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Real Americans Admit: The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Done!

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Ted Rall

For my first (nonfiction) graphic novel, I gathered answers to the question “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” from 540 Americans from all walks of life. I asked fellow plane passengers, people at parties, family members…and I took out ads in newspapers too. I serialized their answers — everything from murder to animal cruelty to a mere one-night stand — in ComicsLit magazine and compiled the best 64 pages worth into this book.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? The answer to that simple question partially defines what and who we are.

Worst Thing won the first-ever annual Firecracker Alternative Book Award in 1997.

This book is out of print. If I do a sequel or it is developed into a reality TV show — something that has been repeatedly discussed — that would likely change.

“By turns funny, unpleasant, and pathetic depending on your point of view (the animal abuse ones really bothered me), these stories are interesting in a voyeuristic way. The book is sort of like Ripley’s Believe It or Not merged with the Jerry Springer show.” —Comics Get Serious

Graphic Novel, 1996
NBM Paperback, 8.5″x11″, 64pp., $8.95

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Standard Deviation

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Ted Rall

America as Cost-Benefit Analysis

As if our country didn’t already have enough to worry about—advancing technology, downsizing, Pamela Anderson—here come the economics of rape.

An exciting new Justice Department study, “Victim Costs and Consequences: A New Look,” reveals that the “average rape” costs its victim $5,100. This sum is based on such out-of-pocket expenses as medical bills and visits to counselors. So, locking up a rapist at the cost of $20,000 a year—the average annual cost of housing an inmate—obviously doesn’t make good economic sense, the authors say, until you factor in “the effect on the victim’s quality of life,” which then brings the total average rape cost to $87,000.

Therefore it may be a good idea to lock up rapists——assuming, of course, that the average rapist would otherwise have performed at least one average rape every 4.35 years. The Justice Department plans to attach tracking devices to a random sampling of 1,200 average rapists to determine the average rate of rapist recidivism. Criminologists will present their recommendations to the Congressional Budget Office, which will then decide whether it makes more economic sense to put rapists in prison or to let them run amok.

Government analysts have also priced the “lost quality of life” for a murder victim at $1.9 million. This amount includes the average murder victim’s average pain caused by an average bullet or average knife shoved through an average heart or lung, the net total of average relatives’ average bereavement, the average number of days the mourners miss from work and the resulting loss to national productivity, as well as average burial costs and uncovered medical expenses. Do bear in mind, however, that people murdered next year will be entitled to a 4 percent cost-of-living increase to account for inflation, minus depreciation.

The average murder investigation costs only $1,400, which at first glance seems to mean the police could catch only one out of 1,357 murders and still be fiscally ahead of the game. Assuming that the average murderer serves 20 years in prison, however, the cost of housing him would be $400,000. Therefore, from a profit-loss standpoint, it only makes sense to continue pursuing murderers if at least one person is convicted for every 4.75 unnatural deaths (the $400,000 cost of housing an inmate for life, divided by the $1.9 million cost of an average life).

Actually, a number of factors mitigate against even considering rape and murder to be “crimes.” First of all, the American medical industry derives an annual benefit from the livers, kidneys, eyes and other organs donated by murder victims that are worth billions of dollars in transplant fees.

Furthermore, when jailed, a murderer or rapist fails to contribute an average of $45,000 in value-added labor to the economy. Over a 20-year sentence, this comes to a loss of $900,000—plus that additional cost of $1.9 million if the inmate should get murdered in prison.

Additionally, many murder victims are smokers, whose secondhand smoke would undoubtedly have killed many of their acquaintances and coworkers, as well as themselves, had they lived.

The statistical analysis is clear: murder—in reasonable, non-Dahmer quantities—is good for the economy, and should be immediately legalized.

If the inmates currently in American penal institutions were released and given even menial jobs, their increased production would cause the Dow Jones Industrial Average to soar at least 300 points. The Treasury Department is currently calculating the effect of legalized killing on interest rates. In the meantime, this much is certain: While we’re coddling the funeral-going, absentee-worker relatives of murder victims, our stockholders are taking a beating and our Asian competitors are laughing themselves silly.

While we’re on the subject, The Cato Institute reveals that the average welfare family receives $17,500 in government benefits, the post-tax equivalent of a $25,000-a-year job. Given that the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour pays a full-time worker just $8,840 a year, assuming no vacation, at first glance it seems that we’re paying people not to work.

But the Cato study fails to take into account the Justice Department’s analysis, which demonstrates the financial viability of murder and rape. Our society needs to find some way to get people off welfare, and out murdering and raping where they belong. Sure, rape and murder may seem like horrible crimes, but it’s time to let go of antiquated ideas of morality. In the brave new world of 21st century international competition, traditional notions of right and wrong offer nothing to a society trying to maximize its asset-liability ratios.

It’s all in the numbers!

(Ted Rall, a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer, is the author of All The Rules Have Changed (1995). He was a loan officer and financial analyst from 1985 to 1995.)

©1996 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Our Great Mixing Bowl

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Ted Rall


American History for High School Students
(September 2053 Edition)

As difficult as it may be to believe today, white Americans—now virtually extinct—were once the dominant ethnic majority in our country. Until as recently as the late 20th century, every President and 99 percent of all Congresspersons were Caucasian!

What happened to these fascinating people?

After four centuries of cultural and political dominance, such famous white Americans as Thomas Jefferson, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Stewart helped build a rich and vibrant civilization that peaked during the late 1900s. White people were responsible for such important inventions as the penknife and airplane. They built computer games, composed music like disco and techno and made contributions to postmodern architecture.

White Americans were deeply spiritual. They worshipped a male god with blond hair and blue eyes who lived in a “church,” a large auditorium ringed with benches where money was collected. In addition, they felt a strong kinship with the land, which they believed had been created by their “manifest destiny” for them to use as they saw fit. Having no strong concept of an afterlife, whites often exploited and murdered each other in order to accrue as many possessions as possible before they died. According to their “work ethic” the practitioners of these violent rituals were not only tolerated but widely admired by their victims. Their government was based on a plutocratic system, in which the most successful exploiters and murderers were rewarded with absolute power.

Although white society was oppressive, its concentration of power in the hands of a few allowed the creation of impressive monuments. Today in the 21st century we can still see such relics of slave-labor as tract housing, fast-food chains and the data used to create the early Internet.

Their family structures were extremely simple, consisting of only a mother and a few children. Males followed the example of animals, which they observed in televised nature shows. After fathering several children, white men struck out on their own and lived solitary lives in one-bedroom condominiums.

Several factors contributed to the decline of white Americans. Unchecked immigration, always a factor in American history, became dominated by Mexicans, Sri Lankans and other dark-skinned peoples during the last half of the 20th century. Although some politicians urged that the country’s borders be closed, most whites were too shortsighted to predict the long-term consequences of these migratory patterns. The newcomers established themselves in business, politics and pop culture. As the number of whites fell relative to other groups, their importance in society receded. By 2020, only 14 percent of Americans had any white ancestry whatsoever. Two decades later, whites were forced to live in gated communities in remote suburbs. By 2050, there were fewer than 75,000 living in the entire United States.

In addition, whites suffered from a low birthrate. Their work ethic, high-fat diet and Puritan heritage impeded their reproduction. White environmentalists, family planners, fundamentalist Christians and feminists discouraged sex and thus large families.

African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics, however, celebrated sexual intercourse as an integral part of their culture and enjoyed exploding family sizes.

Many anthropologists attribute the end of white American culture to affirmative action, a policy that gave priority for employment and education to blacks, women and gays. First developed to counteract the effects of white discrimination against other groups, affirmative action continued after 1970, even though these groups had long since achieved parity with whites. By the year 2000, whites were completely locked out of employment.

Along with declining numbers came discrimination. Whites were limited to the most menial forms of employment. Unable to buy or rent homes in desirable neighborhoods, whites were herded into squalid inner-city ghettos vacated by former minorities. In 2018, the first black-majority government of President Orenthal J. Simpson enacted legislation, the White Protection Act of 2018, that barred whites from the Eastern and Pacific time zones. From that point on, their fate was sealed.

Today we can still see whites practicing their culture on remote reservations in Kansas and eastern Colorado. Watching their big-screen televisions, driving monster trucks and listening to unsyncopated music, these relics of a once-great civilization are a reminder of our distant past and a sad warning of the errors that can lead to one’s own extinction.

(Ted Rall, 32, is a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer based in New York.)

© 1996 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Cashing In On Irony

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Ted Rall

Dole’s Secret Youth Strategy Revealed

As a stunned America reels from the shock of pre-selected Republican nominee Bob Dole’s emergence as the Republican nominee, patriotic citizens should read the following secret memo—faxed to me by a Dole mole. As a dutiful public service, I have opted to relinquish my normal weekly column space. Instead, I am releasing this explosive internal strategy paper, for the good of the country and to improve my lagging sales:

INTERNAL MEMORANDUM
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL—EYES ONLY

To: Bob Dole
cc: ___ _____________
From: C___s__ __in___
Dole ’96 National Youth Coordinator

Date: 3-19-96

Re: Youth Strategy for General Election
______

Dear Bob:
As you know, voters under 35 years of age have emerged as a potent political force. They were single-handedly responsible for Clinton’s 1992 win, but the Little Rock Mafia has failed to market themselves to this key group. For the first time in recent electoral history, the GOP has the chance to appeal to young people.

Not only are young voters (a.k.a. Generation Xers, twentysomethings, twentynothings, posties, Baby Busters, slackers, scum) the determinative demographic group this year—they are also the least worried about your age. February’s New York Times/CBS News poll revealed that 41 percent of respondents aged 65 and older think you’re too old to be an effective president, compared to 39 percent of those aged 45 to 64, or 31 percent of those 30 to 34, and 29 percent of those aged 18 to 29.

Says typical voter Mary Laurent, a Republican from Hollywood, Florida: “I’ll be 74. He’s 72. I think he looks pretty good but sometimes he looks tired. It all depends on who he picks as his Vice Presidential candidate.”

Moreover, you’ve alienated older people with your support of a plan to gut Medicare spending by $275 billion over seven years. Two-thirds of these selfish seniors oppose you on Medicare.

The data is clear: Sucking up to geezers is a losing game. If a Dole candidacy is to be successful, it must concentrate on issues and images that appeal to voters under 35. Specifically:

Baby Boomer Backlash. Difficult as it may be to believe, in light of the “generation gap” rhetoric of the ’60s, Gen Xers have more in common with older Americans over 60 than they do with Boomers (now aged 35 to 50).

Both the elderly and the young came of age under a stagnant economy. Young people, busy working several jobs to survive, do not empathize with their comparatively wealthy (middle-aged) Boomer seniors and their ceaseless search for personal self-fulfillment. Their disdain for a generation they blame for abandoning activism and embracing laissez-faire capitalism—often at their expense, by underpaying them—is impossible to exaggerate.

For Gen Xers, Clinton exemplifies the Baby Boomer stereotype—out-of-touch, wishy-washy, hypocritical, opportunistic, full of flexible idealism. Ask them about Renaissance Weekends, $100 haircuts, Hillary’s “luck” at the futures market or Chelsea’s private-schooling and they roll their eyes. While they’ve passed the last twenty years watching Boomers like Clinton racing to sell out; they never had anyone to sell out to. Gen Xers lost the vast majority of jobs caused by downsizing. They blame Clinton for supporting NAFTA. They overcame their annoyance at their Boomer bosses, gave Clinton’s generation a chance to run the country and got screwed.

Issues for Youngsters. Our focus groups tell us that young voters feel particularly strongly about economic issues. I recommend that you embrace the following promises in your platform at San Diego:

• Student Loan Forgiveness Plan: Your bland balanced-budget pitch (“Interest rates would drop 2 percent!”) is dead in the water. With the federal student-loan program bleeding $20 billion in defaults, ex-students aren’t paying them back anyway. The switch from grants to loans during the Reagan years saddled an entire generation of Americans with debt, preventing them from buying homes and stagnating the housing market. So let the Treasury repay old student loans. Recommended soundbite: “Let’s get real and revive the American Dream.”

• End Reverse Ageism: Drop the minimum car-rental age (now 25) and the drinking age from 21 to 16. Extend senior-citizen discounts to the young, who need it more. Soundbite: “If you’re old enough to work, you need a drink!”

• Corporate Responsibility: You’ve already cashed in on Pat Buchanan’s anti-corporate shtick. Go further by banning profit-enhancement layoffs. Support the SEC’s proposal to force corporations—the biggest employer of young voters—to limit their top salaries to no more than 20 times that of their lowest-paid employee. Soundbite: “Baby Boomers already got theirs. Let’s reward our future before it’s too late.”

• Your Vice President: Since you will probably die in office, choose a vibrant, hip veep, like Al Pacino (a gifted Italian-American actor, see “City Hall,” now playing at Georgetown Multiplex). Forget Colin Powell (black general/author)—when this generation grew up only losers went into the military. If you want to make a dual ploy for Xers and the black vote, consider Magic Johnson (photogenic basketball legend w/AIDS). A woman veep would go over well with kids raised overwhelmingly by divorced women, but Christi(n)e Whitman (NJ governor w/ ambiguous first name) is too patrician, too uptight. You’ll have to look outside the Republican party. Soundbite: “Two presidents for the price of one!”

Hip Imagery. Drop the “Comeback Adult” comparison rhetoric. Twenty-year-old voters consider Clinton too old as it is. Most young voters didn’t have fathers or extended families, so play the role of the wacky grandfather figure they never had. A lot of irrelevant old farts have cashed in on their ironic appeal with young adults(reverse hip): Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Pat Boone. Why not you? Everything square is hip again: the Little Rascals, lunch boxes, gas guzzlers. Don’t fight your age…revel in it! Emphasize your stodgy demeanor and links with the past, use make-up that makes you look even older.

Balance your retro appeal with up-to-date tactics: Appear with Courtney Love (seedy rock singer, see attached cassette) on MTV (cable-TV music channel). Consider a nose ring (like an earring, but goes in nostril). Refer to lines from Tarantino movies (young actor/director, see attached VHS tape) to explain your position on issues (On the minimum wage: “Hey, this is one great $5 milkshake.”). Discuss your World War II experiences in hard-boiled terms appealing to young people (“Sure, we played football with their skulls, but hey—no one asked them to bomb Pearl Harbor.”).

I realize that much of the pandering to the stapled-nose crowd I’ve outlined above may feel somewhat awkward. But bear in mind that you’ve managed to hold down your lunch while promising the world to the Christian Coalition. You can win without the Creationist lunatics, but you can’t win without the young. As always, I’ll be at (202) ___-____ if you need me.
Faithfully yours,
C___s__ __in___

(Ted Rall, 32, a syndicated editorial cartoonist for Chronicle Features and freelance writer, is the author of Waking Up In America (1992) and All The Rules Have Changed (1995).)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Adolf Redux

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Ted Rall

Pat Buchanan’s Basic Instinct

Pat Buchanan is the first Republican I’ve ever considered voting for. Since the day in October of 1972 when my mom took me along with her to pass out McGovern fliers, I’ve been a committed Democrat—or at least a militant anti-Republican. When Democrats jumped into bed with Reagan to support his rancid budgetary attack on the 90 percent of Americans who aren’t rich, it broke my heart. Nonetheless, I still turned out to work on Mondale and Dukakis’ Dem-lite campaigns. And I voted for Clinton in 1992. But after four years of watching him appoint and suck up to Republicans, I’ll never vote for him again.

This is where Pat Buchanan comes in. On Monday night, an ABC-TV news commentator noted: “He’s the only candidate talking about issues people really care about.” In particular, out of the single Democratic and nine Republican presidential candidates who entered the Iowa caucuses, Nixon’s ex-speechwriter is the only one who opposes unfettered free trade.

The big trade deals of ’93 and ’94 are old news to the national media, but for the millions of Americans who sense that they’re being managed by their leaders like so much cattle, NAFTA and GATT are key issues.

Since the early 1980s, the United States has joined a long list of countries subjected by bankers and third-rate politicians to “structural adjustment” policies. Under semi-secret agreements like the 1986 Plaza Accord, central banks and multinational corporations have agreed to keep American wages low and unemployment high to control inflation. Citizens never hear about these economic accords, much less get a chance to vote on them.

Only corporate executives, shareholders and complete idiots deny that radical free-trade agreements encourage companies to export high-paying American jobs to countries that convert them to low-paying ones. They reduce wages, worker protection laws and environmental regulations to the lowest common denominator of the participating nations.

In fact, opposition to free trade is one of the few issues that Americans on both sides of the political spectrum agree upon. Yet, so far the former “Crossfire” host has been the only political figure to capitalize on it.

Alarmed by Buchanan’s success at exploiting anti-free trade sentiment, journalists and other candidates have taken to accusing him of socialist economic tendencies.

They’re half right.

Buchanan balances his fiery anti-corporate rhetoric with the rabid Bible-thumping that earned him Molly Ivins’ famous quip about his 1992 address to the Republican National Convention: “I liked it better in the original German.” “This is a victory (…) for conservatives who will bravely stand up for the right of the innocent unborn,” he crowed after his second-place finish in Iowa. He called gay marriages “illicit and immoral.(…) It’s ain’t a marriage (…) and it’s wrong. The core values and core ideas of Western civilization are the Christian faith,” he ranted.

This is where Buchanan loses voters like me. Like many Americans, I consider gay marriages a bit kitschy, but certainly no threat to the Republic. Like many other Roman Catholics, I don’t recommend abortion as the cheap contraception alternative, but other people’s choices are not my business.

The Buchanian platform also includes such proto-fascist standards as expelling illegal immigrants and evicting the United Nations from New York.

If this doesn’t sound familiar, it should.

During the democratic German elections of 1931 and 1932, the only candidate willing to discuss unemployment as a problem rather than a policy was Adolf Hitler. The then-decade-old National-Socialist Party appealed to both right-wing fanatics and disaffected working-class leftists with a witches’ brew of economic nationalism and appeals to individual responsibility. Like Buchanan, they also flirted with the conservative wing of the Catholic Church, and opposed immigration and the League of Nations.

In his classic study, “The Nazi Seizure of Power,” William Allen describes how voters who were frustrated with the traditional political parties turned to the Nazis. In the ’20s and ’30s, while German living standards eroded and unemployment rose, Nazis opened emergency housing and food kitchens for the poor. Hitler’s genius lay in allying traditional conservatives with poor workers.

It’s easy to see how the brilliant former architect of such Nixon-era dirty tricks as the “Southern strategy” that race-baited white and black Democrats is employing similar scuzzy tactics in the Republican primaries. Whether America’s arcane system of representative democracy has now deteriorated to the point that Buchanan will win the White House remains to be seen. Regardless, Buchanan’s early successes serve as a warning. If American voters don’t start to see their economic concerns addressed by mainstream politicians soon, they could easily by seduced by facile extremists.

Pat Buchanan obviously knows his history. Does anyone else?

(Ted Rall, 32, is a syndicated cartoonist and freelance writer living in New York.)

© 1996 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Choosing My Religion

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Ted Rall

My friend Debra was born into a Roman Catholic family. She got baptized and confirmed and everything; sometimes she even confessed. But twenty years of reciting the same old liturgies gets pretty tiresome. By the time she turned 35, she only went to mass when her parents came to town.

As time passed, Debra began to fear that her life had lost its meaning. She felt empty, unfocused, aimless. So, one afternoon in the fall, she decided to go shopping for a new religion.

“I can buy any car I want. Why can’t I choose my faith the same way? There’s so many religions out there that my parents never even considered. Who’s to say the Pope’s guys have a monopoly on meaning?”

I was intrigued by Debra’s consumerist approach to finding a higher truth. An erratic Catholic myself, it suddenly occurred to me: “Maybe, despite all evidence to the contrary, God really does exist. Perhaps I’ve just been using the wrong long-distance service provider.” I decided to tag along with Debra and check out what the other guys had to say.

Protestantism

A week later, I agreed to meet Debra after work at an impressive Methodist cathedral on New York’s Fifth Avenue. I got there first, in the middle of a torrential downpour. As I waited outside, I read the Post and checked out the architecture, an obvious rip-off of Westminster Abbey. Prestigious address, though, and within walking distance of work.

Debra arrived. As we entered the church, an ominous sixtysomething minister urged his tiny flock: “Acknowledge your wretchedness!” He went on and on after that, but you know what they say about first impressions. Afterward, at the 84th Street Multiplex, Debra interrogated me, “So, whadja think?”

“My boss reminds me how wretched I am all day long,” I said. “I’m kind of hoping to forget about my wretchedness, not acknowledge it.”

Judaism

Next Debra asked a Jewish friend, Paul, to escort us to Yom Kippur services at a synagogue on the Upper West Side. Famous for its outspoken left-wing rabbi, this Reform temple appealed to our political sensibilities, as well as being convenient to a number of excellent Chinese restaurants.

The day before, Paul called Debra to remind us to buy tickets to the service. “Tickets? What for?” Debra asked. Paul explained that Yom Kippur was an important day of worship, like a Rolling Stones concert. Accordingly, tickets were $50 each, actually a bargain if you thought about it.

We promised to buy Stones tickets the next time they were in town.

Islam

A few nights later, Debra and I were studying the Cliff Notes to the Koran over double cappuccinos at Starbucks. “Islam is pretty cool,” she said. “Listen to this: ‘Hell awaits the infidels.’” I agreed that any religion that allowed you to use the word “infidel” in everyday conversation was worth looking into.

We took the subway uptown to the recently-constructed postmodern mosque on East 96th Street. The gate was closed. Hours weren’t posted.

“How the hell did they get to be America’s fastest-growing religion without being open?” Debra sneered. “You don’t need a mosque, you know,” I said helpfully. “Wherever you are, you just pray five times a day facing Mecca.”

Buddhism

Later that night, Debra and I threw down half-priced margaritas with Tamara, a 30-year-old ex-Southern Baptist from Oregon. She’d become a Buddhist after seeing “The Last Emperor.”

Tamara tugged on a diamond earring. “My cat is like a little bodhisattva. He watches you to find out what object you love the most. Then he breaks it.”

“Eastern religions are too difficult,” Debra whispered to me. “I could never remember all those weird vocabulary words.”

Catholicism

I didn’t hear from Debra for a few weeks. She was too busy sorting through solicitation letters she’d received from the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Christian Scientists and Mormons. She even downloaded a tract on Taoism from the Web.

Then she called me at work, while I was in the middle of editing a trust indenture. “I’ve decided to become a Catholic!” she told me. “It’s familiar, I already know the prayers and the masses are only 45 minutes long.”

Debra had her second confirmation, at a hip, predominantly-gay parish in the West Village, in early December. The church was a modest post-Federalist building, but it was directly across the street from an express subway station. It was a beautiful ceremony, and Debra looked radiant in her puffy white dress. “I think it’s great that you’ve finally found what you’ve been looking for, just in time for Christmas,” I told her supportfully.

Debra looked at me quizzically. “Christmas? I’m doing Kwanzaa this year.”

(Ted Rall, a syndicated editorial cartoonist, is author of All the Rules Have Changed (Rip Off Press, 1995).)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Dirty Laundry

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Ted Rall

Child Abuse Isn’t Just the Poor’s Problem

Three million times a year, we beat our kids so badly that someone calls the cops about it. There’s really no way to know how often Americans pound the stuffing out of their children, since these ritual assaults are as mundane as doing the laundry. What’s remarkable about child abuse is that it’s in the news at all–normally, anything that affects children is a rock-bottom priority.

In the last month, we’ve read about 6-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, who was murdered by her mom on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The killing seemed anticlimactic after years of enduring such abuse as having her head used to mop her apartment floor. Then there was Tazar Carter, a 15-year-old boy sold to Detroit crack dealer-pimps by his mom. By far the most spectacular story involved 0-year-old Elijah Evans, whose father’s girlfriend brought him into the wonderful world of Chicago suburbia by amateur C-section–while stabbing his mother to death.

Now that baseball is dead, America’s national pastime is assigning blame. Who could have prevented these tragedies? In New York, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani graciously accepted partial responsibility for Elisa’s death. New Yorkers now sleep better knowing that their city’s leader is roaming the projects, checking up on parents to make certain they’re not forcing their kids to eat their own excrement. Newt Gingrich blamed the unorthodox birth in Chicago upon “a welfare system which subsidized people for doing nothing,” the criminal justice system and lousy schools. Now class, turn to page 76 in your textbook. Today we’re going to learn that carving into pregnant women isn’t cool.

The common factor in media and political reaction to these horror stories is their link of child abuse to poor minorities living in inner-city squalor. Even liberals promote this alleged causal relationship. They blame Republican cuts in welfare programs for a recent spate of parents who chuck their kids out of high-rises after they’ve cried one too many times, as if welfare were a substitute for good parenting.

If child abuse directly results from lower-class dysfunction, all that remains for liberals and conservatives to discuss is how best to eliminate poverty. But who knows whether drug use, child abuse and indolence aren’t just as common among the middle-class and rich?

When I was an undergraduate at Columbia in the ‘80s, I met many kids from successful, white suburban families who’d been brutalized as children. They’d been whipped, burned, raped, molested, and traumatized by means comparable to the most heinous tabloid stories datelined in South-Central or Bed-Stuy. About half of the students I lived with in the dorms did coke at least once a week and pot twice as often. Sometimes I’d be invited to their parents’ expensive houses in the surrounding suburbs, only to be appalled at the filth and squalor inside these outwardly-tidy homes.

In their post-college years, many of these Ivy League-educated white men–who enjoyed every possible advantage in the American rat race–wallowed in indolence and sloth worthy of the most debauched slum-dweller. But rancid behavior among America’s élite goes unnoticed and unreported. Unlike the poor, whose collective butts belong to the state by virtue of their monthly tax-funded checks, no social workers check up on the children of the bourgeois. Cops don’t randomly search rich kids in the streets. When things go too far in a wealthy white household and little Jenny “falls” off a chair and hemorrhages to death, there’s a nice funeral and a tiny obit buried behind the sports section. Laziness among the best and the brightest is called “slacking,” not a drain on the economy. Journalists don’t ask any questions, sociologists don’t count any statistics, and politicians don’t wring their hands about the hopeless problems of the permanent overclass.

It’s not pleasant to think about, but we live in a society that values violence and rewards abuse. Kids getting hit by parents who think of them as personal property is only the first act in this lifelong drama. We’re taught from the first day of school that bullies earn fear and respect. The message is the same in the projects and in the boardroom–intimidation begets prestige.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a country won by slaughtering Native Americans is still wallowing in ultraviolence less than a century later. Nonetheless, we can’t go on like this forever. It’s easier to wage class warfare against the poor than to try to phase out our national jock mentality. But initial steps should be to recognize that social pathology doesn’t just belong to the poor, and kids don’t belong to their parents.

(Ted Rall, a syndicated editorial cartoonist, is author of All the Rules Have Changed (Rip Off Press).)

Memoirs of a New York City Taxi Driver

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Ted Rall

It was all I could do to keep myself from fucking up the guy with the Knicks sweatshirt at the restaurant table next to me.

“Can you believe these guys want a fare increase?” he asked.

“Fucking A!” his friend with the Syracuse baseball cap farted.

“None of ’em understand English; they never know where they’re going.” Such brilliance from someone wearing a vinyl “Cats” jacket.

I refrained from breaking the Heinz 57 bottle over his head. How could these morons know anything different? They’ve never been held up. They’ve never driven twelve hours through pouring rain – without windows. They’ve never driven a taxi in New York. Some people are blessed with perception, but most people need experience to make them complete. I know I did.

In The Beginning
I started hacking in 1984, when I was 21. I’d just been expelled from Columbia Engineering for either disciplinary or academic reasons – my dean couldn’t decide which – and my girlfriend wasn’t returning my calls. It was a shitty summer for a would-be idler. It was overcast, grimy and there wasn’t a ray of sun for the beach-bound. My back rent was piling up, and the housing judge told me he wouldn’t grant me any more delays at my next court date.

I needed a job.

I’d taken the hack license test a year earlier on a lark. I was one of those geeky out-of-towners who gets caught up in the idea of New York City and develops an obsessive need to know it inside-out. I’d heard of other kids at college who made good money, sometimes as much as $300 a night, driving a hack. I liked the idea of not having some asshole boss breathing down my back about how long I spent in the shitter.

I spotted an ad for drivers in the New York Post and showed up for “shape-up” at the Dover Garage at 6 pm. Dover is known to TV viewers as the place they show in the opening credits of the “Taxi” sit-com.

A degrading experience straight out of The Bicycle Thief, a shape-up involves waiting around for one to two hours in a dingy garage hoping there’ll be a beat-up piece-of-shit taxi left over after all the regular drivers – full-timers who pay by the week and part-timers who have been around a while – pick theirs up first. There’s no guarantee this loitering will pay off, although looking earnest and waif-like, a trait I’d perfected as a child, seems to pay off. After two fruitless waits, I was issued my first cab.

Problem gamblers are created by their first experiences: A big win the first time out leads to a lifetime of attempts to replicate that happy incident. My first time out in a New York taxi got me hooked. I drove all night, until 6 am, taking out an hour for a cheeseburger deluxe-and-a-Coke, chatted with some devastatingly cute club girls, got some big tips. I went home with $250 in balled-up, greasy fives and singles – all of it tax-free.

The Faceless Man
The biggest concern of a cabby is safety. New York police don’t investigate cabby murders, you’re not allowed to pack a gun and most cabs don’t have effective safety barriers. You’re on your own, and have to look out for yourself as effectively as you can.

I took a number of precautions, particularly because I drove night shift. Other drivers were my main inspiration. For instance, my colleague Alex took out cab No. 1L88 one night. He stopped at a burger place under the then-elevated West Side Highway, which ran along the Hudson River. Upon his return, an assailant was waiting for him in the back seat. The second he was attacked, Alex reached under his seat, found the tire iron he kept there and swung it backward as hard as he could, hook side first.

“There was this tug,” Alex said, “so I pulled back. I heard a tearing sound.” Then he heard a horrible scream, the back door opening and someone running away. When he turned around, there was blood all over the rear windshield and the back seat. There, in the middle of the seat, was a flap of skin with eye and nose holes. It was the mugger’s face.

I saw 1L88 when it came in the next morning. There was still blood smeared across the rear windshield, but that hadn’t stopped Alex from picking up fares all night.

“I wasn’t going to lose an entire shift fee over that douche-bag,” Alex said.

After that, I always carried a tire iron under my seat.

Control Freaks!
I was the king of my cab. Women in particular were interested in altering my personality during the perhaps six minutes we spent together in my ‘84 Caprice Classic. Inspired by a sequence in the film Stripes, I dealt with a woman fare who insisted on smoking all the way to Kennedy Airport by ejecting her in the middle of the Williamsburg Bridge. Another time, I picked up a woman at the Palladium nightclub who plopped in and announced:

“We’re going to Brooklyn!”

While Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) rules specify that cabbies must take passengers anywhere they want to go within the five boroughs that comprise New York City, reality is a different thing entirely. When you pick up 45 people a night, you quickly detect patterns in human behavior. Of all the possible destinations in New York, Brooklyn may the worst for a taxi driver for the following reasons:

-No matter what the fare, Brooklynites only tip one dollar.
-Most sections are incredibly dangerous.
-There aren’t any decent highways, so getting back to Manhattan takes forever.
-It’s impossible to get a fare back.

For cabbies, time is money. You’re shelling out $100 for a 12-hour shift, so you need to make $8 an hour before you start to see a dime of profit. If you’re dicking around Bed-Stuy with some deadbeat fare for a dollar tip, you would have been better off sitting in a diner sipping coffee. If the city really wanted to ensure cabbies would take people to Brooklyn, they’d make it a double-fare zone. Until then, Brooklynites should get accustomed to subway gangs.

I told the Palladium woman to get out of my cab. She yelled at me and took down my hack license number and taxi company name. In the Eighties, cabs had a fake company name on their doors for this express purpose – this night I was apparently an employee of Asparagus Cab Corp. A few weeks later, I was summoned to Taxi Court, deep in the fluorescent bowels of TLC headquarters at Times Square. My boss wrote a letter certifying that I hadn’t driven that night and advised me to show up in my best Brooks Brothers suit.

“That’s him! That’s the creep that wouldn’t take me to Brooklyn!” the plaintiff spat at me.

I stared at her quizzically as if examining a bug.

“I’m sorry about what happened to her, Judge,” I said. TLC judges like to be called “judge.” “But whoever turned her down wasn’t me. I always go wherever I’m asked.”

“Liar! Fuckhead!”

“I wasn’t driving that night.”

“It was you, you fucking liar! Scum!”

“A lot of these passengers, they think all cabbies look alike, your Honor,” I closed. “While I am distressed that some vile driver refused her request, I cannot accept responsibility for this offense.”

Case dismissed.

Two Jobs, Two Lives
Like most part-timers, I drove around half-asleep most of the time. During the day, I worked full-time as a trader/trainee at Bear, Stearns & Co., the brokerage firm run by New York’s cheapest CEO, Alan C. “Ace” (he gave himself the nickname) Greenberg. Ace paid his clerks $10,000 a year. This way he could afford to pay himself $20 million.

I’d work like a demon from 8:30 am to settle my trade tickets so I could skip out at 5:30 pm and rush to the garage. I drove from 6 pm to 6 am, caught an hour nap at home and went back to work. I made more in one night of taxi driving than I did in a week at Bear Stearns ($160 after taxes), but I needed health benefits and a desk job that might lead to something better. One night I was so dead tired that I drove forty blocks – two miles – down Seventh Avenue completely asleep.

One evening I picked up an older, graying suit. He asked me to talk about myself. He recognized my voice; he turned out to be one of my day job clients. Appalled at my shitty salary, he offered me a job at his firm in eastern Connecticut, but I never followed up on it.

Celebrities
The vast majority of my passengers were businessmen and young couples. I only encountered notable people a few times. One night I drove Roseanne Arquette to her apartment in the trendy Chelsea district; she was really nice and unassuming. She even gave me the phone number of her realty and recommended her quiet, tree-lined block as a great place to live. Another time I drove Jimmy Breslin and an equally rumpled companion through Central Park to the Upper East Side. He was a nasty, rude son-of-a-bitch. He reeked of beer and didn’t tip for shit.

I ran into Woody Allen – literally – near NYU. His limo pulled out of a side street right in front of me. I couldn’t stop in time and creased his front fender. As the limo driver and I finished inspecting the minor damage and decided not to report it, the Woodman (I recognized his glasses) hopped out of the back and started screaming at me: “You stupid fucking asshole! Pull your head of your ass, cocksucker!”

I took the high road, never responding to his tirade. When he had finished, I looked at him straight in the eye and said: “You haven’t made a decent film since 1973.”

Near Death Experiences
Getting mugged is a fact of life when you’re a cabby. Criminals know that you carry as much as two or three hundred bucks at any given time, so you have to take precautions. Whenever I happened to be on the West Side of Manhattan, I stopped by my apartment building and dropped my spare cash into my mailbox. I kept my crowbar handy, and applied for a gun permit.

Nonetheless, the best thing you can do is screen your passengers. I quickly learned that picking up black people wasn’t a good idea. Racism had nothing to do with it; it’s just that most blacks in New York live in shitty neighborhoods. The odds are that your passenger will leave you in peace with a nice tip, but stopping at red lights at intersections where all the lights have been shot out at two in the morning is another matter entirely. Early in my career, I dropped off a well-dressed black couple in Bed-Stuy, arguably the most dangerous area in the city. A block later, I was surrounded by a pack of guys with two-by-fours. I escaped by flooring the gas and aiming at the biggest one.

New Yorkers follow patterns that make screening easier. The leather-clad club girls on Second Avenue in the Village at 1 am are going to Brooklyn – always. The fur-bearing crones hailing you outside Lord and Taylor’s department store hail from the Upper East Side, a sure bet for a Depression-era 20-cent tip. Men tip better than women, poor people better than the rich, West Siders better than East Siders, West Villagers better than East Villagers, Wall Street businessmen better than Midtown ones, Queens residents better than Bronx ones. I tended to receive good tips because I was young, white and clean-cut. A lot of people acted as if they’d happened upon King Tut’s treasure when they entered my cab. “Hey! You’re white!” they’d smile. “Hey! You’re racist!” I’d reply, wondering at my own reluctance to pick up black passengers.

Passenger screening improves your odds for safety and profitability. But when you pick up 45 fares a night, 3 nights a week, 50 weeks a year, it’s unavoidable that one of those 6,600 people is going to fuck you up.

In my case, it was a young white guy on 101st Street, a dozen blocks south of the Columbia campus. This was in 1989, at the height of the weekly cabby murder era. For the past several weeks, a serial murderer had been leaving dead drivers in their cabs along the West Side Highway. The latest one had been robbed and shot in the back of the head at 97th Street a week earlier; I saw the execution scene on the front of the Daily News.

This guy looked like Charlie Sheen in a white shirt and tie. It was ten at night. Probably going to see his girlfriend. Nothing to fear.

We’d driven four blocks when I felt the gun against my right ear. “Pull over and give me your money.”

The Daily News photo flashed across the windshield. We were at the same exact corner. The dead cabby hung out the open driver’s side door into a pool of blood. He’d been a husband and father of two in Rosedale. I immediately knew that this was the guy who’d killed him. His voice was terribly calm, self-assured, relaxed, bored. This was routine business.

I sucked in a huge gulp of air. I let it out: “FUCK YOU!”

I floored the gas and headed down the street, running lights and honking my horn.

“Pull over! Give me the money!”

I had nothing to lose. If I complied, he would rob and kill me. I’d never been as certain of anything in my life. I decided to take him with me.

“You chose the wrong cab, you fucking asshole! Bet you didn’t know you were going to die, did you? Better get used to it, shithead! You’re going to die tonight! You’re going to die! I’m going to hit a building! I’ll drive off a pier!”

I continued in this lunatic vein all the way down the street, veering over to the wrong side of the street, while my attacker kept screaming for me to stop and give him money, that’s all he wanted, he’d leave me alone afterwards, all I had to do was pay him the money, I had nothing to worry about.

Our balance of power had dramatically shifted by 50th Street. Now he was begging me to let him out. I was searching for something to slam into at an angle that would hurt him more than me. Finally, I relented.

“Let me out! Forget it! You’re nuts!” He was really scared.

“Throw out the gun first.” He did. I slowed down to 20 or 30.

“Jump out! I’m not slowing down anymore!”

He opened the door. When he jumped, I swerved to the side of the street and sped up. I heard a deep, sonorous “bong!” and kept driving.

After composing myself, I circled the block and returned to the spot where my attacker had jumped, a half-hour later. Two EMS technicians were busy loading up my assailant.

I rolled down my window casually. “What’s up? What happened to him?”

“Guy got tossed from a moving car. He’s really bad. Hit his head on a lamp post. Ugly.”

Incidentally, the wave of cabby shootings along the West Side stopped.

Price-Gouging for Fun and Profit
Driving a cab is a miserable job. Whole nights go by without decent tips. There’s nowhere to take a piss, except for dark Chelsea streets and diners where they’re nice to cabbies. You suck up vast quantities of exhaust and come home reeking of gasoline vapors.

So it’s only fair that natural disasters and human desperation often compensate cabbies with big windfalls. New Year’s Eve is a prime example of this. Although not as common as it was when I was driving, the practice of driving around with the “off duty” light guarantees vast profits. I charged $20 “off the meter” to go cross-town on New Year’s, $50 to go north and south and refused all outer-borough fares with a vengeance.

It is also possible to make your own opportunities. My niche was cruising the grimy streets of Alphabet City in the East Village on rainy weeknights where there are no cabs to be found. Trendoid club kids hailed me, wanting to go to the nearest subway station – a $3 or $4 fare – and I’d charge $5 per person for a group of four people. They’d always say “no way.” I’d drive away slowly. Invariably they’d start yelling, “No, wait! We’ll take it!” They were terrified of crossing Thompkins Square, which at the time was a homeless encampment.

The Drowned and the Saved
Hacking is a test of survival. Looking back at the many cabbies I knew who died during the brief period I drove is to realize that it could easily have happened to me. Sasha was a miserable asshole. He had too much facial hair in places where there’s not supposed to be any and a habit of cutting the shape-up line. So maybe it was his fate to get held up in East Harlem in 1985. Two muggers shot him through the back of his head, causing him to veer in front of a truck coming off the Triborough Bridge. They escaped the wreck, but got pummeled by a crowd of pedestrians until the cops came.

My friend Dave, who had attended Columbia with me, worked at the same garage. We were supposed to have breakfast together after our night shifts on a Sunday in July 1986, but he never showed up. The street cleaners found him Monday morning, when he refused to move his car to the alternate side of the street. He was slumped over the wheel on a side street in East Harlem, a block away from where Sasha died. He was an English major, a freelance artist, a really nice guy, who always said everyone was entitled to taxi service, regarding of where they lived. His face had fallen over his slit throat.

Joe was a friendly guy who sometimes drove me home for free after my shift. One evening he was driving in the West Village, where there are a lot of intersections without traffic signals. He had the right-of-way, but a semi-truck going the other way ran a stop sign. His cab was cut neatly in half. He walked away from the accident without a scratch, but his two young women fares died instantly. He returned to the garage with a glazed look and demanded his deposit back. No one ever heard from him again. There’s no way he doesn’t think about that now. A few months after the accident, the city put up a traffic signal there.

The Last Detail
My last shift started badly. My first fare was a loud salesman who asked to go to Queens. He tipped me $3 – $3 short of decent – and I headed to nearby Kennedy Airport to get a fare back to Manhattan. I waited for three hours for a flight to come in. The principle of time investment – I’ve already waited x time, if I leave now, that time will have been wasted – tripped me up. Eventually an Air Jamaica flight came in. My fare, a large, loud woman, demanded to be taken to an address in Queens. I didn’t know where that was, and was asking her for directions, when a TLC inspector walked up to her.

“Is this driver giving you trouble?” he asked her.

“No!” I said.

“Yes!” she replied.

“Listen, sir, all I’m trying to do is ask her where she wants to go. She doesn’t know where she wants to go. How can I take her there if she doesn’t know where she wants to go?”

“Is he refusing you?” he asked her.

“Yes. He is refusing.”

“No! I’m not refusing! Christ, will you please listen to me? She–”

“Refusal of service. Two hundred bucks.” He started writing out a summons.

“This woman doesn’t understand English! How can you take her word for anything?”

He kept writing. The woman grinned at me.

He wasn’t going to listen. I was already negative thirty bucks for the night, and this was really going to fuck me over. Nothing was going to stop this idiot from writing this summons. I had no choice.

I leaned back and punched him in the cheek as hard as I could. He fell backwards. I flung the woman’s bags from my trunk to the ground and drove off. I saw people running over to him in my rearview mirror.

Barely a hundred yards further, a lanky black guy hailed me on the airport loop road. I picked him up.

“Where to?”

“The city.”

Things were going to be all right after all.

Traffic was tight on the freeway, so I opted for a local road for a short stretch. Then I felt the knife on my throat. I pulled over.

“I only have twelve bucks.”

“I’ll take it.”

I handed over the money and watched the kid run off among the weeds and broken glass. He found a hole in the chain-link fence and disappeared. I drove back to my garage, asked for my deposit and took the subway home.

Back to School
Six months later, I applied and was accepted back to Columbia, this time as a history major. I finished a year later, in 1991, worked a series of day jobs, in Columbia’s admissions office and as a financial analyst for a San Francisco consulting firm, until I was able to survive on a cartoonist’s income. I moved back to New York in late 1995. My wife and I often take cabs, especially late at night. I always ask my drivers how business is. They open up when I talk shop and mention that I drove during the Eighties.

Not much has changed. Cabbies aren’t getting killed left and right anymore, but street crime in general seems to have abated – for now. Nobody really cares about cabbies, and they know it. They view it as a temporary shit job to tolerate until something better comes along.

I know it doesn’t help, but I always tip too much. I have to.

(C) 1995 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved

Fatal Defenestration: Men Who Love Gravity Too Much

•
Ted Rall

“I want a world without gravity.”
-Jim Carroll, 1980

My first time happened in Boston. It was in a double on the 12th floor of the Hotel Essex across a sprawling boulevard from South Station. It was a shitty room in a shitty hotel in an even shittier neighborhood, but the Columbia Marching Band was picking up the tab for this, my first and last football game. I played the kazoo in the game against Harvard. Anyway, directly next door a party out of a Steve Guttenberg movie raged on for hours. I knocked on the door, hoping against all of humanity’s accumulated reason and logic for an invitation. A disheveled cheerleader appeared. Behind her I could see the early planning stages of a standing-room-only orgy.

“What?” she squawked, looking through my head at the water fountain in the hall.

Back in room 1214, Mike was waiting for me. “Good news,” he said. “The people next door ordered beers by credit card, but they delivered them here!” After we polished off the first case, I staggered over to the window and leaned out into the night. “I can’t believe I’m drinking stolen beer with another guy,” I said. “Maybe we should check out the party next door,” Mike suggested. The 12-inch dance mix of the Go-Gos’ “We Got the Beat” was thumping through the wallpapering along with occasional squeals and grunts. “Forget it,” I said.

I watched idly as a car passed twelve stories below. A random thought flitted through my muddled brain – what if I just let go? – and I opened my hand. The bottle fell away and plunged towards the street. Ka-whap! Then I got an empty and waited for a car to come into range. My aim was perfect – just a slight flick of the wrist outward to clear the sidewalk – but the car sped up at the last second. My glass bomb missed by two car lengths.

Finally, a black sedan rolled slowly down the block. Crash! Direct hit on the roof!

Flashers came on and the car took off, did a U-turn and pulled in front of the hotel. Two more cruisers raced towards us from the opposite direction. I yanked the shade down.

I told Mike that the cops were coming. We tore our clothes, stashed the beer in the closet, killed the lights and jumped into our respective beds. A few minutes later, we heard the cops knocking down the hall. “Boston Police! Open up!” We didn’t answer, but our neighbors did. Mike and I listened at the door as the revelers proclaimed their innocence. We felt sorry for them as the cops called them liars. We chuckled as they were led away in handcuffs.

Despite my auspicious start, I didn’t really come into my own as a defenestrator until my sophomore year. It was 1982, and Columbia was still male-only. Thanks to a corrupt work-study student in the housing office, I became one of the eight guys admitted into a new experimental housing exchange with all-female Barnard College. The trouble was, the women all thought we were just there to get laid – which was not untrue – so for the most part we were ignored.

Fortunately, I soon found a friend in Chris, a fellow engineering student whose fifth-floor room in the Brooks-Hewitt-Reid complex overlooked Claremont Avenue.

One night over Chris’ expensive pot and my cheap vodka, I told Chris about Boston. I quickly convinced him that his room would prove ideal for nocturnal gravitational experiments; the foot-wide ledge running along his floor would provide excellent cover from victims attempting to pinpoint our location. Unfortunately, Woolworth’s only carried regular balloons, the kind people pin to walls at parties, so I got those instead of proper water balloons. I returned to the dorm, went to Chris’ room and tried filling up the first balloon in his sink. We were so drunk and stoned and horny and dumb, we never noticed how fucking huge they were, or that each one held a full gallon of water.

We were both physics students, so naturally we relied on a stopwatch to evaluate average walking speeds. We applied the standard s=1/2 at2 formula (where s is distance, a is the 32 feet/per second-squared rate of acceleration of gravity and t is elapsed time) for the time required for an object dropped six floors (street level was two floors below campus level) to hit the street. Soon we determined the exact crack on the sidewalk where a target should be at the point of release to ensure a direct-hit.

Hitting something as small as a human cross-section from so high up isn’t that easy, particularly when it’s subject to unpredictable variations in velocity and vector direction. The successful defenestrator must be able to identify a target, extrapolate future positioning, compensate for wind resistance and direction, execute the launch and return to visual cover in less than a few seconds. Moreover, the most rewarding aspect of the experience is in the face of the victim; much like the George C. Scott character in Firestarter who examines his victim’s eyes just as they’re about to die, there’s nothing quite like the mix of surprise and discomfort of someone getting creamed with a huge water balloon. Sticking around to watch that reaction increases the possibility of apprehension, of course, but pleasure always entails risk.

It doesn’t take long for even the most inept exploiter of gravity to become proficient, but we became so incredibly accurate that we would often shock ourselves. At first we contented ourselves with scaring the shit out of our pedestrian victims by hitting the sidewalk directly in front of them. The ritual backsplash and the walkers’ ensuing yells at no one in particular soon became dull, however, so we eventually developed an elaborate system of social evaluation to justify hitting actual human beings with objects weighing more than five pounds from absurdly high altitudes. This system was: we hit jocks. We hit jocks walking alone, we hit groups of jocks and we hit jocks walking with their girlfriends (collateral damage was unfortunate, but rare).

It’s impossible for the uninitiated to fully comprehend the idiotic destructive glee derived from a successful launch. The jock in question walks blissfully down the street, planning to pick up a slice at Pizzatown or fill out his syllabus at Bookforum and head out for an evening of beer or sex or whatever. But before he can even get to the corner of 116th Street, his night is ruined. He’s soaked to the bone, humiliated, broken. There’s nothing to do but scream at an invisible nemesis like a wounded wildebeest and go home, wet and alone. For the perp, on the other hand, the situation is all win. Snug and warm at home, surrounded by candles and Pink Floyd and booze, a sink full of loaded water balloons promises an evening of effortless fun at the expense of loathsome athletes.

Inevitably the search for cheap thrills caused Chris and I to develop more intricate schemes. We developed a one-two punch approach, wherein Chris would stay in his room and I would commandeer a window in a communal restroom 20 feet down the hall. I would deliberately drop a tiny balloon directly in front of our prey. He’d instinctively back up and smile to himself, confident that his lightening reflexes and catlike motor skills had saved him from disaster. That’s when Chris would drop his mondo monster balloon smack on the top of his head while I observed the whole thing with binoculars. The thick jockile head would drop forward as the first splash appeared, then snap back up as the rest of the balloon’s contents fell back upon his face. The body trembled with the impact. It was great.

There were many splendid achievements in our year-long bombing campaign – the guy reading the newspaper as he walked, only to have it flattened into wet pulp by a perfectly aimed balloon, the Hispanic guy in a white suit we drowned in leftover spaghetti sauce, the orgasmic victory of a medium-sized water missile dropped through the open sunroof of a Porsche – but we loved rainy days best of all. When the streets filled with black umbrellas, we set aside our traditional respect for womanhood and nerddom. We indiscriminately bombed the young and the old, the slight and the athletic – and it was awesome! A properly-placed one-gallon balloon would collapse the umbrella on its owner, breaking it but providing sufficient protection to keep their owners safe from harm. Best of all, they never suspected a thing. They never looked up or yelled – they simply assumed that the world’s largest raindrop had fucked up their day.

We ballooned in this manner for roughly 6 hours a day over a period of 9 months, but amazingly, we were never caught. Sometimes to break up the monotony, we’d lurk on the roofs of the School of International and Public Affairs and the Law School, but in New York, location is everything. No one ever walks around Amsterdam Avenue at night. Varying our venues transformed us into legends. Graffiti in the Columbia restrooms asked: “Who ARE the mad ballooners?” The Columbia Daily Spectator carried an editorial deriding the “vicious sociopaths” whose campaign of aerial terror had forced an entire campus to look up as they walked.

As time passed, it became more and more difficult to find stores that we hadn’t cleaned out of balloons. Woolworth’s sold out, the bodega on 107th Street sold out, the kid’s section at Sloan’s sold out. That’s what led us to the Atomic Balloon.

I found the A-balloon at the old May’s on 14th Street. It was one of those round red bastards, about two feet in diameter when filled, with a long elastic band tied to the nipple. Kids hold the rubber band and pound away to train them for kicking asses once they become teenagers.

In any event, I didn’t realize what it was, or how fucking massive it was, until I got back to Hewitt Hall. Chris’ sink was too small for the thing, so we filled it up in the bathtub and tied it. It weighed perhaps 50 pounds and it was wiggly as shit. The two of us didn’t have a prayer of extracting the beast from the tub.

“It’s too big,” Chris said. “We’ll have to kill it.” He took out his knife and stabbed it repeatedly, but it didn’t work. The rubber was too thick and flexible and wet.

“We can’t leave the damn thing here,” I pointed out. “If someone finds it, they’ll know we’re the Mad Ballooners. It has to go.”

There was only one solution. Chris went to get our mutual friend Ken. “Ken,” he confided, “Ted and I have a problem. We need your help.”

Ken and Chris and I struggled with the monster balloon and worked it towards the open window. Outside, the night was cold and crisp; the nearest pedestrian was five blocks north on Seminary Row. “Just clear the building and drop it on the sidewalk,” I instructed, “we don’t want this thing taking out someone’s open window.”

We made a running start and let go. A second later the loudest noise I’d ever heard reverberated down Claremont. The guy uptown stopped and looked. Professors living across the street came to their windows. Below us, the roof of a red Cadillac had been flattened into its seats. Shards of red rubber floated in a pool of water in the crater in the roof. The Caddy rested a foot too low; evidently the car’s axle had been broken. A small tree had been totally defoliated by the atomic balloon’s lethal trajectory into the car, leaving leaves everywhere.

The next morning I watched my statistics professor exit a building across 116th Street. He walked across the street in a daze, tried his keys in the door lock and gave up. He stood there for a minute. He took one of the maple leaves plastered to the hood, carefully folded it in half and put it into his back pocket. Then he walked away.

The next year I moved into East Campus, a 20-story high stack of second-rate drywall built on a solid foundation of rats and building code violations overlooking Morningside Park and Central Harlem. Chris lived on 4; I lived on 10. Soon we were back in business.

Chastened by our experience with the Atomic Balloon and aware of the exponential effect of five extra flights of stairs on the stuff we dropped out the window, we scaled down to actual water balloons – I found a mail-order outfit that never suffered from stocking problems – and ice cubes. East Campus was a whole different ballgame: Few pedestrians, but a lot of taxis. Also, the winds were fearsome, making it impossible to target accurately. Our crowning glory was knocking a poodle unconscious as it was being walked by its owner, a balding man wearing a pink biking shirt; other than that, we didn’t hit shit. Naturally, that’s when we got apprehended.

I came home one afternoon to find my suite crawling with pear-shaped university security guards. “Someone reported hearing paramilitary jargon coming from this suite,” the chief security guy, a wiry fortysomething said. Whenever Chris and I prepared to drop something, we’d spat out a melange of Star Trekisms and NASA shit like “engage cloaking device” (pull back the curtain) and “confidence is high – fire! fire!” “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” I said.

“What about all the water on the sill?” he asked. “It’s raining. The window’s open,” I noted.

“We know about you dropping that typewriter on the motorcyclist,” he said, grinning inanely. “He had to have a couple dozen stitches. Hope you’re happy.” We hadn’t done any typewriters – but, come to think of it, why not?

The next day, Chris and I were expelled from the university housing system in perpetuity.

My ballooning days were far from over, though. I moved in with my girlfriend into a four-story walk-up in the middle of the barrio at Amsterdam and 101st Street. It had to at least tie for the noisiest place in New York City; there were a police station, fire house and public junior high school, playground and public pool across the street, not to mention a bus stop and a couple of loose steel plates in the middle of the intersection. Amsterdam was a truck route, but the worst thing was the light synchronization – traffic hit greens all the way from 72nd Street only to screech to a collective halt for an inexplicable red at 101st. The Frederick Douglas housing projects provided a steady supply of truants and guys screaming “hey yo” at all hours of the night just because they could. But all of that shit paled in comparison to the chaos surrounding the bodega on the first floor of our building.

The place barely even bothered to stock food; its main business was over-the-counter drug sales. If you walked in to get milk, the cashier would shake his head over your cluelessness. A hive of young men loitered ominously , transacting business with intensity rivaling the commodities exchange, their brethren double- and triple-parked on both corners to watch for cops. Subtlety was not the byword of the operation; these guys were up until 5 every morning howling at the top of their collective lungs, fighting and blasting the same rap song over and over. Every night passed in a fog of annoyance and revenge fantasies.

I called the police repeatedly, but nothing ever happened. Then, one Saturday morning, I happened to be at Woolworth’s to buy potting soil when I walked past the freshly rejuvenated party balloon section. They had something I’d never seen before: black balloons, perfect for nighttime bombings.

That evening I filled up a washbasin with black balloons, each filled with scalding hot water (it was the middle of winter at the time) and waited in the bedroom with all the lights off. The field of battle was tilted heavily in my favor; my targets were stationary and dimwitted, thus eliminating the need for that old standby s=1/2 at2. The thugs were like fish in a barrel; all you had to do was point and drop. A convertible pulled up with its speakers pulsating the then-ubiquitous (s)hit “It Takes Two.” I targeted the one guy in the back seat with a choice shot slightly behind the center of the head, straight down the back of the shirt.

“Shit!” the guy yelped. But amazingly, he didn’t move, or even look up. I assume it was considered bad form to abandon one’s manly stoic stance. The guys in front ignored him. I dropped two more; one hit his lap and the other missed. There’s no way it didn’t hurt like a bastard.

“Fuck! Shit!” the hapless drug dealer said.

“What the fuck?” the driver said, never turning around.

“It’s wet back here!” said the guy, who was, in fact, very wet.

“What do you mean, wet?”

“I said, it’s wet here!”

“Shut up, wank,” the man in the front passenger seat commented casually. I let loose with a barrage on all three. Boom-boom-boom!

“Motherfuck! It is wet here!” the driver concluded. “Let’s go!” The car pulled off. Nobody looked up.

I had a corner apartment, so I went to the living room. Sure enough, the same assholes pulled up a minute or two later and parked in front of the hydrant. I let them relax a few minutes while I went to reload. The fire escape blocked the view from the street; anyway, my window was already closed by the time the first balloon hit the ground. I hit the loser in the back seat with a balloon the size of a grapefruit. Boosh! “Shit, man! This whole place is wet!”

“What! Here too?” the driver asked, stupefied.

I chucked the remaining dozen balloons so hard that the guys in the car clipped some hood’s foot as they pulled away. “I kill you, man!” the foot guy yelled as I dropped a big one on his left shoulder. He promptly turned around and slugged another guy in the jaw.

My one-man campaign to clean up the Upper West Side continued for about six weeks. The more stubborn villains required something effective; for this I relied upon Rolling Rock bottles wiped clean to remove my fingerprints. Finally, the dealers were gone. Bruised and scalded, they relocated their operation to 104th Street, where they became someone else’s problem. The trucks hit the metal plate and the sirens shrieked as they passed beneath, but I finally enjoyed the semblance of actual sleep for the first time in what seemed like forever. My mood favorably changed, I vowed to hang up my career as a mad ballooner once and for all.

Then, one night during the summer of ‘95, I awoke to the sounds of someone puking outside my window. I was living in Berkeley, California, where the right to act like an utter asshole supersedes everyone else’s rights not to be subjected to such aforementioned assholism. I got up and peered out the window of my third-floor apartment. There, directly below, a car had pulled over. The driver’s side door was open, and a DUI’s head was busy spewing chunks all over the front of my building. Between our indolent super and the fact that it never ever rains in California, I knew that I’d be smelling puke forever.

I got a Sierra Nevada bottle from the recycling bin and woke up my wife. “Think I still have the knack?” I asked her. It was a little tricky – my quarry was wedged in a tight spot. I’d need a slight upward flick of the wrist to clear the lemon tree to the right. Butthead was still hurling upon my return. I triangulated carefully, compensated for the slight ocean breeze coming off the bay, flicked upwards and hoped for the best. It was terrible. Instead of the drunk’s gourd, I took out his rear windshield. He floored it and took off, clipping the rear bumper of a parked car on the way out.

“I can’t believe this!” I told my wife. “I did everything perfectly!”

“Don’t worry about it, honey,” she murmured. “You’ll always be my mad ballooner.”

(C) 1995 Ted Rall, All Rights Reserved

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Now for the Disco President

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Ted Rall

About this time every four years, articles bemoaning the early start of the upcoming presidential campaign begin peppering the editorial pages. Never mind that this writing actually serves to launch the orgy of militant moderation that passes for electioneering in this country.

This year we can dispense with all that. The 1996 campaign has ended before it began.

We already know that the Republican nominee, and probable victor, will be Bob Dole. The legendary meanness and nasty disposition of the man from Kansas hasn’t escaped the notice of even the most moronic American voters, but his third attempt at the Oval Office is sufficiently well-funded to succeed.

Nonetheless, there’s always been something creepy about Bob Dole. He’s like your best friend’s mean father, or Humphrey Bogart’s evil twin. He’s even got Dick Nixon’s five o’clock shadow.

Clinton may be able to put up some resistance. After all, he is the President. He could have the CIA reveal that Dole once rented “The Sorrow and the Pity” and “Carnosaur 2” on the same night. But the man from the Ozarks isn’t likely to break his impressive run of political ineptitude. After all, his buffoonery made him President, even if history students will have trouble remembering him in another twenty years.

Because we’ve been stuck with him a long time, Dole enjoys the advantage of familiarity. Granted, his early career is mysterious because his contemporaries are all dead of old age. What is known is that Dole became Kansas’ first senator after statehood. Although he first made his mark as Gerry Ford’s vice-presidential running mate in 1976, it’s unlikely that those jowls did Ford any good.

In 1980, Dole overcame his image as a has-been and ran for president. He was defeated in the Republican primaries after his involvement in Shea’s Rebellion came to light. The Federalist, a newspaper of the period, called him “a meane guye.” In 1988, by then a has-has been, Dole ran again, but lost due to accusations of conflict of interest relating to the Social Security Administration. Now geared up for ’96, Dole looks not like the has-has-has-been that he is, but rather a shoo-in.

Generational demographics ensure that Dole will become our oldest president ever when he takes office at the age of 73, according to the Gregorian calendar.

His secret? He’s surfing a wave of 70’s retro.

Lava lamps and platform shoes are back. Clogs, disco, hip-huggers, Aerosmith and Earth Day have again taken America by storm. The logical next step is to embrace a politician who first came to prominence during the era of gas lines and disco fever.

Dole’s politics are vintage Nixon-Ford. His alternating hawk-and-dove Bosnia policy mirrors Nixon on Vietnam. Like Ford, he’s obsessed with preventing inflation, but has no idea what to do about it. Maybe he’ll recycle some of those old “WIN” buttons. Dole’s transparently opportunistic anti-Hollywood rant recalls Nixon’s finest moments. Don’t be surprised if historians catch Dole tossing expletive-deleteds around on his tapes while criticizing films he hasn’t seen and songs he hasn’t heard.

But most importantly, Dole’s got the look of the 70’s politician–wide, loud ties, greased-back hair and $200 polyester suits. He could take the part of the Silent Majority-style vice cop in any blaxploitation film.

In short, Bob Dole is the Man.

Perhaps most telling of all, Dole seeks the presidency as his due rather than as the greatest favor the American people can bestow on a fellow citizen. That’s why, like Freddy Krueger, he keeps coming back–he refuses to die until he gets to the launch codes. He undoubtedly hopes to relive a Nixonian imperial presidency (but without the tacky finale).

Bill Clinton has flirted with the Me Decade in some respects–his hair and affection for Fleetwood Mac come to mind–but overall he’s still a 60’s kind of guy. In the final analysis, he lacks Dole’s super-action boogie-down credentials.

The requirement that candidates be at least 35 to run tends to generate presidents who are anachronisms. When white guys come to power, we have to relive their ancient youth. It is a happy coincidence that we live in a place where everything is always getting worse, so we’re always feeling nostalgia for some period when things were lousy, but still better than they are now. The cleverest politicians manage to tap into our obsessive nostalgia at election-time.

In 1980, we craved the quaint boredom and genteel racism of the segregated 50’s. Reagan capitalized on this Happy Days mentality. Clinton, a man who ran as JFK reincarnate, dragged us into the Sixties. Draft-dodging, extracurricular sex and pot became pressing issues as The Wonder Years generation seized control of the White House. Now we have The Brady Bunch Movie. After Bob Dole is elected, the ascendancy of the Seventies will be complete. At the current rate, we’re gaining one decade every eight years; our presidents should catch up with us around 2064.

“Hello? Mr. Frampton? This is your President. How would you like to perform at my inaugural?”

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