Category: Justice

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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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Unreported Crime

The chairman of the police services Board in Toronto doesn’t believe her own eyes.

New reports show that the crime rate in Toronto has declined by a hefty 8% in the past year. Some types of crime have decreased by 15% or more.

Every single time the statistics show that crime has gone up, the Chairman of the Police Services Board has climbed onto her gold-plated pedestal and proclaimed that the taxpayers better fork over some more money for police services.

The Chairman never says: Oh oh. We’re doing a lousy job. Instead of reducing crime, we’re making it go up! Nor does she ever say, “Oh, those statistics are due to changing demographics—we’re doing just fine, really. Put that money into shelters for the homeless instead.” And she never says, “Those statistics are not true. I don’t believe them.” Not when the statistics say that crime is on the increase.

But when these statistics come out and show that the amount of crime in the city of Toronto has gone down, she says, “I don’t believe those numbers. All of my friends say crime is going up. They are all more afraid of crime now than they used to be.”

This is about as stupid a thing as a responsible person in an official position can say. She is saying, I don’t care about proof or facts or truth. I don’t care about the fact that my personal experience is a completely meaningless measure of how widespread crime in a city of 2 million people is. She is saying, it doesn’t matter what the reality is: we are going to ask for more and more money every single time the budget comes up for negotiation.

I think we should give her the increase. Give her another 10, 20, 30 million dollars. Why not? And the next time the statistics come out and show that crime is going up, we’ll tell her: We don’t believe those statistics. We feel that the crime rate is going down. No soup for you.

 

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Exxon Sues Itself

I’ll bet I know something about the 1994 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince Edward Sound that you don’t know.

The Exxon Valdez was the worst oil tanker spill of all time, polluting more than 1000 miles of Alaskan coastline and endangering a vital, delicate ecosystem. Lawsuits followed of course. BIG lawsuits.

The plaintiffs in the case against Exxon were awarded $5 billion, which is about as much as Exxon earns in profit each year. That’s a pretty fair fine, I think. What’s the use of a five or ten million dollar penalty when a corporation sees an amount like that as a mere operating expense? Do you think $5 billion is a deterrent? I think it is.

A group called the Seattle Seafood Processors banded together to sue Exxon for compensation for lost income and all that jazz. Exxon settled with this group out of court. The settlement was SECRET. They get to settle out of court, and we get to wonder if they got anything, and Exxon gets to hide the cost of the settlement from their stockholders, the media, the public, and the other plaintiffs. Maybe there was something about their case that was peculiarly alarming to Exxon. Whatever.

Anyway, people did find out eventually that the agreed upon amount was $70 million. Good deal, right? I mean, these guys get to take a vacation and everything – they can’t fish anymore—and get paid for it! How much do you want to bet that they just laid off all their workers and kept the money for themselves? Well, hell, why not? This is America.

But here the story gets interesting. If somebody does some damage to you and you sue them and then you settle out of court, your case is done, right? You are out of the picture. You sign an agreement saying that Exxon has compensated you for your losses and you have no further claim.

That’s what you think. What happened is this: the Seattle Seven continued their lawsuit, with the full knowledge and consent of Exxon. The very lawsuit they had settled! And they won! Big time! $700 million! Hurray for the lawyers, who get to collect about $100 million of that for themselves. Hurray for America! Hurray for everyone!

Wait a minute. It seems that Exxon is now taking the Seattle Seven to court. What! How can this be? What a strange reversal! Did the Seattle Seven dump a bunch of dead fish on Exxon’s front lawn or something? No! It seems that Exxon had a secret deal with the Seattle Seven that stated that, in exchange for the $70 million, the Seattle Seven would continue their legal action and, if they won, Exxon would collect all of their winnings.

I am not making this up.

Whoa Nelly! What a concept! Exxon was betting that the Seattle Seven’s lawyers were really, really good, and would win a much larger settlement in court than $70 million. The Seattle Seven were pretty stupid, don’t you think? Why didn’t they hire worse lawyers (if such a thing is imaginable)? Then they wouldn’t have been out $630 million.

But wait! Hold on to your hats! The Seattle Seven don’t want to give the $700 million to Exxon anymore. They want to keep it all for themselves! Well, for themselves and their lawyers. Exxon is quite upset about this turn of events. That’s why Exxon’s lawyers are taking the Seattle Seven to court. Give us back your money!

Do you have this all straight? Yes, you’re right: Exxon sued themselves. Can you picture their lawyers in their solemn robes, celebrating after the verdict? Woohoo! We got $700 million! We’re rich! Now we can pay off our lawyers!

Strange story, isn’t it? Why did Exxon make this preposterous deal? Nobody knows for sure. The only people who benefit, of course, are the lawyers. The lawyers who negotiated the deal for the Seattle Seven probably got most of the $70 million. The lawyers who won the lawsuit probably got about $200 million—I am NOT kidding. Contingency fees typically end up in the 25-40% range. Exxon’s lawyers got money too. How much? Well, if the tobacco industry settlement is any guide, they probably persuaded Exxon to sign an agreement paying them a percentage of the difference between the maximum amount of liability given a worst case judgment, and the deal that was actually struck. It sounds like they didn’t do very well. I’ll bet they thought the maximum liability would be somewhere in the $500 – $750 million range. I’m just guessing now. I’ll bet they expected to earn $100 million by keeping the liability below $1 billion.

I’ll bet they didn’t offer to give Exxon a refund of their fees because they did so poorly. That’s not the way life works for the rich, my friend. If you are a baseball player and you hit 30 homeruns, you will get a new contract worth $10 million. If you then hit 5 home runs, do you give the money back? Are you kidding? Do stock brokers convicted of swindling people out of millions of dollars suddenly walk or take public transit?

But if you are supposed to load a truck in two hours and you do it in eight instead, do you think you’ll get paid?

The only advantage to Exxon—had the settlement agreement with the Seattle Seven stayed secret– is that it looks like they are paying a lot more damages than they really are. The $700 million is part of a shared settlement with fishermen and hunters and others who were harmed by the Exxon Valdez disaster. The total of the settlement is $5 billion. It’s hard to believe that Exxon could be so stupid as to figure on coming out ahead of this deal. On the other hand, this is a corporation that hired an alcoholic captain to steer a vessel loaded with oil through one of the most hazardous and sensitive coastal ecosystems in North America.

Maybe the $700 million is tax deductible. Actually, since it is subtracted from their earnings, it quite probably is tax deductible. Who does pay the taxes on the $700 million? The Seattle Seven? For money they will never receive? Exxon? For a judgment they are paying themselves?

Exxon, incidentally, has not yet paid a penny of the $5 billion, though the judgment was awarded five years ago. Exxon is sitting on $5 billion that it owes other people. If you were sitting on $50 that you owed Exxon, you would be in jail in very short order, my friend.

A judge, meanwhile, has annulled the secret agreement between Exxon and the Seattle Seven and ordered Exxon to pay out the $700 million. Exxon is appealing. Well, why not? They have lawyers.

Well, let’s say you are as outraged as I am about this deal.

What are you going to do? Get a lawyer?

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Quagmire

The U.S. likes to call itself the “World’s Only Superpower”. Superpowers, of course, have responsibilities. Right now, for example, there is a disastrous civil war taking place in Sierra Leone, the poorest nation on the face of the earth. At least 100,000 civilians have been driven into refugee camps and are facing starvation or cold-blooded murder. Where is the world’s cop? At home debating a stained dress.

A few years ago, a civil war broke out in Rwanda, which led to the deaths of more than 200,000 people. Where was Uncle Sam?

When civil war broke out in Bosnia, George Bush took one look, heard the word “quagmire” whispered somewhere softly in the wings, and ran for cover. Not only did he not support military intervention—he actually tried to prevent the Bosnian Moslems from acquiring weapons with which to defend themselves against Serb aggression. But, hey, Bush had “character”, whatever that was.

Every time the U.S. considers military intervention in some far-flung part of the globe, a chorus of nay-sayers (including Colin Powell generally) raises their voices and squawks the one magic word that stops the Pentagon dead in their tracks every time: QUAGMIRE.

The application of the word “quagmire” to Viet Nam first occurred, as near as I can tell, in the title of David Halberstam’s excellent book on the subject, “The Making of a Quagmire”, which was published—get this – in 1965.  Yes, eight years before the U.S. began its exit.  That is a remarkable piece of foresight.

Unfortunately, contemporary journalists don’t understand what the problem with Viet Nam really was. They think the problem was that most Americans didn’t really, heartily support the war. They think the Viet Cong were so unrelentingly savage that our “good” boys, with their innate decency and “character”, were corrupted by their involvement.

The real problem was that we chose, as usual, the wrong side to support. In 1954, the remnants of post WW II Viet Nam, were partitioned by the United Nations into a North and South, under two different governments. The keystone of this agreement was a promised election in 1956 which would be fair and open and involve all opposition groups, and which would reunite the two partitions into one nation under one government.

Unfortunately, the regime of President Diem, which ruled the South with the support of the French, realized that it could not control the results of the election and postponed it. Diem also began to systematically repress all opposition political leaders and parties. When it became clear that he had no intention of giving up power, the remnants of the army that had liberated Viet Nam from the Japanese (the Vietminh) began organized opposition to the regime. The French were unable to dislodge the Vietminh so the Americans thought they would give it a try. They believed that the Chinese and Russians were aiding the Vietminh, and that if Viet Nam fell to the communists, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, and the rest of Asia would be sure to follow: the infamous Domino Theory.

At first, the Vietminh included a diverse coalition of political forces, including socialists, Catholics, and other democratic movements. But the corruption of the Diem government and the intensity of the fighting soon polarized the competing forces until the Vietminh, under the umbrella of the National Liberation Front led by Nguyen Huu Tho, was dominated by communists.

The Diem regime never did control the countryside around Saigon. South Viet Nam’s army, the ARVN, was commanded by political appointees more loyal to Diem than to their own generals or the war effort itself. They were arrogant and oppressive and they alienated the peasants who lived in the small villages around the Mekong Delta. As a result, the Viet Cong were easily able to operate, hide, and control large areas of the countryside.

The American “advisors” sent by Kennedy were efficient and sensible, but some of the most important early military initiatives were hamstrung by ineffective local leadership and corruption. U.S. ambassador Nolting continued to send cheery reports back to Kennedy, while reporters (including legendary figures like Peter Arnett, David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Francois Sully), who actually traveled into the battle zones, were accused of disloyalty for reporting what they saw. What they saw were villagers who were hostile to government forces, ARVN battle groups that avoided fighting whenever they could, incompetent commanders, and bad planning. They saw an insurgent force that was quick, efficient, and brutal, and which commanded the respect and loyalty of the general population. They saw, at the battle of Ap Bac, 200 guerrillas defeat a combined force of U.S. and ARVN regulars ten times their number. Halberstam was one of the first to realize that the combination of domestic politics (Kennedy couldn’t afford to look “soft” on communism) and local corruption, including the dependency of the Diem government on U.S. military support, could lead to a unresolvable situation. It was not necessarily in the best interests of the Diem regime to bring an end to the war.

America was pouring in aid at the rate of $1.5 million a day. A lot of this money lined the pockets of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brothers, Can, Luyen, Thuc, and Nhu, and his sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, and his other cronies. It is quite possible that Diem never was interested in defeating the Viet Cong, thereby removing the incentive for lucrative American aid. It would be hard, otherwise, to comprehend the massive stupidity of the South Viet Namese government.

In June 1963, a Buddhist monk, protesting political and social discrimination against Buddhists by the Catholic Diem and his brothers, doused himself with gasoline and set himself ablaze in a public square in Saigon. This signaled the beginning of a summer of protest by Buddhists that gained increasing popular support. Diem’s response? His soldiers broke into Buddhist temples, looted their treasuries, and arrested Buddhist monks and nuns. A move more calculated to incite mass protests and rioting could not be imagined. On November 1, 1963, with tacit U.S. approval, a group of conspirators under the leadership of General Duong Van “Big” Minh turned their troops on Saigon and drove towards the Presidential palace. Diem was captured and killed. Seven more coups or attempted coups would follow. The quagmire was in full tilt. The U.S., blindly, foolishly, willfully plunged into the greatest debacle of its history.

When General Colin Powell talks about Bosnia, he tries to sound like some wizened old war horse who’s seen it all and can’t be fooled into risking the valuable lives of his young, well-trained killers on some frivolous mission to merely save people’s lives. He talks about Viet Nam, as if he thinks he understands all there is to learn from that experience, but experience doesn’t teach you right from wrong. Sometimes, he merely sounds resentful of the military disgrace. One senses, beyond the petulance, a fundamental commitment to the selfsame principles that caused the Viet Nam debacle in the first place, namely, that the guiding principle of foreign policy should be military strategy. At times he sounds like the living embodiment of Metternich’s dictum: “War is too important to be left to the politicians.”

The failure of the U.S.’s involvement in Viet Nam was entirely due to the social, cultural, and political realities of South East Asia. The U.S. made only sporadic and half-hearted attempts to force the South Vietnamese government to try to develop some kind of popular support. When Diem refused to fight corruption in his own government, reform his armies, and win the loyalty of the hamlets and villages in the Vietminh dominated areas of the countryside, the U.S. should have walked away, with the realization that victory was not only unlikely, but impossible.

What does “quagmire” mean in terms of current realities? The key difference between Viet Nam and Rwanda and Bosnia and Sierra Leone is that the latter three nations are not proxies for a world superpower conflict. They do not require the U.S. to make an alliance with unsavory dictators, and pour in military aid to prevent some expansionist foe from gaining the upper hand. And Russia is not only not interested in manipulating the crisis, but incapable of financing proxies. Cuba is out of the picture. China cares only about internal security. The U.S. is free to intervene on behalf of freedom, peace, and justice for all. They are free to be the good guys. How ironic that they no longer want to play.

March 22, 1999

Well, NATO has finally decided to try to stop the Serbs from “cleansing” Kosovo. And some critics, like Senator John McCain—future Republican presidential candidate– are already complaining that the U.S. does not have a credible exit strategy. Look, folks, we just got here!

A more interesting question is this: will the NATO attacks lead to peace? Will the Serbs be more willing to negotiate now?  If bombs and missiles are so effective, why is Saddam Hussein still ruling Iraq? Won’t this lead to intransigence, and a brooding hatred for all things American, and an intensified desire to defy NATO, knowing full-well how unlikely it is that we will ever see ground troops?

The inherent absurdity of bombing Serbia into submission is that bombing does not threaten the interests of the ruling class. Ruling classes everywhere know how to ride disaster: you reinforce the troops, barricade the palaces, and control the distribution of scarce goods—ensuring that you yourself will never suffer the slightest privation. The war footing ensures the success and acceptance of martial law. The crisis justifies harsher repression than usual. Milosevic cannot be threatened unless bombing reduces his country to total ruins and the people rise up in rebellion against him. But NATO cannot go that far, for it would be charged with committing atrocities against civilians, and it would almost eliminate the possibility of any kind of peaceful coexistence afterwards, between the Serbs and the Kosovars. So NATO must be content to strike military targets.

Slobodan Milosevic will be unmoved by the destruction of military installations and buildings as long as he can maintain his control over the army and government. I suspect that the only way he can be prevented from carrying out further atrocities is for NATO to invade with ground troops. At this point, NATO seems extremely reluctant to make that step.

March 31, 1999

And now they have hostages. Three American soldiers captured in Albania. And Bill Clinton goes on TV and announces that that is why he doesn’t want to bring in ground troops. He might as well say to Milosevic, “if you can tolerate the bombing for a few more weeks, we’ll eventually get frightened and go home.”

The whole point of intervention was to force Milosevic to stop the “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo. I don’t know why anybody would have thought at any time that bombing alone would achieve this objective, when it has not achieved anything like that anywhere else in the world where it has been used (with the exception of Japan, after Hiroshima and Ngasaki).

And if the Americans are going to panic with every single casualty, they might as well go home right now, and relinquish the title of “World’s sole remaining superpower” because a superpower has a responsibility and a superpower does whatever it takes to stop genocide.

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The Columbine Matrix

The Matrix, a violent sci-fi adventure film, has drawn comment by social critics who see it as uncannily representative of the type of amoral entertainment that drives kids to acts of violence like the Columbine High School shootings.

And there is a scene in the Matrix that anyone familiar with the Littleton, Colorado shootings would find disturbing: at one point, the heroes strap weapons and ammunition onto their bodies, dress in black trench coats, and then enter a building where they shoot the hell out of a bunch of bad guys. You hear the shell casings rattle to the floor, the rat-tat-tat of automatic and semi-automatic weapons fire—even a few shotguns, in the hands of the bad guys (who, in this film, are the police). In The Matrix, the shooters are heroes. They were dark glasses so they look cool as they kill. They are fighting evil. You conquer evil by outgunning them, or stylishly beating their faces to a pulp with karate blows.

There is nothing new here: Hollywood has glorified this type of adolescent fantasy for years. Hollywood is getting better at it though: the amount of computing and artistic effort put into these scenes is astounding. The sound effects batter the listener with Dolbyized wall-rattling chunky, acerbic smacks. The walls explode with spattering bullets and ricochets.

A fair number of commentators have tried to draw a link between movies like this and incidents like Padukah and Littleton. They believe that children are influenced by these movies. They watch the carnage and enjoy it. It thrills them. They want to be like the actors in the movie: cool and powerful. They derive a invigorating sense of gratification from seeing the bad guys get blown away.

There is always a conversation with the meanest, baddest, most ruthless of the bad guys, before he is dispatched. It doesn’t matter that such conversations have never taken place anywhere in history: they are a staple of the action-adventure film. Usually, the hero revels for a moment in his triumph, and we glimpse suffering, finally, on the face of the man who inflicted so much suffering on others. We feel the necessity of grudging submission, acknowledgement that we (identified with the hero) are the good guys. Just before we blow their brains out.

But there is another weird convention to these action adventure films: the hero has to suffer too. In almost all of them, the hero himself undergoes a few serious, painful trials, before undertaking his climatic mission. Why? I’ve heard this element rationalized as some kind of test of worthiness that ties into our primitive instincts for sacrificial leaders. Thus when the killer acts just as brutal and ruthless as the enemy, in the end, he appears to be justified, because he has suffered.

To put it in more prosaic terms, the audience can’t enjoy the bloodletting later if they don’t feel that the hero is entitled.   The same way they won’t enjoy the murders at the beginning of most trashy thrillers unless the victims are shown to be having sex first.  They deserve to die.

I always find these sequences a little squirmy, because they are so close to pure adolescent fantasy, and adolescent fantasy is utterly self-centred and masochistic. Adolescents don’t feel comfortable with their place in the world; they’re always being accused of not suffering enough, or of making bad decisions. So being dominated and victimized plays nicely into their sense of being very worthy individuals who are unjustly persecuted. All the better if a lovely woman, preferably about 18, feels so moved by your suffering that she pleads with you to save yourself. Adolescence. Fantasy. Myth.

Did Dylan Klybold and Eric Harris shoot their class-mates because, though they were otherwise of sound mind and body, they saw films like “The Matrix” (specifically, “Natural Born Killers”), and decided that killing people was so cool they just had to try it themselves? That’s hard to believe. These films do very well at the box office. You would think there would a veritable rash of killings after every showing. The truth is, we don’t have any evidence at all that these films influence anybody to kill. How unlikely is it, after all, that killers would not have seen the most popular films, played the most popular video games, or listened to well-known metal rockers?

As tempting as it is to ascribe a single cause to the Littleton disaster, the truth is probably more complex than that. Klebold and Harris were disaffected youths, marginalized by the nasty jock culture of Columbine High School. They were intelligent and imaginative, too intelligent to not harbor some bitterness about the putdowns they received constantly from the jocks and preppies . They were probably somewhat psychotic. Perhaps Harris, by himself, would merely have committed suicide. The two of them together formed a deadly combination of audaciousness, bitterness, and collective energy. Their uncensored fantasies of revenge and domination came to life in their conversations and acquired an energy of their own.

So how would you prevent future massacres from happening? Again, people are tempted by simple solutions: censor movies or the internet, ban violent games, restrict access to guns. The most idiotic come first: ban trench coats, which is what all high schools in the Denver area and many more nation-wide have done. Ban trench coats? What about gym bags, back packs, suitcases? What about pockets and purses and bulky ski jackets? I’m afraid I don’t have much faith in knee-jerk solutions.

No surprisingly, conservative Republicans, who constantly insist that only a free-market–without the slightest government intervention–can gratify the needs of the human soul, suddenly reverse themselves when it comes to culture and demand stricter censorship and tougher punishments for thought crimes. I don’t understand why the magic of the marketplace is so wonderful when it comes to wages and product liability, but so odious when it comes to movies and rock music. This position is frankly hypocritical. If conservatives really believe in the principles they describe so passionately as they apply to the economy is absurd to think that those same principles shouldn’t also apply to culture. If they don’t like movies like “The Matrix”, tough—the magical marketplace has decided that this is the way to go. Learn to live with it.

Liberals are at least more consistent on the general principles. They advocate a clear role for government in the economy, ensuring minimum wages and protection of the environment, for example, and they urge a role upon the government in preventing and reducing teen violence. The government should make it far, far more difficult for people to obtain guns, especially by changing the exemptions that allow people to buy powerful weapons at gun shows without even a background check or waiting period. And schools should develop programs that attack the roots of alienation and disaffection, and encourage values of tolerance and diversity, so that students like Klebold and Harris are never again as marginalized as they were at Columbine.

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Les Miserables Los Angeles

Some people don’t believe me when I tell them that a black man in Los Angeles has just been sentenced to 25 years in jail for stealing a loaf of bread.

I don’t have a lot to say about something like this. Some things, like gun control, are quite debatable, though I still think the debate is one-sided, in terms of logic. But putting a homeless man in jail for 25 years for stealing a loaf of bread is beyond all logic and sanity and reasonableness. It will cost the State of California at least $1 million to keep this “threat” to society locked up. From a strictly economic point of view, how many of California’s politicians would have been willing to chip in $2.50 to buy the man a loaf of bread and save the taxpayer a million bucks?

How many of the legislators who voted for the “three strikes and you’re out” law go around pontificating about the decline of moral values in our society? What is a “moral” value? Locking up an indigent man because our society cares so damn little about the poor that we tolerate extreme poverty in our midst while squandering billions of dollars on new military toys for men who award themselves medals every time they fart in the direction of the enemy?

Only two states (California is one, I don’t know the other) apply the “three strikes and you’re out” law to non-violent crimes. Tom Hayden is trying to change the law in California but they say he doesn’t have the 2/3 votes he needs to do it.

If I were a cop in California and I was called in to arrest somebody for stealing a loaf of bread, I’d pay the shopkeeper the two bucks myself and turn the guy loose.

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The Festive Charlton Heston

In a letter, the N.R.A. president, actor Charlton Heston, said the group was canceling a gun show along with all other “festive ceremonies normally associated with our annual gathering.” The group was nevertheless going to hold its annual members meeting at the city’s convention center. From the New York Times, April 21, 1999

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“Festive ceremonies normally associated with our annual gathering”?????

This is Moses speaking. Moses also asserted that the massacre at Littleton, Colorado shows that every school should have armed guards. Governor of Minnesota and Wrestler Jesse Ventura agreed: “Had there been someone who was armed, in this particular situation, in my opinion, it may have stabilized.” But what does “stabilized” mean to a man who used to run around in tight underpants and throw chairs at people in masks?

Well, why stop at permitting concealed handguns? I think they should be obligatory. Just imagine: you’re at school. A couple of kids come in wearing black trench-coats with furtive expressions on their faces. You gonna wait to see what happens? Hell, no. Case closed. Incident ended. No more anxiety for all those parents sending their kids off to school in the morning– they can trust that everyone is well protected!

Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that your teenage daughter was at school, surrounded by a bunch of illiterate metal morons carrying concealed handguns?

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Think of how convenient that concealed hand-gun might be as well, next time you meet up with those hooligans from that rival football team across town, or that dorky teacher that failed you in Consumer Ed!

Charlton Moses Heston, interrupting his prayer breakfast (I kid you not) also said this: “If there had been even one armed guard in the school, he could have saved a lot of lives and perhaps ended the whole thing instantly.”

Errr…. according to the New York Times, Neil Gardner, of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s department, was in the school at the time, and was quite armed. In fact, sounds like he took a few shots and then cleared out as quickly as possible.

And I’m ashamed about the prayer breakfast bit. Deeply ashamed. Deeply, deeply, deeply. Everyone reading this should know that many, many Christians abhor violence and guns, and don’t consider a gun show to be a “festive” occasion, regardless of whether or not it opens with a prayer breakfast.

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School Killers

I can’t think of any sensible thing to say when two students dressed in black trench coats bundle themselves up with explosive devices and guns and set out to achieve their 15 minutes of fame by killing as many of their classmates as they can. We think the world is a pressure-cooker out there in the Stock Exchange and the Bank Towers and the Emergency Wards– it’s a pressure-cooker out here too, in our vacuous suburbs, with our mall-rat status-rated designer running shoes and gilded suburban off-road super-trucks and Hollywood heroic bionic mega-metal men with laser guided killer stilettos whipping the forces of darkness without concept, idea, abstraction, or reflection, and our moral barometric Wall-Street pressure pages of translucent stock quotes: all on a race to achieve, obtain, impress and express, communicate and digitate in the soft blue glow of television on the sideboard at dinner with whatever molecules of your nuclear family are available tonight.

So a couple of boys in their color-drained coats mull over their failures and fantasies. Those girls with the curled blonde hair, up so early to remake their faces… those studs in the Tommy Hilfiger sweats reaping their squeals and nuzzling nipples with their slam-dunks and hail marys… those geeks in the turbo pascal class hacking their uncles pims and measuring their dicks for Harvardized condoms… those fay artistes craving exclusivity through obscurantism… those achievers with the part-time jobs and daddy’s RAV on the weekends and drinking parties and future flatulent frat freaks… those fundies with their pre-school bible studies and Samaritan smiles… the fat girls leaning with desperation… those skinny girls colluding behind their compressed lips… and you just can’t get the grease off your face or the smell off your fingers or lose that dull inviscerating impression that your life is going to end in one long interminable trailer park whimper. And so you trade it all in for your 15 minutes of fame, and you’re going to be bigger than fucking Charles Whitman or Richard Speck and you’re going to know it, for who’d have thought a few hours— hours and hours — who’d have thought it’d take the police that long to find you in this gleaming chromium diaphragm of literate washfulness, here, here in the library, with the brains of your class-mates splattered around you, here among the books of which you never finished a one without thinking it was small or irrelevant, here below the sirens, and the helicopters, and the cameras, and CNN With A NEW SPECIAL LOGO AND MUSIC just for you, my sweet, now that your immortality has bled down the wires and who’d have thought it would take them four hours to find out your blood wasn’t even hot enough to face down your own killers?

And I’m curious as hell about those last moments– not even alone, like Whitman in his tower– Charles, of course, not Walt– not even alone, as if there was something you could say to each other, like Jesus, we really showed them, didn’t we– and you wouldn’t probably even be quite so obvious as to say you have their attention now, would you? What were your last words to each other? Where have they gone? Where are they now? Where are the blondes and the geeks and the jocks and the brains and those oh-so-ephemeral have everything to die for most-popular and likely to succeed barbies and kens, who formerly, obliviously, oh so vacantly, surrounded us—- yes, they noticed.

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“Our Whole School Year is Ruined”

“…our whole school year is ruined.” — student Casey Brackley

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I’m never sure what goes through the mind of Charlton Heston at a moment like this.

Charlton Heston is the president of the National Rifle Association. It is the stated aim of the NRA to prevent the slightest legal restriction from being imposed upon the ownership of almost any type of gun. I’m not exaggerating.

A naïve person might think that the NRA doesn’t know where to “draw the line”. The NRA doesn’t think automatic or semi-automatic assault rifles should be outlawed. It doesn’t think you should have to wait a day or two when you apply to get a handgun. It doesn’t think you should be held responsible if you leave a loaded gun sitting around somewhere and a child picks it up and accidentally kills another child. It is quite comfortable with the fact that you can get 30 years in prison for possession of five ounces of marijuana, but not even one day, if you happen to shoot someone who walks up your driveway one evening to ask directions, or if you happen to shoot your own daughter because she decided to hide in a closet and scare you when you came home late one evening. (Yes, both really happened.)

The NRA has a very strong presence in Colorado. Right at this very moment, the Colorado State Legislature is considering a law that would make it legal to carry a concealed handgun. Charlton Heston’s boys—I am not kidding – are already arguing that if only a teacher had had a concealed handgun, he could have put a stop the carnage immediately.

If a manufacturer made a product that was so defective that it caused injury or death, the lawyers would descend like flies and there would be billions of dollars in lawsuits. I’ve never understood why the parents of children who are killed by other children using guns that were stored carelessly or not at all don’t sue.

In the past several years, two children were killed in Pearl, Mississippi, five in Jonesboro, Arkansas, three in Moses Lake, Washington, two in Springfield, Oregon, and three in West Paducah, Kentucky. In almost all cases, they were killed by young males using weapons easily obtained from careless relatives or friends. I have not heard of a single lawsuit launched against the owners of the guns.

The law requires seatbelts in cars, pets on leashes, and litter in bags. For some bizarre reason, Americans have chosen to award special status to the gun. If you dropped it in a park, you could not be charged with littering. If you made the trigger so sensitive that a fart would set it off, you could not be subject to a safety inspection. If you sold it to a half-witted naked dwarf with a noose around his neck, you could not be held liable for anything.

I am also baffled by the police. Whenever a cop is killed in the line of duty, there is a massive funeral, with tributes to the courage, selflessness, determination, and virtue of the slain officers. But the 911 call from Columbine High School came at 11:30. Police arrived within minutes but did not enter the building until 12:30. They proceeded slowly, checking every knapsack and desk for bombs, and did not reach the library, where they found the bodies of the two killers, until 4:00 p.m. Clearly, some of the wounded teenagers died between 11:30 and 4:00 p.m. I don’t understand why they were left lying there, mortally wounded, while the police “secured” the perimeter.

Well, I do understand. The police were operating on the basis of conventional military strategy: you secure the area, quadrant by quadrant, before proceeding to the primary objective. That’s why they were in no hurry to stop the shooting. That’s why the students fleeing the building were practically arrested.

I don’t get it. Where was the courage and determination? There were hundreds of police surrounding the building, including agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Firearms, Tobacco, and Alcohol, yet two children with guns held a school of 1800 hostage. Were they thinking Waco?

When students were able to leave the building, the suddenly powerful and courageous police made them hold their hands up and chased them into a corner or lined them up against a wall so they could be frisked. Did they really think that the killers would try to escape with a gaggle of terrorized cheerleaders? It looked like Attica on television. It bothered me a lot. Some kids dress up in black and come into your school with guns and start shooting the place up. You think you’ve escaped, but then men dressed in black with guns make you put your hands on your heads and line up against a wall. Who decided that this procedure was suitable?

CNN, right after showing us the results of the carnage in Colorado, showed us some of the carnage in Kosovo. It left an indelible impression: man is a killer.

So, Charlton Heston, where are you now? How come you aren’t on CNN telling us that this is all the result of rock music or feminism or homosexual rights or declining morals or communist infiltration, and that guns have nothing to do with it?

Charlton would probably tell us that if only some of the victims had been armed…

And if you could ignore the past and the future and concentrate purely on the moment the two boys appeared in the cafeteria with their weapons and their empty grimaces, you might have a point. And then you would come to your senses and ask yourself if we are better off with everyone having a gun, or with no one having a gun.

How extreme is the NRA? They make it easy for us liberals. We don’t even have to argue that guns should be banned, to get the NRA upset. All we have to do is argue that guns should come with a child-proof lock, like aspirin containers, and that guns should be electronically disabled until the owner has entered his very own personal identification number. The NRA become apoplectic at the very suggestion!

Charlton Heston once played Moses, in the movie “The Ten Commandments”, one of the worst of the big-budget spectacles Hollywood liked to foist on us in the 1950’s and early 60’s. “The Ten Commandments” bore little resemblance to the real story in Genesis, just as the NRA’s vision of reality bears little resemblance to anything but a Hollywood spectacle.

Charlton Heston can shrug. It was just an unfortunate incident. I don’t think God shrugs.

 

“Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had a gun
Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had a gun
Nobody’d ever get shot
‘Cause everybody’d have a gun
Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had a gun”

– The Arrogant Worms

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The Jailhouse Snitch

Keith Madeley, who is 26 years old, is serving a life sentence in prison for the murder of Fred Sheppard, with no hope of parole for 25 years If this had been the United States, he would be sitting on death row.

Fred Sheppard was 77 years old when he was found dead, in his outhouse, on March 7, 1995. He had been shot several times. The police arrested Keith Madeley and, according to Madeley, beat him up until he confessed. When a judge decided that a confession that was the result of a beating was not admissible, the police found a jailhouse informant to testify against Madeley. There was no other direct evidence linking him to the crime. He was convicted and sentenced to the maximum allowed under Canadian law.

Roy Hopkins is serving time in Warkworth Penitentiary, for robbery. He says he killed Fred Sheppard. He says he may be a crook and a thief, but he won’t let another man rot jail for 25 years for a crime that he committed.

You might remember that Guy Paul Morin was convicted at least partly on the testimony of a jailhouse informant (who later recanted, recanted his recantation, then recanted again). Jailhouse informants usually testify in exchange for something. If you think it’s pretty stupid to offer an incentive for people to lie, you’re not alone.

After boxing promoter Don King was found innocent by a jury in New York, he took the entire jury on a trip to Hawaii.

Am I the only one who thinks this is so stupid that it doesn’t even deserve a serious rant? Does anybody need a detailed explanation of why it should be illegal for a defendant to reward a jury for finding him not guilty?

The most incomprehensible part of this story is the fact that, apparently, King broke no laws. As long as he didn’t offer the reward to the jury in exchange for the verdict before they gave the verdict, what he did was legal. All he had to do was sit there and wink at them, I guess.

This, from a nation that struts the world in out-sized britches constantly proclaiming themselves the greatest, the biggest, the best. Do we really need to give those smug, sanctimonious Europeans another reason to hold America in contempt?

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