On the convention floor, Detroit, 1980. Photo via Landov

"Ronald Reagan and the conceptual auto disaster. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (G.P.I.), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear-trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic character surrounded the image of the Presidential contender. Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan's head of the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities. In 82 per cent of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed faecal matter and rectal haemorrhages. Further tests were conducted to define the optimum model-year. These indicate that a three-year model lapse with child victims provide the maximum audience excitation (confirmed by manufacturers' studies of the optimum auto-disaster.) It is hoped to construct a rectal modulus of Reagan and the auto-disaster of maximized audience arousal."

So began J.G. Ballard's short fiction, "Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan," a remarkable and remarkably prescient piece written in 1967, 13 years prior to Reagan's nomination as his party's candidate for president at the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit. His running mate was a former congressman from Texas and one-time director of the Central Intelligence Agency named George H. W. Bush. They ran on the theme, "Make America Great Again," and won by a landslide, in large part due to a crumbling US economy—the national debt was nearing a trillion dollars—as well as the ongoing Iran hostage crisis, walloping the incumbent Jimmy Carter with 489 Electoral College votes to his measly 49. Of course, by the time Reagan left office the national debt had tripled to almost $3 trillion.

As we look back to that moment, it's worth noting that just three days before voters went to the polls the National Rifle Association gave its endorsement to Reagan, marking the organization’s first time backing a presidential candidate. Little more than three months into his first term, an attempt would be made on Reagan's life by John Hinckley, Jr., a young man obsessed with Jodie Foster, already famous at 14 for her portrayal of Iris, a child prostitute in Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver. Having seen the movie more than a dozen times, Hinckley identified with Robert De Niro's character, Travis Bickle, a former marine and Vietnam vet who tries to save Iris and plans to assassinate a U.S. senator. Hinckley was intent on impressing Foster, whom he had stalked and sent numerous letters to, one of which closed, "Hang onto my dream and we will fly to the netherworld of happiness." He purchased a .22-caliber revolver in a pawnshop on Elm Street in Dallas—the same street as the Texas School Book Depository—and went on to meet his fate in Washington. In retrospect, and offering no regrets, he would describe his attempt on the president as "the greatest love offering in the history of the world."

Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver, 1976. John Hinckley, Jr. postcard to Foster, 2/15/81

The incident is a dramatic example of how, frame-by-frame, Reagan's political life, beginning with his governorship of California, would be filtered through a cinematic lens. This is perhaps because his very mentality was based on filmic memory, a lens through which the world can only be understood as a sequence of illusions. Unlike paintings and dreams, movies are diversions of make-believe. They exist in the realm of the unreal, offering brief escape from the cold, hard facts of the everyday. What the audience sees onscreen always supersedes the mechanism of its creation, from the script to the editing room, the collage-like piecing together of perceived reality. Reagan was well aware that reality exists as so much malleable matter, and was thus able to transition almost effortlessly from a career in movies, television, and advertising, to political life—worlds of artifice and persuasion that, as he helped us to understand, are forever intertwined.

In his presidential bid, Reagan also received the support of PATCO, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, a union he would go on to break. Today, you could fly from Ronald Reagan Airport in Washington, DC to Detroit, which recently earned the distinction of being the largest city to declare bankruptcy in American history. The Joe Louis Arena, where the 1980 convention was held, will soon be replaced by a new home for the Detroit Red Wings. The arena may cost strapped taxpayers in excess of $400 million, and at a time when some officials have suggested selling off the holdings of the city's museum to satisfy a long line of creditors. Christy’s auction house was hired to appraise selected works that were purchased by the city (as opposed to donated pieces), and estimated they would fetch between $452 and $866 million, a drop in the bucket when one considers Detroit’s $18 billion debt.

The collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts is one of the most important in the country. It encompasses antiquity and modern art, including canvases by masters such as Bruegel, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Caravaggio, and van Gogh, with works by Willem de Kooning, Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, and Francis Bacon among its contemporary holdings. The recent auction record set for a Bacon triptych at $142 million must have given city officials pause for thought. After all, who needs an old crusty painting when you can go to a hockey game in a brand new arena?

The museum also boasts Detroit Industry, a series of wall paintings created between 1932-33 by the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Sponsored by the Ford Motor Company on the initiative of Edsel Ford, the only son of the company's founder, the murals were controversial for their content—primarily because of figures that were racially integrated, though an accurate reflection of the city's diverse workforce—and for the fact that the commission was awarded to a Mexican painter rather than an American. Rivera, in a sense, was seen as an illegal alien artist.

Rivera's mural celebrated the major role that the city's workforce played in America's technological achievements, literally helping to set it on the road to recovery against the backdrop of the Great Depression, when unemployment soared as high as 25 percent. At the dawn of the 80s, when Reagan took office and a once great company like Ford had hit the skids, gas guzzlers ruled the road. The Ford Ranchero, which last rolled off the assembly line in 1979, got 12 city miles to the Saudi gallon, and 15 out on the range, as the country ran on fumes.

The current jobless rate in Detroit is over 16 percent, and in Washington it’s almost 10 percent. While the median price of a single-family home in DC is around $800,000, according to the Daily News there are hundreds of fixer-uppers in Detroit selling for under $5,000. And a Warhol canvas from the museum in Detroit? Will it one day be hung in an apartment in Dubai? These are but a few of the pitiable legacies of Reagonomics, and so much for making America great again. As for Jimmy Carter's endorsements in the 1980 election, even Ben Affleck could tell you that he might as well have been backed by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

A Cinematic Dystopia

So how is it that Ballard came to imagine Reagan as a presidential candidate more than a dozen years in advance? Though best known for Empire of the Sun, which was turned into a film by Steven Spielberg, Ballard is more highly regarded for his 1973 cult novel Crash (published four years earlier as a short story titled "Crash!"). Long considered unfilmable, it was produced by Harley Cokeliss as a film text in 1971, narrated by and featuring its author, and brought to the big screen by David Cronenberg in 1996, starring James Spader and Rosanna Arquette. Succinctly described by John Waters as being "about people that are erotically turned on by car accidents, and they fuck and have car accidents through the whole movie," the dispassionately grotesque contours of Ballard's narrative prefigure the porno-forensic articulation of "Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan."

But the answer to the author's prescience can be found in the moment of the text's creation, 1967, not long after Reagan became Governor of California, an office he would hold for eight years. Reagan, a former B-movie actor, would have appealed to Ballard as the very locus and absurdity of celebrity culture in a troubling, convulsive time. In focusing on him alongside some of the most iconic figures in this period, Ballard overlays the military-industrial complex with its Hollywood counterpart, the entertainment-industrial complex. (One can only imagine the author's complete lack of surprise when, in 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California. Moreover, had he not been Austrian by birth, one wonders if, like his predecessor, the former body builder may have easily carried on from "governator" to president.)

By the time Ballard arrived at Reagan as a subject worthy of psycho-sexual/political dissection, he had already published the stories that form a trilogy of experimental fiction which investigates the celebrity death-drive of the 60s. Comprised of "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe," "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," and "Plan For the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy," and all dating from 1966, they appeared, along with "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan," in Ballard's collection, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). Within the book, the Reagan text had as its protective shield the genre of science fiction, a designation the author himself would have rejected, having asserted, with his usual clarity of vision, that "Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire."

After being issued in England as a stand-alone booklet, the Reagan text was open to attack and became the subject of an obscenity trial, with its publisher, Bill Butler, duly brought before the magistrate. When Ballard was interviewed by Butler's defense lawyer, happily conceding that his piece was intended to offend, the author was told that he would make an excellent witness—for the prosecution. Upon the book's imminent American appearance, Doubleday was compelled to destroy almost the entire first edition. Some speculate that as few as ten copies survived.

In something of an implausible act of revenge, though one which took a dozen years to extract, a number of still-unknown former Situationists got hold of letterhead stamped with the seal of the Republican National Committee, upon which they printed Ballard's Reagan text, replaced his offending title with the innocuous, "Official Republican 1980 Presidential Survey," and managed to distribute copies to delegates on the convention floor in Detroit, one of the most audacious acts of political theater in our time.

What must the attendees have thought when they read:

"Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homoerotic behavior."

Reagan, who would ignore the AIDS crisis until nearing the end of his second term—more than six years after its initial discovery and in the wake of 20,000 deaths—was the first and only president to register blind indifference in the face of a national health disaster. Reagan, our only divorced president, a delinquent father who was estranged from various children in his lifetime, who courted the Christian right but never went to church regularly in Washington, would wonder: "maybe the Lord brought down this plague" because "illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments."

What did bewildered delegates think when Reagan was compared to the most evil, reviled figure of the 20th century, with our most disgraced president thrown in for good measure, and in wholly unsavory terms suggesting our entwined fear, fascination, and complicity?

"The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon) … Parallel films of rectal images revealed a sharp upsurge in anti-Semitic and concentration camp fantasies (cf., anal-sadistic fantasies in deprived children induced by rectal stimulation.)"  

Surely they were shocked by the vulgarity and the repeated references to children as victims. And yet Ballard somehow foresaw that Reagan would one day serve not only as president, but as a pivotal cause of deprivation and death among American children. Corresponding to the growth of unemployment under his administration was the loss of medical insurance. How many of those delegates cheering in the arena for their candidate in 1980 would find themselves, within a year of Reagan's election, out of a job and with no health benefits as unemployment in Michigan rose to become the highest in the country? And alongside the rise in unemployment came a sharp increase in infant mortality. Under Reagan, as Howard Zinn writes in A People's History of The United States, "New requirements eliminated free school lunches for more than one million poor children, who depended on the meal for as much as half of their daily nutrition. Millions of children entered the ranks of the officially declared 'poor' and soon a quarter of the nation's children—twelve million—were living in poverty. In parts of Detroit, one-third of the children were dying before their first birthday."

Reagan, who in a 1964 televised speech had joked: "We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet." And who two years later referred to unemployment insurance as "a prepaid vacation for freeloaders." Twenty years later, when he was president, Reagan appeared on Good Morning America and attempted to defend his callous disregard for the increasing phenomenon of destitute Americans, people with no roofs over their heads and no safety net to protect them. Reagan claimed, "What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice."

L: Ronald Reagan speaks out. R: Homeless in the USA.

Back in Detroit, how far the jaws of Republican delegates must have dropped when they encountered evermore disturbing scenarios in Ballard's text:

"Vaginal intercourse with 'Reagan' proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2 percent of subjects. … The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. … Multiple-track cine films were constructed of 'Reagan' in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims."

Talk about bringing the war home. But Reagan had already done that himself as governor of California when he set the National Guard loose on demonstrators at San Francisco State University in 1967, where he was labeled "The Fascist Gun in the West." Reagan, who had glibly admitted to having been a C student at best, not only believed in asserting his full authority and silencing dissent, but may have been motivated by feelings of intellectual inferiority combined with greater political ambition. (Running for President in 1980, he famously weighed in on government assistance for higher education by asking, "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?")

At UC, Berkeley in 1969—which Reagan characterized as "a haven for communist sympathizers … and sex deviants"—his true nature asserted itself in a devious game of entrapment. Students who had been allowed to assemble in a campus quad were blocked from leaving and, as if in a scene from Apocalypse Now, were tear-gassed from helicopters that circled ominously above.

Reagan's bitter hostility toward those who availed themselves of publicly funded higher education (‘copters never descended upon Stanford) is easy to understand in retrospect. Not only was the state paying the bill while the students questioned its very authority, but every student was one less body to enter the army and/or low-paid workforce. On behalf of the wealthy investors who backed Reagan in politics, and expected returns on that investment, as governor, and later as president, he would wage nothing less than class war, beginning in the classroom.

On May 15 of 1969, a day later referred to as "Bloody Thursday," Reagan’s chief of staff, Ed Meese, sent California Highway Patrol and police to chase down thousands of protestors at People's Park in Berkeley. The authorities shot demonstrators in the backs with buckshot, and some bystanders were hit with shotgun rounds. A 25-year-old student, James Rector, watching from the roof of the Telegraph Cinema, was hit in the chest and died four days later. Alan Blanchard, shot in the face at point-blank range with birdshot, was permanently blinded. (A number of photographs taken that day are credited to Kathryn Bigelow—one and the same as the director of the films Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker?) Less than a year would pass before Reagan offered a final word on student unrest when, on April 7, 1970, he chillingly announced, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with. No more appeasement."

Reagan's words would serve as a declaration of war against Americans who sought to exercise their rights to assembly and free speech. (Deputy Attorney General "Buck" Compton, who Reagan appointed as an associate justice of the California Court of Appeal in 1970, dismissively insisted at the time that “free speech, civil rights, [and] rights to assembly have all become “clichés.”) With Reagan's implicit blessing, it was open season on dissenting students, and the governors of at least two other states—Jim Rhodes of Ohio, and John Bell Williams, the openly racist governor of Mississippi—heard him loud and clear.

L: National Guard at Kent State, May 4, 1970. R: The bullet-riddled dorm at Jackson State, May 15, 1970. Photo courtesy Jackson State University

Within a month, on May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen had fired on protestors at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four unarmed students, and wounding nine others. Eleven days later, on the campus of Jackson State, a black college in Jackson, Mississippi, two students were killed and 12 injured by police who fired in excess of 150 rounds, mostly into a women's dorm building. The tragic events at Kent continue to overshadow those at Jackson, where students were not protesting the war, but instead railing against the abusive, racist environment that they were subjected to on a daily basis. In 1970, civil rights in the South was still literally under fire. Reagan himself freely admitted in a 1966 interview with the Los Angeles Times, "I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

The challenge for segregationists, particularly in reaction to the black power movement, was to devise new ways of keeping black people in their place, to never let them forget just who was in charge. It was no great stretch for them to see that if you can get away with shooting white students in the Midwest, nothing much stands in the way of shooting black students in the Deep South. After the incident in Jackson, wounded students were left lying on the ground for 20 minutes before ambulances were summoned, while police calmly collected their spent shell casings.

L: Ronald Reagan in Death Valley Days, photo via AP. R: Aiding an injured student at Kent, photo courtesy Kent State University

Rather than silence dissent, these assaults, clearly intended to serve as a brutal deterrent, may have had quite the opposite effect. The incidents shocked the country, calling even greater attention to the war at home and prompting millions of students and faculty to strike, forcing the shutdown of their high schools, colleges, and universities. Who can say how many, until then watching from the sidelines, were suddenly politicized? In a song written in response to Kent State, Neil Young began, "Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we're finally on our own / This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio." He might just as well have written: "Tin soldiers and Reagan coming."

Rather than facing blame for inciting what amounted to state-sanctioned murder, Ronald Reagan was eventually propelled toward the White House. In the 1968 words of Ballard, "The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years."

Supply-Side Entertainment

Four months prior to the shootings at Kent, the artist Robert Smithson had created an earthwork on the campus titled Partially Buried Woodshed, not far from the bloody scene. Created by piling dirt upon the roof of an old utility shed until its support beam cracked, the work would later be seen as a memorial to the students shot down there, a symbol of the war waged against free speech and its internment. A year later in his essay, "A Cinematic Atopia," Smithson wrote: "Somewhere, at the bottom of my memory are the sunken remains of all the films I have seen, good and bad; they swarm together forming cinematic mirages, stagnant pools of images that cancel each other out." He might have been speaking, in a mental leap forward, of Reagan's own entropic mind and its eventual collapse.

At the 1980 Republican Convention, delegates had to confront images in the Reagan text that were simultaneously offensive, horrific, and banal, and were implicated in their revulsion:

"Studies were conducted on the marked fascination exercised by the Presidential contender's hair style. 65 per cent of male subjects made positive connections between the hair-style and their own pubic hair. A series of optimum hair-styles were constructed."

And more shocking to the senses:

"The genitalia of the Presidential contender exercised a continuing fascination. A series of imaginary genitalia were constructed using (a) the mouth-parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, (b) a Cadillac rear-exhaust vent, (c) the assembly kit prepuce of President Johnson, and (d) a child-victim of sexual assault. In 89 per cent of cases, the constructed genitalia generated a high incidence of self-induced orgasm."

Here, we can't help but be reminded of one of Reagan's most famous remarks, made at the beginning of his political life, although it turned out to be less than prophetic for his own trajectory: “Politics is just like show business. You need a big opening. Then you coast for a while. Then you need a big finish.”

Those days seem both long ago and not so far away. The smoke has cleared but the mirrors remain. In the Reagan text, with his calmly measured, forensic language, Ballard comes firmly to grips with both the superficiality of the man and the general public's inability to penetrate its surface, desiring but denied, consuming and being consumed by the cine-spectacle of violence and its graphic undertow. This is the dual fantasy/fiction that Ballard saw as invading everyday life in the 60s, which he exaggerated to view more clearly. This is the fantasyland that was exploited by the Reaganites, who reshaped America into the theme park that it is today. But it's not so easy to say, "That was then," as if the past somehow can't haunt us if we refuse to be spooked. Gore Vidal's acerbic construction was never more true: The United States of Amnesia.

The fact that many of us willingly create and delete our own fictions, endless surfaces that are reflectively opaque, raises a leading question. If you can never see what's on the other side of the black mirror, is anything actually there? The illusion of choice, and thus of free will, is today most effectively compressed in a handheld device, where a vast array of information is at our fingertips while the world is kept at arm's length. Regular doses of avoidance/diversion, supremely banal forms of self-repression, are not only self-administered, but we pay for the privilege. That dissent remains alive is the only hopeful sign, even in a time when dissent is once again the single greatest trigger for greater social control.

We all—including the president—have our parts to play, but Ballard injects his own particular dose of reality into the equation when he suggests that it probably doesn't matter who occupies the Oval Office. "He is," Ballard asserts, "merely the Chairman of the Board. The President of the United States bears about as much relationship to the business of running America as does Colonel Sanders to the business of frying chicken. He is a warm, reassuring smile on the packaging." Ballard concludes that America has had "great, great presidents as well as corrupt presidents, and I think in the case of some, almost the same man." To which we might add: every president is an outlier, but not an out-and-out liar.      

"Fragments of Reagan's cinetized posture were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counsellor, etc. The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the non-functional character of Reagan. Reagan's success therefore indicates society's periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which re-formulate the roles of aggression and anality."

Movies provided a means for Reagan to connect to reality, particularly as his grasp became less firm, and as the past took on greater presence for him than the moment in which he stood. But would it also possess a significant believability?

In her book, Way Out There In the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, Frances Fitzgerald tells us how the President most likely conceived of missile defense, without any help from NASA or the Pentagon, or any scientific proof, but directly from his personal recollection of the movies.

"In 1940, appearing in the Warner Brothers thriller Murder in the Air, Reagan played an American secret agent charged with protecting a super weapon that could strike all enemy planes from the air. Seed planted in Reagan's brain. Then in 1966, Alfred Hitchcock released a Reagan favorite, Torn Curtain, in which American agent Paul Newman works on developing an anti-missile missile. In words that must have made Ronnie tingle, Newman's character asserts: 'We will produce a defensive weapon that will make all nuclear weapons obsolete, and thereby abolish the terror of nuclear warfare.' Sound familiar? Reagan used almost the exact words in selling missile defense from the office, 17 years later."

Looking back on Reagan in the introduction to the 1990 edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard remarked:

"Ronald Reagan's presidency remained a complete mystery to most Europeans, though I noticed that Americans took him far more easily in their stride. But the amiable old duffer who occupied the White House was a very different person from the often sinister figure I described in 1967 ... The then-novelty of a Hollywood film star entering politics and becoming governor of California gave Reagan considerable air time on British TV. Watching his right-wing speeches, in which he castigated in sneering tones the profligate, welfare-spending, bureaucrat-infested state government, I saw a more crude and ambitious figure, far closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the 1964 movie, The Killers, his last Hollywood role. In his commercials Reagan used the smooth, teleprompter-perfect tones of the TV auto-salesman to project a political message that was absolutely the reverse of bland and reassuring. A complete discontinuity existed between Reagan's manner and body language, on the one hand, and his scarily simplistic far-right message on the other. Above all, it struck me that Reagan was the first politician to exploit the fact that his TV audience would not be listening too closely, if at all, to what he was saying, and indeed might well assume from his manner and presentation that he was saying the exact opposite of the words actually emerging from his mouth. Though the man himself mellowed, his later presidency seems to have run the same formula."

Death Valley Days

Within two years of leaving office, Alzheimer's had overtaken Reagan’s mind. When he went for a walk in the park near his home, he always had a Secret Service agent to accompany him, although that would have been the case regardless. Rumor has it that, on occasion, after being greeted by a well-wisher who was cautiously allowed to approach, Reagan would mention to the agent, beaming with a sense of satisfaction, "They still remember me from my movies," without the slightest recollection that he had at one time been President of the United States. While this is a disease that is so particularly cruel, how many of us can't help but think of Alzheimer's—particularly with his callous indifference to AIDS, the poor, and his general lack of compassion—as the man's divine retribution?

The Air Force One Pavilion at the Ronald Reagan Library.

If you happen to visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California, there is one display that is sure to stand out: a Röhm RG-14 revolver, identical to the one used by John Hinckley, Jr. on March 30, 1981, complete with a set of bullets, though perhaps not including the one that punctured his lung. It is there to remind us of his Teflon armor, for on that day the president, codenamed "Rawhide" by the Secret Service, was not wearing a bullet-proof vest. That he survived the attempt is a key piece of a puzzle, "the Reagan mystique," that remains incomplete. As Reagan famously asked in one of his movies, eyes wide in panicked disbelief, "Where's the rest of me?"

Most American presidents are preoccupied with their legacies—many while still in office—and yet there Reagan was, in his not-so-golden twilight, perhaps never for a moment showing the least bit of concern for his own. No longer aware of why he was recognized those days in the park, or that he had once been shot and came so close to death, the essential fact of who he was had been lost to the man himself. While many tend carefully to Reagan's legacy, it is in the end a last will and testament of sorts, with claimants and relations estranged, and it can only be forever contested.

Although we are often told not to speak ill of the dead, doesn't this really depend on the body in question and what's at stake? For even in death Reagan continues to pose a threat to the well being of this country, and by extension the rest of the world. Ronald Reagan is gone yet lives on, partially buried, perpetually exhumed, no matter how many nails are driven into his memory-coffin. Why, then, write anything else? Even an obituary to an obituary? The fact that Reagan is a hero to the neo-cons who are invested in his ongoing deification should be reason enough, with praise flowing from all sides, even from our current chairman of the board. But there's more, and it takes us back to the period in which Ballard wrote the Reagan text, to the winter of 1967-68, surely a winter of discontent. It was then, as reported verbatim by History Commons, that civil disturbance plans were set into motion at the Pentagon.

“In the wake of anti-war demonstrations and urban rioting in several US cities, the Pentagon establishes a set of civil disturbance plans designed to put down political protests and civil unrest. Conducted under the codename Operation Garden Plot, the new program significantly increases the role of the military in training for and intervening in social uprisings. The Pentagon develops contingency plans for every city considered to have potential for uprisings by students, minorities, or labor unions. ... Operation Cable Splicer, for instance, covers the states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona. Each region will conduct exercises and war games to practice and develop its individual plans. To oversee the operations, the Pentagon establishes the Directorate of Civil Disturbance and Planning Operations. The directorate will operate from the basement of the Pentagon in what becomes known as the 'domestic war room.'”

February 10, 1969:

California Governor Ronald Reagan, along with a variety of other local, state, and federal officials, kicks off a regional exercise known as Cable Splicer II at the Governor’s Orientation Conference. … Governor Reagan addresses an audience of approximately 500 Army officials and troops, local and state police officers, military intelligence personnel, private executives, and state legislators. “You know,” he says, “there are people in the state who, if they could see this gathering right now and my presence here, would decide that their worst fears and convictions had been realized—I was planning a military takeover.”

In other words, a coup d'etat in these United States, or laying the groundwork for the bloodiest of Westerns, a far greater and more terrifying fiction than even Ballard might have imagined. The fact that he foresaw where Reagan might end up, that he was able to conceive that narrative in 1967, is because Ballard clearly saw where America was heading. As the governor of California, Reagan probably couldn't have been elected president. Not only was he still too close to Hollywood and to his betrayals there, he was simply too volatile and too ruthless—cast in stone as the "tough guy" when he auditioned for top billing—he was too far from the softer, folksy, grandfatherly part he would later accept. After all, what plays on a small stage in a turbulent time doesn't translate well to a bigger arena once a sense of innocence has been forever lost.

Reagan came from the West, the last refuge of the outlaw and murderous expansion, of heroic violence in America. JFK had been shot in Dallas, and RFK not far from the Hollywood sign. These were productions that could only have been staged in the West. So too were the attempts on the life of Jerry Ford. The attempt on Reagan's life, just blocks from the White House, was a visible sign that he had brought the cinematic Wild West with him, a shooting that was filmed for all to see. And just like in the movies, the star survives.

That certain persons in 1980 took Ballard's text and dropped it upon unsuspecting delegates at the 1980 Republican convention remains remarkably unparalleled, for a more plausible incendiary device has never been so brilliantly set off. If only one of those operatives would come forward now, to let us know how the mission was planned and accomplished, how the "official report" was received, and what really happened that day. After all, enough time has passed, and was this really anything more than criminal mischief? Where the presidential contender was concerned, his crimes and sins had been committed long before, although there were so many more to come.

Terri-Jean and one of her pals. via Facebook.

The viciously-debated Terri-Jean Bedford Supreme Court decision will be revealed tomorrow, but some Canadian sex workers are saying that even if all three of the laws challenged as unconstitutional are struck down, their work life will remain riddled with problems.

To be more specific: the laws will still be utterly racist and classist, and they will continue to fail at protecting women who work in the industry. They will also, effectively, keep many forms of sex work illegal—even though having sex for money is technically not against the law in Canada.

To provide you with a recap of what this decision is about, Terri Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch and Valerie Scott challenged Canada’s “prostitution” laws (government’s word, not mine), on the basis that their rights were violated under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, they challenged the fact that it is unlawful in this country to operate a “common bawdy house” (shows what era we’re living in here—the Wife of Bath sends her regrets), live on the avails of “prostitution,” (making it difficult to impossible for many sex workers to hire managers, drivers and security personnel), or communicate in public for the purpose of “prostitution.” These new policies will make it extremely difficult for sex workers to find clients.

Initially the court agreed with Bedford, and Justice Susan Himel struck down all three laws. The government appealed, and in 2011, the Ontario Superior Court issued a mixed ruling—to live on the avails was decriminalized, except in “cases of exploitation”—a clause that is too subjective, according to sex workers I’ve spoken with. Communicating for the purpose of “prostitution” remains illegal—which is another very vague ruling. Both sides appealed the decision, and the Supreme Court of Canada heard the case in June.

So, what does race have to do with this decision? Sex workers say these laws are racist because they negatively affect those who live and work on the street, and often, those workers are the ones who are already marginalized in some other way. Monica Forrester, a trans sex worker with 25 years of experience, explains the inherent racism woven into our laws surrounding sex work in such a way that makes it difficult to misconstrue.

“Who benefits from these laws if they are changed? Gender, race, and class play a big role.”

The answer to Forrester’s question became clearer to me as we spoke about these issues. The people who stand to benefit from these new laws are largely those who already operate from a privileged position in the industry—i.e. those who can afford to live and work indoors in the first place. Immigrants, “people of colour,” people who live and work on the street, HIV sufferers, and trans people likely will not benefit, just as they are not benefitting now.

“As much as it’s empowering to see these things challenged—and hopefully changes are made—at the same time, what does it look like for the whole community? That’s the scary part.”

“We have to make sure that the marginalized groups are not misrepresented. The marginalized people that don’t have a voice, that are silenced. They are the most affected by the laws, by lack of services.” Basically, women working indoors with high priced escort services, for example, are not visible, so they are not often penalized. And women on the streets become the scapegoats.

Brazen Lee, another sex worker operating out of a major Canadian city, agrees with Forrester’s analysis that the laws will remain racist, no matter what happens on Friday. Lee has white skin, and works indoors. And from what she’s seen of the industry over the last five years or so, most sex workers who work indoors are white. And a much greater proportion who work outdoors are not.

“This is a great start, but this is not enough. At the end of the day, the most vulnerable people in the community are still the most vulnerable.”

She is careful to note that she does not mean vulnerable in a “needs to be rescued” sense, but in a “has fewer resources and is marginalized by society” sense. 

At the same time, the situation as it stands is not exactly ideal for indoor sex workers, either. Naomi Sayers, a former sex worker I spoke with, makes that clear.

“When I was working, I did not feel safe nor was I safe. I had to commit criminal acts in order to be safe, and this is coming from my experiences as indoor sex workers… For those that work outdoors, nothing has changed if the laws don’t change.”

Curiously, the major argument many people dream up for sticking with the status quo when it comes to these laws (other than “I think it’s morally wrong,” which isn’t worth addressing), is that many women are in the industry against their will, either through trafficking or sheer desperation. Many, like Meghan Murphy did last week for VICE, will argue that decriminalizing prostitution may not be the answer.

Brazen Lee says that in order to have this conversation properly, and in a way that actually benefits someone, people need to learn to differentiate between trafficking and sex work. The former is clearly never good, while the latter is a nuanced realm through which many workers derive satisfaction—and yes, the means for survival. Her message to the naysayers is that the best way to help the women who don’t want to be in the industry is to decriminalize.

“There are a lot of people in a lot of industries. We don’t try to save bankers on Bay Street. The best way to deal with [people who don’t want to be in the industry] is to decriminalize sex work, and the people who don’t want to be doing it will have an easier time getting out, because they won’t have to worry about going to the police or an agency and being [penalized] for their work.”

Sex workers who choose to work in the industry are both bored and irritated by outside voices telling them that what they do is problematic. Often, these are white women operating under the guise of feminism, and who have never been involved in sex work.

via Facebook.

“There are a lot of misconceptions about how sex work is inherently violent or degrading. It is not,” says Sayers. “In fact, how the laws are set up allows violence to exist. When people who speak for the community (yet don’t have any experience as a sex worker), they tend to appeal to the most extreme cases of exploitation or victimization.

“This is problematic because these are the stories that receive the most media attention. It contributes to the moral panic that these moral entrepreneurs wish to feed into. It also silences and ignores the voices of those who have direct experience and who are currently working as sex workers.”

Forrester says that on the vast majority of days, her job is just a job, like any other.

It’s frustrating that there are no solid statistics to work with when it comes to how many sex workers there are in Canada. It would be great to offer an actual number of humans impacted by these laws, but because the laws are such that it is dangerous for sex workers to organize, unionize, or even publicly run a business, they do not widely report their profession. As such, the number of Canadian sex workers remains virtually unknown. Forrester estimates that there are thousands in Toronto. Maggie’s: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project, says the most they can say is that there are thousands in Canada.

All we can do is listen to the members of this community who are willing to share their experiences, and to advocacy organizations. The laws, according to sex workers, do not treat people equally now, and they will not even if the laws are struck down. Maggie’s: The Toronto Sex Workers Action Project puts it succinctly:

“Sex work is real work and we demand fair and safe working conditions for all of us, including those without status. We stand against the exploitation of all workers and legislation that advances the precarity of labour and creates vulnerability to exploitation,” Maggie’s said in a release explaining the impact of these laws on sex workers, most notably, Indigenous sex workers.

“It is the nature of the system to over-police but under-protect certain communities, and criminalizing any aspect of the sex industry will put more poor and working-class racialized people behind bars—sex workers, clients and third parties such as management and security.”

(For even more context of the laws, see this primer created by Stella.)

Forrester, one of the women most affected by the laws, identifies as a “woman of colour” herself—she is Black and Indigenous—and she knows firsthand that racism is still very much alive in her industry, as in so many others. But in sex work, that prejudice is much more visible than, say, an office environment, where it may manifest itself in an inappropriate comment behind someone else’s back. In sex work, it manifests itself in arrests, incarceration.

Lee works indoors, and she says the worst that might happen to her is that someone could notice her work and call the cops.

“If you work on the street, you’re more likely to get raped. You could get arrested every night.”

For Lee personally, the decision surrounding the bawdy house provision is the most important.

She tells me she is low-income right now, and that’s largely because she can’t see more clients when she wants to because the laws are so restrictive. She’s never been in trouble with the law over her work, but that’s due to nothing more than her own careful judgment.

“I limit myself a lot because of the laws. I’ve lived around here for so long, so I limit my traffic. Sometimes I don’t see a client I need to see because I’ve already seen two more that day.” She makes it a point to strike a careful balance between work and appearing as though she doesn’t work.

“But I’m not on their radar—I’m a well-dressed white girl.”

From what she has seen of the industry, you might have worse luck if you happen to be a non-white, non-well-dressed sex worker. She says racist stereotypes abound, that Asian and Eastern Eurpoean workers are often assumed to be trafficked. Black workers are assumed to have pimps… the list goes on.

She says this challenge is a decent first step, but nowhere near enough to provide sex workers with a safe and respectful work environment.

“I think the original decision that was handed down last year would be the ideal outcome. I mean, not ideal, but ideal for now [as a start].”

Forrester says that even if Friday’s decision falls in Bedford’s favour, it doesn’t necessarily mean sex workers will be able to operate in peace.

“A lot more needs to be done. Even if [sex work] is decriminalized, what other things are they going to put in place? Will there be licenses? Will we have to work only in certain areas? Will there be house checks? That could affect many of us who work out of our homes.”

And a shift to a more traditionally businesslike format, she says, could drastically harm sex workers who work outside. They would be much more likely to be arrested for working and, if something happened to them while working, wouldn’t have recourse to get help since they are operating under the radar and possibly illegally, since many of them may not be able to afford a license.  

Hypotheticals aside, Forrester says she doesn’t think the laws will be struck down because of the stigma, the fear, and the Harper government. She says she’s seen too much of this government to let herself think that Bedford will have her way with the courts.

“But if it is, hopefully the government will work with the community to actually make it work and give them dignity and access to safe work.”

Even if tomorrow’s decision falls on the side of Canada’s sex workers, then, Forrester says there will still be much unease within the community. It’s not as though its members have been widely and formally consulted, because there is no mechanism under which to organize. Even if there was, it could still bode poorly for those it impacts most.

“Because we’ve played the game for so long, it’s scary. Personally, I’m scared. What does this mean? How is this going to look? This is a profession that’s kept me in a very comfortable setting in my life.”

Sex work is how Forrester has made her living for many years. She is appreciated within her community and by her clients, and she tells me more than once during our conversation that the work makes her feel empowered.

What’s more, the profession has supported many in a time of economic uncertainty.

“People have to pay rent, and it’s a profession that’s kept a lot of people afloat.”

Just because the laws change, does not mean thousands of women will suddenly flock to the industry—it’s not a logical conclusion. Some might, because they want to/need money/are interested—all of the same reasons everybody else pursues work, of any sort. There are other more nefarious and criminal reasons, too, I will never deny that. But those need to be dealt with elsewhere, according to the women I spoke with. Keeping the profession largely illegal will not make it evaporate—that will only serve to hide it, which will in turn denigrate the workers to a slimy, unsafe underbelly, making it more likely that women will face violence and other forms of oppression.

If we want to do what’s right by women in sex work, whether they’re in it willingly or not, we should let them speak for themselves, and listen to what they have to say. If these laws, deemed unconstitutional by Bedford and so many others, are struck down, this could be one small step toward that end.

To be clear, I do not think that all sex workers choose to be there, or are empowered by their jobs. I also do not think that all sex workers are poor, downtrodden victims who need to be rescued. There are many on either side, which makes it a highly contentious issue to discuss.

That said, women who are in the industry against their will need the rest of society to act in a humane way, and offer them some sort of hand to get out of it, which does not mean applying to them a pitying lens of victimization. If their work is illegal, we’re enacting legislation that will doubly punish them, by arresting them for crimes they did not wish to commit. If they are put in a situation which is dangerous in any way, there should be programs they can turn to, that receive government funding, to protect them from pimps if need be, and to help them find other means of employment. If sex workers are in immediate danger, they should be able to dial 911 for help. But this can only happen if their work is decriminalized in the first place.

Women who choose to be in the industry should be able to celebrate that choice. Lee says clients often tell her that she is their therapy. Forrester tells me sex work is one of the first places she felt fully accepted as a trans woman.

“I just want society to know that sex work has been around forever, and it’s not going anywhere. It’s a lucrative business. It’s an empowering business for many people, and we have to start really looking at this and how we can better work with sex workers and come to a compromise.

“We’re living in the millennium, and things have to change, because it’s not going away.”

In part 2 of Sean Malto’s Epicly Later’d, Sean discusses his upbringing as the son of a military father, his decision to stay in Kansas City, and some of the video parts that took him to the top of the skateboard world.

Head on over to Green Label to check out an interview with Guy Mariano on Sean Malto.

From left: Madeline, the author, and Amber. Images by the author. Video courtesy of Pornhub.

These are dark days for young people in America. According to the Guardian's Jana Kasperkevic, only 63 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds have found work in the wake of the Great Recession, and 18- to 25-year-olds make up 35.5 percent of workers who earn a yearly wage below the poverty line. Many millennials turned to unpaid internships to jump-start their careers but found themselves working for free for years instead. Several interns sued Conde Nast and other companies, hoping the lawsuits would encourage companies to create paid internships, and in response Conde Nast killed its internship program.

As a 22-year-old who landed my first real-world job because of my several internships, I’ve found this chain of events depressing. Yet in the midst of this crisis, there has been a ray of hope in @Pornhubinterns—two interns at the popular porn website (link NSFW, obviously) who have turned their internships into an internet-famous Twitter account and their own personal brand.

Although Pornhub receives an average of 35 million hits a day and a billion hits a month, Amber and Madeline are the company’s first interns. It launched a contest to find two interns a year ago, and a friend sent Amber a link so she could enter. A big-breasted blonde in her mid-20s, Amber had spent the last several years stripping and traveling—she thought interning at Pornhub was something she was born to do.

Madeline found the contest on her own. Between her long dark hair and intense stare, Madeline looks like Wednesday Addams would in an Addams Family Values remake created by a movie studio trying to “connect with millennials.” She saw an ad for the internship while she was high on Ambien in her bed during senior year of college, a moment that seems right out of three or four New York Times trend pieces about young people. The contest seemed like a solution to Madeline’s problems. She had struggled with anxiety her entire life. “I was too cool for school, but I didn’t have friends,” she said about her time at Catholic school. “I was the cool girl who was mean to the rich bitches.” But when she left for college, she found herself rarely leaving her house. “I don’t leave the house because I’m a fucking loser. I don’t have any friends. I’d rather play The Sims.” This internship will be so good for me, she thought.

After several rounds of auditions, the two girls won the internship. Almost immediately, Pornhub flew the girls to the AVN Awards in Las Vegas, where they met for the first time. “We were so turnt up, we didn’t sleep,” Madeline said. They ended up at Ron Jeremy’s party, but refused to say what took place. “Ron Jeremy was influential personally, emotionally, and physically,” Madeline assured me.

“And we may have caused his aneurysm,” Amber added.

Today the girls rarely attend industry events and spend most of their time working from home. Madeline lives with her parents outside Chicago, and Amber has spent the last several months living out of a hostel, although she has a permanent residence in Montreal. Their duties for Pornhub include tweeting dirty jokes, leaving comments on porn videos, and interacting with fans on Pornhub’s social media community.

In their first few months on the job, the girls didn't pick up many fans, but since the fall, their Twitter following has grown to nearly 8,000 and they have become a subject of fascination for many porn fans and others with too much time on their hands. Many companies have their interns tweeting, but only Amber and Madeline have managed to parlay their intern work into their own cult-like internet following.

What makes the Pornhub interns different from other people my age? I decided to become a Pornhub intern for a day to find out.

Because the girls work from home, Pornhub flew them to Brooklyn so I could hang with them for a day in a sketchy motel room. The day of my internship, I woke up to a text from Madeline: “Turnt up.”

When I walked into their lime-green motel room at 11:30 AM, I found the girls lying in their hotel bed in black dresses. Immediately Amber asked if we could go on a wine run.

“I’m sober because I hook up with other people’s boyfriends when I’m drunk,” I said.

“Awww! We have so much in common.”

The differences between the two girls became clear almost immediately—where Amber was blonde and smiled a lot, Madeline had jet-black hair and tended to pout. Amber brought a stuffed Piglet doll to cuddle with, and Madeline came equipped with an ugly toy that looked like an alien. As Amber showed me her huge Hello Kitty suitcase and box of beads she traveled with, Madeline shot her a death stare. “I brought a sensible black suitcase,” she said.

I removed my composition book from my Snoopy bookbag to jot down notes about what the girls were saying, and within minutes, Madeline was tweeting shit about me:

The vice weekend editor takes notes in not a moleskine LAME @mitchsunderland -m pic.twitter.com/Yf5a1DuKNR

— Pornhub Interns (@PornhubInterns) December 4, 2013

Then Madeline told me she had e-stalked me before I arrived. “Do you only write about mainstream stuff?” she asked me. “SELL OUT.” Like notorious Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke, the Pornhub girls have discovered a way to speak in caps lock.

Amber joined in and insisted I wear Pornhub panties and a twink-y Pornhub intern tank top. “He needs to wear the panties to show the confidence and radiance from within!” I was apprehensive about wearing panties, but then remembered that I’ve always enjoyed tight boxer briefs.

In the bathroom, my phone lit up as my friends favorited what the interns had tweeted about me. I swung open the door quickly, and the girls laughed, but everything changed when I walked out of the door in my new outfit. I felt a connection to my fellow interns. Something about my ball sack leaking out of the way-too-small panties made me realize that the girls weren’t making fun of me—they simply have a dark sense of humor that is both unconventional and part of their success. I was spiritually connected to what they call the #CreamTeam. It was time for the girls and me to tweet out photos of us together from our social platforms to spread the news about our burgeoning collaboration.

Afterwards, we debated how I should sign my tweets. The girls sign their tweets as A (for Amber) and M (for Madeline), but I have the same first initial as Madeline.

“Should I sign my tweets as MS?” I asked.

“Isn’t MS a disease?” Madeline said.

We decided I should tweet using my own name to use their social media platform to promote myself. For my first tweet, I decided to jokingly try to fulfill one of my sexual fantasies and tweeted Harry Styles and invited him to our hotel room, so I could participate in a One Direction bukkake.

Hey, @Harry_Styles. We know you're a homo. Come to BK. We'll do a bukkake, and you can come on my face. Bring Niel, that bottom bitch-Mitch

— Pornhub Interns (@PornhubInterns) December 4, 2013

I knew 1D would never fly to Brooklyn to ejaculate on my eyes, but something about tweeting the boys from the Pornhub intern account felt empowering.

Tweeting made the girls also feel the #CreamTeam connection—Amber pulled out her bead kit, turned on Khia’s “My Neck, My Back (Lick It),” and began making me a friendship bracelet.

“I’m in the porn mood now,” she said.

After we finished making jewelry and tweeting about rim jobs, the girls covered me in Pornhub stickers so we could go on a food run.

We stopped at a local Subway, and a black guy buying a sandwich stopped me and said, “I thought you were a billboard for Pornhub.” We explained that the ladies were the internet-famous Pornhub interns, and I was a journalist writing a story about them. We asked if he'd pose for a photo with us, but he thought we were lying. When he got home, he googled "Pornhub interns" out of curiosity and realized Amber and Madeline were the real deal and tweeted at the girls,

@PornhubInterns going to masterbate before bedtime to Amber LOL damn can't believe I froze up on the opportunity to take a pic with her :0(

— ωiℓℓie★Torres ®™ (@ICEMAN187) December 5, 2013

When we returned to the hotel room, I changed back into my panties, and we began exploring the Pornhub community platform. Madeline had chosen a dick pic as her profile picture, and dozens of men had sent her their dick pics. Amber said the users were more than men jacking off though.

“We have a lot of poets on Pornhub’s community,” she said.

“They’re expressing themselves,” Madeline added. “It’s like how you’re wearing panties.”

Each of us then chose a porn video we’d watch and then leave a comment. Madeline put on “DIRTY OLD MAN GETS SERVICE BY 18-YEAR-OLD SLUT IN WHITE PANTIES.”

“Everyone’s seen this... I’m numb to porn now,” Madeline told me. “I have to get off with weird shit. I’ve always been into facesitting luckily.”

We forced the Vice weekend editor to watch straight porn! -a http://t.co/1NpTczFDxY

— Pornhub Interns (@PornhubInterns) December 11, 2013

I thought the porn star's bush was gross, but I'm only into bushes if they're coming out of an Asian bodybuilder's asshole, so I probably wasn't the person to judge a straight porno. After we finished trolling their employer’s website, we played catch with Amber's anal douche and tweeted to see if the fans had any questions so we could film a Q & A video.

Pornhub Interns Meet Vice! Part 1 brought to you by PornHub

Pornhub Interns Meet Vice! Part 2 brought to you by PornHub

In the video, we discussed how Madeline enjoys vomiting on guys' dicks. “I clean up the vomit as soon as I can,” she later said. “Most of them don’t remember it because I give them Ambien. I don’t roofie them—there’s some guy who says I did, but he just wanted his feminist girlfriend back. Oh, and you can print that.”

Some of Madeline and Amber's comments disturbed me. On the subway, a boy wearing a yarmulke stared at me, and Madeline shouted, “Happy fucking Hanukkah!”

But their comments weren’t any different than what one might hear in an office or locker room (or any online comment board). After all, throughout the day, I spent time on Grindr sending ass pics and anal hole pics—or “holies” as the interns called them—to strangers I was trying to fuck. Who was I to judge?

Is that any grimmer than Madeline’s jokes? The difference between the Pornhub interns and most people is the girls are daring enough to say this shit in public, and it's beneficial to their careers. They don't care if their tweets might make them ineligible for a job at a buttoned-down corporation. Why should they? Those jobs don't exist any more.

After we had dinner in Williamsburg, the girls and I lay in their motel bed before we went to a strip club. After a day of tweeting and taking sex selfies, they finally opened up about their opinions on their naysayers and their past.

Madeline said Christians send her Bibles all the time, but she sees her sinful unpaid gig as the road to her salvations. “I’m not happy,” she said. “I’m living with my parents. I don’t have a job. My diploma is really useful. I was supposed to have a job before I graduated. I know we don’t live in our parents' world, but that’s hard to adjust to. I wish I hadn’t gone to school. I feel like I was wasting my time at school.” Her internship has proved more useful than school and helped her find freelance web-development jobs. “Pornhub has given me great opportunities,” she said, and unlike in a more traditional job, she doesn't have to worry about what she says or does.

Amber is also grateful for her internship. “I already had offers,” she said. “I’m absolutely happy.” However, like Madeline, she has had a difficult life. She had a painful relationship with her mother and ran away at age 17. She began stripping, partying in sex clubs, and traveling. One night, the sex club she was partying at burned to the ground, but Amber managed to escape. “I do what I want,” she said, “but I sacrificed a lot for it.”

Amber and Madeline have bonded over their personal problems. “When I went through my breakup, I cried to Madeline on Skype,” Amber said. “She saw me in agony.”

The Pornhub interns weren't that different than me or anyone else my age. They were fucked. The only difference is they've found a way to use their fucked-up situations to their benefit. I pulled my laptop out of my bag and put on Britney Spears's “Dear Diary.” Amber and I started to cuddle with her doll as Madeline rolled over on her side.

“Dear Diary” turned into “Everytime.” Madeline sat up. “Oh my God. Is this the Spring Breakers song?” she said. “Let's watch it.” We found the scene where James Franco and the Disney Channel girls murder people as Britney plays, but we didn’t need to watch it. Being a Pornhub intern made me feel as empowered as a Mouseketeer getting laid on screen for the very first time.

An hour later, we sat in the back of a cab on the way listening to P!nk’s “Just Like a Pill.” As our taxi cab driver cut off other drivers on the highway, I thought, This wouldn’t be such a bad way to die. This might seem depressing to Madeline, but to me it sounded like a happy ending. I was with two girls who had been fucked over and decided to risk it and do what they want. It seemed like my ideal way to end it all, but we didn't die—we ended up at Pumps, a strip club, instead.

At the club, we met up with several bloggers and punk singers who follow the Pornhub interns online and wanted to meet them. We sat at a long bar surrounding a stage. None of the girls wore colors—the crew was more Hot Topic than Forever 21—I was the only boy in the group until my gay friend from the New School, Michael, arrived with his straight roommate. As I jotted notes down in my composition book, a stripper leaned over the bar and asked me to slip a dollar in her tits.

“I'm gay and here for work,” I said.

“That's what they all say.”

I gave her a dollar to go away. My gay friend wasn't looking at boobies for work, so he left to go to a gay bar—his roommate stayed to check out the strippers. While the interns handed out Pornhub shirts to the girls and asked them to assemble outside for a photo, I asked the straight guy to join us. “I can’t do that,” he said, “I want to become a politician.” As if any kid who studied at Eugene Lang could actually become a politician.

I turned away from him and saw the girls looking in the mirror, primping themselves for their photo with the interns. My friend’s roommate was a straight guy, someone who could do virtually anything in the world and get away with it, and he was afraid to take a photo with a few Pornhub interns?

But as we gathered to take the photo outside, I forgot about this heterosexual wuss. Pre-recession jobs don't exist anymore, college graduates are working poverty-level jobs, and the Pornhub interns are the most free and badass girls in America. I ran into the picture, and then as a dude from inside the bar took the photo, Madeline shouted, “millennials” instead of cheese. I couldn't help but laugh—Madeline and Amber didn’t really resemble millennials anymore. In the darkest of economic times, the girls and their sexy selfies have become a symbol of hope.

Looking for something to masturbate to? Follow the @PornhubInterns on Twitter and check out Pornhub.

@mitchsunderland

More adventures with Mitchell:

The Barbie Dream House Experience Is the Scariest Place on Earth

Trying to Understand the English Gays at Oxford

The Gay Sex Club Next to the Vatican Is the Saddest Place on Earth

These photos are from Bobby Abrahamson’s 2001 road trip across the US by Greyhound bus. His book One Summer Across America documents his coast-to-coast journey. All photos by Bobby Abrahamson.

In the 1957 Jayne Mansfield–heavy film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s mostly forgotten novel The Wayward Bus, an assistant mechanic named Kit Carson stands chatting with a lunch-counter girl with Hollywood ambitions in a little dusty Central Valley bus depot named Rebel Corners. “I wonder if there’s going to be any important people on the bus today,” the girl asks. “Important people,” Kit tells her, “don’t ride buses.”

Nelson Algren taxonomized the nonpeople he would run into while traveling in his book Nonconformity, written in the 1950s: “The pool shark hitchhiking to Miami or Seattle, the fruit pickers following the crops in the 1939 Chevy with one headlight gone and the other cracked… The ‘unemployed bartender,’ ‘unemployed short-order cook,’ ‘unemployed salesman,’ ‘unemployed model,’ ‘unemployed hostess,’ ‘self-styled actor,’ ‘self-styled artist,’ ‘self-styled musician’… Their names are the names of certain dreams from which the light has gone out.”

Turgenev and Herzen might have called these people “superfluous” Americans. The dregs of the American dream. Though seemingly dated, vanquished Beat-lit stereotypes, these hustlers, dealers, prostitutes, and “freelancing phonies” never really went away—they’re still here today, tucked on the back of a Greyhound bus.

Sometime in 2002, having dropped out of college and moved back home to North Carolina, unmoored and without job prospects or definite plans, I caught a chance ride to Fort Benning, Georgia, for a protest against the School of the Americas—the academy responsible for training all the Latin American paramilitaries and death squads. There, as frocked Catholic priests thrust themselves over the base’s ten-foot-high fence in nonviolent civil disobedience, I became friends with some young transients on their way down to Florida. After the protest ended, we caught a ride with a guy in a Buick, taking turns driving through the night. On a misty two-lane road in southern Georgia, a rural sheriff pulled us over and ran our IDs. One of the transients had an outstanding warrant and was taken to jail—his girlfriend was only 17, and apparently her parents didn’t approve. We drove around to three different ATMs to get bail money and made it to Gainesville the next morning, stumbling into Denny’s bleary-eyed with exhaustion.

There, as if by magic, an expired Greyhound Ameripass made its way into our hands. (I don’t remember how exactly, but I think these crusties got it from a friend of a friend.) For the uninitiated, the Ameripass was a reasonably affordable pass that got the buyer 30, 60, or 90 days of unlimited bus travel throughout the United States and Canada. Originally marketed toward European backpackers and students on a budget who wanted to wander cities and towns by day and sleep on the bus by night, the Ameripass offered a nice glimpse of the “real” America before being rebranded as the Discovery Pass and then permanently discontinued in 2012.

Having never held an Ameripass in my hands, knowing only the legend, I examined it in awed reverence, like a cutter examines a diamond or an archaeologist a skull. For a talisman of such immense power—providing the bearer passage to literally anywhere in the continental United States—it was easily reproducible, just a laminated page of black-and-white text and numbers, long before the repressive, ironclad era of QR codes. Along with the pass, we had been provided with a photocopied character set of all letters and numbers in the Greyhound font. So, as superfluous young men with nothing better to do, we posted up at the Kinko’s, hunched over X-ACTO blades and paste in medieval concentration, scraps of paper flying everywhere.¹ After we printed out the final copies, we stepped back to admire our handiwork.

It looked awful—a sloppy cut-and-paste job. The numbers and letters were unevenly spaced and tilted from side to side. “This will never work,” I muttered. “It’ll be just fine,” my companion said, though he sounded uncertain. When we brought them up to the lone Kinko’s employee to have them laminated, he grumbled. “You’re doing this all wrong! These look terrible,” he said, reluctantly sliding our passes through the laminator. Sealed in legitimizing acetate, they seemed a little bit more official.

Anyone who has ridden Greyhound or is familiar with the bus line’s various subterranean monikers—“The Dirty Dog,” “The Hell Hound”—can guess that it’s often an unpleasant experience. But what if that unpleasant experience transported you around the country for free? It’s hard to feel indignant and ripped off by free.

The plan was to meet up in Pensacola. The crusties I was with tried to clean up, pulling out septum piercings and putting on crumpled button-up shirts. Despite their best efforts, they still looked like dirty guys dressed up in normal-people costumes. Being the kind of person who waits for a friend to dive into a lake first to see if they hit jagged rocks, I opted out of the maiden voyage. I said goodbye as they trudged off to the station, looking sullen and funereal. Given that one already had a warrant, I had slim expectations of seeing them again.

When I showed up in Pensacola a day later and went to a punk house, they were already there, drinking beer that had fallen off a loading dock somewhere. “No problem at all,” they shrugged when I asked them how it went. After a vicious bar fight with some local military guys put a quick end to our time in Pensacola, my companions jauntily walked off to get on the bus to New Orleans, seemingly comfortable with the scam, already at peace with riding for free.

It wasn’t until the next summer that I tried out my pass, and even then I did so only out of desperation. After two days trying to hitchhike out of the scorching Omaha sprawl and another spent waiting in the tall grass of Missouri Valley for a freight train that never slowed down, I stood in front of the Greyhound station, playing out the various escape strategies should the attendant realize my Ameripass was a fake.

Eventually I walked in the door and tried to walk confidently up to the counter. “Portland, please,” I said. I tried to smile and exude charm. The lady scrutinized my shoddy laminated pass and typed numbers into her computer. She looked at my ID, and then looked at me, and then looked at my pass again.

A bead of sweat appeared on my forehead, and while my face muscles were stuck in a false smile of ease, confidence, and legality, all I could think about was running. All of a sudden, like a slot machine hitting jackpot, the old dot-matrix printer started spitting out reams of tickets—transfers, layovers, itineraries, the whole undulating geography of Greyhound’s western route spilling out in black-and-white. The Greyhound attendant put it all in a blue paper sleeve and handed it to me with an earnest smile.

Outside the double doors, I tried to blend in with the thugs and cab drivers and methed-out kids scavenging cigarette butts. An intercom squealed garbled, unintelligible departure schedules. I got in the long, standing line for my bus with all the other damned souls. After 45 minutes, when our driver appeared at the door to check tickets, a middle-aged lady went up to him and started asking him all sorts of annoying questions. “I don’t have to put up with this,” he scowled, abruptly closing the gate door and driving off in a half-empty bus, stranding us all there. Another bus came an hour and a half later.

When I boarded, I headed immediately for the back rows, hoping to be as discreet as possible—a ghost passenger, taking up a seat or two, but not really there. As we careened out of Omaha, the driver’s voice crackled over the intercom: “Anyone who wants to smoke or drink or do drugs on this bus—I will throw you off without thinking twice. I will throw you off in the middle of nowhere and make you walk. Then I’ll call the police to come get you.” On Greyhound, you are not a passenger, you are an inmate in a prison transfer—you might be an adult, you might even be going gray, but to them you are still a kid in detention, a kid being frisked by a police officer and asked, “Do you have any needles that are going to poke me?”

As the bus rumbled over the prairie, people settled in and started getting to know each other. A David Bowie–eyed guy with a vampire tattoo on his hand struck up a conversation with me. He was heading west with his wife, who looked like RuPaul. They’d just been married—he had hopped a freight train going 40 miles an hour out of Vegas to make their wedding. They kept discreetly dipping their hands into a well-concealed cooler and pulling out bottles of Smirnoff Ice. Throughout the back, other people were quietly pulling out their brown bags, careful not to make too much of a crumpling noise.

The vampire-tattoo guy’s wife fell asleep, and he started talking to a big Midwestern country girl in the seat by the bathroom, periodically turning to me like a wingman to ask, “Isn’t that right?” “Don’t you think so?” and, “My bro here agrees, don’t you?” When the bus pulled over at McDonald’s for a lunch break and everyone piled off, he sent his wife in to get them some Big Macs with a kiss. As soon as she was gone, he headed for the bus’s toilet. The big country girl was waiting there for him, with wide, expectant eyes. As he crammed into the bathroom with her, he saw me staring and grinned, “I’ll buy you a burger if you don’t tell my wife what I’m about to do with this girl in this bathroom.”

Later that day, the bus abruptly pulled over near Cheyenne in a deserted parking lot. Two police cruisers flooded the bus with their lights and the driver stepped out. Everyone seemed visibly tense, hiding guilty secrets, ready to run. The guy with the vampire tattoo and his wife hid their empties and held each other tight. As the cops boarded the bus, they made their way down the aisle, taking obvious pleasure in examining the passengers. Finally, they grabbed two Mexican guys—deportados—who went willingly, looking crushed. A few passengers mouthed objections, but most of them seemed visibly relieved—the “Thank God it wasn’t me!” reaction to being in close proximity to human suffering.

Crossing Wyoming, I met a 26-year-old skateboarder who’d been living under a bridge in Santa Barbara all summer. We swapped cassette tapes and talked about Mike Watt. When our bus pulled over at a deserted Dunkin Donuts in the middle of the night, we got high behind the dumpster and then stayed up all night talking about aliens. After he fell asleep, I pressed my cheek to the cold window glass, looking out at the swarming stars and lunar cliffs in the glare of passing truck headlights. I watched the sun rise in the distant east across the flat desert at 4:30 in the morning.

Boise was empty and glowing at dawn on a Sunday morning, like a movie set. I got some vending-machine coffee and had a peaceful moment peering up at the rumpled-bedsheet hills.

Crossing lumpy green Idaho, I sat next to a middle-aged man who told me about his work fixing wind turbines. “It must be crazy to be so high up and close to those massive propellers,” I said to him. “It is crazy,” he said, his eyes moistening. He talked about following the contract work across the West and then showed me naked pictures of his girlfriend.

Two days later, the bus finally pulled into verdant Portland, the miniature city of dreams. I saw my friends waiting for me in the bus parking lot, outside the window. I ran out and grabbed them like a man who had been drowning—we spent the summer as one does in Portland: riding bikes, drinking espresso, dumpstering from Trader Joe’s, and lazing indolently about.

Like an all-you-can-eat buffet, or an arcade game with endless free plays, the allure of endless free travel can become compulsive for the doomed person who says, as Emerson wrote, “anywhere but here.” And so began a period of aimless travel, facilitated by the Ameripass and strung together with the flimsiest of alibis—visiting a girlfriend, visiting friends, trying to get home for the holidays. The important thing is to stay on the move, crisscrossing the country, finding new nooks and crannies, state highways and little towns, scanning back and forth like those dot-matrix printers, flinging drops of ink to form an image through pointillism.

For restless people, those descendants of Cain cursed to wander the earth, the only peace is the peace of being in motion, suspended between geographies. For them, there is nothing more comforting than an engine rumbling under a seat, cold air hissing from overhead vents, the rows of fluorescent-illuminated products in an all-night truck stop, the feeling of being a fugitive temporarily evading captors—you fall into the most restful sleep of your life with your hoodie pulled up, using your backpack as a pillow.

At home, the psychological anxiety of being stationary and accomplishing benchmarks can be more exhausting than the physical wear and tear of traveling—you drink too much, you pace holes into the floor, you feel angsty and take long aimless walks. When people say things like “I haven’t left town in two years!” you can’t help but look at them in disbelief. In the middle of the night, you look around the bus and feel moved by the sight of all the passengers asleep, curled up on one another, drooling on one another, snoring loudly—it reminds you of some half-forgotten memory of childhood nap time, when the lights were turned off and an entire room of strangers fell asleep together; or an even more distant ancestral memory when people dwelled in large families and close quarters—you wonder if it’s a coincidence that the land of Nod, that purgatory of eternal wandering that Cain is banished to, has come to signify the kingdom of slumber.

You wake up in Pittsburgh, with its seething river and menacing Moriah-like mountains, the whole geography exuding a certain darkness as if lorded over by some winged black demon. You wake up in Savannah, the old clock on the wall, the church-pew wooden benches, the drooping Spanish moss containing a strange, pregnant sense of blood history. You wake up in Amarillo, where the yellow sunlight streams dustily through the huge windows and the station has been untouched by time—the pay phone is still 25 cents and there are coin-operated televisions attached to the plastic bucket seats. You wake up in Dallas on a seething Saturday evening in summer and walk past all the people out on dates to a little corporate “green space” and fall asleep on the lush sod grass until you are roused by police.

How many times have you woken up in a fugue in the middle of the night and stumbled into the Abu Ghraib-bright fluorescence of a station for a two-hour layover? Teenage army corps in their camo playing shoot-’em-up arcade games, a deadbeat dad making empty promises to his daughter on the pay phone, grandmothers sitting dignified on benches, heading down to Fort Lauderdale, a group of guys with crumpled dollar bills shooting dice on the Greyhound station’s bathroom floor, a security guard waking up the sleepers and making them display their tickets, gotta be a big man, gotta keep the homeless from falling asleep. Transients and vagrants of all kinds being shuttled down the river Archeron to Cincinnati, Duluth, Rapid City. You wake up for a layover in Atlanta at 3 AM, and walk laps outside to get the blood pumping—with its clean sidewalks, corporate parks, bank skyscrapers, and Starbucks, it could be any downtown in America.

In the Atlanta terminal, you sit next to a 90-year-old man who is wide-awake and reading through his papers. An elderly Spanish anarchist from Madrid named Unamuno—after the iconoclastic Basque philosopher who barely escaped being shot after delivering a pointed j’accuse to Franco’s generals at a fascist Columbus Day celebration in 1936, at the height of the Spanish Civil War. Unamuno says that he’s an art and antiquities dealer and is traveling the country on behalf of a shadowy client he refuses to name. He laughs and doesn’t answer when you ask him if he fought in the Spanish Civil War. You sit together on the northbound bus and ride through the night, communicating in a mix of broken English and broken Spanish. The next morning, when you arrive in Raleigh, he blows off his bus so you can go to breakfast together and show him around your hometown. At the old diner, he pulls a pile of papers out of his leather satchel, scribblings, pamphlets, aphorisms, Venn diagrams, swatches of color—the moral system he’s created, his version of the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. You can’t decide whether it’s brilliant or bat-shit insane.

There is a certain kismet to the chance encounters of the bus—to being bored out of your mind and finding solace only in talking to others who are awake and lonely at 4 AM and finding out that they have the craziest stories, that they are true singularities.

You walk Unamuno back to the Greyhound station to see him off as he continues the trip north. You never see or hear from him again.

Technology jumps inexorably forward, opening and closing vulnerabilities. Scams arise, are snuffed out, and then new scams emerge. The old mechanical Kinko’s copy counters that you used to be able to drop on the ground to get free copies are replaced by digital card readers that can be hacked to get free copies. The old world, where people could disappear and re-create themselves—where centralized records were only kept on paper and names and government-issued identification numbers weren’t immediately accessible via fiber-optic networks, bar codes, and fingerprint scanners—has been killed off.

Scams may provide a through-the-looking-glass view of the money system, but they still function on the same endless supply logic of capitalism. Contingencies like shoplifting are presupposed and neutralized in advance by insurance policies. The initial amphetamine thrill of finding a dumpster full of just-expired food or making a change machine spit out endless quarters eventually wears off, and one moves on to new pastures, always seeking, never satisfied. The ancient prophets explicitly warned against a life that revolves around sensual pleasures and the possession of things—even if those things are had for gratis.

Adulthood sets upon you insidiously. Doors close, certain adventures grow stale, the body decays, and serious responsibilities to friends, family, health, and work begin to loom large. The cost-benefit analysis of cheating the system no longer adds up. You get a job that pays a little money and you would rather just pay full price than deal with the stress or hassle. Your appetite for risky behavior diminishes commensurate with the embarrassment it has the potential to cause. Like all good citizens, you eventually understand that it’s just cheaper to put quarters in the parking meter than pay for the mess of parking tickets that will eventually, inevitably, catch up with you. All noncompliant subjects are eventually beaten into submission.

By the late 2000s, only a few stubborn lifers continued to mess with the fake-Ameripass swindle, often to their own detriment. One friend, already four years into a dress-up salaried job but trying to milk the last drops from his itinerant youth, took a final trip on his fake pass that ended with his having to run and hide from the authorities in the desert scrub brush. Another Greyhound scammer I knew had his pass confiscated in San Francisco. Yet another was caught using a fake Ameripass in Ohio, was arrested, and had to spend months going to trial, logging thousands of dollars in legal bills.

Like all the dead scams strewn across Abbie Hoffman’s 1960s guerrilla manual Steal This Book!, the Ameripass has now faded away to just a memory, a secret password largely unknown that might, at most, inspire a twinkle of illicit nostalgia for bygone youthful indiscretion.

In 2007, Scottish transportation company Firstgroup bought Greyhound with the intention of rehabilitating the besmirched brand to compete with new, low-cost carriers like Megabus. Greyhound’s familiar faded red, white, and blue logo was reinvented as a silver-embossed dog—a sleek, rebranded harbinger of a new, more comfortable American bus travel for white urban professionals.

Recently, after a four-year or so break from riding the bus, I went to the Greyhound station in Raleigh and bought a ticket to New York—it was cheap, as cheap as Megabus. The counter lady gave me an assigned seat on a svelte new vehicle with Wi-Fi, spacious leather bucket seats, and a fragrant bathroom. The other passengers sat by themselves quietly fiddling with their electronic devices and magazines. As we were getting ready to leave, someone shouted to the bus driver that the Wi-Fi was not working. To my surprise, the driver promptly and courteously fixed it. The “new Greyhound” was something unrecognizable.

As the bus barreled out of Raleigh down the flume-like Capital Boulevard, I prepared for the familiar lecture—“I will throw you out and not look back”—but a pleasant voice projected over the intercom, “Hi, folks, if you’re uncomfortable and it’s too hot or too cold, please come up and let me know.”

Comfort and convenience are nice, but where was the no-snitches criminal-minded pact of the back of the bus? Where was the lonely, desperate need to bare our failures, humiliations, and disappointments to connect with others? Where were the teenage runaways, the secret drinkers, the drug mules, the trying-to-be-good pedophiles, the undocumented migrants, the aspiring prostitutes? All the giants, the mythical, larger-than-life American characters have gone extinct. They are silent now, like the dead, revealing nothing: Why get to know strangers when you can talk to people you already know on a device? Why ever have moving experiences in real life that can’t be recorded on the cloud network?

I hated the new, perfect, Wi-Fi-enabled bus and the constantly-connected-but-always-alone soul-deadening future it represented.

After a few hours on the road, the bus pulled off at a rain-spattered rest stop in rural Virginia. The passengers crowded into a little gazebo to stretch their legs and smoke.

A graying, middle-aged guy with kind eyes offered to share his cigarette with me. He was on his way back home to Petersburg, Virginia, after a month in rural North Carolina with his kids. As Southerners will do, we got to talking about the Civil War and he told me that he had found a loaded Civil War–era musket and a Native American tomahawk while metal-detecting out behind his house along the Appomattox River. He had even found an artillery cannon buried out behind an abandoned house and some ancient megalodon teeth while diving in Virginia’s muddy coastal rivers. “There’s all sorts of stuff buried out there… You just have to look for it,” he said, hopeful, excitable.

Back on the bus, a Massachusetts construction worker with a Kennedy accent heading back to the Cape joined our conversation. “Oh, megalodon teeth,” he said. “I have a buddy who goes out diving for those!” When he learned I was a writer, he told me I could go live in some half-abandoned house up on the Cape he knew about.

Plans and dreams are discussed, lives are splayed open, people running away from and running to other people, seeing about a job, waiting for a paycheck, picking up a Western Union transfer. As Al Burian wrote in one of the seminal Greyhound zine narratives, “We live and die by the highway, and in between we sit in cramped seats, waiting to get somewhere, forgetting where we’re going.” But even now, in the icy future, so hemmed in and two-dimensional, all is not yet lost.

Some solace can be found in the fact that there are still hidden places and fascinating people out there you’d never think to meet—secrets hidden in the overgrowth, revealed only when the sun or moon is in the right position at a certain time of day. Arcane relics and ancient scrolls remain hidden away in caves and tombs. Dinosaur bones and dusty suitcases lie buried, waiting to be discovered. As the great surveillance eye of the future maps and penetrates all known space, the hidden world goes deeper into remission.

¹ Dear Nice People at Greyhound: The events described herein are of course based on overheard stories, gossip, rumors; like the game of Telephone, by the time anything got to me, it was so degraded that it no longer resembled anything near the truth. I never did any of this. I promise. Sincerely, the Author
 

All photos by Bobby Abrahamson.

A poster advocating against the extradition of accused Turkish terrorists back to their home country, where their supporters believe they'll face imprisonment and torture because of their political beliefs.

Collaborative efforts by the Greek and Turkish governments to fight terrorism have been in the headlines since June, when Turkish dissident Bulut Yayla was abducted from Athens and somehow wound up in Istanbul. Yayla allegedly had links to the DHKP-C, a far-left group that's banned in Turkey and has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings. The Greek police denied all knowledge of the extradition, but evidence from various reports suggested that this was bullshit. Yayla is still being held by the Turkish police on terrorism charges. His lawyer has been trying to go to Greece for the past six months in order to turn in crucial evidence relevant to the investigation into his abduction, but has been unable to get the necessary visa.

Until recently, other Turkish leftists in Greece were prepared for a similar fate: extradition followed by inevitable imprisonment. Among them were four Turks who were arrested in August after the Greek authorities seized a boat allegedly carrying guns and explosives from the Greek island of Chios to the DHKP-C in Turkey. They went on a hunger strike that lasted more than 50 days to protest their possible deportation. One, Mehmet Yayla, has particularly pressing concerns about going back to Turkey—he said he was tortured by the authorities there and survived two assassination attempts before fleeing the country.

In November, however, the Greek courts, under severe pressure from the international community, decided not to proceed with the extradition, presumably to avoid violating the bits of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that say that it's not OK to torture people (and, by extension, allow people to be extradited to places where they might be tortured).

These Turks aren't out of the woods yet—the DHKP-C is listed as a terrorist organization by both the US and the EU and, after the group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing of the American embassy in Ankara in February, America's interest in this part of the world intensified. The threat posed by far-left armed groups in the Eastern Mediterranean is currently being taken very seriously by the US—to the extent that FBI agents have reportedly tried to contact the hunger strikers in Athens during their captivity.

To learn more, I spoke with Eleni Spathana, one of the Turks' lawyers, who believes the US is trying to extradite the alleged terrorists itself.

VICE: Eleni, where do you stand now on the case?
Eleni Spathana: We just had a development we had been expecting for some time now. After the rejection of the extradition demand by Turkey, the US has asked for the extradition of two of the suspects. The court has upheld the demands put in by France and Germany [where the two suspects hail from], but now the US wants to interrogate them [in connection with the bombing of the US embassy in Ankara].

What exactly is the US trying to do?
FBI agents are currently in Greece and on the case. The way they approached the process so far is against the Greek constitution. A Greek prosecutor was there when they asked to speak to one of the witnesses, who outright refused to [talk]. But they didn’t have any jurisdiction. In order to justify their presence in Greece, they used a treaty between the country and the US back in 2000. This is the first time this has been used for a political refugee.

And this is related both to the abduction of Bulut Yayla and the seizing of the boat in Chios?
Yes, three of the suspects are held for that case. [In Yayla's case], the documents we have in our possession show that [the police] were looking for Yayla in the past as well.

What is the alleged connection between the people who had already fled to Greece and the bombing in Ankara?
They are wanted because of their ties with the DHKP-C. The questions the FBI asked, though, were not purely about the bombing and other terrorist strikes. They asked them about their ideas and about the group’s ideas. They were very interested in that.

What else has the FBI been doing?
They asked for everything the Greek police had on the case. What is shocking is that they claimed that if one of the suspects cooperated with them, they’d be able to overturn the decision by the Greek high court to extradite him to Germany. Essentially stating that they could just bypass the supreme court of a country, just like that.

Follow Yiannis on Twitter: @YiannisBab

Photo by Nate Miller

It has been a banner year in many respects. We saw some amazing films released (I'm looking at you, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone), and one of the great TV dramas of all time end (RIP The Client List). Most importantly, someone finally asked the question we've all been thinking about: "What rhymes with hug me?"

It's been a fucking crazy year, especially if you're a racist. Racism was super hot in 2013. If I were compiling a list of the trendiest trends for the last year, I think racism would be just barely underneath One Direction, but a couple spots above cronuts.

People were doing shit that was super racially questionable on the regular. Famous people were doing it. Non-famous people were doing it. Government officials were doing it. But let's never forget the OG racists who got the ball rolling. Thanks for blazing a trail, y'all.

Here are the top five most awkward moments in racial politics from 2013:

5) Everyone Thought Lorde was Racist for a Second

FROM OCTOBER 4: I'm guessing by now that you've all heard of Lorde. She's a 16-year-old pop sensation from New Zealand whose song "Royals" has taken American airwaves by storm. She's precocious, the song is ridiculously catchy, and the New York Times raved about her live show. Naturally someone had to come along and take a big, steamy poop on her immaculately coiffed hair. Veronica Bayette Flores of a blog called Feministing seems to think that "Royals" is racist. Her reading of the song's meaning couldn't be more simplistic:

"While I love a good critique of wealth accumulation and inequity, this song is not one; in fact, it is deeply racist. Because we all know who she’s thinking when we’re talking gold teeth, Cristal, and Maybachs. So why shit on black folks? Why shit on rappers? Why aren’t we critiquing wealth by taking hits at golf or polo or Central Park East?"

Could it be that there aren't any songs on the radio about golf or polo that 16-year-old girls listen to? Why would anyone assign their own cultural baggage to someone who isn't even old enough to buy cigarettes in America? Also, are "Jet planes, islands, [and] tigers on a gold leash" or "Blood stains, ball gowns, [and] trashin’ the hotel room" black things?

Flores goes on to say that "several, no, many people listened to this track, and saw no problem with it at all." Hmm. Interesting. I wonder why? "I don’t have to explain why wealth operates differently among folks who’ve grown up struggling." Actually, maybe you do. Hip-hop used to be about the celebration of the struggle for black people to escape the ghetto. It was about "making it." Now, it's about what you do after you make it. That's all fine and great, but does a teenager from New Zealand relate to that? Of course not. Maybe she'll understand Veronica Bayette Flores's dime-store cultural criticism better after she's... gone to college. Why should anyone be surprised that the proliferation of pop songs about conspicuous consumption would eventually get tiresome? I don't care what your race is, the number of people in America who have even seen a Maybach (or can pronounce the word properly) is miniscule. "Royals" is not racist. UPDATE: Lorde is now dating a nerdy Asian guy, and has gotten a ton of hatred for it. Nice going, world.

4) Everyone Thought George Zimmerman was White for a Second

FROM JULY 14: The worst case scenario for race relations came true and George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges by a jury of his peers in Florida. Despite evidence that George, a man with a history of run-ins with the police, shot and killed an unarmed child who was almost 100 pounds lighter than him, he was not punished for ending Trayvon Martin's life. This occurred in the same state where a black woman could be sentenced to 20 years in prison for not shooting someone.

Pundits on both sides of the cultural divide have found signifcance in this outcome. The black community and sympathetic, liberal whites see this as yet another example of the prejudice inherent in the American judicial system. A white man has gotten away with a vigilante murder against a black child. Conservatives are applauding the decision because it not only reaffirms what they believe is the right to defend yourself with deadly force, but also focuses on their vision of an America that demonizes white people and unfairly paints blacks as victims. The problem with this narrative is that it's predicated on a lie.

The American news media, purveyors of truth and your only source for all the developments in the exciting life of Justin Bieber, continues to call George Zimmerman white. From the moment Trayvon Martin died at George’s hand, news outlets across the nation have repeatedly referred to him as an overzealous white male neighborhood watch member who was overcome with racial animosity.

This creates a really appealing narrative, in which a white guy shot a black kid because of racism. Battle lines can easily be drawn based on such a story: black people get on board with the story that Trayvon was killed by a white oppressor, and white people can comfortably defend George’s right to protect himself from a dark-skinned hoodlum.

It’s a hell of a lot simpler to create this clean, uncomplicated tale of racial tension than it is to correctly identify George as the product of an interracial marriage between a white father and Peruvian mother. To deal with that complexity, the New York Times and others have adopted the rarely used phrase “white Hispanic” to describe the killer. Since important media types are throwing around this term, I assume it is now the proverbial “new normal,” and I'm going to start using it too, despite it being a totally clumsy way to deal with a difficult issue. If my sexual performance is any indication, I'm very comfortable with "clumsy."

My father is white, and my mother is black, so I suppose I’m now “white African,” but isn’t a white African a South African of Dutch descent? OK, what if I called myself “white black”? Is that accurate, or does that sound too much like a really bad punk band’s name? Did I mention I’m Jewish? How do I work that in? My grandfather on my mom’s side was part Native American, so I guess I need to add that to the mix. Next time I have to fill out a United States Census form, I’m going to list myself as “white Jewish black Native American,” or “Confused” for short.

I’m probably missing something in my heritage, but I bet we’re missing a few pieces of the puzzle for George Zimmerman too. I guess the next time a guy who looks white shoots a person who looks black, we should do thorough genealogical examinations of their backgrounds to be sure we’re exploiting them appropriately.

Oh, and congratulations to Barack Obama for being America’s first “white Kenyan African Hawaiian ex-smoker with a mole and huge ears” president. That’s quite an accomplishment!

3) Ann Coulter Discussed "Black Heroes"

FROM JULY 26: Ann Coulter wrote an article titled “Unsung Black People,” where she discussed her black heroes. These folks are the people who dare to be happy when a person is killed. Ann has had it up to here with all the black folk sticking up for their race. They should be glad when a black criminal gets shot. Also, she really wants you to buy her book, as you can see below:

“You'll never hear a peep about any of these courageous black people, unless you obsessively research every "race" case of the last 30 years, as I did for my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the 70s to Obama. (All these black heroes appear in my book.) “

Black heroes mentioned in Ann's book include:

• Blade, the vampire hunter
• Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters
• Fat Albert
• The guy who saved the women in Cleveland who loves McDonald's
• Darryl Strawberry
• Shaft
• Mace Windu
• Idris Elba
• Clarence Clemons from the E-Street Band
• T.I.

If this sounds amazing to you too, then please rush out and purchase Ann Coulter’s sensational new book where she solves race relations in America forever. It’s priced to move… your bowels!

2) A Black Man Compared Planned Parenthood to the KKK

FROM JUNE 7: A lifetime of insane ramblings that proves that the old adage “even black people can be racist” is absolutely true. Bishop E. W. Jackson, candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia, has amassed a truly magnificent collection of mind-bogglingly inane campaign positions. He has claimed that President Obama has a “Muslim perspective” (which shouldn’t be an insult, but you know he meant it as such), referred to gay rights as “icky,” and railed against that scourge of American life, yoga, stating that it leads directly to Satanic possession.

"The purpose of such meditation is to empty oneself. [Satan] is happy to invade the empty vacuum of your soul and possess it. Beware of systems of spirituality which tell you to empty yourself. You will end up filled with something you probably do not want."

I can’t stand most yoga enthusiasts or people who wear stretchy pants to the grocery store, so I’m glad I finally have a good reason, but hating yoga isn’t racist or reverse racist. It’s just weird. What is reverse racist is E. W. Jackson trying his damnedest to compare Planned Parenthood to the KKK.

You know how Planned Parenthood has an explicit hatred of minorities, right? Planned Parenthood isn’t an organization that offers women assistance with their reproductive choices. They just plain hate “colored folk” and are engaged in a terrorist campaign against them. Yeah… OK. Next thing you’ll tell me is that Hugh Jackman isn’t gay. You not only insult the people who work hard for a cause they happen to believe in, you also diminish the very real threat of the KKK's hatred. You are actively working against the cause of persecuted peoples everywhere. Nice going, dude. 

1) Miley Cyrus Twerks with Black Backup Dancers, World Shits Bricks

FROM AUGUST 30: August 28 marked the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech, which was cause for celebration for some, somber reflection for others, and for a select few, a very good reason to advance a political agenda or say something vaguely racist.

Miley Cyrus changed the face of race relations in America on August 25 with her bold full-body dry heave at the MTV Video Music Awards. Plenty was said on the subject, most of it by people who think a "ratchet" is something you use to fix a car.

The Guardian's writer Hadley Freeman regurgitated the standard righteous indignation and even invoked Dr. King's memory in chastizing Miley for her display of gluteal dexterity. Freeman writes:

"Sadly, King omitted to say whether he also dreamed of 'little white girls from Tennessee mimicking anilingus on little black girls wearing giant animals on their backs', so it's impossible to know how he would have reacted to Miley Cyrus' performance at the VMAs on Sunday. But it seems likely that not even he could have foreseen how the American celebrity world would manage to twist his image into something quite so, if not actually racist, then certainly race-ish."

I googled "race-ish" and the top of my search results read, "Did you mean 'radish'?" Maybe Hadley Freeman meant "radish." We'll probably never know, just like we'll never know if MLK would have been "down as fuck" with Miley, which is why there's no point in speculating. The bizarre fascination with ascribing modern opinions to historical figures is the reason why American religious zealots invoke famously skeptical people like Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin to justify their insanity. You actually will never know what any dead person would think about a current news story. Sure, I sometimes wonder what Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees would think about the effects of global warming should he have survived to see the year 2013, but I'll never really know. It's a goddamn shame, but let's allow our icons to live in their time and not in ours. 

That said, if I had to guess (like, I had a legally obtained firearm pressed to my temple and George Zimmerman was holding it there), I'd say Martin Luther King Jr. would totally be into Miley Cyrus. It's common knowledge that MLK had a sweet tooth for the ladies. Plus, I bet somewhere in that dream of his was a white girl who actually had rhythm.

@dave_schilling

Photo courtesy of Brian Touhy

What do Super Bowl III, the 2012 Olympic badminton tournament, the 2011 Cricket World Cup semifinals, and the 2012 Manny Pacquiao–Timothy Bradley fight have in common? According to Brian Touhy, they were all fixed.

For years, Brian has been waging a lonely battle, writing innumerable blog entries and two books that all say the same thing: the multibillion-dollar sports industry is as rigged as pro wrestling. This year the soccer world was rocked by a scandal that involved organized-crime syndicates fixing matches worldwide, and in 2007, it was revealed that NBA referee Tim Donaghy made calls to steer the outcome of games and gave inside information to bookies—but Brian’s allegations go well beyond those examples. He says leagues like the NFL and NBA force athletes to throw games and fix the outcomes so they can generate juicy story lines, thereby creating more revenue. I called him to ask what the heck he was talking about.

VICE: Why should anyone believe that sports are fixed?
Brian Touhy: There are certain undeniable facts about professional sports that most fans don’t know and don’t care to know. Leagues willingly admit they’re entertainment and just another facet of show business, like circuses and reality television. It isn’t illegal to fix one’s own game. If they direct their referees to officiate a game in a certain way that may favor one team over another, there’s nothing illegal about that. When a league needs a certain story line to succeed or to promote a particular player, then it will do what is needed to ensure a profitable result.

Obviously gambling plays a big role in this—how big is the sports-betting industry?
Worldwide about $1 trillion, and $80 to $380 billion [is wagered every] year in the US. Take the low estimate, $80 billion—that’s more than three times the revenue generated in 2012 by all major leagues. This is controlled by organized crime.

The 1969 Super Bowl, where the Jets and Joe Namath upset the Colts, comes up a lot in your writing. Why is that game important?
To me, Super Bowl III [the first step toward the NFL/AFL merger] is the Rosetta Stone for understanding why a league would fix its own game. Having Namath and the Jets win meant billions of dollars for the owners of both franchises. It was a game that had to go the AFL’s way to ensure the success of the merger between the two leagues. It was too important to leave to chance. And yet fans still believe the Colts—perhaps the greatest team in NFL history—fell apart in that game against the AFL’s third-place team.

Everyone in the world is turning into an entitled psychopath, which led to a massive surplus in the 2013 cry-baby market. It was a crowded field out there this year, and while it's true that all of the contenders were infantile and pathetic, who was the biggest cry-baby of them all? We'll let you decide.

Below are the ten cry-babies who received the most votes over the last year. Cast your vote for the worst of the worst at the bottom of this page to decide who will receive the Cry-Baby of the Year trophy pictured above. 

Cry-Baby #1: Olga Rozhoav

screencap via

The incident: A teacher saved a class of children from a burning building. 

The appropriate response: Congratulating her. Possibly even giving her some kind of award or a medal or something.

The actual response: She was fired. 

Back in July, Michelle Hammack was working at Little Temples Childcare in Jacksonville, Florida. 

While her children were taking their afternoon nap, Michelle smelled burning and went to investigate. In the daycare's kitchen, she discovered a small fire in the oven. When she opened the oven door, the smoke caused the fire alarm to go off.

She went back to her classroom, woke up her kids, and led them outside to safety. 

As other teachers did a head count, Michelle went back inside the building to make sure there were no children left. While inside, she realized that the fire was small enough for her to deal with, and extinguished it herself. 

When she went to work the next day, she was fired. 

Speaking to Action News Jackson, Olga Rozhoav, the owner of the daycare said, “I fired her only because she left her room. Even though children are sleeping, the teachers are supposed to be there. It’s not acceptable, and if anybody else does the same thing, I will fire again. I will fire them. No question.”

Cry-Baby #2: Austin Davis

The incident: Someone farted in a car. 

The appropriate response: Either laughing or being quietly repulsed, depending on how fun you are. 

The actual response: Unable to determine which of his three children was responsible for the fart, Austin Davis (pictured above) beat all of them.

Earlier this year, Austin, whose head is shaped exactly like an upturned dreidel, was driving with his three children in DeLand, Florida. At some point during the journey, one of the kids farted. 

Austin flew into a rage, and demanded to know which of the kids was responsible. All three refused to talk (go kids!), so Austin removed his belt and beat them with it (boooooo, dad!).

A female relative took photos of the children's injuries and gave them to local police, who arrested Austin and charged him with three counts of aggravated battery. 

According to police, the photos showed a six-year-old with "dark bruising to the legs, buttocks, and thighs," a 12-year-old with "dark bruises on his legs and thighs," and a nine-year-old refused to have pictures of his bruises taken because he feared retaliation if his dad found out he'd told on him.

Cry-Baby #3: Kimberly Hall

The incident: A woman thought that some girls her sons were friends with on Facebook were dressed too provocatively. 

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: She went on to her sons' profiles and blocked all of the girls she thought were too slutty from their accounts.

Last week, Christian blogger Kimberly Hall wrote a blog post called "FYI (if you’re a teenage girl)." The blog post, which is in the form of an open letter, is addressed to the female friends of her three teenage sons (pictured above). 

She opens the letter with the not-at-all-creepy revelation that she and her family sometimes spend the evening looking through the Facebook pictures of her sons' female friends. "Dear girls," she wrote. "I have some information that might interest you. Last night, as we sometimes do, our family sat around the dining-room table and looked through your social media photos."

However, recently she has been noticing a startling, slutty new trend with the photos teenage girls are posting: "It appears that you are not wearing a bra. I get it—you’re in your room, so you’re heading to bed, right? But then I can’t help but notice the red carpet pose, the extra-arched back, and the sultry pout. What’s up? None of these positions is one I naturally assume before sleep, this I know."

Then she drops some hard biology facts on the reader, "I know your family would not be thrilled at the thought of my teenage boys seeing you only in your towel. Did you know that once a male sees you in a state of undress, he can’t ever un-see it? You don’t want [my sons] to only think of you in this sexual way, do you?"

And this has left her with only one choice: she is blocking any girl who she sees posting anything she deems inappropriate, "in our house, there are no second chances, ladies. If you want to stay friendly with the Hall men, you’ll have to keep your clothes on, and your posts decent. If you try to post a sexy selfie, or an inappropriate YouTube video—even once—you’ll be booted off our on-line island."

For some reason, she thinks this is punishment for the blocked girls, because being blocked by her means they will never get a chance to be married to one of her three super desirable sons, "Every day I pray for the women my boys will love. I hope they will be drawn to real beauties, the kind of women who will leave them better people in the end. I also pray that my sons will be worthy of this kind of woman, that they will be patient—and act honorably—while they wait for her."

But there's hope. She ends the letter, which, amazingly, is accompanied by a picture of her sons with no shirts on, by offering the women who haven't yet been blocked a chance to redeem themselves: "Girls, it’s not too late! If you think you’ve made an on-line mistake (we all do—don’t fret—I’ve made some doozies), RUN to your accounts and take down anything that makes it easy for your male friends to imagine you naked in your bedroom."

So, if anyone reading this is friends with any of these kids, what're you waiting for? RUN and delete those pictures of yourselves in towels and pajamas. If you play your cards right, maybe you can one day have this fucking nutcase as a mother-in-law. 

Cry-Baby #4: Diana Medley

The incident: A school prom was organized and gay students who attend the school were invited. 

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: A teacher joined forces with some students, parents, and other dickheads to organize their own separate, straights-only prom. 

In February, a special education teacher named Diana Medley at Sullivan High School in Sullivan, Indiana announced she was organizing a straights-only prom as an alternative to the school's official, inclusive one. Speaking to a local news channel about the bigoted event, Diana (pictured above, visibly evil) said, "we don't agree with homosexuality. It's offensive to us."

Diana, who is probably also a secret racist, then added, “I don’t believe they were born that way, I think life circumstances made them choose that. I think God made everybody equal… I have kids come to me because of their sexual preference. And they know I don’t agree with it, but care about them. And the same thing for special needs. God puts those people in our life for special reasons.”

Diana was then asked if she felt gay people had a purpose in life, to which she responded, "I personally don't, I'm sorry."

Speaking of the prom, futuristically-named high school student Kynon Johnson said that the bigoted group hoped to make their prom a "good prom," that would get "more people to follow what they believe."

As a result of her comments, Diana was suspended by the school district.

Cry-Baby #5: James Ruiz

screencap via

The incident: A drunk driver caused a car crash that killed two teenage girls.

The appropriate response: Prison, a lifetime of remorse.

The actual response: The drunk driver sued a bunch of people, claiming that he wasn't responsible for the accident. 

The crash happened back in 2010, when James Ruiz (pictured above) drove his friend's truck into a car carrying Deshauna Peshlakai, 17, and Del Lynn Peshlakai, 19, killing both of them. At the time of the crash, James was nearly three times over the legal drinking limit.

This was made even more illegal by the fact that James was out on parole at the time, awaiting trial for his fourth DUI. 

He was convicted of vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to 40 years in prison. During the trial, he attempted to pass blame on to the district attorney, saying that if they hadn't taken so long to imprison him for the other DUIs, he would not have been free to cause the accident. 

He's currently serving his sentence at the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility. Which is where, back in March, he filed several lawsuits from.

The first targets of his lawsuit spree were Applebee's and the Blue Corn Cafe, which are the two restaurants where he was drinking the night of the crash. He claims that the restaurants, by agreeing to serve him alcohol, generated "mental anguish," "emotional distress," and "loss of enjoyment of life."

Next up was his friend (well, probably ex-friend by now) Gilbert Mendoza, who James claims was negligent in allowing him to drive his truck while drunk (which he definitely was, though James doesn't deserve to get any money out of it).

And, finally, in another lawsuit, James sued his attorney, because he thinks his sentence is too harsh. 

Cry-Baby #6: Michelle Rowlinson

The incident: A boy went into a store to buy Band-Aids for his friend who had fallen over.

The appropriate response: Nothing. 

The actual response: The boy's mother contacted her local newspaper to complain that her son had been forced to pay for the Band-Aids. 

In early September, 12-year-old Charlie Rowlinson was out playing with his 13-year-old friend Ed in Stapenhill, England. At some point, Ed fell and gashed his knee. 

Charlie and Ed went to a local shop called Wendy's News to buy Band-Aids and a bottle of water to rinse the wound. As is standard practice in shops, they were charged a monetary amount ($1.50) in exchange for the goods. 

Charlie then went home and told his mother Michelle what had happened. Outraged that her son had been forced to take part in a system that has existed for the last 100,000 years or so, Michelle contacted her local paper, The Burton Mail, to complain it.

“In my opinion it’s disgraceful that they charged him to clean himself up when he went in hurt," she told the paper. “If he had come to my house, I wouldn’t have charged him for water."

The Burton Mail contacted the shop, and, for some reason, owner Karen Taylor felt she had to defend herself: “My mom was working at the time. She said the two boys came into the shop and asked if we had any plasters [Band-Aids]. She took them into the corner and showed them the plasters, so I assumed they wanted to pay for them as they had already got the money out."

They didn’t ask for help. They came back in and asked for tissues, and she told him to help himself to some kitchen roll on the side. He then came back in and bought a bottle of water.”

Cry-Baby #7: William Leak

The incident: A man was fired from his job as a caretaker.

The appropriate response: Nothing, if your dismissal was warranted. Seeking legal help if you feel you were unjustly terminated. 

The actual response: The fired man slit the throats of his former employer's dogs. 

William Skyler Leak (pictured above) was fired from his job as a caretaker at a stable in Fort Worth, Texas last August.

According to Fort Worth Police, William was let go because "the owner didn't like his work performance." William was told to clear out the on-site mobile home he'd been living in and leave. William refused, and ended up squatting in the trailer for a month until the owner was able to get a court order forcing him out. 

The next night William returned to his former workplace and broke in. Once inside, he slit the throats of two border collies. He then stuck a note to a bulletin board inside the stable in which he called the double dog murder "absolutely beautiful."

"The sweet surrender as they looked into my eyes," the note read, "It was breathtaking." The note ended with a warning to his former employer, “If you ever try to find me, you will be in the same situation as your dogs.”

William was found and charged with two counts of animal cruelty. He pleaded guilty and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence.

Cry-Baby #8: The neighbors of the Giesegh family

The incident: A family in Colorado installed a wheelchair ramp on their home. 

The appropriate response: Nothing. 

The actual response: Their neighbors are threatening to take legal action against them. 

Vincent and Heidi Giesegh have a 16-year-old daughter with cerebral palsy. Because of this, they installed a wheelchair ramp on their home. 

In an interview with Louisville's 11 News, Vincent said, "We're trying to do our best to assist our daughter with her daily needs to get in and out of the house." He continued, "As she goes into her spastic modes, we could just tumble down the stairs and both of us could get massively hurt."

But, really, he doesn't need to explain any of that. Having a ramp on your house if someone who lives there needs one is a no-brainer. 

According to the Gieseghs, their neighbors got in touch at some point in October asking them to remove the ramp because they were afraid it would lower the value of their property. They said that if the Gieseghs refused, they would take legal action against them.  

11 News tried to speak to the neighbors to get their side of the story, but they declined to comment. 

Cry-Baby #9: Gail Horalek

screencap via

The incident:  A girl read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank as part of a school project.

The appropriate response: Realizing that the people who died in the Holocaust are just like you and just how lucky you are to be growing up with so many nice things, etc.

The actual response: The girl's mother filed a formal complaint with her daughter's school, complaining that the book was "pornographic."

Back in April, the 11-year-old daughter of Gail Horaleck was reading The Diary of a Young Girl by noted-potential-Belieber Anne Frank as part of a school project. Something Gail initially thought was "awesome."

This was until her daughter came to her and said she was concerned about some passages in the book. Specifically, a passage in which Anne talks about her genitals:

"Until I was eleven or twelve, I didn't realize there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris… When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside. They separate when you sit down and they're very red and quite fleshy on the inside. In the upper part, between the outer labia, there's a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That's the clitoris."

Gail felt that this was too much for an 11-year-old girl (who, presumably, also has labia 'n stuff) to be reading, claiming that they "may as well be reading pornography." 

So, she contacted the school and filed a formal complaint, before contacting her local news station and telling them about it. She said if the school doesn't pull the book as a result of her complaint, she will take further action until they do. 

Despite the fact that her child is sheltered and she is literally trying to ban a book, Gail told Northville Patch, “It doesn’t mean my child is sheltered, it doesn’t mean I live in a bubble and it doesn’t mean I’m trying to ban books.”

Cry-Baby #10: Park Elementary School

screencap via

The incident: A kid chewed his Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.

The appropriate response: Nothing. 

The actual response: The Pop-Tart customizing child was suspended from school. 

In July, seven-year-old Josh Welch was eating a Pop-Tart during breakfast at Park Elementary School in Baltimore, Maryland. According to his teachers, Josh chewed the Pop-Tart into a shape and pointed it at another student, while saying, "Bang, bang!"

Speaking of the incident on the local news, Josh said, "All I was trying to do was turn it into a mountain but, it didn't look like a mountain really, and it turned out to be a gun kinda. It was already a rectangle and I just kept on biting it and biting it and tore off the top and it kinda looked like a gun, but it wasn't."

Which, obviously, is all bullshit. What kind of a seven-year-old boy tries to make a mountain out of a Pop-Tart? And how do you fail at a mountain and end up with a gun? And why would you point a mountain at someone and say "bang bang"? There's so many holes in that story. If he's gonna go on TV and lie to everyone, he should have maybe taken the, like, ten seconds it would have taken to think of something more convincing than, "It was a banging mountain!" Come on, man. 

Obviously Josh doesn't need to lie about this anyway, because making a Pop-Tart gun is not a big deal. If anything, a mountain-shaped Pop-Tart would be more dangerous than a gun-shaped one because it would have at least one sharp edge. (Assuming he was going for the traditional mountain shape, and not like, Table Mountain or Ayers Rock or something.) 

Anyway, Josh was removed from the class, and suspended for two days. And his fellow students were sent home with a letter for their parents explaining that there had been an "incident" at school that day. A letter I would've totally framed if I'd received it. 

- - 

Which one of this lot is the biggest cry-baby of 2013? Let us know in this poll down here and I will make sure the trophy gets sent their way.

Previously: Cry-Baby of the Year 2012

Winner: Ashley Taylor, who pressed assault charges against a man because he snatched a microphone out of her hand. 

@JLCT

From a protest for and against the Charter of Values. via Flickr.

Quebec’s French language police are up to their old xenophobic tricks again. This time, two people were speaking Haitian Creole—which is basically 18th Century French, with some West African lingual spices— amongst themselves while on the job at a Montreal hospital, and somebody complained. According to Johanne Gagnon, the hospital’s director of communications who told the Montreal Gazette: “Something happened in a ward where some employees—probably two Haitians—were talking to each other in front of a Québécois employee, a francophone, who didn’t understand what the two people were saying because those two employees were speaking in Creole.”

Even though it is not against The Charter of the French Language (Bill 101) to speak another language that isn’t French on the job as long as it’s not to the public or if it purposely excludes coworkers, the OQLF still set a deadline for the Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies to do something before December 20^th, lest they risk a thorough investigation from the OQLF and as much as a $20,000 fine. That prompted the hospital to give a staff meeting on December 10^th to remind their workers to speak French. 

“This is intolerance,” said Patrick Gilles, director general of the Jeune Chambre de Commerce Haïtienne to the Gazette. “It makes no sense. The OQLF is exaggerating. There is no reason to reprimand anyone over this.”

In this case, the two Haitians, who have not been identified, do speak French—so it’s not a simple case of “shut up and learn French!” In fact, Quebec has actually been encouraging more immigrants like Haitians­ (who already speak French) to move to Quebec, while making it tougher for non-francophones to immigrate, so punishing these people who work in French at a French hospital makes no sense whatsoever.

I talked to Jean-Paul Perreault, President of a French advocacy organization called Impératif français and he said that while there is no law against speaking another language on the job, the problem occurs when it conflicts with the rights established in Bill 101. “There are many, many organizations in Montreal and Outaouais where the fundamental rights of citizens are not respected—the right to receive service in French, the right to be informed in French, the right to work in French—and the Office québécoise de la langue française does not have sufficient resources to intervene.” Which, I suppose, explains the six percent budget increase to $24.7 million the OQLF got this year.

While I agree that it’s important to protect French from death in the face of the rest of Canada and North America, upholding these laws that come with huge fines in 2013 seems a bit overboard.

Indeed it seems that embarrassing and “overzealous” enforcing of Quebec’s language laws are occurring more frequently what with the OQLF making recent stinks over dangerous, culture-threatening words like “pasta”, “takeout” and caffe, or English writing on a spoon at a froyo establishment.

But this isn’t the only recent incident where language at work has become an issue. This past June a young bilingual Anglophone quit her job at the IGA grocery store because her manager repeatedly told her to stop speaking English at work, even in the lunchroom. However, this didn’t prompt the OQLF to react in this case. In fact, the OQLF spokesperson at the time said that there is no provision in Bill 101 that prohibits speaking another language besides French amongst each other on the job. The spokesperson highlighted this again when speaking to the media about #creolegate. Why then, in a situation so similar to the IGA one, did the OQLF choose to intimidate the hospital with a fine?

While it’s still under investigation as to whether or not the two Creole-speakers were doing something more than talking casually amongst themselves, the likelihood of them actually breaking any language laws other than the unspoken one of “don’t be different” doesn't seem high. The danger here for the OQLF and Quebec francophones in general is that the language police’s overzealousness is not only pushing out Anglophones, but French speaking immigrants as well. There needs to be some real collective thought in Quebec on what they want the OQLF to do, and how they can do it without seeming like hyper-sensitive xenophobic jerks.

@joelbalsam

Why must all tech crazes borrow from The Matrix's aesthetic? via the Bitcoin sub-Reddit.

If you have an internet connection, you’ve likely heard about bitcoin. If you have an internet connection in Vancouver, chances are you haven’t stopped hearing about it.  You might even own a fraction of a bitcoin (measured in its cents-equivalent, micro bitcoin) or perhaps you’ve invested in DogeCoin, bitcoin’s lovable, meme-fueled alternative. Invested or not, some days it feels like the city’s patented mix of real estate market speculators, gaming industry nerds, recreational druggies and lefty counterculturists have created a perfect storm of bitcoin enthusiasm.

“I think Vancouver is definitely one of the top cities in the world for bitcoin adoption,” says Adam Soltys, founder of Vancouver’s Bitcoin Co-op, which among other things helps local businesses set up bitcoin point-of-sale apps.

Until recently, the only evidence that Vancouver might be leading the bitcoin charge in North America was the world’s first ATM, which drew over a million Canadian dollars in bitcoin transactions during its first month of existence.

Judging by CoinMap.org, a site that tracks 2,000 cryptocurrency-accepting businesses around the world, Vancouver has a handful more bitcoin vendors than tech-savvy San Francisco. You can get a massage, fix your phone, buy groceries and drink beer all with deliciously postmodern internet money. Despite the sizable population difference, Toronto’s cryptocurrency scene is half the size. According to Google Trends data, in the past 90 days Vancouver is second only to Amsterdam for most bitcoin-related web searches worldwide.
 

Vancouver is coming for your Google-searching Crown, Amsterdam. via Google Trends.

Turns out Vancouverites really are talking about and using bitcoin more than anywhere else in Canada. “Vancouver’s got a lot of counterculture-type folks, and there’s a big libertarian community,” Soltys explains (eventually our conversation moves to discussing hearsay about local pot dealers accepting coin for BC bud, before going back on topic). “I think the whole radical left-leaning socially-conscious element in Vancouver has made it a hotbed for bitcoin.

Some of the buzz is no doubt related to big moves by Bitcoiniacs, the Vancouver-based company that purchased the aforementioned first-ever bitcoin ATM. Three young dudes hailing from British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast went in on five Robocoin ATMs this year—four are still being built—which are all slated to open for business in Calgary, Montreal and Toronto in early 2014.

Sitting down with Bitcoiniacs co-founders Cheyne Mackie and Mitchell Demeter, it’s clear the Vancouver ATM launch was more hyped than expected—thanks in small part to the Left Coast’s healthy contempt for big banks. Mackie and Demeter invited me back to the conference room where they broker trades over $3,000 by appointment. They walked me through the clunky process of setting up a bitcoin wallet on my phone, and let me trade a high-rolling twenty bones into bitcoin.

“There seemed to be a lot of people taking a wait-and-see approach,” Demeter says of competitors from Chicago to Stockholm. In the meantime, bitcoin’s value has only become more volatile. “Since we already had our own physical brokerage down near Granville Island, we knew there was a market… we had some metrics already, so we were just the first ones to jump in.”

“There’s only so many talkers, and not that many walkers,” Mackie adds.

With crisp dress shirts and haircuts, Mackie and Demeter are doing their best to peel back the layers of esoteric nerdism seemingly required to avoid getting fleeced by sketchy bitcoin exchange operations (most notably this happened in Hong Kong in May; $4.1 million disappeared but NBD). Because the currency is open-source and decentralized with no government backing, even some of the most reputable exchange sites are mystery organizations in Slovenia, or former Magic The Gathering forums.

Mackie and Demeter are launching their own “next generation” exchange site—dubbed CoinTrader.net—which just started private beta-testing yesterday. “You have all these fly-by-night exchanges, and we’re providing more reliability and transparency,” says Demeter.

Sitting within earshot of the ATM for twenty minutes, two customers in a row feed stacks of hundred-dollar bills into the machine. One guy says he took the ferry from Vancouver Island when he saw the exchange rate dip under $600 per bitcoin. There’s a utopic tone in his voice that makes me want to remind him he could easily lose half his money tomorrow.

“When bitcoin hit $1,200 it was packed all day long,” recalls Alex Robertson, an attendant paid to stand by the ATM for inevitable questions. “The last week things have settled a bit.”

“We had a young guy come in, he was 18 and he’d been mining bitcoins on his Xbox since 2010,” Demeters says. “With all the hype of the last few weeks he came in, he actually found 3,600 bitcoins on his gaming computer.” Demeters says they helped the kid sell off 800 bitcoins for nearly $800,000.

Vancouver is buzzing with stories like these. And it’s hard not to be excited for whatever inexplicable possibility (or failure) bitcoin’s development might bring. In the last twenty-four hours, the $20 on my phone jumped to $25.61. I spent the difference on currywurst at a trendy Berlin-inspired spot called Bestie, (because, let’s face it; Vancouver is officially the new Kreuzberg). After a bit of QR code fumbling, restaurant co-owner Dane Brown says they’ve been getting at least one bitcoin customer a day all month.

“It’s fun to have the first ATM and help develop the industry and the infrastructure for it,” Mackie says of Bitcoiniacs’ place in the local and international scene. With big plans coming in January, it will be interesting to see if other Canadian cities will absorb Vancouver’s enthusiasm, or remain justifiably skeptical.

@sarahberms

Some of my former students on the cover of an album they made.

Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I’ve worked in an after-school and summer program teaching an English class I devised that utilizes music in various ways to help New Orleans’s elementary and middle school students practice their writing. Sometimes we write and record rap songs (150 so far!), and other times we write essays about our favorite artists. But the kids do their best stuff when I have them review albums by local musicians.

Usually, we pick records that can’t be explained away with a simple genre tag—weirder music is more challenging to describe. This semester we reviewed three genre-defying albums, but also two genre-specific titles—the first of those two being Fooler’s Gold, by popular retro jazz act Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns.

Hello! I will be describing some songs by Meschiya Lake! The first is called “Catch Em Young” and it sounds jazzy and reminds me of a rock concert with trumpets. On “Don’t Start With Me” she’s telling her boyfriend don’t start this again with me I’m tired of it! “My Man” is a classy song and she’s telling her friends that he’s her man, not theirs, and you can’t have him. She’s saying her life is difficult because her man is treating her like a punching bag and she doesn’t like it. “It’s the Rhythm in Me” is jazzy and she’s having the time of her life. She’s dancing around having a slumber party and this is a good song! “I’ll Wait For You” is a jazzy fun song but it sounds like she’s sitting on a bench saying, “I’ll wait for you as long as I can, till tomorrow, till the DAWN!”

“Midnight on the Bayou” sounds like she’s on a boat at starry night and she’s in a beautiful dress having fun and having the best day! “Fooler’s Gold” sounds like she’s on a treasure hunt and she’s acting out a mysterious jazzy song! “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” was nice but it wasn’t the best and she had too much cracks in her voice. “Organ Grinder” was the worst on the album; she sounds like she’s teaching a bad tuba band. “Miss Otis Regrets” was really good but she sounds like a man cow that’s kicked out of a barnyard. “The Fragrance of Your Charms” was also a bad song, she sounds like she got rejected and stranded in the woods! “Do Right” was OK! Not perfection. She sounds like she’s queen of the swamp teaching fat kids. “Believe In Music” was good, like she’s giving a speech that she believes. And she’s in the Civil War.

I think this album deserves a 90 and a half percent! All of the songs were jazzy fun and energetic songs that anybody would want to hear on a happy day. This album is filled with fun.

-Destiny

The album Fooler’s Gold by Meschiya Lake and the Little Big Horns sounds jazzy and romantic. It’s very groovy and I think a lot of people would like this album. The first song called “Catch Em Young” is fun. It sounds like it’s in the French Quarter. “Don’t Start With Me” sounds like she’s singing in the movie Princess and the Frog. On “My Man” it seems like she really loves her man too much. In “It’s the Rhythm In Me” she likes the song’s rhythm so she’s having fun dancing with the rhythm. On “Midnight on the Bayou” she’s smooching at the bayou with her husband because it’s her honeymoon. “Fooler’s Gold” sounds like a pirate trying to find the gold and a fool steals the gold from her. “Young Woman Blues” finally proves that she’s a good singer. On “Organ Grinder” she’s angry at her boyfriend cheating so she wants to grind his organs. “Miss Otis Regrets” is about a woman that warns her man to never do something mean to her. In “Fragrance Of Your Charms” she puts the man under a spell with her amazing smell of perfume. In “Do Right” she’s telling her boyfriend to do right and not break her heart. On “I Believe In Music” she’s telling the kids to not say they don’t believe in music.

I like this album because the music makes sense. She has very good vocals and it’s positive.

-Veronica

The second traditional record we picked apart was the debut EP of original songs by King James and the Special Men, a local group best known for covering a huge catalogue of greasy tunes by the greats of downtown New Orleans R&B.

This EP called The Special Men has four songs and most of them are GREAT! The genre of most of these songs is jazz. The song “Special Men Boogie” has guitar, trumpet, piano, and drums. The beat sounds like something you would hear in the French Quarter. This song is really well recorded. The song “Love My Baby” has guitar, piano, drums, and trumpet. The beat sounds like a donkey snorting. The genre is blues. This song is NOT WELL RECORDED because the guitar sounds horrible and the song is jacked up. On “Guitar King” the beat sounds jazzy. “Guitar King” is well recorded. “BJ’s Bounce” has a piano, guitar, and trumpet. It sounds like a good jazz song but we didn’t get to hear all of it because there is a curseword.

I think you should get this EP because there is only one song that’s horrible and you can always skip it. I like it. Get it, get it, get it!

-Renee

They then moved on to the weird records. The kids tried to wrap their minds around the EP One Foot in Front of the Other by one-man band Lonesome Leash, a.k.a the brilliant and original Walt McClements, who also tours as multi-instrumentalist for the band Dark Dark Dark.

This EP by Lonesome Leash has a sad, slow vibe to it. It’s mainly rock ’n’ roll mixed with a few other genres. I find it impressive for a one-man band. It would be real good for mean people. “Maps” reminds me in an odd way of war. If I close my eyes I picture squiggly lines passing quickly. It’s very depressing. The vocals are swell but he tries too hard to make things rhyme. “Dead” is, once again, very depressing, like a person that is just simply overwhelmed by everything. I also picture being surrounded by everything in perfect order. The lyrics and vocals are very clear. “This Time,” once again, is sad. It is much slower than the others. Halfway through the song it changes pace. It has accordion and drums. It reminds me of a very large room with things falling and breaking. The music starts very rapidly with a large drumbeat. Once again, it is sad It reminds me of walking a bare road and never finding anything. The fifth song is instrumental in two ways (its title is also “Instrumental”). It feels like going around on a merry-go-round. It has a very quick accordion beat with short pauses.

Overall the album is very sad. I get many pictures from it. I would recommend it if you enjoy sad music or you like strong emotional songs.

-Austyn

Beginning song “Maps” is creepy because it feels like something bad is going to happen. The song “Dead” has the same creepy music. It feels like someone is going to capture me and kill me. The first part of “This Time” sounds like a spaceship with aliens. It doesn’t have creepy music like the last two. YAY! I think…

The song “Road” has the thing I hate most, feedback! It was probably recorded live because it doesn’t sound that good. The music sounds like two animals fighting over a trumpet. In the song “Instrumental” there’s accordion. That’s all I can hear. I picture myself in France and in Italy. This is the only song I like because it’s instrumental. That’s why it’s called “Instrumental,” obviously.

This album sucks, I hate the vocals, I hate the lyrics, I hate the feedback, I hate everything about this album. I think this album shouldn’t be sold because other people won’t like it either.

-Eliza

The students were a bit more open-minded about With Out Warning by One Man Machine, a loop-powered psychedelic Creole-punk act. A couple kids who said they did not like the record were later caught singing these songs on the playground.

On With Out Warning by One Man Machine, my favorite song is “You Can Have It,” because it includes animal sounds. My least favorite is “Seven” because it doesn’t have any lyrics and it repeats too much! However, I like the music. The song “With Out Warning” is so awesome because it sounds like ghosts, monsters, vampires, zombies, etc. are having a big party in the underworld. The song that I really hate and that sounds like poo is “The Sacred and the Profane,” because it doesn’t really have any beats and is SOOO endless. I’d rather eat garbage than listen to it. However I like that there is a lot of different mixes of instruments. The thing I don’t get at all is why they would name a song “Seven” when it has nothing to do with the number seven? They should have just named song number seven “Seven,” and since number seven is seven minutes long, the song “Seven” should have been number seven. It really makes more sense.

-Emily

One Man Machine’s new album With Out Warning sounds like one of those horrible British singers called Coldplay. Their songs are really repetitive with bad raspy singing. They sing scary songs with creak sounds and bells. Their voices turn high and then low which makes it sound really bad. They use drums a lot. Also they use a lot of electric guitar. The song “Seven” sounds like punk rock. They do not sing on this song. It has a cool beat. I admit it sounds a little weird. It repeats itself with guitar and drum machine. In the song “Icarus” the guitar sounds like yelling. “Holy Land” sounds like you are singing while you are dying because the singing is so weak. “All of Me” uses a scratchy voice but has cool music. “You Can Have It” sounds like a 90-year-old is saying, “You can have it!” “Robira Naps,” sounds creepy like horror movie music. “The Sacred and the Profane” is very long and boring and repeats itself. The title song “With Out Warning” has drums and what sounds like police sirens.

I don’t think you should buy this album unless you like raspy voices. Their singing is terrible. Also it is so repetitive and boring it could lull you to sleep!

-Claire

Lastly, the students tackled “Term Two” by abstract musical act Earl Long, featuring New Orleans’s psychedelic elder statesman Ray Bong.

Term Two is a very weird album. It has weird but cool sounds. It’s like going through movies and dreams or nightmares. The first song, “Right Brain (Left Brain),” starts off with a dialogue. It makes me feel like I’m going through one of my nightmares. “As Per Request” sounds like Indian music. It’s going very fast like I’m on a rollercoaster. “Bosun’s Mate” starts off like a scary movie. It’s like an alien weird squiggly sound. It starts fast then slow then fast then slow. The fourth song, “Tuk Tuk” sounds like a Mario game, then an alien-like sound. Now it sounds like it’s raining in the spring. “Metal Swiss Cheese Overdose” starts off with drums. It has this weird feeling like you are going through an alien smackdown, or like a bad signal on a walky-talky. “Professor John Plays the Harmonica” feels like a sad black-and-white movie with no dialogue and he is in jail. “Advent of Technology” starts of with a jazzy beat and I feel like I’m in New Orleans. It’s deep and slow but still jazzy. The final song, “Brain Folds (Left/Right),” really sounds like your mind is being folded and weird things are happening. It’s like you’re in the hospital and you’re dying. It sounds like he is screaming because it really hurt. There is a drumbeat for the heartbeat. It totally felt like I went on a weird adventure through my mind.

-Sequoia

Michael Patrick Welch is a New Orleans musician, journalist, and author of books including The Donkey Show and New Orleans: the Underground Guide. His work has appeared at McSweeney's, Oxford American, Newsweek, Salon, and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter here.

The classes Michael teaches are brought to New Orleans by Community Works.

 Screencaps from WSB-TV News, via The Atlanta Journal Constitution

The number of places you can pee in public in Atlanta just got reduced by 111 with the announcement of urine detection devices (UDDs) being installed in all of its subway elevators. If the system leads to tougher enforcement of public indecency laws, a lot of people could be facing some harsh penalties just for relieving themselves.

If you've never had the pleasure of getting around Atlanta on MARTA, its rapid transit system, you might be unaware that for years the customary place to relieve yourself before or after a train ride was in the elevators. Some residents, like the ones on this TV news report said it used to be so bad you had to hold your breath. Other residents, whose quotes I made up, said it smelled like "a nice warm place to take your dick out for 45 seconds." Atlanta's new $1,110,000 program has put the kibosh on all that. 

In updated elevators, according to Tom Beebe, MARTA's director of elevators and escalators, criminal urine will be picked up by one of twenty finely tuned UDDs in every elevator because of its "splash factor." Once the sensor comes in contact with the noxious piss molecules, it will sound an alarm. Next, the police will be there "in seconds," to heroically arrest the perpetrator. One such lawbreaker has already been taken into custody, and since a closed-circuit camera records all pee incidents, the micturator is surely dead to rights.

The news report calls Atlanta's urine detection program "first-of-its-kind," although it's not. The technology seems to have been invented in Singapore by a Canadian engineer named Tom Orlowsky working for a company called Pixelmatrix. Singapore, where public urination comes with a ticket and a steep fine, not even a caning, has had versions of these detectors in place since the nineties, and apparently they've helped with the smell there, although their pee detectors lock you in the elevator when the alarm sounds. In Atlanta, and most places in the US, the law considers it "lewd exposure of the sexual organs," and it can get you locked up. In other words, American laws are harsher than Singapore's.

You might think a little urine smell isn't worth spending taxpayer money. Personally, I steer clear of the elevators at subway stops here in LA, precisely because 100 percent of them smell like an ammonia-soaked muskox. Before I gave it any thought, I used to feel like it was a fair tradeoff. Then, I remembered that not everyone's legs work well enough to use the stairs, which means every disabled person you see on the subway has just gotten an olfactory urine assault on the way down, and they're in for another on the way up. If Atlanta's disabled commuters were in similar straits, I would have wanted some of my hard-earned dollars to be allocated to fixing that. I just don't need anyone who gets busted to be put in the sex offender registry because of it.

Worth noting: MARTA also reopened four public restrooms in subway stations that were closed for some insane reason (9/11?). That should also help.

@MikeLeePearl

Charles Bukowski was a drunk. Not just a drunk, but the drunk. Nearly two decades after his death, he remains the patron saint of drunks. That being the case, naming a bar after him makes sense. It's been done, many times, before: New York City, Glasgow, Boston and Amsterdam all possess watering hole homages to the alpha male author. Santa Monica's week-old Barkowski can now be added to that list.

The deification of Bukowski, and other tortured, inebriated artists of his ilk, is a task best undertaken by those who have not experienced actual suffering. There is no better place to find said demographic than Santa Monica, California, a bourgeoisie beachside burg more well-known for its outdoor shopping mall than its self-destructive poet population. According to Barkowski's website, its namesake's "writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles." Santa Monica is not Los Angeles. Los Angeles, or at least Bukowski's Los Angeles, is where you go when you want to drink $3 draft beers surrounded by human detritus. Santa Monica, however, is where you go when you want to pay $9 for a poorly poured, half-filled glass of Chimay. Barkowski sells poorly poured, half-filled $9 glasses of Chimay.

Barkowski's interior is essentially the same as that of its predecessor, the Air Conditioned Lounge; nothing has been done to alter its nondescriptly modern black and red color scheme and padded leather walls. Enormous glamour shots of Buk' drinking and gazing into the distance, alongside framed printouts of trite quotes about women and incarceration, are the only things that differentiate the new bar from the old. In one photo, he's shown cradling a Schlitz tall boy; in the interest of synergy, Schlitz tall boys are available at the bar. For $7. If Schlitzes were $7 in Bukowski's day, he wouldn't have been able to afford a drinking problem, and Barkowski would have a decidedly different theme ("Papa y Beer Hemingway's," perhaps?). When it came to preserving the authenticity of the Bukowski theme, $7 Schlitzes and the "A" health rating sign hanging above the bar were but two of a myriad inaccuracies.

The cheapest beer available, America's least-favorite piss-like macrobrew Milwaukee's Best, was $4; most were priced in the $6 to $7 range. The "Good Eats" section of the menu advertised "nuked" White Castle sliders for $3. Below, an unrelated quote from Bukowski was written in chalk: “What a woman wants is a reaction. What a man wants is a woman.” In fairness to the bar, however, any quote of his would have been unrelated, as I'm fairly certain the man never wrote any prose about overpriced microwaved sliders. Barkowski lacks a liquor license; the $7 cocktails on the menu get their kick from Soju, a hangover-inducing Korean grain alcohol. I decided, as Bukowski once wrote, to "stay with the beer." After all, "beer is continuous blood. a continuous lover.”  The one lover my thriftiness allowed me to consume, a $5 Blue Moon, was served with a wedge of orange on its rim. The visual of Bukowski consuming fruit, or any kind of food for that matter, with his beer tickled me.

It was 8 PM on a Friday, the bar's first day of business. A smattering of middle-aged white men, many alone, stared at their iPhones. Instead of slaving over the Great American Novel, they appeared to be penning the Great American Status Update. Slowly, the folks you assume would patronize a Bukowski-themed bar trickled in: a man-child wearing a scarf and bandaged knuckles, no doubt injured in a moment of "passion"; a group of young dweebs, who drank their beers in confused, awkward silence; a filthy-mouthed man draped in Dodgers paraphernalia. 

Behind me, two bros animatedly spoke; dialogue like "It's gonna be a great year!" implied they had a stake in this operation. Bro #1, with his manicured beard and bun, sipped an aforementioned $7 Schlitz tall boy. Bro #2, with slicked black hair and an elbow-patched blazer, drank a glass of red wine. Bro #1 sadly lamented to Bro #2, "He was supposed to be a graphics ninja." Yeah. They were definitely the owners.

Time passed slowly, as the bar wasn't exactly "jumpin." The forty minute mark felt like four hours. I decided to wait it out an hour; this goal, while meager, was still difficult to achieve because I couldn't afford to get drunk. Then, all at once, it happened. A couple of gen-u-ine degenerates, the kind that'd make Ol' Bukowski puke with pride, stumbled in.

The men, both wearing polo shirts, had been kicked out of another bar. One, the strong, silent type, said little. His companion, however, did enough talking for the both of them. Gregarious to a fault, he put his arms around everyone, up to and including a depressed middle aged man who couldn't stop gazing at his own reflection in an enormous mirror above the bar, presumably wondering what went wrong. He eventually approached the beard-o owner bros. Shaking an enormous wad of cash, he slurred, "Those people don't even know what they were kicking out." The bros, who appeared genuinely uncomfortable by this level of authenticity, met his enthusiasm with icy terseness. He was the only insufferable drunk in a shrine to one of history's greatest insufferable drunks, and his presence was not appreciated. Granted, he looked more like a stereo salesmen than a tortured artist, but still. 

The staff had no idea how to handle the drunk, who I monikered "Fistful of Dollars." His genuine intoxication, and the Bukowski-level behavior it generated, made them uncomfortable. As he belligerently wandered around the bar, alternating between hugging and talking at patrons, the bartender—gussied up in generic pinup horseshit (impeccable hair, a flower behind her ear; the whole nine yards)—helplessly stood next to the cash register and tried to stay inconspicuous. The manager, to his credit, silently slipped between Fistful of Dollars and me when it looked like I was going to be his next conversational victim.

Despite the manager's best efforts, Fistful of Dollars did approach me on my way out. He drunkenly slurred his way through a shambolic mess of a pick-up attempt, caressing my arm for emphasis as everyone employed by the bar looked on horrified yet did nothing. After a while, his girlfriend showed up. "Your boyfriend is intoxicated," I told her. "I know," she sighed, looking put upon. Her resignation was palpable. A long-suffering woman and a rich drunk? Barkowski had found its perfect patrons. If only the drunk wasn't so... y'know... drunk.

I whipped out the ol' Ouija board once I got home, and asked Buk' for his take on the establishment that bore his name. This amazing poetry flowed through my fingers. He was always such an artist!

i would rather fuck

a big pussied woman

clutch at her big pussied body in the hot cool of the dark night

than pay seven dollars

for a shit cunt schlitz can of piss fuck

@bornferal

Jawad Farooz holding a poster in Bahrain.

It’s been over a year since the Bahraini government cancelled the citizenship of of Jalal Farooz and his brother Jawad, both former leaders of the country's opposition party. Last November, on the night of the US presidential elections, the Bahraini Ministry of the Interior announced it had turned 31 opposition leaders into stateless people for the crime of “damaging the security of the state.” On the day Jalal found out he was a legal nonentity without a country to call home he was in London, teaching a course in management studies.

“My wife called me from Bahrain at midnight,” he said. “She’d seen a statement on local TV. Without any prior notice, my citizenship had been revoked.” There was no legal process and no warning. “I was never interrogated, I’ve never been asked to go to a police station, nothing,” said Jalal. “Then my citizenship was revoked. I was in shock.”

Last week, after 13 months of limbo, the brothers were both granted asylum in the UK, which is probably just as well given the repression, torture, and death that has been meted out to dissidents since Bahrainis began demanding reforms in 2011. The Bahraini regime, which is for all intents and purposes an absolute monarchy, responding to the protests with teargas and oppression. A recent report by the UK parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee cited “evidence of very serious human rights abuses by the security services during the events of 2011 and the two years since.” By granting both Jawad and Jalal asylum, the UK has tacitly recognized that the brothers face persecution for their political activities— which makes it all the more weird that it otherwise seems so relaxed about human rights abuses on the tiny Gulf island.

The Foreign Affairs Committee highlighted Bahrain’s strategic location which, together with its growing economy and willingness to host UK military forces, apparently make it “vitally important” to the UK's interests. When Foreign Secretary William Hague addressed a recent conference on national security in Manama, Bahrain's capital, he was gushing about the two nations’ 150-year-old ties. “As you... work to build the long-term stability that Bahrainis deserve, we will be a staunch friend to you: supporting the sustained, comprehensive reform you are seeking, and calling on all sides to play a constructive role in political dialogue,” he told his audience of Bahraini VIPs. It's quite difficult for the opposition to play a "constructive" role in a dialogue when their leaders face intimidation and imprisonment.

Jalal Farooz.

I met Jalal and Jawad, both smartly dressed in suits and ties, at a cafe on a London university campus. Both are former members of Parliament with the Al Wefaq National Islamic Society, a socially conservative Shiite politcal party that wants the monarchy to surrender more power to democratically elected leaders. As with most coffee dates, it wasn’t long before we were talking about Bahraini sectarianism.

The country's government, security apparatus, army, and civil service are all dominated by Sunnis, despite most of the population being Shiite. Jawad, who had been part of parliamentary committee looking at land use, told me that Sunni areas are targeted for investment at the expense of the country's Shiites. Then there are the 28 Shiite mosques that were demolished by the government in response to the pro-democracy protests, just in case you weren't convinced that the regime is sectarian. In an attempt to reduce the numerical advantage of the Shiite population, the government has granted citizenship to thousands of foreign Sunnis. These include Bedouins from eastern Syria, Pakistanis, Yemenis and, claims Jawad, 30,000 or so members of the Dosari tribe of eastern Saudi Arabia. “During the elections, they send buses to Saudi Arabia, bring them to Bahrain to vote for the regime’s candidates, then send them back,” Jawad told me. “Some of them are registered to imaginary homes in Bahrain.”

Protesters on the march in Bahrain in 2011. Photo courtesy of Al Wefaq News Agency

Opposition leaders—including Sunni ones—insist that the 2011 protests in Bahrain were not motivated by sectarianism. When sit-ins started at the Pearl Roundabout, Bahrain’s revolutionary hub and answer to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, both Sunnis and Shiites turned up in droves. “The protesters didn’t ask for Shiite rights, but for democratic rights: a vote for each citizen, an elected government, the separation of powers, security for all, and an end to discrimination,” said Jawad.

The regime responded with a brutal crackdown. A report commissioned by the King himself later found that government forces had used arbitrary detention, forced disappearances, torture, psychological abuse, and “unnecessary and excessive force,” all of which—predictably—resulted in the deaths of civilians. Saudi Arabia sent in 1,000 troops to “protect government installations." The tension between the regime and its critics continues to this day. Bahrain recently bought more tear gas canisters than it has citizens, and Amnesty International has accused the government of torturing children. In response, anti-government forces have been upping the ante, specifically by attempting to blow up police.

At the begining of the uprising, Jalal divided his time between guiding journalists covering the protests and traveling abroad for lectures. Jawad had a seat in Parliament until February 2011, but resigned in protest when the bloodshed began and put his efforts into organizing demonstrations. In May 2011, he was arrested and, like many others, was beaten with a rubber hose, tortured, and humiliated. He claims the guards insulted him for being Shiite and called him a traitor. “One guard put a pistol to my head as if he was going to fire it," Jawad told me. "He said, ‘I could shoot you now, but I don’t want to spill your disgusting blood.'"

Jawad in London.

Jawad was released, but he was charged with calling for unauthorized marches and “inciting hatred against the regime.” During a break between court hearings, he visited London and it was while he was there that he found out he was no longer a citizen of Bahrain.

“Since I went into exile my first daughter was married and my first grandson was born. At least now I can go to countries close to home and meet them,” said Jalal. “But I can still see all the atrocities and the unhappy situation of the people of Bahrain. The harsh measures by the regime will keep me from celebrating being granted asylum.”

A lot of people’s first exposure to Michael C. Ruppert was with the 2009 documentary Collapse, directed by Chris Smith.

An ex-LAPD officer who left the force after claiming that the CIA were complicit in selling drugs across the US, Ruppert fast became one of the most original and strident voices to talk about climate change, government corruption, and peak oil, through his website, From the Wilderness.

One of VICE’s favorite films of the last 10 years, Collapse was lauded as one of the scariest documentaries about the world we live in and how fragile the state of our planet is.

Following the release of the movie, Ruppert’s personal world underwent something of a collapse itself and he paid off all his debts, left behind all his friends, and moved with his dog Rags to Colorado, with a plan to commit suicide.

VICE caught up with him amidst the epic beauty of the Rocky Mountains at the end of this year. We found a passionate man undergoing a spiritual rebirth with a whole new set of apocalyptic planet-threatening issues to talk about.

The film’s an intimate portrayal of a man convinced of the imminent collapse of the world, but with inspirational answers as to how the human spirit can survive the impending apocalypse.

The full-length documentary will premiere on VICE.com in January 2014.

Soundtrack by Sunn O))), the Flaming Lips, Interpol, Michael C. Ruppert, and more.

Directed by Andy Capper

Image by Courtney Nicholas

Greg Araki’s film Mysterious Skin (2006) is an adaptation Scott Heim's novel about two eight-year-old boys in Kansas who are molested by their baseball coach. The movie avoids the usual clichés of molestation narratives by presenting the two vastly different lives that resulted from the same trauma. Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) becomes a hustler who grows increasingly reckless in his sexual behavior, while Brian (Brady Corbet) is so deep in denial he believes he was abducted by aliens instead of sexually abused. The depiction of the child molester is especially interesting because he is not portrayed as a monster. One of the most curious aspects of the film is the attractive depiction of Coach: because the film is presented through the subjective perspectives of the two boys, Coach is seen as each boy would have seen him. He seduces them, and thus he seems more like a friend, rather than a sexual threat. But this is also the only perspective that the audience is given so there are no cracks in Coach’s appealing façade. This kind of positive exterior is precisely what the molester wants within the diegesis of the film. There are a few ancillary elements in the film that suggest the abuse has damaged the boys—Neil’s attraction to horror films, Neil’s rape near the end of the film, and his denial of the severity of any of the events—but the odd thing, especially for a film by a gay filmmaker, is that the implied repercussions of the child abuse are activities associated with a sexually active gay youth. Because Brian and Neil grow up as sexy young men and do things that any curious young person might do, it is as if the film is making a connection between sexual preference and abuse. The monster at the center of this film is so attractive that he seems blameless, and he turns the boys not into pathological wrecks, but into attractive sexualized portraits of young men.

The opening 30 minutes of the film show us Neil and Brian as nine-year-olds being molested by Coach, done through flashbacks with voiceover that is often just text lifted by screenwriter Scott Heim straight from his own book. This kind of voiceover distances the viewer from the action, because the voiceover acts as a buffer, it is describing and interpreting what the images are showing. The character’s voice mediates the information rather than allowing the audience to engage directly with the disturbing images, and so the voiceover becomes the primary contact with the audience. In the opening half hour of Mysterious Skin, though, the whole point is to highlight the characters’ psychological shell as they grasp at the formative events of their childhoods, trying to undertand. Both characters remember what happened in such a different ways that the events are either glossed over to the extreme of making abuse seem like ecstatic pleasure, as in Neil’s case, or else it is completely suppressed, as in Brian’s.

Brian spends the whole movie actively trying to find out what happened to him, and the voiceover at the beginning of the film connects the audience to the experience of his character. He is certain of some events from his childhood, but is completely at a loss when it comes to the traumatic abuse and the voiceover’s searching narration becomes the central thrust of the whole movie. The first line of the film is Brian declaring, “The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life,” and the rest of the film, at least for Brian, involves the uncovering of that mystery. Alien abduction becomes the prism through which he begins to approach the mystery, which concludes when Neil finally takes him to the site of the trauma, Coach’s house, and tells him what happened. This scene's revelations seem to be an attempt by the director to finally expose Coach for the monster he was. Coach’s crimes against the boys involve blowjobs and fisting, which conceptually might be extreme, especially when stated so explicitly. But even in this scene Coach’s friendly image remains in tact. His crimes are recounted audibly but the only incriminating visual we get of Coach is a shot of him on all fours, sweaty, looking over his shoulder back at the camera. He is caught in flagrante, but it is only suggested, neither the penetration nor the boys are shown in the shot. Penetration would take the movie in a more extreme direction, but without it Coach retains his deceptive mask. In a different context, the setup of this scene could easily make it one of extreme attractiveness.

Neil’s perspective of Coach and his situation in the film are even more problematic than Brian’s. At age eight Neil’s first reaction to Coach is related as such, “I wasn’t sure what to do with my emotion. It was like a gift I had to open in front of a crowd.” Before Coach even begins to seduce him, Neil is already deeply attracted. In the book the desire is more extreme, “Desire sledge-hammered my body, a sensation I still wasn’t sure I had a name for. If I saw Coach now, say across a crowded bar, that feeling would translate to something like ‘I want to fuck him.’” Neil has a crush on Coach and thus Coach is seen only through the lense of Neil’s adoring gaze. Coach is s a fantasy come true for Neil, and there is no filter because Neil has had no one teach him about sexual boundaries. His mother cares for him, but she is too preoccupied with her own love life to provide an example for him or even judge Neil’s extended stays at Coach’s house to be inappropriate. Thus the only critical perspective of the situation comes from outside the diegetic world, in the form of the movie itself. The fact that a movie about child abuse has been made drects the focus on the issue. Regardless of how it is treated within the film itself, because of its subject, the film raises awareness of issues for the purpose of critique. 

But within the film Neil’s perspective only allows few and problematic entry points for an alternative readingsof Coach. The fact that Neil at age fifteen becomes a male prostitute who scores middle-aged johns at a playground pick-up spot is ostensibly a critique of his earlier experiences with Coach. But like Coach’s molestation, Neil’s prostitution is portrayed in such a way that it becomes alluring. His less experienced friend, Eric (Jeff Licon) calls Neil “a god” just as Neil struts off across the playground in slow motion to meet another john. In addition, the johns may be old men who are balding and fat and unattractive, but the sex scenes with them are sensuous and warm. There is nothing in the scenes that suggest Neil is uncomfortable or engaging in something that he wouldn’t do if the money weren’t involved. In fact, money is hardly the issue for Neil, it is all about the sex for him. He even talks about wanting to conquer a man in a white Camero because he has had every other john that comes to the park. Neil is in full control of his situation. Granted, it is suggested that he is possibly attracted to these older men because the approval and adoration they give him parallel the attention that Coach gave him when he was eight. This would mean he has failed to grow past the trauma of his childhood. But the movie has a hard time conveying what Neil is doing is “bad,” just as it has a hard time depicting the monster as a monster. Not that prostitution is bad; in this film it comes off as empowering to a certain extent. The problem is that there are conflicting messages: the film wants to suggest that trauma led Neil into a debased and dangerous lifestyle, but then it depicts the lifestyle very seductively.

Two-thirds of the way through the film Neil moves to New York and his experiences with men change. Neil continues his prostitution in the big city and we see three of his encounters. The first encounter is with a man who is all business; he pushes Neil around and rushes him into the act. It is a new experience for Neil, who is used to being adored and fawned over. The second encounter is with a man who has AIDS and is covered in Kaposi's sarcoma sores. This man initially presents himself as a threat to Neil, he has a reptilian face and speaks in a whisper and smokes narcotics before sex, but he turns out to be harmless. The final New York john beats and rapes Neil violently in a bathtub. This rape comes right before Neil’s return home when he recounts Coach’s activities to Brian and thus, through proximity, the rape could be interpreted as an expression of the emotional violence of Coach’s abuse of the boys. Because the first part of Neil’s career in prostitution was portrayed with so sensationally, the rape at the end might be the culmination of Neil’s dangerous sexual activity. If the prostitution was instigated by Coach’s abuse so many years before then in order to condemn both the molestation and prostitution Neil is violently punished at the end. But this all adds up in a strange way: Neil’s sexual activity with the johns doesn’t seem dangerous in Kansas, but pleasant, while his encounters in New York are not at all pleasant, which comes off as a negative depiction of sex in the big city rather than consequences of Coach’s abuse. If anything the depictions of the johns in New York come off as indictments of anonymous gay sex. Narratively the rape might serve as an emotional punctuation of the trauma caused by Coach, but it paints gay life negatively. Neil didn’t do anything but go home with a stranger, and someone hardly needs to have been molested as a child to want to experience anonymous sex.

What emerges from all these mixed valences is a sense that Neil wasn’t traumatized by the molestation itself so much as he feels abandoned by Coach. Despite Neil’s age, the formation of his relationship with Coach is presented as a mutual convergence. There are some instances where Coach is obviously more experienced with the situation and is leading Neil into areas that he doesn’t know about, but Neil is always a willing participant. Coach offers him candy, food, and soda; he plays video games with Neil and takes pictures of him. Of course, these are diversions for Coach’s greater goals, but Neil hardly needs the bait. Like most young boys Neil enjoys junk food and video games, but unlike many boys at that age he is completely open, comfortable and confident about his gay sexuality. He wants to act on it. So the pleasantries that Coach provides for him might be pleasing in themselves but they are unnecessary for Coach to attract Neil. Neil was already hooked from the first meeting. Araki could never depict this relationship as completely mutual, nor healthy without facing grave criticism, but he makes it attractive through the absence of the horrific. The monster is never seen as a monster, all the audience can do is assume that he is a monster because of predetermined beliefs about the criminality of child molesters. The one seductive thing that Coach does that really hooks Neil is to make him think he is his favorite boy. It is implied that Neil helps Coach seduce other boys, which Neil is fine with as long as he knows that Coach prefers him. This is where Neil gets his sense of worth. So when Coach disappears because he is transferred to a different district, Neil must be devastated. When he prostitutes himself at age fifteen he is empowered. He has turned the situation so that he is now in control of the fawning adults. The older johns want him more than he wants them. Neil is already sexually aware at a young age, so Coach’s introduction to sex seems to have less power than it might on someone else. But the abandonment is what carries greater weight. Neil is thrusting himself into a position where he controls the sexual interactions and who comes and goes. He is the one that always leaves rather than have be left like he was in the past. 

Even at the end of the film Neil and Brian hardly seem like destroyed characters. They dredge up the events of the past but hardly put them in a new light. Brian cries when he realizes the full extent of what happened, but is a healing moment more than anything. And it is not as if his life has been really derailed in any large way because of the molestation of his childhood. He’ll have to give up his avid interest in aliens as a possible source of his loss of memory, but it doesn’t seem like his life would have been much different had the molestation not happened. Neil, whose life is much more clearly affected by Coach hardly, seems changed at the end. Even after his rape he is still the arrogant and reckless character that he was at the beginning. Coach, the monster at the heart of the film, is never presented as a monster. A monstrous situation is addressed, but it is presented as any healthy and condoned relationship might be. He is in fact presented as the perfect lover and is only condemned in super diegetic discourse that presupposes any child molester’s guilt. Within the film he is hardly criticized for what he did. 

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