firing off angry letters to anonymous institutions (like Starbucks), tirades that are to be read as feeble evasions from taking control of his own life. When his niece arrives and throws a big house party, a coked-up Greenberg (in probably the film’s best scene) delivers an agitated generational rant against “these kids today” and their wholly unearned sense of confidence (a recurring X-er complaint about the young ones). There is also the age-inappropriate haircut that Stiller gamely endures for the entire film.
Eventually we learn that the great trauma in Greenberg’s life, as well as among his former circle of friends, was the formation and subsequent break-up of their “next-big-thing” rock band back in the early 90s. On the verge of making it to the national stage, Greenberg refused to sign a record deal that, he claims, would have sacrificed the band’s artistic freedom and turned them into “sell-outs.” Such is the central conceit of Gen-X cinema: the only moral compass that really matters in the end is the issue of subcultural authenticity, a divide as old as the celebrated case of Punk v. Part-Time Punk. Everyone else, as it turns out, would have gladly become plastic popsters, and they all still resent Greenberg for screwing everything up.
This premise, it should be noted, speaks to a certain contradiction in this genre. If, as the film argues so adamantly, Greenberg (and by extension all X-er’s) need to “grow up” and become functional adults, then it would seem he did his band mates a favor by breaking up their adolescent fantasy machine and forcing them into real jobs with real wives and real kids. Strangely, however, no one sees it that way.
Will Ferrell’s “Nick Halsey,” meanwhile, has taken a different route in Everything Must Go. When we first meet Nick, a slimy twenty-something is firing him from his job as Assistant Vice President. Halsey, we learn, is a recovering alcoholic, and his termination stems from a relapse at the Denver office that may or may not have led to the sexual harassment of a co-worker. On the way home, Halsey loads up with some 12-packs to make his fall off the wagon official. Arriving at his home, however, he finds that his wife has thrown all of his possessions out on the front lawn, changed the locks, and left a note demanding a divorce. Dealt this double-whammy of adult problems on the same day, Nick takes the one reasonable course of action available—he decides to live on his front lawn for a few days in a drunken stupor until he can figure things out.
From this inspired premise (courtesy of Raymond Carver), Everything Must Go doesn’t really know what to do with Ferrell or the situation. Through movie logic we establish that Nick has five days to get his shit together (literally, by clearing his lawn, and figuratively, by devising a plan for the future). Nick spends the five days checking off many of the same plot points that occupy Greenberg. He also revisits an old romantic possibility, showing up unannounced on the doorstep of single-mom Laura Dern. Nick also finds a twenty-something woman (Rebecca Hall) to feel his pain—a new neighbor that seems to have relationship problems of her own. Nick eventually learns “everything must go” in a giant garage sale, except of course for his impressive collection of vintage and thus authentic vinyl (there’s that Gen-X line in the sand again—it’s all about the good taste of appreciating “real” music, a quality that, in truth, does tend to make every male over 35 basically insufferable).
The strongest link between Greenberg and Everything Must Go, however, is a rather relentlessly heteronormative insistence that the only thing preventing both characters from achieving happiness is successful reproduction. Greenberg is unmarried and childless at 40, while Nick notes, when asked if he has any kids, that he and his wife “have fish” (a collection of Koi swimming in the back yard). Drunk and crossing the line with his new and very pregnant neighbor, Nick predicts how her marriage will eventually fall apart just like his (as a salesman, Nick prides himself on “reading people”)—but by the end, when her absentee husband finally arrives, her prodigious baby-bump tells us maybe, just maybe, they’ll be okay. 
Of course, stepping straight from the “irresponsible” narcissism of childlessness to becoming a dad is not something that can be done in one step. Happily, both films provide their dysfunctional X-er’s with a “training child” so they can get some practice first. Greenberg must care for a suddenly ailing German Shepard, forming a temporary interspecies family with Florence. Nick, meanwhile, temporarily adopts a chubby, fatherless neighborhood kid to help with his garage sale (“Will you teach me to play baseball?,” the kid asks at one point. No, I’m not kidding, he really does say this). As the film ends, we sense Nick is probably only a few months away from acquiring the necessary skills to take over in the Dern household (he’s been invited back, once he gets his life in order).
Now, here is what makes Greenberg and Everything Must Go such a diabolical one-two X’er punch. Nick goes to college, gets married, gets a job, buys a house, and works like a chump for 15 years—only to be end up divorced and miserable on his front lawn. Greenberg, meanwhile, stays “true to himself,” refusing to join the rat race of marriage, work, and responsibility—only to end up institutionalized, alone, and borderline suicidal. The generational message for 40-somethings could not be any starker: work or don’t work, marry or don’t marry, join society or reject society—it doesn’t matter, you’re fucked either way. Goddamn boomers!
I think my favorite of this genre remains Step Brothers (2009), featuring Ferrell once again, this time alongside John C. Reilly. It is a much broader, borderline gross-out comedy that actually seems more intellectually honest than either Greenberg or Everything Must Go. Ferrell and Reilly play two guys in their mid-30s who, having been insulated from the “real world” by virtue of their rich single parents, basically live the dream-lives of 14 year-old boys. When the parents get married, the two must learn to live together as “step brothers,” which they do blissfully until thrown out to fend for themselves. As each takes the first tentative steps toward adulthood, there is a major falling out and ongoing feud. What is their reward for becoming adults? They both become incredibly boring and generally miserable. Courageously, the film finds a way for them to remain “independent” at the end while also allowing them to regress back into their personas of endless adolescence. I haven’t read Judith Halberstam’s new book on 
For those annoyed, finally, that this genre is so obsessively focused on retarded masculinity, you might want to check out The Future (2011), written and directed by Miranda July. Here the specter of adopting a sick cat sends a 30-something couple into a major life crisis, constituted in large part by their realization that by the time the cat dies (in about five years), they’ll both be 40 (“and 40 is the new 60,” they both agree in classic anti-Boomer logic). From here the film becomes an art cinema hallucination with July suddenly and seemingly randomly having an affair with a 50-something man, presumably because he’s an actual adult who owns an actual house. I’d write more about it, but as that would require me accessing a form of subjectivity that I don’t fully understand, I’ll leave it there. Some, I’m told, find July’s movies insufferably cutesy, but I appreciated the fact that the film made at least some attempt to escape the scourge of Hollywood naturalism. And it was nice, for a change, to see a woman as the center of all the generational floundering.
Tag: mom
January 21, 2012
Generation X: Still Relentlessly and Hopelessly Screwed
January 21, 2012
Farewell, Summer Television
The fall television season starts soon, and with it, the return of some of our most beloved entertainment franchises. Soon we’ll know the true extent of Chuck Lorre’s rage at Charlie Sheen when he offs him in the most humiliating way possible on A Man + Ashton Kutcher ÷ the Teenage Remainder. I’m pretty sure we left “House” in some kind of interesting scrape at the end of last season, although I am hard pressed to remember what it was. And then there are the shiny new shows, like Whitey, which I think stars the lady from the Progressive Insurance ads shacking up with her boyfriend as they try to save up money to buy him a shaving kit. There’s also the sci-fi show, Terra Nova, which upon cancellation will introduce us to the next generation of futuristic whiners mortally wounded that their series was not allowed to fulfill its destiny, even if that destiny was merely to be the Time Tunnel of 2011. 
Most exciting of all is NBC’s bold new experiment in wasting, as egregiously as possible, the considerable talents of Will Arnett and Maya Rudolph. With little to no shame, Up All Night apparently has no more ambition than to document the hilarity of couples fighting over just who is going to get up and stick a bottle in the puling maw of a baby. Given that these TV couples apparently chose to have these TV babies, I’m not sure why this should be my TV problem. I know young parents secrete an enzyme that makes junior’s inopportune puking on various fabrics and visitors endlessly fascinating, but in the past such banal war stories have typically and mercifully circulated only among fellow parents —how NBC plans to do 22 episodes a year of dirty diaper jokes for those who don’t find little Johnny’s little shits adorable is a true mystery. Unless one of the babies is from Venus or the reincarnation of Albert Fish or something equally edgy, I’ll pass, thank you very much.
Of course, for all these new and returning shows to take to the airwaves, we must first say goodbye to the “summer” television season. Time was when there was no such thing as a summer television season—the networks simply flipped into rerun mode and assumed everyone, on both sides of the screen, had better things to do with their time. But as TV gradually came to realize that going dark for three months might, in the very near future, lead to an entire generation completely forgetting that television ever existed in the first place, the decision was made to create the illusion of exciting new programming year round.
Many complain about the quality of summer television. Not me. In fact, I’m always a little sad to see it go. Summer programming, as we have come to know it over the past few years, is like television’s feral cousin—recognizable as TV and yet unexpectedly “wild” in a way that the prestigious gloss of the autumn schedule would never abide. It’s like the dog you once rescued from traffic at the side of the Interstate: he’s cute enough that you grow a little attached to him as he lives in your basement for a few days while you put up posters; and yet he is deranged enough that you come to understand how he got left on the side of the freeway in the first place. You’re a little sad when the Humane Society finally comes to take him away, but not inconsolably so, much like the feeling you have when MTV breaks out the cattle prods to herd Ronnie and Sammi back into their enclosures until next season. 
One of the highlights of this summer was undoubtedly ABC’s Wipeout, a show where mobile assemblages of bone and meat subjected themselves to a punishing obstacle course for reasons that apparently had nothing to do with either prizes or fame. In fact, I’m not even sure if Wipeout was actually a game show or just an ongoing X-treme sport product demo featuring recruits from various So-Cal fitness clubs looking to “test themselves” against the challenge of a human pachinko machine. Making it even more stupidly unfair, some off-screen tech-lord apparently had the power to activate various booby-traps at his own discretion, making sure that even the most worthy competitor eventually ended up in the drink with a broken coccyx. If, as a child, you ever wondered what it would be like to be miniaturized so that you could try to outrun the various components of “Mousetrap,” this was the show for you. Wipeout may seem like America’s take on those wacky Japanese game shows that focus on contestant pain and humiliation, but that comparison makes little to no sense given that it is almost impossible to humiliate an American, especially one appearing on television. It would seem these people decided to appear on Wipeout for little more than talking points at various Orange County juice bars; or perhaps because, to have not done so, would be to lead a life slightly less awesome.
Less strenuous but no less ridiculous has been NBC’s It’s Worth What?, a post-empire version of The Price is Right hosted by a strangely distracted, perhaps even painfully embarrassed Cedric the Entertainer (at top). Whereas The Price is Right concentrates on commonsense consumer-citizenship, rewarding viewers for actually knowing what a can of tuna or a washing machine might cost, It’s Worth What? works the freak show wing of capitalism. The conceit here is that Cedric the Entertainer has access to a giant vault filled with odd treasures from around the world. In each segment, contestants have to guesstimate the price of said objects—most of them ostensibly worthless– without fainting from shock or outrage. Quick—which costs more—a Lamborghini Spider or a mint copy of the first issue of Spiderman? The answer is almost unimportant (it’s the sports car, by a hair)—it is the question itself that is so perversely cruel. In an era of massive economic retrenchment, here we have an entire hour devoted to “Theoretical Expenditures of the Leisure Class,” reminding viewers struggling to make rent that someone out there just paid 2.35 million for a Honus Wagner baseball card.
At least It’s Worth What? feigns a “gee-whiz, rich people sure are crazy” type of populism that makes it available, however remotely, for an eventual Marxist epiphany. Over on Lifetime, however, there resides the irredeemable loathsomeness of The Picker Sisters. In what is perhaps the most tone-deaf series currently on television, here we have two noisome interior designers (apparently on loan from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) who wander through economically depressed regions of the nation in search of hidden treasures and cute knickknacks that they might refurbish and sell in their upscale boutique back in L.A. In the episode I saw, the vulture twins spent a couple of hours swindling an older junk-gentleman in Alabama out of all kinds of odd scrap metal so that it might be stripped, powder-coated, and sold as adorable patio furniture to some copyright lawyer at Sony, a tool who will no doubt regale guests at his pool party with the interesting story of their origins (“Apparently these chairs were originally involved in the transportation of chickens in Alabama,” he laughs, reaching for another canapé. “How, I simply can’t imagine.”). 
Not only is The Picker Sisters irksome for unabashedly trading in fantasies of the bi-coastal tasteful gleefully screwing over clueless rubes, it is also—quite unintentionally, I’m sure–a rather depressing documentary about the precipitous decline of the nation’s once great manufacturing base. In another segment, the gals raid an old Army depot (again, somewhere in the south), now reduced to little more than a rusting collection of obsolescent hardware. They are delighted to find an “Acid Suit” locker, a stand-alone metal closet that apparently once housed an emergency “acid suit” for that lucky soldier called upon to deal with the ominous eruption of an acid emergency in the plant. Rather than ponder the object as silent testimony to the shared dangers and selfless sacrifice of previous generations working difficult jobs for the common good of the nation, the Pickers instead declare that the locker would make a great “wet bar” for some young Hollywood bachelor. On a truck and back to L.A. it goes. With any luck, residual benzene levels will ensure that everyone involved feeds a tumor with each new Mojito.
The vaguely hypnotic Hillbilly Handfishin’, meanwhile, attempts to redress the regional antagonisms provoked by the likes of The Picker Sisters. Here unlikely handfishers from around the nation come to a lake in Oklahoma to stand around in muddy water and let freakishly gigantic catfish swim through their legs—a practice offered as the key to resolving all manner of racial, regional, sexual, and class difference. It’s an odd show, inasmuch as most of the “action” takes place under the water and the producers are apparently too cheap to spring for any submergible camera equipment. For most of the program, we watch as three visiting couples and the two hosts stand waist deep in water, occasionally shouting out with surprise, pleasure, and/or pain when a giant flathead cat swims past their thigh, giving the whole enterprise a vaguely pornographic feel (perhaps better captured in the title of the earlier fish-in-the-crotch show, Okie Noodlin’).
Speaking of slimy things swimming near your junk, Animal Planet got just about everything right in titling its summer exploitation classic: Man-Eating Super-Snake. The premise here, as I understand it, is that there is currently a rogue species of Anaconda loose in the Florida Everglades. If they begin to interbreed with another humongous snake indigenous to the area, most likely everyone weighing under 80lbs. and living south of Jacksonville will soon be dead. The few minutes of the program that I witnessed featured the requisite “slither-cam,” in this case showcasing “man-eating super snake” as he made his way toward a crib. I assume the baby was rescued at the last second and everyone learned an important safety lesson, like not leaving your baby’s crib at the edge of a swamp, but I can’t say for sure. 
Of course, the summer friends I will miss the most are the freaks, the glorious, glorious freaks, especially those lost souls that we got to meet in the second season of TLC’s My Strange Addiction. Who could forget the gas-huffing Mom or the grown woman who took her creepy stuffed animals everywhere? The woman who bathed thrice daily in bleach or the hipster taxidermist obsessively prowling the streets of Brooklyn in search of dead mice to stuff? And who could forget Teresa, she who eats rocks, and Casie, she who eats the ashes of her dead husband? If you somehow missed either of these segments over the summer, I highly recommend them both. Teresa was especially amazing in that she apparently really eats rocks, not by swallowing little pebbles, mind you, but by actually taking great big crunchy bites out of large, hard rocks—teeth, intestines, and foley sweetening be damned!
I have come to love My Strange Addiction so much that I fear it may have peaked this season, so in the interest of having some good kooks for next summer, I will end here with the casting call currently posted at TLC. If you are really screwed up, I beseech you, for my own personal entertainment pleasure, to share your story with us all:
MY STRANGE ADDICTION
Think you have an unusual compulsive behavior or strange habit? Do you find it consuming you, affecting your life, work and relationships? If you or someone you know is suffering from a strange addiction and would be interested in participating in our program, please send us a short description of your unusual behavior and the impact it has on your daily life to: casting@20west.tv. Please make sure to include your name, age, city of residence, a current photo, and a phone number or email where you can be reached for further questions.
January 21, 2012
I Saw That Movie Where All the Apes Get Mad and Take Over the World
First of all, credit where credit is due. Thank you, Hollywood, for finally making a film this summer that didn’t make me wish I had stayed home to express my cat’s blocked anal gland with a Q-Tip. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is actually really, really good. Surprisingly good. True, it did require the industry to dip back into the stockpile of science-fiction ideas that existed before Star Wars transformed the entire genre into little more than an endless sword ‘n’ sandal flick with more and better weapons, but if that means getting a Zardoz reboot next, I’ll take it.
If anyone reading this is in or near Malibu, by the way, please kidnap Michael Bay and force him to see Rise immediately so that he might learn the basics of scene articulation and narrative structure. If Rise can make me misty-eyed over a big, dumb ape taking out a helicopter, surely Bay can learn how to help us keep track of who is a Transformer, who is a Decepticon, who is Shia LeBeouf, and why we should even care in the first place. Okay, obligatory Bay = State of current cinema joke out of the way, let’s proceed…
Let me say this: I wish Rise of the Planet of the Apes were happening right now. I wish super-intelligent apes were swinging through the trees this very moment ready to lay waste to our sorry civilization. It’s about time another species took over for our terrible stewardship of the planet and of ourselves. Millions starving. Inequality increasing. Axe Body Spray still on the market. At this point, the ghost of Paul the psychic Octopus deciding affairs of state with an aqua-Ouija board could probably run most governments better than we humans. And look, we all know this movie is only showing us our inevitable future. Apes may not learn to talk and organize themselves into medieval fighting formations, but it’s even money we end up taking ourselves out with a virus that we will probably invent for profit. It may be an additive used to extend the shelf-life of Cheezy Bread Stix or a fine mist Steve Jobs sprays into the atmosphere to make Apple users misplace their dongles and cords that much quicker, but it’s going to happen, we’re going to take ourselves out in a way that is cosmically embarrassing. 
That’s why it’s so great that Rise targets San Francisco as the first city to go—It’s an open attack on all the Trekkies out there who imagine that Frisco will be the gateway for projecting our boring, homogenized cultural differences of the future out into the universe so that we can lecture other cultures (alien ones, no less) on what they should and should not be doing. You say the future is a bank lobby in space where we all obey the prime directive whilst discovering every civilization in the universe has its own form of brightly colored liquor? I say it will be genetically mutated monkeys ripping out our tracheae and kneecaps just for the hell of it.
In this respect, I always thought Spielberg missed a real opportunity with the Jurassic Park series. After humans stupidly brought dinosaurs back to life, wouldn’t it have been great if a bunch of pterodactyls got loose, bred in such numbers that we couldn’t really control them, and then occasionally swooped down to snatch away house pets and small unguarded children? Not so often that we had to declare a “War on Pterodactyls,” obviously, but maybe with the same frequency as people being hit by lightning—just enough to remind us of what dumbasses we were for bringing dinosaurs back to life in the first place, or for trying to play an extra hole of golf in the face of an advancing thunderstorm. I salute Rise for having the courage to remind us that it is often our very intelligence that makes us the stupidest ape of all. Imagine how much more free and full of life you’d feel if you could simply entertain yourself by throwing your own feces at various comic foils, as opposed to feeling dead inside after paying $14 to see Kevin James do it for you (wait, crossover alert: the mad-as-hell apes of Rise invade Zookeeper, radicalize the non-human primates, and then all escape the film to leave their bewildered human cast-mates wondering where the next fart joke will come from). 
Like all science-fiction, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is of course an allegory. I’ve heard many say this week, either in jest or quite earnestly, that the film is a great parable about the Tea Party—angry right-wingers as angry apes rising up against their oppressors. That’s a really nasty swipe, of course, seeing as how gratuitously insulting it is to apes. After all, the apes of Rise all learn to cooperate for the common good. They share their cookies and divide the labor “from each according to his need, to each according to his ability.” They also learn very quickly how important it is to get a good education, as in that scene where the guard catches them all going to night school. Say what you want about how smelly, dirty, or damned they might be, but an ape isn’t the type of creature that would prefer to shit in coffee cans and stack them on his neighbor’s property line rather than pay that extra penny in sales tax to refurbish his community’s sewer system. No, an ape is smarter than that.
Actually, as far as parables go, I think the film is much more interesting in its kinship to the zombie genre. A few years ago I delivered a paper in London (at the Cine-Excess conference) on the zombie film as a rather playful indulgence of a collective and accelerating social death-drive. Zombies are scary—particularly those British ones that cheat by running extra-fast—but there’s also something exhilarating in seeing the entirety of our social world absolutely destroyed. After all, what’s so bad about being a zombie? You’re still somewhat sentient, apparently, certainly more so than if you just watched 100 Ways to Leave a Game Show or paid actual attention to the last Katy Perry CD all the way through. Moreover, the only thing that can kill you is a clean brain shot—and once everyone else in the world is also a zombie, that isn’t very likely to happen. Zombies don’t have to work or pay mortgages or worry about their personal appearance anymore—what’s not to like? 
If anything, Rise is even more candid and enthusiastic than most zombie films in indulging our desire to watch humankind snuff it—you’re on your feet by the end cheering the primate army as they hoist us brainiacs by our own R&D petard. Hurray for the noble apes! Hurray we’ll all be coughing up blood and dying soon! True, it’s a shame the death of humanity will mean no more incredible specimens like James Franco, Freida Pinto, and the hypothetical primates they might spawn, but that’s a small price to pay for exterminating assholes like that guy in the Ape house with the cattle prod or the pilot-neighbor-from-hell living next door. If I had a neighbor like that, I’d be personally injecting local raccoons with anything I could find in the hopes that one would eventually turn sour and spray his patio furniture with some form of mutantly toxic urine.
So kudos once again, Hollywood, for getting it right this time. I eagerly await the next installment when all the CGI Apes are rather surrealistically talking (which I hope will be even weirder than imagining Roddy McDowell’s mouth flapping behind the latex in the original series). I also hope the sequel has the guts to show thousands of Americans waiting around to die from the mutant virus, sad they will soon be no more, but ecstatic that they didn’t have to see their tax dollars wasted on government medical research or to support the implementation of Obama’s goddamn socialized medicine scheme.
January 21, 2012
"The Five:" Fox After Beck
With the untimely institutionalization of Glen Beck, Fox News faced a momentary hiccup in their nightly procession of puffy male blowhards and the icy blonde women who serve them updates at the half-hour breaks. Beck, you might recall, had set himself the seemingly impossible goal of concocting a theory so horrifying that it might reasonably be considered an insult even to Adolph Hitler. But, like an Icarus aloft on wings of steaming bullshit, Beck flew too close to the infotainment sun and fell like a great corn-fed turd into the sea of psychosis. When a Fox intern stumbled upon Beck coating gold bricks with his own semen, network executives knew he had to go. 
How does one replace a legend like Beck? After a quick tour of bankrupt carnival auctions and compulsory telemarketer retreats yielded no promising leads, Fox decided to reach back into its old playbook and resurrect the classic “Colmes” strategy. Alan Colmes, you might recall, heroically sat opposite troglodyte Sean Hannity for a number of years, ostensibly to argue the “liberal” side of various political issues, but mainly to serve as the Fox demo’s collective instantiation of mealy-mouthed liberalism. Bespectacled and obsequious, Colmes got bulldozed pretty much every night, his highbrow philosophizing no match for Hannity’s monobrow “common sense.” After each pummeling, one imagined him in the Fox commissary—tie dipped in his mashed potatoes—getting jumped and noogied by Brian Kilmeade.
The origins of the fabled Hannity and Colmes, by the way, remain shrouded in mystery. Some say Hannity hand-picked Colmes to be his servile adversary. But there is also the rumor that Colmes once ran a famous bear-baiting act in the Ukraine, and that after unwittingly camping one night in the shadow of Chernobyl, his best working bear, Aleksei, gradually began to shed his fur and—incredibly—develop a limited capacity for human speech. Shunned by the local community and subsisting on old fish heads tossed from the Kiev Zoo, Colmes and Aleksei were eventually spotted by a Newscorp scout who saw something promising in the talking bear’s gruff taunting and bemused swatting of his former keeper. Groomed, indoctrinated, and given the Irish-friendly moniker of “Hannity,” “Aleksei the Argumentative Bear” has gone on to enjoy a lucrative career at Fox and on the radio. Or so some say.
At any rate, Fox is too smart to simply return to such an obvious propaganda vehicle as a nightly pitting of hawk v. sparrow. So, with Beck gone, the network has debuted a new hour-long punditfest called The Five (five pundits who appear each night at five o’clock EST—hence, the “five.”) And it may be the most brilliant move by Fox yet. Knowing that conservatism continues to be associated with the hopes and dreams of old white men looking to crush the hopes and dreams of those who are not old white men, Fox has decided to “flip the script,” as they say, and make The Five a forum in which a quartet of photogenic young conservatives tease and trouble one bedraggled old liberal—in this case, former CNN Crossfirer Bob Beckel. Much as Colmes excelled at playing the “NYU anthropology professor who is against handguns—until his own wife is mugged in the street” type of liberal, Beckel would be central casting’s first choice for playing a Democratic machine union enforcer, drunk by five on the steps of his Chicago stoop but still ready to pull levers for the dead in the local alderman election. 
I’ve only seen a few minutes of The Five since, like any reasonable person, I don’t want my head to explode from consuming Fox product. From what I have seen, however, Beckel plays his assigned role perfectly. While everyone else on set is bright, chipper, and (I’m almost certain) better miked, Beckel slouches, yawns, mumbles, and otherwise puts forward the Democratic position with all the zeal of the last remaining alchemist on staff at DuPont. The message is clear: liberalism is your father’s or even grandfather’s ideology, and boy is it ever a tired one. The younger, fresher Foxes, meanwhile, treat Beckel—not with the contempt and sarcasm Hannity employed in trouncing Colmes every night—but with that patronizing kindness the young always use with the elderly and out-of-touch—much like when your grandmother drops the “N-word” at a family gathering and everyone under 40 makes the mental calculus that she’ll be dead before she can be reformed, so let’s just smile and talk to her as if she’s not really there. Except here they do that whenever Beckel questions the premise that tax cuts for the rich = more jobs. 
As an added bonus, the new format also allows aspiring Fox conservadroids an excellent opportunity to hone their on-air skills before tarrying with more dangerous prey (unlikely, given Fox’s protocols for generally keeping smart lefties off its feed, but you never know when one of these prospects might get trapped in a room, on camera, with someone who might actually rip them a new one. Plus—Fox must realize they eventually need to turn to their farm system in order to re-staff the media embarrassment and national nightmare that is Fox and Friends). In this respect, Fox has brought in Beckel in much the same way that a mother lion deposits a wounded wilderbeast before her cubs, letting them find the jugular for themselves so that they might stand a chance if cornered by Rachael Maddow at a midtown media mixer.
Will it work? Who knows? But I am looking forward to the new Fox News Project: You Kids Get Off My Greedy Entitlements, wherein Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. must defend his twitter and Facebook feeds from a rotating pack of College Young Republicans, each chosen for their skill and dexterity at incendiary texting.
January 19, 2012
Effective Immediately, the Entire Northwest Sales Team Will Be Sacrificed to Quetzalcoatl by Mark Rooke
Hi, everyone. Hope you’re all having a fantastic Thursday. Thanks again for agreeing to meet on such short notice—I know we’re all super busy with the close of the quarter, but I just wanted to take a moment out of this hectic week to announce that the Northwest sales team has blown through their goal of 1.5 million to a record-breaking 1.7 million in new contracted sales for Q4. How great is that? High fives all around, you guys. And in light of these accomplishments, I’m pleased to announce that, effective immediately, the entire northwest sales team will be sacrificed to Quetzalcoatl.
Helen, could you sharpen the Tecpatl before we begin? And Barry, would you remind your design intern that our ritual daggers are not for paper cutting? I love the kid to death, but if this shit keeps happening then we’ll need to talk. About sacrificing her, I mean.
While Helen is working the whetstone, I’d like to call out a few names who really made this unprecedented earnings record possible. Remember Janet’s presentation to our client at OmniCorp that raked in a staggering sixty percent of our revenue for the quarter? She met her responsibilities with zeal and determination, ripping through that project with an almost frightening intensity. Let’s follow her example, shall we?
And who can forget Mitchell’s three-hour long conference call that secured our final contract for the quarter. When the client told him that all of their infrastructure solutions needs had been met for the fiscal year, did he take “no” for an answer? Of course not! He fought tooth and nail for that business, securing it only out of sheer determination of will.
Come to think of it—do we still have that rope left over from last week’s piñata party? If Mitchell treats this news about our offering in the same way he does his quarterly sales goals, I’m thinking we’ll need it.
Before we begin, I’d like to say that we listened to all of the feedback received from last quarter’s ritual, and I’m happy to announce that a “splash zone” has been marked with in gaffer’s tape along the first two rows of folding chairs. Keep this in mind when you choose your seat—I don’t want to see any more dry cleaning bills on monthly expense reports.
Like I said, I’m thrilled that we came together as a company to execute this plan, and I’m just as delighted that we can come together again and execute the team itself. I couldn’t be more proud of these guys. To Tlalocan!
January 19, 2012
Historys a Bitch: A Dog Walk Through Time: Hound Dog by Robb Fritz
“Elvis and The Beatles were the death of music.”
— My parents.
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I was always a Beatles man, not Elvis. I remember arguing the Fab Four versus the King with my parochial schoolmate Margaret all the way from St. Joseph’s Elementary to her house, though what the basis for the argument would have been is a mystery to me now. Were we actually arguing the merits of “Here Comes the Sun” versus “Hound Dog” and “Love Me Tender” versus “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”? Or was it more along the lines of “Elvis is cute and he knows how to dance!” (with a hip-shaking demonstration) versus “They float through this dreamland in a yellow submarine, and there’s this weird house with Frankenstein, and there’s this funny little Nowhere Man and the Blue Meanies and they get old and turn into babies and stuff!” I was driven in part I’m sure by mom’s tacit approval of The Beatles. Though she was officially opposed to everything they stood for (see the above quote), I know she secretly liked Paul’s lyrical side since as a piano teacher she never had a problem teaching easy piano versions of “Yesterday” and “Lonely People.” Margaret had posters on her wall of the young, smoky-gazed Elvis. Since a similar poster of John, Paul, George and Ringo did not grace my own, on devotion points alone I conceded defeat.
On June 5, 1956, when Elvis was a rising star nearing the height of his power, he made a soon-to-be-notorious second appearance on The Milton Berle Show, introducing his version of “Hound Dog,” a song that had recently become his standard closer. Elvis had been refining his performance of “Hound Dog” for two months, testing the reaction of his audience with every move, and honing his delivery to a science. For the first time ever he would be performing without a guitar, Berle’s having convinced Elvis to leave it backstage in order to “let ’em see you, son.”
Elvis started the song at a fast clip leading into a sharp, short solo by guitarist Scotty Moore, and free of a guitar, danced all over, gliding over the floor as he spun his leg opened and closed like a screen door banging in a crazy wind. He then cut the song off midway and restarted it as something near a bump and grind crawl paired with a slow occasionally hip-thrusting dance to match. From the song’s fast start to its hothouse finish, each trademark Elvis leg flip and every shrugging, almost diffident hip gyration was accompanied by screams and amazed laughter from the audience. Milton Berle, “Mr. Television,” loved it, and raced onto the stage, clapping a pleased Elvis on the back and mussing his hair saying, “How about my boy?”
The initial reviews were mostly positive, but eventually the moral backlash kicked in. It’s hard to imagine on this side of the ’60s the level of hysteria that ensued after his appearance. Ben Gross in the Daily News raged, “Elvis… gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos. What amazes me is that Berle and NBC-TV should have permitted this affront.” The Catholic weekly America published a full-length diatribe titled simply “Beware Elvis Presley.” And Ed Sullivan declared Elvis “unfit for family viewing,” swearing he would never allow Elvis on his show.
Elvis protested his innocence, insisting, “I’m not trying to be sexy, it’s just my way of expressing how I feel when I move around.” Whether this was true or not there wasn’t a post-pubescent individual with eyes in his or her head who didn’t know what Elvis’s brief but poignant hip thrusts were all about. Regardless of the intended thrust of his thrusts, there was no doubt that they fucked mightily with the moral zeitgeist of TV Land circa 1956. He insisted that he wasn’t trying to be a rebel, something about which he was genuinely sensitive because of his real concern for his much-adored mother’s feelings. What Elvis didn’t grasp was that in 1956 his simple desire to keep it real was itself a revolutionary act.
How things have changed. Just this month the Supreme Court was debating whether they should strike down all “indecency” rules for primetime. Chief Justice Roberts, the father of two young children, said (in more of a desperate plea than a constitutionally defensible position), “All we are asking for is for a few channels” where parents can be confident their children will not hear profanity or see sex scenes. In its way, Elvis’s appearance on The Milton Berle Show was TV’s gateway drug, the ‘50s sensimilla to today’s TV heroin. One wonders what would happen to the brains of the same critics were Lady Gaga to take Marty McFly’s DeLorean back to 1956 and do her thing on the same show. They would no doubt think they’d died and entered the ninth ring of hell.
Ironically, despite the moral outrage over the song’s performance, “Hound Dog” really isn’t even a paean to sex. Written in 1952 by Mike Leiber and Jerry Stoller, two young Jewish kids from Los Angeles with a shared obsession with R&B, it was intended as a musical middle finger to some worthless pond scum who’s done the singer wrong. They’d written it for blues legend Big Mama Thornton, who later described them as a couple of kids with the song “written on the back of a paper bag.” She altered it as she saw fit, made the phrasings her own, and had the members of her band howl like dogs behind her. She recorded the song in early 1953, and it was released in March. Within the first week of its release, based on a rave in Billboard, another singer recorded a country version, and by the year’s end a total of six country recordings of the song had been released. By 1964, 24 recorded versions of the song—including Elvis’—would exist. It was the biggest hit of Big Mama Thornton’s career.
Her version could hardly be more different than Elvis’, a growly rhumba blues that would be completely at home on basically any Tom Waits album from Rain Dogs on. The lyrics—Lieber’s originals—are more straightforwardly bluesy and make more narrative sense. To my taste Thornton’s version is much grittier and more soulful, and has the deeply satisfying feel of being sung with full vitriol to one particular scumbag, as opposed to Elvis’s more impersonally tongue-in-cheek version. In a 1987 interview, Lieber said that the chorus was code for “You ain’t nothin’ but a motherfucker,” and with Thornton’s fiery growl it’s not a difficult substitution in the mind to make.
Elvis would have known Thornton’s original, but he found his pop version during his first time performing in Vegas. Despite the ill fit between his style and the adult, sit-down audience for which he and his band were performing—like Spinal Tap playing for the air force officer’s club—Elvis loved Vegas, blissfully unaware of the central place it would eventually have in his life. He and the band spent their free time seeing other musicians perform around town. He and his band’s favorite was the lounge act for the Sands, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys.
The Bellboys had had a minor hit with their own pop version of “Hound Dog” the year before in 1955. To turn it into a pop song, they had dropped a verse and changed the lyrics—to Lieber’s great annoyance—so that the hound dog in question is no longer “snoopin’ round my door,” but is now “cryin’ all the time” and the phrase “you can wag your tail/but I ain’t gonna feed you no more” was tossed in favor of the rhythmically nimbler if narratively less sensible phrase “you ain’t never caught a rabbit/ and you ain’t no friend o’ mine.” It now served as the Bellboys’ main showstopper, and Elvis his band, drummer D.J. Fontana, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, decided they had to add it to their act. It would quickly become Elvis’ closer for a long time to come.
Lieber and Stoller, ‘50s hipsters to the core, weren’t pleased with the pop direction Freddie and the Bellboys and then Elvis had taken their song. They were dismissive of Elvis’ ability and assumed he was ignorant of his music’s history, probably in nearly exactly the same way I was once dismissive of Justin Bieber. For my part, I assumed Bieber was just some A&R guy’s bubbly commercial product: take cheesy love song, add cute young singer, and stir. Then I humored my daughter, five years old and suffering from, as she then mispronounced it, “Beaver Fever,” and, together with her and my wife, watched the Bieber documentary Never Say Never. While it’s safe to say I’ll never be listening to "Baby " on my way to work, the movie was genuinely fascinating and watching Bieber as a three-year-old playing on his toy drums and then at five on his real set is pretty much a wonder to behold. For Lieber and Stoller, it would be the summer of ’57 when they were hired—largely against their will—to write the songs for Jailhouse Rock, that they finally befriended Elvis and grew to appreciate both his very real talent and his deep love and knowledge of R&B.
A month after the hip shake heard ‘round the world, Elvis was scheduled for a July 1st appearance on The Steve Allen Show. Allen, for the benefit of the more prudish members of his audience, had made some public noise about possibly canceling Elvis’s appearance, but with Elvis at the top of all three charts that existed at the time—R&B, pop and country—there was little chance of that actually happening.
Instead, Allen devised a plan for cleaning Elvis up. The night of the show, Allen introduced “the new Elvis Presley,” one dressed in white tie and tails. He opened with his current pop hit, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” Then Allen wheeled out an actual female basset hound wearing a small top hat strapped to its head. The hound gazed at the audience with a supremely sad, baleful face, refusing to look at Elvis despite his numerous good-humored attempts to turn her head and sing into her doleful eyes. Elvis remains a good sport, but it’s clear from his body language, from the stunted jerks of his head and shoulders, that he is working fiercely to not burst into his now-notorious hip swivel, like a schoolboy trying to restrain a bobbing knee. In the end, Elvis, a dog lover himself and eventually an owner of many, many dogs as well as a menagerie of other animals, gives the hound a genuine hug, and nuzzles it and kisses it on the neck, probably in sympathy as a fellow sufferer.
That night The Steve Allen Show killed The Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan had repeatedly vowed to never have Elvis on his show, but as J-Biebs would say, never say never. Within two weeks Sullivan caved, eventually signing Presley for not one but three appearances, the first slated for September 9. Sullivan blew off criticisms of his reversal, saying he had been going on hearsay, and about Elvis’s Milton Berle Show appearance he did a complete and unapologetic 180, accusing everyone else of overreacting by saying, “I don’t know why everybody picked on Presley, I thought the whole show was dirty and vulgar.”
On July 2nd, the morning after The Steve Allen Show, Elvis and his band would finally commit “Hound Dog” to vinyl. After 31 takes, they had the full two-minute blast complete with Scotty Moore’s jangly guitar solo (Moore would later refer to it as “ancient psychedelia”) and D.J. Fontana’s trademark machine gun drum attack. That afternoon they recorded “Don’t Be Cruel.” The single of “Hound Dog,” with “Don’t Be Cruel” as the nominal A-side, was released on July 13th and would hit the #1 spot slightly over a month later, on August 18th, where it would remain for a record-breaking 11 weeks, replaced only by his own new single “Love Me Tender” on November 3rd. “Hound Dog” would become Elvis’ best-selling single ever, and in 2004 Rolling Stone would place it as #19 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the highest rank for any of Elvis’ eleven entries on the list.
January 17, 2012
The McSweeneys Books Q&A with John Horgan, author of The End of War by McSweeney’s Books
War is a fact of human nature. As long as we exist, it exists. That’s how the argument goes. But longtime Scientific American writer John Horgan disagrees. In this compact, methodical treatise, Horgan examines dozens of examples and counterexamples — discussing chimpanzees and bonobos, warring and peaceful indigenous people, World War I and Vietnam, Margaret Mead and General Sherman — as he finds his way to war’s complicated origins. John Horgan sat down with McSweeney’s editor Jesse Nathan to discuss his new book, The End of War.
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McSWEENEY’S: In The End of War you argue that war is not, in fact, ingrained in human nature. Do you consider yourself starry-eyed? Idealistic?
JOHN HORGAN: Actually, I consider myself to be pretty hard-nosed and skeptical about some human aspirations. My first three books were about how we face fundamental limits in what we can know about nature, ourselves, and ultimate reality. But in the same way that my research made me pessimistic about these endeavors, it made me optimistic about the prospects for eradicating war. When I would tell people I was working on a book about the possibility of ending war once and for all, they often looked at me with amusement, as if I’d confessed to belief in ghosts or angels (although I suspect more people believe in ghosts and angels than in a world without war). But once I gave them some details of my argument, they usually got very interested.
McSWEENEY’S: How did this book originate?
HORGAN: I’ve been obsessed with the craziness of war since I was a boy, when I first learned that at any moment nuclear bombs could wipe out humanity and even all life on earth. I’ve covered war-related topics throughout my career as a journalist. But I started thinking about writing this book four or five years ago, when I realized how many people think that war is a permanent part of the human condition.
McSWEENEY’S: Does The End of War serve as a prediction about our future, or is it more of an effort to articulate a choice we have?
HORGAN: Both. I predict that if we see war as a choice, and not as something that is foisted on us by forces beyond our control, and if we do all we can to end war, we will succeed.
McSWEENEY’S: You interviewed a lot of people in the course of your research. Does anyone stand out?
HORGAN: I was especially delighted to interview the legendary political scientist Gene Sharp, who has devoted his career to pointing out all the ways in which nonviolent actions can bring about dramatic political changes. Sharp’s writings have inspired lots of successful nonviolent movements, including the uprisings that toppled repressive regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and even Occupy Wall Street. Some people revere him, with good reason, as an almost saintly figure, but in person he is a tough, no nonsense curmudgeon. He is so unflinchingly unsentimental about humanity, and clear-eyed about just how selfish, cruel, and stupid we can be. And yet far from succumbing to cynicism and pessimism, Sharp is an idealist, who has dedicated himself to helping us overcome our worst tendencies and create a better world.
McSWEENEY’S: What was your greatest discovery?
HORGAN: Perhaps the biggest surprise was that the oldest evidence for warfare—organized fighting between two or more groups—dates back only ten- or twelve-thousand years. I’d simply accepted, and had even helped promulgate, the claim of scientists that group violence dates back hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of years.
McSWEENEY’S: Do you identify as a pacifist?
HORGAN: I used to think of myself as a pacifist, and I have tremendous admiration for pacifists like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But I’ve reluctantly come to believe that in certain situations, which I call damned-if-you-do-or-don’t dilemmas, we might need to use violence to prevent greater violence and suffering. But we need to do so in a way that does not glorify or legitimize violence, and only after all nonviolent solutions have failed. As much as possible, our actions should be consistent with the larger goal of ending war once and for all.
McSWEENEY’S: You come from a military family. Why didn’t you join the military?
HORGAN: There was no chance of that. I grew up in the sixties, and I was a typical counterculture kid, who questioned the values of his elders. Also, when I turned eighteen in 1971, the Vietnam War was still raging, and like many people in my generation, I thought the war was immoral or worse. “Not even wrong,” as I say in my book. I rejected not just that war, but militarism in general.
McSWEENEY’S: What can any one person really do to help bring about the end of war?
HORGAN: Talk to others about your views of war, and if they’re fatalists, try to convince them that they should be optimists. Seek out and support groups and political leaders who are seeking an end to war and militarism, or start such a group, or become such a leader yourself.
McSWEENEY’S: If we’re truly rational creatures, why haven’t we rid ourselves of war long ago?
HORGAN: Of course there have always been visionaries, from Buddha to Einstein, who have recognized the insanity of war. But the militarism meme is deeply entrenched in most societies, and it manages to convince even very smart people that war is rational. We reason that the best way to achieve peace is to arm ourselves and even attack potential enemies before they attack us. We need to recognize the fallacy of this sort of logic, which in the nuclear era poses a threat to our very existence.
McSWEENEY’S: Are there examples of warring cultures that have found a more peaceful way to exist?
HORGAN: The Waorani, a tribal society in the Amazonian rainforest, were at one time the most violent people known to anthropologists. They came to recognize that warfare threatened their very existence, and yet people in different villages feared each other so much that they didn’t dare to meet to negotiate a truce. But then missionaries came up with an ingenious solution to help them out of their impasse. (Read Chapter Five, which is called “Choosing Peace,” if you want to know what the solution is.)
McSWEENEY’S: How do you respond to environmentalists who warn that population growth plus global warming, if unchecked, might lead to violent clashes over food and fresh water?
HORGAN: I think these sorts of scary predictions are counterproductive. If you scare people in this way, they might arm themselves for the approaching apocalypse instead of trying to live in more sustainable ways. There is not a strong correlation between war and resource scarcity. We should pursue environmental goals for their own sake, not to avoid war.
McSWEENEY’S: How long will it take for us to achieve a world without war?
HORGAN: Not long at all. If political leaders and citizens are committed to the goal of ending international war, and finding nonviolent means of resolving disputes, they can end armed conflict at any time and start cutting back on their armies. Those who find this possibility unlikely should consider the remarkably rapid—and nonviolent!—end of the Soviet Union, one of the most powerful, oppressive regimes in history
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To purchase The End of War, please visit our store. To watch an MSNBC interview with John Horgan, click here.
January 17, 2012
The Peculiar Arab Chronicles: Love and Defecation by Nour Ali Youssef
Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or Bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
— William Shakespeare
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So in short, love is that thing that obliges you to pretend to respect opposing views, wear deodorant, and fight your gag reflex to watch a movie not of your liking for a special someone.
Love is one of the few default elements in life… much like defecation. You need it for the general satisfaction of your nether region. Some have the good fortune of a healthy bowel movement. Others have constipation and genuine resentment towards those who are doing it so regularly.
Why me? They must wonder, as they write sad songs about love’s painful absence, because while they’re spending the night home alone with a homemade enema, others so easily contract explosive diarrhea.
Love, in Shakespearean and entirely unscientific terms comes out of your heart and you cannot mess with it, the same why poop comes out your anus, and you cannot mess with that either… unless you’re an underpaid Japanese porn star.
From this loving-is-pooping perspective, I systematically scanned my environment to learn something new about my fellow Arabs: how they love!
We’re very passionate people by nature. We throw shoes at those who disagree with us and yell when we greet each other—not to mention the occasional bombing when you really hit a nerve. I hate to break stereotypes, but some aren’t like that. They’re all soft and civilian! And they defecate rather differently as well.
This is why I’ve categorized the different types of affairs that are only available in a country where no one owns an umbrella.
The Romantics
They refer to themselves as “lovers” and modestly flirt via eyelashes, missed calls, and text messages. Arabs are not too keen on public affection, or intimacy, or any physical expression of emotion between a man and a woman. This is troublesome for obvious reasons for a betrothed you couple, so the modest girl must modestly incite the modest guy in order to retain a modest virgin aura. To do so, she resorts to frequent eyelash fluttering and the very Egyptian, cat-and-mouse calling. Usually the guy calls the girl who is not supposed to answer (as not to cost him money), but merely indulge herself in the ringtone.
Unfortunately, the Egyptian movie industry revolves around this category of lovers, which results in grossly sexual movies. Despite showing little skin, they somehow manage to out sexualize French movies (which aren’t gross at all, for obvious reasons!) through this modest-sexually-suppressed demeanor. It’s like being stuck in a humid human-sized, misty glass bottle with your parents fondling each other.
The Pickled
These are people who have been soaked in the bitterness of their own tears inside the sad, rusty jar that is their life. They are single, and acutely aware of it. This category includes the fat, the flat, the spinsters, the widows, the ugly, and the barren. The celibacy takes its toll on the males first, who then channel their frustration onto the closest female relative or neighbor. They refer to themselves as “secret admirers,” with extra emphasis on the secret. Their hobbies include stalking, hair sniffing and love letter writing.
Female pickles, on the other hand, merely eat and glare at their surroundings. If love really was poop, they would kill for the weakest breeze of a fart.
The Sufferers
This is when a pickle meets a romantic, and they fall in shit.
It’s double the misery, because they’re in pairs. They’re always a young couple; old sufferers go to a retirement farm or switch to full-time pickles. They suffer from the same old sob story, it’s either lack of money, parental approval or less likely, conflict over religion. They must spend several years eye fluttering and text messaging, before finally coming to terms with reality.
As far as Egyptians movies are concerned, one of the sufferers must die or get paralyzed from the waist down by the end of the movie. Also they must feature a train in a climatic moment.
The Sinful
When the sufferers do it, baby.
To Arabs this is the equivalent of taking a gun to the relationship’s head and pulling the trigger. Theoretically speaking, intimacy should breed love and pheromones. But apparently, all it does is “taint” the affair. The girl is commonly grief-stricken to the loss of her ticket to the land of the happily married, while the guy is hit with the sudden realization that he cannot marry a girl who slept with him before marriage.
In movies, the sinful always produce an illegitimate “seed,” which is to be flushed out by an unethical doctor in a shady clinic. The girl is destined to wretchedness and shame, while the guy moves on and marries a “good” woman.
The Regretful
They were lucky enough to evade the four categories but ended in the fifth and worst.
This category includes everyone in their late 20s and above.
They are fucking married.
January 16, 2012
An Excerpt from Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice by Voice of Witness
[Originally published September 14, 2011.]
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Available now from Voice of Witness, Patriot Acts: Narratives of Post-9/11 Injustice, is edited by Alia Malek, an author (A Country Called Amreeka) and former Department of Justice attorney. A groundbreaking collection of oral histories, Patriot Acts tells the stories of men and women who have been needlessly swept up in the War on Terror. In their own words, narrators recount personal experiences of the post-9/11 backlash that have deeply altered their lives and communities. For more information about Voice of Witness visit voiceofwitness.org.
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On March 24, 2005, Adama Bah, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl, awoke at dawn to discover nearly a dozen armed FBI agents inside her family’s apartment in East Harlem. They arrested her and her father, Mamadou Bah, and transported them to separate detention facilities. A government document leaked to the press claimed that Adama was a potential suicide bomber but failed to provide any evidence to support this claim. Released after six weeks in detention, Adama was forced to live under partial house arrest with an ankle bracelet, a government-enforced curfew, and a court-issued gag order that prohibited her from speaking about her case. In August of 2006, Adama’s father was deported back to Guinea, Africa. Adama, who had traveled to the United States with her parents from Guinea as a child, also found herself facing deportation. She would spend the next few years fighting for asylum and struggling to support her family in the United States and Guinea.
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The morning of March 24, 2005, my family and I were in the house sleeping.
Someone knocked on the door, and my mom went and opened it. These men barged in, waking us up. I always sleep with the blanket over my head. They pull the blanket off my head, I look up, I see a man. He said, “You’ve got to get out!” I’m like, What the hell, what’s going on?
I saw about ten to fifteen people in our apartment and right outside our door in the hallway. They were mostly men, but there were two women. Some had FBI jackets, and others were from the police department and the DHS. We were all forced out of the bed and told to sit in the living room. They were going through papers, throwing stuff around, yelling and talking to each other, then whispering. I heard them yelling at my mother in the background, and my mom can’t speak much English, and they were pulling her into the kitchen, yelling at her, “We’re going to deport you and your whole family!”
This whole time, I was thinking, What’s going on? What are they talking about? I knew my dad had an issue with his papers, but I didn’t think that my mom did. They kept saying, “We’re going to send all of you back to your country.”
Then I saw my dad walking in, in handcuffs. They had gone to the mosque to get him. It was the scariest thing you could ever see; I had just never seen my father so powerless. He was always this guy you didn’t mess with. If he said do it, you did it. He was just someone you didn’t cross paths with.
They took him to the kitchen, whispered something to him.
He sat down, looked at us. He said, “Everything’s going to be fine, don’t worry.”
And then I knew nothing was fine, I knew something was wrong. They told him to tell us what was going on. He told us that they were going to arrest him and they were going to take him away.
The FBI agents told me to get up and get my sneakers. I was thinking they wanted to see my sneaker collection. I have all types of colors of sneakers. I went and grabbed them. I said, “I have this one, I have this one, I have this one.”
One of the agents said, “Choose one.”
My favorite color is blue, so I picked up a blue pair and said, “This one.”
He said, “Put them on.”
I said, “Okay, but I know they fit me.”
He said, “Put them on!” He was very nasty. Then he said, “All those earrings have to go out.” I have eight piercings on each side, a nose ring, and a tongue ring. I went to the kitchen to take them off, and they followed me in there.
My breath was stinking. I asked, “Can I at least brush my teeth? My breath stinks really bad. Can I use the bathroom?”
They said, “No. We have to go. You’re coming with us.”
I said, “Where am I going to go? Am I going with my dad?” I put on my jacket. They let me put my headscarf and abaya on. Then one of the women took out handcuffs. I panicked so badly, I was stuttering, “What did I do? Where are we going?”
First time in my life, I’m sixteen years old, in handcuffs. I looked at my dad, and he said, “Just do what they say.”
My mom didn’t know I was going. When we got out the door, she said, “Where she go? Where she go?” the agents said, “We’re taking her,” and they held my mom back. The man who seemed to be in charge put his hands on my mother to stop her.
They took me and my dad and put us in the same car. I was scared. I said to him, “What’s going on? What’s going to happen?” My dad said, “Don’t say anything, we’re going to get a lawyer. It’s okay, everything is going to be fine.”
There were two Escalades driving with us. I was looking around, paying attention. I recognized the Brooklyn Bridge, I recognized a lot of landmarks, but I didn’t recognize the building where my father and I were taken. We got out of the car and we walked past a security booth where the cars drive up to, before taking a ramp beneath the building to the parking lot. Once we were inside the building, they put me in my own cell. It was white, with a bench. No bars. No windows. There was a door that had a tiny glass pane, and I could see who was out there. I just saw a bunch of computers and tables, and people walking back and forth and talking. I kept seeing them talk to my dad.
I don’t know how long I was in there.
I was nervous, I was panicking, I was crying, I was trying to figure out what was going on. And I was constantly using the bathroom.
The toilet was an open toilet, though. There was a camera on the ceiling in the middle of the room. I was wondering, Can they see me peeing? I just wrapped blankets around me as I was peeing.
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Hours later, Adama was removed from her cell for questioning, during which she learned that she was not, in fact, a U.S. citizen. While being fingerprinted, she saw that another teen from her mosque, named Tashnuba, had also been detained. Here, she recounts her final interrogation before being transported to a detention facility in Pennsylvania.
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Finally I was brought to another room. This room had a table, a chair on one side, and two chairs on the other side. A federal agent walked in. She said, “I need to talk to you about something.” The questions she was asking had nothing to do with immigration. They were terrorism questions. She asked me about people from London, about people from all over the world. I thought, What’s going on?
The male interrogator told me that the religious study group Tashnuba was part of had been started by a guy who was wanted by the FBI. I had no idea if that was true or not.
The study group at the mosque was all women. So it was women learning about religion, women’s empowerment, why we cover, how we do the prayer, when to pray, things like that. It was more for converts and new people who had just come into Islam. There was nothing about jihad or anything like that.
I wasn’t part of the group, but Tashnuba was. We were the same age, sixteen. So, they asked me about this group and they told me they’d taken my computer and my diary. My diary was a black-and-white notebook. I had phone numbers, I had notes, I had stories in it, I had everything. Basically, they asked me about every contact in there, they asked me about every little thing. But, there’s nothing in there about jihad, there’s nothing in there about anything that’s suspicious. There was nothing in there at all. So I wasn’t worried.
They said, “We have your computer, we can find whatever you’re hiding.”
I said, “Go ahead, look in my computer. I have nothing to hide.”
They kept making a scene, like there was something big there. They said, “Don’t lie to us. If you lie to us, we’ll have proof, we’ll catch you in your lie.”
I knew there was nothing in my computer, but at the end of the day, I started to doubt myself. I thought, Okay, what’s going on now? Is there something there? Their technique is to make you doubt yourself. But then I thought, Wait a minute, I’m not this person. What are they talking about?
The interrogation lasted a long time. This Secret Service guy came in. He asked me how I felt about Bush. I said, “I don’t like him.” I was being very honest with them. There was nothing to hide.
The Secret Service guy was just too aggressive. He said, “I don’t understand—why do you choose to cover when women choose to wear less and less every day?”
I said, “It’s freedom of choice. Some people want to show some stuff, some people want to hide things. Some people want to preserve their bodies, some people don’t want to. They want to show it to the whole world.”
He said, “I don’t understand. You’re young, why are you doing this?”
Then they asked me about Tashnuba. They asked me about her name, they asked me about her family, but I told them, “I don’t know her.”
They said, “Tashnuba wrote you on this list.”
I said, “What list?”
They said, “She signed you up to be a suicide bomber.”
I said, “Are you serious? Why would she do that? She doesn’t seem like that type of person.”
They were trying to make me seem like I was wrong about who I knew and who I didn’t know.
- – -
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January 13, 2012
CSI: Roadshow. by Jack Kelly
“What you have here is a pillowcase with a large reddish-black discoloration in the center.”
“I bought it at a yard sale. I fell in love with the lacy border.”
“Well, that particular lace is a Cambery design, made in a French city near Lyon, and this is really quite a find. The laundry mark you see here is from the Wu Chee Hand Laundry on Chicago’s West Side. Wu Chee was operated, oddly enough, by a German, Hans Splichter, who immigrated from the Bavarian town of Andechs where monks have been brewing beer for more than a thousand years.”
“I never would have guessed.”
“Chinese laundries were all the rage in Chicago around 1922, so Splichter gave his business a Chinese name. He operated only until the stock market crash, which dates your piece to the middle or late 1920s, a violent period in the Windy City, as you can imagine.”
“Al Capone, right?”
“Precisely, so it’s likely that your pillowcase could well be evidence in a gangland hit or ‘rubout’ as it’s called.”
“Oh, my.”
“The splatter pattern is consistent with a sharp blow to the head of the victim. When I examined it under an electron microscope, I determined that the murder weapon was almost definitely a mattock.”
“I think I’ve heard of that.”
“It’s a bit like a hoe, used to break up soil or clear roots. Put in a nice vegetable garden.”
“I grow tomatoes, but I never have any luck. Some kind of wilt.”
“That might be fusarium, a kind of fungus that affects olanaceous crop plants. Awful stuff. Could I ask what you paid for this item?”
“Ten cents.”
“I think if properly cleaned and if you had that tiny tear in the corner repaired it would easily fetch, oh, a dollar or even two at your own yard sale. On eBay, perhaps more.”
“Really? I declare!”
Blood-stained pillowcase: $1.00 – 2.00
- – -
“Now, you say you do have the original container, that’s important. The fact that the envelope is addressed to you establishes clear provenance.”
“I was very careful to save it.”
“Excellent. What you have here is a classic ransom note. You can see that each letter has been clipped from a magazine—Playboy, the typeface suggests—and pasted onto this sheet of rather ordinary notepaper. Taken together, they form a message. Would you care to read it for us?”
“WE HAVE DOUG. PREPARE $1 MILLION.” That’s crossed out and it’s got, “$5,000. SMALL BILLS. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS”. Then at the bottom, “NO COPS”.
“Intriguing. Do you know someone named Doug?”
“My son. Forty-two, he’s never held a steady job. His excuse, he’s writing his dissertation. I tell him, a PhD in early English literature and a nickel will get you a ride on the subway. Though I guess it’s more now.”
“$2.25, actually. But what you say is fascinating because I’ve subjected this note to ultraviolet ion-decay scanning and I’ve detected an outline of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight impressed into the paper.”
“When Doug started talking about the medieval symbolism of Arthurian romances at Thanksgiving, Uncle Morton went into his Robert Goulet imitation just to shut him up. You know, ‘If ever I would leave you . . .’”
“‘Oh no! Not in springtime, summer, winter or fall!’ Well, you know what? That outline increases the note’s evidentiary value significantly. Combined with the fingerprints we were able to lift and the original container, this is a very valuable item. It could be used to trace the kidnapper.”
“Trace? I know Doug sent it himself. They teach a lot of things in the big universities, but common sense is not one of ‘em. Is it worth big bucks?”
“I’m very glad to say that the market for fake ransom notes is just booming at the moment. I could easily see it going for as much as $900 at auction, perhaps more.”
“No! I can’t believe it.”
“Of course, I’m sure the sentimental value is much higher, a reminder of your son’s formative years.”
“Yeah, right.”
Fake ransom note: $900
- – -
“This is an excellent specimen of a human corpse.”
“A corpse? You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“No, it appears to be male, about forty-five years of age, in good shape, perhaps a few pounds on the heavy side—notice the ‘love handles’ as we call them—remarkably fresh. Could I ask where you got it?”
“I found it in my living room. I was vacuuming—I bought one of those expensive models that the man said traps mold spores-–and there on the carpet is this object.”
“No idea how it got there?”
“I think I should talk to my attorney before I say for sure.”
“Naturally. Well, it was a very lucky find indeed. A very interesting ‘case,’ as we call it. The cause of death here is not readily apparent. By the look of him, he should be walking around whistling ‘O Mio Babbino Caro.’”
“Or maybe belittling somebody for the thousandth time because they made a simple arithmetic mistake in their checkbook.”
“Yes, whatever. But if you’ll look closely here, by the corner of the mouth, you’ll see a residue of white powder. Spectrographic analysis has determined it to be deadly poison.”
“Which means what?”
“This person has been murdered, there’s no doubt about it.”
“Murdered? Goodness gracious. How much could one get for that?”
“Ah, there’s the question. What do you think?”
“I really have no idea.”
“My best estimate, if the perpetrator were unable to strike a deal with prosecutors, is that this crime could bring as much as twenty to life.”
“Incredible. That much?”
“Absolutely. So you had better handle this very, very carefully. Cold storage would be the way to go.”
“Yes, I’ll see to it that it’s properly stowed away. I’m just amazed. Thank you.”
“Thanks for bringing it to CSI: Roadshow.”
Human corpse: 20 years to life
