Minority Report
Much Ado About Death
If accurate figures were available as to the exact number of idiots, marks, morons, and ignorant shits populating our country and world, those of us who were not among them might be flung into a deep, merciless despair that could very well send our society into a sort of infantile paralysis of the spirit. Lucky for us, no one can count that high anymore, but estimates begin in the low eight figures and run up to the 100 million who voted for Bush and Gore. The summer heat can be used to excuse isolated outbreaks of stupidity, but not the general condition. I would like to announce that, after several minutes of intensive study, I think I may have found the single least intelligent person in the United States today--at least, the stupidest person the mass media could find so far this century.
His name is Russell Yates. His wife, Andrea, has confessed to drowning their five children--Noah, John, Paul, Luke and Mary--in a bathtub, one-by-one. Why? Because she was depressed, that is, "suffering" from post-partum depression, which occurs when women who've had children look at their bodies afterward and realize that they're finished being attractive. I'm kidding, sort of. Women (and men) are so thoroughly regimented with the "mating instinct" that many are shocked to discover that, not only don't children erase all their problems, but they bring new ones and exacerbate the old. In one moment of stark, delusional clarity she saw the facts of her life--five kids, another coming, permanent domestic torpor--and rebelled in what seemed then the best way. She's not stupid, just crazy.
Russell Yates? Mmm...I don't know. I'm tempted to just call him a flat-out fucking moron, and so I will. He exposed the business of being him in alarming fashion the day after losing all his dependents. Standing before a tree ringed with teddy bears (of all the stupid things to send a man who just had five kids killed), and holding a professional photograph of his family (the kids with smiles not unlike Jack Nicholson's in Batman), he stuck up for Andrea on national television. "She's a good person...I still love her...I'll be there for her," and other hilarious bits of dutiful drivel. He gave us the facts of her mental illness: Childbirth was hell for her. Her P-PD was of unprecedented duration. After her fourth child, she attempted suicide and the kids were taken by relatives. And her loving husband's response, from a pool of nearly unlimited medical options, was to knock her up twice more! "She's not the type of person who would do this," said another member of her fan club. Then how does one explain the fact that she did it? Hmmm...?
It's sad, I guess, but clearly these kids have been saved from what could have been a very problematic life. People who advocate banning abortion have no idea what that would do to society. This world is not morally pure. We are not good or bad people--we are people, and as such are products of our environment, which includes family, peers, the media, all imparting conflicting data about the nature of "normalcy." The only difference between anyone is what areas of that environment we choose to draw from, what prejudices and superstitions we integrate into our personal psychic arsenal. Something told Russell that he needed more kids to be a man, even though each successive one brought increased turmoil to the woman he loved. Something told Andrea that she had to continue as she had, however much she hated it, until, on June 20, she snapped. The kids were her prison, and liberation neccesitated their destruction.
It's hard not to sympathize with people so deeply disturbed; that is, until they go off on a homicide trip. Now I wish Gore had won the election, so GWB could sign her death warrant personally. Russell, having neglected his responsibility to protect his kids from danger, should be immediately sterilized. Harsh? Mean-spirited? Absolutely! I'd prefer having never heard of them--all I wanted was to see if Fox News, CNN or the networks had 30 spare seconds to say goodbye to the departed John Lee Hooker, who's touched a lot more lives than Mrs. Yates. Of course they didn't, because they were too busy pushing a mass murderer and her accomplice.
The Yates story was bookended by a murder that is not yet officially a murder, that of Chandra Levy. California Democratic congressman Gary Condit had been screwing the girl, whose internship with the Bureau of Prisons ended just days before she vacated the Earth, probably not by choice. All evidence points to a seamless, sanitary extraction, which might be related to Levy's relationship, which Condit only confessed to after over two months of aggressive media speculation. The smart money's betting that he had her killed so as to keep his indiscretion out of the news. Great job, Gary!
I wish her well, but I'm too smart to be hopeful for someone who always held her head at a particular angle in pictures--I can see how a professional liar could turn such vulnerability into rank debauchery, then discard her like a line-item veto. Chandra Levy is dead, and will never be seen again. Perhaps I'm wrong to jump to the most insidious conclusion about this matter, but I think the Lewinsky affair of 1998 made a certain point (already understood by the Kennedys) about how one deals with a recalcitrant mistress.
By all accounts, Ms. Levy's fascination with the pig-faced congressman only grew in recent months after her internship had ended. Like Monica, she made the unfortunate assumption that time had upped the level of intimacy in her relationship. She'd begun to talk to friends about the man whom she "loved," even though she knew he was married and in a job where further advancement is predicated on at least the illusion of moral purity. Thinking her feelings to be mutual, she upped the ante by making contact at times and in places any professional sex object knows are inappropriate (though she never exploded at a Secret Service checkpoint like a certain other groupie).
Anyone in this position who desired to maintain his tenuous grasp on power had but one choice: Chandra Levy had to disappear. Unlike Bill Clinton (who obviously can do anything he wants and get over--he's a special case), Gary Condit has neither good looks, a wellspring of personal charisma nor the near-absolute power granted to popular presidents in their second term. He was a lower mid-card Democrat with no national persona, known only for having voted to impeach Clinton. Oh it's true--it's damn true. It's only a matter of time before someone digs up tapes of his floor speeches from that period, which could "go down" as the most ill-advised excoriation in modern political history. However it ends, the scandal will almost certainly end his career, if not his life as a free man.
Of course, he's only part of this: poor Chandra was surrounded by idiots--friends, family, colleagues--who didn't glean a sliver of sense from the Lewinsky angle. They knew of her "intimate relationship" with a married man twice her age on the other side of the country and ignored dynamics that seem obvious now that the girl is gone forever. (I''d love to interview some of the boys back in Cali who had crushes on Chandra--if any did--but got nowhere because they weren't "cool" enough, weren't "mature" enough, didn't "wear suits" because, after all, they weren't congressmen. I bet they feel like Al Gore right now, if not Ralph Nader)
Assuming that she didn't just split for somewhere her ID, wallet, clothing, ATM and credit cards weren't needed, decided not to attend her own college graduation and simply forgot to contact anyone she's ever met (and hasn't noticed her face on TV these hundreds of times), I'd say she's in a Condition we'll all be in eventually. Get your hankies ready, rubes! One day girls will learn to stop fucking old men--probably just in time for my retirement. Ironically, if Condit's not involved, then the publicity surrounding his (immaterial) sexual liaison with a girl younger than his own children may be the best chance Chandra Levy has of ever being found.
It's all very depressing. If I had children, I might drown them now.
Shelton Hull (aka Archibald Bobo) has been writing professionally since 1995. He also does the column "Money Jungle" for FolioWeekly (Jacksonville). His work has appeared in places like Section 8 Magazine, Movement, CounterPunch, Lew Rockwell.com and the Florida Times-Union. He was a 2002 Fellow at the Academy of Alternative Journalism, AAN/Northwestern University. He works for himself.
