The Finder final post

Where is the line between when it is acceptable to kill and when it is a crime. Under the law, a person can be thrown in jail for manslaughter or murder but if a person can prove that they had to kill another person in self defense, they can go free. Often, this choice is not clear cut. This sometimes murky division is seen in Colin Harrison's book The Finder. In this book we see some very obvious examples of clear cut murder but some have several other dimensions. A man, Victor, attacks a drugged man who is helpless to defend himself. Harrison writes, "Richie had never had a chance, his shirtless body still sprawled in the position of deep sleep, hands out, shoes off, his boxer shorts askew, belly soft, a tattooed lightning bolt adorning his hip bone. Next to him, the bedside table drawer had been yanked open. On the floor lay the bloody golf club, bent in the middle now" (157). This gruesome way of dying- beaten to death with a golf club, seems senseless and horrible. However, it is not as clear cut as it seems. The man who beat Richie to death was doing so in order to get revenge on him for sexually abusing his sister. Does this justify the death? Does anything ever justify a death? These are some of the main questions that run through the plot of the book.

Harrison writes about these murders without an extreme bias. We are somewhat led to believe a certain way but we are also indoctrinated by society to believe that some crimes are in fact justified. Frequently, the line between murder and self-defense is unrecognizably blurred. Ray fights with the same man that killed Richie in order to rescue Jin Li. The scene is described, "Victor howled and lunged blindly at Ray, his hands grabbing him by the throat, and the two men stumbled backward toward the tub- which is where Ray tripped, and as he fell he twisted sideways and victor sprawled awkwardly across the tub, sinking heavily into the lumpy mixture and simultaneously setting its contents on fire" (318). While it can be argued that Ray was only protecting himself and didn't directly kill Victor, it is also true that his actions led to Victor's death and without Ray, he would not have been killed. These are the questions we as a society must ask ourselves. When is ending a life justified? Where can we draw the line between murder and self-defense? and is there ever a time or a situation where it is good to end some one's life? These questions have been asked by many throughout history and will continue to be asked. They may, in fact, be impossible to ever answer

Self Preservation (The Finder post #5)

When a person is threatened, just like all animals, they are faced with the choice to either flee the scene or fight against it. This is an instinct that effects people in different ways. In Shakespeare's King Lear, Edgar flees from his family and disguises himself as Poor Tom when he hears that his father is trying to kill him. We also see several different responses to threats in Colin Harrison's book The Finder. Although in general, we may think of a threat as a physical threat, a person can also face the threat of economic ruin and the loss of pride. This is what threatens Martz, a billionaire Hedge fund manager whose choice of a certain stock has drastically fallen. In order to save his face and his wealth, he arranges for an illegal stock lift. He threatens Chen, Jin Li's brother, who provides information to investors, in order to get his help. He tells him that if he he does not cooperate, he will turn him into the authorities. He says, "The last thing you want to do is be arrested for illegal trading here. This will launch an investigation into everything you have ever done, and like a fatal disease it will touch all of the people to whom you have ever given information. It will cause loss of face" (276). Martz knows that in order to save himself, he must carry out the stock price lift. He is willing to threaten and terrorize others in order to do this. This is one example of how, when backed into a corner, a person will either try to flee or will fight for themselves.

In addition to the less tangible threat of economic and personal ruin, there is also the more obvious physical threat to a person. When Jin Li is kidnapped by the man that murdered the two Mexican girls at the beginning of the book, she is afraid that he will eventually torture, rape, and kill her. She is trapped in a hidden room, chained to the wall. Also in the room with her is a bathtub full of a reeking brown goop that is, unknown to her, the remains of another man dissolved in acid. Using her chemistry knowledge, she uses a bucket to concentrate the acid to prepare for anything that might come:

"She watched the liquid settle and ever so subtly separate, the water rising to the top. She took off her shoe and stirred the stuff with it. The shoe started to smoke, but the water was brought to the surface. She tipped the bucket and poured of the brownish water, and it trickled across the cement floor toward the drain. . . Jin Li coughed a moment, then remembered to slide the bucket around the edge of the mattress, where he would be less likely to see it and discover what she had done." (299)

In order to prepare for what might happen to her, Jin Li uses her resourcefulness to come up with a way to protect herself if she needs to. This response will eventually help save her life later. When faced with adversity, human beings resourcefully use whatever means available to them to devise ways to save themselves.

What makes us who we are?

What causes a person to become the person they are? How do seemingly normal people end up to be the most horrible people who have ever lived? When reading about the holocaust or about a gruesome crime, these questions are often prominent in our minds. The factors that shape us are some of the most important events in our lives, but how do they truly influence us? How can it be that someone with a seemingly normal childhood grow up to be someone like Dr. Josef Mengele, a doctor at Auschwitz? He had a normal family and was seen to be a nice person by his neighbors as he grew up. As an adult, however, he conducted thousands of horrible medical experiments on children in the concentration camps, never pausing to consider the consequences of what he was doing. These same questions and situations are addressed in Colin Harrison's book The Finder. In the book, Martz, a wealthy but aging businessman, is losing millions of dollars on Good Pharma company stock. He threatens Tom Reilly, the vice president of the company. Why does he do this? Reilly's wife, a physician gives her opinion, "based on my clinical experience, and a brief interaction, the man you are in trouble with cannot be depended upon to be highly rational! Or kind and decent! I don't care how much money he has! He's an animal under stress! He's got high cortisol levels, increased blood pressure, who knows what" (220). Martz has prostrate cancer and it is affecting the chemicals and hormones in his blood, causing him to become extremely irrational. This is an example of aspects that are beyond one's control, but this is not always the case.

Tom Reilly himself also has drastically changed as a result of the situations he faces in daily life. His job has forced him to change the way to think and has restructured his brain. He has learned a certain way to think and converse with people but it has changed him from the person he used to be. His wife describes how he has changed:

"The overall functioning of his brain becoming, arguably, more specialized in
the exact manner the company required. . . . His sense of humor was
far less subtle, more brutal and dark. Certain of his mental functions
were more highly developed. . . . He was in fact very good with the social
aspect of the job. . . But these were not authentic responses, she'd come to
see. . . . they were algorithmic." (221-222)

He has become a person totally different from the man she married and it has cost him. Under stress, he ordered the murder of two girls that he suspected were contributing to the lowering stock price of his company by stealing information. The strain of his job has caused him to change his morals and the way he conducts business. He could have stopped some of the effects of his job but he chose not to. These are some of the aspects of one's life that influence the type of people they become.

Life and Death (The Finder post #3)

What would you do if you were told that you had one month to live? Would you spend more time with your family or would you do things that you've always wanted to do? Throughout our lives, we never like to think about the inevitable result- death. We take many things for granted and we don't realize just how valuable they are until they are threatened or gone. These things, such as our health, family, time, are the things we miss most when our possession of them is threatened. Above all, we take life for granted. Life is the most precious thing we have and everyone reacts differently when they learn that they are dying. We see these varying reactions in Colin Harrison's book The Finder. The wife of a pharmacy financial advisor, Ann, is a physician. She works with elderly patients, many of whom are near death. She describes her views on humanity, "We are animals and subject to the mortification of the flesh. Born so that we may die" (109). This morbid view is essentially true when you strip down all of our romanticized views of human life. Humans are basically animals and they are subject to disease and the ravages of old age just like any other living organism.

Everyone deals with death differently. Some live in a constant state of denial and refuse to acknowledge the fact that they will die soon. Others succumb to their pain and the allure of pain medications, choosing to drift away the last hours of their lives. This is the case with Ray's father. He is not able to stand the pain that occurs when he is not medicated. He describes his dependency, "He loved the drug more than he could say, craved it, yes, of course- no wonder people destroyed themselves for it. I'm addicted. But these minutes were when he was most clear, the pain rising quickly yet bearable, the veil of the morphine pulled away just far enough to let his mind work" (117). He realizes that he is living under a cloud, but he cannot live without the morphine. He craves and hates the medicine that keeps the unbearable pain from consuming him. He has not chosen this fate but he must deal with it. These situations are what determine the type of people we are. We must never take anything for granted and we must always make the best of any situation we face.

The Finder post #2

A person's character is developed over time as a result of the experiences they have had. In Shakespeare's plays Much Ado About Nothing and King Lear, we see the characters of Don John and Edmund who are both illegitimate children and have lived in the shadows of their brothers. Because they have lived their lives ostracized and made fun of, they grow up seeking vengeance. In the book The Finder, the characters of Ray and Jin Li have both been shaped by their past experiences. As the plot progresses, the author, Colin Harrison, hints at Ray's background without ever truly telling us what his past experiences have been. Over time we can guess that he was possibly a spy or an elite military fighter, but we can never truly know. As he investigates the sewer for clues about the murder of two Mexican girls who were with Jin Li, he is faced with a horrible scene full of raw sewage. He tells himself, "This is nothing. You've seen much worse, pal. Just use some of the usual tricks" (94). Not many people are faced with having to crawl 100 yards through a sewage pipe, but Ray doesn't seem to think it is very much out of the ordinary. He says he has seen worse and we, the readers, are left only to imagine what else could be worse than this?

Jin Li's character has also been drastically shaped by her past experiences in China. As a child she lived in a rural village. Her mother worked in a factory but was seriously injured and her father became a government official. Jin Li was supported by her grandparents who helper her study so she could escape the life that she knew. She worked in Chemistry and in finance, making her extremely diverse in her abilities and allowing her to take care of herself easily. She describes her childhood, "Her mother retreated into their house and would not come out. Jin Li and her brother did the shopping. Her father chose to sleep in the fold-out bed in the front room and rarely spoke to her mother" (88). Because she had to care for her mother and deal with her family's problems, Jin Li was able to take care of herself from an early age and her knowledge of the world around her, both scientifically and personally, was that of someone much older. Her brother was also influenced by her father and came to see humans as only things to be used for one's own gain. These experiences led to where Jin Li has ended up and have developed and prepared her for the difficulties she will face in the future. Throughout our lives, our experiences will develop how we see and treat others as well as the way that we handle situations.

Love and The Finder (Q3 post #1)

The love between members of a family is a unique and complicated entity. This love comes in many different forms. In some families, such as those often ideally portrayed in movies and books, all the members of the family love each other unconditionally and never fight amongst themselves. In the other extreme, some family members such as Don Pedro and Don John in Shakespeare's play Much ado About Nothing, or Edmund and Edgar in the play King Lear, are driven apart by hatred and jealousy. Most families do not conform to either of these forms, but are somewhere in the middle. In the book, The Finder by Colin Harrison, this familial love is also extremely prevalent and drives many points of the story line. The actions of many of the characters is driven by their love for someone or something, and together, these twisting and overlapping desires fuel the story.

In New York City, a woman, Jin Li, narrowly escapes a gruesome murder and hides. She has been stealing classified information from corporations under the guise of a paper shredding business and giving the information to her brother, a prominent businessman in China. Because she has gone missing, he threatens Jin Li's ex-boyfriend, Ray, into searching for her. We cannot know for sure whether or not Jin Li's brother really loves her or if he is driven only by his love for profit. He tells Ray, "Jin Li, she call me and then she does not go to work, like I say before. I have to tell somebody to run my business. That is big problem just like that. Where is Jin Li, I say. She is good at the business for me" (35). Although he is worried about his sister, his greed is still his main motivation. This love between family members is shallow and thin. The love and relationship between Ray and his dying father is much more earnest. Ray knows his father is dying and that he is in great pain and doesn't have much longer to live. The thing that Ray wants most for his father is for him to be comfortable and, although he does love Jin Li, the real reason that he agrees to help her brother, Chen, is because his father is threatened. Chen's men steal Ray's father, Bill's, morphine pump in order to blackmail him. The author describes Ray's thoughts and actions:

Then he understood.

His father's morphine pump.

They'd taken it, yanked it right out of the vein in his father's right arm. He needed a forty-milligram bolus of Dilaudid every hour, or the pain was-

"Yes, yes!" Ray screamed. "I'll do it! Yes, get me up!" (40).

Ray is not driven by fear for his own safety as he is dangled 50 stories high out of a widow by his foot; he only cares about the pain his father is in. This is true respect and love and stands out in stark contrast to the superficial love between Jin Li and her brother Chen. This is what family is all about.

American Spy Post #6

Throughout the trial, both Hunt and Liddy were faced with the decision of whether or not to turn in their superiors in the government. They chose different paths, each with their own consequences. Hunt, for months, chose to remain silent about their involvement. Eventually, he changed his mind and believed that it was better to plead guilty and tell the court everything he knew. He also encouraged the other members of the Watergate Seven to do the same. Hunt told them that the prosecutors knew about the majority of what had happened, so it was useless to still claim information to the contrary. This did not sit well with some of the men: especially a man named Gordon who promptly asked to be transferred to the deadlock section of prison so he wouldn't be near Hunt. Hunt writes, "We would never speak again. I didn't know it at the time, but my friend would later write that he [Gordon] had formed an elaborate plot to have me poisoned in jail if the White House ordered, and going to deadlock was part of the plan" (298). At the time, Hunt believed that he was doing the right thing and that by being fully open in court, justice could be served. What he didn't know, was that the people that he was supposed to be protecting had noticed his actions and were making plans to eliminate him if needed.

Taking the opposite position, Liddy never told the entire truth in court, instead choosing to protect his superiors even though it led to extended time in prison. Even after Nixon's resignation, he never changed his story, saying "the soldier owned his allegiance to the prince, no matter whom the prince may be" (311). He chose to remain loyal to those who had been in power for no apparent reason or gain for himself. In court, Liddy even refused to tell the truth, gaining himself added years in prison. Hunt describes one such instance, "When asked if he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Liddy replied, 'No!' He was subsequently cited for contempt of Congress and returned for sentencing to Judge Sirica, who angrily added an additional eighteen months to his sentence" (312). Because of his continued refusal to help in the investigation, Liddy added years to his time in prison, but he continued to do the same thing because he thought that it was the right thing to do. The choices that we make in life all will have consequences. Sometimes, no matter what we decide to do, we will still be forced to deal with what happens as a result. Also, as a result of our actions, we must be prepared to accept responsibility for what we have done during our lives. These are the lessons that E. Howard Hunt and the other members of the Watergate Seven learned, and they are the lessons that we must learn and apply to our lives.