One That Got Away

The Town That Dreaded Sundown was produced while the Zodiac killings were still under active investigation, approximately 400 miles away. The documentary drama came of age in the decade of my childhood, although I did not know anything of Pierce’s work until very recently, when ThisTV purchased syndication and ran it in their cyclic fashion. While the trombone sequence can be considered signatory for the seventies idea of graphic exploitation, my concern with the film is less critical, and more symmetrical, to allude to Brian Greene’s reminder about the past and present, in physics. The 07 Zodiac has an uncanny familial reflection when compared to Pierce’s more primitive lampoon. Like The Onion Field, Zodiac elevates the focus of the true crime genre, and raises questions about justice and equity. If we wind up haunted by the heinous whom we never apprehend, the penal systems we have for those criminals proven guilty seems to be little more than an existential boomerang. Wambaugh brackets his film between the explosive annihilation of a good man with a strong center juxtaposed against an abscess of judicial process for his impulsive villains, and Fontana and Levinson,  in Oz, bind all together in manipulative culpability, while the EU confinement centers virtually dispense with the concept of punishment. Oz is a good series, but it gets bogged down by too much emphasis on "the rats in the maze," investigations with no repercussions, death sentences with no proportionality. Murderers, however, are the most distinctive of group subsets, marked by an irrevocable violation against the group, to the point that even our more aggressive primates are impacted. Apes may be more in the moment than some, but when they conspire to kill they know they've stressed the bonds that bind the families under the alpha leaders.

Newly Minted

Contemplative. Ritualized execution in the 21st century does not carry the same significance it had under the monarchical symbolism that so concerned Foucault. The death of Nidal Hasan may therefore be pointless as an administered justice; it may in fact offer him a self-conceptualized dignity as a martyr that he does not particularly deserve, living in that broken body, removed now from the empathy of the human socializing dynamic, though how these analytically framed objections to the death penalty apply to treason is in a separate sphere all together. Treason is different than most capital crimes, even spree murders, and Hasan is unquestionably a traitor, one of Clarke's domestic enemies that the military brought on itself through lax standards of accreditation. Ironically, Hasan has reached his nefarious status simply by falling back on eighth century morality codes. Assimilation could not create the comity between identity and western fidelity to standards, to procedure, to multi-cultural influx. Is it too simple to say Hasan's superiors could have prevented the Fort Hood massacre by relieving the man of his duties? Perhaps he would have preferred giving up his citizenship and joining Hamas, that wonderful league of indignation.

Flesh micro-managed, hemmed in by constriction however long it lasts, ostomy bags to discard his excrement, pressure sore maintenance. He has, in a sense, dehumanized himself, and may not survive prolonged incarceration regardless of appellate timelines. What standards are psychiatrists required to adhere to in order to practice psychiatry? Why was such a man drawn to such a field in which his performance was so mediocre? Why didn't the military apparatus raise enough flags about his behavior? Why does society treat me like an Islamist simply because I was born the way he is now immobilized?

Researching a pitch can still amount to procrastination. Worrying my level of diplomacy, but I have to look past ideology and advocacy for the time being. Larger issues at stake.