The Week That Was (1/20 - 1/25)

Heath Ledger and Mary Kate Olsen: "Well, Heath Ledger died. That's something to post, but I'll be honest. I never saw the knight movie, or the cowboy movie, so . . . I'm honestly not sure I've ever seen anything the guy ever did. Mostly, I keep wondering how much the media is going to ghoulishly dwell on his death during the release of The Dark Knight," The League, "Nothing to post," The League of Melbotis, (1/22/08). And dwell the national press will when that film, destined to be a blockbuster even before the untimely death of the young star who would would play its villain and foil to Christian Bale's Batman. But the death of of Heath Ledger will haunt not only that film but also the life and career of Mary Kate Olsen who, by attempting to manage the crisis as it initially unfolded, became an unusual, and perhaps even suspicious, player in the events of that day. The Associated Press reported:

At 3:17 p.m., she made a call to the Olsen twin that lasted 49 seconds. At 3:20 p.m., she made another call, lasting 1 minute and 39 seconds. At 3:24 p.m., another call to Olsen. That one lasted 21 seconds.

Then, at 3:26 p.m., Wolozin called 911.

At some point during the frenzy, Olsen, who was in California, summoned her personal security guards to the apartment to help with the situation, the New York Police Department said.

Paramedics arrived at 3:33 p.m. and actually went up in the elevator to the apartment with Olsen's security guards. Paramedics did not allow the security guards into the bedroom where Ledger died, and they declared him dead at 3:36 p.m. — 19 minutes after the first call to Olsen.

The masseuse called Olsen a final time at 3:34 p.m. The duration of that call was unknown.

This series of events will no doubt become fodder in every interview the currently 21 year old Ms. Olsen gives for the duration of her (presumably) long life to come. Why she, and the masseuse who called her, did not immediately call 911 will no doubt remain a mystery. Why Olsen dispatched her "private security" to the scene (who arrived as quickly as the first responders) is also a curiousity; were they sent to dispose of something embarrassing (though unconnected to the events leading up to Ledger's death)? Or is Ms. Olsen, as a very wealthy young woman, so far removed from daily society that she felt it was her crisis to handle?

We will never know, and she will likely never, ever comment thereupon. But there was another party to that series of telephone calls, the masseuse, and one wonders if she will keep mum.

What November Will Bring: "Romney v. Clinton: if these are the nominees of the Janus-faced party in November, an interesting question presents itself: will more votes be cast for positive or negative reasons?" - Horus Kemwer, "Worst Case Scenario," Against the Modern World, (1/20/08) (emphasis in original). Taking that a step farther, if Mr. Romney and Mrs. Clinton are the nominees in November, will any votes be cast at all?

The Legacy of Budd Dwyer

Not too long ago, those with an alleged conscience in the mainstream media debated the issue of what images, if any, were appropriate to broadcast in the wake of Saddam Hussein's execution. The botched execution was newsworthy, of course, but what standards, if any, does simple decency impose upon the modern mainstream media? How does the media balance that which is newsworthy with that which is appropriate to air? As society becomes more and more desensitized to violence, standards are lowered and then institutionalized. But with so many alternative sources of information these days, the mainstream media doesn't want to be scooped by some fly-by-night website, so mainstream journalists rush to air that which they might not have even considered airing only a few years before. What to do?

This is an old, and sometimes macabre, debate. Twenty one years ago today, on January 22, 1987, R. Budd Dwyer, an embattled Pennsylvania politician, took his own life in front of assembled journalists during a press conference. That very day, Paul Vathis, a Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press photographer, offered this account of the awful scene:

I didn't think there was going to be a problem. Dwyer was passing out handouts. I was waiting for him to bring out the handout saying he finally had resigned. He was nearing the end of the news conference.

He took a blast at the press. We thought the news conference was about to end. He never said anything about resigning.

I was waiting for him to break down and cry. I was waiting for the emotional picture at the end of the conference.

Then he held up his hands when he saw some of the television people starting to take down their cameras and start to leave.

He told the newspeople, "You don't want to take down your equipment yet."

Then he passed out three different envelopes to aides in the room. He called the people up, and I thought they were his letters of resignation.

He put his hand into the brown manila envelope, and I thought he was going to pass out handouts on his resignation. I took a picture of him with his hand inside the envelope.

Then all of a sudden I saw the pistol come out, and I started shooting pictures. He held the pistol in front of his chest with the barrel up. Then he held it outright, with his right hand straight out toward the right wall. And he put his left hand out, trying to stop people from approaching. Duke Horshock, his press secretary, was on his left.

When he pulled the pistol out, everybody started yelling, "Don't, Budd! Budd, don't!"I was standing on a chair between two television guys. Nothing went through my mind except to keep shooting.

Dwyer brought the pistol back and held it in front of his chest and put the barrel into the top of his mouth. And he pulled the damn trigger. I kept shooting my pictures during the whole sequence. I was shocked, personally shocked. From professional experience, I just kept taking pictures. After the bullet went in, it was a gory scene. He went straight down to the floor and went under the window, leaning against the wall.¹

In those circles where such sinister things are celebrated, Dwyer's suicide has been referenced (and the audio has been sampled) in songs over the years (which no doubt causes pain to those family and friends if they chance across them). Filter's "Hey Man Nice Shot," about the Dwyer shooting, has an eerie and ominous feel to it (and for that reason was utilized in episodes of both "Homicide: Life on the Street" and "The X-Files," if memory serves).

It's certainly difficult to imagine an act more selfish than Dwyer's last. "You don't want to take down your equipment just yet"? He purposefully traumatized those assembled, and by offing himself in such a way, he must have made it impossible for his family and friends to fully recover from his death. How could they? When one's intentional death becomes some type of bizarre political theatre, family members and friends can never recuperate from it. But that is why the event is still being discussed a score and a year later.

1. "Painfully Close to the News," Newsday, (January 23, 1987).

The Iowa Caucuses (Comic Book Edition)

Whether it's Hillary Clinton or Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, or John Edwards or John McCain, you can be certain of one thing: Steve Rogers, depicted above in his Captain America garb, and Lex Luthor, depicted below, will not prevail in today's Iowa caucuses. Both of these fictive figures, from Marvel and DC Comics, respectively, ran for president. Cap lost in 1980 and Luthor won in 2000 (if you can believe that). How they fared in the Iowa caucuses, however, was not explored in significant detail, if at all.

Marvel Comics did pause once in 1981, in its alternate history book What If?, to reflect upon the world that would have been had Captain American been elected to the presidency:

November 22, 1963

Today is not just Thanksgiving. Forty four years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Half a century later, the nation is still enthralled with the JFK assassination and the issue of the complicity, or lack thereof, of Lee Harvey Oswald. As with all tragic anniversaries, today's newspapers are filled with memories and reflections, although perhaps less so today because no one meaningfully observes a forty fourth commemoration of anything. Nevertheless, that awful day gave birth to America's thriving conspiracy industry, which suggests that any nefarious deed is the product of a secretive government cabal.


In its November 22, 1993 edition, Newsweek employed a team of writers and researchers to offer their own explanation for the plethora of conspiracy theories. Oliver Stone's JFK had been released only two year earlier, and Gerald Posner's Case Closed, an excellent 1993 book rebutting many of the assassination conspiracy theories, was receiving scoffs from anyone who considered himself or herself outside of the established order of thinking. Published on the assassination's thirtieth anniversary, Newsweek's piece offered an interesting rationale for the behavior of U.S. government officials in the immediate aftermath of JFK's murder: benevolent negligence. In the wake of Oswald's violence, various government agencies and officials tried to secure the public calm and quell any fears, attempts which conspiracy theorists later seized upon as evidence of a vast wide ranging conspiracy of which high government officials were a part. Introducing that series of articles, presidential historian Michael Beschloss observed:

Nervous at the prospect of pursuing the investigation wherever it led, [America's government leaders] instead sought to ensure that the American people's suspicions were put to rest as soon as possible. Their motives were both self-protective and honorable. [President Lyndon B. Johnson], for instance, was justifiably worried that if Americans promptly learned the depth of Oswald's apparent connections to Moscow and Havana, they might demand that he retaliate with force that could lead to a third world war.

The effect was to purchase short-term political calm at the price of thirty years of doubt, not only about John Kennedy's murder but about the integrity and ultimate purposes of American government. During these years, presidents developed such a tendency to conceal or rationalize government failings in the name of national security that the public has been encouraged to suspect a plot behind every act of American statecraft. Thirty years later, if we can wring any moral out of John Kennedy's murder, it is that, in the long reach of American history, the rewards of full disclosure tower over its immediate perils.¹

Certainly, though, these government officials and their underlings had a slight ulterior motive as well: to avoid blame for any possible mistakes or omissions and immunize themselves from accusations of negligence. In the lead article of the series, journalist Evan Thomas concluded:

In the hours and days following the assassination, America's leaders feared that a hysterical public would demand revenge for the death of their president. At the very least, they worried, the small steps Kennedy had taken toward detente would be dashed. With remarkable speed and unanimity, officials at the top levels of the U.S. government decided they must convince the country that the president's death was the work of a lone madman, not some vast communist plot. In the context of the time, this strategy was well intentioned, certainly understandable. But as a method of discovering the truth, it was deeply flawed.

...

In the end, the Warren Commission was probably right: Kennedy was killed by a lone nut, who in turn was killed by another lone nut. But conspiracy theories die hard: more people believe the wackiest conspiracy theory of all -- the CIA-LBJ-Pentagon cooked up by the movie producer Oliver Stone -- than they do the Warren Commission, the combined effort of senators, statesmen and Supreme Court justices.

The irony, of course, is that in their desire to reassure the public that the institutions of government would persevere, the worthies of the Washington establishment produced the opposite effect. The rush to judgment left many Americans wondering if their government was telling the truth.

...

In the end, the story of the American government and the assassination of John F. Kennedy is a tale of human error and parochialism, not of conspiracy. More likely than not, the men of the establishment were right about Oswald. But because of their mistakes, the public will never believe what really happened.²

The American psychology also comes into play in this arena. No one wants to believe that a single individual, acting from a place of malice, can so dramatically alter the course of a nation by killing its leader. Cynicism is also a culprit; it serves well those who are generally ignorant of the facts of the JFK assassination. Why bother to read the Warren Commission report, Posner's mighty tome, or anything else when one can fashionably hide behind a veil of doubt and disdain? If one can veto explanations with an air of cynical derision, one need not read any source material. But cynicsm and ignorance are not the only motivators for the conspiracy industry. There is another motive: profit. Conspiracies sell. Sinister cabals meeting and smoky corridors sell more books and films than a lone gunman acting alone and without aid of government conspirators. From series as popular as The X-Files to films as obscure as 2002's faux-documentary Interview with the Assassin, Hollywood adores conspiracy. By the same token, purported non-fiction books offering the latest bizarre explanations would not continue to appear were there not a buying public interested in reading, or at least purchasing, such things.

In the end, the Newsweek piece offers lessons to government leaders in times of crisis; they would do well to heed them. Rather than scurrying about in the aftermath of tragedy to reassure the American public at any cost, government leaders can and should be a bit more straightforward about such things to avoid the cluttering of the historical record. Now, just as in the 1960s, some people question the official government response to national tragedy and cite any initial uncertainty or reticence as proof positive of sinister machinations. But the goverment can't prove a negative; it cannot establish for the record that there was no American government involvement on November 22, 1963 or September 11, 2001. It shouldn't have to. All that it can do is remain reasonable and responsive and avoid offering the type of "children's history" that Newsweek rebuked as being provided to the Americans of four decades ago.

1. Michael Beschloss, "The Day That Changed America," Newsweek, p. 60-62, November 22, 1993.
2. Evan Thomas, "The Real Cover-Up," Newsweek, p. 66-95, November 22, 1993.

Scott A. Gilbert's Empire of the Senseless

Time was, Houston, Texas played host to the 1992 Republican National Convention, at which that party nominated President George H. W. Bush for a second term. It was from that event that Ronald Reagan made his last major speech and Pat Buchanan called for a culture war. The arts community in Houston was not amused, nor was Scott Gilbert of Apeshot Studios. Gilbert was, and is, a Houston based artist who in the 1990s produced a weekly comic called "True Artist Tales" in Houston's alternative newsweekly, Public News (from which the scan above came). Through Apeshot, he created his own illustrations, silk screened t-shirts, and issued limited edition comic books. He also drew the insert artwork for the Joint Chiefs for the 1992 Houston music compilation, Infected: The Twelve from Texas. That work can be seen below:

But in the fall of 1992, as the presidential battle between Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush raged onward, Gilbert concerned himself with the Republican National Convention. In so doing, he created the "Empire of the Senseless" t-shirt, named for a song by The Mekons (which appeared on their 1989 album, The Mekons' Rock'n'roll, and which mentions, of all people, Oliver North by name in its lyrics).

Fifteen years later, Gilbert remembers his days as an artist and activist in Houston:

I sold a fair number of the Empire shirts, screening them in my house with a very primitive screen set-up. I sold them via ads in the Public News (the ads being a trade-off for the paltry sum the PN paid me for my weekly "True Artist Tales" strip). I recall delivering one set of shirts to some downtown high-rise corporate office bike-messenger style, which was fun.

In the art on the Empire t-shirt, we have a number of the candidates running for office at the convention. Left to right: James Baker as Chaplin's globe-trotting 'Little Tramp", little Danny Quayle hitting on a bong, King George himself preening out front, Pat Buchanan as Dracula, and David Duke as a clown-faced Klansman.

My acquaintances and I did what we could to oppose the Bush-1 regime at the time. One memorable event I organized was a protest march on the book-signing appearance of Oliver North. We marched down Alabama from the PN headquarters at Dunleavy (at the time) to the Bookstop on Shepherd, all wearing xeroxed Oliver North masks, carrying a boombox blasting Public Enemy and other righteous songs. During the convention, I also did a huge mural on the front window of the Lawndale Alternative Gallery on Main, which was a reproduction-blow up of a one of my "True Artist" strips condemning the actions of winner-take-all capitalism in which the Bush machine was engaging. You do what you can, and at that time I had the energy to do a few things.

In 1996, Gilbert moved "True Artist Tales" to another weekly publication, the Houston Press. (Public News folded in the late 1990s). He retired the comic about five years ago and is now a librarian at a Houston college.

"[I'm] not doing much art or comics," he writes, "but I still enjoy the old stuff."

As for the name, "Empire of the Senseless," it was used as the title of a 1988 novel by experimental writer Kathy Acker, four years before Gilbert would use it for his t-shirts and a year before the Mekons released their song of the same name. In 1993, it became the title of the second album by the British band, the Senseless Things. In 2004, a Milwaukee blogger (and apparent Vonnegut fan) calling himself "Billy Pilgrim" appropriated it for his site.

For good measure, you can find an archive of Gilbert's "True Artist Tales" here (although the online archive includes only those strips from 1998 to present).

UPDATE (11/07/07): Scott Gilbert, upon reading the piece above, writes with one additional memory:

When the Mekons played [in Houston] at Emo's in 1993, I gave them an "Empire" shirt, which they much appreciated and showed off at the beginning of their set. It was a lovely turn of the ironic cycle.