I get dizzy a lot these days.......

Hubert Humphry. There is a name you dont hear often anymore. Hubert Humphry was a politician. He was a Senator, and he ran for President once. Humphry was once a giant of the old Democratic Party, a champion of the working person and Civil Rights. Humphry ended his days an almost instantly forgotten goat. His fall was so fast and so far it almost makes one dizzy to contemplate.

Senator Humphry got caught up in what was called the "Milk Scandal". It seems a Milk industry group gave "donations" to politicians in exchange for favorable legislation that kept the price of milk high for the consumer. Humphry when asked about his "campaign donation" said something like "I'm only sorry I didnt get more." Then he just disappeared more or less forever.

One would think that after Senator Humphry's instant fall from grace and fame that the lesson learned by all would be to not take the graft. This seems to not be the case. At every level governmental officials seem to have learned the lesson: "get more".

In Altadena California, where I live, I serve on a little body that advises County ,State and Federal agencies on the needs and desires of Altadena residents. At our last meeting, a member attempted to pass out free gym memberships "for members only". As he tried to pass one to me , I said "I cant take that, it's a bribe, its something worth more than five dollars that can not be consumed within twenty four hours, given due to my position, I'm sorry, it's a bribe and I cant take it." One would think after that no one would take it, but members did. Kind of makes a guy dizzy.

A couple days later, another member emailed the whole group notifying us that a free trip was available from a local power company to go look at their dams and "better understand issues"....Yep all transportation, food and lodging FREE..... I wrote back complaining that it was a bribe, an improper gift and we should only go if we paid our own way. I got a note back from a friend saying I had to look at it differently...I got dizzy. To me, if you put a pig in a dress, apply lipstick to its rear end, and kiss it, you've still kissed a pigs rear end...How you look at it doesnt change it.

A few days later I went to another meeting held by another agency. There a member who I once respected, insisted on the group voting on a endorsement of a State ballot proposition that directly favored his Industry and employer. He took part in debate and voted on the issue. I was dizzy. Then later in the meeting, a member of the public cautioned a member of that Board to recuse himself from an issue that was the awarding of a contract to his employer. He gleefully took part in debate and made a spectacle of his vote on the issue. I felt like I just took a ride on that rotating rising and falling drum at a carnival. I was so dizzy I almost Puked.

Whenever I go to hearings or governmental board meetings I see gross violations of even the concept that Ceasers wife should not only be beyond reproach, but should appear to be so. It seems ethics are missing from several generations of our "leaders" and nothing can be done about it, because everyone seems to think its the way it is, or its just cute somehow, like the pig in the dress.
I get dizzy a lot these days.

I'm not sleeping again

I'm not sleeping again. I start to sleep, but I wake up early in the night, always its the same nightmare. The nightmares had stopped for a time.

Art Snyder had sued me, and for the first couple years, I was so worried about being homeless that I didnt sleep at all, then I was so exhausted, I slept like a log, six hours a night, for the first time since I met Mike Canfield and read Coup D etat in America. After the lawsuit, I maniacally tried to live a "normal" life. I refused to discuss or think about conspiracies. I had no nightmares. I had no dreams. I wanted to get over my anger. I wanted to be a good consuming mind numbed American. It didnt work, I kept trying.

I walked into this health food store. It was the smell of all that healthy stuff, potions and vitamins, it was the taste of the honey crunch bar, just like they had at Bee Balser's House of Health when I was a kid. I should have stuck to cigars, much safer. This nostalgia crapo can kill you. The honey crunch health bar- just like the one I bought that afternoon from the skinny dark kid in back of the counter at Bee Balser's.

The nightmares came back. I wake up and Senator Robert Kennedy is laying in a pool of his own blood, eyes open,staring upward and ever into my soul, crying out against injustice, against the wrong man doing the time for this crime. My mind jumbles to images of things I've never seen, Rev. Owens horse ranch, the inside of the strip club where that skinny dark kid was publically hypnotized,I wonder to myself, did Zorthian and Fineman see and enjoy that Hypnosis show on their famous rounds of debotchery? The blonde crew cut guy and the woman in the polka dot dress sitting down at the Dutch oven for coffee with the skinny dark kid. These images flood my mind as if I have been there and have seen them.

I lay in bed and walk through my home town in my mind in an uneasy familiar terror. During the day, I try to walk around and be a normal citizen, unaffected, but at night, I hear that skinny dark kid, now gray and old, his whole life spent locked in a cage, wailing from Corcoran prison. He wants nothing more but to recover his memory, to know if he was, or wasnt the killer, so he can know is he, or is he not, the prisoner in a Kafka novel. I think as morning slowly rises that Sirhan Sirhan must also not sleep.

Sirhan must lay awake, searching, traveling in his mind to the same places I travel to, looking, trying to know, trying to remember, trying to go beyond the fog of hypnosis, trying to remember the dappled light of trees, and the taste of honey crunch bars.

Buster Keaton- Assassinations Theorist

I was once a good Republican child. I believed Oswald acted alone. Buster Keaton would change that.

It was the 1960's, but I was conservative to the bone. So conservative that I spent a great deal of time studying the past. In 1968,as the rest of the world was looking to a new future, I was starting my early research into silent movies. In my local branch library was a book by Buster Keaton about his career and in particular his early creativity in inventing film technique. Buster was most proud of having invented the "Triple Shot".

The Triple Shot is a technique whereby the viewer through three or more fragmented and separate images, is made to believe he has seen something he hasnt seen. In Keaton's illustration in the book, he shows himself dressed as a caveman throwing what looks like a huge rock. Next he shows the rock flying through the air, and finally he shows the rock landing on someone far far away. In the movie one believes one has seen Keaton throw the rock a far distance and hit someone, when this is not at all what one has seen. Brilliant.

On 5 June 1968, as a dutiful Republican junior politico, I was staying up late, viewing the television returns of the California Primary. I believed that if Senator Robert Kennedy won the Democratic Primary, he would be the Democratic Party candidate, he would win the Presidency, and my candidate of choice, Richard M. Nixon would lose, and lose big time. It would be a w i i i iiiipe OUT.

As the Democratic Primary results were announced and Bobby Kennedy gave his speech, I was one despondent Republican kid. All was lost. I announced this to my parents, and was going to go to bed, when suddenly on camera, I saw this waiter shooting in the room, a jumble of distorted images as the camera jerked all over that little kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel, and then Senator Kennedy, laying on the floor. Oh My GOD!!! A TRIPLE SHOT!!!

In that brief moment, I became a Conspiracy Theorist. In that second, I stopped believing in lone nuts. I didnt know how, at that point I could not imagine why, I just knew that a whole lot of people were involved, in ways large and small, known and unknown to them, that the conspiracies were real and they were active. A triple shot! I was dizzy with the implications. My parents thought I'd slipped a gear.

Unknown to me at that moment, my little town of Altadena California and our neighbor to the south Pasadena , were the centers of action in this conspiracy. The place where my Grandmother bought her cake decorating supplies, the strip club that excited my pre pubescent imagination with its sign, the health food store where I bought honey crunch bars and Grandmother got her arthritis "cures", the gun store where my Father bought targets and ammunition, the gun range where we took target practice, these were each places central to the assassination of Robert Kennedy. I walked through them my entire life. The ghosts of untruth and injustice whisper in them still, the feeling of "wrong" chills your skin in them for reasons most people can not imagine or quite touch. An innocent man is yet convicted and imprisoned for a crime he could not have committed, a crime that altered America and the world forever.

Tom Noguchi says his "professional judgment" is at odds with the physical evidence and shrugs. Buster knows. Buster told me, it was a triple shot.