In the time of Zodiac, at the end of the 1960s, reality and fiction seemed to crash together for good. He is a writer first and a cultural critic, and it’s in Motor Spirit where we find ourselves enveloped fully in the madness and the myth. Since Doerr is not alive to be arrested, the urgency may not be there.īut what beckons you onward is how Kobek situates Zodiac in the context of the moment we dwell in today. Since Zodiac tips come in frequently, it’s unclear when this theory will be followed up on. Kobek has tipped off the FBI and the San Francisco Police Department. This is the news and what will set Zodiac hunters aflame, of which there are many. Zodiac, Kobek argues, could likely be a man named Paul Doerr, a comics and science fiction-obsessive who belonged, for a time, to the Minutemen, a dangerous far-right group that flourished during the anti-Communist fervor of the 50s and 60s. Kobek is an amateur sleuth, as he notes, but he has come as close as any to cracking the case through a study of Zodiac’s writings, a solved cryptogram, and dogged library research, the sort that too few do these days. In two new books being released simultaneously, Motor Spirit: The Long Hunt for Zodiac and How to Find Zodiac, Kobek tells a cultural history of the murderer-infamous for the taunting letters sent to newspapers and the ciphers that came with them-and makes a compelling case for Zodiac’s true identity, a Californian who died in 2007. Jarett Kobek, the author of I Hate the Internet and the very underrated The Future Won’t Be Long, believes it’s possible he’s found the Zodiac Killer. The police-state, in a world before ubiquitous computer networks and forensic mastery, could only do so much. They killed until they were stopped or, in the case of Zodiac, they killed until they receded into history. All bubbled up in the second half of the twentieth century, at a time when the dark currents that course through the culture today were first gaining ground and ruining lives. The Zodiac Killer, whom police never found. Today, the most notorious and sadistic remain as famous as athletes and entertainers, gods of their own twisted underworlds. Mass society did not invent the serial killer-a term that did not come into vogue until the 1980s-but mass society, with its radios and televisions and bodies converging in finite spaces, made him what what he is, what we understand him to be. The night closes, and you’re becoming a headline. There is no way to rationalize what happens next. A bullet smashes through skin and the seconds bleed away or a knife plunges deep toward bone. The killer in the night. Wrong place, wrong time. What we fear, in the meantime, is the personal. This is one reality of life lived among machines, as it will always be until something truly apocalyptic comes along. Mass casualties-outside of the spectacular or the surreal-tend to numb, whether they spring from warfare or viral outbreaks, and it is in the titanic math where comprehension fails. Intimate death might be the most terrifying death. The darkness at the edge of modern consciousness is usually a man with a gun.
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