Meet Gary Fishel, Goofball

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ome dumbass clown—his lawyer describes him as “a goofball who writes funny songs”—regaled the audience at an Elks Lodge charity event with a poor rendition of Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” He had fitted it with new words in the manner of (say) Mark Russell or Weird Al Yankovic or the Barron Knights, but without any of their their wit or skill. (And honestly, that’s not a high bar.) Instead of being about bad, bad Leroy Brown the song is now about dead, dead Michael Brown.

Yes, that’s right, this piece of excrement in human form was indeed making fun of the unarmed teenager who was shot and killed by a police officer who felt the kid might somehow be a threat to him. Gary Fishel—the clown in question—may well write funny songs as his lawyer claims, but this sure as hell isn’t one of them. The available recording begins:

… Michael Brown
Learned a lesson about a-messin'
With a badass po-lice-man.

And he's bad, bad Michael Brown,
Baddest thug in the whole damn town,
Badder than old King Kong,
Meaner than a junkyard dog.

It is heartening to report that the Elks Lodge audience, about half of which were police officers, was not amused, according to accounts. The host—a retired LAPD officer named Joe Myers—apparently had no problems with it. “How can I dictate what he says in a song?” the guy asked irrelevantly. “This is America. We can say what we want.”

What Gary Fishel wanted to say was:

Two men took to fightin'
And Michael punched in through the door.
And Michael looked like some old Swiss cheese
His brain was splattered on the floor.

Dead, dead Michael Brown,
Deadest man in the whole damn town.
His whole life's long gone,
Deader than a road-kill dog.

Why he wanted to spew this dreck is anybody’s guess. His lawyer said he figured an audience of police officers “would get a kick out of it.” My opinion of the police as a group has sunk greatly in the past couple of months, but even I wouldn’t have thought that they would find this funny. (It isn’t for one thing. It’s just dumb.)

And he's dead, dead Michael Brown,
Deadest man in the whole damn town.
His whole life's long gone,
Deader than a road-kill dog.

To each his own. If I could put the two of them in a bottle and set it adrift till eternity passes away, I probably would. But there never seems to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them. Me, I don’t think of the deadest man in the whole damn town. I think of the kid with the bright future who made the mistake of running into a killer cop.