Why Dont You Blog?

It’s almost a truism that anyone who makes a tear-stained televised appeal for help to solve a murder will probably be arrested within the week. It seems as if the more extravagant the grief that is willingly expressed on camera, the more likely that the person is guilty.

Even the BBC has noticed. Today it published a feature on the phenomenon .

And, now, I’ve stumbled across true-crime-in-the-media. 2.0:
Barbora Skrlova on MySpace Assuming this is an elaborate joke, albeit in poor taste, I am compelled to look for MySpace profiles of other notorious figures.

For instance, Myra Hindley seems to have half a dozen.

I type in Fred West and get a “Server is too busy” message a few times.
(Quick break to panic at the idea that half the global population has been taken with a lunatic desire to see which really evil people have a MySpace profile.) Then I find there’s an ill-starred 13 pages full of Fred Wests. Lose interest when I consider that most of them might indeed be real humans who just happen to be called Fred West. Then again, a fair number have headlines such as “Get a load of my floorboards”

On firmer ground with Rosemary West. After a good few innocently but unluckily named real US females who just happen to be called Rosemary West, I find a MySpace profile purporting to be from Fred West’s soulmate. In fact, there’s a link to a more convincing Fred West impersonator in her friend space..

What about Josef Fritzl? That one is actually quite scary. I can’t even work out if its meant to reference the Austrian maniac or the name is just a coincidence.

Michel Fourniret? The server times out. Then I get a
“We weren’t able to find a ” Michel Fourniret ” on MySpace”
message, which probably won’t be true for long.

(In case this name isn’t familiar to you, he’s the male half of a French version of a Rosemary-and-Fred-West couple. She lured young women for him to rape and murder, in exchange for his promise to murder her ex-husband. The family that slays together, stays together…….)

I can partly understand why sane people might create web pages for the truly evil. (Apart from an adolescent desire to shock people.) These sorts of crimes make most of us so uneasy about the nature of what it means to be human that humour becomes a necessary defence mechanism. Otherwise, it’s impossible to contemplate the things they have done.

All the same, I have to suspect that at least some of these tributes aren’t ironically post-modern comments on the nature of notoriety. Some of them have been put there by the very same sort of unspeakable beings who do such crimes.

It’s usually baffling how these spectacularly homicidal people find each other to begin these partnerships in crime.. Rosemary and Fred West; Michel and Monique Fourniret, the children who killed James Bulger; Myra Hindley and Ian Brady…… Do their eyes meet across the proverbial crowded room and they see the spark of a potential partner in homicide? Does it “take one to know one?”

Blimey, interactive web 2.0 must do away with so much of the uncertainty for such people. They could start by putting up profiles of their psycho role models …

Popularity: 16% [?]

Popularity: 16% [?]

Francis of Assisi. Hmm, what does Wikipedia say about him? “…Francis was inspired to devote himself to a life of poverty…..” He founded the Franciscan order which is pretty well synonymous with the concept of monastic poverty, in the face of the incredible wealth amassed by the other medieval monastic orders.

So, it’s a mite odd to find that, according to the Times

Armed guards brought in to protect Assisi church from beggars

Armed security guards have been brought in for the first time to protect visitors to the Franciscan church of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Assisi from “beggars, tramps and gypsies” who “disturb the peace of a place of prayer”…..
Claudio Ricci, mayor of Assisi and a member of Forza Italia, the party led by Silvio Berlusconi, said the friars’ decision to employ guards was in line with a new local ordinance cracking down on illegal immigrants, many of them Roma gypsies….

After all, those irritating poor people might be benefitting from the charitable impulses of the faithful, before they’ve unburdened themselves of worldly wealth in the church’s collection boxes. Leaving that much less to give to the Church. Even when the church in question is supposedly founded on concern for the poor.

(Some of which donated wealth is clearly going to be spent on paying armed security guards to drive away the irritatingly poor….. It’s almost pleasingly circular)

New Franciscan rule: Give to the wealthy.

And here’s a further story, which may seem slightly reminiscent of the above news item to anyone familiar with the history of the British Labour Party.

The Times Rich List shows that:

The richest 1,000 people in Britain have seen their wealth quadruple under Labour, according to The Sunday Times Rich List published today. Even under Gordon Brown’s brief premiership their fortunes have soared by 15%, just as the financial squeeze and faltering house prices have hit ordinary people.

Or, perhaps more pertinently for “ordinary people,” rising costs for food, utilities and local taxes. At the same time, the tax system has been changed to take more income tax from the lowest-paid, while everyone else pays less. (The government has promised rebellious Labour MPs that it will put this tax thing right but not yet explained how it’s going to work)

A new candidate for the Beatitudes: Blessed are the rich for they shall always get more.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

In case you have missed it, Nullifidian is back blogging - today with a nice catch of Archbishop Rowan Williams claiming that he cant come to terms with humans being created for a “Purpose.” Brilliant. Well worth reading.

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Popularity: 19% [?]

From the BBC’s new department of rose tinted glasses:

At 6.30pm, when in times gone by most kids would be sitting round the dinner table, it is not difficult to find a group of teenage drinkers gulping vodka in a quiet corner of Leeds.
At the side of an old cricket pavilion, I found seven young girls and two older boys sharing cigarettes and alcohol. It is hard to imagine stumbling across such a scene 40 years ago.

Well, no it isn’t hard to imagine it at all. In fact, anyone who has been alive for more than about ten years would probably recognise that as a pretty normal scene to stumble across at any time. Or even, to have partaken in.

“Times gone by” when “most kids would be sitting round the dinner table?”

The natural reaction to this sort of bilge is to mention a bit of history. I am trying to rein this in and not go back to the Viking berserkers. I’ll just say, hmm, 40 years ago? Wasn’t that the approximate time of massive “mods” and “rockers” battles every Bank Holiday? They would never have smoked or drank while they were setting about each other with hammers and axes and bike chains, then….

Are we a nation of amnesiacs?

I can’t claim to have read this - too scholarly for light reading and way too costly to buy, but this book that I spotted on Amazon could put the subject in perspective
Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650-1950 (Advances in Criminology) Pamela Cox, Dartmouth.

Note that its time span RUNS OUT in 1950. The blurb says it shows

“.. how certain themes have dominated European discourses of delinquency across this period, not least panics about urban culture, poor parenting, dangerous pleasures, family breakdown, national fitness and future social stability.”

Where are we now? Oh yes, 2007. So when was this golden age when all young people were playing Cluedo with their chums, camping with the Scouts or Guides, going to bell-ringing practice and volunteering to visit the housebound elderly?

Oh, that must have been in an Enid Blyton book, sorry. So, maybe we should all move to live in 1950s children’s literature.

There are indeed some places in England where the lucky teenage offspring of the rural middle class live like this. But even they are likely to be smoking and drinking when they get together. It goes with the territory of being a teenager.

I am not denying there are some seriously dangerous kids. Three men have been killed in a matter of weeks, just for doing the sane adult thing of speaking up when kids are acting badly.
But that doesn’t mean that every kid with a bottle of cider and a ten-pack of Benson and Hedges is a murderous moron.

Most of them are just normal teenagers, who will learn wisdom partly through doing some moderately stupid things, as we all do. And then forget it all again, of course, when they airbrush their own life history to conform to the Enid Blyton world image that even the BBC feels it has to present to the next generation.

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Popularity: 22% [?]