Other Things Are Happening
As you may have heard, lawyers are presenting arguments to SCOTUS about same sex marriage. This has gotten a lot of attention. People are talking. Facebook status photographs are being changed to graphic symbols. Preachers are reading the bible.
Not everyone is amused by this lawyer generated hoopla. A blog post came out, 6 Things That Happened While Y’all Were Preoccupied With Gay Marriage. The six things in this post are a corporate written law signed by BHO, two proposed laws in state legislatures, a rapper saying something tacky, people being arrested, and more people becoming homeless. All of these things are serious issues. Ignoring the rapper would seem a painless solution to one problem.
All of these issues are focused on the United States. It is bad enough to obsess about tax regulations that seem to benefit the wealthy. This commentary by BGD does not consider the ninety plus percent of the population that lives outside the lower forty eight. Here are a few of the things happening in the rest of the world. No facebook graphics are available for many of these issues.
1- The United States is conducting a war of choice in Afghanistan. Men, women, and children are being killed. The production of heroin is being protected. Billions of borrowed dollars are being spent in a worthless endeavor. Revenge for 911 has long ago been taken.
2- The United States is sending unmanned aircraft to conduct air slaughter of defenseless populations. These men, women, and children are residents of countries the United States is not at war with. In the case of Pakistan, we are allies. With allies like that, who needs enemies.
3- Oil products are being used without any consideration of the future. Carbon Dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere at a much faster pace than the trees of the planet can process. Oil is being extracted from increasingly more environmentally sensitive areas.
4- The government of Syria is slaughtering it’s own people. Israel takes in zero refugees.
5- Billions of narco dollars flow into criminal hands in Latin America. This money is causing problems.
6- Millions of Jesus Worshipers are about to celebrate Easter. They don’t seem to care about the neighbors, who are sick and tired of hearing about that religion.
The list could go on, ond on, and on. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. This was written like H. P. Lovecraft.
Conversation At Starbucks
This may come as a surprise, but some of the stuff at Chamblee54 is copied from other sources. Some folks come up with things that just cannot be improved. That is why G-d invented copy paste. This story below originated at a site called World Class Stupid. Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
I’ve been reading a lot about how supportive parents are to their unconventional kids these days, but I never really believed it. All the stories seemed just a little too good to be true: The dad who overhears his son talking about coming out and writes him a note that says he’ll love him no matter what. The two construction workers on the subway who proudly talk about their gay sons. The mom who walks in on her son having sex with his boyfriend and responds with a lock for his bedroom door and a note saying, “I always knew you were gay and I’m fine with it! Sorry to disturb your blowjob!”
Needless to say, I was totally surprised when I witnessed a scene that makes all of them look like Pat Boone eating cheese. I’d never have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. Get the Kleenex ready as we fade in on the local Starbucks.
I was drinking a frappuccino and listening to music when two guys in white robes and pointy hoods walked in. Despite the fact they were covered from head to toe in starched white cloth, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt they were really racist, sexist Southerners — the kind of guys who snapped towels at each other in the locker room and called guys “faggot” when they listened to Erasure over and over (even the new record!).
I always ignore people in costume since they usually ask me for candy, but this time I couldn’t help myself. The tape in my Walkman jammed just as Sheryl Crowe was going to tell me what kind of a road a day is like, and I heard Guy #1 say this: “My wife wants me to stop killing squirrels, but I don’t feel right just turning them loose after I’ve cut off their skins.” It piqued my curiosity so I put a blank tape in my Walkman and hit RECORD. Ordinarily I don’t have time to waste on meaningless strangers but I figured my Yelp review could wait.
Guy #2: That don’t sound much like Wilma. She ain’t one to spoil a good hobby.
Guy #1: She wants me to spend more time with our son Ralph, who’s fifteen and plays football.
Guy #2: How is Ralph anyway? Haven’t seen him in awhile.
Guy #1: Oh, he’s good. This year he’s quarterback.
Guy #2: He’ll definitely have the girls hanging around him now.
Guy #1: Yeah if he had any time for them.
Guy #2: Focused on football?
Guy #1: Focused on terpsichory.
Guy #2: You’re shittin’ me!
Guy #1: I kid you not. Last week he told me and Betty that he wanted to join the Bolshoi Ballet.
Guy #2: Holy Jesus on the cross. I don’t see how anybody can tolerate that parade of patriarchal cliché.
Guy #1: Amirite? Amirite? I tell ya, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Guy #2: Well, it don’t surprise me none. He always seemed soft, even ignoring the tutu.
Guy #1: How’s Marvin Jr.?
Guy #2: Last week I caught him en pointe with his boyfriend doing a tour jeté. His sister told me he wants to sign with Martha Graham.
Guy #1: Hoo-wee! Well, we all saw that coming.
Guy #2: You’re the eighth person to tell me that. How’d everybody see it but me?
Guy #1: It was just a feelin’, Elbert. In their class photo he’s the only one pretending to be a tree.
Guy #2: I guess you’re right. But hell, Charlie — Martha Graham? Critics say her Bacchanale achieves a subtle, sublime lyricism but to me it looks like Jackie Chan fighting off locusts.
Guy #1: It definitely eschews the traditional vocabulary of dance.
Guy #2: Shit, Charlie. We both have kids who adore the dance. What do we do now?
Guy #1: We act like normal fathers. We say their tights don’t make their asses look fat and if anybody says their pirouettes are wobbly we jam potatoes into the exhaust pipes of their trucks.
Guy #1: Well, I guess Ralph and Marvin Jr. won’t be getting together like we thought.
Guy #2: I guess not. If they wanna be professional dancers, they’re gonna need significant others who can pay the rent. [LONG PAUSE]
Guy #2: Hey Charlie, you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?
Guy #1: I think I am, Elbert. Not here, though — at my place. I just bought a new Scriabin polonaise and all this cotton dampens the poetry of my arms.
By that point I was holding back a little tear, but then they resumed talking about squirrels. I ran home and transcribed the whole thing and posted it here. I hope it brightens your day like it brightened mine. Maybe some day I’ll post an actual copy of the tape but when I scan it it just looks like a beige stripe.
The White House Dog
Michele Bachmann gave a speech at CPAC recently. Among other things, she talked about the care given to Bo Obama, @FDOTUS. Mrs. Bachmann, who is sometimes compared to a female dog, is taking a severe political risk in criticizing the Presidential dog.
In 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt was trying to win a war, and running for a fourth term as POTUS. His most trusted advisor was a Scottish Terrier named Fala. The Republicans made a mistake.
“On September 23, 1944, Roosevelt gave his famous “Fala speech” while campaigning in the 1944 presidential election. … . Late in the speech, Roosevelt addressed Republican charges that he had accidentally left Fala behind on the Aleutian Islands while on tour there and had sent a U.S. Navy destroyer to retrieve him at an exorbitant cost to the taxpayers:”
“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family don’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I’d left him behind on an Aleutian island and had sent a destroyer back to find him — at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars — his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself … But I think I have a right to resent, to object, to libelous statements about my dog!”
Mr. Roosevelt won the election, and the war, but lost his life. Fala was in Warm Springs with him, and reportedly knew, before the doctors, that Mr. Roosevelt was not going to make it. Fala went to stay with Eleanor, and lived until 1952.
That was the year the Republicans finally won a Presidential election. This victory was put in doubt by reports of financial chicanery by Vice Presidential candidate Richard Nixon. There was a tv speech given to address these concerns.
“One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something-a gift-after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was. It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl-Tricia, the 6-year old-named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”
Mr. Nixon won that election, and moved into the White House, as POTUS, in 1969. After Mr. Nixon died in 1994, PG saw a huge flag at half mast. It was a hamburger stand called Checkers.
Meanwhile, Bo Obama takes his four legged duty very seriously. @FDOTUS. No, I didn’t know that was Abe Lincoln’s bible and yes, I’m sorry I chewed it. Can we moved on?
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Respect And Fear
It has been seven days since the last edition of the series tagged “repost this sign”. This is when someone puts up a visually pleasing (sometimes) graphic, with the invitation to repost the graphic if you agree with the message. The edited graphics are attached to this post, and the reader is encouraged to copy them onto a facebook wall. There might be copyright issues involved, but this is facebook, and we are making people better persons, so it’s all right.
There are four messages this week. Here are the links to the originals: one, two, three, four. They have been converted to grayscale, which helps them to fit in with the other pictures posted. These pictures are from The Library of Congress.
The first two are tough to disagree with. We all want to see people have well fed, happy lives. The second one is about finding a baby animal on the ground, and putting it back in the nest. The conventional wisdom says this is bad, the poster says it is not, and PG does not know.
The last two posters sort of contradict each other, with the truth somewhere in the middle. Many people confuse respect for fear. Right makes right, and you need the approval of an authority. Perhaps people who are raised with this mindset are more likely to develop mental illness. Or, children with problems have bully, authoritarian parents who make their problem worse. Maybe this is why the wide eyed girl in poster four clutches her coffee with such enthusiasm.
Poster four was put up last week, which is the middle of March. According to the inerrant wikipedia, Mental Health Awareness Week is the first full week in October. Maybe the people posting this need to be taught respect for the perfectly obvious facts.
When producing text for a column of pictures, it is normal to have space to fill. Last week, a series of quotes were copied into the spot, and the cup quickly runneth over. A bit of commodity wisdom from Friedrich Nietzsche was deleted.
Today, there is going to be random nonsense written, until the space runs out. It is ok to skip this, and go ahead to the pictures. These images are from the War Between The States. War is a time when the lines between respect, authority, and mental illness are blurred to the point of no return. A war is usually popular for the first thirty days, at which the memories of previous wars become unblocked. It was ten years ago that we started to kill people in Iraq. This is a textbook example of the inmates taking over the asylum. The oil revenues have not paid for this war.
Shock And Awe Day 2013
Ten years ago, Iraq teetered on the edge of regime change. It was obvious what was going to happen, at least at first. Amerika was going to storm in, kill a bunch of people, and take over.
In post 911 Amerika, the military industrial complex saw an opportunity for plunder, unrivaled since the fall of the Soviet Union. The stories of WMD would infect the body politic with fear of a mesopotamian madman. Saddam Hussein wanted Iran to think he has wonder weapons, and did not think Amerika was serious about regime change. We all make mistakes.
In the ten years since the time of shock and awe, trillions of dollars have gone down the drain, dragging the mighty Amerikan economy along into the sewers of bankruptcy. One of the oldest civilizations of mankind was reduced to hiding, from neighbors, behind concrete barricades. They fought the conquerors with bombs triggered by garage door openers. Thousands of women and children have been murdered. The WMD were never found.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Neil Sheehan
In 1988, C-SPAN presented a five part interview with Neil Sheehan. He was promoting a book, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Mr. Sheehan was a reporter in Vietnam during the early years of the war. Here are some highlights.
LAMB:(Brian Lamb, host of Booknotes) Neil Sheehan, author of “A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam.” What role did the press play in the war? Mr. SHEEHAN: At the beginning, I suspect the press helped us to go to war in Vietnam. The the press was in gen the the the the news media of this country, in my opinion, tend to be quite conventional. They reflect conventional ideas. They are not the cabal of liberal plotters that the right wing would have us believe, at least, that thus that thesis doesn’t stand up to reality in my experience.
Mr. SHEEHAN: Let me back up for one moment. There’s a considerable misimpression about the role of the press in Vietnam all along and particularly in this early period. The reporters who went to Vietnam early on, like myself, were not anti war dissenters. We were very much in favor of American intervention in Vietnam. We had the same set of illusions everyone else did. What we wanted to what we felt was our well, was our duty excuse me we felt our duty was to report the truth, so that the president would know what was happening in Vietnam the president and the rest of the leadership and win the war. And the advisers in the field, like John Vann, told us, `Look, this isn’t working. The policy isn’t working. We’re losing. And here’s why.’ And we were writing these stories and and they were being denounced.
Mr. SHEEHAN:… the South Vietnamese army wouldn’t fight, that the Diem regime (Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam before November 2, 1963) was deliberately holding deliberately holding it back from fighting, that they wouldn’t take on the Communist guerrillas. Because Diem wanted to preserve his army as a force in being to to preserve his regime. The Americans thought of the army, the South Vietnamese army, as a force with which to fight the Communists. Diem saw it as a force to keep him in power. And so he had a he had a secret order out to his commanders not to take casualties. And the advisers couldn’t get them to tangle with the with the guerrillas, and they would tell us this.
Mr. SHEEHAN: .. it was stupid to be shelling and bombing civilian hamlets, that we were just killing women and kids and we were turning the population against us. He (John Paul Vann) showed us the extent to which the ARVN, the Regular South Vietnamese Army, was avoiding contact with the enemy and would not fight the Viet Cong, would not take them on. He showed us the extent to which we were arming the guerillas through these outposts. Again, John would gather the data, precisely how many American arms were going to precisely how many outposts and we ended up – as I said in the book, we ended up arming the Viet Cong in South Vietnam with American weapons because the American generals were pouring weapons into the South Vietnamese Militia and the Viet Cong were collecting them from these outposts. And so, you were giving a communist guerilla who had a bolt action French rifle a fast firing semiautomatic M1 Garand, which was a World War II weapon, but which was a very good weapon in the mid – in the early 60s. This was prior to the fully automatic weapons, the M16, et cetera. The Garand was a fine weapon and we were arming our enemy. … the United States of America, are arming our enemy and giving them far better weapons than with than they already have and we’re going to change the whole the whole kind of wa we’re going to change the war we’re fighting. We’re we’re creating a a monster here.’
LAMB: Given your experience, and this book and other books, could a Vietnam ever happen again to the United States? Mr. SHEEHAN: No. Well, not in the foreseeable future. I think Vietnam has changed this country, for the foreseeable future, at least. I an event like Vietnam is unique in the history of a country. Vietnam was our first bad war …. And it was the first it was the first war in which Americans could get could and did get killed for nothing. Now the Europeans had learned that you could go to war and get killed for nothing, that you could go to war and and your in which you could get involved in a war in which your le leadership was was was driven by illusions rather than reality. We had never learned that as a nation. … And so I think the impact of that on us has been so profound, because the war was so divisive that it remains with us today and you ca the president of the United States cannot so blithely send Americans off to war as he does not have the power to do it that Kennedy and Johnson had, because the public doesn’t give him the credibility that it gave them those presidents.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Tax Law
There was a bloggingheads discussion with Bob Wright and Ann Althouse. If you are worried about the visuals, it was a split screen, and they kept their clothes on. At the 12:30 mark, Ms. Althouse discussed a DOMA case that is going before the SCOTUS.
The plaintiff in question is probably Edie Windsor. “On Monday, lawyers filed a petition on behalf of Edith “Edie” Windsor, an 83-year-old lesbian from New York, asking the Supreme Court to review her case, … Windsor sued the government in 2010, after the death of her partner of more than 40 years forced Windsor to pay more than $363,000 in federal estate tax on her partner’s estate. Windsor and Thea Spyer were married in 2007, in Canada, and while New York recognized the marriage, the federal government did not. When Spyer got sick, she chose to leave her entire estate to Windsor. Had Windsor been married to a man, she would not have had to pay any estate tax, according to court documents; therefore, her suit argues, DOMA violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
The rest of the discussion was lively. PG listened to the entire thing. Mr. Wright explained why there was a closed coffin when JFK was buried. Somehow, this secular twosome got onto religion. Ms. Althouse said that people believe what they want to believe. The peroxide did not seem to affect her delivery. There were no commercials.
Pictures are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
International Women’s Day
PG heard about International Women’s Day on facebook. A fbf friend posted a link to the event. A picture went along with that link. A lady was holding up a sign, “DISCOVER BP’S FEMININE SIDE”. The lady was smiling, and the picture was cropped so that the fingers were seen holding the picture. These fingers were in the same position, on opposite sides of the sign, pointing in. Slick.
This is not getting off to a good start. Fortunately, twitter nation is onto this. Whle BP has facebook, Chevron has the top spot on twitter. @Chevron Happy Intl Women’s Day! How will you celebrate women’s achievements? We help women start businesses. Watch:http://spr.ly/6013neXV #IWD 
@WomensHumor Happy International Women’s Day! Let us remember that we may have a long way to go, but we will always have men by the balls. #IWD
@whitehouse Statement from the President on International #WomensDay: http://at.wh.gov/izQ1H #IWD
@AnnieLennox Please watch & share: @AnnieLennox personal video message: End Gender Based Violence #IWD #MakeItHappen
@safeworld4women #IWD Child brides, female foeticide, genital mutilation: what has changed in 100 years?
@lindatheactor A man just said “Happy Women’s Day Madam” to me. I explained why I would be happy when we no longer need an #IWD. It ain’t Christmas, is it?
@DaveMc99TA :( RT @peterdaou This stat is horrendous beyond words: leading cause of death for pregnant women is homicide http://po.st/nxTsHR #IWD
@yoisthisracist khyros asked: Happy International Women’s day, dogg.
@YourAnonNewsThank the earth for women, especially on this, International Women’s Day. Thanks for everything comrades! We salute you! | #Anonymous #IWD
@BarbieStyle Happy #WomensDay, dolls! Remember… If you can dream it, you can do it. If you believe it, you can be it! #IWD pic.twitter.com/JrI5A9xr5l
@GOPunplugged Mitt Romney celebrated International Women’s Day by only firing women today.
@UNDP In some parts of the world a girl is more likely to be raped than to learn how to read. #stoptheviolence http://on.undp.org/ilA6W #IWD
And so on and so forth. Maybe the best way to celebrate International Women’s Day is to reclaim it from the oil companies and politicians. Celebrate by having a life. A woman played a key role in giving it to you. The pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Agnotology
Agnotology is the study of ignorance. It is not connected to Agnetha Fältskog, the Abba G-ddess. One messenger of this noun says “Today I learned the word “agnotology,” or the study of why we do not know what we do not know. These are the “unknown unknowns,” the questions we don’t even know to ask.”
PG found the messenger’s blog through a google search for the phrase “G-d is a concept through which we measure our pain”. The resulting post was about the death of John Lennon. The embedded video has a guest appearance by Howard Cosell, a well known scholar of ignorance.
There is a book, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. A two star review hits on a cause of ignorance, the inability to communicate knowledge.
Bartolo interesting, but beware, if you value good writing June 11, 2011
… It is the level of writing that is atrocious. Maybe I should have waited for the Bill Bryson version, or for anyone who could use these materials to fashion a book that doesn’t insult the language and waste one’s time. These writers, to a person, are academics, and almost all should be soundly thrashed with a hardbound copy of Strunk & White. This is a compendium of every fault scholarly writing is heir to: wordiness, redundancy, needless complexity of sentence structure (often designed to mask or extend mundane observations), pointless jargon, infelicitous phraseology, obscurantism, even lame humor (as per the double entendres in the essay on the clitoris, by a feminist no less!) that probably plays better in the senior seminar than in a book intended for mature adults. These scholars write as though being paid by the word–and for a nonexistent editor. The book could have been half its length with no sacrifice whatever to the content.
A facility called ResearchGate offers an article about agnotology. You need to pay to see the article. The disclaimer is free. “Data provided are for informational purposes only. Although carefully collected, accuracy cannot be guaranteed. The impact factor represents a rough estimation of the journal’s impact factor and does not reflect the actual current impact factor. Publisher conditions are provided by RoMEO. Differing provisions from the publisher’s actual policy … may be applicable.”
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This feature is written like H. P. Lovecraft.
Did BHO Throw The First Debate?
It is a few months since the election, and many of us are glad to be done with presidential politics for a while. This post is speculative. The idea is that the poor performance of BHO in the first debate last fall was intentional. Anyone using that link to watch the debate has too much free time.
Before we go any further, it should be noted that PG did not watch the first debate. He heard a bit of it on the radio while he was driving. BHO did not seem to do badly in the part that PG heard. Of course, sometimes these debates are more about visual appearance than substative discussion. Many people who listened to the Kennedy-Nixon debate on radio thought that Nixon won. (PG does not have a link for this, and is not inclined to spend time looking. If it is an urban legend, then so be it.)
Now, the consensus is that BHO did poorly in the first debate with WMR. Many right wing pundits were very happy the next few days. (When you google “the first bho wmr debate”, you get a link for airfare deals on flights from Bhopal to Mananara, (BHO to WMR).)
It didn’t matter after election day. BHO won with ease. What this post wants to consider is the possibility that the poor performance in the first debate was part of a plan by BHO. It would be a high risk strategy, but seems to have worked.
Going into the first debate, BHO was on a roll. The release of the 47 percent video hurt WMR, who had suffered other campaign blunders. The election was looking like a rout for BHO. Maybe the democrats wanted to keep people interested in the race, and make it seem more competitive.
Another advantage of a poor debate performance would be to humanize BHO. He had been such a dynamic campaign performer before the first debate. By showing people that he could have a bad night, BHO seemed like less of a superman, and more of an everyday person.
Perhaps the bad debate performance was designed to divert attention from the attack in Benghazi. This attack seemed to be a serious misstep for the Obama regime. The Republicans were unable to exploit this disaster. One reason for this was the constant attacks on BHO from the Fox News crowd. It was the the boy who cried wolf. When something awful really happened, few people believed Fox news.
Whether it was intentional or accidental, the performance in the first debate is all but forgotten today. By this time, the only voters who counted were the undecided voters in a handful of states. The rest of the county did not count. This is a serious problem with the two party/ electoral college system of electing the POTUS. It is to the advantage of both major parties, and is not likely to change.
Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”.
Make The Cuts
Today is number two in the chamblee54 series of edited facebook graphics. Here is the original. The sanitized version is below. A spelling error was corrected, and the picture is now in grayscale. 
The salary that elected officials is a tiny part of their income. The real money in public service comes from other sources. The “johns” supporting BHO invested a billion dollars into his reelection. The pension noted on the sign is .022% of that. The same dynamic applies to the other officials on that graphic.
The salary of a soldier in Afghanistan is likewise a small percentage of the total cost. Having a war of choice, paid for with a tax cut, has had a devastating impact on the economy.
This is the first place a cut should be made. This soldier needs to come home. With the money that will be needed for his/her medical care, there will likely be little money saved.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
The Trial Of Lenny Bruce
Towards the end of his Booknotes chat, Nat Hentoff talked about censorship. As a journalist, his views were predictable.
Mr. HENTOFF: Any words at all. Words are–I mean, there is a great–there was a great scene in New York once when Lenny Bruce, who was a friend of mine, was on trial for his words. And Richard Cue, the assistant district attorney, was making a name for himself trying to blast all of the witnesses for the defense. And he got Dorothy Kilgallen, who was a very famous then syndicated columnist, a devout Catholic, a conservative and a great admirer of Lenny Bruce. And he con–he strung together, Cue did, all of the words in Lenny’s monologues that could be considered terribly offensive, and he hit her with them. It was a barrage. `What do you think then, Ms. Kilgallen?’ `Well,’ she said, `they’re words. They’re words. That’s all. Words.’ That’s the way I feel.
When PG heard this, he remembered reading about this trial. With the aid of Mr. Google, a transcript turned up. If you like to read about lawyers saying dirty words, this is the place for you.
Dorothy Kilgallen was, to put it mildly, a piece of work. She wrote for the N. Y. Journal American, and stepped on more than a few toes. A biography, Kilgallen, tells a few of the tales. Today, Miss Kilgallen is best known as one of the original panelists on “Whats My Line?”
The People v Lenny Bruce (Cafe Au Go Go Trial) was tried June 16, 1964 to July 28, 1964 in New York City. The Per Curium Opinion of Judge John Murtagh sets the tone. “All three performances of the defendant, Lenny Bruce, were obscene, indecent, immoral and impure within the meaning of Section 1l40-a of the Penal Law. While no tape is available as to the first performance [past midnight, March 31-April 1], this monologue, according to the testimony, was essentially the same as that of the second [April 1, after 10:00 p.m.] and third [April 7, after 10:00 p.m.] performances. In the latter two performances, words such as “ass,” “balls,” “cock-sucker,” “cunt,” “fuck,” “mother-fucker,” “piss,” “screw,” “shit,” and “tits” were used about one hundred times in utter obscenity. The monologues also contained anecdotes and reflections that were similarly obscene.
Dorothy Kilgallen was called as an “expert witness”. In lawyerly fashion, the prosecutor claimed she was not a genuine expert. After her credentials were established, there were questions like “Will you tell us what the artistry, or the social value, or the merit, or the good is, in the Bruce story of sexual intercourse with a chicken?” After the testimony described by Mr. Hentoff, Miss Kilgallen talks about something that does offend her.
Q. I wouldn’t take much time, but we did discuss before Lenny Bruce’s use of the words ‘mother fucker’ at his audience. Can you tell me when James Jones or Norman Mailer or Arthur Miller has called his audience ‘mother fucker?’
Mr. Garbus: Your Honor, may I object? We are talking about books against monologue. It’s completely an irrelevant question.
Judge Murtagh: We will allow it. Objection overruled.
A. I can’t tell you anything verbatim from the books, because I read them a couple of years ago or more. I would imagine–this would be my best guess–that they did not call their audiences anything. There’s another book called The Naked Lunch which I couldn’t even finish reading, but it’s published, and I think the author should be in jail and he used–
Q. Unfortunately we can’t do everything at once, Miss Kilgallen. Are you judging the non-obscene quality and the artistic quality of Bruce by the fact that The Naked Lunch is a book which, as of this date, is sold in the community?
A. No, I’m not. I just mentioned it because you asked me for some books.
Q. And The Naked Lunch is a book you found impossible to read, is that correct?
A. Yes, I found it revolting.
Q. What was revolting about it?
A. Just the way it was written.
Mr.Garbus: Objection, your Honor.
Judge Murtagh: Objection overruled.
A. It seemed to use words for shock value, not for any valid reason, and I object to that.
Q. And when Lenny Bruce–I ask you to turn to the April 1st tape . . . and read the portion starting–‘tits and ass, that’s what is the attraction, is just tits and ass and tits and ass’–and goes on all through the page, and ask you if you find some shock value in that?
A. No, I don’t think it’s particularly shocking, it’s just a word.. . .
Q.. Do you, in your column, use the words tits and ass?
A. Never.
Q. You know exactly what Lenny Bruce was talking about?
A. Yes. . . . I think there he’s being critical of the monotony of what is on view in Las Vegas.
Dorothy Kilgallen died November 8, 1965. Lenny Bruce died August 3, 1966. Kilgallen biographer Lee Israel was convicted of selling forged celebrity letters. Nat Hentoff was laid off from the Village Voice. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. These images are Union soldiers from the War Between the States. The spell check suggestion for Kilgallen is Millennial.
leave a comment