Trashcan Man
More than a decade ago I read a book by Stephen King called ‘The Stand’. In this book a terrible plague has destroyed civilization and two small groups of people have survived through a strange sort of immunity. The evil group of survivors under the auspices of a demi-Satan named Randall Flagg has sought to build arms and overpower the “good” survivors. (One thing about Stephen King’s books: if you try to explain the plot it always sounds so outlandish and untenable).
Among a series of unforgettable characters there is one named the Trashcan Man. He is a pyromaniac quasi-retard who has the uncanny penchant of being able to find warheads and other über-destructive fire inducing elements in the deserts of what is left of the western United States.
Indeed, he even manages to recover a decaying nuclear warhead; such is the extent and brilliance of his madness.
When I’m in South Dakota inevitably watching more television than normal I spend a lot of time watching C-SPAN2 Book TV. The authors who get my attention most quickly are historians, usually doing biographical work on famous (or infamous) people. These are the real life embodiment of the Trashcan Man. The destructive element of Trashcan Man is obviously missing but this ability to acquire in a desert that is impenetrable to others is uncanny, remarkable and almost maniacal.
I’ve now had the opportunity to see the unearthing of Marcus Aurelius’ philosophical writings (retranslated to English again), the details of Churchill’s summit strategy for the end of the cold war, and opposing perspectives on H.L. Mencken. As each of these curious beings presents their findings they expose a desert of letters, newspaper clippings, quotations, bizarre trivia and intuition through which they’ve wandered in order to produce their result.
You may be wondering where I find this maniacal – they are, after all, historians. One look at these folks, however, and one can see the (and how do I put this delicately… ) social toll of a few years in a dusty windowless corner of a library obsessing over a well known (but not quite so prominent) figure of the past. Pulling a context switch between that and a couple of beers and an episode of the Simpsons must be a little difficult. Or worse even, doing something brutish like playing a pickup game of basketball while trying to detach oneself from the question of whether J.F.K.’s ill-health impacted policy XYZ over a period N months; the note that Jackie wrote to him on date D seems to indicate otherwise with a light and airy feel and yet it doesn’t collude with the notes that the junior cabinet liaison made after that meeting… wait the meeting was in the morning before the week Jackie went home and she was usually chipper for a week thereafter…
Imagine a group of this sort at a conference. It must be quite the orgy of speculation, intuition and exchange. It would be like a meeting of Trashcan Man like pyromaniacs in a big desert with a weeks worth of pyrotechnics (someone would have to make sure no one went ‘big’ and brought a nuke though)…
So when I watch I end with a parallel yield: one is the information itself which is very interesting by itself, the other is the observation of the Trashcan Man giving his (or her) presentation.
1:55:27 PM 
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