perfidy

For the Week Ending 25Oct04:

Spotlight Iraq: Since this feature began, Iraq has been a bottomless well of exemplary human behavior. This week is no different. Savages kidnapped Margaret Hassan, head of CARE International's Iraq operations. Hassan is part Iraqi herself, and has spent much of the last 30 years working in the country to help (according to the CARE homepage) "the world's poorest communities solve their most threatening problems." But Hassan is only the highest-profile prisoner this week. Three Macedonian contractors captured in August were beheaded. Perhaps the head chopping, self-imagined footsoldiers for Allah might be counted among the most threatening problems in Iraq?

Spotlight South Carolina: A Rock Hill, SC policeman used his taser to subdue a 75 year old woman who...ahem..."assaulted" him. The woman refused to leave a nursing home after visiting hours and became argumentative when told to leave. The cop claims the woman swung at him, despite her having "arthritis and six broken ribs". Tasering ensued, although why he couldn't have just picked her up and tucked her under his arm I'm not sure about.

I might have wished for a taser once or twice when I foolishly put myself between an elderly phalanx of walkers, canes, and Rascals and the 3-for-a-dollar cucumber bin at my grocery store. Warm cookie and macrame cozy grandma disappears; coldly shrewd and implacable ancient evil takes her place. But I manage to get myself out of their way without actually having to, you know, electrocute anyone. Sheesh.

Spotlight Pennsylvania: A man shooting at a mouse in his home shot his girlfriend instead.

One more time: A man shooting at a mouse...in his home...shot his girlfriend instead.

So. His first instinct wasn't to buy some traps, or get a fucking cat, but to take out his .22 and start shooting. As far as I'm concerned, she got what she deserved by being so stupid as to hang around someone so improbably stupid. Too bad the mouse didn't skitter across his forehead when he was shooting. We would've owed him and all mousekind a great debt by helping eradicate this contamination of the human genepool.

Spotlight Massachussesss: Boston is aswarm with historical places. The city is aware of its history and that history's greater relationship to the national imagination. Boston and environs have pioneered living responsibly within important historical spaces in the evolving cityscape. And most importantly, Boston has mastered marketing history to make money from tourists. So it was just true to form that after a historic win in a historic game, the Land of Bean and Cod had itself a good, olde tyme riot.

Lots of property damage, your basic flipped and burned cars, busted windows aplenty. Not a few busted noses. And one death: an undergraduate killed by a policeman firing a munition marketed as "non-lethal". Since the victim is non-alive, and will ever remain so, I urge Boston PD to reconsider non-lethal ammunition's place in the force and treat it henceforward as lethal. Because it quite obviously can be.

Meanwhile, at the University of Massachuessesss-Amherst, local police had their own riots to contend with. There were at least 29 arrests immediately following the game, relating primarily to destruction of property, assault, and....oh yes, hurling beer cans of flaming liquid at cops. Several thousand dollars will be spent to repair windows and replace furniture.

The leaders of tomorrow. Today.

Ministry safety tip: Kids, rioting can be a blast. You can break stuff and steal things, maybe even bust a head or two, all in good fun. You even get plausible deniability to the cops by being a nameless face in a crowd. For precisely the same reason, you get to sound like a big man because you can say you were wherever you need to say you were to sound interesting to chicks. And best of all, you don't even have to be a malefactor- just being there is enough to claim anything for any audience. But when you see a line of riot police with shields, faceplates, and mounted cavalry on the march, go home. Come down off the telephone pole and go the hell home.