My hero: Columbo
In the latest issue of the magazine Intelligent Life (a publication by The Economist, see the website here), Robert Butler writes that environmentalists are often irritating, because their arguments are most times one-sided communications.
Butler advises that ‘we’ (by this he means the environmentalists) should engage with others in a more humble way and try to open the conversation by inviting them to look at the issue from our standpoint. Columbo often does this by very modest way saying that ‘something’ has been puzzling him, keeping him up al night. The other person, usually a upper class murderer who thinks he can outwit this crumbly looking older man, in a kind of arrogant way complies with this invitation to look at the mystery through the vision of the detective. In this way, the millionaire killer often convicts himself, not seldom because he underestimates Columbo.
So the way that Robert Butler advizes the Greens to act more like this American-Italian police man amused me.
This week, I saw an episode of Columbo on cable. He was talking to a collegue, a forensic specialist who was working for more that 15 years on murder cases and he thought he had commited the perfect murder. Within the next 30 minutes of this episode, Columbo will get this man to admit he has killed the victim.
Columbo askes his collegue, who by then was not an official suspect yet, to visit the crime scene with him.
“I think I will go to the place again where the murder took place. Will you come with me? Three eyes will see more than one.”
