Why Did Lance Morrow Create a Dark Willard Who Adds Up Evils on TV in NYC...in 1991?

I think there should be a Dark Willard.

In the network's studio in New York City, Dark Willard would recite the morning's evil report. The map of the world behind him would be a multicolored Mercator projection. Some parts of the earth, where the overnight good prevailed, would glow with a bright transparency. But much of the map would be speckled and blotched. Over Third World and First World, over cities and plains and miserable islands would be smudges of evil, ragged blights, storm systems of massacre or famine, murders, black snows. Here and there, a genocide, a true abyss.

"Homo homini lupus," Dark Willard would remark. "That's Latin, guys. Man is a wolf to man."

Dark Willard would report the natural evils -- the outrages done by God and nature (the cyclone in Bangladesh, an earthquake, the deaths by cancer). He would add up the moral evils -- the horrors accomplished overnight by man and woman. Anything new among the suffering Kurds? Among the Central American death squads? New hackings in South Africa? Updating on the father who set fire to his eight-year-old son? Or on those boys accused of shotgunning their parents in Beverly Hills to speed their inheritance of a $14 million estate? An anniversary: two years already since Tiananmen Square.

The only depravity uncharted might be cannibalism, a last frontier that fastidious man has mostly declined to explore. Evil is a different sort of gourmet."

My mom sent me an email a couple weeks ago with one of Lance Morrow's essays on evil attached to it. She said she was a bit spooked after she'd read it late that night after stumbling across it in her files on Shakespeare.

Part of what's so weird about it is how seemingly random the reference to this futuristic Dark Willard TV news guy in Morrow's otherwise hard-hitting, historical, philosophical essay...after that start to the article he never references Dark Willard again...he never references "a" Dark Willard again. And isn't Dark Willard shining a light on evil by nature of his job?

There are entire essays about this Dark Willard. Maybe the name's simply an obvious reference to Willard Scott as some of those essays contend anyway.

It would be an honor to talk with Mr. Morrow about evil regardless, so I don't know what else to do but ask my bookers to reach out and see if we can get him on the show.

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