“Believe it not, I consider Dahmer something of a tragic figure,” Derf once told me while munching on a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. “My relationship with him ended just before he killed that first guy, but I honestly believe he could have been stopped. Some adult could have stepped in when he was younger, I think, and changed the path he was on. But the moment he actually killed someone, any sympathy I might have had for him disappeared. When he crossed over to the other side, he became a monster to me, and he deserved a bullet in the back of the head.”
Certainly, there is something paradoxical about Derf’s assessment of Dahmer. His portrait of J.D. in My Friend Dahmer aggressively humanizes the killer, often to the point where he becomes almost likable. However, the moment Dahmer took someone’s life, Derf says his perception suddenly mirrored that of the rest of America. And as our conversation continued, I started to suspect Derf’s relationship with this guy was a little more complicated than even Derf was aware of. This was particularly clear when I asked him if he was glad that Dahmer went to Revere High. My specific question was this: If we concede that Dahmer was destined to commit these crimes regardless of where he grew up, would Derf have preferred that Jeffrey been raised in someplace like Cincinnati or Dayton, thereby making him someone he never knew? Or is he happy that—if someone had to go to the mall with the young Dahmer—it was him?
“Well, since I’ve led an exceedingly dull life in all other regards, having known Dahmer has certainly been periodically interesting and sporadically surreal,” he answered. “For example, last night I was watching one of those Saturday Night Live reruns on Comedy Central. It was an episode from one of the really bad years. But there was this skit where a guy is singing some stupid song, and he mentions Jeffrey Dahmer. And it suddenly hits me that he’s talking about a guy I used to pass in the halls every day. That never stops being strange, I guess. But is it really interesting? I don’t know. I mean, how interesting would it have been to have known Michael J. Fox in high school? It’s kind of the same thing.”
It’s noteworthy that Derf mentions Michael J. Fox as a metaphor for knowing Dahmer; Nuzum made a similar comparison when discussing John Wayne Gacy, but his metaphor was Cameron Diaz. I suspect this kind of celebrity analogy is common. However, part of me deeply disagrees with the accuracy of those comparisons, and here’s why: The fame a serial killer achieves is a sicker—but more authentic—brand of fame. There are thousands of thin young women in Hollywood who wanted to be Cameron Diaz, and hundreds of them could have done exactly that. There are five hundred girls who could have had her career. There is nothing inherently special about Cameron Diaz; until she made a movie, she was just an attractive person. At some point, she became Cameron Diaz. But Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t become Jeffrey Dahmer the first time he killed somebody. That’s always who he was. Derf claims he “turned into a monster” the day he killed his first victim, but I think that’s mostly just what he’d like to believe; more than almost anyone, Derf knows that Dahmer was always just a guy who couldn’t (or at least didn’t) relate to the normal boundaries of right and wrong. To know that kind of person is to know the darkest kind of power. To me, that has to mean something. But Derf will always disagree with me.
“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.
1. It should be noted that certain experts disagree with me on this point; some are prone to classify one genre of serial killers as “mission-oriented,” which means they aspire to kill specific people (such as hookers) in order to improve society. Other classifications include “visionary motive” types (who imagine voices inside their head), “thrill-oriented” killers (who find the process of murder exciting), and “lust killers” (who actively get a sexual thrill from torture and execution).
2. One of the Zodiac’s many coded missives included a reference to the semi-esoteric mathematical concept of “radians,” which are 57.3-degree arcs used to calculate circles (2 x pi radians = 360 degrees). Amazingly, it turns out Zodiac’s victims were always found at perfect radian intervals in relation to the summit of nearby Mount Diablo. It does not appear that this could be a coincidence, especially since one of Zodiac’s victims was a cabdriver who was instructed to drive to a specific location before being shot. This kind of “evil mathematical genius” behavior is part of the reason some people erroneously suspected that Unabomber Ted Kaczynski had been the Zodiac Killer as a younger man.
3. In fact, Eric gets kind of annoyed when people dwell on the fact that Gacy sometimes dressed as “Pogo the Clown” and performed at children’s birthday parties. “I think the clown stuff is really overdone,” he says. “He was just doing that as part of a civic group—it was really just an outreach of his political involvement.” Weirdly, this is true: Gacy was a political junkie who was once photographed with then–First Lady Rosalynn Carter. You’d think the GOP could do something with this.
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,”1 196 “good friends,”2 and 2,200 “affable acquaintances.”3 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.
Don’t Worry About Agendas.
Worry About Random Circumstance.
This is—indisputably and in arguably—the biggest misconception people make about the media. Everybody seems to be concerned that journalists are constantly trying to slip their own political and philosophical beliefs into what they cover. This virtually never happens. And I am not being naive when I say this; it really doesn’t happen.4 There are thousands of things that affect the accuracy of news stories, but the feelings of the actual reporter is almost never one of them. The single most important impact of any story is far less sinister: Mostly, it all comes down to (a) who the journalist has called, and (b) which of those people happens to call back first.
Are media outlets controlled by massive, conservative corporations? Well, of course they are. Massive conservative corporations own everything. Are most individual members of the media politically liberal? Absolutely. If talented writers honestly thought the world didn’t need to be changed, they’d take jobs in advertising that are half as difficult and three times as lucrative. So—in theory—all the long-standing conspiracies about media motives are true. But—in practice—they’re basically irrelevant, at least in the newspaper industry. There is no way the espoused Aryan masterminds who run the world can affect the content of any daily story; they usually have no idea what the hell is going on with anything in the world, and certainly not with what anyone’s writing about. I worked in the Knight Ridder chain for four years, and I never got the impression that the CEO read anything, except maybe Golf Digest.
The media machine is too bloated to “manufacture consent.” What filters down from the queen bee is nominal; there is no successful macro agenda. Meanwhile, individual reporters—the drones who do all the heavy lifting—tend to be insane. Being a news reporter forces you to adopt a peculiar personality: You spend every moment of your life trying to eradicate emotion. Reporters overcompensate for every nonobjective feeling they’ve ever experienced; I once got into a serious discussion over whether or not the theft of a live fetus from the womb of a kidnapped pregnant woman could be publicly classified as a “tragedy.” What civilians in the conventional world need to realize is that journalists are not like you. They have higher ethics and less common sense. For example: Let’s say somebody was trying to pass a resolution that created stricter pedophilia laws. Most normal people would think to themselves, “Well, I’m against kids being molested and so is everybody I’ve ever met, so—obviously—if I was asked to write a story about this resolution, I’d make sure people understood it was a positive thing.” Reporters never think like this. A reporter would spend the next three hours trying to find an activist who’d give them a quote implying it was unconstitutional to stop people from performing oral sex on five-year-old boys. Journalists aren’t trying to tell you their version of what’s right and what’s wrong, because anyone who’s been a reporter for five years forgets how to tell the difference.
That’s why the biggest influence on the content of most news stories is simply who calls back first. Most of the time, that’s the catalyst for everything else that evolves into a news story. Since breaking the news is a competition-based industry, almost everything is done on deadline—and since journalism is founded on the premise that reality can only be shown through other people’s statements, reporters are constantly placing phone calls to multiple sources with the hope that all of them (or at least one of them) will give the obligatory quotes the writer can turn into a narrative. That’s why the first person who happens to return a reporter’s phone message dictates whatever becomes the “final truth” of any story. Very often, the twenty-four-second-shot clock simply runs out before anyone else can be reached; consequently, that one returned phone call is all the information the journalist can use. And even when everyone else does calls back before deadline, the template has already been set by whoever got there first; from now on, every question the reporter asks will be colored by whatever was learned from the initial source. Is this bad? Yes. Does it sometimes lead to a twisted version of what really happened? Yes. But it’s not an agenda. It’s timing.
Don’t obsess over the notion of insidious politics creeping into your newspaper. Leftist crackpots and faceless corporate hacks rarely affect the news. High school volleyball games affect the news—or at least they do if a reporter’s kid happens to be one of the players. You see, high school volleyball games often start at 6:30 P.M., so that reporter is not going to wait at his desk past six o’clock to see if his phone rings. His wife will kill him if he does. Or maybe he does wait for that call; maybe he skips his daughter’s game because he really needs the mayor to return his phone call in order to technically say “no comment” about an issue that the reporter already knows the mayor won’t comment upon. Maybe our steadfast reporter waits and waits and waits, and at 7:20 he decides to get a Dr Pepper. This requires him to walk across the newsroom to wherever they keep the vending machines, and—while he pops his quarters into the pop machine—his phone rings. It’s the mayor. But maybe the mayor hates using voice mail, and maybe the mayor inexplicably assumes this reporter is actually a bleeding-heart socialist, so he hangs up without leaving a message. Two hours lat
er, our metro reporter still doesn’t have his obligatory “no comment,” so the newspaper’s metro editor tells him that the story needs to be held for at least one day so that they can get a response from the mayor. But twenty-four hours later, a hospital catches on fire, and that fire becomes the day’s major news event. Meanwhile, the story about the mayor is suddenly old news, and—because of the fire—it’s no longer on the front page; now it’s buried on page B3. Most readers won’t even notice it. But a handful of people who hate the mayor will notice it, and they’ll assume the newspaper buried this story on purpose, either because (a) the reader is liberal, so he or she thinks the paper’s aging Caucasian owner is in cahoots with the mayor, or because (b) the reader is conservative, so he or she thinks the liberal media is trying to raise taxes and mandate abortions and keep the tax-happy, baby-killing mayor in power. And all of this has nothing to do with politics, and it has nothing to do with agendas. It has to do with some guy wanting Dr Pepper. And shit like this happens all the time.
Distrust the Proper People.
Über-idiotic people tend to think of the entire newspaper as one organism; they think that stories, columns, editorials, and advertisements are all exactly the same. Mildly intelligent people understand that there’s a difference between what’s on the front page and what’s on the OpEd page. However, only a select few are aware that most of what’s in a newspaper is either fact-plus-fiction or truth-minus-fact, which evens out to be just about the same thing.