Shelf Life

There was a recent piece in the local paper about a homeless guy who was a crime victim, and the New Mexican referred to him as “unhoused,” which I’m assuming is a new locution.  Mind you, this is a guy my dad would have called a bum, plain and simple. We should take a look at some context.  There was a policy adopted a few years back – a few being relative, it might have been during the Reagan administration – to de-institutionalize the homeless.  Whatever guiding principle was involved, the proximate result was to dump a lot of people on the street who didn’t have survival skills.  What they had were serious drug and alcohol addictions, and unresolved mental health issues.  The problem hasn’t been much alleviated by successive social policies, and it doesn’t matter whether you change the descriptives to somehow humanize these people at the bottom of the food chain.  They’re still in bad shape, just the same.

I realize the anti-woke crowd would suggest that we’re getting overly sensitive to hurting people’s feelings, but it’s not about hurt feelings.  That’s to willfully misunderstand the framing of the argument.  Language is as much about the people applying the labels as it is about the people being labeled, if not more.  Spazz and ree-tard were in vogue back when we were in grade school, and they may still have currency, but if kids use them, they’d probably say they mean no insult to anybody who’s actually spastic or developmentally challenged; it’s exaggeration for effect.  The days are hopefully long past when we threw stones at the witless.  As for words (as opposed to sticks and stones), the same goes for Quentin Tarantino’s favorite noun, or any number of common slang epithets for gay guys or Jews, Italians or Irish or Arabs, and calling somebody a towelhead says more about you than it says about them.

Vocabulary goes in and out of fashion.  We use the term dial tone, but it’s untethered to physical reality, because who dials anymore?  Likewise, a word like Okie, which was specific to homegrown refugees from the Dust Bowl, and these days is as dated as The Grapes of Wrath.  (Except for those pesky refugees, the mojados who just keep coming.)

As a writer, and particularly a writer who’s done his share of period pieces, I’d be the first to admit that colorful language reinforces atmosphere, and authenticity.  Leaving aside the unhappy plethora of prithee, sirrahs in Sir Walter Scott’s medieval fables, he uses picturesque and homely lingo to honest effect in his Border stories, which are closer to his own time.  And for my part, I doubt if the Mickey Counihan stories would have the same gamy flavor if I sanitized the way he talks.  On the other hand, we recognize that even if this is “the way they talk,” common vulgarities perpetuate ugly stereotypes.  It’s not a matter of whether we say these things aloud or in secret.

Language is organic, not prescriptive.  It grows on its own.  The French have an Academy, to hand down the rules, but they can’t keep the weeds out.  I’m no big fan of eviscerating language, of diminishing its muscularity.  Why water your whiskey?  A lot of the time, there’s no real substitute for brute Anglo-Saxon invective.  But there’s a difference between talking dirty, and using language that’s offensive because it singles people out for ridicule, and diminishes them.  It cultivates lazy habits of thought: Jews are grasping, black people are shiftless, Mexicans are illiterate beaners.

We can retire usage, just like clothing.  I might still fit into those paisley bell-bottoms, but hopefully friends and family would stage an intervention.  Sentimental attachment only goes so far.  Enough with the hand-me-downs. 

Wire in the Blood

Wire in the Blood is a Brit TV show based on Val McDermid's series of books featuring forensic psychologist Tony Hill. The character's played by Robson Green, who might be familiar to some of you from Grantchester, and who was also in seasons 4 and 5 of Strike Back, which is where he first caught my attention. He's had a solid career going back to the late 1980's, light comedy and heavy drama, but I wouldn't wonder if doing Tony Hill isn't one of the highlights.

Criminal profiling, in the formal sense, goes back at least to the Whitechapel terror - Jack the Ripper is said to be the first object of analysis. David Morrell would give you an argument, and suggest Thomas de Quincey's essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," which examines the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, predating the Ripper by some 75 years. The 'science,' disputed by some scholars, has gotten a lot of traction over the last forty years or so. The FBI commissioned their Behavioral Science Unit in 1972. Thomas Harris published Red Dragon in 1981. Popular imagination does the rest.

Wire in the Blood falls very much in hagiographic terrain. Tony Hill has an unsettling ability to put himself in a killer's shoes, but his insights aren't always appreciated by the more evidence-driven homicide dicks he works with. He'll make an intuitive leap; they'll be looking for a DNA match. In practice, it usually works out, and the bad guys meet their just desserts. In terms of narrative structure, it can be a little predictable, since Tony's so often proved right. This isn't, in the scheme of things, actually a weakness. It provides a two-track storyline, and even though you know Tony has his finger on the killer's internal mechanics, it's gonna be the cops who run the villain to earth.

There's a very definite something else going on with Tony Hill, though, and certainly in the way that Robson Green inhabits the character. Tony isn't socially adept. If he's not quite as bone-headed as, say, Doc Martin, he's obviously somewhere on the spectrum. This plays out as an interesting contradiction. Tony will walk his way through a crime scene, and try to experience it from the POV of both victim and killer. This kind of sympathetic vibration doesn't work for him, however, with what most of us think of as generic social interaction. He'll stop a conversation cold because he's had a sudden epiphany, he'll forget what he was saying, he'll walk out of a room. He doesn't realize his behavior is often careless or even hurtful. He doesn't mean it to be, of course, and he's embarrassed when he's caught out, but he's obsessive-compulsive. He's got tunnel vision.

This is a curiously common characteristic in our ratiocinatory detectives - is that a word? Sherlock Holmes, for one. Emotion clouds the reasoning process. On the other hand, empathy is a necessary part of it. Tony Hill is deeply affected by what he does, but he has to keep his distance. It's a puzzle in and of itself, and Robson Green makes the guy fascinating to watch. Not endearing, mind, but isolated, apart. Too much in his own head.

I should add a cautionary note. Wire in the Blood isn't a cozy. The theme is damage, the pathologies are unsettling, the prey are children, or the weak, or the damned. It's not terribly reassuring. It makes for one hell of a compelling narrative, though.

Duping Delight

“He lied for pleasure,” Fuselier said— Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier, a clinical psychologist and an FBI investigator.
In this case, he was talking about Eric Harris of Columbine notoriety. But millions of people who aren’t mass murderers also lie for pleasure. They tread beyond compulsive, they go beyond obsessive– they lie for enjoyment, gratification, and amusement.

Psychologist Paul Ekman says lying represents a key characteristic of the psychopathic profile. He calls it ‘duping delight’.

It’s rare for the average person to get to know a criminal mind. I’m not talking about the desperate committer of crimes or those who’ve lost their way, but people who deliberately set out to steal or defraud for no other reason than they wish to.

Oddly enough, most fraudsters I’ve personally known have been disbarred lawyers. Truly. Wait, I’m not picking on lawyers as a class nor am I providing fodder for lawyer jokes– we can do that another time if my friend Dale turns a blind eye. But for unexplained reasons that seem beyond coincidence, the major swindlers I’ve encountered have been former attorneys and one a former judge. They all hail from Florida as well, formerly a haven for con artists and scammers selling underwater parcels of land.

My friend Sharon sent me an Orlando Sentinel article titled “Husband of disbarred attorney sues her, alleging fraud, forgery.” Strange as that sounds, it barely hints at the machinations involved… you’ve got to read the article.

It put me in mind of another lawyer whom I’ll call Dr. Bob Black.

Judge Not Lest… an opinion piece

I met ‘Dr. Black’ at a local college campus. We chatted between breaks. He failed to let on he’d been disbarred, although he mentioned numerous times he’d been a judge. He shared he was raised in financial comfort and had been well educated. His relationship with his parents, especially Bob Sr, sounded complex and later left me wondering about the residual effects.

Black had bought a minor mansion in an Orlando historical district. He’d gutted it and was in the process of slicing its interior into small apartments when the Historical Society called a halt, pointing out that ruining a historical building and establishing multi-family residences in a single-family zone was forbidden. Unfazed, Black put it up for sale, advertising it as partially converted to apartments but possibly not mentioning the legal stumbling blocks.

At the time of his real estate ventures, Bob was also hawking a computer he called the Macintosh XLS. I recognized the machine as an Apple Lisa, the forerunner to the Mac, although Black claimed it was not a Lisa but a super-advanced product that outclassed other computers— especially its price of $10 000, about five times the price of a Mac at the time.

A little research showed he was buying refurbished units from a company in Shreveport, bundling them with freeware and shareware, and offering training worth “thousands of dollars.” As it happened, he was paying less than $40 for adult classes at Winter Park Tech where my friend Geri taught. Geri found herself with more than one of his victims in her classes, including one man whose wife was dying of cancer and was barely holding together emotionally.

The Scheme

Black was buying outdated, refurbished computers for a few hundred dollars, adding freeware (free software) and $40 worth of classes, and then selling them as high-end products to the unsuspecting.

Dr. Black was a snappy dresser. Even at casual gatherings he wore suits, and under his suits he wore sweater vests, not a common sight in Florida.

He liked talking to me, even when I’d call him on some of his shenanigans. When I asked barbed questions, he showed a politely bland face, no anger or irritation at all. I wondered if he masked his feelings or felt nothing at all. Did he choose me just to have one person to talk to?

He claimed to have been a judge, and apparently that was true. The ‘Dr’ part he tacked onto his name– He liked the sound of it. Beyond the connotation of ‘juris’, it had no more meaning than the ‘Dr’ in Dr. Pepper.

Judgment-Proof

Black confided he was ‘judgment-proof’ and explained he maintained real property in his wife’s name and kept all his other assets offshore. The topic of disbarment didn’t disturb him… he simply acted as if he didn’t hear those questions, although once he hinted at a political misunderstanding.

One of his controlling peculiarities was to arrange meetings with clients at odd minutes on the clock, say 9:42 or 10:13. Black claimed he was too tightly scheduled to waste appointments on the half or quarter hour.

His attitude toward ripping off people was entirely incomprehensible to most observers. Black exhibited zero contrition but especially no shame whatsoever. He displayed a bullying arrogance toward anyone he could. He may have fancied himself superior to lesser people; others were merely ants that he righteously stepped on if they got in his way. Bob seemed to typify a sociopath in every sense of the word.

The Detective and the Reporter

A pair of related calls came in on my consulting line. Geri had referred one caller, a former New York City homicide detective who’d been defrauded by Black. The other was from our local WCPX star consumer crusader, Ellen MacFarlane. The detective happened to know Ellen’s mother, a NYC judge, and her sister, a force within the New York Department of Consumer Affairs. They asked me if I would provide technical knowledge for an exposé of Dr. Bob Black.

Ellen suffered from multiple sclerosis, but she was a fighter. I sat in on the interviews, sometimes feeding her questions. Black’s strategy was to answer no question directly. If she asked him about reselling obsolete equipment, he would respond with a rambling discourse on Steve Jobs, Reaganomics, and local gardening regulations. He exhausted the lady, but Ellen managed to air the segment.

The detective wasn’t done. He sued Black and called me as a witness.

We sat waiting for Black in the judge’s chambers. At nearly half-past the hour, the phone rang. The judge put it on speaker phone: A whimpering Black claimed he was deathly ill.

The judge said, “Frankly, Mr. Black, you don’t have much credibility around this court. However, I’ll continue this case if you get a doctor’s note to me within three days.”

Upon my return to court, I bumped into Black. He always acted polite to me and he did so this time, impervious to my cool nod. This time, the parties indicated they were considering a settlement. I wasn’t called to court again so I don’t know what, if any, judgment or restitution was involved.

To say Black was a scoundrel or a rascal is to diminish the impact he had on others. The Yiddish word ‘gonif’ comes close, implying a thief and a cheat.

Most of us would like to leave the world a better place. Besides social currency, reputation is a reflection of future self, the part that remains after we’re gone. We can’t all be great authors, musicians, artists, nurses, and teachers, but we can be good people. People who don’t care are alien to the rest of us.

I’ll bracket this article with “in my opinion,” but Black made a living from cheating people. He could argue he gave naïve people what they asked for (“They should have done their homework”) and what he promised (“So what if I sold them free software and who’s to say the $40 course isn’t worth thousands”).

For all that, my greatest astonishment centered around his lack of shame. I used to attend LegalSIG, a special interest group run by a local law firm concerning matters of business and law. Black would attend, showing no chagrin, no humiliation, not the least discomfort. Most people would not put themselves through such mortification, but Black felt no discomposure. He was internally ‘judgement-proof’ emotionally as well as financially.

Friends asked why ‘Black’ singled me out to talk. Partly, people found it easy to chat with me, even confide, but also I could listen without hating him, which I suspect many of his colleagues and victims must have done. From him, of course, I heard only fragments of his exploits. He never mentioned the word ‘victims’, but hinted those who’d fallen for his schemes were weak-minded. He sometimes suggested when his prey rose up, they were unfairly trying to victimize him for being the more clever.

I can’t read a mind like his, but I began to suspect that if he dealt with emotions at all, he might have felt no wrong. He might even have believed himself entitled, that he had the right to exploit lesser humans, those who could not harm others. If so, I feel sorry for him. But I'll never know for sure.