Obsessed Issue by Buzzsaw Magazine

BUZZSAW DECEMBER 2015

Students Lack Confidence in Rochon pg. 5

CANâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;T LOOK AWAY

Whitewashing U.S. History pg. 26

Electronic Addiction pg. 32

Buzzsaw presents...

EDITORS’ COMMENT

The Obsessed Issue

Welcome to infatuation nation, where desire and impulse rule. What is perhaps most dangerous about obsession is our inability to notice its tumultuous presence in our lives. It has the tendency to sneak up from behind and change everything unless it is called out. And that’s where we come in. America the supercilious: it pervades the hearts and minds of its people through foreign policy, education and political rhetoric. (The Dark Side of American Exceptionalism, p. 22) Brunch, the blessed Frankenstein creation between breakfast and lunch, has transformed Sundays to be the creative class’ preferred meal to conspicuously display status. (The Social Capital of Brunch, p. 20) Oneohtrix Point Never’s new release, “Garden of Delete,” uses the grotesque to find a place of hyper-realistic profundity. (Oneohtrix Point Never review: p. 34)

Divider and Table of Contents Photography By Elena Haskins Elena Haskins is a sophomore Cinema and Photography Major. She is a Photo Concentration and Communication, Management, and Design Minor. She says of her art: “I like to photograph portraits and anything that catches my eye. I find it very interesting to examine things around us, especially things that we see everyday, and allow other people to learn as well by photographing them.”

BUZZSAW News & Views Upfront

Evan Popp Katelyn Harrop Michele Hau Ministry of Cool Kellen Beck Sophie Israelsohn Prose & Cons Robert S. Hummel Sawdust Tylor Colby Layout Olivia Cross Art Lizzie Cox Website Lexie Farabaugh Christian Cassidy-Amstutz Seesaw Erica Moriarty

Production Advisor Founders

Taylor Barker Celisa Calacal Jeff Cohen Abby Bertumen Kelly Burdick Bryan Chambala Sam Costello Thom Denick Cole Louison James Sigman

Buzzsaw is published with support from Generation Progress / Center for American Progress (online at GenProgress.org). Buzzsaw is also funded by the Ithaca College Student Government Association and the Park School of Communications. Vanguard Printing is our press. (Ithaca, N.Y.)

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

Buzzsaw uses student-generated art and photography and royalty-free images. Views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editorial staff or of Ithaca College. Feedback and contributions should be sent to buzzsawmag@gmail.com. Front and back cover art by Emma Rizzo Center art by Lizzie Cox

Write Us

Our magazine exists to inspire thoughtful debate and open up the channels through which information is shared. Your comments and feedback are all a part of this process. Reach the editors by email at: buzzsawmag@gmail.com.

Table of Contents Seesaw ..........................................................4 Print media is dead, check out multimedia on the web.

News & Views .................................................5 Current events, local news & quasi-educated opinions.

Upfront ........................................................19 Selected dis-education of the month.

Ministry of Cool ........................................30 Arts, entertainment and other things cooler than us.

Prose & Cons .............................................38 Short fiction, personal essay and other assorted lies.

Satire threatening the magazineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s credibility since 1856.

BUZZSAW News & Views

Sawdust .......................................................45

Ithaca College Students Obsessions

A peanut butter, photo and music obsessed freshman asks Ithaca College students what their weird obsessions are.

Our Generations Obsession with Modern Technology

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

Originally created to improve our lifestyle, technology has slowly turned into an addiction. Taking over our lifes, it has created an artiďŹ cial sense of humanity.

Food Obsession: Munchie Madness

From breakfast, to lunch, to dinner, three students checked out their favorite places to eat in Ithaca to satisfy their obsession with food.

Subscribe at www.vimeo.com/buzzsawmag 4

Students Lack Confidence in Rochon Board of Trustees must listen to student demands By Evan Popp, News and Views Editor

Lissy acknowledged the issues facing the college and vowed to take action. However, in an interview with The Ithacan Dec. 4, responding to a question of whether the Board of Trustees has confidence in Rochon, Grape said: “Right now, President Rochon is the president of Ithaca College, and we support the president of Ithaca College.” It is clear, however, that if any progress is to be made, the Board of Trustees must listen to student activists and Rochon must go. Students are the ones that make this college viable as an institution of higher education. Presidents are expendable, students are not. Students opinions, which have been clearly shown through the no confidence vote, should be the priority. However, some will likely argue as a reason for not taking the results of the vote seriously that the use of the number 71.75 percent as proof that a majority of students have no confidence in Rochon is misleading. And while it is true that the 2,695 students that voted no confidence in Rochon do not represent a majority of the entire student body — they constitute 39 percent of all students who received the link to the no confidence vote — this argument fundamentally misses the point. It is true that 39 percent of the total student body voting no confidence sounds a lot less substantial than 71.75 percent of respondents voting no confidence. However, it is concerning that nearly four out of every 10 students on campus have no confidence in Rochon. And saying four of 10 students have no confidence in Rochon does not mean six out of every 10 have confidence in him, as only 14.7 percent of students on campus responded with confidence in Rochon. It is significant when fewer than two out of every 10 students on campus have confidence in the president of the college and that is the number the Board of Trustees should examine when thinking about Rochon’s future tenure at the college. Furthermore, it is particularly concerning that such a large portion of the African, Latino, Asian and Native American students at the college expressed no confidence in Rochon. Nearly 87 percent of ALANA respondents voted no confidence in Rochon and 93.42 per-

cent of African American student respondents expressed qualms with the embattled president. When the community of students who are saying they don’t feel safe on campus has such little faith in the leader of the institution to rectify the situation, it should be cause for concern. The Board of Trustees should take into account the degree to which ALANA students have expressed no confidence in Rochon and should take action based off the demands of POC at IC and the majority of students who participated in the no confidence vote. In addition, it is important to recognize this is not only about Rochon, but also about a governing structure that does not feature shared governance between stakeholders at the college and allows a Board of Trustees made up primarily of business people — not educators — to have control over many of the important decisions the college makes, including whether a president the student body has clearly expressed no confidence in stays or goes. Although Grape and Lissy said the Board of Trustees passed a resolution in support of a rethinking of shared governance at the college, they have yet to prove the Board of Trustees will back this up with action. The Board of Trustees must interpret the student actions this semester as not only an indictment of Rochon’s leadership, but also a strike at the heart of a leadership structure that often seems to prioritize the desires of the administration and the Board of Trustees over those of students and faculty. The students are the ones paying tuition to attend this school, and their sentiments regarding Rochon’s leadership and the lack of support Rochon has with students on campus must be acted upon by the Board of Trustees. _______________________________________ Evan Popp is a sophomore journalism major who wishes the Board of Trustees would take a gap semester. You can email him at epopp@ithaca.edu.

News & Views

n Nov. 30, the Ithaca College Student Government Association announced 2,695 students voted no confidence in President Tom Rochon, amounting to 71.75 percent of those who voted. Over half the student body — about 54 percent — participated in the vote. The vote came about after a semester of upheaval featuring questions regarding the college’s racial climate and a perceived lack of inclusivity in decision making. Protests regarding the college’s racial climate were sparked, in part, by a number of racially charged incidents this semester including controversial remarks made by Public Safety officers during resident assistant training as well as a party theme of “preps and crooks” by the fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi that many students found racially offensive. In addition, protests occurred after an incident at the college’s Blue Sky Reimagining Kick-off Event in which two alumni panelists referred to a woman of color alumna panelist as “the savage,” a comment many felt was racially offensive. Many criticized the administration and Rochon for taking much longer to respond to the events at the Blue Sky Reimagining than to the fraternity party and also questioned the nature of the administration’s response, which essentially said the college could not prevent hurtful language from being used. The group spearheading the protests is POC at IC — which stands for People of Color at Ithaca College. POC at IC has advocated Rochon’s removal for failing to create a safe and inclusive campus climate, among other issues. The Board of Trustees — which makes the decision whether Rochon stays or goes — should remove Rochon from his position, as a large number of the most important stakeholders at the college, students, have expressed no confidence in his leadership. To their credit, Tom Grape — chair of the Board of Trustees — and David Lissy — vice chair of the Board of Trustees — came to campus in early December and met with members of the campus community. In a message sent out through Intercom, Grape and

The Power of Student Activism

Why The Atlantic’s “The New Intolerance of Student Activism” gets it wrong

By Celisa Calacal, Staff Writer

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

cross the United States, a resurgence of student power has taken place. Whether at small, private institutions or well-known, public universities, students of color have chosen to speak out and demand an environment of respect, fair treatment, safety and comfort at the institutions they attend on a daily basis. Schools such as the University of Missouri, Amherst College, Harvard University, the University of California Los Angeles and Ithaca College have seen a rise in protests, teachins and walkouts led by students of color in the name of demanding an improvement to their school’s racial climate, with students treated with fairness and respect and given a say in decisions regarding the college they attend. Many of these student activists have written their own formal list of demands to be addressed immediately by the presidents and administrations of their schools. Some of these demands include an increase in the hiring of faculty of color, more funds allocated to programs and organizations benefiting students of color and even the resignation or firing of the president of the college, which is one of the demands of POC at IC — People of Color at Ithaca College. At the prestigious Yale University, student activists have also engaged in confrontations over race regarding recent events that have exacerbated the poor racial climate at the university. However, the actions of these students, who are primarily students of color, have faced sharp criticism, the most biting of which came from The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf in his Nov. 9 piece, “The New Intolerance of Student Activism.” Friedersdorf criticized the actions of these students as examples of their new attitude of “intolerance”

towards viewpoints that are dissenting from their own. One event that sparked controversy at Yale was an alleged “white girls only” party hosted by Sigma Alpha Epsilon. But what Friedersdorf chooses to center his argument upon is the student response to an email sent out by Erika Christakis, associate master at Silliman College, a residential area for Yale students. Christakis wrote the email in response to a separate message sent out by Yale officials Oct. 27 that urged students to be mindful of their Halloween attire in the name of racial sensitivity and preventing cultural appropriation. Some students, however, were frustrated by the email, prompting Christakis to send out her own email arguing against what she saw as the university’s attempt to control the ways its students choose to dress for Halloween. Many students quickly took offense to Christakis’ email for what they saw as a downplaying of issues that continue to impact students of color. As a result, they demanded the resignation of Christakis and her husband Nicholas, a Yale professor and master at Silliman College, who was quoted in the email suggesting that students who don’t like a costume should either look away or tell the person wearing it that they are offended. Friedersdorf criticized the Yale activists for taking offense to Christakis’ email. Citing footage showing a confrontation between professor Christakis and students demanding an apology for his wife’s email, Friedersdorf wrote that the position of the students allowed no room for civil disagreement. “They see anything short of a confession of wrongdoing as unacceptable,” he wrote. “In their view, one respects students by validating their subjective feelings.” Friedersdorf went on to write that the students at Yale are illustrating

the concept of “catastrophizing,” described in an article in The Atlantic in September 2015 by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt titled “The Coddling of the American Mind,” as the idea of “turning common events into nightmarish trials or claiming that easily bearable events are too awful to bear.” But through accusing these students of catastrophizing, what Friedersdorf severely lacks is basic understanding, empathy and context. First and foremost, it is important to note the safety and comfort of students of color do not materialize once they enter the hallowed gates of higher education. Racism and microaggressions are never checked and left behind at the door, but are rather carried through subtly by well-meaning individuals who claim they are not racist. A university may feel like a comfortable bubble to some students, but to many students of color, it can be another manifestation of the continued prevalence of systemic racism that plagues this country. Friedersdorf’s argument only looks at what is on the surface, rather than what lies beneath it. The rise in student protests should not be looked at as an immediate reaction to racially charged actions on campus, such as the email from Christakis, but as a boiling-point reaction from students of color who constantly face racially charged comments from professors, administrators and fellow students on a day-to-day basis. When these students have constantly been kicked down by racist remarks, actions and subsequent inaction by the very people who vow to create a “safe and inclusive” campus environment, it becomes difficult to continue suffering in silence. Their anger does not stem from only one or two incidents, but from years of living in an environment where their own external identity is used

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displayed a poster illustrating Yale’s diversity gaps. The poster read: “A 1% increase in black faculty per century! The students are waiting. Your move, Yale.” In a school with a majority white student population, the need to find a safe space or a familiar face to connect with coexists with the need to increase the diversity in faculty to provide a more comfortable environment for students. Friedersdorf mentions the action that hundreds of Yale students have taken in signing an open letter to Christakis detailing the grievances and frustrations with her email, only to criticize the students’ reasoning and rationale even further. “Yale students told to talk to each other if they find a peer’s costume offensive helplessly declare that they’re unable to do so without an authority figure specifying ‘any modes or means to facilitate these discussions,’ as if they’re Martians unfamiliar with a concept as rudimentary as disagreeing in conversation, even as they publish an open letter that is, itself, a mode of facilitating discussion,” he wrote in his article. However, Friedersdorf fails to understand the ways in which Christakis’ letter infantilized the student body by trivializing the problems of cultural appropriation instead of sparking meaningful dialogue. Oftentimes, students are left to explain the wrongness of cultural appropriation for themselves, and are met with opposition from the other side, who claim it’s just a costume. Having high-level administrators stand on the side against appropriation, with the student activists themselves, illustrates an attempt to understand and listen to the perspectives of the student body, instead of leaving it up to them to fend for themselves, as Christakis suggested. In another attempt to criticize Yale student activists, Friedersdorf said they need to be taught “how empowered they are by virtue of their mere enrollment.” While it is undeniable there is a privilege in being able to attend an Ivy League college, it is unfair to imply that these students of color hold a tantamount amount of privilege that cancels out any oppression they may face in a zero-sum

game. Even in an Ivy League institution, skin color and race can determine how students are treated by their peers. Already their minority status strips away privileges that are held by white students and impacts the way they experience Yale in relation to their white colleagues. Friedersdorf, however, ignored this in his article. The piece ends with this sentence: “In their muddled ideology, the Yale activists had to destroy the safe space to save it.” But what Friedersdorf fails to realize is why the safe space must exist in the first place. They are not methods of exclusion, as he believes, but of inclusion, meant to create a safe and comfortable environment for students who are part of marginalized groups in society. Instead of purporting that safe spaces are becoming “weaponized,” perhaps Friedersdorf should be questioning the ridiculousness of safe spaces in the first place — that students of color must go out of their way to create their own safe space within an environment where they feel excluded and uncomfortable. At a time when student activism seems to be at its peak, those questioning these activists’ concerns, experiences, actions and emotions must first understand the underlying context behind the movement. While opposing viewpoints like Friedersdorf’s will always exist within political movements, the character and bravery of the activists should not be invalidated in the process. Their mobilization and their activism stems from their rightful anger and frustration at the institutions that have continued to fail them time and time again. _______________________________________ Celisa Calacal is a sophomore journalism major with a concentration in rhetorically painting people into corners. You can email her at ccalacal@ ithaca.edu.

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as a form of degradation. Perhaps if Friedersdorf took the time to understand the context of their anger, he would not be accusing these Yale students of “catastrophizing.” Later in the article, Friedersdorf criticized the students’ demand for an apology from Christakis, writing, “Who taught them that it is righteous to pillory faculty for failing to validate their feelings, as if disagreement is tantamount to disrespect?” In the case of these Yale students, as is the case with the experiences of many minority students in college, the constant questioning of the experiences of students of color is already a form of invalidation in of itself. Why should students of color have to explain themselves time and time again when critics like Friedersdorf can sit comfortably in their criticism, without even attempting to question their own privilege that allows them to criticize without firsthand experience of what it’s like to be a person of color. Another important contextual fact Friedersdorf conveniently leaves out of his article is the demographic makeup of Yale. Minority students only make up 28 percent of the campus community, while the number of white students amounts to 72 percent. This classifies Yale as a PWI: a predominantly white institution. Funny how Friedersdorf seems to ignore this fact altogether, given that attending an overwhelmingly white university drastically impacts the experiences of the minority students at Yale. Because students of color are in a place where they are not well-represented, they can often feel ostracized: a black or brown face attempting to survive within a sea of white. As if being the only student of color in a classroom isn’t jarring enough, they are often called upon to speak as the representative for their entire race, religion or ethnic group. Furthermore, Friedersdorf fails to mention the racial makeup of Yale’s faculty. In the 2014–15 academic year, minority faculty only comprised 22.5 percent of Yale’s faculty population. In the university’s School of Fine Arts and Sciences, minority faculty numbered just 17 percent. Last month Yale student activists

Students Spark Nationwide Conversation

By Michael Tkaczevski, Staff Writer

College campuses play vital role in activism

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

ollege campuses are not only places where young people can learn more about society and history, but also where they can form new ideas and movements to change society and make history. College campuses provide students with an environment where they can form relationships and share ideas, enabling the incubation of activism, said Rory McVeigh, director of the Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame. “There’s a lot of people living and working in close contact, and it’s an environment where people are there for exchanging ideas and finding their place in the world,” he said. “It’s different than being spread across a city or having to work 9 to 5 jobs, so students might have greater flexibility.” One example of a cause that has prompted activism to arise on college campuses all over the United States is the Black Lives Matter movement. Students on college campuses such as Ithaca College, Missouri University, Yale University and other institutions of higher education are protesting and making demands that change occur in the racial climate on their campuses, in their respective communities and around the country. The combined effect of so many students protesting has caused mainstream media to be unable to ignore the movement’s spread, McVeigh said. McVeigh said college student activists who can attract media attention can increase the awareness of not only students on other campuses, but also the general public. “Media attention helps organizers reach out beyond their campus to establish connections to others who may also be organized for similar purposes,” he said. At Ithaca College, protests against President Tom Rochon caused him to postpone his other major campus initiatives and make addressing racism and diversity issues on campus his top priority. Rochon made Roger Richardson, associate provost for diversity, inclusion and engagement, the interim chief diversity officer, who will serve as a liaison between the African, Latino, Asian

and Native American community and the administration, although this did not necessarily please student activists. The Ithacan reported the activist group POC at IC, which stands for People of Color at Ithaca College, and Student Government Association members expressed disappointment that students and faculty had previously proposed creating the chief diversity officer position, but Rochon did not agree until after protests had forced his hand. Richardson accepted the position to help address the racial problems that moved students to protest this year, he wrote in an address on Nov. 17. “ALANA and other underrepresented students have been telling us in myriad ways for far too long that they feel disrespected, unwelcome, and unsupported,” he wrote. “And even when they are brave enough to give voice to their experiences, they say many folks in the IC community try to invalidate them.” When he was president of the Black Student Union at the University of Wisconsin-Stout four decades ago, those same concerns were being voiced by student activists, Richardson wrote. Student activism has played a crucial role in drawing new people to social movements, such as the current Black Lives Matter movement and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. Both movements have tapped into student populations, who encounter new ideas in and outside the classroom, to spread the word about racism, said Bobby Joe Smith II, who is studying in a PhD program at Cornell University for food justice. “These issues are not new, racism is not new, and antiracist work is not new either,” Smith said. “There’s always a group of people thinking we’re making these things up.” Smith said he first became involved in advocating for student rights at Prairie View A&M University, a historically black university in Texas, where he was the president of the Student Government Association. He said he did not experience as much racism at Prairie View as students of color on predominantly white campuses may. However, he said he was no less aware of racism in society at large. Smith brought his experiences to Cornell and the Ithaca community.

Smith said activism that begins on campuses can spread awareness to other students on campus and to the rest of the community, although bridging the gap between the campus and the community can sometimes be challenging. “The community does not always see the campus as part of the community, and sometimes neither do the colleges,” Smith said. Smith said he helped organize a Black Lives Matter teach-in at Beverly J. Martin elementary school in October, where students and faculty from Ithaca College and Cornell University could meet, educate and learn from Ithaca residents. Speakers and discussion group leaders led participants to learn more about feminism, gentrification, education systems and other social issues that overlap with race. During the Civil Rights movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s, student activists organized teach-ins on and off campuses to educate and encourage people interested in joining the movement. Both the Black Lives Matter and Civil Rights movements have involved large numbers of community and college organizers. However, a notable difference between Black Lives Matter and the Civil Rights movement is that no single person has emerged as the face of the Black Lives Matter movement like Martin Luther King Jr. did for the Civil Rights movement. But that doesn’t mean the Civil Rights movement was solely the responsibility of King. In the ‘60s, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee spread awareness and organized protests about racism around the country. McVeigh said the essential challenge social movements on campuses face is being able to bring together community members and college students. “It’s usually not the case that people in demonstrations are there for the same exact reasons,” McVeigh said. “It needs a common thread. If everyone can see a case of obvious injustice, that injustice can bring people together across identity boundaries.” _______________________________________ Michael Tkaczevski is a senior journalism major who takes his breakfast with a side of activism. You can email him at mtkacze1@ithaca.edu.

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ItDeniers Snowed? confuse climate change and weather By Sophie Johnson, Contributing Writer

Rupert Murdoch, the man who now ironically owns National Geographic, as well as numerous other publications, tweeted with this same confusion. “Back in U.S. What happened to global warming?” Murdoch wrote in January 2013. “London, D.C, New York seem like new ice age! Rockies too.” And I can’t forget my personal favorite from Republican Sen. Joe Barton of Texas, who said in March 2009 that climate change is just a naturally occurring event that humans should adapt to. “When it rains, we find shelter. When it’s hot, we get shade. When it’s cold, we find a warm place to stay.” There are a few key issues surrounding climate change that must be understood in order for people like these individuals to see that daily weather patterns are no indication of whether or not climate change exists. The first important distinction to make is between the terms “global warming” and “global climate change” because both have different meanings and effects. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, global warming only refers to the rising temperature on the Earth’s surface, whereas global climate change refers to this warming, but also the side effects that come with it. These side effects include the melting of glaciers, heavy rainstorms and droughts. Another one of these side effects of global climate change may even be colder winters. According to a study done at Tokyo University, melting ice caused by warming temperatures increases the amount of open, darker water, which absorbs more heat and in turn warms the air above it. This warmer air slows down the jetstream, which halts weather systems and draws cooler Arctic air down over Europe and Northern Asia. Additionally, according to an article published by The Boston Globe in February 2015, global climate change can actually increase snowfall, because of increased water vapor in the air due to warming temperatures. Those who experienced heavy snowfall last winter and claimed climate change

doesn’t exist because of that snowfall were missing the point that climate change itself could have been causing the high levels of snow. Another discrepancy that needs to be explained to climate change deniers is the difference between the weather and the climate. Weather is the pattern of the atmosphere on a daily, weekly, monthly or short term basis as opposed to climate, which is the weather’s behavior over a long period of time. This distinction is the key reason it is called global climate change instead of global weather change. In the long run, Trump feeling a little cold one morning is extremely insignificant in regards to whether global climate change is occurring. Scientists look at data gathered over hundreds of years to prove global warming, not just one day, one month, one winter or even one year. And the data gathered by scientists proves that the Earth’s temperature has been warming over the past hundreds of years. According to the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research, since 1880 the average global temperature has risen 1.53 degrees. Additionally, according to NASA, the 10 warmest years in the entire 134-year record of all temperatures ever recorded have all occurred since 2000, aside from the year of 1998. It is pointless for people to ignore such a clear problem that is going to have such detrimental effects on every citizen in the world. Climate change has become a politicized issue, when in actuality it is a problem that everyone has to deal with and try to solve. Snow storms and colder fronts are used by deniers to justify their already empty claims that climate change doesn’t exist, but their own ignorance is undermining their cause. _______________________________________ Sophie Johnson is a freshman journalism major who could use a snow day. You can email her at sjohnson3@ ithaca.edu.

News & Views

ast winter, the Northeastern United States had extremely heavy snowfall. Boston got 110 inches, higher than any previously recorded year. This was a field day for not only kids who wanted snow days, but also climate change skeptics. Daily weather patterns are often used by skeptics as a way to deny the actual science that supports climate change, and the negative consequences it will cause. Unfortunately, many people do not understand climate change well enough to realize having cold weather does not mean our society is not faced with the harmful impacts of climate change. An example of one of these people is Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who sent out a tweet in October 2015 to his close to 5 million followers that used the presence of cold weather to undermine the seriousness of the issue of global warming. “It’s really cold outside, they are calling it a major freeze, weeks ahead of normal,” Trump wrote. “Man, we could use a big fat dose of global warming!” Asking for something as damaging as global warming is extremely insensitive and ignorant. It is especially harmful for a presidential candidate like Trump, who has such a large audience, to make a statement like this. This tweet really just proves Trump’s stupidity and misunderstanding of the causes and effects of global warming. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida shares this misunderstanding of climate change with his fellow Republican presidential candidate. “The government can’t change the weather,” Rubio said in February 2013 during an interview with Fox and Friends … “We can pass a bunch of laws that will destroy our economy, but it isn’t going to change the weather.” In that interview, Rubio acted as if economics is more concerning than the flooding of coastal cities and islands, while also confusing weather with climate change.

Going Out On Their Own Terms The increasing support for the Death with Dignity movement

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

By Ben Kaplan, Contributing Writer

arlier this November, Dr. Peter Rasmussen died peacefully after receiving medication from his doctor, surrounded by his family. Rasmussen was an oncologist who had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in 2014. The doctor had also been a lifelong supporter of the Death with Dignity movement. According to the Death With Dignity National Center’s website, DWD laws allow certain terminally-ill adults to voluntarily request and receive a prescription medication so they can die in a peaceful, humane manner in a place and time of their choosing. Rasmussen is just one of the growing number of people choosing DWD treatment. According to statistics from the Oregon government, the number of people being prescribed DWD medication has risen from 39 in 2000 to 155 in 2014. David Leven, executive director for End of Life Choices New York, attributed the increase in DWD to people living longer, although not necessarily better. “Medical improvements have allowed us to keep people alive, but those people may find that they have lost their autonomy and dignity,” he said. DWD laws have begun to spread nationally, and currently Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Montana, Vermont and California have all passed legislation allowing DWD treatment. In addition, back in February, New York State lawmakers proposed two DWD bills, one of which is the “New York End of Life Options Act,” which if passed would make New York the seventh state to allow DWD. New York State Sen. Diane Savino, a democrat, commented to MSNBC regarding the law: “The option to end one’s suffering when facing the final stages of a terminal illness should be a basic human right.”

Timothy Quill, a professor of Medicine, Psychiatry, and Medical Humanities at the University of Rochester Medical Center, as well as the main plaintiff in one of the biggest death with dignity related cases to reach the Supreme Court, said that legalizing DWD laws on a state level is the best way to implement them. “Probably now the best approach is state-by-state,” he said. “This allows for incremental data collection and does not get the movement too far ahead of the general need for a better system.” However, Leven said DWD should be a constitutional right, as well as a human right. “It’s a matter of time like any other issue, like gay marriage for instance,” he said. Death with Dignity first came into the public discourse in 1993 when the Death with Dignity National Center was formed with the goal of creating a concrete organization on which to fight for legal policy in favor of DWD. This model was the first of its kind and helped create the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, passed in 1994 with 51.3 percent approval from the Oregon voters. The act allows terminally ill patients to hasten death under strict regulations from their doctors. These regulations include two witnesses to the request — one of which cannot have a stake in the recipient’s estate post-mortem — and a declaration that the patient is free from any mental conditions inhibiting judgement. Quill said death with dignity is about ending the patient’s pain. “The possibility of physician aid in dying has to do with relieving suffering in patients who are dying, which is clearly within a doctor’s role,” he said. Following the Oregon DWD law, a number of related support groups within the Death With Dignity National Center flourished, including the Oregon Death with Dignity Legal Defense and Education Center as

well as the Right to Die Political Action Committee. Although there were numerous attempts made to revoke the law — stemming from religious and moral opposition — these efforts were not successful. This “right-to-die,” as DWD is often referred to, is still a heavily weighted topic. Religious groups and doctors alike still question the morality of aiding in the death of another human. A big argument being made against DWD is the scenario that individuals with depression or other mental illnesses will not be properly screened when patients are looking to end their own lives, or that people may act too soon in regards to their health. However, as the law currently stands in Oregon, only those that have been diagnosed with six months or less to live are allowed to pursue DWD. “Doctors do not want to lose their patient,” Leven said. “We allow people to end their suffering by having their means of life removed after it has been deemed necessary. When it has been determined that a person can no longer function as a regular human being we take out their feeding tube … this is no different.” When questioned on the morality of DWD, Dr. Robert Milch, the founder and medical director of a hospice in Buffalo, New York, wrote that DWD is consistent with the principles of being a doctor. “Many confuse healing with curing, which we [doctors] do frequently,” he wrote. “With the aid of a physician who remains engaged with his/her patient and caregivers throughout the course of illness, addresses realistic goals and helps craft a plan of care consistent with the patient’s goals and values, people can die healed.” In regards to questions about mental health and DWD, it is as tough to gauge the effects of depression and anxiety on a person’s decision of this nature as it is to even successfully recognize mental illness

nity laws do one thing, and one thing only: give terminally ill patients the choice to end their lives comfortably, rather than prolonging their suffering.” Death with Dignity has a long way to come before it is accepted nationally, but the work being done by New York lawmakers and organizations across the country is creating interest. While opponents of DWD have questioned the impacts of such laws on sick or suffering people, supporters of DWD believe that the power of life should be in the hands of the patients, but in a way that a wellthought and educated decision will be made. Dr. Rasmussen spoke on the topic after he was diagnosed with his brain tumor. “We all realize we are going to die, and the dying part … is often relatively simple and reasonably comfortable, but it is getting there that can be kind of miserable,” he said. ______________________________________ Ben Kaplan is a freshman journalism major. You can email him at bkaplan@ithaca.edu.

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in a person. Whatever the case may be, patients must be deemed mentally competent by at least two physicians before their request is taken into consideration. And the decision to end one’s life is anything but quick. “These decisions made by patients are in no way impulsive,” Leven said. “The average time between when a patient first requests the medication and takes it is around 47 days. These decisions are made thoughtfully with the full support of their loved ones.” Another point made against DWD in the same vein is that the idea of making suicide more socially acceptable will lead to a higher suicide rate and urge those who may only suffer from a disability to end their lives. The Catholic News Agency wrote in an article from 2015 titled “Nine Reasons to Oppose Death With Dignity Laws” that “Disability

rights groups are opposed to ‘death with dignity’ bills. They say it discriminates against the disabled and could lead to pressure on them to end their own lives.” However, a study done by Aaron Kheriaty, a Christian Ethicist and an opponent of DWD, found there was a slight increase in the suicide rate of 1.6 percent after DWD laws had been enacted, but found that increase to be negligible. Milch wrote that DWD does not lead to risks of more people hurting themselves. “PAD [Physician Aid in Dying] creates nothing of a social threat,” he wrote. “As the experiences in Washington and Oregon show, it is not the beginning of a slippery slope or an indication that the sky is falling. If anything it reiterates the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship.” And as put by Mark Stern in an article from Slate, “Death with dig-

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The Hypocrisy of the “Pro-Life” Movement

When being pro-life only extends until birth By Anna Lamb, Contributing Writer

“The Republican Party must continue to uphold the principle that every human being, born and unborn, young and old, healthy and disabled, has a fundamental, individual right to life.” — Republican National Committee for Life.

oday it is so easy to be a hypocrite. You hate trashy reality TV, yet you secretly binge watch the Kardashians for hours. Or you call yourself a vegetarian, yet every once in a while you sneak a little chicken finger to satisfy your hunger. However, with something as challenging as the issue of pro-life, in which most involved have a steadfast position, it doesn’t seem as though hypocrisy would be likely to occur. Yet that seems to be the status quo for so many widely recognized groups advocating for the pro-life movement, especially the GOP. It is far too common within the Republican party to see an overlap of support for pro-life combined with support for defunding welfare, banning contraception or making access to it more difficult, anti-gun control laws and the death penalty — all decidedly anti-life positions. What we see is that the GOP is pro-life until birth, after which the ones most in need of help — single mothers and lowincome people — are left to fend for themselves.

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

Economics

An article from the Huffington Post by Warren Blumenfeld that was published in May 2015 and titled “The Hypocrisy of ‘Pro-Life’ and the GOP,” encapsulated the failure in logic in the Republican party’s pro-life beliefs. The article discussed how the GOP is in favor of helping the wealthy, but its policies often come at the detriment of the poor, the people who need the most help to stay alive. “Under its understanding of being ‘pro-life,’ in its policies and accumulated legislative actions, the GOP fights for the lives of the upper 10 percent of our population who control approximately 80–90

percent of the accumulated wealth and 85 percent of the stocks and bonds,” Blumenfeld wrote. “It works to keep corporative and executive tax rates lower than the rates of the secretaries who work in these corporations.” As a result, there is a climate of little economic mobility for new mothers looking to maybe try and earn a few dollars for their families. And so in addition to the poor job market, it is likely that these same women will have limited access to government welfare that exists today, and even less in the future if things work out the way the GOP and many pro-life supporters hope. In May 2014, The Atlantic published an article stating that while many programs have grown in the United States, welfare that assists new unmarried parents has not. In a study for the journal Demography published in 2014, economist Robert Moffitt details how “the poorest singleparent families — 80 percent of which are headed by single mothers — receive 35 percent less in government transfers than they did three decades ago.” The Republican party, which has been steadfast in its support of cutting welfare to people who need help getting by, shows its hypocrisy when it advocates cuts to government aid that would help single mothers, and as a result their children, have a shot at a better life. This is yet another example of the Republican party being pro-life until birth. To be fair, it’s not always Republicans slashing welfare. In 1996, when former president Bill Clinton decided to put an end to “welfare as we know it,” a five-year cap was put on the program, which includes food stamps. A 2012 New York Times story estimated that, “one in every four low-income single mothers is jobless and without cash aid — roughly four million women and children.” In the government in general, but especially within the Republican party, there is a real climate of pushing single parents under the rug, those same mothers whose fetus’ pro-life supporters were adamant about saving.

Contraception and Restricting Abortions

As well as unfair economic situations for new mothers, there is the contraception problem. How does one suppose that fewer abortions will be necessary if there is not increased birth control use? An article by CBS News from 2012 reported on a long-term study in St. Louis that offered women the free birth control of their choice. The study revealed that, amongst other positive effects, the program lowered the abortion rate for participants. There were 4.4 to 7.5 abortions per 1,000 women in the program. This is compared to the national average, which is almost 20 abortions per 1,000 women nationally. Reducing the number of abortions through increased use of contraception is pretty common sense, so it really is absurd that anyone, particularly those so staunchly against abortion — such as the GOP — would oppose birth control legislation and funding. And yet it’s in the news all the dang time with conservative’s war on Planned Parenthood. In addition, abortion rates do not decrease in countries where it is illegal. “We now have a global picture of induced abortion in the world, covering both countries where it is legal and countries where laws are very restrictive,” Dr. Paul Van Look, director of the World Health Organization’s Department of Reproductive Health and Research, said. “What we see is that the law does not influence a woman’s decision to have an abortion. If there’s an unplanned pregnancy, it does not matter if the law is restrictive or liberal.” So being “pro-life” would mean protecting the lives of mothers by ensuring that they have access to safe abortion procedures right? Wrong. During the first Republican presidential debate, then-presidential candidate Scott Walker was asked about the GOP’s position of banning abortion. Walker had previously asked Wisconsin legislature for a 20-week abortion ban that had no exceptions for rape and incest, clearly an

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Guns

And then there are pro-life gun nuts. Seems contradictory doesn’t it? In October, The Daily Show’s new host Trevor Noah perfectly pointed out the insanity of being pro-life and anti-gun control. “Imagine if we could bring some of that pro-life passion into being more, well, prolife,” he said, referencing the high number of people in the U.S. that are shot each year. “But right now, they’re [pro-life advocates] more like comic book collectors. Human life only matters until you take it out of the package, and then it’s worth nothing.” According to an article by Forbes published in 2015, at least 32,000 people are killed from guns each year, and yet there seems to be a peculiar overlap between pro-life supporters and pro-gun supporters. Many conservative Republicans don’t support common sense gun legislation. When commenting about the October mass shooting in Oregon, presidential candidate Jeb Bush responded by saying: “Look, stuff happens. There is always a crisis…” But when asked about abortion he said: “I’m completely pro-life and I believe that we should have a culture of life.” That seems like a more appropriate response to a shooting than essentially, “shit happens.” And then there is the blatant hypocrisy of pro-life people themselves committing acts of violence. Just recently, Lewis Dear carried out an attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. He’s charged with the murder of three people, including a mother of two, an Iraqi War

veteran and a police officer. Dear, who has proclaimed himself as deeply religious, is noted to have mumbled something about “baby parts” while being taken into custody. And this is not the first time something like this has happened. Statistics put together by the National Abortion Federation have examined incidents of violence against abortion providers from 1977 to 2012 in the U.S. and Canada, as well as violence against abortion providers in 2013 and 2014 in Colombia in addition to the U.S and Canada. According to those statistics, there has been a multitude of violence committed against abortion providers. There have been eight murders, 17 attempted murders, 429 death threats, 199 incidents of assault or battery, 100 butyric acid attacks, 400 invasions, 42 bombings, 663 anthrax threats and four kidnappings against these providers. These instances are examples of the “supporters of life” being outright violent and downright antilife.

Mike Christian, a pro-life Oklahoma state representative, told The Associated Press: “I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don’t care if it’s by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions.” He also threatened to impeach judges who dared delay executions for any reason. What? You care about a fetus more than a grown human person, to the point where you could care less if that person is brutally slaughtered. Especially when a study showed that 4 percent of inmates sentenced to die are innocent, as reported by The Guardian in 2014. The whole ideology and consistency of the Republican’s position on pro-life is confusing, but I guess we can just leave it up to pro-lifers and the GOP to sort it out for themselves. _____________________________________ Anna Lamb is a freshman journalism major who is pro-cancelling finals. You can email her at alamb@ithaca.edu.

The Death Penalty

As for the death penalty, out of 33 states that restrict public funding to abortion, 27 permit death sentences, according to an article from Slate published in 2014.

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extreme situation in which the life of the mother should be taken into account by the pro-life Walker. His justification was that: “I believe that is an unborn child that’s in need of protection out there, and I’ve said many a time that that unborn child can be protected, and there are many other alternatives that will also protect the life of that mother. That’s been consistently proven.” Republican candidate Marco Rubio also stated in the debate that he does not favor exemptions in anti-abortion laws for cases of rape or incest. His, and Walker’s, position are hypocritical however, as both should be pro-life when it comes to the well-being and life of a woman that has been the victim of rape, and not just focus on the fetus.

Weed and Booze

How comparing the two drugs can be dangerous

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

By Devon Bedoya, Contributing Writer arijuana legalization is an age old topic that is often spoken about in political debates, burdens the minds of parents and peaks the curiosity of young adults. With Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington having legalized recreational use of marijuana, and proMary Jane advocates pushing for more support of marijuana legalization, people may ask how harmful marijuana really is. In comparison to alcohol, marijuana doesn’t look so bad. However, comparing the drug to alcohol inherently hinders people’s perspective on its harmful effects. It has become a trend to compare the two substances, even though alcohol and marijuana are different drugs with different impacts on users. A 2015 article from NBC News noted that marijuana is ranked as a Schedule 1 drug, along with heroin and LSD, meaning it is considered to have the highest potential for abuse by users, and to be one of the most dangerous drugs. According to the International Business Times, groups such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and the Coalition to Reschedule Cannabis have filed petitions that ask the Drug Enforcement Administration to place marijuana on a lower schedule. However, both the DEA and the Food and Drug Administration have denied those petitions and kept marijuana at the same ranking. All things considered, this high ranking of marijuana could be due to a lack of comprehensive data on the drug. Yet the effects of marijuana provide good reason for it to be classified on the same level as other dangerous drugs. What is know about marijuana thus far is that some studies have associated it with potential changes in the brain, among other things. A 2015 study done by The Lancet Psychiatry, a specialty journal that publishes original research about aspects of psychiatry, stated a person

was three times more likely to have a psychotic disorder if they had used cannabis compared to those who had never used the substance. In addition, according to the DEA, another possible risk involves changes in lung function or the possibility of long-term cancer due to chemicals like benzene that are found in marijuana. PubMed, a search engine that accesses information from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, published a study that showed memory damage up to six weeks after cessation of heavy use of marijuana, which suggests persisting effects from using the drug. The Lancet Psychiatry conducted another study that correlated lower academic achievement with marijuana usage. Their study was based off of 48 other studies that found the same thing. All of these risks, although only possibilities and not guaranteed to happen, should be enough to lead people away from using marijuana. However, many people are ignoring these potential risks. According to The New York Times “It’s estimated that almost half of Americans age 18 to 20 have tried marijuana at some point in their lives; more than a third of them have used it in the last year.” Clearly the substance’s use isn’t rare, which means that many young people face these risks. We are aware of the long-term effects of alcohol, which can include liver failure, permanent damage to the brain, high blood pressure, stroke and heart related diseases, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. It accounts for about 88,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to an article written by CNN in January 2014. Although not nearly as many deaths can be attributed to the use of marijuana, the drug’s long term-effects are just as startling. The American Lung Association released an article in March 2015 that stated marijuana smoke has been shown to contain many of the same toxins as tobacco smoke, and because marijuana smokers tend to inhale more deeply and hold their breath longer than cigarette

smokers, it can lead to a greater exposure per breath to tar. The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates 9 percent of people who use marijuana will become addicted to it, whereas 1 in 12 adults who use alcohol suffer from alcohol dependence. That is the equivalent of 8.3 percent, but this percentage wasn’t stated explicitly. Saying that 1 in 12 people suffer from alcohol dependence sounds a lot worse than saying 9 percent of people suffer from addiction to marijuana. However, after simple math, estimates of marijuana addiction are actually slightly larger. Additionally, as stated in an NBC News article written in February 2015, “Since legalization last year in Washington and Colorado, pediatric marijuana-related calls to poisoncontrol centers in those states have doubled.” As more people experiment with marijuana in a setting where it is legal, it appears that more bad reactions have occurred. This suggests maybe we don’t really know all the possible effects of marijuana, which would mean that more caution should be taken with regards to the drug and its legalization. In a way, the current generation is like the guinea pig of the effects of marijuana. No one knows for sure just how badly the substance can harm people. So perhaps some people’s obsession with legalizing the drug isn’t the worst thing because it would allow for more definitive research on it. However, legalization brings about many potential risks that don’t seem worth it in the long run. Making comparisons in general only serves to say that one thing is worse than the other; in this case cannabis advocates argue that alcohol is worse than marijuana. But take away the comparison, and marijuana becomes just another dangerous drug that should be restricted. ________________________________________ Devon Bedoya is a freshman journalism major who thinks it’s high time to think about marijuana’s effects. You can email her at dbedoya@ithaca.

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A casserole of overconsumption, colonization and supremacy By Hale Douthit, Contributing Writer

hanksgiving:The time to consume odious amounts of food, sit around with your family and offer token examples of your gratitude. People get off work and school to spend the day toiling in the kitchen, preparing dinner for their families. Small plastic turkeys adorn nearly everything in sight. The problem with this narrative is that it ignores the harsh realities of the seemingly innocuous holiday in its history, health effects and consumerist takeover. First and foremost, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Thanksgiving dinners destroys your arteries. According to the Calorie Control Council, the average person in the U.S. consumes nearly 4,500 calories and 229 grams of fat on Thanksgiving. When considering that the typical amount of caloric intake per day is around 2,000 calories, with typical fat intake being 44 grams of fat, the Thanksgiving meal allows people to consume an enormous amount of food. With such a jump, there is an increased risk for heart disease. According to a study done by the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, two hours after eating a Thanksgiving meal, there is a fourfold increase in heart attack risk. Each time you swallow another gulp of mashed potatoes, you are slowly burning out your own body. The gluttony that has become an iconic part of Thanksgiving feasts is beyond just the physical threat it represents to one’s health, however. The over obsessive commercial characteristic of the holiday represents pervasive consumerism in U.S. culture. In their seminal study on the prevalence of consumerism in Thanksgiving, “We Gather Together,” Melanie Wallendorf and Eric J. Arnould wrote that the agrarian past of Thanksgiving had been replicated and co-opted by private companies

to sell a typical homestyle message to consumers, and consumers easily buy up this message. It takes the form of advertisements based around Thanksgiving meals or typical images of family gathering together to capitalize on the general air of fraternity that surrounds the holiday. In the same vein, Black Friday is only a further indication of the assumption of holidays by private corporations for private interest and not public good. According to CNN, Black Friday workers are usually expected to work 24 hour days, endure terrible conditions and deal with abusive customers. Also, keep in mind that most of the people working at these large stores nearly giving things away are also getting paid very little according to the National Employment Law Project. This has generated a lot of backlash. For example, Walmart, who always has huge Black Friday deals, is facing large scale protests for its abuse of workers and lack of decent pay according to The New York Times. The roots of Thanksgiving show an equally horrible history of marginalization and oppression of indigenous peoples. You’ve probably heard the typical grade school story: Puritans arrive in Massachusetts and can’t grow crops because they aren’t used to the land. The nice Native Americans willingly step in and teach the dumb white people how it’s done. There is a massive harvest, and in exchange for all the help they received, the Puritans organize a huge feast in thanks. Eventually, Abraham Lincoln made the holiday official in 1863. That mythology is the holiday we celebrate today. However, it isn’t the truth. When the settlers arrived in the New World, “relations between settlers and Native Americans deteriorated as the former group occupied more and more land,” according to a History Channel documentary titled Pilgrims. This supremacist attitude lead

to conflict with the local populations for control of land, most notably through King Philip’s War and countless other raids and skirmishes. When the Puritans and other European colonists arrived and made contact with the native peoples, they spread destructive diseases such as typhus or tuberculosis that ravaged Native American populations. According to Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, up to 95 percent of the native population in North America died as a result of the spread of such kinds of European diseases which amounted to nearly 20 million people dead. To say that the English settlers were friendly with the Native Americans to such a degree is ridiculous in the face of the facts of U.S. history, and offensive to the massive crimes committed against the Native Americans in general. Thanksgiving is not just destructive for the body, but also the soul. The foundation that Thanksgiving has emerged out of is a legacy and history of colonialism and domination by Europeans that has ravaged our country for hundreds of years. This history of exploitation and oppression continues to the current day with the abuse of workers by companies trying to squeeze out a profit. All the while we poison ourselves with unhealthy food and get distracted by pointless football games. Many will say Thanksgiving is a tradition. However, it is a tradition of exploitation, overabundance and supremacy. ________________________________________ Hale Douthit is a sophomore emerging media major who pokes holes in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons in his free time. You can email him at hdouthit@ithaca. edu.

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Why Thanksgiving Sucks

Busy as a Fucking Bee

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The deception of productivity

By Annika Kushner, Contributing Writer

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

hen people are asked how they are these days, what do they say? They usually respond with something like “insanely busy,” “super busy,” “crazy busy” or maybe just “pretty busy.” People aren’t just “fine” anymore. Their lives are bustling with things to do, people to see and places to go. They are overworked, overextended, exhausted and deluded by the idea that their degree of busyness is somehow equivalent to their value as human beings in society. Fifty percent of Americans work more than standard full-time hours, according to Gallup data from the 2013 and 2014 Work Education Polls. And according to a survey released by Citigroup and Seventeen Magazine, nearly four out of five college students are working an average of nineteen hours a week while juggling a full course load. Regardless of the strange, domineering mentality that being constantly exhausted is a good thing, being busy can be stressful and unhealthy. Thirty-six percent of employees say that they typically feel tense or stressed out during the work day, according the the American Psychological Association, and stress can cause a lower immune system and problems with the digestive, excretory and reproductive systems, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The interesting thing, though, is

that a study published on the website for the American Association for the Advancement of Science called “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind” suggests that people’s constant overexertion is something that they subconsciously impose on themselves. Timothy Wilson, leader of the study, and his team observed that participants disliked spending six to 15 minutes by themselves with nothing to do but think, and that many actually “preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts.” People have become so conditioned to a strenuous, busy lifestyle that when they are left by themselves with no tasks to complete, they hate it. They hate it so much that they would rather physically harm themselves than simply sit and do nothing. One of the possible explanations for being uncomfortable doing nothing is the advancement of technology. According to Microsoft Advertising, 77 percent of Canadians ages 18 to 24 first reach for their phone when nothing is occupying their attention, and 52 percent of people in this age group check their phone every 30 minutes. This is a lot of digital usage. If people have the opportunity to be constantly engaged in work and social media, they take advantage of that opportunity. Before cell phones were invented, the 77 percent of 18 to 24-year-old Canadians would not have had the opportunity for such instant entertainment, and would have had to pull out

a book or a deck of cards if nothing was occupying their attention. If there was nothing on hand to entertain them, they would have just had to sit and think — to be by themselves. Comedian Louis Szekely, professionally known as Louis CK, spoke on the late-night talk show Conan about the detrimental effects of cell phones and their contribution to people’s inability to be by themselves. “I think these things are toxic, especially for kids. It’s bad. They don’t look at people when they talk to them and they don’t build the empathy,” Szekely said. “You need to build an ability to just be by yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away: the ability to just sit there.” He went further, and commented on the fatality of people’s obsession with their phones, saying that people “are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second.” Szekely was referring to the approximately 1.1 million crashes caused by texting while driving in 2013, according to the National Safety Council. People run the risk of dying and possibly killing someone else just because they can’t put down their phones. In an article published in The New York Times titled, “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” Tim Kreider, essayist and cartoonist, discussed the idea of busyness functioning as a “kind of existential reassurance … obviously

“What is it you really want to accomplish? What can you do today that supports your deepest passions? If you knew your days were numbered, how much time would you want to devote to activities that have nothing to do with striving and achieving? Our days are numbered, so why not start creating that type of balance now?”

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when she got sick and spent a prolonged amount of time in the hospital. Her time incapacitated helped her to realize that she wanted to work with the elderly — and not become a famous actress. The experience “of not doing helped me better understand what I actually wanted to do.” Deschene also discussed ways to live an appropriately busy life, posing these questions to her audience: “What is it you really want to accomplish? What can you do today that supports your deepest passions? If you knew your days were numbered, how much time would you want to devote to activities that have nothing to do with striving and achieving? Our days are numbered, so why not start creating that type of balance now?” In doing so, Deschene highlights the intersection of happiness and busyness. An even smaller number have found the perfect balance of busyness and relaxation to best suit them. Timothy Sharp, author of “100 Ways To Happiness: A Guide For Busy People” and “100 Ways To Happy Children: A Guide For Busy Parents,” and founder of the Happiness Institute in Sydney, Australia, talked about cultivating an environment that allows people to be both happy and busy. “It’s a fine line,” Sharp said. “It’s a bit of a balancing act because being busy can be a good thing. And by that, I mean engaging in pleasurable activities — in meaningful pursuits. That can provide satisfaction. It can provide a sense of pride and happiness and joy and pleasure.” So busyness can be good to an extent. On one hand, it can give people’s lives meaning and on the other hand, extended periods of time without stimulating activity can produce negative effects, such as depression. “Not doing anything might sound nice, but most of us will find that pretty depressing after a while,” Sharp said. “Because if you think about it, you’ve got no stimulus. You’ve got no sense of satisfaction, no sense of pride, no sense of accomplishment or achievement and no stimulation.”

Sharp said this impacts people’s health. “You start to get sick,” Sharp said. “You can’t get to the gym. You can’t exercise. You’re not eating well. Maybe you’re drinking too much. … If it’s impacting your ability to stay fit and healthy, it’s a problem.” Busyness can also be a problem when it impacts important relationships. Sharp said if people are spending 50 to 80 hours at work each week, then their ability to connect with their loved ones is very diminished and that those relationships are “vitally important for our health and well-being.” So. Are you crazy busy? Insanely busy? And are you happy? If you’re not, fix it. Find what is best for you in terms of the balance between busyness and rest — every person is different. But you also don’t have to be busy to be happy. You don’t always have to be working or be on your phone to be valuable in society and have a happy, full life. Remember how happy Kreider is with his lazy ambitiousness; ask yourself the questions posed by Deschene and think about the words of Sharp. Take a breath. And the next time someone asks you how you’re doing, make it your goal to truthfully say, “I’m doing great!” ___________________________________ Annika Kushner is a freshman journalism major who is totally chill with being chill, you can contact her at akushner1@ithaca.edu

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your life cannot be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” Kreider uses the example of a woman that he knew who interned at a magazine and wasn’t allowed to take lunch hours out in case she was urgently needed for some reason. He specified that the magazine was an entertainment magazine whose purpose for existing was crushed with technological advancements, and wonders whether “all this histronic exhaustion isn’t a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn’t matter.” Kreider also wrote about his own experience with busyness. He said that he is one of very few people that does not feel the need to be busy. “I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know,” Kreider wrote. “On the best ordinary days of my life, I write in the morning, go for a long bike ride and run errands in the afternoon, and in the evening I see friends, read or watch a movie. This, it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day.” Kreider, however, feels this lifestyle is not the norm. The psychology of needing to be busy is incredibly present, evident in other forms such as a new app called “Got This Thing.” The app fills your Google calendar with local events in your area and includes three levels of busyness that you can request to be: “Busy,” “Super Busy” or “Go F--- Yourself.” Along with Kreider, some have recognized the negative effects of leading a life that is “too busy,” and have worked to create a more stress-free environment. For example, Lori Deschene, founder of the Tiny Buddha organization, a self-proclaimed leading resource for those seeking peace and happiness, shared her experiences with busyness on her blog. “If I was busy, I was using time wisely,” Deschene wrote. “If I was busy, I was proving to myself that I was valuable. If I was busy, I was creating the possibility of a better life in the future. Any threat to my productivity was a threat to my sense of hope.” According to her blog, Deschene was forced to take life a little slower

Politicizing the Female Body

Why women’s personal autonomy is not comprimisable By Christina Tudor, Contributing Writer

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

n 2015, there are still an alarming amount of forces working together to control women’s bodies. Underweight models in advertisements sell women products, setting up impossible standards about what their bodies should look like, and then profit off their insecurities. Politicians — who are often white and male — loby for anti-choice legislation like HB-2 in Texas and other laws targeting regulations of abortion providers. laws. According to RH Reality Check, these laws create strict regulations for clinics like proximity to hospitals, required sizes of rooms and hallways that are medically unnecessary, which causes clinics to close because of the costs. For women, being stripped of their reproductive freedom and autonomy over their bodies contributes to an environment where women are expected to present their bodies in a certain way to avoid sexual violence. This creates insecurities, and makes it incredibly difficult for women to love their bodies. Melissa Fabello, body image activist and co-managing editor of Everyday Feminism, said ever since Ancient Greece, women have been associated with the body while the mind has always been associated with men. This sets the stage for women to be valued based on their bodies and for those bodies to be controlled. However, in an effort to control women’s bodies, there’s a bigger underlying issue here — loss of power. Constant scrutiny and attempts to control women’s bodies makes women second-class citizens in society. This control is one of the main forces that keep women from achieving gender equality. While people are quick to jump to the more physical ways that women’s bodies are controlled like through abuse, rape and physical violence, women’s bodies are also controlled in less obvious ways. Fabello said narrow standards of beauty cause women to obsess about their bodies, go on diets, purchase products and possibly develop eating disorders. These actions may seem like they’re a

choice but they’re frequently the result of a culture that scrutinizes women’s bodies. “There are many systems playing together to make women feel bad about themselves,” Fabello said. “These industries like media, advertising, fashion and beauty are controlled by men and aimed at women.” Furthermore, as women’s bodies are presented in an unrealistic light and sexualized in the media, female sexuality is simultaneously policed through blame for sexual violence, the belief that women don’t like sex as much as men and shaming women for having sex by calling them “sluts.” Because of this, women struggle to freely enjoy their bodies without social consequences and are often shamed for accessing sex education and reproductive care, because of the stigma attached to a woman taking control of her health and future. Activist and member of Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s Young Leaders Advisory Council, Lauren Shuler, got involved with reproductive justice because of the sex education she received in high school. “They didn’t talk to us about healthy relationships, birth control or values. They just showed us photos of STIs and told us not to have sex,” Shuler said. “It’s even illegal to have a condom in a Tennessee public high school.” To make matters worse, the law is not looking to protect women’s bodies — it’s looking to control them. “When seeking an abortion in North Dakota, state-mandated counseling to discourage abortion is required by law, after which a 24-hour waiting period is enforced before a woman’s appointment for an abortion.” Kate Black, student organizer for Planned Parenthood based in North Dakota, said. A report by Guttmacher Institute reveals that in the last four years, states have enacted 231 abortion restrictions. National Campus Organizer for Planned Parenthood Generation Action, Kate Cartagena, said constant pushback against women and attempts to control their bod-

ies comes from the fact that women are claiming their power. As women come closer to equality professionally and personally, the more they have been objectified in the media and the more restrictions have been placed on reproductive care in order to put them back in her place. “This pushback is because of what women have gained,” Cartagena said Anti-abortion legislation is not about morality or about being “pro-life.” Cartagena said it’s about taking away a woman’s right to make decisions about when to parent, to get birth control and whether to end a pregnancy. Each of these choices allow women to have autonomy not just over their bodies but also their futures. Fabello said if larger social institutions — like our laws and the media — treat women and their bodies like they don’t matter, then this is also going to show up in smaller, every day interactions. For example, if most advertisements depict extremely skinny models, people will expect real women to look like this and pressure them to strive for this — creating a cycle that feeds on itself through daily reminders to women that they are valued less in our society. The big question is: What can we do about this? “Society thrives on women feeling bad about themselves,” Fabello said. “The best thing you can do is be okay with yourself because that’s exactly what these industries don’t want.” Another antidote to this is to learn about feminism and to get educated on these forces that hold women back and are obsessed with controlling their bodies. Understanding and recognizing the motives behind this control is the first step in breaking it down. _______________________________________ Christina Tudor is a Junior writing and politics major who refuses to relinquish corporeal control to the man, you can contact her at ctudor1@ithaca.edu

Upfront

UPFRONT. UPFRONT. UPFRON

Social Capital of Brunch

How stuffed french toast is enhancing status

By Emma Rizzo. Staff Writer

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

urrounded by the chatter of other young professionals, Sarah Matte stands in line with her roommate outside of a restaurant in Los Angeles. There they stand for a half hour before being seated. This wait has been mirrored by people in cities across the country and world. Sidewalks in different time zones have been occupied by those anticipating a cherished weekend pastime: brunch. The pair repeated this arrangement about twice per month. Eating brunch together became a special part of their friendships, Matte said. “I like the idea of stumbling out of bed and meeting somebody,” she said. It is a very communal experience . The practice of brunching began in England, growing in popularity until it evolved into its modern form in the beginning of the 21st century with the onset of the economic recession, according to Farha Ternikar, sociologist and author of the book “Brunch: A History.” “What we see is that with the high cost of living and the recession … not everyone can afford their dream home or their vacations, but the lower-middle class and the middle class can still afford little luxuries like gourmet food,” she said. “Food starts becoming an indicator of status.” The status associated with this brunching population is one embodied by what is known as the creative class. This class, which includes people such as Matte and her roommate who both work in the entertainment industry, is made up of working individuals who often working independently in innovative and creative fields. A privileged social and cultural upbringing is often a common denominator in those enjoying their membership to the creative class, Ternikar said.

“You get these young, liberal, hipster artists and they aren’t all making 100,000 dollars a year but they know something about food trends,” she said. “They know what kale is … and the majority of them are coming from educated, middle class families, and even though they may not be making as much money as their parents … they have the cultural capital to know where you can go to get brunch.” With this social and cultural capital in hand, members of this class are able to direct their consumption decisions toward what is trending at the time, Ternikar said. “This creative class or this leisure class, they are part of this pattern of conspicuous consumption,” she said. “Basically brunch has manifested in symbolizing a way that people are able to be seen, and show that even though they don’t have the economic resources, they still have the cultural capital to know what’s cool, what’s on trend.” Shawn Micallef, author of “The Trouble with Brunch: Work, Class and the Pursuit of Leisure,” also critiques the societal pattern of consumption as a representation of status. “Brunch is this performance of middle class leisure,” he said. “Big cities that have a robust brunch culture have kind of gotten a bit out of control.” Micallef experienced this brunch culture first hand after moving to

Toronto. “You had to go to certain spots, right?” he said. “These cool, trendy brunch spots. They were often in old storefronts. The tables were all mismatched and your knees would touch your neighbor. The wait staff would be grumpy and kind of resentful of your presence, because they were usually hungover artists and the whole thing was kind of unpleasant.” According to Micallef, the members of the creative class who frequent these brunch restaurants are working in the knowledge economy, the name suggested for the modern, information and entrepreneurshipdriven workforce. These workers are driven without benefits or a pension, much like workers in the service industry. “[The service class] is not that much different from the knowledge workers or young creatives, who are working in these other areas that are more valued by society and maybe are getting paid a little bit more,” he said. The main difference between the two classes, however, is the inner notion of being in the middle class, which exists beyond monetary income, Micallef said. “There is a fair amount of mobility to get into the creative class but there are also a fair amount of barriers,” he said. “You have to be able to rustle up a certain amount of social capital and cultural capital, and not

“Basically brunch has manifested in symbolizing a way that people are able to be seen, and show that even though they don’t have the economic resources, they still have the cultural capital to know what’s cool, what’s on trend.”

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modern culture, however, it is important to be mindful of its representation of inequality, Ternikar said. “I think brunch is always going to be here,” she said. “It is always going to absorb different trends … Brunch is an indicator of gentrification, and changes, and economic climate of a community. The same way as when you get a Starbucks or Target in your neighborhood. I would say it signals that there are definitely changes happening.” Food consumption patterns overall are indicative of this social evolution, she said. Coffee and chocolate consumption, for example, are also indicators of how contemporary society is measuring status. As consumption and status continue to be emphasized, Ternikar said, consumers need to be mindful of the implications of their spending habits. “Ethical consumption is really something that Americans need to think about really carefully,” she said. “I think that’s really where we can understand what is going on in our society. How much of it is marketing, neocolonialism and capitalism intersecting with multinational corporations and how much of it is actually individual choice?” ___________________________________ Emma Rizzo is a senior journalism and Spanish double major who likes to have breakfast for under 15 dollars, thank you very much. Email her at erizzo1@ithaca.edu

Upfront

everyone has the means to do that.” Those in possession of this cultural capital also have the privilege of time, Terniker said. “Brunch has come full circle from being this elite institution to now this hipster institution where even if you’re a student you can brunch,” she said. “Because students may not have excess economic capital but they have the time.” This concept of excess is key in understanding the participation in food trends such as brunch, Terniker said. “Brunch, in the end, symbolizes excess,” she said. “Excess consumption, excess money, excess time and ultimately also, brunch is the one meal where you can have bacon, cake and alcohol. There’s no limit to what you can eat at brunch. There’s no judgement of having alcohol before noon on a Sunday if you’re out to brunch.” It is this culture of excess that warrants critique, as opposed to the meal itself, Micallef said. “[The book] became not a condemnation of brunch but a vehicle to talk about wider class implications and precariousness,” he said. The meal that has come to symbolize excess began in England as the lunch-breakfast hybrid of the

society’s elite, Ternikar said. It then spread to the United States as a meal enjoyed by college-aged men in the early years of the twentieth century, Ternikar said. Brunch then gained popularity with the upper class in the Northeast in the 1920s. It was in the 1980s, she said, that the meal expanded to the middle class, gaining a following amongst other food trends, such as vegetarianism, in the 1990s. 21st century brunch, with this large following, became an integral part of leisure. The social culture surrounding brunch, in which people want to be out spending time with other people, is positive overall, Micallef said. “There are genuine reasons why people love brunch,” he said. “It is that kind of community with your friends over dinner. It’s an ancient thing we do. We talk and relate to each other while we’re eating. It’s some kind of human impulse.” Matte, as a twenty-something living in a city, said young people today seem to prefer brunch over other meals as a social gathering. “It is social,” she said. “It is something people tend to enjoy, and maybe they enjoy it a little more than going out to dinner … it does seem to be that more people would elect to go out to brunch than they would to go out to a meal.” Brunch, as a habit of the creative class, is also a unifier in a culture of remote work, Micallef said. “A lot of the work people do in this so-called creative class is very individualistic,” he said. “You are a painter. You are a writer. You make earrings. You produce copy for technical books, whatever … there’s not that unifying identity among creative workers but everybody seems to like to go to brunch.” The popularity of brunch as this shared leisure pursuit does not seem to be waning, Terniker said. With brunch remaining a part of

Where it comes from and why it’s harmful By Evan Popp, News and Views Editor

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

The Dark Side of American Exceptionalism n the inaugural scene of the show The Newsroom, the main character, Will McAvoy, is asked what makes the United States the greatest country in the world. His response: it isn’t. “There’s absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world,” he said. “We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force and number four in exports.” While it has declined a little in recent years, the belief in American exceptionalism — the concept that the United States is unique or special compared to other countries — is still alive and well, although it is being expressed in different terms than it once was. While fewer people are saying the U.S. stands above all other countries — 28 percent in a 2014 Pew Research Center survey as opposed to 38 percent in a 2011 survey — only a small minority of people in the 2014 poll, 12 percent, said there are countries better than the states. People are less likely to proclaim the U.S. as number one, but they are still not willing to concede the U.S. is not the best. This is a differentiated but still very much present form of American exceptionalism, a concept that dates back hundreds of years. The origins of the phrase American exceptionalism are most commonly associated with French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing in the 1830s. However, Walter LaFeber — a retired Cornell University history professor emeritus — said the idea of American exceptionalism predates Tocqueville and extends back to Puritan leader John Winthrop’s “City upon a Hill” sermon in 1630 in which he described the Puritan colony as an example for others to follow. LaFeber said there are additional examples of the concept of American exceptionalism in early history.

“[Alexander] Hamilton started out The Federalist Papers… by talking about American exceptionalism,” LaFeber said. “He didn’t use the term as I recall, but he certainly talked about the United States having a unique spirit and experience that was different.” American exceptionalism has evolved since its inception, however, as LaFeber said it has become more aggressive and expansionist. Walter McDougall, a professor of history and the Alloy-Ansin professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed, saying American exceptionalism has become more global. “Since World War II they [Americans] have also mostly believed the purpose of this exceptionalism is to defend liberty everywhere and extend it, if necessary by force, to the whole world,” McDougall said. “This is very problematic, and at times dangerous.” Ian Tyrrell, an emeritus professor of history at the University of New South Wales who has studied American exceptionalism, said the concept of the U.S. as unique and special has turned into an excuse to extend U.S. systems overseas. “Too frequently there is an assumption that U.S. versions of democracy and liberty need to be exported abroad, usually by persuasion, but too often by force as well,” Tyrrell said. “Moreover, the complexities of other social systems get short shrift.” American exceptionalism has manifested itself in a negative way through the occupation and “bringing of Western civilization” to other parts of the world. This is exemplified in the Middle East quagmire the U.S. has created with its imperialistic “spreading of democracy.” In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq in the name of liberating the Iraqi people of an oppressive dictatorship and ridding the country of weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Twelve years later, after the U.S. im-

plemented its so called democratic ideals onto Iraq, the country is still mired in violence. Tyrrell suggested this kind of imperialism results in part because of a belief in American exceptionalism and a desire to maintain U.S. military and political strength. The aspect of exceptionalism that led the U.S. into Iraq is the dark side of American exceptionalism that promotes expansion and the replacement of culture. However, LaFeber said the concept of exceptionalism isn’t harmful when it’s kept within U.S. borders. “Exceptionalism at home is fine if we don’t try to impose it on other people or if we don’t think it justifies our imposition of it on other people,” LaFeber said. The idea of American exceptionalism has also been reinforced and manifested through the education system and a focus on teaching history that reflects well on the U.S. A recent example of this was the Oklahoma legislature’s attempt to defund AP U.S. history, because of the belief the course shows “what is bad about America.” According to a 2015 article by neatoday.org, after an outcry, the sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Dan Fisher, backtracked and proposed a review of the AP U.S. history course and the promotion of a more “patriotic” curriculum. However, Fisher’s attempt to further promote American exceptionalism through the education system is nothing new. Tyrrell said the concept of American exceptionalism is already reinforced in schools as well as in other aspects of society. “[American exceptionalism] is a social phenomenon encouraged by the way U.S. history has been taught in schools, with the global connections and contexts neglected, and the way American movies — when they do portray aspects of history as in the movies Amistad and Lincoln — reinforce American values in the exceptional nature of the American commitment to liberty,” Tyrrell said.

alism with every fiber of my being,” Obama said in a 2014 speech at West Point Military Academy. “But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.” While the GOP candidates’ blind belief in American exceptionalism plays into the problems with the concept of the U.S as special, Obama’s more nuanced view of American exceptionalism also has its issues, as discussed in a 2014 article from The Nation titled “It’s Time to Rethink American Exceptionalism,” by David Bromwich, a professor of English at Yale University. Bromwich wrote of Obama’s thoughts regarding American Exceptionalism: “The context made it clear that he meant the United States was the greatest country in the world: our stature was demonstrated by our possession of ‘the finest fighting force that the world has ever known,’ uniquely tasked with defending liberty and peace globally; and yet we could not allow ourselves to ‘flout international norms’ or be a law unto ourselves.” Bromwich argued “defending liberty and peace globally” and not flouting international laws are contradictory principles. This is a lesson that can be learned from the U.S. actions in Iraq and the Middle East. American exceptionalism has clearly become highly politicized. The belief in the concept of the U.S as special has become something of a requirement in order to hold higher office, Tyrrell said. “It’s obligatory to genuflect to American exceptionalism to be elected president or even to be taken seriously as a candidate,” Tyrrell said. McDougall said when politicians talk about American exceptionalism, they are playing to what the people want to hear. “Americans have almost always wanted to believe that their country was set apart by God to thrive in liberty,” he said. The necessity for politicians to continually reinforce voters’ need to believe the U.S. is the best is a drag on the quality of political rhetoric. However, it means politicians are less likely to address meaningful problems facing the country and more likely to talk superficially about how “great”

the U.S. is. In a 2011 article in Foreign Policy titled “The Myth of American Exceptionalism,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, wrote the belief in the U.S. as unique or special makes it more difficult for people in the U.S. to see the country’s fundamental problems. “This unchallenged faith in American exceptionalism makes it harder for Americans to understand why others are less enthusiastic about U.S. dominance, often alarmed by U.S. policies, and frequently irritated by what they see as U.S. hypocrisy,” he wrote. In his article, Bromwich argued the concept of American exceptionalism is false and isn’t healthy for a nation to believe in. ”Unconditional love of our country is the counterpart of unconditional detachment and even hostility toward other countries,” he wrote. “None of us is an exception, and no nation is.” American exceptionalism is not unique to the U.S. LaFeber said many other nations believe they are exceptional. He cited the British and the French as firm believers in their country’s exceptionalism. However, the difference between U.S. exceptionalism and other nations’ beliefs in their own exceptionalism is the more blatant perpetuation of American exceptionalism both abroad through military power and domestically through political campaigns as well as the education system. McDougall said American exceptionalism can be dangerous. “When exceptionalism is exploited, for instance to promote a partisan, political or military agenda, then its dark side is revealed,” he said. ____________________________________ Evan Popp is a sophomore journalism major that is tired of the United States pretending to be better than it is. You can contact him at epopp@ithaca.edu

Upfront

The effort to further reinforce American exceptionalism and patriotism in the education system is counterproductive, and reveals one of the many dark sides of thinking one’s country is above all others. The portrayal of history through a patriotic lens promoting only the positive aspects of U.S. history ignores the instances when the U.S. has committed harmful acts. LaFeber said examples of this in U.S. history are the continuation of slavery after many other countries had banned the practice as well as the comparatively long time it took the U.S. to grant women the right to vote. However, LaFeber said there are some positive ways in which the U.S. has been unique, pointing to the form of government set up following the American Revolution as exceptional for that time period. Tyrrell said the U.S. is exceptional up to a point. “The United States is almost exceptional in a number of ways, most particularly through the importance of constitutional guarantees of freedom from the oppression of the state,” Tyrrell said. “But a fair number of other countries do have Bills of Rights and strong traditions of individual liberties.” An additional way the concept of American exceptionalism is ingrained in society is through the political rhetoric used by those vying for high government positions. A 2011 article titled “American Exceptionalism and the Politics of Foreign Policy” from The Atlantic detailed the use of American exceptionalism as a campaign tactic in the 2012 presidential race. The article mentioned how then-candidates for the Republican nomination Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney all made comments criticizing President Barack Obama’s commitment to American exceptionalism. Romney said of Obama: “We have a president right now who thinks America’s just another nation. America is an exceptional nation.” However, the Republican candidates’ attacks on Obama’s commitment to American exceptionalism are misguided as Obama also adheres to the language of American exceptionalism. He said in 2009 that he believed in American exceptionalism, and he repeated that sentiment in 2014. “I believe in American exception-

The Pink Ribbon Band

How good intentions have been co-opted for capital gain

By Emma Rizzo, Staff Writer

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

nude woman is printed on the glossy page of a magazine. Her arms wrap around her torso, concealing her breasts. The image is cropped just above the nose. Her eyes are not to be seen. A graphic of a pink ribbon is beside her, letting the viewer know that the advertisement is for breast cancer awareness. The perpetual sexualization of breast cancer awareness campaigns and the commercialization of the pink ribbon have become commonplace in the capitalist landscape of the United States. Football players wear pink gloves once per season. Yogurt containers and soda cans sport a pink ribbon on grocery store shelves. This attachment of breast cancer to events and advertising has led to a trivialization of a disease, which according to breastcancer.org will impact 12 percent of U.S. women, said Gayle Sulik, sociologist, founder of the Breast Cancer Coalition and author of the book Pink Ribbon Blues. “Breast cancer has become a brand with a pink ribbon logo,” she said. “As soon as that crystallized for me, I realized that a lot of the awareness, and even a lot of the advocacy connected to awareness, was self-promotion and advertising.” The spread of this brand has taken attention away from the reality of the disease, she said. “It’s all about advertising and selling of stuff, and the selling of very narrow ideas of what it means to be at risk for breast cancer, deal with breast cancer and honor someone with breast cancer,” Sulik said. “It’s all about that consumption based forum.” The National Football League participated in Breast Cancer Awareness Month by featuring pink clothing and field equipment throughout October. This initiative, called A Crucial Catch, happened in partnership with the American Cancer Society, according to the NFL website. According to the NFL, the apparel worn by coaches

and players, along with pink-branded balls and coins, were auctioned off to raise money for ACS. This effort, however, made little contribution to cancer research. Following the distribution of funds to the NFL, ACS administration, merchandise retailers and merchandise manufacturers, only 8.01 percent of the proceeds went to cancer research, according to a Business Insider report. “That’s more commercialization and self-aggrandizement on the part of the team, the league and the advertisers,” Sulik said. “It’s all about saying ‘Hey, look at me doing this good thing for this good cause...They’re not focusing on pancreatic cancer. They’re not focusing on any other kind of chronic condition. They’re not even focusing so much on concussions, even though that’s what they could do more with. They are focusing on the pink ribbon because it’s sexy and it’s trendy, and it’s easy to jump on that bandwagon.” The term “pinkwashing” was created by Breast Cancer Action, a watchdog organization of the breast cancer movement founded in 1990 to describe this phenomena. The phrase came out of their Think Before You Pink campaign, which aims to call out companies who are pinkwashing products while contributing to the risk of cancer. “We coined the phrase ‘pinkwashing’ to refer, not just broadly to the cause marketing… but specifically to the hypocrisy of companies that claim to care about breast cancer but are contributing to the risk of the disease,” said Karuna Jaggar, executive director of Breast Cancer Action. For example, in 2008 the organization launched a campaign targeting Yoplait for their pink-lidded yogurt containers. At the time, according to Jagger, the yogurt was produced with RBGH, a synthetic growth hormone linked to the increased risk of cancer. Following the campaign called Put a Lid on It, General Mills, which owns Yoplait, committed to stop the use of

synthetic growth hormones. Corporations who donate money to breast cancer organizations while contributing to the risk of cancer, are further diminishing the perceived significance of the disease, Jagger said. “There is this cancer industry where, by the same nonprofits which are serving the cancer community, are taking huge amounts of corporate funding from companies which are contributing to cancer in the first place,” she said. “It’s really that interlocking system that we call the cancer industry.” The commercialization of breast cancer as opposed to other cancers has been caused by the sexualization of the disease, Sulik said. “Other cancers are not as sexy as boobs,” she said. In conjunction with commercialization, this sexualization leads to the trivialization of the cancer, Jagger said. “Sex sells,” she said. “This is the U.S. We have these really damaging campaigns that talk about ‘save the tatas,’ ‘save second base,’ ‘save the boobies.’ What about saving women’s lives? We have these campaigns that degrade women, objectify them, turn them into breasts. The truth is that women have their breasts surgically removed to save their lives sometimes. What does that do to the ‘save the boobies’ campaign?” The perpetuation of pink ribbon messaging oversimplifies the reality of the cancer, causing women to misunderstand the risk of getting breast cancer, of cancer recurrence and of survival rates, Jagger said. The advice on women’s health decisions comes from corporate marketing teams rather than health professionals. “It creates this single story that makes us feel good,” Jagger said. “It’s a story of triumphant survivorship, of positive thinking and of these sanitized women, many of whom are young, white and thin, that just don’t reflect the lived reality with the dis-

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ease. They tell women, ‘If you don’t survive your breast cancer was it your fault? Did you not stay positive enough?’” This objectification has additional implications in terms of the sexism plaguing women today, Sulik said. “On the one hand you have the reality that about 99 percent of all cases of breast cancer are women, a majority of cases, so it’s a women focus,” Sulik said. “Then you can attach the gender focus to it as well because it’s really connected to women’s sexuality, traditional gender roles and taking care of one’s sexuality, and presentation to others, to continue to be sexy and thrive after the disease. All of that is very, very gendered, including the pink ribbon.” The origin of the pink ribbon as an emblem for breast cancer came out of humble, non-commercial roots. According to Breast Cancer Action’s website, the breast cancer ribbon was created by Charlotte Haley in 1991. This ribbon, however, was not pink, but peach. Haley, who died in 2014, began distributing these peach ribbons attached to a postcard, informing people that only 5 percent of the National Cancer Institute’s annual budget was allocated for cancer prevention. She encouraged those receiving the postcard and ribbon to push legislators to take action, according to the website. That same year, the first breast cancer awareness issue of Self magazine was published. In 1992, the magazine contacted Haley for permission to use her ribbon. Not wanting the ribbon to go corporate, she declined. Legally, Self could use the ribbon if

they chose a different color. Following Haley’s rejection, the magazine’s editors conducted focus groups in order to select the best color to represent breast cancer, and settled on pink. “Pink was everything that breast cancer was not,” Sulik said. “It was not scary. Instead it was very soothing, very calming, very neutralizing and then it was also connected to femininity.” This switch to the pink ribbon jump started the commercialization of the disease, Jagger said. “The pink ribbon has become the most successful marketing tool of our day,” she said. “There is no one who does not know what a pink ribbon stands for. It is an incredibly powerful and well-known symbol.” In the midst of this growing commercialization of breast cancer, it is important to remember that the average person involved is acting from a place of compassion, Sulik said. “On an individual level, many people who are involved in the pink ribbon crusade — and I would say it is definitely a crusade at this point — are very well intentioned,” she said. With this in mind, Sulik said, it is essential that people begin to understand that the branding of the pink ribbon and the disease is working as a force. “It’s almost like a conveyer belt,” she said. “The pink ribbon conveyer belt is there and all you have to do is step on. It’s going to go. It’s going to go and go. So, even though there are good intentions (that) connect to the people who often hop on that conveyor belt… they don’t necessarily see where the conveyer belt is going.”

The solution to blindly following the pink ribbon trend is to begin asking questions about to whom the money made from pinkwashed products is going, and how much of it will be going there, Sulik said. This money, she said, is not always going somewhere, and pushing companies to disclose will confirm or reject that. “There is no law that requires any company to actually disclose where they are giving money, and how much that they are giving,” she said. “They can put a ribbon on anything. They can say it’s going toward the fight against breast cancer and there is no way to follow up.” According to Jaggar, the solution to this epidemic is a complete shift in the health care and information system. “Enough with the empty awareness,” she said. “It’s time for real action. What does real action look like? It looks like evidence-based health care delivered in a culturally competent way that’s affordable for all women, so that we’re not getting our health advice from corporate marketing teams, and we are really getting high-quality, evidence-based information that’s delivered in a timely and culturally sensitive way.” The glossy image of a naked woman gracefully covering her breasts is not indicative of the trauma that breast cancer patients endure, both physically and emotionally. A pink glove on the hand of a professional football player does not improve cancer treatment methods. These symbols are indicative of the exploitation of the breast cancer experience through the connection of commercialization and sexualization. ____________________________________ Emma Rizzo is a senior journalism and Spanish double major who likes to have breakfast for under 15 dollars, thank you very much. Email her at erizzo1@ithaca.edu

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The perpetual sexualization of breast cancer awareness campaigns and the commercialization of the pink ribbon have become commonplace in the capitalist landscape of the United States

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

on the Texas State Board of Education (TSBOE), a 15-member body made up of seven conservatives, called for a revision of the state’s social studies standards to provide balance to a subject that they perceived as having a liberal bias. The primary historical event in contention was the retelling of the Civil War. According to the guidelines, students are to learn that the Civil War was caused by “sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery.” The goal of this standard is to teach students that slavery was not the main cause of the war, but only a secondary issue at hand. Dan Quinn is the communications director for the Texas Freedom Network, a grassroots organization dedicated to protecting religious freedom and civil liberties in Texas. Within the realm of education, the organization works to counter advances made by conservative politicians to whitewash and censor U.S. history. Quinn said students in the South have consistently been taught that the Confederacy fought the Civil War over state’s rights and not slavery, as the Texas State Board of Education believes. This conditioning makes it difficult to have honest discussions about issues results in continued debates, such as those over the Confederate flag and the existence of statues honoring Confederate war heroes on college campuses. Quinn said. “This has been promoted generation after generation, and we now have a state board that’s controlled by a conservative ideologues who want to continue to perpetuate that myth,” he said. “And that’s a problem for a lot of reasons, the primary reason being lying to young people today about what the Civil War was really about makes it harder for us to have honest discussions about issues that still are a problem in our society.” According to the Texas state standards, students are required to read Jefferson Davis’ first inaugural address as the president of the Confederate States of America, in which the issue of slavery is not mentioned. However, the speech given by vice president Alexander Stephens, in which he explains that the new gov-

ernment was built to preserve the slave system, is left out of required reading curriculum. However, Jim Loewen, author of the book Lies My Teacher Told Me, said having standards such as these that minimize the role slavery played in the Civil War only serves up a sanitized version of U.S. history, one that does not necessarily tell the entire story. In his book, Loewen provides a critique of twelve leading high school U.S. history textbooks based on a survey analyzing eighteen texts. In addition to analyzing the texts, Loewen also discusses the pieces of history missing from these textbooks. Loewen said the attempts to sanitize the curriculum of U.S. history leads to textbooks that provide murky and unclear information. “There’s no excuse in the year 2015 for textbooks to whitewash why the Southern states seceded for example,” he said. “They should simply quote South Carolina’s declaration of secession, that’s clear it was about slavery. The textbooks are not clear. It’s kind of about slavery, it’s kind of about state’s rights.” In another politically-charged move to soften the language of U.S. history, conservative critics in 2014 from Texas, Georgia and Oklahoma threatened to pull the College Board’s Advanced Placement U.S. History course, also known as APUSH, from their schools in response to the publisher’s 2014 course framework, which these critics denounced as being “anti-American.” The Republican National Committee even passed a resolution in response, stating that the new APUSH framework “reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects.” As a result of this criticism, the College Board released a new, revised set of U.S. history standards on July 30. Among the revisions includes a softer tone given to issues of slavery, racism and Native American relations. For instance, a previous version of the standards read, “Many Europeans developed a belief in white superiority to justify their subjugation of Africans and American Indians, using several different rationales.” However, in the new

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ifteen-year-old Colby Burren was sitting in his high school geography class, flipping through his textbook. On Page 126, a photo caption on a map depicting United States immigration caught his eye. In referencing Africans brought to America from the 1500s to the 1800s, the caption referred to these Africans as “workers,” not slaves. “That completely downplays the fact that these people were forced into a completely unjust system,” said Monita Bell, associate editor and writer for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project. “Telling one perspective absolutely silences other perspectives that should rightly be presented.” Teaching Tolerance, which was founded in 1991 by SPLC, is dedicated to providing unbiased educational material for teachers across the country. The goal of Teaching Tolerance, Bell said, is to combat the issue of textbooks providing a more sanitized, whitewashed version of U.S. history, one that seeks to downplay the country’s pitfalls and overly emphasize its successes in a fit of American exceptionalism. “It really is this idea of broadening, you know, what students are exposed to and complicating it so we don’t get these really simple, uncomplicated stories that are often depicted in books,” she said. Bell said the emphasis on telling a cleaner version of U.S. history results in an imbalance between telling both the good and the bad of America’s history. In the story of Columbus, Bell said focus is often placed on the Eurocentric perspective of pioneering the Americas than on the side that tells of how Native Americans were stripped of their culture and pushed off their land. “That bias necessarily lends itself to making one side out to be heroic, and in a lot of cases the other side is then made to be villainous if it’s not altogether ignored,” Bell said. The issue of whitewashing U.S. history has moved to the forefront of education, and has been exacerbated by conservative Republican mediation in the standards for social studies textbooks. In 2010, conservative Republicans

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

2015 standards, the term “white superiority” has been removed. A statement released by the College Board said the new framework reflects a clearer and more precise course. The statement also said all the statements in the 2015 edition have been carefully examined based on historical records and the feedback received. “The result is a clearer and more balanced approach to the teaching of American history that remains faithful to the requirements that colleges and universities set for academic credit,” the College Board said in the statement. These demands to reword or rewrite U.S. history to provide a version that is too “negative,” may stem from a concern that students only learn about the bad and not enough of the good, Bell said. “People tend to be very concerned about nurturing a generation of people who are disenchanted with their country, with their country’s history,” Bell said. Bell said the act of whitewashing history only eliminates the impulse to question and criticize, and points to a contradiction with some of the country’s primal beliefs. “People tend to be doing it for quote unquote ‘patriotic’ reasons, but this country was founded on the principle of being able to question and criticize in the interest of improving,” she said. “This desire to kind of quell the criticism or the questioning, to me that just seems counter to these ideals that these folks want to promote.” Loewen also echoed similar sentiments, but said the Republican push to whitewash and sanitize U.S. history displays a sense of nationalism in that it remains uncritical and turns a blind eye to mistakes made in the country’s past. “Nationalism is not patriotic,” he said. “Nationalism makes us, as a people, stupid about the past. And we need to be intelligent.” One of the inherent, glaring problems with U.S. history overall is the absence of a nationwide set of U.S. history standards, an issue explored in a study conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy think

tank. This study, called “The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011” analyzed each state’s U.S. history standards and gave the state a letter grade based on how rigorously and completely the state addressed U.S. history. One of the conclusions drawn from the study is that most state’s standards range from “mediocreto-overall,” resulting in an average grade of a D across all states. For the study, researchers created a common grading metric that would yield a two-part score based on the categories “Clarity and Specificity,” where states can earn a maximum of three points, and “Content and Rigor,” where the maximum yield is seven points. From this point system, states were given a letter grade depending on their total score. A “D” grading equates to an overall numerical score of two to three. Dara Zeehandelaar, the national research director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, prescribed the low grades based on the bias already-present in the creation of history curriculum, and the fact that states have the power to adopt their own standards. For instance, on the curriculum surrounding the Civil War era, California students are to learn about the abolition of slavery in early state Constitutions. Texas state standards, however, do not mention anything about these early attempts to abolish slavery. According to the study, the average number of hours spent on social studies between 2003 and 2004 amounted to only 2.4, in comparison to an average of 11.6 and 5.4 hours dedicated to English and math, respectively. With so little time devoted to teaching history, the study read, this raises the stakes for students to effectively learn about U.S. history. Zeehandelaar said another issue with the state standards is the lack of information provided in how the subject should be taught, leading to a gap between the curriculum and how teachers talk about it in the classroom. “I think there’s a lot of steps between a student’s classroom experience to this list of stuff that they have to know,” she said. An additional concern is the way in which the monopoly of the textbook

publishing industry directly impacts how state social studies standards are implemented in the classroom. In Texas especially, the population of 4.7 million students results in a large textbook market. Because of the sheer size of the state’s textbook market, Quinn said publishers who provide textbooks on a national scale are more likely to adhere to Texas state standards. Subsequently, costs for these books will decrease in other school districts, influencing them to purchase the same materials. As a means of providing economic stability to their company, Quinn said textbook publishers tend to adhere to state standards to minimize the amount of textbooks they produce and the frequency of changes that must be made to those textbooks. He said conservative politicians on the TSBOE are well aware of the influence Texas holds over what students learn on a national scale, and use this knowledge to further their political agenda. “Texas is a major battleground over textbook censorship because Texas is so influential around the rest of the country,” Quinn said. “And social conservatives are determined to use their authority in Texas to impose their political beliefs on what students learn in classrooms.” In November, conservative members of the TSBOE rejected a proposal that would allow state university professors to fact-check student textbooks. Despite the outcome, Quinn said the Texas Freedom Network will continue to support the proposal and will also try to get the state legislature to pass a similar law. Quinn said while he was appalled by the results, he said it reflects the agenda to whitewash and censor textbooks. “It’s certainly another black eye and it makes Texas look like education backwater,” he said. “But it’s certainly not surprising, politicians on the state board don’t want experts weighing in to say what is factually accurate, because politicians on the state board want the ability to force their personal opinions into the textbooks, whether they’re factually accurate or not.” Despite attempts spearheaded by some Republicans to provide a more

Bell said another issue facing students is how whitewashed versions of U.S. history leave out the voices of marginalized groups, such as Native Americans. In one excerpt of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Loewen points out the disparity between the amount of time devoted to discussing Christopher Columbus in comparison to talking about Native Americans in the 2005 edition of the textbook, A History of the United States — two thousand words compared to five. This telling of only one side of the story, Bell said, perpetuates the lie that Native Americans only lived in the past. “So we not only don’t get to hear their experiences from what happened in the past, but we also, I think, by extension and as a result, don’t get to hear about their experiences today and how the people who are descended from those people who were pushed out of their land and had their cultures, you know, erased in a lot of cases,” she said. “It’s as if they’re extinct and their voices and their experiences aren’t important enough to add to the story.” Shannon Speed, the director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas, wrote an article for The Huffington Post titled, “‘Pro-American’ History Textbooks Hurt Native Americans,” where she criticized the push for a more sanitized telling of U.S. history only has a negative impact on students, an effect she sees manifested even through her college students. “My students are usually quite surprised to find that they have been provided a whitewashed version of history,” she writes. “They are often outraged. They feel lied to. Omission of the truth is, in fact, a form of lying,” Speed said in the article. With attempts from national organizations like Teaching Tolerance to combat the Eurocentricity of U.S. history textbooks, the issue of whitewashing the past lends itself to the old saying, “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.” Bell said the continued battle for voting rights, the lack of safety felt by people of color and the continued ignorance toward minority cultures further exemplifies the wrong in attempting to airbrush a version

of U.S. history that does not tell the entire story. “These things [that] are supposedly in the past are still very much present,” she said. “And I think that a society that is called quote unquote ‘post-racial,’ to continue to tell these stories that don’t address the conflicts and the struggles and the obstacles that various peoples in these stories don’t get told, the various perspectives in these stories don’t get told, I think perpetuates the ignorance.” Above all, Quinn said the attempts to produce a more sanitized version of U.S. history is dishonest and negatively impacts students in the sense that they continue to be misinformed. “We’re not arming them with the information they need to be productive citizens of a democratic society and make informed decisions when they go to the polls,” he said. “And that’s why we’re still arguing 150 years after the end of the Civil War over whether the Confederate flag should by flying over state capitals and whether we should be honoring Confederate war heroes in public spaces. We’re still arguing about this because generations of students haven’t been told the truth.” ___________________________________ Emma Rizo is a senior journalism major with a concentration in kickass narrative ledes. You can email her at erizzo1@ithaca.edu.

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pro-American version of U.S. history, students and teachers alike have fought back against these efforts in states like Colorado. In late September 2014, 50 teachers from the Denver, Colorado school district held a “sickout” protest that resulted in the closure of two school districts. Their protest stemmed from outrage toward the suggested right-wing’s modification of AP U.S. History and the adoption of a new pay-grade system that ties teacher’s salaries to their performance review A week later, at least 700 Jefferson County high school students staged a walkout and left their classes in response to the proposed changes to their history curriculum. On the grassroots level, Quinn said the Texas Freedom Network also works to push back against conservative efforts to politicize and censor certain aspects of U.S. history. He said some of these methods include revealing textbook that are up for adoption, monitoring right wing pressure who try to censor textbooks and pinpointing state board members when they try to censor these textbooks. “We’ve done public testimonies, we’ve sponsored rallies, we have lobbied on individual board members,” Quinn said. “We’ve also worked with the state legislature to reign in the authority of the state board to control textbook content because more members have more often abused that power to censor textbook content.” Bell said one of the most detrimental product of providing a whitewashed version of U.S. history is how it leads to the a lack of information provided to students who end up receiving an incomplete and biased version. Within this miseducation, Bell said there is a downplaying of many unjust and immoral actions that occurred on U.S. soil. “In the silencing of those other voices from the past, then you know student identities are gonna be silenced too—not just people who are descended from those voices that are silenced,” Bell said. “But it’s doing everybody a disservice not to know the truth, not to get more well rounded ideas about what happened in the past.”

OL. MINISTRYofCOOL. MIN BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

Arts, entertainment and other things cooler than us.

Soccer Hooligans

When obsessed sports fanatics turn violent

Amanda Emmer, Contributing Writer

Some of these repercussions would be getting arrested on the spot, facing jail time, seriously injury or death. Depending how rowdy the fans get, a soccer game can cease. passion is enough for fans to participate in hooliganism. In a March 2015 article on the Bleacher Report, Andrew Nicholls, an English soccer hooligan reformed, describes the reason he became a hooligan in the first place, “Simple answer: the buzz.” Later on he wrote, “Football was one of the only hobbies available to young, working-class kids, and at the football game, you were either a hunter or the hunted.” People participating in soccer hooliganism can face many consequences. Some of these repercussions would be getting arrested on the spot, facing jail time, seriously injury or death. Depending how rowdy the fans get, a soccer game can cease. A recent ceasing of a game happened in April 2015 in Belgrade, Serbia. According to The Wall Street Journal, fans threw lit flares and metal objects onto the field. Many fans were seriously injured and brought to the hospitals. The thing about hooliganism is that it’s everywhere. In their “2015’s Best & Worst Cities for Soccer Fans” article, Wallethub states the most friendly and engaged MLS Fans were in Orlando, Florida. The least friendly and engaged MLS Fans were from New York City. Though American fans can be violent, they don’t compare to other countries. In their article in The Wall Street Journal, Naftali Bendavid wrote, “Violence has long surrounded European soccer, but recent figures — and some extreme, headline-grabbing examples — suggest it may be getting worse, driven by Europe’s economic struggles and

what’s seen as an accompanying rise in nationalism and racism.” Recently, soccer has been in the media in two respects. An example of positive hooliganism was seen just this past summer. The United States Women’s National Team won the FIFA World Cup. In the ensuing parade, every person was cheering as loud as they could when the team passed by the streets on floats. A recent act of negative hooliganism was seen on Aug. 9, 2015. The Red Bull NY and NYC FC soccer teams faced off. However, before the actual game started, fans went crazy in the streets of Newark, New Jersey. After a pre-game celebration at a Bello’s Pub and Grill, a local bar that is close to the stadium, violence occurred on the streets outside. Fans used different weapons such as a sandwich board and took part in the fight. Overall, this obsession comes not only from pride in one’s team but also in one’s nation. The obsession to participate in soccer hooliganism asserts this belief that fans will do whatever it takes to show how dedicated they are to the sport. Soccer hooliganism at soccer games can range from a positive and supporting vibe to an extreme, out-of-control environment. ___________________________________ Amanda Emmer is a sophomore IMC major who finds cage fighting indereing. You can contact her at aemmer@ ithaca.edu

Ministry of Cool

ooliganism” is defined by the Politics Newspaper as “disorderly, aggressive and often violent behavior perpetrated by spectators at sporting events.” Basically, they are the ones that are the loudest, most dressed up and rambunctious in the crowd. From the start of the game to the last second, the thrill of a soccer game takes a toll on everyone. Referees and fans alike analyze everything. If anything, the fans appreciate the sport. When a team wins, there are cheers of pride and excitement. However when a team loses, many faces in the crowd drop, and some resort to booing. These disappointed faces soon come in contact with proud fans of the other team. It soon becomes an international, chaotic and downhill spiral known as soccer hooliganism. In a July 2014 article in The Atlantic, sports safety and security expert, Steve Frosdick stated regarding soccer violence “‘from the 1960s to the 1980s, we [saw] a move from spontaneous incidents of soccer-related disorder in the U.K. to organized viciousness…’” Since then, violence from sports gave the media a lot to report on. Yet as violent as U.K. fans can be, they aren’t the only ones. Top Bet magazine mentioned the top three worst fans during the World Cup of 2014 were Argentina, England and Brazil. Anyone who has experienced a soccer game has possibly experienced how extremely violent its fans can be. In a 2010 Mother Jones article written by Kevin Drum, Ilya Somin suggests the reason for sports violence is “namely that soccer is strongly associated with nationalism.” Similarly, Drum also quoted David Post, who said, “Soccer’s like life, and people care about it the way they care about their lives.” Both pride in one’s nation and personal

Trapped in the Web

The underestimated danger of electronic addiction

Kellen Beck, Ministry of Cool Editor

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

very time I pop in an earphone it’s like I’m sucking down a cigarette. When I’m out alone, waiting even for a moment, I take out my phone and start swiping through Twitter and Imgur. Whenever I sit down to eat a meal I watch an episode of something on Hulu or Netflix. In lieu of reading before bed, my face glows behind my phone. I’m perpetually plugged in. I’ve always enjoyed using electronics, ever since I got a GameBoy Pocket in ’98, but now I can see my usage is a bit problematic. And it’s not just consuming one thing, like constantly watching shows on Netflix or playing League of Legends for 12 hours a day. It’s shoving information into my eyes and ears at any moment possible. “Internet addiction is described as an impulse control disorder, which does not involve use of an intoxicating drug and is very similar to pathological gambling,” according to the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery (IIAR). Well I certainly don’t have good impulse control when it comes to the internet, and neither do a whole lot of other people I know. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a limit of 2 hours or less of screen time for kids aged 12 to 15, which according to a CDC study in 2012, 73 percent of kids surpass. The internet has become a giant procrastination machine, with social media becoming the leading source of time spent online according to an online survey from GfK and the Interactive Advertising Bureau in 2014. Since the advent of the iPhone in 2007 and the Android in 2008, people have been using their phones more and more. Every day when I walk around, 90 percent of people are either looking at

their phones or have earphones in. Numbers cited in Clair Atkinson’s article “America’s smartphone addiction is only getting worse” in the New York Post put average smartphone use at nearly three hours a day for Americans, and it is only expected to increase. I almost feel a sense of pride when I can walk from one place to another without pulling out my phone or listening to something, or when I decide to read a chapter of a book before bed instead of flicking through Twitter. But is it really that bad to be concerned with staying connected all the time? It’s 2015! We don’t want to miss out on any dope memes. According to IIAR, yes. “Internet addiction results in personal, family, academic, financial, and occupational problems that are characteristic of other addictions.” Being addicted to the internet and electronics can have major effects on a person if left unchecked, including a negative impact of social behavior. Back around 2006, I started playing World of Warcraft as often as I was home. During some summers in middle school and early high school, that meant I could be hunched at my computer for upward of 12 hours a day, mindlessly sending frostbolts at a menagerie of beasts and enemies, completing daily quests for nothing

more than vanity. I put off seeing my actual friends to spend time in dungeons with strangers instead. WoW addiction is a well-documented example of how video games can take over a person’s life. There’s a subreddit dedicated entirely to helping people stop playing WoW and encouraging fellow addicts to stop. It reads like a recovering heroin addicts forum, with thread titles that include “The Pull Is Frighteningly Strong,” “It still haunts me” and “I need to quit, but don’t know how.” People report that they struggled with their jobs when playing and their grades in school went down the tubes, or relationships were over just because they spent so much time playing WoW. Games like these can become an escape from issues like depression, anxiety, stress and more, similar to drugs and alcohol. Smartphones and the internet can act in a very similar way, and are nearly identical according to IIAR. Thumbing through Instagram or scrolling through Facebook are easy ways to ignore the world, while simultaneously feeling connected to it. I don’t really play WoW anymore, but my freetime is always filled with a mix of video games, articles, Imgur, YouTube videos, wrestling, and shows on Netflix and Hulu. For

Entertainment allows us to ignore reality, which is an idea that can be healthy in small doses but can quickly become consuming and harmful. Suddenly, binge-watching a show on Netflix gets in the way of doing what needs to be done, like classwork, cleaning or other responsibilities, and the lethargic nature of this addiction can negatively impact one’s health.

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thargic nature of this addiction can negatively impact one’s health. Sitting is the new smoking, and lounging on your ass for long periods of time can have a myriad of effects on the human body, especially when at a computer. According to “The health hazards of sitting” by Bonnie Berkowitz and Patterson Clark on The Washington Post, we should all be sitting straight up, arms bent at 90 degrees with our feet flat on the floor, and be sure to stretch and take breaks. Berkowitz and Clark found that prolonged sitting can lead to things like heart disease, a decline in muscle response, colon cancer, poor circulation, soft bones, strained neck, lowered brain function, disk damage, sore shoulders and back, inflexibility in the spine, tight hips and of course, mushy abs. They also wrote that people who watched seven or more hours of TV per day had a 61 percent greater chance of dying than those who watch less than one hour in a full 8.5 year study. But not just sitting causes problems, even with ample stretching or a treadmill desk, staring at screens can cause something known as digital eye strain. In the Everyday Health article “How Technology is Hurting Your Eyes” by Amir Khan, in 2013 the average American spent about nine hours per day looking at various screens. This causes issues with our eyes. In the article, Dr. Douglas Lazarro said, “The longer you look at a computer screen, the more eye strain you tend to have, which can cause headaches.” When looking at screens, people tend to also blink less, which leads to dry eyes, burning and itching. Squinting at bright screens can cause eye strain, and sleep deprivation caused by staring at screens can also lead to further eye strain. Entertainment addiction looks

like it’s a problem that won’t be going away very soon, as electronics become more and more pervasive in our culture and new things are constantly begging for our attention. If you have to make an effort to cut back on something like your smartphone, video games or general internet usage, then you probably have a problem. But there are resources to reach out to and programs for anyone that needs help. On-Line Gamers Anonymous has been active since 2002 and has forums, chat rooms, meetings and lists of professionals to reach out to for anyone who feels they have an addiction issue with online gaming. The National Association of Addiction Treatment Providers puts many addiction centers under its umbrella, some of which recognize internet and video game addiction as a real issue. The 2013 update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition includes Internet Gaming Disorder as something to be considered for study, but internet and gaming addictions are still not recognized by the entire psychology world. Without official recognition, there can sometimes be a stigma associated with addiction to electronics, and that can lead to the idea that it isn’t a real issue for people, when in fact this addiction can be devastating. _________________________________ Kellen Beck is a senior journalism major who’s down to his last Internetine patch. You can email him at kbeck1@ithaca.edu.

Ministry of Cool

short periods of time I will avoid or “quit” certain things that offer me pretty much no actual value and become too consuming, like Imgur, but I always end up falling off the wagon at some point. One of the easiest ways for me to disconnect from everything is listening to podcasts. I discovered podcasts around 2006 with KnoxKast Radio, headed by Robert Benfer of blue clay-people fame and Jason Steele of Charlie the Unicorn fame (before Charlie the Unicorn was made). Now I regularly listen to 11 podcasts, with three backups in case I get to the end of the week and need something to replace my own thoughts. This can total somewhere between 17 and 20 hours per week of people talking in my ear. But that’s nothing compared to Stephen Mack, who wrote “I’m addicted to nearly 50 podcasts” in The Kernel in Sept. 2015. Like him, I start listening to podcasts before I even start boiling my water for coffee in the morning. I listen when walking to class, driving, doing dishes, shaving. Podcasts have trumped music in most cases because I don’t have to think, just listen. They become an escape from the everyday stresses of life just because they allow me to tune out what’s happening in my life and focus on literally anything else. Electronic entertainment easily becomes a form of escapism, defined by Merriam-Webster as the “habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine.” Entertainment allows us to ignore reality, which is an idea that can be healthy in small doses but can quickly become consuming and harmful. Suddenly, bingewatching a show on Netflix gets in the way of doing what needs to be done, like classwork, cleaning or other responsibilities, and the le-

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Oneohtrix Point Never

FROM THE

Garden of Delete Album Review Brody Armstrong

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

Staff Writer

Daniel Lopatin has greatly evolved from his mild break in 2009 off the release of Rifts, his first compilation of works under the pseudonym Oneohtrix Point Never. Since then, he’s released several records, film scores, and side projects. Not to mention accidentally birthing an entire subculture of music under the name Chuck Person — thankless creator of vaporwave. From his days in 2010 producing music as Chuck Person, chopping up and slowing down corny retro pop music, Lopatin has been cultivating a genre of his own, still embedded with the same corn and kitsch, now much more inspired. In 2011, he released the highly acclaimed Replica, a sample-based project inspired by television advertisements with a melancholy and drone-ish quality. And in 2013, he released another LP following his signing with Warp Records, R Plus Seven, another brilliant project with tracks layered with synthesized organs, smokey pads, and robotic choirs that create what one might imagine to be the soundtrack to a latent religiously guilt-ridden dodecahedron’s fever dream. In Garden of Delete, Lopatin evolves these geometric cadences into a shape with a thousand more angles that ooze with a newly developed level of grotesquerie. Lopatin organizes processed sounds that by themselves would sound admittedly insufferable from the high-pitched and saturated voices singing cryptic homilies that change key with the quick brush of static to the cutting, harsh spikes of synth noise. These moments of violent and glitchy instrumentation almost never last very long and are sometimes juxtaposed with the more gentle pluck of a synthetic guitar string, like on the track “I Bite Through It,” an almost unorganized though beautiful mess of metal guitars, clanking synthesizers and gargling lo-fi vox samples — an odd high point on the album. Garden of Delete maintains Lopatin’s

long custom of appropriating nostalgic elements of sound into his music. You hear dripping vocals filtered through a talk box in the album’s closing track “No Good,” some tacky 90s-esque zipping synths and clanging arpeggios in “Child of Rage” and recurring jazz guitar noodling that’s hidden under layers of other obscure noise throughout the album itself. Another track, “Animals,” is guided by a shrill, manipulated vocal sample that wails over 16bit synth pads which sound native to a 90s role-playing game; lofty and emotionally stirring with its erratic and bending vocal melodies, it’s arguably one of the best songs on the album. Another, more mesmerizing song is “Freaky Eyes,” an ambiently expansive and placid masterpiece which deteriorates from its eerie, atmospheric beginnings into a cluster of dark and cacophonous noise that is halted midway through by an unexpected break into a stretched and muffled sample of 70s Canadian folk singer Roger Rodier’s “Am I Supposed to Let It by Again” — an atavism to his 2010 vaporwave album Eccojams Vol. 1. This interruption sounds sort of like something that Kanye West was doing in Yeezus. That is, shifting from the main beat to a bridge where suddenly a children’s choir is singing or Charlie Wilson is belting his lungs out unexpectedly, as if the song could manipulate itself independently. G.o.D. may sound bizarre and unattractive — it is — though Lopatin made this his intention. These are the tools Lopatin chooses to work with, like a depressive poet with the macabre or a disturbed comedian exploiting his mental insecurities. He’s taken sounds which vaguely surround his memories of adolescence, their relevance discarded by music’s natural mutation over the years, and has made clever and imaginative use of them, creating something beautiful that is at the same time very ugly in its parts.

Grimes Art Angels Album Review Sophie Israelsohn

Refunct

Ministry of Cool Editor

Game Review Will Uhl Staff Writer

sponse to some backlash from the pop-like quality of “Go” in 2014. Though fan reaction is important to an artist, Grimes, like any artist, will produce the music that she feels compelled to produce, admitting that “It’s nice that you say you like me/ But only conditionally.” “Kill V. Maim” takes on the aesthetic of album cover, an anime-inspired battle song that melts into the electronic texture to where it’s almost discernable. But the slightly sarcastic, cheerleader “B-E-H-A-VE/ arrest us” chorus, reinforces the rather hidden antagonism of her other tracks like “Flesh Without Blood.” “Venus Fly,” features Janelle Monáe and like “Kill V. Maim,” uses femininity as a weapon in a fantastical setting, however translatable to actual reality, a theme of the album. “Wrap my curls all around the world/ throw my pearls all across the floor/ feeling my beat like a sniper girl,” playful, sarcastic humor that is paired with aggressive power. The cover art is accompanied by other artwork that goes with specific songs on the album. Similar to the cover art, the art for “Venus Fly,” the second collaboration on the album, has aspects of femininity that are masked by an alien edge and the gore of blood spurting from multiple places, be it skin or simply a more metaphoric armor. Art Angels could be a concept album if it wasn’t so real-life. Grimes very candidly breaks out of the box she was put in postVisions and proudly expresses her truth with more pop than before, but not without giving up her signature synthesized style.

At a time where games are about competition, intensity, and photorealism, Refunct is refreshingly relaxed. It’s a simple first-person platformer that’s more meditative than anything else, allowing you to take your time with its simple challenges. And despite its brevity, it never overstays its welcome, wrapping up before its magic wears off. Your task is simple: run and jump from platform to platform, finding and hitting a switch to elevate the next set of platforms. Instead of being broken up into distinct levels, the next set of platforms rise up out of the watery abyss, gradually expanding the world from a few clusters of stone and grass into a vast archipelago. There’s no time limit, no enemies, and no high scores. Refunct lets you go at your own pace and instead of being boring, it’s liberating. Nothing distracts from the raw feel-good power of clamboring over the environment — a rarity among

the feature-saturated games of today. The graphics are appropriately simple, likely part aesthetic choice and part budgetary choice. They don’t look bad — well-rendered water and lighting make up for the simple, Spartan geometry. Piano, synth and percussion harmonize in the background, never in any terribly remarkable fashion but always enough to inspire a mix of wonder and calm. Refunct is a glass of ice-cold water, a palate cleanser in between other games. Completing it all the way only takes about an hour, and for $3, it’s not a bad value. But even after clearing it 100 percent, I found myself drawn back to wall jumping from block to block, losing myself in the movement. It goes beyond the escapism many games inspire, coming closer to a zen-like meditation. The best way to experience Refunct is occasionally revisiting it, basking in the tranquil simplicity for as long as you need.

Ministry of Cool

After Visions was released in 2012, Grimes’s otherwise radio silence built up suspense of her next album. When Claire Boucher released “Go” with Blood Diamonds, some fans of the cyclical hum of Visions were thrown in a loop because of its more radio-friendly function. Just a year later, electro-pop artist under the pseudonym Grimes, released her fourth LP Art Angels as a bigger step in the pop direction, leaving behind the construct of Grimes a la previous work. Art Angels opens like a cosmic movie score with “laughing and not being normal,” while not denying the familiarity of the signature synthesizers. Though admittedly softer than the opening beats of Visions, the texture gains a thicker, dramatic buzz after Grimes’s floaty lyrics and leads into the perhaps most catchy track on the album, “California.” “California” contrastingly provides a level of clarity. The familiar electric buzz retracts into the background and instead the vocals are featured as in any pop song, repetitive and layered with harmony. The sample of Rihanna’s “Pon De Replay” supports the pop intention and also perhaps unintentionally covers the pain within the lyrics, “‘Cause I get carried away/ commodifying all the pain,” pre-packaged and uniform. There are also not-so-subtle melancholic undertones in this album rather early on, contrasting the otherwise, at times deceptive, upbeat texture. “Flesh Without Blood” is another example of how this Art Angels is purposely not made out to be akin to Visions, a re-

Suffragette Film Review Tyler Obropta

Carol

Staff Writer

Film Review

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

Joel Kalow Staff Writer

Suffragette is a sometimes-poignant, sometimes-stagnant film from director Sarah Gavron that captures the early sparks of the feminist movement in 20th century England. Carey Mulligan plays Maud, a young laundress who becomes a foot soldier for the movement alongside her friend Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) and organizer Edith (Helena Bonham Carter). As the movement gets bolder and bolder, something in Maud catches fire and she volunteers for dangerous missions bombing postal boxes and houses in radical attempts to secure the vote. Mulligan and Bonham Carter are scenestealers and their performances are brilliantly nuanced and understated. As for the other actors, there’s the phenomenalas-always Brendan Gleeson as an inspector intent on shutting down the revolutionists. Unfortunately, it’s a throwaway role that even a great actor like Gleeson has visible trouble inhabiting. Ben Whishaw is very much in the same boat as Maud’s exasperated husband. It’s a wonder why he’s here. After all, it’s not like he needs the paycheck. And then there’s Meryl Streep. Streep is one of the three women on Suffragette’s poster and her name is everywhere for this movie. So, imagine the disappointment of a devoted Meryl Streep fan when they go to see Suffragette and discover that she is only in it for three minutes, tops, before

being shoved in a cab and whisked away, never to be seen again. And that’s perfectly fine, because it leaves more room to focus on themes of courage, familial loyalty and rebellion. Yet the script focuses too much on hitting the historical beats, so it can’t delve deep into its themes in a meaningful way, instead simplifying the morality and resulting in a very shallow experience. To make matters worse, about 80 percent of the movie is filmed in a Hunger Games shaky-cam style, courtesy of cinematographer Eduard Grau. It works for the intense rally scenes, but some of the quiet scenes are shot as if the cameraman was riding a unicycle and trying his damnedest not to fall off. When the camerawork calms down and lets the audience take in the environment, the film is really quite beautiful. The locations are gorgeous, the production design is immaculate and the costumes feel ripped right from the era. It’s a shame we can’t make it out most of the time, because our cameraman is a finicky monkey with a GoPro strapped to its head. It’s a fine feminist film with terrific performances and some powerful scenes, but the pacing, casting, writing and cinematography all get to be too much after a while and the whole thing just falls apart. Though it probably won’t stop Meryl Streep from getting an Oscar nomination for this movie.

Carol is a film about gestures. It’s about lingering stares, gentle touches, brief moments, all of which come together to tell the story of an affair between a middle-aged woman and a young shop girl. The film is a treatise on loneliness and ennui, on being an outsider in a world that openly condemns your kind. But it is also an enigma, purposely cold and distant to the viewer, as if the film were a beautiful mural put behind thick glass. Carol, directed by Todd Haynes and written by Phyllis Nagy, is calculated and deliberate, qualities that may put off audiences who are expecting a tearful romance between two clandestine lovers, but as the film continues, its seemingly impenetrable façade breaks down to reveal the warmest of hearts. The story follows Therese, played by Rooney Mara, as she meets — and falls in love with — the titular Carol, as performed by Cate Blanchett. Simply put, this is the role Blanchett was born to play. With her old-school movie star looks and her alwayson-the-verge-of-breaking demeanor, she is able to capture the essence of Carol, a woman who must be endlessly desirable and hopelessly lost all at once. As her soon-tobe-ex-husband Harge (Kyle Chandler) tells her, Carol is always “the most beautiful girl in the room.” Blanchett provides the film with its impetus, but Carol is really Therese’s story. As the young lover, Rooney Mara puts in perhaps the finest performance of 2015. It all comes down to her eyes; wide and naïve at the beginning, hurt and just a bit more experienced by the end. Therese is a character that Mara defines more through stolen glances than bombastic monologues. A character this repressed should not feel

so intimate and exposed. She’s like an Edward Hopper painting: beautiful, delicate, removed, alone. Todd Haynes and cinematographer Edward Lachman carefully construct the film mostly through close-ups. It is not a flashy movie but rather closer to the restrained efficiency of Classic Hollywood (one can imagine an alternate reality where Billy Wilder or Douglas Sirk directs Carol). Where the film shines visually is in its use of color: muted reds, gunmetal greys and misty greens light up every scene. The juxtaposition between the lavish art design and the constrained characters creates a story told not just through dialogue and action but in color too. Towards the end of the film Therese paints her ugly beige-ish pink walls a beautiful fresh mint green, signaling a change in her own psyche. These moments of visual harmony are present in almost every film, and it is just one of many reasons why the story of Carol resonates so clearly. Films like Carol aren’t common. Todd Haynes’ masterpiece is the rare movie to offer a deep reserve of textual symbolism while simultaneously operating on an ethereal level that requires nothing but the viewer’s interest. The key difference between Carol and many other, perhaps gaudier films can be encapsulated in a quick scene: when Carol looks at Therese, the two women surrounded by strangers, and smiles. In any other movie, this scene would be adorned with unnecessary exposition or an inflated expression of love. In Carol, Haynes understands that it is not the large gestures that stick in our memories but the small ones. The squeeze of a shoulder, the quickening of one’s breath, the smile of a lost lover in a crowded room. Passion is found in these moments, and no film of 2015 is more passionate than Carol.

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Labyrinth of Lies

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Film Review Tyler Obropta Staff Writer

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Film Review Olivia Blees

Contributing Writer

ities, committed at Auschwitz with the unflinching, yet tortured reserve of Johann staring down the survivors with an unconditional respect and an unspoken agreement to bring the monsters responsible to trial. Such a dedication to articulating the stories of its subjects is best shown in Simon Kirsch (Johannes Krisch), a friend of the journalist’s, who met Dr. Mengele face-to-face. His testimony to Johann and the journalist is heartbreaking. Krisch relives all of the pain of his character in that moment, delivering an unforgettable, tragic performance. Johann’s love interest Marlene (Friederike Becht) is an aspiring dressmaker with lovely deep, brown eyes and an air about her that she’s smarter than people think. A scene toward the end of the film between her and Johann at Marlene’s dress shop is a great show of excellent writing and subtle acting. Yet, the film would have been more impactful if it were more subtle, more reserved. As it stands, Labyrinth of Lies features a wealth of emotional performances and powerful storytelling, and stands among the best investigative dramas of recent years, but it’s also one of the most “Hollywood” films I’d ever seen produced outside of America. The performances got a little too over-the-top and the story became a little too streamlined at times, especially in the film’s concentration on Dr. Mengele. Instead of a more focused, smarter drama about people’s experiences in a country they’re not sure they know anymore, the film changes on a dime into a race-against-time story that just doesn’t suit the subject matter. The plot even hits the clichéd beats of typical investigative journalism films, even the part where the hero decides to leave the case, but something inside him just won’t let him stay away.

The standard Hollywood hitman is unemotional, unaffected and at some point, must deal with a target from their own past. Director Hou Hsiao-Hsien flips the script in The Assassin, and not just because the film is about a hesitant female killer in 9th-century China. This rivetingly beautiful drama considers themes of obligation, endurance, loneliness and empathy. Taken from her family as a child and raised by the mysterious nun-princess Jiaxin (Sheu Fang-yi), Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) has been trained to kill without question. However, she fails to slay a provincial governor when she finds him with his young son. Unsatisfied with Yinniang’s still soft heart, Jiaxin sends her after an even trickier target: Yinniang’s cousin and former betrothed, Tian (Chang Chen). Tian manages Weibo, a secluded northern province with a developing army that threatens the emperor. Although he and Yinniang were promised by their parents when they were young children, this was more a family treaty than a romance. All the same, Yinniang is unwilling to assassinate Tian. She bides her time, learning and considering her task. During a black-andwhite scene the audience is introduced to the killer Yinniang as she slits the throat of a man while he’s on horseback. The next shot is not of spouting blood, but of falling leaves, a traditional symbol of transience, distinctive of the Taiwanese filmmaker, who was awarded the prize for best director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Cinematically, one of the most prominent things about Yinniang is her weapon:

a short, arched dagger. Yinniang dispatches treasonable government officials with a blade meant for quick jabs, not drawn-out duels. There are no classic sword fights in this film: the violence is swift and short-lived. The draw to most of these Chinese martial arts films (wuxias) is their action scenes. Hsiao-Hsien still deals with that in The Assassin, but his focus on schematic violence is purposely annoying, presenting quick shots of huge kung-fu fights on wire-work filmed behind dense forests from a distance, or centering on one character’s reaction with sword fighting in the background. These scenes often stop as suddenly as they start, and HsiaoHsien doesn’t offer easy background for many of them. One would almost assume the wuxia genre substance was something he was hesitant to add to tell this story, if the sense of obscurity and stillness didn’t also feel deeply purposeful. In his own way, Hsiao-Hsien created the anti-wuxia film in The Assassin, implementing the same directorial control in swordswinging battle as he does in catching the historic melodrama that progress. As with the stoic Yianning, Hsiao-Hsien’s tactic finds beauty and secrecy in the fixed, using the film’s unhurried speed not to tire viewers, but to impress upon them the absolute splendor of Weibo’s settings, the gracefulness of Yianning’s lethal skill, and the humble beats of everyday life. The Assassin was a perfectionist effort seven years in the making for HsiaoHsien, and his devotion to detail is obvious in every single moment.

Ministry of Cool

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In 1978, Alan Pakula’s All the President’s Men transcended the standard political thriller by using its story to discuss deeper themes and capture the paranoia of a time when not even the leader of the free world could be trusted. Labyrinth of Lies, Germany’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, is a political drama/thriller that accomplishes much the same feat as All the President’s Men. The story is set in Germany, 15 years removed from World War II, where ambitious prosecutor Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling) works mostly with traffic cases. One day, Johann is confronted with a report from a journalist (André Szymanski) about a former Nazi working as a public school teacher. The German government had largely covered up the activities that went on at the concentration camps. Johann’s boss, prosecutor-general Fritz Bauer (the late, great Gert Voss), puts Johann in charge of investigating former Auschwitz workers. Johann’s investigation questions how many Germans’ fathers have blood on their hands; it shakes the country to its core at a time of economic prosperity. Many that believe Johann is asking questions better left unanswered. Labyrinth of Lies is an exceptional piece of political filmmaking. It treats its subjects with respect. When a former Auschwitz prisoner removes his eyepatch for Johann, the audience is never shown what the patch was covering. When the man tells his story, the audience doesn’t hear it. Often, the stories are told in more human ways; the viewers witness the characters react to the horrors second-hand. Labyrinth of Lies makes us all subject to the gruesomeness, the inhuman-

BUZZSAW: Obsessed Issue

ROSE&CONS. PROSE&CONS. PRO

Short fiction, personal essay and other assorted lies.

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The Devil’s Number

By Samantha Brodsky

November 9, 2010

about what happened, but I don’t think I want to yet. It’s been what? 4 years al-

3:24 p.m.

ready? Damn. I don’t want to think about spending another 6 years here. Here

in this place with the big, red roof and the ghost white walls. They try to make it look like a home. But these cells are not home. This bed is not my bed. Being here is like never getting used to a time zone change. You can never catch up to how you used to be and nothing ever feels normal. You feel like your flesh is not your own, that it’s made up of some stranger’s skin that you’re itching to rip off your bones because it feels dirty and cold and doesn’t fit right.

not on any of the eerie whistling or the echoed howls of some of the inmates

I hate knowing that the world is going, going, going and I’m just here stum-

who think they’re lone wolves up in here. Beth reminds me of someone I once

bling through motions and doing nothing but sitting and shitting and think-

knew.

ing about Florida as life speeds ahead. It’s like those nightmares where you’re

I’ve never been much of a writer. That was Sue’s thing. She always knew what to write. Left me little notes on the kitchen counter like, “Have a day worth talking about Hun.” Or “Love you to the earth’s core and back forever.” I miss that woman, that sweet, sweet woman. It’s winter and that makes everything here more depressing, just knowing the

trying to get somewhere important, sprinting real fast, but no matter how hard you pound the pavement and pump your arms, you aren’t going anywhere. You’re just panting like a wild dog and you can never catch up. December 1, 2010 5:46 p.m.

world is freezing over. Have you have seen The Day After Tomorrow? I used to

Sue came to visit today. It’s been too long. 2 months since she was last here.

love that movie. The one with Dennis Quaid. Anyway, if the world froze over I

She looks older. Her hair’s a dirty mop of grey. Not that I’m not greying too. I

would take Sue and we would go to Florida where we’re supposed to be and

look like my father. God bless is wretched soul. Maybe it’s just nature’s way of

retire there and drink beers on Sundays. We wouldn’t play Bridge or whatever

warning us that we’re moving that much closer to death. She held my hand a

old folk play because we’re not that old, but we would have little dinner parties

bit and that was nice. Her fingers were cold and trembling, and I don’t want

at our house and invite friends to talk about our kids with.

to think about her all cold and trembling and alone without me in our bed. I

The guards here all look like they want a break. They’re all droopy eyed and tired, and so I’d make their job much easier by just leaving this place. We all

want her to be warm and strong and alive. I want us to be alive like we used to be.

would. Sometimes they look as depressed as we do. Except they can go home

One thing she said to me was that she hasn’t gotten anyone to sign her book

to their wives and their kids. And we don’t.

yet. She’s been trying for over two years to get that thing printed cover to

November 20, 2010

cover. I think she wants to be one of those distinguished visitors Barnes and Noble makes huge signs for and clears out rooms for so that the long lines of

6:40 p.m.

today. Or meatloaf. All tastes like shit anyway. Beth said that I should write

won’t tell me what the book is about, but I think it’s about me. Because I’m sure she’s been writing all this time about what it’s like to have a criminal

Prose & Cons

It’s about time for dinner. I think someone said something about actual pork

people can stand and wait to meet her. I would love for her to be famous. She

November 9, 2010

it look like a home. But these cells are not home. This bed is not my bed. Being

3:24 p.m.

here is like never getting used to a time zone change. You can never catch up

Beth told me this would help, writing things out. Make me feel better and shit because apparently I have a temper that needs taming. She makes it sound like I’m a lion and shit. I don’t really know how this works, but she should know what she’s doing since she’s the one talking to us about all our feelings. She’s always playing with her pen, like clicking it over and over will help her help us. Because it makes us all focus real hard on the click-click-clicking and not on any of the eerie whistling or the echoed howls of some of the inmates who think they’re lone wolves up in here. Beth reminds me of someone I once knew. I’ve never been much of a writer. That was Sue’s thing. She always knew what to write. Left me little notes on the kitchen counter like, “Have a day worth talking about Hun.” Or “Love you to the earth’s core and back forever.” I miss that woman, that sweet, sweet woman.

is not your own, that it’s made up of some stranger’s skin that you’re itching to rip off your bones because it feels dirty and cold and doesn’t fit right. I hate knowing that the world is going, going, going and I’m just here stumbling through motions and doing nothing but sitting and shitting and thinking about Florida as life speeds ahead. It’s like those nightmares where you’re trying to get somewhere important, sprinting real fast, but no matter how hard you pound the pavement and pump your arms, you aren’t going anywhere. You’re just panting like a wild dog and you can never catch up. December 1, 2010 5:46 p.m. Sue came to visit today. It’s been too long. 2 months since she was last here. She looks older. Her hair’s a dirty mop of grey. Not that I’m not greying too. I

It’s winter and that makes everything here more depressing, just knowing the