04.27.13
The ineffably strange history of ‘outsider’ music and accused American bioterrorists
J. Everett Dutschke.
No more outsider music, please. It is a genre that apparently holds some coincidental attraction in the very small recent coterie of accused white American bioterrorists.
Bruce Ivins, the anthrax mailer, fancied himself a country music entertainer. Months after his death a friend of your host found Ivins’ vanity white label single at a used record bazaar in Maryland.
I posted the outsider music of Bruce Ivins here.
And in the earlier part of the decade, an autistic man, Robert Alberg, listed in my article The A-Z of ricin crackpots, purchased five pounds of castor seeds with the intent to make ricin and was arrested.
The court recognized Alberg was profoundly impaired and released him under a five year parole sentence. He promptly went back to trying to obtain castor seeds and was jailed.
Alberg was known in Kirkland, WA, as another outsider musician, one who sang songs, now mounted at YouTube.
Here is a cartoon describing him. (And Alberg, or friends, sell it as an album on CDBaby.)
Now J. Everett Dutschke joins the crowd. Like the first man wrongly arrested in the ricin case, Paul Kevin Curtis, Dutschke professes to be a musician, in this case a member of the band called Dusty & the Robodrum.
An album, entitled For Your Leather, is on sale at CD Baby. Dutschke advertises it as the blues. If so, then I am Ernest Hemingway.
The outsider disco blues of J. Everett Dutschke.
Readers can sample the fare here. For those with knowledgeable ears, it’s what results when someone makes a record singing over the mechanized rock and pop muzak loops that come with every copy of Apple’s Garageband for iPads and iPhones. In other words, it doesn’t sound like anyone’s actually playing instruments in real time on the thing, but rather just cutting and pasting from digital libraries provided by iJunk.
While the history of white male ricin kooks is, yes, kooky, the latest episode exposed an incredibly strange feud between two white guys in Mississippi. It pushes the envelope for the bizarre.
Today the US is loaded with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of seemingly functional but mentally ill people who believe in various tortured conspiracies. And In the last twelve years Alex Jones and others have made an industry of them and their beliefs and stories in which the US government is always said to be behind terror plots for which others have been framed.
But this is the first case, to my knowledge, where someone has engaged in terrorism, one purpose of which, at least, was to conspiratorially frame someone else.
On Thursday J. Everett Dutschke was said to have gone on the lam in Mississippi. By Friday, a friend had come forward to say Dutschke was being sheltered from the media.
During the hearing in which a federal judge released Paul Kevin Curtis, Dutschke had been fingered by the first suspect’s attorney. His house was subsequently searched a second time by the FBI and the media descended upon him.
Dutschke and Paul Kevin Curtis very visibly sniped at each other on-line as late as one month prior to the mailing of the ricin letters. Dutschke maintained a channel on YouTube with hard-to-watch videos of himself explaining things like the quality of “perseverance,” all since removed.
News stories chronicled how the quarrel had gone on for years.
Today J. Everett Dutschke was arrested by the FBI in the apparent belief that he is the ricin letter mailer. However, at this point there are still no reports of castor seeds, castor powder or ricin recipes found to be in his possession.
Charged with attempted use of biological weapon.
The outsider country music single of anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins.
Court transcript showing what the FBI had to say on the quality of material found in the letters during the Paul Kevin Curtis hearing:
Friday, different processes… crude… or weaponized. In talking with officials from WMD director this is crude form.
By Looking at it and description of experts… it is preliminarily testing as ricin, a crude form. Appears that someone took castor beans, put them in blender. Looks like sand.