Goons (Foto--Leggero)

Foto: Perchè?--Le Catacombe di Santa Priscilla, Profeta

Mio caro,
° As you know, I’m only 100 pages from the end of the 12th (and last) of the Peter Wimseys (I count the Peterless toadstools), so I’m just murderridden.
° A woman goes to her 5th floor window in Gotham to investigate gunshots, a drunken U.S. Army soldier shoots her through the--well, she dies. But he was drunk, so it doesn’t count.
° In Overton a friend of yours pauses at an intersection (he was too conscientious to use my habitual California stop), an intenseeyed lateteen approaches him from the right, a surly extremely mentally deficient (I use my own eyes on his foto) midteen approaches from the left. The teens demand his car, your friend accelerates, the surly midteen shoots him. Your friend drives a block or two, pulls over, dies. (Within the hour the teens successfully steal a car from another guy just down the way.)
° And now everyone is looking for The Reason.
° I mean, The Reason it couldn’t happen to you or to me. As we do in the face of every violent crime or natural disaster. (My hilltop house’ll never be submerged as a result of a broken levee.)
° “Thank heavens it wasn’t a hate crime.” That is the commonest selfcomfort one hears from his associates.
° And yet I think Peter Wimsey would notice, and indeed a fiveyearold child would notice, that the window of the car was not shattered. There was the opportunity for reply. There was the opportunity for the surly extremely mentally deficient midteen to perceive the murderee as a faggot. The surly extremely mentally deficient midteen in any case must’ve perceived the murderee as a honky.
° For, the surly extremely mentally deficient midteen did not, in fact, slaughter the hispanic guy in the successfully stolen car. What else was different?
° Of course it could happen to you or to me, California stop or fullstop. Of course it could happen to you or to me, ground floor or 5th floor.

§§§§§

° That there is a subspecies of hominids born with the love of shedding blood is as obvious as the rotty stench of their underfingernails. The Talmud has known this for millennia, these are the guys “predestined by God” to be the village butchers.
° But the reason this subspecies--no doubt there’s a genetic marker--is so socially disruptive, the reason that even the extremely mentally deficient ones can blow up 30 women and children at a time, or blow through one woman or man at a time, is because they can so easily obtain the “powder” to do it with.
° Where do those boys get their guns?
° Where do those boys get their explosives?

§

° And by the way, Peter Wimsey finally asks, “How long did your friend survive in that car?”
° That is, did he survive long enough to have been saved if a single one of the multitude of neighbours who heard the shot had phoned E-911?
° No, mio caro, stay out of that neighbourhood. The lawabiding are as dangerous as the outlaws.

° On my Busman‘s Honeymoon, Giac.