There is nothing on this Earth so terrible as a terrible boy. A terrible boy has learned the specifics of cruelty without learning the generality of mercy. A terrible boy worships what is worst in himself and despises what is best. A terrible boy is alienated by his own sense of enmity and seeks connection through the certainties of slaughter. A terrible boy makes even ants his enemies, for he wishes above all to make his enemies ants--and to entertain himself by squashing them both. When a terrible boy closes his hand, he finds a fist; when he opens it, he finds a rock. So terrible are terrible boys that armies the world over have discovered the utility of using them to do their bidding. So terrible are terrible boys that aboriginal tribes used to dispatch them on impossible and solitary missions, hoping they would come back tempered by quest and grown into men. We, who demand something softer from our civilization, have no such uses for terrible boys and no such rituals. Instead, we call them bullies and by new and coming consensus seek to outlaw them.

Was Jonathan Miller a terrible boy? Was he mean enough, hard enough, heartless enough? Did he hate enough? Maybe not. Probably not. Unlike many a terrible boy, he had his sympathies. He loved animals. He loved his family and his friends. He loved the downtrodden and was known to stand up for them when the terrible boys came calling. He was a Boy Scout, for God's sake. He just didn't want to go to school, and, more particularly, he didn't want to go to school in Cherokee County, Georgia. He was from New York, you see. He'd lived happily near Kingston, just upstate from New York City, where he was born. When his father, who worked for a large computer company, transferred to Woodstock, on what used to be the outer edge of Atlanta, he asked to stay in New York with his grandparents. When his parents refused his request, he took on the trappings of the terrible, hoping somehow to achieve by negative means what he cou...