The male ego is a gluttonous monster, hungry for attention and approval. Sometimes it takes on ridiculous proportions and outrageous ambitions. Men think they can change history or take on an Army. Sometimes they succeed. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford certainly changed the world. Mozart did. Einstein did. But for every genius there are a thousand deluded quacks and a hundred lucky bumblers. Columbus and Cortez thought they conquered a new world but it in the end it was Guns Germs and Steel. Men shoot for the North Pole or Paris or the moon and miss altogether. Sometimes they fly the wrong way.
There's a part of a man that needs big dreams, although often we're not equal to them. My dad used to sit at the kitchen table and sketch and draw figures for big projects, large-scale farming or cement barges, dredging round river rock, a mobile restaurant. For years he had three fifty-pound sacks of donut flour in his garage. Once he wanted to start a trucking school. When we became adults he would call us every so often, wanting us to enlist in his schemes. He was Don Quixote and he needed a Sancho Panza. His eyes saw windmills and stars. We begged off and rolled our eyes, but truth be told, we all have windmills and stars of our own. Part of us needs them, to escape the drudgery. Nobody wants to believe that this is all there is, that we were born to be a nobody in a nothing job with no visions worth sketching out at the kitchen table. Colonel Sanders' kids probably rolled their eyes at him, and he wound up conquering the world with fried chicken.
In the news the other day was the story of a man who set out to assassinate Osama bin Laden single-handedly. Gary Brooks Faulkner is 52 and suffering from kidney failure. He saved up money from construction jobs, got on a plane in Denver to fly to Pakistan. He told friends and family he was going to climb a mountain. In Chitral, the mountainous Nortern region, Pakistani police detained him after he checked out of his hotel overnight without telling anyone. They found him carrying a pistol, a sword, a dagger, and night vision goggles. They found him in a forest, headed for the Afghan border.
He's crazed and deluded and single-minded, but so were the Wright brothers and Warren Buffet. Every man has his sound and fury. In the sixties the CIA tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar. In the seventies Nixon had his enemies list. For years J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI kept secret tapes on many prominent Americans, film and football stars, politicians. He had to have the dirt. It kept him in control. In the mid-90's bin Laden himself launched a plot to kill Bill Clinton. They wired a bridge with explosives on his visit to the Phillipines. The Secret Service picked up radio chat and diverted the motorcade.
That plot failed but another succeeded. Strangers on plane managed to change the world forever. Crazed and deluded and single-minded, they crashed three planes into tall buildings, and the world has been in the grip of sound and fury ever since. Gary Faulkner tried to strike a blow for justice, but he did succeed in reminding us that these are the crazed last days. In the larger world, justice is impossible. Insanity and evil reign forever, until the coming king.
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