THE ELOQUENCE OF DIALOGUE: BILLY D., SEAN, AND RJ and a fIcTiOn

“For meanwhile the aforementioned change in public interest had set in; it seemed to happen almost overnight; there may have been profound causes for it, but who was going to bother about that; at any rate the pampered hunger artist suddenly found himself deserted one fine day by the amusement seekers, who were streaming past him to other more favored attractions.”
- Franz Kafka, “A Hunger Artist,” 1924

Where else but in cyberspace could a gentleman from Ferndale, a bloke from down under, and a friend from Wisconsin, engage in an enlightening dialogue on assisted beheadings, the work of V. S. Ramachandran, and the aesthetic implications of subjectivity. Thank you Bill Debroux, Sean, and R.J.. The interplay of your thoughtful comments, rather than isolated response to the text, exemplifies why language is meaningful. Although I can’t access your comments now, I’ll attempt a response to what I do recall.

Sean, Mr. Bill Debroux is actually a kindly fellow who was brainwashed early in life by a group of Franciscan terrorists; and yet Bill’s intellectual gifts allowed him to overcome the torments of Sister Ruthless Marie and lead somewhat of a normal life. I too was exposed to her pseudo-spiritual toxicity, and I too managed to overcome her Svengaliesque mangling. Notwithstanding your marvelously witty response to Bill’s sweet insensitivity, it might not be a bad thing if all citizens of Earth were beheaded, so long as they could move about unthinkingly like swarms of black flies that aren’t biting due to temperature and wind conditions.

If there is a sort of crude continuum between hypochondria and death wish, then BIIDS, while relatively unknown to many people, undeniably occupies a perch on this line. While I didn’t cite him specifically, Sean is shrewd in mentioning Ramachandran’s work. Ramachandran, an eminent neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, has written on what I will call phantom appendage sensation, since his work reveals this phenomenon as existent in phantom breasts after a mastectomy as well as other organs and body parts. Again, Sean, Bill, and R.J., I think you might enjoy reading Gawande’s New Yorker article, “The Itch,” 6/30/08.

R.J., your canny ability at close reading, and careful consideration of something we all take for granted, perception, goes even a bit deeper than I had delved. Who really knows what we each see? Does the fact that Shadow might judge an artifact by its smell lessen its aesthetic value? Duh! Yea! Since animals can’t be said to exercise aesthetic judgment, or can they. My son tells me that some musicians work at attaining perfect pitch by associating tones with certain colors, and then visualizing a color when they hear a tone. Interesting. Does this kind of pneumonic device work? Who knows? What I do know, Mr. R. J., is this: we need more images of non-creepy amputated limbs. How about two amputated arms reading a book, or enjoying a coffee and smoke, or giving the peace sign, or the finger? Since I know you like Lovecraft, here’s an image for you, consider this passage from Gawande’s article:

“One morning after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, ‘this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.’ She pressed a square of gauze to her head and went to see her doctor again. M. showed the doctor the fluid on the dressing. The doctor looked closely at the wound. She shined a light on it and in M.s eyes. Then she walked out of the room and called an ambulance. Only in the Emergency Department at Massachusetts General Hospital, after the doctors started swarming, and one told her that she needed surgery now, did M. learn what had happened. She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.”

PART II

Dear Zelda:

Yesterday the guards herded us together into the cellblock dayroom. The guards take sadistic delight in pitting us against one another. The blacks were on one bench, the Hispanics on another, and the whites at their own table. I was alone. The whites have rejected me for refusing to join their Aryan confederation. It is horrible here. Some of the inmates are so deranged and depressed they have swallowed rat poison, forks, and drain cleaner. I have a horrible skin disease. I sometimes stay in my rack all day. There are 4 of us to a cell and lice are everywhere. 2 of my cellmates are slaves of gangs. The food is rotten.... One guard systematically puts inmates with lung diseases in a cell next to the laundry room, where the walls sweat from the humidity, which worsens their condition. Yesterday, a 21-year-old man was put in a cell with two older hardened criminals, who raped him the first night. One of the older men has AIDS. Another guard forces prisoners working in the laundry to have sex with him. But the prisoners are too terrified to testify against him. I was raped in the factory block, infirmary, and psychiatric unit. I begged, pleaded and finally prayed; but to no avail. I pay what I can and am raped by those I pay. I asked the prison doctor if my anus could be sewed shut. There is no relief, no shelter from anonymous violation: the ripping pain and shame of irrational assault. I have nowhere to run or hide. Mine is a life of unending rape and fear of rape. I am sodomized and infected. Do something. Save me Zelda!

Your Zeke

Slowly, Stakel began to understand. He hadn't planned on asking himself what made Pluto tick; but the more he learned about him the more he wanted to know. As a text, Pluto's life might be thought of as a genre of prison literature, a narrative of confinement. If his life experience had taught him anything, it was the impossibility of being left without some kind of God. If the only doctrine the world had revealed was that slavery and self-destruction were the norm, and that the acceptance of suffering are the inevitable consequences of freedom, then his life was an imitation of Christ;

According to psychiatric interviews directed by Dr. T. Robert Kocsis, Pluto's early life was nightmarish. Slowly, uneasily, Zeke let slip painful clues: how his first foster parents had abandoned him and his eight siblings when he could barely walk; how after his father disappeared, his foster mother used to vanish for long periods, doing what, no one knew; how he scavenged the streets and roads, begging for food and sleeping in cardboard boxes and culverts; how when a concerned social worker brought him to the sheriffs department, he wanted to live there; and how the Lutheran Social services finally placed the children in separate homes, so that from the age of six all that Zeke had was his older sister, Zelda.

For a time they lived at the Father Garin Orphanage in South Marquette, a tomblike brownstone firetrap founded by Finnish Lutheran nuns at the turn of the century, which had a cramped second floor where Zelda and Zeke shared a tiny room with a bunk bed. On the wall was a sign written in bold:

GOD IS OUR REFUGE AND STRENGTH/
A VERY PRESENT HELP IN TROUBLE
- PSALMS 46:1

The place was run by a lay director named Mildred Small, who dressed them in black on Sundays, while indoctrinating them into the mysteries of Christ.

Once, when Zeke and Zelda were playing outside, a strange man appeared and began to rave at them, gesturing and pointing first at them, then at him.

"Who's that?" Zelda asked.
"I don't know," Zeke said.
The man furtively crept forward, suddenly clawing at the fence.
"Don't you know me, boy? I'm your papa."
They ran from the playground and cowered at the orphanage door; cringing in fear and loathing at the sight of a familiar boogieman. When they looked up again he had vanished.

Scenes like this gave Stakel some understanding of what events Plutonism's canonical literature seized upon in mythologizing the Supreme Signifiers life. Kosic's records shed light on what stability family life presented--when it was available at all.


Stakel poured over Pluto's unpublished memoirs for clues to Pluto's psychology. His time in the Army was consistent with the rest of his troubled chaotic life. In the mid-eighties his roommate, Joe Pierce, had been bludgeoned to death in his sleep at Fort Macdonald, Tennessee; a National media story that Stakel was vaguely familiar with.

"I remember the attackers were led by Brook's Bessex of Louisville, Kentucky. Joe was beaten to death with a baseball bat as he slept in his barracks bed early on the morning of December 7th, 1968. Of course, we all knew who did it. The constant and hateful denunciations of Private Pierce as a "faggot," "queer," and "homo," were dismissed as routine boot camp tension by a superior officer. The savageness of the assault, Joe's face was unrecognizable to his own mother, his eyes swollen shut and his head cracked open, was attributed to nothing more than the stress of basic training.

"That's the way it is, sir," Specialist Ricky Crest, our roommate, testified. “This is an Army where blowhards and bullies are encouraged to seek out a soldiers' perceived weaknesses, to invent horrible epithets, and to instigate a reign of terror that our superiors turn their backs on. Shortly before his murder, Joe told me he had had it, he would apply for a discharge. No doubt the fact that our drill sargeant would unapologetically bellow a homophobic cadence in leading us on our daily five-mile run: "Faggot, faggot down the street/shoot him, shoot 'til he retreats," had much to do with this decision.

This incident, as well as the death of my best friend and Zelda's childhood sweetheart, Gary Haley, was instrumental in shaping my profound distrust of any politic that involves ideological justifications. I learned to hate all isms; but most particularly nationalistic theories that appeal===== to patriotism."

Stakel pondered the tattered remnant of a letter Zeke had sent Zelda after Gary's death.

DEAR ZELDA:

On Friday, August 22nd, our company was in the field when the enemy opened fire on our point man with a high caliber machine gun. He died instantly. The point is most vulnerable during a firefight. I had also walked point many times.

Trying to avoid direct fire, we tried to pull back to the right. This led us into another ambush. To relieve us, our captain called in the artillery and air support. After an intense bombardment we were told to continue our advance. Our repeated attacks resulted in high casualties. The soldiers in our forward platoon were all killed. Finally, it was our platoons turn to lead the assault. After repeated failures we rested for the night. Nobody slept.

The following morning we were on point. Not long after we started up the hill we drew enemy fire. We had walked into a set of bunkers. Following our training, we attempted to encircle the first bunker. Gary's job was to throw a grenade into the bunker while we laid down diversionary fire.

As Gary got into position he was hit by an AK-47. Taking several rounds to the chest and head, Gary dropped immediately. After dragging him to cover, the Medic worked frantically to save Gary. The best he could do was make him comfortable. Gary's injuries were mortal: a slug in the temple, and multiple sucking chest wounds.

In the din of battle, I couldn't really hear Gary. But occasionally it would quiet enough for me to attend to him. His breathing was labored, as his lungs were filling with blood. Because both lungs were punctured, we were unable to help him.

Gary probably died by drowning in his own blood. Shortly thereafter, a medivac helicopter took him away. I never saw Gary again.

I am enclosing his wallet-sized photo album. I'm sorry, and so sad.

Love, Your Zeke


The expression of shock and numbness in Pluto's spare and removed prose was something Stakel couldn't process.

Stakel remembered the sixties. He had lived it. Pluto was more like him than he liked to think. The difficulty of admitting that so many had given so much for so little was as unacceptable to Pluto as the conviction many others held at the time: that the distinction between right and wrong was an immutable fact--a division beyond compromise. Stakel sympathized with Pluto's politics, if not its consequences.

The Fragments of Pluto's memoir that recalled his time at the Ypsilanti State Forensic unit troubled Stakel:

Like clockwork, the guards would bring me to the behaviorist specialist for psychotherapy. At the time, the Pavlovian aversion model was the recommended therapeutic approach. In practice, this involved being exposed to violent stimuli, both real and simulated, accompanied by nausea inducing drugs.

Once, Koscis and the behaviorist brought in a skillful actor to taunt and abuse me. After much of the boot and whip I groveled compliantly. I begged, pleaded: "Mercy. Please. I'll be your servant, your slave, your anything. I worship your shadow, your trace. I am not worthy. I obey your will, your boots, your feet." Was it enough that I licked his crotch with savage tongue, like a faithful dog?

Enough?-- perhaps, but not the right response. He plugged in the whip. What I had taken to be the final lash was only a prelude. Now the sting was charged, galvanic. My nakedness was conducive, my pain electric; I cringed, he kicked. The vertigo, nausea, the searing scourge drove me to my knees, and his legs. I clung to him for salvation. My profane reward was an unearthly pain. As I hugged, so he strangled, choked the life from me.

At this point, Koscis intervened: "That's enough. He's progressing." With this, my sadistic tormentor exited with a smile; his erection being entirely inappropriate to a therapeutic setting.

Dr. Alexis, the prison behaviorist spoke first: "The subject is, paradoxically, being chemically conditioned to associate retaliation with physical discomfort, sickness. The idea is that evil, violent intentions produce pathological symptoms. Theoretically, the subject is left with no choice but to succumb to the 'good'. Questions, Dr. Koscis."

Koscis looked troubled. "But what about the issue of free will. After treatment like this, is it possible for him to understand what choice means, as a concept? Darwinian self-interest, psychological adaptation clearly moves him to substitute self-abasement for violent reprisal; but where is the moral conviction in why he does what he does? In the state he is in now, he can't really be said to be 'doing', in the sense of choosing his actions in terms of wrong and right. His reactions seem more animal than human. Can we honestly define his actions as those of a morally autonomous creature, an entity capable of choosing between good and evil? "

What I learned from this of course is the wisdom of de-humanization; from the viewpoint of the de-humanized--of course. What a lark, what a plunge, what a character builder!

It was in Prison that I met Mike Savard. He was blond, his face Mayan-like with a dark mole high on his cheek, his visage constantly affecting the illusion of having just awoken from a deep sleep. I had never encountered anyone as innocent as Mike. The intense blue of his eyes and shaggy Beatle haircut reminded me of a proud lioness. Savard, born in the Upper Peninsula village of Germfask, was raised in Detroit. The mix of urban blue-collar stoicism and rural Northern Michigan family influences appealed to me. I found a sense of human connection I had never experienced before with Mike. At first he was hesitant, but then gradually he accepted my longing for him. Now he's gone; the delicate hands, the oceanic blue eyes, the kind, knowing smile; the silky feeling of caressing his exquisite ears, his kiss on my eyelids, the feeling of pushing back his hair while holding his head in my hands; the ecstasy in following the soft contour of his ribs, his warm, smooth tummy. Gone, all that desire now a painful void; a deep and anguished longing. I loved Mike.

Stakel vaguely recalled the Savard case. He had achieved a pathetic kind of notoriety. In the year 2000 his case would reduce the practice of capital punishment to the level of the absurd. In a ghoulish way, he would cheat the hangman, the terminal needle bearer, of his perverted satisfaction. In a moment of supreme tragic irony, the lethal injection would serve to euthanize rather than punish. Savard's was a case where, through a bizarre coincidence of circumstances, the state would transgress its own laws on assisted suicide.

Mike had been scheduled to die by lethal injection on December 16, 2000, making him the 218th person executed in Michigan that year. But when his death row guards found him unconscious from a self administered drug overdose on a sunny Monday morning, they assured that he would achieve his Warholian 15 minutes of fame---albeit unconsciously. Placed in intensive care in an Ann Arbor hospital, Savard presented the state with a politically delicate problem: would the State of Michigan remove an inmate from intensive care so that he could meet his date with the executioner in a timely fashion. The answer was yes. After the state rejected the Mike's final petition for a delay, Michigan officials took him to the death chamber in Flint and executed him by final injection. There is a grimly comic aspect in all of this. Because Mike's doctor deemed such a move as "risky," state functionaries used an airplane staffed by medical personal from the University of Michigan Hospital to ensure that he arrived in "good health" after the 25-minute trip. The sick diabolical mechanics of state execution were in full array on that millennial midnight when the brain dead body of Mike Savard was removed from a ventilator in an intensive care unit and put to death by lethal injection.

UPPER PENINSULA JOURNAL: SAVE KENNECOTT AND ARM THE BEARS NOW!

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
- William Wordsworth, 1807

Dear Readers:

The weather’s been beautiful up here. I just wish I had more time to spend on the beach. It’s my own fault. You see, my lifetime of dysfunctionality has fated me to attend self help meetings for the rest of my days. Thanks to the Marquette Mining journal I’m pretty much able to network with my inner child on a daily basis. On Friday I attended the “Emotions Anonymous” meeting at the Alano club on W. Washington Street. Meeting with others who suffer this malady allowed me to confront the agoraphobia that gripped me as I waded through the crowds at the Blueberry Festival. Being serenaded by a string quartet playing selections from Bach’s Brandenburg Quartets, while at the same time (they had adjoining venues) having a deliverance-quality U.P. teenager harangue me on the benefit of repenting now, vexed me mightily. And so it was I repaired to the “Emotion” people. The good thing about this group’s meeting is its close proximity to Pat’s Bar (across the street). In these harrowing economic times, Pat’s offers a haven where one can still obtain a cheap drunk outside the home, and God knows (I asked her), one should never attend an “Emotions” group sober.

On Saturday I got up bright and early and headed for St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where the “Debtors Anonymous” meeting was in full swing. The crowd was huge, I mean when you combine debt and religion you’re gonna have a big crowd, especially in the good old U.S.A.. My problem with this meeting is this: it’s not close enough to the mall. It’s also probably just a coincidence that a lot of my fellow “Bariatric Surgery” support group members were also in attendance. They should just consolidate the “Debtors,” Bariatrics,” and “Overeaters Anonymous” folks into one holly jolly bunch.

Well, after the Pat’s Courage began to wear off during the last meeting, I got a little edgy. I began to see flying Pastie Beetles and Cuhighi Worms. I knew then there was one last meeting I had to attend on the way to the Lumberjack. Tavern Time beckoned, but so did my comrades at our “Panic Relief” group. Fortunately, this is offered via a teleconference call. But, oh no! Oh my God! No service! My phone is analog and I just passed the point of no return. Sugarloaf! I was panicky and anxiety ridden. Help! Then I realized there was a case of warm O’Douls in the trunk. I remembered a friend had once failed sheriff Paquette’s breathalyzer test after chugging a case of these ever-so-slightly alcoholic placebos. I chugged, and found hoppy relief as the lights of the Lumberjack appeared in the distance.

If it weren’t for The Mining Journal, not only would we suffer alone in our terrestrial imperfection, we would also be lost in the woods of ignorance and oblivion, and hence forced to form our own conclusions without the guidance of the Journal’s brilliant editorial wisdom and savvy reportage. And so another important role the Mining Journal plays has to do with the dissemination of news. In a Thursday, July 24th editorial opinion, the Journal made the argument that the “Right to Arm Bears Must be Protected.” I couldn’t agree more.

On the front page of that same edition (“Meet Rio Tinto”) it was reported that the chief executive of the Kennecott Eagle Minerals parent company (Rio Tinto) spoke Wednesday about the proposed mine on the Yellow Dog Plains. According to John Pepin, Journal staff writer, Bret Clayton said that a mine on the plains “would help make Rio Tinto one of the world’s top nickel producers over the next decade.” I don’t know about you, but that certainly warms the cockles of my heart. As an expatriate Yooper, I, for one, would take a certain pride in contributing to Rio Tinto’s success. There are some, however, some tree hugging commies, who object to progress. Even though Mr. Clayton says Rio Tinto wants to be a “partner of choice,” these eco-nazis won’t go along with the program. Imagine doubting the sincerity of a company that “always does things to the highest standard.” A company that always has an “open door to work with people, to listen to their complaints, and try and resolve problems and issues.”

Ah yes! Mr. Mining Journal Swamis, thank you, thank you for putting the venerable Bret Clayton’s (isn’t he the Packer quarterback?) techno-gospel on page 1, and thank you for confining the comments of a bunch of yammering eco-terrorists to page 12A. Just who in the hell is Cynthia Pryor, executive director of the Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve, to dispute Sir Clayton’s caring and kindly appeal to the public trust? So what if Pryor and four of her commie confederates flew to London (is that in the Lower Peninsula?), where Rio Tinto company officials had agreed to hear their concerns during Mr. Clayton’s (aka “The Big Enchilada”) Marquette visit.

According to Pryor, “Rio Tinto officials did not pay us the courtesy of informing us of their visit, much less keep their word to meet. They have once again demonstrated their refusal to acknowledge the opposition to this project in the community.” Pryor and her ilk are the same kind of unpatriotic jackasses that would question whether we should commence with gas and oil drilling in the Arctic. Why would they doubt the presence of vast untapped Arctic reserves? After all, according to an AP article the Journal ran on page 2A in that same Rio Tinto edition, this has to be reliable information since it was compiled by “government scientists”; and when was the last time our government gave us unreliable information?

My proposal is this, since there is a small, but fanatic, group of insidious eco-insurgents bent on sabotaging Rio Tinto’s noble aspirations to be the largest world wide nickel producer, we must arm the bears and make them the guardians of progress. Only a well- armed bear militia can deal with the green cunning of these food coop guerillas. And so I say, unequivocally, and without malice aforethought, SAVE KENNECOTT AND ARM THE BEARS NOW!

BIID: Philosophical or Medical Issue?

“When I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”
- Paul (d. ca. A.D. 64) 1 Corinthians 13 ca. 56

“The life we lose through forgetfulness resembles
The earth that sticks to the sides of ploughshares
And the eggs the hen has abandoned in the woods.”
- Robert Bly

BIID (Body Identity Integrity Disorder): Philosophical or Medical Issue?

“’Show me where your wooden leg joins on,’ he whispered….She was as sensitive as a peacock about his tail ...’It joins on at the knee. Only at the knee. Why do you want to see it?’…’Because,’ he said, ‘it’s what makes you different.’…The artificial limb, in a white sock and brown flat shoe, was bound in a heavy material like canvas and ended in an ugly jointure where it was attached to the stump….The boy’s face and his voice were entirely reverent as he uncovered it and said, ‘Now show me how to take it off and on.’…She took it off for him and put it back on again and then he took it off himself….’See!’ …’Now I can do it myself!’ ‘Put it back on,’ she said….’Not yet, he murmured, setting it in its foot out of her reach. ‘Leave it off for a while. You got me instead.’ ‘Give me my leg,’ she said….He pushed it farther away with his foot.’…’Give me my leg!’ She screeched….She saw him grab the leg and then she saw it for an instant slanted forlornly across the inside of the suitcase with a Bible at either side of its opposite ends. He slammed the lid shut and snatched up the valise and swung it down the hole and then stepped through himself. When all of him had passed but his head, he turned and regard her with a look that no longer had admiration in it. ‘I’ve gotten a lot of interesting things,’ he said. ‘One time I got a woman’s glass eye this way.’ And then the toast-colored hat disappeared down the loft hole and the girl was left, sitting on the straw in the dusty sunlight. When she turned her face toward the opening, she saw his blue figure struggling successfully over the green speckled field.’”

- Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People,” 1955

When I last wrote about BIID, my conviction was that having a limb removed, or achieving self-paralysis, or deafening and blinding oneself, was a personal choice, and that the issue of BIID was fundamentally a philosophical rather than medical question. But after further consideration, and some light research on the beach, I’ve come to rethink my position. What got me thinking about this was an essay in the 6/30/08 New Yorker by Atul Gawande, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, entitled, “The Itch.” Ostensibly, this piece takes up the topic of itching, but within it lies an embedded discussion on the phenomenon of human perception.

The following excerpts from a recent blog outline my earlier thoughts on the BIID issue:

“Writing in the “Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2005, Tim Bayne and Neil Levy argue that, regarding the moral arguments against what I will call ‘assisted disability,’ ‘BIID sufferers meet reasonable standards for rationality and autonomy: so as long as no other effective treatment for their disorder is available, surgeons ought to be allowed to accede to their requests.’ For me, as in the case of assisted suicide and abortion, the issue is one of free choice. Given that one is of age and sound mind, and insofar as a respect for the rights of others is in place, one can do with their body as they wish. In a free democracy it should be assumed that “rationality and autonomy” are fundamental to guaranteeing the free agency of all citizens.”

“Bayne and Levy rightly conclude: ‘In an important sense, a limb that is not experienced as one’s own is not in fact one’s own. Disorders of depersonalization are invisible to the outside world: they are not observable from the third-person perspective in the way that most other disorders are. But the fact that they are inaccessible should not lead us to dismiss the suffering they might cause’”(85).

What in Gawande’s essay has swayed me from my former convictions? The traditional view on human perception, which is still the prevailing paradigm, is what Gawande calls the “direct-perception” theory. In a nutshell, this assumes that sensations like cold, distance, color, hardness, itchiness, and such are stimuli our nerves, for instance tactile or retinal nerves, encounter. After which they send signals through the spinal cord, which are then decoded by the brain. Sounds logical. But how then do we explain dreams, hallucinations, and phantom limb pain? My eyes may see the point across the bay, but perspective and dimensionality are reconstructions that ultimately involve subjective imaginings that create individual representations. Consider the oft-repeated example of asking a group of witnesses about how they perceived a certain event, and then getting wildly different interpretations of what they saw.

The error in equating strictly biological reception with perception is nowhere more evident than in the case of phantom limb sensations. Gawande makes the point that invasive surgical procedures meant to quell phantom limb pain have been documented as being largely unsuccessful: “The feelings people experience in their phantom limbs are far to varied and rich to be explained by the random firings of a bruised nerve. People report not just pain but also sensations of sweatiness, heat, texture, and movement in a missing limb. There is no experience people have with real limbs that they do not experience with phantom limbs. They feel their phantom leg swinging, water trickling down a phantom arm, a phantom ring becoming to tight for a phantom digit”(63).

So what’s the alternative to the “direct-perception” theory, and how does all this apply to BIIDS? Bear with me, dear reader. The emerging alternative is what Gawande calls the “brain’s best guess” theory of perception. A bit unwieldy, but as Gawande describes it, “perception is the brain’s best guess about what is happening in the outside world. The mind integrates scattered, weak, rudimentary signals from a variety of sensory channels, information from past experiences, and hard wired processes, and produces a sensory experience full of brain-provided color, sound, texture, and meaning”(63).

If phantom limb pain explains why the mind, rather than strictly sensory processes, is involved in perception, then the idea that BIIDS wannabes’ desires are a matter of conscious choice comes into question. As Gawande points out, it is medically documented that some stroke patients experience a “condition known as hemineglect, which produces something like the opposite of a phantom limb—these patients have a part of the body they no longer realize is theirs”(65). While Gawande’s essay makes no mention of BIID, I immediately thought about the common BIID complaint that they see their limb as an alien appendage. But is this belief a medical or philosophical matter?

There are what Gawande calls, “sensor syndromes,” whereby pharmaceutical treatments fail in the face of sensations “unmoored from physical reality.” Again, consider the case of Robert Vickers: “I couldn’t even get ‘Elementary Suicide’ right. I was severely handicapped, but diagnosed as ‘clinically depressed.’ Psychiatrists treated me without success. None of their tranquillisers and antidepressants worked, but then I could not tell them what was really wrong, what my handicap was. It was too weird, too painful to tell anyone about; it was just there, festering away, destroying me. Two years later, I tried to cure my handicap and failed. This time I got more drugs, more psychiatrists, shock treatment and unwanted surgery over three months in hospital. I told the doctors what I wanted and didn’t get it, but was still too ashamed to tell them why.”

According to Gawande, “sensor syndrome” is akin to that errant dashboard light that says check engine, which in my case was on for the life of my last car, which was about 8 years. So, in cases like phantom limb sensation and BIID, the problem is not of somatic origin, but one of a sensor gone haywire. Which is why, as Gawande suggests, “typically, no amount of imaging, nerve testing, or surgery manages to uncover an anatomical explanation”(65).

This perhaps explains why BIID wannabes can’t conceptualize questions like, “Would you want to rid yourself of this desire,” or, “Don’t you think this is a compulsion rather than a choice?” While I haven’t gone into Gawande’s discussion of a “mirror based immersive visual-reality System” that has effectively treated phantom-limb pain, imagine a pair of glasses carefully adjusted so that a wannabe would perceive their limb as missing. What would we make of the fact that their desire to rid themselves of the alien limb was gone? And further, what does this say about the origin of their desire in terms of choice versus compulsion?

Until next time – Randy Tessier

UPPER PENINSULA DIARY: Let's Have A War! FEAR, and a letter of thanks to the TSA & HOMELAND SECURITY!

Dear TSA:

First, I’d like to thank that most esteemed branch of Homeland Security, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) for visiting my blog yesterday with some frequency. Your, as well as many others, interest in my blog ensures the fact that the site will continue to enjoy its lofty status on Google’s search engine.

It is also comforting to know your dot.gov oversight is ever vigilant in tracking subversive clowns such as I, who sow the seeds of intelligence among the subservient masses. It’s good that you perceive my feeble attempts to stamp out ignorance as a threat to the status quo. After all, the dissemination and perpetuation of fear and ignorance has been critical to the maintenance of your neo-conservative agenda. Keep up the good work.

Yours Truly – General Jack Ripper

PS: Always remember, little brother is watching.

MARQUETTE MINING JOURNAL
LETTERS:

Marchers not patriots

I take exception to the referral that members of Citizens for Peace and Justice in Marquette are patriots. A patriot is a person who loves, supports and defends their country. The CPJ strikes out on all three. I’d go so far to state that members of CPJ would be unwilling to take up arms to defend their country.

Their presence in the Fourth of July parade delivered no credible patriotic message. They have a political agenda to support the most liberal candidates for political positions. For them to be in the fourth of July [sic] was a cynical attempt to display their political outlook. I served 20 years in the army and it gives me no pleasure that I defended these people’s freedoms. If they think God above blesses their shenanigans they need to think again.

Thomas D. Johnson
Marquette, Michigan


To The Mining Journal:

RE: “Marchers not patriots” (7/20/08).

In defining just exactly what a patriot is, Thomas D. Johnson writes, “If they think God above blesses their shenanigans they need to think again.” Before providing a general gloss on Johnson’s disgust with the Citizens for Peace and Justice in the Fourth of July parade, I want to thank him. If it weren’t for people like Mr. Johnson, we wouldn’t know what God thinks.

According to Johnson, “A patriot is a person who loves, supports and defends their country.” In a democratic society, individual citizens, guided by the moral compass they’ve formed through family, education, and community institutions, comprise what a country is. Our willingness to put a generation of young men and women in harm’s way should be something we enter into with caution and wisdom. So when I see a legless young man just back from Iraq visiting his former co-workers at Shopko, I have to ask if he lost his limbs for a just cause. My moral consideration of his hapless state is not predicated upon a “political agenda.”

Since a state’s citizens are what binds a country together, the kind of blind patriotism that follows a “my country right or wrong” dictum is fundamentally flawed. Each citizen has a moral duty, as Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King have all pointed out, to first appeal to their private conscience before supporting collective policies that are socially unjust and privately immoral. If you, Mr. Johnson, lived during Hitler’s regime, for instance, would his being democratically elected and implementing genocidal legislation compel you to “support and defend” Nazi Germany?

As for having a “political agenda to support the most liberal candidates for political positions,“ doesn’t your letter imply a “political outlook” that tacitly supports a war that has cost over 4000 young Americans their lives, and left 600,000 civilians dead? Before appealing to an abstract concept like country, state, or nation, every citizen must first ask if the cause is just. Is it worth it?

Randall L. Tessier
Big Bay, Michigan

POLITICS:
(As if everything preceding this weren’t political)

LET”S HAVE A WAR!

There’s too many of us
There’s too many of us
There’s too many
There’s too many
There’s too many of us…
- Fear

In what follows, I will discuss the current state of affairs regarding the political situation involving Israel, the United States, and Iran. Further, I will look at three very different, and I hope to be representative, media publications as a part of this discussion, The Guardian, from Manchester, England, the New York Times, The New Republic, and The Marquette Mining Journal, from the United States.

According to the Guardian, the general consensus among prominent British political academics is that Israel will soon attack Iran, and my guess is that while the lame duck line will be one of restraint and negotiation, the current administration will bestow not only its consent, but its encouragement, for Israel’s pursuing this course. The hidden agenda here is that, much to the administration’s glee, Israel will perform a service, by proxy, that the U.S. has rendered itself incapable of.

In an earlier post I wrote, “it is at our peril that we discount credible sources, like Seymour Hersh, who warn that Bush will be dangerous right up to 11:59:59 of the day he leaves office.” Hersh’s recent article in the July 7 New Yorker, “Preparing the Battlefield,” quotes Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was head of the U.S. Central Command in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, as saying, “There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option.”

It’s no secret that the administration has had Iran in its cross hairs for a long time. But what has happened is that sustaining a military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq has been so costly in terms of logistics, materiel, and public opinion, that even this administration, as arrogant and imperialistic as it is, can’t sell another war. How convenient it is then to simply appeal to Israel’s hawkishness by reinforcing their doctrine of preemption, hence coaxing them into attacking Iran.

Writing in The New Republic (7/30/08), Shmuel Rosner, notes that at the beginning of June, Israel’s deputy prime minister, Shaul Mofaz, flatly told the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth that, if Iran continues its nuclear program, Israel, ‘will attack it.’” Also consider the following quotes from Benny Morris’s (professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University) op-ed piece, “Using Bombs to Stave Off War,” in the Friday, July 18, New York Times:

“Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months—and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause the…complete destruction of that country’s nuclear program.”

“Should Israel’s conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear war level will most likely follow.”

“Which leaves the world with only one option if it wished to halt Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry: the military option, meaning an aerial assault by either the United States or Israel.”

“But as a result of the Iraq imbroglio, and what is rapidly turning into the Afghan imbroglio, the American public has little enthusiasm for wars in the Islamic lands. This curtails the white House’s ability to begin yet another major military campaign in pursuit of a goal that is not seen as a vital national interest by many Americans.”

SO, WHY WOULD MORRIS ADVOCATE RISKING A POTENTIALLY DEVASTATING GLOBAL CONFLAGARATION?

“The alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland…savaged by a nuclear strike, or that both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate.”

You’re right on one thing, professor Morris, the American public has lost its “enthusiasm for wars.” Yet in the hinterlands, there still exists a romantic mystique involving waging war to end war. As the motto of the Strategic Air Command says, “Peace is Our Profession, but I think were fast coming to the point of questioning whether we can drill our way out of the oil crisis, and bomb our way to peace.

Which brings me to the Mining Journal’s continued support of a failed White House, and blind adherence to the untenable belief that waging war is wise policy. In endorsing McCain over Obama, and condemning Obama’s emphasis on negotiation as reflective of past diplomats who have insisted that, if only they could negotiate with aggressors, everything could be settled,” the Journal editorial of 7/20/08 contends that the American public should “Rest assured, Iranian leaders are eager to take advantage of a U.S. president whose ego makes him similarly delusional.”

The Mining Journal makes a shrewd, if unintentional point here, it’s time that we choose a leader where “ego” and “delusion” don’t enter into policy decisions that will profoundly affect us, and generations to come.

Two Letters to the Marquette Mining Journal and a fIctiOn

Letters To The Editor
> News > Letters To The Editor

Keep up the good work
POSTED: July 14, 2008

After reading many letters to the editor for several years I find I must respond to the letters written in the July 3 paper by Christian Hansen and Marlys Murray.

From what I can determine both writers accuse the paper of biased reporting. I say good for the paper's editors to tell it like it really is. I assume Hansen reads the New York Times regularly by the context of his letter. Has he forgotten a recent president with a very thin resume, Ronald Reagan, and what about one of the greatest defenders of freedom and the Constitution this country has ever had, Charleton Heston?

It saddens me to see and hear about people who vote by party only and really don't study about a candidate's real voting record while he or she served their appropriate terms of office. Sen. Obama is known as the most liberal senator in the entire Senate. Check his Illinois voting record and look into the people and associations he belonged to. It will make you shudder if you are a true American.

Keep up the good work, Mining Journal.

Robert Whitaker
Skandia

To the Mining Journal:

As I read your paper on-line, it was with considerable interest that I read Robert Whitaker’s recent 7/3/08 letter to the Journal. As a writing instructor at U-M, one of the points I make to student writers is the need to support general statements with specific examples. For instance, when Mr. Whitaker writes, “[Hansen] has forgotten a recent president [Reagan] with a very thin resume,” he might tell us what exactly we have forgotten. This same rhetorical rule should be applied when we are told we would “shudder” if we knew the “people and associations that [Obama] belonged to.” Notwithstanding the fact that one can’t belong to people, Whitaker might support this vague charge with, perhaps, just one example of what “people and associations” he’s talking about, lest he be accused of being one of those who “really don’t study about a candidates…record.” Also, considering that Mr. Whitaker’s letter applauds “one of the greatest defenders of freedom and the Constitution this country has ever had,” he might want to spell his name right. It’s Charlton, not “Charleton.” Finally, since I am a U.S. citizen who loves this country, does the fact that I don’t agree with Mr. Whitaker make me a “false” American?

Randall L. Tessier
Ann Arbor
7/17/08
______________________________________________________
FICTION

Under the bridge, in the headlights of dawn, she rummaged in the garbage bag for one of the many disposable lighters she had salvaged. Where is it? I need it. Big Mac I have. Slippery pavement. Stay to the shoulder. A tablet? No. A book without a cover. Pick it up. I'll take it.

She crossed to the southbound side, dodging the cars in the morning gridlock. The sun was rising from the mists of the Saginaw River. It's gonna be warmer today. Make the best of it she hummed softly.

Ten years later, it was this document that led Stakel to interview one Louis Oliver, a High School friend of Guerre's. Oliver's 1999 deposition recalls his early friendship with Guerre.

"For my part, first there was surprise, then stunned disbelief. For no cosmic serendipity, no celestial coincidence, no deus ex machina, no moira; nothing could have prepared me for the shock in learning that this macabre, terrifying document was written by someone I once knew."

Oliver recalled Claude's unpredictable nature.

"It was at the Tip Top. The smell of body odor, heavy medication and cigarette smoke that permeated the air provided the backdrop for our strange conversation. I wanted to talk about Dickie's death. Claude would have none of it. He asked how death could matter out here on the Mekong Delta. What with the constant attacks by enemy guerillas--all of who were women--he wondered how I could concern myself with the death of a Nazi collaborator. At the time I couldn't know the reason for the bandage on Claude's hand. Claude claimed it was his ticket out of the war, and that he fully expected to receive the ‘Purple Heart’ for his valor. Grabbing my lapels, he gave me a cold stare, muttering something about the decreasing value of Canadian currency. At the height of Claude's rant, Dan Tonka and Al Johnson came in and took a booth next to us. They were just back from Vietnam and had been severely wounded.”

Oliver remembered a party where Johnson had described his harrowing war experience. "Al was walking through a mined mango orchard when the guy next to him stepped on a Bouncing Betty. Instead of instantly killing him, as it did everyone else in his squad, the blast blew him twenty feet into the air, straight up. He landed in a bamboo thicket, where he came under intense machine gun fire. For the next hour his body was strafed by enemy fire. After extensive surgeries stateside, Al was finally able to get around using two canes."

"As Dan and Al sat down, Claude began to laugh and scream at them. The ravings of this shrieking wraith were incomprehensible to everyone in the bar. 'Claude! Shut up!' I whispered. 'What outfits were you with,' he screamed. 'Where were you while I was in the bunker? While you were killing babies, I was freeing the slaves.' Tonka's face, now looming menacingly over the top of our booth, was a grimace of hatred and pain. While grabbing Claude by the collar he reached up with his other hand and snatched his glass eye from its woeful socket. Dropping the shimmering orb in Claude's beer, Dan sneered, "I've got my eye on you.' Upon hearing this, Claude got up and bolted the bar. Stammering apologetically, I tried to explain that Claude wasn't right."

"This was the Claude I knew. Was he guilty of the rapes? Who knows? What I remember is this: one Lina Flatley, sister of Sam, who had recently drowned while fishing on the upper reaches of the Yellowdog, had been brutally beaten and raped near the Cinder Pond in the lower harbor. So severe were her injuries that she would never regain consciousness. A persistent vegetative state is what the doctors called it. The Mining Journal reported that she had been stalked in the woods behind the Northland Hotel and the waterfront. The fact that her nude body was completely covered with coal dust--an item that was kept from the press--suggested she had been assaulted amid the coal piles and then dragged into the bowels of an abandoned, half sunk dredging barge in the Cinder Pond. The kind of hatch in which she was found was meant to access the water, but in the winter these grim portals provided ingress to a tomblike labyrinth of solid lake ice; ice that stretched out to form a frozen catacomb within the barges lower compartments. The attacker had left behind a tattered leather motorcycle jacket."

"I later found out that around the time the rapes took place Claude had, for no apparent reason, kicked a number of local women at the Queen City Mall. Not long after these seemingly unrelated incidents, concerned friends drove him to Newberry State Hospital, where he agreed to be admitted.

This was the last I heard of him; and the last I expected to hear of him, but his name came up at my 30-year class reunion. My old Gwinn High School chum, Poo Poo Bourdage, asked me if I knew what happened to Claude after he was committed in 74. I assured him I hadn't seen or heard from Claude since then. But even though Bourdage hadn't seen him for a while, he had seen him more recently than I. Bourdage recalled a night when Claude came to his room at the Brunswick. He had a dazed, confused look and was covered in coal dust. As Bourdage remembered it, Claude didn't want to wash up, but instead wanted a bandage for the crescent shaped wound to his hand; a serrated set of tiny slashes suspiciously similar to teeth marks.”

"Guerre was gasping, frantically agitated, ranting about the fact that human bites were much dirtier, and more dangerous, than animal bites; and that it wasn't nice to bite." Hearing Bourdage's story 25 years after the fact confirmed my dreadful suspicion about a link between Claude and the rapes."

Stekel seethed with anger. "It was he, wasn't it? You saw him. Why didn't you tell someone?" Stan Rosen knew the man he had seen at the phone booth near Downings was probably Merryweather's killer, but he didn't care. As far as he was concerned maybe it wasn't. It didn't matter then, so why should it now. Later, when Rosen was deposed at the inquest after Guerre's body was exhumed, he testified that he had once witnessed the sadistic rape of an old women at an I-75 rest stop, but never reported it. He had spinal problems of the moral variety. "Why didn't you say anything?”

When Louis Oliver visited Guerre at Newberry State Hospital in the late 70's, Guerre had told him he saw a man near Downing's. Supposedly, this guy told him that he had just murdered a nigger. "Do you remember talking to someone?" Stekel asked. Rosen's answer had that ring of equivocation symptomatic of pathological liars. That quality of amoral ignorance which makes even the truth a lie. "I know you did," said Stekel. He knew it even before Guerre himself had told him so one day before his release. They sat under the decorative iron grilles smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.

Guerre's paranoiac affliction hung in the air amidst the thick blue smoke, providing a backdrop of obscene nightmare unabated, an ephemeral frame within which, interchangeably, delusion and reality passed for dialogue. Stakel would later describe this event as the most disturbing interview he had ever done.

The public area of the Michigan State Psychiatric hospital at Newberry contains six visiting rooms--florescent-lighted cells measuring 10x12, with walls and ceilings of cinderblock. In each chamber there was an electric ceiling fan, permanently fixed steel table and chairs, and concealed microphones and, as a part of the door, a one-way mirror observation portal. On Sunday, the seventh day of 2005, a solitary room was booked for 3:00PM--the hour Ward Stakel had selected for his first confrontation with Claude Guerre.

Just prior to that interview, Stakel gathered himself in the drifted over parking lot, preferring the numbing blizzard to the task before him. “Testing...testing. I'm afraid, afraid of the truths I might uncover, lies I might inspire, or worse, inability to recognize the difference." Rewind. "I'm afraid, afraid of the truths I might uncover, lies I might inspire, or worse, inability to recognize the difference." "His wire was working. That night he would edit and transcribe the tapes, carefully manipulating their linear witness."

As Stakel remembers it: "Nicole wanted to be there, behind the glass, but was instead stranded at the Detroit Renaissance Center, her residence since New Year's eve. As far as I was concerned, this has to be the guy! Rosen's testimony, Guerre's movements and actions at that time, and what I would hear that day all pointed to him as the killer. As I entered the room I was overcome by a sense of nausea, of awe and dread. And then I saw him."

"I imagined a bigger man, more physically imposing; not some rail-like wraith with lemur eyes. He was 62 years old but could've passed for 40. Oblivious to the core, he wore a tattered wife-beater, black horned-rim glasses and black shoes with no socks or shoelaces. I shook his hand. It was warm and clammy."

"Mr. Guerre,” I began, “my name is Ward Stakel. I am here on behalf of a private client with regard to events that took place some 40 years ago. You do, of course, have the right to say nothing. However, I must also tell you that you can no longer be prosecuted for any criminal actions you might have engaged in at that time. Further, should you be forthcoming enough in your responses to satisfy my client, we will facilitate your ability to meet the requirements for parole.” With dirty, piercing eyes, a soprano whine and articulate diction--he was a thoroughly despicable looking creature, with a repugnant, sneering grin; and early on he grinned often--eyeing me icily, speaking slowly and softly; seemingly unmoved by what should have inspired some kind of response.

“Been there, done that." Isn't that the quaint little colloquialism one uses in these situations? But all of these things happened so very long ago,” Guerre said, oddly serious for a moment.

“Now Mr. Guerre,” “it’s Claude.” “Claude, we're interested in what you remember about your time in Queen City and St. Ignace area around 1971. Do you recall an acquaintance you may have had? A Mr. Louis Oliver? He claims to have been a friend of yours in those days."

"I remember him all right, Oliver was a joke. Always worried about right and wrong, good and bad. A lot of good it did him, all this talk. It never seemed to prevent him from making the wrong choice.”
“What kind of choices might these be,” I asked.” “How subtle. Oh...you know, like deciding whether to kill someone or not? Come on. Where are you going with this? What is it you want to know?”
“Why don't we begin by talking about your childhood, you know, your family background.”

"Fixing me with those wild eyes, Guerre spun a twisted tale. He remembered when he was 13, his father had euthanized the family cat, Boots. “No matter what we tried, Boots refused to use the litter box. This went on for many months, until, one day, dad decided to, as he so delicately described it, to put Boots away. Only my father would think of electrocution as a humane method of death. Papa assured us that the cat would die immediately, mercifully. However, when it tore away from the electrified snare, he trapped it in a burlap bag and beat it to death with a shovel.” That was the only episode from his family life that Guerre mentioned. By his brief account, he had worked as a morgue attendant, paramedic, short order cook and cab driver. All before the age of twenty.

Let's talk about Oliver! “A strange one, such an intellectual, so shrewd. And such an interest in,...what was his theoretical spin? ...yes, the dynamics of moral consideration. How lofty. Ha Ha. Such a talespinner and glib talker. Spewing his academic snake oil as if it might make words more potable for having been treated with his unique blend of erudite semantic additives.”

"I can never tell you what you want to hear; but I can tell you something about Louis and I."
What Claude?
"They were moored at the Big Bay Marina.”
Who Claude?
“Some yacht girls from Cleveland, or Erie. Somewhere like that. We took them to an apartment above the Lumberjack. It was late. Louis disappeared with one up a pull down attic ladder, while I entertained the others with my guitar. I never saw her again. He strangled her.”
"Strangled who, Claude?"
"I don't know. Just her. As it turned out later, at least according to the newspaper I read, she was really a man. Someone left a cake out in the rain. Certainly a romantic lyric, don't you agree Mr. Stakel? May I call you Ward?"
"No. Please don't use my first name,' I whispered."
"As Louis descended the ladder carrying a sawed off shotgun, I produced a Nazi bayonet I had stolen from my Pappy's brother, uncle Bull. It didn't take long to hogtie and gag them. There is nothing duct tape can't do. Did you know they used it during the Viet Nam War to repair Helicopter rotors. Amazing. Then we marched them down to the basement. I tended to the two youngest first. Taped their hands together, using an overhead steam pipe to suspend them. I positioned them in such a way that they could not avoid watching us. We ordered the other two to undress. Grabbing a dusty refrigerator box from between the coal stoker and furnace, I flattened it out, forming a large stiff rectangle. Since I felt it was inordinately cruel to ask the eldest to stretch out on the cold concrete floor, I provided this makeshift pallet as her final resting place, securely affixing her hands and feet in a splayed position. The last girl, so beautiful, skin so exquisitely while, like alabaster or porcelain, I tied spread-eagled, face down on an old fashioned bumper pool table."

"The basic tools of torture are fist and boots. Nothing else is really needed to inflict suffering. Other items that come easily to hand, of course, are knives, broken bottles and cigarettes--all of which we had at our disposal. In the way of a whip, we had a scourge of electric cord and rubber fan belt. According to Oliver--a connoisseur of pain--a method of torture common to India and Pakistan is, Cheera, a torment in which the victim's legs are spread apart until the muscles tear and great bruises form in the groin. We applied this. We also used electric shock, targeting the genitals, nipples and lips (which are not only the most sensitive parts of the body but also the most private and personal ones). Applied by simply touching the skin with bare wires. Needless to say, we first sexually assaulted them. Oliver informed me this is regarded by many as the worst torture, causing the victim the ultimate humiliation, indignity and lasting psychological damage--a problem these girls wouldn't have to worry about. After this, we garroted them with guitar strings."

"A funny story my friend! Is it not? Cest la vie. Me and Louis Oliver: boulevardier, raconteur, Bricoleur, flaneur, Ph.D! I remember a jet out of K.I. Sawyer--an F101 Voodoo, I believe--that went down in Lake Superior in 1962. They never found the pilot. And I thought right then, I'll kill Oliver. No witnesses.” Guerre paused.

"I had come expecting to hear the worst," Stakel recalled, but not in the form of a story like this. I had hoped to learn what happened to Don Merryweather. Instead I was regaled with a story so appalling I was left with more questions than answers. If this were true, who were these women Guerre, and possibly Oliver, had murdered? Guerre's confession, although implying the fate of Nicole's father, failed to satisfy my understanding of why. What motive? What intent compelled these horrible killings? Stakel sought refuge in the solace of inexplicability. This crime was a simple twist of fate, a violence without meditation, pre or otherwise. The victims might have died in a plane crash or earthquake. But Stakel couldn't leave it at this. They had suffered cruelly, and needlessly. "I saw no desire for redemption in his eyes. No remorse. No flicker of self-examination. Still, I attempted to temper my anger with consideration, my ultimate judgment unfolding from my sympathy, no, my recognition of the cruel possibilities of human nature and an understanding of the need for retribution when these drives are unleashed. For Guerre's pathetic psychosis had never given him the chance to experience what flows from an affect nourished by the dynamics of human emotion, he had no emotional, and thus moral function. His longing was without love, and his hatred without anger, or spite. My sympathy, however, brooked no forgiveness, no mercy; but it did require that a meet my moral obligation to understand the man I was about to condemn. His sentence was sealed, albeit on strictly circumstantial evidence.

JOURNAL OF A CANCER YEAR: (Excerpts)

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

-- Emily Dickinson

Dear Readers:

Today, July 15, 2008, marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. Last night as I was drifting off to sleep, a question came to me. Did this really happen to me? I swim, I lift weights, and I’m healthy again. Was it me who was diagnosed with cancer and underwent chemotherapy? Of course, I know this happened, but a curious thing about being healthy is that the mind expunges memories of fear and pain and displaces them with the joy and happiness of being alive. But it is also true that gaining an awareness of the distinction between facing one’s mortality, that fragility and uncertainty we are hard-wired to deny, and the blessedness of understanding life is not to be taken for granted, provides a more expansive understanding, and appreciation of being alive. So, while in some ways it’s hard to believe I went through this, I also know that this can really happen, and that rather than being just a trying memory, pain and sickness are very real aspects of living that none of us can escape. I don’t say this with the intent of sounding grim or pessimistic, I say it as someone who is grateful for a life lesson that showed me survival is always fleeting, a temporary aspect of being born and dying. In truth, I was diagnosed at a time when I was psychically drifting, or better perhaps, running from myself without looking back; but suddenly, and it was only a matter of time, disease tripped me up, and I couldn’t run away from myself anymore. This blog is the raft that a once cocksure drowning man has clung to in a world where doubt is the only certainty.

Randy and Kirk Osoinach, Cross Village Beach (7/11/08)

Here are some excerpts:

I suppose I should talk about my disease: about prophylactic chemo injections that reinforce the blood brain barrier; about gazing at the galaxy of twinkling tumors that is me; about the unknown compatibility of the Rituximab and Hepatatic deities; about gig-friendly self-injectable Tour de France blood enhancers; about the distinctive differences between bone and bone marrow; about quixotic hopes and experimental studies; and about wooden stakes through the hearts of lymphomaniac vampires. (7/20/07)

We don’t really believe that “shit happens” philosophy. Admit it, you asked for it. You brought this on yourself: He smoked, she drank, bad diet, immoral living, overweight, philanderer, atheist, communist, non-Christian, Christian, pacifist, agnostic, Satanist, homosexual, out of tune, and so on. The cancer personality persists in a culture of psychology. It’s the ominous, opposite side of the pop culture coin of the realm: the power of negative thinking. I’m a cancerous being; my thoughts and habits are malignant; I’m diseased. Self-Help, the New Age Gospels, they can be of no help without asking, why me? (The Existentialist would say, why not?) Curiously, we don’t adopt this sensibility with animals. No one asks why Poofy died. (7/30/07)

Did I mention that my hair has begun to fall out, not in giant clumps or anything like that, (at least not yet) but in gentle wisps and strands. (8/7/07)

Last Friday at midnight, after having been up for twenty hours straight, I looked out over a crowd of happy dancers reveling to the music of George Bedard. I was tired and angry. A feeling came over me that I had yet to experience: “I’m exhausted and sick,” I thought. “Why don’t you all go home and let me do the same?” But then I realized something: Why shouldn’t they all be having fun? They don’t know how I feel, and I can’t blame or resent them for my misery, or for being happy, or for wanting GB&theKPins to play all night. We jog, eat granola, do yoga, etc., all with the idea of staying healthy, but when it comes right down to it, we take our health for granted. And why shouldn’t we? We’re hard wired that way, we’re programmed to survive, and by golly that’s what we’re going to do. And that’s a good thing, because when the shit hits the fan, and the cancer, gout, hemorrhoids, mange, mouth sores, and aching gums come a courting, it’s best that we didn’t spend a lot of time anticipating them. There lies the way of psychotic anxiety at best, and madness at worst. But while it may be good that we never truly contemplate our own mortality, we are ill prepared when the axe comes down. When the specialist walks in bearing grim news, no one wants to hear it. (8/10/07)

The emotional swirl of being sick, researching the disease, bringing attention to the cause, and lobbying for better health/cancer care is slowly fading into the mundane, day to day reality of morning elation, mid-day optimism, late afternoon malaise and evening resignation. Life goes on. Someone gets cancer, there is a pause in their worldview, and life moves on, with or without them. I’m 10 days into the second cycle. So how’s it been? While I only have the first treatment’s experience to draw upon, I can draw some conclusions. The ten day point signals the beginning of an emotional period in which the late day fatigue and stress of life (finance, family, romance, health) conspire to thwart all optimism. The depressed feeling that one is ill becomes inescapable. Not accidentally, the 10 day depression point immediately follows the cessation of the 4 day steroid regimen. The energy affected by the prednisone gives way to an emotional crash where, in the words of Hamlet, life seems “stale, flat, and unprofitable.” Yesterday my tongue and throat were sore, the gums and mucous membranes in the mouth, rough and irritated. The same crazy bald-head in the mirror who’s ready to save the world now sees through sad eyes. Nobody knows what it’s like. (8/24/07)

I had a bad night. Around 4 PM yesterday I began to feel feverish. I had sweats, cold chills, and my temperature was 101….Allow me to briefly explain what I mean by “bad night.” Finally, the fever, chills, and night sweats predicted by the literature on chemo and its side effects were upon me. Along with the drenched linens and fever dreams comes that futile attempt to use those same wet sheets for warmth. At around 5 A.M. the fever broke. (8/29/07)

The dread of death and the overwhelming nature of life, that tragic dichotomy of being we strive to ignore, to neatly compartmentalize, manifests itself most concurrently in that moment when one’s mortality is made concrete, the moment of diagnosis, the close of the real. The collision of mortal dread and life’s absurdity and fragility produces a chain of recognitions that are otherwise impossible, unthinkable, and unimaginable. Why, because abstraction is the balm of denial. It’s not me this is happening to, it’s that gaunt, bald woman crossing the street with her walker. And then it’s you with the swollen lymph glands and night sweats. (10/25/07)

Infusion number 4 served to contradict this disease of reckless romanticism by refusing to conform to Oscar’s expectations. During the second of the three-week treatments, Oscar’s temperature began to rise. His body began to shake, his bones began to ache, and the sweat poured from his feathers, drenching the straw below his perch and mightily worrying his fellow owls. After making it through a feverish night, Oscar reluctantly called his vet (please excuse my intermittent use of doc and vet) at which point he was ordered to the emergency room and given a 3 hour infusion of antibiotics. The throat was sore, the toes were numb, and the bones ached, but he decided if this was as bad as it got, no problem. Now one of his owlish problems from the beginning was his insistence on carrying on as if he wasn’t sick. Where other sick owls had pared down their activities to accommodate their infirmities, Oscar was adamant on living life as usual. Where he had always been the lead hunter as they tracked down mice and snakes, he saw no reason to change that now. If a guard was needed to alert the flock to hunters, Oscar was the Owl for the job. The trouble was, Oscar’s affliction was of a different mind than Oscar. As his beautiful feathers slowly fell out he could no longer escape the inevitable side effects of the medicine, nor could he give up his alpha-owlish qualities. He lost his speed, stamina and, perhaps most important for an owl, his shrewdness and never failing wisdom. And so came the fourth chemo. With the exception of the numbness spreading from his wings tips to his talons, he had an easier time of it. True, it was painful for him to achieve his daily constitutionals, and the mangier and mangier look he was displaying were a blow to his owlish pride, the actual fact of a brief respite from the accumulating side-effects were a welcome relief. Number five was next. Make no mistake about it, Oscar was still intent on leading the parliament, while the spirit was willing, the flesh was weak. His throat constricted to the point that his mighty call went from an owlish pride to a dovish coo. His garbled sounds became unintelligible to the other birds and he tried to keep his larkish tears to himself. He could no longer hide the fact that he was a different bird, an ailing owl. He tried to avoid making droppings of any kind to avoid the burning and murmured sympathies of the other owls. (11/21/07)

Cancer is a humbling experience. One of the things we have in common is the way our ordeals have made us aware of is why we love others, why judgmental attitudes, anger, and negativity are wasted energies/emotions. A silver lining to the cloud of my cancer has been the kindness I feel toward others. I think those around me see it and return the feelings in kind. Goodness comes to those who are good. (12/17/07)

The whole camp, about 200 strong, lined up to watch the ritual. They were dressed in shabby orange work suits. Their faces reflected a kind of hopelessness that can only be described as depressing. A look of despair. We, the loved ones who showed up to collect our men and women children, looked on as the sound of marching feet and shouted cadences slowly came within earshot. M.D.O.C. (Michigan Department of Corrections) guards, dressed like low budget storm troopers, looked on as the graduates stepped out, identified themselves, stepped back, and stood at attention. The last question asked was, “Are you ready to go home?” A loud and clear ”Sir, yes sir” was strongly echoed in unison. With that, the Trainees were dismissed into the arms of their families. Tears ruled the day. (1/15/08)

Curiously, when in the final throes of living the chemo, I wrote less about the side effects than early on. One of the less painful, but madly frustrating, consequences is neuropathy. What happens is this: nerve cells are wiped out and muscle atrophy sets in. In practical terms, everyday living is affected in various and mundane ways. Some examples: the resistance that must be overcome in turning over the car’s ignition is so great as to require either both hands or a fist-like grip; the quickness required in sliding the card in and out of the gas pump’s credit card reader is so compromised as to necessitate a trip inside the station; holding the guitar pick with the thumb, index, and middle fingers is only possible for brief periods; buttoning clothes becomes difficult to the point that one either leaves the garment fastened enough to slip it over the head, or enlists the aid of a confederate to button the shirt. Tying and zipping also present challenges that I’ve discussed earlier. (2/24/08)

Does the fact that others might be secretly happy that they can’t get cancer, mean that I might secretly wish that they had it. After all, common wisdom tells us that it is not contagious. The word “contagion” has a repellent ring. We take it as an article of faith that cancer is not infectious. But if cancer is not a virus, some scientists see an association between viruses and some cancers. Similarly, chemical exposure has been linked to cancer, but we don’t think if it as a kind of poisoning. Unlike renal and coronary diseases, which are marked by organ dysfunction, cancer is the result of cellular reproduction gone haywire. What’s interesting is that the single tumor-of-origin is produced by the victim and not by some outside source. These replicant mutations, cells run amok, are obsessed with wildly reproducing to the point of ignoring the host organism (yes, like a parasite). Which brings me back to the hidden glee of the contagion free. So far, medical research confirms the comforting belief that cancer is a solitary phenomenon. It is the self-originating character of the first rogue cell that sustains our faith in science. And so, too, do cancer’s victims suffer in the solitude of knowing cancer can’t be caught, it is ultimately, and inexorably, the victim’s fault. (3/19/08)

For me, having cancer has been an epiphanous, depressing, exhilarating, distressing, and, to coin a descriptor of Anatole Broyard, “intoxicating” experience. Broyard’s point is that the diagnosis is analogous to be inoculated with a dose of truth. The abstract, and untenable, idea that death comes to us all is banished and is replaced by the knowledge that existential enlightenment is only achieved by embracing our finitude. What Broyard calls, the ‘nausea of the uninitiated’ is replaced by the comfort of rejecting homey truths and ontological delusions. And with this curious comfort comes the intoxication of a heightened desire, which in turn produces a lightheartedness, and hence, reproach to reality. It follows then, that those dear to us who care, who rally around us like “birds rising from a body of water into the sunset” fumble with “pious and inspirational” conversation, with sobering responses to our refusal of seriousness. Over time, the diagnosis directed my attention to the real, and has proved itself to be, as ironic as it may seem, salvific. My narrative has a beginning, middle, and end, and while I can’t predict future agonies, I am learning to accept that anxiety, like time itself, is ever fleeting. As the wisdom of the Lear’s Fool has it, the worst is never the worst as long as we can say it’s the worst. (4/23/08)

So, Shadow Hussein, why does god allow suffering? Well, Master, three reasons: 1) suffering is a test of character that results in spiritual redemption. For instance, when you suffer excruciating thumbnail pain after eating truculent pistachios, the Man-Whore God is punishing you for drinking too much. Or say, when you’re the Magic Poetry man, and you convert to Catholicism, that circumcisional pain at losing your squid ring, or, if you’re Jewish, Shmuck, is redemptive. Your throbbing penile discomfort just got you into heaven, buddy!; 2) Suffering is punishment, ass-wipe. Remember that time you puked on me? That’s why god gave you cancer. And what about that electric shock collar? That’s at least worth a dose of unbearable anal pain, the red-hot Phillips-head up the ass feeling you know you love. And how about the time you put the cat in the dryer, she didn’t forget that. That’s why you couldn’t swallow, and talked like an idiotic neo-teenybopper with multiple tongue rings. I just sent our electronic bids press pack to Chemofest. Will everyone who took the brown acid please report to the infusion center. Shane, come back; 3) You silly-billy, suffering is a sign of god’s impending return, where she will vanquish evil and establish her kingdom of peace and harmony. At the last judgment, she’ll throw the Bushwacker into the big lake of fire, and restore all them dead babies he’s responsible for killing. I’m working on writing a song about it right now, “Season of the Chuckys.” Wait a cottin-pickin minute, you write songs, Shadow? Yes, I do. That’s why I’m changing my name from Shadow Hussein to Dog…I mean, Cat, Stevens.

That’s enough…. (7/1/08)

TESSIER/OBAMA 08

“When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.”
-- Max Lerner, “Actions and Passions,” 1949

Anonymous said...
This just in from the OD Newswire. Bella Abz and Gloria Steiny have been arrested for the attempted murder of ME. According to the report lawyers have been dispatched from NOW to counsel and represent the two. The preliminary hearing will be held on the 13th floor of the City County Bldg in downtown Suffragette City. In other news we would like to thank everyone for attending the Stump People's gala all money raised will go to the BIID Research Charity.

Buns Up Kneelin Herald News reporter;Susy Anthony
July 11, 2008 12:23 PM

Many thanks to the insightful, clever, and humorous comment (don't forget your commas) on the blog regarding NOW’s (National Organization of Women) sending hitwomen (Gloria, Betty [Friedan], and Bella, as well as back up support consisting of Dr. Evil’s Fem-bots, and a squadron of Anti-Rush Feminazis) to assassinate Me. So, thank you Suzy (and please send me a bunch of those round metal things bearing your engraved image). But I must tell you that as much as I abhor Me’s politics, as you know, I’m against the death penalty, and killing in general. Which is why I must warn Me about this secret mission. My readers are many, but responses few -- people have your say!

In an editorial in Fridays (&/11/08), John R. Miller takes up the issue of human trafficking. Miller writes, “Sex slavery is not the only modern incarnation of this ancient institution…but it is the largest category of slavery in the United States.” Miller continues, “Imagine my surprise when the Justice Department started a campaign AGAINST a new bill that would strengthen the government’s anti-human trafficking efforts.” What provisions does the Justice Department oppose? Should Americans who foster a thriving sex-slave-trade in foreign countries be prosecuted? NO. Does sexual child abuse perpetrated abroad merit harsher penalties? NO. Should American courts have jurisdiction over American sex-slavers in other countries? NOPE.

As Miller points out, the Justice Department’s 13 page letter that opposed the new bill contends that addressing these issues would be too “burdensome.” Miller writes, “The department strongly objects to a provision that would make it easier to prosecute pimps.”

There is an argument out there put forth by some feminist groups, and the American Civil Liberties Union, that prostitution is a legitimate profession engaged in by educated, consenting women as a career choice. In truth, those who have worked with sex trafficking victims find that “most prostitutes are poor, young, abused, harassed, raped, beaten and under the control of pimps against their will.”

Count me among those who view prostitution as an enslavement rather than occupation.

Speaking of prosecuting criminals (I know this is an imperfect segue), it was heartening to learn that the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, will ask that an arrest warrant be issued for Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for war crimes. According to the New York Times 7/14/08 (Lydia Polgreen), “anti-genocide and human rights advocates have cheered the decision to request charges against Mr Bashir, calling it a victory in the battle against impunity.” Consider that word, “IMPUNITY.” Further consider the justice in prosecuting anyone, even sitting presidents, who inflict atrocities on innocent civilians and wage illegal wars with IMPUNITY. Hopefully, Moreno-Ocampo will consult Vincent Bugliosi’s “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder”(2008) when he gets around to indicting W. for crimes against humanity.

Why should the International Criminal Court choose to prosecute? Consider this excerpt from Frank Rich’s Sunday, 7/12/08 Times op-ed piece. “Mr. Bush’s 2005 proclamation that ‘we do not torture’ was long ago revealed as a lie. Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated detainee abuse for the Army, concluded that ‘there is no longer any doubt’ that ‘war crimes were committed.’ Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges. Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military’s barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore. No wonder the former Rumsfeld capo, Douglas Feith, is trying to discredit a damaging interview he gave to the British lawyer Philippe Sands for another recent and essential book on what happened, ‘Torture Team.’ After Mr. Sands previewed his findings in the May issue of Vanity Fair, Mr. Feith protested he had been misquoted — apparently forgetting that Mr. Sands had taped the interview. Mr. Feith and Mr. Sands are scheduled to square off in a House hearing this Tuesday. So hot is the speculation that war-crimes trials will eventually follow in foreign or international courts that Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has publicly advised Mr. Feith, Mr. Addington and Alberto Gonzales, among others, to ‘never travel outside the U.S., except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel.'"

What the above considerations suggest is this country needs a radical change of vision. Which is why I have decided to run for president with Obama (I really wanted Ralph Nader) as my running mate. Why would this better serve America? Because with me it would truly be, “Change? Yes We Can,” rather than, “Change? Maybe We Can.” In a role where I’m affecting policy, Obama would serve as eloquent orator who makes what I do sound cool. He would speak out against surveillance. He would excoriate proponents of the death penalty. He would pontificate on why religion has no business in governance. He would drum up support for just campaign financing. He would expound on why building a fence to stop illegal immigration is folly. In short, he would serve as a politically correct functionary, while, I, in my infinite wisdom, would implement what was once thought to be an unachievable utopian pipe dream—the political realization of a universal code of social justice and worldwide attitude of peace love and understanding.

Finally, I will officially announce my candidacy at Julie’s party, which I am thoroughly looking forward to.

AIPS (Acquired Imaginary Personality Syndrome): LOVE, MARRIAGE, and the STUMP PEOPLE

I want to talk about Me.

As my loyal readers know, at times, as a result of the chemo’s after-affects, I’m possessed by an alien personality that calls himself Me. How do I know this? Why else, unbeknownst to me, would strange, outrageous, irreverent, insulting, misogynistic, and crude posts keep appearing on my blog? The blog is turning into a kind of twisted portrait of Dorian Gray document whereby my psychic demons come crawling out and signal the world about the in-dwelling creep lurking in my soul. Consider the weird interviews with corrections officers, psycho Cudighi eaters, and anonymous fudge farmers, concerning pressing social issues, like capital punishment, bio-fuels, and homophobia. This demented persona is like “The Crawling Hand,” except it’s wrapped around my cerebrum rather than throat. What’s really insidious is that Me reads exactly the same stuff I do, so I’m helpless in terms of countering his satanically intellectual machinations. Why, you may ask, don’t I simply delete these insane posts, and allow the astute, articulate, and sophisticated me that everyone knows and loves to reveal himself? In truth, I don’t know. Whenever I initiate the commands to exorcise this evil presence from the blog, a sort of mental paralysis takes over whereby my hands freeze up and grab my crotch.

And so it was I got up this morning and found that, once again, Me had tampered with my blog, and, even though, that, like myself, Me always composes his invectives in word, and then transfers the text to the blog (I’m going for a long sentence here), it was, because I had not seen the official site, too late for me to preemptively block Me from entering this, what is now, official post...

Hello all. It’s Me again!

Maureen Dowd’s July 6 column, “An Ideal Husband”(New York Times 7/6/08), solicited this response.
To the Editor:

I am a twice-divorced woman, and after my second divorce I sat down and wrote a message to women, including these words of advice:

Never marry a man who yells at you in front of his friends.
Never marry a man who is more affectionate in public than in private.
Never marry a man who notices all of your faults but never notices his own.
Never marry a man whose first wife had to sue him for child support.
Never marry a man who corrects you in public.
Never marry a man who sends birthday cards to his ex-girlfriends.
Never marry a man who doesn’t treat his dog nicely.
Never marry a man who is rude to waiters.
Never marry a man who doesn’t love music.
Never marry a man whose plants are all dead.
Never marry a man your mother doesn’t like.
Never marry a man your children don’t like.
Never marry a man who hates his job.
Never marry a man who doesn’t give you lovely and romantic gifts for your birthday and Valentine’s Day.

Susan Striker
Easton, Conn., July 6, 2008

My thoughts are this: I should clip this out and carry it in my wallet, lest some misguided woman should be so inclined as to want me to marry her. I would simply produce Ms. Striker’s letter, advise a careful reading, and point out that I hardly qualify as the marrying kind.

Taking Susan’s admonitions point by point, I would say, since I have no friends, no prospective wives need worry that I will scream at them in mixed company.

Regarding private vs. public affection, I suppose having oral sex under restaurant tables, and intercourse at home qualifies as disproportional affection.

Given that faults are objective perceptions, I would say my only fault is having none, furthermore, the most egregious fault I’ve noticed in women who’ve associated themselves with me is that they’ve associated themselves with me.

Actually, it was only my fourth wife who had to sue me for child support, since the many children begat with the first three were fathered by various strangers.

On those rare occasions when I ventured being seen outside the home with the kind of women who would have me, we sat in such isolated circumstances as to preclude the term “public.”

As for my ex-girlfriends, for them I reserve only the best stationary, since their birthdays represent an expansion of that blessed time since I last experienced their insufferable nagging.

When I’m not spinning the cat in the dryer and walking Shadow on hot asphalt, I’m feeding my parakeets Tabasco soaked marijuana seeds.

I’ll never forget the time Jack Abbot, Norman Mailer, and I had dinner in Manhattan and killed the waiter.

Music is my life. What women could resist my Rhino World Polka Collection and Neil Diamond catalogue?

Plants? I keep a number of flourishing Chia-Pets throughout my crib, and they all love me.

The mothers of the women I’ve known should thank me for relieving them of daughters who, sharper than serpent’s teeth, were, judging by my interactions with them, thankless children.

Does this mean my fourth wife’s eldest daughter, who constantly loosened the lug nuts on my Yugo, put arsenic in my CornNuts, and antifreeze in my watermelon Kool-Aid, didn’t like me?

Everyone knows I love my job with Acme Porta-Potty. Why else would I have left a lucrative position with U-M Bed Pan Disposal and night work at the United Telephone Bill Collection agency?

Here’s just a partial list of some of the more romantic gifts I’ve bestowed on a number of my ex-wives: the Kirby-Deluxe-Attachment- Set, Nostril-Hair-Devil, Ronco Mustache Wax kit, and Massengill Disposable Douche System.
…

I had a dream last night where I was playing the Stump People’s prom. Legless Divas and armless, tuxedoed gentlemen sashayed amidst Daliesque paintings of amputated vegetables and stunted, Promethean Bohemians, as they ensorcelled frustrated Wannabes drinking absinthe from ivory goblets. A baguette sodomized two sunny-side up eggs as a giraffe nibbled on the ivy invading my gutters, as Mrs. Miller strolled the malecon with sombreroed Mexicans playing Guantanamara. Suddenly a wingless dragonfly crawled into my madras cummerbund and began to suckle at my hemorrhoids.

I then awoke in a lukewarm sweat. Was it really a dream?

Then I woke up.

HeLtEr sKeLteR: CHENEY/MANSON 08

“One’s file, you know, is never quite complete; a case is never really closed, even after a century, when all the participants are dead.”
-- Graham Greene, “The Third Man”

I think Vincent Bugliosi likes to write about drugstore cowboys, or perhaps better, criminal ranchers. Why? 1) as a former Los Angeles county prosecutor, he is a public beacon for truth, justice, and the American way, and; 2) he is a shrewd writer who knows how to make a buck. While I know the criminal rancher narrative is a closely circumscribed genre, the real life gangster-thugs he writes about bear some scrutiny. And so, I, the Grand Scrutinizer from planet Zappa, will provide a reader’s guide to the connection between the Spahn Ranch in California, and the Crawford Ranch in Texas. Yeeeehaaaaaaaa!

Bugliosi’s new book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder”(2008), No.14 on the New York Times best-seller list, with very little fanfare, has already sold a whopping 130,000 copies hard cover. The book presents a legal case for why Bush is criminally responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq. Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, said, “130,00 copies is an enormous number of copies of anything.” Bugliosi’s explanation for why this best-seller is not being talked about is this: “I think it all goes back to fear. If the liberal media would put me on national television, I think they fear that they would be savaged by the right wing. The left wing fears the right, but the right does not fear the left”(NYT 7/7/08).

Maybe the media, paper and electronic, think W.s lame-duck status is reason to discount those who see him as a criminal. The mistake in this is that it ignores the possibility of him doing any further damage, specifically, attacking Iran. But it is at our peril that we discount credible sources, like Seymour Hersh, who warn that Bush will be dangerous right up to 11:59:59 of the day he leaves office. Hersh’s recent article in the July 7 New Yorker, “Preparing the Battlefield,” quotes Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was head of the U.S. Central Command in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, as saying, “There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option.”

In an ironic turn, Bugliosi’s book coincides with the release of an HBO documentary, “Polanski: Wanted and Desired”(2008), that briefly touches upon the witch-hunt inflicted on Polanski in the wake of the Manson murders. Polanski’s wife, Sharon Tate, was one of seven victims of perhaps the most sensational cult murders of the late Twentieth Century. Bugliosi’s, “Helter Skelter”(1971) provides an inside view of the Manson case, and was later made into a fairly accurate movie version starring Steve Railsback as Charlie Manson.

Less well known is the fact there were two accomplices with the initials G.B. and D.C. that accompanied the killers on that fateful August night in 1969. The mysterious D.C. was hot for Lynn “Squeaky” Fromme, and his sidekick, G.B., quickly followed suit by seducing Susan "Sadie" Atkins. Squeaky would later try to assassinate Ronny “Trickle Down” Reagan (a nick-name given him by Nancy) for trying to discourage D.C. from pursuing her. It was no accident the killers wrote “Death to Pigs” on the walls of the Polanski home in Benedict Canyon. Much of the confusion surrounding the murders has to do with the identity of one of the killers, Tex Watson. In the original testimony by Bobby Beausoleil, there was no mention of a last name, only “Tex.” It would be years later that this mysterious “Tex” was given a last name.

Noted conspiracy expert, Ollie Rock, has contended the “Death to Pigs” graffiti was meant as a ruse to suggest a left-wing bent to the killers’ motives. When asked who he was and what he was doing there, “Tex” told Wojtek Frykowski, one of the victims, "I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business.” Again, the substitution of the last name Watson, Son of Wat (Wat being an ancient Baragan name for the anti-christ, a shortened bastardization of the avenging satanic arch-angel, What?), is consistent with G.B.s later affiliations with evangelical necro-mancers who allegedly accepted his soul in exchange for installing him as a future World Potentate. D.C.s painting “pig” in blood on the front door, has been interpreted as a sublimated desire to menstruate on the world. It has long been speculated that D.C. was a paraphiliac who took pleasure in spraying older Mourning Dove hunters with birdshot.Years later, a black light illumination of the door revealed an anagramatic invisible text that praised Cthulu, and offered this chilling prophecy, Q-ranicrawbarinapathonimicon.

Another infamous conspiracy expert, Flash Limpblah, has compiled an exhaustive collection of anecdotal evidence that it was D.C., and not Manson, who coined the phrase, “Helter Skelter,” a term he took from the Beatles song of the same name and construed as an apocalyptic clash of cultures (Christian and Islamic) that the murders were intended to precipitate. This connection with rock music linked Manson, from the beginning of his notoriety, with pop culture, in which he became an emblem of insanity, violence, and the macabre.

Earlier, as the four Family members had headed out from Spahn Ranch, Manson had told G.B. and D.C. to "leave a sign… something witchy"; now, using the towel that had bound Frykowski’s hands, D.C. wrote "pig" on the house’s front door, in Tate's blood. En route home, the killers changed out of bloody clothes, which were ditched in the hills, along with their weapons.

This was the last anyone heard of the G.B./D.C. connection to the Manson murders. Rock has speculated they dissappeared into an obscure Indian Reservation in the mountains of Michigan’s western upper penninsula, where they studied archaic Baragan scripture and lived on Pabst, smoked fish, and Trenary Toast, before emerging in the new millenium to wreak havoc on an already declining American Imperial State.