mugshot or surplus to needs

Formally it seems that one could easily hang some signature accessory on a villain, a passably sinister profile, trim of moustache or a particular brand of smokes that might be forever reviled by the horrified public and associated with notoriety. Currently, however, we are all essentially naked with no distinguishing uniform or props (other than the occasional posing) and are just left with rather non-descript—though susceptible to certain judgments, reflective, innocent, ill-informed, poorly counselled, discordant, overly-tuned or just plain skanky in the same fashion as we might rate the cascade of loose-associates—parade-ground of our social-mediators, I wonder where those strains of repulsion dwell, unsafe in the knowledge that we all have a virtually immediate connection. We ought to all delete our accounts—if that meant more than acquiescing to an archive. There’s incubating speculation as well about how the perpetrator of the massacre in Orlando worked for a security contractor that supplements services to the US government’s Department of Homeland Security, including the goon squads at airports and the farming out of newly arrived immigrants by bussing them to points beyond. And while the parent company may enjoy such a position of public-trust and does perhaps deserve to have its employment-screening practises looked into, that particular fiend only had the warrant of a mall-cop. It’s chilling nonetheless, to imagine that he might have been deputised as something more, although this identification and aversion (like the avatars above) is like the high incidence of engineers attracted to radical groups. It is not that they are recruited for their potential bomb-making skills, as one might think, or for their ability to design some diabolic juggernaut, but mostly because they’ve pursued a certain career path and found that there’s not the jobs in the industry to support their numbers. The preponderance of (failed) engineering students is not a commentary on the field, but rather a criticism of the schooling systems of many places in Africa, the Middle East and Asia that puts all its resources in post-primary education for the few, mainly males who survive a childhood of neglect and discouragement.