Fun Time With Pay Mon ("Welcome to the Jungle")

Fun Time With Pay Mon ("Welcome to the Jungle")

By Jason Brown

A few weeks back, my partner wrote a wonderful piece in which he referenced, among other, entertaining topics, the highly controversial response to Jason Garshfield’s piece entitled “The Demonization of Greek Life.” Needless to say, he took great issue with the article, and the manner in which it (in no way) refuted and addressed Garshfield’s main argument. I must confess that, upon reception of Austin’s article for editing, I had read neither the original article nor the response, though I was generally aware of their existence. After having read both (extensively), I can assure you that my colleague merely scratched the surface.

One of my favorite websites (that has since—essentially—discontinued), Kissing Suzy Kolbert, did a weekly takedown of Peter King’s Monday Morning QB column. For those of you who don’t know (and you should consider yourselves lucky), Peter King is the head writer over at Sports Illustrated. He is an absolutely despicable human being for reasons that I won’t get into (we’ll never get to the actual article if I do), and, every week, pens a 10,000+ (with a heavy emphasis on the +) word column recapping the prior week’s football events. It sounds innocent and simple enough, but… it just… it isn’t, okay? Please, please trust me on this one. Anyway, each Monday, one of the writers, Christmas Ape, would delve into the depths of King’s self-indulgent gibberish and systematically, humorously obliterate his column, phrase by phrase. This is called a takedown. After taking my first crack at one (Pay Mon’s response piece, which, although horrific, pales in comparison to King’s ramblings), I am firmly of the belief that Christmas Ape is nothing less than an American hero.

This one’s for you, you hunk of man, you.

*The emboldened text represents passages from Pay Mon’s piece, while the normal text is my own*

Any student of color reading that statement must have been upset that, once again, the struggle of non-white students had been thrown under the bus so that white men, who pay thousands of dollars a year in order to live a Greek lifestyle, could claim that they experience institutional oppression.

We’re off to a great start here, as—from the second sentence of her ‘response’—Pay Mon demonstrates a fundamental miscomprehension of Garshfield’s argument. His main point is that the mistreatment of Greek institutions at UCSB is cause for concern of other groups on campus, such as clubs and minorities. The lack of due process evident in these cases is something that should worry all organizations, not just ‘frat boys,’ argues Garshfield. It is perfectly acceptable to disagree with, and argue against, Garshfield’s point; that is part of starting a dialogue. That however, is not what happens throughout the course of Pay Mon’s article, a fact that is established early and often.

It’s no surprise that 48 percent of Presidents, 42 percent of Senators, 30 percent of Congress members and 40 percent of Supreme Court Justices have been a part of Greek life — this is hardly a group of people that faces “institutional persecution and condemnation.”

The fact that a group of people did not, at one point, face oppression is in no way evidence that that group does not currently suffer from it; slavery no longer exists as it did during colonial America, but that certainly does not mean that black people are not oppressed today strictly because of the color of their skin, just as having a black President does not indicate the eradication of racism in America.

For those of you who are wondering, I didn’t leave out a hyperlink in the quoted text; Pay Mon cited no data for statistics. If that is the sort of thing that bothers you beyond reason, I suggest you stop reading here; it will become a theme of this piece.

If Greek life has any negative stigma attached to it, it is because of the very real occurrence of rape that happens at fraternities; this is an issue that our campus has been painfully slow in dealing with. When a woman was attacked by a group of Asian men on the street in 2013, we spent weeks posting flyers and borderline racist police caricatures in an attempt to identify the perpetrators.

The Asian men referenced herein were in no way affiliated with Greek life. Rape on college campuses, and in our country as a whole, is a massive problem, and one that desperately needs to be addressed in an effective, productive manner, but this case had nothing to do with Greek life. There certainly have been cases of rape in fraternities (although, upon closer examination of that list, it becomes clear that many of the rapes happen either outside the involved organizations, or are caused by unaffiliated persons), but that in no way means that it is permissible to attribute all cases of rape in the surrounding area to fraternities; that’s not how it works.

However, we know that rape happens on a weekly basis in the fraternities of Isla Vista

“We” do? According to what data, exactly?

yet rarely are the perpetrators’ faces plastered around the school

This may have something to do with the fact that rapes don’t occur in UCSB fraternities on a weekly basis (we didn’t even make Gawker’s list for 2014; in fact, rape was not the reason that houses such as Beta Theta Pi were thrown off campus—two members drank too much and were brought to the hospital by their fraternity brothers—but that’s a story for another time).

This dynamic is apparent culturally — think of the popular catcalling video made by a white woman last year that became viral. The men featured in that video were overwhelmingly men of color,

Okay.

despite the fact that all men are responsible for patriarchal violence against women.

But not catcalling, apparently.

This dynamic again is reproduced on our campus, where white men (and now up to five percent non-white men #liberalprogress) who can afford membership in fraternities are promised the experience of “fraternity life,” which includes fraternity parties and sexual exploits at those parties.

I don’t think Pay Mon knows what Greek life entails…

Also, the article was noticeably rife (even for a Daily Nexus piece) with errors such as the ones in this paragraph.

These cases are also kept under wraps by the social pressure exerted on victims by the Greek system to keep quiet or risk becoming a social pariah who caused the closure of a fraternity.

Nowhere in the article does Pay “Digi” Mon offer a source for this claim, or others like it. Also, there is plenty of hatred towards Greek life at UCSB; people aren’t exactly losing sleep over the fact that four houses were discontinued this past year. The idea that one would become a “social pariah” is not only an unfounded one, but one that is easily disproven by talking to members of the community (or just glancing at the school’s Yik Yak Feed during any finals’ week: #AlphaCheat #neverforget).

I’m not saying that all members of fraternities are rapists, and frankly, if that’s what you drew from my previous paragraph, you’re missing the point.

Kind of like you completely missed the point of Jason Garshfield’s article?

I’m saying that the issue of institutionally protected rape at fraternities is a very serious and heavily racialized issue.

But… You just claimed that non-white males are involved in these sexual crimes as well. Isn’t that something you should address by more than simply tossing out “#liberalprogress”? Are Greek institutions brainwashing minorities on top of their weekly rapes? That’s an awfully busy schedule. These guys do need to find time for beer die, you know.

Look, race and racism is obviously a very real problem in America—and in certain iterations of Greek life—and there are a myriad of ways to breach discussion of that issue in a productive manner; this is not one of them. The author has made no real effort here to effect any sort of dialogue, instead electing to lazily toss in race in a way that contradicts herself, and accomplishes nothing.

Just this year, Andy Sanchez, a student at UCSB, bled to death because of the inaction of Santa Barbara sheriff and fire officials who refused to treat him in a timely manner because of his race. This led to Sanchez’s death, once again highlighting the terror inflicted by police on students of color.

This is the toughest part of the article, and it was at this point that I had to stop reading and compose myself. As awful as the rest of the article is, it’s relatively harmless until Pay Mon brings in the death of another student to support her argument. Andy Sanchez’s death was a tragedy, and my heart goes out to his family and all those affected in any way. However, Pay Mon has wildly misrepresented the circumstances of Sanchez’s death for her own personal agenda, and contextualizing this event in order to bring to light Pay Mon’s actions was and is a painful process. It brings me no pleasure to do this, and it infuriates me that the author brought this event into her article.

Here goes nothing.

Aside from not citing anything (which, to be fair, I should be used to at this point in the article), Pay Mon conveniently leaves out pertinent details of the case (like, for instance, how Sanchez was injured).

I cannot stress enough how much this upsets me.

Andy Sanchez, under the influence of ketamine, 25I-NBOMe, and weed, ran to his apartment at 4:40 in the morning and punched a glass window, shattering it. For anyone who doesn’t know (I certainly didn’t), 25I-NBOMe is a hallucinogen not unlike LSD, but deadly if taken in similar dosage; it caused the death of an Australian man in a fashion similar to Sanchez. After a friend came out in an attempt to help Sanchez, he tried to rape her. Police arrived on scene, followed later by paramedics, and Sanchez died in the hospital a few hours later.

An article popped up in (surprise) The Daily Nexus following the event claiming that Sanchez’s death was the result of negligence by the present officers and paramedics, and that their lack of urgency was due entirely to Sanchez’s race. Though the author of the Nexus article offered no proof of his wild accusations, the story quickly caught fire. Witnesses from that night came forward to testify to the AS Senate, claiming that the responders were moving too slowly, and that the only person to whom officers spoke was white. Officers responded thoroughly (and rather convincingly) to each claim made by the witnesses, but that is not always the most reliable source of information.

Paramedics are not supposed to rush around during a call; adrenaline can cause mistakes to be made, mistakes that can cost people their lives, and running in a stressful situation can trigger such reactions. They are not unlike surgeons in this respect; it behooves a surgeon to be calm, quiet, collected, and polite during emergency procedures, as having a member of one’s team crack due to a stressful combination of pressure and a surgeon’s harsh tone is incredibly counterproductive. So, what appear to be lackadaisical movements to a stressed onlooker is actually a conscious effort on the part of paramedics to give the victim the best chance to live. As for the officer’s purported racial exclusivity, the person to whom they spoke was Sanchez’s roommate, and, as such, they assumed—perhaps incorrectly—that he would be able to divulge the most relevant information.

Essentially, a student was on several controlled substances at once, sustained an injury that was self-inflicted, and tried to rape his friend. After adhering to protocol, responding officers and paramedics were blamed for his death due to claims of racism.

This research took me over two hours to conduct. I was as thorough and unbiased as I could possibly be, in an effort to determine the real story. It was difficult, time-consuming, and taxing… and it should have never had to happen. The burden of responsibility lies solely with Pay Mon in citing such a complicated, tragic story in an effort to prove her point. As authors, it is our job to objectively contextualize when using a tragedy such as Andy Sanchez’s in a heavily-opinionated article, not pervert a story for our own ends. Journalism requires much more integrity than exhibited by Pay Mon, and there are not adequate words to express my disgust with her actions.

Unfortunately, the article continues (yes, on top of everything else, Pay Mon’s reference to Sanchez’s death was a throwaway one).

Going to any party in Isla Vista guarantees the sight of many white people shouting the N-word and referring to each other with the N-word while side-eying any black people who enter the party.

There is no evidence to support this anecdotal claim.

No person aware of the brutal history and current reality of racial violence in America would dare use that sort of language unless they fundamentally did not see the humanity of black people.

Except for, you know, every modern rapper in existence, the vast majority of whom are black.

And then there’s this.

Isla Vista has no shortage of offensive costumes displaying racial stereotypes. White men dressed as “Arab Sheikhs,” completely ignoring the fact that the United States military has murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent Arabs through its indiscriminate bombing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and has continued to use drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan and other regions in the Middle East.

The first part of this is actually true: cultural appropriation is a genuine issue, especially around Halloween (though this is an issue that is hardly restricted to UCSB). The rest of the passage, however, is an incredibly basic oversimplification of an intensely complex issue; it is the job of the author to dive into this issue, providing sources and analysis to back up her point, but Pay Mon instead tosses out a statement to be presented as fact, and I sound like a broken record at this point.

White women dressed in sombreros and ponchos, completely glossing over the continued exploitation of migrant workers in the United States, demonization of and violence towards Mexican immigrants and large-scale economic exploitation of Mexico through the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, which has led to a massive influx of immigrants.

This isn’t actually a sentence.

This purported “response” to Garshfield’s article has barely addressed the original piece in any constructive way to this point, and has instead turned into a rant about how awful white people are. This is neither productive nor relevant to Garshfield’s article.

I used Yik Yak for several weeks, posting under the username “KarlMarx420” to call out these instances of racism, and I witnessed the sheer magnitude of reactionary hatred present in white students using Yik Yak.

This is just a blatant lie. One does not have a username on Yik Yak; it is completely anonymous. The only way to refer to or identify another user is by an assortment of randomly-assigned colored icons that change from thread to thread. It is not overly difficult to point to racism on Yik Yak; there is no need to invent stories to prove that point.

At no point have I ever seen white students apply social pressure to other white students to . . . stop any of the other horrible things white people do on a regular basis.

Pay Mon finally says what she has been dancing around her entire article: she is literally saying white people are horrible human beings that consistently do awful things.

She goes on to discuss UCSB’s science program’s direct involvement with weapons manufacturing, a subject about which I am in no way qualified to talk (and neither is she, for that matter); she again fails to cite a single thing.

Without even touching on our campus’s continued support of Israel, a white supremacist colonialist settler state predicated on the death and destruction of indigenous Palestinians

*sigh*

The creation of Israel was handled extremely poorly, but this is an incredibly complicated, multi-faceted issue that is debated by historians to this day. This is another wild oversimplification without (and I swear I’m beginning to see a pattern here) sources. I’m starting to think Pay Mon enjoys opening up huge cans of worms just for fun.

The ignorance of the white student body has only fed this unsafe atmosphere, and the column posted by the Daily Nexus last week is indicative of this attitude. White people will go so far to ignore the real oppression faced by people of color that they will claim that members of a white privileged drinking club face institutional oppression before they admit that racism exists on campus.

This is the closest Pay Mon comes to addressing the article to which she is purportedly responding, and she again fails to grasp the central argument: that the treatment of Greek life on campus should be cause for concern for minorities, as they could end up being treated in an uncomfortably similar fashion.

That about covers it. If you want to subject yourself to the original article (and I highly recommend that you do not), it is linked in the opening paragraphs. I have no good way to close this post, and I really don’t think there is one. Feel free to reach out to me with any thoughts or concerns.

© Jason Brown 2016  

("War") On the Nature of Coffee, Christmas, and Collective Consumerism

Do You Feel Like Busting Up A Starbucks?

By Jason Brown

Alright.

Starbucks is purportedly waging a war on Christmas.

Their weapon of choice?

Red and green cups.

Alright.

*Cracks knuckles*

For those (lucky few) of you who aren’t already (painfully) aware, the internet is aflame with nonsensical white noise after the ironically-named Joshua Feuerstein did an internet thing that has the nauseating cinematography of a poorly-edited, six-second Vine and the bitchy subject matter of a rambling, 34-minute vlog. The fact that his post went viral almost immediately is depressing and a testament to society’s tendency to gravitate towards polarizing figures simply for the sake of their outlandishness, but that is not necessarily the topic of today’s piece/rant/column.

*Before we dive in, keep in mind that this is the same person that demonstrated a fundamental inability to both grasp the basic definition of a scientific theory, and distinguish it from its colloquial counterpart. You need only watch the first 40 seconds. Please do not feel the need to subject yourself to any more than absolutely necessary. The fact that I suffered through the entire thing (twice) does not mean you should repeat my mistakes.*

The basis for Feuerstein’s rage is twofold: first, the fact that Starbucks took “Christ and Christmas off of [sic] their brand new cups.” The problem with this claim is that no Starbucks holiday cup has ever said “Merry Christmas,” nor have any of them referenced Jesus. The second part of his vexation, and the “trick” for which he is so proud of himself, stems from the censorship by Starbucks of its employees, specifically in regards to the phrase “Merry Christmas.”

In a refreshing turn of events transpiring on social media, baristas across the nation have come out of the woodworks on Facebook, Reddit, and countless comment sections of articles debunking this ridiculous claim. Many baristas claim their limited usage of the phrase originates not from a company-wide directive, but from a basic comprehension of the way the world works; they realize that not everyone celebrates Christmas.

Such a revelation must not have occurred to Feuerstein.

The most ironic part of the video, however, lies in Feuerstein’s attire; his hat (in both the aforementioned videos) is the same color as the new Starbucks cups, though there is no “I <3 Jesus” in sight, nor any indication that such a phrase might be present on the concealed side.

The video is laughable at best, but, unfortunately, social media does not have a habit of bringing out the best in society. Yes, Feuerstein is likely just an attention seeker looking for views, subscriptions, and his 15 minutes via social media, but much more serious than the video itself are the all-too-familiar implications accompanying the reactions. Social media’s Obnoxiously Deranged Overreaction fueled by Misinformation and Yelling—SODOMY for short (or SMODOFMY if you’re a smartass that refuses to let that kind of thing slide)—is something that can be observed time and time again. Cracked.com has a running segment strictly dedicated to false news stories and pictures over which the internet collectively lost its shit. These sensational stories or photographs, like the video dissected above, take approximately a minute of Googling to debunk, and yet, with alarming consistency, people continue to fall for them. In the Age of Information, with access to all but unlimited knowledge unlocked by a few keystrokes, our society is insistent on finding the most outlandish-sounding, mind-blowing stories, latching onto them and letting go only in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary:

-NFL executives sat in a room with Bill Belichick and destroyed evidence, but, hey, the Patriots are undefeated this season, so fuck it, #FreeBrady.

-A Republican candidate has been recorded degrading women on multiple occasions, and has made incredibly racist claims about Mexicans on national television, but you gotta love that he speaks his mind!

-A white Christian slaughters nine in a black church, another white kid massacres his English class, asking people’s religions before extinguishing their lives forever, and police are caught on camera abusing their power in a racially-charged manner, yet the word “terrorist” is reserved for Muslims.

Buying into these sensationalist claims or movements is what prevents intelligent, educated discussion from enacting any sort of change, and our society’s blatant disregard for facts just compounds the problem. Our society can’t even agree on the color of a god damn dress, and last week we were more concerned with the design of a fucking cup than a bombing in Beirut, because religion, I guess.

At the heart of the indignation with Starbucks lies the simple fact that being religious, in the most benevolent sense of the word, is simply difficult, and, as a result, we expect others to do it for us.

“If Starbucks doesn’t go overboard with Christmas, how can I feel good about buying a double-venti soy farm-to-table macchiato?”

The visceral reaction to religious institutions is essentially one of self-interest. Every year, it seems, Christmas is less about the birth of a religious figure and more about consumerism. If the biggest companies fail to satisfactorily endorse Christmas for consumers, the burden of religious observation shifts ever so slightly to their shoulders. Most Christians cannot practice their faith every day, or dedicate their lives to the study of the Bible, so they place their faith in priests and officials of the Church. When these same “model characters” rape children and embezzle money, it forces the average Christian to prove their character on their own terms, as their beloved institution has failed to deliver.

Indignation is the easiest way to concomitantly distance yourself from such atrocities with which you were just aligned and show yourself to be a quality individual. It is far easier to be outraged over indecency in others than to be decent yourself. The danger of relying on others to make yourself look good by association dates back to Martin Luther, who desperately wanted people to practice and experience religion for themselves, not depend on officials of a then-corrupt institution.

This mentality is not limited to religion, however. Clicktivism is a word that gets thrown around social media, its appeal lying in the effortlessness that it offers. A sense of accomplishment from sharing a video or signing a pledge that, in reality, accomplishes nothing discourages any real effort put towards change--Kony 2012 is the shining example. Its meteoric rise to relevance had little to do with the cause behind the campaign—though making it about kids certainly helped—and everything to do with the premise: watch and share a captivating (bullshit) 30-minute video, and gather on one night (that never actually happened). It was a chance for easy change, with minimal effort yielding a maximum feeling of reward. Social media went nuts over this sensational (there’s that word again) campaign, until the man behind the video appeared to lose his shit in a recorded public breakdown, and we learned that the infamous Kony had been irrelevant for years.

None of this is to disregard the effect social media can have on real change; the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge raised a record-shattering amount of money for a terrible disease, and while it was certainly easy, it caused genuine good. The Ice Bucket Challenge is the paradigm of benevolent viral marketing, utilizing peer pressure to promote donations and participation in what instantly became a phenomenon. The issue with this kind of marketing is that it is relatively easily imitated, not always with such good intentions in mind, and the Ice Bucket Challenge has set up the world of social media to jump on anything offering a similar structure: minimal effort, maximum feeling of reward.

There are more issues with the outrage over Starbucks’ cups, one of them being the existence of other issues, ones where minimal effort accomplishes nothing. The “there are other, more important things about which one should worry” argument offers a slippery slope, but when people are making swastikas in college bathrooms out of human shit (Lloyd!!!), maybe it’s time to curb our displaced enthusiasm. The fact that there are problems in the world does not mean that everyone is not struggling with something, nor does it invalidate said struggle; however, there are certain events that legitimately deserve our attention as members of the human race:

The alleged War on Christmas is not one of them.

The outrage isn’t warranted even granting the offended an actual event of significance (say that Starbucks displayed “Merry Christmas” in the past, but not in 2015), as other religions have been putting up with this shit for years. Judaism is by no means perfect, but you don’t see Jews posting rants and brandishing weapons because Hanukkah doesn’t get enough exposure (and it most certainly does not). Objectively, the holiday of Christmas is not even that pertinent to the values of Christian faith. Historians aren’t certain of Jesus’s exact birthday, but most say that it probably happened in the spring. Even still, the United States of America are a huge part of my life and identity, but I can’t tell you the birthdays of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, or Benjamin Franklin, nor do we even celebrate such events in the age of holidays.

Jesus’s exploits were significantly more important than his birth, and yet Christmas is one of the two days of the year nearly all Christians attend mass. Hanukkah, on the other hand, is a story of an oppressed, outnumbered people standing up to the Romans (Christians aren’t too fond of them, if I remember correctly), and Christmas receives far more hype. Kwanzaa is a holiday borne out of a people seeking an identity, but nobody is upset with Starbucks over their lack of black cups. Christians playing the victim card when their holidays receive far more nationwide attention than those of any other religion is insane, especially considering that nothing is actually happening with Starbucks.

For those of you who are genuinely upset with Starbucks’ lack of holiday spirit (before we’ve even basted a fucking turkey or watched the Cowboys blow another Thanksgiving game, but I won’t even go there), take comfort in the fact that this past week’s Thursday Night Football matchup featured bright Christmas colors that more than make up for any imagined slights from Starbucks. Well, except for all those people who couldn’t tell the difference between the jerseys.

For any of you who (blatantly ignored my repeated, desperate pleas and) watched the entire Evolution video, uncurl yourself from the fetal position long enough to watch this. You will feel much better. I promise.

© Jason Brown 2016