The Raven

Monday, April 21, 2003

Land of a Thousand Jackals

Plenty of bad choices out there just waiting to be made. And as always, somebody goes right ahead and makes them. Then we get to watch and laugh at the fools, grinning at each other like the gallery in the third tier at the Globe Theater. Pass me that tomato, would you? Many thanks.

Modern Metaphors

If you surf as much as I do, you've probably run into pop-up ads for the "Iraqi Most-Wanted" playing cards. They're everywhere now, and at $5.95 a pop, it's getting hard to resist springing for a pack. Something to show the grandkids, anyway.

Over at the London Times, they've got a wrap-up on our progress through the deck. The point of the article is that we're unlikely to nab all 55 miscreants, as some number of them are surely dead already. But what got my attention was the facility of the playing-card metaphor itself.

Al-Azzawi (No 45) and al-Ghafur (No 54) join four other captives:

Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti (No 52), a half-brother of Saddam who is now reported to be "singing like a canary" under CIA interrogation;
Samir abd al-Aziz al-Najim (No 24), the regional chairman of the Baath party in east Baghdad;
Watban Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti (No 51), another of Saddam's half-brothers; and
Amer Hammoudi Hasan al-Saadi (No 55) Saddam's top scientific adviser.

Fact is, these Arabic names are extraordinarily difficult to type out, let alone pronounce, and reducing these people to card suits and numbers serves the two-fold purpose of simplifying their indentification while dehumanizing them along the way. Something tells me that we'll be doing a lot more of this sort of thing in the years to come.

Crying Wolf

In this case, it's Virginia lawmaker Rep. Frank R. Wolf, who took the floor during a congressional hearing to exhibit a few examples of video game carnage to the assembly. Like many of his ilk, he'd like to see less of this stuff being sold to youngsters.

"Sniper shots to the head, brutal beatings, bludgeoning of women with golf clubs, point-blank shootings of police officers, it's a taste of what many teenagers are seeing every day after school, and this is just unacceptable."

The Raven fully supports game makers' efforts to meet demand for these products and deems any attempt to censor their production as misguided idiocy. It's a shame that children waste so much time playing them, true, but there's just as much violence—and of a far more graphic variety—available in modern literature. Fiction doesn't create reality, it reflects it. I like this response from Rep. Jose E. Serrano, D-N.Y., who pointed out the obvious:

"For the last three weeks the major networks have shown us their version of a video game, which is called "Bomb Baghdad Every Night,'" Serrano complained.

Quite so.

Oops, I Launched a Mortar Round Again

Here you see Dwipamani Kalita at right, handing over a Rocket-Propelled Grenade shell to police at the Special Branch headquarters in Guwahati, India. For the past year, Kalita has been an activist for the the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), carrying out solitary attacks on the "high security" Assam Assembly campus with mortar rounds, killing 3 and injuring 21—including a former Minister of India's Parliament.

The 20-year-old surrendered today, and informed the press that she joined the ULFA for personal reasons of "bitterness," and not for any particular political ideology.

"I was angry with my personal life and chose the path of destruction and like a machine I went on carrying on one after another mortar attack," she said.

Kalita added that "it was a mistake and she wanted to begin her life afresh." Yes, well, all's forgiven then.

Dungeons and Dragons

In this case, the dungeon was built by John T. Jamelske, of DeWitt, New York. Seems he was thinking along the same lines as that the "Buffalo Bill" character in Silence of the Lambs, so he constructed an elaborate underground prison for his victims beneath his home.

Here's a deputy outside the property, and as you can imagine, the neighbors are totally freaked out by this discovery.

During a search of the house, deputies said they found photographs of women chained to a wall. They also say they found diaries Jamelske forced his victims to keep, recording details such as when they had been raped, when they showered and when they brushed their teeth.

This all came to light when he took his most recent captive out with him while he ran some errands, and she managed to get to a phone. "He may have been just a handyman, but he apparently created his own world where he was the ultimate ruler, a king," says Dr. Alan Manevitz, a psychiatrist at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York.

Where the Money Is

Why, that would be the banks, which are being robbed at increasingly frequent rates lately as a result of the downturn in the economy. A huge increase in this sort of crime is occuring nationally at rates approaching the 20-year high set in 1991, of almost 9,400.

What's interesting here is that while the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story this morning covers the trend in Georgia, and the New York Daily News addresses the same situation in the Big Apple, both stories reach the same conclusion: It's the banks' fault. Here's the AJC:

Pressure to curb bank robbery falls also upon the banks. Holmes said the FBI encourages bankers to "harden the target," with measures like bullet-proof teller windows, controlled entrances and extensive surveillance.

Well that makes sense. But it turns out that the average loss per bank amounts to something on the order of only $9,000 a year, whereas increasing security runs around $40,000. From an executive perspective, it's a no-brainer.

But if we have a problem with people like Gerard N. Louis, shown above in mid-heist looking over the money tray like he's ordering a sandwich at Subway, is the correct response to fortify the banks until they're impregnable? I don't think so. As we see with airport security, you can make the citizenry feel like terrorists by treating them like criminals, and when you behave toward people in a certain way, they tend to live up to those expectations.

10:35:19 AM