lying is a possibly apocryphal story
about Koko the gorilla, who famously learned over one thousand hand signs taught to her by
scientists at Stanford University, and was said to understand over two thousand words of spoken English. After ripping a steel sink from its moorings inside her cage, Koko was said to have blamed the damage on one of her pet cats. We smile at this story because we are the children of Machiavelli and Nietzsche rather than Augustine. Rather than believing that the world is a
reservoir of truth available to us through language, we are more apt to believe that the truth is hidden from us and that language is a lie. Starting from a position of doubt, we struggle to get in contact with a reality that often eludes us.
VI. On the Run
Making a neat picture out of the mixed-up puzzle pieces of who James Hogue was and
who he claimed to be is a professional challenge that paled next to the mystery of what he was actually trying to do with his life over the twenty years that his path had intersected here and there with mine. The idea that his life was a mirror in which other people might see themselves more clearly was a myth that he encouraged and perpetuated in order to blind people to his ends.
Still, it was hard not to see his story as a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress in reverse, a cracked reflection of a life story that was shared in some way by his classmates at Princeton and with the lives of tens of thousands of other graduates of Ivy League colleges and ski-poster towns. In his story of isolation and imposture it might be possible to glimpse something that might not be ordinarily visible about the generic life that was shared by a particular group of people in a very particular moment in time.
What made his activity so baffling to those who studied it up close was the absence of the
spectacular payoff that one would expect from a stylish Hollywood movie—the stolen Matisse in his coat closet, the speedboat sheltering in a cove on the French Riviera, a bag of diamonds gone missing from a vault in London, the secret bank account in Switzerland. Hogue’s copper pots, his five sets of skis, and the stolen moose head hardly qualified him as a cinematic criminal. He was more like the hayseed Jay Gatz than the urbane young criminal who became Jay Gatsby His
seeming lack of ambition, his soft-spoken nature, and his habit of giving gifts led some people who knew him to insist that he wasn’t a criminal at all, and that he was instead an innocent person who went about things in the wrong way. His defenders correctly pointed out that Hogue showed no actual tendencies towards physical violence, although he did leave behind a record of threatening phone calls to women who in one way or another had displeased him, including a
shy, crippled violin student in Aspen, who played me the angry messages that he left on her answering machine.
Yet the portrait of Hogue as a gentle, misunderstood loser is belied by the length of his
criminal career and his lack of remorse for his crimes, which included offenses against property and institutions that destroyed the fabric of trust that binds people to each other. His goal was not money or diamonds or twenty-four-karat gold watches. He wanted to make other people’s lives his own. To say that Hogue was smart enough to have acquired university degrees or a house in Telluride by legal means misses the point of acquiring these particular trophies in the way that he did. He stole because he was a thief, a role that allowed him to move in circles into which he might not have otherwise been accepted while exposing the hollowness of the distinctions and accomplishments that adhere to the privileged status of others. Fraud provided him with a sense of superiority that was essential to his feeling of well-being. His story was a throwback to a time when masquerades of race and gender and class were more practical in some ways than they are in our information-glutted age,
about Koko the gorilla, who famously learned over one thousand hand signs taught to her by
scientists at Stanford University, and was said to understand over two thousand words of spoken English. After ripping a steel sink from its moorings inside her cage, Koko was said to have blamed the damage on one of her pet cats. We smile at this story because we are the children of Machiavelli and Nietzsche rather than Augustine. Rather than believing that the world is a
reservoir of truth available to us through language, we are more apt to believe that the truth is hidden from us and that language is a lie. Starting from a position of doubt, we struggle to get in contact with a reality that often eludes us.
VI. On the Run
Making a neat picture out of the mixed-up puzzle pieces of who James Hogue was and
who he claimed to be is a professional challenge that paled next to the mystery of what he was actually trying to do with his life over the twenty years that his path had intersected here and there with mine. The idea that his life was a mirror in which other people might see themselves more clearly was a myth that he encouraged and perpetuated in order to blind people to his ends.
Still, it was hard not to see his story as a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress in reverse, a cracked reflection of a life story that was shared in some way by his classmates at Princeton and with the lives of tens of thousands of other graduates of Ivy League colleges and ski-poster towns. In his story of isolation and imposture it might be possible to glimpse something that might not be ordinarily visible about the generic life that was shared by a particular group of people in a very particular moment in time.
What made his activity so baffling to those who studied it up close was the absence of the
spectacular payoff that one would expect from a stylish Hollywood movie—the stolen Matisse in his coat closet, the speedboat sheltering in a cove on the French Riviera, a bag of diamonds gone missing from a vault in London, the secret bank account in Switzerland. Hogue’s copper pots, his five sets of skis, and the stolen moose head hardly qualified him as a cinematic criminal. He was more like the hayseed Jay Gatz than the urbane young criminal who became Jay Gatsby His
seeming lack of ambition, his soft-spoken nature, and his habit of giving gifts led some people who knew him to insist that he wasn’t a criminal at all, and that he was instead an innocent person who went about things in the wrong way. His defenders correctly pointed out that Hogue showed no actual tendencies towards physical violence, although he did leave behind a record of threatening phone calls to women who in one way or another had displeased him, including a
shy, crippled violin student in Aspen, who played me the angry messages that he left on her answering machine.
Yet the portrait of Hogue as a gentle, misunderstood loser is belied by the length of his
criminal career and his lack of remorse for his crimes, which included offenses against property and institutions that destroyed the fabric of trust that binds people to each other. His goal was not money or diamonds or twenty-four-karat gold watches. He wanted to make other people’s lives his own. To say that Hogue was smart enough to have acquired university degrees or a house in Telluride by legal means misses the point of acquiring these particular trophies in the way that he did. He stole because he was a thief, a role that allowed him to move in circles into which he might not have otherwise been accepted while exposing the hollowness of the distinctions and accomplishments that adhere to the privileged status of others. Fraud provided him with a sense of superiority that was essential to his feeling of well-being. His story was a throwback to a time when masquerades of race and gender and class were more practical in some ways than they are in our information-glutted age,
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