A nicer sort of murder

In Orwell's essay “Decline of the English murder” he details how murder seemed to be changing and becoming an “ordinary” event. Murders had moved from poisoning, mainly by the middle class (see Agatha Christie) to murders done with the utmost callousness and brutality. No more deeds done for insurance money or marital affairs or just good old fashioned envy. In another essay “Raffles and Miss Blandish” he chronicles the descent from Raffles, the charming jewel thief, to poor Miss Blandish who is raped and killed in a cold-blooded way. He attributes this to modern events such as mass killing of innocent civilians, hostages, torture, flogging and treachery as normal and morally neutral events. Today these events are seen as admirable when done by the CIA. We now live in a country that worships guns, especially the weapons of mass destruction used in places like Newtown. They're consecrated in the Constitution, the same document that offers the pursuit of happiness. If you watch television today you are treated to a visit to the morgue or a ghastly autopsy with your dinner or late night snack. Too many corpses; too many sex crimes, too much Freud and Krafft-Ebbing without the redeeming things Orwell said these plots should be about such as real social wrongs, economic injustice and plain decency and justice. On the nightly news 6 year olds are gunned down and a pimp firing shots on the Vegas Strip kills 3 innocent people. I have found an escape from this dreadful drivel to a foreign language channel called MHZ. It features a cop named Brunetti in Venice, Maigret in Paris and DeLuca, a tenacious policeman who has to do his job in WWII Italy. There's even a detective priest named Don Matteo whose only weapons are compassion and human insight. The writing is better because the stories are from literature and always have a moral point of view, not the stuff the overhyped TV hacks serve up today. And the narrative is not constantly interrupted by commercials. These men have to walk down the same mean streets as Phillip Marlowe and Harry Bosch but the boulevards and canals are a lot less mean. These men have charm, intelligence and dedication to justice and they very rarely carry firearms. It's just a safer, saner place over there. So, if you hear an Englishman say, “I could murder some Chinese”, don't take alarm, it only means that he'd like to attack a plate of Moo Goo Gai Pan.