Between the motive / And the act / Falls the (liberal) shadow
David B. writes:
Today’s New York Times has an article on the arrest of the suspect in the murder of Anne Pressly. [See article excerpt below.] This article could be taken as a parody of the NY Times’ style of reporting this kind of crime. The title is “Robbery Suspected as Motive in Beating Death of Anchor.” Note that there is a photo of the victim, but not of the suspect.
LA replies:
Was robbery his motive for beating her until all the bones of her face were broken and she never regained consciousness?
David replies:
Well, the Paper of Record says that robbery was the motive. The MSM uses this as a catch-all for virtually every crime of this type. It was claimed that the Knoxville atrocity was a “carjacking,” even though the suspects did not steal the vehicle. The recent murder of the white marine sergeant and his black wife was “for financial gain.” The police use the same line.
LA replies:
This is interesting. A savage act is always attributed to some relatively non-savage or garden-variety criminal motive. A black man in Little Rock enters a young white woman’s house and beats her to death in her bed, smashing her face until it’s unrecognizable; the motive is “robbery.” A group of blacks in Knoxville kidnap a young white couple and hold them prisoner for several days while they repeatedly rape them, torture them, and finally murder them; the motive is “carjacking.” We could start being on the watch for this, make a collection of all these “motives” as they come in.
* * *
Here is the beginning of the Times article:
Robbery Suspected as Motive in Beating Death of Anchor
By STEVE BARNES
November 28, 2008
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.—Robbery may have been the motive in the bludgeoning death of a popular television anchor, the police said Friday, adding that the man arrested this week in the case is also wanted in a rape near his hometown.
Anne Pressly, a newswoman in Little Rock, Ark., died five days after she was attacked.
Lt. Terry L. Hastings, public information officer for the Little Rock Police Department, said it was not known where the man, Curtis L. Vance of Marianna, first spotted the anchor, Anne Pressly, 26; why he chose her as a victim; or what prompted the savage attack.
Ms. Pressly, a regular on the “Daybreak” program of KATV, the ABC television affiliate here, was found beaten and bloody in her bed early on the morning of Oct. 20 by her mother, who had driven to her daughter’s house when the younger woman did not answer a wake-up call. Her features distorted by what the police have called blunt force trauma, Ms. Pressly died five days later without regaining consciousness.
Lieutenant Hastings said the police had no reason to think Ms. Pressly had been singled out before the evening her assailant entered her rented cottage-style home in the affluent Pulaski Heights neighborhood.
“He was not stalking her,” he said in an interview. “We don’t know for sure, but we think the motive is going to be robbery. I think he saw an opportunity and took advantage of it.”
The police declined to say whether Ms. Pressly had been raped. [cont.]
* * *
The title of this entry is a paraphrase of the following lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Here is the entire relevant section of the poem (which I recently quoted
quoted in another entry):
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 29, 2008 11:40 AM | Send