A BOY DIES IN THE '90S

By LANCE MORROW

In Cambridge, Mass., two men lured a 10-year-old boy named Jeffrey Curley with promises of $50 and a new bicycle. The police said that when the boy refused to have sex with the men, one of them, Charles Jaynes, who weighs 250 lbs., sat on Jeffrey and smothered him with a gasoline-soaked rag. Then, according to the police, the men had sex with the corpse and, after that, bought a 50-gal. Rubbermaid container, sealed the body in it with duct tape and dumped the container into a river on the Maine-New Hampshire border.

The police located the child's body in the river two weeks ago and arrested the two men, who had literature in their trunk from the North American Man-Boy Love Association.

The night the body was found, 500 people from the boy's community packed into an auditorium in Cambridge. It is a measure of our progress as a civilization that the 500 did not get a rope and march on the police station. Instead, they listened to a local child psychiatrist, who told them, "It's beyond our comprehension." The boy's father, a fire fighter, said he hoped the men would be executed. My own mental sentence upon them (before I calmed down) included execution, but was more vivid and, so to speak, Islamic. Massachusetts has outlawed the death penalty, however, and surely would not countenance what I had in mind.

This kind of news is hard to cope with. First comes shock and a flash of retaliatory rage. Then the mind begins to subdue itself to a state of sullen depression--reflecting that these things happen all the time, and always have. There was the double horror just the week before involving first an older man from Long Island and a 15-year-old from New Jersey he had met through the Internet and sexually abused, and second that same abused 15-year-old who then raped and murdered an 11-year-old.

But why should our outrage be dampened, rather than inflamed, by knowing that these atrocities are common? Well, you cannot focus your rage against an evil that is universal. You deepen your sadness with stories--think back to the Leopold-Loeb case in 1924, for example. Everyone in America wanted to hang those two in Chicago for murdering 14-year-old Bobby Franks as a sort of Nietzschean thrill; Clarence Darrow, with a magnificent speech against the death penalty, got the idiots off with life imprisonment. Nathan Leopold was released in 1958 and lived to the age of 66, strolling upon a beach in Puerto Rico.

In the '90s, we oscillate between two moral poles. The left brain says, "Nothing human is foreign to me," a dictum that floats in like elegant driftwood from the second century B.C., when the Roman playwright Terence said it. The line describes the ideal state of today's movie and television audience: a morally promiscuous and passive receptivity, a tolerant consumer's connoisseurship of vice and weirdness.

The right brain, meantime, goes to the other extreme and lays down, "Nothing foreign is human to me"--a thought that is not merely a nice motto for xenophobes, but also points, if you think about it, toward one of the deepest dynamics of human nature. A healthy character, in its raw state, is a nasty little fascist, equipped with an intolerant immune system; it rejects such deeds as the Cambridge murder and necrophilia in the way that a healthy body rejects an invasion of microbes. This vigorous state of mind has no sympathy for what it identifies as alien life forms and thinks such sympathy would be dangerous weakness, a breakdown of a society's natural defenses. In some ways, of course, it is right.

But "Nothing foreign is human to me" is the cry of the lynch mob. The mob does not wish to listen to the psychiatrist--or to the theologian, or to the lawyer. A civilized mind, on the other hand, has all four voices (mob, theology, psychiatry, law) speaking to it at once. That interior argument is confusing.

The theologian in us speaks of evil and has the floor when outrages against children are committed. For evil is a concept that blossoms out of the causeless, and crimes against children seem the least explicable of human brutalities.

The psychiatric appeaser goes to work on causes: if an act can be explained and is therefore part of behavioral cause and effect (well, Hitler had an unhappy childhood, therefore ...), then it does not deserve the name of evil. Which, the theologian replies, is nonsense: the person who did the deed may be a victim himself or may have merely been having a bad-hair day, as someone remarked in trying to figure out Susan Smith's murder of her children in a South Carolina lake. But the deed is, indelibly, evil.

The voice of the law will have to sort the other voices out. And after all the screaming in our mental auditorium, we acquiesce at last to that. But the screaming itself is exhausting. What have we learned from it? Anything new? Perhaps. But even the knowledge is contaminating.