For all its power and technological reach, modern journalism is as limited as the rest of us when it comes to trying to make sense out of the senseless and explain the inexplicable. There are things we can't foresee and won't ever know. If we had any doubts, the Heaven's Gate tragedy reminded us with a vengeance.
In one sense, the Heaven's Gate suicides may be among the best-documented, most meticulously explained mass deaths in human history. We saw the bodies and the medicine cabinets, downloaded the messages and texts, visited the haunted Web site, saw the videos and testaments, heard from the bereaved and bewildered people they left behind, watched as the bodies were carted out and the parade of investigators detailed life inside the mansion. The cult members were open about what they were doing and why, and had been for years. They were leaving this world for a better one, as their very name made abundantly clear.
Yet, in another sense, this story was about the limits of what we can learn. We don't really know much more than we did when the bodies were first discovered.
Wherever these people really went when they died, they left us with the first Web tragedy. For the first time, the dead are very definitely us, not them. Their lives, work, beliefs, and passing are literally woven into the machinery of the digital culture, already part of our archives and history. This wasn't some remote cult hidden away in some faraway jungle, to kill and die in private. Their messages, fingerprints, voices, and handiwork are ineluctably available on the World Wide Web, easily and instantly accessible, a couple of clicks away on any browser. Web sites from Pathfinder to Yahoo to Wired News threw up links, dug out postings, re-produced Web sites and pages within minutes; a medium within a medium, covering the destruction of part of itself.
The killings gave our fearful guardians in politics and mainstream media yet another new Net phobia to warn America about. Cultists momentarily pushed aside pornographers as the demonic and threatening offspring of new technology. The Internet, just last week an interstate highway for perverts, was transformed for a few days into a natural breeding ground for fanatics and zealots.
The Net cult-scare was predictable, given the way media work. It's hard to keep mass suicide cult stories alive, since there's nobody left to go on camera.
By tomorrow, things will be back to normal. Sexuality and the liberation of information are much more frightening to most Americans than some suicidal whacked-out California cult. And much more easily exploitable. Stories like Heaven's Gate are much too weird for politicians or journalists to focus on for long.
It was hard for even the most thoughtless journalists to distort this story for more than a day or so. The group had been around for years. These weren't kids, but adults. And they appeared to have made their choices very much of their own free and inexplicable will.
As a result, the "are-your-kids-safe-from-cults-on-the-Net stories" had a tired, knee-jerk quality about them.
Cults have been around for centuries. The members of Heavens Gate weren't recruited online, and throughout human history, disturbed people haven't needed computers to do horrible things to themselves or others. All weekend, America's reflexive finger-pointing culture, enthusiastically fueled by journalism, was on the hunt for someone or something to blame. Should police have monitored the group? Were there disturbing messages online that should have been spotted? Is the Net crawling with hypnotic and murderous fanatics? Does Congress need to pass another stupid law? But there wasn't really anybody to blame.
There was a UCLA professor who said the Net is now "THE place" for cult recruiting, filled as it is with disconnected, addicted, and weak-minded souls, unencumbered by normal constraints like family and work.
Yet another "cult author" said the presence of so many unattended kids online creates fertile recruitment ground for dangerous organizations. "Are your kids safe from cults online?" was the standard feature on scores of online newscasts.
We were suckers for this, as usual, drawn once again into the ritualistic and wasteful spectacle of explaining that this new online culture isn't about sex, murder, kidnapping or fanaticism. We were so busy defending ourselves against them that we didn't bother to ponder what had happened to us.
This story, like the comet that foreshadowed it, rises eerily above the media's simple-minded representations.
This is as old a tale as it is sad. History is filled with mad, fanatic, and charismatic men and women who led their followers to doom, from the Israelites who attacked the Romans in Jerusalem to Jim Jones and David Koresh, to Shoko Asahara, whose followers unleashed Sarin gas attacks in Japan.
Astral events like the Hale-Bopp comet have haunted humans for centuries. The conviction that comets are cosmic harbingers of doom is old and deeply entrenched in human consciousness. The very word "disaster" comes from the Latin word "disastra," meaning "against the stars."
But these killings did have contemporary twists. They were a mad convergence of technology, spirituality, science fiction, paranoia, mysticism, astronomy, and hype. The dead are not victims of the Net, but perhaps the first casualties of the cacophonous millennial mania building in publishing, religion, entertainment, politics, and media.
Given its nature, and for all our defensiveness about it, the Net will surely be a magnet for many of these strange pilgrims, a natural gathering place for seekers, wanderers, mystics, and lost souls.
But more importantly, there was the shocking sense of a new reality last week, a great disturbance in the field.
The suicides invoke not only mysterious cults but oddly familiar cultural imagery, blurring the line between what we imagine and what we know. And underscoring as well our arrogance and smug assumptions about life.
It was easy enough to picture Mulder, staring at the haunting videos, smirking knowingly and wondering why everyone was so quick to dismiss the UFO lurking on the other side of the comet.
At the same time, Scully would be incredulous and skeptical, recounting from her notebook the writings of the mysterious, very real, Internet poster named Nancy who claims to be an emissary of the Zeta Reticulans and who warns that the furor over Hale-Bopp is nothing more than a diversion designed to deflect our attention from the 12th planet, the true messenger of death, set to rush by Earth soon and send us all to our doom.
As the last bodies were being autopsied, Hale-Bopp sailed over our heads and out of our sights, underscoring for us that there are some things we will never know, even in our smartypants, techno-centered world.
Perhaps Hale-Bopp took the UFO, with all the members of Heaven's Gate. Rod Serling would probably have them hoisting glasses in the Twilight Zone, toasting their bright new futures and bemoaning our poor benighted selves who were too blind and fearful to come along.
For their sakes, we can only hope so. They were, after all, a part of us. We owe them more than they were given this weekend.
In a funny sort of way, we were the ones left behind, shocked and bewildered and remembering mostly the feeling of something dark and frightening brushing against us as it rushed past.
