HOUSTON, Texas (AP) -- For at least two days, neighbors at a city apartment complex noticed an acrid aroma, black smoke and leaping flames coming from two barbecue grills on the balcony of a second-floor apartment.
What, neighbors at the Red Oak Place apartments wondered, was going on in the unit where 27-year-old Timothy Wayne Shepherd lived? What was he burning at all hours, for days at a time?
The answer turned their stomachs.
According to law enforcement officials, Shepherd dismembered, and then burned the body of his former girlfriend, Tynesha Stewart, a 19-year-old Texas A&M University student. Nothing remains of Stewart's body, Harris County Sheriff Tommy Thomas said at a press conference Saturday.
Read the story.
No form of human debauchery surprises me any more. And this is nothing new, as reading in classical literature reveals. Torture, incest, rape, pedophilia, cannibalism, it's all there. Debauchery is as human as mom and apple pie.
Which brings me to one of my favorite theories of history. As we become more civilized, we become more sensitive to such things. We learn to abhor debauchery. We learn to prefer peace to war. Some of us even become pacifists.
But here's the rub. Not every society on the planet is progressing at the same rate. Thus, as today, you have 21st century values and the values of the Dark Ages in a dangerous face off.
Before technology tipped the scales, these face offs were decided in favor of the brutes. In the playground, the bully beats the sissy any day. But give the sissy a nuke and, well, the odds change.
An enemy who prefers death to life, who prefers martyrdom, is a dangerous enemy indeed, and this is the challenge facing those who prefer life to death: how to win a war against an enemy eager to die. Killing him clearly isn't the answer.
I don't know what the answer is. I like to think that education is part of the solution but we can't even educate our own kids, let alone the kids of the world. I do know this: there are areas of human endeavor, such as mathematics, that are cross-cultural, and it makes sense to me that this be used to advantage somehow. The Arabs, after all, developed algebra. Can't this be used to advantage in developing a dialogue with this culture?
So the jilted dude barbecued his ex, right there on his deck. (If we didn't have sex, would we have debauchery?) Reminds me of a Tom Lehrer song.
About a maid I'll sing a song,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
About a maid I'll sing a song,
Who didn't have her fam'ly long.
Not only did she do them wrong,
She did ev'ryone of them in, them in,
She did ev'ryone of them in.
One morning in a fit of pique,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
One morning in a fit of pique,
She drowned her father in the creek.
The water tasted bad for a week,
And we had to make do with gin, with gin,
We had to make do with gin.
Her mother she could never stand,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
Her mother she could never stand,
And so a cyanide soup she planned.
The mother died with a spoon in her hand,
And her face in a hideous grin, a grin,
Her face in a hideous grin.
She set her sister's hair on fire,
a-Rickety-tickety-tin,
She set her sister's hair on fire,
And as the smoke and flame rose high'r,
Danced around the funeral pyre,
Playin' a violin, -olin,
Playin' a violin.
She weighted her brother down with stones,
a-Rickety-tickety-tin,
She weighted her brother down with stones,
And sent him off to Davy Jones.
All they ever found were some bones,
And occasional pieces of skin, of skin,
Occasional pieces of skin.
One day when she had nothing to do,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
One day when she had nothing to do,
She cut her baby brother in two,
And served him up as an Irish stew,
And invited the neighbors in, -bors in,
Invited the neighbors in.
And when at last the police came by,
Sing rickety-tickety-tin,
And when at last the police came by,
Her little pranks she did not deny.
To do so she would have had to lie,
And lying, she knew, was a sin, a sin,
Lying, she knew, was a sin.
My tragic tale I won't prolong,
Rickety-tickety-tin,
My tragic tale I won't prolong,
And if you do not enjoy my song,
You've yourselves to blame if it's too long,
You should never have let me begin, begin,
You should never have let me begin.
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