"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood."

H. L. Mencken

I've been told that perhaps this blog is a little bit of a downer. Surely there must be something more interesting to write about, rather than just griping about George Bush et al.

That criticism is probably true. As I ponder the future from the bunker, I'm not sure if I'm an optimist or a pessimist. I try, believe it or not, to be an optimist. I do have a lot of faith in the human spirit, I don't believe people are inherently evil.

I do think people try, and get in over their heads. Somewhere along the way the compass goes awry. There is no re-do button in human lives, trust me if there were, mine would have worn out a long time ago.

I do think some people are needlessly cruel, not out of a sense of elitism, but out of a sense of weakness in themselves. There is a need to justify one's existence, one's need that they are better at something than someone else. Sometimes when that reason is not evident to themselves it manifests itself in a deprecation of another.

I was thinking the other day about how many crime dramas appear on the TV every night. On a given night, between 8 and 11 PM there are at least 5 police dramas appearing on television, CSI, Law & Order, Criminal Minds, Numb3rs etc.

I like these shows as much as the next person, but one has to wonder why one profession in particular is the focus of so many shows. Is it because crime is truly the most primal form of human behavior, that murder is the simplest human act in which to distill drama?

The formulas for these show are essentially the same, A body is found, a witty comment is made, a passing character we meet in the first 10 minutes is introduced, and dismissed, only to return in the final act to be named the murderer after 35 minutes of red herrings in which we learn assorted life lessons from the characters on the show, mixed in with a healthy dash of character development and exposition on series long story arcs that may or may not be concluded.

Why are there so many police shows on? Perhaps it's a need to justify to ourselves that we give police an extraordinary amount of power and we need to justify the abuses we sometimes read about in the paper or watch on the 6:00 news.

Just the other day I saw footage of man being tased, repeatedly in California because he did not have proper identification at a library. There is also footage of a policeman punching a man repeatedly in the face after he has been pinned down. Here in Vancouver, we have a case of several Vancouver Police Officers apparently beating a man then re-enacting one the photos from Abu Ghraib prison.

The individuals who did this are not going to appearing as poster children for any police departments in the near future.

The libertarian in me resents any police presence in society, the property owner in me is grateful that they are there to protect me. My downstairs neighbour is a police office, and I can't imagine him doing anything cruel or unjustified. However, slap that uniform on someone and a transformation occurs. This is a theme that has been studied in literature for centuries. Most actively, it was examined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, starting with Zorro, going through to Batman, and James Bond, who is better known by a number.