The going got weird

I'm reminded, constantly, of the two-year old remark by the anonymous State Department official: "I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, 'There's been a military coup,' and then it all makes sense."

If only it were that simple, and modestly malevolent. That used to make sense of this world for me, too. Now, it doesn't make enough sense. Now, I'm waking with the crazy notion, "There's been a coup by esoteric Nazis, and it didn't happen yesterday." Or perhaps I'm not truly awake yet. Could be. Hope so. Because my inner life has taken on the complexion of a lucid nightmare.

In other words, what's a poor blogger to do, when Hellboy begins to appear more "reality-based" than Wolf Blitzer Reports?

So please tell me, and I'll repeat after you: It's only a movie...it's only a movie...it's only a movie....

The Gannon/Guckert/Gosch puzzle pieces keep refusing to be put back in the box. For what it's worth, Sherman Skolnick - no stranger to hyperbolic and unverifiable pronouncements - weighs in with this:

A group of elite investigators, for many years now documenting the operation of the male prostitution ring [in] Omaha, Chicago, and District of Colombia, have told a very small, trusted group of old-assistants, some of the following:

That the person using the name "Jeff Gannon" is most likely Johnny Gosch. And that the name is a tip-off in that it is the name of an editor [actually, "James Gannon"] of a major newspaper in Iowa that originally severely condemned Noreen Gosch for making an issue of the kidnapping of her twelve-year old son in 1982 who delivered newspapers for that paper.

That Gannon alias Gosch was selected at an early age because of his cleverness and adaptability to espionage work, as the intelligence agencies are inclined to do. And that Gannon alias Gosch is part of a spy agency team so secretive its name or title is not known by those otherwise knowledgeable about secret teams.

And from childsearch.org, here is another age-enhanced picture of Gosch, as he may appear at 30, next to a photo of Guckert/Gannon:



Then there's the business of Hunter S Thompson, whose name appears in this one passage of The Franklin Cover-Up , at the end of a particularly bloody account by victim Paul Bonacci. (The "Larry King" here, of course, is not that Larry King.)

In other testimony, Bonacci said that Larry King was smiling and laughing the whole time the film was being shown, and that "the men with the hoods" were a Satanic group which planned to use the dead boy in some sort of ceremony. He also named the director of the snuff film, whom they had picked up in Las Vegas, as "Hunter Thompson."

The whole Franklin scandal beggars belief, and when I read those words, nearly two years ago, I just about gave up on it. I already didn't want any of it to be true, because if it were, then I needed to reappraise every assumption about how the world worked, and of its rulers. And reluctantly, I came to the conclusion that enough at least must be true, for me to do just that.

Because even if we don't like it, we have to admit stubborn facts of the Franklin story. Lawyer and former State Senator John DeCamp, author of The Franklin Cover-Up, did that himself, after having initially discounted survivor testimony of rites performed before a giant stone owl in a California retreat. He'd never heard of Bohemian Grove.

And a stubborn fact such as how, in 1999, King quietly abandoned his legal defence against Bonacci, who was awarded compensation valued at a million dollars for damages suffered in King's service. From the judgement of the District Court:

Between December 1980 and 1988, the complaint alleges, the defendant King continually subjected the plaintiff to repeated sexual assaults, false imprisonments, infliction of extreme emotional distress, organized and directed satanic rituals, forced the plaintiff to "scavenge" for children to be a part of the defendant King's sexual abuse and pornography ring, forced the plaintiff to engage in numerous masochistic orgies with other minor children. The defendant King's default has made those allegations true against him. The issue now is the relief to be granted monetarily.

The now uncontradicted evidence is that the plaintiff has suffered much. He has suffered burns, broken fingers, beating of the head and face and other indignities by the wrongful actions of the defendant King. In addition to the misery of going through the experiences just related over a period of eight years, the plaintiff has suffered the lingering results to the present time. He is a victim of multiple personality disorder, involving as many as fourteen distinct personalities aside from his primary personality. He has given up a desired military career and received threats on his life. He suffers from sleeplessness, has bad dreams, has difficulty in holding a job, is fearful that others are following him, fears getting killed, has depressing flashbacks, and is verbally violent on occasion, all in connection with the multiple personality disorder and caused by the wrongful activities of the defendant King.

With respect to the Thompson allegation, even should Bonacci have been telling the truth as he recalled it, the truth may be only that someone was called "Hunter Thompson." I can imagine that in such company, when perpetrating such crimes, pseudonyms, perhaps tinged with black humour, would be fairly common.

Still, there is the business of Thompson's apparent suicide - in the middle of a prosaic phone conversation with his wife of two years, no less - and at the height of the Gannon flap, as some speculation turned to Gosch.

Whatever the truth regarding Thompson and the Franklin scandal, he sized up Bush and Cheney in stark, occultic terms, and described their ascendancy with apocalyptic dread. It was the "big darkness, soon come - take my word for it." On November 20, 2000, just as the Bush team was stealing its first election (second, if we count Bush Sr's "October Surprise" of 1980), this column of Thompson's appeared, entitled "Prepare for the Weirdness" (and thanks to Jon for forwarding it):

We have seen Weird Times in this country before, but the year 2000 is beginning to look super weird. This time, there really is nobody flying the plane. ... We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused.

The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.

The Autumn months are never a calm time in America. Back to Work, Back to School, Back to Football Practice, etc. ... Autumn is a very Traditional period, a time of strong Rituals and the celebrating of strange annual holidays like Halloween and Satanism and the fateful Harvest Moon, which can have ominous implications for some people.

Autumn is always a time of Fear and Greed and Hoarding for the winter coming on. Debt collectors are active on old people and fleece the weak and helpless. They want to lay in enough cash to weather the known horrors of January and February. There is always a rash of kidnapping and abductions of school children in the football months. Pre-teens of both sexes are traditionally seized and grabbed off the streets by gangs of organized Perverts. [Gosch was abducted Sept 5, 1982]
...
Guaranteed Fear and Loathing. Abandon all hope. Prepare for the Weirdness. Get familiar with Cannibalism.

What, if anything at all, should we make of Thompson alluding to the organized abduction of children, as he describes the dawning of the "dangerously weird" Bush/Cheney era?

Then, like some weird icing on his memorial cake, last Saturday's Globe and Mail mentioned that at his death, Thompson was working on a story concerning demolition charges in the World Trade Center. Paul William Roberts goes a little gonzo himself in the first paragraph, but in the second, admits which of his words are founded in fact:

Hunter telephoned me on Feb. 19, the night before his death. He sounded scared. It wasn't always easy to understand what he said, particularly over the phone, he mumbled, yet when there was something he really wanted you to understand, you did. He'd been working on a story about the World Trade Center attacks and had stumbled across what he felt was hard evidence showing the towers had been brought down not by the airplanes that flew into them but by explosive charges set off in their foundations. Now he thought someone was out to stop him publishing it: “They're gonna make it look like suicide,” he said. “I know how these bastards think...”

That's how I imagine a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson should begin. He was indeed working on such a story, but it wasn't what killed him. He exercised his own option to do that. As he said to more than one person, “I would feel real trapped in this life if I didn't know I could commit suicide at any time.”

Hopefully - hopefully - Hellboy may prove, in the end, to be just a movie. But saying Hunter S Thompson was just a journalist is like calling Leonard Cohen only a poet.

Some folks, somehow - they just know.

And now the wheels of heaven stop
You feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
It is murder.