Incomprehensability as a kind of neurological affliction

convoluted thoughts on matters unrelated to baseball or the legal definitions of negligence, of which I have little present understanding, prompted by reading the news reports on the Jenna six in LA and the deTocquevillian commentaries that followed in their wake -

1) Do you think Reginald Denny ever harbors in his heart a desire to watch the footage of the day he got bricked? Or, more pointedly: a desire to encounter each of his attackers lying prone on the street, asphalt chunks at hand, with no witnesses? I've been thinking about Reginald Denny, in fits and spurts, for about two weeks now. As far as victims of irrational mayhem go, he's both emblem and enigma. I have no particularly strong interest in examining what thoughts might permeate the collective consciousness of a riot, though I did - at 14 - think the Sublime song about the riots was worth listening to. (That says more about 14 year olds than artistic defenses of otherwise indefensible behavior, but . . .) It does seem odd to recall that "environmental factors" were cited as an affirmative defense, if not justification, of what was clearly a brutal act inflicted on a stranger in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong skin color. Ok, then, the other coin's side: what about the guy who did the bricking? Does he brag about it to his friends or regret it in a way that might signal more than the most minimal sliver of atonement?
Is atonement an all or nothing proposition, or does it exist on a spectrum of possibility?


2) A crime that lingers in my memory -

the family doctor, accused of sexually molesting his foster daughter, pleads guilty. at sentencing, his wife stands up and berates the judge, an instance of courtroom drama that reignites the town's internal debate, which has been as about contentious as Midwestern small town debates can be. The local paper covers the story and righteous indignation spills over in letters to the editor invoking violations of the public trust and "what has the world come to?" lamentations. I read it all, eating a bowl of Lucky Charms and feeling uncertain about things I didn't really even want to contemplate but knew, at 12 or 13, were part of what ideas like "justice" and "sin" were all about.
And none of the publicity or whispered conversations in the aisles grocery store overcame the central fact that all the actors in the drama were known to us. This is the guy who diagnosed the six or seven cases of strep throat I came down with as a kid, stitched up cuts, set a broken finger, etc. He seemed like the archetype of the friendly, compassionate small town doctor (Cf. Field of Dreams); the ring finger on his right hand was gone, severed in a farming accident. The divergence between the man I knew and the man portrayed in the paper were paralyzing and created a tension beyond anything even a cursory inquiry into the illusion/reality distinction could bear. Weeks go by, and the story goes dormant, except for the occasional mention of the case by a teacher or adult.
Years later - probably close to a decade even - I learn that a sizable portion of the adults I knew, including those who vilified the doctor in public, had come to the conclusion that he was not the story's villain, but its veiled martyr. According to the revised version, the doctor's biological son, two years older than me, was actually the molester. The doctor confessed to the crime he didn't commit to spare a son he would from then on no longer be able to face. He goes to jail, does his time, and he and the rest of the family meet with the son once a year at Christmas but have no contact other than that. The wife's outburst at sentencing becomes intelligible, if only as a symptom of the fundamentally fucked truth to which she alone probably has access and from which nothing good could be gleaned. When I first heard all this, from a mother of a friend who was more like a brother, growing up, I couldn't really breathe and even now the attempt to parse it all out, as a thing that actually happened, proves to be too exhausting.