But even those traits are not particularly unusual in today's world.
It was my bad luck to learn that he was also cunning, violent, and someone who obtained gratification from causing others to suffer. Undistinguished in his career, unexceptional in appearance and demeanor, there was nothing about him that would make him stand out in a crowd. I knew little about him before the attack, and have not seen any reason to find out much more since then. The man who raped me conforms all too faithfully to this pattern. Hence the frustration of biographers who peel away layer after layer of the psyches of history's greatest criminals only to discover, in Gertrude Stein's words, that there is no there there. Bonnie and Clyde were, respectively, a part-time waitress and an unsuccessful turkey thief. Adolf Hitler was an awkward nonentity, his stock of knowledge drawn from the early 20th-century Viennese equivalent of the Reader's Digest, with herbicidal bad breath and an over-large nose to divert attention from which he grew a still more ridiculous mustache. But the perpetrators of even the most atrocious deeds seem to have nothing in common beyond their personal insignificance.
Even petty offenses can be interesting, like the wave of kidnappings of lawn ornaments for ransom in the northeastern United States a few years ago. Great crimes have a grandeur to them, a dramatic sweep that compels our attention. It's not evil that's banal, it's evildoers.
