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.  

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GOLD FEVER AND GOVERNMENTS

I think everybody liked Robert Williamson Steele.  Every one who knew him spoke of him in glowing terms; he was genial, honest, an entrepreneur, a good neighbor and a true friend. Maybe he was a little distracted by his pursuit of money, but that's no sin in America. Then, in 1860, with the Civil War building to a roiling boil, “J.W.” presented the Federal government with a ready-made, right-out-of-the-box, pro-federal union state, to smooth passage of the gold rich Colorado territory into the federal union.  And his fellow politicians turned him down flat. For some reason they just didn't trust “JW”. And that was only partly because he was a Democrat.

See, in the 1850's there were only two kinds of Democrats, southerners willing to go to war to protect slavery and northerners who were willing to make any compromise to keep southern Democrats happy. The leader of the latter group was Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who shepherded the Compromise of 1850 through Congress - protecting slavery but keeping it south of the Kansas border. And then four years later Douglas flip-flopped with his Kansas-Nebraska act, which let the locals decide the issue of slavery. His spin was “Let the people rule”, but the effect was to allow slavery supporters to drag their grievances north, across the Kansas border, where they barged into abolitionists. This intimate mixing of political ideologies set off “Bleeding Kansas” where neighbors like John Brown began settling political arguments by literally beheading their opponents. That was the real start of the American Civil War; not at Fort Sumter in 1861, but in Kansas in 1855. And, surprisingly, if anybody had taken notice, a practical solution to the political anarchy unleashed by Senator Douglas had already appeared,  in July of 1858.

William Greenberry Russell was a Georgia peach who was a “49'er”.  He had been fairly successful in the California gold fields, running other people's claims.  But he really struck gold with his in-laws. His wife, Susan Willis Russel, was 1/8 Cherokee, and that side of her family had been forced marched across the Mississippi River in the infamous Trail of Tears, back when Kansas and Nebraska were supposed to be the new “Indian Territory”- like Indiana before them and Oklahoma afterward. Separate but equal has never worked in America, not for Indians, not for blacks, not for women and not for gays.

Anyway, Susan's Cherokee relatives wrote her about rumors of gold in the Rocky Mountain foothills. Looking to make his own fortune, Russel immediately rushed To Denver.  And one early day in July July day he panned 20 ounces of gold out of Cherry Creek, a tributary of the South Platte River. News of that one day bonanza was like opening a safety valve on an overheated steam engine.  Overnight, violence levels across Kansas dropped as the most adventurous (meaning the most violent) young males packed up all their excess energy and marched 300 miles westward toward the 14,000 foot high Pikes Peak. They weren't actually going to Pike's Peak, but it was the most visible bit of the Rocky mountains as you crossed the rolling prairies; thus “Pike's Peak or Bust”.

Over the first two years of the Pike's Peak gold rush, one hundred thousand abolitionists and pro-slavery men came pouring out of Kansas and Nebraska. You might have expected a repeat of Bleeding Kansas in the gold fields. In 1860 a Kansas newspaper noted that “It is difficult...to walk half a square (mile) in Denver, without meeting some familiar face...” So the “59'ers” were the same folks who had been shooting each other back in Kansas in '58. Oh, they were still shooting each other in the gold fields, just not over slavery. Now it was over failed business deals and cheating at cards. In fact, it seems that all these violent people were suddenly no longer interested in politics. Greed had changed the political ethos, at least in Colorado.

The two largest towns in the region sat right atop the gold fields. One, Auraria, even adopted the Latin word for gold as its name. But the other was named to curry the favor of the governor of Kansas Territory, James W. Denver. See, the gold fields were part of the huge Arapahoe County, Kansas Territory, and the residents of the town of Denver were hoping for win favorable treatment over Auraria.. But by the time the town of Denver had adopted its new name, Governor Denver was out of office, and the toadying to him did them no good. So Denver the town returned the favor. They kept the name, but when the ex-governor visited his namesake, the residents largely ignored him. And that would prove the new reoccurring theme in Colorado politics.

Being ignored by territorial officials in distant Kansas, on 5 September, 1859, the citizens of Denver and Auraria voted to form their own government, which they labeled the Provisional Government of Jefferson Territory. They laid claim to a huge expanse of plains and mountains, almost as big as California or Texas. The genial Robert Williamson Steele, a lawyer out of Chillicothe, Ohio was elected Governor. Not yet forty, his sole qualification was that he was genial and had served a single term in the Nebraska Territorial legislature before catching gold fever. The prickly Pennsylvanian born lawyer, Lucien W. Bliss, was elected Lieutenant Governor. He had sought his fortune in Leavenworth, Kansas, but had moved on to Denver where he helped start the Rocky Mountain News, and a couple of freight lines. And they were typical of pretty much everybody in the the self proclaimed Jefferson Territory.

Everybody in Jefferson who wasn't actually mining gold, was trying anything they could to make money off those who were.  Governor “J.W.” even started a town in the foothills 12 miles west of Denver, which he called Mount Vernon.(He had a Tea Party 'thing' about the founding fathers). He sold town lots, and built toll roads heading to the new mines further up-slope. Lt. Governor Bliss started a couple of freight lines of his own, hauling equipment, food and fuel into the mines, and carrying the ore out. All of the men elected to the Jefferson Territorial legislature were only part time politicians, often business partners with their political allies and enemies. Even the judges appointed had to fit court sessions into their busy schedules - one of them never did show up for work. And Oscar Totten had been elected clerk of the Supreme Court because nobody else wanted the job.

The whole rickety structure survived for only 16 months. You see, most of the residents of Jefferson Territory, like their political leaders, saw themselves as entrepreneurs first. And being businessmen they hated to pay taxes. So, they supported their new government with a one dollar poll tax. But the natural response from all these entrepreneurs when faced with a tax on voting, was to not vote, and thus not pay the tax. This left the Provisional Government of Jefferson Territory on a very shaky financial and political foundation, made worse by the rickety nature of any business on the frontier.

Of the 100,000 who had joined the Pikes Peak gold rush, seven out of ten went bust and headed back home. By 1860, a census of “Jefferson Territory” could find only 25,329, still looking for their Eldorado.   Governor “J.W.” argued that many had gone uncounted because they were working isolated claims up in the hills.  But being isolated, said the census takers, meant they were not interested in being counted, and so, they should not count.  And the evidence was in the ballot box. The vote to create the Provisional Government of Jefferson Territory had been 1,852 to 280 – barely 2,000 participating citizens out of the supposed 25,000 - not what you would call a “popular” election. Certainly Washington didn't call it that.

After their request for recognition had been rebuffed by Washington, in August of 1860 “J.W.” asked Kansas Territory to again absorb Jefferson Territory and its power structure, meaning himself and all those other entrepreneurs. Kansas didn't say no, but they didn't say yes, either. They just waited. In November of 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois won election as President of the United States, sweeping the Republican party into power. They were made stronger when most of the southern Democrats walked out, to form the Confederacy.  On 29 January, 1861, the new Republican Congress voted to admit the state of Kansas into the union, as a free state, sans the territory claimed as Jefferson. One month later, on 26 February, 1861, the Republican congress created the Territory of Colorado, ignoring the Provisional Government of Jefferson Territory to death. A month later the rebels in Charleston, South Carolina opened fire on Fort Sumter, and the civil war began in earnest.

On 3 June, 1861, Stephen Douglas died in Chicago, of typhoid fever. Three days later “J.W.” admitted reality, declaring the Provisional Government of Jefferson Territory disbanded. It had lasted barely 16 months. And even before it was gone, nobody missed it, not even its own leaders. Lt. Governor Lucien Bliss eventually sold his businesses at a profit, and moved on to Montana, where he repeated his success. But Robert Williamson Steele, like most early entrepreneurs in Colorado, was not quite as successful.

His toll roads closed when the mines they served ran out in the early 1860's. His town of Mount Vernon died shortly thereafter. Today, the only thing to mark its existence is an abandoned cemetery and a roadside plaque. “J.W.” fell back on the law to make a living, but he kept prospecting in his spare time.  He lived a long and a productive life, and everybody liked him, right up to his death in Colorado Springs in 1901.

And I suppose if you believed lives can teach lessons, you should remember that genial makes for a good politician, but it ain’t enough to make a viable government - and neither do entrepreneurs. Good government requires shared sacrifice and commitment. And people infected with gold fever aren't interested in sharing anything.

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FOLLOW THE LEADER

"A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader. "
Harry Truman

I would describe it as a generation gap. When James Pendergast won big betting on a horse named Climax, he invested the winnings in a bar, restaurant and hotel in St. Louis’s West Bottom neighborhood (middle, above). The town was then divided between the uptown establishment Republicans, and the working class Democrats who were actually "on the bottom".  James' business was so successful that he became one of the town’s most powerful councilmen. His competition for Democratic votes was Joe Shannon who controlled the police department. But, rather than fight, “Big Jim” cut a power sharing deal with Shannon. To get what he wanted, James' first instinct was always to negotiate. 

“You use a saw to shape wood, not a hammer.”
James Pendergast. 1892

James hired his youngest brother, Tom (above), as cashier and bookkeeper at the “Climax” in the early 1890’s. He also schooled Tom in local politics, lecturing him that, “The important thing is to get the votes.” In 1900 James secured Tom the position of Superintendent of Streets. Tom immediately hired two hundred new employees, all loyal goats - as Pendergast supporters were called. And every goat voted the way the Pendergasts told them too. Why wouldn't they? The Republican Party was not interested in representing them, Then, in November of 1911, at just 55, James died of kidney failure. Tom stepped in to fill his brother’s seat on the council, but resigned after just five years. The position was no longer powerful enough for him. Tom’s first instinct was always to go for his opponent’s throat..

“Today, politics may be our friend, and tomorrow we may be its victims.”

Owen D. Young. Chairman of General Electric. 1922-1939

In 1916 Tom Pendergast had himself appointed to the leadership of the Jackson County Democratic Party, headquartered in a two story yellow brick building (above, left)  at 1908 Main Street. With the votes from the Irish and Italian neighborhoods in his pocket, Tom drove Shannon’s people out of the police department, making him the invisible hand in writing of the new city charter, adopted in 1925. “Boss” Tom could now manipulate both the city and county governments, Democratic and Republican parties, from behind the scenes, following a simple rule; "The important thing is to get the votes-no matter what.”

“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.”
Plato 400 B.C.E.

Boss Tom’s name never had to appear on a ballot. As one St. Louis writer noted, “Pendergast never did hunt ducks with a brass band. It has always been hard to tell what he is doing, but easy to tell what he has done the day after the election.” Tom helpfully described the methods he had learned from his older brother. “Every one of my workers has a fund to buy food, coal, shoes and clothing. When a poor man comes to old Tom's boys for help….we fill his belly and warm his back and vote him our way.”  Again, why wouldn't they? The Republicans had nothing to offer these folks except suspicion and attack.

“Politics have no relation to morals.
Niccolo Machiavelli. 1532

James "Blackie" Audett explained the methods Boss Tom developed for himself.  “My first job in Kansas City was to look up vacant lots…we would give addresses to them vacant lots. Then we would take the address and assign them to people we could depend on – prostitutes, thieves, floaters, anybody we could get on the voting registration books. On election days we just hauled these people to the right places and they went in and voted…”  By implication, the prostitutes, thieves and floaters must have almost outnumbered the honest folk in Kansas, else how could they thrown an election to the Democrats. The truth was  no elections in Kansas were ever won by the handful of votes from prostitutes, thieves or floaters, anymore than Republicans ever won an election based solely on votes from Retirement homes.

“The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority, acting against a divided majority.”
Will Durant. 

With the arrival of the Great Depression, Boss Tom did not wait for Hoover to sympathize with Kansas Cities’ 38%  unemployment. In November of 1930 the town voted a $40 million bond issue, for a “Ten-Year-Plan”. What Kansas got for its investment in the future was the “Power and Light Building”, still a landmark in KC., as well as a new City Hall, the Jackson County Court House, a new Police Headquarters, a new Municipal Auditorium, and several schools. When the KC “Star” described all these new buildings as “Pendergast’s concrete pyramids”, Tom merely smiled. The truth was that Pendergast Ready-Mix Cement was probably his only entirely legal business. But in fact what brought Tom Pendergast down, was another legal business; political consultant. 

“There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting for traces of blood to appear in the water’
Alan Clark. 1974

Since 1922 the State of Missouri and 137 companies had been sparing over rate increases for fire insurance. The difference in any individual policy was small, but after 15 years the amount impounded while the courtroom wrangling continued was $10 million. Then, suddenly, the state agreed to a settlement, giving the insurance companies $8 million, and the right to increase future rates. In May of 1938 Republican Governor Loyd Stark (below, right), a Tom Pendergast pick (below, left), ordered an investigation.  This discovered that the insurance companies had delivered a half million dollars in cash to Tom Pendergast as a “political consulting” fee, just before the settlement. Since Pendergast had no direct authority over the insurance commissioner, this fee was legal. However it was politically embarrassing. And in order to avoid the embarrassment, Boss Tom had not declared it on his Federal income tax. And that was illegal.

“The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.”
Adlai Stevenson.

The end came quickly. On 7 April, 1939 Boss Tom (above) was arraigned on two counts of tax fraud. On 22 May, 1939 he plead guilty. He paid a fine and served 15 months in prison, and was never involved in Missouri politics again.  Maybe he saw it as a handy way to get off the political treadmill.

“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.”
George Eliot. 

The reformers patted themselves on the back, and the Republicans reveled in their triumph over Democratic sin. Governor Stark (above) hoped to use the toppling of Boss Tom to propel himself into the U.S. Senate. But in 1940, he lost a nasty contest to Harry Truman, who had also been a Pendergast man. After that Stark was through in Missouri politics. When Boss Tom died in January of 1945, his funeral was well attended, and the only thing that changed about Missouri politics was the names on the ballots. 

“If you can’t convince them, confuse them.”
Harry S. Truman.

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