Francis E. Dec - Life - Legacy

Legacy

Francis E. Dec was dubbed "one of the most mysterious characters in all kookdom" by his 1994 biographer Donna Kossy, "the most important paranoid schizophrenic kook of the century" or "the Gnostic God of these End Times" by his 1995 interviewer Forrest Jackson, and it was stated that "his insane diatribes must truly be one of the greatest comedic gems of the 20th century" by his 2006 fanclub founder Peter Branting. Dec is often compared or contrasted to William S. Burroughs (for his prose style; some of Dec's rants would even have "found their way to William S. Burroughs" according to Donna Kossy), Philip K. Dick (for his later schizophrenic worldview), and Jack T. Chick (for his conspiracy theory tracts).

Dec's publications are considered outsider art, circulated for their unintended humor, underground poetry, or both. They have been republished in a number of places. One of Dec's rants was reprinted on the back-cover of Robert Crumb's Weirdo #8 (Summer 1983). A 2009 Washington City Paper art article listed Dec as one of three outsider artists whose works ought to be adapted as iPhone app, though considering him not "that far afield from the diatribes of today's talk radio."

Dec also entered the folklore of the Church of the SubGenius, which contributed to his underground popularization since at least 1993: a Dec rant was broadcast at least twice on the weekly syndicated SubGenius radio program Hour of Slack, in program #392 "Francis Dec & kooks" (1993) and a rerun in program #555 (1996); Dec is also regularly mentioned by Church users in their Usenet newsgroup alt.slack, from which messages mentioning Dec or reprinting his rants were selected for the Church's official newsletter The Stark Fist of Removal. Additionally, he was canonized as "St. Francis the Incoherent" among Discordian Saints.

Dec's letters have been used as an example of "kook typography" by graphic designer Steven Heller in a same-titled 1994 article of the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design. There is also a 1998 mathematical analysis which uses five Dec rants as a gauge of "schizophrenic language" for an entropic evaluation of the undeciphered Voynich Manuscript (concluding that schizophrenia alone could not account for the manuscript's puzzling nature).

In 1985, Boyd "Doc" Britton (then a newscaster for the radio station WZUU in Milwaukee, now the talk show host "Doc on the ROQ" for KROQ-FM) received a stack of Dec's flyers mass-mailed to the media; in 1986, he made a spoken word recording of himself reading five of Dec's rants over various background music selected and mixed in at random. Ever since, these recordings have been circulated in underground circles, creating and building further interest in Francis E. Dec: first as tapes, then CDs, and now as MP3 files on the Internet, where they are torrented as well as archived by literature site UbuWeb, Archive.org, and radio WFMU. In 1990, SubGenius co-founder Rev. Ivan Stang gave Dallas artist Joe Riley such a Dec tape, which was eventually played at a 1993 party where Forrest Jackson heard it, inspiring Jackson to track down and meet Dec in 1995 (see Death section), videotaping the only documented encounter with Dec. Psychic TV as Kitten Sparkles sampled Doc Britton reading Dec in "Saint Frances E." (sic, on Ultrahouse The L.A. Connection, 1991, reissued as "Sir Frances E. Dec (Kitten Sparkle Mix)", sic, on Origin of the Species, Volume Too, 1999) and in "The Deadly Touch Taben" (sic, on the compilation Patchouli & Echoes, 2004). Venetian Snares also sampled Doc Britton in "Americanized" on Infolepsy EP (2004), spreading Dec's prose on lyrics websites. Dec's rants inspired other artists: in 2005, the band Coldcut cited "the mad deadly computer gangster godpoems of Francis E Dec, RIP" as inspiration for their CD Everything Is Under Control; in 2007, "Saint Francis E. Dec, Esq." was credited as the co-creator of two MP3 singles called Worldwide Living Death Frankenstein Slavery (vol. 1 and 2) by Alex Spalding et al.

The delusions of Francis E. Dec have also been fictionalized. In 1998, his rants were adapted into the 8-page comic-book story "Worldwide Gangster Robots" (script: Scott Cunningham; art: Danijel Zezelj), acknowledging Dec in the opening credits as the basis for protagonist "Melchizedek" and his posters; the story was published in anthology Gangland #3 from Vertigo at DC Comics. In 1999, his rants were dramatized by Eric Dyer with the theatre troupe Radiohole in A History of Heen: Not Francis E. Dec, Esq., a stage play starring Dec and large excerpts of his rants; selected for The Wooster Group's "Emerging Artist Series" and played then extended for two weeks at The Performing Garage in SoHo, New York City, it was reviewed positively by The Village Voice, CurtainUp, and Playbill.

While Doc Britton's recordings helped foster awareness of Dec's rants and his underground notoriety, little was known about the man and his life; this came with Dec's immortalization in Donna Kossy's 1994 book Kooks (the first biography of Dec, published by Feral House, also home to the book that spawned Tim Burton's biopic Ed Wood), along with NY lawyer Jeff Sperber's investigations into Dec's legal past, and the Dec flyers donated by Tim Maloney to Kossy. Yet since the 1980s, only a few Dec rants were circulated (mostly the five recorded ones), when more documents were known to exist. The next steps were achieved on the Internet, with wider dissemination of the Doc recordings as MP3 files, as well as Kossy's online Kooks Museum in 1996.

In 2006 appeared the so-called "Official Francis E. Dec Fanclub" website founded by Peter Branting, a hub for "Decologists" providing an extensive collection of old and new Francis E. Dec material unearthed by members, including Dec's legal correspondence recovered by Decologist Ted Torbich, new biographical data dug up by genealogist Steven Dhuey, scans of original tracts, along with a biographical timeline, a "Dectionary" of Decian delusions, and humorous illustrations of the rants. In October 2008, such rants mentioned by Doc Britton to Kossy as "Astrocism – The True Religion of the Slovene People" or "The Teddy Kennedy Letter" were donated to the Club together with other formerly unknown material, making possible further study into the beliefs and personal history of Francis E. Dec