564: Too Soon?

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2024

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It can be hard to know the right moment for something to happen.

Prologue: When Jordan was going into his senior year of high school in small town Utah, he and his buddies all lived together in a house, daring each other into Jackass-style pranks and stunts. There's one particular thing Jordan did that he did not want to talk to Ira about. (10 minutes)
Act One: Harmon Leon is a writer and comedian whose cocktail party story about “the-weirdest-gig-I-ever-did” is more weird—by a lot—than anyone else’s we’ve heard. He answered an ad several years ago that called for a hilarious sidekick to a celebrity on a hidden camera show. (30 minutes)
Act Two: One of the show's producers, Zoe Chace, tells Ira about a joke she made pretty soon after something terrible had happened.

Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org

Transcript

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0:00.0	Right after September 11th, we created a brand new criminal justice system at Guantanamo Bay,
0:06.0	a prison and a court to deal with people we suspected of being terrorists.
0:10.0	To do what we wanted to do at Guantanamo, we pushed aside the old rules for detaining prisoners of war,
0:16.0	so we can interrogate people how we wanted and hold them indefinitely, without charging them with a crime.
0:22.0	Maybe you have an idea of what it's like to work at Guantanamo Bay.
0:26.0	Put that aside for a second.
0:28.0	You know, you're on 42 square miles, you've got like five great beaches.
0:32.0	I partied my ass off in gimmo.
0:33.6	Just everyone was getting drunk and getting laid. I mean I love gimmo like it's it's
0:39.2	la land. We're like a Disneyland employee. Hmm, let's talk about that comparison there.
0:48.0	Oh no, that was a joke.
0:50.0	Definitely a joke.
0:51.0	It's nothing like, nothing like Line. Our mission today is to provide safe,
0:55.3	humane, legal, and transparent. The US government has its own story about what's been happening
0:59.5	inside Guantanamo all these years.
1:01.3	Legal, transparent care.
1:04.0	But we wanted the people who served at Guantanamo and survived
1:08.0	Guantanamo to tell their stories.
1:10.0	Now that they've left Guantanamo,
1:12.0	what would they say now that they couldn't say then?
1:14.0	A lot, as it turns out.
1:16.0	Chaos, simply put, it was chaotic.
	...

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