“What kind of meaning would you expect this to have? The guy was a parasite,” Derf tells me, his mouth still half-filled with Cheerios. “He gave nothing to society, and his effect on me is pretty negligible. What is there to learn? These questions seem like bullshit to me.”
Which brings us back to little red-haired Sarah…
“I really must say that I feel sort of ambivalent about the whole Cowboy Mike situation,” Sarah tells me over the phone. She has just finished her second beer of the night, but she does not seem drunk; her boyfriend is trying to fall asleep in the other room. “In a way, I think you care about this more than I do. Because honestly, I would say my knowledge of serial killers is slightly below average.”
This is funny for two reasons. It’s mainly funny because Sarah has inexplicably concluded that there is (a) a universally accepted level for serial murder knowledge, and that (b) she somehow falls just below the national median. But it’s also funny because it’s true; if I didn’t keep bringing it up, I sometimes think Sarah would completely forget she danced with a man who might have killed her if given the opportunity.
“That night was actually something I tried not to think about for several months, and I guess I succeeded,” she said. “It initially seemed strange in the sense that I suppose I could have ended up like one of those women on those Lifetime movies who are always getting beaten. Had I been single, something terrible could have happened that night. I certainly can’t imagine that I would ever have gone home with that person, but I can imagine maybe having a cigarette with the guy. He was really a gentleman. And he didn’t so much seem creepy as much as he just seemed unusually skinn y.”
Well, great. Serial killers aren’t necessarily spooky; they simply have high metabolisms. And they like to watch Footloose. And to know them means nothing, even if it does. Apparently, there is no one on earth who needs to meet a serial killer more than me; only then will I realize these people are meaningless. Get ready, all ye lonely hitchhikers. My car awaits your empty eyes, your random perversity, and your hand of perpetual doom. One way or the other, I need the truth. The next dance is mine, Cowboy.
(Timothy McVeigh interlude)
Timothy McVeigh was executed on June 11 of 2001. Around the time of his execution, the Chicago Tribune ran a breakdown of all 168 people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. Here are some examples of how the victims were mentioned:
Donald Earl Burns Sr., 63, taught woodworking for many years.
John Van Ess, 67, played national championship basketball as a student at Oklahoma A&M.
Karen Gist Carr, 32, was a member of Toastmasters International.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of those details. However, as I read and reread every little bio on the list, I found myself deflated by the realization that virtually everyone’s life is only remembered for one thing. J. D. Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye; for all practical purposes, that’s it. He may as well have done nothing else, ever. As time passes, that book becomes his singular legacy. He’s certainly famous, but 98 percent of the world doesn’t know about anything else he’s ever done. Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin; every other element of his existence is totally irrelevant. Bill Buckner let a ground ball go through his legs in the World Series and cost the Red Sox a championship; in fifty years, everything else about his career will be a footnote.
This doesn’t just apply to second-rate celebrities, either. It’s equally true for normal citizens (case in point: Oklahoma City bombing victim Oleta Christine Biddy was undoubtedly a complex human, but the readers of the Chicago Tribune only know that she “always had a smile on her face”). Beyond your closest friends, you can probably describe everyone you know with one sentence.
I think this is what motivates people to have children. Everyone agrees that creating life is important, so having a child guarantees you’ve done at least one act of consequence. Moreover, it extends the window for greatness; if your kid becomes president, your biography becomes “the parent of a president.” The import of your existence can be validated by whoever you bring into the world. But this doesn’t always work. In fact, sometimes it makes things worse. Which is why the most depressing thing about the Oklahoma City bombing is that there’s now an innocent woman whose one-sentence newspaper bio will forever be, “She was Timothy McVeigh’s mother.”
16 All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers 1:95
As of the writing of this particular book, I have 43 “close friends,”[65] 196 “good friends,”[66] and 2,200 “affable acquaintances.”[67] Due to the circumstances of my chosen existence, almost half of these people—somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 percent—currently work (or once worked) in some sort of media capacity. This means that the other 60 percent do not (or have not). This being the mathematical case, I feel as though I have a pretty solid grasp on the communication industry, as I have ties to both (a) the people presenting the news and (b) the people consuming it. And it has been my experience that they all pretty much hate it.
I would never try to convince someone not to hate the media. As far as I can tell, it’s a completely reasonable thing to hate. Whenever I meet someone who feels a sense of hatred for a large, amorphous body—the media, the government, Ticketmaster, the Illuminati, Anna Nicole Smith, whatever—I fully support their distaste. It’s always better to be mad at something vast and unspecific and theoretical, as these entities cannot sue you for defamation. But here’s my one problem with media bashers, both inside and outside the journalistic profession: They inevitably hate the wrong things. Just about everyone I know who has problems with newspapers (or magazines, or CNN, or Ted Koppel, et al.) is completely misdirecting their anger.
You say you want to hate the media? Fine. I happen to love the media, and I think it’s just about the only organism in America that works more often than it doesn’t. But if you’re truly serious about finding things to hate about your local newspaper, and you want to write letters to the editor that will actually make valid criticisms, I will help you.