Bummer
Dion's Brush with the Law
by D. Ohmans
1998
Dion lay upon the stone shelf, glad he still had
his jacket, for a while. Almost a year later, Dion wrote
to Jefferson County, Colorado D. A. Dave Thomas: "My
main complaints are about Intervention, Inc. However,
let me preface that by saying I was shocked the night of
April 21, 1998 to be incarcerated in a ten-foot square
room with up to seven others. It was sadistic for the
officers to run the air conditioner all night and refuse
to let me wear my coat [since Dion might hang himself].
It was unbelievable that we all were expected to e.g.
have our bowel movements in the middle of that crowd. It
was illuminating that I was almost the only one who was
accused of a fresh offense, the others having been
dragged in on warrants as much as ten years old."
The stone shelf was in the Golden jail, which has
doors which lock with an affluent finality. Has windows
through which the poor prisoner can view Golden's finest
women and men in blue hard at work on the City's word
processors. As it turned out later, they are hard at
work transcribing the complaints of that very prisoner:
quite solipsistic from Dion's point of view.
On April 30, two newspaper articles appeared. The
"Jefferson Sentinel" falsely reported that Dion Illnitch
had come up behind his Judy and put her in an "arm lock"
to prevent her from leaving the house. The "Golden
Transcript" reported that Illnitch had denied ever saying
all his dubious conspiracy remarks breathlessly published
in the "Sentinel" from the police report. On the one hand,
Dion was humiliated, on the other, his integrity had been
breached. What went wrong? Seemingly a backlash from
the defeat of dominant powers had rolled through his
psyche with devastating effect. Judy had little
sympathy, a topic in its own right.
Sorting through the wreckage, several conclusions
emerged. For one thing, there was a lot of energy to be
had by associating oneself against one of America's
several megacorporations run amuck. For another, that
perhaps we live in a state built upon the torturous
doing of time by victims of those oblivious to the sadism
being inflicted in their name. The simple virtues like
loyalty and steadfastness came through as indispensable
as against the siren calls of false solutions. No one
is not guilty when he undergoes Kafka's trial. The role
of counselor becomes a centerpiece in this society of
insecurity, because everyone begins by admitting their
guilt and seeking improvement.
For another, the crucial gesture was the attitude
while going to someone who was rejecting you, with open
arms. It had something that the "zero tolerance" crowd
cannot stand, claims of common sense.
Now on this day in early May, in 1998--the year of
Monicagate--South Table Mountain still looms over us,
still virginal and magnificent. But beneath, the small
town of Golden roils with secret plotting.
Two weeks ago the protagonist was arrested
unexpectedly by the police (who else). In the middle of
the night, crouched in a county holding cell with five to
nine other misfits, at 4:00 a.m. he called Brian
Starling, his local City Councilman. "Brian," he said,
"three hours ago I asked a policewoman on patrol if she
had seen a grey Toyota. Now I'm locked up for spousal
harassment. These police are after me with a
vindictiveness born of the Mayor's humiliation at the
citizens' hands. Can you call my partner Judy and a Mr.
Hayashi, the assistant city attorney, to rein in this
terror."
Starling dared to question the circumstances of
Dion Illnitch's arrest: no charges pressed by anyone but
Golden, a charge of domestic violence when only a brief
restraint occurred. More importantly, he answered the
desperate need of a constituent in the middle of the
night, and followed through. That is the myth of
frontier democracy in action. But the sordid reality
after one month is that Starling has been accused of
ethical impropriety by all six other Golden city
councilpersons.
Tonight, we are filled with loathing for their
mendacity and arrogant thuggery. These were the
insiders who supported Nike's secret plan to put up a
parking lot, and whose payola was punctured by a
coalition representing about 90 percent of the people.
The people united can never be defeated.
Starling got off, but not before spending thousands
of dollars on an attorney and being dragged through the
mud by the press. When one is libeled in the media,
there is little that can be done. It is too late for all
retractions, a lawsuit is prohibitive, and the worst of
it is that one cannot tell who among all humanity have
read or not read the slander. Worse yet, of course,
there may be a kernel of truth to the story - feet of
clay. So one can either wait for the healing power of
time to shrink the injury into insignificance (for most,
but never for all) or slog on forward with an attempt to
embed the negative moment within a continuing forward
movement.
It is words that are assailing one's name, which
after all is itself only a word, but the latter is the
word with whose safekeeping one has been entrusted. From
an objective perspective, there is probably no one nearly
as concerned with it as are you the owner, but that does
little to alleviate the unhappy consciousness that must
re-build but has not yet even begun to do so. It is a
difficult time which presents the times of one's life as
a linear trail with some passages that must simply be
humped.
Yet there must be a secret connection of such times
with all the rest, especially with what came just before.
The globe of one's experience rotates, and exposes
different aspects of the consequences of their choices.
For Dion, the struggle against Nike's incursion into
Golden was so remarkably resonant with the public that
it lofted his existence into an unexplored mode, that of
public figure, which he seemed pre-destined to destroy.
The question whose context still has not been
presented is, how and why could a rational activist
deliver up his head and that of his friends to the
opposition, on a silver platter, as his partner Judy
put it. There must be a deeper logic to it all, and the
road to this logic lies through the accumulation of the
conscious until what is unknown may shine through,
however dimly.
Two months later, Mayor Schenck was screwing up
again in his usual vicious style. City Councilman
Starling, as mentioned above, was alleged by his
colleagues to have committed an ethical breach in trying
to speak for Dion in a crisis--was it unrelated--and it
turned out that the Mayor had called each of them in turn
for their signatures on the accusation. Under pressure,
the County district attorney cleared Starling, and the
City Council had to back down in an evening of intense
melodrama. Nevertheless, the verdict is not yet in as to
"who has fell, and who's been left behind" in this
episode. Alone in a rooming house with you tonight,
reader, Dion could observe merely that he for one was
rubbed between these cosmically Lilliputian power
struggles like a fool destined for hanging.
He was in an agonizing crisis where first the
authorities clamped their claws into his essence, and now
his blood was being sucked away by a sordid array of
so-called professionals. I refer to "counselors." He
has been to four or five of these sessions so far, and
the prospect is for a virtually endless sequence. His
lawyer ($150 per hour) sent his documents to the Kaiser
counselor, requesting a reply so that he may be
sentenced to one form of counseling or another. Then he
asked his perhaps ex-partner if she would like to have
dinner, and was invited to join her at her counselor
($70 per hour, but paid these days from the Victims
Assistance Fund, which may be replenished by a fine
against Dion). And at her counselor, the entire hour
was spent in argument--Judy could not put in a word
edgewise--and self-justification. The lady claimed that
it was unheard of for a man to suggest that his partner
should get some sleep: deep down, the world is based on
teasing, blood-sucking and the lifting of money from
those that had a little. He was left gasping for breath
at the audacity of this coordinated plot of the
establishment to find some poor insect or other, and
leave them an empty husk blowing around on the beach,
every fluid gone.
In the morning Dion had plunked down his co-payment
at Kaiser to be inducted into their conflict management
series, and the service rendered was for someone to
listen to him run himself down, or hold his head high, or
anyway keep talking as the meter kept running. The man
was paying his mortgage, the cops were in their heaven,
and the nightmare would not cease. Write if you cannot
do otherwise, brother, it is said, and brother, there is
little other that one can do when so cornered. But who
would believe such words? You have to have been there.
You have to have seen these counselors pile on for their
cut to understand that they, too, are on the take. There
seems to be no waking from this flypaper dream.
This activists' guide is becoming a rant. The
rueful reflection on how to inflict defeat on big capital
is becoming a cry of pain. Let it be so. Let the novel
become personal. Dion ended up writing his expository
document to a lawyer called Michael Cohen (arest.txt).
To explain the situation, it is necessary to
understand despair. After Judy had stabbed my wrist, I
felt the bite of a grey despair that almost overwhelmed
me. When I tried to turn my situation over to the public
authorities, the police, it was the despair that drove me
to it. But that makes it no less of a mortal mistake.
"The cops don't need you, and buddy, they expect the
same," in the words of Bob Dylan.
And counselors need to buy groceries too, and if
they get someone in their thrall who will come back and
back, week after week, with their 70 dollars, so much the
better. It is all on a different scale from that of
minimum wage jobs, and when the latter tangles with the
former, a "loud sucking sound" is heard. The solution
can only be refusal to participate, but we no longer have
those convenient draft cards to burn. When one becomes
trapped in these machinations, it is possible to squint
a little at your counselor, and see the same leering
presence, grinning like a mask, who was sitting there at
your last appointment. The media are in on the gig, the
hospitals, and the late-model cars keep spinning along
toward the mall. Perhaps Hegel was right that when peace
putrifies, war is needful so that humankind can be
reminded of ultimate issues. So is it time to go back to
the coffee house and push pawns with James King, who was
accused of offing four bank guards and writing a novel
about it but got off free and clear.
Amazing! Just as the door slid shut on the wondrous
rush that was the anti-Nike campaign, it slides shut
today on the nightmare that has been Dion's subjection to
the police, legal and judicial system. The roving eye
looks elsewhere, and bourgeois common sense returns to
its dominant position to conceal the awful underpinnings
of our society. His partner Judy, who just yesterday was
gloating that he would get 36 weeks of Maximum
Counseling, now makes the most of the fact that he
settled for 15, deciding not to go to trial. The night of
the long knives ends, the claws and fangs are withdrawn
for me, but go on for so many others. One question is,
how to express what was seen, how not to repress what was
learned, how to communicate the rage of those
marginalized by the process that keeps the majority
blissfully or blindly afloat.
The pendulum argument. As "Westword" reported on
6-17-98, "Jefferson County's Fast Track program was the
first county level project of its kind in Colorado,
funded as part of a $645,000 federal Violence Against
Women (VAWA) grant given to the county for its
'comprehensive community response' to domestic violence
...$576,000 from grants earmarked 'to encourage arrest
policies in domestic violence cases.'" So Dion was a
guinea pig, fodder for a pilot project.
"Following the passage of the statewide mandatory
arrest law in 1994, the number of arrests skyrocketed."
Westword reports that "arrests were up 12 percent last
year." One police officer said, "If there's probable
cause, which in this case can be as little as her saying,
'He called me a bitch on the telephone and scared me,"
he's going to jail." And "the result, say a half dozen
officers who spoke to Westword, is pressure to 'arrest
now and let the courts sort them out later.'"
One attorney, Patrick Mulligan, believes that
"there's a legitimate question of whether we're trying
to treat a significant social problem with a knee-jerk
response that essentially throws civil and constitutional
rights out the window." He says that "in 11 years as a
defense lawyer, he's had more 'truly innocent' clients
charged with domestic violence misdemeanors than for any
other crime, in part because the normal 'weeding out'
process that cops and prosecutors go through has itself
been weeded out by laws that have taken discrection away
from law enforcement authorities." He notes that "many
of the advocates, not to mention the therapists who run
the counseling programs, are making a living from the
system they've helped create and maintain."
It is necessary, I think, to trust in narrative to
reveal the shapes that are intuited and then lost. It is
needful to spell out the actual events of each minute and
each day, because that is what history itself did, albeit
on an infinitely greater scale. Reality had to unfold
the way it did. It would be a work of reconstruction, of
research, to name the names and describe the moments of
the process, to express one's judgments by depicting how
each player impinged on one's personal reality.
The two processes, defeating Nike and defending
against the law's incursion, simply had to be related.
They had the same inner structure. They had a beginning,
middle and end, in more than a tautological sense. They
revealed a reality for several months, and then moved on.
Alexander Cockburn wrote of the debacle which hit
Teamsters president Ron Carey after the success of the
UPS strike, "One does not exact a major victory from
capital without expecting retribution, and retribution
duly followed. The reformers gloomily hunkered down for
the far more familiar process of setback and reverse"
(The Nation, 5-18-98). A month later, he wrote,
"McCarthyism at its peak could not begin to match the
far-reaching state fascism that is everyday America" (The
Nation, 6-22-98).
About the time the doorknob broke, as Bob Dylan puts
it, Dion was hit with an hourly levy of $150 from his
attorney for about six hours, court costs of $138,
probation costs of $420, and counseling costs of $675.
Meanwhile, Judy had evicted him, so he bought a trailer
for about 10K. The only way to pay for all this has
seemed to be to sell off my share of our residence.
There are those, however, who get in the cross hairs of
this vicious, vindictive apparatus with worse fines and
lesser resources, and often they never emerge whole into
the sunny light of bourgeois common sense freedom.
Only the mechanism behind these connections is still
unclear. The segment of the proletariat who are caught
in the nightmare judicial bureaucracy do not even have
the rigid ego development that allows one to bring money
to bear in a strategic and tactical manner to save their
lives: they barely balance their checkbooks, if they
have checkbooks. They live by their personalities, and
even in a holding cell they are remarkably cheerful. But
the dominant bourgeoisie do not realize the depth of the
genocidal prejudice they are bringing to bear as they
play their accursed stacked deck.
June 19th. The hammer blows continue. Illnitch
feels bruised down to his very bones by his milieu. The
"Jefferson Sentinel" has struck again. The same reporter
who reported that he held Judy hostage in an arm lock
called him last week about his nolo contendere plea. He
hung up on her. Now the new issue of her weekly rag has
Dion's mug shot on page three, cross eyed and apparently
criminally insane, with his name listed twice: in the
headline and under the picture. "Illnitch" is dragged
through the mud. "Illnitch pleads no contest" is the
news, recapitulating the entire non-story of two months
ago. The remarkable thing is that one feels an actual
physical bone-weariness. This low reporter has done her
utmost to inflict maximum damage upon him, and for what.
To sell papers. May one meet her on level ground some
day.
September 28th. It still goes on. In the morning
Steve from Intervention tells me that my 15 weeks, now
completed, will be extended to 36. It's the law, he
says. So I fax my plea to the judge. By nightfall
the injustice to the literate is averted.
Checking in one last time in 1998, we assume:
December 31st. Once again the switch is turned in the
mind of the felon, and he becomes an animal on the run.
Dion should have known when yellow press editor Jan Couch
offered to take his picture for Best PR of the Year that
he was scheduled for another kick. The selfsame smiler
introduced by name on the cover is again so identified
within as the Councilman's friend who was arrested for
domestic violence. And so a long history of non-violence
in practice is negated for a small-town thrill.
And so, dear reader, we arrive at the obscure
intuition that the meaning of the event lies in its
elucidation. Hegel said as much, seeking that moment
when scientific description, merging with the detail of
reality itself, would theoretically resemble Absolute
Spirit. But these things happened. They happened in the
early months of 1998, and contained all the incredibly
rich detail of reality as it is lived. My own depiction
can only be a pale replica of the original. The depiction
must be re-attempted, or simply held, mostly locked in
the terrified memory and arrogant consciousness of Dion
Illnitch, one of the insignificant pebbles about which
the wild waters of Golden's history roared.
And here it is February of the following year.
Eraserhead at Intervention Inc. has departed, to be
replaced by tough Scott, who tried to get me to pay an
extra hundred dollars for their unwelcome services.
"I've seen the fire of a woman's scorn, turn her
heart of gold to steel." -Willie Nelson-
Dion was amazed in March when Judy got someone else
to do the Web page for the Northwest Parkway group. The
woman will not rest until after the offending member is
eradicated.
Every once in a while, Dion would get antsy to post
some email, usually political, to which Judy would
respond with public quotes like, "Dion regularly shoots
off his mouth with misinformation and invective. Give no
validity to what he says." At the same time, she would
be acting courteously with regard to Dion's kindnesses
paid to her.
How did the question of counseling play out.
Almost a year after the incident, Judy discovered
that she felt pained by the fact that Dion had never
agreed to joint counseling with her. So Dion, ever
forgiving, agreed to have her schedule such an
altercation with an Imago Therapist named Bloom. But
some subsequent surgery of Judy's pre-empted the
appointment. Judy then stated that it was probably
pointless - something about beating a horse.
Dion's year under his deferred judgement ended,
about the time a neoplasm of his prostate gland
intervened, and his concerns became more medical than
legal.
As the future unfolded into the past, the bell curve
of estrogen-deficiency induced slights tapered off, as
Dion became weary of his continued attempts at
reconciliation.
On June 25th, 2001, Dion had the following email
exchange with Judy. He could stand her denial no longer
She wrote: (interesting - while filing I found a letter
you had written me two years before we broke up, saying
that you were going to move out - I had forgotten about
that - so clearly that was your idea all along). At this
point Dion answered: I was going to stay with you forever
because I adored your daughter.
Dion's new girlfriend Barbara came and went. "What
a bummer," said Dion.
Then he fell asleep on a stone shelf and dreamt of
Pueblo Angelina.
RAIN POEM
Gray water floods the earth and sky.
Grass, trees respond with green.
The soft tap of drip-drop massages my soul,
Relieved of the blue frenzy of sunshine.
--Judy Denison, May 2011
ABUNDANCE
Carefree blossoms cast away their petals,
Gaily gracing earth;
Colored trees then toss away their leaves,
Hilarious joyful heaps!
--Judy Denison, April 2015
WINTER HAS NO YELLOW
Winter has no yellow.
There's red for Christmas cheer;
Green for fragrant fir;
Blue and silver snow,
Clear blue skies, and stars.
Winter has no yellow.
Yellow bursts upon us!
Bright new sun, and crocus,
Daffodil, and tulip,
Dandelion sunburst,
And forsythia.
Sudden spring, rejoice!
--Judy Denison, April 2015
