The Mysterious Stranger

Lucifer the angel was cast out of heaven for possessing the properties of God: omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and a property he thought equal to God's omni-benevolence--its opposite, omni-malevolence. The Satan of Twain's "Mysterious Stranger" appears to us in a physical representation, a young Satan (nephew to the biblical Satan) who is able to court three boys. In dealing with their lives, he displays his power to know all things by telling of foreboding doom, displays his power to do all things by responding to their pleas to avoid it, and just as well displays his destructiveness in averting it only by killing them one by one. Satan's perspective still persists, because it'd be hard to refute that his actions are wrong without resorting to mere preference. You disagree with him out of preference toward good, rather than any quantifiable reason.

That is to say, there is nothing strange or abnormal about Satan's approach, particularly in his way of mystifying children--it all seems to make sense on the surface, and because it seems to make sense, it has to come in the guise of a stranger just so people may begin to treat it as hazardous. Had it come in the guise of a parent, then it would have gone unnoticed. Modern society has turned the face of Satan on everyone who would spend even the most nurturing and wholesome time with children only because it puts its trust over its children solely in the recognizable face. The unrecognized face may as well be Satan's nephew all over again.

But the question inevitably remains, are we really all so different? So too have the child molesters been cast out for possessing all the characteristics of those we'd put trust in: those who would lie to children, those who would treat them with less than human dignity, those who would exploit them for personal gain, those who would justify their abuse--all save for the one quality that separates the trusted from the untrusted:  a recognizable face. We tend to think an evil that looks familiar is more wholesome than an evil that is strange to us. Child molestation is strange to us because we can't figure out who could be so evil as to sexually exploit a child, when at the same time, exploiting children for financial gain seems right at home with us.

In the fear that someone might accidentally harm our children, we have let a physical manifestation of Satan go off his chain. He has convinced us of foreboding doom, and we have begged at his side so that he might release us from the grip of destiny, and he has responded in his own way.

The short of it is, we repeat this narrative because we wish to see evil put in its place, and yet only succeed in giving it further legitimacy. By repeatedly flashing the killer's face on the news for dramatic effect, we build him up to the status of folk hero in the eyes of those who are society's equals in ability and opposites in moral compass. By thinking we can solve child sex abuse by pushing all that which is strange to us off to some island in the pacific ocean, we succeed in being ruled by the mysterious stranger among us--ruled by the terrorists we're trying to eradicate. By banishing Lucifer to hell, God gave him legitimacy in knowledge that good will necessarily triumph over evil. We are not gods though, so we are in no position to make that assumption when we do likewise.