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2001-06-21 | 1:50 p.m.

Lori Berenson. Not sure what to think about that.

Mumia Abu-Jamal. Not sure what I think about that one, either.

Okay, surely I am not the only person around here who knows criminals. Even E-ticket criminals. And I'm not the only person who knows, with every cellular memento of her being, that you cannot say with any authority what another person is or is not capable of. (You don't even know what you are capable of.) Especially if you know what someone else has done and you're not telling. It gets easier and easier not to tell on them, doesn't it? Because they seem less culpable as time goes by. They blend right in with the rest of us criminals. There will always be a few people who are tormented by guilt, but for most of us there must be considerable external pressure to force a confession.

Some guy went to Sesame Street Land over the weekend and beat the crap out of Cookie Monster because, he said, Cookie Monster wouldn't take a picture with his daughter. He says C.M. put out a furry blue hand and "aggressively" pushed his daughter's head back. (Take a split second here to imagine Cookie Monster saying "Talk to the hand".) Big Daddy snapped, attacked, got arrested. There was a 21-year-old woman inside the Cookie Monster suit (ugh---that is tortune all by itself---take it from someone who once dressed up as the Hamburglar and stood on a median in Florida for four fucking hours, in JUNE) who now has a fractured pelvis, etc., though she is back to work already. That's what we call the minimum wage work ethic. And this blockhead tells the paper, "Would I take my three-year-old daughter to Sesame Street and beat up Cookie Monster in front of her?"

Uh, yes, asshole, you would. There's no reason to get all rhetorical about it, because you aren't very good at it. You absolutely lost your cool and did that. Next case.

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