Random Musings

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Susan Kelly

Susan KellyI had gotten about six hundred words into a “normal” column when, to my chagrin, I realized that I’d already written pretty much the same thing a few months ago. I attribute this to the fact that I have a major-league head cold, and when I have one of those, my cognitive and creative processes (apparently my memory as well) seem to slow. That, of course, is a civilized way of saying that I’m currently sneezing and blowing my brains into a handkerchief.

So, given my currently limited capabilities, I thought I’d try to amuse you, and myself, with some random musings on various topics.

  1. Does anyone seriously believe that Donald Trump is questioning Ted Cruz’s eligibility to be president because he’s worried on behalf of Cruz? Isn’t this what’s known as “concern trolling”?
  2. If you live in New England, you’ll be gloomily aware that we are, as I write, undergoing that ghastly meteorological phenomenon known to the weather soothsayers as “wintry mix.” Rain. Snow. Sleet. Rain. Snow. Sleet. Rain. Then the temperature drops and the whole mess freezes into cement. I would—as I complained in an email earlier today to our gracious host—rather have all snow. It’s much easier to clean up after. I’m not asking for a re-run of January 2015, when the greater Boston area got buried under 101 inches of snow over the course of three weeks. But “wintry mix”—which sounds like it should be something you serve with drinks at a cold weather cocktail party—is the pits.
  3. Biographies of celebrities, particularly those in the entertainment biz, are usually awful: badly written, for one thing. But I read one recently that I really enjoyed. That was Girls Like Us, a literary triptych about Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon, by Sheila Weller. If you have any interest at all in the history of rock, soft rock, and folk-rock music, and more specifically in three of the great women practitioners of the genres, you’ll enjoy this. Weller can write.
  4. I also enjoyed Jay Parini’s Empire of Self, a biography of Gore Vidal. It provides some analysis of Vidal’s writings, which Fred Kaplan’s 1999 Gore Vidal didn’t, though Kaplan provides a more detailed look at Vidal’s life. Vidal apparently hated the Kaplan book, which was written while he was still alive. Memo to all prospective biographers: Wait till your subject has kicked the bucket before you begin your opus.
  5. Back to politics. It seems—are you ready for this—that Donald Trump is claiming credit for the release of the Iranian hostages. Yes. You read that right. Apparently it was his blustering that terrorized the Iranians into submission. Good thing D-Day took place on June 6, 1944. Otherwise he’d be taking bows for having masterminded the seminal event of the twentieth century. And I think some of his fans would believe him.
  6. Well, according to the latest weather prognostication, it’s going to snow here tomorrow and Monday. Just snow. No rain. No sleet. Best of all, I don’t have to shovel it.

And with that, I think I’ll sign off for the time being. Gotta go blow my nose. Have a good MLK Day.

MAKING A MURDERER

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Zachary Klein

zach1ProfileWhat’s important about Making A Murderer ( MaM) isn’t the fate of the defendants in and of itself, but what it exposes about the cancerous underbelly of our criminal justice system. We read or watch the ongoing news reports about police shootings of unarmed citizens and the mass incarceration of people of color, but what MaM brings to the table is the gut shock of knowing that this case is no isolated incident. Rather, some variation of theme happens somewhere, maybe more than one somewhere, all across our country every day.

I’m no stranger to conspiracy theories. Researching an aborted espionage novel way back when, I pored through the 1975 United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee) and, the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (Pike Committee). These hearings made public the “family jewels”—that is, the CIA’s clandestine and covert actions throughout much of the world—which left little doubt that, at times, conspiracies do indeed exist.

But my relationship to conspiracies didn’t turn out to be purely academic. While working for a number of national law firms as a trial and jury consultant I was asked to spend most of a summer investigating the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City in an attempt to discover whether the Federal government had any foreknowledge about the attack. (Another story for another time.)

And my connection to conspiracies didn’t stop at alleged federal malfeasance. I also spent years with different law firms uncovering an entire industry’s lies to its workers, the government, and the public for more than two decades about the lethal effects of its manufacturing processes and some of its products. Thousands upon thousands of documents were unearthed, clear evidence that major players from different corporations within that industry conspired to keep virtually all negative information buried.

Still, despite my library time and personal experience, I’m really leery and usually react with skepticism when I hear people talking or writing about one conspiracy after another. It all begins to feel like Mad Magazine. So, when I first read about Netflix’s original documentary, Making a Murderer, I had, as usual, a raised eyebrow.

Filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi spent ten years working on this series which traces Steven Avery once he was freed from prison after spending eighteen years incarcerated due to a wrongful rape conviction. (Project Innocence and DNA were responsible for his exoneration.)

Thirteen months after his release, October 12, 2004, Avery brought a thirty-six million dollar federal lawsuit for a wrongful conviction against Wisconsin’s Manitowoc County, its former Sheriff, Thomas Kocourek, and former District Attorney Denis Vogel. About a year and change after filing suit (November 9, 2005) Avery was arrested and charged with the murder and incineration of a young, twenty-something photographer, Teresa Halbach. Eventually his sixteen year old nephew, Brendan Dassey, was also charged along with Steven.

The series explores the incredibly sloppy, manipulative, and likely illegal police work that went into Avery’s first conviction and, subsequently, MaM takes a hard look at the police, Manitowoc’s sheriff, and DA as they build the Halbach murder case against both the uncle and nephew.

In stark terms, the documentary raises the question of whether the defendants were flat-out framed in response to the lawsuit which might have ruined the county’s finances and exposed the extraordinary incompetence and/or outrageously illegal police behavior.

About halfway into the documentary, the police’s unwillingness to look at any other potential perpetrators, the hinkiness of evidence discovery and collection, the refusal by the Sheriff’s office to stay away from the investigation despite their own self-recusel, and what appeared to be a coordinated love dance between the DA, Sheriff’s office, police, and eventually the judiciary made neutrality unimaginable—whether or not the accused were, in fact, innocent or guilty. The interrogation scenes of Brendan alone were a textbook rendition on how not to conduct an interview if one was after even a scintilla of truth. Worse, this “Reid Method” of interviewing suspects is used throughout the U.S. despite the serious and significant issues with its reliability.

(More unnerving than the police’s behavior toward Brendan, his own court appointed attorney and the attorney’s “investigator” worked hand in glove with the authorities—using the same interrogation techniques—to ensure convictions, not only for Steven, but Brendan as well. The fact that this attorney is still allowed to practice is mind-boggling.)

The scope of the series also includes the effects of the murder charges on the extended Avery family and, at least, Teresa Halbach’s brother as they react to the investigation, trials, and verdicts. Although none are folks with whom I could particularly identify, (including the two defendants), watching the toll those ten years take is excruciatingly painful.

As with any controversial work, the discussion that has ensued following the film’s release rages on. Those who believe the two men were railroaded have petitioned and demanded federal investigations of Manitowoc County. And, of course, those who are, or were, in positions of authority within the county, decry the film’s point of view claiming much of what was ignored in the documentary confirmed the State’s case, the jury’s conclusion, and the two judge’s sentences.

No matter the arguments, Making a Murderer raises huge questions about how our criminal justice system actually functions. I really don’t know whether Avery and Dassey are guilty or not. Frankly, the courtroom drama and verdicts aren’t the film’s wake up call. The Manitowoc County’s police, Sherriff’s office, D.A., and judges are worse than simply an embarrassment to a country that claims justice is blind. Blind does not mean corrupt and venal with revenge as its first order of importance which was the likely reality behind Avery and Dassey’s prosecution. The overt and clearly detailed abuse of power that rained upon the two defendants left me sickened. And this despite my “conspiracy” experience and my work with a Court appointed criminal defense attorney.

All that legal work quashed much of my respect for our criminal and civil justice system. Making Of a Murderer has damn near eliminated the rest.

“Most of what ails our criminal justice system lie in unwarranted certitude on the part of police officers and prosecutors and defense lawyers and judges and jurors that they are getting it right. That they are simply right. Just a tragic lack of humility in everyone who participates in our criminal justice system”  ~ Dean Strang (One of Steven Avery’s defense attorneys.)

Weird Kid, Food Division

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Susan Kelly

Susan KellyI’m pretty sure I was what, for my generation, would be described as a “weird kid,” at least in terms of my eating habits. Take, for example, a list of my favorite childhood foods. Here are the things I loved most, back when I was in the single-digit age bracket:

  1. Olives
  2. Oysters on the half shell
  3. Harvard beets
  4. Spinach

I ate my first oyster on the half-shell when I was, I think, nine. My parents, siblings, grandfather, and I had gone to the Molly Pitcher Inn in New Jersey for dinner. My grandfather ordered a plate of oysters on the half-shell as a starter. He noticed me gazing at them and offered me one. I took it.

Love at first slurp.

I don’t know how I acquired my love of olives—it goes pretty much as far back as I can remember—but I can tell you that one Christmas, again when I was about nine, I asked for my own personal jar of Queen olives (those colossal green ones) as a gift. I may be the first and only kid on the planet to have requested such a thing. I got my jar of olives.

As for the beets and the spinach, I have always loved all vegetables, apparently another thing that made me weird, since all kids are supposed to hate them. (I have always had a streak of the perverse.) The only vegetable I will not, cannot ingest—I suppose, strictly speaking, it’s a fruit—is lima beans. They’re disgusting. There is no form of preparation that will render them anything less than vile. Put this on my tombstone: Lima beans made her gag. That and: She screwed up every demographic she got into. The latter’s, however, another story.

As a kid, I didn’t care much for the two things kids then were supposed to adore: hamburgers and apple pie. I quite like either one now, but that’s because there are so many interesting ways to prepare them. (Try a shot of Courvoisier in the apple mix before baking the pie.) As a child, though, I found both rather dull.

But the all-time disgusting food I remember from school cafeterias is that culinary abomination known as…American chop suey.

Every kid I knew loved it. They’d gobble it like starving wolverines. As for me, I would eat it maybe as an alternative to being tortured. Under any other circumstance—no, no, a thousand times no. This stuff is slop: overcooked macaroni mixed with poor quality canned stewed tomatoes and overcooked pulverized gray hamburger meat. No herbs. No cheese. No touch of olive oil. No frigging salt and pepper, for God’s sake. Absolutely nothing to make it remotely palatable. But, as I said, every other kid seemed to love it.

Another thing I couldn’t stomach was those cold cereals in weird florescent colors. Worse were the ones that had rock-hard marshmallow bits in them. Even worse than that were the ones that were in the shape of animal, quasi-human, fairy tale, or horror movie characters. Happily, my mother refused to buy any of them. Even as a child, I hated getting up in the morning, and the only thing that would have made getting up worse would have been lurching to the table and staring down into a bowl of teeny green leprechauns or teeny brown vampires. (Lucky Charms and Count Chocula respectively, if you care.) To this day I avoid the cereal aisle in the grocery store, except on the rare occasions when I want a box of raisin bran, which I do find edible, although not as an every day or even weekly event.

The thing that strikes me, though—and I consider this a happy development—is that if I were a kid now, my tastes might be…mainstream. I once overheard a lively discussion about the level of cuisine in various Thai restaurants conducted by three of my nephews, who were, at the time, sixteen, eleven, and eight. More recently, another eight-year-old nephew informed that he’d eaten some “super-good” Indian food at a local restaurant, as opposed to the just “good” Indian food he’d had elsewhere. This is also a kid who, at age 2 ½ , devoured three helpings of a chicken-prosciutto tortelloni dish in an Alfredo sauce I made.

So perhaps I wasn’t weird, back then. Just…ahead of the curve?

Happy New Year to you all. And may your children and grandchildren never, ever have to consume a bowl of American chop suey.

If they do, and they like it…they’re weird.

THEY’RE COMING TO TAKE ME AWAY…

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Zachary Klein

zach1ProfileAnd I deserve it. I did it to myself. I should be locked up. Time for someone to rip my fingers off the clicker, keyboard and telephone. Time to chill in a rubber room and get force-fed Thorazine.

But why now, you ask?

Close to five hours keeping company with Wolfe watching thirteen asswipes screaming for dark meat. Listening to…NO Syrians! NO Mexicans! NO Muslims! NO Obama! But no NO to all the White meat mass-murderers who can get guns at a fucking show without having to bother with a background check. That’s why.

Along with no NO to all the stupid ass lies that catapulted us, bombs first, into the Middle East. Licking chops at the prospect of slaughtering towel-heads, despite the loss of sixty thousand American Ground Pounders, Wingnuts, and our coalition partners. Not to mention hundreds of thousands Iraqi and Afghani people who had gornisht to do with the Saudi terrorists who brought down the Trade Center.

They fucking pretend nothing needs to be said about those Middle East wars, instead just pander to voters’ fears and ugliest instincts. Christ, if I believed in these mooks’ collective worldview, or believed that most Americans felt the same, I’d start inviting friends and family to Jonestown for a Kool-aid party.

Every single one of them makes me sick. Worse, ashamed I share the goddamn country with ‘em. That little ”White wannabe,” Marco Rubio, a man able to combine JFK’s youthful boyishness with Nixon’s sleaze, said in an interview on The Kelly File, It’s not about closing down mosques. It’s about closing down anyplace — whether it’s a café, diner, an Internet site — anyplace where radicals are being inspired.

Right. Ignore the First Amendment and shut ‘em down. Just like that. But let’s not even talk about gun control—that’s supposedly a Second Amendment right. This son of immigrants, (who wouldn’t have been allowed into this country if Rubio’s promises were in effect at the time), squealed like he’d seen the Walking Dead when the Calgary-born, Texas plaid-man of the people (by way of Harvard and Evangelicals), Teddy Cruz, told boy-toy he wasn’t a real conservative. The Canadian Cowboy reminded the twit he had once proposed a path to Green Cards for our undocumented. Rather than stand behind this minimal shred of humanity, Rubio gulped and stuttered that he wouldn’t support that now. Worse, if All That Glitters doesn’t nail the nomination, my money is actually on the little bitch.

But I’m not done with the bible-spouting, flag-waving cowboy, who has blood drooling from his mouth instead of spit. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. Them being ISIL despite their embedment within major urban areas within Syria and Iraq. Cruz not only wants to bomb, he wants to gloat. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out. This prick should have been the one riding the bomb instead of Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove.

And speaking of doctors, Malpractice Carson (who averaged a little less than one lawsuit every ten years so I’m probably being a little mean) hasn’t remembered the Hippocratic Oath; in fact, he’s moved into physician-heal-thyself status. Mr. Nice Guy is opposed to allowing Muslims to run for President and compared Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs” —although not during the debate. His solution? Create a Shangri La in, I believe, Jordan because, in these camps they have schools, they have recreational facilities that are really quite nice. Doctor, you’re fucking with my head.

No, not Jeb! He’s a piece of burnt, dried-out toast. Looked like a guy who wanted to be anywhere else and couldn’t figure out why he had listened to Daddy and Mommy. But even he couldn’t stop from taking a shot at dark. Jeb! said he would prefer to give asylum to Christian rather than Muslim refugees. A polite way of saying, Fuck the desperate Syrians.

This whole debate was a venue of vultures preying on our worst fears and the worst sides of our national character, all the while showing the worst sides of their characters as they pushed and shoved to get airtime. Every one of them, including Fiorina, with her, let’s become a Silicon Valley Nation. Yeah, just what we need. A government populated by the Zuckermans of the world. THEY WOULD FIRE YOUR ASS, lady! Just like they did before.

As for the fat fuck, look, I like New Jersey. Hell, I’m from Carteret. But there are two kinds of Jersey people. Those that never leave, and those who leave and never move back.

So, PLEASE, PLEASE keep Christie at home. You voted him into office. The only blowhard “experienced” enough to fight ISIL never served a minute in the military or even understands the word “diplomacy,” but has the faux cajones to blubber, I cannot allow New Jersey to participate in any program that will result in Syrian refugees — any one of whom could be connected to terrorism — being placed in our State. Then happily flaps his chins “yes” when asked if that included five-year-old orphans. Christie also bellowed that he’d be more trusted by Jordan’s King Hussein than Obama. Hat’s off, shmuck. Hussein’s been dead since 1999.

You’ve run a long way from Clifford Case, New Jersey. Shame on you.

Frankly, there are too many more morons to continue the litany. I’m out of breath and losing heart. To put the entire crowd of war-mongering, anti-my-America racist losers into perspective, when asked about our foreign policy disagreements with Putin, the so-called grownup of the menagerie, John Kasich, replied, Frankly, it’s time we punched the Russians in the nose. This bastard actually wants another round of Duck and Cover.

Uh-oh, I hear the sirens in the distance. I have to prepare for my straitjacket and ambulance ride cause they’re coming to take me away…

Tomorrow is my 31st Anniversary, I’m preparing for a colonoscopy, and I’m watching the Republican Debate. It’s a perfect shitstorm. ~ Bette Midler