Like Humans Do (Radio Edit)

Does the title sound familiar to you? If it does and you can recall where you first saw it, then give yourself a pat on your back. You're officially a geek. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, read on. The thrust of today's post has nothing to do with geekdom, unfortunately. Spurred by Aiz's bewildered posting, this entry is about the human capacity for cruelty, and why it's scary that now more than ever lives are being lost in increasingly hideous ways.

I'm a fan of true crime, and I remember spending a lot of rainy days in my younger years reading stories of murderers and sundry other criminals. Ed Gein, Dahmer, Manson, Bundy, Lizzie Borden and more recently Milat and too many others to mention. They made for interesting reading, but more importantly they made for a frightening (but tantalising) glimpse into the dark side of the human psyche. What possesses a human being to take another's life? We understand the behaviour in war and some of us even commend it (especially if we think we're the Good Guys) but when it happens in times of peace, it's like our lives have been suddenly derailed. Have we actually made any progress? Are we truly civilised?

In American Psycho, Christian Bale's character killed for the simple reason that his dates didn't know enough about Phil Collins. In 8mm, the Machine told Nicholas Cage that he killed because he could, and because he liked to. Ed Gein killed the women he fancied because his mother told him that sex was dirty and the instrument of the Devil. Albert Fish kidnapped, cooked and ate parts of little children before writing down the recipe to mail to the parents. We call these people monsters. And in my books at least, even if he's never even raised a hand to anyone before, Noritta's killer is a monster.

Perhaps it's a classic example of crime passionel, so popular in France. Maybe it was a crime of opportunity. Whatever the cause, a young woman's life was prematurely ended by the selfish act of another human being. He could have had his way with her, tied her up and left. Instead, the perpetrator(s) chose to end her life. To make things worse, the resulting media fiasco throws words like "rape" around, in an effort to rouse the sensationalist in us. Admittedly, we fall for it. One tabloid had a little sidebar about how she allegedly had premonitions of her own death during Raya. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm sick and tired of reading stories like that. Noritta may or may not have had premonitions of doom. She may or may not have been raped either, but until the true facts are known (if ever) add me to the list of people who think that the media should leave well enough alone. Whatever it is she may have done, Noritta paid the ultimate price: feeling her life being squeezed out of her while looking into the face of her killer. I shudder to think what her final thoughts were.

I won't go into the many sociological theories regarding crime, or speculate if our low-synergy society is starting to spawn more and more killers. That needs its own trilogy of books. Suffice to say that the human capacity for hurting and being hurt is almost inconceivable. One needs only look at the Inquisition's instruments of pain and torture to see that these twisted minds have been here with us a very long time. Man is a cruel, cruel beast. We can only pray that our (hopefully) better nature will prevail against our baser instincts, and more importantly that the murderer is caught and punished.

As for the geek reference: it's the title of the default song that plays when you install Windows Media Player on a new PC. 'Nuff said.