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Crime
Crimes Of Punishment
An Interview With Christian Parenti
I describe SWAT teams in Fresno as a kind of postmodern public execution — a highly ritualized, highly theatrical display of the sovereign’s power. Like an invading army, they occupy whole neighborhoods, harass the residents, and surround the houses. They have machine guns, barking dogs, and armored personnel carriers. This is state propaganda, political theater, directed not at the “perp” holed up in the house, but at the hundreds of community members watching.
October 2000Reconciled
I was laughing at myself, at twenty years of a ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication, an attempted negation of Jesus. A ministry of human engineering, of riding on the coattails of Caesar, of playing in his ballpark, by his rules, and with his ball; of looking to government to make and verify and authenticate our morality, of worshiping at the shrine of enlightenment and academia, of making an idol of the Supreme Court; a theology of law and order and of denying, not only the faith I professed to hold, but my history and my people — the Thomas Colemans. For, as much as Jonathan Daniel, they were loved. And if loved, forgiven. And if forgiven, reconciled.
May 2000Crimes And Misdemeanors
A partner in crime, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, a double-dog dare
April 2000And Thy Right Hand Shall Teach Thee
The Littleton massacre won’t go away, and not because politicians and commentators are still yapping about it, but because no one can forget it, and because Littleton has taught some deeply disturbed young people (all affluent, all white, all male) how to make an impact on an America that wants nothing from them but their capacity to consume.
December 1999Panic
A hundred benzodiazopines, a man in a red ski mask with a long knife, a small hole in a blanket
December 1999The Bribe
Grace and I had agreed to pick up Paul at the airport in Guatemala City. Suzie, Paul’s girlfriend and our fellow Peace Corps volunteer, had to build chicken coops in a village near Santiago and couldn’t leave in time to meet him, so she’d asked us to go in her place.
September 1999Tapenade
Three weeks after my father came home from the hospital, I started stealing groceries. It would surprise you how easy it is: so long as you have a full cart, they never suspect you.
September 1999A Dog Named Hopi
I tried to tell myself that he only wanted to rape me. I thought of all the women down through the ages who had been raped and silently asked for their help. I asked their spirits to hover over us and lighten the dark corners of this man’s mind.
August 1999The Cooking Lesson
A good fire, in fact, is like a perfect lie. It takes myriad shapes, it mesmerizes, it consumes itself and leaves nothing behind. Somehow, in my mind, the perfect fire and the perfect lie had always been intertwined.
October 1998Warja’s Feast
I was struggling to open a can of powdered milk with a pocketknife when Kombate clapped his hands outside the window of my house and called, “Mademoiselle! Mademoiselle!”
August 1998
