Marcus Schrenker, evil genius

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"--W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming (Slouching towards Bethlehem)."

Indiana--We've topped the 1920s in every respect. Once, dumb formerly-rich people used to jump out of windows, off of ledges, or off of bridges. This was fine, and it had the dignified sense of not leaving such a mess. Schrenker wasn't from aristocratic-stock--he couldn't be, he's leaving too much of a mess.

Things are more complicated these days: Now, crooked and unlucky businessmen get into a plane, radio in a false distress signal, bail-out (pun intended), hit the chute, then somehow head North 225 miles to a pre-picked location in Alabama...to a waiting, rented motorcycle at a rental storage shed, and they disappear. See simple jumping-off a ledge is? They were smarter in "good-old-days." This guy wanted to be Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, to be able to enjoy the fruits of being dead without all the hassle. Who can blame him when it's "fight or flight"?

Having lost a Federal District case against one of his wealth management firms in Maryland, and knowing his assets were going to be frozen after December 31st, the time had come to face the music. Maybe read Twain in High School, but I'd imagine the lessons were lost on him. Anyway, his wife wisely left the schmuck before the events that began on Sunday...

This guy reminds me of all the morons I had to endure in college, and not people that I knew directly back then, but the business majors and that curious species known as the free market advocate, the Young Republican, the Chamber of Commerce cardholder, but really, the eventual businessman. Schrenker was this last sort of individual, a real card, no doubt, and he never really became a "real"one. Being stupid hurts, and Schrenker appears to have been "the stupidest guy in the room."

At 38, Marcus Schrenker is a creature I've met and know all too well. If you've ever had the misfortune of working for someone like him or entrusted your investments with his used car salesman (future politicians) ilk, you have my sincere sympathy and condolences. I'm sure you want that part of your life back too. Schrenker is that special kind of Midwestern jackass--the boss and petit bourgeois personality who thinks that they're a god after they've made their first $1,000,000 (after taxes). Frequently, they start out in fast food, but that's a story for another time.

Yes, yes, I'm "just jealous"--it's true--but these folks know everything. Just ask them, but it's going to take a time machine to do it now, the hang-dogs. That's just how the market crashes, that'll learn ya'.

Time machine? No problem. The Republican Party has violated most human laws, so why not the laws of physics? They appear willing and able. Yes, some people have a "funny" way of not thinking, and it's not just me. But hey, Schrenker (say it fast, win a prize!) could fly an airplane, he just couldn't run a sustainable business, that's all, no big deal. Perhaps he might have focused on his flying-abilities as a career--just a thought--but the former-business aspirant is at least getting more air and sunlight and experiencing some self-actualization.

Funnier still, I'm familiar with the city he took-off from--blessed Anderson, Indiana--which is not exactly the kind of town fit for human life (nearby Muncie isn't either), but a great place to build a Church (CHOGS occupy the town), discriminate against a Black person on the way home from work, or burn a cross on those hot weekends when the nits are biting. That the people there have almost no real culture, personality, taste, or intelligence, is a given, but not atypical of Indiana. Hey, at least it's a place where one has plenty of time to contemplate. But Anderson is a squalid town in a squalid part of the Hoosier state. Expect it to die almost entirely with the American auto industry along with a whole string of similarly stagnant Midwestern towns.

As is well known by now, Marcus Schrenker's Icon Group ( along with his other "wealth" mismanagement "firms") was under an Indiana Securities Fraud investigation, partly because the fun is over with George W. Bush and most of the GOP leaving office, the other part because what goes up, must come down when you're selling lies and air. He chartered an airplane and flew it out of Anderson on Sunday, January 11th, ostensibly to fly down to Destin, Florida. Schrenker radioed a distress signal over Birmingham, Alabama. Unsurprisingly, he'd already rented a storage shed in Harpersville on that Saturday and placed a Yamaha motorcycle with loaded saddlebags. Maybe he's in Mexico by now.

Unlike during 9/11, military interceptors had actually been sent up promptly to--uh--intercept his plane; they got close to the aircraft before its crash, noting that a side-panel door was open and that nobody was inside, fancy that. FAA authorities authorized that the plane be safely put onto autopilot so that it could crash in an unpopulated area, God bless them. It was just one more mess left by the business community that law enforcement authorities are going to have to clean-up, an era of the lie. Lies are what this story is all about.

Like most of his life--and the lives and values of the average Indiana businessman--it was all a sad lie. He probably lied about the orgasms too. Schrenker wrote his neighbor Tom Britt: "I embarrassed my family for the last time. By the time you read this I'll be gone. ..."Hypoxia can cause people to make terrible decisions and I simply put on my parachute and survival gear and bailed out. [I] just made a 2 million dollar mistake...I did not tell them [the Alabama Police] about what happened as I was embarrassed and scared." You could take the email at face value, and his comments to Britt are still going to be ridden with half-truths and outright lies. Of course he'll embarrass his family again. No, this not is amazing, and the full original must read like a Burroughs-Gysin cut-up thanks to its twisted logic.

What's not amazing is that Schrenker is clearly a pathological liar who cannot stop lying whether it benefits him or not, even in an ostensible "suicide note." He premeditatively bought the rental shed, put an also rented motorcycle in it, and is presumably riding it right now after his escape from the very stupid Alabama Police whom he earlier lied to, telling them he'd been in a canoe accident. Exactly how do you get into a canoe accident and only end-up wet up to your knees? I would have noticed this, but I'm just being observant here. Unfair, I know. At that previous moment in Childersberg, he was 225 miles from the scene of the plane wreck in Florida.

Schrenker bailed-out (pun intended) of his plane D.B. Cooper-style (Cooper was smarter) and probably landed in a Florida swamp thanks to a trusty parachute he'd packed. There's every reason to believe he had some kind of vehicle waiting down there as he did in Alabama. The problem is, he didn't figure-in the fact that the FAA would take it all very seriously, or the fact that those investigating him were going put the word out there on him, that he was fleeing. Now, Federal Marshals are looking for him and he's left a very good trail for them to follow.

Now, in this, the final week of the Bush II administration, the SEC and numerous other state, municipal, and federal law enforcement investigators can untie their hands for the first time in eight years and actually start shooting all the ducks in the mostly GOP-constructed barrel.

Schrenker is just a footnote, but his behavior has made him a noteworthy coda to an era of unparalleled business corruption under the Republican Party's stewardship. He is a clown, but he's not the only one wearing a suit-and-tie and doing the ordering. Marcus Schrenker isn't likely to kill himself, he's too much of an egomaniac, he loves his ass too much.

Postscript, 01.14.2008: Told you so. He couldn't carry it out properly, and he embarrassed himself and his family again. Yes, he tried to kill himself by cutting his wrist, but you cannot be half-pregnant, he failed again. "dual personality" my ass, he was liar who led a double life, end of story. Good riddance to Reaganism, it's over folks, praise God.

$$$ In hoc signo vinces. $$$...

"Schrenker's wife issues statement," WTHR (NBC), Indianapolis, 01.14.2008:

http://www.wthr.com/Global/story.asp?S=9672899&nav=menu188_2_8

"Delta filings unveiled adviser's shaky record," AP, 01.14.2008: http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2009/01/14/planeside.html

"Wanted pilot's life had been falling apart," AP, 01.14.2008: http://www.ajc.com/services/content/printedition/2009/01/14/planecrash.html


The statement from Michelle Schrenker's counsel:

"Michelle first contacted me this past summer to discuss a divorce from her husband because he was having an affair. At the time, she wanted to work on reconciling with her husband. However, he continued his affair and, as a result, on December 30, 2008, she filed a petition for dissolution of her marriage to Marcus Schrenker. Her decision to file for divorce was based on her husband's infidelity and in no way was based on the investment fraud of which he is accused. In fact, Michelle first learned of the allegations against him when, on December 31, 2008, the police and investigators came to her door to search her home. To Michelle's dismay, at the time her home was being searched, Marcus was in Florida with his girlfriend.

Clearly, Michelle and her three young children are victims of this man's deceitfulness as well. She is not guilty of anything other than trusting her husband of 13 years. Everyone should remember that Michelle and her children are suffering through a terrible time right now. Through no fault of their own, they are having to deal with the repercussions of this man's behavior and will be doing so for a long time to come."

From the Blough family vaults: A dirty postcard to a mistress

Kansas, 1907--It seems my great-great grandfather liked to screw-around on his wife. This is close to 101-years-ago, when the dead are scarcely a memory any longer. If you want an idea of how much you're going to be remembered--if at all--this is a good lesson.

But be wise, dear friend, and be sure to destroy all of the physical evidence that might fall into the wrong hands of, say...a historian. Then, they, your descendants and others in the future, could accidentally discover what a fool, a coward, and a scoundrel you were. One ancestor forgot to burn a pile of his post card collection, the majority-of-which were written to his mistress. Oh, it was a very different America, and yet the it's still the same. There was Populism them with all its own internal-contradictions just as there is today. Some of my ancestors were prairie Populists.

As far as I can tell from the accounts, my great-great grandfather was a very wrong-headed small businessman who owned a hotel for a time. It burned-down around the time of this card. A petty bourgeois, some of the worst among us, and I believe his own father was a barber and leather-worker in the Old West. Since the Revolutionary War, some of the Bloughs have worked closely with horses, and we're a vast surname. I have my great-great-great grandfather's Old West Bible. You have to wonder whose hair he cut during his time living in 19th century Kansas. He died in the 1890s of poor health, possibly tuberculosis or pneumonia.

On December 25th, 1907, his mistress felt it important to mail him saying that her ride on the railways had gone well. Wonderful, at least they were satisfied, though I doubt Mrs. Blough was. If you think everything nowadays is new, unique, and that you're the first person to have sex...you must be under the age of 30. That's right kids, you're not the first people to discover illicit-fucking, I hate breaking it to you. Most of you are as boring as you suspect, so try to work on that one. Your parents are full-of-shit too, so why imitate them so much?

My point is, I reject a lot of things in my family history. Many people do, or like to think that they do. I'm not mistaken in my assertions, but all Americans of every color harbor bigotry and racist conditioning, it's inherent to our culture.

While these lily-white slobs were playing house, thousands of Native Americans were being herded into the reservations, thousands were being forcibly-sterilized for being "different" or troubled, millions of workers were being exploited and flogged like slaves, while blacks were being lynched from the highest-trees and still worked as slaves when they weren't being hounded under vagrancy laws; and while our military was slaughtering untold thousands of Filipinos, these ancestors--not the mistress--of mine were screwing in their ignorance. Such are the lives of the middle class.

It's a funny little card from an unfunny little era, not so different from our own. It was yesterday, and I reject the racism and the hypocrisies of that time and this era. Why is reincarnation necessary at all?

Postscript, 09.18.2008: There are what appear to be remnants of writing along the left-margin of the postcard. Yes, some of them are stains from deterioration, very perceptive. I'm guessing it's a reference to the spurned- wife.

Dear Congress...

Viddy well, brothers (and sisters--kick out the jams), viddy well: Go fuck yourselves. I'm hardly alone in this sentiment. You've read the polls, you know why, and you won't change. Therefore, you've got to go, and go many of you will in November. You're complicit in the ruination our country.

That means you too, Joe Donnelly. Your campaign people were actually stupid enough to call my home to ask if I'd volunteer to help in your reelection. What?! For a meat puppet, human compost-heap like you? A sell-out? A twit? A yes man? Disappointed? Civility? You won't listen to the will of the people, you don't deserve any, you stupid asshole, you petit bourgeois businessman (that was the first obvious sign-of-trouble).

Nope, I knew you were a liar and cheat before you ever beat that other idiot, Chris Chocola, another former politician you resemble in behavior. And Tony Zirkle is horrible, but at least we know what to expect out of him every single time: the same as from you, so we don't vote for him if we're sane.

You've got to be fucking kidding me, Joe, I want you gone, forever (and that's a mighty long time, but there's something else--the afterworld...). You didn't get my vote in the primary, and I'll vote against you in November.

I'll also encourage my friends and family to do likewise. Rocky & Bullwinkle might get that vote, or even Madonna, but whoever it is, it's going to beat voting for your two-faced husk. Go away, fuck-off. Take this incumbent away, it is wrong.

Pasolini's Teorema (1968) review

I cannot get this man out of my system, our era's ephemeral Socrates. Pier Paolo Pasolini haunts the modern mind, reminding us of the terminal crisis (ironically brought on by the human desire for freedom), in this, our common era of human society. The Italy of his lifetime passed from a preindustrial to a modern state in less than one generation and it was a shock to the WWII generation of Italians who had previously been very provincial, isolated, and basically an agrarian nation of peasants.

This would be like taking American history from 1877-1920, when we became an industrialized nation, and cramming it into roughly 30 years. The effects on the culture could only be devastating and genocidal, as Pasolini astutely described the Americanization of the Italian peninsula. Other nations fared far worse under the effects of modernization: We know the results in Russia under Stalin with the tens-of-millions dead. But the damage to Italy during the "economic miracle" of the 1950s, and passing into the 1970s, was almost unique: traditional Italian culture was slipping-away, and changing into an empty, bourgeois consumerism. This mindless industrialized technological consumerism now spans the globe. Pasolini saw the writing on the wall: the bourgeois revolutions were culminating in the destruction of the natural environment and human civilization.

Like many authors, artists, and intellectuals of (t)his era, he was doing what most artists do, namely questioning the social order around him. Like Philip K. Dick and Werner Herzog, Pasolini was concerned that this reality we are now surrounded by would strip people of their humanity, their symbols, and of any authentic qualities and spirit, and that we cannot continue along such a path, that the end was near if we did. We would lose our myths and we would lose our souls. Today, the damage is pretty obvious with movies that say nothing, music that makes the listener feel nothing, television that only seems to lie to us more than ever, devouring our creativity and our souls...a runaway consumerism that is literally metabolizing nature and a scientific and economic order that continually tells us that there is no meaning to anything, no truth.

Global warming and an impending ecological catastrophe are the realities that these artists and intellectuals warned us all of during the Cold War, and some still are. Pasolini didn't wax-nostalgic for some sentimentalized remote past, but he saw things as getting worse and that an apocalyptic calamity was waiting at the end of it all. In 2007, this doesn't seem so far-fetched, but one should realize that the alarms were already being sounded over 40-years-ago. So little has changed. Into the bloody fray of 1968 politics and culture came Pasolini's "Teorema," or "theorem." There really isn't another film like it in any director's canon, yet he would top it with Salo at the end of his short life. The film begins with what appears to be a newsreel story taking place at the gates of a factory called "Paolo." Is it a strike? Why are all the workers there, milling-about? The journalist (probably Pasolini, off-camera) with the film crew asks them what's going on, and we find that the owner of the factory has given it to the workers, lock-stock-and-barrel. You'll never see a scene like this in any American movie. But most slaves want to remain slaves.

Pasolini goes on by taking a swipe at the Italian Communist Party (PCI), by having a worker dismissing the miracle as "part of a trend." (!) It's the end of the story, and a lesson on how the Left--and most all of modern humanity--had lost contact with the divine and the ability to recognize it in life and within each other. Much to his credit, Pasolini scandalized all. Barth David Schwarz's biography on Pier Paolo Pasolini "Pasolini Requiem" (1992) illuminates the film's premise:

People expected Pasolini to deliver a straightforward if scathing attack on the bourgeoisie and its lack of religion. His apparently simple premise, the "theorem" of the film's title, was that when one family was faced with a power that constituted real liberation (by necessity sexual) and their values were revealed as bankrupt, its members would spin into "madness."
(Schwarz, pg. 519. Pantheon, 1992)

And so, the story "begins" where it began, the home of the industrialist bourgeois--a Milanese "borghesa"--and his family, in this antiseptic villa that seems almost empty (of belief? of values?). As in life, the bourgeois characters reside in their own social space, alone, living in virtual solitude without meaning. There is the daughter, the wife, the son, and the devout peasant maid who dream of some kind of a release from their life, some transcendence. Be careful what you wish for.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, a kind of salvation announces its coming. A herald in the form of young Italian boy announces his arrival in a note to the maid. In time, the "stranger" (played by a 28-year-old Terence Stamp) appears, and quite abruptly without any explanation. Pasolini had this to say about the stranger in his film:

Originally, I had intended this visitor to be a fertility god, the typical god of preindustrial religion, the sun-god, the Biblical-god, God the Father. Naturally, when confronted with things as they were, I had to abandon my original idea and so I made Terence Stamp into a generically ultraterrestrial and metaphysical apparition: he could be the Devil, or a mixture of God and the Devil. The important thing is that he is something authentic and unstoppable. (ibid, pg. 521)

Inautheticity withers in the presence of truth. Like all the great tragedies of Greece and Rome, the family passively accepts his presence as a symbol of their fate. The stranger rarely speaks, but he brings every family member love and a direct contact with the divine through sex. He fills the void in their lives of isolation and emptiness. Again: be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

The maid (Laura Betti) is first: he rescues her from a suicide-attempt, and makes tender love to her. Shortly afterward, she leaves the villa and the bourgeois reality itself to return to her village. She begins a fast of contrition and eventually seems headed towards some kind of beatification or sainthood, even levitating at one point towards the latter-half of the film. Her fate is the best one, although that of the son points to the interior life of artists and the authentic everywhere, and he is the next to be seduced by the stranger. Then comes the daughter Odette (played by Godard's wife at the time), who appears in some respects to be the most sexually-fulfilled. The mother and father, finally, end the seduction. For a time, they all seem to have lost that feeling of "loneliness" and incompleteness that comes with modern life...and then the stranger leaves, just as abruptly as he came, a hallmark of the divine. With his absence comes the fall, and a reminder that the void never left, a stunning metaphor for the limits of sexual-release and escapism. No, the void in life never leaves, and is made all-the-more lonely after coitus.

The once sexually repressed mother (the sultry Silvana Mangano) becomes a nymphomaniac, and begins to seduce young men in the nearby city, repeatedly trying to recreate her experience with the stranger, but to no avail. The son becomes totally immersed in creativity and contemplation, showing the dissatisfaction and longings of the artist that can never truly be achieved. Like Plato's "The Allegory of the Cave," he can never touch the true forms (the stranger) ever again. His fate is preferable to the rest of the family since he appears to at least have an outlet for his obsession. The daughter Odette lapses into a comatose state that seems permanent. After an illness that's healed by the stranger, the father becomes a sexual deviant who exposes himself at a train station by film's end. Throughout the movie, we see images of a desolate, gray landscape shot at Mt. Etna. It's meant to reflect the inner-loneliness of the characters and ourselves. This dead landscape is the modern worl, the empty space in all of our lives, and what's waiting at the end of this social order. By the end of the film the father is seen running naked through this volcanic wasteland, finally letting-out an almost inhuman scream of existential despair. From this, you can tell that Pasolini actually felt sorry for most of the bourgeoisie, something that I don't share with him.

Teorema is available through Koch/Lorber video on DVD, and is perhaps one of the greatest films of the entire 1960s. It won a special award from the International Catholic Film Office at the Venice film festival that year, but elements within the Vatican had it withdrawn. The students in the Paris, Rome, and Berlin of 1968 adored the movie, yet Pasolini tended to heap scorn on many of them, calling them "bourgeois," and that the New Left's fight with the establishment in France and Italy was a "battle between the haves and the haves...an internecine struggle." Once again, he was correct. One can see and hear Salo (1975) coming in this film, a work that probably got Pasolin killed before his time in a field at Ostia, a place where human sacrifices were once held. Salo is a dark chocolate, while Teorema is a truffle, the appetizer before the meal.

Revised, 11.27.2009

NICE: CHOCOLA SUPPORTERS TEARING-DOWN OPPONENT'S SIGNS

South Bend, Indiana--Someone ripped the Joe Donnelly (Democrat) sign from my front yard. Guess they don't believe in my right to free expression, but that's the GOP for you! I don't even like Donnelly much, but at least he isn't a Republican. I'm getting a new one tomorrow, no effect by the dummies. Why do I think it was some tornado-bait, white-trash factory dog?

Because Indiana is white trash heaven, why do you think?! Most idiots here are descended from farmers, gangster-molls and Klansmen. In case you wonder about the state's name, it's because there were never very many Native Americans here. Many were run out on the trail of tears, to be replaced by people in trailer parks, weird. If I had seen the sign-thieves, I would have written-down their license-plate number. Then the cops woulda paid them a visit--hilarity-ensues.

If they intruded-on my property, I would have creased their scalps with my blackjack. Not-so-ironically, tearing-down my sign doesn't stop the boyfucking episode from sinking the GOP either, so play again. How goofy, you tore-down my Donnelly sign (a guy I don't even care-for), when I can get another-one every time you do it, dummies. This is the climate in Northern Indiana. Yes, I was born-and-raised here. I guess the next thing is the local GOP doing cross-burnings at polling-places when Black people show-up, but Arizona, Ohio and Florida seem to have that one covered. Why does the GOP want to touch our children? That's terrorism, after all.

Why do you think they have that animal stare and the boorish braggard posture? They know they're just cowboy faggots. Besides, gay men could beat their asses (I don't hate gay men, they do. replace hate with 'desire' for homophobes).They only beat women, because they are pussies. They are closet-queens. Beer (shitty-beer) swilling rednecks with no brains, no balls, and no luck. They don't even do real drugs, just methamphetamine. Factory owners love their asses, because they work real hard and fast on that speed for their daily slave.

Some of them hurt themselves for that big-payoff: workman's compensation. Those factory owners are something else, too. Yes, they allow retards to be rich in America, so now you know why we're so fucked. Look at Bush, and you tell me.

They're really the same trash as their employees, only with some money. Hiring illegal aliens (illegally!), and fleecing rednecks--it would be funny if it didn't affect everyone else but rednecks. Only staggering stupidity and cowardice could have created an America like the one we have now. That's why most of the drug tests they use can be easily bypassed for cocaine and meth abusers, it's like advocating specific drugs.

There are now TV ads for drug testing firms! It's an obvious violation of the 4th Amendment, but who tried to stop it? Some of the unions and the ACLU, because it sure t'wernt the goobers here in Indiana. People who don't struggle don't deserve respect, they have no credibility. But what rednecks and most white racists really want is to be sodomized by a BIG Black man, that's why they yammer about how they hate (fear/desire X frustration=hate-crime) 'fags' and 'niggers.' If you think white trash are quaint, remember that Mitch Daniels and George W. Bush are the price.

It's better if some people adhere to voter apathy. Black people vote smarter than most whites.

Non sequitur: I noticed ALL the local 7 Elevens still sell CITGO, and still display the CITGO logo on all their sites here in Michiana. ;0) Viva Hugo Chavez! Some Alaskans have rejected a cheap heating-oil program from Venezuela. It takes amazing ignorance to refuse this, especially if you're poor. If the ones who didn't want it, freeze...oh well. Everyone knows Alaskans are nuts--look where they live. You have to be paid to live there.