Tony Leon, My Father, Died — Cowardly, Child-abusing Fraud

Madison, Wisconsin — "I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction," wrote Clarence Darrow in his 1932 memoir.

Darrow might have been thinking of Tony Leon of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin — my late father who died this month, a child abuser, and a malignant narcissist until the day he left this world.

Tony Leon was not a good man. I won't be attending the Dec 21 service in Fondy. Don't believe what you read in his obit.

I think any human being deserves a send-off, but when you self-consciously abuse children, you're shit and the world should know you're shit.

Tony Leon was shit.

My earliest memory, one I won't forget, is the idiot lining us all up in the dining room at our West 13th Street home, when the four kids ranged in age from about seven to about three-years-old.

"You better hope your Mother doesn't die, or you're in trouble" he railed, continuing on and on, but not making a whole lot of sense.

It was a lot to unpack for a five-year-old: Why is this idiot yelling at us? Why he would suggest Mom might die, and what is he trying to accomplish with this hostile screaming?

It never got much better from Tony Leon.

Three sneak attack-ambushes against me between 10 and eight-years-old at our later Howard Ave home: Two in the upstairs hall-way, one when I was walking in the living room past the player piano.

The last attack happened in front of my Mother. And then the physical attacks stopped, either because of her intercession and objection or because I was beginning to grow.

But it was not the hitting, slapping and choking that was the big problem for me, (I was pretty tough for a little kid): It was the malice, and my knowledge that there was a hostile person who could and wanted to cause me harm on a near-constant basis.

It fucked me up. I developed a slight stutter as a young teenager and a mild generalized anxiety disorder that never really went away.

One of Tony Leon's favorite psychological ambushes after he became afraid of one-on-one physical encounters was a bait-and-switch psychological tactic the U.S. military used to use.

It was used in Basic Training to weed out those who might not be temperamentally suited for combat. The tactic was not intended for use against children by anyone.

Here's what it is: Take the innocence and credulity of a child and speak as though you are fraternal, agreeable and sympathetic. Then, without pause, launch into harsh, abusive and maligning words to cause distress, then smile and laugh. That's who Tony Leon was.

There was a lot more abuse, passive aggression and constant put-downs, but those are some of the highlights.

My Mother and I talked often. She said, he was worse towards me because I physically looked like him, and I objected so frequently. She confessed late in her life, she regretted not listening to her Georgia family and leaving Tony Leon.

I told her she was a victim, she did the best she could and had nothing to apologize for. I assured her that her life and kindness would live on through me. My Mother was actually famous in Fondy for being nice.
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Deep-down, Tony Leon both loathed himself and thought the world needed to bow to his every whim and passing caprice.

I came to understand that Tony Leon was a malignant narcissist with authoritarian and obsessive features. But it was worse: Tony Leon was an undiagnosed psychopath.

You see, I read voraciously for the pure joy of it, and escape from the lunatic. I found out the psychopathic personality traits fit this prick to a T.

We had a seal-point Siamese cat named Lady. Lady would get in heat once a while, and Tony Leon would go on-and-on that if Lady had kittens, he would drown them in the Fond du Lac River about a half-mile away.

But it is the way he described the scenario and the joy he took in detailing what he would do that I found chilling, cruel and infuriating. I told the bastard he was a coward.

To get a flavor of this feature of Tony Leon's pathology, the drunken idiot's story at a dinner instructs as well.

Tony Leon was reveling in his telling of tieing ropes onto cats and throwing the cats over a bridge into a river in Aurora, Illinois with his friends.

I told him, again, he was a "fucking coward." A younger brother, Jimmy, picked up Lady and moved the cat away from Tony Leon, but I think this was clowning intended to dissipate the narrative of hurting small animals.

But who does this shit to children? Who revels in hurting small animals? Who invests so much time and effort in deliberately causing harm onto children? Only shit does this, and I am proud that I told him so.

Tony Leon is gone and good riddance. He has been buying off family members for months now to keep the truth silent.

There is a lesson in the passing of this contemptible coward.

The truth is one person can help the world a lot more than what another can do to destroy and harm. You can believe it.

Republican Party Base Is Racist, Anti-Semitic and Fundamentalist

Baraboo, Wisconsin youth offers display of community pride

Updated: See also Jonah Raskin: A California Jew in a Time of Anti-Semitism, in CounterPunch.

Madison, Wisconsin — News out of Baraboo High School that students gave a NAZI salute posing for a Prom picture should surprise noone.

The same racist minds can be found in DeForest, Wisconsin with a police force stacked with bigots.

Or, in Fitchburg, Wisconsin with City Hall similarly full of white malignant bureaucrats and too-many corrupt, racist cops.

They vote Republican. They're white and proud of it. And racists are everywhere here. See S. Ani Mukherji in the Boston Review.

Small-town Wisconsin and rural USA are the vanguard for the White Party, the Republican Party, and criminal, hateful and violent conduct is given a free pass.

If you are a racist, Christian fundamentalist who works against Jews, Muslims and atheists, Trump and the White Party have a home for you.

You can be attorney general.

Where America is going is unclear:

Matthew Whitaker said that non-Christians should not be judges?
That concept was embodied in Germany’s “Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” Law of 1933.
Whitaker needs to go — now!https://t.co/uwWEQh0F7n via @HolocaustMuseum

— Richard W. Painter (@RWPUSA) November 13, 2018

Time to speak out.

Notes ThinkProgress this morning:

In the United States as in other countries, those old demons include Nazis and other variations of white nationalists, modern iterations of whom strongly support nationalist leaders like Trump and whom Trump has praised in return. When white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville last year, for instance — one of them even murdering a counter-protester by driving into a crowd with his car — Trump insisted there were 'very fine people' on both sides of the demonstration. 

We know where Baraboo, Wisconsin stands, where the Republican Party stands.
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A book to read for the Hitler youth of small-town America:

Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press. ©1955).

Mayer, an American Jewish writer who had gone to Germany in the 1930s, made friends with 10 people, all of whom were members of the NAZI Party. He found them courteous, funny, genuine human beings whom he called "friends."

They were also fools and certainly were guilty.
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From Milton Mayer:

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." ...

Wisconsin 2018 Gov Race—On Deer, Beer and Pizza

Pictured above is a deer sighting thought to have occurred in Waupun.

Small business and municipal police states conflict

Updated - Madison, Wisconsin— There is an old-school bar and recreational joint some four miles west of the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.

Good Badger game-day specials, wonderful people; they even cook a hearty breakfast on Saturdays.

But places such as this independently owned oasis are not thriving like one may think as the Wisconsin Badgers consolidates our perennial status as an elite college football program.

"How's business on game day," I asked a 70-hour-a-week manager weekends back, "Looks nice, man."

"It's not like it used to be," said the gentleman. "The kids are too nervous to go out, and it's risking a lot of money for a few beers."

That's one problem with municipal police states, a new feature of Wisconsin society—really bad for small business. Cops today are dishonest, hostile and Republican in the Badger state. And despite the fact that most people still don't like assholes here, politicians criticizing police and celebrating cold beer is considered taboo here by many.

But, appeals to culture are still powerful, virtual winning tickets for political office.

Scott Walker's people know this. Democratic Party types don't.

Winning cultural appeals are something Wisconsin's evangelical, narrow-shouldered, whiny, and effeminate, (nothing wrong with that), Scott Walker understands.

Walker is a horrible cultural fit for Wisconsin, but he is also a craven and good liar.

Walker avoids unscripted public appearances, lies, and lies again, then plays dress-up in Harley gear, and using an excellent PR team cranks out message after message that work with rural and small-town Wisconsin.

Kids can shoot guns, horrors

For example, this week, Walker announced he has "signed a bill that eliminates a minimum age requirement to hunt in Wisconsin," the weekend before gun season, (WISC-TV).

In practical terms, the new law means virtually nothing. Deer hunting, (gun), season begins Saturday, Nov 18, and kids getting a buck is as normal in Wisconsin as drinking a beer when you're 15.

But the bill, Assembly Bill 455, is also brilliant politics.

I'm from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Growing up in Fondy, deer hunting and lakes being frozen in January are natural. It's the way it is and I love it.

Warm memories from the 1970s:

"Hey, Mike, Susie, (young teenager), got a buck last weekend."
—Way to gooo.

Or, "Susie caught a northern, (a fish)."
—Waaaaahl.

But I swear the Iowa transplant, Scott Walker, effectively knows more about Wisconsin culture than every single, politically inept Democratic Party muck combined, and I'm not even talking about the negative appeals to racism and resentment of those black and brown people in Milwaukee.

Walker is destroying Wisconsin. Democrats' letting him get away with it commit political malpractice, which in the age of the imbecile on the White House should be a capital offense.

I'll give you an example of cultural flat affect syndrome. During the Wisconsin 2011-12 recall campaigns, a Republican state senator from Fond du Lac was knocked off by one Jessica King of Oshkosh in 2011.

Who protects pizza and beer in Wisconsin? Anybody worth
listening to, that's who.

So, as a Fondy guy I told every Democratic Party muck including King's campaign that King would be narrowly defeated in the 2012 general election in a gerrymandered district unless King made an appeal to every Fondy and Fox Valley bar and restaurant on Main Street struggling in business, (except Joe's Fox Hot where cold beer and the best pizza anywhere make the place invulnerable to anything, thankfully).

This proposed appeal calls for the elimination of prohibition for 18-20-year-olds, an idiotic law making 100,000s old enough to die for their country but not drink a cold beer.

King, being a Wisconsin Democrat, ignored the advice and lost a close race in 2012.

Utterly, irretrievably hopeless.

In other Wisconsin legislative news this week, State Rep. Adam Jarchow, (R-Balsam Lake, Wisconsin), introduced a memo that will become a bill to lower Wisconsin's drinking age. It's a good bill, won't pass but it should.

Adam Jarchow is smart.

Jarchow's legislative initiative is in the Memo stage, LRB (Legislative Reference Bureau) 4551/1, and is quickly accumulating co-sponsors.

But do you think the Christian fundamentalist really likes slamming cold beer, or do Republicans know something that Democrats don't about Wisconsin culutre?

Here's the memo from for Jarchow's proposed bill; I'm all for it:

CO-SPONSORSHIP MEMO

TO:                  Legislative Colleagues

FROM:            Rep. Adam Jarchow
                        Rep. Rob Swearingen
                        Rep. Cindi Duchow

DATE:            Wednesday, November 8, 2017

RE:                  Co-sponsorship of LRB 4551/1 relating to: lowering the legal drinking age under certain circumstances

DEADLINE:  Friday, November 17, 2017

At 19 years old, there are very few things that you cannot do. At 19, you have legally been an adult for one year. Most importantly (and honorably) can enlist in the United States military, travel thousands of miles away to fight for our country, but are not able to enjoy an alcoholic beverage.

Today, we are circulating a bill that would allow a 19 year old person to legally drink in Wisconsin as long as it would not result in Wisconsin losing our federal highway funds. If that situation is not possible, then this bill would not go into effect.

The age of 19 was chosen in order to make sure that high school students are not drinking, thus causing unnecessary distractions while still in school. However, after that, men and women 19 years of age or older should be able to make that decision for themselves whether to drink alcohol or not. Further, countless hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars go into enforcing drinking laws in this state, especially on college campuses. Those efforts could be used for other important issues such as drug abuse and sexual assaults.

If you would like to sign on to LRB 4551/1, please email Rep.Jarchow@legis.wi.gov or call 267-2365 by Friday, November 17th at 5:00 p.m.

Analysis by the Legislative Reference Bureau

This bill lowers the legal drinking age to 19 years of age if doing so will not result in this state's loss of federal highway funds.

Under current law, the legal drinking age is the age at which a person may legally purchase, possess, and consume alcohol beverages and enter premises licensed for the retail sale of alcohol beverages unaccompanied by a parent, guardian, or spouse.  The legal drinking age in this state is currently 21 years of age. Under the federal national minimum drinking age law, a state that provides for a legal drinking age of less than 21 years is subject to withholding of 8 percent of federal highway aid annually.

This bill requires the state Department of Transportation to petition the federal

Department of Transportation for a determination as to whether lowering the legal drinking age in this state to 19 years of age will result in this state's loss of federal highway aid or other federal highway safety funds.  If no such loss of federal funds will result, the bill lowers the legal drinking age in this state to 19 years of age.

King-Hopper Race by the Numbers

2011 Recall Election             Votes Percent

Jessica King (D)                      28,188   51.11%
Randy Hopper (R)                   26,937   48.86%

Candidates - 2008 Race      Votes Percent

Randy Hopper (R)                 41,904   50.05%
Jessica King (D)                    41,741   49.86%

Just 65 percent of the 2008 presidential general election total showed up at the polls to oust Randy Hopper in senate district 18.

Still considering an election held in early August, a period when one never launches a marketing or political campaign, the turn-out was significant showing a general disgust with Hopper's turning his back on his community and family.

Jessica King

Against this lying, sleazing, Scott Walker-loving politician of Randy Hopper [the people who know him best in the City of Fond du Lac gave more votes to King], we may have just seen the birth a coming political superstar: Jessica King, who genuinely believes that government by and for the people shall not perish from the great state of Wisconsin.

"It is an honor to have the support of the people of the 18th State Senate district," said King on election night. "I look forward to going to Madison to stand up for the working families, seniors and students of Oshkosh, Fond du Lac, Black Wolf, Waupun and all across the 18th District. Their voices will be once again heard."