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By Root 694 0

undaunted by her failure to take over the museum to use as headquarters for the Victim Studies Department. It seems that funds are being raised for a new building to be designed by the same therapeutic architect who would have gutted our fabulous old pile. I also hear that Ms. Jackson is contemplating something called the White Male Apology Initiative. It apparently involves collecting signatures from members of that designated group on a document attesting to their remorse for all the evil they have caused through the millennia. I wonder if, as the former John J. Johnson, she will sign it herself.

Malachy Morin. The man simply will not go away. Incredible as it seems, he has been appointed President pro tem of Wainscott in place of George Twill, who has retired a year ahead of schedule because of failing health. But then, as Izzy Landes had remarked, chief executives of universities are not the people of substance and stature they used to be. Izzy claims that knowledgeable people can usually name more members of the Red Sox starting lineup than they can the presidents of even the premier universities.

I take some comfort in the fact that Mr. Morin will have a year in which to mess things up enough to prevent his permanent accession. That is not a remote possibility given that one of his first acts has been to appoint Feidhlimidh de Buitliér director of the Wainscott News Office despite the role he played in the suicide of Heinrich von Grümh.

Regarding Mr. de Buitliér, I do not think justice has been served however exculpated he may be in the eyes of the law. He cannot be charged with the murder of von Grümh, but he certainly abetted the man’s self-slaughter. At the very least, he should have tried to stop him. Yet what makes my inner skin crawl is the theft of the dead man’s gloves. To imagine him peeling them off those lifeless, limp hands just to make it look like murder …

But who am I to judge? I have not had a change of heart about Heinie however much I know I should regret the man’s decease. I am scarcely sorry that I am not sorry. I am working on it, but I cannot pretend to have a large enough spirit to forgive. That capacity remains for me, at least in this case, the realm of saints. Or of fools. I believe it too much to ask a man to forgive someone who threatened your life, who duped you with forgeries, who not only slept with your wife but gloated about it, and who very nearly ruined your career. The best I can summon for Christian charity is to tell myself and a God I doubt is listening that Heinie is better off dead if only because his life had become such a torment. I also think it presumptuous to second-guess the judgment of suicides in cases like his.

I regret not having taken the gun from him when I had a chance to. Doing so would have avoided this whole dreadful mess and, perhaps, his untimely death. Unless, in possession of my weapon, and surely I would have recognized it as such, I might have shot the wretch myself. And while I can now deny having the wherewithal to kill any human being in cold blood, I know too well that most of us have a dark side no matter who we are. I am not speaking here of the reptile within, of the despots old and new, of the blank-faced serial killer, of the bowlegged gunslinger. No, I am referring to you and me and the guy driving by in his car. I am referring to good old, highly evolved Homo homicidens, a species distinguished by, among other things, a propensity to murder its own.

As for some final perspective? The question, curiously enough, has become academic, at least where I am concerned. Marvin Grimley, the Director of the Center for Criminal Justice and a friend of Harvey Deharo’s, has invited me to give the annual Bernard Lecture in October. After considerable thought, I have decided the title will be something like “Crimen Delectabile and the Moral Problematics of Using Murder as Amusement.”