Word: motiveless
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...spent a lifetime without seeing a black. Only in Hitch cock or Pinter can one develop paranoia over an unseen "stranger." In Othello, black and white are not racist, but imagistic counters. It is Othello who is white in his innocent gullibility and Iago who is black in his "motiveless malignity." Both men are complementary halves, like day and night...
Even this crime is less terrifying than what Poet Robert Penn Warren calls "blank, anonymous murder," the motiveless, gratuitous atrocity. In Warren's words: "An old man on a park bench reading his papers, smoking his morning cigar, is dead suddenly because some kid decided to kill him." These days, says Theodore Solotaroff, editor of New American Review, "a kind of anarchic murder...
...like the killer in Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, who murdered his victim because he could not stand his clouded blue eye. With power and wonder, both Poe and Duras show us that an act may be most distinctively human and lifelike precisely because it is logically motiveless...
Goldbrick Boredom. Motiveless "busywork," the lowly chores of military housekeeping, and menial jobs that fall short of the challenges of civilian life are principal causes for low morale where it is found among reservists. "Our daily routine," fumed Sergeant Robert A. Levy, a District of Columbia Air Guardsman at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, "consists of reading magazines and newspapers, listening to the radio, playing cards, organizing and participating in chess tournaments, visiting the base gymnasium, pitching horseshoes and taking coffee breaks." Levy, who was president of a Maryland computer consulting firm until he was called...
...males, according to Price, do not suffer from brain damage, epilepsy, or any recognized psychosis such as schizophrenia. They are psychopaths, also called sociopaths-"unstable and immature, without feeling or remorse, unable to construct adequate personal relationships, showing a tendency to abscond from institutions and committing apparently motiveless crimes, mostly against property...