Paracultural Calendar for July 19

[Mark Thibodeau]

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On this day in the year *64 AD*, Emperor *Nero* gently strums his lyre and
sings a tune while watching the city of Rome go up in smoke. Of course,
this historical example of a disastrous failure of leadership has
absolutely no parallels with*Preznit Dubya*'s reaction to the Katrina
disaster, because… um… because fire is, like, the total opposite of water.
A-and Rome didn't have any Black people in it. Or at least not as much as
New Orleans does. I mean did.

***

On this day in *1979*, the Sandinista rebels overthrow the government of
the Somoza family in Nicaragua, much to the delight of... well... UK punk
rock group *The Clash*, for one.

***

On this day in *2001*, a writer named *James Howard Hatfield* - author of
the highly critical and controversial *Dubya *biography *Fortunate Son* -
is found dead in an Arkansas hotel room, victim of an apparent "suicide".
Hatfield's most contentious claim was that Dubya had been arrested on
cocaine dealing charges back in the early seventies, and that Poppy Bush
had to pull some major strings to get the charges wiped.
Yer old pal Jerky was a spectator of the Hatfield saga from pre-release
buzz for his book, to the post-release controversy of its claims, to the
attempts to assassinate Hatfield's character (unlike the individual he
investigated, Hatfield had no way to wipe his criminal record clean), to
the unprecedented *mass burning* of the original run, to the second
printing by the courageous folks at *Soft Skull Press*
<http://www.softskull.com/>, to the claim that *Karl Rove* was a source for
the cocaine story, and eventually to the author's convenient hotel-room
suicide. Shades of *Danny Casolaro*
<http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/article/id901/pg1/>. Shades of *Steve
Kangas* <http://www.psnw.com/~bashford/kang-ev0.html>.

But no matter what one thinks of the author as a man, *Fortunate Son* remains
a book about which respected social critic *Mark Crispin Miller* said: "If
there's any future for American democracy, the trashing of Fortunate Son
and its author will eventually stand out as an important early episode in
the history of the Bush reaction." Your humble blogging friend concurs with
Miller's assessment.
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