Photo by Flickr user Sunny_57. 

Like most Americans, I usually spend the Fourth of July on a roof drinking vodka and shooting fireworks aimlessly into the night. However, since I recently quit drinking (there comes a time in everyone’s life when he has to stop using the phrase “I’m from Miami, bitch” as an excuse to drunkenly hook up with other guys’ boyfriends), I spent last Thursday refreshing Twitter over and over again—which was just as boring as it sounds until people started tweeting about how Tim McGraw looked like a leather queen.

Now, I try to stay up-to-date on which straight celebrities look like they want a rimjob—I’m into gay guys that look a little straight and straight guys that look a little gay—but I had no clue Tim resembled a member of the Tom Cruise club. So I asked an internet friend what was up. “Turn on NBC,” she said.

I turned on NBC and watched as a man in a red button-down shirt played piano, a bald guy wielding glow sticks danced in the audience, and Tim sang “Something Like That" while pumping his arms in the air like a homo dancing to “Gimme More” at a twink club called Splash. Rubbing his black leather cowboy hat, Tim probably thought he looked like a super-straight 1950s Western star, but to me the look reminded me of the butch southern gays I saw at a Jacksonville, Florida, gay bar my friend’s gay best friend/drug dealer dragged me to last year. This was a concert featuring Mariah Carey lying in a pile of hay and Cher lip-synching about women’s rights while wearing tripp pants she may or may not have bought at Hot Topic in 2004, and Tim McGraw was the gayest thing on the screen that night.

This shocked me, but I should have expected a network TV Independence Day special to look like the first five minutes of cowboy-themed gay porn—straight artists dressing gay is as American as Elvis Presley and Miley Cyrus crudley appropriating black culture in the name of pop.

Some history: In 1977, producers Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo saw a man in Native American garb dancing at a gay club in the West Village. His moves inspired the producers to create a band, the Village People, which would have six male singers (some gay, some straight) dressed as a Native American, a cowboy, a G.I., a cop, a biker, and a construction worker. To straight listeners who thought “Macho Man” was about being a muscular man who supported his family, the costumes seemed like icons of American heterosexuality. But gay fans knew that when the Village People sang “Y.M.C.A.” they were singing about blowing jocks in the locker room. 

The group’s aesthetic was based on a style that had emerged after the Stonewall riots as young middle-class gay men flocked to metropolises like New York and San Francisco and created “gay macho,” a new style that would break the trend of flamboyant gender-bending popular in underground gay clubs in the early 20th century. The macho man gays—known in some circles as “clones”—outwardly fit society’s definition of men. They wore leather, Levi jeans, and cowboy hats in outfits that resemble those worn today by Lana Del Ray and Axl Rose because they thought if they looked like construction workers with steroid addictions the world would see them as men. According to sociologist Martin P. Levine’s study Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the American Clone, the clones viewed anal sex as “giving it like a man” (topping) or “taking it like a man” (bottoming), and their lives revolved around “the four D’s” (disco, drugs, dish, and dick). 

Although society never saw sucking cock as in its definition of manly men, gay culture and straight culture continued to blur together in the 80s. On the cover of Born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen wore a red hat in his jean pocket in a manner that resembled the way gays wore colored cloths in their back pockets while cruising. George Michael wore leather jackets and cock-hugging jeans that recalled both the Village People and James Dean—until cops found George with a john in a bathroom stall, he was able to keep his (obvious) homosexuality a mystery, at least on the surface. In the “Vogue” music video and the documentary Truth or Dare, Madonna used her gay background dancers as accessories that made her edgier. Today, pop singers like Kylie Minogue dress their muscular male background dancers in briefs similar to those worn by gay porn stars and Men’s Health models, and gay men continue to try to appear more masculine.

And while straights have gotten gayer, gays have gotten more straight. On Grindr, it’s common for men to say they are “masc for masc” (read: only fucking dudes that look like they eat the thunder cat), and a few weeks ago, at New York’s gay pride parade, I saw multiple guys wearing backwards hats and frat tanks—the uniform of bros at spring break. Their hats were made of leather, just like Tim McGraw’s.

McGraw wasn’t trying to look gay, but mainstream country music fashion comes from the same source as lots of gay fashion—the hetero definition of “masculine” isn’t that far from “masc.” In America, it’s always been stylish to emphasize your manliness, and in the past 50 years it’s become stylish to look like you might take it like a man as well. And if some leather queens mistake McGraw for one of their own, it certainly won’t hurt his album sales.

@mitchsunderland

Previously by Mitchell Sunderland – First Patrick Bateman, Now Anna Nicole Smith?

Photo by Flickr User ATempltetonPhoto

Welcome to a special post-Fourth of July edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

- Johnny Depp’s new movie, The Lone Ranger, came out this week. In this hilarious romantic comedy, Mr. Depp portrays a potentially schizophrenic Native American named Tonto, who speaks in a bizarre broken English and talks to a dead bird that sits on top of his head. All totally normal behavior. Depp, who is definitely white, to the extent that he's appeared in every Tim Burton movie ever made, has claimed that he’s qualified to play Tonto because he’s actually part Cherokee. There are some Native groups that doubt Depp’s connection to their culture, which is kind of akin to demanding Barack Obama’s birth certificate or forcing Applebee’s to disclose their nutrition facts. Some questions don’t need answering. That said, Depp playing Tonto makes as much sense as a black guy playing Jim West in the movie version of Wild Wild West, having a bunch of white kids in The Last Airbender, or eating at Applebee's. 5

- The New York Times Op-Ed page isn’t the first place you’d expect to find prejudice. It’s maybe the 15th or 16th (the first is, of course, Applebee’s). Despite that, columnist David Brooks found it within himself to imply that Egyptians, who are in the process of yet another tumultuous revolution, “lack even the basic mental ingredients” to sustain a democracy. If Brooks is to be believed, an entire nation of people is too stupid to self-govern purely because of their origin (or their religion, it wasn't exactly clear). If being dumb means you can’t govern your own country, then I suggest Mr. Brooks stays out of Applebee’s lest he start feeling the same way about the United States. 8

- If you are watching the live feed of CBS’s Big Brother, chances are pretty good that you’ll hear someone say something bigoted. Yeah, pretty awesome, right? Without the power of editing, reality shows become, well… real again. Unfortunately, that means some people are going to be racist. By “some people,” I mean, “the entire cast of CBS’s Big Brother.”

RealityBlurred.com was nice enough to compile a few of the choicest gems from the live feed. For instance:

• Talking about sheets that smelled bad, David said they were that way because “black Candice” was on them, then admitted, “that was totally racist.”
• Aaryn said about Candice, who is black, “Be careful what you say in the dark; you might not be able to see that bitch.” (A month ago, Aaryn tweeted, “Attractiveness comes from inside. What would you look like if your looks mirrored your words and actions?” So much irony.)
• Gina Marie said, “You know two blacks stick together. They’re like tokens.”
• Aaryn said of Helen, “Shut up. Go make some fucking rice.” I assume this “Helen” person is Asian, because what I know about Asians is that they love rice. That’s literally all I know.

CBS is taking a diplomatic stance, stating: “At times, the houseguests reveal prejudices and other beliefs that we do not condone. We certainly find the statements made by several of the houseguests on the live internet feed to be offensive. Any views or opinions expressed in personal commentary by a houseguest appearing on Big Brother, either on any live feed from the House or during the broadcast, are those of the individual(s) speaking and do not represent the views or opinions of CBS or the producers of the program.” 

So, instead of coming out and saying they’d be making changes to the live feed so that hateful statements would cease to be made, CBS is just saying, “Hey, we’re not racist, OK????” I understand where they’re coming from. Just because my dog is racist doesn’t mean I’m racist.

Yes… I have a racist dog. I found him in the parking lot outside an Applebee’s. 9

- Here's a picture of Ann Coulter signing a book:

Photo by Flickr User WhiskeyGoneBad

What a sweetheart.

@YesYoureRacist’s Ten Most Racist Retweets of the Week [all grammar sic'd]:

10. @09Devo: "I'm not racist, but when racial stereotypes are proven before my eyes, I can't help but laugh. #friedchicken"

9. @caitynicole_: "Y did obama take a $4.2 billion trip to Africa but cancel the fireworks for marines on the 4th? Bc hes a ni**er"

8. @Joe_Gregs: "I'm not racist but if there was ever a black James Bond it would be a disgrace"

7. @J315Stevo: "I'm not racist but I can't stand when white chicks like black dudes."

6. @bisonpride14: "Happy 4th America. Independence and Freedom! But not anymore cause of that ni**er Obama #FreedomIsntFree#Hesgottogo"

5. @boriesmarrero: "I'm not racist. But the way I act towards people makes then think that i am."

4. @LunaBaaby: "I'm not racist but if these fuckin Mexicans that live by MY HOUSE pop anymore fuckin fireworks... SOMEONE'S getting DEPORTED!"

3. @_Kells5_: "I'm not racist but if ur gonna be crying about slavery when the president is black u can kick rocks all the way out my mentions"

2. @SomeIrishChap: "I'd like to think that I'm not racist, but f*ck me, there's few things more annoying than a bus full of foreign students"

1. @bilalqayyum: "I'm not racist, but if your skin colour is like Akon's, please avoid wearing shocking pink."

Last Week in Racism: A Pork-Laced Bullet Designed to Kill Muslims

@dave_schilling

Photo by Flickr user Geezaweezer.

I recently got into what has to be the least aggressive fight in the history of New York City.

Anyone who lives in NYC will tell you that getting into a confrontation on a city street is a complete nightmare 100 percent of the time. People in this town are conditioned to getting where they want to go and staying out of one another’s way. Anyone who stops to slow down and fight is someone who is truly down for trouble. Fights in New York are rarely small. They’re more akin to a lunatic grabbing you by the shoulders and shouting “Kill yourself!” and you’re like “Hey man, I’m just trying to go to the bagel store!” while a crowd gathers to watch.

A few years back I was screamed at by a junkie on the F train who told me to “look out the window like you’re supposed to before I kill you.” This was completely unprompted, and also didn’t make sense—there is no rule that a rider of the subway is supposed to look out the window.  When I was in my early 20s, I was walking by myself underneath some construction scaffolding on a summer night when a deranged man entered from the other side and crouched in a boxing stance. He walked towards me and lunged and I had to hop the scaffolding and walk in the middle of the street. When I did so, he threw his hands above his head victoriously, shouting, “Yeah! YEAH!” I have also been the crazy one; I was once walking on Eighth Ave with my friend Chad Carter when a bunch of fratty dudes walked past us. One bumped me with his shoulder, and his friends laughed. I happened to have a manriki chain on me—a length of metal with weights on both ends usually only seen in video games like Double Dragon and River City Ransom—and I unfurled it and grinned at them. They quickly walked away.

I do not like confrontations in New York City.

That being said, the fight I got in about a month ago is a fight I’d get in every day of my life if I could. I’ve been complimented and walked away feeling worse about myself than I did after this fight.

I was driving south on Ninth Ave, and I had a whole row of green lights. So I had some momentum built up. Everything was smooth sailing, until I realized that a car a few blocks ahead of me was sitting at a green light, not moving. Cars whizzed past the offending vehicle on both sides. Because of the amount of traffic, my only option was to come up behind the guy, hit the brakes, and lean on the horn a little bit. When I did, the car lurched into motion and went on its way.

That should have been the sum total of our interactions.

Instead, when I eventually hit a red light, the car pulled up next to me. A guy was driving. There were two women in the car with him. He motioned for me to roll down my window, which I did. When there were no windows between us, I couldn’t just see that he was furious—I could feel it in the air.

“Hey man,” he seethed, leaning towards me to make sure I could see the rage in his eyes, “You in a big rush or something?”

I was beyond confused.

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t honking at you to be aggressive. I was honking at you because you were creating a dangerous situation.”

His eyes widened. It seemed that this comment only fueled his fire. He shouted, “What do you mean by THAT?”

“Well,” I said. “This one seems pretty self-explanatory.”

He stared me down, waiting for me to continue.

“You were completely stopped at a green light in Midtown Manhattan,” I said. His stare intensified. “I didn’t want to hit you. Look man, sitting still at a green light is one of the only things that it’s completely accepted, you’re going to get honked at for that.”

He breathed in deep, then the dam broke.

“Well we were talking,” he hissed at me, “and I hadn’t noticed the light turned green.”

I nodded.

“It actually sounds to me like we might be right on the same page,” I told him. “Like, you didn’t know the light was green. I was under the impression that maybe you didn’t know the light had turned green. So I used a sound-producing device with the intent of letting you know the light was now green. And you moved on, signifying that the sound-producing device had its intended effect.”

His brow furrowed; he was considering my point. I continued.

“I can see that you’re still really mad at me,” I said, “but if you think about it, we actually kind of came together and had a moment.”

The logic of the situation was finally starting to sink in for the guy.

“You know what?” he asked. “I’m calming down. I think we’re good.”

He was ready to move on. But for some reason, I got all emo and extended the fight.

“Actually,” I said, “we’re not good. Because now you’ve hurt my feelings.”

“How did I hurt your feelings?”

“Well,” I said, “I see that you’ve got Connecticut plates. You’re in from out of town, and it’s a lovely night for a drive in New York City with these two ladies. And now you’ve put me in this position where I’m the guy who ruined your night, and that doesn’t feel good. You’ve made me out in your mind to be the cliché, impatient, bully New Yorker who’s only concern is getting where he has to go, when in reality, all I’m worried about is all of our safety.”

He nodded. “You’re right, man,” he said. “I’m being an idiot. We’re cool.”

I nodded back. Then the light turned green. I hit my gas. He leaned over before I could go anywhere.

“One more thing,” he shouted.

I was expecting him to pull that dickhead move, where he’d shout a final insult and peel out before I could respond, effectively winning the argument with a nasty parting blow. So I was bracing myself for him to yell something like “You look like a less successful Ron Howard” or “Gingers are visually unappealing people” or something like that.

“What’s up?” I said, distrust all over my tone.

He motioned with his thumb towards the woman in the back seat.

“My mother-in-law thinks you’re cute,” he said.

Then he hit the gas and got out of there.

@ChrisGethard

Previously by Chris Gethard – Why I Quit Drinking

The author in her second week of sobriety.

My MRI results are in. I don’t appear to have epilepsy. Add it to the list of labels that have vomited on me from the mouths of others, some true, others false: OCD, whore, anorexic, crazy. Neither the doctors nor I know what caused the loss of vision and seizure symptoms I experienced. Perhaps, it was related to a medication I was on or the subsequential withdrawal.

I’m not a fan of labels, but there is one I must accept—alcoholic. Typing that was really fucking hard. Getting out of bed this morning was really fucking hard. As I type this, I’m in my second week of sobriety and feel like absolute shit. I’m depressed, I’m shaky, I’m not sleeping, and I’m extremely irritable. I apologize if I’ve been hogging the bathroom at work—it’s been rainy here in New York, and I’ve been using the space to sit and meditate and smoke my e-cigarette and concentrate on not killing anything. I’m Sophie the Scorpio, going through aggressive alcohol withdrawal trying to calm my stinger as it raises up ready to stab those who agitate me in the neck. Thankfully, while I may have verbally stung a few during this period, I have (barely) physically stabbed no one.

I wasn’t ready to come out with my recent sobriety; however, in all honesty, it’s all I can think about. Writer’s block is another unfortunate side effect of withdrawal, and as many before me can attest, alcohol was a great writing tool. I have notebooks full of columns, show pitches, and jokes that came to me when I was drunk. Another recovering alcoholic creative has promised me I’ll still be weird and things will get better, and I trust their words.

I don’t remember my first drink—it was sometime in middle school in the Caribbean. (I’ve made jokes they don’t even have a word for “alcoholism” in the islands, because drinking is so engrained in the culture.) One of the first memories I do have of drinking was at a chili cook-off on a beach in September of 2001. I was about 13. My friends and I took some of our parents’ liquor. I remember the actor Mekhi Phifer was at the beach for whatever reason, and we tipsily introduced ourselves and thought we were soooooo cool, because that movie O had just come out and he and Josh Hartnett were hot shit at the time.

My family’s close friend Eddie—an extreme sports expert, adrenaline junkie, and one of the best men I’ve ever met—was skydiving and using an American flag parachute to land on the beach, in honor of the recent 9/11 attacks. After my family’s old house was destroyed in Hurricane Marilyn in 1995, Eddie hooked my family up with a house his construction company built—probably the most beautiful home I will ever live in. The view from the porch was a clear cut of the Caribbean Sea stretching out to the Atlantic Ocean. I spent hours on that deck staring at the line where the sky met the sea. 

A view from the deck.

Eddie was not only a good man, but also a loved and respected man with a beautiful family and very high-regard in the community—the crowd put down their plates of chili to watch him descend onto the beach, American flag parachute blazing. Eddie hit dead air and dropped 40 feet to his death. Despite the newly discovered vodka that ran through my blood that night, I have never forgotten the sound of Eddie hitting the beach, the screams of observers (mostly his friends) and the sight of the crumpled skydiving equipment and Eddie being loaded into an ambulance.

To make us feel better, people would always say, “At least he died doing what he loved. It was how he would have wanted to go.” Eddie died in a freak accident during an act of bravery with a fucking American flag strapped to his back. It doesn’t get much more badass than that. 

My problems don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same page as this man’s memory. If I have unintentionally offended his family or loved ones, I apologize with all the sincerity in my heart. It’s just I’ve only witnessed death a handful of times, and this remains the strongest vision in my mind. It had become a life or death decision for me to get treatment for alcoholism; if I continued to drink I would surely die an early death.

“Sophie Saint Thomas died doing what she loved…drinking” doesn’t quite hold the same sentiment as Eddie’s death. Legacies are different for those who die from a blackout suicide, drunk driving accident, or drunkenly consuming too many drugs. I’ve been jumping out of a plane every time I’ve used alcohol for sometime now, and my shoddy parachute has collapsed. I must get sober and find healthy methods of exhilaration if I want a shot of accomplishing all those things I envisioned standing on that deck Eddie built, staring at that divine blue line where the sea met the sky.

@TheBowieCat

Previously on Into the Weird – My New Disorder Means I’ll Never Have to Go to a Rave Again

The author on her journey to buy a cheap tooth.

Dental tourism is one of the most cheapskate aspects of neocolonialism. Every year, thousands of cheap Americans travel to Mexico to buy new teeth. I am one such cheap person. 

Having a nice smile is as important to the developed world as feeding a family is to the developing world. Although I wore braces from 2007 to 2010, I have a gap in my mouth, because a permanent canine tooth never grew in. When I don't wear a retainer attached to a fake tooth, I look like I have been punched in the face.

I can’t afford a $3,000 American tooth implant, but luckily, I’m spending this summer at my Somali aunt and uncle’s house in Yuma, Arizona—a town only ten miles away from Los Algodones, Mexico, where a new tooth costs $1,000. Last weekend, I decided to do that “kill two birds with one stone” thing and fix my smile and eat cheap Mexican tacos while visiting my relatives. It was like a vacation, except with a considerable amount of pain. 

My aunt and uncle drove me to the Port of Andrade and then parked their car on the American side of the border.  Nobody asked us for our passports when we walked through the border, because nobody gives a shit about Americans entering Mexico—all checking of passports is done upon reentering the United States through the Port of Andrade, because America does not play that shit. (“That shit” being crossing the border while Mexican.)

Once we reached Los Algodones, my Somali relatives started discussing how the small town looks like Somalia, a semi-developed area in the middle of a desert. But Somalia is hardly a tourist destination, let alone a dental tourist destination, let alone a destination. There were dental offices next to liquor stores, and for every six steps we took, six people (two of them being children) tried to sell us Viagra or cheap teeth.

With the exception of the guy who asked my uncle for cocaine, I only saw Americans buying teeth. 

Like a typical American, I walked around the town asking myself questions like, “Will I be killed by a cartel or maimed by my dentist, Dr. Morales?” I was so scared I left my credit card at home in case a Mexican would want to assume my identity as a young Somali woman. Speaking of being black, I thought we’d get a bunch of stares, but no one stared at us. A guy even yelled “Assalamu alaykum” at my uncle—he could tell we too are from the desert. It’s safe to say Los Algodones is fucking safe. 

After eating the cheapest and most delicious tacos I have ever eaten, we headed to the dentist’s office, which looked like a spaceship. The walls were white, the staff spoke perfect English, and the procedure was swift. The dentist swabbed my teeth with anesthesia, gave me morphine, and replaced my tooth’s roots with a metal screw. 

Sitting in the dentist chair, I felt like Raven Symone in Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. 

The implant didn’t take long, because it’s a two-part process and part two takes place in six months. Overall, I had a great, dollar store dental experience in Los Algodones. My mouth feels fine, I paid in cash, and in six months, my teeth will look swag. My only complaint is that when I was setting up my appointment, the receptionist spanishized my name—according to him “Hallan Farah” is “Helen Parra.” 

After my surgery, I walked up the street to a pharmacy. There were multiple pharmacies, but I elected to shop at the first one I saw that had no sales-children begging me to go inside. After buying ibuprofen, I walked back to the Port of Andrade, where mothers and daughters tried to sell us chewing gum and plastic toys all the way up to the gates of the USA. 

More weird reasons to go traveling:

Searching for Forrest Fenn’s Gold

I Went Storm Chasing with a Bunch of Storm Enthusiasts

Malibu

Photo by Flickr User lrargerich

While some poor souls are forced to smoke to escape the drudgery of their jobs, I’m lucky to work in a creative field where I can smoke weed while I work. Nothing inspires my creativity better than a strong sativa rolled with nasty, delicious tobacco. I tend to roll a little spliff, hit it once or twice, let it go out as I keep writing, and rediscover it 15 minutes later. This method worked pretty well until I started working with guys who make my smoking habit look like a dying ember. 

I used to work at VICE’s Brooklyn headquarters, but I recently changed jobs, landing a new creative gig in Manhattan. I’m 29. In this game that makes me an old fart with nowhere near the professional stamina and weed consumption abilities of the younger dudes I work with. These massively productive beasts work every waking hour, and they get through the day passing around big blunts filled with super-potent flavors carried by some of the pricier local delivery services. When we began working together in the same office, their regimen blew my modest procedure to smithereens. I’d come in with my donut and cup of tea, get started on my tasks, and twist-up the customary. As soon as the smell got around, the guys would go, “Ohhh shit, it’s that time!” and thus the first blunt would be rolled. My routine became the unwitting trigger for a smoke-fest that fueled us all into overdrive—or at least, them into overdrive and me into a half an hour of r/woahdude, then overdrive for about an hour, and then more r/woahdude. It was this very downward spiral I was trying to avoid last week when I decided to pop out for a cigarette and clear my head, avoiding the temptation of tasty blunt number three that was currently in progress just feet behind me. 

Manhattan is a city in the sky, and at any given moment during the workweek, millions of people do their shit well above ground level. Our connection to the surface is mediated by perhaps the most important invention of the 19th century other than the light bulb: the elevator. In 1857, the first passenger elevator was installed in Manhattan. For all I know, the one I ride everyday might have been that same one. 

I waited for the rickety-ass elevator  to fetch me from the fourth floor. Finally, the elevator arrived and urgently opened its door, as if gasping for air. I stepped in and hit 1. The elevator descended to the third floor and the door clanked open again, giving way to a little 100-year-old Chinese man holding a plastic shopping bag, who promptly entered the elevator and hit at least six different buttons. I watched over his shoulder as he needlessly fucked with the panel, my cigarette dancing as I mouthed the words, “Man, what the fuck are you doing?” The door closed, and I was in the middle of shaking my head when the elevator stopped dead. The old man looked at me. “Yeah, I don’t think we are moving, man,” I said. He stared at me blankly, revealing that he spoke no English, and went right back to hitting the panel's buttons. 

“Yo, don’t hit the fucking buttons man, that’s not going to help anything,” I said. He continued bumbling with the buttons, because if I wasn’t speaking his language, then I must not have been saying anything at all. I put my hands between him and the panel, and he finally stopped and stepped away. Finding no phone number or inspection card in the elevator, I called my co-worker upstairs who, despite being blunted, sprang into action, quickly finding there would be no easy solution. This was the moment when the possibility of being stuck in this thing for more than a few minutes began to seem real, and my stonedness prompted a vague inkling of claustrophobia that began to materialize in the back of my neck. Not only was I stuck in a metal box, but I was with the moron who I’m pretty sure caused this catastrophe—I started to get pissed. Turning away from the old man, I repeatedly muttered, "Shitfuck" under my breath in frustration.  

The old geezer who got me in this mess.

This scared the shit out of the old guy, who sort of cowered into the corner. I apologized for scaring him, promised him we’d be out of here soon, and dialed 911. As the dispatcher connected me to the fire department, the old man dutifully reported back to the panel and starting fucking with the buttons again. Right when the fire department picked up, I was yelling, “Dude, are you trying to fucking kill us?!?” The guy on the phone overlooked this exclamation, probably because he knew I was stuck in an elevator. I gave him the address, told him what floor we were on, and quickly hung up the phone so I could stare down the old guy, who was looking at me the way a dog looks at his owner after it shits in the house.

20 minutes later, with no prior technical knowledge of elevator mechanics, I had concluded that the old man had singlehandedly killed the elevator by overwhelming it with his button-pushing, and any further button-pushing would inevitably cause the straps or hooks or whatever to break and send us plummeting to our deaths. What pissed me off most was that this fucker had nothing to lose. Judging by his exterior, he had spent at least a century on this earth, carrying things in plastic bags, trapping innocent people in elevators, and god knows what else. Until that point, my prerogative was to save us both, but I had amended that—if it came down to it, I would dismember the old man and weave his intestines into a rope to lower myself to safety. 

My expression turned right back to irritated—I responded, “Oh hell no, don’t you start with that shit now.” I called to the firefighters, “Get me the fuck out of here. This old guy is starting to freak out,” which in retrospect probably sounded pretty selfish. As soon as the door sprang open, I said to the firemen, “Five more minutes and I would’ve eaten this guy.” They got a good laugh out of it. The Chinese guy mumbled some acknowledgement of me and sped out of the room, surely to go piss off some other complete stranger. The firemen quickly showed me how to pop open the elevator door from the inside for future reference. I thanked them and said I had to get back to work. One of them said, “Oh, is your office on the fourth floor? I don’t know how long you were stuck in the elevator, but you better get back up there. They’re having a party.”

@ImYourKid

Previously - My Dad Is Not Down

Image by Chris Johns.

When I discovered both Kim Kardashian and Kate Middleton would give birth this summer, I became excited about the prospect of a baby smack down. A few years ago, pitting two shapeless bundles of human potential against each other seemed uncouth, but Toddlers and Tiaras has proved watching children try to kill each other is rewarding and fun. When you think about it, a battle between Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s new offspring and William and Kate’s still-unborn sovereign is more entertaining than watching little girls named Alaska and Montana fight, because you can mock the kids without having to worry about their inevitable slide into nicotine addiction. (North West will totally only smoke an e-cigarette, and the royal baby will only smoke behind mummy and daddy's back.) Who will win the Thunderdome matchup of needlessly privileged newborn babies? Lets put the tater tots head-to-head to find out. 

Originality of Name

Obviously, I don’t need to elaborate on why North West is a stupid name. But it’s worth noting the name North West embodies the pretension and faux-minimalism Kanye attempted to project by making his 100 months pregnant girlfriend wear Tilda Swinton's church clothes. Meanwhile, during Kate’s pregnancy, Prince William has been flipping through baby name books searching for musty, patrician names like Charlotte, Benedict, or (at best) Lady Edith. Yes, according to weird British tabloids that pretty much exclusively cover the royal family, the names posited for the royal chicken nugget are about as exciting as William himself—which is to say the names are about as thrilling as the empty wind you hear when you listen to a large seashell. Point: North West. 

Education

The Royal baby will attend a same-sex boarding school to learn how to project disaffectedness during tennis matches, and North West will attend a Beverley Hills private school that has a weird semi-directional name like “Crossroads," where grades will have as much value as Whose Line Is it Anyways? points. Basically, the only way the royal baby is going to win this round is if Hogwarts accept the little twat—a long shot considering the royal family’s history of inbreeding. Point: North West.

Swagger

A few years ago, Kanye was swaggier than Justin Bieber’s monkey, but his “friendship” with Riccardo Tischi and devotion to the avant-garde (read: forcing his pregnant girlfriend to wear a shoe he designed to look like it’s made of sea urchins) has knocked his cred. In mere months, we’ll probably see North West wearing laser-cut leather diapers and asymmetrical Comme des Garcons bibs. But North West can still win the battle of the diaper swag, because the royal PR team is probably planning to dress the royal tot like Kate, who loves “to dress like us.” For several years, the paps have snapped photos of Kate in low-priced pieces that “unite her with the commoners," which is British slang for “distract the peasant slaves from their Dickensian working conditions.” You know, I bet Kate pitches a bitch-fit every morning, because her handmaiden refuses to let her wear a tiara or fishnets made of golden fleece. Who wants to be a royal, when you have to dress like a mall kiosk employee? With this style protocol, the royal baby can only pull a surprise upset if Kate decides to ironically dress the babe like an itty, bitty chav. Point: Draw.  

Religion

Kim and Kanye practice a special denomination of Christianity where you enter heaven riding a Faberge camel through the eye of a Swarovski encrusted needle. North West will no doubt have a flashy baptism, (possibly in the basin used by Connie's baby in The Godfatherposted for all of Instagram to see). But the royal baby will eventually head the Church of England—a religion founded on the principle that gluttonous ginger kings should be able to put babies inside whichever six-fingered mistress they please. No need to explain why that's a lot cooler. Point: Royal baby.

Lineage

The royal baby doesn't represent everything wrong with the United Kingdom—the royal baby is everything wrong with England. As the inheritor of an ancient tradition that perpetuated serfdom, colonialism, and unjust aristocratic rule, this toddler and his or her tiara is the royals’ latest flashy attempt to distract the cockney masses from realizing the royals fund their extravagant lifestyles with tax dollars—a fact that gives the world more reasons to bow down to the Kardashians. Yeah, people say the first family of reality TV represents everything wrong with American society, but the Kardashians are really a bronzer streaked version of the American dream—a huge half-Armenian family made up of untalented people who used their Puritan work ethic and shit ton of chutzpah to earn millions of dollars. They’re basically the Romneys. Point: North West.

Final Breakdown: North West: 3, Royal baby: 1. Real Winner: AMERICA. Did you actually think the royal baby was going to win this contest? 

@The_Sample_Life

Previously by Emalie Marthe – I Wore Vaseline on My Face Because Tyra Banks Told Me To

@melgillman

More comics:

Stank 2

Nick Gazin’s Comic Book Love-In #91

The Collectors

For this week’s Mahal, I spoke to Joseph McElroy, my friend’s dad and one of postmodernism’s major players. His 1960s debut novel, A Smuggler’s Bible, is something of a modern classic, and at age 82, Joseph’s still kicking—Dzanc Books recently released his ninth novel, Cannonball. The book tells the complicated story of an inexperienced San Diego photographer, who shoots government staged propaganda during the Iraq War and finds himself involved with two California divers, an illegal immigrant from Mongolia, and the narrator himself. I recently chatted with Joseph about his new novel, his career, and why water is a fascinating literary topic. 

VICE: When did you first realize you could pay your bills by writing postmodern books about smugglers and other dudes living in America?
Joseph McElroy: I never did, although there were times when I had a windfall or a book made some money, and I thought, I’m going to be able to do this. Kurt Vonnegut said that he figured two percent of practicing writers made a sufficient living to support themselves and their families. I was fortunate enough to really enjoy teaching. My books have a certain reputation, but I am not a bestselling author, and I probably could not have continued writing as much as I have if it were not for other sources of income. 

What's the story behind your first book, A Smuggler's Bible?
A Smuggler's Bible is, like everybody's first novel, trying to put too much between covers. What I do is take that idea, think of a young person with eight different episodes in his life, try to bring them together, and fail. With the smuggling metaphor, I find all kinds of connections within the parts of his life. The smuggling also works in trying to bring together what is precariously only one life—it's a young book, and young people still seem to like it.

What was your most significant discovery while writing Women And Men?
It is partly about the close and even microscopic interrelations between women and men, which are always there. Also, the book sees that there are strange similarities between women and men—however, I cannot say that without acknowledging that this fundamental relationship happened during a time when second generation feminism was so important in New York, and there was a war going on that opened up all of the United States.

Why is your non-fiction project on water taking you over nine years to write?
Well, it's partly because of the materials coming in over the transit from day to day—from China, from Russia, from the guy next door. Everybody knows that Joe is writing a book about water! According to my son, Kanye West even says, "My momma was raised in an era when clean water was only served to the fairer skin."

In the beginning, I looked at water becoming a commodity—people buying and selling water and stealing from aquifers, municipal water management in South America, where poor people were really fucked over endlessly—and other bad things happening in the water world. I have always been interested in water, even as a swimmer, a diver, and a coast guard on a weather ship out in the middle of the Atlantic during the Korean War. My goal was to write a book about water that was going to change the world. I soon realized that it was naïve, and I wasn't going to persuade anybody.

I stepped back and went to the physics of water and from there to my own experience of how the properties of water are connected to floods, draughts, and even dams. Many distinctly nonfictional events become chapters in the book. However, our imagination goes beyond what we normally make of non-fiction. Through that I come back to the arts and how it can change the way we think about water.

What inspired you to write Cannonball?
If I were to put my finger to one cause for the novel, it was anger of the Iraq war that led me to the strangeness of things that happened.  Although, I am not a practicing Christian, I was angry at the self-righteousness of the government. They undoubtedly embedded a pretext for entering the war--I made up another kind of pretext for getting into the war. What I made up was partly based upon a big event in archeology back to 1947, the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered on the shore of the Dead Sea. I made up whole kinds of new scrolls. Which, in this case, the government concocts, wants to protect, and sets up intent to destruction of the scrolls by terrorists. It is in that situation that the main character is drawn. The burden of these scrolls is that Jesus is not the person we know, but a yuppie with capitalistic acclamations—thus suiting the mindset of the American government as I saw it. 

Did you intend to create any connections between the Iraq War and the large sumo wrestler kid diving off of the springboard?
Yes, I did. We are flashed forward to the involvement of the young Asian boy, who is physically huge and much younger than he looks, doing a dive off a board into a pool in Baghdad that evidently belonged to the former Iraq dictator. At that moment, an explosion occurs, which the main character is down at poolside ready to photograph. He did not know his friend [the young Asian boy] was in Iraq. Within my knowledge of diving (I was a diver), we learn that even overweight people can be graceful, and we see that in the boy's dive, he enters the water and makes no splash at all.

It takes me a long time to understand Cannonball, and I know that the water book is taking you a long time to write. Is that typical of you?
I think the prose is challenging. I mean it to be an image of what it is really like to be alive. To be an image of consciousness.

You seem to like to take your sweet time with your writing.
I'm glad you say sweet. I think they represent my love for what I am doing and my patience. I don't thing the great books necessarily compel us to finish them in a short amount of time. A lot of my writing and my meditation (out of which the writing comes) could be associated with a kind of lateral and illuminating patience that tells me that I will take my time and the book will be the way I want it to be. Pascal, the French mathematician said, "The last thing you decide is what to put first.” I think he might have been talking about what is important in your life, but also speaking of writing. The difference between writing and acting is that at the last minute you can change the opening—here I can change whatever I like. The rewriting is where the victories are won. That is another reason why books take time.

@RedAlurk 

Previously – Pizza Party at the Good Company

Like many works of ancient literature, The Kama Sutra can be read a few different ways: you can view it as a window into the mind-set and customs of a long-departed culture, or you can take it to be a straightforward how-to guide to pretzel sex. But the two-millennia-old Hindu text also contains some spells that could be useful for women (and men) of any era. Here are some excerpts (something you should know, if you don’t, is that yoni means “vagina”): 

Illustrations by Julia Scheele

If used by a woman, an ointment made of the flowers of the Nauclea cadamba, the hog plum, and the Eugenia jambolana, can cause her to be disliked by her husband. The older you are, the more you realize that there are real-world uses for this sort of unguent. 

A woman who hears a man playing on a reed pipe that has been dressed with the juices of the bahupadika plant, the Tabernaemontana coronaria, the Costus speciosus, or arabicus, the Pinus deodara, the Euphorbia antiquorum, the vajra, and the kantaka plant, becomes his slave.

An ointment made of the fruit of the Asteracantha longifolia will contract the yoni of a hastini, or elephant woman. This contraction lasts for one night.

If lac is saturated seven times in the sweat of the testicle of a white horse and then applied to a red lip, the lip will become white.

An ointment made by pounding the roots of the Nelumbrium speciosum, the blue lotus, and the powder of the plant Physalis flexuosa mixed with ghee and honey, will enlarge the yoni of the mrigi, or deer woman.

If food be mixed with the fruit of the thorn apple it causes intoxication.

An ointment made of the fruit of the Emblica myrabolans and soaked in the milky juice of the milk-hedge plant, the soma plant, Calotropis gigantea, and the juice of the fruit of the Vernonia anthelmintica will make the hair white.

If yellow myrabolans, the hog plum, the shrawana plant, and the priyangu plant be all pounded together and applied to iron pots, these pots become red.

If a lamp, trimmed with oil extracted from the shrawana and priyangu plants, its wick being made of cloth and the slough of the skins of snakes, is lighted and long pieces of wood placed near it, those pieces of wood will resemble so many snakes.

More from this year's Fiction Issue:

The Mare

Jailbait

Miami

1775–1817: Jane Austen
The first important modern writer with a vagina emerged out of nowhere, with an exaggerated, hyperbolic diary she called Pride and Prejudice, written when she was just 21 years old. As a result, universities all over the place now have feminist-literature departments. And no one really knows why, because Jane Austen’s biographical information is scarce and sketchy. All we can be certain of is that she had a pair of tits.  

1797–1851: Mary Shelley
When Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was published anonymously in 1818, everyone was like, “Whaaat? This shit’s crazy!” Although some critics hated it, it became incredibly popular, essentially created the genre of science fiction, and established a bunch of tropes that would get appropriated, mocked, and modified for centuries. It’s so scary and fucked up that it could only come from the mind of an adolescent girl.

1816–1855: “The Bell Brothers”
Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë were sisters born to a minister and his wife who must have had some kind of fucking genius literary genes, because their offspring produced some of the 19th century’s most enduring fiction. Emily wrote Wuthering Heights under the pen name “Ellis Bell,” Charlotte penned Jane Eyre as “Currer Bell,” Anne wrote Agnes Grey under “Acton Bell,” and all three became wildly successful (even after everyone found out they didn’t have dicks). Their brother, Branwell, was also reportedly a genius, but he was also a fuckup who got addicted to alcohol and opium and died of tuberculosis. Just like a man! Am I right, ladies?

1882–1941: Virginia Woolf
Educated by her parents, Virginia had nervous breakdowns and depressive collapses all her life. She was nuts, in the classical way, and published stories that reflected this. She was also an unprecedented literary genius whose books will remain in the Western canon for time immemorial. Then she put rocks in her coat pockets and drowned herself in the River Ouse. The end. 

1903–1977: Anais Nin
Anais, my favorite bohemian slut, was married to two dudes at once and most definitely had some seriously hotttttt fuck times with Henry Miller. She wrote stories about old guys molesting little girls and tranced-out orgies in opium dens, as well as a plethora of personal diaries and philosophical insights. Talk about “having it all.” 

1905–1982: Ayn Rand
A Benzedrine addict who was also a robot from outer space and wrote Atlas Shrugged. Don’t worry, she’s dead now. Thank God.

1929–1945: Anne Frank
Also dead, but you’ve probably read her diary. 

Illustration by the author.

More from this year's Fiction Issue:

The Mare

Jailbait

Miami

Mickey Royal. (All photos courtesy of Mickey Royal)

When I was 18, I liked to trawl through Facebook to try and find the strangest people I could. I guess it was my slightly creepy way of trying to understand people I'd never realistically have the chance to meet in real life; Tanzanian lawyers, Portuguese surfers, LA crack addicts and Cambridge boxers have all been on my friends list, and most of them still are.

At some point, I ended up becoming Facebook friends with a pimp called Mickey Royal. He's incredibly eloquent, speaks like a Baptist preacher, lived through the LA crack wars of the late 80s, is a published author and has a pretty compelling collection of Facebook profile pictures. Of all the people I virtually befriended, Mickey was one of the few I really learned anything from. Looking at his life (and the pimping it seemed to mainly consist of), I realised that the idea that you can apply a rigid moral code to every situation in life is a limiting one, and that morality depends as much on circumstance as what your parents tell you is right and wrong. Even if the basic idea of making money by farming out women for sex is fundamentally abhorrent.

Anyway, I figured that considering Mickey had already taught me something without us ever actually communicating, I should get in touch and have him teach me about something else: the nuances of pimping.

VICE: Hey Mickey. So what are the different types of pimp?
Mickey Royal: "Gorilla pimp" is the universally accepted term for a pimp who is constantly heavy-handed. "Chill pimp" or "boyfriend pimp" is a universally accepted term for a pimp with one ho, who he’s romantically involved with. Most of the terms depend on the region that particular pimp is from. The confusion comes when the word “pimp” goes from noun to verb. You have pimps, macks and hustlers (nouns), and all three can pimp (verb) or be pimps (noun again).

What type of pimp were you?

As a martial artist in my youth, I learned positioning from a mathematical standpoint.

Okay. What does that mean?

When I was just a white belt in Kenpo, I would have to attack from a certain stance. Once I reached a certain level, I could fight from any position using proper weight distribution. When you reach a certain level as a pimp, you can morph into any particular style in order to achieve your intended goal.

What does this morphing entail?

Almost changing physically in appearance, comparable to a vampire. Once a vampire becomes a vampire master, then he/she can morph temporarily into a wolf or bat. In the same way, a master pimp – a true, experienced, skilled pimp – can morph into mack or hustler to achieve the desired objective.

I see. So what type of pimp were you? A gorilla?
I wasn't a gorilla pimp, no. I had very little respect for them because of the absence of psychology involved in their methods. I’m a psychological scientist who was known for using the mind to control individuals.

Mickey (on the right) in his youth.

So you were a kind of hypno-pimp, then?
My violence wasn’t ever unleashed on the women I regarded as my family, sisters, co-workers, etc. I exercised extreme violence against those who threatened them. Sadistic tricks [customers], rapists, gang-bangers and drug dealers were my main enemies. These were the abusive ones in the game, so we were often at odds. I was fair, honest and no nonsense.

What was your inspiration for becoming this benevolent master pimp?

An egg is delicate. Hold it too loosely and it falls and breaks. Hold it too tight and it cracks and breaks. It’s a delicate balance when dealing with the fragile human psyche.



I see.

I noticed that the majority of pimps were gorilla pimps. The rest were just macks who were pimping, or trying to. Coming off of the streets of Los Angeles, you won't find too many pimps in pink or yellow flamboyant suits. I grew up in LA during the crack wars of the 1980s. Those [flamboyant] pimps would have been robbed and raped in my neighbourhood. Coming out of the gang/OC [organised crime] world, when making the transition to pimp, I took my reputation with me.

What was your business like?

I chose to run my "royal family" the same way I lived in the family I was raised in. Just because I was a pimp, didn't mean I was going to sacrifice my principles or lower my standards and methods because of the occupation I was now in. Me and the girls are human beings first. I treated my ladies with the utmost respect. We ate, operated and lived as a family – like firemen at a firehouse who are always on call.

If you're so concerned with people's wellbeing, why get into pimping in the first place?
Why did I choose to be a pimp? It wasn't like Monday I was in a choir and Tuesday I was on the block. It's a gradual descent – or ascent, depending on your particular perspective – into the game. By the time I was 14 I had been shot and stabbed. It's the same as working in a grocery store in the stockroom; one day you decide to work at the checkout counter – it’s not much of a switch. I was 19 or 20 when I became a fully-fledged pimp and stopped being a gangster, but I'd had one foot in the game since 16.

Was the money good?

Drug dealers I knew and worked for since I was 13 lived with more money than any pimp could ever dream of, so it wasn’t the money at all.

So what was it that you liked about pimping, then?

I was attracted to the fact that, on Sunday night on Crenshaw Boulevard, the pimps always seemed happy. They had no bullet holes, no police brutality; no one was trying to kill them. Everyone loved them and they were classy gentlemen. Their mannerisms and overall presence made the drug dealers seem like rich savages. Pimps seemed like well-read aristocrats compared to the knuckle dragging loan sharks, bookies and drug dealers I knew. I was taken under a master pimp’s wing because he saw qualities in me being wasted on the streets. I knew the biggest muscle in my body was between my ears and I wanted to develop it.

Can you share some of that wisdom with me?

I was once asked, "Which one is more powerful, love or hate?" I answered the question this way: I would run into a burning building, risking my life to save someone I loved. But I would not run into a burning building and risk my life to kill someone I hated. My leadership abilities, style and technique stem from a point of love. I referred to my ladies in private, as well as in public, as my “wives”. A man or woman will do ten times to please and protect someone they love as opposed to someone they feared. So fear was a weapon used only against outside agitators. My homes ran as finely tuned sorority houses.

Cool. And do you have any advice for future pimps?

Some get caught up in the intoxicating allure and essence of the pimp game. It’s the indescribable feeling of fantasy and reality having a baby – a love child named "ecstasy". In that moment you become stuck – trapped, willingly. I live my entire life in that moment, but without losing sight of the destination. Most pimps upon reaching this level abandon the destination and the journey becomes an endless one. They begin to get cycled into and get stuck in a downward, upward spiral. I kept my eyes on the destination at all times, not the journey. That way my navigational decision-making won't be affected.

Okay, great. Thanks, Mickey.

Read more from Mickey Royal on his website.

Follow Olly on Twitter: @olongworth1

More on pimping:

Keep It Pimpin'

Kat Stacks is a Real American Hero, Bitch

After the collapse of Communism in Russia, as state assets were divvied up and privatized, a few individuals stepped in to take the reins of this entrepreneurial experiment. Rewarded with massive fortunes and fame, they came to be known as "the oligarchs."

To see how the .00001% lives, we met up with infamous Russian oligarch Sergey Veremeenko and spent quality time hog hunting and helicopter joyriding at his private estate outside Moscow.

Canadian infantry on a military exercise. (Image via)

Perhaps understandably, the Canadian media has been having a hard time covering any news that isn't to do with one of the following: the mayor of Toronto maybe smoking crack with a murdered drug dealer; the mayor of Montreal being charged with cavorting with the mafia; Calgary being swallowed by floods; and the Prime Minister allegedly paying off a corrupt senator to put out a political firestorm.  

Which makes it the perfect time for the Canadian government to quietly announce the deployment of an infantry platoon of 34 soldiers to Haiti. The island nation, which is still dealing with the ramifications of the devastating 2010 earthquake, is currently controlled by the Brazilian troops who've led the UN peacekeeping effort in Haiti since 2004. The move to partake in a UN peacekeeping mission is significant: Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is voluntarily getting back into the traditional peacekeeping game.

For a country that basically invented the concept of the peacekeeper, Harper has overseen a nose-dive to the point where the Canucks now rank 57th out of 114 troop-contributing nations worldwide. And throughout his time in office, Harper has rarely engaged in a foray abroad that he willingly signed up for. It was the Liberal Party that volunteered Canada for Afghanistan (and it was Harper’s decision to pull out), there was the limited contribution to the Nato Libya mission and he’s been extremely hesitant of Syrian intervention. In fact, Harper has only seemed gung-ho about taking down Assad at the G8, when he was in a lion’s den of world leaders clamouring for Assad’s demise (although he still stopped short of advocating arming the rebels).

The change of heart for Harper certainly raises questions, even if 34 troops is only a minor contribution. So why now – and why Haiti?

Brazilian peacekeepers in Haiti. (Image via)

“A platoon isn't [a sign of Canada] getting back into the peacekeeping game,” said one highly sceptical Canadian soldier who remains anonymous (he isn’t authorised to speak to the media). “This mission is preventing the department of national defence from experiencing extreme boredom and keeps them relevant,” he said.

Besides keeping the department of national defence from falling asleep at their desks, there's the chance that Canadian forces might be being used to advance diplomatic relations with Brazil, enhancing the two countries' trading relationship by lessening Brazil's load in Haiti. In other words, the mission is potentially a military handjob for future business opportunities.

It’s also indicative of the post-Afghanistan landscape, where Western militaries are having their budgets tightened as they withdraw from the final frontier of the original War on Terror. Army staff will be looking to keep defence spending down for governments engaged in austerity cuts, and this Haitian venture is just that: a way for the military to engage in a low-cost, positive-press foreign intervention where lots of pictures can be taken of soldiers giving clean water to locals.

“No more [Afghan] war. The department of defence must fight for dollars. And to get dollars they must find operations," said the soldier. "So Haiti equals dollars, plus it aligns with government interests: no casualties and a peacekeeping mission.”

Interestingly, the Haiti deployment was kept from the Canadian public until two days before boots hit the ground, yet the same soldier says he knew troops were training in Brazil for months.

Damage done by the Haiti 2010 earthquake that devastated the country. (Image via)

Like other Western nations, Canada is still reeling from the public perception that the Afghan campaign was a total failure, so it's hardly surprising that the Canadian government wants a military "win".

Another Canadian soldier I spoke to (who has knowledge of MINUSTAH, the UN Stabilisation Mission in Haiti) says that, if Canada is looking for a simple tour and morale booster for their military, the troubled Caribbean country may not be the perfect place to start.

“I think it would be wishful thinking to say there's no chance there won't be any fighting,” he said.

He offered me two possible explanations for Canadian intervention. First, he explained that the small force may have been sent in to “recce” the situation; that is to gather valuable street-level intelligence in preparation for the landing of an expanded force. That scenario gelled with rumours I’ve heard about the Canadians taking over Haiti’s security completely, relieving Brazil of the duty they've maintained since 2004 at some point in the coming year.

The other reason was more political: “Given that these soldiers will be overwhelmingly francophone [therefore speaking the same language as many Haitians, unlike the Portuguese-speaking Brazilian troops], the UN might be attempting to soften the image of their current force and focus on winning the hearts and minds of the population." Interestingly, this round of Canadian peacekeepers will be drawn from the only francophone regiment in the Canadian Forces: the Van Doos (Royal 22e Regiment) – a Quebec City-based outfit of French-speaking soldiers who already contributed 1,000 troops to Haiti in the initial earthquake response of 2010.

In the last decade, Haiti has seen the dissolution of its central government, extreme poverty, a coup, a vicious cholera outbreak courtesy of UN forces and the demise of its infrastructure after the aforementioned Bible-worthy earthquake. They probably need peacekeepers. However, Haitians are starting to see these troops less as peacekeepers and more as occupiers.

“I think most Haitians are pretty ticked off that there's a large foreign presence in their country, yet they still can't provide basic security to the average Haitian,” the soldier told me. “I think the recent failure of the UN top brass to take responsibility for the cholera outbreak and their outright refusal to pay damages isn't helping their image, either.”

Chilean peacekeepers on patrol in Port au Prince. Image (via)

For Haitians, the continuous presence of a foreign army three years after the earthquake hit equates to occupation.

“Seeing foreigners driving around in big UN vehicles and living in luxurious conditions compared to their own contributes to the belief that their country is being occupied, whether intentional or not,” the second Canadian soldier told me. That being said, he also told me that he believes Canada likely has no particularly nefarious interest in “occupying” the Caribbean nation. And he’s probably right.

Nonetheless, it is a tiny Caribbean island with lush gold deposits. And Canadian extractive companies, like Montreal-based St Genevieve Resources, are already major players in Haiti. Latent natural resources means the quicker Haiti is pacified, the quicker everyone can do more business. And that fact cannot be ignored.

On top of that, the fact that the US sits mere kilometres from Haiti’s shores begs the question of an American interest. In the past, Washington and the CIA have shown their dislike for the deposed dictator, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and their sinister commitment to keeping him in exile was exposed by WikiLeaks.

More than once, in recent memory, there have been whispers of Aristide’s political return. In fact, his ex-party still has support and wants to launch new legislative elections in the coming months. So could increasing Western military presence be the result of shadow pressure from Washington? An effort to make sure the country doesn’t descend into being another dictatorship with poor international relations under a returned Aristide?

Whether this new peacekeeping mission is an attempt to strengthen diplomatic and trade relations with Brazil, a move to control domestic Haitian politics, or simply a quick act of charity from an otherwise isolationist government, it's unlikely we've seen the end of Canada’s Haitian experiment just yet. 

Follow Ben on Twitter: @BMakuch

More stories from Haiti:

Haiti Have the UN to Thank For Their Cholera Epidemic

Fright Night

WATCH – Hamilton's Pharmacopeia: Nzambi

James Berisha in his plane. All photos courtesy of James Berisha

James Berisha wants the world to accept Kosovo's independence. So, instead of circulating a bunch of pointless "Facebook awareness" macros, the Albanian pilot decided to single-handedly fly to every country that hasn't accepted Kosovo's independence and talk directly to them about it. 

The Kosovo War ended in 1999, after a harrowing year and a half of bloodshed and the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Albanian population by the ruling Serbs. Nine years later, in 2008, Kosovo was granted its independence, but that status remained unrecognized by many countries. For example, Russia—an ally of Serbia—kicked up a fuss, declaring that the declaration of independence was illegal—a fuss they still don't want to drop.

So it's unlikely that Berisha is going to budge the entrenched hearts and minds of the Russian government any time soon. But that hasn't stopped him from flying to more than 100 countries to spread his message elsewhere.

I met James about a year ago in Sudan after he'd crashed his plane in the middle of the Sudanese desert. At first, I wasn't sure that his strategy would have much, if any, effect on global politics—I mean, how much can one pilot do to affect the foreign policy of an entire country? But after following his progress, I'm starting to change my mind. James visited Egypt last December, and on June 29 they became the latest country to recognize Kosovo's independence—probably the last policy enacted before millions of protesters took to the streets and ousted Mohamed Morsi's government from power.

I gave James a call to see how he's doing.

James in the Republic of the Congo.

VICE: So, James, what possessed you to fly to every country that hasn't accepted Kosovo's independence?
James Berisha: All Albanians are very attached to their homeland and where they grew up. I lived in Kosovo for the first 16 years of my life and suffered a lot from Serbian propaganda. The Serbs called the Albanians illiterate and stupid. They also said that we had tails like animals. Those kinds of things create a lot of resentment. The Serbs tried to eliminate our language, ban our books and religion. They wanted to destroy our families. My vision is this: to go to each and every country on the planet and deliver the message that Kosovo should be free from Serbia in the most efficient and cheapest way possible.

Where were you when the war broke out in 1999?
I was training to become a pilot in Florida, but returned to Kosovo when the Serbs killed my father. He was 47 years old.

Was he a civilian or fighting in the war?
A civilian. I grew up on a farm in a village. He was feeding our cows. He didn't do anything.

Where did you begin your mission?
I purchased my plane when I was in Texas. At the time, I only wanted to do the Western hemisphere. I thought I would try to raise as much awareness as I could by talking to radio stations and newspapers. At this stage I didn't know that the mission would become extremely powerful and that I would become a hero for the people of Kosovo. After I had finished the Western hemisphere, people were encouraging me to continue. I asked my family and thought, OK, no problem! I decided to go to Africa because, in many ways, Africa has suffered from the same problems as Kosovo. It was colonized, and the people therefore understand the importance of independence.

James's plane in the Sudanese desert.

Let's talk about some of the stuff that's happened to you along the way. You managed to crash your plane into the Sudanese desert at one point, right?
Yeah. I was at 8,500 feet when I heard an explosion and everything started going crazy. The plane was vibrating, oil was spilling all over the place, and my engine had completely stopped working. I turned off everything and managed to send a message to a commercial plane flying above, letting the pilot know that I was about to crash.

Were you freaking out?
No. For the first two seconds, I was a little bit scared, but then after that, not at all. All I was thinking about was surviving and saving the plane. If I couldn't rescue the plane then I at least wanted to make sure that I survived. I flew for ten to 15 minutes without an engine – like a glider—before spotting a small gravel road. I used it as a runway and landed the plan. It was actually pretty good—I managed to save myself and the plane.

Is your plane safe to fly?
No, not very safe.

Right. What else has happened to you on your travels?
I was in jail.

I didn't know that. How did that happen?
After I crashed my plane, I decided to go to Eritrea on a commercial flight to do some mission work there. I had no problems when I arrived in Eritrea; I stayed there six days and tried to do the same stuff that I've done around the world—talking to newspapers, doing television interviews, etc. I soon realized that I wasn't going to get much done in Eritrea. It's one of the worst countries in the world as far as freedom of speech is concerned.

The newspapers are controlled by the government, and it's pretty much impossible to campaign for anything at all. As I was leaving the country, ten minutes before my plane was scheduled to depart, a police officer came over and asked to talk to me. I was taken to a room and questioned about my documents. I didn't have a visa because, as a pilot, I'm technically permitted to travel on my pilot documents. They wanted to see a visa, which I didn't have, and I was told that I should have never been allowed to enter the country. I ended up spending three days in a detention center at the airport before being taken to jail and being put in a cell by myself for 156 days.

Jesus... 156 days?
I never saw a lawyer or a judge and wasn't allowed to talk to my family. They had no idea where I was. I was treated like a camel and completely isolated from the outside world. I thought I was going to die. If it wasn't for the kindness of the other inmates who gave me food, I would be dead today.

So your family had no idea where you were?
No. The government of Eritrea lied to my family and friends and said that I wasn't in the country. The last email I sent was from Eritrea, so my family knew that I was still there. In the end, 20 countries intervened to get me out. France, Belgium, USA, Qatar, Sudan, Kosovo, Albania—you name it.

What do you think your mission has achieved?
I have delivered Kosovo's message to the world. If I go on Al Jazeera, the ninth largest channel in the world, it means that the message has been delivered. If I go to every single country in Africa and deliver an official letter stating, "Please recognize Kosovo's independence," the message has been delivered.

I've heard that Egypt has just accepted Kosovo's independence. Do you think you influenced that decision in any way?
I spoke to many people who supported Kosovo's independence. The people are so important. Egypt recognized Kosovo's independence because there was a lot of pressure to do so from ordinary citizens.

More stories about people having interesting adventures:

I Went Tornado Chasing with a Bunch of Storm Enthusiasts

Swimming with Warlords

I Was an Accidental Nigerian Film Star

With Julian Assange consigned to ambling between his lounge chair and his speaking balcony at the Ecuadorian embassy, the fight for free information had gone a little quiet until Edward Snowden appeared and shook it all up again. Now, Assange is back in the news and transparency has been reestablished as one of the key issues of our age. In his excellent new film, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, the Oscar-winning documentary maker Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side) charts the organization's journey, creating a clear distinction between its noble founding principles and the delusional narcissism of Assange, the human being.

To find out more about it, I went down to the Soho Hotel to talk with Alex.

The trailer for We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks.

VICE: Hey, Alex. How easy was it to separate Assange from WikiLeaks?
Alex Gibney: I agree that you can’t really separate Assange from WikiLeaks—and he’s made sure of that—but you can see what WikiLeaks started out to do and the mechanisms it established. Those things you can believe in without having to believe in Julian Assange. I think Julian would like us to think that he and the principles of transparency are one and the same thing—I don’t think they are. So that’s why you can make a distinction. Julian has always controlled the organization, but the ideals of the organization and its founding mechanisms live beyond Julian.

He’s obviously a big George Orwell fan and quotes him liberally, but it seems to me like there’s an Animal Farm situation going on with him—he seems to think he's somehow "more equal" than others.
Oh, definitely, and I think, over time, some of the language he's started to use is Orwellian. He said a “harm minimization program.” I find that language interesting for a number of reasons. One is [that] “harm minimization program” is not the kind of phrase that you would come up with for a small organization that’s just a few people trying to redact some names. It sounds like Microsoft or the Pentagon. It sounds ominous. It’s also utterly false. He didn’t have a harm minimization program. He had a title, which was totally empty, and no practice to back it up.

Alex Gibney

Do you think that what has happened to him as a person—the case in Sweden, his behavior—has harmed the initial aims of WikiLeaks?
Well, I think it’s harmed it to some extent. We all make a mistake if we let Julian force us into a box in which we have to conflate his actions with the organization's principles. That, to me, was the crime of the Swedish episode. Right out of the box, in the publishing of the Afghan war logs, he fucked it up by not taking this issue of redactions more seriously. That’s not because anyone was hurt, as far as we know nobody was hurt, so in that sense, all the people who say he has blood on his hands are full of shit. But it did allow him to be marginalized and separated out from the New York Times and the Guardian. Imagine if that hadn’t happened. Julian will say, “They were always going to do it,” but that’s Julian the martyr talking, that’s the person who says his mistakes don’t matter. But they do matter, particularly if you don’t own them…

Sure.
It’s not so much what happens to WikiLeaks—that’s not the important thing—it’s how we get this whole idea right in the future. So now we’re seeing Snowden, we’re seeing the electronic dropbox at the New Yorker, we’re seeing all sorts of things taking off from WikiLeaks. We don’t need WikiLeaks to get transparency right.

In the film, you show that Assange always thought he was being watched. Do you think his use of the two Swedish women to play up his role as the martyr—two women whose lives your film shows he’s ruined—indicates that he wanted the Americans to extradite him? 
Yes. As Robert Manne says in the film, he lives intensely in his imagination. There’s a wonderful moment, too, where Mark Davis says that Julian was right to be concerned about being watched but that there were a whole bunch of years before that where he was swapping SIM cards when he didn’t need to because no one gave a shit about who he was. There was an element of him that wanted to play the spy game. And with the WANK worm, or the Swedish case, he never takes responsibility and he never denies anything. It’s a way of keeping you guessing. Weirdly, what that’s doing is embracing mystery. Here’s the transparency avatar embracing mystery and ambiguity. That was there from the start, and then when fame hits he becomes destabilized and the paranoia that he had in balance now becomes unbalanced and he starts to believe his own fictions.

Right.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg talks about how Julian seeing spies everywhere became tiring. WIRED has just revealed that the FBI did have a paid informant inside WikiLeaks, but that wasn't until 2011, after everything had happened. Like Hunter Thompson said, “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean I don’t have enemies.”

You used the expression “blood on their hands." It's a phrase that's been used frequently by Assange and WikiLeaks' detractors. Do you think there's a perception that their imagined spilling of blood is somehow worse than the actual blood spilled by the American military-industrial complex? And is this what's happening now, with Snowden?
Of course… it’s the same thing. They always do this, and Bush and Cheney did this with waterboarding. The idea being that waterboarding saved lives, so exposing waterboarding is going to cost lives. It’s always done that way. “Now the terrorists will know how we do our interrogations. Now the terrorists will know the NSA is spying on them.” If you’re a self-respecting terrorist with an IQ above ten, you’ve got to assume the United States is trying to spy on you all the time. Why wouldn’t you assume that? After all, bin Laden had a courier come to him. He wasn’t even using electronic communications.

How would you go about preparing for a waterboarding, anyway?
You can’t! It’s totally idiotic. The idea that Julian Assange had blood on his hands while the US is fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, come on! Where’s the blood? In moments like this—and this is where I think Snowden has to be careful—the storytelling is important because that’s what sways people. If they think you are on the wrong side of some kind of key moral divide, they won’t go with you.

And the revelations about Assange’s personal life have been cleverly used.
Of course, and that’s why Assange’s people say this film is a smear. They’ve released this annotated transcript. They say it’s anti-WikiLeaks, which they think presumably because I criticized him at all. I find that terrifying in another way: if you criticize Julian Assange, you’re anti-WikiLeaks. He tried to pretend that he’d hacked into my office and gotten an early copy of the film that he then annotated with “corrections.” This transcript is missing a full quarter of the film. Why? Because it wasn’t a hack, it was an audio recording of a screening at Sundance and all of Bradley Manning’s words are written, not spoken, so they are left out of the transcript, which is another kind of cruel poetry because Assange writes Manning out of the story, subconsciously. 

And I guess the real story in all this—and the really pressing issue—is Bradley Manning and how he has been treated.
Yes, absolutely. Assange imprisoned himself; Bradley Manning was put in a cage in Kuwait. Bradley Manning is the hero of the film, not Julian Assange. Manning is the guy who’s willing, by the way, to be held to account. He’s pled guilty to breaking his military oath and leaking documents, but he’s fighting these charges that he’s a spy, and, in my view, he’s not a spy. At the end of the day he’s braver than Assange and more idealistic.

Assange says at one point that an Afghan who collaborated with the American army “deserved to die.” Do you think that there’s amorality at the heart of WikiLeaks or Assange? Is he just opening a Pandora’s box?
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s fair to characterize him as “amoral,” but I think that he’s always been very dogmatic. In the film we call him a “transparency radical.” Most people aren’t comfortable with how transparent he wants things to be. That quote about how an Afghan who collaborated with Americans deserves to die is interesting—it shows us that, over time, he believes there’s a larger good to be had by making things transparent, one that transcends the short-term pain.

It reminds me in a way of Enron, where there were a lot of free-market ideologues—people who felt very strongly that the free market would cause a lot of pain but in the long run it would be good. It’s like a thinning of the herd. They felt that they were entitled to take down the California electricity grid for fun and profit because at the end of the day they would force the market to be more rational and efficient. In the meantime a lot of people suffer and some could have died. So, that is the disquieting thing and Julian reminds me of an ideologue, in that he’s extremely rigid and doesn’t see ambiguity much. Or irony.

This idea of truth runs through your film. Assange equates transparency with the truth, but is that sensible?
Well, yes, we have to talk about transparency and truth not being the same. Just because you have a document, what does that mean? Is that a true document? Did someone who wrote it lie? And does that document represent the full truth or just a partial truth? The principles of “scientific journalism,” which is a phrase Julian likes to use a lot, are not so much science as guesswork. It’s important to have documents: a lot of what Snowden is telling us is not news. If you’ve read James Bamford’s books you know all about the NSA, but what Snowden’s documents are is proof and in that sense they’re more powerful.

And with WikiLeaks, it was also the proof that was important.
Proof is important. Showing that the American government lied about the number of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, that’s proof. Seeing the video, these terrified people like Michael Hayden [the former CIA director] because they were OK with it being reported. But they knew that the video would allow people to have an emotional reaction to this carnage that’s far more devastating.

In this post-WikiLeaks, post-Snowden world, what do we do with this information?
That is a very powerful and important question, because of course the next step is how you force the system to change once you’ve exposed it. The exposing of it sometimes doesn’t really force it to change. Sometimes the system just looks back at you and laughs. This is where this whole issue of stories comes in, because people like stories. You need to tell people a compelling story in order to get them to change their minds. If they feel like, “Oh, the government is just taking care of me and they need to keep secrets in order to keep me safe” then that’s a compelling story. But if you learn that you’ve just been spied on and that somebody’s been chuckling over your personal taste in pornography at the FBI or the NSA, maybe you take a different view of the government. That story then becomes a bit darker. It’s how you tell that story so people say, “Fuck this.”

And the story you’re telling is quite classically structured. It’s a story of two damaged people—Manning and Assange—who, because of their ability with computers, end up possessing a lot of power before having their downfall. Did you see the film as a documentary narrative like that?
Yes. That usually happens during the course of editing. Themes and character arcs begin to emerge over time as you boil down the story. You end up doing what a screenwriter does, which is to make sure things fall in on themselves in a way that reverberates. We decided to start with the WANK worm because it reverberates later on in the Swedish episode. Enron was a heist film, Taxi to the Dark Side was a murder mystery, and this is a spy film.

Thanks, Alex.

More stuff about Assange:

I Sent a Camera to Julian Assange's Embassy Hideout

Julian Assange's TV Party

Everyone Poops but Only Julian Assange Doesn't Flush

@oscarrickettnow

Thumbnail photo on homepage by Flickr user JulieJordanScott

The cover photo on the Kern County Sheriff Department's website is of Sheriff Donny Youngblood riding a chestnut horse and wearing a big straw Stetson. Since the death of David Sal Silva, a 33-year-old father of four, his deputies have become national symbols of the cowboy culture of Bakersfield, California. Silva died in the process of being arrested, and video cameras captured the beating administered to him by law enforcement. Despite this, his death was ruled accidental.

The agency Youngblood works for has been colored as trigger-happy good ol' boys, and they do certainly seem to kill a lot of unarmed people for a county that even encompassing all of Bakersfield, its suburbs, and reaching east across the Sequioua National Forest all the way to Ridgecrest, only counts about 800,000 inhabitants. 

Here is a sketch of what happened, assembled with help from reports by the Bakersfield Californian, interviews, police reports, and through a narrative provided in Silva's autopsy report: Late in the afternoon of May 7, David Sal Silva, 5'11'', 261 pounds and well-known in the area, got in a fight with his longtime girlfriend. This was apparently a common occurrence, or at least the official reports make it seem like he was a violent and abusive partner. There are reasons to wonder about the devotion to the truth possessed by the issuers of those reports.

He seems to have gone out to get fucked up, and then to visit his mother. The coroner's report says that Silva's mother told investigators that his breath was boozy and that she told him to go to Kern Medical Center, a hospital in a mostly poor, immigrant part of town for help.

Silva's mother would later tell reporters from the Bakersfield Californian that she never spoke to investigators, so, make what you will of that, because it's in a signed report signed by, well, whom, exactly? The autopsy report provided to me and the lawyers in the case is redacted, but it's signed by a coroner and a reporting deputy coroner and by five law enforcement officers acting as witnesses to the autopsy, one from the California Highway Patrol and four from the Kern County sheriff's office.

Silva did, in fact, end up at Kern Medical Center, whence he was eventually escorted off the grounds after being found lying in the grass next to a trailer. He then went across the street to the intersection of Palm Drive and Flower Street, where officers from the sheriff's office responded to a call of a "possibly intoxicated man."

According to a timeline given by Sheriff Youngblood, he arrived around midnight. He says he found Silva lying on the ground, and when the deputy tried to wake him by using a "knuckle rub" on Silva's chest, Silva tried to stand up and fell forward, flat on his face.

Youngblood says that Silva then "took a rigid stance"—the word stance in this case actually meaning the exact opposite because Silva seems to have been lying "rigidly" on the ground.

Here is Youngblood's exact description of what happened next: "The deputy attempted to gain control of Mr. Silva, he was unsuccessful, he told Mr. Silva that he was under arrest, to submit to the arrest, or that he would release his dog. He used a remote to release his dog from the car, and the dog engaged Mr. Silva. During this fight the dog bit Mr. Silva several times."

If you're wondering why Silva was being arrested in the first place, you can go ahead and keep wondering, because that's not clear to me either, and it's not clear how a "fight" developed between a deputy using a baton, a police canine, and a man who couldn't stand up.

A second deputy arrived. Both officers kept striking Silva with batons. A third arrived and joined in the striking. The deputies told investigators that while they were striking him, Silva picked up the dog by the neck and that, in Youngblood's words, they could see Silva's "hands closing around the dog's throat."

A minute of this passed. Two California highway-patrol officers joined. They put a device called a "hobble" on Silva's legs, binding them. Two more Kern County sheriff’s deputies arrived. Youngblood said that one of those deputies was a "very, very, very, stout, large deputy, who said he had to use all of his strength to stay on top of those legs and keep them from kicking the deputies." This was taking place on a man in the process of being arrested for no clear reason, facing a seven-on-one (or eight-on-one, if you count the dog) fight, lying on the ground. Two more deputies eventually arrived. At 12:11 AM Silva's body lay facing south on Palm Drive, his upper body on the sidewalk, his legs in the street. He had no pulse. He was taken back across the street to Kern Medical Center, where at 12:44 AM he was pronounced dead.

Photo via opnateye.com

Almost all of this information comes directly from the Kern County Sheriff's Office itself. Sheriff Youngblood said at one point in his press conference on May 23 that "This type of incident is not uncommon in law enforcement across this country. This particular case, and the way that it was handled in the media, sent shockwaves all the way across the United States. Every law-enforcement officer in this country was in question. And I said if you’ll wait and be patient, I’ll tell you the facts as I know them, and that’s what I’m doing today."

Which is exactly the point, of course, because in a sense it doesn't matter whether or not the officers involved here actually violated any departmental protocols or whether or not there was an attempt at a cover-up later. The point is that this level of force was used at all on a man who wasn't hurting anybody and wasn't even capable of standing up. "I will tell you one thing," David Cohn, the lawyer for Silva's family, told me, "if you resist or run from law enforcement in Kern County, you will get it." But that's true of most places, and in a sense, the entire narrative of Bakersfield cowboy deputies' going wild on a poor brown man obscures the fact that this sort of thing can happen in New Orleans or New York or Cincinnati or Miami and on down the line. And perhaps what happened next could happen anywhere, too.

The intersection where Silva died is at the edge of a residential neighborhood of little bungalows and four-plexes, and when I visited, there were people out on porches, chatting and drinking beer. The officers in this case must have known they were being observed, which does lead right back to the rather startling conclusion the Sheriff's Office made itself, which is that the deputies weren't doing anything wrong. The department has proudly pointed to the fact that—at least according to the coroner's report—no deputies violated baton-beating protocol by hitting Silva in the head or neck. This is, in the most generous possible analysis, the rough moral equivalent of shrugging your shoulders and saying "I didn't do anything wrong" after killing a guy who ran a stop sign on his bike.

But at some point the deputies, or the command of the department itself, must have realized it was in trouble. While the beating was still going on, Sulina Quair, the woman who filmed the incident, actually called the Sheriff's Office dispatcher, trying to see if someone could radio to stop the beating. The 911 call is surreal and heartbeaking at the same time, because she's accusing the deputies of the killing to an essentially impassive dispatcher who works for the same boss the deputies work for. "There is a man laying on the floor," Quair says, "and your deputies beat the shit out of him. And killed him. I have it all on video camera. We videotaped the whole thing." There's a pause. "Hold on one second, OK?" the dispatcher says. Eventually they take Quair's number and tell her the desk commander is going to call her back.

Sometime after 3 AM, deputies showed up at Quair's home and asked for the phone with the video on it. Quair refused. They also went to the home of Francisco Arrieta, who also had a video and, according to the Californian, deputies then put on gloves and told him "they could do things the easy way or the hard way." Arrieta had to work the next morning, and he gave up his phone.

Quair left her phone with her mother, who refused to give it up without a search warrant and called a lawyer. The lawyer showed up and deputies actually prevented him from talking privately with the mother or from seeing the phone. A search warrant arrives, and mysteriously includes on it the phone that had already been seized, under duress, from Francisco Arrieta. The video on Quair's phone disappeared. On the video from Arrieta's phone a child's voice can be heard saying, “Why are they doing that? He didn’t do nothing!"

The department then took several obvious steps to make sure everything looked right. They sent the phones to the FBI for analysis, though of what has not been made clear. The FBI won't discuss what they found, if anything, and after awhile the Sheriff’s Office adopted a simple refuse-to-comment policy on the case. Sheriff Youngblood blamed the local media for blowing things out of proportion: "If you take a look at the witness statements in this case, and then look at the evidence, it’s pretty clear that we had a group of witnesses out there that didn’t like law enforcement from the beginning."

On May 23, Youngblood announced that Silva's death had been ruled an accident. He also gave a description of the events leading up to the death and made an effort to describe what sounds in a press conference or even in a newspaper report like an insane array of health problems Silva suffered and the drugs he was on. Youngblood made it seem like it's quite possible that anyone else would have walked away from an incident like this just fine.

The KCSO wouldn’t provide comment to me, but everyone I dealt with there was quite friendly, and all I had to do to get a copy of the autopsy was to call ahead and then to drop by the front desk to pick it up.

The coroner who conducted the autopsy is apparently a contractor who does work for a few California counties. An independent coroner didn’t do the autopsy, because Sheriff Youngblood's official title is "Sheriff Coroner/Public Administrator." So, the coroner—name redacted—may or may not be a full-time Kern County employee, but Kern County still signs his checks. The cause of death is listed as "hypertensive heart disease." Other conditions leading to that death are listed as "acute intoxication" and "severe abdominal obesity," among other things. The manner of death is listed as "accident." How this accident occurred is listed as "substance abuse; sequelae of properly applied restrain procedures."

Sheriff Youngblood made a point, in his press conference, of listing all the various drugs in Silva's system, painting him—as is quite common in instances like this—as intoxicated to the point of madness and superhuman strength: "Toxicology shows that Mr. Silva had in his system amphetamine, methamphetamine, a blood-alcohol content of .095, clonazepam, and in his pocket several hydrocodone, vicodin, and Soma pills.”

Exclude the hydrocodone, vicodin, and Soma straightaway, because those weren't actually in Silva's system. His blood-alcohol content was .095, which, in a newspaper or local news story—as any cop who deals with the media well knows—just gets reported as ".095, over the legal driving limit," or something along those lines. Because news organizations aren't in a position to say "he was drunk," or he'd had a couple drinks. But the latter is probably closest to the truth: .095 is barely over the legal driving limit in California; pass-out drunk is usually about three times this concentration.

The clonazepam is Klonopin. A level 50 times higher than the one present in Silva's blood is associated with the possibility of "drowsiness," according to the report. The "amphetamines" were Adderall or dexedrine, and the 30 nanograms per milliliter that were present in his blood were—according to the coroner's own report—less than half of what you would expect peak blood concentration to be two hours after a ten-milligram dose. And ten milligrams of Adderall is not even taking Adderall. It's the dust at the bottom of the pill bottle. It's what they prescribe to preschoolers. So the fact that they were "in his system" is sort of hard to find worth repeating at a press conference.

That leaves the meth, which Youngblood used as the most likely drug to have caused Silva to "behave erratically." It was present at a level of .21 milligrams per milliliter. That is also on the extreme low end of that which the toxicologist reports as being likely to cause "violent and irrational behavior."

This leaves open the possibility that he was still totally fucked up and that he genuinely did exhibit superhuman meth-fiend strength, after falling asleep and trying to stand and failing. But one would think that it was part of the job for deputies in California to know how to handle a guy on meth, without any prior record of violence. 

So instead of saying "this guy might still have been high on meth he took a while ago," we have a meth-headed maniac on a cocktail of legal and illegal drugs. It's character destruction through toxicology. When the coroner's findings were released, Youngblood made a double appeal, suggesting first that the FBI and the local district attorney were looking into things and then arguing against a civilian oversight panel: "This case personifies exactly why a citizen review board is not a good idea. I, as the sheriff, deal in facts, deal in law, deal in policy. We don’t deal in emotion. The public deals in emotion. The media controls the public’s emotion, we’ve seen that."

After meeting with the lawyer for Silva's family I drove around until I found the spot where he'd been beaten. We thought that he'd appreciate it—if what they said about him liking a drink was true—if we poured one out for him. So I got a beer, took a few swigs, and poured some out at the base of the stop sign that's now covered with taped-up cards and stuffed animals and photographs, and I left another in brown bag on a bench nearby, which I thought Silva and whoever might find and drink a free Simpler Times lager might enjoy. Two teenagers on a balcony overlooking the exact spot where he was beaten watched me quizzically. It was dark. I waved to them and asked if they'd known Silva. They said that they'd been told not to talk to journalists, which I said was fair. One of the cards read, in gold letters, "At this sad time," and continued in pencil, "my beloved baby you are in heaven!!!"

More about police brutality on VICE:

We'll Need to See Some ID, Officer

Istanbul Police Tear-Gassed a Memorial March This Weekend

The Underachievers Talk About Stop-and-Frisk and Kimani Gray

The byline for this article is a pseudonym.

Cry-Baby #1: Jason Marin

image via/story via

The incident: A man received a text message from his neighbor asking him to turn his music down. 

The appropriate response: Depending on the time of day and volume of the music, either reducing the volume or saying "no."

The actual response: He allegedly attempted to bite off his neighbor's penis. 

Late last month, 39-year-old Dover, England resident Richard Henderson became annoyed at the loud music coming from the apartment of his neighbor, 41-year-old Jason Martin.

He sent Jason a text message, telling him it was too loud. 

According to Richard, Jason then knocked on the door to confront him about sending the text.

Describing what happened next to Canterbury Crown Court, prosecutor Mary Jacobson said, "A verbal altercation ensued, which culminated in the defendant reaching around Mr. Henderson’s back with one hand and grabbing him by the crotch—his penis and testicles—with the other hand and then pulling Mr. Henderson out of his doorway." Adding, "Once out of the flat a scuffle ensued during which the defendant pushed Mr. Henderson against a wall, stooped down and bit into and gnawed at, Mr. Henderson’s penis.'

A neighbor heard Richard's screams and came out to try and help. She attempted to pull Jason's face away from Richard's crotch, but was unable to do so. A second neighbor, who had also heard the screams, came out and managed to separate them. 

When police arrived at the scene, they found Jason "with blood over his mouth."

When asked by a jury to describe the attack, Richard said, "my willy was not attached to the rest of my body. I have never experienced that kind of pain to this day and I don't want to experience it ever again."

Jason, however, denies the alleged dick-biting, saying "How could I bite him? I have no teeth."

image via/via 

The incident: Singer Pharrell Williams launched a Youtube channel called "i am OTHER."

The appropriate response: Watching it/not watching it. Depending on your tastes.

The actual response: will.i.am is attempting to sue Pharrell, because he was using the term "I am" first. 

Last week, will.i.am filed a notice of opposition against Pharrell's company, i am OTHER claiming that he had legal ownership of the term "I am."

In documents obtained by Rolling Stone, will.i.am's legal team said that Pharrell would be using his "i am OTHER" logo in a similar way to how will.i.am uses his own "I AM" logo. "The registration of the mark . . . is likely to dilute the I AM mark and the WILL.I.AM mark," the document reads.

In a statement to Rolling Stone, Pharrell said, "I am disappointed that Will, a fellow artist, would file a case against me. I am someone who likes to talk things out and, in fact, I attempted to do just that on many occasions. I am surprised in how this is being handled and I am confident that Will's trademark claims will ultimately be found to be as meritless and ridiculous as I do."

Pharrell went on to countersue, claiming that his use of the term "I am" is "markedly different" to will.i.am's use. 

The term "I am " has previously been used by the movie I Am Legend, the songs "I Am the Walrus" and "I Am What I Am," as well as the the young adult book series I Am Number Four. Additionally, it is commonly used by every single person who has spoken English ever. And probably by people who speak other languages, too. 

The trial continues. 

Which of these fools is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this little poll thing:

Previously: Some cops who arrested a kid over chalk graffiti vs. Some cops who arrested a kid over a Facebook comment

Last week's winner: The chalk ones!!!

@JLCT