Are we really to equate the killer whale with the murderous students?
(Clearly Karr means this as a high-art contrast to her schoolyard slugfests, though a student of murderous rage, eyeball-gouging and casual violence could hardly ask for better instructional guides than these three plays).
The distance between a murderous terrorist and an ambitious student is vast, but to maintain that separation we need to connect with a generation of young Muslims who see much of the world as hostile to them and their faith.
On June 15, in the wee hours of the morning, when Tehran University students were at their dormitory, the Basij militia conducted a murderous raid and a number of students were killed.
However, this error in judgment does not justify comparing student journalists to the murderous psychopaths in "Lord of the Flies".
A deranged man armed with a kitchen knife stormed into an elementary school here this morning and began stabbing students and teachers, a murderous rampage that has stirred outrage and soul-searching in this normally safe country.
Tartt's first novel, "The Secret History" (1992), about the intellectual arrogance and murderous hubris of a group of college students, already enjoys a similar status.
In reviewing "Unfinished Animal: The Aquarian Frontier and the Evolution of Consciousness" in 1975, Pete Hamill said in The Times that the luster of the counterculture had by then been extinguished by the shooting of students at Kent State University, Charles Manson's murderous band and other traumatic events.
But in "My Last Duchess," a female high school student secretly identifies with Browning's murderous duke: better to be the ruthless one, moving decisively forward and eliminating the potentially suffocating alternatives.
The murderous brutality of the troops who took Tiananmen Square from student protesters on June 4th has provoked not only the incoherent rage of the Chinese people, but also a more organised resistance by those parts of the army and the Communist party that had opposed martial law and are now sickened at the slaughter.
