THE
TRUTH ABOUT OUR INTENTIONS
WE'VE BEEN IN TOWN less
than a month, and already the rumors are flying. One the one
hand, this is something that we expected. It's natural to
assume that when a group of notoriously belligerent journalists
from halfway across the planet move without any warning or
obvious explanation to a place like Buffalo... well, questions
will arise. What are these guys doing here? Why did they come?
What do they have planned?
While this is not a question that we here at the Beast can
answer easily, there is one thing that we can say for certain,
and that is this: that those rumors that we have come here
to blow up the HSBC tower, killing everyone inside and setting
the whole downtown area ablaze, are absolutely unfounded.
We repeat: we have no plans to crash a small commercial jetliner
hijacked en route to Toronto into the HSBC tower with the
aim of destroying the entire downtown area, human population
and all. It's ridiculous even to think that we might. After
all, we didn't labor for five years in Russia to create a
successful and critically-acclaimed newspaper called the eXile
just to throw it all away in one last, desperate, suicidal
act halfway around the world-- no matter how much we might
want to.
American Airlines can rest assured: there is absolutely no
way that we will be travelling under assumed names on flight
1127, leaving Laguardia for Toronto, at any time in the near
future. Furthermore, it is both slanderous and irresponsible
to suggest that there is anything suspicious or out of the
ordinary in the fact that several members of the Beast staff
have have learned to pilot, but not to land or take off, a
twin-engine passenger liner. A great many people take flying
lessons; not all of them complete their studies.
Our response to all those questions about our strangely frenzied
patterns of foreign travel in the last few months, including
clandestine trips to and from uncharted moutnainous regions
of Abkhazia, Chechnya and Georgia? We just throw up our hands
in amazement. Have we as Americans become so paranoid that
we can no longer accept as neighbors people who happen to
have friends in heavily-armed extralegal territories within
the Iranian sphere of influence? Have we lost the ability
to live and let live-- just because the guy next door sometimes
wears a turban, a canteen, and an ammo belt, and spends his
evenings unloading crates marked in Arabic from a panel truck
with no license plates? Has it really come to that?
The
last thing on our minds.
We
at the Beast believe that tolerance is America's, and Buffalo's,
salvation. While our president speaks of defeating enemies
abroad, and uniting in vigilance against threats here at home,
we believe that our primary responsibility as Americans is
to love our neighbors. We believe that there are a great many
ways in which even we here in Western New York can learn to
achieve a greater sense of closeness with our fellow citizens.
We can, for instance, learn to better understand and appreciate
the point of view of the practioners of other faiths-- the
Muslim, the Buddhist, and even (as Melville would call him)
the Hindoo.
We can put ourselves in the shoes of the black and the brown,
and genuinely try to imagine what the bite of our repressive
white society feels like-- the harrassment by police, the
persecution by landlords, the cold stares of would-be employers.
And at at approximately 11:38 a.m. sometime between May 29
and June 17, we can allow ourselves to be momentarily distracted
by a small and apparently inconsequential electrical fire
that mysteriously breaks out in the corner of the air traffic
control tower at the Buffalo airport. We can take off our
headsets, leave our seats, and walk over to inspect the commotion,
leaving the skies unattended for a crucial four-to-seven minute
period.
These are just some of the things that we as citizens of Buffalo
should do to make our world a better place in these uncertain
times. One thing we must do, however, is learn to refrain
from indulging in hurtful rumors and innuendo. We here at
the Beast have already suffered because of our collective
failure in this area. Our only purpose in coming to Buffalo
was to come home and put out a newspaper that wittily blends
nightlife and club reviews with incisive commentary and hard-hitting
journalism. Our only thought, our only desire, is to serve
U, the reader.
There is simply no truth to the rumor that our plans are any
more involved than that-- that they involve acts of catastrophic
terrorism, outbursts of violent misogyny, or, say, the running
of hideous lounge singer Tom Sartori out of town with a lead
pipe and a four-foot cattle prod. Nothing of that sort has
even been discussed in our offices. We're your friends. Honestly.
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