poets and murderers

America supports its murderers better than it does its poets. Murders get a room, sustinence, a gym, a prison rec room, and occasional interviews with the press after the dramatic simulacra of justice known as the trial. Rapists are given more creedence in the courtroom with their testimonies than an essayist is given in a journal. I wonder what the proportion of criminals to writers is in this country. It would only surprise me if there happened to be more writers. This country could easily support poets for their lifetimes with the finances being fed into federal and state prisons. But it seems that criminals serve more of a purpose than poets. Criminals enforce the average citizen's legal morality by providing examples of deviance. Poets are tied to life, not morality. They enforce no conventions in the populace, except making life worth living through the gifts of articulate communication. And the country obviously hates them for it. There are multitudes of television programs that portray criminals and their violent acts, but not a single one that concerns the acts of the poet. This is a message to Americans, one that says it is more glamorous to kill somebody than it is to write a love sonnet to a woman. It says that investigating a crime scene is more important than investigating a piece of creative writing or a novel. Crimes are usually the work of no more than a few hours, while work on a book takes years. People often hear of a shocking crime in the headlines and respond with "But how could anybody do that?" I read Susan Sontag, Dostoyevsky, Knut Hamsun, etc and think the same thing, only with an appreciative wonder instead of a harrowing disgust. Murderers and rapists do not deserve the attention lavished upon them by the media. Give back the limelight to the innovative filmmakers, artists, and writers of our generation. Do not fetishize the sickness of individuals through mainstream movies, news, and magazines. This is serious.