Daily Inquisition: 2 Good 4 Sainthood

The Daily Inquisition / January 9, 2009

By Team eXiled

An Old Wacko Makes Us Proud to Be American

We don’t know what America’s poets are doing today, but we know what they ought to be doing: composing songs in honor of Robert Sylvester, the aged gunman who robbed a Check’n’Go market in Bloomington, Indiana, hopped into his SUV and shot it out with the cops in the middle of the highway.

Just look at the pictures. This guy must be pushing 70, but he’s facing down a posse of cops one-third his age, leaping over highway barriers, while keeping a cigarette in the middle of his Yoda-like face. And he looks good doing it.

This is an America we can be proud of. This is change we can believe in, as in, “Gimme the bills under the cash drawer and you can keep the change!” Pete Townshend may warble about being “a soldier at 63,” but you don’t see that degenerate Limey facing down the cops. That’s pure America in those pictures, baby, that hard hot sun on the old fart and his gun in the middle of some nowhere highway.

Of course they shot him. Anybody worth mentioning gets shot sooner or later. But the old bastard didn’t even die. And we bet the medic who tried to pry that smoke out of his mouth lost a couple fingers.

Further viewing: Robert “Fuck da Police” Sylvester’s getaway slideshow.

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12 Comments

Add your own

1. Kavuye Toon | January 10th, 2009 at 6:34 pm
I salute him
2. boskomb | January 10th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
Brilliant
3. burbl | January 10th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Yeah! Fun to watch, but… isn’t he a bit retarded?
4. hobomaker | January 11th, 2009 at 7:44 am
unfortunately RS is dead now, but this piece inadvertently makes even more of a hero out of him:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28529658/
5. Joe Blow | January 15th, 2009 at 10:29 am
He’s not wearing a belt and yet his pants are staying up! Amazing…
at least he had a chance for a smoke before he died…
6. Wilbur Evans | January 16th, 2009 at 11:49 pm
What a first class MoFo! He was obviously committed, yet remained casual before his almost certain exit. Conviction is beautiful!
7. Cash Money | January 25th, 2009 at 11:20 am
damn look at that nigga run! but come on let’s really LOOK at this:
-2 jean with jean
-3 shit pose, frame 2
+1 for two buttons undone
+1 vintage’d jeans
+5 cigarette in mouth
+10 frame 4, “the outlaw”
8. David | February 4th, 2009 at 8:20 am
What a Gentleman… He even closed his SUV door while exiting to flee.
9. PSmith | February 5th, 2009 at 12:16 am
Now that Mr. Sylvester has snuffed it, would it be unkind to point out that a career on Wall Street would have garnered a lot more Loot (Other People’s Money). And the penalties (until VERY recently) were pretty near ZERO. See B. Madoff for details. YMMV.
On Style Points –
-10 for bringing a handgun to gun-fight.
.50 cal, a one mile start and a hardened bunker to use it from – wimp with no obvious cojones …
10. PSmith | February 5th, 2009 at 1:45 am
THE LAST CIGARETTE
Smoking can kill you. But not always in the way you thought.
> Just look at the pictures. This guy must be pushing 70, but he’s facing down a posse of cops one-third his age,
ER, No. In fact he’s 57. Smoking while gunfighting looks cool. (Un) fortunately (or not) it also makes you look (and react) like you are 70.
And it didn’t do much for Raymond Sylvester’s reflexes. Seeing as how he is recently dead. From said gunfight.
That WAS his last cigarette.
11. shea | June 11th, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Just an FYI from someone who lives where this took place: it’s Bloomington, ILLINOIS, NOT Indiana (happens all the time).
AND, Mr. Sylvester died on that highway (I-74) … he was ‘pronounced dead’ at the hospital they took him to, afterwards, but that was just a formality as he never regained consciousness after being shot down by BPD.
Also, Mr. Sylvester allegedly robbed a dozen or more banks and businesses in the weeks leading up to this ‘shootout’, so this was no ‘glory day’ for him. He was (allegedly) a simple thief who got caught and went out as theatrically as he could.
Nothing glorious or American about that (at least, in any ‘good’ way)…
12. BlottoBonVismarck | February 20th, 2010 at 12:53 am
NOT CLEAR ON THE CONCEPT
>>> Mr. Sylvester allegedly robbed a dozen or more banks and businesses …
>>>He was (allegedly) a simple thief who got caught and went out as theatrically as he could.
>>> Nothing glorious or American about that (at least, in any ‘good’ way)…
For the slower members of the class (#11 that means you)
>>>He was (allegedly) a simple thief who got caught and went out as theatrically as he could.
That was rather the point. Glorious _and_ utterly American, all the way.
>>> (at least, in any ‘good’ way)…
Perhaps, in the old days, when there was a moral world and right and wrong n’ shit. But today? In 2010, after the last nine years and the Neocon murder, torture, genocide of 1.5m Iraqis and 3m Afghans? We don’t think so.
“As you sow, so shall ye reap.” And it can’t come soon enough for some MoFos.,