How the “Mighty” Fell

10/26/2007

“Oh how the mighty have fallen…Oh how the mighty yet continue to breathe.” MCR, “From Me to You”, January 31, 2007

Oh how the mighty are not yet behind bars, homeless, or dead from a self-inflicted bullet to the brain. It’s been almost a year since MCR returned to the U.S., after having fled it; after having vowed to never return and to henceforth take being “part of the solution” to the next step by being either the chief of some indigenous tribe somewhere (like Martin Sheen at the end of Apocalypse Now) or possibly even consigliere to Hugo Chavez. He wasn’t yet quite sure at the time.

But the world is a delicate place for a leader with no cult. He had a good thing and screwed it up. I wonder if he wishes sometimes that he had never moved to Oregon, but rather stayed in his apartment on Magnolia: writing his stories, manning a small staff and, although not exactly importing barrels of money, making just enough cheddar to justify being one’s own boss. Most importantly, above and beyond everything else, is that when MCR lived in L.A. he was able to enjoy the right amount of privacy and anonymity required for him to maintain the following he possessed, enjoyed, and wholly took for granted.

You see the thing about MCR is this: he’s a bad internet date. He’s that all-around perfect guy or gal you’ve been looking for all your life. He says all the right things, and surprises you frequently with a few more. He gets your blood pumping and makes you feel alive and hopeful. That is, of course, until you meet him and very quickly realize that he is, in every way imaginable, the exact opposite of what you’d expected — to an almost menacing and predatory degree; in many ways, kinda like a child molester.

To this date, as far as I’ve been made aware, MCR has continued to reside in NY with Jenna Orkin (or, for those who need refreshing: “the dyke that loves me” “[that girl] I fucked in the a$$ when we went to that ASPO conference in NY…”). None of us ever thought that relationship would last two months. Lucky for Mikey that it did, or one hard-assed rite of passage it would have been until his trust fund kicked in — which it finally did, I think, sometime in August or September.

Say what you want about MCR but he is lucky. For instance, there was so much evidence proving that he (not the government, meth-dealers, ex-employees, or who-ever-the-hell) was the actual perpetrator of that burglary in Ashland, Or. Again, I don’t think many people thought it would turn out the way it did, but it did. To this day the APD, although having named MCR as having been its only suspect, hasn’t done anything whatsoever to do anything at all about it. I think MCR was probably just as surprised, being that he fled the country and all, in my opinion, as a direct result of his botched plan to make some easy money — i.e. committing insurance fraud. This is just one example of how lucky MCR has been. Or, more accurately put: lucky-enough, as more bad has befallen him than good — most usually by his own doing; in fact, I’m not aware of anything bad that’s ever happened to him that wasn’t the direct or indirect result of his own power-hungry, desperately sadistic, cosmocentric self. That being the case then what happened in Oregon, i.e. MCR’s supposed “downfall” and humiliation, was bound to happen in one form or another at some time, regardless of whether or not he had decided to move out of L.A.

The longer MCR stayed on the activist scene the more his true colors bled through. His days were numbered. To put it one way, he wasn’t the genuine article — a concerned citizen selflessly slaving away to expose and fight the wrongs committed by the United States government. Anyone not a complete sheep whose known Ruppert is well aware of his lust for social status and power. This is where his actions belied his words, his writings and all his friggin’ footnotes. He despised fellow 9-11/Peak Oil activists, attacked and dismissed them. Only he was the expert. Only he was worth listening to. As a result, the number of his followers shrunk over time, and increasingly so as his narcissistic frustration and anger swelled. It’s always been my belief that, when you get down to it, most rebels are just individuals who’re pissed off that they aren’t the ones in charge. For all his seemingly endless ranting and raving about the corrupt elite that control the world I have no doubt in my mind that Mike would give his balls for a seat at the conspirator’s table. Being that most of the people involved in the 9-11 and Peak Oil activist movements are truly concerned and well-meaning people who are genuinely selfless in their cause, an animal like Ruppert could only move among them undetected for so long. Again, as it was, he was on borrowed time, and as said time passed it was clear that some changes were about to take place. Knowing this, to one degree or another, Mike was determined to remain in the game. Now it was Peak Oil that he began to singularly focus on, but with much more of a doomsday bent than others in the field (“others” such as university professors, geologists, people with the qualifications necessary to address said topic, etcetera etcetera etcetera…), which again served to allow Mike to be special and stand apart.

Mike once said, “Oregon is the promised land for me.” He could not have been more wrong. His reasons for wanting to move aside, it never was a practical venture — at least not in the way it was approached by Ruppert. First of all there wasn’t an actual plan…for anything. It was as if Mike assumed that things would naturally fall into place when the times were right. “The Universe will guide me,” he said on more than a few occasions when either myself, or a whole bunch of us were trying to talk sense into the man — trying to get him, for the love of god, to change his mind about moving north. He talked about the universe a lot and how much clout he had with it, being that he was such an awesome guy and all. To the rest of us it seemed that if the universe did have Mike’s back then it was for sure going out of its way to send message after message warning him that moving to Oregon was bad ju ju. Take the business, for example, which at the time was operational, sustainable, whose earning potential had already peaked. There was only so much money that could be made from Mike’s beloved following who, as a demographic, aren’t characteristically wealthy people. Just enough money was made to pay employees, rent, bills, and Mike’s expenses, which to briefly state, were lavish. Since there was no plan for relocation that also meant that there hadn’t been any money set aside to bankroll the expenses of a move. Being that FTW was a sole proprietorship, Mike was FTW and vise versa. Mike was up to his neck in debt. Money was owed to credit card companies, vendors. There were back taxes that would have to be dealt with, state and federal. The whole thing was a mess.

It was at the beginning of 2006 and Mike was determined to make the move sometime during the first half of February. Despite having made bogus predictions within the past two years about when exactly the fall of western society would happen, for some reason that now slips my mind Mike had come to the conclusion that the shit would hit the fan on a world-wide scale in March or April – or maybe it was May; anyway, according to Mike it wasn’t that far off. Of course it’s quite understandable how, in the face of impending societal collapse, money would be low on the list of priorities. That said, I was never able to reconcile Mike’s thinking along those lines. How was it that Mike could have such big plans for FTW, such as expanding the business on a five-fold scale once in Oregon, while at the same time believing that life as we have known it was about to come to a tragically sudden and, no doubt, bloody end? Mike had spoken many times about how it was his dream that someday FTW would become as big as The New York Times. How he could sort out those two ideas is way beyond my scope of imagination.

What was very clear was what Mike expected from Oregon with the same vigor with which he desired it all his life (of course Reality ended up presenting him with a severely disappointing polar opposite). To put it simply, Mike wanted to be a leader of the masses just like his sworn enemies, his secret idols. He had always been well received in Oregon whenever he gave lectures there and he just assumed that in the wake of all the destruction to come he would just naturally be able to step up as a wise chieftain, warlord, or commandant somewhere – most likely in the Ashland area, being that that’s where he was going. I am not kidding. His “relocation fantasy” was based on the idea that Peak Oil was going to hit and hit hard. Almost overnight it would be anarchy as the fuel that made our way of life possible simply just ran out. It would be like Mad Max and Road Warrior, basically. The communities that remained, or that would crop up during this time, would have to circle the wagons and be able to defend themselves in order to survive. Mike spoke of building a small army that we would train – he even said I could be one of the D.I.’s! He would whip those hippies into shape, train them up to Delta caliber, arm them, and when the time was right all of us would head a few miles south and blow up the mountain pass separating Oregon from California. The reasoning for this was to keep the thousands of tired, hungry, scared, fleeing California refugees from entering the Rogue Valley (where Ashland and a few other small towns are located) to suck dry whatever realistic chance of hope and survival the communities they were to eventually come across still had – they would be like locusts, a walking scorched-earth policy. Yes, this was cruel, Mike admitted, but it was necessary. The pie would not be big enough for everyone to have a slice.

I have already stated that there wasn’t enough money to afford the move to Oregon. And when I say that I mean that I mean there wasn’t enough money to pay just for the move. That was a big red flag waving in the wind, hammered into the peak of this Ruppert-imposed iceberg. And everyone saw it except Ruppert — no surprise. Not that we didn’t tell him about it, time and time again. It just wasn’t that big of a deal. We were overreacting, nervous-nellies. “I’ll sell my car,” he said, as if trying to deliver a one-two knock-out wisdom-rationality punch combo that would shut us up for good. After all, he used to be a cop. He knew what he was doing.

“It’s a 2005 Cadillac. I should at least get 25k for it!”

You could tell he thought we were all idiots, but I doubt it was just as apparent to him what a dumbass we all thought he was. After a while it became clear that there was no talking to him and so we just stopped trying. More and more, any expression of doubt in Mike’s “plan” led to a sort of diaper rash freak-out on his part — like a demon-possessed, straight-jacketed Wilfred Brimley. It got old fast.

Mike first tried selling his car online, which didn’t work out so well since his “busy schedule” wouldn’t allow for the five minutes it would have taken to explain to him how to actually go about selling a car online. There was no way he was going to get $25,000, not on the web, and definitely not at a car dealership, which is where he went next. Just knowing Mike, I imagined him walking on the lots of these places with the type of confidence that only a fool who thinks he can beat the house in Vegas would have. And to more than a few dealerships did Mike go. This was over the course of one week. Every now and then Mike would show back up at the office to get his mail. We’d ask him how selling his car was going and he kind of growl or mumble something about how they were offering too little money and that they were just trying to rip him off but that that wouldn’t happen because what did they think he was a sucker he wasn’t a sucker he used to be a cop and he knows more about the in’s and out’s than any civilian and if they thought for one second they were going to sucker him then they had another thing coming. Then he’d force himself to perk up and attempt to assure himself more than us that everything would turn out alright and that he’d get the dough in time and that it would be enough.

All this time I’d been under the impression that selling a car at a dealership was the last thing you’d want to do because they’d tea-bag you every time. 25k? It was hard to think that Mike was serious. He was quirky and a little crazy but this was something concerning, at least to me, because it didn’t seem like he truly had a grasp on reality — oh, if I only knew how much more crazy and absurd things would get.

It was a Thursday or Friday when Mike called. He said that he’d sold the car and needed someone to pick him up at the dealership. I went, following the directions he gave me, and eventually ended up in a part of town where all the storefronts, billboards are in Spanish, and Mexican music is piped out onto the street. The “dealership” looked like a chop shop. Mike was standing out front, looking like he’d just been released from jail immediately after having been gang-raped. When he got in the car, neither one of us said anything for a while. Mike was the first one to pipe up. He wanted us to go to the bank. I figured that was was as good a cue as any so I asked him how much he got for the car. Looking out the passenger window he said, “Seventy-five hundred.”

“Yeah?” I said, thinking OMG he stuck his dick in it this time!

“Yeah. See? I told you guys not worry. I told all of you that everything was going to turn out alright — that the universe would take care of us. We’re gonna make it. Everything’s going good so far and it’s only going to get better.”

He spoke with an almost smug, pissed-off expression, as if to say, “I shouldn’t have to tell you so.”He was serious, or so it seemed. At the bank he flirted with the teller like he was depositing his first million. When I dropped him off at his apartment he said, “It’s been a good day, buddy,” and then shook my hand. Before pulling away from the curb I accidentally caught, out of the corner in my eye, the spring in Mike’s step as he walked down the street like he owned it.

$7500. Jesus. I laughed my ass off all the way home and continued off and on until I fell asleep.