Right now everywhere in political circles the recently-deceased John Murtha is being toasted by friend and former foe alike. He was a man’s man and a politician’s politician. It was hard not to like the character he cut.
That said, I don’t miss the King of Pork Congressman Murtha, who felt no shame in the game that earned him his moniker; the white elephant of waste that is the $200 million John Murtha airport his true legacy.
Liberals sort of fell for Murtha when he became anti-war because he was continually trumpeted in the media as a real “hawk”. He’s still loved for that.
However, Murtha’s ‘grasp at the swill for my constituents because it’s my Constitutional duty’ style of politics were foolish before and ruinous now that the country’s economic outlook is so dire. If we don’t start capping people like Richard Shelby at the knees, as we should have done to Murtha, our entire standard of living is threatened. We simply can’t afford to spend this way anymore, nor allow our government to be run so ineffectually. The war, tax-cut and high spending policies of the last ten years have hurt this country’s finances greatly, and we haven’t woken up to the economic reality yet. Our leaders won’t tell us how bad it is because they are all too much like Congressman Murtha, or Senator Shelby, and because the cold hard truth of it all does not get them re-elected.
But a toast to John Murtha the man, may he rest in peace.
14-year old Admits Killing Parents in Dispute Over Chores – John Caudle, 14, didn’t want to do his chores, so he took his parent’s .22 caliber pistol, shot his mother, hid in the laundry room, and then shot his stepdad. Then he spent the night playing video games.
Police: Son Asked Friend to Kill Parents – According to police, Timothy Chester had gotten into an argument with his parents. He left the home, but later returned with his friend, Victor Veliz, and they allegedly shot and stabbed them. According to police, Timothy Chester said the plan was to not only kill his parents, but his sister and brother-in-law as well as Veliz’s family.
Edlington child torturers: we attacked because we were bored – Two young brothers, ages 10 and 11, inflicted numerous injuries on two children during a sadistic 90-minute orgy of violence, torture and sexual abuse that began because they were bored and there was “nothing to do”, a court heard today.
“Some of his erstwhile political enemies filled the airwaves Tuesday eulogizing him, a practice that might have baffled the irascible giant slayer: He was not above excoriating the recently deceased, including Orlando Letelier, the Chilean dissident assassinated in 1976, or the journalist I.F. Stone, who died in 1989.“ Ron Kampeas, JTA
That his many critics would now eulogize Robert Novak, who died of brain cancer this morning, is not surprising as people will do anything to be on television, particularly journalists. But this blog is fundamentally against all the weepy revisionism and “yeah, buts” for Novak, one of the worst people there was in modern journalism. Good riddance.
Is that harsh? Unfortunately, so is Novak’s legacy. He was a template of what was to become of American punditry and cable news, and his influence was fundamentally destructive to the United States. You can read his big media defenders–who see his only failing as the Valerie Plame affair–to read his bright side.
The comments below focus on how corrosive the man was to the national discourse.
What is the legacy to which he most contributed? A cable news industry that does little else but incite the worst in Americans’ passions, which has helped to condition a portion of the American electorate to willfully believe lies in obfuscated debates over our most pressing issues.
Novak paved and spit-shined the way for the Keith Olbermanns, Sean Hannitys and Glenn Becks, and their imitators. Here is a collection of words around the web about Bob Novak:
Novak titled his 2007 memoir, “The Prince of Darkness,” and he was indeed a very dark force in cable TV news contributing mightily to the toxic culture of confrontation, belligerence and polarization that so defines cable TV and American political discourse today. There is no way to be nice about his impact on cable TV during its formative years – and his contributions for the worse to the tone and style of what passes for political conversation today.
There was Robert Novak, screaming at someone — probably Michael Kinsley on “Crossfire” — like an enraged health care town hall meeting participant: “Death squads in El Salvador is a liberal MYTH!”
I haven’t been accused of being a liberal all that much, and, as Christiane Amanpour said so wonderfully in Iraq, “Wolf, I can only tell you what I can see,” but I can tell you reliably that Salvadoran death squads were as real as Scooter Libby and Evans and Novak.
At the time, I wanted to reach through the TV screen and strangle the guy into sensibility. Or have the two tragic dead men delivered, without benefit of makeup, on his front lawn.
It wasn’t a liberal-conservative thing. Death squads were a fact.
Whatever else Bob Novak did well, even superbly in his professional life — a great deal, I don’t doubt — at that moment he did a huge disservice to the truth and to the memory of thousands of people who died violently, painfully and without justification in El Salvador.
In Novak’s last prominent chapter, he was best known for reporting leaked information in 2003, identifying Valerie Plame as a CIA operative.
He hid behind his journalistic reputation when he allowed himself to be used by the likes of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and other members of George W. Bush’s inner circle. Novak was content to watch as the nation had to experience an agonizing investigation to explore what had happened.
To me, that underlines everything I didn’t like about Bob Novak and his particular style of journalism.
[T]here was a lot in Novak not to like, a mean gruff manner visible to anyone on TV, a stiletto pen that seemed more about destroying than illuminating. I disagreed with his politics but it wasn’t his politics which were infuriating. It was his arch, cutting style that made him one of the journalists I wanted to avoid becoming. It was his behavior in the CIA leak case that made me think still less of him.
The United States is better off without journalists and pundits that practice their craft the way this destructive, mean man did. He may have had talents as a journalist, but they certainly won’t be the legacy of the man with the fakest teeth in cable news.
“[T]hey organized a kind of death squad to execute rivals who disputed with them the drug trafficking business [and Wallace Souza] would eliminate his rival and use the killing as a news story for his program.” – Police intelligence chief Thomaz Vasconcelos, Associated Press, 8/11/09
A murder victim Wallace Souza filmed for his Brazilian crime show before the police arrived.
Wallace Souza, the host of the Canal Livre crime show in Brazil’s lawless Amazonas region, consistently delivered graphic footage of murder victims well before the police arrived on the scene. Souza, a state legislator, is now being probed for ordering the killings to help boost the ratings of his show, and he faces separate charges of drug trafficking and involvement with a gang.
Souza became a media personality after his career as a police officer ended in disgrace. He started Canal Livre in the 1990s on a station in Manaus, the capital of Brazil’s Amazonas state.
“The order to execute always came from the legislator and his son, who then alerted the TV crews to get to the scene before the police,” state police intelligence chief Thomaz Vasconcelos alleged to The Associated Press. Vasconcelos further stated that the killings “appear to have been committed to get rid of his rivals and increase the audience of the TV show.”
Souza’s son, Rafael, has been jailed on charges of homicide, drug trafficking and illegal gun possession. The elder Souza denies all charges.
Just a few days ago brother Malachy McCourt said Frank did not have long. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes died today from metastatic melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, according to Susan Moldow of McCourt’s publisher, Scribner.
I met Frank and took this shot of him at a tribute to Benedict Kiely (who had recently died) at Housing Works Bookstore Café in March 2007. He was 76 and in good spirits. I was very shy at the time, almost embarrassed, to take photographs of people I respected so much. My camera was a cheap, 2.3 megapixel Fuji my sister Cheryl bought me for my birthday; it certainly didn’t look serious. I had no confidence. When Frank asked me why I was taking the shots, I told him it was for Wikipedia and he brightened. We talked about the site, and he asked why we didn’t just use PR photographs. I explained to him that we could only use work whose copyright was Creative Commons.
“David,” he said, “you mean to tell me you give all your photography away? And don’t make a penny? My mother might say you were a fool!” He laughed to show he meant the comment good-natured.
I explained to him that I wasn’t a professional, but that the photography gives me a substantive excuse to go out and do things like meet him.
“Mr. McCourt,” I said, and he quickly corrected me to use Frank as I continued, “my life is far richer for moments like this, with you, than the $10 I would chase to have it published, which would only cheapen the experience. This camera has given me an interesting life, but only because I’ve shared it.”
Colum McCann, Christy Kelly, Christopher Cahill and Frank McCourt by David Shankbone, March 2007
He looked at me for a moment, and then asked if I was going with the other writers, including Christopher Cahill and Colum McCann, on a bar crawl after the reading to celebrate the Irish poet Kiely (everyone was invited). I was staying away from drinking at the time and told him my stomach didn’t feel right, so I would miss it. Then he clasped my shoulder, and said:
“Too bad, it would be interesting to hear more. Society has become so possessive. People keep things that have no value unless they are shared. That’s very respectable that you do what you do.”
Then I took a couple of shots, and he continued to mingle. It was moments like that which fueled my energy to eventually photograph over 500 of the biggest names found on Wikipedia, and my confidence climbed. Thank you, Frank. Later that year I would photograph Malachy McCourt in his Manhattan apartment, where we got into heavy philosophical discussions that have never left me. The McCourt family had a good impact on me at a time when it mattered, and I am thankful to them.
The portrait of Frank above, like all my photography, is licensed Creative Commons and available for reproduction. Click on it to download a higher resolution version.
Yesterday I walked over to one of my favorite mini-restaurants, Snack Dragon, to buy a couple of carne asada tacos. The topic of Michael Jackson’s and Farrah Fawcett’s deaths were already on the lips of the two ladies eating rice and beans. We all started talking about it. Suddenly, one of the women said, “And then Liza Minnelli, too! I can’t believe it!”
“Liza Minnelli?!” I replied, mouth agape.
“Yeah – you didn’t know about that? They just announced she died today, too.”
“Holy shit,” I said, “the drag queen mascara is going to be running in the streets of Chelsea this gay pride.” We all talked about June 25th, and the deaths of so many amazing people on one day.
I had earlier broken the news about Jackson to my mother. She was floored. When I returned home with tacos in hand, I called her immediately and said, “And did you hear about Liza Minnelli?!”
Of course, Liza Minnelli is alive and well. It was only after I told my mother–”This is starting to feel like a terrorist attack!“–that I looked for information on Google about Minnelli and found nothing.
It turns out that the celebrity death rumor mill was in full swing yesterday, as pranksters preyed on the shock and raw grief of unassuming people. The New York Daily News reported that Harrison Ford and Jeff Goldblum death rumors were circulating:
The rumors of Goldblum and Ford’s untimely deaths turned out to be false, and were in fact well-known Internet pranks that once made similar claims of Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise.
“Reports that Jeff Goldblum has passed away are completely untrue,” said the actor’s publicist in a statement Thursday night. “He is fine and in Los Angeles.”
According to Snopes.com, these stories are automatically generated with fake scenarios via prank websites. Users simply plug in any name – which in this case were Goldblum and Ford.
For Goldblum, it was suggested he fell to his death while filming a movie in New Zealand. Ford supposedly disappeared while on a boat in the French Riviera.
This kind of prank first appeared online in 2006, and targeted Hanks. Cruise was similarly reported “dead” in 2008.
It’s amazing how the Internet is reshaping our society in such a way that things like pulling pranks in the wake of tragic deaths are now completely common. It’s true: nothing is sacred anymore. We all better learn to live in that kind of world.
Michael Jackson Wikipedia article
This image on Wikipedia was dedicated to editor Realist2, who has worked hard at creating high quality articles on the entire Jackson family. Click on the image to see where it is used on Wikipedia.
I have no doubt that Michael Jackson knew that this editor was keeping the article as close to the core Wikipedia policy of “Neutral Point of View” as possible. Realist2 is an example of the amazing work that happens on that site. He took an interest in popular culture and turned himself into a scribe of popular culture. That’s pretty cool.
Realist has worked on the articles about all of the Jacksons, and they owe him a debt of gratitude. We all do. I dedicated the image of a Michael Jackson impersonator at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival celebration of the 25th anniversary of Thriller in Realist’s honor. Also pictured are cast members of the television program Step It Up and Dance!, who put on a show at the festival with the original choreographer of the Thriller video.
With its dedication, Realist2 was inducted into the Wikimedia Hall of the Greats, along with other people who have greatly improved the quality and scope of Wikipedia and its sister projects.
When I was thirteen, I found a boy my age in the woods who shot himself in the head. It’s in a little “about me” narrative I wrote a few years ago found on this blog. It used to say his full name, and eventually both his girlfriend at the time of his death and his sister found me. It was an incredible experience. There is a finite number of people who, like me, felt consequences from that moment.
I won’t condemn a person for taking their own life, but I will condemn them for the method they employ to do so. There are other people involved than just the suicide, and in my case I was hapless. A kid cutting through the woods to go to the Lane Drugs to buy candy.
Once we overcome the initial, “ZOMG! they’re dead and that’s sad!” reaction to a celebrity death, what are we left with? To try to figure out what our knowledge of, and interest in, that person means to us now that he or she is gone. It’s a natural process.
However, there is a knee-jerk reaction to people ruminating about the celebrity life-and-death cycle: give the family privacy. If nothing is sacred, shouldn’t at least the respect for the privacy of a celebrity’s family be? goes that thinking.
I cannot imagine while going through chemotherapy or radiation, people commenting on my prognosis based on how bad or good I looked on any given day. How hurtful those comments must be, whether you are a celebrity and accustomed to the tabloid gossip or just “average Joe”.
I say we give Paul Newman a break. He has lived a wonderful life, giving so much to others through his Newman’s Own Foundation. He deserves privacy, just like we all do.
Leave aside the assumption that the dying are googling themselves, celebrities don’t deserve that kind of privacy. In other words, the privacy that people are not going to discuss you. Fascination is not a faucet. Celebrities have cultivated the public, usually over decades, to breach that privacy with them.
Many commonalities most of us can’t imagine strangers would care to learn about in our lives, tantalize us in the famous. We follow their clothing, their loves, their friendships, their careers, their thoughts, drug problems, marriages, divorces, awards and causes. In fact, if the public loses interest in the life of a celebrity, it might be the death of their career.
We examine our own lives through them, but suddenly we are all supposed to avert our eyes when they are dying or dead? The warm helpings of chastisement when we do not are myopic. They are logically flawed and insult the media machine that has been effective in getting all of us to think about that person, sometimes nonstop, sometimes shaping our entire lives around her.
When David Carradine dies in a bizarre way, bringing to light a sexual practice few of us knew existed before Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, people are going to be interested. Most of the general public neither knew about the practice of autoerotic asphyxiation nor can they contemplate wanting to try it.
Human mortality and the fragility of life is something we all think about, and how people die and the reasons are cause for scrutiny that have implications for ourselves. Celebrity deaths are often how we think about our own, and whether we would want to go the same way.
Lucy Gordon – tragic but heartless?
It has been almost a month since Lucy Gordon committed suicide and the answers to this mystery may never come to light. Why did the rising English actress do it? I am surprised at how much I have thought about it, and it is not because I photographed her.
I won’t begrudge a person for wanting to kill herself. Life is difficult for many of us, and nobody should be forced to live in their own skin by a person or government who does not have to do so.
But how a person commits suicide is another story. All evidence is that Lucy Gordon had family that loved and cared about her. There are no reports coming out from anyone that she had anything but a loving family. Lucy also had a boyfriend, the cinematographer Jerome Almeras. She professed, recently, that she was in love with him. Even his teenage daughter liked her.
Exacerbating the issue is that Lucy just had a friend commit suicide, which upset her terribly. So she knew exactly the pain her death would cause for those she left behind. The night she killed herself, she and Almeras had a spat, according to neighbors. After he went to bed, she then hung herself in their apartment.
Almeras, the man she loved, woke the next morning to find her hanging and went running down the street screaming in anguish after having to cut her down. ‘Call the police – my friend has hung herself!’ he cried over and over. Now, he is left with one of his last experiences with her a quarrel.
There appears to be no evidence of mental instability–outside of the suicide–that could have flagged anyone. Her father, sister, agent and all of her friends were left groping for answers and signs that things were not okay. They couldn’t come up with any.
This is a stunning way to end your life, knowing well the pain that you will cause; ensuring the man you love finds you when he wakes and has to cut you down; and nobody having any idea why you did it.
Suicide may not be a selfish act, at least no more so than the desires of people who want you to go on living in pain so that you can inhabit their lives, but how you do it has implications for the sort of person that you are. How you leave it for people to find you, and the answers you give them, are an indication of whether your death was a selfish act or not.
That boy I found in the woods has never left me. In the case of Lucy Gordon, I think it was a heartless way to go.
Henry Cavill 2009 by David Shankbone. On The Tudors, Cavill plays Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, brother-in-law to Henry VIII of England
A friend gave me the DVD set for Season 2 of The Tudors. The show has Baz Lurhmanned me into a passing interest with a time period I care little about: the days of Kings, Ladies and Knights. King Arthur, Merlin, Elizebethean England and dragons were total duds to my imagination when I was young. It made Shakespeare a challenge to enjoy. I was into the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians. Later, the French.
Maybe it’s the writing, maybe it’s the drama of the period or maybe it’s just Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Henry Cavill, but The Tudors had me flipping through Wikipedia articles on Anne Boleyn and Mary Queen of Scots.
I read about people who were executed with a sentence to be hanged, drawn and quartered. I didn’t know what that meant, but I imagined it had something to do with getting hanged, your body dragged through the streets by a steed and then split apart.
The real horror of this sentence for treason was insane. Wikipedia’s open teased me, and it delivered:
To be hanged, drawn and quartered was the penalty once ordained in England for the crime of high treason. It is considered by many to be the epitome of cruel punishment
To write “epitome” upped the ante. This better be good. Well, it was. This has to be the most amazingly worst way a person could die (leaving aside any Sawscenarios):
Until reformed under the Treason Act 1814,the full punishment for the crime of treason was to be hanged, drawn and quartered in that the condemned prisoner would be:
Dragged on a hurdle (a wooden frame) to the place of execution. This is one possible meaning of drawn. The more likely meaning of Drawn is the act of disembowelment.
Hanged by the neck for a short time or until almost dead (hanged).
Disembowelled and emasculated and the genitalia and entrails burned before the condemned’s eyes (this is another meaning of drawn—see the reference to the Oxford English Dictionary below).
The body divided into four parts, then beheaded (quartered).
Typically, the resulting five parts (i.e. the four quarters of the body and the head) were gibbeted (put on public display) in different parts of the city, town, or, in famous cases, in the country, to deter would-be traitors who had not seen the execution. After 1814, the convict would be hanged until dead and the mutilation would be performed post-mortem. Gibbeting was later abolished in England in 1843, while drawing and quartering was abolished in 1870.
There has been a lot of news about photographs published by the Thai Rath tabloid that reportedly show David Carradine as he was found after his death. Word is going around the Internet that they are fake, or a reenactment.
Below is the front page of the Thai Rath tabloid with what appears to be a dark-haired man hanging in a closet that they purport to be Carradine:
According to the New York Daily News, friends say that Carradine enjoyed autoerotic asphyxiation, a sexual practice that often involves tying a rope around the neck. On TMZ.com, Brenty Turvey, a forensic psychiatrist, said that it is easy to bind yourself:
Turvey says it’s simple for someone to tie rope around his/her hands, by loosely tying the hands in front — then raising them up to tighten.
Turvey says undoing the knot is easy as well, allowing for a quick escape.
That would make the photo consistent with accidental erotic asphyxiation. However, according to the Thaindian News:
The photographs displayed by the Bangkok tabloid show a man with dark skin and black hair, naked and suspended by a rope tied around his wrists and attached to a clothes bar inside what appears to be a cheap closet. A bed is less than one meter away from the closet and the room has a wooden floor – all hardly the stuff of a suite in a prestigious hotel such as the Swissotel Nai Lert Park.
Police reports have said Carradine was found with a shoelace tied around his penis and a rope around his neck. An earlier claim that the dead actor’s hands were tied has been refuted by Thai police.
Carradine’s representative stated that his hands were tied not above his head, but behind his back.
The photographs might not be real. Carradine’s family strongly dispute that idea that he may have committed suicide and they also reject the autoerotic asphyxia theory.
The small glimpse of the room layout does not look like the Swissotel Nai Lert Park rooms, except that they do share similar dark paneling and light shades next to the bed:
That his many critics would now eulogize Robert Novak, who died of brain cancer this morning, is not surprising as people will do anything to be on television, particularly journalists. But this blog is fundamentally against all the weepy revisionism and “yeah, buts” for Novak, one of the worst people there was in modern journalism. Good riddance.
It has been almost a month since Lucy Gordon committed suicide and the answers to this mystery 
Joan Rivers – a Musto-inspired photographic Creative Commons essay
I’m living with a ghost in New Jersey
A man has lived in a van outside my home for 8 years
Making out in public – good or bad?
Obama Condoms in Union Square
New York City water shots
RNC characterizes Republican base as ‘Reactionary’ and ‘Ego-Driven’
Celebrities and downtown denizens salute 25 years of Michael Musto
Recent Comments