Shame

Brooklyn residents are doing laudable service recording the license-plate numbers of motorists prowling their neighborhood in search of prostitutes. As The Sun's Peter Hermann reported recently, residents are alerting the cops, who check the plates against vehicle descriptions, then send the registered owners a "Dear John" letter warning the car has been spotted in suspicious circumstances. While the letters, written on official police stationary, don't actually charge the owners with committing a crime - there's no law against driving slowly on a public thoroughfare - most recipients get the message.

MAMONOVO, Russia -- The wooden board outside the local government building in this town of 7,000 near the Baltic Sea - a place small enough that word travels fast and no one's business is exactly private - might just as well advertise a community festival or a schedule for trash collection. In fact, it is a pillar of shame. Posted on the yellow and green board recently were the names of 50 residents who had not paid their utility bills, some for years; nine residents with other debts; and a local fish cannery that allegedly dumped untreated wastewater into the environment.

The Other Little Theater, in its fifth year of residence at the Naval Station on Greenbury Point, has carved out a nice little niche for itself among our local dramatic troupes, and its current production of "The Shame of Tombstone," a hilarious melodrama, is a cute one that deserves an audience.As folks are reminded at the beginning of the show, melodrama is not a passive genre. Viewers must be prepared to ooh and aah for the heroine, and hiss and boo the villain within an inch of his life.

IF TRUST AND ETHICS were public stocks, they'd be at risk of being delisted. Every few days brings news of a fraud more immense than the ones that preceded it. WorldCom Inc., the nation's second-largest long-distance company, revealed last week that it overstated the money it made by $3.8 billion dating back through last year. The company, already teetering, could wind up in a bankruptcy even larger than the one that ended Enron Corp., the previous poster child for corporate accounting illusion.

BRING BACK FEAR!Thanks to William Bennett and cover stories on major news magazines, we have already brought back shame.The shame of having a child out of wedlock, the shame of not supporting it. The shame of living on welfare, the shame of driving drunk, the shame of cheating on your spouse or your taxes or your boss.The old-fashioned mortification that comes with sin, itself an old-fashioned notion in revival, is back in vogue.Now that shame is no longer considered a disabling emotion destructive to self-esteem, parents can confidently shame their kids as they go about the business of making them responsible (( members of society.

NO MATTER how deeply buried, truth rises sooner or later. A half-century ago, The Evening Sun reported how the state mental hospital in Crownsville housed its patients in dirty, overcrowded conditions, warehousing them rather than providing proper therapy. Last week, Sun reporter Jackie Powder revealed that the hospital mistreated them in death, too, burying them in unmarked graves identified by numbers instead of names. A final insult to as many as 3,000 people who were cast aside as "feeble-minded, idiots and imbeciles" and sent to the facility once called the Hospital for the Negro Insane.

It's one thing to suspect captured terrorists may be treated harshly to gain information that could save innocent lives. But it's quite another to see the reality of torture carried out on a fellow human being, in all its grisly horror. That was precisely the point of the photographs of U.S. military guards humiliating and mistreating Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison published in 2004. For most Americans, it was their first inkling of the enormity of the crimes committed in their name; the meaning of such euphemisms as "stress positions" and "enhanced interrogation techniques" hadn't really sunk in until they saw the smiling face of Spec.

A drunken driver is ordered to carry in his wallet pictures of the people he killed. A wife-beater must apologize to his victim from the courthouse steps, with cameras rolling. A shoplifter is forced to pace outside the market from which she pilfered, wearing a huge sign that brands her a convicted thief.It is justice by sandwich board, tearful apology and posted placard, the modern versions of the stocks and scarlet letters of Colonial times. A small but attention-getting group of judges across the country, fed up with a revolving cast of drug buyers, drunken drivers, johns and shoplifters who never seem to get the message, has been sentencing criminals to shame.

Good morning --Roger Federer-- It's a cryin' shame - for anyone trying to beat you.

The Sun editorializes that "the incumbent is a known commodity" ("Who is Mitt Romney?" Aug. 28), and that is President Barack Obama's problem - he is a known commodity. His record is no record. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. " Norman Wolfe, Pikesville