Thinking about crime.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Mainstream media commentators - Pundit Watch - Column

I went to the post office to mail a Christmas package. After the usual twenty-seven minutes in line, I reached the counter.

"Is there a letter inside?" asked the clerk.

"No, just a note," I answered.

"Does the note contain more than five words?"

"Yes," I admitted, it contained about ten.

"That will be an extra five dollars, please," the clerk announced.

I'll spare you the details of the rationale for this, but will admit to certain homicidal fantasies, and I don't even work there. Dealing with Federal and state agencies will do that to you. Then I did some Christmas shopping. Everyone I saw was grim and irritable, spending money on stuff no one wanted or would use, but not daring to violate the crazed consumerist ethos of the holidays.

I came home and watched the news. A man angry about his dealings with the New York State workers' compensation board shot twenty-three people, killing five, on the Long Island Railroad. It was Colin Ferguson who prompted the cover of Time to scream ENOUGH! in bright yellow capital letters. More young women and girls were killed. Polly Klaas became famous; most of the rest did not. Cynics that we are, we await, with dread, the TV movies based on these crimes. The news announced more mass murders at restaurants and other public places. Then it showed us Sega's latest video "games," in which women are decapitated.

We are watching the country--and much of the world, for that matter--falling apart, hobbled by dysfunctional and callous bureaucracies, endemic unemployment, major migrations of peoples fleeing their homelands, the rise of pugnacious nationalism and neo-fascism, and the concomitant rise in violence. In the face of this, our illustrious pundits have two messages: Nothing can be done, since what we have is a collapse of "values," but at least you can scapegoat women and minorities.

Now if I hear the term "family values" one more time, as if only white, maleheaded, upper-middle-class nuclear families have them (whatever they are), or watch our wholesale societal decline blamed on young (usually black) women, I'm going to cast a spell on Fred Barnes and George Will. (I'm a feminist, and therefore adept at witchcraft.) I'm going to turn them into entry-level postal workers who are single fathers and live in neighborhoods where they can't get a mortgage but can witness drive-by shootings.

Yep, we got a crisis in values, all right, and in civility, too, but according to the pundits, this crisis is surging up...