Mickey Spillane interview – “The best inspiration is an empty bank account.”

washingtonpost.com
Man of Mysteries
It’d Been Years Since Spillane Pulled a Job. Could We Find Him? Yeah. It Was Easy.
By John Meroney
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 22, 2001
MURRELLS INLET, S.C.– For a man who has the reputation as the toughest tough guy in all of mystery fiction, Mickey Spillane really isn’t all that hard-boiled after all.
These days, at age 83, the writer of the classic 1947 detective novel “I, the Jury,” containing the famous line by gun-wielding private eye Mike Hammer, “I’m the jury now, and the judge, and . . . I sentence you to death,” is more obsessed with justice than vengeance.
Now living in this South Carolina fishing village, Spillane and his wife have spent the past 10 years questioning the verdict of a high-profile homicide case — a brutal murder in which a high school student was convicted of stabbing his girlfriend to death. Most observers saw it as open-and-shut. But the Spillanes believed an innocent man might have gone to jail. Spillane’s reluctance to render judgments in real-life crimes even extends to O.J. Simpson. While the conventional wisdom may be that the ex-football star is a guilty man, Spillane has always given him the benefit of the doubt, and only now will reluctantly admit that Simpson might be a murderer.
But next month, the other side of Spillane will again emerge. The New American Library is publishing two volumes of the best of his novels, from the late 1940s and early ’50s. In books like “I, the Jury,” “One Lonely Night” and “Kiss Me, Deadly” (all included in the collections, and all starring Mike Hammer), Spillane secured a permanent place for himself in the pantheon of such mystery greats as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald.
A fall rollout is being planned for “A Century of Noir” (also from NAL), a volume containing some of Spillane’s rare magazine stories from the same era, which he edited with mystery writer Max Allan Collins. An independent documentary of Spillane’s life was recently completed, and Jay Bernstein, producer of a Mike Hammer TV series that ran on CBS during the ’80s, is gearing up to sell prime time on another incarnation of the private detective, with a twist worthy of some of Spillane’s best shockers.
“I never thought anything big would come of all my writing,” says Spillane. “I just always wrote the kind of stuff I like to read.”
Others liked it, too, although it had a slow start. Spillane’s first book, “I, the Jury,” published in hardcover by Dutton, is the story that introduced Hammer to late-’40s America. In it, the detective is avenging the murder of an old Army pal, and the novel ends with three words that rank as one of the most famous — and unforgettable — conclusions in all of mystery fiction. But the book wasn’t a success until it appeared a year later in paperback. By 1951, Spillane had written the three best-selling mysteries of all time. According to today’s industry estimates, his 26 books have sold more than 200 million copies. Long before Jacqueline Susann, Mario Puzo, Stephen King and John Grisham, long before the blockbuster bestseller, there was Mickey Spillane, toiling away in I-like-Ike America.
“While Hammett and Chandler were successful and well known, they never approached the kind of success in terms of readership and recognition that Mickey has had,” says Otto Penzler, founder of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York.
But selling books wasn’t the only area where Spillane cornered the market. He is the only mystery writer to portray his sleuth on film: 1963’s “The Girl Hunters” has Spillane outfitted in a trench coat and porkpie hat, playing opposite Shirley Eaton in a screenplay based on his book. During the ’70s, Spillane went a step further and appeared in TV commercials for Miller Lite, parodying his reputation and helping make a name for the new beer. One spot, shot film noir style, showed Spillane in his office on a rainy night, pounding out his next bestseller on a manual typewriter. The story heard in his voice-over: “Chapter 9. I kicked in the door and shouted ‘Freeze!’ to the lone figure in the room. Even in the dark I could see she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever met. Then I saw a Lite Beer from Miller. ‘It’s got a third less calories than a regular beer, and it’s less filling,’ she whispered. ‘But the best thing is it tastes so great.’ Suddenly, all the pieces fell into place and I knew I’d come to the end of a long, long road. She poured. We drank. To be continued.”
In the books, Mike Hammer was no Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. And he was certainly no sophisticated Nick Charles. Hammer was always a man on a mission, righting a wrong, settling a score. He was Dirty Harry long before Clint Eastwood was even in “Rawhide.” As Hammer explains to the head of police homicide in “I, the Jury”: “You’re a cop, Pat. You’re tied down by rules and regulations. There’s someone over you. I’m alone. . . . No one can kick me out of my job. Maybe there’s nobody to put up a huge fuss if I get gunned down, but then I still have a private cop’s license with the privilege to pack a rod, and they’re afraid of me. Some day, before long, I’m going to have a rod in my mitt and the killer in front of me. I’m going to watch the killer’s face. I’m going to plunk one right in his gut, and when he’s dying on the floor I may kick his teeth out.”
Spillane never really wrote sex scenes; he wrote about sexuality in a way that was unapologetically sensual and often seemed more provocative than the act itself. In “I, the Jury,” it’s all in the line of duty: “She was making no attempt to keep the negligee on. . . . I wondered how she got her tan. There were no strap marks anywhere. She uncrossed her legs deliberately and squirmed like an overgrown cat, letting the light play with the ripply muscles in her naked thighs. . . . I was only human. I bent over her, taking her mouth on mine. . . . She quivered under my hands wherever I touched her. . . . My hand fastened on the hem of her negligee and with one motion flipped it open, leaving her body lean and bare. She let my eyes search every inch of her brown figure. I grabbed my hat and jammed it on my head. ‘It must be your sister who has the birthmark,’ I told her as I rose. ‘See you later.’ “
The Absolutist
As popular as Spillane became with readers, it’s probably safe to say that in the decade or so after World War II, no writer of fiction incurred the wrath of the intellectual elite the way he did. Life put it pretty accurately in 1952 when it said that “no major book reviewer, anywhere, ever said a kind word about Mickey Spillane.” Some critics claimed to be horrified and revolted by his work. They labeled him gruesome and shocking. From afar, critics psychoanalyzed Spillane and asserted that the way he wrote about women revealed that he hated them. One review of “I, the Jury” said the book may soon be “required reading in a Gestapo training school.”
Just as famous, though, were Spillane’s rebukes: “I pay no attention to those jerks who think they’re critics,” he would say. “I don’t give a hoot about reading reviews. What I want to read are the royalty checks.” Today Spillane still laughs about it, and tells the story of the dinner party where “some New York literary guy” walked up to him and said, “I think it’s disgraceful that of the 10 best-selling books of all time, seven were written by you,” to which Spillane replied, “You’re lucky I’ve only written seven books.”
But it wasn’t just prudery about sexuality and violence that motivated Spillane’s critics: The political ideology and philosophical content of his novels also seemed to cut against the grain of the prevailing ethos. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s excesses were giving anti-communism a bad name. Spillane opted to forge ahead and make defiant anti-communism a staple of several of his novels.
There is little moral ambiguity in Spillane’s work. Mostly, Mike Hammer sees the world in black and white. Often he looks at his cases in biblical terms, and once articulated his philosophy this way: “There’s no shame or sin in killing a killer. David did it when he knocked off Goliath. Saul did it when he slew his tens of thousands. There’s no shame to killing an evil thing.”
In the 1951 novel “One Lonely Night” (which Spillane says is one of his favorites) Hammer’s investigation leads him to the Communist Party, which he believes may be behind a murder, as well as the kidnapping of his secretary, Velda. Along the way, Hammer changes from an apolitical man who jokingly admits that “I haven’t voted since they dissolved the Whig party” to one who sees to the harsh realities of the Cold War, and equates the Soviet regime and Communist Party to Nazi Germany in white-hot if not purple prose:
“I could laugh now and think rings around them all because I was smarter than the best they could offer. Torture, Death, and Lies were their brothers, but I had dealt with those triplets many times myself. They weren’t strangers to me.”
Mickey and Ayn
Spillane’s effectiveness at tailoring that political message for the masses made him the envy of intellectual conservatives and won him affection from another best-selling novelist who also endured critical skewering: Ayn Rand.
Spillane smiles when the writer of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” is mentioned. “We were good friends,” he says. Rand was an atheist and Spillane was devoutly religious, but they found common cause in their opposition to communism, a theme they agreed should be championed in literature. Rand also liked Spillane because her concept of an ideal man was similar to the Mike Hammer character: tough, strong-willed, independent. She admired the way Spillane dramatized themes of moral absolutism in his detective plots. In 1961, partly as a publicity stunt, their publisher helped arrange a dinner meeting between them in New York. Spillane still recalls the affair: “It lasted four hours,” he says. Later, Rand wrote to Spillane privately, explaining what happened when she got home: “I wish I could have brought you in with me that night, after our meeting, because you might have been pleasantly shocked, as I was: When I entered my apartment, six young people (my students and close friends) were there, with my husband, waiting for me — and had been waiting for several hours — to hear what Mickey Spillane is like in person. The news that I was going to meet you had spread through our own grapevine — and there they were.
“All of them are enthusiastic admirers of yours — all of them (including me) had been disappointed too often, when meeting famous people — and so it was an enormous pleasure for all of us that I could give them a report on you (on any publicly reportable issues) which, for once, confirmed and raised, rather than lowered, our enthusiasm. You are the only modern writer with whom I do share the loyalty of my best readers — and I am proud of this.”
Rand appreciated Spillane’s precision as a writer, and in an essay on literature (which appears in her book “The Romantic Manifesto”) quotes from Spillane’s description of New York at night as an example of his skill — “The rain was misty enough to be almost foglike, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy yellow lights off in the distance” — and then compares it to a passage by Thomas Wolfe — “The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, a city of night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match.”
To Rand, “there is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane’s description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness.” Wolfe, she argued, used only estimates, “and in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities.”
Rand’s letters to Spillane (reprinted in the book “Letters of Ayn Rand”) appear to indicate she was taken with more than just his writing. On one occasion, she mailed him a gift and wrote, “I am waiting eagerly to see you again. As you say, ‘Time ran out on us the other evening.’ But is there any reason why time should run us, rather than the other way around? Love, Ayn.” Later, when Rand missed seeing Spillane after “The Girl Hunters” was published, she wrote to him: “Why have you vanished? I was hoping to hear from you when you were in New York, but I understand that you have been rushing in and out of the city and that one can never catch you. If you want me to be a ‘Spillane Hunter’ — take this as part of the pursuit.”
When asked whether Ayn Rand had a crush on him, Spillane just smiles. “I really liked her,” he says, noting that much of their camaraderie came from an “us against them” view of the critics. “They hate us, don’t they?” Spillane would say to her.
The Case Next Door
In recent years, it is real-life crime that has captured Spillane’s attention. He is an avid viewer of Court TV, and it was the cable network that caused Spillane and his wife, Jane, to become involved in a nearby 1991 murder case. Johnnie Kenneth Register was convicted of a killing that sounds like one that would have spurred Mike Hammer to action. Register, then an 18-year-old high school student, was found guilty of raping his girlfriend, Crystal Faye Todd, stabbing her at least 30 times, slashing her throat and finally disemboweling her.
The Spillanes met with Register and interviewed him, but despite DNA tests that prosecutors said proved his guilt, they came to the conclusion that the young man was incapable of committing such a heinous act. The Spillanes believed Register was the victim of a corrupt legal system, and argued that the prosecutor for Horry and Georgetown counties, Ralph Wilson, had tampered with evidence to frame him. Jane Spillane even mounted her own political candidacy to challenge the prosecutor in 1998, and although she didn’t win, many feel that it was her entry in what was a two-way race that caused the incumbent prosecutor to ultimately lose his bid for reelection. Nevertheless, both the South Carolina and U.S. supreme courts have upheld Register’s 1993 conviction. While the Spillanes still maintain the case was botched from the beginning, they now admit the weight of evidence against Register is enormous, but argue there is no way Register was the only one involved in Todd’s death.
Mostly, though, Mickey Spillane’s days are free of the kind of controversy that his novels generated. The man who penned sexually provocative scenes is actually a family man, married to the same woman for almost 20 years. This afternoon he has returned from taking his grandchildren to the amusement park rides in nearby Myrtle Beach. He is also deeply religious, committed to the Jehovah’s Witness faith, and attends meetings at Kingdom Hall five times a week.
Those most familiar with Spillane’s work say that his novels softened after his 1951 conversion, a notion that Spillane dismisses. But in 1952 he told Life: “There are more books on the way, but they won’t contain the things that bolster the excuses for the moral breakdown of this present generation. I’ve changed my work and course of action to be in harmony with Jehovah’s Kingdom.”
Missing from the Spillanes’ rambling house are the kinds of mementos that come with a 60-year writing career — Hurricane Hugo destroyed many of them when it hit in 1989, destroying their previous residence. He completely rebuilt the house on the same site where he’s lived since moving here from Newburgh, N.Y., in 1953. One thing that was salvaged, and which visitors can’t miss seeing, is his vintage Jaguar XK-140, which John Wayne surprised him with after Spillane wrote part of the Wayne-produced film “Ring of Fear” in the 1950s. “He didn’t know what to give me because I told him not to pay me,” says Spillane. “But he knew I liked cars. I used to look around when I was out in Hollywood — ‘Boy, I’d love to have one of those’ — but knew I’d probably never buy any. One morning I opened the front door and there was this car with a big red ribbon wrapped around it and a card that said, ‘Thanks, Duke.’ “
The Final Word
In the documentary “Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane,” which Max Allan Collins produced and is readying for film festivals and a possible TV premiere, Spillane tells about a $1,000 wager he made with an editor, betting him that an entire novel could be built on a one-word climax occurring on the final page. Spillane calls that the perfect book. “My idea was that if you took the last word away you wouldn’t know what the book was about. When I turned in “Vengeance Is Mine!,” I turned it in with the last word missing,” says Spillane. “The editor said, ‘What was the word? What was the word?’ I said, ‘Give me a thousand bucks,’ and I gave him the word.” As readers know, it made the book.
The phone rings. It’s Hollywood producer Jay Bernstein on the line, updating Spillane on his concept for a new Mike Hammer series that he wants to sell to an industry enamored of “Sex and the City.”
Bernstein has a plan to remake Mike Hammer into something even Mickey Spillane could never have dreamed up.
A woman.

Haiku

“So how is Social

Security different from

Madoff’s ponzi scheme?”

Ever wonder what would happen if a proton beam warping through a super collider slammed into your brain? – the story of the Soviet science towns.

The Future Ruins of the Nuclear Age 
By Masha Gessen 

In pursuit of superpower status during the Cold War, the Soviet Union built 60 science boomtowns. Then in 1990, the Soviet Union collapsed, and funding for the cities ended. Masha Gessen reports from Russia on this grand experiment in failure.

 

 

When two protons collide in an accelerator, they are transformed into muons and other particles. One Russian physicist offers this analogy: it’s like two Soviet Fiats colliding to produce a bus and a Mercedes Benz 600. That’s the thing about high-energy physics: the total is different than the sum of its parts.

So it was in 1978 that when the proton beam entered Anatoli Bugorski’s skull it measured about 200,000 rads, and when it exited, having collided with the inside of his head, it weighed in at about 300,000 rads. Bugorski, a 36-year-old researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, was checking a piece of accelerator equipment that had malfunctioned – as had, apparently, the several safety mechanisms. Leaning over the piece of equipment, Bugorski stuck his head in the space through which the beam passes on its way from one part of the accelerator tube to the next and saw a flash brighter than a thousand suns. He felt no pain.

From what we know about radiation, about 500 to 600 rads is enough to kill a person (though we don’t know of anyone else who has been exposed to radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of sound). The left side of his face swollen beyond recognition, Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow so that doctors could observe his death over the following two to three weeks.

Over the next few days, skin on the back of his head and on his face just next to his left nostril peeled away to reveal the path the beam had burned through the skin, the skull, and the brain tissue. The inside of his head continued to burn away: all the nerves on the left were gone in two years, paralyzing that side of his face. Still, not only did Bugorski not die, but he remained a normally functioning human being, capable even of continuing in science. For the first dozen years, the only real evidence that something had gone neurologically awry were occasional petit mal seizures; over the last few years Bugorski has also had six grand mals. The dividing line of his life goes down the middle of his face: the right side has aged, while the left froze 19 years ago. When he concentrates, he wrinkles only half his forehead.

Because virtually everything connected with nuclear energy was kept secret in the Soviet Union, for more than a decade Bugorski observed an unspoken ban on talking about his accident. About twice a year he went to the Moscow radiation clinic to be examined and to commune with other members of the brotherhood of nuclear-accident victims. “Like former inmates, we are always aware of one another,” he says. “There aren’t that many of us, and we know one another’s life stories. Generally, these are sad tales.”

Bugorski thinks of himself as a fortunate exception: a man in reasonable health, able to continue living a full life. For years, he was a poster boy for Soviet and Russian radiation medicine, which was entirely content to take the credit for his good fortune. Last year, though, when Bugorski finally decided to apply for disabled status, which would allow him to receive his epilepsy medication free of charge, the doctors chilled on him.

For his part, now that his fate is no longer secret, he would like to make himself available to Western researchers, but he doesn’t have the money to leave the science town of Protvino and go west. He thinks he would make a brilliant object of study for someone: “This is, in effect, an unintended test of proton warfare,” he claims. More to the point, he believes, “I am being tested. The human capacity for survival is being tested.”

 

This is the thing about science towns. They should all be dead by now, but they limp along, half frozen and half hopeful. The unglamorous miracle of their survival might indeed make a brilliant object of study. It is, in effect, an unintended experiment in grand failure, an eerie test of the ability of people to live and work after death. That they manage to do it is, perhaps, in part good fortune and in part the nature of the beast: the end result is always different than the sum of history, people, and money.

In the postwar drive to harness the atom, the Soviet government built little towns charged with various scientific tasks. About 60 of these towns were created between the late 1940s and early 1980s. Some of them, towns where new weapons were designed, were not even on the map. Other towns worked on what the Soviets called “the peaceful atom” and were considered “open,” which meant that access to them was highly restricted for foreigners and that the residents themselves were closely monitored by the secret police.

 

In exchange for their isolation – these towns were generally situated at least a couple of hours outside major cities – the researchers enjoyed a standard of living significantly higher than elsewhere in the Soviet Union. The towns, usually built in beautiful wooded areas, boasted better town planning – well, any town planning was better than the haphazard warehousing of the citizenry that went on elsewhere – higher salaries, and, paradoxically, a sort of cloistered freedom. The scientists in some of the open towns were allowed to organize performances of singers or exhibits of artists considered too ideologically unreliable for a wider audience. For the intelligentsia living outside, science towns held the allure of romantic impossibility. When I was 8, my translator grandmother married a nuclear physicist living in Dubna, one of the science towns – and it seemed my family’s entire Moscow social circle was struck by the glamour of it.

The exchange of talent for the good life made for an extraordinarily productive relationship between the state and the scientists. The science towns helped ensure the Soviet Union’s standing as a military and intellectual superpower, and the state paid them back by ensuring their continued comfort.

The top graduates of the country’s famous math and science high schools and high- pressure technical colleges were assigned to the science towns, where they received good pay and, usually, an apartment – while their peers had to make do with dorm rooms or communal flats. They were the chosen people.

In 1990 science funding suddenly dropped about 90 percent. With the country on the brink of collapse, international prestige finally had to take a back seat to economic emergencies. Construction in the science towns froze and the trickle of young science graduates dried up. By 1993, many institutes could not afford to keep their electricity turned on, and the life in most labs had ground to a halt. While the economic disaster of the early ’90s hit the entire country, the science towns were arguably in the worst position to adjust. Unlike military-factory towns, which also lost their funding overnight, the science towns had no industry to convert to civilian production. Unlike their colleagues living in other cities, the scientists in science towns could not switch to careers in finance or the service industries: most of them lived hours away from anything that wasn’t a research institute, and they had no money to move.

While a small scientific lobby is pushing a hopeless bill in the Russian parliament to secure full federal funding for at least a dozen of the towns, salaries and pensions in some science towns are held up for months, even more than a year at a time. When the wages are paid, they generally range between about US$70 and $200 a month. The head of one nuclear institute at the heart of a science town shot himself last year – his colleagues are convinced it was over the lack of funding. For a few years, starting around 1992, various Western foundations, led by American financier-philanthropist George Soros’s organization, gave out small grants to Russian exact scientists. Now most of that funding has dried up: Soros, for one, has said he will no longer single-handedly attempt to save Russian science if the Russian government plans to do nothing to help.

Many scientists find occasional teaching gigs in the West: if they are frugal during their semester of lecturing in some Midwestern town, they can save enough money to finance the following year at home. Some get financial infusions from more fortunate relatives living elsewhere. Many find ways to procure cheaper produce, even to live off the land with tiny plots they stake out outside the towns.

But even if each individual survival can be explained separately, the mechanism of the towns’ collective endurance remains largely a mystery. Without the infusions of money and people, the towns and their populations are aging steadily, slowing down, and losing their old buzz, but the buildings are not crumbling and the residents are not deserting. In fact, the “brain drain” that has been the bugbear of post-Soviet science and technology, whose best and brightest are lured to the West, has barely affected the science towns. A recent survey of science towns’ residents conducted by the Russian Labor Institute found that most young people would like to stay in the towns and in the sciences. Perhaps they are incurable romantics.

Or perhaps, being the best and the brightest among the best and the brightest, they know something we don’t; perhaps they are right in believing that they are in possession of something so unique and precious that they should spend the rest of their lives propping up – and touching up – these 60 giant monuments to the power of science, the future ruins of the Nuclear Age.

 

 

Protvino, population 40,000, is one of the youngest science towns. The Institute for High Energy Physics was founded in 1963 and its accelerator completed in 1967, with the first experiments run in 1968. The town is built in a moderately impressive pine forest about 100 kilometers outside Moscow, where the small Protva River meets the larger Oka. The problem is, it is haunted. Subterraneanly, that is.

It could have been foreseen: the town was founded on a bunch of dead bodies. In 1941 the southern front line outside Moscow cut through this area, and before the Germans were finally forced out, they retreated and returned seven times. World War II continued for another three and a half years, and, it seems, no one really bothered to clean up the bodies and the ammunition both armies left behind. When the first scientists moved here in the late 1960s and ’70s, their kids kept dragging home rusty helmets and unused ammo ribbons they’d found while digging around the old trenches. Construction workers still find human remains.

Too modern to fear bad omens, Soviet scientists and bureaucrats had big plans for Protvino. They built the largest particle accelerator in the world and imported a group of artists and designers from around the Soviet Union to make it into the prettiest of towns. “There was no architecture then in the Soviet Union,” remembers Vitaly Gubarev, who headed up the beautification task force until its demise in 1991, “just prefab concrete boxes.” It’s a wonder, he says, that Protvino has buildings designed especially for the town: two pyramid-shaped brick high-rises and two “saw buildings,” long zigzags in gray concrete that may look like a typical Eastern bloc monstrosity to the untrained eye but in fact consist of split-level apartments – an unheard-of luxury. The master plan called for the cluster of these apartment buildings with stores and schools to create a pedestrian-only zone. A miniature beltway around the town, with no exits into Protvino itself, would keep out cars and accidental tourists.

The plan behind the master plan was to win the State Prize – the highest Soviet honor – for the best town plan. But in the mid-1970s construction engineers made a horrifying discovery: this area was what geologists call a karst, a limestone region that contains giant underground hollow caverns. The master plan had to be revised again and again as more caverns were found; the original cluster idea had to be abandoned. A few years later another small town, just outside Moscow, was refashioned as a pedestrian cluster and promptly received the State Prize.

Thus began the tradition of failing to be the first. Other countries, too, were building accelerators, so that by the middle of the 1980s the Protvino machine was only fourth-largest in the world, trailing accelerators in the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. Plus, the US was starting to build the supercollider. To save the prestige of Soviet high-energy physics, in 1987 the government launched the construction of a new accelerator, the biggest ever at 21 kilometers in length. It would in fact be three accelerators in one extralong channel: one “warm” accelerator – that is, one made with regular magnets – and two “cold” accelerators, created with superconducting magnets. All over the Soviet Union, wherever there were large building projects, signs went up inviting construction workers and engineers to come to Protvino. They needed hundreds of people just to create the channel: you’d think the planners would know better, but they were going to put it underground.

Starting in 1990, when science funding was cut, the big project was gradually revised down from three accelerators to the one warm one. As the staff of the institute continued to assemble giant magnets for the accelerator at an ever-decreasing rate, it gradually became clear that the accelerator had no chance of being completed before it became obsolete.

Big dreams leave big traces. Enormous warehouses filled with thousands of magnets and hundreds of generators stand as giant monuments to the accelerator that never was. Most of the equipment is useless for any other purpose and wouldn’t be worth much as scrap metal, but ultimately it could be disposed of. The creaky mechanism of assembly, storage, and upkeep of the accelerator parts could ultimately be forced to stop churning.

The problem, of course, is the tunnel. The circle was completed in October 1994, and it now haunts the town from below. Left alone, engineers estimate, it would be destroyed by water in four years. The way of the land is such that the level of groundwater to one side of town is higher than the street level in Protvino itself. In other words, if the tunnel were left to fill with water and collapse, in four years the earth would open up to swallow the town of Protvino.

 

Alexander Vasilevski, a large, bearded man in his 40s who came to Protvino as a college graduate, is the chief engineer of the accelerator project. He has calculated that it would cost nearly as much to fill in the tunnel as to complete the accelerator: about $200 million. For the last few years the project has been receiving seemingly random amounts ranging anywhere from $3 million to $30 million a year, which Vasilevski has been using to maintain the tunnel and continue, little by little, to assemble the magnets. He does not have any choice but to keep going: it seems the government will never be able to fork up enough cash at one time to make it possible to fill the tunnel. That, of course, is irrelevant: whatever the needs of the scientists, Vasilevski believes the tunnel ought to be built. “The accelerator would only be in use for 20 or 30 years anyway,” he argues. “But if we build it right, the tunnel will be there for another 250 years. A structure like this should be used.” Yes, it could be the world’s longest underground shopping arcade. Or the world’s only subway in the woods. Or a nuclear fallout-shelter for forest dwellers.

 

It is time to stop thinking so big. Protvino may have some trouble coming to terms with this imperative, but 20 kilometers down the road, in the biologists’ town of Pushchino, small has come to mean survival. Granted, unlike Protvino, Pushchino was never meant to hit it big: it was too secret for that. Yuri Bespalov, the official local historian, even claims, with some pride, that the town plan was devised to make it impossible to add on to Pushchino. It would always be three finite zones: Zone A for the scientific institutes (all nine of them), Zone B for greenery, and Zone C for living (in any one of three types of nine-story concrete-block buildings). Nearly 30 years after the town was built, its population still only about 20,000, the experiment in stasis can be deemed successful: the new era has managed to insinuate itself into the Pushchino look in just two ways – the glass panes that residents have now been allowed to put on their balconies (in the old days this was believed to spoil the gorgeous uniformity of the façades), and the retirees who gather in front of the store in the morning to find out when their pension might be paid and to beg shyly.

With no money for the institutes, the answer to the townpeople’s problems clearly lies outside of Pushchino. About a mile outside, that is. Residents have turned the tracts of land that once guaranteed their isolation into tiny garden plots – 20 or 30 square meters a person. Weekends and evenings year-round, half the town is working the land. The more enterprising types have put up miniature houses – half tool shed, half status symbol – on their plots; others just spend their time pulling old nylon pantyhose onto tiny year-old apple trees.

“People were suffering unnecessarily trying to work on their garden plots,” explains Gennadi Bulatkin, head of the Laboratory of Bioproductivity of Agricultural Ecosystems and a chief instructor at the school. “What they needed was scientific knowledge to make their work efficient.” Researchers at the Institute of Soil and Photosynthesis have organized the School of Practical Fruit and Vegetable Gardening. Most of the students are scientists – biologists, astronomers, and physicists. Bulatkin plans to devote this year to the study and practice of basic gardening, with instruction on tree-wrapping and crown-trimming, then eventually graduate to beekeeping. “Every plot should have at least two or three beehives,” he says emphatically. “That’s good for pollination and teaching your children, both.”

Bulatkin should know. He has spent his life in science studying complex ecosystems; he claims to head the only lab in the world to study the relative energy consumption and production of natural and agricultural systems. A believer in the efficiency of agricultural ecosystems, he says two thirds of his family’s sustenance comes from their little plot. Walking through the gardening tract on a December Saturday, he examines his colleagues’ and students’ efforts, praising the fir-tree-branch coverings here (they help create a layer of snow to insulate the soil), criticizing the evident lack of attention there. We pass a couple of abandoned plots – an institute director and his grown children have moved abroad – and greet the assistant director of another institute in his garden. This PhD, decked out in a gray cotton quilted jacket and tall rough soldier’s boots, clearly relishes his back-to-the-land persona. He poses for the photographer, smoking one of those foul hollow-filter cigarettes found in Russian villages and prisons.

 

 

There is something outrageously subversive about staking a small project against the grandeur of Soviet science. Soviet science set itself up for it, though, by creating its little havens: the blueprints for a cozy individualism the residents would eventually come to claim. Long before the state left its scientists to fend for themselves, popular Soviet mythology already portrayed the science towns as oases of progress, modernism, and comfort.

The generic symbol of all the science towns was Dubna, a nuclear physicists’ town two and a half hours northwest of Moscow. Here the popular fascination with the romance of science towns got to run wild. One well-known writer waxed sentimental upon visiting the town: “In our days, when even the poles of the earth are becoming inhabited, it is rather difficult to become known for youth and novelty. Yet the young town of Dubna did. The interest in this town of nuclear physics is now universal…. Its streets are cuttings in the forest. Its squares are forest glades. The prevailing sound is the forest stillness. Probably, such will be the towns of the future.” Yuli Kim, a quasi-underground singer-songwriter, crooned of Dubna. Alla Pugacheva, the megapopular pop star, sang of future geniuses who “study the Synchrophasotron in Home Ec.”

Dubna’s Synchrophasotron, a light-nuclei accelerator constructed in the 1950s, captured the imagination of many Russians. Its neoclassical building with a flattened round dome became the symbol of Dubna’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Not that many people from outside the institute had ever seen the mythical structure: though Dubna was an open town and its institute was international, the Synchrophasotron itself hid in the woods behind several fences and a tall embankment. This, of course, only added to the mystique.

As a kid, I spent all my school holidays in Dubna – friends and I killed entire vacations lurking around the Synchro-phasotron fence. Kids elsewhere may have lived for legends of their football or fishing exploits, but all our adventures focused on the Synchrophasotron.

Along most of the inside of the Synchrophasotron fence ran a strip of turned soil, off-limits even to employees: its inside perimeter was marked with barbed wire. This, we were convinced, was like the neutral zone at state borders – an area specially designed for gunning down trespassers. In fact, it appears, it was sealed off to make sure that trespassers left footprints. The summer I was 9 we discovered a small patch of the strip that the guards used for shooting practice. My most trusted friend Anton and I took a few days to dig a tunnel beneath the wooden fence and spent all summer making triumphant, if nerve-racking, forays into the shooting range to collect spent bullet casings (the guards, it turned out, used handguns with tiny copper bullets and shotguns with blanks weighed down with dried peas). We shared the secret passageway with a few other friends with whom we then traded casings and adventure stories.

When all nine years of your life have unfolded against the background of the world’s grandest dream, you need a mythology that makes you a part of it. There was never much doubt in our minds that we’d become scientists: we were all attending math schools, the rebel among us wanted to become a geologist.

But making career plans was not enough. We needed romance, and romance was in the Synchrophasotron. We needed conflict, and conflict was in the imaginary gunfire. We performed our job of trespassing on adult territory with the determination and literalism of future scientists. (The rebel did become a geologist and moved to the Russian Far East; his brother, my old friend Anton, is a scientist at the Dubna institute. I lost touch with them when my family emigrated to the US when I was 14. I haven’t looked for them in the four years I have been back.)

Pavel Zarubin, the plump youthful scientific secretary – a sort of scholarly PR rep – for the Laboratory of High Energies, which oversees the Synchrophasotron, refuses to believe a bunch of kids managed to breach the accelerator’s security 21 years ago. “But we got shot at,” I claim in an irrational reach for credibility. “Well, my friends did.”

Born and reared in Dubna, Zarubin is, I suppose, either what I would have become had I settled in this town or, alternatively, what I would have had to be to stay. He is a fountain of variously mystical metaphors. In a single run around the dimly lit Synchrophasotron – the institute has to save on electricity – Zarubin manages to compare it to a castle, a monastery, and an abbey. The point is, the Synchrophasotron was built to stand for centuries – not unlike the Protvino tunnel except, of course, that it was actually completed.

 

The moment of the Synchrophasotron’s obsolescence more or less coincided with the end of science funding, so the local researchers, who’d been counting on conducting future experiments in Protvino, came up with the brilliant idea of putting a new accelerator right where the old one was. The Synchrophasotron could not be dismantled, mind you – if the hundreds of tons of steel that comprise it were shifted, the entire castle just might slide into the nearby Dubna river – but they had learned to miniaturize, so they put the Nuclotron, a superconducting accelerator of nuclei and heavy ions, just below the Synchrophasotron. The first Nuclotron experiments were conducted in 1994.

Thus Dubna, population 68,000, became the first and possibly only success story among the struggling science towns. Constructing the Nuclotron, the scientists and engineers had to invent cheaper ways of doing their thing. The traditional way to make the tube that holds the beam, for example, is prohibitively expensive: a high-pressure chamber is generally used to force the metal alloy to conform to the complex shape required of the tube. In Dubna they used water frozen with the aid of liquid nitrogen to do the work of the pressure chamber.

“This is the innovation level of a guy working in his garage,” Zarubin claims with a folksy pride. “Guys need their garages. Russian monasteries were always the repositories not only of spirituality, but also of skills. And technical culture, engineering culture, the belief in scientific values – all this has almost a religious quality. In times of trouble Russia often lost its churches, but never its monasteries.”

Yes, I say, still sore over his refusal to believe my shooting story, but in Soviet times a lot of the monasteries were turned into prisons. “They became only more sacred for that,” Zarubin retorts. One has to cultivate an enlightened disregard for history in these science towns. If Protvino was built on the bodies of soldiers, then Dubna rests on the bones of labor camp inmates. The town sits on an island shaped by the Dubna and Volga Rivers and the Moscow Channel, which connects the Volga with the Moskva River. The channel, a utopian dream of Russian rulers for centuries, was built in the 1930s by prisoners – as many as 700,000 of them, according to sources.

After the war, prisoners were used to build the first accelerator here (the world’s biggest, naturally), the Synchrocyclotron, which became operational in 1949. The entire project was the province of the Ministry for Mid-Range Machinery, as the Soviet ministry of atomic warfare was euphemistically named. It was a state unto itself, with Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s police chief, as its czar, and labor camp inmates as its citizens. The first scientists, who moved to Dubna in the 1940s and ’50s, remember that the large green between Dubna’s luxurious (by Soviet standards) hotel and the Volga used to be the campgrounds. They remember too that the inmates were escorted by armed guards to the Synchrophasotron construction site.

It was all top secret then; the physicists were not even allowed to publish their findings. But then in 1954, Western European physicists joined forces to create CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, now known as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics and the place where the World Wide Web was invented) on the Swiss-French border. Soviet Science had to retaliate with a Warsaw Pact center, and in 1956 the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research was inaugurated around the Synchrophasotron (then the world’s biggest) in a freshly built town full of yellow Hungarian-style cottages (for the top scientists) and gray Bulgarian-designed apartment buildings (for the rest). The only memory of the labor camp inmates lay in their unmarked graves. “Where the prisoners’ graves are, there is a stream,” Zarubin tells me. “Local men use the water for pickling cucumbers, and they don’t have to boil it first.” He pauses. “It is holy water,” he explains. This man can put a good spin on anything.

 

Even with a correction for Zarubin’s PR prowess, the picture that emerges from our circular tour of the venerable Synchrophasotron and the defiant Nuclotron is one of folksy ingenuity riding in on a good old workhorse to save Soviet science. At a time when, in most science towns, salaries have not been paid in months and institute directors have resorted to hunger strikes and even suicide, the mere fact of functioning can be a source of boundless pride. In 1996, the year of the science town’s 40th birthday, Dubna put on a lavish celebration of its continued existence. Façades were painted, roads repaved, and new streetlights erected to greet visiting dignitaries. The money ran out before some of the repairs were completed, though; at the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, for example, the front entrance is sealed off. This lab, the source of Dubna’s greatest prestige, is also the recipient of the largest part of the institute’s budget.

Thanks to the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, all of Dubna hopes to immortalize itself in the name of element 105 (one of those blank spaces in the periodic table), which, if all negotiations among international agencies go as planned, will become officially known as dubnium. The Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, with its four small accelerators, synthesizes the nuclei of new elements. It is a source of great pride in Dubna that elements 102, 103, 104, and 105 are generally acknowledged to have been synthesized first in Dubna, and elements 106, 107, and 108 are said to owe a sizable debt to Dubna as well. It is element 114, however, that the lab is pinning its hopes on.

“It has been predicted,” explains director of the lab Mikhail Itkis, “that element 114 will live a long time. The nuclei of other elements we have synthesized have been short-lived, dying after milliseconds or microseconds, while this one may live for days or even months.” Led by the theoretical predictions, scientists have been looking for it. The prediction, explains Itkis, is that element 114 will have a magical nucleus – that is, a nucleus with magical numbers of neutrons and protons. Like lead, for example: it has 114 protons and 184 neutrons, which makes it doubly magical. The point is, a nucleus possessed of magical numbers is extraordinarily resilient. “We are looking for a new island of stability,” says Itkis. Aren’t we all. Measured against other science towns, though, Dubna seems to have come closest to finding the magical combination, the correct relationship between scaling down and insisting on the dream. It’s just lucky not to be saddled with a dream that’s 21 kilometers long.

 

Tito Pontecorvo is one of Dubna’s most famous residents. His father Bruno, the brother of Italian film director Gillo Pontecorvo, studied with the great Enrico Fermi, then fled fascist Italy, emigrating to Canada and disappearing with his wife, a Swedish communist. As it turned out, the man who was dubbed the Hydrogen Traitor (though he maintained he’d never worked on the H-bomb) went to Finland and crossed the border into the Soviet Union, where, apparently by prior arrangement, he was hidden – in Dubna. A couple of years after Bruno Pontecorvo disappeared in the West, he reappeared at a press conference in Moscow, his transformation into Soviet scientist complete. He lived in Dubna for the rest of his life; his wife, they say, lost her mind.

Dubna myths feed on the memory of Bruno Pontecorvo’s flamboyance: he is said to have delivered April Fool’s Day lectures and to have ridden his horse through Dubna at midnight wearing a wide-brimmed hat. The latter story, though, seems to conflate his image with that of his youngest son: Pontecorvo the father is most fondly remembered for introducing the Soviets to snorkeling; his son is the one with the horses. Tito Pontecorvo started out as a scientist in oceanology and spent most of his time at sea – but as the son of foreigners, he was not considered reliable enough to disembark in foreign lands. finally, Pontecorvo quit, declaring to anyone who would listen that he had been forced out of science.

Since he was a child, Tito Pontecorvo had had a thing about horses. Enough of a thing, apparently, to do the unimaginable: launch a private enterprise not just anywhere in the Soviet Union, but in one of its showcase towns. In 1979 he built a barn right where the town of Dubna met the forest and started offering riding and horse-grooming lessons.

 

Having a local riding school appealed to the Dubna ambition for the finer things in life. Tito Pontecorvo and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research entered into a mutually beneficial relationship that lasted a dozen years and produced hundreds of Eastern bloc city kids uncommonly good with horses. In 1991, when Russia legalized private farming, Pontecorvo set about building the dream of his lifetime. He spent more than a million dollars of borrowed money to build the biggest palace the Volga has seen. He situated it on the opposite side of the river from Dubna, where the gray-brown of dilapidated villages unexpectedly gives way to the spectacle of a red-brick rendition of a sugar castle, with tiny turrets and silver-topped towers stretching as far as the eye can see. The castle lies low in a valley, surrounded by the green pastures rolling down to the river, dotted with Pontecorvo’s 200 Akhal-Teke, some of the world’s most exotic, most expensive and, possibly, most beautiful horses; there are only 2,500 of them on earth.

But the Russian nouveau riche have not rushed to buy these fine animals. And the state is in no hurry to fork over half a million dollars in farming subsidies that Pontecorvo figures he is due. Pontecorvo’s plan now is to use his natural charm, native English, and Canadian citizenship to popularize the Akhal-Teke in North America, “so that American snobs start saying to one another, ‘What, you still have not bought an Akhal-Teke?’” For now, though, he has sold off most of the farm equipment. His telephone has been turned off for nonpayment. His six employees, his family, and his 200 Akhal-Teke are living in the castle, gates closed tight against the creditors.

 

The moral of this story, then, is that ambition can trap you – indeed, that if science was among the Soviet Union’s greatest ambitions, then the science towns were its best-built traps. As these things go, of course, it is better to be trapped in a castle, like Tito Pontecorvo, than in barracks, like the builders of Protvino’s ill-fated accelerator tunnel. When miners and construction workers were called in from all over the country, some of them were temporarily settled in barracks on the outskirts of Protvino. In the years since the money stopped, the 200-family barracks settlement has turned into a town of its own, rife with the complaints, the smells, and the rumors bred by hopelessness and poverty.

As soon as I declare myself as a journalist, the women of this shanty town flock to me and interrupt one another with complaints. “Our children have to travel to school in another town.” “The sewers leak everywhere!” “The rats are as big as a soccer ball!” “We were tricked!”

True, they were tricked. They were lured here with high salaries – about the same as a physics PhD’s then – and the promise of an apartment in a few years. When the construction came to a standstill, all hope for an apartment vanished. A couple of years ago the local sanitary commission deemed the shanty town unsuitable for living. Some of the wives in the town formed an activist group, and last summer they finally succeeded: they obtained permanent residence registration stamps for all the barracks’ residents. Now they have more rights, including the right to stay indefinitely in a place unsuitable for living, playing the raggedy ghosts of Protvino’s ambition.

The town retaliates by putting on an aggressively happy face. Protvino is holding a town-anthem contest, in which the front-runner is local celebrity poet Alexandra Kurbakova.

In a scene too heavily symbolic for even the most exploitative of journalists, Kurbakova greets me from her bed in a cramped first-floor studio apartment in the “saw building” by saying she doesn’t have long to live. Reclining beneath a wall of portraits of great Russian poets – Alexander Pushkin, Sergei Yesenin, and Kurbakova herself – she performs her hymn to Protvino, a waltz that I present here in my own faithful translation:

Where the scientists are free Like the birds in the trees, Hear the sounds of science In the forest’s green silence. You can feel antimatter And the scientists had better Take you down the stairs To the tunnel that’s theirs.

Kurbakova’s husband, also a local poet, has lit candles and cranked up a crackly mono tape recorder for this performance. I sort through my embarrassment at being the recipient of this ritual, my disgust at this filthy little apartment, my squeamishness at the sight of Kurbakova, who really does not look like she has much time left – and discover that I am not only touched, but also vaguely envious.

 

There was a time, albeit when I was 9, when I would have been willing to be shot in the butt with a salt bullet just to stake out a place in the science-town mythology. How glamorous it is to be going out as a science town’s tragic living classic.

That’s the thing about science towns: their projects are so grand they are absurd, their residents are so stubborn they have tunnel vision, their artists are so gloriously provincial they are pathetic, but somehow, even now, the total is different than the sum of its parts.

 

---

Masha Gessen is a Moscow journalist. She is the author of Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia After Communism. She wrote “The Day After Technology“ in Wired 4.03.

Trepanation & some of its advocates

Dear Cecil:

You haven’t had a really odd column in a while–how about an overview of trepanning? Who are some of the people availing themselves of this “earliest known surgery” and why are they allowed to run around loose (if in fact they are)? KIDS, DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME!–hraka

Cecil replies:Sound advice for troubled times, bub. Trepanning, also known as trephination, is the art of boring a hole in the skull for medical, mystical, or, God help us, recreational purposes. Practiced since the Stone Age (hence the “oldest known surgery” sobriquet), trepanning was common well into the 19th century, and a few iconoclasts are attempting to revive it today. One thinks with a shudder: Could this be the next goth fad?

Archaeological evidence of trepanning has turned up all over the world, in the form of skulls with holes bored into them up to two inches in diameter. Amazingly, say researchers, judging from signs of bone growth and the like, perhaps two-thirds of the patients survived. Maybe ancient trepannists were trying to relieve intracranial pressure due to disease, trauma, etc., in the manner of modern surgeons. Or maybe they just wanted to release the evil spirits. Nobody really knows.

Trepanning enjoyed a vogue centuries ago as a treatment for insanity, headaches, and other complaints. This was back in the era of leeching, mercury cures, and so on, when the line between health-care provider and murderer was less clear than it is now. The tools of the trade (seewww.braceface.com/medical/Trepanning.htm) consisted of (1) a sharp knife so you could slice the skin of the skull and pull back the flaps, (2) a corkscrewlike borer with a wicked-looking bit, and (3) files, brushes, and whatnot so you could dress up the job when done. In the old days trepanation was strictly a manual operation and took a long time. Today, with the advent of the electric drill (you think I’m joking?), an amateur can do it in an afternoon.

There are those who say trepanation has much to offer the modern world. You’re saying: Come on, these people are psychos. I’m not arguing with you. However, being a psycho can take you a long way these days. Searching on trepanation in Google we come up with 6,120 hits. There’s even a Web site sponsored by the International Trepanation Advocacy Group. OK, there’s a Web site for everything. But skull boring has also been featured on network television, written up in the Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/features/trepan.htm) and the on-line journal Salon(www.salon.com/health/feature/1999/04/29/trepanation/print.html), even solemnly discussed at academic conferences (“International Colloquium on Cranial Trepanation in Human History,” University of Birmingham, April 7-9, 2000). Perhaps I’m overstating the case here, but if you ask me, trepanation is hot.

I still don’t think it’s a good idea. You could, like, die, you know? Or get meningitis or suffer an accidental lobotomy. Some people who get trepanned, one has the feeling, didn’t have a lot of spare gray matter to start with. A woman on the ITAG site says of her trepanned husband, “He does not appear to be so confused when more than one thing comes at him at once anymore.” Listen, lady, one wants to have an open mind, as it were. But–you can see where I’m going with this–the average person needs trepanation like he needs a hole in the head.

The leading theorist of modern trepanation is Bart Huges, a Dutch research librarian who came up with a concept called “brainbloodvolume.” Huges’s idea is that when we’re babies our skulls are soft (ever watch a newborn’s forehead throb?), allowing our brains room to breathe and grow. But as we age our brains get locked in the old skullcase. Trepanation gives us back that lost freedom. Joe Mellen, an associate of Huges’s, put the matter more succinctly in a book called Bore Hole: “This is the story of how I came to drill a hole in my skull to get permanently high.”

Is trepanation the next big thing? Some indication may be gleaned from the career of Amanda Feilding of the UK, who in 1970 bored a hole in her skull with a dental drill after trying for four years to get a surgeon to do it. Feilding twice stood for Parliament on a pro-trepanation platform (she wanted it to be offered free by the National Health Service). The first time she got 49 votes, the second time 139. Sure, that’s not many. But I don’t like the trend.

–CECIL ADAMS

Cyber Bully Mom Lori Drew indicted in CA for causing 13-year old Megan Meier to croak herself; apparently there’s no justice available in big MO

NY Times May 16, 2008

Woman Indicted in MySpace Suicide Case

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — In a highly unusual use of a federal law generally employed in computer fraud cases, a federal grand jury here on Thursday indicted a Missouri woman accused of using a phony online identity to trick and taunt a 13-year-old girl, who committed suicide in response to the cyberbaiting.

The woman, Lori Drew, was charged with one count of conspiracy and three counts of accessing a computer without authorization and via interstate commerce to obtain information to inflict emotional distress. Each count carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Ms. Drew lives in O’Fallon, Mo., where, according to the indictment, she created a MySpace account under the name Josh Evans in 2006. Prosecutors said she used the social networking account to contact a young girl named in the indictment as M.T.M. with sexually charged messages from “Josh.” The girl, who has been identified by her mother as Megan Meier, was a former friend of Ms. Drew’s daughter.

After a few weeks of chatting, “Josh Evans” began to send Megan nasty messages, via the MySpace account, ending with one that suggested “the world would be a better place” without her. Megan, believing she had been rejected by “Josh,” committed suicide in her home.

Missouri law enforcement officials said they had not found enough evidence to bring charges in the case, and Ms. Drew, who was 48 when Megan died, has repeatedly denied creating the account.

But because MySpace, a unit of Fox Interactive Media, is based in Beverly Hills, Calif., and its server is here, federal prosecutors decided to wield a federal statute that is generally used to prosecute fraud that occurs across state lines.

The statute applies in the case, the indictment says, because by violating the user agreement of MySpace, which prohibits phony accounts, Ms. Drew was seeking information “to further a tortuous act, namely, intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

“To my knowledge it is the first case of its kind in the nation,” said Thomas P. O’Brien a United States attorney in California. “But when an adult violates terms on a MySpace account to gain information that creates this type of reaction, it caused this office to take a really hard look.”

Calls to Megan’s parents, Tina and Ron Meier, were not returned Thursday. Mr. Meier told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “It’s a good day. It’s an awesome feeling.”

Ms. Drew’s lawyer, H. Dean Steward, said: “I am deeply disappointed. We thought when the St. Louis prosecutors took a look at the case and decided not to bring charges that was the end of it. I don’t think the statute they used fits the facts in the indictments.”

Ms. Drew is scheduled to be arraigned in Los Angeles in June.

Experts were skeptical that the charges would withstand close legal scrutiny.

“It is an extremely aggressive indictment,” said Rebecca Lonergan, a law professor at the University of Southern California and a former federal prosecutor. “I have never in 18 years as a prosecutor seen the statute used that way. Cybercrimes is a relatively new area, but I am not sure this statute technically covers the essence of the harm.”

Officials at MySpace said in a written statement, “MySpace does not tolerate cyberbullying and is cooperating fully with the U.S. attorney in this matter.”

Various state and local governments have passed or introduced laws that prohibit cyberbullying, often through requirements that school districts have cyberbullying policies.

“I have concerns about the term ‘cyberbullying’ being applied to this situation,” said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. “Cyberbullying usually occurs between peers. It is not this kind of action.”

Ms. Willard, who is also a former lawyer, said she also had doubts about the prosecutor’s tactics. “I, like everyone else, would like to see Lori Drew see her comeuppance,” she said, “but I have some concerns. I don’t think the statute was written to apply to this case.”

Client 9 & his 7-diamond ho’s real victims: Elyssa, Jenna & Sarabeth

Bonnie Fuller The Huffington Post

Eliot Spitzer’s Biggest Challenge – Winning Back the Trust of His Daughters!

Posted March 12, 2008 | 08:13 AM (EST)

---

Read More: Eliot Spitzer, Eliot Spitzer Daughters, Eliot Spitzer Daughters Pictures, Eliot Spitzer Family, Eliot Spitzer Prostitution, Eliot Spitzer Prostitution Scandal, Eliot Spitzer Silda, Elyssa Spitzer, Elyssa Spitzer Pictures, Jenna Spitzer, Jenna Spitzer Pictures, Sarabeth Spitzer, Sarabeth Spitzer Pictures, Silda Spitzer, Slideshow, Breaking Entertainment News

Silda Spitzer looked about as devastated as any human being could be as she stood at her husband Eliot’s side while he announced that yes, he had patronized a prostitution ring.But as awful as this must be for her, there are three other innocent victims of Eliot Spitzer’s unseemly behavior — his three teenage daughters, Elyssa, Sarabeth and Jenna. Anyone who has ever been through the experience of having their father choose another woman over their mother, especially if it happened when they were a teenager, knows how traumatic this can be. Whether your father has an affair or anonymous sex, it’s all the same and it’s even more devastating when the world knows about it. huffington_post:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bonnie-fuller/eliot-spitzers-biggest-c_b_91078.html

As Dr. Jenn Berman, psychotherapist and author of The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy, Confident Kids, says, “when you’re a teenager, it can be embarrassing enough just to be seen in public with your parent, let alone to have all your friends know about your dad’s sexual escapades.” And in this case, the world knows. There’s no school that you can switch even in Timbuktu to, where your classmates aren’t going to be whispering.”

Aside from the embarrassment factor, the Spitzer girls no doubt feel like a warm, security blanket has been ripped off their backs. “Teens count on their parents to look out for their best interests and to take care of them and their family. Now they’ve been betrayed,” says Dr. Berman. “They’ve even been betrayed financially. When their father took money that should have been used for their family and instead spent it on his sexual gratification, it’s like spending it on drugs.”

Most little girls grow up worshiping their fathers. Daddies are big and strong enough to pick you up when you fall down and scrape your knee. They carry you inside when you fall asleep in the car. They teach you how to ride your bike.

• • • • • • • • New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer orders some food at the New York State Fair on Wednesday, Aug. 29, 2007, in Geddes, N.Y. With him is daughter Jenna and wife Silda. (AP Photo Empire Expo Center, Mike Okoniewski)

And in this case, Eliot Spitzer wasn’t just any old terrific dad, he seemed like a genuine and “wonderful white knight rooting out evil,” points out Dr. Jacqueline Olds. He put bad guys behind bars. The problem with this is that “it makes him seem like such a hypocrite now and young people have a far lower tolerance for hypocrisy than adults. So it will make it especially hard for them to deal with this,” explains Dr. Olds, McLean Hospital psychiatrist and author of the book Marriage in Motion: The Natural Ebb and Flow of Lasting Relationships.

It could also make it hard for the Spitzer daughters to develop their own positive loving relationships with men as they grow up, warns psychiatrist Dr. Carole Lieberman “They’re at a time — 13, 15, and 18 — when they’re starting to date and finding out that the man they love most has betrayed their mom and family could cause them to distrust any boy they start to get close to, because he may break their hearts,” says the author of Bad Boys: Why We Love Them, How to Live With Them and When to Leave Them.

But they aren’t totally alone in their boat of private family matters exposed in public. Other daughters have survived this situation, thrived and remained close to their fathers. Chelsea Clinton is remarkably adjusted post Monica Lewinsky. Ivanka Trump couldn’t have found it easy when her parents’ marriage imploded on the front page of the New York Post. Today she’s a successful businesswoman who stars on Donald’s hit show, “Celebrity Apprentice.” Actor David Hasselhoff’s two teenage daughters videotaped their father drunk and incoherent, lying on the floor and the tape was aired around the world. Today he has custody of the girls and apparently a close relationship.

“If Eliot Spitzer has been a good and decent father I believe that even teenage daughters can put this experience in context,” asserts psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow, author of Living the Truth. In other words, despite the anger and betrayal that his daughters may feel now and for a long time, he can repair his relationship with them. “He must say to them ‘I need to understand why I would have taken this risk not just with my own career but with your feelings and I will be there for you 1,000 percent now.”

So true. Too often dads that disappoint their families make the betrayal even worse, by abandoning them. So Eliot Spitzer, despite the guilt you’re feeling and despite the anger your daughters may express, the last thing you should do is take the “easy” exit from their lives. Even if it means years of personal and family therapy to figure out why you made such a huge mistake, do it. And don’t think your girls are better off without you. They’re not.

Why humans feel compelled to binge, especially at the end of winter

NY Times, March 4, 2008
MIND
When People Drink Themselves Silly, and Why
By BENEDICT CAREY
The urge to binge mindlessly, though it can strike at any time, seems to stir in the collective unconscious during the last weeks of winter. Maybe it’s the television images from places like Fort Lauderdale and Cabo San Lucas, of communications majors’ face planting outside bars or on beaches.

Or perhaps it’s a simple a case of seasonal affective disorder in reverse. Not SAD at all, but anticipation of warmth and eagerness for a little disorder.

Either way, researchers have had a hard time understanding binge behavior. Until recently, their definition of binge drinking — five drinks or more in 24 hours — was so loose that it invited debate and ridicule from some scholars. And investigators who ventured into the field, into the spray of warm backwash and press of wet T-shirts, often returned with findings like this one from a 2006 study: “Spring break trips are a risk factor for escalated alcohol use.”

Or this, from a 1998 analysis: “The men’s reported levels of alcohol consumption, binge drinking and intoxication were significantly higher than the women’s.”

In fact, the dynamics of bingeing may have more to do with personal and cultural expectations than with the number of upside-down margaritas consumed. In their classic 1969 book, “Drunken Comportment,” recently out in paperback, the social scientists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton wrote that the disconnect between the conventional wisdom on drunken behavior and the available evidence “is even now so scandalous as to exceed the limits of reasonable toleration.”

They detailed the vast differences in the way people from diverse cultures behave after excessive alcohol. In contrast to nearby tribes, for example, the Yuruna Indians in the Xingu region of Brazil would become exceptionally reserved when rendered sideways by large helpings of moonshine. The Camba of eastern Bolivia would drink excessively twice a month. Sitting in a circle, they would toast one another, more lavishly with each pop.

In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance. Aggression, sexual or otherwise, was unheard of during these sessions.

Western cultures are more likely to excuse binge drinking as a needed mental vacation. “An awful lot of cultures have institutionalized bingeing as a kind of time out like Mardi Gras or New Year’s Eve, a culturally recognized period where a certain amount of acting out is acceptable,” said Dwight Heath, emeritus professor of anthropology at Brown.

Not to say that would-be bingers, when ordering that first tray of Irish car bombs for the table, think about discharging a cultural tradition. They have their own reasons. And those, too, shape subsequent drunken behavior.

In a series of studies in the 1970s and ’80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The researchers served alcoholic drinks, most often icy vodka tonics, to some of the students and nonalcoholic ones, usually icy tonic water, to others. The drinks looked and tasted the same, and the students typically drank five in an hour or two.

The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk. “No significant difference between those who got alcohol and those who didn’t,” Alan Marlatt, the senior author, said. “Their behavior was totally determined by their expectations of how they would behave.”

In a repeat of the session performed for a coming documentary, one participant insisted that she could not have been drinking because alcohol always made her flush.

“We told her that, yes, in fact she was drinking it,” Dr. Marlatt said. “She immediately flushed.”

Somewhere between personal preferences and social custom, moreover, the peer group asserts itself. In a recent study, public health researchers in New Zealand conducted extensive interviews with teenage girls in one of two cliques at a high school. Both groups associated drinking with uninhibited behavior — and that is what they exhibited. But one group considered being uninhibited to include making out, and the other considered it to include far more.

In their discussion, Dr. MacAndrew and Dr. Edgerton acknowledged that Western societies, and certainly the United States, send multiple signals on bingeing. At times, the signals cross, as when movies show spring-break binging as sunburned, sexy fun, while health pronouncements make it look like an orgy of near-criminal behavior.

At other times, cultural expectations and personal preferences reinforce each other. The hope that a wild session might “reveal new things about myself” or “allow me to act completely out of character” is widely echoed in literature, pop culture and drinking lore. If the research is a guide, those hopes should be self-fulfilling at some level.

Unless, that is, the binge goes beyond any reasonable definition of excess. Then the amount of tequila consumed matters very much — and poison is poison in any culture.

Billy West, the voice of every cartoon character you love

Billy West, voice of Ren and Stimpy, Futurama, on the rough start that shaped his life

From Wikinews, the free news source you can write!

February 13, 2008

Philip J. Fry from Futurama

Ren and Stimpy. Bugs Bunny. Philip J. Fry and Professor Hubert Farnsworth on Futurama.Sparx. Bi-Polar Bear. Popeye the Sailor Man. Woody Woodpecker. You may not think you have ever heard Billy West, but chances are on a television program, a movie, a commercial, or as Howard Stern’s voice guru in the 1990’s, you have heard him. West’s talent for creating personalities by twisting his voice has made him one of a handful of voice actors—Hank Azariaand the late Mel Blanc come to mind—who have achieved celebrity for their talent. Indeed, West is one of the few voice actors who can impersonate Blanc in his prime, including characterizations of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and other characters from Warner Bros. cartoons.

What is the fulcrum in Mr. West’s life that led him to realize a talent to shape personalities with his voice, and how did the discovery of that gift shape him? Wikinews reporter David Shankbone found that like many great comedians, West faced more sour early in life than he did sweet. The sour came from a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic father (“I could tell you the kind of night I was going to have from the sound of the key in the door or the way the car pulled up.”), to his own problems with drug and alcohol use (“There is a point that you can reach in your life where you don’t want to live, but you haven’t made the decision to die.”).

…	I’m telling you stuff that I never said to anybody…	…

If sin, suffering and redemption feel like the stages of an endless cycle of American existence, West’s own redemption from his brutalized childhood is what helped shape his gift. He performed little bits to cheer up his cowed mother, ravaged by the fact she could not stop her husband’s abuse of young West. “I was the whipping boy and she would just be reduced to tears a lot of times, and I would come in and say stuff, and I would put out little bits just to pull her out of it.”

But West has also enjoyed the sweet. His career blossomed as his talent for creating entire histories behind fictional characters and creatures simply by exploring nuance in his voice landed him at the top of his craft. You may never again be able to forget that behind the voice of your favorite character, there is often an extraordinary life.

Below is David Shankbone’s interview with renowned voice actor Billy West, who for the first time publicly talks about the horrors he faced in his childhood; his misguided search for answers in anger, drugs and alcohol; and the peace he has achieved as one of America’s most recognizable voice actors.

Contents  [hide] 1 The use of celebrities for voiceovers 2 Iconic characters and choosing projects 3 Discovering his talent 4 “It was a horror chamber where I grew up” 5 West moves to Boston after his parents divorce 6 How West dealt with his father’s abuse 7 Rehabilitation and sobriety 8 Is West glad he experienced addiction? 9 West on his career 10 West on politics 11 Billy West on modern American society 12 Billy West on telling it like it is 13 Source

[edit]The use of celebrities for voiceovers

This exclusive interview features first-hand journalism by a Wikinews reporter. See the collaboration page for more details.

David Shankbone: You’re known for speaking about the use of famous actors to do voice-over. What is your central problem with their use?

Billy West: My problem is that if they were judged by the same standards we were, that we have to try and get work with, they would be pretty piss poor as voice performers.

DS: What standards are those?

BW: The standards are that you have a really special voice that you can go around and do that voice and make a living that people just instantly love it. Nobody is just instantly in love with the usual suspects. Voices that we see in the cartoon movies now.

DS: Like Robin Williams?

BW: No, he’s different, he understands character. I mean he understands characterization and voice changes. And so does Mike Myersand so does Eddie Murphy.

DS: Jerry Seinfeld as well in Bee Movie?

BW: No, that’s not it because he‘s doing a character that looks exactly like him and sounds exactly like him. I mean, Will Smith does characters that are drawn to look like him and sound like him. I wish I had that luxury. Nobody draws a character that looks like me and sounds like me for me to just step in and be the perfect person for the role. You know what I mean?

DS: What’s the solution? Not to do characters around stars?

BW: The thing is, I don’t have an issue with the fact that these movies are being made. If I could audition for them and I didn’t get them, I still wouldn’t have an issue with them. But this is the thing: they audition us for these movies and then they play it for the A-list people, for these celebrities, so they can strip my talents’ abilities and kind of toss them over to the celebrity just to make it look better than it would be. And I’m not a teacher. Not a paid teacher. I don’t like that stuff.

…	They audition us for these movies and then they play it for the A-list people, for these celebrities, so they can strip my talents’ abilities and kind of toss them over to the celebrity just to make it look better than it would be.	…
—West on laying down cartoon characters in auditions, only to have a celebrity end up doing the voice with the quirks West’s voice introduced.

DS: They’ll have you come in, or someone of your caliber come in, and actually shape the voice around the character and then they’ll present it to the celebrity as the template?

BW: Yeah, and sometimes you’ll actually hear stuff that you actually thought of during the audition, because you have to really be on your toes.

DS: Are you paid for that?

BW: Not really. Only a couple gigs did I ever get paid to scratch a movie for a celebrity that was going to do it. The stuff that goes on at auditions is despicable.

DS: Are there legal remedies that you could pursue for that?

BW: No. I gotta prove it. I used to bring a tape recorder around with me, but still, it’s like trying to fight city hall. It is what it is. But that’s my real issue with it is that this is an Area 51 for experienced voice-over people who do create characters and not just do who and what they are. It takes away from the creative process.

DS: There was a similar issue involved with Crispin Glover. They had taken a likeness of one of his earlier roles. I think it was Robert Zemeckis Then they tried to pass it off later as him and he sued them for doing that. Are you familiar with that situation?

BW: It only means anything to me if he won.

DS: He did.

BW: Oh, he did! That’s very similar. But the thing is, if you could prove that. You can’t prove that somebody deliberately took the stuff and tossed it off to some person that’s acting. But it’s a dirty business and I won’t do it anymore. I never really quite got what it’s all about. It’s to show up and to sound exactly like the character and to read it, yet you’re doing it the way that you would do it. It’s not good business as far as I’m concerned. It’s not my part of town.

DS: Has your speaking out on this issue hurt you in any way?

BW: In what way?

DS: In your career?

BW: No.

DS: There’s no reaction against it from the studios or from the ….?

BW: No they don’t give a shit which voice-over person is in the alleyways beating the piss out of the other one to get a gig. I mean, they don’t care. They really don’t.

[edit]Iconic characters and choosing projects

DS: You discussed in an interview issues about the weight of the character’s legacies, such as Pop-Eye or Bugs Bunny. You had said that every time they do one of these they say, ‘this time it’s going to be different. We’re putting the teeth back in those characters. Nobody is going to tell us what we can’t write and what we can write.’ And you said they always blow it. How do they blow it?

West starred (as Bugs Bunny) oppositeMichael Jordan in Space Jam.

BW: They pander. Slowly they take away the aspects of what made those characters who and what they were. In other words, cartoons contained sometimes gratuitous violence with the squash and stretch animation. Sometimes it was gratuitous. But that was only an aspect of the cartoon. When you start stripping away those things that made it a full dimension character, you’re going to have Xeroxes of it in every way including creativity. The worst mistake Warner Brothers ever did was make all these characters friends, because then you took away the dynamic. Elmer wanted to kill Bugs Bunny. There was no question in anybody’s mind. Sylvester wanted to kill Tweetie. There was no question in anyone’s mind, unless you wanted to say, “He just wanted to eat him. He didn’t want to kill him.” Go figure that out. There was danger involved, and some life truths involved. When you’re telling the truth, you’re really dealing with comedy. If you don’t have the truth on your side, then comedy can’t spring from it, unless you have some weird hydroponic garden that doesn’t need any of the standard things that it takes to grow something.

DS: How do you choose a project, or does the project choose you?

BW: It works both ways. I get offers for stuff. If it looks like a good offer, I’ll take it. I’m not a snob. I love working, and every now and then somebody will say, “Why did you do that?” You know what? It’s none of your business. All I owe you is a good performance.

DS: Where do you think voice acting is going? It doesn’t seem like it’s ever an art that’s going to lose its place, but do you see it diminishing? Is it on a downturn? Is it on an upturn? Is it idling?

BW: What they’re doing slowly is they’re going to have to turn the celebrities and actors into cartoons, slowly but surely, because it’s the look that people are seduced by. It’s almost as if they like watching animation more than they do live action because of all the farms of kids being fostered to love computer-generated images. If you don’t do this, if you don’t start turning all of the celebrities into cartoons, we’ll lose our star system. It’s better to have their likenesses with their voices rather than trying to act out something that sprung from someone’s imagination that needed a concerted effort to give it a voice, a look. These characters are actors, they look like themselves, but they’re doing it with cartoon and computer processing. This is where it’s going.

DS: With computer animated voices?

BW: No, no, no. The stars will never go away. Let’s start there. If they have to become cartoons they will, because it’s a trend in the industry that these kinds of movies make more money than the regular ones do, for the most part. And they have no use for people that can create any kind of a character that’s shaped to whatever you want. That’s not useful in this case.

[edit]Discovering his talent

DS: Do you remember a time in your life when you started recognizing your talent for being able to shape your voice into memorable characters?

BW: I never really noticed. It was just so natural to me. What I used to do was hide it because no one would say anything. When somebody’s mind got blown around you, they just resented you or would find a reason to not like you. What happened was, I grew up thinking that everybody could do it, but that they were just too cool to do it.

Two protesters arguing outside Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking at Columbia. Both protesters had voices that stood out; press the audio link below to hear them.

Audio file of these two people above arguing.Image: David Shankbone.

DS: You had a talent that seemed very trite to you, but very few other people could do it and you didn’t recognize that?

BW: Yeah. I didn’t even think that it was something that was gifted upon me. I mean I never thought of it like that. I thought everybody was exactly the same. And then I would hear that nobody was doing the kinds of thing that I did and I began to feel weird and I retreated for various reasons. If I showed up at a softball game I started calling the plays like an old-time sportscaster. You would think people would like that. But it would be met with, ‘Who do you think you are?’

DS: You would feel a compulsion to do the plays in a voice?

BW: Yes. And I definitely wanted to get approval. Every kid wants that. But I would do those things because I heard the radio and I would listen to what people actually had to say. I just had my own approach to everything. Every little town weirdo like me grows up to come to the Mecca of weirdos, which is Hollywood.

DS: I’m not a voice actor, but there’s times I’ll hear a person say a phrase. I covered theIranian president speaking at Colombia for Wikinews and I watched these dueling ideologues who were normal citizens. One of them was this large black woman with a Bible yelling at this secular Jewish guy. I recorded these voices. She had one of those voices that I just couldn’t get out of my head. She just kept going, “You’re evil. You’re going to burn in Hell.” I found myself saying it aloud over and over and over again because her voice and what she said made such an impression on me that I wanted to imitate it. There was such a history behind that voice. She probably could have just said, “Buy Tide detergent,” and I would still be saying it over and over and over again.

BW: Sure. That’s what I mean about some people having naturally quirky voices. You’ve heard people in your life, like you meet a girl, a full-grown woman, who goes [in high pitched squeal], “I wanted to ask you.” And you go, ‘Drop the act. Is this a put-on?’ And I go, “Shit, you should be doing cartoons!”

[edit]“It was a horror chamber where I grew up”

DS: Is how you developed your talent when you were younger based upon imitating others? You would hear things that would leave impressions on you and you would want to imitate them? But why would you want to imitate them?

BW: Because I had no role models. My dad was a certifiable psycho and he made my life a living hell and it was a horror chamber where I grew up and when I grew up. The guy used to beat the daylights out of me left and right, for any random reason. He was a raving alchie. I grew up with him making fun of me. I was forced to retreat into a world where I couldn’t get hurt or beat up or anything like that.

…	[My father] used to beat the daylights out of me left and right, for any random reason. He was a raving alchie. I grew up with him making fun of me. I was forced to retreat into a world where I couldn’t get hurt or beat up or anything like that.	…
—Billy West on beginning to do voices

DS: It was escapism …?

BW: Well yeah. You gotta understand, it was like I was a little kid. I’m not a magical being. My dad tried to kill me about fifteen times.

DS: So when you would escape into those voices, you felt a sense of safety?

BW: Yes. ‘Cause I was surrounded by things that wouldn’t be a threat to me.

DS: And things that you could control through your own voice.

BW: Yes.

DS: Whereas you couldn’t control what an alcoholic authority figure was going to do.

BW: I was like an alien; I was an observation unit, trying to study the human condition, not consciously, but because I had to. I could tell you the kind of night I was going to have from the sound of the key in the door or the way the car pulled up. I was hyper vigilant. So all I was, was this unit from space that had nothing but data gathering and sensory equipment.

DS: What was your dad’s reaction to your doing voices?

BW: It didn’t register on the radar because, number one, I wasn’t really doing it in the time I spent with him. The other thing was that he was a frustrated talent. He could sit down at the piano and just start playing it, having no lessons or training. He could do dialogs and he could do voices. He was very funny, you know, among his friends and all that. He was also a musician, a drummer. And I became a musician except I wasn’t a drummer, I was a guitar player. The thing is, he could never make it pay. All he had was a string of jobs. Driving a beer truck then driving a soda pop truck then driving an ice cream truck. You know what I mean? Like a Ralph Kramden kind of thing.

DS: Where was your mom during all this?

BW: She was trying to make a household and trying to keep the place as sane as she possibly could.

[edit]West moves to Boston after his parents divorce

DS: It doesn’t sound like she was very successful.

BW: She had to leave him. She came into the sixth grade one day. I saw my mother at school and I was mortified like any other kid would be. She talked to the teacher and they went out in the hall. My mom came and I went with her to the airport. It was like going on a trip. We got out of Detroit, Michigan and we were on a plane to Boston. Me and my two brothers. One was a baby and the other one was like, gosh, he had to be seven or six because I was about eleven. This was back in 1963.

DS: When did you come to a realization that your voice was something that you wanted to turn into a career?

…	I’d go out and kick the shit out of some little cat or something, just like you know, smack it… In a weird way, in a weird permutation of the whole situation, to me that was supposed to be love. Cause why would your parent hit you, hurt you? Why? It never makes sense to a kid. And they all used to say, ‘It’s because I care about you.’ But I got over that stuff and what I did was start to hurt myself.	…
—West on abusing animals to deal with his own abuse

BW: It never was a realization. I started playing trumpet in grade school when I was ten years old and I liked the idea of going on stage and playing. And I was in a couple of plays in school and I really liked that world. I felt totally at home with it cause you had to be ready for anything and you had to be vigilant and you had to be on your toes, which actors need as skill and survival tools. So it was the perfect place for me to be. It’s not like I was a hollow, empty vessel. I had plenty of things percolating inside and all that, but I needed to be where I to be where I felt good and I never fit in with other kids. I only had, like, two friends, maybe one, who was, “You like that comic book too?” You know, that kind of stuff. Getting called faygot by any random goon.

DS: Did you say fay or faggot?

BW: No, it’s faggot, but they would pronounce it fay-got, you know, in Boston. Faygot. What are you, faygot? What are you, queer?

DS: Do you think that’s had any lasting effect on you?

BW: Well, I can now get crazy without being angry or raging because I know how to do it. Everything you do has to come from something real. You have to tap into something. Otherwise, there’s nothing to grab hold of if you’re a watcher or a listener or whatever. There’s nothing for you there. It’s no fun for theaudience.

DS: They say that all great comedians typically have extraordinary tragedy in their lives, and they develop their humor as a response to it.

BW: Yes, but I developed mine a lot of the times to comfort my mom. Because she saw the way I was being treated. Not so much my brothers, but I was the whipping boy and she would just be reduced to tears a lot of times, and I would come in and say stuff, and I would put out little bits just to pull her out of it.

DS: Even though you were hurting, it would hurt you to see her hurting over you.

BW: Yes. And you know, I could take a beating. I finally learned how to just galvanize myself where you just totally like disassociate and your body can sit there and get smacked around and punched or whatever and your mind is a million miles away.

DS: What made you the whipping boy?

BW: Well my dad was very very angry. He was abused as a child and he lived in a matriarchal situation with his mother and her sister and then her mother and there were all these big German …. I don’t know, like real staunch [people], angry and punishment-inclined. He liked to dish out punishment ….

DS: What would make you the one that he would unleash that upon as opposed to your brothers?

BW: Because I could do little things that he seemed to be threatened by.

DS: Like what?

BW: I could draw. He was an artist. I could pick up a pen and start drawing immediately. He was a musician, a drummer. Then, I learned to play guitar when I was ten years old. He didn’t sit right with any of these things. Plus, he was very jealous of me because my mother loved me more than him.

Ren Hoek from Ren and Stimpy.

DS: An oedipal issue?

BW: Well, yeah, but it happened from Day One. He resented eventually the fact that I was born ’cause I took away his mommy.

DS: What is your relationship with your brothers like? Did they see this going on? Did they feel bad for you?

BW: Only my other brother. He’s dead now. He bore witness to an awful lot of stuff and he, himself, was the brunt of an awful lot of stuff that I teased him and bothered him, ’cause it trickled down.

[edit]How West dealt with his father’s abuse

DS: You said your father was a victim of abuse himself and that pattern often repeats. How did you stop that pattern? Was it through your voice work?

BW: No, not really. I had a mean streak. But I’m such a dyed-in-the-wool animal lover. I’ve always had pets. I would be so filled with anger and rage that on my way to school, it was literally a “kick at the cat” as they used to say. You’re angry and you don’t know where to direct it. You’ll kick a wall that has wet paint on it. That’ll teach them. And hurt yourself doing it. I’d go out and kick the shit out of some little cat or something, just like you know, smack it. You know, go over and go to pet it, then whack it because that’s all I knew. In a weird way, in a weird permutation of the whole situation, to me that was supposed to be love. Cause why would your parent hit you, hurt you? Why? It never makes sense to a kid. And they all used to say, “It’s because I care about you.” But I got over that stuff and what I did was start to hurt myself.

DS: How so?

BW: I started drinking and doing drugs when I was about 21. I was playing in a band and it was all part of the picture, you know. It could be rosy for you. You couldn’t survive anywhere else, but in a band you were like golden. I used to punch walls, cause ruckuses and get into fights wherever I went. You know, throw things at people.

[edit]Rehabilitation and sobriety

DS: How did you stop the fights and the drugs?

BW: I had to go to rehab. I had a job in radio. I stopped playing music. I tried to do some standup comedy, but I don’t have the discipline for it. I used to just go out there and not care if I died or lived or whatever. You know, I’d just say stuff. I was always searching. I just couldn’t go up there and do twelve minutes and pretend like I’d just thought of it, you know, for three years.

DS: Are you still sober?

BW: Oh yeah. I’ve been sober for 22 years. But I had to go into rehab. I had a series of car accidents. I almost got killed one night but I just walked away from it chuckling, smashed.

…	I got away with this kind of behavior and it was awful because I was terrorizing people. Not during the day. At night. And stories. There would always be stories and then it would make the papers.	…
—West on his wilder days.

DS: Were you at a point where you didn’t necessarily want to die, but you just didn’t care if you lived?

BW: That’s pretty much it, yeah. You put your finger on it. There is a point that you can reach in your life where you don’t want to live but you haven’t made the decision to die.

DS: Whatever happens happens.

BW: Yeah. You let the wind blow you around. I have a zillion stories. I should write a book. These are stories that you think, ‘No, that couldn’t be true. That couldn’t possibly be true.’ I was in radio around the same time too. I went back to playing music in the early eighties after a hiatus. I started playing again with a couple of people and I was also working radio but I was in a constant blackout. And people said I was good on the radio. I don’t know what I did or said. I just used to come in there and turn the place upside down. I was too good to fire. But they didn’t know what to do with me, you know. I’d come in in the middle of a night—

DS: And that would almost egg you on?

BW: No, no. It wasn’t that. They wouldn’t just grab me and throw me up against a wall and say, “Listen, you little fuck, you’re going to rehab.” I got away with this kind of behavior and it was awful because I was terrorizing people. Not during the day. At night. And stories. There would always be stories and then it would make the papers. You know, that kind of stuff. I finally cracked up a car and I was in for non-payment of rent and the judge says, ‘I don’t care about this non-payment of rent thing, but you’re doing a week in Charles Street Jail for this DWI that you never answered for.’ This was before the advent of computers. Now, they press a button and it spits out everything. But back then, you could screw up in one town and then go to another town and do exactly the same thing and they could never put them together because everything was on paper.

DS: Now it’s all electronic.

BW: But I wasn’t proud of that. That was the lowest point of my life. But I’ve been sober for longer than I was a user. Twenty-two years.

[edit]Is West glad he experienced addiction?

DS: Are you in some way glad that you went through the drug and alcohol abuse?

BW: I could ask you the same thing and I don’t mean to pull a “Donald Rumsfeld,” interviewing myself. But I could ask you the same thing. Are you glad? Because if you are where you are and it seems okay, then you had to have gone through those things for you to be the total sum of your experiences which led you to the very spot and the very phone you’re talking on. You know what I mean? And so it’s almost like no matter what you did, if you finally get yourself together and you mean well and things are going okay, it’s like, ‘Well, it had to be that way.’ The universe obviously had to teach me something.

Stimpy from Ren and Stimpy.

DS: Do you believe in a higher power?

BW: Yes I do. I don’t know what it is. I just think its some higher form of energy and some sort of being, but I can’t embody it in my mind. But I know I have a one to one, kind of a spiritual connection to whatever that is. See I was raised, I had Catholicism shoved down my throat. I was an altar boy. I knew the mass in Latin.

DS: Me too.

BW: Really?

DS: I didn’t know the mass in Latin, but I was an altar boy and I had Catholicism shoved down my face, but I’m 33, so Vatican II had happened.

BW: Yeah, and then you get “Father PreCum” trying to give you a massage and shit like that.

DS: The priest at my church got a nun pregnant and my mother, who was the president of the PTAat my Catholic grade school, helped deliver the baby and keep the whole thing hidden.

BW: Really?

DS: Yeah. And he’s still the priest.

BW: I think it’s probably a guy masquerading as a nun, if you’re talking about priests.

[edit]West on his career

DS: Where do you see yourself now in your career?

BW: Exactly where I want to be. You know, I feel bad for kids who want to be voice-overs. They will always be needed. I always encourage them. They’re always going to need what you offer. And you can make a living if you’re really good. But there’s only so far you can go now. Before, the sky was the limit. There wasn’t these rigged fights standing in your way. ‘Cause right now, it’s like a rigged fight. You can still audition and get great satisfaction on the job as a voiceover. And that’s all I ever really wanted to be.

But I did aspire to do animations that required voice work. And I’ve done some of it and then this trend set in. And believe me we don’t get the kind of money those people get for doing voices. It’s rather odd to me. At some point I realized many years ago—I was a teenager in the sixties, protesting with the long hair, running around with the hippies—I realized when I looked at all the guys we were supposed to hate so much and resent, I kind of analyzed what complacency was, and they seemed complacent to me. They reached a point in their lives where they felt good about themselves and just cause a bunch of kids come along that were popping drugs and accusing you of this and that and being the man and everything, you think your feelings states are never going to change. And I used to say they’re complacent. But the thing is that everybody that’s born pretty much has to reach that point where they’re looking down the barrel of their own complacency. You gotta like do a little gear shifting.

DS: At what point was that for you?

BW: When I stopped drinking, of course. But I couldn’t play music in the way I wanted to play it anymore. I would have been like a parodyof myself. So that didn’t seem truthful to me. Trying to do comedy seemed truthful to me, but then, like I told you before, I didn’t have the discipline to do stand-up. That term wasn’t popular much before the seventies. Then you started hearing these stand-up comics. When I was a kid and when I was a teenager, doing comedy meant you were interrupting somebody’s dinner in a restaurant. There was no comedy clubs per se. But the turning point—it’s called survival. It’s like being a cockroach. You evolve or die. When I was kid I thought everybody was like me and all these people I hang with are going to be running the country and I couldn’t have been more wrong.

[edit]West on politics

[continued from previous section]

DS: Well they are. It’s just things have changed.

BW: I’m way older than a lot of these guys by the way, that are out there. But to me they look like old men with bad breath and dandruff.

DS: Who are you talking about?

BW: Republicans.

DS: Yeah.

BW: You know, the guys that are running things. They don’t look like people that came from my generation at all. I’m as old as Karl Rove, or any of those idiots and it’s like, ‘Where did you come from?’ It’s still the same old geezers that hide behind religion and family values, and then they’re messing with guys in men’s rooms and scandal prone because that’s sort of what the party is famous for. I hated those guys and I didn’t grow up to be one. But then I watch all these people from my generation just suddenly morph into that and I’m still in a state of shock. Where did these Donna Reeds and these little Breck girls, St. Pauli girls that are filled with Republican ideology come from? It’s like they’re young. What is this, you know.

DS: It’s confusing because you look at somebody like Dick Cheney, who has this lesbian daughter, who’s in a gay marriage [Poe and Cheney have not entered into a formal union - ed] and now has a baby with her partner, and you just don’t know how the situation exists. It’s hard to comprehend. That Mary Cheney exists in the Republican party, and that she seems to be fine with that existence and even works for it.

BW: I know, it’s almost like it shouldn’t be possible, yet it is. And these guys are thumping their chests about it. I don’t go for that. It’s like saying you don’t approve of who and what your daughter is by birth. I’ll never understand that. And, again, Cheney is only like six or seven years older than me. You know what I mean? Like where the f did this shit come from?

[edit]Billy West on modern American society

DS: Has the Iraq War affected you much as a person?

BW: Yeah, totally. I watched the whole Vietnam thing go down and it’s the exact same thing. You think we would learn, but we don’t because the proof of that is there’s Holocaust deniers to something that happened a couple years before I was born, that there wasextermination. Now there’s people that aren’t sure whether that happened or not, no matter how many shoes are piled up and down inWashington, D.C..

DS: Teach the controversy. Make it appear there are two sides to every fact.

BW: Yeah, but there ain’t two sides to science. And when you start banning science and real knowledge, then you’re in George Orwell land. The pretense of it all really bothers me. I hate sitting there, talking to a guy that’s looking me right in the eye, and he’s lying to me. I hate when adults play pretend. I hate it more than anything. The only time I want to play pretend is when I can play like a child and not make it into an ideology. I know I go way off the subject, but I have a lot to say and a lot of people say, as far as the animation and the celebrities and all that, you know, I’m not so outspoken. Maybe not everybody talks about it, but what am I going to do? It’s the truth.

Dr. Farnsworth on Futurama.

DS: Do you think we live in a fear-based society now?

BW: It’s no secret to anybody, unless you fell off a potato truck somewhere. Back-street America.

DS: What is the reasoning behind questions like, ‘Aren’t you afraid of saying such-and-such thing?’

BW: Because the person is usually fear-driven himself and totally understands the consequences of telling the truth. You don’t get rewarded for it, let’s put it that way.

DS: Are you optimistic?

BW: I’m optimistic about my own life and things changing for the better. I don’t pin my existence on the industry. I really don’t. Some people, without their fame, they would just roll up into a ball and bounce away and I’m like a reluctant famer, if you know what I mean.Celebrity means nothing to me. The word means nothing to me. I don’t know if I said this. I probably already did because I’ve been talking so long. But if you fart the national anthem you can be a celebrity. It’s bloodless. It’s artless. It’s Godless. But, fuck, that’s what people want. And the idea that the word celebrity and the word diva has been watered down into any girl with a belly button now and some gold chain around her neck can be a diva. It doesn’t matter why they call the great talents divas, you know women in the theater. It’s a pass-fail society. It’s like, in my opinion, the guy that can fart the national anthem and is famous is totally equal to someone else who actually has talent and worked their ass off and became famous for having a gift. But it can be debated. It’s like you’re saying there’s good art and bad art. Then there’s like, well define art. It’s endless. It’s infinite.

DS: And you think that they are equal?

BW: No, of course not.

DS: You’re saying in today’s culture they are equal?

BW: Both can be famous. That’s not the kind of fame that I would want and the other kind of fame is a certain flavor of misery too because there’s a trade-off that you lose your personal life. I spent enough time in the fantasy world. I don’t watch reality shows. These are the kind of people I couldn’t wait to get away from in high school and I’m going to chronicle their stupid adventures, you know? I don’t live there. I don’t watch television.

DS: I don’t have cable, so I know how you feel.

BW: Yeah, but even if I had cable, satellite, everything, I don’t watch television. I surround myself with things that edify me, not because it’s there. I’m an information freak. I’m a news freak. But it’s got to be truthful news and that’s why I’ll go to the BBC News on the Internet. There’s less pressure with the truth teller over there.

DS: It’s amazing when you hear the BBC interview British politicians. We find it shocking that they’ll say things like “Aren’t you essentially lying when you say that?”

BW: But that was the Fourth Estate. That was the idea that you owe your readers. You’ve been entrusted to deliver news to them and even if it’s an editorial or an interview, the idea is to get as much true information so people can decide for themselves. I don’t care if the interviewer’s biased. If I get enough information, I have a chance to be biased or not.

DS: That’s an argument on Wikipedia: people make the argument, ‘let’s present the information out there and let the reader decide.

BS: Yeah, but if a lot of times the information is totally incorrect to begin with.

DS: Exactly,and it can be difficult to decide what to believe when reasonable minds can differ, but I think it’s very problematic to ever argue “just let the reader decide.” I don’t know if WIkiedia is the place for that fight, but in the news media, that is the place for the fight. I interviewed Gay Talese, who quoted Norman Mailer who said the media is like a donkey, and you must feel the donkey every day; the donkey will eat anything: garbage, tin cans, slop. And report on whatever they are fed.

[edit]Billy West on telling it like it is

DS: Are your voices an attempt to understand reality?

BW: Well yeah. All I was presented with was life as it was deconstructing and disintegrating. And I had to pick up whatever pieces I had off the floor and try to put it together in a way that made sense to me. I don’t know if I’m making myself all that clear.

…	I really love what I do and I don’t want people to think I’m sitting here angry all the time. I’m absolutely happy and I like what my life has become. But I still will start feeling weird if somebody asks me a question and I can’t tell the truth about it. I’m just telling it like it is.	…
—Billy West

DS: No you are.

BW: Yeah, I’m telling you stuff that I never said to anybody.

DS: Well it’s good.

BW: You’re like the Barbara Walters of your generation. And I’m not going to protect an image I don’t really have. Nobody wants to hear what I really think about politics. I totally understand it. It’s like, every night is opening night if you’re a performer. Okay that’s done. Now what? I mean if everyone had to answer that standard in their job. “Now what are you going to do?” Because I don’t get told what to do. I audition for everything because if you want to work you’ve got to audition. Some people call me out of the blue and say, ‘We just want you,’ which is very nice and I worked really hard for that status. But I still audition for everything. There’s a show coming up called Rahan and there’s a 26 episode commitment on that. I’ll be starting that soon. I can’t tell you much about it because I’ve only read the auditions, the lines I was supposed to do. And the other thing is Futurama is going to keep me busy for awhile even though all the voice-over work is done. There’s lots of projects that are related to it. And I’m still doing the M&Ms. I really love what I do and I don’t want people to think I’m sitting here angry all the time. I’m absolutely happy and I like what my life has become. But I still will start feeling weird if somebody asks me a question and I can’t tell the truth about it. I’m just telling it like it is.

DS: That’s perfect. I will send you a link to the interview when it is published.

BW: That would be fine. I’d appreciate it. There’s so much wrong on Wikipedia, like that I got booted off the Stern show. I feel a lot of dehumanized lie dispensers get a hold of these things and just make it so. Believe me, there’s this very small but very active group of posters that want to keep dancing in the pet cemetery with animal corpses.

DS: It doesn’t say anything negative about the Stern show. It just mentions the characters that you did and that you were on there. And the only thing it says is that “Billy has since claimed that he left the Stern show because WXRK management refused to give him a sufficient pay raise.”

BW: Yeah. That’s the real reason. That’s cool. They finally got that in there. For a while there it was like, He was going to be Invader Zim, but he didn’t make the cut. He wasn’t Invader Zim and somebody else was. That’s so stupid to me. Rick Horowitz was a friend of mine. He was better at it than I was. That’s a fact of life. Instead of printing what I didn’t do. I mean, there should be a link to the list of voice credits, if you can find one. You know a complete one.

DS: There’s a link to your official web site on there. And there’s also a link to Voicechasers database and a link to Internet Movie database and a link to an interview with you on CNBC.

BW: Oh. The Donny Deutsch interview. That was weird too. I mean I really love Donny Deutsch, but he kept asking, ‘What it’s like making all of this money?’ Because that’s what the show is. It’s about finance or something. I mean, I know the guy. I actually used to work for him because he had Deutsch Advertising, when I was doing commercials. But he had to keep the money thing going because that’s the channel basically. His show was about that and I was embarrassed. I mean, now that you’ve got millions because we know that you’re working. I’m in the same boat you are Donny. As far as your house goes, you want what’s yours and what touches yours to avoid encroachment. And it’s never enough because fate keeps throwing stuff at you and nobody knows what it’s like to pay a seven figure tax, in quarters over a year. You wind up about the same except that you have more stuff than most people.

Everyone needs to accessorize with a hot pink taser C2.

Published on Friday, January 25, 2008 by In These Times

Tupperware and Tasers

by Silja J.A. Talvi

The SUV-driving, stun-gun-wielding housewife is coming to a suburb near you. In Arizona, Tupperware-style Taser parties have become all the rage, thanks to the enterprising savvy of saleswoman Dana Shafman, founder of Shieldher Inc.

Shafman’s little soirees aren’t just popular, they’re also highly profitable. Over light conversation and snacks, women are invited to handle the palm-sized C2, the latest (and smallest) civilian version of a Taser stun gun. The C2 is also the most affordable Taser to hit the market, starting at $299.99-with an option to upgrade the C2 with a $50 laser beam to better the chances of debilitating a human target. Because practice makes perfect, the women in attendance are encouraged to grab a C2 and take turns shooting at a cardboard cutout representing a male attacker.

“I felt that we have Tupperware parties and candle parties to protect our food and house, so why not have a Taser party to learn how to protect our lives and bodies?” Shafman told the the Arizona Republic. Shafman projects that the parties will be held in at least a half-dozen other states by March.

The C2 comes in four iPod-matching metallic colors: “Hot pink” has been the top seller since the weapon hit the consumer market last summer. While the company admits that men, too, might benefit from carrying the mini-stunner, Taser’s marketing strategy has been directed at the phobic and fashion-forward female consumer.

Last July, the New York Times previewed the C2’s debut with a feature article titled, “Feeling Secure With a Little Shocking Pink.” Accompanying the article was a glamour-action photo of Taser International President Kathy Hanrahan with the weapon in hand. Hanrahan made no bones about the C2’s direct marketing strategy and conceptual design: “It’s a woman’s product,” she said.

In a number of promotional media appearances and technology conference presentations since that time, Taser officials have even gone so far as to dub the C2 the “Lady Taser.”

“When you’re going out to a nightclub or you have the device clipped onto your belt at a business meeting, you don’t want to look like Dirty Harry,” company spokesperson Steve Tuttle told ABC News last summer.

In what could have easily passed as a terribly tacky infomercial, ABC News ran a December 2007 “Money Matters” segment praising the palm-sized stunner as an exciting holiday gift for women, in which anchor Laura Marquez described the C2 as a “Taser with a softened look.”

Despite a plethora of headline-making news over the course of the year-including the notorious “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” incident during Sen. John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) University of Florida speech in September 2007-ABC News showcased Taser’s own video montage of alleged male criminals being stunned into submission. For the ABC News segment, the network opted for a large-font text banner to accompany the images: “Tasers Sold to Protect Women.”

None of those video snippets actually depicted women being attacked, and the network’s Taser-friendly sloganeering (and Marquez’s ridiculously soft-balled questions) didn’t seem coincidental in the least.

The Scottsdale, Ariz., corporation has spent years honing a relentless public relations campaign-complete with a Rolodex of at-the-ready medical, legal and law enforcement stun technology “experts”-that seems to have convinced many news outlets that Taser’s word is gospel truth.

The success of Taser’s C2 sales over the past several months can largely be attributed to the company’s aggressive strategy to play on women’s worst fears of assault and rape. While the C2 might look cute, it is utterly debilitating-a serious step up, as it were, from older self-defense products like mace and pepper spray.

Just as with the “professional” model, a triggered mini stun gun shoots out two, thin nitrogen-fueled wires with dart-like tips that penetrate clothing and embed in the skin. These darts are juiced to deliver an incapacitating 50,000 volts of electricity for 30 uninterrupted seconds-ostensibly to allow the Taser-wielder to make a quick getaway.

Aside from the various bells and whistles that would appeal to paramilitary-minded weapon owners, the key difference between C2s and the much more costly civilian and “professional” versions of X-26s is that they enable the “stunner” to shock the “stunnee” over and over again.

Whether we’re talking about cutesy mini-stunners, or their beefed-up big brothers, Taser has become a household name and a veritable pop culture phenomenon rooted in either opposition or celebration of this futuristic weapon that was once but a gleam in Gene Roddenberry’s creative eye. (Unlike the Taser, the sci-fi Star Trek “phaser” could specifically be set to a specific stun level, all the way up to a deadly jolt.)

Devoted Trekkies with “Set Phasers to Stun!” T-shirts were likely never the cool kids on the block, but “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” bumper stickers and T-shirts are a different story. Some are wearing the shirts to express their outrage toward the prevalence of Tasers in use by “campus cops” on college, high school, middle school and even elementary school grounds-as well as in political demonstrations as a terrifying method of crowd control.

But you might be just as likely to spot a clean-cut fraternity member wearing the same shirt-only to find that he hasn’t given a thought as to whether being hit repeatedly with 50,000 volts of electricity should be considered an act of torture.

There’s been no shortage in the blogosphere of people poking fun of Andrew Meyer’s appeals, moans and screams that accompanied the University of Florida incident. Indeed, sites like www.dont-tasemebro.com are further proof of the ways in which even the most serious issue can be trivialized and depleted of its power. Why pass up a perfect opportunity to make a bit of money ($29.95 per T-shirt, to be exact) on a popular slogan, even if it originated in the pleading moments before the sickening crack-snap-sizzle sound of a Taser shooting electrified darts into a person’s skin?

Taking outright pleasure in the pain the weapon can inflict, the popular TV series “24″ seems to have developed a love affair with this kind of weaponry. At least two “terrorists” have been stun-gunned thus far, in addition to Abu Ghraib-style electrical torture during interrogations.

Even low-budget Asian martial arts movies shown in the United States feature the occasional stun gun stunt, alongside more familiar, high-flying punches and kicks.

People who have been tased often liken the experience to the sensation of dying-something that does not seem like an exaggeration in light of at least 250 Taser-related deaths in the United States since 2001, according to Amnesty International. The U.N. Committee Against Torture recently determined that the use of Tasers “causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture.”

Until recently, reports of Taser-related incidents and deaths have tended to involve men, typically described by police as having behaved in deranged and/or dangerous ways before being stunned.

But what once amounted to a few reported Taser encounters per month has now taken the shape of daily accounts throughout North America, including several high-profile deaths in Canada.

Last September, the death of a non-English-speaking Polish immigrant at the hands of inexplicably aggressive, Taser-wielding Royal Canadian Mounted Police at the Vancouver Airport drew international outrage when a bystander’s cell phone footage thwarted initial “official” efforts to downplay what had happened.

Increasingly, people being stunned aren’t just people with limited English-speaking skills; they’re also children, teenagers, the elderly and the disabled. In fact, with astonishing frequency, police are using Tasers on women and girls.

In November 2007, for instance, Chicago police tased an 82-year-old woman with dementia.

Last June, a homeless woman died outside an Oklahoma City shelter after she was thrown on the ground, handcuffed by police and then tased while incapacitated.

In Green Cove Springs, Fla., the family of an agitated 56-year-old wheelchair-bound woman filed suit last February after watching police shock her 10 times in response to their request for assistance. Her death was ruled a homicide.

Ohio has become an unexpected epicenter of the use of Tasers against women and girls. Last May, Crystalynn Coker, a 17-year-old African-American student was tased in Monroe, Ohio, when she refused to back down from a racist verbal barrage by a fellow student and staged her own form of a one-person, nonviolent sit-in after her teacher ordered her out of the classroom. According to Coker and her family, a police officer was called in without any justifiable cause to physically remove her from the room. Once the officer pulled Coker from her chair, he handcuffed and tased her three times without any explanation before, during or after the attack.

In the town of Warren, Ohio, footage emerged in September 2007 of a policeman shocking 38-year-old Heidi Gill repeatedly. In the video, Gill is shown crawling, moaning and pleading desperately as she tries to get away from the apparently trigger-happy officer. Footage shows Officer Rich Kovach handcuffing and dragging Gill’s body around during much of the ordeal, which is now under investigation.

One of the strangest overreactions involving Taser use occurred in, of all places, a Best Buy electronics store in Daytona Beach, Fla. Amid frenetic rush of pre-Christmas shoppers, 35-year-old yoga instructor Elizabeth Beeland had been waiting in line to purchase a CD player with her credit card. When her cell phone rang, Beeland stepped outside the store’s noisy environment to have a brief conversation. Although she left both the CD player and credit card with the cashier, the clerk somehow concluded that Beeland might be using a stolen card, and called police officer Claudia Wright over to handle the situation. Beeland took umbrage at the accusation, and raised her voice. Wright threatened to arrest her if she didn’t stop yelling. In what has become an increasingly familiar scenario-the rapid escalation from an initial encounter with a civilian, culminating with the infliction of horrendous pain, sometimes within just a few seconds-Wright opted to use her X-26 over any number of more logical alternatives. On the surveillance tape, Beeland is seen trying to back away from the Taser-wielding cop, then falling to the floor in obvious pain after the stun gun wires pierced her flesh.

Worse yet, Tasers have already begun to be used in robberies, domestic violence and hostage situations.

Among other disturbing reports, a serial rapist in Modesto, Calif., kidnapped and brutally raped a 27-year-old woman in August 2006 after stunning her with a Taser.

For the sake of those schmooze, stun and sales parties, they might do well to keep this kind of information under a tightly sealed Tupperware lid.

Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In These Times, an investigative journalist and essayist with credits in many dozens of newspapers and magazines nationwide, including The Nation, Salon, Santa Fe Reporter, Utne, and the Christian Science Monitor. Her book, Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System was published in November 2007 (Seal Press, an imprint of Perseus.)

The US Department of Agriculture, through its commodity subsidy program for soybeans, corn, wheat and rice, deliberately and forcefully prevents the local fruit and vegetable food movement from expanding.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

MY FORBIDDEN FRUITS (AND VEGETABLES) 

By JACK HEDIN

NY Times, Published: March 1, 2008

Rushford, Minn.

Enlarge This Image

Jacob Magraw-Mickelson

 

IF you’ve stood in line at a farmers’ market recently, you know that the local food movement is thriving, to the point that small farmers are having a tough time keeping up with the demand.But consumers who would like to be able to buy local fruits and vegetables not just at farmers’ markets, but also in the produce aisle of their supermarket, will be dismayed to learn that the federal government works deliberately and forcefully to prevent the local food movement from expanding. And the barriers that the United States Department of Agriculture has put in place will be extended when the farm bill that House and Senate negotiators are working on now goes into effect.As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.All went well until early July. That’s when the two landowners discovered that there was a problem with the local office of the Farm Service Administration, the Agriculture Department branch that runs the commodity farm program, and it was going to be expensive to fix.The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)In my case, that meant I paid my landlords $8,771 — for one season alone! And this was in a year when the high price of grain meant that only one of the government’s three crop-support programs was in effect; the total bill might be much worse in the future.In addition, the bureaucratic entanglements that these two farmers faced at the Farm Service office were substantial. The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.Why? Because national fruit and vegetable growers based in California, Florida and Texas fear competition from regional producers like myself. Through their control of Congressional delegations from those states, they have been able to virtually monopolize the country’s fresh produce markets.That’s unfortunate, because small producers will have to expand on a significant scale across the nation if local foods are to continue to enter the mainstream as the public demands. My problems are just the tip of the iceberg.Last year, Midwestern lawmakers proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would provide some farmers, though only those who supply processors, with some relief from the penalties that I’ve faced — for example, a soybean farmer who wanted to grow tomatoes would give up his usual subsidy on those acres but suffer none of the other penalties. However, the Congressional delegations from the big produce states made the death of what is known as Farm Flex their highest farm bill priority, and so it appears to be going nowhere, except perhaps as a tiny pilot program.Who pays the price for this senselessness? Certainly I do, as a Midwestern vegetable farmer. But anyone trying to do what I do on, say, wheat acreage in the Dakotas, or rice acreage in Arkansas would face the same penalties. Local and regional fruit and vegetable production will languish anywhere that the commodity program has influence.Ultimately of course, it is the consumer who will pay the greatest price for this — whether it is in the form of higher prices I will have to charge to absorb the government’s fines, or in the form of less access to the kind of fresh, local produce that the country is crying out for.Farmers need the choice of what to plant on their farms, and consumers need more farms like mine producing high-quality fresh fruits and vegetables to meet increasing demand from local markets — without the federal government actively discouraging them.

Jack Hedin is a farmer.