Looking Deeper into Joan Felt
The press has encamped itself outside the Santa Rosa, Calif., home where Mark Felt lives with his daughter Joan, waiting for the next move from Family Deep Throat.Joan Felt, who has said she'd like to "pay some bills" from their notoriety, is described in today's Washington Post as a Sonoma State University Spanish lecturer and former Fulbright scholar.
Reporters have yet to discover her association with a spiritual group called Adidam, brought to light by members of an online discussion group about the movement.
Joan Felt's phone number, which has been publicly listed, turned up on three official Adidam sites as the contact for a study group in Santa Rosa. The pages have recently been deleted or edited to remove her name and phone number, but could still be found Friday morning in Google's cache. I was unsuccessful contacting her by e-mail or phone.
Adidam has 1,000 to 3,000 adherents, according to a Religious Movements project published by the University of Virginia.
Santa Rosa lies around 45 miles from the Mountain of Attention, a 1,000-acre "meditation retreat" in Lake County that was for many years the headquarters of the movement and founder Adi Da Samraj's residence.
Some members have resided communally and devoted their lives to Adidam, as described in a member's book about joining in the '70s:
Friday evenings were yours, every other moment was filled. We took up the disciplines of meditation, service, study, meeting and consideration, a purifying vegetarian diet, confinement of sexuality to twice a month, right livelihood, and maximizing our tithe or financial support.
Another member account from a few years later describes it differently:
I have gotten along well in the Adidam organization ... never got badly burned by anyone because of doing something I really didn't want to do. I read accounts about people being "forced" to eat a certain way, or "forced" to give money ... certainly hasn't been my experience.
A lawsuit filed by three former Adidam members in 1985 alleged that adherents impoverished themselves while the group's founder lived opulently with nine wives and 30 followers on a Fiji island bought for $2.1 million from the actor Raymond Burr.
In 2002, J. Todd Foster was in discussions with the Felt family while preparing a magazine story on Deep Throat's identity. The former freelance journalist wrote about it this week for The News Virginian in Waynesboro, Va., where he serves as managing editor:
Ultimately the story died because of money. The Felt family and their attorney wanted a lot of money, and People magazine -- with my blessing -- backed away in what would have been a case of "checkbook journalism." Reputable news organizations don't pay a penny for news.
In an e-mail this morning, Foster told me the subject of Adidam never came up with the Felts: "My partner dealt with Joan, and she didn't mention it to him either. Money was a prime motivator, but mostly for her son's law school bills."
May Divorce Be With You
This weblog now has a second marriage to debate: the four-year union of the writers Carl Bernstein and Nora Ephron.
I love the movie Heartburn, which Ephron wrote as fictionalized revenge after she and Bernstein crashed and burned. They had two sons, the second born prematurely after Carl was caught convening a rump parliament with the future Baroness Jay of Paddington, a member of Britain's House of Lords.
In novel and film, Ephron lampooned Bernstein so hilariously that I'd be amazed if he ever dated another woman without first making her sign a non-disclosure agreement. James Wolcott believes she scared an entire class of famous men from bedding female writers, calling it the Nora Ephron factor:
Now here's Maureen Dowd, attractive, witty, bitchy, a woman who likes to share bon-bons of her personal life with readers. Ephron, the daughter of screenwriters, was brought up to believe "everything is copy," and I suspect that's Modo's philosophy too. But men with a lot to protect don't want to be turned into copy. Any bigshot in a public position of power and accountability is going to have to consider, "If our relationship [or marriage] hits the rocks, am I going to get ripped in print as revenge?"
At risk of my own matrimonial bliss, I often quote fictional Bernstein from Heartburn when asked whether I enjoyed a home-cooked meal: "I never want my roast beef cooked any other way." The line's delivered in such an insincere manner you wonder how fictional Ephron resisted the urge to gut him like a fish.
Master of Their Domain
Internet pornographers got lucky with ICANN and will receive their own top-level domain.A Florida domain registry and the International Foundation for Internet Responsibility, the groups that requested the domain, will devote .xxx explicitly to sexual content, making it easier for Internet users to avoid such sites entirely or dive headfirst into the fleshy sea of sin:
ICM and IFFOR selected .xxx as the sole string for this application based upon its high ranking in the aforementioned criteria.
Although other potential strings were considered such as .sex, .adult and .porn, the research demonstrated that these strings lacked broad geographic recognition and were perceived to be primarily Anglo-Saxon.
When this registry opens for business, I will try to acquire benedictxvi.xxx to keep it out of the hands of pornographers.
I bought a text ad on Google yesterday for the search term Mark Felt, wondering how many people would hit the search engine for more information on the deep-throated stool pigeon:Chasing Mark Felt
How a 19-Year-Old College Student
Unmasked Watergate Source in 1999
cadenhead.org/workbench
The result: 525 clicks on 14,260 impressions, which cost me $26.22 (5 cents per click). Though at first my ad had no competition, by the end of the day, it was joined by ads from NPR, Kentucky Fried Cruelty, and the Washington Post, which you'd think has all the publicity it needs for this particular story.
Thomas Sowell's Fuzzy Math
On Memorial Day I read the local daily from cover to cover, one of my favorite lazy holiday traditions. I was pleased to find Thomas Sowell writing the same kind of piece he always writes -- an unhappy, factually thin screed on how one of these days, mark my words, as God is my witness, blacks will wise up and become more like Thomas Sowell.
If the share of the black vote that goes to the Democrats ever falls to 70 percent, it may be virtually impossible for the Democrats to win the White House or Congress, because they have long ago lost the white male vote and their support among other groups is eroding. Against that background, it is possible to understand their desperate efforts to keep blacks paranoid, not only about Republicans but about American society in general.
For an economist, Sowell's not very good with numbers.
Black voters comprised 11 percent of the electorate in the 2004 presidential election and went 88 percent Kerry, 11 percent Bush. The shift Sowell yearns for would amount to a 1.98 percent boost for the Republicans, hardly enough to cause Democrats to become electorally extinct.
Sowell's also spreading fuzz when he claims Democratic support is eroding among "other groups." Looking at presidential elections since 1976, it's difficult to find any demographic category in which support for the Democratic candidate is in significant decline.
Exit polls have tracked 28 distinct demographic categories in the last eight presidential elections, according to data compiled by the New York Times.
In 2004, the Democrat's percentage of the vote fell to the party's 28-year low in only three of those categories: Hispanics, Republicans, and conservatives.
By comparison, the Democrat hit a 28-year high in seven categories: people 45 to 59, unmarried people, suburban residents, independents, Democrats, liberals, and Democratic congressional voters.
The party also reached an all-time peak among circumsized white male suburban lapsed Catholic computer book authors aged 30 to 44 with luxuriant hair who are worse off today than they were four years ago.
Deep Throat Old News to Student
Now that Mark Felt has owned up to being Nixon nemesis Deep Throat, I hope the media tracks down Chase Culeman-Beckman.As recounted in Slate, Culeman-Beckman made news six years ago by claiming that he learned Deep Throat's identity 10 years earlier at summer camp.
The 19-year-old college student broke one of the biggest news stories of the 20th century in a paper for his school, which Slate quotes:
I was in the "Herons" group along with about fifteen other 8, 9, and 10 year olds ... One Friday in July we went on a trip to Long Beach, Sag Harbor, and Jacob, Max and I ended up sitting in the sand precociously talking about politics. It was an election year and I was in favor of George Bush because he had gone to the Greenwich Country Day School where I was attending, while Jacob and Max were for Michael Dukakis, although I do not remember why. At some point, the conversation turned to Nixon and Watergate ... which I knew little, if nothing, about. During the conversation Jacob told me: "Deep Throat was Mark Felt, he's someone in the FBI. I'm 100% sure."
I hope he got an A.
Update: A paper found Culeman-Beckman, who never believed Carl Bernstein's denial that his 8-year-old son could have found him out.
He'd Rather Fight Than Switch
This morning's Guardian has an amazing transcript of a joint interview with the writers Christopher and Peter Hitchens, brothers who hadn't spoken in four years.I love this exchange between an audience member and Christopher Hitchens:
Female audience member: Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all but I'm sitting here and we're asked not to smoke. And I don't like being in a room where smoking is going on.
Christopher Hitchens (smoking heavily): Well, you don't have to stay, do you darling. I'm working here and I'm your guest. OK. This is what I like.
Ian Katz (Guardian interviewer): Would you just stub that one out?
Hitchens: No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it. If anyone doesn't like it they can kiss my ass.
(Woman walks out)
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