another run at a story about an evil villain. The story I'm focused on now is based loosely on events I experienced roughly twenty years ago. I lived in Milwaukee, worked at Northwestern Mutual, and attended a writer's workshop at Marquette. A classmate was a de-frocked priest who volunteered his time at Wisconsin's high security prison, Waupun. He talked me into helping him teach a creative writing class there.
Waupun sits on the south end of the great Horicon Marsh. It's a brutal, almost medieval place. The outside looks like a castle, the inside is hot in the summer and cold in the winter. To earn your way there, you need an average of three convictions. Average length of incarceration is 15 years. Murderers and rapists abound.
My time at Waupun exposed me to a prisoner by the name of McDonald, who although he looked like a pudgy white accountant and was smarter than most of the other prisoners, was both a murderer and a rapist. Totally unrepentant. Totally dedicated to convincing anyone who would listen that his victims, his lawyer, and the courts were really to blame for his life having gone awry.
We spent a day a week in Waupun for a couple of "semesters." I was always happier to leave than arrive. Prison is a jungle. Everyone is a predator. Everyone feeds off of someone else lower on the food chain. There is constant jockeying for position. One of out students was a sadistic murderer. He was also one of only a few of our students who could put two words together, much less a story or piece of creative non-fiction. He was manipulative and scheming.
McDonald always wrote the same thing regardless of the assignment. He wrote about his crimes, his arrest, his trial, and conviction. In incredible, lurid detail. That was bad enough. What was worse were the cruel ways he found to criticize the works of others, which were read from time to time in our workshop. He could be systematic and unrelenting.
Once, another prisoner turned on him.
What transpired and how it informed my views about evil and villainy are the heart of my story.
I'll never forget McDonald and Waupun.
Waupun Prison, writing in Creative 
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Reader Comments (6)
I'll be interested to read your story and how it defines evil. The nature of evil is an interesting question. If you are looking for a definition, you might try contacting George W. Bush, he seemed at one time to be quite an expert on the subject....but I digress. Going back to my days in the factories of Elkhart, I met a lot of nasty dudes, thieves, killers, the whole realm. What I found was that up close, there wasn't a whole lot of difference between them and what we would consider "normal" people. More than once, the thought "there, but for the grace of God, go I" entered my mind. Of course I never met anyone with the credentials of your McDonald character either.
Jeff, your comments are absolutely relevant, and yet they add to my confusion on this whole issue of evil, imprisonment, and possible rehabilitation. If that is possible. Did I read that 1 percent of our adult male population is in prison? I may have that wrong... hope so.
Please continue to write on this subject.
I thought that was interesting because I'd never thought of evil like that, as an ideal like beauty or goodness. And that seems to me a different way to think of it than George Bush and right wing Christian Fundamentalists think of it.
For them I think evil is anything that threatens and is foreign to their world view. I suspect the fundamentalist Muslims share that perspective on evil.
For the existentialist there is the abyss, the cold, blank stare of an absurd and indifferent universe into, what, our souls? Is that evil, or does the word evil conjure intent, an active malignancy?
The plot thickens, so to speak.
Jeff, there were some nasty dudes in those Elkhart factories. But what I remember was more ineptitude than evil. Hardly a day went by when someone didn't injure himself or someone else through incompetence, often induced by overindulgence in drugs or alcohol.
Bill, your taxpayer dollars were no doubt well spent. I understand that much has been done to modernize Waupun, which sits on the northern edge of the great Horicon Marsh. When I was there, it was a very bleak and dangerous place.
I really liked Mary's observation, particularly viewing evil as an esthetic. Like beauty, it prompts the same "I know it when I see it" type of reaction. But I also believe that it exists in something more tangible than just an idea.
We have again bumped into the eternal problem that has surfaced whenever mankind has set out to define either good or evil; it falls woefully short except in the eyes of those doing the defining. As we discussed in your post about the Mormons, everyone who has tried, (either with or without devine guidance) eventually confronts someone else with a much different idea, and both believe that they are right.
But just because we have not been able to categorically define good or evil does not mean that neither exists. Other than to the existentialist, each is either behavior or a state of being.
As I eluded to in my reference to the "nasties" in the Elkhart factories, everyone I met was capable of goodness and kindness and compassion and exhibited it on a regular basis. They could also be cruel, mean and evil, and were that on a regular basis also.
I was never quite sure if I was watching good people doing evil or evil people doing good, or just people being people, but the behaviors were obvious despite the lack of a universal definition. So even if we can define evil behavior esoterically, is it really possible for a person to BE evil as well?
Not to put any pressure on you, but I'm really looking forward to your story.
My scientific background generally leads me to place things on a bell curve, and to apply standard deviations in some manner. Hitler would have been at least 6 standard deviations on the evil side. Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, they are certainly 4 or 5. On the other side, Mother Teresa certainly ranks, along with many others who come to mind. I get snarled up on JFK, whom I supported like mad, and later found out had feet of clay. Let's add his brother Ted in there too, just for discussion sake.
Really, this is multi-dimensional, and doesn't fit on a two-dimensional chart. The discussion of ethics, evil, good, etc. gets complicated.
Which brings me to your comment about Bush and Fundamentalists. Of whom I seem to have many around me. They see things in pure black and white, which never fails to astonish me. It is either their way, or the highway. Very strange way to look at life.
That in turn brings me to fundamentalists of any background or belief. Are such people pre-disposed to see things in such stark terms? Presumably there is a cultural influence as well, but I wonder what causes people to reach such a fervid state of judgmental behavior. And then to take violent action, which is evil in my book. It isn't evil in their book, as weighed against their firmly-held beliefs.
I used the term "as weighed" but I wonder if there is any weighing going on at all in their minds. It is one way or the other. One inspires warfare, and the other inspires acceptance. Very strange.
Anyway, the story's nearly finished and, as it should be I think, it's more about the characters in the story and their internal conflicts than any resolution of the conflict between moral relativism and morak absolutism.
Bell curve indeed.