Of course, there is a whole spectrum of necrophiliacs, ranging from those who are promiscuous, hopping from one casket to another, to those who like to stick with one corpse.
Here, from my “Great Moments in Necrophila” file, is a dispatch from Associated Press:
“The prosecution in the insanity trial of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer rested its case. Dahmer has confessed to killing and dismembering 17 young males since 1978. A jury must decide if he will be sent to prison or a mental institution. The final prosecution witness, Dr. Park Dietz, a psychiatrist, testified that Dahmer wore condoms when having sex with his dead victims, showing that he could control his urge to have intercourse with corpses.”
I smell a public service announcement there: “If Jeffrey Dahmer is sane enough to have safe sex, what about you?”
Whether necrophilia is a victimless crime may still be open to debate, but to arrest a sick person for using medical marijuana undoubtedly transforms a victim into a criminal. States’ rights—it’s not just for racists anymore.
During the Supreme Court discussion of this issue, Justice Stephen Breyer sure sounded like he’d been smoking some pretty powerful stuff himself: “You know, he grows heroin, cocaine, tomatoes that are going to have genomes in them that could, at some point, lead to tomato children that will eventually affect Boston. . . .”
Chief Justice William Renquist, wasn’t present. He’s undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer. One of the plaintiffs, Angel Raich—who uses marijuana every few hours for a brain tumor, scoliosis and chronic nausea—said she hoped Renquist’s chemotherapy “would soften his heart about the issue. I think he would find that cannabis would help him a lot.”
However, there was a definite agenda permeating the unhigh court. Justice Antonin Scalia sarcastically stated, “I understand there’s whole communes in California planning on using marijuana for medical purposes.” Justice David Souter said that an estimated 10 percent of people in America use illegal drugs, and those states with medical marijuana laws might not be able to stop recreational users from taking advantage. Souter added that making an exception for patients could open the door to widespread marijuana use and to fraudulent claims of illness by recreational pot smokers in California and the ten other states that allow medical marijuana. Justice Stephen Breyer said, “Everybody will say ‘Mine is medical.’”
If you simply substitute the word “Viagra” for “medical marijuana,” then the anti-recreational-use party line echoed by the Three Stooges is clearly revealed as a double standard.
Maybe it’s because you can’t grow Viagra—or Prozac, or Vioxx—in your window garden.
KERIK’S NANNY
“[S]keptics in city government circles were questioning the very existence of the nanny . . .”—New York Times
Somewhere in Mexico:
Q. So, Maria, how does it feel to have people doubt that you exist?
A. I regret it very much. I am alive and tricking.
Q. You mean alive and kicking.
A. No, tricking. When Mr. Bernie suddenly had me flown back home, I had no money, I had to turn tricks.
Q. Didn’t he pay you well?
A. Oh, he did, but I spend it all in Atlantic City on my days off.
Q. What were your duties?
A. I take care of his two girls—they are good kids, shouldn’t have to hear all this shit, you know, about their father. And I do some housekeeping. That’s when the trouble start.
Q. How do you mean?
A. Well, he has this apartment—we call it the ground zero place—and he wants me to clean that up too, and get fresh flowers, wine, weed, would you believe that, so he can fool around with not one but two mistresses—I even have to buy the condoms—and I’m friendly with his wife, but I have to pretend like I don’t know what’s going on.
Q. Did you actually meet those mistresses?
A. Just one, Miss Judith, and she tells me, “Maria, if you keep a journal of everything that goes on behind the scenes, my company will publish it, and you will make a lot of money.”
Q. And did you do that?
A. No, no, I have very much loyalty to Mr. Bernie. Gifts and everything. For my birthday he give me a taser gun. For Christmas his friend Mr. Rudy give me a Green Card.
Q. Did you know about Kerik’s involvement with organized crime people?
A. Are you kidding? In our living room, it was just like watching The Sopranos without a TV set.
Q. Was there a highlight for you—something that stands out in your memory—during the time you worked in the Kerik household?
A. Yes, it was during the campaign for president. Mr. Bernie was going to be interviewed for the New York Daily News and he was really nervous. I mean there was sweat dripping down his face from his bald head and staying in his mustache. He says, “Maria, I gotta come up with a good sound bite.” I say, “What’s a sound bite?” He says, “That’s the thing I wanna say that will be quoted all over the media.” I say, “Why don’t you make a warning. Like if that guy Kerry wins, then there will be another attack by the terrorists.”
Q. So you wanted the Democrats to lose?
A. They don’t need me to lose. They are, you know, chickenshit. Mr. Bernie tells that sound bite to the Daily News, and then the Democrats still praise him for Homeland Security.
Q. Do you miss living in America?
A. Yes. I really wanted to see Spanglish.
T-SHIRT TROUBLES
As a kid, my favorite radio program was ventriloquist Edgar Bergen with his dummies, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd. Charlie was the pretentious city slicker, wearing a top hat and monocle. Mortimer was his naive, freckle-faced, buck-toothed country cousin. I realized that there was something bizarre about featuring a ventriloquist on radio, but it didn’t matter—they all sounded like different personalities.
One time Bergen said, “Charlie, what are you doing?” He replied, “Oh, nothing.” Then Mortimer interjected in his goofy, innocent manner, “Well, then how d’ya know when yer finished?” A Zen koan from the mouth of a wooden dummy.
I ate with a Charliie McCarthy teaspoon, and I wore a Charlie McCarthy T-shirt, which I got in trouble for wearing to a public school assembly. You can understand why I’m particularly sensitive to people getting in trouble for wearing a T-shirt, and this has been a banner year for that offense.
The private Cape Cod Academy in Osterville, Massachusetts updated their student handbook, and the new guidelines forbid all T-shirts with writing on them. “This very strict new dress code is, quite honestly, ridiculous,” complained the student body vice president. “You can’t really represent yourself the way you’d like.”
During the national Day of Silence, an annual event sponsored by gay rights groups, a high school junior in San Diego was not allowed to wear a T-shirt that read “Homosexuality Is Shameful” and “Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned.”
“The school district wants [him] to be politically correct,” his attorney said. “We want the school district to be constitutionally correct.”
When the father of Nick Berg, who was beheaded in Iraq by Al Qaeda-connected militants, was a guest on Good Morning America, he declined to remove his T-shirt that read “Bring the Troops Home Now,” so ABC wouldn’t show it on the air.
Michelle Goldberg reported in Salon that author Irene Dische was covering a George Bush speech for the German paper Die Zeit, sitting with artist Art Spiegelman, when police removed them both from the press stands and questioned them about their T-shirts. Spiegelman’s said “Pray For a Secular Society”; Dische’s featured the word “Bush” and Chinese characters. She convinced police it said, “I love Bush.” It actually meant “Shit on Bush and flush him away.”
In Franklin County, Washington on Election day, a man reported being turned away from a polling place because he was wearing a T-shirt that said “Vote or Die.”
A federal judge ruled in favor of the Williamstown, Vermont public school officials who forced a st
udent to cover up a T-shirt with a variety of images, including cocaine and a martini glass. It referred to George Bush as a lying drunk driver who abused cocaine and marijuana, and called him the “chicken-hawk-in-chief ” who was engaged in a “world domination tour.”
No doubt I would get in trouble if I were to wear a T-shirt with a picture of Charlie McCarthy labeled “George W. Bush” at his inauguration. That’s the problem with suppressing freedom of expression. In the immortal words of Mortimer Snerd, “How d’ya know when yer finished?”
BITE YOUR TONGUE
Of all the movies I’ve ever seen, Midnight Express—which featured images of appalling conditions and brutality in a Turkish prison—was one of the most powerful, and landed Oliver Stone an Academy Award for best screenplay. Now he’s gone and apologized for offending Turkey. “It’s true I overdramatized the script,” Stone told reporters in Istanbul. “But the reality of Turkish prisons at the time was also referred to . . . by various human rights associations.” Stone had been afraid of visiting Turkey since the release of the film in 1978, he said, because of the effect it had on the country. “For years, I heard that Turkish people were angry with me, and I didn’t feel safe there. The culture ministry gave me a guarantee that I would be safe, so I feel comfortable now.”
Midnight Express was adapted from the book by Billy Hayes, an American who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of Turkey, and eventually escaped. Stone and Hayes also did a week’s worth of interviews in Stone’s hotel room after he’d read the galleys.
“That was fun,” Hayes recalls, “like being in a washing machine on tilt. And while some people find him a bit much, I love Oliver’s energy.”
I had contacted him to get his reaction to Stone’s statement.
“How would you say that the script was overdramatized?”
“My biggest problem with the screenplay and the film was that you didn’t see a single good Turk, so the overall impression was that all Turks are like those depicted in the film. And, of course, this is not true. It doesn’t take away from the fact that the prison was brutal and the legal system hypocritical, but that can be said of almost any country, particularly, and unfortunately, ours. Prison guards are not necessarily the cream of any society.”
“Did your biting the tongue off a fellow prisoner actually occur?”
“The tongue-biting was the filmmaker’s way of having the informer get his dramatically just reward. Actually, I tried to bash that sumbitch’s head in but the guards stopped me. I don’t have a problem with the intent of that scene, but it’s so strange now to remember that kind of up close and personal violence.”
“What would say was most offensive to the Turks?”
“The most offensive scene for the Turks was Billy’s speech in the courtroom calling them all a ‘nation of pigs,’ etc. In fact, when I spoke to the court, knowing I was having my sentence changed to life, I was trying to hold on to my shredding sanity and wanted to affect these people who were taking my life away but really knew nothing about me as a person. I said something like, ‘I’ve been in your jail four years now and if you sentence me to more prison I can’t agree with you, all I can do is forgive you. . . .’ It affected them. The judge told me his hands were tied. They all looked upset. Then sentenced me to life, which the kindly judge reduced to 30 years. Thanks. I think. Anyway, Oliver wanted to know how I could forgive people who had just taken my life away. I told him about trying to maintain my balance. He asked how I felt the next morning after sentencing. I told him I was furious. So he wrote that courtroom speech.”
“Was there anything that you thought should have been included in the film that was omitted?”
“What was missing from the film was what I found in jail. A sense of self and the trite but true notion of appreciating each moment. I discovered my reason for being, which is simply to love. It took a lot of banging my hard head against the wall, literally and figuratively, to realize this truth. They didn’t deal with it in the film but that made the entire experience worth it.”
“Tell me about Midnight Return.”
“It’s a follow-up book about the really weird part of my prison experience—returning to the U.S. and becoming a little mini-celebrity, with all that entails. Hope to get it published one of these days.”
“Can you give me an example of mini-celebrity weirdness?”
“February 20th and 24th in 1980 I was mentioned in the Steve Canyon comic strip. From the bizarre to the surreal. How weird is that?”
“Oh, yeah? Well, I’ve been mentioned in Pogo and Zippy the Pinhead. You get used to it. Anyway, now I can start waiting for Oliver Stone to apologize to Greece for Alexander.”
Michael Dare once interviewed Billy Hayes and a few other protagonists in Stone’s biopics about what it’s like to have your life rewritten by Oliver Stone. Their stories all involved some sort of wish fulfillment. At one point, Stone said to each one, “Is there anything you wish you had done but didn’t?” Hayes said, “I wish I’d ripped that guard’s tongue out.” Ron Kovic (Born on the 4th of July) said, “I wish I’d gone and talked to the parents of the American soldier I accidentally killed.” Richard Boyle (Salvador) said, “I wish I’d told off the American ambassador to Salvador when I ran into him at a party.” Ray Manzarek (The Doors) said, “Fuck Oliver Stone.” In each case, Stone replied, “You got it,” and he put the subject’s fantasy in the movie, except for that scene with Manzarek fucking Stone, which didn’t make the cut.
FUZZY MATH
Comic strips like Doonesbury, Boondocks and La Cucaracha are expected to be controversial, so it was surprising when Get Fuzzy—an ordinarily non-controversial comic strip which features talking animals—dealt with a human character losing a leg in Iraq, a sequence which, coincidentally, ran simultaneously with a Doonesbury sequence on that same theme.
Recently, Get Fuzzy presented a series of “Rejected Get Fuzzy Storylines.” One was, “Get Fuzzy attempts to outdo the South Park episode where they said ‘fuck’ 162 times by saying ‘fuck’ 162 [sic] times.” To illustrate this rejected storyline, a cat is saying ‘Fuck you’ over and over. Although each use of the word ‘fuck’ had been blacked out by artist Darby Conley, the Los Angeles Times quietly substituted a year-old Get Fuzzy.
In another non-controversial strip, Zits, Jeremy, a lazy, would-be rebellious teenager, asks a friend to hold his backpack while he changes into a T-shirt that says “Question Authority.” Jeremy explains, “I’m not allowed to wear this at home.” His friend responds, “Weak convictions are better than none, I guess.”
That same theme popped up in a sometimes controversial strip, Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller, venting via his alter-ego, Joe. Little Danae asks him, “Why are you so grumpy lately, Daddy?” Looking up from his newspaper—which has a front-page headline, “Nothing to See Here, Folks, Move Along”—he replies, “I’m just peeved about our wimpy news media. They’re nothing but corporate lap dogs now.” “Oh, I see,” says Danae, “questioning authority isn’t just a good thing, it’s patriotic!” Her father, now reading another page—headlined “Nothin’ Here Either”—replies, “Absolu . . . I mean, it depends on the authority.” Danae says, “Too late, Daddy . . . if that’s your real name.”
In another strip, Miller reveals his disgust with how little attention American media were paying to reports of voting irregularities. A waitress with a New England accent is serving coffee to a customer at Offshore Flo’s Diner. She asks, “What’r ya readin’ theah, Joe?” He replies, “The Ukrainian Times.” Waitress: “Uh . . . how come?” Now we can see that the headline reads, “Election Fraud!” Joe: “Oh, I’m just curious what an independent press questioning its government looks like.” Waitress: “Why don’t we have one of those?” Joe: “I think it has something to do with values.”
Miller told Editor & Publisher that he’s upset by “the laziness and lack of guts by our entire ‘news’ media—both print and electronic. They should all be em
barrassed by what happened in the Ukraine. But that would take integrity, wouldn’t it? At least they’re providing me with material, so maybe I shouldn’t complain.”
He added that he would’ve liked to have seen American media “pursue the election results and the many questions surrounding its legitimacy with the same fervor and interest they showed in the all-important story of steroid use by baseball players. But I guess that in itself shows what’s really important to corporate wonks posing as editors today.”
Ironically, Non Sequitur is syndicated to more than 700 newspapers, none of which rejected his Ukranian-election strip.
EXPLOITING FEAR
Six weeks after 9/11, the U.S.A. Patriot Act became law. It had been secretly drafted by the Department of Justice. There was virtually no debate in Congress. Hardly any legislators had more than a few hours to read 342 pages. Now, that document and its ilk are pierced and probed by Walter Brasch in America’s Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government’s Violation of Constitutional and Civil Rights.
“Although I expected the Bush administration to be scared of dissent,” Brasch told me, “I don’t believe that in my 35 years covering government and politics I have seen a presidential administration so fearful of the people that it would deliberately and arrogantly go to the lengths it has to reduce dissenting views—and even potential dissenting views of any kind at any level. I kept running into incident after incident of the president’s ‘people’ restricting the First Amendment rights of the people. Had I focused only upon this, there would have been nothing else in the book.”
Many instances of government repression have occurred too late to be included. For example, at the University of Wisconsin, the student health center informed students that under the Patriot Act, the government may obtain their medical records, and patients will never know.
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