Bring the Pain is the single best Comedy Album of the 1990s (if not all time), and I can always find a way to integrate Chris Rock’s sage wisdom into politics and culture. In one of his best bits about O.J. he explains how even though O.J. is a terrible guy for allegedly killing his wife Nicole Brown Simpson, at least his motivation wasn’t a mystery.
“So you gotta look at OJ’s situation. He’s paying $25,000 a month in alimony, got another man driving around in his car and fucking his wife in a house he’s still paying the mortgage on. Now I’m not saying he should have killed her… but I understand.”
I’m feeling you Chris. No one condones murder, abuse or anything else, but I think we can all understand bizarre blinding rage from time to time. Of course in the case of Larry Dunn, who is about to face a lifetime in jail for an ‘understandable’ killing, I have to say my sympathy for his anger is tempered by my shock at his overall stupidity and hypocrisy.
Larry Dunn is going to do down in the pantheon of “Don’t Date Him Girl” men that give all guys, married, single, straight or gay a bad name. The 36 year old Dunn is a married father of two and decided that the daily responsibilities of being a husband and father just wasn’t enough to take up his time so he went on line and started up an affair with 28 year old Cicely Bolden. It is not clear if Bolden (a single mother with two children) actually knew if Dunn was married or not, but she clearly felt very close to him. Close enough to have a few months of unprotected sex, and eventually close enough to inform him that she was HIV positive but that it was supposedly “Not that bad.” Dunn went ballistic picked up a kitchen knife and stabbed his mistress to death and walked out the door. Her two young children found her bloody, half-clothed in the bedroom when they came home from school. It wasn’t too hard for the cops to find Dunn, witnesses say they saw him coming in and out of Bolden’s apartment that morning. In an interview with a local news outlet from his cell, Larry Dunn calmly explained the mindset that he was in that led to his actions:
To be fair, I don’t know how I’d respond to someone I was having sex with informing me that they had a sexually transmitted disease, let alone HIV. Although I’m fairly confident that stabbing them in the neck and hiding my bloody clothes in the Waffle House dumpster wouldn’t make my top 10 list of Terminator responses. More importantly if you widen the lens a bit, Dunn’s rage seems more and more hypocritical. He’s a married father of two having unprotected sex with another woman, meaning he had no problem potentially exposing his wife to anything that he picked up while he was out in the streets getting his R. Kelly on. Then he has the nerve to get mad at his mistress for lying to him? What was it Bill Clinton said last week at the DNC about hypocrites? “It takes a lot of brass to attack a guy for what YOU did”. And take if from Bill, he knows a little something about hypocrisy, lying and cheating.
The even sadder irony in all of this is that the entire horrible sordid affair happened in Texas of all places. The one state where the law justifies killing people for just about anything so long as you’re angry enough and have a gun handy. Texas is one of only 13 states that does NOT have Criminal HIV Transmission laws. In other words, in a state where you used to be able to shoot your wife if you caught her cheating they won’t actually prosecute someone for knowingly infecting you with a life threatening sexually transmittable disease. I guess Larry was just unlucky all over.
It would be nice to think that this case will change some minds about adultery and unprotected sex but we all know it won’t. It would be even nicer to think that this case might shed some light on the validity of Criminal Sexual Transmission laws in general but that won’t happen either. No, all we have is the sad story of a morally bankrupt man who has may or may not have been infected with AIDS by an equally morally bankrupt woman. Seems like they did a pretty good job of Bringing the Pain to each other whether they intended to or not.
This article originally appeared online at Politic365.com.