Dragging, and Indiana Makes The News

 I slept away most of Wednesday, and have come close to it today.

A critter made its appearance this morning. Not sure what it was, albeit I have my opinions, because it was pulling a plastic sheet up under the drawers in the kitchen.

Tired. No good reason. Yesterday, I worked like a dog for the last hour.

Watched a clip of Harris on Fox. I think she did fine; she sounded competent, and she's got backbone.

Indiana officials ask federal government to verify citizenship of 585K registered voters

‘Unlimited dollars’: how an Indiana hospital chain took over a region and jacked up prices

I need to study the Indiana Driver's Manual.

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Indianapolis Murders

While looking for a story idea, I ran across these items. As a run-up to Halloween, I thought they might be fun to share.

The first one is a story that I heard when I was young. Quite the scandal it was; then it was another scandal when it was thought solved about 30 years ago. 

 The LaSalle Street Murders Solved? A Case for the Case (November 30, 2021)

These are ones I knew of, I saw Kiritsis on TV, I came home from work, turned on the TV, and there he was looking crazy and the guy with the shotgun taped to his neck looked scared. I had forgotten Marjorie Jackson's name.

Indy's 10 Most Notorious Crimes of All Time (2013)

2. Angry Landowner Holds Mortgage Broker Hostage

Small-time businessman Tony Kiritsis convinced himself that Richard O. Hall, an executive at Indianapolis-based Meridian Mortgage Company, had cheated him in a land deal. So on February 8, 1977, he burst into Meridian’s downtown offices, wired a shotgun to Hall’s neck, and staged a 63-hour hostage standoff, much of it broadcast on live TV. He gave up after being told that he’d get an apology, immunity from prosecution, and a large sum of money. (He only received the apology.) Kiritsis was acquitted by reason of insanity, spent a decade in a mental institution, and was back on the street in 1998. He died a free man in 2005. [See “The End of the Line” for a full account of Kiritsis’s crime.]

 3. Bodies Unearthed on Property of Westfield Businessman

It seemed Herb Baumeister was a respectable citizen and family man. But it was a cover for his other identity: serial killer. The Sav-A-Lot owner liked to cruise gay bars, take men back to his palatial Hamilton County home, murder them, and then hide the corpses on the property’s 18 wooded acres. Acting on a tip from a man claiming to have escaped Baumeister’s home unscathed, police searched the grounds in 1996 and discovered the skeletal remains of 11 males. Only four of the men have ever been identified. Baumeister drove to Canada and shot himself before the authorities could prosecute him.

 4. Heavyweight Champ Convicted of Raping Beauty-Pageant Contestant

Fearsome boxer Mike Tyson got coldcocked by justice after he was accused, in 1991, of raping a Miss Black America hopeful in his downtown Canterbury Hotel suite. The highly publicized trial resulted in a sentence of six years for three counts: one for rape and two for criminal deviant conduct. A model prisoner, Tyson served only three years total (in accommodations far more spartan than the Canterbury).

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5. Powerful Klan Leader Outed as Sex Offender

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7. Millionairess Robbed and Killed in Northside Home

Eccentric northside widow Marjorie Jackson, whose late husband had been heir to the former Standard Grocery chain, stashed a considerable fortune around her house on Spring Mill Road. When word of the pile got out, a cast of unsavory characters lined up to make some unauthorized withdrawals. The first heist nabbed close to $2 million, and then, on May 7, 1977, bandits took Jackson’s life as well as her loot, shooting her dead in the kitchen and running off with approximately $3 million more. The killer, Howard “Billy Joe” Willard, and his accomplice, Manuel Lee Robinson, were quickly apprehended by the authorities. But it is thought that several million dollars of Jackson’s riches remain unaccounted for to this day.

 8. Four Dead in Burger Chef Murders

On November 18, 1978, the four-person night staff at a Burger Chef in Speedway simply vanished. Days later, their bodies turned up in Johnson County. Two had been shot, one stabbed, and the other beaten until he choked on his own blood. More than three decades have passed, yet the perpetrators are still unknown. The restaurant was relieved of a paltry $581, but some theorize the motive was more than robbery. Only the killers know. And they aren’t talking.

I did not know of this case until I was almost 50:

1. 16-Year-Old Sylvia Likens Tortured, Killed by Caregiver

In 1965, Gertrude Baniszewski was hired to look after sisters Sylvia and Jenny Likens, ages 16 and 15. Baniszewski and her daughter Paula (right), along with some neighborhood kids, took a pathological dislike to Sylvia, harassing and locking her in the basement of their eastside home, where they tortured her until she died on October 26, 1965. The condition of the girl’s frail body—“I’m a prostitute” was etched into her stomach—and horrific courtroom testimony might have won the Baniszewskis a trip to death row. Instead, they got “life.” Gertrude left prison in 1985. Paula wound up in Iowa with a new name, working as a teacher’s aide.

 This is how I found out about the case: The Girl Next Door

Yeah, this one is mentioned above. My first jobs were in restaurants, and I was working in one in 1978. I do not know how it could not make an impact on me. Solving it seems unlikely, so it will stay in the collective mind of Indy until several generations go by.

New documentary explores 1978 Burger Chef murders ( Mar 04, 2024)

A new true crime documentary exploring the 45-year-old unsolved Burger Chef murders will be released later this year, distribution company Altitude Film Entertainment announced.

The true crime documentary titled "The Speedway Murders" tells the story of four young Burger Chef employees who were kidnapped from a restaurant on Crawfordsville Road on Nov. 17, 1978.

sch 10/13 

 

 

 

 

 

Can't Say I Ever Wanted To Read Ayn Rand

 When I first heard Ayn Rand's philosophy, I was left with the impression of a Nietzsche rip-off. And a rip-off of exceeding stupidity.

Atlas Schlepped by Gary Saul Morson in The Jewish Review of Books gives me more reasons to dislike and distrust the most dangerous political writer of modern times.

Born and raised in Petersburg, Alisa Rosenbaum—better known as Ayn Rand—shared this mentality. Though Jewish, her thought was Russian to the core. Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. In the most perceptive article on Rand I have encountered, Anthony Daniels claimed, without much exaggeration, that “her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature.”

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Rand differed from the radicals on one key issue. For them, socialism solved all questions; for her, it was capitalism. In almost all other respects, their views coincided. Both embraced militant atheism and regarded religion as the main source of evil, for Marxist radicals because it was “the opiate of the masses” and for Rand because it preached “irrationalism” and altruism.

In Soviet thinking, radical materialism entailed a centrally planned economy presided over by an omniscient Communist Party. In rejecting government for “pure capitalism,” Rand was closest to the Russian anarchist tradition. There is no government in Galt’s Gulch, the utopian community of industrialists described in Rand’s last novel Atlas Shrugged. “We have no laws in this valley,” Galt explains, “no rules, no formal organization of any kind. . . . But we have certain customs, which we all observe.” The Soviet Union regarded Communism, symbolized by the hammer and sickle, as the ultimate social system. Galt’s Gulch features a dollar sign three feet high, and when Rand died, her body lay in a funeral home beside one twice that size.

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John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged, deduces the objective morality of selfishness from another tautology, “existence exists.” “My morality, the morality of reason,” Galt argues, “is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these.” No one could explain to Rand that tautologies can’t be used to prove anything about the real world. 

 Even more surprising, Rand, the defender of capitalism, seemed to lack even an elementary grasp of market economics. “When a man trades with others,” she declared in The Virtue of Selfishness, “he is counting—explicitly or implicitly—on their rationality, that is, on their ability to recognize the objective value of his work. (A trade based on any other premise is a con game or a fraud.)” But it is in Marxist economics that goods have “objective” value (the amount of labor it took to produce them). In market economics, value depends on preferences, including tastes, which have no objective basis, and on how much of the good one already has.

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Is it any surprise that Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

With ambiguity and compromise characterized as moral treason, Rand’s novels feature principled heroes and dastardly villains, just like socialist realist fiction. In The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, Rand argued for what Soviet theorists called “the positive hero,” the perfectly virtuous person who speaks the indubitable truth. Rand’s novels all contain such spokesmen, typically male, who display the physique of a Greek god, the nobility of a hero, and the charisma accompanying absolute self-confidence.

 And then I found what has bothered me most since the days of George W. Bush (it seems to me Ayn Rand produces wet dreams in Republicans) - that realism is bad for you. 

Rand distinguished this “romanticism” from its evil opposite, which she called “naturalism.” Naturalists (including those usually referred to as “realists”) describe the blemishes of the existing world. They focus on ordinary, fallible people. Instead of showing that reason and will can accomplish anything, they depict social forces and psychological dispositions limiting us. Such works are as bad as tragedy, which both Rand and the Soviets rejected as a genre based on falsehood.

Yeah, reason and will have a funny way of stubbing their toes on the real world - that is what exists outside the dynasties playing in the own minds of Rand's followers

sch 10/13. 

 

American Individualism and American Culture

 I think I have found an idea for "Chasing Ashes" in Matthew B. Crawford’s Why Individualism Fails to Create Individuals.

In the Lockean or Cartesian dispensation that Americans tacitly adopt, tradition is subject to a hermeneutic of suspicion. Our default is to think that inherited wisdom does little more than perpetuate forms of oppression, offered in bad faith as so-called knowledge. But cutting ourselves off from the past in this way, out of a determination not to be duped, we find that we have little ground to stand on to resist the tyranny of the majority. Intellectually, we find ourselves trapped in the present. This amounts to a kind of anti-culture, if we understand the word culture to imply something that grows over time; and witnessing such a cultural deficiency in America led Tocqueville to worry that Americans would be prone to a creeping “soft despotism.”

This seems contradicted by Trump's MAGA. That I think MAGA wants a return to a mythical past does not mean its adherents do not think it was real. 

It also feels congruent with Gore Vidal's view of Americans having historical amnesia. 

One needs to know the rules before one can break them. Teachers can teach us the rules, and, hopefully, encourage critical thinking. If nothing else, they can point the way to critical thinking.

One variation on this is the insistence that all values are merely subjective anyway: There is nothing truly higher that stands in judgment of my own character and capacities. This is to collapse the vertical dimension of reality in order to protect a fragile self-image. This seems to be the upshot of a thoroughly democratic education, and we witness its fruits in the steady erosion of competence.

Liberal democracy, as distinguished from democracy simpliciter, is a mixed regime that includes aristocratic elements. It needs to protect the zones of intellectual and moral formation—in particular, the family, the school and the university—the must rely upon rank and authority if they are to do the work of creating citizens capable of self-government.

Self-government must include critical thinking - how else can we avoid being the dupes of demagogues?

Oh, a quick bit about teachers - I mean to limit them to those employed in our schools. I recommend Henry David Thoreau as a possible teacher.

sch 10/13

Wiped Out

 I came from work, planning on seeing CC about clothes. She told me she might be coming my way. So, I read the news and email on the computer. That lasted an hour. I felt too drowsy to do anything useful, so I thought a 90-minute nap would work. It turned into three hours.

The muscle relaxers are doing me in.

After dinner, I walked down the street to see if I could see the comet. No such luck.

I worked on this and another post, after I got through some reading for the day.

I did read Steinbeck mined her research for "The Grapes of Wrath." Then her own Dust Bowl novel was squashed by Iris Jamahl Dunkle on Salon. I have seen similar links, but Salon is free. It raises a few question for me about Steinbeck, a writer who I felt was more relatable to than Hemingway, Faulkner, or Fitzgerald. I would like to have had more about the "her", Sanora Babb, than what is given, but there is a biography out on Ms. Babb. Then, too, there is Wikipedia. She kept writing.

LitHub published an extract from Anthony Bourdain, Life and Legacy of a Truly Infamous Cook: Typhoid Mary. I miss Bourdain. Another with depression, he always seemed so sane.

Also on LitHub: “A Valentine to the Intoxicating Nostalgia of High School.” Joyce Carol Oates on Writing.

But then, it is only what we must expect, and accept. Life itself is the “blues”—life itself breaks our hearts, which is the price we must pay for its beauty and terror.

More on Harlan Ellison: INTERVIEW: J. Michael Straczynski

I forgot to mention this rejection that came in on Sunday from  Sequestrum for "Perspectives On Sibling Rivalry". I paired two of my "Dead and Dying" stories; it was an experiment.

Thank you for sharing your work with us. We often have to turn down well-crafted writing, and while "Perspectives On Sibling Rivalry" isn't quite right for our current needs, we appreciate the time and effort which goes into every submission we consider. Thank you for sending your work.

We're all writers too at Sequestrum and appreciate how hard this process can be. So we want to say thanks for trusting us with your work. As a token of respect, feel free to take advantage of 75% off our usual subscription price. That's not something we advertise, but it's something we try and offer writers when possible. As a potential contributor, subscribing means more than just access to great literature: It's the best way to get an idea of our current editorial focus; as an added bonus, subscribers can make free general submissions (limit one pending at a time). Please feel no obligation. If Sequestrum is a home for literature you enjoy, we'd love to have you.

To fulfill a discounted subscription, use the coupon code "LitWriter" on any checkout page (https://www.sequestrum.org/checkout). For more subscription options, visit our "subscribe" page.

Thanks again for sharing your work, and best of luck.

Sincerely,

Sequestrum

Listening to Land of the Lost. Nothing more to do than get ready for work.

By the way, it is getting chilly. Autumn is here.

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Resistance Is Not Futile

 A short post, probably muddled by having read James A. Diamond's The Devastation of Philosophy: Nazi Jurisprudence, the Shoah, and Fackenheim's Transcendental Wonder of Resistance, a review of James A. Diamond on Kenneth Hart Green's The Philosophy of Emil Fackenheim: From Revelation to the Holocaust, after having awakened from 6 hours asleep thanks to my muscle relaxers.

I admit the review goes into deep water and should be read in full. One stray thought came to mind, a reminder of an old Usenet discussion about why Stalin's murderous regime did not get as much attention as Hitler's, when the review mentioned the philosophers arrayed against Fackenheim. They were all German. There is the difference between Stalin and Hitler: Hitler attacked German philosophy and its humanistic metaphysics. 

Resistance is, however, the subject here. I have also been reading about Albert Camus, so the following struck home:

Green refers to concrete paradigms cited by Fackenheim of resistance mounted during the Shoah, which he considered so powerful as to provide an antidote to the ‘diabolical’ evil they confronted. A heroic act of resistance is “a novum of inexhaustible wonder, just as the Holocaust itself is a novum of inexhaustible horror.” Resistance reaches its crescendo on a national scale in the establishment of the State of Israel as the supreme fulfillment of that 614th commandment, redemptive not only for all Jews, both orthodox and secular, but universally so. As Green concludes, the resistance embodied in the heroic successes of the Zionist project flow directly from resistance effected during the Holocaust, “offering hope of survival not only to the Jews but to all mankind and hope also for restoring (belief in) God.” This idea closes the circle in the span of Fackenheim’s struggle with the fraught nihilistic implications of the Holocaust since its impetus was the Six Day War of 1967 and its looming possibility of another Holocaust that roused his theology “from its dogmatic slumber and quickly turned him toward an unyielding focus on the Holocaust.” But this transcendent notion of resistance leads to what I believe is Fackenheim’s most important legacy, not only for Jews but for a world that seeks to make sense of evil all around us, of human rights violations around the globe. Such a philosophy goes beyond mere survival of circumstance because it asserts the human right to dignity and freedom from oppression, it provides a reason; resistance is the assertion of tzelem Elohim, it is brandishing a living flame in the face of every force that seeks to obliterate the divine spark.

What else can we do except resist our worst impulses? That is part of free will - to do good or do evil.

 There is also an interesting view of Israel as an act of resistance. This gives another perspective on anti-Zionism.

Fackenheim’s philosophical theology identifying tikkun, or mending of the world, veritably with “Israel itself” is now, in the face of the growing herd of voices seeking to dismantle it, more urgent than ever. I do not refer to legitimate criticism of state policies—to which Israel is not immune—but rather anti-Zionism. What this amounts to is no less than the sole call in the world to relinquish political sovereignty of a nation that is the sole historical victim to near total extinction made possible by its very statelessness, and of the sole ancient people to reclaim its indigenous roots. Only ‘diabolical’ antisemitism can account for such animus.

Which raises the question if one can be anti-Zionist without being anti-Semitic? 

I still hold that one can be anti-Netanyahu without being either anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic.

sch 10-13

Starting The Week

 Off work early, I spent an hour deleting email before getting on the bus to the west side. I was to see my counselor at 4 pm, I decided to treat myself to some frozen yogurt. I should be embarrassed by what I spent at BerryWinkle, but it did taste good.

The session went well. I made it back to the apartment around 5:30.

I ate dinner, read some of my email, did some legal research, and spoke with MW. The reading glasses are good enough but not good for everything.

I also listened to the following because I saw "Straw Dogs" once, a very long time ago, and it has stuck with me through the years.

This I finished it this morning while writing this post.

The goals for the week: legal research and my driver's license.

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