Ever since reading Denis Johnson's essay "Run, Rudolph, Run" from his outstanding collection Seek, I had known something about Olympics-bomber Eric Rudolph's status as a kind of hero among both anti-abortion crazies, right-wing survivalist types, and perhaps even folks with vague sympathies for the old outlaw, outrun-the-Feds strain of American mythology.

So it didn't surprise me to hear some of those rural types--interviewed on NPR yesterday following the story of Rudolph's plea-bargain--admitting out of one side of their mouths that Rudolph had a lot of sympathizers amongst them. The real kicker was hearing these same people say out of the other side of their mouths that they were sorry Rudolph wasn't going to get the death penalty, because that would been "a better punishment."

I guess it's really the same side of the mouth. The impulse to privately cheer on the abortion-clinic bomber hiding up in his cave, embarrassing the Feds with his clever evasions, is inseparable from the impulse to wish Rudolph death at the hands of those same authorities. Yeah, they want him to bomb the baby-killers and stay free in the American wild--but, captured, they want him murdered in the most degrading possible fashion: by a faceless government bureaucracy.

This seeming schizophrenia says a lot about these people--mainly about how fucking pathetic and feeble-minded they are. But it also reveals a truism about the nature of the American hero: like Terri, like all those sensational child abductees, like the "heroes" in firefighting hats and riding in unarmored vehicles across the wastes of Iraq--like even the Pope and, hell, Ronald Reagan--we say we love them, we say we want them to live, live, live!!!

But our deepest sense of ourselves will only be satisfied when they die--and the more violently the better. I guess that's sacrifice. Seems awfully pre-Christian to me, but it's what we got.