I had a eulogy all penned out for irony last month. After The Atlantic — whose “affluent, influential and highly engaged readers turn to [it] for intellectual stimulation” — put Britney Spears on the cover, I was convinced irony was as dead as G. W. Bush’s relevancy. But a hugely distracting billboard urging drivers not to drive distracted has given me hope that iron might just stage a comeback. And with this week’s deliverance of poisoned prison guards and a stupid spies, it’s guaranteed that irony is going nowhere.
Prisoners and guards don’t get along, everyone surprised
Lesson one in The Inmates Versus Us: A Guard’s Survival Guide: never trust a man who’d shoot his mother in the face. Four guards at a top-security prison in Denmark apparently didn’t get that far in the book (maybe because the book doesn’t exist), and ended up eating a cake baked by some of the prisoners. Now they’re in the hospital with stomach pains from the complimentary “unidentified narcotic” that had been added to the batter.
Some of the prisoners had recently exchanged their overflowing testosterone for a dash of estrogen by taking up baking. The aspiring chefs included members of some serious gangs, including Black Cobra — two words scary enough on their own but combined probably mean, “Ain’t Nuthing Ta Fuck Wit.”
The guards were so trusting because “Normally the guards and the inmates are very close in the Danish system,” Lars Erik Siegumfeldt, a spokesman with the Danish Prison and Probation Service, told The Sydney Morning Herald.
The prisoners’ actual record would say otherwise. In 2004, the prisoners rioted after their dumbbells were taken away. As it turns out, a side effect of chronic weightlifting is a Hulk-like physique. “Some inmates have grown to abnormal size. They have become monster men,” said Carsten Pedersen, then-chairman of the prison officer union, to The New York Times.
The guards were clever enough to deduce that — by virtue of having committed some heinous crime — the prisoners shouldn’t be trusted with large, rippling muscles. But while the guards were policing the weight room, the real weapons were being cooked up in the kitchen.
The Danish guards, now forbidden from accepting food from prisoners, can commiserate with untrustworthy people with a spy who was accidentally giving American information to the wrong side.
Spy can’t figure out which side he’s working for
Being a spy isn’t supposed to be complicated. It doesn’t even require literacy — just shuffle somebody else’s memos from one government to the other. But an alleged spy who had infiltrated the U.S. Defense Department figured out one way to supremely screw over not just his government, but his own mission.
Gregg Bergersen is a weapons analyst for the Department of Defense with top-secret clearance. He thought he was giving American military secrets to Taiwanese government officials. Except, not so much: He was inadvertently helping Taiwan’s BFF (not!), China.
Using his security clearance, he stole sensitive information about the U.S. and Taiwan’s military relationship. He handed it over to a Chinese furniture salesman in New Orleans… who sent it to officials in Beijing.
Ah, the camaraderie of the spy business! Really warms the heart.
Bergersen is now charged with conspiring to communicate national defense information and faces up to 10 years in prison. Though he doesn’t deny the treason-lite, he inexplicably claims to be too dense to realize that payments he was receiving were in expectation of him divulging state secrets. Though, “In hindsight, he understands that the money was given to him in anticipation that he would provide documents,” his lawyer told The Independent.
Now the hapless traitor, having dicked over Taiwan by delivering their secrets to the mainland, may need to find some new friends, as the Taiwanese probably don’t require his assistance any further.