Category Archives: Scumbag studies

Book reviews, Scumbag studies

Recent read: The Rajneesh Chronicles

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By Win McCormack, The Rajneesh Chronicles proposes to tell the story of an Indian cult’s takeover of a tiny Oregon town, the shenanigans committed by the guru’s minions, their biological terror activity and their downfall.

This interests me because my home residence was rather close to Wasco County, Oregon. I played high school sports against teams from Wasco County, shopped there, drove there for such fun as existed. The bioterror attacks harmed people I knew and liked, folk who were just going to The Dalles for dinner (typically a substandard prospect). The short version: in 1981, a guru named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh got out of India before the state turned the heat up to frying temperature, and decided to park his movement in Antelope, Oregon. Antelope only had about forty residents, its county of Wasco having about 20-25,000 residents. The Rajneeshees bought up a distressed ranch near Antelope, started building a compound, brought in over a thousand of their own people, took over Antelope by sheer electoral numbers, renamed it Rajneeshpuram, and tried to take over the government of Wasco Country. That’s where the bioterror attack came in–it was meant to keep voters from the polls. They had homebrew salmonella, and they hosed it onto public salad bars. It sickened about 750 people, with roughly forty hospitalized (a very heavy load for the local hospital). With bad timing, my family could have been among them.

The Rajneeshes were pretty sinister; imagine one of those breakaway pseudo-Mormon polygamist communities with their total control over sworn local police and politics, but larger. Supposedly, this was all about enlightenment, peace, love and such. Given how efficient the Rajneesh leaders were at milking money out of new arrivals, and how many expensive cars Rajneesh owned, looks to me like it was a big con game dressed up in cute red robes. Eventually the state of Oregon caught on, the Federal government got involved, and both started leaning on the Rajneeshees. Rajneesh himself was deported, some of his lieutenants did jail time, and Antelope got its town back–and for the first time in its history, it might actually interest the outside world. (Antelope is remote as hell.  It’s about 85 miles south of The Dalles, and the only thing nearby that would attract traffic is a resort on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation.) The nearest city is Madras, OR (which has decided not to rename itself Chennai).

Here’s what’s awful about this book. On its face, it can’t lose. It was assembled by a reporter who spent a lot of time busting out Rajneeshee shenanigans, back in the day. He was perfectly positioned to write a definitive history of the group, its activities, its people (especially the colorful and combative Sheela Silverman, aka Ma Anand Sheela), the whole story. It ought to hit the story into the nosebleed seats.

It does not. The editor/author just gathered up a bunch of old magazine articles from the Rajneesh years (many of them his own), arranged them in chrono order, added some pics, and called it a book. What is wrong with this? Think of what goes into a magazine article. An article cannot assume the reader’s familiarity with the previous events. It has to re-introduce the persons involved, define again esoteric terms, recap the story to date, and so on. In every article. Every time. What’s more, except for the front and back material, that is all the reader will receive. No ongoing analysis and interpretation, no insertion of new facts come to light in the intervening quarter century, no fullness of story. If you had an old stack of the magazines in which the articles originally appeared, you’d already have the book.

This I do not like. Every columnist, blogger or journalist who just gathers up a pile of old stuff and slaps it together into a book has cheated, because any hosehead can do that. A book meant to tell the story of an event (such as calling it ‘Chronicles’) should do just that, relating the tale in light of all relevant knowledge past and present. This could have been an excellent study in religious cults, their tendency to exaggerate leaders’ virtues and faults, and how people got sucked in. It could have been very much worth the money, especially in these days in which the threat of biological terror is taken very seriously. We could even have learned which restaurants were attacked, how it was carried out, more about what went on inside the cult, what its current ‘Osho’ diaspora thinks of it now. (They aren’t hard to find. I dated one for a year.) We could have heard stories from those who got sick.

Nope. That would be work. Other than the intro material, it’s just a bunch of old magazine articles. The source material has been mistaken for the book.

What a cheesy way to wring some modern profit from a bunch of outdated work–for which one was already paid once.

Married life, Religion, Scumbag studies, Social comment

The day we faced down the Phelps gang

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When thinking of people who have no purpose on earth but to hate and harm–real, true emotional terrorists–everyone but about fifty or so Americans agrees that Fred Phelps and his gang take the cake. Out of respect for my Christian friends, I’m not going to dignify the Phelps gang by calling them a Baptist church except in quotes (and tags). As much pain and indoctrination as real Baptists have inflicted on me in life while I was defenseless, even those involved in those abuses would not approve of the Phelps gang. Thus, I’m not cooperating with fake ‘Baptists’ in the effort to steal the title of authentic Baptists. I may not agree with much of anything that comes from the latter’s ecclesiastical leadership, but when it comes to Phelps, I’m okay singing a stanza of Onward Christian Soldiers with the real ones. (With my atrocious singing voice, they may not think of it as much of a joyful noise.)

Being a non-Christian here is actually pretty painless, because the Tri-Cities live by a quiet ethic of staying out of your face. It’s the same way with regard to homosexuality. If one doesn’t wash everyone’s face in one’s difference, and simply lives one’s life in peace, one is left in peace here. My gay, pagan and gay pagan friends living in other states tell me I shouldn’t take that for granted, and I believe them.

On 2 Feb 2007, Marine SGT Travis Pfister of Richland, WA died in Iraq. Always sad, but also an ever-present part of war. A memorial service was scheduled in early March for SGT Pfister at the TRAC (a trade show and expo center) in Pasco, to which one could presume his family, friends, and supportive community members might join in honoring his life and sacrifice. The Phelps gang announced that they were sending a picket.

Where there is a Phelps gang visit, counter-protests appear. For this one, attendance was triply obligatory. Phelps’s gang lives in my home state, in gutless Topeka which snivels and cowers before its barratry rather than taking concerted action to encourage them to find a new state. A civilized Kansan thus had to represent. Considering how many of my good friends are gayer than the 90s, I couldn’t look them in the eyes if I didn’t show up. I’m no patriot, but I respect service and sacrifice, and I don’t appreciate anyone–especially outside thugs–showing up to offend the family of someone who died keeping his oath of service. Deb, of course, was as dead set on attending as I.

We had company.

It was a pretty spring day, though I’m sure it didn’t feel springy for those who came to mourn. The law in Washington is that protests may not approach within 500′ of a funeral. The Pasco Police decided to confine the Phelps gang to a vacant lot across the street from the TRAC, well away from the main entrance and avenue of approach for mourners. A thin line of police officers manned the street with obvious reluctance, to prevent the crowd from physically tearing the Phelps gang to pieces. The air was filled with the sound of big motorcycles, for the Patriot Guard Riders had shown up with about 140 bikes. In most situations, to put it mildly, I am not a motorcycle enthusiast. For that day, I was happy to hear the rumbling sound. This organization travels around organizing counter-protests where necessary, and presumably doing other things associated with veterans’ causes. They do add a sense of muscle to the event, just by looking the way they look, not that we needed extra muscle. There were about two thousand people there, and it was a little difficult to get up the front of the police line. There was no way the family and attendees could see the protesters unless they worked at it. There was no way they could fail to see the rest of us, as there was barely room for cars to get around in the parking lot.

Across from us on the vacant lot were five pathetic individuals. I only remember a wild-haired adult male and a little girl. They were holding up their usual disrespectful signs, insulting military service, Christianity and homosexuals. What struck me was the great diversity of the crowd, a full representation of the Tri-Cities. Black, Hispanic, Asian, white; male, female, somewhere in between; straight, gay, still not sure; old, young, middle-aged; atheist, evangelical, Catholic, pagan, Mormon, Unitarian, agnostic; veteran, union, average joe or jane. At last, something we could all agree on and get together about! I am not a person for whom a sense of belonging or membership comes easily. I truly felt like part of the Tri-Cities that day, and proud to be so. We were supposed to turn our backs to them, or at least the Patriot Guard Riders tried to get us to, but not everyone did. I guess that’s the train wreck factor: it’s hard to look away.

In case you have never seen a Phelps gang protest, it works like this. They only send a small group (they’re a busy bunch, with a lot of people to offend nationwide). Their goal is to get attacked, or have some other event happen that will get them media time. If they do not get it, they lose. So they keep ratcheting up the outrage, in order to see what they can provoke, with increasingly offensive yells and signs. At the end, they had the little girl angrily stomp a U.S. flag into the dirt, which I gather is their ultimate step: if that doesn’t get them assaulted, nothing will. In this case, it didn’t. When it becomes obvious they won’t get what they came for, they leave. They may even have been gone before the family arrived at the memorial, which would be an added bonus. I think four squad cars of Franklin County Deputies escorted the Phelps gang’s car to the county line, off to whatever mission of antipathy awaited them next.

On the way home, I wondered if we’d done any good. I decided that we had. We couldn’t prevent the Phelps gang from doing what they did, but to whatever degree knowing of their presence made it worse for the family, perhaps a 400:1 support:hate ratio made it more bearable for the bereaved. It had gotten us all together, in all our different forms and ways of being and living, in good spirits. I didn’t see anyone showing disrespect for the police, who were doing a necessary and unpleasant job in a professional manner, and deserved cooperation from the good guys and gals. It must have been a moving experience for the gay counter-protesters, seeing so many of their neighbors so forcefully rejecting homophobia–which, after all, is the whole basis for this Phelps crap.

If nothing else, at least a few people learned that the Phelps gang is not representative of Kansas or Kansans. The heavy-bearded character in the KU t-shirt, looking like Gimli the Dwarf after a growth spurt, had something to say about that.

Entertainment and music, Scumbag studies, Social comment, Sports

The Pac-12 Networks, a.k.a. the Not-works

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In July 2011, with many college sports programs playing musical conferences and engaging in games of chicken with each other, the recently expanded Pacific-12 Conference (UW, WSU, the Zeroes, OSU, Utah, Colorado, Cal-Berkeley, Stepford, ASU, UA, USC and UCLA) announced plans for a TV network like what the Big 10 (which has more than ten schools) has deployed. Great, we said, we want to see more football and have our conference doing what big-time conferences do. Revenue sharing would help the smaller market schools, etc., etc. Let’s see the show!

The assumption, which we could not know was flawed, was that we would be able to see the show. In the words of the immortal, unbearable Lee Corso:  “Not so fast, my friend.”

Fourteen months later, the 2012 college football season kicks off. The Pac-12 has failed to reach agreement with just about everyone, which is a pretty good sign the conference got very greedy. A number of games are televised on the Pac-12 Not-works, but very few people can watch them on TV. A few clever souls find other ways, naturally, but only the hardest core of fans would do that. Those who do, find out that the Pac-12 Not-works have sold zero advertising, so the not-work fills the space with commercials for itself. Yes. I must have seen the Stanford swimmer’s segment a dozen times. Every few minutes, its ten viewers are treated to advertising telling us how fantastic the not-work is.

That isn’t marketing. It’s masturbation, and comical masturbation at that. Seriously: while having failed in your most basic mission, which is to get on TV so you can sell advertising, rather than spare me a bunch of commercial breaks, you are going to go on and on about your virtues? Do you not understand that when the only advertising content you have to offer is to rhapsodize yourself, you have failed? You are a conference comprised of twelve research universities, all with educational claims to fame and pride, which attract some of the best and brightest people in the world, and you leave the house without your pants? Mr. Larry Scott, you are a Harvard graduate. For the gods’ sake, put some trousers on. No one needs to see you this way.

Not that the satellite and cable providers are any prizes in the area of doing what’s best for viewers. DefectiveTV, which is what I have, engages in a ‘playground recess hair-pulling skirmish of the month’ with some content provider just about every month, taking its message to the blacked-out channels to explain how those nasty stupids at (insert network name) have been unreasonable, pulled their content, and tried to force us all to pay through the nose, but only DefectiveTV stands Promethean in defense of our fair prices and sweet reason. Yeah. When every recess, the same kid is always in a fight with someone, always comes whining, and never takes any responsibility for even being half the problem, guess what. It’s obvious where most of the problem lies.

The much-vaunted Pac-12 Networks are Not-works. They are a failure. At this point, we would be better off without them, since the games they show would otherwise be picked up on other channels, all of which seem not to consider themselves too ultra-special to get a deal worked out and be on the air.

Every year, it is a little more about pure greed and big money, and a little less about athletics and education. I will always wish UW well, but I can see a day where, if this trend continues, I simply won’t care about watching the sport. At which time I will cease to be an advertising consumer, be it for idiotic pickup truck commercials appealing to my machismo, idiotic insurance commercials appealing to my gullibility, or idiotic beer commercials appealing to my pedestrian tastes.

Mr. Scott, you and your networks are a failure.

The best ass-covering you could come up with was to blame it all on the other side, and sick your athletic directors on the public, encouraging them to switch providers. (For some of us, with no provider in our areas that carries the Not-works, a non-starter.) “Waaaaaaah! They started it! Waaaah! Punish them!”

It’s looking positively Congressional.

Just another area of America in which the stupidity of the public is taken on faith by the wealthy and powerful, and where, if said public notices something wrong and complains that ‘this is bullshit,’ the public is fed a line of crap and told to stop being difficult.

I’ll give you difficult. Mr. Scott, so far you have boloed this exercise. You are a no go at this station. You snubbed BYU/Utah, the perfect regional, rivalry and research fit for the conference, simply because a Mormon school icks out Left Coast schools, with all that honor code and right-wing political stuff–as if that were relevant at all to research or athleticism. Instead, you brought in Colorado, which is about as Pacific as Wyoming and has a minimal existing rivalry relationship with Utah. Mr. Scott, if this is how you roll, I wouldn’t hire you to manage a Division 5 conference, much less a I-A BCS conference. You have failed. The results speak for themselves. You are the John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi of collegiate athletics. Enjoy that prestigious distinction.

In the meantime, Commissioner Scott, go to hell.

Scumbag studies, Social comment

The strange story of Gary Thomas Rowe Jr.

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A great American died recently:  Sheldon Kennedy.  He infiltrated the third Ku Klux Klan in the WWII and post-WWII years, then wrote about them.  The Klan never forgave him, which made him my friend in spirit on some level.  That got me back to some re-reading in a subject that has long interested me:  the KKK and its kind.

In the mid-1970s (age 12 or so), I happened to pick up a book called My Undercover Years in the Ku Klux Klan, by Gary Thomas Rowe Jr.  In brief:  “Tommy” Rowe was a working-class Georgian who liked to fight, and who infiltrated Bobby Shelton’s Alabama branch of the KKK (at FBI instigation) during the civil rights movement.  He informed (how truthfully, we are uncertain) on the Klan until the 1965 day he was in a vehicle from which Michigan civil rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo was shot to oblivion near the Edmund Pettus Bridge, not far from Birmingham and Selma, AL. The jig was up, of course.  Rowe testified against the assassins (never quite shedding suspicion that he was among them), his cover was well beyond retrieval, and he went into Witness Protection.  He passed away in 1998.  Here is a brief catchup on his story from a biographer, a more reputable source than the NYT.

In a way, Rowe’s ghosted autobio was one of my first introductions to historiography:  how much of what he said could I believe? I wanted to believe as much of it as possible.  As the descendant of a Kansas Ku Klux Klansman (unless my grandfather lied to me in one of his last fully lucid moments, which I doubt), I have had a longtime antipathy toward their kind–and toward all such organizations.  With a little luck, they feel the same way about me.  Any time you start researching any intelligence matter–and anything to do with the FBI qualifies as such–your historiography and skepticism must kick into passing gear.  You must realize that any of your sources have axes to grind and would willingly lie like rugs, the G-Men as much as the racists.  It’s all up to what you believe credible.  The greatest handicap is to be so emotionally involved that there are sources from which you would believe nothing, and on this topic I leave some paint on that guardrail.

So, thinking of Sheldon Kennedy, I revisited The Informant.  This investigative bio of Rowe came out in 2005.  As one may imagine, so long as Rowe lived, information about him would be elusive; he had betrayed a terrorist organization whose propensity for violence and reprisal he knew as well as any man alive.  Even after his death, it wasn’t easy for Prof. May to find the full story of Tommy Rowe.  At the very least, I can re-read what he did find–and even that must be considered historiographically.  Two of Liuzzo’s living relatives call May a liar.  Whom do we believe? Now you see why history can get so fuzzy.  The sister says she didn’t talk to May.  May disagrees.  Even though the principals are still living, we still must decide who’s lying.

All right.  What do I now make of Tommy Rowe, FBI informant, known racist, thug and adrenaline junkie? There is zero doubt that he participated in violence against the civil rights movement (we’ve got pictures).  Was that justified in the name of maintaining cover? Not an easy ethical question.  Did he fire at Viola Liuzzo? He may have, in order to avoid being immediately next, which does not necessarily mean he fired accurately.  FBI agents with motive to lie said his pistol had not been fired, but that means nothing except that someone (with a motive to lie) told us that a given weapon hadn’t been used.  (His was not the only weapon in existence, of course.  Lots of Americans have more than one pistol.  Some have dozens.  Show them this .22, not that one.)  We cannot know if Rowe fired, nor how effectively. What is well documented:  whether Rowe fired effectively at Viola Liuzzo and her passenger Leroy Moton (a black civil rights volunteer), or shot to death the three other Klansman in the car as they overtook the Liuzzo vehicle, fatal violence was imminent. Someone was about to die, by his hand or another.  Rowe could not have doubted that.

One may argue that this is exactly what Lowe should have done:  three quick, calm shots, executions of backseat fellow, shotgun rider, driver.  Two seconds, three violent bigots erased.  All very well to say, except that neither I nor most of you have ever lived a double life for several years while infiltrating a hate organization.  At this remove, it isn’t so easy to lay fair judgment about Tommy Rowe; he was there, deciding on the spot, and I was not.  Blowing people away in a speeding vehicle (in which you too are riding), before they actually commit a crime, in cold blood, well…that’s asking a lot.  Rowe had no more desire to spend life in jail than anyone else, and up to the moment guns blazed, he was still in cover with a job to do.  When does the infiltrator decide that the game is over, and to change his life forever? Judging this is like judging combat veterans.  We weren’t there; they were.

To call Rowe a civil rights hero is unsupportable, but it is equally indefensible to call him a racist redneck out for only a few thrills, some government dollars and shielding for beating people up (preferably integrationists).  He did tremendous damage to the Ku Klux Klan; unless he murdered a baby doing it, that goal was valuable to any enemy of the KKK.  I don’t have to think him an admirable man to be glad he was where he was.  I think he was a moderate racist, the garden variety who knew the cant and could pass, rather than a virulent bigot who only showed up so that he could beat up blacks with Federal impunity. (You think there is no such thing as a moderate racist? Don’t let the desire to demonize racism make you forget to be careful what you wish for.  I know people who use racist language but aren’t ever going to blow up a church.  I can disapprove of their attitudes while being glad they aren’t going to commit murder.)  Meta-fact:  fear of informers was a leading paralytic to KKK violence in the civil rights era, and after Rowe, it wasn’t paranoia on the Klan’s part; the Feds truly were out to get them.  (Go Feds!)  In the end, Tommy Rowe probably prevented far more racist violence than he participated in, and did vast harm to the Ku Klux Klan.

Sometimes we have to take what we can get–unless we ourselves are willing to step up.  Who’s volunteering for such a thing? Had I not married, I might have done so–but that’s not a story I’ll ever tell in a blog.  Rowe was what the FBI could get.  I would have a very hard time constructing an argument that decency would have been better served had he told the FBI and KKK both to go to hell, or had he died before then in a car accident and we never known him.

Entertainment and music, Scumbag studies

Alestorm, and piracy

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My friend Jennifer turned me on to this Scottish pirate metal band not long ago.  A lot of metal bands can’t sing, so they seem to just smoke about eight packs of cigarettes and then sort of yell/croak.  Alestorm’s better than that, and their instrumental work is quite good.  While their lyrics are up and down at times, they’ve really grown on me.

If I had to pick an Alestorm tune to win you over, it would be Keelhauled.  If you have anywhere within you a streak of the buccaneer, you may enjoy the video and tune.

Most pirates, by the way, met pretty ugly ends.  The pirate game had very few winners.  A lot were surprisingly incompetent.  Pirate trivia:

Blackbeard (aka Edward Teach) once raided the Tidewater coast for VD meds.

William Kidd was railroaded in a miscarriage of justice.  In a fair court of law, he would have walked rather than hang.

John Taylor, a calculating sort, actually won at piracy.  In 1721 he took the Nossa Senhora do Cabo with a retiring viceroy and a fortune in diamonds, then had the sense to buy a commission in a South American navy.

While the skull and crossbones was a common motif, most pirates designed their own flags.

The sickest pirate in history might be either Edward Low (probably hanged by the French; merci) or Jean-David Nau, aka François l’Olonnais (put to a messy death by Central American Indians).  Both were prone to the kind of brutalities that would make a Gestapo interrogator wince.

The Age of Piracy was in fact a rather short one, from about the 1690s to the 1720s.

A privateer is a sort of legal pirate, essentially a hired commerce raider in wartime.  Kidd was one.  What makes a pirate a privateer is a Letter of Marque.  I think the US last issued Letters of Marque in the War of 1812, though the Confederacy handed them out like samples.  It is rumored that during World War II, at least once, someone asked President Roosevelt for a Letter of Marque.  Ron Paul (and no, I am not on his bandwagon) has seriously suggested the issuance of Letters of Marque as a way to combat Somali pirates.

Personally, I think it would be a great idea.

Some clients demand that their editors sign NDAs, evidently fearing that someone whose reputation depends upon a basic expectation of integrity would suddenly pirate or plagiarize their work. One might point out that one should worry more about whether one’s work were worth pirating than the possibility of it being pirated, but that’s a tactless response. In one case I have signed an NDA, because I understood the logic and was legitimately exposed to trade secrets essential to my client’s endeavors. Beyond that, no one has asked it of me. I guess I’d take it case by case.