Who Killed Iron Joe? Part 5: Moon When the Ponies Shed

As I’ve been saying, I made it easy to put the blame on me, even if “the blame” means assassination, something only a select few in history have been capable of doing, and traditionally it hasn’t been easy to understand the motivations of such individuals.  Okay, so again I’m trying to make it obvious that I’m a scapegoat.  Anyway, I was always a suspicious individual.  I’ll give the Danab and Cavanaugh that much.

I’ve already said that my parents were murdered by the Danab, and that I was adopted into a family that produced the somewhat radical Magnum and Stringfellow, who were more than brothers to me in my youth and became more than friends as I grew older, even as they made their views, priorities, and ambitions plain as proponents of their peoples’ rights as separate from the goals of the Danab.  Even outside of this sphere, I was always agitating, or at least that’s how it might be easy to interpret my activities.  I never accepted the easy solutions and regular paths even when I was in school.  I was a good student, but I didn’t accept that everything I was taught and its methodology was the best possible way to learn, and as a result struggled to earn the grades I was capable of achieving based on my intelligence.  I’m not sure my teachers understood what happened, how I gradually turned away from their methods, posed an independent mind, but they certainly stopped being so enthusiastic about me.  They grew less interested to hear my thoughts.  Some people might have dropped out eventually, but I kept at it, even though it became clear that I had become an outsider.

It was the same story with my circle of friends.  In the beginning I found it easy to find them, but the older I got, the easier it was to be a loner, since I had everyone I needed at home, and fewer and fewer others understood what it was that defined me as an individual; or in other words, I was more of an individual than most people were willing to accept, especially the less I was able to interact in the expected ways.  I would never say that I was an introvert, but that would have been the natural conclusion.  I didn’t want to play the social game, even though it could have helped me a great deal.

I pursued activities that became available through the schools, and in that way I retained a semblance of the mainstream, but even in that I was at the fringe, seeming out of place, expressing thoughts others found baffling.  I reserved my most intense feelings and concerns for those who knew me best, and they were few and far between, and again, mostly at home.  I was basically untrustworthy.

When I wrote, I did not hide my thoughts, and so it would not have been difficult to interpret my true feelings for the Danab.  It’s not as if I did drugs or vandalized property or set pipe bombs, nothing so obvious like that.  I guess I’m not so different from the famous assassins in history.

But again, I am not the assassin of Iron Joe, and yes, I fully understand that it does not so good to continually insist on that.  Denial is the first avenue of suspicion, but then, it’s not often you hear the thoughts of an accused assassin.

It still came as a surprise to me when I was roused from my bed, in the middle of the night, by Cavanaugh and his agents, and roughly treated all the way to the law building, and unceremoniously deposited inside this cell.  It’s true, I had visited the offices of Iron Joe, but then, that was true of everyone.  It was a public forum he had purposefully set up that way; anyone could have fallen into that trap, and statistically speaking just about everyone did, almost as if it was a conspiracy to have the most convenient means of catching the culprit on the likely event that someone finally snapped and did what he had coming.

Okay, I could have worded that better.  What I mean to say is, Iron Joe was not well-liked, even for the Danab.  He was resented for what he took as policy, and so there was a lot of discontent even from those who couldn’t be considered agitators.  Was I an agitator?  I would argue only by association.