June 01, 2003
BANALITY OF (alleged) EVIL
Australia’s alleged wooden stake hijacker isn’t a fundamentalist Muslim psycho - he is, in fact, a teetotal Catholic Hawthorn-supporting car fiend:
Mrs Brennan said Robinson was quiet and seldom had visitors to his neat brick home.
"He was a loner. He had a couple of mates over but not girls. He had a higher faith than me, he would often quote from the Bible. He was very bright."
A non-drinker, he had few hobbies but occasionally drove his white sports car to Hawthorn to barrack for the Hawks.
And he was previously employed in IT. A Hawk Geek!
Posted by Tim Blair at June 1, 2003 03:28 AMI used to work at a computer games company. I hate to stoop to facile steriotyping (bzzt! lie!), but I knew about twenty programmers there who were one mental twitch away from flinging sensiblility to the wind and riding the Crazy train like there was no tomorrow.
It's the profession. It sucks and it drives people nuts or kills them or both.
Though having said that, this guy was married and had at least nominal access to at least one woman, which makes him like no computer programmer I ever heard of. When she ditched him he probably sat down in front of the computer and thought "Well, this is my life now" and that's what did it.
In those circumstances, looking around and noticing some object that could be carved into a wooden stake to stab a Quantas flight attendant and hijack an airplane is actually kind of a stroke of genius. I only hope would have that kind of presence of mind.
Posted by: Amos at June 1, 2003 at 03:50 AMHannah Arendt's banality of evil refers to ordinary decencies and courtesies, like kindness to animals, which is how you get the biggest killers of dogs being humane societies. Goodness that goes public, in short.
Posted by: Ron Hardin at June 1, 2003 at 04:21 AMAm I alone in thinking that this guy might have thought there was a vampire on the plane?
Posted by: Jeremy at June 1, 2003 at 12:09 PMEverybody seems so concerned about the possibility of the airline passenger sitting next to them being armed with a wooden stake.
What about poor Melbourne tram users like me, who are often confronted on the way to work by garlic-breathing vampire slayers?
I ask you to decide which is more dangerous.
Posted by: Adrian Luca at June 1, 2003 at 12:44 PMHoly crap! And here I was thinking he must be a Magpies fan...
Posted by: mark at June 1, 2003 at 02:13 PMHmmm.... a non-drinker. I should have guessed. It is notable that the "God" of the Koran is the same "God" of the Catholics.
Conclusion: Non-drinkers (a.k.a. abstainers) whether they be Muslim, Catholic, or otherwise, are the bane of our society.
I mean, imagine waking up first thing in the morning, and KNOWING that this is going to be the BEST that you will feel all day.......
Posted by: Thorn at June 1, 2003 at 03:31 PMCatholics are non-drinkers now? Does this mean I have to give up bourbon?
(And do Catholics and Protestants now worship a different $deity all of a sudden?)
Posted by: mark at June 1, 2003 at 05:25 PMI still think he was upset over the season finale of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."
Posted by: Tatterdemalian at June 1, 2003 at 10:36 PMCatholic does not equal non-drinker. The Catholic religion includes drinking wine as part of the actual mass, how different from non-drinking can you get?
But of course, anyone who has ever heard of Italians or Irish or French already knew that.
Posted by: Patrick at June 2, 2003 at 12:44 PMWow! The world's first sober Catholic. With an inherent contradiction like that, no wonder he went nuts!
Posted by: Korgmeister at June 2, 2003 at 02:21 PM