KEY POINTS:
The mistral is a powerful dry wind that sweeps down through the Rhone Valley to reach the Mediterranean every winter and spring. A wind that howls towards the sea, tugging at coats, banishing hats, and according to local legend, driving men mad.
Writing from the region in 1883
while the mistral was blowing, Robert Louis Stevenson describes the weather as "vomitous". He is tormented, he says, by "a hot mistral which is the devil or a near connection of his". Stevenson went on to immortalise the mistral in his vampire tale Olalla, adding the maddening wind to the landscape of insanity and atavism he drew in his story.
I thought of the mistral, the idiot wind, this week as police and politicians fell over themselves to blame everything from midsummer madness to full moon fever for the homicides that have whipped us into a frenzy over the past few weeks. Ten murders since the start of the year. Among those dead: the young, the beautiful, the hard-working, the innocent.
As the politicians haven't stopped reminding us, every single one of these murders is one too many. But another consequence of these violent crimes is widespread media madness. In the last few weeks we've been subjected to all manner of rhetorical hand-wringing, breathless reportage and purple prose.
Into this climate of Endtimes come the mystical burblings of our politicians. On a visit to the scene of the latest shootings in Flat Bush, the Police Minister attributed the recent spate of violence in the area not to any of the usual suspects like drugs, or drink or gangs or tagging or even "the parents", but rather to the altogether more poetical combination of the hot summer and a full moon.
Yes. The sun and the moon. My own transgressions under this particular conjunction of elements tend more towards the carnal than the murderous and bloodthirsty, but who am I to argue with the reasoned and expert analysis of the minister in charge of police? It's certainly a new way of explaining social ills. One that has more in common with the world view of Medieval peasants perhaps, but definitely entertaining nonetheless. I look forward to hearing more of our politicians and public servants explaining daily contretemps in this manner. How much more fun to hear about arson due to fire breathing dragons?
Or white-collar fraud when mercury enters the Second House of Saturn? Fishing quotas disrupted by marauding Kraken?
Listen closely and you can almost hear the mistral howling through the space between their ears.