Month: November 2015

by William Skink

A compelling little side-drama has emerged from the latest trials and tribulations of Griz Nation. Let me set the scene.

It’s a dark and stormy Halloween night. The Griz got slaughtered by Portland State 35-16, and instead of quietly meditating on this failure on the field, a few Griz players decide to attend a party where quite possibly alcoholic drinks are being served.

This is when an angel of temperance enters our dark drama. Her name is Courtney Reep, and she has admirably designated herself as a responsible driver, dropping off the collegiate losers at a house party to, you know, party. Courtney only stays for like 10 minutes, then goes home to await the call so she can spread her wings and drive these wayward Griz football players home. Alas, when she arrives, it’s just minutes before the cops descend.

Somehow the cops weren’t able to quickly determine that Courtney is a privileged white girl with good grades and a lawyer daddy, so one can only imagine the trauma Courtney suffered by being arrested and booked into our very crowded jail. From the link:

Reep, dressed in pajamas and not in costume, was handcuffed and arrested, despite protestations on her behalf by the four men, who told police that she was the designated driver who had just arrived to pick them up.

“(The officer said) my first mistake was entering this house and told me to turn around and he put handcuffs on me,” she said. “I was crying and shaking.”

She said her explanation was ignored by the police, and 45 minutes after arriving at the residence, she was booked into the Missoula County jail. The men who were arrested with her were booked hours later. Van Ackeren was booked at 5:19 a.m., Counts at 5:22 a.m., John Schmaing at 5:47 a.m., and Tomlinson at 6:18 a.m.

She was bailed out hours later on a $50,000 bond, posting a non-refundable $5,000.

Jasper said the experience with police and at the jail has traumatized the University of Montana senior, who has a 3.5 GPA and plans on being a nurse. He said he is curious about why she is being charged with the same crime as her friends, who she was picking up.

Courtney Reep may feel traumatized, but at least she’s well represented, legally (Jasper is her daddy’s colleague) and she’s got a winning pedigree (not to mention a nice photo in the Missoulian standing resolute before the County Courthouse). She’s also white, which always helps when it comes to the criminal justice system.

It may be jarring for privileged white people to be treated like some second class citizen, but one can always look on the bright side: if Courtney was black, her chances of being shot and killed by either the property owner or police would be much higher.

by William Skink

I can understand why Montana Democrats are celebrating Montana getting the green light from the Feds to expand Medicaid. Our state desperately needs any help it can get to insure uninsured Montanans.

But expanding Medicaid in Montana, at least for me, is overshadowed by a larger crisis of co-ops failing across America, leaving hundreds of thousands of Americans scrambling to figure out how to get insured.

Democracy Now! has a good piece on today’s show about this crisis, and by good I mean incredibly depressing.

As Montana Democrats cheer expanding Medicaid, it might be instructive to recall that it was Max and his gang of six who killed the public option, setting the stage for the predictable failure of co-ops whistle blower Wendell Potter warned about six years ago.

by William Skink

Once again the University of Montana is catching negative headlines. Last week it was a piece in the Indy about the UM enrollment decline being worse than reported. This week, it’s felony burglary charges for several Griz football players.

I don’t recommend that previous link, because it’s the Missoulian. The Kaiman did a much better job reporting what allegedly happened:

The homeowner, who wished to stay anonymous, said a few rooms on the first and second floor aren’t connected to the main house where he and his family live.

His wife and three daughters were home when, according to charging documents, Schmaing, Counts, Van Ackeren and Tomlinson allegedly entered the addition with a ladder. He and his wife said they could hear the assailants walking around and talking upstairs and could see them through a front window, but the homeowners stayed quiet.

“One of the guys was standing in the doorway and he was as big as the door, so I thought it wasn’t in my best interests to confront him,” he said.

The home owner said he heard the four students talked about taking something, but the homeowner said nothing was stolen or damaged.

Reep arrived just before police arrived and the homeowner said he didn’t think she knew she was picking up the guys from a burglary.

“I hope they’re not guilty of much more than being extraordinarily stupid,” he said.

Does this incident warrant a burglary charge? I don’t know. Regardless, the behavior exhibits a continued culture of entitlement from the UM football program that’s troubling. Going places without consent just seems to keep happening.

Luckily, the Missoulian has another headline to help out Griz Nation, titled Prosecutor: Initial Investigation Insufficient to File Charges Against Griz Players, Two Others.

If you read the article you won’t find a quote from a prosecutor stating what the title implies. Instead, you’ll read this:

“The Missoula City Police Department has given this case to their detective division for further investigation,” Pabst wrote in the statement. “We are meeting with the detectives this morning to request specific additional information. Once the investigation is sufficiently complete, our office will make individual charging decisions for each of the suspects.”

Paul Ryan is representing some of these potential felons, and so far his strategy is to depict this breaking and entering as simply some curious guys with a ladder and perhaps some interest in construction:

A Missoula attorney representing one of the University of Montana football players arrested early Sunday on burglary charges says the students entered a Pattee Canyon residence out of curiosity.

“I haven’t seen any charging documents,” Paul Ryan said. “From what it appeared to them, it was just an unoccupied structure.”

“They were just curious as much as anything,” he added.

Nice defense. I wonder who is footing the bill?

by William Skink

After WWII, bullets and bombs were replaced with words and songs. What I mean by that is the war transformed from a shooting war to a war of culture and ideas. The emerging Cold War had many fronts.

Even visual art was deployed as a cultural weapon by the CIA:

For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.

Scoff if you want, but this involvement in promoting modern art by the CIA is a fact. More from the link:

Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and thecultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.

The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the “long leash” – arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.

The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.

This is a critical part of understanding how we have gotten to such a sad place here in America, where Americans, when confronted with the horrors of the violence we inflict on innocents around the world, shrug their shoulders with defeatist sentiments, like this pathetic comment from my last post:

Livingston has bomb trains rolling through every day, wild bison are being managed as livestock and strip mining decimates Montana. Write about something you have actual control over, liz.

What writers write about, and how they write it, is the topic of a fascinating piece by Eric Bennett, titled How Iowa Flattened Literature. Though this piece came out in February of 2014, it’s timely for me as I consider what I’m going to do next after I leave the job I’m currently doing early next year. I had kicked around the idea of getting my MFA for creative writing. This article helped me realize I’m not going to waste my money. From the link:

Did the CIA fund creative writing in America? The idea seems like the invention of a creative writer. Yet once upon a time (1967, to be exact), Paul Engle received money from the Farfield Foundation to support international writing at the University of Iowa. The Farfield Foundation was not really a foundation; it was a CIA front that supported cultural operations, mostly in Europe, through an organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

Seven years earlier, Engle, then director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, had approached the Rockefeller Foundation with big fears and grand plans. “I trust you have seen the recent announcement that the Soviet Union is founding a University at Moscow for students coming from outside the country,” he wrote. This could mean only that “thousands of young people of intelligence, many of whom could never get University training in their own countries, will receive education … along with the expected ideological indoctrination.” Engle denounced rounding up students in “one easily supervised place” as a “typical Soviet tactic.” He believed that the United States must “compete with that, hard and by long time planning”—by, well, rounding up foreign students in an easily supervised place called Iowa City. Through the University of Iowa, Engle received $10,000 to travel in Asia and Europe to recruit young writers—left-leaning intellectuals—to send to the United States on fellowship.

Read the whole article, it’s fascinating.

I bristle when people tell me what to write about, or what NOT to write about. The backlash is quite interesting, and shows how pressure to conform works through impotent little proxies. When I write about foreign policy I’m told I hate America. When I write about conspiracy culture I’m ridiculed. When I write about another political scam absorbing the misplaced hope of easily manipulated Democrats, I’m booted from the blog space I kept relevant for years.

America doesn’t require the same degree of cultural repression that other regimes require to maintain power. That’s because American propaganda works so well, there are millions of unwitting foot soldiers ready to pounce on those who challenge long-accepted norms, like American exceptionalism.

I’m going to keep writing about what I want to write about, including putting more of my time in developing a story I’ve started that I’m really excited about. Stay tuned…