Category Archives: Gonzo

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Christopher Dorner: The New Guy

Dapper Fawkes

Dapper Fawkes

Hero. Revolutionary. Soldier. Assassin. Loser.

Guy Fawkes? Or Christopher Jordan Dorner?

“#Dorner killed two civilians. But the State is making it about much more than that. This is a message about social control. #wakeup”
L3ft-Libertarian

Mainstream media and the general public reacted with understandable consternation to the news that Anonymous, or at least parts of the famously fractious internet hive mind, adopted accused spree killer the now-late Christopher Dorner as a new icon, a rallying point if not a hero. Dorner, a former University football star, LAPD officer and Navy pilot, was on the run from the police and accused of killing three people when he died of a single, allegedly self-administered gunshot as police burned the cabin in which he was hiding to the ground. A million-dollar bounty had been put on his head, and in a contentious move the government authorized the use of drones to locate, if not assassinate, him, one of the first times drones have been used against American citizens on American soil.

“One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.”
Jeremy Hammond

Dorner’s fame stems not primarily from his actions, but rather from his powerful manifesto shared on Facebook in which he stated his intention to kill as many police officers as he could, in what he said was revenge for institutionalized racism among the LAPD and the way he himself was victimized. His first two claimed victims, however, were guilty of nothing more than being related to an officer who had drawn his ire. Meanwhile, the LAPD seemed like a more-malevolent Keystone Kops, having failed to located Dorner, mistaking two little old ladies for the so-called “Chocolate Rambo” and firing on them.

“Anyone else feel like the safest place to hide from LAPD gun fire is directly behind dorner? @YourAnonNews #Dorner #LAPD”
TheRaven

At first glance, Dorner seems little different from many another political revenge killer, from Andrew Kehoe to George Sodini: above average intelligence, good training, strong work ethic, and a powerful moral center. A man, in short, with every reason to expect success in life, who nonetheless tragically failed at the goal closest to his heart, and snapped as a result. For Dorner, it was a career as an LAPD officer.

For Guy Fawkes, it was bringing about a Catholic revolution in Protestant England by blowing up Parliament.

Unlikely icons for any movement, however splintered and self-contradictory, but it is their very failure which makes them eligible for the role.

“Guy Fawkes, as far as Anon is concerned was chosen because he failed. Fight Club is much closer to Anon’s culture. If people wonder whether Anon supports Dorner (no, just the LAPD meltdown) because of Guy Fawkes, G.F. was always a joke. What’s clear here: the subtext. Drones, fear, Erin Burnett the shark jumping drone hawk, this is like with Kony: war mind games, the whole lot of it. We cut thru dog and Kony show early on. Same here. Dorner is LAPD’s karma. Guy Fawkes a failure.”
Hectoring Hegemon

Anonymous’ public “face” was once a faceless stick figure cartoon known as Epic Fail Guy, a self-deprecating identifier for 4chan members, a group which at the time largely saw itself as basement dwelling wankers. But awesome basement-dwelling wankers. Anonymous emerged from 4chan, essentially evolving into its internet pranking arm. Not long after his creation, Epic Fail Guy stumbled across a Guy Fawkes mask, put it on, and the rest is history. Truly: English history.

Once OpChanology, the in-person protests against Scientology, was initiated in 2008, Anons needed a way to identify themselves as Anons while hiding their faces, and facelessness of the shiny green morph suit (another 4chan/Anon favorite) was not accessible to many people. The Guy Fawkes mask was chosen because, thanks to the anarchist (originally anti-Thatcherite) movie V for Vendetta, it was both affordable and ubiquitous worldwide. Revolutionary echoes handed down from Fawkes himself added to its appeal, as long as you didn’t look at the history too closely; however, the semiotics of the mask were actually directed at Scientology, intended to brand it a failure. Fawkes, after all, had to replace his gunpowder stock when the first stash deteriorated, failed in his attempt to get Spain to invade England or support his revolution, failed at this ultimate attempt to take out Parliament, and at last succeeded in killing himself. Score one for the revolutionary.

Instead of registering as a symbol of “Fail,” the heroic/outsider aspects of the mask were taken to heart by the public at large (who had no knowledge of 4chan’s history) and ultimately by Anonymous itself, which is not immune to the warm fuzzies given to our cultural icons. It’s better to be a lost, noble cause than a basement-dwelling wanker, no?

Remember: Epic Fail Guy = failure. Guy Fawkes = failure. Christopher Dorner?

A colleague and friend of Dorner’s was interviewed on KPFA’s Hard Knock Radio, and claimed the benefit of small-A anonymity, calling himself “Ben.” When asked why, he said, “I have an interest in raising my children. Someone might have an animus against me for speaking the truth, and that’s what I don’t want to happen.” And that is what Chris Dorner was talking about.

A new Facebook manifesto, written by former LAPD officer Joe Jones, has surfaced, and echoes many of the accusations of racism and nepotism that Dorner made. Jones, however, repeatedly stresses that taking lives is not the answer, is never the answer, and is clearly not about to “go rogue.” Respect for the rule of law is currently unfashionable, and is insufficiently controversial to make Jones a renegade hero, however much courage was involved in speaking out with honor about dishonorable truths.

Was anyone, ever, willing to put money on Dorner’s achieving the goals of his manifesto? To eliminate institutional racism in the United States, to retroactively win his police hearing, to clear his name, and yet to simultaneously die while killing as many LAPD officers as he could? Would he ever have been embraced, even conditionally, if people truly believed that there were any chance of his ultimate success? People prefer dead (or obviously doomed) martyrs to live, inconvenient revolutionaries. They are easier to incorporate into political narratives. They are less likely to repudiate their earlier beliefs.

They are simply more convenient.

Christopher Dorner the man had already passed into legend long before his mountain hideout was surrounded and burned.

“Whatever pre-planned responses you have established for a scenario like me, shelve it. Whatever contingency plan you have, shelve it. Whatever tertiary plan you’ve created, shelve it. I am a walking exigent circumstance with no OFF or reset button.

The only thing that changes policy and garners attention is death.”
Christopher Dorner

“The real story here is that methods of oppression by our corpos are now coming home. From PERF to drones, we. let. it. happen.”
Hectoring Hegemons

But when it comes to what Hunter Thompson used to call the shitrain it’s always easier to watch a movie than to look in a mirror.

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Spencer Cox, hero, dies

Spencer Cox

Spencer Cox

I’ve been procrastinating this for thirteen hours now, but I can no longer put it off. I have to write the obituary for a friend of mine, a great man, and a hero to millions.

Spencer Cox, founder of ActUp, and one of the key reasons an HIV diagnosis is no longer a death sentence, has died of pneumonia.

There is literally no way to explain the impact he had on people, including me. He was a righteous warrior who gave no quarter, not an inch, to those he felt were in the wrong. He was (rightfully) called the Dorothy Parker of HIV, and was a sensitive enough man to take that as a cue to be kinder, although he never shied away from dishing out what was due.

He was the kind of hero who, when asked about his participation in the documentary How to Survive a Plague, could say the following:

One of the visceral things the film brought back for me is the rage that is still almost as fresh as the days when I first discovered it. Footage of virulently homophobic North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms reminds me even today of how much I hate (present tense) this man. I found out he’d died a few years ago when a ‘porter called me to ask for a comment, and while usually I’d ask for fifteen or twenty minutes to compose my thoughts, on this particular occasion it came slipping out before even I knew what I was saying. “It’s too little, too late.” I wanted him to suffer, and I deeply regret that the last few years of his vicious life were spent deep in the fog of senile dementia, leaving not enough consciousness for genuine suffering. His colleagues, including New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor, Mayor Ed Koch, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Patrick Buchanan, even the low-level Reagan press staffer who, in a transcript of an early White House daily briefing, is asked about AIDS, and reduces it to a smutty joke worthy of a quick chuckle. Karma be damned – I hate these men, and probably will until the day I die.

I met (“met”) Spencer in the comments section of Gawker, which was, for a time, the Algonquin Round Table of the 21st Century. That was some time, and a whole comment model, ago, but back in the day genius could make itself felt, and Spencer‘s always was. He didn’t throw his weight around: hell, in a pseudonymous world, none of us knew who he really was. We respected him because he was visibly wise, visibly kind, visibly passionate, and visibly a marvellous human being. He was also funny as hell.

He would get a kick out of the fact it took me two double Martinis and thirteen hours to bring myself to write this.

Eventually we became Facebook friends, and he read my blog from time to time. I’ll never forget the counsel he gave me about Occupy. “Make sure to have fun,” he said. “Don’t trust a movement that has no room for fun,” remarks he expanded on in his column in POZ.

If I have one piece of advice for young, aspiring activists, it is to always hold on to the joy, always make it fun. If you lose that, you have lost the whole battle.

And now, if you’ve never met Spencer Cox, allow me to introduce him.

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Black (metal) Christmas!

Fuck Christmas

Fuck Christmas

Yes, it’s a week into December and I’ve decided it’s time to start with the Christmas shizz for this year. Some years we’ve taken a wide-eyed and innocent approach (I think that was the year we were four) and some years more of a Merry Fucking Christmas approach, but this year I think we’ll go with a Punk Rock Christmas, including this lovely album cover from Bing Crosby (signed!) and a tuneful welcome to the Yuletide from the Peanuts gang, via Journal of a Journalist.

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For the Record: Assange, Asylum, and Assumptions

Julian Assange Smug Life. I got 99 problems but a snitch ain't one

Julian Assange Smug Life. I got 99 problems but a snitch ain’t one

Just because I’m going on the road tomorrow and will be away from my computer and THE WAY THIS WEEK IS GOING I EXPECT ALL THE AWESOME ASSANGE/ANONYMOUS/HACKER STORIES TO BREAK WHILE I’M OFFLINE, I’m putting this here so I can be smug later.

Not that I’m not smug by default. But, you know, more. In writing.

It is perfectly clear to anyone with their head screwed on straight that Julian Assange is going to be granted asylum by Ecuador.

On August 12, after 613 days of Assange’s detention (53 of which have been spent at the Ecuadorian embassy in London), WikiLeaks tweeted that an announcement by president Rafael Correa was imminent. Leaving nothing to chance, it used Twitlonger to offer instructions to supporters in case a) the request for asylum was granted or b) things got complicated.

As seems inevitable in every WikiLeaks story, things got complicated….

  • Ecuador announced that, gee, there sure was a lot of material to go over and it would be Wednesday at least before any announcement would be made.
  • Then, unnamed Ecuadorian officials in Quito today would told the Guardian that Assange would certainly be granted asylum, done deal, all over but the fat lady singing.
  • Then, President Correa, apparently not one to take leakers on his own staff lying down, subsequently took to Twitter to specifically deny the rumor, while shedding no light on his possible decision.

It has been perfectly obvious since the moment we all heard he’d materialized within the embassy (somehow…without being seen) that he would get asylum. Julian Assange is not a guy who throws himself on the mercy of random governments without making sure he’ll have a soft landing.

He hasn’t been seen since. He hasn’t even done a Skype video interview, and again, mark my words: if Julian Assange can’t handle some simple call forwarding magic then I’m Hillary Fucking Clinton. Knowmasayin’?

He hasn’t been seen in public, in fact, since May 24, when he appeared wearing a black “Emergency” Anonymous mask created by WikiLeaks Truck artist Clark Stoekley. And before that, other than one RT interview, not for another whole month or so. He said he missed his final extradition appeal ruling because he was, “Stuck in traffic.” Hell, I’ve used that one myself.

Julian Assange is, if he wasn’t before, officially a man of mystery.

But there’s no mystery about his fate. He’s allegedly been holed up in that embassy for something like 55 days, the Ecuadorian decision having been deferred till after the Olympics closed, no doubt at the request of the UK, who didn’t want to be upstaged, what with organizing all the athletes and the Spice Girls and everything.

The entire span of time has been nothing more than an elaborate stall, to allow Ecuador and the UK to work out some plausible way he could end up out of the UK’s hands (“not my chair, not my problem,” says Cups Lizard) and in Ecuador. Technically, there’s the issue of getting the body out of the embassy and across UK territory to either a boat outside the legal territory of the UK or, conceivably, an aircraft or space ship outside of UK airspace.

Barring the timely arrival of the TARDIS, it seems impossible, unless Assange is equipped with the forepaws of an enormous groundhog (and where do you get those out of season? I ask you) for tunnelling under the Atlantic ocean.

Mark my words, Julian Assange will be granted asylum, you won’t hear how he gets out of the embassy (unless they can pull something plausible out their asses at the last minute), and he will materialize in Quito, probably by Thursday.

Almost certainly while I’m away from the computer, not that I’m overpersonalizing things.