Phantoms and Operas

Interred in nearby cemetery is Zona Heaster Shue. Her death in 1897 was presumed natural until her spirit appeared to her mother to describe how she was killed by her husband Edward. Autopsy on the exhumed body verified the apparition’s account. Edward, found guilty of murder, was sentenced to the state prison. Only known case in which testimony from a ghost helped convict a murderer.--Marker in a cemetery. A ghost's testimony was actually admitted as part of the court record


The Marcellus Shale Formation is a petroleum rich area that runs from western New York through western Pennsylvania into western West Virginia. The formation is deep, between six to eight thousand feet and recently has become approachable through modern drilling and extraction techniques. Part of the technology-fracing--involves sending pressurized liquid, water, into the shale layers to break them and make the petroleum recoverable. This technique has evolved over the last years in several similar sites throughout the North America, most recently in the Bakken area in Montana, North Dakota and Saskatchewan. The site is rich with potential and southwestern Pennsylvania is at the center of it. The area has suffered terribly in the last generation or so with the decline of the steel industry and current estimates are that the Marcellus Shale project will bring up to 200,000 jobs to the area, productive and high paying jobs. But rather than celebrating this potential, the area has begun a strange symbolic and ritualized dance between the businesses that want to develop the area and a poorly identified group that fears terrible consequences of local industrialization. The industry presents its plans, advantages, downsides and quality control methods, the opposition presents its anxieties over the industry, mainly their fear that the pressurized fluid used in the process will contaminate the drinking water generally and the local aquifer specifically.

This debate has been loud and intense in the area despite the fact that several sources show that there has never, ever, been a single episode of fracing resulting in groundwater contamination. There are episodes of organic contamination--plants and animals--but never a fracing contamination.

What is interesting about this is that evidence does not lead to conclusion. There is no endpoint to discussion. Debate goes on as long as people show up--sometimes to meeting places that have no involvement in drilling at all. Nor do facts or accuracy seem to play a part.

This quality of ongoing debate about prima facie questions have become a characteristic of our politics and our journalism. In "JFK" the storyline presented with real historical persons had only coincidental relationship with history. Michael Moore's films are scripted fiction woven in and around factual geography. Positions have become the structure around which the facts are molded; when that is impossible the facts are simply ignored. Every event comes with narrative camp followers who see and analyze through their own specific prism and present their conclusions with operatic drama.

Cormac McCarthy has a recurring theme in his fiction that history and fiction are intermingled by their very nature; it is a necessary--and productive--creative and subjective error. To apply such a distortion to the present and the future is either insincere opportunism, nihilism or madness.