Dealing with the Devil.

Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller: Evil.

I could barely stand to read this.

Police Find Molester's 'Stunning' Records
Notes in binders may detail hundreds of victims over 30 years, San Jose authorities say.

Meticulous records kept by a convicted child molester indicate that he may have had hundreds of victims in five states, Brazil and Mexico over more than 30 years, police and prosecutors in San Jose said Thursday.

"Assuming these numbers are remotely accurate, these are far and away the most stunning, over-the-top numbers I've ever seen in terms of potential victims," said San Jose Police Lt. Scott Cornfield, commander of the department's sexual assault investigations unit.

Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller, who has a molestation record stretching back to 1970, apparently used several aliases and never registered his whereabouts as required with authorities, so his name did not appear on Megan's Law databases, police said.

Schwartzmiller was arrested last month in Snohomish County, Wash., where he is believed to have fled after a San Jose couple told police that their 12-year-old son had been molested by the 63-year-old plastering contractor. Detectives said subsequent investigation revealed that Schwartzmiller is believed to have molested another boy in San Jose.

Officers said Schwartzmiller lured the boys to his San Jose home with gifts, then showed them movies and videos before sexually assaulting them.

During a search of the home, officers found seven binders containing the first names of hundreds of boys, said Steve Fein, a deputy Santa Clara County district attorney.

"There were codes," Fein said.

"In some cases, he'd put nicknames," Cornfield said. "He had titles of categories: boys under 12, boys over 14, cute boys, some specific act, boys who have said no."

In all, the binders contained 36,720 listings, but many of them were repetitive, Cornfield said.

As to the exact number of youngsters who were molested, "it's anybody's guess," the police lieutenant said. "There's a good likelihood there could be hundreds of victims."
…

No invective even comes close.

If true, this monster is the Stalin or Hitler of molesters. A committer of crimes that any number of others have committed, but done with such relentless premeditation and focus and with such terrible scope, that there are really no also-rans. Where the criminal becomes sui generis and the individual victims -- each one a tragedy -- dissolve into a sheer cliff-face of pure statistical horror, climbing so far into the sky that we can't make out the peak of it.

So three things and only three things do I think I can say about this with any competence.

First, with rare exceptions, child molesters don’t stop until they are stopped. This is the lesson that the Jackson people and the Catholic church seem to be unable to grasp at an almost cellular level -- molesters need to be partitioned away from children, in some form or fashion. To be contained.

Acquitting them back into their sick lives will not stop them. Rotating them out of one parish or school or postal route and into another -- with or without admonitions -- will not stop them. It will, in fact, just open up new ecosystems to their predation. Child molestation is not really a "sex" crime in any normal sense of the word; as rape is about power and control and violence, and not about sex, the molestation of children is about power and the corruption and despoiling of innocence.

Second, on a general note, those who want to conflate the molesting of children with homosexuality need to shut the fuck up and need to be denounced in clear, declarative sentences by their political and religious fellow travelers. Molesting little boys has no more relationship to gay sexuality than raping little girls has to do heterosexuality, and trying to link the likes of what this monster has done to hundreds or thousands of children to anything that goes on privately and victimlessly between consenting adults because it offends your particular religious sensibilities has got to stop.

Last, and most importantly, is the question that I think has haunted a lot of us with special resonance since 9/11; how shall we deal with Evil?

It always seems simple at first blush: After 9/11, I confess I wanted Afghanistan bombed to glass. I wanted everyone who had ever had lunch with Bin Laden's nanny fed through a rusty woodchipper until somebody delivered him to us...alive. And what we are doing to prisoners at Gitmo is 5-star hotel treatment compared to what I wanted to see us do to that ratfuck on live television.

Night after night.

And in that way, my entirely human and entirely justified rage made me vulnerable.

Once I was willing to say "Fuck the law; kill ‘em all" I delivered myself briefly into the hands my true enemies. People for whom rage and revenge -- especially righteous rage and revenge -- are not end’s, but means. Political tools.

People who have trained all of their adult lives in the arts of redirection and misdirection, who take you one step at a time on a journey so easy that you don't even notice the gentle slope downward the path is taking.

Geneva Conventions and due process (and for some even a five-day waiting period to buy a gun) seem the Devil’s own tanglefooted encumbrances, because I'm mad right now and if we don't act right now -- even if “acting” means lashing out in entirely the wrong direction – we’re terrified that the Bad Guys will get away.

Except for some, it’s not the wrong direction at all; the course into which our rage has been channeled was carefully planned and carefully executed by men who knew exactly what they were doing.

These are the men (and women) who speak disparagingly of human rights for our enemies, and talk about "law enforcement" as if living by a code of civil conduct and enforcing it in as fair and impartial way as possible were some kind of Commie invention designed to sap our precious bodily fluids.

Law and the rule of law is not the enemy; they are the tools of a democratic society that keep us safe from our enemies -- ALL of our enemies; Foreign AND domestic. -- as slow and imperfect as the machinery may be.

We want fast justice…by which we mean thunderbolts of terrible retribution raining down on everyone who ever looked at us cross-eyed. And once we lower that bar, we get fucking speed all right. Jesus Christ do we get speed: things move so fast we can hardly believe it.

We get wild, reckless retribution as fast as a rocket, and we end up in entirely the wrong country, shooting at entirely the wrong people, for entirely the wrong reason.

We see otherwise nice, rational gentlemen and ladies explaining impatiently in tones usually reserved for scolding retarded children why torture and rendition and murder are peachy keen, A-OK…just as long as the objects of our rage are really, really, really deserving.

And just to sauce the goose a little more, the Gods of Coincidence decide to interject a Senate Resolution into this terrible vortex – one that proposes that the Senate apologize for refusing to condemn Lynching. Because once upon a time a whole lot nice, rational gentlemen and ladies tortured and rendered and murdered 4,700 American citizens and thought that it was peachy keen, A-OK…because the objects of their rage were really, really, really deserving...

…and no one on the Right slows down long enough to notice the dreadful irony.

And so here we sit, half the country begging the other half to sober up, wake up and look at what is actually going on, and the other half desperately trying to suck a little bit more hate from the cork of the bottle we opened such a long, long time ago.

Way back when President Bush decided to use our understandable rage and legitimate fear to con the nation into let him do something very wrong.

Back when that bottle of righteous bloodlust seemed so endless, bottomless. We could stay drunk on it forever, and like all drunks, our reasons for living deep in our cups were perfectly plausible. We were virtuous in our mania, so we believed morning would never come and we would never have to explain to anyone the blood on our shirt…

…on our hands…

…on our teeth.

But the morning always comes.

Always.

At the high end of that seductive, intoxicating path of swift, sweet retribution you find cheering crowds, real villains, high-flown rhetoric and demagogues patting you on the back and encouraging you to take another step, then another, and to run a little faster. And then a little faster still.

And then it becomes a blur

And then a flip-book of ghastly images that you don’t dare look at too closely -- and the road you’re on angles sharply downward, and sooner than you could possibly imagine you find yourself at the bottom of a dark mountain, in the presence of the mob, the tree and the torch-lit visage of Judge Lynch, with his nigger-necktie in one hand and his Bible in the other, waiting just for you.

We all get drunk on outrage from time to time, and believe me, for purely personal reasons if for no other, nothing would be more satisfying to me than to see this child molesting sociopath slow roasted on a spit for a few weeks before being draw and quartered. It’s perfectly natural, but it’s an impulse that only barbarians and totalitarians seek to enshrine.

That slow, maddening and imperfect instrumentality of the Law –- the right to a trail, to a lawyer, the right not to be tortured, to be treated fairly even when you’re an enemy and our prisoner, to be secure in our persons and our papers, to keep the machinery of government scrupulously secular and fair and, yes, every other last inconvenient bit of it that you learned about in Junior High School -- and the setting of the Law above the Whims of Men is all that keeps us safe from our own murderous rage.

It’s the price we pay to keep us from losing our way and falling forever into darkness.