SAMPLE REALITY

Eric Rudolph and The Lone Wolf

I have often suggested that Eric Rudolph, who for five years successfully evaded the largest federal manhunt in U.S. history–until he surrendered himself to a rookie sheriff’s deputy in the alley behind a local supermarket, exemplifies the modern fugitive. The fugitive summons forth the great machinery of government: scores of armed agents, ballistic tests and DNA samples, barking dogs, search ‘copters, infrared flybys. And as he eludes it all, he becomes legendary, a folk hero. No matter how heinous his crimes, the figure of the fugitive is alluring. Alluring, because a lone figure trumps the power of the state. Alluring, because he just disappears. And that is something that is increasingly impossible in today’s world.

Given my interest in Rudolph, I devoured Maryanne Vollers recent journalistic account of the lengthy Rudolph investigation, Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph: Murder, Myth, and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw. Vollers incorporates hundreds of sources, including conversations with many of the lead investigators, Rudolph’s family, and written interviews with Rudolph himself. The book is enlightening in many ways, especially Vollers’ behind-the-scenes descriptions of the ego battles and in-fighting between government agencies, some of which probably contributed to Rudolph’s initial escape into the mountains of western North Carolina.

Vollers’ account is riveting, in part because it reads like a police procedural–an extended episode of Law & Order. However, this blow-by-blow treatment of the Rudolph investigation and trial contributes to the book’s greatest weakness, which is its light treatment of Rudolph’s life on the lam. So focused on the state and federal investigation into Rudolph’s crimes, the book pays short shrift to the Rudolph’s actual experiences on the run. For the most part, the reader concludes Lone Wolf without knowing how Rudolph spent his five years of fugitivity.

We do learn how Rudolph survived, nutritionally-speaking, and these daily acts–eating ground salamander bones, scrounging from Taco Bell dumpsters–should disabuse us of the glamour of life on the lam, but in fact, we learn little about the larger strategies of escape and evasion in the mountains. What about the close calls with the tracking dogs, the sleepless nights slipping past hunters, the breathless chases across ravines and gorges? About these moments of the manhunt, Rudolph has remained silent. Perhaps these dramatic twists, so fitting for a Hollywood blockbuster, never happened. Perhaps they did. Rudolph does not say, and so Vollers cannot say. In this way, Rudolph’s aura as a fugitive sustains itself and outlives his actual fugitive life. The mystery of his long disappearance lingers. “Where I’m hidden, they’ll never find me,” Rudolph reportedly told George Nordmann in the only confirmed sighting of Rudolph during the entire manhunt, six months into his life on the run. Indeed, though Rudolph later let himself be found, the fugitive is still hidden.

Tags: fugitives, national security, terrorism

Add comment September 19th, 2007

The Futility of Rowing

I’ve never seen a more fitting description of a rowing machine than in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man:

There was no fitness center in his hotel. He found a gym not far away and worked out when there was time. No one used the rowing machine. He half hated the thing, it made him angry, but he felt the intensity of the workout, the need to pull and strain, set his body against a sleek dumb punishing piece of steel and cable.

DeLillo captures the essence of the rowing machine: more than any other piece of exercise equipment, the rowing machine is a punishment, a throwback to the ancient days of galley slaves. But here the Barbary overlords with their whips and chains are internalized. Beset only by his own thoughts, the exerciser rows for dear life, chased by nothing and chasing nothing.

The rowing machine is a self-imposed disciplinary sentence. With every stroke, one’s very life seems at stake. It’s like trying to outrow death itself. A strenuous workout on a rowing machine is as close to drowning on dry land one can come.

It is also a pointless endeavor, and for DeLillo’s character, who has become a professional gambler in the wake of 9/11, its pointlessness is its very point. In true gambler fashion, he “half hates” the thing yet continues to submit to it. The anger it provokes is all that matters.

Tags: DeLillo, Literature, torture

Add comment September 17th, 2007

Art and Terror in the Arctic

It’s a good thing that August had record temperatures — seemingly endless days over 100 degrees — because I spent part of the month reading Dan Simmons’ leviathan novel The Terror, a semi-historical account of a failed bid in the 1840s to chart the legendary “northwest passage” through the frozen arctic.

Simmons accomplishes much in his 800 pages — supernatural beings stalking the ice, arrogant British explorers ignoring nature and common sense, a landscape both barren and hostile, sailors succumbing to scurvy and cannibalism — but what stands out is the cold.

A hundred degrees below zero cold.

The painting on the cover of the hardback edition of novel (shown above) goes a long way toward capturing this alien, frozen wasteland and the suffering and wonder it provoked. The painting is Magdalena Bay, by the 19th century French artist Auguste François Biard (larger image). The painting, which is now in the Louvre, shows the aurora borealis from a bay on the Arctic island of Spitzbergen. In the foreground are five figures, presumably explorers, who are either dying or dead:

Biard painted this fantastic, morbid scene after he participated in a scientific expedition to the Arctic in the 1830s (in which nobody died), and he seems to foreshadow, in an oddly Romantic style, the ill-fated journey of the HMS Erebus and Terror in the 1840s (in which everybody died). It is quite easy to imagine that the men in Biard’s painting are the same men who Simmons has dying by the dozens…from exposure, from botulism, from pneumonia, from tuberculosis, from scurvy, and from murder.

In line with the Humanism of the time, the French expedition, aboard the French corvette La Recherche, included both scientists and artists. The hope was that the artists would create works that documented the expedition as well as inspired the citizens back home about the value of exploration and discovery. The artists had an implicit pedagogical mission: to teach people that scientific progress is worthwhile, that extending the limits of human knowledge is brave, vital, and beautiful. Of course, Biard’s painting would seem to suggest that it’s also dangerous, that for prideful men the drive to chart the uncharted can be pure folly.

There is a contemporary project reminiscent of the Recherche expedition’s melding of art and science: David Buckland’s Cape Farewell Project, which takes photographers, writers, sculptors and other artists on voyages in the arctic. A report on NPR described the origins of Buckland’s project:

Buckland had been talking with scientists about global warming–and he was convinced they needed help to communicate what they knew about the way the world’s climate was changing. Now, after three voyages to the Arctic for his Cape Farewell project, Buckland believes the artists have lived up to his expectations.

While I like l’art pour l’art, I also like art with a mission, and I think Buckland and his fellow artists (which includes notables like Ian McEwan and Gretel Ehrlich) are following a noble purpose. I can only wish there were more collaborative efforts between contemporary artists and scientists. Instead of a teacher aboard the space shuttle, send a sculptor. Forget the reality TV camera crews on Sir Richard Branson’s latest exploit; send a sound artist. Don’t be satisfied with mapping an underground world, design one of your own

Tags: art, Literature, terror, Travel

1 comment September 6th, 2007