It’s one of those days of American history that lives in infamy: April 20, 1999, the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, killing twelve students and a teacher, and inuring twenty-four others, before turning their guns on themselves.

Say “Columbine” today, and nearly anyone can tell you what it means. But as journalist Dave Cullen says in his new book on the tragedy, the real story of Columbine is only now starting to become clear. Media sensationalism, police cover-ups, scapegoating, and mythmaking have all distorted the story. Cullen’s Columbine, then, represents an important historical and journalistic effort to shed light on what really happened.

Cullen starts the book by recounting the massacre from the perspective of those who lived through it. He writes a gripping narrative, showing the confusion of events without falling prey to it. He finishes the book in a similar vein, but this time he recounts events from the perspective of the shooters. The result is a retelling of a story—twice—that many readers might think they already remember from the headlines and news clips.

But the real meat of the book comes in between in all the myth-busting Cullen does. For instance, media reports painted the shooters as two misunderstood high schoolers who’d been bullied to the point that they finally snapped. Cullen demonstrates that the two hadn’t been bullied at all, and that the shooters weren’t, for instance, targeting jocks or popular kids.

Nor did the shooters “snap.” Cullen lays out evidence suggesting that Klebold and Harris had been planning the attack for nearly a year. They’d already engaged in an escalating series of vandalism missions and acts of criminal mischief. Friends heard rumors that the pair had been shooting guns and making pipe bombs. The pair leaked other clues, including an explicit short story, which no one pieced together until everyone had the lens of hindsight to look through.

Cullen delves into the personal journals the two shooters kept as well as a series of “basement tapes” they recorded. Harris, in his journal—which he called “The Book of God”—expressed festering contempt for other people and frequently spoke about extinction fantasies. Cullen provides chilling details about the true extent of the duo’s plans, which would’ve made the actual outcome of their massacre seem merciful.

Harris and Klebold, says Cullen, wanted to perform an act of “performance violence” that would be seen as “mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater,” so stunning that it would top Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City. Harris and Klebold “didn’t have political agenda of terrorists but adopted their methods,” Cullen says.

While this all may seem straightforward, Cullen employs masterful storytelling techniques in his book that add powerful impact. For instance, he refers to the shooters throughout by their first names in order to personify them more vividly. He structures the book so that the story of their preparations leading to the attack is told in parallel with the stories of the community as it tries to recover and rebuild after the attack.

Cullen tells the story of Patrick Ireland, a student who crawled to safety from a second-story library window and overcame incredible odds to not only walk and talk again but to achieve his goal of being class valedictorian. He also tells the story of Cassie Bernall, who reportedly professed her faith in God to her killers just before they pulled the trigger—a story later proved false even after Cassie achieved international fame as a Christian martyr.

And there’s the story of Brooks Brown, a former friend of Harris’s. In the year prior to the shootings, Harris engaged in a campaign of harassment against Brown’s family because he thought Brown had turned on him. Despite numerous complaints against Harris, police did nothing until after the shooting—when they tried to implicate Brooks as part of the crime.

In fact, the Jefferson County Police Department comes off looking like a confederacy of fools and villains. Cullen details a decade-long cover-up by the department as it tried to hide the ways it mishandled the case.

Cullen at once captures the uplifting spirit of a community that pulls itself together after tragedy while also showing the sad, shattered pieces still left behind. The toll of the attacks aren’t just measured in lives lost but in marriages destroyed, in families broken, in public confidence broken and public anxiety heightened.

While some portions of the book are necessarily graphic, Cullen never gets gratuitous. He avoids sensationalism in an effort to show humanity. His book strives for insight and understanding—and that’s no small feat for a tragedy so hard to understand.

So, little Christopher Bizilj is dead, dead, dead.  His father, Dr. Charles Bizilj, director of emergency medicine (if you can believe it) at a hospital in Stafford Springs, Connecticut, got to watch his son bleed out from a head wound on the floor.  And the people who put this little event together have to look at themselves in their mirrors and ask themselves the simple question, “What the FUCK made me think it was a good idea to put a submachine gun in a child’s hands?”

Look, I’m not anti-gun.  I own a lot of guns.  I keep them well out of the reach of any children, and it wouldn’t occur to me to let a child handle a firearm with that kind of power and kick.  I was a rural kid. I got my first Winchester .22 rifle at age 10.  It had a shortened stock to fit my arm, and was a bolt-action, single shot weapon dangerous only to someone who was too ill-trained or too careless to use it properly.  I was neither.

I went through a weeks-long gun safety course before I got that rifle, and even after I got it and took the course, my parents spent two years watching me carefully to make sure I understood that I owned a WEAPON that can kill people and has to be handled with the utmost respect before I could take it out on my own.

Adults who treat guns as though they’re toys should be locked away for a helluva long time until THEY grow the fuck up.  I’m sick to death of hearing about children getting killed because those responsible for watching out for them — didn’t.  Lock ‘em up and throw away the damned key.

It won’t bring little Christopher back, but it would make me feel a helluva lot better.

Is taking justice into your own hands ever justified?

I Don’t Like the Looks of This

Early one recent morning, I boarded a subway on the 1 line, which runs north and south on the west side of Manhattan, at about 6 a.m. A wiry guy in his mid-twenties a couple of inches shorter than me, who was supported by a crutch, bent over a seated woman wearing ear plugs. “Can you hear me?” he asked.

I didn’t like the looks of this. (Note the vigilante speak.) Musicians play in hopes of donation on the subway or people solicit for the homeless. But not many individuals outright panhandle. Not only does coming up with cost of a ride itself require an hour or two of panhandling, but, though few and far between, transit police make it clear the practice won’t be tolerated.

However occasional, the subway panhandler tends to be as well-mannered as those in the rest of Manhattan. When rejected though, you can often hear an edge in their voice when they say, “Thank you have a good day.”

Meanwhile, his injury apparently less than severe, the panhandler with the crutch moved along without too much difficulty. When he asked a man reading a book for money, he was met with a forceful “no.” Perhaps resentful of not only the denial, but its vehemence, the panhandler tapped on the man’s book.

In retrospect, the lack of compunctions exhibited by a guy with a crutch who’s somewhat on the scrawny size about intimidating passengers suggests that he seldom meets with serious resistance. But he made this rider uncomfortable.

“Cut that out,” I yelled (or something to that effect). “Stop bothering the passengers.”

The panhandler, supported by his crutch, stepped over to me. Objective number one — distracting him from the other passengers — achieved. Again, I got into another vicious argument complete with swearing, to which I seldom stoop. When he attempted to get in my face, I shouted, “Step away from me. Don’t touch me.”

Like in the animal world, that if you make more noise than your foe, you can often neutralize him. I assumed that, because he was homeless, he wasn’t carrying a handgun. But I couldn’t rule out a knife.

Nor, once again, did I have a good answer for that inevitable question: “What are you gonna do about it?”

The altercation had reached its turning point: Back down or escalate? I came up with something about getting help at the next stop, but continued to shout at him to keep him from thinking he had the upper hand.

Then he said something like: “I could kill you and I wouldn’t care. At least I’d know where my next meal is coming from.”

As the absurdity of a situation like this kick in, my anger tends to dissolve. Worse, I now felt sorry for him.

In response, I said, “You can kill me if you want, but leave the other people alone.”

I was at a loss what to do next. The doors finally opened — at 34th Street: This had all happened in the space of one stop. Even though I could easily walk the rest of the way to work, I didn’t want to get off the train because it might look like backing down.

But he exited, turned at looked at me. Before the door closed, I said with some facetiousness, “Have a nice day.” He spit at me.

Looking back, this situation was a prime candidate for leaving well enough alone. The panhandler probably would have moved on from the reader he was bothering. My actions, in fact, only increased their chances of becoming collateral damage.

Vigilantes Come in Two Flavors. . .

. . . those motivated by revenge for real or imagined slights and those who would save the world. Neither are paragons of mental health, the first paranoid, the second grandiose.

Goetz, who’d been victimized, is of the revenge variety. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t think the grandiose type is as dangerous. But, on the lookout for situations to prove himself, he’s just as likely as the vengeful to make a mountain out of a molehill.

The grandiose male seeks to protect women. Standing up for a man is a dicier proposition since it highlights the inability of a man who’s being accosted, such as the fellow reading the book, to stand up for himself. It’s not unlike coming to the aid of a woman who’s being battered: Often embarrassed over her predicament, she just wishes to be left alone.

But there’s an even stronger impulse driving some to the vigilante act than grandiosity. It’s the realization that if you do nothing, you’ve essentially allowed yourself to be held hostage, not necessarily to the perpetrator, but to fear. The lingering shame can be worse worse than, say, your fears of being stabbed.

To prevent it from recurring should the situation arise again, keep things simple. The formula need not go: He’s terrorizing subway car; I better not do anything stupid and endanger myself because I have family to support. Instead, bypass the justifications and keep it simple: He must be stopped.

Most people, even men, feel no shame about failing to stand up to a thug. No doubt they’re the same men who don’t let masturbation make feel inadequate because it’s not a real live woman to whom they’re making love. In other words, they’re sickeningly well-adjusted.

But, if vigilanticize you must, take precautions and make sure your martial arts are as mixed as possible. And that your motives are un-mixed up. In other words, acknowledge that, no different from a common criminal, you’re taking your problems out on the world.

Part 1

I don’t have pet peeves. I have major, psychotic hatreds.

— George Carlin, who died early this week at age 71; June 23

At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries. Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated. They are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation. They are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers. They are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the bank lending offices and banned from the ballot box.

— excerpt from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s address to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing, China; Sept. 5, 1995.

Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

— Will Rogers

Sen. Specter: In our initial conversation, you talked about the stability and humility in the law. Would you agree with those articulations of the principles of stare decisis, as you had contemplated them, as you said you looked for stability in the law?

Judge Roberts: Yes, Mr. Chairman, I would. I would point out that the principle goes back even farther than Cardozo and Frankfurter. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 78, said that, To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the judges, they need to be bound down by rules and precedents. So, even that far back, the founders appreciated the role of precedent in promoting evenhandedness, predictability, stability, adherence of integrity in the judicial process.

— exchange between Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and John Roberts during confirmation hearings on Judge Roberts’ nomination to be chief justice of the United States; Sept. 13, 2005.

Since our decision in Miller, hundreds of judges have relied on the view of the Amendment we endorsed there; we ourselves affirmed it in 1980.

— from Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in throwing out a D.C. ordinance against handguns, ruled that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to have a gun; Miller was a 1939 case that directly addressed the Second Amendment; June 26; emphasis added.

You guys are great on ‘Beat the Clock.’

— an exasperated Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., as members of the House Judiciary Committee questioned David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and John Yoo, formerly of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, on definitions of torture and executive authority; June 27.

Cities routinely build in the flood plain. That’s not an act of God; that’s an act of City Council.

— Kamyar Enshayan, a professor and director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa and a Cedar Falls, Iowa, City Council member, explaining that recent Midwest flooding has more to do with human nature than nature; June 19.

The congressman’s appropriations projects are carefully vetted to ensure they are consistent with the needs and interests of his constituency, and there is no connection between his fundraising efforts and his work in Congress.

— Vincent Perez, spokesman for Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, explaining that no connection exists between a $4 million earmark for Digital Fusion and $18,000 in campaign contributions from Digital Fusion executives; The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr. reports that “[m]ore than a year after Congress pledged to curb pork barrel funding known as earmarks, lawmakers are gearing up for another spending binge, directing billions toward organizations and companies in their home districts”; June 13.

This legislation will bring unprecedented transparency to lobbyists’ activities. On the first day of the 110th Congress, we passed a landmark rules package, and this is another important step to strengthen accountability and public trust.

.
— from a July 31, 2007, press release on the Senate Web site of Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, in which he announced his vote supporting the final House-Senate agreement on the Honest Leadership, Open Government Act of 2007, an act that, according to his release, would “[s]trengthen Senate Ethics Rules, similar to already enacted House Reforms: Includes a variety of changes to Senate rules, including a ban on gift and travel by lobbyists and full disclosure of earmarks.” [emphasis added]

This is a con job. It’s a diversion. These guys ought to be given a Mandrake the Magician permanent title, for pretending that this has anything to do with solving gas prices today.

— Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wisc., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, after adjourning a hearing in which, according to a story by David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times, “he was ambushed by Republicans with an amendment to allow drilling on the outer continental shelf off both coasts”; June 27.

A two-page “survival guide” issued in 2007 to interns in Rep. Don Young’s (R–AK) office lists nine transportation lobbyists as “The A Team” and informs interns that “[t]hese people can talk to whomever they want” when phoning the office. Phone calls from other Members of Congress, however, must be directed to two Young staffers, according to the memorandum. The document is titled “The 2111″, a reference to Rep. Young’s Rayburn Office Number.

— from a report on the Web site of Taxpayers for Common Sense; June 18.

When you see a 15 percent yearly increase, that is an epidemic that is out of control. And yet we don’t see a response that recognizes it is an epidemic out of control.

— Phill Wilson, head of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, in a Washington Post story by David Brown reporting that “[t]he number of young homosexual men being newly diagnosed with HIV infection is rising by 12 percent a year, with the steepest upward trend in young black men” according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; June 27.

Years ago, when there was an accident or an injury, neighbors would usually come and help each other. Nowadays, there are fewer family farms and fewer children on those farms, and it’s just not as easy for neighbors to help one another anymore.

— UPS pilot Bill Gross, whose non-profit group Farm Rescue helps farmers who have suffered a major illness, injury or natural disaster; June 27.

President Bush has set forth a clear and detailed plan for making our public schools excellent, so that every child in this country can have access to a quality education. He has included in that plan not only the objectives, but the support and the flexibility that states and school districts and schools and parents need in order to reach the objective.

President Bush has assumed this as his mission — the mission that no child will be left behind. He’s made it clear that he sees the urgency involved in making our classrooms safer and equipping every child with reading and math skills, and closing the inexcusable achievement gap that exists among students attending public schools across this country — primarily among minority students and economically disadvantaged students.

— from remarks by Dr. Roderick Paige during his swearing-in as Secretary of Education; Jan. 21, 2001.

Q: Has the President ever considered an executive order that would ban torture specifically? There’s a letter out now from a bipartisan group of former Secretaries of State, including Secretary of State George Shultz, with whom the President was a couple of weeks ago, and former Defense Secretaries and military officials saying that there should be an executive order with the force of law saying that torture is unacceptable.

MS. PERINO: Well, we certainly respect the views of George Shultz. And one thing I would point to is that we have a set of laws that have been passed during this administration, and an executive order, in fact. There was the Detainee Treatment Act, there was the Military Commissions Act, and then there was the President’s executive order interpreting Common Article 3.

So we feel like we have taken steps to address that issue. And I would also point out that we face a very different enemy today than America has ever faced before. We face an enemy that respects no borders, respects no uniforms, and certainly has no regard for civilians, especially innocent women and children and the elderly. So we take his position seriously, but we do think that we have the mechanisms in place to address the issue.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; June 25.

I am shocked. I think all this is a provocation. If I get punished, I’ll quit training and do something else.

— Bulgarian weightlifter Ivan Stoitsov, who took two gold medals at last year’s world championships, after he and 10 teammates — seven men and three women — tested positive for the banned anabolic substance methandienon; Bulgaria withdrew its weightlifting team from the Olympics; June 27.

[W]e are making broad and dramatic progress against corporate fraud in America. We’re defending our free enterprise system against corruption and crime. And we’re beginning a new era of corporate integrity. Corporate responsibility is essential to America. It’s essential to shareholders. It is essential to investors.

— President Bush, unveiling a Corporate Fraud Task Force at the White House-sponsored Corporate Fraud Conference on Sept. 26, 2002.

That was a complete victory for the defendants. The judicial system has become more conservative and more sensitive to economic rights and business interests. This is one of many cases that has restricted the scope of investor recovery.

— Georgetown University law professor Donald C. Langevoort, commenting on the Supreme Court’s decision in Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta that “strictly limited the ability of investors who lost money through corporate fraud to sue other businesses that may have helped facilitate the crime”; Jan. 16.

There isn’t a lot of latitude these days to indulge controversy or ideas in fashion, and so even Miuccia Prada in her strong collection seemed far less intent than usual on engaging in what Carlo Antonelli, the editor of Italian Rolling Stone, termed “the discourse about gender.” In other words, Prada ditched the peplums and other feminizing elements of her last, determinedly noncommercial collection and sent out a tightly organized presentation that combined elements of sports and formal wear and that eroticized men without rendering them drones.

— from a review of the Milan Fashion Week by Guy Trebay of The New York Times; June 26.

I have a million children.

— Kermit Love, the creator of many “Sesame Street” characters including Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, who died this week at 91; June 26.

photo credits:

• George Carlin: HBO promotional photo via Associated Press
• Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack O’Bama at “unity” rally: Jim Bourg, Reuters

• Rep. Silvestre Reyes: Rep. Reyes’ Senate Web site
• male model at Milan Fashion Week: Matteo Bazzi, EPA

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Texans view today’s “landmark” decision in much the same way a fond parent regards the efforts of a four-year-old to load a single-action revolver: there’s a sense of indulgent pride, stifled giggles so as not to discourage the little cowboy, and the knowledge that once the Justices get past these first fumbling steps, they can look to us to lead the way into the explosively exciting world of unregulated gun ownership. Call us bellwethers; call us progressives; call us what you will… just don’t call us late at night without identifying yourself, ha ha. Because we can shoot you. No, really. We probably can.

In fact, whom we can shoot with impunity is the primary concern of the more judicially advanced Texas gun debate. The right to own guns hasn’t been an issue in Texas for.. for.. well, forever. We take for granted the ability to walk into Walmart and pony up for handguns, rifles and shotguns without all that permit, registration and licensing crap. We applaud our like-minded neighbors (most of the nation, you anti-gun anti-freedom bleeding hearts, and now the Supreme Court) but we’re so far past that old  argument it’s hard to get lathered up about it. What we want, what we demand, is the right to shoot more people in more situations with less provocation and fewer consequences. And I’m proud to say that progress continues. As of September 1^st, 2007, any Texan, including me, now has the chance to legally live out that greatest of all Old West gunslinger fantasies.

I can shoot you for lookin’ at me funny.

Breathtaking, isn’t it? All I need to prove to a jury after I blast you into kingdom come is that I felt legitimately threatened by something you were doing: committing a crime, standing between me and the door, looking at my chi-chis in an ominous manner, whatever. I don’t have to try to get away or warn you that I’m armed (this is Texas, dumbass). And if I’m female, middle-class and white and you’re not, not and um, not – well, that’s a bet this modern Annie Oakley will take any time. Squeeze out a few tears, look vulnerable, and you’re in like an armor-piercing bullet with any red-blooded Texas jury.

So congratulations, Supreme Court. We here in the Lone Star State eagerly await the maturation of the rest of the nation’s views on the sacred rights to self-defense and blowing away pesky varmints at will, and we’ll be here to set the standard for generations to come.

Unless we cross someone’s property line after dark. Price of freedom, Bubba.

The fourth in our “Cult of Crime” series.
(Pix by the one-and-only Weegee.)

New York’s reputation as a tough city took a major hit in the summer of 2006 when it received the highest score of all the world’s big cities in a courtesy test. Even worse, according London’s Guardian, “New York loses mean streets image as murder rate plunges.”

In 2007, less than 500 people were killed, the fewest since 1963, the first year reliable records were kept. By contrast, 1990, the worst year, a Beirut or Grozny-like 2,245 were killed.

It’s true that murders dwindle as the cost of housing increases. The poor, more likely to murder, are driven out and murders, no longer concentrated in the city, become less noticeable as they’re dispersed over sub- and exurbia. But, as always, policies and policing are major factors too.

“Criminologists suggest that killings by strangers have become so rare that the police cannot reasonably be expected to stamp out the problem any further,” writes Andrew Clark, author of the Guardian article.

New York’s top cops inevitably share the secrets of their success at seminars, as well as accept jobs in other cities. Maybe then, murders in cities with rates five to seven times as high, such as Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans and Washington, will dwindle down to New York numbers.

But a reduced crime rate may not be in the best interests of the US. After dot.com and housing, do we really want another bubble to burst?

It’s true that streets that are no longer mean might result in the criminal justice system being drawn down, like an army after a war. But how does the criminal justice system qualify as a “bubble?”

As crime reporter Art Montague wrote in 2006, “policing is big business.” In fact it’s almost criminal how many Americans are employed by the criminal justice system. “The uniformed cop on the street is the tip of the human resource iceberg.”

Just below the water line are detectives and crime scene investigators. Beneath them are criminalists, who study biological, trace, and impression evidence (fingerprints, footwear impressions, and tire tracks), as well as ballistics.

They coexist with the denizens of a veritable kelp forest of forensics: anthropology, archaeology, entomology, geology, meteorology, odontology, psychology, and toxicology.

Next, Montague writes, is “civilian staff ranging from technicians and auto mechanics to bean counters and file clerks.” Multiply that by “levels of jurisdiction — local, state/provincial [he's Canadian –- Ed.], national.” Not to mention by-law enforcement: “Meter maids, dog catchers, anti-smoking and anti-noise sleuths.”

Then, after a suspect is arraigned, come the “phalanxes of lawyers and judges, plus their support staff.” If a defendant gets off with probation, “More workers and infrastructure are needed to fill this niche in the supply chain.”

Meanwhile, much of the pressurized air needed to keep the bubble afloat is provided by federal agencies like the FBI, DEA, ATF, and Border Patrol.

Then, “local lock-ups, county/provincial jails, state and federal prisons.” Parole means “supervisors, their support staff, and their infrastructure,” not to mention the staff of halfway houses.

Finally, always ready to do their parts to keep the “budgetary ball rolling,” as Montague writes, are “social scientists, trainers, instructors, seminar leaders.” Like all bureaucracies, he points out, the criminal justice system self-perpetuates: “In this case, crime and criminals are the feed stock.”

All this adds up to a ballpark figure of $100 billion a year. Remember, since we aren’t dealing with terrorism, just good, old domestic crime, we’re not taking into account the $45 billion budget of the Department of Homeland Security (a whole ‘nother bubble).

Come to think of it, the criminal justice system is more than a bubble, it’s a cult. The definition of a cult is a group with “a sacred ideology and a set of rites centering around their sacred symbols.”

Criminal justice’s ideology is the belief that every criminal can be caught. Its rites are the investigation. Forensics has become the most ritualistic of ceremonial acts.

The service is the trial, the high priest, of course, the judge. An innocent verdict is akin to salvation. A guilty verdict and subsequent incarceration is hell (probation, purgatory).

Every cult needs scripture and that’s where the other half of the crime industry comes in. Its pie chart slices are divvied up between crime reporters, crime fiction writers, and TV shows and movies about law enforcement, crime scene investigation, and courts.

Crime dominates entertainment. Even literary authors, to increase chances of publication and subsequent book sales, and directors of independent movies, to enhance box office, use crime as a plot device.

Where would they — and we, the paying audience that fondles crime, turns it every which way, and drools over it –- be without crime?

The funds allocated to the criminal justice system would obviously be more beneficial to society if diverted to more constructive use. But, imagine if crime were wiped out like a disease that’s been cured.

As with the massive research and charity infrastructure left behind by the defeated disease, redeployment to another cause is called for. But a transformation this radical would not only burst our bubble but de-program us from the cult. What’s the best way to head a shock to the system like this off at the pass?

For starters, abolish the death penalty. Second, mount an advertising appeal to disadvantaged youth featuring rap, rock, and country artists.

“You know you’re gonna wind up in the slam anyway,” it might run. “Choose murder and the state will guarantee you a cell with cable TV and broadband.”

In other words, we need to do all we can to keep America safe for crime.

But, take heart, there’s a mechanism hidden within the heart of murder that will keep it from becoming extinct. In the New York Times article that inspired Clark’s Guardian piece, Al Baker writes: “In the eyes of some criminologists, the police will be hard pressed to drive the killing rate much lower, since most killings occur now within the four walls of an apartment or the confines of close relationships.

Murder, says Peter K. Manning, a professor of criminal justice, in the Times article, “is usually ‘a private crime, resulting from people who know one another and. . . end up in death struggles at home or in semipublic places.’”

“What are you going to do,” he asks, “send cops to every house?”

In other words, as with sodomy or smoking marijuana, you can’t keep people from committing murder in the privacy of their own homes.

Still, the day may come when even these last little pools of blood dry up for some unanticipated reason. Who knows? Maybe all the violent death perpetrated or unleashed by us in Iraq will induce a collective revulsion toward murder here at home as well. (We can dream, can’t we?)

But, never fear: We can always shift the bulk of our criminal justice overseas. The endless stream of killings in Iraq makes it ripe for law, justice, forensics, and of course, a CSI: Baghdad.

Besides, if law enforcement instead of military fought terrorism, as most national security experts advise, it would be infused with an even greater sense of purpose than when it was fighting common crime.

Part 1: Foxy Knoxy and the case of the honorary Missing White Woman
Part 2: School, mall and workplace shootings: Why so many? No, why so few?
Part 3: Star medical examiner’s compassion a lesson to splatter film fans

Last night saw the premiere of the final season of “The Wire,” HBO’s long-running drama that started out as a gritty look at the cat-and-mouse battle between overworked, underpaid cops and ruthless drug dealers in the decaying metropolis of Baltimore, Maryland, but quickly evolved into a scathing, unforgiving tour of the failure of all the institutions we take for granted. This ambitious vision is married to some of the most honest, raw, and real characters ever to grace a television screen, making “The Wire” not only the best show on television today, but one of the best examples of modern American thought and commentary we have.

Each season of “The Wire” has focused on a different institution or system and demonstrated in gory detail how badly it is failing, wrecked by corruption, indolence, greed,and above all else, apathy. Season One explored the parallels between the drug trade and the police culture, both groups crippled by greedy leaders more interested in protecting themselves than fulfilling their objectives. Corner boy drug dealers like Bodie and Poot were grousing about their distant bosses just as detectives like Jimmy McNulty (the peerless Dominic West) and Bunk Moreland raged at their inability to break cases due to politics.

Season Two explored Baltimore’s ports and the tired workers who man them, as a grisly murder investigation morphed into a look at the decline of unions, collective bargaining, and workers’ fortunes in Corporate America. Union man Frank Sobotka makes a deal with the devil to preserve his people’s dying way of life, and pays for it with a bullet and a padlock on the doors of his local’s headquarters.

Season Three, the most Shakespearean and dramatic yet, focused on the efforts of ambitious drug kingpin Stringer Bell to go legit by working the business world, hampered by his partner Avon Barksdale, just out of prison and looking to reestablish an empire weakened by a dangerous newcomer, Marlo Stanfield. The suave and businesslike Bell chastises the hot-blooded Barksdale for pushing a turf war against Marlo when they can make real money by investing drug profits into real estate and condos, only to be taken for a ride by smarter players in the muck and mire of Baltimore’s political world. Eventually, Bell and Barksdale sell each other out, Bell ends up dead, Barksdale in prison, and Stanfield moves in on their corners as the new king. Meanwhile, idealistic but combative Democratic City Councilman Tommy Carcetti decides to do the unthinkable and make a run for Mayor in an overwhelmingly black city, using soaring crime and decaying schools as his selling points. The resultant inside look at how city politics are defined by self-interest, compromise, and short-term gains is thoroughly depressing, all the more so for its realism.

Season Four, perhaps the most heartbreaking, focuses on four kids getting ready for eighth grade–Michael, the alpha-male group leader, Randy the mischief maker, Namond the wannabe gangsta, and Dukie, the shy, nearly homeless outcast. Their story winds through an educational system marred by massive budget deficits, the heavy hand of No Child Left Behind, teachers who are terrified of getting killed or stabbed, and children who are growing up in a world that has no use for them, left to evolve into wild animals but for the lack of someone to pay attention to their needs. Even as Carcetti wins his run for Mayor, his desire for the Governor’s chair leads him to refuse $5o million in education money for the city from the current (Republican) governor, condemning the school system to even more neglect and disrepair. As for the kids, none of them end up where you expect, but their fates are alternately grim and uplifting.

That’s the great beauty of “The Wire.” The show, created by David Simon, former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of “Homicide: Life On The Street,” steadfastly avoids cliches, judgment calls on its characters, or pedantry of any kind. People don’t learn life lessons. Cases aren’t wrapped up neatly in a bow at the end of the episode. Nowhere does the narrative stop to lecture us about the evils we’re witnessing. Simon and co-creator Ed Burns (a former Baltimore homicide detective) know better–every vista of hopelessness is tied to the narrative of the lives of cops, dealers, addicts, lawyers, politicos, and all of their attendant desires and ambitions.

Simon says in the above-linked interview that he is cynical of institutions to create change, and rightly so, but the individual stories of “The Wire” have the power to wreak great change. The show has never done “Sopranos” numbers, due to the complexity of the narrative and the simple truth that a majority-black cast in an urban setting may scare off white viewers. Season Five may broaden that scope a bit, as Simon turns his critical eye to examining the failures of our modern media to chronicle the important stories of the age. Already we can see the beleaguered reporters and editors under assault from corporate cutbacks, uninvolved superiors, personal ambition, lack of institutional experience, and the same devils that plague every other aspect of “the game.”

I strongly urge you to click every link in this entry and read everything you can about “The Wire.” Then watch it. There’s never been a show like it, and there most likely never will be again.

Recommended:

Christy Hardin Smith’s rave review of the show and its themes.

The Wire 101 for those who need a primer.

Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion
by Mark Ames
Soft Skull Press, 2005
360 pages, $15.95

In April 2007, when a Virginia Tech student killed 32, it was one of the worst ever, to coin a phrase, “social shootings.” Earlier, in February, five were killed in a Salt Lake mall and then, in December, nine in an Omaha mall.

Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion by Mark Ames was published by Soft Skull Press back in 2005. But the continued popularity of school, mall, and workplace shootings as a practical solution for troubled souls obligates us to revisit this essential work.

When social shootings first burst upon the scene, they seared the national psyche like a wildfire. Though since overshadowed by 9/11, Iraq, and Katrina, the regularity with which they flare up keeps them from slipping off our radar.

In 1986 postal employee Patrick Sherrill couldn’t have imagined the trend he sparked when he opened fire on the Edmond, Oklahoma post office. “Going postal” soon spread to the workplace at large. Few are aware of the numbers, but from 1998 to 2003 there were 164 shootings resulting in 290 dead and 161 wounded. In 2003 alone, 45 workplace massacres left 69 dead and 46 wounded.

The frequency of school shootings is just as mind-numbing. For example, bet you didn’t know that two weeks before Virginia Tech, two were killed at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Afterwards, while the bodies are autopsied, the culture audits itself. In the case of school shootings, perennial culprits like the broken family, gun availability, and bipolar disorder inevitably boil down to, “the parents,” as in “I blame the…” or “Where are the…”

Never mind that, according to Ames, love for their parents is expressed in the suicide notes of Klebold and Harris (who the adolescent Internet has canonized as Saints Dylan and Eric of the Columbine order).

Ames is a founder and the editor of the eXile, a Russian alternative weekly for the English-speaking that’s so wild and wooly it forces us to confront the painful truth that there may now be more freedom of the press in Russia than in the US.

Ames, pugnacious by nature (at least in his writing) is battle-tested by a decade in post-perestroika Moscow. He’s thus equipped to handle the accusation for which a superficial reading of Going Postal leaves him wide open — that he’s justifying the killings.

“Rather than looking outside of the office world for an explanation,” Ames writes of workplace shootings, “why not consider the changes within America’s corporate culture itself?”

Because it results in the death of innocents, a massacre by a heretofore unknown entity obscures what causes it. Difficulty identifying exactly who was targeted masks the motive. But Ames chronicles case after case of a worker who’s singled out for scut work and judged by separate standards. Wilting under the pressure, he invites further abuse, before ultimately erupting in a random shooting.

Except, Ames maintains, there’s nothing random about it. Besides hunting down a hated supervisor or executive, the killer also mows down co-workers. Why? Because he seeks to destroy the company as an entity. This is the stuff of which uprisings are made.

In fact, Ames devotes part two of Going Postal to building the case that today’s workplace shootings are akin to slave rebellions. At the time, outbreaks like Nat Turner’s were viewed as inchoate and devoid of political context by a public blissfully unaware that the victims of slavery might have a problem with the institution.

But institutions, like the state whose instrument they are, have a way of steamrolling the little guy. In fact, good old American bullying is at the heart of Going Postal. But, we remonstrate, hasn’t bullying in the workplace and schools become a thing of the past since civil rights laws and an ambient political correctness?

On the contrary, according to Ames. Besides labeling the killings uprisings, he has the audacity to invoke slavery to describe the working environment that’s evolved since the Reagan years.

“Reagan’s legacy to America and modern man is not the victory in the Cold War, where he simply got lucky.” (Remember Ames has an inside view of Russia.) Instead it’s “one of the most shocking wealth transfers in the history of the world…”

“Historians,” he conjectures, “may look back at this time and wonder why there weren’t more murders and rebellions.”

Regarding school shootings, he reminds us of what many forget: When Reagan was running for president in 1980, he pledged to abolish the federal Department of Education. But by exactly what mechanism does school carnage become a toxic byproduct of the economy?

Ames explains. While, for example, the “Top 20″ universities remain the same in number, the entrance bar is constantly raised because of an ever-expanding pool of applicants.

Furthermore, “The kids are stressed out not only by their own pressure at school, but by the stress their parents endure in order to earn enough money to live in [a prestigious] school district….Everyone is terrified of not ‘making it’ in a country where the safety net has been torn to shreds.”

But it’s not enough for Ames to justify the shootings to a certain extent and comparing the millennial work environment to slavery. He gives the reader even more bang for his or her buck. Ames concludes Going Postal by going out on a limb and tracing the killings back to one infamous moment in American history.

The Reagan years and the rocketing stock market of the nineties convinced most Americans they were rich people waiting to happen. They became too proud, Ames says, to identify themselves as the working people they remained in the interim. But those who are old enough to remember Reagan’s first term can’t help but feel the sting of Ames’s coup de grace at some level.

“When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981,” he asserts, “he told America he was literally willing to kill us all [in plane crashes, presumably] if we didn’t give in to his wealth-transfer plan….The air controller’s union broke — and so did a whole way of life.”

Ames renders the shooting incidents with the skill of a crime novelist. But while many in the competitive world of crime writing escalate the violence from one death to serial murders, Ames, as dictated by his subject, has no choice but to top them with serial massacres.

It’s no reflection on the author, but the horror wears you down. After a while, it begins to seem like there are as many bullets flying around the country as there are cockroaches crawling around.

At times, Ames works too hard to convince us of his thesis, when the facts speak for themselves. But it’s only in the service of giving voice to a generation of workers left to twist in the wind without unions, their children buffeted by the harsh realities of the No Child Left Behind Act.

Virginia Tech generated as much hand-wringing as any shooting. And it resulted in the passage of an important gun-control act, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Erecting obstacles to gun ownership is a no-brainer. Closing gaps in mental health care as well as remedying misinterpretations of privacy laws (like those that left the Virginia Tech killer’s deteriorating condition untreated) are steps in the right direction, too.

But it’s hard not to agree with Ames that failing to address the structural issues of, no, not society — but the economy — will continue to impose intolerable strains on Americans.

As long as the gap between the rich and the rest of us continues to widen, social shootings will remain the meltdown of choice for many. Just like suicide bombings in the Middle East.