REVIEW: Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

James’s baseball books made us take baseball seriously. Popular Crime tries to do the same for gruesome tabloid stories. Framed mostly as a series of short, anecdotal chapters in the author’s famously argumentative style (“That sounds pretty stupid to me,” he says about medical evidence in one case, “but what do I know, I’m not a doctor”), the book recounts the murders and other crimes that have seized the U.S.’s attention since its inception, from Lizzie Borden and Mary Phagan through O.J. Simpson. Even Casey Anthony turns up, though the book was published before her acquittal. James mentions that Anthony was bound to get a lot of coverage because she “is a very attractive young woman, and she lived to party.”

What James wants to demonstrate is that these crime stories “are very often the basis on which new laws are proposed and old ones modified.” Sometimes coverage of an individual case can even change society: whitewashed portrayals of Robert Stroud, the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” led to “careless application of the principles of prisoner’s rights” and thereby to the modern backlash against the rights of the accused. Just as baseball gets us interested in math and probability, James says, “we were, in our involvement in the O.J. Simpson case, asking ourselves very, very serious questions.”

It sometimes feels as if James could make his arguments more convincingly if he would slow down and make them without rambling so much. He offers a system for “categorizing crime stories” to figure out whether they will be media favourites but, unlike in his baseball books, in Popular Crime, James doesn’t take time to develop a full-fledged methodology. And when he offers his opinions on whether people were actually guilty or innocent—like his explanation of why Lizzie Borden could not have killed her parents—we can sometimes be uncomfortably reminded of the time he argued that Pete Rose might have been framed.

Violence, rhetoric and rhetorical violence

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 25, 2011 at 1:07 PM - 4 Comments

Charles P. Pierce considers rhetoric and violence in American politics. (This was first published before the horror in Norway.)

We are political animals. It is a truth as old as Aristotle, who attributed our political nature to the fact that, unlike any of the other animals that travel in herds, we are able to speak. We can ignore the politics central to all our various interactions, or we can pretend that actions, good and bad, are apolitical, but politics is there, binding us up, regardless of how fervently we deny it, which we do, and take refuge then in fragmentation rather than confront what we may have in common with other people — strange people, crazy people, violent people — who share with us the politics of our common humanity. And we have chosen fragmentation as our comfortable, counterfeit heritage… Continue…

Kidnap victims fight to the death

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, July 5, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Bernadino Hernandez/AP

A new practice has emerged that raises the bar for twisted cruelty in Mexico’s bloody drug wars, where beheadings, hangings and shootings are regular occurrences. The Zetas drug cartel is reportedly pitting kidnap victims against each other in gladiator-style battles to the death. The revelation comes from a drug trafficker speaking anonymously in Texas, according to the Houston Chronicle. The trafficker reportedly described how Zetas gang members storm highway buses, kill the elderly, rape the women, and force the able-bodied men to fight in their blood sport. Armed with machetes, hammers or sticks, these victims are forced to fight until one of them is killed, said the trafficker.

The practice has been linked to the discovery of mass graves in northern Mexico, where over 400 bodies have been unearthed in recent months. Meanwhile, 33 people were killed during a 24-hour span in June in the city of Monterrey, where gangs battle for control of drug traffic. Since 2006, more than 35,000 people have been killed in Mexico’s drug war.

The women shortage

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, June 14, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 4 Comments

Photography by Steve Simon

FLUENT IN CHINESE and Spanish, Mara Hvistendahl is a Beijing-based correspondent for Science magazine and a former journalism professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. She is the author of Unnatural Selection, about how and why rampant sex-selective abortion in Asia is skewing the entire world’s gender balance.

Q: The natural sex ratio at birth, resulting in equal numbers of men and women, is 105 males to 100 females. But in Asia, that ratio has been skewed for a generation, and demographers calculate there are now over 163 million women “missing” from the continent’s population. Which countries have been most affected?

A: The areas most affected are eastern China and northwest India—the most developed parts of those nations—as well as South Korea, Taiwan and northern Vietnam. The important thing is that it’s beginning to appear in other parts of India and China.

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Shootout in a vacation paradise

By Jane Switzer - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 1 Comment

Bernandino Hernandez/AP

The latest wave of violence in the resort town of Acapulco left three people dead and ended in a fire that destroyed a supermarket, movie complex and stores in a shopping centre. Two gunmen and one soldier were killed in a shootout that started after police chanced upon a gang trying to set fire to the shopping centre. The incident is believed to have been drug related; the popular holiday destination has seen a marked increase in drug violence this year, despite claims from the city’s mayor that things aren’t as bad as they appear.

Indeed, Acapulco authorities claimed to have ended a gang war when they apprehended a cartel member suspected of being behind the murders of 22 people in January. Still, killings have steadily continued as rival drug cartels fight for control of the port city. Last month, 10 people were killed when gunmen opened fire in a nightclub. That same week, two young boys were shot dead as attackers chased a man through their house. Overall in Mexico, an estimated 35,000 people have been murdered in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderón declared war on the country’s cartels shortly after taking office in December 2006.

Study: violent games turn kids into jerks

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, April 5, 2011 at 5:05 PM - 14 Comments

The war over violent video games, raging for decades now, can get as loud and dumb as the games themselves. Media watchdogs, parents’ groups and religious organizations are quick to blame gaming for everything from falling literacy rates to school shootings. Meanwhile the massive gaming industry dodges these accusations with its self-imposed ratings system as its army of hot-headed gamers stubbornly deny any connection whatsoever between gaming and behaviour.

Mention in an online forum that you don’t like your kid slitting the throat of drug kingpins all night when he sleeps over at his friends’ house, and a hundred goons will chastise you for allowing your kid to play what is laughably classified as “Mature” content. One side demonizes the other for corrupting millions of innocents, the other blames its opponents for raising their children poorly. Things can get tense. Continue…

Bows, arrows, and firebombs

By Erica Alini - Monday, March 7, 2011 at 11:56 AM - 1 Comment

Yiorgos Karahalis/Reuters

Protests were once again roiling Greece last week as the two main labour unions staged the first general strike of the year, disrupting basic services across the country. In the capital, Athens, an estimated 30,000 workers, shopkeepers, civil servants and youth marched in the streets to protest the government’s ongoing austerity program. The turnout was lower than at previous rallies, and the marches mostly peaceful, but groups of youth did hurl firebombs at police. In parts of the city, residents witnessed now familiar urban guerrilla scenes, with protesters erecting barricades, smashing shop windows, and setting garbage bins on fire. Twenty-five people were held for questioning, police said, including a man carrying a bow, arrows and an axe. The protests came as new data showed the Greek economy contracting by a worse-than-expected 4.5 per cent last year. Greece agreed to the austerity measures as part of a deal with the European Union and International Monetary Fund for a $150-billion bailout.

Why do Canadians still vacation in Mexico?

By Michael Petrou with Erica Alini and Julia Belluz - Sunday, March 6, 2011 at 11:02 PM - 42 Comments

Mexican police keep a close watch on one of the beaches in Acapulco Pedro Pardo

The Plaza Sendero shopping mall on the outskirts of Acapulco has a fabric store, a shoe shop, and a movie complex, screening Tron: Legacy, The Tourist, and Gulliver’s Travels. A red-eyed dog lies asleep in the shade of the mall entrance, and nearby a man sits on his haunches, awake but equally motionless. The parking lot is scattered with bright orange shopping carts. Across the adjacent highway, shanties cling to an eroding hill, where the scorching sun has singed off almost all greenery. Smoke drifts upward from a cooking fire or burning rubbish.

A pedestrian bridge spans the highway. On it someone has pasted a flyer for a local church that promises salvation for those who suffer from vice, broken families, curses, or sicknesses with no known cause. Fifteen bodies were dumped here in January, most with their heads cut off and bodies mutilated. Six more were found stuffed into a nearby taxi. Their hands and feet had been bound. Two police were shot and killed the same day.

Handwritten posters at the crime scene link the murders to one of the drug cartels in the midst of a war for territory and export routes in Mexico. The victims almost certainly belonged to rival gangs. They are among more than 1,000 murdered over the past year in Acapulco, a popular vacation spot for Canadians.

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Murder and sex, Canadian-style

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 7 Comments

Ajax, Ont., teacher Paul Martin leaves a courthouse in Jamaica | Jamaica Observer

The first murderer in my life was John George Haigh, also known as the acid bath murderer. While in prison for some lesser crime, he dreamed up the idea of dissolving bodies in sulphuric acid until they were sludge. Which he did during the late 1940s in Britain, pouring loads of it down manholes. His last victim was a 69-year-old widow living at a hotel in Kensington. Haigh liked the Persian lamb coat she wore and it was the cleaning ticket for it that helped track him down.

The British papers were rapturous about Haigh. There are no subjects that people read about more eagerly and deny reading about more readily than murder and sex—preferably in combination. When someone speaks of reading such a story, they proffer the waiting-room defence. Perhaps you are reading this very column while waiting for your dental checkup.

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Canada's shame

By Cathy Gulli with Patricia Treble - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 3:30 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Windeyer/Nunatsiaq News

Talk to people living in the North about why the violent crime rate is so high compared to the rest of Canada and you’ll hear about the “complex” or “unique” problems “up here.” But it’s not until you listen to Peter J. Harte, a lawyer in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, tell the unimaginable story of a young woman he knows that you can begin to understand what that means.

At 13, the girl was sexually abused by her brother. This only came to the attention of police when they questioned her about why she was trying to put her little sister into hiding. Her brother wound up in jail, and the teen was placed with a foster family in another community.

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Telling us all about his friend Stieg Larsson

By Brian Bethune - Monday, October 4, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Kurdo Baksi is 45 now, and taking better care of his health than in his youth, eating his vegetables, exercising, even quitting smoking. It’s the sort of thing you do when one of your closest friends—a 60-cigarettes, 20-cups-of-coffee-a-day man—drops dead of a heart attack at age 50. The death of Stieg Larsson in 2004, just as the publishing phenomenon known as the Millennium trilogy—The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its successors—began building steam, also provoked another response in Baksi.

The Kurdish-born Swedish author and anti-racism activist decided to write Stieg Larsson, My Friend.
The new book is Baksi’s attempt to capture for the record Larsson as he was when they campaigned together for racial equality, long before Larsson’s novels sold 23 million copies worldwide, including one million in Canada. My Friend is eye-opening for any foreigner who still thinks of Sweden as a sublimely tolerant, feminist-ruled egalitarian state, and contentious at home, where Baksi is not the only one of Larsson’s intimates to lay claim to his legacy, or to a piece of a posthumous fortune worth $50 million. (So far: that’s just the print profits to date. The Swedish-language film versions have generated over $160 million in worldwide box office—even though the third has yet to be released in North America—with the Hollywood remakes still to come. In December, Penguin Canada will issue a $110 boxed set of the novels plus On Stieg Larsson, a volume of commentary.)

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The Commons: ‘This is our game and we need to protect our players’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 6:11 PM - 34 Comments

“It is high time,” said Glenn Thibeault, the NDP MP for Sudbury, “this issue is taken seriously.”

Shortly thereafter he clarified just how seriously.

“Today,” he said, “we are calling on the government to establish a Royal Commission on violence in sports. We need to look at all aspects and all of the causes, from equipment to social trends, coaching and officiating. This is our game and we need to protect our players.”

Oh, Patrice Cormier, look what ye hath wrought. Continue…

Fleeing the capital

By Michael Petrou - Monday, February 1, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 1 Comment

The broken blocks of concrete that fell from his house during the earthquake killed Vladimir Desir’s wife and child, and split open the top of his head. Bleeding badly, he tried to find medical help in Port-au-Prince. There wasn’t any. Desir gambled that he’d have a better chance of receiving care in Jacmel, a city 60 km to the southwest. It took him 12 hours to get there. When a Maclean’s reporter spoke to him a week later, he lay on a cot in the yard of Saint Michel’s Hospital and was enthusiastically praising the work of Canadian military doctors who treated him. He doesn’t regret leaving.

Desir’s case is unique only because of how quickly he decided to get out of the capital. Tens of thousands of other Haitians are now making the same choice. Many have family in countryside towns and villages. Those who can afford it buy space on private buses that are brightly painted with images of leopards, pop icons, and all manners of slogans: Thank you Jesus; In God we trust; Jerusalem; Big Family; Baby I love you. Ticket prices have almost doubled since the quake. The owner of one bus blamed the price of gas.

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Old wounds, new violence in Belfast

By Julien Russell Brunet - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

Once again violence has flared across Northern Ireland. In Ardoyne, a Catholic district in north Belfast, republicans threw petrol bombs, stones and bottles, injuring 23 police officers. The friction between nationalists and loyalists arose following the Twelfth, an annual—and contentious—celebration of Protestant King William III’s victory over Catholic King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.

The riots seem to have been orchestrated by a small number of dissident republicans from outside Ardoyne with the hope of stoking sectarian tensions. “When conflicts end,” says Dawn Brancati, an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, “there are frequently splinter groups that do not support the larger peace process and may remain active for many years after a peace agreement has been signed.” Continue…

Australia confronts racism

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 4:20 PM - 5 Comments

After weeks of refuting allegations of Australian racism, PM Kevin Rudd may be pulling an about-face. In response to a spate of violent attacks against Indian students, Rudd announced Thursday that he would consider a new set of federal laws aimed at curbing violence against overseas students. The amendment would strengthen the powers of police to respond to attacks, and also make “inciting violence” against an individual, on the basis of race, a federal offence.

It’s a move that was slow in coming. The first of the assaults—which left a 21-year-old student in a coma after he was stabbed with a screwdriver—took place over a month ago. Since then, over a dozen such incidents have been reported. But Australian officials have steadfastly denied that the attacks were racially motivated. Police said the violence was nothing but pedestrian street crime; Indian students were “soft” targets because they were walking alone at night. Rudd similarly dismissed race as a motive, calling the violence “just a regrettable fact of urban life.” Continue…

Dead: happily-ever-after endings

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, June 12, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

“If you look at our prize-winning literature, you would think we are humourless, violent and pathetic.” So says Ben McNally, an influential Toronto bookseller whose voice—think James Taylor after a bottle of Xanax–belies the sting of his zingers. He has a point: lasting romance, if not dead in contemporary literary novels, certainly isn’t winning any prizes these days. Sex, death, violence and depravity, yes, but true happily-ever-afterness? Dodo bird. “Conflict is where it’s at,” McNally laments before hanging up.

A review of winners of the Giller, Canada’s top prize for literature, shows that not a single winning book has a happy ending for a romantic couple since its inception in 1994. It is much the same for the Governor General’s Literary Awards. Since 1936, the winners of the award have been showered in superlatives—2007 winner Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje, is replete with “tenderness, compassion and grace”—yet hardly any of the winning titles end with the ultimate culmination of tenderness, compassion or grace.

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IRA killings escalate as recession hits

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

A sudden resurgence in killings by IRA breakaway groups in Northern Ireland has experts worried that as the local economy falters, youth could once again be drawn into violence. Almost a decade of relative peace was shattered by the shooting deaths of two British soldiers outside army barracks in Antrim on Saturday, followed by the brutal killing of a police officer on Monday.

While the scale of the operations surprised many, there have been rumblings of violence recently from the Real IRA, which claimed responsibility for the attack on British soldiers. (The second killing, which took place in Craigavon, was claimed by Continuity IRA, another IRA breakaway group.)

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Violence Good, Sex Bad

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 3, 2008 at 3:41 PM - 9 Comments

I haven’t seen the episode of Law and Order: SVU that Lee Goldberg pans here, but one of the points he makes is a very interesting one: that even as networks have tightened language/sex censorship in the post-Janet-Jackson era, those same networks have loosened or all but eliminated restrictions on violence, blood, mutilation. Some network shows probably have more violence, or at least more exploitative violence, than The Sopranos (where violence was usually more like real life: sudden, horrifying and unattractive), and apart from violence, the level of exploitative/prurient content seems to be up.

On broadcast network TV now, you can show almost as much blood as you want….hell, you can Continue…