Tawana Brawley, Dec. 1971, NY

“Signifying Rappers” p. 16/18, on Tawana Brawley

This is written in the “M” section abbreviation for that it’s by Mark Costello:

p. 16, 1990 SR:

And best of luck making sense out of gang-banging, out of rap, out of anything in Reaganmania or this book without admitting first that the hub of the wheel is the urge to be a star. Why did Tawana Brawley insist for a year that she’d been raped by a gang of whites? Because she told the lie to begin with; and lies, once told, are easier to extend than end. Why did she tell the lie to begin with? Probably because she wanted attention. Like the teenage Diana Ross, she wanted to be a star. In this respect, the Tawana Brawley phenomenon is a haunting mix of Linda Browm — the Topeka child plaintiff who claimed that a white gang called the Board of Education held her hostage in a segregated school system – with the Salem witch complainants — who were themselves about Tawana Brawley’s age when they claimed that they were transported to the woods and stuck repeatedly with pins. Like the Salem witch complainants, Tawana Brawley entered the confusions of puberty in a time of paranoia. Now spokesmen for Ms. Brawley tell The New York Daily News that she would like to be an actress someday. And if the Salem Seven lived in a teenybopping era, they too could segue into show biz, forming the Salemettes, white-skinned Supremes with necessarily more complicated dance steps, singing

Here I am

Signed, sealed and delivered

I’m yours

Fear of devils is not limited to teenagers, and neither is the stardom urge. The difference between the adolescent’s need to be noticed and the big star’s need to be even bigger is equipment: begging Look what I’ve done, L.L. Cool J raps that he started out in his basement and now is double plantinum, a boast which itself goes double platinum. Why did the Reverend Al Sharpton make Tawana Brawley’s wobbly story into his media vehicle? For the same reason that Public Enemy, having staked out ground as hip-hop’s baddest-asses, commissioned an MTV-playable video of their “Fight the Power” 12-inch. Why did Tawana Brawley, Aspiring Actress, show up, unannounced, at the video’s shoot? For the same reason that, she having so shown up, Public Enemy gave her a bit part.

p. 18, 2nd paragraph on Brawley, 2013 edition:

Fear of devils is not limited to teenagers, and neither is the stardom urge. The difference between the adolescent’s need to be noticed and the big star’s need to be even bigger is equipment: begging Look what I’ve done, L.L. Cool J raps that he started out in his basement and now is double platinum, a boast that itself goes double platinum.

== Okay, the difference is mostly about the Public Enemy “Fight the Power” video and that’s what I’d like the “ear bugs” for, that I could try looking that video up right now and playing it if I had a pair of those. I’ll try to go look it up. It’s been a long time since I’d read the 2 books published on the subject of that 1987 NY incident that I’d moved near to in 1989, but now I’m starting to — try to figure, because I can’t use the term “wonder” because the “Jomon c***” on my head translate that to one-door, that they’re filling their LURE off of me by tricking people into one-door only places that they block off exit to, etc., — I’m trying to figure is the alternate verbiage I can only figure to use so far, etc., if there wasn’t an identity-replacement Tawana then, because the photos of the girl allegedly from right after the horror-incident really don’t seem in retrospect to have looked much like the Tawana then photographed with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who now I’m thinking looks like the “Mi-chel-angelos” -type in skin-color disguise, but also he was involved with office-sharing with the union that I had to be in in order to do that 2003-2005 home health aide work in NYC. I don’t recall the details offhand, the union giving him office space or vice-versa how it had worked but when I was with that union, — they’d audibly flushed a toilet the day I signed up and was about to leave after having done so. I took that as maybe a “bad sign” after the previous decade of this “Armageddon Show” and me being used to all this invisible and unprovable negativity toward myself, and then that union was giving space I guess to Rev. Sharpton for some reason I can’t recall offhand yet.

Okay, it was a big deal song, about Fight the Power of abuse by the powers that be, and she was one of the many people in the video, in Brooklyn. This whole “Armageddon Show” mostly comes from when I’d gone to Brooklyn homeless after being in Wappingers Falls. The thing with this Wappingers Falls business, and with this SR book it comes up a little too, and with Brooklyn, is the Hasidic “Jomon” part of all this all this. It’s inconspicuous up in Dutchess County, NY, but it seems that its been a big base for a long time, around Fishkill in particular maybe, and then that that’s what I’ve got on my skull as I sit and try to do anything, all these years, etc. But none of it is trustable, as with the business about Ms. Brawley, that it was that “magic” c*** all over the incident the same as all over me right now and since 1962 and 1959, the same “convoluted” seems the best word for what it’s like, patterns of modus operandi. They were primarily trying to brew-haha any racial dichotomies, they are ever trying to stir up “civil war” -type dichotomies, so that you can’t take any of it too seriously because it’s all this insane and hallucino-reality, that it’s taking us to oblivion with its made-up insanity base.

I had thought Ms. Brawley was 14 years old for some reason and now I notice that in 1987 it was 2 or 3 weeks before she turned 16. Maybe I’d read that they’d moved to Wappingers Falls when she was 14, and then they’d moved from the village to the larger town-area a year or so later, and then when she went to get off of a bus shortly after that move she’d gotten confused and gotten off at the village-bus stop instead of waiting and getting off at the new bus stop, the village-bus stop being just a main road that goes by there, but it’s like 2 different environments, that villages are like more established and closed to outsiders places and they’d sort of been gotten out of there where they didn’t belong I’d guess, from having seen what I guess was/is the little area where black people live that’s considered to be in the village rather than the town. I’d have to refresh my memory — she was found near the house in the town that they’d moved to I think, like in the backyard of a neighbor’s house not too far away, shortly after they’d moved…. == Now I might as well go back and type the whole first paragraph that’s the same in both the editions I think…

== I typed it and I’m just going to leave it and try to get back to checking for big changes like that. I can’t think straight enough to figure how come that had been edited out. I don’t know why Mr. Costello is so sure that Ms. Brawley had lied, but I figure he should know about the Salem witch trial girls, to be a little snide on my part. He is correct about that “psychology” that it’s easier to stick to a lie once started, that that has happened to me once or three times, and the main one I recall offhand was about “racial” business where I’d been tricked into a long boring questioning about some petty matter and was “itching” to go have my overdue cigarette break when it was then brought up about a patient with the same name and I as a temporary worker just said I hadn’t noticed anything unusual, because I was only there 2 instead of 5 days a week sort of a bottom of the questioning barrel I should be but here it was like my opinion was more important than the regular nurses’ at the place and I was just exasperated to get on with my cigarette break and said I didn’t know what she was talking about more or less, that it was too-obvious a set of tricks being played on myself and I was just trapped in this set up and said just anything to get away. It isn’t like really maintaining a lie but it was close-similar and is likely still being held against me down to right here in this library, come to think of it, that that questioner and one of the clerks here might be the same stereotype, in this lie-world we live in. The question had been if I’d noticed any marks on the first lady and I hadn’t and she’d gone on and on about nothing to do with anything about that first lady named Carrie and I thought the questioning was over with when that head nurse had then thrown in like an Oh, by the way, did you notice anything unusual about the other Carrie having any marks on her, question mark, and by then I thought this was an abuse of holding up my cigarette-addiction break and that I was the least of employees in the place and, I had my suspicions but, no, really, I couldn’t tell if the lady, both of the Carries being black ladies, if the second Carrie, she really did have some sort of a bruised-look to the skin around her eyes but as far as I could tell it might have “always” looked like that on her and if she was getting taken underground and being beaten up the other nurses would know more about that than me, but what happened I think is that after that questioning then the bruising became worse and more apparent. — I’m the “Infinite Jest” victim, I never have any idea what is and isn’t “legitimate” that’s going on around me or if it’s acting. That Carrie began screaming when I’d go in to assist her, getting worse and worse each week. I’d call in the shift nurse and the shift nurses were responsible for whatever that was then and I would proceed to wash and dress the lady over and around her seeming terror of me, increasing horror each week, and by tricks like that the system gets me to lose each job and place of residence all these years, that I can’t wait to find a different job or place to go to to get away from “acts” like that. That particular place was named St. Thomas More convalescent, and I didn’t put together that St. Thomas More had been decapitated to that we have an underworld that is “addicted” to brain of other people, that it’s a big system of brain-eaters, or I likely would have left the place as soon as I could. Even if I’d been aware that More had been decapitated, which I likely would have read somewhere by then, I wouldn’t have realized that we have an underworld of headhunters for brain-eating. I’d just reached my addiction-exasperation point with the “just a minute” to ask me a question to then that long, drawn-out psychology trick so that by the time “the plant” got to the real point I’d have lost interest in sitting there like that any longer and would just pass off the opportunity to discuss the darker-colored skin around the lady’s eyes, that I couldn’t think it was bruising from being punched or if it was natural in that particular case, etc.

One more thing is that I don’t have any idea, and it doesn’t come up in those 2 paragraphs, how Ms. Brawley could have even known the name of that particular prosecutor or what he was that turned around and sued her for defamation. Someone, maybe Rev. Sharpton, must have informed her of the guy’s name. If she picked his photo out of a group of photos then it should be mentioned that he’s from a big stereotype, system-stereotype. They bother me too, but only once that I think I’d noticed about, some piece of sneaky propaganda. Otherwise I’d known one as a doctor in the group I’d worked for in Baumholder, W. Germany, that had seemed odd, and then when I’d gone to Washington in 2005 and answered a classified ad for temporary work I’d gotten sent out to the NIH, National Institute of Health, to do cafeteria work and then boss-chef had been one of that stereotype and I’d lost my ID-card on the way back that evening and wasn’t allowed to return for the 2nd day then, and everything went downhill, then in 2015 I was in the hospital across the street from the NIH after the car-hit. I don’t yet have any idea how she’d come to “identify” a bigshot prosecutor like that, that that seems too odd a thing for anyone young like her to know his name. But, again, this is a system that strives to cause dichotomies so that they can get 2 sides to fight against each other and thereby catch “the others” in between to be disappeared and that’s likely a main purpose for the brew-hahaing, except that there’s also then the aspect that I was certainly anticipated to eventually be having to visit the fraud-family who lived right near there, and when I did get forced to have to try to “hide” from what seemed like all devil worshipers around out here and after me, by sort of fleeing to visit their house in 1989, it was like a mise-en-place that included a newsletter with Tawana Brawley’s name on its headline, so that when I went to that area in 1989 I’d seen her name on the fraud-family’s kitchen counter right away. Then I’d had to leave there the following month but had subsequently found a little job that was back in that area, just outside of the village part of Wappingers Falls then. — I’ll move this to a file on Ms. Brawley and put a link into the regular piece I’m trying to do on this SR book, now.

This is a good article from not long after the “incident:” ny daily news dot com slash news slash crime slash tawana hyphen brawley-rape-allegations-sparks-racial-strife-1987-article-1 dot 2445708