The Strange History of Okinawa’s Shuri Castle

                     “I do love these ancient ruins:

                      We never tread upon them but we set

                      Our foot upon some reverend history.”  

                         —John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

When I lived in Okinawa (1969 to 1972), the island’s most significant architectural site was only a ghostly footnote for the few of us among the occupying military forces, dependents, and DOD personnel at all interested in Ryukyuan history.  I’d read that the island used to be ruled by three clans, each operating from stone castle/fortresses (gusuku). You couldn’t get to the main northern castle, Nakijin,even if you’d wanted to, as the roads had been bombed out.  Nakagusuku (in the middle, nearest to my house) was basically a pile of stones with a barely identifiable gate that made it vaguely picturesque. Of the once magnificent Shuri Castle, in the capital city of Naha, which became the seat of a consolidated Ryukyu kingdom in 1429, no discernible traces remained — certainly not any remarkable enough to go look at them. 

Nakagusuku, Central Okinawa (naka = middle;  gusuku = castle/fortress).
The site has been tidied up since the 1970s but not rebuilt.

Imagine my surprise when, a couple of weeks ago, engaged in the random web browsing that has superseded rifling through card catalogs, I came across links to Shuri Castle, including photos like the one at the beginning of this blog.  Where in the heck did this historical confection come from?  Was it a high-tech heritage shrinky dink or maybe a theme park hologram?

How did this happen?  Answering this question requires a trip in the way-back machine.

Like forty-four years ago this month, when the United States and Japan signed the ‘Reversion Agreement,’ which was to transfer control of Okinawa. Okinawa had been the site of the last major Pacific Theater battle, resulting in huge casualties (1 of 4 Okinawans were killed, a distressing number of whom committed suicide on Imperial orders) and destruction of every structure taller than hinpun, the low stone privacy walls that block evil spirits as well as prying eyes.  From the end of World War II to 1971, Okinawa had been ruled by the U.S. military headed by a High Commissioner, the top-ranking American officer on the island. ‘Reversion’ was part of a geopolitical deal that allowed the U.S. to retain most of its military bases on Okinawa while acknowledging Japan’s new status as an important East Asian ally and trading partner.

Shuri Castle during and after the Battle of Okinawa, 1945 

(which ended seventy years ago this month)

'Reversion,' however, was based on revisionist history, Japan-style.  Until the 17th-century Tokugawa Shogunate, Okinawa had been an independent kingdom with strong cultural and economic ties to China.  Although the Satsuma clan invaded the islands in 1609 and briefly occupied Shuri Castle, Okinawa remained somewhat autonomous although firmly roped into Japan’s sphere of influence.  Only between 1879 and 1945 was Okinawa actually considered to be a part of Japan, albeit a backward country-cousin part with nothing much to recommend it except being the birthplace of karate and of bingata, distinctive dyed banana-leaf textiles. 

Karate practice, Shuri Castle, 1938;  Karate demonstration, Shuri Castle, 2003.

Performer at Shuri Castle folkloric festival, dressed in traditional bingata kimono;

souvenir bingata featuring Shuri Castle.

Some Okinawans demonstrated against Reversion. I remember seeing people in red and white headbands clustered in front of military checkpoints, shouting about dokuritsu. They were claiming (accurately) that the Ryukyus were not actually part of Japan and demanding independence instead, demands ignored by the Superpower and Would-be Superpower negotiating Okinawa’s political fate.  But virtually drowning out calls for independence was a deep-seated resentment against the massive American occupying presence, a resentment that culminated in the “Koza Uprising” in December, 1970.  Given the choice between United States or Japanese rule, most Okinawans preferred the latter.

MPs patrolling Koza after ‘riots’ stemming from a traffic accident involving an American driver and an Okinawan pedestrian.  Approximately 60 people were injured and 80 cars were burned. Koza (now Okinawa City) was about half a mile from my house.  

Contributing to the dismissal of independence claims was the sad fact that material evidence of Okinawa’s autonomous history had been reduced to rubble, most notably the Shuri Castle complex.  But It wasn’t only the devastation visited by World War II that made Shuri Castle and its meanings invisible in Reversion talks.  It was also the way Meiji and Showa Japan repurposed it, particularly in the militarily expansionist decades between the two World Wars.  

The first repurpose was turning Shuri Castle into a military barracks, a logical move for an aggressive state bent on increasing its East Asian dominance.  With Taiwan, China, Manchuria, and Korea in its sights, Japan treated Okinawa as an afterthought, already-picked easy pickings that had nothing to contribute other than, perhaps, a strategic location for staging troops bent on more important conquests (not unlike the United States’ treatment of Okinawa during the Vietnam War years).  Further, and somewhat uncannily considering later events, it transformed what had been the center of Ryukyuan national identity into a foreign military base.

Soldiers from the Kumamoto Garrison in front of Kankaimon (official welcome gate), 

Shuri Castle, 1890s.

In 1898, after Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War, the garrison was moved and its quarters were used as a conscription office, another marker of colonial hegemony.  Turn-of-the-century plans to convert the Shuri Castle grounds to a public park came to nought. 

The second major repurpose came in the 1920s, when a fewJapanese scholar-patriots launched a campaign to ‘preserve’ Shuri Castle as an example of distinctive Okinawan architectural traditions.  The way they secured funding was to completely efface the history and purpose of Shuri Castle, substituting instead a fabricated political-religious identity.  Shuri Castle became a State Shinto worship hall, an appendage to the previously non-existent Okinawa Shrine, an instantly concocted devotional nexus for State Shintoism in which the Japanese Emperor was the object of devotion.  

The Okinawa Shrine was established in 1923 to solidify the island’s fealty to the Japanese mainland; the Shuri Castle grounds were chosen so that a former political order could be overwritten, in material and ideological terms, by the present one.

Of course, no Okinawans had ever ‘worshipped’ the Japanese Emperor at Shuri Castle, nor did they do so during the interwar years. But the bogus narrative did at least keep the architecture from further deterioration . . . until the utter ruin wrought by World War II.

And now?  ‘Shuri Castle’ is a tourist attraction.  It’s a venue for cultural pageants and a yen-generator for main-island Japanese vacationers who can’t afford to go to Hawaii.  Starting in the 1990s, twenty years after ‘Reversion,’ it has been ‘restored’ into a Dizuni Warudo destination, an 'educational' Orientalized Williamsburg equipped with staffers in period cosplay.  As authentic as the plastic cherry blossoms that used to decorate Naha’s streets (because the subtropical climate was not friendly toward living cherry trees), Shuri Castle is nearly as stripped of actual Okinawan historical meaning as it was when it was a barracks, an ersatz shrine, or a scatter of bullet-pocked stones.  

Poster for the 2008 Shuri Castle Festival.

Maybe the strange history of Shuri Castle is not all that strange.  Striving and ascendent political regimes have always reappropriated, redefined, and reconstructed material culture to serve their own purposes.  From what I can learn, the ‘new but genuine’ Shuri Castle was built with careful attention to whatever architectural documentation was available.  But it is being marketed in ways that continue to efface the original site’s significance.

I suppose it’s a good thing that Shuri Castle has been rebuilt.  If I were to go back to Okinawa, I’d no doubt include it on my itinerary.  But I’d also return to Nakagusuku, which like the other twenty-odd gusuku, remains in ruins.  It’s at places like this, or like Nakajin Castle in northern Okinawa, once the home of the island’s most powerful ruler, that speak most profoundly to me of lost histories, lost lives, lost cultures.  

Nakajin gusuku, Northern Okinawa.  Now easily accessible by train as well as by road, the ruin is included in many island sightseeing tours. 

References

Appleman, Roy E., James M. Burns et al.  Okinawa: The Last Battle.  Washington DC: Center of Military History, United States Army, 2000. 

http://www.history.army.mil/books/wwii/okinawa/index.htm

“Exposure to History and Culture of the Ryukyu Kingdom World Heritage Site ‘Shuri Castle.’”  Okinawa Clip 10 August 2014.  http://okinawaclip.com/en/detail/263

Figal, Gerald.  Beachheads: War, Peace, and Tourism in Postwar Okinawa.  Lanham MD:  Rowman & LIttlefield, 2012.

Kerr, George H.  Okinawa: History of an Island People. Rutland VT: Tuttle, 1958.

Loo, Tze M.  “Shuri Castle’s Other History.”  Japan in Focus 12 October 2009.  http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tze_M_-Loo/3232/article.html

Mitchell, Jon.  “Military policeman’s ‘hobby’ documented 1970 Okinawa rioting.”  The Japan Times 17 December 2011. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2011/12/17/general/military-policemans-hobby-documented-1970-okinawa-rioting/#.VZCfkO1Viko

Quest, Andreas.  “A Word in your ear.”  Martial Antiques 1 May 2015.  http://ryukyu-bugei.com/?p=4284

“Shuri Castle.”  Jcastle: guide to Japanese Castles. (n.d.) http://www.jcastle.info/castle/profile/69-Shuri-Castle

“Survivor looks back on madness, hell of mass civilian suicides in Battle of Okinawa.”  Asahi Shimbun 21 June 2015.  http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/social_affairs/AJ201506210012

Tanji, Miyume.  Myth, Protest and Struggle in Okinawa.  London: Routledge, 2007.

A Day of Amazing Grace

Friday, June 26, 2015, for me started early (as usual) — that would be around 5a.m.  I felt a bit morose because it’s my mother’s birthday: although she’s been dead for ten years, missing her presence is still raw and sharp. Usually my sister and I talk and reminisce on Mom’s birthday, but my sister is on vacation.  As are most of my friends.  And it’s hot as hell here.

So the day didn’t start all that well.  Errands (grocery, bank) accomplished before 10a.m., when the temperature starts flirting with 100 degrees Fahrenheit.  Back home.  Turn on the TV because why not have some companionable noise other than groans of overworked air conditioning?  

Then: breaking news (for once, actual breaking news).  The Supremes have ruled, narrowly but absolutely decisively, on marriage equality. All fifty states!  Bam!  So happy for LGBT friends and for the country.  I’d guessed that the less sweeping option (mandating that non-gay-marriage-rights states must honor gay marriages performed in other states) might be the verdict.  Glad I guessed wrong!

Enjoying watching people celebrate, reading the actual decision plus the say-whut dissenting opinions (particularly the head-scratching, logic-defying one by Clarence Thomas and the Don-Rickles-on-a bad-day riff by Antonin Scalia — guess he and Justice Kennedy are not BFF).  

Still sweltering.  Upcoming on the TV is Barack Obama’s eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a man the President knew, the most nationally prominent of last week’s victims of the sickening murders at Charleston SC’s Emanuel AME church.  

Must watch.  For one reason, the whole event — from massacre to stunning statements of forgiveness to Confederate battle flag disavowals — has been totally head-spinning (I’ve tried to write about some of it, but events torque faster than one can respond to).  For another, with all the calls to ‘address race’ (as if Barack Obama has not done so for the past eight years, as if he doesn’t by his very being), I wonder how he will handle this delicate and important assignment.  Which, at its core, is a funeral/homecoming for a specific individual, but which also seems to call for some sort of policy statement or statements, plus acknowledgment of the stunning, swiveling events of the past week.

This was the most brilliant, beautiful, moving speech I’ve ever had the opportunity to watch, to listen to, or read, or access in whatever way current technology allows one to do.

Although not raised in an historically ‘Black church’ environment, President Obama demonstrated that he not only knows but also has internalized its history, its pride, its cadences, its activism, its communalism, its suffering, its traditions of performance.  Amazing grace.  I found myself choking up, then crying, which — believe me — I don’t do often.

What’s more, the President was able to weave authentic tributes to the Reverend Pinckney with calls for social and legislative change (voting rights, sensible gun regulation, eradication of hiring bias, policing reform).

Watching this speech, at this event, reminded me of watching another speech on the occasion of another event — Barack Obama’s 2008 inaugural.  That January, I (like many others on the East Coast) was snowed in.  Plans to enjoy that event with friends were scuttled because no one could get out of his or her driveway.  So I watched it alone — still amazed that my country actually had elected a smart, cool, non-white, non-war-mongering person — and found myself choking up, then crying.  

Today, Barack Obama was the man and President most of us (probably including Obama himself) hoped he would be. Only a man of subtle intelligence and profound empathy, no matter what his race, could give the speech.  Only a man who has been subject to crazed, vitriolic calumny could understand the ethic of forgiveness so achingly voiced by the Charleston massacre victims’ survivors, just a few days ago.  

And today, it seems that it would be possible for at least some racial attitudes and their systemic institutionalizations (maybe even some attitudes about gun violence, and unequal education, and a corporate-sponsored incarceration regime) to change in substantive ways.  That we could care about our fellow citizens’ health, as well as our own.  That we would celebrate loving each other and not judge the paths that love takes.  That it wouldn’t be so hard to name the mistakes, yes, the crimes, of our history instead of weaving feel-good myths about them. That our country could aspire to a state of grace.  

This photo shows the President beginning to sing "Amazing Grace."  Here's a link to the President's eulogy for Clementa Pinckney: http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4542228/president-obama-eulogy-clementa-pinckney-funeral-service

Words and Flags and Euphemisms

Two outrage-a-thons vied for attention today.  One is about Barack Obama’s use of the scary-quotes “n-word” in a free-ranging, informal podcast.  The other concerns the “Confederate flag” still flying (but maybe not for long) on the South Carolina statehouse grounds.  To no one’s surprise, instant push polls popped up all over various media platforms, almost all of them employing either false dichotomies or otherwise simplistic choice mechanisms. Should the President have used . . . should the Confederate flag be . . . ?  

Dipping into the shallows of knee-jerk instant opinion doesn’t do much to advance civic discourse.  Glued to the news today (it’s 100 degrees Fahrenheit here, so enjoying the great outdoors is not an option), I was appalled at the intellectually thin reactions of commentators I otherwise often admire.  This was particularly true with responses to President Obama’s lexigraphical remarks.  

Barack Obama in a relatively non-scripted conversation with podcaster Marc Maron (19 June 2015), in which the President [gasp!!!] said the word ‘Nigger’ out loud. 

Very few people went beyond the scandalous word the President dared to utter:  Nigger.  His point was straightforward on the surface — the fact that most people (particularly White people) no longer use this word in polite discourse does not mean that racism has been eradicated.  Below the surface, I think, was a deeper challenge.  It’s about time someone called out this childish “n-word” (or for that matter, “b-word”) nonsense. Yes, the words are ugly -- that's why hiding behind what sounds like parents trying to keep things from five-year-olds is ultimately a way to avoid confronting real and continuing issues of racism (or sexism).  It’s at best disingenuous and at worst cowardly. It's a lot easier to get outraged by a word than by actual occurrences of discrimination, disrespect, and violence.

President Obama certainly was not advocating that we return to using inflammatory terms.  Instead, he spoke an offensive word to highlight the realities behind condescending euphemisms (cover your ears, kiddies) that make it easy to ignore how prejudice remains institutionalized in our country.  Black and Brown and Tan folks know this, because they live it.  White folks need to hear it.

Nikki Haley and a rainbow of South Carolina Politicians Call for Flag Relocation 

(22 June 2015)

The flag controversy has been discussed, often in useful historical context, for the past few days, so commentators should have had more to draw on when South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley announced (4p.m. EDT, June 22) her support of the ‘Confederate flag's' removal from the statehouse grounds in Columbia. So far, however, perceptive discussion hasn’t happened.  Media reactions that I’ve seen or read have been along the lines of:  Who would have thunk it? Look at the optics — black and white, women and men!  Coming together, even dragging along old flat top in his pickup with confederate license tags!!  Put that decrepit flag in a museum where it belongs!!!  Oh happy day!!!!

Governor Haley made a politically adept and no doubt personally sincere speech about the need to relocate the (Virginian) Confederate battle flag.  Plus the optics were great.  Nonetheless, the whiff of euphemism hung in the air like faint traces of swamp gas after the sun has scoured the Great Dismal.  Nikki Haley’s acknowledgment of those who see the flag as a symbol of heritage and nobility and sacrifice and history was a smart move but a troublingly pandering one.  Who now really thinks that way, even in South Carolina?  Doddery scions of the plantocracy, aggrieved good old boys who haven’t gotten past the sixth grade, delusional adolescents looking for someone to blame for their bleak prospects, even relatively harmless Civil War re-enactors?  

Actually, South Carolinians didn’t die because of that flag.  It’s a Northern Virginian Artillery flag.  The South Carolina Confederate battle flag (Owen’s Rifles) is pretty much reproduced in the current South Carolina state flag (palmetto and crescent moon on a blue background). 

Two things bother me.  First is ceding legitimacy, even if it’s politically wise to do so, to EVER (after 1865) officially flying the (Virginian) Confederate battle flag in South Carolina (or any other U.S. State).  I don’t need to rehearse here the arguments in this regard — these aspects of this controversy have been well covered (particularly in regard to the reasons why the South seceded, which would be to preserve the economic and cultural privilege of slavery).  Second is a more wide-ranging concern.  Although removing the (Virginian) Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina Capitol grounds is a good thing, it can also be a euphemistic swerve.  Move the flag, racism vanquished.  South Carolina is now a loving, united, forgiving place.  Umm, I’ll believe that when that state’s political power structure backs expanded voting opportunities, expanded health care access, expanded gun safety measures, and expanded worker’s rights.

Rehousing the “Confederate flag” in a South Carolina history museum should not become another analog of righteously using the ’n-word.’  Feel-good, instant-revisionist-semiotic (or locational) fixes cannot heal deep-seated cultural/historical wounds.  

It’s a start, however, just as the shift in vocabulary acceptability has been a start.  But starts should not be construed as finishes, and bandages should not be construed as remedies.  As President Obama said yesterday, and as we all should know, “Racism — we’re not cured of it.”  

Victimology

“Victimology” studies (1) the possible relationships between criminals and their victims, primarily as a tool to solve crimes, and (2) the effects of a crime on the victim.  In the wake of yesterday’s horrible Charleston massacre, we might want to consider a third way to define the term: media treatment of victims as compared to media treatment of perpetrators. 

The fact that the well-known cleric and South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney was among the victims of the Emanuel AME church shooting made a huge difference, I suspect, in how this tragic ‘breaking news’ has been covered.  Because there was a relatively, or at least regionally, well-known face and biography to attach to the carnage, news from the start was as focused on the dead as much as on the not-for-very-long-unapprehended shooting suspect.  Even as I write, the MSNBC Chris Hayes show starts out with profiles of the victims.  And not with the Reverend Pinckney, but with some of the lesser-known but in their own lights equally admirable victims.  

Thanks (!) to the media, the nine people shot dead in church have names, faces,and biographies now known throughout the country.  Their ages range from 27 to 87;  they are our friends, our grandmothers, our co-workers, our students, our pastors.  Their significance lies not in their relationship to their murderer (there was none, other than, evidently, the fact that they were Black and he was White) or in how they are affected by the crime (obviously impacted, as they are dead, but nothing further to investigate in this regard).  What is important is certainly that they were innocent victims, as innocent as the children mowed down at Sandy Hook, as the students attending class at Virginia Tech, as the moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado.  But what is also important is dealing with ‘victimology’ in a way that highlights victims per se, as real human beings with families and accomplishments and good works to their credit — whose deaths are losses not only to loved ones and friends but also to society as a whole.  Whose deaths matter in and of themselves, as opposed to simply adding to bad-guy kill counts.

I don’t remember anything, really, about the actual victims of the movie-theater shootings.  The media focused on the bizarre gunman and continues to do so.  Coverage of the Sandy Hook carnage tried to individualize the victims, but the fact that most were little children made that attempt fairly difficult. Twenty tiny dead bodies tend to blend into one heartbreaking amalgam of senseless pain; media coverage did tell the stories of the adults who perished, but the stories of their lives and heroic deaths were overwhelmed by the sheer horror of child slaughter. 

What is encouraging today, if anything can be, is that coverage of the latest ‘mass shooting’ episode has de-emphasized the ‘mass’ and emphasized the discrete, valuable, irreplaceable human lives that have been lost. Maybe one could even wish that reporting on victims as three-dimensional people, rather than as casualties or statistics, might nudge some legislators toward reconsidering common-sense gun regulation.

That’s probably too much to hope for.  But I do hope that this third way of dealing with ‘victimology’ becomes standard media practice -- that never has to be employed again.  

[Note:  I chose a photo of victim Susie Jackson, age 87, to headline this blog.  To me, her death was the most gut-wrenching . . . after living so long, and just coming back from visiting her great-grandchildren, and then attending a prayer meeting at her church home . . . ]

Rachel Dolezal and the Satanic Wolf Children of Auschwitz

"It's not the true reality, but it is my reality.” — Misha Defonseca

In 1997, Misha Defonseca published her completely fabricated Misha: A Memoir Of The Holocaust Years, in which she claimed to have escaped the Warsaw ghetto and been raised by wolves.  Its preposterousness was almost immediately called out, and a year later Defonseca (a Belgian-born woman living in the U.S.) admitted the fraud, although holding out for her book’s emotional authenticity, whatever that may mean.

The minor hubbub surrounding Defonseca’s Kamala-and-Amala-by-way-of-Adolph-Eichmann hoax was dwarfed by the tumult surrounding the 1995 publication of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood.’ Along with laudatory reviews in influential European and North American publications, this ‘Holocaust memoire’ won a handful of prestigious Jewish book awards.  It purported to narrate, from a young child’s perspective, the terrors of deportation and extermination camp ‘life’ . . .  the traumatic witnessing of the unspeakable.  Unfortunately, Fragments was as false as Defonseca’s improbable concoction.  Binjamin Wilkomirski was really a Swiss musician named Bruno Doesseker (born Bruno Grosjean), who had spent his World-War-II childhood in middle-class gentile safety near Bern, rather than being a miraculous little-boy survivor of Auschwitz and Maidenek.   

Translated into English in 1996, Wilkomirski’s haunting ‘memoir’ was much more believable than Defonseca’s macabre fantasy.  As the top illustration shows, though, Defonseca’s work had the dubious distinction of being made into a French movie, Survivre avec les loups.

Both Wilkomirski and Defonseca held to their self-crafted Jewish victim identities even in face of hard evidence to the contrary.  Another Holocaust poseur, ‘Laura Grabowski’  [Laurel Rose Willson] evidently valued the general idea of horrific-childhood ‘experience’ more than the imagined specifics: before she went on the talk circuit as a ‘victim’ of Joseph Mengele’s experiments, she (as Lauren Stratford) wrote Satan’s Underground (1988), her ‘memoir’ of being raised in a Satanic cult, subject to all sorts of devilish atrocities. 

Laurel/Lauren/Laura (1941-2002) may have been lost in identity thickets of her own making.

Wilkomirski’s case is the most complex, as he really seemed to believe his manufactured victim pedigree (and his work engendered vigorous debate about the line between truth and fiction in memoirs, and whether literary value could adhere to works published under false pretenses).  Defonseca seems more delusional (raised by wolves in the war-torn forests of Eastern Europe? Really?), and Willson/Stratford/Grabowski appears to be either a crass opportunist, jumping aboard whatever crazy victim train was puffing around our cultural terrain at at the time, or completely bonkers.

What these authors do appear to have in common is a real experience of childhood trauma, emotional or physical or both.  Rather like the media sensation of the moment: Rachel Dolezal.  (For readers who’ve been so immersed in the FIFA Women’s World Cup, or Presidential candidate announcements, or the hunt for escaped criminals in New York State:  Rachel Dolezal is [accordingly to her biological parents)] a white-woman-claiming-to-be-black — who (until yesterday) led the NAACP in Spokane WA, has taught Africana college courses, and has parlayed her imaginary ‘mixed race’ identity into other municipal appointments.)

Rachel Dolazel’s wedding, 2000; her adopted siblings are in the front the photo.

According to what one can glean from the news, Dolezal’s childhood was difficult.  Her parents, if one believes her ‘biological’ brother’s own memoir, were fanatic Pentecostal Christians who lived in primitively prayerful, isolated conditions in the Pacific Northwest.  When Rachel Dolezal was a teenager, her parents adopted a quartet of African American and mixed-race children.  Part of the reason her parents outed her a few days ago seems to be a custody dispute (over one of these adopted siblings, whom Rachel Dolezal is passing off as her son), which is connected somehow to molestation charges against the memoir-writing brother.  This does not sound like a healthy family.  But it does sound like the real-life childhoods (abandonment, adoptions, hardships, accusations of abuse) endured by the false-memoirists mentioned above, and it does sound like fertile ground for identity confusion and for embracing historically sanctioned narratives of victimization to validate frightening and ultimately incomprehensible early years.

A complicated family: Rachel’s adopted brother whom she now claims as her son, 

Rachel, and Rachel’s biological son.

Like those who have falsely laid claim to the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, Dolezal has publicly tried to connect herself to the horrors of the African Holocaust and their racist legacies by, it seems, staging race-motivated death threats and related harassments. 

This, to me, is the most distressing aspect of Dolezal’s imposture, on two counts.  First, it undercuts or occludes the very real legacies of violence still endured by African Americans, including policing and incarceration practices that —until the Dolezal story grabbed headlines — were edging their ways into serious national discourse.  Also, Dolezal’s inventions provide fodder for those who want to bash affirmative action, the NAACP in general, or honest discussions of this country’s history of slavery, Jim Crow, and their present-day effects.  Holocaust hoaxers/impostors/wanna-be’s also have had these sorts of effects, giving raw material to Holocaust deniers as well as to debunkers of people like Anne Frank and Elie Weisel (although there is a question about catastrophe memoirs and the line between fiction and non-fiction, as exemplified well by Jerzy Kozinski’s The Painted Bird — but that’s another blog).

Iron Eyes Cody, actor and ‘Crying Indian’ advertising model, was originally a second-generation Italian American named Espera Oscar di Corti.  He totally embraced his ‘adopted culture,’ supporting American Indian causes and wearing his braided wig and buckskins until his death in 1999.

As a side note, Dolezal’s invented biography includes a fantasmagoric American Indian heritage, that encompasses being born in a teepee and having to forage for food with a bow and arrow.  As opposed to people who claim Indian heritage in order to gain some sort of get-ahead advantage (Elizabeth Warren, or is that unfair?) or to cash in on casino profits, Dolezal appears to gravitate toward auras of hardship and oppression.

The second point:  Dolezal’s intense personal identification with suffering and victimized others (rather than, say, with Black, White, or Indian freedom fighters or political leaders or just with social justice advocacy that doesn’t assume being the recipient of a particular form of injustice) suggests an unfortunate pathology. Because Rachel Dolezal seems to share with prominent Holocaust impostors a difficult childhood during which she felt (to say the least) alienated from her family, she has concocted a life story that vampirizes history to make sense of her own psychic pain and perhaps to seek validation for that anguish. 

The mother of ghost child Kyra, in M. Knight Shymalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999), is afflicted by Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and eventually kills her daughter.

This may be a corollary of Munchausen Syndrome, where a person repeatedly makes herself (sorry, it’s almost always a female disease) sick in order to gain attention and sympathy.  In Dolezal’s case, it may also shadow Munchausen By Proxy, in which a mother makes her young child sick — again, to gain attention and sympathy. Dolezal has involved her adopted brother/son in threateningly racist scenarios she appears to have created.

‘Black’ people passing as ‘White’ have been well-documented, in literature and in lived history.  ‘White’ people passing as ‘Black’ have been less known, and no doubt less prevalent.  The only ones that come immediately to mind (outside the ‘black-faced minstrelsy’ tradition) are white politicians and white journalists. 

(Top) Very white Republican Dave Wilson represented himself as Black in order to win a Houston election a couple of years ago.

(Bottom) Black Like Me (1961), by John Howard Griffin, traced a white man’s travels through the segregated South disguised as a Black man.

I’m not qualified to comment sensibly about the issue of transracial identification, although Dolezal’s story does bring up how and for what reasons race is constructed. Neither am I qualified to comment on how gender is constructed (a corollary frequently mentioned, given recent news).  That said, the current discussion of transgender may shed some light on Rachel Dolezal’s transracialism. Does Dolezal resemble a person like Caitlyn Jenner, who has always felt ‘that way’ without ‘that way’ being a biological mandate?  Or does she resemble other famous maybe-not-transgender people ranging from Saint Pelagia to jazz musician Billy Tipton:  born females who adopted male identities for practical purposes and apparently, gradually ‘became’ the identities that they’d assumed?  

(Top) The 4th-century St. Pelagia adopted male clothing and become a monk, the only way she could escape her sinful courtesan past. Her female sex was discovered only upon her death. 

(Bottom) Dorothy Lucille Tipton adopted male clothing in order to pursue her career as a jazz pianist, under the name of Billy Tipton (playing piano on this album cover).  He had several long-term relationships with women with whom he adopted sons; his female anatomy was discovered by loved ones (and doctors) only upon his death in 1989.

Dolezal, however, went from up to down on the socio-cultural power scale, white to black as opposed to female to male or black to white.  That this trajectory had to do with toxic family dynamics as well as with well-meaning empathy (or self-serving manipulation of identity politics) seems pretty obvious.  And, as I noted earlier, it may have something to do with a specific pathology that translates masochistic, narcissistic needs into self-affirming pedigrees. 

The whole episode, to me, is rather sad — less worthy of outrage than of pity.

References

“Credibility of local NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal questioned.”  The Spokesman-Review 11 June 2015.  http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/jun/11/board-member-had-longstanding-doubts-about-truthfu/

Crockett, Zachary.  “The True Story of ‘The Crying Indian.’”  Priceonomics 9 September 2014. 

http://priceonomics.com/the-true-story-of-the-crying-indian/

Donadio, Rachel.  “Stranger Than Truthiness.”  New York Times Online 4 March 2008. http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/stranger-than-truthiness/?_r=0

Eskin, Blake.  “Crying Wolf:  Why did it take so long for a far-fetched Holocaust memoir to be debunked?”  Slate 29 February 2008.  http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Wilkomirski/OUP0803.html

Gibbons, Fiachra, and Stephen Moss.  “Fragments of a Fraud.”  The Guardian Online 14 October 1999.  http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/oct/15/features11.g24

Holloway, Lynette.  “Rachel Dolezal Wasn’t The First — Here Are 6 More Whites Who Passed For Black.”  NewsOne 12 June 2015.  http://newsone.com/3122057/rachel-dolezal-other-whites-who-passed-for-black/

Howley, Patrick. “Candidate Wins Election in Houston by Pretending to be Black.”  The Daily Caller 10 November 2013.  http://dailycaller.com/2013/11/10/candidate-wins-election-in-houston-by-pretending-to-be-black/

JD.  “Laurel Rose Willson/Lauren Stratford/Laura Grabowski.”  Everything 2 23 August 2002. http://everything2.com/title/Laurel+Rose+Willson+%252F+Lauren+Stratford+%252F+Laura+Grabowski

Marcos, Maria Lucila Merino.  “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy in the cinema.

From The Sixth Sense (1999) to A Child's Cry for Help (1994).”   JMM 2 March 2006. http://campus.usal.es/~revistamedicinacine/Volumen_2_1/n1/ing_1_pdf/munchausen_ing.pdf

Moyer, Justin William.  “‘Are you an African American?’  Why an NAACP official isn’t saying.”  The Washington Post Online 12 June 2015.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/12/spokane-naacp-president-rachel-dolezal-may-be-white/

—-.  “Rachel Dolezal’s brother, author Joshua Dolezal, faces trial for alleged sexual abuse of a black child.”  Washington Post Online 16 June 2015.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/16/rachel-dolezals-brother-author-joshua-dolezal-faces-trial-for-alleged-sexual-abuse-of-a-black-child/?tid=pm_pop_b

“Munchausen’s Syndrome” and “Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.”  Web MD (n.d.).  http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/munchausen-syndrome; http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/munchausen-by-proxy

Perkins, Rebecca.  “The Golden Age of Trannies in Medieval Europe: Pope Joan, Bearded Women and Other Saints to the Tragedy of Jeanne d’Arc.”  Polaris February 1995; republished gendercentre (Australia) October 2013.  http://www.gendercentre.org.au/resources/polare-archive/archived-articles/golden-age-of-female-trannies-in-medieval-europe.htm

Scrase, David.  “Review of The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth by Stefan Maechler (New York: Schocken, 2001).”  Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17.1 (2003) 161-163.  http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/Wilkomirski/OUP0803.html

Smith, Dinitia. “One False Note in a Musician’s Life; Billy Tipton Is Remembered With Love, Even by Those Who Were Deceived.”  New York Times Online 2 June 1998. http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/02/arts/one-false-note-musician-s-life-billy-tipton-remembered-with-love-even-those-who.html?pagewanted=1

Walters, Guy.  “Could there be anything more twisted than these Holocaust fantasists?  How more and more people are making up memoirs about witnessing Nazi crimes.”  Daily Mail Online 21 June 2013.  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2346193/Could-twisted-holocaust-fantasists-How-people-making-memoirs-witnessing-Nazi-crimes.html

Wilhelm, Maria. “Whether He's Black or White, the Voters Want Stebbins to Stay.”  People Online 11 June 1984.  http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20088031,00.html

Dad versus the Yard

Dad was a man of many talents and interests:  writing, raconteurship, business, sports, travel, to name a few.  He was a loving and involved father and husband.  What he was not — in sharp contrast to most of my friends’ fathers — was ‘handy.’  I’m not sure he even owned a hammer, and I’m positive he couldn’t use one effectively.  He also was not comfortable in ‘nature.’  A Chicago boy, his idea of the outdoors was Wrigley Field or stick ball in the streets. In other words, he was the last candidate for being a lawn-proud suburbanite.

Nonetheless, after growing up on the edge of urban poverty, dishwashing his way through college, marrying my genteel mother, serving honorably but not remarkably in World War II, and working as a cub reporter in Northern Wisconsin, Dad found himself to be an up-and-coming advertising guy (yes, Mad Men in the boonies) in a reasonably-sized down-state town with a well-liked wife and two young daughters.  And a house that came with a yard.

Ah, the yard. The house in which I grew up — a compact three-bedroom colonial on a corner lot in a respectable but not posh part of town — had a smallish front lawn bordered by sidewalks and a somewhat bigger back yard separating the house proper from the detached garage. We’re not talking acreage here, or even half-acreage.  But the yard was Dad’s constant challenge.

First was the lawnmower challenge.  My father dutifully acquired a push mower that he had no idea how to oil or otherwise keep in good working order.  It didn’t occur to him to avoid stones or other obstructions, resulting in ricochet bruises and expensive lawnmower repairs (since Dad could not do these himself). I remember being convinced or bribed, at around the age of ten, to take on lawnmower duty; the mower was so heavy and the blades were so rusty that I gave up after two unsuccessful straight-line passes (the grid-mowing system had been explained although not demonstrated).  

Second was the watering challenge. In Wisconsin, there isn’t much of a spring, and by the time the dirty snow deposits have melted (and irrigated the soil), it’s summer.  Which can be hot and dry enough to necessitate lawn watering.  

As unmechanical as he was, my father did figure out how to connect a hose to an outdoor spigot.  Thus he would stand in the yard idly spraying the grass, the small plot where my mother had replanted irises from her mother’s garden, and the sidewalks.  It being summer in the days when children had little to do, my sister and I often took over watering chores, as it allowed making droplet patterns in the air and squirting each other unmercifully.  But then my dad made an uncharacteristic purchase:  an oscillating sprinkler.  

No doubt with the help of a more handy friend, Dad set up the oscillating sprinkler.  Voila:  an undulating arc of nourishing moisture, great for children to scamper through on hot summer days.  And not great for anything else, as no one told my dad that one had to move the oscillating sprinkler so it could cover the entire lawn.  The result was a rotted swath of over-watered grass surrounded by sere patches punctuated by drought-resistant dandelions.  

Which gave rise to the third challenge:  weed eradication.  Again, my sister and I were volunteered for this task, which involved a long stick with a forked metal terminus that was supposed to uproot weeds.  We weren’t very good at it, as we rarely dislodged the roots.  Even when we did, we just tossed the dandelion carcasses on the lawn — where they could easily re-propagate, which they did.  Obviously, Dad’s tutelage in this area of lawn care was less than stellar.  

A related lawncare implement that someone must have convinced my dad to buy was an edger.  This tool was supposed to be employed between sidewalk and lawn to make a nice clean edge and prevent grass or weeds from creeping into concrete seams.  I think we all tried to use this tool to no avail, and it ended up in the garage, propped against the wall with other abandoned long hard things like bent golf clubs and wobbly sweep brooms (that could have been fixed with a little glue, but hey . . . ).

Years passed, my sister and I got married, and my parents moved to what they thought would be their ‘final house’ (it wasn’t, but it was their last house in Appleton, Wisconsin). This house, overlooking the Fox River, had very small front and back lawns.  Though by this time my parents could afford professional lawn care, my father’s vexed relationship with his own patch of the outdoors did not end.  Someone (NOT ME) gave him aerator shoes for Christmas.  The point of these spiked pedal attachments was that you strapped them onto normal shoes and then walked heavily around the lawn, increasing air and nutrient flow or something, giving yourself useful exercise in the process.

My father, his aerator shoes, and the lawn lasted for one encounter, as he immediately turned his ankle while trying to stomp the yard. 

His culminating Wisconsin yard adventure was setting off fireworks that caught on dry summer grass (where was that oscillating sprinkler?) and resulted in a Fourth-of-July visit from the Appleton fire department.  

Once Mom and Dad retired to North Carolina, they were careful to buy a house with a ‘natural’ yard, and they hired people to do whatever minimal maintenance was necessary.  My father was happy to enjoy the outdoors in ways congenial and familiar . . . playing golf or tennis.  When ill health made these pastimes impossible, he liked looking out the window at the azalea-strewn yard he did not have to tend.  

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.  The azaleas are still struggling along on their own, and I miss you.

Smurfing with Denny Hastert

Tomorrow morning, former Speaker of the House and Yorkville Illinois homeboy Denny Hastert will be arraigned in Federal Court.  Despite the predictable newsdrool over his alleged sexual misdeeds, Hastert will be indicted on two different counts:  Smurfing and Liar-Liar-Pants-on-Firing. ‘Smurfing’ is cute banker’s slang for ‘structuring’ — trying to avoid reporting requirements about cash transactions of $10,000 or more.  Lying in this case is, well, lying to the Feds about why you’re being sneaky with your own money.

A bit of personal background: my mother’s family was a fixture in the then-tiny town of Yorkville; she and her sisters grew up there; my grandfather was a prosecutor who once worked mob cases in Chicago Federal Courts; I lived in Yorkville for a while and attended Yorkville elementary school just a few years before another Yorkville resident, Denny Hastert, was employed as a coach and teacher at Yorkville High. 

Denny was a very successful wrestling coach (Yorkville High: 1965-1981) and a less successful football coach.  He also ‘taught’ homeroom.

If rumors of sexual abuse are true, Denny may have been messing with my friends’ brothers or the sons of people we knew.  You’d have to know how stereotypically small-townish Yorkville was back then (re-read Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or imagine Mayberry with corn instead of tobacco) to grasp how residents would have reacted to this betrayal of trust and exhibition of moral turpitude, if they had been able to even entertain the possibility that molestation occurred. Disbelief and denial come immediately to mind. Which is probably why no student reported it (presuming something unsavory or criminal happened).  And which may have something to do with Hastert’s conduct in the first place (again, if the rumors are accurate). Yorkville was a town that demanded deep closets; today it would be easier, albeit not necessarily easy, for someone like Hastert to explore healthy adult-adult relationships and perhaps leave his students alone.

Smurfs are cute and winning coaches are revered, particularly in small towns.  

But not always.

What I’d like to examine here, though, is not the ‘underlying crime’ that is no longer a crime (because the statute of limitations has run out) that triggered the cash withdrawals that triggered the Federal investigation that triggered the lie. Nor the possible reasons why this isn’t a case of extortion, with the indicted person being Hastert’s accuser rather than Hastert himself, as shame and desire to protect one’s reputation may have been sufficient motivation to participate willingly (and not illegally) in a 'compensatory' pay-off arrangement.  Instead, let’s look at the actual charges.

Regulations about banks’ reporting large cash transactions were instituted over 40 years ago, with the purpose of tracking money laundering in order to uncover illegal activities (drugs, smuggling, bribery, gambling etc.) that could lead to prosecuting real criminals.  (In 1970, $10,000 — the ‘must report’  threshold — was a large bunch of money; it equates to over $62,000 today, which suggests the need now to tweak the law, but that’s another issue.)  Because real criminals are not always stupid, some evaded reporting requirements by dealing in repeated smaller-money transactions (either by themselves, in a series of banks, or with proxies [aka ‘smurfs’]).  Consequently, attempting to evade reporting requirements also became a felony.

Fun urban-legendary fact:  the term ‘money laundering’ comes from Mafia efforts to skim gas taxes; they collected cash from proprietors of individual gas stations, and the bills literally stank of gas, oil, and grease.  Thus the dirty money needed to be laundered.  A competing urban legend has to do with protection money from laundromats.  

But but but . . . what if the cash one is depositing or withdrawing is not tainted?  Where is the crime?  We can all think of non-criminal reasons we might not want the Federal Government prying into the way we conduct our personal business.  Should it be illegal to circumvent reporting requirements . . . legally?  It’s not illegal to withdraw one’s own money, no matter what the amount.  

Recently, I talked about this conundrum with a person whose judgment and logic I trust.  She gave the example of running a red light at a deserted intersection at 2:00a.m.  Although the original purpose of the law is to curtail dangerous driving, you can still be stopped and ticketed even if you were putting no one, including yourself, in danger.  So in Hastert’s case, he knew the law (or he should have, or even if he didn’t, ignorance of the law is no defense), and he broke it, whether or not his individual action had no unfortunate consequences.  Ergo, the indictment on smurfing is justified.

The following is not a perfect analogy, but it may capture the Catch-22 nature of the smurfing charges against Denny Hastert.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that all stoplighted intersections are equipped with traffic cameras.  And that there’s an additional law that says choosing a route that evades these intersections is . . . against the law.  And that these regulations were enacted in good faith to provide a tool against car thieves who don’t want their stolen cars to be photographed (plus to gain revenue and to inflate traffic-violation gotcha stats).  And let’s say that you’re on the road transacting some legal but potentially embarrassing personal business that you don’t want other people to know about.  Thus you take a non-traffic-camera route . . . and are detected, and hauled in for questioning.  

           “Why were you driving in a way to duck traffic cameras?”

           “Um, uh, I was looking at houses for sale. Most of them are not on main roads.”

           “At 2 in the morning?”

           “Well, hmmm, it’s a good time to assess properties because, like . . . “

           ‘We have information that you met a person who is not your spouse at Motel 6.”

           “Uh, I guess . . . it was a business meeting about flipping houses . . . “

           “You’re under arrest.”

Which brings us to the second charge against Denny Hastert:  lying to the Feds.  Yes, this is a crime, a crime every semi-comatose U.S. citizen knows about thanks to Bill Clinton, Gary Condit, Larry Craig, and many other high-profile political Pinocchios.  Let’s be real:  it is absolute rock-solid human nature to lie initially about accusations of sexual misconduct.  It's not surprising that Hastert lied about why he was (legally) withdrawing cash, given that it was to keep prior sexual misconduct from becoming public.  Is it necessary to make, well, a Federal Case out of such an almost genetically programmed lizard-brain response?

Did you have sex with that woman?  Who, us?

The charges against Denny Hastert are disturbing from a civil liberty, right-to-privacy, common sense standpoint.  But in another way, they may be fulfilling the intent of the laws in question even if they don’t seem to do so at first glance.  I suspect that, once banks (one being the bank my great-grandfather founded in Yorkville) alerted the Feds to Hastert’s odd cash habits (at first big whopping withdrawals, then a smurfing series of smaller, under-the-reporting limit withdrawals), mandatory investigation ensued . . . and was continued because (1) Hastert’s post-Congress lobbying career spanned the globe from Singapore to Dubai, and thus it was not unreasonable to look into potentially shady payments or disbursements; or (2) the Feds had prior information about the sexual abuse allegations and were probing extortion charges — or that, knowing those decades-past alleged crimes could not be prosecuted, they wanted to get Denny on something.  Kind of like how Al Capone (and other mobsters whom my grandfather prosecuted back in the 1930s) were caught on tax evasion.

I will not regret whatever happens to Denny Hastert.  His hypocrisy (anti-LBGT initiatives, impeachment of President Clinton, the Tom Foley episode) makes him wildly unsympathetic, as does the ignominy he’s brought to Yorkville, a little town that means a whole lot to me.  And there’s the underlying unprosecutable and unforgivable (alleged) crime of teacher-student abuse.  Most or least of all is the sheer dumbassedness of Hastert’s actions: there are so many ways to pay someone hush, or guilt money, the easiest being a simple check, that wouldn’t have set off Federal banking alarms. Perhaps the Kafkaesque smurfing laws are defensible after all, as they may provide some sort of roundabout justice for idiotic sleazeballs who are otherwise untouchable.

Just so you know:  maximum penalties for the two charges (as far as I can tell) are, for each, a $250,000 fine and, much more devastatingly for a man in his seventies, five years in jail.

References

Balko, Radley.  “The federal ‘structuring’ laws are smurfin’ ridiculous.”   The Washington Post Online 24 March 2014.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/03/24/the-federal-structuring-laws-are-smurfin-ridiculous/

Gutierrez, Gabe.  “Dennis Hastert Indictment:  Big Questions Still Unanswered as Court Date Looms.”  NBC News Online 2 June 2015.  http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/dennis-hastert-indictment-big-questions-still-unanswered-court-date-looms-n368381

Friedersdorf, Conor.  “Why Is It a Crime to Evade Government Scrutiny?”  The Atlantic Online 2 June 2015.  http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/when-evading-government-spying-is-a-crime/394640/

Kaplan, Rebecca.  “Former House Seaker Dennis Hastert facing federal charges.”  CBS News Online 28 May 2015.  http://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-house-speaker-dennis-hastert-facing-federal-charges/

Keneally, Meghan.  “What We Know About the Dennis Hastert Scandal.”  ABC News Online 1 June 2015.  http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dennis-hastert-scandal/story?id=31443570

Legum, Judd.  “Fox News And The Victimization of Dennis Hastert.”  Think Progress 1 June 2015.  http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/06/01/3664545/victimization-dennis-hastert/

Lipton, Eric.  “Dennis Hastert Rushed to Make Money as Payouts Grew.”  New York Times Online 6 June 2015.   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/us/politics/dennis-hastert-rushed-to-make-money-as-payouts-grew.html?_r=0

Meisner, Jason.  “Ex-Speaker Hastert’s arraignment on federal charges postponed.“ Chicago Tribune Online 2 June 2015.   http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-arraignment-for-hastert-delayed-until-june-9-20150602-story.html 

Mencimer, Stephanie.  “Dennis Hastert May Have Chosen the Absolute Worst Way to Buy Someone’s Silence.” Mother Jones 8 June 2015.  http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/06/dennis-hastert-indictment-payoffs

Raab, Selwyn.  "Mafia-Aided Scheme Evades Millions in Gas Taxes."  New York Times Online 6 February 1989.  http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/06/nyregion/mafia-aided-scheme-evades-millions-in-gas-taxes.html

Saletan, William.  “Hastert’s Hypocrisy.”  Slate 1 June 2015. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/06/dennis_hastert_should_be_prosecuted_the_former_house_speaker_impeached_president.html

Smerconish, Michael.  “The Pulse:  The case against the Hastert Case.”  Philly.Com 7 June 2015.  http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/20150607_The_Pulse__The_case_against_the_Hastert_case.html

Stein, Sam.  “Congressman Who Knew Of Dennis Hastert Abuse Rumors Urged Restraint During ’06 Scandal.”  Huffington Post 3 June 2015.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/03/dennis-hastert-abuse_n_7504464.html

Terkel, Amanda, and Sam Stein.  “Dennis Hastert Hid His Skeletons as He Helped Push GOP’s Anti-Gay Agenda.  Huffington Post 6 June 2015.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/06/dennis-hastert-anti-gay-_n_7521394.html

Toobin, Jeffrey.  “The Legal Logic of the Case Against Hastert.”  The New Yorker Online 2 June 2015.  http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-legal-logic-of-the-case-against-hastert