The law is an ass - an idiot

What a strange book Oliver Twist is. I love his sentences - nice big Victorian monsters of sentences. Do love a big sentence. The coincidences were rather trying and made it difficult to suspend disbelief at every moment of the narrative, but most of the right emotional triggers were there and the death of Nancy was properly brutal and amazingly unsentimental. It was hard to believe, though, that Bill Sikes was going to get mobbed for murdering her if he hadn't been mobbed for any of the other dreadful things he'd done.

I wonder if that's just a spot of heavy literary irreality, or if perhaps there was a different attitude to murdering women back then. After all, Jack the Ripper only got through eleven or so, and that was the biggest media scrum ever, and Robert Pickton killed goodness knows how many just the other day, historically speaking, and confessed to it, and the justice probably won't even charge him with all of it. I reckon there's much, much more to that Robert Pickton shit than meets the eye. Well, fucking duh. Dozens get killed at a busy pig farm/events locale (???) and only one fucker gets charged for it - and he's sent up on second degree charges? What absolute bullshit. What bullshit.

Where's the Oliver Twist making people acknowledge what life and death on Vancouver's downtown east side is like? It needn't be so different. Ineptitude from the police and justice system, indifference from the public, and a swarming, uncomfortable scrounging life in bad rooms and wet streets only alleviated by fucking yourself up or by desperately underfunded social services. The main deviation would be that the general public isn't going to get too upset when you knock off the women like Nancy . . . not until gruesome details emerge from the slow and belated investigation about their flesh being fed to pigs and mixed up with pork. Oh, I hate it all this morning. What a comfort it is to believe in hell sometimes.