Word: monsters
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...vision. And the incessant patter of news updates will inevitably numb us, pushing onward the boundaries of our tolerance for atrocity. But in the beginning, as we make out the shape of the crime, as we see it unfolding like some putrid flower, one word sputters to our lips: "Monster." The word applies whether the alleged criminal is a killer-cannibal in Wisconsin who has confessed to murdering and dismembering 17 victims or 39 schoolboys in Kenya arrested for the rape of 71 of their female classmates and the murder of 19 others...
...choice of word is instructive. Its image is not its origin. Monster conjures up a three-headed Cerberus at the gates of Hades. Etymologically, however, the word has few frills. It is related to demonstrate and to remonstrate, and ultimately comes from the Latin monstrum, an omen portending the will of the gods, which is itself linked to the verb monere, to warn. If a city sinned against heaven, heaven sent it a monster. One can argue that the Sphinx, who confronted travelers to Thebes with her famous riddle, was born of some Oedipal crime and performed an important...
...historian Georges Bataille noted incredulously that the man given to butchering infants calmly raised a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents -- the children slaughtered in Bethlehem by Herod. Yet at his execution Gilles de Rais exhibited so much remorse that the crowd gathered to witness the death of a monster was completely confused. How could God not forgive such devout penitence? It is the Bible, after all, that promises, "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow...
...into the veins of her captors, stashing weapons with her own righteous version of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. She is a more twisted sister of Sigourney Weaver's Ripley in Aliens (also written and directed by T2's James Cameron), who proves her maternal mettle by blasting a space monster to ugly bits...
...individual owner, but at a cost to everyone else. At a societal level they're not of any use at all." Perhaps car alarms, like gun control, are an urban vs. rural issue: different cultures need different rules. What is tolerable and useful in the country may become a monster in the city...