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.
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