The End of a Greek Marriage/West Seattle/Mon Aug 1/10:00 pm: Officer Evans reports: "Both parties are Greek and speak broken English. The complainant/husband [68 years old] told me that his wife [the suspect, 60 years old] did not like the music he was listening to earlier tonight, which he said was 'Greek history music,' so she tried to pull the radio away from him. He resisted her attempt to take the music away from him. During the tugging match, he sustained a small abrasion to his right cheek, and she sustained bruises to her left arm. He told me that his wife 'was crazy.' I then spoke to the wife. She told me that he was listening to 'very bad, very painful, very nasty music.' She tried to take the radio away to turn it off, but he would not let her. There was insufficient evidence of a crime, but there was a disturbance between both parties and they were both agitated." All long marriages are doomed to end this way, with the husband trying to listen to 'Greek history music' and the wife trying to turn it off.

Love and Honor/Rainer Valley/Fri July 29/1:00 am: Officer Griffin reports: "When I arrived, fire medics were already on the scene treating the victim's injuries. The victim had glass in her arm and back as a result of the driver's side window being shot out. The victim said that she was in an argument with her boyfriend when the boyfriend's friend, the suspect [who wore a black coat, and had short hair], got upset at her. The suspect then pulled out a large handgun and pointed it at her. She was sitting in the car with six kids [the oldest of which was 9 and the youngest under a year]. The suspect fired two rounds at the vehicle, shattering the driver's side window and hitting the rear driver's side door. The suspect and witness [the boyfriend] then left the scene. She only knows the suspect's street name, and has no idea where he lives. We went to contact the witness at his address but he was not home." Though what the gangster did was terrible and deserves to be punished by the law, we cannot deny the fact that he has a very high sense of honor. Honor, of course, has nothing to do with intelligence, with making the best decision for oneself and others, but with respect. For the man of honor, or the man who strives for honor, all situations (be they insignificant or great) demand respect. As Maudemarie Clark and Alan Swensen write in the introduction to Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, "...[T]heives and [other criminals] who are beyond the pale of what we call 'morality' live by... a code of honor."

The poor woman in this report was, for one reason or another, dissing her boyfriend, and because the gangster happens to be friends with man she is dissing, she is dissing him also. This is a great dishonor, and the only way he can regain her respect is to show her (the girlfriend of a friend he may or may not be close to) that he will risk everything (years in prison, the death penalty) for the sake of a little respect. Honor is the stuff of madness.