Setting:

Where does your mind go at the mentioning of “Man parts.” Is it your sexy place? Is it clinical? like a doctor’s office? Is it somewhere between some legs? or a place all in your head?

MR. PROVE-IT

(continuing from the exact breath exhaled at the end of Part 3b, with emotional audio air quotes.)

“…Masculinity!” Women in pop culture can’t win. They’ve had to fight hard to be more than objects for straight-male ogling, and even when they succeed in taking on roles of authority beyond their sexual availability to the most powerful male in the room, they have their lives and actions scrutinized in ways that men would never allow. Fuck, this 2016 presidential campaign pretty much proves the point in a conversation I am sure we will have later about the Clintons.

Men, consciously or not, often fail to see the value of the work women do.

As men investigating a women’s prison, we’ve got to be real about our biases and keep an eye on ourselves and each other not to slip into shitty behaviors. That might sound easy, but think about it for a moment.

An investigation is an examination of a subject. Historically, this means believing that we were looking at subject from a distance that allows for an “objective view” of whatever we are looking at. When the investigator is a man, and the subject of the investigation is a women’s prison, the tradition is for us to treat the women we talk to, or even just research, during this investigation like the objects of our study. That many of these women will be incarcerated only gives us more power to fuck up and cause someone harm without respecting her or recognizing her power to speak for herself and set the record straight.

Look at the media out there about “women behind bars:”

The first thing that came up for me in a Google search of those tag words shows that Women Behind Bars is the English title for a 1975 French sexploitation film, Des diamants pour l’enfer. The movie poster for the films shows images of naked women chained to walls and tortured. People who liked this film also liked movies like, SADOMANIA, Barbed Wire Dolls and Sexy Sisters, all of which have equally suggestive promotional posters.

In 2008, Women Behind Bars became a true crime TV show that lasted for three seasons, dramatizing and reenacting the cases of famous women criminals. Maybe this “docu-tainment” show was less sexually exploitative of the women it was showing, but the focus was on still on sensualizing the woman as criminal, and not investigating the conditions of her captivity. And even within the context of being presented as non-fiction, the relationship between femininity, sexuality and violence was a theme often explored by the show, with the first episode of the first season looking at the case of Stacey Lanart, a Missouri woman, who was raped by her father for years, ignored by her family when she tried to report him, and eventually resorted to shooting him twice while he slept.

The most recent show to portray women’s incarceration, Orange Is the New Black, tries harder than most previous efforts to highlight the real problems faced by women in prison. However, the show is still a work of fiction that still hams up women’s sexual relationships as one of its major selling points.

For many men, thinking about women in manacles is a sexual fantasy about having power and control over an object of desire. While the possibility of sexual violence in women’s prison is a source of erotic imagination for many men, Sexual violence in men’s prison is a terrifying cautionary tale often reinforced as a joke. In neither case do men outside of prison like to think about the horrific realities of sexual exploitation in prisons, or the daily lives of people living under the threat of being sexually assaulted while incarcerated.

Being a man investigating a women’s prison means needing to be aware of this history and how easily the real issues of women in prison can be overshadowed by assumptions about sexuality and violence in institutions. It also means needing to push ourselves to look beyond sex and violence in our investigation, so that we do not reduce women in prison to nothing more than sexual victims, or ignore the host of other issues women in prison face: like being moved hundreds of miles from their families, having limited access to physical and mental health care and being stigmatized for life as a criminal.

MR. WHINEY

(MR. WHINEY responds quickly in a tone of self-righteous self-reproach.)

The fact that our first concerns as investigators were issues of sexuality and violence exemplifies the limitations of our male investigative perspective, and the terror women must face being incarcerated in a patriarchal society.

Nothing about the theoretical purpose of women’s incarceration should lead to thoughts of sexual violence, except for the fact that sexual violence against women is culturally rampant in America, and that the risk of sexual violence for men as well as women in prison, is one of the most commonly portrayed and accepted consequences of incarceration.

Books have been written about the hierarchical implications of sexual identity and authority as established in society through institutions of incarceration, and anyone interested in thinking more deeply about these relationships might want to consult the philosophical writings of Michael Foucault. But you are pointing out that we have a responsibility not to let those issues become the only ones we are concerned with, correct?

MR. PROVE-IT

Uh, yeah, that’s what I said wasn’t it?

(waits a beat to see if MR. WHINEY responds before continuing.)

We gotta be aware of the roles we can fall into as researchers, and make sure we don’t reduce the stories of any of the women we investigate into tales of their sexual objectification that we then go on to exploit for our own benefit.

We also gotta be real about the fact that our project is not a one-sided look at women’s prisons that is going to focus only on the lives of women behind bars. For one, women are already telling their own stories about these experiences and we should be seeking those out rather than trying to speak over them. For another, the scope of our project is more about the role of McPherson’s Unit in the world than just the prisoners’ roles within McPherson. We will have to look at some stories of women who have been locked up there because their stories are THE story of McPherson’s Unit. But, when we do so, it will be in relationship to a specific issue of justice and incarceration we are trying to highlight. And all the stories we tell are ones synthesized from secondary sources, not the women themselves.

MR. WHINEY

Some members of our audience will probably feel cheated by that acknowledgement, that this project was undertaken without directly soliciting the voices of incarcerated women, and those feelings are probably justified.

If you made yourself an audience to this investigation under the assumptions that you were going to get an in-depth exposé about the lives of women in prison, you have come to the wrong place. The good news is, there are phenomenal books, written by women, that contain the stories of real women who have lived through, or are living through, years of incarceration.

Read them.

Read Inside This Place, Not of It, compiled and edited by Robin Levi and Ayelet Waldman. Read Assata, by Assata Shakur. Read Doing Time: 25 years of Prison Writing, and seek out the many voices of the women you can find in there.

I give you my most passionate blessing to put this investigation down right now to go read those books. Only one rather quiet, tiny, voice of the many collected here is going to feel bad if you never come back to our investigation. If you abandon us in pursuit of a more powerful or direct look at women’s carceral experiences, we will not consider our mission a complete failure.

MR. PROVE-IT

You are annoying, as always, but you are also correct.

Projects that focus on the voices of women talking about their own experiences in prison are important. Some already exist and should be read. More need to be written, and that project very well could be more important in the grand scheme of things than anything this investigation will accomplish. But the scope of this project is to think about a specific women’s prison and its role in the world, and we cannot pretend like any prison exists exclusively for the people held inside of it.

MR. WHINEY

The voices of prisoners are too often deliberately silenced.

We do not want our investigation to lead any audience into thinking that listening to us excuses them from seeking out additional voices on the issue of women’s incarceration in the United States. But we can use our position as investigators to invite you, as audience members, into the project of critically examining the voices calling for and maintaining prisons, and why we as a society continue to let our current practices of incarceration to perpetuate themselves.

We hope, that by making our limitations painfully transparent, we can share our hours of research and listening to as many different voices on the subject of McPherson’s Unit as we can, to help create a richer and more complete picture of what that building is doing there at 302 Corrections Drive.

Setting:

Upon our skins dance multitudes of beings we will never see nor understand. We are a landscape defined by stories, most frequently those told to make us comfortable.

MR. PROVE-IT

“Whitenessss…”

(MR. PROVE-IT trails off in thought holding on the hiss of his ‘s’ for a full beat.)

…This is going to be a tricky.

MR. WHINEY

Forgive my brackishness, but BULLSHIT.

You absolutely do not get to dismiss the rhetorical impact of whiteness as an investigator, in examining the role of incarceration in America.

This is not a “gray area” conversation.

The only reason that the very concept of the prison does not qualify as a racist institution from before the founding of the United States of America to present is because most non-western European peoples were denied the status of citizenship for the majority of that history. Slavery, genocide, internment—all involved forms of inhuman incarceration, but they were happening outside of the limits of a criminal justice system and inside systems of an economic and military domination.

Even most working and under-class Western Europeans colonists were first codified into a class of humanity outside of colonial citizen: indentured servants who were forcibly relocated to the Americas under threat of execution in their European homeland. It is estimated that half to two-thirds of all Europeans who came to the Americas before US independence came as indentured servants. Less than half of indentured servants out-lived the terms of their bondage. Now, different laws existed to protect some of these groups in more ways than others (indentured servants eventually gained legal protections and recognitions denied African and indigenous slaves). However most of these laws came into existence to pit these groups against each other and make the ruling colonial elite look like the most reasonable and enlightened group to emulate or appeal for support.

Before the establishment of the United States (and for more than a century after it) outside of industrializing urban centers—incarceration was rarely employed as a means of establishing justice. Frontier law made heavy use of capital punishment, forced labor, and banishment (benignly called transportation) to lands outside of defended colonial borders.

MR. PROVE-IT

—Ok, ok, ok.

I think yr history lesson about the role of prisons in our country is gonna be a great section somewhere in this investigation. But maybe not right now, while you are going ape shit on me for saying that it is gonna be complicated to make clear the ways in which our whiteness impacts our findings.

MR. WHINEY

(Responds with caution.)

Conceding that we should save for later a conversation the history of the myth of “incarceration as justice” vs “a system of social control,” I still find your postmodern push to label “race” as complicated to be extremely problematic.

Yes, it is complex, but you are not allowed to dismiss complexity just because it makes you uncomfortable. Or are you scared that critically examining our whiteness will lead some readers to stop here in our investigation, and not consider any other issues we address in regards to McPherson’s Unit, because we are insisting that it is impossible to consider any institution of criminal justice without centering that analysis in the construction of race?

MR. PROVE-IT

Come on Mr. Whiny, this self-righteous bullshit is a farce, even if you are right.

Who are you trying to impress here by beating yrself up in some kind of PC pissing contest? What is at stake here? I want you to really consider that question before you answer and not give me some canned defensive response about being on the right side of history.

Because the whole point of doing this exercise in self-exposure is to admit up front that we have an agenda here, and if yrs is just to convince witty leftist intellectuals that you are smart enough to earn that big university tenure-track paycheck, then I want to reconsider what exactly is “problematic” here.

MR. WHINEY

What do I think I will win by making it clear that I recognize that whiteness and the social necessity of prisons walk hand in hand?

(His voice reeking of scorn.)

Nothing but the opportunity to take some accountability for that reality: that incarceration exists in America today to protect people like us from the consequences of the violent histories that have bought us our privilege to have this experience with incarceration as a conversation instead of having to live through it.

There is a strong possibility that our investigation will be nothing more than an attempt to justify those white privileges, and to reinforce the relationships between them and the existence of this prison, if we don’t address these issues up front.

(Calming down.)

I insist on recognizing this link of race and rates of incarceration because there is no way to look at the question “why does this prison exist?” and not have part of the answer be “to make people like me feel safe.”

MR. PROVE-IT

That is a pretty answer, but it is not simple, easy, or without legitimate critique.

The existence of prisons don’t make any people of color feel safer?

Aren’t there white people making up most the folks that are in prison in America, in Arkansas, and incarcerated in McPherson’s Unit? Even where the percentages of incarcerated people of color are horrifically skewed in comparison to those states general populations, it doesn’t mean there aren’t a shit load of white people in prison too, and we can’t ignore the role that class plays in incarceration rates, just because race also plays a role in them.

If we really want to “center” race, as you describe it, instead of just saying that we are doing so as a rhetorical move to appeal to some liberal academic audience, we gotta own up to the possibility that we might alienate other audiences that have more at stake in this investigation of McPherson’s Unit. Now maybe that possibility is worth it, if we succeed in digging into the roots of race and incarceration in America or Arkansas.

But we also gotta face the possibility that “centering” race, as a white investigator, might not even be possible beyond us going through some motions that we are not capable of contextualizing beyond our own privileges. There is also the very real possibility that by asserting so confidently that we are authoritatively putting race at the center of our investigation, we might be ignoring, and stepping on the toes of other writers of color that have been doing the kind of investigative research for decades-long careers instead of just for years. We are not exactly anthropological race experts any more than we are sociologists of criminal justice. We are just a writer with some pressing need to keep looking where state authorities have told us that we can’t. Pretty words and boldly stated intentions cannot disguise these facts or limits.

Recognizing complexity is not dismissing it.

MR. WHINEY

Fair enough Mr. Prove-it.

It feels like you have successfully used my own words and ideas against me, although I am still cautious that this was all just an elaborate ploy to pat ourselves on our “pasty white ass” as you would say.

We are here to explore complexities instead of dismissing them. The impacts of whiteness on America’s models for criminal justice, and the ways in which those impacts are critically examined are complex relationships. But let’s make certain that we agree that nobody here is going to take a “post-truth” position claiming that the complexities of race and incarceration include the possibility that the two are not connected.

Whether it is possible or not, whether it proves that my analysis is more racially ignorant than yours or not, I will be striving to centering race within my investigation of McPherson’s Unit, and where that comes into conflict with your desires to situate race as one of many intersecting social factors of its construction, we will have those debates as they arise.

MR. PROVE-IT

That seems like a deal I can live with, but if you forget or slip out of yr “ideological framework,” that is on you.

Before we move on, it is my job to point out that this turned into a theoretical exercise rather than a real look at how the whiteness of Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett impacts this investigation.

In addition to keeping it real about how our whiteness might make us more sympathetic to arguments in favor of prisons, another important consideration of race in prison is how the white inmates are going to have an easier time getting attention about abusive prison conditions than prisoners of color.

MR. WHINEY

(returning to his calm but eccentric enthusiasm for the project at hand.)

That is an interesting consideration in light of the legacy of when and how prison reformation movements have gained steam.

The only times that masses of citizens have sincerely questioned the harshness of penal justice methodology are in times of political turmoil and revolution. A majority of people will defend the state’s obligation to adopt severe consequences to perceived criminal behavior up unto to the point that they start to see prisoners as political resistors of an unjust system. Then it has often been the lash back that has highlighted the horrors of the justice system and lead to the most significant changes. In many European revolutionary movements, for example, this softening of the criminal justice system coincided with attacks on class systems that saw previously “untouchable” members of society’s elite, being treated equally to it is poor and destitute.

MR. PROVE-IT

(Softens his tone.)

People always think that criminals get off too easily, no matter how harsh the punishments.

“Law and Order” was as effective a concept for kings as it has been for politicians, right up until a critical mass started to fear that it could be their necks up next at the gallows.

MR. WHINEY

Exactly!

And this is relevant to race because race has been used historically to divide people with the most to gain from working together to accomplish reform.

The more people can be convinced that the criminal is some terrifying “other,” some dangerous “super-predator,” in the words of former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, the easier it is for people to utilize “Justice” as a tool to centralize and control political power instead of distributing it throughout society.

MR. PROVE-IT

We will need to remember to explore the relationship between race and the reporting of abuses in prison later, when we look at the cases of some specific prisoners.

It is a fucked-up reality, but white Americans don’t even tend to give a shit about the legacy of genocides and oppressions carried out in their name. It’s about impossible to convince them to pay attention to abuses directed at individuals that have already been demonized with the label “criminal.”

MR. WHINEY

These racial issues we are discussing are true on a global and national scale, but they are especially prevalent in local communities that might harbor stronger attitudes about criminal justice enforcement than their national average.

This has been a critical reason that prison abuses in the South have such an ugly history, and often spiked in those times where the prison system received its largest influxes of populations that enfranchised society considered most deplorable: immigrants, indigenous people, post-emancipation African Americans. Finding evidence of these abuses often proves difficult and it is easy, as a white researcher, to overlook absences of examples, rather than attempt to contextualize them.

MR. PROVE-IT

So basically, you are saying that we may not even be aware of what we are overlooking when we look at questions of who has been impacted by the construction of McPherson’s Unit and the institution that it has grown into—

MR. WHINEY

—But we will do our best to discuss the places where we found absences in information and the larger social circumstances that may be contributing to that lack of information—

(Enjoying the flow of this conversation, both Mr. PROVE-IT and MR. WHINEY do not so much as interrupt each other, as complete each other’s thoughts. As if the space between them was disappearing.)

MR. PROVE-IT

—and as we do so, our audience knows that even our best efforts to talk about these situations are going to be limited by all the ways our whiteness has trained us not to see racial injustice, no matter how hard we think we are looking for it.

(The period at the end of Mr. PROVE-IT’s sentence has a finality that results in a beat of silence as the two investigators consider the impact of their own statements. Eventually MR. WHINEY gather’s his thoughts enough to continue.)

MR. WHINEY

(with a tone of approving humility.)

OK, Mr. Prove-it, I will admit that it is not wrong to suggest that the intersection of race and incarceration—and how our whiteness is going to impact this investigation—is likely more complicated than we will manage to recognize or discuss.

I hope, by having this conversation in the manner that we have done so, our audience will be aware of those complexities and be willing to think critically about race as they investigate issues of incarceration on their own.

I also want to put this on the official record: Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett is always open to listen to and respect anyone who wants to question and challenge the role that race plays on the projects he undertakes.

MR. PROVE-IT

Alright, Mr. Whiny, I doubt this will be the last time we talk about race in this investigation, but we do have a few more factors of social identity to discuss and I can’t wait to see you squirm around how you are not ignoring them in yr “centering” of race in our investigation of incarceration.

Setting:

A classroom.

MR. PROVE-IT

Next up, “Class…” …It seems to me like we covered the “why we have to pay attention to class” in the background and experiences of Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett, as they related so closely to issues of race. Do you think we can just move on to pointing them out?

MR. WHINEY

You mean that…

(Pauses a beat for dramatic effect.)

…like race…

(Pauses for a second beat.)

…class has been a central contributing factor to how and why prisons exist in America—a history that will be discussed in greater length when we discuss the changing role of incarceration in democratic societies—and that the class status of any investigators is relevant information for a reader and should be made as authentically accessible as possible?

MR. PROVE-IT

Uh, yeah, that.

So, class.

Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett is obviously one well-educated and class-privileged dude, right? Who else has the time and energy to spend on an investigation like this: thinking about something that does not contribute to his own survival? Much less do it in such a pretentious and fucked up format that has us talking more about him than the subject we are supposed to be focusing on?

MR. WHINEY

(Says dryly in a flat tone.)

Zing— Certainly, he has benefited from class-privileges that, considered globally, very few human beings could match.

However, like race and gender, this might be a more challenging social identity to deconstruct than pushing squarely into round categorical holes like working-class, middle-class, or upper-class.

MR. PROVE-IT

(Giggles uncharacteristically)

Well, I want to give you shit over yr need to over complicate everything to the point of meaningless…but, since I started off the discussion of race saying identity was going to get tricky, I’ll be gracious—

(raises his voice to keep MR. WHINEY from interrupting.)

—This once…and let you continue before calling bullshit.

(MR. WHINEY, feeling playful, “Oooooo’s” like a first grader.)

MR. WHINEY

Getting fancy there Mr. Prove-it, you might want to watch it and stay in your lane there…

MR. PROVE-IT

Are we going back to this again?

MR. WHINEY

No.

(returns to his calm and scholarly persona before continuing.)

Understanding class in America is always a complicated endeavor. There is such an unfathomable and disparaging gap between wealthiest and poorest citizens of the United States, that it makes almost everyone believe that they exist somewhere in the middle of a spectrum that includes malnourished children and unimaginable decadence, even as that wealth is cause celebrity in the United States. When you have a country where a Billionaire presidential candidate can get elected by convincing enough people that he has best understanding of the issues faced by a blue collar American, because he is wealthy enough not to be impacted by the political machinations of his millionaire opponent, class-analysis is a confusing and convoluted beast.

MR. PROVE-IT

—That’s an awfully sympathetic way to describe how a sexist, racist, asshole, with the assistance of foreign spies, could bully an out-of-touch political system into giving him the presidency.

MR. WHINEY

Maybe so, but the point is that Americans fail to acknowledge the impact of class hierarchies as badly as Europeans fail to acknowledge racism when it is not codified into law.

Wealth moves so quickly in America that it is incredibly difficult not to get caught up in the fantasy of the American dream: that riches beyond imagining are just a spin of the roulette wheel away. When given the choice between the security of “good-enough,” and the lottery of “Big Money/Big Whammy,” Americans consistently prove themselves gamblers in ways that the entire world has grown to dread. Manufacturing the logic required to revel in the suffering of others is one of this nation’s biggest growth industries.

MR. PROVE-IT

Your claims are getting pretty bold there, but if I agree to the point that Americans have a weaker grasp of class than folks in many other countries, what does any of this have to do with our investigation?

MR. WHINEY

Isn’t stating facts your job? Why don’t you tell us what factors of Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett’s class upbringing are relevant to an investigation of McPherson’s Unit, and then we can talk about it?

MR. PROVE-IT

Fine then.

(responds with a snarky bluntness.)

The child of a single working mother, making peanuts as a hippy-dippy school teacher, it would be easy to suggest that Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett came up in a struggling working-class household.

For example, he has many memories of years spent moving from one cockroach-infested apartment to the next while his mother tried to stay ahead of bill collectors and eviction notices. But this telling of the story gets complicated by other realities of his childhood. Realities, like: his grandfather was a prominent civil-defense lawyer and his extended Jewish family placed such a traditional emphasis on education that he had aunts, uncles, cousins and -in-laws who ran a gambit of embarrassingly stereotypical upper-class Jewish occupations. When Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett dropped out of college at the age of twenty-one, it was a letdown that spoke to a lack of respect for the opportunities he had been afforded, rather than a decision made out of economic necessity, as he tried to spin the story at the time.

In the six years that followed his “dropping out,” he spent jobless and hitch-hiking across America, crashing alternately between friends’ couches and abandoned buildings. This time period again exists problematically in defining his class experiences.

Sure, he learned how to survive eating food out of trash cans, but he was also testing the limits of the incredible strength of the safety net that existed to keep him from hitting concrete when he fell off the high wire of his political fantasies.

Class is complicated in America, not just by the extreme disparity of economic wealth, but by how successfully the benefits of class are buried deeper than can be dug out of a bank statement. Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett is a product of privileges, class-included, that can’t be taken or given back just because they have been observed.

MR. WHINEY

Wow, that kind of describes some of the heaviest issues we are having with a lot of these constructed social positions that Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett occupies, doesn’t it?

MR. PROVE-IT

Maybe so, but class—more so than race or gender—is a site of potential concern because Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett has conflicting enough experiences with its privileges to get ugly defensive about things that he has no right to take so personally—

MR. WHINEY

—and thus, is far more traditionally American than he would like to admit.

MR. PROVE-IT

Probably…

(MR. PROVE-IT trails off for a beat in thought before returning with a sigh.)

Well, that feels to me like about everything that could be said of Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett and how his identity signifiers might impact this investigation. You think we can finally move this thing along?

MR. WHINEY

Well we never explicitly discussed the relationship of sexuality to issues of incarceration and identity, which will problematically lead most of our readers to make heteronormative assumptions about Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett and desire, but it seems rather invasive to make a case that who Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett has or has not copulated with is relevant to this investigation.

MR. PROVE-IT

You mean fucked. Right?

Well, we did discuss sexuality and incarceration, when discussing masculinity, we pointed our audience to Michael Foucault. I think it’s alright if we leave the discussion about the relationships between sex, power, identity and incarceration, for our audience to explore on their own time, now that we have pointed them in the right direction.

MR. WHINEY

Perhaps so, perhaps so.

Perhaps, it is enough to admit that sexuality is confusing enough of an aspect of social identity that we must be observant of the ways in which heteronormative constructions of masculinity attempt to frame this investigation, even if only resorting to default assumptions, both on a public and private scale?

MR. PROVE-IT

That is an awful and indirect way to admit that we are just not sure how queerness factors into this investigation beyond assumptions about gender and sexuality. So, we did our best to cover them both together, and if we left something out, we’d sure like to hear about it. Is there anything else?

MR. WHINEY

Well, national identity seems pretty clearly established as American. And we are woefully under-qualified to discuss the relationship of Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett’s identity as being abled-ish, Neurotypical, and with no known diagnosed physical or mental health concerns to really take that conversation anywhere more useful than stating everything I just did…

(Takes a beat to catch his breath and ask himself if he misstated any of that in a way that would be hurtful to someone he didn’t mean to offend or harm. He does not give himself a reassuring answer.)

We stated that he was Jewish when discussing his class privileges, and to discuss the philosophical impacts of being a Jew and asking questions about respected institutions in the South—any deeper than its class impacts—might have to be an investigation of its own for another time. This is especially the case since Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett’s loose linkage to formal Judaism rarely manifests in one-on-one interactions while he researched this investigation. It does feel pertinent to state that he is religious and culturally Jewish enough to have had a Bar Mitzvah and deliver the HaMotzi in Hebrew when asked to do so.

It is possible that the recent and growing wave of anti-Semitism in America will catch up with Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garrett at some point in the future, since he is an outspoken Jew with radical political affiliations, but it hasn’t yet—

MR. PROVE-IT

—Speaking of politics, Benjamin C. Roy Cory Garret certainly has a history of radical shit-disturbing that can be found without too much searching on the Internet.

MR. WHINEY

Well, that is true, and we have left that subject suspiciously vague.

In reality, his politics might prove to be the most salient identity factors of this investigation, as will become painfully obvious when we have to address why the State of Arkansas decided to be so uncooperative with this investigation. But I think we might just have to leave that dramatic tension alone for now and see what happens.

MR. PROVE-IT

(laughs heartily.)

Well, Mr. Whiney, Examiner, have we finally talked around these issues of identity politics enough that we can move along into…you know…REAL TALK about McPherson’s Unit and the place it occupies here on planet earth?