Punishment

Ron Mueck Dead Dad 1996-1997

The lifeless prose of Seung Cho undermines the friendless man's
effort to embody Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov, but the media creation of a hacker film mega-star succeeded with pathetic enormity.

"Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off" evokes numerous B movie scenes of furious skin scrubbing after rash acts and, two days later, the scene of a bomb wasting 140 lives in a Baghdad market.

Just as the chain of hurt can't be cleansed from Raskolnikov's soul until he speaks his guilt, so our mitigation of global terror can't begin until we account for our crimes.

New York took a first step in this accounting when it released a carbon inventory as part of a climate protection plan agreed to by 678 cities across the world.

Although Los Angeles--leader in death by breath--has signed on to the plan, one wonders if the reckoning will ever happen. The notion of a collective burden runs counter to the neo-Reaganite drive of the urban cowboy whose "highway rights" are God given.

God Bless America.
God Bless L.A.