Looking Past the Headlines
This was written shortly after the murders at Virginia Tech, and modified a few months later. I still hear the phrase “face of evil” attributed to someone, or some thing, new every few weeks on the news.
Evil Has a Face
If the stock market could trade Evil as commodity, it’d be time to buy. These days the “Face of Evil” belongs to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose visit to America was marked by The New York Post headline, “The Evil Has Landed.” This comes after much tough talk from Ahmadinejad, ranging from assertions that The Holocaust never happened to his stated wish that Israel be wiped from the face of the Earth.
The media knows that whenever “evil” gets trotted out, Americans prick up their ears. Last summer, evil wrapped its coils around pro wrestler Chris Benoit, who murdered his wife and family in a testosterone-fueled rage before committing suicide. Or maybe Crandall Canyon mine owner Bob Murray had it right: When the mountain he was excavating in Utah claimed the lives of six miners and another three who died tried to rescue them last summer, Crandall proclaimed the mountain itself to be evil. Typically, “evil” is a tag reserved for sentient beings who ought to know better – the Scott Petersens and O.J. Simpsons of the world. But check the cable headlines every few days and there’s some new culprit clawing from the primordial ooze to spike a teacup with radioactive material, kidnap a child, or set a chunk of California ablaze. Before you can say “Special Bulletin,” the media alarm has us all metaphorically crouching under our desks, waiting for The Big One to drop. To paraphrase mythologist Joseph Campbell, “When you have an invisible cure for a non-existent disease, then you really have something you can sell.”
News editors and producers understand that nothing moves their product like an unexpected bloodletting. And although no one has publicly tallied the financial bump in broadcast ratings and rack sales that occur whenever violence erupts, we can safely guess it’s in the millions of dollars, which is good news since the coverage itself can run into serious money. When the U.S. began its invasion of Iraq, CNN marked the occasion not only with a new set of graphics, but a few bars of iconic theme music.
Apparently, we eat it up. Americans can’t seem to turn away from the faces of mass murderers. But what are we looking for when we peer into their eyes? Here’s Evil Personified, we’re somberly informed, and now you and I are gazing upon it. As witnesses, our first response seems to be to emphasize the differences between them and us – thereby putting distance between their misdeeds and our own more measured responses. Traces of the perpetrator’s individuality are sketched out in a few journalistic keystrokes, progressing quickly to bromides about “cold and distant” loners who were “filled with rage.” In this age of the 24-hour news cycle, their images flicker and taunt us – suggesting that if only we could think long enough, or hard enough, or deeply enough, we’d be able to understand the inexplicable.
Over and again, it’s the same tableau: Our Man on the Scene, clutching a microphone and nodding gravely, allows eyewitnesses to share each piercing detail on the half hour. A click away, a tabloid-trained reporter adds “perspective” as the concerned-but-indignant voice of the people. Then there’s a patchwork biography disguised as a Special Report, to help us identify that tipping point in the perpetrator’s life, followed by the timeline of his or her offense. See, it’s all there in black, white, and color: Another textbook example of evil at work in the world.
It’s easier to dispatch such a complex problem with the simple rubric “Evil” than to entertain, even for an instant, the mystical grace that prevents each of us from wandering into McDonald’s armed to the teeth one sunny morning.
Why do the distant gazes of Adolf Hitler, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Charles Manson haunt us so, and, more importantly, how does it serve us to wonder about them at all, if the most insightful determination we can arrive at collectively is that they’re “evil?” If we must wade into the water of absolutes, shouldn’t such a pronouncement follow a consideration of the events and personalities involved, rather than a pre-emptive conclusion that short-circuits any attempt to think more deeply?
Maybe we find it hard to turn away because we want to discover what it takes to make that leap into infamy. It seems unlikely that these miscreants sat at a school desk behind us and, on career day, considered the plusses of mounting a bloody rampage that ends in blaze-of-glory suicide. Who grows up thinking, “I could be the next Zodiac Killer?” Do we ask, should we – if we aren’t all capable of such carnage were it not for some vital puzzle piece of DNA or socialization? Certainly we guess at what makes them snap; how long they marinated in real or imagined abuse before their psyches were so thoroughly poisoned that their insanity made sense.
In this age of life lived through reality TV, Orange County Housewives grouse that their remodel is behind schedule or the regular massage therapist is on vacation, and our travails all look petty – until one of us goes ballistic. But most of us won’t Lose It. Instead we’ll remain in single file, order the latte, and wrestle privately with our worries and hopes until the next payday. What is it that keeps the Silent Majority from taking up arms against their supposed sea of troubles and by opposing, end them, along with the lives of those they hold responsible? After all, the Columbine Kids were raised among us, as were Timothy McVeigh and Virginia Tech Shooter Cho Seung-Hui. And if we don’t ask ourselves what it all means, not as statisticians or psychologists, but as thinking human beings trying to comprehend our coexistence, then what good is the media saturation we’re forced to endure every time one of us goes berserk? Are we just rubbernecking, the way we still do over 9/11 or the Kennedy assassinations or the Lindbergh baby kidnapping? Are these simply jolting anomalies in the progression of a natural world? Sorting it out is like asking lightning where it likes to strike.
Actually, as a label, “evil” has a connotation similar to lightning striking; it’s totally random, patently beyond mortal control and something neither you nor I are ever likely to encounter. Fine. So what are we supposed to do with we’re confronted with these images when they’re delivered to our doorstep? Become so frightened of our neighborhoods that we keep our kids inside and only allow them out in the backyard to exercise? Enter and leave the house via a locking garage? Post no internet bios and chat online only with people we’ve met in real time? Take up a martial arts course, keep an assortment of pepper sprays handy, and leave no caller IDs anywhere? Surely our insatiable curiosity means more than to rubberstamp the media’s notion of who ought to be today’s Worst Person In the World. The degree of our fixation on these miscreants suggests that they have something vital to teach us –not about themselves, but about us. If most of us don’t want to join the ranks of Evildoers, but some do anyway, where did they slip, and how can we avoid doing the same?
There are more than six billion of us surfing these unstable tectonic plates as we hurtle too quickly through space and life, skidding toward inevitable deaths we can expect to be unpleasant and untimely.
Maybe what we’re looking for in those twisted faces is some reassurance that at least today, we’re not among the evil – or their luckless prey. It’s like the old joke about scanning the obits for your own name before heading out to work. Thank the Deity of your choice (or your own abs-of-steel moral core) that it was someone else out of the six billion of us who twisted off, maybe while you were NOT hunting down that guy in the Escort who cut you off, then flipped you off three exits back. Evil is not a condition or a diagnosis. It’s a succession of choices, made by someone born as innocent as any of us. You deserve congratulations, all right, for choosing compassion even as you rush from appointment to obligation. But don’t kid yourself: You could choose wrong one day, just like the face on the news. Evil forever seeks a new poster child.
