Boy Scouts, Campers and The Summer of Sudden Death

There must be something more than coincidence to explain the recent spate of high voltage tragedies befalling the Boy Scouts. Rather than picking off the stray child or reckless teenager, the usual M.O. for Nature and the summertime elements, horrifyingly spectacular death has targeted the adult volunteer leadership and incinerated them with the speed of, well, lightening. Still, that organization has won the legal right to exclude homosexuals from their leadership, so God couldn’t possibly be angry with them.

If you’ve been out of the country and somehow missed these events, google “Boy Scouts” with “tragedy” yourself. Even though I can sound glib talking about them, describing the scenes themselves will just burn images into my brain, and there has been way too much smoking-brain smell lately.

I can’t ignore the 13-year-old who also caught enough of the lightening bolt that he was brain-dead by evening. Provenance may have problems making precision strikes, but it is worth noting the boy was kept alive for a day so his organs could be harvested for donation. I hope his parents can hold on to the thoughts of all the lives that were saved because their son had lived long enough to die doing what he loved. Me, I can’t stop thinking that someone up there loves hunting human flesh.

Ironically, the heat wave sickened dozens of scouts who were waiting for God’s hand-picked leader in America, President Bush, to arrive. Apparently the situation would have gotten lethal if someone in the Administration hadn’t realized they needed to get those boys out of harm’s way – proof that at least one person in the Administration has learning from being burned. I suspect it was a closeted homosexual who knows when macho stops being fun, and who’s also learned a thing or two about skin cancer. The problem was probably made worse because the last guys that tried to put up a large tent for shade were resting comfortably in cold storage, or at least in peace.

No, I don’t think that God has it in for the Boy Scouts, and I’m sure he loves America and all of its inhabitants albeit somewhat unequally. I do think that once in awhile He gets pissed off enough at the quality of our leadership that He let’s us see who we are and what we’re up against. Leadership should not come to those simply willing to take the job, but to those with the ability to take the job and to take the job seriously.

The facts aren’t all in about the dance camp counselor who drove herself and five teenagers 100mph into and under a dump truck on a two-lane highway in the Catskills, but Irina Mironova was a poor choice for a driver considering her license had been suspended by the state of Florida two months earlier. License or not: Anyone who drives such a road at that speed at anytime, let alone with someone else’s children in the car, is someone you want to steer clear of [intended] and not someone you hire. That is usually not an isolated behavior and is something that ordinary hiring prudence could have uncovered if the camp’s owner had thought it important.

I am probably being unfair however, since the camp owner’s 16-year-old son was also minced in the car. No, I’m afraid that I stuck this onto the Boy Scout story because I had to mention it (it’s the local horror of the week) and because I didn’t want think about it longer than necessary. Listen, can’t you hear it? The sound that seems to come from upstairs saying, “Bring me human flesh. Just make it look like an accident.”

Dave Itzkoff, Do You Know Where Your Father Is?

When I'm in the mood to be horrified by a coke-fiend father's depravity I can always google Joel and Lisa Steinberg. That's why reading Dave Itzkoff's morbidly unflinching grievances against his father ("Cocaine's Kid", New York Magazine 8/1/2005) is not merely for my uneasy voyeuristic pleasure, but because nobody else is this good and peculiarly honest when writing about themselves.

What at first glance appears to be a self-serving "tell-all" not worthy of the writer's skills is in fact a crime story replete with a murdered childhood, a zealous cop (adult Dave) whose efforts at justice have so far been thwarted, and a detective (author Dave) who is just unable to close the file and walk away.

To his credit, Mr. Itzkoff does not rig his writing to keep us from wondering what kind of person writes such material without changing the names, and he concedes his narcissism possibly as a caveat to the reader that all may not be what it seems. He does not waste his words, so when they don't resonate with the others they are potential clues, evidence out of place at a crime scene. Contemplating a name change and unlisted number in response to a bad therapy session whimpers next to the sound and velocity of his father's totaling the car after the same session due to one self-destructive behavior or another.

While the son is unwilling to see past his own experiences, it wasn't always so. Relating what seemed to be his last moment of unspoiled childhood, the boy asks his mother why his father did drugs. The writer's weak treatment of her response deserved exclusion of the Q&A from the article, but he suspects some truth to be found there. "If I knew that, maybe I'd be on drugs myself." Now at an age of responsibility, the son does not have the stones to ask the question again.

Mr. Itzkoff ends the article without resolution, more desperate about his father's mortality when his father seems happier than at any time in Dave's lifetime. He should re-check the witness list for new information before the case gets suddenly and permanently cold.