Gift of Laughter Needed When the World Seems Mad
August 1, 2003
by Joseph P. Tartaro
Executive Editor
The novelist Rafael Sabatini began his swashbuckling French Revolution classic Scaramouche with one of the choicest opening sentences in all literature: “He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world is mad.”
These characteristics of Scaramouche would serve people well these days as they keep up with the world through newspapers, television, radio and news magazines. It’s not just the news itself which seems to characterize a psychotic world state; quite often it is what is not said in some reports that is so unbalanced.
Take for example the June report that Eric Rudolph, the suspect in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Park and 1998 Birmingham, AL, abortion clinic bombings, who had evaded capture for five long years in the woods of western North Carolina, had finally been taken into custody.
It is not just the long survivalist story of Rudolph that fascinated the media so much that is so surreal, as the irony involved in his capture.
The news media and much of the public focused on the amazing elements of how he survived on the lam, “alone in the North Carolina woods and fearful of being discovered,” living off what he could scrape from the land, subsisting on “acorns and salamanders,” and game that he was able to harvest. According to Sgt. Lester White, a detention officer with the Cherokee County, NC, Sheriff’s Department, Rudolph said he eventually began hunting deer, bear and turkeys, using a .223-caliber rifle. He rarely fished in the abundant creeks, he said, because he feared that the roar of the rushing water would drown out the sounds of approaching footsteps.
Cop on the Beat
What was largely missed was that the nation’s premier federal and state law enforcement experts had spent millions and millions of dollars and thousands and thousands of man and dog hours tracking the fugitive Rudolph without finding him. And the media had spent more millions in sending reporters and camera crews to report on and photograph the legions that were sent to track Rudolph down. At one point someone called it the “most intensive manhunt in US history.”
High federal and state law enforcement officials appeared on camera to report on the progress of the search over miles of tough country for months, until they, the media and the public tired of a story that seemingly had no ending.
Months and years after everyone seemed to have forgotten about the search for Rudolph, which probably cost more than the making of any of the movie and TV versions of “The Fugitive,” Rudolph was captured—not far from some of the most concentrated searches.
Then, after all those days and dollars, Rudolph was not captured by all the super-agency experts, but by a local law enforcement rookie going about his routine patrol.
That part of the story was a reprise of sorts of the case of Timothy McVeigh, the confessed bomber in the 1995 Oklahoma City Federal Building case.
While FBI, ATF, Oklahoma City and state police were spread across the Midwest in search of the bomber, or bombers, who blew up the Murrah Office Building killing and injuring so many people, it was an every day, garden variety, veteran Oklahoma State Patrol officer who had made a routine traffic stop and captured McVeigh.
Both cases illustrate that while journalists will seek out and follow the lead of the top ranking federal or state police types—those who appear to know more than anyone else and welcome the publicity—it is usually the average unsung local cop on his or her regular beat who brings these infamous criminals to the dock of justice.
Monkey Pox
There are similar ironies involved in the June news story about the pet prairie dogs who were infected with monkey pox and spread the rare disease to humans.
The prairie dog case first came to light when 19 people in Minnesota were discovered to have a disease which was normally associated with Africa. But the story walked on for a few days as more cases were discovered elsewhere and the origins of the infection were linked to a suburban Chicago pet store dealing with exotic or unusual animals.
The viral disease was explained by the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) which said it can pass animal-to-animal and animal-to-human, and scientists believe it can pass human-to-human, as well. However, such a chain had never been documented previously in North America.
Both Wisconsin and Illinois immediately banned the sale or importation of prairie dogs, and officials urged people not to release prairie dogs for fear of spreading the disease to other wildlife. Everyone was scrambling for a while, but there wasn’t much said by people who think that prairie dogs are just cute little animals that should not be hunted and shot.
Well, as those who have taken up long-range shooting of prairie dogs know, it’s not so much hunting as pest control and target shooting. Part of the problem of public misinformation about prairie dogs is their name; they would more properly be called prairie rodents—although that wouldn’t discourage some of the animal rights crowd.
But like rats, prairie dogs carry the fleas that can transmit bubonic plague, which can be a grave threat to human beings. Aside from the animal rights activists, there is another group that loves owning exotic pets, but thinks they are just like domesticated cats, dogs and canaries. They never admit that they were wrong, even after they turn the animals loose somewhere, or leave others to deal with their pet alligator, snake or the diseases they transmit.
When a disease gets a foothold in indigenous North American species, it can become almost impossible to control, the CDC said.
Federal health officials believe the prairie dogs may have been infected with monkey pox by a Gambian rat at a Villa Park, IL, pet distributor. No one reported on who was buying Gambian rats.
Rabbits or People
While we are still on an animal theme, it might be worth mentioning the jack rabbit problem at Miami International Airport (MIA). These rabbits are not pets, TSA workers or anything useful, but their time finally may be up. Here again animal activists played a role.
Back in January, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ordered the airport to get rid of the jack rabbits near runways one way or another. The hares attract turkey vultures and hawks, large birds which can wind up hitting windshields or getting sucked into airplane engines, causing catastrophic dangers.
The airport signed up the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to shoot the jack rabbits in February, but after complaints from animal lovers, MIA officials gave volunteers until the end of May to trap the hares and fly them to a ranch in Texas. When that deadline neared, then-County Manager Steve Shiver announced he was giving the hare removers another month.
After that, the timid county manager said that the rabbits would not be killed. The county would set up a hot line and send out trappers on a hare-by-hare basis, The Miami Herald reported.
But Shiver is gone now, and with him apparently any likelihood of the county’s giving trappers more time. Unless airport officials or the courts grant another last-minute reprieve, the USDA’s Wildlife Service was scheduled to start shooting the jack rabbits as we go to press.
Meanwhile, everyone is lucky that the long and irrational delay over solving the danger to aircraft was finally resolved at the airport before the vultures or the hawks caused a serious accident that could have cost lives and inspired litigation for years to come.
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