No Matter Where you go…: Disappearing Acts in the News

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


While we were digging out from 9/11 and the nation spent so long hysterically trying to account for everyone, a writer friend told me that after most mass accidents — train wrecks, etc — some people were found to have used the tragedy to decide to disappear. They’d turn up months or years later, usually by accident or the diligent work of family members who hadn’t known they’d been abandoned, simply having decided to walk away from it all. I don’t know whether to condemn or admire these…bastards? Maybe they’re heartless schemers and maybe they’re just more brave and honest than the rest of us.

Britain’s “Canoe Man” is simply the latest, if not the smartest. He deserves nothing but condemnation. Had he, and his wife, foregone the insurance money and simply walked off into the sunset together, hand in hand, to start over again like Adam and Eve in the Canal Zone, you could see the poetry. But what they’ve done to their sons: inexcuseable. You can live without your children, your parents, a lifetime’s worth of friends and your country but not without an unearned windfall?

Ah, but wanting to be someone else, to do something else. That was one of the big draws of the military; each of the many times I moved during those 12 years, I could, and did, re-create myself — from mousy deacon’s daughter, to jock, and then to fashion plate before finally landing at intellectual, just to name a few. First day at a new base half way around the world, there was no one around to out me with “Skirts and heels? You?” Wanting to walk away from even a good life for a different life… To go from prison worker to jet ski wrangler, or the other way ’round…, combat boots to pumps, the attorney’s fast track to journalism and blogging. I get that. Understandable. Delicious and intrepid, even. A determination to live your life and not have it live you, whatever the foregone lucre and external validation. But these clowns – intrepid they are not. Not only are they not brave and determined, they’re not even bright.

Hollywood is no doubt already working on this movie (suggested title: Dumb-ass and Even Dumber Start All Over Again, Make All the Same Mistakes). I can’t wait to see a schematic of the secret door in the wardrobe and the Saddam Hussein hidey-hole he scrambled into whenever neighbors stopped by. And, oh, to unravel the thought process that led them to “cheese” for their Panamanian realtor’s website whilst on the DL or why a tanned Canoe Man walked into that police station, bored now with the limitations of being “dead” in one’s home town, thinking he could pull off amnesia. He probably had a pina colada in one hand, while searching mightly for his own ass with the other.

When the news broke, I felt sure I knew why they’d done it. I figured they’d built a solid life. A predictable and suffocating life, however free of tragedy, and they simply wanted to be other people, alone together in a brave new world. A world in which they were free of all the things they’d worked so hard to acquire — possessions, responsibility, movie on Friday, church on Sunday, their favorite morning coffee and grown boys who they’d miss but who could, let’s face it, manage for themselves. They wanted to be free to start over. He went first, I figured, but then realized he couldn’t live without her. So he came back from the dead for his true love. I thought it was a love story.

Of course, I was wrong. I gave them far too much credit. Turns out, they didn’t want new lives. Homey grew an attention-grabbing Unabomber beard, hid in his own house for yeeeears, limped like a moron on his rare forays out and even signed his lame fake name (“John Jones”) on a stupid local zoning petition. They wanted to be the same losers they’d always been. Just debt free. Are there no bankruptcy laws in England? The way we Americans rely on it, you’d a thought it was the centerpiece of the Magna Carta. They’d bought a bunch of useless crap and, just so they could acquire more useless, albeit it beach front, crap, put their family and their community through hell. They’re just deadbeats who want to have their cake and eat it, too.

No matter where they go, there they’ll be, sad, defeated and now in a real jail instead of the mental one that concocted such a pathetic caper.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate