C-VILLE Weekly

On a recent afternoon, Sharon Tate turned her GMC pickup onto a rutted dirt road branching west off Route 29, and knocked on the door of a white cottage.

The door opened, and a stooped man looked up from his walker and beckoned Tate inside. Sitting at a kitchen table strewn with Tylenol bottles and a plastic tray of prescription drugs, he tells Tate that a pack of dogs killed one of his goats and harassed another.

"They bit him on his butt," he says. The man says his hired helper reported a shepherd-like dog and a Jack Russell terrier were part of the pack. "I can’t get out there and shoot the dogs myself," he says, holding up his right arm, which is braced with plastic panels and tucked into a sling.

So Tate, one of Albemarle County’s two animal control officers, steps gingerly through the muddy, dung-coated floor of a tiny stall where a goat sits in the corner. With the edge of her baton, Tate prods the creature to stand up so she can inspect the wound on his rump. A brown horse keeps one eye on Tate and the other on the green hillside rising beyond the enclosure’s wire fence.

Tate climbs back into her pickup, with a well-marked calendar, a cell phone and an old Virginia Lottery ticket clipped to the sunshade.

"I never win," says Tate. If she does, she will build her dream house, which she has mentally cobbled together from favorite parts of different homes she’s seen around Albemarle County.

 

Tate goes bouncing up another dirt road to another house that sits up the hill from the aggrieved goat. As she pulls into the driveway, a child’s face watches from behind a curtain. A pair of women in t-shirts and Spandex shorts emerge from the house and stand on the back porch. As Tate approaches them, a white wolf barks in a deep, aggressive tone and pulls on the chain keeping him tethered to a doghouse. Tate tells the women that their neighbor’s animals have been attacked by some dogs, as a Jack Russell terrier not much bigger than Tate’s boot yaps at her feet.

The women respond just as Tate expected they would. "’Ain’t my dogs,’" she recounts them saying. "That’s what everybody says."

This is how Tate spends most of her days––driving along the back roads of Albemarle County, mediating between neighbors. Armed with a disarmingly folksy personality and a gun she’s fired only once in her 12-year career (to kill a German Shepherd that attacked her) Tate confronts potentially violent people every day. While the rest of the Albemarle County police force aligns itself with the War on Terror and creates a reputation for roughing up civilians, Tate practices a kind of "community policing" that the County says it wants to initiate.

Unfortunately, in a City and County where public safety resources are already scarce, combating animal cruelty isn’t a high priority.

 

"I take a lot of vacations," says Tate. "You have to get away about every four to six months, because you get burned out so quickly in this job."

Tate gets away to the Caribbean to scuba dive and jet ski about twice a year, and she credits these trips with helping her survive more than a decade in an emotionally wrenching job.

Not that she doesn’t know how to handle stress. Tate always dreamed of working in law enforcement––a self-described country girl who grew up in Albemarle, she joined the Charlottesville Police Explorers (a kind of police internship for teenagers) before going on to study law enforcement and police science at Piedmont Virginia Community College. Then she got married and her career plans took a 14-year detour during which she worked as a bus driver. Perfect training, it turns out, for animal control.

"You learn a lot about the County if you drive a bus," says Tate. "You get an insight into how kids’ lives are affected by their home life, and you learn a lot about mediation, helping kids work out their squabbles."

Since she started as the first female animal control officer in Virginia in 1992, she has seen seven fellow officers come and go; the most recent officer quit last spring because, Tate says, she was an animal lover who could no longer face the daily encounters with animals suffering pointlessly at the hands of people who are cruel, ignorant, or both.

No doubt, the recent examples of violence against animals are enough to make anyone want to run off to a tropical beach.

On July 25, railroad worker James Willis found an adult female boxer lying on the tracks north of the Arrowhead Valley Roads Southern Crossing. According to the police report, her front paws were bound together with a cord, and she had been shot in the head and thrown from a 20-foot-high bridge to the tracks below. The fall broke both hind legs. The dog was treated and now has a new home. Private citizens have pooled their resources to offer a $17,500 reward for information that leads to an arrest and conviction in this case.

On September 6, a construction worker discovered a tabby kitten nailed to a plywood board at Stone Creek Apartments, along Route 20 South, adjacent to Monticello High School. The kitten had been beaten to death and spray-painted gray and red.

"That’s kind of Satanic," says Leisa Norcross, whose son is a freshman at Monticello. "It’s sick to take something that’s innocent and defenseless…I just don’t understand the motivation."

What kind of person does this kind of thing? Norcross recalls the school shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

"They’re always the quiet, secretive-type kids. You don’t know what’s going on with them until after they start shooting. If they catch whoever did that, it would be like predicting a storm," she says.

At Monticello High School, principal Billy Haun says he and Albemarle resource officer Matt Powers, who patrols the school, have no reason to suspect that the killer is a student.

"To make accusations that a teenager did this, when we have no idea that it’s true, that can be a dangerous thing," Haun says. "We have no way of knowing whether that was a teenager or an adult."

Private donors have advertised a $2,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, and the national group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is offering an additional $2,500.

According to Dr. George Boudouris, a Charlottesville psychologist, such cases of animal torture are rare, and while they are often associated with twisted teenagers, children are no more likely to commit violence against animals than are adults.

"Children are more likely to reveal the abuse in therapy sessions," Boudouris says. "Adults tend to be more guarded."

People who brutalize and torture animals may be reacting to their own feelings of pain and helplessness, Boudouris says, or acting out abuses they’ve seen or suffered themselves. "One of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child," anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in 1964, "is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it." Indeed, children who commit violence against animals are five times more likely to commit violence against people later in life, according to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, used to enjoy smashing mice with crowbars and shooting woodpeckers, according to friends. Luke Woodham––who at 16 stabbed his mother to death, then went to high school and shot and killed two classmates in Pearl, Mississippi, in October, 1997––wrote in his journal about beating his dog, Sparkle, and torturing her by pouring lighter fluid down her throat and setting her on fire. Serial killers Jeffery Dahmer, Edmund Emil Kemper and Albert Desalvo all tortured and killed animals before moving on to human victims, according to The Humane Society.

"Hurting or killing animals is one of the diagnostic criteria for what we call anti-social personality disorder," says Boudouris. The disorder manifests as a disregard for the rights of others, a trait of many serial killers.

"Its not a good thing," he says.

 

In patrolling Albemarle County’s trailer parks and tony subdivisions, Tate doesn’t often see the work of cruel psychopaths. In the City and County, animals are abused by people who are just plain stupid.

"Most of the calls we get are reports of dogs running loose, and reports of neglect," Tate says.

Animal control officers do not have full police powers––they carry guns, but do not have the power to arrest people. Animal control officers can write tickets to people for, say, leaving their dogs in a hot car––which usually nets a fine of $50––or issue summons for animal cruelty, which is a Class 1 Misdemeanor punishable by a fine of not more than $2,500, up to 12 months in jail, or both.

Animal control and police officers may confiscate a person’s pet if the animal is in danger of dying from neglect or mistreatment. On September 7, for example, Charlottesville Police Officer James Morris, responding to a report of an animal in distress, found a dog tied to a plywood doghouse in a semi-circle of dirt behind a house at 701 Rockland Ave. The dog was held captive by about one foot of chain, according to the police report, and the dog had pulled the collar so tight that it dug into his neck, and the wound had become infected with maggots. The police report states the dog had apparently been without food or water for some time. The pet owner, Curtis Christmas, has been summoned to appear before Albemarle General District Court.

All animals rescued by police and animal control end up at the Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA on Woodbrook Drive. Chico, the dog from Rockland Drive, was treated for his wounds and now paces timidly in a chain-link pen, waiting to be adopted. The SPCA keeps a "black list" of known animal abusers who are not allowed to adopt animals from the SPCA, says Executive Director Carolyn Foreman.

As she drives around Albemarle County, Sharon Tate often ponders why people can’t seem to get along. If you’re a dog owner, and your dogs are running around in someone else’s yard, for example, and the neighbor complains, why can’t you just put them in the garage? And why, if a strange dog keeps appearing in your yard, do you need to solve the problem by killing the dog?

"I try to convince them to let me handle the problem, but people want to come out with guns blazing," says Tate. Whoever killed Harry Marshall’s dog took a more subtle tactic––rat poison.

Around July 28, Marshall noticed his 1-year-old Brittany spaniel, Parker, wouldn’t eat. The dog got so weak he could barely stand up. "He’s just a puppy, so my first thought was that he chewed into something," says Marshall. Then Brandy, his 10-year-old German short pointer, scratched her eye. It started bleeding and wouldn’t stop. Another dog, Samantha, also "started acting funny," says Marshall.

Tests run by veterinarian Dan Woodworth reported that the dogs had ingested Remic, a rat poison that prevents blood clotting. Brandy died in early August, but after extensive treatment Parker and Samantha recovered and "are fine now," says Marshall. His fourth dog, McKenize, had not ingested any poison.

Marshall suspects that one of his neighbors poisoned his dogs. According to the police report, neighbors reported Marshall’s dogs running loose multiple times, and his dogs have been taken to the SPCA and picked up by animal control. According to Tate’s report, the neighbor claimed to be afraid of retaliation from Marshall. Marshall says his dogs usually live behind an invisible fence––a buried wire that gives dogs a mild shock if they try to cross the boundary––but he admits Parker sometimes got loose when his son took the dogs down to the Mechums River, near the Marshall’s home in Ivy.

"If you’ve got a problem with somebody, go talk to that person," Marshall says. "Don’t go kill their dog. The dog isn’t to blame. Dogs love people unconditionally."

 

At the SPCA, Chico, with his neck hair shaved and his once-infected wound now almost healed, pants lovingly at Shaye Heiskell, who travels around Charlottesville and Albemarle presenting evidence on the links between animal abuse and human violence.

"If a dog is chained to a tree with maggots coming out of the wound, what is happening with the children in that house?" she wonders. "It’s a big red flag."

The link between animal abuse and child abuse is so strong the animal control agencies report cases of animal cruelty to social service workers, and vice versa.

"If [animal control officers] are investigating an animal situation, they may come to us with concerns about the children," says Phyllis Coleman, supervisor for foster care and adoption in Albemarle County’s social services department. "There’s plenty of times our workers conduct an investigation and we find dogs chained up and starving," she says. "There’s a very clear link between domestic violence and child abuse."

The SPCA’s Heiskell says the link usually takes one of two forms. A man may beat his wife, children and his dog. Another common scenario, she says, is a man beats the woman, the woman beats the child and the child beats the dog.

The good news for animal lovers is that abused pets can usually overcome the cruelties of a previous owner.

"The amazing thing is that she’s so people-friendly," says Jan-Bas van Beek, who adopted the boxer found on the railroad tracks. The SPCA received about 100 calls from people who wanted to adopt that particular dog, but van Beek’s brother-in-law happened to be the vet in Richmond who treated the dog for its injuries. "I have a boxer who is 3 years old, and I thought this dog would be a perfect buddy," says van Beek. He has named the injured boxer Britta, and he says that despite a limp the dog is doing fine.

"In the beginning, she didn’t know how to play. She had this blank look about her. But now she’s starting to play with toys, and she loves to go out and meet people," van Beek says. "She’s shown a bit of aggression towards other dogs, but that’s slowly going away."

But the bad news for animals is that animal control is simply not a big part of local law enforcement. In the City, there is only one animal control officer, and that department gets only $59,000, less than 1 percent of the $8,710,292 City police budget. In the County, there are two officers (with room to hire one more) in a department that gets 1.8 percent of a $8,178,983 County police budget. Tate used her own money to buy two of the animal traps—harmless cages with a trip-wire door––she placed near the beleaguered goat’s pen to catch the offending mongrels.

And animal control officers have less power here than other places. Some jurisdictions, like Richmond and Roanoke, have "nuisance dog" laws that allow police to ticket people who fail to control dogs that run loose or bark too much. Albemarle and Charlottesville don’t have those rules.

Also, in Charlottesville and Albemarle, dogs who attack and kill another person’s pet must be classified as "dangerous dogs," meaning they must be confined or kept on a leash with a muzzle. Other jurisdictions have adopted rules that give animal control officers much more flexibility in deciding how to deal with problem animals.

"I don’t think the folks upstairs in the County executive office are aware of how much of a demand we have for something like that," says Tate. "Are people frustrated? Yes. Are we frustrated? Yes."

One of the cinder-block walls at the SPCA is decorated with this quote from Chief Seattle: "What is man without beasts? If all beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to beasts soon happens to men. All things are connected."

In Tate’s line of work, she sees how animal suffering is connected not so much to human cruelty as human ignorance and indifference—to their neighbors as well as their pets.

"So many problems could be solved if people would just talk to each other," Tate says. "But people don’t talk to their neighbors. They want to be isolated. The sad thing is that the animals get caught in the middle."

We know a lot more now about the dangers and disasters of U.S. empire building in Iraq—the ongoing bloodshed on the ground, expansion of terrorist activities, the huge budget-busting costs of occupation, the stretching and undermining of the military and the increased sense of fear and insecurity that many Americans feel as a result of the invasion and its potential for blowback.

We also now have a better handle on the immediate and flimsy reasons for the invasion. Bush told us we were going to war in Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened us. Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons programs (the aluminum tubes, the uranium from Africa). He had huge stocks of chemical and biological weapons that could be launched somehow in a way that threatened the United States. And finally, that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda. According to some polls, as much as 70 percent of the public believed this. But now it seems clear these were all falsehoods. The lies and deceptions Bush and his minions were feeding to the media are making their way into public discourse and are being covered fairly extensively in the press, in columns by Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd in The New York Times, in wide-ranging reporting at the Washington Post and elsewhere.

But far, far less is known about the planning and the actors that brought us this foreign policy disaster. What ideas and worldviews motivated the push to overreach and try to dominate the globe, with Iraq as step No. 1? What secret maneuvers and behind-the-scenes policy power struggles after the attacks of 9/11 led the United States to invade a country that had nothing to do with that infamous day?

The reminder that the media often reports the "news" as fed to it by those in power, and skips past the real news—the reasons for the behaviors and policies—is good reason for the continued existence of Project Censored, a program in its 27th year that collects under-reported stories from around the country and compiles a list of the Top 10 "censored stories" as well as 15 runners-up. About 200 students and faculty from Sonoma State University compiled and reviewed the stories for Project Censored. The project describes its mission as "to stimulate responsible journalists to provide more mass media coverage of those under-covered issues and to encourage the general public to demand mass media coverage of those issues or to seek information from other sources."

Most of the stories on Project Censored’s top 10 relate to the United States’ war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. On the one hand, this emphasis indicates how the issue dominates the news, but on the other, how few news consumers really understand how it happened and why. Taken together, these stories paint a chilling picture of a long-ranging plan to dominate huge sections of the globe militarily and economically, and to silence dissent, curb civil liberties and undermine workers’ rights in the course of it. Some of the information published as part of the project is pretty shocking, like the fact that the United States removed 8,000 incriminating pages from Iraq’s weapons report to the United Nations or that Donald Rumsfeld may have a plan to deliberately provoke terrorists so we can react. Other issues like the attacks on civil liberties have been covered in the mainstream press, but not in the comprehensive way Project Censored would like to see. The Top 10 censored stories, followed by the 15 runners-up, are:

 

The neoconservative plan for global dominance

Sources: The Sunday Herald (September 15, 2002), Harper’s Magazine (October 2002), Mother Jones (March 2003), Pilger.com (December 12, 2002)

Project Censored has decided that the incredible lack of public knowledge of the United States’ plan for total global domination,
outlined by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), represents the media’s biggest failure over the past year. PNAC plans advocated the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan and other current foreign policy objectives, long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Chillingly, one document published by the PNAC in 2000 actually describes the need for a "new Pearl Harbor" to persuade the American public to accept the acts of war and aggression the Administration wants to carry out. "But most people in the country are totally unaware that the PNAC exists," said Peter Phillips, a professor at Sonoma State and major domo of The Project Censored Project. "And that failure has aided and abetted this disaster in Iraq."

According to Project Censored authors, "In the 1970s, the United States and the Middle East were embroiled in a tug-of-war over oil. At the time, the prospect of seizing control of Arab oil fields by force was considered out of line. Still, the idea of Middle East dominance was very attractive to a group of hard-line Washington insiders that included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, William Kristol and other operatives. During the Clinton years they were active in conservative think tanks like the PNAC. When Bush was elected they came roaring back into power."

In an update for the Project Censored Web site, Mother Jones writer Robert Dreyfuss noted, "There was very little examination in the media of the role of oil in American policy toward Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and what coverage did exist tended to pooh-pooh or debunk the idea that the war had anything to do with it."

 

Homeland security threatens civil liberties

Sources: Global Outlook (Winter 2003), Rense.com (February 11, 2004 and Global Outlook, Volume 4), Center for Public Integrity (publicintegrity.org). Corporate media partial coverage: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 11, 2003), The Tampa Tribune (March 28, 2003), Baltimore Sun (February 21, 2003)

While the media did cover the Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (PATRIOT) Act, and the so-called PATRIOT Act II, which was leaked to the press in February 2003, there wasn’t sufficient analysis of some of the truly dangerous and precedent-setting components of both acts. This goes especially for the shocking provision in PATRIOT II that would allow even U.S. citizens to be treated as enemy combatants and held without counsel, simply on suspicion of connections to terrorism.

Under section 501, a U.S. citizen engaging in lawful activity can be picked off the streets or from home and taken to a secret military tribunal with no access to or notification of a lawyer, the press or family. This would be considered justified if the agent "inferred from the conduct" suspicious intention.

Fortunately, PATRIOT I is under major duress in Congress as both parties are supporting significant revisions. Yet President Bush, realizing that he and his unpopular Attorney General, John Ashcroft, are losing popular support, is threatening a veto, and has aggressively gone on the offensive in favor of the repugnant PATRIOT II. Let’s see if the media has learned its lesson from PATRIOT I. Will it probe the new legislation much more thoroughly than the first round, which received inadequate analysis post-9/11?

 

United States illegally removes pages from Iraq United Nations report 

Source: The Humanist and ArtVoice (March/ April 2003), first covered by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!

Story No. 3 is the shockingly under-reported fact that the Bush Administration removed a whopping 8,000 of 11,800 pages from the report the Iraqi government submitted to the U.N. Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency. The pages included details on how the United States had actually supplied Iraq with chemical and biological weapons and the building blocks for weapons of mass destruction. The pages reportedly implicate not only officials from the Reagan and Bush administrations but also major corporations including Bechtel, Eastman Kodak and Dupont, and the U.S. departments of Energy and Agriculture.

In comments to Project Censored, Michael Niman, author of one of the articles cited, noted that his article was based on secondary sources, mostly from the international press, since the topic received an almost complete blackout in the U.S. press. Referring to his first Project Censored nomination in 1989, for which he went into the bush in Costa Rica, he said, "With such thorough self-censorship in the U.S. press, reading the international press is now akin to going into the remote bush."

 

Rumsfeld’s plan to provoke terrorists 

Source: CounterPunch (November 1, 2002)

Moscow Times columnist and CounterPunch contributor Chris Floyd developed this story off a small item in the Los Angeles Times in October 2002 about secret armies the Pentagon has been developing around the world. "The Pro-active, Preemptive Operations Group (or so called Pee-Twos) will carry out secret missions designed to ‘stimulate reactions’ among terrorist groups, provoking them into committing violent acts which would then expose them to ‘counterattack’ by U.S. forces," Floyd wrote. "The Pee-Twos will thus come in handy whenever the regime hankers to add a little oil-laden real estate or a new military base to the Empire’s burgeoning portfolio. Just find a nest of violent malcontents, stir ‘em with a stick, and presto: instant justification for whatever level of intervention-conquest-raping that you might desire."

Floyd notes that while the story received considerable play in international and alternative media, it has hardly been mentioned in the mainstream U.S. press.

"At first glance, this decided lack of interest might seem a curious reaction, given the American media’s insatiable—and profitable—obsession with terrorism," he told Project Censored. "But the media’s equally intense abhorrence of moral ambiguity, especially when it involves possible American complicity in mayhem and murder, makes the silence easier to understand."

 

The effort to make unions disappear

Sources: Z Magazine (November 20, 2002), War Times (October 11, 2002), The Progressive (November 2003), The American Prospect (March 2003)

The war on terrorism has also had the convenient side benefit for conservatives of making it easier for employers and the government to suppress organized labor in the name of national security. For example, in October 2002 Bush was able to force striking International Longshore and Warehouse Union members back to work in the San Francisco Bay Area in the name of national safety.

Chicago journalist Lee Sustar noted that labor coverage is usually woefully inadequate in the mainstream media, even though union membership, while shrinking, still makes up a national constituency that is 13 million strong.

"Twenty years ago every paper had a beat reporter on labor who knew what was going on," he said. "Today that’s not the case. Besides a token story on Labor Day or a human-interest story here and there, you don’t see coverage of labor. You only see coverage from the business side," said Sustar, although Steven Greenhouse, the labor reporter for The New York Times, is one obvious exception to Sustar’s claim.

Ann Marie Cusac, whose story for The Progressive about the decimation of unions was cited, said she thinks the position of organized labor is worse than it has ever been.

She combed National Labor Relations Board files for egregious examples of the lengths to which employers will go to bust unions. And she found a lot. "They had a woman with carpal tunnel syndrome pulling nails out of boards above her head, because they wanted her to go on disability so she couldn’t organize," she said. "But she did it, even knowing she might disable herself. The willingness of people to sacrifice, because they know how important it is to unionize, is a sign of hope."

 

Closing access to information technology 

Source: Dollars and Sense (September 2002)

The potential closing of access to digital information is a development that could have a harmful effect on the powerful role online media plays in side-stepping media gatekeepers and keeping people better informed. "The FCC and Congress are currently overturning the public-interest rules that have encouraged the expansion of the Internet up until now," writes Arthur Stamoulis, whose story was published in Dollars and Sense.

The Internet currently provides a buffet of independent and international media sources to counter the mostly homogenous offerings of mainstream U.S. media, especially broadcast.

As the shift to broadband gains momentum, cable companies are trying hard to dominate the market and eventually control access.

In 2002 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) decided to allow cable networks to avoid common carrier requirements. Now the giant phone companies, who offer the competitive DSL services, want the same freedoms to control access to their lines. In the long run, instead of the thousands of small ISP services to choose from, the switch from dial-up to broadband means that users will have less and less choice over who provides their Internet access.

While the media finally woke up and gave significant coverage to the recent public rebellion against the FCC, which voted to increase media concentration even further, there has been scant coverage of the possibility that the Internet as we know it might be lost.

 

Treaty busting by the United States

Sources: Connections (June 2002), The Nation (April 2002), Ashville Global Report (June 20-26, 2002), Global Outlook (Summer 2002)

"The United States is a signatory to nine multilateral treaties that it has either blatantly

violated or gradually subverted," says Project Censored. These include the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Treaty Banning Antipersonnel Mines and the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Just as the Bush Administration is crowing about the possibility of Saddam Hussein manufacturing nuclear or chemical weapons, it is violating treaties meant to curb these threats, including the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Commission.

 

U.S./British forces continue use of depleted uranium weapons despite massive evidence of negative health effects

Sources: The Sunday Herald (March 30, 2003), Hustler Magazine (June 2003), Children of War (March 2003)

The eighth story on the list deals with another subject that victims have tried to get into the mainstream media for more than a decade—the United States’ use of depleted uranium in Iraq, in both the recent invasion and in the Gulf War. Depleted uranium (DU) was also used in Afghanistan, Kosovo and Bosnia.

The publications cited, including hard-core porn magazine Hustler, note that cancer rates have skyrocketed in Iraq since the first Gulf War, most likely because of the massive contamination of the soil with DU from explosive, armor-piercing munitions. U.S. soldiers are also victims of this travesty, suffering Gulf War syndrome and other ailments that many feel sure are linked to their exposure to DU.

Reese Erlich, a freelance journalist who reported on the topic for a syndicated radio broadcast and related website report, said that the Federal government has dealt with the issue of DU the way the tobacco industry deals with its liability problems. "They’ll fog the issue so no one can say for sure what’s happening," he said. "They’ll commission studies so they can say, ‘There are conflicting reports,’ [or] ‘We need more information.’"

He noted that while the U.S. media is quiet about the issue, it is a hot topic in the international press. "When you get outside the United States, the media is much more critical," he said. "They refer to it as a weapon of mass destruction. This will be a legacy the United States has left in Iraq. Long after the electricity is repaired and the oil wells are pumping, children will be getting cancer. The United States knew this would happen, it can’t claim ignorance."

 

In Afghanistan, poverty, women’s rights and civil disruption are worse then ever

Sources: The Nation (October 14, 2002), Left Turn (March/April, 2003), The Nation (April 29, 2002), Mother Jones (July 8, 2002). Mainstream coverage: Toronto Star (March 2, 2003)

Though his work isn’t cited here, Erlich also reported on the topic of the ninth story on the list, the continuing poverty, civil disruption and repression of women in Afghanistan. While the country has virtually dropped off the radar screen in the United States press and public consciousness, it is suffering its worst decade of poverty ever. Warlords and tribal fiefdoms continue to rule the country, and women are as repressed as ever, contrary to the feel-good images of burqa-stripping that have been broadcast in the media here.

"Reporters by and large don’t go to Afghanistan to report on what they see," said Erlich, who spent several weeks reporting in the country. "They go to the State Department officials, so everything is filtered through these rose-colored glasses, saying things are getting better. But they’re not."

 

Africa faces new threat of new colonialism 

Source: Left Turn (July/August, 2002), Briarpatch (vol. 32, No. 1), excerpted from The CCPA Monitor, (October, 2002), New Internationalist (January-February, 2003)

While Afghanistan is being essentially ignored, the tenth story on the list shows how African countries are getting plenty of attention from the United States—but not the kind of attention they need. These stories deal with the formation in June, 2002, of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development, or NEPAD, by a group of leaders from the world’s eight most powerful countries (the G8) who claim to be carrying out an anti-poverty campaign for the continent. But the group doesn’t include the head of a single African nation, and critics charge that the plan is more about opening the continent to international investment and looting its resources than fighting poverty.

"NEPAD is akin to Plan Colombia in its attempt to employ Western development techniques to provide economic opportunities for international investment," says Project Censored.

 

Bleeding green
The Bush Administration’s dubious deeds extend to the ecosystem

The current issue of Mother Jones magazine features a 20-page package on the Bush Administration’s stealth war on environmental regulations. This list, reprinted here with permission from the magazine, offers a quick overview. For more on the subject, see the September/October issue of Mother Jones or visit www.motherjones.com and check out "The UnGreening of America."Tons of additional air pollutants permitted to be released by 2020 under Bush’s "Clear Skies" plan: 42 million

Estimated number of premature deaths that will result: 100,000

Estimated amount that Clear Skies-related health problems will cost taxpayers, per year: $115 billion

Days after Bush took office that he reneged on his campaign promise to regulate CO2 emissions frompower plants: 53

Days after the U.S. Geological Survey released a 12-year study indicating that drilling in the Arctic Refuge would pose
"significant harm to wildlife" that the agency reversed itself: 7

Years that the Bush Administration says global warming must be further studied before substantive action can be taken: 5

Number of members of the 63-person energy advisory team Bush convened early in his administration who did not have ties to corporate energy interests: 1

Amount that energy team members gave to Republican candidates in the 2000 election: $8 million

Percentage of "replacement
wetlands" developers are required to create that end up failing, according to the General Accounting Office: 80

Area, in acres, of wetlands, lakes and streams opened to development under a proposal to end Federal oversight of "isolated waters": 20 million

Area, in acres, of Lake Superior: 20.3 million

Estimated acres of public land the Administration announced in April it will open to logging, road building and mining: 220 million

Acreage of California and Texas, combined: 267 million

Number of snowmobiles allowed in Yellowstone National Park this winter, per day: 1,100

Percentage of the 360,000 public comments received by the Park Service that were against repealing the Clinton-era ban on snowmobiles in the park: 80

Percentage of Superfund cleanup costs paid for by corporate polluters in 1996: 82

Percentage that will be paid for by taxpayers under Bush’s 2004 budget: 79

Amount at which the Environmental Protection Agency historically valued each human life when conducting economic analyses of proposed regulations: $6.1 million

Amount the EPA considers each person worth as of 2003: $3.7 million

Average annual number of species added to the Endangered and Threatened Species list between 1991 and 2000: 68.4

Number voluntarily added by the Bush Administration since taking office: 0

Grade Bush received on the League of Conservation Voters’ 2002 presidential report card: D-

Grade he received in 2003: F

Sources: Center for Responsive Politics, Clear the Air, Department of the Interior, Earthjustice, General Accounting Office, League of Conservation Voters, National Park Service, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

 

In other news…
Project Censored’s 15 runners-up
to the Top 10 censored stories of the year

11) U.S. implicated in Taliban massacre

12) Bush Administration behind failed military coup in Venezuela

13) Corporate personhood challenged

14) Unwanted refugees a global problem

15) U.S. military’s war on the earth

16) Plan Puebla-Panama and the FTAA

17) Clear Channel monopoly draws criticism

18) Charter forest proposal threatens access to public lands

19) U.S. dollar vs. the Euro another reason for the invasion of Iraq

20) Pentagon increases private military contracts

21) Third World austerity policies coming soon to a city near you

22) Welfare reform up for re-authorization, but still no safety net

23) Argentina crisis sparks cooperative growth

24) Aid to Israel fuels repressive occupation in Palestine

25) Convicted corporations receive perks instead of punishment

 

The meltdown began just before 3pm. On the first Saturday in September, the visiting UVA football team was trailing South Carolina 10-7 when a Cavaliers fumble gave the Gamecocks the ball just a skip away from the end zone. The play, which sunk the Cavs, was the moment that launched a thousand quips into cyberspace.

On TheSabre.com, an independent Web site devoted to UVA sports, the football message board blistered with negativity. Dozens of fans who were watching the game at home logged on to type sarcastic praise of the Cavs’ coaches. Many of the faithful called for a quarterback change. “WORST TACKLING IN FB HISTORY,” one fan declared.

Whenever the Cavs cough one up on the field, irrationality runs wild online.

Nobody knows that better than Mike Ingalls, The Sabre’s creator and message-board moderator. Count Ingalls among the level-headed fans who applauded the players and pleaded for optimism even as other fans plunged into despair throughout the night. “Not sure why people have to sling insults and curse words after a loss,” he wrote.

Around midnight, some fans gradually turned their attention to college football’s eternal consolation: next Saturday. Yet others continued to seethe. One worried poster surmised, at 5:03 Sunday morning, that the loss would “cost us between three to six top recruits.” The players may compete for only 60 minutes a week, but on The Sabre, fans can obsess online 24 hours a day.

That the locally grown site has hooked legions of Virginia fans still surprises Ingalls, a self-taught Web designer with an orange-and-blue heart. Since the Charlottesville native turned his part-time hobby into a full-time business, the site has risen from obscurity to become the hub for Cavs fans to read about their teams and to discuss wins and losses (and everything else). The Sabre’s traffic has increased 50 percent in each of the last four years, Ingalls says, and the site now receives more than 100,000 different visitors each month.

Now, Ingalls, 37, is trying to put the company in the black for the first time. The Sabre is supported by local advertising, the sale of online merchandise and a growing number of paying subscribers to the site’s premium content, but funding from a Virginia alumni has helped float the company thus far. The plan is for the site to become a self-sustaining business in the next year, yet Ingalls is wary of discussing the specifics of the small company he runs out of his home off Rio Road. The Sabre, he says, is in competition with two wealthier Web companies—rivals.com and theinsiders.com —that court the same fan base with their own UVA sites.

“There are bigger fish out there that might like to see us fail,” Ingalls says. “We’re trying to grow under one man’s wing.”

Ingalls grew up in Charlottesville and graduated from Albemarle High School in 1984. He spent six years in active duty with the U.S. Air Force, serving as a security policeman. He was stationed in Texas and Belgium, among other places, which made keeping up with UVA sports nearly impossible. He returned to Charlottesville in 1990, the same year Virginia’s football team climbed to the top of the national rankings for the first time.

In 1996, Ingalls earned an associate’s degree in police science from Piedmont Valley Community College, but switched gears to enroll in computer-science classes at the college. One day, he bought a book on Web design to learn the basics of HTML.

The University did not have an official athletics site at the time, so Ingalls, on a whim, created a five-page site devoted to his passion, UVA football, specifically to Tiki Barber’s Heisman campaign. Ingalls wrote his first article following the team’s victory over Texas that season. Later, he composed a more critical piece about the Cavs’ receivers, who dropped crucial passes in a loss to Georgia Tech. Ingalls found sports journalism cathartic, though he figured hardly anyone was reading his work.

He was wrong. Rabid fans, who had learned of his site through word-of-mouth, were hooked. After shutting down the site before the end of the season, in an attempt to concentrate on his studies and make some money, Ingalls received a flood of e-mails from fans, all clamoring for more.

Ingalls finally decided to humor them. In the spring of 1997, he cut back his classes and worked only part-time jobs. The rest of his time he devoted to beefing up the content of his site, which he re-launched as virginiafootball.com.

Still, it was only a hobby, and Ingalls figured he would find his career after transferring into UVA’s engineering school at some point. But those plans changed the night of June 2, 1997. He was at the Yuan Ho restaurant, where he worked as a delivery driver, when a man walked in, pulled out a gun, and demanded money.

Ingalls, an expert marksman, noticed that the man before him was holding a starter’s pistol. The owner of the restaurant had opened the cash register, but Ingalls slammed it shut. “Get the hell out of here,” Ingalls yelled, then chased the man out the door.

When Ingalls stepped into the parking lot, a second man popped up from behind a car. He had a real gun, which he fired seven times, hitting Ingalls once. The bullet tore through his left bicep, punctured his lung and lodged in his back, about a half-inch from his spine—where it remains.

Ingalls spent six days at UVA Hospital. During the stay, he received 50 e-mail messages from fans of his site and a get-well card from the University’s football coaching staff.

“That really got me motivated,” Ingalls says. “When you’ve got people you don’t even know who are concerned, sending you messages, you start to realize you’ve got people counting on you.”

As he recovered from his wounds, Ingalls continued to add to the football site. That fall, responding to popular demand, he created a second Web outlet, virginiabasketball.com. By the spring of 1998, fan traffic was so heavy that Ingalls had to find a new server for the sites. To keep costs down, he asked for donations online. More than 50 fans sent checks, but none was bigger than the $2,000 that came from Mark Massey, an alum who lives in Boston.

The two soon worked out a deal that made Massey primary owner and principal investor in the company now known as TheSabre, LLC. The arrangement made Ingalls the general manager and editor of the site, allowing him to turn his hobby into a full-time job.

Since merging the two sites into The Sabre, a nod to Virginia’s crossed-sabres logo, in 1999, Ingalls has expanded the Cavalier content, contracting with writers who provide regular articles and columns about the teams. The main part of the site is free, but a premium “Edge” subscription—which includes access to recruiting information, articles and photos—runs $34.95 per year. Ingalls will not say exactly how many fans have signed up, only that there are more than 1,000.

Matt Welsh, son of former UVA football coach George Welsh and the president of The Sabre, helped start the site’s online store, The Sabre Shop. A sportswear company in Lynchburg ships all The Sabre’s merchandise—more than 300 different items—five days a week. Fans can order virtually anything Wahoo, including UVA shirts, pennants, hats, jackets, umbrellas, even a V-Sabres dog collar.

The site also features advertisements for local businesses, such as Crown Automotive, Andrew Minton Jewelers and Crutchfield. Sabre sponsors also include Advance Auto Parts, Budweiser and Geico. Some companies have offered perks to Sabre readers, including the Charlottesville-based MoneyWise Payroll, which is currently offering to make a $100 donation to the Virginia Athletics Foundation in the name of each customer who signs up.

“Part of our advertising pitch is to say, ‘Hey, we are very in tune with our user base—we will help encourage them to look at you first,'” Ingalls says. “We get a lot of feedback from users, so the advertisers can feel like they’re being a little bit more taken care of.”

While those revenue streams keep the company on its feet, the heart-beats of The Sabre are its message boards, which distinguish the site from UVA’s official athletics Web site, virginiasports.com. The latter is a rather bland public-relations vehicle that provides schedules, team rosters and video highlights, but no post-game analysis or inside information from fans in the know. On the University’s official site, a visitor can read a press release revealing that a player was suspended from the basketball team, but he would turn to The Sabre’s message boards to learn why and what the implications were. Sometimes the rumors there are true, and sometimes not.

The Sabre has separate discussion forums for football, basketball and other sports, as well as for recruiting. On the site, everyone can strategize, speculate and savor the tidbits of information posted by “gurus” with connections to the teams.

Regulars on the site include students, graduates and retirees. Many are UVA graduates, but some are not. Some of the enthusiasts admit they have become addicted to the site, a community unto itself that’s as intense as the sports world that spawned it.

Dan Heuchert, editor for UVA’s News Services, has been posting a couple of times a day for about seven or eight years.

“It’s a great place to see which way the wind is blowing among UVA fans and alumni on both sports and sports-related topics,” Heuchert says. “Like any community, it has idiots, jerks and blowhards, but you learn to avoid them. It is definitely an outlet for blowing off steam, which is good and bad. I do worry that people who aren’t familiar with the format will get a skewed picture of UVA and its fans.”

A good post, Heuchert says, is one that contains an original thought, a well-argued opinion, a nice touch of humor, a fresh scoop, or a request for information. Poor posts, he says, include “mindless rants, malicious attacks, ill-formed speculation, instant overreactions and needless repetition.

“The one thing I’ve learned is that Internet sports bulletin boards are manic-depressive, and that effect is exacerbated by herd psychology,” Heuchert says. “Once the tide turns in one direction, there is a lot of peer pressure to follow the momentum until there is some new event to reverse or divert it.”

Ingalls, who monitors the boards constantly, is well aware of his the need for civility on the site. In his own posts, he prefers to accentuate the positive. The Sabre’s terms of service bar personal attacks or insults on all parties, including athletes, sportswriters and fellow posters. Slander, obscene language and racially offensive material are also verboten. Posts that are written to anger others, known as “flames,” are often quickly removed.

“Anybody that comes in there is like a guest in my home,” Ingalls says. “If you start causing problems with anyone at the party, you’re gonna have to leave.”

Sometimes, the boards have soft sides. Fans ask for prayers for ailing family members and announce the arrivals of little ‘Hoos. Humor and wit are the coin of the realm. Pop cultural allusions are constant. Some posters have imaginative handles, like “zarathustra.” Other fans go so far as to rewrite passages from Shakespeare, turning them into pregame poetry.

While Ingalls may be a gentleman of the boards, he is no blind cheerleader. He welcomes and allows for criticism of the home team. This is sports, after all, so there must be room for heated, passionate—and occasionally pedantic—debates to continue for days.

The message boards are not intended for the faint-hearted. On a given day, there might be a post asking if Groh’s an idiot, or how much money it would take to buy out the contract of men’s basketball coach Pete Gillen, or why fans of other colleges have inferiority complexes about UVA. Following losses, the site becomes a venue for venting, an electronic therapy couch. For some ‘Hoo diehards who post regularly on The Sabre, as well as those who “lurk” there only to read, the grousing is a sport in its own right.

UVA officials were first reluctant to give the site press credentials. “There were concerns [about The Sabre] from a professionalism standpoint, from an accountability standpoint,” says Rich Murray, the athletic department’s director of media relations.

After discussions with Ingalls, though, the athletic department eventually granted The Sabre the access it wanted, allowing members full access to players and coaches enjoyed by other media outlets. That has let Ingalls take thousands of game-day photographs to give the site its visual oomph, while giving Sabre writers credibility.

Murray says The Sabre has followed the University’s guidelines, and he and Ingalls agree that the two parties now enjoy good communication. Murray does not say much about whether the message boards in particular are a concern for the athletic department, saying only that one can draw parallels between fan sites and talk radio in the sense that on radio folks can call in and express their opinions, and on a Web site, folks write in,” he says. “There’s an opportunity for an individual to express his or her thoughts” on The Sabre.

Since online anonymity can be freeing, Ingalls requires fans to create a password-protected account to post on The Sabre. To get a handle, they must submit their e-mail address to the system. That way, repeat offenders can be booted off the site permanently. But since fans still post under handles of their choosing, there’s no guarantee that they will do unto others with courtesy.

Some UVA athletes read the sites, as do their parents.

Dan Ellis, a former starting quarterback for the Cavs, says his teammates often read the message boards for mere amusement. But others, he says, seemed to think the site was a place where they could measure their performance. Ellis says he stopped reading The Sabre after his freshman year because he did not want praise from fans “to go to my head.”

But he could not always tune out the negative chatter. In 1999, Ellis suffered a concussion during a game. Because he missed a week of practices, the coaches kept him out of the following week’s contest. That night, his brother-in-law and some friends took Ellis out on the Corner to celebrate his 21st birthday. The next morning, Ellis was shocked that his evening was big news on The Sabre. Ellis says some posts, apparently from students who had seen him in bars, alleged that he had been drunk, while others questioned his commitment to the team.

“There were people on there saying that I didn’t want to play, which was absurd,” says Ellis. “I wanted to play so bad that game.” The quarterback’s uncle was so angry about the innuendo that he logged on to The Sabre to defend his nephew, asking who among the fans would want details of their 21st birthday publicized on the Internet?

On The Sabre, Ellis says, “You have complete immunity—you can bash anybody.” But the former quarterback, now a high-school teacher and football coach in Pennsylvania, once again counts himself among the Web site’s readers.

“When I want to find out something about who Virginia’s recruiting, I’ll go there for that,” Ellis says. “It’s convenient.”

Mike Benzian, a UVA alum, says The Sabre contains more “blather,” less “etiquette” than when he started reading. Benzian recently criticized some fellow posters for carping on the men’s basketball team, following yet another disappointing season. He likens the change to what happened after Charlottesville lost Dave Matthews Band to the rest of the world.

“You’d go down to Trax to see them with the guys, now you go see them in the Oakland Coliseum with 50,000 of your closest friends,” says Benzian, who lives in San Francisco. “When the secret gets out, there seems to be a loss of community.”

Nonetheless, Benzian, like many Sabre fanatics, keeps coming back for the content he can’t get anywhere else.

“It’s an important part of my day,” he says.

Most Sabre faithful are men, but not all of them. Lisa McAvoy, a 1981 UVA graduate who lives in Arlington, reads the site religiously. On a recent trip to Oakland, she excused herself from a family gathering to log on to The Sabre for a half-hour.

“It’s great because there’s this whole collection of people out there who are like me, so I can plug into a passion without being [in] Charlottesville,” McAvoy says. “You’ll see someone post ‘I’m on vacation in Italy.’ That’s the power of the Internet—connecting disparate people.”

She feels ambivalent about her “addiction,” though.

“The intellectual snob part of me is embarrassed that I’m doing this,” she says. “There are moments when I step back and realize that I spend $35 a year [for access to recruiting news on The Sabre] to follow the whims and fancies of high-school students.”

It seems that the site itself is no better or worse than any other component of big-time sports, but it does lay bare the light and dark sides of fandom like nothing else can.

Doug Doughty, who covers UVA sports for the Roanoke Times, says The Sabre simply reveals a true cross-section of fans, from the “knee-jerk reactions to the thick-and-thin” supporters. Doughty, a frequent target of criticism on the message boards, says he routinely receives angry e-mails from UVA fans, many more so then when fans had to sit down and compose a letter.

“It’s a product of the whole Net generation,” Doughty says. “A lot of times, when I type a sensible reply, I’ll get a response from someone saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t really mean that.'”

As Ingalls sees it, The Sabre, whatever its faults, has brought the fan base closer together. And that has happened at a crucial time for UVA athletics. The University is trying to grow into an expanded stadium and a new basketball arena is under construction. That requires enthusiastic fans. And millions of dollars.

When it comes to his own business, though, Ingalls is wont to discuss the finances, for fear of tipping off rival companies. He will not say how many people work for the site at the moment, though there is at least a handful of full-time staffers—a content editor, an advertising director, a store manager and a recruiting guru, in addition to part-time freelance writers.

Ingalls hopes that The Sabre can become successful enough for him to retire on. For now, there are other perks. Though Ingalls often spends between eight to 14 hours at a desk in the corner of his bedroom—his “office”—there are days when he gets to go on the field, just like the players, as part of his job. Once he was an unknown guy in a baseball cap. Now, he cannot walk into Scott Stadium or University Hall without someone recognizing him or complimenting his site.

“When I hear Coach Groh say, ‘Hey Mike, how ya doing?’ it’s like—woah. You feel respected in terms of being a media representative, in passing along information to the public,” Ingalls says. “Even though I didn’t graduate from UVA, I can still put my heart and soul into it.”

 

 

 

pointed commentary
A snap-shot from The Sabre’s football message board,Friday, September 12.

 

Poll—What was the worst moment for this board?

—Hoo98, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:20:07pm.

 

Duke loss, Curry committing to UNC, VT in 2001.

—BoardHost, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:48:03pm.

 

Learning Casteen sold out for political gain.

—TonyClifton, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:29:32pm.

 

Fred’s expansion commentary. Sorry, Fred. 😉

—26.2Hoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:13:23pm.

 

Hey now…I resemble that remark.

—Fred F., Fri Sep 12 2003 3:20:29pm.

 

I had to give you your due.

—26.2Hoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:39:09pm.

 

Coach Beamer shaking hands w/UNC’s Dick Baddour…oh wait, wrong board.

—Mad Bowl, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:11:08pm.

All good ones below—how about “keep Danny Wilmer” after Groh was hired.

—gfhoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:09:45pm.

 

1998 GT AND UGA. Two blown 21 point leads

in Hotlanta.

—Salems#1HOO, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:01:23pm.

 

When the board was pansy blue

because Boardhost lost a bet to

some ‘Heels….

—Karl Hess, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:58:36pm.

 

LOL! I can’t believe you still remember that.

—BoardHost, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:41:30pm.

 

How bad was it after the Duke (97) and

WFU (01) losses? I was at the games.

—Hoo98, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:57:18pm.

 

Learning Tek [sic] would be included in expansion.…

—hoo75, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:55:58pm.

 

Or realizing I was truly an armchair genius.…

—hoo7, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:03:52pm

 

Ellis v. Rivers debate.

—zeropointzero, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:51:38pm.

BYU 2000 fallout was real ugly.

—game time, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:39:19pm.

 

But Duke at home was the worst.

—JoeHoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:40:57pm.

 

This board has never come close to the negativity on the Hoops board.

—MrHoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:36:52pm.

 

For the last three years of Welsh’s regime, the hoops board was a bastion of sanity.

—hooba, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:53:12pm.

 

I wonder why that is.

—JoeHoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:42:32pm.

 

After Ronald Curry signed with UNC.

—SysHoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 2:35:31pm.

 

Yep—seemed like there were a million “My last Curry post” subject lines.

—gfhoo, Fri Sep 12 2003 4:01:31pm.

 

Bingo—a four-year hangover from that one!

—Wahoo Josh, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:42:10pm.

 

It has to be Curry. Nothing else is even close

—98Cav, Fri Sep 12 2003 3:33:41pm.

 

 

Where’s Wilk Hall?
TheSabre.com posters meet for buds, suds and the freshest tailgate parties in town

Free beer makes fast friends. It also helped turn an online community into an unlikely horde of Wahoo tailgaters. A typical wine-and-cheese contingent they are not.

The group started last year when Darren Yowell, a zealous Cavaliers fan, posted a message on The Sabre inviting other die-hards to join him for a tailgate prior to Virginia’s spring game. Yowell offered to provide the suds. About 60 people showed up. The fans, many of whom had previously only known one another only by their Sabre “handles,” could now shake hands, wolf down snacks together, and meet the wives.

Yowell, 34, extended another invitation for the season opener against Colorado State, and about 100 fans came. As the season wore on, the gatherings became more popular, perhaps drawing even heavier crowds at road games, since fans had fewer pre-game options outside of Charlottesville.

At first, the event lacked a name, but that changed when a poster who’d ordered football tickets asked an innocent question on the Sabre message board: Where was “Wilk Hall?” The UVA ticket office had told him he could pick up his tickets there, he explained. Only they’d said “will call,” of course. The Sabre collectively exploded in laughter and the tailgate found its moniker.

Unlike many pre-game gatherings, this one is socially diverse, drawing lawyers and laborers alike. “There’s an intermingling of guys that normally wouldn’t be giving each other the time of day,” says R.W. “Butch” Johnson, who works for Norfolk Southern Corporation, a railroad company, and treks to games from his home in Salem. “I’ve gotten close to a lot of people on the site that I never would’ve met in a 100 years. They’ve become part of an extended family.”

Yowell, who lives in Winchester and works for a beer distributor, recently purchased a 34-foot motor home, a gameday chariot that he loads with 15-20 cases of beer. A buddy cooks up fare appropriate for each opponent’s mascot.

While Wilk Hall is not a real place, it has become a state of mind.

“It’s all about the hardcore fans, just the fans who are committed—no bullshit,” says Yowell, who has established a Web site in honor of the gathering [www.wilkhall.com]. “It’s for the fans that are gonna go on the road, not the ones that say they’re doing all that.”

Yowell did not attend UVA, but he is a regular donor to the Virginia Athletics Foundation. He doesn’t take kindly to the idea that fans like him are diluting the traditional fan base, a view that has been espoused by some posters on the Sabre who lament the apparent decline in preppy spectators in the stands.

“I’ve got on a big orange ‘Hoo T-shirt, I’ve got a shaved head and look psycho,” Yowell says proudly.

That’s just fine with Al Groh, UVA’s football coach, who has praised the Wilk Hall crew at VAF events. As he tries to build the Cavs into a football powerhouse, Groh has been clear about what he wants to see in the stands: Maniacs.

And maniacs apparently should not look like they are going to a dinner party. That is why, at a press conference following the Duke game earlier this month, Groh congratulated the home fans for their noise, but also for their dress. “Looks like we’re in the process of trading in repp ties for body paint, and blue cotton Oxford button downs for T-shirts—orange ones at that,” Groh told reporters.

That shift Groh envisions is sartorial, but also psychological: If UVA fans look the part, they will play it better, louder, just like the fans down in Blacksburg, where there is no such thing as a semi-formal Hokie, or a subdued one.

Yowell says that UVA can fill up Scott Stadium and build more grassroots support for the team by reaching out to non-alumni like him, to “blue collar” Virginians.

“There is the image of UVA fan as being a stuffy bowtie-wearing snob—an elitist attitude that’s stuck,” Yowell says. “Joe Schmoe who’s an asphalt worker…doesn’t give a damn about that. He just wants to go see a good game and have fun.”

To be sure, UVA has started to court new fans by flexing its sports-marketing muscle like never before. The series of slick Cavalier football television and radio advertisements that aired recently in Central Virginia are part of a larger effort to attract football enthusiasts with no connection to the university, according to Andrew Rader, UVA’s associate athletic director of marketing, promotions and licensing.

“To have the support we want to have, to have the enthusiasm and energy in the stadium, we’re going to need those people…people who live in Madison County who have never been to a Virginia game before,” Rader says. “We’re trying to reach the whole demographic.”–E.H.