thedailytimes.com : Your 24/7 news source

There's little dour enough in the world today that a fix of Southern Culture on the Skids won't cure.

Tuesday morning, after watching the ongoing coverage of the Channon Christian/Chris Newsom tragedy, I turned to the band's "Liquored Up and Lacquered Down" CD, hoping a handful of fun tunes about big-haired women, cheap motels and corn liquor would take my mind off of what I'd seen.

As entertaining and rollicking as SCOTS is, however, it couldn't quite put the horrible details, the heart-wrenching testimony, the sheer weight of it all out of my mind.

East Tennesseans have been riveted by the trial this week of one of the men accused of the crimes. Round-the-clock news coverage and up-to-the-second updates on Twitter have shared with us every agonizing final moment of life the young couple endured, along with every tear and outburst and sob and expression of grief of their loved ones.

Riding down the road to work, I try to make sense of it all, as I always do with the dark and malevolent side of human nature, and I find myself coming up short. I lack the words to properly express how devastating it was to watch Ms. Christian's father talk about his daughter's death, silent and unwitnessed while he and others searched for her a few hundred yards away.

I don't know the man; didn't know his daughter or her boyfriend. I don't know the accused, or their friends and family members. All I know is that when someone commits such a crime, I find myself wondering what it is about us, as human beings, that make us capable of such basic indecency.

It's unfathomable to me what can become so corrupt, so feral, so ... evil that one person could perpetrate such torture on another. We hear about such brutality all the time, but this ... this is different. There were no war-time conditions, no premeditated resentments, nothing financial to gain. It was just wrong, pure and simple. And to most of us who live our lives without acknowledging that such evil walks and lives and acts among us, it's an abomination. We recoil, and yet we can't turn away.

As a father, I try to put myself in his place, and I can't even approach that mental door. To imagine my own son dying in such a brutal, demeaning and animalistic manner makes me curse my own imagination, and my first instinct is to pull him close, hold him so tightly he can barely take a deep breath and never let him go. Even whispering those fears to myself makes my head take an immediate leap to thoughts of great and terrible vengeance, the kind with no mercy and no regard for the consequences.

On the flip side of that coin, I try to put myself in the place of the parents of the accused, and all I can think about is the devastation of the heart and mind to find out a child is capable of such horror. The accused in this week's trial didn't get the death penalty, but to his family, I'm sure he's dead already. Not because they shun him or wish it upon him, but because he's been found guilty of crimes so fundamentally opposed to basic human nature and decency that it probably feels like he's been replaced by a demonic doppelganger, like the man they know and love has been an imposter all along.

To top it all off, my heart is twisted even further when I read the comments left by members of the public on various Internet bulletin boards and message forums. While most are expressions of sorrow and condolence to the families of the victim, many others spew the same venom and hate and bile they target the accused of having. They call for his rape and death in prison, relish the tortures of eternal damnation they say he'll face after death and rail against the jurors in the case for what they believe is a lack of spine.

It's all so ... wrong. I can't think of any other word to describe it -- it's a stain on our collective human heart, a blight on the harmony we do our best to contribute to and maintain on a daily basis. Everything about this case is a tragedy at the most primal of levels, and while the families of those directly involved will never, ever be the same, we all come away with it marked in one way or another.

Personally, I'm still processing it all, rolling it around in my head even though I wish I could forget and pondering its meaning even though there just may not be any. All I've been able to figure out is this -- nothing, not even a good-time band of North Carolina hillbillies who throw out fried chicken when they play live, can take a person's mind off of what we've gone through in the past week, and what we'll continue to endure until all of these trials reach their end.

Steve Wildsmith is the Weekend editor for The Daily Times. Contact him at steve.wildsmith@thedailytimes.com or at 981-1144.