But it doesn’t matter if he’s alive or dead, or if those fuzzy recordings of cryptic bearded men are really him, because he’s more of a symbol than a human being these days. He plays an important role in the neo-con narrative: the supreme villain– he gives Bush something tangible to rhetorically define himself in opposition to. In reality, we know they’re more like two sides of the same coin– two men on religious crusades who see the collateral damage in their wake as justifiable means to some impossible end. To quote Charlie Kaufman, “You explore the notion that cop and criminal are really two aspects of the same person. See every cop movie ever made for other examples of this.” Yes, the Bush years are the deadly byproduct of hack Hollywood screenwriting.

Making bin Laden the black king on his chimerical chess board (with Hussein as the reluctant queen?), Bush has been able to keep the game going as long as bin Laden remains unfound– after all, what better reason is there for American to continue living in fear than the possibility of bin Laden’s return? But as Bush’s time runs out, he’s finally preparing to fight the big boss: NPR reported yesterday that the military has entered Pakistan and intends to “hammer al Qaeda before the November election.” We’ll just have to keep tuning in to Fox News to see how this chapter in the Bush saga plays out!

Before there was bin Laden, the face of skyjacking was D. B. Cooper. So much the same and so much the opposite of Osama, the man calling himself Dan Cooper performed a vanishing act of his own on– literally– a dark and stormy night in 1971. In a freshly ironed shirt and a dark suit with a mother of pearl tie clip, he boarded a Boeing 727 and nonchalantly passed a note to a stewardess demanding $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes.

After releasing the flight’s passengers at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, Cooper drank a bourbon and had meals delivered for the crew while the FBI acquiesced with this anonymous terrorist’s demands, and the plane took off for Reno, Nevada with four crew members left aboard. Somewhere above the southern forests of Washington, Cooper closed the crew in the cockpit and parachuted into the night, with no light to guide his fall, never to be heard from again.

Naturally, there was a manhunt. In fact, the FBI made Cooper their top priority. Private investigators, boy scouts, adventure hunters, and mystery buffs have poured over the facts for almost four decades, and yet no one has ever been able to find D. B. Cooper– dead, or alive. Just over $5,000 of the loot was found in 1980, decaying on a nearby riverbed, but none of the other bills have ever been recorded as having passed through the treasury.

D. B. Cooper is a folk hero. People root for him. They hope he survived, and that he’s living the good life on a beach in Mexico. They like him because he was clever and polite, and because he didn’t hurt anyone, but I think most interestingly because, as Leonard Nimoy noted, “He did it for money– not a cause.” Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a concept with capitalist undertones smoldering beneath its surface.

Skyjackers in the 60s were frequently re-directing American airliners to Havana for a variety of reasons, often pulling off their schemes without a hitch– but such daring feats of transnational border-crossings became mere punchlines and nuisances in the eyes of the public. Were those desperate Cuban skyjackings more or less justifiable as acts of the “pursuit of happiness” than the D.B. Cooper incident? Are we more likely to forgive people who step outside the bounds of the law to manipulate economic systems rather than political ones?

D.B. Cooper, the vanishing skyjacker, the Robin Hood of the 70s, and Osama bin Laden, the phantom menace of the 00’s, hidden in caves or buried underground or living lives of luxury, or maybe never existing at all, just characters in a couple of equal but opposite narratives about taking over the skies and then disappearing into thin air.