The psycho rapist freakshow conundrum / The Dugard story asks: How do you make sense of the ugliest abuses of man?

As a passionately jaded observer of news media and the insane human spectacle it is so painfully wont to wallow in, I find there are always a number of choices when it comes to analyzing something like the horrific Jayee Lee Dugard/Phillip Garrido saga, that sickening kidnapping/rape/confinement tale spanning 18 years, multiple offspring and countless layers of psychological torment often too disgusting and sad to ponder for long without a book of poetry, a puppy and a large glass of Scotch.

Nevertheless, it remains one of the more fascinating and revealing of questions: How do you parse it? What the hell do you do with such bizarre and soul-curdling information? Through what sort of lens do you observe, take in, try to make even a passing hint of sense of such stories? Do you even try?

Maybe you take the easy route. Maybe you, like millions of others, go for the knee-jerk, right-wing reaction and simply say, "Great, another psycho rapist madman. Let's just kill Phillip Garrido right now and be done with it. Or maybe throw him in prison and let him suffer for a while first and then inject him, hang him and zap him with 2,000 volts all at once because he's obviously an unspeakable monster who doesn't deserve another breath on this planet."

Easy, right? It's a hugely typical, mindless, even comfortable sort of all-American pseudo-cowboy response, allowing all sorts of bogus calls for "justice" and retribution while doing absolutely nothing to offer perspective and help you walk down the street with just a little less taste of fear and misanthropy in your mouth. But hey, it's what we do.

Or perhaps you realize the ignorance and small-mindedness of such a perspective, and hence you go a layer or two deeper, attempt to examine such a bizarre spectacle from various socio-psychological angles, try to see how it might fit into the human circus, the Jungian shadow side, the convoluted world in which we live, as you ponder the seemingly endless levels of cruelty the human animal is capable of.

This is where it gets ugly. This is where you start to imagine the worst, the nastiest, the darkest deeds of man, as you begin to tie the Jaycee Lee Dugard story into all the other horrors you've read about over the years, every sort of rape and incest and brutality -- like that recent saga from Austria, the even more horrific tale of Josef Fritzl who raped his own daughter for 24 years and fathered seven children by her and kept most of them locked deep in a homemade suburban dungeon.

But then you get a bit trapped. Because then it becomes all sorts of terribly morbid, horror-movie fun to imagine, in your most cynical fears, that these sociopaths are surely not the only ones, that there are probably thousands more like them who just haven't been caught, living right this minute in all sorts of neighborhoods, maybe even down the street from where you live, maybe right next door, and, gosh, maybe it's more wicked and scary out there than you ever thought possible, and maybe sustained fearful disgust/mistrust really is the best way to endure this horrible little planet. You think?

The unrelenting media coverage, of course, plays right into this perspective, amplifies the fear to such a degree that you think this sort of thing simply must be happening all the time, even if it's completely untrue. Like Internet predators, like porn exploitation, like a hundred other largely bogus cultural terrors that have been exaggerated to the point of undue paranoia, and so we are trained to think the worst. It doesn't really matter if they're often completely fallacious.

Or perhaps you wonder, in your inverse cynicism, why it's always the God zealots, or the right-wing militants, or the gun-loving fanatical loners who seem to be the ones who enact the worst offenses. Isn't there an obvious pattern here?

Why do you never read about, say, that pacifist Buddhist yoga teacher who suddenly snapped and opened fire on a playground? Why is it the worst a hardcore liberal lefty is capable of appears to be, say, hurling a brick through the window of the Nike store, whereas the your average knee-jerk neocon likes to bring his a machine gun to Glenn Beck's Obama-is-a-Nazi pool party?

Again, too easy. Too unsubtle. And completely lacking in the obvious fact that violence and brutality ain't exactly the sole dominion of the religious or the hyperconservative (well, not completely). The potential is, of course, universal. As Joseph Conrad put it, "the bitterest contradictions and the deadliest conflicts of the world are carried on in every individual breast capable of feeling or passion." The real danger lies in denying it.

Or maybe you simply skip over all these options entirely, and choose not to even try and understand any of it at all.

Maybe you saw the Dugard headline itself and said, "No, no way, I am simply not allowing that into my worldview; I refuse to let that kind of poison drip into my daily coffee. There's enough horror and sadness, war and pain, sickness and trauma in the world already without letting some extreme example stab at my spirit." Despite the willful ignorance, this is often the most appealing response of all.

I wish I had the correct answer. I wish I knew which perspective was the healthiest, the safest, the least depressing and spiritually disturbing, while still allowing an examination of the lessons such sagas might hold.

Maybe it has more to do with taking the open-ended view itself, and seeing the Dugard story as simply that: a compelling opportunity to ask yourself how to respond, which perspective holds even a modicum of compassion and humanity. Maybe there is no "right" way to take it all in; there is only a sigh, a shudder, a wincing nod to the demon in us all, and a breathing through.

Mark Morford's latest book is 'The Daring Spectacle: Adventures in Deviant Journalism'. Join Mark on Facebook and Twitter, or email him. His website is markmorford.com. For his yoga classes, workshops and retreats, click markmorfordyoga.com.

Mark's column appears every Wednesday on SFGate, and is frequently cross-posted to Huffington Post. To join the notification list for this column, click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal mailing list, click here and remove three more.

This column also has an RSS feed and a very handy archive page.