The Mayhem Chronicles

I’ve been feeding my Borneo Slash-Hounds fresh meat. My perimeter defenses have been reinforced with extra razor-wire from the Ping-Ping Hardware Store and Management Consulting Enterprise. And my squad of wayward Office Ladies is well-trained in the use of small arms, though I’ll admit that a shotgun and thong bikini are an incongruent mix…maybe I should move the armory further from the armoire.

On the other hand, where did the term “armoire” come from? Armory. Cool!

Wednesday’s San Antonio triple-homicide inspires such paranoid thoughts. It’s said that murder victims and the perpetrators are generally acquainted, which doesn’t make a murder any less of a murder, but does partially defuse the fearsome specter of random mayhem creeping into your door.

Which it can, indeed, do. It crept into a friend’s house last month, and that’s the tale I want to relate.

First, though, allow me to acknowledge the heroism of a DPS officer, PO2 Victor Val Hocog. As reported in the Saipan Tribune, he was injured in the line of duty responding to the crime in San Antonio, whereupon he smoked the perpetrator with his (Hocog’s) sidearm. I wish Officer Hocog a swift recovery, and we all owe him our prayers and our gratitude.

* * *

And now, my tale, which came via valuable cell phone minutes I burned on a call from an American friend. He goes by the handle “Dr. Duck.” He lives in the cold expanse of the American Midwest. He has a nice house. Work takes him away from home often; the more house you buy, the more you gotta work to keep it. And, true to form, he was over a thousand miles away, in a hotel, when a crazed intruder broke into his home at night and found his way into the bedroom of his young daughter.

The intruder, as it turns out, is no stranger to crime. He is on probation. Not a nice guy. And decidedly not an acquaintance of Dr. Duck or his family. Dr. Duck keeps better company than that. You know…guys like me, who might raid your fridge for beer every so often, but we’re not into the felony racket.

But some people are. And they’re clumsy about it. The intruder’s ingress was not inconspicuous, and the noise roused the missus from her slumber.

Whereupon she ventured from her bedroom to investigate, and she was confronted by your basic nightmare scenario in all of its living, real-time, three-dimensional terror. There was a bad guy in the house, and he had nabbed her daughter! And, of course, there was no husband to play the Alpha Male protector role, a role that Dr. Duck would play with effectiveness; he’s no wimp.

He’s no fool, either, and he married a sensible woman. A foreign one, incidentally. And, being from a tropical foreign country, she was evidently not immersed in the Oprah and Rosie sob-sister culture. So instead of crying, popping a psychotropic medication, and bleating about her self-esteem, the missus did something more decisive:

She drew a bead on the intruder’s head with the family .45. Other than letting the daughter out of his clutches, he decided not to move a muscle, which may have been the first intelligent decision of his life.

In due course, the cops showed up and hauled the bad guy away. Dr. Duck had to cut short his business trip and return post haste. It messed up his work schedule but at least his family is safe and sound.

That bad guy will, of course, be back on the streets some day, and odds are that modern society will feed him a more pliant victim next time around, and the results will be very bad. This is called “progressive.”

But it serves to remind me that the world is largely comprised of victims and predators; those who aspire to be neither are quaint relics now.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my Hounds are due for their feeding…I’m due for a cold Asahi Dry…and my squad must be inspected; I don’t know how they can march in those high heeled platform shoes, but they manage.

(Ed Stephens Jr. is an economist and columnist for the Saipan Tribune. E-mail him at Ed@SaipanEconomist.com)