LOVE & HATE IN ARIZONA | A DARK TREK | WAYNE BRADY FIGHTS BACK
THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE
MAY 19, 2013
How Deathbed Singers Comfort the Nearly Departed
05.19.13 #49 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: Barbara Out ... Angelina’s Big Reveal JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst Q&A: Wayne Brady on Being ‘Black Enough’ HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE
ON THE COVER: 1997 SUPERSTOCK, INC./GETTY IMAGES; THIS PAGE FROM TOP: VENUS MAHER; RADLEY BALKO
Voices PETER S. GOODMAN: The Shame of Bangladesh
ALL EARS Soothing the sick and dying through a cappella song. BY JAWEED KALEEM
CAMERON RUSSELL: Beauty Is in the Lies of the Beholder QUOTED
Exit 25Q: How Dark Is Star Trek Into Darkness? STRESS LESS: Why Americans Just Can’t Get Enough TASTE TEST: Canned Chicken Soup Like Mom’s. (Really?) TFU
‘HOTTER THAN ASPHALT’ The fight for gay rights in Arizona. BY RADLEY BALKO
FROM THE EDITOR: Final Songs and Free Spirits
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
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Final Songs and Free Spirits n this week’s issue, Jaweed Kaleem looks at threshold choirs, a growing movement using a capella song to soothe the dying. “Words are good for many things, but they don’t seem sufficient when it comes to death,”
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says Ellen Synakowski, a former academic journal editor and member of a choir in Washington, D.C. “The feelings are just too deeply intense and words are too inadequate. But music can reach those places where words alone can’t go.” Jaweed traces the threshold choir movement to Northern California, where 13 years ago people — mostly women, mostly older than 50 — started coming together
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
and visiting hospitals, hospices and private homes, by request. Selecting songs based on what a patient or the patient’s family wants, they approach the bedside and sing from memory — from upbeat, jaunty songs like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to original compositions, which are most common. Synakowski’s choir practices for 90 minutes each week at a D.C. massage school and posts flyers in local coffee shops seeking people who can “communicate kindness” with their voices. At a recent rehearsal, they could be heard singing, in preparation for some future bedside performance: “It’s alright, you can go/ Your memories are safe with us/ It’s alright, you can go/ Your memories are safe with us.” Elsewhere in the issue, Radley Balko puts the spotlight on Bisbee, Arizona, a town of 5,500 people about 10 miles from the Mexican border, and at the center of the state’s debate over gay marriage. As Radley delves into the politics and introduces us to local officials and residents on both sides of the issue, he also shows us around Bisbee in all its eclectic, freespirited glory: the art festivals
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and theaters, the annual parade of “art cars” colorfully decorated by locals, and characters like Brian “Legz” Tagalog, a tattoo artist who was born with arms and works entirely with his feet. As Gretchen
Music can reach those places where words alone can’t go.” Baer, a Bisbee artist and political activist put it, “Arizonans like to think of themselves as mavericks. We’re individualists. We do our own thing, forge our own way.” Finally, as part of our ongoing coverage of stress, we’re featuring the results of HuffPost’s stress survey, shining a light on causes ranging from finances and relationships to work and sleep deprivation.
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‘ NO POSSIBLE JUSTIFICATION’
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The Justice Department secretly obtained the phone records of editors and reporters at the Associated Press for April and May 2012, the news organization reported this week. “There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” AP president Gary Pruitt said in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder. The DOJ did not specify why it took the records, but officials have previously said a criminal investigation is underway to determine who leaked information for a May 2012 AP report that the CIA stopped an al Qaeda affiliate’s plot to detonate a bomb on a U.S.-bound airplane. The Obama administration has brought more cases against people suspected of leaking classified information than all previous presidents combined.
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‘I WILL NOT TOLERATE IT’
Obama slammed the IRS Monday following the news that it targeted conservative political groups during the 2012 election cycle. “I have got no patience with it, I will not tolerate it,” he said. The IRS admitted it targeted groups applying for taxexempt status if they had “tea party” or “patriot” in their name. The IRS’ acting director resigned later in the week, and the attorney general called for a criminal investigation into the matter.
‘HOUSE OF HORRORS’
Philadelphia abortion provider Dr. Kermit Gosnell was sentenced to life in prison this week after being found guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of three babies born at his clinic. He was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the death of a woman who had an abortion there. The 72-year-old was accused of botching late-term abortions and cutting the spinal cords of newborns delivered in the third term. Prosecutors described his now-shuttered clinic as a “house of horrors.”
‘I DO NOT WANT TO CLIMB ANOTHER MOUNTAIN’
After more than 50 years on TV, Barbara Walters announced on The View that she will retire next summer. “I do not want to appear on another program or climb another mountain,” she told ABC News.” The 83-year-old was the first female host of the Today show and of an evening news program. She has interviewed every U.S. president and first lady since the Nixons, and has landed countless other interviews with the likes of Fidel Castro, Monica Lewinsky and scores of Hollywood stars.
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‘YOU ALREADY GOT YOUR MONSTER’
The two brothers of Ariel Castro, who is accused of holding three Cleveland women captive for about a decade, described him as a “monster” in an interview with CNN. “I hope he rots in that jail,” Onil Castro said. His brother Pedro offered his sympathy to the women, saying, “I’d just tell them I’m sorry for what Ariel done.” The brothers, who were initially arrested in the case, said they hope they will not always be associated with it. “You already got your monster, please give us our freedom,” Pedro Castro said.
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‘YOU HAVE OPTIONS’
THAT’S VIRAL D’AWWWWWWWW
Angelina Jolie revealed in a New York Times editorial Tuesday that she had a preventive double mastectomy. The actress, whose mother died of cancer at 56, made the decision after finding out she had a mutated BRCA1 gene that increased her risk of getting breast and ovarian cancers. “I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer,” she wrote. She emphasized that she wants women to make “informed choices” about their health: “I hope it helps you to know you have options.”
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
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RODMAN RIPS OBAMA
TURNS OUT WE’RE NOT ALL QUITE SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE...
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TOWARD A BETTER BENGHAZI INQUIRY HE STATE OF PLAY on the ongoing Benghazi inquiry, in terms of the partisan backbiting, seems to be rather simple. GOP interlocutors on the House Oversight Committee seem to believe that they are on to something important enough to merit contin-
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ued attention. Their Democratic opponents believe that most of what Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and his colleagues are up to is steeped in politics, and so they are dismissive of the proceedings. I’m a bit different. I feel that there is a worthwhile inquiry to be had, and Issa and company are not currently having it. But I’m not dismissive of their efforts because I feel they are rooted purely in poli-
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee holds a hearing about the Benghazi attack on May 8, 2013.
Enter tics — though there’s plenty of politics to be had. Rather, I’m dismissive because the current probe is obsessed with matters that haven’t managed to journey outside the realm of the superficial. To wit, there seem to be two matters under investigation. The first has to do with whether or not the response offered in what was clearly a dire emergency was adequate. With the benefit that hindsight offers, critics-slash“whistleblowers” have stepped forward to suggest that the military response was lacking. The Pentagon has officially pushed back on these claims, suggesting that they offered up an accordingto-Hoyle response and that they were not in the position to do more than they did. Absent some dynamic, evidence-based break in the case, this is probably going to end up a “he-said/another he-said” argument that won’t be resolved until such time as the military has another emergency to which to respond, at which point maybe one side will prove to have been correct. Or not! The other critical track the inquiry is on involves inter- and intra-agency memo-mummery. What talking points got changed
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and why. What low-level functionary took the blame so that principals didn’t end up looking embarrassed. How much energy was spent on a State Departmentwide cover-your-ass effort, and how it compares to the energy spent on properly and efficiently disclosing the relevant information to the public. (A third thing that is being investigated is how well prepared the State Department was to deal
If you strip all government agencies down to their constants … what you will be left with is bad lighting, indoor plumbing, and a small army of bureaucrats striving to shield their superiors from cock-ups.” with the predictable contingency of an attack on their facilities. There, we have consensus: the State Department was not well prepared, and the State Department officially agrees. Thomas Pickering, who ran the State Department’s Accountability Review Board, concluded that the “changing situation in Benghazi was not understood either on
Enter the ground, or in Washington to the degree to which it represented a danger.” If that’s the State Department’s official consensus on the matter, the only thing left to do is determine which lawmaker can shout the loudest about it.) That said, there’s no doubt that all of the agency ass-covering is bad and embarrassing, and I wish that governmental culture in the United States was vastly different from the way it is. Kris Belisle’s explanation of how Washington works (“The number one goal of most agencies is, frankly, to try and make the principal [Washington-speak for the head of the agency] look good, no matter what the actual facts are, even if it means lying to or misleading the press”) shows how hopelessly prevalent this aspect of governmental culture is. If you strip all government agencies down to their constants, through some sort of regression analysis, what you will be left with is bad lighting, indoor plumbing, and a small army of bureaucrats striving to shield their superiors from cock-ups. The one thing, of course, that makes Benghazi stand out from all the rest is the fact that four
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Americans are dead. But their deaths did not come about because the State Department engaged in the aforementioned CYA mission. Rather, their deaths are a natural consequence of the fact that the United States intervened in Libya in the first place. And if we’re going to continue a Benghazi inquiry, we should do so in a way that questions the wisdom of the
If we’re going to continue a Benghazi inquiry, we should do so in a way that questions the wisdom of the intervention itself.” intervention itself. Clearly there is reason to believe it was very unwise. But it’s the original policy of Libyan intervention that deserves to be litigated — not the afterthe-fact bureaucratic touch fouls. Of course, the reason we shan’t be litigating the policy is fairly obvious — many of Benghazi’s critics are simultaneously in favor of a similar intervention in Syria. Many of the same conditions present in Libya are present there as well, chief among them being a sketchy “rebel” force that includes
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Enter many fighters who are just as happy harming Americans as they are battling the Assad regime. The primary difference is that an intervention on Syria would be much harder to pull off. If we actually took a searing look at the Libyan intervention itself, the dubiety of such an intervention in Syria would be more pronounced. But that’s not what’s happening, and so it’s hardly a shock that, with Syria, we have similar calls for a “no-fly zone” and “arming the rebels” in a way that ensures that only the “right” rebels get arms, all of which is supposed to be pulled off without having to put “boots on the ground.” The mental disconnect between all the anger-banging about Benghazi and the screeching for more intervening in Syria reached an apotheosis on ABC News’ This Week, when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seamlessly transitioned from calling Benghazi a “cover-up” to insisting that U.S. forces should intervene in such a way that allow Syrian rebels to have their own “Benghazi.” And, yes, that is precisely what McCain proposed, without so much as a trace of irony (emphasis mine):
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MARTHA RADDATZ: But how do you keep out good rebels, and bad rebels? You’ve got al-Qaeda rebels, running around... JOHN MCCAIN: Thank you. Martha, these are legitimate questions you’re asking. But they are there. And you put them inside Syria, they then have a Benghazi. Then they have a place to organize, to — to identify the right people. These Jihadists aren’t — there aren’t that many of them, they’re just so good. Because they’ve been fighting all over the Middle East for all these years, and they’re not afraid to die. But we could still organize a legitimate and non-Jihadist group that are already there. Because it worked out so spectacularly the last time.
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John McCain suggested that the U.S. should intervene in Syria in such a way that allows rebels to have their own Benghazi.
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Q&A
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Wayne Brady on Accusations That He’s Not ‘Black Enough’
“It irritates me to no end when people lock you into this one thing, and when someone doesn’t get the ironic bent of what that joke is.”
Above: Comedian Wayne Brady performs at The Hip-Hop Inaugural Ball II in January. Below: Brady arrives at Spike TV’s Eddie Murphy: One Night Only in November 2012.
FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE
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Lahore, Pakistan 05.09.2013 A man overcome by fumes falls out of a window as a fire burns at the Lahore Development Authority (LDA) Plaza. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Voices
PETER S. GOODMAN
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The Shame of Bangladesh WE ALREADY KNOW that our banks remain too big to fail, threatening regular people with crisis. Now, a parallel reality is emerging in the garment trade: Most of our clothing is produced by global enterprises so vast and complex that
they are simply too big to supervise. The inability of these multinational brands to monitor factories that produce their goods in poor countries combined with their power to extract cut-rate prices reinforces an uncomfortable yet unavoidable truth: People will suffer and die making our clothes. No matter how well-intentioned
Bangladeshi volunteers and rescue workers at the scene of the factory collapse on April 25.
Voices the brand, no matter how diligently it may scrutinize its supply chain, the global nature of largescale manufacturing entails so many hands touching products in so many different places, no system can keep tabs on all of them. And that, combined with the pressures incumbent on factories to produce clothes at the lowest possible prices, ensures that some of this production will wind up taking place in the underground market — beyond the purview of local regulators, and outside the realm of the lawyered-up codes of conduct that supposedly govern modern commerce. There was ample evidence for this reality long ago. But in the wake of the deadliest garment industry disaster in history — the collapse of a factory complex in Bangladesh, which took the lives of more than 900 people — this truth is more evident than ever. This truth explains how Benetton — a prominent brand that has marketed itself as an archetype of global style — now finds itself cast as the latest poster child of the sweatshop conditions that put clothes in our closets. First, the company said none of its products had been made inside
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the doomed Bangladesh factory. Then, after photographs taken at the scene of the disaster revealed Benetton products strewn in the rubble, the company said that, yes, it had once placed an order. Then, in an exclusive interview with my colleague Kim Bhasin last week, Benetton’s chief executive officer confirmed that the company had indeed purchased about 200,000 cotton shirts from a supplier in-
Bangladesh is poor, and poverty is dangerous. But these tragedies are systemic.” side the factory, though it was a relationship of short duration. The confusion, Benetton executives explained, came from the fact that the order had initially been placed with another supplier in India. When the Indian firm struggled to fulfill the order, it shifted some of the work to another factory — the plant in Bangladesh. Benetton presumably had to move quickly to keep the product moving. That meant taking a leap of faith that shifting to another factory — a company Benetton has ac-
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knowledged it failed to fully scrutinize — would not deliver precisely the sort of public relations disaster the company now confronts. Even companies that operate with the highest discipline can wind up purchasing items produced in factories about which they know little to nothing, for the simple reason that their suppliers routinely engage subcontractors who themselves subcontract out some of their work. Layer by layer, the brand gets further removed from knowledge and control. The production sinks deeper into the underground economy. I saw this repeatedly in the years that I was based in China, at factories that were producing
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Benetton now finds itself cast as the latest poster child of the sweatshop conditions that put clothes in our closets.� goods for some of the most recognizable brands on earth. Ikea has become an icon of responsible production, a brand that markets itself as committed to sustainable living. But in 2004, in an industrial hub in northeastern China that was well understood to be a major transshipment point for wood harvested illegally in neighboring Russia, scores of small-scale backyard wood processing operations were engaged in producing boards. Many managers said their wares were destined for Ikea. Some told me they would sell to a larger fac-
A shirt with a Benetton label lies in the rubble three days after the collapse.
Voices tory that had a contract to make 100,000 pine dining sets a year for Ikea using timber harvested in the Russian Far East. A sales manager at that plant told me Ikea gave managers wide purview to purchase wood as they thought best. “Ikea will provide some guidance, such as a list of endangered species we can’t use, but they never send people to supervise the purchasing,” the factory manager told me. “Basically, they just let us pick what wood we want.” Ikea had a range of well-intentioned policies in place. It did not mean to use illegally harvested logs, I’m willing to assume. But the purchasing was simply too vast and decentralized for the company to fully monitor. At least, not without deploying more people to the scene, a step that would cost the company money — a cost presumably passed on to those of us whose patios boast Ikea dining sets. Instead, Ikea relied upon paperwork produced by logging companies and factories. And if the paperwork looked okay, that box got checked off and the product stream continued. We need not understand the complexities of global supply chains to see how such a system
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can go awry. Here in the United States, the orgy of mortgage lending that culminated in a housing bust, the worst financial crisis in generations and then the Great Recession all stemmed in large part from people filling out paperwork as required while failing to scrutinize reality. (And, yes, some of the paperwork was bad, as the robosigning scandal revealed, but plenty of predatory lending, fore-
The global brands have built a system designed to inoculate themselves from liability to disaster …” closure and sticking of taxpayers with terrible loans resulted from files that were seemingly in order, with required forms in place.) Every time another garment industry disaster reveals the seamy underside of this production, major brands start talking about their audit processes: “We know that our goods are clean, because we inspect the factories that make them,” runs the script. “Buy our products without guilt.” But as workers have told me in factories from China to Cambodia
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to Turkey to Guatemala, they are routinely coached on how to answer questions posed by inspectors who arrive every so often, working for accounting firms at the behest of the brands. Bathrooms that are ordinarily foul and denied to many workers are suddenly pristine and stocked with the necessary accoutrements. Managers who routinely cheat workers of legally mandated overtime and meal breaks speak of the lawful policies in place. So it goes in Bangladesh, now the world’s second largest apparel maker, as my colleagues Dave Jamieson and Emran Hossain revealed in an eye-opening report
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earlier this month. “What to say to the auditors always comes from the owners,” one worker in a factory in Bangladesh told them. “The owners in most cases would warn workers not to say negative things about the factories.” The global brands have built a system designed to inoculate themselves from liability to disaster, while effectively pushing the dirty work further into the crevices of the underground economy. They have built an apparatus that enables them to say that they inspect the factories that make their goods, while ensuring that dangers persist by dint of the stuff they do not talk about publicly: The prices they pay for their products. Prices that can only be met by someone
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Workers sew plaid shirts on the production line of the Fashion Enterprise garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Voices cutting corners on safety, wages and environmental stewardship. In 2004 and 2005, I visited scores of factories making a range of goods for Walmart in southern China, from baby strollers to cabinets for stereo speakers. Seemingly every factory that had a direct contract to produce for Walmart appeared gleaming, well-lit and new, indistinguishable from industrial facilities in the U.S., Japan and Germany. They maintained logs inspected by the auditors who visited. But the people running such factories often confided that they saw no way to avoid farming out some tasks to less-regulated facilities, and typically without Walmart knowing about it. That was the only way they could make what Walmart wanted at the price Walmart was willing to pay, they said. Inside Walmart’s global procurement center in Shenzhen, agents from factories throughout China sat in plastic chairs, waiting to meet with buyers for the largest retailer on earth. They sat alongside representatives from their competitors. When the agents got their turn to sit face to face with a Walmart representative, they found that the conversation was far from a nego-
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tiation: It was more like a directive. Walmart would simply name the price it was willing to pay. The factory typically felt compelled to accept, knowing that the Walmart representative could go right out to the waiting room and grab a competitor who would oblige. Time and again, we absorb another tragedy — families weeping
We need not understand the complexities of global supply chains to see how such a system can go awry.” in Bangladesh or China or Pakistan — and we indulge the language appropriate for an accident. Bangladesh is poor, and poverty is dangerous. But these tragedies are systemic. The factories that produce the goods we are buying are too far away and too scattered for any company to supervise. And the prices we are paying are too low. Which means someone else has to pay, someone typically far away. Peter S. Goodman is the executive business editor of The Huffington Post.
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LIFESTYLE
COURTESY OF TED
Beauty Is in the Lies of the Beholder Women are not crazy for wanting to have a discussion about body image. And the conversation isn’t as superficial as the one Dove keeps encouraging us to have. It is a conversation about sexism
and racism. It is a conversation about the real reason we try to shrink our waists and whiten our teeth (and sometimes even our skin). Most of the time we don’t do those things to make ourselves happy, we do them for someone else. I think we should start talking about that.
Fashion model Cameron Russell speaks at the TEDx MidAtlantic conference in 2012.
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The easiest place to see discrimination is our incomes. Modeling is one of the few professions where women actually out-earn men. And across all jobs, studies have found that more attractive women earn more. A woman’s value is too often skin-deep. In 2004, a study found that resumes with very African-Americansounding names were 50 percent less likely to get called for an initial interview. And racial bias in salaries is overwhelming. While white women make an average of 78 cents for every man’s dollar, for African-American women that number drops to 62 cents, and for Hispanic women to 54 cents. Unfortunately, the industry with the most potential to change this reality is also a site where women have little access. In the media, where we can powerfully perpetuate as well as undermine damag-
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Women are not crazy for wanting to have a discussion about body image. And the conversation isn’t as superficial as the one Dove keeps encouraging us to have.” ing stereotypes, both coverage and employment are hard to come by. Physical appearance plays an enormous role in who gets seen. When women and other marginalized groups do get access to the media, they often have to fit into a
TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful “idea worth spreading” every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week’s TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation!
narrow definition of what the people in charge are looking for. Women, for example, are more likely to be portrayed as victims when they get news coverage, and are more likely to be depicted wearing sexy clothing when they are cast in Hollywood’s leading roles. I’ve experienced this first hand. During the last couple months of press around my TEDx talk, when I’ve suggested that TV producers include more women in discussions around access to media, they wanted to see headshots. (Not bios, or clips, or anything a sane person curating a panel would ask for.) And while last year women wrote just 20 percent of all opeds, over the last month I have been invited to contribute more op-eds than I have time to write. Many an editor has made it clear why I’ve been invited to contribute. “We sought you out because of how you look,” one put bluntly. Women are often worried about
MORE ON TED WEEKENDS WHAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT THE MODELING INDUSTRY
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BEAUTY AND BIBLICAL PLAGUES
how they look, and that’s not superficial. We know that our appearance has nothing to do with how smart, creative, or hardworking we are, but it plays powerfully into what soci-
We know that our appearance has nothing to do with how smart, creative, or hardworking we are, but it plays powerfully into what society decides we are worth.” ety decides we are worth. There are healthy ways to have this dialogue. A good place to start is inviting those who are marginalized and discriminated against into the conversation more often. Cameron Russell is an American fashion model.
A selection of the week’s related blogs HEADLINES TO VIEW BLOGS ABOUT THIS WEEK’S THEME
‘LOOKS AREN’T EVERYTHING’
LET’S PUT AN UNDERWEAR MODEL IN THE WHITE HOUSE
‘I’M A PRETTY WHITE WOMAN’
QUOTED
Voices
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“ This whole thing comes down in the end to whether we think the future will be better if we face it with open hands or closed fists.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: RANDY BROOKE/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; EARL GIBSON III/ WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES/BLEND IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO
— Bill Clinton
“ I’m never going again. It was so un-fun.”
advised students to be openminded in a commencement address at Howard University
— Gwyneth Paltrow
told USA Today about the Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala
“ Who the hell buys property and then waits 10 years to give it a good look over?? FAIL.”
— HuffPost Commenter TRexHole, on a Wisconsin family discovering a fully stocked fallout shelter in their backyard
“ Maybe with enough love and a sense of humor it all comes right in the end.”
— HuffPost commenter Cranky Liberal, on “Dear Less-ThanPerfect Mom”
Voices
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“ It’s really the only still-acceptable form of discrimination in our country.”
— New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R)
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: IMEH AKPANUDOSEN/GETTY IMAGES FOR TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL; COURTESY OF NICKOLAY LAMM/MYVOUCHERCODES.CO.UK; AP PHOTO/MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
called in to Politico’s “Playbook Cocktails” and praised Mika Brzezinski for revealing her weight loss issues
“ Good sex!”
— Heather Graham
told Vegas magazine during an interview when they asked her what her desires are
Truth? We don’t look for truth. It’s so messy and makes us nervous.
— HuffPost commenter simian_sez,
on Mississippi death row inmate Willie Manning being denied a DNA test
“ If you are looking to a child’s doll for your body image and self-esteem, then you clearly have problems far beyond your measurements or BMI.”
— HuffPost commenter JoeMentia
on “Barbie Body Looks Pretty Scary Next To A Human Woman”
VENUS MAHER
05.19.13 #49 FEATURES
DYING TO LISTEN LOVE & HATE
DY I N G TO L I STEN By JAWEED KALEEM
How Deathbed Singers Comfort the Nearly Departed
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
WASHINGTON — Always face the person in the chair. Sense their breath, the rising and falling of the lungs, the blood’s flush on the cheeks. Watch the loosening and tightening of the muscles, the movement of the eyelids, how the hair on their arms straightens up. Don’t stand out. Speak softly. Blend in with the voices. ¶ This was the advice of Ellen Synakowski to members of the Washington, D.C., Threshold Choir, only a few months into its existence. Their job: to use song to comfort the dying through the end of life.
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As if repeating a mantra, they sang in unison as they rehearsed: “It’s alright, you can go/ Your memories are safe with us/ It’s alright, you can go/ Your memories are safe with us.” “Words are good for many things, but they don’t seem sufficient when it comes to death. The feelings are just too deeply intense and words are too inadequate,” said Synakowski, a 55-year-old former academic journal editor who has always had a hobby of singing, whether it’s to the car radio or in a community chorus. “But
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music … music can reach those places where words alone can’t go.” Death used to happen solely at home or in a hospital, with company limited to family, close friends and clergy. Solemn music would be reserved, perhaps, for the funeral. But as the options for the end of life have grown to include hospice, palliative care and other avenues that recognize not only physical but also emotional and spiritual well-being, Synakowski and likeminded volunteers are offering another service to the dying: soothing through a cappella song. Each week, Synakowski and between five and 10 people gather around an imaginary bed to prac-
Singers practice at the Threshold Choir national conference in Healdsburg, Calif., in early April.
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“ Words are good for many things, but they don’t seem sufficient when it comes to death … music can reach those places where words alone can’t go.” tice original songs written for the dying. The D.C. circle formed in January, and is one of the newest in a little-known, mainly U.S.-based network that began in Northern California 13 years ago and now includes dozens of groups across the country. In the years before launching the choir, Synakowski was a theater critic, a parenting newspaper staffer and an editor at a physics journal. Now an aspiring creative nonfiction writer, she spends her days memorizing songs, calling hospices and hospitals to gauge their interest in bedside singers, and placing ads seeking members in coffee shops, churches and newspapers. But it’s not easy to find volunteers and she’s just started to look for friendly care facilities that may house those who are dying and willing to listen. “Do not initiate touch. If someone reaches out to you, you can respond,” she told the men and women gathered to practice in April in a massage school class-
room in a nondescript, concrete office building that donated its space. It was a Wednesday night, and the singers, most in their 20s and 30s, had rushed in from their day jobs. They included a legal secretary, a massage therapist and an acupuncturist. “If someone asks you for water, or to adjust them in their wheelchair or bed, we can’t,” Synakowski said. That’s up to the nurse. They are singers, and singers only. As if it were a worship service, she opened the meeting with a testimony, reading a letter from a woman who recently had another choir in California sing to her ailing mother who is in her late 80s. The students had never performed for the ill or dying, and they needed encouragement and inspiration. “When you came to our church and sang, I had more energy than I have had in many months. When you and the choir sang to my mom, I felt your singing was able to hold a space open that we all fear. That ‘space’ could be death or just the struggle of sickness, and when it’s held open like that, we are less alone in it ... When
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you sang, your voices had a kind of wisdom of being in dark places or feared places ... My mom told me the feeling overwhelmed her, while you were all singing to her, of not being afraid to die.” The D.C. choir practices for 90 minutes each week at the Potomac Massage Training Institute, where Synakowski is also a student. Laureen, the acupuncturist, joined after seeing a flyer at Starbucks seeking people who could “communicate kindness” with their voices. Becca, the legal secretary, had taken a class at the massage school, through which she met Synakowski. She brought her friend Leah, who has wanted to work with the dying ever since her brother died of cancer. It will take six months, possibly up to a year, before the choir can reach its goals: having each member memorize 30 songs, and reaching enough understanding of the dying process and the effect sound can have during it, including receiving hospital and hospice volunteer certification. For now, they prepare. SYNAKOWSKI’S HUSBAND and one or two men come to each rehearsal, though most Threshold
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Choirs are made up of only women. They’re located in nearly every major American city, and meet once or twice a month to practice. Each choir varies in its style and composition, though the majority skew older than 50 on average. They visit by request only to hospitals, hospices and private homes. The service is free, and because of limited resources, the groups usually don’t advertise unless they are just getting started. Oftentimes, it’s a chaplain, social worker or doctor who asks for them. Two to three singers will go to a bedside, and they pick songs based upon what a patient or the patient’s
Ellen Synakowski launched a Threshold Choir in Washington, D.C., in January.
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“ I sang the same song for two-and-a-half hours. As soon as I started singing, he started to calm.” family wants. The tunes can be slow or upbeat, and emotional or lighthearted, like “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” though most are original. At first, choirs sing two or three songs to gauge a person’s response. Sometimes, the recipient will move a finger, mouth a “thank you” or will change their breathing and relax their muscles. At the end of life, when human functions began to slow and cease, the signal for “I like this” can be as simple as a blink. Sessions last between 15 to 45 minutes, depending on the patient. Family members are given song sheets so they can join in or continue after the singers are gone, though choir members themselves prefer memorization. The lyrics aren’t religious, and are meant for those who may be spiritual but don’t follow a strict dogma. It’s rare for a choir member to witness a patient’s last breath. Most people prefer to die alone or in the presence of family, say singers who have performed at deathbeds. So far, Synakowski can sing just 10 pieces from memory. And while
she has attended choir workshops in New York and Ohio, she has yet to sing to the dying. Searching fruitlessly for a choir since moving to D.C. nearly four years ago, she became tired of waiting and recently launched her own. Maybe she hadn’t sung to the dying before, she thought, but she loved to sing, was taught by the pros and felt at ease with death. When the D.C. singers gather, Synakowksi doesn’t just train them in music, but poses questions about the end of life. What role does song play in transitions? What do they want to hear in their last week alive? The aim is to steer their minds toward thinking about the death that will soon surround them, and to weed out the uncomfortable. She starts by sharing her own experience. Growing up in Lincoln, Maine, she sang in nursing homes with her Girl Scout troop. She went to her first funeral, for her aunt who died of ovarian cancer, when she was in third grade, and has vivid memories of the open casket and the raw grief in her rather stoic family. She was in her high school’s chorus, and was in a gos-
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pel choir as an adult until one of her vocal chords started to get chronically swollen about six years ago, making it tiring to sing for extended periods. When her father died of a septic aneurism back home in 2000, she joined her siblings and mother in touching him, holding his cheeks, his legs and his feet, though she never thought to sing. When her mother was dying eight years later, Synakowski remembers rushing during the two-hour commute from the Bangor airport to her childhood home and spontaneously breaking out into song: “Swing
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low, sweet chariot/ Comin’ for to carry me home.” While singing, she got a call that her mother had died. It was one of the first times she realized “the transcending energy of music,” she says. “I feel almost responsible to show up and do this because I understand not being (alive),” she says. Syankowski first heard about bedside choirs six years ago, when she lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the family moved for her husband’s job as a physicist. She came across the idea the way most people do: through wordof-mouth. But between work and taking care of two kids, it wasn’t until recently that she could man-
Members of the Washington, D.C., Threshold Choir meet weekly at the Potomac Massage Training Institute in Northwest Washington.
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What do they want to hear in their last week alive? The aim is to steer their minds toward thinking about the death that will soon surround them. age the time to get involved. There are 19 choirs in Northern California, the epicenter of the bedside singers’ movement. They’re each aided in one way or another by Kate Munger, the founder and executive director of Threshold Choir. A 63-yearold resident of Inverness, Calif., 40 miles north of San Francisco, she’s a lifelong singer and former elementary school music teacher. Munger, too, remembers the first time she realized the power of song at death. It was early November in 1990, when her close friend Larry was dying of AIDS. “I found myself doing chores all morning and was supposed to sit by him in the afternoon, but was terrified when the time came,” recalls Munger. “He was comatose but agitated.” She was upset, afraid and confused. So she did what she always did in times of trouble: She sang. “I sang the same song for twoand-a-half hours. As soon as I started singing, he started to
calm,” she says. The song was Gail McDermott’s “Hello, Moon:” “There’s a moon/ There’s a star in the sky/ There’s a cloud/ There’s a tear in my eye/ There’s a light/ There’s a night that is long/ There’s a friend/ There’s a pain that is gone/ Long are we waiting awakening/ Long are we singing this song.” It took until 2000, and many years between of Munger teaching music to kids, for the first choir to begin. Based in El Cerrito, Calif., its first client was a terminally ill friend in her 50s with Lupus. Split into small groups, the original 15 members sang to her weekly in the nine months before she died, and she gave them feedback. Soft, blended voices felt better, she explained. Singers learned to read her body language. Even the smallest twitch of a limb could mean she was enjoying or put off by the music. At her death, they sang to her for hours on end. Today, Munger leads Threshold Choir full-time as a registered nonprofit. It has a small part-time staff, 100 chapters across the U.S., Canada and Australia, and a rep-
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ertoire of 500 original songs written in a dozen languages. Most are no more than two minutes long, and have been perfected at annual camps that members organize in Northern California. The most recent one in April at a retreat center in Sonoma County drew 140 women. The titles of songs sung during those five days invoke wonder, ease and tenderness: “Welcome Home,” “May Peace be with You,” “What Light Do You Shine in the World.” “There is no audition process to join. All I ask is that you feel the shiver when you hear about our work,” says Munger. “A mother’s heartbeat is the first sound that each of us hears. It feels to me that women’s bodies are the guardians of life entering this world and it feels right that we will be guardians of the gate out.” Experienced soloists are often not the best fit because “projection of voice is not the goal, softness and comfort are,” says Munger. She, Synakowski and other choir leaders encourage those who like to sing but lack professional experience to join. It’s easier to teach them to mix their voices into the group’s, sing softly and focus on the dying instead of themselves.
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THE THRESHOLD CHOIRS’ ultimate purpose may not be a creative one, but one that’s psychosocial. One of the hardest parts of dying, say those who have been at bedsides or been close to death themselves, is not pain but fear of the unfamiliar — of a stopping point — even for those who believe in an afterlife. Feelings of guilt and regret, too, can stress the body and mind. While bedside singers may be unique in American culture, it’s not unprecedented. In some Hindu and Buddhist practices, hymns are sung near those who are dying, while mantras are chanted into the ear at the moment of death. In the Middle Ages, French Benedictine monks became famous for establishing infirmaries across Europe for the terminally ill, where they used Gregorian chants to soothe the dying. In more advanced hospitals and hospices around the nation, music therapists are employed to use instruments, such as harps, to calm the ill. And an emerging academic and medical field, music thanatology, is studying the effects frequency and tone have on a dying person, from changes in heart rate, temperature and respiration to better sleep and reduction in stress. Studies that have scanned brain waves near the time of death have
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indicated that hearing is one of the last senses to be lost. “Our culture is coming to a great awareness of the role of song and music when it comes to pain, death and grief,” says Joy Berger, who teaches in the music therapy program at the University of Louisville and is the director of education for Hospice Education Network. Diana Sebzda, the director of bereavement at the Karen Ann Quinlan Hospice in Newton, N.J., says she has often seen music used for terminally ill patients. It seems “to bring about a sense of peace to the dying by calming down their terminal restlessness and for the family bedside,” she says. “Often, the hospice team will request the music continue to play, even after the loved one has died, because it helps create an emotional environment to respect the transition period of the loved one who died.” But deathbed songs can also go wrong. Research is still being done on how music affects the dying, says Berger. “Especially if the musicians are not clinically trained music therapists, assumptions and mis-uses of music can occur with ... what music is selected, and outcomes to expect.”
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“Music should never be imposed upon another, but rather should be empowering with and for the dying person. And, the same power of music to engage one’s emotions, memories, and memories can ignite overwhelming pain,” Berger says. Some of the most traditional or least-equipped hospitals and hospices still don’t have musictherapy programs, let alone a relationship with bedside singers. And the cooperation and interest among medical staff varies when it comes to Threshold, though personnel are typically asked to listen in and the choirs’ songbooks include appreciation songs
Kate Munger founded the Threshold Choir organization in 2001 in El Cerrito, Calif., and teaches workshops nationally about how to sing to the ill and dying.
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The lyrics aren’t religious, and are meant for those who may be spiritual but don’t follow a strict dogma. for nurses and doctors. Once at a hospital in California, says Munger, two of her singers were pushed to sing for a patient who was in pain by a “desperate” nurse, even though they had not been invited. “So they started singing for Mr. Jones who sat bolt up in bed and ordered them out.” WHILE MORE EXPERIENCED choirs have seen broad success in gaining membership and clientele, it’s a struggle for the newcomers in D.C. People come and go. Synakowski and her husband, Ed, are the constants, though others have started to come more regularly. She says local hospitals and hospices have be “very receptive” to the idea, thought she still doesn’t know who, exactly, the choir will sing to. “You can’t just go around saying you are singing to people who are dying in beds. Some people are very uncomfortable with it,” Synakowski says. “I’m confused about how to market it.” When she’s asked to explain what she does or when she makes a flyer,
she leaves the concept a vague: “We sing to people at tender times.” With a group so focused on the dying, its rehearsals are often equally meditations and conversations on death as they are chances to harmonize. In the middle of the April practice, Synkowski asked singers to reflect on the role of music in transitions and what led them to the music and the dying. Laureen Gastón, the acupuncturist who found one of Synakowsi’s flyers at Starbucks, talked about her mother and sister, who died four weeks apart a year ago. She first learned of Threshold Choir songs last summer while attending a community singing group at church during a vacation in Maine. “At the time, I thought that the idea of a Threshold Choir was intriguing given my latest losses and how much I sang at their bedsides. It made sense that others would do the same for their loved ones, but to hear about an organized group was news. Last night, I found myself singing those songs, and it transported me right back there to the ones I love,” Gastón said. “My brother had died from cancer. His favorite song was called
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‘Change,’ and back when he was in high school he had a senior quote which was from the song. It was amazing how fitting it was,” said Leah Dick, a massage therapist who wants to specialize in serving cancer patients. “I sing that song over and over and over again” to remember him. Synakowski thought of her son, Byron, who was born Sturge-Weber Syndrome, a rare neurological condition that usually affects one side of the brain. A port-wine stain on his forehead signaled the condition, which was caused by vascular malformations. Byron suffered hundreds of seizures within less than a year after his birth that resulted in 11 hospitalizations. Doctors had to remove half his brain when he was 10½ months old, and he could have easily died from bleeding during the surgery or a stroke afterwards. It was 1997, and she now realizes it was then that her path in death and song really began. “I told them they didn’t have permission to keep him alive if he did not want to be here,” says Synakowski. She would touch his small hands, holding him in her lap before and after treatments, lulling him to sleep with what she knew could be
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the last words he would hear: “This little little light of ours/ We’re going to let it shine/ ... We won’t let anyone (blow) it out/ We’re going to let it shine.” He survived and is now a high school sophomore. Though weak on one side of his body, he enjoys playing volleyball, and is close to becoming an Eagle Scout. “Going through that baptism, it enables me to say I can go in there and be with a child who is suffering,” she says. Recently, Synakowski has started calling pediatric hospitals, asking if they would be interested in allowing song in their checkup rooms. “It made me comfortable with the idea that babies’ lives can end. It’s not just older people. People always say phrases like ‘his time was cut short’ and things like that. I think we are giving a certain amount of time on this earth, and that’s that. It’s the time we have to live.”
Reporter Jaweed Kaleem on whether deathbed choirs make people uneasy. Tap here for the full interview on HuffPost Live.
Love Hate and
A Tiny Mining Town Takes Up the Cause of Gay Rights
D
By RADLEY BALKO
BISBEE, ARIZ. —
During a session of afternoon cocktails around the patio table in the brightly painted backyard of notorious standup comedian Doug Stanhope, Melissa Reaves begins to strum an acoustic guitar. She fiddles a bit, settles into a bluesy groove, then starts to sing. In a throaty wail, she belts out lyrics that, it turns out, she’s making up on the spot. It’s a bit of party trick, writing songs as she’s performing them. And so she sings about this reporter, in town to write about her; about her partner, Jennifer Garland, who is sitting next to her; and about the gay marriage debate that’s broken out in this quirky little town of 5,500 people about 10 miles from the Mexican border.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY RADLEY BALKO
Jennifer Garland (left) and Melissa Reaves will be the first couple in Arizona to enter into a civil union should Bisbee pass a resolution this month.
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Reaves and Garland have been together for 13 years. They moved to Bisbee from Asheville, N.C., in 2011 after hearing the band Calexico rave about the place. (The band’s song “Bisbee Blue” is about a variety of turquoise named for the town, a byproduct of the area’s copper mines.) If Bisbee’s city council passes a resolution to recognize civil unions, as it’s expected to do this month, it will be the first city in Arizona to do so. And Reaves and Garland will be the first gay couple in the state to be “civilly unioned.” “It isn’t something we ever expected after moving here,” says Garland, who paints and works as a server at a local restaurant. “We were just tickled when we heard it might happen,” Reaves chimes in. This all began in March, when recently elected Councilman Gene Conners was talking to a gay friend at a hardware store. “She said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Bisbee could find a way to welcome gay couples to town to get civil unions?’ I had the mayor’s ear a couple weeks later, and we started trying to figure out if there was a way we could do it,” Conners says. At first blush, Conners seems like an unlikely champion of the
gay-rights movement. When he isn’t doing city business, he’s a painting contractor. He showed up for his interview for this article in paint-splotched work duds. Conners was born in Tucson, but spent nearly a decade in Chicago, where he seemed to pick up some of the bluster the Windy City is known for. “I cannot claim to love Bisbee more than anybody else,” he writes on his official website, “but I would go toe to toe with someone claiming they did.” “Both Councilman Conners and I live in the ward with the high-
“ The gay marriage debate is hotter than Arizona asphalt, and Bisbee is in the thick of all of it.” est LGBT population,” says Bisbee Mayor Adriana Badal. “And proportionally, Bisbee itself has one of the highest gay and lesbian populations in the state. We decided we wanted to do something real. Not a resolution, but something that carries the force of law.” The problem is that in the U.S., most legal protections for marriage are codified at the state level. Conners and Badal knew they couldn’t grant rights to same-sex couples that the state wouldn’t recognize, but they did come up
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with an ordinance that granted as many legal protections as a small town could. Bisbee, for example, owns a cemetery, so the ordinance granted the same interment rights to same-sex couples and their families that the town gives to heterosexual families. The ordinance also granted same-sex families the right to get family passes at the public swimming pool, the right to the same land-use permits, and — perhaps most significantly — visitation rights and power of attorney to make medical decisions at the local hospital.
Other cities in Arizona have granted certain rights to same-sex couples, but none has gone as far as Bisbee has. The bill passed the city council 5-2. But that vote was only the beginning of a battle that has since put the town in the spotlight. For years, Bisbee has had a reputation as a gay friendly enclave in largely conservative Arizona. As the state has made national headlines in recent years for its controversial immigration law and Gov. Jan Brewer (R)’s high-profile skirmishes with President Barack Obama, Bisbee has stayed under the radar with a live-and-let-live attitude. Now the gay marriage debate is hotter than Arizona as-
Bisbee Mayor Adriana Badal (center) with Jennifer Garland (left) and Melissa Reaves.
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phalt, and Bisbee is in the thick of all of it.
EDDIE-X /FLICKR
A BOHEMIAN MINING TOWN Bisbee comes into view shortly after you pass through the Route 80 tunnel coming out of Tombstone. You’ll find it when you see the enormous “B” looking down from one of the Mule Mountains. Old Bisbee is splayed out in the valley below. Built in the 19th century, well before the onset of the automobile, the historic section of town is a pastiche of Old Europe in the American southwest, with narrow streets, closely bunched houses and a host of art galleries, coffee shops and restaurants. Bisbee was built around the Copper Queen copper mine, which for a time was one of the largest such mines in the country. When copper was booming, so was Bisbee. In the early 20th century, the town was the largest city between St. Louis and San Francisco. It even had its own stock exchange — the former exchange is now a bar. The mine itself ceased operation in 1975 when falling copper prices made it unprofitable, but its legacy is everywhere. Most notably, there’s the 300-acre, 900foot deep hole in the middle of
town, known as the Lavender Pit. It’s named after Harry Lavender, the former manager of the Phelps Dodge Corporation, the company that built it. Holes that big don’t fill up naturally, and filling it now would be prohibitively expensive. And so it remains. There are also slag piles scattered around town, you can still take tours of the old mine, and the Copper Queen Hotel is allegedly haunted. The town itself is made up of several smaller jurisdictions bunched together, the product of the various ethnically segregated mining camps that over time congealed into Bisbee proper. The more affluent ward features the
A view of the Lavender Pit copper mine.
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mansions where mining executives once lived. The grandest of them — the former residence of the mining company president — will soon be converted into a treatment center and residence for wounded veterans and their families. But by the time the mine closed down in the mid 1970s, Bisbee was already in the process of remaking itself into an enclave for artists, tourists and retirees. This wasn’t an uncommon destiny for America’s mining towns. Often isolated from other major population centers, mining and gold
rush towns tended to either atrophy into ghost towns or were repopulated by people with the sorts of alternative lifestyles often frowned upon in polite society. Jerome, Ariz., is another example. Jerome, like Bisbee, thrived as a copper town in the early 20th century, then became a hippie enclave in the 1970s and 80s. In 1985, the entire town of Jerome was raided by a team of federal and state drug cops, who arrested the police chief, two city council members and the former mayor on drug charges. Today in Bisbee, you’ll find live theater, art festivals, an annual parade of “art cars” (functional
Comedian/ Bisbee resident Doug Stanhope and Jenn Luria, owner of The Shady Dell, a gayfriendly motel in Bisbee.
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automobiles that locals turn into rolling works of art) and, among other eclectic businesses, Brian “Legz” Tagalog, a tattoo artist who works entirely with his feet (he was born without arms). This confluence of alternative lifestyles has long made Bisbee a welcoming place for gay people. Some businesses here are already planning for what they hope will be an influx of tourism as a result of the town’s support for civil unions, and possible new residents should the ordinance finally become law. One of them is The Shady Dell, a vintage 1950s trailer park that now serves as a quirky motel. The gravel lot features nine authentic,
This all may at first blush sound like a hippie heaven — or, say, Rush Limbaugh’s version of hell …
refurbished trailers that tourists can rent for the night, each decked out with vintage 1950s-era televisions, furniture, and decor. It’s a campy gay paradise, all the more savory given the irony of gay couples staying in lodging themed to reflect an era when gay couples would have found it difficult to find lodging. Owner Jenn Luria — who is a little bit Donna Reed, a little bit Suicide Girl — is more than ready for their patronage. “We already have a lot of gay couples stay here,” Luria says. “In fact, we just
The Shady Dell trailer park motel.
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hosted a lesbian wedding of sorts earlier this year. They called it ‘my big, fat, illegal, gay wedding.’” Stanhope, probably the town’s most famous resident, moved to Bisbee after driving through the town on trips between Los Angeles and El Paso, Texas. (Disclosure: Stanhope is a personal friend.) He stopped in once, was charmed by the place, and eventually moved in with his partner Amy “Bingo” Bingaman. “It’s really laid back here,” Bingaman says. “Very live and let live.” That attitude extends beyond
“ We just hosted a lesbian wedding of sorts earlier this year. They called it ‘my big, fat, illegal, gay wedding.’”
gay marriage. After Arizona voters passed a medical marijuana ballot initiative in 2012, Bisbee became one of the first towns in the state to host a dispensary. The Farmacy opened earlier this year. The town also passed a resolution denouncing SB 1070, Arizona’s controversial anti-immigration law. Mayor Badal herself recently traveled across the bor-
Bisbee resident Gretchen Baer with her “art car,” functional cars that locals turn into works of art.
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CHARLES NORFLEET/GETTY IMAGES
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der to help a non-profit group stock stations set up to supply migrants who may be planning to cross the border with food, water, and basic supplies. “However you might feel about immigration, the desert is starting to get hot this time of year,” Badal says. “This is about preventing deaths.” Badal has also set up a council of border mayors, made up of the heads of towns in Cochise County, Ariz., and towns in Mexico, aimed at promoting tourism, cooperation, and border management. “There’s so much history between these towns. And we’ve found that a lot of times we have more in common with these towns than we do our state capital,” Badal says. “So there’s a lot to be gained from cooperation, and working together toward economic development.” This all may at first blush sound like a hippie heaven — or, say, Rush Limbaugh’s version of hell — but the ethos in Bisbee feels more libertarian. Stanhope, who became active in the civil union debate after he’d heard conservative groups were planning to bus protesters in from out of town — once flirted with running for president as a member of the Libertarian Party. Badal points out that
“ Some people I’ve known for 40 or 50 years, they just became so hateful.”
Bisbee doesn’t just forge its own path on social issues. The town also recently attempted to opt out of a state water initiative that required towns and cities to pay into a state fund, whether they wanted to or not. Bisbee lost that fight, but it reflects more a spirit of localism than traditional progressivism. “Phoenix is always saying to D.C., ‘Leave us alone,’” Badal says. “But it’s a lot of ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ I suppose that’s just hu-
Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton offered his support to Bisbee Mayor Adriana Badal.
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man nature. But so is wanting to go your own way.”
BILL CLARK/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES
PHOENIX PUSHES BACK When the civil union ordinance passed in April, it made national news, and Badal quickly began to hear from other towns around Arizona — Jerome, Guadalupe, Tempe, Sedona and Star Valley — that wanted to pass something similar. “I had no idea so many other communities would react the way they did,” the mayor says. “They wanted to know what they could do — if they could use our ordinance as a template.”
But there was also some resistance. Within 12 hours of the ordinance passing, Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne raised concerns that Bisbee had usurped some of the state’s powers, and possibly violated a constitutional amendment passed in 2008 that defined marriage as “only a union of one man and one woman.” Horne threatened to sue to have the new policy overturned. Badal also encountered resistance from unexpected places. “I’ve lived in Bisbee all my life,” she says. “And some people I’ve known for 40 or 50 years, they just became so hateful. Hate directed at gays and lesbians, and directed at me for doing this. I
Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne raised concerns that Bisbee had usurped the state’s powers by passing the civil union ordinance.
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understand the religious objection to gay marriage. I do. But I just didn’t expect so much anger and hate to come from this.” Badal, the city attorney, and the city council then rewrote the ordinance, not to revoke or soften any of the legal rights the town intends to grant, but to make sure there’s no possibility the ordinance could be struck down in court for overreaching. “I think this is a conversation we need to have,” Badal says. It’s about dignity. It’s one of the last major civil rights battles.” Badal has already received support from officials in the cities listed above, as well as from Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton. Arizona may be home to immigration hawks
“ It can really only be good for Bisbee. We’ll get some notoriety, publicity and tourism. We’ll get goodwill. I don’t see a downside to playing this out.”
like Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and its legislature may be among the most conservative in the country, but there’s also some evidence that the state is more tolerant on social issues than the reputation of its politicians. A poll taken in May of last year, for example, found that just under 80 percent of Arizonans (including 63 percent of Republicans) support some form of legal recognition for same-sex couples. Another poll taken in March found that 63 percent of the state’s
The road to Bisbee, about 80 miles southeast of Tucson.
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residents supported a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, with just 19 percent supporting deportation. “Arizonans like to think of themselves as mavericks. We’re individualists. We do our own thing, forge our own way,” says Gretchen Baer, a local artist and political activist in Bisbee. (One of her projects is “Beadazzle the Border Wall,” in which she brings art supplies to Mexican children to paint and decorate the Mexican side of the barrier.) “But you hear that from politicians in Phoenix at the same time they’re putting limits on the decisions people make in their personal and social lives.” There initially was some concern that if Horne sued and Bisbee fought him, state officials might retaliate by withholding funds for other projects, like transportation. But back in Doug Stanhope’s backyard, Conners says he’d like to see a fight. “I think this is a battle that needs to be fought. I don’t want to back down if the state sues. And we shouldn’t,” he says. “It isn’t going to cost Bisbee any money. We have all the legal help we need. “It can really only be good for Bisbee,” Stanhope continues. “We’ll
get some notoriety, publicity and tourism. We’ll get goodwill. I don’t see a downside to playing this out.” But the Bisbee battle for civil unions ended with a win, if not as sweeping of one as some supporters may have wanted. On April 29, Horne and city attorneys from Bisbee agreed on new language. Bisbee will get to recognize same-sex unions, but in a way that Horne is confident won’t confer rights that the state can’t enforce. The new language stops a bit short of what some in the town had wanted, but may also serve as a template for the other towns in the state that wish to recognize same-sex couples, but don’t want the expense of a lawsuit from the state. As for Conners, he didn’t get the fight he might have hoped for, but it now looks like he will at least get the ordinance passed. “It’s also just the right thing to do — to be on the right side of history,” he says.
Reporter Radley Balko discusses how Bisbee can be an example for other cities in Arizona. Tap here for the full interview on HuffPost Live.
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Zachary Quinto as Spock.
How Dark Is Star Trek Into Darkness? (AND 24 OTHER URGENT QUESTIONS)
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TAR TREK Into Darkness — the sequel to 2009’s Star Trek — out in theaters across the United States on May 17. Will it live up to four years of pre-release hype? Are the crazy rumors about the film’s main villain true? Is it actually dark? On Thursday morning, we saw an advanced screening of Star Trek Into Darkness, so, here, as always, we answer every question that you could possibly have about Star Trek Into Darkness. (Warning: Some references are made to plot points that could be considered a spoiler, considering how secretive the plot of this movie has been.—Mike Ryan
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Is Star Trek Into Darkness as dark as its title teases? Not really. It’s basically at the same level (or non-level) of darkness as 2009’s Star Trek.
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Are the rumors about a villain in Star Trek Into Darkness true? The rumors are true: There is a villain in Star Trek Into Darkness.
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Are the rumors true that the villain in Star Trek Into Darkness is a villain we’ve seen in another Star Trek movie? I mean, look, that rumor has been floating out there for a while. And if you use your Google
machine, you’d be able to find out the answer to that pretty quickly at this point. All that I’ll say is this: Do you think the villain in a summer blockbuster with a reported budget near $200 million is a British guy named John Harrison, a.k.a. the most boring name in the world?
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For the rest of this piece, will you refer to the villain as “Most Boring Name In The World”? Yes.
Does Star Trek Into Darkness begin just like the preview that ran before The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey? Strangely, no. The two scenes that you saw in that 10-minute preview are now flipped. The film starts with Kirk (Chris Pine) and Bones (Karl
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Urban) running for their lives from the natives of an unidentified world, while Spock (Zachary Quinto) attempts to extinguish a volcano before it erupts. After that, we are introduced to a mysterious man named John Harrison Most Boring Name In The World (Benedict Cumberbatch) who offers his help to a family with a dying daughter.
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Is the crew of the Enterprise on its fiveyear mission that we see in the original series? No, but Kirk certainly wants to be a part of that five-year mission. His aspirations, though, are put into jeopardy after what happens in the opening scene on that unidentified world.
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Does Kirk break any rules on that planet? Kirk broke a lot of rules. Then, he lies about it. Spock, on the other hand, chooses to tell the truth, which results in Kirk being demoted. Before you ask, Kirk’s demotion doesn’t last long — he’s the captain of the Enterprise again soon enough — but this does create some interesting friction between Kirk and Spock about the nature of friendship.
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Does Kirk’s reinstatement as Captain have anything to do with Most Boring Name In The World? A lot. Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) puts Kirk in charge of finding Most Boring Name In The World, who is accused of two terrorist attacks against Starfleet. Marcus? Any relation to Carol Marcus? Admiral Marcus is the father of Carol Marcus (Alice Eve; played
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Karl Urban (left) as Bones and Chris Pine as Kirk, running for their lives from the natives of an unidentified world.
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by Bibi Besch in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of The Most Boring Name In The World Khan), who is on the Enterprise when Kirk and crew depart to find Most Boring Name In The World. Where is Most Boring Name In The World hiding? Qo’noS, which presents some problems.
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Because that’s where the Qo’noSians live? It’s where the Klingons live. At this early stage in Star Trek history, Klingons and The Federation are not on good terms. Going to Qo’noS in an effort to find Most Boring Name In The World could start a war.
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Are you giving too much of the plot of Star Trek Into Darkness away? Everything I’ve referenced happens in the first third of the movie.
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How fast does the plot of this movie travel? Around warp seven, I’d say. Did you like Star Trek Into Darkness more than Star Trek? Yes. But only because of what I personally like about Star Trek as a franchise.
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Tribbles? Though there is a Tribble in Star Trek Into Darkness, no. What I love about Star Trek actually kind of mirrors what I love about Star Wars: the relationship between the three main characters.
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So Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Leia Organa appear in Star Trek Into Darkness? Sadly, I’ll have to wait two more years to find out what J.J. Abrams decides to do with those three. In this case, however, it’s the relationship between Kirk, Spock and McCoy.
Kirk, Spock and McCoy are in the first movie, too. Did you not know that? My favorite scene of the first movie is the final one, when Kirk walks onto the bridge of the Enterprise,
Spock (left) and Kirk in a scene from Star Trek Into Darkness.
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wearing his yellow uniform, and starts barking orders at the crew. This scene basically establishes that all of these characters know each other now. The movie that came before that moment was about getting to that point. I don’t want to see Kirk and Spock fight each other; I want to see Kirk and Spock fight for each other. In Star Trek Into Darkness, Kirk and Spock fight for each other.
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What’s the worst thing about Star Trek Into Darkness? The Most Boring Name In The World’s plan seems, let’s say, unnecessarily complicated.
ZADE ROSENTHAL/ (C) 2013 PARAMOUNT PICTURES.
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Is this a plot hole? No, actually. The more I think about it, the more it does make sense. But there is a lot more “Why did this guy do what he did to those guys?”-type questions than you’d expect after a Star Trek movie. Again, though, the plot moves along so quickly, that these kind of questions are only things that are thought about after the movie is over.
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Do Scotty (Simon Pegg), Sulu (John Cho), Chekov (Anton Yelchin) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) have
much to do in Star Trek Into Darkness? Uhura has a major role, which has a lot to do with her ongoing affair with Spock. The other three all have nice moments to varying degrees, but the show belongs to Kirk, Spock and McCoy.
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Benedict Cumberbatch (left) as John Harrison and Karl Urban as Bones
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How does Star Trek Into Darkness compare to, say, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan? Here’s the thing: it really is impossible and unfair to compare these two movies (even if there are similar tropes throughout the two and it feels like Into Darkness does welcome the comparison). But you will do it anyway? Look, J.J. Abrams’ version of Star Trek isn’t the same as the one William Shatner stared in — we have known this for four years. And those clamoring
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for Shatner’s version would most likely hate the final result because Pine, Quinto and Urban are not Shatner, Nimoy and Kelly. Do you have a master’s degree in “stating the obvious”? Sadly, the University of Missouri discontinued its master’s program in “stating the obvious” right after I earned my bachelor’s degree in “stating the obvious.”
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Do you have a point? Probably not. I will say that before Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the original cast had
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filmed 79 episodes of the original series, lent their voices to 22 animated episodes, plus filmed a full movie. There was a chemistry there because those actors knew each other and liked each other (or, in some cases, hated each other) so much. This is only the second time this group of actors have worked together. If the new cast tried to pull of a direct clone of what the original cast did, it would be a miserable failure.
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A view of the Enterprise in the film.
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What’s the stupidest thing about Star Trek Into Darkness? That I’m forced to refer to the villain in this movie as Most Boring Name In The World.
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STRESS LESS
What Stresses Americans? Not Having Enough. BY LISA BELKIN
MERICANS ARE stressed. Ninety-one percent of us felt stressed by something in the month of March, with 77 percent of us feeling stressed “regularly” — defined as weekly or more. Men and women reported being stressed equally as often, though that stress can be triggered by somewhat different things. Those are among the results
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of a national survey of more than a thousand Americans 18 and older, conducted online for The Huffington Post by an internal research team. When people were asked about the biggest cause of their most recent stress, the most common answers tended to include all the things you might expect: too much work (or none at all), too little time, financial concerns, illness and rocky relationships. More than half of those surveyed named “Work” (or lack thereof) as their
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Exit biggest stressor, and full-time employees were more likely to bring this up than Americans in general (75 percent did so). Many answers relating to work stress spoke to the overwhelming pressure people face to do more than ever, in less time, for the same amount of money or less. In describing their stressors, people said things like “Overworked and under-appreciated,” “The feeling that I’m not doing well enough,” “Makes me feel that I can not do enough in the hours I have, and that my bills may never be paid” and “I feel like I can’t keep up.” In addition to having “too much” to do, another phrase that came up often was “not enough.” The feeling of missing something essential was pervasive, and nearly one in four responses included the word “not” in some form (i.e., don’t, can’t, won’t). While some lack essentials today, others worry about having them tomorrow — specifically, these include time, money, health and/or employment. We are perhaps more united than we realize in our constant striving to attain “enough” of these limited resources. It all seems to beg the question: when do we have enough? Will we
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5Amount MOST COMMON STRESS TRIGGERS of recently stressed Americans* who said this caused stress within the past month:
Worrying my home isn’t clean or organized enough
47% Feeling guilty about taking a break when I should’ve been more productive
48% Thinking about how I will afford my monthly bills
51% Worrying about my weight
56% Getting too little sleep
66% *91% of Americans were recently stressed. Sample size: 950
recognize it when we see it, or raise the bar and aim for more? When it comes to how stress makes us feel, those who’d recently been stressed were most likely to describe it as “pressure,” which can makes them feel “overwhelmed,” “inadequate,” “frustrated,” “exhausted” and “anxious.” Many who started the sentence “It makes me feel” completed it with other obvious negatives such as “bad,” “panicky,” and “like I should have done more” or “like I’ll never get everything done.” However, when respondents were asked specifically whether or not a wide range of things had caused them stress in the past month, the most common answer was “getting too little sleep,” which is, arguably, one stressor that individuals can actually do something about. (And it was one of the
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few things we looked at that has a relatively universally agreed upon range of what has a relatively universally agreed upon range of what “enough” means.) Among the 91 percent who felt stressed by something in March, only 5 percent felt that lack of sleep didn’t apply to them at all, while 66 percent said this did cause them stress. The other 29 percent may have gotten too little sleep but didn’t feel it caused them stress. While the majority of both genders faced this issue, women were 24 percent more likely to be
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The feeling of missing something essential was pervasive, and nearly one in four responses included the word ‘not’ in some form.” stressed by getting too little sleep than men. In order to understand how we can collectively get “enough” sleep, we wanted to first explore what was getting in the way of it, so we asked respondents to elaborate on their habits. Americans are not sleeping enough for many reasons, they told researchers. We are dealing with schedules
Exit that keep us up too late and get us up too early, the result of work, school or household responsibilities (“too much to do and too little time,” as one respondent said). Sleep can become the most negotiable item on the to-do list. Once in bed, respondents described difficulty in “turning off” the brain — so the stress of the day can lead to insomnia, which can lead to more stress the next day caused by lack of sleep. This effect was particularly bad for one individual who explained, “I am on medication which can cause insomnia so I’ve been worried about not being able to sleep and have thought about what I’ll do during the day to catch up on my sleep if I’m unable to sleep.” The results of lack of sleep include more stress — acting as a stress magnifier. “I was tired the next day and unable to deal with things, a little more cranky,” one person wrote. Another said: “My general level of stress and irritability is caused by too little sleep every night,” another said. When people were asked whether they had done a number of specific things to deal with their stress in the past month, the most common answers were “Talk to a friend
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MOST COMMON WAYS TO DEAL WITH STRESS Amount of recently stressed Americans* who said they did this to deal with stress within the past month: Exercised, Ate
46% Took a nap or slept, Took some alone time, Listened to music
53% Watched TV or a movie at home
54% Breathed deeply
55% Talked to friends / family
56% *91% of Americans were recently stressed. Sample size: 950
or family member” (56 percent), “Breathe deeply” (55 percent), “Watch TV or a movie at home” (54 percent) and “Take a nap or go to sleep” (53 percent) The good news is stress, respondents say, is not the only strain of emotions they feel regularly. While 77 percent of Americans felt stressed regularly in the past month, more reported feeling “Happy” (91 percent) and “Grateful” (89 percent) on a weekly or daily basis. How these all exist together in an American working day — how we compartmentalize them, or not, whether we use happiness and gratitude to tamp down stress — are questions to explore going forward. HuffPost invites readers to use the comments to explore their personal coping equations and to suggest questions we might ask in future surveys.
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TASTE TEST
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Can Canned Chicken Soup Tastes Like Mom’s? BY KRISTEN AIKEN
s your resident obsessive food nerds, we sometimes have to speak the hard food truths. Ready? You need to know that no canned chicken noodle soup will ever, ever beat the taste of homemade soup. But, this is real life, and in real life sometimes we get sick and/or lazy. And when we are sick and/or lazy, knowing which brand makes the best canned chicken noodle soup can really benefit your happiness.
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAMON DAHLEN
So, armed with plenty of water to combat the salt-induced dehydration, we blind-tasted 11 popular brands of chicken noodle soups in cans and boxes. We discovered a few things: 1) holy cow, there really is a lot of salt in these things (we’ve listed the sodium per serving), 2) even in a blind taste test, your tastebuds will recognize Campbell’s soup, and 3) sometimes the winner of our taste test really surprises us.
As always, this taste test was in no way influenced or sponsored by the brands included.
TASTE TEST
SHUTTERSTOCK / HANNAMARIAH
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TAP ON THE SOUPS FOR THE TASTERS’ VERDICTS
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TFU
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AP PHOTO/CAROLYN KASTER (GEN WELSH); LEO GRAND/ GETTY IMAGES (GENDER WAGE GAP); CULTURA/MATELLY/ GETTY IMAGES (PHONE); AIMSTOCK/ GETTY IMAGES (RICH PEOPLE); HOWARD SOKOL/GETTY IMAGES (HOSPITAL)
Top General Blames Military’s Sexual Assault Record on Hookup Culture
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Gender Wage Gap Causes Typical Woman to Miss Out on $443,360
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FORMER FBI AGENT: ‘NO DIGITAL COMMUNICATION IS SAFE’
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05 Rich People Prefer to Avoid Real-Life Contact With Poorer Friends
New Data Reveals Unbelievable Differences in Hospital Prices
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WORAPUT CHAWALITPHON/ GETTY IMAGES (TIGER MOMS); JASON B. KOERNER (MURAL); CAROL T. POWERS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (SALLIE MAE); KJEKOL/ GETTY IMAGES
Children of ‘Tiger Moms’ More Prone to Depression, Bad Grades
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South Florida Condemns Vibrant Mural, Fears Area will Start Looking ‘Like a Ghetto’
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EDUCATION PROFESSIONALS DISCOVER A WAY TO PROFIT TWICE OFF THE SAME STUDENT
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Lion Tacos, Anyone?
Rule Keeps Disabled Married Couple From Living Together
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