The Try-Works

Two more of our greatest hits to The Churchill Smear: (1) Ward Churchill Killed JonBenet Ramsey — including a link to Snapple’s own personal blog for those of you who are the rubbernecking-at-a-car-crash sort — and (2) my crack at defending Ward Churchill’s “Some People Push Back” on literary grounds.

So I’ve been revisiting Twain over the past couple of weeks.  However scholars may dispute Twain’s record on racism vis-à-vis African Americans, there’s no disputing his sentiments towards American Indians.  From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer on, Twain’s Indian was an inherently murderous savage which the world would be better off without — a fairly common representation posed by avid exterminatists.  The logic was simple: Indians, being inherently savage, can’t be educated out of their Indianness, they can only be entirely destroyed. 

Some provided a bit of nuance to the argument, contending that since American Indians can only be degraded by contact with civilization, they might as well be annihilated.  The most infamous example in this vein comes in a South Dakota newspaper directly after the Seventh Cavalry gunned down several hundred Lakota non-combatants at Wounded Knee.  It was penned by no less than beloved The Wonderful Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum.

The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies, inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation for the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are.

It was a sentiment he later followed up with:

Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.

That was a little too subtle for Twain, however.  His Indians weren’t degraded by contact with civilization — their nature was degradation.  Nor could Mark Twain have been unaware of the affect of such propaganda in encouraging open extermination.  He spent a good portion of his career working in California newspapers at the tail-end of a period when those newspapers were openly encouraging — to great success — the citizenry to exterminate California’s indigenous inhabitants in the interests of commerce.  It’s exactly his awareness of the consequences of this kind of rhetoric that makes it so chilling.

Examples?  Well, let’s start with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, wherein begging, thieving, villainous, drunkard Injun’ Joe explains the murder he’s about commit as being prompted by his “Injun’ blood.”

“Yes, and you done more than that,” said Injun Joe, approaching the doctor, who was now standing. “Five years ago you drove me away from your father’s kitchen one night, when I come to ask for something to eat, and you said I warn’t there for any good; and when I swore I’d get even with you if it took a hundred years, your father had me jailed for a vagrant. Did you think I’d forget? The Injun blood ain’t in me for nothing. And now I’ve GOT you, and you got to SETTLE, you know!”

And then, from Roughing It, there’s Mark Twain taking up the mantle of the best of inveterate Indian-hating racists, from Vincent Carroll to Robert Montgomery Bird, cloaking his bigotry in a pretense of setting the record straight against so-called Romanticists — in this case James Fenimore Cooper.  (There’s a whole separate post coming someday about Cooper’s so-called Romanticism.)

On the morning of the sixteenth day out from St. Joseph we arrived at the entrance of Rocky Canyon, two hundred and fifty miles from Salt Lake. It was along in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white men, except the stage stations, that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. I refer to the Goshoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised Digger Indians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our continent; inferior to even the Tierra del Fuegans; inferior to the Hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to the Kytches of Africa. Indeed, I have been obliged to look the bulky volumes of Wood’s Uncivilized Races of Men clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take rank with the Goshoots. I find but one people fairly open to that shameful verdict. It is the Bosjesmans (Bushmen) of South Africa. Such of the Goshoots as we saw, along the road and hanging about the stations, were small, lean, “scrawny” creatures; in complexion a dull black like the ordinary American negro; their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor; a silent, sneaking, treacherous looking race; taking note of everything, covertly, like all the other “Noble Red Men” that we (do not) read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances; indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless, like all other Indians; priceless beggars–for if the beggar instinct were left out of an Indian he would not “go,” any more than a clock without a pendulum; hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline; hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat jackass rabbits, crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and cayotes; savages who, when asked if they have the common Indian belief in a Great Spirit show a something which almost amounts to emotion, thinking whisky is referred to; a thin, scattering race of almost naked black children, these Goshoots are, who produce nothing at all, and have no villages, and no gatherings together into strictly defined tribal communities¬-a people whose only shelter is a rag cast on a bush to keep off a portion of the snow, and yet who inhabit one of the most rocky, wintry, repulsive wastes that our country or any other can exhibit.

. . .

The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of Cooper and a worshiper of the Red Man¬even of the scholarly savages in The Last of the Mohicans, who are fittingly associated with backwoodsmen who divide each sentence into two equal parts: one part critically grammatical, refined and choice of language, and the other part just such an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer, as a Broadway clerk might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett’s works and studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks–I say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshiper, set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been over-estimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy and repulsive-¬and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings-¬but Goshoots, after all. They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine¬-at this distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody’s.

Then there’s the following, in the same vein, from an article entitled “The Noble Red Man,” which first appeared in The Galaxy.  Twain begins by describing the Noble Red Man as he has read of him in books.  He then corrects the misimpression, outright endorsing extermination:

He is little, and scrawny, and black, and dirty; and, judged by even the most charitable of our canons of human excellence, is thoroughly pitiful and contemptible. There is nothing in his eye or his nose that is attractive, and if there is anything in his hair that–however, that is a feature which will not bear too close examination . . . He wears no bracelets on his arms or ankles; his hunting suit is gallantly fringed, but not intentionally; when he does not wear his disgusting rabbit-skin robe, his hunting suit consists wholly of the half of a horse blanket brought over in the Pinta or the Mayflower, and frayed out and fringed by inveterate use. He is not rich enough to possess a belt; he never owned a moccasin or wore a shoe in his life; and truly he is nothing but a poor, filthy, naked scurvy vagabond, whom to exterminate were a charity to the Creator’s worthier insects and reptiles which he oppresses. Still, when contact with the white man has given to the Noble Son of the Forest certain cloudy impressions of civilization, and aspirations after a nobler life, he presently appears in public with one boot on and one shoe–shirtless, and wearing ripped and patched and buttonless pants which he holds up with his left hand–his execrable rabbit-skin robe flowing from his shoulder–an old hoop-skirt on, outside of it–a necklace of battered sardine-boxes and oyster-cans reposing on his bare breast–a venerable flint-lock musket in his right hand–a weather-beaten stove-pipe hat on, canted “gallusly” to starboard, and the lid off and hanging by a thread or two; and when he thus appears, and waits patiently around a saloon till he gets a chance to strike a “swell” attitude before a looking-glass, he is a good, fair, desirable subject for extermination if ever there was one.

There is nothing figurative, or moonshiny, or sentimental about his language. It is very simple and unostentatious, and consists of plain, straightforward lies. His “wisdom” conferred upon an idiot would leave that idiot helpless indeed.

He is ignoble–base and treacherous, and hateful in every way. Not even imminent death can startle him into a spasm of virtue. The ruling trait of all savages is a greedy and consuming selfishness, and in our Noble Red Man it is found in its amplest development. His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts. With him, gratitude is an unknown emotion; and when one does him a kindness, it is safest to keep the face toward him, lest the reward be an arrow in the back. To accept of a favor from him is to assume a debt which you can never repay to his satisfaction, though you bankrupt yourself trying. To give him a dinner when he is starving, is to precipitate the whole hungry tribe upon your hospitality, for he will go straight and fetch them, men, women, children, and dogs, and these they will huddle patiently around your door, or flatten their noses against your window, day after day, gazing beseechingly upon every mouthful you take, and unconsciously swallowing when you swallow! The scum of the earth!

Anyway, all this is fairly standard stuff.  Twain’s main contention is that Indians are inherently prone to a degraded state of near starvation and absolute poverty.  Half of that statement is fairly inarguable — most Indians did indeed live in horrific conditions at the end of the nineteenth-century.  But, contrary to Twain, it wasn’t a result of their inherent proclivity to degradation, it was a result of deliberate US Indian policy.  Even Baum doesn’t miss that point. 

So, why am I so interested in this particular rhetorical tack?  Because, like most good American Indian-hating rhetoric, it gets recycled.

The following from MSNBC:

In a capital where public services barely function and five straight hours of electricity is cause for celebration, Sadr City stands out.

An estimated 2.5 million people, nearly all of them Shiites, live in the northeastern Baghdad community. Many of them lack running water and proper sewerage. Hundreds of thousands have no jobs and subsist on monthly government food rations, a holdover from the international sanctions of the Saddam Hussein era.

Streets in some parts of Sadr City run black with sludge. Damaged power lines provide at best only four hours of electricity a day.

Many U.S. soldiers were unprepared for what they found.

During a patrol last week, American troops brushed flies from their faces as they drove through rotting heaps of refuse and excrement piled outside houses. One soldier opened the door to his Humvee and vomited.

Improving the quality of life of Iraqis - including those in Sadr City - is part of the U.S. strategy, articulated by the new U.S. commander Gen. David Petraeus. Once areas have been rid of insurgents, criminals and death squads, the Americans hope to pump in cash to encourage small businesses and revive the local economy.

The plan is for the Americans and their Iraqi counterparts to remain in the neighborhoods to keep the militants from returning.

But first comes security: Economic improvement will have to wait until the streets are safe.

“This is their lifestyle. This is how they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years. And they’re not going to change overnight,” said Marine Capt. Seth Crawford, who works in Sadr City. “That’s what works for them right now.”

Keep reading.

The trick is the same: Iraqis forced to live in poverty and filth due to specific conditions — i.e., nigh two decades of crippling sanctions, infrastructure bombing, and, of course, invasion and war — are dehistoricized, and presented as inherently savage.  Worse, they’re presented as such by exactly the same people forcing them to live in poverty and filth.

That Mr. Crawford’s statement is horseshit goes without saying.  This is not how Baghdad has been for “hundreds of years.”  Not even for a few decades.  Say what you like about Hussein — and I’m no admirer — he was pretty good at keeping Baghdad’s infrastructure together.  Up to the commencement of our two-decade bombing campaign, Baghdad had hospitals, schools, electricity and water.  They’ve just been obliterated by Mr. Crawford and those like him. 

I’ll grant that there’s no call for extermination in the article.  There’s an implicit demand for occupation and colonization, of course, but not extermination.

But given the nature of our current occupation, one has to wonder what the hell the difference is.

One thing I love about the folks Rocky Mountain News, what they lack in integrity, they more than make up for in disingenuous. You know my favorite example, right? I’ve been harping on it for nigh two years now. And, at the risk of alienating you, dear reader, I’m about to do so again. See, I awoke this morning, pilfered a copy of the Rocky from my neighbor’s doorstep, and couldn’t help but notice this:

Ward Churchill’s claims of Indian ancestry were questioned in an extensive genealogy by the Rocky Mountain News in 2005, which identified 142 direct forebears of Churchill and found no evidence that any of them were American Indians. Now the controversial University of Colorado ethnic studies professor says he has black ancestry as well.

Churchill made that claim while answering questions at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair in San Francisco on March 17. In a video clip available at tinyurl.com/yvlr9b, Churchill criticized as racist the vote this month by the Cherokee Nation to oust freedmen - descendants of slaves once owned by Cherokees - from tribal rolls. After repeating the debunked claims of his Indian ancestry and membership in an established Indian tribe, Churchill said: “Actually, I do have black ancestry.”

Keep reading.

I like that “debunked” by an “extensive genealogy” line. Surely, when a major daily newspaper like the Rocky makes such claims, they must have something fairly substantial to back it up, right? Assumedly, they assembled a panel of professional genealogists? Including an expert or two in American Indian ancestry claims?

Or that’s what you might think if you were dealing with any newspaper save the Rocky. But, since you are dealing with the Rocky, how’s about this: their panel of genealogical experts consisted entirely of two anti-Churchill bloggers and a New Jersey cop?

This from the article introducing their so-called genealogy:

The News’ genealogical research was conducted both in-house and in concert with several outside researchers.

Jim Paine, 51, of Hartsel, who heads several Internet database companies, maintains an anti-Churchill site at www.pirateballerina.com.

He worked with Bill Cullen, 35, a New Jersey police officer who plans to become a professional genealogist.

Jack Ott, 65, of Lakewood, a retired telecom planner, engineer and amateur genealogist, maintains an online Churchill tree at home.comcast.net/~jackott2/ahnentafel1.htm

Keep reading.

Crackerjack work, there, John Temple. Since you’re broadening your pool of experts to include anyone who will agree with you, whether or not they have any fucking idea what they’re talking about, I’ve got some ideas.

Like, Snapple dabbles in forensic science, how’s about asking her for her analysis of the JonBenet case?

And, hey, why stop there? Maybe next week you can commission hot-dog vendor Peter Fotopoulos to diagnose a certain editorial page editor’s chronic racist wasting away disease.

Yeah, look into those eyes, see if you can stand it. Click again. And again. Makes you want lock up your children and install dead-bolts on your doors, doesn’t it? Or hide under your table, hugging your knees and whimpering with the kind of existential dread not usually experienced outside of a CIA-backed torture chamber? Jesus, I look into those eyes, and I feel my soul shift; I’m ready to call in an airstrike on the entire human race.

By the way, Ernesto Vigil also mentioned the Rocky’s horseshit genealogy in the comments to a post over at Jim Paine’s place. (And, yes, the same Jim Paine who also serves as the Rocky’s professional genealogist. Amazingly, he still has time to moonlight as a horse breeder.)

The genealogy published by the Post and the Rocky was compiled by a professional genealogist, a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists and an expert in Indian ancestry claims. It is airtight, and conclusive proof that Churchill’s stories about his Cherokee ancestry are false. Churchill’s only comeback is to bitch and moan.

Really? That’s funny, I’m fairly familiar with the Rocky’s “Churchill Files,” and I don’t recall mention of any such thing. See, the lack of a professional genealogist was one of those omissions so glaring, so striking, so wonderful, that I almost wept when I saw it. Not only did it call into question the Rocky’s entire methodology, the only thing it proved was the depth of the sewer John Temple and Vincent Carroll were willing to swim in.

And, Noj, Jim Paine already ran your line of shit on me, claiming that the genealogy he’d dreamed up had been vetted by a professional who preferred to remain nameless. That would kind of speak volumes in itself, even if one were tempted to believe Mr. Paine, wouldn’t it? That the Rocky couldn’t find a single “member of the Association of Professional Genealogists” to attach their name to the thing? They’re not exactly a rare breed. One would almost be tempted to wonder why. I mean, if there were any chance Mr. Paine weren’t lying through his teeth. Just like Mr. Vigil.

Anyway, since you’ve made the claim Mr. Vigil, please, name the genealogist in question. I’d love to hear it. But if you can’t, do shut the fuck up.

Oh, and since we’re on the subject, anyone catch the whopper in Westword’s latest article about the Try-Works?

Try-Works has demonstrated just as much resolve when going after perceived enemies, as Rocky writer Charlie Brennan understands. In 2005, after the site spent weeks ripping Brennan’s coverage of Churchill, a Try-Worker got hold of sometimes flirtatious, often embarrassing e-mails the reporter sent to a woman he may or may not have thought was an American Indian Movement source and began posting them in serial fashion. Before long, Brennan vanished from the Churchill beat. He refers questions about the move to Rocky editor/publisher/ president John Temple, who characterizes it as a mutual decision designed to avoid any perception of bias.

Keep reading.

Nice to see you working to avoid “any perception of bias,” Mr Temple. Funny how employing two openly hostile bloggers with no documented expertise whatsoever in genealogy as genealogical experts slipped under your editorial radar.

I’m starting to think you’ve been peddling horseshit so long that you’ve become a bit addled by the fumes. I recommend you find a new line of work while you still have two brain cells left to rub together.

Oh, and not that I mean to crow or anything, but how are the layoffs going? Down to just you and Vincent Carroll yet? Given the rabidly pro-Capital stance you and Mr. Carroll have adopted, there’s a grand irony in that your rag seems just a little less profitable than, well, Enron.

Anyway, keep up the good work. The way your company’s hemorrhaging money, the only thing worth reading anymore are the obituaries. You know, in case that chronic racist wasting away disease turns out to be fatal.

Evil skank. Check out Roxanne’s website, too. She’s like the lesbian Ward Churchill.

Keep reading.

Quite a zinger, Mr. Martin. I get it, it’s funny because not only is she a skank, she’s also a lesbian. Good thing Charley Arthur or I didn’t say that. Why, it’d be more evidence of our moral turpitude and rampant misogyny.

I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Martin, but if you’re going to continue these cawhanded attempts at invective, buy a fucking thesaurus. There’s something monumentally depressing about a squirrelly little guy in his fifties desperately trying to pour forth his hatred onto his keyboard and only managing to squirt out — through contorted lips, brow furrowed in relentless frustration — “skank.” It’s almost pornographic in what it reveals about your character, almost impossible to read without wincing and turning away. It’s like the sum of all your hypocrisy and inadequacy wrapped up in one poignantly idiotic phrase.

Update: Oops. Mr. Martin updated his post. She just looks like a lesbian due to her “physical mannishness.”

That’s even funnier. Why, one might be tempted point out that Mr. Martin looks just like a bigot.

Update II: Jim Paine has posted his take on Mr. Martin’s post (http://www.pirateballerina.com/blog/entry.php?id=564).

Not really OT: Drunkablog takes a look at the latest from an Ethnic Studies professor he calls “the lesbian* Ward Churchill” (NTTAWWT™). We’d post an excerpt, but you really must read it all.

* We have no evidence that Professor Dunbar-Ortiz is anything but heterosexual (NTTAWWT™), and neither does Drunkablog. He was just being funny.

Funny. Got it.

Update III: From the comments, the best take on John Martin yet:

I had this image of the guy being a 20 something meathead from Cherry Creek who thought of his shitty photos as artistic works. He can’t write a simple summary/response essay so I assumed he must be spending most of his time snowboarding or playing video games. That’s why it’s particularly amusing that he’s this dried up ol chicken bone of a runt spouting off “putdowns” too lame even for Carrot Top.

Update IV: Nice work, laurie.  Have one on me, if you’re still up.  (Well, not literally on me, being across the globe and all.  But, y’know, pretend I’m buying.)

Read the whole comment string.  My favorite bit comes where John Martin contends his calling Ms. Dunbar-Ortiz a lesbian because of her “physical mannishness” is not homophobic.  Because, he wasn’t trying to be funny by calling her a lesbian — no matter what Jim Paine says — he was just describing her.  Because, you know, that’s what lesbians look like:  physically mannish.

Everything clear now?

I know I’ve posted about this before, but it seems to be a seasonal thing with me. See, we’ve had a lengthy spell of good weather around here (which should in itself explain the recent downturn in posting). All the signs of spring are stacking up. The birds are singing, the grass is greening, small animals are chattering outside my door. And, when springtime approaches, my thoughts naturally turn away from the internet to the most natural of springly diversions.

Drinking and driving.

I’m a firm believer in the regenerative power of drinking and driving. Not driving drunk, mind. That’s a shorter, shallower, more brutal second cousin to what I mean. I’m talking about spending a full day and night — or two — with a Budweiser in your lap and a cooler by your side, listening to country & western music on an AM station and letting the backroads just kind of unfurl in front of you. It helps if you’re driving a $500 Ford LTD with a firearm in the glove compartment, but it ain’t necessary.

It’s the only sure way to unwind the winter knots. To shake the blues from the bonebreaking mundanity of the day-to-day hustle. Let me tell you, it wipes the shit off and puts a glint back on your blade.

I’ll grant you that the practice has fallen somewhat out of favor of late. Some heavy-handed gang of angry mothers seem particularly pissed off, for instance. But, hell, everything worth doing has been outlawed at one time or another.

Anyway, someday I’m putting together an anthology of the best writing on the subject. Obviously, that would include William Kittredge’s staggering essay, “Drinking and Driving” in Owning It All. And the following, my favorite poem from Raymond Carver. (Which, yeah, I know, I’ve already posted about six times.)

Drinking While Driving - Raymond Carver

It’s August and I have not
Read a book in six months
except something called The Retreat from Moscow
by Caulaincourt
Nevertheless, I am happy
Riding in a car with my brother
and drinking from a pint of Old Crow.
We do not have any place in mind to go,
we are just driving.
If I closed my eyes for a minute
I would be lost, yet
I could gladly lie down and sleep forever
beside this road
My brother nudges me.
Any minute now, something will happen.

Has figured out I ain’t teaching this summer (http://www.pirateballerina.com/blog/entry.php?id=559).  If he was just a little bit savvier, he’d probably have noticed that — with the exception of one class — I don’t teach summers.

There’s a reason I haven’t been losing a whole lot of sleep about blowing my CU gig.  I thought I’d been pretty clear about it, but given the way the geriatric crones at Jim Paine’s place have been slobbering over my “academic career” like a gang of toothless old hounds after a piece of gristle, obviously not.

Sooner or later, I’ll spill the whole story.  But not now.  I’m getting far too much of a kick out of watching these pinheads burn lean-tissue on ten-thousand word comment strings debating whether or not my students have ever referred to me as “professor.”  To paraphrase George Carlin, it’s like watching flies fuck.

I’ve written about Captain America before, back in the Moredock days, pointing to two wonderful posts at Pretty Fakes. This one, about a battle between Captain America and a Navajo super-hero hell-bent on revenge for the genocide of his people, which ended with a gruesomely disingenuous and grotesquely hysterical Oprah moment.

And this one, where Captain America joins up with gun-toting black militants to do battle with a super-nationalist fake Captain America. (Yes, that’s Dan Caplis under the mask.)

Ending with this classic face-off:

I don’t think I’ve ever read the comic book, and I probably ain’t gonna start searching out back issues, but I couldn’t help but grin when I saw that Mr. America took three to the gut a couple weeks ago, and died blowing blood bubbles.

A grin that turned real quickly to a grimace when I started noticing the amount of analysis being poured forth by pundits.

This week, when many think America needs him the most, Captain America died at the hands of a new enemy.

“A lot of people look up to Captain America, not only in the comic book world but in real life,” says Quentin Mugavrin, a Captain America fan.

Over the last year, Marvel Comics fans have followed a Civil War. The community of comic book superheroes split down the middle — battling each other over the government’s call to register them.

Captain America rebelled, calling the measure an infringement of his civil liberties. His one-time buddy, Iron Man, believed it was all for the greater good — national security.

“Fans were absolutely torn as to which side they were on,” says Marvel Comics editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada.

Quesada can’t deny the parallels between his Marvel Universe and the real world. He had plenty of material to work with: a War on Terror, battlefronts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and above all, concerns over the Patriot Act.

“We were asking the question, the very, very simple question, which is, What is more important for you, your civil liberties or your personal safety?”

This week fans got the answer. Captain America was bumped off, betrayed, in true Manchurian Candidate fashion, by his girlfriend after she had been hypnotized.

The issue sold out in a day and a half.

Marvel comics killed off Captain America once before, when the Nazis blew up his plane over the North Atlantic. He was frozen in ice for 20 years.

Maybe that’s why he seemed a little old fashioned for this age when so many of our leaders seem to have flaws.

“He’s actually a man out of time who lives with the convictions and morals of the ’40s, trying to adapt to a new millennium,” says Gerry Gladston, co-owner of Midtown Comics.

Quesada says he’s not sure if fans will see Captain Marvel in the future or not.

One thing’s for sure, the comic book will live on — without its namesake.

“That to me is why this story is worth telling now because to me its: How do we get along without Captain America?” says Quesada. “Do we stand up? Do we step down?”

Because now, maybe more than ever, America needs its heroes.

Keep reading.

The last thing America needs more of is heroes. We’re all heroed out around here. I’m all for fewer heroes to heroically defend our freedom by locking us up. Fewer to butcher brown-skinned civilians in the interest of our heroic principles. Fewer to defend the purity of our children’s minds by heroically eliminating all discourse whatsoever — whether it be by the likes of Jim Paine (http://www.pirateballerina.com/) or Stan Goff. And far fewer to heroically pass legislation eliminating the last few heroic freedoms left us.

Fuck heroes. Let’s have a few more shit-talking poets, drunken visionaries and bomb-lobbing anarchists. Let’s slip the heroically clean-living John Martin a drink and go reeling through the streets of Denver with his disheveled doppleganger, looking for something to burn down. Let’s bump off all the heroes, and each find our inner Bukowski.

Mahmood Mamdani has a great piece on the differences (or lack thereof) between Darfur and Iraq in the latest issue of The London Review of Books. I’m not a Darfur groupie. Not by any stretch of the imagination. As Mr. Mamdani points out, a US intervention in Darfur would be as furiously stupid and counter-productive as our intervention in Iraq. (Not too mention Serbia, Rwanda, and etc.)

The similarities between Iraq and Darfur are remarkable. The estimate of the number of civilians killed over the past three years is roughly similar. The killers are mostly paramilitaries, closely linked to the official military, which is said to be their main source of arms. The victims too are by and large identified as members of groups, rather than targeted as individuals. But the violence in the two places is named differently. In Iraq, it is said to be a cycle of insurgency and counter-insurgency; in Darfur, it is called genocide. Why the difference? Who does the naming? Who is being named? What difference does it make?

The most powerful mobilisation in New York City is in relation to Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics. Americans worry about what their government should do in Iraq. Should it withdraw? What would happen if it did? In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans’.

A full-page advertisement has appeared several times a week in the New York Times calling for intervention in Darfur now. It wants the intervening forces to be placed under ‘a chain of command allowing necessary and timely military action without approval from distant political or civilian personnel’. That intervention in Darfur should not be subject to ‘political or civilian’ considerations and that the intervening forces should have the right to shoot – to kill – without permission from distant places: these are said to be ‘humanitarian’ demands. In the same vein, a New Republic editorial on Darfur has called for ‘force as a first-resort response’. What makes the situation even more puzzling is that some of those who are calling for an end to intervention in Iraq are demanding an intervention in Darfur; as the slogan goes, ‘Out of Iraq and into Darfur.’

. . .

The history of colonialism should teach us that every major intervention has been justified as humanitarian, a ‘civilising mission’. Nor was it mere idiosyncrasy that inspired the devotion with which many colonial officers and archivists recorded the details of barbarity among the colonised – sati, the ban on widow marriage or the practice of child marriage in India, or slavery and female genital mutilation in Africa. I am not suggesting that this was all invention. I mean only to point out that the chronicling of atrocities had a practical purpose: it provided the moral pretext for intervention. Now, as then, imperial interventions claim to have a dual purpose: on the one hand, to rescue minority victims of ongoing barbarities and, on the other, to quarantine majority perpetrators with the stated aim of civilising them. Iraq should act as a warning on this score. The worst thing in Darfur would be an Iraq-style intervention. That would almost certainly spread the civil war to other parts of Sudan, unravelling the peace process in the east and south and dragging the whole country into the global War on Terror.

Keep reading.

The horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them—the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel.

Keep reading.

And if you can’t get enough, Baudrillard’s Selected Writings and this fantastic overview.

Relevant to absolutely nothing, the mighty Jim Page on Bruce Springsteen, the “Original Starbucks,” and everything in between.

Now and then you read something in a blog that makes you remember why it’s still cool that millions of people are out there typing their brains out, with no editorial intervention.

I wish I was a clean as Bruce Springsteen. But I’m not. What can I say…. I come from the old days. I don’t squeak when I walk and I tend to knock things over when I first come into a room. Ask anybody who knows me, I leave a trail of stains behind. But Bruce is immaculate. That’s what they said on the AOL start page today – “what’s so different about Bruce Springsteen?” I didn’t know there was anything different but I thought I’d go check it out to see, and sure enough there he was, Mister Clean. “No drug busts and no bad hair days ever.” Well, I have to admit that I never did much with drugs, they always kinda scared me – I did acid, smoked a bunch a pot, did some speed – that’s about it. But I’ve had a lot of bad hair days. In fact, I have not been to a barber since 1965. I cut my hair myself, using a pair of regular scissors and a car mirror. I don’t even wet it down first. “So how do you get the back?” you might ask. Easy – just walk around for the next few days with a pair of scissors in your pocket and when somebody says, “jeeze, what happened to back of your head” whip out the scissors and say, “I don’t know, can you fix it for me?” I’ve been doing it that way for years. But then I don’t have a reputation to uphold or a house in Bel Air. And I don’t charge a hundred dollars a seat for people to come see me.

What did you say? That’s right, a hundred dollars a seat for Big Bruce. And that was when he was doing his Pete Seeger tribute tour. I’ll bet Pete was thrilled about that part, being an old communist and all. I mean, if you take the ideology to heart and really sing those songs, knowing what they stand for, and if you charge a hundred dollars a seat, then that must mean that the working class has made such great strides that the average Joe and Josephine can easily afford it! Plus parking, plus a baby sitter, plus dinner, plus everything else. Probably works out to about two hundred and that’s just for one person. So if you add a friend or a spouse then its three, or four. Damn! We won that revolution and didn’t even know it. Thanks, Bruce. If it wasn’t for you I’d still be waging the class war.

And speaking of class war did you see where Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, has sent around an in-house memo bemoaning the loss of the “Starbucks Experience?” I’m not sure what that experience is – you’d have to ask people who go there regularly. I’m sure they all have their own versions. To some it would be aromatic low fat double soy decaf lattes, extra hot. To others it would be huge plastic bags full of disposable cups being hoisted into green rubbish bins by uniformed baristas. To me it is often the endless crowds of lemming-like touristas pilgrimaging to the “Original Starbucks” down at the Pike Place Market. They spend thousands of dollars a day getting their super gulp sized drinks and having their pictures taken, with glue sniffing grins on their faces, in front of that wonderful corporate sign.

Keep reading.

After I posted the list of quotes on blood purity and extermination from T. Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, Charley Arthur rightly pointed out the similarity between Roosevelt and Rocky Mountain News exterminationist, Vincent Carroll.

Nor did it take Mr. Carroll long to make the connection explicit. This from Tuesday’s On Point.

To be sure, there is a good argument against the bill authorizing ethnic heritage license plates, although not one that Tupa may be disposed to make. It goes to a worry expressed by Theodore Roosevelt more than 90 years ago.

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all,” he said, “would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans . . . each preserving its separate nationality . . .”

It’s one thing for Americans to have pride in their roots and to express it occasionally by way of a parade or folk festival. It’s quite another - the word “overkill” comes to mind - for them to trumpet their tribal membership literally everywhere they go.

House Bill 1120 has been approved by the full House and a Senate committee. After all, who wants to say no to professional ethnics?

Other than TR, of course, but his kind have passed.

Keep reading.

Yes, Roosevelt has passed. Though, unfortunately his insane brand of imperialism and racialism remains. Especially in the halls of the Rocky.

That said, it might behoove Mr. Carroll to actually read the rest of the text of the 1915 speech he’s quoting. That it’s a favorite among anti-immigration types speaks more to the lack of familiarity with Mr. Roosevelt exhibited by that gaggle of morons than anything else. See, the speech winds up with a fairly fiery indictment of everything Mr. Carroll stands for: i.e., unchecked corporate power.

We cannot afford to continue to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants merely as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and menaces any more than fifty years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial asset and not as a human being. We cannot afford to build a big industrial plant and herd men and women about it without care for their welfare. We cannot afford to permit squalid overcrowding or the kind of living system which makes impossible the decencies and necessities of life. We cannot afford the low wage rates and the merely seasonal industries which mean the sacrifice of both individual and family life and morals to the industrial machinery.

Keep reading.

As my dear old grandfather used to say, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

Yup, tha’s right, it’s true.

Pirate Ballerina will have it’s own official booth at this year’s Anarchist Bookfair, prominently featuring a new book titled, THE WIT & WISDOM OF A PONY PIMP: COLLECTED SCREEDS OF A BRAINDEAD BLOGGER, by Denver’s redoubtable Jimmie the Pain (PB Pubs., 506 blank pages, indexed, foreword by Vernon Bellecourt, preface by Wild Bill Bradford, intro by Ernie Vigil,epilogic echo by John Martin).

An anonymous book-signing will be conducted by somebody else altogether—maybe David Yeagley, or even the real Michael Jackson—mid-afternoon on Sunday, by which point the folks at PB tell us they expect to be completely sold out.

Suzan Shown Harjo, replete in her $5000 elk-took studded “Indian dress,” and fresh from her latest session with Lady Clairol, is all set to serve as Mistress of Ceremonies (not that she’s ever been to one), and the rumor is that she’ll be giving an award to ace ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS “investigative reporter” for having published the most irrelevant story to appear in any US newspaper thus far this year.

The whole thing will be digitally recorded on a battery of cellphones by Walkin’ Eagle Productions, who, of course, will turn the results into another of their breakthru doc-oo-ment-eraries (either that, or link fuzzy clips with unintelligible sound to PB an’ Drunkablog).

Some of us have volunteered to help them man their booth. I’ll be the guy with the black Stetson & a yellow t-shirt bearing the inscription, “I Too Would Be A Pirate Ballerina (But Only If I Was Old, Fat & Dumb).”

Do drop by for a chat. ’specially you, Bad Dog.

Surely you can take time out from your nudist body-painting long enough for that.

The poor ol’ Pony Pimp just can’t ever seem to catch a break.

So much so that his whole act is beginnin’ to make us think he may be plagiarizing Rodney Dangerfield. Really, nobody, not even Jim Pain at his most sanctimoniously stupid, could just “happen” to get himself butt-fucked as consistently he manages to do (a matter which raises other possibilities, but we’ll leave those for another day).

A quick review of the record to set the stage:

First our hero finds himself bedded by that notorious band of accused kidnap/rape/murderers calling itself “National AIM,” then by Wild Bill Bradford, then by Michael Jackson Yeagley. Most recently, he’s outed for posting to PB under an array of psuedonyms like “B.D.” (it stands for “Bad Dog,” we hear), participating in an echo chamber arrangement with John Martin (”jgm”) over at Drunkablog, and for having whooped it up as a nudist body-painter during the 2005 Anarchist Bookfair. Meanwhile he’s stuck with the likes of Walking Eagle and Klan-member/bingoist/American Idol Joe Sullivan as his only bona fide contributors.

NOW THIS, among the comments posted yesterday on PB:

Jim Paine and Pirate Ballerina:
I have recently seen posted on other blogs that the person who is writing as Noj on your blog is reported to be Ernesto Vigil of Denver. If that is true, you should bar him from further postings. It appears that your blog is devoted to a credible position of libertarian/conservative views, which I commend. To have someone as a regular contributor to your blog who is a notorious cop-hater who (if he had had his way) would have killed cops is very offensive. As a former police officer from Pueblo, I was well aware of Vigil’s positions while he was in the Crusade for Justice. He has even stated that the FBI agents who were killed on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation by convicted cop-killer Leonard Pelteir “deserved what they got.” Google this guy and you’ll see that he’s a sleazeball. Just because he hates Churchill and his riff-raff is no reason for you to get into bed with an anti-American cop-hater.
Brian Tomlinson (ret.)
Boise, ID
Brian Tomlinson | 03.14.07 - 10:43 pm

To that, might be added a few others among Ernie’s credits: being a wife-beater, for example abandoning his kids, physically assaulting his middle-school students, skimming money from community service programs, involvement in the Anna Mae Aquash kidnap/murder, and quite possibly putting his name to a book written, at least in part, by Ward Churchill.

Helluva guy.

‘course, the Pain replied to the former cop quoted above that he shouldn’t believe what’s been said about “Noj” here on ye olde Try-Works. That, too, is standard. He said exactly the same thing about N-AIM, Bradford, Yeagley, and…

Obviously, the boy insists on getting butt-fucked over and over again.

Be that as it may, however, we’ve a tradition to maintain. So, listen up, Jimmie, ’cause this is gospel: “Noj” is Ernesto Vigil.

And, whenever you get around to admitting the obvious, don’t pretend we didn’t warn you.

There was a real hoot of a comment posted by “Noj” (aka, Ernie Vigil) on Pirate Ballerina yesterday, well worth quoting in full: “Note that Ernesto Vigil published his book with one of the top university presses in the country. Mr. Churchill has never published with any university press. That should tell you something about whose work the academy considers to be more credible.”

Actually, it does it tells us a lot, Ernie, but probably not what you intended.

A few questions will no doubt clarify what we mean.

When, for starters, did U/Wisconsin’s became “one of the top university presses in the country,” Ernie? UWP doesn’t show up among the top 25 academic presses in the standard ranking, so you wanna share with us where you got the your peculiar idea about its stature (aside from the fact it once printed a book under your name)?

Even if UWP was a “top press,” Ernie, there’s still the matter of the good Prof being credibly rumored to have drafted a good portion of it for you. To be fair, we’ll acknowledge that you may well have gone in after the fact and fucked up parts of what he wrote, but that wouldn’t change the fact he wrote it in the first place, would it?

And weren’t you the guy who was busily insinuating—within the last 2 weeks, as we recall—that Churchill had ghostwritten all or parts of other books published by university presses? A little self-revealing, doncha think?

Meanwhile, have you actually looked at that CV of Churchill’s you keep saying you have? By our count, there are a couple-dozen items listed therein that published by academic presses like Oxford, Kansas, Michgan State, Cal, ABC-CLIO, Humanities, Blackwell, and—you guessed it—Colorado. And that’s not counting stuff he’s published in peer-reviewed journals, soooooooo…

You wanna run your vaunted “publication record” by us again?

A couple of related queries before we close, Ernie: When was the last time you served as a peer reviewer for the AHA, or were asked to serve as an outside reader for a university press? Yeah, that’s what we thought.

We could go on, but why bother?

That question about “academic credibility” pretty well answers itself at this point, don’t it, Ernie?

Jim Paine finally got the response from CU to his outrage with me over the comments I didn’t make. Somehow, I think the poor dear’s going to be dealing with one helluva Special K hangover in the morn.

University of Colorado President Hank Brown asked me to look into your concern outlined in your e-mail of March 14 and respond to you. After reviewing the matter, university legal counsel has determined that the postings you refer to are personal correspondence outside the purview of the university. Should Mr. Crowell be concerned for his safety, that is a matter for law enforcement. Thank you for writing.

Sincerely,

Ken McConnellogue
Associate Vice President for University Relations
Office of the President

Keep reading.

And you wanted this, Mr. Arthur?

Wow.

Not only has the regular PB “contributor” known as “Noj” been unmasked as the notorious wife-beater, cop-killer wannabe, and certifiable psychotic Ernesto Vigil—beneficiary back in the early ’90s of one of Churchll’s supposedly rigged hires at CU, whose vaunted book on the FBI’s operations dirty tricks against Denver’s Crusade for Justice was reputedly ghost-written in large part by the Good Prof—but now we find that the Pony Pimp himself has been fleshing out his roster of commentators by writing in to his own blog under a variety of psuedonyms.

While the Pimp’s latest incarnation seems to be something called “Northeast Republican,” it looks like he’s been more inclined to pen missives to himself under various sets of initials: “B.D.,” for example, and “jgm.” Then there’s “DWG,” and who knows what else.

Better yet he follows the tradition established by the Right’s favorite scholarly fraud, John Lott, by routinely answering himself in print. Could it be that Ernie ain’t the only looney in the bin over there in Ballerina-land?

Besides the occasional burst from Snapple, we mean.

Jim Pain appears to have finally caught a glimmer of ye olde literary light, having spent the bulk of his day extolling the power of our prose and quoting selections from Try-Works’ Greatest Hits (yer loyal correspondent being featured most prominent, we proudly report).

Now, how fucking kewl is THAT!!!

Even kewler was his linking a couple of days ago to a photo of the PB delegation at a recent Anarchist Bookfest in San Francisco.

For those who don’t know what these folks look like, Jim Pain’s the one all painted up with yeller flowers.

His pal, “Noj,” aka Ernesto Vigil, is the one not standing.

The third refers to himself as “Retired Bill.”

Truth is, if these fellers keep it up, we’re gonna have to merge.

The latest about me from Mr. Ballerina: CU instructor posts death threat on blog. Which, after leading with the line “a posting on CU instructor Benjamin Whitmer’s try-works blog has threatened the life of anti-Churchill documentarian Grant Crowell,” goes on to admit that, well, I actually did nothing of the sort. In fact, I didn’t even make the comment. It was Charley Arthur.

Anyway, he claims to have emailed a number of CU administrators to hip them to the post in question, which he reads as a direct threat. That could be horseshit, of course. Certainly, no one’s contacted me, and it there’s any spike in CU traffic, I can’t really tell — we get a fair share as it is.

Either way, I don’t care. Charley Arthur writes whatever he likes. I don’t edit or vet his posts. Nor do I edit comments left by Grant Crowell or anyone else, no matter how racist, dull, vile, outright stupid, or — in the case of most of Jim Paine’s readership when they come slithering around here — any combination of the four. I moderate comments to make sure no one posts any personal information about my family, as the anti-Churchill bloc is wont to do. Other than that, anything goes. If you don’t like what Mr. Arthur has to say, leave a comment and tell him so.

Or, follow Paine’s example: do a lot of whining, and in the finest McCarthyist tradition, try to get me fired. Like I said, I could care less. Land of the free, home of the brave, and all that.

And, hell, Mr. Paine, maybe when you get done spamming CU administrators, you could dig up a copy of my CV, and see if I ever (gasp) listed my GRE scores!

Thus precipitating the kind of monumentally moronic and entirely inscrutable comment string on the minutiae of academic principles that would make Jacques Derrida rip his own eyelids off in frustration.

Dealing with these jackasses makes one feel like the lone woman in a houseful of twelve-year-old panty-sniffers.  I’d have more to say, but (a) I’ve got some reading to get done, and (b) good Christ, who cares?

Ferget the probable criminal complicity of right-wing darling Bob Beauprez in the leaking of classified documents during his miserable failure of a gubenatorial campaign last fall. Ferget the even more probable roles of Republocrat icons Dick Cheney and Karl Rove in the outing of a bona fide CIA operative a while back. Shit, you can even ferget the still unanswered question of whether Bill Owens fathered a child out of wedlock.

Like, HOLD THE PRESSES!!!

Berny Morson, ace reporter, has been doing some REAL investigative work these past [x] weeks/months, the result of which is what he rather grandly described as “New questions about Churchill” in an article of the same title printed in yesterday’s excrement of the RMN.

Hang on to your bippies, boys and girls: This is seriously earth-shaking stuff.

First off, the intrepid Mr. Morson asks whether Churchill has “seen secret Canadian government files.”

Got your attention?

Yup. It surely does sound like ol’ Berny’s finally gotten the goods on Churchill for bein’ a Russian spy or somethin’. And a couple of next he tries to heighten the effect—no shit—by conjuring up an image of Churchill skulking about in a black suit, à la Tom Cruise in “Mission Impossible,” sneaking Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs at mignight, and perusing some of the Ottawa government’s most closely-guarded material.

At this point we can conjure our own image of Vince Carroll whacking off under his desk as he imagines himself as lead editorialist on another Punkin Papers case, featuring the good Prof as Alger Hiss.

Alas, right there in mid-wank, Vinnie no doubt detected a fly in the proverbial ointment he’d used to lubricate his tiny member (Yes, kids, it IS there… It’s just that you need a magnifying glass to see it.).

Like, what sort of state secrets would be filed at the Department of INDIAN Affairs, for Pete’s sake???

Uh-huh.

You can almost feel the boy startin’ to wilt, can’chuh?

Cuttin’ to the chase, what’s actually “at issue” is that of the 546 footnotes in Churchill’s 2004 book, KILL THE INDIAN, SAVE THE MAN, in 3—or was it 5?—Morson uses both numbers at different points in his scoop, although he really should’ve had enough toes available on one foot to decide which count was actually correct—he cites documents already cited in John Milloy’s A NATIONAL CRIME.

Milloy, according to Morson, claims that he’s only researcher who’s ever been allowed access to said documents, so, unless Churchill actually creepy-crawled the files in the dead of night, he must’ve “stolen” the entire fraction of 1% of his source material from Milloy’s book.

Holy wowsers, Batman!!! This is really big-time stuff.

There is a great danger that the earth might even shift on its axis, flattening every Dairy Queen in Denver, if it turned out to be true. (Really, why would any responsible journalist ever probe the Beauprez matter when there are stories of THIS magnitude to be pursued?).

Fortunately for humanity, however, this impending disaster turns out to be self-averting.

According to Patricia Valladao, who Morson describes as a “spokeswoman” for Canada’s Indian Dept., many documents in even the supposedly “closed” files involved have been released in varying states of redaction, and the rest long-since leaked to native rights activists.

So, Milloy really ISN’T the only researcher who’s seen the stuff. The fact is that nobody, least of all Berny Morson, has a clue how many people might be privvy to the “secret” documents at this point. A couple who are, however, have already confirmed that they’ve shared file material with Churchill over the past 10 years.

End of story? Nope.

Berny ain’t done yet.

And we must admit that we had to gasp at the sheer enormity of what he seemed to be exposing when he explained that several of the photos in Churchill’s book—9, to be exact—also appeared in Milloy’s.

Why, a mere 300 or so additional duplications, and there’d be as many identical images in Churchill’s and Milloy’s books as there are in, say, the LIFE PICTURE HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II and the later WORLD WAR II IN PICTURES! (Right off the top, we’ve got about 200 more “for examples,” if you want ‘em.)

More to the point, 22 of the photos in Churchill’s book DON’T appear in Milloy’s, and those that do are all not only in the public domain, but duly credited to the original source (which is a lot more than can be said about all those German photos from the 1930s and ’40s that end up being credited to the US National Archives, eh?).

Why drag this out any further?

Unless you consider your recitation of what Churchill has been “accused of” to be a “story,” then there is no story to your “story,” Berny.

And, if you actually do, your next “feature” really ought to be an in-depth analysis of how prominently the RMN—and you yourself—figure among the accusers.

Or, better yet, an exposé on how many times you’ve been accused of being a fucking moron.

We’re quite certain that we can come up with a few “questions” nobody’s asking for you to use as a vehicle for that one, too.

Okay, call us naïve.

Hell, for the sake of accuracy, in view of the sheer magnitude of our gullibility in this instance, a one-off permission is hereby granted to describe our behavior as “moronic” (takes all the fun out of it, don’t it?).

Anyhow, remember Grant Crowell’s comments in Try-Works a while back about what Ward Churchill supposedly said in a book he’d written about his late wife? We’re genuinely embarrassed to admit that we took the little scumbag seriously enough to think the book itself might actually exist.

The net result, of course, was that we wasted a fair amount of time over the past couple of weeks trying to acquire a copy, only to find that it doesn’t.

Okay, okay, another confession: We didn’t search any further than Amazon and Google before figuring out that something was amiss with Crowell’s rendering of reality—now THERE’S a surprise!—so we didn’t really waste all that much time (maybe an hour in total).

The pace at which we coagulated our conclusion was slowed mainly by Churchill’s having been MIA from the local scene for about 10 days, unavailable to resolve the issue until Thursday.

At that point, it took about 5 minutes-worth of phone time to ascertain that while Churchill never wrote a book about her, he did include lengthy “biographical preface” in a posthumously-published collection of her essays he edited back in 2001 (Leah Renea Kelly, IN MY OWN VOICE; available on Amazon), a copy of which book he readily provided a couple of hours later.

Long story short, we’ve now read the preface from start to finish twice-over, and can find NONE of the statements Crowell attributes to Churchill, e.g.: that Leah was sexually molested by her father as a child.

In fact, he says the exact opposite.

So, how ’bout it, Grant, m’boy? If were referring to something other than the above-discussed material, could you per chance provide a title so the we can have a look for ourelves?

Or, if you WERE talking about the preface, would you mind providing page references?

Better yet, since even YOU ought to be able to tell the difference between “a book” and a book preface, how ’bout doing something to convince us that you’d actually read—or even laid eyes on—the material you claimed to be paraphrasing?

The reason we ask, aside from the obvious, is that we recall your mentioning that some of your “information” derived from an interview with Leah’s sister, Ronda.

That, of course, would be the same Ronda Kelly who was quoted in the RMN back in 2005.

Right, Grant?

That is, the same Ronda Kelly who admitted she “really didn’t know” her younger sister at all, had never visted during the entire 5-year period Leah lived in Boulder, and who, according to a letter she wrote Churchill back in 2001—he shared it with us yesterday, although he declined our request to post it—had not only refused to read the preface, but insisted she never would?

THAT Ronda Kelly, Grant?

The same Ronda Kelly who, as we’ve now confirmed through a half-dozen sources in a position to know, was afflicted with such severe trauma as a child that she’s been undergoing one or another therapy—that offered by Adult Children of Alcoholics being but one—since her teens?

The same Ronda Kelly who is herself documentably afflicted with acute alcoholism?

You ARE aware—are you not?—that the Kelly family as a whole acquired such notoriety for publicly belligerent drunkness over the past three generations that those engaging in such behavior in the Kenora/St. Francis area of NW Ontario are still frequently referred to as “acting like Kellys.”

And you DO know—don’t you?—that “a virulent and intractable pathology of denial” is a keystone of the so-called Residential School Syndrome, as Churchill characterizes the variety of psychological carnage suffered by the Kellys (Ronda quite specifically included).

You wouldn’t happen to be borrowing a few chops from ace journalist Charlie Brennan at the RMN, would you Grant? Really: Ol’ Chuckles “forgot” to mention exactly the same things when he “reported” on the Kellys’

Tell us it ain’t so, Walking Eagle.

And tell us that your next “expose” ain’t gonna be a verbatim excerpt from an exclusive interview with Snapple, explaining how Churchill really DID off Jon Benet as a cover for his orchestration of the Oklahoma oil field murders back in the mid-20s, or the transcript of a session with an institutionalized schizo-paranoid who’s “proven” that the tall guy on the grassy knoll credited with the Kennedy head-shot was actually Churchill.

Ah, but you can’t, can you, you shitlicking little cocksucker?

Your propensity to lie is no less pathologically compulsive than Ronda Kelly’s to deny, isn’t it?

Hence, a humanitarian gesture on our part: Comes the moment of our forthcoming 1-on-1 in Chicago, Walking Eagle, we’re volunteering right here and now to administer unto you a desperately-needed hot lead enema.

Two or three in succession, if need be.

It’s not really clear that your condition hasn’t already become too advanced for even such radical intervention as that to be effective, but it’s the only thing we can imagine that stands a chance of purging you of the rapidly-increasing quantity of maggot-infested excrement clogging the bowels of what, in your hyper-constipated state of delusion, you imagine to be a mind.

Should the remedy fail, youth-in-Asia may be the only solution to your pollution.