"Lionel sought to 'peer not just into the soul of his son but into his own'..."

"... the British author Will Self wrote in [a review of the 1994 memoir, 'A Father’s Story']. 'Throughout, the sense of someone constitutionally ill-equipped for introspection of any kind groping toward a vile realization is gripping.'... [H]e wrote vividly about the uncanniness of seeing Jeffrey’s face, which looked so much like his own, staring at him from the front page of a newspaper, and about revisiting old memories. 'As I recall him in his infancy, I feel overwhelmed by a sense of helpless dread,' Mr. Dahmer wrote. 'I dwell on the small, pink hands, and in my mind I watch them grow larger and darker as I think about all that they will later do, of how stained they will become with the blood of others.'"

From "Lionel Dahmer, Who Agonized About Raising a Serial Killer, Dies at 87/The father of Jeffrey Dahmer, he wrote a memoir that one reviewer said sought to 'peer not just into the soul of his son but into his own'" (NYT).

From the Will Self review of the memoir:

"Maybe [Evan Peters] decided to watch my show to counterbalance the heaviness of playing Jeffrey Dahmer, and something stuck."

Said Joe Pera, quoted in "A BRIEF INTERVIEW WITH JOE PERA ABOUT NETFLIX’S ‘DAHMER’/What does the mild-mannered comedian think about being compared with the Evan Peters version of the serial killer?" (Gawker).

That was published last month. I ran across it because I was looking for things about Joe Pera, whose show we've been catching up on, watching and rewatching, these last couple weeks. I was not looking for anything about Jeffrey Dahmer, and I'm not watching that series, even if it's supposed to be good.

Joe doesn't want to watch it either:

What does the NYT know about me?

I was scanning the front page of the NYT, looking for headlines to click, and I noticed that the Times had picked out a set of things recommended for me. I was pleased for an instant and genuinely ready to to share Penn Jillett's love for hot baths and cold watermelon, but...

 

... I don't like the implications of the rest of it. The kiosk and the toilet are okay — lowly and functional — but don't push Jeffrey Dahmer at me, and don't juxtapose him with a person with a mysteriously drooping face.

I go to read the Penn Jillette article and the word editing slows me way down:

"But, why wasn’t more written sooner?"

Asks Melinda Henneberger at The Washington Post.

One colleague viewed Gosnell’s alleged atrocities as a local crime story, though I can’t think of another mass murder, with hundreds of victims, that we ever saw that way. Another said it was just too lurid, though that didn’t keep us from covering Jeffrey Dahmer, or that aspiring cannibal at the NYPD.

Yet another said it’s because the rest of the country doesn’t care about Philadelphia — that one was especially creative, I thought....

That would explain covering the cannibal cop. It happened in New York. As they say: Only in New York! But who cared about Milwaukee?

I say we didn’t write more because the only abortion story most outlets ever cover in the news pages is every single threat or perceived threat to abortion rights. 

Come on. Add the obvious: The media perceive the Gosnell story as a threat to abortion rights.

By the way, why are we calling what he did "abortion"? Just as a matter of clarity in the language. The grand jury report says that his method of ridding women of their unwanted late-term pregnancies was to induce labor and deliver the child. That's not abortion. That's childbirth. We're not even in the gray area where a strange term like "partial-birth abortion" could be used. It was complete birth, followed by murder. Why don't abortion rights proponents come down hard on that distinction? He wasn't an abortionist (in most of these instances), but an obstetrician-murderer. If abortion rights proponents don't want to talk about that, I'd like to hear exactly why they have a problem.

"Scott Walker Compared To Jeffrey Dahmer By Wisconsin Democratic Aide Graeme Zielinski."

Yikes.

Screen shot of the now-deleted tweets here.

At the Wisconsin protests today — one year after protesters stormed the Capitol.

As the Wisconsin State Journal puts it: "Union members rallied outside the Wisconsin Capitol on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the Republican-led Legislature's passage of a hotly-disputed measure that stripped most public union workers of collective bargaining rights."



How do they know who's a union member? There was a huge crowd, including lots of children (and dogs!) on this sunny warm Saturday:



They couldn't have all been union members. But I saw lots of generic printed signs and flags, and there were massive trucks painted with "Teamsters" and "Boilermakers" imagery.

Speaking of imagery, here's a woman holding a sign depicting Governor Scott Walker's head emerging from a hairy asshole. The sign reads "Buttholes for Billionaire$:



Another sign depicts Scott Walker peeing on the words "Public Employees." Walker has a Hitler mustache and the words read "Gov. Dick Tater":



(Is this sexist, an insult to all men, to call one man a "dick"?)

The socialists were there:



They want to tax the rich.

There were puppeteers... who had trouble wrangling the papier maché Scott Walker in the March wind:



There was this young woman aligning Governor Walker with murderers Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer:



"Wisconsin regrets Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Scott Walker." Oh, there's always so much to regret. Grisly mass murders... balancing the state budget...

... spending a beautiful Saturday photographing the deeply aggrieved.

"Glenda Cleveland was Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbor, and the serial killer could have been stopped two months earlier if police had only listened to her."

"God knows she tried. 'Are you sure?'  she kept asking police on the phone when they insisted that a dazed and naked boy trying to escape from Dahmer was actually an adult involved in a lovers' spat with him. We know now, of course, that he was 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, and that he was about to become Dahmer's next homicide victim. Cleveland's daughter, Sandra Smith, and niece, Nicole Childress, had spotted the boy fleeing from Dahmer in the alley on May 27, 1991. They were rebuffed by police at the scene, but they told Cleveland who then called police numerous times."

Cleveland died on Christmas Eve at the age of 56.

A 911 call transcript:

Cleveland: “Yeah, uh, what happened? I mean my daughter and my niece witnessed what was going on. Was anything done about the situation? Do you need their names or information or anything from them?”

Officer: “No, not at all.”

Cleveland: “You don’t?”

Officer: “Nope. It was an intoxicated boyfriend of another boyfriend.”

Cleveland: “Well, how old was this child?”

Officer: “It wasn’t a child. It was an adult.”

Cleveland: “Are you sure?”

Officer: “Yup.”

Cleveland: “Are you positive? Because this child doesn’t even speak English. My daughter had, you know, dealt with him before, seeing him on the street. You know, catching earthworms.”

"People cannot see that a story about Mr. Dahmer is a story about all of us."

Dan Barry writes about the minister who baptized Jeffrey Dahmer (TimesSelect link):

“He was seeking redemption,” [said Roy Ratcliff, minister of the Mandrake Road Church of Christ in Madison], recalling how Mr. Dahmer often spoke of being the worst of sinners. “He was seeking forgiveness.”... Every Wednesday for months afterward, Mr. Ratcliff met with Mr. Dahmer to pray. The convict said he should have been put to death for his crimes, and his minister agreed. He talked about suicide, something the preacher had flirted with many years earlier, after being fired from another church. A shared faith drew the different men together.... After a discreet memorial service at the minister’s church in Madison, after the notorious surname had slipped into the recesses of public consciousness, Mr. Ratcliff continued to be identified as the man who baptized the serial killer. Both in and out of the Church of Christ community, some embraced him for it, while others shunned him.

Well, he also wrote a book about it. As Barry puts it: "'Dark Journey, Deep Grace,' has sold poorly — perhaps, he says, because people cannot see that a story about Mr. Dahmer is a story about all of us." Oh, please! It's one thing to recognize the proper role of a minister baptizing someone who has committed murder. It's quite another to read the book he writes about a famous serial killer. I haven't seen this book, but is it the best book to read if you want to curl up with info about Dahmer or if, alternatively, you want to read a book about Christian redemption? What's with Barry/Ratcliff acting like people are shallow for not wanting to read it?

Steve Irwin mockery.

Were you upset by the little Steve Irwin thing on "South Park"? Satan is giving a Halloween party, and he confronts a guy who appears to be dressed as Steve Irwin. Picture at the link -- he's walking around with the stingray stuck in his bloody chest. Satan tells him it's too soon. When it turns out it really is the dead Steve Irwin, Satan throws him out for not wearing a costume. Dressing as Steve Irwin for Halloween actually is a pretty clever idea, and it raises the interesting question why some evil/horrible things are considered good for costumes when others aren't. We all know you can't dress as Hitler, for example, even though, in general, evil imagery is encouraged. Hitler, by the way, appears in the new "South Park." Not as a costume, as a dead guy. And he does have a costume. He's the "Can you hear me now?" guy, with a cell phone. Don't you hate that guy? Also pushing the evil/funny envelope: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer did an extended Three Stooges routine that was quite brilliant.