A Moment of Darkness for Our Collective Dignity

This evening I find myself annoyed by a Berkeley-like phenomenon that extended the world over. Purportedly, over a billion people took place in “Earth Hour” this evening, dimming their lights as part of “a global event designed to highlight the threat from climate change” (see here). World-famous landmarks and ordinary homes alike reduced their artificial luminescence in an apparently united “up yours” to global warming.

Now, I happen to believe that climate change is a serious issue: that even though I think Al Gore’s sheep-like followers – who really have transformed greenness into nothing less than a cult – have exaggerated humankind’s malicious, apocalyptic contribution to the situation, I believe that the world’s getting warmer (and yes, it has been) is a genuine problem. My problem lies with this self-satisfied “display of solidarity” against our inanimate foe, the greenhouse gases. The demonstrators as a whole have the right idea, but as usual, they think that by inconveniencing themselves ever-so-slightly for a brief period, that they’ve done their part to solve the issue.

In the end, one desk lamp isn’t melting the polar ice caps; neither, for that matter, are a billion. The problem is 4-person families that own 3 cars and drive them to work, 15 blocks from their homes, because they don’t want to walk, bike, or (heaven forfend) take the bus. The problem is idiots that own and use private jets because they don’t find flying first class sufficiently dignified. The problem is jackasses that buy pickup trucks when they work at Kinko’s/FedEx. So when people around the world turn off some of the lights in their homes for an hour and then look down on someone else for not doing the same, they’re not really as close to being a part of the solution as they probably assume.

I don’t mean to disparage the sentiment, and I’m sure there were millions upon millions of well-meaning people who took part in the gesture because it was just that – an excellent gesture. And yet, I bet “Earth Hour” was a big hit in Berkeley, where it would give so many smug morons yet another unearned chance to feel proud of themselves. I’m very glad I wasn’t there. The complacent attitude that would lead these people to go to the limited trouble of flipping a few switches is the same that has seen so many people complain about the Piedmont Penetrator’s existence, while not actually doing anything to help local women by seeing to his capture and extended imprisonment.

Maybe it’s just hot air causing global warming, after all.

Back... and to the Left.

I once took a walk along the pier at the Berkeley Marina. The sea was choppy, the clouds lying ominously above me, and out along the horizon, the vague silhouette of a freighter could be seen against the crimson flare of the setting sun. Amidst it all, there was a seagull sitting on the right hand railing of the dock, eyeing me suspiciously. As I approached, he took off and flew further down the same railing, towards the heart of the bay. We exchanged this little back-and-forth the whole way down: every time I moved too close for comfort, he would fly further down the dock. We got near the end – by which time, mind you, I felt really bad for pushing the little idiot as far as he’d gone – and he ran out of dock to which he could flee. Not wanting to force him to think of an alternate course of action, I turned around and walked home.

I couldn’t help but think back on this when it was revealed in the Daily Cal last week (see the article here) that Senator John Moghtader, after much deliberation with his lawyer, was prepared to release a video taken on the balcony at Eshleman Hall on November 13 – one which purportedly negates the testimonies presented by first-hand “witnesses” Husam Zakharia and Dina Omar, among others. I liken those who falsified the evidence to the seagull, and myself (arrogantly enough) to the truth: you can try to run away from it, but if all works as it should, sooner or later, you’ll run out of dock.

The long-term repercussions of this new development are difficult to make out, particularly as very few have had access to the video itself. Still, its very existence certainly raises concerns about the recall, which was primarily based on the assumption that Moghtader had engaged in conduct unbefitting his role as an ASUC Senator by joining in the fight, as outlined in Dina Omar’s editorial. In recent days, the argument has been made that the results of the recall are not invalidated by the new tape, since Moghtader acted against student interest by withholding said evidence from the voting body. I, however, would answer that it would not have made any difference: if the actions of the District Attorney of Alameda County weren’t sufficient to convince students to vote on the recall, the outcome would seem to have been predetermined.

Don’t be fooled: this video is not important because it can undo the results of an unjust election. It presumably won’t do that, and even if it does, it’s pretty meaningless, because (a) the term is largely expired, (b) this year’s Senate can’t get anything done, and (c) the ASUC Senate is a worthless organization to begin with, as I’ve been writing all year. No, the video is important only because it will, based on what’s been revealed so far, prove that the dubious claims presented since November were, indeed, wholly falsified.

Ideally, it would be nice to see those whose dishonest claims saw the election presented to the disinterested populace in the first place face some personal repercussions, though presumably such will not be the case. Realistically, there are two things that should come out of this affair. First, it should lead to a serious reconsideration of the recall procedure on all fronts. The administration should recognize that the cost of a recall election is virtually unjustifiable, and that it needs to pressure the ASUC to amend its constitution accordingly. Student government should recognize that the proceedings have been far more divisive than the events that triggered them in the first place, and that the process was both far too easy to begin (those shady 1000 online signatures) and far too easy to finish (with just less than 2700 people deciding to remove the 7th highest vote getter). Finally, the students themselves should recognize that it’s apparently easy to waste a boatload of money to divest yourself of political enemies provided one is willing to intentionally distort the truth. Assuming another recall takes place before too long – which I’ve got to say, given how easy it is, it clearly ought to – students would be well-served to bear in mind the likelihood that testimony they’re presented with from anyone with something to gain from lying cannot necessarily be trusted.

Second, and even more important, students should recognize that the repercussions of this extend far beyond those who provided the fraudulent testimonies: those implicated in the email leak were as responsible for the spread of any lies as the students who provided them. I by no means intend to imply that the CalSERVE party is inherently ideologically opposed to Moghtader and all he stands for, but I posit that it can’t be a coincidence that the emails were all written by members of that group. It should also be noted that in the email written by CalSERVE Senator Kifah Shah, she did not express hope that Student Action Senators could be convinced of the legitimacy of their claims, but rather merely that they would “think of [Moghtader] as dispensible.” For a party that prides itself on “transparency,” CalSERVE’s practice feels uncomfortably more like a return to the rampant corruption of the United States’ Harding days. What’s emerged since November has been a political slate that has worked as a unit to overturn the democratic process they so insist they love in a transparent (oh, the devastating irony) attempt to remove the fly from their proverbial ointment. I refuse to waste money on a recall to remove the guilty parties from office. However, I sincerely hope that this political impropriety has not been lost on voters, and that when the April elections come up, they give a good, long thought as to whose interests CalSERVE really promises to defend – and to how much value transparency really has when you’re frightened by what you see inside.

I saw that same seagull again the last time I walked to the pier; once more, he took off down the dock. Remember, some people never learn.

Speed Kills

This is one I was going to let go, because I was willing to categorize it as a brainless mistake by an often well-meaning institution that a number of my friends actually care about. However, an email I got yesterday attempting to downplay and defend said mistake made me realize, upon reflection, that it was even worse than I’d thought.

In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, Berkeley Hillel ran a “speed friending” event (think speed dating, but with less appeal to college students), and put out ads featuring the image seen right. Now, it’s easy enough to see how this could have been intended to mean something other than “we’re scared of traditional Judaism as an institution,” even if it doesn’t. And so, even as the barbs were flying around here, in the form of machine gun exchanges over Facebook and the Jerusalem Post’s website, I refused to join in, for the reasons listed above.

The email I received was penned by a guy I respect, and yet the sentiment scared me. He called it “an example of a collegiate attempt at humor that fell flat, and exploded it into something it wasn't, suggesting it was an attack on Orthodoxy.” He went on to say that the outrage this piece of work prompted was just an attempt by people who don’t like “Hillel's big tent approach to Israel issues and attitudes” to discredit the institution any way they know how.

It rather sickens me that people are trying to play something like this off as some local political spat. Even assuming the best, is it any more comforting to think that it didn’t occur to the author that this could be offensive than it is to think that they were straight-up admitting they were scared of observant Judaism? This could only happen for one reason: whoever wrote this for Hillel didn’t have any Orthodox people to pop up in their mind and make them think twice. Speaking as someone who doesn’t give a crap about Hillel’s “big tent,” I can say that since my arrival in 2006, Hillel has steadily pushed observant Jews out – myself included. Not by putting on speed friending events to celebrate holidays named after saints, either: by refusing to take the minor steps to move their kitchen past dubious kashrut; by doing nothing for Passover, the hardest of Jewish holidays for college students to observe; by serving gummy snacks with gelatin in them on Purim; by sticking the Orthodox minyan in a side room because the yoga minyan needed the space more. The list goes on.

This ad was not wrong because it was a poorly-executed attempt at a joke that shouldn’t have been considered funny to start with; it was wrong because it’s representative of a situation that has progressed to the point where it doesn’t occur to anyone that there are Orthodox Jewish students even tangentially tied to Hillel who might take offense. And to reiterate, regardless of intent, this ad was EXTREMELY offensive, as are all attempts to justify it with anything other than “it won’t happen again.”

Here’s a picture of what I left Hillel for: Doesn’t scare me. And I’ve never looked back.

And They Still Had to Cheat?

A Daily Cal reporter asked me on February 23 whether my like-minded voters and I were surprised by the low turnout projected for the recall election; as I recall, my reaction was, “I wouldn’t say we’re surprised, but we’re definitely disappointed.” This sentiment pretty neatly sums up my feelings in light of the news that Senator John Moghtader has successfully been recalled. My lack of surprise results from the knowledge – advertised here for weeks – that this election was nothing more than a vendetta campaign launched by personal political enemies of Senator Moghtader’s, and one which meant little-to-nothing to most students on campus. The disappointment, in large part, results from the self-importance and laziness of Berkeley students – the former of which led waves of kids to express their outrage at the egregious waste of their money, and the latter of which made the same juveniles unwilling to go three feet out of their way to express this outrage in any effective manner.

Thursday morning, a story broke in the Daily Cal (see here) reporting a leak that revealed emails sent by ASUC President Roxanne Winston and Senator Kifah Shah, advocating the recall of Senator Moghtader. (The reason this is newsworthy is that ASUC Senate officials are forbidden to use their positions of – for lack of a more befitting word – “power” to pull sway as far elections are concerned.) Further implicated were External Affairs Vice President Dionne Jirachaikitti and Senator Mary June Flores: the former had an offending email sent through her listserv (though she, in proper Nixonian fashion, denies any knowledge of said email’s existence), while the latter publicly demonstrated her colors by pushing for the election to take place during finals last semester.

Senator Shah’s email – an odd, haphazardly worded little ditty that displays an alarming disregard for the sanctity of the English language – concerned the mobilization of Senators from the opposing party (Student Action, the proverbial Aaron Burr to CalSERVE’s Alexander Hamilton) in garnering support for Senator Moghtader’s removal from office. She claims that the email was sent out in a purely private capacity, with no intent to abuse her position as a Senator to assist in the takedown of the president of Tikvah: Students for Israel; despite her well-publicized status within the ranks of Students for Justice in Palestine, I am, of course, inclined to believe her wholeheartedly.

President Winston’s email was addressed to senators and an SJP official, intended to put them in contact with one another and express her intent to “lend [her] support as best [she could]” in the recall campaign. She, too, has recently claimed that her email was sent out in a purely private capacity, with no intent to abuse her position as President of the ASUC to assist the takedown of a Senator she’d presumably long wished had never been elected. Her email, though, ended in an electronic signature that identified her as the President of the ASUC.

I smell a rat... and this time, it isn’t just that standard Berkeley odor.

Though I can’t say I know her personally, from my position Roxanne Winston reminds me a good deal of Star Wars crimelord Jabba the Hutt – not because of her Rubenesque proportions, but because of her position as the self-serving, short-sighted, and woefully incompetent figurehead of a bloated organization that holds little realistic claim to power and seemingly never gets anything done, yet nonetheless is somehow capable of dragging untold sums of cash out of an unwilling populace. I believe the fact that this ASUC Senate has developed a distinct reputation – mind you, among the pantheon of incapacity that precedes it in the annals of ASUC history – as one that can’t get anything done must lie, in large part, at her feet. In this particular instance, I can’t tell if she’s lying because she’s been caught, or if she was just too damn lazy to erase the letterhead at the bottom of her email – and frankly, I don’t know which would be worse. It would seem we’re either dealing with a woman who illegally abused her position and then lied about it to her constituency (again, rather Nixonian), or else one whose unwillingness to make the slightest effort even when it’s most called for is exacerbating the chronic Senatorial stagnation! Call it one simple man’s opinion, but abuse of power and incompetence sound more like legitimate reasons to begin an obscenely expensive recall than anything I’ve heard or read since this hullabaloo started.

I’m at this stage disappointed that the recall went through for four basic reasons: (a) I believe it was an overblown vendetta, parlayed into a simple miscarriage of justice; (b) I believe the 3717 votes cast in the recall election should not constitute a sufficient percentage of the 24,636 undergraduates enrolled at Berkeley to overturn the purportedly democratic election that saw Senator Moghtader receive more votes than all but 6 other candidates last year; (c) at the risk of beating this dead horse officially beyond recognizability, I believe that the recall of a Senator from a meaningless Senate with 2 months left in his term was categorically NOT worth the astonishing expenditure; and (d) finally, I fear that the outcome, combined with my readily apparent stance on the election itself, will mislead readers into believing that my disgust with the would-be politicians outed in Zach E.J. Williams’ article stems only from resentfulness. To be candid: the very “behavior unbefitting an official of the ASUC” that those behind the recall were (evidently successfully) attempting to convince voters that Senator Moghtader was guilty of has here been ably displayed by both Senator Shah and President Winston, to say nothing of Jirachaikitti or Flores.

For me there is no way around the conclusion that a concerted effort must now be made to ensure that the responsible parties do not find their way back into the ASUC. If some putrid cocktail of fate, lies, corruption, and laziness has seen to it that the Berkeley student body was not able to make use of the recall election to declare that it’ll have no part in yet more unrepentant squandering of public funds, then the regularly scheduled election will have to do so in its stead.

It’s funny that the most important thing I get out of studying history is something they don’t try particularly hard to impress on us in classes at Berkeley: that the only thing worse than electing conniving, manipulative politicians is electing them twice.

Total Recall

The two people pictured above are my dad, Adrian Mirvish, and my mom, Lissa Rechtin. My dad’s a philosophy professor at CSU Chico, and my mom’s a child psychiatrist at Kaiser Permanente. Their jobs cumulatively pay pretty well, and the 5 of us in my nuclear family are acutely aware of how lucky we are; nonetheless, the family does have many sizable drains on finances. As regular readers know, I’m a student at UC Berkeley; as the enormous percentage of those few and (hopefully) proud readers who are also close friends of mine know, my older brother, Ezra, is a medical student at the University of Pittsburgh, and my younger brother, Asher, is set to enroll at UC Davis. The price of having 3 kids living away from home while enrolled in institutions of higher learning is, as comedians with no original material will tell you, significant. My family also lives in a house big enough for 5 in San Francisco, with a correspondingly expensive mortgage. We are in the process of paying off two cars. Taxes are significant on a doctor’s salary. My dad, lamentably, has to pay for fairly regular dental work; I, as the inner circle will already be aware, am on a bevy of fairly costly ophthalmic medication; my mom takes an expensive osteoporosis pill. We also all like to own warm clothing and indulge in some food on a fairly regular basis. My parents pay for all of the above and much, much more.

An unusual election is taking place in Berkeley tomorrow and the day after, polling the student body as to whether or not to remove ASUC Senator John Moghtader from office. For the uninitiated, the ASUC is a worthless governmental institution, one which gets nothing done (as a dual result of widespread incompetence and constitutionally-granted power that doesn’t entitle it to accomplish much under the most ideal of circumstances), yet constitutes a very sizable drain on university finances. John Moghtader is a fully competent officer of this hopeless legal body, whose threatened removal from office stems not from illicit activity or conduct unbefitting a Senator, but from the personal vendetta of a small group of UC Berkeley students. The details on this are as follows:

Senator Moghtader also serves as the president of a student group known as Tikvah: Students for Israel, devoted to Israel advocacy on campus. On November 13, 2008, on an Eschelman Hall balcony overlooking a concert being held on Lower Sproul Plaza by the Zionist Freedom Alliance, an (in the eyes of this direct eyewitness) exceedingly minor physical altercation broke out between Israel and Palestine student advocates. The organization of this concert had seen significant effort and input at the hands of members and associates of Tikvah, and it was one of these, Berkeley alum Gabe Weiner, who was most actually involved in the scuffle. Moghtader himself was at the time in the area of the so-called “fight” but remained visibly uninvolved.

The recall campaign has been run by members and friends of the Palestine advocacy group most associated with the counter-demonstration that served as the basis of the fight, Students for Justice in Palestine. A number of these have been people involved in the altercation themselves, or else friends of participants, such as Husam Zakharia, the man who (as I can directly attest) started the “fight” by punching Weiner in the right cheek. They claim that Moghtader’s behavior in light of the event – which, as far as a number of eyewitnesses and the District Attorney of Alameda County can tell, was limited to being nearby – was unbefitting of an ASUC Senator, and that, for this reason, the democratically-elected official needs to be removed from office.

I almost wish there was any more to the charge than that, but there isn’t: the only ostensible reason Berkeley senior Yaman Salahi and his like-minded compatriots are seeking to have Moghtader removed from office is his demonstrably nonexistent participation in the events of that evening. This can only lead me to believe that the real motivation behind the campaign has less to do with anything Moghtader has done than with what he represents to Salahi and his fellow members of SJP: a political opponent, one whom they simply wish hadn’t found enough support to win office in the first place. My late, great friend Dan Kliman immediately diagnosed the campaign as a “witch hunt,” and he was right. Regardless of where one stands on Israel/Palestine or any other pertinent political issue, it should be clear from the evidence that Moghtader did not do anything to warrant removal from office – that this entire grandiose production is based on nothing more than petty resentment, and that the cause is a repugnant if magnificently-orchestrated sham.

Yet it gets a good deal worse: by dint of the evil miracle that is modern bureaucracy, the recall election is going to cost the University of California $25,000 – a bill which goes directly to the taxpayers. Admittedly, particularly spread across everyone who pays the University, $25,000 is not that much money (for scale, the projected California budget for 2009-10 is $135 billion.) Nevertheless, especially in light of the widely-acknowledged financial difficulties the United States and all its constituent parts find themselves in, any new addition is a crime.

I am unrepentant about my political stances: I am myself conservative (and just for the record, you’d do well not to equate that to “Republican”) and stand firmly in support of the State of Israel. This means that though I think that debates in Berkeley about the situation in the Middle East are a stupid and worthless enterprise – dividing a populace as they do and, let’s face it, having as nonexistent an impact on the Middle East as they do – I still believe it my duty to defend my political beliefs when they are assailed on campus. In essence, this means that when Salahi and company attack Senator Moghtader’s ASUC position because they disagree with him on grounds irrelevant to his post, I am both ideologically obligated and personally happy to argue the charges and do whatever I can to come to his aid. However, I am adamant that this responsibility does and absolutely should not extend to my mom and dad – both unflinchingly wonderful both as parents and as people – who sacrifice far too much for the good of the family already, and for whom ANY additional burdens are not only uncalled for, but also, I’m convinced, morally reprehensible.

My situation could not be further from unique: in all likelihood, there is no family out there that could not use any extra money they could get their hands on. Accordingly, there should be no one out there willing to outlay money that could – inevitably must – be used to pay mortgages, fund down payments, buy food or clothes or medicine, or even (heaven forfend) simply enjoy life to instead collectively fund an isolated case of puerile, narcissistic greed. That Salahi and co. are bothering the public to win that 3:15 fight at the flagpole on the proverbial schoolyard playground of life makes me angry; that they’re succeeding to do so at the expense of innocent people across the state makes me absolutely furious, and if, dear reader, you’ll forgive my forcing feelings upon you, it should do the very same to you.

Of course, as everyone is aware, it’s too late to stop the election: too late to amend the constitution to allow an ASUC Judicial Council to dismiss transparently frivolous suits; too late to stop the ASUC from accepting a laughably insufficient online petition; and much too late repair the abysmally-worded bylaws that allowed this entire monstrosity to take place after those first two failures had occurred. The $25,000 are already spent, and so in some sense, the outcome of the election itself is irrelevant. Yet I beg all who are entitled to vote to go out of their way into the wet, gray abyss of Berkeley to vote no on removing Senator Moghtader from office for two reasons:

First, simply, because a detached, discerning mind should come naturally to the conclusion that it’s the right decision. Second, because only by stopping this witch hunt where it currently stands can we, the students of UC Berkeley, assure that when, in the future, the University’s twin jewels of illustrious incompetence, the administration and ASUC Senate, fail to do anything/enough to prevent a similar event from recurring, history will have already shown that the student body is wholly unwilling to be party to such vainglorious horseshit.

For yourselves, for me, for our parents, for everyone - get out and vote NO on the recall of Senator John Moghtader.

(The online voting site can be found here. Thank you.)

This is 48% Off?

Today, an article in the Daily Cal (see here) reported that the ASUC Senate has decided that the impending recall election could follow less strict guidelines than a normal one, meaning a price tag of $25,000, instead of $48,000. Good tidings, no?

Admittedly, anything that saves taxpayers $23,000 is great news; still, I can't get excited when our Senatorial putzes are still wasting such a gigantic sum of cash. To put it in perspective by citing a few examples, with $25,000, I could:

(a) Buy a 1999–2002 Mercedes-Benz E55, according to Car and Driver; (b) legally purchase the entire discographies of my top-20 favorite bands and artists on vinyl, CD, cassette, and 8-track tape; (c) purchase a surplus eyeball on the North Korean black market for replacement surgery; (d) comfortably live and go to school in Berkeley for a year; (e) buy a catapult to protect my loved ones; (f) order a Slovenian mail-order bride and hire an idiot savant to teach her the fine art of counting cards, so she could earn me a modest fortune; or (g) redo my house's kitchen, among other things.

Instead, we're spending it settling a petty grudge, and regardless of whether or not Senator Moghtader is removed from office, the money will have already been wasted. Even more than to prevent the miscarriage of justice I've been writing about since November, then, Senator Moghtader needs to be kept in office to prevent setting a dangerous precedent - one which could pave the way for frivolous recalls for years to come. We already have to pay for one useless election a year; let's leave it at that.

It's decision '09... and for once, it means something. Don't just get out the vote, get the vote the fuck out - and vote NO on removing Senator John Moghtader from office.

Happy Happy Happiness is a Warm Gun

Yesterday, I found myself walking around Sproul Plaza with a distinctly unusual sense of contentment. The environment was delightfully calm, tablers and flyerers having already packed up for the day. I was wearing a newly purchased sweatshirt; this allowed me to enjoy the crisp air while feeling comfortably warm – and looking snazzy, if I do say so myself – and with the sweatshirt on, I was looking forward to donating the old one I had replaced it with to a homeless dude. (It was stained enough that a student couldn’t reflect well on his colleagues while wearing it, but still in pretty good shape for someone less image-conscious.) To top it all off, I’d just bought myself a Churro, and was lost in its sugary, doughy goodness. Truly, it was a happiness in which I felt secure. Berkeley’s response was so immediate and so perfect I had to stop and marvel.

As I reached the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft, I heard and then saw something I’d been dreading for months: the triumphant return of my first mortal enemy, The Happy Man.

As reported in the Daily Cal some 3-and-a-half years ago (see the article here), Happy Man is J.J. Chin, a native of Taiwan and graduate of the University of Utah – I daresay the second most unloved one in the Bay Area, behind 49er “quarterback” Alex Smith. The near-septuagenarian stands on a precariously balanced bucket all day long, holding up a sign featuring the messages he receives from god while chanting that ubiquitous, obnoxious mantra, “Happy, happy, happy,” on an infinite loop.

Back in my first semester at Berkeley, the only thing that would get me through my morning chemistry classes was the thought of an eventual lunch break at Subway, across the street at the same intersection. This son of a bitch ruined that for me every time, shouting just loud enough for me to hear it faintly over the sound of “My Heart Will Go On” on the radio and my chewing. It wasn’t just that he was interrupting my lunch that pissed me off, though: it was the shit he had written on his signs.

It turned out, Happy Man doesn’t like white people or Jews. His signs usually contained some rant about the satanic George Bush and his rouges’ galley of associates, but they made it bitingly clear to anyone who actually stopped to read them that his main problem with the man was his being white. His constant criticism of Israel worked in the same vein, complete with allegations of Jews everywhere running the world. That blood libel charges never made it into his repertoire was a blessing that can only be attributed to his apparent inability to speak the English language, despite having lived in America for 45 years. That the man’s never gotten into any trouble despite his racist diatribes can only be attributed to the Berkeley Doctrine, which firmly establishes that prejudice against white people is both moral and fair.

With H. in the Oval Office, the name has changed on the sign but the sentiment remains the same – proving once and for all that this is a man with no particular political agenda, rather just an urge to spread his unflinchingly racist prophecies to everyone unfortunate enough to be within a sandwich-eating radius. The only thing more repugnant than the asshole himself is the fact that so many people get a kick out of him.

I’d like to get a kick out from under him.... I need a Churro.