The Devil and Bob Dylan, by A.J. Weberman (review)

WEBERMAN: And here I am a Dylanologist.

DYLAN: A Dylanologist pig man.

WEBERMAN: In a certain position, in a certain position where I can do a number on a cat who’s become a pig man who’s become a fucking sell out ‘ya dig? Like that’s the way it goes man. You write all these songs some jerk is gonna fucking believe them man and he’s gonna get pissed off when finds out you didn’t believe ‘em or don’t believe them anymore.

DYLAN: I believe ‘em. …

--The Dylan/Weberman tapes, January 1971.

As more than a few observers have noted over the decades, to be a Bob Dylan fan is to hate writer/Yippie activist/researcher/chronicler A.J. Weberman. No one likes the bearer of bad news which is human folly. In the nearly four decades that I’ve been aware of the pioneering sing-songwriter there hasn’t been one moment that the cult surrounding the folk singer didn’t seem detached from reality, unhinged from the facts, even after numerous admissions by their icon of his fallibility never mind what the detractors have unearthed over the years. When did I first notice cracks in the edifice? It was in the early 1980s when I saw D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary on Dylan, Don’t Look Back (1969) which painted a portrait of a pompous, arrogant nihilist who didn’t appear to believe in anything but money and fame, a real asshole.

Dylan shot a hole through the Elvis print that Andy Warhol gave to him and gave it away thoughtlessly during that period. This guy was a real creep, yet so many idiots I knew loved this prick ignoring what was obvious. Others took note though early on, one of them was in the film, John Lennon, who needs no introduction.

Weberman was no stranger to either man having spent considerable time getting Lennon’s ear as well into Dylan’s garbage, speaking with him on the phone and so on. His foray into “garbology” of the latter apparently began in the fall of 1970 (he has the pictures and the trash to prove it). Weberman and Dylan had many friends in common at the time as he recounts in the new text. In the case of Dylan, there was physical contact when the folk singer rode up on a bicycle behind the then young writer and punched him in the back of the head, yelling at him to keep out of his garbage. The Yippie had pushed it too far after bringing literally hundreds of protesters of the DLF to the front door of his Greenwich Village apartment on Dylan’s birthday demanding he get involved in the politics of the day. As his account goes, he took his licks feeling that he’d earned them. Fair enough. Some of this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Indeed, Weberman cites literary history going back to the French novelists and poets of the 19^th century, drawing a parallel that’s spot-on. The Yippies have often been called “proto-punks” (or, as the saying went, “A Yippie is a Hippie who got beaten by the cops.”). Looking at Weberman’s actions directed at Bob Dylan it’s hard to argue against it. This is cultural history at its best and the author has made a good contribution to chronicling a lost time in American countercultural history. Dylan’s trash became grist for his mill, say what you want. His fallen idol also earned his licks. You really don’t want to sell a mythology of being a social rebel, a progressive when you’re not willing to live up to, when you only do it for money, something he admitted he was doing to folksinger Joan Baez in the sixties.

Sometimes people like Mr. Weberman—or Baez--will come after you with everything they’ve got once the scales have fallen from their eyes. Hell hath no fury. Dylan is a lie, a Shibboleth for lost people, an ingenuine creature in a false reality in a construct of democracy within an oligarchy, a sick, twisted version of the American dream that’s been copied ad infinitum. This is the horrible truth at the heart of the Dylan myth: Rather than being a genuine radical as Woody Guthrie had been, he was literally the opposite while contending that he was like some kind of dustbowl minstrel, a fabrication.

Ultimately, this was never about money for the author, it was another quest for the truth on his part (with some exceptions that go into the personal). While I and many may not agree with all of his analysis of Dylan’s lyrics his central contentions are rock solid: Bob Dylan has been a fraud the entire span of his career and his fans are delusional people who have projected their wishes onto him. That’s a religion, not unlike Christianity, that Judaic faith created by Jews and appropriated by Anglo-Saxons and other groupings, then perverted as the messages got into the wrong hands. Would you know it, somehow, Weberman was able to obtain mimeographed copies (there had been under 100 copies made, a small run for a select few) of Dylan’s awful unpublished experimental novel, Tarantula which he’d written in 1965-66. Rather than being a sycophantic biographer like so many others, Weberman has taken the path towards uncovering the truth, or his version of it, which has been found to be surprisingly accurate over the intervening years.

In May of 2011, for example, the tapes of the late, sycophantic music critic Robert Shelton which were rummaged through after his death in 1995 yielded the final word on his heroin addiction. This suppressed passage was found in them: "I kicked a heroin habit in New York City. …I got very, very strung out for a while, I mean really, very strung out. And I kicked the habit. I had about a $25-a-day habit and I kicked it." This was recorded by Shelton in March 1966 at a tour stopover in Denver. His biography of Dylan, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, is silent on the subject. The music critic was one of the very first to notice the talent of Dylan in 1961. He promptly wrote a review of a performance in the Village and the singer-songwriter was just as quickly signed to a record contract with Colombia. The rest is false history written by liars.

In August 1962, the “schmuck” would sign with Albert Grossman to manage his career becoming one more willing victim of that deceased criminal. Grossman would become infamous as a con artist who ripped-off his talent roster but also for taking out a life insurance policy on Janis Joplin after he’d found she was injecting heroin. According to writer Ellis Amburn’s biography on the singer, Pearl, he’d told her and the rest of Big Brother & the Holding Company upon signing them in 1967 that he wouldn’t tolerate intravenous drug use. Where did he get that notion from? Because of Dylan? Weberman was the first to contend that Dylan was using heroin and has paid the price for telling this truth ever since 1971. Now he’s been proven correct. I believe that Grossman and Shelton constitute Weberman’s “Devil” in his text in an allegorical sense. This is a story about Jewish identity as well as one about the failure of the baby boomer generation to grasp their place in the world, in history, resorting to fraudulent lifestyles and voting accordingly. Many of these fools—too many of them American WASPs, banal reincarnations of conformist lynch mobs--will continue to ignore the truth about Dylan and America to the grave and to our collective peril. Weberman’s ability to grasp all of this underscores a powerful intellect that has yet to be even remotely appreciated, however rough the delivery might be, however painful. The truth is the truth that fools run away from. The Crowd delights in lies.

The Devil and Bob Dylan is interspersed with thematically-linked excerpts throughout from Tarantula and the legendary songs. According to Dylan biographer Bob Spitz, Weberman took the substantial proceeds from his bootlegging of the text and formed the “Dylan Liberation Front” in 1971, part of a multi-pronged assault to pressure the singer-songwriter into participating in progressive causes for a change. Considering the times, one can hardly blame him. Considering all of the lies, one can hardly blame him.

What he found in Dylan’s garbage went straight into the East Village Other and various underground publications during that painful transition from the sixties into the seventies, a time when so many illusions of the counterculture were being smashed. The reaction to Weberman’s revelations by 1971 ranged from explosive to utterly dismissive, and this is where some of the crux of the story comes into play: there are those who are capable of seeing the hard facts and those who are believers in the mythology of Dylan as an icon of an era. They buy into the lies on many fronts. The Yippies are also part of that iconography, albeit in a different sense, a far more transparent one. The main difference was in their sincerity proven by their adherence to social activism well into the 21^st century, something the singer-songwriter ditched decades ago…if he ever truly believed in it at all. According to Weberman’s new book, he never did, a conclusion he seems to have reached before the legendary phone call between him and Dylan in January 1971. Legend has it that avante garde composer John Cage provided him with the means to tap and record the conversation. The entire operation to unmask Dylan should be regarded as an artistic work. The Devil and Bob Dylan is likely the bookending of it, the frame--a conclusion. Others were also ahead of the Crowd and were ignored.

By 1970 John Lennon had reached a point of maturity where he roundly rejected Dylan…as well as an addiction to heroin through snorting it, probably the method that his faltering hero had employed. George Harrison also battled this demon throughout the 1970s and Graham Nash was one more casualty. Harrison also snorted heroin. Was it thanks to Dylan’s influence over them? In his song “God,” Lennon roundly rejects Dylan as a weak man, not a man-god that others had made him and the Beatles into. Who would John Lennon, perhaps the most popular sing-songwriter of that era besides Zimmerman himself, have looked up to enough to have been persuaded to try heroin? That’s right, no one. The myth of Bob Dylan was founded on lies. The lies have begun to come crashing down for good. A.J. Weberman was right all along: you’ve been had and you wanted to be, the talent of the artist aside. Now grow up and get a life.

Jewish Republican Eric Cantor sings for his meals

This smarmy fascist asshole was on the CBS investigative program 60 Minutes last night denying before God and everybody that Ronald Reagan never raised taxes when it's well established that he did. Is Cantor hanging out with Holocaust denier David Irving as well? Is he totally insane or just a bad liar? I'll tell you what he and most politicians are: simulacra of human beings, parodies of people. Politicians having sex with prostitutes is one more indicator that these people aren't human, acting out perverse, parallel versions of the lives of normal, well-balanced, ordinary people. The fact is that they're pathological, totally insane, and should be detained and evaluated as to whether they're criminal psychotics by legal and clinical definition.

Republican Eric Cantor needs to reform the Sonderkommando (Jews in the death camps who assisted in the disposal of other inmates for a little more time) so he can join it. Will he shoot himself in the back of the head, then dump his own body into a mass grave? Could be. His Walther P-38 is loaded with a full clip, he's ready for action, ready to lick the hand that overfeeds him with inflated capital. What scum. What an animal. Dirt. Typical behavior of Republicans in every sense. Next week they're going to tell us that the laws of gravity have been rescinded.

On Ron Paul and his Trolls

He's a racist, but in the interest of brevity, ala Seuss, a few lines (no, not drugs):

I will not vote for him in a booth, I will not say he's long in the tooth. I will not say that he is sane, or that he is a weather vane. I say that he is a kook, and that he thinks that blacks are "spooks." He will not win on election day, so there is nothing more to say about this ossified ofay.

And since he's bound to lose, there truly is no more to say.

Gimp of the Perverse II: Will the real Jack Burkman please stand up?

Ed.--I got an interesting comment from someone purporting to be a former girlfriend of Mr. Burkman. This one's juicier than the rest, but it corresponds to other communications I've received about him from others sources who I am certain did date him at one point. This comment--from October as OWS was gestating--went unmoderated for some time, I wasn't paying attention with the editing/revising work on the DC Madam account.

All the breaks are original, no edits, as with the others:

October 2011 comment: http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=32294008&postID=6232334077798997076

I dated Jack for a considerable amount of time, and can say without a doubt, the man has SEVERE issues when it comes to women.

With respect to his dearly departed Mommie Dearest, Jack sure loves to have a daily chat with her in his mirror. At first, I thought it was a joke before recognizing that he considers it a "real" discussion. Thankfully, Mother gave her blessing for our relationship *shudder*

He believes that ALL women are whores and out to "get his money", yet he likes to buy his way into your life. And thus, Jack attends church in Tyson's Corner almost every weekend, in a laughable attempt to cleanse himself of his sins.

What would those be?!

Oh gosh golly gee, Jack likes to think of himself as a VERY dirty birdy.

Forget the DC Madam scandal---I'm astonished that no one has posted about his frequent trips to the Spearmint Rhino or the Red Rooster in Las Vegas!

Essentially, Jack must feel in complete control of his romantic relationships:

1) He needs a woman who will stimulate him intellectually. Bonus points if she can banter about about the declining moral fiber of America, and constantly praise his efforts to educate people about strong family values.

2) He insists "his" woman act as arm candy at the many DC hotel bars he frequents BUT you're forbidden from directly speaking to any other men... including bartenders, bellmen OR cab drivers.

3) He will withhold sex because he loves you (Madonna), yet he'll ask if it would be okay if he can satisfy his needs elsewhere (Whore). And you're possessed by the Devil himself if you even think about masturbating! haha

He has many great attributes, which is why I accepted most of the flaws. It was only after he threatened me physically that I called it quits, and severed all contact.

Oddly enough, Jack's brother is normal. Last I heard, he was a physician in Seattle.

A note to the lady in question: I would like to discuss more of this with you. Feel free to contact me at the email address on my profile. I will honor your wishes for confidentiality.

You ever noticed (FEMA)?

You ever notice that all those rednecks and meth-heads (often inhabiting the same body!) who are yammering about "We're all going to be dragged kicking and screaming to FEMA camps man, any day now!" are all white? Did you ever notice that none of them gave a shit about all those African-Americans languishing in FEMA trailers for roughly two years except when they thought they were getting a "free ride"? Yeah, me too, but really: where was the outrage over many of these same people having to inhale formaldehyde for months? No conspiracy there, agreed, just not for the same reason they might unthink it was so.

Imagine had these refugees been white, middle-class. Imagine that they had been taken there, sometimes against their wills like in 1927 when another storm ravaged the place, to be held for a a very long time with few rights to speak of in toxic surroundings. The Libertarians, the rednecks, the red-headed stepchildren of the American Left who have smoked too much dope for decades with predictable results, have an erection (nipples too) over FEMA this, FEMA that, but the slant is always the same: an anti-government agenda that's arch-conservative, almost certainly baseless in the terms their putting them in and basically racist at heart.

Seriously, where was the alarm over these poor black families being forcibly relocated, permanently in many cases, away from New Orleans? Wasn't this your legendary FEMA camp theory based on your own criteria? No, these were only a gaggle of dirty niggers (to you), so it didn't matter. It didn't matter when a naturalized Middle Eastern businessman was detained by private security in a bus station...that was OK and then repainted by assholes on the right like Alex Jones as a purely government move. The message must always be that it's the big, bad Boogeyman "gubmint," never the most serious threat to liberty across the globe, multinational corporations.

This shit is a ploy, conscious or not, it is code. We know you have an agenda. We know you're afraid of black people, of minorities. We know you're ignorant, that you're the boring crank at a party that everyone ignores for good reason. Now shut up about FEMA camps you racist, yammering retards.

James Dobson, Jack Burkman & the DC Madam

The Rev. James Dobson, former founder of Focus on the Family, former human being, has been telling evangelicals that if they don't vote to the right that God's going to be angry at them, some such bullshit flowing from his sewer-shaped orifice. Normal people don't take to this swill, but then, there's Republicans, evangelicals, the Aryan Nations crowd, the Tea Party demographic (a very tiny one comprised mostly of middle-aged small business owners), and the Klan. In the backdrop of all this are the lobbyists, war profiteers, criminal banks, criminal management subcultures, speculators, lawyers--the criminals who have hijacked the system--doing their do while the rubes think they're accomplishing something. OK, they are: the dismemberment of their own rights, so there.

I've written on Jack Burkman more than I cared to. He's a good argument for sterilization. What I have concluded is that as a golden tiered lobbyist, media pundit for the right, and whatever hat he's wearing this week attached to his utility-belt, this guy is no good for America or the world. He's not just typical folks, he's up there at the summit, part of the problem, a threat to the Republic. We're all entitled to freedom of association, but these fuckers take it to the breaking point into organized crime. I don't really give a shit if it gets a free pass from all the other criminals in office, it's a subversion of the rule of law. Dobson is telling his flock and anyone foolish enough to listen to him seriously that if they don't vote Republican, forget it, God's going to be angry, watch out, eek, oh, aw. Does this shit ever get tired for these jackapes? Do they think with the primeval part of the brain underneath the cerebellum more often than not? Hey, were it not affecting the rest of the world, fuck if I care, but it is. Burkman is just one more cheerleader on the runaway train called Western capitalism. These clowns have taken us to the edge of the cliff now, whatever's coming is coming sooner rather than later, and it will be big, nothing will ever be the same again. Their reaction? To try to clamp down on the rest of us because they know intuitively that they're the problem, a source of dysfunction, and that this dysfunction is going to wash them out of power soon. They send out the usual clods like Burkamn to distract, divide, to demoralize.

Nothing he or they have to say is going to wash with the majority, however, so they wrap it in religion and patriotism, nationalist iconography, so the rank tasting pill will go down for the slack-jawed crowd. Rawstory had a recent blurb on Dobson, his recent utterances on how we're all supposed to be voting. I posted a comment relating to the cynicism of the Burkman/Dobson relationship since the former has spoken as a representative to the phony preacher man, the founder of Focus on the Family, which in turn created the Family Research Council. It's more right wing attacks on the separation of church and state, but also to get evangelicals to vote stupidly, to vote Republican.

Burkman is a well-known pussyhound who loves fucking almost anything in sight. He's not exactly the model of behavior that Dobson's advocating either. Why would he care? Burkman has promoted him and his agenda, a mutually beneficial one with the GOP, he gets results. Caring about the behavior of others is for the flock--with exceptions like these. Dobson has never come out criticizing Burkman for this behavior.

To believe in nothing is nihilism:

Dobson only cares about temporal power, he's ashen inside. His mouthpiece Jack Burkman was found by multiple researchers in the DC Madam's phone bills--he did a callback to her escort service, so it wasn't a mistake, especially with each instance years apart.

Burkman was given incredible cover by the mainstream press, it was extraordinary, suggesting a media campaign to contain the scandal generally, to contain the damage to the GOP. They couldn't keep a lid on Larry Flynt with Senator Vitter, but they could with Jack. Burkman goes out spouting the same family values garbage as Dobson--for Dobsons in fact. Vitter got an award from the FRC for his work in promoting family values in the Senate, in hotels, with hookers, you know...

Bill Maher had him on his shows so often I question whether they might be friends, something over two dozen. He's not just spouting GOP swill on Fox, hardly. He's all over the place as a "voice of the right." He was a high level campaign adviser to the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign. The media ignored his presence in the phone records because of his other job, a pattern you will find in the phone records: lots of lobbying related entities, individuals, most in defense/intelligence or related contracting, like SAIC or Qualcomm. SAIC is all over the phone records. I think the whole scandal was about influence peddling being uncovered in Hookergate with investigations turning up a lot of stones with the escort services in DC., finally accelerating the investigation in Palfrey. It didn't help that the November 2006 midterms were coming, so someone interim appointed (for other reasons too) Jeffrey Taylor...now at Ernst & Young, who have a revolving door relationship with their executives and those at Qualcomm. There's something major there with Burkman for almost all of the press to uniformly go silent on it. That's because they could with him, not Vitter, not Tobias, etc.

There are more phone records out there, she didn't release all of them. It's possible I have everything, however, as I was a member of the defense as a general researcher, hired at Palfrey's request. I've seen Dan Moldea's findings. There are quite a few more names in them of significance, but patterns are what matter most. That doesn't really fit Flynt's format, he wants hypocritical office holders, they're the ones in his sights. Burkman isn't an elected official, he wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny--probably wouldn't know he was doing something wrong, heh. Word in the Beltway is that he's chasing women all of the time. Then there was the anecdote about him walking around DC (he's a gimp) coming to a Gay Pride parade and propositioning a lesbian couple for sex. The girl put story up on her Myspace page with a scan of his business card, but it was yanked. Wonkette's story on it was also taken down, or at least one or two of them, and so on.

I've communicated with a few of the girls that Jack has...well, fucked. He's not remotely in the Dobson mold in his real life, a very sexual one at that, and he has purchased birth control for at least one of them, the morning after pill. Does James Dobson give a shit? Of course not, Burkman is his hire, his media mercenary, his spokesman, his lobbyist. Burkman cut his teeth working as a congressional staffer during the GOP's endless assault on the also corrupt Bill Clinton, another political operative. Now he's a golden tiered lobbyist. Results. Those are what Dobson wants, gets, and so, he would never admit Burkman was this way unless he had no choice. These people are the lowest form of life on the planet, below the amoeba, lethal mutations. There's a presidency on the cancer...

Expect more on Mr. Burkman in my upcoming account on the DC Madam.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/08/dobson-we-are-in-serious-trouble-with-god-if-we-vote-wrong-in-2012/

Zuccotti Park (Wall Street occupation) images from October 7, 2011

All images the intellectual property of Matt Janovic and Isabel Martins. Copyright 2011.

Some visits to Zuccotti Park (the Wall Street occupation)

New York City--Me and my girlfriend paid a couple of visits to the Wall Street occupation over the last couple of weeks (on September 30th and October 7th), two days with marked contrasts for the site. September 30 was brimming with occupiers--as many as between 700 to 1,000 core individuals from New York were present (exact numbers are difficult to come by since how one defines an occupier can slippery at best), it was literally standing room only with "visitors" like myself.




It's my opinion that as this is a mostly symbolic action, "visitors" are just as worthy of being counted among the occupiers since we all share the same views about Wall Street and the bailout of the biggest American banks. We have come from all over the nation, from all walks of life and from a variety of age groups, a variety of demographics. What all of us share is that we're working class and that we're getting screwed by the economic sector and the political class. We know that working within the political process isn't going to bring about reform.




This occupation could go on record as the most photographed and recorded political event in American history to date, not even the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.



Contrary to the contentions of early mainstream coverage, the occupiers aren't all twenty-somethings and they have a solid focus on why they're there and what their demands are: radical reform of the financial sector.

Also on that September 30 came some of the first representatives of American labor--the Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100--and we were present, recording the event...along with an NYPD surveillance pod on a crane and nearly everyone else there. The TWU has sued the City of New York for commandeering five MTA buses to arrest Wall Street occupiers crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and lost, the cops can arrest them if they refuse to allow the action. Interestingly, police on the curbside began enforcing pedestrian codes, as if on cue once the TWU showed, but I leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusion. Had the cops not rioted again two nights earlier, beating and pepper-spraying occupiers once again, I wouldn't be so suspicious of their motives.

A number of plainclothes detectives were on hand as well as select NYPD who were photographing and videotaping everyone in the crowd. But many of the cops I've encountered were simply doing their jobs. An "us vs. them" mentality should be applied when brutality and extralegal behavior are present, but not as a default, my opinion.

There have also been unsubstantiated rumors that police planted among the occupiers were arresting individuals on the 5th of October--they have yet to be proven out. It's not the first of such rumors either that has been making the rounds. My own conclusion from both visits is that the core of the occupiers is well organized and know what they're doing. They're resourceful and could be ready for the long haul when the occupation itself ends and the real work of organizing begins, and a beginning is what this is. Right now, the police shenanigans at the Brooklyn Bridge and the resumption of extralegal brutality on the 5th of this month have seemingly thinned the ranks. That's if you only count them and leave out us visitors...

From September 30th:

Above: The TWU arrives on site, Sept. 30.

Above: Speeches by occupiers, not leaders. As no bullhorns are allowed by NYPD, every few words are relayed across the crowd by selected individuals, spaced-apart, so as to reach the farthest boundaries of Zuccotti Park.

All images the intellectual property of Matt Janovic and Isabel Martins. Copyright 2011.

Where's Waldo? Fuck if I know...

Ossining, NY--I've been visiting a dear friend for over a month now and have (don't laugh) contracted an unknown ailment that has been rending my body for two weeks running now. With principal work on the DC Madam account basically finished, it's time to find another direction. I'm not sure what's that going to be, so I'm still in the spirit of the times since no one in government does either. Welcome to America.

It's possible that I will never write a non-fiction work ever again unless there's a damned good reason, meaning taxable income.

On the ailment: we first thought this was the measles. It was not. First, it was a very sore throat and a fever, aches, pains, and not simply the kind my rapidly decaying body is used to. For all you armchair physicians out there, the spots spread first from around my throat (never reaching my face) and looked both like the spots from scarlet fever and measles. None of the doctors who saw me has any idea what it was except that it could have been "viral."

Like measles, it spread down my body until it reached my feet, yes my feet. Now, they're fading and I'm spent, no energy, zip, nada, zilcho. Who knows where I got this shit.

So, since I've been in NY State, I have endured:

--An unprecedented earthquake that originated in Virginia.

--A hurricane (Irene) and flooding (it missed us, but still...).

--An undisclosed medical diagnosis unrelated to the "spots" that I don't want to go into, but life-changing nonetheless.

--The spots, whatever the fuck it was.

--A slew of existential crises that, yes, have to do partly with the current economic crisis and getting older.

And so, there it is, more fodder for the writing mill. Yes, there will be short stories coming eventually. I'll be changing my name to "Job" for every reason you think.

1921-2011

In a bold move towards transparency, the Chinese Communist Party has changed its named to Howard Johnson's™. Have a great day.

A very tiny except from my impending DC Madam account

Ed.--I've posted some of this before, but it bears repeating.

This is taken directly from the text of my account and can also be taken as an assertion of intellectual property (the bracketing text and the edit of the transcript). You do not own it. Any copying requires a request as well as citation, no exceptions, and I will come after major offenders in a court of law, bank on it. This applies to everything I have ever generated on this site as well as outside of it.

This exchange was never reported by the mainstream press for doctrinal purposes.

"From day three (April 9, 2008) in the racketeering trial of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, an exchange for the ages that would serve as a fine example for law school students in the Anglo-American sphere, and which came towards the end of a long day of endlessly banal testimony:

 Q [AUSA Daniel P. Butler]. And did you compare the tax returns to the bank records for Ms. Palfrey?

A. Yes.

Q. And what did that show?

A. The comparison of the bank records for this year, 2002, show that there was a greater amount of gross receipts than was reported on this line.

MR. BURTON: Can we approach, Your Honor?

THE COURT: Yes.

(BENCH CONFERENCE ON THE RECORD.)

MR. BURTON: I don't know where this is going.

MR. BUTLER: I'm not going to any tax discrepancy, or anything to that effect.

THE COURT: You just saddled her with basically what is false reporting.

MR. BUTLER: Well, I don't think it's gone that far [Page break] yet, Your Honor. I'm not going any further with this line of inquiry.

THE COURT: Well, now you've put the defense in the position where they have to respond to this. How are they going to do that?

MR. BUTLER: Well, Your Honor, that was not the intent of my question, but I appreciate what the Court is saying.

THE COURT: What was the intent of the question?

MR. BUTLER: My intent of the question, Your Honor, was directed at the gross receipts that were deposited into this and comparing it with the bank records that we have. It was a poorly phrased question. That's all I can say about it. I don't know anything more than that.

THE COURT: Well, where are you going next?

MR. BUTLER: Your Honor, I'm going next with -- can I just have a moment, Your Honor? Your Honor, there's another chart in terms of -- I just need to grab it, just to answer the question more explicitly, if I can have a moment.

THE COURT: How much more do you have with this guy?

MR. BUTLER: Not very much at all, Your Honor.

MS. CONNELLY: I think there's a bunch more documents.

MR. BUTLER: Well, there's other documents we need to admit through him, yes.

THE COURT: Can he come back in the morning? [Page break]

MR. BUTLER: We can do that, Your Honor.

THE COURT: I think I want to instruct the jury that there was no tax charge, no tax claim in this case.

MR. BUTLER: That's fine, Your Honor.

THE COURT: Maybe I'll even instruct them they are to disregard that last answer because it's not relevant to your case.

MR. BUTLER: What I would ask is -- I'll defer to the Court on that, but I think there's no -- that the answer did not say that she has cheated on her taxes. [Even though it actually did say that, but...]

MR. BURTON: I think I have to move for a mistrial because of it, because she's not charged with tax evasion.

THE COURT: I know you have to file that motion, and the motion is denied. But I will give a corrective instruction right now.

MS. CONNELLY: Your Honor, in terms of scheduling, we do have some more civilian witnesses. He may not come back on until tomorrow afternoon, but he'll be available all day tomorrow. We just might put the other witnesses on first.

THE COURT: You've made satisfactory progress today.

(END BENCH CONFERENCE.) ...

I was expecting “Robertson pats AUSA” in brackets in the transcript next. ..."

It's a Guy Thing: A Visit from Football Dumbo/Legend Daryl Sanders...at Facebook

WWW--I'm on Facebook a lot (no shit Sherlock), one of many reasons I rarely post on here anymore, besides the fact that...oh, never mind.

Any reader of this blog will know that I'm adamantly iconoclastic, that I hold no sacred cows and that slaughtering them is something I excel at. Football (not the EU version, the real deal) is an American obsession to the point of being nauseating. Like baseball, it very openly wraps itself in "Old Glory," and doing so is the last refuge of scoundrels. Yes, Hunter S. Thompson was just as obsessed and it was something I could never relate to with him. I see it as a failing on his part and that of many Americans, it is a drug, literally, to socialize as well as to anesthetize the public.

Like a lot of self-destructive American institutions, I hope to live to watch it also bite the dust, and it's a roundly corporate one. People having fun is one thing. This shit isn't fun, it's a pathology.

It would hardly be the first time were I to observe that American football is equivalent to the "bread and circuses" of the Roman empire, it's literally a cliche at this point and obvious, something to take for granted. It is a distraction, one-of-many, but it's served a very central part in shaping the public mind since the 1920s, and is an adjunct to jingoism with its over-emphasis on competition, machismo, and a Manichean (us vs. them, black & white, etc.) worldview. What's more, and has many others have observed, George Carlin being a noteworthy example, football pushes a military mentality and is a cultural avatar of militarization. Anyone watching the coverage of the first Gulf War on CNN will know what I'm writing about here, but that scoreboard mentality could just as easily be applied to the current conflicts America's now mired down in. It's all part of the same moronic, wrong-headed Americanism that got us into Vietnam.

I have never, for one moment, entertained the bullshit surrounding the sport and find it unbelievably boring, as much as going to church, and that's what it really amounts to (or doesn't). This is literally institutionalized nationalist barbarism. The rest of the world fears us over how pathologically feral we are as a nation thanks to these cultural roots, never mind our entertainment output, enough to scare any normal human being into paralysis. But we're not a normal culture at all, we're a sick one, a degenerated settler state like many others. It's no surprise, then, that a sport like football is so popular here, even supported over our museums and cultural centers that are actually frequented more often.

And so, into this mix came me...and some asshole I only heard of over the years: Daryl Sanders, professional flag waver. Amazingly, he can walk upright and read and write, but his trainers had to use negative reinforcement therapy for all of that. Somehow, some way, some retard on Facebook got his ire up and thought he'd tap the "champ" (chump, chimp) to confront me over my opinions of the recent deaths of a helicopter filled with professionally trained assassins in Afghanistan. I apparently wasn't showing enough "respect" to these Einsatzgruppen-clones and he posted a comment on my wall, which was nice of him.

Next week I'll ask him to get groceries, mow the lawn, he's a rock and apparently does widow, a rarity these days. A hero isn't some oddly-shaped lummox who chases a ball around a field, little FYI. A hero is someone like Pat Tillman, a real man who wanted to protect his country, but also a dedicated leftist who wanted to go to Afghanistan to bear witness. He knew where America had been and wasn't a little child like Sanders, he was a real hero who was probably slaughtered by his fellow soldiers for seeing too much, like the fellow who recently reported the "kill team," another real hero. Heroes don't follow illegal orders. The resist, from inside of the military, putting their lives on the line in the truest sense, for the common good and the good of humanity.

That was Patrick Tillman. I don't even know or care if dumbo ever served, but members of my family did, so don't even go there, sunshine patriots.

Some of this bullshit goes back to John Wayne, a Californian (the genocide state, look at their constitution) college athlete in the 1920s who excelled at football, so much so that he landed a movie contract since if there's anything Americans value, it's the sport. That's called having your priorities out of order. "Wayne" (not his real name) became a wrong-headed icon of American manhood, machismo, just like Daryl Sanders, a little boy who I have to assume still thinks the Vietnam War "was a good idea." He also supports the illegal and genocidal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our point of entry. Sanders told me that I "have an odd sense of right and wrong." Oh really? Someone should really air-drop this piece of shit there and see if his over-sized ass could even make it out alive.

The fact is, those assassins who were killed weren't heroes, they were mindless killers who are paid to murder human beings in the service of private power, something Tillman grasped, making him that rarest of things, an intelligent and reflective American football player. Perhaps that's why he's dead and Sanders is still alive and will die at a ripe, old age. Heroes--real ones--don't live to old age, like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The system here finds some way to eliminate them or to wreck their lives. Daryl's an obedient lapdog, and so his taking-up-space ass will probably continue on, contributing more sickness to our culture. He's a disgusting little man, a joke, a fraud, but then, so are most football players and phony patriots.