SOURCES OF CRIME Each generation decides where crime comes from to mess up its plans for our living a better life.
We select some recent addition to our daily schedule and mark it as being harmful to society. It is made into a scape goat, of sorts. Anything we don't completely understand becomes bad for everyone. We campaign against whatever our most evil might be and carefully let our rule-setters, even our lawmakers that “while you and I can handle it, sir, but there must be thousands of good people out there who cannot do so!” New rules. Restrictions. Even new laws which caused us to have get along without such words as “saloon”, “sot” “bar room bum “and the like for a while so we could rename everything.
Do know what one of my personal crime cause friction was when I was a kid? You may have met with the same one.
It was “The Dime Novel.”
In truth, the true Dime Novel of history had ceased to be in the 1920's when I became a reader. By that time at the very bottom rung of every ladder of publications there was a class called “the pulps”. They were printed on a cheap, unfinished paper as were many newspapers of time rather than on slick-surfaced paper which was becoming common in new magazines of that era. They were cheap and for a dime we cold read adventure, mystery, romance, sea tales, and cowboys and Indians on a wholesale basis, especially so as we traded, bartered or sold issues among ourselves.
This type of magazine is still being derided today by critics who have not the slightest idea of what they mean. True enough, in time, the books began to specialize and some went “off the table” on subject matter “into the pink” and helped doom the entire category.
The Dime Novel was said to have been hastening our assured passage to Hell! What can you blame today? TV in general? Sex and Violence on TV? The movies? Or...maybe today's $36.75 plus tax and shipping fee novel!
A.L.M. February 4, 2006 [c401wds]
