Visit watchfirepress.com/jf for purchase links to all major online booksellers.
Editor’s Afterword
Much to my great relief, I did not have to preface The Mother of All Fonkos with a “trigger warning.” I greatly resented the notion that these books contain anything to offend any reader’s sensibilities—after all, they only repeat the truth, which we know shall make us free. Ms. Mellowdee Coxbaum, Assistant Associate Dean in the Office of Student Succor and Solace, had stipulated that I include one, and I hated doing it. But then her wife took an administrative position at the University of California, Lompoc, and Dean Coxbaum was promised a post in the Womyn’s Studies Institute as well, and away she went. Our university has not yet filled her vacated slot, and no one else in that office has ever paid attention to me, so we are home free. For the time being.
Concurrently with the final editing of The Mother of All Fonkos, I came across a recently published work on the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, The Lid is Lifted. The author, Paul D. Kennedy, is an Irishman who at the time of the invasion worked as a financial consultant in Kuwait City. This book, the first of a trilogy, recounts his experiences during the first several weeks of the invasion, and subsequent books will recount his entire adventure. He was located in the heart of the city and he enjoyed wide and deep connections with the expatriate community there. Thus his book is ripe with detail and insight. Jake Fonko’s experiences differed widely from Mr. Kennedy’s, of course, but where I noted similarities or coincidences I was gratified to find that their respective accounts were rarely in disagreement. As both are true and factual accounts, this is only to be expected.
The campus here at California State University, Cucamonga, has been in a state of chaos lately, and these unfortunate distractions impeded the release of the present book, which should have come out months ago. It is regrettable that the pursuit of scholarship and the quest for learning should be derailed by trivial matters but such is the unfortunate state of academe in our troubled age.
The root of the disturbances lay in the traditional mascot of our athletic teams—”The Fighting Chumash.” The Chumash are a Native American Tribe indigenous to Southern California, and if Stanford University could have “Indians” why should not we have Indians also, was the thinking at the time. It fostered some rousing school anthems and stadium cheers, for example, “Cucamonga, Cucamonga, Ziss Boom Bah! / Mash ‘em! Mash ‘em! Rah Rah Rah!”
However, colleagues in the sociology department took it upon themselves to conduct a study to measure community sensitivities regarding our mascot. They visited the Chumash Casino in Santa Ynez and conducted a series of scientific interviews. Of the dozen actual Chumash they found there, 25% declined to answer, and 42% had never heard of the “Fighting Chumash” and couldn’t care less. Seventeen percent had heard of them but couldn’t care less. One respondent said he was flattered that anyone would ascribe war-like qualities to the Chumash, whom anthropologists tell us mostly were a blissed-out and laid-back tribe that lived along the beach and may have developed a rudimentary version of the bodyboard. Another respondent told the interviewer she was offended, but inasmuch as she was a blackjack dealer and he badgered her while she was on duty, said offense may have had no relation to the mascot situation. Nevertheless, the student newspaper headlined the story, “STUDY FINDS MASCOT OFFENDS NATIVE AMERICAN NATION.”
The school administration immediately set about expunging all mentions of Chumash or any other Native Americans on campus or in any of its publications or statements. A committee was formed to find a replacement mascot. After months of extensive search the committee proposed “The Potato Bugs.” This insect, indigenous to Southern California, is a nasty little creature, certainly as suitable for a mascot as, say, tarantulas. The thinking was that if Stanford University (which had years ago dropped “Indians”) could have a tree and U Cal Irvine could have an anteater, why not a potato bug?
All well and good, but then some malcontent found out that potato bugs also were known as “Jerusalem crickets” and wrote a letter to the editor. Well! You can imagine the protests and counter-protests, and the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, that provoked. Rival factions have been raging for weeks with no end in sight, rendering getting any work done on campus a near impossibility.
One of my students approached me a few days ago with an unsettling news clipping. It was headlined “Nation’s Historians Warn the Past Is Expanding at Alarming Rate.” It showed how, just in the last century, the amount of the past had increased by a full 100 years. I’d never thought of it before, but it is true. And it shows no signs of abating. The next century may well expand the past by a like amount. I alerted my colleagues to this development, but they shrugged it off. My search of the history literature turned up nothing on this topic and a Google search located only one source, something called “The Onion.” On the one hand, having more past will create jobs for historians (and I could use a change of scene!). On the other, might we already have enough of the past to deal with for the time being?
I will pursue the matter further, but I feel heartened that my lectures have inspired at least one student to take a serious interest in historical scholarship. I noticed that when he returned to his group they were all giggling, no doubt out of embarrassment that one of their friends so diligently applied himself to his studies in a campus atmosphere that generally seems devoted to partying and frivolity. I think I shall award him an A+ in “Postmodern History 252”, just to encourage further serious efforts.
B. Hesse Pflingger, PhD
Professor of Contemporary History
California State University, Cucamonga
From The Publisher
It has come to the attention of Matchbook Press that considerable controversy has arisen concerning the origins, accuracy and veracity of the (thus far) six books recounting the life and career of Jake Fonko. While we could present a positive case in our own favor on these matters, doubters could dismiss such an effort as being self-serving. And rightly so. Judgments must always be based on fair, balanced and neutral analysis. Therefore, we are fortunate to have found a definitive exegesis on the matter, recently penned by an eminent scholar in the field. We have appended it to this book with the permission of the author. It will, we hope, settle all questions that have arisen regarding this excellent series of books.
Dorwin Huxtable
Senior Editor in Chief
Matchbook Press
The Fonko Conundrum Deconstructed
By: Aethelstan Proudhoum, AB, MA, MFA (ABD)
Literary Critic
The Phlogiston Review
the recent release of a series of “history books”—purported to be “true and factual accounts”—concerning the involvement of a putative espionage agent, “Jake Fonko”, in certain major world events has ignited considerable controversy throughout scholarly circles. “Are these stories genuinely true and factual?” many ask. Do they reveal history faithfully and accurately as claimed? Or do they constitute an elaborate, diabolically clever hoax at the expense of the scholarly community? Are they, in a word, some kind of “send-up” or “spoof”, a snare set to entrap the intellectually gullible?
I pose these questions not lightly, for au fond they challenge the very integrity and foundations of the historians’ purview. Can the past truly be unraveled and revealed? And if so via what voices and vehicles? The Fonko books constitute an assault threatening the foundations of historical knowledge, and I will endeavor to address and answer that assault with all the depth and diligence at my command.
Numerous aspects of this “historical” compendium raise troubling doubts. To begin with, it is by no means clear that the author, “B. Hesse Pflingger, PhD”, actually exists. My exhaustive search unearthed no one else, anywhere in the world, with the surname, “Pflingger”. Mr. “Pflingger” claims to be a “professor of contemporary history.” There is no such thing! The conce
pt is an oxymoron, an absurdity! He purports to seek tenure after holding his faculty position for nearly 20 years, during which he published absolutely nothing but the Fonko books. Preposterous! It is invariably the rule that by his or her seventh year a tenure-track professor faces an up or out decision, and with a curriculum vitae boasting zero publications in bona fide scholarly journals the candidate would be most definitely cast OUT.
“B. Hesse Pflingger” possibly serves as a nom de plume, and if so it is by no means either unique or original. One is reminded of one’s sophomore year at Oberlin College, when classmates dubbed a particularly obscure and pedantic lecturer “B. S. Flinger”, a joke name that, I am sure, has occurred to sophomores in many different places, times and contexts (c.f., B. F. Skinner). The more one considers the matter, the more one’s conviction solidifies that it must be a nom de plume… but if so, why that particular one?
“Professor Pflingger” claims employment at “California State University, Cucamonga”. Rancho Cucamonga is a prosperous Southern California community, blessed with the presence of several institutions of higher learning including: Chaffey College, University of La Verne, Cambridge College, University of Redlands, Everest College, and University of Phoenix. However, there is not, nor has there ever been, any campus of the California State University system located anywhere in that vicinity. So why was “Cucamonga” chosen as his affiliation? Other than being a running joke on the venerable Jack Benny Radio Program (“All aboard for for Anaheim, Azusa and Cuc… amonga!”) and in Looney Tunes cartoons, the town of Cucamonga has hitherto received scant notice or attention from the world at large.
On the other hand, “Professor Pflingger’s” recountings of campus events, issues and policies in his “Editor’s Afterwords” ring authentic and plausible. For example, only someone thoroughly immersed in contemporary campus life could so graphically describe his altercation with an Assistant Associate Dean in the Office of Student Succor and Solace. Or compose as comprehensive a “trigger warning” as the one preceding Fonko Bolo. Apparently he is intimately familiar with the current academic milieu, but then why would he claim a fictitious affiliation at a non-existent university?
The protagonist, “Jake Fonko”, is introduced at the outset as a man of retirement age straightforwardly proffering a memoir, a chronicle of his adventures and exploits since 1975. An exhaustive search yielded no other people of the surname, “Fonko”. He claims that an Ellis Island clerk bestowed that name on his great-grandfather, an immigrant arriving from Serbia, but even so, by this late date (more than a century after that event) other “Fonkos” must surely exist somewhere in the world, as he does allude to extant relatives. My inquiry as to his status at UCLA (from which he claims to have been expelled during his sophomore year) yielded no information—for reasons of student privacy, their registrar informed me. I could find no record of homeownership in Malibu, California, where he claims to reside in a beachside bachelor pad. Queries to the Central Intelligence Agency, with which he alleges a longstanding history, were politely deflected.
Mr. Fonko’s exploits recounted in these volumes seem reasonably in correspondence with reality. If he was indeed a decorated Ranger (Distinguished Service Cross) and college athlete (tailback, freshman football), then his actions throughout the stories seem acceptably believable. Yet one aspect raises a red flag, as it were. If, as he claims, his family lived in a mansion in Pacific Palisades, California, and he attended a well-regarded second-tier university such as UCLA, how likely is his claim that he participated in combat in Vietnam as a Ranger in Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols? It is widely known that such assignments are given exclusively to “rednecks”, “hillbillies” and minorities, not scions of the upper middle class. Answers to requests for clarifying information from the United States Army have yet to emerge from that bureaucratic morass.
One point stands in favor of his veracity: Skillful and resourceful he may be, and admittedly lucky on occasion, but his successes do not rely on superhuman expertise, strength, prescience, split-second timing or coincidental happenstance. At the least, the actions he reports in these books do not undermine his credibility, and certain quotidian chores—he counts his money, he goes to the bathroom—serve to bolster it. Nor do his accounts rely, as “thriller” fiction so tiresomely does, on preternaturally evil, relentless and implacable villains (more often than not, psychopathic serial killers). Mr. Fonko’s adversaries and antagonists consistently are drawn from the domain of reality. Indeed, they invariably are well-known public figures.
Compounding the mystery, these books employ a first-person narrative style and therefore are entirely self-referential. “Mr. Fonko” speaks for himself, with no alternative perspectives available. “Professor Pflingger” proclaims himself the editor of this lengthy memoir and assures the reader of meticulous vetting, cross-checking and fact verification. Yet a diligent search for citations or other evidence of any scholarly effort on the part of “Professor Pflingger” yielded only a smattering of mentions of proof of “Mr. Fonko’s” accuracy based on lack of evidence to the contrary.
Most disturbingly, “scholarly” though these “historical accounts” purport to be, it appears they were not peer reviewed.
In sum, we face the distinct possibility that we are confronted by “true and factual accounts” of the adventures of a man who does not exist, transcribed by an editor who does not exist. In other words, these books may be nothing more than pure fabrication. However, it also is possible that “the names have been changed to protect the innocent”, a not uncommon literary disclaimer. I note the many instances where Mr. Fonko takes pains to label people he encounters with obviously false names “to spare them trouble or embarrassment.” Perhaps this was done throughout every aspect of the work, for if the material reported therein is in fact the unvarnished truth, these tales suggest serious implications for national security. And perhaps for matters of “Mr. Fonko’s” personal safety?
Thus, while a case, convincing to some, can be built that both the author, the subject and the substance of these books may be purely fictional creations, that assertion must for the time being be held in abeyance as “not proved.”
Broaching the subject matter of the series conveys one into similarly shoal scholarly waters. On the one hand, Mr. Fonko claims to have played key roles in some of the major debacles of the later 20th Century: The collapse of Cambodia, the fall of Shah Pahlavi, John Delorean’s failed venture, the Grenada invasion, the Amritsar Massacre, the deposing of Ferdinand Marcos and Operation Desert Storm, among others. That one man, acting as a “free lance whatever” (his description of his profession) but otherwise unlettered, unqualified and undistinguished, could find himself embroiled in such a wide spectrum of critical international events strains this reader’s credulity, to say the least. On the other hand, where the history of these situations is publicly available, the books seem plausibly accurate. Mr. Fonko could have been there, but the reader must decide for him or her self whether or not to take as truth Mr. Fonko’s reportage of behind the scenes occurrences. Maybe he saved Margaret Thatcher’s life, but maybe not. Maybe he helped Corazon Aquino steal an election from Ferdinand Marcos, but maybe not. Maybe he saved the ruling family of Kuwait and outwitted Saddam Hussein, but maybe not. Maybe he arranged for the Shah’s medical treatment in the United States, but maybe not. The purported outcomes of Mr. Fonko’s adventures are public knowledge. The onus is on the reader whether to accept his word that he influenced world events as averred.
Mr. Fonko’s relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is especially problematic. Initially, he claims, he was set up by a rogue agent who as part of an unauthorized scheme to “smoke out a mole” fabricated a fictitious “legend” for Mr. Fonko and dispatched him to Cambodia on the eve of the Khmer Rouge takeover. As a result of that assignment he received a Distinguished Intelligence Medal (or “jockstrap award”), he claims, and who can dispute it, given that
disclosure of such awards is prevented by Top Secret classifications? One can justifiably wonder if the CIA is as devious, venal, corrupt and inept, as portrayed in Jake Fonko MIA. However, given that agency’s ability to classify embarrassments and malfeasances on grounds of “national security”, one cannot discount such a possibility. Other fictional treatments of the CIA, e.g., Harlot’s Ghost, by Norman Mailer, Shelley’s Heart, by Charles McCarry, Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series, the Coen Brothers’ film, Burn After Reading, to name just a few, portray the CIA as devious, corrupt, venal and inept, and are there not invariably grains of truth interspersed through fictional tales?
Similarly, Mr. Fonko claims that a certain KGB agent, “Emil Grotesqcu”, built a career in his agency for himself by both pursuing Fonko and perpetuating his legend, at times arriving opportunely to rescue him from seemingly hopeless situations (e.g., in Abu Ghraib prison). Agent Grotesqcu claims to have originated, as did Mr. Fonko’s family, in Serbia, his family then fleeing from there to Kiev in Ukraine. The “cu” appendage to his name however, suggests neither Serbian nor Ukrainian, but Romanian origins. However, a search turned up no one else, from anywhere in the world, with the surname “Grotesqcu”. Granted this name could be another pseudonym, or perhaps a “code name”, but could that ruthless Russia espionage agency plausibly have allowed such a corruption in its own ranks to occur, let alone persist for nearly a quarter century? Comparably to the CIA, the KGB has ample capability to bury its embarrassments out of sight if need be, so once again proof may exist but may not be accessible. For what it is worth, one’s exhaustive search of the Venona Files yielded no evidence one way or the other.
Most perplexing about these accounts are frequent excursions into literature and popular entertainment that Mr. Fonko enfolds into his narrative. Take, for example, his account in Fonko Bolo of his adventures in India and his rescue by (apparently) Mother Teresa. Portions of the tale are redolent of Voltaire’s Candide—abject evil and depravity confronting naïve optimism. The adventures themselves, veering hither and yon and from pillar to post, as it were, appear reflective of Homer’s Odyssey more than just coincidentally. And in their midst appears a guru who recites what might easily pass for one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. And, not least, from whence could the embedded “stories within stories” structure have arisen but Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa?
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 62
