The Vessel, New York

Source: Bigstock

The Week’s Most Mithraic, Archaic, and Pharisaic Headlines

STONE, COLD KILLER
There’s no house party like a Como house party. Como is a historically black neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas. The word “como” in Spanish means “what?” And the neighborhood got its name when the first black settlers tried to communicate with the local Mexicans.

“Yo, nigga, what dis place called?”

“Como?”

“Como it is!”

In recent years, reflecting changes occurring all across the Southwest, Mexicans have been “reclaiming” Como from blacks. And last week a bunch of Como’s Hispanic enrichers were holding a house party, blasting mariachi music (which tragically has the same effect on black people that Slim Whitman’s voice had on the aliens in Mars Attacks!) and beating piñatas filled with smuggled fentanyl.

It may have been someone’s quinceañera, because Mexican families are so large that it’s an inevitability that on any given day there’ll be someone who’s turning 15.

As the party raged on and drunken men began doing their Cantinflas impressions while El Santo movies played on the big screen (“Momias aztecas? ¡Corre por tu vida!”), two guests got into a heated dispute over whether William Buckley was correct to fire Joe Sobran from National Review (Hispanics are natural Republicans; what else would they be arguing over?).

“Paleoconservateeesm is theee way, ése!”

“Shut your mouth, vato. Sobran was fixated on theee Zioneeests, chavo.”

“Do you even read Gottfried, pinche? Revisions and Dissents is da bomb, pachuco!”

Soon fists began flying, and one of the brawlers fled the party…only to return moments later with a gun. He began firing indiscriminately (yet another example of senseless natural-Republican-on-natural-Republican violence). Being drunk, he missed, like, everyone (he did hit the piñata), so the partygoers began chasing the offending hombre down the street. The poor sap-atista shot blindly behind him as he ran, fatally felling a gentleman named Joel Pocosangre Garay. “Pocosangre” in Spanish means “a little bit of blood,” and as Joel bled out on the street, his aorta having been ruptured, his final thoughts were “My name is a blatant case of false advertising.”

Incensed at the death of Muchosangre, the crowd finally caught up to the shooter and proceeded to…stone him to death. Yes, they picked up rocks, boulders, and landscaping stones and turned the bastard’s head into guacamole.

And no one had to blow a whistle or say “Jehovah.”

The pureed gunman was 42-year-old tattoo artist Miguel Chavez. His obituary claims that he was “always smiling and never let anything steal his smile away.”

Except for the boulder that shattered his teeth.

Forth Worth legal experts say that the stoners are unlikely to face prosecution, because “we’re Mexico now, right?”

In a humorous postscript, Como black activists held a press conference during which black resident Estrus Tucker told assembled reporters that “new Como residents don’t take the same pride in or show the same concern about the neighborhood as the longtimers seem to do,” adding that they’ve “got to do a much better job of managing anger, of learning to settle a dispute.”

He then spent the next ten minutes furiously asking why all the reporters were doubled over with laughter.

FARGO: THE BLACK REBOOT
In the Coen brothers’ iconic film Fargo, a man pays two inept lowlifes to kidnap his own wife, as part of a scheme to extort a million bucks in ransom money from her wealthy father. Fargo famously begins with the title card:

The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

That was, of course, a lie, and one told on purpose. As the Coens explained in their book about the film, the point of Fargo was to tell a bubbe-meise (“grandmother’s story”). A bubbe-meise is a tall tale your grandma tells, usually about something that happened in her youth. And even though she swears that every word of it is true, the more you listen, the more skeptical you become.

As the Coens stated in their book, the essential element of a bubbe-meise is the pledge of factuality. The listener is supposed to be skeptical. So all the people who griped about the film, including heroic frontal lobotomy survivor John Kasich, were providing exactly the response the Coens hoped for.

But what if there were a real-life Fargo? And what if the events were so unbelievable that the incident seemed more like a satirist’s joke than an actual occurrence?

Lawrence Michael Handley, a 53-year-old blond white guy in Louisiana, sold vitamins and ran a network of rehab centers. But unbeknownst to those around him, he was a meth-head and cocaine freak who was deeply in debt.

Okay—Fargo box No. 1 checked: blond white guy in serious financial trouble, keeping secrets from his family.

He hatched a plan to have his own wife kidnapped, and although the motivation is still not 100% clear (he either wanted to kill her for the insurance money, or rekindle their dying love by “rescuing” her from the kidnappers he hired), that checks Fargo box No. 2.

The two kidnappers broke into the wife’s home, put a sack over her head, and shoved her into the back of their vehicle.

Fargo box No. 3 fulfilled.

On the road to their safe house, the kidnappers attracted the attention of a cop, who decided to pull them over (Fargo box No. 4. In the movie, the cop pulled the kidnappers over for not having tags. In real life, the cop tried to pull them over for riding the shoulder of a highway to avoid traffic).

But here’s where the resemblance to the film ends, and the bubbe-meise skepticism begins. See, unlike in Fargo, the conniving husband didn’t hire two white guys, but two soul brothers—Sylvester Bracey and Arsenio Haynes. And as soon as the cop lit ’em up, they ditched their van (the wife, still alive, left inside) and took off running into a wooded area.

They had a good head-start.

They might’ve made it.

All they had to do was swim a small canal; once on the other bank, they’d be home free.

So they both jumped into the canal.

And sank like stones straight to the bottom.

Neither man could swim.

That concludes today’s bubbe-meise. And like all bubbe-meises, it seems too perfect, too on-the-nose, to be true.

But this time, it is. The two black guys couldn’t swim.

The end.

TOURIST SPLAT-TRACTION
New York City is known for its flat terrain, its miles of wide-open plains, and buildings that never rise above two stories.

Wait, scratch that. Turns out NYC is known for its many tall buildings, bridges, and monuments.

In short, if one is of the mind to take a nosedive from a high place, New York City is the right place.

Apparently, this never occurred to New Yorkers before the construction of something called the Vessel, a sixteen-story, 150-foot-tall tourist attraction located in a newly redeveloped section of Manhattan. There’s not much to do at the Vessel; it’s a whole bunch of stairs to climb, and at the top one is treated to a spectacular multi-borough view of black men assaulting Asians and Jews (“Oh look, honey, that guy just clobbered a Hasidic and a Chinaman. I’m so glad I brought the camcorder!”).

The opening of the Vessel caused a light bulb to go on over the heads of New Yorkers: You can commit suicide by jumping from a tall structure. That this was a revelation isn’t surprising considering that these are the same geniuses who gave the nation bubonic plague rats, sewage rivers, and Bill de Blasio. So when the Vessel debuted in 2019, all it took was one guy to climb to the top and say, “Hey, lookit dis, I could totally jump to my death. Get a loada me; I’m sucha characta!”

So one guy jumped. And then another. And then another. And then another.

The Vessel closed in January because nobody could figure out how to keep the Bowery Boys from offing themselves. The brilliant minds behind the structure, including British architect Thomas Heatherwick (who designed Boris Johnson’s ill-fated Garden Bridge and the even more ill-fated Benny Hill Monument to Running in Fast Motion to “Yakety Sax”), gathered to figure out how to stop the denizens of the city that never sleeps from using the structure as a path to eternal sleep. And they came up with two crackerjack ideas: charge a fee to enter the Vessel (because no suicidal person will waste $10), and mandate that no one can enter the structure alone.

And voilà! After the Vessel reopened in May, the next suicide was a 14-year-old kid who took the dive in front of his family, as he’d been unable to enter by himself. Thanks to the Vessel brainiacs and their New York smarts, that family not only lost a son, they gained a memory that will last a lifetime.

And now the Vessel has closed again, and word is it might be demolished.

Amazingly, this is not NYC’s first brush with “If you build it they will succumb.” After NYU opened its spankin’-new twelve-story library atrium, the school couldn’t stop its Barbarinos and Horshacks from taking a dive off the top floor (“Hey, lookit us! We’re such charactas!”). Administrators were forced to encase the entire atrium with an aluminum screen, turning a magnificent structure into an ode to hernia mesh.

Maybe New Yorkers are trying to tell us something…like “Gimme a quick way out, and I’ll friggin’ take it.”

THE DIVERSITY LOOP
Diversity! We must have diversity in our colleges and universities! Why? Well, that should be obvious, you racist. That black kid sitting on a stoop in Detroit might one day cure cancer or send a man to Mars. He just needs a chance!

So, we initiate diversity programs that send those stoop-dwelling kids to college. And when they get there, their professors tell them that they’re oppressed and isolated and surrounded by white racists (and worse, Asian studiers), so therefore before they can start curing cancer or prepping that Mars mission, they must join the school’s diversity department to ensure that more stoop-dwellers are brought into the school. And then those stoop-dwellers arrive and are told by the previous stoop-dwellers that they’re oppressed and isolated and surrounded by racists, so therefore before they can start curing cancer or prepping that Mars mission, they must join the school’s diversity department to ensure that more stoop-dwellers are brought in.

Black kids affirmative-actioned into a school, only to become part of the machinery that affirmative-actions other black kids into the school, who become part of the machinery that affirmative-actions other black kids into the school, and now you have a loop in which kids of color arrive at college and devote themselves to bringing in more kids of color and in all the hubbub no one ever actually gets around to curing cancer or planning a Mars mission.

At some point, there’s the temptation to ask, “Okay, when do we see the wondrous fruits of the diversity beyond just enrollment numbers? When do we get that cancer cure?”

Last week the Heritage Foundation published a study of diversity departments at major U.S. colleges and universities. And wouldn’t you know it? Many of the nation’s top schools now have more “diversity, equity, and inclusion” staffers than professors in certain academic departments (like history).

Because it’s no longer about academics, but the “diversity loop.”

Missing is the goalpost: At what exact percentage of blacks on campus will these kids finally say, “Okay, there are enough blacks here; time to go cure us some cancer!”

Of course the answer is never, because “diversity” ideology dictates that a college simply benefits from blacks being present. They don’t need to actually do anything. Black students are our educational system’s air fresheners. Just put ’em in a room and enjoy how their existence makes everything better. They don’t have to move or walk or think; they just need to radiate!

Who needs cures and space missions? Blacks are magic crystals that you keep around to improve the feng shui.

It’s fitting that the people who claim to have “built the pyramids” are now part of one of the most impressive pyramid schemes in history.

NAT TURNER AND HOOCH
If I could walk with the animals, talk with the animals,
Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals!
Wine with the animals, dine with the animals,
Say you’re looking fine to the animals!
Dance with the animals, romance with the animals,
Put my hand down my pants with the animals,
Then they would [censored] and [censored] and [censored] with meeeeee!

What do you call a guy who’s been a neo-Nazi for a very, very long time?

A veteran Aryan.

Get it? Veterinarian.

Which brings us to The Week That Perished’s Freak of the Week.

Prentiss Madden was no veteran Aryan. But he was a veterinarian. The black animal doc was the hip-hop soul-brother vet of Aventura, Florida. Madden’s goal in life was to fight the stereotype that black people aren’t good with dogs. Sure, that stereotype might’ve gained some traction after black celebrities and other self-appointed spokespeople defended Michael Vick when the NFL player was convicted of abusing, torturing, and killing dogs for pleasure. Why, even Whoopi Goldberg claimed on The View that Vick’s animal abuse was a natural part of being black (to be fair, she was just grateful to Vick for not mistaking her for a schnauzer, a common error). But Prentiss Madden wanted more than anything to be known as the black man who loved dogs.

And he got his wish.

The 40-year-old Madden was a vet at the Caring Hands Animal Hospital. The clinic’s website featured photos of Madden holding dogs, caressing dogs, and generally being very loving toward dogs.

Maybe a little too loving. Maybe his hands were a little too caring. In retrospect, the fact that the Muzak in his office was all Marvin Gaye and Barry White might’ve been a giveaway. Because Prentiss Madden had a nasty habit of sneaking into his clinic after hours and, well…being “intimate” with the animals left in his care.

Prentiss Madden was the Larry Nassar of veterinary care. A regular Harvey Weimaranerstein.

Police caught Madden after his IP address was linked to a cloud-based child-porn file-sharing service. Upon seizing his phone, videos were discovered of the bad doctor engaging in “relations” with his patients after hours…along with thousands of child pornography images.

He now faces up to 37 years in prison, and a bunch of dogs face many, many years of therapy.

Who turned the dogs out?
Who, who, who, who, who?

Prentiss Madden, that’s who. Our Freak of the Week.