Valle Ummm!

Cannibalism on Tanna by Charles E. Gordon Frazer

The Times quoted Federal District Court Judge Paul G. Gardephe in his dismissal of the case against former Officer Gilberto Valle for cannibalism thusly “The evidentiary record is such that it is more likely than not the case that all of Valle’s Internet communications about kidnapping are fantasy role play…once the lies and the fantastical elements are stripped away, what is left are deeply disturbing misogynistic chats and emails written by an individual obsessed with imagining women he knows suffering horrific sex-related pain, terror and degradation (“Officer’s Conviction in Cannibalism Case Overturned,” NYT, 6/30/14). The cannibalism, as the Times described the prosecution case, involved communicating “with others about how he wanted to abduct women, butcher and cook them, and eat them.” Even though Valle has been exonerated, it seems unlikely he will ever be assigned to either the sex crimes unit of the department or reinstated to any unit at all, for that matter. But now that’s it’s determined that Valle was guilty of nothing more than having the kind of fantasies about unattainable love objects characteristic of hormone addled adolescents of both sexes, it won’t be surprising if he doesn’t receive a flood of interest in his recipes from prominent cook book agents and publishers. It’s long been noted that Brazilian hot waxing and surgical techniques like vaginoplasty are also very useful in stove top cooking. And provided Officer Valle is able to behave he might even find himself back in uniform as a guest judge on the Food Network’s Chopped.

“Mistah Kurtz--He Dead"

With Thanksgiving coming up it might be a good time to revisit a news story that appeared in the New York Times a while back under the title, “Officer Plotted to Abduct, Cook and Eat Women, Authorities Say" (NYT, 10/25/12). Not to make light of the actual investigation which revealed that the officer, one Gilberto Valle, wrote to an accomplice, according to the Times, about his “game” plan as follows, “I was thinking of tying her body onto some kind of apparatus. Cook her over a low hear and keep her alive as long as possible.” Could Officer Valle have been a fan of Jonathan Swift whose A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick written in l729 offered up the idea of cooking children as an ingenious solution to the problem of famine in Ireland? Could the offending communications have been some sort of literary product (the Times quotes from “a dating profile” where Officer Valle describes himself as a budding comedian, who “can find the humor in any situation”)? And if so what is the object of the satire? And satirical or not can we conclude that the manifest content is such that Officer Valle doesn’t hold women in very high esteem? Still cannibalism of which this incident partakes has a long and venerable history. As only one of many historical examples, the doomed members of the Donner Party ended up eating each other to survive. And then there are all the examples in nature. The praying mantis bites off the male’s head during sexual intercourse and there are many male homo sapiens who will testify to the fact that they have their heads taken off by the female members of their species without any sexual act taking place at all. But the real fascination and horror of cannibalism is not how foreign it is, but how familiar. Behind the veneer of civilization, lies a universe of cannibalistic fantasies (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street presents cannibalism in Broadway musical form) and inclinations. What about Darwin’s fittest? What enables him to survive and isn’t this what Joseph Conrad was getting at in Heart of Darkness with its famous line, “Mistah Kurtz--he dead”—which Eliot used at the epigraph for The Hollow Men?