Obligations of the Harp. Arthur Saltzman

      6 Reason Not the Need

      A telephone, its shorn cord dragging after, a few ripped filaments licking the pavement. A bag of Christmas wrapping. A mobile made entirely of CDs. There is no predicting what someone will rush to salvage from the fire. There is no knowing what an intruder will choose to carry off from an unlocked apartment. A cocker spaniel. Metal chessmen simulating Union and Confederate forces. You’d think they’d think alike, occupant and outlaw, but that’s seldom the case. Nor does either one automatically seize what you’d seize. A cabinet that once housed an old-fashioned radio, now nothing but a husk. An ashtray that had been painstakingly shaped by the thumbs of an eight-year-old at sleep-over camp or one that advertises a restaurant an uncle once owned, now, restaurant and uncle alike, gone under. An assonant series sounding like something out of Doctor Seuss—a hat, a bat, a cat, a doll named Pat, and a basketball that’s flat—whose rhyme does not guarantee a reason. There is no system to infer from the compulsions that litter the news. A tornado smashes storm doors and storefronts, and the thieves are one step ahead of the Samaritans. The home team blows the pennant or wins it: the host city braces itself for invasion either way. A revolution breaks open the marketplace like a piñata, and the mad scramble is on.

      Or not so mad: what seems at street level like chaos and abandon may seem from the distance of sociology understandable. Michael J. Rosenfeld, a Stanford University professor, has inferred an underlying logic from his data on looting. “You get a sense, from what people loot and destroy, of which things they think are legitimate,” he discovers. “The things left standing are the parts of society that people feel some solidarity with.” Occasionally, the protocol of what gets protected and what gets plundered is obvious, such as when during the Viet Nam War students ransacked the private bookstore on my campus while leaving the Union Bookstore, which gave a superior student discount and funneled money back into the university’s general fund, undisturbed. (They also savaged the local phone company outlet and shattered the windows of a bar notorious for carding undergraduates, but the inspiration was not determined to be political in either of these instances.) When the cash register at the dime store remains intact although all the candy bars and gum are gone, the cops rightly forego interrogating suspects from grown-up syndicates in favor of neighborhood kids. Money and jewelry spark obvious motives, and no one wonders about neurosis when they are made off with. Only a handful of culprits might be held accountable for missing vials of anthrax, and while editorialists debate the repercussions, none question the rationale. In a word, thefts tend to make sense.

      But just as often, it seems that there is no concept or consistency behind what the violent bear away. Eight mannequins were stripped naked and abducted from a department store in an Ohio suburb. A rack of costumes was filched from a party supply store in the same mall. (A fraternity scavenger hunt? An outbreak of transvestitism? Officials claim that it would be premature to connect the robberies to one another, much less to some eccentric fascination more disturbing than the break-in itself.) All the brass instruments—only the brass instruments—were hauled off from the band room of a community college. In one night a week before Thanksgiving, three cases of Merlot were taken from a Bloomington, Indiana, liquor store and, from a farm less than two miles away, half a dozen baffled, crated turkeys. (Police surmised that the feast would take place somewhere in the same county. Citizens, lock your pantries! Keep your eyes on your pies!) From a barbershop in Pasadena, two electric clippers. From a sports card shop, a baseball signed by Tony Oliva. (Be on the lookout for the only Twins fan in Kansas City, where the robbery was committed.) From an open garage just outside of Nashville, a drill, a weed trimmer, some guttering, and two pair of work gloves, one so worn that it had stiffened permanently into the contours of the guy who’d been using them for so long, so they’d accept no substitute hands. (Credit the criminal with a dedication to home maintenance, despite his other moral lapses, that’s undeniable, as well as with a willingness to supervise his own rehabilitation through work detail.) From a dentist’s office in Lincolnwood, Illinois, a glittering fistful of picks. The plastic letters from the sign outside the First Presbyterian Church of Jefferson City, Missouri. When passions surpass understanding, we are left with as much wonder as dismay.

      When a Denver felon was asked in court why among the stuff he burgled from a neighbor’s house he bothered to steal a box of empty jars, jars the man had gathered for recycling, he answered, “It’s what there was.”

      ABC News publishes an annual “crime blotter” devoted to the year’s weirdest delinquencies, and the competition is always fierce. There was an outbreak of gumball banditry all over greater metropolitan Newark that was so extensive and so prolonged that only a coordinated gang operation could account for it. During the same week that a Nebraska man was arrested for stealing garden gnomes, an Iowa man pleaded guilty to swiping 35,000 toy Hot Wheels cars. There was a spate of parking meter robberies in Pittsburgh—214 meters beheaded and absconded with in a span of two months. Then there was the case of Melvin Hanks, who swiped ninety-six ponytails that had been donated to a charity for the making of wigs for sick children. He was brought to justice, but the person or persons behind the theft of a sixty-five million-year-old dinosaur footprint from Bosque County, Texas, which had to be chiseled out of the surrounding rock to accomplish the crime, remain at large. So does the Condom Crook of Little Rock, Arkansas, whose pilfering of dozens of cartons of condoms has lifted him to folk-hero status and suggests a brand of criminality at once profligate and oddly, in terms of proper sexual precautions, responsible. In countless as yet undiscovered headquarters, under assorted mattresses and piles of clothes in closet corners, in mud-choked crawlspaces and in plots dug at night in backyards all over America lies the enigmatic stash of indecipherable crimes. Presumably, the perpetrators can hardly contain themselves for the thought of the classic hubcaps, Hummel figurines, or trick handcuffs their respective estates now secretly contain.

      In the film Arthur, the amiable alcoholic title character, played by Dudley Moore, marvels at Liza Minelli’s Linda, whom he accidentally observes stealing a necktie from an upscale men’s store. “It’s the perfect crime!” he gasps. “Girls don’t wear ties! Well, admittedly some do, but it’s a good crime!” He responds to the pure aesthetic gesture of useless, inscrutable shoplifting. It is the movie’s inceptive moment, too: love at first crime site.

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      Although TV cop shows would have us believe otherwise, forensics cannot always track the damage back to a coherent, triggering grudge. Such was the case at the Tri-State Mineral Museum, where a Saturday night’s vandalism struck both the museum curator and the detectives assigned to the case as arbitrary and impenetrable. They—for it did appear to have taken more than one crook to accomplish so thorough a trashing in a single visit—had shattered the glass cases where the better pedigreed gems were kept and scattered their lines of ascent all over the floor. They had dislodged the plutonic tools from their wall mounts and toppled the reef of semi-precious stones that had stood for more than half a century against the north wall. They had scattered the sullen plunder of Joplin’s founding excavations and spilled the fittings and gears of bygone machinery like the black castings of titanic worms. Displays that had taken the proprietors months to construct and patrons even longer to fund were overturned. Even the reporters on the scene, stepping gingerly through the muddle of base metals, could not restrain themselves from commenting on air about the loss to community history and the shameful conduct of teenagers—for the consensus was that this was the handiwork of teenagers, evidenced in part by the lingering aroma of beer and (a clue discreetly kept off the air) a soiled prophylactic—who had no conscience and no resources for finding something more worthwhile to do on a Saturday night.

      Within the year, however, the museum restoration was essentially complete. In a follow-up interview, the curator expressed his relief that almost the entire collection had been recovered