Ron Rosenbaum - The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms

Contents

For my sister, Ruth Rosenbaum,

a far far better person than I,

who has been a lifelong source of strength,

inspiration, and laughter.

Foreword

ERROL MORRIS

Ron Rosenbaum is one of the great masters of the metaphysical detective story, a nonfiction writer in the spirit of Borges, Nabokov, and Poe. Like Poe, he can take a tabloid story (the death of identical twin gynecologists, a motel suicide, a suicide doctor) and turn it into profound and nightmarish art. And like Dupin, Poes alter ego, he is a supreme investigator. Yet he goes Dupin one better. Poe, after all, had to disguise himself as an all-knowing detective. In his investigation of historical enigmas, Ron lays his cards on the tablehis doubts about the evidence, even his doubts about himself. He appears in his own stories often perplexed, sometimes bemused, occasionally even tortured by his own investigations.

I have been reading Rons stories for many years, but it wasnt until I saw his pieces assembled that a grand scheme, a master plan became evident. This is a collection in which the many parts are great, and the sum of the parts even greater. Here is a vision, an entire cosmology, or, if you prefer, an anti-cosmology. Because the central feature of Rons grand scheme, his master plan, is to squelch grand schemes and master plans, to defeat our natural human tendency to retreat into easy answers and bogus explanations. Many of these stories are skeptical examinations of our great need to create grand taxonomies, systems of classification that pretend to comprehensiveness. (Take Elisabeth Kbler-Ross, whose effort to provide a definitive chronology of death results in a bizarre evasion of it.) There is something immensely appealing about watching someone in combat with the world, wrestling with our attempts to understand the world, trying to talk the world into making sense of itself.

Ron provides a clue to his attitude in his metaphor of the lost safe-deposit box, a metaphor for truth that exists but that may be beyond our grasp. These are not essays about the impossibility of knowledge, theyre skeptical and hopeful. Borges cites a line from Chesterton: There is nothing more terrifying than a labyrinth without a center. Rons labyrinth is a labyrinth of theories, evidence, interpretations, and misconceptionsbut it has a center, if not some ultimate truth then a sliver of it, a standpoint from which one can at least decide what the untruths are.

And so the reader should look for at least three Rons in these essays.

And yet he is no glib postmodernist. There is no hint of the claim that we should give up on truth and reality altogether, that we cant possibly hope to know anything about the world when our ability to judge, to perceive, to reason, are hopelessly colored by self-interest, wishful thinking, and self-deception. His work is a powerful attempt to find a way around this dilemma. Its an attempt to recover the world by compulsively examining and reexamining our misconceptions of it.

I remember reading one of his Hitler essays and realizing, Oh my God, hes doing something extraordinary. Hes up to something new and unique, chronicling the way peoples interpretations of themselves (and others) shape and distort what they project onto history. This is not to say that history itself is subjective but to recognize the way its often driven by subjectivity.

And so, for Ron truth exists and must be sought after, even if it sometimes cant be known with certainty. Theres a terrific moment in Oswalds Ghost. It illustrates Rons belief that you can get so lost in a labyrinth of detail you not only lose the forest for the trees, you lose the trees as well. Its when the Kierkegaard scholarturnedprivate eye talks about the unreliability of evidence, the fact that some piece of the puzzle may forever be missing. Yet we continue to search for those elusive certainties knowing that the only place to start is usthe whole mess: the evasions, the confusions, the misconceptions. Ron has made the point better than anybody else I can think of: The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.

The great Rosenbaum line, the epigram I love more than any other, the one that repeats itself in my mind again and again, is the one about the underlying mechanism of illusion and belief in the world of unorthodox cancer cures. Hes speculating about the way false hope derived from bad science nonetheless seems to work miracles for many of these people. Hes worried that by exposing this mechanism, hes done something terribly wrong. Hes given away the game. Hes deprived them of the one thing that could provide a cure: hope. And then he decides he cant really kill it because, after all is said and done, False hope springs eternal.

Here is Ron in a nutshell. It is his version of Pandoras box: Is the hope at the bottom of the box a good thing or a bad thing? It is that admixture of principled hopefulness and intense skepticism that characterizes what he does.

Quite simply, I love Rons work. I believe it will last. I want everybody to read it.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

January 2000

Errol Morriss nonfiction films include The Thin Blue Line; A Brief History of Time; Gates of Heaven;Fast, Cheap & Out of Control; and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. Before becoming a filmmaker, he was a doctoral student of philosophy at Berkeley and a private investigator in New York.

Introduction: Ancient Mariners and Airport Motels

The Dream of the Great Decipherment

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing...

Proverbs 25:2

Im not sure what to believe about God, but I do sort of like the notion of a God who takes delicious pleasurewho gloriesin hiding things from us. The proverb (which was singled out for imitation by Francis Bacon) goes on to add, and it is the honor of kings to search out a matter.

I dont know about the honor of kings, but the proverb does say something about the seductiveness of the hidden: the primal, almost theological, root of the hide-and-seek impulse in human beings. Whether its source is in the longing to find the hidden faceor at least the latent fingerprintsof God, or in something more secular, even sexual, there is this persistent, ineradicable conviction that the ultimate truths, the truths behind appearances, the keys to unlock the tormenting mysteries of existence, are always hidden, just beyond our grasp, or inscribed in indecipherable code.

It aint necessarily so, of course. It may just be consoling to believe that what is hidden could explain and perhaps diminish the terror of that which is all too apparent. Whether or not it is the glory (or the mischief) of God to hide a thing, the glory of man is to fantasize about the hidden. The search for the hidden hand, the hidden springs, the hidden handshake behind history attracts a certain kind of glory seeker, Ancient Mariner, mad scholar, Wandering Jew. And some who are all of the above.