SOVIET MIDDLEBURG

(AUTHOR’S NOTE: This piece was posted on my Typepad blog site in January 2008 but somehow got deleted, so here it is again for the record.) The little town where I live has been taken over by wolverine bureaucrats. It’s a toney town, known for having Jack and Jackie Kennedy live here, ride their horses here, that has tons of toney nouveau-riche people, and the streets are filled with BMW cars and people walking all over the place every day. Where the Safeway was when I was growing up became Billy Leach’s hardware store and is now Linda Tripp’s Christmas Sleigh shop – Linda being famous as Monica Lewinsky’s buddy when Monica was blowing President Bill Clinton. So I got arrested one recent evening – January 11, 2008 -- woken up by the Middleburg einzatsgruppen banging loudly on my door, asked to step out of my house in my pajamas, arrested and handcuffed by a Middleburg police officer on my front porch without my Miranda rights being read, and pushed into a police car and carted off the jail on charges I was “drunk in public.” The police chief, Steven Webber, later sent me a letter on January 22, 2008, saying the police visit was “following a domestic related incident.” That was absurd as I live alone and have lived alone at my mother’s home since she died in August 2006. But Police Chief Webber was kind enough to tell me the complainant for the arrest was my own sister. Valerie Embrey, through her attorney, Joan K. Fine of Winchester, by telephone, no inquiry was done prior to the arrest. My sister, Valerie, apparently was upset and angry after I had yelled at her over the telephone in a conversation when she said she wanted to force me to sell our jointly-owned house bequeathed by our mother and force me out of the house. Yes, I told her to stuff it where the light doesn’t shine and hung up on her. She made the call to me. I did not have to put up with her unwanted telephone insolence and silly demands to sell a valuable paid-for property in a bad real estate market. So I told her to stuff it and hung up on her. Then the police showed up, woke me up, handcuffed me without telling me what it was all about, did not read me my Miranda rights, and carted me off to jail in my pajamas, where I was stripped, put in an orange jump-suit, fingerprinted and photographed, and thrown in a cold cell with a metal bench and toilet, ultimately with a multitude of other prisoners. And Middleburg Police Chief StevenWebber told me in his January 22 letter, a week after I was released from jail onto the street in my pajamas, that “additional charges are pending” – apparently because I pushed the police officer’s arm away and asked him what was going on when they asked me to step outside my house, grabbed me and handcuffed me without inquiring or explaining anything. Assault? The police were the assaulters, not me. I was just trying to defend myself. After the police arrested me and carted me off the hoosecow, giving sister Valerie 24-hour access to the house without me there, she came in with a paid appraiser and inventoried all the contents, including our mother’s and my own property, in an apparent effort to gain some advantage in the ultimate settlement of division of tangible personal property under our mother’s will. So I was double raped – in the Loudoun County jail thanks to my own sister, Valerie, and again by her as she burgled our house after she had me carted out by the police on bogus trumped-up charges, in violation of my civil rights. Well, I made it back home. This whole stinking assault and Soviet Middleburg police violation of my civil rights and my sister Valerie’s role (and her attorney Joan K. Fine’s role) in all of this will not stand. Martin Luther King Jr. walked across the bridge in Selma, Alabama, many years ago in behalf of human rights and dignity. Just because I’m white, why can’t I have those rights as well? My parents moved to Middleburg, Virginia, in 1956, when whites and blacks were segregated and told to use separate facilities. I sat at the counter at the New York Café, now the Coach Stop in Middleburg, in 1961, when the Reverend Earnest A. “Froggy” DeBordenave led us in a civil rights sit-in that desegregated this then white-only restaurant that would not serve blacks. We arrived with black patrons at the New York Café that day in 1961. My mother told me not to get on the school bus after my father refused to write a note to Loudoun County High School to get me excused from going to school that day. So I played hookey to participate in a historic sit-in. After getting served with black patrons at the New York Café, we walked round the corner to the Middleburg Pharmacy soda fountain and got served there as well, thus ending so-called separate-but-equal requirements in Middleburg. The terrible shame is that tiny historic Middleburg has changed over the years, been taken over by nouveau-riche dilettantes with none of the class and manners my parents taught us. They are low-class yet nouveau-riche Jack Kent Cooke types, no grace and manners, but somehow rich, a lot of inherited money, contributing nothing to the good of the order except their spending and crass narcissistic lack of any class or attributes. Such a pity.