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Today I’m continuing with my monumental project of reviewing my output of the last four years to see where I’ve been. the better to see where I should go in the future with Strike Me Pink in my efforts to inoculate the public with my views on life and, well, everything else, whatever that is.
Reviewing my work is not made easy by my clever trick of using titles that mostly come from popular songs and fir in with my text quite well, but remain mysterious until one has gotten halfway through this and finally sees the relevance of the title to the contents. I’m sure this trick greatly impresses you readers or else I wouldn’t be doing it, but whether it does or not I’m not likely to change things because I’m hooked. Without a cute title added to titillate the reader everything is dust and ashes and the fun’s gone out of writing. Sorry about that.
Critical types can console themselves with the knowledge that I suffer too because, as I’ve noted before, I can’t tell about the text from the title and have to pull out the paper and read it before I know anything. This is called being your own worst enemy.
Enough of my sufferings. Some of the titles aren’t completely cryptic and you can actually look at them and get an idea of what the text is about. “Jailhouse Rock” from 2004 is one. It’s about plans to build a jail in Suffolk County, my home, and the monstrous costs that will be incurred in doing it. All the experts were predicting disaster for Steve Levy, the new Supervisor of the county, if he tried to go through with it. He has persisted, though, and today, which happens to be Election Day, he is on the ballot with the nomination of (a) the Republican Party, (b) the Democratic Party, © the Conservative Party, and (d) several other parties. He must be doing something right.
One way is by looking like Eliot Spitzer, our governor, only better, but not resembling him in his approach to illegal immigration. Eliot wants to give driver licenses to the illegals. Steve wants to send them home. Hmm, Suffolk county’s verging on two million population. That many people might be capable of producing a governor, say in 2010.
Another title that points at, rather than away from its accompanying text, is “A Bridge Too Far” from November ‘04. It memorialized Christmas Day fifty years before when I got into a fracas with three black drunkards while driving to work at my station house in Harlem. We were all stopped dead on the Macombs Dam Bridge when I tried to help them move their car out of the way by nudging it with mine, causing the three of them to charge me with the intent of throwing me off the bridge. I held them off with my gun, creating a panic as drivers attempted to get off the bridge, but things ended quickly enough when the skels saw the gun. Now their car could move and they piled into it and took off cursing at me. I mopped my brow, reholstered my gun and went my way.
For the last few months I’ve thought of another bridge, this one in St. Louis, Mo. I wrote about it in October after I learned about it from the “American Justice” program on TV. It has stayed with me. Why was it sixteen years before I heard about it? Was it covered up? It has to be one of the most gruesome crimes committed in American history, yet if most people are like me before I happened to see the TV story, they’ve never heard of it. Never heard of what happened to two girls who went for a stroll on a St. Louis bridge one evening and were mobbed by a gang of thugs who beat them, robbed them, raped them and then threw them screaming off the bridge to their deaths in the river sixty feet below.
If, as I suspect, there was a media coverup of this case, which would have aroused public indignation if it became known, there was at least one class of people in this country who knew all about its facts, but who felt no indignation at all and did everything they could to perpetuate the coverup rather than penetrate it. These were the conniving judges and lawyers who sided with the killers and succeeded in delaying the execution of their leader for a full thirteen years after his conviction. Their objective of course was to string out the appeals even longer until the Supreme Court would decide that twenty years’ wait for execution was “cruel and unusual punishment” and nullified his sentence. They almost made it, in fact the case went before the Supreme Court twice. When this case is remembered as I hope it will be, may its history of legal tricks and traps be remembered with it as a warning that American courts aren’t to be trusted.
(To confirm this, three years after St. Louis we got the Simpson case which produced the worst exhibition of courtroom chaos yet seen in this country. Deliberate chaos of course.)
Protesting all the while that I won’t write about politics because I don’t have any contacts any more, I still managed to write something I called “The Roaring Kennedys”, also something about former Comptroller Hevesi of New York, about the nominating conventions we enjoyed in the past, and of course about my pet punching bag, the late Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court, the Court’s all-time champion groper, drinker, chiseler, liar, wife beater, grafter and redbird, whose staggering history was laid out in a book by an admirer (!) titled “Wild Bill.” Douglas wouldn’t have minded. He gloried in his shame. He displayed his contempt for us peasants and our narrow little minds when he told us he not only understood the Constitution better than those who wrote it, but was also able to find its real meaning in “emanations” from the “penumbra” of the statements it actually contained. This put him in a class with L. Ron Hubbard and other wizards able to read the coded messages of the bricks in the Great Pyramid. But by the end of his days he was completely gaga and his colleagues no longer took stock in his insights, no matter how inspired.
Big Bill gave me enough material for a number of pieces and when I got through with him I found more up-to-date subjects in the faculties of the schools under the jurisdiction of the Roslyn school district, who managed to make off with $11,000,000 in diverted educational funds before being found out. Then there were the volunteer firemen…but probably the one I liked the best was the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, somehow planted on the shelves of my local library and emitting rays of malicious animal magnetism from its pages closely packed with lies, libels, distortions, inventions, slanders, invective, mudslinging and other poisons without number. Fun, though, if you admire cheek. | | |
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