Blood Simple: Perps

It’s hard to track someone who is not in the system, someone with no priors. If they haven’t been fingerprinted, there’s no way of making an ID at the crime scene. Once you’ve got a rap sheet, things are easier, even if the perp has no permanent place of residence and just hangs out. Chronic criminal behavior is viral, so if a detective is trying to nab someone for one crime, he can just wait for him to be apprehended for another. An I-card is produced, and as he is being arraigned for the second offense, the perp can be rearrested if he is not remanded. The subject in question had been picked up for trespassing in the 4-1, or forty-first precinct, the Fort Apache of cinema fame, which was once an urban form of the wild west, when New York, and particularly the South Bronx, was wide open back in the eighties. Now it’s still a tough neighborhood where teenagers in hoodies, sweat pants and heavy boots scurry between narrow doorways. The perp was being held on the trespassing charge at the Bronx Criminal Court house on 161st Street, but he was also being sought for assaulting his girlfriend. The court looks like the set of a television police procedural. There are clusters of court officers and an attractive Hispanic female judge, who in fact looks like an actress whose name you can’t quite remember. The public defenders arrive with thick legal files under their arms and four or five young ADAs, including an Orthodox Jew, are already processing varying cases, which all have docket numbers. Once the proceedings begin, the accused are led in, handcuffed, from a side entrance, like they’re coming on from the wings of an off-Broadway stage. A young woman is charged with assaulting her boyfriend, but she has also filed a complementary complaint against him. Orders of protection are the issue. The judge’s voice pipes up in a refrain that will be heard throughout the morning: “You understand that you will not contact him by cell phone, by email, by S-mail, or by Googling him, even if he indicates that he wants to contact you. You understand that you are being released subject to your understanding of this order of protection and that your discharge will be revoked if you violate this order of protection.” There is an appearance of studiousness amongst all the players that verges on goodwill, but there is a countervailing glazed-over look amongst the defendants, prosecutors and even family members who fill the pews. Everyone has seen it all before. It’s an ongoing drama that replays itself everyday like the old soaps. As four young men are brought before the judge, two burly court officers line up in back. Defendants are known to flee even in handcuffs.

Fuck You!

You can say something is bullshit, which means it is as worthless as the feces of bull, but how did fucking become an adjective? Fucking, as we all know, began its life as a gerund, referring to the act of sexual intercourse. It then evolved into a modifier, as in the case of a woman on 23rd Street the other day who was overheard angrily saying, “You take the fucking car.” But how did the adjectival form of the noun come to take on the same connotation as the imperative of the verb, as in “fuck you”? Now, “fuck you” means you will get fucked, which is basically a nice idea, unless fuck in some way implies that in being fucked rather than doing the fucking you are getting the lesser end of the deal, as in Philip Larkin’s famous line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” For instance, people who feel they have been taken advantage of frequently refer to themselves as “being fucked in the ass.” But there are lots of people, male and female, who enjoy being buggered—at least an equal number (if not more) than those who enjoy doing the buggering. It all doesn’t make a helluva lot of sense, but there is no mystery to language. Idioms tell us something, and the message in “fucking,” “fuck you” and “fucked in the ass” is that there is something about a normally pleasant experience that is not pleasant. This negative association seems to derive from the folksy and now anachronistic notion that it is better to be the giver than the receiver, better to penetrate than be the one who is penetrated. But passivity and vulnerability, as we all must realize at some point, are highly successful ways of gaining knowledge.

Quiddity

Quiddity refers to the whatness of things, and it is precisely this whatness that is lost as we advance ever further into technological bridge building. In his famous graveside speech, Hamlet says, “Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures?” referring to a departed lawyer. Cybernetics allows for an increase in efficiency at the price of progress. This is not to suggest that everyone must do the Boston AIDS ride to get a feeling for the distance that is lost when traveling by plane or car. Arguing for purity is like chasing windmills, but there are qualitative things that can be done to improve one’s relationship to the world of objects. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx argued that the means of production resulted in the worker’s alienation from the world of things. The automobile production line epitomizes the kind of anomie in which workers are chronically estranged from the products they produce, but in modern life, more and more conveniences make it ever more difficult to actually have a hands-on relationship with anything. We push too many buttons. For instance, a new service called Doodle allows people to effectively coordinate group activities through an online calendar. It sets up future human interactions by surgically triaging all its clients before presenting a neat little diagram of availability. Seems innocuous enough, right? But it’s not. Such applications prevent all the usual grousing, bickering and love-hate that accompanies human congregation. It’s proven that even animals need others animals, and of all mammals Homo sapiens are perhaps most defined by their social needs. However, with the advent of cyber universes like Second Life, humans may no longer even have to have first-hand contact to arrange social events. Their avatars will Doodle via Google.

Diasporic Dining XIX: Bulimia for Idiots

The IHOP in Englewood Cliffs, NJ—the pancake special offering unlimited stacks for $4.99, assorted syrups including but not limited to maple, the rack of Smucker’s jellies, thick New England Clam chowder, the club sandwich sitting on a mountain of soggy fries—is a recipe for vomiting, a paradise for bulimics who don’t even have to bother putting their fingers down their throats. Add to this a discussion of Chuck Palahniuk’s "Guts," a gastrointestinal story if there ever was one, and you have the perfect setting for literary deconstruction, or, in medical terms, triage. In the intimacy occasioned by the overcrowded seating area, the text becomes the menu, in which the very ingredients that create our sense of good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and profane, Levi-Strauss’s “raw and cooked,” come into question. Fast food restaurant chains like IHOP, Denny’s, and naturally Burger King, Wendy’s and McDonald’s are much maligned because of the poisonous nature of the food. But few realize the value they serve as metaphoric Petrie dishes for the process of ingestion and regurgitation. The presuppositions of culture coalesce in a windswept parking lot, with the harsh but inviting white light and the cheerily uniformed servers with their mechanized first-person-plural responses. Here, like in the Large Hadron Collider, the initial conditions of longing for what anxious Americans call comfort food are recreated, one day at a time.

Population on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

During the 1950s, “nervous breakdown” was the overall rubric under which a variety of behaviors and conditions were catalouged. High powered advertising executives of the kind portrayed in the popular television series Mad Men had breakdowns due to the stress of their jobs, and were sent away to sanitariums like the famed Austen Riggs in Stockbridge (if they could afford it). In those days, the tranquillizer of choice was Miltown, which then gave rise to Librium and Valium. The protagonist of A Stop at Willoughby, the famed Twilight Zone episode about a harried ad executive who slips into an escape hatch from the prison of his high-pressure existence, is the prototypical nervous breakdown sufferer, but his psychic break transports him into a fantasy of a euphoric, carefree world which turns out to be death. You don’t hear about nervous breakdowns much anymore. Today, the diagnosis that is increasingly being provided for a variety of behaviors is bipolar disorder. What are we to make of this? Were those suffering from bipolar disorder merely ignored, in the same way that the learning disorders ADD and dyslexia were long overlooked or misunderstood, or were those afflicted with nervous breakdowns really suffering from bipolar disorder? Sometimes the changes in labels are the result of the DSM IV, which lists and categorizes conditions, and which recently broadened the category for autism to such an extent that Asberger’s no longer stands alone as a diagnostic category. And then there are the ailments that seem to come and go, like the women who talk of Michelangelo in “Prufrock.” One of these is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a malady that appeared to be more ubiquitous in the ‘90s than it is today, despite the fact that no vaccine was ever developed to prevent it from striking. 

The Trolley Problem

Philippa Foot, the English philosopher who put forth the Trolley Problem, recently died (“Philippa Foot, Renowned Philosopher, Dies at 90,” NYT, l0/9/10). The Trolley Problem is one of those conundrums like the Prisoner’s Dilemma that presents ethical decisions in a utilitarian context. In short, a run-away trolley is about to kill five track men, but can be diverted so that it will only kill one worker. What should the driver do? Clearly, by diverting the tram, the driver is playing God, deciding who shall live and who shall die. In addition, implicit in the seemingly rational decision to kill one man over five is the notion that life can be quantitatively valued. Surely five lives are worth more than one. But are they? The United States sentenced many of the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to horrible deaths in which they were literally incinerated in order to force a Japanese surrender. But this nuclear holocaust saved many lives. The firebombing of Dresden is a lesser example. Ironically, the U.S. implementation of similar tactics in later wars—napalming in Vietnam and massive air assaults, most recently in Iraq—proved to be far less successful. It’s as if the tram that mowed down the one track worker became a possessed evil spirit and returned to knock off the other five. However difficult these arguments become, underlying them is a belief in the power or reason, rationality and logic. Significantly, Foot, who was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, was an activist and obviously a believer in the possibility of making decisions for the Greater Good, as evidenced in her having helped to create Oxfam.

Blood Simple: Sam Sleeps

In the annals of pathological behavior, the case of Col. David Russell Williams, the high-ranking Canadian air force pilot run amok, must rank high. Williams’s crime spree started with breaking and entering houses of young girls to steal their underwear, and ended in several grisly murders involving battery and asphyxiation. He recorded most if not all of his exploits and saved them as computer files (“Top Canadian Commander Pleads Guilty to Murders,” NYT, 10/18/10). Without playing amateur sleuth or psychoanalyst, one would have to conclude that Colonel Williams wanted to be caught. Another salient feature of the crime spree was that it was characterized by a continuing escalation, in which the equivalent of a high school prank evolves into fetishism, masturbation, and finally acts of assault, starting with stripping and blindfolding his victims and culminating in two acts of murder. Bank robbers and other criminals often go on sprees, but it’s unclear if their adventures are characterized by continually upping the ante, with more daredevil-type robberies of ever larger and seemingly well defended institutions. Also, it seems rare that felons wish to be caught. Thus, Williams’s pathology is distinctive in its evolutionary and self-defeating character. Williams was not the classic criminal who simply sets out to get the things he can’t have. In fact, one would think that a high-level pilot of his type would be a sex symbol to certain women, which makes his bevy of transgressions all the more puzzling. His persona would hardly seem to be that of the retiring misfit who would be unattractive to women. Indeed, if he had wanted to engineer it, he probably could have found willing partners in debauchery. What was driving this latter day Jack the Ripper? Was he hearing voices like the famed Son of Sam, David Berkowitz? How does he compare to Hayes and Komisarjevsky, the two criminals recently involved in the grisly Petit murders? Were drugs involved? And how is such behavior defined? Is Williams, who led a double life as criminal on one hand and as husband and family man (who golfed with his wife) on the other, insane, by legal definitions of the word?  In the lifetime of incarceration that undoubtedly awaits him, authorities and mental health professionals will have a unique opportunity to explore the subterfuges of one of the more extreme examples of criminal pathology.