Mark has become one of those great friends I have yet to meet in person, although the face to face is happening soon, and I Am Excite. The subtitle says I’m doing this as a favor, but it’s more about payback for his above and beyond work to help me become a bestselling author.
Mark is the author of a shit-ton of books. He also is the man I hired to manage all the nightmarish shit involved in self-publishing my On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down books. I cannot begin to describe his dedication and professionalism, except to say that he is way fucking dedicated and super fucking professional. And he did a lot of extra shit that he refused to charge me for, even when I insisted.
So, when he asked me to write a Foreword to his latest book, I was goddamn delighted.
Last year he published a trivia guide to the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. This year, he followed it up with Yippee Kai-Yay Motherf*cker! A Trivia Guide to Die Hard. And for that book, I was honored to write the aforementioned Foreword. I’m gonna link it again at the end, but here is a collection of store links to get Mark’s new book.
Being that I’m a history guy, I decided to take somewhat of an historical approach to the project. This is what I came up with. Enjoy!
Welcome to the party, pal!
The late ‘80s was a boon for Beretta sales. Specifically, the 92F model.
The 9mm pistol with its 15-round magazine received a major product placement in Lethal Weapon, with Danny Glover doing the kind of firearm dirty talk that makes ammosexuals touch themselves. “Fifteen in the mag, one up the pipe, wide ejection port, no feed jams.” Ooohhhh dammit now I need to change my underwear.
A year later all those not members of well-regulated militias recognized Martin Riggs’s shooty boom toy in the hands of another doesn’t-play-by-the-rules copaganda hero: John McClane. It wasn’t just the Italian-made Beretta 92F (a company that’s been in business for half a millennium) Detective John Boy was using to send Eurotrash terrorists off to the great certainty, but the exact same prop gun that Mel Gibson caressed while turning paper targets into smiley faces. I wonder how the notoriously antisemitic Mel would have felt if they gave him an Israeli-made Desert Eagle to shoot at fleeing helicopters with. Probably would have needed to do a bunch of Hail Marys afterward or some shit.
Anyfuckingway, let’s talk terrorists. I mean thieves. Not common thieves, exceptional ones.
Hans had been a terrorist, a member of the “Volksfrei Movement,” which never actually existed. None of the terrorist groups named are real, but they’re all based on real organizations.
Volksfrei was intended to represent the Baader-Meinhof-Gruppe, also known as the Red Army Faction. They were a West German urban guerilla movement that bought into all that communism bullshit. Operating from 1970 to 1998, they killed a total of thirty-four people via bombings and targeted assassinations in their “anti-imperialistic struggle.” I mean yeah western capitalism has a lot to answer for but embracing Soviet-style communism as the alternative was just a big bucket of dumbfuck.
I guess Hans got tired of this idea that the state would own everything and said Karl Marx can inhale a big bag of dog farts because Gruber wanted to be owning his own shit and sitting on a beach earning twenty percent with his stolen bearer bonds. Twenty percent? The fuck kind of miracle worker is his portfolio manager?
My ADHD wants me to do a sidebar on the history of bearer bonds but it’s kinda boring so google that shit if you want.
As part of Hans’s ploy to steal an assload of cash he fakes out the cops by making them think he still embraces all that revolutionary freedom fighter stuff with the goal of getting the FBI involved because that electromagnetic seal has gotta come down. He gets on the radio with Assistant Deputy Dwayne T. Small Dick Energy Robinson and demands the release of his “comrades in arms around the world languishing in prison.” The groups he names are the “Seven members of the New Provo Front” in Northern Ireland, the “Five imprisoned leaders of Liberté de Quebec,” and the “nine members of the Asian Dawn movement” in Sri Lanka that he read about in Time Magazine.
As I said, none of those terrorist groups existed by those names. The New Provo front is based on the Provisional Irish Republican Army that sought to end British rule in Northern Ireland. Interestingly, the 9/11 attacks accelerated the IRA’s decommissioning and embracing of the peace process because seeing videos of planes flying into buildings soured much of the world on any form of terrorism.
Liberté de Québec was based on the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), a terrorist group fighting for Quebec to separate from the rest of Canada. In 1970 the group kidnapped the deputy premier of Quebec Pierre LaPorte then later executed him. Within a dozen years all involved were walking free, so there weren’t any imprisoned FLQ leaders when Die Hard came out in 1988. In fact, the killing of LaPorte and the arrests that followed embittered many on the organization and it rapidly fell into decline.
And Asian Dawn was of course meant to represent the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant separatist group questing for an independent home for Hindu Tamils in northeast Sri Lanka. They were by far the most vicious and deadly of the three groups, with the quarter-century-long civil war between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government resulting in 100,000 deaths, close to half of them civilians.
While Hans gives his spiel our hero John is listening in and says, “What the fuck?” like he rightly believes this is all bullshit, but it’s important to note that terrorists taking hostages as a ploy to gain freedom for their “comrades in arms” has been a common occurrence. As an example, prior to murdering eleven Israeli athletes and coaches in Munich in 1972, the Black September group demanded the release of 234 mostly Palestinians held in Israeli prisons. Israel said get fucked and the Germans fucked up the rescue and a lotta people died and then the Germans fucked up again a month later. The following October 29, Palestinian terrorists hijacked Lufthansa Flight 615 and said hey you need to free the three surviving Black September terrorists who killed those Israelis or we’re gonna kill everyone on this plane and the West German government said yeah sure okay and let the terrorists go because Germany has something of a history of not giving a fuck about Jewish lives.
In conclusion, Die Hard is definitely copaganda but also good fun so as long as you realize that there is a serious problem with the militarization and infiltration of white supremacy of policing in America. Sorry to be a downer on that front. Go ahead and enjoy the movie.
And also, enjoy the shit out of this book.
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And so there you go. If you’re a fan of Die Hard, the book is a must read. Get it here.
A side note: thank you for being so open about your ADHD diagnosis. Guess who joined the official club, if there is one, in the past month? I looked into it, found out what's up, and am starting treatment because so much you've written about your experience sounded like it was coming from my life and head. You've changed my life, and in the unlikely event we ever meet, I owe you at least a beer.
“New Provo Front” - thought at first they would be rebel LDS youth...