Mass Murder, Bourgeois Style

In quieter days, in any time but the Year III of Watergate, we’d all know that the trial of the decade is the one that unfolded this summer in San Antonio for the chief survivor of the Texas Bluebeard’s little band— though not for Bluebeard himself, Dean Arnold Corll. It says much about our society and its “priorities” that a villain so extraordinary and crimes so purple can be, and have been, almost wholly overshadowed by the pranks and graft of a few political rapscallions. But then the anchormen and news editors decide such things; public conscience adjusts itself to their decrees.

We must be thankful, at least, that last year’s revelations of the Houston murder ring’s activities and its destruction weren’t accompanied by the Establishment liberals’ habitual lamentation over “violence in American society” and the inevitable mayhem growing out of—remember?—our “aggression” in Vietnam. They even spared us the helpful reminder that “we’re all guilty” for Corll’s 27 misdeeds (as we all were, of course, for the Kennedy-King murders), probably because the horror in Texas was unrelated to political questions, and the intelligentsia in the U.S. is so intensely and passionately politicized that the New York literati and the East and West Coast professors who dominate it can’t persuade themselves that events not bearing on social justice and political activism have their own importance.

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J. D. Futch

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In quieter days, in any time but the Year III of Watergate, we’d all know that the trial of the decade is the one that unfolded this summer in San Antonio for the chief survivor of the Texas Bluebeard’s little band— though not for Bluebeard himself, Dean Arnold Corll. It says much about our society and its “priorities” that a villain so extraordinary and crimes so purple can be, and have been, almost wholly overshadowed by the pranks and graft of a few political rapscallions. But then the anchormen and news editors decide such things; public conscience adjusts itself to their decrees.

We must be thankful, at least, that last year’s revelations of the Houston murder ring’s activities and its destruction weren’t accompanied by the Establishment liberals’ habitual lamentation over “violence in American society” and the inevitable mayhem growing out of—remember?—our “aggression” in Vietnam. They even spared us the helpful reminder that “we’re all guilty” for Corll’s 27 misdeeds (as we all were, of course, for the Kennedy-King murders), probably because the horror in Texas was unrelated to political questions, and the intelligentsia in the U.S. is so intensely and passionately politicized that the New York literati and the East and West Coast professors who dominate it can’t persuade themselves that events not bearing on social justice and political activism have their own importance.