America doesn’t have a voter fraud problem—rather, it has a problem with people who think there is a voter fraud problem. As Doug Bock Clark shows, in Georgia, where legislation allows individual citizens to issue unlimited challenges to voters’ registrations, a few zealous right-wing activists are leading the charge. Among them is a man named Frank Schneider:
On March 15, 2022, an email appeared in the inbox of the election director of Forsyth County, Georgia, with the subject line “Challenge of Elector’s Eligibility.” A spreadsheet attached to the email identified 13 people allegedly registered to vote at P.O. boxes in Forsyth County, a wealthy Republican suburb north of Atlanta. Georgians are supposed to register at residential addresses, except in special circumstances. “Please consider this my request that a hearing be held to determine these voters’ eligibility to vote,” wrote the challenger, Frank Schneider.
Schneider is a former chief financial officer at multiple companies, including Jockey International, the underwear maker. His Instagram page includes pictures of him golfing at exclusive resorts and a dog peeing on a mailbox with the caption “Woody suspects mail-in voter fraud” and the hashtag “#maga.” On Truth Social, the social media platform backed by former president Donald Trump, Schneider’s posts have questioned the 2020 election results in Forsyth County and spread content related to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that holds that the Democratic elite are cannibalistic pedophiles. In January 2023, he posted an open letter to his U.S. representative-elect encouraging “hearings to hold perpetrators accountable where evidence exists that election fraud took place in the 2020 and 2022 elections.”
The March 2022 voter challenges were the first of many from Schneider: As the year progressed, he submitted seven more batches of challenges, each one larger than the one previous, growing from 507 voters in April to nearly 15,800 in October, for a total of over 31,500 challenges.
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I have been to Disney World—but only as a child, and the memories are vague. I remember bright colors, noise, and the endless, miserable queue for Space Moutain. And being cross about it. (Such treasured memories make it money well spent for my parents.) I, therefore, enjoy those who enter the gates with a healthy dose of cynism, and Molly Young’s analytical take is no exception. But although she approaches things with humor, she does not quite shake off the wonder altogether—finding the most surprising part of Disney World to be people’s unerring positivity. Maybe I am the exception who managed to sulk through the experience. Sorry, Mum and Dad.
Everywhere at Disney World there existed a strong sense of rising to the occasion. The grandmother in her milk-drenched slacks, the mother pursuing her demon spawn, the hour-long lines for ten-minute rides. Rising to an occasion is something we associate with scenarios of adversity, like a post-hurricane cleanup, not scenarios in which we have paid hundreds of dollars to have our pants ruined. And yet.
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Digging into the moral and environmental hazards of a battery-powered future. Reckoning with a family secret. Celebrating Diné cultural traditions. A deeply personal search in Pennsylvania, and Barbie’s complicated relationship with feminism.
Nick Bowlin | The Drift | July 9, 2023 | 7,602 words
The mining sector is having a moment. Due to people’s growing—if absurdly belated—concern about climate change, demand for alternative materials that can power the future is skyrocketing. We’re talking lithium, cobalt, and copper, the stuff needed to build electric-vehicle batteries, solar panels, and other items that are likely to be staples of a decarbonized economy. It’s no surprise, then, that mining interests are talking a big game about being on the right side of environmental history. Journalist Nick Bowlin heard it loud and clear while reporting on the world’s largest mining conference, which was held earlier this year in Toronto, Ontario. As Bowlin smartly details, in a story that never once gets boring despite being about—let me repeat—a mining conference, there’s an ugly underbelly to this touting of green bona fides. Extractive industries are notoriously and unrelentingly colonialist, and above all they’re eager for profit. They will strip land, exploit people, and smile as their rampant devastation earns them billions. If the mining sector were really serious about a green future, it would drop its maximalist mindset. Indeed, we all would. “The mining industry,” Bowlin writes, “benefits from the self-satisfied consumerism of the E.V. buyer. For all of its disdain for environmentalists, the industry needs green consumers who seek absolution for their carbon-intensive ways of life. With their complacent inattention to the injustices inflicted by the green economy, these consumers not only fund the industry’s expansion but give it moral cover.” —SD
Rachel Priest and Emily Strasser | Bitter Southerner | July 11, 2023 | 3,069 words
At Quaker school, Emily Strasser notes, they weren’t allowed to keep score at recess soccer games because it was considered a form of violence. Imagine learning that for 30 years, your grandfather worked as a chemist at the Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility that helped make the atomic bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Like everything to do with family, it’s complicated. In this nuanced Q&A from Bitter Southerner, Rachel Priest speaks with Strasser about her ten-year search to understand not only more about her grandfather’s work, including why he chose it and the affect it had on him, his family, and his mental health, but most importantly the horrific legacy of the U.S.’ nuclear weapons program. Priest’s tough, necessary questions and Strasser’s thoughtful responses make for reading that transcends the average Q&A. “It started off as a way of thinking about how to be in the world where I came from, my own origin story, and then grew into confronting this vast legacy of nuclear weapons in our country and in the world,” Strasser says. How does one reckon with immeasurable harm, a toll that defies reckoning? What becomes clear is that while the most important questions are often the toughest to answer, Strasser demonstrates that this is the only way we as humans will ever learn to do better in this world. —KS
Rachel Yoder | Harper’s Magazine | June 20, 2023 | 7,350 words
As Rachel Yoder points out early in this searching, personal piece, there are many names for the phenomenon she’s writing about. “Powwow” and “Braucherei” are simply two of the most common, though “pulling pain” and “natural healing” are also popular. What they all refer to is an Amish folk ritual that Yoder calls “one of the more compelling corners of my Amish and Mennonite heritage.” That heritage, and Yoder’s uneasy relationship with it, propels one of the most beautifully written pieces I’ve read all year. She’s come to Pennsylvania in search of a spell book, but also for answers to the existential aches plaguing her—and, crucially, accompanied by her father, who himself drifted from an Amish upbringing into modernity many years ago. There’s tension everywhere you look, from the father-daughter dynamic to Amish reluctance to Yoder’s halting embrace of the culture that birthed her. There’s also love, particularly between Yoder and her father; his equanimity and humor leavens what might otherwise become sodden, and provides delightful counterpoint to her indelible, rhythmic prose. “It’s comforting to imagine that things go away if you leave them alone long enough,” she writes. They don’t, of course. But in looking for a piece of herself, to use one healer’s phrase, Yoder is kind enough to bring us all along. —PR
Jake Skeets | Emergence Magazine | June 22, 2023 | 3,901 words
Every once in a while, I stumble on an essay that not only teaches me, it feeds me with something good and genuine, and gives me a sense of hope. Jake Skeets’ recent essay for Emergence Magazine was a deeply satisfying journey of cultural discovery as he reflects on butchering a sheep to help celebrate Kinaałda, the Diné puberty ceremony for a young relative. Skeets revels in the cycle of stories and knowledge passed from generation to generation. At points he is a child and a learner, at other times an educator passing on his deep love and respect for animals and the land. His prose is spare as he describes the influence that food and story have had on him in his lifetime, but there is a profound beauty in his minimalism. “Stories have a unique ability to collapse time,” he writes. “Food does, too. Stories move through time differently than we do. They can move between times, slow time, or even stop time. Food operates similarly carrying metaphors, images, and memories.” Skeets’ keen attitude and commitment to educating himself in traditional ways and passing that on to others is like a helping of nutritious comfort food: something to savor and something to celebrate. —KS
Willa Paskin | The New York Times Magazine | July 11, 2023 | 6,671 words
After the barrage of Barbie-related content that has preceded Greta Gerwig’s forthcoming film, I was not sure I was ready for another 6,000 words on the subject. Luckily, I succumbed and read Willa Paskin’s thoughtful discussion with Greta Gerwig on the Barbie film she is bemused she was allowed to make. Paskin gets why she was: “[T]he fizzy marriage of filmmaker and material would break through the cacophony of contemporary life and return a retirement-age hunk of plastic to the zeitgeist.” Smart, Mattel. (And the snippets of the film Paskin describes do sound pretty good.) But what I most enjoyed was the reporting that went beyond the film. Is Barbie a feminist, or really, really not? Why did her creator, Ruth Handler, refuse to allow Barbie to have a child? How did Mattel reinvent Barbie in 2015? Read and find out. As someone who grew up with classic Barbie—the one whose proportions meant she wouldn’t be able to stand up in real life—I was intrigued to learn about her evolution. But as evolved as she may now be, this remains my favorite quote from the piece: “A psychological study found that after playing with Barbies, girls thought themselves less capable of various careers than they did after playing with a control Mrs. Potato Head.” Go, Mrs. Potato Head. —CW
Audience Award
Here’s the piece our readers loved most this week:
Sara Clemence | The Atlantic | July 3, 2023 | 1,532 words
Sara Clemence is ruthless in this piece, questioning the privilege and indulgence of the people who travel to the one place on earth that still belongs to nature, just because they can. The self-important justifications of these tourists will leave you feeling even more frustrated with the human race. Clemence is right: Don’t go. —CW
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It’s a bizarre niche of the art world that Roberto Marquez occupies: As a self-styled disaster artist he paints murals at the scene of tragic events. This piece does not dig too deeply into what inspires Marguez, but it does show the importance of a central place for grief after a tragedy.
Instead of a finished mural, at the Wednesday night vigil Marquez offered up his incomplete panels to the mourners, inviting them to take paintbrushes and add their own messages of grief or love. “He really gave them a place to express their feelings,” Jackson says. “Nobody else thought about it or even tried to do it.”
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Max Olesker| Longreads | July 13, 2023 | 15 minutes (4,199 words)
When I walk into the room, it is the enormous minotaur head that first catches my eye—its vast gaping concrete mouth containing the grate of a fireplace, its wide eyes staring back at me. Above the minotaur, ancient Greek tragedians are painted on the wall—Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus. Surrounding the minotaur on one side is an array of handmade military paraphernalia: shields, tabards, helmets, and weapons. Dismembered human body parts sculpted from newspaper adorn the other, limbs, torsos, and heads all aimlessly scattered near the bay windows.
It’s a cold February morning, and I’ve come to Birkenhead, just outside Liverpool, to visit the former home of a man named Ron Gittins, a property affectionately known as Ron’s Place. Over the course of 33 years, Gittins painstakingly transformed almost every surface of this flat with a series of artworks in a variety of styles and mediums, from friezes on the walls of his living room to a Roman altar in his kitchen and enormous, ambitious fireplaces (yes, multiple). It’s a singlehanded labor of love. But, because Gittins was renting the flat—with no right to modify the property to this extent—it’s also illegal. As a result, the work was created almost entirely in secret. It was only after Gittins’death at age 79 that word gradually began to trickle out about the existence of this strange cave of wonders.
It was in Koh Samui, Thailand, that I encountered my first “outsider environment.” Away from the bustling hubbub of the beaches and tourist strips, partway up a mountain, in a secluded grove surrounded by waterfalls and greenery, lies the Secret Buddha garden. It’s full of large, intricate stone sculptures—angels, snakes, musicians, and Buddha figures—in a world sprung entirely from the imagination of a man named Nim Thongsuk. A retired durian fruit farmer, Thongsuk started his project at the age of 77, constructing a vast, complex environment that even included his own tomb. Exploring the garden, I became taken by this industrious, audacious expression of something deeply personal.
“Outsider art,” “folk art,” and “art brut” are designations frequently applied to artists—often untrained—who work outside the classical tradition (and frequently the law). If the work is a large-scale installation, permanent or semi-permanent, it might be deemed an “outsider environment” or “visionary environment.” Outside Madrid, a former monk named Justo Gallego Martínez spent 60 years singlehandedly building his own cathedral, working on it daily until he passed away in 2021. In Westbourne Grove, London, retired postal porter and factory worker Gerry Dalton, an “Irishman and self-proclaimed gardener” according to his site’s Instagram bio, created a series of remarkable outdoor sculptures along the Grand Union Canal, in a collection he dubbed Gerry’s Pompeii. In South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Helen Martins, who lived from 1897 to 1976, created The Owl House, which features over 300 sculptures made from concrete and ground glass. And there are many, many more across the globe, each with its own infinitely rich backstory.
I am partly drawn to these works because of my parents. My mother trained in visual arts and works with community groups, teaching thousands of people her skills and techniques; whenever she sits somewhere for more than a few minutes, sketches and illustrations emerge. Every birthday card she’s ever given me has been a wondrous one-off—illustrated, painted, or screen-printed—and accompanied by a poem from my father, a writer, poet, and word-obsessive from whom I’ve inherited my own compulsions. Both my parents have amassed vast bodies of work, unseen by galleries or collectors. Perhaps they too are outsider artists. And perhaps, via her teaching, my mother has even inspired the work of other outsider artists as well.
Upon entering Ron’s Place for the first time, I’m unprepared for the feeling of being subsumed by a man’s imagination. The flat is dusty, strange, and wonderful.
The central corridor is painted floor-to-ceiling with ancient Egyptian iconography—profiles of Horus the falcon-headed god and Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, beneath life-size depictions of a Cleopatra-esque pharaoh and impressionistic signs and sigils. On the left is the Minotaur Room, its cavernous mouth the focal point. Next is the bathroom, entirely aquatic-themed, with manta rays, hammerhead sharks, and all manner of other painted sea life swimming across the walls. The Georgian Room is filled with portraits of naval figures and the first fireplace Gittins created (a comparatively low-key affair, with fish for feet). Across the hall is the Lion Room, which features trompe-l’oeil friezes, including an area of faux chipped stone and a cheekily smiling horse, which faces Gittins’s technical masterpiece: a vast lion fireplace, spectacularly and carefully rendered.
Upon entering Ron’s Place for the first time, I’m unprepared for the feeling of being subsumed by a man’s imagination. The flat is dusty, strange, and wonderful.
Minotaur fireplace. Photo courtesy of Max Olesker.The Lion Room. Photo courtesy of Martin Wallace.Egyptian iconography. Photo courtesy of The Caravan Gallery.
Throughout the flat are half-finished sculptures of busty women, bags of papers, books, bric-a-brac, passable (from a distance) replicas of military uniforms; miscellaneous items gathered and hoarded for some future use. Whatever task Gittins’ magpie mind focused on, he seems to have worked on it feverishly and industriously. Many of the paintings are naive. The painting on the high ceiling of the Georgian Room is particularly crude—the makeshift ladder and extra-long extended paintbrush he used clearly not affording him the detail he might have wished for. But the fireplaces, particularly the lion, are astonishing. And the totality, the experience of it all, is what Ron’s Place is about. Not one painting, not the model of the weirdly muscly cherub, nor the vast pile of notes seemingly devised to help Gittins remember entire history books (“TAASB; The American Army Surrounds Boston” “HLOTB; Heavy Losses of the British”), but everything, all together—that’s what makes this special. Taken as a whole, it’s an endlessly fascinating space; a window into a man’s life, into his mind. Although the flat is cold and musty, it’s a dreamlike place where time slips away. The experience is all-encompassing and leaves me feeling disoriented.
“It’s all quite powerful, isn’t it?” says Martin Wallace, as he shows me around the flat. Wallace, 55, is a warm, articulate Scouser and BAFTA-nominated filmmaker who frequently collaborates with Jarvis Cocker, the frontman of ’90s Britpop band Pulp. Together, they made a documentary series, Journeys Into the Outside, traveling the planet to investigate extraordinary places built by regular people. Wallace, who lives nearby, is now working on a feature-length documentary about Gittins, and in the process has become inexorably drawn into the orbit of Ron’s Place. Initially, this only involved helping cover the flat’s rent—as a trustee—after Gittins passed, and thinking of a long-term strategy to preserve the unique interior. But it’s rapidly become far more problematic. Ron’s Place is under threat: After months of stasis, the landlord and owner, Salisbury Management Services, has finally decided enough is enough. The building is to be sold at auction.
The front door flies open and Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale hurry in. They huddle with Wallace in the Egyptian corridor; urgent crisis talks begin. Jan Williams, 61, is Gittins’ niece. Together with her partner, Teasdale, 71, they work as artists under the name The Caravan Gallery. Along with Wallace, they have now dedicated themselves to preserving Gittins’ legacy. The current discussions, hushed and frantic, are about potential investors who might work with them—but they don’t sound promising. One man claiming to have the money also had quite a lot of snot on his jumper. The housing associations who expressed interest the previous summer have all gone quiet, the occasional sympathetic voice inevitably getting lost in the mundane realities of running a large business. In order to be eligible to apply for funding, the trio has created a legal entity, The Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust. But, with time now of the essence, it’s not clear how that will save the property.
One man claiming to have the money also had quite a lot of snot on his jumper.
At one point, we all stand together in the Georgian Room. “What would you do?” Williams asks me. It’s hard to answer. It’s also hard to countenance the environment I am standing in being destroyed. Could an art gallery step in? Could the council? Could the Lottery?
“Couldn’t Paul McCartney just buy it?” says Williams, exasperated.
Ronald Geoffrey Gittins was born in 1939, the middle child between two sisters, and grew up in a small terraced house that was later destroyed as part of Liverpool’s slum clearances. His father, James, a navy man, worked on the docks, and his mother, Alice, worked in service for a wealthy family. In their small, ramshackle yard, where his father kept ducks, there was an outside toilet. Here Gittins would sequester himself away, training his voice by reciting Shakespeare, frequently Richard III’s opening monologue:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
“There were theories that he was on some sort of spectrum,” says Williams. “At school, teachers didn’t know how to handle him. He was obviously really bright—but he didn’t know how to fit in.”
“He was known as your mad uncle Ronny,” Teasdale says gently.
After school, his employment was patchy. In the 1960s, he trained as a Methodist minister at a theological college in Derbyshire. “He became a sort of freelance preacher,” says Williams, “causing havoc and being a pain in the ass!” For a while, he became a white goods inspector, where he was known for being overly officious and invariably siding with the management, rather than the employees.
While the interior of his flat was a closely-guarded secret, Gittins himself was a well-known flamboyant local figure. He wore bright handmade suits and wigs—sometimes more than one at a time. He would take his guitar to the local bank and serenade the staff. “It’s kind of what we might call eccentricities, in a euphemistic way,” says Wallace. “Mental health problems, looking at it another way, of course.” He was sectioned on a number of occasions, following bouts of erratic behavior, and later in life shared his belief that he was a spy, intercepting articles hidden in newspaper articles. “People sort of enjoyed what he’d do, but also othered him quite a lot,” says Wallace.
But he was also clearly extremely bright and capable, fascinated with the world, and generous with his time. Christopher Lee-Power, a Liverpool-based actor, met Gittins in a chance encounter on a college bus and credits him with launching his professional career. “Ron took me under his wing and began refining my voice while teaching me drama, life skills, and art,” says Lee-Power. “We visited several art galleries, where he shared his knowledge of the great artists, and he even encouraged me to read aloud from a book to boost my confidence. As the years passed, I honed my acting skills and voice under his tutelage.”
He wore bright handmade suits and wigs—sometimes more than one at a time. He would take his guitar to the local bank and serenade the staff.
And as an artist, Gittins wasn’t totally untrained—he took an art foundation at the Laird College of Art and at one point set up a logo business called Minstrel Enterprises, naming the company after a Bible quote in which King Solomon summons a musician to play.
What’s more, Ron’s Place wasn’t the first home in which Gittins expressed his art; he had transformed properties twice before. He did it in his parents’ rented home: pictures of pompeii help put ron to sleep reads the headline on a mid-’70s article in The Liverpool Echo, alongside a photo of a 35-year-old mustachioed Gittins sitting in his childhood bedroom and gesturing proudly at the space he has transformed. Later, he secretly recreated the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling on the ceiling of his rented room. But it wasn’t until 1986 that he found his true muse—the little flat where he would live for the rest of his life—and begin his greatest creative endeavor.
In the days after I return to London, Williams, Teasdale, and Wallace continue to tirelessly publicize their cause. A GoFundMe is set up, and donations trickle in. The public is enthusiastic, but the pledges are generally on the order of £10 and £20, and their target—£350,000—seems futile.
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The precarity associated with Ron’s Place is not uncommon when it comes to outsider environments, which are often created without any long-term planning. This has led to some mixed legacies. After Justo Gallego Martínez’s death, Spanish officials deemed his junk cathedral unsanitary and refused to honor his wish of being buried in the crypt; the cathedral itself faced the prospect of demolition before eventually being preserved by a charity. Gerry’s Pompeii, though “saved” after a mass crowdfunding push, had a number of its artifacts removed by a relative, only surviving in a diminished, depleted form. But Helen Martins’ Owl House was declared a “provisional National Monument” in 1989, keeping her glass (and concrete) menagerie safe.
Discussions around the fate of these environments invariably prompt questions. What is art? What is valuable? But part of the joy and power of environments like these is that they are generally, almost obstinately, uncommodifiable. In this, they feel like the polar opposite of NFTs—they are not joyless, arid things, designed solely for the marketplace; they are not scalable. Instead, they speak to something inner. This is My World reads the sign that Helen Martins placed on the grounds of Owl House. “I will not be ignored” was Ron Gittins’ passionate mantra, often repeated to his brother-in-law Henry.
But the defiantly impractical nature of visionary environments certainly doesn’t make them any easier to preserve or protect. “If Ron had made prints or T-shirts, everyone would want one,” says Wallace. “But what do you do with a minotaur fireplace?”
What do you do with a minotaur fireplace?
As the auction to sell the flat approaches, the atmosphere in Gittin’s camp oscillates between panicky, resigned, and frustrated. Appeals to the press are made: Articles appear in The Guardian and local papers; Williams speaks on BBC Radio 4.
Serious buyers begin to emerge but with no plans to preserve the unique ground floor space. Sensing a bargain, a builder draws up plans to gut the building and remodel it as a home for his family. The unthinkable—the destruction of Ron’s Place—now seems the most likely outcome.
In a last-ditch effort to keep bidders at bay, the team submits a listing to Historic England, infuriating the landlord and property manager. “The owners were absolutely furious, and said we’d stabbed them in the back after everything they’d done,” says Williams, “Which is a bit luxurious because we’d been paying the rent and we kept our side of the bargain.”
In life, Gittin’s relationship with his landlords was equally contentious. “He didn’t have water for many years because of a dispute,” says Wallace. “Originally his rent included water. Then the landlord was bought out by another landlord, and the second landlord said, ‘I’m not paying your fucking water rates.’ And Ron said, ‘Oh, yes, you are. And let’s go to court about it because it’s in my contract.’ Eventually, it was found against Ron—but he disputed that. So he’d walk miles for a standing tap.”
With his penchant for high-handed letter writing, Gittins escalated things to the inevitable level. “Dear Mr. Gittins,” reads a letter dated January 16, 1996, “Thank you for your recent letter to the Prime Minister about your liability for paying water charges to North West Water. Your letter has been passed to his Department for reply.” When Gittins eventually did get water access, he would leave his water on constantly. “I don’t know whether he was trying to retrospectively get his money’s worth,” says Wallace, “or whether it was just so cold that he didn’t want the taps to freeze.”
Discussions around the fate of these environments invariably prompt questions. What is art? What is valuable? But part of the joy and power of environments like these is that they are generally, almost obstinately, uncommodifiable.
The Gittins of my imagination reminds me a little of Johnny Rooster Byron, the central figure in Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem. A local drug dealer, retired stuntman, and teller of tall tales, Byron is a self-created creature of fantasy. He is set against his nemesis, the local council—a bureaucratic, clipboard-toting symbol of mundanity. He’s a romantic, creating art from the mythic history that surrounds him and the detritus of his life. Byron is a deeply flawed figure, but his impassioned fist-waving at authority has a certain power to it, a certain magic. He rails against the quotidian bean counters until the last, but you feel the walls closing in, and sense his world can’t last forever.
Yet, bizarrely, despite his outsider status, Gittins wasn’t just anti-authority; he clearly identified with the establishment. His journey through life was shaped by a testy, complicated relationship with the powers that be: part fascination, part frustration. An ardent monarchist and an enthusiastic Thatcherite, in 1973 he even ran unsuccessfully for Conservative councilor in Bevington. He became almost a tribute to authority, from his preoccupation with spycraft and military history to dabbling with organized religion and his prodigious, litigious, letter-writing. (He tended to begin his letters with the words “Without prejudice,” a phrase Williams feels reflects his positive outlook on the world, but Wallace suspects to be more a highfalutin means of being able to sound off with impunity.)
And, though Gittins created all of his work outside of institutions, that wasn’t entirely by choice: In 1998 he submitted a piece of work to the Royal Academy. When I visit the flat, I see the piece—a bust of Alexander the Great, created in newspaper and glue. It wasn’t accepted. But he never seemed fazed by rejection, Williams explaining that he’d invariably see it as their loss, shrug, and continue work on his latest project. Perhaps he didn’t require the approval of the establishment because, in his own flat, he was the establishment. Gittins had created a visionary environment: A place where he rubbed shoulders with kings and commanders and beautiful women, where he dressed in the smartest of uniforms and corresponded with the highest offices in the land, and they with him.
He’s a romantic, creating art from the mythic history that surrounds him and the detritus of his life.
Bust of Alexander the Great (far left). Photo courtesy of The Caravan Gallery.Jarvis Cocker taking a photo in The Lion Room. Photo courtesy of Martin Wallace.Naval portraits. Photo courtesy of The Caravan Gallery.
In February, a final burst of creativity sets in at the flat. Local music students come to play there and Wallace films them. Andy McCluskey, the lead singer of the band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, drops by. Paul Griffiths, the Birkenhead Poet, performs spoken word. But it’s a last hurrah; at 4.30 p.m. on February 28, the day before the auction, their license runs out. The keys to Ron’s Place are handed back.
The next morning, however, Williams receives an email: “Just heard [the flat] is up for auction today. I would like to loan you the money needed.”
Tamsin Wimhurst is a 57-year-old history and heritage professional from Cambridge with a passion for rescuing unusual properties. In 2014, she and her husband, Mike, became the saviors of David Parr House, a Cambridge terraced house filled with beautifully preserved, intricately patterned interiors from the Arts & Crafts movement. Wimhurst was sat at breakfast flicking through a day-old Guardian when she read about Ron’s Place being put up for auction later that day. She sprang into action. “I rang my husband who was away to say we had to save this place, and made contact with Ron’s Place whilst also trying to catch a train to London,” says Wimhurst, “but I had to act quickly, as the auction was at midday.”
The morning of the auction becomes a whirlwind. Gittins’ camp had the assurance of funds from Wimhurst, but, with mere hours to the auction, no actual money had changed hands. The Wirral Arts and Culture Community Land Trust they’d set up doesn’t even have a bank account yet. With the clock ticking, Martin Wallace takes a giant plunge. He offers to use his own credit card to secure the deposit.
“It was all, you know, completely risky,” says Williams. “We were all in our van driving over to Ron’s, and Martin was saying ‘Should I? I’m gonna do it now. Are you okay with that?’”
He places the bid.
Gittins seemingly never stopped having grand plans. When his parents needed a wall outside their house, he volunteered, promptly beginning a hugely ambitious Roman wall, the construction of which rendered the garden completely unusable for 12 months. Towards the end of his mother’s life, Gittins would wheel her out of her nursing home and take her to spend the night in his flat. His siblings were horrified, but Gittins didn’t seem to care—and, by all accounts, Alice seemed delighted. But it was worrying, wearying behavior.
His family became frustrated. His sister Pat was able to retain an affection for her brother, but Pat’s husband, Henry, eventually washed his hands of Ron—and still can’t bring himself to talk about him. “Henry hasn’t got any interest—very little interest,” says Pat. “He [Ron] really had a detrimental effect on our family life, many times.”
But it’s a last hurrah; at 4.30 p.m. on February 28, the day before the auction, their license runs out. The keys to Ron’s Place are handed back.
The last time Pat saw Ron, there was none of the fire and brimstone of his more combative moments. They shared an avocado sandwich, and Ron ate a kiwi fruit. “We just chatted generally about different things,” says Pat, “nothing of any great significance. Before he left, he said, ’Can I say a little prayer with you?’ I said ‘fine.’ And he sounded quite reasonable and rational.”
But years of living in an unheated flat eventually took their toll: Gittins became ill. A local friend tried to put him in contact with social services and Age Concern, but Ron played down his illness and pretended he could look after himself, only allowing a head teacher from a local school to check in on him and deliver essentials. By this point, he had begun sleeping on the floor behind his front door, as though guarding the flat. It was here, on September 2, 2019, that Ron Gittins’ body was found—and the fight for the legacy of his extraordinary home began.
As the auction plays out, the atmosphere in the van is unbearably tense. But there is only one counteroffer—likely the landlord attempting to boost the bidding price—otherwise, the team’s listing of the property with Historic England works in warding off other bidders. At 12.40 p.m., a notification pings up on Williams’ phone. Their bid has won.
Euphoric, they pull up to Ron’s Place. Outside, sitting in his car, is the property manager who had recently berated them for the Historic England registration. They knock on his window; when he rolls it down to tell them that the house has been sold, they say “We know—we’ve just bought it!” The issue was always knowing what to do with a space that wilfully ignored the rules of the world, and instead, chaotically, gleefully, created its own. The property management company was never some vindictive captain of industry; it just hadn’t signed up for a Roman altar to be created in one of its buildings. The bland, indifferent machinery of business was simply seeking to tame something strange and wild—to turn it into another cell on a spreadsheet. Or, as Williams put it: “The notion of a developer gutting the amazing art environment created by Ron Gittins over 33 years is like deciding to gut a pyramid to create a new branch of Primark.”
Tamsin Wimhurst proved to be true to her word, providing funds from the Muller-Wimhurst Trust to ensure the ongoing survival of Ron’s Place (and Wallace’s credit rating). The home had found a benefactor who sees value in the chaos. “It is unique and quirky, with the passion of one man’s life laid bare on the walls of his home. It immediately gets your mind whirring—how, why, who, what, when?” says Wimhurst. “I just thought, ‘How could it not be saved?’”
Jarvis Cocker succinctly summed up Ron’s Place in his statement to the press: “With environments like these, you get a complete work of art that somebody is living in and that they’ve established the rules. It’s like a personal universe.” Adding, with beautiful understatement, “Everybody decorates their house in some way, Ron has just gone that extra mile.”
On March 29, the day after the sale finally goes through, I speak to Williams. She is elated: “Miracles do happen!”
There’s more work to be done. Having fought tooth and nail to preserve the dilapidated house that contains Ron’s Place, Williams, Teasdale, and Wallace are now faced with the challenge of what to do with it.
Further fundraising is beginning, with the aim of renovating the property and making it safe to welcome the public. But there’s now the sense of being at the start of a new chapter, rather than the closing of an old one.
“Ron’s Place will thrive as it has a group of passionate people behind it who have worked so hard to conserve it,” says Wimhurst. “I don’t mind what it becomes—that is for Ron’s Place to decide—but I know that the community, wellbeing, and creativity for all will be at the heart of it.”
“We want to make the house really beautiful, just make it a really fantastic place,” says Williams. Their Community Land Trust now has ambitions beyond Ron’s Place, too—to take on other old buildings and transform them into creative spaces.
I ask Williams what Gittins would have thought of the drama surrounding his old flat.“Oh, he’d have been absolutely over the moon,” she says. “He always said, ‘I will not be ignored.’ So it’s like he’s getting all the attention you could ever have wished for, even after he’s gone.”
And so, against the odds, the minotaur continues to roar. Ron’s Place—with all its grandiosity, impossible aspirations, outsized ambition, surprising accomplishments, exasperating complications, contradictions, and surprises—lives on. And so does Ron.
Max Olesker is a London-based writer-performer, comedian, and Associate Editor at Esquire Magazine UK. His feature writing has also appeared in The Observer, Times, Telegraph, and Esquire’s many international editions, and he is the co-creator of the ITVsitcom Deep Heat. His radio sitcom, The Casebook of Max & Ivan, is available on BBC Sounds.
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The first of Megan Cassidy and Gabrielle Lurie’s series investigating the San Francisco drug economy, this impressive undertaking focuses on Honduras’ Siria Valley, a collection of villages where poverty abuts expensive new homes dotted with 49ers and Warriors iconography. Such design choices aren’t rooted in sports fandom, but in the flow of people and money between the Siria Valley and the Bay Area; the latter promises financial stability, as long as you can make peace with selling fentanyl. A breathtaking piece of reporting, matched only by the series’ second piece.
One Thursday last November, the town center’s streets and benches were mostly empty at midday, its fountain dry; it was unclear whether the nearby restaurants and clothing stores were closed temporarily or for good. Yet construction was everywhere: a new church, new home additions, new roads. El Porvenir’s hardware store was the busiest spot in town.
“You shouldn’t go asking questions about El Pedernal,” a customer at the hardware store told The Chronicle’s journalists.
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In just one week, about 100 million people downloaded the app Threads, Meta’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to capitalize on Twitter’s large-scale setbacks under the leadership of Elon Musk. I was one of the 30 million or so who eagerly signed in on the first day and was happily surprised by the overall good vibes and clean user interface found within.
Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel, two of my favorite writers in the tech space, are a bit more pessimistic. But rather than solely picking apart Threads—though they admittedly do a bit of that—they train their view on the entire landscape of social media. When the billionaire boys’ club continues to bicker online and direct our digital attention at their whims, do any of us really win?
With a few threads posted, and the most eager followees following or followed, the dopamine high cleared, revealing reality: The age of social media is over, and it cannot be recovered. Zuckerberg has merely copied and pasted a social network, and we are back where we started, only with all the baggage and psychological scarring of previous connectivity experiences. Big tech companies now dictate where attention, and therefore money, power, and influence, reside. You don’t have to like that fact to admit that it’s the case: Is Threads a thing? Should we be on it?
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Sam Kinchin-Smith considers the tension inherent in green tourism writing, that need to extol the virtues of a place and invite people to share the sublime, knowing that it could bring droves of people that exact a toll on the land and the locals.
Glacier calving is a natural phenomenon that has been accelerated by global heating, part of the wider collapse and run-off of melting ice in the polar regions (and beyond) whose impact, because of the resulting rise in sea levels, is likely to be catastrophic for low-lying landmasses and communities around the world in the near future; by some measures, it already is. From Patagonia to Greenland, calving is also a tourist attraction which, thanks to improvements in smartphone camera resolution, has given rise to a YouTube subcommunity. I’ve watched scores of these videos, which may come closer than anything else on the internet to evoking Romantic sensations of the sublime. But as enormous shelves of ice break off into the sea in surges of blue and white, like slow-moving comets, it’s jarring to hear their creaking tectonic bass drowned out by a shrill treble line of hoooooly shits and whoooahs and hysterical clapping. This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but applause.
To celebrate these events, knowing what we know, is only a particularly flagrant example of the cognitive dissonance we all experience in different ways.
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Anyone who grew up with a Barbie (or Ken) doll will be enthralled by this piece. It explores not just the new film, but also Barbie’s history and complicated relationship with feminism. There has been a flood of Barbie content recently, but this reporting has far more depth than most.
“Barbie,” too, is a coming-of-age story; the figure coming of age just happens to be a full-grown piece of plastic. “Little Women” would have been a fine alternate title for it. Same with “Mothers & Daughters,” a working title for “Lady Bird.” For Barbie, as in both those other films, growing up is a matriarchal affair. It is something you do with your mother, your sisters, your aunties. Or, in Barbie’s case, with the women threaded through your product history.
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Rachel Yoder returns to the land of her family’s Amish roots, seeking folk medicine and answers. She finds them, in a way—but she also finds a different sort of homecoming, one that manages to be both uncomfortable and absolutely necessary. A lovely meshing of reporting and prose.
We talked about God because we did not want to talk about how I no longer go to church, how ten years ago I told him I didn’t believe in God, how twenty years ago I left home in love and on fire, causing extraordinary tumult, checked myself into a rehabilitation facility because I didn’t want to be alive and couldn’t articulate why, blamed my father for being too controlling and didn’t speak to him for months. We do not talk about how I have forsworn the Mennonites for decades.
It’s comforting to imagine that things go away if you leave them alone long enough. These are the questions I don’t ask my father: How did I hurt you? Are you still hurt? When you think of me, do you feel sad? Am I a failure? Can you forgive me? Can we be happy?
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A simple, yet lovely essay that connects you to the beautiful, rainy, landscape of Iceland. Pam Houston respects the horses she rides—even the stroppy mares—and her words are full of gratitude towards them.
Anna, our German guide, tall, strong, magnificently beautiful in her muck boots and men’s overalls, her thick blond hair tied in a mane-ish knot atop her head, is the horse girl we all wish we’d had the courage to be. She gathers us, says yes, that in spite of the gale and the worsening prediction (50 mph, gusting to 75), we need to saddle up and get ready to go.
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Emily Strasser discovered that for 30 years, her grandfather worked as a chemist in the Oak Ridge, Tennessee plant that was one of three secret cities involved in the Manhattan Project. Instead of turning away from this family secret, she went on a ten-year mission to bear witness not only to her grandfather’s work and the affect it had on him, but most importantly the horrific toll of the U.S.’s nuclear weapons program. For Bitter Southerner, Rachel Priest is in conversation with Strasser on her work and her memoir, Half-Life of a Secret: Reckoning With a Hidden History.
Rachel Priest: How did this book come about?
Emily Strasser: I was about to graduate from college and, at this precipice of adulthood, thinking about what kind of person I was going to be in the world. What does it mean to live a good life? All of a sudden, this memory from childhood came back — very, very vibrantly — of this photograph of my grandfather standing in front of a nuclear test blast. This was a photograph that hung in my grandmother’s house above the bed where I slept when I was a child.
RP: Going off that, you said this is an ongoing history, and it just kind of reminded me of part of your title: Reckoning With a Hidden History. And then you have a section where you talk about trying to reckon with your whole family, and your grandfather specifically. You write, “A reckoning implies that the world may be set right with some sort of calculation; good and evil measured, justice meted, balance restored. I cannot make this equation come out. I count too many different kinds of things; my units are all mixed up.” Do you feel like you’re still reckoning with this family history and the broader implications of nuclear weapons? Do you feel like there is an end to a reckoning and, if there is an end, how do you get there?
ES: I don’t think the reckoning is finished. I mean, when we speak about nuclear weapons and we think about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the ongoing production of nuclear weapons, the reckoning is so far from finished. It’s never happened, really, at all. There’s never been an apology. The 2023 G7 Summit was in Hiroshima and released a statement about nuclear weapons. They met with hibakusha [those who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] and released a statement that was really weak and made no promises about changing anything materially.
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To save the world, we have to decarbonize it. Enter the mineral-extraction industry, which is on a major upswing thanks to skyrocketing demand for substances such as lithium, cobalt, and cooper. But ending our reliance on fossil fuels by turning to a battery-powered way of life is a fraught path. Nick Bowlin attended a conference hosted by the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) to dig into the moral and environmental hazards of an electric future:
Even the most optimistic version of the future, involving reduced demand and robust recycling, will still require some mining. What this ought to look like increasingly preoccupies Patrick Donnelly, who works for the Center for Biological Diversity in Nevada. I know Donnelly—as do a lot of other journalists in the West who cover extractive industries—as a ferociously dedicated conservation advocate. A few years ago, Donnelly realized that no one was tracking all of the American lithium projects and decided to do so himself. His map now shows more than 115 potential mines, clustered in his home state. “It’s the biggest mineral rush of our lifetime,” he told me over the phone.
In an ideal world, Donnelly said, the U.S. government would put a moratorium on speculative claims and instead survey all of the country’s mineral deposits in order to identify the least harmful places to mine. This isn’t happening and won’t anytime soon. In May, the U.S. fast-tracked a manganese and zinc mine in Arizona, the first mining project added to a program designed to expedite the clean-energy transition and other infrastructure developments. But Donnelly also fears that anti-mining sentiment is turning people against electric cars—and against lithium extraction altogether. “There is zero chance we can recycle our way out of the problem,” he said. This is true. There isn’t enough lithium on the market for battery recycling to realistically meet present demand, let alone the expected increase.
“There is an element of the mining resistance movement that opposes not just particular mines but all lithium and all electric vehicles,” Donnelly went on. “Unless we’re talking about deindustrializing society, which I don’t think appeals to most people, we need to be thinking about how and where we’re getting our lithium, and critically examine our own use of these minerals, like the cell phone I’m speaking to you on now, with minerals from South America, where locals say the mines are destroying their environment and community.”
Such are the paradoxes of the globalized green economy, in which blocking a mine in one place means shifting extraction somewhere else. We want to decarbonize, yet our lives require ever-increasing supplies of energy. And so climate-minded consumers and the mining industry are locked in a self-justifying embrace. We buy an E.V. and think we are doing right by those vulnerable to rising temperatures and tides. But in trying to continue consuming as we are used to, buying stuff and zipping down the highway, we have exposed many of those same vulnerable people to another threat—the market’s readiness to kill, poison, and displace them to get minerals and metals. The mining industry, meanwhile, benefits from the self-satisfied consumerism of the E.V. buyer. For all of its disdain for environmentalists, the industry needs green consumers who seek absolution for their carbon-intensive ways of life. With their complacent inattention to the injustices inflicted by the green economy, these consumers not only fund the industry’s expansion but give it moral cover.
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Natasha Bridges blanketed the Facebook inboxes of men she didn’t know with the simplest of greetings:
hi hi
hi
Plenty of the men never replied to Natasha, but it was striking how many did. Even more striking was how quickly some of them seemed to fall for her.
Can you love an older man?
So wrote a guy named James* after just a few hours of messaging. James said that he was 56 and rode a Harley. After sending Natasha pictures of his bike, James told her, unprompted, how he would perform oral sex on her.
*Unless otherwise noted, the names of scam victims have been changed.
Other men were starry-eyed. They told Natasha that she was gorgeous, that they liked her smile and her flirtatious way of chatting, that they couldn’t wait to meet her one day. There were also sentimental types, like Brett:
I don’t know if I’ll ever be truly happy again. I think the only dream I have is if I had a special woman with me.
You know I mentioned it a couple of days ago, but I haven’t seen you for a very long time. Would you please send me a few of your pictures? I would really like to see you.
Natasha had yet to respond to Brett’s latest lovelorn message. Her silence would have been callous if she was who she said she was. But given the truth—that Natasha Bridges didn’t exist—the real cruelty might have been replying.
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The person sending messages to Brett, James, and dozens of other American men was named Richard, but he preferred to be called Biggy. He was 28 and from Nigeria. The photos he used in the Facebook account where he posed as Natasha—a 32-year-old single mother from Wisconsin, interested in economic development and cryptocurrency—were pilfered from the social media of a real woman named Jennifer. He’d used other accounts to pretend to be a gym instructor, and a lonely American soldier deployed abroad.
I knew all this because Biggy was sitting on a green sofa in my hotel room in Lagos, playing the video game Pro Evolution Soccer 17 as I read the private messages he’d sent to unsuspecting foreigners on his iPhone 6. When I asked why he was ghosting Brett, Biggy, scoring yet another goal for Australia in the Asian Cup final against Japan, shrugged. “Bro, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Being a Yahoo boy is very stressful,” he said without taking his eyes off the game. “Do you find it easy to make someone fall in love with you? The hustle is the same as real life, with just one difference: You have to pretend to be another person.”
In Nigeria, Yahoo boys are online fraudsters. Their nickname comes from the email service Yahoo, which became popular in Nigeria in the 2000s, and they are descendants of the infamous 419 scammers, who, first with letters, and later in emails, promised to help strangers get rich for a nominal advance fee. (The number is a reference to a section of the Nigerian criminal code pertaining to fraud.) Biggy is a particular kind of Yahoo boy: a romance scammer who pretends to be other people online to seduce foreigners into trusting him and giving him money.
Biggy’s game is all about intimacy. He invests time in building what seems like a real relationship with his victims. He flatters them, tells them jokes, asks intimate questions. “The most important thing about being a Yahoo boy is keeping the conversation alive,” Biggy told me. “Dating is all about patience. It takes a long time before a client starts trusting you.”
Yahoo boys, I was learning, love euphemisms.
Biggy estimated that over his ten years—and counting—as a romance scammer, he’d lined his pockets with $30,000 from people he conned. People yearning for love. People like my mother.
Hi Silvia,how are you? This is Brian. We contacted each other on Tinder, I hope you are having a wonderful day. It would be a delight for me if we can get to know more about each other, and to answer your question, I was once married, but now I am single after the divorce.
I would hope to hear from you soon
warm hugs Brian Adkins Carmel, NY 10512 bcmakins@aol.com
By a lot of metrics, my mother, Silvia, is a successful woman. She opened her own dental clinic in Spain before she was 30, and over the next two decades she served some 10,000 patients. She got married and gave birth to three boys, of which I am the youngest. But her divorce from my father in 2003, when she was 44, was turbulent and costly. After the split, my brothers and I lived mostly with our mom in various rented apartments around Madrid. For a long time, her only asset was an old Citroën C1. The bulk of her income was spent on food, education, and yearly vacations with us. “Books and travel—no matter what, there’s always going to be money for that in my house,” she’d say.
One day in December 2015, my mother’s face seemed brighter than usual. She told us at Sunday lunch that she’d met someone. They’d connected on Tinder, an app I’d encouraged her to use. The man was named Brian, and he was a handsome, divorced 52-year-old American soldier. My mother said that her feelings were real, and that Brian’s were, too.
At first my brothers and I didn’t pay any of this much attention. Jaime and Miguel were in their twenties, launching their careers. I was 19 at the time, the only one of us still living at home, but I was busy studying at university. My mother’s blossoming romance was background noise. But when she later told us that Brian was on a mission in Syria, Miguel, a pilot in the Spanish air force, scoffed. “Come on, you really believe that? It’s sketchy,” he said.
After that my mother shared updates about her new love more sparingly, and mostly with me. She showed me some of the long, passionate emails she and Brian exchanged. She’d studied English in high school but still used Google Translate to better express herself. Brian’s messages had grammatical mistakes, too—but I thought, so what?
“Sometimes I tell Brian, ‘You’re going too fast!’ ” my mother confided in me. She’d said as much in one of her messages to him:
I hope there will be many ends of the year together. I think the love of a couple is a way to go, I am sure our beginning is good and I like it. We are in different situation, my life is very comfortable, yours not, I am surrounded of friends and family, you are only with other men fed up like you. And so…and so. I understand you hang on me and in some way I appreciate it very much, but in other way it makes me feel a little bit anxious about responsibility of being what you expect of me.
Whatever doubts she had, the joy she felt overrode them. One day she came home with two rings: one for her, and one for Brian. “He’s coming to Spain,” she said, grinning. He’d told her that he wanted to leave the military and be with her.
Now my brothers and I were officially concerned. We asked her if she’d ever had a video call with Brian; when she said no, we told her we found it shady that, apart from a few photos, she’d never even seen the guy who claimed to love her. We argued, and my mom, hurt that her sons weren’t supporting her, shut herself in her bedroom. “I’m going to talk to my boyfriend,” she said before closing the door.
In early January 2016, about five weeks after my mother first connected with Brian, Jaime sent me a message while I was studying at the library for a microeconomics exam. “Carlos, we have to do something,” he wrote. I could feel his anxiety behind the typing bubble on my phone’s screen. “This guy told mum he’s going to ship her some bars of solid gold he’d found in a terrorist stash,” Jaime continued. “It’s a scam.”
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It’s hard to think of a more entertaining magazine story published thus far in 2023. With wit, style, and empathy, Reeves Wiedeman details the peculiar war that erupted between an IHOP kingpin named Domenic Broccoli and Revolutionary War history enthusiasts when a dead body was found on a plot of land in the Bronx:
On Memorial Day, Broccoli drove to his property in Fishkill, where a crowd was gathering to protest his planned development. These were the Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the town’s Revolutionary War history and, in Broccoli’s view, to making his life hell. For more than a decade, the Friends have argued—based on some evidence, but not as much as they would like—that there are more Revolutionary War soldiers buried on Broccoli’s land than anywhere else in the United States. Broccoli argues that this is rubbish and accuses his foes—with some evidence, but not as much as he would like—of going so far as to plant human remains on his lot in their effort to make it seem more grave-stuffed than it actually is.
“Is Domenic Broccoli here?” Keith Reilly, a co-president of the Friends, asked the protesters through a microphone. “Mr. Broccoli, we dare you to be a profile in courage.” The crowd included a half-dozen Revolutionary War reenactors with muskets and several people Broccoli has sued, including Bill Sandy, the archaeologist who found the first dead body. The protesters marched up and down the edge of the property—careful not to trespass lest Broccoli call the police—while honks came in from passing cars.
Broccoli had told me that he had planned to crash the protest with “guns a-blazing” but ultimately thought better of it. “If I go there and then my Bronx comes out, it’s not gonna go well,” he said. His Bronx had come out plenty in his campaign to build the IHOP as part of a Colonial-themed strip mall he was calling Continental Commons. The Friends of the Fishkill Supply Depot are a group of history buffs and retiree volunteers, and yet Broccoli claimed he had found it necessary to spend more than a million dollars battling them with archaeologists, lawyers, and the private investigators he hired as “spies” to infiltrate the Friends. As it happened, one of his spies was at the Memorial Day protest holding up a STOP CONTINENTAL COMMONS sign while surreptitiously recording the group in case anything might help the RICO case Broccoli was building.
Broccoli insists that he’s not anti-history. He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance; his vision for the IHOP involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there. And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried.
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