Word: assassin
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...presidential assassin establishes with his victim a deadly intimacy, follows his movements, attaches himself to his rising star." Historian Christopher Lasch was writing about political assassins, but he might have been describing Mark David Chapman, 25, the accused murderer of John Lennon. Since he was a child, Chapman had attached himself to his hero's star, first as fan, then as imitator, finally as killer. Indeed, it is possible that in some distorted, Dostoyevskian mirror within his mind, he saw himself as Lennon-and the real Lennon as a threatening impostor...
...writers can evoke this October country more trenchantly than Bradbury. No reader of The Fog Horn can pass a lighthouse without visualizing the sea creature listening in the darkness. Parents who understand The Small Assassin, the anecdote of a homicidal infant, will always wonder about the Freudian undercurrents coursing through the minds of their children...
Roger Rosenblatt's essay "The Wars of Assassination" [Sept. 8] pinpointed the reason assassins and assassin countries escape punishment for their dastardly crimes: lack of outrage and resolve on the world, national and individual levels. The slain Ali Akbar Tabatabai was a cultured, pro-Western and democratic man-a human being of excellence and compassion...
...never really shaken its revolutionary cast of mind since that final decade of the 18th century, when the French Reign of Terror wed murder to freedom. All the revolutions since have sealed the knot, if only theoretically, and somewhere in the modern mind may lie the automatic connection of assassination with something good and hopeful. That would be especially true of places where corrupt administrations are unseated at gunpoint. The assassin states in turn may depend on that connection, trusting that the elimination of ex-employees of defunct governments will be held akin to the expunging of the Tsars...
When a government proves to function in a social vacuum, the process of putting it away is more of a problem. Short of war there are words of protest, but in the middle distance the assassin has free rein. The rein might be shortened considerably if the words of protest were harsher or more frequent, or, better still, if they were attached to an economic quarantine. To treat killer governments as pariahs would only be fair, after all, and the purpose of a quarantine is to prevent contagion. To date, however, the world seems to be going on the hope...