Sextant Volume X, Issue 2. Spring 2000

SEXTANT The Journal of Salem State College

Spring 2000

Volume X, No. 2

President Nancy D. Harrington Vice President of Academic Affairs Albert J. Hamilton Editor Margaret Vaughan, Psychology Assistant Editor William Coyle, English Editorial Board Susan Case, Biology Richard Lewis, Art John Mack, Management Eileen Margerum, English Michael Prochilo, English Eleanor Reynolds, Library Ellen Rintell, Education Vera Sheppard, Theatre & Speech Donna Vinson, History John Volpacchio, Art Design & Production of Volume X, No. 2 Susan McCarthy Photography Leon Jackson, Instructional Media Mark Keene, Art Department Publications Carol Morgan, Assistant Director Susan McCarthy, Graphic Artist Lorraine Jarnes, Graphic Artist Sextant is published biannually by the faculty of Salem State College.

Opinions expressed by writers are their own and do not necessarily reflect college policy.

Copyright © 2000 Salem State College 352 Lafayette Street, Salem, MA 01970-5353

editor’s

Note

We live in the Golden Age of Communication. Never has information been so readily available or so easily communicated. Each new technological advance seems to transform our way of living—with the potential of doing the same for everyone, worldwide.

Chris Mauriello, in his instructive essay on cyberspace and higher education, “Virtual College,” suggests that it is now possible for anyone, anywhere to receive a quality education—even though, as Chris points out, the implications of a virtual education may be for some faculty a bit disquieting. It is perhaps a much greater reach to imagine the futuristic world Ed Wilkens details in his book review of The Age of Spiritual Machines, but in the not too distant future people may have all the time in the world to obtain that quality education as technology may provide a means for us to live forever—online, that is.

While the optimism associated with this age of communication is almost palpable, it comes with a caveat. Beyond simply adjusting to the mere explosion of facts, we are simultaneously faced with how to organize these facts as well as how to evaluate the organization of these facts by others. Back in the 1950s, many people believed they were living the good life but, in his retrospective essay “Jack Kerouac’s Coming of Age,” Jay McHale reminds us that the Beat Generation had a very different view.

In the same vein, Bill Cunningham, in his dark play “Managed Care,” suggests an alternative view to our golden high-tech age—a growing indifference, if not a total loss of goodwill, toward one another.

And what are we to make of Elizabeth Malloy’s book review of The Word According to Eve, where she reports that there is now compelling documentation that many women have been seriously misrepresented, if not unjustifiably denigrated, in the Bible? Or Rich Levy’s fascinating essay on “Revolution(aires) on the Internet,” which highlights various revolutionary groups online and how they are using the Internet to draw attention to their struggles. Even Subcommandante Marcos is online, publishing journal entries and quoting Shakespeare—direct from the mountains of southern Mexico—while outlining the philosophy of the Zapatistas and describing their battle with the government of Mexico for a more representative democracy.

More troubling is Avi Chomsky’s scholarly lead essay, “Nationalism, Race, and History in the Caribbean,” where she provides us with a sobering reappraisal of Western Civilization’s glorified past with respect to the Caribbean. By placing major historical events into a larger world context, Avi articulates a history that is not so glorious.

While it is a lofty time of great expectations for modern technology, the growing responsibilities associated with such technology are becoming apparent. Information can no longer be viewed as composed of single unitary facts, but as facts imbedded within the larger context of time, place, and history. Each new organization of facts represents a view that is an alternative to other more traditional views. It is no longer enough to access and/or learn specific facts; it is imperative that we come to understand the various ways facts are organized. Today, a well-educated person must be able to deal with both of these dimensions.

—Margaret Vaughan

Telephone: 978-542-6253 Email: sextant@salem.mass.edu www.salem.mass.edu/sextant/

Postscript: The timing of Jay McHale’s article is especially fortuitous. Jay will be moderating a panel discussion on Jack Kerouac and his work,Thursday, March 23 from 2:304:30 p.m. in Charlotte Forten Hall.The discussion is one of a series of Kerouac-related events to be held at Salem State that day.

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Volume X, No. 2

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Nationalism, Race, and History in the Caribbean Aviva Chomsky

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Revolution(aries) on the Internet Richard Levy

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The Virtual College: Technotopia or End of Academe?

Christopher Mauriello

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Metalsmithing: A Series of Works Daniel J. Frye

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Managed Care William Cunningham

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Jack Kerouac’s Comes of Age Jay McHale

B O O K

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The Mind Electric Review of The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil Edward J. Wilkens

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A New View of Eve’s World Review of The Word According to Eve: Women in the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own by Cullen Murphy Elizabeth Malloy

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Responding to Silence History Disputed

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On the Cover: Global Communications © Digital Art/CORBIS

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Nationalism, Race, and History in the Caribbean Aviva Chomsky

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he field of history has a perhaps ignoble tradition of being inextricably bound with the process of state- and nation-building. In the nineteenth century, historians constructed national histories that defined and justified the existence and character of the different nationstates. Children were taught national history—a glorified, celebratory version of the national past—with the goal of creating patriotic citizens. Although in the late twentieth century the historical profession has increasingly distanced itself from this stance, nationalistic histories still live on in the popular mind, in elementary schools, as well as in film and other popular versions of history, in the United States and elsewhere.

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Even some of the more global courses and fields, like the “Western Civilization” that many colleges required a generation ago, tended to focus on heroes and elites, and to turn Western Civilization itself into a hero. However, over the past several decades, under the influence of worldwide and national social movements of the 1960s, the discipline of history became less parochial. Histories of third world peoples, ordinary people, and ethnic minorities—topics that had traditionally been left out of history books—were recognized as important areas of historical research and teaching.

Above: Two boys in front of an anti-American mural near Havana, 1995.

© Jan Butchofsky-Houser/CORBIS, circa 1995

Along with this shift, the new field of World History has beings cannot be divided into clearly separate races…. emerged and has increasingly been incorporated into curWherever people mingle and move about… all sorts of ricula and standards. The theories and approaches of intermediate mixed racial types come into existence….

World History bear only a dim resemblance to the old Racial purity among large and flourishing human commu“Western Civ,” which tended to focus on achievements, nities never existed.” However, our ideas about the existand on development and continuities in what was underence of races came into being over the past 500 years in stood as a unique and singular historical tradition—that of the context of a particular set of human migrations and the West. World history takes a very different approach: it interactions. Since these ideas do still condition so much tries to understand historical of our thinking, it is particuprocesses, and sees these prolarly interesting to analyze In the United States people tend to cesses as occurring on a world how they came into being, and scale. World history themes how they changed over time. perceive racial categories as discrete tend to be topics like human The contingent meanings and have a generally binary view of race, of racial migrations, cultural excategories are particchanges, and the interaction dividing humanity basically into black ularly clear to those who have of humans with the environdone comparative studies and white. In Latin America, where ment. World History conon the meaning of race in ceives of economic and racial categories tend to be more fluid, the United States and Latin cultural development as ocAmerica. In the United States an understanding that most people curring in a global context, people tend to perceive racial rather than separately within are racially mixed is the norm. categories as discrete and have discrete cultures or countries. a generally binary view of race, Individual traditions, or the dividing humanity basically into achievements of particular civilizations, look very differblack and white. In Latin America, where racial categories ent when placed in a world context: they become part tend to be more fluid, an understanding that most people of a larger process. are racially mixed is the norm. There was not necessarily more racial mixture in Latin America; what is different is the system of categories that people use. In the United The History of Race from Global, Social, States, for example, the offspring of European men and and Cultural Perspectives African women were classified as African American; in Latin America, they belonged to a new category, mulato nterestingly, at the same time that history has become (or, in Haiti, mulâtre) meaning mixed-race. Thus in the more global, it has also become more particular. TurnUnited States, some people today identify themselves as ing attention away from the heroic elites has allowed biracial, a category that can only exist if one assumes that historians to focus both on global forces and patterns and races are discrete categories. In Latin America, such a on the lives of ordinary people. Social and cultural historiterm or concept makes no sense. ans have tried to reconstruct the ways of life, historical agency, and the ideas of the apparently powerless as well A world historical perspective illuminates the origins as the powerful. The subfield of intellectual history went of today’s racial hierarchies. While many societies are ethbeyond its roots, which lay in studying the cultural crenocentric in that they consider their beliefs and customs ations of elites, and began to look also at the development to be superior to those of others, modern racism emerged of popular culture and the social construction of the very in contexts of one people dominating and subjugating idea of cultural groups and nations. Concepts that previanother. European domination of the indigenous societies ously had been taken as a given—like the concept of race of the Americas, and enslavement of Africans, were sup—were called into question and studied as social and ported by ideological systems claiming European superiorcultural constructions in a global context. ity. Global structures of power were replicated at the local level in colonial societies, as people of European origin World historians are well aware that race is a category maintained political and economic control of peoples of that is socially constructed, and that the ways it has been indigenous and African origin; racial ideologies and social understood, and the meanings attached to it, are different structures were mutually reinforcing. in different societies. What we perceive as races today are The nineteenth century brought several shifts in the patall the result of millennia of human migrations and intertern of European domination and the ideologies associated actions, and the way we understand our history conditions with this domination. European countries lost hold of their the way we categorize people according to race. As world colonies in both North and South America; the European historian William McNeill (1963) points out, “classificatrade in African slaves, and later the institution of slavery, tion by skin color distorts and confuses the genetic facts ended. Or perhaps we should say that the American coloof human variation, which are much more complicated nies freed themselves from European domination, and that than any difference indicated by skin color alone. Human

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the slaves liberated themselves. At the same time, however, Europeans turned their colonizing attention to Africa, and with the aid of new medical and technological developments, conquered almost all of the continent. The newly independent United States maintained the institution of slavery and expanded its conquest of native Americans and, in 1848 and 1898, began what was to prove a long-term imposition of hegemony on Latin Americans as well. A new “scientific” racism, as developed by European thinkers in the late nineteenth century, was eagerly adopted by many in the Americas as they sought to maintain racial inequalities in the aftermath of emancipation.

tions are the descendants of these post-1492 migrants.

But the peoples of these two neighboring islands engaged with the same world historical processes in very different ways, leading to sharp differences in ideology and identity among the three countries.

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Reprinted by permission of The University of Wisconsin Press

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From Latin American History: A Teaching Atlas by Cathryn L. and John V. Lombardi © 1983

The Caribbean played a central role in world history after 1492. The islands held strategic and economic importance for the increasingly powerful Europeans, and European control of the Caribbean played a crucial role in shifting the balance of power in the old world. American silver gave Europeans access to the lucrative Asia trade, from which they had been Although Europeans elaboexcluded by Europe’s relative In very general terms, Haitians tend rated ideologies of racial difeconomic and technological ference in the context of their backwardness. Since Spain to emphasize their African ancestry, conquests, these ideologies the silver-producing while Cubans take pride in their racial controlled were also an integral compoareas of the American mainnent of racial thought within land, other European countries mixture, and Dominicans celebrate the colonies. As Latin Ameristruggled over the tiny islands can elites set about building their Hispanic (i.e., Spanish) origins. of the Caribbean. As England, new nations, they proclaimed France, Holland, and Denmark the genetic superiority of gained footholds, they transwhites, sponsored racial whitening schemes through Europlanted Indian and Muslim sugar-producing techniques, pean immigration, and denounced what they called the and West African slaves. As Trinidadian historian Eric Willcultural barbarism of their countries’ indigenous and Afriiams, an early exponent of world history, wrote in 1964, can-origin populations. At the same time, however, many “the triangular trade made an enormous contribution to colonial subjects took an active role in interpreting and reBritain’s industrial development. The profits from this trade writing the racial scripts written by the imperial powers, fertilized the entire productive system of the country.” and in fact used them in the process of their own liberation from colonial rule.

Thus, concepts of race and identity in Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic were forged in the context of global events of the pre-twentieth century: conquest and migration, slavery and emancipation, colonial rule and The Caribbean Case struggles for independence. In the twentieth century, these f we examine the social conditions were replicated in construction and political neo-colonial rule as the United meanings of race in three States invaded and occupied all Caribbean countries—Cuba, three countries, and in a new the Dominican Republic, and wave of labor migration, giving Haiti—we can see how global rise to new conceptualizations forces and ordinary lives inof nationalism. tersect. The three countries are neighbors: the Dominican However, despite the simiRepublic and Haiti share the lar world historical position island of Hispaniola, which of the three countries, and the in itself is a direct result of similarities of their trajectories European competition over from the fifteenth through the the Caribbean in the 1600s twentieth centuries, their and 1700s, and Cuba lies bepopulations today speak very tween Hispaniola and Florida. differently about race and In all three, European expannation. In very general terms, sion after 1492 brought about Haitians tend to emphasize the virtual destruction of intheir African ancestry, while digenous populations and the Cubans take pride in their rarepopulation of the territories cial mixture, and Dominicans with European masters and celebrate their Hispanic (i.e., African slaves. Today’s populaSpanish) origins. Looking at

© Bettmann/CORBIS

Eighteenth century, hand-colored engraving of Toussaint L’Ouverture participating in the successful revolt against French power in St. Domingue (Haiti).

the ways that the peoples of these areas interacted with ing national institutions. The leaders of the new nation world historical processes can help explain why. The three had no interest in challenging the racial hierarchies of the countries’ different experiences of independence and the colonial period, including slavery. abolition of slavery, and the Haiti, in 1804, was the secways that the peoples of these ond country of the Americas countries learned and underThus, the meaning of citizenship in to attain independence and its stood these experiences, route to independence was the first two independent countries shaped their responses to very one that was to be much more similar events in the twentieth of the Americas was diametrically common in world historical century. Thus the ways that terms: The colonized (African opposed, in racial terms: people have understood their slaves and free people of Afriown histories have played key in the United States, can and mixed origin) rose up roles in how they understand, against the colonizers (French to be a citizen was to be white; and act in, the present. planters) and declared their in Haiti, to be a citizen was to be black. own independence. Unlike the The United States was unique in its colonial path to British slaveholders in North independence in that it was America, who emerged as the elements from among the colonizers (the British) rather leaders of the new nation, French slaveholders in Haiti than the colonized (native Americans and Africans) who fled—many to Cuba—and the ex-slaves declared their led the struggle for independence and set about constructnew country “free” in the sense of political independence 5

and the abolition of slavery. Thus, the meaning of citizenship in the first two independent countries of the Americas was diametrically opposed, in racial terms: In the United States, to be a citizen was to be white; in Haiti, to be a citizen was to be black.

© Bettmann/CORBIS

ism, that is, the idea that the eastern half of Hispaniola should be an independent political unit, was primarily a Hispanic-identified movement that fought not against Europe and slavery, but against Haiti and the African identities it promoted. To construct a Dominican identity that opposed Haiti, independence leaders relied on promoting After the Haitian revolution, the U.S. model of indeHispanicism. The Dominican Republic was the only forpendence with slavery could not be repeated: The fear of a mer Spanish colony to base its slave uprising similar to Haiti’s drive for independence on its was too great. Slaveholders Spanish character. Every other Thus in Haiti, independence and national everywhere realized that inSpanish colony strove to build dependence would threaten identity were associated with the an identity that emphasized its their ability to maintain the promotion of a black or African identity, difference from Spain. system of slavery, and that only by coming to terms Cuban independence folin the Dominican Republic with a with abolition could they lowed yet a third route. Since white or Hispanic identity, and in Cuba, Spain’s top priority had been hope to build a free nation.

The Haitian revolution was its mainland American silverwith racial and cultural mixture. also a turning point in the producing colonies, its interest history of the institution of in Caribbean sugar production slavery. Just four years later, in 1808, Britain abolished the was weaker than that of other European powers. Thus slave trade, and the slave system slowly and painfully beSpain’s Caribbean colonies (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the gan to crumble. Only Cuba and Brazil maintained the inDominican Republic) had a lower proportion of slaves stitution longer than the United States, with Spain than did the colonies of France, England, and Holland—a implementing a gradual abolition in Cuba between 1880historical difference that is still obvious in the phenotypic 1886, and the Princess-Regent of Brazil, which was the make-up of today’s Caribbean populations. Nevertheless, only American country to maintain a monarchy, abolishing after the Haitian Revolution, and Spain’s subsequent loss slavery there in 1888. of its mainland colonies, Spain intensified its production of sugar—and its importation of slaves—especially in Cuba.

Haitian national identity and institutions, then, were The Cuban independence movement that emerged by the based upon an interpretation of Haitian history that saw end of the nineteenth century clearly constructed a Cuban their independent country as the embodiment of black identity that transcended race. “To be Cuban is more than liberation. The white population fled. In the twentieth being white, more than being black, more than being mucentury, the ways that people understood this history latto,” wrote Cuban independence icon José Martí. Cuban and the ways that they behaved as historical actors when nationalists would faced with U.S. occuconstruct a country pation mutually rein“with all, and for the forced each other. good of all.” Slavery In the Dominican and racial inequality, Republic, national independence leaders independence was argued, were inherent established very difin colonial rule, and ferently. Newly indewould be abolished pendent Haiti invaded only through political the Spanish-held eastindependence. ern half of the island in 1822 and drove out Thus in Haiti, the Spanish. The new independence and naHaitian rulers quickly tional identity were abolished slavery, and associated with the the period of Haitian promotion of a black rule led to what one or African identity, in scholar has termed the Dominican Rean African “cultural public with a white or renaissance” in the Hispanic identity, and region (Davis cited in Cuba, with racial in Austerlitz 1997). and cultural mixture.

Toussaint L’Ouverture (right) at the signing of the treaty granting Haitian independence.

Dominican nationalHowever, the color 6

© Bettmann/CORBIS

Woodcut of slaves with a supervisor harvesting tobacco in Cuba, circa 1840.

hierarchies of the colonial period did not disappear even in Cuba and Haiti. In some respects “colorism,” or a hierarchy of skin tone, became even more pronounced once the imperial rulers were no longer part of the picture and the need for national unity receded.

Cuba remained a U.S. protectorate until the Platt Amendment—written by the U.S. Senate and incorporated into Cuba’s constitution as a condition for ceding sovereignty from the U.S. military government back to Cuba—was abrogated in 1934; U.S. forces occupied Haiti from 19151934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924, setting up military governments in both countries.

Despite their divergences in the nineteenth century, the three countries entered the twentieth century as formally independent nations, in conEstablishing hegemony over trast to most of the rest of the the Caribbean, or at least over In 1898 the United States occupied Caribbean, which remained the “independent” countries of under colonial rule until the the Caribbean, as the islands Cuba and claimed Puerto Rico, late twentieth century. Howthat remained in European ever, independence was comsetting the stage for a thirty-year period hands were free of U.S. interpromised by an increasing vention, played a key role in of repeated military and political dependence on the United the U.S. rise to global power, States, which had gradually intervention in the Caribbean known to which included the building of become the largest investor the Panama Canal and expanU.S. historians as “dollar diplomacy.” in, and market for, the islands’ sion into the Pacific. The tightsugar. This economic depenening of economic relations dence was formalized in a between the United States and new political dependence when the United States entered Latin America progressively excluded European interests, the Spanish-American War, a war clearly named by the imand also precluded industrial development in Latin America perial powers, who erased the Caribbean country in which until the Depression and the Second World War brought the war was fought. Cubans call it the Spanish-Cubanabout a shift in U.S. policies. In the pre-Second World American War. In 1898 the United States occupied Cuba War period, U.S. military involvement was limited to the and claimed Puerto Rico, setting the stage for a thirty-year northern regions: Mexico, Central America, and the Caribperiod of repeated military and political intervention in the bean; after the War, the U.S. military sphere broadened to Caribbean known to U.S. historians as “dollar diplomacy.” include all of South America.

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In some respects, the results of U.S. occupation were compelling interpretations of their pasts and presents that similar in the three countries. U.S. investors sought access opposed foreign domination and justified sovereignty. to cheap land and cheap, docile labor. They also needed n Cuba, a white, racist version of nationalism hysterigovernments that would protect these interests. The U.S. cally attacked black identity, black political organizing, government made no humanitarian pretenses during the and black (Haitian) immigration as threats to Cuban first half of the century: the goal of U.S. policy was to unity and Cuba’s ability to withstand foreign domination. promote the profits of U.S. investors. In the words of In 1912, Cuban military and paramilitary forces massacred Woodrow Wilson in 1907: “Concessions obtained by finansome four to seven thousand Cuban blacks in eastern ciers [that is, U.S. investors] must be safeguarded by minisCuba, the very area where the new U.S. sugar companies ters of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations were taking over. For many poor whites, the governbe outraged in the process.” His Secretary of State, Robert ment’s attempt to scapegoat Lansing, elaborated in 1914 poorer black Cubans for that “the integrity of other When Fidel Castro welcomed Pope John even the country’s loss of political American nations is an inciand economic sovereignty was dent, not an end.” And Calvin Paul II to Cuba in January of 1998, successful. Later in the 1910s, Coolidge concurred in 1925: he clearly drew on this thread nationalists turned their at“North Americans and their tacks on Haitian immigrants, property are a part of the of racial and social justice in the whom they described as “a bad general domain of the nation, construction of Cuban patriotism virus” that posed a great even when abroad…. There “threat to our nationality.” is a distinct and binding obliwhen he began by denouncing gation on the part of selfSome Cubans of color prothe Spanish destruction of respecting governments to moted an opposing nationalafford protection to the perCuba’s indigenous population. ism, however.

They turned to sons and property of their citiJosé Martí’s radical vision of zens, wherever they may be.” social and racial justice as being the essence of Cuban independence. They proclaimed But Cubans, Haitians, and Dominicans insisted upon the unity of the goals of emancipation, racial liberation seeing their sovereignty as an end, not an incident. Their and national liberation, and emphasized the essential black prior histories of national identity and their paths to indecontribution to those goals. By the 1920s, many white inpendence shaped the way that they responded to this new tellectuals were moving closer to this position, promoting round of foreign control. In Cuba, a brief and relatively the Afro-Cubanist movement and celebrating Afro-Cuban bloodless occupation by the U.S. military (1898-1902) succulture. Some radical nationalists began to identify U.S. ceeded in establishing a collaborationist government, and imperialism, rather than black immigration, as the real the U.S.-dominated sugar industry thrived. In the Dominithreat to Cuban sovereignty. The Cuban revolution of can Republic, a guerrilla war opposed the U.S. invasion, 1959 explicitly denounced racism, which revolutionaries and a longer occupation created a domestic military force, linked to colonial (or neo-colonial) domination, and drew the National Guard, to continue the occupation policies afupon José Martí’s ideas of political and racial liberation. ter withdrawal in 1926. U.S. investors established a flourishing sugar industry in the eastern part of the island. In When Fidel Castro welcomed Pope John Paul II to Haiti, however, guerrilla resistance turned occupation into Cuba in January of 1998, he clearly drew on this thread a long-term war. Thousands of Haitians were killed, and of racial and social justice in the construction of Cuban despite the nineteen-year occupation and the creation and patriotism when he began by denouncing the Spanish dearming of the Haitian gendarmes to assist in carrying out struction of Cuba’s indigenous population. “In the course occupation policies, unrest and resistance prevented the of centuries, over a million Africans ruthlessly uprooted occupation from achieving its economic goals. from their distant lands took the place of the enslaved natives already exterminated. They made a remarkable These relationships had cultural as well as political, contribution to the ethnic composition and the origins military, and economic aspects. In each country, foreign of our country’s present population, where the cultures, occupation and domination led to a resurgence of nationalthe beliefs and the blood of all participants in the dramatic ism, and in each case, nationalism was shaped by citizens’ history have been mixed.” This denunciation of Spanish understandings of their own histories. The occupations, colonialism and slavery was the preface to Castro’s comand the spectacular growth in sugar production in Cuba mentary on the present: “Today, Holy Father, genocide is and the Dominican Republic, along with the war and the attempted again when by hunger, illness, and total ecoreinstitution in Haiti of forced labor—under the more nomic suffocation some try to subdue this people that rebenign name of corvee—led to a huge migration of Haitian laborers to both Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Nafuses to accept the dictates and the rule of the mightiest tionalists in all three countries attempted to construct economic, political, and military power in history,” the

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© Bettmann/CORBIS

Illustration showing a group of men with torches setting ablaze the sugar cane fields and the houses of the plantation during the Cuban War of Independence, circa 1869.

United States. Clearly, interpreting the past is a crucial element of understanding the present, and just as clearly, interpreting Cuba’s place in the world is a crucial element in understanding what it means to be Cuban.

As the occupation

The metaphor of slavery was a constant in anti-occupation rhetoric and literature.

The U.S. occupation, and the ways that Haitians elaborecreated a labor rated their resistance to the In occupied Haiti (1915occupation, contributed to a system in Haiti that approximated 34), it was initially the revitalization of black identity slavery and facilitated the export of tens among intellectuals. Indepenmulâtre elite who collaborated with the U.S. occupiers, ideologies were one of thousands of workers to U.S.-owned dence-era while resistance centered in factor that contributed to the sugar plantations in Cuba and the the primarily black peasant strength of peasant resistance population, those most to the occupation; these two Dominican Republic, the sense that immediately affected by the phenomena intertwined with occupation’s land takeovers the growing intellectual patriHaitians were being re-enslaved for and forced labor policies. otic movement. When the dicthe profits of white masters grew.

Drawing upon the ideologies tator Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti’s independence perose to power in the 1950s, riod, peasant rebels associated political independence with he successfully elaborated a populist appeal in the name black sovereignty, and identification with blackness became of noirisme, or a sort of Haitian version of Black Pride, in opposition to the outside powers who had so long domia political, rather than a phenotypic, identification. As the nated the country. Thus black identity was used in active occupation recreated a labor system in Haiti that approxiresistance to the U.S. occupation, but it was also used in mated slavery and facilitated the export of tens of thouan attempt to manipulate popular support by a leader sands of workers to U.S.-owned sugar plantations in Cuba who kept the country closely inside the U.S. sphere of and the Dominican Republic, the sense that Haitians were influence. being re-enslaved for the profits of white masters grew.

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In the Dominican Republic too, a strong peasant resisthe sugar industry, but many were peasant farmers. Like tance emerged after the U.S. occupation in 1916. HowCuba’s nativist campaigns of the 1910s, this one used naever, the intellectual promotion of Dominican identity that tionalist and even anti-imperialist rhetoric to engage in a accom- panied this peasant form of ethnic cleansing that mobilization reconstructed targeted the powerless rather The ways that people in the three the “Hispanic sense of self ” than the imperialist power. that had mobilized the popucountries responded to U.S. imperialism In both countries, racism lation against Haiti one hunbased on color intertwined in the twentieth century were shaped dred years earlier (Austerlitz with racism based on national 1997). The dictator Rafael origin, and politicians used by historical events tracing back at Trujillo, who rose to power racism and nativism to divert least until 1492, but also by the ways through the U.S.-sponsored the popular eye from their Guardia Nacional, used own collaboration with foreign that the peoples of the three countries “Hispanism, whiteness, and However, in Cuba, interpreted and understood these events. powers.

Catholicism” to appeal to people of color could contest Dominican nationalism (Jorge their political and social exOf particular importance were the cited in Austerlitz 1997). Like clusion by turning to the meanings of independence and freedom, mainstream version of history, Duvalier’s, Trujillo’s populist approach combined personalwhich celebrated emancipation and the ways that these intertwined ism with terror; but the and African heritage. with the meanings of race and identity. difference in the way they shaped their populist appeals was literally the difference World History, National(ist) Histories, between black and white. and Race Hispanic nativism as a populist mobilizer reached its ooking at these three countries in their world historpeak in 1937, with Trujillo’s “Dominicanization of the ical context helps us to see the similarities in the border” campaign, which resulted in the slaughter of from forces that shaped them: European expansion, fifteen to thirty thousand Haitians near the Haitian border colonization, slavery, sugar, migration, U.S. expansion, region (Austerlitz 1997). Some were recent migrants to

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© Bettmann/CORBIS

U.S. Marines guarding Haitian prisoners of war on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, February 25, 1920.

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nationalism. At the same time, we can see how people make their own history. The Haitian Revolution of 1804 and the Cuban Revolution of 1959 both had enormous impacts on world events and on the decisions and actions taken by the world powers of the time. But beyond these great events, people also made history in the ordinary, everyday world, in the ways that they understood their identities and acted on them.

In each case, individuals sought justice within their own countries, even as those countries sought independence and freedom in the international sphere. People—and peoples—lived and made history, and they also wrote history. In every historical period, people analyze and interpret the past in a way that helps them make sense of the present. Nationalist histories, which glorify the heroes and attempt to impose a cultural or ethnic homogeneity on the nation, can serve both liberatory and repressive purposes. But they fail to help us make sense of a world characterized by interaction rather than by isolation, and by people who stubbornly insist on continuing to make their own histories.

Cultural factors, in this case, ordinary people’s understandings of their own histories and identities, shape the ways that they act and continue to construct and write their history. The ways that people in the three countries responded to U.S. imperialism in the twentieth century were shaped by historical events tracing back at least until 1492, but also by the ways that the peoples of the three countries interpreted and understood these events. Of particular importance were the meanings of independence and freedom, and the ways that these intertwined with the meanings of race and identity.

Works Cited Austerlitz, P. (1997). Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

McNeill, W. H. (1997). A History of the Human Community: Prehistory to the Present (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.

Williams, E. (1964). Capitalism and Slavery. London: Andre Deutsch.

Nationalist histories, which glorify the heroes and attempt to impose a cultural or ethnic homogeneity on the nation, can serve both liberatory and repressive purposes.

John Hurley

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n each country, ordinary people engaged in a dialogue with the dominant, patriotic narrative of history, and used elements of the dominant ideology to contest their social positions, and to contest U.S. domination.

Political leaders likewise tried to manipulate popular understandings of liberation, patriotism, and identity to pursue their own agendas. In Cuba, people of color were able to draw upon the commitment to racial justice that was imbedded in Cuba’s drive for independence in order to pursue their rights in the twentieth century. However, the association of political independence with racial justice also allowed political leaders to attempt to silence racial issues by claiming that raising them threatened national unity and even political sovereignty. In Haiti, the twentieth century U.S. occupation created a space for peasant agendas to become nationalist agendas and for color to be politicized, as adherence to lightness was associated with collaboration, and blackness with resistance, regardless of actual phenotype. In the Dominican Republic, political leaders claimed that blackness was an attribute of Haitians, and that Dominicanness and blackness were antithetical concepts. This formulation paved the way for one of the single worst massacres of blacks in the history of the Americas.

Aviva Chomsky is an associate professor of history and coordinator of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Salem State College. Her books include West Indian Workers and the United Food Company in Costa Rica, winner of the 1997 New England Council of Latin American Studies Best Book Award, and Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, co-edited with Aldo Lauria-Santiago. The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics, co-edited with Barry Carr and Pamela Smorkaloff, is forthcoming.

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Revolution(aries) on the Internet Richard Levy

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t is frequently very difficult to understand what’s going on in Latin America. There are so many things happening, and most of what we can read about ongoing events—in English anyway—is what is presented in dribs and drabs by the mainstream media, complete with the orientation and bias it usually carries. Increasingly, though, there is another way to understand the events that may catch your attention as you read the newspaper. Just a half an hour at the computer can put you in contact with information and sources about these events in English that can change how you understand them.

The Internet provides access to information that allows, if not forces, people to critically examine developing events and the information about these events that they have re12

ceived through more traditional avenues. While much of this information does not include the bias of the U.S. media, it carries its own bias. Anyone can post anything s/he wants on the Internet, from campaign ads to white supremacist Web pages. Thus, it is critical to think analytically about the source, its orientation, and, if there are criteria for being published in that site, what those criteria are and how they are implemented. Analyses on the Internet are not necessarily reliable. But all of that notwithstanding, information on the Internet is reliable in coming to understand how different people or groups perceive and/or portray different issues. There are many cases in which the Internet can provide fascinating insights into ongoing conflicts and revolutions throughout the world. Take Latin America as an example.

Mexico n January 1, 1995, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, linking the United States, Mexico, and Canada into a free trade zone, which means that goods and investment can move freely among the three countries without tariffs or other barriers to trade. On the same day, there was an armed uprising in Chiapas Province in southern Mexico. It was organized by the Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) or the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, better known as the Zapatistas. After a short period of fighting, during which time the Zapatistas took control of several small towns in the poor region populated mainly by descendents of the Mayan and other indigenous peoples, the Zapatistas withdrew into the mountains under extreme pressure from the Mexican military.

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Who were the Zapatistas? Where did they come from?

What did they want? Who supported them? Were they terrorists, revolutionaries, bandits, or what?

In the United States, the armed nature of the uprising did lead to considerable short-term coverage of the uprising and the Zapatistas. This coverage included Mexican government denunciations of the “terrorists,” some discussions of the poverty that the large Indian population of Chiapas faced, and even some discussions of the linkage between NAFTA and the uprising. But, as is frequently the case, the issue was largely reduced to individual personalities. In this case, the focus was on the Zapatistas’ enigmatic and charismatic leader/spokesperson, Subcommandate Marcos, whose actual identity remains unknown to this day. Much of the more in-depth coverage available in the Mexican and Latin American press was not accessible to most Americans, partly because of the difficulty in obtaining the coverage and partly because it was in Spanish.

However, roaming the Internet shortly after the uprising occurred, one would have come across some very interesting information directly from the Zapatista side and in English. Now remember, this is a small group in southern Mexico that has just launched an armed uprising with, at most, several hundred outdated weapons. The Mexican army has occupied the area with thousands of soldiers, tanks, and armored cars. The guerrillas have retreated into the mountains. How and when would they be heard from again?

On March 5, 1995, Subcommandante Marcos’s incredible journal entry of February 20, the sixth day of the Zapatistas’ strategic retreat, appeared on the Web in English.

In a whimsical writing style—completely foreign to American, but not to Latin American, politics—Marcos describes the absurdity of their situation and the measures they took with Federal troops passing by, only 500 meters away: …we were going to drink our urine. I say ‘we were going to’ because we didn’t do it as we all began to vomit after the first swallow. Previously, there had been a discussion. Although all of us had been in agreement that each person should drink his/her own urine, Camilo said that we should wait until night came so that the urine gets cold in the canteens, and we can drink it thinking that it is soda….

Finally we decided to take a sip, all at the same time, to see what would happen. I don’t know who began the ‘concert,’ but almost immediately all of us began vomiting what we had ingested, and also what we hadn’t.

We were left even more dehydrated, lying on the ground. Like dunces, stinking of urine.

I think that our image was hardly soldier-like.”

Having parodied the macho image of the guerrilla, he then goes through a series of statements outlining the Zapatistas’ strategic position: — It was not the EZLN who broke off the dialogue and reinitiated the war. It was the government.

— It was not the EZLN who feigned political willingness while preparing a military attack and betrayal.

It was the government.

— It was not the EZLN who detained and tortured prisoners, who murdered, who bombed and strafed, robbed and plundered….

Previous page: Graphic from the Zapatistas in Cyberspce homepage.

Above: Web site posted by a support base of the Zapatistas.

In light of the myths then circulating about Subcommandante Marcos’s identity and political links, he provides a satirical list of fifteen “confessions” ranging from “…in the company of other Mexicans, the majority Mayan Indians, (we) decided to make a paper (The Mexican Constitution) live up to its words,” to “(Marcos) has been irreverent with all of the truths that are called supreme, except those that emanate from being a human being and that they are, to declare clearly, dignity, democracy, liberty and justice,” to “(Marcos) believes… that 13

Mexico is something more than six letters and an underpriced product on the international market.”

In a similarly poetic vein, perhaps playing on Émile Zola’s famous 1898 letter during the Dreyfus affair entitled “j’accuse,” he answered a series of accusations: — The white accuse him of being dark.

Guilty.

— The dark ones accuse him of being white.

Guilty.

— The machos accuse him of being feminine.

Guilty.

— The feminists accuse him of being macho.

Guilty.

— The communists accuse him of being anarchist.

Guilty.

— The reformists accuse him of being ultra (left).

Guilty.

— The ultras accuse him of being reformist.

Guilty.

— The Stock Exchange accuses him of ruining their breakfast.

Guilty.

— The serious ones accuse him of being a jokester.

Guilty.

— Everyone accuses him of everything bad that has happened.

Guilty.

that if someone is interested enough in a particular issue, a brief search of key words could easily provide access to revealing information not available elsewhere. The Zapatistas are a particularly interesting example of this.

Since the uprising, the “Zapatistas in Cyberspace” Web site <www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver /zapsincyber/html> has appeared. [All Web sites listed here were active at the time of publication.] It provides a guide to over sixty related Web sites providing updated and interesting information that is not available in the mainstream U.S. media. In addition to fascinating pictures and graphics, it provides information on the Zapatistas’ overall political position, namely, their criticism of the Mexican government as anti-democratic and corrupt; their criticisms of NAFTA as undermining the ability of small farmers to make a living or have their demands heard; and their calls for greater political and economic democracy for all Mexicans regardless of race, gender, or income. It also links to sites ranging from the Zapatistas’ own homepage, through information on Chiapas, to a “What You Can Do” homepage about the Zapatistas, southern Mexico, NAFTA, and related struggles throughout Latin America in both English and Spanish.

Does this means that everything on the Zapatista Web sites is true? Not at all. But it does provide an accurate view of how an important political actor in Mexico views the situation and it casts doubt on the Mexican government’s version of events, which is far more accessible in the United States. As such, it provides some basis for evaluating the situation more objectively.

What’s perhaps more surprising about the linkage beIn closing, after quoting Shakespeare’s sonnets, he extween the Zapatistas and the Internet is that it is not only plains why the Zapatistas are calling for peace rather than a tool through which the Zapatistas reached out and further fighting, and why they are not claiming the mantle shared information to develop their policies and strateof revolutionary leadership in gies—as Indonesians did in Mexico—as many other Latin May 1998 in overthrowing the …if someone is interested American armed groups have Suharto government, which done—but instead calling for controlled virtually all other enough in a particular issue, more democratic, political, media and means of commua brief search of key words could and economic processes and nication. It was also an active structures in Mexico. tool in their struggle against easily provide access to revealing the Mexican government. In How did such a document information not available elsewhere. particular, a report written make its way from a guerrilla by an investment firm, Chase The Zapatistas are a particularly leader hiding in the jungle to Emerging Markets, was upthe Internet? Perhaps a laptop interesting example of this. loaded by Zapatista supportcomputer—with Shakespeare ers onto the Web. The report on the hard drive—and a secalled on the Mexican governries of hand deliveries from the jungle to a small village ment to “eliminate” the Zapatistas to demonstrate its to a town where a Zapatista supporter had a computer command over the internal situation in Mexico and thus with access to the Web. As the Zapatistas are fast to point restore investor confidence.

This led to outrage in both out, living in a backward area doesn’t mean the people the United States and Mexico against what was seen as a are backward.

Wall Street hand behind the Mexican government’s FebWhat does this all mean in terms of learning about ruary 1995 offensive against the Zapatistas. The resentLatin American and Mexico in particular? Briefly, it means ment was so strong that Chase was forced to fire the 14

A collage of images from a variety of Web pages. Clockwise from top left: masked and armed members of the Zapatistas, Subcommandante Marcos at the Intercontinental Congress Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity, sympathizers of the EZLN, and a young girl from Chiapas.

author of the report and the Mexican government forced to rein in its offensive. As a result of such effective use of the Web, the U.S. intelligence community has been purportedly trying to emulate its methods for their own purposes. (See “Reforming the CIA in the Image of the Zapatistas?” and “The Zapatistas and the Electronic Fabric of Struggle,” both available through the “Zapatistas in Cyberspace.”)

Cuba nother situation where the Internet could have provided an uncommon and unfamiliar perspective is in Cuba when in early 1996 the Cuban Air Force shot down two planes owned by the anti-Castro Cuban exile group, Brothers to the Rescue. The vast majority of news coverage in the United States was based on statements by the U.S. government and the Miami-based

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Brothers.Yet a quick search of the Internet, including Cuban sources—an English edition of the main Cuban newspaper, Granma, is online—and secondary sources, such as the Center for Cuban Studies in New York, provided very different versions of these events.

The Cuban version included Cuban government allegations of ongoing violence against various types of targets in Cuba by exile groups and the U.S. government. It asked how the Cubans were supposed to know that the planes were unarmed—if, in fact, they were—particularly given a recent machine gunning of a beach site from a light plane. It revealed messages that the Cuban government had communicated to the U.S. government, and indirectly to Brothers to the Rescue, warning them not to continue such flights, as well as providing information from a Cuban government agent who had infiltrated the Brothers to the Rescue and reported on its plans and intent.

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Although this information is not necessarily true, it Peruvian and U.S. media. (There is another Web site does provide a very different view of these events and one <http://ils.unc.edu/~marsc/sendero.htm> which prothat probably reflects at least the official position of the vides access to a wide range of materials on and by SenCuban government. With access to information dero Luminoso. There is also an “Anti Imperialist representing both sides of the issue, it is possible Internet Resources” Web site <http://www. to think more critically about the issue and orgulurk.org/dhkc/links/html> which procontextualize it differently. For example, afvides direct access to Web sites of revoluter reading these materials, a member of the tionary groups around the world.) Only U.S. National Guard at the time concluded later was there a major focus on the govern“I can’t really come out and say it was the ment raid, which killed the guerrillas and right thing to shoot down the planes since rescued virtually all of the hostages who had some people I know in the Guard could end not yet been released by the Tupac Amaru. up having a shoot out with the Cubans over Although some stories could be found about that, but I know I would have done what the the history, development, and occasionally even Cubans did.” Although this conclusion isn’t what on the political program of the Tupac Amaru, such most people would have stories were rather rare. And, drawn from the mainstream they appeared, they The Tupac Amaru’s Web page also shed when press coverage of the same tended to focus more on perevent, it does demonstrate sonalities than on the underlight on why there was such a conflict how using materials available lying issues, such as the lack between their movement and the on the Internet can provoke of democracy and increasing more critical thinking about economic polarization in Peru, Peruvian government over whether political events in Latin issues quite similar to those in they were revolutionaries, America and elsewhere.

Mexico, despite the very different strategies of the Zapas they asserted, or mere terrorists atistas and the Tupac Amaru.

Peru as the Peruvian government claimed.

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nother particularly fascinating example of how the Internet can provide access to types of information never before available is linked to the December 1996 seizure of the Japanese Embassy and over 500 hostages, in Lima, by the Peruvian guerrilla organization Tupac Amaru. Most media coverage initially focused almost exclusively on the hostage taking, the standoff between the Peruvian government and the “terrorists,” and the alleged similarities between Tupac Amaru and Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path, a self proclaimed Maoist organization operating in the Peruvian countryside. But a Web page run by a support group <http://www.csrp. org/ pwar.htm> gives Sendero’s version of its history, development, and goals—a very different version from those found in the mainstream

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Button and poster from the Committee to Support the Revolution in Peru (CRSP), available via the Internet.

Yet, to the amazement of many, at the time of the Embassy seizure, and thereafter, the Tupac Amaru had their own Web page <http://burn.ucsd. edu/~ats/mrta.htm>. It was here where they explained the reasons for their actions and the context in which it occurred, namely, increasing economic polarization and political repression in Peru. Their argument was written in terms that were rarely if ever seen in the mainstream press coverage of the event. While not necessarily convincing, these explanations and positions can help clarify why people would put their lives at stake to undertake such an operation. The Tupac Amaru’s Web page also shed light on why there was such a conflict between their movement and the Peruvian government over whether they were revolutionaries, as they asserted, or mere terrorists as the Peruvian government claimed.

Home page of the CSRP which gives the Sendero Luminoso or Shining Path’s version of its history, development, and goals— a very different version from those found in more mainstream media.

Shattering Stereotypes any groups and organizations that have no access to the U.S. media do have access to the Internet.

Consequently, the Internet can provide access to a whole range of previously unavailable political information that can shatter stereotypes of many Latin American groups, from the isolated jungle guerrilla to guerrillas with guns and laptops, from terrorists to principled revolutionaries. Having access to such information and thinking it through critically can only help people to understand how different peoples and groups in the Americas see some of the key events that are affecting their— and our—future. And in the process, these sources can also provide valuable insight into how the U.S. media filters

and packages so many of the international events that we read about in it.

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Leon Jackson

Richard Levy, associate professor and Chair of the Political Science Department, teaches courses on Chinese, Asian and Latin American politics among others. He is very interested in the direct access that the Internet provides to many otherwise inaccessible political actors.

He is still researching his primary field of interest, the Chinese political economy and has been a political activist for many years focusing, most recently, on opposition to the World Trade Organization.

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18

TheVirtual College: Technotopia or End of Academe?

Christopher Mauriello In technotopia the possible finally gains complete supremacy over the actual, through virtuality.

— David Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein Data Trash:The Theory of the Virtual Class I’m a twenty-first century digital boy, I don’t know how to read but I got a lotta toys.

— Song lyrics by the rock band Bad Religion

Science Fiction?

Dynamic Graphics

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raduation Day. Thousands of students, friends, The rest of the college, however, has chosen to participarents, administrators, and faculty gather for pate in the graduation ceremony as they have participated the annual rite of passage. The college auditorium, in all college activities, from remote locations via Internethowever, is almost empty. Scattered in the first rows are based distance-learning technology. Upper middle-class a few defiant, aging professors in archaic doctoral robes. students from around the country and world have used Toward the back are a few nervous graduates with family their sophisticated home personal computers or digital and friends. They are not nervous about graduating. They televisions to access the ceremony via the Internet. Lower are nervous because this is their first physical visit to the middle-class and working-class students have driven cars campus even though most of them have taken over fortyor taken buses to sites—glass office buildings immediately five credit-bearing virtual off the exit ramps of major courses there. They are uninterstates—that house banks comfortable in the presence of computer terminals. The …if recent trends continue, of their fellow students and poorest students have used virtual graduations from faculty, who previously have Internet-connected commubeen digital images or typed nity learning sites in schools, distance-learning degree programs… lines in a virtual classroom. community centers, or public could become commonplace.

And most, at one point, have libraries. posed as an alternative identity: White suburban teenage In the auditorium, one males have identified themselves in virtual classes as large screen and two smaller peripheral screens flicker middle-aged African-American females or Hispanic males as a “Pomp and Circumstance” audio file fills the nearly have taken classes as handicapped suburban Asian females empty hall. For the next two hours, a combination of — another post-mortem to affirmative action. In short, pre-produced and real-time streaming audio and visual students, administrators, and faculty present are there for images fill the screens. The highlight of the ceremony is only one of two reasons: curiosity or nostalgia. the graduation speaker. From a pull-down menu, faculty 19

and graduates can choose to listen to “as you go forth...” from a nuclear physicist from India, a Nobel Prize winner from Spain, or the President of the United States. Finally, the president of the college presents the diplomas to the graduates. Most will choose to have them emailed to them or simply link their electronic resumes to the college registrar so that future employers or graduate schools can verify their records via the Internet. Some traditionalists will want to download their diplomas to their personal computers and print them on noncorrosive paper.

The Virtual Campus

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More dramatic and controversial has been the proliferation of new for-profit virtual universities. These universities have no physical campuses but offer accredited associate, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral programs completely online or through satellite teleconferencing centers situated near major interstate highways. The University of Phoenix is one such virtual university that has aggressively moved into the field of for-profit distance learning. The Graduate School of America, an affiliate of Learning Ventures, Inc., offers accredited virtual MBA, MS, and doctoral programs. Kaplan Educational Centers, a subsidiary of the Washington Post Co., recently began Concord University School of Law that offers a law degree online. Corporate America, sensing profit potential in tuition and in the distribution of new hardware and software technologies, has also begun to invest in distance learning. Computer industry giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and Motorola, as well as entertainment giant Walt Disney and textbook publisher Harcourt General Inc., have started their own distance-learning divisions.

he scenario depicted above may sound like the opening scene from a science fiction novel, but it is not beyond the realm of the possible. In fact, if recent trends continue, virtual graduations from distancelearning degree programs at established colleges, or from the new virtual universities on the World Wide Web, could become commonplace. While statistics and definitions of what constitutes distance learning vary greatly, a conservative estimate is that in 1998 over one million students took Internet courses for college credit. According The phenomenon of the to the PBS documentary “Net virtual college is compelling Learning,” that number is exMore dramatic and controversial on a number of levels and has pected to triple by the year spawned a great deal of scholhas been the proliferation of new 2000. These trends in student arly research. Education and enrollment have stimulated a for-profit virtual universities. technology specialists have rush to implement similar analyzed and assessed the efThese universities have no physical programs at existing higherfectiveness of electronically education institutions, and campuses but offer accredited associate, delivered courses against for-profit education corporatraditional, classroom-based bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral tions, to cater to this poteninstruction. Communication tially lucrative market. In programs completely online…. and language specialists have 1998, three regional virtual explored the transformed universities or electronic nature of communication in campuses were unveiled on the context of cyberspace and the Internet: the Western Governors Association Univervirtuality. Sociologists have examined the social strucsity, the California Virtual University, and the Southern tures of virtual communities and the socio-economic Regional Electronic Campus. According to a recent article makeup of the new virtual students enrolling in increasin the Virtual University News, these state-supported coning numbers across America and the world. Cultural sortia “…will provide a high-profile online presence in theorists have begun to explore the meaning of the vir30 of the 50 states….” tual university, and the broader virtual community of the More common is the creation of online learning Internet, to established norms for education, politics, and courses within established higher-education institutions. the public sphere.

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Danielle Lucero, 1999

The ceremony is over. A small line of students and faculty file out of the auditorium as the screens fade to the college logo. Terminals and computers are logged off from remote sites. There is no need for videotape or photographs; the entire ceremony can be replayed by simply downloading it from the college Web site—anytime, anywhere. Another graduating class from the virtual college.

For example, in 1997 Cornell University established the Office of Distance Learning, where students may take a small selection of continuing education courses online.

Wharton School, the top-rated graduate business school at the University of Pennsylvania, has started Wharton Direct, a combined distance-learning and live-interaction course for mid-level managers and technical professionals. Florida Community College Distance-Learning Consortium offers an extensive array of online courses that can be taken to fulfill program requirements for almost any degree program at most of Florida’s public highereducation institutions.

Glossology 101

Fundamental to all of these investigations is the question: What are the implications of Internet learning for traditional ideas and practices of college education? Is it, as proponents of internet learning argue, an exciting new opportunity to further democratize higher education by providing students with the access and flexibility they need in order to complete degree programs? Or is it, as critics contend, a dangerous trend that will undermine the interpersonal nature of teaching and learning and ultimately lead to the demise of academic institutions?

A Speeding Train

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any faculty in higher education perceive Internet learning as a speeding train. They see it bearing down ruthlessly on the traditional college, destroying the very future of education and the career of college teaching. They raise serious issues regarding the implications of Internet learning on academic life and professional careers. Would it eliminate faculty positions, since one instructor could conceivably teach thousands of students, or hundreds of sections of the same course, in a virtual environment? Once a professor organized, prepared, and taught a virtual course, would she or he own the rights to that course or would the college? Could lectures and course content be captured (digitally recorded) and then reproduced by the administration to countless generations of students with the intellectual and technical support of underpaid teaching assistants? Would the electronic campus replace the physical campus and end the enriching face-to-face interaction between faculty member and student? In short, would Internet learning and the virtual college be the end of the teaching profession?

Generation.com: Learning at the Millennium

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uch of the anxiety among faculty toward Internet learning arises from fear of the unknown, or, more accurately, fear of the technological dimensions of the unknown. The myth that the younger generation of today, whom theorists have aptly labeled generation.com, are more technologically sophisticated in the world of cyberspace, email, and electronic videoconferencing than their parents’ generation has reached the level of cliché. But it is true that many people born before the 1980s, which includes most, if not all, present faculty, perceive technology as threateningly mysterious.

They find the language of bits, bytes, and downloading as foreign as the dialect of some arcane language.

Much of the mystery surrounding the new distance learning dissipates when explained in non-technical terms and taken out of the threatening context of “technotopia” —utopian visions of technological progress. Despite the glowing promises and hyperbole of the new technical elite, which Michael Kroker and David Weinstein compellingly label “the virtual class,” pure distance learning over the Internet today is primitive, technically impractical, and in its earliest phases of development. In fact, as a recent New York Times article made clear, an early case study of one such Internet-based course proved confusing and frustrating to the students and faculty that participated.

Currently, there are three general modes or types of Internet-based distance learning being used and assessed: synchronous, asynchronous, and Web-enhanced instruction. Synchronous refers to distance learning dependent on time and location. This idea was the basis of the early phases of distance learning and resulted in the creation of 21

classes distributed via cable, public access channels, and more recently, satellite. Very recently, this relatively old idea of synchronous distance learning has moved to the Internet and the World Wide Web. Attempting to seize on the revolution of the personal computer and the stupendous growth of the Internet, software engineers have developed programs that allow real-time class instruction over the Internet to the homes and offices of students worldwide.

A second mode, asynchronous, refers to distance learning independent of time and location. While synchronous distance learning overcomes the limitations of location by providing access via a virtual connection to a live lecture or class, it is still bound by a set time. Asynchronous distance learning claims to overcome this time limitation. The mantra of asynchronous distance educators is â&#x20AC;&#x153;learning anytime, anywhere.â&#x20AC;? This is accomplished by creating entire courses or whole programs solely for the Internet that students can access anytime day or night from their home, office, or library computer. Generally, asynchronous courses rely heavily on email, Internet discussion forums, listservs (mailing lists for a specific group, in this case a class), independent student research, and the World Wide Web.

The third mode is Web-enhanced instruction. This refers to a combination of live instruction in a physical classroom and asynchronous distance learning. Dependent on both time and location for at least part of the course, this synthetic mode supplements face-to-face instruction in a classroom with resources from the World Wide Web and email. This increasingly common approach requires students to attend traditional classes on physical campuses, but provides the flexibility of conducting research, completing assignments, submitting papers, and participating in class discussions in a virtual environment on the studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; own schedules.

Despite the optimism and in some cases the euphoria of technotopians, corporations and advocates of this new method of education, there are serious technical and pedagogical limitations common to each of the three modes. First, all three modes require, or at least would be enhanced by, some form of high-speed Internet access.

While the transmission of data over fiber-optic cable lines is becoming available to many Americans, most student and faculty home computers are still connected to the Internet using a modem to a telephone line. Over phone lines, large amounts of data cannot be transferred quickly enough to provide a continuous video image on the

Danielle Lucero, 1999

The Offish Savant

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screen or allow large files—graphics, images, or audio— to be downloaded at an acceptable rate of speed for quality distance learning. Second, depending on the type of distance learning, most college campuses and faculty would need big-budget upgrades including new personal computers, laptops, networking, and, of course, expensive distance-learning training.

those surrounding the effect of Internet learning on the professional life of current academics.

Virtual Professors or Virtually No Professors?

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More limiting and more complex are the pedagogical n the twenty-first century, Internet learning will inor teaching issues that emerge from these new approaches creasingly transform not only traditional modes of to learning. The synchronous mode would require profesinstruction, but also the professional life of all those sors to not only coordinate the online multimedia presenwho teach. While important educational and social issues tation with their lectures and respond to incoming quessurrounding this virtual learning are being addressed tions from remote locations on their monitor, but to also through scholarly research, the effect of this new mode of teach a subject to their live class, respond to students’ live education on traditional academia, and those professionals questions, and be prepared to stop when any single comwho work and earn their livelihood within it, has been ponent of the system fails. The asynchronous mode preignored—perhaps consciously—or given only marginal sents equally challenging pedagogical problems. When a commentary. course is conducted entirely There are, however, serious online independent of time issues that need to be considIn the twenty-first century, and location, the spontaneous ered. To return to some of the communication between Internet learning will increasingly questions raised at the outset: teacher and student is interIf a faculty member teaches a transform not only traditional rupted and replaced by the synchronous or asynchronous virtual space of the Internet. modes of instruction, but also the course online, who owns that Emails, listservs, and assignand its content—the professional life of all those who teach. course ments on a Web page all professor, the college, the require a very sequential corporation, or the Internet process of posting, reading, service provider? Who deterand responding. While generation.com is increasingly acmines the number of students allowed to enroll in the customed to and even comfortable with such virtual inonline course and who regulates its reproduction and reteraction, important communication cues in the form of distribution? Technology will enable one faculty member, body language, class atmosphere, and eye contact are lost. with the support of graduate assistants, to teach multiple sections of one course and thus eliminate the need for Web-enhanced instruction provides the least technical individual faculty members to teach each section of each limitations and fewest pedagogical problems. But pedacourse. Could this course then be virtually reproduced gogical problems still arise when electronic discussion and distributed to students semester after semester with groups, multimedia presentations, and research on the royalties being paid only to the original faculty member?

World Wide Web supplement any course. A common problem with multimedia and/or Web-enhanced teaching These practical questions lead to broader, abstract is overproduction. Overproduction occurs when powerful questions. If students take all or most of their courses images, video and audio clips, or in-class use of the World virtually, what is the meaning of a college degree from a Wide Web dominates a class. Students of generation.com specific institution? Assumptions regarding social and inare instinctively drawn to visuals or the browser screen tellectual experience, physical community, the interaction running behind the professor, and can—unconsciously, between faculty and students, and between students and of course—ignore the spoken words of the professor and other students, evaporate at the virtual college. Realistifixate on the multimedia. In this case, the multimedia cally, students could take a sequence of courses from muldominates the class, and the focus of learning shifts away tiple accredited virtual institutions and receive a virtual from the professor-student interaction. degree.

The technological limitations of Internet learning will be solved. Software corporations, cable companies, and Internet service providers will create user-friendly software for faculty and increasingly provide high-speed Internet access for students. The pedagogical problems are real, but will decrease as a new generation of technologysavvy graduate students begins to enter the professorate.

The most immediate and challenging issues, therefore, are

Some of these issues have not yet arisen, and, quite honestly, may never arise. Most students and their parents will continue to want real classes in real classrooms with real colleagues and real professors. They resist the ideas of losing face-to-face interaction with faculty and fellow students and the social experience of a real campus. In short, the immediate future of colleges and universities, particularly private and four-year state colleges, is safe. However, 23

The Purlieu Classroom

some issues regarding the professional life of college and university professors are already with us.

ration and actually compete with the original faculty member for student enrollments.

The first immediate issue is the intellectual property Another immediate issue affecting the professional life rights or ownership of faculty-produced content. A quick of college professors is the meaning of teaching a course review of college faculty Web pages reveals that many in a virtual distance-learning environment. While most unnet-savvy professors across disciplines are putting lecdergraduate and graduate courses are still taught with one tures, exam questions, assignments, Web links, class professor and one class, synchronous and asynchronous handouts, images, and Internet learning courses are video/ audio clips from their rapidly expanding in adult Most students and their parents courses on the Web. While education programs, evening having this material on a coland summer programs, and will continue to want real classes lege computer network prograduate-degree programs. in real classrooms with real vides some form of copyright These virtual courses and proprotection, corporations and grams make good economic colleagues and real professors. institutions interested in the sense not only for corporations, profits of Internet learning but also for colleges and uniare beginning to recruit faculty and their Web-enhanced versities. The implication for professors depends on the content. Educational software publishers and large textenrollment. If those students are virtual students, meaning book publishing houses, which have the technical but not that they would not have taken any courses unless they the content expertise, are looking for faculty to produce were online, then the implications are unclear. But if they specialized software packages for general commercial disare traditional students, who normally take live courses tribution. Content originally produced for use with the with professors on campus, then the implications are clear. faculty memberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own students could become the basis Instead of four professors teaching four classes of twentyfor an asynchronous distance learning course at a virtual five students, one professor is teaching one hundred stucollege. This course and the original content could be redents. The other three professors are expendable in the produced again and again by the virtual college or corpovirtual college.

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Danielle Lucero, 1999

As boards of trustees, administrators, and state legislaSo, are we facing a speeding train? If so, academics can tures increasingly look toward business models for ways to confront it in three ways: they can stand in the way like trim costs and limit the astronomical growth in college tusome Promethean heroes hoping for a derailment; they ition and fees, the cost-saving features of Internet learning can let the train rush by as they continue traditional teachbecome ever more attractive. In sheer business terms, a ing, hoping that the train will simply fade into the sunset; college can deliver more innovative products to a larger or, they can choose to help conduct the train and detergroup of consumers with mine its speed and destination. lower costs and higher proThe third option provides the As boards of trustees, administrators, ductivity. These facts alone— most professionally responover and above the legitimate sible approach. and state legislatures increasingly desire to make higher educaThis can be accomplished look toward business models for ways tion available to students in in a number of ways. Most sparsely populated areas of to trim costs and limit the astronomical important, all faculty need to the country—make Internetbecome better informed about based learning an attractive growth in college tuition and fees, any and all forms of distance option for most colleges as learning occurring on their the cost-saving features of Internet well as such distance-learning campuses and on campuses corporations as computer, learning become ever more attractive. around the world. State legisentertainment, and book latures, boards of trustees, adpublishing companies. ministrators, and technology corporations are well aware of the growing demand from students for some form of distance learning to meet their increasingly busy lives and schedules. Internet-based courses, degree programs, and whole virtual universities Confronting the Speeding Train are already online—or are being planned—to meet this potentially profitable new market. istory is replete with stories of traditional groups, institutions, and structures displaced by technoInformation is essential. Faculty, and all those conlogical innovations. One of the most famous from cerned with the impact of this new technology on educaEuropean history is the Luddites of nineteenth-century tion, must begin to share their opinions, anxieties, and England. Their name comes from Ned Ludd, the leader visions for Internet learning at their institution. They must of a group of renegade handloom weavers who during raise the important questions. Should they agree to parthe Luddite riots of 1812 went about destroying the new ticipate in the construction or execution of Internet learnmechanical looms of the Industrial Revolution in an effort ing courses at their institution? What are the implications to stop the loss of their traditional handicraft and way of for faculty teaching loads, compensation, and job security? life. The effort failed miserably, and the term luddite or Should they develop Internet- and World Wide Web-based luddism has been derogatorily attached ever since to any courses for an educational software or textbook company? group or idea that resists innovation.

They need to discuss these issues with their union representatives, administrators, experts on intellectual propCollege faculty who resist the computerization of their erty law, outside distance-learning consultants, and fellow research field or the use of computers in their classes are professors from other colleges and universities who have often labeled luddites. In some cases, the charge is justialready implemented distance-learning courses. Finally, fied. Some faculty members reject out of hand the use of faculty need to meet at formal workshops and sessions computers, electronic messaging, and the World Wide with college officials from presidents to deans to adminisWeb as educational tools. This negative response to comtrators to discuss their vision of distance learning, planned puter technology misses the great opportunities that comor executed, at their institution. Unless faculty members puterization brings to any research field: the incredible begin to discuss these issues among themselves and with convenience of electronic messaging and the exciting use administrators to provide input into the process, some of the World Wide Web for teaching and student research. form of Internet learning will be imposed on them from budget-conscious state legislatures, departments of eduHowever, the charge of luddism, when applied to faccation, boards of trustees, or college administrators. ulty who resist Internet learning, is unfair and equally shortsighted. There are serious pedagogical issues surSome forward-looking colleges have already established rounding the rapid growth of all three types of Internet formal distance-learning plans and policies. These policies learning, and faculty members have a right, indeed an specifically define the type and amount, as percentage of obligation, to understand them because these issues will degree or program credit, of distance learning that can ochave a direct impact on their professional life, their stucur at an institution. They clearly define faculty roles and dents’ learning experience, and the very idea of a college. responsibilities and provide guidelines to negotiate issues

H

25

Danielle Lucero, 1999

Ms. Harbinger

of intellectual property, teaching load, compensation, and job security. These policies are developed collaboratively with faculty, librarians, union representatives, information technology personnel, and administrators. These policies are not simple appendages to broad institutional plans, but are separate, freestanding policies that have gone through appropriate college governance.

deliver them to generation.com—and future generations.

Not only is Internet learning a speeding train, the information revolution as a whole is a speeding train for traditional academic institutions. The question is who will be conducting the train? The answer will determine whether the future is technotopia or the end of academe.

Works Cited Bray, H. (1999 April 11). Plugging in to the Electronic Campus.

The Boston Globe Magazine.

Frenkel, K. A. and Weinberg, H. (1998). Net Learning. PBS Video.

Kroker, A. and Weinstein, M. A. (1994). Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual Class. NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Mendels, P. (1999 September 22). Study Finds Problems With Web Class. The New York Times. <www.nytimes.com/library/tech/ 99/09/cyber/education/22education.html> Winer, R. M. (1998). Distance Education Arrives: Three Virtual Universities Gear Up for Fall Openings. Virtual University News, 1, 1-4.

…Internet learning is part of the broader information revolution that is transforming the very nature of communication, the meaning of knowledge, and who controls it.

T

26

Christopher Mauriello received his Ph.D. from Brown University.

He currently teaches modern European history in the history department at Salem State College. His interest in virtual education and Internet technology emerges from his ongoing research on the public sphere and contemporary culture.

Mark Keene

he real implications of Internet learning are in our future. The dominance of the virtual college may never materialize and distance learning over the Internet may be as insignificant in terms of competition to traditional campus-based education as videotaped lectures, satellite programs, and correspondence schools are today.

However, unlike these earlier experiments in distance learning, Internet learning is part of the broader information revolution that is transforming the very nature of communication, the meaning of knowledge, and who controls it. As knowledge is increasingly defined as information, and as education is increasingly defined as developing the skills to gather and manage that information, other institutions and corporations beyond the traditional college can legitimately provide knowledge-management skills and

Computer generated art by Danielle Lucero, ’00

P O R T F O L I O

Metalsmithing: A Series of Works Daniel J. Frye

Chess Pieces, 1984 Oxidized nickle silver (4" x 2" x 2")

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Ancestral Cameo, 1995 Sterling silver, copper, and brass (18" x 6 1/2" x 21/2") 28

Chained Freedom, 1996 Sterling silver and copper (8" x 51/4" x 1/4") 29

Vessel to Hold a Precious Lie, 1998 Silver and nugold (10 1/2" x 6 1/2" x 21/2")

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T

he artist who confronts “self ” fosters the potential to create work that translates into the universal.

Such work must exhibit aspects of an historical context, explore the limitations of techniques and processes, and consider the perspective from which the work will be viewed, while allowing the voice of the artist to find its expression.

Mark Keene

My early work, which includes Chess Pieces, provided me with the opportunity to explore metalsmithing techniques while discovering my aesthetic voice. I often worked from drawings to metal and then metal to drawings until I arrived at the final piece.

Daniel J. Frye, assistant professor of art at Salem State College received his B.S.Ed. and M.Ed. in art education from the University of Pennsylvania at Millersville with a major emphasis in metals for both degrees. He earned his Ph.D. in teaching and curriculum from Syracuse University where he was awarded a fellowship in African American Studies, the Burton Blatt Scholarship, and the Syracuse University Fellowship. He has exhibited in national and regional competitions and has received numerous awards. Most recently he received an award for General Excellence from the Newburyport Art Association.

As my abilities developed, my ideas expanded and I imbued my creations with cultural meaning. The technique I used in creating jewelry such as Ancestral Cameo and Implied Freedom (back cover) is called Mokume Gane, a Japanese term meaning “wood grain metal.” This technique involves fusing layers of different colored metals together, upsetting the topography to create peaks and troughs, and then sanding these peaks and troughs down to a flat surface thereby revealing the different colors and layers of metal. Once the metal has been created, a design is worked out which incorporates the Mokume. Married metals—simple lamination—are also used in some works to create harmony or tension through two or more different colors of metal. Soon, the jewelry became more sculptural as my intent led the viewer to consider who might wear the jewelry (see Chained Freedom). At this point, the jewelry was more for viewing and less for wearing.

Eventually my ideas and work evolved to larger sculptural forms. On this level my observations of the human condition took on a less serious tone. Vessel to Hold a Precious Lie is the last in a series of “functional” containers entitled LyingVessels. The inspiration for the series flows from observations of how individuals twist knowledge to suit their own purposes. The creation of these vessels allows the viewer to appreciate the meticulousness in the construction of a lie, preview forms in which particular lies may be housed, and inspect certain features common to lies. For instance, lies cannot stand independently; they must be attached to existing structures.

I am poking fun here. Obviously, lies should not be valued or taken seriously. We need to create and maintain sound and healthy structures in which human development and emancipation can flourish. Yes?

To the right is a sketch for a work in a new series entitled Semantics: Dining Gear for Zealots. The series involves five vessel designs for soft-boiled eggs and is a tribute to the nonsensical dispute between Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians.

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D R A M A

MANAGED CARE William Cunningham Editor’s note: Managed Care was recently produced as a part of the Boston Playwright’s Ten Minute Play Marathon, sponsored by the Boston Playwright’s Theatre. The play was performed by the Mad Horse Theatre Company of Portland, Maine and was singled out by the Boston Herald as one of the standouts of the marathon.

Leon Jackson

Salem State College students Jeffrey Clark ’01 as James Nelson Goodsell and Karla Trigueros ’01 as Tizzy Tyler-Goodsell.

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A corporate office

Tizzy:

JAMES NELSON GOODSELL is talking on a cellular phone Goodsell: (To the phone) Upgrade, Bernie.You need to upgrade.

Your old system is crapola. It’s no longer…

What’s the word?

What’s the word I’m looking for?

TIZZY TYLER-GOODSELL, who sits in an overstuffed leather chair, reading the inside cover to a board game, says, without looking up…

Tizzy:

Viable.

Goodsell: You’re no longer viable, Bernie.

People today want to browse… surf… link.

They want to feel connected at the click of a finger. Email… chat rooms… pornography.

A miracle, Bernie. Worldwide access in the privacy of your own home.

It’s a modern miracle.

(Grabbing a handful of M&M’s® out of a bowl) Tizzy:

(Reading from the board game cover) “The object of the game is to feed the world.”

Goodsell: (Switching ears) Don’t be ridiculous.

Everybody believes in miracles.

(Popping an M&M® into his mouth) Tizzy:

(Reading) “The youngsters role-play food-rich nations who gather apples, plums, pears, and cherries before the hungry raven eats them all.”

Goodsell: We can’t afford to become personally involved. We’re in the insurance business.

Tizzy:

Premium.

Goodsell: We care at a premium.

Tizzy:

Stock and trade.

Goodsell: That’s our stock and trade. Reality number one.

Tizzy:

Which leads to reality number two.

Goodsell: Happiness… Happiness, Bernie!

We insure it. We write policies that allow people to be personally irresponsible.

Reckless. Secure in the knowledge that their beneficiaries will be better off without them.

Tizzy:

(Reading) “Wearing culturally authentic clothing from their dress-up boxes—sold separately— the children take their baskets full of juicy, non-toxic fruits and distribute them evenly to the poor.”

Goodsell: I’m aware of stock prices! What, you think I need you to remind me of stock prices?

I have the Wall Street Journal to remind me of stock prices!

Tizzy:

“Some of the children—the sympathetic bird lovers in the group—will even leave a little something for our fine-feathered friend.”

Goodsell: (Switching ears) I don’t need you to tell me about initial offerings! Prices fluctuate! Worth isn’t a constant! Everything is artificially inflated!

Everything! Everything from a stock price to the importance of any one man to a company!

(Tizzy takes a non-toxic wooden apple and a non-toxic wooden pear out of the game box) Goodsell: Threatening! Who’s threatening?

I’m just talking realities.

(Tizzy knocks the wooden apple against the wooden pear) (Knock) (Knock) Goodsell: (Switching ears again) Once upon a time, Bernie, we sold term, variable, and whole. We traded in value stock.

But now we’re in a market economy and we need to turn value into growth. And that means we can’t afford to be thinking about term life and variable life and whole life.

We have to be thinking about shelf life.

(Popping an M&M®) It’s an adjustment.

(Popping another M&M®) We’re not answerable to individual policy holders anymore. We’re answerable to the market and—God knows—the market doesn’t give a rat’s ass about health and well-being.

Tizzy:

Reality number three.

Goodsell: Mutual funds. People expect a healthy return on their investment.

Tizzy:

Bottom line.

Give him the bottom line.

God forbid.

Goodsell: God forbid.

(Popping an M&M®) 33

Goodsell: We no longer sell term, variable, or whole.

We sell limited life… The prudent-man rule no longer applies… Bernie?…

You there?… Bernie?

(Goodsell lowers the phone) Tizzy:

What happened?

Goodsell: He quit.

Tizzy:

Who?

Goodsell: Bernie.

Tizzy:

Tizzy:

Still...

Goodsell: The problem with marriage is people rush into it blindly, without forethought.

Agreeing to live together for…

Tizzy:

Bernie quit?

…the children’s sake?

(Short pause)

Goodsell: Never would have pegged it.

Goodsell: I told you, Tizzy, what’s good for us is good for him.

(Popping an M&M®) You sure you don’t want...?

(Offering)

Tizzy:

Tizzy:

Goodsell: Just like that.

Tizzy:

But he was like a father to us.

He gave us our first jobs as policy writers.

Remember?

No, thank you.

Goodsell: A quitter.

Goodsell: Divorce is a carefully weighed decision.

Mutually satisfying.

Tizzy:

Tizzy:

He afforded us such a nice life.

Goodsell: He didn’t afford us this, Tizzy. We earned this.

We were entitled to this. Every trapping.

Tizzy:

Self-made?

Still…

Goodsell: Still?

Tizzy:

The boy.

Goodsell: The boy?

Goodsell: That’s all I’m saying.

(Returning the phone to its holder) Big baby… No one likes a quitter…

Isn’t that what we’re teaching the boy?

That “winners never quit and quitters never prosper?”

Goodsell: (Dismissive) Daycare.

Tizzy:

Tizzy:

Still… we may owe him a little something.

Goodsell: Gratitude?

Tizzy:

That’s all I’m saying.

Goodsell: Gratitude enslaves people. It makes them emotionally hamstrung. I choose not to be indebted to loyalty. Indebtedness leads to subordination and subordination leads to…

Tizzy:

Submission?

Goodsell: Emotional blackmail.

Tizzy:

Like marriage.

Goodsell: The worst submission of all. “I” becomes “us” to the point where there’s no “you” there’s only “we.” A hostile takeover of the heart. An unhealthy merger. Bad policy.

We were smart to divest when we did.

Who knows what might have come of it.

34

The important thing is we’ve been able to make divorce work.

(Popping an M&M®) We have a healthy respect for each other’s individuality.

Tizzy:

He’s confused. At school they emphasize cooperation. Staying on task.

Conventional thinking. We all start with conventional thinking.

Goodsell: Who’s more conventional than us?

Tizzy:

(Standing) They say he’s being uncooperative.

Goodsell: Good.

Tizzy:

(Holding out the non-toxic apple) They say he’s not a bird lover.

Goodsell: He’s a Goodsell. We don’t go in for birds.

You start feeding the birds and what happens?

They become dependent on it. Next thing you know, you’ll have more birds than you can handle. They’ll be flocking in, looking for a hand-out. That’s not what I expect them to be teaching my son. I expect them to be teaching him self-reliance, self-sufficiency, self-motivation. That’s the natural way of things. For the birds. And for Goodsells.

Tizzy:

Still...

Tizzy:

(Goodsell stops. He turns)

Goodsell: Still?

Tizzy:

Goodsell: Still?

I’m his mother.

Goodsell: And I’m his father. A father who knows that care needs to be managed. Care isn’t something you bestow on everybody.You don’t squander care universally. Care needs to be selective. The way I care for you. There are always terms, Tizzy. Who knows that better than us?

Tizzy:

Tizzy:

Tizzy:

Tizzy:

All I’m saying is we need to be setting a good example.

Goodsell: Non-competitive play… Would be nice, wouldn’t it, Tizzy? If it all came down to the goodness of our hearts, it would be…

Tizzy:

Still…

(Curtain)

Leon Jackson

Goodsell: Individual achievement is the only way, Tizzy.

It’s the example we set.

(Popping another M&M® and looking at his empty hand) Hey, look!

Melts in your mouth not in your hands.

(Holding up his hands for Tizzy to see) As advertised.

(Goodsell goes to his desk)

Nice?

Goodsell: (Looking up from the game box) Yeah.

Competition.

For the fortunate few.

(Nods) Still.

(Goodsell walks over and picks up the game box and looks at it for the first time)

Goodsell: Natural selection.

Tizzy:

Care, Nellie. He needs for you to care.

He needs…

Goodsell: Us?

Goodsell: We’re contending with a legacy situation.

Gender and ethnic balancing. There are already thirty kids enrolled in the Nichols, McLaughlin & Murray Beginners’ class, and if all of them return for kindergarten positions, that’ll leave only three openings for the one hundred or so applicants for fall semester. Three!

Tizzy:

Still.

Goodsell: I’m the best provider I can be.

Goodsell: Good?

You think the admissions office of Nichols, McLaughlin & Murray is interested in recruiting good? You think they’re interested in good boys? Good isn’t good enough.

Good gets you wait-listed. Daycare mentality needs to stay in daycare.

Tizzy:

The loss of a father hurts. It leaves a hole.

William Cunningham is an associate professor of theatre arts at Salem State College. He is a graduate of Tufts University and of UCLA, where he received an MFA in Playwriting. He has had plays produced both in Boston and Los Angeles. Professor Cunningham is a lifelong resident of Massachusetts, and he currently resides in Rockport with his wife and three children.

Goodsell: We’ll need to find a replacement for Bernie.

I’m thinking of a lateral promotion. Keeping the job in-house. I prefer it when people climb the ladder, but...

35

I N

R E T R O S P E C T

Jack Kerouac’s Coming of Age Jay McHale

O

Courtesy of the Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac, John Sampas Literary Representative

36

ctober 1, 1999 was a classic crisp autumn afternoon in New England. Along the glittering banks of the Merrimack River, a colleague and I were driving west on Route 110, upstream to Lowell, Massachusetts. We were to attend a panel discussion, “Kerouac at the Millennium,” at the University of Massachusetts – Lowell, author Jack Kerouac’s hometown. We were especially interested in hearing Paul Marion talk about the soon to be released Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings by Jack Kerouac. Marion had compiled and edited this volume of early work by the young Kerouac, written between 1936-1943. By the end of the day, we came away with a renewed sense of Kerouac’s importance and staying power as an American writer whose popularity is still growing, long after his death in 1969 from the ravages of alcohol. He was 47 years old and virtually broke.

At the conference, we learned that Kerouac’s On the Road is selling over 125,000 copies a year and four of his works are on Penguin’s hundred best sellers list. On the Road ranks seventh; John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men ranks first. Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks on a 120-foot roll of paper, with almost no revisions. He then labored in vain for six years searching for a publisher.

Finally, in September of 1957, On the Road burst onto the American literary scene, and made Kerouac famous overnight.

Left: Jack Kerouac (circa 1937) lugging the pigskin before his senior year at Lowell High School. His stardom would take him to Columbia University on a football scholarship.

Today, the literary world is, once again, abuzz with Jack his standing as a representative person of his time and Kerouac. Not only was Atop an Underwood recently pubrevealed the passion, struggles, and dignity of one life. lished, but so was Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957-1969.

As improbable a candidate as he may have been, Kerouac Joyce Johnson, who dated Kerouac in the late 1950s, will achieved his goal of becoming an American author.” have her book Door Wide Open: A Love Affair in Letters The material in Atop an Underwood was written by (1957-58) published this summer. In addition, the 1998 Kerouac during his adolescence and through 1943, the “Summer Fiction Issue” of The New Yorker printed previyear after he walked away from a football scholarship at ously unpublished journals by Kerouac, while the NovemColumbia University and one year before he joined Allan ber 1998 issue of The Atlantic Monthly featured him on Ginsberg and William Burroughs on the outskirts of the the cover. The issue included published selections from campus where they spawned the Beat Generation. The his diaries with commentary by Douglas Brinkley, whose selections consist of a variety of topics and interests, and authorized biography on Kerouac is scheduled for publilike the Greek god Proteus, the book keeps changing shape cation in 2002. in the guise of various genres: poems, essays, exhortations, With renewed enthusiasm, I sat down with my copy self-sermons, sketches, “jazz riffs,” short stories, scenes of Atop an Underwood to visit the youthful world of Jack from plays, an excerpt from a novel in progress, and sevKerouac, who grew up in the Pawtucketville section of eral manifestos by Kerouac about what it takes to be a Lowell just across the Merrimack River from where I grew writer. Despite its disparate nature, however, the book up a generation later. I was particularly interested in the does manage to provide a somewhat coherent picture of seeds of Kerouac’s artistic growth. What brought forth the Kerouac as an artist in the making. fruit of such a profound, influential, and prolific writer?

One of the most compelling pieces is an autobiographAs it turns out, Atop an Underwood is a treasure of priical sketch, “Background,” which Kerouac wrote in 1943 mary source material, a collection of more than 60 previwhen he was applying for jobs as a script synopsizer for ously unpublished works written by Kerouac between the the movie industry. It is more extended than the autobioages of 13 and 21. Marion, like Kerouac a Lowell native, graphic statement Kerouac wrote as a preface to Lonesome says he compiled the material from “an enormous cache Traveler (1960). Although somewhat exaggerated, selfof writings in carefully organized files” that were in the promoting, self-congratulating, and tongue-in-cheek, it is custody of John Sampas, the brother of Kerouac’s third a delight to read. “At twelve,” he writes, “I printed a novel wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac, and the literary representative laboriously into a nickel notebook dealing with the advenof her estate. When Kerouac died he left his estate to his tures of a runaway orphan down the Merrimack River.” At mother, who bequeathed it to Stella. After Stella’s death age 13, Kerouac playfully claims, “the Lowell Sun published in 1990, John Sampas asked a ‘column’ of mine written in Marion to take inventory of father’s office predicting the The material in Atop an Underwood was my Kerouac’s remaining manuoutcome of the Louis-Braddock scripts, notebooks, and letters written by Kerouac during his adolescence fight to the round.” stored at the Sampas family and through 1943, … one year before One of the unifying themes home in Lowell. Marion bein the is the slow but progan the project in 1991. He he joined Allan Ginsberg and William gressivebook growth of Kerouac’s says when he saw the wealth Burroughs on the outskirts of the campus literary persona. He begins as of material in store, it was teenager writ“like visiting King Tut’s tomb.” where they spawned the Beat Generation. aingsports-minded about small-town fantasies That’s when he came up with while looking at the world the idea of publishing the mafrom the dark abyss of depression-racked Lowell in the terial in Atop an Underwood. Marion took the title “from 1930s. In time, he develops into a more mature, introspeca book of stories Kerouac imagined publishing in 1941.” tive, dedicated artist finding both his own voice and his Kerouac writes InVanity of Duluoz (1968), “I was happy in own style of writing. my room at night writing ‘Atop an Underwood,’ stories in the Saroyan-Hemingway-Wolfe style as best I could figure As early as age 18, Kerouac had dedicated himself to it at age nineteen.” the vocation of writing with as much seriousness and ardor In his introduction, Marion says that Kerouac, by the as a person aspiring to the priesthood. In “God,” Kerouac end of his career, “knew he had invented a new way of writsermonizes in almost mystical terms that his talent as a ing, fusing local talk, blown jazz, a scribe’s eye, relentless writer is a gift from God, “who has endowed me with the self-examination, the grammar of dreams, memory glee, power; my performance depends on the extent of his gift.” and gloominess about our short lives.” Moreover, says In the same year, Kerouac writes, “I wish I had the flow Marion, Kerouac’s “roots in the industrial, multiethnic of power that Wolfe possessed. But I don’t want to copy milieu of early-twentieth-century society connect him to anyone.” He concedes that he is a “stinted writer” and says, millions of Americans. Taking his life as legend, he asserted “I shall have to correct it some day. Cliché is the word.”

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Mark Keene

The original, provide evidence non-clichéd and of “a maturing unstinted style Kerouac” as he that Kerouac “pushes to create vowed to find more complete became known works.” One is as “spontaneous a long excerpt bop prosody,” from Kerouac’s which evolved first attempt to out of his liswrite a complete tening to imnovel, The Sea Is My Brother. In it, provisational Everhart, a disjazz solos by illusioned 33musicians in year-old college New York City graduate, leaves night clubs teaching and his during the early The Jack Kerouac Commerative in Lowell, Massachusetts, dedicated in 1988. family to ship out 1940s—Charlie on a merchant vessel with Wesley Martin, a veteran sailor “Bird” Parker, Lester Young, and Dizzy Gillespie, in particuwho will die at sea. This excerpt is interesting because, lar. He also liked the free-flowing un-revised letters, some

by Kerouac’s own admission, it discloses his dichotomous of them thousands of words long, that he later received nature: the adventurous voyager versus the stay-at-home, from his west coast buddy, Neal Cassady, who served as intellectual writer. It foreshadows the attraction of oppothe model for Dean Moriarty in On the Road. sites prevalent in On the Road with Kerouac’s portrayal of Kerouac’s idea of writing spontaneous prose had early the street-wise, wanderlust, Dean Moriarty, in contrast to roots. In “A Play I Want to Write,” Kerouac says, “I will the aspiring writer, Sal Paradise, who lives at home with write a play about life as life is and I will wait till it hits me his aunt. Kerouac says that in The Sea Is My Brother he was in the face…. Then I will rush to my typewriter and write trying to connect “two ends of a rope” in his “dual mind” it. So hold onto your seats.” Moreover, he says, “ This play by creating contrasting characters. of mine will have to be a spontaneous burst of passion For his part, Marion does a remarkable job of managing which I will develop all of a sudden….” this potpourri of material, bits and pieces of writing that Marion credits William Saroyan as having influenced were not prepared for publication by the author. Not only Kerouac as early as 1939. Saroyan’s advice to aspiring writare his introduction and headnotes valuable, but Marion ers was, “Learn to typewrite so you can turn out stories as also reveals some things about Kerouac that previous fast as Zane Grey.” Allen Ginsberg once said that Kerouac scholars and biographers have missed. He has discovered “could type athletically 120 words a minute…. So he was the influence of 1930s writer Albert Halper, “until now able to transcribe instantaneously all the flash thoughts that perhaps the least-known influence on young Kerouac.” went through his head and continue in one single stream.”

Marion writes, “Halper produced a dozen books about In other words, as Ginsberg would say, “First thought; best people of his day—city people, ethnic people, working thought.” In a 1962 interview with Professor Charles Jarvis people.” Halper’s story “Young Writer Remembering on Lowell radio station WCAP, Kerouac said, “Once God Chicago,” says Marion, “resonated deeply with Kerouac.” moves the hand and you go back and revise, it’s a sin!”

In it, Halper portrays a young man who wants to write “a big slangy piece of work” because he feels “a locomotive” in In 1941, the 19-year-old Kerouac professed that writing his chest—an eerie foreshadowing of On the Road it seems. was the main reason for his being alive: “You see, my heart resides in a typewriter, and I don’t have a heart unless James Joyce also influenced Kerouac. Marion asserts there’s a typewriter somewhere nearby, with a chair in that Kerouac loved Joyce’s “poetic prose,” his “hyper local front of it and some blank sheets of paper.” At the same detail, urban texture, self-focus, and ‘cosmic regionalism,’” time, Kerouac had repudiated the notion of punching a a term Marion credits to Joycean scholar Harry Levin. time clock, working all day, and reducing himself to the Kerouac’s “cosmic regionalism” stems from his Lowell humdrum existence of a “dumb animal.” After quitting a background. Lowell was to Jack Kerouac what Dublin factory job Kerouac writes, “It is not right for me to give was to James Joyce—the cradle of his creativity. In 1942, eight hours of my precious life to anyone at such a gory Kerouac writes, “No one can write of old barflies, on a task every day. I should rather keep those eight hours to sunny afternoon, with as much clarity, force, and authority myself, meditating in the grass, let’s say….” as Joyce.” Jack Kerouac notwithstanding, that is.

Despite these literary influences, Kerouac was largely The book concludes with works written by Kerouac bea self-taught writer. He studied Shakespeare with Professor tween 1942 and 1943. Marion says these writings begin to 38

Mark van Doren at Columbia, but Kerouac says that he could learn more by himself with three months in a library than he “could have learned in three years at college.” Such a pronouncement, of course, would feed the contempt of academicians and more traditional social commentators like Norman Podhoretz, who included Kerouac in his 1958 essay, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” and Truman Capote, who tried to zap Kerouac by saying that he was not a writer but a typist because he claimed he wrote spontaneously and without revision.

readjustment of perception, from physical actuality to a perception expressed by the artist.” The goal is to “intensify consciousness.” The writer must be engaged in “the act of readjusting perception,” as observed in “reality” to give it a “new objectification.”

On the Road is an indelible fingerprint of Kerouac’s generation—the one with post-World War II jitters. After suffering through the horrors and deprivations of that war, most of Kerouac’s contemporaries were anxious to settle down to a life of security and comfort in suburbanized Middle America. Upward mobility was the word of the day, and the economy was consumer driven. Kerouac, however, saw something different. Many of his generation were iconoclastic. More than a few were attracted to a bohemian subculture of jazz, poetry, drugs, sexual liberation, and America’s open road.

Throughout his career, Kerouac rebelled against traditional, crafted writing that was philosophical, abstract, or academic. In “Credo,” a free-verse poem written in 1940, Kerouac preaches to himself, “To write is not difficult… it comes out of you with ease.” Cheering himself onward, he says: Do not forget it in your gloomier moments. Make your stuff warm, drive it home American-wise, don’t mind critics, don’t mind the stuffy academic theses of scholars, they don’t know what they’re talking about, they’re way off the track, they’re cold; you’re warm, you’re redhot, you can write all day, you know what you know….

Kerouac saw this adventurous other “reality,” and he was hot to capture it in prose. When he wrote On the Road, he rendered a “new objectification” of his generation like nobody else. That’s why the book is an American classic, and why, in 1998, Modern Library ranked On the Road fiftyfifth in its list of the 100 most important English language novels of the twentieth century.

Atop an Underwood is unlikely to make the best sellers list. That, perhaps, is not the intent. Its primary value is achieved elsewhere by showing the slow evolution of the writer that Jack Kerouac would become. To a large extent, as Paul Marion says, “This is Kerouac’s book about becoming a writer,” written years before he became a best seller and achieved literary fame as the father of the Beat Generation, and years before he became jaded and subdued by the melancholy so often associated with the incurable romantic. It contains the stuff of which dissertations are made.

It will delight Kerouac’s readers as well as those interested in the creative process of art. It is a writer’s workshop in the making. Marion dedicates it, “To young writers everywhere.”

Throughout his career, Kerouac rebelled against traditional, crafted writing that was philosophical, abstract, or academic.

K

In “Odyssey (Continued)” Kerouac seems to prophesy, at age 18, the coming of On the Road, which he wrote some ten years later: “A writer wants to cut a slab out of the whole conglomerate mass-symphony of nature and life and present it to his readers.” He continues, “Art is a

In the five years between 1939 and 1944 Kerouac says he had written “600,000 words.” He was destined to write many thousands more. To the naysayers and those who would discourage him, a 19-year-old Kerouac warns, “stand back, you pack of howling dogs. Let this boy muse.”

And muse he did.

Mark Keene

erouac’s free-flowing style of writing had its roots in the oral tradition of storytelling and in the home of his youth, where Marion says Kerouac became “hooked on words” because he was raised in a household where Canadian French was the primary language. In “Father of My Father,” Kerouac describes the FrenchCanadian dialect as “one of the most languagey languages in the world. It is unwritten, it is the language of the tongue, and not the pen.” Kerouac, however, made it the language of the pen, most especially in his novel Doctor Sax, which is replete with splendid passages of FrenchCanadian dialogue, wherein Kerouac captures the street talk in Lowell’s Little Canada during the mid 1930s. In one conversation, he portrays his Uncle Mike saying to him at age 12, “…mon enfant pauvre Ti Jean, sais tu mon âme que tu est destinez d’être un homme de grosses douleurs et talent....” Kerouac’s English translation reads, “…my poor child Ti Jean, do you know my dear that you are destined to be a man of big sadness and talent….” The prediction, it seems, came true on both counts.

Jay McHale is a professor of English at Salem State College where he teaches “Jack Kerouac and the Beat Writers.”

He also organized and moderated what is considered to be the first academic symposium on Jack Kerouac, held at Salem State College in the spring of 1973. His rememberance of that event is featured in SSC’s Soundings East (Spring/Summer 1998). His traveling companion was Susan Edwards, archivist for Salem State College.

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B O O K

The Mind Electric Edward J. Wilkens The Age of Spiritual Machines Ray Kurzweil 1999 Viking Penguin $25.95

I became aware of The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil from seeing stacks of it at the entrance to Borders Bookstore. In his previous book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, Kurzweil had predicted that a computer would be world chess champion within 10 years. This prediction came true a year early. So the sight of this new book, coupled with Kurzweil’s long virtuoso career in inventing previously impossible capabilities for computers, led me to take a serious look. That look led to my fascination with the scenarios presented in Kurzweil’s book and my acknowledgement that the possibilities he predicts are within the realm of probability.

The Age of Spiritual Machines soon had me envisioning the computer of the future not simply as a tool, but as an ever-increasing participant in the intelligent activities of society—both as an independent machine and as an intimate partner of humans. Running throughout Kurzweil’s arguments and predictions is the thesis that in twentyto twenty-five years a computer will have the computational capacity of the human brain.

Computational capacity alone does not make a computer intelligent, nor does it allow for more intimate partnerships with humans. But Kurzweil’s central and most fascinating scenario involves the combination of scanning technology and computer technology, yielding the possibility in the not too distant future of downloading a mind.

Humanity is mortal. Our life span is tied to the maintenance of our hardware, our bodies. When our hardware 40

S H E L F

crashes, we are no longer; when our hardware deteriorates, our capabilities are diminished. More and more, medical science repairs and replaces bodily hardware. Our destiny may be that our identities, trapped until now within our irreplaceable brains, will some day begin to take on the properties of software and be downloaded to a waiting computational replacement.

The mind—that holder of our identity—may ultimately be found in the detailed interconnections of the neurons of our brain, all 100 trillion of them. Let us imagine a computer, built of manufactured neurons not yet fully interconnected. If a brain scan, an MRI, or any of the myriad present and future scanning technologies allows us to accurately record the neural interconnections of a human brain, and these recorded interconnections are then used in the manufactured neurons, the result might be characterized as the downloading of the mind into a personal computer.

Downloading a Mind Such a downloading of the mind to a replacement brain can take place even before we know how the program actually works. As long as we copy the data accurately enough, we can successfully download a mind without a complete understanding of its workings. After all, most of us load our computer systems today from a CD-ROM without a clue as to what that software does. The result is another instance of our Windows 98 or Linux or any other operating system.

It may be objected that someone knows how each of these programs work, namely, their programmers.

But even today, it is unlikely that any one person knows in detail the whole program. There is no single programmer. On the other hand, our minds have been carefully programmed by genetics and environment. Our minds help program themselves. Correctness only requires accurate copying, since what we want is our own minds, bugs and all!

Scanning is a combination of sensing technology and computational technology. The sensors detect the results of their emitted signals on the scanned object. Multiple receivers feed the huge amount of data produced by these resulting signals into the memory of a computer. Then a very large amount of computational power is applied to the data in order to rearrange it into pictures that make sense to a trained technician, clinician, or sometimes even to an untrained eye. The more accuracy desired, the more the resulting signals will consume memory, and the more computational time will be required to convert the raw data to meaningful information. In order to have the possibility of detecting and recording neural interconnections, the computational capability of the scanners needs to be increasing exponentially.

Fortunately it is.

Scans have already been recorded on brains of recently dead people.

Several scanned brains, including a 25 billion-byte female brain and a 10 billion-byte male brain, are available on the Internet at the Center for Human Simulation Visible Human Project Web site. These are much smaller and lacking in the resolution needed to download all the data of a complete mind because of the current limitations of scanning technology. But the mapping of the human brain, synapse by synapse, will seem a lot less daunting as the computational capacity of computers increases. The computations in scanning alone are pure brute force numerics and, while not anything like intelligence, require increasingly capable computers to attack the scanning of 100 trillion neural connections.

What might such a downloading of mind be like? A book by Hans Moravec published in 1988, Mind Children, the Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, presented a similar analysis of the computational capacity of the human brain. In Moravec’s book, several graphic scenarios of how a computer may replace the human brain are described. One may be

called a “peeling of the onion” brain scan. Imagine a scan of the surface of the brain downloading the detailed interconnection data to a waiting neural network. A trial run is made with the scanned peel in the computer joining the remaining brain in the human patient to see if it works. If everything is normal, the scanned layer is scraped away, and the next layer is scanned.

This is repeated until the whole brain has been scanned, and the mind downloaded into the neural network computer. The final result is a human being with a computer attached to the brain stem. The computer is running an exact copy of the neural interconnections that were found in the original brain.

There are other less gruesome scenarios, however—more of a coexistence with, and slow replacement of the brain function by, the computer and the downloaded program.

The Law of Time and Chaos Kurzweil thinks that such a fantastic scenario is very likely to happen within the next century. In the early sections of the book he discusses some of the reasons. The bedrock of Kurzweil’s optimism rests on a set of theories that are special cases of a single observation that he calls the Law of Time and Chaos: In a process, the time interval between salient events (that is, events that change the nature of the process, or significantly affect the future of the process) expands or contracts along with the amount of chaos.

A first special case or sublaw of the Law of Time and Chaos is the Law of Increasing Chaos, which holds that as chaos

Moore’s Law states that every two years you can pack twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit …. …taken to its logical conclusion, [Moore’s Law] predicts that the computational capacity of the human brain will be reached by personal computers by about 2025.

exponentially increases, time exponentially slows down. An example of this law is the universe prior to the Big Bang. Since the universe was then a single orderly point in time and space, major events happened extremely quickly. Descriptions of the first nano-, micro-, and milli-seconds include major changes to the universe and the introduction and exponential growth of chaos. And with billions of galaxies in trillions of light years of universe, major changes require billions of years to occur.

The Law of Time and Chaos also has an inverse sub-law. Kurzweil calls it the Law of Accelerating Returns: As order exponentially increases, the interval between salient events grows shorter as time passes. This inverse law is one that describes evolutionary processes. Kurzweil includes significant discussion of the applicability of these laws in a much more careful way than I can repeat here. However, one special case of the Law of Accelerating Returns is Moore’s Law of Integrated Circuits, named for the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, Chairman of Intel. Moore’s Law states that every two years you can pack twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit, yielding twice as much circuitry running at twice the speed, for the same price. It applies to processors—and their speed—as well as memories—and their capacity. This observation, taken to its logical conclusion, predicts that the computational capacity of the human brain will be reached by personal computers by about 2025. The brain’s capacity of one million billion bits 41

will also be reached by computer memories at about the same time.

Moore’s Law is expected to apply just long enough for us to build computers with computational complexity equal to that of our brains.

Observations of current trends such as Moore’s Law are often criticized because they often hit an unexpected wall. Not this one, says Kurzweil, and he backs his opinion up with extended observations of similar growth laws in computing.

Kurzweil shows us that Moore’s Law is really the fifth segment of an exponential-growth law of computation, including mechanical computers made from gears, electromechanical computers composed of relays, vacuum tube computers, and discrete transistor computers. Just as each of the computational-growth segments had similar exponential paths, each was replaced by the next technological innovation just as the potential limit for further growth was approached. Is there such a technology to replace integrated circuits? The Law of Accelerating Returns suggests that there will be. And there are a number of new emerging technologies in the wings.

Kurzweil also extends the evolutionary exponential-growth path back in time to link the technological growth segments just discussed, including the ability to maintain internal states and to respond to external stimuli, to the evolution of life forms. Nervous systems, memories, pattern recognition, reasoning, and problem solving all show a continuum of computational capability in evolving organisms. Kurzweil posits that our current technological evolution is simply the external continuation of the same exponential growth of computation ability from singlecelled organisms to humans augmented with their most powerful computers. Kurzweil also shows that the utility of all this computational power is critically enhanced by other technologies that are also following the Law of Accelerating Returns. The technology of scanning, which we 42

saw may be of central significance to downloading a mind, is one that also benefits from this law.

Promise and Peril The last part of the book is made up of chapters that begin with brief predictions that describe what Kurzweil believes will be the state of technology in 2009, 2019, 2029, and finally 2099. Then each chapter shifts to a dialog between the author and a fictitious student from the future named Molly. This device allows Kurzweil to personalize his ideas as he converses with her at the end of each chapter. In the early chapters, she relates his writings to her life and to her college courses. In the chapters about the more distant future, Molly becomes the expert, rating Kurzweil’s predictions against her reality.

Kurzweil foresees an increased interest in philosophy arising from these developments. As machines get more computationally able, we will care more and more if they are becoming intelligent. Intelligence—or its potential—is often held as one of the characteristics that requires the according of human dignity and rights.

Who and what is entitled to “human rights” will become an even more difficult problem than it is today. Addi-

tionally, the advantages of human intelligence may become difficult to identify. It is likely that computer intelligence will remain subservient to human control, but there will be temptations to allow the computer intelligence to control, especially when it seems more utilitarian to do so. Such questions require considerable study within the realms of political science and sociology.

Alan Turing, the British mathematician responsible for cracking the German enigma code of the Second World War, wrote in 1947, “The extent to which we regard something as behaving in an intelligent manner is determined as much by our own state of mind and training as by the properties of the object under consideration.

If we are able to explain and predict its behavior we have little temptation to imagine intelligence.” Turing devised a test to eliminate some of the subjectivity in recognizing intelligence mentioned above. In the test, a human questioner interrogates a computer that is either operated by intelligent programs or a human foil.

If the questioner cannot tell the difference between the computer and the human, then the computer should be judged to be intelligent. Kurzweil predicts that by 2009 there will be renewed interest in the Turing Test.

By 2019, Kurzweil imagines relationships between people and automated personalities such as companions, teachers, and caretakers. These personalities will sometimes be viewed as superior to humans. They may have better memories, and their personalities may be more predictable. Of course, options might be built in to allow randomness to be included in their decision making to allow them to remain interesting.

There are potential problems, however. As intelligent machines, joined by other virtual realities, become virtual assistants, intelligent programs could perform tasks for humans that previously were done by the persons themselves. But the real problem may be that such machines

could conceivably block out people from their own realities. Early signs of this have already appeared with Internet addiction. Eventually, ethical distinctions will need to be made about interaction with real people in reality, real people in virtual reality, and simulated people in virtual reality.

The first of these, real people in reality, might also include the downloading of a mind to a computer to increase longevity by allowing the replacement of the brain by a machine brain programmed with the original person’s mind. The second, real people in virtual reality, may be a spin-off of the same downloading capability—the use of a copy of a mind over the Internet without the presence of a body. What a wonderful way for a professor to have office hours!

She might be there for all her students any time they wanted help. It would not really free her from work, however, because she would need to frequently synchronize her instances— the number of distinct copies of her mind that had interactions with students—or it would no longer be her holding office hours. To allow copies of her mind to actually perform her work, she would have to make sure all the information remembered by the copy is also remembered by the master copy of her mind.

Finally, the third type of person, a simulated person in virtual reality, springs from no specific original intelligence. It might be completely programmed, or it might combine aspects of several real minds with or without a partially-synthesized mind.

Again, definition and elucidation of the rights, obligations, and relations among these three kinds of people promises to be a fertile field for intellectual pursuits. Machines are likely to create new knowledge without human intervention. It is probable that human transactions and decisions will require by law a human agent of responsibility, although defining “human” and “agent” will become more difficult. For example, virtual persons will become a problem for the census.

“Just being— experiencing, being conscious— is spiritual, and reflects the essence of spirituality.

Machines, derived from human thinking and surpassing humans in their capacity for experience, will claim to be conscious, and thus to be spiritual.

They will believe that they are conscious.

They will believe that they have spiritual experiences.

They will be convinced that these experiences are meaningful.

And given the historical inclination of the human race to anthropomorphize the phenomena we encounter, and the persuasiveness of the machines, we’re likely to believe them when they tell us this.”

When a person’s identity is in software, how do you know who or what is human? Emulations such as a personal assistant and a downloaded person might be hard to distinguish.

Will there be a need for the presence of some “unenhanced original substrate”—that is, human neurons, in order for a person to be classified as human?

If machine capabilities increase at the rate Kurzweil predicts, we will be hard pressed to make the decisions required to produce coherent laws.

As we consider the possibilities and the questions raised, we may begin to get uneasy about the potential for making significant mistakes. The Age of Spiritual Machines, with its interesting and cogent arguments and descriptions, informative chapter notes, a huge bibliography, and eighteen pages of Web links, may help us avoid some of those mistakes.

Edward J. Wilkens chairs the Computer Science Department at Salem State College, where he is an associate professor. He received a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania, following Electrical Engineering degrees from Manhattan College and New York University. He has been a member of the Information Systems Technical Advisory Committee to the United States Department of Commerce since 1984, contributing especially to the performance evaluation of supercomputers to allow appropriate export control.

The Age of Spiritual Machines

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A New View of Eve’s World Elizabeth Malloy The Word According to Eve: Women in the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own Cullen Murphy 1998 Houghton Mifflin $24.00 In the beginning was the Word, And the Word was with God, And the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its beginning but through him.

The Gospel of John 1:1-3 The Jerusalem Bible (1966)

(She) is the image of the invisible, virginal, perfect spirit, She became the Mother of everything, For She existed before them all, The motherfather (matropater).

Apocryphon of John 4.34-5.7 The Nag Hammadi Library (1977)

❦ In The Word According to Eve: Women in the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own, author Cullen Murphy introduces a number of women scholars and describes their difficult journey into the biblical academic discourse as well as their great accomplishments within that very specialized world.

The work and probably very existence of this group is largely unknown to the general public, although the importance of its research is central to many of today’s debates about gender issues. After centuries of being forbidden university study, access to biblical studies or ordination, women in the twentieth century have made remarkable progress. In the last 50 years, an increasing number of women have become biblical scholars with advanced degrees from prestigious universities.

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In the 1960s the first wave of these women became degreed and entered the domain of a small, male biblical elite. They began to ask different questions. Over the years, the body of their work has become substantial, provocative, and influential.

Murphy’s book does a great service by telling us what these women scholars asked and what they found. As associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly, Murphy has his finger on the pulse of a literate public and ably puts flesh on the lives and work of these women.

He tells each of their stories, the routes each took to and within biblical scholarship, and clearly describes the methods of critical analysis they used.

He makes the difficult material of biblical scholarship easily understandable to a general audience. The book is both engaging and well written, reading at times like a detective story and at other times like a travel brochure.

Wherever Murphy goes, we see what he sees: vivid descriptions of territory and place—Phyllis Trible’s office tucked high in the Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s booklined eyrie under the rafters of the Gothic building that houses Harvard Divinity School, or Carol Meyer’s Gothic office at Duke University.

As Murphy travels through Israel to Magdala, Sepphoris, and Jerusalem we see the landscape and are reminded of the biblical events that took place in that landscape. This literary sightseeing is an attractive device to relieve the reader from over pondering.

Murphy’s chapter titles are attractive and intriguing as well. They act both as markers and as puzzles. For example, chapter one—“Joining the Procession” —was actually taken from Virginia Woolf’s book, Three Guineas.

It comes from the passage where Virginia thinks about a request for money from a girl’s school so that through better education women might join the long procession of educated men who preach, teach, administer justice, practice medicine, and transact business. In Woolf’s own words, “The questions we have to ask and to answer

about that procession during this moment of transition are so important that they may change the lives of all men and women for ever. For we have to ask ourselves, here and now, do we wish to join that procession or don’t we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men?” The Word According to Eve is the story of those women scholars who have chosen to join the procession and extend its knowledge.

Dr. Phyllis Trible is the Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature at Union Theological Seminary. She is an honored member of the very first generation of women scholars of the Hebrew Bible. Trible has challenged centuries’ old traditions concerning Eve. Eve is the named, primordial woman of the Bible. The story of the Garden of Eden is well known. Most young children can probably recite it. Many churches still use that story as an example of Eve’s, and therefore women’s, weakness and guilt, as well as her responsibility for God’s punishment of all humanity. This longstanding tradition lingers. It invades the consciousness of believer and nonbeliever alike and is deeply integrated into our cultural customs.

Trible poses a new view of Eve based on the meaning of a verb. In her argument, Eve represents the pinnacle of creation, the only being who was created by God in a direct intervention. This is indicated in Genesis by the action of God in the verb used in Eve’s creation, bnh, which means to build.

God specially intervenes in the creation process to build the woman from the rib of the man. Eve is the last in a series of successive creations, each considered a higher order. She is the last and therefore the most important.

The question then arises: Was the subsequent subordination of women ordained by God, or was it culturally imposed by a new set of political circumstances? The work of archaeologist Dr. Carol Meyers may throw some light on the question. Meyers began teaching at Duke University in 1976 where she is now a professor of reli-

In Adam, Eve and the Serpent, Dr. Elaine Pagels, the Harrington Spear Professor of Religion at Princeton University, adds further understanding to the question of Eve. Pagels examines how various Christian and Jewish communities interpreted that particular story in Genesis during the first three centuries after Christ. Her research demonstrates that they did not share the view later accepted as the orthodox Christian interpretation.

During those early centuries, many Jewish and Christian communities understood the stories from Genesis to be parables of human equality. Both men and women were seen as formed in the image of God and given the gift of moral freedom. Later, due to the growing influence of the writings of Detail from the middle panel of The Fall of Man by Albrecht Altdorfer, circa 1535.

Samuel H. Kress Collection, © 1999 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington

gion and the associate director of women’s studies. Since college, she and her husband, Eric Meyers, who is also an archaeologist, have focused their excavations in Israel. It was on these digs from the Bronze Age, when the Israelites were emerging as a people with their own distinct consciousness, that Meyer developed an interest in women’s role and status in Israelite society. Her book Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context presents women in another cultural setting very different from our own.

Material-cultural remains show that the people of Israel lived in a relatively egalitarian family structure. After the Assyrian captivity of the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 B.C., hundreds of refugees fled to Jerusalem, the capital of the southern kingdom of Judah. There a hierarchical city culture had marked distinctions between public and private domains as well as male and female roles. In this time of crisis, before 587 B.C. when Jerusalem itself and the Kingdom of Judah was captured by Babylonia, an elite minority of priests in the Temple worked to sift through hundreds of years of tradition to collect and preserve the history of God’s chosen people by assembling the books that became the Hebrew Bible.

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St. Augustine, the Christian tradition became defined as: Humanity exists in a fallen state; woman lead humanity astray, man is ordained to be the master of woman, sexuality is the corrupting aspect of human nature. It is interesting to note that St. Augustine, the fourth century Roman Catholic Bishop of Hippo, converted to asceticism in penance for a profligate sexual life, as he acknowledges in The Confessions of St. Augustine.

save her baby brother from the pharaoh’s order of execution, she guards him as he floats in a basket of rushes in the river where the childless pharaoh’s daughter bathed. Convinced

by Miriam, the pharaoh’s daughter decides to raise the boy. She gives him the Egyptian name Moses meaning “I drew him out of the water.”

becomes a leader in the formation of Israel along with her brothers Moses and Aaron. Why was her part cut in fragments and scattered? History and archaeology record that the Hebrew Bible was pieced together in Jerusalem hundreds of years later in another time, place, and culture.

Many years later, of course, Moses negotiates the freeing of the Israelites.

After their escape through the Red Sea, Miriam not Moses, most scholars now agree, sings the victorious “Song of the Sea.” “Miriam, the prophetess, the sister of Aaron begins to sing.” A fragment, a wandering rock, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1945, represents Miriam as singing a longer and somewhat different “Song of the Sea.” It includes the phrase, “...and he exalted her to their heights.”

Miriam also appears in the Hebrew Bible Book of Numbers in an argument over leadership. Miriam and Aaron raise the question, “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?”

Further on, in the Book of Micah, God puts Miriam on a par with Moses and Aaron. “I brought you up from the land of Egypt, I sent Moses, Aaron and Miriam to lead you.”

When Miriam is reconstructed from her scattered remains in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, she

The treatment of Mary Magdalene is another case of a woman leader who was not only cut out of the official record but also defamed. Who is Mary Magdalene? The town Mary came from was called Magdala, a fishing village at the Sea of Galilee at a juncture of the ancient highway linking Egypt and Mesopotamia. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John portray Mary Magdalene as the woman out of whom Jesus cast seven devils. Mary was one of three women of means who followed Jesus and ministered to him. She was also one of three women who stood at the foot of the cross and watched him die. Mary was one of the women who, after the Sabbath, went to the tomb to anoint his body. She found it empty, but shortly thereafter Jesus appeared to Mary and told her to tell the apostles that he had risen. Those are the facts written about her in what became the four Gospels of the New Testament.

Early Christian writers call her apostola apostola-rum, “apostle of the

The work of Dr. Mieke Bal sheds light on how people interpret biblical stories. Bal is a Dutch literary critic, the director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, and a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam. She reads the biblical stories about women as stories. Bal argues that when they are read in any other time period, the interpretations tell more about the social values of that particular time period than about what the bible story was originally meant to portray. A modern reader puts a modern twist on the meaning.

It is Bal who conceived the image of “wandering rock” to portray segments of the Bible. They are fragments of words and phrases found seemingly out of place that survive. She speaks of them as “those wandering rocks, glacial tilts that traveled with the ice toward a new and alien world where they were put to a use foreign to their origin.” Bal considers this a useful image with the understanding that the biblical text is a patchwork of older texts, of older situations.

Trible’s academic specialization is piecing together fragments that appear to be out of place in various books of the Hebrew Bible. In addition to Eve, she has made a particular study of the role and status of Miriam, the older sister of Moses and Aaron. Trible has found fragments of Miriam’s life in the biblical Books of Exodus, Numbers, and Micah, as well as in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Miriam is a Semitic name which means “fruitful mother.” Her story begins in the Book of Exodus during the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt. To 46

Dr. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza also speaks and writes of the Bible as a quilt of pieces, as women in the New Testament have also been fragmented and deleted from the official record. In her book In Memory of Her, Schüssler Fiorenza, the Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, honors the unnamed woman who anoints Jesus prior to his passion, and yet remains nameless, despite Jesus’ special commendation: “And truly I say to you, wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.” The event is noted in all four gospels but the woman who honored him remains unnamed in each gospel while Judas, the betrayer, and Peter, the deserter, are named.

apostles.” These are the facts known about Mary Magdalene.

Dr. Jane Schaberg, professor of religion at the University of DetroitMercy, has posed the question “How did Mary Magdalene become a whore?” Church history answers that question. In 591, Mary Magdalene’s history took a strange, fabricated twist. In September of that year, Pope Gregory the Great, the monk Hildebrand, declared in a homily that Christians were thereafter to consider Mary Magdalene to be the same woman as the women in three separate gospel stories : (1) the adulterous woman whom Jesus saved from being stoned with the forever reverberating reminder, “You who are without sin, cast the first stone,” (2) the Samaritan (non-Jewish) woman living with a man not her husband, with whom Jesus interacts, and (3) the woman who anointed his feet not long before the Last Supper. Although in 1969 the Roman Catholic Church reversed Pope Gregory’s directive, Mary Magdalene’s fabricated identity has become a popular image of a sexual woman who loved Jesus, a “Venus in Sackcloth.”

In 1869 a bound manuscript was offered for sale in Cairo and bought

by Carl Schmidt, a German scholar, and brought to Berlin. It became known as Papyrus Berolinensis 8052, the Berlin codex. The Berlin codex turned out to be segments of a Coptic text called The Gospel of Mary, concerning the leadership of Mary Magdalene in the first century after Christ’s death. Internal evidence indicates that it may date from the early second century. Two other small pieces of this Gospel written in Greek were later discovered.

Dr. Karen King, a full professor at Harvard, has made Mary Magdalene an important subject of academic inquiry. King studied at The Free University in West Berlin, for years the only woman in the religion department. Each Friday King would get a one-day visa to cross the Berlin Wall to work on the Nag Hammadi manu-

scripts and the Berlin codex with New Testament historian and Egyptologist Hans-Martin Schenke and colleagues at Humboldt University in East Berlin.

King found that the Gospel of Mary differs from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because it is more concerned about teaching the meaning of Jesus’ message. Some of the dialogue in the Gospel of Mary portrays Mary arguing with Peter about the meaning of Christ’s teachings, styles of leadership, and women leaders. Peter and Mary were at odds about the direction Christians should take. Mary emphasized internal spiritual development based on the teachings of Christ. Peter argued that the role of leaders was to lead Christians to understand the realities of sin, judgment, and atonement.

Reconstructing Mary Magdalene from her remains scattered throughout the New Testament, the Gospel of Mary and the early Christian writers, we find a woman honored as “apostle to the apostles,” a central leader in the early formation of Christianity very much like Miriam was in the early formation of Judaism. Mary was an interpreter of the message of Christ at odds with Peter’s view at the time of the very foundation of the Christian Church. Excluded from the traditional record, the Gospel of Mary had to be hidden in order to be preserved.

When the Gospel of Mary was discovered in 1869, little was known about the early Christian world until another great discovery provided a wealth of background. In 1945 in an earthen jar under a rock high in the cliffs of the Nile valley near the village of Nag Hammadi, parchments were found which when translated represented fifty two texts portraying the world of the early Christian Gnostics.

In the 1960s, Pagels was part of the Harvard team of scholars who translated these works into English. Her book, The Gnostic Gospels, presents to the reading public the world of the Gnostics, a diverse group of Christian communities that were radically at

odds with the emerging hierarchical, male dominated Christian orthodoxy.

Within Gnostic Christian communities, women were prominent in the public arena of community life.

Within Christian churches, women ministered and theorized about who God was. Many of the Nag Hammadi texts offered a feminine ideology concerning the meaning of Jesus’ teachings, as well as images of women in leadership roles in these early Christian communities. They are filled with a substantial amount of sexual imagery. Some portray God as a dyad embodying both masculine and feminine aspects.

May She who is before all things, The incomprehensible and indescribable Grace, Fill you within and increase in you her own knowledge.

Gnostic prayer, Gnostic Gospels The Gnostic Gospels were buried so that they would not be lost. A scholar of the history of early Christianity, Pagels offers a warning about what happens historically to sources of knowledge about women. That warning hangs over the records of Miriam and Mary Magdalene. Today, women scholars of Jewish and Christian history are working toward a more accurate and enduring record of the place of women in religions’ origins.

Murphy notes that this clarification of women’s roles in the ancient past has already begun a reassessment of many contemporary gender issues. They have come to dominate the meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and also the American Academy of Religion. The influential work of women scholars of religion over the past 50 years is well represented in The Word According to Eve and in Murphy’s extensive bibliography.

Elizabeth Malloy is a professor emerita of history at Salem State College. She holds graduate degrees in history, religion, and education. Since her arrival at the college in 1970, she has developed and taught numerous courses in women’s history. Her books include Myths Role in Gender History and Snake in the Roots: Women in Sacred History.

47

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Responding to Silence I managed to get over to the psychology building today to check my mail. And there was Vol. X, No. 1. I turned to Robert Brown’s article on the silence of NY Jewish intellectuals (Sextant, Fall 1999). I lived in New York from 1943 to 1951, and most of my acquaintances were Jewish intellectuals, in many cases ex-Trotskyites.

Although I did not myself read much of what was published by the people Brown writes about, their names were very much in the air in my circles. One reason, I think, for the lack of comment on the death camps was merely ignorance. I can’t place exact dates on the times when things became known, but my impression is that the scale of the Holocaust, at least, was not known in this country until fairly late in the game. Up until then, the persecution of the Jews may have been viewed within the context of the earlier persecution of Communists and Socialists. The extent of the slaughter was not realized.

Further, the group in question involved at least some names—Dwight Macdonald comes to mind (cf. Politics magazine)—who were internationalists and opposed to the war. These people were probably suspicious of any atrocity stories being circulated in support of the war, including possible rumors of mass exterminaton.

And being internationalists, usually assimilationists, the New York Jews treated even the socialist Zionists as a somewhat regressive force, parochial in their outlook. Jewishness should disappear, not be represented by a new national state.

I remember writing an editorial in support of providing a humanitarian refuge for Jews in Palestine back when the Irgun and other terrorist groups were battling the British authority. Some of my friends compared it to Garveyism. (Marcus Garvey was the leader of a back-to-Africa movement in earlier years for what were then called Negroes and are now called African-Americans.) It was not approved by socialist internationalists, 48

R E S P O N S E who wanted to harness black resentment for the overthrow of capitalist society.

James Dinsmoor, Ph.D. Psychology Department Indiana University

I read with interest “Listening to Silence” (Sextant, Fall 1999). It seems that Hannah Arendt was the only real exception to the New York Jewish intellectuals’ silence in the face of the Holocaust and Zionism, although I am not certain how early she became vocal about the Holocaust. When did she leave Germany? I wonder whether firsthand experience with German anti-Semitism and Nazism made her more aware than her fellow intellectuals of the possible consequences.

I’ll add my own theory to those that are already floating out there.

After I happened to read back to back Henry Roth’s Mercy of a Rude Stream and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, I began thinking about how our view of the world is influenced by the “vision” that is passed from one generation to another. In other words, we inherit cultural and familial visions that shape the way we see the world.

Both authors are depicting protagonists that are struggling to come to terms with and move beyond the limiting vision of previous generations.

In the case of the New York Jewish intellectuals, they were all either themselves immigrants or the children of immigrants. In order to shake off the narrow, stultifying vision of the world described by Roth, they embraced universalistic political, social, and religious philosophies.

This vision of the world that they hoped to bring into being would have ill-equipped them to respond quickly to the first indications of the Holocaust and would have made them shun Zionism. In other words, their vision prevented them from emerging as leaders at this critical time in the history of the Jewish people.

Rosalind Bronsen, Ph.D. Framingham, MA

History Debated I am ordinarily reluctant to intervene in an intramural faculty debate.

Nonetheless, my name came up several times in your columns and the allegations warrant, I think, a response (see “Status of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?” in Sextant, Fall 1999).

Professor Eric W. Metchik makes three substantive points: (1) I suggest that the Nazi Holocaust is exploited to “deflect attention from current Israeli policies.” This is hardly a novel claim on my part. Numerous mainstream scholars, including Boas Evron ( Jewish State or Israeli Nation), Peter Baldwin (Reworking the Past), and Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust), argue a similar thesis. Indeed, University of Chicago historian Peter Novick has just published a full volume on this topic, The Holocaust in American Life. The Holocaust, he observes, “came to be, for the Israeli cause, what Israel was said to be for the United States: a strategic asset;” thus, it “allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate grounds for criticizing Israel.”

(2) I ignore the “full context” of the June 1967 war, which, in Metchik’s view, shows that Israel confronted a major military threat. Metchik is surely entitled to his opinion, but readers should know that not one Israeli leader at the time—from Yitzhak Rabin at one extreme of the political spectrum to Menachem Begin at the other—believed this to be the case. All acknowledged that Egypt did not intend to attack and that, were it to do so, Israel would easily prevail on the battlefield. This was also the view of the CIA, which closely monitored developments.

President Johnson reported at the end of May that, in the “unanimous view” of American intelligence, “there is no Egyptian intention to make an imminent attack.” Israeli intelligence services likewise reported that “Egypt was not ready for a war; and Nasser did not want a war.” Regarding the Continued

outcome should hostilities ensue, the only question was—in the words of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara —whether it would take Israel closer to seven or ten days to defeat the Arab countries.

(3) I compare the “Zionists and the Nazis.” In my book, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, I point up the ideological convergence of various conquest enterprises. For example, I document that, just as the Zionist movement depicted Palestine as a “land without a people,” so the Nazis depicted in similar language Eastern Europe. I also observe that Americans described the West as a “virgin land” and “wilderness’’ when they embarked on conquest. Unfor-

tunately, Professor Metchik seems still to believe that most of Palestine was, in his phrase, “originally deserted.”

In recent years, Americans have sought to come to grips with the terrible truth that the native population suffered a profound injustice: North America was not a “virgin land.” One hopes that, rather than propagating tired myths, Professor Metchik will one day find the same moral courage to acknowledge the injustice perpetrated on the indigenous population of Palestine.

Norman G. Finkelstein, Ph.D. Political Science Department Hunter College

Sextant encourages readers to submit letters or comments.

Please write to: Sextant Salem State College 352 Lafayette Street Salem, MA 01970-5353 or send email to sextant@salem.mass.edu Please include your name, address, phone number, and email address.

Letters may be published and edited according to available space.

S O U N D I N G S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Mark Keene

We have been most fortunate to have Bill Coyle, M.A. ’93, serve as assistant editor during the fall semester. We have already become dependent upon his editorial pen and good ear. He has made each of the essays in this issue better, and for that we are most William Coyle grateful.

We are also pleased to announce the appointment of Richard Lewis, assistant professor in the art department, to the Sextant editorial board. He comes with impressive credentials and we look forward to working with him.

Publishing a journal requires the loving care of many people. Susan Case read each line of type in this issue and, as in the past, caught errors that had been missed by others.

(If errors remain, it is only because we couldn’t resist making some last minute changes—and with changes comes the potential for misplaced hyphens and typographical errors.)

Carol Morgan and Lorraine Jarnes of the publications department have once again helped find obscure references and settle questions of grammar and style. Derek Barr has proved invaluable by loaning us equipment and burning CDs. And Rod Kessler deserves thanks just for being Rod Kessler.

Betty van Iersel, Lee Ann Ball, and Nancy Ranahan have helped make Sextant more visible off campus by updating the

mailing list. And what would we do without Monica Clinkscales from mail services, who has graciously taken on the task of mailing the journal. John McElaney, Lee Gagnon, and Barbara Houle from shipping and receiving ensure that the Sextant distribution boxes remain full, and Mark Jay of purchasing, coordinates all aspects of mailing and distribution. Thank you.

Others on campus that deserve a special thanks include Kris Cowles, Amie Marks Goodwin, Lucille McCarter, Howard Coffin, and Laurie Toomey, for their administrative assistance; Mark Keene for going “on the road”; Joe Giordano from maintenance and his crew—Mike Walker, Jim Hunt, and John Pickett—for remodeling our new office; Clayton Livingston and Jim Barts for their computer expertise; and Donna Hoffman and Jane Kehoe for helping us in so many ways.

Our thanks also extend beyond the college community to Raquel Irizarry of Corbis; Margaret Walsh from the University of Wisconson; Harry Cleaver, Webmaster of the Zapatistas in Cyberspace; and John Sampas, literary representative of the Kerouac Estate. As always, Scott Prewitt, Paul Valle and the rest of the folks at Imperial Company deserve credit for great prepress and fine printing.

Finally, we thank the following for their many kinds of support: Nancy Schultz and Frank Devlin from the Writing Center; Patricia Buchanan, chair of the English Department; Janet Stubbs, chair of the Psychology Department; Anita Shea, dean of Arts and Sciences; Albert Hamilton, vice president of Academic Affairs; and Nancy Harrington, president of Salem State College.

MV & SM

S alem S T A T E

C O L L E G E

 Lafayette Street Salem, Massachusetts 

Metalsmithing: A Series of Works

Daniel Frye, 8˝ x 6 1/4˝ x 3/16˝

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Implications Series: Implied Freedom, brass and copper necklace.