Category: Crime

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Our Moral Decline

A number of things happened in the 1940’s and 50’s that created many of the social problems we have today.

Firstly, people started to do pretty well for themselves. They made money. And, thanks to the huge government subsidy of the auto industry (especially the Interstate system in the U.S.), many people could afford cars.

Secondly, developers began to build a new type of residential community: the suburb, which was designed around the principle that everyone would have a car. The suburb was located away from the downtown (cheap land), which meant a lot of people had to drive their cars around in order to get to work. Public transit doesn’t work very well in the suburbs because of all the winding streets and the low density of population.

Thirdly, effective birth control allowed families to reduce the number of children they would have. This, in turn, allowed women to re-enter the work-force more quickly. It allowed numerous families to send their children to college who otherwise couldn’t have afforded it. It changed the character of the family.

Fourth, the tax base shifted away from the inner city and out to the suburbs. As a result, city governments lost their ability to pay for the upkeep of downtown areas. These areas decayed, housing prices plummeted, the poor moved in with even more social problems, unemployment among the inner city poor soared, drug and alcohol addiction increased, and so on and so on.

In the 1960’s, this was all no secret. Sociologists and social scientists understood very well the negative effects of urbanization. Lewis Mumford wrote some sensational, amazing books on the development of cities. We studied them in high school as late as the early 1970’s. Too many people living too close together tended to develop strange behavior patterns. Most of us have heard about the girl who was raped and murdered while dozens of her neighbors leaned out of their high-rise windows and listened, and not a single one of them decided to call the police and go to help her.

The suburbs are no better. Instead of communities, where people know each other and interact with each other at local businesses, and operate schools together, and build playgrounds together, and help each other out, people barely know their own neighbors, because they can travel to see their friends, in their cars, and you don’t want to get too friendly with a person who lives just 30 feet away from your lawnmower.

But nobody could do anything about urbanization. Or was it just that we were all complicit in urbanization? We all wanted our own homes with a back yard and a driveway. And we never blame ourselves for society’s ills, so we blame hippies or blacks or other minorities, or a decline in “family values”, or softness on crime. That way, you can elect fascist leaders, give more money to the police, sentence people to thirty years in jail for possessing marijuana, and execute developmentally delayed adults for murder. This, apparently, is more satisfying to some people than reconsidering the huge subsidy to the auto industry.

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The Prison Franchise

Mike Harris wants to close down Ontario’s prisons. They are expensive and inefficient.

Whenever someone from a conservative political party says “expensive and inefficient” you know he has friends waiting to make a lot of money with a backroom deal– and he is about to announce a new privatization scheme. Sure enough, Harris wants to privatize Ontario’s prisons. He wants to pay private companies to incarcerate Ontario’s criminals.

Don’t we all believe that private companies are more efficient and effective than government? There’s something to the idea. Most private companies exist in a competitive environment. If they are inefficient or lazy or slow, they get squashed by those powerful rivals. In theory, this means that most private companies are smarter, quicker, and more responsive to changes in the marketplace than governments are.

Unless you happen to be Microsoft.

This is the simple myth that America lives by. It’s partly true. It’s also partly untrue. The U.S. has a private health care system in which hospitals, insurance companies, and doctors all compete for your business. Canada has a government-run monopoly on health services. Which system is more competitive, efficient, and cheap? Surprise! The Canadian system is at least three times more efficient than the U.S. system. Why? Because there are some advantages to a government-run monopoly. First of all, the government is able to control costs by negotiating the rates for medical procedures with the doctors. In the U.S., the market is supposed to keep doctors prices low. Right. Like you’re going to go shop around for a cancer treatment and see if you can get a discount from that “big box” medical centre out near the highway. Yes.

Secondly, there is much less duplication of services. Some U.S. cities have five or more Magnetic Image Resonance machines, each of which cost millions, and each of which sits idle most of the time.

Thirdly, the Canadian system is actually run quite well, thank you, by people who know their jobs.

Fourthly, the Canadian system doesn’t have to skim off a certain percentage of profits for greedy corporations.

Anyway, back to the prisons…

Privatizing prisons is quite popular in the U.S. there are thousands of them, run by several companies. Unfortunately, they haven’t reduced costs quite as much as expected. In fact, some studies show that they haven’t reduced costs at all. And when you think about it, why would they? A privately run prison must provide all of the same functions that a state run prison provides, plus, it must provide a profit for the owners. Now there is only one way for the owners to create that profit: and that is to run the prison more cheaply than the state does. That means less staff, less training, less programs for the incarcerated, and less medical care. Less food. Cheaper food. Smaller cells. More over-crowding. Less control.

In fact, this is what is happening to the publicly owned prisons as well. State after state is going to court to try to reclaim control of their prisons. Wait a minute… reclaim control? That’s right. They no longer control their own prisons. Why not? Because about 20 years ago, lawyers for the inmates began filing lawsuits against various state governments alleging that the prisons were so badly run, so decrepit and vermin-infested and dominated by sadistic long-term convicts that sentencing any person to spend time in them constituted “cruel and unusual punishment”. The courts investigated and agreed and seized control of the prisons. Many states still did nothing about the horrendous conditions.

Now, not only do state governments want to treat criminals like animals, they want to contract out the service of treating criminals like animals.

Unless you really believe that these corporations that own these prisons are seriously interested in rehabilitation and whatever.

The truth is this. Governments find it unpopular to treat prisoners too, too badly. Sooner or later, some muckraking journalist comes along and uncovers the dirt and then those liberals will demand reform. Or, as we have seen, the courts will step in and order expensive improvements. Some idiots actually think that prisons should have some rehabilitation programs. Some real idiots actually think that prisoners should be treated with some kind of dignity and respect, even though they have committed awful crimes.

You have to remember that when rich people commit crimes, they don’t go to prison. So when rich people privatize prisons, they know very well that no matter what, they themselves are never going to end up in one of those prisons.

So the goal of privatization is to append a flattering objective to a contemptible practice.

Now, wait a minute. If a private citizen or company locks me up in a room and threatens me and forces me to eat disgusting food and prevents from leaving…. isn’t that kidnapping? You bet. So why is not kidnapping when a private company does the same thing, even if it’s with permission from the state? How can the legal government assign rights that are normally only given to duly-constituted civil authorities to private individuals employed by a for-profit corporation?

Would it be legal for a state government to allow the mother of a murder victim to decide on and execute the punishment of the offender? It certainly would not be. But then again, never over-estimate the intelligence or ethics of twelve years of Republican-appointed judges. The Republicans have shown, over and over again, that they are willing to appoint relatively unqualified people to the position of judge if they share the “correct” ideology. Clarence Thomas, a manifestly undistinguished jurist, immediately comes to mind. And these judges, who were appointed too late to have an influence on the earlier court-ordered prison reforms, have been trying to undue their effects piece by piece. And they have ruled it is legal for a private company to hold people prisoner on behalf of the state.

I’m lazy so I don’t want to write a hundred pages about why this is a stupid idea. It just is. Sorry. I’d love to spend a week in the library so I can refer to you specific documents that show what a stupid, sorry mess the U.S. prison system is, but I have a job, so I can’t. But there’s one thing readily apparent to everyone: the Americans love to punish criminals. They love to see them suffer. They love capital punishment. They love long, long prison terms. For everyone who commits serious crimes, except the rich.

The Americans are on this vindictive schtick and it’s pure barbarism. It makes me wonder if you can even call the U.S. a civilized society. It certainly calls into question the intelligence of the average American voter. For about 30 years now, the U.S. has been throwing scores of people into prison and lengthening prison terms all in the name of being “tough on crime”. I would like just one of these people to give me an objective measure that will show us if and when this program is succeeding. When does the crime rate go down? When can you show me that it is having some positive effect? Can you show me that the benefits outweigh the costs? When will we finally see the slightest indication that we are winning the war on drugs?

They can’t and won’t because they are wrong. Longer, tougher prison sentences do not reduce crime. If they did, the U.S. would be the most crime-free nation on earth, and Canada and Europe would be infested with criminals. Instead, it is quite the opposite.

Privatizing prisons is a very bad idea. Mike Harris thinks it will save money and provide more “efficient” services to Canada’s justice system. I think it will result in scandals and abuses as these private companies try to cut costs to make bigger profits. Harris thinks, so, who cares? They’re criminals. They don’t deserve to be treated with respect or dignity.

The net result will be an increase in man’s inhumanity to man.

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Lee Harvey Oswald

Did Oswald Shoot Kennedy

No, of course not.

In 1978, Edward Jay Epstein published a book called “Legend: the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.” He tries to show that Oswald had very suspicious ties to Soviet Russia and Cuba. He doesn’t quite go so far as to say that Russia or Cuba planned Kennedy’s assassination, but he clearly lays out the groundwork for such a conclusion.

The book was published by Reader’s Digest. If that doesn’t tell you enough about it (condensed books for condensed brains), then consider that Epstein has no problem with the “magic” bullet which supposedly went through Kennedy’s neck, John Connally’s ribs, wrist, and thigh, and emerged without a mark only to appear on the wrong stretcher in Parkland Hospital, so that it could be definitively “traced” to Oswald’s rifle. Nor does he tell you that the palm print taken from the rifle, which matched it “conclusively” to Oswald, was only “found” by the FBI after the Dallas police had already concluded that the rifle bore no finger prints at all. Nor does he mention that the bullets used to kill police officer Tippit were not, in fact, traced back to Oswald’s personal handgun and that, in fact, they could not have been fired from Oswald’s gun.

But, gee, those are just facts. There’s better material in “Legend”. The best part is Epstein’s nodding and winking as he describes Oswald’s suspicious behavior in New Orleans. What did Oswald do that was so suspicious? Well, he marched around handing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets and appearing on radio stations.

Now, suppose for one minute that Oswald was, in fact, a Soviet or Cuban agent, sent to assassinate Kennedy in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs. Come on, you can do it. After all, he lived in Russia for several years and had a Russian wife. After all, he spoke fluent Russia.

So let’s say that some crazy day in 1960 or so, the KGB decided to shoot Kennedy. If you were a KGB officer, who would you choose to do the deed? Remember—if it is shown that you were behind the assassination, you would be in BIG trouble. For one thing, your own leaders would be fair game. For another thing, Cuba certainly would be invaded and re-colonized by the Americans. And of course, there was always the possibility of all-out war.

So who do you choose for this important task? Your cleverest, most experienced, most self-disciplined agent? Wrong. You choose an ex-marine defector with a Russian wife. You send him to America for a few years. You have him march around in New Orleans demonstrating and agitating on behalf of Castro’s Cuba. Then you send him down to Mexico to the Russian and Cuban embassies and have him loudly argue about getting a VISA to Cuba quickly because he can help the communists out by committing all kinds of violent crimes in the United States. You make sure the CIA gets all of this on their “hidden” cameras with the telephoto lenses.

Epstein is an idiot. His book is remarkable not because it defends the Warren Commission but because it simply pretends that none of the weird things about the Kennedy assassination even exist. In the thirty years since Kennedy’s death, most of the basic, confusing facts remain confusing. Part of the problem is that there are a lot of nut cases on both sides. But considered simply and directly, these facts certainly raise suspicions.

Oswald was a pretty smart guy who spoke fluent Russian, married a Russian woman, defected to Russia, defected back to the U.S., agitated for Cuba, tried to re-defect to Russia in October, 1963, worked at a map printing company that did secret work for the U.S. military, and sent a very, very strange note to a man named Hunt shortly before the assassination. He would have been a monumentally stupid choice for the Russians or Cubans to assassinate Kennedy.

Oswald is repeatedly described as having “fled” the scene. If he had been trying to escape Dallas, he could have gotten into a taxi at any time and driven off. Instead, he went home, and then to a movie theatre. He retrieved a pistol on the way. Think about these actions. If you had just shot the President of the United States from the building you worked in, would you go back to your home?

Witnesses to the Tippit shooting persistently denied that the man they saw was Oswald. Yet the FBI and the Dallas police continue to insist that the man they saw was, indeed, Oswald. Witnesses reported being harassed by investigators when they did not report the “correct” version of Tippit’s shooting.

Epstein believes that the problem with the magic bullet is easily solved. He simply decides that Oswald started firing sooner, while Kennedy was still out of view. Even the Warren Commission couldn’t be so bold, because the Zapruder film shows rather definitively that Oswald did not fire before the limousine drew behind the freeway sign.

The pristine bullet cannot have been the same bullet that shattered Connally’s wrists and ribs. It simply can’t. It was planted on the stretcher in the Dallas hospital (the wrong one, apparently) to implicate Oswald.

Oswald was spotted drinking a coke and having his lunch about 40 seconds after the last shots were fired. It is barely possible for a man running full speed to make the distance from the sixth floor window to the 2nd floor lunch room in that time. But according to several witnesses, including a police officer, Oswald looked cool, calm, and quiet, as if he’d been standing there for some time.

No fingerprints were found on the rifle at all. The FBI, much later, claimed to have found a palm print on the stock, underneath the barrel. This was after the Dallas police had already stated publicly that there was no fingerprints on the weapon. So Oswald wiped the gun clean of prints and made it down to the cafeteria in 40 seconds?

Shortly after the shooting, the police asked the manager of the warehouse for a list of all missing employees. We are told that it was found that only one employee was missing: Lee Harvey Oswald. In fact, several employees were missing, but the police announced that they were searching only for Oswald.
The police obtained Oswald’s address from the Depository and broadcast it to all the police officers in the vicinity. The trouble is, this address, Elsbeth St., had been Oswald’s address six months earlier, before he began to work at the Book Depository. The address he had given to the Book Depository, and which was recorded in his employee file, was different. Where then, did the police really obtain this address from?

Jack Ruby was able to walk through a large group of police officers right into the basement of the police station, precisely at the moment that Oswald was emerging from the cell area, and shoot him precisely where underworld assassins shoot someone they really want to kill efficiently: in the stomach, the vital organs. By doing so, he ensured that no trial would take place, during which the evidence, and Oswald’s links to the intelligence services, would have been probed.

Just imagine a good defense attorney analyzing the Warren Commission’s single bullet theory, in court. Just imagine hearing all the witnesses testify that they heard shots and saw smoke coming from the grassy knoll. Just imagine a thorough dissection of the planning of the parade route, the actions of Roy Kellerman or William Grier – the slow-footed driver of the limo—and the rest of the secret service agents who had been up late the previous night partying. Imagine a thorough discussion of how and why Oswald obtained a job printing spy photographs considered top secret by the U.S. military just months before the assassination. If Oswald was a “lone nut”, he was the most well-connected lone nut in history. Imagine parading the Parkland doctors up to the stand to testify, as they did to the media immediately after the shooting, that the fatal bullet entered Kennedy’s forehead, not the back of the head, and that the throat wound was one of entry, not exit. Imagine a Grand Jury digesting the fact that the Parkland doctors were all deeply experienced with gunshot wounds, while J. Humes, the autopsy surgeon, had almost no experience in that area. Imagine how quickly a defense lawyer would have noticed that the frames of the Zapruder film, reproduced in Life Magazine, and in the Warren Commission Report, had been placed out of order, so that, coincidentally, they appeared to show Kennedy’s head snapping forward with the fatal shot, rather than backwards as it really did. Image a cross-examination on the question of why no finger-prints were found on the rifle, though Oswald could not have had enough time to wipe them off and run down to the second floor cafeteria on time to be spotted and questioned by a police man 40 seconds after the last shots were fired.

The lead attorneys for the Warren Commission, relying primarily on evidence supplied to them by the FBI, consistently ignored, degraded, or ridiculed any evidence that did not fit the preconceived “lone nut” and “single-bullet” theories of the assassination. The Commission report is riddled with omissions and inconsistencies, but the most glaring problem is the way eyewitness testimony is presented as reliable and demonstrative when it supports the Commission’s conclusions, and then ridiculed as unreliable and conjectural whenever it does not. Witnesses who saw a single gunman in the sixth floor window are triumphantly presented as damning proof of Oswald’s guilt. But other witnesses saw shooting from behind the grassy knoll, and saw bullets hit the curb (which would have meant more than three shots were fired) and saw a second man in the same window. In other words, the Commission’s only standard of truth was that which corresponded to its preferred theory of how and why the assassination took place. It was not an investigation at all. It was a rubber stamp. As a result, even people who believe the Commission’s conclusions do not bother defending the Commission report itself.

Top cabinet officials were on a plane bound for Japan at the moment of the assassination. White House communications were cut shortly afterwards. Neither of these two elements by themselves are suspicious, but, taken together with the other facts, they are positively eerie.

After years of reading just about everything there is to read about the Kennedy assassination, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a lot of nuts out there who derive perverse satisfaction in proving to themselves that everyone, from the CIA to the KGB to the Mafia were all involved in Kennedy’s assassination. Possibly the worst expression of that view would be Oliver Stone’s movie hodgepodge, “JFK”, which combined every theory from the lunatic fringe into one incoherent, rambling, and chaotic film.

David Lifton, in “Best Evidence”, tackled the autopsy itself, at Bethesda Naval Hospital, and suggests that a brilliant team of conspirators managed to alter the body between Dallas and Washington, so that it appeared as if Kennedy was struck from behind. He goes too far. His mistake is that he believes that the conspirators were capable of such meticulous and foolproof planning. I don’t think the conspirators would have had any way of guaranteeing themselves access to the body for a sufficient length of time to accomplish the deed. It’s too preposterous. But he also believes that the body was “altered” to show that shots had come from behind. There’s no need to grasp at straws here—the existing autopsy report is riddled with inconsistencies.

The truth is that Lee Harvey Oswald, displaying not the slightest inclination for leftist politics, joined the marines. While he was with the marines, he was probably recruited by one of the U.S. intelligence services. He was trained in the Russian language. He began to publicly criticize capitalism and the American government in a way that seems utterly bizarre and ostentatious, unless, again, you assume there is some covert reason for him to make himself known as a communist. Then he “defected” to Russia. He tried to convince the Russians that he had information about spy planes to sell them. The Russians smartly realized that he was a plant and ignored him, even after he married a Russian woman named Marina. Having failed in this subterfuge, the American intelligence agency pulled him out by having him “renounce” his “defection”.

Back in the U.S., Oswald, who probably only married Marina as part of his cover, lived alone, and did a lot of strange things. He demonstrated on behalf of Cuba, but also tried to join a Cuban anticommunist organization. His office was in the same building and adjacent to an office used by men with direct links to U.S. intelligence agencies, including Guy Bannister. He had regular contacts with the FBI and other U.S. federal government agencies. (After he was arrested for distributing leaflets, and FBI agent came to see him and spent more than an hour talking to him in jail.) He briefly worked for a coffee company in New Orleans that would later sent a raft full of employees to NASA!

It should be noted that Marina did not tell the Warren Commission what it wanted to hear, until months after the assassination, after intensive questioning by the FBI, the Dallas Police, and other government agents. Members of the Warren Commission thought she was lying, because her story varied so much from the initial interviews. Their mistake was that they assumed she had lied in the beginning, and not after months of police harassment. Oswald’s mother, Marguerite, insisted that her son had been working for the government. She too was coached by the investigators until she, sort of, got the story right.

Then, in Dallas, Oswald worked for a printing company that received contracts from U.S. military intelligence, printing photos taken by spy planes. He offered to kill Castro for the U.S., and then offered to commit terrorist acts for Cuba. And so on, and so on. None of these activities make any sense unless you believe that Oswald was working for U.S. intelligence and the general plan was to have him infiltrate communist organizations or governments, and that when these plans failed, they periodically came up with other tasks for him, the purpose of which he himself probably barely understood. Shortly before the assassination, he sent a plaintiff note to a Mr. “Hunt”, begging for an opportunity to discuss his “situation”.

Then the purpose becomes clear. Think about it. If a real “lone nut” had shot Kennedy, and escaped, the entire nation would have turned every stone searching for him. There would have been a huge investigation. There would have been powerful suspicions. There would have been grave questions about the changes in policy Johnson introduced—especially towards Viet Nam. Perhaps the Secret Service would actually have been require to fire their incompetent agents, including William Grier who, upon hearing shots fired, put on the brakes!

There might have been an inquest, a trial, deeper investigations by a Grand Jury. If the slightest substantiated suspicion had fallen upon Naval Intelligence or the FBI or the Secret Service, the political dynamic of the entire decade would have changed. People would have demanded that someone “clean up” the government agencies suspected of involvement.

The best way to dissipate such suspicions is, of course, to throw suspicion elsewhere, and to convince the public that a single “lone nut” committed the crime. Now remember, you have to think about how it was planned, now how it actually turned out. In my view, the assassination was actually botched, and came out far messier than the conspirators had planned. The Zapruder film, for example, caused grave complications, for it provided a precise time-line of the sequence of shots.

In any case, the plan was for Oswald to be positioned where he could be made the patsy. Perhaps he had been ordered to guard the sixth floor of the Depository on the day of Kennedy’s trip. Oswald had already begun to realize he was being set up, but had no idea of what for.

If Oswald was indeed employed by the U.S. intelligence community, it would not have been difficult for the conspirators to position him in the building, direct suspicion towards him, supply the police with incriminating evidence, and arrange for him to be shot while “resisting arrest”.

The real shooter is on the sixth floor, but there is also quite likely someone behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll. They fire roughly at the same time, when Kennedy is in the best position for the shot from the grassy knoll, the best possible location for a fatal shot. The shooter in the Depository escapes in a Nash Rambler, as several witnesses suggested, while protected by numerous other agents. The shooter behind the picket fence disposes of his weapon and then joins a group of “hoboes” in a nearby railway car. Other conspirators, identifying themselves as FBI agents or Secret Service agents, prevent witnesses and police from following him quickly enough to identify the suspect, but witnesses from the the overpass see the puffs of smoke and locate the source of the shots, and find cigarette butts and footprints behind the fence.

Oswald’s background as a communist defector is ideal. The police and FBI—who despise Kennedy– immediately understand that the U.S. government will not want to go to war with the Soviet Union, so they downplay Oswald’s communism and play up the “lone nut” theory. So the conspirators correctly surmised that they could have their cake and eat it too. Top government officials could suspect that the Soviet Union was actually involve, while conveniently ignoring the implications and tacitly approving the Warren Commission’s conclusions.

The Warren Commission wishes only to placate an anxious electorate. It is clear from the notes and minutes of their meetings that nobody on the commission had a serious interest in uncovering any new facts. Nobody seriously wanted to suggest, at any time, that a conspiracy exists. Failing to kill Oswald at the movie theatre—too many police officers and witnesses around, probably—the conspirators arrange for Jack Ruby to burst into the Dallas police station at the exact moment Oswald is being moved. Ruby himself dies of cancer four years later after alluding to dark plots and explosive revelations.

My suspicion is that the FBI was not directly involved but it was well-known that Hoover hated Kennedy and liked Johnson—he was frequent dinner guest at Senator Johnson’s home in the 1950’s—so the FBI could be counted on to cooperate. In January, 1964, Johnson appointed Hoover head of the FBI for life, in spite of the fact that he was beyond the age of compulsory retirement. This was Hoover’s fondest wish. Reporters who knew Johnson well were astonished. They had understood that Johnson knew that Hoover was a dangerous, excessively powerful bureaucrat. Why would he extend his term?

The effects of Kennedy’s assassination are, of course, illuminating.

  • The Viet Nam war continued, as Johnson rescinded Kennedy’s decision to withdraw.
  • The military-industrial complex grew much, much bigger and richer.
  • A conservative Democrat replaced a liberal Democrat.
  • The CIA, which Bobby Kennedy had been trying to control, was given a free-hand to continue it’s sponsorship of various coups and insurgencies around the world.
  • The cold war grew more intense.
  • The oil companies (including several owned by the powerful Hunt family) grew rich.

Does it seem all that unlikely that the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy were also part of a continuing strategy to maintain real control of the U.S. government?

Richard Nixon, who was in Dallas on the day of the assassination, may have benefited the most from Kennedy’s death. He eventually became President himself, of course. But I doubt he was a conscious part of the conspiracy. In fact, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Nixon later on tried to take on the same elements of the intelligence community that conspired to assassinate Kennedy, and lost, big time. Except that this time, instead of having his brains blown out, he was impeached, and Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren Commission (yes, he did!), became President. Since then, it’s been Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Carter and Clinton, like Johnson, are conservative Democrats. Reagan and Bush are Republican. There has not been a “liberal” president since Kennedy, and Kennedy was a moderate liberal at best. Johnson was a liberal on domestic social policy, but an unregenerate hawk on the war in Viet Nam, and military policy.

I believe the conspirators grew wiser, and, noting the continued obsession with John Kennedy’s assassination, realized that their goals could be achieved with less risk, by simply destroying, politically, those it believed were a genuine threat to their control, and buying off the rest. The result is a striking trend in the U.S. economy that shows wages for the average work as completely stagnant for the past twenty years, while over-all wealth has increased by an incomprehensible margin.

The long-term result of Kennedy’s death is what we live with today. This bizarre infatuation with huge, expensive weapons, by governments that declare that they are obsessed with reducing taxes. The inability of either party to nominate a genuine outsider for the office of President. The vastly overblown Lewinsky scandal. Colin Powell. Large, expensive military bases that remain open though they have no military purpose. Congress voting budget increases to the Pentagon that the Pentagon did not request. All very strange.

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Numbers Sanctify

One of the biggest problems with movies these days is the fact that so few of them are truly subversive, in any sense of the word. That’s right. Films today are not subversive enough.

We live in a screwy society. Rich criminals get to drive their limousines to the golf course. Poor criminals spend decades in filthy, violent prisons. The Third World sends the First World more cash in debt repayments than we send them in foreign aid. Schools are allowed to shove advertising down the throats of our students. Everyone sues each other over the slightest problem. What we need is something that undermines this state of affairs. We need more subversion, not less.

Oh, many directors like to see themselves as subversive, or at least, “shocking”. But these days, “shocking” refers almost exclusively to special-effects enhanced gore and splatter, or frontal nudity. “Natural Born Killers” comes to mind. For all the pompous strutting about by Oliver Stone, proclaiming, with every jiggly camera angle, with his incoherent script, and abrupt uneven edits, that this film “rocks”, “Natural Born Killers” is an utterly conventional film. The police generally behave like the criminals because our society believes that that’s the only way to deal with criminals, and the media try to exploit both sides. Everyone is trying to get something, and the preferred strategy is confrontation and violence. Instead of challenging the viewer’s assumptions about reality, “Natural Born Killers” merely affirms our most paranoid assumptions. It is an utterly boring film. It is a conformist film. Most people would walk out of the theatre without a single new thought in their heads.

Critics frequently toss around adjectives like “bold” and “shocking” when some new film reaches for new heights of explicit violence or sex. What is bold or shocking about that? It has been almost 30 years since “Bonnie and Clyde”, with its celebrated slow-motion machine-gunning of Beatty and Dunaway in that elegiac last scene. Since then, it’s been largely more and more of the same, to the point where explicitness can no longer be said to be subversive at all. Even drug movies, like “Trainspotting”, really don’t tread any ground that hasn’t already been stampeded through by “Midnight Cowboy”, “H”, “Drugstore Cowboy”, “Sid and Nancy”, or even “Days of Wine and Roses”. Been there, done that. What else can you show me?

There are a few, of course. Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”. Todd Solondz’ “Happiness”. Maybe “Bulworth”. But “Brazil”, as imaginative and original as it is, still ends up telling us something we already know: mindless bureaucracies suppress individual freedoms. “Happiness” is more interested in personal emotional fulfillment than society. “Bulworth” suggests that the fundamental institutions of our society need merely be reformed.

You might be surprised to learn that one of the most subversive films ever made in the United States is almost 50 years old. It is Charlie Chaplin’s “Monseiur Verdoux”.

“Monseiur Verdoux” is based on the life of the infamous Henri Desire Landru, the French serial killer. Landru seduced over 400 women and murdered 10 of them. He was executed by guillotine in 1922.

Orson Welles thought it would be interesting to make a film of his life and suggested the idea to Chaplin. Chaplin fictionalized the story somewhat, to suit his own purposes (he wanted explicit links to the depression and World War II). But the most sensational aspect of the case remains intact: a supposedly rational, ordinary man makes a business out of marrying wealthy spinsters and widows so he can murder them and keep their money. The real Landru disposed of the bodies, sometimes, in an outdoor stove. So does Chaplin’s Verdoux. Neighbors in both accounts noticed the smoke for days but thought that nothing was amiss.

In Chaplin’s version, Monsieur Henri Verdoux is a former petty clerk at a bank with a charming wife (Chaplin, in one of his rare misjudgments, put her in a wheel chair—are we supposed to feel more warmly towards him now?) and young child. He lived a honorable, petty little life in the South of France until the faceless administrators at the bank decided to restructure and he was tossed out of his job. Until this point in his life, he resembled T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who “measured out” his life “in coffee spoons”.

Facing dire poverty, Verdoux picks himself up and goes into a different business. He travels around France seeking and seducing wealthy married women. After a time, he murders them and takes their property. He invests most of the money into land and the stock market, and supports himself and his family on a modest scale. He clearly sees this activity as nothing more than an extension of business to its’ logical conclusion, the way, as Chaplin described it, Clemenceau saw war as an extension of diplomacy. His family thinks he is a traveling salesman.

At one point, Verdoux, experimenting with a new poison, picks up a waif from the street. The script called for a prostitute, but the studio opposed that idea (this was the post-Fatty Arbuckle era of the Hayes Office and Hollywood’s voluntary repression of vice in the movies), so Chaplin had to make due with subtle suggestion. As he prepares a meal for the girl, with a poisoned glass of wine, Verdoux questions her about her life, expecting to find her hopelessly pessimistic. Instead, she is happy. She thinks life is wonderful. And she is optimistic. She is convinced that life is going to get better for her. Verdoux changes his mind, gives her a few francs, and sends her on her way.

It wouldn’t be Chaplin without the physical comedy. His attempts to murder one wife (played by the inimitable Martha Raye before she became a parody of herself and started doing Bounty ads on tv) are constantly interrupted. He takes her out into a lake (she can’t swim) and is about to toss her overboard when a group of yodelers appears. He mixes her some poison, but the maid thinks it’s peroxide and uses it on her hair. Finally, he smothers or strangles her (off camera) and cheerfully takes her money, sells her house, and moves on to his next conquest. It is his urbane self-possession here that viewers find most offensive. He is no madman, no self-loathing sexual pervert. Merely a businessman conducting his “business” with the same ruthlessness with which his superiors at the bank liquidated him.

There is a charming scene of Verdoux checking with a flower girl about some bouquets he’s been sending to a prospective victim. He phones the woman from the shop and rhapsodically proclaims his complete and passionate devotion to her. The flower girl, over-hearing, becomes breathless and can hardly tell him his change.

But Verdoux’s luck eventually changes. The stock market crashes and he is wiped out. His wife and child die—we aren’t told exactly why, but can presume he couldn’t afford medical care or adequate food or housing anymore.

Years later, we see an embittered Verdoux on the street. His face is a mask of dark sorrow and cynicism. A beautiful woman in a limousine recognizes him and calls his name. It is the prostitute. She is now married to a rich and successful munitions manufacturer. Grateful for his earlier kindness to her, she takes him out for lunch at an exclusive restaurant. Unfortunately, he is also recognized by another guest, the brother of one of his victims. The police are called and Verdoux is arrested.

At his trial, Verdoux is described by the prosecutor as a monster, a savage beast of relentless fury and remorseless cunning. Verdoux thanks the prosecutor for his compliments but claims he is not worthy of them. He catalogues the atrocities of recent and imminent wars and notes that Generals are awarded medals and described as heroes for murdering millions. In comparison, he is a mere “amateur”. He says, “numbers sanctify”. He smiles at the judge and jury and tells them, with horrifying prescience, that they will all be joining him very soon. For my money, it’s one of the great moments in film.

“Monsieur Verdoux” was pulled from the theatres after two weeks of savage criticism from the church, the public, and the media. Chaplin himself was driven out of the country and had his visa revoked a few years later (he had never become an American citizen) and lived the rest of his life in exile in Switzerland. Ironically, one of the issues raised was his support of the Soviet Union. This support was given during speeches he made in support of the war effort at a time when the Soviet Union was an official ally of the United States in the war with Germany! This was of a piece with the outrages that prompted Joseph Welch’s famous, “at long last, have you no shame?”

Why did Chaplin make such an offensive film? Why would anyone want to dramatize the life of a blue beard and scoundrel?

Chaplin saw, in Verdoux, the personification of the ruthless practices of big business corporations in the U.S. and Europe. Things haven’t changed much. Read through any Time Magazine or any newspaper and you will see that rich, successful businessmen like Bill Gates and Donald Trump—no matter how ruthless or greedy they are—are routinely worshipped and admired. Furthermore, it is very clear that when the rich swindle stockholders or investors out of millions of dollars, they never serve a day in jail—in fact, they never even give up their limousines and four-star hotels, even if they owe millions–whereas the poor are locked up and brutalized without a second thought.

Chaplin, having grown up in poverty himself, was acutely aware of these injustices. “Monseiur Verdoux” is simply a dramatization of the same ethics that drove Bill Gates to a fortune of billions applied on a more personal, immediate level, without the layers of lawyers and bureaucrats and advertising agencies that cushion today’s executives from the consequences of their policies.

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With bimbo cheerleaders like Time Magazine and the Wall Street Journal waving their pom-poms from the sidelines, we have all come to accept that it is appropriate and right for businesses to operate in a cut-throat fashion, in order to ensure that the stock markets rise and profits increase and men like Bill Gates become fabulously wealthy—wealthy beyond the means of any sane man to ever possibly indulge. What happens to all those workers who are down-sized? How many families are disrupted? How many divorces? How many suicides? What about the damage to the environment? Why are governments using tax dollars to clean up the toxic wastes generated by profitable private corporations? Why are people being cut off from welfare while the government awards billions in tax subsidies to the wealthy shareholders of corporations like Boeing, or major league baseball teams?

Numbers sanctify. It is probably the most subversive film ever made in America.

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Exploiting a Tragedy

It might have been a wonderful story. Well, not a “wonderful” story. It’s a horrible story, actually. But part of the story would have been very appealing to a certain constituency: when one of the teenage killers at Columbine High School held a gun to the head of Cassie Bernall and asked her if she believed in God, she courageously said “yes”. Then he blew her away.

Oh wait. What do you mean “might have been a wonderful story”? Didn’t it happen?

The Christian community in the U.S. has seized upon this incident. It has a lot of appealing elements for them. First of all, Cassie was a young, attractive teenage girl. She had gone through a rebellious stage, including, allegedly, some dabbling in witchcraft, but her parents had straightened her out by sending her to a strict “program” at West Bowles Community Church. She wore a “What would Jesus do” bracelet. She carried a bible to school every day and was reading it at the moment the carnage began. She confessed her faith in words loud enough to be heard by her cowering classmates, though she knew it might mean her life.

So the story seems to provide a little of everything. Cassie was courageous because she confessed her sin. When she had rebelled, her parents no-nonsense, “tough love” measures worked. She carried a bible to school, where, of course, thanks to the godless liberals and feminists, prayer and bible study is no longer permitted. She was murdered by two young boys who were heavily immersed in video games, violent Hollywood movies, and rock’n’roll. Most importantly, she was murdered because she was a Christian. Because America turned it’s back on God when it banned prayer in school.

The latest fad among the ultra-right in the U.S. is to assert that they are now a persecuted minority. In a perverse way, this is the rationale they now use to assert their traditional privileged status in society. They claim that they are the only religion not allowed to have prayers in school (ignoring, with twisted logic, the fact that no other religion ever had a large enough constituency to even attempt to assert such a right in the first place, and ignoring the fact no other religion is or ever was allowed to lead classes or assemblies in prayer at any time).

It’s a story that plays into the social and political attitudes and platitudes of the Christian right.

The trouble is, the story is not exactly true. Well, it’s not true at all, essentially.
The report originated with one of the boys who was in the library, and who survived the assault. He was the brother of Rachel Scott who was killed outside of the school. He told the police that he heard the conversation and recognized Cassie’s voice.

The police later tried to verify the story. They took Mr. Scott through the library, as part of the process of meticulously reconstructing the sequence of events at Columbine. When Mr. Scott showed them where Cassie had been during the exchange, the police knew that the voice did not come from Cassie Bernall. Cassie’s body had been found in a different location. In fact, Cassie had been hiding under a table with Emily Wyant, quite some distance away from all of the other students. This is information that is not difficult to confirm.

This much is true. The gunman—most likely Dylan Klebold—asked a girl if she believed in God. The girl was not Cassie Bernall but Valeen Schnurr. Valeen did indeed answer yes, courageously, yes. But the gunman did not shoot her. In fact, he allowed Valeen, who was seriously wounded, to crawl away, without further harm.

What does it mean?

What does it mean?

The Christian community has adopted Cassie Bernall as a symbol of all that is forthright and courageous and virtuous in America, just as they have come to see Klebold and Harris as icons of deviance, immorality, and godlessness. Every hero needs a villain. Even Valeen Schnurr says she doesn’t mind that this spurious story circulates because it might bring someone to Jesus. Meanwhile, she has come under some abuse herself by “Christians” who are upset at her for disabusing them of their congenial myth.

So, she goes along with the silent consensus here among people who should know better: a little lie can be excused if it furthers the greater good.

I have trouble with this. So some minister is going to tell the story of Cassie Bernall at an evangelical service somewhere and fifteen young people, as a result of the story, will come to the front to pledge their lives to Jesus. No harm done? Not if they find out some day that Christian leaders knowingly perpetuated a lie? No harm done when reputable scholars and writers and journalists are aware of the deceit and draw negative conclusions about the integrity and honesty of the Christian community as a result? No harm done when a Christian congressman like Asa Hutchinson stands up in Congress and argues for a bill and some wavering delegate sits and listens and thinks, “Well, this is the guy who still goes around flogging the story of Cassie Bernall even though he should know better….”

If Christianity is true, would it’s adherents willfully lie about a thing like this?  If Christianity means something to its adherents– if it means anything– why does this happen, often?

 

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Just Say No

Universities in Canada got 60% of their funding from the government in the 1960’s. Now they get 40%. The rest comes from tuition and corporate donations.

The Corporate sponsorship is disturbing.

Apparently, according to the Canadian Association of University Professors, many of these agreements are secret, especially in regard to intellectual property rights. It was this kind of agreement that led to the University of Toronto trying to silence researcher Nancy Oliveri when her research showed that there might be harmful side effects of a drug produced by Apotex.

In a related story, a professor at McMaster University imposed a new policy on all researchers at that facility: no meetings with representatives of drug companies. Why? Because he felt that medical research was becoming compromised by the intermingling of the interests of the drug companies with those of the universities and the medical profession itself.

Perhaps the most laughable slogan of the entire 1980’s was pet phrase of Nancy Reagan’s: “Just say no to drugs”. Just say no to drugs? Ritalin! Valium! Prozac! Viagra! Lithium! Etc. Etc. Etc. We are the most drug-addled society on earth! Say “no”? And bring the stock market crashing down?!

Our society loves drugs. Institutions love them because violent patients can be sedated into harmless mindless sacks of inert flesh. Doctors love them because they provide convenient and speedy personality modifications to persistently annoying patients, and spare them the aggravating ordeal of actually trying to find a real remedy. Drug companies love them—naturally—because they provide incredible profits, since they can charge far in excess of the actual cost of the chemicals in the prescription, to cover—ha ha—research and development. Research scientists love them because drug companies provide them with millions of dollars to conduct research to arrive at just that conclusion (and if they don’t reach that conclusion—see above—the money is withdrawn).

So what’s with this “just say no” campaign? Well, you see, those poor inner city blacks don’t play by the rules. First of all, their drugs don’t include a healthy royalty to some large pharmaceutical firm (just imagine their apoplexy had Nancy Reagan added—”and let’s all try to do with a little less Prozac and Valium ourselves, shall we?”). Secondly, they haven’t developed this wonderful rationale of how stressed out they all are and how they’ve all seen so many psychiatrists and been to all the doctors and just can’t get over this severe depression that’s been limiting their ability to work, you know… The truth is this: in the U.S., blacks constitute 14% of the drug-using population, but they constitute 58% of those convicted for drug use. Look at those numbers carefully. Think of all the movies and tv shows you see about drugs and crime. Think about the reality. The war on drugs is the war on black America. And this war cost $18 billion a year (Harpers Magazine, November 1999). And it is the most one-sided debacle in U.S. history. It has been lost over and over again but America continues to fight it because it’s a winner as an election issue.

It is at moments like this I feel somewhat pessimistic about the human race.

There is a pretty good argument to be made that marijuana, especially, is illegal today because it provides the same sort of hit that Prozac and Valium provide, but at much, much less cost. In fact, you could grow it yourself in your backyard, if the police would let you. A similar argument could be made for cocaine. So, even though I feel pessimistic, I must admit that there are signs of hope. In seven states, voters have indicated, by substantial margins, that they approve the use of marijuana for medical purposes. Representative Bob Barr, in fact– he of impeachment fame– used some nefarious and obscure loopholes to prevent the results of the vote in the District of Columbia from becoming known. When it was finally released, 70% of the voters supported medical use of marijuana. But Mr. Democracy, Bob Barr, has blocked the implementation of the law on a technicality.

It might strike you as surprising that it is only recently in human history that drugs like Cocaine and marijuana have been made illegal. The prohibition of these and other “recreational” drugs coincides perfectly with the rise of the large pharmaceutical companies (who also tried to ban or hobble sales of herbal remedies).

Ah, you say—but aren’t those evil, illegal drugs addictive? Precisely. Why some of them are almost as addictive as, say, lithium. In fact, many of the heavy duty, most frequently-prescribed pharmaceuticals are at least equally addictive.

So what am I saying?

First of all, I am not saying that drug use is good. Get that clear. I don’t drink more than two or three beers a YEAR myself. I dislike anything that messes with your mind. And I certainly don’t use any prescription drugs and whenever I hear of someone who is depressed or disturbed, I hope they find some way to deal with problems that does not involve pharmaceuticals.

However, just as Prohibition of alcohol failed, the war on drugs has failed. And just as most people came to realize that Prohibition did more damage than good, people should come to realize that the war on drugs does more harm than good. The war on alcohol produced powerful criminal organizations that branched out into prostitution, gambling, and murder. Does that sound familiar?

As shocking as the idea sounds, the fact is that some countries have already tried legalizing drugs. In Holland, marijuana and hashish are freely available. And surprise, surprise, more adolescents try marijuana in the U.S. than they do in Holland!

That drugs like cocaine and marijuana should be legal? Well, think about it. Alcohol, in terms of sheer quantity, does far more damage to our society than marijuana. Yet it’s perfectly legal. In fact, it is downright easy for any teenager to get a six pack or a bottle of wine.

We did try banning alcohol once too. Of course, we all know how disastrous that was, and how it led to the development of powerful criminal organizations in North America that branched out into other forms of crime and plagued our society for years afterwards. Does that sound familiar?

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court, featuring embarrassingly second-rate minds like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, appointed during the twelve years of Republican Administrations between Carter and Clinton, have been steadily eroding constitutional rights protecting citizens from “unreasonable search and seizure”. Police in helicopters can now peer inside your windows, and officers can search your car just because they feel like it. What does this mean? In California, according to Harper’s, an elderly grandfather was shot twice and killed by police who burst into his house in a hail of gunfire searching for a suspect who had lived next door fifteen years earlier. In New York, a mentally retarded, menstruating young girl was dragged naked from the shower and hand-cuffed while police searched the house. Again, no drugs were found.

Nor were any apologies offered. Why should we apologize? We’re the police! We’re in a war on drugs! You don’t apologize to civilian casualties during a war!

And those two cases are just the tip of the ice berg. Under the Supreme Court’s relaxed rules on search and seizure, it has become very profitable for police to pull suspects over the side of the road, seize their cars and property, and leave it to the hapless citizen to “prove” that the property was not used for the purpose of drug-dealing. Not every citizen is smart enough to respond within the 10 days allowed, or rich enough to afford a lawyer, or patient enough to challenge the constipated U.S. criminal court systems. It’s easier, quicker, and safer to please guilty to a reduced charge and turn snitch, thereby providing the police with fresh leads on new property to seize.

It’s utterly incredible, contemptible, and outrageous. Why isn’t this on the front pages of the newspapers, the lead story on television?

Because there’s no sex.

Hollywood stars can afford lawyers.

Everyone has been convinced by successive administrations that drugs is the number one problem in our society and nobody– not Al Gore, not George Bush Jr., not Bill Bradley, not even John McCain– has the guts to stand up to his juggernaut of imbecilic brutality.

 

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Software Police

All over the civilized world, the software police– at taxpayer’s expense– are invading homes and the offices of Internet Service Providers, warrants in hand, to shut down those evil, pernicious, dangerous, malevolent software pirates.

That’s the way the world works. The lawyers for a big company like Microsoft or Lotus calls the police. They say, “arrest that man– he’s stealing our software!” The police say, “yes sir!” and throw on their flak jackets, arm themselves to the teeth, hop into their paddy wagons, and go racing out to courageously fight for justice and truth and all that.

It should tell you something about the nature of our economy and our politics that if you called the police and asked them to arrest Microsoft or Lotus or Compaq, for the same crime, they would laugh in your face. You just know, don’t you, that the police would assume that a lawyer for Microsoft represents the forces of justice and truth, while a mere consumer represents… well… the average person. And the law, my friend, has become a tool of the rich, by which they exploit you and me.

Case in point. Do you own a computer? What does it mean to own? If you own your couch, that means that no one can sit on it without your permission. If you own a house, in the U.S., that means you can pretty well kill anybody who tries to enter it without your permission.

You own this computer. So why is your hard drive loaded with parasite programs that suck the breath out of your CPU? Why is your e-mail flooded with SPAM? Why can’t you delete certain directories like “My Documents”? Why does Office 97 exterminate your copy of Office 95, without giving you a choice? And when Windows crashes for the umpteenth time, costing you hours and hours of precious work, why is nobody accountable for it? Why is Compaq allowed to sell laptops with fake modems? Why can a software company sell a check-writing program that doesn’t work and refuse to give the purchaser his money back?

This is theft, of your time and your property.  It is robbery.

 

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Butch, Sundance, and Etta: the Lonely Dislocations of History

Robert Leroy Parker, alias Butch Cassidy, was born in Beaver, Utah, on April 13, 1866. He was the first of 13 children. His mother and father were Mormons, trying to eke out a living on a small homestead that was eventually taken away from them by the Mormon Church. At 16, Butch met a drifter and cattle rustler named Mike Cassidy. Cassidy taught Butch how to shoot, and, possibly, why he would want to know how to shoot. At 18, Butch left home and began his long career as an itinerant outlaw. Eventually, he adopted Cassidy’s last name. He was called “Butch” after one of his infrequent attempts to earn an honest living, as a butcher.

Harry Longabaugh, alias The Sundance Kid, was born in Pennsylvania in the Spring of 1867. At the age of 15, he left home and traveled to Durango with a cousin. He drifted around taking jobs here and there, until the harsh winter of 1884, when disastrous winter storms in the west wiped out most large herds of cattle, and the jobs tending them. In 1886, he stole his first horse. He was caught. He escaped. He was caught again, and escaped again. A newspaper published a headline story about his adventures. He wrote a fairly literate letter to the editor, disputing some of the points, but disarmingly conceding that he was, indeed, a thief.

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It was around this time that the Sundance Kid met a woman named Etta and took her with him to the famous outlaw refuge, the Hole-in-the-Wall, in Wyoming. Who was she? Where did she come from? Why was she traveling around the wild west in the company of a known outlaw? She registered in hotels as Etta “Place”, but Place was Sundance’s mother’s last name. All that was known about her for certain was that she was young, she appeared to be refined and educated, yet she could ride a horse and shoot a Winchester rifle, and she spent about ten years in the company of two of the most wanted bank robbers and criminals in the history of the American West. There were many rumors—that she was a prostitute, or a teacher, or both–but almost nothing could be confirmed. Even the Pinkerton’s Detective Agency was mystified by her.

On June 2, 1899, the Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy, and about five others, robbed their first train together—the Union Pacific—between Wilcox and Medicine Bow, Wyoming. They politely informed passengers and crew that no one’s lives were in danger as long as they cooperated. Then they blew up the mail car—using too much dynamite– and recovered $30,000 from the debris. On August 29, 1900, they took another Union Pacific train for $55,000. On September 19, $33,000, from a bank in Winnemucca, Nevada. The banks and railroads posted rewards of $10,000 a head for any member of the gang. In today’s terms, that would be over $100,000. Their $30,000 haul from the Union Pacific was probably worth about $400,000 today. Pocket change, by Michael Jordan standards.

Keep in mind that some conjecture is involved here. While it is known with some certainty that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were associated with the gang known as the Wild Bunch during this period and that members of this gang committed a series of train and bank robberies during the late 1890’s and early 1900’s, everything else is somewhat conjectural. Naturally, the outlaws did not exactly keep detailed logs of their larcenies. Different combinations of men robbed different banks. In some cases, Butch or Sundance may have masterminded robberies that they did not directly take part in. In other cases, it is now known, robberies attributed to them were committed by others.

That fall, one of the gang members married a former prostitute, Lillie Davis, in Forth Worth, Texas. Lillie had worked in a well-known bordello named “Fanny Porter’s” in the rowdy Hells Half Acre—a sort of red-light district to which the authorities turned a blind eye, usually. After the reception, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Harvey Logan, Ben Kilpatrick, and the groom, Will Carver, had a group portrait taken. This turned out to be a serious mistake, an act of hubris, by men who were otherwise regarded as very clever. A Well’s Fargo detective, recognizing Will Carver, obtained a copy of the picture and it was widely posted. Ironically, it may have been this picture, more than anything else, that sealed the image of glamour and sophistication attached to these men, in the public mind. The outlaws look dapper, bemused, and well-bred. They look like well-to-do bankers. They looked successful.

Study the photograph carefully for a minute. Will Carver was killed by a sheriff in Texas in April the next year. Logan, reputed to be the only genuine psychopath in the group, was killed (or committed suicide) in June 1904. Kilpatrick was captured and sentenced to 15 years in November, 1901. He was released in 1911, and killed while attempting to rob a train less than a year later.

Anyway, back in 1900, Cassidy and Sundance found their lives becoming difficult. The wild open plains of the west became dotted with towns and villages, new railroads and telegraph lines, marshals and posses, private detectives and bounty hunters. The legendary Pinkerton Detective Agency, hired by the railroads, was also hot on their trail. With their photos posted everywhere and large rewards for their capture, dead or alive, they faced long, lonely, restless lives as fugitives, never able to drop their guards for even a minute.

Oddly enough, they felt safe traveling to New York City with Etta in February, 1901. I would suppose they figured that would be one of the last places Pinkerton’s would expect to find them, but who knows?

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After three weeks of rest and relaxation, they departed for South America, where they planned to go straight, buy themselves a ranch, and blend into the general population. Sundance, in particular, seemed to crave a “normal” life, perhaps hoping to settle down with Etta and raise children.

In South America, the threesome established a ranch near the remote town of Cholila, in southern Argentina, where they built a log cabin and acquired horses and cattle and entertained their neighbors and were regarded as good citizens. Argentine officials had no idea of who they really were. It is said that Etta even danced with the governor at a ball.

For unknown reasons, Sundance and Etta traveled to Manhattan on April 3, 1902 and remained there for three months. Butch accompanied them as far as Buenos Aires. He stayed in a comfortable hotel there, the Europa, for three weeks. Sundance may have sought medical treatment for a wound in the leg in Chicago, and Etta may have seen the doctor as well: about this time, the Pinkerton’s obtained a description of her. She was 5’ 5″, 110 pounds, medium dark hair, blue or grey eyes, no blemishes on her skin.

Butch allegedly said of her once, “She was a great housekeeper with the heart of a whore.”

Cholila was a remote village in Southern Argentina, inaccessible from the more settled north during the rainy season, and 15 days strenuous travel by horseback from Rawson, on the coast. Nevertheless, the Pinkertons were able to trace their movements through informants. They offered to arrest them and bring them back to the United States for trial, but the American Bankers Association was content to leave them alone in South America, where they wouldn’t be able to rob American banks.

The Pinkerton’s were not content. A spiteful agent, Frank Dimaio– it had to be spite, didn’t it?– circulated wanted posters in the area around Cholila. He tried to persuade the Argentine police that Butch and Sundance were involved with local bank robberies. By the end of 1904, the trio had disappeared from Cholila. They had been tipped off that the authorities were on their way to arrest them.

Without a source of honest income, Sundance and Butch fell back upon tried and true methods of survival. They robbed a bank in Rio Gallegos, near the Magellan Strait, and then they robbed one in Villa Mercedes, about 800 miles north of Cholila. It is generally believed that Etta took part in both robberies. According to friends, Butch and Sundance had wanted to go straight, but nobody would let them.

The details of the Rio Gallegos robbery provide an interesting glimpse of how they operated. The three arrived in town two weeks before the robbery and checked into the best hotel under assumed names. They deposited $12,000 in the Banco de la Nacion, the largest, most prestigious financial institution in town, and made the acquaintance of the manager and several tellers. They made it known that they were looking to buy some land and were invited to parties given by the elite of the town. Either Butch or Sundance dropped by at the bank every day, pretending to have business to discuss with the manager, while actually scrutinizing the layout, the schedules of major deposits, and the best escape routes. On the day before the robbery, they withdrew all their money, and threw a lavish party that lasted well into the night for all their new friends. The next day, at 11:00 a.m., one of them asked to see the manager while the other waited in the lobby. Then they pulled out their weapons, forced the manager to turn over the money, and raced off on fresh horses waiting for them outside, probably with Etta. They made off with $70,000. Several posses and police forces followed them for up to three weeks. All they found were tired, discarded horses.

In January 1906, the trio were seen crossing the Salado river on a raft, probably headed over the Andes into Chile. This may well have been the last reported sighting of Etta Place. She was never seen again in the company of Butch or Sundance, or, indeed, anyone else.

Percy Siebert, an engineer for the Concordia Mine, where Butch and Sundance worked for a time as payroll guards (!) claimed that Butch told him that Sundance had taken Etta back to Colorado for an appendectomy. While waiting for her to recover, Sundance got drunk one night, shot up his room, and had to leave town in a hurry. “He didn’t know what became of her after that,” said Percy. Nor did anyone else. Etta’s pretty, fine-featured face faded away into one of the great mysteries of the old west.

If she had needed an appendectomy, it would have made no sense to travel all the way to Colorado to have it done: she would have died well before she got there.

He didn’t know what became of her after that. I don’t want to just glibly pass over that line. If, as reported, Sundance fled the scene and never came back for her, it’s one of the saddest lines ever written. How does the “heart of a whore” break? Did Sundance grow tired of her company, or did she grow tired of their primitive, dangerous lives in Argentina?

In the following years, Butch and Sundance tried again to go straight, working for mines and ranchers, but inevitably their real identities were discovered and they were forced to flee. Again and again, they resorted to larceny to get by. After holding up the payroll for a mining company in Bolivia, in early November 1908, they stopped in a small, godforsaken little town called San Vicente. A citizen noticed the mining company brand on one of their mules and notified the local constabulary. When the soldiers arrived to question them, gunfire broke out. Butch and Sundance were trapped in a small, unprotected villa. After an intense gun-battle, both were seriously wounded. The police waited all night before confirming that the two were dead. Both of them had died from bullet wounds to the head. It was believed that Sundance shot the wounded Butch to put him out of his misery, and then himself.

There were persistent rumors that Butch survived the shootout—or wasn’t even there when it happened– and traveled back to the U.S. where he lived in anonymity for another thirty years. Unfortunately, there is very little convincing proof of this story. A Spokane machine shop owner named William T. Phillips famously claimed to be the former outlaw, but his claims have been demonstrated to be false.

What is clear is that no one ever heard from them again. All letters and contacts ceased as of November 6, 1908. And almost immediately, the process of transforming outlaws into icons set in. Western novels celebrated their skills with a gun, their rugged individuality, and “honor” code (the myth of the shootout at high noon, with it’s almost mystical adherence to protocol). One of the very first films ever made, Porter’s “The Great Train Robbery”, was inspired by their exploits.

* * *

Now most Americans nowadays seem to be possessed of this great notion that men and women who break the law should be punished very severely. If you commit a felony three times in California, the judge is obliged to sentence you to something like 50 years, under the “Three Strikes and You’re Out” laws passed by its enlightened state legislature.

You would think that a society that is so determined to punish crime that it would send pick-pockets, soft drug users, and shoplifters to prison for 50 years would regard a pair of bank robbers with at least a little ironic detachment. But a quick browse through the dozens of web sites devoted (and I mean devoted) to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid tells you a different story: Americans love these guys. They adore them. They admire them beyond all reason and common sense. They want to know everything about them, what they wore, what they ate, how many bullets they had in their gun belts at the moment they died. They want to believe that they were the fastest, the smartest, the best-looking criminals on the face of the earth. They are our heroes.

You could make an argument for it. Butch and Sundance planned their robberies with meticulous attention to timing and detail. Like Bonnie and Clyde, they seemed to rob institutions, not people. They tried to live up to a standard of professionalism. They preferred to get in and out quickly, with a minimum of confrontation. They studiously avoided shooting anybody if they could. This might strike the modern reader as chivalric, but there’s a lot of common sense to it too—murder is a far more serious crime than robbery, and would certainly draw more lawmen, detectives, and bounty hunters into the chase.

But when pursued and confronted, they would shoot to kill. I didn’t see many web sites devoted to the lawmen who died in their wake.

So you could argue that Butch and Sundance are heroes today because they were smart and witty and good-looking and didn’t really do any harm to people, other than to the banks and the corporations. On the other hand, you could probably say the same about a lot of those young men serving long prison terms in California right now. In 1993, 50% of the prison population consisted of people convicted of drug possession. Surely these men and women were no more intent on harming anyone—other than themselves– than Butch or Sundance were. I’ll bet a lot of them are witty. Some of them probably know how to dress well.

And you could say the same about a lot of young professional athletes, who get caught using drugs, or driving while drunk, or assaulting their coaches, or raping cheerleaders, or cheating on their college grades. Those poor boys. We should help them.

There is a further irony in the fact that one of the reasons Butch traveled out west in the first place was his thirst for adventure, slaked by cheap dime-store novels about the west. Blame the media.

It is important to remember that the line between right and wrong in the western frontier in the late 19th century was not clearly delineated. Ranchers frequently “employed” lawmen, to drive out homesteaders and “undesirables”. Sometimes the homesteaders would hire their own “lawman”, to fight the rancher’s lawman. State politics were exceedingly corrupt. Perhaps, like Bonnie and Clyde, the Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy represented the underdog, fighting the corrupt powers that be. Perhaps they were just good businessmen, like Monsieur Verdoux, doing what they had to to make a living. Kill someone during a robbery and you are a criminal. Kill thousands during an invasion and you get a medal.

But in the same sense, young black athletes, like Allen Iverson, Lattrell Sprewell, and others, emerged from poverty and economic oppression in the dark inner cities of America, to represent vicarious triumph over the corrupt, rich, white racist establishment.

There’s not much out there that reads well in black and white. Most of the world is as grey as Etta’s peerless face in that wonderful black and white photograph. We don’t know what became of her after that.

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Keystone Cops

The Toronto Star recently reported that 99% of the complaints made against the Metropolitan Toronto police force are resolved in favour of the police, according the “objective” civilian complaints review process. That means that either Toronto has the greatest police force in the world– truly, the most amazing, perhaps, in history– , or the biggest liars. An officer responsible for handling complaints against the police force, with a straight face, actually insisted that the police really are in the right 99% of the time.

What kind of a person are you that you would say something so preposterous to a journalist, on the record? What do you really think of the people out there, that would make you believe they would believe you?

Now, even if you support the police (and with the level of paranoia in our society as high as it is nowadays, that’s quite likely), and even if you believe the Metropolitan Police force to be the best trained and most well-behaved in the world, it is statistically impossible that they could be right 99% of the time. It simply cannot be true. This kind of statistic is reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, when year after year, “record breaking” crops were harvested, proving the superiority of the Soviet system, while the people continued to starve.

When you think about it, it’s pretty scary that the police can get away with pulling this stuff. How dare they claim to be right 99% of the time? Who’s making this judgment? Who is in control here? Is there no civilian authority that can call this guy up and say, “What? Are you out of your mind? Don’t you realize how stupid that figure sounds? Do you want people to think you’re delusional? Withdraw the figure immediately and come up with something more credible, like 70%.”

Let’s get real. Would you believe that 99% of the customer complaints against Walmart were false? Would you believe 99% of the complaints against a surgeon were false? Would you believe that 99% of the allegations of sexual abuse made against boy scout leaders or priests were false?

I don’t know what the actual number of legitimate grievances against the police force should be. The Toronto Star didn’t have any difficulty finding at least two representative cases that made the police look pretty bad but which the police resolved in favour of the police. (The investigating officer decided that the two police officers, who corroborated each others’ stories, were more believable than numerous civilian witnesses, who right out of the blue, for no reason at all, decided to make up a bunch of lies about two officers beating up an innocent civilian.) The point is, that even if you think the police are doing a great job, a terrific job, it is simply outside of the realm of human experience that they could be right 99% of the time, or that an honest judge would even think they were right 99% of the time even if, incredibly, they really were.

It’s like those leaders in totalitarian nations that receive 95% of the vote.  Right.

What this number really means is that if an officer pulled you over by mistake, dragged you out of your car in front of family or friends, kicked you and beat you with a club, and then tossed you into jail for a day or two until the mistake was realized…. well, who’s going to stop him? If he has any hesitations about exceeding the limits of “reasonable” force, they are swept away by his acute awareness of the fact that you have only a 1% chance of success in filing a complaint. This, my friends, is about the same percentage of success you could expect in a police state.

Or you might believe that there is virtually no chance that such a thing could happen, because our Toronto police are better, and more honest, and more virtuous, than any other police force in the world.

Some cops–and some civilians too—believe that we need to give the cops more latitude to deal with those hordes of criminals out there. They believe that most law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear. Right. Like Guy Paul Morin, Donald Marshall, Damien Echols, and David Milgaard. Anyway, the fact that a victim of excessive police force might be innocent is beside the point. The idea that police can use excessive force on anybody, criminal or not, with impunity, is repugnant to a democracy.

The solution is simple: a civilian review board should be set up to handle all complaints against the police officers. Appoint smart, fair, and dedicated people to the board. Tell the police that because we know they are competent and professional, we expect few complaints, but that even the most competent and professional people in the world make a few mistakes, lose their cool, and do stupid things sometimes. And if the police were smart, they would welcome the increased public confidence in them that would result from a fair and impartial review board.

Unfortunately, this is pretty well exactly what they did do a few years ago. The police complained so bitterly about actually having to be accountable to someone else that the Harris government, ever concerned about civil rights (ha ha) disbanded it.