BOSTON — While the crime rate nationwide remains at a 30-year
low, my city is being terrorized by…the Fruit and Vegetables Gang, apparently so named
because “several of the youths have worked in produce departments
at grocery stores.” Now, it sounds like these kids are a public
service message gone bad — “What’s your gang do?” “We eat our
fruits and vegetables!” “Word!” — but I wouldn’t want to get in a
fracas with them, especially considering their proclivity for
beating people up with baseball bats. Still, if I have to live in
fear, does it really have to be of the Fruit and Vegetables Gang?
Not only does it jettison that much more of my already tattered
masculine self-image, but it also inspires some measure of
nostalgia for the tougher sounding Bloods and Crips gangs of yore.
The transcendental question with regard to all of this (you knew
there was one, I’m sure): If they remade The Apple
Dumpling Gang today would it look more like Menace II
Society?
I couldn’t help thinking of the Fruit and Vegetables Gang and
the discrepancy between something that sounds so foolish yet must
unfortunately be taken seriously when I recently came across an
interview with Emperor Magus Caligula of the Swedish satanic black
metal band Dark Funeral. Among a slate of unremarkable questions
about the band’s unremarkable music, the stage make-up festooned
singer was asked to describe his feelings about a rabid fan,
Roberto Orias, who had murdered an Italian Catholic priest in Chile
last year.
Here is what Caligula — who during a 2003 meet-and-greet had
burned an inverted cross into Orias’ arm with a cigar at his
request (apparently to match the pentagram branded over his heart)
— told the Swedish magazine Close Up about the vicious,
demented slaying, according to a Blabbermouth Translation:
People ask us if our music caused the murder. I don’t
think so. Sure, we sing about killing Christians and blood and
feathers falling from angels are present in a lot of the lyrics.
Maybe the music triggered him somehow, but he probably would have
harmed someone even if he hadn’t been listening to [Dark Funeral].
He was not well. But I have to say that I’m…er, SOMEWHAT
impressed. He deserves some credit. You’re not supposed to say
that, but I don’t care.
One wonders what it takes to fully impress Caligula. After all,
Orias nearly decapitated 69-year-old Father Faustino Gazziero
moments after the priest finished saying mass in front of hundreds
of parishioners, and then, according to the Herald Sun, Orias “smeared his face
with the victim’s blood and then stabbed himself several times in
the chest and neck.” Gazziero had been in Chile since 1960 and
helped run four schools in Santiago.
While no one can place the weight of this crime on anyone’s
shoulders other than those of the 26-year-old Orias (who was
ultimately found mentally unfit to stand trial), Caligula’s
comments are still worth pondering if for no other reason than out
of pure wonder at the fact that such an eminently silly man who
makes a living playing Viking dress-up,
saying spooky things, and working under an utterly ridiculous stage
name, can hold such sway over the fate of living, breathing human
beings. It looks as if the fantastically disturbing Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal
Underground — which detailed the church burnings, human
sacrifices, sometimes even cannibalism some European Black Metal
bands have engaged in — is going to need a sequel.
More frightening still is the nonchalance with which Dark
Funeral guitarist Lord Ahriman acknowledges this may not be an
isolated incident.
“Before we found out the name of the killer, I thought it was
another fan,” Ahriman said. “A guy in Santiago just stood there
crying when he met me. He knew everything about Dark Funeral. It
was creepy. He’d bought the same guitar as the one I have, a BC
Rich Warlock, and he had desecrated graves to honor us. He said,
‘My Lord, give me an order and I will execute it.’”
Desecrated graves to honor them? Full preparedness to receive
and execute satanic orders? And I thought girls throwing their
underwear at eighties hair bands was demented. Of course, the true
tragedy in that was always the lack of self-respect these women had
for themselves. Likewise, it is utterly disheartening that to face
the fact that there are people out there so forlorn and
disconnected from their humanity that they do not see bands such as
Dark Funeral for what they are: human cartoons churning out
laughably absurd paeans to evil — one of the band’s records is
titled, Teach Children to Worship Satan — in a sort of
faux rebellious stance.
After all, it’s hard to imagine a netherworld where the Prince
of Darkness is impressed by such theatrics. Emperor Magus Caligula
may be willing to burn impressionable fans and praise them when
they strike out in violence, but when it comes to actual pillaging
and virginal sacrifices the guy is M.I.A. One gets the impression
this Satanist would be in a world of pain if he ever stepped wrong
in the Fruit and Vegetables Gang’s hood.
This isn’t an argument for euphemism. It’s a plea for truth in
advertising. There are enough vivid, properly named terrors in this
world without having to add the foolish and laughable to that list.
None of us deserve to be marked for eternity with the epitaph that
we perished at the hands of the Fruit and Vegetables Gang or the
perverted disciple of a bunch of guys whose job prospects were so
nil they were forced to paint themselves up like Tammy Faye Baker
might have had she married Anton LaVey instead of Jim.
