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chiseler · 5 years ago

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The Long, Sad Death of the NYC Newsstand

Up until 2003, New York’s newsstands—those charmingly ramshackle wood-and-aluminum sidewalk constructs where scurrying commuters could grab a morning paper, a pack of smokes and the new issue of Leg Show on their way to the train—were all privately owned and operated by the scruffy characters who inhabited them. All a would-be news dealer had to do was fill out some forms, give the city a check for $1000, and in return they’d receive a two-year license. The license gave them rights to a location, but the costs of building the stand and operating the business was the responsibility of the new owner. That said, within zoning regulations, they could do what they wanted with their stand: paint it whatever garish color they liked, design it after the Taj Mahal, sell Ju-Ju powders along with The Irish Times and racing forms, and keep all the profits at the end of the day. They even, under certain circumstances, maintained the right to sell the newsstand and the license if they so chose. All that changed in 2003, but I’ll get back to that. It was hardly the beginning or the end of the city’s war on newsstands, a war which began soon after newsstands became such an iconic part of New York’s sidewalk landscape.

If we can accept Hollywood films as providing an accurate historical record, ad-hoc open-fronted newsstands had been a familiar and welcome part of daily life in New York since at least the first half of the nineteenth century. Most, again if we accept the Hollywood myth, were owned and operated by gruff but lovable cigar-chomping midgets or preternaturally wise blindos, colorful outsiders who inevitably knew far more about what was going on than what was reported in any of the periodicals they sold. Newsstand operators were the eyes and ears of the community, knew everyone, and acted as invaluable sources for cops and reporters in search of tips. Especially the blind ones.

We may have no choice but to accept the mainstream studio version, as historians seem flummoxed when it comes to pinpointing exactly when or where the first of New York’s newsstands appeared. All they can say for certain is that the hundreds of newsstands that dotted street corners and subway stations across the five boroughs were modeled in function if not form after similar news outlets which had been commonplace in England, France and Italy since the late eighteenth century. But there is at least a small kernel of truth to the mainstream studio version, if you’ll allow me an aside.

For over half a century, thanks to a program spearheaded by the NY State Commission for the Blind, a handful of the city’s newsstands—in City Hall, the King’s County Courthouse, and a select few subway stations—were designated to be run by blind operators exclusively. It seemed a more humane alternative to forcing the blind to sell pencils out of a tin cup. Whether or not these blind news vendors acted as infallible informants for newspapermen and the cops is unknown, but the program was an extremely popular and desirable one within the blind community, allowing those lucky enough to take over a newsstand to earn a living wage. Unfortunately the program was so popular that in the early ’90s I was told the waiting list was so long it would likely be twenty years or more before I was set up in my own operation. Now I have to imagine the wait is even longer, but more about that later, too.

By the late nineteenth century New York’s stand alone sidewalk newsstands had evolved into their iconic form: a shack, usually painted green, constructed of wood and metal, with a low shelf along the front to hold bundles of newspapers, another shelf above that to hold candy and other snacks, and open window through which the proprietor conducted business, with cigarettes and magazines displayed on the wall behind him.

As beloved and essential as the newsstands became among New Yorkers, they’d always had a rough go of it. During the newspaper wars of the 1880s and ’90s, when competing papers quite literally battled each other in pursuit of higher circulation numbers, it was often the newsstand operators who caught the brunt of the violence. If, thanks to personal political leanings or, more often, a little monthly handout, a news vendor opted to carry The World, say, and not The Herald-Tribune, he might find himself beaten bloody by Herald-Tribune deliverymen, his newsstand torched or bombed. A similar fate often also awaited those vendors who, out of respect for the First Amendment or a sense of egalitarianism, refused to play favorites by foolishly carrying all the city dailies.

Not long after the Newspaper Wars were resolved, the city took up the fight to make your average news vendor’s life miserable. In 1911, the city prepared legislation to get rid of newsstands altogether by revoking the owners’ licenses, arguing the stands blocked foot traffic. Newsstand operators banded together against the threat. In a public hearing, the Newsdealers Association President William Merican told members of city council, “Why, there are some men who cannot eat their breakfast without a newspaper. Think of the women in the crush of the subway and elevated. They are exposed to every kind of indignity and hardship. They buy newspapers to make them forget their misery. If the public cannot get their newspapers on the street, they will find the inconvenience intolerable.”

The mayor was swayed by the argument, and the proposed legislation was shelved, at least for a little while.

A decade later in the early Twenties the NY Times took up the fight to do something about what the city’s wealthy and powerful considered an eyesore. Citing the Municipal Art Society’s plans to design polished modernist newsstands that would blend organically with their surroundings, the Times wrote “Why should the sidewalk news stand remain in the architectural class of the squatter’s shanty and the chicken coop? Why shouldn’t it be beautiful or at least not offensive to the eye?”

What the Times clearly didn’t realize was that by then, and over the decades to come, news vendors were not only designing and decorating their stands to reflect the personalities of the owner and the community, but selling things catering specifically to the neighborhood. You can’t get more organic than that. A Financial District newsstand served a different clientele and purpose than one in the East Village, and one in Park Slope served a different clientele and purpose than one in Flushing. (Well, at least that was the case in the twentieth century, even if it isn’t anymore.)

A number of newsstands, especially in the outer boroughs, evolved into mini community centers, with folks from the neighborhood hanging out with the owner to catch up with the news and each other. Some vendors gave their stands unique paint jobs (in some instances adorning the sides with murals), others hung Chinese lanterns or installed awnings, while still others abandoned the standard shack format altogether for more architecturally interesting designs. Despite the general perception, virtually no two stands were identical.

Ignoring (or more likely unaware of) this, the city pushed ahead with their efforts to beautify the stands,. In the ’50s and ’60s the city began once again drafting plans and sponsoring contests with an eye toward replacing the glorified chicken coops with sleek and uniform metal and glass designs, but none of their efforts went anywhere. Beyond that, there were the seemingly bi-annual efforts mounted by city council and various morality watchdog groups to ban the sale of porn. Every time the city pushed on this issue, the newsstand operators once again pushed back, arguing that porn sales represented a huge percentage of their annual profits, and by taking that away, the city would be putting them out of business.

In 1987, Hudson News was founded. Hudson News was an international chain operation, essentially the Taco Bell of storefront newsstands, whose slick and jazzy neon logo quickly became a familiar sight in airports and train stations across the country. It seems Hudson News represented exactly what New York officials had been looking for since the turn of the century. After grabbing spots in Penn Station, Grand Central, JFK and LaGuardia in the early ’90s, Hudson News and the city both took aim at the newsstands in the subway. Suddenly it was argued that the newsstands which had been there forever were not only obstructions to commuter movement, but blocked police sight lines on the platforms as well, preventing them from stopping crime. It was an insane argument no one had brought up before, but it worked. Before long, a number of the old subway newsstands were replaced with stand-alone Hudson News kiosks. The ironic thing of course, is that the Hudson News stands were much bigger and brighter, presenting even more of an obstacle to commuters and cops alike. But they were much nicer looking and covered with neon piping, so that was okay.

For the moment anyway, the sidewalk newsstands were safe.

Then along came Rudy Giuliani, The new Law and Order mayor who made his own bid to get rid of New York’s newsstands. Along with his efforts to scrub the city clean of porn, Giuliani argued the newspapers sold at these stands sometimes blew away, adding to New York’s litter problem. The only solution, as part of his Quality of Life campaign, was to get rid of the newsstands altogether. Once again the vendors and their customers alike pushed back.

Although Giuiliani was able to clean up Times Square and Coney Island, by the time he left office those sloppy newsstands remained steadfast, and New Yorkers were still wandering knee-deep in scattered fluttering pages of The Financial Times and The Guardian.

It took his successor, Michael Bloomberg, to do what Giuliani couldn’t. Always with a mind toward the tidy and seemly and sterile, Bloomberg had long found the city’s newsstands an eyesore. In 2003 he signed what was called The Street Furniture Bill. As he put it, the aim of the bill was “to rationalize the streets of the city, where right now it's a hodgepodge of unattractive things.” The quote says a lot about Bloomberg, how he perceived New York, as well as how and why NYC turned into Des Moines.

With an eye toward faceless uniformity, the city cut a deal with the Spanish company Cemusa to design not only clean and pleasant newsstands, but matching public toilets and other bits of street furniture as well. Soon, it seemed, Bloomberg would have his dream, and wherever you went in New York, it would look just like every other part of New York.

Four years later, the city began seizing those ugly hodge-podge newsstands away from their longtime independent owners, people who had in some cases owned and operated their own newsstands for forty years or more, replacing them with identical steel and glass boxes decorated with enormous digital ads. In a blink, those faces you saw behind the newsstand windows were now mere employees, and all profits from those digital ads went straight to the Cemusa company.

By 2009, over 200 old newsstands had been removed, replaced by 300 sleek and shiny boxes with those goddamn digital ads all over them. But by then it was a moot point. With the internet killing off newspapers and magazines, and with everyone staring dead-eyed into phones instead of picking up a copy of the Daily News on the fly, newsstands themselves became all but irrelevant. As quickly as those slick and flashy boxes appeared, they began to vanish. Nowadays you’d be hard pressed to find a sidewalk newsstand anywhere in New York, though there are still a few in the subways and train stations, where Hudson News is still king.

In a final and ironic insult, in 2013, long after most of New York’s newsstands were nothing but a grubby and fading memory, every last one of them operated by Angelo Rossitto in a newsboys cap, the city spent an estimated $90,000 on a new newsstand design to replace the one which had been in the lobby of the Brooklyn criminal courts building for over forty years. As that had always been one of the stands set aside for blind operators, the primary goal of the new design was that it be blind accessible.

Once completed, it was discovered this fancy new newsstand, which had been designed with absolutely no input from a single blindo, let alone the one who would be working there, was not in the least accessible, and so had to be scrapped. The city then dumped even more money into yet another design, but by then it was too late. No matter how popular and valuable that State Commission for the Blind program was, the New York newsstand had gone the way of the dodo, making the hubbub over the blind-friendly design for the Brooklyn courthouse irrelevant.

I can’t help but suspect the city’s alleged good-hearted move to do something decent for the disabled community (one member of it, anyway) in fact cloaked a deeply cynical effort to deal out one last fatal blow in the century-old effort to do away with newsstands altogether, making the city that much less interesting.

Well, they got what they wanted, though aesthetics aside, the more conspiratorial sections of my brain still wonders what was really behind the push.

.by Jim Knipfel

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pier-carlo-universe · 23 days ago

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Cuspo: Tris di Vittorie nel Weekend del 20 Ottobre 2024 per Basket, Scherma e Rugby

Successi per il Cuspo Alessandria nel fine settimana, con prestazioni eccellenti nel basket, scherma e rugby.

Successi per il Cuspo Alessandria nel fine settimana, con prestazioni eccellenti nel basket, scherma e rugby. Il weekend del 20 ottobre 2024 ha visto il Cuspo (Centro Universitario Sportivo Piemonte Orientale) protagonista con importanti vittorie e prestazioni di alto livello in diverse discipline sportive, tra cui basket, scherma e rugby. Le squadre e gli atleti del Cuspo hanno dimostrato…

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pier-carlo-universe · 1 month ago

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CUSPO Basket Alessandria: Esordio di stagione e sfida in salita contro il Pinerolo. Nonostante un buon inizio, il CUSPO Basket Alessandria cede contro il Pinerolo nella prima partita di campionato

Il campionato di basket per la Blindo Office CUSPO Basket Alessandria è iniziato con una prestazione caratterizzata da alti e bassi.

Il campionato di basket per la Blindo Office CUSPO Basket Alessandria è iniziato con una prestazione caratterizzata da alti e bassi. Nella partita disputata contro il Pinerolo al PalaCima di Alessandria, i ragazzi di coach Valerio Ferrero hanno mostrato segnali incoraggianti, specialmente nel primo quarto, ma hanno subito un netto calo nei successivi, chiudendo con un punteggio di 74-89. I…

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chiseler · 5 years ago

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All the World’s a Stage

In 1988, a socio-linguist at the university of Pennsylvania posted a note on the departmental bulletin board announcing she had moved her late husband’s personal library into an unused office. Anyone who wanted any of the books should feel free to take them. Her husband had been the chair of Penn’s sociology department. They’d married in 1981, and he died the following year at age sixty. Normally you’d expect the books and papers to be donated to some library to assist future researchers, but she’d recently remarried, so I guess she either wanted to get rid of any reminders of her previous husband, or simply needed the space.

At the time my then-wife was a grad student in Penn’s linguistics department, and told me about the announcement when she got home that afternoon.

Well, had this professor’s dead husband been any plain, boring old sociologist, I wouldn’t have thought much about it, but given her dead husband was Erving Goffman, I immediately began gathering all the boxes and bags I could find. That night around ten, when she was certain the department would be pretty empty, my then-wife and I snuck back to Penn under cover of darkness and I absconded with Erving Goffman’s personal library. Didn’t even look at titles—just grabbed up armloads of books and tossed them into boxes to carry away.

As I began sorting through them in the following days, I of course discovered the expected sociology, anthropology and psychology textbooks, anthologies and journals, as well as first editions of all of Goffman’s own books, each featuring his identifying signature (in pencil) in the upper right hand corner of the title page. But those didn’t make up the bulk of my haul.

There were Catholic marriage manuals from the Fifties, dozens of volumes (both academic and popular) about sexual deviance, a whole bunch of books about juvenile delinquency with titles like Wayward Youth and The Violent Gang, several issues of Corrections (a quarterly journal aimed at prison wardens), a lot of original crime pulps from the Forties and Fifties, avant-garde literary novels, a medical book about skin diseases, some books about religious cults (particularly Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple), a first edition of Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, and So many other unexpected gems. It was, as I’d hoped, an oddball collection that offered a bit of insight into Goffman’s work and thinking.

Erving Goffman was born in Alberta, Canada in 1922. After entering college as a chemistry major, he eventually got his BA in sociology in 1948, and began his graduate studies at The university of Chicago.

In 1952 he married Angelica Choate, a woman with a history of mental illness, and they had a son. The following year he received his PHD from Chicago. His thesis concerned public interactions and rituals among the residents of one of the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland. Afterward, he took a job with the National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. His first book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which evolved out of his thesis, came out in 1956, and his second, Asylums, which resulted from his work at N.I,M.H., was released five years later. In 1958 he took a teaching position at UC-Berkeley, and was soon promoted to full professor. His wife committed suicide in 1964, and in 1968 he joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania as the chair of the sociology department, a post he would hold until his death in 1982.

Citing intellectual influences from anthropology and psychology as well as sociology, Goffman was nevertheless a maverick. Instead of controlled clinical studies and statistical analysis, Goffman based his work on careful close observation of real human interactions in public places,. Instead of focusing on the behaviors of large, faceless groups like sports fans, student movements or factory workers, he concentrated on the tiny details of face-to-face encounters, the gestures, language and behavior of individuals interacting with one another or within a larger institutional framework. Instead of citing previous academic papers to support his claims, he’d more often use quotes from literary sources, letters, or interviews. He created a body of work around those banal, microcosmic day-two-day experiences which had been all but ignored by sociologists up to that point. After his death he was considered one of the most important and influential sociologists of the twentieth century.

Without getting into all the complexities and interpretations of Goffman’s various theories (despite his radical subjective approach, he was still an academic after all), let me lay out simpleminded thumbnails of the two core ideas at the heart of his work.

Taking a cue from both Freud and Shakespeare, he employed theatrical terminology to argue that whenever we step out into public, we are all essentially actors on a stage. We wear masks, we take on certain behaviors and attitudes that differ wildly from the characters we are when we’re at home. All our actions in public, he claimed, are social performances designed (we hope) to present a certain image of ourselves to the world at large. The idea of course has been around in literature for centuries, but Goffman was the first to seriously apply it in broad strokes to sociology.

His other, and related, fundamental idea was termed frame analysis, the idea being that we perceive each social encounter—running into that creepy guy on the train again, say, or arguing with the checkout clerk at the supermarket about the quality of their potatoes—as something isolated and contained, a picture within a frame, or a movie still.

He used those two models to study day-to-day life in mental institutions and prisons, note the emergence of Texas businessmen adopting white cowboy hats as a standard part of their attire, analyze workplace interactions and the complicated rituals we go through when we run into someone we sort-of know on the sidewalk.

I first read Goffman in college when his 1964 book, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, was used in a postmodern political science course I was taking. In the slim volume, Goffman studied the conflicts and prejudices ex-cons, mental patients, cripples, the deformed and other social outcasts encountered when they stepped out into public, as well as the assorted codes and tricks they used to pass for normal. When passing was possible, anyway. At the time I was smitten with the book and these tales of outsiders, being a deliberately constructed outsider myself (though as a nihilistic cigar-smoking petty criminal punk rock kid, I had no interest in passing for normal). I was also struck to read a serious sociological study that cited Nathaniel West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—my favorite novel at the time—as supporting evidence.

Thirty-five years later, and after having read all of Goffman’s other major works, I returned to Stigma again, but with a different perspective. Although my youthful Romantic notions about social outcasts still lingered, by that time I’d become a bona-fide and inescapable social outcast myself, tapping around New York with a red and white cane.

Goffman spent a good deal of the book focused on the daily issues faced by the blind, but in 1985 those weren’t the outsiders who interested me. Now that I was one of them myself, I must say I was amazed and impressed by the accuracy of Goffman’s observations. He pointed out any number of things that have always been ignored by others who’ve written about the blind. Like those others, he notes that Normals, accepting the myth that our other senses become heightened after the loss of our sight, believe us to have superpowers of some kind. (For the record, I never dissuade people of this silly notion.) But Goffman took it one step further, noting that to Normals, a blindo accomplishing something, well, normal—like lighting a cigarette—is taken to be some kind of superhuman achievement, and evidence of powers they can barely begin to fathom.

(Ironically, he writes in Asylums that the process of socializing mental patients is a matter of turning them into dull, unobtrusive and nearly invisible individuals. Those are good citizens.)

Elsewhere in Stigma Goffman also points out—and you cannot believe how commonplace this is—that Normals, believing us to have some deep insights into life and the world, feel compelled, uninvited and without warning, to stop the blind on the street or at the supermarket to share with them their darkest secrets, medical concerns and personal problems as if we’d known them all our lives. He also observed the tendency for Normals to treat us not only like we’re blind, but deaf and lame as well, yelling in our ears and insisting on helping us out of chairs.

Ah, but one thing he brought up, which I’ve never seen anyone else mention before, is the fate awaiting those blindos (or cripples of any kind) who actually accomplish something like writing a book. It doesn’t matter if the book had absolutely nothing to do with being a cripple. I’ve published eleven books to date, and only two of them even mention blindness. It doesn’t matter. If a cripple makes something of him or herself, that cripple then becomes a lifelong representative of that entire class of stigmatized individuals, at least in mainstream eyes. From that point onward he or she will always be not only “that Blind Writer” or “that Legless Architect,” but a spokesperson on any issues pertaining to their particular disability. I was published long before I developed that creepy blind stare, but if I approach a mainstream publication nowadays, the only things they’ll let me write about are cripple issues. Every now and again if I need the check, I’ll, yes, put on the mask and play the role. But I’m bored to death with cripple issues, which is why whenever possible I neglect to mention to would-be editors that I’m blind. And I guess that only supports Goffman’s overall thesis, right?

Well, anyway, a series of four floods in my last apartment completely wiped out my prized Goffman library (as well as my prized novelization collection), so in retrospect I guess that professor at Penn probably would have been better off donating them to the special collections department of some library.

by Jim Knipfel

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chiseler · 8 years ago

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TRANS-ASSHOLES

My god, my god I never cease to be amazed and confounded by what a ridiculous world this has become. The depths people will plunge in order to solidify their pitiful victimhood. It grows more flabbergasting and absurd by the day.

I was just getting a handle on what “trans fats” were when they threw “transgender” at me. That took some more doing, considering all the legal repercussions and all the concessions businesses, schools, and prisons had to make to cater to this sudden explosion in the quasi-hemaphrodite population. Then people started bandying around the term “transracial,” and I still don’t know what the fuck that one means. Are they like wiggers or something? It all seems like so much whining foolishness. Worse it results in more controls on the language, those things we are and aren’t allowed to say out of fear of offending some useless delicate simpering snot. Because if you do offend them they’ll sue you into oblivion and make you go on an apology tour, as this is what we do now.

Until yesterday I was able to mostly just laugh off the nonsense and go back to listening to my Mentors records. Then yesterday I encountered the word “trans-abled” for the first time.

Okay, bear with me here if you already know the term (and if you do, and if you have ever used it earnestly in conversation, may God have pity on your soul.)

See, while “transgender” refers to people convinced they were born with the wrong genitalia given how they would prefer to have their genitals manipulated, “trans-abled” refers to people so desperate to be pitied, so desperate to be a victim they become obsessed with being a specific kind of cripple. Some will roll around in wheelchairs even though they’re perfectly capable of walking. Others will truss up their arms and legs like Lon Chaney in The Penalty to pretend to be amputees. Others with 20/20 vision will wear sunglasses and tap around with white canes. They claim, in myriad support group websites, that it’s just like being transgendered, in that they feel like they were born with the wrong body, that the defective bodies they pretend to have are how they were meant to live.

Yeah, they can tell themselves that all they want, but what it boils down to is they’re a bunch of pity whores who want to be treated special.

I thought it was bad enough to be living in a stupid world in which assholes are now allowed to bring their so-called “service animals” (mostly poodles and terriers and other pointless small dogs) into restaurants because some goddamn shrink told them they were suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome since mommy didn’t hug them enough when they were six. These “trans-abled” assholes are pushing it much, much further. A few with the courage of their stupid and misguided convictions are apparently taking steps to have themselves surgically altered in order to make their dreams of crippledom a reality. Most, however, seem content to remain cripple poseurs, to play act gimphood when it suits their fancy. But since this is America it’s now turned into a movement demanding they be treated the same way people with actual disabilities are treated. That means they want all those bonuses and perks that come along with being gimpy, like being able to go to the front of the line at Whole Foods, or parking in cripple spots at the mall simply because they enjoy pretending to be handicapped. Some apparently hang out with vets at paraplegic support groups and the like, sharing their own imaginary stories about what their lives would be like as if they really were cripples or blindos or deafies.

There’s even a move on now (again because this is America) to legally declare “trans-ableism” a real honest-to-goodness mental malfunction, which would then allow these fakers to fulfill their dreams of not only having an actual victim label to slab on themselves, they’d also be able to collect disability payments.

Know what I think, as a blindo myself? I’m not personally offended by this on account of my own condition. To my mind there’s absolutely no difference between these poseurs and those geeks who go to comic book conventions dressed like Wonder Woman or Han Solo, or that sexual subbculture whose members dress like big stuffed animals. No, it’s that these fake cripples are demanding the rest of us take them seriously. I’m pissed at all the seemingly endless levels of whininess constantly being unleashed upon the culture. If the laws are passed and the language further constricted to take these fucknuts seriously instead of just, y’know, pushing them down, what happens to the real cripples who have to be lumped together with the fakes?

First day I was teaching a couple years back, I was confronted with a line of students at my desk, each one holding an official piece of paper issued them by the school stating they had “a learning disability” and were therefore to be given separate tests, easier assignments, and more time than the other students to complete those assignments. My response at the time was “Well if you’re so goddamn stupid, why are you here? Why aren’t you in remedial classes or working in a mop factory like a normal retard instead of wasting everyone’s goddamn time with your fucking whining?”

(Of course I didn’t say that aloud, or I would’ve been arrested and convicted on hate crime charges. And don’t get me started again on “hate crimes.”)

Many years before that I was approached by a woman who claimed she was making a documentary film about blindos. “Oh,” she said in a wistful tone that made me want to stab her right there in my office,” it must be so wonderful to be blind! You’re living in a whole new, magical world!”

Realizing now that had the word been invented back then she would undoubtedly have called herself “trans-abled“ I wish I had stabbed her. No jury in the world would have convicted me. Hell, I might’ve even been given a prize for ridding the world of one more asshole.

I’m the first to admit that blindness doesn’t bother me that much. So long as I can work and get around I’m fine. It’s frustrating an annoying at times, but so are headcolds and hangnails. There’s nothing “wonderful” or “magical” about it, that’s for damn sure, but you learn to fucking deal with it or you become an insufferable pain in the ass.

I’m starting to get the impression, from the research I’ve done, that these “trans-abled” morons actually begin with the impulse to be an insufferable pain in the ass, to be an unending constant burden on everyone around them, then set about figuring the best way to do that—a way no one could ever call them on. “Oh, you can’t yell at me! I’m in a wheelchair!”

So here’s what I think we should do. We should gather all the cripple poseurs together and give them exactly what they want. They want to be blindos, we pluck out their eyes. They want to be amputees we roll out the guillotine. They want to be paralyzed, we shoot them in the spine. Then we send them on their way and follow up about six months later to find out exactly how much fun they’re having with this wonderful new lifestyle of theirs. Was it real super fulfilling when they got lost in the West Village and no one would stop to give them directions? And hey, was it real magical when they had to ask their understanding spouses to wipe their asses?

Then we tally up all their responses and shoot them in the head and dump them in the woods.

Whoops, could that be read as some kind of terrorist threat? Oh heaven forfend!

That would be ironic, wouldn’t it? If a real cripple had to do time in stir because a fake cripple was offended by him? Yet I can see it happening. Jesus christ what a pathetic world we’ve created.

by Jim Knipfel

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