Gazing into Dennis Rader's eyes

JWR ^ | 9 Mar 05 | Leonard Pitts, Jr.

[xzins]

"Smiling faces show no traces of the evil that lurks within." — from a song by the Undisputed Truth

Did you search for murder in Dennis Rader's eyes?

I certainly did. He looked disheveled and disgruntled, as anyone might in his or her mug shot. But did you see anything else? An unsettling gleam like the one in Charles Manson's eyes? The remote coldness that lurks in Theodore Kaczynski's? Did you see murder in Rader's eyes? ....It's a judgment call, of course, but I didn't. He looked like Joe Blow's cousin, a fat, balding white guy of late middle age, the kind of person you'd pass a million times on the street without registering that he was there.

.....(snip)

It's a profile that, I think, brings us face to face with what the writer Hannah Arendt meant when she subtitled her treatise on the Holocaust "a report on the banality of evil." ....snip

Think of all the perpetrators of the Holocaust whose names were not Hitler, Himmler or Eichmann — ordinary shopkeepers, farmers and housewives who simply averted their eyes, chanted the slogans, allowed themselves to be swept up in fervor and in doing so went along with the extermination of a people.

[OKSooner]

Later read.