The Georgetown Voice, February 4, 2010

VOICE the georgetown

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CALEN: HE’LL BE BACK? PAGE 4

HOYAS DROP THE BALL PAGE 7

O’KEEFFE: NOT JUST FLOWERS AND BONES PAGE 10

Georgetown University’s Weekly Newsmagazine Since 1969 w February 4, 2010 w Volume 42, Issue 18 w georgetownvoice.com

i am. we are?

2 the georgetown voice

february 4, 2010

comments of the week “Am I the only one who finds this story hilarious?”

—Tim, “Bookstore thief jumps off Leavey Center bridge in escape attempt”

“Can you imagine how lame the people who asked for more church must be?”

—bro, “Students bring the traditional Latin Mass back to Georgetown” “An excellent account of Scientology’s smarmy used-car salesman tactics. I burst out laughing whenever I hear the Church of Scientology’s oft-repeated claim of being ‘the most ethical organization on the planet.’”

—GoofLoof, “lez’hur ledger: Please don’t sue us, Scientologists”

“Best of luck to those guys. They’ve done a great job and stayed down to earth – Calen and Jason ‘10.”

—Kate, “GUSA executives Calen Angert and Jason Kluger to run for reelection” “Glad to know we’re not the only ones passing toothless resolutions, but at least we’re not getting paid.”

— ATalbot, “Faculty Senate passes a resolution condemning The Heckler”

Talk Back.

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Voice Crossword “Wordplay” by Mary Cass and Jaclyn Wright

ACROSS 1. South African porridge 4. Poisonous plant 9. Ski site 14. Nice yes 15. Make a speech 16. The Jungle author

17. Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian __” 18. Checked out 19. Flirt 20. None (2 words) 22. Billy __ 24. Corn or wheat 25. Home of the Quakers (abbr.)

27. Ancient stringed instrument 31. Big __ (Georgetown’s conference) 32. Island nation 33. Corn portion 34. Psychoanalyst who loves Greek mythology 36. Acquire information 38. To sprinkle on in a holy manner 40. Lampoon 42. Bird wake-up call?

43. Master Swiss chocolatier 44. One of Queen Ursula’s minions 45. Mini or tutu 47. “__ my every order and you might survive” 51. Foreboding prophecy 53. To endure 54. Legally Blonde blonde 55. Aid and __ 57. Take-off or touch-down site 59. A gravelly-voiced singer 62. Got Up 65. Estimated Time of Arrival 66. Like some suspects 67. Woulda, __ a, shoulda 68. Crimson 69. Beach memento 70. Wrangles 71. 180 degrees from NNW

classified Embrace a career in shopping and dining out. Your job will be to evaluate and comment on customer service in a wide variety of shops, malls, stores, restaurants and services in your area. For further details send in your resume to ianaspiraconsult@live.com.

answers at georgetownvoice.com DOWN 1. Like a cat on a mouse 2. __ Borealis 3. Mulitcolored horses 4. In the near future 5. Strong desire 6. Not bon 7. Had a meal 8. Surrendering 9. “Mobile” or “matic” prefix 10. “Wingardium Leviosa,” for example 11. Mom’s club 12. Titanic goddess of the dawn 13. Compass direction 21. Choose (2 words) 23. Genetic coding 25. Seductive frowning 26. Omega 28. Currently, of the Tiger 29. Steak preference 30. Sea eagle 32. In Rome, X

35. Tear 36. Denoted an incorporated business (abbr.)

37. One or the other 38. Excuse me!

39. The river that run backwards 40. A bitch’s lover 41. Picnic guest, often 42. Head honcho 43. Covers a jar 45. Science society (abbr.)

46. Show of lowbrow taste 48. Glue brand 49. Causes to rejoice 50. Ten years 52. Passes through the nose 56. Seed pod 57. Shared (like a secret) 58. Puts together 59. Like GUTS or Metro 60. __ Wednesday 61. Take to court 63. __ the line 64. Yours, mine, and __’s

Are you a logophile?

Share your love of words and help write crosswords.

E-mail crossword@georgetownvoice.com.

editorial

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VOICE the georgetown

Volume 42.18 February 4, 2010 Editor-in-Chief: Jeff Reger Managing Editor: Juliana Brint Publisher: Emily Voigtlander Editor-at-Large: Will Sommer Director of Technology: Alexander Pon Blog Editor: Molly Redden News Editor: Kara Brandeisky Sports Editor: Adam Rosenfeld Feature Editor: Tim Shine Cover Editor: Iris Kim Leisure Editor: Chris Heller Voices Editor: Emma Forster Photo Editor: Hilary Nakasone Design Editors: Richa Goyal, Ishita Kohli Literary Editor: James McGrory Crossword Editor: Cal Lee Contributing Editor: Daniel Cook, Dan Newman Assistant Blog Editors: Hunter Kaplan, Imani Tate Assistant News Editors: J. Galen Weber, Cole Stangler Assistant Sports Editors: Nick Berti, Rob Sapunor Assistant Cover Editor: Jin-ah Yang Assistant Leisure Editors: Brendan Baumgardner, Leigh Finnegan Assistant Photo Editors: Jackson Perry, Shira Saperstein Assistant Design Editors: Robert Duffley, Megan Berard

Associate Editors: Matthew Collins, Lexie Herman Staff Writers:

Jeff Bakkensen, Cyrus Bordbar, Tom Bosco, Sonnet Gaertner, Aleta Greer, Victor Ho, Kate Imel, Satinder Kaur, Liz Kuebler, Walker Loetscher, Kate Mays, Scott Munro, Katie Norton, Sean Quigley, Justin Hunter Scott, Sam Sweeney, Keenan Timko, Tim Wagner

Staff Photographers:

Max Blodgett, Jue Chen, Matthew Funk

Staff Designers:

Marc Fichera, Dara Morano, Marc Patterson, Miykaelah Sinclair

Copy Chief: Geoffrey Bible

Copy editors: Aodhan Beirne, Keaton Hoffman, Matt Kerwin, Molly Redden

Editorial Board Chair: Eric Pilch Editorial Board:

George D’Angelo, Emma Forster, Molly Redden, Chris Heller, Imani Tate, J. Galen Weber, Dan Newman, Will Sommer, Brendan Baumgardner, Cole Stanger, Juliana Brint

Head of Business: George D’Angelo

Director of Marketing: Michael Byerly

The Georgetown Voice

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On this week’s cover ... LGBTQ Life at Georgetown Cover Illustration: Jin-Ah Yang

the georgetown voice 3

q MISAPPROPRIATED

Don’t give GUSA power over your funds The long-standing rift between the Georgetown University Student Association and the advisory boards that dole out funding to clubs has come to a head, with potentially disastrous implications for student organizations.

This Sunday, GUSA will vote on legislation that will strip the advisory boards of their votes in the annual budgeting process, giving GUSA sole control over the allocation of half the approximately $620,000 collected through the Student Activities Fee, according to figures provided by GUSA Senator Colton Malkerson (COL `13). This bill would give an inordinate amount of power to GUSA, an organization that has repeatedly shown itself to be incapable of handling such responsibility.

This highly problematic bill is emblematic of GUSA’s tendency to pursue its long-running feud with the Student Activities Commission at the expense of the other, better-run advisory boards.

Although some of the reforms in the sixpoint plan GUSA presented last semester were misguided and inapplicable to the other advisory boards, on the whole it was a decent first attempt at improving SAC. However, GUSA has not given the commissioners enough time to implement the proposed reforms. Instead, GUSA is inappropriately conflating SAC reform with the budget allocation process—attempting to leverage widespread animosity toward SAC into support for this unwise power grab.

The bill’s proponents have argued that advisory boards should not be able to allocate and vote on funding proposals because they have an inherent conflict of interest—no board wants to

challenge another and risk having it’s own funding cut, they claim. In addition to grossly misrepresenting how the budgeting process actually works, these senators are glossing over the fact that by giving GUSA—whose budget also draws from the Student Activities Fee—sole control over funding, this bill would exacerbate the conflict of interest issue by allowing GUSA to give itself funding without any peer oversight.

Furthermore, GUSA’s demonstrated ignorance of the important details of the club funding process raises serious questions about its ability to responsibly allocate funds to all of Georgetown’s student organizations. Last semester, for example, GUSA senators arbitrarily demanded that advisory boards reduce their reserve funds to 10 percent of their annual budget, a stipulation that GUSA has since backed away from, after learning that complying with such an order would put many boards in a precarious financial position. Just this week, the GUSA Senate realized it would have to reset rules for the upcoming GUSA executive elections since no one could locate the legislation passed last year to govern the election process.

By granting GUSA so much power, this bill would create the enormous potential for manipulation of the funding process. Even if the current batch of senators could be trusted to be unbiased arbiters of the budget, students will have a strong incentive to enter largely uncontested and uncompetitive GUSA races with the primary intention of securing money for their clubs.

Some proponents of the bill argue that since GUSA is elected, it is guaranteed

to represent the interests of the student body more fairly than unelected advisory boards. But with only 25 percent of the undergraduate population voting in the most recent GUSA Senate election and eight out of 24 Senators seated after uncontested elections (with three or fewer votes cast for opponents), these claims ring hollow. Giving GUSA sole control over club budgets would not democratize the process, but it would concentrate power in the hands of the most historically dysfunctional organization on campus.

That description could also fit SAC, which has upset many students who justifiably complain about the opaque decision-making and the lack of an effective appeals process. But whatever SAC’s failings may be, students should remember that the advisory boards were created so that knowledgeable, dedicated, and passionate club leaders could represent student groups and advocate for their best interests. Even GUSA’s own survey results show general satisfaction with the four funding boards that operate independently of SAC. SAC reform is necessary, but it should not be used as an excuse for allowing GUSA to co-opt the budget allocation process currently in place. Even the most well-intentioned GUSA senators cannot have the same nuanced understanding of the needs of student groups, which the advisory boards focus on exclusively.

Students should contact their GUSA Senator and Speaker of the Senate Adam Talbot, as well as attend GUSA’s meeting at 8:15 PM on Monday, February 8th in Healy 105 to express their opposition to this unsound bill.

q REEFER MADNESS

Pass medical pot; Support democracy Twelve years after District of Columbia voters expressed their overwhelming support for legalizing medical marijuana, the local government is finally poised to put the will of the people into effect. A bill currently under review by the D.C. Council would provide long-awaited relief to those suffering from many serious ailments while minimizing the risk of congressional interference.

Although 69 percent of voters approved the 1998 initiative to legalize medical marijuana, their opinion was disregarded by Congress, which prohibited the city from spending any money on implementing legalization.

With that ban lifted last summer and the Justice Department no longer interfering with local marijuana laws, the District now has the opportunity to align city policy with public opinion.

The new bill, co-sponsored by nine of the council’s 13 members, represents not only the reversal of Congress’s undemocratic interference, but also demonstrates compassion for the city’s

chronically ill residents. Among other medical uses, marijuana has been shown to counteract nausea, appetite loss, pain, and anxiety in AIDS and cancer patients, relieve the effects of glaucoma, and slow the progression of Alzheimer ’s disease. Unfortunately, the entrenched “War on Drugs” mindset has turned what should be a clear-cut medical decision into yet another battle in the culture wars. But with medical marijuana legalized in 14 states in as many years, Americans are starting to see it is possible to extend the medical benefits of the plant to suffering patients without inviting rampant drug abuse.

While concern for the democratic process and compassion for the chronically ill compel the council to move forward with legalization, as with any controversial issue in D.C., all legislative decisions must be made with the possibility of congressional interference in mind. As the case of California has shown, legalizing medical marijuana without proper regulations can ef-

fectively legalize recreational use of the drug. The Democrat-controlled Congress is not likely to put the District to task for following the lead of 14 other states in legalizing medical marijuana, but it may step in if the system is inadequately regulated.

The council seems to recognize this dilemma. The bill’s lead sponsor, Council member David Catania (I—At Large), recently told The Washington Post that the law must guard against a “Camp Run-amok program that invites [Congress] to come in and shut it down.” Although some of the provisions in the current bill may be unfeasible—the requirement that dispensaries be located at least 1,000 feet away from schools and youth centers would effectively deny service to many parts of the city—but by limiting the number of dispensaries to five and emphasizing strict regulation, the District has a good shot at avoiding congressional meddling while giving patients with chronic illnesses the relief they have been waiting for.

news

4 the georgetown voice

february 4, 2010

GUSA executives seek re-election

Calen Angert and Jason Kluger announced they will be seeking reelection.

have won re-election since at least 2000,” Ungar said.

The unprecedented reelection campaign is already creating confusion about how to distinguish fulfilling their current responsibilities from improper early campaigning.

Some have criticized an event that took place last Friday afternoon in Red Square, in which Angert and Kluger distributed free pizza and cupcakes in exchange for student feedback. Some saw the event as an improper use of GUSA funds for campaigning purposes.

“It seemed like they dipped into the GUSA slush fund to buy student votes,” Johnny Solis (SFS ’11), a former GUSA senator, said. “What they really wanted was ideas for the campaign platform.”

Election Commissioner Adam Giansiracusa (SFS ’12) said the Election Commission will only respond to formal complaints.

Angert and Kluger maintain that their event on Friday was strictly for the purpose of improving their communication with

Witek in Fall 2009, was impressed with his passion for the Jesuits.

Witek incorporated Jesuit history into the regional history they were learning and would become emotional as he told stories about Christian martyrs.

“It was really the right vocation for him, just to have that emotional connection was really surprising,” Roehrich said. “It really just goes to show he was really serious about his identity as a Jesuit, and you can tell he really lived the Jesuit values.”

Witek also showed a strong interest in getting to know his students. Stratmann said he found Witek to be warm and open during office hours, remembering how Witek inquired about a trip to Thailand Stratmann had recently taken.

According to Langan, Witek was born on the northwest side of Chicago in 1933. He attended St. Ignatius High School and entered the Jesuit order in 1952. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1965.

He completed his Jesuit training in the Chicago province, and then worked as a novice outside Cincinnati. He studied theol-

ogy and philosophy at the West Baden College in Indiana.

He attended Georgetown University for graduate school and worked for Father Joseph Sebes, S.J., a noted Asian history scholar. It was then that Witek became interested in the movement of Christianity into East Asia. He later became chair of Far Eastern languages.

Langan said Witek may have underestimated his impact on the Georgetown community.

“I said to him a number of times over the past couple weeks, ‘You are loved and esteemed by many, many people,’” Langan said. “I think sometimes when I said that to him, he was a little surprised because he didn’t think about himself that way. But it was true.”

Members of the Georgetown community who wish to pay their respects may attend one of two visitations at the Jesuit residence, Wolfington Hall, on Friday from 3-5 p.m. and 7-9 p.m.

Witek’s burial will be held after the 10:00 a.m. mass on Saturday at Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart.

by Mark Waterman Georgetown University Student Association President Calen Angert (MSB ’11) and Vice President Jason Kluger (MSB ’11) announced their intention to run for reelection last Sun-

day. Incumbents running for reelection is unprecedented in recent GUSA history, according to GUSA Parliamentarian Sam Ungar (COL ’12).

“There is apparently no evidence that any president has run again since at least 2003, and none

Archive

Father Witek, S.J. passes away

by Kara Brandeisky Father John Witek, S.J., an Asian history professor who had taught at Georgetown for over 35 years, died Sunday morning at the age of 76.

Witek died of cancer, according to Father John Langan, S.J., Jesuit community rector.

Witek’s academic accomplishments include editing a ChinesePortuguese dictionary written by the first two Jesuits in China and the Monumenta Sinica, a collection of letters sent between travelling Jesuits in the sixteenth century.

Witek’s students spoke of his intense passion for the material he taught. Several students remembered Witek tearing up as he talked about emotional subjects in class.

“He was talking about Tibet and the Dalai Lama … and he started crying in class,” Lucas Stratmann (SFS ’12), who took History of Asian Cultures class in Spring 2009, said. “Students really felt that he was so emotional about it.”

Victoria Roehrich (SFS ’12), who took History of Japan I with

students and that they had not decided to run for reelection at the time. They announced their candidacy on Sunday.

“We’re here for another month,” Angert said, “We’re not going to stop doing our job.”

Angert and Kluger said they are satisfied with their achievements so far—like creating a subsidized LSAT class and restructuring event e-mails sent to the student body. However, a number of significant projects have not been fully implemented—such as permitting volunteer students to drive SafeRides vans, provid-

ing free daily newspapers, and operating a “GUSA Fund” to distribute money to students and student groups seeking funding for events.

“It seems like they’ve got big ideas, but they’re not very well organized,” Solis said. “They’re more interested in their own careers.”

Angert and Kluger said that they would develop more specific goals for the next year as they draw near to the official start of campaigning on February 9, but anticipate focusing on student safety, campus life, and student space.

IPOL concentration removed

by Claire Wheeler Beginning with the class of 2012, the Trans-State Actors in World Politics concentration will no longer be offered to International Politics majors in the School of Foreign Service, Dean Bryan Kasper announced last week.

Professor George Shambaugh, the International Politics Field Chair, said that the decision was made with faculty-wide consultations. According to Shambaugh, there was no significant opposition to the decision.

In Kasper’s e-mail, sent out to International Politics majors, he explained the decision saying that the TSA concentration had become outdated.

“All of the research questions of the concentration are now commonly, and more appropriately, studied under the other three concentration fields,” Kasper said. “In the twenty years since the end of the Cold War, trans-state/ trans-national actors have become as common and as important as nation-states.”

Some students agreed with the International Politics Field Committee that the concentration was outdated. Sarah Sealock (SFS ’12), an international politics major, said she believes that the trans-state actor concentration is not as relevant in a post-9/11 world. She said the new world order requires

that all SFS graduates focus on third party actors like Al Qaeda.

“This is an improvement rather than any huge change,” Shabaugh said.

Other students, however, were frustrated by the decision.

“The fact that TSAs are becoming increasingly pervasive in international politics today should make it more logical to have a concentration devoted to its study,” Emma Rekart (SFS ’12) said.

Juniors and seniors concentrating in TSA will not be affected, but this decision has come as a shock to some sophomores who were planning on concentrating in the subject, and found out about the change two weeks into the semester.

“I put significant thought into what I wanted to choose for a concentration and am disappointed that I can’t take it anymore,” Emily Cabanatuan (SFS ’12) said. Cabanatuan officially declared herself a TSA major one week before the concentration was cancelled.

Rekart questioned the timing of the decision, since she must declare a new concentration within the week in order to study abroad.

“I was planning on declaring TSA, but because of the change I feel like I am being rushed into choosing another major,” Rekart said. “The other IPOL concentrations are not particularly relevant to what I want to do.”

news

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the georgetown voice 5

GUSA Fund chair appointee from SAC

by J. Galen Weber In the midst of a public and bitter battle between the Georgetown University Student Association and the advisory boards that disperse funds for student programming over the fate of the funding allocation process, GUSA President Calen Angert (MSB ’11) has nominated Kate Petersen (COL ’11), a former Student Activities commissioner, to be the first chair of the GUSA Fund.

The GUSA Fund was created in November to provide clubs with supplemental money if an advisory board fails to allocate sufficient funding to an event. In arguing for the new fund, many

GUSA senators pointed to student surveys they had collected early in the fall semester showing that clubs under SAC’s purview were more dissatisfied than student organizations under any other advisory board.

Angert said he sees Petersen’s SAC experience as a positive, and believes her familiarity with the funding process will help the GUSA Fund succeed.

Angert said he does not believe her position on funding reform contradicts GUSA’s.

“She has a very healthy view of the reforms,” Calen said. “She loved the thought that this fund could help supplement groups and cut through a lot of the red tape.”

Petersen said that she be-

Kate Petersen is the nominee to be GUSA Fund chair.

Jackson Perry

Jelleff’s field mice Tempers flared, voices were raised, and motives were questioned. Monday’s meeting of Georgetown’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission was like any of their other meetings over contentious issues, except for one thing: no one blamed Georgetown students.

Monday’s debate was over the Jelleff Boys and Girls Club field on S Street, near Safeway.

The club’s field, which is owned by the District’s Department of Parks and Recreation, is in rough shape. Fortunately for DPR, the private Maret School has agreed to make a deal. In exchange for priority access to the field on

certain times and days, Maret will pay $2.5 million to fix the club’s field and other facilities.

That may seem like a high price, but Maret decided it was worth it to avoid sharing with the field’s other main users, the British School of Washington and Stoddert Soccer league. When the British School heard about Maret’s deal with the District, they went where everyone with a grievance in Georgetown goes: the ANC. Georgetown neighbors usually devote their significant influence to keeping the University in check, interfering with everything from GUTS routes

lieves the GUSA Fund must be viewed as an auxiliary funding board, not a substitute of any advisory board.

“We’re really here to augment, to try and help out, we’re not here to compete,” Petersen said.

While SAC has been a vocal critic of the GUSA reforms, especially GUSA’s recently proposed bill to remove the votes of advisory boards from the Funding Board, Petersen took a very diplomatic stance on GUSA’s reform legislation.

“There is a lack of understanding between all of the institutions,” Petersen said. “I think if you were to throw GUSA members into a SAC meeting, and give them the same budget and the same rules, they would probably make the same decisions.”

Members of both SAC and GUSA applauded Petersen’s nomination.

“The problem of SAC is ... collective and institutional,” GUSA Senator Colton Malkerson (COL’13), a member of the Financial Appropriations Committee, wrote in an e-mail. “Individual members, past or present, of SAC are not the problem necessarily.”

Harrison Holcomb (NHS ’11), vice-chair of SAC, expressed support for Petersen’s appointment.

“I applaud GUSA for acknowledging its limited experience in supporting student programs, and choosing someone with experience working with Student Affairs to lead the GUSA fund,” Holcomb wrote in an e-mail. to student housing. That makes it all the more delightful to watch neighbors turning the full weight of their e-mail-writing, resolution-passing, change-opposing powers on one another.

As usual, no one is willing to

City on a Hill

by Will Sommer

A bi-weekly column on D.C. news and politics give up without a fight.

“We’re willing to pay a whole lot of money to secure the field usage,” Leslie Morgan Steiner, a Maret alumnus and a member of the school’s board of trustees, said.

The most controversial part of the deal is that Maret pur-

The Leavey Bridge: the site of Saturday’s fall.

Jackson Perry

Man falls from Leavey bridge

by Cole Stangler

On Sunday afternoon, a man unaffiliated with the University fell off the Leavey Center bridge, after allegedly shoplifting textbooks from the University bookstore.

According to Joseph Smith, associate director for the Department of Public Safety, the suspect had shoplifted two textbooks, each valued at $177.

Smith said he dropped a duffel bag containing the textbooks over the side of the bridge before climbing over the bridge wall. The suspect did not attempt to jump directly off the bridge, but rather tried unsuccessfully to climb down it before falling.

“Witnesses on the scene at the time stated that they saw the subject dangling from the bridge before falling,” Smith wrote in an e-mail. “When DPS [officers] arrived on the scene, the subject who had fallen was being attended to by GERMS personnel.”

chased priority on weekday afternoons during the school year, from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.— leaving the British School’s program with nowhere to go in the afternoon.

“We use the field during the day, every day,” Peter Harding, the British School’s Head of School, said. According to Harding, Maret’s monopoly on the field will interfere with afternoon sports at the British School.

Monday’s Jelleff drama centered on a resolution introduced by curmudgeonly eccentric Charles Eason, an ANC commissioner whose district includes Jelleff. Eason’s resolution criticized DPR and Maret’s behind-the-scenes dealing, and called on both parties to void

Robert Byrne (COL ’11), who witnessed GERMS attending to the subject and DPS taking information from witnesses at the scene, said the suspect was attempting to convince those around him to let him go.

“He had been saying he was hit by a car, but people were holding him down because he had just stolen books from the bookstore,” Byrne said.

According to Byrne and Smith, the suspect was taken to Georgetown University Hospital in an ambulance.

“His legs were all contorted and everything so it was very clear they were broken,” Byrne said.

Georgetown University Hospital personnel were unavailable for comment.

No MPD Police Report was available at the time of publication. According to Second District Officer Thomas Magruder, MPD is currently modifying the report and is thus unable to release it.

their agreement. The resolution passed the ANC unanimously.

Unfortunately for the British School, the resolution has no legal weight.

Both sides are now tangled up in an unfortunate drama, and neither is getting the treatment it deserves. The British School is getting a raw deal, while Maret is under attack just for entering into an arrangement that would help both the District and itself Don’t feel too sorry for them, though. Instead, enjoy watching our neighbors realize that having an entire community meddle in your affairs isn’t much fun.

Know a way to level the playing field? E-mail Will at wsommer@ georgetownvoice.com

sports

6 the georgetown voice

february 4, 2010

Some Hoyas cheer, others make musical tributes

by Tim Shine When junior guard Austin Freeman scored 28 points in the second half to lead the Hoyas to an amazing comeback victory over Connecticut, it was a performance for the ages, one that deserved to be immortalized in song.

Most would consider that slightly hyperbolic, but not Chris Tiongson (COL ’89).

Two weeks after Georgetown’s epic comeback, Tiongson went on a Georgetown basketball forum, HoyaTalk, where he posts under the handle nodak89, to announce his new song, “I Am Free.” The song recounts Freeman’s Saturday afternoon heroics in the style of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”

“I Am Free” is just the latest release from Tiongson, a pediatrician from Fargo, North Dakota who has become the unlikely troubadour for the John Thompson III-era Hoyas.

“It started, I think, Roy [Hibbert’s] freshman year,” Tiongson said. “There was a Starbucks commercial … the guy’s name was Roy, and they started chanting his name: Roy, Roy, Roy. I think it was at one of the McDonough home games the students started chanting this, doing the ‘Roy’ chant to ‘Eye of the Tiger.’

Then somebody on HoyaTalk said, ‘Well wouldn’t it be funny did a song to that.’ So then I did.”

That would be “Heart of a Hoya,” a simple acoustic guitar effort that began what is now a 26-song catalog. But his tribute to Roy was hardly the first time Tiongson expressed his fandom through music.

“I was a tuba player [in the pep band],” he said. “I went to all the home games and all the tournament games from my freshman year on.

Two Elite Eights, but never quite the Final Four.”

As an undergraduate in the late ‘80s, Tiongson just missed out on the Patrick Ewing-led teams that

took Georgetown to back-to-back national championship games. He developed his love for the Hoyas while watching players like Reggie Williams and Perry McDonald, two of his favorites to this day.

Still, for as diehard as he had been, Tiongson saw his enthusiasm wane over the years, as the Hoyas foundered under head coach Craig Esherick, and he tried to observe from halfway across the country.

“The whole Esherick, white jersey era, it was hard to keep following the team,” Tiongson said. “It wasn’t as much fun. And being almost a couple thousand miles away, it wasn’t easy to follow the Hoyas as well. But then when JTIII was hired, that kind of re-inspired me to connect back with the team.”

Thompson and his first group of players brought an excitement about Hoya basketball back to the Hilltop, and that enthusiasm was felt all the way in Fargo. Thompson’s first two seasons marked Tiongson’s most prolific songwriting period, in which he released two eight-song albums chronicling Georgetown’s rise. Those years produced such notable tracks as “1984” (an adaptation of Bowling for Soup’s “1985”), commemorating Georgetown’s sole national championship, and “Jeff Green’s Mom” (based on Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacy’s Mom”), in honor of one of the Hoyas’ more visible supporters.

Of course, Thompson’s third season brought Georgetown back to the Final Four, a trip Tiongson called so “spectacular” that it didn’t require a song. Since then he has gone into semi-retirement. “I Am Free” was his first song in almost a year.

Tiongson’s decreased output is due in no small part to the amount of work each song requires. While many of his earlier tracks were simply recorded as he played his acoustic guitar into a cheap microphone, the production of his work has become much more sophisticated over the years. Now, producing a track easily

HILARY NAKASONE

Free’s Ballin’: Freeman’s clutch performance against UConn earned him a song.

takes him upwards of 15 hours.

But after witnessing Freeman’s game-saving performance against UConn, Tiongson knew he needed to put the time in.

“I’d been thinking about it for awhile,” he said. “Austin definitely deserved his own song … So it had been kind of percolating, but then it took that legendary Connecticut game to really push him over the edge to like, ‘Ok, I really need to do this.’”

Once it was released, it didn’t take long for “I Am Free” to attract the attention of its subject.

“I heard it,” Freeman said. “It was pretty funny. I showed it to my teammates too and they started laughing … I appreciate it. I always like the support by the fans.”

There’s a certain irony to a 20-year-old basketball star in Wash-

ington, D.C. knowing Tiongson’s music, when most people back in North Dakota know him as a mildmannered doctor whose musical claim to fame is playing guitar for his church.

“Only a few people know that I do songs,” Tiongson said. “Almost everyone knows I’m a crazed Georgetown basketball fan. But not everybody knows about that. It’s kind of surprising and shocking when they find out some times.”

Those who do know Tiongson as nodak89 can expect more Georgetown-centric songs in the future.

While he has no timetable set, Tiongson has potential song ideas running through his mind all the time. One he’s thinking about now is “Saxa Dance,” a variation on Men Without Hats’ “Safety Dance.”

Of course, Freeman’s team-

mates have their own suggestions for Tiongson’s next creation. Shortly after discovering “I Am Free,” star sophomore Greg Monroe took to Twitter: “How am I the man without my own song????”

Lyrics from “I am Free” by Chris Tiongson to the tune of “Free Fallin’” by Tom Petty Austin Freeman, number 15 From DeMatha and Mitchellville, too Hoya Blue’s all crazy ‘bout Austin Love Georgetown Basketball, too It’s a long game, so don’t leave him open Austin Freeman, he’s a man you can’t guard He’s a Mack truck barreling right through you He’s a bad man breakin’ UConn’s heart I AM FREE! Now Free’s ballin’!

the Sports Sermon “We could never match their emotion ... the place was electric, their team was electric” — Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski on being blown-out at the Verizon Center walk. We join these diehards, setting up camp on the pavement twenty feet from the McDonald’s and settling in for the next four hours.

This is what I signed up for.

Around 10 a.m. the snow starts falling hard. The weather, coupled with the countless taxis and garbage trucks that honk their horns to rile up the line, creates the perfect atmosphere of anticipation for the game. Finally, the doors open, and the

President Barack Obama walks to the courtside seats right in My alarm starts blasting at front of our section.

6:30 a.m. Saturday morning.

This is what I signed up for.

Just as I set my phone down, my The game itself delivered roommate’s alarm sounds. He a bigger payoff than any of us wakes up and we look at each had hoped for. The Verizon other with a shared sense of purCenter was a sea of gray, with pose. It’s time—this is the day of an unbelievable energy flowthe Duke game. ing from the student section, We scurry to the showers, amplified by the presence of then don our gear for the day: our President—Duke had no navy knee-high socks, gray chance. From the opening tip shorts, a student section t-shirt, to the final buzzer, we didn’t white stunna shades, think about sitting Pete Rose Central and a fedora. The down as our Hoyas weather reports inplayed suffocating Da bettin’ line dicate snow, so we defense while nevDookies Margin Hoyas both tack on some er seeming to miss (underdogs) (duh!) sweatpants, a hood- (favorites) a shot. You know ie, and a winter coat. you have a good Nova Payback We enter the hallway program when the Monroe and the rest of our Saints It’s Manning President comes Colts crew is waiting for to your games, Kardashian It’s Reggie but you know you No Ring us. We all grab some Sprite bottles for refreshment and mad push to enter begins. After have a downright filthy team we’re off, heading out into the squeezing through the door and when he leaves early because cool, dark morning. passing security, the sprint for your opponent is getting blown As we approach the front seats commences. My friends out of the arena. I was even gates, the two taxis we had or- and I find a suitable row on the fortunate enough to shake the dered the night before are wait- opposite side of the entrance President’s hand as he made his ing—perfect. The time is 7 a.m. and begin final preparations for way back into the tunnel. and we are fast approaching the the game: face paint. All around This is what I signed up for.

Verizon Center. We had heard us men and women are creating When I made the choice to rumors of students sleeping over truly superb works of body art, come to Georgetown, I envithe night before to get good plac- but we go for the classic half- sioned waking up before the sun es in line, but we figured a 7:15 blue half-gray faces along with rose to attend nationally telea.m. arrival should put us right those timeless words of wis- vised games with my friends. I near the front. How wrong we dom, “HOYA SAXA,” down our envisioned going bananas in the were. Upon arrival, we see that at arms. With our looks complete, student section and beating the least 150 students are already in we engage in some last minute best teams in the country. This is line, some sleeping in tents, oth- constructive criticism of the Blue what I signed up for, and last Saters huddled up on newspapers Devils before the game starts. urday I realized that I could not hastily strewn about the side- Just before the national anthem, be happier with my decision.

by Adam Rosenfeld

sports

georgetownvoice.com

Hoyas gored by USF Bulls

by Tim Shine There was one word that summed up Georgetown’s performance against South Florida Wednesday night: foul.

The No. 7 Hoyas (16-5, 6-4 Big East) couldn’t hit their foul shots, saw their star big man sunk by foul trouble, and were left with a foul taste in their mouths after blowing a nine point halftime lead to lose 72-64 to the unranked Bulls (15-7, 5-5 Big East).

Coming off a convincing victory over then No. 7 Duke Blue Devils, the Hoyas were riding high, looking to roll against the Bulls en route to a matchup with No. 2 Villanova this Saturday. But a suddenly hot USF squad proved to be more than Georgetown could handle.

“I don’t exactly know what happened tonight,” sophomore center Greg Monroe said. “We

definitely weren’t looking backwards, and we definitely weren’t looking forward. As a team we have to be more focused on games like this.”

Monroe gave the Hoyas their best opportunity to win, scoring 21 points on 9-of-14 shooting and pulling down eight rebounds. But he was in foul trouble for most of the second half, and fouled out with three minutes to go in the game.

The big man was also 3-of-7 from the free throw line, a problem his teammates shared. The Hoyas hit just 11 of their 22 attempts from the stripe, missing six of their last eight as they tried to mount a comeback.

“We take pride in controlling the things we can control,” Georgetown head coach John Thompson III said. “Today we didn’t, just overall I don’t think, control the things we can control, be it foul shots, be it turnovers.”

What happened? Greg, we’re just as confused as you are.

Hoya politics “My geekiness is getting in the way of my nerdiness,” the comedian-philosopher Patton Oswalt once said. Standing sleeveless in the upper student section last Saturday with a sixteen ounce sports beverage in hand, I came to a similar conclusion about two things that I cherish dearly: sports and politics. Maybe it was the fact that Obama was in attendance, or maybe it was the aforementioned sports beverage, but I started thinking that the Georgetown basketball team bears an eerie resemblance to the cast of characters currently dominating American politics.

Let’s start at the top. Greg Monroe is Barack Obama. He’s a bit young for a position of such great responsibility, perhaps, but he’s cool and calm— the cerebral leader. I’m hoping

HILARY NAKASONE

that both will remain in D.C. for the next few years.

Going down the chain of command, Chris Wright is Joe Biden. Does he have a vast skill set? Yes. Does he know how to run the court, both by the regulations of the NCAA and the operating procedures of the U.S. Senate? Certainly. Can he get a little carried away in his own brilliance? Sometimes. Wright is perhaps the best pure athlete on the Hoyas this year, but his propensity for jacking up the ball in traffic and trying too hard to make the highlight reel can cost him. Biden is known as one of the best pure debaters in the Senate, but he also has a tendency for making gaffes, like when he asked wheelchairbound Senator Chuck Graham (D-Missouri) to stand up and let the crowd see him.

For Austin Freeman we’re going to have to reach back in time a little bit, because he is Ted Kennedy (D-Massachu-

Georgetown had 14 turnovers to USF’s eight.

For the most part things had been going the Hoyas’ way in the first half, but the Bulls were able to rally as Monroe receded, and their star shooting guard Dominique Jones was able to break out.

In the first minute of the second half, Monroe picked up his second and third fouls in immediate succession. After the game, he maintained his play was not affected, but from that point on he scored just seven points and never grabbed another rebound.

Jones, meanwhile, had been shut down by the Hoyas for much of the first half. But the Big East’s leading scorer in conference play could not be contained.

“I’m pulling out my hair—the hair I have—and saying what play can we run, what can we do to get this guy, because if we don’t get him involved, we’re done, we’re toast,” USF head coach Stan Heath said. “Once he got going, boy he was really hard to stop.”

Jones could not be stopped in the second half, scoring 22 of his game-high 29 points after the break.

An ecstatic Heath heaped praise upon Jones in the postgame press conference, offering a stark contrast to the sullen and reticent Thompson.

“I’m really amazed at our team.

This was the best win in our school history,” Heath said. “We’ve never beaten anybody of this magnitude on the road.”

This was the kind of game USF never wins, and the defeated, clearly disappointed Hoyas knew it.

Georgetown looks to rebound at home this Saturday against Vilanova at 12 p.m. setts). When he was younger, Kennedy struggled with teasing about his weight from his svelte older brothers. Could the same sort of relationship have existed between a sophomore Freeman and his older teammates? In the Senate, Teddy took a few years before he hit his stride and became known

Backdoor Cuts

by Jeff Bakkensen

a rotating column on sports for such gut-busting bills as the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993 and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.

Sound anything like Freeman’s 28 second-half points against UConn? I rest my case.

Now things get confusing, because the next three Hoyas come from the other party. For

the georgetown voice 7

Women down St. John’s

by Nick Berti When getting knocked down, good teams seem to always find a way to get back up.

Chumbawumba’s mantra was appropriate for the women’s basketball team facing St. John’s on Tuesday night—less than a week after the Hoyas squanderd their 16-game winning streak with an away loss to Marquette.

While an evening snowstorm blanketed the Hilltop, the team took care of the Red Storm as the No. 18 Hoyas (19-3, 8-1 Big East) defeated No. 25 St. John’s (18-4, 6-3 Big East) 67-57. It was the first time that two top-25 teams faced each other inside McDonough in nearly three decades. The last time such a meeting occurred, the No. 13 men’s team defeated No. 4 Missouri en route to a Final Four appearance.

The Hoyas got out to a hot start as freshman guard Sugar Rodgers knocked down three consecutive three-pointers and the Georgetown defense stifled St. John’s, keeping them off the board until the 15:50 mark. Georgetown rode sharp shooting and pressure defense to a comfortable 37-21 lead at halftime. The team shot 54.5 percent while forcing St. John’s into 12 turnovers. This defensive dominance isn’t anything new for Georgetown. The team is currently second in the nation in steals, averaging 14.3 per game.

When the second half started, though, the Red Storm flipped the script on the Hoyas.

St. John’s began the half on a 15-4

starters, Jason Clark is a defensive mastermind in the mold of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky). Like Clark, McConnell is among the best at stymieing the opposition.

Whether intercepting a pass or picking off pork-barrel spending, both play great defense.

Julian Vaughn came out of nowhere this year to become a valuable supporting player with good numbers in rebounds and blocks, as did political unknown (and former nude model) Scott Brown. Brown’s performance in the Massachusetts special election on Jan. 19 broke the Democrats’ filibuster-proof super-majority, just one day before Vaughn dropped 11 points to end Pitt’s 31-game at-home winning streak. No word yet on how JuJu’s nascent modeling career will shape up.

Rounding out the Hoya’s Senate cast, Hollis Thompson is Louisiana wunderkind-turned

run by shooting 63.6 percent in the first nine minutes while furiously trapping Georgetown’s offense, causing the Hoyas to shoot just 25 percent from the field. It looked like a typical second half for the Hoyas, who have consistently let opponents back into games.

After St. John’s cut the lead to three, Coach Terri WilliamsFlournoy called a timeout to relax her team.

“In the huddle I just told them not to panic,” Coach Williams-Flournoy said. “Unfortunately we’ve been in this situation before and I know if they see me panicked, then they’ll panic. I just told them to calm down and play our game.”

Williams-Flournoy’s calming influence was the perfect remedy for the struggling Hoyas. Coming out of the timeout, they went on a quick 10-0 run to regain a large lead, which they held on to through the end of the game. No Hoya had a more complete game then sophomore forward Latia Magee. Magee had seven rebounds, five assists, and twelve points, all well above her season averages. WilliamsFlournoy was proud of Magee for her performance, especially considering she is undersized and playing out of position.

“I think more impressive than anything else was the seven rebounds, it’s tough for her playing that position at her size,” Williams-Flournoy said.

Georgetown will have some much-needed rest before their Wednesday game at Pittsburg at 7 p.m.

political pariah Bobby Jindal.

Thompson came to the Hoyas as one of the top-ranked forwards in the country, much the way Jindal came to national prominence for his handling of Hurricane Gustav. However, both floundered on the big stage, Thompson with performances like his 0-7 effort in Georgetown’s January 17 loss at Villanova, Jindal with his response to Obama’s first State of the Union.

We can only hope that Thompson masters the jump shot before Jindal learns to speak like a normal person.

Whomever the Georgetown basketball players bear resemblance to, lets just hope this years crop of Hoyas can avoid any serious gaffes, reach across the aisle, and execute a successful campaign deep into the NCAA Tournament.

Tell Jeff who he resembles at jbakkensen@georgetownvoice.com

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8 the georgetown voice

february 4, 2010

Pride and prejudice: LGBTQ AT GEORGETOWN by chris heller “I came out the day after the election—November 5, 2008.”

After spending eleven months working for John McCain’s presidential campaign, Carlos Hernandez (SFS ’11) was exhausted.

“I was dealing with politicians and people who worked for the campaign that were fake, and I realized I couldn’t do that,” Hernandez said. “I felt fake.”

In a striped collared shirt, sweater vest, and Windsorknotted tie, he looks every bit the classic stereotype of a Georgetown preppie. Buttonedup. Intellectual. Politicallyminded. Except Carlos Hernandez happens to be gay.

Hernandez is one of many students who associate with the emerging Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning community at Georgetown. More students are out—meaning they are public about their sexual orientation—than ever before, according to Sivagami Subbaraman, director of Georgetown’s LGBTQ Resource Center.

“Before I came [in August

2008], there were maybe one or two people out as professional staff in residence halls,” Subbaraman said. “Now we have at least ten RAs who are out and are comfortable being out, and at least half a dozen full-time, professional staff who are out in residence halls.”

But with growth comes growing pains. As the LGBTQ community has become more visible on campus, internal and external tensions have bubbled to the surface. Controversy about sexually explicit advertisements and discussion panels plagued last year ’s inaugural “Sex Positive Week.” A number of leaders of GU Pride, a student-run organization devoted to LGBTQ issues, stepped down during an organizational shake-up in the first weeks of the fall 2009 semester. Multiple “bias-related incidents”—violent crimes directed towards students assumed to be LGBTQ—were committed on and around Georgetown’s campus in recent years.

One question lingers for LGBTQ students on-campus.

What does it mean to be queer

LEXIE HERMAN

Coming out for Shruti Dusaj means different things in different spheres of her life.

at Georgetown?

Shruti Dusaj (SFS ‘11), former co-President of GU Pride, has been trying to answer that question since she arrived at Georgetown in 2007.

“When I came to this school, I was expecting a liberal bastion, despite the Catholic identity,” Dusaj said.

Dusaj arrived to George-

“

Dusaj was familiar with homophobia, but not violence toward homosexuals.

“I had never heard of actual violence, even though I’m from India and homosexuality is still illegal in most of the country,” Dusaj said. “When the hate crimes happened, it was really unsettling.”

The LGBTQ community re-

You’re only fragmenting the community if you assume that we have to be one in order to be healthy.

town amidst a series of violent acts aimed at LGBTQ students, the most notable occurring on September 9, 2007. According to the police report filed after the incident, a male student walking along O Street was harassed by shouts of “Where are you going, faggot?” The victim was followed to 36th Street, where he was tackled and punched in the head and face.

As a native of New Delhi,

”

sponded to the violence with the Out for Change campaign, a student initiative that demanded administrative support for LGBTQ students at Georgetown. Students wore “I am” tshirts to publicly support the LGBTQ community. A petition circulated around campus gathered over 1,600 signatures— more than a third of the undergraduate population. While Out for Change ultimately led

Carlos Hernandez came out after campaigning for John McCain.

CHRIS HELLER

to the creation of the first LGBTQ Center at a Catholic college, the campaign and its aftermath caused divisions within the LGBTQ community.

“I didn’t want to come out freshman year because that fall was the big Out for Change campaign,” Hernandez said.

“I didn’t think it was the appropriate atmosphere for me to come out because I thought that people would think, ‘Oh, he’s just being reactive to all of this.’ I wanted it to be a bit more authentic.”

Others, like Antwaun Sargent (SFS ‘10), were not satisfied with the gains Out for Change earned for LGBTQ students.

“I think people expected something different from Out for Change,” Sargent said. “We didn’t want to stop where we did. We wanted to change the climate and culture. You don’t change an institution by getting an office on the third floor of Leavey.”

The LGBTQ Resource Center, which opened in the Leavey Center in August 2008, was Out for Change’s biggest accomplishment. Later, the University would offer support to LGBTQ students through prayer groups organized by Campus Ministry and LGBTQ-specific counseling at Counseling and Psychiatric Services. But the Center was, and still is, the most visible administrative support for LGBTQ students at Georgetown.

With the establishment of the LGBTQ center, GU Pride faced an identity crisis. No longer the most prominent representation of LGBTQ students at Georgetown, GU Pride had to redefine itself and re-evaluate its role on campus.

“We no longer have to serve the mission of being the only outlet for aiding the coming out process,” Robert Byrne (COL ’11), co-Programming Chair of GU Pride, said. “We no longer

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georgetownvoice.com have to be the only place that’s visible on campus. [There are] lots of different outlets now.”

By most accounts, GU Pride is still seen as the de facto leadership within the LGBTQ community, despite the fact that many LGBTQ students avoid involvement with the club.

“The general Georgetown community sees the heads of the LGBTQ community as Shiva [Subbaraman] and the two head Pride people [Byrne and Rehana Mohammed (SFS ’12)],” Sargent said. “But, most of the LGBTQ students here are not involved with Pride.”

Sargent, who contributes to the Voice’s blog, Vox Populi, was once deeply involved with GU Pride, but he does not associate with the club today.

“It’s a gay, white male-centered movement,” he said. “If you fit into that paradigm, you benefit. And if you don’t, you don’t.”

Last semester, in an attempt to address concerns about the group, GU Pride opened organizational meetings to all members and reduced the size of its leadership board from eleven positions to five.

“It can be problematic when a handful of people are seen as the faces of an entire identity group,” Dusaj wrote in an e-mail.

The changes have attracted students like Alex Buckley (COL ‘10), who were once wary

the georgetown voice 9

CHRIS HELLER

Newfound Pride: Alex Buckley was wary, but has grown to embrace GU Pride.

provide services that the Center or CAPS can’t because they’re grown-up professionals.”

The results of these services have been mixed. At least a dozen students regularly attend Outspoken, a confidential, peer-led discussion group that explores the LGBTQ community and sexual identity, according to Rehana Mohammed, Co-Programming Chair of GU Pride. Mohammed, along with Byrne, leads and facilitates Outspoken meetings.

A varied mix of LGBTQ students attend Outspoken meetings. Some are closeted or attempting to come out, while

culine, you will absolutely get called out on it,” Byrne said. “People will dance up on you if you’re dancing with someone of the same sex. On Thursday nights, we don’t go to Thirds. People go to Apex.

[The Georgetown scene] isn’t our climate.”

Apex, a gay nightclub in Dupont Circle, is popular among many gay men at Georgetown.

Every Thursday, Apex offers free admission to college students aged eighteen and older.

On Thursdays, the last Georgetown shuttle bus to Dupont Circle at 11:45 p.m. barely has enough room to stand, let alone sit comfortably.

“On the GUTS bus, people are usually falling all over each other because they’re kind of sloshed,” Byrne said. “People make a lot of jokes and eye each other. It’s part of the process of figuring out who you want to dance with or flirt with. Are you going to hang out with friends or are you going to meet new people that night?”

Despite the discomfort LGBTQ students face around campus, the LGBTQ community

“

that if a guy goes to a gay club on a Thursday or Friday night, and going and hooking up with boys, they’re out,” Dusaj said.

“That’s not necessarily true.

People move through different spheres, even on campus.”

As an Indian lesbian, Dusaj faces her own difficulties. She says that her friends at Georgetown don’t understand how she can be out at Georgetown, while not telling her family about her sexual orientation.

She believes that Indian culture and the prevalent opinions about homosexuality in India require a different approach to coming out.

The general Georgetown community sees the heads of the LGBTQ community as Shiva and the two head Pride people ... But, most of the LGBTQ students here are not involved with Pride.

of GU Pride. Buckley attributes his participation to his growing comfort with his sexual identity as a gay man.

“I was reluctant to go to any meetings for a long time ... people who seemed straighter—less flamboyant, more restrained—seemed not to be entirely welcome,” Buckley said.

“I didn’t see anybody in there that came from where I came from. But I feel much better about the club now because of the changes.”

Since the LGBTQ Resource Center has opened, GU Pride has searched for a new niche, largely through peer outreach. “[GU] Pride should at least try to reach out—not to pry people out of the closets, but if someone is coming out and wants a place to test their sexuality and identity,” Dusaj said.

“I think Pride has a responsibility to students. Pride should

SHIRA SAPERSTEIN

Proud without Pride: Antwaun Sargent is out, but doesn’t identify with GU Pride.

others have been out for years.

Mohammed claims the balance allows students to help one another and draw from one another ’s experiences.

While Outspoken is open to all—or perhaps because it is open to all—some LGBTQ students choose to avoid the group for privacy reasons.

“I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with going to Outspoken … It just seems like there are a lot of issues with confidentiality in that group,” Hernandez said. “There’s only so much that a student-led group can keep in confidence. Things get out. It’s a fairly small community.”

A fear of being involuntarily outed publicly is almost universal in the LGBTQ community. But it’s a matter of degree—how far out must a LGBTQ student be? At all and in all contexts?

“There’s this assumption

”

“It’s a very American thing to go to your parents over Thanksgiving break and say, ‘Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you. I’m gay.’ In Indian families, communication just happens without words,” she said. “My mom is friends with me on Facebook—she can see I have ‘Interested in Women’ on there. They can see it, but it’s just not the same way as it is with American kids.”

Other students, such as Byrne, suffered because they were public about their sexual orientations. Byrne avoids the well-trafficked Georgetown bar scene, claiming the atmosphere makes him uncomfortable.

“I would never go to the Tombs, ever. Or any Georgetown bar, really. I don’t think many queer students go to Georgetown bars because if there’s any sort of gender expression that isn’t hyper mas-

has persevered. It is a unique community of one and many, a group of students and staff simultaneously drawn together and pulled apart by their sexual identities. As the LGBTQ community continues to grow, students must confront the seemingly paradoxical nature of queer culture on campus—progression by division.

“You’re only fragmenting the community if you assume that we have to be one in order to be healthy,” Subbaraman said. “We want choice in toothpaste and milk, but we don’t like plural when it comes to ourselves. That bothers me.”

Can an LGBTQ community thrive at Georgetown? Hernandez paused, leaned back, and placed his forefinger against his temple while he pondered the question.

“It will never be a homogeneous community. Lesbian issues, gay issues, transgender, transsexual, bisexual issues are all very different and you can’t really lump them together,” Hernandez said. “I think most people are starting to accept that fact.”

JUE CHEN

Who’s at Third’s? Robert Byrne said Georgetown bars are not LGBTQ-friendly.

leisure

10 the georgetown voice

february 4, 2010

O’Keeffe blooms at the Phillips

by Sara Carothers The Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction exhibition opening this week at the Phillips Collection will radically redefine the way people view the iconic artist. O’Keeffe becomes youthful, revolutionary, and full of contradictions. Nowhere in the collection will you find cattle bones in the hot New Mexico sun, or coffee table bookreads calla lilies. The curators of the exhibit––from the Phillips, the Whitney Museum in New York and the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe––make a strong claim that O’Keeffe is the unrecognized pioneer of abstract art.

Abstraction seemed to be the truest way O’Keeffe could express herself, but early interpretations of her paintings as overly-sexualized images prodded her to steer towards more recognizable forms. O’Keeffe’s first publicly shown works, a series of abstract monotone watercolors circa 1915, are gathered together in the first gallery to give a sense of the play between curved figures and straight lines to which she would return for later paintings. Her first major retrospective in 1921, which showcased colorful evolutions of the early watercolors, revealed “the problem of a woman expressing herself abstractly in the early 1900s,”

Barbara Lynes, curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe museum, said at a press screening of the exhibit last Tuesday.

Critics at the time called her sexually repressed, due to the vaginas and other female parts found in the creases and shadows of her work. Rarely-seen letters included in the exhibit reveal that O’Keeffe abhorred the interpretation of her work as fixated on sex, and so began to search for other realistic ways to express herself––hence the animal bones and petunias.

Ironically, O’Keeffe herself seemed remarkably in touch with her sexuality for a woman of the 1920s. She insisted that nude photographs taken by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, be shown alongside her works. Included in Abstraction, these photographs reveal O’Keeffe’s playful, experimental side.

Breaking O’Keeffe free from the two prevailing interpretations of her work––fixated on female anatomy or romanticizing dusty skeletons––seems challenging, but Abstraction manages it well. The galleries filled with abstract paintings of jarring depth seem to be from a different artist altogether. “Music, Pink & Blue #2,” one of iconic paintings in the exhibit, loses its limited gynelogical interpretation in the

company of so many other abstract forms.

Barbara Haskell, curator of the Whitney, said music was the perfect form of expression for O’Keeffe and her contemporaries because painters rely on abstract thoughts rather than concrete form. Throughout the works collected in the exhibition, it’s clear that O’Keeffe sought to express intangible feelings through her painting—restricting them to any one interpretation makes them one-dimensional.

“Jack-in-the-Pulpit,” a series of six large oil paintings, contains one of the only realist images in the series, a close-up of cabbagelike leaves surrounding a flower. In the subsequent paintings, O’Keeffe distills the subject into a unique abstraction. But seeing the same flower––an androgynous object––in alternatively phallic and feminine stylizations pokes fun at the critics who saw the sexual in everything she touched.

The “Jack-in-the-Pulpit” series, aside from revealing O’Keeffe’s sense of humor, also gives unmistakable insight into her process of creating artistic imagery. By bringing together major works like these, Abstraction begins to free O’Keeffe from the reductive criticisms of the past and solidify her place as a revolutionary American artist.

only about eight of those pages mention the topic directly. Rather, the focus is on war architect and 73-year-old reclusive intellectual, Richard Elster, and his interactions with the narrator, filmmaker Jim Finley.

Thirty-something and lacking any real accomplishments, Jim sets out for the desert to track down Elster in the hopes of filming a continuous one-shot documentary of “Just a man and a wall.” Although he never succeeds in filming the documentary, Jim’s intentions are accomplished in the text itself as DeLillo presents an unflinching view of his characters—just two men against the wall of Elster’s desert home.

The bare setting’s empty scenery reflects the mental psyche of the character that lives within. The novella is laced with conversations that focus on the

depth of knowledge and it’s relation to time. Every other page has the chance for dialogue that incites the mix of simultaneous bewilderment and complex enlightenment that only DeLillo knows how to provoke so well.

Enter Jessie, Elster’s daughter and the only source of plot activity in the novel. Without her entrance, the text exists as two men, a bottle of whiskey, and good conversation. Her lack of depth as a character betrays DeLillo’s intentions behind her creation, merely to force a change of pace.

Point Omega is best summarized as a discussion of intellect between a man that possesses it and a man who wishes to capture it. DeLillo creates a scenario where time slows and becomes unimportant and from that setting of timelessness emerges a text that is indulgent and challenging, spare and eloquent.

DeLillo gets to the Point

by James McGrory If you read reviews of any of Don DeLillo’s last four novels, you are certain to find the critical buzzword “post-Underworld.”

After the 1997 epic, which spoke at (great) length about the effects of nuclear proliferation and baseball, readers were given a handful of more abstract and conceptual works—The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, and Falling Man. These three texts show DeLillo taking time to inspect everything a little more closely, a tendency that has culminated with the slow roll of his latest novel, Point Omega. Despite the absence of any form of conventional plot progression, the 117 page novella showcases DeLillo’s well-honed ability to work freely within space and time.

This hardcover may be packaged as an Iraq War story, but in a text barely over 100 pages,

oceansbridge.com

Georgia O’Keeffe harmed no deer in the making of this painting.

Q&A: Demetri Martin Comedian Demetri Martin spoke to the Voice earlier this week about his joke-creation process, comedy, and the upcoming second season of his Comedy Central show, Important Things with Demetri Martin.

How is Important Things different than your other work, such as Taking Woodstock?

[Taking Woodstock] was really challenging because … that was the first time that I had to interpret someone else’s work … [With] television I have a little more control, so I like that part of TV more. But the part I like about film more is that it moves at a different pace, and in that pace it seems that you have a little bit more time to figure out what you’re doing.

were telling a story and I wanted it to have a little bit more of a sadder tone, I thought maybe if I put a certain type of music under it, it would give an emotional context to the story.

Do you write your jokes with a specific audience in mind?

When I think of a joke, … it’s just a question of, would anybody else find funny an idea that I find funny? But audience-wise it’s hard to get a handle on who your audience even is. When I tour I try to meet people after shows … so I can get a sense of who’s coming out, but in the end I don’t think I can do anything beyond what I find is funny.

Do you think there’s a certain direction that comedy is going in, because Comedy Central has so many different types of comedy?

I think I spend so much time doing comedy that I kind of check out of it and I don’t watch that much … I try not to watch TV, and even on the internet I try to avoid comedy stuff, so ironically maybe I don’t know that much about what direction stuff’s going in.

How do jokes about small, everyday things come to you?

Usually it’s something that’s frustrating me or like, interrupting my daily pattern.

There’s probably a joke in it, and I don’t see it as a joke, I just see it as an annoyance … So if I kind of switch my perspective, I can look at it as an opportunity … Sometimes I make believe that, like if you were from another planet and you just didn’t know anything that’s going on here, what would you conclude?

What kind of influence do you feel that music has on a set of jokes?

You know, the first time I thought of putting music in with comedy … [it was to] punctuate the different things … so that if I

Do you have any new palindromes for this season?

I’m not putting that many on the show, but … one of the ones that I like that I came up with a while ago was “snub no man, nice cinnamon buns.”

georgetownvoice.com

the georgetown voice 11

“If he dies, he dies.”—Rocky IV

Mel versus mobsters D.C. band bangs out beats

by Brendan Baumgardner

A disclaimer: Edge of Darkness is not a rock opera based around Bruce Springsteen’s fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town. It’s a shame, because that would have been epic. Instead, Edge of Darkness is a revenge drama based on a 1985 BBC series, but ultimately feels like a watered-down version of Taken.

Edge of Darkness stars Mel Gibson as Thomas Craven, a Boston cop who plays by his own rules.

He has nothing to lose and is on a crusade to avenge his daughter’s murder, system be damned. Edge of Darkness sounds like a mash up of Lethal Weapon and Mad Max, but it lacks the punch that made those Gibson movies classics.

The film opens with Craven picking up his daughter at the train station. She’s a pretty young woman and clearly the most important thing in his life. Of course, she gets blown away in the first ten minutes. Of course, Craven explores her murder. Of course, she was entangled with left wing activists, weapons manufacturers, and corrupt government officials.

Yet, none of these elements are adequately developed. Edge of Darkness

wallows in complexities and feigns political acuity, but ultimately they just eat up time between beatings.

It’s a shame that the plot is so uninspired, because Mel still has what it takes to carry a good action flick. He is as intense and dominating as ever and—provided you can look past the poor Boston accent— even provides some solid emotional scenes. He’s joined by the phenomenal Ray Winstone, playing a shady “security consultant” hired by a government official to stop Craven from uncovering the truth about his daughter. Winstone steals scenes with a quiet confidence that adds to his character’s mystery. Unfortunately, as with most elements of the film, these moments of greatness are never followed through to a satisfactory end.

Edge of Darkness is a sloppy neonoir revenge flick with a floundering second act. The performances are solid, but aren’t enough to carry the film. But, it is nice to see Gibson kicking some ass again. Hopefully this is the beginning of the healing process, where we forget about Mel’s transgressions (bigotry, religious fanaticism, What Women Want), and welcome back our old friend Mad Max.

“Don’t move! This gun kills you with lame dialogue. And bullets.”

It’s dark at the Rock and Roll Hotel—a grungy H St. club in the heart of the Atlas District—and Rob Pierangeli, the front man of Casper Bangs, is urging the crowd to come closer to the stage.

He darts out into the gallery, beckoning the audience forwards with his hands. This will be a lot more fun without five feet of space in front of the stage, he seems to be saying It’s this exuberance and seeming desire for closeness to the crowd that has helped Casper Bands rise to the upper echelons of the D.C. music scene.

It didn’t take long for the crowd’s initial reluctance to evaporate. Towards the front, everyone danced to “Always On,” an upbeat tune based around staccato keyboards and drummer Dennis Manuel’s sharp rhythm.

Pierangeli is no stranger to the local scene. The Hard Tomorrows, his earlier, grittier project, generated praise from local media like DCist and Washington City Paper. At the end of a two-year hiatus from live music, he began recording again in his free time last May. This process spawned the songs that would become Casper Bangs’s catalog.

Though not yet signed to a label, Casper Bangs recently released a self-titled, free

five-song EP for download.

Pierangeli is the driving force on the album, playing every instrument on the recording except for the drums.

Pierangeli’s diverse musical influences can be heard in the loud and distorted yet carefully controlled interludes that factor prominently into his stage show.

COURTESY casperbangs.com

Ladykillers wear pleated pants.

“I come from a pop background but I also like noise pop, with things like Jesus and Mary Chain, and My Bloody Valentine,” Pierangeli said.

He also finds inspiration in his turbulent personal life.

A former girlfriend, Katherine Bangs, lends her moniker to the last half of the band’s name. When the relationship went sour, he decided to keep the name and draw on the experience for songs about love— the joys when it’s good and the

pain when it falls apart.

Pierangeli laughed when asked how that was working out.

“It’s definitely a bit unusual,” he said. “The songs were written at a very pleasant time in my life and it’s been really fun to have this all come together.”

His romantic endeavors contribute to more than just the brand’s name. In “Katherine,” another ode to his former flame, Pierangeli laments, “Don’t you go away… I need you to always stay right by me.” Later in the set, during “The Other Half,” he sings, “I lost/she was my better half/I lost you.”

With a dwindling D.C. music scene offering little support to up-and-comers, it’s hard for local bands to really gain momentum. But thanks to a string of successful shows in both D.C. and New York, Casper Bangs has built a strong reputation extending beyond the District.

The band will be traveling to Austin in March for South by Southwest, affording them the opportunity to extend their fan base nationwide. See them now at local clubs like the Black Cat, DC9, and Arlington’s IOTA, because the days of Pierangeli needing to pull the crowd forward are dwindling—pretty soon you’ll be fighting your way to the front.

IMDB

Studying, one nap at a time For most college students, sleep looks like a poor substitute compared to caffeine. Sleeping wastes precious time, and unlike sipping from a coffee cup, sleeping isn’t an acceptable option in class, even in those huge lectures.

It often seems lavish and lazy to spend hours asleep, when you could be getting that paper assignment out of the way, or making extra time later in the week to hang out with friends. All those hours of doing nothing can be difficult to justify.

And yet, those seemingly empty hours may just be the most

by Eric Pilch

active hours of your day. You may be under the impression that most of the learning you do takes place in the classroom, in that little cubicle in Lau, and during those long hours of staring blankly at your computer screen or at the ten pound textbook splayed across your lap. But, in fact, a lot of your learning takes place while you’re fast asleep. Ever wonder why babies spend so much of their day slumbering, or why kindergarten kids get nap time and you don’t?

It is partly because they are acquiring, processing, and consolidating new information and knowledge

at a much faster rate than you are, and all that sleep is helping them to do it.

That’s right—sleep is hard work too, even if it doesn’t feel like it. The type of memory that you tackle in your sleep is aptly

Rub Some Dirt on It

by Sadaf Qureshi

a bi-weekly column about health termed consolidation memory.

Consolidation is the process by which all of the knowledge you acquired during the day becomes stable and sticks. It gets cemented and solidified, so hopefully it will stay some-

where in there for the next time you need to pull it back out.

While you’re asleep, devoid of all thoughts and worries, your neurons are free to get to work.

They work to strengthen the neural connections that help form and solidify our memories. They set up a network of links and cross wiring between each other. The flow of traffic between related neurons is what allows us to recall information we acquire in the recent past.

So while you may remember when the Crimean War began a few hours after an all-nighter studying for a history exam, by the next evening, you will likely have to start over again to refresh your memory.

It simply isn’t efficient, and you’ll

be too tired to concentrate on the exam once it rolls around.

So how much sleep do you really need anyway? How long does it take your brain to consolidate? This is one of those instances in which quality is more important than quantity, so it varies depending on who you are, and how good of a sleeper you are. For the average person, eight hours is recommended. So put your notes away, shut down your computer, turn off the lights, and give your body a break while you put your mind to work.

Feeling brain-drained? Curl up in bed next to Sadaf at squreshi@ georgetownvoice.com

leisure

12 the georgetown voice

february 4, 2010

Critical Voices track. But here, rather than allowing the song to waltz along at a snail’s pace, the tempo picks up and the band adds a hi-fi snare drum and crashing cymbals. These rhythmic additions propel the track forward and complement the crappy drum machines that have come to characterize their sound.

When the magnificent chorus hits, achieving a regal beauty unlike anything in their back catalogue, it’s clear this is a different Beach House.

The album’s first single, “Norway,” is similarly anthemic, with Legrand’s breathy backing vocals and Alex Scally’s jangly guitar giving way to a woozy organ line and one of the album’s most arresting vocal performances. “Walk in the Park,” which follows, is a lyrical highlight for the band. “In a matter of time/it would slip from my mind/In and out of my life/you would slip from my mind,” Legrand eulogizes. But as the song fades out over a beautiful organ melody, she grows more defiant.

“More, you want more, you tell me/More, you want more, only time can run me.”

Undeniably, time has changed Beach House, and nowhere is this clearer than in the album’s poppy

midsection. Its best track, “Lover of Mine,” an unusually angular and danceable take on their typical dream-pop, exemplifies Teen Dream’s palatable sense of wideeyed wonder. When Legrand sings, “In a wide-open field we know we can feel/Awake and unreal, off to nowhere,” you might even feel like you’re coming of age again.

Keeping the surprises coming, “10 Mile Stereo” sounds straight from the future, with monstrous, echoing synths and a post-apocalyptic sense of empty space. It’s dynamic and exciting, a surprising relief between the subpar “Better Times” and “Real Love.”

With Teen Dream, Beach House has made its best album, one that showcases the band’s substantial growth in songwriting. They have incorporated a popular indie sound while staying true to their hypnotic roots, crafting an album that should please both their diehard fans and anyone looking for something a little out of the ordinary on the indie-pop landscape.

Take one down, pass it around

of great craft beer to everybody, not just people in the know,” ChurchKey beer director Greg Engert said.

To that end, Engert provided me with a beer itinerary meant to help college students navigate ChurchKey’s repertoire, starting with unassuming, yet flavorful relatives of light beer and concluding in a foreign landscape of

Beach House, Teen Dreams, Sub Pop Records Following the release of Beach House’s second album, Devotion, in 2006, lead singer Victoria Legrand retreated from her front woman spotlight. After singing backup and collaborating with Grizzly Bear, she’s back with a vengeance on Teen Dream, Beach House’s latest LP. Her stunning, deeply evocative voice has been revamped with a new hint of hickory, like she’s been smoking a pack a day in the Adirondacks since 2006’s Devotion. However she did it, she’s certainly a more confident vocalist now, and Teen Dream, as an album, reflects it.

The rolling, elegant guitar line that kicks off album opener “Zebra” evokes memories of “Gila,” Devotion’s strongest

In 1980, sixteen men were pulled from the North Sea an hour and a half after their fishing vessel had sunk. The frozen fishermen headed below deck to warm up with a drink. Sixteen steaming beverages later, according to an account of the incident in Outside magazine, each one promptly dropped dead—due to “rewarming shock,” when hypothermia victims are warmed too quickly, their blood pressure drops, and their hearts stop.

Such is the plight of the beer drinking college student.

Freshman through junior years are spent floating in a sea of Natty Light and metallic Keystone. Then adulthood beckons, along with its requisite nutty lagers and rich India Pale Ales.

College students can be in for a jolt when emerging from that

collegiate ocean of sudsy urine— admittedly not a fatal jolt, like our poor fishermen, but vividly unpleasant with a bitter aftertaste.

The answer, of course, is to warm up slowly to the vast world of beer that lies beyond the front gates. And in D.C., there’s no better place to do that than ChurchKey over on 14th and P St., the District’s hottest new beer joint.

ChurchKey offers the bounties of the microbrew beer world—it boasts 50 beers on tap, 5 casks, and hundreds of bottles—without the typical beer-snob pretension. Instead of being categorized by style, beers are grouped on the menu in seven flavor categories, making the menu accessible even to beer newbies.

“I’m trying to spread the word

Voice’s Choices: “Walk in the Park,” “Lover of Mine,” —Justin Hunter Scott

bottoms Up

by Sam Sweeney

a bi-weekly column about drinking meaty and sour brews.

So earlier this week, Will Sommer, the Voice’s Editor-at-Large, and I headed over to ChurchKey, a short ride away on the G2, to test out Engert’s recommendations.

Our journey began in the “Crisp” section of the menu, which Engert assured me wouldn’t be too big of a leap from light beers.

“Tasty without being over-

Lil Wayne, Rebirth, Money Records

Young

Pushed back 10 months from its original April 7 release, Lil Wayne’s Rebirth is finally here.

We waited for it, knowing pretty well what was coming our way. After hearing the horrors of “Prom Queen” and “Hot Revolver,” dark omens of what was to come. So, should the fact that Rebirth is terrible surprise anyone?

Slogging through the whole album is quite a chore. Wayne’s vocals are Auto-Tuned and accompanied by a heavy echo, becoming more garbled and tiresome as the album progresses.

All the instruments on the album sound like they were taken from an Offspring, Korn, or Blink-182 track (Travis Barker

whelming,” he described the beers. “Just a touch more body and true flavor, great malty, bready flavors.”

This turned out to be an apt description for our Brooklyn Lager. If I were in the annoying habit of personifying beers—and I am—I would describe the Brooklyn Lager as a friendly but timid beer.

Emboldened, we turned to Engert’s next recommendation: fruit and spice beers. For this, we chose Aventinus, a dark-ruby Bavarian beer that brought to mind the exotic spice bazaars of, well, Bavaria, I suppose.

By the time our third selection, which hailed from the “Roast” section, touched my lips, Busch-fueled townhouse parties seemed a hazy world away. This Russian stout, aptly named The Czar, had a chocolately, coffee flavor that masked its 11 percent alcohol content.

drums on the album). Riffs and chord progressions are repetitive and labored, and many of the solos are in Wayne’s signature aimless style. The tracks fail to differentiate themselves from each other, each one boasting even more boring and forgettable lyrics.

The only track that stands out is “Drop The World,” in which Wayne turns off the Auto-Tune and echo and returns to rap. Eminem, the only featured rapper on Rebirth, shines here, providing some of the best verses on the whole album.

Rebirth is a failure on the same level as 2008’s Dedication 3, a mixtape widely considered Lil Wayne’s worst unofficial compilation. Rebirth does not mean Wayne has crested; it will only create more anticipation for a return-to-form rap album as explosive as Tha Carter III. Wayne had his time to experiment as an “artist,” but now it’s time for Wayne to go back to doing what he does best. At least, let’s hope so.

Voice’s Choice: “Drop the World” —Nico Dodd

Our second-to-last stop was also my favorite: the “Hop” beers. Hop was what we got too, in a strapping India Pale Ale called Double Trouble that smacks you across the face with its hoppiness—an incredible sensation. If you’re into that kind of thing, anyways.

From here, Engert offered two possible end-points: “Smokey” beers—“peat smoke or sausagey, spicey, bacony” flavors—or “Tart and Funky,” marked by an “earthy funkiness.”

We choose “Smokey” and as soon as I tasted it, I knew we had gone a bit too far. It was smokey, indeed, and rich, like a slab of cured bacon. No matter, though.

Next time I hit up ChurchKey, my palette will be rested and ready.

All in due time.

Relax and knock back a case of cold ones with Sam at ssweeney@ georgetownvoice.com

fiction

georgetownvoice.com

The Capital of Sadness

The sound of his roommate’s alarm stirred Cameron from sleep.

He brought simple facts to mind, to see how they looked in this odd half light of consciousness: Something very sad had happened which he wanted very much to forget. He was seventeen years old and attended the Hill Top Academy in Cranberry Farms, Connecticut. The Greeks defeated the Persians at Marathon in 479 BC. There were 67 days until spring vacation and his roommate was a dick. He waited but the alarm pulsed on and he heard nothing stir on the bunk beneath him. He threw himself off the top bed and landed so flatly on the hard ground that the arches of his feet hurt. He waited a bit but the alarm pulsed on like an upended remote-control car spinning its wheels in the air. Fumbling with the vast array of buttons and switches on top of the clock, he gave up and yanked the cord from the wall. His roommate slept on.

At 5 a.m. the dorm room looked much as it did at 2 a.m. Two desks.

Two chairs. Two dressers. His roommate’s huge lacrosse banner spanning the expanse of the one available wall. He had told Cameron repeatedly that he was waking up early to study and went to bed when the prefects came around at 11 convinced of this fact. Greek declensions, the fruits of his lucubrations, lay quietly in Cameron’s mind, ready to be summoned to careful order, as he let their formless alien sound slide across his lips. His mother’s letter filled with news about going back to work lay lifelessly on the top corner of his desk and the blank sheet on which he had tried to write his reply rested next to it. Maybe Greek had the words to say that he wanted to say, he thought.

The last night came back to him as small as the circle of light his desk lamp emitted and reeking of the antiseptic chemical-mint stench of the dip-spit with which he had filled an entire one liter soda bottle.

It was a solid three hours until class

By Emma Forster

and sleep was already irretrievable.

He went over to the room’s lone window and gazed down onto the town which mobbed up against the stone ramparts of the Hill Top Academy’s citadel. The school would be ready when the army of philistines attacked, defending the high ground and rolling down the dollies from the library circulation desk to thwart their attack. The widower of a one night stand with the fickle mistress of industry, the town was comprised of derelict steel foundries and businesses so specialized they had to be a front for something.

One Saturday he had walked out of the school’s walls and across the cemetery filled with headstones barely visible over the uncut grass to the deserted factory he had agreed to explore with Marie. They jumped the fence and tore the plywood off what used to be the factory’s window. On the wide expanse of the concrete floor a few pipes opened up their gaping mouths and a web of cords dangled down from the ceiling vaulted with huge steel beams nearly 50 feet above, recalling the blast furnaces they must have fueled, now connected to nothing.

He thought of all the time in which there had been no one there. Here it was. The unmarked time seemed to occupy the cathedral-like expanse of the factory.

Marie took off her coat, spreading it over the ground, and remarked that it reminded her of her attic or her garage. Cameron pivoted slowly in one place. Finally, he had reached it. Happily raising both hands out, palms turned up like a priest or a circus master, he announced matter of factly that this was, in fact, the Capital of Sadness.

He woke up with a start at the ten minute bell and threw on a blazer and tie he knew to match impeccably, opting against the time consuming option of a belt and socks. His roommate slept on. He walked through his hall full of the sounds of waking and coated with

the thick pallor of sleep. The scent of innumerable masculine hygiene products commingled into one overpowering musk wafting from the bathroom where the dull sound of falling shower-water skittered.

He walked out on the quad and the cold instantly enveloped him in a brittle chrysalis of sharp discomfort. He sneezed so hard his dry upper lip split like a fine paper cut. The campus was made up of structures of Gothic stone built out of sheer English envy, connected by paths of red brick flanked by bare trees. A thin film of solitude was thrown over the whole place, like the silence over the little lake at the edge of campus. He loved this place with a sweetness beyond words. The path he walked to class was girded by mountains of snow which the “physical plant” had pushed to the side with one of the omnipresent golf carts attached to a massive plow.

His first class was Advanced Humanities, or the Yale waiting room as the rest of the campus called it. The room, with its Ivy League woodwork, levitating candelabras, high backed red leather chairs and portraits of Thomas More, the heretic burner, and Thomas Jefferson, the slave holder, seemed to be a dungeon of knowledge. The teacher was out but left instructions that they edit each other’s papers in class. He was assigned Liz Smith. Liz was an Egyptian girl from New York who had been lobbying since freshman year, pressing hands on orientation day, to be the school’s first female Student Government President since it went co-ed, after boarding schools ceased to be fashionable and started needing tuition checks.

Liz had an indefinite number of protean voices that she plucked from her toolkit to fit the situation: a cloying voice of entreaty to address her constituents forcefully grouped in the Memorial Room to hear her speak (“Reflect if you will, upon the names carved upon the very panels

the georgetown voice 13 of this room, of the young people just like you who gave their lives for their country … ”), a soft probing tone to discuss literature (“From my perspective … ”) and a sharp hiss to execute the reverses of wit and irony upon which prep school repartee is based (“Or so he says … ”).

He read her paper. She always used adjectives in tautological pairs, gleaned cleanly from the useful and efficacious thesaurus she kept hidden in her desk. Every paper she wrote was a declaration of the absolute relativism of human life, followed by an imposition of herself onto the subject matter (she had turned Emily Dickinson into a diatribe against drinking), brought to a crescendo by an exhortation to the glorious and indefinite “man.”

Cameron wrote “go fuck yourself,” deliberately illegibly in the margin.

“I wouldn’t joke about it. Gilbert here says sand-in-the-clam is a very serious medical condition.”

Cameron, realizing Nick had floated out a joke in order to summon him to a battle of cool, wondered what it was that made people call each other by their last names. He felt the eyes of the twelve achievers around the oak table fix on him in expectation, but he kept his head in Liz’s paper and pretended to busily continue correcting split infinitives and consciously build up the effect he planned. Nick Eldridge was the only other varsity hockey player in Advanced Humanities so their assumed superiority over the other mere intellectuals tied them together. Nick, in sweatpants and a blazer, was currently fighting to flaunt the dress code. As the avatar of its spirit, the school always featured him in its promotional materials, which featured pictures of the campus even more picturesque than it actually was. One photo showed Nick halfdressed in his hockey locker, one skate untied and poring over Robert

Frost, intently running his free hand through the thick swath of his hockey flow. The hockey team’s captain and leading scorer, on the ice his insatiable furnace seemed to be fueled by hard carbon lumps of arrogance.

Nick was a joy to watch and, as the backup goalie, Cameron did a lot of watching.

When he first got to the school, Cameron had worked hard to become Nick’s friend and he even earned a long weekend at the Eldridge family house in Maine. Four days filled with silences and doors shut softly, looking onto gray fingers of rock reaching into the darker gray of the water. The family radiated an implacability that was wealth itself. He learned how to mimic it, but snapped pictures with his disposable camera when no one was looking. He answered the questions about school Nick’s father posed to his son so frequently that Cameron began to jokingly call himself “Nick’s Representative” in a desperate attempt to include everyone in a joke. It seemed that some mutual lie or truth had been assumed or revealed between them, and they didn’t talk much after that, except in the locker room where fraternity breathed the fetid stench of hockey equipment.

Nick had gotten no reaction from Cameron, so a few moments later, slouching in the right angle of his red leather chair, he launched into an extended narrative about getting caught dipping and having to drink his own spit to prove his innocence on the bus ride back from the hockey team’s game against Andover (Final Score: Nick Eldridge: 2, Andover: 1).

“Go fuck yourself Eldridge.”

Cameron, calmly lifting his countenance out of Liz’s paper, cut in a perfectly sarcastic pitch. Nick’s eyes lit up with the pride of fraternity. The rest of the day was full of dailiness.

JIN-AH YANG

voices

14 the georgetown voice

february 4, 2010

Islamic studies: The jihad against ignorance

by Brittany Schulman My hometown paper, The Intelligencer, is usually filled with rants from Bucks County, PA residents about neighbors who leave their Christmas lights up for too long or page-long lists of students who made the honor roll. But as I perused the January 7 issue while home over winter break, one article caught my attention. It was Cal Thomas’s column, “Administration reluctant to call a war a war” that caught my attention. The piece, notable for both its absurdity and a rather unflattering reference to Georgetown, demonstrates not just the ignorance of one smallminded small-town man, but a frighteningly widespread misunderstanding of Islam.

In his column, which is syndicated in over 500 newspapers across the country, Thomas argues that Muslims are the en-

emies of the United States, and that the Obama administration must recognize current cultural clashes for what they really are: a war. If the administration continues to regard these instances as isolated acts of terror, Thomas ominously warns, “our enemy” will win. The flaws and examples of blatant ignorance in this anti-Muslim screed are numerous, but I was particularly outraged by Thomas’ criticism of Islamic studies courses. These classes have become increasingly popular at American colleges and universities—even, he notes with dismay, at “Catholic ones like Georgetown”—leading Thomas to wonder what there is to study about a group that “[desires] our demise and will not be pacified or mollified.”

As a senior who has taken a number of the Islamic studies classes Thomas criticizes, I can assure him that there is plenty to study. My courses

have shown me that Islam—like all religions—has its merits and its flaws. From “History of the Islamic World,” to “Islamic Thought and Practice,” I have learned not just the facts and history of Islam, but also the skills necessary to appreciate and critically evaluate world cultures and religions. Maybe if Thomas took some of these classes he would understand that Islam itself is not a violent religion, but how certain radical minorities have manipulated it to benefit their political or ideological agendas. To dismiss them as purposeless because of their failure to end all acts of terrorism, as Cal Thomas does, is absurd.

In an attempt to bolster his baseless argument, Thomas points out that we never engaged in “Nazi studies” during World War II. Thomas wrongfully assumes that all Muslims are enemies of the U.S.—and

therefore somehow remotely equivalent to Nazis—betraying his fundamental misunderstanding of Islam and unjustifiable hostility towards Muslims. The truth is that the vast majority of Americans who are Muslims simply want to benefit from the values that make America great.

They want to practice their religion and live their lives free from hatred and oppression, as we all do.

It appalls me that ignorant attitudes likes these still exist, but I suppose that it does not surprise me. The idea that ignorance only breeds hatred may be cliché, but it is based in truth. I will not pretend to know all of the complex reasons why terrorism occurs, but I do know that attitudes such as these only contribute to a negative view of Americans.

My fellow students and I were not taught that Islam is above judgment. Instead, we

study this culture and religion from a critical distance, allowing us to form our own educated opinions, based on knowledge rather than ignorance.

I am proud that Georgetown offers such an extensive array of Islamic studies courses. As a secular Jew, I never expected to be interested in— or even moved by—other religious traditions, but my classes have forced me to critically evaluate my assumptions about Islam.

Ultimately, I want to thank Cal Thomas for reminding me to appreciate the Georgetown professors who have given me the tools necessary to recognize his dangerously ignorant opinions.

Brittany Schulman is a senior in the College. When studying Islamic culture, she recommends you start by watching Aladdin.

Protesters’ pro-life arguments prove ill-conceived

by Andrew Zipperer A quarter of a million activists descended on D.C. this past weekend to advocate for the sanctity of human life. As a liberal vegetarian seeking to understand the nuances of the pro-life argument, I ventured down to Constitution Avenue—notebook in hand—to question the marchers in the 37th annual March For Life.

With plenty of time and paper to use, I fell in step with the marchers. Their arguments appeared simple and straightforward. They claimed that there is a fundamental problem with disrespecting humans: life is sacred, and it should be protected. However, the apparent ideological consistency among the crowd disappeared after this point.

Upon further inquiry, life concerns fragmented around capital punishment and health care. Some of these pro-life marchers supported capital punishment. Where some felt that health and life were connected, others argued against any association. All agreed that governmental intrusion into medical care was unjust.

Every single marcher I talked to was omnivorous.

Based on these answers, the marchers are willing to kill fully cognizant criminals as punishment, ignore the medical well-being of fully cogni-

MARCHFORLIFE.ORG

As a mob of pro-lifers flood the streets as part of the January 2010 March for Life rally, their incongruous stances get lost in the crowd. zant humans (who happen to be poor or genetically deficient), and brutally slaughter fully cognizant non-human animals for food. But, they find it morally offensive to abort unfeeling, pre-conscious cellular bundles?

The only common thread among these decisions, as I see it, is a consistent disregard for quality of life. Humans, both innocent and guilty, are shoved in overcrowded prisons. Lowincome families are plagued by easily preventable ailments.

Animals are brutalized in factory farms on their way to anaesthetized slaughter.

In light of these examples, I could not understand what could account for such confusing conclusions. Is their movement not titled “prolife”? In my opinion, only entirely, unfounded beliefs could favor the well-being of

unconscious cells over mature, intelligent living beings.

Even if restricted to humans, are the above abuses worse than the elimination of an unfeeling cellular mass?

Instead of arguing religious semantics or “when something becomes human,” there has to be a more straightforward method of reason regarding the value of life. One such method is determining whether or not a particular action causes unnecessary suffering.

Such an argument would require some data, though.

Relevant information would include whether the subject in question feels pain (if so, how much) and how he, she, or it experiences emotion. The following figures should shed a little light on the picture: fetuses cannot feel pain before the thirteenth week; ninety

percent of abortions occur before this point; babies have no consciousness (unable to form memories, have complex emotions, etc.) until months after birth, etc. Taken together, these facts indicate that there is no suffering endured by the aborted party.

Fully-cognizant humans, on the other hand, feel angst and terror before being killed and pain as they are killed.

Poor families feel the full force, financially, physically, and emotionally, of simple illnesses. The complete disregard for the mistreatment of fully-conscious animals is required to be omnivorous.

Until this movement adopts consistent, defensible arguments, my opinion will stand. The issue could be argued along the lines of the horrors of systematized killing, the debasement of the hu-

man person, or any number of other avenues. Couching oneself in spiritual complacency, on the other hand, I find unacceptable. People need to realize the implications of their argument. A true pro-life argument extends to ending capital punishment, health care to the needy, and virtual pacifism. A purely pro-life argument extends to veganism, anti-pet euthanasia, anti-animal lab testing, and the like.

The marchers need to carry their pro-life views to their logical conclusion or at the very least, add some rationality to their dogmatic views.

Andrew Zipperer is a freshman in the College. In addition to marching, he enjoys walking, sauntering, meandering, and strolling.

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15

Paralysis on the operating table: Awake and afraid

by Kate Imel On January 3, while many of you were still celebrating the new decade with themed parties or family vacations, I was preparing myself for a routine tonsillectomy. Aside from getting my wisdom teeth out, this was my first surgery, so I was not quite sure what to expect— other than a really sore throat and lots of ice cream.

On the morning of my surgery, I was given a mild muscle relaxant called succinylcholine, intended to wear off in five minutes, so that a breathing tube could be put in during the operation. Hours after surgery, I awoke to realize that my throat was the least of my worries: I was paralyzed.

As I slowly regained consciousness, I recall waiting eagerly to have the doctor and my parents tell me all went well and that I was fine. But that hazy vision of a hospital recovery room that I was expecting never appeared. I awoke to complete darkness, where I remained for the next six hours. I did not hear the doctor tell me

everything was fine. Instead, I found myself an intruder in the conversation, an unknown presence.

“I don’t think we should bring her parents back, I don’t think they would stay very calm,” one nurse said to the other. “Have we found Dr. Bates yet?”

Still utterly motionless, an apparent vegetable, my bewilderment quickly turned to terror. All my effort was focused on moving an eyelid or raising a fingertip, anything to let them know that I was there. I was quickly foiled by my own anxiety when a change in the respirator alerted me that not only was I not breathing on my own, I could not even make myself breathe. In that moment I would have done anything to scream and cry, “I’m here! I’m here!” But all efforts only added to my panic. I was trapped inside myself, and the only thing I could think to do was pray that I would survive whatever was happening.

As disparate traces of the Lord’s Prayer echoed in my head, I found myself desperately attempting to mute the

chaos that had engulfed me. I was thrown back into my reality when the nurses slowed the flow of oxygen to my lungs saying, “she’s tiny, I think we should slow it down.” I can only describe what followed from this slight change in oxygen pace as the sensation of being held under water a little too long, without the ability to signal that you need to come up for a breath.

When the anesthesiologist entered, my panic subsided as I convinced myself that he would

“

room, I kept hearing estimates of how long my state would persist—some said two hours, others thought it would be more like eight. No one in the room, including my doctor, had ever witnessed this reaction. It was not until six hours after surgery that I was able to flick my eyelids, an act that was answered by a reassuring hand on my wrist from the nurse. Finally, someone knew I was there.

After my ordeal I would come to find out that I have a

All my effort was focused on moving an eyelid or raising a fingertip, anything to let them know that I was there. have some answers. Instead, in an attempt to revive my reflex reactions the doctor applied a minor shock to my hand. This might have been fine in other circumstances, but considering I was completely paralyzed, I could only lie there screaming silent obscenities.

Within the chaos of the

rare enzyme deficiency that affects only 0.1 percent of the population.

While researching this condition, I found that it only applies to one class of muscle relaxants and cocaine.

I have never taken hard drugs, but I won’t say that the curiosity wasn’t there. Ironically, the main reason I never wanted to

The hypocritical ethics of Super Bowl advertising Was there ever really a time when athletes could be considered paragons of morality? Years before Tiger Woods slept with every cocktail waitress in the greater Orlando area, the American public gave up trying to look up to sports stars as role models.

And between Janet Jackson’s nipple, Prince’s giant penisguitar, and any beer commercial ever, the Super Bowlbowl should have even less moral credibility. But according to some evangelical groups and CBS, the Super Bowl is the last bulwark between America as we know it, and a modern Soddom and Gamorrah.

College football star Tim Tebow and his mother Pam will be talking to the nation about abortion during this year ’s Super Bowl. CBS has accepted a commercial, paid for

by the conservative evangelical group Focus on the Family, wherein the Tebow twosome speak out against abortion.

The Tebows make an effective argument against abortion: your child may grow up to be a great football player, too, and then you’ll have lots of money and won’t be burning in the fiery pits of Hell for all eternity—the very definition of a win-win situation.

Before this year, CBS had a policy of not accepting what it termed “issue” ads during the Super Bowl and other event programming. I may not agree with the Tebow ad, but I was glad to see this asinine policy go. CBS or any other television network should never be allowed to act as a cultural gatekeeper, deciding what is and isn’t appropriate for the general public to see during

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try cocaine was not due to a lack of curiosity, but just a feeling that I would be that one, the statistic they warn you about in school. Now I know I would have been. It took six hours for the small dose of succinylcholine to wear off. If I ever did even a small amount of cocaine, it would be like taking ten times the amount, and it would kill me in minutes. At twenty-years old, I find myself confronted with the jarring realization that I am not invincible.

commercial breaks. Like bea uty, inappropriateness is in the eye of the beholder, and I would much rather determine what I find distasteful on my own than have Les Moonves tell me what I should find distasteful.

CBS’s abandonment of this policy should be good news, even if it means hearing about positions I don’t agree with during the Super Bowl or the

Carrying On

by Daniel Newman A rotating column by Voice senior staffers

Grammy’s (which is its own sort of punishment to watch).

But CBS’s seeming rejection of censorship and paternalism didn’t last long.

Soon after CBS announced it would air the Tebows’ gross oversimplification of a complex and ambiguous issue, a gay dating website, Mencrunch, submitted an ad to CBS for the Super Bowl. The commercial depicted two male

football fans watching the game before starting to make out on the living room couch.

Although Mencrunch was prepared to pay the accepted rate for the commercial to air during the Super Bowl, CBS decided once again that it should revert back to its role as moral arbiter—and rejected the ad.

In a statement announcing its decision, CBS declared it is “open to working with the client on alternative submissions.” Like the alternatives that depict heterosexual couples engaged in solely procreational sexual acts.

CBS’s double standard is all the more egregious in light of recent Super Bowl ads that depicted homosexuality. The 2007 Super Bowl broadcast included a Snickers commercial that reinterpreted the famous pasta scene from The Lady and the Tramp. Two automechanics eat from each end of the Snickers bar until their lips accidentally touch. The men are horrified, and yell out to do something manly to rectify the situation—and so thus rip out clumps of their own

”

Kate Imel is a sophomore in the College and a staff writer for the Voice. She’s glad she wasn’t around in the 80s to witness Studio 54.

chest hair. The message is that homosexuality is allowed in Super Bowl commercials as long as it is portayed as either disgusting or a joke (preferably both).

CBS is trying to define “normal”—in this case, as football, religion, and babies— while marginalizing anything that does not fit into its narrative. Allowing a television network to draw this line in the sand is ridiculous, especially when considering other ads airing Sunday night. The majority revolve around binge drinking—advocated by animals and scantily clad young women, with a healthy dose of slapstick violence.

It’s time for CBS to stop rejecting ads that don’t live up to its arbitary vision of American morality. The world is full of ideas I don’t agree with. But I would much rather determine which values I choose to respect than have them dictated to me by the network that airs Ghost Whisperer.

Daniel Newman is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and a contributing editor for the Voice. He kissed a guy once.