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Demonologist Jim Dooley Spends Lent Performing Exorcisms

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A few years ago, I came across a book called Beware the Night by Ralph Sarchie, an NYPD veteran and demonologist who spent the greater part of the 90s helping people burdened by spiritual oppression work their way back into the grace of God. Although I never considered myself to be religious and have a particular fondness for the kind of movies that could make a grown man shit himself, I was so scared of the “true-life” accounts I read that I needed to seek out answers to the burning questions Sarchie's book presented: Is my soul at risk? Do I even have a soul?

Then I found Jim Dooley, a former NYPD captain who works with Sarchie. I reached out to him and asked if I could tag along on one of his house calls to see how a real exorcism went down, but my request was immediately denied because he worried I might be some kind of satanic probe. But following a long phone interview where he grilled me about my past—if I had ever had an abortion (since the Devil loves those), played with a Ouija board, or worshiped Satan—he finally agreed to meet with me.

The interview that follows is from May 2011. For various reasons, we were unable to run the interview at the time, but now that it's Easter, one of the busiest times of the year for demonologists, I decided to follow up with Dooley and ask if I could post the transcript. Although it had been years since we last spoke, he kindly agreed and reminded me that the Devil is an evergreen topic. To this day, he still has a client that is being raped by the unknown nightly—I clearly didn't need to ask Dooley any additional questions. The world is as fucked up as it was when we last spoke in 2011. 

VICE: How long were you a cop?
Jim Dooley: A little over 23 years. I retired as a captain.

How did you get into demonology? Are there other cops who investigate the paranormal in their spare time?
No, there aren’t unfortunately—well, other than Ralph Sarchie. I really didn’t want to do it at first, but then a lot my colleagues started confiding in me that things were happening. One of them, who I consider to be very trustworthy, claimed that he was levitated to the ceiling on numerous occasions, and no one believed him. I advised him to get some holy water, salts, and to say some prayers so he could get himself in spiritual order. He did, and it stopped. It was nice that I was able to give him what I thought was simplistic advice and to see it actually work. So now I go on websites like Real Ghost Stories to offer help to others. I’m a fairly traditional Catholic, however, I know my limitations as a maligner—I don’t do exorcisms of people, only places. If a spirit has attached itself to a person I have to call one of the priests in my society. They’d need to get permission from a bishop, and unfortunately the Church doesn’t want to get involved with stuff like that these days.

The Church is trying to distance itself from exorcisms?
A lot of times the problem is psychological, not spiritual, and because of that I think the Church is afraid of embarrassment. They know the media will mock them.

How can you differentiate psychological problems from spiritual problems?
It can be difficult. Angelic disturbances can often piggyback as real psychological pathology, and on the other hand, a person who is mentally ill can have a spiritual accomplice—the two aren’t mutually exclusive. The manifestations in each individual case may differ, but the root evil is always the same.

Are the people who reach out to you for help generally religious?
I get calls from everyone, but the reported attacks are clearly on Catholics. The Devil hates the Catholic Church, and the name he fears most is Mary. Even a glance from her causes more fear than a person saying the name of St. Michael.

What are these people doing to become so vulnerable to spiritual attacks?
Most of the time it’s because of children dabbling in the occult—tarot cards, Ouija boards, Santeria, palmistry, astrology, séances. Anytime you’re trying to retain knowledge or power from a source other than the Bible or the holy sacraments, it comes with a major price tag. I recently helped a woman who claimed she was talking to her guardian angel and it told her she didn’t have to go to confession. This immediately set off a red flag—while I felt it could be some type of seraphim, I was confident it wasn’t one of the good guys. About a month later my theory was proven when she said it appeared to her in the form of an angel with hooves for feet.

How did they start talking?
Sometimes it just happens—they like to play head games, and very often they’ll appear to you in mysterious ways like in a mirror. All of the deception is to depress you. The ultimate goal of a demon is to lead someone to suicide. If you kill yourself intentionally, you’ve committed a mortal sin, and all they want is your damnation. They want you to be condemned to hell.

On ghost shows they always use a lot of equipment to pick up on energies. What is that all about, and do you carry any of that stuff?
I just bring my sacramentals—a cross and blessed salt. You can use tools but the ghost chasers on TV aren’t spiritual—all they can do is prove to you that you’re not crazy by showing you something is real. I actually haven’t seen a lot of things, and thank God. I prefer it that way.

Are there specific prayers you recite during your visits?
I recite Pope Leo XIII's prayer of exorcism, which is very effective and can be used by all Catholics in times when devilish mischief is suspected. I also hang medals like the miraculous medal of Saint Catherine Labouré on the walls of the house or bury them around the property. The family may not know they’re there, but if it’s a true haunting, their visitors will sense them from a mile away. This is good for a demonic harassment, but if it goes untreated, it can develop into oppression.

How often do you refer people to the Church for possession?
I have a few times, but 70 percent of the cases can be healed by ordinary means of salvation, attending mass, communion, and going to confession. A person has to be diligent and avoid what objectively might be a sinful lifestyle—alcohol or drug abuse, homosexuality, or promiscuity weakens your spiritual armor.

Tell me about some of the cases you’re working on now.
I’m currently helping a man in Long Island who is being beaten and burned nearly 20 hours of every day by some invisible force. We don’t know how it all began—it might have started when he found some questionable items in his basement that were left behind by the previous tenant, or it’s possible that his ex-girlfriend is into the occult now and sending negative energy his way. He’s a really nice guy, but this has been going on for a year and he’s blamed me for taking so long to figure it out. I have to keep telling him this will be cured in God’s time. It’s not up to me, and in my opinion he hasn’t really done much to help himself out of this situation anyway.

It’s easy to be angry when you’re trying to fight something you can’t see.
Yeah, what do you do if you’re a woman and you’re being penetrated vaginally or anally by an unknown force? You think you’re going out of your mind! I have one client who is a former satanic high priestess.

Do a lot of Satanists reach out to you?
Many of them actually kill themselves before they get to that point. A very powerful high-ranking lieutenant of Satan is violating the woman I’m helping now, about two to three times a week. She’s tried to kill herself twice, but I don’t think she is possessed—this is more of a transient possession. There was an instance where we were exchanging emails recently and she said she was starting to feel a lot of anger welling up inside of her body. A minute later I received another message saying, “You can’t help her. She belongs to us. You and your prayers are a joke. You wait and see.” There was also a time during one of our meetings where this entity actually materialized; I pulled the so-called snake out of her head and dragged it across the floor as she screamed out, “Saint Michael, help me!” She claimed it worked and she saw the demon vanish.

But things are still happening, right? What’s keeping it around?
She’s finally able to pray the rosary and say the name Jesus, so that’s a step in the right direction, but she needs to go to confession. The Devil is a legalist, and considering her past and the fact that she invited him in, he’s going to exercise his right to stay.

Is it actually possible for someone, via Ouija board or psychic medium, to converse with a spirit that doesn’t necessarily have malicious intentions?
No. The Bible strictly forbids necromancy, which is attempting to contact the dead. Sometimes our lord does permit holy souls to weakly manifest themselves, but it’s usually immediately after death, if a loved one is in deep mourning over their passing. But it’s always something small like the flickering of a light bulb, because human souls aren’t powerful enough.

How can you tell the difference between harmless, leftover spiritual energy and these demonic forces?
If it involves some kind of sexual impurity, heavy drug use, or is leading into oblivion, it’s not good—even seeing something as harmless as a floating orb is a bad sign. The Devil uses the same tricks over and over again to deceive us. It’s just our own stupidity and arrogance that causes us to misinterpret them.

Have any of the negative spirits you’ve dealt with ever attached themselves to you at work?
No comment.

Why don’t you want to talk about it?
Because by acknowledging this I’m putting myself at greater risk.

OK…
Just trust me.

When I contacted you, you asked me a lot of questions to see if I was some kind of satanic probe. What do you think people want from you?
I think they want to know how I know what I know. Who trained me, how I got into this field, how many of us are involved, how my team operates. I don’t give that away.

How could that benefit anyone?
It depends on what they’re looking to do. Maybe a phony call one day trying to make fun of us or sacrifice us during one of their ceremonies. That would require a lot of planning, but it’s still possible.

You said you are getting a lot of calls right now. What kind of situations are you seeing?
Dark shadows, intrusive thoughts, thoughts of suicide, depression, scratches at night, poundings, whisperings, and some are worse, like people being physically assaulted. The girl we’ve been speaking about often wakes up with scratches on her body and recently awoke with a razor blade in her hand; she has no idea how it got there.

Do you ever bring people with you on house visits as spiritual backup?
Anyone you bring becomes a target. That’s why I go to confession to make sure my soul is in a good place—if possible, even the very same day.

So even though you’re spiritually fit you're a target now just because of your profession? 
Yes, and now so are you.

What? Why? Just by asking you about it?
Yes. You’re on the Devil’s radar now. You know things about him he doesn’t want you to know.

So these dark forces can now manipulate my thoughts and read my mind?
There is disagreement among priests and theologians about whether they can read minds. I’m not 100 percent sure, but they understand us better than we think—they’ve been studying us since Adam and Eve.

That all sounds really scary.
It’s a lot to think about, right? 

Follow Annette Lamothe-Ramos on Twitter


VICE News: VICE News Capsule: Edward Snowden Asks Vladimir Putin About Russia's Spy Program

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The VICE News Capsule is a news roundup that looks beyond the headlines. On this week's episode, Edward Snowden asks Vladimir Putin about Russia's spy program, journalists in Thailand face charges for reporting on human trafficking, Peruvian police forcibly remove squatters in the Amazon, and the FBI releases a video urging overseas students not to become spies for China.

Old Ladies Have Dominated the History of Weed Brownies

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Old Ladies Have Dominated the History of Weed Brownies

Reality Bites: Did Oprah Winfrey Actually Expect Lindsay Lohan to Find Sobriety on a Reality Show?

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Photo courtesy of OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network

I knew I would run into Lindsay Lohan during her most recent stint in rehab. We both got sober in the same community in Malibu, and Malibu is a very small town. But when I ran into Lindsay last summer, I was shocked.

It was a Monday night, and I was in dire need of some recovery. Harper, my daughter, was only about six months old, and I hadn’t been out of my house in what felt like weeks. Lindsay saw us, walked up to me, and then kneeled in front of Harper, extending her hand to grab my baby's tiny finger. Lindsay and I briefly chitchatted, and then she took her seat. She seemed different from the girl I had recently seen in the media: Her skin was glowing, her voice sounded clear, and her white eyes glistened.

Wow! I thought. That was really pleasant.

I had reasons to expect our conversation to go disastrously. Lindsay and I had served time together at the Lynwood Correctional Facility before I found sobriety three years ago. When I left jail early because of overcrowding, I was in desperate need of money. I had spent all my savings on drugs, and I had no way to support myself. A television channel offered me a post-jail interview that would pay me a decent amount of money. At the time, I had two options to pay my bills and buy drugs: sell my stuff or sell my soul. I decided to do the latter, be a mean girl, and agree to talk shit about Lindsay for $20,000.

After I got sober and began learning about my disease, I felt terrible about agreeing to do that interview. I realized I had no ability to see my behavior’s impact on others when I used—this is one of the many symptoms of my alcoholism—so I worked my steps. I made amends to friends and family members I had hurt, and volunteered with women in the community. I wanted to apologize to Lindsay, but I had no contact with her, and our brief encounter in Malibu wasn’t the right time to say I was sorry—true apologies between two girls are rarely made in public.

When OWN announced they were paying Lindsay $2 million to star in Lindsay, a “docu-series” (read: a classy reality show) about Lindsay’s attempts to stay sober after rehab, I rooted for her. She looked healthy in Malibu, and Oprah Winfrey had a reputation for helping troubled people on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I thought Winfrey could guide Lindsay on her journey to a healthier life.

Unfortunately, Lindsay has been anything but a self-help show. In the first few episodes, Lindsay moved from California to New York. (Would even a normie want cameras in their face while doing something like this? Who likes moving?) On the first episode, she sat in a hotel room covered in clothes, compulsively smoking cigarettes, worrying about money, and calling a real estate agent to ask if she had been approved to rent an apartment. Midway through the episode, Lindsay brought up the bling ring and talked shit about me. I assumed either the producers had asked her to mention the robberies because they needed to stir up some drama to make the first episode more exciting, or Lindsay still had some resentment towards me—which I could understand. After all, I did talk shit about her on national TV.

The next few weeks, I struggled to watch the show, not for the same reasons that made many viewers stop watching the show, but because Lindsay reminded me of myself—I have lived in fear of financial instability and have agreed to sell my soul instead of selling my stuff. But mostly I became uncomfortable watching the way Winfrey spoke to Lindsay. I know Winfrey grew up with a lot of trauma, but we can’t all be Winfrey, regardless of how many issues of O magazine we read or how many of her favorite things we buy. I thought Winfrey would at least be a good female advocate for Lindsay—the emotionally stable mother Lindsay never had. Instead Winfrey was like any other stage mom, a cold, opportunistic parent trying to make a buck off a little girl.

Winfrey was shocked when Lindsay misbehaved. Early in the series, Lindsay started to show up late and cancel shoots with the show’s crew—probably because she wanted to back out of the whole thing, which was understandable. Winfrey, the crew, and Lindsay’s assistant would get mad at Lindsay like they were angry parents. Was I the only one who wasn’t surprised by Lindsay’s behavior? Winfrey paid Lindsay to appear on a reality show a few days after she left rehab. Have you met addicts after they leave rehab? They’re vulnerable and raw. Why would you put a camera in front of them, let alone expect them to show up on time?

Yet on episode three, Winfrey flew to town to chastise her pet project, Lindsay, and pressure her to succeed, when she was really setting her up to fail. The cameraman shot Winfrey from below, as Winfrey rode in a luxury car to Dina’s house to see Lindsay, emphasizing Winfrey’s omniscience. When Winfrey sat down with Lindsay, she threatened to pull the plug on the show. The Big O’s canned speech about how she rooted for Lindsay dripped with insincerity. Lindsay had repeatedly called her reality show a documentary during the show, and I began to wonder if Winfrey described the show as a “docu-series” to Lindsay to disingenuously convince her to appear on OWN. Clearly Winfrey's aggressive, exhibitionistic approach had exacerbated the pressure on Lindsay, but Winfrey seemed completely unaware of the role she was playing, that she was toying with a troubled girl’s life. On episode five, Lindsay admitted to relapsing.  

In between this chaos, Cliffside Malibu, the treatment center Lindsay went to, ran copious ads on OWN. But what else could we have expected? Everything about this show, from its concept to its advertisers, was pure promotion and exploitation. Lindsay was broke and struggling to salvage her career. She needed $2 million and to associate her tarnished name with Winfrey’s respected brand, and Winfrey needed Lindsay to save her channel that everyone knew was failing. (When have you ever watched OWN?)

When the show flopped, it wasn't surprising to watch OWN unceremoniously discard Lindsay, announcing this week that they weren’t going to renew the show for a second season. But this show was never about showing Lindsay’s recovery. Lindsay was an exercise in pure Schadenfreude—taking joy in the misfortune and suffering of others—and we're all partially to blame. Lindsay was bound to fail, and that’s what we all wanted. I would be lying if I said part of me wasn’t looking forward to a train wreck. (And I'm known for being a quasi-famous train wreck myself.) It’s insane that anyone thought Lindsay was going to be about recovery, not a battle to the death. After all, what is the logical conclusion of a reality television show? A public execution. The media wants to see Lindsay die. 

Recovery, thankfully, is typically the opposite of a public execution. What I’ve learned is women in recovery need to support each other, not tear each other down. We share the common demands that addiction puts on us, like the inability to deal with normal stressful events, like moving, and being forced to delve deep into our psyches and develop a sometimes painful sense of awareness of both the history of our trauma and the ways we’ve continued to traumatize ourselves. This work can be terribly painful, totally wonderful, and sometimes messy—normal people rarely experience the transformative healing that addicts go through.  Recovery takes a very long time. I’m not sure how recovery works for every person, but I know real long-term recovery will never take place in a few short weeks, let alone in front of a TV camera. 

Follow Alexis Neiers on Twitter.

Weed 'Em and Weep!

VICE Premiere: 'Baby Love' Easter Music Video

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Every day people send us emails about their terrible fashion lines and abstract rap music videos, but today God blessed us, and we woke up to an email about “Baby Love,” the artist Actually Huizenga's brilliant new music video set to a Cicciolina cover from the upcoming Viking Angel EP. The video combines iconic Easter symbols—eggs, bunnies, and Jesus—with blasphemous images, like footage of Cicciolina. “I wanted to make something that made me happy the way Victorian, romantic Easter cards, 40s holiday-themed pin-ups, and Cicciolina, in all ways, make me feel,” Actually told us. After watching the video on repeat, we can assure you that she succeeded and her Easter bunny mindfuck will make you feel like an Easter-themed, Italian porno.

Willie Nelson Is Going to Receive a Fifth-Degree Black Belt (and It's Not In Smoking Weed)

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Willie Nelson Is Going to Receive a Fifth-Degree Black Belt (and It's Not In Smoking Weed)

The Story Behind Every Pothead's Favorite Number

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The Story Behind Every Pothead's Favorite Number

VICE News: Russian Roulette: The Invasion of Ukraine - Part 28

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Last week, Ukraine launched an anti-terror campaign to recapture the cities being occupied by pro-Russia protesters. So far the campaign hasn't been going so well.

On April 16, the second day of the campaign, the Ukrainian military moved into Sloviansk—the focal point of the pro-Russia forces—and gave up their equipment. The armory was brought to the center of town where it has become a local amusement.

In Kramatorsk a crowd of pro-Russia protesters stopped a column of Ukrainian troops and made them disarm. VICE News correspondent Simon Ostrovsky was on the scene as Ukrainian forces disarmed their weapons and vehicles.

Weediquette: T. Kid the Cannabis Cup Judge

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Every time I travel to Denver, I start my trip with an edible and a Xanax, which I consume discreetly at LaGuardia Airport. Exactly one year ago, I flew to Denver to attend the first truly legal Cannabis Cup in America and film a documentary about BHO. This week, I traveled to the Cannabis Cup for a different job—rating 38 different sativa strains as an official Cannabis Cup judge.

Judging the Cup has been a dream for most of my life. I’ve always smoked a decent amount of weed, but have never had enough variety of pot to be picky. Leading up to my trip, several friends asked me how it’s possible to smoke strains one after the other and then judge their different effects. As I learned in a crash course from the guys at High Times magazine, it’s not only about the high. The flavor, texture, and appearance are all judged as well, and the winners are the ones who score well in all the categories. Also, when you regularly smoke a lot of weed, the strong initial high doesn’t last as long. I figured it would be easy to fairly judge each strain if I took a 15-minute break after I smoked each strain. 

After I arrived in Denver, I checked into my hotel, picked up my rental car, and bolted to the secret address High Times sent me the previous week. I had arrived two days later than the other judges, so I was the last guy to pick up my strains. I always imagined the Cannabis Cup judge’s kit would be a small wooden chest filled with uniformly packaged strains and just the right amount of papers and crutches. What I received was ten times more awesome.

As soon as I reached the house, Danny Danko handed me a cardboard box filled with different containers. There were different shapes and sizes of medical containers, glass jars, and zip bags filled with different buds. Each had a label that said “sativa” and was numbered one through 38. I sat down on the couch and opened a random jar that smelled incredible. I was already overwhelmed by the buds’ quality, but I had to stay level in front of the High Times OGs. I didn’t want to geek out. I twisted up a nice big joint and sparked it—the first smoke of the day is always the clearest high, so this was my most accurate rating. The guys told me to base my ratings on the distinct sativa qualities of each sample, favoring the lush, citrus-flavored strains over the ones with a Kush smell. After smoking spliffs for so many years, I struggled to detect the subtle flavors in the strains of weed. I had to concentrate hard through one pure joint after another to get the full bouquet of each strain. As I smoked each strain, I rated its aspects in an app on my phone. Every time I rated a strain, the app marked it as done, so I could see how many I had left to grade. After four strains at the house, I decided to grab a handful of strains from the box and enlist the help of a couple of Denver homies.

The Chamberlain brothers were my first guides through cannabis culture in Denver, and I hang out with them every time I come to town. (Both of them are extensively experienced with the plant.) Along with Bobby, another VICE writer who was writing a story in Denver, they were the perfect backup squad for my three-day weed testing frenzy. With their help, I managed to get all of my scores in by the deadline. The next test was seeing if the other judges agreed with my ratings. Weed’s taste is subjective, but I was still hoping the group would validate my selections. When I met with the other judges on the final day, I waited to hear from them before making suggestions. Everyone selected a couple of obvious contenders. Another judge and I selected one strain as the best, and we advocated for the strain during deliberations. After taking a look at the buds, the group agreed to choose it as the second best strain. Incidentally, that other judge was Shawn Russ, the first kid to ever divorce his parents. He has excellent taste in weed.

Once the meeting adjourned, we all stepped out and smoked some of the winners before parting ways. We now had the consensus of the whole panel and could spend the rest of the week smoking all the best strains. Since then I’ve been rolling up joints, smoking half of them, and then passing them off to friendly strangers I meet at the festival. Everyone I’ve shared with takes one hit and recognizes the quality, but one guy at the 4/20 rally had a spiritual experience.

I was sitting on the grass at Civic Center Park and smoking with the Chamberlains when a guy in Chicago sports gear invited us to join him and his friends. They had arrived in Denver a couple of hours before and were having their first legal smoke. We rolled up a joint of one of the top strains and passed it to the guy. The second he took a hit, he howled and then coughed up a lung. In between coughs, he strained to tell us how amazing our weed was. His coughing fit continued for several minutes. When it was finally over, he had tears in his eyes. He pointed to his tears and said, “You see this? Look how happy that made me. These are tears of joy.” Then he whipped out his cell phone, said, “This is a moment to remember, right here,” and snapped a selfie of his tearful face. I shot a photo of him taking the selfie.

People were smoking pretty freely at the rally, but there were a lot of cops and private security guards walking around and hassling people, so we took off and left the rest of our sample with the crying guy. A few minutes later, I realized that I no longer had my wallet. We searched around to no avail. I had to call it a day so that I could deal with the aftermath of being nearly 2,000 miles from home without an ID or an ATM card. As a result, Bobby has to feed me for the next 24 hours. The only thing open late around here is fast food drive-throughs, so we hit up a Taco Bell. After waiting behind five cars, the voice on the speaker told us that the guy in front of us had bought the last tacos they had in stock. He saved our night by telling us Wendy’s was across the street.

As we pulled up to Wendy’s, I smoked the strain that won my judging category. The guy ringing us up noticed the lit joint and said, “You couldn’t wait 15 minutes, huh?” I looked at the clock and realized that it was 11:45 PM on April 19. Another Wendy’s employee came up behind him and said, “That smells good!” Bobby grabbed the joint and held it out to him. He leaned out the service window, took a few hits, and passed it back to us. “Wow! That is really good. It’s… piney,” he said. I was kicking myself for not getting a picture of his hit. A second later, Bobby said, “One more!” and the guy leaned back out for another hit. Again I failed to get my phone to take a picture. The guy gave us our food, and we pulled away. “Shit, I wish I got a picture of that,” I said. “That’s why I told him to hit it a second time,” Bobby said. “I got that shit on video.”

Now it’s officially 4/20, and I’m without cash, cards, and ID. What I do have is a shit ton of amazing sativa strains and a VIP wristband to the Cannabis Cup. I may be in a tough spot, but I’m still going to have the best damn 4/20 ever, and I sincerely hope you do too.

Happy 4/20, everyone!

Follow T. Kid on Twitter

Your Burger Could Be the Next Big Terrorist Target

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Your Burger Could Be the Next Big Terrorist Target

The SS Doctor Who Converted to Islam and Escaped the Nazi Hunters

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Aribert Heim on horseback in his SS uniform

The Holocaust, as you’ll probably know, produced some of history’s worst human beings. The thing is, though, besides those who made it into your textbooks—the Hitlers, Görings and Himmlers—many escaped unscathed, free to live out the rest of their days pretending to be mild-mannered ex-pats who’d moved to Argentina simply because they preferred empanadas and polo to bratwurst and car manufacturing. 

One SS member to ultimately escape prosecution was an Austrian concentration camp doctor called Aribert Heim, who later became known as “Doctor Death.” The atrocities committed in the Nazi camps have their very own scale of horror, and Heim sits somewhere near the top (his trademark was injecting gasoline into healthy people’s hearts and keeping their skulls as trophies). However, despite his horrific crimes he managed to mostly evade the authorities, and when they did finally catch up with him in the early 60s he had already fled Germany.

Almost 50 years later, New York Times journalist Souad Mekhennet got a tip that Heim had converted to Islam and had been hiding out in Cairo. Teaming up with another NYT journalist, Nicholas Kulish, the pair decided to follow up what they’d heard, hoping to track down Heim and explain what exactly had happened after his sudden disappearance.

An article about Souad and Nicholas’ search for Heim was first published in the New York Times, before the pair turned their investigation into a book, titled The Eternal Nazi. I recently spoke to the writers about their experience, the briefcase of Heim’s possessions they were handed in Cairo and the effect the story had on them and those closest to Dr Death.

Aribert Heim's briefcase, which was handed to Nicholas and Souad by his adoptive Egyptian family

VICE: Hi guys. So let’s start at the beginning; when did you start investigating the story of Aribert Heim?
Souad Mekhennet: It started in 2008, when I received a phone call from an old source of mine. We met, and he took out this photocopied photo of Aribert Heim. He told me that he was the most-wanted Nazi doctor, “Doctor Death.” There was information that Heim used to hide out in a certain neighbourhood in Cairo, but it wasn’t confirmed. So I spoke to Nick and we decided to take on the challenge. I took this photocopy to Cairo to see if it was true. We went from small hotel to small hotel, until, on our third day, we found someone who recognized him.

What exactly had Heim done to become the most wanted Nazi in the world?
Nicholas Kulish: He worked as a Waffen-SS doctor in a series of concentration camps, including Buchenwald in Germany and Mauthausen in Austria. He was accused of committing hideous crimes in Mauthausen in 1941, including operating on healthy living patients, killing them in the process, and injecting gasoline into people’s hearts. He also used to take the skulls with particularly good teeth as trophies and keep them on his desk.

And he then managed to escape after the war.
Well, what a lot of people find unbelievable is that he was held in custody—first by Americans, then the German authorities—for more than two years after the war, but there was no sign on his record that he’d served in Mauthausen, so he was released under the Christmas amnesty in 1947.

How he did he manage to get that wiped from his record?
No one really knows. It could have been a lucky oversight; they were shuffling millions of soldiers around half of Europe.
SM: Also, the witnesses to Heim’s atrocities were in Austria, and it took the investigators quite some time to really figure out who and where Heim was.

Yeah, one story I found interesting was how Nazi hunters started putting things together after Heim was explicitly mentioned in a play written by a Holocaust survivor.
NK: Yeah, that was a fascinating thing – it was one of the earliest works of art about the Holocaust. The playwright, Arthur Becker, was a kind of assistant war crimes investigator in Mauthausen and took down the first known testimony about Heim’s crimes in 1946. Then he writes this play in which the villain is a doctor who collects skulls as trophies. So Heim has become this bogeyman Nazi murderer within two years of the war.

When really Heim was off playing professional ice hockey.
SM: Yes, he had moved to Bad Nauheim [near Frankfurt] and was playing for the Red Devils ice hockey team. Then he met a girl from a very wealthy family and moved to a tremendously big villa in Baden-Baden, where he settled as a gynocologist.

How long was it until the Nazi hunters caught up with him?
NK: He received a phone call in 1962 asking him if he was the doctor who worked in Mauthausen. He then had this incredibly casual encounter with a couple of investigators, but he knew what it meant. He borrowed his brother-in-law’s Mercedes and basically hightailed from Germany into France and France into Spain, then ditched the car before moving on to Morocco. His brother-in-law was pretty angry with him when he picked up the car. He said, “The least you could have done would have been to wash it.”

Heim's passport photo

And it was in Egypt that he converted to Islam and became Tarek Hussein Farid. It’s apparent in the book that he was very good at hiding who he really was. Do you think his conversion had something to do with that?
SM: We heard a few theories, and one from his immediate family was that when Egypt started to have closer relations with Israel, Heim started to feel very unsafe there. So one way to change his name and blend in better would have been to convert to Islam. But, on the other hand, his Egyptian adopted family believed that he had a genuine interest in the religion and that he prayed and followed all the rules. So it depends on who you talk to. But he definitely succeeded in making people believe he had a genuine interest in Islam.

Can you tell me a little about the family he lived with in Egypt?
He moved into a little hotel called Kasr el-Madina, and the owner’s family felt sorry for him because he was this older foreign man living alone. He eventually became close friends with the owner and they used to cook for him and hang out. He more or less adopted them as family and they adopted him. He became very close to Mahmoud Doma, who we interviewed several times for the book. Heim became Mahmoud's and his younger brother’s second father, because their father passed away when they were very young.

What was it like telling the family that the man they knew had done all these horrendous things?
They had no idea that he was hiding or who he really was, so it came as a big surprise to them. They didn't about his second identity. But they did know that he’d been married and had two children in Germany. They also met Rüdiger [Heim’s younger son] at one stage because he started to visit his father.

How aware were his real family of what he’d done?
Well, we spoke to his wife before she passed away and she said she had no idea until she first heard the accusations [after Heim met with the investigators in Baden-Baden]. It appeared that her mother had told him there would be no way the family could face such a trial and said it would be better for all of them if he took off.
NK: One of the central ironies was that he supposedly fled to protect his family, in Germany in 1962, when a Nazi war criminal could get off with a slap on the wrist or a couple of years in prison, before going back to a normal life. Instead, he subjected his family to half a century of phone taps, questioning, and searches, and set himself up for decades in exile, essentially turning Egypt into his own prison.

What were Rüdiger’s feelings when you spoke to him? How did he reconcile what his father had done with the father he was visiting in Cairo?
SM: My impression was that he didn’t want to believe that his father would have committed all these evil crimes, and he didn’t want to know whether he’d really done it all or not. He was totally obsessed with trying to prove that his father was innocent.
NK: Heim had two sons, and it’s really telling how different their reactions were. The older son more or less knew and remembered his father and going through all the questions and police investigations. He had nothing to do with his father and never went to visit him in Cairo. Whereas the younger son, who was six when his father disappeared, barely had the faintest memory of him, so he went in search of a father he never knew and who he always longed for.

Was there anything you learned while working on the book that surprised you?
One thing that surprised me was how many real Inglourious Basterds stories there were. Groups with names like Vengeance and the Avengers tracked down and killed former SS and Gestapo members. Tuviah Friedman, who later worked with [renowned Nazi hunter] Simon Wiesenthal, hunted down Nazis in post-war Europe. The SS captain known as the Hangman of Riga was found in a trunk in the bedroom of his beach house in Uruguay, executed for his part in the Holocaust.
SM: Also how the Mossad tried to kill Nazis in Egypt. Hans Eisele, who was also a Nazi doctor, was sent a letter bomb, but it exploded in the delivery guy’s hands.

What did you personally take away from the experience?
It was a chance to learn about what happened in Germany from a totally different perspective. The Egyptian family handed over Heim's dusty, rusty old briefcase, which was stuffed full of letters and medical records and a long report about Jews and anti-Semitism, which he obsessed over. I took away that there are still so many things that we don’t know about – and, I mean, I grew in Germany and studied history, but there are so many things we don’t know.

What about you, Nick?
I asked a retired judge who was hunting Nazis in his spare time, “What’s the point in arresting these 90-year-old guys? What’s the point in going after them?” And he said, “At the concentration camps they sent 90-year-old men and women to their death, and they had no problem killing newborn babies. So you pursue justice at any point and at any cost.” There’s a reason why there’s no statute of limitations on murder here in the US, and that’s because the victims deserve justice, no matter how long it takes.

What do you think of the theory held by some that Heim is still alive and out there somewhere?
SM: Well, there is no body. Our research led us to believe that he was buried in a common grave, but of course the final proof is not there. From the Nazi hunters’ perspective, this kind of scepticism is a normal part of their job. There was an investigation into Heim going on in Germany, but because of our research and because of further proof the case was closed.
NK: On the one hand, this guy made so many escapes after the war, and the idea of him slipping away one last time—of faking his death—is a really attractive one. On the other hand, Heim would be turning 100 in June, but people still feel that justice hasn’t been done—and, in some ways, you could never really catch enough people for the crimes of the Holocaust.

Do you think they’ve mostly missed their chance now?
In the late 40s and early 50s, when almost all the Nazis perpetrators were there to be caught, the Americans were more concerned with fighting the Soviets, and the Soviets were more concerned with fighting the Americans. The Germans just wanted to build Mercedes and BMWs and to forget about the whole thing, so it was only later—once these people started dying—that people were ready to go after them.

Thanks, guys.

Follow Jamie Clifton on Twitter.

The Eternal Nazi, published by Doubleday, is available now.

Santeria Is Cuba's New Favorite Religion

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Santeria—or "the worship of saints"—is gaining ground as a popular religious practice in Cuba. Developed in the African slave communities of the island’s 18th century sugar plantations, it's a syncretic religion adopting elements of Spanish-imposed Catholicism while maintaining the central beliefs of Africa’s kidnapped natives, primarily Nigeria’s Yoruba tribe. As a practice rooted within a world of oppression, Santeria is shrouded in secrecy, surviving first the ruthless command of slave masters and imperial governance, and later the religious intolerance of Castro’s government.

The religion owes its continued existence over the centuries to the prevalence of the oral tradition, with believers passing on, preserving and nurturing its secrets through countless generations. Today, Santeria has emerged from the shadows of a Cuban society now at liberty to practice religion, and is witnessing not only an increase in acceptance but also popularity.

In its earliest days Santeria was an exclusive slave practice, a rejection of the masters’ Catholic saints and the colonial Christian God, and it was the slave social centers (calbidos) of the tiny village of Palmira that witnessed its first inception. Here, Cuban slaves congregated on a weekly basis in order to worship the spirit gods of Oloddumare and the Orishas, through whom they believed mortals communicated with the higher God.

The Orishas are semi-divine beings, each expressing a specific aspect of human existence. Ochun is manifested in romantic love and money matters, while Oggun represents war; Chango embodies passion and virility; and Babalu Aye healing. In return, each enjoys one day of the year dedicated to his or her honor, on which Santeros will summon the Orisha through music, dance and ceremonial performances in which offerings of food, rum and animal blood are made to the present spirit.    

As the religion has evolved, each Orisha has become firmly associated with a specific Christian saint; Yoruban Chango, for example, is now synonymous with Christianity’s young beheaded Santa Barbara. This form of worship demonstrates the equal faith that many of Santeria’s adherents have placed in both the Orishas and the Catholic saints, and by accepting and adopting the beliefs of both Cuba’s historic oppressor and oppressed they have formed a religion that can neither be labelled as truly Christian nor Yoruba, but instead inherently Cuban.

As with other syncretic religions practiced in Latin America, Santeria offers an outlet through which modern Cubans can fuse together a ruptured past. After its centuries of underground existence, Santeria is becoming an open practice, with participation coming from all levels of society. Representing a shared identity, Santeria is a cultural inheritance, a dynamic form of worship, a religion uniquely Cuban.

Follow Phil Clarke Hill on Twitter.

Fresh Off the Boat: Fresh Off the Boat: Season Two Leftovers

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That's a wrap for Season two of Fresh Off the Boat. This year, we saw some really great moments traveling from Mongolia to Russia to Chengdu to NYC. So much, so that we couldn't possibly fit it all into our previous episodes. But worry not—we're coming at you with a blooper reel containing some of the most outrageous leftovers from the Human Panda and the FOB crew. Watch your boy, Eddie Huang, in the moments where the cameras shouldn't have been rolling. Can't wait to see you next season!

The Social Media Updates of British Jihadists in Syria Just Got a Lot More Distressing

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The last time VICE checked in on British jihadists in Syria, their war seemed, in many ways, more like some college kids' spring break than a brutal civil conflict. British fighters posted snaps of themselves messing around in swimming pools, hoarding Easter candy from home, eating kebabs, and generally having a good time. But this year, everything changed. The renegade al Qaeda offshoot that most Brits join—the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham, or ISIS—alienated other rebel groups due to its tendency to attack them and kill their commanders.

By January, the less radical rebels had had enough, with even Jabhat al Nusra—the official Syrian al Qaeda franchise—joining the rebels of the Islamic Front and the relatively moderate Syrian Revolutionaries Front, in a campaign to rid the rebel-held north of ISIS. Now ISIS has been pushed back into a swathe of territory along the Euphrates river valley in eastern Syria and the thinly-populated Homs desert region in the west.

But battlefield setbacks haven’t hampered their social media outreach effort. If anything, British ISIS fighters have been busier uploading videos and photos of their exploits than ever; only now the tone is different. Driven away from the creature comforts and internet cafés of Atmeh on the Turkish border, British fighters are now uploading darker, more disturbing images from their desert strongholds.

You may find some of what follows distressing.

Under the name Rayat al Tawheed, two ISIS fighters from London, Abu Abdurrahman al-Britani and Abu Daighum al-Britani, have been busy uploading a constant stream of expertly-photoshopped motivational image macros for their adoring British fans.

 

And they're keen to make it completely clear what they're fighting for.

They haven't just stuck to memes. They have also filmed recruitment videos. Note the flawless London English in this one:

But their recent posts are the darkest images yet to emerge from the strange milieu of British jihadist fighters in Syria.

While their Facebook posts have always displayed a willingness to mutilate and degrade the bodies of dead government troops, their latest Instagram posts reveal a degree of bloodthirstiness unusual for British ISIS fighters, many of whom can come across more like unworldly idealists than hardened killers.

This recent—and very graphic—Instagram video shows the Rayat al Tawheed crew playing around with a collection of severed heads, purportedly from government troops.

When we said some of this might be distressing, we meant this video:

The comments from their adoring British fans seem to express disappointment that the heads formerly belonged to regime forces, rather than their old rebel allies in the FSA—who are now, obviously, their bitter enemies.

It’s hard to know whether these images are an expression of war’s ability to brutalize ordinary British kids, or whether it takes a certain sort of Brit to seek out and join a group despised even by al Qaeda for a willingness to behead first and ask questions later.

Many British jihadists are returning home now that the war has gotten too tough, to the contempt of their fellow fighters.

The ones who choose to stay are, no doubt, the most committed to the cause, willing to die in their pursuit of installing and maintaining Sharia law in Syria.

The British security services estimate that half the British fighters who travel to Syria will die there, and with their group now at war with every other armed faction in the country, the odds aren’t in favor of Abu Abdurrahman and Abu Daighum’s survival. Until then, their increasingly grisly social media feeds offer a darkly compelling window into Syria’s tragedy. 

Follow Aris Roussinos on Twitter.


Sothern Exposure: The Thing on Interstate 10

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Photos by Scot Sothern

1977

I’m crossing America—Florida to California, Interstate 10, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana… endless miles across South Texas, New Mexico, Arizona. I’ve got two cats and my first wife in the car, a battered 1964 Plymouth Valiant. We’re driving nonstop to Faraway as quickly as possible. Danielle is at the wheel, and I can’t wind down: Speed, marijuana, too much coffee, a lack of sleep, and Danielle’s driving have me on edge. She likes to go fast, and she tailgates and only uses the brakes when they need to be stomped. When I close my eyes, the lids are vibrating, and I can see a road map of capillaries. I try to relax my breathing and mellow out. Danielle slams the brakes into a screeching skid and screams, "LOOK OUT," and I’m thrown forward and my eyes shoot open and I yell, "AAGGGHHH," but she has her foot back on the gas and there is no one in front of us and she can’t stop laughing. I try to share her amusement but my hands will probably shake for another hour.

We are leaving four chaotic years and a bundle of debt behind us. All we know about the future is in the billboards we keep passing:

"THE THING: 157 Miles."

"THE THING: 124 Miles."

I’ve got my camera, a Contax RTS with a 85-millimeter Zeiss lens, and a single short roll of Kodachrome with a prepaid mailer for processing. It wasn’t my camera a few days ago, but on my way out of Florida I said, "By the way, I’m taking this camera and lens, and the wide lens as well." Nobody stopped me. "THE THING: 99 Miles."

I’m leaving behind a few thousand negatives, portraits I made under another guy’s banner. Now I need to start a new batch of photographs, proof of my brilliance for the future archives. I pull off the interstate at a Texas tourist trap where I buy a Hostess cherry pie and a coffee, which is burnt and thick. I tell the woman behind the counter that I like her blouse and ask if I take a picture of her outside, with the store in the background. She says, "I don't know, I don't care," and I say, " That's great, thanks so much." I escort her out through the door and into the bright sun. I pose her in the light, and she squints, and I take her picture.

Next door, at a service station, Danielle lets the cats out and goes looking for a shady spot where they can frolic. I light a cigarette and sit on the hood of the car. A guy leaning on a trashcan asks me where I’m headed, and I tell him California. He says California’s full of perverts and commies and I say, "Yeah, well, I hope you’re right." I tell him Florida’s not been good for me, and Texas doesn’t really look like my kind of place. He says this right here, Texas, is the real America, and what do I think of that? I tell him that’s just great, God fucking bless America. I point the camera at him and focus, but I’m really loaded, and after I take the picture I’m not sure if I took the picture or not.

Time is distorted, but I think it was three days and three nights ago when I said goodbye forever to my partner in deeds and deceptions, Joe Smith. I knew another Joe Smith when I was in high school, and we were best friends for a while. Springfield Joe died when he drunkenly climbed a telephone pole and grabbed a hot wire. Smoke and sparks blew out the soles of his feet. Florida Joe Smith is another story. First time in the darkroom with Florida Joe, we talked while I developed film, and when I turned the lights back on Joe was naked and smiling, his engorged wiener aiming up at my face like an accusing finger. He said, “What do you want to do now?” I stuttered and laughed, which encouraged him enough to start singing “Misty": "Look at me, I'm as helpless as a kitten up a tree." Joe was guileless and quick and fully corrupt—he swindled everything he ever earned. I had some of the best times of my life with him, but it was a love-hate relationship, and business was a constant state of panic. I’m better off without Florida Joe Smith.

"THE THING: 200 Yards."

Somewhere in Arizona we pull into the parking lot under the billboard welcoming us to THE THING, which is not really much of anything. We go through the gift shop: pecan logs, jackalope postcards, bolo ties, Indian jewelry, toy guns and holsters. We each pay 50 cents to see THE THING, and we’re ushered out the back door to a pathway. A freestanding wall is painted like a goofy cowboy saloon, and I grab a kid in a hat and take his picture, and when I’m done he says, "Thank you, sir."

We come to a painting of a ballerina and a guy in a top hat, and they both have head-holes cut out. A woman stands on her toes, sticks her face in a hole, and becomes a ballerina. I snap her picture while her husband and little kid watch. I’ve smoked more pot and taken more speed since our last stop and have yet to sleep a wink. I feel a little like I’m on LSD. Into a Quonset hut we go: an old rusty Rolls-Royce once owned by Adolf Hitler, a covered wagon, a bunch of folk-art wood carvings, and a large assortment of junk I wouldn’t pick up off the street. I photograph a sculpture of a tortured guy in a glass coffin, and it looks like he’s trying to tell me something. We’re five minutes back on the road when it dawns on me that I still don’t know what THE THING is.

In 2014, an age of information, I have reconnected with everyone I ever lost touch with except Florida Joe Smith. I found my first wife, Danielle, online after 30 years, and we emailed back and forth for a while. I typed Joe Smith into Google and got 380 million hits. At the end of the sexual-revolutionized 70s, Florida Joe was a bi-guy horn-dog, and safe sex wasn’t in the vernacular. I’ve always assumed he took a tainted blood transfusion up the ass and died in the early days of the plague. I hope Joe is alive, but he’s probably not. If he is, I hope he still has my negatives.

Scot's first book, Lowlife, was released last year, and his memoir, Curb Service, is out now. You can find more information on his website.

'Heaven Is for Real' Is Phony

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Connor Corum as Colton Burpo. All photos courtesy of Allen Fraser/Sony Pictures

Hollywood never met a true story it couldn’t fuck up. In Braveheart, the Battle of Stirling Bridge is fought without the bridge, a fuck-up akin to a D-Day movie without a beach. They can fuck up downward, casting the five-foot-seven Martin Sheen as the famously tall Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg. They can fuck up life and death: In Band of Brothers, a show so faithfully detail-oriented that it might well have been called Honest, We Read a Book: The Miniseries, they killed one character 19 years before reality did.

But those are wars. Big things. You know, 50 million dead, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-yous, the atomic bomb. Getting smaller stories right is easier, or so you'd think. Like Heaven Is for Real, the tale of a four-year-old Nebraska boy—deliciously named Colton Burpo—who went to heaven and then came back to tell his pastor father all about it. The bare bones of that story sounds like a Capra script already, but somehow, Hollywood fucked it up. Heaven Is for Real is phony. It isn’t even a fun bad movie.

You’ve probably heard about Heaven Is for Real, which, like everything, was a book before it was a movie. Published in 2010, it sold like only a relentlessly heartstrings-tugging tale of a young boy who saw heaven during emergency surgery could. It was co-written by Colton Burpo’s father, Todd, and Lynn Vincent, who also co-wrote Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue and Never Surrender, with Lieutenant General William Boykin, who left the US Army after saying that America was at war with Satan and that he didn’t fear a Somali warlord because he was armed with God, while the Somali had only an “idol,” and who once proudly stated that he wanted to crawl into heaven on all fours covered in blood. Those are the kind of righteously tone-deaf people Lynn Vincent writes books with, people whose level of doubt vacillates between “Am I right?" and "Am I right, or am I really right?”

So no, there’s not much doubt in Heaven Is for Real, as the book’s name implies. Despite suffering financial setbacks and a painful broken leg, Todd Burpo—volunteer firefighter, wrestling coach, garage-door installer, and minister to a congregation in Imperial, Nebraska—is certain of the presence of God in his life. Then his son Colton develops appendicitis, is misdiagnosed, and becomes gravely ill. Colton spends costly days in the hospital before his life-threatening condition sends him to surgery. At that moment, he writes, Todd doubted God. But the prayers of friends in Imperial came through, and Todd’s brief moment of questioning disappeared when Colton emerged unscathed. Then Colton started talking about visiting heaven and sitting in Jesus’ lap, and Todd bought it after only a second of doubt.

That’s what makes Heaven Is for Real a fun book for believers and skeptics alike. If you’re a Christian, there’s something admirable about Todd’s trust in his son and in the Son of God. If you’re a skeptic, it’s pretty silly. For instance:

“Colton, you said Jesus had markers. You mean like markers that you color with?”

Colton nodded. “Yeah, like colors. He had colors on him.”

“Like when you color a page?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, what color are Jesus’ markers?”

“Red, Daddy. Jesus has red markers on him.”

At that moment, my throat nearly closed with tears as I suddenly understood what Colton was trying to say. Quietly, carefully, I said, “Colton, where are Jesus’ markers?”

Without hesitation, he stood to his feet. He held out his right hand, palm up and pointed to the center of it with his left. Then he held out his left palm and pointed with his right hand. Finally, Colton bent over and pointed to the tops of both his feet.

“That’s where Jesus’ markers are, Daddy,” he said.

I drew in a sharp breath. He saw this. He had to have.

Believers who are reassured by visions of for-real heaven will be reassured by Colton’s vision. Those who roll their eyes at the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, on the other hand, will probably react sarcastically, as a Twitter follower of mine did: “How could he possibly have known the most famous thing about Jesus?”

Greg Kinnear as Todd Burpo

Colton's faith isn’t funny, and scoffing at people’s harmless beliefs is dumb. What’s funny is how much Lynn Vincent and Todd Burpo try to put their thumbs on the scale. When Colton first describes seeing angels while unconscious on the operating table, Todd and Vincent write, “I marveled at the things I had just heard. Our little boy had said some pretty incredible stuff—and he had backed it up with credible information.” Later, even though Colton never died in surgery, Todd is certain that he went to heaven anyway: “Clearly, something had happened to Colton. He had authenticated that by telling us things he couldn’t have known.” Authenticated, credible information has never had to clear so low a bar.

Even if you’re trying to read Heaven Is for Real 100 percent on its own terms, it’s hard to suppress disbelief. What “authenticates” Colton’s presence in heaven is that he sees his father praying in one room while his mother frets in a waiting room, despite his parents not telling him this happened. But supposing that your minister father would be praying in private and that your mom would be waiting in the room built for waiting isn’t a stretch of the imagination at any age. Besides, maybe the nursing staff told him what his folks had been doing. Or maybe his parents did, mentioning it in passing and then forgetting about it; one of the surprises of being a parent is discovering how porous your older-person’s memory is, while your kid latches onto trifling details with tenacious, intense recall.

The other credible information isn’t much better. Colton sees Jesus in purple and white, which echoes scripture he has doubtless heard and images he has doubtless seen. He’s aware of family secrets his parents have never told him, but so are millions of kids—people talk, after all. And Todd’s testing of Colton’s experience is hardly rigorous. When Colton says that he saw his great-grandfather in heaven as a young man, Todd shows him a picture of young great-granddad, and Colton says, “That’s him.” Well, no shit. He might have said the same thing if Todd had shown him a picture of Estes Kefauver.

At no point in Heaven Is for Real does it seem to occur to anyone that four-year-olds sometimes have trouble distinguishing between dreams and reality and might double down and tell lies out of embarrassment or out of just being kids. But when Colton says that Jesus sits on a throne to the right of His Father—imagery Todd doubtless employs all the time—Todd’s response, always italicized, is, “He had to have seen this.”

Which, fine. But as I mentioned, the movie fucks this up.

The film version of Heaven Is for Real seems to have been written in anticipation of the audience’s doubt. Screenwriter and director Randall Wallace—the guy behind Braveheart and the bridge-less Battle of Stirling Bridge—makes up a lot of dissonantly secular elements that don’t appear in the book and that spoil the tone of the movie.

A fictional church elder played by the reliably excellent Margo Martindale dislikes Colton’s story because she has seen pastors manipulate people with stories of heaven and threats of hell. The only reason for her character to exist is to inform the audience, “See? This story isn’t being manipulative.” Then, when Todd becomes too fixated on Colton’s story despite mounting medical bills and no income, his wife (played with a kind of impishly spirited good humor by Kelly Reilly) throws dishes in the sink and castigates him for thinking so much about the next life instead of this one. In addition to never appearing in the book, this scene thuds in the middle of the movie. This is Wallace screaming, “I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE THINKING, GODLESS AMERICAN MOVIEGOER.”

Kelly Reilly and Kinnear as Colton's parents

Meanwhile, movie Todd—Greg Kinnear exuding a patient, sweetly fretful vibe that progresses into anxiety—experiences far more doubt than the real one. At one point he consults a philosophy professor (as if his faith and ministry didn't already give him all the answers), having arrived with no prepared questions or answers. The conversation, unsurprisingly, gets contentious with almost no provocation, as if Wallace wanted to throw two straw men at each other. Movie Todd barely quotes from scripture and at no point consults it, which is awfully strange in a film that presumably was made to appeal to Christians. Apart from Jesus actually being in the movie, he makes almost no appearance in it. Todd’s final uplifting sermon doesn’t seem to reflect any recognizable religion. Instead, it looks like a scene from It’s a Wonderful Life for Mr. Smith’s Kid to Go to Heaven. Then a ghost Marine appears. Then they win the big game!

It’s obvious what’s behind this tonal dissonance: Wallace wanted the movie to appeal to true believers and at the same time win over non-Evangelical America by addressing its concerns and putting the main characters through the same process of skepticism that many viewers will experience. But in trying to please everyone, it winds up speaking to nobody at all. For doubters, the story of Colton Burpo remains absurdly riddled with holes. (And how many nonbelievers were going to go see a movie called Heaven Is for Real in the first place?) For Evangelicals, this is a Christian story almost devoid of Christianity, instead filling the mouths of the faithful with secular disbelief and, at times, cynicism, while robbing their voices of what should be familiar references to the Gospels and an Evangelical way of life.

So if the movie doesn’t succeed on its own terms, the least it could do is be entertainingly hateable. Sadly, all the latent camp elements in the book remain unexplored. At one point in the text, Colton describes celestial transport. “We flew,” he says. “Well, all except for Jesus. He was the only one in heaven who didn’t have wings. Jesus just went up and down like an elevator.” Elevator Jesus would have been incredible. Just bopping up and down. Letting people on and off. “Floor Three. Housewares of My Father. White robes, yellow hoops, Birkenstock repair, small white crosses for planting by the side of the road...” Maybe some bewildered heaven newbie could ask Jesus what floor the churro cart is on. Nope, none of that. You don’t get Elevator Jesus; you just get some dude who looks like David Copperfield appearing in a Norelco beardtrimmer ad.

You also get some real wasted opportunities. Kinnear, Reilly, Martindale, Thomas Haden Church, and newcomer Connor Corum (as Colton) deliver impressive, thoughtful performances in a movie that’s hard of thinking. Instead of being addressed, the holes in the plot are absurdly papered over, but never so absurdly that it becomes fun in spite of itself. If you want to see that sort of thing, you can just watch Sean Hannity taking real-life Colton Burpo totally seriously.

Aside from the acting, the most satisfying part of Heaven Is for Real is the cinematography of Dean Semler. Like his work in Dances with Wolves, almost every frame is rich with natural vividness—erdant foregrounded farmland, a line of virtually virgin horizon, a fat swath of blue, a final stratum of flat cloud. It’s enough to make you accept the divine origins of such abundant beauty, perhaps even suspect that American exceptionalism might be true. Then Todd Burpo gazes on nature and delivers a closing sermon that’s sort of Saint Paul’s epistles by way of Belinda Carlisle, i.e., Heaven Is a Place on Earth. Then, if you wait to the end credits, you find out that place is Canada.

Manitoba is for real; everything else is just Burpos.

Jeb Lund wrote the America’s Screaming Conscience column for Gawker and covered the 2012 election primaries for VICE under the pseudonym Mobutu Sese Seko. He is a contributor to the badbooks podcast, I Don’t Even Own A Television. You can follow him on Twitter.

I Went to a Convention for Old, Washed-Up Celebrities

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The Hollywood Show does not, as its name would imply, take place in Hollywood.  Nor is it a show in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, it’s a weekend-long expo in a hotel ballroom, a chance to peddle yellowed movie memorabilia and even yellowed-er celebrities from days long past. For a mere $20, nostalgia buffs can meet “the guy”: the guy who wrote the song “Build Me Up Buttercup,” the guy who starred in M.A.S.H. (the movie, not the TV show), the guy who spat, “No soup for you!” on the episode of Seinfeld that inspired a million novelty shirts.

A “Celebrity Check-In” table greeted the show’s attendees; behind it, a bored-looking woman silently ate a slice of flavorless-looking pizza. In the corner, a revolving door of middle-aged men, who had each paid $40 for the privilege of getting professional photos taken alongside a rapidly decaying Martin Landau, struck a pose next to the Ed Wood star. "Make sure to mention the Hollywood Show on your Facebook posts!" an employee loudly, cheerfully, reminded them.

Hugh O’Brian, star of 60-year-old show The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, hung signage in the hallway inquiring, "He's Still Alive???"; said signage instructed readers to "See For yourself!" Once one took the bait, they bore witness to the sight of an elderly, yet still breathing, O’Brian eating a sandwich next to his parked Rascal scooter. 

Lita Ford, wearing a leather jacket with her own name on it, signed mementos shakily held by a man sporting a vintage Runaways tour shirt. The face of the woman who played Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan contorted into a look of pain and confusion as a large white male (the show’s target demographic) asked her one in a no doubt series of inane questions.

The Soup Nazi, sullen and alone, swiped at his iPhone behind a folding table filled with unsold, signed ladles. Sans fanfare, he pulled a vape pen out and started smoking.

The lines to meet Landau, Patty Duke, and Cloris Leachman, the show’s main draws, were endless. Not so for folks like the Soup Nazi. I spotted him smoking outside and followed suit. I listened to him speak, in hushed tones, to an associate about how he hoped the show’s attendance would pick up tomorrow. About how he no longer drinks liquor. About how someone once said something extremely nice about him on the internet and how it made his day.

I could tell, watching him from a distance, that he was kind-hearted, undeserved of the karmic injustice of his surroundings. Hours after the cigarette, I walked by his folding table and saw him finally get his photo taken with an eager fan. A genuine smile crossed his previously pursed lips.

The "celebrities" wandering around the convention wore lanyards indicating their status. I recognized virtually none of them. The star of The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking mindlessly doodled behind her folding table; I watched as her presence was met with universal disregard. She seemed used to such treatment.

While it was part of the reason why I was there, I felt uncomfortable taking photographs of the festivities. The intrusion seemed too intimate. As I moseyed by their folding tables, the sad, yet somehow hopeful, looks the “stars” gave me as I passed by made me feel as though I were walking through a pound.

In their eyes, I was here to find someone to love, to appreciate. They hoped it was them. I quickly realized there was no place more vulnerable a person, let alone a celebrity, could sit than behind a folding table. It seemed disingenuous to feel sorry for them—after all, they had achieved far more success in their careers than I ever had and ever could. Yet, as a person capable of human empathy, I did.

On a lighter note, it turns out that Chuck Negron of Three Dog Night has his own variety of hot sauce. And guess what? It’s for sale!

The line to meet Patty Duke was an endless snaking mess, the extent to which attendees used the sentence "by where Patty Duke is" as a map point. A 20-something guy, the kind I'd let give me a mediocre hand job, stared intently at her head as he waited to shake her bony hand.

Everyone who had weathered the line’s length was delighted by her pixie-like size and friendly demeanor. "She was great," one fellow sighed to another outside her table, the joy and relief in his statement implying he had just successfully fucked her.

Duke was high-profile enough to warrant her own handler—she, however, was an exception to the rule. Only the big guns—your Mickey Dolenzes, if you will—could afford such luxuries. The rest of the fray were subject to the existential crisis only sitting alone behind a folding table could provide. In this context, a handler was one’s best ally, not to mention the perfect hype man. "He's been in more Gunsmokes than anyone else!” one shouted. “Look at his credits!" As I wandered by, I couldn’t help wondering if they were new hires, procured for a cheap rate, or had stuck with their employer through the good and the bad, like a long-suffering wife.

"Isaiah 26, Verse 18–19, New English Translation," a Bible-carrying gentleman instructed Sam J. Jones, the star of Flash Gordon, to make a note of. "I was like the Prodigal Son's brother," he reminisced. "But when I got saved, it was like an opening up. Like freedom." While feeling blessed to meet his idol, he gave props to the creator who had facilitated the whole thing. "Thank you God first,” he said. “God's more important. Sorry, but I love God more than I love you." "Yeah,” Jones replied. “Gotta put God before everyone else." Walking into the conversation, I assumed the fan was an insane annoyance. It turned out, however, that he was a spiritual ally. “You've always been a blessing to talk to," the fan spurted. Jones thanked him for his love.

For the unsaved, there was little common ground. Their job was to pretend as though they enjoyed the intrusions their rabid (albeit small) fan bases provided. Their acting training, however, facilitated this ruse.

And some, anyhow, made the most of it. I saw Fred Williamson, star of M.A.S.H. (the movie, not the TV show), first merely exchange pleasantries with a young, lithe fan. The next time I walked by, she sat behind the folding table with him. Decades younger and delighted by his presence, she delivered a series of preplanned, bemused laughs in response to everything he said. I’m sure, right now, in a hotel by the airport, they are making something akin to love.

Tony Clifton, inexplicably, was also in attendance. I, in love with the irony, took a picture of two bros taking a picture with him. As I did so, he spotted me out of the corner of his eye and sprinted toward me. He was quite spry for his size. "Whatcha doin'?" he aggressively spat. Terrified, my camera shook in my hands. Once he reached me, he began to laugh. "Ah, I didn't scare ya, did I?" he asked. "No," I lied, my heart pounding.

The bros went back to taking their photo. "Yo, put your middle finger up!" one implored. Andy Kaufman, creator of the Tony Clifton persona, would have allowed this. He would have loved it. While this iteration of Clifton was clearly Bob Zmuda, not Kaufman, he appeared to be the only one at the show who was genuinely enjoying himself. Most of the time, he wasn’t even manning his booth.

Surrounded by photographic specters of their past selves, less self-aware celebrities must have felt as though they were in hell—failing that, purgatory. It must have, to them, felt like a goddamned Twilight Zone episode. "Let's say 'bye to Richard," a woman said, as if she were close personal friends with the huge, grotesque actor who had played a huge, grotesque alien on the show and sat behind a folding table because of it. Shit, maybe she actually is, I thought. He seems nice.

OVERHEARD LINES:

"She's... that gal... from that thing!" Spoken with reverence.

"Look! Billy Preston!" Spoken while the person held a water-damaged notecard with Preston’s signature on it, which was procured from a bin of discounted signatures.

"I saw Stephanie Powers!" Spoken by a portly middle-aged man with an un-ironic mustache

“Y’know, the guy who plays Boba Fett."

"The hottest old lady actress? Definitely Helen Mirren."

Follow Megan Koester on Twitter.

The Science Behind Powdered Alcohol, the Latest Way to Get Drunk

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The Science Behind Powdered Alcohol, the Latest Way to Get Drunk

This Guy is Trying to Collect Every Single Copy of the Movie 'Speed' on VHS

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Ryan Beitz owns over 500 copies of the movie, Speed, on VHS. He also owns 26 laser discs of the film, but those aren’t part of the collection. He just holds onto them so he can use them as bargaining chips to get more on VHS. His goal is a simple one: To collect every copy of Speed on VHS ever made. His other goal? To trick out his 15-passenger van to look just like the bus in the movie.

In order to see the World Speed Project for myself, I decided to visit him at his current residence in Moscow, Idaho, where he has scattered all his copies of Speed throughout the van in anticipation of my arrival, and lined the ceiling with them. As we talk, he drives me and a handful of his friends out through the woods via a restricted-access sheep farm on his college campus. As he drives, copies of Speed periodically fall from the ceiling onto the floor.

VICE: Are we allowed to be back here?
Ryan Beitz: Yeah whatever. The signs just say, “No Public Access.” We got official business. I don’t have car insurance now, but that’s OK because I only drive the van around for show. We’re going like 35 and I feel like we’re being respectful. We’re not trying to scare the sheep or like, steal them. Although we could put a sheep in here.

Why don’t you tell me what got you started collecting the Speeds?
I lived in Seattle and I was super broke and I had to come up with Christmas presents for my family. Usually I would just like, dumpster dive books or something and give them to them, but when I was at the pawn shop they had six copies of Speed and I thought it would be really funny to get everybody in my family the same gift, even me. I wanted to watch them open them one at a time and go, “Oh, Speed. Don't we already have this?” Somebody else go, “Oh, Speed. Really funny, Ryan.” Then by the time you go around everybody got the same gift from me. Then I can tell them that I love them all equally, you know? Just some bullshit.

Then when I bought all six it was like, way too good. I realized it was really fascinating to have that many like same copies of a thing. What really cemented it was when I went to another pawn shop and they had like 30 copies. I said, “I’ll take them all.” They sold them to me for 11 cents a copy.

How many copies do you have right now?
I don’t know, like 550 or something. I haven’t counted in a while ‘cause who really cares?

And you’re going to collect them all.
Yeah. People always go, “Dude how many of these things are you going to get?” And I'm like, “All of them, duh.”

Isn’t that impossible?
I mean probably, because of unknown human forces, the logistics of tracking them all down, and just the sheer expense.  I don’t want to spend money on this. If a copy’s more than $4, I’ll just steal it. But that’s not going to make me stop. That’d be the same as somebody saying like, “It’s impossible to make the world a good place, so I’m not going to try.” If the idea is awesome, I’m just going to devote myself to it regardless.

So you’d say the World Speed Project is awesome?
I think the World Speed Project is awesome in the truest sense of the word. It's larger than life. Imagine all of them in one place! It’s uncompromising.

Yeah, it’s like a radical dedication to uselessness.
Totally. I don’t give a shit whether what I do is practical or not, I just don’t want to perpetuate society’s shitty capitalism forever. If you see everything needs a use or an instrumental value as like part of a capitalistic worldview, then the World Speed Project is anti-that.

Cool. Why does it says something about Freud on the World Speed Project's Facebook page?
I say it’s a practice in the repetition compulsion, which is Freud. Basically, Freud thinks that the goal of your unconscious is to repeat. You just have to repeat over and over again. I can’t remember exactly why. I think it has something to do with eros—you know, the life force or whatever?

The World Speed Project is satisfied by a compulsion to repeat because when you get one, you want to get another! And another! And another! Like the bus in Speed, we collectively cannot—and will not—stop.

Ryan is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fix up his bus to resemble the one in the movie, and purchase auto insurance so he can tour his collection around the country. Take part in the global effort and send any and all copies of Speed to:

Chairman Ryan Beitz
The World Speed Project
20204 SR 195 
Pullman, WA
99163 USA

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