Perhaps the best explanation yet of the behavior of Olympic-bomber Eric Rudolph comes from John Hawthorne, whose wife Alice was killed in the 1996 explosion. “Little person, big bomb,” Hawthorne was quoted as saying by the New York Times, and speaking directly to the misogynist racist homophobe (not to mention redneck urban legend) Rudolph at his sentencing he added, “But you are still a small man.”

Sentenced to life, Rudolph tried out a note of contrition (“I would do anything to take back that night”) that had been sadly lacking from past court appearances. Still, he addressed only the Olympic Park bombing, in which he also wounded over a hundred people, and not the bombings of two women’s health clinics (in which six people were injured) or the bombing of an abortion clinic (in which an off-duty police officer was killed and a nurse injured) or the bombing of a gay bar (in which five people were injured) — presumably because Alice Hawthorne was not a gay woman seeking an abortion. He deeply regrets his error.

That Rudolph might get in touch with the Christian principles he claims to adhere to in prison is perhaps too much to hope for (and the vengeful side of me would rather he got in touch with a sadistic weight-lifter in the prison yard) but you never know. A few years ago, when a Palestinian terrorist decided not to set off the explosives she had strapped to herself in a square in Jerusalem, her Israeli captors elected to have her speak to the American press about her change of heart. What had happened? In English she answered simply: “I look at the people. I look at the sky.”

For some things you don’t need a rocket scientist.