Perhaps it's too easy to find in Thomas Hardy's fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, a rebuke to Jane Austen's chronicles of courtship - splendid women absorbed in the puerilities of landing suitable husbands. Hardy's story begins with an independent and courageous young woman, with the usual fantastic Hardy name of Bathsheba Everdene, resisting the proposals of three stalwart men and ends with her eventually marrying all three. Hardy's story ends with one of the men dead (interestingly, the only one who has had sex with Bathsheba), and a second as good as dead - he will hang for the murder of the first. The man she ends up with, a rather stolid shepherd named Gabriel Oak (!), was the first to propose, but it's safe to suppose that she doesn't love him. If Bathsheba can be pinned down to loving any of them, it was the first, the one who seduced her.
After watching the latest of four film adaptations of Hardy's novel, it's tempting to think, comparing it to the expensive and expansive first adaptation, from 1967, "What a falling off was there." Recalling that film, directed by John Schlesinger and photographed by Nicolas Roeg, so many scenes stand out: the sheep dog driving Gabriel Oak's flock off a cliff, Sergeant Troy demonstrating his swordsmanship to Bathsheba, Troy breaking open the coffin of Fanny Robin, the gothic church's rain spout disinterring Fanny's grave, Boldwood's wedding party interrupted. But the simple fact that one recalls only scenes from Schlesinger's film exposes its essential weakness. It isn't a cohesive - or even a coherent - work. Top-heavy with three great actors, Alan Bates, Peter Finch, and Terence Stamp, perfectly cast, they appear to revolve in the memory around a beautiful nullity - Julie Christie, whose stardom was one of the most baffling flukes of the 1960s. Why she was never expected to act by David Lean and Schlesinger (who was her lover for awhile), is one of film history's greatest mysteries. But the technicolor imagery summoned up by Roeg, who would shortly embark on his own meandering career as director, caught fleeting glimpses of Hardy's fatalistic Wessex tale. Hardy belived so overwhelmingly in the inevitability of disappointment (especially in love) and grief that he could get away with devices like coincidence and foreshadowing, all of it to establish his sense of a powerful Fate ruling the lives of his characters.
In the new movie, there is a much airier feeling, a particularization of detail that has something other than the plot to justify it. The Danish director, Thomas Vinterberg, shows us how people lived in Victorian Dorsetshire, the English county that Hardy redubbed Wessex. The costumes are marvelously explicit. (When I reaquainted myself with the Schlesinger version twenty-five years ago when I was in the Navy, and Terence Stamp walked on in all his dragooned glory, I said, "Now that's a uniform!" A friend corrected me: "No. That's a costume.") The actors don't behave as if they're wearing costumes, but their everyday clothes, which is a subtle but marvelous touch.
Carey Mulligan heads the cast, as she should - since it's Bathsheba's story to tell. She provides this version with a much sturdier center, with her three male swains (Matthias Schoenaerts, Michael Sheen, and Tom Sturridge) providing their parts with supporting substance. But how I missed Bates, Finch, and Stamp in those roles! There are no English actors around today who could properly replace them. Mulligan carries the film well, even if she isn't as superficially toothsome as Julie Christie was in 1967. Vernon Young was right, though, when he pointed out that Christie missed her true calling as a flight attendant (he used the quaint term "stewardess"). Mulligan breathes life, if not fire, into Bathsheba, the same life that Hardy gave her on the printed page.
One other dimension missing from Vinterberg's film is the music, an absence that would've been welcome since it's so overused in today's films. Craig Armstrong composed a somewhat murky score for the film, along with a quasi-English folk song sung by Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen. But Richard Rodney Bennett supplied the Schlesinger film with a score worthy of Ralph Vaughan Williams, even if the film wasn't quite worthy of it. Vinterberg's choice of the Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen replaced Nicolas Roeg's lugubrious atmospherics with sunny, sharp images in keeping, perhaps, with the Dogme dogma of avoiding photographic effects (filters, underexposure, artificial lighting, etc.). It's an improvement, I think, on the Turneresque look of too many Hardy adaptations.
In keeping with the latest literary adaptations, the new Far from the Madding Crowd is just shy of two hours, which is a serious short-shrifting of the novel's density. The Schlesinger version was a hefty 169 minutes, but few audiences today have the patience for such long-hauls. Which means, of course, that it isn't just their loss but ours, dear reader. Vinterberg's film only managed to scrape in $30.2M worldwide. This time the madding crowd stayed away.
Wednesday, 18 May 2016
Sunday, 8 May 2016
From the Cockpit
As of right now Filipinos, around forty million of them this year, are standing in line outside voting centers all over the Philippine archipelago waiting for their turn to cast their vote for candidates running for president, vice president (an office elected separately from the president), senator, all the way down to municipal mayor. Even if most of the 7,107 islands that constitute the geographical area of the country are uninhabited, the Philippine Committee on Elections (COMELEC) has transported automated voting machines made by a company called Smartmatic to as many populated areas as possible. Starting with the 2010 elections, COMELEC decided to replace the time-consuming manual voting system - in which voters filled out a ballot, folded it and put it into a secured box, and which resulted in a lengthy waiting period while the voting boxes were gathered from far and wide, unlocked, and the ballots counted by an army of volunteers (a process that could take weeks) - with a machine that works like a fax, transmitting every voter form via secure connection to a central receiving station in Manila. Vote tallying is over in a matter of a few days. For some reason, people actually believed that this faster process would prevent, or at least discourage, cheating.
In the past week, Filipinos hung around their barangays waiting for representatives of the candidates who carried lists of registered voters and satchels filled with envelopes. The envelopes contained cash of various denominations, from twenty pesos (45 cents) to one hundred pesos ($2.10). In provincial gubernatorial elections, which can get heated, the money in the envelopes can be as high a one thousand pesos ($21). An average voter, if he was patient, came away with maybe five to ten bucks this past week. It's called vote buying - a quite simple quid pro quo between poor people and the unimaginably rich people who rule them. I have seen it with my own eyes - the bank notes even had the candidate's name on a piece of paper stapled to them.
For a majority of Filipinos, cock-fighting is more than just an unofficial national sport - it's a metaphor of the political process that Filipinos experience. When they vote, it's easy to see their votes as a bet for the cock that they believe will win the fight. What happens after the winning cock/candidate takes office isn't a factor Filipinos consider when they vote. Despite no one ever acting in their interests in the seventy year history of their republic, Filipinos take voting seriously - far more seriously, strangely enough, than Americans - but they don't expect anything in return. For example, the common rationale behind the election of President Benigno Aquino III in 2010 was that he was already rich enough not to feel the need to steal from the people, as every president before him did. Ferdinand Marcos managed to steal billions of dollars (not pesos) from his people before they'd had enough and drove him from power. To our shame, Marcos's personal friend, Ronald Reagan, requisitioned two C-130 transport aircraft to carry the Marcos family, a small retinue of cronies, diaper bags crammed with jewels and gold bars, along with pallets of millions of freshly-minted Philippine peso notes to Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii where he was given asylum (and where he died of cancer a few years later).
Among the candidates running for president this time is a former mayor of Davao, a sprawling city in the Philippine Wild West (or South) on the island of Mindinao, named Rodrigo Duterte. Since he announced his candidacy, he has become wildly popular among voters, mostly the poor and uneducated, for his tough talk about mass executions for drug dealers. One rumor going around is that he shot and killed his own son when he discovered he was doing drugs - crystal meth, known hereabouts as "shabu." He has been labelled the "Philippne Donald Trump" because of his routine outrageous statements, like wishing he had been the first to have a go at an attractive Australian woman who had been gang-raped and murdered in a Philippine prison. Duterte makes Donald Trump look like Gandhi. Like Trump, however, he is ahead in the polls, and looks like a winner in this cock fight.
Also running, but for Vice President, is Senator BongBong Marcos, the only son of former dictator Ferdinand. He goes by the nickname BongBong, I suppose, because his real name is Ferdinand Jr. He was last polled to be in a dead heat with another candidate. He has been trying to paint a far different picture of his father's presidency since he arrived on the public stage, claiming that Ferdinand was interrupted in his project to transform the Philippines into another Singapore, and that he intends to continue that legacy if he makes it to president. Since Duterte has dictator written all over him, provoking current president Aquino (whose father, by the way, was murdered by Ferdinand - a fact that has never been legally established) to warn Filipinos that Duterte may actually do what he says he will do and throw out the Philippine constitution, Marcos may have to wait his turn to plunder his country.
Philippine politics has always resembled a two-ring circus, with the forces of corruption and the status quo in one ring amassing as much stolen wealth as they can before they get caught, and the forces of reform and fair governance in the other going about the piecemeal and arduous task of holding a window - if not a mirror - up to the antics being carried out in Ring #1 so that everyone can see. The Philippines is just about to conclude a six-year period of economic increase, brought about by Benigno Aquino III, son of the rich and powerful - and long-standing Hacendero - Cojuanco family. Like American president Barack Obama, his term (only one 6-year term) has been spent down in the weeds of governance unknown to ordinary Filipinos. It was uneventful, lacking in drama, boring in Circus Ring #2. Perhaps that was exactly what voters wanted in 2010, after twelve years of corrupt presidents, plunder, impeachments, and stolen elections. But now, evidently, once again they want to see what the first ring will give them - or what they will spectacularly steal.
In the past week, Filipinos hung around their barangays waiting for representatives of the candidates who carried lists of registered voters and satchels filled with envelopes. The envelopes contained cash of various denominations, from twenty pesos (45 cents) to one hundred pesos ($2.10). In provincial gubernatorial elections, which can get heated, the money in the envelopes can be as high a one thousand pesos ($21). An average voter, if he was patient, came away with maybe five to ten bucks this past week. It's called vote buying - a quite simple quid pro quo between poor people and the unimaginably rich people who rule them. I have seen it with my own eyes - the bank notes even had the candidate's name on a piece of paper stapled to them.
For a majority of Filipinos, cock-fighting is more than just an unofficial national sport - it's a metaphor of the political process that Filipinos experience. When they vote, it's easy to see their votes as a bet for the cock that they believe will win the fight. What happens after the winning cock/candidate takes office isn't a factor Filipinos consider when they vote. Despite no one ever acting in their interests in the seventy year history of their republic, Filipinos take voting seriously - far more seriously, strangely enough, than Americans - but they don't expect anything in return. For example, the common rationale behind the election of President Benigno Aquino III in 2010 was that he was already rich enough not to feel the need to steal from the people, as every president before him did. Ferdinand Marcos managed to steal billions of dollars (not pesos) from his people before they'd had enough and drove him from power. To our shame, Marcos's personal friend, Ronald Reagan, requisitioned two C-130 transport aircraft to carry the Marcos family, a small retinue of cronies, diaper bags crammed with jewels and gold bars, along with pallets of millions of freshly-minted Philippine peso notes to Hickham Air Force Base in Hawaii where he was given asylum (and where he died of cancer a few years later).
Among the candidates running for president this time is a former mayor of Davao, a sprawling city in the Philippine Wild West (or South) on the island of Mindinao, named Rodrigo Duterte. Since he announced his candidacy, he has become wildly popular among voters, mostly the poor and uneducated, for his tough talk about mass executions for drug dealers. One rumor going around is that he shot and killed his own son when he discovered he was doing drugs - crystal meth, known hereabouts as "shabu." He has been labelled the "Philippne Donald Trump" because of his routine outrageous statements, like wishing he had been the first to have a go at an attractive Australian woman who had been gang-raped and murdered in a Philippine prison. Duterte makes Donald Trump look like Gandhi. Like Trump, however, he is ahead in the polls, and looks like a winner in this cock fight.
Also running, but for Vice President, is Senator BongBong Marcos, the only son of former dictator Ferdinand. He goes by the nickname BongBong, I suppose, because his real name is Ferdinand Jr. He was last polled to be in a dead heat with another candidate. He has been trying to paint a far different picture of his father's presidency since he arrived on the public stage, claiming that Ferdinand was interrupted in his project to transform the Philippines into another Singapore, and that he intends to continue that legacy if he makes it to president. Since Duterte has dictator written all over him, provoking current president Aquino (whose father, by the way, was murdered by Ferdinand - a fact that has never been legally established) to warn Filipinos that Duterte may actually do what he says he will do and throw out the Philippine constitution, Marcos may have to wait his turn to plunder his country.
Philippine politics has always resembled a two-ring circus, with the forces of corruption and the status quo in one ring amassing as much stolen wealth as they can before they get caught, and the forces of reform and fair governance in the other going about the piecemeal and arduous task of holding a window - if not a mirror - up to the antics being carried out in Ring #1 so that everyone can see. The Philippines is just about to conclude a six-year period of economic increase, brought about by Benigno Aquino III, son of the rich and powerful - and long-standing Hacendero - Cojuanco family. Like American president Barack Obama, his term (only one 6-year term) has been spent down in the weeds of governance unknown to ordinary Filipinos. It was uneventful, lacking in drama, boring in Circus Ring #2. Perhaps that was exactly what voters wanted in 2010, after twelve years of corrupt presidents, plunder, impeachments, and stolen elections. But now, evidently, once again they want to see what the first ring will give them - or what they will spectacularly steal.
Wednesday, 4 May 2016
Look at Me
Nothing demonstrates a society's faith in the rock-bottom decency of human beings than the manner with which it treats its criminals. Of course, the faith of some people in human decency appears to be far greater than that of others.
On April 20, a verdict was returned by the Oslo district court in Norway regarding a case brought against the state by Anders Behring Breivik. As everyone should know by now, Breivik is a Norwegian man who, on July 22, 2011, set off a bomb near a government building in Oslo, killing eight people. After lighting the bomb's fuse inside a parked van, Breivik then proceeded directly to a tiny island called Utøya where the country's ruling Labor Party was sponsoring a youth summer camp. With two guns, a Ruger carbine and a 9mm Glock, and a bag full of ammunition, Breivik strolled around the island for more than an hour, shooting everyone he encountered, often at point blank range, killing sixty-nine. When police finally arrived, he quietly surrendered to them, as if it, too, was a part of his plan. Before leaving his mother's flat on that horrific morning, where he had been living and where he had manufactured the bomb, he emailed a 1,500-word manifesto to a thousand online recipients in which he stated that he wanted his actions to provoke a revolution in Norway, and in every other European country, against immigrants, especially against what he called a "Muslim invasion." He also uploaded a 12-minute video to YouTube declaring the same message.(1)
Almost immediately after being taken into police custody, Breivik began to complain about the most trivial things. Asne Seierstad, in her article in The New Yorker, wrote:
"When his bloodied shoes were put in a plastic bag and he was given slippers, he refused to wear them. 'I don't want to be seen in these; they are riduculous,' he said." (2)
Then Breivik discovered that, during the shootings, he had somehow cut his finger and was bleeding. He remembered that, during the shootings on Utøya, he had been hit in the hand by something - probably a piece of the skull of one of his victims whom he had shot in the head. He continued until his interrogation, when he demanded a bandage. One of the policemen present muttered that he would get "no fucking bandage" from him. So Breivik refused to any more questions until he got a bandaid. Someone got it for him.
At the end of his ten-week trial in 2012, in which there was conflicting psychiatric opinion about his mental state (the court concluded he was not psychotic, although his total lack of remorse clearly showed that he was a sociopath), he was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, the longest penalty under Norwegian law, but the sentence can be extended indefinitely.
In prison, Brievik was subjected to daily strip-searches, found himself separated from visitors by a glass partition, was prevented from communicating with his followers, and was restricted to solitary confinement for lengthy periods. Breivik complained to prison officials, as well as directly to the press about other things as well, such as having to use a Playstation 2 rather than a Playstation 3, having to drink cold coffee or not having enough butter for his bread, and about the total absence of artworks in the prison. He claimed that the resulting psychological damage made him a fan of a reality television dating show.
Last year, Breivik filed suit against the state because some of the conditions under which he is obliged to live are, he claimed, a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting "inhumane and degrading treatment". Having to see him again every night on Norwegian television as his case was presented to the court, made the wounds of the families who lost a son or a daughter, a sibling or a friend in the massacre, bleed again. Seeing Breivik obviously relishing the publicity, his taking the stage once again, enraged everyone. Yet the law required that the court hear Breivik's complaints. And last month the court ruled in his favor, agreeing that there was deliberately inhumane and degrading treatment of him, but that some of the terms of his confinement, like his being prevented from communicating with his followers, should continue. And now the state has appealed the court's decision, Breivik will be provided with still more attention from the press, and Norwegians subjected to further outrage.
Some of the most acute minds in Norway have spent the years since the Utøya massacre trying to figure out how Breivik could have brought himself to the point of committing mass murder, and then to have carried it out without the slightest comprehension of wrong-doing. In another New Yorker article, published a year ago, Karl Ove Knausgaard tried to comprehend Breivik. "The most logical approach is to view his actions as a variation on the numerous school massacres that have occurred in the past decades in the United States, Finland, and Germany: a young man, a misfit, who is either partly or completely excluded from the group, takes as many people with him into death as he can, in order to 'show' us. . . He wanted to be seen; that is what drove him, nothing else. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me."(3)
If Breivik had committed his massacre in the U.S., it's fairly certain that by now he would be dead. Like Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (an act that Breivik tried to repeat with his Oslo bomb) and who was put to death by lethal injection in 2001, Breivik would have been expeditiously tried by a federal court, convicted, and sentenced to death - all out of consideration to the victims and in the interests of "justice." In Europe, however, capital punishment has long since been abolished. Brevik must spend the rest of his life in prison. The survivors of the massacre and the families of the victims never expected justice, since no matter what they did to Breivik, the seventy-seven dead will never be brought back. The responsibility of the state, therefore, is to keep him in one sort of confinement or other until he, too, is dead.
What is the purpose of incarcerating convicted criminals? My father, after his retirement from the Army, got a job as a guard at a prison in South Carolina, and it gave me a lesson in the confusion Americans evidently had towards prison inmates. Because of his experience with weapons, my father worked in one of the prison towers with a high-powered rifle and instructions to shoot anyone who tried to climb over one of the high fences near the main gate. Since he worked the graveyard shift, I remember he drank alot of coffee and slept all day.
The prison where he worked, down by the Congaree River in Columbia, was officially known as the South Carolina State Penetentiary. Penetentiary is an old word, betraying an old conception of imprisonment that has little meaning any more. It's where "penitents" - confessed sinners - go. The state department was called the Department of Corrections. That prisons "correct" prisoners is a liberal 20th-century idea that is the expression of a different understanding of what happens when someone breaks the law and what society needs to do about them.
Anders Breivik seems determined not to go quietly into the living oblivion that Norwegian law has sought to place him. "Every time his name appears in public," Knausgaard wrote, "he gets what he wants, and becomes who he wants, while those whom he murdered, at whose expense he asserted himself, lost not onky their lives but also their names - we remember his name, but they have become numbers."
(1) Charles Manson believed that the Tate-Labianca murders carried out by members of his "family" would spark a race war.
(2) "Mercy for a Terroist in Norway," The New Yorker, April 25, 2016.
(3) "The Inexplicable: Inside the mind of a mass killer," The New Yorker, May 25, 2015.
On April 20, a verdict was returned by the Oslo district court in Norway regarding a case brought against the state by Anders Behring Breivik. As everyone should know by now, Breivik is a Norwegian man who, on July 22, 2011, set off a bomb near a government building in Oslo, killing eight people. After lighting the bomb's fuse inside a parked van, Breivik then proceeded directly to a tiny island called Utøya where the country's ruling Labor Party was sponsoring a youth summer camp. With two guns, a Ruger carbine and a 9mm Glock, and a bag full of ammunition, Breivik strolled around the island for more than an hour, shooting everyone he encountered, often at point blank range, killing sixty-nine. When police finally arrived, he quietly surrendered to them, as if it, too, was a part of his plan. Before leaving his mother's flat on that horrific morning, where he had been living and where he had manufactured the bomb, he emailed a 1,500-word manifesto to a thousand online recipients in which he stated that he wanted his actions to provoke a revolution in Norway, and in every other European country, against immigrants, especially against what he called a "Muslim invasion." He also uploaded a 12-minute video to YouTube declaring the same message.(1)
Almost immediately after being taken into police custody, Breivik began to complain about the most trivial things. Asne Seierstad, in her article in The New Yorker, wrote:
"When his bloodied shoes were put in a plastic bag and he was given slippers, he refused to wear them. 'I don't want to be seen in these; they are riduculous,' he said." (2)
Then Breivik discovered that, during the shootings, he had somehow cut his finger and was bleeding. He remembered that, during the shootings on Utøya, he had been hit in the hand by something - probably a piece of the skull of one of his victims whom he had shot in the head. He continued until his interrogation, when he demanded a bandage. One of the policemen present muttered that he would get "no fucking bandage" from him. So Breivik refused to any more questions until he got a bandaid. Someone got it for him.
At the end of his ten-week trial in 2012, in which there was conflicting psychiatric opinion about his mental state (the court concluded he was not psychotic, although his total lack of remorse clearly showed that he was a sociopath), he was sentenced to twenty-one years in prison, the longest penalty under Norwegian law, but the sentence can be extended indefinitely.
In prison, Brievik was subjected to daily strip-searches, found himself separated from visitors by a glass partition, was prevented from communicating with his followers, and was restricted to solitary confinement for lengthy periods. Breivik complained to prison officials, as well as directly to the press about other things as well, such as having to use a Playstation 2 rather than a Playstation 3, having to drink cold coffee or not having enough butter for his bread, and about the total absence of artworks in the prison. He claimed that the resulting psychological damage made him a fan of a reality television dating show.
Last year, Breivik filed suit against the state because some of the conditions under which he is obliged to live are, he claimed, a violation of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting "inhumane and degrading treatment". Having to see him again every night on Norwegian television as his case was presented to the court, made the wounds of the families who lost a son or a daughter, a sibling or a friend in the massacre, bleed again. Seeing Breivik obviously relishing the publicity, his taking the stage once again, enraged everyone. Yet the law required that the court hear Breivik's complaints. And last month the court ruled in his favor, agreeing that there was deliberately inhumane and degrading treatment of him, but that some of the terms of his confinement, like his being prevented from communicating with his followers, should continue. And now the state has appealed the court's decision, Breivik will be provided with still more attention from the press, and Norwegians subjected to further outrage.
Some of the most acute minds in Norway have spent the years since the Utøya massacre trying to figure out how Breivik could have brought himself to the point of committing mass murder, and then to have carried it out without the slightest comprehension of wrong-doing. In another New Yorker article, published a year ago, Karl Ove Knausgaard tried to comprehend Breivik. "The most logical approach is to view his actions as a variation on the numerous school massacres that have occurred in the past decades in the United States, Finland, and Germany: a young man, a misfit, who is either partly or completely excluded from the group, takes as many people with him into death as he can, in order to 'show' us. . . He wanted to be seen; that is what drove him, nothing else. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me."(3)
If Breivik had committed his massacre in the U.S., it's fairly certain that by now he would be dead. Like Timothy McVeigh, who carried out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 (an act that Breivik tried to repeat with his Oslo bomb) and who was put to death by lethal injection in 2001, Breivik would have been expeditiously tried by a federal court, convicted, and sentenced to death - all out of consideration to the victims and in the interests of "justice." In Europe, however, capital punishment has long since been abolished. Brevik must spend the rest of his life in prison. The survivors of the massacre and the families of the victims never expected justice, since no matter what they did to Breivik, the seventy-seven dead will never be brought back. The responsibility of the state, therefore, is to keep him in one sort of confinement or other until he, too, is dead.
What is the purpose of incarcerating convicted criminals? My father, after his retirement from the Army, got a job as a guard at a prison in South Carolina, and it gave me a lesson in the confusion Americans evidently had towards prison inmates. Because of his experience with weapons, my father worked in one of the prison towers with a high-powered rifle and instructions to shoot anyone who tried to climb over one of the high fences near the main gate. Since he worked the graveyard shift, I remember he drank alot of coffee and slept all day.
The prison where he worked, down by the Congaree River in Columbia, was officially known as the South Carolina State Penetentiary. Penetentiary is an old word, betraying an old conception of imprisonment that has little meaning any more. It's where "penitents" - confessed sinners - go. The state department was called the Department of Corrections. That prisons "correct" prisoners is a liberal 20th-century idea that is the expression of a different understanding of what happens when someone breaks the law and what society needs to do about them.
Anders Breivik seems determined not to go quietly into the living oblivion that Norwegian law has sought to place him. "Every time his name appears in public," Knausgaard wrote, "he gets what he wants, and becomes who he wants, while those whom he murdered, at whose expense he asserted himself, lost not onky their lives but also their names - we remember his name, but they have become numbers."
(1) Charles Manson believed that the Tate-Labianca murders carried out by members of his "family" would spark a race war.
(2) "Mercy for a Terroist in Norway," The New Yorker, April 25, 2016.
(3) "The Inexplicable: Inside the mind of a mass killer," The New Yorker, May 25, 2015.
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