Michael Ansara

            At around noon on Tuesday I weighed 89.4 kilos, which puts me into the healthy weight range. In the afternoon my weight only went up a tenth of a kilo.

            I got caught up on my journal.

            I spent a couple of hours editing my book Paranoiac Utopia because I wanted to print it show it to Albert, my creative writing professor to see if he has any ideas about how I could publish it when it’s finished.

            This was the twelfth day of my fourteen-day fast and so I had the usual boring tomatoes and avocadoes with no dressing for both lunch and dinner.

            That night I watched The Rifleman. This story begins when Lucas sees a Native man on horseback leading another on horseback by a rope. Lucas thinks that the man is going to scalp the other and begins to intervene until he finds out that the captor is a Harvard educated federal agent named Sam Buckhart and that his captive is under arrest for murdering an elderly couple by setting fire to their cabin. In North Fork a community leader named Gorman, not realizing that Sam is Native is praising the fact that the government finally sent a federal agent in to deal with the Apaches. Sam and Gorman share a drink. Sam leaves with his prisoner to take him to his chief and explain to him that he has to take the man to prison and then to stand trial. Meanwhile Mark lets it slip that Sam is Native and suddenly Gorman has all the glasses in the bar destroyed so no one has to drink from something that an Indian touched. At the Apache village Sam receives information that changes everything. He learns that it was a white man from North Fork named Slade who burned down the cabin. Lucas has followed Sam and he overhears this. He tells Sam that although it’s the right thing to do for him to arrest Slade, the townspeople would not accept an Indian arresting a white man. Sam just says what’s right is right and heads for North Fork. The whole town except for the marshal is standing against Sam when Lucas jumps in to pretend that he is also against him. He indirectly mentions the things that the marshal has done for them and adds that they mean nothing and so go ahead and shoot him. The men except for Gorman and one of his men give up and walk away. Gorman and his men draw on Sam but he shoots the guns out of their hands. Slade tells Sam that if he arrests him he should also take Gorman since he’s the one that ordered him to burn down the cabin. Sam arrests Gorman too.

            Sam was played by Michael Ansara who played a lot of Natives and Klingons in his career but who was born in Syria. He was married to Barbara Eden.

            There definitely had been Native American graduates from Harvard since 200 years before the time that this story was set. In the history of Harvard there have been 1000 Native graduates.