These screengrabs, used here for criticism, are owned by MGM

On June 4, former Marine Chester Nez, the last of the Navajo radio operators of World War II, died at 93. The announcement came from Judith Schiess Avila, his biographer, who worked on Nez's book, Code Talker. Despite coming at a sad time, I hope the PR she got in the past few days boosted sales of what I hear is a pretty good book (I haven't read it), because the only piece of media we journalists have had any interest in now that the last code talker is dead, is Windtalkers, a 2002 box office flop featuring Nicholas Cage.

No, Cage doesn't play one of the Navajos. That would be racist. Instead, he plays one of those white protagonists in a movie about a minority group at war. Like Matthew Broderick in Glory, or Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, Cage's white face theoretically makes the whole thing much more palatable than one of the actual Navajo faces, like this one below, which belongs to Nez: 

Press coverage considers the film one of Nez's accolades. The Washington Post puts it in a paragraph with his military honors, saying Nez "was honored a generation later, receiving the Congressional Gold Medal in 2001. 'Windtalkers,' a 2002 film starring Nicolas Cage, was based on the code talkers’ story."

My suspicion is that they, like most of America, gave Windtalkers a miss. It was not a hit, so it's weird that it's our reference point for this moment in American History. It's like memorializing the author Edgar Rice Burroughs by talking about John Carter.

The entertainment and media industries don't consider a Native American story to be a smart move if you want to make money. Some anonymous people I know who represent talent confided in me that when something having to do with Native Americans gets submitted, they're vary wary, or they just skip it outright. No one wants to spend their entertainment dollar on anything having to do with Native Americans. Apparently Dances with Wolves was a fluke. 

I took a gamble even writing this, but I hoped that the presence of Nicolas Cage would draw your precious clicks.

(By the way, in case you're planning to watch it, I should tell you I'm going to completely spoil this movie)

Windtalkers is a surprisingly violent war flick centering on a shell shocked protagonist with fresh trauma, who goes into a psychopathic berserker mode during every battle scene. The completely-made-up Cage character is a perfect wartime analog for the antiheroic killing machine protagonists from John Woo's early gun-fu movies, like A Better Tomorrow.

At $115 million in 2002 money, Windtalkers was a big risk, and it was meant to be John Woo's rise to total domination of Hollywood after the successes of Face/Off and Mission: Impossible 2. Huge and bloated, with CG planes, and more fiery explosions than the actual war had, its failure actually halted John Woo's rise. Since then, he's returned to China, and has done really well for himself making action blockbusters that are also literally propaganda.

But despite its action pedigree, it had that title. So we the audience would need to eat our vegetables, and take a break from things exploding to learn all about the valuable contributions of 2 of the 29 Navajo code breakers.

The screenplay gave us the completely fictional Charlie Whitehorse, and Ben Yahzee, two guileless privates who left happy lives on the reservation, and joined up to do their duty as loyal Americans. The art department placed a truly astonishing number of American flags behind the Navajo characters in the opening few minutes of the movie. 

The story in Windtalkers was about the campaign for Saipan, an island under Japanese rule that was, interestingly, inhabited by Chamarro people, who were in a similar position to the Navajo people, being forced to fight for the group who had colonized them. The movie doesn't mention this.

But I just wanted to know how "code talking" might have worked, and the movie delivered! Here's the nuts and bolts of how the code was used by the late Chester Nez and his comrades:

They'd be out in the battlefield, across enemy lines, where shit was hairiest. They were seeking out targets that had not been scouted yet, underground bunkers and such. Nicholas Cage would spot one, and then shout the coordinates at one of the Navajo guys. The Navajo guy would then translate the whole thing to Navajo while shouting into a radio.

Another Navajo guy, safe on a battleship, far from the action, would then hear the transmission and write down the coordinates. He would hand that off to a guy whose job it was to aim the guns.

The Japanese guys in the bunker would be listening in, like "Wha? I don't speak this crazy language. Oh well, I guess we're safe for the time being."

Then the movie would cut to some vintage WWII footage of an actual battleship firing actual Mark-7s at the island. No trial and error would be needed. First time was always a charm.

The bunker would explode in a big, cinematic, gasoline explosion. Well done, Navajo guys! 

As the film wore on, the movie put the whole code talking thing on the back burner. From time to time it would just use conversations between code talkers as little interstitial moments between battles, as though there was a focus group full of people who wrote "Wasn't this movie supposed to be about code-talking?" on their comment cards.

The conversations tended to be there to show the Navajo radio men getting used to their jobs, and starting to sprinkle in Marine jargon even though they were speaking Navajo. It came off as cutesy and patronizing.

Other than that, Windtalkers is mostly the story of Nicholas Cage's character, with some minority soldiers sprinkled into a company that was not in any other way racially integrated. One particularly racist character was this white bully.

He spent most of the film being a dick to the Navajo guys, spitting on them, calling them "chief," and excluding them from poker games. This sort of thing probably happened to the actual code talkers. 

But in the movie, this was a really pathetic way to pay lip service to discrimination. For instance, at one point he was distracted because he was shooting wave after wave of Japanese people. 

One of the Navajo guys locked eyes on him...

...reached for a knife to throw...

The racist guy turned, scared he was about to have a knife thrown at him. 

Oh but it was actually a Japanese guy just behind him. 

And then he's like, "Oh wow, the Navajo guy really saved my bacon. Maybe they're not so bad." This sort of thing probably did not happen anywhere other than in pretty much every action movie.

Right after this scene, Christian Slater got outnumbered and this guy ran in with a sword.

..and cut his head off! It was really unexpected, and definitely my favorite part of the movie, although it was really no more or less violent than pretty much any other battle scene in Windtalkers. It also had nothing to do with Navajo code talkers.

It goes without saying that Chester Nez would be better memorialized by mentioning a different movie about Navajo code talkers, but the only other one is Never So Few, which somehow manages to be worse (seriously):

Granted, I don't expect to see some carefully written drama about the difficulties of being a radio technician on a battlefield. Not a lot of people would go see something that goes into detail about the practical aspects of actually operating the radio and translating military terms into Navajo. I agree. That doesn't exactly sound like a blockbuster.

But then neither was Windtalkers.

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A Nuer medicine man. Mysticism, prophecy, and traditional beliefs run deep in Nuer culture. Machar has integrated the forces of the tribal prophets, the media, and diplomacy throughout his long career. Photo by Tim Freccia

After spending days talking to Machar, we learn that the White Army is heading north to stage an assault on Malakal. So we need to get there—first by boat to Nasir, then by vehicle to Malakal.

As we make our way through Akobo, a medicine man approaches to perform a little song and dance for us. He struts like a chicken, mimes spitting on Salva Kiir, and insists that the Nuer will overcome. Onlookers laugh and cheer him on. He may have more sense in him than anyone we’ve met on our trip thus far. Akobo city is considered holy land by the Nuers, and the latest prophet, the man who controls the White Army, lives about ten miles away and meets with Machar on a regular basis.

The boatman we’ve hired to take us to Nasir finds us. He wears a pink shirt and has sparkles painted on his fingernails. As we discuss the trip ahead, he tells us that besides the fuel he’ll need oil and spark plugs—in addition to his fee. He wants $200. I barter and persuade him to take half that, roughly a month’s wages for what should be a five-hour trip. He tells us where to find fuel.

The merchant is conveniently located behind the UN camp, selling food and fuel that a more cynical person might think he looted from the compound. We buy six jerricans of gas for $100 apiece, about $20 a gallon, which is what (we hope) we’ll need to make it up the river and back to Akobo.

We have just spent what it costs to fly one way from Ethiopia to New York on what should be a short boat ride. At Machar’s request, we must also take aboard half a dozen rebel soldiers, who insist they are along for our security.

The Pibor River and even more convoluted Sobat River might seem like a circuitous way to travel between Akobo and Nasir, but it’s faster than driving through the dense bush. We load up and the boatman guns it, and we almost immediately hit a fishing net. Soon we slam into another, then another, flying forward in the hull. With every net we hit, our pilot takes an inordinate amount of time to uncoil it from the prop. They keep coming, dozens of them. It’s like slamming the brakes on your car every five minutes on the freeway.

One of the soldiers accompanying us warns that if any fishermen see us destroying the nets they’ll get angry and probably shoot at the boat. This is clearly not going to be a five-hour trip.

It evolves into an 11-hour marathon of clearing nets, slowing down, speeding up, getting stuck in hyacinth weeds, and then, after dark, looking for something to eat. The soldiers have brought nothing but a few cookies for the journey.

Our boatman pulls into every village along the way to ask if anyone has food. Nope. The sun sets, and fireflies dance around our heads. Smoke rises from a red horizon of burning fields. Finally, the soldiers spot some young men with rows of dried fish hanging among their shanties. Fires are lit, and crusty catfish are thrown into a pot of boiling river water, or simply torched black over the flames, until the soldiers are full. They leave without paying, and we resume our trip down the river, now by moonlight.

Along the shoreline we see movement in the shadows. A flashlight reveals dozens of terrified animals drinking meekly from the crocodile-infested water. The pelicans are startled, barely missing our heads as they dart from the water and into the sky.

We are now freezing from the constant spray of water below. Our only relief comes when the boatman almost collides with an overcrowded passenger boat and instead runs us aground at full speed.

At last we see the lights of Nasir. It’s 2 AM, and nobody is up, so we sleep atop an overturned steel boat. At dawn we discover we’re camped out in the middle of the town market, surrounded by curious spectators.

We walk over to visit the commissioner, who is apparently someone we have to see. Where he’s stationed there are two new schools and a new government center—signs of growth.

The commissioner graciously puts us up in a compound abandoned by an NGO, the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA). Things are in a bit better shape here than in the camp in Akobo, and the commissioner says he can supply internet and power if we buy fuel for the generator.

The compound is littered with garbage, but there are beverages in town. An old lady snags up our bottles as quickly as we can drink from them. There seems to be a fuel business being run out of the NGO building, operating off the gas left behind. We watch a “businessman” enter the compound and sell ADRA’s fuel to our boatman for his return trip. We are introduced to the economics of warfare when the boatman explains that his original estimate was wrong and in fact we are paying for the fuel for him to return to Akobo.

I explain that we already purchased the fuel we needed, prior to our departure, as he requested and based on his estimate. This argument doesn’t interest him. Machot intervenes and tries to negotiate a settlement, but our boatman, with his painted nails and crisp pink shirt, continues to argue through the “manager” of the abandoned NGO, who now seems to have a deep interest in prying more money out of us on behalf of the boatman.

Soon the boatman and Machot are shouting and arguing in Nuer. Machot says that more fuel is needed because the boatman has to go upstream to return. I point out that he used up all his fuel because we had a ton of weight, a dozen people on the boat—three of them his crew. I tell him that he should be able to make it back without the extra weight, and besides, that was the price agreed upon.

This doesn’t sway the boatman, so he decides he will not drive the vessel back. I agree and tell him that this is great, that he can stay here and we’ll charter his boat on our return—and hire a different boatman to drive it. Flustered, he tells me he will go to the commissioner to seek satisfaction. Soon the boatman arrives with an angry mob of armed men.

Machot tells me that word has gotten out that we are cheating the boatman, and the whole town has come to prevent us from leaving.

“Leaving where?” I ask.

“Leaving,” Machot says.

I see a gaggle of heads, guns, and sticks outside the gate. But we aren’t leaving; we are quite comfortable in the ADRA compound with our free internet.

“Fine, we could use the extra security.”

My response puzzles Machot. The rabble is clamoring outside the gate. He makes another plea to go along with the boatman’s extortion, insisting on a new tack—that we need to return the boat to the commissioner because wounded people need to be carted off for medical care. I point out that the Doctors Without Borders hospital is actually here, in Nasir, not in Akobo. As our argument drags on, the mob outside the gate grows quiet.

I have Machot bring our accuser to me, and I ask him why he is such a bad boatman. Why did he take 12 hours instead of five, why did he break so many fishing nets, why does he demand more money, and why has he brought a mob to beat and shoot us? He looks at Machot, who refuses to translate. I tell him to go, and that we will hire another boatman.

Machot is now even more frustrated. He offers to pay the man out of his own pocket, even though he doesn’t have any money. Apparently, I am making Machot look bad because he brought these crooked white men to swindle the locals. Tired of the game, I give the money to Machot. As if by magic, the crowd outside the gate disperses. We have somehow gone from esteemed guests to instigators of violence, cheaters, and pillagers and back again in the course of a day.

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Photo by Sean Williams

On the top floor of a grand old building that used to house the Devecser post office, there’s a museum devoted to the worst environmental disaster in Hungarian history. Hardly anyone ever visits the place, the lights are usually off, and there’s no heat, but one cold December morning I strolled among its dusty glass cases with Toldi Tamás, Devecser’s mayor. Inside the cases are the sorts of things you’d find in someone’s house—a VCR, a Bible, teddy bears. All of the items are caked in the carmine residue of a weird wave of sludge that in 2010 killed ten people, injured 150, and left hundreds in the region homeless.

Tamás paused to examine some blown-up press clippings on the wall from publications like Le Monde, the New York Times, and the Guardian. During the hectic days of the crisis, he told me, journalists would flank him as he walked up the steps of the hall while taking calls from his frightened constituents, some of whom had burn marks the size of dinner plates after coming into contact with the sludge.

We went up to the roof and took in the view: On one side we could see the elegant town of about 5,000, where baroque halls daubed blue, yellow, and pink sat beside drab Soviet-era apartment blocks along winding cobbled streets. Beyond the old buildings were the 87 new eggshell-colored houses that Tamás had ordered built from scratch in just eight months. Looking the other way, we could see a vast park where dozens of homes used to stand before the red sludge came. Some were wiped away by the flood; others were so badly damaged that they had to be bulldozed in the days following the disaster. The devastation, now consigned to memory save for the odd patch of rose-tinted soil, occurred in a single day. It also happened to be Tamás’s first official day on the job. He woke up that morning to find himself mayor of a city where people were drowning beneath two feet of polluted water that was rapidly flowing through the streets.

Tamás doesn’t seem like the kind of man who saved an entire town. With his thin, gray hair, waxed jacket, billowing scarf, and Chevron mustache, the 62-year-old resembles a cross between a rural party apparatchik and a geography teacher. Hungarians of his generation lived through a Communist regime where stray words could have serious consequences, which may at least partially explain his taciturn nature. Even while touring the museum that serves as a monument to his greatest accomplishment, the idea of heroism is completely lost on him. “You just do your duty,” he said of that time as we walked down the stairs. “It was madness here. I wanted it to be happy again, calm.”

The aftermath of the flood of toxic red sludge that hit Devecser, Hungary, on October 5, 2010, after a reservoir owned by an aluminum plant burst. Photo by Tomas Benedikovic/isifa/Getty Images

Devecser, located a two-hour drive from Hungary’s capital of Budapest, has long been an important strategic point, and it has been conquered over and over by a succession of empires. The Ottomans tried and failed to raze it seven times in the 16th century. It became a sleepy fiefdom under the heel of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. During World War II, it was controlled by the Nazis before being overtaken by the Red Army.

Tamás was born under Soviet rule, in 1952, to a farmer father and a mother who worked at a meat factory. Devecser was a “great, fun place to grow up,” he told me, even though it was in the midst of an industrial tumult. Ajka, a nearby city of 30,000, was booming: Trees were being torn down, and giant prefab apartment blocks “grew from the ground like mushrooms.” The city was soon home to power plants and an aluminum factory that produced so much filthy red waste, from the bauxite-to-aluminum process, that in the 60s a giant reservoir had to be built just outside town to contain the toxic runoff (the stuff was so alkaline that it could cause skin burns on contact).

Meanwhile, Devecser “was left to the old people,” Tamás told me. “Houses were dilapidated, and there were no real prospects.” For fun, the townspeople would sit around a wireless and listen to Radio Free Europe—a welcome alternative to the crude propaganda pumped out daily by Hungary’s Soviet-backed politburo. “We were isolated and had to listen to a lot of crap,” Tamás said.

Tamás followed in his father’s footsteps and in the 60s, after attending college, joined a local state-owned agricultural firm. In the 80s, he was drafted into the Hungarian army for a stint in which 100 men were placed under his command. Rations were tight, and there was little to do; the men staved off “hard-worn boredom” by spending hours watching state-run television broadcasts. In the afternoons, when the officers left the barracks, they would climb to the top of the roof and reposition the TV antenna toward Austria. It was one of the few ways they could learn about life beyond the Iron Curtain.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and Hungary began to embrace capitalism. Tamás, by then an agricultural commissioner trading cattle with the West, bought a plot of land and established his own farm, which became wildly successful. In 1995, Ajka’s aluminum plant was privatized under Magyar Aluminium (MAL). It regularly inspected the reservoir, which was slowly filling up with red mud—after the disaster, a spokesman for the company would tell the media that the last appraisal of the facility showed “nothing untoward.”

Eventually Tamás ran for mayor. To hear him tell it, he was persuaded to enter the race by friends who were upset that the last two Devecser mayors had been Communists from other towns. Tamás, a local kid who had managed to garner the respect of the community, was temperamentally and politically conservative—in other words, the ideal candidate.

The race against incumbent László Holczinger was a close one: Voting ended at 6 PM on October 3, 2010, but Tamás didn’t find out he’d won until after midnight. Congratulatory toasts were made as the victory party carried over into daylight. Just hours later, the sludge came and washed the town away.

A dog covered in toxic sludge. Photo by Tomas Benedikovic/isifa/Getty Images

October 4, 2010, was an uncommonly bright Monday for autumn. Having celebrated until the wee hours, Tamás slept in until 10 AM. His wife, Irma, had already left to teach her math class up the street, but he still had plenty of time to clean himself up before his 2 PM inauguration at town hall.

He never made it. A little after midday, Tamás was overwhelmed by phone calls. His voicemail was full of messages from virtually everyone he knew, all of them frantic about some sort of flood. It was then that he first looked out the window: A tidal wave of rust-colored slime was rushing down the street, taking cars, furniture, and people with it. As the slurry ripped through downtown, residents caught in the river were gasping for air. Cries rang out from people clinging to anything they could get their hands on. The dam keeping the red mud in MAL’s reservoir had burst, and a million cubic meters of hazardous waste was spilling out into the surrounding towns and villages. Devecser was among the hardest hit, and Tamás suddenly had a crisis of immense proportions on his hands.

“It was a busy first day,” he told me.

The townspeople had had no warning before the river of what looked like blood surged through Devecser. Homes were filled with foul ooze or wrecked by the force of the flood. People were forced to climb onto their roofs. Pets, vehicles, and even children were washed away by the red mud—Angyalka Juhász, a toddler from the nearby village of Kolontár, drowned when the sludge smashed through the walls of her house and ripped her away from her mother, Erzsebét.

“Our family is cursed,” Erzsebét told Bulgarian journalist Dimiter Kenarov. She had already lost one young son when he was hit by a train, and now her entire family was covered in huge alkali burns from exposure to the mud. Hundreds of her neighbors were suffering the same painful sores.

The messages Tamás was receiving on his phone were getting grimmer by the minute. “There was a huge panic,” he told me. “People didn’t know what to do. They were running all around like poisoned mice. There was a chaos of communication.”

Tamás quickly sprang into action: After calling Irma to advise her to stay at school, on higher ground, with the kids, he rang up old friends from the farming business who owned heavy machinery—tractors, diggers, dozers—that could be used to pull people from danger.

“I asked them to go rescue people from their windows and rooftops,” he told me. His own house was being pummeled by the mud as he made his calls, but it survived, unlike the homes around it, thanks to its six-inch concrete foundation.

Within hours the cameras from international news stations showed up and introduced the world to Devecser. At the same time, MAL was going on a PR offensive to claim that the red mud wasn’t dangerous. “It’s an innocuous material,” CEO Zoltán Bakonyi told one reporter. (He later apologized for the comment.) Even if that were true—which it wasn’t—it would have provided scant comfort for those who had lost their homes or worse.

Anyone who had been affected by the flood knew that the substance that had flowed through the streets was anything but innocuous. People who had waded through the red mud started getting painful burns on their legs and arms, sores that took a long time to heal. Peter Pallinki, a butcher from Ajka, had climbed onto his roof when the mud slammed into his living room, and a year afterward he was still nursing the gaping wounds on his knee that had put him out of work. “Painkillers are my breakfast now,” he told Kenarov.

For three nights after the flood Tamás barely slept; at one point he stayed up for 24 hours straight. He was kept busy coordinating with officials in neighboring towns to provide refuge for the hundreds who were displaced. While he worked, he answered constant phone calls and dealt with reporters throwing microphones in his face wherever he went. The town, which had been under his leadership for less than a week, was caked in poisonous red mud, and the relatives of people who were dying in the hospital from God-knows-what wanted to know how, in the 21st century, no one could figure out that a concrete wall had been about to break. Tamás didn’t know what to tell them. He was tired, angry, and inundated with too many requests to handle. Irma worried about his health but made sure to keep calm around him.

“Without her,” he told me, “I could not bear anything.”

Tamás got a second phone for calls from the press, and it rang day and night. The Hungarian government sent in more than 500 policemen and soldiers to maintain control of the village, direct traffic, and prepare to evict people from damaged homes (in the end, all the townsfolk left their houses peacefully). A pontoon bridge was thrown across Kolontár’s Marcal River to replace a bridge that had collapsed in the slide. Plaster and other chemicals were poured into the river to stem the tide, extinguishing its ecosystem overnight.

Devecser looked like a postapocalyptic version of Stepford. As the days passed and the mud dried, it blew into the air and enveloped Devecser in a scarlet sandstorm. People began to have trouble breathing. Tamás waded through the mud, coordinating every aspect of the cleanup and rebuilding process. Sometimes he’d forget which phone was which—reporters were told about the post office, and locals got information about the blueprints that were being sketched for a new housing project across town. He soon slipped into a pattern of sleeping from 11 PM to 2 AM, which lasted a year. He had no choice—quitting wasn’t an option. “I never really seriously thought of giving up and turning my back on anyone,” Tamás said.

Within weeks of the disaster, Tamás, working with famed architect Imre Makovecz, had drawn up plans for 87 new homes for those still without houses. They would be completed within eight months, using nothing but local materials. Some people who lived in damaged houses that had survived the initial flood weren’t sure the new homes would be constructed and chose to stay. Three years later, Tamás told me, they’re angry with him and bitter that they’re stuck in their red-mud-stained homes. “They didn’t believe I could do it,” Tamás said. “That’s tough luck. But I have to make tough decisions.” Today, when the mayor sees some of those people in the street, they won’t make eye contact with him.

He had a lot of latitude to make those decisions—Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s populist prime minister, told Tamás to knock down anything that had been damaged and replace it. Budapest auctioned off 230 Communist-era relics, including more than a dozen portraits of Lenin, to help fund disaster relief, and the government eventually provided $190 million in aid. The region also received $9.6 million from private donors.

Among the demolished buildings had been a crumbling old cinema that the locals had been complaining about for years. “People had been asking for that cinema to be knocked down for 20 years,” Tamás said, chuckling. “I guess it wasn’t all bad.”

The development built by Toldi Tamás in the wake of the flood. Photo by Sean Williams

After we left the town hall, Tamás took me to a small kindergarten. Toward the back of the building is a dim room with a sandbox on the floor and yellow-brown blocks of salt lining the wall. It’s a salt room, the type of which is common in high-end spa resorts and is said to relieve respiratory problems. (Many dismiss salt rooms as pseudoscience.)

“We make the kids take lessons in this room at least once a week,” Jennervé Pál Szilvia, the school director, told me. Tamás had insisted the school install the salt room to help kids suffering from clogged lungs, and he persuaded two Austrian businessman who’d visited shortly after the flood to pony up $65,000 to pay for it.

“We’re so fortunate our children weren’t affected more,” said Szilvia. “Of course we were scared. But it’s an unbelievably great achievement, what’s been done here… We were saved by this man.”

Tamás smiled briefly before fixing his face to its default frown setting. “I was just doing my job,” he said quietly before heading slowly to the front door.

Other improvements made as the town was rebuilt according to Tamás’s vision included a bus station heated by geothermal energy and a mulch-powered generator set up behind the town hall that heats the new homes. To run the generator, Tamás ordered a 75-acre poplar field to be planted on the damaged land. The poplars, which can grow up to eight feet a year, are chopped down every other summer and turned into mulch.

Hungarian politics are notoriously corrupt, and many have questioned some of Tamás’s more ambitious projects like the salt room and the mulch-powered generator, but he showed me a series of documents detailing when each project had been completed and how much it had cost—a rare amount of transparency for a mayor.

After the school, he showed me the new development built in the wake of the flood. The 87 white, red-roofed houses are all slightly different, and at the center of the development is a small chapel with a spire girded by two bronze wings—though it looks a bit like a half-submerged trout, it’s supposed to evoke a phoenix-like triumph.

At the bottom of the development are half a dozen homes whose walls are trimmed with ceramics and hanging baskets. They belong to Devecser’s small Roma population, who lived on the town’s lowest ground before the flood hit. As in other Eastern and Central European countries, the Roma have been increasingly persecuted in recent years. In August 2012, about a thousand black-shirted supporters of the far-right Jobbik (“Better Hungary”) Party marched through Devecser to protest against “Gypsy crime.” Tamás, sensing my train of thought as we looked at the Roma houses, said, “They keep to themselves, but they’re nice people.”

There are some things Tamás would have done better if he’d had more time and sleep. Perhaps more homes could have been built. A quicker cleanup could have saved those still suffering from burns. And he struggles to hide his anger at Bakonyi and MAL—the company was fined $650 million and nationalized after the reservoir burst, but though some employees, including Bakonyi, face charges, the mayor claims they’ve all so far escaped jail time. “Why should the judgment take so long?” Tamás said. “No one can understand. I can’t.”

But for someone who woke up to an environmental catastrophe on his first day and has had to rebuild his town from the ground up, it’s fair to say that Tamás has been pretty good for Devecser. Irma is proud of him, anyway, which is all that matters to him.

Anyone who has ever scrolled through a Facebook newsfeed knows what “clickbait” is—the internet is awash in headlines promising a photo cuter than all other cute photos, an outrage-inducing news item more outrageous than all other news items, a piece of celebrity gossip juicier than all the previous undeniably juicy gossip bits. The key is that these headlines always withhold that critical piece of information: who the best guitarist in the world is, what the bad Republican man actually said, which nutritional supplement will cause spiders to grow in your stomach and eat you from the inside out.

Jake Beckman has achieved a modest amount of internet fame by ruining these headlines and saving people clicks in the process with his aptly named Twitter account @SavedYouAClick. In often hilarious fashion Beckman retweets links to stories from websites and publications like the New York Times, Salon, the Atlantic, Slate, the Huffington Post, Forbes, Upworthy, and Buzzfeed, among others, with a pithy summary of the article’s interesting bits. His tweets save everyone time by boiling down stories into single words (“The World Cup is days away but is Brazil Ready?” “Nope”), but they also should shame people who write misleading or insulting headlines and tweets in the service of drawing traffic to uninteresting stories. @SavedYouAClick has apparently struck a chord, amassing 90,000 followers in just over 400 tweets, and last week, Beckman even got the opportunity to save his followers a click to a story about himself. How charitable of him:

Me. RT @jackshafer: New @ReutersOpinion: The guy who reads crap on the Web so you don’t have to

— Saved You A Click (@SavedYouAClick) June 4, 2014

VICE: You told Jack Shafer of Reuters that you don’t have a problem with headlines that ask questions, which leaves only teasing, "curiousity gap"–exploiting tweets in your crosshairs. But you don’t appear to be going after some of the worst clickbait offenders—sites like Upworthy and the God-awful Facebook mom feed, Elite Daily. Are those sites just too easy to target?
Jake Beckman: It’s not that headlines with questions are always OK—sometimes they’re legitimate, and sometimes they’re not. What I’m targeting, though, are the tweets: how these articles are positioned on social media in an attempt to score easy traffic. I definitely include Upworthy, and just recently followed Elite Daily—I’m always looking for more publishers to follow. Usually it’s just a matter of timing—when I’m looking for tweets and how recently the offending tweets were published.

A bigger shark. RT @IFLScience: But what was it? Find out here: pic.twitter.com/0sDOpFgY1b

— Saved You A Click (@SavedYouAClick) June 9, 2014

Running a Twitter feed doesn’t pay, as much as we all wish that was the case. What do you do for a living?
I run @SavedYouAClick as a personal side project. I work for RebelMouse, a publishing platform with a focus on social content. I used to work in breaking news and editorial at ABC News and Bloomberg TV, so I'm very familiar with how newsrooms work.

I like to imagine you starting @SavedYouAClick in a fit of drunken rage after reading a dumb Huffington Post story. Is that how it went down, or have you been planning this all along?
I started using #SavedYouAClick on some early tweets from my personal account whenever I'd see tweets that were particularly egregious. It was Alex Mizrahi, who runs @HuffPoSpoilers, who suggested in a Twitter thread that I register the account. So I did and started tweeting with a few hundred followers. It wasn't until last weekend that the growth in followers shot through the roof. I'm glad that it's resonating with so many people.

No. They’re creating a font. For computers. RT @Digiday: Can Bic's crowdsourcing campaign get people excited about writing again?

— Saved You A Click (@SavedYouAClick) June 9, 2014

Some have argued that all journalism is essentially clickbait in one form or another. What’s your endgame here? Do you want a return to straight-laced headlines like “Man Starts Twitter Account to Fuck with Large Publications”?
I'd love to see publishers think about the experience of their readers first. I think there's an enormous opportunity for publishers to provide readers with informative updates that include links so you can click through to read more. Instead, we see publishers withholding more and more information on social. That's not right.

What’s the worst, most clickbait-y tweet you can think of?
There are so many different types of clickbait that I see that it's tough to say. I will say that my least favorite thing to see is a tweet phrased as a question, and when I click the question is answered in the actual headline. Not even the first paragraph. It's just so clear that publishers are trying to tease their stories on social, instead of using Twitter to inform.

Because it's gun control. RT @thenation: Why we never talk about the one thing that might actually prevent the next mass murder:

— Saved You A Click (@SavedYouAClick) June 8, 2014

What’s your method for finding and processing these links?
I do everything manually. I follow hundreds of publishers' accounts between my personal timeline and @SavedYouAClick. I check Twitter every so often until I find one that works for @SavedYouAClick. And yes, I actually click on all of the links.

I can only see so many tweets by myself, but the response from Twitter has been amazing. It's been really nice to see people flagging stories by mentioning the account. A lot of people ask me to read specific articles for them, which I'll only do if they seem interesting or relevant.

Are you a masochist?
I like to think that I'm more of an altruist.

Clickbait seems like a quick and dirty way to get web traffic. With the rising popularity of @SavedYouAClick, outlets are beginning to introduce your account to their readers, but only a few have actually reached out to you. Why is this? Is everyone just really fucking lazy, or do they know people will read about the account and not necessarily care who the person behind it is?
I think it's because it's incredibly easy to embed a string of tweets in an article and call that journalism. It's much easier than actually asking me some questions.

No school buses. Walk to school. RT @Upworthy: This school district has the secret to happy teachers, happy parents, AND happy kids. What?!

— Saved You A Click (@SavedYouAClick) June 9, 2014

With all this attention, how drunk are you with power right now?
I'm just excited that this idea is resonating with so many people, and it's been really cool to see this idea catch on around the world. It's just my way of trying to help the internet be less terrible.

Follow Justin Glawe on Twitter.

The last time I was excited about seeing a photo of a boner was in fourth-grade health class via a projector transparency from the 70s. Ever since that initial shock of just seeing a real wiener, images of dicks have just come off more goofy than sexy. Unfortunately, in the age of smart phones, women like me all across globe are plagued with shitty dick pics. We're sent unimpressive and often unsolicited schlong shots from horny dudes who think they are really doing something special by snapchatting a selfie of their one-eyed snake. Little do they know, their penis pics often become the butt of jokes between girl friends.

What dick pics need today is a little more creativity and fun—not trick photography to make their peckers look like giant phalluses from Monster Island terrorizing a metropolis. In order to combat the world's sad barrage of boring penis pics, Los Angeles natives Lauren Brenner and Stephanie Pool have developed a photo customization app called Rock That Cock. The app allows dudes to modify their cock photos with stickers and backgrounds. Lauren, a yoga instructor and comedian, and Stephanie, a creative strategist, have spent the past year creating the app. Soon men will be able to share an image of their Johnson being abducted by a UFO while wearing a Lil Jon face. As if that wasn’t enough, the duo will also be donating a percentage of the profits from Rock That Cock to prostate cancer.

In anticipation of the launch, Stephanie and Lauren have created a new Rock that Cock tumblr, where photos are posted of the customization options that will be available through the app. In order to find out more about how they plan to change the world’s standards for dick pics, I called up Lauren and Stephanie.

Classy Lauren Brenner and Stephanie Pool 

VICE: Why did you want to start Rock that Cock?
Lauren Brenner: It seems like all of my girlfriends are inundated with dick pics. Technology is moving forward, and dick pics aren’t going away. In my ideal reality, they are just going to get amazing. I promise that dick pics now are just getting laughed at and shown to like 45 people. Why not be in on the joke and make it hilarious? It could be fun. It is all about spreading joy in the most ridiculous way. We are really close to a time where bros can send hilarious pictures of their dicks to one another. If you can send me a picture that makes me think you’re smart and funny and also slip in your big penis, that’s awesome.

Stephanie Pool: No one ever asks for dick pics. We are assaulted with them. We get a text message, and inside is a dick we didn’t ask for. If you are going to send me a dick pic, you might as well make me laugh. 

What’s your experience with dick pics?
Lauren: Many times you get unsolicited dick pics. I will be looking at my phone, and there’s a dick. I have seen really embarrassingly artsy dick pics where a tank top will be pulled to the side and one of his nipples is showing too. I want to help these guys out and give them tools to make their dick pics better. 

Have you had a positive response from men who want to use the app?
Lauren: They love it. Everyone I have talked to about it wants it. 

How exactly do you modify the pics?
Lauren: You can put your dick in a jersey. It can wear an engagement ring that you uploaded. You can put a sombrero on your dick if you’re on the beach in Mexico. You can use a stock penis, which is a papier-mâché penis, so it’s not too obscene. Or you can use a picture of your own penis and upload it to your own backdrop or a stock backdrop. People can take dick pics they have received, make them hilarious, and send them to their friends. 

Stephanie: We have a bevy of options, which include pre-designed backgrounds like your cock in Tahiti or your cock in a hammock. We also have stickers, like a wig or hat. Then we have the ability to upload whatever you want. For example, if you took a picture with your new Maserati and you want to replace your body with your dick—you can do that. Then you have the ability to publish it, so you can put it in your pictures folder or in a text message. Also, there is the anonymous ability to share to a public forum if you are proud of what you’ve done.

When I first watched the video, I didn’t think it was real. Have you had that response?
Lauren: Definitely. At first we were joking because we had witnessed an interaction with two girls. One girl was like, “This guy just sent me a dick pic to apologize,” and the other girl was like, “I get so many dick pics.” I was like, so many dick pics? How do you tell them a part? At first we were just going to make a parody video, but everyone wanted us to really do it.

So, a lot of the things that you see in the video are actually going to be available in the app?
Lauren: Totally. Some things that we don’t have in the video are little stickers. Those are pretty basic. Can you imagine, like, a four-leaf clover on your penis? It could be really dumb or really amazing. It is up to the guy to showcase his personality. You can give the man the tools, but you can’t make him use it correctly.

When are you hoping to launch the app?
Lauren: We are hoping to launch it this summer. Maybe on the Fourth of July; it is very American. Everything is in place. We are just getting ready to pull the trigger—or blow our load, if you will. The way we are going it is that the app will be free, but there will be little upgrades. Two bucks if you want to make your penis an ATM and shoot hundred-dollar bills out of it, because that is awesome.

Follow Erica on Twitter.

Illustration by Zelda Mauger

According to a poll published in January 2014, 78 percent of French voters believe their political system doesn't work well. Which I guess sort of explains the recent victory of the far-right group the National Front in the EU elections—many saw it as a solution to the two-party tradition of the past decades.

But National Front president Marine Le Pen scares me a little, so I had a think about the alternatives:

Sadly, the Party of Pleasure does not seem to exist anymore, and Hunting, Fishing, Nature, Tradition has yet to admit that its existence is a joke. But what about the Royal Alliance? This small party seems to believe that the answer to all our problems is to put a good-looking monarch back in the Palace of Versailles.

Baptiste Roger-Lacan is a student in the Department of History at the École Normale Supérieure. He is a specialist in royalism in the 19th century, so I called him up to ask if France should go back to being a monarchy.

Members of the Royal Aliance. Photo via Flickr

VICE: Do you think a king could be reinstalled legally in France?
Baptiste Roger-Lacan: In the Constitution of 1958, Article 89 outlines that the republican form of the government can't be subject to modification. But a first modification could be made in order to make this article disappear, and a second one could re-establish the monarchy.

Do you think a king could unite France?
A king would be a symbol of consensus and national unity. Monarchy wouldn’t guarantee political balance, as the head of state wouldn't have any real power and wouldn't have been elected by the citizens. However, it appears to me that the European monarchies—except Spain, a particular case because of the Francoist era—are much stronger when they face political and institutional crises than the republics are.

Would the French accept a king or queen, even if he or she were powerless?
France does have a sort of “revolutionary tradition,” but I think it's more of a barricades-and-riots habit. Yes, we had a very famous revolution, but the other insurrectional moments—1830, 1848, 1871—were only based on days of riots that concerned Paris exclusively.

France suffers from a huge contradiction: We know our tradition is to be a monarchy, but we also know that by beheading Louis XVI we reached a point of no return.

Photo via Flickr

So it's unlikely that we'll see a return of monarchy. Why?
The Third Republic managed to find a compromise during the 1870s, softening the revolutionary image of the republic and making it acceptable to the conservatives. Then World War II interrupted everything, and that's why Charles de Gaulle is so important. He was able to make the French believe that the Vichy government was just a parenthesis in French history—an illegal and illegitimate regime. The republic has triumphed thanks to him. 

We also have to underline the incompetence of the candidates for the throne, especially the house of Bourbon. They are lame, and they have never been a serious alternative.

Why do we associate monarchy with social conservatism, especially on questions such as same-sex marriage and the role of the Church?
There are no general rules on this. The monarchists and the conservatives banded together because the French revolutionaries fought the king and the Church at the same time. Historically, some monarchies have been very liberal.

It's important to notice that nowadays republican France is more conservative compared with some European monarchies, like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark.

The Coronation of Napoleon, painting by Jacques-Louis David. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Would it be possible for a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte to be king? I do know that Jean-Christophe Napoleon is interested in the job.
Hard to say. The Napoleonic regime was based on plebiscite, which means that it's not really a question of dynastic legitimacy. We have to ask ourselves if the Empire is more likely to be restored than the monarchy.

What's your opinion on that?
In times of “controlled” crisis, it seems highly unlikely that one of these regime will reappear. But if one day we actually do come face to face with the collapse of our political and economic structure, who knows?

Thanks a lot, Baptiste.

Follow Romain on Twitter. 

Yaman Sawaf, hoding the Save the Children of Syria sign. All photos via the author.
Last week, on the day of the Syrian Election (or otherwise referred to as the #BloodElection), the Syrian community gathered together in solidarity across the world. In Toronto, they stood in front of the Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Toronto to read out loud the names of 100,000 so far victims of the crisis in Syria. They handed out information fliers, waved flags, and a main banner read: "Together we voted for freedom; but Assad killed the voters and stole elections again. Hell has surely frozen over."

To start the commemoration, Ali Mustafa’s—a Toronto photographer who was killed in Aleppo last March—sister read the first names into a microphone. The campaign was also happening in different cities in countries all over the world including the US, France, Germany, and Syria. In Syria, people read names in Homs, Kafranbel, and Aleppo. This was especially meaningful (and dangerous) in Homs and Aleppo because both cities have been under constant attack by Bashar al-Assad’s regime in recent months.

The revolution in Syria began in 2011 and last March marked the third anniversary. The #100000 names campaign was first held in Washington, D.C at that time to try and bring attention to the growing number of fatalities in what the UN has deemed one of the worst humanitarian crises in recorded history. Syrian activists had come from all over the world to read names out loud for three days straight in front of the White House, where often “unidentified” is read out loud to memorialize a body that could never be named because it had been too badly destroyed. A “Book of Death” was also started at that time and holds the names of as many deceased as activists have been able to put together.

“The main idea here is to show the people of Syria that since they haven’t been able to have a proper memorial, this is working as a memorial for Syrians and for other to people to see that the people who have died, have not died in vain,” said 17-year-old Noor Mamlouk, “and that they are never going to be forgotten.”

Noor Mamlouk reading the names of the dead into the microphone in front of Russian consulate.
Noor has been an important voice in Syrian activism here in Canada and helped host the event along with other activists. She read hundreds of names out loud both days.

Activists across the world chose to reignite the #100000 names campaign to draw attention to the fact that Bashar al-Assad was running again for president and would probably win. They were right. While names were being read in Toronto and other cities, Syrians lined up to vote in an election that was handed to a man that has already been proven guilty of using sarin gas and other terrorist-style measures against his own people. According to Ya Libnan press, one man voted for Assad by marking his ballot with blood. At the protest in Toronto, activists discussed the election as being a joke, calling it a “theatre play,” and something that means absolutely nothing to Syrians anywhere.

“We believe that more than 200,000 people have already died and it’s unbelievable that he is running for president and that his campaign slogan is ‘Together,’ especially when you see all the terrible destruction in the country,” Mamlouk said. In Syria’s capital city of Damascus it was reported that military aircraft could be heard overheard bombing rebel-held suburbs.

Another 17-year-old Syrian-Canadian read hundreds of names in honour of the people in his family who have been tortured and killed by the Assad Regime. “It means a lot to me to be here to say the names of the people who have died, especially because Bashar’s father also did the same thing to my family,” said Yaman Sawaf, who still has family in Syria that is frightened for and has already lost many relatives in this war.



Activists holding a banner similar to the ones held in other cities.
Activists also chose to protest in front of the Russian consulate because of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s involvement with Syria and general backing-up of Assad. It has been no secret that the two leaders have been supporting each other during the midst of individual political chaos. The fliers that were handed out included information regarding Russia’s current contracts with Syria for arms that have an estimated value of over $1 billion and include attack helicopters, scud balletic missiles and Russian-made T tanks. 

“My parents and my two sisters are there and every day we have hundreds of people, women, and children being killed,” Rasha El Endari said. “My family won’t leave because they say it is their home and they want to fight for their freedom and their home.”

According to a recent UN Security Council report the council is “Appalled at the unacceptable and escalating violence and deaths of more than 100,000 people in Syria.” However, it does not seem like there is an end in sight for the people of Syria who have been living in such extremely terrifying conditions that no one who hasn’t experienced it themselves could possibly understand. Over 10,000 of the fatalities have been children and there are over 2.5 million refugees now living outside the country. But, Syrian activism, such as this most recent campaign in Toronto, has been relentless and continues to involve social media and youth as much as possible.

“I want people to know to keep to their faith and that everything will be solved,” Sawaf said.

@angelamaries 

Painting by Richard Phillips

I was in Bungalow 89 of the Chateau Marmont, the old hotel where the stars stay. The hotel is tucked behind a wall, off Sunset Boulevard, just west of Laurel Canyon, right in the heart of Hollywood. Bungalow 89 is in the cottage area, apart from the main building, where the pool is. It was dusk.

Bungalow 89 is not famous like Bungalow 3 (Belushi) or Bungalow 2 (Rebel Without a Cause). It is only famous in my own mind, because it’s where I first met Gus Van Sant, and because I have been living in it for the past nine months while they do repairs on my house. When I met Gus here, he sat in the comfy chair in the living room and played a little red guitar and talked to me. It was back when he was casting the supporting roles for his film about Kurt Cobain’s last days alive. The role he liked me for eventually went to Lukas Haas, the kid from Witness, with Harrison Ford. Haas was one of the original members of the Pussy Posse, the group centered on the young Leo DiCaprio, back in the 90s, post-Titanic and pre-Scorsese.

Lukas Haas had a gay sex scene in Gus’s film. It was with Scott Green, the guy who talks about having to fuck a guy with a big cock in the Chinese-café scene in My Own Private Idaho. His monologue was probably based on at least some reality; he had helped River Phoenix do research for his young-hustler role in the same film. Which reminds me of a story Gus later told me about River in Portland, during preproduction. River was pulled over by the cops for wearing jeans with a hole in the front so big that his dick hung out.

***

There was a Hollywood girl staying at Chateau Marmont. She had gotten a key to my room from the manager. I heard her put the key into my front door and turn it, but I had slid the dead bolt and that thing—I don’t know what you call it; it’s like a chain but made of two bars—that kept the door from opening.

She said, “James, open the door.”

Across the room was a picture of a boy dressed as a sailor with a red sailor cap, and except for his blondish hair (closer to my brother’s color) he looked like me.

She said, “Open the door, you bookworm punk blogger faggot.”

***

But anyway, the gay sex scene in Last Days, the one with Lukas Haas and Scott Green, was ultimately cut out.

The Pussy Posse must have been around the time Leo shot Celebrity with Woody Allen. Leo played an outrageous party-monster actor who trashes hotel rooms and flies around the world having fun with his celebrity.

Around this time Leo was spotted by the crazy producer of American Psycho (who would eventually finance Buffalo ’66 and Spring Breakers) walking around the balcony of a high-rise in New York with a white parrot. Even though Christian Bale had been cast as Patrick Bateman, this crazy producer—let’s call him Crazy Producer—made an offer to Leo for the role. That sent the movie’s development into chaos: There was a moment when the casting was up in the air, and Crazy Producer was at Cannes and could claim that he had the star of Titanic, the most beloved film of teenage girls around the world, about to play the most despicable character in American literature in decades, a torturer and murderer of women. The concept was better than the actualization would have been.

It was the high-flying New York period. Leo was one of the cameramen on Harmony Korine’s Andy Kaufman–inspired, drug-fueled experiment called Fight Harm, in which Harmony picked fights with bouncers around the city and got beat up while his friends filmed it (David Blaine was also one of the cameramen). This project ended when a bouncer put Harmony’s leg on the curb and jumped on it.

***

My phone rang. She let it ring until I answered.

“You’re not going to let me sleep, are you?”

“Do you think this is me? Lindsay Lohan. Say it. Say it, like you have ownership. It’s not my name anymore.”

“Lindsay Lo-han.”

“I just want to sleep on your couch. I’m lonely.”

“We’re not going to have sex. If you want to come in, I’ll read you a story.”

“A bedtime story?”

“It’s called ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish.’”

Do you think I’ve created this? This dragon girl, lion girl, Hollywood hellion, terror of Sunset Boulevard, minor in the clubs, Chateau Demon? Do you think this is me?

***

Photo by Adarsha Benjamin

And oh yeah, after doing Milk, Gus drove me around Portland, giving me the “Idaho tour,” including the street in the heart of Downtown where the real hustlers had stood, a street called “Camp” because it had been a squatter camp back in the 30s and the name was passed on to the young hustlers of the 70s and 80s without their really knowing its origins. He showed me the condemned building that Keanu and River stay in with the rest of the homeless kids, which is now a restaurant, and also a run-down motel where the production stayed during the first week of shooting, the week they shot the “This road looks like a fucked-up face” scene and Keanu was ready to quit the film because he wasn’t feeling good about his performance (it turned out to be one of his all-time best) and River came into Keanu’s little hotel room, drunk from being in the bar with Udo Kier, and jumped on Keanu’s bed and pretended to be the Incredible Hulk, to make Keanu lighten up.

***

Then she made me wait for her. I was sitting in the comfy chair that Gus once sat in, strumming his little red guitar. I looked at the painting, you know what I mean, of the blond boy. A portrait of my ghost brother—I thought that he was someone Gus would have liked.

And out my window, above the red ceramic tiles of the Spanish roofs, just to the left, was the billboard owned by Gucci, so close it was essentially part of the hotel, and on it was my oversize face, for, you see, I was a model for their fragrances, clothes, and eyewear. In this particular ad I am sitting, with a goatee, in an old-fashioned blue Ferrari, looking out into the night: a concept designed by Nicolas Winding Refn, of Drive fame, of The Pusher Trilogy fame. His direction to me when we shot the Gucci commercial was always, no matter what I did, “Less is more; nothing is everything.” I think he used the same direction on Only God Forgives.

***

She knocked on the door. She was in her pajamas. She had bare feet.

Once upon a time a guy, a Hollywood guy, read some Salinger to a young woman who hadn’t read him before. Let’s call this girl Lindsay. She was a Hollywood girl, but a damaged one. I knew that she would like Salinger, because most young women do. I read her two of the Nine Stories, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” “Bananafish” was great because it has a nagging mother on the other end of the phone line, nothing like Lindsay’s real mother, but still, the mother-daughter thing was good for her to hear. And there’s the little girl in the story, Sibyl, and the pale suicide, Seymour, who kisses her foot and talks about bananafish with her, those fantastic phallic fish who stick their heads in holes and gorge themselves—it should be called “A Perfect Day for Dickfish”—and then, bam, he shoots himself.

Then I read “For Esmé,” which is basically the same story as “A Perfect Day for Dickfish.” A man goes to war. He is traumatized. Then he is saved by the innocence of a young girl. The structure of this story is very nice. Yes, stories, stories, stories, stories. S-t-o-r-i-e-s.

And what do we say about all this obsession with innocence? Salinger would be a companion to young women, real young women, for years, and then, one fateful night, he would sleep with them and the friendship would end. After that, after he fucked them, they were no longer the innocent ones running through the rye to be caught before they went over the cliff. They had gone over, and he had been the one to push them.

***

And I thought of that billboard and what it had been for me, thanks to Gucci; that huge sign above Sunset, the main vein of Los Angeles; the time I clambered across the tiles and pulled myself up to stand beneath it; myself a small, scruffy speck in a Rolling Rock hat, and above was the Gucci version 30 times my size in a svelte black tux. And later, when Gus and I did the show at Gagosian, where we showed a new cut of My Own Private Idaho that focused mostly on River’s character, Mike Waters (“Waters” like “River”) and called it My Own Private River, Gucci let us use the billboard, and we put a photo of the back of River’s head, because the show was called Unfinished, and River had lived a life that was unfinished. This was the same weekend as the Oscars, the ones that I hosted, and behind the scenes of that show, that wonderful show, Terry Richardson shot photos; and we had this plan to do a book together with photos (him) and poems (me) about the Oscars, and the Chateau and Lindsay Lohan, and we were going to come back to the hotel and do a shoot with Lindsay, who seemed to be doing better at that point but maybe wasn’t actually. But I was so unhappy about the Oscars because they had cut my Cher sequence—I was supposed to sing the song from Burlesque, “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me,” dressed as Cher—that I didn’t meet with Lindsay for the photos. Later she leaked a false story to the press that Terry was shooting a sex book with her and me.

***

Photo by Daily Billboard Blog

Now we were lying in bed. I wasn’t going to fuck her. She had her head on my shoulder. She started to talk. I let her.

“Before things got bad, I was in New York for the premiere of a film I did with Robert Altman and Meryl Streep. After the movie I took James Franco and Meryl’s two young daughters to the club du jour, Bungalow 8, in the Meatpacking District. It was my place. All my friends were there: school friends, my mother looking her slutty best, bodyguards, and Greeks. We had our own table in the corner, our own bottle.

“I took two Oxycontins and things got bad. The DJ was this bearded dude named Paul. I remember requesting Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’ I remember sitting back down, and I remember trying to speak up, to talk to that cute boy in a red gingham shirt, James.

“I was slurring. My words rolled around and got sticky and didn’t come out.

“My friend from school kept talking to him, trying to be cute, but she was only there because of me. I told Barry, my bodyguard, to take her away from our table. And he banished her.

“I took James back to the bathroom. ‘You know why Amy put mirrors all around in here?’ I said.

“‘Why?’

“‘So that you can watch yourself fuck.’

“He didn’t fuck me, that shit. And what was he doing there anyway? On my night. My night with Meryl, my night when everything was right, when I got everything I wanted. Almost.

“I fucked one of the Greeks instead: a big-schnozzed, big-dicked, drunk motherfucker. We did it in the bath. That was the best night of my life.”

Then she fell asleep.

The picture of the sailor was still there, implacable, eternal, as the first rays of the sun lit up my face on the Gucci billboard outside. The billboard me was the vampire me: He sucked something from all the people in all the cars that passed below.

And he was immortal. Immortally young; immortally sex.

I ran my fingers through her hair and thought about this girl sleeping on my chest, our fictional Hollywood girl, Lindsay. What will she do? I hope she gets better. You see, she is famous. She was famous because she was a talented child actress, and now she’s famous because she gets into trouble. She is damaged. For a while, after her high hellion days, she couldn’t get work because she couldn’t get insured. They thought she would run off the sets to party. Her career suffered, and she started getting arrested (stealing, DUIs, car accidents, other things). But the arrests, even as they added up, were never going to be an emotional bottom for her, because she got just as much attention for them as she used to get for her film performances. She would get money offers for her jailhouse memoirs, crazy offers. So how would she ever stop the craziness when the response to her work and the response to her life had converged into one? Two kinds of performance, in film and in life, had melted into one.

But I suppose a tabloid-performance run is limited for anyone. After a while it’s just an out-of-control vehicle running on fumes.

The masks are just as important as the reality. The masks are our reality. Everyone’s reality. Life is a performance. When an actor gives a good performance, often people say, “What good choices.” So if life is your grand performance, have you made good choices?

I dreamed about vampires, and a voice came to me. It was a demon. The demon said, “I live on the power of celebrity, and I am celebrity. I am the power bestowed on people like you by all the myriad reflectors of your celebrity: the tabloids, the blogs, the fan pages, the way we sit in fans’ minds, the way people read us through your roles in films, etc. This is our public persona, partly created by you and your actions, and partly by these reflectors that act in concert and become me.” It was a voice of permission, a voice of castigation, a voice of supreme supreme.

“Do all. You are immortal and live on forever, on the screens and in the minds of the peoples. Your physical self lives above their heads, in the dream hotels, in the chateaus of rarefied space, and your spirit inhabits their minds, while your teeth and cock feed on their bodies.”

I saw them all, in different positions, and the same positions, and I, like a sculptor, would position them and mold them. Or like a choreographer, I would put them through the same paces, again and again.

***

There is an area off the main hotel building where the bungalows are. At the center of the arrangement of chalk bungalows there is an oval pool like a blue pill, huddled by ferns, palms, and banana trees. Tended to be wild, webbed by a nexus of stone walkways. In the day, in summer, mermaids and hairy mermen drape the brickwork. At night the underwater lights electrify the pool zinc-blue, and the surface cradles the oven-red reflection of the neon Chateau sign above Sunset, above the paparazzi and miniskirts.

For nine months, while they fixed my house, I was staying in the bungalows. First in 82, next to the little Buddha in the long, trickling fountain. Lindsay Lohan was there too. The Chateau was her home, and the staff were her servants. She got my room key. One night she came in at 3 AM. I woke up on the couch, trying not to look surprised. Instead of fucking her, I read her a short story about a neglected daughter.

Every night Lindsay looked for me. My Russian friend, Drew, was always around like a wraith. He, like the blond painting, was my doppelgänger, writing scripts about rape and murder. A Hollywood Dostoyevsky, he had gambled his money away. We played a ton of ping-pong. My room was on the second level, the exterior walls hugged by vines. Every night Lindsay looked for me, and I hid. Out the window was Hollywood.

James Franco is the author of two short-story collections, Palo Alto and Actors Anonymous.

Illustrations by Jonny Ruzzo

Note: Jane Doe is the alias used in court for victims of sexual abuse.

Jane Doe sat on a bed in a cheap motel room in Scottsdale, Arizona, cigarette in one hand, Four Loko in the other. Her feet dangled inches above the floor. She was 14 years old.

“I have something to tell you,” Chuncey Garcia, 32, said to her gravely. “But once I tell you, you can’t leave, and you can’t tell anybody what I’ve said.”

Jane thought she was there to make some extra cash by taking calls and performing phone sex. Earlier that evening, February 22, 2013, a black Mercedes had approached her after her shift at Skin Cabaret, a strip joint in South Scottsdale where she had been working for a few days after running away from home. The tinted windows rolled down revealing Cierra Robinson, 27, a woman Jane had befriended at the club a couple days prior. Driving was Garcia, a man she had never seen before. He told her that she was stunning, and that he wanted to discuss something with her about an opportunity to make money.

“I want you to be a part of our team,” he said.

But something seemed off about this team. Later, in the motel room, Jane saw Garcia hit Robinson in the face. Cierra’s transgression was simple: She did not respond to him with the required “Yes, Daddy.” That is one of Garcia’s foremost rules. His girls are always to refer to him as “Slim,” “King Slim,” or, most usually, “Daddy.”

After Jane agreed to his condition of silence, he unveiled to her to his secret: She’d be his newest prostitute.

Fourteen months later, on May 16, 2014, Garcia was the first person in Orange County to be sentenced for human trafficking of a minor under Proposition 35,  the 2012 ballot initiative that more than doubled penalties for human trafficking and created a new theory of trafficking when it involves a minor victim. Garcia will serve 17 years to life in prison—the maximum sentence possible under the new law.

Before Prop 35 passed, “it was relatively rare for pimps to go to prison,” according to Deputy District Attorney Daniel Varon, the case’s prosecutor. The penalty for trafficking an adult in California was originally only three to five years and up to eight for a minor. But what made it difficult for prosecutors to secure convictions was the stipulation that a court had to hear evidence of “deprivation of liberty”—where the victim’s liberty is restricted by means of force, fear, or coercion. This is notoriously difficult to prove, largely because victims usually refuse to testify for fear of retribution from their trafficker.

The reworked legislation makes it possible to convict offenders without proof of deprivation of liberty in cases in which the victim is a minor. The idea is much like that behind statutory rape laws, which presumes coercion because persons under 18 years of age are legally incapable of giving consent. Prop 35 classifies all forms of pimping a minor as sex trafficking, which before wouldn’t have necessarily been considered as such. It’s a shift that has unearthed what activists are calling an epidemic of child sex slavery.

After the drug trade and counterfeiting, human trafficking is the world’s most profitable criminal activity, raking in $31.6 billion annually. According to estimates by the International Labor Organization, a specialized agency of the United Nations that promotes workplace rights, 26 percent of victims are children, and most trafficked girls are forced into child prostitution and pornography.

Back when Prop 35 was just an idea, Daphne Phung, the executive director of California Against Slavery and one of the bill’s first proponents, marched the Bay Area streets seeking signatures in support of the bill. She’d relay people the statistics. She’d tell them that pimps lurk outside foster homes and schools to recruit girls for their ranks. She’d impress upon them that it’s all happening here in our communities, right under our noses.

“People would yell at me, call me insane,” Phung told me. “They’d say, ‘What you’re talking about doesn’t make any sense!’ The awareness was just nonexistent.”

Phung would have to start at the beginning, explaining that child sex exploitation is far from a phenomenon contained to distant, third-world corners of the globe. Fifty-five percent of child pornography worldwide is produced in the US, and the FBI estimates that 100,000 to 300,000 minors are sold for sex each year nationally (that’s 10-30 percent of the global market). The average age that a minor starts working in the US skin trade is between 12 and 14, according to a 2005 University of Pennsylvania study titled “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the US, Canada, and Mexico.” Other regional studies found that the average age of initiation into prostitution is about 15 years old, indicating that a large percentage of sex workers started during adolescence.

Officer Michael Viscomi had been on his usual traffic patrol in Garden Grove, an Orange County suburban town famous for its annual strawberry festival, when he first met Jane Doe. He pulled over a black Mercedes at 2:30 AM on March 1, 2013, for a broken headlight. A quick scan of the car’s interior led him from the driver, Garcia, to Robinson, who rode shotgun, and then to the back seat, where he saw one more woman and, lastly, a girl tucked up against the far window. Her tiny body looked misplaced in the multicolored, skintight dress she wore. It was sleeveless on the left arm and barely reached below her hips.

The two cars idled under a freeway overpass at Harbor Boulevard and Trask Avenue, an intersection known for its streetwalkers. That Jane Doe “looked so much younger than the others,” as Viscomi testified, in such an area, signaled to him that something was amiss.

Prop 35 requires that all law enforcement become trained to identify and approach human-trafficking victims. In order to identify victims, you have to understand how traffickers themselves identify their targets.

Sixty percent of child sex-trafficking victims in the US have spent time in foster care or group homes, according to FBI data. Other studies indicate that incest and childhood physical abuse precedes the vast majority of prostitute histories–upwards of 85 percent. Though estimations vary, all agree that at least one third of US runaways end up in the commercial sex-trade industry.

Coming from broken homes or none at all, their disappearances often go unnoticed.

Though District Attorney Varon is aware of all the risk factors, he says that the most haunting part of the Garcia case is just how many of them Jane Doe exhibited. She was a runaway. She was using methamphetamines around the time she met Garcia. Though the attorney declined to give specifics in order to protect her, he says that she testified to having had “issues and concerns” with her home life—severe enough to have led her to run away between five and ten times in 2012.

The vast majority of sex-trafficking victims share similar sets of risk factors whose combination produces a pimp’s ticket to recruitment: vulnerability.

“These are kids who have significant lacks in their lives,” said Shannon Forsythe, founder and Executive Director of Run2Rescue, a nonprofit committed to the rehabilitation of sex-trafficking victims. “And they are hungering to fill that void.”

That void is the cornerstone of sex-exploitation psychology, a trafficker’s point of access. It starts with lavishing the victim with emotional and commercial offerings: compliments that pander to insecurities, then food, clothing, or shelter to accommodate basic needs that runaways often lack. Jane Doe informed Viscomi, according to his testimony, that Garcia told her “things she wanted to hear” when he first approached her outside of Skin—that she was beautiful, stunning. That she could make money with him.

A pimp’s team structure, borrowing domestic terminology, becomes the victim’s fill-in family. His moniker is “Daddy,” casting himself as provider and protector of the unit, the central figure of authority. His girls refer to one another as “wifeys,” “in-laws,” or “sisters.” Collectively they are known as a “stable,” and the pimping and prostitution paradigm as a whole is called the “game.”

Jane Doe failed to meet Garcia’s $200 minimum quota on her second day working the track. The troop had relocated to Buena Park, California, after a day’s journey through Southwestern desert. Garcia locked Jane Doe in their Buena Park Hotel and Suites room while he and the others went out to eat, withholding food as punishment for her transgression. On at least one occasion, he smashed her head against the backseat of the car when he saw her looking at another pimp. And one of those first nights in Arizona, he forcibly raped her, according to court documents.

It doesn’t take long for the feigned friendship or love relationship between trafficker and victim to give way to abusive control, and the reach is totalizing. Her economic, social, and sexual well-being are all contingent on her level of compliance with her pimp’s demands.

“They convince them they’re in love with them, but on the other hand they’ll kill them if they don’t comply,” said Dr. Sharon Cooper, CEO of Developmental and Forensics Pediatrics, PA, and specialist in child sexual exploitation and trauma. 

Cooper explains that physical terror becomes a pimp’s instrument of authority, used to transmit one message loud and clear: There is no way out. Traffickers take measures to sever victims’ ties to the outside world, to erase their past lives. New names are given (Jane Doe’s was Snowflake). Communication is regulated. They create new vulnerabilities by convincing the victim they’ve lost all credibility in the eyes of society. What police officer won’t just throw you in jail? What community or family—if there is one to go back to—will take back a prostitute?

The level of dependency is so pervasive that many victims develop Stockholm syndrome, the psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and attachment toward their captors.

Phung’s hope is that Prop 35 will fundamentally change how law enforcement approaches commercial sex work. When they encounter what they might traditionally chalk up to a normal prostitution case, she urges them to withhold this assumption and investigate the possibility that there is “something else to this, behind the surface.”

“Human trafficking and pimping have always existed as the drivers of prostitution,” says Varon. “And understanding that means there is a shift in the perception of someone engaging in prostitution—from a criminal to a victim of coercion, who, most often, has been exploited since they were a kid.”

Sex exploitation is an archetype of a vicious cycle. The risk factors that make someone more likely to become a victim of exploitation are the same as the ones that make someone more likely to become an exploiter. A DePaul University study of ex-pimps in Chicago found that 76 percent were molested as children. Eighty-eight percent were physically abused. Almost half ran away from home to escape that violence, leaving them on the streets in the same condition as the victims they later target: vulnerable and without a home. Sixty-eight percent were trafficked before they began to pimp. The abused often become the abusers themselves.

Once it was clear that Jane Doe was a juvenile runaway, she was transported to Orangewood Children’s home, Orange County’s only emergency shelter for neglected and abused children, where more than 1,000 beds stay full year-round. After running away several times, she finally landed in an Arizona lockdown treatment facility in late June 2013. As of this past February, according to court documents, she continues to receive “vital treatment.” She suffers from extreme post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She has nightmares daily and fits of aggression and rage. It’s taken her nearly five months to show any signs of progress.

Though Varon refrained from giving an update about her current condition, he noted, “Generally these types of cases have devastating, life-long effects on their victims.”

Psychologists liken sex exploitation to war. It produces trauma similar to that experienced by hostages, prisoners of war, and concentration-camp inmates. In an international study, 68 percent of 900 sex workers evaluated by Dr. Melissa Farley—America’s leading researcher on the effects of prostitution and sexual violence—had PTSD. That’s far above the rates seen in war veterans, which ranges between 4 and 50 percent.

And like certain war landscapes, the field of sexual exploitation can be fatal. The average life expectancy after exploitation starts, if the subject doesn’t manage to escape, is seven years. The leading cause of death is homicide, followed closely by AIDS.

After her treatment plan is completed (usually 18 to 24 months after enrollment), Jane Doe will face reassimilation. She’ll return to her mom, who, by Varon’s accounts, is “supportive, loving, and doing everything she can for her daughter.” But many victims don’t have such a figure in their life. They’re parachuted back into society—–maybe at another shelter much like the one they initially ran away from—often years behind in school, stigmatized by their time on the street. Being sexually exploited is just another bad card to add to an already miserable deck. And there are always more pimps waiting.

Garcia, wiry from a year in jail, stared blankly at his hands as Varon listed his offenses at the sentencing. Varon reminded the judge that Garcia has yet to take “an ounce of responsibility” or demonstrate “even the slightest” remorse for his actions.

“He asserts and asserts that everybody was free to do their own thing,” Varon stated.

It will be 17 years before Garcia is eligible for parole. Jane Doe will face, after just two weeks of exploitation, a lifetime of reparation. Meanwhile, the increasing demand for purchasable flesh continues to drive young, marginalized souls—both pimps and the pimped—to the streets.

 “You can’t sell what people are not buying,” Phung told me. But that’s her next battle to fight. 

Danielle L. Davis is a nonfiction writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the Intentional, LA Weekly, and on various Internet platforms, such as www.takepart.com.

Trigger warning for rape

While the past weeks have fostered a stronger collective awareness for women’s rights than I’ve seen in my lifetime, thanks to campaigns like #YesAllWomen, apparently not everyone has received the memo that you’re not supposed to gang-rape people. Or slut-shame them.

A group of star athletes allegedly raped a classmate at their prom party. The three were arrested for sexual battery too, but they have yet to spend a single evening in jail. And in order to slut-shame a woman, two little fuckwits who worked at the University of Cincinnati Medical Centre posted a woman’s STI test results online.

My dad texted me this week to remind me not all men are bad, and that my writing sounds angry. Angry? I’m fucking Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. So here’s what happened this week—besides more discussion on Elliot Rodger’s virginity and the horrifically dehumanizing and dangerous new laws surrounding sex work in Canada.

Post Prom Gang-Rape Case In Georgia Focuses On All The Wrong Things

Echoes of the Steubenville rape reverberated across America last week—at least for those who were paying attention. An alleged gang rape, alongside sexual battery, happened in Georgia after Calhoun High School’s prom in May, and it’s coming to light now.

A prom party at a cabin in the woods—almost a right of passage and experienced by so many—turned into a nightmare on May 11. An 18-year-old woman says she was raped by multiple men—she can’t remember who—and, according to Jezebel, they inserted a “foreign object” into her vagina, causing major tearing and internal damage. Even the local sheriff called the tearing “substantial.” It happened after four men, all top athletes, reportedly locked her in a room. From Jezebel:

“Other attendees of the party knew what was happening but did nothing. According to some accounts, the fourth boy in the room was there to barricade the door closed.”

Police arrested three 18-year-olds on sexual battery charges: football quarterback Fields Chapman, wide receiver Andrew Haynes, and star baseball player Avery Johnson. Johnson was planning to play college baseball at Georgia Highlands College next year. The three turned themselves in the next day, but didn’t spend so much as a night in jail. They were released on bonds of $51,000 each.

While authorities deserve a gold star for effort for actually bothering to investigate these chunks of human scum, there are some serious issues with the way the crime is being investigated, beyond that obvious bit:

1.)  Authorities are babbling a lot about how teen drinking causes terrible things to happen, instead of how men’s entitlement to women’s bodies causes terrible things to happen. "Teenagers and alcohol just do not mix. Nothing good can come out of it. It's not just a little innocent fun,” the sheriff pointlessly told local paper the Times Free Press.

    2.)  People knew this was happening and did nothing, including, reportedly, the fourth boy in the room.   There’s no word on whether he’ll be charged, but he could have stopped it from happening. Inaction in these cases causes just as much harm as the rapes themselves.

Here’s a thought. These aren’t the first athletes to allegedly gang-rape a young woman. Rape culture is an entrenched part of athletics for boys. We’ve seen that in the horrendous acts at the University of Ottawa, and with Steubenville, University of British Columbia, Florida State University. The list of sexually violent acts committed by athletes is endless, really. Because schools are so good at making things “mandatory” for students, how about training male athletes, from a young age, to treat women properly? Male athletes need to be explicitly taught, apparently, that gang-raping women is not what we mean by team sports. Sexually terrorizing women should not be part and parcel of the high school and university athletic experience.

Until that day, these careless monsters need to face some kind of wrath for what they did. VICE UK ran a piece that outlined some good ways to punish rapists. My favourite, from the comments:

“how about a rapist is injected with a small robot that takes 9 months to grow to the size of a rugby ball then forces its way out thru the rapist's butt hole then follows the rapist around generally thwarting any activity the rapist is enjoying and stealing from their wallet until the rapist goes mental and kills it, after which upon the mention of the word baby or pregnancy in any conversation within ear range the rapist receives an electric shock strong enough to make them cry?”



A breakdown of female representation in Ontario politics. via WiTOPoli.
Not Nearly Enough Women Running In Ontario Election

“Women in Toronto Politics” and “Elect Women Ontario” have tallied up the number of women in Toronto ridings running in this week’s provincial election, and despite two of the premier candidates being female, it’s not looking good overall.

“Of the declared candidates for the four major parties, 29.5 percent of candidates are women,” Women in Toronto Politics reports. The UN states that the critical mass needed for equitable participation of women stands at 30 per cent. (If it’s meant to be “equitable,” I’m not sure why it’s set at a little over a quarter instead of at a full half but that’s as good as women can dare to ask for, I guess).

Given the likelihood of each woman winning her riding, I highly doubt that we’ll land anywhere near equitable representation amongst the city’s ridings. It doesn’t mean meeting the target is impossible, though: provincially, a record 145 women are on the ballot province-wide, which constitutes 34 percent of overall candidates. Happily, some are saying we might wind up with another record number of female MPPs. At dissolution, female MPPs made up 29 percent of Ontario’s legislative assembly.

Any progress is good progress, but I have to say, Canada as a whole should be doing much better. Out of all Canadian provinces and territories, as of April 2014, only the Yukon and British Columbia met the already-low United Nations target for fair and equal representation. My own home province, New Brunswick, came in at an embarrassing 16 percent.

Federally, we’re not doing so hot, either. Women occupy 25 percent of seats in the House of Commons, and that’s a record high. That’s simply not good enough, and more parties need to endorse female candidates. Maybe if they did, there would be more childcare available, better and more accessible transit, fewer abortion clinics closing, and fewer sex workers being damned to unsafe work environments. Maybe.
 

@sarratch

The album cover of Satisfaction Guaranteed 

Early into the second song on Junglepussy’s excellent debut album Satisfaction Guaranteed she raps, “How dope is this? Teach you how to grow and live.” The line—rapped quickly, with her rollicking flow, kind of like a slinky expanding and contracting with each breath—also works as Junglepussy’s motto. She’s here to please you, help you, teach you and, most importantly, introduce you to her tropical lifestyle.

It took nearly two years since her first song, “Cream Team” and even Erykah Badu asking for more, but the 22-year-old FIT-student formerly known as Shayna McHale finally came through with a self-help album for the people. “I wasn’t like I want to make music so that I could be amazing and everybody would love me,” she said when we met yesterday afternoon during a quick interview. “People really wanted me to do it. The people were asking me to share my thoughts and views on things and I can’t deny them of that.”

On Satisfaction Guaranteed, Junglepussy teaches you how to eat, date, text, and live the life of a take-no-shit power bitch, all over a set of lush, deep and dark Shy Guy beats. Girls, take notes. Guys, try not to catch too many feelings. Everyone—put this on heavy rotations for maximum effect.

Do your four- and six-year-old little sisters know about Junglepussy?
Not yet. I need them to find out on their own. Even though she was on my phone the other day and saw the album artwork. She was like, "Is that Beyonce?" I was like, "No that’s me." She was like, "Oh, you look good!" That was so cute. I love them so much.

How would you explain the name to them?
I would just have to tell them the real original story.

Which is?
It started out with me loving loving animal prints. I had it on my clothes, curtains, cups—everywhere. I felt like a little jungle animal around all of these animal prints and exotic patterns, and the name "Junglepussy" came up. Females have pussies, so it’s the most feminine word ever and jungle—it could be wild, but it’s also beautiful to me. Twitter came out and I just wanted to have a name that nobody was going to steal. So I was like, I could use Junglepussy... People were like, "Are you a stripper? Are you a porn star? Are you a tranny?" No, I am a natural-born girl. You see my throwback Thursday pics? I was a baby girl and I just liked animal prints. I’m not even that wild, but I took the responsibility of it. I didn’t run from the name because I felt that in my heart I knew it wasn’t anything crazy or degrading. I knew it was everybody else’s reaction that was making it what it is, so I decided to stick it out and see what would come from it.

Photo by Miyako Bellizzi

How has the perception evolved?
People are more scared of the jungle than the pussy. Pussycat Dolls, Pussy Riot, Josie and the Pussycats have all been out. Dick Cheney, Dick Clark all these men named Dick have been publicized on television and everywhere. It’s not that crazy. I think it is the jungle more than the pussy that scares people.

What is it about the jungle?
That’s what I want to know. Y’all need to tell me. What scares you about the jungle?

The idea of a strong, self-reliant jungle woman is intimidating to the masses. What is feminism to you?
Black feminism is the same as feminism for any race. But black women do have more problems and struggles and tribulations than... all women have problems, but I’m black so I’m more familiar with those of black girls.

Like?
Hair is important to a lot of black girls because we can’t just wake up, shake, and go. We really go through a lot of maintenance to come out of the house. Each of my hairstyles is JP—is Shayna. I used to do a bunch of crazy hair in high school like blue, red, shaved, short hair. I just started growing. I feel like I’m turning into a woman through my hair.

Photo by Miyako Bellizzi

What does this style mean?
This is more like freedom. I don’t have to worry, it’s very carefree for me. It makes me focus on more important things in life. My grandfather always told me, Don’t worry about your hair or your face. We can’t worry about those things. We can't control our looks all the time, but we do what we can. 

How would you describe yourself?
I like to be peaceful and serene. I like to be prosperous to strive for better—always. I like to help my friends. I like to be with my family. I love tanning.

Your album and outlook are so self-help oriented. Anything else in the works?
I definitely want to do some more girl empowerment stuff and have little conventions all around where girls can meet and talk about things that they don’t get to talk about on Twitter with hating ass bitches. We could just come together and talk and learn from each other and grow together. I’m planning it out.

Photo by Miyako Bellizzi

Black power is a big part of your Twitter aesthetic.
I’m all for black power. I’m not for black power that’s criticizing other races. I am for black people embracing themselves and their culture and everything that comes with it instead of people just taking our culture from us and telling us who we are—that we’re ghetto. We’re just black. It’s who we are. If we just come to good terms with that we can all begin to learn.

What are your goals?
I want to see who I’m going to be if I keep learning and bettering myself. That’s my goal. Everyday I just want to improve. I want to live in the moment too and just be conscious of all that I have.

How do you actively work to improve?
I write a lot of lists. I write a lot in general. I meditate and I ask for more patience, understanding, and compassion.

Was the “Picky Bitch Checklist” one of those lists?
Yeah, that one is dumb long. I always write lists, everyday. It’s things I have to do, thoughts I have, different ideas. If it’s an important list, like, I’ll have a Wednesday to-do list and I’ll make it my lock screen pic so I just know what I got to do. You need to be very organized.

Is it only to-do lists?
I write so much now that I have books where I write happy thoughts, books where I write sad thoughts, books where I write my lyrics, books where I write poetry, books where I write video ideas and song concepts. Now I got all these books... One day I need to go through and edit them, refine everything, and perfect it, so it’s a nice collection of information and not just scribble scrabble.

You can make it into a multi-volume book.
I definitely want to do books. I want to do cooking shows. Taste of the Jungle is my guide to healthier choices and how to live tropical in America.

The back of Satisfaction Guaranteed

How does one live tropical in America?
Eating as many fruits and vegetables as possible and the smallest amount of processed foods as possible. It’s a fun thing to do because I feel so much better when I don’t eat things that are made from names that I can’t pronounce. I feel so much cleaner and more energized and I just want to show people there are options. You don’t have to eat shit. Now you don’t have to wonder why I look like I’m glowing.

I hear that if you eat a lot of fruits your pussy tastes good too.
That’s what they say. Another good perk. I heard that I do taste very delicious—magically delicious. Just drink water, flush the kitty out so everything is nice and clean.

With this album, what satisfaction are you guaranteeing?
The satisfaction of your own individuality. The satisfaction of your own uniqueness. The satisfaction of being you, expressing, learning, and growing. People are so hard to satisfy nowadays. It’s hard, but I try. 

Follow Lauren on Twitter 

Tobacco field in Cuba. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As a pot smoker, it’s nice to see the country changing its mind on my drug of choice. Part of the transformation is practical—allowing medical use, keeping nonviolent criminals out of jail, and so on—but it’s the shift in social acceptance that really makes it OK to smoke weed in America. We smoked lots of weed while it was still illegal, after all. We had to keep it on the low, and not just because of cops who might be sniffing around. It was possible that a random civilian who happened to see you smoking weed in the park would either call the cops or personally confront you. 

Most adults agreed that weed was a bad drug plaguing the nation’s youth, and it seemed like it would take a century for things to change. Instead, the kids who smoked grew up and retained their views on pot, altering the national psyche and bringing about drastic changes—not only in what is legal but also in what is socially accepted. But along with the acceptance of weed, Americans are building an intolerance for my second favorite thing to smoke: tobacco.

After the decadent heyday of cigarettes, when 20,679 doctors endorsed Lucky Strikes, people started catching on to the imminent health risks of heavy smoking and the world turned on tobacco, for good reason. The scientific and medical communities unanimously agree that cigarettes are terrible for you, and over time the downright evil tactics of tobacco companies have come to light. People are changing their minds. Fewer people are smoking. But I haven’t changed my mind yet.

I started smoking regularly when I was 15. A grubby senior at my school bought me packs of Marlboros for a dollar markup. Every time I got a new pack, I’d smoke one in the boys’ bathroom during my math class.

I got away with it until a substitute teacher stopped at my desk while she was passing back test papers. “Is that you?” she asked. I gave her a confused look. “I smell smoke." I admitted that I'd been smoking. She didn’t write me up or send me to the vice principal’s office. Instead, she shamed me in front of the whole class by sternly saying, “Well, you stink!”

I wondered if she would say the same to a kid who stepped in dog shit, or one with chronic BO. It seemed like a harsh and damaging thing for a teacher to say to a student, but because she was talking about cigarette smoke, she was right and I was wrong. This struck me as unfair, because it’s completely subjective whether or not cigarettes smell pleasant. I mean, I don't like mayonnaise, but if someone eats it in front of me, I don’t say aloud that their breath will be disgusting.

I’ve received plenty of other verbal reprimands akin to that one, but most of the judgment I receive is from strangers—mainly those with children. When I’m walking down the sidewalk smoking a cigarette, parents corral their kids away from me with a sense of urgency. They don’t want my poisonous fumes anywhere near their family, even though they chose to live in America’s most congested city with kids who are just the right height to directly inhale a car's exhaust. It's also occurred to me that perhaps it's not the smoking that bothers them. Maybe they are just steering clear of the long-haired, bearded, brown guy wearing headphones and bobbing his head uncontrollably to Lee "Scratch" Perry. Either way, I can’t really blame them.

I enjoy smoking cigarettes, and I’m the only person I know who admits it. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a habit that’s becoming increasingly restricted and taxed. The negatives are quickly beginning to outweigh the positives, so I’m sure it won’t be long before I kick the cigarette habit. Even when I accomplish that, it will be hard to smoke weed without tobacco.

My brother taught me how to roll a joint when he returned from a trip to Amsterdam. As is the custom in many parts of Europe, he rolled big cones filled with a two-to-one ratio of weed to tobacco. From then on, it became my preferred method of smoking. A joint of weed alone doesn’t give you the same bite in your throat when you inhale, and it might not burn as well, depending on the weed. A spliff has the perfect balance for me.

If I’m smoking with other people, I always ask before adding tobacco to the joint, and if anyone objects, I don’t insist. Anything less would be discourteous. However, the reactions I get don’t reserve any scrutiny. Instead of simply saying, “No, thanks,” people will say something like, “No! That’s disgusting!” Somehow, blunts are totally OK, but the sight of a cigarette is enough to evoke a lecture. In their mind, it’s OK to belittle someone’s preference for tobacco. They don’t consider that they’re giving it the same unjust treatment that weed suffered under for so long until now.

Admittedly, weed is far better than tobacco in many ways, and if I had to give one of them up, I would cut tobacco right away. Come to think of it, I should also do away with my dependence on over-the-counter pain relievers, screen time, and thick-cut bacon, but none of those have a national campaign encouraging me to quit. It’s widely admitted that we’d be better off without such things, and yet we leave it to individuals to decide for themselves how much of a bad thing is enough. At a time when enthusiasm for a long-prohibited drug is at an all-time high, it seems counterproductive to go the other direction with another.

All photos by Greg Gibson. Asian Republican Coalition co-chairmen Tom Britt and John Ying are joined at their launch event by US Senator Orrin Hatch (right). 

On a sunny afternoon in early May, a number of Republican insiders, lobbyists, and politicians huddled at The Newseum in Washington, DC to nibble on hors d'oeuvres and celebrate the launch of a new group designed to win back the hearts and minds of Asian American voters.

Many have talked about the "demographic time bomb" threatening the Republican Party as America increasingly becomes less white and more multiracial. That problem is particularly acute with Asian Americans, the fastest growing ethnic group in the country, who have trended dramatically toward the Democratic Party in the last 20 years.

While small overtures have been made of late, the Asian Republican Coalition (ARC) is the new group unveiled this past month that hopes to permanently reverse the Democratic trend among Asian voters.

How do they plan on doing it? VICE spoke to Thomas Britt, the vice chairman of ARC and a former Asia Finance Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Britt told us that Republican values of faith, family, education, and entrepreneurship reflect the interests of Asian American families. "I think the Republican policies with respect to some of those core values are very consistent with what Asian Americans believe," says Britt, who talked to us over the phone while on a business trip to Beijing.

Notably, both of ARC's chairmen are based primarily in Asia. John Ying, the chairman of the group, is Managing Director of Peak Capital, a Hong Kong-based firm that specializes in business deals in China.

But what are ARC's connections to the Asian American community in the United States?

“We have a very broad definition of what constitutes the Asian American community," says Britt, who is white. "The Asian Republican Coalition is open to all Americans, including Asian Americans and those of us like me who are not ethnically Asian but have spent twenty years living in Hong Kong.”

Ying, who was not available for an interview with VICE, made similar remarks to Fox News, telling the news outlet that ARC seeks to expand the definition of Asian American to include those who might be married to an Asian or doing business in Asian markets. “We want to broaden the footprint beyond bloodlines,” Ying said.

Indeed, pictures posted from ARC's launch party show that ARC's team is currently populated by a staff, which includes fundraisers from the firm Sentinel Strategic Advisors, that is virtually all white.

Members of the Asian Republican Coalition team pose at the launch party in Washington, DC

The event was attended by about a dozen Republican lawmakers, including Utah US Senator Orrin Hatch and Oklahoma US Senator Jim Inhofe. "Although I am not Asian American I represent a large part of what ARC represents," Britt said at the unveiling, according to the website Hollywood on the Potomac. The event was also attended by Ed Feulner, the former president of the Heritage Foundation, as well as Brian Johnson, a tax lobbyist with the American Petroleum Institute.

ARC and the Republican Party have their work cut out for them. In the 1992 presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush picked up 55 percent from Asian Americans. But those numbers have been slipping precipitously. In 2008, Obama garnered 62 percent of the Asian American vote. That number jumped to 73 percent in the last presidential election, according to exit polls.

The same dynamic has occurred down ballot. Last year, Asian Americans broke for Democrat Terry McAuliffe over Republican Ken Cuccinelli by 63 to 34 percent in Virginia's gubernatorial race. Polls show Cuccinelli's support for English-only policies and hostility towards immigration reform were a major factor for Asian American voters.

Still, Britt told VICE that the Republican Party does not need to support comprehensive immigration reform to convince Asian American voters to join their team. "I don't believe the Asian American community is a single issue group," he told me bluntly. Britt believes that the GOP has taken Asian American votes for granted, and that a more focused outreach strategy will boost the party. ARC, he notes, intends to get involved in congressional elections this year. The group a 501(c)4 non-profit, meaning it does not have to disclose its donors but can solicit unlimited individual and corporate donations. Registration records show the group was incorporated in Delaware.

So far, ARC has been endorsed by many heavy-hitters in the party. Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Rand Paul are among the GOP leaders who have written statements of support.

But ARC isn't the only effort by Republicans to curry favor with Asian Americans. Last year, the Republican National Committee hired two Asian Americans to boost its community outreach apparatus, Jason Chung and Stephen Fong. In December, several House Republicans appeared in a fairly bland video to mark the 70th anniversary of the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Democrats, on the other hand, aren't so terribly worried.

"Is this a joke?" asks Frank Chi, a Democratic media consultant, when told about ARC's broad definition of Asian American. "If not, then this is a fundamental misreading of politics in a multicultural America."

Lee Fang, a San Francisco–based journalist, is an Investigative Fellow at The Nation Institute and co-founder of Republic Report.

Trinty Western University president, Bob Kuhn. Image via YouTube.
In September 2016, Trinity Western University (TWU) plans to open a Christian law school where gay people would not qualify for admission. This obviously restrictive—and highly offensive—policy has caused a legal uproar around the country. To simplify the question being asked in legal circles around Canada: Is this even legal? Today, a general meeting between members of the Law Society of British Columbia will be held—to decide whether or not to uphold the school’s legal status.

Resistance to TWU’s law school began shortly after the faith-based university proposed its plan to the British Columbia Ministry of Advanced Education and the Federation of Law Societies of Canada in June 2012. The first true obstacle for TWU law becoming accredited came on April 24, however, when the Law Society of Upper Canada voted against the school, making it impossible for its graduates to practice law in Ontario. The vote was 28-21 with one abstention, and according to the Toronto Star, that was the first time the Law Society of Upper Canada (our country’s oldest law society, by the way) voted against accrediting a law school.

In the same month, the Law Society of Nova Scotia voted to approve TWU’s law school on the condition that it drops the Community Covenant Agreement, a document students are required to sign that prohibits sexual intimacy between members of the same sex. And on April 11, the Law Society of British Columbia voted to approve TWU’s law school—a decision that could be overturned as a result of today’s general meeting.

The Law Society of British Columbia’s original decision to approve the law school did not surprise me. I couldn’t help but wonder if the province simply did not want to repeat 2001, when the British Columbia College of Teachers lost an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada where they were arguing for “the right to deny approval of TWU’s teacher education program because students while at TWU agree to refrain from extramarital sex, including homosexual behaviour.” TWU successfully argued that—despite their anti-gay policies—their students are required “to show love and respect to everyone.”

In spite of TWU law’s turbulent trek through some of Canada’s legal communities, law societies in Nunavut, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Prince Edward Island have approved the school for accreditation. My first reaction to this can be summarized quickly as: “Damn, what a bummer.” But, to figure out what’s going on in the heads of the leadership over at TWU, I called up their president Bob Kuhn, and here’s what he had to say.

VICE: The Community Covenant Agreement requires TWU students to abstain from sex, unless that sex is with their spouse, who must be a member of the opposite sex.
Bob Kuhn: Yes.

Are off-campus students required to abide by the Community Covenant Agreement?
It applies to students who are part of our community, and that includes off-campus students.

What happens to TWU students who participate in sexual activity with a member of the same sex?
We’ve never had to deal with the issue of same-sex sexual intimacy. In a general fashion, we respond to all variations from the Community Covenant Agreement in a personal, relational way and that means that there’s no beaten path in the road with respect to the issues.

The Community Covenant Agreement states that TWU welcomes all students who qualify for admission. Does a person who is legally married to and engages in sexual activity with a member of the same sex qualify for admission to TWU?
Well, let’s put it this way: somebody in that position would immediately recognize that their values would conflict with the values that are in the Community Covenant Agreement, so a welcomeness is reflected by the circumstances.

It’s a bit of an academic question I suppose, because anybody applying would be advised or would know that the Community Covenant Agreement is in place. It’s difficult to say that they would be compliant with it. Somebody who tends not to be compliant with it would probably not apply, unless it was a confrontation application, which we haven’t had yet, and I hope we won’t have.

Yes, someone who is legally married to their same-sex partner, and who engages in sexual activity with that partner, would probably not want to apply to TWU. My question, however, is whether that individual would qualify for admission.
Well, I can imagine circumstances where they would qualify for admission, but they would not be typical circumstances. From a technical perspective, it would be a matter of do they qualify from a position of being able to sign the necessary documents, those documents being the Community Covenant Agreement. If they can’t see their way through to signing those documents, then they would not qualify for admission.

What is a faith-based institution?
Faith-based is a broad term. It can apply to many different institutions that see their worldview, or perspective, is based on a religious—and it could be any religion—perspective. So, faith-based means that somebody who is a member of that community or a member of that institution is basically committed to or compliant with the faith-oriented perspective.

In the context of TWU, faith-based would be the founding fathers, if you will, of the institution believed that having an education from a Christian perspective, specifically an Evangelical Christian perspective, was a worthy goal that had real merit. The fathers started a small college that was a liberal arts college but it teaches from a faith-based perspective. It teaches from a faith-based worldview, that is specifically Evangelical Christian in nature.

In the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, section 15 states that every individual is equal before the law.
Yes.

The faith-based values at TWU conflict with the values of at least 5 percent of Canada’s population. Because of that, every individual is not afforded equal rights at TWU. Why should a law school that does not afford every individual equal rights exist?
Canada is tolerant of a wide variety of viewpoints. We have a pluralistic society, which we purport to nurture, and it necessarily involves some aspect of conflicting viewpoints. In fact, that’s the nature of the country’s values.           

To say that 5% of the population would not find a comfort level, perhaps, at TWU could be said of many, many organizations, not necessarily related to same-sex orientation, but relating to religious groups, relating to ethnic groups, relating to political perspectives. I’m intrigued by, for instance, the news that Justin Trudeau would not permit a candidate to run for the Liberal party who has a view that would be considered anti-abortion or pro-life. In the same way, Christian organizations such as TWU have a niche, if you will—a perspective that is going to attract only a portion of the population—but it does have a legitimate place in society, and has been determined to have such by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2001.

You’re referring to when Supreme Court justices concluded that “the proper place to draw the line [between freedom of religion and discrimination] is generally between belief and conduct,” in the 2001 case of Trinity Western University v. British Columbia College of Teachers.
Yes. And what I think is being said now is: ‘We didn’t like the result the first time, we want a different result from a court 13 years after a decision was made.’

When there are competing rights, how do you discern between freedom of religion and discrimination?
When you talk about discrimination, you must always refer to a definition of discrimination, which is a definition that implies unlawful discrimination. In the case of TWU, the answer’s very simple. The Supreme Court of Canada has defined that balance and have concluded that TWU is on the right side of the balanced equation, and that is they [the Supreme Court of Canada] have protected the religious freedom in exactly the same circumstances as we’re currently facing [in 2001].

The website for TWU’s law school says that the school will be a place where the great questions of meaning, values, and ethics are confronted, debated, and pondered, and the broad and diverse communities of Canada are served through a richer understanding of the law. If members of the faculty at TWU must abide by the Community Covenant Agreement, how can you be sure that the people who students learn from represent the broad and diverse communities of Canada you expect your graduates to serve?
Well, for 52 years we’ve been doing exactly that, and it won’t change in the law school. The perspective brought by our educational staff is unquestionably in the excellent category, which has been approved at every level by every third-party, objective reviewer.

It’s just not conceivable that the perspective of one [group] of individuals that has not even looked at the academic performance at TWU could determine that it’s not adequate.

I’m not questioning the performance of the faculty, I’m questioning the diversity within the faculty. For example, do you have any openly gay faculty members who, within the law school, will represent the perspective of at least 5% of our country’s population?
No.

The learning experience at TWU is actually probably at least as much, if not more, comprehensive than you will find at a public university because there are certain topics dealing with religious perspectives that are not covered at all in a public environment. Specifically, a public law school. I would argue that the kind of instruction that takes place at TWU, or in a law school that would be run out of TWU, is not limited to the ability of one professor, or any group of professors, to personally attest to any particular viewpoint.

A web page that describes the rationale behind TWU’s law school says that the school plans to partner with agencies that serve the oppressed. Who does TWU consider to be oppressed?
Our experience with community activity, that means not just the community of British Columbia, but the community internationally, [suggests] the identity of the oppressed depends on the circumstances in which you find them.

We’ve had individuals work on projects in Rwanda, we’ve had groups serve the downtown eastside of Vancouver, where there’s issues of prostitution, issues of drug abuse, or substance abuse generally, certainly alcohol being one. The oppressed includes a broad group of people.

Does TWU regard people who engage in sexual intimacy with members of the same sex as oppressed?
Some people have been historically oppressed, and I would include LGBT community members in that category. Others have been recently oppressed, and I would include some Christian groups in that context.

At TWU’s law school, are you are serving the oppressed by prohibiting a member of a community that has, in your words, been historically oppressed, from being a student?
I don’t see the issues as related. I don’t see it as an oppression issue at all. There are many choices of law schools. If one law school happens to be a particular perspective that doesn’t agree with other perspectives and it’s lawful to do that, there’s no reason to require everyone to attend.

The website for TWU’s law school says that the Law Society of Upper Canada’s decision to reject otherwise highly qualified [TWU law school] graduates sends a message that in Ontario, you cannot hold religious values and fully participate in society.
Yes.

What would you say to someone who argues that by requiring students at TWU’s law school to abide by the Community Covenant Agreement, you are rejecting highly qualified Christian, homosexual law school applicants and sending a message that at TWU, you cannot hold LGBTQ values and participate in the school or campus community?
First of all, the Law Society of Upper Canada has a public duty, and cannot discriminate against a Christian organization that produces graduates, unless they can establish, somehow, that those graduates would be a negative influence in the community in which they’re called to serve. Law students who graduate from TWU, five years from now, are being told in advance, five years even before they’ve graduated from the law school, that they are not acceptable. They’re not acceptable because they have gone to a particular law school. They’re not being told that they’re not acceptable because they’re inadequate technically as lawyers, ethnically as lawyers, or in any other way. They’re simply being identified by the law school that they came from.

What risk, if any, exists for students at TWU’s law school, and therefore students who have agreed to abstain from engaging in homosexual activity on account of university policy, to develop negative opinions about homosexuality?
I think the chances of that are absolutely nil. If you look at the situation objectively and say: ‘Do the graduates of one of these public university law schools, are those graduates likely to treat Evangelical Christian clients well, or without bias?’ The answer, I think, in most cases would be yes. They would not treat them without bias. They’d be able to treat them fairly, and they’d be maintaining their ethics.

As a lawyer who has practiced for 34 years, who is an Evangelical Christian who adheres to teachings from a biblical perspective, I’ve found it offensive that somebody would say that because I believe a certain thing, I do not have the capability of practicing law in an ethical and professional manner.

I’m sure you’ve read some of the commentary [about the Community Covenant Agreement] online. I dare say that the commentary is not just offensive, but is harmful and derogatory in an extreme fashion against Christians. That shows intolerance.

How does it feel to be the president of a university that is known for excluding people?
Historically, the LGBT community has been treated poorly. Not just by the world at large, but by churches and Christian environments. That historically has been the case. I feel bad when I think that some people have been inappropriately treating LGBT community members, and I have relationships with members of that community, and I value those relationships, but we disagree on a sexual moral issue.

On a personal level, when we’re not dealing with behaviour of a sexual nature, there’s no difficulty at all in relating to those people as individuals. I think that should be clear that we can have a community that is defined with certain sexual ethics, and the LGBT community can define its community as it wishes.

Take the issue of heterosexual sex outside of marriage. We take exactly the same position there as we do with homosexual sex.

But in the context of married couples there is a difference. Heterosexual married couples are permitted to have a sexual relationship, according to the Community Covenant Agreement, but homosexual married couples are not afforded the same right.
What you’re saying is: ‘Forget about the fact that you have a religious view.’
 

@kristy__hoffman

Kingston Penitentiary cellblock. Image via WikiMedia Commons.
When it comes to the Conservatives' “tough on crime” agenda, you might assume it's a pretty basic crowd-pleaser for the prison guard, soldier, and policeman-types out there.

Well guess what? Your assumptions are wrong. Last August, Canada's police chiefs called for new marijuana laws. Veterans are now seriously pissed off over service cuts after they return from war. And now our correctional officers are stepping it up and throwing down some harsh words at Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government.

“Ignorant,” “illogical,” “dangerous,” “ideological,” “ridiculous,” and “ludicrous” are just a few of those words.

As Canada's increasingly draconian laws toss more and more criminals into the slammer—thanks to mandatory minimum sentences pretty much copied directly from the states or slashing credit for time served in jail before being actually convicted of any crime (which our top courts say are not all that constitutional)—prison guards are feeling the heat of rising inmate numbers jammed into smaller spaces.

That combination, says one longtime guard, is explosive. And it's about to get a fuck of a lot worse.

“I've been a corrections officer for a long, long time—22 years,” Jason Godin says. “We've seen the levels of inmates cascading into the system, from maximum to minimum security, but budgets are being cut and no programming added.

“Our jobs are becoming more dangerous. We live by the motto that the tough-on-crime agenda is actually translating into a tough-on-correctional-officers agenda. We'd be naive to say our job isn't dangerous, but the actions of this government are just compounding the danger to us.”

Godin is the national vice-president of the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers. He says members across the country are reporting more and more frequent assaults on guards, as well as inmate-on-inmate violence. Both have gone “way up,” he says, and the statistics back that up.

The Auditor General, Michael Ferguson, released a scathing report last month alerting us that increasingly overcrowded prisons are heightening the dangers to inmates and guards alike, in many institutions that are already in “poor operational and physical condition.”

Ferguson warned that prisons across the country are running above their intended capacity, and with nearly 1,500 new inmates expected in the next five years being dumped into the system, bringing the total population up to 16,700, there will be more offenders than there are cells.

The solution: jamming two inmates into a “cell designed for one,” Ferguson reported—generally sharing a small toilet and sink in a cramped eight-by-ten foot locked room, otherwise known as “double-bunking.” But Ferguson warns in his new report that the practice was supposed “to be used only as a temporary measure.”

Now Canada apparently plans to make it permanent. And the rooms aren't getting any larger.

The report noted that even the Correctional Service of Canada was concerned about the “serious implications with double bunking, including increased levels of tension, aggression, and violence. It also identified increased safety and security concerns for staff and offenders, especially at maximum and medium security penitentiaries.”

The rise in violence is playing out already in the cellblocks, Godin said, and guards are often the targets.

“Our members are telling us directly: 'We've had some pretty severe assaults on staff members recently,' most recently a stabbing incident in Edmonton on an officer,” Godin said. “Every time we go into facilities and talk to our members we're hearing same things: the level of violence in here is getting pretty difficult.”

Rising tensions are coupled with a rise in guards' use of force, as well as increasing reliance on segregation cells—what inmates call being thrown in “the hole.” The Georgia Straight reports that 24.3 percent of federal prisoners spent time there; that's 850 people in segregation every day, and BC is launching an inquest into three recent deaths in solitary.

For the first time in the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers' history, and despite a self-imposed ban on political endorsements, the guards are telling us to vote against the Conservative Party of Canada in 2015. (Godin insists they haven't launched a formal campaign, but last month he tweeted ominously: “ABC - Anything But Conservative”).

In an email to VICE, a spokesman for public safety minister, Steven Blaney, dismissed the union's safety concerns as nothing more than “political grandstanding.”

“Our Conservative government is taking strong action to keep convicted criminals behind bars where they belong,” said the emailed statement from Blaney's press secretary Jason Tamming. “While big union bosses are engaged in partisan political grandstanding paid for by the dues of their hardworking members, our Conservative government is standing up for the interests of frontline correctional officers.”

Despite the government being slammed by its own auditor general over prison overcrowding, Tamming tossed aside Godin's arguments: “Studies show that double bunking does not have any link to violence,” Blaney's spokesman insisted. The government points to plans for 2,700 new cells across the country, despite thousands also being cut.

Tamming backed up his argument with a quote from the head of the Corrections Service of Canada, Don Head: “None of the incidents that we've seen… are directly linked to double-bunking at all. They're linked to the behaviours of individuals who are problematic.”

That's right: overcrowding doesn't cause violence; people cause violence. Godin doesn't mince his words.

“The minister is completely denying there's a correlation between a rise in inmate population and an increase in violence in our institutions,” he says. “That's just absolutely ludicrous. The minister's statement is completely ignorant.

“That's the problem with this government: they don't listen to evidence-based research, but make ideological decisions. It's illogical what they're doing.”

The overcrowding has made the guards' union some unlikely bedfellows. Prisoners, too, are complaining about overcrowding, and both sides say the tinderbox it's creating have pitted them against the feds, particularly with what Godin says is increasing gang activity and hostility between prison sub-populations.

The explosive situation in Canada's prisons saw federal inmates stage their own labour strike last fall, decrying a 30 per cent pay-cut despite skyrocketing canteen costs. (The prisoner job action saw guards forced to do the jobs normally done by inmates).

“If there's one thing that inmates and corrections officers agree on, it's that double-bunking is good for no one,” Godin says. “Unfortunately, Canadians in the end are going to suffer, because as you increase the inmate population without augmenting existing infrastructures to allow programs, health care and segregation space, you end up creating universities for criminals.

“That's unfortunate, because 80 percent of these guys are going to get out into the community. Certainly the tough-on-crime agenda sits well with the public, but unfortunately the public don't realize the consequences in 10 to 15 years. Imagine what these guys will be like when they get out.”
 

@DavidPBall

Last month, I found myself amongst hundreds of awkward teenagers in a large auditorium in Cincinnati. If all were to go as planned, not a single soul in attendance would end up having sex before marriage. The Silver Ring Thing, an organization dedicated to duping kids into buying purity rings, is like the Cirque du Soleil of Christian teen abstinence programs. Since 1996, their mission has been to have as many kids as possible publicly pledge to abstain from premarital sex at one of their big virginity promise events. According to SRT, over 460,000 teenagers have come to past shows; 175,000 have put on the ring, and 85,000 have given their lives to Christ.

Buses pulled into the parking lot of Cincinnati Christian University for the last leg of the 10-month long Silver Ring Thing’s One Night Stand Tour. At the registration area, energetic teens checked in, then immediately had their fingers measured by youth leaders for silver rings ($20 each) to be picked up after the event.

First on the agenda was a pre-event workshop to educate parents on how to keep their children’s virginity intact: How will your child navigate the next 5, 10 or 15 years of sexual pressure?

I turned up for the event wearing a T-shirt of a local sports team in an attempt to fit in: “Nothing strange about that guy. He likes the local sports!” Approaching a smiling youth leader, I said, “I’m here for the parent session,” flashing my silver purity ring I bought off the Internet for validation. Hopefully, I could sell it on eBay afterwards.

“I want you to strongly consider putting on a ring yourself so you can pray for your child’s abstinence every day,” said a middle-aged man to a room filled with dozens of concerned parents. “How cool is that?” "Creepy" might be a better word. “I’ve been wearing this ring for almost 15 years now. I pray for my daughters purity every day—all three of them!” 

I nodded, just a lone man on his own looking concerned about teen virginity; contemplating the visual imagery of a man praying for his daughter’s purity. No unrealistic high expectations here, just a bunch of adults—who probably have regular sex—relaying to children that vigorous praying and a ring will replace basic human biological needs. 

“I wish every parent in America would be doing what you are doing here tonight,” the Silver Ring Thing man said. He went on to explain that parents should basically act as their kids' own personal NSA: monitoring their social networks, watching what they wear ("don’t advertise what you’re not selling!"), and forbidding one-on-one dating until they’re 16. Even then, parents are told to “inform both dating parties what will and will not be acceptable!” (Awkward.) The grown man beamed the benefits of this magical, silver, Jesus chastity belt: “Imagine your kid walking out of the house to go on a date and you know that they have a ring on their finger and that they value it.”

Next, he explained what evolution-loving public schools instruct: "Respect yourself and your partner enough every time you have sex." Laughter erupted. “That’s a value they teach that I think most parents don’t agree with... Everyone deserves sexual fulfillment regardless of age, mental capacity, martial status, and sexual preference, as long as the sex is consensual…"

Parents frowned. (I frowned.) These stupid, godless, secular schools; next they’ll be saying humans and dinosaurs didn’t coexist. 

“Let me tell you about the ‘con’ in ‘condoms," he went on. "The tragic message the media gives our children: If you use a condom you will be protected. Nothing can be further than the truth…” Correct! A condom doesn’t protect the most important body part of all: The heart; an area most susceptible to raging gonorrhea.

Abstinence might work for some kids (and, it's not really a choice for the butt-ugly ones), but how irresponsibly dangerous is it to scare teens away from condoms in the age of HIV? These medical inaccuracies set kids up to fuck around without protection; SRT is Christ-centric; it’s in their agenda to lie to kids about safe sex practices: “Teenagers' access to condoms have never been greater yet we have a record number of infections…” A factor, perhaps, is teens being told that condoms aren’t effective, gain zero instruction on use, and end up having sex anyway.

Then it was on to the main event. “All right! Y’all still with me?” screamed a street-talk-utilizing youth pastor named Spence from the stage, backed by flashy lights, pumping beats, and glow-sticks. “Cool. You guys decided to come and kick it with us, and that’s awesome!”

I settled into my chair, next to a row of parents, for an evening of Christian abstinence entertainment.

“There’s still some people who’d say: ‘Dude, you’re crazy. It’s 2014. There’s nobody in my life who’d expect me to wait until you’re married to have sex. I know of one person in your future who does…”

Spence periodically turned his baseball cap backwards, then forwards, as he spoke. I almost expected him to use the N-word to try and sound more street.

A female volunteer was then brought up for the classic abstinence "Pieces of My Heart" skit. A guy held a wooden heart which was broken each time he broke his purity vow. The pieces were then handed to his next girlfriend.

"She breaks up with him and breaks a piece of his heart,” narrated an SRT team member.

More sex. More wooden-heart-breaking. At the end, a virgin bride appeared: “She waited for you, and what did you do?” The guy looked at his damaged heart and made a sad face; their heart pieces clearly didn’t match.

Some hip-hop poetry about abstinence followed: “For me, there’s no premarital lovin’. Because I’m stayin’ pure until the day I’m a husband.”

We also saw a “funny” parody of MasterCard’s Priceless commercial, where a guy walks away from a date with blue balls. ("One Silver Ring: $20. Always knowing how the night’s going to end: Priceless.")

So far, this had been light-hearted fodder; serious scared-straight-abstinence-shit was about to go down with the underlying message: If you hump before marriage, all this WILL happen to you!

After a skit in which two teens acted out what happens when you have sex before marriage—spoiler: it's bad—we were introduced to a girl whose life was ruined by pre-marital sex. “My name is Mackenzie,” said the girl on stage. “I’m going to share my story. At the end of the night you can decide what you want your story to be.” 

Mackenzie has had premarital sex. This has, in turn, resulted in becoming alcoholic, homeless, and having an abusive relationship. Why? “When I was 16, my boyfriend gave me an ultimatum: either you sleep with me, or choose one of your friends I lose my virginity to."

Mackenzie ended up losing her virginity to him in the school parking lot. Instead of romance (from the town drug dealer) she got nothin' but sex. “That was the only thing we would do together, it would happen again and again and again…” (Is it wrong if her bad girl story slightly turned me on?)     

The suburban Cincinnati kids hung on Mackenzie’s every word. “I found myself on my face in the bathroom of my home, in the ghetto, with no heat no running water holding a stolen pregnancy test pleading with the Lord it would be negative.” (You see what happens?!)

The ultimate shocker: “The entire time we were together, he’d been sleeping with my best friend! I gave pieces of my heart away that I can never get back. Ever!”

Mackenzie eventually went to a Silver Ring Thing show, and her past was forgiven. “I put on this ring and made the commitment to wait for my future husband. And in 27 days, I’ll be getting married.” (Applause.) "There’s nothing you have done that prevents you from starting over tonight.”

“This commitment we talk about here tonight, it doesn’t make sense to the rest of the world. We’ve come a long ways away from God’s plan for sex,” said Spence, brought back to close the show. He knows; like Mackenzie, he has experience. His premarital sex left him homeless, addicted to Oxycontin and cocaine (at the same time), and a suicide attempt. The hard sell: “God created sex to be between one man and one woman, in the context of marriage” (Gays, take a break). "It’s like a wedding gift God gives you. For it to be amazing, it has to be equally as powerful… You need to use it the way I’m telling you…”

And then it was time for the Silver Ring Thing pledge: “This ring is a visual reminder of your commitment,” said Spence. “I want you to keep it on and not take off, you understand, until your wedding night.”

He then instructed everyone to stand up, directing their attention to the large multimedia screens.

“Yo! This is the very last thing,” Spence said. “What you see on screen is a vow. It's a verbal commitment to God. I’m going to start us off and we’re all going to read it out loud. Here we go…”

The awkward teenagers chanted in unison: “In signing this covenant before God Almighty, I agree to wear a silver ring as a sign of my pledge to abstain from sexual behavior that is inconsistent with Biblical standards.”

I looked around, loudly mouthing the words; everyone was taking this ritual no-smiles serious. 

“On my wedding day, I will present my silver ring to my spouse, representing my faithful commitment to the marriage covenant.”

“CLAP YOUR HANDS!!” screamed Spence at the conclusion—a thunderous applause, the sound of an auditorium of virgins clapping. “People just met God. Heaven is freaking out. LET’S MAKE SOME NOISE!”

Teens flocked to the front, filling out pledge cards on the back of friends and answering questions like: “Did you pray asking God to forgive you and take control of you life?"

An abstinence pledge is like AA. A number (5575) was given out to text in moments of weakness. Spence requested that everyone get an "accountability partner," to check up on each other’s virginity: “Ladies, your accountability partner must be a lady. Fellas, your accountability partner must be a fella.”

Virginity came with a $20 price tag: “I want everyone to get a ring tonight. If you don’t have the money, I want you to borrow it,” Spence said, urging parents to donate money to become a ring sponsor to support SRT so they can follow up with their kids until the day they are married.

Then a big group virginity photo: “Let’s do something CRAAAAAAZY!”

Afterwards, merchandise tables hawked all sorts of Silver Ring shit: DVDs, T-shirts, jackets, caps, stickers rings. The ring-purchasing reception line spilled out into the foyer. Groups of smiling kids posed for photos with outstretched ring hands. A tiny 8-year-old girl sat in the doorway reading out loud from the Silver Ring Thing manual: “They say one day you will crack and have sex before marriage, you can’t keep up this goody two-shoes act forever…”

“What did you guys think?” said a neighborhood mom to a group of suburban teens. “Are you glad you came?”

“Yes…” they mumbled weakly in unison.

“Later this week, do you guys want to get together and discuss what we just learned?” she said. “I’ll make brownies.”

“I enjoy brownies,” piped up a confused shy kid, trying to look optimistic about his sexless future. “Brownies sound awesome.”