Stop, Thief!

Some excitement in my normally staid urban existence today. While driving down the street I noticed someone smashing the window of a parked BMW, stealing something from the seat, and taking off on a bicycle. The perpetrator was a 20 something white homeless/hippie looking fellow. In the heat of the moment I decided to give chase, continuously honking my horn and futilely shouting "stop that guy!" to passers by. After a couple blocks of this, with diabolical cleverness he turned his bike left onto a one way street. Perhaps having seen too many police movies, I took a calculated risk and followed. A beat up car behind me, I noticed, carried two guys who'd apparently also seen the crime, and they followed suit.

I kept even with the bicyclist along the curb, while the other car pulled ahead and cut him off at the next intersection. Seeing he was cornered, he abandoned his bike and ran across the street into the lot of a gas station. Out of the other car emerged a bearded white guy with an enormous belly who against all expectation managed to chase down the thief. Happily, by the time I pulled my car into the lot the guy was pinned in a fetal-like position on the concrete. I called 911, had a nice little wait (4 minutes?), and officers were on the scene in about 15 minutes.

The thief threatens the guy pinning him--"you weren't allowed to hit me"--and claims his girlfriend is videotaping the whole thing and that the guy will go to jail. We rebut this line of thinking.

The driver of the smashed BMW somehow finds his way there, I'm not sure how, and demands to know "where the cash was". And sheesh, there was a giant wad of cash the kid had stolen from the car in his pocket.

I was immediately suspicious of the BMW driver now, but he hung around after the police came, talked to them, and was fine with them impounding the cash til it was all resolved. We talked later at the police station and there was a completely innocent explanation for him having that much cash, and he seemed like a very nice guy.

The bearded white guy, who did the really important heavy lifting in all this of hand to hand grappling with the perp, was only in town temporarily and had to get back to his ship. He told me later he was a great believer in people taking action on crimes, and in carrying guns. "Hey, right to bear arms!" I agreed.

I've had two car stereos stolen since I've lived here. They do $900 worth of damage to your car to get a $200 stereo they probably fence for $10 or 20. It's nice to see someone get caught.

Attack, Punishment, or Tragedy?

A friend asks if I observed any actual persons doing any actual grieving on the national day of mourning. And the answer is: No.

No one's grieving. Half the country is scolding the ugly American, the other half is saying let's roll. Only certain media types believe the story is about recollecting our emotional reactions.

You can take 9/11 as Attack, or you can take it as Punishment. Or you can avoid an unseemly argument during the eulogy by calling it Tragedy.

One of several problems with Tragedy, however, is that it works rather well with Saddam's view that it was "God's Punishment". By impersonalizing the perpetrators right out of the picture frame and zooming onto someone's heart, the Tragedians are effectively in the "act of God" camp themselves, as if they were talking about a hurricane or bridge collapse. Usually when someone is to blame for some horrible event, that person is, um, discussed, and at some length, especially if they're still at large. The problem is we're not sure yet whom we're blaming. Even those basically blaming "them" feel that saying so is somehow boorish and indecorous, and likely to dangerously encourage the flag-waving monster truck element in our midst.

"Fearful symmetries" of the type beloved by Malcolm Muggeridge abound. They say it's an act of God, we treat it as such. They pay enormous sums of money to the killers' surviving families, we pay enormous sums to the victims'. Their media is obsessed with stories of "look what they're doing to us now", ours with "look what we're doing to them now." For now it's a thriving little ecosystem, with Palestine the perfect media storm.

We hope Arab moderates start winning some hearts and minds over there, but if you're sitting in the United States and can't see a TV show squarely criticizing Islamic fundamentalism on the 9/11 anniversary, what can we expect from their media?

The Attack camp will inexorably win in the end, of course. I take it as unfortunately axiomatic that the usual suspects will keep doing dastardly things til their crimes exceed what even a Sontag can excuse with "root causes". For now, 9/11 has only woken up half the country, and we're still bleary-eyed. I give it one more attack; pessimists might say two or three.

OK Shakespeare, What's It Gonna Take?

Illuminating table on copyright duration.

Life plus 70 years. What does the publishing lobby shoot for next: the death penalty?

And these amazing durations are to incent what, exactly, besides more lobbying for even longer ones?

How many Shakespeares have been lost to humanity because, all things considered, they just didn't think that writing as an enterprise was quite worth the time and trouble involved, unless they were assured that, a hundred years hence, their great grandchildren would still be financially profiting from the copyright?

Children and grandchildren aren't enough, apparently, to lure some crypto-Goethes and crypto-Faulkners out of the woodwork, from their careers as sports agents and chefs.