Witch hunt update
US authorities have finally released Brandon Mayfield, whom I blogged about here. Turns out the Spanish authorities were right all along and the print — a single, partial print — never matched Mayfield’s in the first place. Spain has made a more definitive match with an Algerian suspect. See this Seattle Times article.
Mayfield was obviously very stressed by the experience. He is quoted as saying, “I want to thank my friends and family for what I’ll call a harrowing ordeal,” which I suspect isn’t quite what he meant, but is an eloquent indication of the effects that witch hunts will have on an individual. Up is down, down is up, red is green, green is red, and so on and so forth. Why should anything make sense in that kind of world?
Somewhere in Gravity’s Rainbow — which I started to read, but didn’t finish — Pynchon writes, “Paranoia, paranoia, even Goya couldn’t draw ya.”
Talk about witch hunt.
Talk about witch hunts. Maybe it’ll help to dispel them.
In the movie Hopscotch, Ned Beatty, playing a sleazy CIA man named Myerson who is bedevilled by Walter Matthau’s character Miles Kendig, has to work cooperatively with the FBI, who seriously mess things up. Myerson slams his fists after announcing that he now knows what FBI stands for: fucking ball-busting imbeciles.
The CIA gets off very badly in this film, too, of course. Glenda Jackson’s character, Isobel von Sch
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