Making Sense out of Murder

Murder by the conventionally prominent commands attention because it shatters convenient assumptions about violence as a problem that occurs only on the wrong side of the tracks among high school dropouts with many good reasons for their low self-esteem. And while we have become accustomed to pictures of well-groomed men in hand-made suits wearing platinum cufflinks and stainless steel hand cuffs, we recognize them as high-class swindlers who are very bit as different from us as the 3-card Monte dealer pushing smack on the dark side.

Murder is the ultimate breach of the social order and society is reassured when it occurs in somebody else’s neighborhood among people who don’t look like the rest of us.

We know about and are inured to cold-blooded murder by and among kings and princes but hot-blooded murder among our own kind is unsettling and undignified and calls for some rational explanation to assuage our discomfort.

Dante had a certain understanding of hot-blooded crimes and punished them less severely than the premeditated crimes of the intellect. But our modern culture is different, regarding crimes of passion with more disdain and more discomfort than crimes and criminals that either make some sense or at least that we can make some sense of.

DV/September 13, 2009