I know John McAfee.
You’ve heard of him, right? He’s the guy behind the once-ubiquitous (and still popular) McAfee antivirus software. He’s the guy who moved to Belize and was then accused of murdering his neighbor Gregory Faull and is now on the run from the law while posting missives on his blog. He’s the guy who’s recently been written up in everything from Wired to The Washington Post, from Fox News to, now, Plugged In.
Yeah, that guy. I know him.
Well, maybe “know” is too strong. I met him a couple of times. See, back before he left for Belize, he lived near Woodland Park, Colo., around the same time I was a reporter for a weekly paper up there. I was doing some sort of story about a highway (highway stories were big sellers), and interviewing a rich, powerful guy who had a new plan for said highway, and lo and behold, John McAfee stopped by.
I knew because my interviewee introduced us. “This is John McAfee,” he said. “He owns his own software company. You’ve probably heard of him.”
Truth be told, I had not. This was the early 1990s, I was fresh out of college and the newspaper paid me just enough to keep my car in gas. A computer? I was lucky to own a refrigerator. Still, I took mental note of the name in hopes of scoring an interview later—even though McAfee was described at the time as somewhat “reclusive.”
Reclusive. Ironic, considering the guy’s giving more interviews these days than Karl Rove.
I eventually gave up on an interview, but I had the opportunity to run into him a couple more times: Turns out, his expansive mountain property abutted an acre of land my best friend’s parents owned. We’d cook hot dogs and camp up there, and we knew when the bedraggled dirt road to the property had all been paved, it was McAfee’s doing. Occasionally, McAfee himself would drive up and exchange pleasantries—making sure, I think, that we had the right to be there. We pegged him as “eccentric,” but we would not have guessed what his future would hold—or that he would become some sort of bizarre celebrity figure in the process.
Because really, that’s what he is now. His blog The Hinterland (we’d link to it here, but the language can be pretty rough) seems to be attracting quite a following—readers lured, perhaps, to the outlandish unreality of it all. It’s as if Charlie Sheen, at the height of his tiger blood craziness, started writing a blog from Tehran claiming to be a secret agent.
McAfee is a conscientious blogger, posting almost every day. He describes his various disguises, answers readers’ questions (no, he doesn’t take bath salts, he insists) and does his best to convince the world that, while he may be one of the more unusual former software executives around, he’s no murderer. And there’s no question that his posts are … interesting. In a recent one, McAfee virtually kneecaps a one-time associate-turned-critic, saying that she once stabbed a girl in the face with scissors. Then, in the next paragraph, he calmly directs readers’ attention to a picture of he and director Ang Lee with a captured crocodile.
To a reader whom he responded to a little too tartly, he issued the following apology:
For over half of my exile I've been living in a f---ing tree. My cell phones all smell oddly of urine. I'm trying to type on a 13th century input device. The Beneficent Order of Mosquitos had [awarded] me "Lifetime Blood Donor of the Century" status and my inflamed bumps now cover more body area than the remaining white skin. I sleep less than two hours a night. … I have been stung twice by two sociopathic scorpions (I did nothing to them) and became very sick both times. I have been eating raw iguana and fish for half of my diet. Sam [McAfee's female companion] is completely unafected by any of this and diss's me constantly. I am 67 f---ing years old to boot. So please forgive my testiness at your questions.
So what, you may ask, is the point of all this?
I have three, actually.
1. McAfee’s plight suggests that celebrity, by itself, is pretty worthless. Sure, being a big shot might get you a better table at a tony restaurant, but it won’t save you from sleeping in a tree if you’re wanted for murder.
2. Despite point No. 1, many of us—perhaps most of us—crave it.
On an emotional and spiritual level, I can understand the underpinnings. We’re creatures made for community, after all—designed by God to treasure our friends and family, to want and need the love they can provide. And in our “more is better” sort of culture, we sometimes assume the more folks we have around us or who love us (even if we don’t know them at all), the better we’ll feel. McAfee—who probably was unable to share Thanksgiving with his loved ones in any traditional way—might feel that need for connection more than most, even with virtual strangers online.
But celebrity also feeds our sense of importance—something we might not need, but most of us want. Those who’ve been in the limelight tend to feed off its energy. It’s intoxicating. And again, given McAfee’s circumstances, you might understand his desire (if not the wisdom) to feel like he’s still important, even as he eats his raw iguana.
3. Just as celebrities may feel validated by their fans, most of us feel validated by celebrities.
Think about how McAfee calls our attention to his picture with Ang Lee. The aside was an effort—perhaps subconscious, perhaps not—to draw our attention away from “fugitive” McAfee to a different character: Happy, powerful, influential. In happier times, he could catch crocodiles with one of Hollywood’s elite, he tells us. He’s the sort of guy who knew Ang Lee.
But let’s be honest: McAfee’s not the only one guilty of getting a bit of self-worth from an ancillary celebrity. Consider how I started this blog.
“I know John McAfee.”
I name-drop a man wanted on suspicion of murder, a man on the run from the law. This connection—as tenuous and febrile as it is—was enough to write a big ol’ blog about. Sure, there were some points I wanted to make. But I also wanted to tell you, dear reader, that I knew John McAfee—as if the mere fact that I had met him would make this blog more worth reading. Would make me more worth reading.
One might say that McAfee’s off his rocker: He’s got an inflated sense of his own importance, a twisted idea of what his priorities should be.
But if we think about it, maybe the same could be said of us, too.
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