It Comes, But In Its Own Good Time
Four weeks ago, I had never heard of Andrew Cunanan.
Three weeks ago, I saw his face everywhere I looked.
Two weeks ago, he committed suicide on a houseboat.
Last week, a producer announced a TV movie about him.
If the speed of this thing surprises you, it’s my guess that you recently immigrated to this country. From Neptune.
Me, I’m not surprised, just confirmed in my belief that notoriety moves upon hummingbird’s wings, a constant thrumming in the air, flitting this way and that in search of the new, the now, the next.
Once, the trajectory of fame described a parabolic arc, ascending, ascending, peaking - then beginning a slow return to earthbound obscurity. Now, fame often has the trajectory of the bullet a drunkard fires into the air at New Year’s - straight up, straight down and forgotten before it hits the dirt.
The punch line to this surreal joke is the ubiquitous TV movie. Supposedly an attempt to frame an event or put it into context, it actually performs the same function as the folks with the push brooms who follow the elephants in the circus parade. It sweeps up the poop.
Oh, we are promised high-minded ideals; the producer of the Cunanan movie even swore with a straight face that it will not be “headline-exploiting.” We’re always told that these quickie flicks, undertaken while the smoke is still rising from the rubble or the caskets still settling in the loam, will help us in the search for answers. Truth is, the only search they help is the one for advertising dollars. Answers require things we can no longer muster.
Patience. Perspective. Time.
But truth moves as truth will and doesn’t much care that we want to know all the facts - yesterday. So we find ourselves all revved up with nowhere to go, chasing down blind alleys of speculation instead.
Indeed, if jumping to conclusions were an Olympic event, we’d lead the world in gold medals.
Consider that two weeks ago, we all “knew” Andrew Cunanan was some kind of HIV-avenger, killing people right and left in his fury at having tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS. Great story, except it turns out Cunanan was never infected.
Truth is like that sometimes. Slow arriving and inconvenient, it has a way of torpedoing our favorite tales.
Remember Richard Jewell? At one time, everyone “knew” the former security guard was a pathetic loser who had bombed the Atlanta Olympics in order to make himself seem like a hero. The Justice Department recently conceded what has long been obvious: The man was railroaded by the FBI.
And there’s more. Remember the Oklahoma City bombing that everyone “knew” was the work of foreign terrorists? Remember the disappearance of Susan Smith’s children that everyone “knew” was an act of random violence?
It is the job of journalists to report truth and the job of both pundits and artists to interpret it, to give it definition and heft. But first you have to let truth emerge, and that’s difficult when you live in the presence of a media monster that demands constant feeding. Nor is the beast particular: When truth is not available, it finds speculation, hearsay and rumor just as tasty.
Speed is the point - feed it anything, but feed it now! Never mind that truth has its own timetable or that without truth, there can be no understanding. So who can be surprised that much of what we feed the monster - and much of what comes out - is junk? It behooves us, as journalists, pundits, artists and people, to remember that, to understand that we often don’t know what we think we do.
Right now, we don’t know Andrew Cunanan. Don’t know why he did it, what forces drove him or what lesson - if any - there is for the rest of us.
Not that it matters. Four weeks ago, I’d never heard of Cunanan and a week from now, he’ll be all but forgotten.
We’re just biding time, waiting for the next show. Meantime, this circus moves on, sweepers scrambling to clean up the mess.
xxxx