In my time of dying, I want nobody to mourn...

What is it about some deaths, disappearances and murders that capture our attention so much? As this year draws to a close, one thing that is fascinating is the events that catch our attention, or at least the media’s attention more so than others. Politics, Economics and self-interested rambling of the media aside, there doesn’t seem to be anything more fascinating that a decent murder, especially one that is wrapped in mystery and preceded by debauchery.[1] While in any given year, there are around 1.2 reported murders per hundred thousand people in Australia, how many murders are not reported? More to the question is: can we, as a populace, let alone those fuzzy control freaks that make up the media and political circles, deal with the seemingly severe lack of control that we have over our lives? 

What is it about looking from a distance at a family who has lost a loved one through violence? We rubber neck through the facts and try to find a reason as to why this wouldn’t happen in our house, yet we are fascinated by it. We can’t seem to stop at just sinchelectually deconstructing the facts and motives on the players. We go beyond that, to lay blame on the victim, or worse, to excuse them. We look at the Jill Meaghers and the Baden-Clay families around us and moralise and philosophize as to why they are different to us. Why we would never be a victim or be guilty of a crime like that. Crime dramas still plague television and movies more so than most other genres, and the news of someone being killed, being raped and/or going missing still dominates over other stories. I wonder whether the main reason for this is that there is no voice of the victim in a homicide related crime; so we can speak for them, or at least, speak about them without fear of them telling us we’re wrong. There is also an asymmetry of ability to respond available from the culprit. Take for instance, the inability of 2day FM’s Mel Greig and Michael Christian to be able to say something like “The idea that someone would top themselves over a dumb prank is just plain bullshit [and] If you’re dumb enough to fall for a prank like that, you at least deserve to be fired, and so does your boss, who ought to have known better than to release such info.”  However, if that were said, there would be further outrage from people who seek to “speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongue.”

Looking into it a little more, there tends to be a polarisation of these interest stories. We are fascinated by two types of death stories. Firstly, and mainly, the ones that involve a respectable member of society, both of the victim and the accused, that is able and willing to plan out an elaborate series of events that hide the motivations and premeditations of the scene and people. They then seemingly slip up somehow on the most bizarre or uncommon occurrence that begins to unravel their disguise; as if God herself took a moment to intervene. We wonder at the marvels of the Inspector Grishams of the world who always get to the bottom of things, regardless of how carefully planned the murder was. We hide every experience we have ever had with real life police, who generally have trouble finding their way to McDonalds without tasering themselves in the pills, let alone have any ability to solve a crime.

The second type is the polar opposite. The victim may be one of us, but the accused is not from our realm. The accused is without morals, without education and without social standing. He is a gutter dweller that has slightly graced our realm, bringing the horror of Dionysian dualism to our newspapers, radios and television screens to mock our sense of control. The police here are what we want them to be, stupid Neanderthals that bash up the clearly guilty persons, for they are not guilty of an action, they are guilty of simply being who they are. They are murderers, rapists and paedophiles. It is not in their actions that these types are guilty, it is in their very existence that they are guilty and as such, they have no rights, no reason to seek redress from brutality toward them.

When crimes are reported, the ones that are reported generally do not match the average of that crime. This year, the violent deaths that have captured our attention are only a few: Alison Baden-Clay; Jill Meagher;  Azaria Chamberlain. The common theme of murder doesn’t seem to get reported, as it is, at least partially, here.  The theme of the reports is about trying to lay blame somewhere. Some may say that the victim brought it on herself by the way she acted or dressed, others may lay blame at the family and friends, yet more lay blame on society at large in an attempt to hide from the very real horror that there is nothing stopping us from oblivion just as there wasn’t anything stopping the victim from meeting her end. Are we trying to lay blame or create a reason as to why it will not happen to us? Do we not have control over our own safety?

To start with the sheer numbers; the Australian Institute of Criminology reports that somewhere between 250 to 300 people are reported as being the victim of murder or manslaughter each year. This seems to have been continually decreasing over the years, and many peeps have pointed to the development of medical science to explain this trend, as it also matches with a growing number or assaults, so the theory is that people who, in past times would have died from their attack are now getting medical help and living and as such, their assailants are getting nicked for assault rather than murder or manslaughter.

But then, that is only the reported crimes. Given that the Australian Federal Police tell us that someone gets reported as missing every 15 minutes, the reported crimes may be only a tiny portion of the actual occurrences of people getting killed by someone. Notwithstanding the fact that 95% of people reported missing turn up in the first week, of the 35,000 people reported missing each year, 1,600 a year seem to stay missing. It would be a fairly decent assumption to say that a good deal of these people are buried in someone’s yard. And yet again, these are only the people reported as missing; which means they have to be missed by someone, which would probably not include the murderer, unless they were stupidly trying to create a type of explanation and alibi.

In Brisbane, the disappearance and death of a former beauty queen, mother and wife in the leafy suburbs, Allison Baden-Clay who is then found ten days later, 14 kilometres from her wealthy home captured the attention for weeks. For some reason, the media and facebook posts all showed shock about the husband being charged with her murder, despite allegations of a troubled marriage and wandering eyes and hands and despite the statistics that overwhelmingly show the family home to be by far the preferred location for violent crimes. After all this, a further twist revealed the possibility that Mrs Baden-Clay may have taken her own life. That she had high levels of an anti-depressant medication in her blood and an empty box of some Mother’s little helper in her newly leased car. This type of suicide is blanketed by ads asking if you are, or know anyone that’s a little depressed, which we’ve spoken of before.

These silly little wankers seem to blanket most of the reports about the case of the English nurse, Jacintha Saldanha who supposedly killed herself, and supposedly killed herself after allowing two DJs from Sydney access to the future Queen of England’s private nurse.

The idea that a dumb prank could be seriously held to blame for an apparent suicide is a nonsense and hides from the notion that any person or organization that holds personal information of any sort on someone must have considerably better standards in place to stop this type of thing happening - the most noticeable element about the prank itself was how ludicrous it was and they really didn’t sound very convincing.

During the prank, the DJs even commented that “Are they putting us through?...if this has worked, this is the easiest prank call we’ve ever made...your accent sucked by the way.”  They sounded more like Barry Humphrys than the Queen and that was probably supposed to be the joke, that they would and should have been hung up on, as the DJs later confirmed - the idea that it worked is such a concern - if anyone, whether they be a nurse, doctor, lawyer, accountant or whoever hands over such information on what was clearly a stupid hoax to any reasonable person, they ought to be close to being shut down.

Funnily enough the boss of the relevant hospital, John Lofthouse ... ”denounced the action as foolish and regrettable.“This was a foolish prank call that we all deplore,” he said. “We take patient confidentiality extremely seriously and we are now reviewing our telephone protocols.”“

SuPERB

If you have nothing in place to stop a staff member at a hospital from revealing very personal information to a dumb prankster about the future head of state , then it’s a bit thick to say that you take confidentiality seriously guvna. The reports were then about possible criminal charges, police looking into it etc, however it apparently escaped police’s finest minds if impersonating the head of state is actually a crime...

But that’s dodging the main issue: that you can’t say that someone who kills themselves; a wife and mother of young children who takes her own life can be blamed can she? Her family and friends can’t be blamed can they? It’s much easier to look at a weird joke from two larrikins and blame them. Walk into a room with a corpse, a suicide and don’t look at the note, don’t look at the family, don’t look at the friends, don’t look at the don’t look at any of the circumstances, but then see a copy of ‘the Catcher in the Rye’ in the corner, or a painting on the wall, or a CD in the player; something that can be removed, something that should have been removed; and you can lay blame and throw it out with the rest of the crap that a life cut short collects. And you can reason that you have that control; to be able to throw out that element that doesn’t deserve to be in our realm, as it didn’t in that poor lady’s.

The (hopefully) final verdict on what happened to Azaria Chamberlain was given this year. This is the perfect case, and always has been, about our ability to create an ‘other’ out of our fellow human being. Mrs Chamberlain in particular has always been scrutinised way beyond the point of absurdity; that she didn’t act like a grieving mother should, that she was a witch or that she was one of those religious cult types, we have always repelled the notion that, in some circumstances, in most circumstances, a dingo is never very far from our door and there is little we can do about that. Instead, we hide from that fact and create an ‘other’ out of people who have been through such circumstances.

Then there was the troubling case if Jill Meagher, an ABC journalist in Melbourne disappeared after a late night party and was found dead and raped. At the time, there was so much facebook, faking about whether she was dressed appropriately, whether one of the ‘marrieds’ should act/dress/be like that; whether society could be blamed; whether it is a symptom of a sickness in society that such an event could happen to ‘one of us’.  People honestly saying things that equate to laying blame on the victim. How dare she drink, enjoy herself and not cover herself up. Very strange. There is an element of naivety or throwing caution to the wind, but the element in all these types of comments is one of ‘that wouldn’t happen to me or mine because I could/can/do control the whole situation away from that happening.’ I can keep the dingo, the rapist, the murderer from my door.

Another story that didn’t overly catch the public eye, but almost did, was the tell-all tale of Major General  John Cantwell (ret.). The one thing that I am talking about is his recollection of the American strategy in the first Gulf War called ‘industrialised killing’. In order to avoid trench warfare, the put bull-dozen blades on the front of tanks and buried the Iraqi soldiers alive. The theory is that this would result in considerably less allied loss of life than traditional warfare. But doesn’t it strike you as wrong? Soldiers dying in battle by being buried by sand from the waring opposite army sounds so much worse than the same soldiers being shot by the opposing army. Is it because they don’t have a chance to shoot back? Well, they never really would have against such a well organised and well funded force and they did what they were supposed to do. It’s hard to remember that point I guess. Soldiers are trained to die. The good ones are trained to avoid this, but in terms of a war, the victor is the army that inflicts a heavier casualty on their opponent than their opponent has placed on them. This is why the ANZACs, the Red Army, the Vietcong, the IRA and the like were so successful, they inflicted greater loss on their opponent relative to their own situation. 

The poor Iraqi soldiers though, buried alive and probably didn’t even ever realise how. All of a sudden, these soldiers stop being the invaders of Kuwait and the bad guys and become these people, these anonymous to us people that we may identify with and object to their demise based on the idea that when someone dies, when anyone dies, there should be some sense of justice. You should be able to understand, to reason or to negotiate with the person or thing that comes along to kill you no matter how bad you have been. What a silly notion this is.

This post’s lame joke

When Seamus died at the age of 89, there was a problem, rigor mortis set in and they couldn’t close the coffin lid. The undertakers called in Seamus’ wife, Dot, to see the problem.

“Well, what do you usually do in this situation?” Dot asked.

“Well ma’am,” replied the undertaker, “We generally cut it off and re-attach it to his body...you know... around in the back.”

Dot thought the whole thing strange, but the undertakers assured her that this was quite common practice and no-one would know.

The next day, Seamus’ funeral was a beautiful affair; a solemn, yet beautiful ceremony filled with distinguish guests, family and well-wishers.

Dot was very happy with the turn-out. Looking into the open coffin of her late husband, Dot knew that he was in a better place, at peace with everything and at the same time, looking as though Seamus was still very much a part of her life; there with her, loving her. Some condensation from the humidity of the day collected around Seamus’ cheeks and then formed a droplet of water that ran down his face. Dot loving reached over to wipe it up. With a smile on her face she quietly whispered to her dearly departed husband, “See, I told you if freaken hurt.” 

This post’s inappropriate over-share

I used to like a few bands that either now, or at some stage, I stopped liking because of other people. Guns and Roses were an example. For a few years, I really liked their stuff, then all of a sudden, all these dorks at school liked them and, just like that, I stopped liking them. Not only that, I actually sold off the albums that I had of theirs and turned my back on the whole thing. Years later, I got back into it a little, but never too much. But just recently I have been trying to collect some music from here, there and everywhere for car tapes and running type compilations and have remembered this really groovy cover that Avril Lavigne did of some song that used to be on an old mini-disc player, blaring out at me on my morning ride to work. I found the song, here, only to find out that it is a Metallica song...like really...Metallica...now I don’t really like it. I have thought about the idea that I can’t stand the Culture Club, but quite like the song ‘Do you really want to hurt me’, so long as it is sung by the Violent Femmes. But I guess I am just vain at heart.

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[1] Then again, I am not sure that the public’s attention is ever really grabbed by something as much as the media would have us believe; the constant talk of the 24 hour news cycle seems a furphy. Listening to most media outlets, it would be more accurate to call it a 24 day news cycle, because that’s about the time most editors seem to take to realise that there is no interest left in a given story.