Well, let’s get to it, shall we?

A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the “writings” that got him arrested are being taken out of context.

I don’t know how big a deal this is, but why is the word “writings” written in quotation marks?

Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole’s home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police.

… And Fluffy the Cat? (I’m always going to interject “Fluffy the Cat” when I happen upon stories such as this one… You know that, don’t you?)

Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class.

“My story is based on fiction,” said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. “It’s a fake story. I made it up. I’ve been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies.”

Yes, dear Poole. But, don’t you see… all high schools are over-run by zombies! You can’t rely on the over-familiar — you need something a bit more exotic or you’ll lose your audience.

Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. “Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it’s a felony in the state of Kentucky,” said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

The Winchester Police Department, evidentally, is over-run by zombies too. That needs to be his sequel. Only he’ll probably have to change the name to avoid suspicion or dancing to close to “Terrorist Threats”. Maybe call it the Pinheadster Police Department. (I’m willing to donate a notebook and pen so that he can write it while waiting for bond or arraignment in his jail cell.)

“It didn’t mention nobody who lives in Clark County, didn’t mention (George Rogers Clark High School), didn’t mention no principal or cops, nothing,”
said Poole. “Half the people at high school know me. They know I’m not that stupid, that crazy.”

So, half the people at George Rogers Clark High School knew Poole, eh? The other half probably thought he was a freak. Or maybe half the people who knew him thought he was a freak, and half the people who didn’t didn’t think he was a freak. Calculating such percentages is a tough business.

On Thursday, a judge raised Poole’s bond from one to five thousand dollars after prosecutors requested it, citing the seriousness of the charge.

And so it goes…

In the bastions of Pinkwater-related rumours (an obscure Internet reference, circa late 1990s), Pinkwater was in some stage of writing — perhaps entirely written but never-to-be-published, a third “Snarkout Boys” book entitled I Snarked With a Zombie.

But the premise in Lizard Music serves as much purpose as anything else. Our hero, Victor, becomes aware that everyone around him is pod-person.

“Now, what’s this about pod people?”

“Oh yes, it’s a problem, but it doesn’t do to worry about it too much. Somehow, people who get all concerned about podism usually seem to wind up catching it.”

I don’t know what Poole was getting at with his zombies. Perhaps it was a Revenge Fantasy of some sort. Perhaps it was an erudite commentary on society at large. It was probably neither, though.

Well, here’s the eventual explication to the provacative caller’s “I don’t support the troops” thangy, from the Clyde Lewis message board:

First, I am no pacifist, I believe in the appropriate use of a military. My father was with the U.S. Air Force on Iwo Jima, and I see his service as protecting our country form a fate worst than conquest.
Second, In 1848 my greatx4 Grandfather, Beuford W Smith came to Oregon and set up the first sawmill with his brother Titus. On the Pointer side of my family we homesteaded the land on the north side of Hwy. 26 from the zoo all the way west to the hospital where my family welcomed a band of 12 Cherokee to camp . My great GF Pointer fell in love with one of the women and married her. There was some hostile sentiment toward Indians at this time so they told most people she was from China.

“He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind, and the fool shall become a slave to the wise at heart.”

Take it for what it’s worth. Truthfully, I don’t take the phrase seriously, and can only really brush it aside as a rhetorical device that will have meaning as soon as the necessary changes in the English language grant it meaning.

For what it’s worth, I just received an outraged mass-email about Jane Fonda. I contemplate the aesthetic choice of centered 13.5 Arial font block letters (which I would contemplate the same if it discussed, say, Dennys cutting back to low-grade cheese for their grilled cheese sandwiches.)

(Do I now drudge up Rush Limbaugh’s recent comments in Afghanistan to the troops? Yes… no… maybe…)

The New Republic, as per this cover, considers itself as defending the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, John F Kennedy (or is that Robert Redford?), Harry Truman, Woodrow Wilson, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Martin Luther King, Jr. having been a qualified Socialist, I imagine the magazine would have, by the late 1960s, ran editorials citing him as a a bit irresponsible under the current editorial board.

They found the man who embodied their magazines’ political hopes and dreams in 1992 in the guise of the “New Democrat” Bill Clinton, and endorsed him heartily. All the while running op-ed pieces by Fred Barnes and others advancing George H W Bush’s cause. Make of it what you must.

I am told that if I go back to Joseph Lieberman’s first bid for the Senate seat from the state of Connecticut, I would find that he was a man who ran to the right of the seating Republican Senator, endorsed by Pat Buchanan of all people. See here:

Lieberman was first elected to the United States Senate as a Democrat in 1988, scoring the nation’s biggest political upset that year by a margin of just 10,000 votes after being backed by a coalition of conservative Democrats, allied with conservative Republicans who were upset with Republican incumbent Lowell Weicker’s liberal voting record.

I suppose that this has to be considered the deathknell end of the “Rockefellar Republicans” that the Goldwaterite and Reaganite(*) Republicans were at war with… a group of Republicans that may well its soul from Robert La Follette, but for the most part were just standard political hacks. Pity the political party or political party faction that finds its base in the Northeastern United States! Today, you have Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, and that’s about it. He voted for Bush’s father in the 2004 election, considers himself Republican to the core, and does not like the current party all that much. And, he’s found his poll numbers dissipate quickly, as Rhode Island Republicans wonder: You couldn’t vote for Bush?, and Rhode Islanders in general wondering You’re caucusing with these freaks?

The New Republic endorsed Joseph Lieberman for the Democratic Nomination for Presidency. Lieberman is currently the weak point for the Democratic Party’s attempt to claim a cohesive party Legacy: Roosevelt and Kennedy hang over us all. The effect of Joseph Lieberman is to ponder whether he’s a Skull and Bones plant of some type.

Murmurs abound about throwing up a primary challenge to Lieberman, ranging from a sort of token “conscience” choice of Paul Newman to some more credible politician. Actually, defeat Lieberman and perhaps it’d be the same as deflating the Rockafellar Republicans…

The two most recent credible primary challenges of note… New Hampshire in 2002. Pennsylvania in 2004. New Hampshire’s Republicans wanted to get rid of Bob Smith for quiting the party in 1999, and thus backed John Sununu to oust him. Movement Conservatives consider Arlen Specter Enemy #1, and backed Pat Toomey to oust him… Arlen Specter was then backed by the Republican Party — including Bush and the other Pennsylvania Republican Senator, Rick Santorum, who gave him enough cache amongst Pennsylvania’s Right Wing Republicans to win the danged race.

So, with Lieberman… it sadly depends on whether the Democratic Party particularly gives a damned.

Maybe I’m picking on the wrong person here, but I really don’t understand Jeremiah Adler:

He made solo treks into the Oregon woods for days at a time. He stood on the front lines of downtown anti-war protests. Then, shortly before graduating last June from the alternative Waldorf School, Adler did what his friends and family considered unthinkable.

But only hours after arriving for basic training at Fort Benning, Ga., he had a change of heart. The Army, he says, wanted to turn him into “a ruthless, coldblooded killer,” and he wanted no part of it.

You think you are going to change the Military?

After nine days, Adler fled, running into the Georgia forest in the middle of the night with a friend. As he did, he joined thousands of other would-be soldiers who bolt from their units each year, risking everything from a blot on their employment records to prison time. Since 2001, more than 15,000 people have gone AWOL, or absent without leave, from the Army, according to statistics provided by a military police official at Fort Lewis, Wash.

Most of whom I have much more sympathy to than Jeremiah Adler… the cases where someone goes to war and has a conscience change. Or realize suddenly what the military is and what it is you are doing. Or realizes that it is not worth the college money. Frankly, they are often brave people for deserting against such a political backlash. Jeremiah Adler, on the other hand…

As a high school senior, Adler seemed as unlikely a candidate for the military as one could imagine. He not only marched the streets of Portland to protest the war, but his mother had to talk him out of a plan to scale a downtown crane and hang an anti-war banner from it. Growing up, he was forbidden to play with toy guns. To schoolmates, he was a jokey, sensitive social activist.

He thrilled to the possibility of joining the Army. He told his mother, he told his teachers, he told his friends. They all tried to talk him out of it.

Perhaps his mother, his teachers, and his friends saw the difference between the military and himself? Egad, he could have been a perfectly good police officer… might have helped solve some of the Portland Police Burea’s problems.

“He said, if it’s only warmongers in the military, that’s how the military will stay,” Wasson said. “He believed he could tip the scales. It was a very, very idealistic attitude, but my son is a very articulate, convincing kind of guy.” […]

He was giddy on the airplane to Fort Benning in September. He arrived late at night and filed with 103 other recruits into an auditorium. A drill sergeant welcomed them with a story about why he joined the Army. Not for the education, not for the camaraderie but, as Adler recounts him saying, “to shoot (bad people).” The auditorium erupted in hoots.

“It wasn’t about preparing you to kill,” Adler says about basic training. “It was about instilling inside you a desire to kill.”

That’s the culture one has to know they’re joining with when signing up for the military. A bit disillusioning, I imagine. Except if you throw out all your idealistic illusions and realize… that is the culture you’re about to encounter.

Have I ever shared my military recruitment story? It’s only vaguely interesting, but that may be good enough to throw back up.

I woke up feeling sickly because the window shut closed in the middle of the night. No circulation of air in a poorly ventriculated room, which is why the window must always be open.

Maybe I oughta vaccuum the place. I can’t clean it, because if I told the manager that I was “cleaning my unit”, I would receive a lame lowbrow joke. I’d much prefer an ironic comment on the double-entrendre nature of the term “cleaning my unit”, and a knowing reference to how lame such a remark is, but the manager is not that type of person.

Hey! Jeff Gannon, ex-gay prostitute, ex-contributor of re-written White House Press Relases to the currently-on-hiatus “Talon News”, now has a BLOG! Why can’t this guy sign up with “bloglines”? (Otherwise, I’m never going to be able to follow up on the hilarity of pearls of wisdom such as:

I’m baaaaaaack! If you thought I was going to slink away – then you don’t know much about me. Someone still has to battle the Left and now that I’ve emerged from the crucible, I’m stronger than before.

Despite all the pleas from the Left to go over to the ‘dark side’ and expose the ‘corrupt Bush administration’ simply isn’t going to happen. My faith and my ideology are rock solid.

No longer a strange peg in the wheel of the Right-Wing Echo Chamber, Jeff Gannon has emerged as a Maytr for the Cause… Bigger, Louder, and UnCut!

Does he still have his white house sources?

Two items pop up in regards to the Jeff Gannon story. #1 is the nature of the White House Press Briefing. That’s really not a place to get news of any type… bonafide journalists should be seeking answers (and investigating, mind you) elsewhere. It’s a stupid ritual. (And, as noted here, perhaps getting frozen out of the White House isn’t such a bad thing.) Knight-Ridder has been able to get some good stories by making their reporters actually do some digging. They’ve cultivated sources lower down in the departmental hierarchies–where there’s actual news, not just press releases. I believe it was by necessity, as K-R was reportedly frozen out of the cozy access arrangements.

#2 is the Jeff Gannon is the closed-circuit loop nature of the Right-Wing Media Echo Chamber. Start in the White House before you have any media source to report for. Regurgitate falsities from Rush Limbaugh. Recycle White House Press Releases. Call John Kerry too gay-friendly. Make an appearance on Sean Hannity’s program. There is no need to look beyond Free-Republic — Fox News (itself a Pravda unit) — NewsMax — Talk Radio for any information of any kind… all of which, incidentally, you must burn before your very eyes.

That last blog entry of mine (and the quote from the Creationist that spawned it) leads us right back to Columbine, a news event that weighed heavily on me through my last month of high school. (The uptik in murmurings on public education on this blog is due to reading through Gatto’s book… as well as a couple of news items.)

Now I can elaborate on the “Rorschach” Test aspect to the whole thing. It seems as though nobody ever discussed the violence known as Columbine — they discussed other items. (Oftentimes it seemed to take on the aspect of debating whether to abridge the First Amendement or the Second Amendment.)

Remember “The Trenchcoat Mafia”? They didn’t exist. Or, for all intents and purposes, they didn’t exist in 1999. They appeared in a group photograph in the 1998 yearbook, and that was just about the end of those guys. (I sort of assume it was mostly guys.) Kleebold and Harris were just two straggler-ons, incidental enough to the whole cliquish subset that they didn’t appear in that photograph. Thus… The Trenchcoat Mafia are completely innocent and have little or no bearing on any conversation regarding the Colubime Shooting Incident. It makes perfect sense how they permeated popular imagination: second hand from other high school students looking from the outside in on a batch of weird looking freaks. Translate this into news items, and everything is perverted from there on out.

This lead us to news items from throughout the nation’s schools about students expressing, in class discussions and elsewhere, guarded sympathies to the two killers. These kids were guilty of framing Kleebold and Harris into their own experience as alienated, bullied adolescents. Welcome “Jocks versus Nerds”. (or Goths. Or Whatever.)

Maybe this is for the best. It has lead to schools re-examining and looking at the issue of bullying, frequently and too easily dumped away and rationalized as a cynical social Darwinian exercise: “It’ll toughen them up. Prepare them for the harsh, real world.” (An attitude that seems to frequently lead to suicide, if nothing else.)

The other batch of news items I was reading through and scratching my head at at the time. Interviewing “jocks” (usually jocks, occasionally other “popular kids”) who now feel (a) vulnerable and (b) a bit more empathetic to the less popular, picked-on kids. The imprint on my mind was an article with a football player saying something along the lines of “And a friend pointed at a fellow student, saying ‘he’s the type who just might do something like this’, and I was like, (and as though this proves his virtue) I didn’t bother looking over at who he was pointing to.”

You do recall that these two killers pretty well shot indiscriminately? See… that’s what leads some fundamentalist Christians to believe they were Atheists shooting Christians! (And a fairly odd legend grew out for Christian Youth to snatch onto, the matry who said “yes” to the question of whether or not she was a Christian, and was gunned down anyway. Replete, annoyingly enough, with merchandising.)

Actually, they were trying to kill everyone in that school, but the explosive devises they wired up proved poorly connected. Beyond that, they planned to … hijack a plane, kill more people on the way to … I believe Washington, DC, but my memory is fading.

Which would’ve turned their more-deadly than usual school shooting into a bonafide murder spree. Which is what they wanted to accomplish. And which destroys what had been my impression of the two, which was still buried into the popular storyline of the events (and everybody’s adolescent expereience): A month away from graduation, and yet they lacked the perepective to realize THEY WERE A MONTH AWAY FROM GRADUATION. Nay… they had some perspective beyond a shallow high school corridor. Or, at least the more dominant and irredemibly sociopathic of the two (and I don’t remember which one was that one.)

Figure out why they were sociopaths (emotion-numbing drugs which help put them into a video-game mode… but, then again, there was a reason they were prescribed emotion-numbing drugs), but don’t alter the story into what it wasn’t.

I’m not sure what my point is in deconstructing away what was a moderately (though only moderately) overhyped news event that is fading away from the public conciousness, as all things do. Nor do I know how shedding it away to what looks like its real story guides us anywhere in the future. But, I never knew how to discuss Columbine (the last time I had any reason to was, really, the Spring of 2001 — which was about the ending of the mass media feeding off of various incidents) — due to the difference between what it was and what different people wanted it to be for various reasons.

We should ban video games, maybe?

Conveniently thrown at us in pull-quote form, comes quote from the Creationist Sect:

“We have kids killing kids because they think they’re just a bunch of people descended from monkeys, with no one to answer to,” he said. “If I took a bunch of guns to the zoo and handed them out to the monkeys, we’d have a bunch of dead monkeys. My problem is not with guns. My problem is with calling my kids monkeys.” (Jerry Allen is a mechanic from Burbank, a suburb of Pasco, Washington… which is just what we need… a suburb of Pasco, Washington. Can there be such a thing? Is Outlook [Home of Astronaut Jennifer Dunbar, or whatever it is her name is] a suburb of Sunnyside, Washington [Home of a sign that says it is the home of said Astronaut]?)

Never mind. One of the positive results of the 9/11 attacks is that it seems to have pretty well ended the era of school shootings, and more importantly the Political Rorschach Tests that followed. The media space that sociopathic drugged out kids attempted to mine through the early 90s and early 00s has moved away to weightier matters. Or maybe the increased security has done it… I don’t know.

Students Arrested for Cyber Bullying.

Investigators with the Attorney General’s High-Tech Crimes Unit say the situation started when a 15-year-old female student created a website called “Loranger’s biggest queer.com.” The website featured pictures of a 14-year-old male student. He responded with his own web site, which investigators say included a list of students he called “The Preps,” and poems so graphically violent, investigators say “they crossed the line.”

That’s a strange little curious case of cross-purpose. Stick to threatening “Fluffy the Cat”, and you’ll be better off. (Who where and why does any angsty youth think about such a thing as “The Preps”?)

This article came to my attention when I heard in the corner of my ear a news item that Washington State politicos were seeking to rid our schools of “cyber-bullying”, and I wondered what they were referring to. A google search, and I ponder any number of items.

The Right-Wing is currently in a tizzy about some anti-war letters some sixth graders sent to the troops. I don’t really know what you expect sixth graders to write … and it seems to me that the Bill O’Reillys of the world seem to believe that the natural state of a sixth grader is to believe in the righteousness of a war effort, or to be “taught” to believe in the righteousness of a war effort. (Actually, I suspect the sixth graders’ opinions reflected the opinion of their parents, an effect that will change in a year or two.)

WHAT HAPPENED? Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Adams, Hamilton. Things were going well. Then Ford, Quayle, Mondale, Agnew, Nixon, Clinton, Dole, Bush I, Bush II. What happened? — George Carlin WWJBTPC p 52

Note the final paragraph of this article.

By age group, Clinton is favored by the youngest (18-29), Reagan by the 30-49 group, Kennedy by the 50-64 baby boomers, and FDR by the elderly.

I ponder how it is that people’s sense of history is destroyed to the point where they hark back to the president they most directly experienced during their formative years — whether this is the state of things in nature or due to the fact that High School History is frequently taught by Football coaches that regard teaching History as a side project. But it seems that people’s sense of history is directed to the immediate now. They like the president they grew up with… or at least, the ones that left triumphantly. Keep in mind that Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter all left in disgrace of one sort or the other– so we have this huge gap between Kennedy and Reagan. The warm and fuzzy feeling associated with one politico or another is likely divided between Kennedy and Reagan.

I recall a survey result heard in the corner of my ears in the summer of 2001 that an increasing number of youngsters, coming of age during Clinton, regarded themselves as “liberal”. (Leave aside how far liberal the actual president Clinton really was.) Which works in well with the 1980s Reaganites (Michael J Fox’s character on “Family Ties” epitimizes the standard). On election day 2004, Tom Brokaw or Chris Matthews called our new batch of crappy Republican Senators as being “Reagan’s Children”, and we received a number of comparisons to Politicos from the 1950s who were “Roosevelt’s Children”. (That Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn makes absolutely no sense to me either underscores or is beside the point.) Grover Norquist believes that the dying out of the generation that grew up with Roosevelt will allow us to go onward and upward to the great Gummint-Less State — what, historical memories of what wrought the Great Depression and what was needed to get by during trying times having been vanquished. He’s probably right to some degree.

Today’s children get to admire Bush II (as I guess I’m supposed to gravitate toward Clinton), which brings us back to these survey results:

One in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, according to a survey being released today.

Asked whether the press enjoys “too much freedom,” not enough or about the right amount, 32% say “too much,” and 37% say it has the right amount. Ten percent say it has too little.

It is all starting to make sense to me. At least my age group gets to parse out the meaning of “oral sex”. (Though, this is another general sense of the Children of Clinton… and that makes sense to me as well.)

Wow. The “Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth” (the same marketing firms) are now going to go after the AARP!

That sounds like a bad parody…

Actually it’s like the Saturday Night Live spoof where the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” went on the attack of what Kerry’s war record meant for domestic policies. “And it was there, in the jungles of Combodia, where I witnessed John Kerry perform… a same sex marriage.”

It didn’t make a whole heck of a lot of sense last time, and it doesn’t make much sense this time. I hope this time around people notice that.