Eric Rudolph and The Lone Wolf

Eric Rudolph Composite SketchI 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.

Is this fireman a little too happy?

This firetruck is a Melissa & Doug puzzle our son used to play with.

Happy Fire Engine

I was staring at the puzzle the other day, in an odd moment of nothing to
do. And it dawned on me that perhaps one of the firemen is a little too
happy?

A Happy Fireman - Click for a larger image

Now, I’m not the kind of person inclined to see a phallus in the Washington
Monument or genitalia in a whiskey advertisement, but I couldn’t help
but thinking that in another context this fireman’s body language might
be read a bit…uh…suggestively?

Puff the Magic Cereal Box

A while ago I posted a few pics of my cereal box wall. I still occasionally come across a cereal box worth photographing, even if it’s not in wall form. Here is “Organic Wild Puffs”—one of the trippiest cereal boxes I’ve ever seen (larger version).

Decorated in faux-Aztec imagery, the box suggests a cereal that is part Fruit Loops, part mescaline hallucinogen.

And the box admits as much: not only is there a play on the word puff, there is also a play on the idea of addiction: the cereal is “habitat forming.” (The company donates a percentage of profits to the National Wildlife Refuge Association.)

In DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney calls cereal boxes “the only avant-garde we’ve got” in America. Looking here at the drug references, quetzalcoatl icons, and vivid coloring, I’d say he might be right.

Tony Soprano Did Not Get Whacked

It seems that public opinion is shifting toward the idea that Tony Soprano was whacked in The Sopranos series finale after the screen went black. That possibility can never entirely be ruled out, which is part of the brilliance of the abrupt, unsatisfying final seconds of the series.

I want to suggest, however, that the blank screen signifies something other than Tony’s death.

In fact, the final seconds of a black screen forever hold Tony’s death in abeyance. It can never happen now. But more fundamentally, the sudden disruption of the Journey song, the disconcerting jump cut to the black screen—these remind us that we are watching television, that our visit with Tony has been mediated all along. Think of the the sudden silence and black screen as a kind of Brechtian moment of estrangement, shocking the viewer out of the usual mode of passive consumption.

We might think of the entire episode (called “Made in America”) as a contemplation upon the habits of the television-watching public. Upon a second viewing, this theory seems obvious, as multiple times we either catch characters on The Sopranos watching television themselves or we the viewers are forced to watch a TV within a TV:


What to make of all this, aside from the commonplace grievance that our lives are mediated, that representation has replaced reality? I think Chase is doing something far more politically charged here. Note that the final shot of a television shows President Bush, famously dancing in April 2007. Chase is clearly mocking Bush, who becomes a Nero figure, fiddling while Rome burns to the ground. When you consider the dozens of references to the War in Iraq and the deadly SUVs in this episode (the Ford Expedition smashing Leotardo’s skull and A.J.’s firebomb of an Xterra), it doesn’t take much to imagine that Chase is making some very serious indictments about American arrogance and American hypocrisy, embodied in everyone from President Bush down to Anthony Soprano, Jr.

Add in the fact that the only things the characters watch more intently in this episode than television sets are gas stations (where Leotardo might use a pay phone), and we have an explicit political statement about Bush’s follies abroad:

The juxtaposition of the American flag and the Gulf truck is surely intentional. As is the display of the American flag every other time in the episode a gas station appears.

Chase seems to be proposing an antidote to the Bush administration’s own mediation of itself, which links Bush to patriotism by always placing him near a Stars and Stripes.

By replacing Bush with the gas station, Chase lays bare the nature of the relationship between the United States and the War in Iraq. It is about oil.

But to say this is to say nothing new. So Chase makes it fresh by making it subtle. He again catches us off guard—so focused are we on those 11 seconds of black space where Tony and his family should be at the end of the episode, we do not recognize what’s really going on. Instead of asking what happens to Tony, we should be asking why are there seven flags at this gas station?

More of the Cereal Box Wall

Eventually the cereal box wall had to come down.

I wish I had a picture of that sight but I don’t. It was a mountain of empty cereal boxes, hundreds of them on my dining room floor in the sad little Pheasant Run apartment complex, where I could see and hear the four lanes of the Ohio turnpike out my bedroom window. All I have is this second photograph (larger image), taken from a different angle in 1995.

Needless to say, I was a bachelor at the time.

The Cereal Box Wall

I used to eat a lot of cereal. A lot. Three or four bowls a morning, every morning at 6am just before I went off to teach the teeming hordes of America’s youth at an all boy’s Jesuit high school.

At one point I got sick of throwing out all those cereal boxes–this was 1995, long before curbside recycling became the norm. So I began collecting the boxes, and eventually I had enough to cover an entire 10×8′ section of an interior wall in my apartment.

I snapped a few pictures of this wall, with what camera I don’t even remember. At some point in the past twelve years, again, I don’t remember, I scanned the photos (larger image). And these are the only evidence that once, in Toledo, Ohio, there was a wall of cereal boxes.

Speaking up for Jerry Falwell

Last week I posted a video clip of Jerry Falwell in 1998 delivering a sermon about the potential apocalypse of Y2K. In the clip, Falwell tosses off a weird aside about how he used to teach billy goats to “do what they’re best at.” It was a funny clip, especially out of context. In a similar vein I had prepared another clip, from the same series of sermons. In this clip, Falwell means to be talking about natural disasters, but he goes off on a tangent about boxing:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDDSKUouQ6Q]

Again, a funny clip, especially out of context.The first clip has been viewed several thousand times (helped no doubt by its mention on BoingBoing). I was pleased so many people watched the video, but I was unprepared for the kinds of comments people left on YouTube. A few were innocuous, a few were clever, but most were simply hateful. Far more hateful than anything Falwell himself ever said. And that’s saying a great deal, considering Falwell was a close-minded bigot peddling fear and willful ignorance based upon an uninspired and incompetent interpretation of the Bible.But the things you people said. They were just mean. Whereas my clips are examples of ironic juxtaposition (say, a homophobic preacher revealing that he likes to watch big sweaty men “get with it” in the boxing ring), the comments on YouTube were spiteful, vengeful, and punctuated extremely poorly. Most were gleeful that this man had died. And most wished that in death, Falwell was due for worlds of pain, usually involving hellfire, and usually involving defilement by one or more farm animals.

I deleted the offensive comments and closed off the page to any more comments.

I don’t see this as censorship so much as good taste. However poor his grasp of biblical scholarship, however provincial his worldview, Jerry Falwell was, I believe, at heart a decent man. By all accounts he was not a moral hypocrite, as so many other famous televangelists and preachers have turned out to be. So, I say, it’s a case of hate the sin (ignorance, antisemitism, xenophobia, etc.) but love the sinner.

And that’s coming from someone who doesn’t believe in either heaven or hell.

Jerry Falwell on Y2K and Goats

In September 1998, Jerry Falwell delivered a series of sermons about the impending social collapse soon to be delivered to a wicked nation by the “Millennium Bug” — that is, the disaster that never disastered, Y2K.

In the sermons, Falwell likens the Tower of Babel to Y2K, and prophesizes that “God may use Y2K to crush us and prepare us for revival.” And oh, yeah, he talks about goats too.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPoItVbNels]

Are you a guest or a host?

Thinking more about fugitives and detainees, and how fine the line is between them, I am wondering if there is some corollary relationship between the detainee and the detainer, between the prisoner and the warden.

I am guided here by a curious etymological fact: the words “guest” and “host” share the same root. Both words are derived from the Latin hostis, meaning “stranger,” or more precisely, “enemy.” In medieval Latin, hostis came to mean “army” or “warlike expedition.” And this is similar to the original meaning of “host” in English–“an armed company or multitude of men.”

What does this tell us?

Every meeting between a host and a guest is a possible enemy encounter.

And the distinction between hosts and guests can blur, or fade entirely.

Fugitives and Detainees in American Social Life

Two years ago in Tracking the Fugitive I predicted that one of the dominant symbolic figures of the 21st century will be the fugitive. In film, literature, music, art, video games–in all these arenas, the fugitive will play a central role. And the reason, I suggested, is because there is no room anymore for fugitives in our society. With technologically-sophisticated corporate and state apparatuses tracking every move, every transaction, it’s nearly impossible now to become a fugitive, to live life “off the grid.” And the more difficult fugitive life becomes, the more legendary fugitive figures become. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White put it in their classic study of the grotesque and carnivalesque, “…what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central.” So the more marginalized and rare fugitives become, the greater role they play in our symbolic repertoire. The image of Osama bin Ladin, for example, has much more narrative power than the actual man. He’s become a kind of boogeyman for the 21st century.

As for fugitives in our own country, Eric Rudolph was perhaps the last great American fugitive.

The fate of Rudolph–in permanent solitary confinement in the ADX Florence supermax in the Rockies–tells us what stands as the antithesis of the fugitive: the detainee.

Detainees come in many forms: the prisoners held in federal and state supermaxes across the country (in addition to Rudolph, ADX Florence alone houses Ted Kaczynski, Terry Nichols, Richard Reid, Zacarias Moussaoui, and many other former fugitives); the “illegal enemy combatants” held in Guantánamo without writ of habeas corpus; the undocumented workers rounded up by ICE and held in makeshift internment camps like the one in Raymondsville, Texas.

And what is the relationship between fugitives and detainees?

As the fugitive becomes one of the dominant images in American cinematic, literary, and folk culture, the detainee will become one of the dominant figures in real life.

The principle works under a law of inverse visibility. Detainees, for all their sheer number, will be virtually invisible to the mainstream media.The more detainees held indeterminately in detention centers, internment camps, and black ops military barracks, the less visible they will be. In their place stands their opposite: the fugitive.

Detainee should be the watchword of the 21st century, but it won’t. Instead, the fugitive will dominate the stories we tell ourselves about the modern world.

KUBARK on 24

Jane Mayer, an uncompromising journalist who’s become a thorn in the side of the Bush administration (for her reporting on current U.S. torture tactics and the method of “extraordinary rendition”), has written a New Yorker profile of Joel Surnow, one of the creators of the hit television show 24. Her profile focuses on Surnow’s support of torture and his show’s over-reliance on what security experts call the “ticking time bomb scenario”—a hypothetical situation used in 24 to justify torture, but which has never occurred in real life.

In her article, Mayer reveals that “several copies of the C.I.A.’s 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual can be found at the ’24’ offices.” I find this simply amazing. The KUBARK manual, which I mentioned in an earlier post on the CIA , is infamous for its straightforward tips on how to conduct coercive interrogations. Even more amazing, the lead writer for 24 admits that most of the torture scenes in 24 are not inspired by the CIA. Gordon tells Mayer, “for the most part, our imaginations are the source. Sometimes these ideas are inspired by a scene’s location or come from props—what’s on the set.” Gordon goes on to say that he (and reportedly Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Jack Bauer) are running into torture “fatigue.” They’re getting tired of it.

Maybe they should, as U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan (who also happens to be the dean at West Point) suggests, “do a show where torture backfires.” Because in real life, that’s what happens. Not only is torture illegal and unethical. It simply doesn’t work.

Here is Mayer herself, talking about torture in 24:

Disaster Porn: Airplanes Crashes!

Google Maps Mania recently highlighted a website that should satisfy your urge for disaster porn during that dry spell between hurricane season and tornado season: AVCRASH, a Google Map mashup with aviation accident (i.e. plane crash) data from the National Transportation Safety Board. You can narrow your search by time period, location, type of aircraft, even number of fatalities.

ScreenShot003.pngSo I know, for example, that on 1/13/2006, a Piper PA-30 went down near Fresno, California, killing the pilot and all three passengers.

The NTSB’s full report, conveniently linked to the map, tells me further (and get ready for the soft core disaster erotica) that “Vertical aft accordion crushing was evident on the forward engine.” Oh, baby. And then there’s this sexy image: “The right propeller was located approximately 3 feet from the right wing tip and buried in soil.” That is so hot. But what about some wing-on-wing action, can we have some of that? “The empennage section was circumferentially buckled 3 feet forward of the vertical stabilizer.” Omigod, it’s better than “Planes Gone Wild Seatac Style”!!!

Okay, I admit it, I’m being a tiny bit facetious (though those quotes are real). The disaster porn really doesn’t do much for me. But it must for somebody out there. Why else would you go to all the trouble to make AVCRASH?

I know! To sell airplane insurance!! It makes perfect sense, in a bizarro world, to entice potential customers to buy your aviation insurance, when you enable them to see in such grueling detail all the things that can go wrong when you go up in a plane. Why, the kind people at Aviation Marine Insurance have even included a handy “Get Quote” button on the bottom of the map.

Maybe later. I’m too busy right now drooling over the way the “left propeller was examined, still attached by two flange bolts to the left engine.” Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Goodbye 2006, Goodbye US Airways

It’s been one long fall. And it’s finally come to a close. Late December is when everyone comes out with their “best of” or “worst of” lists, so I thought I’d throw together a few lists. There’s no best and no worst, simply a snapshot of some of the things that made life as a commuting professor so grueling these past five months (and which explains why I haven’t posted in weeks). Come to think of it, this is more like a Harper’s Index than a proper list…

Number of novels read and taught since the beginning of August: 13

Number of those novels featuring characters named Asa: 2

Estimated average length, in pages, of each novel: 400

Estimated number of student papers read, in pages: 1,950

Estimated time spent grading those papers, in hours: 975

Percentage of students who “stopped attending” (as the registrar puts it) but were still registered for my classes: 8

Frequent flier miles earned since August: 54,484

Number of peanut butter jars confiscated by TSA screeners under the “no liquid” ban: 1

Percentage of successful smuggling attempts of lip balm aboard aircraft: 100

Number of times the 9 volt battery, digital watch, stress ball, and random twist-tie in my carry on baggage were mistaken for bomb components: 1

WWJB?

Click the image for a larger photo

What would Jesus blog? It’s a question theologians have pondered for centuries. But the answer, finally, is here.

Yes, the Prince of Peace is back, and he’s online.

Blogging under the cryptic pen-name “Long Haired Jew,” Jesus tackles the issues of the day, such as terrorism (although he’s no Pope Benedict), global warming, and of course, what it’s like to be a bobble-head.

And for all you doubting Thomases out there, consider these divinely-inspired lines from Jesus’s blog:

There is a lot of debate going on about being “good stewards” with all of our natural resources. I admire many of your motives for wanting to keep the world pure and wanting to make sure there are plenty of resources around for generations to come.However, please don’t get carried away. This world was created for you. Use the resources wisely but do feel free to use them. Our Father knew what he was doing when he put the resources in place. They weren’t put there to never be utilized.

[…]

By the way, I didn’t mind walking everywhere but man oh man what I could have done if I would have had one of those SUV’s. The four-wheel-drive would have come in handy in those hills around the Sea of Galilee.

There you have it. Truer words have never been spoken. Unless you count all that Sermon on the Mount stuff, but who pays attention to that anymore anyway?

By the way, here’s the postcard Jesus mailed me. Direct mail–what an improvement over those old school marketing techniques, like that matted-hair, bug-eating, bearded, wait-where’d-you-go-with-my-head, prophet in the desert thing his cousin John had going.

Click the image for a larger photo

Now if only Jesus had a myspace Facebook page, he’d really be hip.