Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/26/before-breitbart-new-trump-ca.html
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Somehow I never expected to see Biosphere 2 appearing on this guy’s résumé.
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Oh ferchrissakes. The guy is a bigot and asshole, not a monster.
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Actual archive footage
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I read Biosphere 2 as Bioshock 2, and I was confused as I thought Bannon would have been a better fit in 1 or Infinite.
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I wonder what it would be like to explain this year to someone from 1993.
“Hillary Clinton is running for president. Yes, she didn’t think it would take that long either. Everything as you expected? Well, let me continue…”
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The Fort Worth connection is interesting… Ed Bass financed Biosphere 2 but before that, he was one of the people behind Caravan of Dreams. (Self-aggrandizement: I wrote started the article.) Ornette Coleman, William S. Burroughs, and Brion Gysin attended Caravan’s opening (as seen in the film Ornette:Made in America). Which gives us the following relationship diagram:
Burroughs and Gysin have their misogynist sides, to be sure, but reading their work is a hell of a lot more entertaining than reading or thinking about Bannon.
ETA:
Here’s a second-hand anecdote; take it for what it’s worth.
I was slightly too young to have enjoyed the Caravan of Dreams in its early heyday. Some years later, when I had read both Burroughs and Gysin and was getting into Ornette’s music, I found out that they’d all been in Ft. Worth to christen the place. I had a friend who was old enough to have been there for the whole thing.
He told me about attending a party in one of the Bass towers in downtown Ft. Worth. Bill Laswell was there. The guy who was tending bar was wearing a pair of google-eye goggles, where the eyeballs are suspended from coiled springs. My friend asked someone about the character tending bar, and was told “That’s Ed Bass” (whose family built the towers).
I wondered how a big venue like Caravan managed to stay open in Ft. Worth while bringing in talent like Ornette, Ronald Shannon Jackson, James Blood Ulmer etc. (because they had stopped booking acts like those by the time I was familiar with the place). According to my friend, the Caravan was very ambitious and lost money year after year. After a while, the IRS looks at such enterprises as hobbies instead of businesses, meaning that gross profit = net profit and the tax is much higher. (Again, that was his explanation. I only know enough to fill out my 1040.) Faced with this, they switched to more mainstream acts.
Caravan also ran a record label, and I picked up a few cassettes that they still had in their gift shop in the early '90s. (The gift shop was more like a head shop, minus any actual smoking paraphernalia, and a year or so later had turned into a TCBY while Caravan remained open a few more years.) My friend had amassed a big collection of their vinyl LPs; he found them all at a flea market. He asked the vendor how they’d gotten so many and the vendor claimed to have found them all in a dumpster (directly behind Caravan, if I remember the story correctly).
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[quote=“xeni, post:1, topic:84236”]once bullied women in the historic environmental research project known as Biosphere 2.
He called a female science researcher who wrote a report about safety concerns a “deluded” “bimbo,” and threatened to “ram it down her (expletive) throat.” He also threatened to “kick her ass.”[/quote]Um… Isn’t the implication here really that he only bullied one woman in particular? Just sayin’.
Also, considering he’d gotten involved past the point “when things got weird”, it is not too unsurprising that tempers were flaring.
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He’s also a wife-beater and dabbles in voter-fraud.
But yes - not a monster.
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For all the attempts to dig dirt on him you don’t need to go any deeper than “he ran breitbart.com.” That right there is worse than any of the other allegations that have come up so far.
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Allegedly.
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Yes, I concede. Bannon, who threatened to “ram it down your throat” to a woman under his management control, is only allegedly a wife-beater; his wife dropped the charges and filed for divorce, so it is entirely circumstantial and not proven.
You may wish to draw your own conclusions, should you be the sort of person who can make inferences.
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For all your headdesk needs:
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Right. He isn’t 600 ft tall and he can’t set fire to buildings with his breath. So, not a monster. Wait… what’s a monster again? I suppose he’d have to be found with a Thai rent-boy in the trunk of his car to be a “monster”.
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A little like where Bannon finds his career today.
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Bannon?
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I personally think that Bannon is trouble, that Breibart.com is crap, and that Trump is a national menace. That said, I think articles about Bannon’s activities from twenty years ago–including his alleged domestic violence–are immaterial to the election. Bannon isn’t running for election, nor has he made, AFAIK, holier-than-thou type claims.
Yes, you could say that this is the kind of person that Trump surrounds himself with, who could be part of a Trump administration, but still, I think there is so much we can look at in terms of policy that we can ignore this kind of detail about Bannon’s life. This smacks too much of Internet-style attacks on someone’s personal life for my taste.
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Hogwart’s Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers last longer than Trump campaign managers.
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