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Decadent Worker #70 - 4Sept87

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on September 4, 2007
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Hit Squad, Inc.

Decadent Worker 70In addition to rumors and theories, there is another factor that will help the reader see my conversations with Brother-in-law in perspective. Life among the artists and writers in the French Quarter, not chats with a strange hoodlum, comprised the central theme of my activities as I perceived them then.

My association with Clint Bolton was more or less typical in this respect.

One night when I was being a barroom poet in a cafe, reading some of my verses to friends, he rather drunkenly butted in. “Tear down the walls!” he roared, in response to a line about keeping my love behind the highest wall.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Isn’t your own business worth minding?”

“No.”

That answer caught me off guard.

“Trouble with you young people nowadays — you build too many walls. Rip ‘em down.”

As our discussion continued I realized he was a man who knew a great deal about literature. If I ever wrote about him, he was to tell me later, I should describe him as an aging middle weight.

Clint Bolton, an aging middle weight, had retired from a career of news reporting, of which a highlight had been interviewing Ernest Hemingway in Spain.

When what he called our “Tuesday afternoon poetry reading circle” broke up, he and I went together to a saloon on Rampart, where we talked about Pindar until morning.

“I could write circles around you,” he bragged. “I could tell you so much about writing — hell, I’ve already forgotten more than you’ve learned.” Then he paused, as was his way, for an intolerably long and drunken interval as I patiently awaited his next word. Clint was an emotional alcoholic whose own eloquence often drove him to tears. “I never wrote a novel. Every newspaper hack keeps an unfinished book manuscript in his desk drawer. Don’t mess around with that Tuesday afternoon stuff, kid. Every little old lady in America writes poems. Write a book.”

As I walked him home at dawn, I told him about The Idle Warriors. This was in the spring of 1963, probably April, and I’d long since given up trying to find a publisher. “It needs work. Not enough unity and plot. Just a collection of anecdotes,” I told him. But the basic idea was fantastic. I was trying to explain why foreigners hate Americans — like The Ugly American, only about enlisted men in the service, about how some of them acted on liberty in the Far East in peacetime. Man, it was horrible. A bunch of crew-cut young punks who thought they were conquering heroes. They beat up on cab drivers, tore apart bars, made fun of the customs. I felt ashamed of my uniform by the time I’d been there a month. One guy I knew got so disgusted with it that when he got out he defected to Russia. So my main character in the novel does the same thing.”

By this time we were standing in front of Clint’s shotgun apartment, a couple of blocks up the street from the Bourbon House. “Say the truth, kid. That’s all there is to great writing, you know. Just saying the truth without wasting words. And another thing,” he paused again and let me stand there as he fished for words in bleary-eyed silence. “I listen to you — as you tell me about this novel of yours — your tone of voice, your enthusiasm — and I think: Why in hell’s name is this kid sitting around in saloons reading poems to a bunch of Beatniks? Writing is lonely work. That’s something you have to accept if you are going to be an author. And that’s your book. I can tell by the ay you talk about it. Now listen to me, son — because I wish you were my son and that I was your father — listen carefully, because I’ve got only one thing to say to you: Go home and write, ya bum!”

I went home and slept. But when I awoke, I got out the old Idle Warriors manuscript and had a look at it. Maybe Clint was right. Ola had said practically the same thing in different words. I should write this book.

In retrospect, I cannot free myself of the suspicion, so nagging, that there was an intelligence community plot to get The Idle Warriors into print. If there was, it failed — not completely, though. A few chapters were published in a nonfiction book about Oswald I wrote after the assassination. When I testified for the Warren Commission, photocopies of two of my manuscript drafts were taken for the National Archives. Any such theory, of course, cannot omit the hypothesis that both Clint and Ola Holcomb were agents…

If any theory remotely like that one is true, then I must have been virtually surrounded by the intelligence community before the assassination — perhaps since 1959 when Oswald and I volunteered in the Marines for that project to help Fidel Castro rid his new government of Russian agents. That’s a pretty enormous conspiracy theory to have to swallow; it sounds paranoid beyond all reason.

Yet if Nixon and E. Howard Hunt were in charge of the preparations to invade Cuba, and they were, and if Hunt possessed the authority to create exile governments, and he did, then why is it not possible that I was the focal point of such a government? One thing Brother-in-law seemed especially concerned about was the human slavery that exists within even the U.S. intelligence community. With authorization to create a government unrestricted by the usual overseeing clauses he could have designed an organization with multiple purposes. And if CIA bureaucrats really were signing things without reading them, such a document would have been possible.

That the CIA sector involved with anti-Castro activities went out of control, “like a rogue elephant,” just prior to the President’s murder is known.

What if they got authorization to protect certain individuals, to legally murder anyone who posed a threat to their lives? Such persons could under those circumstances have been selected for no other reason than their capacity to draw fire. I was writing a novel based on a man I had known who was probably an undercover agent (for the CIA) in the Soviet Union, a man who then returned to the U.S. with remarkable ease married to the niece of an officer in Russian intelligence. According to a theory presented… in The Yankee and Cowboy War, Oswald may next have been assigned by the CIA to spy on FBI people involved with Guy Banister in anti-Castro preparations. Besides my curiosity about Oswald, I possessed other qualities. I was a militant atheist in a predominately Catholic town, and I appear to have been involved in one way or another with an intelligence community heavily infiltrated with Jesuits. I was an extreme rightwing laissez-faire capitalist. I wanted John Kennedy assassinated and made no secret of it. On top of everything else, I had a chip on my shoulder. I was an emotionally alienated, judgmental misfit. What better way for the likes of Richard Nixon and E. Howard Hunt and Tracy Barnes to get rid of their enemies?

–Kerry Wendell Thornley
The Dreadlock Recollections (c) 1984

Decadent Worker #58 - 24Jul87

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Decadent Worker 58“Then you might start a minor rumor campaign against him.” — Ex-CIA Agent Keehner, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, John Marks, p. 174

“It is still better if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue; it demonstrates that we have not only drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves but achieved a great deal in our work.” — Mao Tse-Tung, p. 15

Over and over Brother-in-law asked me if I thought all publicity was good publicity, that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all. Every time I answered in the affirmative, without reservation. I may have been wrong, or at least too simple.

“Sometimes the concepts Brother-in-law wanted to convey were quite complex, and he seemed to be taking pains to speak awkwardly, possibly to give me the impression he was not an articulate, educated man.

“‘Kerry, what do you think of the idea of just scaring hell out of everybody — by convincing them that there is a situation, like say, where there are these enormous gates or something. And everyone expects a fierce lion or tiger to be behind them. They open and, instead, a kitten comes walking out.’

“I laughed and said, “I think that would be very funny.’” (The Dreadlock Recollections (c) 1984, Kerry Wendell Thornley)

At any point in time, there is always at least one more deal coming down. Rumors about me were oft planted when ‘the foundations of the world were laid.’ There actually are — and have been at least since 1959 — cults about me being some dubious famous person’s reincarnation, including Judas Iscariot and Napoleon Bonapart. I do not control these cults; they control me, particularly by means of rumors.

And of course all I get this way are rumors and rumors about rumors — particularly the latter, seeing as how the former were leading to the hypothesis of a genocidal depopulation conspiracy, with ruthlessly discocerting ecological logic, if also somewhat of a genetically chauvinist bias. The worst of Hitler, the exterminator of territories who utilized faulty maps — who could not grasp the reality that overcrowding is caused by the rent and/or the landlord.

As a result, my only purpose — stemming the tide of genocide — is defeated in the confusing babble of robot spirit mediums. Judas, in my place — in the poetically just mind of many a sober radical — would have said what I said: “Why don’t you frame some Communist?” — would have counseled cruxifiction of the Collective Christ, the Mystical Body of the Dialectical Jesus: the Communist Party. How can I blame them? That’s a rhetorical question; avoid right opportunist temptations.

As for Napoleon looks: a haircut which Judge L. Perez liked for that reason, it kept a lot of French rednecks off my back in its day. A class of the Harvard School of Business became the subject of a lifelong study that was highjacked by foreign intelligence. Somehow these Harvard grads became the basis of an organization to pass me off as a reincarnation of Napoleon, Meyer Lansky’s favorite historical personage. Slim Brooks called nut houses Napoleon Factories and called Napoleon Avenue, where earlier I resided, Crazyman Street. So the Napoleon Complex, as it is called, could also be a conspiracy to drive me mad.

There is in any case a virtual occult reich of these cults — half a dozen of which I am aware deem me this or that notorious figure from the past. When in my ignorance I was keeping my mouth shut about Brother-in-law, they were nice to me. These days they surround me with gullible pawns eager to help me work off bad karma by adding to my problems. Rumors are among their best weapons.

That my case was reviewed by the Supreme Court, who decided my rights were not being violated, is — I suspect — a CIA lie; challenged, they fall back to the position that the Supreme Court refused to hear my case. A similar lie is that the American Bar Association stands forever on the sidelines of my life, forever prepared to help me if and when my rights are violated. I have never been plaintiff in any court in the land is the truth, unless there is some way it could happen without my knowledge. My rights — all the rights numbered in the Bill of Rights with the exception of the right to bear arms, and not to quarter troops, etc., which I have not been called upon to exercise — have been relentlessly and repeatedly usurped. Why? Because this country is full of servile dumbshits who will do anything to anybody as long as they are convinced it isn’t against the law. They slept through civics and never studied Natural Law, and so conspire night and day to deprive me of my civil rights because they think the Supreme Court approves, or that in any case a bunch of Nixon and Reagan appointees even understand what rights are to begin with.

Nixon will hang for war crimes if the truth is ever known.

That I somehow actually became philosopher-king, in spite of my attempts to expose the assassins and despite three plots I joined to foil the Nazis who wanted me for king, is another rumor that makes life impossible for me. Like the Elders of Zion conspiracy rumors about Jews and the hysterical legends that Gays secretly rule the world (such as are circulated locally by Will Jones), wild tales serve to justify persecution of the weak by fostering illusions that they are the strong. I am in fact possibly the most enslaved individual in the domestic intelligence community — in spite of my stubborn refusal to take orders or to join any long-range conspiracy or party or agency. Again I suspect the CIA, possibly the Ford Foundation.

That I am actually someone else impersonating Kerry Wendell Thornley is the belief of people who were misled by my own inconsistency. In Cosmic Trigger Robert Anton Wilson published a memo that I would no longer carry any identification; a number of years ago I was arrested in Tampa, Florida, for driving without a permit, so I went ahead and got a driver’s license — after which the inconvenience of going without other i.d. seemed pointless. So because I carry identification that says I am Kerry Wendell Thornley (Wendell Kerry Thornley on my birth certificate, etc.) many think I therefore could not be Kerry Wendell Thornley!

Additional slanders insist I am a sexual sadist, a Marx-Leninist, a rightwinger, a homophobic puritan, an ex-Nazi or Nazi, and what they call in conspiracy politics “old” — to name a few. All are either lies or misunderstandings. The idea that I am a Satanist is both, although I dislike organized religion.*

* Alleged: Bert Lance secretly recorded my 1979 sex magick experiment intended to blow up the Vatican in conclave, repentence for my foolish foiling of a 1978 Finn plot to attain a like end.

Decadent Worker #47 - 17Jun87

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Decadent Worker 47Excerpts from “Jonestown: CIA, Assassinations, Drugs and Mind Control” by John Judge, Critique (Box 11451, Santa Rosa, CA 95406) Spring/Summer 1986, #12/22:

“It seemed the first reports were true, 400 had died, and 700 had fled to the jungle. The American authorities claimed to have searched for people who had escaped, but found no evidence of any in the surrounding area. At least a hundred Guyanese troops were among the first to arrive, and they were ordered to search the jungle for survivors. In the area, at the same time, British Black Watch troops were on ‘training exercises,’ nearly 600 of their best-trained commandos…

“A new word was coined by the media, ’suicide-murder.’ But which was it? Autopsies and forensic science are a developing art… Dr. Mootoo, the top Guyanese pathologist, was at Jonestown within hours after the massacre… While the American press screamed about the ‘Kool-Aid Suicides,’ Dr. Mootoo was reaching a much different opinion.

“There are certain signs that show types of poisons that lead to the end of life. Cyanide blocks the central nervous system… The facial muscles draw back into a deadly grin, called ‘cyanide rictus.’ All these telling signs were absent in the Jonestown dead. Limbs were limp and relaxed, and the few visible faces showed no sign of distortion.

“Instead, Dr. Mootoo found fresh needle marks at the back of the left shoulder blades of 70-80% of the victims. Others had been shot or strangled. One survivor reported that those who resisted were forced by armed guards. The gun that reportedly shot Jim Jones was lying nearly 200 feet from his body, not a likely suicide weapon. As Chief Medical Examiner, his testimony to the Guyanese grand jury investigating Jonestown led to their conclusion that all but three of the people were murdered by ‘persons unknown.’ Only two had committed suicide they said. Several pictures show gunshot wounds on the bodies as well.

“At the Jonestown site, survivors described a special group of Jones’ followers who were allowed to carry weapons and money, and to come and go from the camp. These people were all white, mostly males. They ate better and worked less than the others, and they served as an armed guard to enforce discipline, control labor and restrict movement. Among them were Jones’ top lieutenants, including George Phillip Blakey… This special guard survived the massacre… The dead were 90% women, and 80% Blacks. It is unlikely that men armed with guns and modern crossbows would give up control and willingly be injected with poisons. It is much more likely that they forced nearly 400 people to die by injection, and then assisted in the murder of 500 more who attempted to escape. One survivor clearly heard people cheering, 45 minutes after the massacre. Despite government claims, they are not accounted for, nor is their location known.

“George Blakey, who married Debbie Layton, was from a wealthy British family. He donated $60,000 to pay the leas on the 27,000-acre Guyana site in 1974. Lisa Phillips Layton had come to the U.S. from a rich Hamburg banking family in Germany. Most of the top lieutenants around Jones were from wealthy, educated backgrounds, many with connections to the military or intelligence agencies.”

—

It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn. — Louis L’Amour

Decadent Worker #34 - 4May87

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on May 21, 2007
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Decadent Worker 34“Sex is not like eating a ham sandwich.” — Ronald Reagan

For young people who have not been kept by the Reagan Administration from finding out anything else about sex, it is far more like watching a televised commercial for ham sandwiches — or Snickers candy bars, Ford motor cars, Revlon cosmetics, etc. In the venacular of Madison Avenue such ads epitomize the sex sell.

Capitalism promites plasticism for that purpose, a process radical social sociology calls sex-scarcity or stroke-scarcity economics.

The hornier and more emotionally starved people are and the sexier and softer the tone of advertising is, the more attention commercial messages receive — and the more superfluous merchandise is sold.

In The Making of a Counter Culture Theodore Roszak says: “To liberate sexuality would be to create a society in which technocratic discipline would be impossible. But to thwart sexuality outright would create a widespread, explosive resentment that required constant policing; and, besides, this would associate the technocracy with various puritanical traditions that enlightened men cannot but regard as superstitious. The strategy chosen, therefore, is not harsh repression, but rather the Playboy version of total permissiveness which now imposes its image upon us in every slick movie and posh magazine that comes along. In the affluent society, we have sex and sex galore — or so we are to believe. But when we look more closely we see that this sybaritic promiscuity wears a special coloring. It has been assimilated to an income level and social status available only to our well-heeled junior executives and the jet set… Real sex, we are led to believe, is something that goes with the best scotch, twenty-seven-dollar sunglasses, and platinum-tipped shoelaces. Anything less is a shabby substitute… It is the reward that goes to reliable, politically safe henchmen of the status quo. Before our would-be playboy can be an assembly-line seducer, he must be a loyal employee.

“…As with sexuality, so with every other aspect of life. The business of inventing and flourishing treacherous parodies of freedom, joy, and fulfillment becomes an indispensable form of social control under the technocracy.” pp. 14-15

In the late sixties when the effects of the make-love-not-war strategy of the Love Generation began eroding its bulwarks, the technocracy began a campaign to sex-sell the whole capitalist ideology. Under a sudden surge of Stalinist leadership, the left fell over itself to cooperate ith the capitalist image makers; all at once everything sexy is labeled by feminists and sour radicals as, for one reason or another, reactionary. Just one more clue in the riddle of caviar Communist conservatism. So these days the left is drab, joyless, cruelly homophobic and ludicrously prissy, in order, we are tempted to conclude, that the right may appear all the more festive, ecstatic, tolerant and seductive.

In the intelligence community things are the same — only worse. Being assigned a mate is called “going home.” (Note the manipulative connotations of that term in view of stroke-scarcity economics.) Until or unless you espouse acceptable opinions you are actively isolated and cannot “go home.” In my experience the only acceptable opinions are endorsement of landlordism and/or agreement with Marx/Leninism; and, since I am neither a sadist nor a masochist — and therefore unwilling to applaud either the starvation of children or the persecution of anarchists — I was for many years not given permission to “go home.” I am also as loath to sanction the incredibly arrogant notion that anyone may presume to give, and therefore to withhold, permission regarding anything so personal as I am reluctant to raise my hand in order to request permission to go to the bathroom now that I am a big boy. So I still have not “gone home.”

There is also something called “going to the park,” where sometimes they let you get laid, though not very often, in return for coincidental agreement with them in one or another situation about lesser matters. So as not to let them compare with the reward for total surrender, however, these affairs are cramped, stiffling and usually of brief duration.

I am only guessing, but the whole thing looks to me like a white slavery racket to conscript agents for Dutch Royal Petroleum and/or the KGB — as whoever you wind up with when you do finally get to “go home” is doubtlessly an agent.

Note that I have twice used the and/or phrase. Having only heard of Revisionist Marxism, Stalinist Marxism, Marxist Humanism, Trotskyism, Titoism and Eurocommunism it may surprise you to learn there is any such thing as Feudalist Marxism — although we no doubt should have suspected as much all along. A messsage I have encountered more than once, though, says I could “go home” if I would sanction both landlordism and Communism.

Even were that not the case, the revelation that Marx-Leninist organizations acquire members by hassling them for disagreement and bribing them for expressing no-doubt hypocritical orthodox views explains much — France 1968, Spain after the civil war, the betrayal of anarchists at Kronstadt and in the Ukraine during the early days. Their intimidating self-righteousness is, then, only a mask for apathy of individuals who never wanted revolution in the first place.

Among secret societies there is one called the Earth, which is supposed to be against landlordism and the energy cover-up much the way Communism is supposed to be against capitalistm. Again there is a temptation to suspect the actual purpose is to behave so brutally and irrationally that the opposition will eventually seem the preferable alternative. I am told that among the fronts for the Earth is the Urantia Foundation — which not only is just staggeringly rich, but has also been around since the fifties; Earth has not yet blown the energy cover-up. Moreover the Earth, with whom the notorious munitioner Sam Cummings is allegedly involved, is reputedly the facility through which the Permanent Universal Rent Strike is being suppressed. Supposedly the energy cover-up is to be blown first, making fossil fuels and uranium obsolete, then the P.U.R.S. will occur. Meanwhile a child under five starves every two seconds and the Earth’s reputation for homophobia and puritanism in general surpasses that of the Spartans, Cromwellians and Stalinists all. Wilhelm Reich believed that love of nature was a sublimation caused by orgasmic impotency and the Earth, at least, appears sincere about ecology.

Ham sandwiches, anyone?

They’re biodegradable.

LANGUAGE IS THEFT / Jesuit: One who lives in the imitation of Satan in order to make life miserable for those who fail to live in the imitation of Christ. — Ho Chi Zen

Decadent Worker #26 - 6April87

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Decadent Worker 26“…Following the Boss Frog’s overthrow, the once dark, dank well was magnificently illuminated and made a much more comfortable place to live. In addition, the frogs experienced a new and gratifying leisure with many attendant delights of the senses — even as the philosopher frog had foretold.

“But still the eccentric skylark would come visiting with tales of the sun and the moon and the stars, of mountains and valleys and seas, and of grand winged adventures it had known.

“‘Perhaps,’ conjectured the philosopher frog, ‘this bird is mad, after all. Surely we have no further need of these cryptic songs. And in any case, it is very tiresome to have to listen to fantasies when the fantasies have lost their social relevance.’

“So one day the frogs contrived to capture the lark. And upon so doing, they stuffed it and put it in their newly built civic (admission-free) museum… in a place of honor.” — The Skylark and the Frogs, pp. 121-3 of The Making of a Counter-Culture by Theodore Rozak (continued from DW #22)

“William Goode (1957, p. 195) recognizes that ‘the elite of any profession are usually conscious of a communal identity.’ As this identity extends and becomes commonplace among the general community population, its sense of solidarity should increase. This appears to be the case with the intelligence community, the other characteristic and conditions of which encourage an identification with the professional community and virtually exclude identification with any other potentially competing community or even reference group.” — Fred M. Kaiser, “Secrecy, Intelligence, and Community: The U.S. Intelligence Community,” Secrecy by Standon K. Tefft (Human Sciences, 1980)

“A vigorous and open exchange of ideas is vital to a healthy government. And on this issue the Reaganites have a terrible record.

“The administration clearly prefers to work under wraps, unencumbered by strict accountability to the public…

“It has sought to weaken the Freedom of Information Act. It has required government workers with access to top-secret material to sign a written pledge that they will get prior approval for speeches and articles. It reversed a Carter administration policy that instructed officials to consider the public’s right to know as they decided whether to classify documents.” — “Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial, 21 March 1987

“In the context of the intelligence community, several important mores and associated norms apparently predominate — obedience, discipline, dedication, and most critically, defense of secrecy and internal security… The fact that illicit activities within the intelligence agencies went unexposed for decades testified to the importance of this norm.” — Fred M. Kaiser, Tefft, Ibid.

If secrecy is national security, than voting with our eyes shut could insure the safety of democratic rule. — Ho Chi Zen

Decadent Worker #5 - 22Jan87

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worker
on January 22, 1987
in Castro, Illuminati, The Decadent Worker, Thule Society, cant, central banking and intelligence community
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Decadent Worker 5A 1981 afternoon found me sitting behind a typewriter in Tampa, Florida, dredging up miscellaneous memories of conversations that happened between twenty and eighteen years earlier. I was finally organizing my material about the John Kennedy assassination. Most of the important stuff had already been recorded in affidavits, notebooks and tapes, if not also in the stack of large filing cards behind me. By now I was involved in the loose ends — the scraps of repartee which even in retrospect did not seem to make much sense, or at least not much history when they did, the irrelevant and the mundane. Things about Castro — I was thinking: What did Slim’s weird Nazi brother-in-law say about Fidel Castro? Not much in view of what a hotbed of anti-Castro activity New Orleans was between 1961 and the end of 1963. Most of the time Brother-in-law had been predictably rightwing here as about other things. Only twice that I recalled did he say anything I could interpret as pro-Castro at all.

“You know, Kerry, people like Fidel Castro aren’t going to respect you unless you have to struggle the same way they did.” Why, I wondered aloud, would I possibly ever want Fidel’s respect? A laugh was the only answer Brother-in-law gave me.

What was the other thing? Oh yeah, something about how very few Spaniards in Cuba had married in with the Indians — repeating the same thing, almost word for word, Slim had told me once before. And that leading up to something else. What was it? Oh yeah: his opinion that it would be a shame to fight white people in Cuba.

Anything else? Maybe. What was it? Oh yeah, something about how it would be preferable to go to war against an Asian race, instead.

Oh Jesus: That would have been, it occurred to me for the first time, the war in Indochina!

“Not only that,” I was soon told in the cant language I had developed in 1978 for communicating with the intelligence community, “it is also the source of censorship about the JFK murder.”

Finding out why all this shit is being covered up has been something more than a hobby with me since 1975. My collection of rumors and speculations involved Thule Society terrorism and sabotage intended to undermine public confidence in government and the media, energy cartel supression of anti-profitable technology and, of course, the Illuminati central banking conspiracy. So I added this one — the deliberate escalation of the Vietnam War by racists — to my already unwieldy collection.

On another afternoon a year later just north of Santa Barbara, California, I was sitting beside the road hitch-hiking and smoking my pipe. Only after I rather carelessly dumped out the smoldering ashes in front of me did I remember that it was summer in California where a few sparks can destroy miles of field and forest. As I rubbed the embers out with a pebble I thought about what would’ve happened if I had caused a horrible fire. “Hell,” I said out loud, “I could burn everything in sight, admit it and tell everybody about why the Vietnam war was escalated and I’d be doing more good than harm.” Instead, I met another vagabond up the coast who kindled a small fire in an improvised stone oven and wound up taking the rap when half a dozen firetrucks and forest rangers with extinguishers busted us or an unauthorized fire. I told them about the Vietnam war; they didn’t seem interested, but then the fire only covered about six square inches. I was fined fifty dollars. –Kerry Wendell Thornley