A Good Man is Hard to Find

I think it all has to do with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the misconception that the government is obliged to provide those things or has the jurisdiction to deny them. We’ve gotten away from the principle that they were only created to secure those rights. And that’s where, I believe, much of the trouble has surfaced.

This seemingly reasonable statement that undoubtedly would be agreed with by many was made by Timothy McVeigh, the bomber of children, innocents, by-standers and government employees at the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. It raises the interesting question of "Psychological Homogeneity", the notion that people who are deranged in a small way are likely crazy all over.

A recent movie about the Craiglist Killer created a picture of him as a complex--but not necessarily contradictory--man mainly through the sympathetic depiction of his attractive fiance who wandered through the story planning her wedding, in complete ignorance of her husband-to-be's criminality; she never suspected a thing.

Ted Bundy, of course, was a charming guy well liked by everyone who met him who moved though the young female population in the United States like a infectious fatal illness. He actually can be tracked by the statistical deviations in the deaths of young women as he travelled from Florida to the West Coast.

Ted Kaczynski was a bit peculiar--he was terrible shy--but he graduated from high school at 16, listened to Vivaldi and Bach, got a PhD from the University of Michigan in mathematics and was regarded as a very bright social critic. The fact that he mailed letter bombs for 7 years to the homes of total strangers, killing and maiming them with the risk of doing the same to their families, did not seem to fit. Moreover, like Bundy, Kaczynski always had supporters, the former because people--particularly women--simply couldn't believe the charges against such an attractive man and the latter was admired by people, particularly academics and artists, who saw the murderous but presumed anti-technological acts as somehow less of a crime, somehow forgivable in a poorly articulated intellectual way. (One attack on David Gelernter, one of his victims, by Joyce Carol Oates was particularly bizarre.) People Magazine made him one of The Most Intriguing people of 1996.

Norman Mailer campaigned for the parole of Jack Abbott, a career criminal who had sent him essays on the prison system. He was paroled in 1981 and his book of the essays, In the Belly of the Beast, was published the same year. The New York Times gave it a terrific review but, unfortunately, Mr. Abbott saw fit to kill a waiter in an argument in a restaurant the same week and was sent back to prison.

This is a serious problem. One would like to think that a homicidal maniacal necrophiliac would give you some hint sometime between the appetizer and the coffee. More, one would hope that once the mask was off and the evil revealed for all to see, so many people--particularly intellectuals, those self appointed guardians of our zeitgeist--would not be ambivalent.