The Try-Works

Michael Roberts is on a roll, checking in with another update about Ward Churchill and the Boulder Daily Camera.

A More Messages blog from January 30 includes an e-mail Q&A with Ward Churchill, who responded to a query about the dropping of charges against one of his supporters over an episode involving Boulder Daily Camera reporter Heath Urie. However, the final section of the communique was temporarily omitted because it made a separate accusation against the Camera that required a response from the paper. With apologies to Paul Harvey, here’s the rest of the story, which deals with the 2005-2006 period when the question of whether or not Churchill should be allowed to continue in his role as University of Colorado Boulder professor ate up huge chunks of newsprint at publications across the Front Range.

The concluding section of Churchill’s e-mail found him responding to an assertion that editors at the Camera couldn’t squeeze in letters or op-ed pieces from some of his most prominent defenders, including the University of Hawaii’s David Stannard – yet somehow space for attacks against him was always available. According to him, this claim is accurate. He wrote that the Camera “simply declined to run [Stannard’s] or any of a number of other pieces favorable to me submitted from scholars around the country, meanwhile finding room to run hostile material on a regular basis.”

“The Camera wasn’t alone on this score, BTW,” he went on. “The Colorado Daily did pretty much the same thing… and so did the Post. The Rocky, of course, was worst of all. The Boulder Weekly was pretty much the only Metro Area rag that even made an effort at retaining something resembling balance.”

In addition, Churchill wrote that a Camera representative told him that, “despite running editorial material about me every single day, their policy was that responses appearing under my name could not appear more than once or twice per month. They did allow, however, that they were aware that this placed me at a rather glaring disadvantage, and that this was undoubtedly unfair. That’s when it was suggested that I write responses under other people’s names, and that they’d run them with a wink and a nod, thereby letting me have ‘my’ say while still maintaining ‘appearances’ (of what was left a tad mysterious). My response to that proposition was to ask why, if they felt material arguing my case [could] appear under names other than mine, they weren’t publishing the material submitted by people like Stannard. I got no answer.”

Clint Talbott, the Camera’s editorial page editor, begs to differ. Here’s his take:

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to respond. My brief response is this: The charge that the Camera declined to publish letters and op-eds favorable to Churchill or from Churchill supporters is completely false.

We strove throughout the relevant time to include letters and op-eds from supporters, detractors and those whose opinions could not be easily categorized. Below, you’ll see a sample of letters from 2005 that defended Churchill’s right to speak, his scholarship and/or his blow-back critique in the “Eichmann” essay.” [This material has been placed at the bottom of the blog.] We also published op-eds from vocal defender Tom Mayer, local activist Ty Gee and instructor Ursula Lindquist that challenged the Camera’s editorial view (and the academic committees’ damning assessment) of Churchill’s academic practices.

For the record, the Camera consistently defended Churchill’s right to make provocative claims about 9/11 victims. His scholarship was another matter, to us, and to his colleagues at the university.

I have no record of receiving anything from David Stannard, and I am not familiar with that name. I know I have received suggested op-eds from [CU sociology department staffer Tom] Mayer (and perhaps others) that were far too long to print. I have not spoken to Churchill since sometime in the mid-90s. So this conversation, if it in fact occurred as he says it did, took place either between one of two former editorial writers, one of whom is deceased.

It’s easy to say we declined to print “any number” of pro-Churchill pieces. It requires more rigor to specify a number; just a wild guess that he did not specify so much as a ballpark figure. Similarly, it is easy to recount an alleged conversation with an unnamed staff member. It is more revealing to name the staffer (which, I’m inferring, Churchill does not do).

We do have a once-a-month policy on letters. And we do not bend it for public figures, even when they are in the national spotlight. I can certainly believe someone here told him that much. Beyond that, however, I guess you’d have to take Churchill at his word.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Clint

What follows is nearly 7,000 words worth of pro-Churchill material – the sort of commentary that may resurface if and when the onetime CU prof’s lawsuit against the university over his July 2007 dismissal reaches the courtroom stage. By then, Churchill and the Camera will likely have plenty more about which to disagree.

The rest.

Of course, almost all the “nearly 7,000 words worth of pro-Churchill material” comes in the form of letters and open forum blog postings, rather proving Churchill’s point, and Mr. Talbott seems to have included anything that mentions Churchill in any sort of positive light by every letter writer in the last three fucking years.

So what’s missing?

Well, the obvious. During the period in question, the Boulder Daily Camera was giving space to every jackass, lunatic and rapist/murderer who’d ever had a bone to pick with Mr. Churchill. And then, as I understand it, was relying on their once-a-month policy to forbid any sort of rebuttal.

It’d be sort of like me, as a newspaper owner, calling Clint Tabott a rapist on the first of the month, printing his rebuttal, then calling him a child molester on the fifteenth and refusing to allow him to respond out of my sense of journalistic integrity.

An example?

How’s about when the Boulder Daily Camera, riffing on one of my favorite of the local media’s sleazy tricks, ran a Suzan Shown Harjo editorial accusing Ward Churchill of being an ethnic fraud, quoting Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt to that effect.

Think it might have anything to do with anything that Ms. Harjo’s buddies, Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, have a longstanding feud with Mr. Churchill that ain’t got a thing to do with his ethnicity?

That maybe what really gets under their skin is that Mr. Churchill and others in Colorado AIM have been accusing them for about a decade of being involved in a particularly nasty bit of kidnapping, rape and murder?

And that said accusations seem borne out by the fact that one of their cronies has already been convicted of said rape and murder and another one’s been extradited from Canada to stand trial?

Now, don’t you think the Boulder Daily Camera might should give a little space to that kind of information? Even if it violates their once-a-month rule?

Seems like a fair question to me. But, hell, maybe rebuttals as regards that sleazy little maneuver were some of the ones “far too long to print.”

Or, maybe, just some more examples of correspondence the Camera doesn’t care for getting, ahem, lost.

Yeah, just try to imagine that.

Anyway, Michael Roberts has an update in today’s Westword about the Passion of Heath Urie.

Class conflict: The October 18, 2007, Message revolved around Boulder Daily Camera reporter Heath Urie, who was prevented from entering a class taught on the CU-Boulder campus by firebrand instructor Ward Churchill. Back then, neither Urie, who pressed charges against Churchill supporter Josh Dillabaugh after the incident, nor the infamous prof commented on the matter. But a few weeks after charges against Dillabaugh were dropped, both are weighing in — and their viewpoints have absolutely zero in common.

Urie expresses regret that he became part of the story: “That’s something you never want to happen.” Yet he thinks he and his photographer, Joshua Lawton, acted in a professional manner throughout, and he defends his decision to call the police after his forcible ejection. In his view, “When somebody lays a hand on you, that’s when they cross the line.” He’s just as adamant that the accounts of the episode that emanated from Churchill’s camp bear no relation to reality. “They’re exaggerated, blown out of proportion and just inaccurate — and I stand for the opposite things as a reporter,” he says.

Churchill begs to differ. Via e-mail, he argues that charges against Dillabaugh should never have been filed in the first place, especially considering his contention that Urie initially identified his alleged attacker as someone else entirely: TryWorks blogger Benjamin Whitmer.

After the authorities declined to prosecute Dillabaugh, Whitmer suggested the Camera pony up an I’m-sorry, and Churchill concurs. “Apologies are owed by the Camera not only to Whitmer, and even more so to Dillabaugh, but to everybody in the room that night — including yours truly — and to its readers,” he writes as part of a Q&A at blogs.westword.com/latestword. “Any reputable newspaper would already have issued them. But, hey, we’re talking about the Daily Camera. So neither the word ‘reputable’ nor the word ‘newspaper’ really applies.” Churchill strikes the same chord when he’s asked how the Camera has treated him in general. “Truth is,” he responds, “I’ve received better treatment from the Klan.”

Guess that’s his burning cross to bear.

The rest.

Mr. Roberts also provides his full exchange with Ward Churchill and myself in his blog. As well as a quote from David Lane, who cuts right to the heart of the matter.

When contacted for his comments, David Lane, the attorney who represented Dillabaugh, was brief and to the point. “The charges against Josh were dismissed as they should have been because he never assaulted anyone,” Lane wrote. But Whitmer was much more expansive in the following e-mail exchange, conducted earlier in January.

Westword: What’s your understanding of the reason charges against Josh Dillabaugh were dropped?

Benjamin Whitmer: My understanding is the charges were dropped because the case couldn’t be proved — i.e., Mr. Dillabaugh’s lawyer talked to the DA, told them the Camera had a longstanding animosity towards Mr. Churchill and that if the case went to court, he’d run roughshod over Urie. Granted, that came to me secondhand, but that’s the way I heard it.

WW: Were you surprised by this decision? Or was it pretty much what you expected?

BW: It’s exactly what I expected. And what I’ve been predicting since charges were filed. I’ve been calling Heath Urie a liar from the outset, and that wasn’t hyperbole. He’s a lying little prick with a monstrous sense of entitlement. This was his attempt at retribution after going batshit when he was prohibited from entering the classroom. The only thing fucking dumber than Urie’s filing charges is the other lying asshole over at the Camera, [city editor] Matt Sebastian, implying [in a public statement] that Urie had been physically harmed. I’ve received rougher lap-dances than the treatment Urie got.

WW: When did you send your latest letter to the Daily Camera? [The letter demanded an apology from the Camera.]

BW: January 2nd.

WW: Was it posted on the blog right away? Or was there a delay? [A previous Whitmer letter didn’t appear online until after Westword contacted the Camera about it.] Did it also appear in the regular print edition today?

BW: It was posted on the blog right away. As to whether or not it appeared in the print edition, I have no idea. I’d rather gut myself with a rusty fishhook than read the Camera on a regular basis, so I don’t subscribe. [The letter was printed in the paper’s January 7 edition.]

WW: Have you heard from anyone at the Camera in regard to your demand for an apology? Do you expect to hear from anyone there in the future?

BW: No, I ain’t heard from anybody. And I won’t hear from anybody. To be honest, the only reason I sent the letter was in hopes they’d be dumb enough to “lose” it again. It was a stupid enough move on their part that it seemed worth seeing if they’d replicate it.

WW: What lessons should reporters at the Camera and/or other newspapers learn from what took place?

BW: Quit the mainstream media. The fourth estate’s populated by dribbling morons of which Heath Urie’s all too typical.

WW: Would you like to share any other comments about the resolution of the case?

BW: This is what the Camera does when it comes to Ward Churchill. This is typical. Like the Rocky, they hate Ward Churchill’s fucking guts, and they’ll pass up no opportunity to slime all over him. It’s this kind of sleazy horseshit that’s pissed me off throughout the so-called scandal, and it’s exactly what led to my attempt at giving them a taste of their own medicine on the Try-Works.

The only thing atypical about this incident is the stunning incompetence of Heath Urie. It’s one thing to attempt to smuggle in recording devices and rush a closed room to provoke a gotcha journalism incident. I expect no less when dealing with the Denver/Boulder media. But to file charges based on an insane, self-contradictory police report is something else entirely. I feel almost bad doing this, since Urie seems a beer or two shy of a six-pack, but I kind of owe him a hearty round of thanks. I can lecture about the hypocrisy of the local media until my eyes bleed, but it doesn’t have anything like the impact of Urie’s dipshit stunt.

A few days after this exchange, Churchill provided his own replies to a similar batch of e-mail questions:

Westword: What is your response to charges being dropped against Josh Dillabaugh?

Ward Churchill: There was never any basis for filing charges against Dillabaugh in the first place. Setting aside the fact that Urie was assaulted by no one – quite the opposite, actually (see below) — Urie described Ben Whitmer, not Josh Dillabaugh, as his “assailant.” Indeed, his identification of Ben was “confirmed” by a picture snapped in the hallway by the photographer who accompanied Urie that night.

WW: Are you pleasantly surprised that charges were dropped? Or did you expect them to be by virtue of witnessing the incident?

WC: Actually, I’d like to have seen it go to court. That way, the bald-faced nature of Urie’s lies would have ended up a matter of official record. And that, in turn, would have served to shed a bit of very useful light on the Camera’s editorial defense of the guy, as well as its broader editorial posture.

WW: Were you interviewed by representatives of the Boulder Police Department in relation to the charges?

WC: Nope. Nor by the campus cops, although I was standing within a few feet of the “investigating officers” at a couple of points while they were on the “scene.” That in itself would have made for some interesting testimony when I took the stand at trial, doncha think?

WW: Do you think charges should have been filed against Heath Urie, the reporter with the Boulder Daily Camera?

WC: Given the daintiness of the “standards” applied in bringing charges against Dillabaugh, Urie should definitely have been charged with assaulting Ben Whitmer. This is to say that when Urie came barging into the room, Ben put up his hand, palm toward Urie, and told Urie to stop. Urie then walked into Ben’s hand, and tried to keep moving forward (i.e., to push Ben backwards or out of his way).

My own view is that this is all chickenshit, pure and simple. But, since Urie, the cops, and the DA all opted to play by such rules, Urie should have been charged with assaulting Ben and possibly Dillabaugh.

He should also have been charged with menacing me (he was headed directly towards me when he ran into Ben’s hand), harrassment (he came charging right up into my face later, during the break, despite having been repeatedly told that I didn’t wish to speak with him), trespassing (he entered a closed session in a reserved room after being told he was barred from doing so), and something on the order of creating a disturbance (demanding his “right” to interview me right in the middle of my trying to deliver my lecture).

WW: Benjamin Whitmer has asked for an apology from Camera representatives in the wake of the charges being dropped. Do you think the newspaper should issue a formal apology? If not, how do you think the paper should respond?

WC: Apologies are owed by the Camera not only to Whitmer, and even more so to Dillabaugh, but to everybody in the room that night — including yours truly — and to its readers. Any reputable newspaper would already have issued them. But, hey, we’re talking about the Daily Camera. So neither the word “reputable” nor the word “newspaper” really applies.

WW: How would you characterize your treatment by the Camera?

WC: Truth is, I’ve received better treatment from the Klan.

WW: Are you teaching your class at CU this semester? Do you feel that the first class last semester was a success?

WC: It’s a year-long deal, so we’ll simply pick up during spring semster where we left off in the fall. And, yes, I’d consider the fall semester to have been a resounding success. It was, moreover, a genuine delight.

The rest.

Mr. Urie can wax philosophical all he wants, but charges have been dropped. His version of events has been found lacking by Boulder’s DA. And she’s known to buy just about fucking anything.

Update: Just noticed that Mr. Martin’s whining because he didn’t manage to worm his way into this story. Hey, maybe next time, you fucking parasite.

Update II: I like Michael Roberts a lot, but c’mon, don’t tell me that lapdance line shouldn’t have gone in the print edition. That motherfucker was solid gold.

I just picked up the first book in my promised Larry Brown binge from the local branch of my library. It’s Joe. I couldn’t help but read a few pages in the car, and what I read was fucking spectacular.

There’s a paucity of information on the web about Mr. Brown. The best I could do for a biography was this bit from this New York Times obituary.

William Larry Brown was born on July 9, 1951, in Oxford, a town with a literary tradition stretching from William Faulkner to John Grisham. But for much of his life Mr. Brown, the son of a restless sharecropper father and a mother who was a store owner and postmaster, seemed to be anything but the bookish type.

Before graduating from high school in 1969, he failed senior English and had to attend summer school, he told an interviewer in 2000. Soon after, he enlisted in the Marines, serving for two years in noncombat positions.

After his discharge Mr. Brown returned to Mississippi, where he worked a variety of odd jobs - over the years they included lumberjack, house painter, hay hauler and fence builder - before joining the Oxford Fire Department in 1973.

He remained a firefighter for 16 years, during which he began to teach himself how to write, reading obsessively the work of Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy and, of course, Faulkner. For years afterward he would be referred to as “the fireman-writer,” enough so that he tired of that designation and discouraged its use.

Though he took one writing course at the University of Mississippi, he honed his craft by writing scores of stories, many of which were rejected before he got one published in 1982 in, of all places, Easyriders, a bikers’ magazine.

Five years later another story, “Facing the Music,” published in the Mississippi Review, a literary journal, caught the attention of Shannon Ravenel, a founder of Algonquin Books. “I called him and asked if he had other stories,” Ms. Ravenel recalled. “He said he had a lot.”

Algonquin published nine of them in a 1988 collection, also titled “Facing the Music.” A novel came a year later: “Dirty Work,” about two Vietnam veterans from Mississippi - one white, the other black; one with his face blown off, the other missing all four limbs - who find themselves in adjacent hospital beds.

“Right from the beginning he was willing to look very straight into the depths of human pain without blinking,” Ms. Ravenel said. “If you didn’t blink and were willing to stand there and look with him, you could learn some remarkable things.”

Mr. Brown’s characters had dark, brutal lives, often overtaken by drinking and sex and ruinous relationships. But Mr. Brown, though as spare in conversation as in his writing, was neither brooding nor a wanderer. He is survived by his mother, Leona Brown, of Tula, Miss., near Oxford; his wife of 30 years, Mary Annie Coleman Brown; his children Billy Ray, Shane and LeAnne, all of the Oxford area; and two grandchildren.

Being from Oxford, Mr. Brown was frequently compared to Faulkner. But his prose was direct and simple - perhaps better compared to Carver or Hemingway - as in the opening of “Fay,” based on a character that first appears in “Joe.”

“She came down out of the hills that were growing black with night, and in the dusty road her feet found small broken stones that made her wince,” he wrote. “Alone for the first time in the world and full dark coming quickly. House lights winked through the trees as she walked and swung her purse from her hand. She could hear cars passing down the asphalt but she was still a long way from that. More than once she stopped and looked back up into the ridges that stood behind her, thinking things over, but each time she shook her head and went on.”

The rest.

He’s my favorite kind of writer: dedicated to playing it his own way, win or lose. As he said, “I think it is necessary to sit down and work for years and years to get it right. I think that’s the main thing, that’s what the emphasis has got to be on: individual work.” He means it, too. He decided to be a writer at the age 29, and spent the next ten years banging out five novels and a few hundred short stories before publishing a word.

More to come.

A spectacular piece on Bill/Hillary’s latest racist tactic. As if you needed another reason not to vote for her.

George Wallace reflecting on his first and unsuccessful run for governor of Alabama in 1958 defeat, made a remarkable vow. “Well, boys,” he said, “no other son of a bitch will ever out-nigger me again.” Needless to say, no one did, as you might recall.

Perhaps until now. Bill Clinton, self-proclaimed and rather foolishly acclaimed by some who shall go nameless as the first “Black” president has played the race card with a finesse that even Wallace might have admired. He has niggered Barack Obama. After he and Mrs. Clinton began to see that African-Americans were turning to Obama – doubtless armed to with polling data (I am guessing here) that might have indicated an African-American swing toward Obama in other states, this most ruthless and cunning couple, the Macbeths of our time, played the race card.

And Bill Clinton knows it. There is nothing, and I hope that progressive Southerners will forgive me this, like the expertise of a Southern politician in out-niggering, to use Wallace’s infelicitous phrase. Clinton employed it with a devilish finesse. Why, “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice in 1984 and 1988. And he ran a good campaign. Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here, he’s run a good campaign everywhere.” (Financial Times, January 28, page 4) The Financial Times, a straight-ahead, moderately conservative but rigorously reported newspaper concluded: “Mr. Clinton’s bleary-eyed implication was clear: Mr. Obama is a black candidate whom blacks disproportionately support.”

The rest.

This ain’t an endorsement of Obama, by the way. As has been pointed out in the comments — though not with the emphasis where I’d place it — there ain’t a viable candidate up there that offers a real choice vis-a-vis foreign policy. Nor, for that matter, in any other issue I give a shit about. They’ll all be pro tyrant, pro war, pro torture and pro pissing on the Constitution. I wouldn’t waste my time voting for one of them if the ballot box was located behind my toilet and I’d just finished a twelve-pack of Budweiser. Not if mine was the sole deciding vote.

But I hate Hillary Clinton. Besides her stated positions, I hate her for being a Clintonite. Just as I hated Gore. See, I take she and Bill at their word, that she was instrumental in Bill’s policy decisions. And I remember his Presidency. I remember the explosion in prisons, and the clearcutting of civil liberties. I remember Clinton’s awesome slavishness to corporate interests. Most of all, however, I remember the continuous, systematic bombing of Iraqi infrastructure and the imposition of sanctions known to have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

Bush policy ain’t anomalous. It ain’t even a fucking deviation from the norm. Overthrowing sovereign governments and the application of military force in violation of international law is business as usual, and has been since the Mystic massacre of 1637.

And, to my mind, nothing is so emblematic of business as usual as the Clintonites. No set of political hacks better represents the uselessness of the American political process. And if the Democrats go with her, I hope to God they get handed their fucking head.

Y’know, that might even be a scenario where I’d vote. If it turns out McCain vs. Clinton, I might just have to stumble out and throw down a ballot for McCain.

Just to add my own tiny little voice into the national chorus of “FUCK YOU” that I expect will resound in the Democrats’ ears for decades to come.

Jessica Corry, who you’ll remember from my reaction to a spectacularly fucking dumb article in the Rocky Mountain News, has a new spectacularly dumb fucking article over at New West. I’m used to columnists from the Independence Institute not being the brightest of the bright, but in Ms. Corry’s case, I have to wonder that her brains don’t dribble out her ears with every keystroke.

This is my favorite:

To make their extremely debatable point that Christopher Columbus was a murderer, rapist and slave trader, they splashed fake blood peppered with doll heads onto the streets. They then blocked the street, at which point 80 people were arrested.

The rest.

What the fuck’s debatable about that? Have you done any research that didn’t take place at your keyboard in your fucking jammies, Ms. Corry?

The historical record’s pretty clear on Columbus. He traded slaves, you need read no further than his own writings to verify that. He also raped Indians — or at least kidnapped woman and gave them to his underlings to beat and rape — we’ve got diaries to that effect written by the motherfuckers sailing with him who were doing the raping. As to whether or not he was a murderer, again you don’t have to dig too deep to find evidence of it. No deeper than Bartolome de Las Casas, who sailed with Columbus.

That’s one source for each of the points you consider “debatable”. There are plenty more. You can argue that what Columbus did was worth the human cost because of the ensuing colonization of the Americas — it puts you on the same moral plane as Hitler, but you can argue it — but you can’t fucking argue that Columbus was not a murderer, a rapist and a slave trader. That train’s left the station, dear. At least amongst those of us who visit, like, libraries for our historical information.

Really, where the fuck does the Independence Institute come up with the mudheaded idiots?

Anyway, as much fun as it is to poke fun at Ms. Corry’s monolithic ignorance, I should be kind. After all, she did provide me with the heartiest belly laugh I’ve had in some time.

By continuing on, Lane and his radical clients have done nothing to help their cause, especially in my household, where my two-year-old daughter is now deeply afraid of American Indians.

Her fear is not the result of some bigoted Hollywood movie production. Rather, it’s because of the radical activists themselves. On a morning walk with my husband not far from our home in downtown Denver on the day of the last parade, my daughter heard the sound of drums and wanted a closer look. As she leaned forward in her stroller, protestors jumped out in front of her, splashing their “blood” onto the street.

Nearly four months later, she still talks about the event. Every time she hears the sound of a drum, she says “boom, boom, boom. Indians scare me, Mommy.”

I’m pretty sure that’s supposed to be some kind of hamhanded attempt at irony, but, hell, I can’t help but take it as an imperative to action.

See, I’ve always been a little ambivalent about the fake blood, but now I plan on demanding it for each and every protest I attend.

Anything that scares the shit out of yuppie spawn has its fucking place.

And, gosh, just imagine how scary it must’ve been for those real flesh and blood brown babies getting fucking butchered by Columbus.

Or, for that matter, those flesh and blood brown babies being butchered in Iraq.

With the open encouragement of the Independence Institute.

Update: Interesting, by the way, how variable Ms. Corry’s tender sensibilities are. Fake blood on the street has her torturing prose into purple, yeah?

But being married to a fucking convicted rapist doesn’t seem to phase her in the least. (Scroll down to the comments.)

Russell Means recently gave an interview with The Final Call about the Republic of Lakotah’s secession from US treaties.  (Thanks to my favorite BLM Whore Who Just Can’t Wean Himself Off The Public Tit.)

The Final Call (FC): Specifically, what does the Lakotah sovereignty declaration mean and what is it based on?

Russell Means (RM): We unilaterally withdrew from our treaties and agreement with the United States of America. That is backed by Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution along with other amendments and also backed by the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties which the entire international community including the United States of America signed into effect in 1980. So legally, we have returned to the position we held prior to the signing of the treaties which makes us free and independent. According to national and international law, we are legally within our rights to be independent and free. Also, in the acts from Congress that enabled those five states to become states, those states expressly said they would not interfere with our affairs. Representatives of the freedom seeking Lakotah Nation signed and delivered the documents. We do not represent the tribal governments. The tribal governments are representatives of the United States and the colonial apartheid system of America. In order to save our people, our nation our language, our ways of life, our value systems, we have to withdraw.

FC: Geographically, how much land is covered by the Republic of Lakotah and how many people currently live in that territory?

RM: The area covers, two-thirds of northern Nebraska, one-half of South Dakota, about one-forth of North Dakota, twenty percent of Montana and twenty percent of Wyoming. Indians and non-Indians, about 1.5 million people live there.

FC: In your writings and speeches, you have drawn many parallels between the experiences of the indigenous people, the apartheid government in South Africa, and the occupied Palestinian territories. It appears that you are saying that wherever unjust land appropriation policies are found, they all have the same origins.

RM: Exactly! Hitler wrote that the American policy of creating reservations for the unclean and the unwanted was the perfect solution for race, and (using) that example he created the concentration camps for the gypsies, Jewish people and homosexuals. The Bantu Development Act of 1964 which institutionalized apartheid in South Africa is a copy of the Indian Reorganization Act of America which was passed thirty years before. What happened to us was the genesis and example for all land appropriations the world over—that includes Palestine. Our people are being exterminated, much like the African slaves were exterminated from their homeland and separated from their way of life. The apartheid system is the most lethal colonial policy ever created, and you have to hand it to the United States of America. They are very good at eradicating human beings in all ways physically, spiritually and economically.

FC: Are you expecting either mass migration into or out of the Lakotah territories as a result of this declaration?

RM: We know that there will not be a mass migration out of our territory. We’ve offered citizenship to anyone who wants to become Lakotah, provided they renounce their U.S. citizenship and apply for citizenship with our Nation. We know that all of those Americans and many of the Indian people in those states are not going to renounce their citizenship. We have no illusions about that, however, our nation will not have taxes and we will have individual liberty through community control.

FC: What will happen to those who live in the area but do not want to leave the land or their property they have purchased?

RM: The power we have is based on U.S. law. The negotiation tool that we will use with the city, county and state governments is the power to put a lien on any and all real estate transactions in that five-state region. What that does is that it puts the burden of proof on the seller of the real estate. They have to prove that the lien is invalid. Well, based on the U.S. Constitution, we own the land. Therefore, if we choose to do that, the real estate market in those five state areas will absolutely totally collapse. That is the power that we possess. They have a problem with their government because their government defrauded them. They bought property believing that the property was free and clear. It isn’t. We own it.

The rest.

Also, the website for Mr. Means’ total immersion school is up, and well worth a look.  (Thanks again to the Ballerina Welfare Queen.)

Master James Benjamin rightly amends my call for “Anybody But Hillary” to “Anybody But Clinton.”

I’m printing bumper stickers. And, when Ms. Clinton is ordained the Democratic candidate — which there’s no doubt of — don’t forget that we’re holding the party right here in Denver.

And there ain’t never been a better year to re-create 68.

Based on some of the comments made on KHOW’s Caplis and Silverman show, Try-Works commenter N would like to know. And you can decide for yourself. KHOW’s .mp3 of the show is right here. In it, the pair interviews Glenn Morris and David Lane about the Columbus Day protest trials I pointed to yesterday.

Generally Caplis and Silverman seem a little confused as to what civil disobedience actually fucking means, arguing somehow that Martin Luther King was a hero, but that any violation of any law, no matter how fucking stupid, arbitrary or vicious, should be prosecuted to the fullest. They manage to reconcile that logical split in the way they usually do: by being too fucking dumb to notice it.

But anyway, highlights as follows:

At 5:45, when David Lane corrects one of our historically illiterate local media’s favorite canards: that those engaged in civil disobedience during the civil rights movement just took their lumps, and never fought prosecution.

At 8:45, when Dan Caplis begins a tear about the fundamental characteristic of America being the rule of law. This’d be the same motherfucker who never saw a treaty or international obligation he didn’t piss on. The same Dan Caplis who has openly called for anyone expressing an opinion to the left of Hillary Clinton to be tried for fucking treason. Not to belabor the point, but Dan Caplis has about as much right to lecturing on the rule of law as Monica Lewinsky does lecturing on tobacco abstinence.

At 16:00, when David Lane points out the city of Denver doesn’t celebrate Columbus Day. City employees go to work, offices are open. Not much to that, but it’s interesting, and I didn’t know it.

At 20:45, when Silverman waxes eloquent about the poor racists who might’ve missed their tee time. Incurring open derision from David Lane.

At 21:35, when Glenn Morris points out that Silverman’s idiotic argument about protestors not having the right to inconvenience working people is the self-same argument used by white segregationists when whining about the civil rights movement’s tactics.

And the kicker, at 22:15 when, as N said, “referring to civil rights demonstrators who sat-in at and otherwise disrupted segregated businesses, Silverman [or Caplis… whichever one sounds like a child molestor] said, ‘That was their own bad decision.’”

Leading me to the answer to N’s question: “are you required to be a covert racist to host a show on AM radio?”

The answer: absolutely not.

But if Mr. Silverman’s any example, being an open racist is fucking mandatory.

However, my absolutely favorite moment, comes at 28:20 when Craig Silverman is asked by David Lane if he’s really unaware that treaties made with other nations are the supreme law of the land; that they trump the US Constitution.

To which, Craig Silverman answers, “Correct, I’m unaware of that.”

Which left me literally fucking agape.

See, as regular readers ought fucking know, even I knew that one.

You know why?

Because it’s IN THE FUCKING CONSTITUTION.

In those exact fucking words: “[A]ll Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.”

Even better, when Glenn Morris points Mr. Silverman to the appropriate passage, Mr. Silverman honks something to the effect that he’ll take a look at that.

Meaning that Mr. Silverman, a man who has made it a quarter-century into the legal profession, who has built a career as a legal pundit, isn’t even generally conversant with the fucking US Constitution.

He’s never even fucking read it.

That’s the kind of stupidity that borders on legendary. It would be something akin to a medical doctor not being able to point out the general location of the human heart. If there were a God in heaven, the dumb fucker would be divinely disbarred upon uttering the words.

And they call Ward Churchill a fraud.

Try-Works commenter Rockabilly Baby was recently kind enough to repeat a story I was groping for the other day to illustrate the character of Boulder Daily Camera editorial page editor Clint Talbott.

For your amusement, my favorite anecdote about the hellish little resort town of Boulder.  Which the rest of Colorado is fast in the process of becoming.

So now you’re stealing lines from the Klan itself, eh Bennie? That bit about Boulder being a “KKK dream community” was lifted from Tom Robb, head of whichever denomination of kluxers predominates down Arkansas way.

The story is that Robb was invited to keynote a Colorado Klan-sponsored commemoration of Hitler’s birthday in front of the old Boulder courthouse some years back. The usual Boulder suspects turned out to chant their opposition, burn a few candles, and wave signs promoting “diversity.”

You got to hand it to Robb. He looked them calmly in the eye and informed them via bullhorn that Boulder was a 96% white town by design, and—as such—is exactly what the Klan is trying to create.

His clincher was that if anybody in holding a pro-diversity sign genuinely desired to live in a diverse community, they should get the hell out of Boulder and relocate to Detroit.

Talk about silencing the “opposition.”

At that point, I’m told, the big anti-Klan protest melted away even faster than a polar icecap. But, hey, they were probably in a hurry to get home and pack for their big move.

And that’s why Boulder’s so much more racially and culturally “diverse” these days than it was 15 years ago. Right?

After nigh 20 fucking years of flexing its prosecutorial muscle — not to mention drafting a law specifically to target Columbus Day protestors — the city finally garnered a victory in court.

Managing to level about $500 in fines at a combined three defendants.

Yeah, I can’t stop chuckling either.

There’s times one starts wondering if the motherfucker’s putting us all on.

George Bush’s favorite painting.

According to The Bush Tragedy, a new book by Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, Bush suffers from a similar inability to distinguish between what he wants to see and what is there to be seen. This is nicely captured in an anecdote about a painting (that’s it to the left of this text; click to enlarge) that Bush put up in his office when he was governor of Texas. Weisberg writes:

In an April 1995 memo, Bush invited his staff to come to his office to look at a painting. … The picture is a Western scene of a cowboy riding up a craggy hill, with two other riders following behind him. Bush told visitors—who often noted his resemblance to the rider in front—that it was called A Charge To Keep and that it was based on his favorite Methodist hymn of that title, written in the eighteenth century by Charles Wesley. As Bush noted in the memo, which he quoted in his autobiography of the same title: “I thought I would share with you a recent bit of Texas history which epitomizes our mission. When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves.” Bush identified with the lead rider, whom he took to be a kind of Christian cowboy, an embodiment of indomitable vigor, courage, and moral clarity.

Bush subsequently took the painting to Washington, hung it in the Oval Office, and continued to tell the painting’s inspiring story, adding embellishments:

He came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.

Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled “The Slipper Tongue,” published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: “Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught.”

The rest.

Blood and Grits wrapped up my Harry Crews obsession. At least for now. That don’t mean I won’t be reading more of his work — I never did make it to A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, for instance — but I’ve read damn near ten books by him in that last few months, and I’m getting a little burnt.

That said, Blood and Grits couldn’t have sent me off on a better note. Reviewers like to paint Mr. Crews’ fictional characters as the product of his whiskey-soaked, fever-ridden imagination. It ain’t the case. His characters walk. They inhabit our world. You just don’t see them in the sorts of places book reviewers are likely to frequent. Which is probably why Crews is so much fun to read.

The subjects include Charles Bronson, dog-fighting (Free Michael Vick!), fatherhood, taking LSD with rednecks, alligator poaching, saving a wounded hawk, and, of course, drinking beer. Particularly drinking beer while hiking. Something which made me damn near tearful in gratitude at seeing such a glorious topic on the printed page.

There’s a cult of horror-filled little shits in these parts who think they know something about walking in the woods. They wear space-age fabrics and pedometers. They leave, as a friend put it succinctly, pointing out the indents made by hiking poles, yuppie tracks. As with most things, they miss the point. I was raised as rural as it’s possible to get, and I’ve lived most of my life in the woods. There are few necessaries when taking a walk, and one of them is a backpack full of beer.

It’s a spiritual necessity. And in this world of assholes who treat the woods like a treadmill, who live their lives in a training regimen, it’s a fucking moral necessity.

Anyway, I’m in the middle of a Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock, Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, Hayduke Lives by Ed Abbey and Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, for the umpteenth fucking time.

And as soon as I’m done with that set, or at least any one of them, I’m moving on to Larry Brown.

Snippets to follow.

Jason Salzman thinks just a tad bit.

As a media critic, I’ve often felt like kicking KHOW talk radio hosts Dan Caplis and Craig Silverman, but I restrain myself.

I know that violence against talk radio hosts is the worst form of media criticism. And it’s illegal.

It’s true that kicking journalists was popular among media critics during the early Neanderthal era, but this is the year 2008.

Plus, in the case of Caplis and Silverman, I like their show more often than not. It airs 3-6 p.m. on 630 AM.

They’ll take on the most serious issues (e.g., the Iraq war) and the most trivial (e.g., Britney Spears’ pregnant sister). It’s fun and intelligent, mostly because of the disagreements between these two very smart hosts about even the dumbest topics.

I wish they wouldn’t latch on to stuff like Ward Churchill, but their core job is entertainment, and they obviously find trivial matters in Boulder more entertaining than I do.

It also bugs me that Caplis is a right-wing Republican and Silverman is a centrist Democrat - which creates the perception that the political spectrum starts with centrism and ends with social conservatism.

Caplis is among Denver’s most right-wing pundits. If he ran for governor, as he’s threatened to do, he’d get Focus on the Family founder James Dobson’s support in a heartbeat.

Silverman outlined his history of Democratic centrism in a letter to me that’s posted on my blog (Bigmedia .org). He writes that he has an open mind, but in reality he rarely strays from the Democratic center. When he does, he usually tilts right, not left.

Surprisingly, Silverman refused to answer a single question from a long list I sent him, covering basic stuff like “Do you favor elimination of the estate tax?”

Caplis wrote me that because he and Silverman don’t “walk lock step with either political party, we cover a much broader portion of the spectrum than the typical hard-left vs. hard-right show.”

Hardly. Imagine if a local radio talk show pitted a real progressive against a guy like Caplis.

The rest.

Well, you know my fucking opinion. If the gap were any narrower, you could probably slide it in Vincent Carroll’s ass. In fact, the only difference I can discern between the two as regards foreign policy is that while Caplis would have all Muslims converted to Christianity before incineration, Silverman has a certain antipathy to proselytizing. Listening to the show is sort of like listening to Heydrich and Himmler argue logistical points.

• Drink Up playing cards.
• “It’s shite being Scottish! We’re the lowest of the low, the scum of the fucking Earth. The most wretched, miserable, servile, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate the English. I don’t. They’re just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. Can’t even find a decent culture to be colonised by. We’re ruled by effete arseholes.”
• “Chess on its highest levels, as Bobby Fischer said many years back, is a form of psychic murder.”
• “Corb Lund is obsessed with horses. I’m not sure if every song on this album mentions them, but even ‘Student Visas,’ a haunting song about a US soldier’s experience as a CIA aide to the Nicaraguan Contras, calls upon the soldier’s family heritage in the cavalry, connecting his injury in a shot-down helicopter to the helicopter’s replacement of the horse in some US Army cavalry units.”
• Vandalize Israel’s land-grab apartheid wall from afar. Well worth your money.
• “J G Ballard has ‘been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer’. As a result, and in the teeth of his personal extinction, he has written an autobiography, although part of me thinks: hasn’t he already done that, in a parallel circuit of soldered and aligned multiple fictions? But it will be a sad day when his cancer (which I understand to be shaped exactly like Richard Nixon) finally claims him.”
• “Seven shades of mis — drink, drugs, eating-disorders, dead parents, nasty parents, nice parents, growing up plain/pretty/dumb/smart; the steady drip-drip-drip of confessionals by the type of person who would, curiously, look down their snobby noses at Springer rednecks or strangers who show you their holiday snaps. And while most of us would agree that a good working definition of a raging bore is someone who tells people they don’t know their problems, for some reason these jokers seem to believe they’re pretty damn fascinating. Above all, they seem to believe that they’re in some way “brave”. But what’s so brave about not being able to hold your drink and/or drugs and then whining about it?”

Over at Salon, Gary Kamiya takes on Gloria Steinem’s doorknob-dumb argument that compared to American white women — one half of the most pampered population on the planet — black guys have it easy. (Seems Ms. Steinem missed that whole prison industrial complex thing that’s been happening over the last couple of decades. Not to mention nigh a century of poverty data.)

In effect, Steinem was arguing that sexism trumps racism as a national concern and backing that up by claiming that women in America have fewer options than black men. But this claim is flawed, as a simple thought experiment shows. Would you rather be born in the U.S. today as a white woman (to choose the most privileged subset of Steinem’s “restricted” caste) or as a black man? Few would choose to be black. More white women are not in prison than in college, thousands of young white women are not shot down on inner-city streets every year, few if any white women have ever been arrested for driving while female, and so on. Steinem’s historical arguments are unconvincing because they aren’t up to date: She ignores the exponential advances made by white women and the failure of black men to keep pace. Leaving aside her omission of Jim Crow laws, and no matter how many black men may have made it into boardrooms before women (and there weren’t too many), it was never better to be a black man than a white woman at any time in U.S. history.

If we compare only middle-class black men to middle-class white women, Steinem’s thesis gets a little stronger — but not much. There is no way to quantify these things, of course, but I would argue that middle-class black men still suffer from the legacy of slavery and racial bigotry far more than middle-class white women suffer from sexism. Only if we compare wealthy black men to poor white women does Steinem’s argument ring true.

Some critics of Steinem’s piece have argued that racism and sexism can’t be compared because they’re apples and oranges, and that she’s inciting conflict between two victimized groups and two worthy candidates. But that’s evasive. Steinem had every right to make the comparison — she was just wrong.

The rest.

You can be a white feminist and vote for Hillary Clinton. But you can’t vote for Clinton if you’ve raised a single objection to George Bush’s murderous and insane foreign policy. There is no candidate more pro torture, pro mercenary, or pro war than Ms. Clinton. Likewise, her contempt for international law, particularly that which would limit civilian casualties, is fucking unrivaled.

So, yeah, a Clinton presidency would be a token victory for wealthy white women in the United States. But it’d also be a vote for the butchery of non-wealthy non-white women, the rest of the world over.

Meaning, in a way, it’s the perfect stance for white feminists, isn’t it? A vote for Hillary Clinton helps ensure white feminist interests, while ensuring the open imperialism that ensures their over-indulged status is reinforced.

All in the name of, ahem, diversity.

Update: You won’t be surprised to hear that Clint Talbott of the Boulder Daily Camera has weighed in on the issue recently. Quoting Steinem, no less.

Which only makes sense, of course. Given that the demographic of Clint Talbott’s paper resembles nothing so much as a KKK dream community.

• Give him the evil little fucker hell, Mr. Lane.
• “Is it just me, or is there something subtly racist about gunning down mobs of angry Africans.”
• Finally, a Colorado politician I can get behind.
• “The bloodshed was epic. Orgimmar’s guards automatically waded into the crowd and slashed left and right. Poisonous snakes slithered from crevices and sank their fangs into libertarians. Ron Paul opponents charged and struck a blow for the status quo. ‘I died twice,’ says Lettuce B-Free. ‘There was so much chaos. It was a mass battle.’ But Paul’s supporters won the day, as characters breached the gates and stormed the city. The Constitution, it seems, was triumphant.”
• When I relax I feel guilty.
• Holy shit!  Clint Talbott almost took a stand!  Millionaires shouldn’t be able to arbitrarily steal other millionaires land!  (Yeah, I still don’t give a shit, except to note that Clint Talbott’s a fucking ethical moron.)
• There goes the economy.  Good riddance.

From your friends at wardchurchill.net.

As we see how Dr. King’s life and message has been sanitized for mainstream consumption, we   recall his April 4, 1967 speech at Riverside Church in NYC, “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence,” in which he said:

Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in times of war. . .

On the “why do they hate us” question of that era, King quoted a Buddhist monk:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct.   The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies.  It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat.   The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

He also quoted John F. Kennedy:  “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable,” and added that

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.

We must not only break silence, but defend those being silenced.

Click here to hear Martin Luther King’s April 4, 1967 speech.

Holocaust hucksters and racist shitheels who make their living by defrauding the poorest people in the nation.  Sounds just like Joseph Trimbach’s kind of people, don’t it?

Eight decades after the massacre, the village of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation was known mainly by its trading post.  The post was a descendant of one of the many franchises the Indian Bureau had granted white businessmen to keep Indians in food (usually rotten), clothing (usually thin), and hardware (usually frail).  General William Tecumseh Sherman had observed in the nineteenth century, “A reservation is a parces of land inhabited by Indians and surrounded by thieves,” but the trading post franchises brought the thieves onto the reservations.  The Wounded Knee Trading Post was a superior specimen.  Its owners, the Gildersleeve and Czywczynski families, had strewn billboards for seventy-five miles that announced, SEE THE WOUNDED KNEE MASSACRE SITE, VISIT THE MASS GRAVE.  POSTCARDS, CURIOUS, DON’T MISS IT!  The postcards showed slaughtered Indians, including Chief Big Foot, frozen in the 1890 snow.  The traders enlivened their commerce with beadwork, quilts and other cuious bought low from Oglalas and sold high.  A Catholic priest once watched Mrs. Czywczynski barter a beader to a stingy $3.50 for an exquisite work, then turn around and sell it for $12.00.

The traders doubled as creditors, lending their Indian patrons $10 at humble interest of $2.25 a week.  As village postmasters, they also offered a rudimentary auot-payment–opening the mail of customers who had run tabs, cashing their checks without asking, paying their bills at the post, and calling other shopkeepers across the reservation to see if debts were owed them too.  There had been calls to boycot the post, but none had worked.  The post was the only story for a dozen miles, and the many carless Oglalas of Wounded Knee had no choice but to buy groceries and other wares at its inflated prices.

Steve Hendricks — The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country.

Court Reporter gives us another example of FBI thug Joseph Trimbach’s many lies, in the comments here.

Anybody else reminded of the inspirational tale of Andrew Myrick?

Joseph Trimbach, amplified by Snapple, has made a lot noise lately about the “hostages” supposedly held by “AIM terrorists” during the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee.

Among other things left unmention in such depictions is the fact that the “hostages”—residents of the village, actually—were afforded an opportunity to leave Wounded Knee in the company of Senators James Abourezk and George McGovern very early in the confrontation. All declined, expressly to try and protect their property from damage by federal forces (Voices From Wounded Knee, 1973 [1973] pages 38-39).

In other words, having elected to remain at Wounded Knee, the “hostages” weren’t really hostages at all.

The idea that they were, and Trimbach’s/Snapple’s harping on it, is plainly designed to conjure the image of vicious “AIM terrorists” abusing a group “innocents” at Wounded Knee.

It would thus be well to consider the example of James Czywczynski, owner of the Wounded Knee Trading Post and focus of myriad complaints over the years—none of them acted upon by the FBI—of illegal business practices undertaken at the direct expense of the impoverished Indians on Pine Ridge.

Called as a federal witness during the Wounded Knee trials, “Czywczynski asserted his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination ninety-five times to inquiries from defense attorneys regarding the financial arrangements of his business” (John William Sayer, Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials [1997] page 128; citing trial transcript, U.S. v. Gilbert et al. [1974], vol. 22, pages 2488-2643).

One wonders whether, had Trimbach and his agents ever bothered to enforce against predators like Czywczynski, the actions of AIM at Wounded Knee would have been necessary.

For those of you excited to some interest about FBI thug Joseph H. Trimbach’s lies by Court Reporter’s excellent work, and who would like to continue reading, Peter Mattheisson’s In the Spirit of Crazy Horse is completely searchable on Amazon.

My favorite tidbits:

• Wherein Joseph Trimbach begs an army colonel to lead an assault on Wounded Knee. A request the colonel refuses, of course (72).
• Wherein said colonel, after speaking to Mr. Trimbach, recommends the murderous, trigger-happy motherfuckers in the FBI revoke their shoot-to-kill orders (72).
• Wherein Judge Nichol, from the Wounded Knee trials, flat-out calls Trimbach a liar (121).
• Wherein Trimbach tells yet another lie: that he had no idea AIM was even on Jumping Bull land (541).

And for those of you who have no fucking idea what the last couple of posts are about, see here:

And here: