The Truth About The Epic Beard Man Viral Video
Back in February, a fight took place on a public bus in Oakland. A week later, four million people had watched the video on YouTube. "AC Transit Bust Fight I Am a Motherfucker" featured all the key ingredients for a video to go viral: colorful characters, a silly catchphrase, and most importantly, someone getting badly injured.
Can you spot the similarity?
But it also had something most viral videos lack: a clear protagonist. For once you didn't have to feel bad for the guy writhing in pain on the ground. This was that rare viral video where the good guy won.
As opposed to the viral videos where no one wins.
That is, at least, what the internet told us. And unless you were one of the people who was physically present on the bus that day, you knew who the good guy was before you'd even watched the video. The sites linking off to the fight told you what to expect, who to root for, and who was going to win. But in everyone's rush to turn the video into an underdog tale of an old man standing up to a teenage thug, they missed a few key details.
What The Internet Saw
When the video begins, two men are engaged in a heated conversation near the back of a public bus. In one corner we have our hero, Tom Bruso, an old white man wearing a shirt that says "I AM A MOTHERFUCKER," and a fanny pack beard combo that says "I am Santa Claus on my way to a beach volleyball tournament in the year 1984."
"And I like my belt cinched a foot above my waist."
In the other, we have what sites like Digg, True Crime Report and True Slant objectively described as a "young shit talking thug who deserves to get his ass beat."
#1 on Digg for an entire day.
We don't get to see the beginning of the argument, but it's hard to imagine old man winter starting shit with a black kid who looks like he's specifically outfitted himself to make white people lock their car doors when they see him on a street corner. Not that it matters. Even if you were one of the few people who didn't come to the video from a blog or portal promising a fight, the description below the video, ("BLACK GUY GET HIS ASS WHOOPED BY OLD WHITE GUY. SMH"), makes it clear that you're not here to watch these two solve their disagreement with words.
The description's use of grammar would indicate words are of very little importance in general.
As the argument escalates Bruso walks to the front of the bus, the thug follows and tries to hit him. It is at this point that the old man stands and reveals that he is Epic Beard Man, a tightly coiled blender of ass whoop in disguise. He lands a number of punches to the center of the "would be tough guy's" suddenly not so intimidating face. After a few seconds standing over his vanquished attacker talking shit like Ali in Zaire, Bruso exits the bus which is now covered in blood. This seems appropriate since we've just witnessed the live birth of an internet legend.
The comments sections and blogosphere immediately hailed Bruso as an everyman hero, standing up for old people, white people, racists and anyone who's ever ridden public transportation.
Mostly racists, though.
Soon, people began to speculate that Bruso was the old man getting tazed in a YouTube video filmed at an Oakland A's baseball game. You might recognize "unwarranted tazing" as the internet's favorite genre of viral video from a few years ago. If he didn't use phrases like "Chinamen" and punch people in the face, we might have started to suspect he was part of some brilliant viral marketing campaign. Instead, we sat back, and waited for the video of Bruso choking a shark to death with the octopus he just had sex with.
But it was the "documentaries" that transformed EBM from hero to legend.
Among other things, we learned that EBM knocked out his dad when he was 15. His violent streak was explained by the fact that his mom placed him in an oven as a baby. Plus, he'd returned from Vietnam in '69 to find that he wouldn't be able to spend time with his black friends (his only friends) because of segregation.
Holy shit! He's not just some awesome old guy, he's a bearded Rambo!
Or a badass, psychotic Santa Claus.
The Truth
Imagine that the first time you watched the video, you didn't know the black guy was supposed to be a young thug or that the white guys was supposed to be an old man acting in self defense. In fact, imagine you didn't know there was going to be a fight. Your only goal was to watch a video and try to figure out what's happening here.
Who Started It?Based on the conversation, it would seem that moments before the video began, Michael was walking onto the bus while Bruso was near the front of the bus talking to his friend about a shoe shine. Michael thought Bruso was being racist, and told him so.
There is no trade more maligned than that of the shoe shinesman.
We certainly can't say if Michael was right to take offense in the first place. We have no video of what Bruso was saying. But if an African American stranger tells you they find your conversation about shoe shines to be racist and you're not being racist, you might apologize for the regrettable misunderstanding, and explain the context of your conversation. If you were being racist, you were trying to avoid a fight.
"I sincerely regret any foolish statements I may have made."
Bruso opts instead to follow Michael to the back of the bus and ask him how much he'd charge for a spit shine. Again, we can't tell if his intent was necessarily racist, but we can say it's pretty misleading to claim Bruso wasn't acting in self defense. He followed the "shit-talking thug" to the back of the bus, and asked him a question designed to provoke more shit-talking. He was being antagonistic. If this were middle school, everyone would have started chanting "Fight! Fight! Fight!" when Bruso followed Michael to the back of the bus after they exchanged words at the front.
Michael eventually threw the first punch. We're not trying to excuse his actions. But at the very least, Bruso played a major role in what happened up to that point, and at worst, he acted like a man looking for a fight. It was enough for the person sitting two seats away to take out a camera and start recording.
Above: 21st Century Conflict Resolution.
So why would an old white guy go looking for a fight with a teenage thug straight off the set of Menace II Society? Who's The Underdog Here?
Watching the video, the idea that Bruso was somehow the underdog never really materializes if you don't have that idea in your head to begin with. First of all, he's probably got a hundred pounds on Michael and a good five inches. So really the only thing that might make you think Bruso wouldn't win a violent conflict with Michael (assuming you're not just afraid of black people in general, as most of the internet appears to be) is Bruso's declaration "I'm 67 years old." Still, it seems strange that we'd take that as a declaration of vulnerability since the full sentence in which the information is conveyed was, "You ain't scarin' this white boy, I'm 67 years old!" What's strange is that everyone seems to have missed Michael's response, "I'm 50."
Obvious human misery becomes hilarious when we arbitrarily define the victim as "thuggish"!
How did they miss it? He's doesn't speak as loudly as Bruso, but it's clearly audible. And he says it immediately after Bruso says he's 67, which is something the internet seems to have caught.
Does a 67 year old with a half dozen weight class advantage really become the underdog over a 50 year old? At best, it's an even draw.
This is Somehow a Relevant Commentary on Racial Politics:The Internet seemed to take this as a relevant comment on black white race relations. Video responses were posted in which black men took Bruso's side. A startling portion of the comments are racist rants about how this is just the way it is, and that Bruso was standing up for John Q public who's had to live his life in fear of black thugs.
Taking a step back and watching the video outside of that context, you might notice that you are watching a fist fight that is taking place on a public bus. You might also notice that the white guy is wearing a shirt with the word motherfucker on it, and that he casually drops the word "Chinamen" when defending himself against racism. There is almost nothing about Bruso that doesn't shout "crazy homeless guy."
The man's last fight was due to an attempted Rascal-jacking by his "special" cousin.
This is to be expected from a guy whose mom tried to bake him into a baby pie, and who was then shipped off to fuckin' 'nam, man...right? This also can be expected from someone who's bipolar, which EBM is. If you're thinking, "Wow, he went to Vietnam and was bipolar?!" then we hate to break it to you, but people suffering from bipolar disorder are prone to lying for attention.
"And then I gunned down a thousand Vietnameses and saved the princess."
In fact, EBM's sister says her brother never went to Vietnam. He was honorably discharged due to his mental disorders. He was never put in an oven by their mother, never knocked out their father.
People probably would have realized pretty quickly EBM was prone to lying: his post fight interviews included a claim that during the original confrontation, Michael pulled a giant knife on him, and punched him in the jaw three times, all claims that can be debunked by watching the video that made him famous.
If he'd had a giant knife, don't you think he'd have used it?
At the time he became Epic Beard Man, Bruso was moving around San Francisco, teetering on the brink of homelessness. In fact, he believes his most recent eviction was caused by the video that made him famous. Tom Bruso isn't a badass hero. He's a mentally ill old man who, in his own words, "can't even remember yesterday," and is "out of my mind and can't think anymore."
And all of those things were on clear display in the video that brought him to our attention. But of course, a video titled "Bi-Polar 67 Year Old Beats Crap Out of Much Smaller 50 Year Old" wouldn't have become an internet sensation. So someone early on edited all of that stuff out, and made up a new story that appealed to our imagination, desire for justice and the racism simmering just below the surface of most sites on the web. It's no different from what Hollywood does when they release a movie that's "based on a true story." The saga of Epic Beard Man just proves that you don't even need to change a single event. All you need to do is upload it to YouTube, give it a good enough title, and the echo chamber of the internet will do the rest for you.
"Heroic hobo flips off three suspiciously Mexican ninjas after saving a white woman from their mongrel depredations."
When not having flashbacks of the night a beard murdered his parents, Nick is working on the sequel to his Kingdom Hearts Parody.
Sad.
ReplyI don't know why people like the white guy. The article says he's clearly insane, and he was also provoking the black guy. -.-
Reply...and again it's proven that we as humans can form opinions before knowing any context. It's bullshit. Suppose you were the black man. Now, I know there's a lot of moral nonsense on here stating that "they were both wrong" bla bla bla. This guy, who is a great deal larger than you, is threatening you. How about a brutal racial slur followed by "I fucked your momma and she"... That could be a very offensive statement if he made one like that. You've taken steps to avoid this a*****e, yet here he sits, bullying you with his racial bullshit. You're a grown man. Nobody can talk to you like that - I know they better not talk to me like that. So, that's it. This a*****e has said enough. Even if you get your ass beat, you know what? You defended yourself and your pride.
ReplyRather than say is it "right" as everyone suffers from their own personal idea of morality, was it legal? Well, the black man was being verbally assaulted, harassed, and intimidated it seems. So, he threw a punch and was brutally physically assaulted. To me, while liability falls own both perhaps, Santa should be facing far more severe punishment.
If no one remembers this, look up Bernhard Goetz. Now he WAS supposedly being attacked, or robbed, or whatever - but the circumstances are similar. Now where's your moral compass? Rodney King? Assumptions before/after? Have we learned anything since the civil rights movement?
I, personally, hope the black man knows that somewhere people understand why he threw that punch. He probably held back quite a bit.
AMBER LAMPS!
ReplyNo.
Talking s**t is one thing. EBM should not have provoked the other guy, I'll admit. You should, however, possess enough self-control to refrain from swinging on someone just because they were running their mouth. Neither one of them is in the right here.
ReplyI love reading the comments on videos like this, especially the racist ones.
ReplyThey prove what I say about how the internet provides a place for people to say things they would otherwise be too chickenshit to say in real life.
They can't prove anything unless you meet those people in real life. Maybe they DO say those things in real life. You don't know.
There seem to be a lot more of these sorts of idiots in YouTube comments threads than in real life. I think that may be evidence of something. I mean, even xkcd's much-vaunted YouTube commenters parody is astonishingly tame compared to the depths of human stupidity that manifests on that site. There's something going on here, whether it's a video site selecting for the dipshittiest of the dipshits, or the effects of anonymity, WindmanEarle has put his finger on something...
was it really necessary to write a whole article for something that would only take a sentence to say??
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesYes. It'll be yes every time.
That article feed his kids so I'm cool with it.
Go ahead, try and sum up every valid point he was trying to make, including all the evidence he used to illustrate it, in a grammatically correct sentence. By the way without all his points and evidence, that "one sentence" would hold absolutely no credibility.
This is Cracked. What do you expect?
This is so bayarea.
ReplyRandom crazy white guy, who may or may not have been in nam' or smoked pot this morning, says random s**t that random angry black guy, who might be the recipient of said comment,or may just be too f*****g sensitive, get in fight over.
Thank you, Mr.Coffin for pointing out that this shouldn't be a symbol of black and white relations.
What's wrong with boot blacking, we like it VERY MUCH!
ReplyEveryone involved was a pitiful moron.
ReplyAnd before getting all red-faced about waaahmeanracistwhities and deciding that that whole thing is a one-way street fingersinearslalalala, maybe pay attention to things like how the trashy broads recording the thing encouraged the Michael guy specifically because the other guy was white.
I don't know what was worse. The beard guy acting like even more of a lunatic after he got off the bus, or the Michael guy going from acting like a tough hard bastard during the incident to acting like the 180-opposite upstanding genial gentleman in interviews later.
They were all retarded and racist and pathetic and the only cool part of the whole thing was that a public bus got covered in blood.
It's kind of hard to say that - maybe the lady recording it took Michael's side because of how douche-y/aggressive the bearded man was acting before she started filming. Maybe that was why she started filming in the first place. That doesn't justify her saying racial slurs (although I'm white, and if someone called me pinky I'd probably just blink at them... It doesn't really carry a ton of weight, you know?) but that might be her responding to the guy being a dick, and her reaching to insults she knows.
Or, of course, maybe she is prejudiced against white people. f**k if I know.
I think after you've been verbally intimidated and had racial slurs thrown at you by an old crazy psycho, then you can maybe judge whether or not it was silly that this Micheal guy acted "like a tough hard bastard" and tried to prop himself up a bit.
Until then, shut the f**k up.
Any fight video with a black or hispanic dude on it is going to be treated as IGNANT ASS NIGGERZZ/BEANERS TALKIN s**t AND FIGHTIN CUZ THEY DUM NIGGERZZ/BEANERS. It's just a downside of the internet that everyone can voice their opinion on something without knowing the backstory.
ReplyIt does make me wonder if this is a case of people saying things they are thinking anyway but realize is will get them ostracized in a non anonymous setting, or if it's twelve year olds getting excited about a chance to say stuff that they're not allowed to say. And if it's the first, I wonder if those people who would say it if they could are a big portion of the population, or if it's a small minority who just spend a lot of time on the internet. I'm not really sure how to find out, but it's interesting.
12-year olds are the only way to explain most of YouTube, much of Yahoo Answers, all of LJDramaz and 4chan, and 95% of the ironically autistic xkcd sucks blogsite.
It's 12-year olds, or it's time to plunge into Lovecraftian insanity.
The white dude said the black dude had a big ass knife on him, and you can clearly see he doesnt. Just saying, its hard to believe what he says when he will tell such an obvious lie. Of course the black dude could and should have just been an adult and let it drop but this clearly isnt some old white guy standing up to a young (50 year old) black thug and being a hero. There is no hero here, just 2 old guys acting like children
Reply"Bi-Polar 67 Year Old Beats Crap Out of Much Smaller 50 Year Old"
ReplyCome on, who are you kidding...that would have gotten just as many people to watch the video. It actually makes it sound even more awesome.
Really?..... Without the chocolate and vanilla icing.
It might of... But then there's be people yelling about how all insane and/or homeless people are dangerous, and we should be getting rid of them dammit! A mentally disturbed man killed a woman on a subway track years ago, and the response was similar. It seems like there always has to be a hook.
The author also neglects to mention that the Black dudes friend who was filming the whole mess could barely wait for EBM to get off the bus before she stole the bag he left behind. Shoulda punched all of 'em.
Replyf**k this author. Dude. The old white man got up and moved to another part of the bus, to separate himself from the other man. Who then got up, pursued him, and threw the first punch.
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesb***h got what was coming to him.
If some a*****e on a public bus asked you your going rate for shining shoes would you just sit there?
@AdanRyder: Thats not how I interpreted it at all. As far as I could tell the white guy wasnt even talking to him. He was talking about a spit shine but it had nothing to do with guy who got whipped. The old guy tried explaining that. The old guy was actually trying to resolve the situation before just giving up and moving to the front. If that black guy had just minded his damn business and wasnt so busy trying to act "real" and "hard", then he wouldnt have ended up with his face looking like lasagna. Got what he deserved all the way.
Sharpton and Jackson like to overplay things for monetary gain, but the truth is that blacks do hear racism constantly. Claiming his racism wasn't directed personally against Michael doesn't excuse EBM. You would have to be exposed to repeated racism to understand that. But commandodude and corehaven are the exact type of people the author is criticizing. It's a shame that they can't comprehend that. I guess Agent Smith is right - the world needs degeneracy.
That Black guy fucked up by the way. When the White guy got up and left, they should have just squashed it. Instead - dumbass gets up and put his hands on him. Stupid.
ReplyI wanna see a fight to the death between Al Sharpton and Pat Buchannan.
WHO YOU CALLIN "BOY"?
Basically, Fox News has White people so afraid and depressed about "losing White America" that anytime White people can catch a White man defeating a Black guy on tape, the racist trolls among them try and hype things up as much as they can. I'm sure Stormfront and a couple other White nationalist websites contributed to this videos hit count, but even with such a "victory", they've still gotta turn on the TV and watch Obama walk across the world's stage.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesWhat bothers me most about this country is that people and THE MEDIA don't care about crimes unless they are interacial. White guy rapes/kills a White woman... so what. Non White guy rapes/ kills the same woman IT'S A MAJOR CRISIS THAT REQUIRES CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS.
I'll know racism is gone in this country when all criminals are treated the same.
If both the guys in this video were the same color, it wouldn't be a big deal.
Because white people are really freaking out about that, right? Bullshit. No one beyond a fraction of republicans gives a fuck. You seriously think Fox News has anywhere near that much influence? You seriously think that many people care? Who do you think secured Obama's presidency, the ~15% of the population that's black?
You're full of s**t for more than that and your brush is too wide to paint more than nonsense caricature.
Yeah, Fox News, the highest rated news network on television, has no influence...wait, what?
Surely you are not so stupid that you think the 12% of the population that is black normally votes republican, o___o?
The funny part of "losing White America" is that white people aren't indigenous to America in the first place. It'd be like saying "losing Black France" or somesuch.
Honestly, I have seen fights over less. I'm from Hayward (like 5 minuets from Oakland) and have seen two guys fight over one of them throwing a bottle in the direction of the person, missing the trash can that was right next to the guy, and hitting him in the back. It ended with one guy knocked out on the ground and the other in the back of a cop car.
ReplyFor those who think that you can say whatever you want where ever you want: You go anywhere to Oakland, Fremont, Hayward, San Lorenzo, or really anywhere there (dare you to say some racist comment in Richmond at night) and see if you don't get your ass kicked.
This isn't Jeff by the way... it's his wife, Serena
Hi Serena.
Ah racism, harder to kill than Superman on PCP and the font from which the true essence of stupidity flows. Amazing how as soon as people get into a comments section they start flinging the racist remarks whether it makes sense to or not. Even funnier is the answer to this question, which I pose now to a disturbingly large number of posters before me...
ReplyIf there was a black guy standing right next to you reading over your shoulder, would you have typed the same thing? My guess is no, because you're a goddamn coward and hypocrite.
It doesn't matter what he said. He can say what ever he wants. Physical violence is never an acceptable recourse for disagreeing with someone else's words. The only change I would make is 67 yo white man kicks middle aged black man's ass after black man steps to him and forces the issue, other than that this article is a total fail.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesAgreed.
You've got an interesting perspective on the issue, but I disagree with it. First of all, while physical violence might not be an acceptable recourse to any kind of directed hostility, insults and epithets that are designed to provoke that kind of response out of a visible minority are equally, in my opinion, just as morally repugnant.
Second of all, I believe that this article is a total win on the basis it successfully managed to deconstruct the racial arguments used to market the "epic beard man" video, and the will to conformity surrounding the culture itself. Thus, is our protagonist not really epic on any scale, only flawed. I think that got to you, to be honest, and that's what's getting to you now.
You're a little b***h if you wouldn't take action if some stranger insulted you on the bus.