From the LA Weekly: Morgan vs. Foretich Twenty Years Later

Originally posted here.

At home, things are as normal as can be. Dr. Elizabeth Morgan brings in a tray carrying a single cup of coffee, a sugar bowl and her favorite creamer. The creamer is shaped like a cow, with a looped tail forming a handle. It doesn’t work that well, she explains as milk slops out, but she loves it.

Her daughter, now called Elena, laughs as she finishes snacking on a cracker, checking her teeth for crumbs in a mirror. She’s wearing tight jeans and a baby-blue tube top, is ebullient and bouncy, and seems younger than 26, closer to the teen pop-music audience she’s wooing.

But Elena has her mother’s eyes and the same burning moral outrage that propelled them both into the global spotlight in the 1980s. It’s been so long that Elena and Elizabeth have begun entirely new lives, landing in the town that has turned epochal personal remakes into a local industry.

“When you’re an only child raised by a single parent, you have a special bond with them,” says Elena — an assumed name she began using after returning to the U.S. from New Zealand, where she went by the assumed name Ellen. “My mother and I get along very easily.”

The term “special bond” would be an understatement. In the late ’80s, Elena, whose given name is Hilary Foretich, rocketed along with her mother, into the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and New York Times and made news regularly on ABC, CBS and NBC, fighting an ugly custody battle against Hilary’s father, Dr. Eric Foretich.

Dr. Morgan alleged that Foretich, whom she had divorced before their daughter was born, had sexually abused their little girl, and today estimates that she spent $1 million to prove it and to protect Hilary. When D.C. Superior Court Judge Herbert B. Dixon Jr. dismissed the civil case against Hilary’s father, oral surgeon Foretich, in 1987, Morgan defied his court orders giving Foretich visitation rights.

She spent two years at the D.C. City Jail for illegally whisking 5-year-old Hilary out of Foretich’s — and the court’s — reach.

Hilary Foretich lived secretly in New Zealand with her grandparents, who plunged her into obscurity by renaming her Ellen Morgan. In jail, Elizabeth Morgan refused to divulge her daughter’s location, but the defiant mom was freed in 1989 — by an act of Congress, no less. Then in 1996, Congress passed yet another custom law for the duo, the Elizabeth Morgan Act, which allowed them both to return home to Washington, D.C.

About a decade ago, Hilary Foretich/Ellen Morgan changed her name again, to Elena Mitrano — a nod to her grandfather’s Italian heritage.

Today, mother and daughter live in Los Angeles, the city of ultimate do-overs. In their second year here, they share an apartment that overlooks the posh Four Seasons Hotel adjacent to Beverly Hills. Because of the location, they get a Beverly Hills view, explains Mitrano, now a beautiful young woman, but with an L.A. rent.

Mitrano recently reached No. 26 in the New York music charts with the title song from her debut album, Rescue Me, produced by L.A.-based company the Heavyweights.

Upbeat and catchy, her pop vocals are popular in New York’s club scene, while ballads like the autobiographical “Voiceless” add weight to her fan base. Whenever she’s at a loss for lyrics or rhythms, Mitrano says, she looks to her idol and asks, “What would Cher do?”

Inevitably here in Tinsel Town, a record deal is in the works. “In a lot of ways, I have been very, very fortunate,” Mitrano says. “My family on my mother’s side loved me and supported me and gave me a tremendous childhood. But there are so many children who aren’t as lucky as I had been, and I wanted to do something for them.”

She got a degree in journalism at American University in Washington, D.C., but found that her voice was more powerful as a creative force, and with her mother’s help she began producing music. “I think it’s high time pop music addressed people’s need to just smile,” Mitrano says.

Her brainy mother, now 61, is getting a master’s in public health at UCLA — adding to her biology degree from Harvard, M.D. from Yale and psychology degree from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

Mitrano has performed at the Roxy, Molly Malone’s and Tangier — and is preparing for a tour. With dates yet to be set, she hopes to visit 10 U.S. cities as part of the Rock Your Fashion Tour with Sledge Clothing Co. When Mitrano moved to L.A. to further her singing career, within months, and at Mitrano’s behest, her mother followed.

“Anything for Elena,” Morgan says. In fact, Morgan was an icon to U.S. mothers two decades ago because she would do anything for the then-named Hilary. But Morgan was also accused of being a fraud and a psychopath who would do anything for her daughter.

Some family psychologists and other experts, like law professor Susan B. Apel, have repeatedly suggested that Mitrano suffers from “false memory” syndrome, and that no abuse actually took place.

Foretich, who rebuilt his life, which was ruined for years by their allegations, and who is a successful oral surgeon now living in Virginia, claimed that Morgan was a “pathological liar” who fabricated details in order to retain sole custody of the little girl. Some critics have even suggested that it was Morgan, not Foretich, who was the perpetrator.

Mitrano’s jaw stiffens at such suggestions today. She sits upright and places her hands in her lap.

“My mother was made out to be a liar,” she says. “She was made out to be crazy and vindictive and a woman who was just trying to spear her ex-husband and make him look bad and steal his daughter from him. ... My mother was trying to save my life.”

It all seems incredibly distant from 1987, and it is. Morgan has term papers to write. Mitrano has glitzy Hollywood events to attend. But they always make time to play gin rummy together each weekend.

Their apartment is made homey by a plush purple chaise, welcoming furnishings and fully stocked bookshelves. But there are no photographs from Mitrano’s early childhood.

“Life is good now,” says Morgan with a red-lipped smile, nodding and interlocking her fingers. “But looking back can be kind of a downer.”

In the summer of 1987, temperatures in Washington, D.C., soared above 100 as a crime wave gripped the city. The D.C. jail was full of murderers, carjackers and rapists jammed in a pink-toned building. The Washington Post described it as “plagued by chronic sanitary conditions.” Rats scuttled along the corridors. Flies buzzed around puddles of who-knows-what.

On a Friday that August, an unusual guest checked in, a Harvard graduate and plastic surgeon with more than 20 years of schooling. “I think that’s the most I’ve ever seen,” a guard told the media of Morgan’s education as he checked her paperwork. She had refused — once again — to tell Judge Dixon where her daughter was.

“Either you tell me where your daughter is, or you go to jail,” a weary Dixon had told her.

Morgan replied, “That’s not a problem. I’ll go to jail.” She was escorted from Dixon’s courtroom, strip-searched, hosed down and given a jump suit. “It wasn’t so bad,” she now tells L.A. Weekly. “At least I got to read a lot of books.”

The Morgan vs. Foretich case was a white-hot news story. She remembers being harangued in her cell by a journalist from the Washington Post, who, Morgan claims, suggested that her jail venture was a stunt to aid her plastic-surgery business.

“Isn’t it true that they’re letting you out to see patients?” the journalist asked.

“If you think that’s true,” Morgan replied, “why don’t you ask my guard?” As Morgan tells it now, the guard looked at the Post reporter in disgust.

Quietly whisked to New Zealand, Mitrano remembers growing up afraid of being found by her father or New Zealand officials. Says Mitrano, “I felt that looming feeling as if someone was always standing behind me.”

Someone was. When Interpol discovered the little girl’s location, the police in Christchurch, New Zealand, began accompanying her to swim meets and sometimes tracked her schoolmates — purportedly in case her father showed up and nabbed the wrong girl.

Mitrano’s grandparents tried to protect her from TV images of her jailed mother. With her pale skin and long brown hair, Dr. Morgan was a photogenic inmate and international media sensation. The press loved to have her pose with her delicate hands wrapped around prison bars. But on day 759, she was freed by Congress — thanks to its District of Columbia Civil Contempt Imprisonment Limitation Act, limiting contempt-of-court terms to one year. She had served almost two.

Time has padded the sharp edges of the past with protective cushioning. Eric Foretich is more than 2,500 miles away practicing dentistry in Virginia, his office confirms. He is living in an alternate dimension as far as the mother and daughter are concerned.

Under law, Mitrano had until age 21 to file criminal charges against her father, but she decided to leave the past alone. In 1987, when the threat of having to visit her father was highest, the little girl was suicidal, according to Mary L. Froning, her therapist at the time, who testified in court in 1989.

Since she arrived in Los Angeles, and began climbing steadily up through the competitive, creative music scene here, her demons started to grow quiet. “I remember a lot,” Mitrano says. “And I still get sad sometimes.” Her brown eyes glisten as she sits in the sunlit living room with her mother.

But for 20 years, some journalists, psychologists, researchers and lawyers have been skeptical. Eric Foretich passed three lie-detector tests in court — two administered by police. He has consistently filed lawsuits against media outlets, including ABC for portraying him as a pedophile in the 1992 TV movie The Elizabeth Morgan Story. ABC paid him a settlement, but Foretich has nearly gone bankrupt fighting the media, according to his attorney, Jonathan Turley.

He also tried many times to contact his daughter, and after a detective traced her and her mother to New Zealand, Foretich flew there and appealed to the courts. “He tried to plead his case as the ‘good father,’” Mitrano says with a sarcastic tilt of the head. “They sent him back with his tail between his legs.”

Foretich also tried to see his daughter during a court hearing in Washington, D.C., when she turned 18. It didn’t go well. Mitrano was furious and demanded that Foretich leave the courtroom. She recalls, “I remember screaming and telling him to get away from me.”

“She got a chance to give him a piece of her mind,” Morgan says. “He left immediately.”

The two women have been as consistent as Foretich in telling their version of what unfolded. Says Morgan today, “Before the visits began, she was a really happy baby. And then once the visits began, she was really unhappy. It was not subtle, I mean, something bad was happening.”

She would throw fits when her father came to pick her up for a visit and came home acting “like a zombie,” Morgan recalls. On the one occasion that Morgan asked her daughter to “act out” what was going on during the visits, the child, she says, began inserting objects into her genital area.

Mitrano says she remembers feeling unsafe, and trying to fight being taken to her father’s house. “There’s a certain kind of screaming that kids make — a certain type of scream— that I remember in my own head,” she says, and pauses to hold back tears. “It’s bone-chilling. It really is. It’s not a normal cry. It’s a child in mortal danger. And kids will tell you.”

Why, then, did the judge side with Foretich, ordering a two-week unsupervised visit to make up for his lost time with his child? There is no clear answer. According to Morgan, because it was a civil case and not a criminal one, the burden of proof lay with her.

A lot of men, among them similarly accused spouses, think otherwise. Jake Morphonios, the North Carolina coordinator for the fathers’ rights organization Fathers-4-Justice, writes in his Web column, the Liberty Tree, that in civil-court battles between parents, “constitutional safeguards are abandoned. The burden of proof falls upon the accused to prove a negative, or to conclusively show that an alleged event never occurred.”

According to Judge Dixon in the District of Columbia, the evidence offered against Foretich was “in equipoise’’ — an even split between evidence suggesting guilt and that which suggests innocence.

Foretich was contacted by L.A. Weekly, but declined to comment. According to online reviews, his small McLean, Virginia, dental-surgery practice is respected by patients and locals. His last official contact regarding the case was on December 16, 2003, when the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the Elizabeth Morgan Act, declaring it unconstitutional because it singled out Foretich and inherently accused him of the crime.

His attorney, Turley, a professor at George Washington University in D.C., at the time called it “a wonderful day of vindication.”

Courts now are frequently faced with allegations like those in Morgan vs. Foretich, hard to prove and even harder to dispel. The fathers’-rights movement now makes a point of warning fathers to prepare for abuse allegations.

“The mere accusation is sufficient to strip the father of all his custody rights and launch a criminal investigation,” Morphonios says.

Accusing Foretich of a crime would have been a big step for Judge Dixon, who saw the evidence as a draw. Morgan says of Dixon, “Since I was the squeaky wheel, he thought that all he had to do was get rid of me and the problem would disappear.”

And the problem did disappear, eventually.

“I visited my dad for the last time when I was 5,” Mitrano says. She takes a deep breath. “It’s a long time between 0 and 5. I think the biggest question that I had was, ‘Why wasn’t I safe sooner?’”

It’s a warm Friday night at the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Hollywood, and Mitrano stands under the glow of stage lights with a microphone in hand. She is surrounded by the buzzing, glittering life of a church carnival. Children with painted faces and parents pushing buggies stop in front of the stage and sit down.

Mitrano closes her purple-shaded eyes and sings: “For unheard anguish and for uneased pain — this is for the voiceless.”

In the audience, her mother sways to the soft ballad. Her diamond earrings sparkle. She sings along — fumbling the first few words but remembering the rest. “For senseless sorrow, for their stories never told — this is for the voiceless: You’re not alone.”

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The Interpretation of Search Trends: How SEO experts are tapping into the human psyche and revealing its darkest secrets

Posted on Pop+Politics.com
Leaning over his keyboard, author Andrew Keen typed the word “Why?” into the search bar. Keen, who believes that the internet is “cannibalizing culture,” is also fascinated by the secrets of our online universe. He plays with a keyword research tool – a website feature that ranks the frequency of billions of questions inputted into search engines – and the results of his one-word query are sorted into a tidy graph.

“Oh my,” says Keen as he reads down the list. “This is interesting.”

At the top of the graph, with almost 4,000 searches per day: “Sigmund Freud: Why do we dream?” For Keen, this is an uncanny result. Only moments before, he was comparing Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams to what he sees as its modern equivalent: the interpretation of search trends. Freud delved into the human psyche through the analysis of dreams, but the internet is providing a window to the subconscious on a massive scale.

“Freud had to come up with a whole theory of guessing what people were thinking through dreams,” said Keen. “Marx had his theory of thoughts being driven by the reality of economics. Religious people of course have their theory. But in a sense, the people of Google know more than anyone.”

In the U.S. alone, 250 million internet users seek answers from search engines every day.

Keen has been actively raging against what he believes to be the culturally destructive force of the internet since his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur. This self-labelled polemic accuses internet users of feeding themselves wilfully into Google and creating a monster. The search engine, Keen says, is the “Big Brother” of the modern world. “We pour our innermost secrets into the all-powerful search engine through the tens of millions of questions we enter daily,” Keen writes. “Search engines like Google know more about our habits, our interests, our desires than our friends, our loved ones and our shrink combined.”

Our ignorance is Google’s power, according to Keen, as all our freely given information is manipulated for massive commercial gain. Websites competing for traffic use search engine optimization – the art of catering to search engine rules in order to grab a top spot in their page rankings – and try to interpret search trends so that they can create pages depending on recurring terms or hot topics. The relationship between search engines and websites is financially interdependent. The more information search engines accumulate from users, the more advertising they can sell. The more traffic websites catch, the more advertising revenue they earn. Everyone is vying for clicks, and that means knowing as much as possible about web users.

“Never before have we given out so much information so publicly,” said Keen. “That’s the thing about search that is so shocking, and that most people don’t know – Google is keeping information. Every time we search we’re adding to the intelligence of Google and not being paid for it.”

And what is it that the “people of Google” know about us? Aside from the numerical data that makes up our governmental and financial identity, search engines know the questions we are seeking to answer through the internet. More than 2.5 million people every year search for “How to talk dirty to my boyfriend”. Almost 1.5 million want to know “What does a hymen look like?” and approximately 800,000 people are asking “Where can I buy guns online?” In one of the most popular search categories – the “How to” query term – more than 2.1 million people annually want to know “How to give head” and 1.6 million people want to know “How to have sex”. It is impossible to gage whether or not these terms are being dictated by bored, uninformed teenagers, but certain results imply something more sinister than curiosity. The 13th most popular term, with 2,500 people a day and 900,000 annually seeking its content, is “How to kill a fetus at home.”

“I think it reveals how pathetic a lot of people are, that they would ask these kinds of questions,” said Keen. “It’s a mystery to me.”

Keen has been widely criticized for his pessimistic view of the internet’s social value, notably by his nemesis Lawrence Lessig, who described The Cult of the Amateur as “shot through with sloppiness, error and ignorance” . He has been called an “elitist” by bloggers who disagree with his view that the internet is killing our long-established cultural gate-keeping system by democratizing information to the level of lowest common denominator. Bloggers are also quick to point out that for someone who thinks blogs are the amateurish evil of the internet, Keen updates his own – a blog called “The Great Seduction” – daily.

Keen believes he is separated from most of the blogosphere by being a “pre-existing professional artist” for whom the internet is an “exciting vehicle” – a medium that works as a supplement to the real world, not as a replacement. The internet, Keen believes, is nothing more than a pool in which to view our own reflection.

“This technology is a mirror,” said Keen. “The theological and deeply philosophical nature of the internet is such that now we can know what people are really thinking. We didn’t know before. We could only guess.”

Just like Freud’s dreamland – where our anti-social thoughts and repressed behaviors come out to play – something about the internet brings out the primitive, desirous and socially forbidden in us. Whether revealed in a list of search trends or through dream psychoanalysis, desires such as sex and aggression are a deep-rooted part of humanity’s instinctual nature. But in Freud’s theories, the dark side of human behavior was usually kept locked up inside the walls of the subconscious. Dreams were the only place it could flail around unleashed, unguarded by Freud’s super-ego, the moral conscience, the ten-commandments, the inner watchdog who cages wrong from right and polite from perverse. Seventy years later, we have a new playground: an entire virtual world that we can live in real time. And there is no Super-ego here to guard us.

The pleasure of anonymity, according to Cyber-psychologist John Suler, encourages people to “deliberately create a specific online personality for themselves.” Suler writes in his online text The Psychology of Cyberspace that the freedom of the internet allows people to “have some conscious control over the same kind of wish fulfillment that fuels dreams.” Like dreams, virtual online space encourages people to act “out of unconscious fantasies and impulses, which may explain some of the sexuality, aggression, and imaginative role playing we see on the internet.”

In chat rooms such as www.4chan.org, users are given unedited freedom to be as sexually explicit and aggressive as they like. Pornographic pictures are posted into the adult chat rooms every second, and all it takes to access the content is one click on the “I agree” button. One anonymous user describes in chronological detail how he meets women in clubs and drugs them before taking them home, raping and torturing them. “I go out in clubs and spike drinks, get ‘em drunk and take ‘em home,” he writes. Another anonymous user offers “human meat” for fellow cannibals. “I'm not a serial killer,” he writes, “but I have a connection to buy human meat. I am a cannibal. Does that work for you?” In the “random” chat room, a user posts pictures “to piss Christians off” – anonymously, of course. The image shows a figure kneeling, with another figure holding a gun to its head. Underneath, the text reads: “The cure for Christianity”. Another anonymous post follows a thread about the best knives for causing bodily harm. “Blade goes in, twist, twist back, remove,” the user describes. “The bleeding most likely won't stop without cauterization within the first few minutes. By then he'll either have been stabbed again or be dead depending on where you got him.”

On average, more than 35,000 users post to 4chan.com every second, with hundreds of posts feeding the site continuously. Although much of the traffic may be driven out of harmless curiosity, sexual and aggressive internet behavior – displayed in public forums or through search trends – can also indicate a more formidable threat. Hans Christian Jasch, who works for the Justice, Freedom and Security department of the European Union – one of the largest and most prominent world organisations tackling global terrorism – believes that the internet has become a breeding ground for extremist ideology and an almost infallible communication device for terrorists. “There is basically no control,” said Jasch. “It is impossible to control the internet.”

Cases of anti-social behaviour encouraged by the internet happen every few seconds. “Because of the nature of the Internet, people are anonymous,” said search engine optimization consultant Michael Gray. “They can go and act like a jerk online and nobody is really going to care – a lot of people do that.”

In the industry, these people are known as “trolls”. Trolls lurk in public forums, waiting for the moment to attack anonymously. Their comments splash individual blogs and respected news outlets alike with vulgar criticisms and personal assaults designed to cause disruption and outrage. “The Internet is so big, so powerful and so pointless that for some people it is a complete substitute for life,” says Andrew Brown, a journalist and blogger for the British newspaper The Guardian.

Of course, the internet isn’t just a breeding ground for uninhibited alter-egos. A major shift has occurred in recent months, as social networking websites have officially become more popular than pornography. Facebook, the master of the social networking universe, more than doubled its user base last year by targeting the global market. In Europe alone, the site’s user base increased from under 9 million members in June 2007 to more than 35 million in June 2008. Globally, the site grew by 153 percent. Approximately 14 percent of all Americans have a Facebook account, and more than 580 million people – making up 7 percent of the world’s population – belong to a social networking site.

But Facebook and similar sites are still dwarfed by search engine use. Google has consistently remained the number one website in the world, with 75 percent of the market share. The exponential growth of the internet has meant a guaranteed increase in search engine use and created the perfect environment for big business.

“Websites and publishers who are able to figure out what people are searching for are going to do a much better job of capturing the traffic,” said Gray.

Figuring out what people want has become a vital skill in the online world. More websites are gearing themselves toward the most popular search terms in the hope of attracting the 250 million daily visitors from search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Every taboo, embarrassing or perverse question – along with many innocent ones – typed into the search bar creates a virtual model of the human mind that SEO experts use as a basis for the mass psychoanalysis of internet users. Google CEO Eric Schmidt describes the search engine as “a giant supercomputer” with dozens of data centers around the world. They keep logs of every website visited and every corresponding IP address – meaning that each word typed into the search bar can be easily traced back to the user. Schmidt says that Google is “reasonably satisfied” with their privacy controls and that the company works hard to ensure that private information cannot be accessed and used for harm. “Although you can never say never,” he added.

Right now, a tool called “Google Trends” allows anyone to view the world’s top search queries down to a specific day and year, country and province. Most websites that offer information – such as news sites and guide pages – regularly check Google trends and create pages specifically to catch search traffic. For example, one of the top “How to” search trends – “How to have sex” – has accumulated 36 million pages in Google. There are more than 28 million pages for the next most popular term – “How to give head”. The question, “Why do we dream?” corresponds to more than 25 million pages. Bringing eyeballs to pages means advertising revenue, so web pages are constantly being created to match consistent search terms – such as “How to have sex.” With topical search terms – such as “Smallville, final episode” or “Sarah Palin SAT scores” – it’s a fast-fleeting competition to catch searchers before their interest in the subject matter wanes.

“It’s sort of an arms race,” said Gray.

Search engines and SEO teams compete to analyse and understand inputted information. For search engines, the more specific model of the human mind they can create, the better targeted advertising can be. For SEO experts, paying close attention to search trends is essential for building websites that will drive traffic. Search engines want to produce the most specific and accurate results they can filter, while SEO experts want to create pages that will rank highly in search engines and get clicks. The relationship is fraught with competition.

“Google is doing everything they possibly can to prevent us from manipulating the search engines,” said Gray. “Because if it’s completely manipulatable, then they’re not in control and we are. That’s a bad spot for them to be in.”

The information that Google accumulates about how and why people search is kept a tight secret. These “algorithms”, which determine how Google ranks pages, are the secret recipe that every internet entrepreneur wishes he could get his hands on. Google is constantly adjusting its methods depending on the terms being typed into search bars every day.

“Google says that every six months, 50 percent of their search terms are new,” said Gray. “But people are always going to searching for the same problems that human beings have been trying to solve forever.”

In internet terms, that means sex and communication – pornography and social networking. In Freudian terms, it represents the fundamental struggle between primitive instincts and social behavior. Freud believed that it is “impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built on a renunciation of instinct.” According to Freud, the animal in us all lies dormant in the recesses of the subconscious. It might be the case that our dream playground has become virtual reality through the internet and the ravaging animals within us are tearing down the walls of polite society. The unfiltered information we provide to search engines may be posing a threat to personal privacy and national security, as well as building mass corporations with God-like omniscience. Or it might just be the case, as Keen suggests, that the internet is nothing more than a shimmering pool of information allowing us to drown in our own reflection.

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Short Story: Guitar, Gum, Papers

I was standing on a pitch black area of beach with a pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum in my hand, watching the confrontation between Mark and the toothy Jamaican man and feeling increasingly nervous. The man’s face was inching closer throughout the conversation, his voice getting louder. I glimpsed at his hands in case they concealed a weapon. I looked longingly toward the part of the beach 100 yards ahead, well-lit and sure to have security guards on patrol. I wished we were standing up there.
“If I don’t get money, how am I supposed to feed my children?” The man said. He had told us earlier in the conversation, when things had seemed more friendly, that he had come down from the mountains to sell a random selection of goods on the beach. He couldn’t go home without enough tourist cash to feed his three kids. His boy was 13 he said as he gestured the boy’s height with a hand wavering around his neck line. He had been with his woman for 14 years, unmarried but happy. Mark held the cigar awkwardly. We had asked for none of this stuff, but had them pushed into our hands anyway. It had seemed like a gift.
“I want you to have this,” the man had said, pushing the cigar into Mark’s hand and the chewing gum into mine. “Oh, thank you very much,” we said. What a friendly man. What a nice thing to do, to offer us little gifts for visiting Jamaica.
“Do you need rolling papers?” he said. The terrible mistake had been to tell the guy that yes, we needed rolling papers. Now he had something on us: he was providing a service rather than being a nuisance and a charity case.
Rolling papers (which we later discovered didn’t work – the sticky edge was completely useless), a “Jamaican cigar” and a pack of chewing gum. These weren’t gifts. The man asked for 500 Jamaican dollars (about eight bucks) and Mark had paid him kindly, just to help out, when really this horde would have cost us a quarter of the price anywhere else. Plus, we hadn’t wanted any of it. The man seemed thankful at first. He knew he was getting more money out of us than was necessary or fair. We thought it was the end and continued our walk to find dinner. The plague had been brief and was over.
But on the way back, after ironically realizing that we had – in fact – given away our dinner money and only had 300 Jamaican left, the man approached us again in the dark patch. He squinted at Mark’s face and I thought he would offer a salutation of appreciation, but he was angry.
“How much did I tell you?” he asked.
“You said 500 Jamaican.”
“Do you have to lean in close when people speak?”
We didn’t understand. Mark asked him what he meant. He repeated the question, which we realised was passive-aggressively sarcastic, and then said: “I said THREE 500s. You only gave me one. So I came looking for you.”
Oh shit. This was not good. He was lying, of course, but we were in that dark patch of beach again. No use calling for help with a glance at security or walking away to safety. We wouldn’t get far, and who knows what this guy was on or how far he was willing to go. He was asking for $23 for a cigar, papers and chewing gum. It must have been a dry day.
“I saw you open your wallet with all your money down there,” he said.
Damn! We had been checking to see if there was enough money for dinner. He had obviously spotted an opportunity and thought he’d milk our stupid, tourist asses for all we had.
“We’ve only got 300 J,” Mark said.
“That’s all you got?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you have more money in your hotel room?”
Damn, damn, damn. Now what? But Mark was thinking on his feet.
“We’re going home tomorrow, so no, this is the last of it.” He handed over three 100-dollar bills. I was getting teary with anger, but it was a smart move. The guy took it and left us to walk sullenly back to our room.
I was angry. What a failed evening! We were left hungry and pissed off, while that guy had abused us for responding in a friendly way and wanting to help him out. It was the only moment during the whole week that I wanted to go home, where there were no hustlers and we were safe.

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Poem: Oh, That I Were a Man

Oh, that I were a man and could be
A thinker of great things, I could see
The universe in existential glory,
History in form of linear story,
Politics in terms of how to vote,
Passion and upon whom I should dote.
I could sit hours away with only Brandy
Thinking of what tool would be handy
To mend a shoe, though worn in appearance,
Allowing my toes much room for clearance.
I would smoke cigars - and enjoy the taste,
I would never think about my waist
When portioning the meat on my plate
Or whether the evening had grown too late.
When taking a stroll around the garden
I could allow my mind some pardon
And place its troubled thoughts to rest
Thinking of nothing - my, that would be best.

If only my mind could see a line
From start to finish with some time
Left over to smoke, drink and eat
Without the reminder of my feet
Itching to finish sewing,
Or aid my rose bed growing,
Or awaiting a tender touch,
To prove I am loved much.

Instead, I cannot help but feel,
And feel I must, for it is how I deal,
With matters ranging from the mundane
To thoughts on the brink of the insane,
All tangled in a web of doubt -
For I cannot pick one out
And place it on the page for solving –
The thought keeps on dissolving.
And while I ponder some new drama
The men have donned their armour
And have set to work the beast,
The reward – a midnight feast.

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Poem: The Silence of a Morning

There were daffodils in the springtime,
Dewy ground, the smell of real green,
The sun reflected in wet eyes
Of a road seldom used.
Slumbering dark behind windows,
The sleepy whispers of morning,
Rousing dawn from sleep,
To Paint the watercolor of day.
No children’s noises, or
Mechanical sounds, other
Than the door hinge that Mr Brown
Will fix today.
He carries a bucket, wears Wellington
Boots, treads carefully along the stone path
That he laid, brick by brick, last summer.
Now the straight lines are caressed
By a twinkling mass of yellow,
And the sun is enticing the flowers
To dance into the cracks.
Mr Brown kneels, elbow to knee,
And takes his gloved hand to the throat
Of a straggling weed.
There is no hope for the lonely;
No matter how tirelessly he works to keep them straight,
The path was built too late.
They had already decided to wander.
The vine curls around his finger,
And a sad smile rests gently in the mists
And shades of morning.

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Short Story: Memories, Part II

Where does a story begin? This is something that all authors, writers, dreamers and poets grapple with. Does it begin with birth? Or does it begin with the present? I carried the laundry up the stairs in a big, black sack. I threw it onto the bedroom floor thinking that all the clothes inside will have creased before I take the time to fold them and put them away. I’ve spent the day reading, drinking coffee and trying to push all other worries out of my mind by convincing myself that they can all be dealt with tomorrow. But tomorrow comes so quickly when there are things to do.

A memory: mum used to make us milkshakes by filling a pint glass with ice cream, pouring on milk, and stirring it all together with a fork. The glass would steam with cold, and the milk would squelch as she tried not to spill the concoction over the sides of the glass. They were delicious. Much more ice cream would go into the milk shake than would be served in a bowl, so we often opted for the milk shake. We would always buy Neapolitan ice cream (three stripes of brown, red and white) and the chocolate would always be devoured first, which made me wonder why we didn’t just buy chocolate.

A memory: There was a certain point in the trail through the woods that always smelled really bad, like rotting bitterness. Mum told us that it was probably a dead animal, but it smelled like that for years and we never found any animal.

A memory: One time I bought a pack of “joke” stickers, which included a trail of ants and burn marks, and I put the burn marks on the kitchen counters. I completely forgot about them, but when I remembered and asked mum if she had noticed them, she told me that she had been soaking the burn marks with wet flannels in the hope that they would clean off.

A memory: I don’t remember much from the last house. I only remember darkness, the smell of unclean skin and must. Mum glued one of my paintings on the hallway wall with wallpaper paste and I was angry. I think it was her way of showing me that she approved of my art, despite criticizing it for being too “scary”. Did I ever ask her bout her life?

A memory: I ate a lot of boiled eggs (maybe 12?) at a picnic in High Wycombe with mum, dad and Katy. It’s the only picnic I remember us having. Mum told me that I would get constipated, but I don’t remember if I did or not.

A memory of my dad: I sprayed perfume on his pillow once and he got really angry because he wouldn’t be able to sleep on it. The smell would be too strong and he was allergic to all the chemicals.

A memory of my dad: Dad got really drunk and was going to become “blood brothers” with mum’s friend Don. So Katy, mum and I collaborated and stole his knife. We hid it beside the chest of drawers in our bedroom and found it there years later.

A memory of dad: He came back from America with a big suitcase of presents. He was still half asleep in bed when I asked him if I could start opening them. He said yes, and I opened a long, stick shaped package (I still remember the intrigue) which turned out to be a twirling stick with bubbles and sparkles inside and long, shiny, rainbow ribbons on either end. I loved it.

What does it mean that I remember these things instead of something else? How does my brain choose one memory over another?

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Short Story: Memories

Inside the car, boarded up by metal and glass, radiator circulating like warm breath in the morning of their tiny bedroom at home, she thought the saddest thought of all. It was the thought that they would never truly be alone. No matter how small and impenetrable the space. She had so much more to fight against than opening doors and cracked windows. There was a space that she could only feel, inside his head, filled with memories that she could never see. He could leave her and go there whenever he wanted, and she would only feel alone without knowing it. This was not a space she could protect herself from, like at seven years old when she would build a fort against the comforting solidity of the bedroom wall and stay there, for hours, feeling safe in the darkness. She could not feel safe like that anymore, even though she tried by sleeping against the wall and bundling the covers up tightly beside her like a trench of cushioning warmth. Still, there he lay, entombed by his memories.

That there had been a before, a long-term love, a routine, was shocking to the very core. The more she thought about it, the more unanswered questions drove her insane. There was no way to take control or understand; she could only speculate for hours, imagining their lips together, their Sunday mornings in bed, laughing. It was the most painful daydream she could muster, and she replayed it over and over until she had to stop and remember to breathe. She recalled reading Sigmund Freud at seventeen, one passage in particular that she used now to explain herself. The baby throws his pacifier out of the crib, and cries. But when the pacifier is returned, the baby throws it out again. And again. The subconscious is teaching itself to endure pain. In order to deal with the prospect of losing something so essential, the mind prepares itself for injury by simulating heartbreak. Like a fire drill. When the real pain comes, the mind is prepared and can follow a routine course of action. Without this simulation, chaos ensues. The body can shutdown, the limbs go numb, the mouth dry; darkness encases the eyes in a faint. This is always what happens when a human being is faced with death. There is no way for the mind to prepare for death, which is why dreams about dying always stop on the brink and never lead into the abyss. The abyss is empty; there is no knowledge because there can be no experience. But for every other eventuality, the mind must prepare by testing scenarios and building a safe place to retreat to.

There is one scenario that she plays over again in her head. She has finished the work day early, and comes home, unlocking the door quietly, slipping inside to see an ajar bedroom door, hearing him moaning, hearing someone else moaning with him. She pushes the door wide and the bed frames the naked bodies, enmeshed, gleaming with sweat. His hair is ruffled, and the covers are splayed on the floor. Skin glows golden, shining, stretched across white sheets. He looks up at her, it registers on his face, wide-eyed and open-mouthed from a kiss, twisted into shock. His bottom lip is red and moist.

Here she stands, in her mind, playing the moment over ten times before she turns and leaves. She walks calmly out of the apartment, into the hallway, out of the front door, onto the steps. He calls her name, she turns and sees his face before she falls down the metal staircase, thumping into a crushing crescendo, into darkness. She stands again, staring from above at her twisted limbs and closed eyes.

Now she cannot breathe, and the space inside the car has shrivelled into a tight grip, hot and suffocating.

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Two red helmets sit side by side on the seat of a motorcycle.

One belongs to Dr. Stephen Trudeau, a psychologist and longtime biker with a passion for scenic highways. The other belongs to his 9-year-old son, Devin, a fourth-grader who loves math and riding to school with his dad.

But instead of traveling on the back of his dad's bike, Devin rides alongside, in the comfort and safety of a shiny red sidecar.

Father and son are among the 140 members of the SoCal Sidecar Club, and both will be donning their matching helmets to ride into Los Angeles' Griffith Park next weekend for an annual rally celebrating the legacy of their favorite pastime.

"I rarely see another sidecar motorcycle," said Thousand Oaks resident Trudeau. "So it's great to get together with other enthusiasts and admire the different uniqueness of the machines."

The Griffith Park Sidecar Rally, being held Oct. 19, has been a hub for sidecar enthusiasts and curious spectators for 37 years. According to Louis Vanderveen, president of the SoCal Sidecar Club, thousands of attendees come from around the country - some even from Europe - for the event.

"It is one of the largest sidecar-only rallies anywhere in the world," said Vanderveen. "It is also the oldest and longest running."

Spectators show up to admire 200 types of sidecars, all as unique and colorful as their owners.

Vanderveen's own sidecar is sparkling white, decorated with a Union Jack that recalls the first era of the sidecar, in early 20 th-century Britain.

The economic hardship of two world wars boosted the popularity of this cheap and simple mode of transportation, and the sidecar quickly became an asset to civilians and military alike.

Because sidecars allowed soldiers room to operate a machine gun without eliminating the efficiency of a motorcycle, they quickly became a global military trend. Meanwhile, the economic efficiency of the sidecar motorcycle sparked a cultural phenomenon across Europe.

A half-century later, economic concerns are again a reason for downsizing by a wheel or two. But for many sidecar enthusiasts, their three-wheel drives, which start at about $2,000, allow for something much more important.

Trudeau had been riding motorcycles for most of his life, but two years ago he upgraded to a gleaming red sidecar motorcycle as a way of fusing one aspect of his life with another.

"Devin was born with cerebral palsy, and that was why we got the sidecar," said Trudeau. "I've always been a motorcycle enthusiast, but I wouldn't be able to share that with him - he wouldn't be able to ride on the back. So the sidecar was a natural evolution for us."

Father and son ride with the club once a month along the scenic routes of Southern California, to places such as Santa Barbara and Ojai, as well as on weekend camping trips together.

"We ride because we just like to enjoy it and spend time together and watch the scenery," said Trudeau. "It's a much more relaxed way of riding."

Vanderveen also bought a sidecar so he could share the motorcycling experience with others. As task-force leader for the fundraising program Ride for Kids, Vanderveen organizes charity events to raise money for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation and to give children affected by brain tumors a chance to ride in a sidecar at the nationwide events.

Because most manufacturers customize their sidecars, modern versions have come a long way since the first boxy attachments of the early 1900 s.

Not only are there more safety features available, but the ride is smoother and more comfortable. From simple attachments to semi-luxurious two-seater cabins, sidecars have transitioned from a practical accessory to a unique personal statement.

Doug Bingham, founder of the Griffith Park Sidecar Rally, has an enclosed wooden sidecar with two seats and plenty of legroom - all hand-built. His company, Side Strider Inc., has been creating custom sidecars since 1969 for a global market, and many of the creations are designed to be comfortable and spacious enough for long-distance traveling.

Bingham also started the SoCal Sidecar Club as a means for three-wheelers to get together on a regular basis.

"We go on monthly rides and arrange trips to motorcycle museums and private collections around Southern California," said Bingham. "It's a community as well as a hobby."

The club is now run by Vanderveen, who says members come from all walks of life, spanning age ranges and reasons for riding.

"Everybody loves a sidecar," said Vanderveen. "You never go anywhere without drawing all sorts of attention. Car drivers will give the 'thumbs-up' and truckers will honk their horns. Besides having a very practical function, sidecars are just plain cool."

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Little Britain USA: Class, Culture and Dignity?

The premier of Little Britain USA Sunday night marks the inevitable transition of Britain’s leading comedy sketch show onto American televisions. In Britain, the show has been running for five years and is a cultural phenomenon. Books, coffee mugs, t-shirts, you name it. Everyone in the show’s homeland has received a Little Britain Christmas gift since the first season’s debut in September 2003. Catch-phrases are plastered on everything, and the streets sing with imitation.

What made the show such a success was its unbridled parodying of people-types in the U.K. The show spoke aloud what everyone else was witnessing in day-to-day life, from the “Chav” persona of Vicky Pollard—a teenage girl with a fondness for sports brand clothing, shop-lifting, smoking, binge-drinking and pregnancy—to the ancient socialites in charge of judging village events like jam-making or cake-baking—one of whom is plagued by bigotry and vomits on anyone who isn’t white or heterosexual. These were caricatures, with a high level of disgustingness thrown in, but they evoked the real-life counterparts in a way that allowed Britain to acknowledge them together.

The show’s tag line, “Class, Culture and Dignity” is, of course, a little British sarcasm. Little Britain USA lives up to the British show’s reputation for being crude, lewd and rude. But the show’s fondness for coarse, unrestrained sketches may be its downfall in the U.S. While the British public watched LB move from parody to perversity over five years, Americans are getting the rawest deal. This season’s Little Britain USA is the result of five years of broaching and breaking boundaries. The sketches are shocking, even for someone who owns the first few seasons on DVD and would consider herself an addict gone cold turkey since moving to the U.S.

Vicky Pollard: Proud mother of six, photo courtesy of the BBC

Many of the characters have been invented to parody American stereotypes—the gun-clinging cop, the brownie-guide going to camp, the muscle-bound gym-goer—but each with a hard-to-swallow outrageousness factor that makes it difficult to appreciate what the characters represent. The cop has more than an obsession with guns; it’s an erotic fascination that comes to a climax right before our eyes. The young brownie guide can’t help but spurt out references to Internet pornography as she waves goodbye to her mother and leaves for camp. The “gym buddies” sketch involves a couple of grotesque body suits, heaped with muscle and overshadowing the miniature body part beneath it all, bikini-line shaving, and sex simulation in a very precarious position for a public gym locker.

The sketches that remain funny without the involvement of bodily fluids include the Weight Watchers equivalent “Fat Fighters” and its team leader Marjorie Dawes. Her unabashed anti-“fatty” mentality is not only hypocritical, but hilarious. This week, Rosie O’Donnell had to defend her sexuality and size as two independent facets, after Dawes asked: “Are you a lesbian because you’re fat, or are you fat because you’re a lesbian?”

And then there is Carol Beer, the most unhelpful receptionist of all time, who instead of answering questions will cough in your face and tell you, “Computer says no.” Vicky Pollard, the classic Little Britain character, also returns this season to go to boot camp, and Lou and his wheel-chair bound friend Andy go to a preacher for healing.

But many of my favorite sketches seem to have disappeared, perhaps because the producers deemed them un-translatable to an American audience: The strange Scottish hotel owner who speaks only in riddles and plays the pipe-whistle; Mr Mann, the annoying customer who is always looking for something unattainably specific (like a picture of a disappointed horse) or unhelpfully broad (like a book); or Mr Cleaves, a teacher at Kelsey Grammar School who sets ridiculously unachievable goals for his students (e.g.: “find the square root of Popeye” or “divide Henry VIII by Edward II”).

These were the more Monty Python-esque pieces in terms of outright silliness, and it’s a shame to see them exchanged for the cruder sketches. Still, I’ll be watching avidly to see how many different ways Matt Lucas and David Walliams can both annoy and charm America with their candid displays of “Class, Culture and Dignity” as they take Little Britain to big U.S.A.

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Welfare Policy, Leg-up Versus Hand-Out

At some point soon after the very beginning of man, a Neanderthal tripped and fell over a misplaced mammoth bone onto the cave floor. Some of his buddies laughed. Some ignored him. But one of them grunted over and put out his hand. This was the moment we started talking about welfare policy. When the fallen Neanderthal refused to get up, that was the moment we started complaining about it.

Since then, governments around the world have tried, reformed, and tried again with various welfare philosophies. Some prefer the "leg up" method, where aid is a stepping stone to self-sufficiency (the Neanderthal learns how to get up from the cave floor himself, after a little instruction), and others employ the "hand out" method, where welfare is a wall of dependency to lean on in hard times (the Neanderthal has a fake arm installed in his cave to use in case of slippages).

In Germany, the method is one of social karma. If you've put a lot into the system, through work or education, then you can get a lot out of it. France prefers the concept of "mutual responsibility". Sweden puts its money where its mouth is, paying 50 percent of its wages to advocate "social equality". Britain has a bad reputation for giving away too much too easily, and America for giving too little too late.

According to the Budget for Fiscal Year 2008, Historical Tables, the U.S. Spent $354.3 billion on means-tested entitlements in 2006. That figure includes a long list of different types of aid:

"Medicaid, food stamps, family support assistance (AFDC), supplemental security income (SSI), child nutrition programs, refundable portions of earned income tax credits (EITC and HITC) and child tax credit, welfare contingency fund, child care entitlement to States, temporary assistance to needy families, foster care and adoption assistance, State children's health insurance and veterans pensions".

It sounds like a lot of money, services, and philosophies, but how does welfare policy really apply to those in need of help? What does it mean to be living in a "hand-out" versus a "leg-up" system?

Thanks to a helpful calculator on the U.K. Government's welfare website, I can figure out exactly what I would receive if I was unemployed and living in the United Kingdom. Every two weeks, I would pick up a government check for £47.95 (approximately $84) in Jobseekers Allowance. As long as I remained unemployed, I would get a 100 percent reduction on the property fees owed to the government, known as Council Tax, and live rent free in government property. Even if I wanted to work, as long as I pitched in less than 16 hours a week, I would still receive my unemployment benefits.

If I were to add an infant to the mix, not only would I be moved to bigger accommodation (a 2-3 bedroom house), but I would receive £18.80 (approximately $33) a week in Child Benefits and £1393.46 (approximately $2438) a year in Child Tax Credit - more if I had a husband, civil partner or if the child's father was also living in the house, unemployed.

So, I would make a total of £93.54, or $170 a week without working. Or I could supplement that with 16 hours of work and double my income. To top it all off, health care is completely free, including dental care until the age of 19, and then unemployed or low-income families have their bills subsidized by the government.

In the U.K., you don't have to go it alone if you find yourself in financial trouble: The government will act as a safety net. But the biggest downside is that it pays to do nothing. In fact, the way the system works, most single parents wouldn't be able to match their government income if they worked full-time. Not only would they lose time with their children and have to spend their wages on child care, but they wouldn't be able to pay the bills. Working at minimum wage 40 hours a week would provide £30 more income than government welfare benefits. That "extra" income equivalates to one day of child care. The result of this dramatic system flaw is that most mothers, especially single mothers, have to wait until their children are old enough to go to school before they can go back to work.

It's not as easy to find out what benefits you are eligible for in the United States. The questionnaire is more probing for a start; it requires ethnicity, professional experience and marriage history. I also have to tell them whether or not I have ever worked for the government or have end-stage renal disease. And then the pages take ten minutes to load.

Have you run away from home or are thinking about running away from home? Do you need disaster relief funds? Are you a victim of domestic violence, torture or trafficking? It gets harder. One minute you're trying to find out what money the government can give you, and the next you're taking an exam about yourself. I choose "general declining economic conditions" as the reason for not having a job: No, it's nothing to do with September 11th or having my parents killed by a "President declared disaster" (as opposed to a "declared President disaster?"). No, I don't live on a farm, have any family in the military or come from Native American heritage.

Finally, with question 72 complete, I discover that I am eligible for 29 separate sources of welfare. After reviewing the choices, it becomes clear that some of them are not going to work. A competitive grant for research "that joins biology with computer science" for example, is not something I would consider myself "eligible" for. I can get Food Stamps. If I had children, they could get milk on school days and food in the summer. I can line up at certain health centers and try to get medical aid. I can get help with my electricity bill and I might even be able to get a loan. Nowhere in any of this is the government giving me a check. Nowhere are they handing me an income and saying "this one is on us". Nowhere can I depend upon a solid government cash flow while I'm down and out.

That's the very real difference between the U.S. and the U.K. in terms of welfare policy. Britain, which has come to be known as "The Welfare State", is criticized as being too lenient, too ready to hand out money first and ask questions later. The government is the sole welfare provider and charities throw a few pennies into the bucket now and then.

America, on the other hand, forces people to jump through loops even to find out what help is available. There is little unity in the welfare system, which isn't really a system at all but more of a fragmented selection of charities who might receive government grants and incentives to keep them going. The only "umbrella" government welfare system in the U.S. is reserved for people old enough to access social security. Everyone else is encouraged not to rely on their government but rather find their own way.

Both systems have their evils. Ideally, government dependence means national solidarity, just as independence means self-sufficiency. But "dependence" can also mean inescapable reliance, and "independence" can render many people lost and alone.

(The Huffington Post, Sep 26,08)

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