Watching cop shows

The predisposition is dystopian, one bestseller after another that others have put their lives aside to write. Art is no longer made to be remembered, art is now the opposite of its historic conceptual antecedent; art is now made to be forgotten.

Watching the crime shows, the police procerdurals, one sees how difficult it is to be criminal--it's a full time job keeping track of things, what you said yesterday and the day before that, and squaring what you said yesterday with what you're going to say today. Lies require so much advance and rear guard preparation, so much more preparation than is required in telling the truth.

I watch the criminal squirm once he's caught and think, o, the criminal is now the persecuted one. The poor criminal, I think, seeing how much energy he expends, all the planning, to say nothing of the actual execution of the criminal act, and so much of it at night when he could be sleeping. 

While these police procedurals bend toward Dr. King's arc, they have a perverse logic all their own: the mistake we've made we'll make again after the mistake we've made is rectified. At some point the suspect is either cuffed and presumably led off to jail, or killed by the deputy's partner who made a mistake by not taking early retirement.

The bond between law enforcement and law breaking personnel is palpable--each understands the other. The law abiding viewer is sometimes confused by this relationship, until he reads the morning newspaper and everything becomes perfectly clear. So many things he reads in the morning paper as common, ordinary news stories are sure to become tv shows. The question then becomes: how to tell the difference between common ordinary news and the news one really has to know, and which is essential?