Whores and Agendas

 I'll make this short: Not so long ago, I was contacted once more by an unreliable narrator who was a marginal player in the DC Madam case, someone who Jeane consulted briefly before her trial in the spring of 2008, a long time ago. I am not and will never be willing to compromise with the factual-and-objective information I experienced and uncovered before, during, and after, the DC Madam's legal proceedings. 

This is never going to change. Not for money, or any other reason. I know what happened and what happened to me during the legal proceedings. The sad reality in the United States today is the complete ditching of context by some along with a fundamental disrespect for the truth. Unless it serves someone's personal or political agenda, they don't want to know, and we're  talking about an all-ages club here, a pervasive American attitude. This is nothing new in American history; we've been running from the truth since well before Lexington and Concorde, which is running from your problems. I think we decided a long time ago as a nation that these very real social problems aren't problems at all, but just one more way to turn a buck, the original point of Anglo-America. Fine at least if one admits it from the onset and remains consistent on the point. Everyone knows that we were founded by a corporation.

I knew when I began assisting the late Ms. Palfrey that it wasn't about money, and it wasn't. There's no way that I will have ever profited from my involvement in the case. Insisting on the truth of the matter precludes that in a culture which has and is hostile to truth, whatever it may be, in whatever context...that dirty word again, that abomination to would be tyrants everywhere. The case was and will continue to be a barometer for this climb backwards into the darkly peculiar history of the United States. 

We've been here before, in the 1830s and 1840s, when the kind of demagoguery was being pioneered by Andrew Jackson whose shadow looms over the current mess that is the U.S.; it's no secret that it's particularly evident in the southern states and those whose formation came about as a result of the Mexican-American War. Money is all in this, the final white supremacist holdout. I wrote over a decade ago that America is an oligarchy; we have a contemporary aristocracy, and the DC Madam case was just an expression of that fact. These congressmen generally live above the law.

     Hardly being alone, the U.S. is a lawless nation and has yet to become fully civilized. In this context, I always have and will consider Palfrey more akin to a 19th century madam than anything, curious anachronism in a former colonial jerk-water, one that became a world power for a time. That time is over. One day, perhaps, young people will want to learn the truth about this and many other events and stories of the first decade of the twenty-first century. If others were serious about portraying the DC Madam case either dramatically or in a documentary, I would know about it. There have none up to the time of this writing. What will young people think about the case in the future? 

If there's one message that I would send them, it is this: understand that the people who often govern your lives are lesser than you are, that they can sometimes be beaten, they are human, and, therefore, fallible. More often you'll begin to see as you grow older that the bastards undo themselves with their moronic and self-destructive behavior. The best cure for all of this is heading them off at the pass by filtering them out of politics. Get involved in taking down the local Goliaths, forget national politics, start at the bottom...but don't think you're not corruptible, you are.

Eat at Joe's

 America, you have colonized yourself, which takes a lot of effort, congratulations. You're no quitter, only non sequitur.

Anthropos

Prologue

The incomplete text below was found in the pocket of a murdered Italian banker in the early 1980s. Another section of it was discovered later in the 1990s in the safe of a deceased senior member of Italy's military intelligence:

...but what did the primary witness, this surveyor named Rampali, say he saw? This comes down to us from his recently rediscovered journal entries in a forgotten cabinet in a local municipality and from local folklore in that part of the Campania, the lore itself almost lost in the face of an encroaching technological-industrial modernity and its attendant cultural homogenization due to consumerism, most Italians now communicating in Tuscan, and so on...

After several days of uneventful entries, Eduardo Rampali, who was a learn ed man from Pisa and a prominent vassal of the Spanish Bourbons wrote on a summer day in 1713:

July 19,

Work hath progressed slowly [with] the first well sunk.

Workmen frightened, seeme to be slowing dig [with] purpos[e] lazy sods.

[cont.] I decide to go down into the hole thus sunk...

My lords, I can not put upon paper what I have witnesseth with mine own eyes as God is my guarantor [and] I must convey onle that we appear [to have]come [upon] what is statuary but a most curious one at that for [it] appears to have station of its own [and] puts thought into motion.

[cont.] It grabbed my hand [and] it spake my lords [and] its agency ceased. I can discloose [sic] no more [and] will apprise you of the details with your audience.

E.R. ...

And at that, Mr. Rampali vanishes and the trail disappears like so many others from the historical record, perhaps to be unearthed another day as Truth is most patient. This, we fear, might one day happen in this case. But at present the narrative has no other supporting documentary record. The document has been found to be genuine, but there is no opinion on the veracity or even meaning of its claims from the specialists consulted to interpret it thanks to a lack of greater context. Current corporate thinking makes a definitive explanation impossible for the time being, and this is viewed in our circles as a positive sign.

During the rule of Charles III of Spain, King of Naples and of Sicily, over what is now most of the southern half of Italy, a decree had come from the very House of Bourbon by way of the gendarmes, heralds, and criers, for a series of wells to be dug around the southeastern base of Mount Vesuvius. On its face, there is nothing special to note here and there are many such projects that have come about over the generations.

Among other purposes, this dig was to feed water to one of the many estates in the Campania for agricultural purposes and to maintain their decorative gardens and hydraulic fountains; it was also to be connected by way of a network of discreet, cyclopean maintenance tunnels through which the aristocrats and their guests could make a quick exit in case of the periodic and inevitable peasant uprisings and other foreign invasions. For an undetermined period only the authorities and the underworld knew of them. Certainly today, the Italian public has knowledge of them but are also currently unaware of parallel structures. Current knowledge of this specific network dates back primarily to their use as air raid shelters during World War II, and tours are often conducted in parts of them; other sections are home to the addicted population, general derelicts, youth gangs, and organized crime. (All heavily surveilled by numerous agencies of government.) They sometimes serve as ceremonial chambers for the Camorra when they induct members; usually this is children from the housing projects of Naples and greater Campania, generally. More often, many of the tunnels and corridors are used as garbage dumps by the very same populations. Occasionally, one can find the burned image of a saint lying among the rest of the decaying drug paraphernalia and human detritus, dirty, contaminated needles everywhere...

But this is all academic by now: Farmers around Vesuvius had been turning up relics tilling their fields for centuries and, while it still occurs, these were, as they are today, one-offs, not hordes of coins nor priceless statuary or decorative pieces that could be exchanged in the underworld of that era, or this one. The discovery of Herculaneum through a series of tunnels that began their lives as farm wells had already occurred in the region and was filling the king's private museum in Naples with a growing hoard of lost masterpieces. The digging itself was not a criminal act, but the secreting away of antiquities was, even under the very loose statutes and customs of the day, it was grave robbery. This digging and pilfering would continue until the revolutions and shortly after Johann Joachim Wincklemann's (ironically, an antiquarian from the Prussian city of Stendahl) essay on the treasures and Weber's work outlining the layout of the legendary villa of the papyri. The overarching story is universally known and is considered infamous in the history of archeology.

As yet another test dig close by progressed, a rather familiar pall of secrecy began to blanket the undertaking. It seems that the young king smelled more treasure to loot. Gangs of prisoners were brought into the area close to the coastline and strictly overseen by the King's men, literally mining the volcanic earth for treasure as it was little more than a form of looting. While many passages have collapsed and are no longer accessible to the public, the Bourbon tunnels still worm their way through the buried sections of Herculaneum and can be considered a very old crime scene, a crime as it were, against humanity. There would be many more in the new modern era.

Though there are similarities to the separate finds the wells dug close to the base of Vesuvius must be considered a completely separate venture from the tunneling into Herculaneum and decades later at the site of Pompeii.

There were some peculiar problems encountered with the sinking of the first well: the site chosen by the court engineers had encountered a hard volcanic crust and then subsequently uncovered what seemed to have been a village dump at one time; the workmen were finding numerous bits of cloth, old olive oil lamps, bits of parchment, curious “can-like cylinders” that may have been metal scrolls, mule bones, bottles, broken farm implements, but nothing of any ascertainable value. You first had to dig through the thick layers of rich, volcanic soil to be carried away plat-by-plat in the punishing Mediterranean sun, leaving the diggers open to all four elements. These were the labors of slaves who worked with primitive spades, staves, and wooden barrows. And this was also a military venture. By the third day of digging, the first well sunk was only fifteen cubits deep, incredibly slow going, even in those days; load after load of loose limestone, dirt, sand, gravel and tufa came up with each hoisted basket. The hole only got deeper and wider with intensive sifting and careful horizontal exploration. A few more days passed. In that meantime the overseer, a local surveyor, a rare vocation in the region at the time, had decided to split his workers in order to sink several more wells. The hole seemed to feed on their labor, and the more they dug, the less it seemed to relent, as though time was standing still and the dirt dug magically re-appeared from whence it came. Things keep their secrets, he recalled, and so, the engineer decided to reconnoiter the first well to see for himself what was slowing the work.

Rampali's log tells us that the encrusted rural workers and prisoners cleared out of the hole and that down went the engineer “sans his tricorner” with a boxy oil lamp. Descent into the hole was like running a gauntlet of outstretched skeletal-arms, thick, hard weeds nearly choking any view of the bottom, scratching any exposed flesh. The diggers had somehow made it down to twenty-four cubits by now, well under half the normal rate of speed. There was an ineffable smell he could not pinpoint, well beyond his experience, not even in war, dense in its character. It was an acrid odor, and then he heard a sound, beneath him, as though something were moving. The odor transmuted, relocating from his nose to his mouth, becoming a very sour, metallic taste, the kind you feel before an act of violence, although this was apparently not the experience of synthesia. Everything is violence in our temporal existence. The walls of the hole seemed to be undulating gradually, and a creaking sound began to emanate from the ground beneath him like the broken gears he had heard on a crude farm machine that was cranked by hand, metal on metal, like some broken clock or the spokes of a cart becoming entangled, and, rather than giving away and eventually dying down, it was becoming an immutable and irresistible force, crushing whatever got was in its proximity. Below him, he could hear rocks cracking into pieces.

He could now feel the ground beneath his feet shaking, and a rumbling sound came from what sounded like everywhere. A tiny mound began to form at the center of the pit's floor that was going to be breached at any moment and he steadied himself, reaching for his saber and hoping that his powder was dry and his flintlock was still on his belt. What broke through the earthen mound would be folklore in the nearby villages and towns for generations—still told to this day—but the surveyor would never say what it was that he first witnessed being reborn from the earth, because no one was certain that it had ever been alive. They weren't certain that it was dead, or alive, or what that might even mean. These were peasants, and implications for Western technological development escaped them completely. It would have escaped almost anybody at that historical moment, however.

The Bourbons forbade any talk of of the “artifact,” and what happened to the object found in the pit has never been fully ascertained by contemporary scholars and our best technicians who have been brought into the circle. However, through the forensic piecing together of local folk narratives around Vesuvius and greater Campania, thanks primarily to the noted historiographer, Giuseppe Calabrese, we have a general idea that a statue and various other Roman era objects relating to it were unearthed and taken away from the site by the royal authorities at the time. What does not square with this reconstructed story is within the narrative folklore itself which we can dismiss as being embellished and overly imaginative superstition that could not be possible based on our current understanding of the Hellenic world and what it was capable of in the area of machine technology. At the same time, something remarkable was uncovered.

Only 1% of all Roman bureaucratic and literary output is known to have survived into the contemporary world, while most technological artifacts of that time would have been constructed of perishable materials, there were no synthetics, no modern chemistry, to our knowledge, so little is left. Conversely, there was a continuous artisanal tradition within the city of Rome and the rest of the empire, some of it originating from the Greek provinces and in Alexandria, a base which was more than capable of creating at least working models—unique, and incapable of being mass produced—on demand to what can safely presumed to be aristocratic patrons. The island of Rhodes was well known for its special machines.

We know on the one hand that the Roman military was equipped with construction machinery that was on par with 19^th century devices such as a primitive construction site conveyor belt uncovered in Greece in order to convey away soil, sand, gravel, rock, uprooted foliage, and the rest of standard, geological detritus. It's also common knowledge that steam-propelled toys existed as one-offs for children of the aristocracy and were barred from further development and production by the emperor. What other one-offs originated in the workshops of Rome? Who forged them? Was it the god Hephaestus or was it some mortal inventor like Daedalus? What historical processes brought these inventions about, these curious creations that we can only guess at for want of any concrete remains? Like so much else, this was borrowed Greek & Egyptian technology that might have been adapted and improved upon by the Romans in their inimitable style. As is so often the case, we are left with more questions than answers and physical artifacts are scanty.

Outside of the occasional shipwreck discovery, what happened to so many of the statues of classical Greece? Was there an Etruscan literature? Surely there was. Who were the makers of these devices and who were the men who thought them up in the first place? Only the dead know, and only forensics experts—archaeologists and scholars, some of the new priests and diviners—are listening anymore, and they might begin listening once more to the stones, to the walls of the ruins, to the few corpses which remain, for they whisper some of their secrets to us, ever so lightly. The world and the Four Elements are immutable and eternal. There is a moisture in the earth.

… [page missing]

One more scrap of Rampali's very brief existence on this earth was discovered in yet another forgotten file cabinet in the office of the Carabinieri in Naples in 1977: it was part of a kind of an inventory manifest of the Villa Fraticidio that came with the fall of Bourbon rule in the Campania listing two partial statuary found at the well site in 1713 with the surveyor's surname and initials appended to it, all listed alone, and without any context provided, a common state of affairs in such matters. A description states one of the statues “has seams.” No living scholar has been able to decipher what this meant exactly, but one German has put forward the most logical possibility: they were busts, and not of Roman origin at all, a most satisfying conclusion if unprovable, while the French schools seem to think they might just as easily have been bronzes with casting remnants around the edges, perhaps. From our current level of knowledge, there was little uniformity in ancient workshops. Traces of seams in the statuary could indicate that these were later works, possibly from arsenal works in Corinth. They are almost certainly composed of bronze but further analysis will be necessary as recent X-raying and scanning of the parts and trunks have revealed they are composites of lost-wax and beaten metal processes. In addition, most of the parts have an outer-coating of ceramic. As always, folkloric narratives are to be ruled out as in error and do not adhere to any standards of evidence and more often contradict the known archaeological record around Vesuvius, if not the very laws of physics themselves.

Irrational stories of this kind are normal to peasant societies, but stories of the fantastic can be found in virtually all human groupings, notably in places known to have been the sites of natural disasters, former battlefields of war, cemeteries and the archaic necropolis, not to mention the tales that almost always surround the ruins of past civilizations. They are to be dismissed as out of hand and comprise a kind of dreamlike desire to transcend what is a very monotonous life under a mostly banal feudal order. Such are the dreams of the faceless man, the common man who will always elude the archaeologist, scholar, living as it were in the shadows that border time and space, happily anonymous until the next spade comes along to disturb their rest, again. ...

 All contents © Matt Janovic 2019

Monsters & Critics makes a "new" documentary on the DC Madam case

Ed.--I'm not sure anything surprises me anymore, and this "new" documentary Monsters & Critics (yet another entertainment media site) is no exception. I was never consulted because I don't (won't) support the ridiculous conspiracy theories peddled by right wing assholes and hungry media assholes who want to massage the facts or ignore them outright to fit their moron-narratives. 

Why do people want to lie about the DC Madam case? Because it sells. I myself could have sold many more copies of my account of the case had I adhered to these fabrications--and that's what they are, pure fiction, from the very tiny minds of morally-impaired idiots. I also have to say that a large-swath of the American public doesn't care about truth or facts and are also scumbags of basically the same ilk.

This is addressed to Harper Hill and her morally-impaired staff:

"Conspiracists and those who claim to know more about 'the list' say it was murder and not suicide." Let me guess--Wayne Madsen, for one? I'm sure Mr. Sibley had a few new dark comments without corroboration as well?  Oh, then there's the ever-credulous Infowars who were never players in the case as I was, only on-the-margins. 
The fact that Hill never contacted me for this "documentary" (safe to assume a bad collection of hastily-assembled clips supporting an erroneous thesis based on a desire for more site hits--money--with a dumb voice-over) speaks volumes for its general lack: lack of an overall array of the primary evidence; a steering very wide-of-the-mark away from contrary evidence (me, the primary records I still possess); and an obvious lacking of a desire for the truth, what really happened.
A Safe Prediction: There will be no new information in this documentary, and it will offer no new insights into the case. 
Therefore, there is no reason for this documentary to exist at all beyond the most obvious economic motivations. In short, one more gaggle of entitled assholes has come and shit upon the late Ms. Palfrey's grave, disrespecting her, her family, and what's left of her memory. Goddamn all of you. You are well-poisoners, the lowest form of human life.

I was going to post this in comments but their site insists that you register an account with Facebook, something I flatly refuse to do.

2016 election stimulates new interest in DC Madam case

Former DC Madam civil and criminal counselor Montgomery Blair Sibley has been doing some filings recently, all covered in the press, and he wants to release the subpoenaed Verizon phone records for reasons I won't go into based on confidentiality, a promise I have made to a source. The development comes at an interesting time and I cannot fault the man for doing what he's doing and even wish him well, I hope he's successful.

His claim that there are 815 names in the subpoenaed phone records is correct, however, I never noticed any major political names and have not gone back to them or Dan Moldea's searches of her phone records that Jeane herself entrusted to myself and others for the purposes of research for her case.

I would add that since 2008, I haven't had anyone request or tell me either telephonically, via email, or served through the postal service, to return any of those materials, not that I could if I tried since they've been so thoroughly disseminated as to render that impossible. That being stated, and I say this as a layman, I seriously doubt that anyone could even claim jurisdiction over me and them. In fact, I've published some of them on here, the raw information, but only specific names.

Here's the thing: Nearly all of the names we were able to dig deeper on are published online anyway. The Chief U.S. Courts judge, a fellow named Roberts, God help us, really just seems to hate Sibley along with the rest of the legal establishment in DC and won't let him release and publish (the most important aspect, I believe, that right) them, hoping, Sibley said, to affect the outcome of the political elections. Can he? Will he? Should he?

It's possible that the names are of people who rose since I last looked at them, I don't know, frankly, there were so many.

Where does that leave me? Yes, stuck in the middle, again, somewhere in Dante's limbo, on the outskirts of mortality.

Jeane never told me or Mr. Sibley to return that information, the files, the phone numbers, the scans of her phone bills, or anything at all. Neither has the Palfrey Estate in all of eight years. I believe their time is well up seeing that the phone records were probably released online at Jeane's bequest by Citizens for Legitimate Government, hence by Lori Price. It was never a great idea to put those phone bills online for the defense, but, I must add that the above parts of this paragraph are simply my conclusions and opinions, albeit very informed ones.

Are there more names of importance in the phone records? Why wouldn't they have been found already? I'm skeptical but might be induced to take another look, maybe, just maybe, if I cared enough to. It's mostly a closed door for me.

I have communicated with Mr. Sibley recently. That being said, no, I'm staying mum out of respect.

Comments

I think commenting is working now. Fire away.

Clive Barker's Director's cut of Nightbreed (1990/2014)

Memory, as they say, and assay, is a strange and curious thing: it has a plasticity that somehow still conveys the truth of something while generously protecting the mind from the horrors and chaos of an uncaring universe, the human condition reduced to its essentials. Any literature aspiring to greatness is going to explore our peculiar predicament of being sentient in what appears to be a mindless cosmos; Clive Barker's additions to the canon, Blakean in their imagery & themes, invoking love (an expression of divinity) alongside corruption (the material world), are what high art is made of. (And as with the highest forms, he takes some of his prima materia from the lower depths.)  

From sex, to politics, and religion, it's all about bodies and who controls them, but some of this is about remembering.

I was twenty-two when I saw Nightbreed at the theater in 1990 and had come wondering what the hell it was about since 20th Century Fox insisted that it be marketed as a slasher. 

When you're that young, you frankly don't know shit, yet paradoxically believe you know everything, you're molten, outside, unassimilated into society at that point--therefore, "dangerous." Obviously, I've changed a lot since then: now I know how little I know and knew then. At that time, romantic love meant everything to me, now, not so much, yet, life being circular, you tend to come back around to things. Experience leavens  base innocence. Barker had a very ambitious agenda indeed when he attempted to foist his non-Manichean monster movie onto an unsuspecting American public used to a more black and white storytelling; what you had was a collision of "mindsets" (his term for it) about fictional monsters being fodder for militarized "heroes." In 1990, no one wanted to try to the understand the other whether they were human or a fictional monster. That should be a reminder that there are no others ultimately, and that the monsters we've conjured in storytelling are often mirrors of ourselves to get beyond that screen. 

Context being everything, this all came to a head on the eve of the first Gulf War when the public was being whipped into another cycle (see?) of hating the other; additionally, the movie was released just weeks after the illegal invasion of Panama. The Soviet Union was busy collapsing; German reunification occurred just three days before its release, the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after twenty-seven years, less than a week earlier. Old habits tend to continue on anyway, anachronistically.

The timing was bad on all fronts for Barker who was nobly spitting into the cultural trade winds with his film version of his 1988 novel Cabal: unfortunately, the suits at Morgan Creek wanted something more like Hellraiser, the idea of the monsters in a horror movie (really, a fantasy with elements of horror) being the good guys didn't sit well with them, and they rejected it as out of hand and demanded Barker make extensive cuts and reshoots. What it did was to place the psychotic psychiatrist character played by legendary cult director David Cronenberg more at the center of the story; they also demanded that there be more of an emphasis on the menacing qualities of the nightbreed. Not only did they miss the point of most classic monster movies, they just wouldn't listen to Barker, and so, what went out into the world was a confused fusion of his and their ideas. The good side is, they weren't able to remove the sympathy for the breed, outsiders all, but they did incredible harm to the love story between main characters Boone and Lori with all their meddling. A movie that cost $10 million--and a bargain for Morgan Creek at that--made less than nine, and that was that, it bombed, having an afterlife on cable and home video. Part of Barker's legend as a prodigy was that the total cost of Hellraiser had been under $1 million USD. 

Say what you want, but he made an epic with his second film, and that's where the money people come in, and serendipitously perhaps, the themes in the original story material got underlined in real life. The failure haunted Barker for years.

The more jaded among us might see one reading the movie as a parable of the modern world crashing into the author's anachronistic fantasy world with sadly predictable results. Occasionally, the universe smiles and throws something unpredictable out there: a small but fundamental victory for the underdog. You could write an entire book on the themes in Nightbreed, from the content of the script, to the theatrical & final cuts, and the politics of the actual making (or, really, unmaking) of the movie itself. Nothing happens in a vacuum.   In the end, the breed are history's losers, and conversely, winners, like the heretics of the world religions and every other kind of social rebel that ever lived under a repressive order. You cannot kill the truth. But in 1990, history seemed settled, that seemed to be that, the show was over, and there are very few second chances with motion pictures. Did I mention that homophobia was actually worse than it is today?

However, a lot of us out here felt that something was missing from the theatrical cut, as evinced in the opening titles of that showed scenes which were cut. (Some still are, but now we're fortunate enough to have access to the outtakes in pristine condition.) Beginning with some of Barker's public statements and various rumors over the last twenty-four years, considerable force has been gaining for a new cut. I direct the reader to search out the story of the "Cabal cut" which made a final reconstruction of Barker's original vision possible, a convoluted tale in itself. After years of searching, an announcement was made last year that the lost film elements had finally been found in a storage warehouse in Dayton, Ohio. What was once the detritus of a lost vision had become a global cause via Internet outreach and public showings of the Cabal cut. By 2013, the stage was set and cinematic history was about to be rewritten, and that's a rare occasion. Shout Factory! has made good on that promise and beyond. Its message of universal love is central, but I believe the restoration is also about fixing a work of LGBT filmmaking that advocates the same message of acceptance as Richard Oswald's Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern, 1919), the first pro-gay movie in cinematic history. Both movies were damaged for ideological reasons.

If Barker's Cabal and Nightbreed remind us of anyone in literature, it's Arthur Machen. Machen was a Welsh Catholic who, ironically enough, had an intense fear of forbidden sex, a kind of ritual  sex he was made aware of by fellow occultist and American expatriate A. E. Waite, co-author of what is still the most popular version of the Tarot. To be a Catholic in Britain at that time was considered a little eccentric. After Cornelius Agrippa, Waite was also the first to systematically catalog and study the Western inner tradition and was a sworn enemy of Aleister Crowley. When it comes to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, there's plenty of subversive sexuality, inside and outside of the magic circles. I'm not suggesting that Barker based Nightbreed on the politics of esoteric lodges, no, albeit a lodge of that sort could be considered a "cabal" of another kind. Here, we really could go on forever, because that's how the occult works, it's a rabbit hole. Similarly, the Gnostics and other religious minorities and sects were once smeared as sexual deviants; the pagan has been equated with homosexuality; accused witches were blamed for male impotency, and so on. Being different can be dangerous in human society.

The reason I mention Machen is that he wrote similarly weird tales that dealt with shunned races who fled underground from human society. That sounds just like the tale of any human outsider. But is it really metaphor when faced with the incredible fact that everyone who isn't African has a percentage of Neanderthal coursing through their veins? And not so long ago, the bones of "Hobbits" ("homo floresiensis") have been found in caves on an Indonesian island, suggesting that the human story and what constitutes human beings is plastic, always changing, and open to wide interpretation and revision, if not correction. The results of some of that pondering have been catastrophic, such as in the application of eugenics philosophy to social problems, first, in North America, and not much later, Shark Island and in Nazi Germany. Artistic truth can be funny in the way that it naturally draws our attention to these truths of the human experience. A lot of what happens in Nightbreed in its final cut has a lot to do with the first half of the 20th century and the legacy of a long history of genocide.

Machen wrote most of his incredible weird tales about "little people" (and worse) living underground--"where the monsters live." 

"This folk," I translated to myself, "dwells in remote and secret places, and celebrates foul mysteries on savage hills. Nothing they have in common with men save the face, and the customs of humanity are wholly strange to them; and they hate the sun. They hiss rather than speak; their voices are harsh, and not to be heard without fear. ... But as I idly scanned the paragraph, a flash of thought passed through me with the violence of an electric shock: what if the obscure and horrible race of the hills still survived, still remained haunting wild places and barren hills, and now and then repeating the evil of Gothic legend, unchanged and unchangeable as the Turanian Shelta, or the Basques of Spain? (from "The Black Seal," 1895)

The Basques have been found to have an unusual genetic connection to the Neanderthal. Who are the monsters, and who are the humans? Only action and love as will can tell us.

And now, my memory of Nightbreed is changed forever, and base metal has been transmuted to gold. Being human is to be in the process of remembering and forgetting. Nightbreed is about remembering where we've been.

comments section

For some reason, comments are fucked up, having problem accessing them. I'm not ignoring you. If, for whatever reason (make it a logical one please), you want to vent your spleen: mtthwjanovic007@gmail.com .

"Dude, I just realized..." [insert conspiracy theory here]

If indeed you are sane, you need to reply immediately that, "I don't give a shit about your stupid fucking opinions, or your goddamned speculations based on a staggering ignorance of our history and human nature, fuck you very much." This won't stop them. 

Stupidity needs an airing and wants to parade itself: "No, really," says the asshole that flunked out of history and barely passed civics. "This is REALLY important, it's the truth!"

"No, really, I'm not fucking around--I don't value your opinion about anything."

Feed a cold, starve a fever dream. When you respond to a conspiracy nut, you're giving them oxygen. The same goes for political opponents. Let them suffocate alone, in silence.

Another old review of an important movie...

If you haven't seen it already, I recommend seeing Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. This one still gets a lot of hits: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2010/01/imaginarium-of-dr-parnassus-2009-review.html

Still true...

You're never gonna see a dude, dudette, or anyone, walk into a party with a big bag of pot, and suddenly, yes, instantly, they all flock/sashay ostentatiously to that person/dude, dude(tte)s. Never. Unicorn time. Didn't happen, anywhere.

Nightbreed

A review of the director's cut is coming in a few days.

Seattle Socialist Sawant rips fellow city leaders for ‘brazen’ retreat with corporate execs

Seattle Socialist Sawant rips fellow city leaders for ‘brazen’ retreat with corporate execs

Postscript: I visited Seattle in 2002 and found it boring. You can have it. People pay shitloads of money to live there? They're stupid, and of course, boring. There's nothing especially exciting about the place. I' do heroin too if I lived there--if you want to call it that.

Libertarian Senate candidate from Iowa dies in plane crash

Libertarian Senate candidate from Iowa dies in plane crash

Sears, RIP

Who woulda thunk that once a libertarian hedge fund manager took over at the venerable American chain, applying his dumbo dinosaur ideology to the place (important note: make all of your employees who formerly worked together to make a business a success turn on each other, crucial, really...) would destroy it rapidly? 

The genius just had to "loan" Sears $400 million to save face, and now, now, Sears has posted a "dinner ring" with a swastika on it. My grandfather is turning in his grave, right now.

Hello, Ukraine...

I get a lot of hits from two nations: these here United States and the Ukraine. This started before I met a number of people from the Ukraine on Twitter and France is often a close third. I thank you all for your interest.

Arianna, my first play!

Ed.-I never liked this stupid asshole, never trusted her. Giving someone like her a second chance was always gonna be a mistake...

http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2009/01/arianna-satirical-play-by-matt-janovic_31.html

Clive Barker's Nightbreed Director's cut

I was one of the first thousand to preorder it. I saw the movie back in 1990 and wasn't entirely pleased with it. Warners billed it as something like a slasher at the time, which is not. What Nightbreed was and now is again is the Citizen Kane of monster movies where the tables are turned--or that's what it was supposed to be, an epic tale, a metaphor for discrimination against LGBT people, and much more, a lost classic now found and restored to its former glory before the suits got their hands on it. 

A comparison is in order here: This is like the achievement of a full restoration of the first gay-positive movie ever made, Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern, 1919, starring Conrad Veidt, the somnambulist from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) or The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), it is historic.

I should receive the set by this weekend or early next week. A sprawling review and reflection on the new cut is coming. I'll also be doing a similar essay on Breaking Bad as a cultural and historical phenomenon in time now that the series has concluded and the dust has settled a bit. Expect the unexpected.

Postscript, 10.10.14: It's arrived! This is going to take some time to digest, but I should have my first observations up in about a week. The set is pretty amazing and the new artwork for the 3-BD set is better than the promotional art at the time. David Cronenberg should be pleased, he gets more screen time.

10.11.14: After watching the director's cut last night, I can say that we have a new classic.  What's most surprising is how what Barker intended most is a great, epic love story, a tale of universal love. Nightbreed has finally arrived to the audience it was intended for all along. There are so many things to say about it, and I will shortly. 

Audio and video quality are superb--it looks & sounds vastly better than its theatrical debut which is saying something. Yes, David Cronenberg has more screen time. I won't be printing any spoilers. 

From 2008: Some observations on the WM3

Ed.-I've written on this case several times and am always amazed at the comments my observations have generated. Have I been wrong about the case in the past? You bet, and so were many observers. Read the comments. Many of them are interesting, a few very illuminating. My deceased maternal grandparents were from Arkansas. I have some unique views on the place and its very backwards culture.

http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2008/01/west-memphis-3-update-terry-wayne-hobbs.html 

From 2010: "Why Alex Jones Will Live Forever"

http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-alex-jones-will-live-forever.html

to my twitter pals...

I'm here, I'm not queer, but I accept everybody who's thoughtful. Let's talk, if you want. 

Postscript: And I might add: yes, there is comments moderation, but fire away, I tend to post 99% of everything that comes my way. Besides those asserting the DC Madam was murdered--I will not respond to them beyond occasionally refuting their ridiculous assertions--I'll be happy to answer any questions about the case and my book account on it.

And of course, if you want to put the word out there about this site, the case, and my book, you're welcome to. It will be greatly appreciated. The information on this blog and in the text serve the public interest.

Indiana trooper pulled over woman to ask if she’d accepted Jesus Christ as her savior: lawsuit

Indiana trooper pulled over woman to ask if she’d accepted Jesus Christ as her savior: lawsuit

and another thing...

After not doing so in any sustained sense, I'm going to start drawing again. I might post some results on here. Maybe. I'll be geeking out to horror movies for the rest of the month, among other things, besides taking my sweet niece Trick-or-Treating. The Autumn is my favorite season.

Additionally: Yes, it's banal, but we're taking things in for the winter. I have some celery to harvest, some eggplants, leeks, carrots, and brussel sprouts. Except for the first vegetable, most of these do well in the cold--at least for a time.

Additional cinema website coming

I've been thinking of doing this for a long time and now that time has come: a separate blog that will contain only observations and reviews of movies, the occasional doc-men-tar-y, animated work, & series. Beyond that, there are no rules, I'll do it at leisure and much of it will be my opinions on the state of the movie business. I haven't thought of a title yet, or even given it any thought, frankly, but I will in the next week. The standard American view is to assume that the industry is shielded from all of the problems we're all exposed to in mainstream economic life and somehow exists in its own space and time. It does not. 

Making motion picutres has always been a raging battle against art & commerce. As with everything else, that battle is essentially over with capital winning. The old Hollywood studio system was a separate and organic industry at one time; that time is long gone & ended with the general collapse of the labor movement and the decline of the working class. It was always about spectacle, but now power expresses itself more fully, spectacle being all that's left now. There can be no doubt that the movies were always a pallative--an opiate to calm the masses from making the natural connections about their predicament & revolting--and they still are, indeed, more than ever. It's never been a pure thing, but there was a time when you could still make relatively subversive (to power) statements. 

In the United States at least, most of that maverick spirit died with Sam Peckinpah, and by the late 1970s, nearly all the major studios were being bought up by conglomerates. That process was basically completed by the early 1990s with the death of Orion Pictures, the last genuine independent distributor left standing by that point. (One of their final releases was George Romero's The Dark Half.)

Don't get me wrong, the unions in the Hollywood system cut their own throats by a thousand cuts; but they're just as much victims. Right now, most of the computer animators are watching their own jobs evaporate to overseas labor pools. I'm sure that they never saw it coming. My question is, why?

A'murka

this site's most popular post ever...Mr. Smiley

Ed.-Iffin' you never heard of "Mr. Smiley," let me clue you in: it's some weird marijuana substitute that was once sold over the counter here and elsewhere across the US, mostly at shady gas stations.

I smoked it. It does produce intoxication. It's also very, very bad for you, and I don't recommend you try it. They only reason it didn't harm me is that I took two tokes, no more.

Without being too prolix: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2010/05/mr-smiley-product-review.html

For Lazy Readers, from 2012: When Fixers Get Book Deals that Flop

Ed.-Not even that long after Deborah Jeane Palfrey's body had cooled, the very class of people (who had worked in the same office as the scum who ran her to her death), Allison Leotta, who left her job to write her "big book," penned a fictionalization of the DC Madam case. Regardless of what she'd probably say about the case, one would have to assume it would always be fiction. But, hey, these are flush times for the people who serve the people who serve power. Or are they? And regardless of what most of them will say, they're not protecting you, unless of course it's an unforeseen side-effect. Then, they'll take all the credit in the world for it at the DOJ.

I don't serve anybody's fucking agenda.

This, presumably, being the Land of Opportunity for professional fixers--the people who wipe the congressional asses of eternal children with impulse control problems for a living--Leotta scored what I would never want or accept: a book deal with the rapidly sinking (good) publishing powerhouse Simon & Schuster. 

Thankfully, the book didn't go anywhere, so I hope she's saddled with all that debt I assume was in her standard contract under "recoupable losses," or whatever guarded language they & their attorneys hid it under. You see, the public, contrary to whatever they might say, hates the truth, so the lack of sales on her part was a little hard for me to fathom. However, being human, or facsimiles thereof, the American public will do anything they can to run away from stories with a bad ending--in Jeane's case, her death. This doesn't keep some of them from speculating about the case along flat-earther lines. How could it when our toxic culture produces concentrated radioactive irrationality as its greatest export?

When I found out about this stupid woman's piece of crap novel, I was outraged. Indeed, as in other cases, I found it important to counter her comments. So, as you can imagine, I posted comments online at some of the sites that were opening their doors to her (hey, don't they for everyone?) as though it were coordinated from the start since she wasn't giving away any secrets on endemic corruption anyway, just bullshit wrapped in...don't know, don't care.

And so, here's where it went: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2012/06/former-ausa-allison-leotta-writes-novel.html

PS: There are no pictures in my book either, fuck you very much.

Dumb cup of coffee™

It's National Coffee Day, and I don't care.

What's going on?

I've been writing again. For over a year after the completion of my first book, I took time off to rest and recuperate, it being a five year journey, and a solitary one at that. Some of what I've been working on is general research into future projects that are non-fiction, while others are short stories--most in early drafts, embryonic form--and one fictional screenplay that might end up being a short film of around ten minutes, one reel.

My feeling now is that I would prefer to work on fiction with some non-fiction essays and research on a few narrow topics. I'm not telling what they are right now for a variety of reasons. Pets, caring for my ailing mother, yardwork, work of all kinds, & helping my niece do homework. Life's pretty good right now. No one's fucking with that. Expectations require throwing money. In other words, serious enquiries only. I am very open to questions and comments about the DC Madam book. However, I know a waste of time when I see one and you'll be ignored if you ask impertinent ones or simply want to have some catharsis with me thanks to your bad childhood.

Speaking (more like writing-or "writhing") of that, as the world has become more hopelessly lost, I've become more obsessed with cinema, not really a surprise, but there it is. Because of that, I'm thinking of keeping this blog going but starting another one that's only about movies, therefore, it will have reviews and some commentary, observations, and whatnot, on the current state of cinema and where it's been.

Oddly, the hits to the blog have risen substantially while I've been fucking around on Twitter. Top three nations of readers are as follows, in order: USA, France, & the Ukraine, fancy that. Yes, the less you write, the more people want to read. Human beings are perverse like that.

And in the spirit of that thought, that's all you're getting for now.

DC Madam trial transcript links

Ed.-I posted these not long ago, it's just down the page a few posts, but to newer readers (?), this should make things easier: http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/2012/12/dc-madam-trial-transcripts.html

 For reasons unknown, I was the first to post these online in their totality. Insofar as I can tell, no one else has followed suit. 

What libertarianism really is, at base

It doesn't get any closer to the truth than this: 

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted,
socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The
other, of course, involves orcs.  

 This was a quote from writer John Rogers, I couldn't have put it any better myself, and yes, I know idiots obsessed with both novels, right Greg?

"Who are you?"

Why do people ask this? That's like asking someone to describe a color. Everything you would want to know is on this blog. Take a look around, read. I'm a writer, that's who I am. By this point, I've made it clear where I stand on most issues, political, cultural, and otherwise. Beyond my book Let the Dead Bury the Dead, most of the answers to your questions are here.

The rest you don't get to know because all men are islands and all the self-help gurus can't get their shit together either.

Postscript: I make no claims of perfection.

A Recent Reflection on the DC Madam Case

Everyone has an opinion, even people who clearly don't know anything about the topic and weren't involved. This is typical of people the world over, but this obsession, then, with being "right" takes over, which is very Germanic, yet in its worst form, uniquely American. 

Few know it, but this dumbo mining camp of a nation was founded on a conspiracy theory, a pervasive form of mental illness in the modern world to explain things simply: that the Vatican was working to enslave Protestants in the Colonies through the throne of King George III. It didn't matter that there was no truth to it, many believed, and it was part of motivating a normally apathetic mob into action (it still didn't work on everybody, just the incredibly stupid ancestors of the Tea Party movement). People believe what they want.

Unless you've actually written a thesis in your life and you can back up your statements, I don't care. You have to make me care by making real effort. I will not debate idiots. There it is.

C'est la vie

You have to laugh when things begin to happen--constructive ones, nothing weird, now--without any effort: writing, creating, and even traffic to your website. It seems the less you do these days, the more happens, and that makes a lot of sense in an era where there's to much coming at you, so, you look for your own "port in the storm." People need some kind of a niche that makes some kind of sense in a chaotic and confusing world, God knows.

This makes all the sense in the world, and in that spirit, without much effort, my site traffic has tripled (not a BIG deal, mind you) without any effort and me neglecting this blog for about a year to finally catch my breath--what little there is of it. What's always interesting are the "whys." Everyone wants to know why. I'm no exception.

I've written on a wide variety of topics: the DC Madam (which went on far longer than I would have imagined), geopolitics, history (a lifelong interest), art (ditto), cinema (a more recent obsession), tidbits of high weirdness, and simply put, my observations on any number of subjects. I make no claims of being a scholar of them, but there it is: I have many interests, too many. What you find when you write about certain topics is that they have a tendency to come looking for you eventually. The Internet is like that. These things don't happen when you simply write a letter and post it.

And so, as America careens over yet another cliff of its own making, I believe some, a tiny percentage of this site, will assist in making a little sense of the mess we're going to be in very soon. I don't claim to have the keys to the crapper like everyone else, but I do have my own unique insights into the nature of things in human society. I'll be writing a little more frequently here. However, don't expect anything. ;0)

Noah Isenberg's Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (2014) review

Professor Strowski:  Now I am here, to bring you home.

Dr. Erich Vornoff:  Home? I have no home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal! The jungle is my home. ...

-Bela Lugosi, from Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster, 1955

The American films (and even a few that weren't) of Edgar G. Ulmer are deeply rooted in the immigrant experience, that irresolvable tug between assimilation and preserving one's identity and traditions. Author Noah Isenberg has illuminated this and many other key elements that combined to create a unique voice in cinema in his biography Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (University of California Press, 2014) and drawn the best roadmap (with a few detours, pun intended) so far into the many mysteries of that voice. As anyone familiar with biographies knows, things have a way of keeping their secrets. But the author's extraordinary and unprecedented interrogation of Ulmer's vast body of work provides incredible insight and corroboration into his life, and he marshals his information from every conceivable direction in a way that would probably make his subject very proud if not a little bemused.

The essentially itinerant director's professional life began not too many years after becoming a refugee with the internal collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1916, beginning as it has for many talented emigres fleeing social and political chaos, a process that continues into today. Like so many, Ulmer came to America with great aspirations and a hopefulness that with retrospect now probably seems naive; his first stop was typical for so many immigrants, and where one might think: New York City, during the early 1920s, working on the design of a Max Reinhardt stage production, a first for almost everyone involved. It wasn't long before the young and bright-eyed Austrian had headed to Hollywood, where, like most of America and its many claims to exceptionalism, success is a coldly loaded word. What better, tragic frission could an artist steeped in German Expressionism with its play of light and shadow want? Not a lot of it was going to end on a happy note, and neither do most of films of this underappreciated king of Poverty Row filmmaking who created such classics as the Laemmle era Universal horror The Black Cat (1934), the Poverty row classics such as Blubeard (1944, starring John Carradine), the legendary noir Detour (1945), and the captivating & shimmering noirish moral parable of Ruthless (1948, co-starring the suave and inimitable Ulmer co-conspirator Louis Hayward).

This is all fine and well--but, who was Edgar G. Ulmer, really? It's like asking who Charles Foster Kane, Dr. Mabuse or Jesus of Nazareth was. Luckily, we have more clues on hand, albeit often, as in the rest of life, flawed ones...

 Ulmer's a name which crops up constantly in writing on cinema, especially in cult and noir circles, but how many would know of his design and preparatory work for F.W. Murnau on the classic Sunrise (1927) and Tabu (1931)? I had only an inkling, if that, and had only read musings that the filmmaker had worked on a few Expressionist movies, but they were only vague allusions to the fact that he was one of the few keeping Murnau's memory and technique alive in the Hollywood system. He had popped back and forth between Hollywood and Europe as early as 1929 when he co-directed the proto-verite classic People on Sunday (or the German title: Menschen am Sonntag, 1930), along with Robert Siodmak, from a treatment that had been co-written by the great Austrian director Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann, all of whom would go on to direct noir classics in America...or at least that's how some of the stories go. Untangling the legends and myths from the facts took Isenberg over a decade; his subject was often the worst source of information, as it were. There are reasons for this that have a lot to do with filmmaking and the kind of people who become motion picture directors: they're storytellers as well as notorious bullshitters, which is often how they get their vision onto the screen in the first place, they lie to achieve it, they're tricksters. 

Anyone familiar with Fritz Lang's stories about his own life and career will be recognize Ulmer's propensity to lie about himself and to exaggerate his experiences and accomplishments (including participation in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & Metropolis). Lang himself simply made things up to tell a better story; so too did Ulmer, and so many other directors over the years. Not all of this was intentional and shows that for many of them the creative process is never over. This bleed of one's life and work shows so clearly in Ulmer's filmmaking. Additionally, directors are usually intuitive psychologists and master manipulators, again, for aforementioned reasons. It takes a lot of effort to put your signature to a movie effectively and for it to retain your vision and style. Therefore, to do it in less than a week of shooting time, which was typical for Ulmer due to economic restrictions--low budgets--and end up with something somewhat coherent and even memorable is something short of a miracle. Ulmer was able to repeat this miracle many times over. This also means that he produced a lot a bad work out of sheer necessity. Even in those circumstances, he was able to imprint most of his movies with memorable themes and moments that contained not only some of his greatest dreams and aspirations, but those of audiences of his era, and ours.

Long relegated to the margins, Ulmer's body of work has been championed by everyone from the Cahiers du Cinema crowd, the leading theorist-directors of the French New Wave, to contemporary hipster movie buffs, and of course, academia. Isenberg shows us the availability of many of these movies and draws us another path to them, again, with no discernible detours. Thanks in part to the Internet, and like such luminaries in other mediums like H. P. Lovecraft, Ulmer is probably more known and popular today than he was when he was alive. My own Ulmer collection has grown in leaps and bounds as of late and announcements of new restorations of his work have been growing periodically over the last few decades, often to great acclaim.

I first came upon Ulmer's work as the Hollywood cult director of Black Cat (because of its stars Bela Lugois & Boris Karloff and the fact that it was--loosely--"based on Poe"), which is maybe the most unique horror film in the horror canon, never mind Universal's. Isenberg notes ably that the movie went on to inspire The Rocky Horror Picture Show for its own high camp value, which is impossible to debate as the movie revels in its perversity, it's simply true--artistic truth. What first strikes the virginal viewer of Black Cat is the familiar use of Expressionist technique; this of course is obvious, but we shouldn't think this was done by someone who had fled a Hitlerean Europe. Ulmer, as stated earlier, was already installed in the American movie system. A fateful decision of running off with the married wife of a cousin of the Laemmles appears to be the deciding factor that relegated him to Poverty Row, he was blacklisted, even after the regime at Universal changed in 1936 to a man named Rogers after its bankruptcy. Not even hits like Black Cat & The Bride of Frankenstein (1935) could save the Laemmle-run studio from cost overruns during the Great Depression.

 Well before the rise of NSDAP & Hitler, talent like Ulmer, Murnau, Joe May (née Mandle, another Austrian), the Hungarian Paul Fejos, Josef von Sternberg (a child of immigrants), even Bela Lugosi, were already working in Hollywood and were "refugees" after Nazi Germany became a reality. They were a different kind of emigre talent, some of whom never quite felt at home in America, or anywhere, and many of them had emerged from the ashes of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the aftermath of WWI. Movies aren't made in a vacuum.

Again: who was Edgar G. Ulmer? We're never going to know entirely, but thanks to studies like this, we can get an idea. Without excessive sentimentality, Noah Isenberg has advanced our knowledge of this great, dark prince of the cinema through a study of his films that delivers to us many answers and many more questions about an often tortured life at the margins. Ulmer has finally come home.

What was the DC Madam case about?

With the blessed passing of yet another election cycle, we might reflect on another one from the recent past which resulted in a significant routing of the GOP by the Democrats: the deeply contentious 2006 national midterms. There's at least one major political sex scandal that takes down a significant politician in the United States every election cycle, generally speaking, two years, with overlap for higher office.

After the fall of the Director of the CIA at the hands of the surveillance state, we might reflect on the DC Madam case and look at the same themes and actions at play.

Jeane got this, maybe more towards the end:

On 3/15/08, Jeane Palfrey <jeanepalfrey@sprynet.com> wrote:

Bil… yes, I saw it. This further supports my belief that escort and adult services – which cater to powerful and influential clients – are being used as the new "hunting grounds" in American politics. –Jeane PS if interested, I will be on Geraldo and Coast to Coast Radio (10:30pm PDT) tonight. Newsweek also has done a piece on me, that is coming out in Monday's edition. It should be available online, by late tonight/tomorrow.

Yet, it appears that the GOP practically brought their own scandal to the attention of the American public. This kind of calculated stupidity is completely in character for them. I walked away from this train wreck a few days after this email. This all began with a leak by federal prosecutors to Bill Bastone and the Smoking Gun, they wanted it out there.

Why do this? Damage control knowing that you can redefine a problem. 2006 had a lot to do with corruption, how much the public will take of it, and damage control rather than the willingness to change or to take responsibility like adults. There are no adults, don’t kid yourself. You look at events differently once you’ve been on the inside of them. Whether others like it or not, Jeane allowed me to take in a lot for a purpose. She invited me to sneak a peek behind the curtain, and indeed, some impotent clowns resembling the Wizard of Oz were incompetently pulling levers that affect people’s lives, tripping, falling over each other, and they were just as blunderingly human and frail as I expected them to be. What the case was about is right in front of your eyes, every day, therefore invisible. It wasn’t a mistake that defense and intelligence technology contractor SAIC and the CPU giant Qualcomm were in Jeane’s phone records, or that they were visiting my website any more than it was that so many arrows pointed to San Diego and numerous military personnel, many of them officers. It wasn’t coincidence that put Lockheed Martin in her phone bills for her escort service, that a World Bank executive was in them, that a major league GOP operative like Jack Burkman was too, and there were many others, others I haven’t even included in my account of what I believe happened and what the case meant. Judge Kessler saw no coincidences when she granted Jeane subpoena power over the intelligence community.

This was a tale of partisan politics and statism, but also where the lines blur in those constructs, because interests overlap, making for the strangest bedfellows of all. Why the 2006 midterms? I believe this election is the key to understanding why an interim-appointed U.S. Attorney named Jeffrey A. Taylor decided to move on Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the press-dubbed “DC Madam,” only one month after she’d shuttered her escort service. I’m assuming here that someone tipped her off. Why waste millions on a small escort service like that? This was first of all about damage control for the part of the public that can be reached when presented with stupid things like facts and corroborated evidence, empiricism, stuff that's not entertainment. Without wanting to, I have no faith in the rank-and-file of either major party, and I think Palfrey’s own apathy about politics and her ignorance of it was instrumental in her undoing, word to the wise. Being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind doesn’t elevate you to the throne.

She knew some significant things about her predicament and her place, but clearly, not enough. What still surprises me is that before I brought the timing of the search of the Vallejo residence to her attention, she, her counsel, and others assisting her, hadn’t considered it—not even journalists she was encountering were expressing their observations of this. For an openly partisan Republican prosecutor to move on a suspect who, perhaps unknowingly, holds information damaging to his party and other related interests, is an unmistakable political act. Breaking the law to achieve damage control and to protect the defense and intelligence contracting game was implicit to their theater and the media was only too happy to play along.

Not even a nearly unprecedented economic crisis was going to overcome the racist backlash over the 2008 election of Barack Obama and it temporarily breathed new life into an ashen GOP, perhaps for the final time, since it was coming from a demographic of angry, aging white Americans whose political significance has been rapidly eroding over the last few decades. In their bigotry, they fear this massive influx of Hispanic refugees, most of them desperate Mexicans fleeing social chaos, generations of poverty, the militarization of the drug war, corrupt federales, goons, police, the cartels, and enslavement in the maquiladora factories that line the Free Trade Zone along the border, and now, private security, the CIA and drones. Such a happy family relationship between nations brought the dictator Porfirio Diaz to remark, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Yet, thanks to this ruthless repression and exploitation, there were some unexpected results: a new dynamic where Latin Americans are now heading towards being the future of politics, and possibly the labor movement, in the United States. And with this realization among the nativist rabble element came the inevitable Know-nothing reaction of hounding immigrants, which, like lynching, is a time-honored American tradition. Does the public ever truly learn? Which one would that be in a divided nation when these racists are becoming the minority? They're also the staggering idiots who tolerate an emergent police state and runaway defense spending while at the same time painting themselves inaccurately as rebels. That's called a fool. This is why it wasn't surprising to me that these same people--if you want to call them that--run to conspiracy theories that never truly touch on those power centers. Chasing ghosts and being ineffectual is the safest thing in the world. 2006 wasn't especially different from now.

At this, the halfway mark of the second and unfortunate term of George W. Bush, when the future Tea Party members were cheering the illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and police state tactics in the war on terror, Republican Party officeholders were paying the price for more skeletons in their closet than the Marquis de Sade or Al Capone. The litany of corrupt acts, antisocial behaviors, and general high weirdness, was widespread enough in their elected ranks to warrant decades of inquiries, yet, no, according to President Obama, we must “continue to look forward,” sounding as much like Scarface as the Republicans. Of great note, one of the cappers that went over the line was Florida congressman Mark Foley, who was accused of pedophilia. This is all about breaking the law and surviving through until the next ever-tightening election cycle. Controlling the DOJ never hurts. Besides, you can always fire your Attorney General and appoint another one the public can grow to hate as an arch-criminal the more they get to know about them. Almost a year earlier the profoundly illegal warrantless wiretapping program that bypassed the judicial oversight of the FISA court (housed at the DOJ, and I suspect they knew), initiated by the White House, was no longer being sat on by the traditionally submissive New York Times. (They had done this for a full year, so that the 2004 elections could pass by safely for the GOP, at least regarding that particular skeleton.)

You know that there’s a political crisis going on when the culture of politics has shifted so far to the right, that all the partisan hacks can talk about is a non-existent center. Most of what you’re going to be hearing from the official channels when a system ossifies is unbridled crap and lies, more obfuscations, apologies to power, ignoring the growing herd of elephants (the only one), until this game no longer works. Rather than looking at all of what we’re learning about rampant corruption as an excuse to cop-out (pun very much intended) and run to the temporary safety of jaded apathy, we should be glad that we know about these crimes at all, because knowledge really is power. But then the problem is that you’re forced to decide to do something about it. I made that decision getting involved in this case, hoping that I could bear witness to history and to accumulate whatever materials I could for the record. I was successful in that endeavor. Too often, the residue of events is lost to the ages. Collecting these materials was done so that the information could be out there and the public has the option to discover, more generally, how the private sector and government collude, and I've put it out there, with more to come.

An incredible effort was mounted to neutralize the destructive potential of what the charges against the late Ms. Palfrey were really about. To re-frame a story, and by doing so, redefining it, is a common practice in, ours, the most propagandized modern society outside of the former Soviet Union and China under Mao. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." This is why corrupt government contractors need to operate in the dark, and that’s what the DC Madam case, a branch of Hookergate, was about: to hide their criminal behavior and bury the evidence of their much greater crimes. When you keep raising this glaring discrepancy between how Palfrey was treated under the law on the one hand and how her privileged clients were on the other, and it’s never addressed in any substantial sense by government prosecutors, career spokesmen like P.J. Crowley, those clients like Senator Vitter, law enforcement, the hierarchy at the DOJ, you begin to realize the fix is in. Mind you, this was being said by many of us during the proceedings very loudly, and to no avail, because the mainstream press did its best to let it die by its own hand, and I mean that literally, because they also knew that Jeane was suicidally inclined. Brecht couldn't have dreamed this nightmare up. That's not murder, it's willful negligence

There had been a very serious scandal in 2006—one of many—that eventually fizzled-out named “Hookergate,” the standard cigar and hooker parties that are held in and around the Beltway for hungry contractors, to obtain coveted, high dollar jobs and assuage the seething addictions of sociopath Republican horndogs (as opposed to Democratic ones) with a taste for the high life on your dime. Yes, this is all about the war on terror and the moronic, runaway militarization of America, the biggest buyer of unnecessary, clunky military hardware in the entire world, six hundred times the spending in this area than of all the other nations of the world combined. That’s pretty stupid—nay—exceptional. We not only have the right to blow our balls off in this manner, but we still somehow have the right to speak about it thanks to a historical accident that began during the Colonial period, freedom of speech and the press. Things working out will never be good enough for the species. In our meanness and selfish tendencies that have been fostered into the emotional equivalents of plutonium, another poison we’ve refined, so as to illustrate our collective wretchedness, we have contaminated the world with our greed. From the moral rot of John Jacob Astor, to the senseless greed of the speculator Jay Gould, America’s first millionaires, on down to the Robber Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, men who childish fools have emulated ever since, we compromised with the bad guys and lost our way long ago as a nation, and we’re finally running out of road for the last time. This is our last chance. All of this is what the DC Madam case was about, the culmination of generations of baseness and barbarity. Either this is the beginning, the end, or both, but we’ve undoubtedly come full circle, which is rarely a good sign for the little people out there, the rest of us out here in television land.

This has happened before. Our out of control defense spending is doing to American democracy what it did to that system in Athens, first, by bankrupting their Treasury, then the inevitable collapse into anarchy and dictatorship, wrought by irrational military adventurism. Ask the Greeks how long it’s taken to come back from that one. And, so today, we have a similar situation in place thanks to the same kinds of criminals bent on power at any cost: a crisis on several fundamental levels—political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental. Not so long after Jeane died I conveyed to her former counselor Montgomery Blair Sibley that she may as well have stayed alive since, what with the encroaching economic catastrophe, she could have walked out of prison once there was no money to house her anymore (it elicited no response). What was the DC Madam case about? The fall of America by militarized self-immolation and general greed, nihilism.