In the coming weeks this blog is going to have some revelations, some shocking, about people who supposedly died who are still with us. The first one will be the hardest, as the lengths that they have gone to in convincing us that John Denver died are extensive. I won’t have a smoking gun there, just a compilation of evidence, but lack of total certainty. We are only missing a body, a plane, and witnesses. You can judge for yourself.
Perhaps before moving forward on this stuff however, it might help if readers understood the concept of fake death. I don’t quite grasp it myself even as I know it is common. I see in the music business that a dead musician’s collection of work is worth 20X what it was when he was alive. Elvis, John Lennon, Denver, and recently Prince and David Bowie were probably economically motivated fake deaths. (John Lennon’s death had an added bonus of killing hope, as he was also publicly playing the part of a left-wing leader.)
Others have differing purposes, I suppose. John Belushi, it appears, merely wanted a quiet life, perhaps Robin Williams too. We should respect that decision. Fame can be a hard life. River Phoenix is still around, and I assume Heath Ledger as well. Since they fake-died at young ages, we should look for them in new cloaking.
It is the death and reappearance as someone else phenomenon that I am most curious about. I cannot pretend to understand it, but Bill Hicks (now Alex Jones) and Phil Hartman (Glenn Beck) seem to behave as employees being reassigned from one task to another. I don’t imagine they had the sway or power to decide for themselves to fake die, undergo plastic surgery, and reappear as right-wing icons. That means that in their original careers they were recruited, hired, assigned a certain part, and assured that fame would come to them if they played along.
And this is what is troublesome. It indicates that our celebrity culture is far more manipulated and contrived than we imagine. I know that in music our tastes are not our own idea, but rather given to us for us to imagine we stumbled upon. Apparently the same social phenomenon is at work in acting, comedy, and as we shall see, even political discourse done via TV and movies.
Is it all fake? Probably. I assume that Tom Cruise is gay, for instance, and all his marriages have been beards. I assume the same thing about Brad Pitt and Clooney as well. Bradgelina’s kids are surely hired actors. Are those two merely public beards for an incubator system for future stars? I would assume most famous marriages are fake, even Ellen and Porsha, that they are assigned partners in public and each night go home to separate lovers and homes. Is it like Caitlyn … all for show? Most likely.
That is celebrity culture, but the movement of people who have fake died into political punditry speaks of higher involvement and planning of our daily lives. I don’t for a second believe we have anything vaguely resembling an open society and free exchange of ideas, but prior to discovery of the true origins of Jones and Beck, I never imagined how contrived it all is. On the “other” side of that spectrum, I would imagine Thom Hartmann, for instance, is in real life a right-winger assigned the role of lefty talk show host. Controlled opposition is key. That is full spectrum dominance, even as narrow as our allowed spectrum is.
More fun ahead here. In looking over the blog roll, I see that it is tedious and predictable partisan politics and hashing out and misinterpretation of major staged “events.” Here it is going to be more fun. I have, for instance, a list of 60 or more “dead” rock stars from the late sixties and seventies whom I assume were either merely retired to desk jobs or obscurity without pay, but perhaps a few of them have been re-purposes to other high-profile gigs.
Stay tuned.


Note the differences: The one we know as “Paul” on the left has a slightly longer face, lower ears, wrap-around eyebrows, and eyes that droop far more than “Mike’s” below and on the right. This after plastic surgery. They appear to have been fraternal twins, not identical.
We’ve been off mountain climbing … At our age, merely walking up trails that lead to mountain tops, called “walk-ups.” We did Mt. Bierstadt today, which at 14,060 qualifies as a “fourteener. I am beat.
