A Guilty Conscience
What George Zimmerman, O.J. Simpson, Edgar Allan Poe, and William Shakespeare have in common.
Yesterday, the story broke that George Zimmerman, the man who killed young Trayvon Martin in cold blood, had been arrested for a domestic disturbance which involved pointing a shotgun at his girlfriend’s face. While some jokingly feigned surprise that Zimmerman had a girlfriend, almost no one was surprised that he was arrested again.
This being the second time that this has happened since he was acquitted for manslaughter, it is shocking that Zimmerman would do these things knowing his infamy. After getting away with murder all he had to do was to stay low-key for the rest of his life, and he would have faded away into obscurity. But he had to go pointing guns at innocent people — the same thing that got him in trouble in the first place.
And we all kind of knew this would happen. I’m not surprised. You’re not surprised. Edgar Allan Poe certainly isn’t surprised.
It’s 1843, and Edgar Allan Poe will unleash upon the world one of the greatest short stories ever written: The Tell-Tale Heart. This story of obsession and anxiety is not only a masterpiece of the horror genre, but also a blueprint for the psychosis of guilt.
In it, a man who is never named obsesses over an elderly roommate’s glassy eye. He spends a week watching the old man sleep before the old man wakes in fear, and the narrator, in a panic, kills him in his own bed. The narrator dismembers the old man and places him under the floorboards when the police show up.
The narrator would have gotten away with it. The crime scene was spotless and the cops suspect nothing. Trying to prove his innocence through bravado, the narrator brings in chairs for them to sit on right where he placed the body! It is there that he begins to hear the persistent beating of the Old Man’s heart. He eventually breaks down and confesses to the murder, tearing up the floor boards to reveal the body below.
Now obviously the dead man’s heart was no longer beating, but the narrator heard something to drive him mad. And as we have all guessed by now, it was his guilty conscience.
There are plenty of news outlets and blogs already claiming that Zimmerman is the new O.J. Simpson. And for good reason. They both famously got away with murder that the court of public opinion judged them guilty. And they, after getting their innocent verdicts, had numerous run-ins with the law.
But it goes deeper than that. These men are far from sociopaths, so they probably harbor some guilt over what they did (it should be here that I should say that Zimmerman did kill Martin but it was acquitted on the grounds of self-defense and O.J. did lose the civil trial). What is happening to Zimmerman and what happened to O.J. is the insanity linked to a guilty conscience.
I don’t know what they hear in their heads, but it must be as traumatic as the heartbeat the narrator heard in Poe’s story. Their attempts at leading normal lives after what they’ve done is nearly impossible for the very same reason. That guilt can drive you crazy.
And it can lead to some pretty strange confessions, the same way that Zimmerman pointed a gun at an innocent woman, showing his temperament to point a gun at anything, O.J. wrote a book called “If I Did It.” They got away with it in the criminal courts, but they did not get away with it in their own heads.
These two men are only the most famous recent examples, but the guilty conscience goes back to Ancient Rome (or at least Shakespeare) when Brutus helps to kill Caesar. But unlike what Shakespeare said, conscience doesn’t make cowards of us all, sometimes it just drives you crazy.
