Three years ago, 15-year-old Melanie Ethier disappeared from the small community of New Liskeard. In the fall issue of Northern Ontario's HighGrader Magazine, Brit Griffin reports on Melanie's mother, Celine, and her continued vigil for her daughter. The article proceeds simply, allowing for the fact that we don't really know what it means to have a page of our life pulled out and crumbled. "Beside her," writes Griffin, "I feel small, cramped up with all these fears for my own children. How does she do it? Maybe there is a difference between fearing the worst and facing it down."

Is Celine Ethier closer to understanding the violence we perceive as an ominous entity -- at once everywhere and nowhere? Perhaps there is no understanding, just reverberations, a pin-prick inevitability. The article is an attempt to come to terms with our perception of senseless crime overwhelming us, without falling prey to dubious paranoia. It is a rare moment of lucidity in an otherwise frenzied collage of murders, rapes and disappearances; events that are never real to us, coming into our minds as images, statistics, hyper headlines.

"TV violence ... linked to suicides of two boys," goes a familiar proclamation. If only it were this simple: Don't watch this show, 'cause if you do, you'll kill yourself (or someone else). Burlington, Ont.'s Kevin Pearce knows better. In his juvenile, grotesque, hilarious zine, Subliminal White Trash, he cannily satirizes those who think violence is nothing more than a narcissistic charade -- boys acting out because they want to be action figures or cartoons. One story in the zine, The Portrait, tells about a man who receives a sketched portrait of himself. Delighted with the handsome portrayal, he runs out and makes five copies of the drawing. Then he robs a liquor store and several gas stations, each time handing out the portrait. "Hopefully," writes Pearce's manic alter ego, "my face will grace the cover of the next day's newspaper. I want to share this beautiful portrait with the world!"

It is Pearce's strange twilight -- where our cities are generally safe, our lives are usually comfortable, but our minds seem to perpetually seethe with the possibilities of violence and terror -- that gives rise to the "new resistance" as set out by Colorado's Paladin Press. In their fall catalogue, Paladin hawks books that equate individual freedom with the capacity for destruction. Hot titles include Identity, Privacy, and Personal Freedom: Big Brother v. the New Resistance, and such hands-on 'resources' as The Fighting Submachine Gun, Machine Pistol, and Shotgun. ("When the metal starts flying, you want to know how the weapon in your hands is going to perform!") Books on homemade bombs and silencers merge eerily with books on disappearing (including the third edition of Reborn in Canada -- "the best book available on obtaining a new Canadian identity.")

In addition to being a highly entertaining -- and ominous -- 83 pages of casual reading, the Paladin Press catalogue is also the kind of document that shows just how far we can take our misperceptions. The creeping pseudo-violence portrayed in newspapers and television shows and represent- ed by Melanie's disappearance is everywhere. Ergo actual violence is everywhere. Ergo we must have the right to fight back against this mythical violence -- with the myth of violence. Here we equate anonymity with the right to violently defend ourselves against everything from faceless governments to random home invasions. The "new resistance" feeds off our perception of violent crime as ubiquitous, inevitable, but not quite real. The message of Paladin is clear: To combat that which threatens us, we must become what we most fear. Trapped in this closed circle, the crime rate can drop even as we clamour for more police and jails, and exuberant reports of heinous crimes pour gasoline on our smouldering sense of danger and vulnerability. As Celine Ethier puts it: "You worry and worry, it just eats you up inside, it doesn't protect you."