Notebook

As a regular reader of Smith's Report, you probably have a few questions you’d like to ask me. Like: Where is that wonderful 16-page tabloid that we were going to submit to the Ivy League universities and elsewhere? What happened to the February issue of Smith’s Report? Now that this issue of SR is numbered “62” and covers both February and March, what happens to our subscriptions? Have we lost an issue? And just in general, what the devil is going on?

Well, here’s the story. It starts out sluggish but picks up considerably before the end.

In January your editor and publisher suffered an infestation of some kind of Mexican intestinal-munching microbial entity which incapacitated me for the best part of a week. In the life of your ordinary revisionist activist, a week or so in bed is neither here nor there, but here at CODOH we’re on a very tight schedule.

Then I twisted my neck while sitting in a pick-up truck listening to an old friend I hadn’t seen in maybe ten years. I could walk and sit but I couldn’t hold my head up. I looked like something that had been broken.

It was beginning to get comic. Meanwhile, we were working on the tabloid that would focus on the USHMM and the ADL with the intent of inserting it into student newspapers at top universities. On each campus which accepted the insert, thousands of students. and faculty, would have in their hands the first real revisionist production they have ever seen. Very nice. I had set a 10 February deadline to get it to the printers. It would be close, but we had thought we would be able to pull it off.

It was the middle of January and things were looking pretty good. The intestinal bugs had been slaughtered, and under the care of a Mexican orthopedic medico of some kind I had repaired the neck. Plans for distribution of the tabloid continued to grow.

I would send a copy to each SR reader. I’d send one to the editor of every campus newspaper on my lists. I would send it to city editors, their feature writers, their columnists. I hadn’t been concentrating solely on the tabloid, however. I had also been submitting the $250K ad to a list of colleges and state universities which we had never approached before. I was beginning to get the first offers to run the ad. My plate was beginning to runneth over.

My mother, however, who had been sick on and off since October with one thing then another, had been growing increasingly weak, and now she took a turn for the worse. Some of you were aware that she was 97 years old had MS, had been an invalid for 30-odd years and so on, and that we have always taken care of her at home. Now, besides being just sick and helpless, we discovered a tumor had grown on her spine. There was a great deal of pain. We had to administer her various drugs very carefully or the pain became unbearable. Now she needed constant, 24-hour attention. I had the night shift and by the end of January I was exhausted. The tabloid would have to wait. Everything would have to wait.

One morning I had a curious experience. Because Mother hadn’t been able to get around for so long I had developed the habit of stopping by her bedside to tell her the latest news about the house, the family, or some television personality. I’d make the telling as amusing as I could. This particular morning, it was still dark. I was in the kitchen making a cup of instant coffee when it occurred to me that something important had happened a few hours earlier and that I would have to tell Mother about it. The next moment I realized that I was about to go to her bedroom to tell her she had died at 1:20 am. Such is the rule that custom has over us.

We held a small wake that evening and the next day beneath a dark half-rainy sky' we buried my mother in the grassless, ramshackle cemetery in the hills behind Rosarito. Looking toward the west I could see the tops of the tourist hotels and condominiums along the beachfront and beyond them the dark sea. In the other direction, behind the cemetery and beyond a gully lined with makeshift living shelters, there were horses and a flock of white seagulls grazing on the brown hillside. I was touched by the view of seagulls and horses sharing the hillside that way and I brought it to the attention of Paloma, who is still twelve years old but going on twenty, and she said: “Daddy, put your glasses on. Those aren’t seagulls. They’re plastic bags. It’s just trash.”

The next day I was back at my desk and back to work but by that time our 10 February deadline for the tabloid to go to the printer was behind me. We decided to forge ahead and one way or another get the tabloid to the printers during March. Some of the research on the Museum, however, and on the ADL too and the Karski article, was taking longer than we had planned. Illustrations were more of a problem than I had anticipated. There were formatting problems to be overcome because of the page size the tabloid. Then there was the issue of the 250K ad.

A couple weeks earlier a number of student newspapers had contacted me to complete arrangements for running the ad. I had been too distracted to nail them down. Yet I had committed myself to the ad last August.

I’d followed through with it into December. It was successful. I could not set it aside now for a new project—the tabloid—even though we had announced it in SR61. The last week in February I asked everyone to turn away from the tabloid and help me put together issue #62 of Smith’s Report. I had to deliver something to SR readers ASAP, even if it was not what I had promised. We could get an issue of SR to the printers in one week. It could take another two or three weeks to have the tabloid ready.

The Campus Project was in full cry. Student papers were running the ad all over the country—University of Southern Maine; Michigan Technological U; U Wisconsin-Platteville; Oakland U; (Rochester MI); Jersey City State College;

Murray State U (KY); Weber State U (Ogden UT); Valdosta State U (Marietta GA); Allegheny College (Meadville PA); Salisbury State U (MD); Mississippi State U; U Missouri-Kansas City; Emporia State U (NY); SE Massachusetts State U; Parkland College (EL); Tarrant County JC (TX); St. Joseph U (PA)—and others were cooking. It would take a good part of every day just to keep up with the business end of the project; the telephoning, the written confirmations, the record keeping.

At the same time, I was to map out a plan for the promotion of Samuel Crowell’s The Gas Chamber of Sherlock Holmes—first to raise funds to begin pre-publication to try to create something of a buzz. Not easy, but necessary. That’s what you do when you are going to publish an important book. Then there would be the work of promoting Sherlock and printing it in both hard and soft cover, and finally the work of selling it, searching for a market, not only among revisionists, but a market niche among the general book-buying public. While I understand that this is part of the plan, it is easier said than done, much easier as a matter of fact, but that’s just what the work is.

I don’t know now where the idea came from, but someone suggested that we put our video on Auschwitz, David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper, on our Web site—CODOHWeb. You can do that. Moving pictures! I’ve had the site for three years but the idea had never occurred to me. Once it was brought to my attention. I didn’t have to think about it twice. One e-mail message to our Webmaster. David Thomas, and it was as good as done. He didn’t do it, but he knew where and how to get it done and in about ten days there it was—for all the world to see.

At first I thought that was that. Then it was pointed out to me how the Cole video being on the Web fits in with the 250K ad campaign. The ad references Cole and the video, the implicit threat the JDL makes against him, and the complicity of silence by our favorite “human rights” organization. the ADL. Does the student editor, as he/she considers the risk of running our ad, feel uncertain about the value of the Cole video because he/she has not viewed it? No problem. It’s eminently viewable now. By student editors, city editors, academics, and everyone else. We only have to bring it to their attention and tell them why it is significant, because they are not going to know.

I would have to put it off for the time being however. The 250K ad had been accepted by Lamar U (Belmont TX); St. Louis Community College at Florissant (MO); U Tennessee-Chattanooga (TN); Wesley U (Middletown CT); Middle Tennessee State U (Murfreesboro TN); Chabot College (Hayward CA); Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago IL); Texas Women’s U (Denton TX); Western Oregon State College (Monmouth OR); Sonoma State U (Rohnert Park CA): Edinboro U of Pennsylvania (Edinboro PA); Monroe Community College (Rochester NY); Prairie View A&M U (Parry View TX); Southern Polytechnic State U (Marietta GA); and South Hampton College (Long Island NY). I still had a dozen leads to follow up. I have many targets; I have to take them one at a time.