High Noon
[NOTE: The following case is one of the reasons I think the ricin letters may have been sent by someone out for revenge.]
“High Noon” is such a dramatic movie, it’s easy to forget what starts the whole thing rolling: a man Kane helped convict and who has just been released from prison after serving his sentence has vowed to kill Kane, and returns to town (with a few eager confederates) to do it. He almost succeeds, and the dramatic action of the movie relates how and why he fails.
But that sort of risk is one that modern-day authorities can also run, as this Texas arrest shows. If they have actually caught the proper perpetrator (and it sounds very much as though they have), these two murdered Texas lawmen—DA Mike McLelland and assistant DA Mark Hasse, as well as McLelland’s wife Cynthia—were not killed by any fringe group such as the Aryan Brotherhood or by drug cartels, as many had theorized. The motive was revenge by a man filled with rage:
Police reportedly zeroed in on Williams after several emails making threats to other county officials were linked to him.
Those threats, though, were not his first.
Williams, who served as a justice of the peace, handling-low-level legal cases in Kaufman County, has been prosecuted by McClelland and Hasse on charges that he stole three computer monitors from the courthouse and misused law library funds…
Prosecutors also brought up an incident in 2010, when Williams reportedly became irate when he learned that an attorney on an arbitration case he was handling had canceled a hearing.
‘First thing I heard was Eric say, “I’m going to kill him,”‘ attorney Dennis Jones, testified, according to the Dallas Morning News. ‘”I’m going to kill him, his wife, his kids. I’m gonna burn his house down. I’m gonna stab him.”‘
Despite this, Mr Jones and the man Williams threatened to kill both testified that they thought his words were harmless and that he never would have hurt anyone.
Doesn’t sound all that harmless to me. But then again, I have the wisdom of hindsight. Of course, he didn’t kill that particular man; he killed three other people against whom he had a similar grudge.
Here’s the scene from “High Noon” it all reminds me of (unfortunately I couldn’t find this particular clip at YouTube), except of course for the very different ending:
The marshal [Kane] exclaims: “You’re a judge!” The practical judge replies: “I’ve been a judge many times in many towns. I hope to live to be a judge again.” And then the judge confronts Kane with his suicidal decision – the camera zooms in on the empty chair where sentencing was pronounced years before:
“Why must you be so stupid? Have you forgotten what he is? Have you forgotten what he’s done to people? Have you forgotten that he’s crazy? Don’t you remember when he sat in that chair and said, ‘You’ll never hang me. I’ll come back. I’ll kill you, Will Kane. I swear it, I’ll kill you.'”
[ADDENDUM: Apparently Williams’ wife was the shooter in all three murders. Perhaps.
It’s a bit difficult to get the story straight from the somewhat garbled reports, but as best I can decipher it he’s saying she did it and she’s saying he did it.
You may recall that, in the movie “High Noon,” Kane’s pacifist Quaker wife ends up killing Frank Miller, the guy who’s been stalking him, thus saving her husband’s life. It’s her moment of truth.
Quite a different situation from this one. That was in order to keep Miller (the bad guy) from killing Kane (the good guy). Here we seem to have a wife and husband pointing the finger at each other as the killer of the good guys.]
Interesting, but the movie and the murders have one thing NOT in common. The movie villain was known. The first-media-blush suspects in the murders were suspected because they were the Other.
We are encouraging people to think with their guts, not with their brains.
IMO, High Noon’s resonance derives from its skillful portrayal of the moral courage it takes to face ruthless, ‘crazy’ evil.
Will Kane is a sheepdog facing wolves. Wolves often hunt in packs and Kane is outgunned because of the lack of support of the town’s citizens.
When sheepdogs are outgunned by wolf packs, the sheep have to be willing to fight and die if needed in support of the ‘flock’. If they are unwilling or unable to find the moral courage to do so, survival itself is threatened.
In the end, that is why Kane throws his star in the dirt. The town’s citizens have proven unworthy and unfit for civilization itself because they refused to defend the rule of law.
All of this is symbolic of the civilizational impulse confronted by barbarism.
Europe long ago surrendered to the barbarians. It is only America which has kept them free. Now, American liberals arguably compose a slim majority of the American public and have done so as well. In electing the pacifistic governments it has, the West is signalling its surrender. The barbarians simply haven’t stormed the gates, yet.
But they are gathering upon the not-so-distant horizon.
It is not however, Islam’s fanatic jihadists who shall overcome the West, they are merely the left’s cannon fodder. It is the West’s own ba***rd stepchild, communism, the perversion of communion, that is the far greater threat. For it makes a prison of civilization. The left threatens outwardly, through China and Russia’s machinations but it is the left’s internal threat wherein the greatest danger by far lies.
Disease has always killed far more in wars than have bullets and the Western left is a metastasizing cancer that has almost overcome the patient.
Geoffrey Britain Says:
April 17th, 2013 at 7:29 pm
Quite right, Geoffrey. For a couple hundred years since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, the West surged forward and the Muslim world became an increasingly irrelevant backwater, and little threat to us.
In those days the West had optimism in progress and a strong sense of the superiority of our culture. Since the rise of the Left we’ve been taught to denigrate our own culture, and give undeserved respect to inferior cultures.
Leftism is a much more dangerous enemy than Islam. Without leftism, Islam would be no match for the West.
rickl,
One point of difference. It is not a case of the ‘superiority’ of the west’s culture versus other more ‘inferior’ cultures.
There was nothing superior about almost wiping out the N. American buffalo, mostly for its tongue, while leaving millions of carcasses to rot on the prairie.
There was nothing superior about dismissing even the possibility that other non-white cultures had anything of worth to contribute to mankind.
That’s simple arrogance, certainly not in historical short supply in Western cultures.
There are aspects of every culture that are deserving of respect and emulation and other aspects that would be far better abandoned.
That said, Western culture does arguably have more to offer and contribute toward mankind’s progress than any other culture yet developed.
The left, in order to advance its agenda has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. In that we agree.
Geoffrey Britain:
I appreciate, and share, your views. Thanks.
But I have a quibble about your bison remarks.
Bison were slaughtered for their hides and shipped back East to city-dwellers as lap robes for wagon journeys, sleigh-rides and for use around the home.
Back in the day, a hide was worth up to $3, a tongue 25 cents…and absent refrigeration and effective pickling, most tongues did not travel far.
The decimation of the bison-thousands of herds in the thousands- allowed farming, and wiped out the Plains Indians’ primary food source.
Bison sneer at regular cattle fencing. It is tough to keep them from going where they want to go.
Beef tongue is an absolute delicacy…at least for me. Good Jewish delis used to feature tongue sandwiches; “prime tongue” was cut from the lean tip.
Don Carlos: my discourse on tongue.
Neo: To which I replied, IIRC.
Don Carlos,
Not a quibble, clearly your historical knowledgeable in this area exceeds my own.
True, buffalo hunters sought the hides and that was systematic slaughter. It’s also true that tens of thousands of buffalo were slain by passengers on trains with only the tongue quickly removed and the entire carcass left to rot.
But whether for hides and/or tongue, the unsustainable harvesting of the buffalo was criminal.
I have only had beef tongue once in my life, prepared by my ex’s very aged grandmother (from the old country) the sight of it was off putting, it was unmistakably a giant tongue but as a guest I gave it the old college try. The texture of the organ was memorable.
I still shudder at that memory.
Geoffrey:
Yes, bison (Bison bison -Linn.: they are not properly called ‘buffalo’any more) were slaughtered by hunters. There was an Eastern city-dweller market for the hides of the slaughter. Without the market, the driving economic force, and the developing railroads to deliver hides to that market, I doubt there would have been such slaughter. Bullets cost $, even then (as did rifles,etc.).
Geoffrey…
The US railroad/ railway industry PAID to have the bison herds suppressed — ultimately eliminated.
You can’t have railroads and bison stampedes at the same time and place. This correlation was so strong that it’s been committed to film:”How the West Was Won.”
Additional references are found in “Dances With Wolves.”
$5 was paid for each dead bison, IIRC. That’s a week’s wages for an able bodied farmhand back then.
A single bison strike by a locomotive could destroy it — actually — both. At the time such machines ran between $10,000 and $20,000. The consequent boiler explosions normally would kill the fireman and engineer — with plenty of additional injuries among the following cars.
Not surprisingly, every effort was made to avoid such ‘biological impacts.’
The bulk of the bison were destroyed for the same reason that cockroaches are laid low: they’re a pest.
The fact that the plains natives followed the herds/ went missing when the bison weren’t around was just icing on the cake.
When the great culling began, no railroad man ever imagined that it was even possible to do more than just ‘control’ the herds. — A sentiment still seen with regard to insects.
It turned out that $5 really did the trick; that and Civil War weapons improvements: breach-loaders.
Bottom line: until the bison was suppressed America could not connect the land with railways. In Europe, the campaign against wild herds had long been won.
Amazing, ‘biological imacts’ is Napolitano-speak, as in ‘man-caused disasters.’
Sorry for the typo; I meant “impacts.”