Re-reading Shakespeare: As You Like It

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

(1) Several years ago I heard about a production of Shakespeare using the original pronunciation, or what’s known in the trade as OP. Apparently even audiences familiar with the material only understood about a 1/3 of the lines.

This was a valuable experiment then, just in terms of alerting us to something that’s easy to forget. Since then OP has become a movement, and I was able to watch some of an OP production of As You Like It online. It’s worth giving a listen to (the video quality is terrible), though if you’re like me you won’t last long. It’s very hard for a modern ear to follow.

I thought of OP while re-reading As You Like It because of the number of times the notes were telling me how certain words had to be pronounced. I remembered that the name Jaques was supposed to rhyme with “jakes” because that’s the name the Elizabethans had for a privy so it’s meant as a joke. But I’ve always wondered if Rosalind should be pronounced the way we normally do or so as to rhyme with “kind” and “find” as Touchstone does in his poetic improvisation. And I didn’t know, or had completely forgotten (it comes to the same thing), that back in Shakespeare’s day “Goths” rhymed with “goats” and “hour” with “whore.”

This reminded me of something I read a while back about how if we had a recording of Keats reading his own poetry we likely wouldn’t be able to make out much of what he was saying because his Cockney accent would be unrecognizable even in London today. Similarly, we think of Shakespeare’s lines being delivered in some version of the beautiful voice, but it probably wasn’t like that at all.

(2) The seven ages of man seem very much like the seven ages of Jaques’s life, because he doesn’t invest them with a lot of joy does he? The infant isn’t cooing but “mewling and puking,” the schoolboy is whining instead of having fun with his classmates, the lover seems out of luck writing his woeful ballads to a woman who probably doesn’t even know he exists, the soldier is on his way to getting killed “seeking the bubble reputation” in the cannon’s mouth. The justice at least seems comfortable, though he’s a bore and a phoney. Then the pantaloon has one tottering foot in the grave, and “second childishness and mere oblivion” is the horror waiting for all of us at the end of the road. Who would sign up for such a curriculum vitae?

(3) I always thought the line had it that “the truest poetry is the most feigning,” but I guess it’s really “faining” (or longing). There was a pun there with the subsequent use of “feign” that got lost with a later emendation.

(4) How strange that Rosalind asks Orlando “what is’t o’clock?” and he replies “You should ask me what time o’ day. There’s no clock in the forest” when earlier Touchstone had drawn “a dial from his poke” to tell Jaques that it’s ten o’clock. I wonder if that was consciously done.

(5) A man of the theatre, Shakespeare could see how divine monarchs weren’t so much born but made and then sold to the public. His plays are full of observations on how rulers are popularly perceived and how their image must be managed. Which is all pretty striking in that he wouldn’t have known anything even remotely like today’s democratic process. There’s Henry IV coaching Hal on how to appear before the masses and how he stage managed his reputation by stealing “all courtesy from heaven” and keeping his “person fresh and new.” Or Claudius, who would do with away with Hamlet but for “the great love the general gender bear him.” You wouldn’t think to find reflections like these in As You Like It, but the fact that you do says something about how much Shakespeare thought about such things. Oliver has to connive at his brother’s murder because Orlando is “so much in the heart of the world.” And Duke Frederick has to lecture Celia on how Rosalind is beating her at the public image game:

She is too subtle for thee, and her smoothness,
Her very silence and her patience
Speak to the people, and they pity her.
Thou art a fool. She robs thee of thy name,
And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous
When she is gone.

Of course in the twenty-first century we’re very familiar with the idea of political theatre, but I find it amazing that Shakespeare was so attuned to it in an age where it wasn’t anything like the industry it is today, and where I wouldn’t have thought it made a whole lot of difference. Hal, Hamlet, and Oliver aren’t running for office. There were plenty of monarchs in the early modern age who weren’t charismatic, or were even downright monstrous or moronic, but it’s not like they could be voted out by the “general gender.” The worst they had to face was a rebellion of their nobles. This is one of those ways Shakespeare is so far ahead of the curve he really does feel like our contemporary.

Gurning and gurning in the widening gyre

/ Alex Good / 8 Comments

Gurning contestant. I’m not sure what the point of the horse collar is, but they all wear one.

I was recently reading a British graphic novel where an unhappily married woman referred to her husband as a “gurning idiot.” Now I was sure I’d heard the word “gurning” before but it’s one of those words that you give a pass to because you think you have a general idea what it means and it seems to only be modern slang anyway. But out of curiosity, this time I decided to look it up.

In fact, it’s a very old word, and seems to have enjoyed peak popularity sometime in the 18th century. Nobody is quite sure where it comes from, though it’s been suggested it comes from a Scottish dialect for “grin.” To be honest, I always figured it basically meant “grinning,” with an added sense of doing so in a particularly stupid way. It also has a more modern application related to the sort of face people sometimes make when they are on drugs.

The more precise meaning is to make a distorted facial expression, typically by sticking one’s jaw out and up. This is easier to do if you have no teeth, and apparently people without teeth can even gurn to the point where they cover up their noses. This makes their gurns hard to top in gurning contests, which I was surprised to find are a real thing. There’s even a World Gurning Championship for gurners held in England, though I don’t know how big gurning is outside of England. I suspect it’s very limited, as I’d never heard of these competitions before.

I don’t know what calling someone a “gurning idiot” means beyond saying they are ugly and stupid. Or maybe that they have an idiotic grin, even though it’s clear that gurning as a competitive event involves deliberately making a funny face — it’s not natural. That said, maybe a decent analogy for Americans to “gurning idiot” would be to calling someone a slack-jawed yokel. I think that’s basically what’s meant.

Words, words, words

TCF: Killer Cults

/ Alex Good / 4 Comments

Killer Cults: Stories of Charisma, Deceit, and Death
By Stephen Singular

The crimes:

Nineteen stories of charismatic gurus and false prophets, most of whom were only interested in grabbing money and acquiring lots of submissive sexual partners.

The book:

I don’t see there being much of a market today for a book like this, or any of the Profiles in Crime series of which it is a part. For starters, there are already a couple of anthologies dealing with the same material and even with the same title already out there. In this one the entries on the different cults are little more, and sometimes even less, than you get on a Wikipedia page, the writing is nothing special, the editing poor (it’s the Book of Revelation, not Revelations), and the few pictures are of low quality. There’s only a very brief introduction and no conclusion or summary, so we get little sense of any big picture of the cult phenomenon. Stephen Singular suggests at one point that “a common thread in almost all of them [these cults] is an attempt to control sexual behavior.” But even here more needs to be drawn out. To be sure, many, if not most, of these cult leaders were sexual predators. But to what extent was an out-of-control libido the driving force behind their cults?

Of course, in any book of this nature you’re not expecting a deep dive. But even so the analysis is cursory. I couldn’t even be sure how much research Singular (a veteran true crime author) put into it. The sources referenced at the back seemed very inadequate, mostly consisting of news stories pulled from the Internet. In the section on Jim Jones reference is made to Jeff Guinn’s book The Road to Jonestown, but it isn’t listed in the sources. Nor is Tim Reiterman’s Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People. In the section on Charles Manson, missing as sources are Vincent Bugliosi’s classic Helter Skelter and Jeff Guinn’s Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. In the section on Aum Shinrikyo particularly noticeable is the absence of any reference to a couple of pertinent books on the subject and on cults in general: Haruki Murakami’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche and Robert Jay Lifton’s Destroying the World to Save It.

There were at least a couple of directions that Singular might have gone in that occurred to me while I was reading. The first he does touch on, but again only briefly. This has to do with the advent of the Internet and cults going online. The Heaven’s Gate cult was a pioneer in this regard, though their web-page looks laughable today. Singular mentions how The Order had a vision of spreading their white nationalist message online but in the mid-1980s they weren’t there yet. It would take time, but that future has now arrived, as witness the dark fandom of the Columbine cult. But has this made cults more dangerous, or does the intense personal charisma of the leader get watered down, to the point where he or she just becomes another star of YouTube, or Instagram influencer?

The other point I would have liked to hear discussed more has to do with America as the natural home or breeding ground of modern cults. So much so that even people from as far away as India (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh) would come to the U.S. to set up their cult communes. Is there something in the American psyche, its status as (in Kurt Andersen’s name for it) Fantasyland, that lends itself to the sort of magical thinking and instinctual worship of gurus? Or something about the link between cults and the anti-government movements and conspiracy thinking that have always been so much a part of the American cultural tradition?

These are the sorts of questions Killer Cults doesn’t ask. Instead, it remains a light read that won’t tell you anything new about the famous cases it discusses and will only whet your appetite for seeking out more information on its more obscure cases elsewhere.

Noted in passing:

What is the link between cults and the products of pop culture? Charles Manson thought the song “Helter Skelter” from The Beatles’ White Album contained a hidden message about a coming race war. Adolfo Constanzo based his brutal crime cult on a 1987 flick called The Believers starring Martin Sheen and Jimmy Smits that I have only the vaguest recollection of today. The Heaven’s Gate cult took its lead from Star Trek mythology, with its members thinking of themselves as parts of an “Away Team” as they killed themselves. Why do so many people put so much faith, or even find any meaning, in such crap? I know that’s a question every outsider asks of any belief system, but Star Trek? I guess fandom and cult membership have to be plotted on a spectrum.

Takeaways:

Not every cult leader is just a scammer looking to score a fleet of Rolls-Royces and a harem of young lovers. Unfortunately, the true believers are no less toxic than the cynical ones.

True Crime Files

Crowned

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

Today marks the coronation of Charles III as king of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.

As a political institution the British monarchy ceased having any purpose back in the 18th century. Because of its near total irrelevance, and the expense of its maintenance, there have been frequent calls for getting rid of it. These have become more pointed recently, as Charles is not well liked and is 74 years old, which seems very old to finally be elevated to the position of even nominal head of state. At least until you realize that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are older. When will we be rid of this cursed generation?

How much longer will the monarchy go on for? Will cancel culture ever come for it? I doubt it, but if it does I imagine it will be for the reason any long-running show finally gets the (metaphorical) axe: a fall in ratings.

The thing is, few people care at all about the monarchy anymore. According to one recent poll, a whopping 78% of young people in Britain fell into this camp. The Crown is more popular than the Crown.

Things were different just forty years ago. The marriage of Charles and Diana was a big deal, and a popular show. But then the funeral of Diana was perhaps the last TV special that drew an audience. The media put a huge amount of effort into selling Harry and Meghan, and the funeral of Elizabeth II, but these weren’t even blips on my radar. The coronation will receive enormous coverage, even in markets like the U.S. that severed their ties to the monarchy a couple of hundred years ago, but I wonder if anyone will pay attention despite all the play on CNN. I know I won’t be watching. And this really is the key point in our attention economy. If royalty aren’t celebrities then they’re nothing at all.

DNF files: Hell Town

/ Alex Good / 4 Comments

Hell Town: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer on Cape Cod

By Casey Sherman

Page I bailed on: 79

Verdict: I was looking forward to this, as I didn’t know anything about Tony Costa and the rampage he went on in 1969 where he killed a number of young women on Cape Cod. But it put me off right away with the novelistic treatment of its subject. Here’s the first sentence: “The prisoner closed his dark eyes and inhaled, taking the warm air of midspring deep into his lungs.” Talk about sounding a false note. I mean, I suppose Costa at some point on the day in question closed his eyes and took a deep breath, so there’s no saying Sherman is wrong here. But at the same time he’s clearly just making it up. As are subsequent accounts of Costa’s mental operations (“his thoughts turned to . . .”, etc.). Costa did write a sort of memoir while in prison that Sherman draws on here, but it’s hardly a reliable source. Meanwhile, what sources he does refer to are only sparingly referenced in the endnotes.

The “non-fiction novel” is a bastard genre I don’t care for, and it’s very much the hell that Hell Town was on a  highway to. To take just a couple of related examples, at one point Sydney Monzon is out late driving with Costa and he leaves the car to break into a medical office so he can steal some drugs. Sitting in the car, “She fiddled with the radio and landed on Hugo Montenegro’s orchestral from the Clint Eastwood film The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which was nearing the top of the Billboard charts. She now felt a bit like a desperado herself as she sat in wait for her companion to make his score.” Then, later in the book, Patricia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki are described driving to Cape Cod: “the young women listened to the car radio and the sounds of Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine,’ which at that moment was the number one song on the Billboard charts and had dominated the airplay at local radio stations.”

At the time, the only witnesses here would have been the three women themselves, as no one else was with them. And Costa soon killed all three. So how does Sherman know what they were listening to on their car radios? How does he know they had the radios on at all? There are no sources for this guesswork because none are available. Instead we’re just pointed to the songs that were big at the time, according to Billboard Magazine. And why would Sherman assume that Monzon felt like a desperado? I would have thought she’d be nervous as hell.

It was at the second of these car-radio scenes that I gave up. But I hadn’t been enjoying the book up till then. Patches of dialogue, for which again Sherman seems to have no source, are related directly and sound highly dubious. At one point Costa, who was a police informer as well as a drug peddler, asks the local police chief for a gun so that he can protect himself. The chief denies his request. Costa responds: “I’m astonished, and I cannot believe your indifference. You will not offer me protection until there is a violent act against me?” Really? That’s what he said? Those exact words? I don’t believe it. Not without a tape recording. And maybe not even then.

The chapters oddly alternate between telling Costa’s story and the literary rivalry of Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. This didn’t interest me at all, as I already knew something about them. What I was hoping for was more along the lines of a cultural-historical commentary about the nightmare that the hippie movement turned into, sort of like what Helter Skelter did with the Manson case, but that didn’t seem to be on tap. And to top it off the writing is just hack work. Just before killing Monzon, Costa has a brief, abortive make-out session with her in his car. Did this happen? No way to know. So I guess Sherman was either taking Costa’s word for it or making it up. How does it go down? “They kissed as droplets of rain rolled down the windshield like tears on a baby’s cheek.” Ye gods. Tears like rain. And a baby’s tears. Why? Because a baby evokes pathos and the imminent murder of innocence? Because they’re extra soft? But a baby’s tears are more likely to be accompanied with red-faced screaming rather than make one think of tender lovemaking. Or duplicitous lovemaking, since babies are nothing if not authentic in their rage. The simile is ridiculous. There was no way I was going to read 400 pages of this. Begone!

The DNF files

Brave New World Revisited, revisited or Consider the dodo

/ Alex Good / 5 Comments

From Brave New World Revisited (1958) by Aldous Huxley:

Does a majority of the population think it worth while to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift towards totalitarian control of everything? In the United States – and America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now – recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censorship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that government of the people by the people is possible, and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts. That so many of the well-fed young television-watchers in the world’s most powerful democracy should be so completely indifferent to the idea of self-government, so blankly uninterested in freedom of thought and the right to dissent, is distressing, but not too surprising. “Free as a bird,” we say, and envy the winged creatures for their power of unrestricted movement in all the three dimensions. But, alas, we forget the dodo.

TCF: A Deal with the Devil

/ Alex Good / 4 Comments

A Deal with the Devil: The Dark and Twisted True Story of One of the Biggest Cons in History
By Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken

The crime:

Maria Duval was the name and face behind one of the biggest mail frauds in history. People (usually the elderly and vulnerable) sent money to her hoping that her psychic powers would bring them good fortune. But when a pair of CNN reporters tried to track down Ms. Duval they found that she was just a front for a much deeper scam being operated by a variety of mysterious and shady characters.

The book:

I don’t say this very often, but this is one of those books I couldn’t put down. It sucked me in and I kept reading it all in a rush.

I think it helped that it was a mystery, and no less satisfying for being a mystery without a full solution. Ellis and Hicken are intrepid reporters, and seem to have been having a lot of fun along the way while trying to track Duval (or “Duval”) down, but as with any great conspiracy story we only get past one wall (or e-mail address, or shell company) to find another standing behind it.

This is what I found so fascinating about A Deal with the Devil. I think everyone agrees that we live in a time that’s rich with magical thinking and dense with conspiracy theories. What doesn’t get enough attention are the background cultural factors that contribute to this.

In some ways it all goes back to the way the world itself has become more complicated through science and technology, making us feel increasingly alienated from and powerless in the grip of tools that we use and depend on every day but don’t understand a thing about. But there is a political and economic side to this as well, as we feel both left behind and in the dark by governments and big corporations that operate so much in the shadows that there’s often no way even investigative reporters working for major news outlets can figure out what it is they do.

This leaves A Deal with the Devil reading a bit like a Pynchon novel for the Google Street View age. All the indeterminacy and mystery in our everyday lives naturally leads to unexpected lapses into credulity and conspiracy mindsets. Near the end of their investigations the authors are even entertaining one tip from Romania suggesting that a cult of Satanists might be behind the whole thing. Shades of QAnon! But the truth, though less sensational, is even more unnerving: a cabal of international money people and crime bosses running a global scam taking in hundreds of millions of dollars. If this is so, might there not also be some truth to ESP and the power of magic crystals? Given the existence of such real conspiracies, wouldn’t it be a kind of survival technique to just believe everything?

The one part of the book I felt resistance to came at the end where the authors finally get to meet Maria Duval and find the perfect image for the wall of unknowingness they’ve come up against in the blank eyes of an old woman afflicted with dementia. There is a suggestion made of this being a final irony, in that Duval herself might be seen as a victim of the fraudsters who bought her name and monetized it by attaching it to their scam. That may be, but I had zero sympathy for Duval. She cashed out and was in no way a victim in all of this.

Noted in passing:

Is it the case that native speakers can’t hear themselves speaking with any kind of accent? That they just see their own accent as “normal”? I think this might happen, which is why I was surprised when the authors (both born and bred in the United States) described the Canadian characters they meet as having “a charming Canadian accent” or “a distinctly Canadian accent.”

According to Wikipedia, most North Americans “cannot distinguish the typical accents of the two countries [that would be Canada and the U.S., though Mexico is also in North America] by sound alone.” Of course there are regional differences. People from Texas, Boston, or Newfoundland have easily recognizable accents. But I don’t think there’s any difference between the speech of someone from Toronto and a native of Cincinnati. The old joke from South Park where Canadians are heard pronouncing “out and about” as “oot and aboot” always baffled me. We don’t sound like Scots.

When I went and watched some videos about Canadian accents I was just as confused. The way words were being pronounced in a “Canadian accent” didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “sorry” pronounced as “sore-ee.” There are some Canadianisms, like the particle “eh?” that I guess are a tag, but to be honest I don’t even hear “eh?” very much anymore. Certainly not as much as it was used thirty or so years ago, when you did hear it all the time. Place names are a specialty in any language, so I don’t know how many people from elsewhere pronounce Toronto as Trahn-toe (which is how we do it). Probably as many as pronounce New Orleans as New Orleens or New Orlee-ans, when I think it’s supposed to be New Orlins or New Awlins (but not Nawlins, which I’ve heard is a myth).

In any event, Ellis and Hicken don’t give any examples of what makes the Canadians they talk to sound so charmingly or distinctly Canadian, so I don’t know what it was they were responding to.

Takeaways:

It’s lucky the Duval mail fraud was shut down, though I doubt it has been shut down so much as it’s just been diverted into other channels. These operations know how to stay two or three steps ahead of the law. It’s exasperating reading about scams like this because they’re like junk mail, telemarketers, and spam: at any point the government could step in and put an end to all this but they won’t because there’s too much money involved.

What’s worse, in accepting, as I think we do, that so much of normal capitalist activity is a fraud or a scam, or something very like it, we tend to valorize the scammers as heroes and see their victims as clueless suckers who are, in the words of one of the people involved in the fraud here, “too dumb to live.” Taking the life savings of these people is a sort of cull. And this is old school mail fraud we’re still talking about. The Internet takes this heartlessness to a new level.

True Crime Files

Maigret: The Grand Banks Café

/ Alex Good / 4 Comments

I read The Grand Banks Café out of order, coming to it after I’d nearly finished the Maigret series. It’s an early novel, one of nine (!) in the series that were published in 1931. Simenon was just getting started, and still writing in a white heat. Apparently he only took eleven days to write a Maigret roman, because if they took any longer he felt like he’d burn out.

I should have liked this more, as I was coming off reading the later, less distinguished entries and part of the action here is about as close as the series came to Canada. A trawler returns from fishing cod off Newfoundland, but the captain is murdered as soon as he leaves the ship. A wimpy young man who was radio operator on the trawler is arrested and Maigret, who is technically on holiday and only “working in a private capacity” is asked by a friend to look into the matter. Madame Maigret raises some objections because they’d planned to stay for a week with her family in Alsace, while “the thought of staying in a hotel by the seaside with a lot of other people from Paris filled her with dread.” But that’s all we hear in the way of complaining, and immediately she’s packing her sewing and crocheting. How obliging she is!

The idea here is pretty good, with Maigret trying to piece together, largely through intuition, what happened on this “voyage of the damned.” Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand the motivation of any of the principals, and by the time the wireless operator (literally) spills his guts I thought it had all become implausibly melodramatic in a way Simenon usually avoided. Even the femme fatale, if you can call her that, is a blowsy caricature, her seductiveness limited to offering up “fragrant flesh in a trawler that stank of fish.” Madame Maigret had a point about holidaying in such a place, especially given that this is another story where her husband lets the perp walk. They should have gone to Alsace.

Maigret index

Stupid aliens

/ Alex Good / 6 Comments

Nope.

I’ve been watching a number of videos online recently that have addressed the popularity of the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, written and hosted by Graham Hancock. These online “debunking” videos, produced with little or no budget, criticize Hancock’s show for advancing highly speculative theories on the basis of little or no evidence.

Hancock has been at this for a while, following in the footsteps of Erich von Däniken’s smash bestseller Chariots of the Gods (Hancock even gave his books titles like Fingerprints of the Gods and Magicians of the Gods). I wanted to get some more insight into the attractiveness of this kind of fantasy history so I checked out a DVD from the library called The Best of Ancient Aliens: Greatest Mysteries. This was a two-disc collection of eight episodes from the popular television series Ancient Aliens. I’d heard of this show, and was of course familiar with the face of Giorgio A. Tsoukalos and his famous meme, but I’d never actually watched any of it. So I stuck it in the machine.

I don’t think I’ve ever given up on a show faster. I made it maybe 15 or 20 minutes in to “Aliens and the Third Reich.” The intro kicks off with some talking head telling us that “a lot of the information we’ve been told about the Second World War is wrong.” Well, no doubt. Especially if you include shows like this. Then we cut straight to the lede: “Did, as some believe, Adolf Hitler base his plans for world domination on secret extraterrestrial knowledge?”

No. No he did not. Nor do I think Nazi rocket technology came from reverse engineering a downed flying saucer.

I then tried to watch a bit of “Alien Tech,” which had to do with the alien influence on the building of ancient megastructures. I think. It just seemed like more bullshit to me. None of the claims being made had much if any evidence to back them up but it was all put across with slick production skills and in documentary style, including interviews with experts whose credentials I didn’t think amounted to much.

Two thoughts came to mind.

First of all, why is this bullshit so popular? It’s been big since at least the ’70s so it’s not a recent phenomenon, but it’s still tempting to tie it in to our contemporary rage against experts and elites who seem to know it all and our appetite for the craziest conspiracy theories imaginable. If you believe that Democrats are shape-shifting lizard people I suppose none of this seems that far-fetched. This brought me back to the well-known passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. . . . Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Whenever I come across this sort of “reject authority” babble I find myself agreeing, at least somewhat, with the skeptics and doubters in their questioning of the evidence, but being baffled as to their own alternative theories. Put another way, I can sort of understand why they don’t believe what they don’t believe, but I can’t figure out why they believe what they do. Cynicism shouldn’t have its end in such blank credulity. But Arendt’s observation only brings home what Chesterton said: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

The second, and more depressing if of less immediate concern, point is the fact that television used to be good at putting together quality documentary series that were entertaining and educational. I wrote about this a couple of years ago and tried then to think of some reasons for how and why we’d lost our way. I was only concerned then with what we’d lost, not with what had taken its place.

Of course what drives all this is ratings, and stories about lost civilizations and ancient aliens do attract eyeballs. But it does make you wonder just how much stupider we will get if we continue on this course. I’m heartened by the popularity of some of the debunking videos, but they’re still coming nowhere near the cultural reach of the (underline this!) mainstream media messaging of pseudoarchaeology. It’s almost like there really is a conspiracy afoot to keep us from the truth . .

TCF: Lust Killer

/ Alex Good / 7 Comments

Lust Killer
By Ann Rule

The crime:

In the late 1960s, Jerry Brudos killed four young women in Oregon. A closet transvestite with a particular obsession for high heels, his method involved strangling the women and then having sex with their dead bodies. He was apprehended and pled guilty to three counts of first-degree murder. In 2006 he died in prison.

The book:

I’ll start at the end. Lust Killer was one of Ann Rule’s earlier efforts, written under the pen name “Andy Stack” and first published in 1983 (The Stranger Beside Me, a work of memoir-true crime that drew on Rule’s acquaintanceship with Ted Bundy, came out in 1980). Later editions included an Afterword published in 1988, where Rule speculates on the possibility of Brudos getting early release. We now know that didn’t happen, and indeed Brudos was told by authorities that he was never getting out.

It’s also in the 1988 Afterword that Rule talks about how Brudos stands as “one of the classic examples” of a lust killer, but at the time even the label “serial killer” was something new (Rule herself has credited its first use to Pierce Brooks, the creator of the ViCAP system, in 1985, though others have found earlier instances). Today Brudos is a familiar type, with sexual fetish escalating into violence and necrophilia (in Rule’s account, a “constantly accelerating process – a juggernaut of perversion”). Apparently Ted Levine based his performance as Buffalo Bill in the film The Silence of the Lambs on Brudos, and it’s possible author Thomas Harris had him in mind as well when writing his 1988 novel.

What was different about Brudos? What first jumps out is that he was a married man, with two young children. This was seen as being so odd at the time it led to his wife Darcie being charged as an accessory, mainly on the suspect evidence of a busybody neighbour. She (Darcie) was found not guilty, and at least as Rule tells the story her complicity in the murders seems a stretch.

This isn’t unheard of with serial killers. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, was another lust killer who was married with two children (not to mention president of his local church council). Russell Williams, who also had a fetish for taking pictures of himself in women’s clothing, was married. So it does happen, even though I think it’s considered rare. Everyone compartmentalizes their life to some extent, but being a married serial killer, not to mention sexual deviant, is a hard act to maintain.

Noted in passing:

It was 1968, and Brudos had shag carpet (colour: blue) in his garage workshop. He said he needed it to keep his feet warm.

I’ve mentioned the process of escalation in Brudos’s criminal career, and it’s clear he was well on his way to becoming another Ed Gein at the end. When Rule mentions Gein, however, she says of him that “he hated his mother so much that he had killed her and other women and made vests of their dried flesh.”  This is actually a myth, reinforced by Hitchcock’s film Psycho. In fact, Gein seems to have doted on his mother, who died of a stroke and whose body he left intact and undisturbed in its grave.

Takeaways:

Rule emphasizes the key point: if you’re being abducted, even at gunpoint, you might as well take your chances and fight it out, because things aren’t going to get any better for you once you’re tied up in someone’s basement.

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