Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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They’re studying me for $750,000

Unfortunately, I don’t get any of the money. Maybe not to Donald Trump, but to the rest of us, $750,000 is a lot of money.

It’s being used to study me.

It’s an idea that’s really caught fire.

It started with the request for $750,000 to study the childhood of Nathan Dunlap, the convicted murderer of four employees at Chuck E. Cheese’s, back in 1993.

If you ask me, they should use the funds to figure out why 24 years after the murder, a slew of governors can’t decide whether Dunlap should live or die.

He did get the death penalty. Gov. Hickenlooper neither commuted nor carried out the execution.

Anyway, it was suggested that for $750,000, authorities could figure out whether Dunlap suffered from a traumatic childhood, which, if he did, obviously means that he should not be executed. Because murder is automatic in people with traumatic childhoods.

As I said, I’m really here to talk about me, not Dunlap and the $750,000 needed to analyze his childhood, he being an adult and all; no one can access him as a child. That’s why it takes so much money. One has to reconstruct the Dunlap childhood based on . . . old report cards? his arguments with umpires? memories of his former teachers, or, if they’re dead by now, people his teachers talked to? Interviews with his childhood bullies (or bullees — you know, the people he bullied)?

No doubt, all that would require $750,000; no doubt, it would all show that Dunlap could not control himself and the murders weren’t really his fault.

Sorry, I’ve gotten off track. This isn’t about Dunlap. It’s about me, since, as I say, the go-study-the-child national budget item has really caught on. You can now apply for your own $750,000. I did.

I really need to get myself all figured out. I really do, because I did a lot of bad things as a child. No doubt they have deformed the way I live today and caused all the mistakes I make, which, of course, are not my fault.

Why, when I was a kid, I did things like stay up late. I should have been asleep, but like a real sneak I listened to Bill Reed broadcast the old Denver Bears baseball games. Because I cheated myself out of enough sleep, I didn’t take full advantage of my education. What worse crime is there than that?

My friends and I used to engage in a fierce competition as to who stayed up latest, listening to the most innings. It was the depths of juvenile delinquency if you listened to all nine innings (not to mention an extra inning game). It was depravity. If, somehow, with that $750,000, we could retroactively chart just how much sleep I lost, due to exactly how many innings I listened to, think how that could explain about my current crimes!

I don’t want to leave anyone with the wrong impression. There was a lot more I did wrong than listening to Bears’ games. I pretended to be sick once in a while because I just didn’t want to go to school. I cheated on my spelling test in the second grade. It gets really bad. I never learned how to hold a bat, and let down my buddies in AZA baseball games.

Like I say, there’s a lot to uncover about me. At school. In day camp. In arts and crafts. At the old BMH Hebrew school, when we — yes, we, as I was a very bad influence on others — used to sneak out of class to go down to the scary tunnel between the two buildings. So what if I wasn’t as bad as Tilden Russell or Chuckie Weiss? I was bad enough.

Pardon the tangent. Chuckie Weiss could find any excuse to leave Hebrew school class. Hear this: our classroom was at the end of the hall and the ceilings were old, high ceilings and the flooring was hard linoleum. When Chuckie finally decided to come back to class, he had to walk down the entire hall to get there. He put these heavy metal taps on his shoes and walked very slowly. You could hear each loud tap, tap, tap as he walked slowly back to the classroom. He disrupted the class even when he wasn’t even in the class. You just couldn’t avoid listening to those slow, rhythmic, very deliberate tap, tap, taps. They stopped the class cold.

It would probably take about $1.5 million to figure out Chuckie’s childhood at this point.

I wasn’t that bad, but it doesn’t matter. I was at least $750,000 worth of bad.

There’s a lot to uncover about everybody and his traumatic childhood.

Which is why the national budget is so bloated. I mean, add up those $750,000 segments, not a penny less of which is needed to figure what went wrong with each kid.

If, G-d forbid, Nathan Dunlap was abused as a kid, it’s no simple thing to figure out the consequences for his decision-making. It probably takes most of the $750,000 just to get that part straight.

So like I said, it’s a darn shame that I myself don’t get any of the $750,000 needed to study my early years, but I have to admit: the cause is just. The money is put to good use. Think of how much I and everyone around me will gain when the study is done. It will be so illuminating and explain everything that’s wrong with me.

It’s really not a sacrifice to see all those dollars go to this good cause. Just like Dunlap’s lawyers said, “It’s very confusing for all of us.” We all need clarity, whatever the price.

Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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IJN Executive Editor | [email protected]


One thought on “They’re studying me for $750,000

  1. Sam Rubinson

    Dear Rabbi Goldberg,

    I was really amused by your View From Denver column this week. I must admit that I am just as guilty as you are. I too spent many hours listening to the Denver Bear games on the radio when I was a kid. I even went so far as to go to quite a few Bear’s games at the old Bear’s Stadium and I did learn how to hold a bat. Would this qualify me for the $750, 000? Please let me know how to apply for it. I promise that any money allotted to me will be donated directly to Jewish organizations.

    Reply

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