Ludicrous Levity

   As you know, I try to avoid the current news because most of it is awful. But, it is a cool Sunday morning and I am compelled by habit to look online at the printed newspapers I used to enjoy much more in print. Apart from the badness of the news stories, some of them are surreal and perhaps that should be a fourth news category to add to the 'real', the 'fake' and the 'breaking'.

   The headlines in even the most staid, solemn and serious newspapers now often resemble those found in the tabloids and one is reminded by them of the satirical publication, The Onion. If you aren't aware of it, see the information provided below. I was glad to see that The Onion is still around and the latest headlines provided include: "EU HONORS ANGELA MERKEL'S TENURE BY GIVING HER GREECE" and "MOST AMERICANS WOULD SWAP DEMOCRACY FOR $100 BEST BUY GIFT CARDS."

   It will probably not be difficult for you to figure out why I thought of The Onion when I saw the picture above of members of the Taliban in Bumper Cars (Dodgems, the generic term, which provides a bit more sophistication to an activity popular among American adolescents at amusement parks.) I am serious. The picture is from the very serious, Wall Street Journal and the headline to which it was attached is: "Afghanistan's Taliban Warn Foot Soldiers: Behave, and Stop Taking Selfies: Men Who Recently Spent Their Days in Bloody Battle Are Now Frolicking in Parks and the Zoo, Drawing Admonishments Form the Defense Minister," Saeed Shah, Sept. 25, 2021. The news is better today. Apparently the admonishments were taken seriously since a headline this morning reads: "Taliban Puts Bodies of Alleged Kidnappers on Public Display, In a Sign of Return to Harsh Islamic Justice," Rachel Pannet, Washington Post, Sept. 26. 

   Even on the domestic front (in the U.S.), there are news items that are rather odd and look more like spoofs written by the folks on the news desk at Saturday Night Live,  or from The Onion. This one involves a Black woman who bought a house, only to have it taken and occupied by someone else. Perhaps not an odd story if the usurper was white, but it was possessed by a Moorish "sovereign citizen", who is Black. You are unlikely to believe my telling of the story, so here is an abridgement from the source:

"She Bought Her Dream Home. Then a ‘Sovereign Citizen’ Changed the Locks.A New Jersey Woman was Preyed Upon by a Fast-growing Extremist Group That Claims its Members are Sovereign Moors, Not Bound by U.S. Laws," New York Times, Sarah Maslin Nir, Sept. 26, 2021

"The official-looking letters started arriving soon after Shanetta Little bought the cute Tudor house on Ivy Street in Newark. Bearing a golden seal, in aureate legalistic language, the documents claimed that an obscure 18th-century treaty gave the sender rights to claim her new house as his own….

Ms. Little was a victim of a ploy known as paper terrorism, a favorite tactic of an extremist group that is one of the fastest growing, according to government experts and watchdog organizations. Known as the Moorish sovereign citizen movement, and loosely based around a theory that Black people are foreign citizens bound only by arcane legal systems, it encourages followers to violate existent laws in the name of empowerment. Experts say it lures marginalized people to its ranks with the false promise that they are above the law.

“The Moors claim to be about Black liberation and opportunity, and uplifting Black people,” Ms. Little said in an interview seated on a staircase inside her house. “But he is literally oppressing me and taking what’s mine as a Black woman.”

   The members of this extremist movement are not to be confused with the white insurrectionists who were involved in the January 6 event in Washington (their racial group has not yet earned a Capital letter.) You may recall, however, another bizarre news item from back in July when a large group of heavily armed Black people were in a standoff with the Massachusetts state police. Apparently they were members of a Moorish sub-group, known as "Rise of the Moors." 

   Even the talented people at The Onion would have difficulty coming up with such surreal subjects. 

Sources: 

   The "real" story about the Massachusetts kerfuffle is here: "11 Arrested in Armed Roadside Standoff in Massachusetts," New York Times, July 3.
"The men, who wore military-style gear and claimed to be “foreign nationals,” were part of an hours long standoff with police officers."

   The Onion", "America's Finest News Source" can be found here. There is also a Wikipedia entry for "The Onion." 
  The picture above is of the cover of a book of good Onion stuff published by Three Rivers Press back in 2000. On the back cover it says: "The Onion is the world's most popular humor periodical. Its first book Our Dumb Century, was a New York Times #1 best seller and winner of the 1999 Thurber Prize for American Humor."

The Bonus Source:

   All of this should be taken seriously, or at least the part about the terrorist group, of which you were likely unaware. It is serious enough to be the subject of an academic article in a legal journal. Apparently even we Canadians need to be concerned. 

"The Sovereign Citizen Movement: A Comparative Analysis with Similar Foreign Movements and Takeaways for the United States Judicial System," Mellie Ligon, Emory International Law Review, 297, 2021.
Abstract:

The Moorish Sovereign Citizens Movement began as an offshoot of the overarching Sovereign Citizens Movement in the United States in the 1990s by former followers of the Washitaw Nation and Moorish Science Temple of America. The Moorish Sovereign Citizens Movement follows an anti-government ideology, based on the idea the current American government is illegitimate and has been operating under false pretenses since as early as the 19th century. Though disagreement among the members of the movement regarding what spurred this covert change from a legitimate to an illegitimate government exists, examples of the different catalysts include the U.S. abandonment of the gold standard in the 1930s and the Reconstruction Era of the 1860s and 1870s following the U.S. Civil War. Members of the movement live scattered across the United States and do not follow a single ideology or teaching, but they all engage in similar tactics of disruption—levying false liens against government officials they deem have wronged them, filing countless motions to flood the system, and employing a nonsensical legal language of their own in court appearances and filings. This comment engages in an overview of this movement in the United States and subsequently compares it to parallel movements in Canada and Ireland, specifically by looking to their cases involving individuals with similar ideologies and tactics. Finally, it discusses takeaways from non-U.S. movements for potential application in the U.S. setting.