D.B. Cooper: Brushing Heaven’s Gate With a Landing Light

D.B. Cooper...or whatever...

Do not look for him

In brittle mountain streams

And do not examine the angry rivers

For shreds of his body

Or turn the shore stones for his blood

But in the warm salt ocean

He is descending through cliffs

Of slow green water

And hovering colored fish

Kiss his snow-bruised body

And build their secret nests

In his fluttering winding-sheet

-          Leonard Cohen

-   

He hails from 1971 but the vibe is sooo 60s. He’s Clyde Barrow with a parachute. He’s Randle McMurphy escaping into the midnight trees. Nobody really knows anything about D.B. Cooper, except that he hijacked a Boeing 727, got $200,000, and jumped out at 10,000 feet with a parachute over southwest Washington State. Pitch black. Raining. Never seen or heard from again. No body. No parachute. Nada.  The snake eats its tail.

The crime remains the only unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation history. It’s driven people crazy.  Thousands of books and articles have been written. There are a million theories. Why? Ask yourself why?

The FBI has given up. Exhausted after decades of futility... He’s gone baby gone, this black-feathered defrocked angel that ordered a bourbon and soda, stared out the plane’s window, then vanished forever into the night, as if he was never there; as if he never existed.  He is Camus’ Meursault, but more than an outsider—someone who has no need for terra firma; a fading phantom who cannot be traced through corporeal stigmata.

They could never find him because they were always looking down.  This narrative is clearly airborne. It has to do with winding jet streams and falling into the sky and holding onto the back of that silent condor as it sweeps up to the moon and brushes heaven’s gate with a landing light.

#dbcooper #hijack #cult #criminal #1971 #boeing #popculture

Kurt Vonnegut: Trapped in the Amber of this Moment

 

 He looked like the themes he wrote about—a slightly debauched Mark Twain who just may have traded river rafts for a space ships, and cigars for cigarettes.

Kurt Vonnegut had seen war close up with burning fleshing in the air and eventually counterbalanced the horror with child-like euphemisms.

His novels were somehow meta long before self-awareness became buddy-buddy with irony. His books are easy-to-read prophesies, non-sectarian but spiritual, dark with a flashing light at the end of the tunnel.

An obvious humanitarian, Vonnegut was wary of humanity. Slaughterhouse House Five, which he claimed to be his best book, isn’t about World War Two so much as it’s about the kind of people who participated in the war and how it affected them. His skill comes in melding the fantastic to the ordinary—and in that way explains how easily evil may overcome good, and vice-versa.

Like Hemingway, his sentences are deceptively simple. With Vonnegut, you’re misled by the often sophomoric humor, glib insights or near-cartoon characters. Then, later, the full force of the message hits you and that rare and precious reader-writer connection clicks in.

Initially embraced by the 1960s counter-culture, Vonnegut aged without relinquishing his Mark Twain follicles and cigarettes, his mustache sagging under the weight of worries—that humans might not make it over the fence; that people are too smart in the wrong way.

There is a Zen quality to his writing, as if he’s seeking the tranquility to be found in the acceptance that no one, ever, has really understood life.

                                ---

“Why me?"

“That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"

"Yes."

- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

-         Slaughterhouse Five

 #kurtvonnegut #vonnegut #slaughterhousefive #author #american #counterculture #huntersthompson #billypilgrim #glenngould