The Try-Works

Time to change the filter cartridges in the old gas mask, folks.

Terming it a “lack of foresight” on the part of the Democrats, a group of Colorado activists have snagged a half-dozen 2008 Democratic National Convention related Web domain names  — and secured another bundle of sites designed to help protesters organize long before descending en masse on the Mile High City.

Anyone who clicks on DenverDNC.org, or 2008DenverDNC.org, or multiple other related web sites will automatically be rerouted to Recreate68.org, a “Virtual Activists’ Convergence Center” designed for “people who are tired of being sold out by the Democratic Party.”

The group, calling itself Recreate-68 Alliance, shelled out $126 for the domain sites six months ago, anticipating that Denver would be selected for the ‘08 convention, said organizer Glenn Spagnuolo. (See the box below for a complete list of the 15 Web sites.)

“The gamble paid off,” Spagnuolo said. “We didn’t know what they were going to use, so we grabbed as many variations as possible [given the cost restraints].”

. . .

Asked whether the Recreate ’68 will bring a repeat of the rioting and violence that gripped Chicago during the ’68 convention, Spagnuolo said: “That will be up to the Denver Police Department. Any violence would be at the hands of the Denver Police Department.”

And actually, such national conventions now fall under the U.S. Secret Service, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, as the lead agency coordinating National Special Security Events. Spagnuolo says the group plans to meet with police agencies, but will object to any efforts to install protest zones, or protest pens, that have used to segregate protesters from convention-goers.

Both national political conventions in 2004, in Boston and New York City, included a massive police presence, with concrete barriers, barbed wire fencing and what one Boston judge described as “a brutish and potentially unsafe place for citizens who wish to exercise their First Amendment rights.” Spagnuolo was among an estimated 600,000 protesters at the Republican National Convention that year.

“I don’t think the message will come down to crack skulls,” he said of Denver’s ’08 convention. “We’ll try our hardest to negotiate, but we won’t be having protest zones — you can’t cage democracy.”

Keep reading.

If my “violent imagination” makes all of Ethnic Studies an intellectual slum, what’s this make of Denver talk radio?

(And I won’t even get into the Denver Archdiocese.)

Unlike that of, say, Vincent Carroll and the rest of the MSM.

Hell, nice to know he’s reading.

And call me crazy, but I’m betting the reason he didn’t want to dignify the site by printing its name might have more to do with some of his own rag’s dirtier tricks, not to mention good-buddy Senate-candidate Dan Caplis’ proclivity for filing junk lawsuits in hopes of quashing stories he doesn’t like.

And not even knowing what the hell that means, I stay out of the Indianness debate except to note the lack of evidence to prove that Ward Churchill ain’t exactly who he says he is. The history of racist weirdness involved in Euro-Americans defining Indians out of existence is more than I care to delve into. And, it’s something I think white folks ought mind their own business about.

But the AngryIndian has no such restrictions. And, commenting on Grant Crowell’s latest You Tube contributions, he’s dead on.

I find it really humourous that this Crowell fellow determines Ward Churchill’s visible agitation is akin to losing “One’s composure” during a rather racist chat with the press in Hawaii.

I like this clip for one thing, it shows how institutional racism in the United States applies to Aboriginal peoples and communities. In order to be an “authentic” and culturally bonded “American Indian,” one must possess BIA issued “White Card” legally identifying an individual as a “Native” American.

In more honest days, this was known as Eugenics Laws. It is generally only recognised in cases of European Jewry and occassionally in regards to Aparthied-era South Africa. It is never recognised in cases of Indigenous populations and to openly connect such dots one risks being accused of Judeophobia and historical revisionism to the European Semitic ethnocide. A journalist who forced the European mentality to admit to its own brutality to the Armenian genocide was shot to death just yesterday for his daring to assert the naked truth. Only his people mark his passing.

The American blood-quantum tradition informs the socio-political status of two U.S. populations, Aboriginals and Africans. In the case of the latter, the “One Drop Rule” deems a person African if it is determined that at least one ancestor, no matter how far back, was of African identification. No card is required as very few wish to be ethnically associated with the group aside from hardcore Black Power advocates and young non-African males in particular, Euroamerican wannabes.

Keep reading.

Grant Crowell’s got videos up on You Tube.  My favorite’s the four part epic wherein Crowell interviews himself.

Guess the documentary budget must be running a little thin.

As TRM49 reminds, I should probably link to the Westword piece about me, and the blog followup. It ain’t great, but it’s about 60% accurate, which as goes for the Denver media, is just shy of stellar.

I still prefer the “fiercely funny and proudly profane” tag Westword laid on us the first time around, but, hell, I’ll settle for “hold onto your intestines.”

Two more installments in the Churchill Smear are up.

They’re oldies but goodies.  The first being a breakdown of the local media’s fabricated ethnic fraud allegation.  It’s a humdinger, beginning with the propping up a few lunatic long-time Churchill enemies, and ending with the Rocky Mountain News’ passing off a trumped-up genealogy from two anti-Churchill bloggers and a New Jersey Cop.

The second is even better.  Remember KHOW shock-jock Dan Caplis’ defamation suit against Churchill supporter Glenn Spagnoulo?  Ever wonder why it just quietly disappeared?  Yeah, I’ve got a guess or two.

More to come.  Lots more.

Long-time readers will remember I went through a Zizek period that ended in something like hard-core contempt.

That’s a position that hasn’t changed.  For reasons best summed up by Lenin’s Tomb.

Lenin’s Tomb is delighted, quivering and damp in the crevices to have received a leaked draft of a script outline for the next Sacha Baron Cohen film, involving a zany new character: Sizlak. A hyperactive, dishevelled, foul-mouthed academic from Slovenia who delights in pushing to the limits of contrarian absurdity, this satiric fancy is certain to test every one of Baron Cohen’s legendary ‘foreign accent’ and ‘funny face’ skills. Worldwide audiences will be challenged and giggled to bits by the casual racist humour and misogyny.

Cultural ironies abound. In one scene, Sizlak explains to an antiwar demonstration: “What if, you know, the real problem with America is that it is not an empire! Okay, why not, you need an empire, who else is there? But America will precisely not invest itself in a proper colonial adventure because it would have to be a genuine humanitarian operation. No? This is what I call subversive overidentification - you precisely, like The Good Soldier Švejk, follow orders so closely that you end up unmasking the whole enterprise! Have you heard the one about the chocolate laxative?”

This is closely followed by a hilarious skit in which Sizlak tries to book an overnight stay with a gentle family in London - only to discover they’re Muslims. “You know,” he explains breathlessly to the camera as he cowers in the unlit bedroom he has paid for, “this is not what I meant by traversing the fantasy! I did not see their horns, but they were always present in the Running of the Mohammedan - don’t get me wrong, I like them. I like sex too - it’s nice. It is simply that I refuse to engage in the patronising strategies of sophisticated, you know, pseudo-understanding that characterise the official liberal racist response to Muslims. We must, to be properly in solidarity, have exactly a ruthless critique of Islam.” And with that, he flees.

Keep reading.

Looking for the name of the infamous twentieth-century war criminal who said this:

“We’re not inflicting pain on these fuckers. When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers. I believe in killing people who try to hurt you. And I can’t believe we’re being pushed around by these two-bit pricks.”

Mickey Z’s got the answer.

Looks like Shareef Aleem won’t be doing any time for wearing a T-shirt.

Of course he might still be facing years for refusing to submit voluntarily to being gang-tackled by the Denver PD.

But not for wearing a T-shirt.

Because that would be a fucking arbitrary display of power.

And rent Factotum.  Do it now.

Just finished watching it and I haven’t laughed that hard since, well, Barfly.

And since we’re on the subject:

Something For The Touts, The Nuns, The Grocery Clerks, And You — Charles Bukowski

we have everything and we have nothing
and some men do it in churches
and some men do it by tearing butterflies
in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
laying it into butterblondes
with Cadillac souls
Cadillacs and butterflies
nothing and everything,
the face melting down to the last puff
in a cellar in Corpus Christi.
there’s something for the touts, the nuns,
the grocery clerks and you . . .
something at 8 a.m., something in the library
something in the river,
everything and nothing.
in the slaughterhouse it comes running along
the ceiling on a hook, and you swing it –
one
two
three
and then you’ve got it, $200 worth of dead
meat, its bones against your bones
something and nothing.
it’s always early enough to die and
it’s always too late,
and the drill of blood in the basin white
it tells you nothing at all
and the gravediggers playing poker over
5 a.m. coffee, waiting for the grass
to dismiss the frost . . .
they tell you nothing at all.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anybody seen Play Misty for Me?

Grant Crowell, a little miffed at my characterization of his bizarre emails, followed up with a bizarre phone call to my home last night to let me know that he’d be seeing me after class one of these days. Followed by another bizarre email.

Benji.

Now that I called you up at your residence and know what you sound like, I just wanted to clarify something from your blog post. You didn’t out yourself. I outed you. Here’s your further outing:

[My home address here.]

Also, I didn’t demand you take part in my documentary. I offered to talk to you over the phone. Show me where I made the offer to be in my documentary. (Also, amazing ability you have to hear “pitch” from an e-mail.)

I see you still haven’t answered the questions I had asked for Ward. Apparently neither he nor you have the answers for it. Yet I answered all of your questions already.

Funny that you list yourself as an Adjunct Professor when you’re just an instructor. Delusions of grandeur apparently.

I hope when I do show up to meet you this semester you can face me like a man. I know you like being anonymous, but time to face up to the real world, kiddo.

G

And, waitaminute, I thought the gentlemen at Pirateballerina decided I was a Lecturer, not an Instructor? (And, no, I still don’t know what the hell the difference is.)

So, thanks to the gentle nudging of a reader, the next installment in the Churchill Smear is up: But What About The Academic Fraud? It’s my level best to put down exactly what I think of CU’s investigation into Ward Churchill’s so-called research misconduct. Yeah, it’s a Frankenstein compilation of old material, but I think it’ll serve us well.

And there’s one great new tidbit in there.

You’ll recall that Ward Churchill specifically requested no members of the CU Law School serve on the Research Misconduct Committee? And that CU not only went ahead and appointed Mimi Wesson, member of the CU law school, to the Committee, but made her Chair?

You’ll probably also recall his reasons for the request. In his words:

Given the pervasive bias of CU administrators, I requested an outside committee and, because of bias exhibited by law school dean Getches as well as law professor cum columnist Paul Campos, I specifically objected to the inclusion of CU law faculty. The committee, however, was composed of three CU insiders, chaired by law professor (and former prosecutor) Mimi Wesson.

Seemed reasonable to me. After all, Paul Campos was probably the most virulently anti-Churchill voice coming out of CU, and was publishing his screeds in the most virulently anti-Churchill print publication in Denver: The Rocky Mountain News. Oh yeah, and reprinting those columns in David Horowitz’s FrontPage Magazine. Oh yeah, and appearing on The O’Reilly Factor to “discuss” Mr. Churchill.

Well it turns out that not only does Ms. Wesson hail from the same Law School as Mr. Campos, she’s also on friendly enough terms with him that she helped prep his last book for publication (search “Wesson”).

And the one before that.

Now, if I’m remembering correctly, didn’t Pirateballerina, KHOW and the Rocky Mountain News run a couple scholars off the Committee for quite a bit less?

Guess we can just sit back and wait for them to pursue Mimi Wesson with similar diligence, right?

I mean, we could if they weren’t hypocrites.

* By the way, it hasn’t entirely escaped my notice that, being an adjunct (or lecturer, or instructor, or what the hell ever they’ve decided on over at Pirateballerina) and thusly ranking somewhere around dung beetle on the academic food chain, attacking CU in this manner might not be the wisest career choice in the world.

But, then, no one’s ever accused me of being too sharp.

Bottoms up.

This one’s for John G. Martin, according to whom no local media paid any attention to William Bradford.

I’m tempted to call him a liar, of course. But I’m also willing to believe he’s just sounding off with no idea what the hell he’s talking about.

Yeah, don’t swallow your cigarette in shock.

Anyway, the Bradford Saga is up on The Churchill Smear page.

* Actually, as I recall, Mr. Martin once claimed to be reading The Professors. Funny how he missed that whole Bradford bit, ain’t it?

Y’know, it being the crux of the book and all.

I’ve fired up a new page you’ll see on the header: The Churchill Smear. In it, I’ll be dumping break-downs of the filthiest tricks played by the local media in their Ward Churchill coverage.

Beginning where we left off: with Grant Crowell’s paying provocateurs to harass Churchill, illegally record his speeches, and provide staged interviews.

As a bonus, dear reader, I’m sharing the following highlights from an email string with Mr. Crowell that took place the night I outed myself. Crowell stayed up all night, it seems, firing off email after email, pleading, whining, cajoling and demanding that I take part in his documentary — each email increasing in pitch until it reached something like the piercing squeal of rabid squirrel.

Nor did it end there. Believe it or not, I opened my email up first thing this morning to find another plea, which steamrolled into three more increasingly shrill missives.

Needless to say, my answer was, and remains, hell no.

But it’s fun reading.

I didn’t pay off any unemployed. Show me an example where I did. And I would be glad to give an unemployed person a job. I’m not greedy for money unlike some fake Indians and fake-named bloggers

You have “interviews” confused with “questions.” I’m very glad to pay people to ask questions that Ward is too scared to do an interview with me to answer. I answer all questions directed to me. Since your idol Ward refuses to do that, I’m glad to have other people who enjoy the opportunity to do so.

Tell you what — how about you answer all of those questions I had presented the way you think they should be answered? Or if you can’t have an opinion without Ward telling you first what it should be, just pretend you’re Ward and lets see if you can answer them. You do that and I’ll keep your identity a secret and you don’t have to worry about all those “death threats” — real or contrived. Otherwise I’ll continue to share the truth and reveal more fake indentities.

For the record, he’s already admitted to paying people. And my anonymous tipster is unemployed. So, and this ain’t rocket science here folks, he was paying the unemployed.

But, hell, what’s a little flat-out lie among friends?

I think you mean, Benjamin.Whitmer@colorado.edu, Adjunct Faculty for CU Ethnic Studies. Nice to see the department does fakery across-the-board. Now lets see who’s “dead to rights.” I think I’ll pay your office a visit now that I know who you are. Sloppy work, hombre.

Now I can start with writing my public response. I think the title will be something like, “Ethnic Studies lackey enjoys spicy-delicious Ward Churchill cocksuck for the holiday blogfest.”

Talk about our own “Primary Colors” series, huh guys? At any respectable university department you’d have a resignation speech out of this guy. Instead for CU Ethnic Stupids, call it par for the course.

Spicy-delicious? It’s a wonder Mr. Crowell didn’t break his own back on a Freudian slip of that size. If you were ever wondering what exactly has inspired Crowell’s obsession with Ward Churchill, I’m thinking you can consider the case closed.

Don’t be so sure of that, Ben. I think even you can admit its not going to help Ward’s cause with how you’ve been acting online. I’m sure its been a thrill for you personally but its going to reflect on your own Ethnic Studies department which we can both agree is already under heavy scrutiny.

I think you really now better consider giving me a phone call this weekend. I know your up thinking about this so you have one hour from now. Whatever you may really think of me, you are definitely not going to fool me to think that bloggers and local media are not going to pick this up like a hot potato. Your posts under your faculty name and your pseudonyms are everywhere from the internet searches I’m doing, and I’m sure there’s a lot more to be uncovered.

Yeah, hot potato, indeed. Two weeks in, and besides a hysterical series of posts and comments on all of, count ‘em, two right-wing blogs, absolutely no one could give a rat’s ass.

Granted, those two blogs have been a gas to watch. Especially lately, as they’ve taken to arguing over whether I’m technically an adjunct, a lecturer or an instructor at CU. Hell, I don’t even know, to be honest, but it sure is nice to see these super-sleuths hard at work, ferreting out the important questions of our day. Next I’m guessing they’ll start a thread on the brand of toilet paper I use.

I’m starting to feel like JonBenet Ramsey, with a couple of John Mark Karrs on my trail.

The lack of interest ain’t something I’m bragging about, by the way. If anything, it’s just evidence of how little effect the Try-Works had. (And a large part of the reason I haven’t been working too awful hard on getting it back up and running.)

Ben, I figured you might try taking down your site, so before I emailed you I had archived your entire blogspot postings under tryworks — dates, names, everything. That’s only going to make it more incriminating for you. You have posts everywhere online, and all of the cached items in the search engines under your many names are being saved. Pulling an Enron won’t help you here.

Put your site back up or we’ll be notifying the press first thing tomorrow morning of what you’re doing.

The press has been notified. A yawn resulted.

Y’know, just like I predicted in the first place.

Which won’t come as a surprise to any of you.  But anyway, when scrubbing the site, I deleted all the links.  I did my damnedest to re-compile my blogroll, but I’m pretty sure I missed out on a couple.  If you’ve been cut off and you want back on, drop me a line and let me know: benjamin.whitmer@gmail.com

Those six of you who pay attention to this site will be wondering why we’ve been down for the last couple of weeks. Those of you who’ve skimmed around the Internet will figure it had something to do with a Try-Works contributor being outed as Benjamin Whitmer. That’s partly true.

When Mr. Grant Crowell, anti-Churchill documentarian, received the sloppy email that outed me, I pulled the Try-Works and emailed those folks involved, asking them how they’d like to proceed. Though I was tagged as a member, I didn’t feel comfortable providing ammunition for those who would continue to pick at other contributors’ postings, looking for identifying marks. Since then, we’ve been considering what to do with the site.

But first, a bit of history.

When the Ward Churchill scandal broke, much of what was said in the Denver news outlets could barely be credited as news at all. The coverage ran from the absurd, like the ridiculous genealogy crafted by two anti-Churchill bloggers and published as fact in the Rocky Mountain News; to the sublime, like right-wing hoax William Bradford being propped up in the local media as the “responsible voice” of Indian country; to the impressively sleazy, like the ongoing speculation that Churchill had been responsible for the demise of his late wife. There was no low to which the local media wouldn’t stoop. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens (and why not?) beneath every gutter lay a whole new sewer.

It was the worst kind of smear campaign, and it had only one intended consequence: to get Churchill canned from CU for his legally protected free speech. And even worse, all attempts at setting the record straight were blocked. Dozens of people, including myself, wrote letters to the papers, but they were ignored. Others tried to provide some kind of context on talk-radio, but they were brayed off the air. Anything considered inconvenient to Professor Churchill’s lynching was simply disappeared.

So I started the Try-Works. And within months had a rotating cast of (at least) seven contributing members. I didn’t know who most of them were. They were recruited through their comments, and we communicated using our pseudonyms. And, though this will break a few hearts, none of us were taking orders, telepathically or otherwise, from Ward Churchill. To be honest, I’ve always been a little offended at the suggestion. I consider myself quite a vulgarian in my own right.

At its height, the Try-Works was a glorious free-for-all, with dozens of posts and comments popping up daily, each funnier and more obscene than the last. I never censored anyone once approved, and I never deleted a comment (though I did ban one troll who would expound in amazingly tiresome detail on his own pet theory that Ward Churchill had killed Jon Benet Ramsey). It seemed to me that if we were going to tout the virtues of free speech, we’d better enact them.

Our point was not only to point out the horseshit at play in the Churchill coverage, but also to give the local media a taste of their medicine. We’d already learned that discoursing reasonably could and would be ignored, so we cranked up the volume as high as it would go, and went to work. We were a satire site. We played rougher’n hell. That, after all, was the only thing that gave us any chance of getting anyone’s attention.  But unlike the MSM, no one considered us objective, nor, as I made amply clear, even sober. The ridiculous innuendo we posted was never accepted as fact, nor was it meant to be.

I don’t have much sympathy for those we went after. The local media makes its bread and butter on the smear campaign, as do the slimy little blogs that wag their tail. It’s what they do. When the Ward Churchill scandal broke, every corny little opportunist in the Rocky Mountain region pinned on a yellow-ribbon lapel pin and piled on, smelling blood and hoping for an easy target. (A decided preference for soft targets being the hallmark of the neo-con ideology, after all.) Contrary to their own back-patting, there was nothing courageous about it. Courage never came by jumping on a lynch-mob, and that’s all this was: a grotesque cavalcade of cheap Lazik-peddling hucksters and greasy political hacks.

As I said, the other members and I have been considering what to do about the Try-Works. Needless to say, I ain’t about to spend the next six months trolling through every post, editing out identifying marks. So, I’m scrubbing everything posted up to now, and starting over. The content won’t change a whole hell of a lot. I’ll still take the local media off at the knees, I’ll still post essays by outlaw intellectuals, I’ll still deride the ditchwater dumbest of the Churchill coverage, and I’ll still post the occasional poem. When time permits, I’ll post a page containing a recap of our greatest hits. Also, unless I’m seriously off mark, there’ll still be a guest appearance or two, as well as the occasional exclusive, fed to me by my wonderful network of anonymous tipsters.

New content won’t be coming nearly as frequently now that I’m running solo, but it will be coming. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll rather miss the old gang, but lately I’ve been feeling a little like a Henny Youngman knock-off with a pocket full of pedophile jokes. It’ll be fun to give you, dear reader, the opportunity to hate me for myself.

Oh, and to all you burning lean tissue into the wee hours of the morn composing hate-mail: do try not to electrocute yourselves slobbering all over your keyboards.

Cheers,
Benjamin Whitmer