1. A disturbing article at the New York Times by Adam Nossiter on violence in New Orleans:
Eight killings have occurred in 10 days. New Orleans, the United States’ murder capital by many measures in 2006, is well on its way to keeping that distinction in 2007. Since July 2006, there have been at least 95 murders per 100,000 residents, and possibly a higher ratio depending on how the city’s depleted population is counted, said Peter Scharf, a criminologist at the University of New Orleans.
Frightened citizens now see their city as a stalking ground, roamed with impunity by teenagers with handguns — an image that may not be far off the mark, experts here say.
Emphasis added and, just for comparison, the national homicide rate in the US in 2002 was 6.1 per 100,000.
Over the last few years, Germany's homicide rate has been around 1.0 per 100,000. Statistics on 'Mord und Totschlag' -- murder and manslaughter -- are available here (though only in German), showing Germany to be a relatively safe place. And this is so even if many Germans don't realise it.
2. Speaking of teenagers with handguns, an even more disturbing article appears at today's Guardian which looks at the shift from insurgency to civil war in Iraq. As a former Republican Guard commando puts it:
"I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya [the notorious Sunni insurgent area] - all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad."
What is also striking are comments like this one:
And this one:He told me that one of his main suppliers had been an interpreter working for the US army in Baghdad. "He had a deal with an American officer. We bought brand new AKs and ammunition from them." He claimed the American officer, whom he had never met but he believed was a captain serving at Baghdad airport, had even helped to divert a truckload of weapons as soon as it was driven over the border from Jordan.
These days Rami gets most of his supplies from the new American-equipped Iraqi army. "We buy ammunition from officers in charge of warehouses, a small box of AK-47 bullets is $450 (£230). If the guy sells a thousand boxes he can become rich and leave the country." But as the security situation deteriorates, Rami finds it increasingly difficult to travel across Baghdad. "Now I have to pay a Shia taxi driver to bring the ammo to me. He gets $50 for each shipment."
"Every time they arrest a Shia, we take their car, we sell it and use the money to fund the fighters, and jihad," said Abu Aisha. The mosque sheik or the local commander collects the money and it is distributed among the fighters; some get fixed salaries, others are paid by "operations", and the money left is used for ammunition.
"It has become a business, they give you money to kill Shia, we take their houses and sell their cars," said Rami. "The Shia are doing the same.
"Last week on the main highway in our area, they killed a Shia army officer. He had a brand new Toyota sedan. The idiots burned the car. I offered them $40,000 for it, they said no. Imagine how many jihads they could have done with 40k."
3. At Ballardian, there is a very good interview with Dr. Jeanette Baxter. She is a literature scholar and is organising an upcoming conference on J. G. Ballard. Asked about Ballard's expressed frustration with academic analyses of literature, she replies:
I suspect that Ballard’s attitude towards academia arises, in part, from the belief that the literary imagination is in danger of being compromised, and even tamed in some way, when it became the focus of academic discourse. Ballard’s attack on the “postmodernisation” of SF, for instance, seems to suggest that academic jargon might be nothing more than a linguistic strategy for explaining a text away without engaging with what that text is actually saying.
And, I'd have to agree, that in many cases, this is very true. Something else, then for me to avoid doing in future.
There's also a link at the above piece to another interview with Ballard, 'The Age of Unreason'. It is well worth reading and, very conveniently, also brings us back to the topic with which we started:
JB: Your latest cluster of novels tests the controversial theory that transgression and murder are legitimate correctives to social inertia. If we are at once disquieted yet invigorated by acts of violence and resistance, then what implications does this lack of moral unity have for the reader?
JGB: The notions about the benefits of transgression in my last three novels are not ones I want to see fulfilled. Rather, they are extreme possibilities that may be forced into reality by the suffocating pressures of the conformist world we inhabit. Boredom and a deadening sense of total pointlessness seem to drive a lot of meaningless crimes, from the Hungerford and Columbine shootings to the Dando murder, and there have been dozens of similar crimes in the US and elsewhere over the past 30 years.
These meaningless crimes are much more difficult to explain than the 9/11 attacks, and say far more about the troubled state of the western psyche. My novels offer an extreme hypothesis which future events may disprove - or confirm. They're in the nature of long-range weather forecasts. As I've often said, someone who puts up a road sign saying "dangerous bends ahead" is not inciting drivers to speed up, though I hope that my fiction is sufficiently ambiguous to make the accelerator seem strangely attractive. Human beings have an extraordinary instinct for self-destruction, and this ought to be out in the open where we can see it. We are not moral creatures, except for reasons of mutual advantage, sad to say...
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