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Out of curiosity, why does he yell Attica Attica?
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From the
New York Times:
"[O]n Sept. 9, 1971, angry inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility, 30 miles east of Buffalo, N.Y., rioted. They seized control of an exercise yard and took guards as hostages. Thus began a chain of often-bizarre events that produced the worst prison insurrection in U.S. history, indeed the bloodiest single clash between Americans since street riots in New York City a century earlier.
Altogether, 43 people died at Attica, nearly all -- inmates and hostages alike -- when state troopers stormed the prison Sept. 13 and fired indiscriminately through a thick haze of tear gas. It was, a state investigating commission would later conclude, an assault both ill-conceived and poorly executed, leading to needless loss of life. One disenchanted state prosecutor ended up calling it 'a turkey shoot.'
As if the mass death were not shocking enough, officials at first lied about what had happened. They said inmates had killed the hostages, slitting their throats and castrating them. None of that was true, as autopsies showed the next day....
There was, for many, a queasy feeling that government might be capable of just about anything. Nor did the news media emerge looking good. Tales of inmates' atrocities were reported as fact. There was not nearly adequate attribution to officials who were spreading the lies.
'It was a little like the Vietnam war coming home,' recalls Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, a prison monitoring group. 'You had a brutal application of government power and then the sheer audacity of government cover-up.'
For a sense of how deep the cynicism ran, catch
Dog Day Afternoon the next time it is on television. In that 1975 film, Al Pacino, playing a loser who takes hostages after a botched bank robbery, whips up a street crowd to pressure the New York police to hold their fire. He does it by rhythmically chanting, 'At-ti-ca, At-ti-ca, At-ti-ca.'"
