Crime and Punishment

The story of Raoul Moat is oddly reassuring.

Though there has been death and injury (tragic for those personally involved), we know where we are with this drama. This is Harry Roberts, John Dillinger, even Jimmy Cagney.

Just as we on the outside can readily read into Raoul Moat, so the elements within his story seem to form a kind of staircase that runs up and down between everyday behaviour and petty frustrations, all the way to grand emotions and singular, all-or-nothing moments. In other words, in the very words of his story, the contrast between these two levels of human experience is formed into a continuum.

Compare this with last month's shooting spree by Derrick Bird. Apart from the horrifically high body count (Bird left 12 dead before he shot himself), the really disturbing thing about Bird's actions was the absence of narrative (various motives suggested, none sufficient). In this scenario, there was a small man and the big landscape that he lived in; and nothing but random killing to make them anywhere near commensurate.

Reading their lives like books, Raoul Moat's violent behaviour seems like the almost understandable continuation of his personality, now extended to a new level; whereas Bird appears to have flipped from one dimension into an entirely different one. Jekyll and Hyde, but without the potion, or any other potent explanation.

The Derrick Bird scenario is the more unsettling because in it we can see a representation of our everyday lives and their (our) estrangement from anything big enough to make them worthwhile on a world scale. But if we have no stairway to heaven, are we already in hell? Or some sort of limbo? Shaking our heads in horrified anticipation, we come away from watching the Bird episode wondering whether we, too, will find ourselves committing an arbitrary atrocity in order to connect our lives to the wider dimension we know they ought to have.