[Part II] Word Gets Around: May and the Art of Overlooked Assholes

Earlier we covered the contrast between the madness of people that seem to feel the need to drive tour parties past my house and point me out as the neighborhood "crazy" person, and the fact that there are real things to worry about. Such as: the 18th Street Gang driving around by the carload, to surround and abduct a 15-year-old boy from a bus-stop in Langley Park and drive him to Gaithersburg, dumping his body in a stream after stabbing him 72 times.

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Ah, May, sweet month of new flowers and green leaves. Not so cruel as April, where warm breezes may lure the early blooms only to crisp them like lettuce with unexpected hard frosts.

May is the time when the last of the migratory birds seem to settle into place, and when the robins have long since stopped looking so starved and are now plump enough to fight for nesting space, then come the pouncing birds that love small insects that hatch only after a week or so after the final frosts. These are the birds that I find most entertaining. The antics of the catbirds as they flutter from high point to high point and zoom down on unwary beetles are amusing. Yet what most amuses me are the antics of the mockingbirds.

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Mockingbirds are, to most people, some sort of symbol of the extravagance of how many songs one little gray bird can remember. Well, they are certainly adept at uttering a huge number of distinct melodies, some of them quite complex.

Yet anyone who knows much about birds knows why they sing. Although we find their songs enjoyable, to the birds themselves, much of their singing is just declaring their territory, marking off space for themselves, so to speak. To the birds, what we hear as sweet music, they hear as roaring challenges. One bird might be thinking "here would be a good place to have a nest", but then they hear the song of a bird that sounds much larger than themselves, and they go elsewhere. Or they hear the song of another of their kind, and they come together either to fight, or to watch the fights to choose the victor.

The mockingbird, thus, has an extremely large voice for such a small bird. Not quite 3/4th the size of a robin, it can sing almost twice as loud, and when it imitates the call of a robin looking for a battle, it sounds like the biggest robin ever. Any robin hearing that is struck with fear of the legendary giant robin... but if it were ever to see what was making the sound, it would laugh, if birds could laugh. That sound is coming from an insignificant gray bird, not a proud robin with its red breast and long sharp beak. So, to complete its deception, the mockingbird sings very loudly, but only from a hiding place, which it very frequently changes.

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Joel Yonathan Ventura-Quintanilla, 22, recently escaped prison in El Salvador, where he had been held for homicide and weapons trafficking. His escape was reported as August 2, 2008.

And of course, where does an escaped murderer in El Salvador feel most safe from the long arm of the law? Montgomery County, Maryland, of course.

Does anyone remember the four kids who were knelt down and shot in the heads, execution style, in New Jersey a few years ago? Their murderer fled to... suburban Maryland.

Does anyone remember the man who fled Mexico with the cash proceeds from the biggest meth-lab bust in Mexican history? And where did he flee to? Why, to Wheaton, where else?

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People are not mockingbirds, this is a fact. But the mockingbird is a tiny little thing that has a very powerful weapon in his voice, which can broadcast deception and thereby fear. But he must do it from hiding, so he is small, and a mousy gray, with little black eyes, and no markings. You'd never look twice at him unless he opens his mouth and cuts loose with an immensely varied repertoire of calls, all done at ear-wrecking volume.

Mockingbirds are not people, that's a fact. But the central-american gangster is a tiny little thing that has a very powerful weapon in the fact that he is so unremarkable, you'd never look at him twice. He hides in crowds, but that is how you find him, by looking for what makes him so very dangerous: gangsters never go anywhere alone.

If you want to find a mockingbird that is singing, you have to look in the shadows. You will have to look in a lot of shadows, because the mockingbird knows that the other birds will lose their fear of its song if they see it, and so he moves all of the time.

If you want to find gangsters looking for trouble -- usually because they intend to cause as much as they can -- you need only look for groups of a certain size, of a certain type, and they are usually traveling because if people ever know where they are, and who they are, people who do not like danger but who are prepared to remove danger will come and remove the gangsters. So they hide, and they move frequently, and this means that all you have to do to find them, especially here in Maryland and Montgomery, you just drive around and you will encounter them in their favorite hiding place: their cars.

It's easy to find a mockingbird. You listen for their song.

It's easy to find a gangster driving his carload of homeys around. They have a look on their face like they're getting away with murder and nobody can ever stop them.

Too bad there's no law against that thug face, that leering smirk and the hand illegally outside of the exterior of a moving motor vehicle, or there'd be a perfect excuse to pull 'em over and run their IDs.

After all, there's no place that an escaped murderer from El Salvador feels more assured of being immune to recapture and prosecution than Montgomery County Maryland. Thus, we probably have a higher concentration of them here than in El Salvador, or Honduras, or Nicaragua, etc etc etc. Thus, the odds are also higher that any given vehicle packed full of thug-faced gangstas will have at least one with significant wants-and-warrants. For a cop, it's a no-lose proposition. Pull the fools over for "limb outside of vehicle" and then ID everyone. Your odds of getting major arrests only increases, as will public safety.

Of course, if you don't, the odds are, that you get very dangerous people easily circulating, thinking they are invisible and invincible until they get so full of themselves that they start kidnapping and murdering the children of your taxpayers. Ventura-Quintanilla, after all, was riding around with his homeys for almost a year before he finally got caught.

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More to come?