Gypsy Child Snatchers! Don’t Exist

Hysterical and unfounded fears of Gypsies stealing babies spread through Ireland this week, which led to the police taking children away from two separate Roma families. The police turned out to be the only child snatchers in these cases, which were the culmination of years of growing anti-Roma sentiment that at every point politicians—and sometimes the press—have perpetuated rather than prevented.

The Roma community has long been Europe’s whipping boys and girls. They are the last minority group that it is safe for ostensibly respectable politicians to openly attack. Despitethe dark legacy of the Porajmos, the Nazi’s extermination of as many as 1.5 million Romani during World War II, in Europe it has never become taboo to repeat centuries-old slurs about their culture.

This particular round of Gypsy hate started last week in Greece, where a child named Maria with blonde hair and blue eyes was found living with Gypsies who were not her real parents. Immediately, the centuries-old myth of Gypsy kidnappings was reborn. The parents of missing blonde children lined up to say they had found new hope from the case because Gypsies could have taken their child. The idea is as discredited as the blood libel against Jews—that they used Christian children in rituals—but people still like to trot the lie out every so often.

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Why Do People Keep Getting Into Fights at Chuck E Cheese’s? 

Although their slogan is “Where A Kid Can Be A Kid”, Chuck E. Cheese’s prepares kids for some of the greatest truths they’ll run into as adults: the addictive thrill of gambling, the drug rush of salt, sugar, and carbs, the economic shortfalls of a monopoly fixing both the means of production and the mode of distribution, and the crumbling disappointment of seeing grown adults beat each other with their fists at what is, essentially, a playground. 

Just this Monday, Chicago police arrested two 21-year-olds after a fistfight in a Lincoln Park area Chuck E Cheese’s, apparently started while waiting in line for prizes. The argument began over prize tickets, which are literally worth their weight in paper, and ended with three injured and one bleeding. 

This is far from being an isolated incident. 

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My Family Lost Our Health Insurance and Can’t Sign Up for Obamacare 

The Bush years were not kind to my family. Between 2000 and 2011, my parents went from earning high six-figures to roughly $50,000 a year at the Puppy Palace, the pet store my mom owns and my father manages in Hollywood, Florida. During this period, the store’s staff declined from 25 full-time employees to less than ten part-time employees and one full-time employee who received health care through her husband.

This happened as both my parents’ health declined. My mom battled lupus and recurring blood clots thanks to a mutated gene, which I inherited, and my father was diagnosed with pancreatitis in spring 2011, causing him to spend three months in a coma and die four times—he was magically resuscitated and now suffers from diabetes and a poor memory. Although we had insurance that covered my parents and four out of their five children, our medical bills skyrocketed over the past ten years—last month, the pet store paid over $3,000 to Aetna for my family’s insurance alone.

Because of this, my parents celebrated when Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. They thought Obamacare would decrease our medical payments—Obama promised the bill would help small businesses—and my parents grew up in the British Commonwealth, where socialized medicine took care of everyone. My parents’ opinion changed on October 5, however, when the Puppy Palace received a letter from Aetna saying they were canceling the insurance policy we’ve had since January 2001 because of Obamacare.

“The Affordable Care Act is bringing more changes in 2014,” the letter said. “ACA requires us to make significant changes to our health benefits plan designs. We cannot renew your existing plan in 2014. We are replacing our entire small employer portfolio with new health benefit plans that comply with the 2014 ACA requirements. You will have many options available to meet your health benefits needs. Your existing coverage will continue until your policy period ends in 2014. At that time you can purchase any of these new 2014 policies.”

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This guy is losing his virginity in public for art

Don’t Have People in Blackface at Your Birthday Party

Welcome to another edition of This Week in Racism. I’ll be ranking news stories on a scale of 1 to RACIST, with “1” being the least racist and “RACIST” being the most racist.

-An Australian girl currently known only as “Olivia” became internet infamous this week for posting a bunch of photos from her "Africa"-themed 21st birthday party. In Australia, I guess “Africa-themed” parties traditionally include plenty of racist caricatures of black people, dudes in gorilla costumes, and a dude in a KKK outfit. If you haven’t had your eyeballs melted by these pictures yet, please prepare to lose your ability to see the majesty of human existence!

Still trying to figure out what a Klansman is doing at an African-themed birthday party. You can’t tell a black person to “go back to Africa” if they’re already there.

An elephant never forgets… unless we’re talking about remembering to respect ethnic minorities!

Please note the title of the album on Facebook was “This is My Africa.” I’ve never been to Africa, but if it’s as lame as this party looks, then you can have it, baby.

The girl who threw the party issued a statement on her Tumblr, which was subsequently deleted. In the statement, she offered a rebuttal to anyone who dared be offended by her friends’ decision to buy all the grease paint and Darque Tan oil in Australia and apply it to their faces:

"I am 100% sure that parties would be held that would be ‘Australian themed’ or American themed or even countries of the world, and in that instance I don’t believe anyone would be offended. People wear oktoberfest cotumes [sic] to parties and no one cracks it that they are not German?"

I am 100 percent sure that if I had an Australian-themed party, I wouldn’t paint my face white. But that just might be because I hate costume parties. RACIST

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Don’t Escape from Chris Burden and Mike Kelley, by Alien from Spring Breakers

I Am Not from This Planet is a column where we give James Franco’s Florida-bred, gun-toting, big-bootie-loving pal Alien the floor to sound off on whatever he likes. For this edition, Alien breaks us off some knowledge with a review of Escape from Tomorrow and the NYC retrospectives of artists Chris Burden and Mike Kelley.

This Alien, ya’ll. You know how I do. I be out and about in New York, seeing things, doing things, and getting cultural. Know what I’m saying? Them things that interest me is pure art and pure cinema. So I’m gone talk about them things, if that be alright with ya’ll.

First off, let me tell you about Escape from Tomorrow. It is out in theaters and On Demand, but I bought the shit when I was getting my hair braided at the bootysalon on a bootleg DVD along with a pair of mismatched socks, a handful of Raisinets, and two sticks of incense. The movie’s all about Disneyland. It was shot there without the Mouse’s permission. But for some reason, Disney has NOT shut the movie down. It features a mean old daddy who is having one of them “emotional breakdowns.”

I knew the shit was gone be tight when I seen the trailer. It was in black and white and had these crazy effects with fairies, possessed eyeballs, and some dude’s head turning into the Epcot Center golf ball. Then I seen Mickey in the park speaking in that squeaky, spooky voice, all like “People come here because they want to feel safe!” The shit gave me goose bumps. When I first heard about this thing, I guessed that it would be a rough-looking mumblecore film, but that trailer looked arty than a motherfucker. I had nightmares after that trailer. I’m a gangster, y’all, and I was sleeping with the lights on and shit. It got so bad, I was worried that it would ruin Disneyland for me forever, and you know I love me so Minnie Mouse.

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This Guy Is Losing His Virginity in Public for an Art Project

Virginity generally tends to be a big deal for most people. This is presumably because society dictates that, pre-sex, you are a hairless fawn crawling your way through the embarrassing undergrowth of training bras and stealth wanking, and post-sex you’re fully grown with a comprehensive understanding of D’Angelo’s discography and the right to drink triple sec next to swimming pools. But then society is notoriously cruel and probably doesn’t even know what it’s talking about.

In a bid to understand where the obsession with virginity comes from, my friend Clayton Pettet, a student at London’s Central Saint Martins art school, has decided to lose his flower in front of a crowd next year as part of performance piece titled Art School Took My Virginity. He told me that some tabloid journalists had been sniffing around the story, so I thought I’d give him a call before they got their noses in the trough.

VICE: So, I hear you’re being hounded by the press?
Clayton Pettet: Yeah, I just spoke to this journalist and it was so weird—it feels like the national papers that are asking about the project want to get the best angle and rip it apart. It’s crazy. It’s not something I’m used to, watching everything I say with caution.

But you must have expected something like this would happen, right?
I don’t really mind what they say about me, as long as it’s their words. I don’t want them to twist mine. But it brings discussion, and whether it’s making people angry, excited, or confused, it’s bringing forth emotion about art. Which is something we’ve lost.

You think?
People say that everything has been done already, but I don’t think that’s true. If you think hard enough, there’s shit that only you could think of—something so buried inside of you that, if you let yourself, you’d be able to just to throw up onto a canvas and let your mind do the rest.

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Riffing is something like mutual masturbation (coincidentally, saying “riffing is like mutual masturbation” could make a cool riff). It is essentially the small talk of anyone who, at some point in their adolescence, learned how to throw dice about their thing, whatever that may be, music or movies or whatever, instead of having regular conversations. Social, jokey, and jockey, peer-on-peer riffing is the casual and ongoing assertion of opinion, specifically for some specific think-scene, which might be between two people, or a silky thread of smooth talk between a zillion strangers on the internet, endlessly one-upping. Its first and most important requirement is that there only be a finite number of people who are invested in getting it and who can relentlessly evolve a given riff-thing.

—from the latest edition of Kate Carraway’s Li’l Thinks

Diane Meyer

I Started a Punk Zine in Racist Rural South Africa 

Growing up in the shadow of apartheid in rural South Africa was complicated. Even by the time I turned 18, in 2006, an ignorant concept of the “other” was still deeply rooted in the psyches of a lot of people, which made life pretty difficult. As an English speaker in a predominantly Afrikaans agricultural region, I was often made to feel like a foreigner in my hometown, despite being born on the same soil as everybody else.

The African National Congress, the country’s ruling political party, had—and still has—failed to create an equal-opportunity society nearly 20 years after apartheid ended.Corruption plagues the ruling system and poverty is widespread, while crime andunemployment levels are high, and social mobility is near to impossible for most people. As a teenager, I felt that I—a poor, English-speaking white South African—had absolutely no voice in my province, which was paradoxically named the Free State.

While trying to figure out my place in the society I’d been born into, I realized that I lacked a cultural identity and any tangible economic prospects. Which is probably why I soon became fascinated with the British and American punks from a generation before me who were writing and singing about racism, unemployment, poverty, and other social issues.

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