Saturday, October 29, 2005
Conservative Comic One-Off
I don't have time to do a full-on tournament level conservative comic lame-off today. But Newsbusters' dependably lame Gaggle deserves special mention for its current strip. Let's take a look (click to enlarge):
It's not notable for its reiteration of the talking point that journalists who cover Iraq for the "MSM" (man, do I hate that stupid term) are cowards, though I am still amazed at how brazenly this charge gets thrown around, considering that most of these "critics" show no indication that they ever leave their (or their parents') basements, let alone the Green Zone. No, what makes this one jaw-dropping is the apparent belief that Marines should be "executing" anyone. Should Marines line up people and systematically kill them? Apparently. Just another example of the steady degradation of what's now considered normal discourse.
It's not notable for its reiteration of the talking point that journalists who cover Iraq for the "MSM" (man, do I hate that stupid term) are cowards, though I am still amazed at how brazenly this charge gets thrown around, considering that most of these "critics" show no indication that they ever leave their (or their parents') basements, let alone the Green Zone. No, what makes this one jaw-dropping is the apparent belief that Marines should be "executing" anyone. Should Marines line up people and systematically kill them? Apparently. Just another example of the steady degradation of what's now considered normal discourse.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Conservative Comic Lame-Off 3
Again, we see the nagging punchline problem. These guys just don't know what one is. Chris Muir comes in last again today. It's ham-handed, the set-up in the first panel is sloppy, but at least there's an attempt at some sort of internal rhythm. So Day By Day is today's least lame conservative comic.
State of the Union and Gaggle, both employing the TV convention, are nearly tied for lameness. It seems pretty lame--and, frankly embrassing--for them to harp on Sandy Berger when the Republicans are going through such a massive ethical crisis on several fronts, but I'm going to give the nod to Union because you can just tell that Carl Moore think he's really put out a zinger--whoa, just look at how flustered Kerry is.
Mallard Fillmore wins. First, because it continues the super-lame "artist talking to his character" routine (again I ask, what is clutching that pencil; are those claws?), and second, because Bruce Tinsley actually manages to turn the strip into a little bout of self-pity. Waaaaah!Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Conservative Comic Lame-Off 2: Pathetic Boogaloo
A pretty lame day for conservative comics. Let's figure out who's lamest!
"Day By Day" comes up last today, since Chris Muir has been laying off the politics this week, and letting his office-bound characters do whatever it is they do in that office. You can tall that Jan--she of the impossibly slim waist--isn't being used as the liberal fall-girl now because she is reasonably dressed, at least by Muir's fantasy standards. Keep an eye out--whenever he wants her to be the office dopey liberal, he draws her with her pants nearly falling down. Seriously.
"Mallard Fillmore" mastermind Bruce Tinsley tries his hand at a predictably lame self-referential strip. Post office jokes? I can't wait for Mallard/Tinsley to start talking about his golf game. And what's up with that perspective? Is that supposed to be Tinsley's fingers holding the pencil or does he draw with his mouth? Lame, but sadly lame, so Mallard pulls up third.
Here things get close. Via Roger Ailes, I've dicsovered that there's a new lame comic on the block: "Gaggle," which purports to tell, in humorous (or not) comic form, about the scourge of the liberal media. Today's strip is a pretty lame example of what has consistently been, in its short existence, a very lame strip. Read that last panel closely--see the punchline? Of course you don't! In lame conservative comic fashion, the strip's writer (anonymous for now) doesn't see the need for one, or--more likely--has no idea how to construct one. Why be funny when you can make a specious point that the "liberal" media is no less media when it invites Bill Kristol to comment?
On many days, today's "Gaggle" would win. But as it happens, Carl Moore over at "State of the Union" is feeling particularly vicious. In another one of his patently lame celebrity cameo strips, Saddam Hussein calls up his good buddy Michael Moore for some advice on "Bush bashing." Forget that even within the realm of satire this makes no sense, and note that Moore is doing the sort of thing for which liberal commentators get raked over the goals: coyly suggesting that a commentator one doesn't agree with is somehow aligned, even casually, with a brutal dictator. So congratulations Carl--you've won today's Conservative Comic Lame-Off!
"Day By Day" comes up last today, since Chris Muir has been laying off the politics this week, and letting his office-bound characters do whatever it is they do in that office. You can tall that Jan--she of the impossibly slim waist--isn't being used as the liberal fall-girl now because she is reasonably dressed, at least by Muir's fantasy standards. Keep an eye out--whenever he wants her to be the office dopey liberal, he draws her with her pants nearly falling down. Seriously. 
"Mallard Fillmore" mastermind Bruce Tinsley tries his hand at a predictably lame self-referential strip. Post office jokes? I can't wait for Mallard/Tinsley to start talking about his golf game. And what's up with that perspective? Is that supposed to be Tinsley's fingers holding the pencil or does he draw with his mouth? Lame, but sadly lame, so Mallard pulls up third. 
Here things get close. Via Roger Ailes, I've dicsovered that there's a new lame comic on the block: "Gaggle," which purports to tell, in humorous (or not) comic form, about the scourge of the liberal media. Today's strip is a pretty lame example of what has consistently been, in its short existence, a very lame strip. Read that last panel closely--see the punchline? Of course you don't! In lame conservative comic fashion, the strip's writer (anonymous for now) doesn't see the need for one, or--more likely--has no idea how to construct one. Why be funny when you can make a specious point that the "liberal" media is no less media when it invites Bill Kristol to comment? 
On many days, today's "Gaggle" would win. But as it happens, Carl Moore over at "State of the Union" is feeling particularly vicious. In another one of his patently lame celebrity cameo strips, Saddam Hussein calls up his good buddy Michael Moore for some advice on "Bush bashing." Forget that even within the realm of satire this makes no sense, and note that Moore is doing the sort of thing for which liberal commentators get raked over the goals: coyly suggesting that a commentator one doesn't agree with is somehow aligned, even casually, with a brutal dictator. So congratulations Carl--you've won today's Conservative Comic Lame-Off!Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Conservative Comic Lame-Off
There are currently three daily comic strips whose sole existence appears to be the representation of conservative worldview on the frozen tundra of newspaper comics pages. I'm sure the creator of each strip labors under the fallacy that his is a worthy competitor to Doonesbury. Needless to say, all three strips are, in their own way, consistently lame. As an ongoing experiment at Spitting Caves, we will compare each day's offering and award a daily prize for overall lameness. So let's meet the contestants.
Mallard Fillmore: The granddaddy of the crew. In art and joke rhythms, kind of resembles B.C. with a more overt right-wing agenda. Main character is a grumpy anthropomorphic duck journalist who hates liberals. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/mallard.asp?date=20050913
State of the Union: Carl Moore's strip features no characters of its own. Mostly an array of labored caricatures of celebrities and politicians. http://www.comics.com/creators/union/archive/union-20050913.html
Day By Day: The young upstart. As of now, distributed solely on the Web. In terms of both art and writing, this is easily the most modern and accomplished of the three, but Chris Muir is also the one most plugged into Republican talking points, which he often regurgitates. The major characters work in an anonymous office where nobody seems to do anything (a comic strip tradition) and everybody often seems dressed for a formal awards ceremony or something. An odd quirk: Muir's female characters have a tendency to wear clothes a few sizes to small, all the better for Muir to render their big butts.
So let's get started with today's offering. May the lamest strip win!
Mallard's having one of those weeks. All he wants is his food at the diner but his waitress is a grumpy graduate student. Today's punchline is either astoundingly lame or ingeniously minimal.
At State of the Union, we find two Native Americans with big heads griping about how the Interior Department won't let them open a casino at Yellowstone. The punchline is presented as though it's supposed to knock you out of your seat. Bonus lame points for Moore's use of the term "Indian ways."
Finally, over at Day By Day, it's another day at the office.
The half-naked liberal white woman has been arguing with the suave black conservative all week, first about the hurricane, and now they've apparently switched gears to talk about Iraq. Let me first point out that there is an actual joke in the punchline, one that involves a semi-skilled sense of worldplay. Muir tries this kind of thing a lot and usually fails. Nonetheless, while more sophisticated than his fellow contestants, today's Muir strip is a perfect illustration of his lame tendency to regurgitate Republican babble--in this case, the notion that Iraq correspondents at the, you know, "MSM" are lazy cowards who stay in their safe air-conditioned hotels all day, while intrepid conservative bloggers are writing history's real first drafts. This viewpoint is, of course, so obviously lame given the fact that more journalists have died covering this war so far than during the entire Vietnam War. If Chris Muir were to go to Iraq and actually spend some time outside his hotel, we might reconsider our judgement, but for now--congratulations, Chris! You've won the first Conservative Comic Lame-Off!
Mallard Fillmore: The granddaddy of the crew. In art and joke rhythms, kind of resembles B.C. with a more overt right-wing agenda. Main character is a grumpy anthropomorphic duck journalist who hates liberals. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/fun/mallard.asp?date=20050913
State of the Union: Carl Moore's strip features no characters of its own. Mostly an array of labored caricatures of celebrities and politicians. http://www.comics.com/creators/union/archive/union-20050913.html
Day By Day: The young upstart. As of now, distributed solely on the Web. In terms of both art and writing, this is easily the most modern and accomplished of the three, but Chris Muir is also the one most plugged into Republican talking points, which he often regurgitates. The major characters work in an anonymous office where nobody seems to do anything (a comic strip tradition) and everybody often seems dressed for a formal awards ceremony or something. An odd quirk: Muir's female characters have a tendency to wear clothes a few sizes to small, all the better for Muir to render their big butts.
So let's get started with today's offering. May the lamest strip win!
Mallard's having one of those weeks. All he wants is his food at the diner but his waitress is a grumpy graduate student. Today's punchline is either astoundingly lame or ingeniously minimal.
At State of the Union, we find two Native Americans with big heads griping about how the Interior Department won't let them open a casino at Yellowstone. The punchline is presented as though it's supposed to knock you out of your seat. Bonus lame points for Moore's use of the term "Indian ways."
Finally, over at Day By Day, it's another day at the office.
The half-naked liberal white woman has been arguing with the suave black conservative all week, first about the hurricane, and now they've apparently switched gears to talk about Iraq. Let me first point out that there is an actual joke in the punchline, one that involves a semi-skilled sense of worldplay. Muir tries this kind of thing a lot and usually fails. Nonetheless, while more sophisticated than his fellow contestants, today's Muir strip is a perfect illustration of his lame tendency to regurgitate Republican babble--in this case, the notion that Iraq correspondents at the, you know, "MSM" are lazy cowards who stay in their safe air-conditioned hotels all day, while intrepid conservative bloggers are writing history's real first drafts. This viewpoint is, of course, so obviously lame given the fact that more journalists have died covering this war so far than during the entire Vietnam War. If Chris Muir were to go to Iraq and actually spend some time outside his hotel, we might reconsider our judgement, but for now--congratulations, Chris! You've won the first Conservative Comic Lame-Off!Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Let's All Add to the Discourse!
For those of you who don't really have the courage of your convictions, yet still like typing things on the Internet, anonymous comments may now appear on this site.
Monday, March 21, 2005
Newsflash: Incidence Arises From Circumstance
The whole Schiavo circus is so surreal by this point, it's slipped the bounds of parody, satire, whatever. The midnight Capitol jam session, the tapdance on separation of powers, Tom DeLay ranting that Democrats "have so far cost Mrs. Schiavo two meals already today" (actually, since yesterday was Sunday, she really only missed brunch, so he's counting "br-" and "-unch" separately--why won't the media tell the truth?!), the usual journalistic ass-kissery now employed in the service of Bush's defence of "life" (and almost no mention of the Texas law signed by Gov. W. that allows hospitals to pull the plug on poor people), one of these "life" advocates comparing journalists covering the story to Saddam's Minister of Information (on a day when 45 people, including one American, were killed in Iraq), and on and on.
The attempt (apparently unsuccessful) to subpoena Terri Schiavo to get her out of the hospice and onto Capitol Hill to be paraded before a loving nation still represents, for me, some sort of low-water mark in the affair. In its over-the-top tastelessness, it reminded me of something, but I couldn't figure out what. Then it hit me--it's the sort of gross-out scene that often winds up on South Park. Actually, it sort of already did.
I should say right now that I will always watch South Park, even though the show is often bogged down in "anti-PC," "look, we skewer everyone" tediousness and bogus "envelope-pushing," mainly because Cartman's voice is comedy gold. That voice has always been funny and always will be funny. If Cartman told me I had emphysema, I'd probably laugh. But another reason I'll always watch is that the show is responsible for one of the most mind-blowing television segments I've ever seen, one that eerily foreshadowed our Schiavo moment.
It's the episode where Kenny is actually dying (a neat trick in itself, since it takes a while until you figure out that his death this time isn't played for laughs). Cartman learns that stem-cell research can save Kenny's life, and travels to Capitol Hill to appear before Congress and beg them to make such research legal. At a loss for words and on the verge of tears, he decides to make his case "in the words of a timeless song." He begins to sing Asia's "Heat of the Moment." One legislator joins in, and then another, and soon the whole chamber is singing an a capella version of the turgid, keyboard-riff-having high point of a band that merged the wonder-twin powers of the Buggles and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
I won't deny that part of the reason I love this scene can be chalked up to the sort of sense memory that can be triggered by a bad song from one's youth. I mean, I guess Cartman could have sung "I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight" and it would have had the same effect. But "Heat of the Moment" is a real home-run here because the song is such a grand amalgamation of fake gestures employed in a desperate belly-flop toward sincerity--the purposeful arena-drenched power chords (I'm guessing Trevor Horn produced the song, but the 40 seconds it would take to confirm this on allmusic are 40 seconds I'll never get back), the Spector-ass "Be My Baby" drum pattern (ingeniously evoked by the cartoon Congressman via foot-stamping), "Do you remember when we used to dance / And incidence arose from circumstance?"--so that what first seems like a random choice by stoned 30-something writers starts to look like just what that scene called for.
Too often this show is overwhelmed by its contention that nothing means anything, nothing is worth caring about, get over it, etc. But here's one instance where that impulse works. If we actually have to have an argument about whether or not a stem cell deserves to be protected in our "culture of life," there's a certain dignity in opting out by leading a rousing chorus of some collective-memory doggrel. And as a gesture, singing it is no more fake or empty than dragging Terry Schiavo into Congress and in front of the cameras.
On the subject of Asia (the band, not the continent), in searching for this clip I made a startling discovery:
Way to go, Geoff Downes!
Also:
Steve Howe, are you listening? We need a miracle...
The attempt (apparently unsuccessful) to subpoena Terri Schiavo to get her out of the hospice and onto Capitol Hill to be paraded before a loving nation still represents, for me, some sort of low-water mark in the affair. In its over-the-top tastelessness, it reminded me of something, but I couldn't figure out what. Then it hit me--it's the sort of gross-out scene that often winds up on South Park. Actually, it sort of already did.
I should say right now that I will always watch South Park, even though the show is often bogged down in "anti-PC," "look, we skewer everyone" tediousness and bogus "envelope-pushing," mainly because Cartman's voice is comedy gold. That voice has always been funny and always will be funny. If Cartman told me I had emphysema, I'd probably laugh. But another reason I'll always watch is that the show is responsible for one of the most mind-blowing television segments I've ever seen, one that eerily foreshadowed our Schiavo moment.
It's the episode where Kenny is actually dying (a neat trick in itself, since it takes a while until you figure out that his death this time isn't played for laughs). Cartman learns that stem-cell research can save Kenny's life, and travels to Capitol Hill to appear before Congress and beg them to make such research legal. At a loss for words and on the verge of tears, he decides to make his case "in the words of a timeless song." He begins to sing Asia's "Heat of the Moment." One legislator joins in, and then another, and soon the whole chamber is singing an a capella version of the turgid, keyboard-riff-having high point of a band that merged the wonder-twin powers of the Buggles and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
I won't deny that part of the reason I love this scene can be chalked up to the sort of sense memory that can be triggered by a bad song from one's youth. I mean, I guess Cartman could have sung "I Just Died In Your Arms Tonight" and it would have had the same effect. But "Heat of the Moment" is a real home-run here because the song is such a grand amalgamation of fake gestures employed in a desperate belly-flop toward sincerity--the purposeful arena-drenched power chords (I'm guessing Trevor Horn produced the song, but the 40 seconds it would take to confirm this on allmusic are 40 seconds I'll never get back), the Spector-ass "Be My Baby" drum pattern (ingeniously evoked by the cartoon Congressman via foot-stamping), "Do you remember when we used to dance / And incidence arose from circumstance?"--so that what first seems like a random choice by stoned 30-something writers starts to look like just what that scene called for.
Too often this show is overwhelmed by its contention that nothing means anything, nothing is worth caring about, get over it, etc. But here's one instance where that impulse works. If we actually have to have an argument about whether or not a stem cell deserves to be protected in our "culture of life," there's a certain dignity in opting out by leading a rousing chorus of some collective-memory doggrel. And as a gesture, singing it is no more fake or empty than dragging Terry Schiavo into Congress and in front of the cameras.
On the subject of Asia (the band, not the continent), in searching for this clip I made a startling discovery:
January 30, 2005
PRESS RELEASE
What do James Bond and Eric Cartman have in common? Read on...
You may recall Cartman singing "Heat of the Moment" on Capitol Hill in Kenny's final episode of South Park, where Kenny actually died and went to heaven.
All those Senators joining in the chorus, a tribute to democracy and the power of satire.
Now we can confirm that "Heat of the Moment" has been chosen as a lead song in Pierce Brosnan's new film, The Matador.
Distributed by Miramax, this black comedy/thriller stars Brosnan as a hired killer who meets Greg Kinnear in Mexico City, setting off an odd and stirring chain of events. The film recently made its worldwide debut to critical acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival.
The Matador also stars Hope Davis, Philip Baker Hall, Dylan Baker, Roberto Sosa and Adam Scott, and is directed by Richard Shepard.
More information to follow.
Way to go, Geoff Downes!
Also:
February 08, 2005
We can now confirm that Carl Palmer will be guesting on "Heat of the Moment" and "Only Time Will Tell" with Asia on all of their Italian dates except at the Magic Bus in Venezia on February 24. This is the first time for Carl to play live with the band in 14 years!
Steve Howe, are you listening? We need a miracle...
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Five Years
I moved to New York about 11 years ago, at a time when the conventional wisdom was that the city was in the grips of a full-on malaise. In the few years before I got here, there had been a series of big crises that got a lot of media attention, and seemed to be very local in their character: Howard Beach, Bensonhurst, Crown Heights, and the Tompkins Square Park riots. I didn't know where those places were, but they were stitched together in my mind to form a sort of overall geography of conflict, and that's what I felt New York was.
I can remember when Rudy Giuliani was elected, because the "new sheriff in town" vibe started immediately. The crackdown on so-called "quality of life" crimes (are there any other kind?) started soon after. The scourge of squeegee men was eliminated, he got tough on sidewalk vending scofflaws, etc. There were bigger crime-fighting initiatives, too. Especially drugs--lots and lots of talk of fighting a local version of the drug war. Suddenly NYU professors and David Lee Roth were being arrested for buying pot in Washington Square Park. But I don't think many of us really understood how far Giuliani was taking this fight. Its true scope became abundantly clear exactly five years ago.
Late at night on March 15th, 2000 (actually early in the morning on the 16th), Patrick Dorismond and his friend Kevin Kaiser left a Times Square bar and decided to get a cab back to Brooklyn. (The first of many ironies regarding that evening is that both men worked as uniformed security guards for the 34th Street Partnership, an organization that performs various functions on behalf of local businesses.) Before they could hail a cab, a voice from the shadows beckoned Dorismond and asked if he had any pot to sell. Dorismond told him to beat it, but the guy wouldn't leave him alone. Kaiser urged his friend to ignore the man, but the guy wouldn't let up. He said something to Dorismond that made no sense: "What are you going to do, rob me?"
What happened next was widely reported, but the best reporting was done by former Times writer and Pulitzer winner Jim Dwyer in "Casualty In the War On Drugs," which appeared in Playboy in October 2000, and was reprinted in Busted , an excellent collection of articles and essays on drug policy and the drug war. (It looks like someone also transcribed the article here.) Immediately after the man asked his odd question, a few others emerged from behind him. Kaiser yelled that one of them had a gun; he and Dorismond obviously thought they were being mugged. At the same moment, a black SUV tore around the corner and deposited several men in police windbreakers. They yelled at Dorismond and Kaiser to drop to the ground, but at that moment Dorismond and one of the men he thought was mugging him were scuffling. One shot was fired at Dorismond, hitting him in the chest. He and Kaiser were thrown on the ground and cuffed. Dorismond, who was bleeding from the mouth, couldn't speak, but Kaiser, who thought the police had mistaken them for the muggers, tried to tell them they had the wrong guys. He was taken into custody and interrogated for several hours. Dorismond, who was 26, died soon after he was shot.
It turned out that everyone involved in this fracas, except for Dorismond and Kaiser, were members of Operation CONDOR, an elite police anti-drug task force spearheaded by Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir. "What are you going to do, rob me?" was a coded message that told the windbreaker-ed crew, listening on the wire, to swoop in and make the arrest. (CONDOR stood for Citywide Organized Narcotics Drug Operational Response, but "Operation Condor" was also the name of a Latin American death squad. When a City Council member pointed this out to Safir, the chief replied, "In case you didn't know, a condor is a bird.") CONDOR members were under pressure to make multiple arrests each time they went out. At the time of Dorismond's death, CONDOR had existed for two months and was averaging 350 arrests a day. Obviously, given this large number, many of these were low-level, barely misdemeanor arrests, but the emphasis was on quantity, which might explain why the group that accosted Dorismond felt so emboldened to force an arrest on someone who wasn't even giving the impression of committing a crime.
Giuliani, who was in the throes of his Senate campaign, went into full blowhard mode following the shooting. Less than a day had gone by before he and Safir unsealed and made public Dorismond's 13-year-old juvenile crime record. "I would not want a picture presented of an altar boy, when, in fact, maybe it isn't an altar boy," Giuliani said. Except that--whoops--it turned out Dorismond had been an altar boy--at the same Catholic high school Giuliani attended. But Giuliani didn't back down. The cop who shot Dorismond apologized to Dorismond's family (the shooting was ruled justified), but it was months before Giuliani did the same, after Dorismond's family sued the city (they lost).
The shooting of Amadou Diallo has become the symbol of that era's police excesses (his shooting also involved an elite crime-fighting unit), but I think the shooting of Patrick Dorismond, another unarmed black man (he was the son of Haitian immigrants), was even more egregious. As ludicrous as it was to fire 40-odd shots at a guy reaching for a cell phone, the Diallo event can at least be placed in a recognizable moral universe of cause and effect. There's an "Odessa Steps" quality to the whole thing, a series of miscommunications unfolding tragically over a few seconds. Dorismond, on the other hand, was just killed, by killers who completely manufactured the context of his killing. "Entrapment" doesn't even really cover what happened, since the word suggests a situation where someone had at least a vague notion to commit a crime.
Five years ago, Patrick Dorismond was murdered. As Giuliani continues to bask in the rapidly fading glow of 9/11, let's not forget how his policies laid the groundwork for this crime, and how he reacted in its aftermath. A man who had neither the ability nor the inclination to sell drugs was killed by people empowered to assume that he did. That's the ultimate irony of that night: "All Patrick Dorismond had to do that evening was surrender a joint, if he had one," Dwyer writes, "and he would have had a night in jail instead of the morgue."
I can remember when Rudy Giuliani was elected, because the "new sheriff in town" vibe started immediately. The crackdown on so-called "quality of life" crimes (are there any other kind?) started soon after. The scourge of squeegee men was eliminated, he got tough on sidewalk vending scofflaws, etc. There were bigger crime-fighting initiatives, too. Especially drugs--lots and lots of talk of fighting a local version of the drug war. Suddenly NYU professors and David Lee Roth were being arrested for buying pot in Washington Square Park. But I don't think many of us really understood how far Giuliani was taking this fight. Its true scope became abundantly clear exactly five years ago.
Late at night on March 15th, 2000 (actually early in the morning on the 16th), Patrick Dorismond and his friend Kevin Kaiser left a Times Square bar and decided to get a cab back to Brooklyn. (The first of many ironies regarding that evening is that both men worked as uniformed security guards for the 34th Street Partnership, an organization that performs various functions on behalf of local businesses.) Before they could hail a cab, a voice from the shadows beckoned Dorismond and asked if he had any pot to sell. Dorismond told him to beat it, but the guy wouldn't leave him alone. Kaiser urged his friend to ignore the man, but the guy wouldn't let up. He said something to Dorismond that made no sense: "What are you going to do, rob me?"
What happened next was widely reported, but the best reporting was done by former Times writer and Pulitzer winner Jim Dwyer in "Casualty In the War On Drugs," which appeared in Playboy in October 2000, and was reprinted in Busted , an excellent collection of articles and essays on drug policy and the drug war. (It looks like someone also transcribed the article here.) Immediately after the man asked his odd question, a few others emerged from behind him. Kaiser yelled that one of them had a gun; he and Dorismond obviously thought they were being mugged. At the same moment, a black SUV tore around the corner and deposited several men in police windbreakers. They yelled at Dorismond and Kaiser to drop to the ground, but at that moment Dorismond and one of the men he thought was mugging him were scuffling. One shot was fired at Dorismond, hitting him in the chest. He and Kaiser were thrown on the ground and cuffed. Dorismond, who was bleeding from the mouth, couldn't speak, but Kaiser, who thought the police had mistaken them for the muggers, tried to tell them they had the wrong guys. He was taken into custody and interrogated for several hours. Dorismond, who was 26, died soon after he was shot.
It turned out that everyone involved in this fracas, except for Dorismond and Kaiser, were members of Operation CONDOR, an elite police anti-drug task force spearheaded by Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir. "What are you going to do, rob me?" was a coded message that told the windbreaker-ed crew, listening on the wire, to swoop in and make the arrest. (CONDOR stood for Citywide Organized Narcotics Drug Operational Response, but "Operation Condor" was also the name of a Latin American death squad. When a City Council member pointed this out to Safir, the chief replied, "In case you didn't know, a condor is a bird.") CONDOR members were under pressure to make multiple arrests each time they went out. At the time of Dorismond's death, CONDOR had existed for two months and was averaging 350 arrests a day. Obviously, given this large number, many of these were low-level, barely misdemeanor arrests, but the emphasis was on quantity, which might explain why the group that accosted Dorismond felt so emboldened to force an arrest on someone who wasn't even giving the impression of committing a crime.
Giuliani, who was in the throes of his Senate campaign, went into full blowhard mode following the shooting. Less than a day had gone by before he and Safir unsealed and made public Dorismond's 13-year-old juvenile crime record. "I would not want a picture presented of an altar boy, when, in fact, maybe it isn't an altar boy," Giuliani said. Except that--whoops--it turned out Dorismond had been an altar boy--at the same Catholic high school Giuliani attended. But Giuliani didn't back down. The cop who shot Dorismond apologized to Dorismond's family (the shooting was ruled justified), but it was months before Giuliani did the same, after Dorismond's family sued the city (they lost).
The shooting of Amadou Diallo has become the symbol of that era's police excesses (his shooting also involved an elite crime-fighting unit), but I think the shooting of Patrick Dorismond, another unarmed black man (he was the son of Haitian immigrants), was even more egregious. As ludicrous as it was to fire 40-odd shots at a guy reaching for a cell phone, the Diallo event can at least be placed in a recognizable moral universe of cause and effect. There's an "Odessa Steps" quality to the whole thing, a series of miscommunications unfolding tragically over a few seconds. Dorismond, on the other hand, was just killed, by killers who completely manufactured the context of his killing. "Entrapment" doesn't even really cover what happened, since the word suggests a situation where someone had at least a vague notion to commit a crime.
Five years ago, Patrick Dorismond was murdered. As Giuliani continues to bask in the rapidly fading glow of 9/11, let's not forget how his policies laid the groundwork for this crime, and how he reacted in its aftermath. A man who had neither the ability nor the inclination to sell drugs was killed by people empowered to assume that he did. That's the ultimate irony of that night: "All Patrick Dorismond had to do that evening was surrender a joint, if he had one," Dwyer writes, "and he would have had a night in jail instead of the morgue."
