"The Passing Of A Frontiersman"

Hah! McPhillips has reservations about the alleged death of J. Orlin Grabbe.

That's hilarious, in a style that I've always admired in him.

He remarks:

"I found Grabbe a tiresome bullshitter and he found me a tiresome conservative, and so it all came out even on that score. His tendency to step over into conspiracy theories about conspiracy theories to feed the conspiracy hobbyists was something I found exceedingly annoying. If I’m remembering correctly he had it that Vince Foster was murdered by Mossad for reasons that I forget and based on no evidence that I can remember. I do recall that this made fertile territory for some to blame all of the variety of Clinton scandals on the plotting of 'Israeli agents' inside the Clinton White House. I surmised that this was part of Grabbe’s intent, if he ever had any intent.

...not to mention his "Angel of Death" script, which had a team of spooks running around with stolen banking data in brown envelopes delivered to prominent jobholders with the idea of forcing them out of various offices. Stuff like that. (For far too long, I was infatuated with his demonstrable case that The Lying Bastard would not be the Democratic nominee in '96.)

I have sometimes wondered whether he got played by someone really heavy-inside or he really was crazy enough to spin idle amusements for himself with the world's biggest recording machine: the internet. He pulled some rabbits out of hats, though -- again: he had the FBI files thing wired before anyone I saw, and the Lewinsky thing was outrageous. He got that from someone inside the grand jury room who knew the facts of the case at the moment of the presidential testimony. Everything he ever said about the PROMIS software caper that I was able to check on was true.

"Ordinary Money" hit me hard back in the day, and I think it's still a milestone piece. All in all -- even given how I got taken with his notorious "Apology" (not one of my best Usenet moments) -- I couldn't just ignore the guy. I had to think about everything he wrote, and I enjoyed that, even if I had to think harder about it as time went on.

McP on the old frontier:

"But it was a place where, once upon a time, one got high-speed rigorous training in making and countering arguments, if one could either ignore the constant bar fights or merge one’s arguments into them."

It was an intellectual and rhetorical crucible. I would note that Grabbe was as much of a notch above what one wag called "the grand theatrical lunacy of alt.conspiracy" as the rest of us at AC-ECW. I think it was Martin who called Edward Zehr the founding father of the group or something like that. I think that's about right. However, Grabbe was, to me at least, a charter member, along with people like Preston Crowe, who instituted the Dartmouth archive in early '95 at the latest. I had never seen anything like it. Here were people working issues in ways that I had long given up on ever seeing in maimstream media, and I instantly saw all the implications for those assholes. ("Oh, man... you're so fired.") I thought that it must have been what samizdat had been to the Russians, but plugged-in with technology bigger than ever before. BBS systems couldn't compete, at all.

"It was not for nothing that it was called The First War in Cyberspace."

It was Michael Rivero who called it that, and it was the truth.

It was the wildest thing I ever saw.

(Ps. -- e-mail out just now:

> Okay....now I'm confused. Either one
> is dead or alive....which is it? If still
> alive....that was a rotten trick. What
> does your gut tell you about this?

He's dead alright. That's just McP's sense of humor pissing on the grave a bit. It's pretty damned funny, really. Orlin would have appreciated it.)

A Change In Emphasis

"Drill right now
Drill today
Drill all night
Drill all the way!"

I first said it about oil.

Now, I recommend it for congress.

J. Orlin Grabbe

Bill St. Clair points to Grabbe's Web page which contains the following statement:

"We are sorry to inform you that James Orlin Grabbe passed away in his home in Costa Rica on March 15th, 2008.

He will be missed, Godspeed Orlin."

After the 2000 election disaster, Orlin and I only rarely ever saw eye-to-eye on details of American politics anymore, which was curious to me because we had so tightly agreed on principles, prior. I think the differences later were fairly superficial, but I haven't spent my time burning on Bush the way I did during the Ozark Long March years.

However, I could never forget that his 1995 article "The End Of Ordinary Money" was the first thing that I ever read that completely convinced me of the value of an internet account. He was the first person who ever paid me for something that I wrote. (I still have that check: I cashed the ones after that.)

The day that The Lying Bastard lied to the grand jury in the Lewinsky matter, Grabbe was there in alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater to let us know about the lie before TEEVEE networks were reporting that the session was concluded. When the FBI files story broke with the number "900", it was Grabbe who instantly pointed out that the real number was over two thousand, a report later verified in fact.

Who could forget his hilarious put-on of Leslie Stahl in the 60 Minutes interview at a bar called "Area 51" in Reno?

Grabbe was a handful and an original net.character. During the Bush years, I was content that he was out there raising his special brand of hell, even though I didn't pay attention to him day-by-day anymore.

Pretty good job, Orlin. Off you go, then.

(5/29 -- Kisnevi pointed out a link to "Ordinary Money" after the one I used failed. ...which I thought was interesting. Cheersalot.)