Last week I was on an interfaith television programme (as a tame Buddhist) and the subject was capital punishment (which Canada currently bans). Most of the interesting discussion didn't make it on the air, as usual, but we battled it back and forth. Since my opponents were mostly Christian fundamentalists, I pointed out that Buddhists believed in the potential for redemption, which I had always thought was a Christian specialty until recently. This got everyone rolling, and after covering victims rights, and the need to "pay for what one has done", we got on to rituals of sacrifice in various cultures -- the need to reestablish the moral order by cleansing it through human sacrifice. Everyone was very polite: they didn't budge from their pro-capital punishment stance, and I didn't budge from my anti-stance.

This week, Canadians have heard again from Karen Homolka, who was an enthusiastic partner with an equally psychopathic boyfriend in a horrible series of sex killings that make you want to go and be sick every time you read about them. She has recently been awarded a degree in psychology from Queens University pursued while in prison, and while she is awaiting parole is writing letters that say things like: "I have learned to get rid of my mistrust, self-doubt, misplaced guilt and defence mechanisms. I am now completely in touch with my inner feelings. My self-esteem is quite high and I am fairly easily able to deal with confrontation".
Everything I have ever read by her and about her, including this week's letters in the press confronts me with what Hannah Arendt called 'the banality of evil": not some snarling villain, but something much more frightening. All I can think of when I read about her is an image of her mind as a bleak and abandoned parking lot late at night, bright with cold arc lamps, and blotched by dark discoloured stains spreading out on the asphalt. I realize that the part of me that desperately wants to kill her does not want justice, or revenge, or all the things I said on that program: what it fears is the cold antihuman emptiness that seeps out whenever she, and the others like her, surface. I am still against capital punishment: but it is not as easy as I made out on TV.