The Destructors

By News on the Net —— Bio and Archives June 27, 2010

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Watching TV news footage of black-clad hooligans in Toronto's downtown core smashing office windows recalled a scene from an episode of Twilight Zone: The Movie; the one in which an alien creature stalks the wing of a passenger airliner and hammers mindlessly away to eviscerate the engine. The episode gives us little insight into the creature's motivation, but from its hideous appearance we may conclude it was simply sheer malice. So, too, with the hooligans. Novelist Graham Greene depicted such nihilistic and gratuitous youthful violence in his 1954 short story "The Destructors" with some insight, but also a sense of limitation for fully understanding it.

In all fairness to the hooligans, their destructive lust is small potatoes alongside that of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's, who gloatingly licked his chops while he described the wholesale destructive power unleashed by bombers dropping "daisy cutters" -- 15,000-pound bombs able to level an entire forest with a single blast -- across the Afghan landscape. Sincerely, Orest Slepokura Strathmore, Alta