I read this one too. I think everyone goes through a true crime phase at some point, don't you? Oh, you don't? You never did? Are you sure? Oh. Hmmmm.I read this one too. I think everyone goes through a true crime phase at some point, don't you? Oh, you don't? You never did? Are you sure? Oh. Hmmmm. ...more
- Scuse me, Fred Rosen - no, don't try to scurry away, I know it's you, I got your picture right here, see - "Fred Rosen, author of Lobster Boy and Bo- Scuse me, Fred Rosen - no, don't try to scurry away, I know it's you, I got your picture right here, see - "Fred Rosen, author of Lobster Boy and Body Dump", see, right here.
- Yeah look whaddya want kid, I'm busy. You want an autograph?
- No, I want my money back.
- What? huh?
- Because the only reason I read your damned revolting execrably written piece of shit was to find out how on God's earth a family (a mother, a father, two grown-up kids, that's a family right?) can live in a house, an ordinary house, which contains five human corpses in the loft and three more in the crawl space, having been put there by the son in the pursuit of his principal hobby, and they just don't notice when the stench of decomp overwhelms and pervades every pore of their lives like a jukebox which can only play Elton John, when awful effluvia remains curled up and nestled in every corner of their being, when they wake, when they sleep, when they eat, and this is how they live for a year as the bodies pile up because of the son's shall we say limited notions of what constitutes spring cleaning, and they, the father, the mother and the daughter (not the son, he knows whereof these noisome vapours, this dismal reek) never get the exterminator guy in for a complete fumigation, never complain to the council about the drains, and it's a complete surprise to these people when the authorities haul the eight by now skeletal but previously full of flesh remains from out of their happy home - I wanted to know what kind of people these were and you, you big Fred Rosen, you didn't tell me at all. At all.
- yeah well it's a good question.
- but that's why I read your rubbish book.
- well, nobody ever found out. They wouldn't talk.
- well that's not good enough, gimme my money back.
- well how much did you pay?
- 0.1p plus postage from Amazon.
- you cheap bastard
- yeah well, it's not Anna Karanina, it's Body Dump
- well here's your one penny and screw you
- plus postage, £2.75
- look I'm just trying to make a living selling other people's misery to nauseating voyeurs like you
- what, now you're insulting the only friends you've got? What are you, the Van Morrison of true crime writers?
[the encounter degenerates into frank name calling and unseemly shoving. Finally they walk away hurling lame insults.:]
What I learned from this book was that I should stop, I should really really stop reading trashy true crime. For a while, at least. Also, that some people's olfactory sensibilities are a good deal different to mine.
**************
[I just reread this and I would like to say to Fred Rosen and his lawyers and members of his immediate and extended family that the persons represented in the review above are like really made up and fictitious and what I'd like to say is that any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, true crime writers or not, is purely coincidental, as is the remarkable co-incidence that the guy's name is Fred Rosen. So, you know, please bear that in mind. Don't hurt me. Don't kill my pets. My name is not really Paul Bryant. I could be anybody. Also, same goes for that stuff I wrote about Van Morrison, Mick Jagger and Richard Nixon. Wait - Nixon is dead, so I don't care about that one]
Mark Ames' argument : rage murders – workplace and school massacres – started in the 1980s and now there a Edited with a heavy heart, 16 December 2012
*
Mark Ames' argument : rage murders – workplace and school massacres – started in the 1980s and now there are a LOT of them. Americans blame this that and the other thing for all this hideous violence but they frantically avoid looking at the real culprit because to do so would mean they would have to face some harsh unacceptable political truths : it’s the conditions of life in workplaces and in schools, the toxic pressures of American middle-class life, which cause it all. In one word : Reagonomics. Or : rageonomics.
So this is an unabashedly leftist book which strongly reminds me of a title of an old union song – I wonder why it was never a big hit – “Can’t You See This System Is Rotten Through And Through?” Because Mark Ames does think that. Through and through.
Some characteristic quotes :
A person’s ability to adapt and grovel as much as required is almost the definition of normal. p41
We moderns are just as slavish and painfully docile as African slaves. p41
Kids are demonstrably more miserable today than they used to be. p226
Here’s Mark in an alliterative frenzy :
the normal and natural instinct is to resist reconsidering what one had once taken for granted as grossly unjust
As if you hadn’t guessed, Mark is saying that the socioeconomic pressures of unfettered capitalism make people miserable and then drive them mad. They encourage bullies and little Hitlers who get a free pass called “cost-cutting” and “efficiency savings”. But – here’s the thing – we do not acknowledge these modern psychological pressures because it’s all been normalised – everywhere is the same. Ain’t no more jobs for life. That’s gone like spats and galoshes, real gone. So MA makes this comparison – in slavery days many (at one time most) Americans didn’t appreciate that slavery was wrong or oppressive. No! They thought the slaves were better off in America than in Africa. So they were shocked – shocked and hurt! – when very occasionally a few pitiful slaves revolted. Ingrates! The Devil made them do it. They just didn’t know how good they had it, down on the plantation. Same thing now – office and factory workers and school students are the new slave class, and when some of these new slaves rebel, go crazy and shoot up the plantation we reel back and say – the devil made them do it, they’re evil, it was the parents’ fault, it was video games, it was drugs, the internet, breakup of the family, lack of religion, too much religion, blah blah, but we don’t say – yes, it was the oppression of being a slave and being treated with bullying contempt along with a maniacal work ethic and an obsession with success which made them do it.
It isn’t the office or school shooter who need to be profiled – they can’t be. It’s the offices and schools.
Yes, now we see, this whole system is rotten through and through! We don’t ever say that out loud, so MA is spelling it out for us. It will not make him the most loved author.
I have been conditioned to believe that Americans always rise up against oppression and that the good side always wins. The reality is that the oppressed rarely rise up, they always lose (in this country anyway) and they always collaborate with the state against those rare rebels to make sure they remain oppressed.
Whew! Mark Ames’ predicted earnings as an after-dinner speaker in 2012: zero.
One very striking part of MA’s portrait of American corporate life as oppression is the stats he gives on American’s disappearing holidays. I myself get 36 days off per year and I work a 37 and a half hour week and this is fairly normal in England. Compare this :
our 14 day average is just half of the European workers’ vacation time. That’s if an American even gets paid vacation time : today 13% of companies don’t even offer it, up from 5% in 1998. But even this exaggerates Americans workers’ holiday time. many Americans are reluctant to take even those few days off that they’re allowed, fearful of falling behind or giving the wrong impression to their superiors…. According to a 2003 survey by Boston College, 26% of American workers took no vacation time at all in the previous year.
Wow. (Now compare with that : in China no-one takes any holidays at all except the super-rich.)
On overtime there’s another huge basket of stats, leading up to :
Americans work 350 hours more per year than their European counterparts.
There’s a vast irony going on here. All the new voices which began to be heard in the 60s and 70s – racial minorities, feminist women, gay people – located the source of their oppression in straight white male culture, the despised patriarchy. Now, it’s the straight white males who are shooting up offices and schools and Ames is telling us that yes, all these years they’ve been oppressing themselves too. Kind of funny when you think about it. Or not, of course.
I like books which make strong in-your-face arguments, which are bristling with info without being scholarly, which are slangy and which grab you by your metaphorical lapels and say “Listen kid, this world is nothing like what they been telling you it is!”, which take on some urgent issue ripped from yesterday’s papers, which are the print form of the agitprop documentaries we see on the big screen these days, Fast Food Nation, Sicko, Capturing the Friedmans (you haven’t seen that one? you MUST see that one). And I love books which argue with and yell and poke at each other – books have been doing that since Socrates – and even though Columbine (the book) was published after Going Postal, Dave Cullen wrote enough articles about it to get Mark Ames’ complete goat. Here’s Cullen on Eric Harris:
Eric was an injustice collector. The cops, judge and Diversion officers were merely the latest additions to a comically comprehensive enemies list, which included tiger Woods, every girl who had rejected him, all of Western culture, and the human species.
Cullen summarises Eric Harris’ personal hatreds in one word : inferiors. And he thought everyone was his inferior. Ames inverts this. Not inferiors, that was just showoff stuff. Instead : superiors. When you analyse these shootings apolitically, as Ames accuses everyone of so doing, your chosen aetiology is always the personal, so you say : these people snapped, they were mentally ill, psychopaths. Can’t do anything about that, get those types everywhere. Move along, show’s over folks. Nothing to see here. (The NRA are quick to do this.) From MA’s point of view, this is a giant copout.
Ames (p61) :
Cullen’s breakthrough is essentially this : Eric Harris murdered because Eric Harris was an evil murderer. Cullen rides this line of reasoning further down the light rail of idiocy.
In pages 211 to 213 MA goes after Cullen like a he's a dangerous dog. He lists all the ways that Eric Harris’s life was a living hell because of treatment meted out to him by the jock bullies of Columbine. NONE of this is in Cullen’s book (I just read that one). Frankly, I’m amazed. One of these guys is right, but I don’t know which one.
FROM A BRITISH PERSPECTIVE
In Britain the kind of rampage this book debates, the latest horrible example of which we are still reeling from, does not happen very often because we have truly draconian gun control laws. Actually, three such rampages have happened here - one in which a guy walked around the small town of Hungerford and shot 14 random people in 1987; the second, similar to Newtown, in which a guy went into a primary school in Dunblane, Scotland, in 1997, and shot 16 five and six year old children plus one adult before shooting himself; and one in June 2010 in Cumbria, a tranquil beautiful part of the Lake District, in which a taxi driver shot and killed four people he had problems with and eight random others. I often hear an argument from Americans against gun control which says – if you restrict gun ownership you will take the guns out of the hands of lawful people and leave them in the hands of the criminals. And also – the knowledge that lawful citizens could be armed is a powerful prophylactic for criminals. None of that means a tuppeny halfpenny damn to a guy stepping into his office with a duffel bag full of semiautomatics or a 15 year old with his dad’s rifle. None of these office/school shooters have ever been gunned down before they’ve shot their victims and themselves. The argument doesn’t work at all. Also, and this is a strange point - no hardened gangsters have ever gone on a rampage and shot a dozen people. That's a crime done by civilians, people who the police had never heard of.
Stats from today's paper:
Gun homicide per 100,000 citizens :
Mexico - 10.0 USA - 2.98 Australia - 0.1 UK - 0.03
The message from Britain is that gun control laws work. But I’m not preaching to Americans. The toothpaste is out of the tube, you couldn’t get guns under control if you wanted to. I am so sorry.
THE WRAP-UP
Although I think this is a brave book with a solid urgent argument, Mark Ames beats his reader to a pulp and leaves him limp and bleeding by the end. The last 50 pages are a total slog, there will be no one who doesn’t involuntarily shriek “Mark Ames, enough already, I can’t take it anymore” to the consternation of their partners, neighbours, offspring or pets. One huge problem about MA’s argument-book is that aside from a total Year Zero Pol Pot style revolution or a 1000 megaton Love Bomb I don’t see what can be done about the horrors catalogued in Going Postal. Two terms of Obama will not do the trick, I’m afraid.
What does it matter that two crazy teenagers shot 12 other teenagers and one teacher to death at a school somewhere in the American Midwest over ten y What does it matter that two crazy teenagers shot 12 other teenagers and one teacher to death at a school somewhere in the American Midwest over ten years ago? It was just another school shooting and since then we have had Virginia Tech which accounted for nearly three times as many victims, didn’t it, not to mention any amount of death and catastrophe in places other than schools. Why should anyone want to write a book about this particular school shooting a decade down the line? Why should we waste one more thought on this loathsome pair Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? It’s a reasonable question and this book has a 400 page answer.
Eric was the driving force and Dylan (named after Thomas not Bob) was the depressive suicidal kid who was sucked into Eric’s mania. They planned the whole thing for a year. They called it “NBK” after the movie Natural Born Killers. Eric chose the date.
David Koresh’s Waco siege ended : 19 April 1993 Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing which was his revenge for Waco: 19 April 1995 Columbine : 20 April 1999. Ah yes, it was going to be on the 19th, but Eric screwed up getting the right quantities of ammo, so it had to be put back by a day.
In the 12 months before Judgement Day they wrote reams of journals, Eric had a website, they bragged about their plans to various pals who of course didn’t take it seriously, and starting on March 15th 1999 they made many videos of themselves acting out mass murder or explaining why they were going to do it, or apologising in advance to their parents. Eric described his parents as “the best” and said
“It fucking sucks to do this to them. They’re going to be put through hell.”
and he quoted Shakespeare on that point :
“Good wombs have borne bad sons.”
He also said:
“I’ve narrowed it down. It’s humans that I hate.”
and regarding the 1993 Brady Bill which had restricted the law on the sale of semiautomatics:
“Fuck you Brady! It’s not like I’m some psycho who would go on a shooting spree.”
and
“It’s kinda hard on me, these last few days. This is my last week on earth and they don’t know.”
But the overriding impression from these Basement Tapes (as they have been amusingly named) is one of glee – Eric and Dylan are so excited, they’re gagging for this huge one-performance-only production. They relish the greatness and horror they are about to unleash and express mild regret they won’t be around to enjoy everyone’s reactions or see the movie which will be made about it (that would be Gus Van Sant’s Elephant – sorry, Eric, not Spielberg after all.)
What did they actually want to do? Dave Cullen sorts through all the mountains of evidence and discovers that Columbine wasn’t – actually – a school shooting, it was a bombing which went wrong. Eric and Dylan had been making bombs using internet information. The two big ones were made out of propane gas canisters, and others were in Eric’s car (to divert the police). On 20th April they sauntered into the school cafeteria and dumped down the big backpacks containing the bombs with timers ticking. Then sauntered out. No one batted an eye. The bombs were supposed to blow up the whole school, then E&D would be outside picking off any fleeing students. Death toll : over 500. When Eric’s timing and detonation devices all failed – big disappointment of course – they stalked into the school and started shooting. But within 15 minutes they were bored with that. After the bloodbath in the library, they could have gone round and shot dozens more kids but they didn’t. They sauntered past rooms packed with terrified kids and didn’t glance inside. After half an hour of aimlessness, some potshots at the police outside, perhaps the real point of the whole thing was reached, and both of them blew their brains out.
And in their minds, that was : Cool.
When the shooting began the police made a number of assumptions and a lot of mistakes, some of which they can’t be blamed for – the mayhem and the students’ accounts as they fled made it seem like there was a whole team of gunmen inside the school. This crippled the police response. When the press got hold of the story a whole new series of assumptions erupted - for instance, that Eric and Dylan were loners. That they were unpopular. That they were waging a private war against a target (maybe jocks, maybe Christians, maybe the whole school). That they had horrendous family backgrounds. That they were Goths, or on drugs, or that there was some significant incident which had triggered the rampage. All wrong. Then there was an assumption that there was a conspiracy (the Trench Coat Mafia). It surely couldn’t have just been two kids did all this, there were more involved. The police spent months trying to solve this notional conspiracy. There wasn’t one. The media was flailing : 20/20 on ABC reported an unnamed police source saying “the boys may have been part of a dark, underground national phenomenon known as the Gothic movement and that some of these Goths may have killed before”. A few days later USA Today began their piece “Whatever these two young men in Colorado imagined themselves to be, they weren’t Goths.” No one knew anything.
Cullen’s simple solution to the why of it all is bathetic. He says Eric Harris was a psychopath, pure and simple, and this, dear friends, is the kind of thing some psychopaths do.
Well. If there is evil, psychopaths are its living breathing rock and rolling embodiment. Motiveless malignity, Coleridge’s phrase describing Iago, catches the horror but we, the unpsychopathic, really struggle hard with it – everything has a motive, surely, we are motive-seeking missiles of brain and spirit, we need reasons like we need food, a reason to learn the violin and a reason to shoot 13 other human beings. Motivelessness offends us. Is there motiveless benevolence? Yes, this is known as altruism. But doing good to others is seen as its own motive – to do good IS the motive, doesn’t need an ulterior. So is doing evil also its own motive and its own reward for some? Do they bask in the pain and misery they cause in just the same way that others might shout with joy and hug each other as another Haitian is pulled from another collapsed house? Then the pain and misery IS the motive. The existence of psychopaths in our midst has already been addressed in movies like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Children of the Damned, and all those other alien invasion movies in which the aliens look exactly like humans – we thought it was because the movie’s budget was so low they couldn’t afford impressive costumes, but in fact it was because aliens perfectly disguised as humans is the perfect metaphor for psycopathy – you can’t tell ‘em from normal people! We can’t fill in the blanks. Why would the fascinated, excited contemplation of suicide and mass murder, eventually fused together into one super-cool entity called NBK, so delight the minds of Dylan and Eric that it crowded out all the usual teenage boy obsessions such as having sex with teenage girls or being in a rock band and then having sex with teenage girls? It drives us crazy so we lunge around – where did this evil come from? Why didn’t anyone notice it? Why didn’t anyone prevent it? Who can we blame? – not Eric and Dylan, they were just kids. (You can hear this argument again and again, every time a kid gets caught for something – the parent says “he’s not to blame, it was his bad friends that led him astray”). Let’s blame video games, violent movies, porn, drugs, the devil, goth culture, gun laws, school bullies (uh oh, Eric WAS the school bully so that doesn’t work), the parents. Ah yes, of course, the parents. “It also appears that even the best parenting may be no match for a child born to be bad” (p241) – Cullen paraphrases Eric’s Shakespeare quote. This is so un-PC it explodes the whole thrust of child-centered theory and whatnot which has been trying to get away from the Victorian view that in a class of thirty children there will be one limb of Satan (hence the old insult “you young limb!”) Psychopaths know just as well as we do that certain things are considered to be bad, so they try their best not to get caught. But they just don’t agree that these things actually are bad. They think they should be allowed to do whatever takes their fancy. They must be in a permanent state of irritation with the world and its puerile petty rules. A couple of psychopaths once lived in a world where there were absolutely no restraints because they themselves made up the rules. Bliss! These were the Roman Emperors Caligula and Heliogabalus, and we may read about their idea of fun in Gibbon’s dolorous history.
There are so many breathtaking side-stories in Cullen’s compelling, brilliantly organised book. Like Cassie Bernall, the Christian martyr who wasn’t, like the guy who made crosses for all the Columbine dead – 15 of them, one for D & E too (guess how long they stayed upright – 3 days). Like the lawsuits (naturellement) – turns out that Dylan’s parents had a home insurance policy which covered them for murder committed by their children. Like the discovery by a detective of Eric’s rampage fantasies in 1997 which Eric, as we know, published on his own website leading to the detective getting an affadavit for a search warrant for Eric’s house and how no one did anything about it, it was just kind of forgotten about, oops! - and how that major cock-up was covered up by county officials… on and on it goes.
In his last year, Eric was constantly badgered by his parents about getting his life on track, having a goal and sticking to it. He couldn’t tell them that he did indeed have a goal, and he was sticking to it, through thick and thin. And it was going to be so cool.
*********************
NOTE
I hope this isn't too creepy, but readers of this review may be interested in my review of Going Postal which continues the discussion of this subject. The author of that book explicitly criticises Dave Cullen, and in many ways Mark Ames' book is a necessary corrective to this one.
True crime, my once secret vice, but now you all know about it. This unlovely genre, true crime - it’s so sleazy and it’s got everyMY ONCE SECRET VICE
True crime, my once secret vice, but now you all know about it. This unlovely genre, true crime - it’s so sleazy and it’s got everything. The piquant pleasures of the do it yourself abattoir, the discovery in the dumpster, the jolly uncle, the picnic spot, the man walking his dog, the folorn poster, the crucial forensics, the fortunate CCTV, the plausible absence, the pretty niece, the remains gnawed by animals, the cellar, the other hidden cellar, the bulletproof alibi, the trophy collection, the videos, the hard drive, the doormat wife, the unlikely suspect, the unusual receipt, the police overtime, the televised appeal, the incredulous son, the legwork, the blurred photograph, the last sighting, the uncertain identification, the kind repair-man, the white van, the planned randomness, the last house on the left hand side of the road, the intimidated girlfriend, the perfect hindsight, the happy faces, the clenched handkerchiefs, the driver’s license, the two and two put together, the sharpened screwdriver, the same gun, the misidentification, the derisory sentence, the anguished appeal, the idiocy of the jury, the blunt instrument of the law, the subtle instrument of the crime, the willing victim, the smiling man.
YOUR FAMILY IS A SMALL CULT
This little book recounts the murder by the clearly deranged Theresa Knorr of two of her daughters, I won’t go into the details because it’ll put you off your dinner. The Knorr family were pure trailer trash. What we learn here, if we didn’t already know, is that the crazy family is run on similar lines to the crazy cult, whereby the leader (usually male but in this case not) empowers his inner circle (in this case the sons) and scapegoats some lowly minions (in this case the daughters, one by one). The power structure is well known and clearly the life Inside operates so strongly on the mind that completely different rules apply when you’re Inside to those which apply Outside. We see this when guys like Josef Fritzl or Philip Garrido can live quite normal Outside lives whilst being high priest of their own lunatic sex cult as soon as they cross the threshold back Inside. Same phenomenon in the concentration camps – the top Nazis had nice little houses and sat with their nice pretty families every night a few hundred yards away from where human beings were being gassed and shot. This situation always strikes sane people as the acme of horror yet it’s the same every time, so we should expect it. I guess the word is compartmentalisation.
HOW LITTLE WE KNOW ABOUT EACH OTHER
How little we know, even in this information-soaked world, of how other lives are lived. Fiction in books and movies can sometimes throw some light into the dark parts of our society but even Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Irvine Welsh, Carolyn Chute or Dorothy Allison necessarily by their acts of imaginative sympathy shape their underclass materials and therefore inevitably bring them into our moral universe. In true crime books, even (perhaps especially) those as atrociously written as this one, there is no redemption of art, no glimpse of understanding, just a sudden appalled trip into a shrieking chaos of people who seem to have no defence against each other’s rapacity. We want to regard the poor as noble, as capable of love and not just sex, as economically displaced, as people who would thrive if they just had this thing or that thing happen to them (an interested teacher, an inspired government outreach programme), and this ingrained desire sentimentalises everything it touches – so hail Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh’s brilliant black humour portrait of junkie life in Glasgow, and hail Last Exit to Brooklyn too, that was pretty unflinching, and hail true crime books whose just-the-facts approach steamcleans away most of these false perspectives. The only people otherwise who write about the underclass are the sociologists who are trying to figure out how to fix them. I did come across one great attempt to present these lives in all their hyperactive detail, Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and it was alienating, exhausting, depressing and defeating. I need more brave writers who are willing to live in the trailer parks and sink estates here in England, and report back what they see, because I’m not going anywhere near these places if I can help it. The drawbridge is up, the attack dogs are roaming freely just inside the razor wire fence. And this is no way to live, for them or for us. ...more
This is a very difficult meditation on blame and a dignified, moving and quite riveting exercise in soul-baring and self-laceration by a stoic harshlyThis is a very difficult meditation on blame and a dignified, moving and quite riveting exercise in soul-baring and self-laceration by a stoic harshly condemning his own stoicism and trying with his scientist’s rationalism to be even-handed whilst facing the hardest question : how did this human being, your son – who you were entrusted with - go so wrong? Lionel Dahmer comes up with at least four suggestions, all inadequate.
I found out that after this book was published that Joyce Dahmer, Jeffrey’s mother, interpreted it as a direct attempt to blame her, the mother. After this book was published she broke her silence. She agreed to take part in a tv programme in which Jeff, Lionel and herself discussed their lives. It’s all on Youtube. I'll come to that in a moment.
Back to Lionel. He describes a terrible marriage with Joyce. They were unsuited to put it mildly. Lionel was withdrawn, cold, unemotional, passive, these are all his words, and Joyce was demonstrative, emotional, the complete opposite. Joyce had a whole catalogue of emotional and physical problems, which were incessant for years, and Lionel frankly states that he stayed away from her as much as possible, and buried himself in his untroubling laboratory. Many heated arguments ensued, in some of which Joyce became somewhat violent.
Lionel describes episodes from Joyce’s pregnancy :
At times, her legs would lock tightly in place, and her whole body would grow rigid and begin to tremble. Her jaw would jerk to the right and take on a similarly frightening rigidity. During these strange seizures, her eyes would bulge like a frightened animal, and she would begin to salivate, literally frothing at the mouth. p34
Joyce didn't remember any of that at all. Lionel says the doctor could find no physical reason for these attacks and thought the condition was psychological (but she was not referred to a psychiatrist at that point). Joyce was already on a whole 20-pill drug regime, and the doctor added phenobarbital.
In the tv show Joyce says this is all rubbish. She was outraged. She announced she was writing her own book, provisionally called “An Assault on Motherhood”, but said that she didn’t want to cast any blame on Lionel as she perceived him to have blamed her. She says :
Jeff’s condition was proven to have nothing to do with his upbringing – I don’t want parents frightened to death thinking that the little things they do or the little things they miss are going to result in them having a child that is going to cause all this pain and anguish…..I want to get across that we as women just can’t take this kind of thing anymore if something bad happens to our son.
Your heart goes out to her. Yes, Lionel is saying – maybe the drugs given to my wife harmed my son in the womb. But hang on, is that actually blaming Joyce? No – more like blaming the ignorance of the doctor. But she interprets this as blame the mother. It is true that Lionel makes a point of including Joyce’s decision not to breastfeed – that does sound perilously close to calling her names. But at that point Joyce had read only excerpts, so maybe she would have discovered later that in fact Lionel blames himself :
Rather than having developed a natural fatherhood, I had learned, as if by rote, what a father should do.
Lionel is withering about his inability to see what he thinks was in front of his eyes, the depth of Jeff’s problems, his social withdrawal, his teenage alcoholism – no friends, no girlfriends, no interests, no sports, no music, a failure at everything he turned his hand to. One term at college – expelled , never went to any classes. One spell in the army – kicked out for alcohol problems.
A parent will always want to forgive, smooth over, downplay, minimise, believe that a problem is just a phase, not make a mountain out of a molehill. The parents of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were in the same dilemma – they suspected, they worried, they confronted, they accepted explanations they shouldn’t have, what could they do? Even when Jeffrey gets a prison sentence for sexually abusing a 14 year old boy, Lionel remains doggedly optimistic – this will be the short sharp shock he needed. Now he’ll turn the corner. Well, he didn't.
Finally Lionel begins to see ghastly points of similarity between him and Jeff – the emotional vacuity, the desire for order and control. Searching back in his own life he produces this remarkable attack on his own mother, a woman he has previously spent pages praising :
Even more telling was my mother’s tendency to finish things for me. I would start some task, working slowly through it, as I always did, and suddenly my mother would appear, and in a few quick strokes, either of mind or hand, she would finish it for me. Even though done in a helpful, loving manner, it was a gesture that powerfully reinforced my sense of myself as slow and inept [and fostered an] infuriating sense of weakness and inferiority
You can see his intelligent restless miserable questioning, picking up every psychological stone, is the answer under here, maybe this one, could it be this? Over here? Why did my son kill 17 men?
The trial of Jeffrey Dahmer was to determine if he was guilty or not guilty by reason of insanity – prison or mental institution? In these cases the victims’ families wait breathlessly for the verdict – they know the guy will be locked up for life, but they need this one last thing, they need for the murderer to be sane. So when Jeffrey Dahmer was found guilty and sane by the jury they cheered and wept. They needed to be able to blame him, with no ifs and buts. He did it, not his mental illness. He did it because he wanted to. He didn’t have to do it, he chose to do it. Evil. 100% guilty as sin. We don’t want no doctors muddying the waters. Murder in the first degree. We need to blame with a clear conscience.
The following people have been blamed for the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer:
His mother (the pregnancy drugs, plus her general craziness and temper) His father His paternal grandmother (for screwing up his father)
and
Jeffrey himself.
What did Jeffrey say about this matter of blame and responsibility? He’s asked this question in the interview. He says very firmly that all this shoving the responsibility onto this person or that person or alcohol or drugs, it’s all bullshit. I did it. The blame is mine and mine alone. But wait… he says a little more than that :
I always believed the lie that the theory of evolution is truth, that we all came from the slime and when we died that was it. So the whole theory cheapens life. And I started reading books that show how evolution is a complete lie. I’ve since come to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ is the true Creator.
So… maybe if the theory of evolution had not poisoned Jeff’s mind to the extent where he thought human life was cheap and worthless, he wouldn’t have killed all those men. So, maybe, the guy who should get the blame is
Are we now living in the age of Full Disclosure when everything is revealed about what people do to each other, the real truth about what human beingsAre we now living in the age of Full Disclosure when everything is revealed about what people do to each other, the real truth about what human beings are? When it comes to dresses being paraded with presidential semen stains still upon them, or the latest youtube viral video horrors, you may think so. But - although it seems we have reached a plateau I think there is a way to go. The misery memoir, of which A Boy Called It is the ur-text, is a step along the way. Misery memoirs - my Waterstone's has a whole wall of them. Damaged was one of the first.
But here's what is still to be revealed: the perpetrators' stories. We might be talking about domestic abuse or rape or war crimes, but there's nothing from them ever. Ever. Probably on the very reasonable grounds that they're all nauseating lowlifes who should be given rat poison rather than a pen and paper, and also that they'll lie and try to make out it was all because of their own painful childhoods or that the rape and the war crime was consensual. The depraved are either smart enough to know they really shouldn't tell the truth, or stupid enough not to be able to anyway. So it seems that at present we believe that victims always tell the truth and perpetrators always lie. Can this be true? Probably not, but I think we'll have to live with that for a long time yet. I doubt that we'll ever get the perpetrator's stories. Why would we want to? Because no man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; because I am involved in mankind. (That last bit's by John Donne, not me!)
As regards Damaged, as I read I found the good angel of belief and the bad angel of unbelief grappling with each other in the space just behind my left ear. Alas for Cathy Glass, she writes very dully and competently except when it comes to dialogue, when we get stuff that sounds straight out of The Exorcist :
Jodie [aged 8] spun round to face me. Her features were hard and distorted. "No" she shouted, in a gruff masculine voice. "Get out or I'll rip you to pieces. Get out bitch!"... She advanced towards me with her hands clawed, baring her teeth. "I'm not Jodie" she growled, "I'm Reg. Get out or I'll fucking kill you."'
I know there are abuse cases as bad as this one but this kind of stuff inadvertently gives the abuse the patina of bad fiction. Exactly what the perps count on, of course - No one will believe you . Anyway, this is a straightforward account of one foster woman's total nightmare, the nastiest most ungovernable 8 year old which everyone else had given up on. Once again the social workers get it in the neck - all the signs of familial abuse were there for years and were not spotted, the stupid feeble social workers were intimidated by the family, same old same old. I would have been interested in more detail about the degenerate birth family but Cathy Glass would not have had any access to that info. And I would have liked an uplifting and hopeful end to this revolting tale. So here's my full disclosure: there isn't one. This damaged child was not healed. Life's like that. ...more
The case of Andrei Chikatilo makes me think that maybe the Devil does exist, and if you pray to him real good, he'll reach down and do a little tweakiThe case of Andrei Chikatilo makes me think that maybe the Devil does exist, and if you pray to him real good, he'll reach down and do a little tweaking on your behalf.
Tweak No 1 : he was a pretty solid suspect in the very first murder he committed in 1978 and was questioned around 8 times by the cops. But then it was discovered that a guy living on the same street as Andrei was a released sex murderer ! What are the chances? So naturally they lost interest in Andrei, arrested this other guy and in the time-honoured way of the Soviet police they soon produced a confession. This other guy was eventually executed for Andrei's murder in 1984. (The Devil, 1; God, 0).
Tweak No 2 : Andrei got properly going in 1982. His victims were the usual strays, the drifting detritus of the collapsing USSR, an interesting period which we haven't heard too much about. (Which makes this absorbing book different from your usual true crime case study. I don't like the title, but whaddya gonna do?)
Here's a typical Andrei quote :
It is not difficult to become acquainted with these people. They don't try to hold themselves back. They crawl into your very soul, demanding food, money, vodka, offering themselves for sex.
A touch of Dostoyevsky, almost.
Oh sorry - tweak No 2. I lost my thread. So the cops realised they had a serial murderer running round by 1983 and after another year passed their suspicions began to focus on Andrei. One night he was observed pestering women on a railway station for several hours. When they opened his bag they found knives and rope. Bingo! you might think. Now the cops at this point had evidence from sperm found on previous victims and they knew they were looking for a guy with a particular blood group. When the results came back, Andrei was a different blood group.
What the cops didn't know was that in some very rare individuals the sperm group will be different from the blood group, and Andrei was one of those rare individuals. So they released him, so that he could commit another 40 or so murders. (The Devil, 2; God 0)
It all reminds me of that Jacques Brel song, where the Devil decides to take a holiday on Earth to see how things are. And he gazes round, and he says
Revived review celebrating the reissuing of this book on 3 October.
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Here’s a good question for all you lovers of literature – what’sRevived review celebrating the reissuing of this book on 3 October.
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Here’s a good question for all you lovers of literature – what’s the connection between Fred West and the Booker Prize? Answer: one of the 11 females he killed was Martin Amis’s cousin.
Gordon Burn was a unique, brilliant writer (Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, Alma Cogan) and this book takes on the awful, awful story of Fred and Rose West, one of the most ghastly murder cases ever to have happened in England.
There are different types of true crime books. There are the true crime penny-dreadfuls (Body Dump, Whatever Mother Wants). And there is solid dependable true crime journalism (The Man with the Candy, Two of a Kind, Columbine). Then there are the personalised accounts by the lawyers involved - they can be great (Helter Skelter, Defending Gary.)
But then there are those true crime books which rise above the mere marshalling of detail and become by authorial alchemy a kind of literature (The Executioner's Song, In Cold Blood). Happy Like Murderers is in that class. I recommend it for anyone looking for something often promised but seldom delivered, a book like no other. You don't have to be a true crime fan to read this one, although it might help, because you have to be plenty tough-minded. This is a very unpleasant read.
It's like a 500 page oral history, like Gordon Burn has given up his author's authority or it's been wrested from him by 500 English working class voices woven together into a seamless demotic fractured multitextured whispering mumbling muttering onrushing torrent. I'll give you an example.
And the rest of Ronnie Cooper’s men would go drinking together regularly but Fred never wanted to go. He wouldn’t mix with anybody. Good worker, mind. Brilliant worker. He became known for moving large sheets of metal manually rather than wait for the crane to move them. He was very strong and wouldn’t wait because he was on piecework. Always at work. He’d work all the hours God sends. But he wouldn’t mix. He wouldn’t drink. He never drank. He wouldn’t go to a pub at all and always said he was too busy if they asked. Said he had too much to do.
It’s like a river running on and on. When required, Burn lays out half a paragraph of your more usual, more formal sentences, but then he’s back to the babbling bubbling whispering gossipy insinuating voices which are - evidently – mirroring the voices he interviewed for his massive book. It works, it all works, and down into the whirlpool you go.
Books like this shine lights of horror on aspects of society we generally leave to the most hapless social services. Incest families. Throwaway children. Disappearing teenagers.
A brilliant book - I may have said that already - but not, you can see, for everyone.
Context from Wiki :
Fred West committed at least 12 murders between 1967 and 1987 in Gloucestershire, the majority with his second wife, Rosemary West. All the victims were young women. At least eight of these murders involved the Wests' sexual gratification and included rape, bondage, torture and mutilation; the victims' dismembered bodies were typically buried in the cellar or garden of the Wests' Cromwell Street home in Gloucester, which became known as the "House of Horrors". Fred is known to have committed at least two murders on his own, while Rose is known to have murdered Fred's stepdaughter, Charmaine. The couple were apprehended and charged in 1994. .
The story is that Peter Moskos was a sociology graduate and wanted to do in-depth research into police behaviour involving extended participant observThe story is that Peter Moskos was a sociology graduate and wanted to do in-depth research into police behaviour involving extended participant observation in some major city, I guess what became known as embedding when journalists did that in the Iraq War. After some rejections Baltimore accepted the idea but then there was a change of heart. But the new commissioner asked him “Why don’t you want to be a cop for real?” and Peter said because nobody would hire him knowing he was going to resign after 18 months and write a book about the whole thing, and this guy said he would, so that’s what happened.
So the city that accepted him being good old Baltimore and him working in the most drug-ridden part of the city, this means if you saw The Wire, that was where Peter was, jacking up all those corner boys and hoppers.
This is a mixture of gritty anecdote, facts & figures, and Peter’s forceful suggestions for how things might be improved. Here’s one stat that is kind of eyebrow raising :
From 1925 to 1975…about 1 in 1000 Americans was imprisoned at any given time. In 1975 there were approximately 200,000 prisoners. Thirty-two years later there are 2.3 million behind bars – 1 in 130 Americans.
That’s the effect of the War on Drugs, kicked off by Richard Nixon. The majority of the huge increase is of course young black males. This whole book is really about drugs since all the crime these cops deal with is drug related. Cue comparisons with Prohibition and the realisation that Prohibition failed. Peter sums up his views in a very memorable phrase –
After all these years, if the war on drugs were winnable, it would already be won.
This is a very solid trustworthy book. It mostly told me things I already knew but in a good way. ...more
Tony Parker was a big burly man who liked to listen to people and who had the extraordinary talent of persuading people to tell him all manner of thinTony Parker was a big burly man who liked to listen to people and who had the extraordinary talent of persuading people to tell him all manner of things whilst his tape recorder was spooling it all in. He roamed far and near, to Russia, to Kansas, to Belfast, to lighthouses, but at the centre of his great body of work was the prison and its contents. Tony Parker's technique is to edit out all his questions so that his subjects tell their own story in their own words.
In this extraordinary book he interviews eight sex offenders, in prison terms the lowest of the low. And how illuminating this all is. Because you NEVER get to hear the perpetrator's story. I don't think anyone could possibly publish this particular a book in 2009. Imagine any paedophile telling their story to a tape recorder for publication now - it's not going to happen. But that's what you get in the first two chapters. Later on there's a chapter on a man who's in prison for...being gay. Oh yes, this was published in 1969, at the height of the swinging sixties, it gives you a jolt - Britain really did imprison people for being gay. Homosexuality was only legalised in 1967.
Anyway, here's a flavour of the conversation of Billy Atkinson, aged 37, in prison for numerous sexual assaults which turn out to be flashing:
I think you'll find August is rubber but with some wood, and June is a wood month, well wood and grass; July would be grass the same as May because July is the son of May or June, whereas June in turn is the son of December. And April, well April is a funny month isn't it. because it's closer to summer than winter? You get January, February, March, which is mostly winter; and April can be inclined to cold but it's heading towards summer. I could be wrong but I think you'd find that April is rubber - because May would definitely be grass and June would be wood. January is rubber and February is wood and rubber, and March is rubber: then April is rubber but springing to wood, which is very funny. May goes to grass with a bit of wood and rubber, and June is wood and grass, followed by July which is all grass. You have say a field or a park in July, so that would be grass wouldn't it? And August, I'm only guessing, but I think it would take rubber, and then in September you'd have rubber leaning to wood. October is definitely wood, I doubt if you'd find it was rubber at all; then November is rubber and December is wood. Yes, that makes sense doesn't it, it definitely saves confusion you see, and apart from April which to my mind is a funny month you get it all sorted out and it gives you much more confidence: well in my case it does, and so I take a great interest in politics. Other people take religion as something to look forward to, or then again others take crime, such as dance-halls or slot-machines, where a good living can be made often only as a result of violence.
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So, a brilliant book full to the brim of the pain and horror of humanity and told in the plainest words.
**** Update :
And after being out of print for decades, Faber have just reprinted it (September 2013) - so there are still some good decisions being made in the crazy world of publishing.