EMILY, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU

 

I am still pissed off. The violent death of Emily Sander in November of 2007 left the usual wreckage. Her family was devastated. Her friends were  bereft. The Kansas towns where she grew up and went to college was  wounded. But within in a month or two few remembered  her name, and we will forget that once until we  look behind the veneer and see the dark face of our capitalistic news media; provocateurs who cater to the public’s prurient interests. 

Without the ennoblement of the Bill of Rights, they (we) would all have been arrested as pornographers long ago. And the truly ironic aspect is that the media sold their papers and commercials by billing Emily as an “internet porn star”, as if the pittance she made from selling her image and reputation had ever come anywhere near the treasure collected each day by CNN, NBC, FOX, and even the Associated Press, all of them marketing Emily’s image and reputation. 

Her life didn’t make her newsworthy to them. Marketing her self as the “barely legal, Zoey Zane” certainly did not distinguish her significantly from millions of others living a fantasy on the net. Even her brutal murder by itself did not earn her a dubious equation with “man bites dog”. But her life and death tied to the word “pornography” is what finally made Emily Sander “worthy” as news.

The word “pornography” was born from an odd root. The ancient Greek sources are “porneia”, meaning fornication, and “graphein” meaning to write. They refer to the advertising signs hung outside the prostitute’s place of business (above). For three thousand years a “pornographer” was anyone who wrote anything about the lives of prostitutes or their customers. Which was a legal and respected profession.

It wasn’t until the Victorian age (about 1850) and with the invention of photography, that the noun “pornographer” evolved into the more specific meaning of “…Someone who presents, shows or sells writing or pictures whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal”. But the last 150 years has failed to inspire a simple accurate definition of what is now considered to be pornographic. In 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted that the best description he could provide was, “I know it when I see it.” And it is that hazy justification which allowed the news media to sell Emily Sander as an “internet porn star” without calling themselves “pornographers”.

Emily was a lovely, vibrant 18 year old woman, discovering her sexuality at a time when the internet gave young women economic power over their bodies.  She wanted to make a profit from that power. And if that was a mistake it was her mistake to make.  Said Nikki Watson, a fellow student at Butler Community College, "She was a young teenage girl and she wanted to be in the movies and enjoyed movies. She needed the extra money. Nobody in El Dorado, Kansas knew besides her close friends." 

As a writer Rhonda K. Baughman pointed out in a piece which appeared on the Larry Flint web, "Emily Sander was neither royalty of adult entertainment, nor, truthfully, was her Internet site naughty enough to warrant star status."

But Kansas is infamous for its fear of shifting that power away from men who have traditionally held it. And the life of Emily Sander is and was proof that that cultural wars over sexual conduct have always been a fraud. 

Emily did not murder herself. She is blameless for that crime.  The precipitous cause of Emily's murder appears to have been that over Thanksgiving she revealed her web site to her boyfriend, who immediately broke up with her. A week later, on 8 December, she met a 24 years old man at a local bar. He made her feel wanted and desired. She accompanied him to his hotel room, where he raped her and strangled her with a telephone cord.  The internet had nothing to do with it. So said the cops.   

Emily’s death is no more proof that internet sex sites are dangerous for women than the murder of Stacy Peterson, a Chicago cops fourth wife, is proof that being married to a cop is inherently deadly. Neither of these two women were murdered as punishment for some moral shortcoming, no matter what the implied moral tag the media wants to tie on their lives. They were murdered by men. And 57% of all women who are murdered are killed by their husbands, ex-husbands or boyfriends. 

And that makes Emily a member of the unlucky majority of women, whose greatest enemy are the men in their lives. She was a freshman at the local junior college. That should have made her death worthy of being a headline; but it didn’t. As the saying goes, sex sells – especially it sells newspapers and cable and internet news ads. The slaughter of another young woman by an enraged male ego was simply another “dog bites man” story and not “news worthy”; unless she could be described as an “internet porn star”.

Well, Emily wasn’t much of a “star” until she was murdered by the media. On what was once her web site (ZoeyZane.com) her business partners, RagingBucks,com posted the following; “Emily was a solo nude model whose site went live September 25, 2007…the media…sent more traffic to Emily’s adult site in two hours then the site has received in the two months since the site has gone live”. 

The “Fort Worth Star-Telegram” printed the absurd statistic that 30,000 customers paid $39.95 a month to look at Emily’s nude photos. In fact “RagingBucks” offered access to images of dozens of women for that price. Emily was merely one of the newest.  Five minutes of investigation by main stream media would have shown, as anyone who has ever been the victim of internet porn pop-ups and seen the prices listed could testify, that being a "solo nude model" hardly qualifies anyone as an "Internet Queen" or even defines their site as pornography in the opinion of the majority of the population. 

"RagingBucks set up a fund for Emily's family and seeded it with $3,000. The least the "Star-Telegram" could have done was to match that amount, so that Emily might at least be paid symbolically part of the money she made for them. But they never did. 

But what finally, ultimately pisses me off is that if you “Google” the name Emily Sander you get 1,920,000 references, and almost all of them refer to her at some point as an "internet porn star". But if you Google “Isreal Mireles” you get just 734 hits -  and he’s the SOB convicted of raping and murdering her and then dumping her body beside a highway before picking up his 16 year old pregnant girl friend and fleeing the country.  

- 30 - 

PUNCH LINE

The oldest known written joke is Sumerian, because they were about the oldest writers that we know of. “Name something that has never happened in all of history. A young wife who did not fart on her husband's lap”. 

Now, somebody took the time, 4,000 years ago, to notch that one up in cuneiform on a clay tablet and bake it into a book. Today you would have to write a script, find the money. gather a crew, light and decorate the set, hire the actors, rehearse, tape and edit the result, and then title it something like “Bridesmaids”, all to capture that magical moment of discovery when the young couple realize there is nothing they can hide or have to hide from each other. 

And, of course, its also a fart joke – and those are always good for a laugh.

Then there was the ancient Egyptian riddle. “A virgin and a slut attend a beer bash. The slut just has a good time, but the virgin gets pregnant. How is this possible? The answer (drum roll): Auxiliary Forces.” (Ba-dum-bump.) 

Okay, you have to know that auxiliary forces are sort of local yokels, farmers usually, badly disciplined and...oh, just trust me. Tell this joke to any ancient Egyptian and they will laugh themselves to death.

Goes another old joke, “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh?” And the answer is, “You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile, and then you urge the pharaoh to go fishing.” 

According to the gossip Herodotus, Khufu, who ruled Egypt about 5,000 years ago, got really drunk one night and ordered his spendthrift daughter to go into a temple and have sex with any man who would pay. She did, but she only asked each man for a small stone. And when she rose from her task the next morning she had built her father's Great Pyramid. That was maybe the first political joke, 150 feet long on a side.

I know where people got the idea they were the first generation in history who were funny. Nothing can bury a punch line faster than an archaeologist. It's the degree – the suffix “ology” means to kill the joke. 

Did you hear the one about the unlucky eunuch who developed a hernia? That perfectly good joke survived being buried for two thousand years before a graduate student dug it up, dusted it off and handed it over to her professor who sucked the life out of it and then published it in his own name. I'll bet you if every school of archeology had a resident comic, our view of history would be a lot funnier.

Did you hear about the rich guy who got caught in a storm at sea? The waves were crashing over his Trimene and the slaves shackled in the rowing deck were starting to drown. Taking pity on them the rich guy runs to the gangway, leans over and tells the terrified men, “Don't worry. I freed you all in my will.”

By the way, there is an ancient contemporary religious version in the Torah, but in this one the rich guy is a schlemiel named Jonah, whom Yahweh had chosen to be a prophet. Why would the Hebrew god pick a schmuck to be a prophet? Because that Yahweh has a sense of humor. Unfortunately the scribes who later copied and edited this one down did not. 

Okay, having survived the storm in the belly of a whale, this mumbling wishy-washy nobody Jonah manages to convert the entire population of the Assyrian town of Nineveh. That is hilarious, but nobody laughs at this joke, because that is what happens when you take all the humor out of religion - it's just not funny anymore!

Then, of course. there are the jokes that read like a letters to a Latin language Penthouse magazine; an ambitious young man invited two MLF's to his house for an afternoon diversion, and on arrival ordered his servant to “Mix a drink for one of these lovely ladies, and have sex with the other, if she wants to." And both women immediately blurted out, “I'm not thirsty.” 

Or consider the rich old man who bought a stupid servant boy to attend for his wife while he was out of town. Returning from a business trip a week later he was greeted by the boy. “And how are you getting on” asked the master. A big grin spread over the boy's face. “Oh, Master” he said, “very well. Saturday night I had sex with one of the dancing girls, and when I took off her mask, your wife was inside.”(Ba-dum-bump.)

For something over a thousand years the Greeks had a comedy-industrial complex, which allowed the sheep herders to rule the known funny world. Four hundred years before Christ, the father of Alexander the Great, Phillip of Macedonia,  paid the Athenian Friar's Club to send him a collection of their best gags. But, unfortunately the collection did not survive, perhaps because in 336 B.C. E., the assassins got tired of waiting for Phillip to die laughing, and they had him was murdered. 

Eight hundred years later Greek culture produced the epitome of funny for another thousand years, the comedy equivalent of the Parthenon, when that great comedy duo of Hierocles and Philagrius produced the oldest surviving joke book in the world, “Philogelos”, or the “Joke Lover”. There may have been better stuff written in the the post ancient world, but I get the feeling that the notation, A. D. actually means  “After the Death of Funny.” Jokes wouldn't be this good again until the Catskill Bosch belt.

To the post-ancient Romans, the Thracian city of Abdera was the equivalent of the Yiddish comedy capital of Minsk a' Pinsk – every resident was an idiot, for the purposes of a joke. Goes one - a worried Abderite mother calls in an astrologer to cast a horoscope for her ailing son. He assures the desperate woman that her boy will live happily and productively for many years to come, She thanks the prophet and then promises “Come around tomorrow and I will pay you.” The astrologer is indignant. “I don't do business that way,” he tells the woman. “If your son dies tonight, I could lose my fee.” 

Or - after many years two old friends accidentally meet on a Abdera street corner. The first man says, “Thank the gods, Alexios had told me you had died years ago.” The second man says, “Well, you can see, I am very much alive.” And the first man agrees but adds, “Of course, Alexios was always more reliable than you.”

An Abderian man complains to a trader that a recently purchased slave dropped dead on the way home from the slave lot. “Well” says the trader, “He was alive while I owned him.” (Ba-dum-bump.) 

A local merchant saw a donkey counting to ten with his hoof, and was so impressed by the money being offered for the creature he decided to teach his own ass to do tricks. After some thought about which trick would draw the largest paying crowds, he set about teaching his donkey not to eat. Three weeks later the broken hearted merchant explained to his wife, “And just when I had taught him not to eat, he died”  

Two thousand years later, this would be re-written as the "Dead Parrot Sketch".

Even Medieval Christian monks, shivering in their isolated monasteries, praying for forgiveness right up 'til the Vikings showed up to slaughter them, even these poor filthy religious louts told the same jokes we do today. 

This one made the rounds of monasteries thirteen hundred years ago; question - what man can kill another man without being punished? Answer; a doctor. Of course this was before the Sisters of Charity became a For-Profit Health Insurance Provider, which is the modern punch line of the same joke.

It is a sad fact that not only have humans not gotten smarter in the last 10,000 years, we haven't gotten funnier, ether. And that is the real joke on all of us.

                                                       - 30 - 

GEORGIA PEACHES - Chapter Eight

I think Patrick Henry's (above) death may have been a release. At the urging of George Washington, in the spring of 1799, Patrick stood for one last election - for the Virginia House of Delegates. He ran as a Federalist. Patrick won his last election, but never occupied his seat. He died of stomach cancer on 6 June, 1799. His second wife, Dorothea, quickly married Patrick's friend, Judge Edmund Wilson, thus protecting the family investments from predators who might have cheated a naive widow, probably a predator like  Judge Edmund Wilson.

Once the details of the Yazoo Land sale became public, Senator James Gunn (above) was universally despised. Six years later, toward the end of his term he announced he was “disgusted with everything connected with public life.”  It was certainly disgusted with him.  In March of 1801 he returned to the old state capital of Louisville, Georgia and at the end of July, in a room full of people, James Gunn died so quietly no one noticed he was dead for several minutes. That would have galled him. One obituary called him “General Yazoo”, a reminder of those runaway slaves he had murdered so many years before, and the millions of dollars he had tried to steal from the  tax payers.  A kinder obituary hoped he was “beyond the reach of friendship, or of hatred.”  Not me.

James Jackson was twice elected Governor of Georgia. In his first two year term he personally wrote sections 23 and 24 of the new Georgia constitution, which insured that " “no...order shall pass the General Assembly, granting a donation or gratuity in favor of any person whatever...” except by a two-thirds vote.  During his second term, in 1802  he finally disposed of the temptation of the Yazoo Lands by selling them to the Federal Government for $1,250,000. Georgia was no longer broke. For awhile.

And when the “Prince of Duels” died on 19 March, 1806, no one was more surprised and disappointed than James Jackson, that he met his demise quietly in his own bed.

Most of the speculators who tried to profit from the selling the Yazoo swamp  -  Patrick Henry, David Ross, Robert Morris, John Nicholson, James Wilson and James Gunn - lost everything. Taking a profit would be up to the next generation of “land jobbers”, starting with John Peck, and his partner in “ legal crime”, Robert Fletcher.

The story goes - and it was a fictional story - that on 14 May, 1803, 75 year old John Peck sold to 43 year old Robert Fletcher (above) 15,000 acres of Yazoo swamp around the Tombigby River, in exchange for $3,000, or about 4 and 1/3 cents an acre.  Fletcher was supposedly concerned about receiving a clear title because of the "The Rescinding Act”,  so Peck had included the following addendum, insisting that,  “The title to the premises as conveyed by the state of Georgia (in 1795)...has been in no way constitutionally or legally impaired by virtue of any subsequent act of any subsequent legislature of the...state of Georgia.”

The addendum was important because of that 1603 English case of Chandler v Lopus, which you remember (I'm sure)  established the legal doctrine of Caveat Emptor - buyer beware.  Peck had now provided the guarantee in writing that the 1796 Rescinding Act did not apply, even though Georgia had just sold the Yazoo Swamp-Land to the Federal Government. And in doing so, he had provided legal grounds for Fletcher to sue Peck to get his money back. But then that was not really the point of the entire transaction.

Because Fletcher was a resident of New Hampshire and Peck resided in Massachusetts, the case moved directly into the federal court system – what a lucky break that was. There  it was heard at the circuit court level by the cranky, craggy 74 year old Federalist New Englander, William Cushing (above) , who was also a Supreme – another lucky break. Cushing  decided the case for Peck, which allowed Fletcher to appeal to the Supreme Court.

And it is now that the final character in our farce, John Marshal (above), steps upon the stage. He was a cousin to Thomas Jefferson, and a close friend to George Washington. When the case of Fletcher v Peck reached the high court in March of 1806, Chief Justice Marshall decided that the arguments made by Peck's team of lawyers had been “incorrect”, and so the case was “continued by consent”,  meaning held over for the next term, to be re-argued (or better argued) in October of 1807.  

And even then, Marshall did not issue the final ruling until 16 March, 1810, 3 years later, probably because it took him that long to cajole an unanimous decision. The decision had to be unanimous because for the first time ever, the Supreme Court was declaring that a state law - the Rescinding Act -  violated an article of the Federal Constitution – in this case, section 10 of Article One.

As usual, Marshall wrote the court's opinion. He acknowledged that the members of the 1795 Georgia legislature were guilty of reprehensible actions. However, he reasoned, “The grant, when issued, conveyed an estate...(and) This estate was transferable; and those who purchased parts of it were not stained by that guilt which infected the original transaction.” Thus was born the legal fiction of the “innocent third party” in the Yazoo land fraud, meaning the speculators who had bought the land from the men who had bribed the legislature were not the same man who had committed the sin, working under the mask of a corporation.

Marshall argued that if a concealed defect in a contract could be held against the victim of that concealment, then “All titles would be insecure”. That might be true in the abstract, but referring to the members of the New England Mississippi Company as “innocent” was almost as much a legal fiction as insisting that written guarantees protected buyers in an age when only 3% of the population could read.

Oddly, the only member of the court to disagree with Marshall in writing was Jefferson's only appointee on the court,  William Johnson (above), from South Carolina. And his only objection was that he thought the Indians had a better claim to the land than did the state of Georgia. Still, Johnson managed, at the end of his argument, to state the obvious. “I have been very unwilling to proceed to the decision of this cause at all,” he wrote, because, “It appears to me to bear strong evidence... of being a mere feigned case.” 

But having stated the obvious, Johnson then folded his tent and concurred with Marshall's decision. And so the court had decided in favor of the New England Mississippi Company and all the other speculators in the Yazoo land sales.

The cost of that decision became clear in 1814, when the Federal government reached a settlement with all the “innocent third parties” in the Yazoo land fraud. Having already paid Georgia $4 million in 1802  for the swamp land -  the modern equivalent of $63 million -  they now paid the speculators in the various Yazoo companies another $5 million for the same swamp - the modern equivalent of $50 million - over 113 million dollars for a swamp which grew little more than mosquitos, turtles and alligators.

It made Patrick Henry's scheme to cheat the tax payers of Georgia seem small potatoes. And this would be far from the last time the lawyers wrote and interpreted laws to assist thieves in robbing the public. Such behavior is a stab to the heart of the public's faith in their government. And it all began at the very birth of that Republic.

It was the next generation of Americans who would risk their fortunes to build levees, to drain the Yazoo swamp and keep the Yazoo river to a path, and who would finally lay bare some of the richest agricultural soil in the world, upon which they would plant and grow cotton. There were profits aplenty for all...except, of course, for the natives who had originally owned the land and the slaves who picked the cotton. It is a sad truth about speculators that like villains in a horror story they generate life for no one but themselves, and misery and debt for everyone and everything else they touch.  And capitalism empowers them.

- 30 -