There’s been some conversation over on SLOG today that the author of those threatening letters to gay bars in Seattle might actually be a gay man himself. I wasn’t convinced, until I saw this…
Remix in comments flagged an important clue about the author of the Ricin Letters. The line…
…is from a poem, "A Display of Mackerel", from a collection by poet Mark Doty. The poem appeared in Atlantis, a 1996 collection of poems that Doty wrote after the HIV-related death of his partner in 1994.
They don’t care they’re dead
and nearly frozen,
just as, presumably,
they didn’t care that they were living:
So whoever wrote the letter knows—and plagiarizes—his gay poets.
That’s…pretty telling. It’s not conclusive, but I’m not making any more assumptions about this guy until he’s caught. Let’s hope that happens before he actually kills someone…
Radical Leftists: Still Cheerfully Working For Their Corporate Masters After All These Years
German culture, or so I’m told from all the books I’ve been reading about it lately, teaches its own that life is mostly a zero sum game. This, so I’m told, follows from the fact of Germany being a small nation that is very tightly packed with people. The attitude is that if you have more of something it means someone else has less. This is in contrast to American culture which teaches us (or tries to) that life is what you make of it and wealth is something you create, not something you merely acquire. On the plus side, their attitude gives Germans a strong sense of social responsibility and mutual obligation to one another. Not as much as some Asian cultures maybe, but compared to my own native land it’s very striking. German corporations, so I am told, will bend over backwards not to fire anyone, compared to here in the U.S. where employers treat staff like paperclips to be used and disposed of at will. On the minus side…well hello there Karl Marx…Baader-Meinhof… Oh…and the paper hanger…
German culture, so I’m told, tends to frown on ostentatious displays of wealth, which isn’t so very odd when you consider the circumstances of Germany, but then again it is when you consider who manufactures BMWs, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz…and…oh yes…the Maybach. The books I’m reading about German culture make the point over and over that Germans don’t like it when wealth is waved around in everyone’s face. Yet…the Maybach. Okay…there’s Volkswagon. But…the Maybach. You imagine them exporting Maybachs shamefacedly in the dead of night in containers labeled Glühwein.If only we didn’t have to make this half million dollar V12 luxury sedan with reclining massage seats and a wine cooler in armrest for all those other decadent nations we could be a proud people once more…
But no… Germans like their cars very much, and that is why there are both Volkswagons and Maybachs. People here in America used to point their fingers and laugh at the old Volkswagon Beetle, but that stopped when gas prices started going up and our big three tried to make decent gas efficient sub-compact cars and couldn’t. And they still can’t. If we loved cars here in America as much as we claim to, maybe GM wouldn’t be needing a bailout now to keep tens of thousands of its employees and that third of the American workforce that depends on the car industry gainfully employed. No…what we love here in America is showing off. Here in America it’s not about the car, its about the owner. In Europe, it’s about the car, and Germans love the automobile. But a good car is expensive because it just costs more to go the extra distance in terms of engineering and quality, and Germans don’t like ostentatious displays of wealth either. So like many passionate love affairs, German fondness for the automobile is just a little bit schizophrenic.
I’m thinking about all this while reading This Article in The Local about a recent rash of attacks on luxury cars in Berlin. And since I am the owner of what is ostensibly a luxury car, reading it makes me more then a tad apprehensive. I’ve known ever since I bought Traveler, that I’m likely one of these days to come out and find that someone walking past laid eyes on a Mercedes-Benz and decided then and there to let me know how much they hate rich people, and never mind that its owner isn’t rich. But that I could forgive. When you see the gods of finance throwing parties with bailout money it’s not hard to have a really bad attitude toward the fabulously well off. What I couldn’t forgive is someone who damages my car because they hate the sight of human excellence.
Several luxury cars have been set alight in the capital in the past week in what is beginning to look like a concerted attack on conspicuous wealth. Seven expensive cars were found burning in the city on Tuesday night, while another 15 were damaged by the flames. Early Friday morning a car was found burning in Christinenstrasse in the Prenzlauer Berg district.
Another six cars were consumed in a large fire early on Sunday morning in Michendorf near Potsdam. Nearby houses were also seriously damaged.
Of course the car in the accompanying photo is a Mercedes…
Ow! That hurts just to look at. Looks like it might be an older model ‘E’ class. But…with a decorative spoiler? I can’t believe Mercedes would actually do that to one of their sedans.
Listen Che…if it’s parked on the street next to a parking meter, it’s not a rich man’s car you drooling jackass. You think the CEO of AIG drives an ‘E’ class? You think the vice president at Exxon in charge of putting things on top of other things drives an ‘E’ class? What planet do you live on? That’s a working person’s car and if you think the distance between that ‘E’ class and a Kia Rio makes the Merc a luxury car you have obviously never laid eyes on a Bentley. You think that fat bloated pig of an Exxon CEO even drives his own motherfucking car, let alone parks it on the street, let alone wants to be seen anywhere near an ‘E’ class? As far as people like him are concerned, that car and its owner and you are all commoner junk.
You may think you’re sticking it to The Establishment, but in reality you’re still dancing for it. Not only does the owner of that car hate you now, but so does everyone else seeing it, holding onto hope for a better life for themselves. They look at this and they don’t see The Establishment is holding them down, they see you holding them down. And that’s the way The Establishment likes it.
Character is what you are, not what other people think you are.
The news this morning tells me that the marriage (second try) of the guy who dressed up as Santa and killed nine people at a party recently started to break apart after his (second) wife found out about the brain damaged son he’d abandoned…
He was a software engineer who liked SUVs and went to Mass on Sundays. She was a secretary with a quick mind and an infectious laugh. When Bruce Pardo married Sylvia Orza three years ago, the match seemed ideal — right down to the housing arrangements: He lived alone in a sparsely furnished house and she had three children and plenty of furniture.
But the marriage splintered nearly a year ago when she discovered that, years earlier, he had abandoned a brain-damaged son but continued to claim him as a tax write-off.
Sylvia Pardo was appalled, according to a source close to the police investigation…
I’d read about the son previously and how Pardo had continued to claim him as a tax write-off even though he’d basically abandoned him and wasn’t paying any child support. The tale I got from the news outlets about the Christmas party massacre contained this horrible detail I hadn’t been able to get out of my mind: Pardo’s first victim was an 8 year old girl who had come running up to him when she saw him in the Santa suit. He shot her in the face. I just couldn’t fathom that. I’d read about the nasty divorce, and his loosing his job, but shooting the kid like that was more cold blooded then I could picture from all that by itself. There had to be more then the divorce and the job I thought at the time.
And there was more. Well…less. Less to him then anyone around him really grasped. There were all the usual statements from friends about how Pardo’s behavior that night was a total shock and completely out of character and so on. But it wasn’t. He had an easy laugh and a calm, quiet disposition. But character isn’t what you do, it’s why you do it. That’s what’s missing from so many of these horrible news stories about the quiet man who suddenly goes on a berserk rampage. People see the easy going smile and they don’t notice there is nothing behind it.
If I had read these news stories about Pardo and seen a man who had abandoned a son, used him to cheat on his taxes, married another woman for her money and was living it up until he got caught, I’d still be confused as to how he could be so cold blooded. But he wasn’t a crook. He was a cheat. It’s not the passionate man you need to be afraid of. The angry one. The wily one. It’s the empty one. Be afraid of the empty one.
You’ve probably heard by now about that church shooting in Knoxville, Tennessee. You may have even heard that the church, a Unitarian congregation, has just put up a sign outside affirming of gay people. The reflex, and I understand this perfectly as it was my first one too, is to connect the dots. But it’s not so simple at this point…
The man accused of a mass church shooting this morning was described by his Powell neighbors as a helpful and kind man, but one who had issues with Christianity.
Jim D. Adkisson, 58, has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, which killed one and injured eight others.
He is being held on $1 million bond.
"He had his own sense of belief about religion, that’s the impression I got of him," said neighbor Karen Massey. "We were talking one day when my daughter graduated from Bible college, and I told him I was a Christian, then he almost turned angry.
"He seemed to get angry at that."
According to Massey, Adkisson talked frequently about his parents who "made him go to church all his life … he was forced to do that."
Another story out there says the cops found a letter in Adkisson’s car…a "manifesto" according to the story. The police are being tight lipped at the moment about what was in it.
So. At this point all I know is that a man walked into a church full of people and started shooting. He killed one person who confronted him at the door instantly with a shotgun blast. He killed one more before he was tackled by other church members. The usher who was killed first is being called a hero for acting as a human shield to protect the children’s choir that was singing when Adkisson walked in.
A man walks into church and starts shooting. Maybe it was the sign affirming gay people. Maybe he had a grudge against Christianity and that church was just a random target. Maybe it was something else entirely. Hate has its own reasons.
[Update…]
The Knoxville police chief says Adkisson targeted the church because of its "liberal views". The letter in his car apparently shows he was frustrated at being out of work, and that he had a hatred of "the liberal movement". I just saw this in an AP article which I’m not linking to because of the blogger AP boycott. But probably this will be showing up in other news outlets later.
Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter in a cellar dungeon for 24 years, has asked permission to leave his prison cell after admitting he can no longer stand being cooped up.
Fritzl, 73, kept daughter Elisabeth locked in a windowless cellar in Amstetten, Austria, and fathered her seven children before being caught by police. Three of the children had never seen daylight before being released.
Now, after just two months of incarceration and despite his fear of being attacked by fellow prisoners, he has demanded his right to 30 minutes exercise every day.
Fritzl has now twice had half-hour walks, protected from other inmates by a close guard of prison officers.
Prison spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Erich Huber-Guensthofer said: "Mr Fritzl is accommodated in a cell for two and recently he has made use of his right to go outside for half an hour per day.
"He usually sits there watching television all day, especially news programmes about him," said one prison source. "He’s terrified that someone will attack him or try to kill him."
Der Spiegel has an article today on the murder of 16 year old Morsal Obeidi, an Afghan girl living in Germany, who had to die when she came to believe that her life belonged to her, not to the males in her family. You hear a lot lately about honor killings among Muslims as though misogyny was exclusively a Muslim problem. It isn’t, as even a cursory glance at the rates of domestic violence here in the United States will tell you. The problem isn’t religion. It’s the bitterness of runts.
When all you have to be proud of is what you physically are, because you never bothered or saw no need to make anything more of yourself then that, the inner void that would have held everything you might have become is filled with resentment instead. White. Straight. Male. Whatever. The one who rises above themselves kills you, by leaving you behind, by leaving you all alone with only that emptiness inside of you where a person could have been.
In this new world, the proud men are the first to become losers. They lose their way of life, because in their world their only claim to authority is the fact that they are men and that, as men, they can resort to their one advantage over women, brute strength. They cling to old concepts like honor, because honor is something that even a loser can invoke.
I should start a running Every Boy Needs A Good Father series a’la Dan Savage’s Every Child Deserves A Mother And A Father posts… The Ex-Gay theorists will tell you that every boy needs a strong masculine father figure in his life to prevent his turning out queer. Good men of strong will and aggressive manly masculine temperament like…well…this guy here…
Austrian Found Guilty of Attempted Murder with Poisoned Praline
An Austrian innkeeper has been sentenced to 20 years prison for attempting to murder his local mayor with a chocolate candy laced with poison.
Helmut O. attached the chocolate, which contained a deadly dose of strychine, to his victim’s car’s windshield wipers alongside a card that read: "You are someone very special to me." When the victim Hannes Hirtzberger, the mayor of the north Austrian town of Spitz, ate the cherry brandy praline the next day, he suddenly became ill and suffered a heart attack.
During the trial, prosecutor Friedrich Kutschera said the motive for the attempted murder had been delays in a planning application that the defendant had submitted. Helmut O. wanted his inn and its attached vineyard to be reclassified to allow construction on the site, so he could sell it or use it for a hotel project, Austrian newspaper Kurier reports on Wednesday.
Those wacky Austrians…what are you going to do with them, eh? But seriously…what’s a man to do when effete nanny state bureaucracy gets in his way? Kill the bastards! There’s a real man for you. And what else does a real man do? Why…try to implicate his sons in the crime of course…
Throughout the proceedings Helmut O. had maintained he was innocent of the allegations. Yet, DNA evidence massively incriminated him, German news agency DPA reports Wednesday. The defendant’s genetic fingerprint was found on the inside of the deadly chocolate’s wrapper, the court had heard.
And the case against him became more convincing after his sons testified that their father had asked them to spit into a marmelade jar after police had requested DNA samples from potential suspects in the area during their investigations.
It probably never occurred to the nitwit that his sons would have the DNA signatures of both him and his wife which would make theirs clearly and obviously distinct from his, and yet would still lead police right to him once they looked at it. Oh…it’s this one’s father… But real men don’t think twice.
On her way to buy some orange juice, 26-year-old Pamela Brown, who started living as a woman three years ago, said she was viciously attacked because she is transgendered.
"I saw five guys blocking the storeway. They called me a [expletive deleted] and then I was hit. Then I was attacked by two more guys from the back and my fiance ran over," she said. "I probably could have been killed if I was by myself."
Brown is now recovering while in protective police custody.
Meanwhile, two young men have been arrested near the Old Town Mall in Baltimore where the beating occurred.
Police commented on the attack last week.
"More than likely it will be upgraded to a hate crime, simply because of the things that were being said," said Troy Harris, Baltimore City Police spokesperson.
But now the city state’s attorney’s office is not pursuing hate crime charges. Why?
A spokesperson says while there was provocative language, it is free speech and there’s no evidence of premeditation.
Dig it. If you’re gay or transgendered here in Baltimore, and someone walks up and beats the crap out of you while calling you a fucking faggot, that’s not a hate crime here in Baltimore, because the fact that they used sexual slurs while they were beating the crap out of you isn’t evidence of either hate or premeditation, merely one citizen’s opinion of another.
This actually isn’t the only kind of crime Baltimore city chronically under reports. And Baltimore probably isn’t alone in that regard either. But check out the link I have on the right to the Baltimore Crime blog every now and then to see just how infrequently the violent criminals around here actually get the attention they need. Between our police department, which as been known to threaten victims for reporting crimes, and Patricia Jessamy, our pathetic state’s attorney who drops charges more frequently then a blizzard drops snowflakes, a lot of stuff around just gets swept under the rug, or dropped somewhere they hope nobody will notice. Which is all to say that it isn’t necessarily prejudice that’s motivating Patricia to under report hate crimes against sexual minorities here in Baltimore. More likely then not it’s just standard operating procedure.
But now some of Baltimore’s black ministers are gearing up to wage Kultur Krieg on Maryland’s gay community over same sex marriage…so expect Patricia to be classifying more violent crimes against gay and transgendered people as freedom of speech in the coming months. Hopefully my family and friends won’t be seeing my name in that roll call.
Last night, some thieves stole the car parked Right Behind my new Mercedes. They apparently left behind another car they’d stolen previously. They took my neighbor Joe’s Dodge mini van. Joe is an elderly WWII vet and he has some trouble walking. The thieves left behind the walker he’d left in the back seat.
I woke up this morning, and looking out my front office window noticed Joe’s van was gone and assumed he’d gone to church early. Then I saw the walker laying in the grass and thought he’d accidentally left it behind. Later, I saw the police talking to my neighbor across the street and went out to ask what was going on and that’s when I found out Joe’s van had been stolen. It had happened right in front of my house. While I slept.
I’m assuming the Mercedes wasn’t disturbed because its built-in anti-theft devices still haven’t been cracked by the street, and the thieves didn’t want the alarm going off. Also, the evidence seems to indicate that these were joy riders, since they left behind another vehicle they’d previously stolen. I’m sure they’d have loved to have gotten their hands on my car. So on the one hand I’m a bit reassured that my car is deterring thieves, at least for now. But on the other hand our neighborhood seems to be a target lately.
It really burns me that Joe lost his car…and they had to know they were stealing it from someone who had trouble getting around since they took the time to take the walker out of the van. But I’m sure the thieves wouldn’t have even paused to know they were stealing from someone who put his life on the line for their freedom to be asswipes.
I’ve been considering putting up outdoor security cameras ever since we had that last bout of car thefts in the neighborhood a couple months ago. I’m going to do it now. Three hidden cameras out front…one looking directly in front of the house, one looking upstreet and one looking downstreet, and a DVR recording it all for posterity. Hopefully then when something’s stolen we’ll have their faces on record. I’ll start making inquiries this week. I’ll need someone to run a conduit for the cabling to the outside, and I suppose while I’m at that I should get an electrician to put in those outdoor outlets out front that I’ve been wanting ever since I bought the house.
The other thing I may do is go ahead and buy one of these, or one of these. If Joe gets another car to replace the one that was stolen, I’ll ask him if he wants one of those too.
[Update…] My brother in California says if I’m going to get a wheel boot, I should get one that covers the lug nuts. Apparently some thieves will just bring along a spare tire and just unbolt the one with the boot on it if the boot doesn’t cover the lug nuts. But then…I have locking bolts (on the Mercedes they’re bolts, not nuts) and maybe that’ll deter that.
You’d think that the managers of a gay bar would understand that the climate of violence toward gay people can make their establishments seem to gay bashers, as a waterhole to a leopard…somewhere they know their prey will be. You’d think that they’d keep the safety of their customers (you know…the folks who pay their bills) in mind. You’d think that, at minimum, when a gay man is bashed right at their doorstep, that they’d give the man shelter inside and not have their bouncers throw him back out to the wolves. You’d think…
Two guys stood in front of us hugging. The usual New York traffic passed without dismay until the white Mercedes C-class appeared. The tall bald guy leaned out of the window yelling and screaming obscenities that no one would be proud of—the usual clichés spit towards gay men. It seemed like an incident that could easily be brushed off until he got out of the car. He came toward us, still yelling. He was angry, as if we had personally offended his entire being.
All I saw was a tall muscular man coming toward my friend and these other unsuspecting guys in the path of what seemed to be a disaster. He continued to yell, the couple broke their hug.
My instinct told me that I was the most beefy of all of the guys standing in the breezeway—a silly notion seeming I only stand 5 foot 6. He came within inches. I tried to ward him off by telling him that no one is trying to mess with him. I pleaded for him just to go away. He spit in my face and I knew that I was no match for him. I immediately ran toward the bouncers of the gay club. I got behind the huge door man. The guy was quickly in pursuit behind me, fired up. Out of nowhere a punch landed on the right side of my face. It was the basher’s friend from the passenger seat. I swung, at which point the basher kicked me in the stomach. The bouncers quickly yelled at me to get in the club.
I tried to keep my composure, but ended up in the bathroom stall, crying, ashamed that I wasn’t able to protect myself, my friend or my fellow gay brothers. And then the worst happened…
To my dismay, one of the bouncers found me and told me I had to leave. Leave, I said. I’ve been gay bashed by a stranger. I was protecting my friends and in turn was socked and kicked in the stomach. He stayed firm to his orders. As I walked up the stairs of Splash Bar NYC, I saw one of the managers. I pleaded with him not to kick me out because I was afraid the guy and his friend were still out there. His response: "I don’t know anything about that!"
Before I knew it I was outside and I started to tremble at the sight of a white Mercedes parked down the street. And then a hand grabbed my back and pushed me toward a cab. "Get in, I’m taking you home," my friend said. I hurried inside trying not to cry before the driver pulled off.
As I write this I don’t know what hurts worse: My stomach or my eye or the fact that a gay bar kicked me out and refused to help me. I’ve spent the past five years trying to empower gay men, hoping with all my heart that we can one day roam the streets without being afraid, and here I sit at my computer, hurting physically and psychologically. If we can’t protect ourselves who will? In five years I’ve managed to post nothing but positive comments about any establishment or gay product. During this time my mindset was that there is enough negativity out there for me not to join in and down other gays. Yet I sit here wondering why I even bother when a gay bar (albeit a tragic one called Splash Bar NYC) threw me out to the wolves.
Dig it. A gay basher vomits a string of obscenities at a couple he sees hugging…a thing opposite sex couples do in public every fucking day…and when doing that doesn’t fulfill him enough he and his passenger jump out of their car and one of them proceed to beat the crap out of the a gay guy who tried to protect the couple from being attacked. The gay guy takes refuge in the Splash Bar, only to be almost immediately thrown out back out the door. Luckily for him the attackers were gone by then.
The Splash Bar website has an "Under Construction" page up. No word yet on whether or not their conscience is still under construction too, or when it might be completed. But they have a MySpace profile Here. This reminds me of the contemptible indifference the bathouses gave to the safety of their customers during the initial AIDS outbreak in the early 1980s. But more then that, the history of the institution of the gay bar is more one of preying on the gay community, rather then catering to it, and that’s something we all need to keep in mind as we choose which businesses to patronize, where to spend our hard earned 23 percent less income then the average heterosexual makes.
Back before Stonewall, before the modern gay rights movement, most gay bars were run by organized crime gangs who payed off the local police in order to stay open and serve alcohol in a day when most states and cities had laws forbidding bars from serving known homosexuals. Back when any same sex dancing on the premises could get a bar closed down and it’s patrons arrested, the only gay watering holes that could stay open for very long were the ones run by mobsters who knew which hands to grease and when. Those bars basically treated their gay customers like dogshit, because they knew there were no other places where we could gather, other then back alleys. They served watered down bathtub booze and charged premium prices for it. The bars were pest holes, but they were all we had, and their owners couldn’t have cared less about the people who spent their money there. They didn’t have to. We had nowhere else to go.
Times have changed. I’m sure many gay establishments now are operated by people who feel a close connection to the community, and want us all to prosper and have the good life and enjoy ourselves together. Chasing the Almighty Dollar doesn’t necessarily mean treating your customers like rubes. In fact, that’s always a short sighted path to nowhere. Just ask Detroit. We have come a long way from the days of the seedy mob run bar. But it’s worth remembering that the people who serve us drinks, don’t necessarily give a rat’s ass about us, about our safety, about our basic human dignity. Some of them just want our money. If they could pluck dollar bills off our cold dead gay bashed bodies they would, and spend it the next day on their own cheap thrills without a twinge of remorse or care. You don’t throw someone who’s just been gay bashed back out the door to face his attackers again if you have a single solitary shred of conscience in you. However, if you’re afraid that giving refuge to a gay bashing victim inside your establishment might spoil the atmosphere you’ve so carefully worked to create, and maybe make people spend less money, or even worse, go somewhere else where they might feel safer, then out the door he goes like yesterday’s trash, and your conscience before it.
[Update…] From the comments to Ramone’s blog post…
I am so sorry about the bashing aspect of your story, but the only thing that I wanted to add is that SBNY has a tendency to REMOVE any drama from the bar at first glance. They did it to my partner who slipped on the steps and cut his had on a glass. The wrapped his hand up and told us to get in a cab. In retrospect – they never gave us an apology nor and sympathy or compassion, they just wanted us out. SBNY is lacking compassion and the days where is used to be a good ole neighborhood bar are gone. Now they just want gay dollars for shitty small watered down drinks, and they have no sense of community.
Are You Seriously Asking What’s Wrong With Torturing Dogs…???
I haven’t been following the Michael Vick dog fighting story all that much, partly because it’s one of those miserable stories that I just don’t want to get very emotionally involved in. There are tons of those going across my news ticker every day and after I’ve read the latest from President Dispshit’s Excellent Iraq Adventure, and More Anti-Gay Crap From The Haters, I’ve usually had enough news for one day. And partly, it’s because I’ve become inured to news articles about pro athletes behaving badly. I should be willing to summon up more outrage but I can’t. The standards of conduct in professional sports have been going into the gutter for decades now.
Arianna’s ‘progressive’ celebrity pals have recently posted a slew of editorials defending the electrocution, hanging, gang rape, drowning, starvation, and systematic torture of dogs. Their reasoning? Well, through the lens of their sophistical primitivism, they seem to think it’s just plain irrational to feel anything for ‘lesser mammals’. Some have even gone so far to suggest that Vick’s crimes are some sort of appropriate karmic balance to the silliness of people putting sweaters on their dogs.
If you’re like me, you probably find it hard to believe that these views are being seriously considered among our ‘allies’ in the so-called ‘Progressive Blogosphere’, but check it out for yourself:
Huh? Is Lawrence O’ Donnell seriously asking what’s wrong with what Michael Vick did? Because if he is I hope the rest of his family is keeping an eye on him. My understanding is that torturing animals is a Really Bad Sign that there’s something deeply, profoundly, sociopathically wrong inside a person’s head. It’s something you really need to pay attention to.
I acknowledge the vegan’s retort that if you’re willing to kill animals and eat them you might as well be willing to torture them too. I don’t find those things to be on the same psychological plane. If I’m cruel to animals because I eat meat, then it’s a cruel world that can have my body back after I’m dead to nourish itself. That’s in my will. But I don’t think our flesh and blood life is essentially cruel. It just Is.
I won’t argue that modern factory farming isn’t an abomination, let alone cruel. I won’t argue that a lot of people who call themselves sportsmen just enjoy killing something for the sake of killing it, without a moment’s pause to reflect on how they’re just as much a part of the circle of life on earth as their food. A human who is thoughtlessly cruel to animals has no brakes and needs to learn a thing or two about sympathy. But a human who makes a sport out of watching animals suffer, whether they actually die or not, is dangerous. If O’Donnell can’t figure out what the fuss is over electrocuting, hanging, drowning, starving, and sexually abusing small animals and calling that a sport, I recommend he give the matter some quality thought time, before he turns his back on the wrong person.
Oh…and before he looses his own conscience. Over at KOS, Stroszek makes clear what the problem here is…
So yes, O’Donnell is right in his point that there is no ‘natural law’ that protects dogs, just as much as there is no natural law that protects humans. What drives people to react with disgust and horror at any immoral act is simply COMPASSION, which, sadly, seems to be more exception than ‘law’ in a society that, in just a few short years, has produced Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Prison, "Shock & Awe", and yes, Michael Vick.
We’re swimming in a cesspool of Might Makes Right here, and you need to understand that there’s no bottom to it. We need to take a longer, closer look at where all the excuses our culture makes now for the prerogative of power are leading us. The Greed Is Good, Power Is It’s Own Reason credo of the last couple decades has made us indifferent to cruelty. It’s just part of the background noise in George Bush’s America. We start viewing sadism as a normal part of our environment too, and I don’t think there is a road back from there.
…we move on to the condescending protection of "minorities" in the form of superfluous hate crimes legislation. The latest attempt has been named the Matthew Shepard Act, in honor of a Wyoming meth addict killed in a drug deal gone bad. The fact that he happened to be gay apparently entitled him to more protection than your average straight meth addict.
Thank you, ABC News, and especially you Elizabeth Vargas, for giving gay haters everywhere a way to pistol whip that poor kid’s memory forever, if not his actual body like they’d like to.
Almost immediately after the bill passed the House, president Nice Job Brownie threatened to veto it, saying that the laws "already on the books" were sufficient. One of the most pernicious memes the religious right is putting out there regarding hate crime laws is that they’re unnecessary, because the violent crimes committed against gay people are already illegal.
It’s one of those pat little bits of dishonest rhetoric by which they poison the national discourse. Yes, killing someone is already illegal. But motive has always been a part of how killings are prosecuted. It is more then simply determining the kind of punishment that fits the crime. You have to know what crime was actually committed, before you can know the punishment that fits it. Was the killing accidental? Was it accidental but reckless? Was it reckless in a depraved and indifferent way? Was it intentional? Was it committed in a heat of passion, or in a cold, calculating and deliberate way? This process of evaluating a criminal’s motive, and differentiating between them as to the charges and punishments applied works the same for just about every serious crime that comes before a court of law. When the religious right argues that hate crime laws are thought crime laws, they are in effect arguing that four-fifths of the laws on the books today are also thought crime laws.
That’s not what they mean of course. What they mean is that crimes committed against gay people should not be treated as what they are, but as something they are not. Murder is murder is murder, they say. But it isn’t. Otherwise, why have so many different laws for it? And where you really see the effects of hate crimes on the gay community, isn’t in the murders, but in the far more common, and often devastating to the survivors, assaults, beatings, gay bashings.
Gabi Clayton called me on Wednesday to tell me that she had some very good news. She sent me the link to lennonpiano.com and said that they had contacted her to participate in an even to happen this next Tuesday at her house May 8, the anniversary of the death of her son, Bill.
Longtime readers of my diary know that I met Gabi at least 10 years ago over the net after having seen a picture of Bill. I also wrote and recorded a song — "Will It Always Be Like This" — about her and the whole incident.
The story of Bill Clayton is just heartbreaking…
Bill came out to us as bisexual when he was 14. He was afraid to tell us, because he knew that other kids had told their parents and that their parents had disowned them or reacted in other ways that were frightening. He had read the book I had loaned him "Changing Bodies, Changing Lives," and there were coming out stories in the book. Finally he worked up the courage to tell us and we assured him that we loved him and accepted him. He was so happy that he wanted to tell the whole world. We recommended a support group out at the college which I had just graduated from. Bill went to that group three times and stopped – he said he really liked it but that he was fine and didn’t need to go any more.
An older man had sexually assaulted him after one of the support group meetings. Bill struggled afterwards with the trauma, and with suicidal throughts…
Bill finally told Sam, his best friend. He told Sam that the memories of that sexual assault were overwhelming him and that he was suicidal. He asked Sam not to tell anyone, but Sam put the friendship on the line and told me, because he didn’t want to lose his friend. Bill was relieved once we knew, and we reported it to the police and got Bill started with a therapist.
It took the police a long time to find the man. When they finally questioned him he confessed to exactly what Bill had said. Then he got a lawyer, plead not guilty at his arraignment, and managed to avoid jail and court until a month after Bill died. (He finally went to prison for 13 months.) So, Bill would see him around town — which aggravated the post-traumatic stress he was in counseling for. There were times when Bill would suddenly take a nose dive into severe depression for no apparent reason. Later we would find out that it was because he had seen this man on the bus or at the movies. Bill was so depressed and suicidal at one point that he spent some time in the hospital.
He stayed in counseling, and finally was getting back to being his old, impish self again. His mental health improved tremendously. He had a summer job doing computer and office stuff, and he loved it. He started looking forward to school again (after two rough years), and he felt like he had a future. Yes, he was back! He and his counselor agreed that he was done with therapy, and she closed his case with Crime Victims Compensation — on April 5th, 1995.
And then it all came apart…
On April 6, 1995, Sam and his girlfriend, Jenny, were walking with Bill near their high school to Jenny’s house to watch a video they had rented. Four guys — one of whom knew Bill and Sam because he was in the same high school (and had gone to their middle school before that) — followed them in a car and yelled things I will not repeat related to sexual orientation. Bill and his friends ignored them and decided to walk through the high school campus, thinking it would be safer because the gate was closed. The four guys drove off, but they parked the car nearby, because the next thing Bill and his friends knew, they came up on foot and surrounded them. They said "You wanna fight?" Bill, Sam and Jenny tried to walk away — they didn’t want to fight at all.
The four then brutally assaulted Bill and Sam, kicking and beating them both into unconsciousness while Jenny screamed at them to stop. It was broad daylight during Spring break.
When they regained consciousness a minute after the attackers left; Bill, Sam and Jenny ran to the school custodian’s office and called the police and then their families. They were taken to the emergency room where we met them. Bill had abrasions and bruises. They thought he might have kidney damage, but he didn’t. Sam was a mess too, with a broken nose and many bruises.
While we were in the emergency room, one of the guys who did the assault came casually walking through with two other friends, to visit a friend who had just had a baby. Sam saw him and Sam’s parents called the police. When they found him he confessed and told the police who the other guys were – they were all under 18 years old. The police treated it as a hate crime from the very beginning.
It did its work…
We thought he was going to make it – he seemed to handle things really well until after the rally, and then he crashed back into depression. He was suicidal again – it was too much. The assault sent him right back into the place he had fought so hard to get out of. He suddenly became depressed and suicidal, and we had to put him in the hospital again. While he was in the hospital he heard that a friend of his was gay-bashed at school in a nearby town.
After about 10 days he came home. We and his doctors in the hospital thought he had gotten past being suicidal. But Bill took a massive overdose on May 8th. Alec found him unconscious on the kitchen floor and had him rushed to the hospital, but they couldn’t save him.
And the attackers? Well the police may have treated it as a hate crime from the beginning, but the courts sure didn’t…
The boys who assaulted Bill and Sam were finally sentenced to 20-30 days in juvenile detention followed by probation and community service and 4 hours of diversity training focusing on sexual orientation.
Hate crimes really are different in kind, from other crimes, just as manslaughter is different from murder one is different from terrorism. That much is obvious from the overkill police often see in them. But the religious right doesn’t want people to see it that way. Partly, it’s because they don’t see it that way themselves. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… In their eyes, gay people aren’t even human. We don’t feel pain like real humans do. We are sick, depraved, lower then animals. Attacks on us simply do not do the kind of profound damage they otherwise do to real humans. If anything, the gay haters think that crimes against us should be treated Less seriously then crimes committed against real people…as something tacky and graceless, that polite upright god fearing men don’t do, at least not in public anyway, but not rising to the level of an actual crime against a Person. More like kicking a dog. These are homosexuals after all.
But gay bashings are more like rape then like common assaults. For the victim, a gay bashing strikes a knife into the heart of their most intimate sense of sexuality and self. And that is the intent. And they are a kind of domestic terrorism. It is that last quality that makes them particularly useful to the religious right, and why they emphatically don’t want the nation to become serious about combating anti-gay hate. A fearful homosexual, is a good homosexual. Fearful homosexuals stay in the closet. They don’t agitate for equal rights. They don’t live openly. They don’t hold their lover’s hand in public. They are not proud.
This is what the fight against hate crime law is about. This is why the gay haters are taking such a scorched earth attitude toward the Matthew Shepard Act. When a gay person is murdered, the religious right can point to the seriousness of the crime and argue that a hate crime enhancement is meaningless. When the killer is brought to justice they can say that the law already prosecutes murder, what is the point of adding a hate crime charge too? But most gay bashings do not result in death, most are random and sudden attacks such as the one that left a same sex couple beaten and bloody on the streets of Scottsdale Arizona last year, when they’d dared to hold hands in public …
Scottsdale police are investigating an alleged hate crime reported by a gay couple who said they were jumped by as many as seven men outside a Scottsdale restaurant near McDowell and Scottsdale roads.
As they held hands and began to leave Frasher’s Steakhouse late Sunday, Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost said they were humiliated and beaten in the restaurant’s entryway.
Frost, 19, was taken to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, where he was treated and released. Frost received several staples to treat a wound on his scalp, and several stitches to seal other wounds to his face.
Rolland, 28, suffered minor injuries.
The men, who had been dating for a couple of weeks, are seeking to press charges against their attackers – none of whom have been arrested as of Monday afternoon, according to Scottsdale police.
"My only hope is that they’re going to brag about it and tell their friends how tough they were," said Rolland, a native of France who lives part-time in Scottsdale.
"How tough is it to use seven guys to take on two guys, including one 19-year-old who weighs 120 pounds?" he asked.
Frost, a Scottsdale resident who graduated from Mesa Westwood High, said the attack was the second he endured in the past three years. When he was 16, he said, he was attacked by two teens and an adult in Mesa. One used an aluminum baseball bat.
The Sunday night incident was upsetting, he said, because no one from the restaurant said they saw anything, though the attack happened only a few feet from the front door.
Of course no one saw anything. And George Bush and James Dobson would like it very much if this nation keeps right on not seeing anything. Except this:
Imagine. Imagine a world, where there was no hate…
It’s like fussing with a wound that hasn’t even begun to heal, but humans are like that. One of the hardest things to teach a kid is to leave it alone when it starts hurting again…
So the killer sent a package to at least one of the big TV networks. I’m actually surprised he didn’t post it all on YouTube or MySpace, but he may have thought that would have given him up too soon. I’ve only seen a few very brief clips so far, but one thing that that leapt out at me was how completely deranged he seemed. I’ve seen anger, I’ve seen fanatical hate, I’ve seen bitterness. I’ve had a gun pointed right at my head, saw killing rage in the face behind the iron sights, heard it in his voice (it was a road rage incident…obviously he didn’t actually shoot me…). I can half close my eyes and still see and hear it. It seems bizarre to think of it as sane, and yet I realize now it was sane, completely sane, compared to what I saw as Cho Seung-Hui vented for a few minutes about rich people and trust funds and debauchery.
I keep hearing the word "disturbed" here. Let me say it: he was crazy. It’s not just our rational mind, but all the evolutionary baggage our brains have accumulated over the eons that make us human. I’ve seen human rage. I’ve seen human hate. What I saw in that brief excerpt NBC showed us was chillingly grotesque…like a face blasted apart and sewn back together by something that had never seen a human face before and didn’t know quite where to put things. There were pieces missing from him inside…deeper more ancient things then those higher emotions of compassion and empathy. Things from the bedrock of our mammal souls. Maybe older still. And what was there wasn’t enough to make any sense when it came to making a person out of it. I’ve no idea if his personality had decayed that much before he sat down to make that video. But if it was anything near I can see why he was scaring the hell out of people long before he did what he did. The face chills you, not because of it’s anger and rage, but because it is missing something, some subtle thing you can’t quite put your finger on, but which leaps out at you for its not being there.
I don’t think they’re going to find the why of this in anything in his history or his environment. A trigger, perhaps. Perhaps not. This is a clinical case. He was crazy. I strongly doubt now that it has anything to do with anything that might have been said or done to him. In addition to the video he left a paper manifesto, with photos and writing. One glimpse of a page of densely packed text, no paragraph breaks, just one long string of words for line after line filling the entire page, was enough. I’m no professional but I’ve seen that before in case study after case study, and in the graphic art of the mad, which I have studied with interest. And…something I saw first hand…
I once worked for a private psychiatric hospital. I was a stock clerk. My job was to keep the office supplies and custom printed forms flowing to the various units, most of which only dealt with mildly disturbed folks. But one, the Intensive Care Unit, had double doors you had to be buzzed through. I made my deliveries there only just to the inside door, where one of the staff would take my things and hand me a list for the following week. One day while I was doing that, I saw a young girl who had just been brought to them. She was laying on her back on a sofa in a room just next to the door and I could see her clearly. She couldn’t have been more then 20. Young, strikingly beautiful. Her face was set in a serene, peaceful, fixed stare at the ceiling. Her elbows were at her sides, forearms up, her hands and fingers extended, the palms facing the ceiling almost as if she was pushing it away. She was talking in a low, utterly calm monotonal drone. Something like this…
remembering sank shadows echoed in water reflected gained in light realized remembered effort grounded in reputation in secure secure remember programmed joy of momentum needs energy remember the well placed expansive classrooms bringing forth eyes to ponder glass light thrown up into sky remember remember remember reframe embrace renew fever strives to purge soul light and sky remember imbalance pursuing sickness and wonder together in wonder wonder wonder wonder aware awareness gave transcendent sight casts forth water fire cast cast cast cast cast
Like that. I’ll never forget it. I wanted to quit my job then and there because I wasn’t sure I could deal with seeing and having to know because I was seeing it, how tenuous the grip the human identity really has inside of us. What is a soul?
You hear it called the ravings of lunatics, but until you’ve actually witnessed it you might assume that’s something like a politican or a fundamentalist preacher babbling on and on about something that nobody but them actually cares about. But no…it’s more like a brain just dumping its contents onto the table like it’s barfing. That’s what I saw in that video, and even more, in the page of his manafesto. It was a brain dump.
Cho Seung-Hui, I believe now, was crazy. Not crazy angry. Not crazy with hate or crazy with rage against…whoever. Just crazy. In the literal sense. We throw that word around so much that it’s practically become meaningless I suppose. But there it is. The Abyss. The unraveling of the human identity inside of a person. That’s not excusing or trivializing what he did to 32 school kids who still had their lives ahead of them, and I’m not trying to dehumanize him. Cho was certainly human. He had that rational mind, was able to think and plan, was able to consider death and what would happen after he was dead. He was calculating and methodical as only a human being can be. But a very sick one. He was mad.
I’m shy. Almost deathly so. Not a recluse. I socialize easily with co-workers and neighbors. But it takes time for me to get comfortable opening up to new people. It’s not that I’m paranoid or distrustful. I’m just…shy. I have friends I regularly go out with. But I live alone. I’m single. And I’m shy. Almost never the first one to speak up and introduce myself. It takes wild horses practically, to get me to go to a bar or club by myself. I need friends I can go with. When I’m with people I know I can let down my hair and have a good time. But in a room full of strangers I just want to run away. This may have something to do with why I’m still single. And live alone. But I am not a loner. I like my quiet time to myself…yes. But I enjoy human company too. Very much so. I’m just…shy.
Swear to god I cringe every time another mass killing happens…and next thing you know the news media is all about how the guy was a loner. And…quiet.
Garance Franke-Ruta, to her credit, has a somewhat novel take on What We Should Learn from the tragedy – namely, that we need to take domestic violence more seriously:
Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society.
Yes. Yes! But Sullivan doesn’t get it…
So while maybe there’s a case to be made for shutting down a campus or a neighborhood in any situation in which a killer is on the loose, it’s hard to see why intimate homicides in particular should be taken as warning signs that a killing spree is about to begin, and easy to see why police investigating a crime of passion would take the risk of random violence less seriously than when, say, there’s a murderous convict on the loose.
But it wasn’t random. There’s a sense you get, merely from the phraseology "crime of passion" that it was a spur of the moment unthinking, instant of madness kind of thing and mostly domestic violence isn’t that at all. It certainly wasn’t in this case. He chained the doors shut so the kids inside couldn’t get out. He brought along two guns and plenty of ammo. It was cold and brutal and calculating.
There are two dark and ugly shadows staring us back in the face after all this, and one of them is domestic violence and the other is the grotesque assumption that anyone who would violently attack their lover probably isn’t a threat to anyone else because…well…it was personal. But that willingness to attack the intimate other is Just the sort of thing you need to be watching out for in people. I keep harping on this quote from the author Mary Renault, but it keeps being a relevant insight into human behavior…
Politics like sex is only a by-product of what the essential person is. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you are the sort of person who won’t behave like that.
There’s almost nothing that shows us what the inner person is like, then how they treat their lover. Yes, just about no one else on earth can hurt you quite as painfully, or as deeply, as the one you love (unless it’s your own parents). Yes the emotional wounds a lover can inflect, particularly during a breakup, can be devastating. Ask me how I know. But that’s because no one else’s feelings matter to you as much. If someone you love isn’t safe around you then who the fuck else can be? Nobody, that’s who.
DUNDALK, Maryland — A dramatic hostage escape from a home near Baltimore, Maryland late Tuesday gave police information they needed to storm the house and safely rescue a remaining hostage. The alleged hostage taker, Joseph Palczynski, was shot dead in the raid, police said.
The standoff had dragged on for four days, and it was the time factor that police credited with ending the siege.
"Patience," said Baltimore County Police Chief Terrence Sheridan. "It was waiting for the opportunity to save three lives" that led to the end of the standoff.
That opportunity came when hostage Lynn Whitehead escaped through a window in the home where she, her boyfriend Andrew McCord and his 12-year-old son Bradley had been held since Friday. McCord then followed Whitehead out the window and both ran to safety.
"We were having a briefing when we were informed she had come out of the window," Sheridan said. He said that Whitehead and McCord told police that Palczynski was sleeping on a living room couch and that the boy was asleep on the kitchen floor.
"At this point, SWAT team officers made what’s known as a tactical entry," Baltimore County Police spokesman Bill Toohey said. "They broke through a window, encountered Mr. Palczynski in the family room and shot him. They then rescued the boy."
"Joseph Palczynski is dead," Toohey said. "He was shot by Baltimore County tactical officers shortly after 11 tonight and died at 11:05 on the scene." None of the police was wounded.
Police rescued the boy, who was found asleep on the kitchen floor. None of the hostages was hurt, Sheridan said.
Palczynski was accused by police of killing four people in the Baltimore area two weeks ago while he allegedly tried to kidnap his former girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, who later escaped.
Whitehead, who is the daughter of Lynn Whitehead, had broken up with Palczynski, recently, police said. The ex-girlfriend escaped from Palczynski at a motel, police said. Family members said she had been beaten with the butt of a rifle and sustained a broken nose, black eye and multiple bruises.
You can read more about Palczynski’s violent history here. He killed the couple his ex was living with, Gloria Jean Shenk and her husband, George Shenk. He killed David M. Meyers who tried to intervene while Palczynski was dragging his ex to his car. He killed Jennifer McDonel and wounded her child during an attempted carjacking because he needed vehicle to run from the cops in. For two weeks he terrorized the Baltimore area. He took some relatives of his ex, including a 12 year old boy, hostage and for four days randomly shoot up the neighborhood they lived in, demanding that police let him talk to his ex (they didn’t, knowing full well that as soon as he got her on the phone he’d start shooting his hostages). A swat team finally brought him down after one of his hostages managed to sneak a tranquilizer into his drink and he fell asleep and the adults were able to get away. Nobody later questioned the hail of bullets he was awakened to, because for certain he would have killed the boy the instant he knew the game was up, had he the slightest shred of a chance.
To assume that nobody else but the ‘Ex’ is in danger from a violent lover is stunningly stupid on its face. If they’re dangerous to their lover, then nobody else around them is safe either.
[Update…] Now we’re hearing that girl he killed first in the dorms wasn’t romantically involved with him at all. So this apparently wasn’t all brought on by a violent lover after all. Cho seems to have simply just been mad. As in…crazy.
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