Well, it only took former congressman Pat Williams a few minutes to lose my respect. I say minutes because I re-read his quote to the New York Times roughly 30 times. And then I just felt sad.

“I’m very sorrowful one of the premier universities in the Rockies has been scandalized by a few knuckleheaded students,” said Pat Williams, a former United States congressman and a member of Montana’s Board of Regents. “The football team has been terribly hurt by this.”

That is the embodiment of all that is wrong, tragic and sad about the University of Montana rape scandal. These alleged crimes are being treated like a tragic inconvenience rather than a terrifying and awful wrong that’s left victims.

In those two sentences Williams just… Christ, what doesn’t he do?

Knuckleheads? Rape is NOT knucklehead behavior. Knuckleheads are like Larry, Moe and Curley (Shemp as well). Knuckleheads come out dancing in togas during a party and fall down comically much to everyone’s joy. Knuckleheads is also a now closed Missoula rib joint.

But knuckleheads don’t rape, sick men rape. Williams is far too smart for me to believe he confused the term “knucklehead” with “alleged rapist.”

To equate rape with knuckleheaded behavior is jaw-droppingly wrong. It’s like calling a serial killer an “overzealous playmate” or a genocidal murderer a “driven politico lacking a defined moral compass.”

And then we come to that second sentence. The poor football team.  The poor, tortured football team. Those poor players who have done no wrong but are now associated with the crime of rape… Just awful. That actually is sad. Those student athletes not implicated in any alleged rape have reason to be upset.

That reason, of course, is that UM and rape are now as closely associated as USC and recruitment violations. Personally, I’d rather the recruitment violations and I’m sure those players agree.

But the focus of Mr. Williams should be on the victims of rape and not on the fucking football team.

As a proud alum (’07) I just want to say that my pity is with those victims. I hope they find peace and can be happy, healthy people.

And, Mr. Williams, that’s what you should have said.

“Thinking about Image and Truth.” With those words, last week the Missoula Independent in its “etc.” editorial column took the Jezebel article that has been making waves around the country, to task:

“Last week at the Indy, there were groans as staffers read the website Jezebel’s article “My weekend in America’s so-called rape capital.” It was the product of writer Katie J.M. Baker’s recent trip to Missoula…

Clearly, Baker came with an agenda, coupled with the belief that she was the only feminist to step foot in town, and she ignored the kinds of complexities that could have made her story interesting.”

Wow. So the Indy now believes that anyone who tries to come to Missoula to get an independent outsider’s view of what may be going on also gets tagged as distorting the truth about rape culture in Missoula. That they are unable to comprehend the “complexities” of this town that would make the story more interesting to them.

Instead of just letting the story stand on its own as adding to the body of information to be written about what is wrong in Missoula — the story contains extensive reporting from interviews Baker held with Missoulians — the writer of the Indy’s editorial decided to invoke “Image and Truth” in such a way as to discredit Baker. What an un-friggin’-believable ad hominem attack on Baker. And kudos to the Missoulian and our own jhwygirl for following the story wherever it may lead, and to expose whomever needs to get some light shone on them.

Then the Indy author had the temerity to attempt some back-handed hypocritical and censorial journalistic slap by telling Baker her work was useless, and instead suggest what should and shouldn’t be written about Missoula:

“And yet, to depict Missoula as a place overrun with dumb kids who condone rape is disingenuous and useless. A better story might have asked how a town with such a good reputation, one constantly spotlighted in outdoors and travel magazines, fell so far—and a better story would have asked what we’re going to do about it.”

Well, no… Baker did not depict Missoula as “a place overrun with dumb kids who condone rape”, that’s the Indy’s strawman at work. Baker simply let the words of Missoulians speak for themselves and reported them with some commentary and factual context. What is disingenuous and useless is for Missoula’s so-called liberal and progressive alternative weekly to lambast other journalists, when they have yet to do any useful reporting on the one topic that is roiling our community. So watch out all you journalists and bloggers out there. If you don’t write about rape in Missoula to the Indy’s standards, you’re going to get attacked. Must defend image, even at the expense of the truth.

Hey Indy, why don’t you write the stories you wish others would have (instead of writing the ones that got your staff groaning). Why don’t you write some articles about how far Missoula has fallen from its celebrated high-lights and what we are going to do about it? Isn’t that your job? Or is your job to criticize those who are attempting to put some outside perspective on our good-ole-boy network and tolerance of rape culture, because… maybe it hurts your bottom line somehow?

So yeah, you got me thinking about image and truth. About how our community gets so caught up in the fishbowl phenomena that we can’t even comprehend an outside perspective on our problems (and yeah, I’m talking about you too, Fred Van Valkenberg and your disbelief at being the subject of a federal investigation).

And you know what, I think the Indy’s editorial take on Baker’s story on rape in Missoula — let’s beat up on the messenger — is about as unproductive and damaging as can be, and will do nothing to bring the dialog and soul-searching needed in this community to address the issues and bring about change. It serves to stifle independent thought, investigation and debate. You are a part of the problem here, Missoula Independent. Try being a part of the solution, instead.

Eileen Myles has a new book out, titled Snowflake / Different Streets (reviewed here by Jacob Kahn of the Indy).

An accomplished poet like Myles, who spent last spring in Missoula as the visiting Hugo writer teaching at UM, doesn’t need to fret too badly about how to get a book of poems published. This from Kahn’s review:

Myles came of age in the New York art world of the ’80s, initially as an avant-garde punk-poet who hung around the likes of Patti Smith and other art-world badasses. Since then, she’s published over 20 books (including fiction, non-fiction, plays and even a libretto, in addition to poetry), ran for president in 1992 as the first openly female and lesbian write-in candidate and shared the stage with Sonic Youth. She currently appears on the newest Japanther record, “Rock’n'Roll Ice Cream,” reading from Snowflake / different streets.

Obviously a poet with a badass pedigree like Myles has choices when it comes to publishing, and for this latest book she chose Wave Books.

I have at least a half-dozen Wave Books titles in my collection, including a signed copy of Michael Earl Craig’s Thin Kimono, so when I saw a link on Silliman’s Blog, I eagerly clicked.

What I found was a great piece written by Broc Rossell for the Los Angeles Review of books—Portrait of a Press: Wave Books.

Here’s a teaser:

If you’re getting the sense that Wave has a different idea of what constitutes a “book” or a “publication” than other publishers, you’re on to something. That aesthetic is embodied in everything from how Wave supports its poets, through and beyond the editorial process, down to the way Wave books look, and it’s a stance Wave authors buy into. The books themselves seem to be conceptualized as curiously isolated moments in a sustained lifestyle of creativity.

“The only difference between a publication and a performance is the format,” says Myles. Myles sees the book as “a trailer of the performance. When you do a reading you stand up and you read these seven poems, the event is constructed just like a book is.

“When you’re writing a poem or an essay or even a novel, it’s improvisational; you’re opening your mind up and making choices, and so the book and the performance resemble each other. The only difference is the form, the accommodation to time. When I have people in front of me in a room, I only have so much time, and I have to make choices; some of them are even predetermined. There is a downpour of language we exist in. And a writer just makes different choices for different occasions, which is what literary form is, finally: a kind of occasion.”

The personalities that make Wave Books breathe have exhibited a manic dedication to the occasion of poetry. In 2006, their Poetry Bus Tour embarked on a 50 cities in 50 days tear across the states that included a stop in Missoula (up Butler Creek).

I was lucky to be in attendance that evening as a fantastic smattering of poets bounced their amplified voices off the hills.

So in the spirit of performance, instead of text, I offer this performance by Michael Earl Craig. Enjoy!

Missoula Mayor John Engen apologized today in an email to all city employees…only, as Lizard points out, it was more likely born out of being caught than truly giving a shit about impinging on free speech.

And for evidence of that, I point to the last two paragraphs of Sunday’s Missoulian piece. It’s pretty clear that up until darn near press time, Engen was still justifying his position of trying to silence Officer Geoff Curtis:

On Friday, Engen termed Curtis “pretty passionate about his university. It was just one of those situations where it probably was not the most appropriate choice, given what his career choice is.”

While Engen said “there was an offer (to apologize) during a particular meeting. I don’t think we need to do it today.”

Later, he texted the Missoulian to say that “Curtis is a really good young officer and his was a minor mistake born of good intentions.”

Yeah. So he apologized. Only after what was probably a hundred phone calls and him trying to figure out how he could sit through the city council public meeting tonight.

A thanks to councilperson Adam Hertz for first bringing that letter to our attention. Mr. Hertz posted the entire contents of Mayor Engen’s comments here in this comment.

And once again I offer a super huge THANKS to reporter Gwen Florio and the Missoulian for the continued investigation into this sexual assault and rape scandal enveloping the City of Missoula, County Attorney Fred Van Valkenberg’s office and the University of Montana. And extra thanks to her for those last two paragraphs above. That’s attention to detail – and makes a difference even today, imo.

The disgusting underbelly of the good old boy’s club – ‘you cover our ass, we’ll cover yours’ mentality – has been pretty much laid bare over this weekend in a series of articles from the Missoulian’s Gwen Florio.

On Saturday we got Emails show UM, city accounts differ on Saudi rape suspect and UM dean implicated 4 football players in gang rape, emails reveal – a lowlight hightlight of that being U. Montana Vice President and thug Jim Foley’s great offense to the term “gang rape” and that the university’s own legal council David Aronofsky had been advised by the National Association of College and University Attorneys that hiding a felon behind the student code of conduct may violate state laws.

Geez – you have to go to law school to know that? Because that’s what many of us have been complaining about for months.

And just to repeat a salient point here – when you deny someone justice, you have violated their civil rights.

Just in case anyone is wondering why the U.S. Justice Department civil rights division is in town.

I also tend to think that Coach Pflugrad won’t be showing up to that office he still has over there at U. Montana.

This morning we get even nastier news that thug Foley sought to use the so-called Student Code of Conduct against the rape victim who had been speaking publicly about the handling of the rape and sexual assault cases at the U.

AT WHAT POINT IS FOLEY GONE? FOR THE SAKE OF THE UNIVERSITY AND ALL STUDENTS ON CAMPUS, I DON’T CARE WHAT IT COST – GET THIS THUG OUT OF THE UNIVERSITY SYSTEM. PERIOD.

The fact that his questions were even friggin’ tolerated among university administration who were part of his emails on this tactic – the story naming then-Dean of Students Charles Coutur, chief council David Aranofsky, and UM’s director of equal opportunity and affirmative action Lucy France – is beyond comprehension.

At this point, if every parent in this state – if every parent of every out of state child – and if every alumni from everywhere hasn’t contacted the Montana Board of Regents to direct them to take a comprehensive investigation and correction of this malfeasance, then they should be now.

Even more disgusting for Missoulians, the every-so-pleasant Mayor John Engen was right in there with U Montana’s Vice President Tim Foley and President Royce Engstrom. Working feverishly to protect the University of Montana image (and those that had violated the rights of sexual assault victims), even after Engstrom & Co. had facilitated the escape of the Saudi rapist – while violating the civil rights of Missoula City Police officer Geoff Curtis.

Progressive Mayor Engen? Calling a cop out on the carpet and sending him to apologize to UM President Royce Engstrom for an email he send while off duty and from his private email account?

And just to repeat a salient point here – the First Amendment which protects free speech is a civil right.

How does an elected official send a police officer – who is charged with enforcing the law and protecting the rights of others – off to apologize for exercising his right to free speech? The pornographic assault on the constitution with just this one incident is simply astounding.

And sure – there will still be those out there defending our illustrious Mayor Engen, because after all, he’s a nice fun guy. Tells lots of great jokes at parties.

Katie J. M. Baker at Jezebel picked up an important piece of information (imo) in her weekend in the U.S.’s new Rape Capitol – and those of you still wishing to give the oh-so-nice Mayor John Engen a pass would do wise to take notice. Because things aren’t going to change here until all of the problem players are held in check.

Ms. Baker refers to Engen’s interview with CNN’s with Erin Burnett, which I had caught live. I was caught off guard with Burnett quizzing Engen on reports that the police were hading out pamphlets on false reporting penalties to rape and assault victims. Engen’s interview had left me upset not only for his inability – even with the justice department in town looking into civil rights violations – to grasp the seriousness of situation, but also his convoluted excuse-making for Chief Muir’s handing out of pamphlets.

Engen also falsely puts forth that Muir didn’t believe in the literature he was handing out. Now – anyone that pays attention here in Missoula knows that Muir did put forth that most rape reports were false until he was corrected by council woman Cynthia Wolken.

Ms. Baker went a digging on that one and spoke with the woman who had brought forth that allegation.

The next few weeks were even more frustrating for Kerry. The detective assigned to her case canceled meetings, failed to call her back, and told Kerry “not to expect much.” After interviewing a tearful Gabe, the detective concluded he was so distraught that he was possibly suicidal. “I was like, great, I’m glad you’re so concerned about his well-being,” Kerry said. When she asked Police Chief Muir why it mattered if she had a boyfriend, he told her that most rape reports are false. After she argued that, in fact, generally accepted data suggests only about six percent are indeed false, Muir emailed her a dubious 2009 report from The Forensic Examiner supporting his claims. “I guess I just didn’t want you to think I was just pulling stuff out of thin air,” he wrote.

Engen defending Police Chief Muir without having the full picture was just a glimpse into his draw-the-wagon’s-up-boys mentality…and it’s even uglier now to look at now that we know the exchange between him and Engstrom…and that he sent a police officer over to apologize for criticizing the university.

Jezebel took a beating in the comments on her post a little – Missoulians and/or UMontana connected people attaching her for coming into “my town” and “my university.” I read Jezebel with too irregularity (I admit) but I do know they don’t give a shit about being criticized. Goddess bless ‘em, because this story needs all the attention it can garner.

Even today, in the comments of the Missoulian – with emails of Engen and Engstrom and Foley exposed – there are those that continue to defend the entire group of sycophantic administrators complicit in Missoula and the university’s rape and sexual assault problem.

I know that isn’t what Missoula is about. Goddess help us if it is.

With the Clark’s Fork rising, search efforts on a 15 mile stretch of river were called off after efforts both last night and this morning and afternoon failed to turn up the body of a male 19 year old UM student.

The student had jumped into the river with a female companion early yesterday evening around 6:30. Response was instantaneous, as community member Mikal Anderson was on the trail adjacent to the Madison Street footbridge (where the jump was made.) Anderson – a certified EMT and lifeguard instructor – jumped into the river after the young man who had immediately showed signs of trouble once he surfaced briefly from the jump.

I hope he gets the public thanks that he deserves for his effort.

While the loss of a life under such a reckless act does leave me shaking my head wondering why anyone would jump into the flooding waters of a Montana river, what I heard on KECI on this evening’s news leaves me very disturbed. And concerned for the still-visibly shaken Danielle Chesley who witnessed the jump.

Ms. Chesley tells the the story of a young man who was goaded into jumping by a girl – even after having expressed a fear of the water and its temperature. here is the interview, but be warned that you might find it upsetting.

My heart goes out not only to the family of the victim, but also to Danielle – who expresses concern for the (as of yet) unnamed victim’s family. While the family will no doubt struggle with this loss, they will struggle more with the knowledge that some companion of their son prodded him to do something despite his clearly demonstrated misgivings over his ability to handle the situation.

A tragedy. In some ways, a tragedy multiple times over.

After watching the KECI interview, I can’t help but think of what bullying does. Hazing is another form of bullying – and whether the victims are 9 or 19, the results can be tragic. Undoubtedly there was no intent to cause harm, but there also appears to be a lack of concern for the personal safety of the victim.

I am leaning towards this having been a situation of bullying – and I am left wondering what we can do as a society to change the community standards that create an environment where this kind of behavior happens.

Life is never perfect and there will always be tragedies – but recognizing the factors that bring about situations like that which resulted in the tragedy witnessed by Danielle Chesley yesterday evening may be one step in ensuring that a life is saved the next time someone considers pushing someone too far. Or the next time someone considers “yes” to doing what the victim did when the jumped from the bridge.

Lots of people have been asking me – today alone I had 3 people ask me about their ballots. There are only a handful of votes I’m certain about, and for Montana’s next U.S. Representative, Bozeman’s Franke Wilmer is my choice, hand’s down, as the best person to represent Montana’s interests in Washington D.C.

Wilmer’s been a favorite around this blog going back to at least 2009. In a politically schizophrenic town like Bozeman – who doesn’t seem to be either Republican or Democrat – Wilmer’s been elected to the state House 3 times, showing she knows how to represent her constituents who are clearly a mixed bag.

I mentioned the women’s gathering in Helena a few weeks back? Here’s Franke Wilmer speaking to the crowd of about 250 people that gathered that day.

I already know Wilmer’s record. I’ve watched her in 3 legislative sessions now, and I know Wilmer knows her issues. I also know she knows how to speak to them. What I like about this video is it shows the thoroughness with which Wilmer approaches the issues. It’s that kind of knowledge that gives her the voice of conviction needed for Montanan’s (and the rest of the U.S.) in Washington D.C. right now.

If I had signed up for absentee ballot, I’d show you a picture of her dot blackened…but for now I will continue to endorse Franke Wilmer to anyone who asks (and those of you reading here.)

(In a fuller disclosure, I’ll note that this last session, Franke departed from one very key issue I wrote extensively about, even before the session began: Eminent domain. That bill passed, and Schweitzer signed it into law. Still stings for me and many others. Regardless, I’m moving on.)

I have a lot of respect for Joshua Clover. He has made the choice to risk what too many American poets timidly avoid—participation:

In some ways, Clover, a California native with two volumes of poetry to his name, is reminiscent of poets like the Soviet Union’s Joseph Brodsky or Chile’s Pablo Neruda, for whom the life of the poet was inherently political. At the very least, they were not hidden away in MFA programs, but engaged with the real world and its all-too-real problems. While the American poet is often shy, poets in other parts of the world have had to be bold.

I consider any intersection between politics and poetry to be fascinating, so naturally Clover’s participation in OWS direct action got my attention.

From this Harriet piece by Mathew Timmons, I found this wonderful collaborative statement written by Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr:

And we would like to say that we think poets have been very involved in politics this last year or three, and we believe they have been involved and committed in part because they are poets but that doesn’t mean they have been involved only as poets. And this distinction seems crucial right now. It may be that the present situation asks us to give a lot of our time to other matters, and we write less poetry in this case, and that is the answer adequate to politics. But this is still what we do as people who write poetry — we are not renouncing this desire that is poetry by recognizing that politics sometimes wants other things of us. And it may be that we feel the need to engage the present situation with poems — that, again, does not make us more or less people who write poems. Maybe we are saying something as improbable as it is simple: that being a poet, if it is to be in any way meaningful, doesn’t mean being a person who engages the world through poems. It means being a person who is in the world and for whom writing poems is one possibility in trying to figure out what is needed. It means recognizing the political as the case, as the situation, before we have been captured by the question that begins, “As poets….” We ask first: what does the situation need to help it along? Poems are neither the answer nor not.

For a sample of neither the answer nor not, this week’s poem comes from Clover’s the totality for kids (2005, University of California Press) enjoy!:

*

BENEATH THE ABSTRACT LIVES THE EPHEMERAL

You cannot remember whether, at this
Corner, years before, you turned left or right.
Inside this immanent sigh, a city
Under the sign of the Ferris wheel,
The bullet-pocked clock tower. A city
Upflung from notes sprawled in the cool
Margins of the ghostly, the great cities.
City about nothing at all: it will not
Speak of me or others, of love or youth
Or anything else. And the city called
The Antipast toward which you travel
And travel, where rain is falling across
A grammar of skyline, rain is filling
The April air with silver quotation marks.

—Joshua Clover

This report has some startling numbers from the absolutely racist Stop and Frisk program. Here are some quick numbers from just last year:

In 2011, 685,724 New Yorkers were stopped by the police.
605,328 were totally innocent (88 percent).
350,743 were black (53 percent).
223,740 were Latino (34 percent).
61,805 were white (9 percent).
341,581 were aged 14-24 (51 percent).

Below the fold, a poem of sorts, or more like an imagined conversation.

*

SERVE AND PROTECT?

NO, Stop and frisk—
it goes like this: you’re black.

Just like that?

Yeah, or brown.

All suspicious?

All, if asked, must submit.

Like ‘right quick, boy,’ like that?

Yes, if you’re black
or bronze as if kissed
by the sun…

Did I mention we have guns?

No.

We do,
but if we shoot you there’s a mountain
of paperwork
and pussy-ass sessions with shrinks.

Besides
I think tasers are more fun
I’m like Zeus packing little bolts
of lightning.

Are you done?

Just one more thing. Last night I
blew out my knee
beating some dumb hippie bitch protesting Wall Street
so pushing a pencil tomorrow sounds
kinda nice

Oh, I see

You feel me know?

I—

How about now?

That’s what I thought

In an ideal world writers would be ethical. Journalists would be unbiased. Bloggers would be independent.

Now that isn’t what happens all the time.

One thing that is true, and does apply specifically to the current situation is this: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

That force was put into play here in Montana a few years back. Now it is a bunch of forces just pushing of of each other.

The shame of it is that the real policy issues then fall by the wayside. Which is really what the puppet masters wanted in the first place.

Ultimately, life isn’t fair. Politics? Much less so.

For those in any of it with the best of intentions, the better thing to do – in the words of my friend who has rattled many a cage, George Ochenski – is to Keep On Keeping On.