Michael Lissack buy caviar advertised at $250 a pound has adjoined the sullen line of ravaged paupers waiting for the soup kitchen to open at the church around the cor- ner. Downtown, in the suave, postmodern towers that house health clubs, power lunches, and automated teller machines, grimy derelicts looking like leftovers from the Depression haunt the gleaming atriums for warmth and safety, while above sit dapper investment bankers, some of whom made seven-figure incomes rearranging the industrial order before they were forty. As for the urban parks and pillared train stations that speak of a once confident civic pride and prosperity, how often are they now-graffitied, vandalized, reeking of human waste-but dreary gauntlets of beggary? These public places-the grand, columned train stations, the metropolitan parks-are powerful embodiments of the democratic social order: splendid construc- tions made by communal effort not for the pleasure of kings and aristocrats but for dignifying the ordinary lives of ordinary people. That for a decade train riders have had to hurry through the stench of waste and atmosphere of threat with averted eyes, that park users have had to steer clear of the tents of the mad and keep their children out of the tall grass for fear of AIDS contaminated needles discarded by homeless drug users. These are scandals that starkly symbolize how far we have succeeded in eroding the boundaries of the social order. Crime is the last refuge of the curious notion that man is basically good. Here the best intentions enter into strange alliances with old fashioned theories of environment and socialization and a slimmed-down version of psychoanalysis. Its proponents, in their boundless good nature, excuse the aberrants from all responsibility for their actions. Its never the fault of the offender, always his environment: his home, the consumer society, the media. It’s as if every criminal were handed a multiple-choice questionnaire which he had to fill out as best he can:
1. Mom didn’t want me; 2. My teachers were far too authoritarian / liberal; 3. Dad came home drunk / never came home at all; 4. The bank gave me too much credit I closed my account;
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