Rollin' On The River

I’m shocked, SHOCKED, that all the deep thinkers who are bringing us the raw facts of the story concerning Michael Devlin and Shawn Hornbeck out of rural Missouri do not have even the wit or cultural perspective to put the story in its historical context.

And I’m not talking about Count Metternich or the Congress of Vienna, or the War of the Roses in England, but plain ol’ Mark Twain and the kids running away from home in that neck of the woods in the nineteenth century. Every American knows the story, but in the knucklehead world of modern society they have forgotten even our own culture, which is not that complicated to know.

These are the facts of the case, Your Honor: Shawn Hornbeck was sick of being dogged by his mother. Wash your face, go to school, do your homework blah blah blah…

One day this guy drives by in his pickup (or SUV, whatever…) and asks the kid, “Can I give you a lift?” Once the kid is in the car, the guy, who is lonely and has the mind of a child, says, “Let’s go play video games at my house.” He gets some pizzas (after all he manages a pizza parlor), takes the kid home and they play “Grand Theft Auto” til’ the cows come home.

Finally, he tells the kid, “You can stay as long as you want. I’ll take care of you. I’ve got a good job, and we can go camping and play video games.”

Essentially, what I’m talking about is an updated Huckleberry Finn, where Huck floats down the Mississippi on a raft with escaped slave Ol’ Jim, never to go to school again. The difference between nineteenth Missouri of Mark Twain and the twenty-first century world of modern life may appear outwardly transformed, but it is just a blink of an eye in human history, and people’s motivations don’t change. Rafts down the Mississippi are no longer feasible with huge chemical barges and oil tankers, but kids still want to run away from home to get away from a sourpuss mom who’s nagging them every step of the way.

The idea of this kid being molested by a half-wit diabetic amputee is too absurd to be seriously entertained. Admittedly, Devlin did a bad thing keeping these kids in his house while their parents were frantically hunting for them – one for four years, no less. But given the facts that are leaking out on a daily basis, it looks more like he was running a clubhouse for runaways that a dungeon for abused victims.

The one kid, Shawn Hornbeck, had a bike, a cellular phone and internet. Now it turns out he was dating girls as well. Give me a break! This kid was no more of a prisoner than I am. In fact, given the hours I have to work to survive in New York and the way my girlfriend, Magpie, hounds me the minute I walk in the door of my apartment each night, this kid was living the Life of Riley.

The law states clearly that even if a kid does not want to go home, you are prohibited from keeping him away from his parents. And given the brainless hysteria that is condensing around this case, Michael Devlin stands to end up purging a heavy prison sentence.

But the facts of this case also speak loud and clear about the difficulty the public has seeing circumstances in their true light. The fact is, people have a vested interest in believing whatever they’re told, because it’s too much trouble to think for themselves. That’s why these news commentators and public policy deciders get away with so much: the public has shifted the burden of responsibility onto them and are loath to second-guess them.

Nevertheless, even if the news announcers and journalists who are driving this story with a jackhammer are stupid enough to believe that it’s a straightforward case of child molestation, the executives who shape the agenda are not. They know perfectly well that they are doing a railroad job on Devlin, and they don’t care as long as it drives up ratings.

This game of intentionally lying or misrepresenting or half-reporting the facts just to get ratings is a dangerous one and it leads to tragedy on a personal scale, like in the Devlin case, or on a mass scale, as in the corruption of the media during the Iraq war.

Nobody is expecting this kid, Shawn Hornbeck to step up and come clean on his own and tell the truth, that in the land of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, he played hooky for four years. When I was fifteen, my commitment to the principles of truth and justice was somewhat less than total. Plus which, even if the kid hadn’t been molested, which at this point I have no particular reason to believe that he had, the social pressures against him saying that he hadn’t, from Oprah on down, would prevent him from admitting it.

In today’s world you are nothing if you have not been molested at least once. Now Oprah is also jumping on the molestation bandwagon too, tearfully recounting her own adolescent molestation tragedy.

Not to be outdone, I would now like to reveal my own molestation tragedy, which happened when I was only 24 years old. One day, while I was sleeping on a park bench in Brooklyn, a fat lady sat on my face and farted.

Ooooh, the humiliation I have endured since that infamous day! To this day I cannot look at a woman’s fat, blubbery butt without breaking into tears of shame.

But life is about redemption and forgiveness, and if I were to run into that woman today, I would hug her butt and tell the fat, stinking buttocks “All is forgiven.”

I don’t know if it’s feasible but the governor of Missouri should appoint some decent, responsible adult to question Shawn Hornbeck, no-nonsense, and get the real facts of the case out of him in plain English before a publicity-starved Mike Nifong-style district attorney jumps on the media circus and railroads Michael Devlin into a black hole for eternity.

So who can you believe to tell you the truth? Essentially, nobody. Not even me. Especially not me. There’s an old saying, “Don’t believe anything read, anything you hear and only half of what you see.” That last part has to be updated to “anything you see,” now that doctoring of images has been perfected.

Get some books and read them. Develop a comprehensive worldview of culture. It may be a ridiculous parody of reality, but it might sometimes help you to know when you are being deceived.

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Posted on 1/21/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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