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There were plenty of villains to go around in 2001. Osama is no
longer a viable name for a child, so stick it in the book of proscribed
names with Adolph and Attila. Andrea Yates methodically drowned
her five children in Houston then calmly called her husband at work
to tell him to come home. "Is anyone hurt?" he asked.
"Yes, the children, all of them," she said. Timothy McVeigh
was finally executed for the 1995 bombing of the federal building
in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people. He had no last words, but
instead wrote out a few lines from William Ernest Henley's poem
Invictus: "I am the master of my fate," it read, "I
am the captain of my soul." 232 relatives of the victims and
survivors of the bombing got to watch on closed circuit TV as McVeigh
'captained' his soul into the next world via lethal injection. Lawyers
Marjorie Knoller and Robert Noel's 120-pound mastiffs, Bane and
Hera, attacked Diane Whipple in the hallway in front of her Pacific
Heights apartment. Whipple was mauled for as long as ten minutes
before she could be rescued. She died after two hours of surgery
to her neck. The dogs were ordered put to death and the owners were
charged with murder. It turns out that Knoller and Noel have strange
connections to white supremacists, prison inmates, and dog fighting
rings. What do they say about pets turning out like their owners?
Less obvious are the shades of political gray that were cast across
men like Bob Kerry and Gary Condit in 2001. Nebraska Senator Bob
Kerry was haunted by allegations that he led a 1969 mission in the
Mekong Delta in Vietnam in which civilians were killed. We've all
seen Platoon, we know it happened. But the twist this time is that
it happened to a prominent politician who earned a Bronze Star for
the operation. California Representative Gary Condit's situation
is more like something from Silence of the Lambs. While investigating
the disappearance of Chandra Levy, one of Condit's interns, Washington
DC police found out he'd been having an affair with the 24-year-old
girl. What's worse, Condit's been cagey and evasive about the matter
to the media and investigators. Condit's decision to run for re-election
in 2002 is nothing if not Quixotic.
2001 had its heroes as well. When animals attack, Vance Flosenzier
will beat the crap out of them. In Florida, a shark tore off the
arm of Flosenzier's nephew. He grabbed the 7-foot fish by the tail
and wrestled it to the beach. The arm was retrieved and reattached
by doctors. This was the perfect cap to a summer in which it seemed
sharks were all but crawling up on the shore to attack people (unfortunately,
Flosenzier wasn't around when a Komodo dragon latched onto the toe
of Sharon Stone's husband at the Los Angeles Zoo).
Statistically speaking, 2001 was a typical year in terms of shark
attacks, but the news was slow enough that shark attacks played
big in the media. It also helped that they were more interesting
than the summer's big expensive movies. In fact, far more people
were casualties of Pearl Harbor, Planet of the Apes, A.I., and Jurassic
Park III than shark attacks. Besides, there was much more entertainment
to be had scoring celebrity breakdowns. Robert Downey Jr. ran away
with the Repeat Offender award, but Mariah Carey took the Drama
Queen award. Her timing also probably accounted for most of the
twelve people who actually went to see Glitter.
Although he's obviously a cash cow, Harry Potter is arguably a
hero. He makes smart cool, nerdy glasses hip, and reading popular.
But he's also got kids going to movies and buying merchandising
crap in Star Wars-sized droves, pouring money into Warner Brothers'
coffers. Now that her character is pregnant, I suppose you could
say Jennifer Aniston on Friends is a sort of hero among single mothers.
But to be fair, she's just traipsing down the trail that Murphy
Brown blazed almost ten years ago. Hey, Rachel, I bet you wouldn't
have pulled that stunt when Bush Sr. was in office.
A new kind of hero
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