Gin and Tacos

Sometimes the stars align perfectly.

Actor/smirking chimp Zach Braff has brought renewed attention to the practice of wealthy celebrity assholes using Kickstarter to fund their for-profit endeavors by soliciting donations to film a sequel to the unbearable Garden State. Braff, who makes over $350,000 per episode (!!!) on his sitcom and netted over $36 million in box office revenue alone for Garden State, admits that he has traditional funding offers for the sequel. But why spend your own money when you can spend someone else's? Braff claims to want "artistic control" over casting and editing, hence avoiding studio funding. And then he offers speaking roles to anyone who donates $10,000.

Palmer, whose own Kickstarter crimes are extensive – claiming that she needed $100,000 to record an album, raising $1.1 million, and then soliciting unpaid volunteer musicians (to play shows people would pay to get into) because she claimed she could not afford to pay them. Wow, you'd think a successful recording artist with a multimillionaire author spouse could afford to pay a couple of touring musicians! But you just don't understand the music biz.

Now, Palmer is back in the headlines with her latest desperate grab for attention, a "poem" called "A Poem for Dzhokhar," about the Boston Marathon suspect. She shared this masterpiece on her website, closing with a donation button "for her time and effort" despite admitting that it took "about 9 minutes" to write.

Since Ms. Palmer is such a fan of crowdsourcing and brazen internet attention grabs, I'm sure she'll be the first to donate to my experimental documentary film project, The Slapping of Amanda Palmer.

What it is: A short film documenting the planning and execution of a journey across the country wherein I locate Amanda Palmer and slap her across the face with a glove. As a contingency plan only, I may slap her with an open hand if the glove fails.

Fundraising goal: $100,000

+$15,000 for first class travel and luxury hotel accommodations
+$35,000 for high end cameras (operated by volunteers)
+$10,000 for handmade artisanal calfskin slapping glove
+$20,000 for six months of slap training with certified masters in slapkido and Advanced Combat Slapping (ACS)
+$20,000 for my time and creative efforts

Reward levels (the Kickstarter page is still being verified)
$100: A signed photo of Ed plotting to slap Amanda Palmer.
$500: A non-slapping role in the film. Donor must pay for own travel costs.
$1000: Donor will receive the opportunity to pose for pictures behind the slapped poetess/artist/musician after I subject her to slapping.
$5000: A private dinner and one-on-one slapping session with the director/star/producer of this documentary. Donors are guaranteed at least one clean, unobstructed slap.
$10,000: Six weeks of intensive training in Slap-kido and Advanced Combat Slapping (ACS) with master practitioners at their desert retreat near Kingman, AZ. The music of Enya plays over loudspeakers at all times throughout the experience.

Thanks in advance for your support! I'll send you a link as soon as the Kickstarter is processed and approved. In the meantime, buy some artwork or a bumper sticker! No matter what, just keep sending money. People like Amanda and I are important and we deserve it.

OK.

I tried the polite version of this argument last week – reminding everyone that, all things considered, the terrorist attack in Boston was handled well and did minimal damage – but a few days in airports, standing among CNN-blaring monitors, broke me. Why are we still talking about this? Let me qualify that; why are we still talking about this 24 hours per day?

Is it a story? Certainly. But jesus tap-dancing christ, watch a half-hour of CNN and witness the raw banality, the extent of the overkill being inflicted upon us at this point. It's a strange combination of wild speculation, Grief Porn, and countless interviews with individuals of no importance who do little more than idly chat about things already reported in the preceding weeks. Oh yes, let's hear from another of the attacker's college classmates. Another Marathon spectator and was kinda-vaguely near the bombing. Another important guest who will make blanket statements of dubious utility about Chechnya. Just shut up. For fuck's sake, even Fox News has moved on to something else at this point.

Look, I and the rest of the world are terribly sorry for the families of the three dead victims and the many survivors whose lives were changed forever. But my god, things of this magnitude happen every day. Here and abroad. When three people die in a freeway accident, we don't devote three weeks to it. When three people are gunned down in Chicago's South Shore, it's a blip on the screen. We pay almost no attention, here in 2013, to people who come back from Afghanistan or Iraq with a missing leg or disfiguring wound. Three people died, and for that we are all sad. But it was nearly three weeks ago, and the "manhunt" portion of the show is long over. Let it go.

What is CNN even going for here? Are they drawing out the coverage to overcompensate (and do penance) for how horribly they botched the real-time reporting? Are they trying to flank Fox News on the right, baiting viewers with more Islamophobia and Keifer Sutherland-like tales of clandestine terror, Enhanced Interrogation, and Russian secret agents? This has turned into a D-list Tom Clancy novel, and it's approximately as entertaining.

At this point it is almost interesting to see how long they can hold out before they stop doing 24-hour Boston coverage. Almost.

Pennsylvania's Republican Governor Tom Corbett (who, incidentally, is about to get creamed in the next election) insisted that the food stamp program is riddled with fraud. So he instituted an "asset check" requiring state workers to weed out all the rich people pretending to be poor people on food stamps. They looked for the telltale signs of hidden wealth, such as:

It's the question Kathryn Hoffman hates to ask, especially of the elderly people who come into her office looking for help. Do you have a burial plot? How much is it worth?

It all makes sense, since elderly people who can afford to dispose of their own corpses can't be poor.

Don't worry though, the asset check is working. Of the 1.8 million Pennsylvanians who applied for food stamps last year, "about 4,000" were rejected for having too many assets to qualify. That's less than one quarter of one percent, if you're scoring at home. Sounds almost as scary as the 10 cases of in-person voter fraud out of the 146,000,000 registered voters since 2000.

In the cacophony of Boston-related news coverage last week, the death of USA Today founder Al Neuharth on April 21 barely registered. The way perceptions of Neuharth's paper changed since its founding in 1982 is a fascinating look at how American media have changed as a whole. To put it another way, the relative consistency of USA Today over the past three decades highlights how much the rest of our media have changed around it.

Despite being the most widely circulating newspaper in the country (although the Wall Street Journal also claims this honor, depending on how circulation is measured) USA Today has always been something of a joke. Journalists and readers both derided it when it debuted in the Eighties, and it has become the butt of countless jokes. It is not difficult to see why. Its visual style – particularly its parodied-to-death front page "Snapshots" graphics – and willingness to place advertisements everywhere (including the banner headline) made it difficult to take seriously. That it was (and is) commonly given away for free in hotels and institutional settings reinforces the perception of the paper as disposable, shallow, and generally Less Serious than Real Newspapers like the New York Times, WSJ, and other big city dailies.

As is so often the case in a nation that lets the free market determine which media outlets succeed or fail, USA Today established some measure of legitimacy with its popularity. It's hard to ignore a paper with circulation that spills into seven figures. But the hue and cry throughout USA Today's rise in the 1980s interpreted its sales figures as a harbinger of the apocalypse. "America is doomed if this is the kind of garbage we are going to read", said many a snobbish, albeit not entirely incorrect, commentator. It looks like a comic strip! It's more advertising than news! It's just so un-serious!

How funny it is to fast forward to 2013 and see USA Today in its current position as part of the "old guard" of the American media; a remnant of a bygone era. Its emphasis on graphics, ads, and short blurbs in place of feature stories all became common in the intervening years. Its graphics, in fact, now look quite tame – almost quaint – in comparison to what media outlets routinely plaster all over the internet, cable TV news, and newspapers today. In thirty years the USA Today went from the bottom of the journalistic barrel in the U.S. to an example of how things were done in better days – without fundamentally changing. Everything else got much worse.

Direct comparisons are difficult because newspapers as a medium have largely faded into the background of American media empires. Nonetheless, the weeping and rending of garments that accompanied USA Today's emergence shows how little we knew in the 1980s about how much worse the media could get. We hadn't foreseen the Glenn Becks, the 20-words-or-less Headline News network, the bombastic graphics and music, the entertainment-as-news ratings bait, and all the other rotten aspects of the system we have today. Hell, CNN has been doing 24-7 Boston Marathon bombing coverage for the past week; did it actually deliver more or better news than USA Today during that time? Probably not, unless Grief Porn counts as news now.

The pessimist's mantra – "Don't worry, it will get worse" – would have been sage advice to anyone who saw USA Today during its infancy and declared it the worst of the worst. When I watch TV news these days, I am disgusted by how bad it is. What really depresses me, though, is not how bad it is now, but that it is inevitably going to get worse.

First off, sorry for the erratic posting this week. End of semester. Lots of balls (*giggle*) in the air.

On Tuesday I wrote about how poorly students are taught about recent history – the past 50-75 years – in K-12 in the United States. It's particularly damaging that many students past and present have concluded their high school history courses without getting to World War II, which I argued is essential to understand if one hopes to make sense of the world since 1950. On that note, today seemed an appropriate time to share a couple of my favorite trivial facts about ol' WWII. Well, several iterations of one fact, I guess.

One of the funny things about the Nazis (And really, who can pick just one?) was how important the concept of racial purity and Aryan supremacy was to them when the war was going well and how quickly it became a secondary concern when the tide turned in 1943. For a group of people who considered almost every other ethnic group and nation in Europe to be composed solely of degenerates, the Nazis sure did have a lot of foreigners in their midst.

True fact: The last Nazi SS troops defending Berlin were…French. The SS "Charlemagne" Division was composed of French volunteers who had greeted the Nazis with enthusiasm when they took Paris. By May of 1945, German troops had surrendered in droves to the advancing American and (if they had no other option) Soviet armies. But not the Charlemagne Division. So it transpired that the last holdouts, the people defending the bunker as Hitler and Goebbels were writing out wills and killing themselves, were Frenchmen. We might assume that the French Nazis preferred death in battle to whatever awaited them if they returned to France.

Speaking of, I'm sure the Red Army had a forgive-and-forget attitude toward members of the Russian Liberation Army – Russian expatriates and POWs who volunteered to fight for the Third Reich. What do you suppose was the life expectancy of a Russian in a Nazi uniform who fell into Soviet hands?

And the Russians weren't the only Degenerate Slavs welcomed into the SS and Wermacht with open arms. There were dozens of Croatian units (no one remembers the Ustase, who were actually more fascist than the Nazis and largely responsible for the "ratlines" through which Nazi war criminals escaped to Argentina after the war) as well as the British Free Forces (which was mostly for propaganda purposes), Danish, Belgian, Serbian, Turkish, Dutch, Estonian, and Ukranian units fighting in the German Army and SS.

Oh, and a bunch of dark-skinned, swarthy Indians. Yes, the "Indische Legion" was composed of Indians who so hated the British colonialists that they fled to Berlin and took up with the Nazis. Most were followers of Subhas Chandra Bose and the Nazis thought enough of these decidedly non-Aryan troops that they were heavily represented in the Atlantic Wall defenses that opposed the Normandy landings on D-Day. So contrary to what Saving Private Ryan would have you believe, a lot of the "Germans" defending those beaches were Indians (and Russians).

Must have made for some awkward moment, though, to have so many foreigners in the ranks of such a thoroughly xenophobic population. I mean, not that the Indische Division was disliked by any of its German colleagues or anything…

The first batch of Sounds of Real America prints are shipping out today. If you're not one of the lucky recipients, what are you waiting for? An engraved goddamn invitation?

Those are going out tomorrow.

Sounds of Real America, Vol. 2

Single or full set?

Vol. 2 only $40.00 USD 3 pack $100.00 USD

Sounds of Real America, Vol. 3

Single or full set?

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Sounds of Real America, Vol. 4

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Don't underestimate the appeal of surreal, trenchant social commentary on your walls. If you buy these you will get laid and strange people will start appearing to do your laundry for you. You will regret nothing.

In the wake of any disaster in the United States, someone will take it upon himself to point out that what we consider tragedies are part of daily life in other places. Three people die in a terrorist attack in Boston (a fourth later during the manhunt) and the entire country loses its shit. Meanwhile, random bombings in places like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others kill a few dozen people on a daily basis.

What I infer from this is not that Americans shouldn't complain about terrorist attacks, despite the fact that they're remarkably uncommon here and, statistically speaking, we should probably worry more about every asshole in the country having access to a wide array of firearms. Instead, this underscores the fact that the United States is remarkably well prepared for a terrorist attack or (since Katrina) city-scale disaster.

Despite the appearance of chaos all week, Boston was as prepared as hell to handle what happened. The marathon planners diverted the race (as they had contingency plans developed for exactly such an event). The wounded were in hospitals within minutes, keeping the fatalities surprisingly low under the circumstances. Police secured the scene quickly and, working with federal agencies, identified the perpetrators within a day or two. Then, after the suspects ambush-killed a police officer in a patrol car, there was a moving shootout and standoff in which no one was killed despite hundreds of rounds being fired. That's because the local governments had the city on lockdown, and people obeyed the recommendations made by law enforcement. I'm sure criticism will develop as the events recede further into the past, but dang, Boston. All in all, excellent job. I'd challenge any city of nation to do better, even though I'm sure many could do equally well.

This is the point at which people start asking what we can do to prevent attacks like this in the future. The answer is clear: nothing. Sure, the errant, racist media coverage was a disaster, but that's not a matter of public policy. Short of banning public events or repealing the 4th Amendment, we're about as safe as we're ever going to be. All the metal detectors, closed-circuit cameras, armed cops, and knee-jerk proposals for new legislation won't make us one bit safer – we already have enough layers of security in place to catch the Idiot Terrorists, the only group that would be deterred by those kinds of things. When people are making backpack-sized bombs out of common household items and black powder, there really isn't much anyone can do to stop them. Yes, that's scary. That's why it's called "terrorism."

Events like this are a big part of our culture of fear, and we're encouraged to incorporate this fear into a kill-em-all worldview. But here's the thing: complete security is an illusion. If it could exist, it would horrify you to see what it looks like. What are you going to do? Refuse to leave the house? Stop attending events in cities? Stop traveling? Live in a bunker in rural Montana? We can't spend the rest of our lives scared of our shadows, either individually or as a society. There's no point in basing public policy on our inability to accept the fact that we can't be 100% safe at all times. I guess 99.99% safe will have to do. The sooner we accept that, the better off we will be.

In higher education we spend ample time discussing the idea of a core curriculum. Every university comes up with a buzzwordish name for it, but the concept is the same: to define the basic, bare minimum knowledge that we feel a student must have, in addition to whatever specialized knowledge they get in their field(s) of interest, to leave college with a useful understanding of the world and the skills required to function in it. Unsurprisingly these core curricula focus on writing/composition, basic math and science, and history. While it is fair to note that some students get college degrees without mastering some or all of these core skills, polling data shows that Americans are woefully ignorant about history and world affairs – to a troubling extent.

If I may briefly mount my pedagogical high horse, I consider two historical events – if you could only pick two – absolutely essential to understanding modern American society and government. The first is the American Civil War. The other is World War II. No, I don't believe students benefit from memorizing the names of battles and generals. I do think that if one is really to understand the fundamental political conflicts in the United States, an understanding of the causes and aftermath of the Civil War is indispensable. Likewise, modern global politics (and a good deal of American exceptionalism in policy both foreign and domestic) is rooted in WWII.

K-12 classes still overwhelmingly choose to teach history chronologically. This, in my experience and what I commonly hear from students, results in a seriously detrimental lack of emphasis on modern history. The academic year begins with ancient Greeks and Romans and ends sometime in May, usually having gotten no further than the Industrial Revolution or perhaps World War I. Accordingly, I get a ton of young people who, through no fault of their own, have been taught more about Plato and Tacitus than about the Cold War, decolonization, the Vietnam War, globalization, the collapse of the Iron Curtain, and 9/11 combined. Recently I found a class of 25 honors students – excellent students – totally ignorant of the basic aspects of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent propaganda surge leading to the Iraq War. And why should they know? They were 8 when it happened, and it has never been taught to them.

American students do get the Civil War. They might get it in bizarre or ideologically motivated ways (some southern schools, I discovered, continue to teach that slavery was not the root cause of the War) but they get it. They have a basic understanding of what happened. But World War II? The Holocaust? The Treaty of Versaiilles and the rise of Nazism? The complete devastation of the industrial powers of Europe and Asia that led to 20 years of unparalleled economic growth in the U.S.? Western nations' abandonment of Poland, exploitation of empires, and refusal to take Jewish refugees? They have nothing, really. What they know about WWII is what they get from movies and from Call of Duty video games. They often believe (thanks to films like Saving Private Ryan) that Americans fought the Nazis essentially alone. They rarely know that the Soviet Union was America's ally, and primarily responsible for the military defeat of the Third Reich. They rarely understand why or how the Holocaust happened, and the economic scapegoating of Jews and other "others" during the post-WWI economic collapse in Germany. They fail to recognize how the War accelerated decades of technological development (radar, nuclear power, aircraft, electronics, medicine, etc) into a few short years. They think – if they think anything at all about it – that America beat the Nazis and someone else (either the Chinese or Japanese) because we invented the nuclear bomb.

Everything – from international terrorism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to 20th Century American economic growth to the housing crisis to the Vietnam War to the woes of underdeveloped countries – about the modern world can be understood completely only by tracing the roots of these events at least as far back to WWII. And increasingly I – I can't speak for anyone else here, but I doubt I am alone – find that students have the least knowledge about these more recent events. Try saying "Arab Oil Embargo" or "Mikhail Gorbachev" to a room of college freshmen and see what kind of looks you get. Hell, try it with a group of adults; it probably won't be much better. We know very little of recent history and what we do know is often wrong. Is it any wonder that opinions about current events rarely make sense?

Perhaps the recent past is deemphasized because it is assumed, incorrectly, that students somehow know this information because "it didn't happen that long ago." Or maybe the design of grade- and high school curricula continues to talk about ancient times at the expense or exclusion of the 20th Century. In either case the consequences are the same: parochial attitudes about the world and a skewed understanding of any issue that takes place outside of the bubble around our immediate lives.

Early in the evening on July 23, 1984, five year-old Ed was in the driveway with one of the neighbor kids learning the basics of tactical warfare with GI Joe action figures. Our moms were sitting in cheap folding lawn chairs. The day had been unbelievably hot, and by about 6 PM the sun had gone down enough to offer some shade and bring the temperature down under 90. Shortly after 6:00, with no warning we were all shocked by the loudest explosion I've ever heard before or since. It knocked one of the neighbor kids off of his bike. Crappy 1980s car alarms went off. It was the kind of loud that you could feel; the ground actually wobbled a little.

We hadn't a clue what happened. Earthquake? (Midwesterners have no idea what those actually are. It seemed plausible to us.) Russian nuclear strike? Plane crash? After a few minutes we decided that the nuclear plant in Braidwood, IL – about 30 miles away – had blown up. We didn't exactly know a lot about nuclear power as a group, so we figured it would just blow up like a giant bomb.

Well, we were close. Turns out that the Union Oil Refinery in Romeoville, IL (about 20 miles away) had been leaking gas into one of its tanks for days. A small fire broke out. As they began trying to extinguish it, the whole structure detonated in an explosion heard as far away as Indiana. A thirty-four ton tank was thrown over 500 feet through the air. Everything in the immediate vicinity was flattened. Seventeen people, including ten members of the fire department, died in the explosion. OSHA fined Union Oil, although a promise to prosecute company officials for safety violations (of course) never materialized.

I had an immediate and unusually vivid flashback to all of this when I saw the video from the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas. An explosion of that magnitude is the kind of thing that you can't explain but, if you experience it (from a safe distance, fortunately) you never forget it.