There are two stories at the top of the news about people who shot other people to death. There are no obvious similarities between the two events. There are nothing but similarities between how the stories are being told to those of us trying to make sense out of the world.

The first is the story of Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who allegedly walked into a village in Afghanistan and went house to house, butchering people along the way. Ever since the army released Bales's identity over the weekend, we have had a spate of stories in which people back here expressed amazement that Bales would ever do such a thing, and also seeking to explain away what is self-evidently a war crime by the kind of banal arguments presented every day in U.S. courtrooms by overworked public defenders. Family problems. Money pressures. Stress in the workplace which, in this case, involved four combat tours in our imperial exercises in southwest Asia, including at least one tour after he'd lost part of his foot and suffered a mild traumatic brain injury, which is yet another thing we didn't care about until it became useful in our efforts to explain the unexplainable and to absolve ourselves of the consequences. It's now going to be Bales's alibi, and our own.

The second is the story of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year old boy in Florida who was gunned down by a "neighborhood watch" commander named George Zimmerman, apparently for the crime of carrying Skittles in the wrong part of town:

According to 911 recordings released late Friday by Sanford police, Zimmerman said the person was walking slowly, looked drugged and appeared to be looking at people's houses. Police would later learn that Trayvon had gone to 7-Eleven during the NBA All Star game halftime to get Skittles and Arizona iced tea.

This is what the local sheriff, a man named Bill Lee, whose job it is to be the ostensible real law enforcement officer for the area, had to say about the incident over the weekend:

Police Chief Bill Lee said that although police do not encourage watch program volunteers to carry weapons, he recognizes a citizen's constitutional right to do so. No arrest was made, Lee said, because there was no evidence to disprove Zimmerman's account. He has cooperated with the investigation and never retained an attorney, Lee said. His phone numbers are disconnected and no one answered the door at his home or his parents' home. His in-laws shooed a reporter away. After death threats and an avalanche of hate mail, Lee said Zimmerman went into hiding. Local station WFTV Channel 9 reported that he showed up with a truck last week and moved out. "We are taking a beating over this," said Lee, who defends the investigation. "This is all very unsettling. I'm sure if George Zimmerman had the opportunity to relive Sunday, Feb. 26, he'd probably do things differently. I'm sure Trayvon would, too."

Got that? The victim would have "done things differently." What things, exactly? Going for the Doritos instead of the Skittles? The Snapple instead of the Arizona Iced Tea? Yes, I am sure that, given the opportunity, Trayvon Martin would do things differently. For example, he would not have gotten shot. But he won't have the opportunity because he's dead, and he's dead because George Zimmerman shot him in the head.

You can see the enveloping ambiguity in both cases begin to soften the edges of the actual events, so as to make them easier to live with. There's a creeping paranoia at the roots of both events. For Bales, it was another trip into a war zone where the lines between friend and foe were utterly blurred, and the search for someone to blame. For Zimmerman, it was the fear of crime that seems to have seeped into that neighborhood like foul water up from the earth, its source the very real economic dislocation abroad in the land, and the search for someone to blame. Someone who "seemed" to the professionally paranoid to be on drugs. Someone who "seemed" to the professionally paranoid to be "looking at" people's houses. Bales and Zimmerman are already halfway to being, if not victims, then people just like the rest of us who simply "snapped" due to circumstances we can all understand, if not excuse. There, but for the grace of god, and all that.

We see the steady construction of an architecture of anesthetic nuance, the comforting embrace of anodyne cliche. It deadens us to the fact that we are a people too violent with each other, too ready to reach for the gun, and all too prepared to go out hunting for the Other who steals our dreams and our futures and our barbecue grills. We tolerate the monsters within ourselves, and the actions of the monsters those monsters provoke, and then we tell ourselves fairy tales to make them go away. And, in that, the country fails, again, what I like to call the Hugh Thompson Test.

On March 16, 1968, Hugh Thompson was a helicopter pilot operating in and around the village of My Lai. After drawing fire from the village in a mission that resulted in his taking two prisoners, Thompson flew off for refueling and then returned a few hours later. From above, he saw many of the people he'd seen earlier in the day lying in a ditch, shot to ribbons. He landed and confronted Lt. William Calley, who was overseeing the slaughter. He and Calley argued and Thompson took off again. Not long after that, Thompson saw a group of American soldiers pursuing another group of civilians toward a shelter on the edge of the village. He landed his helicopter between the soldiers and the fleeing civilians:

Sometime later, we saw some people huddle in a bunker and the only thing I could see at that particular time was a woman, an old man, and a couple of kids standing next to it. We look over here and see them and look over there and see the friendly forces, so I landed the helicopter again. I didn't want there to be any confusion or something; I really don't know what was going on in my mind then. I walked over to the ground units and said, "Hey, there's some civilians over here in this bunker. Can you get them out?" They said, "Well, we're gonna get them out with a hand grenade." I said, "Just hold your people right here please, I think I can do better." So I went over to the bunker and motioned for them to come out, everything was OK. At that time I didn't know what I was going to do, because there was more than three or four there, more like nine or ten or something like that. So I walked back over to the aircraft and kind of kept them around me and called the pilot that was flying the low gunship and said, "Hey, I got these people here down on the ground, and you all land and get them out of here." So he agreed to do that, which I think was the first time a gunship's ever been used for that. There's enough of them there that he had to make two trips and he picked them up and took them about ten miles or so behind the lines and dropped them off.

The country flunked the Hugh Thompson Test even in the case of Hugh Thompson. The Army hounded him out of the service. (Thirty years later, they gave him the Soldiers Medal for what he'd done that day.) One general even said that Thompson was the only one who should have been court-martialed for what happened at My Lai. But the Hugh Thompson Test applies to us all. There are moral boundaries the violation of which no amount of fear and paranoia can mitigate. To absolve murder on that basis is to forgive ourselves through the worst kind of sad vanity. We are not all like that, but for the grace of god, because the grace of god ought not to absolve killers before the law. Which is what Hugh Thompson meant when he told an oral historian, years after he had been strong enough to pass the Hugh Thompson Test...

It was probably one of the saddest days of my life. I just could not believe that people could totally lose control and I've heard people say this happened all the time. I don't believe it. I'm not naive to understand that innocent civilians did get killed in Vietnam. I truly pray to God that My Lai was not an everyday occurrence. I don't know if anybody could keep their sanity if something like that happens all the time. I can see where four or five people get killed, something like that. But that was nothing like that, it was no accident whatsoever. Pure premeditated murder. And we're trained better than that.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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