Word: malefactors
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With his hunched, narrow shoulders, his chin tucked resolutely into his chest, and his slinky, slouched walk, Bernhard Hugo Goetz looks rather like a human question mark. The inner man bears the same punctuation: Victim or victimizer? Hero or malefactor? Loner or leader? He is gentle, but demonstrably violent. Personable, but introverted. Idealistic, but cynical. He desires privacy, but has courted publicity. He is humble, but strangely messianic. He lives in New York City, but claims to loathe it. He is not indicted for attempted murder; he is indicted for attempted murder. In his public statements and interviews...
...retelling of atrocious crimes has produced a genre almost as pernicious as the criminals. Typically, the malefactor is made-into a symbol of his surroundings: his private ailments are seen as social ills, his wrongdoings merely the carrying out of humanity's dark impulses. In his psychobiography, the victims become only walk-ons, subordinated to a drama in which everyone is somehow responsible and therefore no one is truly guilty...
Maas builds his story cinematically, cutting swiftly from malefactor to investigator, from scandal to expose. Marie is destined for the camera, and parts of it already seem clipped from All the King's Men and The Godfather. Chapters over flow with whispered depositions, missing files and subterranean intrigue. Three key witnesses are professionally murdered; a fourth commits suicide under suspicious circumstances. The Justice Department declines to prosecute Blanton. Claims Maas: "It was already clear that in 1980 Jimmy Carter would need every electoral vote he could scrape up. The President might not like the Governor, but he was stuck...
...selected Plays demonstrate, Kleist was the first great absurdist, obsessed with justice and the black-comic ways in which it can miscarry. The Broken Pitcher centers on a judge who is also a malefactor; in Amphitryon, the great Theban commander rages against an impostor "who wants me . .. out of the fortress of my consciousness." This sense of self as an armed camp is one of many traits that make the playwright seem a contemporary of another great admirer, Bertolt Brecht...
...news and show biz. Last week a CBS station in Chicago got into an unseemly row by criticizing the ABC network's 20/20 program and Reporter Geraldo Rivera's use of the "ambush interview"-surprising a journalistic target on the street, with cameras turning. Even when a malefactor has it coming to him, a viewer is left with the impression of a defenseless person's being taken advantage of by privileged characters with mikes and press badges...