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Every city that contains a subway also contains a number of people who would prefer to ride it without paying. The obstacles they face in that pursuit varies from grid to grid, determined by local cash-flow and attitudes. Most metropolitan governments install some variation on the AFC (Automatic Fare Collection) in their underground stations to ensure payment. Though the efficacy of such electronic boundaries dwindles with their porosity — New York’s turnstiles invite duckers and jumpers, while Singapore’s Access Control Gates would crush either — all-in-all they constitute the most effective way of collecting revenue. 

Unfortunately, the mass installation of AFC devices takes a while to pay for itself, especially in cities with large subway grids and sparse populations. This consideration lead my fiscally challenged hometown of Berlin to instead build their prevention effort around a more primitive control system: patrolling ticket inspectors, a method inefficient on paper and absurd in practice.

Berliners refer to these inspectors as “controllers”. They are not government officials but underpaid mercenaries, employees of a private security contractor, well-known to be a compilation of undesirables recruited from the bottom of the guardian food chain: failed bouncers, aged store detectives, veterans of the GDR’s security services. 

The controllers’ main function is to obscure the fact that Berlin’s underground operates on what is essentially an honor system. They can ask you for a ticket; they can ask you to leave the train and follow them to their office and fill out the paperwork incriminating yourself; but running away from them is not illegal. But few people want to run away or pretend they don’t speak the controller’s language (both popular evasion techniques). In other words, the system is predicated on the notion that while a majority of the population may not be instinctively law-abiding, a majority of the population wants to be perceived that way. The ticket inspections introduce an element of shame into the honor system. 

The problem with ticket inspections is that the men and women appointed to do it are paid on a commissionary basis, meaning they receive a small bonus for every ticketless individual they catch. This incentive, and their institutionally bruised egos, adds an element of desperation to their pursuits; when their subjects make a run for it, they run, jump, trip and wrestle. While this is bad for public standards of civility, it also makes Berlin’s underground a lot more exciting — especially for children.

To those who engage in it habitually, fare evasion is a sport. By the age of ten, I understood its mathematics: 50 Marks extra allowance meant I had to keep a close eye on every passenger who entered the train. Ticket inspectors, as a rule: 

• rolled in twos. 
• wore plainclothes but not plain clothes. 
• never carried bags. 
• either boarded the subway seperately or in unlikely combinations: young punk and old butch, gang banger and social worker, peruvian flutist and skinhead. 

But that system wasn’t perfect, so I eventually learned to run. My childhood friend J. and I had a routine: when one said “found it”, the other dashed. This became more difficult as we grew older — the controllers assumed, rightly, that we could take more

When I was 13, a controller pushed me into the tracks. I stood up, bloodied, and kept running into the tunnel. This story spawned a popular myth among my friends; in it, I emerged triumphantly at the next stop, fingers broken. In truth I had chickened out after a hearing a train echoing in the distance and turned around. The controllers were relieved to see my head reemerge. I expected abuse, but instead received an informal apology and a Doner Kebab in return for my silence.  

In May of last year, Berlin’s transport authority phased out plain-clothed controllers, promising friendlier ones. This was a pragmatic decision given the city’s dependency on tourism and the ugly history of red-faced German thugs asking for people’s papers, but stripped the city of a unique cultural attraction. Nostalgia, alas, is rarely a sound basis for transportation policy. 

by GMM

Yesterday afternoon at Madison Square Garden, after a decade plus of something less than futility, New York Knicks basketball was officially revived. With the Lin Dynasty now well underway, and the NBA world champions (albeit in a slightly more disjointed, geriatric configuration) in town, this definitive Knicks team got the first statement win of what fans hope will be a glorious half decade run. While many sportswriters focus on the Jeremy Lin phenomenon through a racial and cultural prism, far more interesting to any Knicks fan has been his immediate impact on the team on the court. As Walt Clyde Frasier might say, “With one serendipitous substitution the Knicks were suddenly swoopin and hoopin, dishin and swishin.”

It hasn’t been this way for a long time. Indeed, the average domesticated pet born during the last gasps of the late 90’s would have died having never witnessed a 500 Knicks season, much less a playoff appearance.  Owner Jim Dolan, a bloodless toad of a man, has been the beneficiary of nepotism, if nothing else. For longer than seemed possible in the “Mecca of basketball,” this veritable homunculus labored under the delusion that the one functional neuron careening around his otherwise vacuous silo gave him the license to evaluate talent and make critical personnel decisions.  First came the hiring of GM Scott Layden; perhaps the luckiest man in the history of pro sports for having his then unprecedented professional ineptitude somehow overshadowed and expunged from popular infamy by his replacement, the Rupert Pupkinesq malignancy named Isaiah Thomas.

This absurd triangulation produced an era of on and off the court embarrassment that reduced Madison Square Garden’s television channel into a saccharin parody of a Ken Burns snoozfest; perpetually running documentaries lionizing the 2 championship Knicks teams of the early 70’s, the bruising, competitive teams of the 90’s, and some disposable 80’s Bernard King scoring binge scraps for good measure.  Who wants to hear another tired anecdote from Clyde Frasier or Dave DeBusschere, or see Willis Reed hobbling down the tunnel and hit a staggering two midrange jump shots? Who wants more inane interviews with Al fucking Trautwig, or more paunchy former Knick role players waxing monotone- nostalgic about their salad days against a graphical backdrop that makes Fox News look like fucking Avatar?

The fates finally interceded in 2008 when long respected GM Donnie Walsh was hired as basketball Tsar. Dolan receded into his lair, and Walsh began methodically purging the team of all the players and contracts that had hung like an albatross around its neck for so long. With new money to spend, the teams’ first big free agent signing was Amare Stoudemire in the summer of 2010.  Then came the Carmelo Anthony trade. Suddenly a team with big guns but no ammo, the Knicks were swept by the Boston Celtics in the first round of last years playoffs.

Coming into this year it was hard for anybody but the hardcore fan to expect better than being a 2^nd or 3^rd tier playoff team. While effectively addressing their need for leadership and a defensive anchor by signing Tyson Chandler; the Knicks still had no real point guard in a league full of great ones. In what seemed like a desperate move, the team signed Baron Davis, a wildly mercurial, sporadically in shape talent and potential wash-up, who remains out recovering from a sports hernia. Before the ascension of Jeremy Lin, Knick hopes were pegged on Davis having a career revival. In the interim, the team has played mostly uninspired basketball. This all changed of course when Lin became the toast of the town with his inspirational creativity, competitiveness, and now unequivocally consistent play.

At this fragile moment it is no longer a stretch to hope for a near term championship run from these Knicks. The signing of J.R. Smith, an offensive machine hot from China, marks the final step in compiling a roster with a punchers chance against any team in the league. Now that Lin is starting, everybody has a clear role. Baron Davis gets demoted and becomes potentially the best backup in the league. Because of Lin, he can get locked in a dungeon of sandwiches behind a mote of soda and ingest his way to freedom for all Knicks fans care. With draft pick Iman Shumpert proving to be a supremely athletic perimeter defender and tireless worker; the Knicks have a solid 3 guard rotation. They are now poised, with two of the top 20 players in the league, a defensive mindset, a kinetic, hyper creative point guard, the second best center in the Eastern Conference, a potentially explosive bench, some selfless veterans minding the intangibles,  and most importantly, a vibrant, palpable chemistry . Now the only question is what unseemly blackmail fodder Herb Williams has on James Dolan to explain his listless ubiquity on every Knicks coaching staff since the end of the last golden era.

From the April 1984 Issue of Playboy Magazine: 

“Yes, we are like feudal lords or godfathers, something like that. We are living in the Middle Ages, even though we have a so-called surface of civilization.”

Lebanon. The name is synonymous with shellings and massacres and shootings and car bombings. In a word, chaos. Lebanon is where more U.S. Marines have died than in any other engagement since the Vietnam war. It is where Reagan’s foreign policy, which ended with the euphemistic “redeployment” and subsequent pull-out of U.S. forces, suffered a defeat some observers have compared to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Even after the pull-out of the Marines (and that of the rest of the multi-national force), television broadcasts continue to make the bloody streets of Beirut as painfully familiar as the Mekong Delta was to a generation of U.S. viewers.

If there is an individual most responsible for the frustration of U.S. policy in Lebanon, it is Walid Jumblatt, the 34-year-old leader of a mysterious Islamic sect known as the Druse and the head of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party. Jumblatt’s fiercely disciplined and personally loyal army of Druse fighters has met the U.S.-supported central army of President Amin Gemayel and has virtually defeated it. Jumblatt now controls more Lebanese territory than the government does. With only about 7000 regular troops and about 25,000 members of the Druse people’s armed militia (some of them boys as young as ten), Jumblatt is not timid about taking on the U.S. itself: In response to what he claims was shelling by the Marines, his Druse sporadically rained artillery down on the Marine base throughout 1983. When the U.S. Ambassador’s residence was shelled, the U.S.S. New Jersey aimed its 16-inch guns at the Druse’s mountain redoubts surrounding Beirut and began pounding away before finally picking up its shells and steaming off.

Isolated in their hillside villages in the Shuf Mountains, the Druse are legendary for their fighting ability and are excluded by their esoteric religion from the rest of the population; they may well be the most homogeneous group in a country of vividly contrasting nationalities, sects and political ideologies. Jumblatt, whose family has led the Druse for generations, is a Western-educated (at the American University of Beirut), well-traveled man of philosophical bent who took command when his father was assassinated in 1977. As he put it to Playboy, “few of the Jumblatts had a natural death.” He divides his time between Damascus, where his ally Hafez al-Assad, president of Syria, makes him feel welcome, and the Shuf Mountains, where his soldiers and his people wait with rifles poised.

Lebanon seems to invite invasion. Besides uncounted invasions in the past century, it has been overrun three times in just the past eight years; by Syria in June 1976, by Israel in March 1978 and again by Israel in June 1982. Syria, whose troops have occupied the western part of Lebanon since the 1976 invasion, is undoubtedly the ranking power in the region (though Jumblatt angrily denies being a puppet of Assad’s), and it is Syria’s ties to the Soviet Union that worries the West and President Reagan in particular.

To understand the context of Lebanon’s present troubles, a quick recap may be in order. Lebanon’s 20th Century difficulties began immediately after World War One. To satisfy French demands, the British allowed Paris a mandate to govern “the Lebanon,” which was then technically a part of Syria. At that time, the population effectively consisted of two groups: the Druse and the Maronite Christians. The French separated Lebanon from Syria, then expanded the boundaries of Lebanon to include inhabitants who were Moslems. Paris ruled through its protégés, the Maronites, who were then compliant and dependent on the French for material support. Lebanon became independent of Syria in 1941, and in 1943 a national covenant was hammered out and was reluctantly agreed to by all parties. In theory, it was to have provided a balance among the factions, with the titular leadership residing with the Maronites. It worked well until the great influx of Palestinians after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. A decade later, a civil war began between the Christian and the Moslem forces. President Eisenhower sent U.S. troops there in July 1958, imposing an uneasy peace, but that invasion has been blamed for halting a necessary redistribution of power and setting the stage for what was to follow. Palestinians from Jordan fleeing the civil war in that country in 1970 substantially increased the Moslem population, creating further imbalance, though the government remained in the hands of the Maronites. That civil war also brought the militant arm of the Palestinians—the P.L.O—into Lebanon, and that set off a civil war between the P.L.O. and the Lebanese government in 1973. That introduced the Syrians, who invaded the country in 1976, supposedly at the request of the Beirut government so that the bloodshed might stop. The Syrians occupied the country, brutally suppressed the P.L.O. and have remained in Lebanon. For reasons supposedly linked to their own national security, the Israelis conducted their two invasions shortly thereafter, and there has been no effective government in Lebanon since that time. Gemayel, the latest of the Maronite leaders, became president after his brother Bashir was elected—and was promptly assassinated—but he is president in name only. Within Lebanon, the man calling the shots is Walid Jumblatt.

Playboy sent free-lance journalist and syndicated political columnist Morgan Strong to speak with this enigmatic guerrilla, scholar and self-avowed war lord while the so-called reconciliation talks were taking place in Lausanne, Switzerland, in March of this year. Strong’s report:

“I first talked with Jumblatt in Damascus in 1983, during the height of American involvement in Lebanon and just before the suicide bombing of Marine headquarters. He confirmed to me at that time that his men had, indeed, fired upon U.S. Marines holding positions at the Beirut airport—in retaliation, he said, for Marine shelling of the Druse positions.

“When Playboy sent me to Lausanne, the atmosphere was no less tense. The Hotel Beau Rivage was decorated in Beirut-civil-war style: Barricades blockaded the streets around the hotel; the high walls surrounding it were topped with concertina razor wire; sandbag bunkers ringed the entrance. Swiss riot police in long black-leather coats stood outside with automatic rifles cradled in their arms. Helicopters swooped down low from time to time and, except for the missing sound of artillery and gunfire, the participants from Lebanon must have felt right at home.

“Our first meeting was at the Beau Rivage. After considerable security checks, I was taken to the Druse headquarters within the hotel. It was a suite in constant turmoil and disarray. A video-cassette recorder was invariably playing an American movie as Arabs watched from couches surrounding the TV set. There was loud, excited talk, and messengers darted in and out. Jumblatt himself came out of a small bedroom off the sitting room and offered his hand cordially. He is tall and very thin, with large, unblinking eyes. If there is a single word to describe him, it is intense; he unbent slightly but never completely in later Interview sessions. We sat in his bedroom for our first session, which was somewhat stiff, and he sipped cognac as he gave terse answers.

“As the conference dragged on, I spent most of my time in my hotel room across town waiting for a call from Jumblatt’s aides. When it came, I was told we would meet not at the Beau Rivage but at Jumblatt’s own hotel. Its location outside Lausanne was a closely guarded secret for security reasons. When two Arab assistants picked me up and ushered me into Jumblatt’s large, bulletproof Mercedes, I made a point of not watching too closely where we were going.

“When we arrived at the hotel—which or where I’m still not sure—we were greeted by the Druse chief and his beautiful, blonde Jordanian wife. Jumblatt and I sat down for a long session in an anteroom off the hotel lobby, and by then, though the reconciliation talks were disintegrating and his conversation reflected his resignation to that fact, he had loosened up and was speaking candidly with me.”

We met sporadically over the next several days. As the prospects for reconciliation grew dimmer, the atmosphere grew more tense. There was infighting and jockeying for position among the participants, and Jumblatt seemed more and more fatalistic in our private conversations. Security at the Beau Rivage grew tighter: Metal detectors went up and more guards were added around the Druse suite. Jumblatt’s candor with me grew to the point where I felt uneasy with what amounted to state secrets. For instance, he had told me for publication that Libya had been his principal supplier of arms and funds but that Libya’s strong man, Muammar el-Qaddafi, had stopped the supply.

He and his army, he said, were strapped and had to ‘shop around’ — this while his opponents were a few floors below assessing his military prospects. In fact, a few hours later, Jumblatt’s Druse militia back in Lebanon attacked, for the first time, the stronghold of the radical Murabitunian and quickly commandeered their headquarters and military equipment. That group had been supported exclusively by Qaddafi.

“I saw Jumblatt for the last time the day before the talks fell apart and he headed back to Lebanon. Through it all, I came to respect his openness, which not only is unique among Arab leaders but is a quality absent from most political leaders. That alone might qualify him for the nearly impossible job some observers feel he is destined to hold—president of Lebanon.”

Playboy: How much longer can this bloody war in Lebanon go on?

Jumblatt: That’s a good question. We are in our tenth year. It seems the Lebanese are not civilized.

Playboy: How many casualties have there been?

Jumblatt: Whew! Nobody knows. In Lebanon, around 100,000, they say. More than 1,000,000 scattered refugees, so many wounded. I have no idea.

Playboy: Why do you continue to kill one another?

Jumblatt: Well, you also had your Civil War in the States. It was quite a bloody civil war, too. But somebody lost and somebody won. So, really, it’s the same thing. Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. We’ll see whether I’ll be the next Lee or the next Grant.

Playboy: Reconciliation talks are going on in this hotel as we speak. Is there any hope of a resolution through them?

Jumblatt: That is why I’m here—to meet with my opponents and to try to fix up a deal. Perhaps we’ll fix something up; perhaps not. But in either case, I’m going back home—for peace or for war.

Playboy: What’s the real state of negotiations at present?

Jumblatt: Truthfully? Rubbish. But I have to do it. Just part of the show, just part of the game.

Playboy: Rubbish? Most of the world is watching for some sign of progress to end the fighting and you say it’s rubbish? Aren’t people dying for you?

Jumblatt: Well, I couldn’t tell my people and others that I refused to come to Geneva because I knew the talks would be rubbish. They wouldn’t have believed me. So I had to tell them I was coming here to negotiate some peace and security— which is not the case. Sometimes you have to fool your people. You can’t always tell your people the whole truth; they won’t be able to understand it.

Playboy: So this exercise is pointless?

Jumblatt: Yes. I know it’s rubbish. But there are crazy people, too. Maybe I’m crazy! [Laughs]

Playboy: Does President Gemayel feel that way, too?

Jumblatt: No, no. Gemayel just wants to hold on to his power, to profit from it. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The impasse is not because of us, the Druse. It is the Christians who are quarreling among themselves.

Playboy: But the Christians are your opponents.

Jumblatt: Yes, but there are different factions there, different war lords.

Playboy: War lords? Why do you call them that?

Jumblatt: Because we are all war lords in Lebanon.

Playboy: Are you a war lord, too?

Jumblatt: Yes. Gemayel, too. Gemayel’s father and my father were war lords, along with all the other leaders.

Playboy: So when you sit down and talk with President Gemayel, it is something like war lords’ meeting during feudal times. Is that how you actually deal with one another?

Jumblatt: Yes, like feudal lords or godfathers, something like that. It’s still very, very feudal in Lebanon. We are living in the Middle Ages, even though we have a so-called surface of civilization.

Playboy: You made the statement recently that you thought Gemayel should commit suicide. Were you joking?

Jumblatt: Well, he was terribly defeated. He was forced by the Syrians and by us to change his whole policy. I don’t know if he has a minimal feeling of dignity. I don’t think he does. His basic concern is to hold on to power. I think it would be better for him to commit suicide, but he won’t do it.

Playboy: Were you joking about it?

Jumblatt: We have to joke. If we take politics too seriously, we’ll take ourselves too seriously. Nothing is serious in life.

Playboy: Are you saying, “What the hell?”

Jumblatt: Not “What the hell?” when it comes to the interests of my community. That I care about. My aims are very limited. It’s better to have limited aims.

Playboy: But if you believe so strongly in your people’s interests, why not make every effort to resolve the conflict?

Jumblatt: Because we are blocked by the fact that it is not a purely Lebanese issue. It’s an international issue. We are just surrogates for somebody, puppets for somebody. Everybody is a puppet.

Playboy: That seems a rather fatalistic attitude, doesn’t it?

Jumblatt: Well, take the killing of my father. My grandfather was killed, too. It’s a tradition of the family. The father of the father of my grandfather was killed, too, on duty. As you go down the line for 300 years, few of the Jumblatts had a natural death. My aunt was killed; my ex-wife committed suicide. So it’s cynical, but it helps you be fatalistic.

Playboy: How do those things help?

Jumblatt: Their personal experience helps me confront realities and see that the problems of this life are minor and see that this whole world is going to absurdity. Total absurdity.

Playboy: However fatalistic, your philosophy reflects the fact that you are an educated man, not merely the war lord you claim to be.

Jumblatt: Yes. I took my B.A. in political science at the American University of Beirut. I wanted to go somewhere in the States for graduate school and maybe finish my Ph.D. But I couldn’t, because the civil war broke out.

Playboy: Since you’re perceived as having hostile feelings toward the United States, why did you want to go there?

Jumblatt: I simply wanted to get an education, knowledge. I wanted to know what was going on in the world. I think that in the United States, you can see what’s going on in the world.

Playboy: Before the war, you had traveled to the U.S., hadn’t you?

Jumblatt: Twice. New York, Washington, Los Angeles.

Playboy: How did you feel about American society then?

Jumblatt: Well, once you land in the States, you forget everything about the outside world. This is why I understand the American people. You are so totally involved with yourselves, you are sucked into the system by everything. You don’t think about the outside world.

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