One Hand Jerking (43 page)

“The school district wants [him] to be politically correct,” his attorney said. “We want the school district to be constitutionally correct.”

When the father of Nick Berg, who was beheaded in Iraq by Al Qaeda-connected militants, was a guest on
Good Morning America
, he declined to remove his T-shirt that read “Bring the Troops Home Now,” so ABC wouldn't show it on the air.

Michelle Goldberg reported in
Salon
that author Irene Dische was covering a George Bush speech for the German paper
Die Zeit
, sitting with artist Art Spiegelman, when police removed them both from the press stands and questioned them about their T-shirts. Spiegelman's said “Pray For a Secular Society”; Dische's featured the word “Bush” and Chinese characters. She convinced police it said, “I love Bush.” It actually meant “Shit on Bush and flush him away.”

In Franklin County, Washington on Election day, a man reported being turned away from a polling place because he was wearing a T-shirt that said “Vote or Die.”

A federal judge ruled in favor of the Williamstown, Vermont public school officials who forced a student to cover up a T-shirt with a variety of images, including cocaine and a martini glass. It referred to George Bush as a lying drunk driver who abused cocaine and marijuana, and called him the “chicken-hawk-in-chief ” who was engaged in a “world domination tour.”

No doubt I would get in trouble if I were to wear a T-shirt with a picture of Charlie McCarthy labeled “George W. Bush” at his inauguration. That's the problem with suppressing freedom of expression. In the immortal words of Mortimer Snerd, “How d'ya know when yer finished?”

Of all the movies I've ever seen,
Midnight Express
—which featured images of appalling conditions and brutality in a Turkish prison—was one of the most powerful, and landed Oliver Stone an Academy Award for best screenplay. Now he's gone and apologized for offending Turkey. “It's true I overdramatized the script,” Stone told reporters in Istanbul. “But the reality of Turkish prisons at the time was also referred to . . . by various human rights associations.” Stone had been afraid of visiting Turkey since the release of the film in 1978, he said, because of the effect it had on the country. “For years, I heard that Turkish people were angry with me, and I didn't feel safe there. The culture ministry gave me a guarantee that I would be safe, so I feel comfortable now.”

Midnight Express
was adapted from the book by Billy Hayes, an American who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for attempting to smuggle hashish out of Turkey, and eventually escaped. Stone and Hayes also did a week's worth of interviews in Stone's hotel room after he'd read the galleys.

“That was fun,” Hayes recalls, “like being in a washing machine on tilt. And while some people find him a bit much, I love Oliver's energy.”

I had contacted him to get his reaction to Stone's statement.

“How would you say that the script was overdramatized?”

“My biggest problem with the screenplay and the film was that you didn't see a single good Turk, so the overall impression was that all Turks are like those depicted in the film. And, of course, this is not true. It doesn't take away from the fact that the prison was brutal and the legal system hypocritical, but that can be said of almost any country, particularly, and unfortunately, ours. Prison guards are not necessarily the cream of any society.”

“Did your biting the tongue off a fellow prisoner actually occur?”

“The tongue-biting was the filmmaker's way of having the informer get his dramatically just reward. Actually, I tried to bash that sumbitch's head in but the guards stopped me. I don't have a problem with the intent of that scene, but it's so strange now to remember that kind of up close and personal violence.”

“What would say was most offensive to the Turks?”

“The most offensive scene for the Turks was Billy's speech in the courtroom calling them all a ‘nation of pigs,' etc. In fact, when I spoke to the court, knowing I was having my sentence changed to life, I was trying to hold on to my shredding sanity and wanted to affect these people who were taking my life away but really knew nothing about me as a person. I said something like, ‘I've been in your jail four years now and if you sentence me to more prison I can't agree with you, all I can do is forgive you. . . .' It affected them. The judge told me his hands were tied. They all looked upset. Then sentenced me to life, which the kindly judge reduced to 30 years. Thanks. I think. Anyway, Oliver wanted to know how I could forgive people who had just taken my life away. I told him about trying to maintain my balance. He asked how I felt the next morning after sentencing. I told him I was furious. So he wrote that courtroom speech.”

“Was there anything that you thought should have been included in the film that was omitted?”

“What was missing from the film was what I found in jail. A sense of self and the trite but true notion of appreciating each moment. I discovered my reason for being, which is simply to love. It took a lot of banging my hard head against the wall, literally and figuratively, to realize this truth. They didn't deal with it in the film but that made the entire experience worth it.”

“Tell me about
Midnight Return
.”

“It's a follow-up book about the really weird part of my prison experience—returning to the U.S. and becoming a little mini-celebrity, with all that entails. Hope to get it published one of these days.”

“Can you give me an example of mini-celebrity weirdness?”

“February 20th and 24th in 1980 I was mentioned in the
Steve Canyon
comic strip. From the bizarre to the surreal. How weird is that?”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I've been mentioned in
Pogo
and
Zippy the Pinhead
. You get used to it. Anyway, now I can start waiting for Oliver Stone to apologize to Greece for
Alexander
.”

Michael Dare once interviewed Billy Hayes and a few other protagonists in Stone's biopics about what it's like to have your life rewritten by Oliver Stone. Their stories all involved some sort of wish fulfillment. At one point, Stone said to each one, “Is there anything you wish you had done but didn't?” Hayes said, “I wish I'd ripped that guard's tongue out.” Ron Kovic (
Born on the 4th of July
) said, “I wish I'd gone and talked to the parents of the American soldier I accidentally killed.” Richard Boyle (
Salvador
) said, “I wish I'd told off the American ambassador to Salvador when I ran into him at a party.” Ray Manzarek (
The Doors
) said, “Fuck Oliver Stone.” In each case, Stone replied, “You got it,” and he put the subject's fantasy in the movie, except for that scene with Manzarek fucking Stone, which didn't make the cut.

Comic strips like
Doonesbury
,
Boondocks
and
La Cucaracha
are expected to be controversial, so it was surprising when
Get Fuzzy
—an ordinarily non-controversial comic strip which features talking animals—dealt with a human character losing a leg in Iraq, a sequence which, coincidentally, ran simultaneously with a
Doonesbury
sequence on that same theme.

Recently,
Get Fuzzy
presented a series of “Rejected
Get Fuzzy
Storylines.” One was, “
Get Fuzzy
attempts to outdo the
South Park
episode where they said ‘fuck' 162 times by saying ‘fuck' 162 [sic] times.” To illustrate this rejected storyline, a cat is saying ‘Fuck you' over and over. Although each use of the word ‘fuck' had been blacked out by artist Darby Conley, the
Los Angeles Times
quietly substituted a year-old
Get Fuzzy
.

In another non-controversial strip,
Zits
, Jeremy, a lazy, would-be rebellious teenager, asks a friend to hold his backpack while he changes into a T-shirt that says “Question Authority.” Jeremy explains, “I'm not allowed to wear this at home.” His friend responds, “Weak convictions are better than none, I guess.”

That same theme popped up in a sometimes controversial strip,
Non Sequitur
by Wiley Miller, venting via his alter-ego, Joe. Little Danae asks him, “Why are
you so grumpy lately, Daddy?” Looking up from his newspaper—which has a front-page headline, “Nothing to See Here, Folks, Move Along”—he replies, “I'm just peeved about our wimpy news media. They're nothing but corporate lap dogs now.” “Oh, I see,” says Danae, “questioning authority isn't just a good thing, it's patriotic!” Her father, now reading another page—headlined “Nothin' Here Either”—replies, “Absolu . . . I mean, it depends on the authority.” Danae says, “Too late, Daddy . . . if that's your
real
name.”

In another strip, Miller reveals his disgust with how little attention American media were paying to reports of voting irregularities. A waitress with a New England accent is serving coffee to a customer at Offshore Flo's Diner. She asks, “What'r ya readin' theah, Joe?” He replies, “The
Ukrainian Times
.” Waitress: “Uh . . . how come?” Now we can see that the headline reads, “Election Fraud!” Joe: “Oh, I'm just curious what an independent press questioning its government looks like.” Waitress: “Why don't we have one of those?” Joe: “I think it has something to do with values.”

Miller told
Editor & Publisher
that he's upset by “the laziness and lack of guts by our entire ‘news' media—both print and electronic. They should all be embarrassed by what happened in the Ukraine. But that would take integrity, wouldn't it? At least they're providing me with material, so maybe I shouldn't complain.”

He added that he would've liked to have seen American media “pursue the election results and the many questions surrounding its legitimacy with the same fervor and interest they showed in the all-important story of steroid use by baseball players. But I guess that in itself shows what's really important to corporate wonks posing as editors today.”

Ironically,
Non Sequitur
is syndicated to more than 700 newspapers, none of which rejected his Ukranian-election strip.

Six weeks after 9/11, the U.S.A. Patriot Act became law. It had been secretly drafted by the Department of Justice. There was virtually no debate in Congress. Hardly any legislators had more than a few hours to read 342 pages. Now, that document and its ilk are pierced and probed by Walter Brasch in
America's Unpatriotic Acts: The Federal Government's Violation of Constitutional and Civil Rights
.

“Although I expected the Bush administration to be scared of dissent,” Brasch
told me, “I don't believe that in my 35 years covering government and politics I have seen a presidential administration so fearful of the people that it would deliberately and arrogantly go to the lengths it has to reduce dissenting views—and even potential dissenting views of any kind at any level. I kept running into incident after incident of the president's ‘people' restricting the First Amendment rights of the people. Had I focused only upon this, there would have been nothing else in the book.”

Many instances of government repression have occurred too late to be included. For example, at the University of Wisconsin, the student health center informed students that under the Patriot Act, the government may obtain their medical records, and patients will never know.

Canada is concerned that information about citizens living in the United States, working for Canadian companies in the U.S. or for U.S. companies directly falls under the Patriot Act. British Columbia privacy commissioner David Loukidelis stated, “Our research and analysis led us to the conclusion that the U.S.A. Patriot Act knows no borders.”

The Department of Justice refuses to confirm whether the government can see what you're reading on the Internet without having to show probable cause for a crime, instead using “pen-traps” to garner such information—tools used without the same judicial oversight required for a wiretap—a practice codified in the Patriot Act.

The Justice Department now finds it necessary to have a website defending the Patriot Act. Their public relations campaign intensified before the November election, and apparently Bush has enough votes to continue most of the Act's provisions past the December 2005 deadline.

“I was upset, although not entirely surprised,” Brasch told me, “at the number of people who were so overcome by fear after 9/11 that they said they would willingly give up some of their civil liberties in order to be safe. I expected this from those who stood close to the Bush administration. I did not expect to see so much of this from the people who claim to be moderates or liberals.

“I was also upset, although not entirely surprised, with the level of antagonism for dissenting views. While this nation had a long history of dissent, and an equally long history of people suppressing dissent, it seemed that the past three years have left more people willing to hide the First Amendment as a ‘necessity' to keep America safe.

“While all administrations in various ways have tried to curtail opposition, there is in this administration an almost morbid fear of the people—or
perhaps it is a fear that if truth emerges, the people will not support the adminstration. The frightening part is that this administration actually believes it has a mandate—from God? the people?—to do what it does, and opposition is not in the nation's best interest. Indeed, we have a more modern divine right of kings.”

And the faucet of legalized repression continues to drip drip drip. . . .