A good death
May 3rd 2011
He had kind eyes.
They were brown and glowing, and seemed to be brimming with compassion, empathy, and a touch of mirth. They were the eyes you might expect to see in the face of a Buddhist monk, the lady who runs the local Toys For Tots program, or a Hollywood priest.
He was almost certainly the man responsible for 9/11, the worst crime ever committed on US soil, a crime that killed 3,000 people in one hideous day.
I know about the dangerous charm of sociopaths and demagogues, and so the eyes shouldn’t have been so jarring. The most lethal monsters in the history of the world were nice fellows, often jolly, and made people adore as well as respect them. The fires and deaths and screams would come later, after they had achieved unassailable power. Everyone knows about the power of Hitler’s oratory, but it was his ability to charm and create trust that put him in the position where he could become the horror he was. It’s downplayed in the history of the Third Reich, but there were literally millions of women in Nazi Germany in the 30’s who would have gladly abandoned their husbands and lovers and families for a chance to have his baby. Just as England had the far more benign “Beatlemania” thirty years later, Germany had “Hitlermania”. When Stalin died, millions of men who had been shunted into the Gulags on trumped up and Kafkaquese charges wept openly in their cells. They had lost, not just a leader, but a friend.