02.02.11
The poor sod, continued
The altie Cleveland Scene published this photo plus caption of Jeffrey Levenderis, the castor seed pounder. It’s a bit of piling on; almost all the white guys banged up over powdering castor seeds for the sake ricin over the past ten years have been generally pathetic down-and-out individuals. Levenderis is no different.
But this is what passes for journalism, particularly at the altie news blogs. Something sarcastic, meant for a cheap laugh, no interest in bringing light to a subject, even for a paragraph.
Then move along to the next something or someone else to be given a gratuitous kick down for the sake of shits and giggles.
The history of ricin arrests in the US during the war on terror years is worth telling for its illustration of the intersection of the ginned up fear of biological and chemical terrorism and how that has resulted in a process that regularly grinds up and spits out weak and confused people from the fringes of society. And that process is totally unique to America. We own it.
And if you were the survivalist he-man Kurt Saxon and had written the Poor Man’s James Bond — from which Levenderis’ ricin recipe ultimately derives — and your primary legacy was that your idiotic books had contributed to putting a noticeable amount of people in jail, what would you think of yourself?
That you were somehow stubbornly demonstrating the right to freedom of the press? And that this was a shining example to the kinds of people who actually credulously read the stuff?
“A federal grand jury in Cleveland indicted 54-year-old Jeff Boyd Levenderis of Tallmadge near Akron on Tuesday on one count of possessing a biological toxin and one count of making false statements,” reads the Dayton Daily News today.
There’s a book in this and other perplexing and common-sense defying stories unique to the American condition but connected to the war on terror.