My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

And if you like, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

The 2012 presidential campaign is coming down to its last few days, for those of you who have just recovered from an eighteen-month coma and have immediately decided to check out this website (and why wouldn’t you?) And for some reason, it’s actually kind of close. Not as close as many in the mass media are making it out to be; most pundits are deliberately ignoring any information that would make the race seem like anything other than a down-to-the-wire deadlock (like, say, the existence of the Electoral College, or the unreliability of the “likely voter” screen) because let’s face it, nobody tunes in to CNN to see a bunch of guys saying, “Romney’s DOA. Wanna break down the details of House Bill No. 497?”

But it is closer than it should be. Even if the two men are not absolutely deadlocked, Romney still has a chance to win this. And if you are one of the people who this open letter is addressed to, it’s because of people like you. I don’t know if you’re undecided, apathetic, or actually planning to vote Republican, but if you’re any of these things, I have one thing to say to you: Please change your mind. Right now. Because if Mitt Romney wins, I honestly think that’s pretty much it for the United States of America.

Not, mind you, because Mitt Romney has some unrevealed policy goals that will destroy this country. I think that Mitt Romney will be a bad President, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t think he’ll do anything radically different than George W. Bush. He’ll probably be a better President than Bush, in fact…mainly because it’s not actually possible to be worse…but he’ll probably be more slightly moderate because he’s not a true believer like Bush was. He’s a cynical, calculating schemer with no personal convictions, which is actually an improvement over a President who had deep personal convictions that all happened to be absolutely wrong. (The analogy I always used was, “If you had a firefighter who thought that gasoline put out fires, would you want him to be a determined firefighter who always charged in regardless of the obstacles, or would you want him to be wishy-washy about it?”)

But it’s not the hypothetical Presidency of Mitt Romney that scares me. It’s the fact of his victory that I think would spell the beginning of the end for America. Because Mitt Romney has run the first campaign in American history founded entirely on lying. That’s not to say that other candidates, or indeed other successful candidates, haven’t lied before. We all know they have. But Mitt Romney has made the conscious decision to run using nothing but lies. He has lied about himself; he has lied about his opponent. When he has been caught lying, he has either responded with a new and slightly more complex lie, or he has lied about being caught lying. Where he has avoided lying, it has been either with empty platitudes or with pleas for trust in the absence of evidence. The only time the man has ever revealed his true plans, thoughts, opinions or emotions in the entire eighteen-month campaign, it has been when he did not know he was being recorded, and it was to express his open and naked contempt for almost half the electorate. Mitt Romney is running on the platform that if you spend enough money throwing enough bullshit at the wall, sooner or later enough of it will stick to convince people to vote for you. Mitt Romney is running the first ever entirely fact-free campaign.

And if it works…if the people pushing Romney’s candidacy find out that they can actually win with this strategy, they will do it again. Mitt Romney’s next campaign, in 2016, will be nothing more than naked lies and character assassination directed against his opponent, and 2020 will see another empty suit spouting empty bullshit. And every one of these empty suits will do what the last group perfected: Loot the public treasury with both hands and funnel it into the hands of their rich benefactors. They will steal until there is no money left if they have their way, and they will never tell the truth until they learn that there are consequences for lying.

So far, this campaign hasn’t exactly done a great job of teaching them that. The media hasn’t called Romney on his lies in any meaningful sense. Obama has pointed out the existence of the lies, but there’s only so honest he can be without opening himself up to charges of character assassination. The only people left to hold Mitt Romney accountable for being a shameless, craven liar are the American voters. So please…on Tuesday, can you go out and do that? Because I guarantee you, they will lie like this until it stops helping them get elected. Or until they have stripped this country to the bones like vultures feeding on a carcass. I’m kind of assuming you don’t want that to happen.

Last week I had a curious dream about me reading a crossover between Quantum Leap and Doctor Who.  This would not be particularly stunning except that I’m like the one contributor to this blog who cannot stand Doctor Who.1  Indeed, what made the dream amazingly vivid is that I was constantly thinking “Why am I reading this?  I don’t even like Doctor Who.”  Also, I have checked and I’m pretty sure the first Doctor Who was in the dream, which is disturbing because I wouldn’t have known what that guy looked like before he appeared to me in a vision.  This is like one of those creepy stories about somebody visiting an ancient castle for the first time and remembering a past life spent there, except that my past life was apparently a colossal dork.

After I woke up and thought about this some more, I realized that a) Quantum Leap/Doctor Who certainly makes sense and b) it would be cruel of me to withhold this concept from the universe just because it doesn’t turn my crank.  (I am choosing to pretend no one has ever thought of this before, despite the fact that Doctor Who has been crossed over with literally everything I have ever heard of.)  Maybe somebody else can get some mileage out of it.  So for those of you looking for a plot for the next great fanfiction, this one is on me!  (Adding the buttsex is up to you, though.)

continue reading "I’m meeting you halfway, you stupid hippies!"

1. Hopefully Seavey is being plagued by dreams about James Nguyen meeting Tommy Wiseau, to balance things out. [↩]

This is my second year playing fantasy basketball and it hits the sweet spot for me in terms of fantasy sports – less rigorous and attention-demanding than fantasy baseball1 (where everybody plays almost every day and roster decisions tend to be insane in terms of amount of attention required), and less annoying than fantasy football (both because I don’t like football, and because fantasy football people have a tendency to be really, really irritating about fantasy football, whereas fantasy B-ballers in my experience tend to recognize the essential absurdity of what they are doing and are willing to make riskier choices in the name of fun).

Anyway, this is to say that the one MetaFilter-based league I’m in right now is, I think, not quite enough to whet my fantasy B-ball appetite. Therefore, I have created a second league for MGK readers (and well, whoever really). I’ve capped it at 16 teams but we can go with as few as 8. Head-to-head weekly matchups, scoring by categories (free throw percentage, field goal percentages, points, threes, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, and turnovers), live draft (tentatively for Saturday at noon EST).

League is here. To join go here – league number is 157832, password is “mgkisthebestest”. So… come on! Lots of room!

UPDATE 11:00 A.M. EST: Half full already!

UPDATE #2, 4:00 P.M. EST: We’re at twelve teams and I have locked it so as to make sure we don’t have an uneven number of teams going into the draft. If you want to play and aren’t in yet, email me (mgk@mightygodking.com), and when I have a set of two people who want to play I will send both of you invites.

1. Discussion of the apathetic failure of the previous MGK-based fantasy baseball league is OFFICIALLY DISCOURAGED. [↩]

M.M. (it’s short for “Mo’ Money,” which his friends called him – far better than his birth name of Marvin, anyway) sits back on his thin prison bed in the dark and looks up at the top bunk. He’s new fish here in Cordell Maximum Security Penitentiary, and though he thinks he could probably take Rich Clay – the big-ass biker doing a dime for trafficking heroin, currently farting in his sleep in the top bunk – if he had to, he figures it’s best not to bother. Rich looks tough enough, but in their first day he hasn’t been mean. No sense in looking for trouble. Clay (“call me Clay when you gotta call me anythin'”) laid it out, straight and respectful, when M.M. entered the cell with his week’s worth of blues and fresh sheets.

“You got your bunk, I got my bunk, I’m not one for conversatin’ with niggers much, but I ain’t got anythin’ against you people pers’nally, don’t get me wrong, not Klan or shit like that. I just wanna be left alone. If you can do that, we’ll get along fine. Dig?” M.M. dug. So he sits on the bottom bunk, telling himself eventually he’ll get used to Clay’s farts, and thinking ahead.

M.M. is doing fifteen to twenty for manslaughter. It’s fair enough, he figures. He shot Li’l Bobby in the head, after all. Li’l Bobby had called down the thunder on Peso’s boys some three months beforehand, and although M.M. didn’t have any personal stake in whether Peso lived or died (really, Peso was kind of an asshole), he was on payroll – and so were Coyote (who pronounced it “Cuh-yoat”) and Stevie G., who were like his brothers. He’d known them since he was maybe five, and they’d grown up together, gone to school together, dropped out together, and Li’l Bobby’s boys had shot them dead and didn’t even get five-oh on them for the trouble, much less Li’l Bobby. So M.M. took care of business, and his lawyer pled him down to manslaughter because the D.A. at the end of the day just figured one more banger off the street was all they wanted and they’d gotten two (counting Li’l Bobby), so make it easy. And that’s why M.M is looking at prison until he’s forty-one.

At least he doesn’t have kids, right?

He’s come in prepared, of course. Near a thousand dollars stuffed up his ass in a Baggie, plus a C to the search guards before he went in to make sure he wasn’t searched too close. So he has money. It’s not a twenty-year supply of money (fifteen, he reminds himself again silently, don’t make waves and you’ll be out in fifteen, you’ll only be thirty-six, maybe you can get out even a few years earlier, maybe), but it’s there for emergencies. He doesn’t do drugs or gamble, so he doesn’t have much to spend it on. When he was outside he mostly played XBox for fun, but it’s not like you can buy an XBox in prison. The thousand is his stay-alive fund.

Mostly M.M. is thinking about the next fifteen years. He’s never been much of a reader, but he’s never had any trouble reading, really. XBox was just more fun. But you got to make the time pass somehow, and people mostly don’t get stabbed in the library (so he hears – he’s not entirely correct on this point, but in the broad strokes he’s right to think that the library is generally safer than the exercise yard). Mostly he’s thinking about what could happen if he gets his GED while he’s in here. Maybe even take some correspondence courses – sure, maybe nobody hires him when he gets out, but maybe they do, and what else does he have but time? Thirty-six (forty-one) is too old to be banging anyway.

Mostly he’s thinking about what happens if somebody tries to rape him. He’s not so much scared of the actual rape (he’s lying to himself, he’s terrified about it) but dealing with it, that’s the thing. He could shiv somebody if they tried it, but then say goodbye to fifteen and hello to twenty (or much more, even, if they tack assault or homicide onto his sentence, if he gets caught, and he assumes it’s more than likely he would). Is it better to just lie back and take it and look in the mirror the next morning? He’s not sure. He just doesn’t want to be in the position coming from one cell over, where somebody is whimpering “no, please” over and over again, under their breath. Clay doesn’t seem like a candidate to go that route, but you never know.

Much later than he would like, he closes his eyes.

—

The next morning, after breakfast, he sees his first prison murder. Exercise yard, of course. A pair of bangers (nobody he knows) walk up to this skinny-looking Italian and just do him quick – two stabs and walk on. Very clean, very quick. He’s impressed and horrified by them walking away like it was nothing. When he was done with Li’l Bobby he had to throw up after, he was so angry and scared. Maybe the bangers are vets at this sort of thing. He starts doing mental math in his head about social dynamics – are these bangers potential allies, and if so, does he benefit more by joining up or keeping his distance? He knows how gangs work in prison and he knows lone wolves get picked off, but gangs are also targets.

He wishes he knew more when he notices something – the Italian’s pinky ring. Mafioso, then? Or a wannabe? And then he sees something else – a silver cross on a chain. It was ripped off the guy’s neck when they killed him. He can see from here it’s real silver – he’s always had a good eye for jewelry and the like – and does a little more mental math. All of this goes through his head in maybe five seconds.

Then he’s walking, very quickly, over to the already-dead Italian, acting concerned and calling for a guard – and he sweeps the cross and chain up into his hand and then his pocket.

—

“Why would you do this? We don’t take in niggers.”

The man saying that is Donnie “Noose” Nucci. Old-school gangster, in for first-degree murder, probably did at least two dozen they could never pin on him. He’s in his fifties, hair and pencil-thin moustache going grey, not an ounce of fat on him. He’s in charge of the Mob inside Cordell, and he’s reading – or at least pretending to read – Of Mice and Men. M.M. saw the movie of it with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich and wonders if the book is any good. He liked the movie. In the Noose’s spare hand is the silver cross and chain. It’s taken M.M. a week to find out the lay of the land, find out how to approach him (and more importantly, find out all of this without anybody finding out he was finding out).

M.M. is quite sure the Noose could kill him twice over before M.M. could make a move, despite the three decades’ difference in age.

“Not looking to be taken in. I saw that it was real silver. That’s worth something. Coulda sold it, maybe, but figured it was worth more giving it back to you. Maybe he got family who want it.” Playing it humble. Best chance for a positive outcome.

The Noose snorts. “You want money or something for this?”

“No.” He has already decided that, although he wants the Noose to think M.M. respects him – which he does – he is not calling this man sir. Any chance of that ended the first time Noose called him a nigger. “I’m not looking to be owed anything for this, if you follow. I just wanna be sure in advance that you know where I stand.”

The Noose was looking at him keenly through that sentence, and continues the look silently for some time after. M.M. knows the gangster is trying to make him feel uncomfortable. It’s not working, and he looks back at Nucci – not insolently, just even and calm like an ocean (he has never seen an ocean). He knows he’s being sized up, and that’s fine by him. He already pled guilty. He has very little to hide.

Finally the Noose tosses him the cross back. “Tell you what. You can keep it. Probably shouldn’t wear it during the day, though. They’re kind of a calling card.” M.M. at that moment identifies the brief flash of light he saw when he first approached Nucci as a silver chain, mostly hidden beneath the mobster’s prison blues. “Call it a thank-you, if you like. A reward, even. It’s valuable.”

M.M. figures it at maybe a hundred, hundred-fifty tops, but he’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. “If you’re sure you wanna do that, then I’ll thank you in return.” A pause. “Can I ask why your friend got done?”

Noose shrugs. “We have a lot of enemies here. Everybody does, you included. Keep frosty.” He turns back to his book. The conversation is over. Nucci has not even once asked for his name. M.M. strongly suspects that Nucci thinks knowing his name is a waste of time, and that bothers him – not so much for the blow to his ego, but rather because it implies that Nucci thinks he’s not around for the long haul.

He sighs to himself. He’s going to need a weapon, looks like. And soon.

—

When he heads back to his cell when free time’s over, he sees that the cell next door is half-empty. When he went in yesterday he saw a big, burly black man and a small Latino who looked like a weasel. Now, there’s only the Latino, a nervous-looking motherfucker named Javier. Javier’s eyes bulge a bit as they chat (which means Javier talks a streak and M.M. occasionally asks a question). He’s pale for a Latino, M.M. thinks. Maybe he doesn’t get enough sun.

“Yeah, man, heart attack, it was a fuckin’ heart attack, that’s what it was, poor Cal. We weren’t fags for each other or nothin’, don’t get me wrong, I ain’t going fag for nobody (well, maybe Channing Tatum, but that motherfucker’s pretty like a girl, know what I mean, and you better believe if I had to go fag I’d be pitching, right?) but Cal was a good enough dude to bunk with. He just up and died, you know? Heart attack. He was only thirty-eight! Blessed be but there I go, know what I mean? Fuck, at least he went in his sleep. Maybe we can hope he was dreamin’ of pussy, right? Pussy out in the great wide open, yeah.”

But the noises M.M. wants to say, and then stops. If it had been Cal buttfucking Javier, that would make sense. But Javier’s denials aside, he’s not giving a vibe that speaks consensual partnership to M.M, and although the idea of this five-nothing squirt of Latino Peat raping big Cal is ludicrous to M.M., even if he thought it was possible (and he doesn’t – Javier’s too fucking tense) Javier’s not giving that vibe either.

Maybe Cal was talking in his sleep while he had the heart attack. Maybe he was trying to call for help and he couldn’t. M.M. doesn’t know a lot about heart attacks, but in movies when someone has a heart attack they always get real quiet and try to call out but they can’t. Maybe that’s what happened to Cal? It’s as good a theory as any, and it makes sense. He’s satisfied with it. He goes into his cell. Before he forgets, he cuts a small hole in his mattress at the head of his bed and stuffs the silver cross in it. It should be safe there, and if it isn’t with his money (stuffed into a fresh baggie and stuck to the underside of the sink, safely out of sight, with chewing gum), it’ll be an extra cash reserve if he needs it.

—

Later that night, trying to relearn being used to Clay’s sleep-farts (and starting to recognize that he will never, ever entirely get used to them), M.M. nearly sits bolt upright when he hears the scream. It’s Javier. That’s obvious to him. Javier is screaming bloody murder.

“YOU KEEP AWAY FROM ME! YOU KEEP AWAY! OH YOU -” and that’s the last intelligible words Javier screams. This isn’t to say that he stops screaming. He just keeps screaming, again and again, and he’s clearly in pain. At least M.M. thinks he is.

After a few seconds other voices come from down the cell block. Nothing terribly sympathetic. “SHUT THE FUCK UP, SPIC, WE’RE TRYNNA SLEEP” is about as sympathetic as it gets. “TELL YOUR MOM NOT TO BITE DOWN WHEN SHE SUCKS YOUR COCK, I BET THAT’S THE PROBLEM” is more elaborate. “GRIN AND BEAR IT, FUCK” is a fairly common sentiment. “OOOH IDDUMS HAVIN A NIGHTMARE” is screamed by one high-pitched voice who seems gleeful to be screaming it. And then they all start calling for the guards because they all want to sleep.

Most of these cons don’t know that Javier was in there alone. M.M. does; they dragged Cal’s body out this morning and Javier has no new bunkmate yet, not the same day – even prisons aren’t that crowded. Which means the guards must’ve gotten bribed to let somebody in there. He’s sure he heard the sounds of a fight in there while Javier was screaming. Bad scene, and it just reinforces the need for a weapon.

Eventually Javier’s screams dwindle down to nothing, and he’s silent. Either beaten unconscious or dead. Either way, there’s nothing more M.M. can do. Clay’s already snoring again, having only woken up briefly to yell for a guard to come like everyone else. M.M. settles down into bed and eventually drifts off, but as he does he thinks to himself, while he’s almost falling asleep – I’m not hearing any guards coming.

—

The next morning, M.M. wakes up early. He wants to know what’s happened to Javier before he has breakfast and goes on work detail. Partially it’s concern for Javier, who is one of the few people so far in Cordell that he knows by name. Partially it’s because he wants to know what happened, if it affects him. And of course, partially it’s because he’s been here a week now and prison routine is boring as fuck and anything that stimulates your mind is welcome, particularly if it’s something happening to other people rather than you.

He’s already got a peeking-mirror built so he can look out of his cell, and that is how he comes to see Javier being wheeled out of there on a stretcher. The little man is paler, even, than he was. And not breathing. And – and this is most curious – not marked. There is not so much as a scratch on the man who, last night, screamed like he was being set on fire.

Nobody else is paying attention to this, M.M. realizes as he looks around the cells opposite – they’re shooting the shit, paying up owed smokes and Honey Buns from late-night gambling (competitive Twenty Questions is a popular way to kill time after lights out, although you have to write down your answer first so there’s no disagreement about lying). This is prison. You watch your own ass and Javier dying is Javier’s problem, not anybody else’s. M.M. knows he should adopt that philosophy already – and in truth he mostly has, because his concern about Javier’s death is more, if he was being honest, sort of a case study than any interest in Javier’s welfare. This little Latino dude is dead and he died badly. How do I prevent that from happening to me? Because that’s the real bottom line here. M.M. doesn’t wish anybody bad – he used all that up on Li’l Bobby – but this is prison, and you don’t get by in prison by playing nice.

He’s weighing options in his mind now. (Although M.M. would not recognize this without being told, he was always far and away the most intelligent of his boys, and in a few years probably would have been able to replace Peso and do the job better than Peso ever did.) No marks on Javier that he could easily see, but he can think of a few ways they could kill him. Strangling, maybe. He didn’t get a good look at Javier’s neck. Or maybe they broke his neck, and then twisted it back into place? Is that possible? He thinks he saw it on TV once, but that’s TV, that doesn’t count nohow.

And he’s also wondering if cons did it, or guards. Guards would have to let cons in anyway, so guards were involved somehow. But why would guards want to kill Javier? Cons make more sense, but it’s also more complicated – he figures guards gotta let the cons out, escort them there, and then wait around in the cell for the cons to kill Javier? The more he thinks about it, the more he thinks it had to be a guards-only job. Cons might have arranged it, sure – he can’t think of a single reason offhand, but he didn’t know Javier that well except that the man would run his mouth like fucking crazy, and that can get a man in trouble real easy.

But there’s still too many questions, and worse, questions he can’t easily answer without raising questions.

—

A couple weeks later, on work detail, he’s hefting laundry into the industrial washing machine when the Noose, flanked by two big Italians, walks up to him. Nucci is important enough and connected enough that he doesn’t ever really have to do work detail, so the fact that he’s here is not good. M.M. immediately stuffs his last handful of sheets into the washer and turns to face them.

“Hey. How can I help you?”

“What makes you think I want your help?” The Noose’s voice is cool. It’s obviously a test.

“You ain’t down here for no ambience, I don’t think.”

“Good one.” Nucci doesn’t smile. “I actually wanted to pick your brain for a bit. About that thing with Espina.”

“Who?”

“The little Spic who fucking keeled over in the cell next to you. I know you knew him, Ace. Don’t bullshit me.”

“Ain’t bullshitting.” M.M. lifts another load of sheets into the washer so guards don’t give him shit for slacking. “Didn’t know his last name offhand. His first name was Javier. If in full he’s Javier Espina, sure thing.”

The response earns a noncommittal shrug. “Fair enough. What did you know about our boy Javier and what happened to him?”

“Not much. He didn’t give no sign that he was in the shit, if that’s what you’re asking. Last conversation we had was about his bunkmate havin’ a heart attack. In terms of him going down? I think guards did it. Dunno why or who paid ’em.” That earns a glittering stare from the Noose and a request for a brief explanation, which M.M. provides. At the end of it, the mobster nods, satisfied, and without a further word he turns away and leaves.

M.M. knows when he’s been pumped for information, but Nucci didn’t ask follow-up questions – that means he got everything he needed in the brief talk. Which means, probably, that Nucci knew it already. This wasn’t a trying-to-find-shit-out talk. This was a tell-me-my-suspicions-are-correct talk. Which is probably more dangerous, because if Nucci knows something and M.M. is on the radar in some way, that means he can be set up.

He needs to know what’s going on, and quickly. It takes a great deal of self-control not to reach down to the shiv in his pocket (a spoon with a sharpened handle, which cost him fifty dollars) and touch it just for the sake of comfort.

—

Two nights later M.M. wakes up. He was having a nightmare where Stevie B and Coyote were driving with him, Timbaland blaring out the speakers. He turned to look at some pretty girls, but when he turned back to tell his boys about them, they were looking at him, bullet holes riddling their faces. Coyote had three, one in the forehead and one in each cheek, and his left eye was exploded. Stevie B’s jaw was hanging loose, torn away from his face, one end dangling off. Coyote had said, air whistling through his cheek-holes as he spoke, that M.M. hadn’t done enough, what about their mamas, who was going to look after their mamas, and they reached for him, and that was when M.M.’s eyes popped open.

He always had a fast reaction time – that was in part how he dropped in time to avoid the initial driveby that popped Coyote, how he rolled away from that Honda he and Stevie had ducked behind in time to avoid the followup of Li’l Bobby’s thugs running around the car to spray Stevie and three other of Peso’s boys with lead – and it is this reaction time that saves his life now, because before he can exhale in panic from his nightmare (part of him still thinking that it made no sense, both Coyote and Stevie’s mamas were dead – much later on he would realize he was conflating survivor’s guilt with his guilt that he would not be around to support his mother and his two little sisters, but this was no comfort to him now) he sees two guards standing right next to his bunk.

They’re not here for him. That’s obvious. They’re here for Clay. Clay is making tiny distressed sounds, but other than that, nothing, not even the sound of breath. As he notices that, he realizes he is holding his breath, and so begins exhaling slowly, trying to mimic the sounds of sleep. He doesn’t know yet why he is so terrified, but he is.

Finally, the guards step back a bit. M.M. does not dare move. Whatever their reason for being here, it’s definitely not legit, and he cannot afford to be a witness. He still has fourteen years and a little more than eleven months. Getting short, he suddenly thinks, his sense of humour asserting itself at the oddest time. And so he lies, silent and still, and he waits and he waits, and he knows he’s not breathing enough air to stay properly awake, he remembers from somewhere that you breathe less when you sleep and that you make yourself can go to sleep if you breathe slow enough. But he has to stay awake. He has to stay awake, and it is fear keeping him alert even as he gets less and less oxygen.

One guard breaks the silence. “Had enough?”

“Yeah. We got to get another riot going sometime, though. That was the best. Infirmary was full up for weeks.”

“We can’t do those too often. We had one only nine months ago, remember? More than one every couple years is pushing it.”

“I just hate coming down here. You do too.”

“Better than a kick in the ass, my friend. Besides, this happy asshole should do for at least another night. Maybe two. He’s been going a week now. Always like it when we get a big boy.”

“True enough. Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.” And they leave. The cell door slides shut behind them. M.M. wants to exhale sharply, he wants to breathe hard so badly he’s almost seeing stars – but he makes himself wait another two minutes, counting one Mississippi two Mississippi until he gets to one hundred and twenty Mississippis, and only then does he gasp for the air his body needs, he breathes so hard he almost chokes on air and he didn’t even think that was possible.

He breathes hard and makes himself wait another ten minutes before very, very cautiously getting out of his bunk.

Clay looks fine. He looks like he’s sleeping like the dead, sure – no, not like the dead, just sleeping – but his chest is rising and falling like you’d expect and there’s not a mark on him, not anywhere. M.M. wants to poke him and wake him up, and damn the consequences, but settles for whispering at him.

“Clay? You hear that, man?”

No response. Clay doesn’t even shift in his sleep or mutter a mumbled “fuck off.” That man is out cold. So M.M. lies back down and tries breathing slowly to force himself back to sleep. It doesn’t work this time. He can’t make himself do it. And indeed, he doesn’t sleep for another few hours, until he’s too tired and part of his brain mercifully says “look, we need at least another few hours if we’re gonna be any good tomorrow, okay?” and he shuts down.

—

The next morning – with Clay complaining, as he wakes, that he wishes they had the option for an extra-large breakfast every once in a while – M.M. goes in search of the Noose, and once again finds him in the library, as he suspected he would. This time Nucci is reading something by Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby. The Noose nods at him when he approaches. He doesn’t look surprised.

“You know what? Growin’ up, I thought all these dead writers were just shit, but turns out they’re really good. Not easy to read, but in here you got the time to put to it. You should read these books. Improve your mind, learn that all the shit you thought was new is in fact just the same old shit these guys invented. Not that I’m sayin’ you’re dumb. Just sayin’ there’s always another step up you can take, if you get my gist.” Nucci closes the book. “So whaddya want, Lincoln?”

“Nobody who ain’t official calls me by my last name, Mr. Nucci. You can call me M.M., if you like.” He sits down at Nucci’s table. “Do you know what the fuck is going on here?”

That gets a smile. Dark, but not mean. Not too mean, anyway. This is prison, after all. “Finally, he asks. I figured you’d come sooner. But you’re a patient one, aincha? You want to crack the code for yourself. I get that. Your bunkie’s looking kinda sick lately, ain’t he?” If the Noose realizes that would be a non-sequitur under other circumstances – but obviously not here – he doesn’t show it. “And here you are feelin’ around in the dark, lookin’ for the proverbial light switch, I suppose.”

“You could say that.” He keeps his voice even, but he’s pissed. Nucci’s playing with him now? What the fuck?

“I’ll be blunt with you, kid. I can help you, maybe, a bit. But not now. Frankly, it’s hard for me to help you at all, mostly because of you being a nigger. It’s not done, capisce?” He scratches at his pencil-thin moustache. “But if you play your cards right, maybe I can help you a little. Tomorrow or the day after. Don’t get me wrong, we ain’t galpals all of a sudden. The Antones want me to keep their boys solid in here and I do it, and it means I get to fuck my wife on conjugal once a month despite the double life I’m doin’, and that’s my priority. But… tomorrow or the day after, yeah.”

“Tomorrow or the day after? What, you busy or something? What kind of bullshit test is this, man?” His voice rises – only a little. He’s upset, but he needs to control it. Just enough to let him know how serious this is without coming off all drama.

If Nucci is offended at all, he doesn’t show it. “The kind you gotta pass.”

—

That night, he doesn’t sleep. When he hears the footsteps approach – he thinks it’s at about two-thirty in the morning – he slows his breath again. Closes his eyes – it’s almost impossible for him to do, but he does it. Hears the cell door slide open. Hears the two pairs of footsteps. Hears them briefly talk about who goes first this time. Then there is silence, and then the tiny, almost inaudible whimpers from Clay. It’s beginning again, he thinks, and he opens his eyes.

One of the guards is leaning against the bunk, his head level with the top bunk in fact, and looking right at him. His nameplate says GABRIEL GELLER.

“Well, what do you know.” The guard speaks very quietly, but he’s smiling a bit. It’s not a nice smile at all. He glances upward. “See, Will – I thought I heard him start breathing fast last night after we left. And you thought I was just imagining it. Point for me.” He looks back at M.M., who is inching backwards, sitting up a bit in his bunk, trying to create distance from the guard even though he doesn’t quite know why yet. “So. You’re probably wondering what a couple of guards are doing here in your bunk late at night, and what we’re doing with your bunkmate. I might tell you, but first you have to tell me what you know.” His tone is friendlier than his eyes are. M.M. knows this is a routine – this guard has had to give this speech before. They’ve been caught before. But clearly, they have left no witnesses.

His shiv is in his pants pocket and his pants are at the foot of the bed and the guard is not quite between him and his pants – but he also knows he will never make it. He is sure of that. “I know you went into Javier’s bunk before this.”

“Very good. What else?”

“I don’t think cons paid you to do it.”

“Sharp! No, really, I’m not saying that to mock you. Most cons in your position, they think the world revolves around their little jailhouse conspiracies. But it doesn’t. You’ve got an admirable sense of perspective.” Smiling again, a wide smile, and it looks to M.M. to be a hungry one. This guard is looking at M.M. like he’s a rib-eye steak with gravy.

That’s when M.M. clicks it.

He sits up a little more. “Thank you, sir.” No compunction about calling Guard Geller “sir,” no. He needs time. “I also suspect that you killed both Javier and Cal. And, if I’m being truthful, probably lots of other cons besides.”

“More than you can count. Say, Will -this guy’s reeeeeeal sharp.” Geller begins leaning further down. “You almost done there, by the way?” M.M. isn’t sure if he’s talking to the other guard or to M.M. when he asks that question, but he doesn’t care. He’s started inching his hand down into the hole in his mattress. He only needs a few seconds more. Just a few seconds.

“If that question was directed to me, then all I got to say otherwise is one thing.”

“Mmmhmmm.” Geller clearly doesn’t care to talk any more, and that is when M.M., smooth as silk, pulls the cross out of his mattress and holds it in front of him.

“How old are you, anyway?”

Geller’s reaction surprises M.M. – he laughs, quietly, under his breath. “Oh, that’s good, that’s very good. Will, I told you, this guy is good! But -” and a note of menace enters Geller’s voice now – “what makes you think that’s going to work?”

M.M. shrugs, quite aware that he has placed all his chips on slightly more than one ounce of silver. “Hope, I guess.”

“Very Shawshank of you. Oh, don’t be like that. Yes, it works. I’m not going to recoil hissing in agony or anything, but… yes, it works. Congratulations. How did you get the wops to give you one of those?” As Geller speaks, his canines extend ever so slightly. “Don’t mind the teeth, by the way. It’s just nice to stretch them every once in a while – speaking of which, Will? You done yet?”

The other guard (WILLIAM TUCHMAN) looks down, his mouth bloody. Not his blood, of course. “Yeah, there’s still some left. Go finish up.” The two guards exchange positions. Guard Tuchman, rather than lean on the bunk, instead opts to sit on the tiny metal chair opposite the bunk. He’s not smiling. He clearly doesn’t think this is funny. “I believe Gabe asked you a question, fish.”

“Found it lying around, is all.”

“I don’t believe you, but I suppose I can’t take it as contraband.” A shrug. “Nucci and his boys don’t give those out, so – must’ve been when we hired those Bloods to knife Salvatore. Right?”

“I suppose.” He had never learned the Italian’s name. There didn’t seem to be much point.

“Fucking Catholics… Okay. So let me tell you how it’s going to go.” Tuchman leans forward a bit. “You’re a dead man. We’ll get you eventually. Not tonight, of course. But you’re in here, what, ten years?” (M.M. doesn’t bother correcting him.) “Sooner or later, we will get you. Nobody will care. That’s the beauty of this setup. Nobody gives a shit about you. You’re a rabid dog so far as they’re concerned. Nobody gives a damn about what happens to cons in jail. Hell, they actively want bad things to happen to you. We’re working with society, see. And even your fellow cons don’t care, because they’re all focused on Number One.”

Tuchman starts wiping blood off his chin and licking it down as he speaks. “We’ve been doing this a very, very long time. We built this prison. Well, helped build it, anyway. We can’t all be aristocrats living in castles, after all. Some of us have to work for a living.” That prompts the ghost of a smile from him. “We’ve got safety spots and hidey-holes all over this place. We work the night shift. Most times, we just work over whoever’s in the infirmary. And if it’s empty? Well, we go after one of you. You don’t have weapons – not anything that can hurt us, anyway. It’s perfect.”

M.M. nodded. “Not entirely perfect. Looks like the Noose -”

“The Noose is a dead man. All the wops are dead men walking. They think the crucifix protects them, but Salvatore shows that we can get at them – and you – in other ways. Often we don’t even need to do that.” Tuchman’s voice grows even more serious. “You’ve got a choice here, Lincoln. You can die easy or you can die bad. If you want it quick, clean and painless, we can do that. You won’t feel a thing. Speaking from experience, it’s honestly pretty pleasant. Or… well. you saw Salvatore. And that was the nicest that gets. We can be worse.” Pause. “Much worse.”

M.M. is silent for a long time. When he starts to open his mouth, Tuchman shakes his head. “Not tonight. Sleep on it. No, really, sleep on it. Nucci or someone will tell you anyway – wearing that thing will keep us off you. I’m being civil here because I want you to have a choice, and I hope you’ll make the smart one. Because you have to die, Lincoln. That’s how it goes.” He stood up. “You done, Gabe?”

Geller stands back from the bunk, wiping his mouth. “Yeah. Oh, hey, kid, don’t worry about, you know, fatso here coming back. He won’t. We don’t need an extra mouth to feed, right?”

The guards withdraw from the cell – walking backwards, M.M. noted. As they close the cell door behind them, Tuchman’s gaze never leaves M.M. – and specifically, M.M. is sure, his throat. After a couple of seconds, the guard speaks once more.

“We’ll come by tomorrow night. You can let us know then. If you like, we’ll even do you a last meal. Whatever you like. Seems only fair. We all gotta eat, right?”

—

Long after Geller and Tuchman are gone, M.M. lies back in his bunk, still holding the cross even though it was now hanging around his neck, not noticing the lack of Clay’s sleep-farts or even the fact that Clay is now a dead body. In his head, he’s doing math – not metaphorically, but literally.

Fifteen years. Figuring they don’t manage to get me to do something to extend that, like have to defend myself from a shivving and kill somebody. Fifteen years is three hundred and sixty-five days every year, plus three leap years adds three days.

That’s five thousand, seven hundred and forty-eight days. So far I’ve done twenty-nine. So that leaves five thousand, seven hundred and nineteen days… but really it’s five thousand seven hundred and forty-eight nights. The days are easy time, even though the guards will probably be hiring muscle to off him on a regular basis. It’ll be the nights that’ll be hard, lying there, waiting to see how they finally decide to kill him. They’ve got guns. If they got desperate – and he thinks they will, towards the end, if they haven’t managed to kill him yet – they could just shoot him in his cell. Crosses don’t stop bullets.

Oh, Lord.

M.M starts to cry.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

And if you like, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Okay, he’s forgiven for somehow getting people to think Dr. Horrible was brilliant.

Unless he is using his mind-rays again! OH LORD WHAT IF HE IS USING HIS TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE MIND-RAYS AGAIN

Although some have criticized the film’s choice to have white actors portray nonwhite characters in various eras (and, in fairness, nonwhite actors as white characters) as unnecessary given the lack of thematic links between the characters each actor portrays, that was never the point – instead, the point of using the same actors repeatedly, I think, is to provide a grounding sense of unity between the six timeframes the movie is set in, as the storytelling of the editing choices (and I think shifting from the book’s “nested” stories was necessary to make it work on film at all) is jarring as it is; in any case, I have said before I will take a dozen ambitious failures over one unambitious, repetitive “success,” and so this movie gets my support for if it is indeed a failure, it is only barely one, and I do not think I concede even that (and yes, this may be a run-on sentence, but it is a run-on movie, so there).

The HOT-T-T news in comics this week is that, in Superman #13, Clark Kent has quit his job at the Daily Planet to start a website because print is dying and internet something something.  I hate when they do this crap.

This is the kind of event in comics1 that gets mainstream attention precisely because mainstream society is not paying attention to comics the rest of the time.  Think about all the times you’ve read about a comic book storyline in a newspaper article.  Some character died.  A character that’s been on TV is getting a new look.  The Avengers are fighting the X-Men.  All of these things are “dog bites man,” which does not become newsworthy just because some people do not pay attention to dogs.  Comics Alliance put it best in their headline: “Superman Leaves ‘Daily Planet’ Newspaper For Third Or Fourth Time.”

Still, I can’t beat up on mainstream coverage of comics; after all, somebody has to make sure my dad hears that Green Lantern is gay. (Of course, somebody else ends up having to explain that it’s the Green Lantern he’s never heard of, in one iteration of a parallel universe.  That person is usually my brother.)  What really steams my hams is DC’s crude attempts to revitalize Superman with these stunts.  Ultimately I do not trust that Scott Lobdell has any stories to tell about this event, or that DC particularly cares.

I complained about this last year when Superman renounced his citizenship (which led to exactly zero stories before being retconned away by the reboot), and I would argue the problem has only gotten worse.  DC does not know what to do with Superman–sometimes I get the feeling he’s been lumped together with Aquaman in terms of “this character is embarrassingly silly but we have to publish stories about him anyway.” 2 In lieu of actual ideas about how to properly use Superman, DC can only constantly invert aspects of the character.  Superman is the sole survivor of Krypton, so let’s introduce more survivors.  Superman can fly, so here’s a story where he doesn’t fly.  Superman has a thing for Lois, so now he doesn’t.  Superman works at the Daily Planet, so here’s a story where he quits.  Experimentation is fine, but it’s been about six years since I saw a Superman comic that was saying anything except “Look how hard we’re trying to make this not be a Superman comic.”  If I wanted to read not a Superman comic, I’d buy Batman.

Past a point, these gimmicks lose meaning because the model they defy has been left so far behind.  After everything else that’s been changed about Superman in the past year, is anyone really all that impressed that he’s going to break with tradition?  Lobdell wants to jump into writing Superman with a cannonball splash, but so did Geoff Johns, J. Michael Straczynski and Grant Morrison, and by now all the water has been splashed out of the pool.  So when Andy Diggle comes aboard with “Check this out…Superman’s abandoned his traditional costume for a black outfit!!!” it means absolutely nothing.

What Superman needs, I think, is consistency.  Not necessarily tighter continuity, but just a general sense that this is the same character as he was 70, 20, or even three years ago. 3  Any idiot can decide to have Clark Kent, the most famous newspaper reporter in fiction, quit the newspaper business because “print is dying” and Superman has better things to do.  What would be far more interesting is to explain why Clark would remain a newspaper reporter in spite of reaching those conclusions, which have presumably crossed his mind long before this week.

Personally I ain’t no writing genius or nothin’, but I’m willing to take a stab at rationalizing Superman’s adherence to a dying medium.  First off, in the DC Universe the Daily Planet is on the same level as the New York Times, which is not going to cease print operations anytime soon and already has an online edition.  Second, if Clark is so butthurt that the Planet covers trivial celebrity gossip, I’m pretty sure he could balance it out by posting some hard-hitting journalism to whatever blogs are on dailyplanet.com.  Leaving to complain about it on his own website sort of sounds like giving up and running away, which are two things Superman doesn’t tend to do.  Third, while the old “Clark uses the Planet‘s reporting to tell him where Superman is needed” concept doesn’t make sense anymore, the inverse is perfectly acceptable: Clark uses his exploits as Superman to discover the sources of injustice in the world, and reports those injustices in the Planet to tell the public where its help is needed in the never-ending battle.  Headlines like “America needs to stop taking Lexcorp’s shit” or “Superman can’t end famine by himself, you guys” have more clout coming from a great metropolitan newspaper than the blogosphere.

Now, the rationalizations stated above may not be to your liking.  But the point is, every incarnation of Clark Kent has worked at a newspaper for most of his adult life, so there must be some reason that overcomes the obvious problems with that arrangement.  Figuring out what that reason is makes the difference between leaving your mark on an iconic character or petulantly deconstructing something that someone else is going to reconstruct once you’re gone.  For example, “Lois doesn’t seem to notice Clark is Superman because she’s actually protecting his identity as an anonymous source” might be kind of clever.  “Lois doesn’t notice Clark is Superman because comics are stupid so now Lois is suddenly not stupid” would be a childishly simplistic solution to the problem, which would not stand the test of time.

1. “Event” as in “something that happens,” not “Secret Wars II continues in this issue.” [↩]
2. The difference, of course, is that Arthur has gained faux outsider cred; he’s the Pabst Blue Ribbon to Clark’s Bud Light. [↩]
3. Grant Morrison’s effort to revive Superman’s 1930s style of fighting for social justice was in this vein, although revising the role of the Phantom Zone in Kal’s origin story for the 900th time was not. [↩]

As I’m sure most of you are already aware, the long-rumored/awaited/teased/hinted/more-blatantly-hinted Ant-Man movie finally has a release date. When I read the announcement of this momentous news (well, momentous to me at least, but I’m a pretty big Edgar Wright fan) on io9, one of the things I noticed was that a frequent commenter here also made a comment there. “Oh good,” they said, “the wife-beater is finally getting his own movie.”

It probably says something about my comics nerdishness that my first thought was, “Fifth, actually. But the latest Spider-Man sequel has been in the cards for a while now.”

At first, that was really my only thought on the subject. But the more I thought about it, the more it started to nag at me. Because Spider-Man is every bit as much of a wife-beater as Hank Pym. Heck, he’s worse; during the Clone Saga, he smacked around a pregnant Mary Jane. He didn’t just hit his wife, he hit his pregnant wife. That is, generally speaking, considered to be one of the worst things you can do as a human being short of stomping on baby ducks, but nobody ever mentions it again. Certainly you don’t have prominent comics creators stating that they can never write him as a sympathetic character because he beat his wife, as was said about Pym (I want to say by Mark Millar, but it could have been Bendis. I suspect that whichever one I delete from this sentence will turn out to be the correct one, so I’ll leave them both here and ensure that it was actually Paul Jenkins or somebody.) It’s something that gets swept under the rug by writers and editors alike. (Although not by fans…I’m far from the first to point out the double-standard here.)

This isn’t to say that people should get over Hank’s actions and start liking the character or anything. The comment on io9 was totally valid. I’m certainly the last person to talk, seeing as how I haven’t been able to read a Batman comic ever since he used Brother Eye to murder a few thousand people and I still can’t stand Tony Stark, Iron Douchebag in the wake of ‘Civil War’, despite being explicitly told by Marvel’s editorial staff that his brain has been rebooted and I should just forgot he did all that imprisoning and murdering. So yeah, I can totally get how some fans can’t really get past Hank Pym slapping his wife around for trying to stop him from creating a killer robot to defeat all the Avengers to make him look good. (Because that couldn’t possibly go wrong.) Especially since ‘The Ultimates’ pretty much wrote a version of the character who’s unrepentantly abusive. But I wonder why the writers who’ve handled the character can’t get past it.

Because again, Spider-Man provides a clear alternative. As far as everyone who’s written the character since has been concerned, that happened when Peter was under a tremendous amount of mental strain and Mary Jane forgave him right away and there’s no need for anyone to even mention it again. Hank was under a tremendous amount of strain, Jan forgave him…well, eventually…but every story arc comes back to “Hank Pym redeems himself for being a wife-beater and puts it behind him for good! …until the next time he feels terrible about it.” Everyone wants to write the redemption arc, but nobody seems to want to write the post-redemption arcs.

I think the difference comes down, ultimately, to the fact that Hank Pym never really had a defining arc until his nervous breakdown. Peter has had several (the Master Planner, Spider-Man No More, the death of the Green Goblin) and writers can always go back to these big moments when they need an iconic Spidey story and they’re out of ideas. (…which is why it sometimes seems like Peter quits being Spider-Man “for good” every three weeks, but I digress.) Whereas Pym…his two big moments are his going insane and inventing a whole new identity, and his going insane and assaulting his wife and friends. And Number Three on the list is his going insane and creating a killer robot that’s committed genocide a few times. It’s hard not to think of this as the defining trait of the character, unless you want to go really far back and do an amped-up, iconic storyarc where his arch-nemesis tries to bribe his ants with sugar cubes to betray him.

(That really happened. He triumphed because the ants refused to betray him due to their inherent loyalty. I’m not sure which is sadder, commencing your criminal career by kneeling in front of an anthill with a handful of sugar cubes and an “ant language translator”, or being suckered by ants.)

The point is, the most attractive arc for any potential Ant-Man writer in comics is the redemption arc. It’s the definitive Hank Pym arc in a way that it’s not the definitive Spider-Man arc, and it’s got a lot of power because it’s so archetypal. Which is why Marvel keeps going back to that well, time and time again, despite the fact that his original sin happened well before many of his readers and some of his writers were born. And with every new repetition of the cycle, it becomes more inescapable, because every Hank Pym story becomes about his attacking his wife…which makes him “the character who beat his wife”…which a new writer addresses with another redemption arc…which causes the next writer to feel like they have to address the wife-beating issue before moving on, because he’s such an important character and he’s mostly known for attacking his wife. The only real way off the treadmill is to completely reboot the character in a whole different medium, away from the legacy created by the Avengers storyline so that the next writer won’t know all that history to begin with.

Which we may yet see in a few years, when the Ant-Man movie comes out. We’ll find out then whether Hank Pym has any other stories to tell.

When Snuff came out last year and was discussed here, several commenters made the point that Pratchett’s writing doesn’t read quite as it used to read, which is true – perhaps he has evolved as a writer, perhaps something to do with his Alzheimer’s, perhaps the fact that he is dictating to his assistant rather than writing himself, or maybe it is a mix of some or all of these elements. (I tend to believe this last one.) The point being: his Discworld books do not “sound” as they used to, and for longtime fans this is problematic.

In any case, Dodger is, in some respects, a clever workaround of that issue, as it is basically a Discworld novel transplanted to a mostly-real-history setting. Dickensian London rather than Ankh-Morpork, Charles Dickens rather than William de Worde, Joseph Bazelgette rather than Leonard da Quirm, Robert Peel rather than Sam Vimes (this one is not too subtle at all, since Vimes is of course derived from Peel), Angela Burdett-Coutts rather than Vetinari. Where Pratchett indulges in fiction he pulls more from Dickens than from Discworld (appropriately, as his writing has, I think, drifted more Dickensian as he’s grown older): Dodger himself is of course an Artful Dodger-as-hero archetype (with more than a bit of a mix-in of Pip from Great Expectations), but Solomon Cohen is very clearly a riff on Fagin and Simplicity reminds me quite a bit of Agnes in David Copperfield, personality-wise. The only distinctly Discworldy thing in the book is the identity of the Outlander, and that reveal works splendidly.

But is it a good book? Mostly, yes. As said, it doesn’t read in the way that Pratchett wrote at his peak; instead it is more in his later, meandering style, but that style is matched to a perspective character (Dodger) who is a meandering sort of person in the “goodnatured but ethically bendy” sort of way. The result is a book where, truthfully, not a lot really happens – you can describe the narrative in a paragraph – but the journey is pleasant, and that makes the difference. Recommended.

8:50: The WWE put on the tag tournament finals, the CM Punk promo and the Antonio Cesaro match all in the first hour. Presumably they guessed I would be watching the debate afterwards. Kudos, WWE! Just as I tune away, you announce that Vince McMahon will show up next! THAT is when you should put Vince on the air! When I am not watching.

8:54: And I tune into Bob Scheiffer, who is probably less appealing than Vince McMahon. I forgot that this final debate featured a boring old white person as moderator. He looks like Jim Lehrer except more brittle.

9:01: Bob Schieffer, exhaling dust with each breath, explains the debate rules, and the candidates are out. Are they booing Romney? I can’t tell.

9:03: Schieffer talks about Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, because he was there. Then he talks about the McKinley asssasination, because he was there. And now, the first question, which is about Libya, and the question is phrased in terms that are, to say the least, very favourable to Mittens. Romney thanks everybody, of course, and references the Al Smith dinner because why not. Romney explains why the Arab Spring has gone terribly wrong, and even references Mali, and then talks about Iran (which has no Arabs in it, but whatever). Romney then explains that “we can’t kill our way out of this mess,” despite the fact that he is far more pro-war than Obama, but I guess that’s not killing or something now.

9:06: Obama: first priority keep Americans safe, rebuild alliances, take out Al-Qaeda. Libya: we took leadership to organize an international coalition to liberate a country for practically no money down, no interest, and Libyans marched after Benghazi in support of us. Attacks Mitt on his strategy for being “all over the map.” Romney says his strategy is to take out the bad guys and kill them, which is also not killing one’s way out of a mess I suppose otherwise Romney would’ve flip-flopped in less than two minutes. Then he talks about helping the Arab world, which because he is Mittens means BIDNESS, and also women’s rights and the rule of law, which are very important to him and of course nobody thought of promoting those things in the Middle East before. God, this is vapid.

9:10: Obama slams Romney for the Russia comments from a few months ago, which is good, then works in some attacks on Romney’s social and economic domestic policies for good measure. “Every time you’ve offered an opinion, you’ve been wrong.” Calls out Romney for supporting the war in Iraq, wanting it to continue, attacking nuclear treaties, not making up his mind on an Afghanistan timeline… DAMMIT OBAMA MENTION ALIENATING ENGLAND. But he wraps up by basically saying Romney is a retard on foreign policy. Romney lies and says Obama’s statements about what he’s said are not accurate, presumably because he has also said other things at some other point because, hey, whatever. Romney says Russia is just a “geopolitical foe” which is MUCH better and I’m sure Russia is all “hey, that’s cool.” Romney tries to play gotcha with a status of forces agreement on Iraq and Obama and then starts lying straight-up about wanting troops in Iraq, and his lines are TERRIBLE. Obama hammers him on it and his lines are GREAT. Says he has to support Israel, because well duh, and protect minorities in foreign countries, and his lines are SKY HIGH, higher than they have been at any point.

9:16: Syria! What will we do? Obama: We’ve worked with the international community to provide humanitarian relief, and we’ve assisted moderates inside Syria, but ultimately this is Syria’s ballgame, so we’ve let Turkey and Israel take the lead in helping the opposition. We’ve done what we can, but if we get militarily involved, we have to make sure we know what the fuck we’re doing. Romney: 30,000 dead. It’s an opportunity for us! (Good lord, Romney, you dipshit, don’t put it that way.) It’s important to get Syria going the right way, but we don’t want military involvement, so we need to work with our partners to help with the moderates in Syria. THIS IS WHAT OBAMA JUST SAID BASICALLY. Except that Romney’s lines are worse, possibly because he doesn’t seem like he knows what he’s talking about. “Assad must go!” When Romney starts attacking Obama on this his lines drop. Obama: we are playing a leadership role, we’re mobilizing support for the moderate rebels. Back to Libya: we were able to stop massacres there because of the unique circumstances there, but when it came to Gaddafi, Romney said getting rid of him was “mission creep,” and he was wrong, and that’s why Libyans mostly love us right now.

9:21: Bob asks Romney what more he would do about Syria, asking about no-fly zones. Romney says he doesn’t want to use American forces; he wants things to get better! There are so many things that could get better! We can make that happen by giving them weapons! Obama: Romney just said he doesn’t have different ideas; we’re doing what we can to promote a new moderate Syrian leadership.

9:23: Bob asks if Obama regrets interfering in Egypt. Obama doesn’t because democracy and freedom, but Egypt needs to step up to protect religious minorities and women’s rights and stick to their treaty with Israel and work against terrorism and help the kids get jobs. But this also means America has to build up its own economy so we can help them with all of that. Bob asks Romney if he would have stuck with Mubarak and Romney says no, but maybe Obama didn’t force a transition in Egypt sooner, which: what. Then Romney wants to talk about promoting freedom and peace in the Middle East, which means a strong economy and then quotes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dissing the US debt, and also the US needs to spend more money on the military, and having strong allies. Then he says the US is less strong abroad than it was four years ago, which is just a GIANT MOUNTAIN OF BULLSHIT.

9:29: Romney blathers in the next segment at length about how the economy is weak and this means America is weak, because turning the foreign policy debate into a domestic debate is the only way he wins. And then he goes back to having a strong military budget, and how Israel can’t have its feelings hurt, and then complains that the US didn’t say anything during the Green Revolution in Iran. Obama responds by saying American alliances have never been stronger – including Israel – and has repositioned America so the economy can get better and no outsourcing and better exports because this is now apparently Domestic Debate Two: Electric Boogaloo. Romney’s plan doesn’t cut the deficit and Obama’s plan will. Obama slams GWB and Cheney as Romney’s buddies. Lines are not wild about this.

9:33: Romney goes back to his Five Fingers Of Doom and cackles over opportunities in Latin America like a banana magnate. Attacks teacher’s unions for some reason. Then drops the Greece hammer, because at least I guess that’s technically foreign-ish. Obama points out that when Romney was governor of Massachusetts, small businesses were bad off because his policies were bad. Then he jumps to education policy and talks about his policies, which have created progress on scores, and he wants to hire lots of math and science teachers, then points out that Romney doesn’t think class sizes make a difference and teachers don’t help the economy. Romney demands a response on education and talks about how well students did during his tenure as Governor, because of bipartisanship and stuff. Obama points out, quite rightly, that Romney had nothing to do with this and in fact cut education spending. Romney just keeps bullshitting and gives his I’m Full Of Shit grin.

9:38: Bob wants to know where Romney will get the money for his increased military spending. Romney lies straight-up and says he’s explained how this is possible, and basically admits he’s going to cut Medicaid by turning it into block grants. His lines are awful for all of this. Obama points out that Romney’s math doesn’t work at all, YET AGAIN, because maybe this time it’ll work. Points out that the USA spends more on the military than the next ten countries combined, and he worked with the Joint Chiefs to come up with military budget cuts that would work, and also Romney is full of shit and Romney’s math is impossible. But America needs to think about military strategy, not politics: what the country needs, not just charting it by money spent. Plus, it means we get to cut the deficit.

9:42: Romney brags about how he is a BIDNESSMAN and how he didn’t lose money on the Olympics, and he balanced budgets as Governor, and he wants a big Navy, and he wants a big Air Force, and he wants America to be able to fight two wars at once, and the military budget should not be cut. Obama points out that sequestration was Congress’ idea, not his, and it just maintains the military budget. Obama: “We have less ships than in 1916: well we also have less horses and bayonets. We have these things called “aircraft carriers,” which have lots of planes on them.” Obama is just treating Romney like an idiot right now and Romney is giving him DEATH STARE.

9:45: Bob desperately wants this to be a foreign policy debate again, and asks if either candidate would say an attack on Israel is an attack on the USA. Obama says, straight-up, he will stand with Israel if they are attacked (Bob asks him again and he says it again). On Iran: as long as Obama is President, Iran will not get nukes. The sanctions are crippling their economy, their currency has plunged, their oil production is in the toilet. We will not have a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and Iran will not get the chance to give terrorists nukes. Obama points out that Romney wants “premature” military action, and sending in troops is the last resort. Romney: I’ll stand with Israel too! And Iran can’t get nukes, I say that too! I called for sanctions before it was cool and Obama took too long! I would make the sanctions even tighter! I’d get Ahmadinejad tried as a war criminal! And I would not invite Iranian diplomats over for tea!

9:50: What about these rumoured talks with Iran? Obama: that’s just a newspaper story and isn’t true. But if we did have talks, we would accept them ending their nuclear program. Points out that Romney just wants to do everything they did, but louder. Points out that sanctions wouldn’t have worked without Russia and China on board, which is why it took so long to get them in place. And Iran can’t keep offering talks and then walking away. Obama is doing Tough Talk here and very credibly: one of his strengths of the professorial style is that he sounds totally badass about this.

9:53: Romney claims that Obama went on an apology tour, and Obama has a tight-lipped Oh I Am Going To Cut You Bitch smile. The lines are not great here. Romney keeps bullshitting and says that Obama is basically wimpy and Iran feels like it can do whatever it likes, and Presidents have to be STRONG LIKE BOOL. Iran needs to be pressured. Obama: “Nothing Governor Romney just said is true.” He directly calls out Romney for lying about the apology tour. Points out again that Romney was invested in a Chinese oil company, then points out that he supported the Green Revolution as much as possible by getting the world together to slap Iran around with sanctions. Romney says “we’re four years closer to a nuclear Iran,” which I suppose is technically true because at some point in the future Iran may have a nuke, but they’re not OPERATIONALLY closer. Then Romney explains his “apology tour” by getting VERY BITCHY, and Obama responds by pointing out that he went to Israel as a candidate and didn’t have a fundraiser there (OH SNAP) but instead went to the Holocaust museum and the border towns getting missiled by Hamas. Obama says that he is credible and Romney, basically, is a putz.

9:59: Bob: What if Israel calls and says “hey, we’re bombing Iran”? Romney: I don’t wanna talk about hypotheticals, because it wouldn’t happen under my watch. But four years later and Syria is a mess and we have a trade deficit with China and North Korea still exports nuke technology, and our influence is receding because the economy is bad and we’re going to cut military spending and Israel’s relationship with us is problematic. Obama: the problem is that Romney has been all over the map, and I’m glad Romney suddenly likes all of our foreign policies because you used to be opposed to them, because you’re a two-faced sneak. Well, not that last bit, but he was thinking it. Also, Romney didn’t care about killing Bin Laden and wanted to ask Pakistan for permission to kill Bin Laden, and killing Bin Laden at least gave America closure, and also tells the world that we are serious, and we can’t test decisions for polls, but I’ll do what needs to be done.

10:03: Bob wants to talk about Afghanistan. Romney complains about the debate rules again, but no dice. What if the deadline arrives and the Afghans aren’t ready? Romney: we’ll be done by 2014, I’m sure of it. Afghanistan is going smoothly and our troops can come home. Pakistan is important, and some people feel we need to walk away from Pakistan – not you, Obama! – but some people. (Wait, what?) Pakistan has nukes and the Taliban and if it falls apart, that is bad. Obama: we are in a position to leave Afghanistan, because we remembered why we were there in the first place, so we decimate Al-Qaeda’s core leadership, and now Afghans can defend their own country. We’ll pull out responsibly and it’s time to do nation-building here at home rather than spending that money on foreign countries and wars and the like. And I want to make sure veterans get the benefits they deserve and get more certifications so they can work in civilian life, and veteran unemployment is now lower than the general population whereas it used to be higher.

10:09: Bob: America gives Pakistan $100 billion every year but they are full of bad people. Should we keep giving them moneys? Romney says yes, we need to keep giving them moneys, because if Pakistan falls apart then just anybody will get those nukes, and not even the right sort of people, you know what Romney’s talking about. (Okay, not really, but yeah, sorta.) We’ll need to work with Pakistan and help them to have a responsible government, because Pakistan is like America’s dumbass little brother who lives overseas and has a drug problem, and they ain’t heavy, they’re our metaphorical brother. Then Bob asks Romney about drones, and Romney totally supports drone strikes. Lines, sadly, are quite high for drone strikes, because people are selfish. Then Romney complains that it has been four whole years and fundamentalist Islam is not gone yet.

10:12: Obama thinks it’s important to help conservative Islamic governments liberalize and develop economically. Then points out under his watch that the USA jumped to stand for democracy in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya, and nobody has any doubts about America loving democracy and freedom, no sir. Al-Qaeda is weaker than it was, despite Romney pretending otherwise.

10:14: Bob: What is the greatest future threat to America? Obama: Terrorist networks. China is a potential threat, but it’s also a potential partner, and we’ve told China to play by the same rules as the rest of us. We went after international trade “cheaters” and we’ve won just about every WTO case we’ve filed. We stopped China from flooding the USA with cheap tires and now we can sell steel to China, and Romney criticized me for being too tough and protectionist. Also we need to spend money on education and R&D and infrastructure, and Romney wants to cut spending on all of that. Romney gets real offended and says that government doesn’t invest in things (what?) and that Nuclear Iran is the worst thing ever. Then points out that there are lots of Chinese people who want to be free, and says that America can partner with China, which will be difficult when he wants to call China poopheads on his first day in office as he promised to do in the last debate. Then he goes back to military spending. Then he complains that China is holding down their currency and that has to end, and says AGAIN he will call them poopheads on day one, and boy I’m sure the Chinese will love that.

10:19: Bob points out that calling China poopheads might start a trade war. Romney actually uses hand gestures to suggest that China has more to lose from a trade war than the USA does. China’s IP theft is very bad and Romney will Do Something About That. Obama snidely points out that Romney knows all about outsourcing, and he’s bet on American workers, like when he bet on the auto industry. Goes back to government investment in education and basic research. US exports have doubled since Obama came into office and currencies are better for exports than they have been since 1993. We were able to transition to Asian defence because we pulled out of Iraq and will pull out of Afghanistan. America has trade agreements with other countries to pressure China. Romney whines about the auto industry attack because he loves American cars and he wanted his stupid, stupid plan for a privately managed bankruptcy. Obama butts in to point out Romney is just full of shit and Romney gives him a sneer. Then he attacks government investment in Tesla and Solyndra and says “that’s not research.” Obama is jumping at the bit to respond to Romney.

10:26: Obama: “You were very clear” that Romney was full of crap and wanted private bankruptcies. We can’t cut education and R&D investments. We can’t bring down the deficit with seven trillion bucks of tax cuts and military spending. We’ve started making real progress and the old policies which are Romney’s policies will not work. Good line movement there. Romney goes into his usual schtick about the food stamp numbers and the unemployment numbers, you know the drill by now, but the lines are not nearly so strong as they were. And he loves teachers, but he wants the private sector to grow instead.

10:29: Closing statements! Obama: Well, now you have a choice. Over the last four years we’ve been digging our way out of shitty GOP policies. You know Obama’s spiel by this point, there’s nothing really new here. Romney: [initiate Optimic-Morning-In-America.exe] [initiate Bipartisanship.exe] [initiate I-Am-A-Moderate-No-Really.exe].

10:33: And that is that. Basically a tie here, I think, with a slight lean to Obama because Romney had to agree with his foreign policy so often. Romney didn’t make any huge mistakes and wasn’t a pissy asshole this time around for the most part, but lied out his ass like always. Obama stuck to his ground game and rebutted where he needed to do.