How dare you! Extrapolating from odious crimes to the depraved state of American society is the foundation of the great science of punditry. What are the nation's most distinguished columnists supposed to write about? Snide tirades against bourgeois liberals are so last Thursday.

PS Thanks for the h/t, but you've totally misrepresented my position. In modern America, no one opposes marriage between consenting adult centaurs of opposite sexes. It's the mixing of centaurs with Level 12 Elven Clerics wielding +7 Swords of Infinite Erection that threaten to destroy the institution of marriage.

In The Watchmen graphic novel, the vigilante hero Rorschach is inspired by news of the real-life murder of Kitty Genovese, which occurred in public, while the residents of outer Queens neighborhood Kew Gardens watched from their apartment windows...

Interesting to know that one of the genre of "graphic novels" I hear so much about but don't know personally, is still playing the "everything is black or white, good or evil" of the plain old vanilla comic books. (As opposed to say, addressing the complexities of the human condition presented in a lot of other kinds of fiction, low to high, since the Renaissance.) I thought they were popular because they were more sophisticated, like novels.

Those interested in the complexities of real life might like to check up on more recent scholarship on the case of the supposed mythic Genovese murder "witnesses." What actually happened is more like a real Rorschach test, where everyone sees something different in those ink blots.

Brooks is taking the moral outrage everybody feels about the story to make a case against a morality based upon mutual consent. The move is odd in this particular instance because the criminal act was obviously not, by any stretch of the imagination, an act of mutual consent. The bait and switch Brooks employs is so upfront that it seems disingenuous to me. But as you say, it is hard to know what is happening in another person's mind.

However that may be, I propose that developing a code of what comprises mutual consent has been a powerful source of good responses to awful behavior. For those who are willing to intervene in something that isn't their own business, what standard could be more clear than that?

A reminder that China just went through a big "bystander effect" cultural crisis, with the story of "little YeuYeu." Just in case someone tries to claim it's just American culture that fixates on individual tragic stories to get a grip on bigger questions. That's universal, in mho, and not just contemporary; there are many historical examples as well.

This whole thing often comes up in the blogosphere this way: with the more wonkish complaining that "the media" is causing the heavy coverage of some tragic story that is not important in the scheme of things  (i.e., Anna Nichol Smith, etc.) Actually in most cases, I think "the media" is doing that because the public is responding that getting more info on the story is what they are interested in. (Josh Marshall addresses that whole thing in a different vain--pandering to interest in horse race politics--when he talks about not being interested in "eat your spinach" coverage of issues.) I think where the more wonkish err is in not seeing that what individual tragedy stories are popular are important in understanding their own culture. I do want "spinach" coverage to be supported and maintained, but I think that thinking that can be done to the exclusion of pop "personal interest" feeding frenzies is folly. I can mock the interest if I think it's excessive and silly and overblown, but I can't stop it, and I ignore it as culturally significant to the detriment of my own understanding.