I am dumbfounded by news today from South Africa that legless Olympian runner Oscar Pistorius has been charged with murdering Reeva Steenkamp, his longtime girlfriend, with four gunshots. Why would a man like Oscar ever raise a gun in fear or anger? Hasn’t his life taught him that obstacles are to be overcome and never under-gunned?
A few minutes ago, the United States Supreme Court ruled it is unconstitutional to sentence juvenile killers to life in prison without the possibility of parole. We support that hallmark decision because a bright line is now forever drawn between the immature lives of children and the unruly lives of adult offenders:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court says it’s unconstitutional to sentence juveniles to life in prison without parole for murder.
The high court on Monday threw out Americans’ ability to send children to prison for the rest of their lives with no chance of ever getting out. The 5-4 decision is in line with others the court has made, including ruling out the death penalty for juveniles and life without parole for young people whose crimes did not involve killing.
I have seen quite a few interesting websites in the past few weeks that have cropped up that have evidence of various kinds that Trayvon Martin, who was shot dead by a neighborhood watchman, was suspended from school and that he was a small time drug dealer. None of the websites I have seen thusfar have provided any reason why he, at the time that he was killed, was doing anything remotely threatening that would possibly cause a person to feel the need to shoot him in so-called self-defense.
We have been big supporters of Rihanna — but the tastelessness of her new “Man Down” video where she assassinates a man before the song even begins — is just too much tacky for our type. We are also plainly aware that the core mistakes of the Man Down video are identical to the errors made in the video for “Love the Way You Lie.” We see a pattern here and we don’t like the mosaic.
Yesterday, we witnessed the Death Penalty — circa 1931 — with George Orwell’s assistance in “Taking the Mechanism Out of Man.”
From July 1976 to July 1977 in New York City, David Berkowitz — The Son of Sam — terrorized the entire city and killed six people and injured many others with a Charter Arms Bulldog Pug .44 like the one below.
The final episode of Dexter on Showtime was a brutal end to a murderous season. Dexter, in case you don’t know, is a television series about a vigilante killer who works for the government solving murders while secretly killing murderers. The show celebrates the thrill of the kill. Dexter is a needlessly bloody show filled with few surprises, but the final episode was made more interesting by a rabbit punch killing.
The killing of Wendy Hile in the Bethany area in the Northeast part of Lincoln, Nebraska in 1974 was an event that marred and scarred everyone in that tiny, tight-night, neighborhood. Tenth grader Wendy Hile — and her high school Junior murderer, Mark Goldsberry — lived within a few blocks of each other and the rest of us.
This Urban Semiotic blog has been dedicated — for the last five years or so — to digging up and discovering the signs, images and visual imprints that coerce the city core. After writing over 2,000 articles for you here, I can confidently share with you the American Urban Center is governed by, and dug into, two unflayable, and perpetually un-learnable, lessons in dueling images: The Bullet and The Body.
Erik Harper, age 11, had a deal with his grandmother. If Joseph Randolph Mays, the man living with him and his Deaf mother, and his younger brother Dakota, ever tried to really hurt them — it was an open secret in the family that Mays was physically beating all of them — Erik would send her an emergency text message in code: “The Sky is Blue” that meant they were in real danger and she should call 911.
I finally watched Donnie Darko on Blu-ray DVD yesterday, and I must say, after seeing the film for the first time, I don’t understand why this is the favorite movie of some of my friends. I will be discussing plot points next, so if you haven’t seen the movie yet, stop reading now.
What do we fear the most? Our deaths? American culture is enraptured with the idea of dying in our popular entertainment and religious cultural memes. Today is Friday the 13th and that means — to many people — that today is an unlucky day, a foreboding moment in time, a chance for the terror within us to strike out in the dark to wound those surrounding us.
Can a mother’s love go too far? Is it appropriate to go to any means to free her Ghetto Mafia son convicted of second-degree murder by secretly recording one of his jurors to set aside a guilty verdict?
“The Dark Knight” — the new Batman movie — make $155 million over the weekend. One cannot help wondering what sort of message the movie reflects in us considering its vast amounts of spilled guts, buckets of blood and unmitigated gore. How do we contend with the strange, inhuman, joy found in the shared popularity of public killings?
