The World O' Crap Archive

Welcome to the Collected World O' Crap, a comprehensive library of posts from the original Salon Blog, and our successor site, world-o-crap.com (2006 to 2010).

Current posts can be found here.

Thursday, January 13, 2011

December 1, 2004 by s.z.


Kerry's Ilk Threw Eggs,Tomatoes at Wounded Vets - Wo'C Exclusive! 


Let me now turn the monitor over to the esteemed Glenstonecottage, who has consented to share with us a true-life story about his recent dealings with a cousin who sounds kind of like the guy who called Rush Limbaugh for advice on how to deal with his wacky liberal relatives.  I think you will be edified by it.  And a little troubled.  And greatly amused. 
 
*******
 
Cousin Mary's Houston Airport Story
 
Mary L------- is my second cousin, a lawyer in her 50's who lives in a major city in Texas and works for the DA's office there. I don't remember that I've ever met Mary, but if I did, it was back in the fifties when my family lived in Texas.
 
My dad, who has just turned eighty, enjoys keeping in touch with a large network of family and friends via e-mail, regularly passing along jokes and voicing  liberal political opinions. From my dad's mailouts, Cousin Mary has learned that that my dad, and indeed our whole family, are the kind of earnest liberals with weird, mockable left-wing opinions on issues such as the death penalty, homosexuality, the Iraq war, etc. and that we can usually be suckered into endless, pointless arguments about these issues. So Mary occasionally enjoys e-mailing us to stir the pot a bit and start an argument.
 
The latest exchange occured when Mary sent an e-mail to my dad a few days after Nov. 2, gloating about the election results.
 
Now, my dad wasn't in the best of moods last month, due to a combination of Bush-induced depression, turning eighty,  and some painful bouts of sciatica. And so, physically unable to spend much time in a sitting position in front of his computer, he forwarded Mary's message along to his four children and invited us to respond to her.
 
The basic theme of Cousin Mary's epistle could be summarized as: "John Kerry: America's number one traitor"... Mary simply had to vote against a man of Kerry's despicable character, yadda yadda, despite the fact that Mary is NOT a Republican, but prides herself on being a "GDI" ("god damned independent")
 
Personally, I thought Mary probably was a Republican, at least her message was full of crapola about Kerry of the type spread about by the Shitboat Veterans, Freepers, etc.
 
Anyway, one detail of Mary's message that quickly caught my attention was her claim that John Kerry reminded her of a shocking incident which she had personally witnessed at the Houston airport during the Vietnam era:
I'll never get the mental image out of my mind about the day that my brother-in-law came back from Nam with a planeload of wounded. We family members were all anxiously waiting to greet them, most of us having not laid eyes on them for over a year. And the anti-war protestors showed up and ruined the homecoming, calling them baby killers and throwing tomatoes and raw eggs at them. We're talking about soldiers who were being wheeled in on gurneys and wheel chairs because they had been really WOUNDED and had earned their Purple Hearts.
I knew I wasn't going to win an argument on any of Mary's other idiotic ideas, such as her insistence that John Kerry's war wounds were bogus. So I decided to press her a bit more on her airport story. It struck me as patently false for so many reasons.
First of all, to my knowledge the Houston area was never exactly a hotbed of anti-Vietnam activism. And any protesters down there who'd actually dared to pelt a planeful of returning Vietnam veterans with raw eggs and tomatoes would have survived roughly two and a half seconds.
 
Then there was the fact that I'd never heard of harassing servicemen upon the completion of their tour of duty- what would even be the point of that? I do remember news reports of demonstrators attempting to prevent recruits from boarding the bus to basic training camp, but that was a totally different thing. 
 
And one thing you'd know about 1960's peace demonstrations in the US, if you had attended a few, was that there were usually plenty of angry servicemen hanging around them trying to start a fight. And we few lonely peace demonstrators were more interested in trying to avoid these fights than seeking them out!
 
So I asked Mary to please provide more information about her airport story, like what was the month and year that it happened? How many demonstrators took part? etc.
 
She responded as follows. (BTW, all the messages that follow were cc'd amongst  family members.)
I find it interesting that you doubt my memories of that fateful night in the Houston airport when my brother-in-law came home. Do you think I need to make something like that up to justify my opinions or who I cast my vote for? If so, you need to get to know me a whole lot better.
 
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the plane was late and didn't arrive and start unloading until 1:00 am. We were exhausted physically and mentally, worrying about what sort of shape[Name] would be in. But trust me, the protestors did exactly what I described and it felt great to watch them be arrested and taken to jail that night for disturbing the peace of those returning wounded soldiers.
 
Perhaps it's another peculiarity about Texans, but I don't recall there being any huge anti-war protests in Houston during my high school or college years there... Maybe that's why we were so shocked and appalled that night in the airport when those assholes started screaming and throwing things at our boys.

Truth be known, they were damn lucky the police got there quick and took them to jail because there were enough healthy servicemen in that airport to have taken them apart one body part at a time.
 
Mary's story still smelled pretty bogus. I was determined to get to the bottom of it, so I tried to e-mail Molly Ivins, one of my favorite columnists and a long-time Texan... but unfortunately, the Creator's Syndicate website said they couldn't contact Molly Ivins. 
 
Then I got the brainstorm of e-mailing one of my favourite bloggers, David Neiwert, whose weblog Orcinus is a sort of national right-wing watch.
 
David turned out to be a motherlode of information. He alerted me to the fact that Cousin Mary's airport story was actually a variation of an urban legend which had been sweeping the US for years. Better still, he put me on to a Holy Cross sociologist and Vietnam veteran named Dr. Jerry Lembcke, whose 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam described Lembcke's long but fruitless attempts to find a factual basis for this urban legend airport story, popularized in the 1980's Sylvester Stallone movie Rambo, which I had never seen.
 
Armed with this delightful information, I decided to do some "torquing" of my wingnut cousin. My first e-mail was cc'd to Mary, but addressed to Dr. Lembcke:
Dear Dr. Lembcke,
I recently became aware of your 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, in which you describe your efforts to track down the source of the "urban legend" of returning Vietnam servicemen who get spit upon by Vietnam war protesters at an airport.
I am writing to tell you that I have been fortunate enough to find an original source who can verify this story for you: my second cousin Mary, down in Texas.
Mary is a lawyer, so you know she'd never do a thing like committing perjury, and she actually witnessed what happened at the Houston airport that fateful night.
And it's worse than you would have ever believed, Dr. Lembcke!!! The returning servicemen were in wheelchairs and lying prone on hospital gurneys, while the cowardly hooligans who attacked them werenot spitting--- Mary actually witnessed them throwing raw eggs and tomatoes!
So, Dr. Lembcke, since my second cousin Mary was an actual eyewitness to this event, she will be able to provide you with the names of other eyewitnesses, such as her brother-in-law and the rest of the soldiers who were on the plane with him.
For your convenience, I've included Mary's e-mail address, in the hopes that you can get all the particulars from her and hopefully add a new chapter to your book, definitively proving for once and for all that the terrible insults heaped upon returning US servicemen by Vietnam war protestors are not an urban legend at all.
Please make sure you cc me on all your exchanges, Mary and Dr. Lembcke--- I'm dying to know how this thing turns out!
Sincerely yours,
glenstonecottage
I waited a few days. No response from Mary.

I began to worry that perhaps I'd teased Cousin Mary beyond the bounds of family propriety. I phoned my dad at his Ohio home to find out if he was upset by my latest broadside.

My dad can be a bit testy at times, so I was relieved to hear him boom over the phone, "Hell, no! Don't stop! You're doing a great job!"

This inspired me to further flights of fancy, so I waited a few more days and wrote to Mary and Dr. Lembcke again:
Dear Mary and Dr. Lembcke,
Hope you two have hooked up by now so Dr. Lembcke can get down every detail of Mary's Houston airport story.
 
Why? Because I'm getting EXCITED about this!!!
 
Mary, I never mentioned this before because we were too busy talking about politics, but I'm an amateur writer who has written several poems, plays and film treatments.... nothing really bigtime yet but I think a project like this one could really put me on the map!
 
Just use your imagination for a second--- wouldn't this be an absolutely fabulous vehicle for one of those made-for-TV movies, like the one that they made about that Private Jessica Lynch???
 
Now just imagine this: every US serviceman in the WORLD, both active duty and retired, all glued to their TV sets, watching "Houston Airport: America's Shame". (What do you think of that title, eh? I just made it up!) Not to mention all the families and friends, because this would be so controversial--- lie that Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ"?--- so practically everyone in the world would be talking about this for months before it even came out on TV!
 
Now pardon me if I'm getting ahead of myself here, but my sister has an ex-boyfriend in Baltimore who owns a FOX-TV station--- now, doesn't this just sound EXACTLY like the kind of thing FOX would really go for? And I'll bet, as a station owner, good old Mark could get an appointment to see FOX's top management practically the day after tomorrow! 
 
So what do you think? PLEASE, Mary! Let's just put aside our political differences for a while and get GOING on this thing!!! Let's face it, it could make us all rich, you and me and Dr. Lembcke too!
 
Even more importantly than the money, of course, this represents a chance to set the record straight about the despicable treatment that returning US servicemen got from war protesters. Because I have to admit that this was a story I'd never heard of before Mary opened up my eyes to it, but now that I know about it, okay, I am ashamed to admit that I, too, was once a war protestor... but isn't THAT  a big part of what this story is about, too? There would be millions of former Vietnam war protesters, just like me, having to face up to the real truth, just like I am now!
 
So what do you say, Mary. Is it a go? Please tell me you'll hurry up and give Dr. Lembcke all the details so he can verify them ASAP!
 
Your cousin (and future business partner?)
 
glenstonecottage
 
Soon after this, I considered writing a whole bogus Houston airport screenplay to send to Mary, but since I am a teacher and report cards were beckoning at that point, I had to give that idea up.
 
But an even better idea intervened in the form of a second second cousin in Texas, Denise G, whom I'd been cc'ing my Cousin Mary stories just for a laugh.
 
Denise has never met Mary, although previously unbeknownst to either of them, they  live in the same city. Denise was not thrilled when I enlightened her to the fact that my second cousin Mary was also hersecond cousin Mary. Denise in turn enlightened me of the fact that stories like this one are common as dirt down in Texas!
 
Denise is a real computer nerd and it took her only a little bit of Googling to find out the real truth about Cousin Mary's airport story. Namely, that it was a thinly plagiarized version of a September 1, 2004 GOP-USA column entitled "Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold" by a writer named Barbara Stock
 
BTW, the strong of stomach can read Stock's "Revenge" article for themselves here.
 
Naturally, I had to e-mail a copy of the Barbara Stock column to Cousin Mary for her comments. But surprisingly, Mary had no comments.
 
At some point in my correspondence with cousin Mary, I had started cc'ing blogger "s.z." whose humorous weblog, "World O'Crap" is devoted to lampooning the lunacies and lies of rightwing columnists.
 
Since Barbara Stock had long been one of s.z.'s favorite wingnuts, she was delighted to learn of the Stock-Cousin Mary connection, and suggested that I share the entire story with her thousands of worldwide "World O'Crap" fans.  [Ed. note: I did not pay Mr. Cottage for his testimonial.] 
 
Now, s.z., I know this story is a bit long, though I've done my best to compress it. But I hope you will allow me the luxury of finishing with a quote from one of my heroes, progressive economist John Maynard Keynes, who wrote back in the 1930's about "the Power of Ideas":
"Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggereated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas…. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil…"
Unfortunately, it seems that things in the USA have degenerated to the point where the "voices in the air" echoed by many of our countrymen--- people like Cousin Mary, a lawyer, university graduate and presumably an intelligent person--- originated not with arcane rightwing academics, but with out and out liars who are paid to whip up the rubes with "boogeyman" stories...("Bill Clinton is a cocaine dealer and murderer! Hillary Clinton is a lesbian! Liberals are all traitors!")
 
From my reading of history, similar hysterical delusions swept over Germany in the twenties and thirties, with results which didn't take long to become terrible.
 
So, family etiquette notwithstanding, I think it's incumbent upon everyone who has a Cousin Mary in their family--- and alas, most Americans nowadays probably do-- to gently shine the light of reality on some of their increasingly bizarro "boogeyman" hallucinations. 
 
I'm sure that one day when they wake up, they will thank us... right, Cousin Mary?

4:10:13 AM    



Who Said It?

  (Dr. Mike Adams Scandal Edition)


As Chris V. stated, our first Mystery Guest from yesterday was Midge Decter's son, John Podhoretz
We want to thank Clif for reminding us that the righteous Podhoretz said he didn't need any lessons from crack addict Aaron Sorkin -- you know, until Pod got that job at "The West Wing."  I don't know if he's still advising the show this year (I don't watch "The West Wing" because, frankly, I have enough problems running the country via this blog and can't carry the TV version too), but if he is, then I think he should suggest a story line that involves President Sheen announcing that he's no longer the President of the people who didn't vote for him, and so he will totally ignore them and try not to do anything to benefit them as long as he's in power.  

And as D. Sidhe indicated, our second Mystery Guest was Ditto Head Jerry Falwell.  We have to thank Media Matters for the quote, because we also don't watch Jerry's televised sermons. 

Chris V. also correctly identified our third Mystery Guest, the prolific Mike Adams, who, as you will recall, wrote that lovely column in which he said that Senator Julia Boseman and her lesbian partner were raising a child sired by her brother (and implied that some sort of hillbilly incest was involved). 

Mike, as you also may recall, came to public attention after a student threatened to sue him for libel for using the university's computer system to send her an abusive email after she sent him one claiming that US actions played a part in causing 9/11.  She also claimed that he forwarded her email to some students, two of whom then sent her threatening emails.  She reported the students (but not Mike) to the university police, who didn't deem the emails to be threats.  

Mike, who was worried about being sued, whined to the "Foundation for Individual Rights in Education," which told the Moonie Times how the liberal university P.C. forces were repressing him ("Help! Help!  I'm being repressed!") for making a student feel "uncomfortable" -- and Mike became a conservative martyr to the issue of free speech, and got a Townhall gig out of it.

In the spirit of free speech, let's revisit some of that story. 

Here's part of the student, Rosa Fuller's, complaint:
A University faculty member, Mike Adams, sent me an e-mail message, dated September 17, 2001, with the use of the University’s central computing facilities and services, from the address:adamsm@uncwil.edu, which berated me, with no semblance of an argument, with abusive epithets, which falsely represented me as "dishonest," "intentionally divisive," "bigoted," "unintelligent," and "immature." The intent of such a message is intimidation and defamation.
[...]
A student, Krysten Scott, sent me an abusive, threatening, profane and libelous e-mail message, dated September 17, 2001, with the use of the University’s central computing facilities and services, from the address: scottk@uncwil.edu, which in part said: "People like you deserve to be dragged down the street by your hair. . . . I hope you will have the good sense to keep you[r] liberal moth shut at a time like this. No one needs your shit." The intent of such a message is defamation, intimidation and the communication of a threat. I have reason to be concerned for my personal safety.
Here's more, from Rosa's father :
When Dr. Adams first read Rosa's statement, on the morning of September 17, he immediately contacted the secretary of the North Carolina Federation of College Republicans, a UNCW student named Krysten Scott.  He sent her a frantic series of e-mail messages at 9:03 a.m., 9:06 a.m. and 9:11 a.m.  We believe Scott then forwarded Rosa's statement to current and former members of the College Republicans.  She likely included either Dr. Adams' name-calling response or her own threatening response, which she sent Rosa at 9:38 a.m.  Dr. Adams sent his abusive e-mail letter to Rosa at 9:45 a.m.  He then continued his obsessive contact with Scott with three more e-mail messages at 9:57 a.m., 9:59 a.m. and at 12:33 p.m.  We believe these facts indicate that Dr. Adams sent his false representation of Rosa to Scott.  We believe Scott then acted on his false representation and sent Rosa an abusive and threatening e-mail communication.
Should professors be allowed to call students names, and disparage them to other students?  Well, while it's probably not illegal, it sure doesn't sound like the kind of behavior universities should be encouraging.  

But here, let's read Mike's Townhall bio:
After his involvement in a well publicized free speech controversy in the wake of the 911 terror attacks, Adams became a vocal critic of the diversity movement in academia. After making appearances on shows like Hannity and Colmes, the O’Reilly Factor, and Scarborough Country, Adams was asked to write a column for the Heritage Foundation’s Townhall.com.
Today he enjoys the privilege of expressing himself both as a teacher and a writer. In his spare time, he loves spending time with his wife, Krysten.
"Wife Krysten."  Hmm. But maybe she's not the former Krysten Scott.  Surely all those emails that Professor Mike sent to this young, female student (and the Secretary of the campus branch of the College Republicans) were purely professional (in that they were about disparaging Rosa Fuller).  Right?
From the Wilmington Star -- 01/19/03
Krysten Dyanne Scott of Wrightsville Beach and Michael Scott Adams of Wilmington are engaged to be married Aug. 2 at Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church in Wilmington. Miss Scott is the daughter of Bill and Lynda Scott of Kure Beach. Mr. Adams is the son of Joe and Marilyn Adams of Huntsville, Texas.
So, less than 18 months after Krysten sent Rosa an email telling her that she deserved to be dragged through the street by her hair for not keeping her liberal mouth shut, Krysten and Dr. Mike were engaged.  What a touching story.  If I were like Mike, I would imply that all kinds of nasty and inappropriate things were going on between Dr. Mike, an Associate Professor, and Krysten an impressionable  student under his guidance (and a College Republican, a member of a group for which he is the faculty advisor).  But I will just stick with the facts. 

But on to other things.  Who said this?
The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage--no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them. She had never to this moment thought Eden a particularly attractive paradise, based as it was on naivete, but she saw that the women in the cart had a passionate, loving intimacy forever closed to her. How strong it made them. What comfort it gave.

1:19:11 AM

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