I went to see the film HANNAH ARENDT on the day Richard Ramirez had died. The film had opened in LA that day and I had waited for about two weeks, eager to see it from the minute I read about it. ARENDT has been reduced to her tagline observation "The Banality of Evil" a line that gets shot out a lot but is misunderstood by many who use it and most who hear it.
Richard Ramirez, a murderous, predatory thug was a loser in life, beneath mediocrity in everything he had tried and so he sought to destroy life itself. The buildup to his arrest was a media frenzy in Los Angeles that whipped up an hysteria not seen since the days of the Charles Manson murders. When "The Night Stalker" was captured, his use of satanic slogans and imagery put the local media into overload.
Everyone wants assurances that evil is the other. A loser who destroyed was made to be a mythological monster. A legend of folklore, a boogeyman for the ages. Sexy like a forbidden nazi as he rotted on a death row that is funded but never used. We desperately want our mediocrities masked, overlooked and ignored, because Hannah Arrendt was so right, it is our mediocrity that can do the most terrible things.
Mohammad Atta learned to fly a plane because his rigid, ordinary mind saw a binary world with no possibilities beyond pathetic interpretations of scripture perverted into dogma. Richard Ramirez hunted sleeping prey because the world did not bow to his lazy expectations. The monstrous props, wardrobe and makeup were added later, added by a media we insist turn away from the ordinary.
Our dull evil, our banal acceptance of the regular instead of the excellent, our love of testing and meaning instead of learning and wonder, all of it and more and locked up in our attention span self-imprisonment.
To think and to do so deeply and often and freely questioning our assumptions is thwarted. All of the stagnant apostoses against truth have no devil, no führer, they just have a comfortable structure and multiply the habits we form in returning to that comfort. And THAT is the banality of evil, the plain old ordinariness of the things that cause death, misery and sadness. We run from thinking, scatter from questioning and shirk ever standing up to an absurdity – and we head right to the evil clutches of comfort, the blandest clutch the devil ever invented, but the tightest grip evil has ever held.