The Chameleon
The Chameleon, David Grann, The New Yorker, August 2008
I found this piece in the New Yorker to be so interesting that I felt inspired to relate it to our 202 discussions somehow. It was in this attempt that I gained a whole new appreciation of and perspective on the story and it’s characters.
The Chameleon is a true story about a Frenchman named Frederic Bourdin who, at the age of 16, runs away from home and wanders across Europe, taking on many different personas and fictional characters in search of the “perfect shelter.” By the time he turns 18 and becomes a true adult Interpol has a growing record of his deceits, and he has attracted the attention of the European media. These potential threats hardly affect his lifestyle as he continues to “insinuate himself into youth shelters, orphanages, foster homes, junior high schools, and children’s hospitals,” across 15 countries, generally posing as a desperate child in order to “win sympathy.”
His deceits escalate until he eventually hatches up a plan to impersonate a missing child named Nicholas Barclay who is said to have run away from his home outside of San Antonio, Texas three years earlier. Not only is he able to convince Spanish and American Authorities, but also the missing child’s family. The missing child’s older sister eventually meets Frederic at the American Embassy in Spain where he receives an American passport and is taken home to live with the family. Without giving the whole story away, suffice it to say that there are quite a few additional twists.
So how does this relate to 202? Well it made me think about misinformation, peoples’ varying perceptions of information, and how they determine the validity of information. Do people believe what they see, what their instincts tell them, what their emotions or feelings make them want to believe, or what other people tell them to believe? It also made me think about the sharing of information across institutions, how we manage and interpret personal identification information, and whether or not somebody could pull this off in today’s post 9/11 world.
Related Lectures
7 – Controlled Names and Vocabularies (9/22)
11 – Information Integration and Interoperability (10/6)
15 – Personal Information Management (10/20)
Ryan Said,
September 2, 2008 @ 5:08 pm
I also read this article and I found it completely engrossing. Regarding whether you could pull this off in the post-9/11 world, the answer is yes: Bourdin posed at Francisco Hernandez-Fernandez and came to the U.S. in 2005.