#529_ Human Spectacle
2024.01.12 金 午前 2:48 ・ 59分 38秒
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all captured by 6 cameras. Yours at this american life org if you want it thanks. In October 2003 a guy was brought into the psychiatric emergency room at belview hospital in New York city. Dr. Joe Gold was the chief attending psychiatrist that day and saw him.
He felt that his life was essentially a reality show that he's been recorded for years that everyone in his life was an actor reading from a script. And he came to New York essentially to test this hypothesis.
He thought that maybe 9, 11 was faked just to get a reaction out of him on reality tv.
And if he came to New York and if the world trade centers were still standing he would know that that was in fact the case. If in fact they had been destroyed then he would admit that perhaps he was delusional.
Then once he got to New York instead of visiting the twin towers he walked into the United nations and asked for asylum asylum from a tv show those filming him without his consent 24 hours a day which is how he ended up in belview.
Dr. Gold didn't think much of this. People show up at belview with lots of weird delusions all the time. And then a few months later another guy walks in with the same idea that he was being filmed 24 7 and BroadCast around the world. And the second guy like the first one mentioned film
the 1998 movie the Truman show.
Both of them named the Truman show by name. They said my life is like the Truman show.
Truman is played by Jim Kerrie. He's filmed all day every day on a program that is BroadCast to billions of people around the globe. His wife, his best friend, everybody around him is an actor
everybody knows it's a tv show but him until one day he starts to see CLUES that make him suspicious. And just to be clear you're not saying that the Truman show necessarily triggered this like people watch the tuman show and suddenly something in their brain snaps.
Yeah exactly. On the contrary I think it's just when people are becoming psychotic things feel a little bit unusual a bit odd but
what would explain all this weirdness? And perhaps if you've seen the movie and that's kicking around your head you might say yes this is it this is what's happening to me
if your psychosis includes both paranoia and a sense that you are very very important what psychiatrists called grandiosity. 30 years ago you know you might think that the CIA or the KGB is watching you all the time these days. You have another possible explanation reality tv.
A few months later a third patient showed up with the same delusion and a few months after that a 4th Dr. Gold started calling it the Truman show delusion.
He's just written a book about it with his brother Ian called suspicious minds. In one case in the book a patient a super smart guy an academic very altruistic I believed that he was part of an elaborate game show and the world was watching him and betting on everything that he did.
And this was a really fun thing that everyone would be doing online and the money is collected would go to charities all over the world and that every single human being on earth would be given some amount of money and the world would be you know bettered for.
One of the things that he included in his delusion you write in your book is that he has the thought that he actually was the mastermind who created this game show that he was on and that he controlled it and he knew the rules when he had originally created the show
but somehow he had forgotten that and all the rules which is so interesting because of course it's true like he did invent the game show and the only fact that he's missing is that it's not real it's all in his own head.
That's yeah an interesting way of putting it. It is kind of fantastical
and heartbreaking like part of him knows he made it up but he can't grasp
he does not remember. At one point he suggests that he told his best friends this is what I'm going to do. You're going to run the show but you will now hypnotize me and I will forget what we're talking about now so we can do this really good deed for humanity.
Some of these patients respond to treatment some don't same as with other delusions and psychoses. But Dr. Gold says that if they do come back to reality
some feel a great relief if they've been persecuted. It's quite embarrassing if you think about it every moment of your life. I mean when you're in the shower literally everything is filmed
and so they feel quite good about it. At the same time there's a certain sadness that they're not particularly important.
Do they miss being the most famous person in the world?
No question. There are some who feel that that's a huge loss. At the same time I think you know they return to the notion that they're mentally ill which in and of itself is an unfortunate and sad thing.
Psychosis aside I think all this illustrates so clearly there's a downside and an upside to being on stage for the whole world to see a human spectacle against your will. And today in our program we have people who became just that
they have an experience so few of us have that we all get to see from afar. They are on display for everybody and not because they chose
what that feels like the positive parts and the negative side and the real life reality of the whole thing. From wbez Chicago it's this american life distributed by public radio international imer glass stay with us
nkwan I am the egg plant kuku katube and the tv genre that's devoted to pure human spectacle reality tv. You know people fight drunkenly in hot tubs they eat live spiders for money but none of that can hold a candle to this show.
A show that aired in Japan all the way back in 1998 it was called susunu Den PA Shonin and one of its segments in particular got the attention of one of our producers Stephanie Fu.
The segment is called Sweepstakes life. It starts the way a lot of these shows do with a bunch of people at an audition. One guy beats out everyone else. He's 22 years old a comedian just starting out in his career. His name is Nasubi.
Nasubi means egg plant in japanese a nickname he got because he is a long face. The producers tell him they have a unique idea for a show something they've never tried before. It may or may not air but if it does he'll be the star he'll be famous.
The producers blindfold him, put him in a car and take him to a small apartment. Then they tell him to take his clothes off.
Yeah not at all.
That wipes the grin off his face.
Wasn't just my personal sort of shame or sort of issues about nudity per se. My dad is a COP and when I first announced that for my career choice was going to be comedy he was not thrilled and we had to go through some things to get him around to the idea.
He said you know the one thing that I must never do in public is strip.
Oh no
so there I was and then this guilt towards that I was breaking the promise to my father as publicly as possible.
But he strips he grabs a pillow, holds it over his groin and looks around the room. There's no chair in the room no bed just a coffee table and magazines tons of magazines.
The producers tell him that from now on if he wants food clothes he will have to win them by entering Sweepstakes in those magazines. They give him postcards to send in for prize drawings. He'll be freed from the apartment after he WINS one million yen or 10,000 dollars worth of prizes.
Until then he isn't allowed any outside contact with the world. He can't call his family he can't talk to friends and oh they tell him don't forget to put tapes in this little camera here every two hours and record yourself we'll come pick up the tapes once a day then they say
all right later nusby screams are you for real?
It's a dog.
Nasbi says he'd signed no contract but he didn't have anything better to do. So he sat down and wrote and soon was entering two to 300 contests a day. And while he waited for prizes to arrive he had no food. Nasby got frighteningly thin very quickly.
You could see the sharp angles of his collar bones.
Well starvation is a good word for it. The staff got together and would give me basically a very simple little bread
each day. So I had bread and water essentially for the first two weeks but then as soon as the results started to come in then that stopped and everything shifted over entirely to the things that I could win through Sweepstakes.
After two weeks he finally won some sugary drinks. A few days after that he won a bag of rice. When the postman dropped it off it was like Christmas nice to be danced like a madman.
Were you trying to be a good performer and be funny when you were doing that or was it just really genuine joy?
Initially of course I was there as a performer and I wanted to be a comedian. And but somewhere in the middle you know the whole business of staying alive became my full time occupation. So I think what you saw if you saw any dancing it was really just a human being expressing great joy.
So he danced for this package of rice but then he stopped short. He realized he didn't own a pot to cook the rice in. But after a couple of days of failed attempts he figured out that if he put some rice in an empty drink container and left it near his single gas burner
eventually turned into a kind of porridge
and I could eat delicious rice every day. I remember how good that felt. And then there was the slow trepidation as it started to vanish and then it ran out. And the only food substitute that I had been able to win in the Sweepstakes was dog food. You know after
let's say 6 weeks of eating dog food when then I was able to get more rice and it arrived I really felt a kind of special kind of joy at being able to sort of return to humanity in a sense and taste delicious rice again.
Back then there was a kind of Sweepstakes mania in Japan. The country was in the middle of a terrible recession and some wondered whether one could subsist entirely on their winnings.
And so when Sweepstakes life debuted almost immediately after Nasby was first shut in the room it was an instant hit. Nasbe had no idea. He didn't even know he was on tv. He believed what the producers had told him that he'd record some videotapes and maybe some day it would end up on the air
on television. Nasby's groin was hidden by a purple cartoon egg plant that floated around as he moved. Everything he did was accentuated with ridiculous boying boeing sound effects and puffy rainbow letters floated above his head.
But these effects popped up just as often. When Nasby was despondent. The show took every chance to poke fun at him whether he was muttering to himself, dancing around or doing terrible head stands. You know the dumb stuff you do when you think no one's watching
except people were for context. In the us game of thrones usually has around 9 million viewers. Nasbi had 16 million in a country less than half the size of ours. People thought nasbit was the funniest comedy act they'd ever seen. And I have to admit as a viewer
once in a while when Nasby got something really awesome in the mail I couldn't help it. I laughed too. Even though I knew how much he was suffering I couldn't help it.
His unfiltered joy is contagious. Though. As a foreigner watching sweepstakes's life most of the time when the studio audience cracked up I felt sick. I thought what could possibly be funny about this?
I mean that was maybe a time when Japan was going through some things and they needed to sort of do that. Roughly 50 years of prosperity has finally come to a close and people really uncertain about their futures. You know I think people just tended to watch the show and say
you know I got it bad but look at pornaspi know he's got it worse. Now there's a lot more awareness of the weak and of people who need extra support. And I don't I don't think the average japanese today would think it was funny that there was a guy you know naked in a room somewhere.
Nasby won hundreds of prizes but many of them were useless to him. Spice girls tickets for example or a tv with no cable or a bicycle he sent away for clothes but never won anything he could wear. He was naked the entire time he was in that room for the entire show
and as the weeks went by then months Nasby started to look less and less sane. He grew a beard his hair was wild and he started talking differently slower
he'd make really creepy faces into the camera. At one point he won some toys and he started talking to them. He took a stuffed seal for a walk around the apartment an action figure became his son say and he got life advice from it.
And if right now you are sitting there thinking how in god's good name is this possible? Why was this allowed? Imprisonment solitary confinement starvation watching I thought this isn't a reality tv show it's a psychological experiment made public
plus boing bangs. Of course was there anything preventing you from backing out at that point like was the door locked?
There was no lock on the and producers later asked me so why why didn't you escape? I was naked so I would have had to go outside naked and seek help
but I don't think that that's what kept me in there. The only thing I really have to say is that I said I'd do it and I do what I say.
That was it the only reason I kept asking him but wait really why
the phrase Yamato damashi the japanese spirit which is just that you sort of stick through you endure things you know when you're given something whether it's easy or whether it's hard you just really do you know you're obliged to follow it through.
Nasby did finally win 10,000 dollars worth of prizes. It took him almost an entire year but at last he'd completed the challenge. When he reached his goal
producers didn't tell him anything about it. Instead they snuck into his apartment in the middle of the night, put a blindfold on him, took him out to a car, gave him clothes. Nasby seemed to think this was a good thing. He was laughing, giggling
but when he took the blindfold off he found out he'd been taken to Korea.
When I got off on the other side in Korea I took off the mask and they said congratulations you've achieved your 10,000 dollars. This is your reward you get to have a trip in Korea. So I got to do a little sight seeing that day
and I thought wow that was a long thing. Boy what I've been through. But then when they at the end of the day they took me back to my room and there was the exact same room set up in the exact same way.
They'd recreated his little apartment complete with the magazines the stuff seal, the postcards exactly how he'd left it except in Korea. And they told him great now all you have to do is start over and win your airfare back home.
This was just like somebody just had pulled the floor out from under me and I just fell. I I didn't know that humans could be that cruel.
Did you feel like you were going insane?
Anything the opposite of insane I lost all energy. It's like somebody had just sucked the life out of me. I didn't want to talk I didn't want to breathe I didn't want to move a muscle I had reached the end I was just that was finished.
He told the producer that I wouldn't do it. I refused and we went back and forth for quite a while actually but in the end kudos to his skill as a negotiator I did give in and do the last section of
why did you do it? What did he say that actually convinced?
Well it was just got exhausted if anything. I mean he wasn't leaving I couldn't just sort of get up and storm out. I had made no preparations for being in Korea and so at the end I just said yeah whatever and so I continued.
After all he was naked with no money in another country. If you watch the clip, the producers just tell him he's trapped show him looking shocked and cut away. The studio audience laughed.
Nasby continued his writing routine for four more months and then the final episode aired picture. The producers sneak into nasby's room and blindfold him again, dress him, drive him to another location. They release him in yet another bare room
and he sighs and instinctively takes off all his clothes. Then suddenly all four of the walls around him fall down.
That's him screaming. Turns out he is on stage in a huge studio in Japan in front of an enormous audience.
Nasvi, congratulations on your goal.
Nusby looks horrified. Two television hosts cautiously approach him and talk to him like a baby telling him congratulations. Nasby says frightened my house fell down and there's all these people here.
It's finally over presses the host you're finished. Nasby should be happy but he looks thoroughly weirded out. Remember nasbi didn't even know he was being BroadCast. The producers told him that it was an experiment that they didn't know if he'd ever make it on air.
So he's blown away. When they tell him about the tv show that a secret camera in his apartment once even BroadCast a 24 hour live stream of his actions they tell him his diaries were published and are best sellers.
Clips from him enjoying a specific brand of ramen turned into commercials and endorsement deals. He was on the cover of magazine then they play a bunch of clips from the show. Nasby blinks he says did I do that? That was me.
So I sat there realizing that this new sort of life was I was no longer just a nobody. I was the entire nation had been watching me for 15 months and you know to be honest I thought you know what the hell's where is my country coming to? I mean I was you know
I'm very happy that you know my journey was not for nothing but it's still
unsurprisingly Nasby left the show with some scars. He had a lot of trouble holding a conversation for 6 months and he felt sweaty and uncomfortable in clothes for a year. And his role didn't help his comedy career like he'd hoped.
He was mostly offered roles that required him to be goofy and naked. He's a dealist celebrity now and has the dwindling bank account to match. In talking to him it felt like he's really worked hard to turn that traumatic experience into a positive story. He tells himself
he even says he's thankful for the experience.
I don't want to overstate it but it was kind of meditative in a way. You know I had a lot of time to think about my life and a lot of time to think about a lot of stuff.
That certainly is a very zen way to look at.
I mean it's you know it's 10 some years since I finished since I did that project. And after that everything has been much easier and much better. You know I mean obviously
I'm able to deal with things. I see things happening or I see situations around myself and I think that's nothing like what I went through in that room
and people still remember him. That's more than one could say. For most of the other denta shown in characters none of them lasted as long as Nasby or became as famous. The show ended in 2002 after its ratings began to drop.
I came out of the whole thing in a sense with the very best of possible results. A lot of people were not so fortunate. There were terrible things that happened related to the show.
One contestant on Denpa Shonen almost died of dehydration while trying to hitch hike across Africa. Some people were starved until they completed various challenges.
Another man was forced to go into a gay club in Australia and offer condoms to men until he was assaulted. The video cuts out but you can hear him scream. And the mastermind behind all this the producer of the show the guy who convinced Nasby to keep going in Korea his name was Toshio Zuccia.
Back in the 90s he was considered the king of japanese reality tv. Last year 14 years after sweepstak's life ended succia called Nasubi who wasn't thrilled to hear from him. At first
I had some you know let's say mixed feelings about him a little resentment maybe yeah I kept my distance for a very long time and then actually just last year he got in touch with me and apparently it sort of came to his attention that maybe he had put people through
maybe more than they deserved. And so he invited me to dinner and he spent the evening sort of explaining why he did what he did and apologizing. I think yeah I think we pretty much came to terms and I welcome the opportunity to work with him again certainly.
Wow he would work with him again. That's really that's shocking. And what was his reason for putting you through what he did?
He wanted something that would move people and you don't get that out of just sort of somebody playing around. He wanted to see something real. He wanted to see he wanted to pull miracles out of people and he wanted to it was done for the purpose of of getting a miracle on film.
And that seemed to me like well I'll be honest it sounds like something an evil puppet master would say. So I had to. I talked to Toshio Suuccia on the phone. He's a round middle aged guy bleached platinum blonde hair.
He confirmed that he reached out to Naseby and that when they met Nasby told him very honestly how painful his experience on the show was. Soccia says he listened and was moved but he says he wasn't sorry
about Nasby about any of the segments he produced for Den Puonin about any of the contestants not in the slightest. I use the same interpreter for our interview that I use for nausbes. Here's tuccia.
I was enthralled by their struggle. I was thrilled by their personal struggle so I was watching them succeed. I have no regrets about anything I did with that show.
Nasby said that you apologized to him when you guys talked. Is that correct or no
I put him through a lot. If you say that you have a sports team and you have a coach who runs his players through very difficult maneuvers
at the end of the day he may pat him on the back and say sorry for putting you through such a rough struggle. It wasn't me expressing that I shouldn't have done the project.
Soccia has a lot of lofty ideas of what the show is trying to accomplish. And when he talks about them you do get the sense that it was in fact intended to be a sort of psychological experiment.
The whole project was trying to reach at some very elemental a simple humanity. You see nasbi had been sort of brought to a state where he was such an elemental part of sort of his existence that he danced without realizing he had ever danced and he danced on a regular basis.
The modern individual is sort of shackled by convention and expectation and all these other things that we wear from day to day. And I wanted to see them drop some of that to see the simple humanity and then to see actual gratefulness.
It's weird to think about but the fact of the matter is what Suu Kyi is saying is true. Den Pas Shonen did really capture humanity in a rare way a way you don't ever really see even on the craziest of american reality tv shows
hungry starving alone unaware that he was being watched Nasby was totally innocent and totally animal. Of course it's cruel to bring a human being to that point and it takes a special kind of cruelty to take someone at their most vulnerable and add wacky sound effects to their suffering.
A couple of weeks into nasby's challenge before he won any solid food when he was hungriest a delivery man came to the door bearing rawmen and stirfied vegetables. It's 1700 yen altogether. The man said I don't have any money. Nasubi replied sorry my mistake the delivery man said and left.
Nasby sat there his head hung a contestant in a real life hunger game the smell of ramen lingering in the air.
Stephanie foe is one of the producers of our program. Coming up we go to a land where highway coover reliefs are sunk in a vast meadow with one man. It tries to document how things really are. That's in a minute from Chicago public radio and public radio international. When our program continues
this podcast of this american life is supported by people with five dollars burning a hole in their pocket who enjoy video entertainment produced by this american life. That's right. Video of our craziest most ambitious live show ever is at our website this american life org
this american life amer glass. Each week in our program of course we choose a theme bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show human spectacle.
We have stories of people who go on display in front of others lots and lots of others even though they are not so crazy about doing that. We've arrived at act two of our program act two I always feel like somebody's watching me.
We've talked a lot in today's program so far about reality tv and of course what makes reality tv entertaining is very very simple and that is editing
editing. If they just set up cameras and showed you all 24 hours in anybody's day you know how interesting could that possibly be? Well here is a story of somebody trying just that
a story of everyday people being treated as human spectacle and being treated that way precisely because of their everydayness. Ariel Subar explains
here's how it worked. On a tuesday morning in the spring of 1949 a 7 year old boy named Raymond birch was fast asleep in his bed. His mother walked into his bedroom and said Raymond time to get up for school. When the boy opened his eyes
he saw a scientist with a clipboard and timer standing in the corner of his room. The scientist a stranger to the boy just stared didn't say a word. The boy squirmed out of bed and reached for his clothes. The scientist wrote 701 m. Raymond picked up a sock.
In the late 1940s and early 50s scientists followed kids in houses school yards and streets across the town of oscalusa, Kansas taking pages of notes on the littlest things they did or said
6 33 PM. Bradley walked deliberately to where his sister sat playing with the puppy and hit her on the head twice just as hard as he could hit. His sister looked very surprised and annoyed. 1106 am. Fred skidded on the floor so that he fell with his body partially under the swing.
He yelled whoops and then lay still since he saw the swing coming back over him. 1137 m. Margaret's mother asked why can't you play with your dolls and let that go Margaret kept on painting the pillars before neither looking at her mother nor answering her.
All of this was happening under the watch of a university of Kansas psychologist named Roger Barker who was bent on taking his field in a radically new direction because psychology was still struggling in those days to be taken seriously as a science.
Most of barker's colleagues imitated other kinds of scientists doing lots of experiments in labs but none of this made sense to Barker.
Humans didn't live in laboratories they lived in the real world and that's where Barker wanted to study them in the wild the way abotanist looked at flowers in the field
or a primatologist tracked apes through a forest. So when the university of Kansas called in 1947 and asked Barker if he wanted to chair its psychology department, Barker said I'll take the job but on one condition you find me a small town. A dean at the school said he knew just the place
oscalusa population 7
when Roger Barker first drove up into the hills of northeastern Kansas to see oscalusa he must have been beside himself. The place was a norman rockwell painting not too rich, not too poor, sturdy families and modest houses. It was the picture of middle America.
Barker wanted to study what he called the naturally occurring behavior of free ranging persons. And to do that he told his field workers to become part of the scenery visible and friendly but not obtrusive. The last thing we want to do, he said is give people the guinea pig feeling.
Barker took his own advice and moved his entire family to oscalusa. They settled in a beat up house near the town square,
joined the presbyterian church and became active in the town's social and civic organizations. And that left Barker just as exposed as the oscalucans he planned to put under his microscope. You'll be watching us a local mother told the researchers one day but don't forget we'll be watching you.
One of the first things Barker wanted to do in oscalusa was to document a day in the life of an ordinary boy. Barker didn't have a hypothesis about the boy or about 7 year olds. He wasn't testing for anything. In particular
he wanted only to show the world that following a kid for a day could produce a ton of interesting data. Scientists could later break down that data in an infinite number of ways depending on their interests and the goals of their research
which was how little Raymond birch woke up that morning to find a scientist standing over him. On that tuesday, April 26th 8 researchers taking turns like runners in a relay race followed Raymond for 13 hours straight.
The book that came out of it one boy's day was 435 pages long. It had an entry for nearly every minute of raymond's day. The researchers tried to record not just raymond's words and movements but also his perceptions, motives and feelings.
They noted that ramond mumbled with a mouthful of toast at breakfast. They followed him as he walked with his mom to her job at the county clerk's office and looked on
as he drew a picture of a cowboy with a long beard. They watched Raymond find a baseball bat in the grass and pick it up. Oh boy he said. According to their notes he tossed a stone in the air and swung but accidentally clipped a flag pole 824
this made a wonderful hollow ringing noise so we proceeded to hit the flagpole again 825 am. He went around and around and around the pole hitting it with a bat as he did so until he became so dizzy that he fell down bat and all.
Even before the book about raymond's day was published Barker felt it was destined for greatness. It would find its way onto campuses as a staple of psychology courses he thought and into the hands of artists novelists and laymen interested in the cultural scene
we believe it will become a sort of classic and be in demand for a long time. He wrote in a January 1951 letter but one boy's day never took off. And by April 1959 Barker crestfallen asked Harper and row to ship him the 70 remainders languishing in his warehouse.
Part of the trouble was simply the book's premise in its defiant first sentence. Barker calls the book a scientific document but other scientists had a hard time seeing that the book was just a tiktk chronology of raymond's day. There wasn't any theory or analysis
and this annoyed many of the reviewers. In serious academic journals one reviewer wrote the reader is struck by the fact that he is encountering only raw data. How can one evaluate such materials without a theoretical framework? In other words what does it mean?
Barker lived in oscalusa the rest of his life but he abandoned his day in the life studies. After just a few years. There were more revealing and less labor intensive ways he discovered to study human beings in their natural habitats. Today
field studies of naturally occurring behavior are no more common in psychology than they were in barker's time. The costs and logistics are just too staggering. One rare but recent Barker like effort was conducted by ucla's center on the everyday life of families.
Researchers there embedded in the homes of 32 middle class families in Los Angeles for a week and videotaped nearly every waking minute. But the ratio of cost and effort to interesting results remains as lopsided today as it was in barker's time. The New York times reported that quote
after more than 9 million dollars and untold thousands of hours of video watching the researchers found that well, life in these trenches is exactly what it looks like
a fire shower of stress, multitasking and mutual nit picking. One guy in particular who's not a big fan of these studies, Raymond birch the boy I tracked him down a few years ago his real name is Gary Morgan and he's now a retired utility worker in his early 70s living in Pennsylvania.
Roger Barker autographed gary's copy of one boy's day and personally inscribed it calling Gary its quote real author. But Gary has yet to get past its first pages. I have to say why is this interesting? He told me there's nothing happening in this book as far as I can tell.
What is it going to tell them that I was standing there chewing on my finger nails.
Ariel Subar is the author of the outsider a biography of Roger Barker. It's available as an Amazon kindle single
victory I am a rock I am an island. These last few awful weeks in Iraq as the New York times put it jihadists are entrenching positions in the north and west. The national army seems incapable of challenging them
lots of fighting lots of death. The website Iraq body count says that over 1700 people have died this month the highest number of deaths of any month since 2007 with all that happening the people of Iraq have become a reluctant spectacle for the rest of us. Around the world.
There's been excellent coverage of the breaking news here on public radio and elsewhere too but we wondered how it is looking to people inside the country. What are they seeing
and what is it like to be living there right now? So between Thursday of last week that's June 19th and tuesday of this week that's June 24th Nancy updyke called around Iraq to find out.
I called about a dozen people in different parts of the country and I found out that that's also what they themselves were doing calling friends in other parts of Iraq to try and get some sense of what is going on where
because what's happening to iraqis right now is very different depending on where they are.
Hello
hello jo amir' Nancy
yes Nancy you called in a very good time. I'm just about to get into my car somewhere else.
For years he worked for an american NGO that dealt with landmines in Iraq.
He lives in erbille it's a city in the north the part of Iraq that's governed by the kurds. They have their own very tough security force called the peshmerga who've been keeping Erbil safe.
If you tell your family I am going to arabil it's in Iraq they will just cannot believe it. Wow you are going to Iraq right and you can believe how safe is a real and how it is growing. And you know I mean I am driving now this is bicycle rider. It seems like it's a bicycle race.
Oh there's a bicycle race wow
the 11 bicycle drivers they are exactly in front of me now passing by okay just say hello to them OK yeah no ibille is definitely f.
It's not unusual for a war or conflict to have pockets like this where life is incongruously normal. But because herbil and other kurdish areas are safe at this point there are also places that iraqis and syrians are fleeing to.
The UN says there are now an estimated 300,000 displaced people in the kurdish region of Iraq. Some are living in hotels or with families but others are just sweltering in camps.
In these camps they don't have air coolers they don't have cold water you know all these people are in these camps. It is a disaster Nancy. The temperature in urbil it is 6, 30 in the evening and the temperature is 35 celsius. I'm talking
yeah 35 is I'm going to see what it is in fahrenheit hold on. Yeah it's 95 degrees fahrenheit so very hot even though it's night.
No no no. Now it is very cool it is very cool. Now this is the time when people come out for working and going for coffee and stuff like that but in the noon time it goes up to 44 next month it becomes in the noon time it goes up to 550
that is 120 degrees. If you've ever been in a place that hot you know it feels like being punched in the face. Chewamir is kurdish he has two young kids 6 and four years old. And for so many years he and his wife worried that he might be killed for working for americans
or just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Jew Mir says if there was no more Iraq if it was chopped up into different countries he really wouldn't miss
at least to have cistan state. So whether it will be divided into four parts three part or two parts we don't care. As long as there is Kurdistan state in place everybody every curs will hope to have independent Kurdistan really I mean nobody would like to stay any longer with Iraq.
About 60 miles west and a little north of Erbil is Mosul. That's the first city in Iraq that was invaded by ISIS, the sunni militant group that's been fighting in Syria and now is in parts of Iraq.
One of the other producers here called the man in Mosul Ziyad Al Senjari. He's a stringer for different news outfits reuters, the BBC. We reached him on June 19th 9 days after ISIS took over the city.
Actually I went out today to do some shopping. I went to the center of mussul I bought some things from there and I found that life is going on. Most of the markets are open there's lots of food, vegetables and the prices
are against the expected the prices have went down and we were expecting that it would go up.
The iraqi security forces who used to police Mosul are now all gone. They were mostly shiite and ziadzes. Plenty of the city's sunni majority felt like good riddants. When Ziad talks about ISIS he calls them the gunmen.
We know that the gunmen are supposed to be barbarians but you can go anywhere you can park anywhere you can do whatever you want. And this is something strange this is something that we weren't expecting life in general. Most of the roads in mussul have been opened
the checkpoints have been removed the concrete barriers that were there are removed there is no violence there is no shooting
that's how Ziad sees it. I reached another man in Mosul, a political science professor at the university there who said of course there's no violence because it was ISIS who was doing the shooting and the bombing when they were attacking the iraqi security forces.
Now that they've driven the security forces out of the city ISIS is running the place. The professor said he's not going to work these days higher education isn't really functioning in the city. He said he's afraid of ISIS and what they'll do next
ISIS have distributed their symbol to each and every mosque. There's no mosque operating in the city without their logo basically on the gate and inside where the preacher stands. Their messages are that first we are in a transitional state. As soon as we establish the fundamentals of the
islamic state things are going to be different. We are coming to relieve the city of the evil the forces of evil meaning the iraqi state forces the shiites the city itself is in deep slumber it's terrified and fear is all around.
Currently there are no assassinations and killings but people are still afraid because they know how ISIS operates they know that it's only a matter of time and that ISIS is now being so nice only because they want to win people over. For the people of Mosul there's no other solution now other than
and
being quiet and sitting at home and waiting for the worst thing to happen.
In Baghdad. I called another professor, a professor of linguistics mohammed he is going to work. He said he was shocked when ISIS went into Mosul and worried but he says now he's not that worried. He's Shia in a city Baghdad that's majority Shia.
The first time I interviewed Muhammad was four years ago just before the us officially ended its combat mission in Iraq. And he told me at the time about going to lunch with a sunni friend again mohammed Ashia and the friend told him casually over lunch
when the americans leave we the sunni resistance we are going to take back the country. And after telling that story mohammad talked about Shia sunni tensions in Iraq generally. This was back in 10
and I called him now because I wanted to ask him something which is in the United States what we hear about Iraq and the fighting is that it's all sectarian it's sunni versus Shia.
Isis and the other groups that are fighting with them are sunni the prime minister Shia the militias driving around Baghdad Shia and so on and so on. But when I've talked to iraqis over the last 10 years and this is my experience but other reporters have also told me they get this.
If I ask an iraqi are you sunni or Shia? Their answer is often and annoyed. Why are you asking me that? That's not how I think about things. I'm iraqi. So I asked the professor what's going on and his take was of course they say that in public
but deep inside they are all defending their sectarian identity. And when they are at home they will teach their children how to hate Chiat and Shia. They teach them how to hate the news. In fact somebody said it that in sectarianism is like adultery. All
are denouncing publicly but all are you know let us say
people denounce it in public and then they just do it behind.
Yes yes everyone is doing it everyone is sectarian actually. Now look at the social networks the Facebook pages because many people have their imitation names have their studio names so they will speak freely against the Shia and the shiats will speak freely against
the suns in the morning. We will say no there is no difference between Shia and sunns we are all iraqis. So this is why when you ask somebody
but I mean all of these all of these things that you're saying is this what you think? You personally when you go to university you talk you talk against sectarianism if anyone brings it up. But when you get home
when the private
you're like this is the way it is. Is that true for you personally?
Yes yes actually it's the truth. I myself do it. Yes yeah frankly speaking I've got to be frank.
Yeah
namshin hello I'm here
I'm here
I'm here can you hear me? Yeah so I told to you yes yes yes.
Oh hi Nancy how are you? I'm good I'm good I'm good.
This is the last call I'm going to play for you to Laal Ajil. He's near Basra way in the south of Iraq a 7 plus hour drive from Baghdad. Tell used to work for USAID now he works for an oil company in the south but his family, his wife and his five year old daughter are back in Baghdad. His daughter
when this crisis started stopped going to kindergarten and his wife has taken her vacation so that she can just sit tight at home with their daughter and see how things play out in the next few weeks.
Tlal is Shia but he's secular and he lives in a neighborhood that used to be mixed sunni Shia occurred and then became mostly sunni after the sectarian fighting in Baghdad during the Iraq war. Tallo and I talked a couple of times this call was at night after we got off work
you know Nancy the common issue that you hear from all iraqis is that we don't want to divide Iraq into three countries sinasia this is a nightmare for us and today I heard that this might be happening.
Where did you hear
in the company you were talking we were a few iraqis you know
this point I mean we're going to divide in Iraq. I mean the kurds sunnis Shia
they would be happy if it's if it's divided and you know they would just keep keep this out. I mean they have all the oil
we don't need Baghdad we don't need up north mossl we don't need PuR have our own region.
Yeah
this is a nightmare. I mean is this a new Iraq?
If it was divided that way sunnis in the north Shia in the south and then Kurdistan where would you live?
I don't know I don't have any other place to live. I cannot live with. Sney I cannot live with I cannot live with third I think I'm going to be homeless or something like that. I don't know. Tonightmare
in case this isn't clear of course Talal could live with shiaz he's Shia but the point is that he doesn't want to live in a sectarian one horse country or city. He wants to live in Iraq he wants his daughter to be iraqi he wants to live in a neighborhood like they used to live in.
Talking to tollal I kept thinking about Yugoslavia this country that existed for decades and then just didn't. Suddenly you couldn't be yugoslavian anymore. You had to go be with your own kind which was whatever the guys with guns decided it was
well anyway Nancy it's not good. I mean I don't know if the United States is feeling that maybe you can answer this question I doubt it. Go ahead
now we're in the middle we cannot go back where we started this and fix it. We cannot go any
about himself or his people and at the end of this we're going to divide Iraq. I mean I used to have a country that's what I feel right now. I used to have a country
I'm little checkpoint
please check point
it's a police chick.
Nancy updyke is one of the producers of our program is everything
happening uncontrol?
My program is produced today by Stephanie Fo and myself with Alex Bloomberg Ban Calhoun, Sean Cole, Hanna Joffy Walt Sarra kennic Micky Meek, Jonathan Mheivar Brian Reed, Robin Semi and Elsa ship and Nancy updyke our senior producers Julie Snyder production help from Alice and Davis.
Seth Wynd is our operations director Emily condon's our production manager ELISA burgerson's our office manager adrian Mathawitz runs our website research help from Michelle Harris and Julie beer music help from dami and grave from Rob Getettis.
Thanks today to Kara Francis Christine vanderorn Sarah bromer Jonathan goldstein Kurt brownover Basma fahoun amhed fadam David dehaly Maki fujita
and special thanks to Becca Heller and the iraqi refugee assistance project. They're helping hundreds of iraqis try to escape the violence and get to safety in the United States. Their website is refugee rights org
and to Kirk Johnson in the list project regular listeners to shona they helped iraqis who worked for the United States
and are now in danger because of it get to safety. Their website is the list project org. Both of these organizations have been flooded with emails in the last two weeks from people needing help.
Our website this american life org this american life is distributed by public radio international this week for the last week. They've been our partner for 17 years and they've been a great partner and we wish them best.
The sport of this american life comes from the car company cyan. For over 10 years cyan has been helping others follow their passions. Last year their motivate program helped 50 creative entrepreneurs take their businesses to the next level
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Thanks as always. Torry malatia you know, at the beginning of this show, when we started this american life together even then, he already wanted to disavow any responsibility for what happens here. Each week. He told me,
this is what I'm going to do. You are going to run the show but you will now hypnotize me and I will forget.
I'm glass back next week and more stories of this american life.
Is everything happening?
This is IR glass of this american life and I'm talking fast to get in shape. For this week's program
you see every week on our program, we bring you three to four stories on some theme blah, blah, blah. You know the drill but this week, we throw that slow paced thoughtful nonsense to the wind and bring you 20, yes, 20 stories in 60 minutes.
Frankly, we wanted to do 30 stories in 60 minutes but at this point, we don't know if we can pull that off. I, guarantee you at least 20 to see how many we speed through. Listen this week.
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