That theme continues at “American Tantra: How to Worship Each Other in Bed,” This workshop—whose motto, “Orgasm long and prosper,” paraphrases Star Trek’s blessing, “Live long and prosper”—is conducted by Paul Ramana Das and Marilena Silbey. “Interspecies intercourse,” he muses. “This can’t be the only planet where love is made.” A writer for AVN (Adult Video News) has reviewed their Intimate Secrets of Sex & Spirit and confessed, “I’ve rarely laughed so hard in my life. No shit, this vid earns a pre-nomination for ‘most outrageous sex scene.’ Paul actually uses Marilena’s pussy as an echo chamber!”
Now, in his regular voice, he is telling our workshop of the need to “approach the body, not for sexual release, but for every single inch of this body, the groundwork, the geography of pleasure. Can anybody name one spot on your body that is not capable of receiving pleasure?” Nobody can. Later, the entire audience, seated around the perimeter of this extra-large room, is instructed to come stand in the center area and face their partners. I start to slide out, but not inconspicuously enough. Ramana Das, who knows me from a previous incarnation, calls out, “There goes Paul Krassner. Are you afraid to participate?”
“I’m here as a journalist.”
“Ah, he can’t participate because he’s a journalist. See how everybody has excuses.”
Suddenly I’m saddled with a dose of New Age guilt, as though I have aborted my inner child. Meanwhile, there’s a lovely blonde who doesn’t have a partner, and now I’m tempted to participate, but some guy who’s also without a partner links up with her. Unexpectedly, my guilt changes to jealousy. Just a slight pang of jealousy, mind you, but a terrible taboo in this particular world.
Jealousy is an outmoded emotion to be shunned like dandruff. There’s even a workshop that advises “How to Handle Jealousy” and another titled “Swing Without Guilt or Jealousy.” And so now I not only feel guilty about not participating, I also feel guilty about feeling jealous. I’ve committed a swinger crime. I can hear security guards shouting “Jealousy alert!” Loud sirens go off. “Jealousy alert!”
Now where will I go? I have been reading about tantra in Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits: “Energy control is a very important part of the exercises; it is essential, for example, that during Kama-kali the male be able to refrain from ejaculating under the most harrowing circumstances.” I decide to drop in on a workshop, “How to Prevent Premature Ejaculation,” but everybody has already been there, and they all left early. Sorry. I blurted that out before I could stop myself.
*   *   *
There are swing clubs all around the country, from “Shenanigans” in Indiana to “Liberated Christians” in Arizona (“for Christians seeking liberation from false sexual repression based on mistranslation of scripture who wish to explore responsible non-monogamy and polyfidelity”). Many clubs designate themselves as Equal Opportunity Lifestyle Organizations, where membership is open to all races, and they belong to NASCA (North American Swing Club Association).
The Spring 1997 issue of NASCA Inside Report editorializes:
“There are political attacks on freedom that citizens should be aware of. It is far too easy to lose, through complacency and ignorance, the freedom that we Americans cherish. These attacks include the proposed censorship of the Internet now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court, the recently court-upheld attempts by states to keep ‘harmful’ literature from the eyes of children by controlling street news racks, the reintroduction in Pennsylvania of legislation to outlaw swing clubs and a similar measure in California. Regarding the latter two, do we smell a conspiracy here?” If there is one, it’s bi-partisan.
In Pennsylvania, Richard Kasunic, a Democratic state senator, failed in his 1996 attempt to outlaw “sex clubs.” This year, he has reintroduced legislation to outlaw “swinger clubs.” He states, “My bill will outlaw these immoral establishments in every community in Pennsylvania and provide significant penalties for those who choose to continue this offensive practice.” The penalty for operating a swing club, even in one’s own home: up to two years in jail and $5,000 in fines. For a second conviction: up to seven years and $15,000. For patronizing a swing club: $300 plus court costs.
In California, Tim Leslie, a Republican state senator, has introduced a bill which would provide that “every building or place which, as a primary activity, accommodates or encourages persons to engage in, or to observe other persons engaging in, sexual conduct including, but not limited to, anal intercourse, oral copulation or vaginal intercourse, is a nuisance and shall be enjoined, abated and prevented, and for which damages may be recovered, whether it is a public or private nuisance.”
Swinger periodicals range from New Friends to Fuck Thy Neighbor. Patti Thomas, author of Recreational Sex: An Insider’s Guide to the Swinging Lifestyle, is editor at Connection, which publishes thirteen titles, including Cocoa ’n Crème, catering to interracial swingers (not to be confused with Black ’n Blue, catering to sadomasochist swingers). Connection is suing the federal government over a bill that Ronald Reagan sent to Congress in 1987, the Child Protection and Obscenity Act, an outgrowth of the Meese Commission on Pornography.
The specific statute being challenged—known as the record keeping and labeling law, or the ID law—was supposed to be aimed at child pornography, but has been applied to adults-only swing publications. It requires anyone placing an explicit photo ad to provide a photo ID, nicknames, maiden names, stage names, professional names and aliases. These records must be available for inspection by the attorney general’s office.
Connection had attempted to comply with the law by cutting out every explicit photo ad from its magazines and sending them with a letter to those advertisers, explaining the new law and its requirements, asking that they submit the proper ID or send a “soft” photo that didn’t require ID. Out of 500 advertisers, only 26 responded with IDs. Patti Thomas spoke about this in her keynote speech at the Conclave ’97 Convention in Chicago:
“It definitely makes it difficult to produce the magazine our readers and subscribers have come to expect, when you don’t have enough so-called ‘legal’ ads to fill all those pages. And considering that swinging itself is not illegal, why should we have to ‘register our sexual choices’ with the government just to place a personal ad in a magazine? . . . I’ve never really thought of myself as an activist, or as one who was ‘politically involved,’ but over the last few years I think I’ve finally come to realizing that it’s going to be necessary to be involved, even if it does mean ‘exposing’ my lifestyle to those who would repress it. I am fucking sick and tired of do-gooders trying to tell me how I should live my life!”
In 1995, Connection filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of the law and seeking a permanent injunction. In 1997, the motion was denied. Attorneys filed an appeal and a motion for a temporary injunction relieving Connection from complying with the act during that appeal. The motion was granted.
“The justice system in this country just makes no sense to me whatsoever,” Patti Thomas tells me. “As far as I know, once we do present our case to the Court of Appeals, if our decision isn’t favorable, we will make every attempt to go to the Supreme Court. Our attorneys are the best First Amendment attorneys anywhere. Our lawsuit has been very costly, as you can imagine, but our company believes very strongly in fighting for our constitutional rights. Our suit was filed not only for the benefit of our company but because we felt that this outrageous law was totally infringing on the civil rights and freedoms of people involved in alternative lifestyles. Obviously, the average person involved in swinging would have no way of combating this law on their own.”
I ask her whether attempts at repression have resulted in politicizing the swinger community.
“I’m afraid we haven’t been very successful,” she replies. “We try to inform our readers about political issues threatening our lifestyle and attempt to get them involved. Unfortunately, many in the lifestyle either don’t believe that the government will actually take away their rights or are too afraid to make a stand. Swingers who have been ‘exposed’ as active participants in the lifestyle have lost jobs, family, community standing and friends as a result.
“People I’ve personally known who have lost their jobs when their swinging activities were discovered just wouldn’t fight back because of the fear of further exposure through the publicity that could have been generated. As a matter of fact, my ex-husband was fired from a management position back in 1980 when someone discovered his photo in one our magazines and brought it to the attention of his superiors. Luckily, he was able to find a position with one of Connection’s affiliate companies. So we pretty much remain an ‘underground minority.’”
That point is underscored by a 29-year-old woman at the convention. “None of us like publicity,” she says. “None of us want to be out in the open. The business world is very conservative.” She is wearing an American flag bikini, although she has never heard of Abbie Hoffman. She was born the same year that he got arrested for wearing an American flag shirt. Nor did she have any way of knowing that when he wore another American flag shirt on The Merv Griffin Show, his half of the TV screen was blocked out all across America. She was, in short, unaware of the roots of her own, limited freedom.
*   *   *
It’s Saturday night, and the Carnival Masquerade Ball is being held in the huge Convention Center Ballroom. On the wall behind the stage are gigantic masks. Above the tables are gold and purple balloons, fashioned after either somebody’s school colors or a Chinese restaurant’s little hot mustard and soy sauce plate. The taped music is loud, and the dancing is raunchy, enhanced by gaudy yellow, blue and red lights. Pheromones are flying, and the costumes are kinky.
“Costumes,” the program states, “may be anything of fertile imagination (genital area musts be covered) for an exotic night of adult social fun.” Hey, look who’s here: Superman. The Phantom of the Opera. The devil. Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse (in a see-through top). An executioner. An Arabian potentate. A gold-plated pharaoh. A chicken lady covered with big yellow feathers. A guy in a dog collar being led around on a leash. And the one-legged man, who is wearing a roller skate as his costume. 
At one point, an announcement is made that the next dance number will be filmed, so anybody who doesn’t wish to be recognized should get off the dance floor. About 80% of the dancers leave. Similarly, taking part in the costume-judging means that permission to be photographed is automatically granted, which results in many contestants not making themselves available to be chosen as possible finalists.
The Best Male Costume goes to a 75-year-old man dressed as a biker stud. The Best Female Costume goes to his 75-year-old wife, dressed as a biker slut. The Best Couple’s Costume goes to a woman with papier mache’ breasts the size of beach balls and her mate with matching enormous testicles but covered by pillowcases and a sign that warns, “Censored by the hotel and ABC.”
A marriage ceremony is performed onstage. The blissful pair have written their own vows; nothing is mentioned about forsaking all others. The newlyweds, their party and a few other couples are invited to a gathering in the suite of a three-time Emmy Award-winning TV producer and his wife. It turns out to be a tantra-filled wedding night. All the women massage the groom, and all the men massage the bride. One woman, a computer animator who wants to become a sexual surrogate, predicts that, as the millennium comes to an end, tantric men will be popping up everywhere.
A retired chairman and CEO of a title and escrow company, who attended another tantra party, tells me, “The difference between the tantra party and the party next door is the fact that at the beginning of the wedding tantra party there was a lot of ceremony and shared tantra ritual, but once we had experienced that, it was every person for themselves. It was like the party next door.” These were closed parties by invitation only. But you didn’t need an invitation for open parties. All you had to do was find them.
The Wyndham Hotel is permeated by a sense of uninhibitedness. In the elevator, a beautiful black woman is looking in the full-length mirror and admiring her new Clit Clip—non-piercing, adjustable, genital jewelry--“not designed to be painful,” I learned at the Adult Marketplace, “just very sensual and aesthetically attractive. The Clit Clip is a long narrow, U- shaped piece of metal, designed to fit around the clitoris hood, with some light-catching Austrian crystals, in your choice of clear, red, blue and purple, dangling from the ends.” The woman in the elevator turns toward me and says, “Isn’t it nice?” Her husband smiles proudly.
“It’s charming,” I reply, “but what are you gonna do if the metal detector goes off at the airport?”
I leave them giggling in the elevator as I get off on a floor where I’ve heard there would be lots of action. I follow one group, but only the couple in front really knows where they’re going. But they happen to be on the way to their own room, and when they get there, they go in, close the door, and we are all left out in the corridor, looking like a perplexed ant farm. Everybody turns around. I am now at the front of the line, so I let them all pass by me as they head in the opposite direction, strolling briskly, except for the one-legged man with the roller skate and crutches, who is gliding gracefully along the carpet. Passersby are asked, in vain, “Where’s the party?” We finally find a room with a porn photo on the door, which is slightly open.
Inside, there are around fifty people in semi-darkness. Exhibitionists and voyeurs, together again. Here a blow job, there a copulation, everywhere an undulating juiciness. There is an unspoken homophobia—no man is relating sexually to another man—but there is lots of lesbian libido. In order to keep a low profile, I have ripped several pages out of my notebook and folded them in half, so that I can take notes unobtrusively.
However, a woman with a feather duster asks me to hold on to her panties. She is about to join a threesome on the king-sized bed near the bureau that I’m leaning against. I marvel at the choreography of this foursome. But they’re playing, and I’m working. Their moans become my background music.
I wasn’t always a wallflower at the orgy. I flash back 30 years to 1967 . . . I was at a Sexual Freedom League couples-only party on New Year’s Eve at a large theatrical studio in San Francisco. There were about 150 people dancing in the nude. Behind the closed curtains on the stage there were fifteen small mattresses in constant use by different couples.
I remember making love on one of those mattresses with a sweet flower child only fifteen minutes after we’d met. It was an exhilarating experience. We were on the front lines of the Sexual Revolution. We had to hold back from screaming out political slogans at our moment of climax. The seeds of contemporary swinging were planted at that party, but who could have known it would blossom into an industry?
*   *   *
If it’s true that, as Bill Maher once stated so poetically, “The real problem with marriage is that it’s just very difficult to bump your uglies with the same person every night your whole life,” then for some people, swinging is the answer. To them, cheating is not an issue, unfaithfulness is obsolescent, and adultery is merely a concept that deprived former Air Force Lieutenant Kelly Flinn of her opportunity to drop a nuclear bomb.
The Lifestyles Convention provides a nurturing environment for these couples the same way a convention of crossword-puzzle enthusiasts or barbed-wire collectors would provide for those folks. Yet, in the case of swingers, one is left with a puzzle. Is impersonal intimacy an oxymoron? I ask that question of psychologist Stella Resnick, sex therapist and author of The Pleasure Zone. Her reply:
“We can’t put a value judgment on this. These are all consenting adults. It doesn’t really matter that it’s rather impersonal because they are in long-term relationships, so they’re getting their intimacy needs met, but not necessarily their needs for excitement in sex, and this is certainly a way to do it. Often they are sexually identified in the sense that they’re sexual people, they have strong desires, they’re not necessarily into politics or other causes, but this is a good cause—being in the body, being healthy—and it’s a way of relaxing and enjoying their bodies. Whatever turns you on, as long as you’re not doing any damage to anybody else and you’re taking care of yourself, fine, enjoy.”
When Tom Arnold was a guest on Late Show, David Letterman pressed him about his friendship with Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford. This was shortly after the Globe had entrapped and videotaped Gifford’s extramarital tryst with a flight attendant in a hotel room. Letterman insisted, “I don’t revel in the miseries of others,” but Arnold reminded him of his monologues with jokes about Gifford. Letterman defended himself: “It’s part of the job.” Arnold stammered, searching for just the right words. He finally found them: “Frank Gifford took a bullet for a lot of us.” And the audience applauded the accuracy of his assessment.
Certainly, non-celebrities don’t have to worry about supermarket tabloids revealing infidelities to their spouses. Such exposure could never occur with swinging couples, not only because, as a rule, they are honest with each other, but also because they party with each other, so there are no surprises. They are sharing a secret lifestyle, one with an ethic that transcends ordinary romance. Sneaky affairs are for straight people, but swingers can eat their wedding cake and have their fantasies too. Which explains why there have been no hookers hanging around this convention.

Life Among the Neo-Pagans

In the summer of 1997, I performed at the 17th annual Starwood Neo-Pagan Festival in Sherman, New York—Amish country on the border near Ohio and Pennsylvania. This event—a female-oriented celebration of the sensual and the spiritual—took place on private campgrounds, where clothing was optional. Many women were bare-breasted, and several men and women walked around fully naked, a practice known as the “sky clad” experience.
Instead of camping out, I stayed at a nearby bed-and-breakfast place. Downstairs in the living room, I asked a woman—falsely assuming that she was the proprietor—where the key would be left if I came back late at night.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I’m here for the festival.”
“Oh. In what capacity?”
“I’m in the craft.”
“Which craft?”
“That’s right,” she said.
She has been a Wiccan for twenty years, but now she complained, “Witchcraft has become trendy. I mean, ever since Buffy the Vampire Slayer . . .”
At the festival, on Merchants Row, there was an inviting banner over one of the booths: “Stop by for a Spell.” A positive perspective on witchcraft was a theme at this event, along with such workshops as “Privacy Rights and Drug Policy,” “Cultivating Consciousness in Your Child,” “Live Meditations in Drumming and Dance,” “The Supreme Court and the Free Exercise of Religion, “A Procession to Honor the Earth Goddess,” “Safer Sex” and “Dark Ecstasy: The Ritual Use of Pleasure, Pain and Sensory Deprivation as Psychedelic Experience.”
When I walked on to the outdoor stage, my opening line was “I’m gonna start with two words that have been thought year after year at these festivals, but which have never actually been uttered out loud, and those two wards are: “Nice tits.” The audience hesitated a second, because in that context this could be a politically incorrect observation—I had deliberately taken that chance—but then they laughed and applauded, because they knew it was true.
I was invited back to perform at Starwood again in the summer of 1998. The previous month, two Amish men had been arrested for distributing cocaine they bought from a biker gang, the Pagans, one of whose members was a police informer. The two men were from a particularly conservative Amish sect, where not only electricity and tractors were forbidden, but even zippers. Did the sight of those Amish-tempting zippers on the Pagans’ leather motorcycle jackets serve as a gateway drug to cocaine?
Speaking of illegal drugs, at the festival I came across the only individual I’ve ever met who had actually hallucinated on toad slime. I pictured him as a young lad with a tadpole in his pocket, and now as a grown man with a frog in his pocket.
I also met Reverend Ivan Stang, leader of the infamous Church of the SubGenius. He talked about “how to milk the Internet for all it’s worth, and get away with murder, before the Conspiracy figures out how to spoil it for us.” But Stang was in deep embarrassment mode, since this was only a couple of weeks after the failure of his widely circulated prediction that, on July 5th at 7 a.m., Pleasure Saucers would descend to Earth as part of the great “Rupture” and take away all those SubGeniuses who had paid $30 for the privilege.
The festival climaxed with its traditional 50-foot-diameter, 25-foot-high bonfire, constructed during the week with the aid of a derrick. On Saturday night, several dancers with torches ritualistically teased this pyramid of logs, encircled at a distance by two thousand enthusiasts, although one impatient woman yelled, “Just do it!” The neo-pagans danced and pranced and cavorted around the bonfire late into the night.
My own personal highlight occurred when a beautiful woman named Pearl approached me. She was in the process of transforming her breasts from fetish to functional by nursing a baby that had been conceived there the year before. During that festival, she had walked in on my performance, bare-breasted, at the precise moment that I uttered the words, “Nice tits.” She assumed that I was referring specifically to her and, I had learned, she was flattered, so now I didn’t have the heart to disillusion her. But I did write about it in my High Times column, “Brain Damage Control,” ending with this sentence: “I hope she doesn’t read this.”
Furthermore, at the 20th annual Starwood Festival in 2000, I found myself in front of a microphone on that same stage, and I told that story. Pearl was in the audience, and she was laughing heartily. This time, though, when I said, “Nice tits,” I added, “Okay, now everybody,” and the words came booming back at me: ‘NICE TITS!’” Later, as I was leaving the stage, Pearl called out, “Nice dick!” I was fully dressed, but it didn’t matter. This was a perfect example of tit for tat. Or dick for tit.
My old friend Steve Gaskin and I were staying at a bed-and-breakfast house where there were angels all over the place. Stuffed angels, plastic angels, plaster-of-paris angels, embroidered angels, stained-glass angels, papier-mache’ angels, teddy-bear angels and origami angels. There were angel dolls and angel paintings and angel sculptures and even an angel mobile hanging from the ceiling. In the bathroom, there was an angel tissue-dispenser and an angel night-light. On a table in the hallway, there was a pile of Angels on Earth magazine. On the bureau in my room, there was a copy of Whispers From Heaven, featuring such articles as “Feeding Angels,” “When Angels Kiss” and “Rescued by Angels: The Amazing Story of a Kidnapping Survivor.”
Gaskin’s room had a door that led to the roof, and the first night we sat out there and smoked a joint. The next day there was a note taped to the door: “The roof is to be used only as a fire escape. Please use the patio.” The next night we smoked a joint in my room. And the next day there was a “No Smoking” sign on the inside of my door, and the electric fan was on, aimed toward the now-open window.
At breakfast the next morning, I was just about to apologize to the kindly Christian woman whose home this was, explaining that a doctor had recommended marijuana for my arthritis, but she apologized to me because she hadn’t told me in advance that smoking wasn’t allowed. “Some people are allergic to cigarette smoke,” she explained, and I almost blurted out, “That wasn’t tobacco, that was pot.”
I hope she doesn’t read this.

Murder At the Conspiracy Convention

“The history of civilization is the history of warfare
between secret societies.” --Ishmael Reed

In the men’s room at the airport, a man standing at the urinal a couple of urinals away from my urinal was urinating without aiming his penis. Both hands were flossing his teeth. A monument to multi-tasking. I’ll admit that I occasionally brush my teeth while I’m urinating—at least that leaves me with one hand free to steer—but this guy could possibly be the only human being on earth who pisses and flosses simultaneously.
He must have practiced at home before he decided to go public. And of course he was proud of his manual dexterity. Maybe he even has a license plate that says PFLOSS, though other drivers might assume it’s his name, not his avocation. In any case, that image immediately replaced my previous visual mantra: seeing one of the kids on a school bus holding up to the window a sign that read HELP US!--and laughing with his classmates.
Now, on Memorial Day weekend, I was catching a flight to San Jose, California. I was headed for Conspiracy Con 2001, a convention featuring the prophets of the sinister.
My friend Roy Zimmerman, who writes and sings satirical folk songs in the tradition of Tom Lehrer, has a spoken piece of patter which goes: “I just got back from the conspiracy convention. Have you been? It’s fun. Seven hundred conspiracy theorists all in one hotel, with the little name tags, ‘Hello, my name is—none of your fucking business!’ Great seminars—‘Triangulation and You, ‘Paranoia for Profit,’ ‘Victoria’s Real Secret Was J. Edgar Hoover.’ In the lobby, I saw five people get off the elevator—what, you think that’s a coincidence? There was entertainment, of course—a group of horny anti-government folk singers called the Randy Weavers.”
Zimmerman was surprised to learn that there would actually be an event such as the one that he thought he was making up. Although the real conspiracy convention didn’t have the seven hundred attendees he had imagined, there were over 500, including 40% from out of state and 10% from other countries, including Canada, England, Australia, Denmark, Austria and Ireland. Also taking place at the Santa Clara Convention Center that same weekend as Conspiracy Con was the Charismatic Catholic Convention. Dueling religions, together again.
*   *   *
The leadoff speaker at Conspiracy Con was Cathy O’Brien, who claimed to be a victim of the CIA’s MK-Ultra child-sex-slave program, Project Monarch. She was introduced by her husband, Mark Phillips, as “the love of my life.” Phillips claims that, having worked for the CIA, where he learned hypnosis, and for a Department of Defense subcontractor with exposure to mind-control research, he was able to rescue O’Brien, deprogram her and collaborate on their book, Trance Formation of America.
“There is not one person in this audience,” he exhorts, “that could not be legally experimented on, killed or financially destroyed.”
He has the bearing, the cadence and the pompadour of a dramatically pious televangelist. He oozes with practiced integrity. In contrast, Cathy O’Brien has the demeanor of a guileless, bleached-blond checkout cashier in a small-town supermarket who sends money every week to her favorite televangelist. She speaks with a certain tremor in her voice.
“Mind control,” she warns, “is the most important issue facing humanity today.”
She reveals her relationship with Gerald Ford, who was “very much interested in mind control, so the local Michigan Mafia child pornography ring was actually sanctioned, and they could target children like myself who were so horribly abused that they would be used in child pornography. When my father was caught sending this pornography through the mail, Gerald Ford approached and told him that he could receive immunity from prosecution if he would sell me into the project. My father eagerly agreed. He was so happy that the government actually condoned child abuse that he went on to have five more children to raise for the project, so there were seven of us in all. He was never prosecuted and remains free for reasons of national security.”
At the age of 13, she met the man “who would become my owner”—Senator Robert Byrd. In Trance Formation, she describes their first meeting:
“I undressed and climbed into his bed as ordered. I was momentarily relieved to find that his penis was abnormally tiny—so small it didn’t even hurt! And I could breathe with it in my mouth! Then he began to indulge himself in his brutal perversions, talking on and on about how I was ‘made just for him’ due to the vast amounts of pain I could withstand. The spankings and police handcuffs I had previously endured were child’s play compared to Senator Byrd’s near-death tortures. The hundreds of scars on my body still show today.
“I was one of the only kids in my school who listened to country music. But then, Senator Byrd fancied himself a country music fiddler, and it was ‘my duty to love what he did.’ I was ordered to listen to country music or no music at all. Music was my psychological avenue for escape, a dissociative tool. CIA operator Merle Haggard, who often used well-documented cryptic language in his songs pertaining to government mind-control slave operations, released songs including ‘Freedom Train’ and ‘Over the Rainbow.’
“My father told me repeatedly that Merle Haggard was my ‘favorite’ singer, and his songs reinforced my programming. Of course, Senator Byrd remained my ‘favorite’ fiddler’ as ordered. He played train songs like ‘Orange Blossom Special’ while making train sounds on his fiddle. Sometimes I was his captive audience, bound and gagged, while he played his fiddle. Other times he instructed me to spin round and round like a music box dancer in order to add ‘new dimensions to our sex.’ These new dimensions included more and more physical pain through ‘kinky’ torture.”
It was Senator Byrd who directed her father to send her to Catholic school, and it was Gerald Ford who became “my first president.” That night, she recalls, “I wore my Catholic uniform as instructed and went into a dissociative trance as my father drove me to the local National Guard Armory, where I was prostituted to Ford. He took me into an empty room, pushed me down on the wooden floor as he unzipped his pants and said, ‘Pray on this.’ Then he brutally, sexually assaulted me. Afterward, my memory was compartmentalized through use of high voltage. I was then carried out to the car where I lay in the back seat, muscles contracted, stunned, in pain, and unable to move.”
And then there was Dick Cheney, President Ford’s chief of staff. After Cathy was hunted down and caught in Cheney’s game of “human hunting,” she stood naked in his hunting-lodge office as he paced around and gave her this choice: “I could stuff you and mount you like a jackalope and call you a two-legged deer. Or I could stuff you with this--he unzipped his pants to reveal his oversized penis--right down your throat and then mount you. Which do you prefer?”
Apparently, Cheney’s oversized penis balanced out Senator Byrd’s tiny penis--a tawdry version of Emerson’s Law of Compensation.
Cathy specialized in political figures (although she was also thrust upon by country singers such as “CIA operatives” Merle Haggard and Kris Kristofferson). With unintentional prophetic irony, Cathy described her 1983 meeting with Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Dick Cheney: “Reagan gestured toward Bush and said, ‘This is my vice president. People don’t usually know what the role of the vice president is because he’s always behind the scenes making sure everything that the president wants done happens the way it’s supposed to.’ He looked at me and said matter-of-factly, ‘I catch the public’s attention while the vice president carries out orders.’ ‘And gives them,’ added Bush’s close friend, Dick Cheney.
“George Bush, Jr. stood by his father and covered his backside whenever Bush would become incapacitated from drugs or required criminal backup. It appeared that Junior was there to serve both purposes while his father and Cheney enjoyed their work-vacation. Junior had never shown any interest in me sexually. Like his father, he had only shown sexual interest in [my daughter] Kelly, who had been away with him most of the day.”
Cathy told the Conspiracy Con audience that, at the age of 19, “I worked on a White House/Pentagon level during the Reagan/Bush years and carried out many criminal covert operations for the CIA. The war on drugs was no more than the CIA eliminating competition worldwide, turning our streets into a bloodbath. I was exposed to many drugs, perversion, sex activity, filmed through a little lens in the ceiling because these criminals do not trust each other, so they blackmail each other. I used cocaine, sometimes heroin, Bush’s drug of choice.
“Of all the drugs I was exposed to there was one that was strictly forbidden, and that was marijuana, because the effects on the brain actually opened those neuron pathways so that any compartmentalization of memory, of any kind of trauma, or so-called secret, actually begins to erode. That’s why they don’t want to have even medical marijuana. I’m not standing here to be pro-marijuana at all, I am here to tell you I am extremely anti-marijuana, but I know why this anti-marijuana campaign is out there, with their efforts to control all of us by making sure that this particular drug is controlled so that no one in any kind of position would have free thought.”
When Cathy finished her presentation, Mark Phillips returned to the stage. “We ask you respectfully,” he said, “to please allow us to provide you with”—that is, to sell—“our book and share it with someone you love. It’s a horrible book, probably the most incredible validated story that is going to soon be a major theme in maybe more than one motion picture and a TV documentary series. After all these years, Cathy and I believe that this is our last year.”
And therein lies a paradox of this convention. All the speakers totally distrust the controlled mainstream media, yet they all sense imminent triumph, believing that they and their messages will soon be vindicated by that very same controlled mainstream media.
You want statistics? Here’s what the polls show: That 68% of Americans believe President Kennedy was killed as part of a conspiracy. That 51% believe federal officials assassinated JFK. That 40% of Americans think the FBI set the fires at Waco. That more than four in ten Americans think the FBI deliberately withheld evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing case. That 80% of Americans think the government is concealing knowledge of extraterrestrial life. That 75% of Americans believe the war on drugs is a failure. That 47% of people using public toilets flush with their feet.
*   *   *
In a book about the National Security Agency, Body of Secrets, James Bamford reveals that, in 1962, U.S. military leaders proposed a plan to commit violent terrorist acts and kill innocent Americans, blaming Cuba in order to create a pretext for invading the island and deposing Fidel Castro. One document prepared and signed by all five Joint Chiefs or Staff, states: “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba. Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation.”
In an interview, Bamford said, “What the Joint Chiefs indicated in their plan was, they would have people shot on American streets, bombs blown up, refugee boats sunk on the high seas—and all this would be blamed on the Cuban government.”
I have no problem believing such insidious intentions—certainly the U.S. military commanders were capable of such dehumanization—and yet I can’t accept as truth Cathy O’Brien’s story. I think it’s an elaborate hoax, intertwining celebrity porn with historical context to foster credibility. Example: “Noriega had been an intricate part of arming the Nicaraguan contras for Reagan, as well as an international hub in the cocaine operations that funded the black budgets for ultra-secret projects such as Project Monarch.
“Michael Aquino put a vaginal prod in my hand and ordered me to masturbate myself with it, pushing the button to electrically jolt myself internally upon command. Noriega’s eyes were enormous. He paled to a sickly grey, his mouth fell open and he ran out the door while Aquino assured him that he had ‘nowhere to run, nowhere to hide from Reagan’s powers.’”
So who is this Aquino guy? According to Cathy, “In the early 1980s, my base programming was instilled at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, by U.S. Army Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino. He holds a Top Secret clearance in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Psychological Warfare Division (PSYOP). He is a professed neo-Nazi, the founder of the Himmler-inspired satanic Temple of Set and has been charged with child ritual and sexual abuse at the Presidio Day Care in San Francisco. But like my father, Aquino remains ‘above the law’ while he continues to traumatize and program CIA-destined young minds in a quest to reportedly create the ‘superior race’ of Project Monarch mind-controlled slaves.”
I contacted Aquino, who retired in 1994, and he responded:
“Not only was I never stationed at Fort Campbell at anytime throughout my entire Army career, but I’ve never even visited that particular post, on- or off-duty. I have never had any contact at anytime, anyplace, anywhere with Cathy O’Brien. I have never programmed sex slaves for the government or anyone else. I have never participated in any form of child abuse whatever.”
What does he think her motivation is?
“I can only assume that O’Brien is either a crank or simply an unethical individual who seeks money, notoriety and/or publicity by inventing sensationalistic lies. Her book is strewn with sex accusations not just about myself, but concerning a parade of high government officials, celebrities and country music stars. I haven’t sued O’Brien for libel for the simple reason that her book is clearly in the lunatic fringe, and to take legal notice of it would only give it a dignity it doesn’t deserve. I presume that the other public figures libeled by it haven’t sued her either for the same reason.
“I certainly am not going to defend/excuse any of the MK-Ultra projects. These were all before my time—I was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in 1968—and I read about such things in Search for the Manchurian Candidate and Acid Dreams, shaking my head, much the same as you probably did. I can affirm that my work in Army PSYOP was strictly legitimate and in keeping with the Field Manual #33-1 guidelines taught at the Special Warfare Center, Fort Bragg.
“In a nutshell: techniques for trying to convince an enemy not to fight but to cooperate with you. I originally became interested in it because (a) I believed that the USA was generally on the side of goodness, and (b) winning wars by persuasion rather than bullets and bombs seemed a great idea to me. This may sound like a naïve idealist, but that’s the way I looked out at the world in 1968.”
I asked Aquino, “Do you think that Cathy O’Brien and Mark Phillips utilized you in their book [published in 1995] because the Presidio case would give their accusations a patina of verisimilitude?”
“Well, I think that’s obvious,” he replied. “After the highly publicized and sensationalized attack on my wife and myself at the Presidio, all sorts of nutcases tossed my name around in whatever their fantasy of the moment. The combination--high-ranking Army officer, intelligence officer, Special Forces officer, PSYSOP officer, #2 official of the Church of Satan 1970-75+--was just too juicy.
“As for the Presidio affair, following the publication of the ‘recovered memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse’ book Michelle Remembers in 1980, the United States and other Anglo-American countries went through a decade of ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse scares and witch-hunts. After the 1984 McMartin Preschool became internationally publicized in one such scare, day-care facilities generally became targets of ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’ witch-hunts.
“The epidemic extended to U.S. military services as well, including fifteen U.S. Army day-care centers and elementary schools by 1987. In late 1986 it was the turn of the Presidio. The San Francisco Police investigated, verified that my wife and I had been three thousand miles away in Washington, D.C.—where I was on duty every single day [that the alleged victim] was at the day-care center September 1st to October 31st, 1986—and closed the case with no charges accordingly.
“In October 1988, however, I appeared as a panelist on a Geraldo Rivera Halloween Special. Rivera was trying to aggravate and escalate the ‘Satanic Ritual Abuse’ witch-hunt mania, and I was speaking out against it. The broadcast came to the attention of Senator Jesse Helms who became enraged that a Lt. Colonel in the Army should dare to hold a ‘Satanic’ religion. As Freedom of information filings later revealed, Helms then secretly contacted his close personal friend, Secretary of the Army John Marsh, and insisted that Marsh devise some way to destroy my career. 
“What was actually taking place: a blatant attempt by Senator Helms, Secretary of the Army Marsh and the Criminal Investigation Division of the Army to discredit an Army officer with a ‘politically incorrect’ religion. It didn’t work.”
*   *   *
Although I believe that Trance Formation of America is an elaborate hoax and Michael Aquino thinks it’s in the lunatic fringe, conspiracy researcher Robert Sterling perceives a more devious motivation. In Apocalypse Culture II, edited by Adam Parfrey, Sterling writes:
“Effective disinformation is never an absolute lie. The purpose of disinformation is to confuse truth and validity, and to do so, boldfaced les are rarely convincing. Effective disinformation mixes truth and deception to obfuscate the two. The closer the disinformation approaches truth, the more damning it becomes. Then all the disinformation, even the legitimate parts, discredits targeted research and ideas.
“At the time of the release of Trance Formation, there was a growing awareness in the conspiracy subculture of intelligence agency involvement in satanic ritual abuse. Literature on the subject was reaching a critical mass where it could not be ignored. Would intelligence agencies devote resources to counteract such information? Not only is it possible, it almost certainly has occurred.
“The CIA, even with an officially acknowledged history of abusing people through mind-control experiments (the most famous being MK-Ultra), certainly has a vested interest in denying such operations exist, especially when the operations are as insidious as sexually abusing children. And supposing that [the] tales are part of a CIA disinformation campaign, it would make sense that some names on the list would actually include guilty participants. After all, what better place to hide the truth than out in the open, knowing full well it won’t be believed?”
Sterling posted a review of Cathy O’Brien’s book by Jaye Beldo on his Web site, The Konformist:
“If you are bored out of your mind with the usual Pamela Anderson Lee ‘power-fuck porn,’ I suggest grabbing a copy of Trance Formation of America and heading to the nearest bathroom with a jar of Vaseline. Why not infuse life into your worn-out sexual fantasies by envisioning some of the scenes spelled out in Cathy O’Brien’s supposed expose’ of the pedophile shenanigans of our Government officials? I mean, how could you not get excited over picturing Hillary Clinton going down on the author’s deformed vagina like a starved wolf while Bill walks in on them and casually ignores them? 
“I cannot help but get the impression that Cathy is, at times, really no different from some of the questionable UFO abductees making extravagant claims of being transported to other solar systems and back again. I have little doubt that some of the horrible things she mentions actually happen on a day-to-day basis. Completely denying them would be folly.”
Mark Phillips was not too thrilled with this review, and he wrote to Beldo:
“I feel compelled to inform you of the inevitable consequences of your unsolicited written vulgar assaults upon Cathy O’Brien, Kelly, myself and the overall integrity of our book. I have placed you on the shortlist of potentially dangerous sexual predators, which is automatically reviewed by interested local law enforcement personal [sic] (that we are in regular professional communications with) whenever a sexual crime is committed in the area you reside. Until you are apprehended for being a physical threat to yourself and/or innocent others, you will remain at large but nevertheless well identified.
“Stay away from contact with children and out of any county/state/federal prison system, as within moments from the time you may eventually be arrested for some alledged [sic] charge of illegal/immoral activities, I will be notified and will do all in my power of influence to see that you are legally seperated [sic] from society until you have had to time necessary to do what you proposed for others less appreciative of your sick ‘review’—to get a hold of yourself or allow an inmate to take matters into their own hands and change your thoughts towards acceptance of brutal criminal activity.”
Konformist editor Sterling wrote to Phillips:
“I harbored no personal animosity to either you or Ms. O’Brien, but I had serious questions about the accuracy of what was in your book. Even more disturbing, I had a very bad feeling that, wittingly or not, the claims in Trance Formation could easily be used to manipulate people into a hysterical witch-hunt state, and could be used to smear those who are innocent of charges made by you and Cathy, Brice and others. I felt if people were not careful, they could be whipped into a fascist state of mindlessly agreeing to any charge made by alleged CIA sex slaves to a conspiracy underground version of McCarthyism.”
The “Brice” he refers to is Brice Taylor, author of the first competitor of Trance Formation, published in 1999—Thanks for the Memories: The Memoirs of Bob Hope’s and Henry Kissinger’s Mind-Controlled Slave—in which she asserts that Walt Disney raped her on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride; that she had sex with all three Kennedy brothers plus JFK, Jr. when he was 12; and that she has cavorted with public figures ranging from Prince Charles to Alan Greenspan, from Elvis Presley to Neil Diamond, from Johnny Carson to Ed McMahon. “Hi-yo!”
Brice Taylor also claims the existence of a federal program of brainwashing and molesting children with electroshock and dolphins, that she and her 13-year-old daughter had a threesome with Sylvester Stallone, and that he filmed them in Dolphin Porn, videos of dolphins penetrating women in the ocean. And Cathy O’Brien declares that “Jesuit/NASA-based whale and dolphin programming suggests that water is a mirror to other dimensions and is the means by which aliens have mixed with our population.”
Robert Sterling observes that, “After suffering horrible torture and abuse at the hands of countless famous politicians and celebrities, both O’Brien and Taylor declare of being spoken to by Jesus Christ, whose glorious powers healed them of all trauma and left them immune to further manipulation. At the time of her ‘memory recovery,’ Brice was corralled and influenced by Christian fundamentalists, who convinced her that her previous life was the prelude for an afterlife in Hell. It should be obvious that the New World Order sex slave genre is nothing more than thinly veiled porn disguised as parapolitics.”
Sterling told me that Cathy and Mark’s book has “sold over 20,000 copies. Their following is heavily right-wing Christians and patriot groups, and if you hang out with either sector you’ll eventually hear some pro-Trance-Formation-of-America sentiments. Not surprising—part of the book’s thesis is that mind control is part of the New World Order plot.”
The predecessor of this whole non-literary genre was The Control of Candy Jones, published in 1976. Jones was a highly successful model supposedly transformed into a CIA Manchurian Candidate. The book was ghostwritten by her husband, a carnival hypnotist and late-night radio talk-show host “Long John” Nebel. His friend, stage magician and psychic debunker James “The Amazing” Randi, told me that Nebel made up the entire book because he needed money. When I mentioned this to Walter Bowart, author of Operation Mind Control, he insisted that Randi himself was an intelligence agent. Amazing, indeed.
*   *   *
There’s a mini-ballroom at the Convention Center where conspiracy books, audio and videotapes are being sold. A man wearing a space suit is hawking an Alien Abduction Survival Kit. Another vendor is selling aura cameras. And, for some incongruous reason, a woman is coning—that is, getting the wax out of a prone client’s ears with the aid of a burning candle and a tin pie-pate. At a booth offering “Free Electricity for Life,” the proprietor is saying, “They killed one of my associates.”
In the auditorium, William Lyne, a researcher on free energy devices for 50 years, tells the audience, “I know a man who’s in mind control—and they’ve used it on him and his father—they use a virtual reality type of technology that’s projected to that person, transmitted to them so that they see images that aren’t there, but what they want to do is terrify them and make them think they’re seeing these things, except they’re intelligent people and they know that they’re not real images, they just want to know how they’re receiving those images. If they want you to see something, they can transmit it to you.
“They can do it for a whole area. And the place where this person lives, they’re all shutting down at 10 o’clock at night.  Everybody in that whole part of town are actually going to bed at the same time. It’s like they’ve got the whole area under control. And it’s within eyeshot of Los Alamos Labs. The dirty part of the labs where they do this kind of stuff. I say dirty because there’s coerced black projects being done out of there.”
	As for Lyne’s own safety in the face of promulgating free energy, he says, “I’m encouraged lately because there’s safety in numbers. Too many people have access to this stuff and are promoting it. Now there have been some real tragedies in the past. People had some of this technology and they disappeared or were squashed. I don’t have any fear of the government. I lost my fear a long time ago. They tried to murder me several times, and I said to myself, ‘Well, I might be dead tomorrow and nobody’d know why, so I’m gonna go out there and tell what I know and I’m not afraid,’ and I think everyone should take the same approach.”
Jordan Maxwell has been exploring the hidden foundations of religions and secret societies since 1959. At the convention, his presentation is titled Toxic Religion and the Occult Establishment. “The same people who gave you the Mafia gave you the Church,” he says. 
“The Church is the Mafia. An FBI man called me: ‘We’ve been watching you, we follow you wherever you go, we know what you’re doing. But you are not a threat. We admire what you’re trying to do. But your government does not consider you to be a threat—yet—but if you get enough people listening to you—and they’re not just listening but they’re actually hearing you—then you will be considered a threat and now we’ll have to take another look at what you’re going to do.
“‘But the reason I’m calling—this an unofficial call—is to warn you when you talk about corruption and government, most people in government couldn’t care less, they don’t care, they’re corrupt and they know it and you know it, so what are you gonna do about it? But when you talk about the Church and religious institutions in this country, what you’re doing is you are messing with organized crime at its highest level. The highest levels of organized crime in this country are the religious institutions. We’re talking about a lot of money. We’re talking about the control of men’s minds, about the dream of absolute total domination. This makes the Mafia look like child’s play.’”
Another speaker, Len Horowitz, author of Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola, explains that “Non-lethal warfare is where you don’t kill populations like with a bomb or a gunshot, but you make them sick. You make them dependent on pharmaceuticals which are actually a military-pharmaceutical complex run by the same players—the global elite—and then ultimately these populations become enslaved to the pharmaceuticals and economically debilitated along with their nation states.”
Now, like the Blues Brothers, he on a mission from God: “Bust the Illuminati. Bust the cryptography code. The darkest time in our history is just beginning. Revelation tells you in God’s word that you and I should count the number of the Beast 666. The revelations we’ve just been given is that wisdom. It takes it out of the realm of foolish conspiracy theory into hard, provable, scientific, statistically significant fact, and God bless you with it at this time. With that blessing, I want to thank you so much for allowing me to be here tonight [it was now 12:30 in the afternoon]. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you [said nine times]. Say hallelujah! Praise God! Thank you all.”
Dr. Horowitz was scheduled to fly to Africa and spread the word. “Okay, God,” he prayed aloud, “if it’s not Your will for me to go—because apparently I’m hearing from all these people that I shouldn’t go, I shouldn’t go, fear, fear, fear, fear—please let me know what You want me to do, and if You have me go, if You choose to have me die if I go, then so be it, but I would prefer to live and carry your work forward, so please direct me.” And of course God told him to go. 
Yet another presenter, William Thomas, author of Chem-Trails: Mystery Lines in the Sky, also revealed a sense of his own martyrdom. He stated that “The earth and its inhabitants are being subjected to unprecedented experimentation without our knowledge or permission. Some say the chem-trails are intended to kill us all. Others insist the disorientation and lethargy resulting from chem-trail exposure are intended to make citizens compliant to the New World Order and enslave us all.
     “The most plausible explanation for massive aerial spraying is a planet-wide, high-tech campaign against catastrophic climate change. If true, such a desperate Band-Aid solution disregards fundamental causes of global warming in order to protect powerful financial interests by permitting pollution and profits. This story has cost me a lot--cost me the love of my life, my career. To the people doing this, you can break my heart and you can break my back, but you will never, ever, break my spirit.” [Prolonged applause, shouts of Bravo] “I’m not afraid of death.”
And the P.A. system blared forth the sound of Jackson Browne singing, “There are lives in the balance . . .”
*   *   *
If there is a star of this show, it’s David Icke (rhymes with bike). Author of And the Truth Shall Set You Free, he’s a dynamic performer, somewhat pot-bellied, with longish yellow hair. His presentation is about the secret manipulation of the human race, going back thousands of years, revealing how the same interbreeding bloodlines continue to control positions of power today, and he ardently shares suppressed information on humanity’s ancient extraterrestrial origins. Thus he offers an alternative explanation of our existence that transcends creationism and evolution alike.
All that, and he puts his underwear on backwards too. With his whimsical British accent, he confides to the audience: “A little while ago, I’m thinking I’ll empty me bladder before I speak, so I’m fiddling and I can’t make contact, and then I realize I put me underpants on the wrong way around. I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.” Then he entered specific domains of strangeness:
“A few years ago, I met a scientist who joined the CIA as a youngster, serving his country. He is a genius in the area of magnetics. When he started to work for the CIA in these secret projects, he realized that they didn’t want his knowledge to serve humanity, they wanted to create technology that would help to control the mass of the population, and he rebelled against it and said, ‘I’m not doing this any more.’
“He started to tell me a story and, as he did, he was opening his shirt. One day he left home and he started missing time. Doesn’t remember anything about it. But he does remember waking up on a medical-type bench, and as he got his faculties back he realized there was something stuck to his chest. As he opened his shirt, I could see like a see-through shampoo sachet on his chest with an orange-gold liquid inside it.
“And he said that what they’d done was manipulate his body to need this drug to survive, and if he doesn’t get it, then he starts to die what is apparently a very long and painful death. And this patch--which is what they call them on the inside--with the drug has to be replaced every seventy-two hours, and if he doesn’t serve an agenda that sickens him, then it’s not replaced.
“He told me about a microchip now so small it can be inserted in a vaccination program through a hypodermic needle. Even those who thought the microchip was coming along as a tagging device have not realized that it’s not just about keeping a tag on where people are. It’s not actually the signals going from the chip to the computer we should be concerned about, but the signals coming the other way to the chip, because the technology exists, outside the public arena and increasingly in it, which can manipulate human emotion and thought processes externally once one of these guys is inside. If people say no to one thing, say no to the microchip.”
(In December 2001, Reuters would report that a chip the size of a grain of rice which can be injected into your body and give detailed information to anyone with the right scanning equipment is soon to be available from Applied Digital Solutions. The company has projected a potential market worth $70 billion.]
Occasionally, Icke throws in a tidbit of comic relief, such as two Martians in a bar: “Have you heard the latest about the Earthlings?” “No, what have they done now?” “They borrow money that doesn’t exist and pay interest on it.”
Other times, he’ll throw in a generally unconsidered theory: “JonBenet Ramsey has all the feel of her being a multi-personality, dissociative identity disorder, trauma-based mind-control situation, and involved in satanic ritual abuse. I think there’s a massive cover-up there, because if you’re going to stop the dominoes falling, you have to stop the first domino falling, and that’s what that cover-up to me was all about.”
But he is most challenging when he discusses interbreeding: “Why are three ruling families today obsessed with interbreeding? Why when you follow them back genealogically to the ancient world have they always been obsessed with interbreeding? I found an amazing common theme in the ancient world anywhere on the planet—the theme of gods interbreeding with humanity, creating hybrid bloodlines which ended up in positions of power.
“I talked five hours with a Zulu shaman about extraterrestrial connections to the Illuminati. African history is the same theme, of gods from another world, which have great connections to earth history, interbreeding with humanity, creating bloodlines which have ruled the world all these thousands of years. The royal black bloodline of Africa from the age of tribal days claimed descendants from the same gods that these other crowds do.
“One of the great themes that comes up in this interbreeding and these ancient accounts is of a serpent race, a race of a reptilian genetic history, which interbred with humans, creating hybrid DNA. I’m not just talking about this tiny frequency range we call the world. There are other frequencies as well, in terms of where manipulators of the manipulators actually come from. This force which manipulates through these bloodlines overwhelmingly operates right on the periphery of our physical senses, right on the edge. It can appear that someone’s gone from one form to another. This is ‘shape shifting’ between human and reptilian form.
“From 1998 onward, I kept meeting people telling the same story, that they have seen people overwhelmingly in positions of power--but not always--move from a human form to a reptilian-type form. There is the Mayan legend of the iguana. Lizard-like aliens had descended upon the Mayans. Their pyramids—their advanced astronomical technology including the sacrifice of virgins—were supposedly inspired by lizard aliens. When the aliens interbred with the Mayans, they produced a form of life they could inhabit. They fluctuated between a human and iguana appearance in chameleon-like abilities, a perfect vehicle for transforming into world leaders.
“Those who have seen a reptilian-type ethereal figure enveloping and following around humans and locking into them in those lower two chakra points, vortex points, for me, is possession. The more I’ve understood this, the more I’ve realized just how many people, particularly these bloodlines, are actually controlled by these other-dimensional forces, and while we appear to be seeing a president or a banking leader in a physical form, the actual point of control is beyond that and overshadowing it, and on some occasion people see that overshadowing entity.”
One wonders whether such a defense—“The reptile made me do it!”—will some day be used in a court of law.
“To understand humanity,” Icke continued, “you have really got to understand humanists reptilian past, reptilian inherited genetics. One of the most ancient parts of the human brain is known by science as the R complex, for reptilian brain. We get these traits—cold-blooded behavior, ritualistic behavior, desire for top-down power over structures. Now, dismiss the reptilian thing—let’s just think they don’t exist—I have just described the basic mentality of the Illuminati that allows wars to be created, millions of casualties without any emotional attachment to consequences. Why do people who have more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes go on accumulating it? Why do corporations that have enormous power and control over vast areas go on accumulating and seeking more and more power and control?”
So, then, is this whole reptilian agenda really just a metaphor for the varieties of human cruelty? Or does Icke mean it all literally?
Previously, Jordan Maxwell had told the audience, “I think the dirtiest, the filthiest, the most licentious people on the face of the earth are the British royalty. They represent in the human race all that is evil and all that is filthy and degenerate. And that’s why Princess Diana is dead.” That there was a conspiracy behind Diana’s death seems to be a given among this crowd: the royal bloodline protected by the paparazzi. Conspiracy researchers often start with a premise—who benefits?—and work their way backward, molding their perception of reality like Silly Putty in order to culminate with the justification of that premise.
Maxwell continued: “About ten years ago, a young black man broke into the Queen Mum’s bedroom, and one of her servants happened to be walking by and the bedroom door was open a bit, and she saw this young black boy in the queen’s bedroom. She quietly went to security which came up and arrested him for breaking into the queen’s bedroom, but the queen said he didn’t threaten her and he wasn’t armed and it was just a childish silly prank, and so she let it slide if he promised not to do that any more. James Bond couldn’t break into the queen’s bedroom! If there was a young black man in the queen’s bedroom in Buckingham Palace, the queen ordered him in like pizza. The Queen Mum with her black boyfriend. Tell me about racism.”
That anecdote says something about the queen’s human nature, but now David Icke added another dimension:
“Some of the descriptions, like of the British royal family—people who claim to have been at the rituals—are of a literal shift. They seem to go from one physical state to another, very much in this dimension, which from our perspective of this-world physics is like, what? And then others are describing what appears to be a vibrational thing, where people are looking into another dimension slightly outside of our physical frequency range, the normal one, and suddenly they’re seeing another level of the person which appears reptilian. And exactly where the truth is in all that or whether it’s a shade of grey and both are true, there’s a lot more information that is needed.
“Going back in African history, this reptilian group actually go back a phenomenal amount of time in relation to this planet, and they claim that it’s actually rightfully theirs, and at some point in the ancient past there were some great wars that went on, and in fact they were kicked off, and they’re trying to regain control of what they think is rightfully theirs, like being kicked out of a country.
“Other researchers, concentrating on the reptilian thing for a long time, say that in some way they basically go around to different places, just raping the resources, and then move on. Then there’s the one about the fact that in some way a lot of these beings were almost imprisoned, in a vibrational prison, like they can’t get out of it by going up because they can’t vibrationally get there in their present state of being. And their only way out of that level is to come into a lower level of vibration into this dense physical world, and operate through that. But I understand Cathy saying it’s only a mind-control thing.”
From the gospel according to Cathy O’Brien:
 “When Bill and Bob Bennett together sexually assaulted my daughter Kelly and me at the Bohemian Grove in 1986, I had already known Bill Bennett as a mind control programmer for some time.  He apparently found perverse pleasure in whipping me. With my wrists bruised and my body stinking with pain, Bennett lit up a cigarette and cryptically asked, ‘Was that your first cum-union with an alien?’
“[On another occasion] deep underground in NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center mind-control lab near D.C., Bill Bennett began preparing me for the program. NASA uses various CIA designer drugs to chemically alter the brain and create exactly the mindset required at the time. I could barely crawl up onto the cold, metal lab table as the drug took effect in the darkness surrounding me, I could hear Bill Bennett talking. ‘My brother Bob and I work as one unit. We are alien to this dimension—two beings from another plane.’
“The high-tech light display swirling around me convinced me I was transforming dimensions with them. A laser of light hit the black wall in front of me, which seemed to explode into a panoramic view of a White House cocktail party—as though I had transformed dimensions and stood amongst them. Not recognizing anyone, I frantically asked, ‘Who are these people?’
“‘They’re not people, and this isn’t a space ship,’ Bennett said. As he spoke, the holographic scene changed ever so slightly until the people appeared to be lizard-like aliens. ‘Welcome to the second level of the underground. This level is a mere reflection of the first, an alien dimension. We are from a trans-dimensional plane that spans and encompasses all dimensions. I have taken you through my dimension as a means of establishing stronger holds on your mind than the earth’s plane permits. Being alien, I simply make my thoughts your thoughts by projecting them into your mind. My thoughts are your thoughts.’ If this were so, why did he have to audibly tell me?”
Aha! A touch of skepticism from Cathy. And yet part of me still hopes that was all true, if only because of Bill Bennett’s personal maxim: “Hypocrisy is better than having no values at all.”
*   *   *
How could I distinguish truth from lies if truth was cross-fertilized with greed, the need for attention, false memory, speculation, fantasy, self-delusion and intentional propaganda? I contemplated the implications of something that Michael Aquino had told me:
“Part of what we learned in PSYOP was that it’s not just the propaganda you create that is a factor, but the pre-existing propaganda ‘filters’ in target audiences’ brains as well. The key has to be designed to fit the lock, so to speak. And underlying all this is the challenge to the PSYOPerator to extricate himself from his own filters--otherwise he will see the situation only through his personal distortions and thus be inept at influencing it objectively and comprehensively.”
Consequently, propaganda can become a two-way street. For example, Cory Hammond, former president of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, has had many clients who, under hypnosis, “remember” hideous incidents of satanic rituals, infant sacrifice, sadomasochism and coprophilia (get that shit-eating grin off your face). Dr. Hammond believes that three groups working together—neo-Nazis, the CIA and NASA—have been programming American children for over fifty years to make them part of “a Satanic order that will rule the world.”
Likewise, the war on drugs is filtered through a mass of distortions. In the words of The Economist—a venerable British newsweekly that has been a longtime passionate advocate for the legalization of drugs—the growing, selling, consuming and outlawing of illegal drugs around the world is a complex mix of economics, politics and world culture.
There are silly conspiracies. Some folks believe that the moon landing was faked (those were close-up photos of oatmeal). Others believe that the Woodstock Festival never occurred (it was contrived by the media). Still others believe that Elvis Presley’s death was fabricated (he’s alive in Las Vegas, working as an Elvis impersonator). And surely there must be others who are convinced that militant vegetarian activists are responsible for Mad Cow disease.
Sometimes silly conspiracists get results. In 1995, Indiana transportation officials were forced to alter the maintenance codes marked on the back of highway signs because some state residents were convinced that the markings were coded messages designed to assist invading UN troops.
And there are serious conspiracies. Gasoline refiners conspire to limit supply and fix prices. The relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies is blatantly conspiratorial. Douglas Valentine wrote in The Phoenix Program (about the CIA’s notorious terrorist campaign against Vietnamese villagers) that in 1968 the Army’s 111th Military Intelligence Group kept Martin Luther King under 24-hours-a-day surveillance. Its agents were in Memphis on April 4th and “reportedly watched and took photos while King’s assassin moved into position, took aim, fired, and walked away.”
World War II was racketed by presidential conspiracies of silence: Franklin D. Roosevelt knew that Japan was going to attack Pearl Harbor; and Harry Truman knew that Japan was about to make peace overtures but he nevertheless ordered that atomic bombs be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Domestically, the Aryan Republican Army financed and helped to stage the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms knew about it three weeks before it happened.
Pokeman has become a target of religious leaders throughout the Arab world who charge that the game promotes theories of evolution, encourages gambling and, at its core, is part of a Jewish conspiracy aimed at turning children away from Islam. To David Icke, Jews are the pawns in an elaborate Rothschild-Illuminati breeding experiment, and they are “impregnated with a reptilian genetic code.”
*   *   *
There’s a final panel at Conspiracy Con with questions from the audience. A reporter for Stuff magazine waits his turn on line, then steps up to the microphone and asks, “What is the secret to how you’ve managed to maintain such healthy heads of hair? The answers: “Well, mine’s glued.” “I stopped pulling it out a few years ago.” “It was the fluoride.” “Mine is the same color when I purchased it.” And, “Genetics.”
A woman who claims to be a victim of mind control asks, “How do you function? How do you deal with manipulation in your personal lives, being individuals that are speaking out? Is there any secure communication? Can the whole body be scanned for implants, inside your teeth or your skull?”
Icke responds: “No technology exists in this frequency range more powerful than the human mind in its true power. When disconnected from that, we become open to technical manipulation. Is there any secure communication? I don’t give a shit. I say what I think on the Internet. I don’t worry about being harmed. If you don’t allow the idea of vulnerability into your reality, it cannot manifest. If it’s not your reality, you cannot project it. It never occurs to me that these guys can do anything to me.
“Those that were doing this [work] in fear of consequences were getting them. ‘I don’t know how long they’re gonna allow me to do this.’ They almost wore their bravery like a war medal. Courage is overcoming fear. If you don’t have fear you don’t need courage because there’s no fear to overcome. You just do it, get on with it, do what you believe to be right without the need for courage because there’s nothing to overcome.
“‘I’m doing dangerous things,’ they say, ‘but I keep on going. I’m sure they’re gonna do this to me if I keep on.’ They will get the consequences, and others who are just doing it, won’t. And because we create our own reality, what we allow into our field of possibility can manifest. If it doesn’t come it, it cannot manifest. I don’t worry about defending myself.”
Suddenly, as if on cue, an agitated man brandishing a pistol stalks out from the backstage area. Shouting, “The China card will be played big,” he aims his gun at Icke, who sits there calmly while the other panelists all duck under the table. A single shot rings out. Panic fills the air, and screams emanate from the audience. But it’s the would-be assassin, not Icke, who is the one that falls to the ground. The panel discussion has ended, and the auditorium is cleared.     
I show my press credentials to a security guard and he allows me to stay. I can see a doctor hovering over the man, who is bleeding fiercely. When the doctor unbuttons the man’s shirt I notice that on his chest, just a couple of inches from the gaping wound, there is a patch with an orange-gold liquid inside it. The doctor pats it gently and says, “What the hell is this?” The man is able only to whisper, “He blew my goddam cover.” Then he gasps for breath. The doctor says he’s dead, and the security guard tells me I have to leave.
I had been looking forward all day to a room-service dinner of Colossal Pacific Coast Prawns simmered in Thai curry sauce with sticky rice and toasted coconut, but now I wasn’t hungry. I was too preoccupied with what had transpired that evening. I kept asking myself, “Who shot the mad scientist? And why?” I felt like a poker player who’s been dealt a hand of all blank cards.
Finally an epiphany arrived, and I knew exactly what I had to do. I made three phone calls, then went down to the bar to keep an appointment with David Icke that we had arranged early in the day. We selected a corner table, I took out my cellphone, dialed my own number at home, and when the answering machine started, I dialed the code to get my messages and handed the phone to Icke. This is what he heard:
“Hi, this is Paul, calling myself. I’ve already left a message on [my wife] Nancy’s answering machine, asking her to save this tape in case anything happens to me. About the shooting that took place here, I called my contact in the CIA who informed me that it was a Company job. They killed David Icke’s friend before he could kill Icke. But why would they be protecting Icke? You’d think that they’d want him dead because he knows too much. Unless he happens to be one of them and they need him to continue spreading disinformation. So now that this precaution has been taken, I will go and confront Icke.”
He laughed.
“Nice try,” he said. “First of all, don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen to you. But, by all means, keep that tape as a souvenir. You’re right about one thing, though. I am protected by the CIA. Not because I’m one of them, but because I’m not one of them. If they wanted me dead, they could kill me any time they wanted. But they know I’m not spreading disinformation. You have to understand, these guys work strictly on a need-to-know basis. So it’s not that I know too much, it’s that they don’t know enough.
“Because, if an individual agent knows too much, he may not do what he’s been assigned to do. He must have a given order to do something, but if he knows that the end result is that somebody’s going to be blown up twelve miles away—and all he’s supposed to do is deliver an envelope—he may start thinking about it. So, various agents read my books and check my Web site and show up wherever I speak. It’s a safety valve for them, on how far things are going.”
“Are you saying that the intelligence community has allowed you to function because you know more than any of them?”
“Exactly . . .”
*   *   *
On my return fight the next morning, I found myself reminiscing about the 1987-88 TV season, when I had been a writer and on-air commentator on The Wilton North Report, a nightly satirical hour on the Fox network that lasted only 21 shows. Critics blamed the hosts, a pair of disc jockeys who were not untalented but who were deliberately chosen for their inoffensiveness.
I had previously suggested as host Conan O’Brien, a writer on the show who also did the audience warm-ups. “No,” said the producer, “he’s not professional enough.” Ellen DeGeneres? “Too dykey.” Chris rock? “Too raw.” Rosie O’Donnell? “Who wants to look at her every night?” Richard Belzer? “Too reptilian.” Belzer is a conspiracy researcher as well as a comedian and actor, but little did he ever dream that ultimately he—his reptilian self—could be the culmination of his own investigation.
Now, back home, the marketing of conspiracy was on a roll. Majestic, an interactive computer game revolving around a conspiracy involving corporate intrigue, was available. For $10 a month, tens of thousands of online players would receive screaming phone calls at midnight, faxes, anonymous emails and instant messages from mysterious informers directing them to research strange alien conspiracies and nefarious government activities. Majestic was suspended on September 12, 2001.
The invasion of the United States on September 11th was the mother of all conspiracies. Immediately there were those who began spinning scenarios of an inside job, an American version of the Reichstag Fire, carried out in order to justify the rise of a police state in the guise of security procedures. In any case, political opportunism has been providing the same results.
That Halloween, I was invited by producer Andy Meisler to be a panelist at the taping of a new TV series, The Conspiracy Zone. Although the plot behind the 9/11 terrorists was certainly a topic of conversation in the Green Room—“Do you think this is the endgame?”--the official subject that evening was the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968.
On the program, hosted by former Saturday Night Live cast member Kevin Nealon, I mentioned that Kennedy had once been on the Tonight show, telling Johnny Carson that cigarettes kill more people than marijuana, and I speculated that Sirhan Sirhan was a hired gun for the tobacco companies. On a more literal note, I talked about the ballistics Inconsistency; a total of ten bullets was found, though Sirhan’s gun could hold only eight.
And I discussed the fact that psychiatrist Bernard Diamond described in Psychology Today how, during the trial, post-hypnotic suggestion was used to program Sirhan into climbing the bars of his cell like a monkey. However, in the book RFK Must Die, Robert Kaiser, who was there, wrote: “Sirhan had no idea what he was doing up on the top of the bars. When he finally discovered that climbing was not his own idea, but rather Dr. Diamond’s, he was struck with the plausibility of the idea that perhaps he had been programmed by some else, in like manner, to kill Kennedy.”
There were two others on that TV panel, plus a separate segment with a dentist who practices hypnosis.
One panelist was Michael Ruppert, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department, Narcotics Division, who became a prolific conspiracy researcher. Off camera, I asked what the turning point had been for him. He said that it was when his fiancée, a CIA operative, tried to involve him in drug smuggling, and he refused. Ruppert and I were both columnists for High Times then, but, he told me, “I don’t smoke grass.”
The other panelist was scheduled to be former Nixon speechwriter and now bespectacled, drone-voiced personality Ben Stein, but he canceled out at the last minute. Ann Coulter, former Justice Department attorney and Senate aide, now a professional reactionary and Stepford pundit, was at the studio for a subsequent taping about secret societies, and she was drafted into taking Stein’s place. A frequent guest on talk shows, Coulter is recognizable by her long blond hair, her short black skirt, and her drag-queen aura.
When she was a guest on CNBC’s The Big Idea, host Donny Deutsch asked her what an ideal country would be like, and she replied that it would be one in which everybody was a Christian. “We just want Jews to be perfected,” she said. As for Muslims, two days after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, she wrote in National Review Online, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” But now, the taping of The Conspiracy Zone had to be delayed because she was still in the makeup room.
“It takes a long time to turn Ben Stein into Ann Coulter,” I explained.
During a break in the show, I suggested to her that the labels “conservative” and “liberal” had become obsolescent, and I asked what she thought might be appropriate substitute labels.
 “Americans and cowards,” she said.
 “Yikes,” I replied.
On another occasion, I got a call from Conspiracy Zone producer Andy Meisler. The show was featuring debates about cover-ups, ranging from Freemasons to bar codes to Hollow Earth. “The frightening thing,” he observed, “is that life is so random. At least there’s something comforting about conspiracies.” He was calling me for recommendations as to who might be appropriate to appear on programs about the fix behind professional sports and the fix behind the election of George Bush. (The latter topic was discarded after 9/11.) He told me that the show would also deal with “unexplained deaths,” such as Jimmy Hoffa, Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys.
“Oh, that’s so last century,” I said. “Conspiracy research has evolved from ‘Who Killed JFK?’ to ‘Who Fucked a Lizard From Outer Space?’”
One other thing. My visual mantra of the man who urinated and flossed simultaneously was replaced by a patriotic image of Cathy O’Brien: “I was ushered away from my classmates,” she said, “and taken to an office where Michigan State Senator Guy VanderJagt was waiting with soon-to-be-president Gerald Ford. They laughed as he placed a small American flag in my rectum and instructed me to wave it.” Like all politicians, though, Ford merely wrapped himself in the American flag.

Swimming in the Dead Pool

When Ken Kesey’s son Jed was killed in an accident--the van carrying his University of Oregon wrestling team had skidded off a cliff--I immediately flew to Oregon. “You were his favorite,” Kesey said as we embraced, sobbing. “I feel like every cell in my body is exploding,”
A few days later, several of us old friends were sitting around the dining-room table there, and someone mentioned that the Dead Kennedys were on tour.
“I wonder if Ted Kennedy is gonna go see ’em,” I remarked.
Kesey, standing in the kitchen, responded, “That’s not funny.”
“You’re right. I apologize. It’s not very abstract right now.”
“It’s never abstract.”
I recalled that little dialogue as I began to explore The Game, now in its 34th year [2004], the longest-running dead pool in America, currently with 125 players. Before January 1st everyone submits 68 names of people who might die that year. (Dr. Death, co-founder of The Game, liked to work on a legal pad--34 lines, two columns, hence 68 names.) Points are awarded according to the age of each dead person--anybody in their 50s is worth five points; 60s, four; 70s, three.
Each participant gets one wild card per year worth five points no matter how old the deceased. Gamesters generally pick one-pointers for their wild card to get four extra points. Last year, most picked Bob Hope. When he died, one Gamester said, “My father was shot during World War II. While recuperating in England, Mr. Hope came up to his bedside and stuffed a half-dozen golf balls into his [own] mouth. It cheered my old man up.”
Deaths become official when mentioned in the New York Times or any two major newspapers. One player “is extremely frustrated,” I was told. “He has Idi Amin, who is on life support in a Saudi hospital. Now there have been death threats, and armed guards have been posted.” Since the listees are all on various rungs on the ladder of celebrityhood, The Game is understandably rife with abstraction.
“After all, the dead pool has probably been around since the phenomenon of fame itself,” write Gelfand and Wilkinson in the book Dead Pool. “It has certainly been around as long as gallows humor has. In the heyday of hard-boiled journalism (the Front Page days of the 1930s), reporters who covered a country ravaged by organized crime and engaged in a world war found respite in the dark humor of the dead pool. Even before the Internet, the dead pool was slowly emerging from the shadows of our culture.”
As with dead pools, ranging from business offices to Howard Stern’s radio show, that book is a guide to profiting from money bets. But members of The Game play solely for the fun of it. Whoever has the most points at the end of the year wins--“bragging rights only”—slightly ironic since Gamesters (lawyers, ad people, educators, psychology professors, writers, everyday working folks) all play under aliases like Frozen Stiff, Fade to Black, Worm Feast, Decomposers, 2 Dead Crew, Johnny B. Dead, Wm. Randolph Hearse, Daisy Pusher, Silk Shroud, Necrophiliac Pimp, Legion of Doom, Gang Green, Habeas Corpse, Die-Uretic, Shovelin’ Off, Blunt Instrument, Rig R. Mortis, Flatliners, Unplugged, Toe Tag, Clean Underwear and Gratefully Dead.
One couple, the Moorebids, insist, “We play for honor, not bragging rights. It has to do with honoring who you get the hit on.”
Another player told me, “I compare playing The Game to my day job, science. We do a lot of data collection and data analysis; play our hunches. Our reward is not financial, but peer recognition. One selects some names to acknowledge the person. Other names are selected because earning you points is their last opportunity to do something productive and honorable in their otherwise useless life. My most missed hit was Spiggy [Nixon’s disgraced vice president, Spiro] Agnew; I was distressed at missing him.”
Each Gamester pays $10 to Pontius, official coordinataor and editor, to keep score and report the hits. There are players in over 30 states (23 in New York), plus one each in Quito, Kuwait, England and Australia. You can become a Gamester only by being recommended by another Gamester. They’re mostly baby boomers, attracted by a whimsical, informative style of reporting.
Forty-nine Gamesters “hit” Buddy Ebsen. Obituaries mentioned that after ten days of filming The Wizard of Oz, Ebsen fell ill because of the aluminum make-up on his skin, and was replaced as the Tin Man by Jack Haley. (A suspicious player wondered, “Did Jack Haley add something to the aluminum make-up at the Wizard set?”) Conversely, there have been “solo’s” on the unexpected demise of Princess Diana and JFK, Jr.
“A solo I am proud of,” one Gamester told me, “is the hit on Christian Nelson, who invented the Klondike Bar.”
“Yes, it’s sick,” another player admitted, “but c’mon, it’s just a game! The Game is a light-hearted way of spitting in death’s eye--your opportunity to pick a Generation-X rock star who OD’s on heroin, a geriatric blue-hair who finally kicks the bucket, a fascist totalitarian in the Mid-East who is assassinated. I’m not doing great this year because I invested too heavily in Hamas, but I’m still in the top ten. The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is doing its job--I just guessed wrong. Last year I scored on Khattab, a Chechnian rebel leader who was killed by a letter he opened that was poisoned. Our first poison-pen-letter death.”
But isn’t it somewhat ghoulish?
“Ghoulish?” a participant replied. “No more so than fantasy baseball. We can get up in the morning, and either pick up the newspaper or turn on the Internet to see if we scored, every day. It’s like baseball stats, you want to move up in the standings of the veterans. The reason we Gamesters play, I would say it’s about style. Style involves who you pick. Some concentrate on music, some on politics, some on sports.”
As for social significance, one player explained that “The pastime has been going on for more than four hundred years, so I don’t think it’s reflective of any given time or society. Every Gamester comes with their own perspective. The Game is irreverent, even a bit shocking, and some take pleasure in that. It’s a poke to the ribs that lie beneath stuffed shirts, a tweak of bluenoses. The Game is a competition—challenging, engaging and energizing. The Game heightens awareness and helps us to recognize our kinship with those whose deaths we note. The Game is a way of sharing and staying in touch with friends, whether near or far. It gives people a reason to call and correspond.”
Pontius’s predecessor, Ghostwriter, had thanked many folks in his farewell message, including “Persephone, who enabled me to say, ‘Yes,’ when a friend here in Central New York said, ‘Do you know a good adoption lawyer in Arkansas?’ It was my greatest cameo role, my finest hour as a networker, and I couldn’t have done it without The Game and this wise, wonderful woman.”
The Game’s listserv emails are titled “It’s a Hit!” They can be poignant, respectful, even sentimental: “July 4th—A score of swaying Gamesters were heard singing ‘I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe’ as each collected a five-note from velvety-voiced singer Barry White . . .”
Or they can sound like a warhorse race: “July 22nd—Mosul, Iraq. Qusay and Uday, the brutal and powerful sons of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, were ambushed by Special Forces and the 101st Airborne that resulted in a deadly four-hour firefight. Enjoying the best day of his career was Tomb Essence who had a 14-point Daily Double . . .”
But The Game giveth and the Game taketh away: “August 21st—British and American armed forces in Iraq announced today that they had arrested Ali Hasan al-Majid, aka Chemical Ali. Back in April 2003, the British armed forces announced they had killed him. Tomb Essence celebrated then, but is crying like a baby now.”
Animals have also been “scored,” from Morris the Cat to Dolly the cloned sheep to Keiko the killer whale. Choices can get personal, though. A player told me, “I purposely Left off a good friend [former New York Post editor Jerry Nachman] who I knew was dying, and one of our game mates refused to list a friend’s [famous] mother who knew she was dying. Sometimes we just don’t want to ‘cash in’ on our friends’ pain. How un-American of us.”
Gamesters have scored on all the Kennedys as well as Lorraine Petersen, the model on the Sunmaid Raisins box. But, under the title “It’s Not a Hit!” came this email: “August 9 th—The entire Game failed to list dancer and actor Gregory Hines, 57.” In The Game’s 2001 Hit List, under the subhead “Other Notable Deaths That No One Picked,” included was “Ken Kesey, 11/1201, author, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
I had a visceral reaction. This was not abstract.
“I never could decide if leaving Kesey off my list was the right thing to do,” one Gamester told me. “The Merry Pranksters obviously inspired my non de plume, the Bury Pranksters.”

Trashing the Right to Read

Before Kenneth Foster’s death sentence was revoked at the last minute in August 2007, he had read a book, Welcome to the Terrordome, and he wrote a letter to the author, Dave Zirin:
I have never had the opportunity to view sports in this way. And as I went through these revelations I began to have epiphanies about the way sports have a similar existence in prison. The similarities shook me.  Facing execution, the only thing that I began to get obsessive about was how to get heard and be free, and as the saying goes, you can’t serve two gods.

Sports, as you know, becomes a way of life. You monitor it, you almost come to breathe it. Sports becomes a way of life in prison, because it becomes a way of survival. For men that don’t have family or friends to help them financially, it becomes a way to occupy your time. That’s another sad story in itself, but it’s the root to many men’s obsession with sports.

Zirin writes, “It didn’t matter if he was on death row or Park Avenue, I felt smarter having read his words.  But even more satisfying was the thought that thinking about sports took his mind--for a moment--away from his imminent death, the 11-year-old daughter he will never touch, and the words he will never write.  I thought sending him my first book, What’s My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the U.S., would be a good follow-up.”
But a form titled “Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice, Publication Review” was banned from Death Row because “It contains material that a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots.”  Two pages were specifically mentioned.
Page 44 includes a quote from Jackie Robinson’s autobiography referring to the blatant racism he suffered early in his rookie season: “I felt tortured and I tried to just play ball and ignore the insults but it was really getting to me.  For one wild and rage-crazed moment I thought, ‘To hell with Mr. Rickey’s noble experiment.  To hell with the image of the patient black freak I was supposed to create.’  I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches, and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist.  Then I could walk away from it all.”
And page 55 includes a passage about Jack Johnson’s defeat of the “Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries: “Johnson was faster, stronger and smarter than Jeffries.  He knocked Jeffries out with ease.  After Johnson’s victory, there were race riots around the country in Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas and Washington, D.C.  Most of the riots consisted of white lynch mobs attacking blacks, and blacks fighting back.  This reaction to a boxing match was one of the most widespread racial uprisings in the U.S. until the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”
Zirin points out that “There was a time in Texas when it was illegal to teach slaves to read.  The fear was that ideas could turn anger often directed inward into action against those with their boots on black necks.  It is perhaps the most fitting possible tribute to Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson that they still strike fear into the hearts of those wearing the boots.”
In the Dallas County jail, one of the largest in the country, all publications are refused, including daily newspapers such as the Dallas Morning News.  “They seem to have a rather callous disregard for the Constitution,” said Paul Wright, publisher of Seattle-based Prison Legal News, with a circulation of 9,000.  He filed a federal lawsuit challenging the ban on First Amendment grounds, and won.  His lawyer, Scott Medlock, prisoner rights attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, points out that some jails have argued that prisoners can watch TV news in jail, so they don’t need access to publications.
Prison Legal News is also preparing a lawsuit against the Utah Department of Corrections for a policy that bars all books except those that are shipped directly from Barnes & Noble.  Generally, prisons require that books be sent directly from the publisher or a major distributor, for security reasons.  Otherwise, a spokesperson for one jail explains, “There’s a possibility something could be in one of the pages that we don’t want.  There could be little bits of drugs in the pages.”
“We have not yet sued them.” Wright told me, “since they only sporadically censor us and aren’t letting us develop a good fact pattern.”
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said that its jails allow inmates to receive books from booksellers after checking to see whether they can be fashioned into a weapon, promote violence or have sexually explicit content.  Across the country, only paperbacks are accepted.  Hardcovers are rejected because they provide “source material” for fashioning weapons.  When the Supreme Court ruled that law libraries did not have to be provided to prisoners, jails in Montana not only removed the entire contents of the law library, but they also removed the typewriters.
Washington State has tried to keep Prison Legal News itself out of prisons.  First, the Department of Corrections prohibited inmates from receiving nonprofits.  PLN sued and won.  Next, the state issued a rule that inmates couldn’t receive publications that were paid out of their trust accounts.  PLN managed to get that rule overturned too.  Then the prisons adopted a policy of not delivering subscription-renewal notices.  PLN took that to court and succeeded in getting the policy reversed.  PLN has won similar lawsuits or settlements in Alabama, California, Michigan, Nevada and Oregon.