To my cherished correspondents/confidantes: 

Follows the latest discourse from the desk of “Dawson-G-the-Freestyle-King”. I could do this on the radio too you know.
Yours truly, 
Dawson Gage


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Dear Ben,

Follows the text which I attempted to send to you via “Twitter DM”, but which some 2000+ words is a bit too long for that medium. In good faith and high purposes do I persist.  I will respect your wishes not to trouble you with random remarks if you will refrain from harassing me through the vector of my mother (who it is hard enough to get along with already.) Thanks and take care.

Regards,
Dawson Gage

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From 2 March 2024, Twitter DM from Benjamin Schachman to Dawson Gage:

“It’s not worth it for me in any way to dispute your deranged accusations. I can only say I hope you stop inflicting pain and suffering on the people, notably women, that you’ve focused on. I hope you get the help you need, I hope you can one day lead a fruitful, happy life. But I will always defend my employees and colleagues. And I will always recommend to the full extent allowed by the law that HQR defend against your delusional actions.
Be well. And please stop contacting me, from here on out.”

Dawson’s commentary-in-reply:

“They accepted him with no questions. He thought of himself, there and here, as a radio transmitter of some kind, and believed that whatever he was broadcasting at the time was at least no threat to them. In his electro-mysticism, the triode was as basic as the cross in Christianity. Think of the ego, the self that suffers a personal history bound to time, as the grid. The deeper and true Self is the flow between cathode and plate. The constant, pure flow. Signals — sense-data, feelings, memories relocating — are put onto the grid, and modulate the flow. We live lives that are waveforms constantly changing with time, now positive, now negative. Only at moments of great serenity is it possible to find the pure, informationless state of signal zero. 

“In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid?” said Pökler. 

“Yes, that’s good,” Mondaugen smiled.”

—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Thank you for a minimally civilized response. I will do my best not to write to you in the previous irregular fashion, but understand that your mixture of threat and condescension doesn’t go down any better with a touch of sympathy. Neither does it convince me nor undo the wrong which has been done. Naturally I have a few more words before I attend to more important matters. You will excuse my freestyle approach, not to be mistaken for “derangement”. Like so:

Perhaps the “help” I need is for those who have accused me to back down from this malicious false narrative about “pain and suffering”. Perhaps there is a direct and absolute correlation between “defamation of character” and “mental illness”. You act as if you speak with authority of “truth”, but you use the same vocabulary and concepts as the DA’s office, Ben. That is neither journalism nor science (and as far as the English language goes, it’s pretty dismal, too). 

I don’t know what “pain and suffering” means to someone who has never been threatened, never been the victim of a true crime, never been arrested, jailed, beaten, tortured. You act as if I am some kind of lonely reject who obsesses over women who fear and loathe him. Well, which one is it, Ben? I have said for years that we should not afford emotions a status in law, that “fear” is never “reasonable”, and that bourgeois-patriarchal liberal white men do not have credibility when it comes to criticizing Dawson the communist poet/journalist/scholar/popstar. 

That’s a much more compelling argument than your own discourses about “mental illness” and “defending WHQR” from “stalking” (whatever that means, see the quote from Chaucer in my “Pitt County motion” for the earliest use of the word in English.)

You ask me to admit to my “delusions”, but do you really think I’m going to accept your use of words like “stalker” and “schizophrenic”? Truth may be separate from language, but without the correct language, truth disppears, or is turned “inside-out” (to use Mr. David’s catch-phrase).

You say “the full extent allowed by law”, but that’s for Mr. David (or his successor) to say, not you, yes?Nevertheless let me say that by this point, I am something of an authority on these areas of North Carolina law, and I would not be making my criticisms were I not certain that I had a sound basis in law to speak and write thus. I have said that Mr. David is a rogue district attorney who purposefully distorts the law, and this should reflect in some fashion upon your idea of what is “the fullest extent” or what is “allowed by law”. Perhaps you have placed faith in the wrong authorities, namely Mr. David and Mr. Stein. Constitutional lawyers have yet to take up my arguments, but it is only a matter of time.

Like many of my accusers, “criminal prosecution” (and the threat thereof) by the white supremacist tyrant Ben David is your weapon-of-choice, even if it is (in terms of “reality”) grossly inappropriate and uncivilized and cruel. I can think of several reasons why this is so, and none of them are good. 

One, almost-technical, is that the “Workplace Violence Prevention Act” does not have the “teeth” that Chapter 50B has, as in “criminal prosecution for 50B-4.1”. Let’s just accept this as a fact and assume that the General Assembly, however wayward and wrongful in its ways, nevertheless does draw certain lines. At least intuitively, you all must understand that you were abusing that statute in your actions, and claiming “fear” with no evidence nor reason against someone who was vulnerable to your pantomimes of “concern” and “respectability” etc etc. Even Judge Noecker seemed to agree.

Two, because when my “focus” is on an “institution”, it is not clear who your “fake-victim-poster-child” would be, since your only other option for “criminal prosecution” is NCGS 14-277.3A, “the stalking law”, but you all would be loathe to admit that I was actually “stalking WHQR”, that is, attempting to seize control of the station. 

(I suspect that it was in the person of Camille Mojica that this half-baked fascist legal-reasoning began to become apparent in your internal discussions, but I would also point out that Hannah Breisinger passed through WHQR, having received several polite and decent letters from yours truly, without me ever meeting her, nor seeking her out in person, nor her coming to any harm. 

In passing, to the end of saying “that was not stalking”, I point to, and stand behind, my decision to write Ms. Breisinger a letter complementing her ability to properly pronounce the words “black babies” and “white babies” in an afternoon news-item, which even Rachel Lewis Hilburn would have found difficult. If you were interested to know I have had plenty in the way of commendation vis-a-vis HQR News over the years, including of your own work.  Mr. Campbell tried to say my communications were not those of the “normal” or “ordinary” listener, but I would count myself more “extraordinary” than “abnormal”, and in any event “listener feedback to radio stations” is obviously a constitutional right. There is a general disdain for the intelligent and eccentric listener which is manifest in WHQR’s campaign against me which is worth resisting, since it tears at the the roots of “public radio”. )

Let’s subject our assumptions, if we can, to elementary test of “reality”. If I did pose the “threat” you all have feigned to fear, then we’d be in a different situation. But you are old enough to remember the debates about “the War on Terror”, when this country had to learn the hard way that a “foreign policy of fear”–that is, of preemptive violence against America’s chosen enemies–was not merely wrong, but self-destructive and dangerous. On the level of “interpersonal relations” and “institutional life” the same principle holds: fear leads to loathing, which leads (to use Dr. Thompson’s phrases) to “the downward spiral of dumbness” and “the end of fun” etc etc. Michelle Rhinesmith’s first threat to call the police, and her subsequent resort to the Courts, were precisely such a case of “psychopathic preemption”, and as with the Iraq War, it is correct in such situations to question the sincerity of such rationales (of “fear and loathing” crossed as usual with “power and privilege”) in favor of ulterior motives. The fact that WHQR has only escalated and repeated her indefensible calumnies would seem to speak to this point that “the original aggression was wrongful”. If that is a “deranged accusation”, I’d like to know what a “reasonable accusation” looks like.

I understand there are some people who threaten journalists, even newspapers, and there are some people who threaten women with violence, but I am not one of these. How could I be, being the son of North Carolina’s most celebrated woman radio station manager? And that is of course not all I am: do you not understand what I mean when I describe myself as “poet & journalist”, “Lesbian male”, “revolutionary communist”, indeed as “radical feminist”? Or do you deny me even the rights of identity and autonomy where such things are concerned?

To put it another way, I don’t need lectures about “women” from you or any other man, nor from any woman, thank you very much (though I do welcome comments and criticisms from all persons regardless of gender or sex.) I have probably kissed more women than all the men at WHQR put together (indeed, you could throw the DA’s office in and I would still probably come out on top.) When it comes to “defending” your station, keep in mind that these “women” for whom you claim to speak might have different ideas than you or your male colleagues which they do not feel comfortable or even capable to articulate in the fear-culture of your workplace. 

A more honest and open discussion, unfiltered by ideology nor regulated by violence, would have required you give up the violent  threat to abuse the powers of police and prosecution. But believe me, I have been writing far more and far better to Anita Rao than I have to you, and WUNC is not going to follow your lead nor agree with what you’ve done. If they did, they would still be wrong. Understand in other words that while I will do my best to be patient, I will not be deterred in my efforts at redress.

And I promise you, the primal heart of this controversy–is the singer *NAME REDACTED* married to Dawson Gage?–is going to be resolved in my favor before you all have the chance to change your tune. But while Ms. Rao will have to account for her giving airtime to “Violet Bell”, that’s something I have forgiven her for, and something which she has permitted me to address through lawful correspondence. I suppose one difference here is that I don’t live in the listening area of WUNC anymore, for that matter in walking distance of its studios (though in the past I have for fully 6 years–not 7, since there are no radios in the Orange County Detention Center, where I wrote extensively to WUNC). 

You all act as if your judgments about me are definitive and sound, as if you were in a position to judge me, but they say much more about your own whiny liberal-progressive square-dom than they do about me. 

I do not take for granted my own moral or political authority, speaking as I do from the position of the underground artist and persecuted dissident. If what you all do is so noble/elegant/sexy/”high-quality”, then maybe I am just a “reject”. As things stand, however, this argument has been conducted in secret between you and I mostly. Naturally I’m not going to let you pick on me in this way if I can help it…

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“someday / I’ll be / big enough so you can’t hit me / and all you’re / ever gonna be / is mean…”  
               
—Taylor Swift, “Mean

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You’ll excuse me if am not overawed by the institutional gravity behind your dismissals. I have plenty of credentials of my own, you know, but Phillips Academy, the Society of the Cincinnati, the Carolina Yacht Club, Folk Nation 720 Gangster Disciples, Bolivia’s Movimiento al Socialismo, or the Chinese Communist Party do not necessarily want to get involved (though several of these “pro-Dawson Gage institutions” have at least one radio station). 

And then there’s Coast 97.3. Then there’s 98.3 The Penguin…. Why do you assume that someone like Isabelle Shepherd won’t simply change her mind in light of everything that’s happened? Mistaken identity? Poetic justice? And you know they have radio in West Virginia, too!

(And on that front, be advised that my lawful written correspondence with Isabelle Shepherd just since December has run to some 70 pages of electric superprose. Perhaps I will copy this to WHQR for “background information”, but it does not seem to have frightened or bothered Ms. Shepherd (who also lives and works in downtown Wilmington), who told me as far back as 2017 that she did not have “anything to do with” the central object of my complaints, which is “Rhinesmith v. Gage”.)

But nothing you or any of your “colleagues” has said about me is fit to be read on the air, is it? You all seek to defame me negatively, but if I am such a malefactor, isn’t even that a story? 

(My grandfather got his job as a radio station manager when his predecessor was arrested and charged with murder. He quit graduate school at NC State, drove to Fayetteville, and proceeded to broadcast the murder trial. I believe this was BEFORE the composition of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” which treats of similar ideas about “radio trials”. )

Have you all even discussed the possibility of having to deal with my story on the air? And let’s keep in mind that I have in fact been a minor Wilmington public figure my entire life. I was interviewed by the likes of Don Ansell (WAAV 980AM) and Matt Murphy (WMNX 97.3FM) in my teens, and my public remarks on everything from Project GRACE to police militarization to racial gerrymandering (all of which I opposed on-the-record in public) have been reported in the Wilmington News Media (as in “the Star-News + the TV stations”) (a lot of this took place before you even got to town.) 

When I say “character defamation”, I mean to speak sincerely of the “pain and suffering” experienced by someone who used to have a reputation for being extremely intelligent, principled, and humane, and who did not obey the usual rules. Perhaps I remain one such. 


But I do not need to style myself an angel when I am being made out to be even “less than a demon”. I do not lack significance, and that is what your discourse of “mental illness” and “stalking” are meant to effect, that is, wholesale and shameless character defamation. Because you have the DA’s office on your side, it may have seemed as though WHQR has the cultural or political or intellectual authority to dismiss me, but when it comes to credentials in the genres relevant to public radio—recording art, poetic recitation, extemporaneous commentary on public affairs–my work speaks for itself. The question is why you all are so determined to ignore my work, while attempting to discourage me from even looking at, let alone critiquing, your own.

After all, I’m the one who walked away from his internship in the DA’s office to record a 96-track debut-mega-album in his grandmother’s garage, taking breaks to sleep in a sleeping bag listening to Noam Chomsky lectures. Say what you will, but I doubt there’s a better interpreter of Lennon and McCartney than me, and as far as Chomskians I am pretty much the amateur best. I would have thought that “Chomsky and the Beatles” were pretty good authorities to invoke in an argument/discussion with Ben Schachtman, but I suppose I formed that view of you before you began to work for WHQR/Ben David.  And so I would point out that in American radio history, we’ve seen DJ’s burn the Beatles and ban the Rolling Stones, and National Public Radio say “We will never have Noam Chomsky on All Things Considered”. You all are very much in that tradition, so to that extent your abuses are so-many back-handed tributes.

The problem is that you all refuse to accept any standard of objective truth, but rather cling to this term “delusional” and various vulgar synonyms therefor (you just used “deranged accusations”, but to that I would simply say “pathetic non-responses”.)

There will come a day when this dispute is resolved, and obviously my hope is that you and your “colleagues” have the intellectual integrity to heed my forthright words, which are not merely of “accusation” (though there is that) but also pleas for understanding and dialogue in the pursuit of truth and beauty on the broadcast airwaves, that is, of “public radio”.

*finis*

— ========================= William Dawson Gage. 高大文 513 Orange Street Wilmington, North Carolina 28401-4609 United States of America ========================= 1-910-322-5853 [email protected] | [email protected] @gageagainst ——————————————- freestyleking.info | orangestreetlawschool.org | soundcloud.com/dawson-gage ——————————————— “…’cause to take on the world at all angles / requires a strength I can’t use…”