Debbie Nathan

It’s been awhile since I hit the sex-panic button on this blog … been playing hooky from newspapers and the internet cave to hit sidewalks and neighborhoods during September’s Indian summer. As usual, though, much is happening back in Terror & Loathing land — a place densely populated with out-of-control minors, who appear mostly to have come to earth from Mexico or cyberspace…and with adults who think they can save the kids by activating X-ray vision and other phantom powers. Here’s an update:

First off: The Washington Post has debunked federal government “trafficking” hysteria, even as Hollywood (thanks to the New York Times) goes on a roll with it.

Last week the Post ran a long piece strongly suggesting that the government’s seven-year campaign against “slave” trafficking is based on statistical smoke and mirrors coupled with, recently, a public relations agency campaign. And oh yeah — on a creepy, fetishistic fascination with “sex slaves” who don’t exist.

What else is new? I wrote about this two years ago in The Nation.

Which brings us to item two of the Roundup:

This weekend marks the national premiere of Trade, a Hollywood shlockopornorama about “sex trafficking.” It’s based on yellow journalism, published in so-called Grey Lady New York Times, by Nicholas Kristof-wannabe Peter Landesman.

Landesman’s 2004 Times piece, “The Girls Next Door,” found a few teens who’d been forced or tricked into moving from Mexico to the US to do coerced prostitution. That’s a troubling, sad story, of course. But the Times justified Landesman’s mammoth, Sunday Magazine cover piece (complete with teen on bed in “school uniform”) with government statistics purporting to show that hundreds of thousands of foreign girls and women are sex slaves in this country. These are the same sketchy figures that people like Jack Shafer at Slate, Dan Radosh at his own blog (see “Bad Trade,” entry for Sept. 27), and I have been questioning for awhile.

Landesman and I had an exchange about this in The Nation, where I showed that he’d conjured a large passel of imaginary child sex slaves from thin air – and the Times hadn’t bothered to fact check his nonsense.

Landesman’s dozens of sex slaves were said to have been little 12-year-old girls imprisoned in a field in California, cowering in fear, dressed – for the pleasure of pedophile customers – in white communion dresses.

White? Communion dresses? Hello!!?? Where is Jan Harold Brunvand, of The Choking Doberman and other Urban Legends, when we need him most? Of course, as I found out by doing about two hours of phone reporting, there was never any mob of middle-school slaves, no 12 year olds, no communion dresses. But the Times never ran a correction. That’s pernicious since – as the Washington Post notes – the government has estimated the slave population by tallying “victims” reported in … news clippings.

If our foremost paper of record can’t be bothered to supply the truth, you can be sure Hollywood won’t. In fact, they’re delighted to spread the lie. Check out the promo image, above, from Trade. Landesman – what a pornographer. In the Kincaidian sense.

The what sense?? Please, be patient.

Next item: an interview with me published this week by Susie Bright’s Journal, where we bring you up to speed on the latest from those crazy guys of the cultural intergalactic, Kurt Eichenwald and Justin Berry — and why you might care (even if Kurt hasn’t threatened to sue you).

Eichenwald spent a hot July and August, trying mightily to seal documents in a federal criminal court case in Nashville. The judge nixed his efforts, and two weeks ago the papers were unsealed. They showed (see my Counterpunch coverage, here) that while Berry was an adult in the kid-porn biz, Eichenwald paid him hundreds of dollars for pictures, was a member of Berry’s illegal porn site, and even had webmaster sign-on privileges. For more on these revelations (and for what I mean by “Kincaidian” journalists), visit Susie’s Bright’s always enlightening website. Be ready to read many links, including “The Perverse Law of Child Pornography,” a brilliant work by First Amendment legal scholar Amy Adler. People keep asking me if I think Eichenwald “had a prurient interest” in child porn. See my answer here.

While reporting for Counterpunch, I asked the Times over two weeks ago for a reaction to the latest revelations about their former reporter Eichenwald. They said they were still reviewing those Tennessee court documents. No public word since. I wrote to Public Editor Clark Hoyt, telling him to look into this sordid mess and offering to send documents. His answer? Nothing but the boilerplate “we received your letter, thank you” blah blah.

Meanwhile, word on the media street is that New York Magazine will be soon running an in-depth piece on Eichenwald/Berry.

While waiting for that, you can follow the developing story of acclaimed American photographer Nan Goldin, as reported in England’s Telegraph (see an example of Goldin’s oeuvre, left). One work, depicting a girl with legs apart, is owned by Elton John. A gallery in England was preparing an exhibit of Goldin photos including Elton John’s, which he had loaned to the museum. Police showed up and seized the piece, under suspicion that is it child pornography. Investigation continues.

Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch just released a comprehensive report on what’s wrong with US sex offender registration laws (click here).

Finally, word is getting out that the laws and the lists they engender constitute gross violations of American’s rights – not just civil rights, but human ones as well.

The HRW report shows that huge percentages of the 600,000 (!) registered sex offenders in this country are there – for years or life — for relatively trivial crimes, such as urinating in public or “streaking.” It shows that statistically, children run far less risk of being abused by the “stranger-danger” registree down the street than they do by family members and others they already know. Further, most sex offenses are committed by people who have no record of such crimes and are not on sex offender registries. So much for the lists’ prophylactic value.

And the report reveals that a sizable proportion of people prosecuted for having sexual contact with children are, themselves, children.

Yet, in accordance with federal law combined with laws in some states, kids as young as 12 are being put on sex offender registries, complete with their photos. (HRW proposes many sensible reforms to the registry system. One is removing from it anyone who is under 18.)

If reading about US children cast as demons doesn’t makes you queasy enough, go peruse the mug shots of these frightened, humiliated boys and girls on registry websites. Last night I visited the Kansas site. Among the hundreds of names, addresses and photos that popped up were dozens of 15, 14 and 13 year olds. I downloaded some images. I wanted you to look face-on at these children who have been put in the 21st century version of the village stocks. I figured I’d preserve a modicum of anonymity by omitting their names and state. I began uploading them to this post, then started thinking: To republish these photos, even without names and with the best of intentions, is to violate the kids’ privacy and humanity one more time. So I’m not posting. But to see for yourself, spend a few minutes on a registry (here).

According to Human Rights Watch, ours is the only country in the world — save for South Korea — that tortures sex offenders (children and adults) with barbarities such as public registries.

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For the next few weeks I’ll be doing work in outer space (aka southern US border.) No blogging then: Back in late October.

“It was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there… And there wasn’t any kind of craziness at all.”

So said Bill O’Reilly last week of Sylvia’s, a venerable soul-food restaurant in Harlem. He’d eaten there after being invited by Al Sharpton. Later, on his nationally syndicated radio show, he raved about how civilized his dining experience was. This provoked a wave of “duh’s” and disgust over his obvious prior notion that black people don’t know how to behave in eateries. “What was he thinking??” the thinking goes. “Why wouldn’t Sylvia’s be like a restaurant in an all-white suburb, with no kind of craziness at all?”

OMG — I hope not!

Any of you readers been to an Olive Garden in, say, suburban Dallas? It’s not pretty. The servers — invariably oppressed, perfectly coiffed high school seniors — have pasted-on smiles, and they spend excessive time refilling the water glasses, in a shameless, tasteless bid for bigger tips. The menu is nationally standardized in the way BurgerKing’s is, which precludes energetic dinner-table discussion about what to order: decisions are predictable and not worth hashing out.

And naturally since we’re talking suburb, the room is too big. Much larger than in New York restaurants, because all suburban places are hypertrophic. Tables are spread far apart. You can’t listen in on the nutty, intense stranger chat that makes it so fun to dine out in NYC.

Few people are getting drunk, either (suburbs=kids=families=”family style” dining = propriety, ergo Apollonian rather than Dionysian alcohol intake). No tables screeching merrily with the “tequila laugh.”

No haughty waiters with interesting intimations of inner demons.

No dominatrixally competent waitresses.

No feisty negotiations with them over the accuracy of the check.

No swoons over amazingly good food.

No hustle-bustle or buzz. No acoustic drift about politics, the therapist, the next huge deal.

No window view from one’s table onto Seventh Avenue near Sheridan Square, where I once dined on oh-so-civilized Japanese while watching a movie-star-handsome, cheerful schizophrenic remove all his clothes and dance the hula before darting into the crowd to avoid an oncoming cop.

Give me crazy any day with my edamame. And my fried chicken as well.

Thanks for the review, Bill. I think I’ll skip Sylvia’s.

Yom Kippur is past and now we are into the five days’ preparation for Sukkot. It’s a harvest fest that also commemorates the 40 years of wandering post-Exodus, with the Jews living in temporary huts in the Sinai while God waited for everyone to die who’d picked up slave mentalities in Egypt.

Nice story, but only that — a story — according to revisionist archaeologists. Lately they’ve found evidence suggesting the Jews were plotzed in Canaan the whole time the Bible has them enslaved in Egypt, then wandering the Sinai. As reported by writer Daniel Lazare in Harper’s a few years ago, competing desert tribes from the period, including Jews, invented “wandering” and “conquest” myths to lay claim to land they’d never been kicked out of but were simply trying to hold onto, in part by spinning elaborate rationales.

One of the fruits of those rationales, literally, is the etrog, or citron. (Also known as esrog, with an “s,” among Ashkenazim of a certain age, including yours truly). Go to the Williamsburg Bridge this week and see black hats caressing the fruit in one hand and ritually waving long, green fronds (lulav) in the other. Or skip the bridge and check an article in this week’s Forward that outdoes Ben Katchor:

“This is a good year for etrogs,” said Levi Zagelbaum, a wholesaler who is president of the Esrog Headquarters Inc. in New York…“It’s not an easy business … I’m so nervous and tense that I haven’t slept for nights. I can find an etrog that I think is perfect, and someone will send it back to me because he doesn’t think so. And then I might sell it for a lot of money to someone else who thinks it’s beautiful. It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”

… But what determines beauty? Most agree that a beautiful etrog should be shaped like a tower, with a wider bottom and a narrower top. … there is the Chazon Ish (or Lefkowitz), which is shaped like an egg, and the Braverman strain, which has a bumpy exterior. Another type, the Kivilevitz, is a sub-strain of the Braverman. Some like etrogs that are narrow in the center, commonly referred to as “belted” etrogs…Zagelbaum himself prefers an etrog that is straight and bumpy.

Etrogs cost $50 to $100 — apiece. (Do the goyim need to know this? Is it good for the Jews?) Quite the fetish, and the commodity to boot, as evidenced by Mr. Zagelbaum’s brisk business and high anxieties. The Forward recommends a Kosher chocolatier in Park Slope, Brooklyn where one can buy jelly made from etrogs. Presumably it’s to be eaten with pate of hummingbird tongue.

Typically, an etrog is the size of a lemon (for some soft, food-porn etrog footage, click to this Youtube). At least, it was lemon sized in the shtetl. Today, there appears to be something called the Braverman fertilizer, related to the Kivilevitz hydroponic and the silicohen implant. The result: etrogs bigger than XXX-rated breasts (see second Youtube clip).

Speaking of which, look how Chabadniks are sexifying the etrog (final Youtube). Accosting people on the streets to do mitzvahs has taught the Lubavitchers at least one thing: 2 turn people on 2 atavistic religious rituals, u gotta help them shake shake shake. If not their booty, then at least their etrog.

I’ve been busy this week! Sorry for not posting till now.

Story in the NY Times today about yuppie males in the city who want pix taken of themselves proposing marriage to their girlfriends in Soho. They pay $500 for this service — to people like an ex-photojournalist featured in the article. The Times published some product by this apparent casualty of the 21st-century media, which is too busy running pictures of OJ, Dubya, Condi and Paris to commission much of the work that once lent romance and nobility to the term “photojournalist.”

Oh well. Where there’s a void, it’ll always get filled with something, no matter how weird. In Queens, that something is appliance-love paparazzi. Awhile back, I had a piece in the Times City Section about their work, accompanied by photos I ‘d submitted with the query (I’m not a pro photog, as my work posted on this blog clearly attests. I figured the Times would send their own people out, but no). Anyhow, they put some of my pix of pix on their website, but eventually took them down when the article got old. Meanwhile, every time I pass the storefront, there’s a new collection of astounding images showing individuals becoming engaged to their new gadgets. Here are some of the latest, along with my article from two years ago.

TUCKED in the shadow of the No. 7 elevated tracks in Woodside, Queens, the photographs resemble the Depression-era images captured by Walker Evans. The people in these pictures wear humble clothes and stark expressions. They are very poor, but they are not Americans from the 1930’s. They are 21st-century Ecuadoreans, framed by little luxuries sent by their kin from the big city.

One result of the economic crisis that hit Ecuador in the 1990’s was an exodus of immigrants to New York; almost 115,000 Ecuadoreans live in the city, according to the 2000 Census.

Many of the new arrivals, most of whom live in Queens, are young husbands who came to New York without their families. As soon as they get work, typically in construction or restaurants and delis, they send money home. They also send shiny new stoves, refrigerators, televisions, boom boxes and blenders.

A store in Woodside makes the sending easier. Creditos Economicos is a little showroom on Roosevelt Avenue and 67th Street that is crowded with appliances and Ecuadorean salespeople. Customers point to sample products, pay cash and supply addresses back home. A warehouse in Ecuador fills orders and delivers to anywhere in the country, from huts in the Andes to shacks by the Pacific.

To assure New York customers that their purchases have arrived, agents in Ecuador photograph the deliveries and send snapshots back to Queens. Some are taped to the store’s picture windows, concrete evidence of the grinding poverty that many Ecuadoreans in New York have come from, and the loved ones who have been left behind.

See my piece in today’s Counterpunch (click here)

Don’t know who Justin Berry is? (Where’ve you been?) See resources here, especially my piece in Counterpunch from April 2007.