So a little more than a decade ago I wrote a verse essay called, "Boilerplate: Koreshians, Potential Rioters, and Bureaucratic Complicity in American Self-Destruction". One of my obsessions at the time was the Brown’s Chicken Massacre, where 7 people were killed in a suburb of Chicago as they were closing a fast food restaurant. It seemed as if the murders were going to get away with it. It made people feel uneasy and unsafe. Our own little Bosnia. A precursor to Killer on the Loose, in my mind.
And they did, for a long time. But not forever. From wikipedia:
On May 10, 2007, Juan Luna was found guilty of all seven counts of
murder. He was sentenced to life in prison on May 17. All but one juror
had voted for the death penalty for Luna, but in Illinois the vote must
be unanimous, so Luna was spared the death penalty. Jim Degorski’s
trial has yet to be set.
Here’s the relevant chapter from Boilerplate:
3 DERANGED
Scrang the sirens go. We’re led from one crisis to the
next, whether it’s a hurricane or a foreign intervention or the dead at
Brown’s Chicken (you can kill 7
people before midnight and get away with it) in
Palatine, Illinois. Cop shows beat us in front of ourselves.
There is no time for reflection, only a stilted
genuflection at each virtual funeral.
Quiet contemplation is discouraged— even drycleaning chemicals make us sick.
Glazed with the patina and muck of a whole culture built on destroying yesterday.
Collective memory is hosed out and
patted into caloric units of the whitewashed milquetoast truth.
Look at Ollie North— he whacked us over the head and we let him run for Senator.
That’s deranged. Oh, the rabbit squeals in each ear,
the rabbit squeals indeed.© 1995 Daniel X. O’Neil
Epigraphs Dedication Foreward 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8