the claw magazine february-march 2009
vol. 1 no. 1
The Forgotten Front What went wrong in Afghanistan?
Cowboy Monks
Education at Deep Springs
Stanford’s Budget
On the road to financial ruin?
From the Editor
the claw magazine Editor-in-Chief Anjali Albuquerque ’10 Senior Editors Paul Craft ’09 Irys Kornbluth ’11 Max McClure ’11 Alice Nam ’11 Senior Layout Editors Moritz Sudhof ’11 Beth Wei ’10 Copy Editors Alison Dame-Boyle ’11 Alex Mayyasi ’11 Art Editors Claire Lorentzen ’10 Jenny Tiskus ’11 Web Manager Alex Romanczuk ’11 Financial Manager Stephen Hess ’10 Fiction Editor Erica Toews ’10 Primary Sources Alex Slessarev ’11 Policy Editor Aimee Miles ’10
Faculty Advisory Board Department of Anthropology Lisa Maalki Sylvia Yanagisako Department of Comparative Literature Russell Berman David Palumbo-Liu Franco Moretti Department of History Aishwary Kumar
It is with pleasure, pride, and, perhaps, a certain trepidation that I invite you to read the first issue of the claw magazine. As part of the 1964 dedication of White Plaza Memorial, Stanford University commissioned the modernist sculptor Aristides Demetrios to design the eighty-jet bronze fountain, The Claw. Intended to represent the “growth and growing of things” and the “ebb and flow” of students and ideas throughout campus, the fountain stands as the centerpiece of a space for public forum, where free and open exchange of diverse opinions takes place. Our Mission We believe that this publication uniquely enriches the public forum in the following ways: 1) fusing the relevance and currency of a political journal with the excitement, creativity, and aesthetic appeal of a literary magazine; 2) addressing issues relevant to the Stanford, national, and global community; 3) presenting substantial and nuanced perspectives on a specific theme of timely interest; 4) introducing voices into the public forum that are either unconventional themselves or conveyed in unconventional media; 5) energizing Stanford’s public dialogue in our pages, through our events, and on our web site. In the lively and imaginative narratives of our pages, we hope to touch hearts and temper egos. We invite you, reader, to this conversation and hope that you will enter into it with letters, suggestions, and your own contributions. Anjali Albuquerque
Department of Political Science Joshua Cohen Abbas Milani Rob Reich Stanford Law School Helen Stacey Allen Weiner
COVER PHOTOGRAPH Special thanks to the ASSU
Afghani Pastoral Life Peter van Agtmael
www.theclawmagazine.com info@theclawmagazine.com
Publications Board, Boston Review, Peter van Agtmael, Michael Smith, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, and Professors Cohen, Crews, and Shamel.
contents
Features 9
Iraq’s Journalists Charlotte Lau, ’10
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Alternative Education: Deep Springs College 11 Sons of the Desert
Photo Essay by Michael Smith
14 Desert Solitaire Irys Kornbluth, ’11
Students at Deep Springs College find education in the dry desert, page 11.
Events 2 Best of the Bubble Talk of the Quad 6 Stanford Budget Cuts 7 8
Luukas Ilves, ’09
Barack in Translation Moritz Sudhof, ’11
A History of Citizenship Max McClure, ’11
24 Blog Digest
Paul Craft, ’09
Primary Sources 26 Bordertown
28 Ulysses in Tijuana Alice Nam, ’11
29 Murdering the Border Clara Long
Michael Smith
Meditations 36 What Happened in Vegas Alex Romanczuk, ’11
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Forum on the Future of Afghanistan
16 Rethinking ‘the Good War’ Robert D. Crews
40 Grounds
18 Bad Education
Fiction 32 Polyams
19 The Outpost War
Charlie Mintz, ‘10
Justin St. Germain
Poetry 34 Tyrrhenian Sea
Shafiq Shamel
Photo Essay by Peter van Agtmael
23 ‘Lifting the Veil’
Interview with Sharmeen ObaidChinoy by Aimee Miles, ’10
James Arthur
From the Archives 30 Letter to B. Goldwater 31 Barry Goldwater’s Reply
29 Beyond the Border
Antonio Ruiz-Camacho Emma Webster
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BEST OF THE BUBBLE S
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PROFESSIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP WEEK The Stanford Entrepreneurship Network hosts a week-long series of events culminating in a conference at the Graduate School of Business. From James Bond capers to venture capital speed dating, Entrepreneurship Week aims to instill the campus with creative business spirit. (See page 4.)
ENVIRONMENT
Above: Ughandan women doing laundry, Photo by Claire Lorentzen ‘10
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THE ETHICS OF FOOD & THE ENVIRONMENT SERIES Joel Salatin and his third generation organic farm, Polyface, Inc. achieved iconic status when both were featured in Michael Pollan’s bestseller,
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The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Salatin is a passionate defender of small farms and the right to opt out of the conventional food paradigm. (See page 4.)
MUSIC KRONOS QUARTET The ever-inquisitive Kronos Quartet heads east for an expansive program that explores the popular, contemporary, and mystical musical traditions of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. (See page 5.)
THE PUBLIC THEATER LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST Acclaimed director and aartistin-residence at Stanford Karin Coonrod of New York’s The
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Public Theater directs scenes from Shakespeare’s comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost. Coonrod has created productions nationally and internationally, including Henry VI, Everything That Rises Must Converge, and The House of Bernarda Alba. (See page 4.)
CONFERENCES PUBLIC INTEREST AND SOCIAL JUSTICE LAW RETREAT Global Social Justice Lawyering Keynote Address: Kyong-Whan Ahn, Chairperson, National Human Rights Commission of Korea. (See page 5.) All event descriptions compiled from events.stanford.edu
LECTURES, READINGS, AND TALKS HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEMOCRACY IN DANGEROUS PLACES Speaker: Paul Collier, Professor of Economics, Oxford University, and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. Professor Collier is a leading expert on the economics of developing nations. In this lecture, Collier will argue that the concept of national sovereignty is now being applied in a context for which it was not designed. Wednesday, February 11, 2009. 7:00-8:30 PM. Annenberg Auditorium. SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, and SECURITY SEMINAR: WIRED FOR WAR Speaker: Peter W. Singer, Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative and Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy, Brookings Institution. Wednesday, February 18, 2009. 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM. Reuben W. Hills Conference Room, Encina Hall. SELF-GOVERNMENT IN OUR TIMES Speaker: Adam Przeworski, New York University, Department of Politics. Respondent: James Fearon, Stanford University, Political Science. A weaker notion of self-government is logically coherent: a collectivity governs itself as long as decisions implemented on its behalf reflect the preferences of its members. In these two Wesson Lectures, Professor Przeworski will define the secondbest self-government and analyze whether democratic
institutions can satisfy even this second-best. Lecture I, Wednesday, February 25, 2009. 5:30 - 7:00 PM. Building 370, Room 370. Lecture II, Thursday, February 26, 2009. 5:30 - 7:00 PM. Building 370, Room 370. Discussion, Friday, February 27, 2009. 10:00 AM 12:00 PM. Landau Economics Bldg, SIEPR A. ETHICS@NOON: CHINA’S SWEATSHOP ECONOMY: PURVEYOR OF MISERY OR DEVELOPMENT NECESSITY (OR BOTH) Speaker: Scott Rozell, Freeman-Spogli Institute Rozelle will be taking an in-depth look at rural China’s labor markets and the workers and entrepreneurs that are part of history’s largest movement of a human population. The near and longer term consequences of China’s economic development will also be discussed. Friday, March 6, 2009. 12:00 PM. Bldg 110, 1st floor seminar room. BOOK LAUNCH: POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY - BUILDING INTERATIONAL ORDER IN AN ERA OF TRANSNATIONAL THREATS CISAC, FSI Stanford Special Event The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies will host a book launch event for Power and Responsibility prepared by the Managing Global Insecurity Project, a collaboration between the Brookings Institution, the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009. 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM. Bechtel Conference Center. A3C SPEAKER SERIES: ASIAN FUZZY: AN OXYMORON? How do Asian Americans break free from the engineer/scientist mold? To learn more on this topic, come for a discussion led by Professor Stephen Sohn of the English Department. Thursday, February 26, 2009. 12:00 PM. A3C Couchroom, 2nd Floor of the Old Union Clubhouse. STUDY GROUPS LECTURE SERIES: RENAISSANCE VISIONS: MYTH AND ART Speaker: Patrick Hunt, Stanford Archaeologist Based on his recently published book, “Renaissance Visions: Myth and Art,” Dr. Hunt will explore ekphrases of great painters and present the legends surrounding 11 favorite works of Renaissance art. Ongoing every week from March 5, 2009 through March 19, 2009. 4:15 PM. Cantor Arts Center. SYMPOSIUM: CONTEMPORARY HISTORY AND THE FUTURE OF MEMORY An all-day symposium with Françoise Lionnet,University of California, Los Angeles; Achille Mbembe, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research; and Istvan Rev, University of Budapest. Thursday, April 9, 2009. 9:00 AM. Building 460, Terrace Room.
Tables for Two Loving Hut Vegan Cafe
by Irys Kornbluth, ‘11 In college towns across the country, cuisine is going green. Many students have realized the environmental impacts of eating meat and industrialized food – second only to cars in fossil fuel consumption – and nearby restaurants are beginning to cater to our environmentally conscious taste. Examples include the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, a vegetarian eatery near Cornell, and Veggie Planet pizzeria in Harvard Square. With the opening of Loving Hut Vegan Café, Palo Alto is joining the ranks.
Like many restaurants on University Ave., Loving Hut has an unusual back-story. It is the first American opening of a restaurant chain based in Vietnam, and brings the vegetarian philosophy of Supreme Master Ching Hai, a Vietnamese spiritual leader and advocate of vegetarianism, to an environmentally concerned generation of American eaters. What this provides is a foreign take on green eating during a transitional period in American food culture. Given all of its idiosyncrasies and the timing of its debut, it is, understandably, a restaurant with an identity crisis. First, Loving Hut markets itself as a fast food restaurant, which may confuse American customers who relate fast food to McDonald’s and Burger King. In contrast, Loving Hut uses organic ingredients, and none of their dishes contain animal products. Second, the interior of the Loving Hut has a modern Asian aesthetic with white walls and minimal furniture. It resembles a cleaner version of a popular fast food joint I once visited in Xi’an, China. The décor of the restaurant may fit in Asia, but the shiny, barren walls might seem sterile and uninviting to the American eye. Identity crisis aside, the food stands on its own. The Heavenly Salad is an enlightening
mound of crisply chopped lettuce, topped with a zesty citrus dressing and crushed peanuts. I found a few pieces of pinkish tofu in the mix that I could’ve sworn looked and tasted just like turkey, and that wasn’t the only time I was fooled. The soy protein substitutes in the Guru’s Curry had the texture of buttery lamb shank – the furthest from vegan that I can imagine. The curry sauce was thick and complemented the texture of the protein substitute nicely. Loving Hut’s recipes are unconventional for what we normally associate with veganism, which makes the dining experience both surprising and intriguing. Try the Vegan Cheesecake for dessert – the smooth, creamy filling and crisp crust will melt in your mouth. A cool Thai Iced Tea will go well with any dish. Like most natural and organic restaurants, Loving Hut is expensive. Heavenly Salad is $8.95, out of the price range for most students, but still cheaper than anything at the CoHo. The Italian Sorbet costs $6.95. Portion sizes also tend to be small. For those looking for a different dining experience, try the Loving Hut, and taste the green.
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TANNER LECTURE 1: THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE Speaker: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Harvard Law School. The Tanner Lectures aim to advance the scholarly and scientific learning relating to human values. Lecture I: The Future of Religion, Wednesday, April 15, 2009. 5:30 - 7:00 PM. Location TBA. Discussion I: Thursday, April 16, 2009. 10:00 AM 12:00 PM. Location TBA. Lecture II: The Religion of the Future, Thursday, April 16, 2009. 5:30 - 7:00 PM. Location TBA. Discussion I: Friday, April 17, 2009. 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM. Location TBA.
ENVIRONMENT WOODS ENERGY SEMINAR: SEQUESTERING CARBOM DIOXIDE IN THE BUILT IN ENVIRONMENT - A REVOLUTIONARY CEMENT TECHNOLOGY Brent Constantz, President and CEO of Calera Corporation. Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009. 4:15 pm. Bldg 420, room 40. THE ETHICS OF FOOD & THE ENVIRONMENT SERIES Speaker: Joel Salatin, owner of Polyface, Inc. Organic Farm. Joel Salatin and his 3rd generation organic farm achieved iconic status when both were featured in Michael Pollan’s bestseller “Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Salatin is a passionate defender of small farms and the right to opt out of the conventional food paradigm. Thursday, February 19, 2009. 7:00 PM. Cummings Art Bldg, Annenberg Auditorium. DOES PERSONALIZED WATER AND HAND QUALITY INFORMATION AFFECT ATTITUDES, BEHAVIOR, AND HEALTH IN DAR ES SALAAM, TANZANIA Speakers: Professors Ali Boehm and Jenna Davis, CEE, Stanford. Friday, February 27, 2009. 12:00 PM. Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy Building, Room 101. DESIGNING MODEL-DRIVEN SENSOR SYSTEMS TO CLOSE THE LOOP ON WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT: PROTOTYPES AND PILOT STUDIES IN CALIFORNIA’S SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY Speaker: Tom Harmon, Professor, School of Engineering, UC Merced. Friday, March 6, 2009. 12:00 PM. Jerry Yang & Akiko Yamazaki Environment & Energy Building, Room 300.
MEDICINE BIO-X SEMINAR: ON GROWTH, ANTIBIOTICS, AND EVOLUTION Speaker: Professor Terence Hwa, Center for Theoretical Biological Physics & Department of Physics, U.C. San Diego.
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Thursday, February 26, 2009. 4:15 PM. James H. Clark Center Auditorium. NECK PAIN: CURRENT CONCEPTS IN DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT Speaker: Ivan Cheng, MD, Assistant Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery, Stanford Medical Center. Greater than 50% of people over the age of 40 experience significant neck pain, which affects their work. This talk will focus on the diagnosis of various neck problems and the latest techniques and technologies available to aid in this widespread problem. Thursday, March 5, 2009. 7:00 PM. Cypress Room, Tresidder Memorial Student Union. To register call (650) 498-7826.
PROFESSIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP WEEK Hosted by The Stanford Entrepreneurship Network. Entrepreneurial Leadership Speaker: John Hennessy, President, Stanford University. Wednesday February 18, 2009. 4:30-6:00 PM. Kresge Auditorium. Careers in Product Creation and Manufacturing for New Graduates Thursday, February 19, 2009. 6:00-8:00 PM. Hartley Conference Center, Mitchell Building, School of Earth Sciences. Pitchfest: Venture Capital Speed Dating Apply in advance for 3-4 opportunities to give threeminute pitches to VC pairs and receive three minutes of feedback. At 4:00, the event opens to the public for a networking mixer. Friday, February 20, 2009. 1:30-5:00 PM. Wallenberg Learning Theater, Building 160. Pitching and Presenting Workshop: How to Make Your Story Compelling Space is limited to the first 30 people. Saturday, February 21, 2009. 10:00-12:00 PM. Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (“d.school”), Building 524. “Bring Your Product to Life” Workshop Space is limited to the first 30 people. Saturday, February 21, 2009. 1:00-3:00 PM. Hartley Conference Center, Mitchell Building, School of Earth Sciences. Starting & Growing a Social Enterprise: Panel and Showcase Sunday, February 22, 2009. 3:00-5:00 PM. Wallenberg Hall Learning Theater, Building 160. “Solving the Global Talent Equation” Seminar & Reception Speaker: Kyung Yoon, CEO of Talent Age Associates, former Vice Chairman of Heidrick & Struggles. Monday, February 23, 2009. 4:00-6:00 PM. Bechtel Conference Center, Encina Hall. “Startup 101” Job Fair Tuesday, February 24, 2009. Noon-4:00 PM. Tresidder Union. Entrepreneurship Mixer Tuesday, February 24, 2009. 5:00-7:00 PM. Graduate School of Business (GSB), South Building, Lower Arbuckle Lounge. Creativity Challenge: James Bond Casino Caper
Dress as your favorite James Bond character (or not) and join us for a glamorous soiree while mingling with the stars and enjoying Blackjack, Craps and other casino favorites. Sometime during the evening your entrepreneurial spirit will be put to the test, and you may just be blown away. Come armed with your creativity and sense of adventure. Space is limited to the first 35 people. Tuesday, February 24, 2009. 7:30-9:30 PM. Top Secret Location. Annual GSB Entrepreneurship Conference There is a fee for this event, and registration is required (http://www.econference.org/). Wednesday, February 25, 2009. 11:00 AM-4:00 PM. Graduate School of Business. “The Next Big Thing”: A special presentation of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture Series Featured Speakers: Tim Draper, Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Tony Perkins, CEO, AlwaysOn; Michael Moe, Founding Partner, ThinkPanmure. Wednesday, February 25, 2009. 4:30-6:00 PM. Kresge Auditorium. Networking Reception and SEN Fair Wednesday, February 25, 2009. 6-7:30 PM., Kresge. ENTREPRENEURIAL THOUGHT LEADERS LECTURE: ELIZABETH HOLMES, FOUNDER & CEO OF THERANOS, INC. Wednesday, March 4, 2009. 4:30 PM. Skilling Auditorium.
ARTS AND CULTURE THE ART AFFAIR FESTIVAL Day-long celebration of art at Stanford. Friday, April 17th, 2009. White Plaza. Sponsor: SOCA
THEATER THE PUBLIC THEATER AT STANFORD DRAMA: SKETCHES FROM LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST Acclaimed director and Stanford artist-in-residence Karin Coonrod of New York’s The Public Theater directs scenes from Shakespeare’s comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost. Ongoing every day from February 26, 2009 through February 28, 2009. 8:00 PM. Pigott Theater, Memorial Hall. HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME: THE WASTE LAND Directed and choreographed by Tony Kramer. A dance piece inspired by T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Ongoing every day from March 5, 2009 through March 7, 2009. 8:00 PM. Roble Dance Studio.
POETRY MARK DOTY READING Mark Doty, recipient of the 2008 National Book Award for Poetry, will read from his work. He is the author of several collections of poetry, and memoirs including “Heaven’s Coast”, which won the PEN/ Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Wednesday, March 4, 2009. 8:00 PM. Levinthal Hall, Stanford Humanities Center.
VISUAL ARTS VERY CLOSE TO FAR AWAY – 1st YEAR MFA EXHIBITION An exhibition of four first-year MFA graduate students in Art Practice, Jeremiah Barber, Jamil Hellu, Juan Luna-Avin and Armando Miguélez. Ongoing every day from January 13, 2009 through Febr uary 22, 2009. 10:00 AM. Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery. ARTIST’S RECEPTION: ELIZABETH M. WILLIAMS, “PERCEPTION AND REALITY” A Connecticut native, Elizabeth resides in California. She holds a B.S. in Mass Communication, magna cum laude, from Boston University and a Certificate in Business Administration, with distinction, from the University of California, Berkeley. About her photography, Elizabeth states, “I shoot as I see.” Tuesday, February 24, 2009. 6:00 PM. Serra House.
MUSIC STANFORD PAN-ASIAN MUSIC FESTIVAL The annual Stanford Pan-Asian Music Festival has established itself as one of the most important Asian music festivals in the U.S. Now in its fifth year, the festival will celebrate Asian composers and explore both traditional and contemporary works across many genres. The Stanford Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Symphonic Choir, Stanford Philharmonia Orchestra, and Stanford New Ensemble will perform. Ongoing from February 13 - 27. KRONOS QUARTET The ever-inquisitive Kronos Quartet heads east for an expansive program that explores the popular, contemporary, and mystical musical traditions of Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Tickets: Adults $42/46; Stanford Students $21/23. Friday, February 20, 2009. 8:00 PM. Dinkelspiel Auditorium. SONGWRITERS WORSHOP: ESPERANZA SPALDING Jazz/soul vocalist, bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding leads an interactive workshop with students at the Roble Hall Theater. Bring your instrument, song lyrics, or any music you are working on to share with the group. Refreshments will be served. Thursday, February 26, 2009. 8:00 PM. Roble Hall Theater. Sponsor: Stanford Lively Arts and the Office of Residential Education.
For the Time Being Quatuor pour la fin du temps by Max McClure, ‘11
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BOISE NOISE AT THE COHO Friday, February 27, 2009. 8:00 PM. COHO. SPANISH HARLEM ORCHESTRA The Spanish Harlem Orchestra channels the vintage salsa sounds of El Barrio in the 1960s and ‘70s with full-bodied big band style, vocals by turns suave and soaring, and crisp new arrangements of classic repertoire. Sunday, March 15, 2009. 2:30 PM. Memorial Auditorium.
FILM SCREENING: EVANGELION 1.0: YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE (2007), DIRECTOR: HIDEAKI ANNO In a post-apocalyptic world where all that remains of Japan is Tokyo-3, a young boy must defend his city from the destruction of Angels, giant creatures bent on the destruction of humans. Thursday, February 12th, 2009. 7:00 PM. Cubberley Auditorium. SCREENING: THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME (2006), DIRECTOR: MAMORU HOSODA 17-year-old Makoto Konno discovers that she has the powers to leap through time and starts using her abilities to improve her grades and avoid undesirable situations. She soon realizes, however, that playing with the past can have many unintended consequences. Thursday, March 5, 2009. 7:00 PM. Cubberley Auditorium.
CONFERENCES AUSTRIA AND CENTRAL EUROPE SINCE 1989 The third in a series of international conferences to study the political and cultural landscape of Austria and Central Europe. Thursday, March 5, 2009. 9:30 AM. Bechtel Conference Center Encina Hall. RSVP required: lseaman@stanford.edu. 11TH ANNUAL TRINA GRILLO PUBLIC INTEREST AND SOCIAL JUSTICE LAW RETREAT Global Social Justice Lawyering Keynote Address: Kyong-Whan Ahn, Chairperson, National Human Rights Commission of Korea February 20 - 21. Stanford Law School.
here is something very interesting going on in the title of Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” Is the piece’s sense of time literally stopping, as if the Book of Revelations that inspired Messiaen brought about a state of suspended animation (that “silence in heaven about the space of half an hour”)? Is it instead all a pun – a puckish sounding of the death knell for typical Western rhythm in the vein of Brubeck’s “Time Out”? And how do we work in the peculiar finale – the keening note of the violin dying out unaccompanied? One of the few acknowledged classics of 20th-century chamber music, the choice of the “Quartet” to begin Stanford’s tribute to the celebrated French composer’s centenary, now continuing with the upcoming performance of his Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus, is hardly surprising. Messiaen’s work is unusually listenable for a modern composer, and nothing enhances this so much as the venue itself. Memorial Church is both a gorgeous visual presence, shining in its gold leaf over the increasingly ecstatic musicmaking of the group, and a remarkable acoustic space. The piano sounds like bells, the clarinet like trumpets, and something in the reverberation combines with the subtlety of the playing to remove any direct association of the musicians’ movements with the sound that emerges, as if the walls themselves were seeping music. This is not to take any credit away from the performers, who have done a tremendous job bringing lyricism to atonality. Todd Palmer, in particular, imparted a remarkable vocal quality to the liquid birdsong of the “Abîme des oiseaux,” rising from a calm melodic quality into frenetic, chaotic twittering and back into that unbalanced tranquility that runs throughout the piece. In this uneasy combination lies the key to the Quartet. There is motion in the stillness, subtle cycles that Messiaen hides in the middle of the wall of sound. That is where the Quartet means to stand on the issue of time – stopping and never ending, simultaneously. The way the Book of Revelations allows for someone who “liveth for ever and ever” even if “there should be time no longer.” The violin will just quiver out of our hearing when it’s time to leave. february-march 2009
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Budget Cuts
In Defense of Student Consumerism
by Luukas Ilves, ‘09
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s Stanford goes through unprecedented budget cuts, we can easily tell ourselves that these reductions are an opportunity to identify the essential aspects of the Stanford experience and expect that the administration’s guiding hand will prevent any real losses. The truth, however, is far less rosy. The student body’s disproportionately small influence in running the university mitigates our influence when it comes to where our money is going. Remedying this problem requires an attitude shift: we need to stop thinking like passive students and start thinking like consumers. Let me sketch the problem: Though Stanford’s operating budget for 2008-09 exceeds $3.8 billion, most of this income consists of grants and restricted funds that are already allocated to specific labs, programs, and endowed chairs. Meanwhile, the University has about one billion dollars in General Funds towards causes of their choosing; these funds make important infrastructure possible. Authority over the budget rests largely with the Provost and a small advisory group of faculty and administrators. Nevertheless, professors get a lot of say: departments determine how their money is allocated internally; faculty committees approve budgets for administrative entities like the libraries; and the Faculty Senate has extensive access to the Provost during meetings. The faculty has ensured that they will face no salary cuts and no job losses. Students, in contrast, have precious little access. There isn’t an undergraduate on this campus that really understands the budgeting process or could hold his own in a budget conversation with Provost Etchemendy. Students on university committees have little training and usually sit back and listen. The ASSU does not necessarily include Stanford’s best and brightest, and those few com-
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petent Senators and members of the Exec who do work on this problem lack the time, information, and access to make 1/100th of the impact that the faculty already have – it was a breakthrough that the ASSU President and VP even met with the Provost to present a two-page list of recommendations. So, there is a huge mismatch between how much the University depends on our support and how much say we have in their use of our money. Despite Stanford’s rhetoric about how tuition ‘pays for less than half the cost of our education’, the University is still dependent on tuition money. This year, 53% of the General Fund was paid for by tuition money; with the reduction in endowment income, that portion will grow drastically. Every year, Stanford sorely requires our tuition money to hire more faculty and invest in new programs. This year, Stanford needs our money just to stay afloat. Most students remain complacent, trusting the University to take their best interests into account. After all, Provost Etchemendy promises the undergraduate experience will go largely untouched. Nevertheless, new dorm and dining hall construction has been put off, support structures and advising are being cut, and our tuition bill is still going up 3.75%. These cuts particularly affect current students: we foot the increased bills of a university going through recession, but we will be gone before we can reap the benefits when Stanford recovers. Nobody knows whether the cuts would look different if students were more strongly involved in budgeting, but it’s worth the try. Ask Stanford if it is giving you the best bang for your buck; have your tuition-paying parents call the provost and complain about budget cuts; get your friends to develop opinions about the budget; and get involved in student government. Maybe, just maybe, Stanford will then move closer to the effervescent ideal of American consumerism: the customer (er, student) is always right.
Right-side Round:
Barack in Translation
by Moritz Sudhof, ‘11
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t was like putting a t-shirt on backwards. Something about the voicemail didn’t fit. Alison, Alex, John, and I were zooming through the midnight Mojave Desert, the big nothingness between Las Vegas and Palo Alto. Inspired by our palpable excitement, our snacks — mainly forgotten wasabi peas on the loose — tumble around the car like balls in a bingo cage. Something about my mom’s voicemail, though, gives me pause. —I watched the speech with Gina she found it online and even Dallas County went for Obama and can you believe that, can you believe that! I hope you’re driving safely, Moritz, and I really am so— Wait. My mom has never before said my name in English. It hits me: the whole message is in English; my parents have always addressed me in German. Rewind: I was born in the broad geographical region between the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel — Texas. This simple occurrence supplied me with a passport, and this passport tells me I am American. At four, however, German was the only language I could mumble, and it wasn’t until age six that I learned the name “Santa Claus.” At lessly ten, I ran home after school to breath-lessly recount to my mom — in German — the hardships of Valley Forge. Last July, I was taking summer classes in Berlin when then-Senator Obama visited to deliver his speech. I was one of the only audience members to whom neither the speaker nor the setting was foreign. English shouts for voter registration polka-dotted the avenue of carts peddling bratwursts and Becks. I felt at ease — more so than I do in California, where my friends still laugh when I blurt, let’s make a picture! Moritz, here in America, we say let’s take a picture. Try to define that with a passport. Mark Twain said that, in writing, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. The difference between being an American and being a citizen is the same. I’ve had the passport my whole life, so I hoped that one day I would just wake up an American. But not until Barack was I inspired to go search for America. I spent November 4th, 2008, in Clarke County, Nevada. On the way to the field office, Alison, Alex, John, and I munched on a pre-dawn breakfast of wasabi peas: fired up, ready to go! One sunrise and one sunset later, after a flier and two knocks on every apartment door of Precinct 2462,
I called on Mrs. Stevens, her daughter Shawna, and her granddaughter Jill again. Mrs. Stevens was buoyant and full-bodied; Shawna was lithe and energetic — a leopard in a sweat suit; and Jill was just plain cute. I had called the field office earlier to arrange a ride to the polls. Had they made it yet? No – no ride. I huddled with my canvassing team. The residents of apartment 114B did not just represent two votes; Mrs. Stevens and Shawna represented the desire to participate in determining the course of this country. With the doors of William J. Long Elementary School closing soon, we decided I should take them myself. Alison, Alex, and John would walk to the next neighborhood. On the way there, Shawna and her mother argued about who would take care of Jill while Shawna went for groceries; on the way back, the car was silent. “God Bless You,” Mrs. Stevens said when I dropped them off back home. She said it slow and looked me in the eye; she said it like it was three words and not a ready-made phrase. It was the first time someone had told me that and actually meant it. I thought of those three words that night as we drove out of Vegas and towards early morning exams, and I mulled over the Inaugural promise of a previous President from Illinois: “The mystic chords of memory … will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” I’ve struggled through Dylan on the guitar; I’ve played Bach on the cello. Neither has convinced me I am American or German any better than my passport has. When Mrs. Stevens said those three, slow words, though, I finally felt like lightning. In trying to help swell the chorus of the Union, I joined it. —I hope you’re driving safely, Moritz, and I really am so happy, so happy, Moritz, to be here in America— I understand why the English of my mom’s voicemail bothered me that night as we drove towards the curvaceous slopes of California. I have always defined my mom as the fixed German part of my mixed identity, but she has also been searching for America. I crunch down on a wasabi pea with a smile: I think we both just turned our t-shirts right-side round. february-march 2009
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History
A Brief of Citizenship:
From the American Revolution to the Present
by Max McClure, ‘11
I
t’s been many years since the visionaries who founded this great nation of ours (America) first experienced the orgasmic yet responsible thrill of voting. Their methods seem laughable to us now — painstakingly researching the most qualified candidate, inking their name onto parchment, walking miles through sleet and gunfire, and finally placing their completed ballots in the mouth of a ravenous mule (hence the phrase “the Electoral Mule”). Nowadays, the miracle of industrialization has dramatically streamlined this process, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who walks more than a block or two to feed their ballot to a mule. But our responsibilities as Americans remain inconvenient and tiresome. There is a great deal of work involved in voting, and it pays very poorly. We need more motivation. This is why the United States’ government started using Citizenship. But, for such a crucial component of modern life, very little is known about Citizenship’s origins. Who discovered Citizenship? How did it make its way to the US? Is it still single? Thankfully, at least one part of the story is relatively clear. Although high school civics textbooks maintained through the mid ‘70s that the concept of Citizenship was imported by Thomas Jefferson on a dare, the evidence is now overwhelming: Citizenship came to America via Xenopsylla cheopis – a flea found primarily on Norwegian wharf rats. In rodent-infested American port cities, where rat and human populations lived in close proximity, epidemics of Citizenship ravaged Americans of all classes. Firsthand accounts describe horrifying symptoms, including “blacke melancholy,” “seveere idiocy,” and “a desire to take part in democratic processes,” a combination that would eventually give birth to the Reform Party.
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Regardless of its genesis, Citizenship found the New World to be fertile ground, rapidly spreading to all Americans except women, Blacks, Jews, Native Americans, immigrants, and one Edward Langsley, who had smiled at John Jay in a “harsh and condescending manner.” Then again, its progress across the continent was not without its rocky patches. The mid-nineteenth century, for instance, saw a particularly egregious infringement on the American view of Citizenship from south of the border: in April of 1846, de facto Texan leader Stephen F. Austin received a handwritten note from the Mexican ambassador asking Texans to “please stop owning slaves” (though, of course, it was likely written in Mexican). Thankfully, the American passion for civic duty took the day as the US armed forces, 50,000 men strong and equipped with 7000 horses, 4000 cannons, and 23 unmanned Predator drones, bravely slaughtered 4 mariachi bands and an old man in a comically oversized hat. The Mexican-American war has since defined our present-day view of Citizenship, which is to say: whatever America wants it to be. For a long time, this primarily meant not doing bad things (like sex, drugs, spicy food) on the flag, but now the word has taken on additional significance. One example: America may, in fact, claim anyone anywhere as a Citizen. Jesus, for instance. Genghis Khan. Tom Hanks. Alternately, we can expel people, like Roman Polanski, or Ted “the Weasel” Kornbluh of 153 Redwood Court, who attempted to smoke a hand-rolled and ended up vomiting alfredo all over the new paisley carpet that I had literally just installed, man. Christ. On the other hand, Citizenship’s unique status as both a right and a duty is crucial to understanding the concept’s ineffably erotic mystique. William McKinley – a self-described “monster fan” of Citizenship – subtly addressed this duality after the Philippine-American War by referring to his victory as a “mission of benevolent assimilation” – a statement both prophetic and amusing, because “assimilation” has a dirty word in it (ass). Citizenship, he seems to say, means nothing if the whole doesn’t draw some effort from each of us. Preferably from the Filipinos. After all, somebody has to feed the mule.
War Junkies
The Dangerous Lives of Iraqi Reporters by Charlotte Lau, ’10
M
y friend got shot in my car one time because they thought it was me.” Salam Talib said, matter-offactly and almost in passing. That one-line story is not an uncommon one for native Iraqi reporters like Talib, on whom foreign media bureaus are relying more and more as the situation in Iraq becomes too dangerous for Western reporters to effectively report on the ground. Iraqi journalists can blend in with crowds more easily and speak with Iraqi accents. But as they have taken on greater reporting duties, Iraqi reporters have also faced additional dangers. Asked why they truck on despite added hardships, some said they relish wartime dangers, but all expressed hopeful, even idealistic, views of how journalism could serve to help their country, while still suggesting that more could be done to ensure their safety. Many Iraqis became translators and journalists after American troops landed in Iraq in 2003. Their previous jobs ranged from biology professor to taxi driver. Omar Fekeiki, an Iraqi correspondent for The Washington Post, began his career after a chance run-in with a Post reporter whom he saw struggling with the language barrier during an interview. Huda Ahmed, another Iraqi who has worked at CNN, the Post, and the McClatchy papers, got into the business through family connections. After Talib’s own Arabic-English bilingual newspaper folded at the beginning of the war, he started freelancing for media outlets whose members he had met while working at the Palestine Hotel. Huda explains the initial draw: “I wanted to see the streets. I was watching from the roof of my house. [But] I didn’t want to stay at home and watch it.” She said her brother agreed to drive her around so that she could “watch it with my own eyes. I wanted to see everything—to have a war and the toppling of the government. I had never seen that before.” This natural curiosity drove Huda and many of her Iraqi colleagues to rise from translators to reporters, often for top news organizations. Former Washington Post Baghdad Bureau Chief Karl Vick admitted the training of Iraqis under his watch was “ad hoc and on the job,” but Fekeiki found the journalistic
exercises substantial. For about six to eight months, he said he was trained during interviews. “The reporter would ask me, ‘Do you know why I asked that question?’ [and] ‘Are there any questions you want to add?’” After that period, he and a trained Western journalist would both be dispatched to cover the same story, but Fekeiki’s work would be for practice. At the end of the day, Fekeiki said he would sit down with the reporter to talk about how he could improve. Ayub Nuri, a reporter for radio and TV stations around the world, including the BBC World Service, started translating for journalists in 1998, but he only began doing his own stories when the Iraq War began. He learned by “paying attention and observing to what approach [Western journalists I worked with] used. I learned how to use the equipment— how to record and edit sound.” According to Talib, international journalism organizations have also offered more official, albeit generally truncated, training sessions to several local Iraqi newspapers. Under Saddam Hussein, the government had full control of the media, and journalism as it existed in America was nonexistent. However varying, these training processes all occurred in the middle of a war that made journalism increasingly difficult and dangerous. Eighty-three of the 105 journalists killed on duty in Iraq have been Iraqis. Many others have been threatened. In one such case, Omar Fekeiki, a native Iraqi and correspondent for The Washington Post, left his home in October 2004, and noticed a car sitting about 50 meters from his house, which then followed him to his office. Knowing they were Iraqi insurgents threatening his life, he told his newspaper bureau chief, who offered to helicopter Fekeiki out of Iraq. “I didn’t want to leave [my home], but I had to,” he said. Declining to be sent out of the country altogether, he simply switched locations, instead reporting on the U.S. military operations in Fallujah. Native-born journalists have continually struggled to stay safe while negotiating Iraq’s treacherous networks of streets and people. Many Iraqis said they kept their jobs secret from
most of their friends. Talib said his family knew that he worked for a foreign news organization but never knew his whereabouts. “I feel that danger is always as close as the ring I have in my finger,” said the McClatchy news group’s Faith Hammoudi, corresponding from Iraq. “Only two real friends know my job. Can you imagine that?” Isam Rasheed, an Iraqi freelance cameraman, faces the added challenge of equipment that cannot be easily concealed. As a result of his job, he has been arrested three times. Rasheed recounted that, in January 2004, the American military came to his house and searched his 3-year-old child and 85-yearold father in its quest for his tapes and cameras. He was then held in jail for seventeen days. Vick described similar incidents with his Iraqi employees involving insurgents and the media. In a place where the journalists feel constantly threatened by armed rebels, government militias, and the American army, Iraqi reporters explained that they have accepted much of the responsibility for their own safety, especially since protective guard like flak jackets would only draw attention to the correspondents. “No one has responsibility for my safety, because they can’t be,” Rasheed explained. Nuri agreed, “What can you do in a place like Iraq? Most of them love their jobs, the Iraqis.” It is this love for journalism and a deep belief in the power of the written word that Iraqis continually cite as their main reason for continuing to report. “I want to be a voice of my people, of their miseries, their pains, their stories—what they really want to say,” explained Ahmed. “My camera gets taken from me, and many of my colleagues get killed. But I challenge [those who attack journalists] and I continue because I believe I have to show everything,” Rasheed concurred. “This is my country and those are my people, and I have to do something for my people.” Rasheed’s belief that “all you need to do is show the reality” and things will change is echoed by many Iraqi journalists, even if for many it is less a conviction than a hope. february-march 2009
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Some, however, acknowledge that more could be done on their behalf. While Talib didn’t think anyone could take full responsibility, he said, “I think definitely [the foreign employers] should feel responsible. It’s a human thing, not a professional thing.” But Fekeiki noted two ways in which Iraqis are left out. “We don’t have life insurance,” he said. “If someone [from an Iraqi news outlet] is injured, they get nothing. If someone is killed, their families get nothing.” For those working for American companies, “if one of us gets killed, maximum, our families get $2000. I don’t even hear of people getting that much,” he added, solemnly. “That’s how cheap the life of an Iraqi journalist is.” Fekeiki also pointed out that nearly all Iraqis work without contracts. “I’ve sat in a meeting where they were planning how to evacuate a certain journalist compound in Iraq if insurgents attacked. American military helicopters would take the journalists out of the compound—everyone except the Iraqis. The American military isn’t allowed to take the Iraqi employees. “When I said [Iraqis are] employees of American companies, they said, ‘No, they’re not because they don’t have contracts.’ And it’s true. We just work. “And it’s a real plan—it’s there. It’s ready to be, you know, conducted. If they attack, they’ll evacuate the Americans only.” Asked how other Iraqi journalists feel about the plan, Fekeiki responded, “It was a closed-door meeting. They don’t know. That’s the worst part of it.” But Fekeiki brushed off the question of why there were no contracts to begin with. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just wanted to be a journalist. I didn’t care.” For him, it was compensation enough to report from war and be the world’s eyes and ears to one of the biggest news stories in the American media today. “The last six months before I left [in June 2006], every place was dangerous. [The staff] would sit in the living room and we would laugh about how dangerous it would be and we’d still want to do it,” he said. Another Iraqi at The Washington Post, Naseer Nouri, seems to reflect that sardonic humor. His Skype online chatting profile reads: “I’m available means I’m alive.” “You’ve heard of ‘war junkies?’” Fekeiki asked. “It’s basically war junkies.” But not everyone has the same visceral addiction. Talib, who has since moved to the U.S., acknowledges that he might not return. “I would like to go back to my job whenever it is safe and pays the bills,” he said. “That does not mean that I did not enjoy
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Peter van Agtmael
Medic Jeffrey Smith cradles a young Iraq girl injured when a rocket explosion sent shrapnel through her home. After digging the pieces of metal from her back, he picked her up and carried her to the intermediate care ward, where she rested for a few days before being discharged to her family. One of his first duties as a medic in Baghdad was to treat seven marines wounded in a suicide bombing. Between them, they only had seven legs and seven arms, and five of them died on the operating table. Smith never quite recovered from that experience and began self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. After testing positive for drugs, he was discharged from the army and lost all health benefits.
being a journalist. I just wish that I did not learn how to be a journalist the hard way in the middle of a war zone where professional journalists fail to cover the whole story.” In Talib’s opinion, many Iraqi journalists are only working for news organizations because few other jobs are available. The Brookings Institute estimates that unemployment is at 25 to 40 percent, as other sources report a wide range of statistics. “Even for people who like journalism, if it weren’t a good income, I don’t think anyone would do this.” He also noted that reporters get paid substantially less than the security workers who go to the same locations. According to Vick, while he was stationed in Iraq in 2004 to 2005, The Washington Post paid its stringers based around the country between $250 and $400 a month and those in the bureau $1000 a month. Security personnel receive $1200 a month. In comparison, the median income of an Iraqi in the first half of 2004 was about $144 a month, according to a report by the Iraq Ministry of Planning and Development Cooperation and the UN Development Program in Iraq. “They were good salaries by Iraqi standards,” Vick said, also noting that other news operations paid their Iraqis substantially more. “All these salaries put [our employees] in the top one percent of the population.”
While money may have played a part, the compensation comes with the perils of wartime journalism—and sometimes, not even a byline. Tom Popyk, a freelance foreign correspondent from Canada, explained: “Most Iraqis, including those working with western agencies, shun any identification, fearing kidnappings or violence.” In areas where printing the names of stringers would be especially dangerous, newspapers protect the identities of their employees, who might otherwise be seen as foreign spies. Fekeiki added that, though the risks Iraqis face are less acute than those foreigners encounter, they are more permanent: “Americans have American passports, and if anything happens to them today, they’ll be on the first plane tomorrow. If anything happens today, I can’t leave tomorrow,” he said. According to him, reporters for Iraqi news outlets are offered even less protection. The four news organizations with highest journalist death tolls are all local. But Rasheed, who has worked with Baghdad TV, remained adamant about his profession. “I prefer to stay a journalist more than anything,” he said. “This is my duty to my country, you know? To survive, we must sacrifice.”
Sons of the Desert The Students of Deep Springs College
by Michael A. Smith Twice the recipient of the National Endowment in the Arts, Michael Smith was awarded the Le Grand Prix de Livre Rencontres Internationale de la Photographie in 1981. Over 100 museums worldwide maintain permanent collections of his work, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Art Institute of Chicago, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the London Victoria and Albert Museum. For the last forty-two years, Smith has balanced photography with teaching, and at Deep Springs College, these two passions came together to produce The Students of Deep Springs College, a book of portraits published in 2001.
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Desert Solitaire
The Strange Paradise of Deep Springs College
by Irys Kornbluth, ’11
I
had my hand up a cow’s ass that day… election day,” Gabe reminisces from across the table. Glancing up, he chuckles as our heavily tattooed waiter pours him another glass of water. Gabe is a first-year student at Deep Springs College, an all-male post-secondary school in the middle of the California high desert. On November 4th, Gabe and his 25 classmates spent the day of Obama’s historic victory administering manual pregnancy tests to cows while the faculty and staff drove to the nearest town and watched the election on a hotel TV. “So did Martin,” Gabe recalls. He gestures across the table at his fellow classmate, an international student from Germany. As Gabe describes the particulars of “pregtesting” cows, Martin cringes ever so slightly. He says that he read about Deep Springs in a newspaper and became fascinated by their motto – “service to humanity.” It is an ironic phrase, considering that Deep Springs is 45 minutes from the closest town. “I had never seen these ideas in an institutionalized form,” adds Martin, explaining why he was so drawn to the philosophy of the school. Martin’s curiosity is not unwarranted. Under what circumstances could the values of service and leadership be institutionalized? The geographic and sexual isolation at Deep Springs is daunting, but it may allow the students to grow in ways that few are able to explore in today’s world. With such a small student body, Deep Springs students have the chance to be fully invested in their immediate community. Given that they are completely isolated, they have no other choice but to learn how to lead and serve each other. But can they extend these notions of service and leadership to a broader community upon graduation? Even though they live and learn in seclusion during their formative years, the
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students of Deep Springs are still expected to serve others on a national and even global scale. What do these students gain by removing themselves from the modern world? In the end, can being removed from humanity better equip you to serve and lead others? § Deep Springs was founded in 1917 by Lucien Lucius Nunn, a power industry tycoon whose mission was to educate generations of leaders. Nunn started out by educating poor workers at western power plants, who would only have time for classes in between shifts of hard labor. Having come from a privileged background, Nunn was fascinated with the groundedness of labor, something that he aspired to integrate with elevated academic study. Max Hare, a junior here at Stanford, transferred after completing two years at Deep Springs. He took on various leadership positions on the ranch, the most memorable being his role as the campus butcher. Since leaving Deep Springs, he has been itching to continue doing manual labor. “I feel completely skill-less here at Stanford,” he remarks. Last year, he was trained to work fMRI machines at the campus neuroscience lab, but he quit after a few months. “It still wasn’t really a skill,” he explains. Now, he enjoys working at the Ricker Gardens. Max misses manual labor, in part, because it had the power to bring him closer to his immediate community at Deep Springs. He remembers how close he felt to his classmates when he worked the land beside them. “One winter, I had to dig with just this one other person,”
he recollects. “We were working four hours a day in the afternoon for three weeks, just digging and digging.” But can the level of engagement on the local level at Deep Springs ever be replicated on a national scale? At Deep Springs, the limitations of manual labor helped Max to realize that there are limits to what one person can do to serve their community. “You can only really serve people that you know,” he remarks. Max is not optimistic about Stanford’s potential to replicate the Deep Springs sense of community and campus stewardship. “At Stanford, people aren’t here to live with each other. The first week I showed up, I picked up a lot of trash,” Max says of New Student Orientation. The student body is simply too large for students to feel connected to each other in the same way. “When I lived at Deep Springs, it was our home: when we saw something wrong with it, we would fix it.” § If manual labor is the cornerstone of Deep Springs, self-governance is the centerpiece. Students admit new classmates and hire and fire faculty and staff. They also dictate the curriculum and maintain school grounds. “You feel like you own the place,” Martin comments. This sense of ownership encourages the students to think critically about the decisions they make. Max remembers the heated debates over school policies that would arise during Student Body meetings. “When I was at Deep Springs, there was a big emphasis on ‘people who like to think about things’ and engage in ideas,” he explains. Student body meetings would often go until 3 AM, when dairy staff would be excused to take an hour-
long nap before milking the cows. Nevertheless, Deep Springs is a strange paradise. Although tuition is free, the majority of the student body comes from a white, upper-middle class background. Diversity does not come easy to a school like Deep Springs — their PR is modest, and they only receive around 150 applications per year. There remains the question of women. Nunn made it clear in his will that Deep Springs was to be an institution for “26 men,” and the Board of Trustees are faithful to Nunn’s original vision. While the students have little hope to change the terms of Nunn’s will, they still engage with these controversies, especially during Student Body meetings and organized speeches. Both students and faculty tend to favor allowing girls to attend the school. Michael A. Smith, an acclaimed fine arts photographer (featured on p. 12), taught at Deep Springs College during the seventies, and he remembers sitting in on student speeches that pressed for coeducation. Smith admits that he is biased – it was an artsy girlfriend who first encouraged him to pursue photography, a hobby that would become his profession and lifelong passion. Nevertheless, Smith still believes that accepting women into Deep Springs would benefit the school atmosphere even though he understands the concern that girls might “distract” from the experience. “I gather that Nunn was fairly asexual,” Smith remarked during a phone interview. “He didn’t want relationships to get in the way of this short, intense time.” Sexual isolation, like geographic isolation, is implemented to keep students from getting distracted. Perhaps this explains why less than 50% of alumni go on to marry. However, it is difficult to generalize Deep Springs students; the intellectual culture changes every two years as classes graduate. Even so, as a monoethnic, all-male institution, Deep Springs seems to be falling short of a “democratic” experiment, at least
when placed in the context of America’s pluralism. How does Deep Springs expect to educate future leaders of a multicultural nation when they do not expose their students to this diversity? § “I shot the cow at what is called the ‘point of humane termination,’” Max recalls of his time as a butcher at Deep Springs. “After that, I bled the cow and cut and stored the raw meat.” The experience has changed the way that he thinks about animal treatment in the industrial food system. At Stanford, he was inspired to become a vegetarian in a class taught by Saul Williams. Max is a poet himself, although he wants to study neuroscience. Back at Deep Springs, Martin and Gabe are beginning to wonder how they will apply what they are learning to the national community. “I think Deep Springs prepares you because you learn what responsibility means,” Martin muses, “but I’m not sure how a life of service might manifest itself in a professional sense. It’s hard to figure out what this will mean for yourself.” He thinks he might want to be a banker in the developing world when he is older. “I’m not completely free of capitalism,” he says. On New Year’s Eve, Gabe took Martin to a house party near his home in Los Angeles.
Both of Gabe’s parents are actors – his father played the “Dad” on 90210. After most of the guests at the party had left, they picked up hundreds of red plastic cups. On the way back to Gabe’s house, they spotted a man walking drunkenly on the highway shoulder. They pulled over and drove the stranger to his home across town. As we wrapped up the interview, Gabe struck up a conversation with our somewhat intimidating waiter. They talked about money. When our waiter first moved to San Diego, he found that, working at the restaurant, he didn’t need money to survive, and he liked it that way. Gabe related similar sentiments about living at Deep Springs, where all they need is each other, the livestock, and the land. For a guy who had been living in isolation for seven weeks, Gabe seemed to thrive in the urban setting of the restaurant where we met. In the end, I came to thinking that he was just as well-adjusted as anyone else walking down the street, perhaps even more confident and comfortable. “Some people justify having a life of service by going and being a blacksmith,” he remarked while we paid the bill. “I think that’s fine, but I think it’s a cop out to go into construction. I’m not necessarily pissed at those people, but I definitely don’t think that is what the founder intended.” “By the way,” I asked before we parted, “were the cows pregnant?” “They were,” Gabe laughed.
Photos by Michael Smith
The California high desert has long been fodder for the lonesome. As Deep Springs graduate William T. Vollmann writes, “you could hear the creek talking to itself, the faint hiss of the grass-pennants in the wind, the hums of flies and the discussions of birds where the shale spires and saddles were fractured into vertical planes seamed with quartz granite.” William T. Vollmann, The Atlas, 93
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Rethinking ‘the Good War’
America’s Nation-Building Strategy in Afghanistan by Robert D. Crews
Assistant Professor of History at Stanford
A
recent bombing illustrates the depth of the quandary facing the Obama administration in Afghanistan. On January 17, a bomber drove a Toyota Corolla packed with explosives into the heart of Kabul. The blast exploded close to a U.S. military base near the Germany embassy, killing five people and wounding two dozen more. But this was not the first major assault on one of the capital’s most heavily guarded neighborhoods. In January 2008, the Taliban attacked the luxury Serena Hotel, a resort that was previously thought to be an oasis of security. In July, a bomb killed more than fifty at the Indian embassy. In October and November, attackers targeted both the office of the shipping company DHL and the U.S. embassy. As we enter the eighth year of a campaign that the American media has dubbed “the good war,” the Taliban have a firm presence in nearly threefourths of the country including provinces neighboring Kabul.1 The American-led effort to stabilize Afghanistan risks losing the capital – and the war. The Obama administration understands that the situation is dire. Pakistan remains a haven for insurgents and a source of regional instability. The Afghan economy is dominated by opium while the Karzai government is weak and corrupt. The struggle against the Taliban has been undermanned and underfunded. The vehicle for salvaging the war effort, we are told, is the transfer of counterinsurgency lessons from Iraq. Inspired by the seeming success of the “surge” and Sunni “awakening,” the new strategy calls for the long-term deployment of 30,000 new troops, bringing the total number of international forces to roughly 100,000. It also involves the arming of tribal militias. A military official in Afghanistan recently explained that the troop increase would allow U.S. forces to take control of hostile areas in the Talibandominated south, adding, “we can (then) bring in governance and development.” He warned, however, that “there will be some tough months of violence first.”2 Is such a strategy likely to succeed? Skeptics have observed that the conflict in Afghanistan differs from that in Iraq. A less obvious, but
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more troubling, objection is the fear that the U.S. may be transferring to Afghanistan a plan whose impact on Iraq may be too early to judge. Do we know which factor played the greatest role in Baghdad, the troop buildup or the mass sectarian killings that emptied out entire neighborhoods? True, supplying arms and cash to tribal militias mobilized sectarian sentiment. But what will the longterm implications of this policy be in Iraq and the region as a whole? Our assessment of the surge and its transferability should receive more scrutiny, but it is not the only concern that the new administration must tackle. The president has promised to make diplomacy a priority. But military force still lies at the heart of U.S. strategy. What if, contrary to received wisdom, a large number of Afghans do not share the view that this is an unambiguously “good war” against an irreconcilable enemy? It would be hazardous to generalize about public opinion in a country as diverse and complex as Afghanistan, but recent developments suggest that many Afghans, including those whom the Americans regard as allies, oppose the strategy. Spokesmen for the United Front (or “Northern Alliance”) have objected to raising tribal militias, arguing that such a strategy will return the country to its fratricidal past.3 Afghan communities fear a spike in the fighting. From many villagers’ perspective, foreigners have not been very successful at distinguishing between friend and foe. House searches and air strikes have alienated whole districts and driven Taliban recruitment. Thousands of civilians have died in the fighting. Karzai and Afghan human rights groups have complained that civilian casualties undermine the government and bolster the insurgency. Protesters have staged dozens of demonstrations throughout the country. Detentions and abuse at Guantanamo, Bagram, and other secret prisons have also provoked repeated demonstrations. A growing number of Afghans now mistrust the United States. They are frustrated by the inability of their government and its foreign supporters to combat the scarcity, corruption, and violence around them. Conspiracy theories call U.S. motives into
question. The Israeli siege of Gaza, which most Afghans view as an extension of American policy, has been met with protests in Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-i Sharif, and elsewhere. Afghan identification with the plight of civilians in Gaza is noteworthy. One recent editorial asked, “Why are the people of Afghanistan and Palestine being killed?”4 Afghans have called for justice for the Palestinians – and the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan. In an era when radio and satellite television reaches most of Afghanistan, the U.S. can no longer ignore the fact that its support for the killing of more than 1,300 Gazans undermines American credibility in other parts of the world. Another rift may imperil the new strategy. U.S. forces and Afghans do not necessarily share a common view of “the enemy.” Who, after all, is the coalition fighting? Washington tends to view the Taliban through the lens of 9/11 as a medieval band of religious fanatics and a key ally of al-Qaeda. Afghan political leaders, by contrast, see heterogeneity, recognizing that the movement has championed the cause of the ethnic Pashtuns, many of whom feel disenfranchised under the Karzai government, and recruited members with diverse grievances and loyalties. Alongside Karzai, influential clerics have championed reconciliation, arguing that many insurgents can be convinced to give up their weapons in exchange for political inclusion. Although U.S. commanders have secretly participated in these efforts on an ad hoc basis, they have preferred to fight rather than negotiate. Such a strategy might succeed when the identity of the foe is clear, but in Afghanistan an unpopular government and its foreign backers face a variety of challengers. The Taliban are a cross-border movement with an elastic and loosely coordinated membership. They have expanded their control by setting up shadow governments in rural areas and promising law and order. Harkening back to a period of national unity against a foreign invader, these “neoTaliban” have also laid claim to the mantle of the 1980s jihad against the Soviets. Yet this is only part of the story. The government faces many other opponents with their own agendas. Smaller Islamist groups like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Party of Islam, in addition to regional military commanders and drug lords, challenge Karzai’s authority. Coalition forces face suicide bombers in towns and on highways; in southern and eastern villages they confront populations
Peter van Agtmael
Sergeant Russell embraces two stray dogs, days before the end of a 16-month tour of duty to Afghanistan. A number of strays hung around the base waiting for the bored American soldiers to feed them from their excessive food supplies. With the absence of women, many of the soldiers took to lavishing the strays with excessive affection. Not all the soldiers were so welcoming to the dogs. Several weeks before, one of the dogs urinated on the cot of one of his more reluctant hosts. Several soldiers proceeded to shoot the dog with every weapon they had in their inventory. This led to tension in the platoon, already strained from a long deployment in which they were extended for four months, just days before they were scheduled to return home.
who are not affiliated with the Taliban but may still take up arms against foreigners. They may face hardened jihadis or villagers bent on guarding the poppies they rely upon for survival. As one British veteran has pointed out, a “poppy-farmer can hang up his hoe over lunchtime, pick up his Kalashnikov, shoot at the British and be back in the fields for the rest of the afternoon.”5 The front lines of this war are endlessly fluid. A troop surge will likely contribute to stability if troops are deployed to secure towns, highways, and infrastructure. But taking the fight to villages haunted by a shadowy Taliban presence – and murky allegiances – is another matter. Such a strategy will inevitably harm more civilians and swell the ranks of the opposition. U.S. soldiers may find that they are fighting Pashtun villagers, not the Taliban alone. The notion that the military should then spearhead “governance and development” is also flawed. Provincial Reconstruction Teams have dangerously
blurred the line between humanitarian work and military activity while depriving the Afghan government of an opportunity to establish its legitimacy by providing for its citizens. It is time to rethink “the good war,” especially when American strategy runs counter to the aspirations of growing numbers of Afghans. A military solution looks more doubtful than ever: the U.S. will not transform Afghanistan into a secular democracy at gunpoint. The remaining alternatives are less than ideal, but they all revolve around some kind of bargaining. An ambitious diplomatic initiative aimed at defusing Pakistan-India tensions and reintegrating Iran into the international order will be an essential step toward stabilizing and demilitarizing the region.6 The U.S. can make the first move by renouncing permanent military bases. Some kind of decriminalization (and regulation) of Afghan poppy production will be another. Most important, Afghan concerns must be heard. The constitutional structure imposed
by Americans upon Afghanistan in 2001 lies at the heart of this crisis. Instead of devolving authority upon the provinces, where most Afghans live, it concentrated power in the hands of the president in Kabul. The U.S. must now allow Afghans to strike a more equitable balance between the center and the provinces. It should also support Kabul in talking to opposition groups. Coalition forces may have to combat some Taliban and permit the re-entry into public life of others. Sharing political authority more broadly among Afghanistan’s diverse regions –even among Karzai’s opponents – remains the sole means to bring an end, at last, to thirty years of civil war in Afghanistan. 1 The International Council on Security and Development. “Struggle for Kabul: The Taliban Advance.” Dec. 2008. 2 Pamela Constable. “Resistance to U.S. Plan for Afghanistan: Troop Boost Complicated by Growing Taliban Influence, Anger Over Airstrikes and Civilian Deaths.” The Washington Post. Jan. 16, 2009. 3 “Arbaki sazi, bazgosht be gozashte.” Payam-e Mujahed. Jan. 1, 2009. 4 “Afghan Daily Says ‘Real Holocaust’ in Gaza.” Cheragh. Jan. 1, 2009. Trans. Open Source Center. 5 Leo Docherty. Desert of Death: A Soldier’s Journey from Iraq to Afghanistan (London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 190. 6 See Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid, “From Great Game to Grand Bargain: Ending Chaos in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Foreign Affairs (Nov./ Dec. 2008).
february-march 2009
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Bad Education:
Reevaluating Reconstruction in Afghanistan by Shafiq Shamel
Lecturer, German Studies and Comparative Literature
A
lthough United States foreign policy in Afghanistan has been driven by regime change for the last eight years, the Obama administration will best serve the region and American interest by shifting its focus to cultural and social change, redistributing resources from the military to the civil sector. In particular, the longterm goal of political stability, democratic pluralism and civil society in Afghanistan is directly linked to the development of the educational system. To that end, any investment – political or otherwise – is well spent if it contributes to the advancement of education in Afghanistan. In my research so far, I have mainly engaged with EastWest relations in the context of literary and intellectual exchange, with special focus on Persian classical poetry and its reception in England and Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until the autumn of 2008, here at Stanford University, that I was given the opportunity to teach a course on twentieth century Afghan literature and history. When I began to consider textual and visual materials for the course, I realized that a presentation of contemporary Afghan literature and history would be incomplete without calling attention to Afghanistan as an emerging discourse beyond the confines of the news media. As a result, I was able to integrate texts across genres ranging from poetry translations to English memoirs written by Westerners and Afghans in diaspora. Despite the primary focus on critical discussion of textual and visual media, I frequently found myself drawing a map of Afghanistan and its neighbors on the blackboard, while talking about the complex cultural, linguistic, and religious relationships among Afghans themselves and with neighboring countries,
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particularly Iran, Pakistan, and Tajikistan. More often than not, I had to draw upon historical developments from past centuries, lessons that newcomers must grasp in order to understand simple issues, such as the relationship between ethnic affiliation and political power in Afghan politics. The dynamics of political culture in Afghanistan have changed considerably over the last two decades since the collapse of the Soviet backed government. When I fled Afghanistan in 1983, there were mainly two major forces engaged in an armed struggle for political power: the communist government and the Afghan resistance. The victory of the Mudjahedin forces marked a shift in the nature of the conflict; although the struggle for freedom was inspired by patriotic and religious sentiments to resist the Soviet invasion and communist ideology, it could not provide any political vision for the future of the country. In fact, the victory of the Mudjahedin revealed a deeper divide among Afghans instead of bringing about the unity that they longed for. Ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity became the main source of conflict for the legitimacy of political power, and the ensuing civil war put an end to any kind of vision for political stability and a democratic culture in Afghanistan. The iron rule of the Taliban after the defeat of the Mujdahedin is remembered by some as a time of stability. Yet the civil order and sense of security among the people masked the brutality – including ethnic cleansing – and the totalitarian, dogmatic nature of the Taliban rule. Nationalism, as a political concept for unity in Afghanistan, has its beginnings in the 1920s; consequently, it is not an unknown subject among Afghan intellectuals. However, neither the Mudjahedin nor the Taliban, who have both been in possession of political power for the last two decades,
seem to have considered it a political goal. Instead, both eras represented the return of religion in the public sphere as the only cultural force for political unity. It is this interrelatedness of politics and religion that shows how local politics of Afghan society are connected to the larger context of Middle Eastern politics including Islamic fundamentalism, nationalism, and democracy. It seems as if religion has come to present itself as the only force capable of overcoming ethnic and linguistic divide. The current Afghan government and society has not made any considerable advancement in this regard. There is not yet social and cultural awareness to harness diversity as a source of strength and to accept its centrality in democratic pluralism. The role of religion in society is still coupled with cultural and political identity. However, the development of civil society based on the principles of democratic pluralism, such as religious freedom and human rights, is closely linked to the de-coupling of citizenship and religious faith. Afghanistan is thus as much a project as it is an emerging discourse. From the perspective of a scholar of who has studied literature, history, and culture in both Germany and the United States, I consider the build-up of the educational system in Afghanistan to be the most important factor in the development of both political stability and unity. The main challenge for the United States and the international community does not have much to do with Taliban military power. Above all, it is the lack of civil political culture, a problem that has its roots in the breakdown of the educational system during the thirty years of civil war. Much effort is needed to provide tangible prospects for Afghan youth in order to render the Taliban-run madrassas (religious schools) obsolete. In other words, political stability in Afghanistan cannot be achieved without a paradigmatic shift in cultural identity, a task that is conditioned by strengthening the educational system as its foundation.
The Outpost War photos by Peter van Agtmael
One of four small outposts overlooking the remote town of Aranas in Eastern Afghanistan’s Waigul Valley. Five months later, the American unit manning the outposts was ambushed. 28 of the 30 soldiers were killed or wounded. The outpost was abandoned, and the valley returned to insurgent control.
At dusk, two Afghan soldiers pray while a third mans a recoilless rifle. Many of the U.S. soldiers were on their 2nd or 3rd year-long deployment and desperately wanted the Afghans to take active and ambitious responsibility for the regions they operated in. The Afghans felt that the U.S. soldiers should bear the burden of risk since the Afghan army was sparsely equipped.
february-march 2009
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The 3rd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division has lost the most soldiers of any unit to serve in Afghanistan.
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Peter van Agtmael A year out of college, with a history degree from Yale, Peter van Agtmael decided to become a freelance photographer. At just twenty-seven, his work has been sought by prestigious publications, including Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times. In 2008, he was awarded the Critical Mass Book Award as well as 2nd place in the General News Stories category of the World Press Photo Contest. On assignment, van Agtmael has specialized in crisis, documenting the tsunami in Thailand and the AIDS epidemic in Africa. These photographs chronicle his time with American troops in Afghanistan from 20062008. february-march 2009
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Dawn breaks over a village in Eastern Afghanistan occupied by U.S. soldiers searching for a man suspected of launching rockets at a nearby American base. The previous night, as the soldiers approached, the village dogs began barking, but by the time soldiers arrived the suspect was long gone.
Patrol Base California, Pech Valley, Afghanistan. The outpost was built by a small platoon in May 2006. “This will be your home,� their commander told them. Over the next year, California was attacked 83 times.
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Interview with Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
Stanford Alum examines the role of women in Afghanistan
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
In the last seven years, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has produced and reported on 13 films for major U.S. and British networks including CNN, PBS, and Channel 4 (U.K.). Born and raised in Pakistan, her two-part series Lifting the Veil aired in 2007 on CNN: Special Investigations Unit. The documentary examined the condition of Afghan women six years after the American invasion. Aimee Miles,‘10, conducted this interview on January 18, 2009. Aimee Miles (AM): What was it like, as a woman, to film Lifting the Veil in the social climate of Afghanistan? Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy (SO): When Afghan women – or for that matter, Afghan men – would talk to me, there was a kind of shock that a Pakistani woman, a Muslim woman, had the freedom to get an education in the West and move about as she pleased. The women had so many questions of me— like how my father treated me, and what was life like as a workingwoman. They were trying to reconcile my story with what they were seeing in their own society, and I think I was able to show them that it’s not only okay to ask for more rights, it’s our responsibility to do so. There were also moments in the film when Afghan men were flabbergasted that a Muslim woman could have a conversation with a man, looking at him straight in the eye as an equal. I think they found it a little disconcerting. I was speaking to one young man about his wife, whom he had literally been keeping under lock and key. At the end of the conversation, he said, “The way you speak, the way you move, the way you interact with us – it’s like a man. So we’re able to grant you that respect. But our women are different; they like to take two steps back.” In that moment, I understood their mentality that “our women are weak and that’s why we have to protect them. So in that conversation I told him, “You have to give a woman that opportunity --you have to give her that voice. If you don’t, she’ll never be able to be strong.” AM: How would you respond to the claim that in criticizing the status of Afghan women in your film, you are imposing a Western agenda on a different culture?
SO: I can’t impose a Western agenda because I’m a Muslim woman, born and raised in a Muslim country. There’s a huge difference between a white American woman making a movie and a Muslim girl making the same film. AM: In Lifting the Veil, you discuss the fact that girls are going to school, a right that was denied to them under the Taliban. Are there opportunities available for them to pursue the goals that their education has qualified them for? SO: Afghan society is still a very conservative society. In Kabul, you never see women driving. You’ll see women in the market, but most of the women are covered completely. So while you have young women getting an education in the cities, you find that there are very few opportunities available to them when they want to get a job. They can work in a western NGO, and you also find some women in journalism, but by and large, most sectors are closed to women. One of the reasons that I did Lifting the Veil was because there was all this talk about women being liberated in Afghanistan. The rhetoric on Western television by the President and Laura Bush was “Afghan women have been freed.” I wanted to explain that Afghan women are facing obstacles that we don’t often hear about in the West anymore. Twenty years of warfare ruins the social fabric of the society, and it takes a generation or more to bring about change. AM: Is it difficult for you as the interviewer to remain impartial when you speak directly to the women and men who, in many cases, support the oppressive status quo? SO: I don’t come across as neutral at all because, for me, these kinds of stories are extremely important to tell in an emotional way. I sit with them in their homes, often living with them to better understand what they’re going through. In those cases, I don’t think I’m a journalist as much as a storyteller. february-march 2009
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PAUL CRAFT, ‘09
BLOG DIGEST OPPOSING BALKANIZATION
8 Feb 2009 07:11 pm
Author’s note Writing in the “Boston Review” back in 2001, Law Professor Cass Sunstein warned that the democratizing powers of the Internet have their dark side: . . . As a result of the Internet and other technological developments, many people are increasingly engaged in a process of “personalization” that limits their exposure to topics and points of view of their own choosing. The internet has, in other words, “balkanized” our national conversation into disconnected echo chambers. The Claw Magazine will run a regular feature analyzing a series of blog posts that have addressed the same topics from different points of view, putting into conversation opinions from different corners of the web. 8 Feb 2009 06:58 pm
Civil Rights “Anachronism”? The 2008 general election set a voting record in North Carolina: for the first time in the state’s history, more African-Americans voted than whites. In the 1950s, less than 25% of blacks in North Carolina could vote. The electorate has certainly changed, and after President Obama’s decisive victory, some question if the Voting Rights Act of 1965 should change as well. Later this year, the United States Supreme Court will examine Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. One v. Mukasey, a case that contends that Section 5 of the Case – which mandates Federal oversight of state election laws in certain Southern and Western states – is outdated.
The Background Voting Rights Act •
Signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson.
• •
Passed in 1965.
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Extended to Texas and other states in 1975
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Bipartisan exensions in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006.
8 Feb 2009 06:33 pm
Conservatives and States’ Rights Commentary Magazine has been the flagship publication of the “neoconservative” movement for decades, publishing Irving Kristol and Max Boot among others. At the moment, the monthly magazine rests well within the mainstream of pro-“War on Terror,” Bush-style conservatism. On Jan. 18 Jennifer Rubin posted the following: When African American turnout has reached historic highs and when record numbers of white voters have elected an African American President, it’s hard to maintain that the Voting Rights Act is necessary or, more to the point, Constitutional . . . . . . There is an entire civil rights industry devoted to the proposition that voting discrimination is still rampant and therefore the federal government must still regulate all manner of election procedures in the Old South (and other designated jurisdictions) despite forty years of electing African Americans to federal, state and local offices. The Obama administration will soberly argue that the nation has not much changed since 1965. These days, Constitutional law boils down to what Justice Kennedy thinks. So your guess is as good as mine as to how the Court will rule. But I think two days before swearing in the first African American President most of us can agree this isn’t 1965 anymore.
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Required federal approval for new election laws in certain states.
Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. One v. Mukasey •
Accepted by Supreme Court on January 9th.
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Appealed from United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
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Small Texan municipal district hopes to repeal Section 5 restrictions of the Voting Rights Act. The district came into being in the 1980’s and has never passed discriminatory voting laws.
Ms. Rubin demonstrates the conservative logic of the “post-racial society” – a logic that has gained major momentum in the era of Barack Obama. In her mind, America has progressed beyond the need for the punitive Federal regulations that defined the Civil Rights movement. Constitutionality is at the heart of the matter. Conservatives have long contended that centralized national legislation infringes on the Constitutional tradition of states’ rights. So, despite good intentions, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was an unconstitutional use of Federal power. Conservatives have fought since the 1960s to roll back Federal oversight of “the Old South.” Why have these efforts largely failed? To Mrs. Rubin, the answer is a “civil rights industry” that perpetuates the myth of “rampant” voter fraud. Presumably, she refers to leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, Sr. who stand to benefit from a public perception of racial discrimination.
... Voters black and brown and red (and student voters of all colors) are now deprived of their essential civil right not through crude violence, as in Selma once upon a time, but through methods infinitely subtler, and far more efficient . . . Here Professor Miller aims to obliterate the core of the “post-racial society” argument. To him, the Bush era has brought the wide-spread, systematic disenfranchisement of the votes of “black, brown, and red (and students of all colors).” It is an argument often hinted at but less frequently voiced by the American left. Professor Miller’s final point, however, is well within the mainstream leftist understanding of racism: discrimination has not disappeared but gone underground. It is no longer de jure – formalized by state law – but de facto – carried out secretly and subtly. The difficulty of spotting racism is all the more reason to legislate aggressively against it.
8 Feb 2009 06:16 pm
Leftist Outrage Most liberals, however, see this issue in different terms. Foremost, many contend that voter fraud is still rampant in America. This argument is made most forcefully by Mark Crispin Miller on his blog News from Underground. Miller, a farleftist professor of media studies at New York University, focuses on issues like the manipulation of public opinion by the corporate media and voter disenfranchisement. He contends, for instance, that the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections were stolen by the Republican Party, a movement he has called “crypto-fascism.” Here are excerpts of his response to Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. One v. Mukasey: But we can’t treat this new judicial threat to our democracy as an entirely rightist move, or blame this situation only on Bush/Cheney . . . [What] we’re facing now is based on a far larger abdication of responsibility. ...For both the Democratic Party and “the liberal media” have both refused even to note, much less investigate, the Bush regime’s unprecedented program of election fraud and voter suppression. ... ...The case that Roberts and his brethren have agreed to hear Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Mukasey argues that there’s simply no more need for those onceinfamous localities to seek “preclearance” to make any changes in their voting rules. The lawsuit argues bluntly that “the times they have a-changed,” that citizens throughout the land now cast their votes without impediment . . . . . . Suffice it here to say that, while the lawsuit claims that things have universally improved since 1965, the evidence makes clear that, since 2000, things have gotten just as bad as they once were, or even worse–
8 Feb 2009 06:03 pm
Let’s Be Serious A more moderate leftist critique of the case comes from the blogger “B-Serious” at Jack and Jill Politics, a blog that describes itself as “a black bourgeois perspective on U.S. politics.” He writes: It’s disturbing to see that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to hear this challenge. ... Even more disturbing is the fact that this challenge comes just after Washington reauthorized the Voting Rights Act (including Section 5) in 2006. Section 5 is not a permanent provision of the Voting Rights Act (although Section 2 is). It must be reauthorized (and it has) from time to time. However, states are not defenseless against the special provisions of the Voting Rights Act. In fact, Section 4 provides a “bail-out” wherein jurisdictions may seek to terminate coverage under the special provisions. Soooo . . . If race relations have progressed as much as petitioner claims, then it would appear that it’d have little trouble applying for and receiving a bail-out as a case-by-case basis. But apparently that’s not good enough for them. ... Instead, petitioner has asked the Court to declare Section 5 unconstitutional; an act that threatens to completely strip victims of voting rights violations from protections of preclearance altogether. B-Serious argues that the Supreme Court is taking an extreme position by hearing the case. By threatening to overturn major Federal laws that have been renewed consistently for decades with bipartisan support, the Supreme Court is taking a drastic, politicized step to against the status quo. In other words, a lot has changed in the 44 years since the Act’s creation, but it’s only been three years since its bipartisan renewal.
february-march 2009
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[the neighborhood]
[primary sources]
BORDERTOWN In Search of Citizenship
O
ur world is made up of documents – of emails, blogs, coffee receipts, brochures, papers, and problem sets. But in this section of The Claw, we have selected three documents that we believe should endure – primary sources that frame the moment but might not otherwise be heard in the cacophony of the public forum. Border zones have long been epicenters of cultural change and conflict, but lately the confines of these hotspots have become less strictly defined. Where the border of the early 20th century was rarely more than an imaginary cut-here line north of Ciudad Juárez or east of Jerusalem, the 21st century hides its borders where we least expect them. The dotted line has moved out in all directions until we find ourselves confronted with aduanes at every street corner, or, in the case of Mr. Garcia’s poem, in a supply closet rendered invisible by the everyday workings of an elite university. Even at the Rio Grande, as in Border Stories’ Casa del Migrante, there is something of the no man’s land – a house apart, only able to offer transients an identity by cementing their transient status. And the rise of virtual communities has extended marginal identity even further, until Ms. Araji views herself as a member of a border community nearly 1000 kilometers away. Together, these three documents provide insight about citizenship in a globalized world. In this era of mass communication, we are fortunate to have so many voices competing to define the moment.
Alguien camina por las noches Stanford janitor Doroteo Garcia’s poem about the division between institutions of higher learning and the unseen hands that maintain them was first excerpted, in translation, in the New York Times. Below, the poem appears untranslated and in its entirety for the first time, revealing both the trials associated with the modern border and the hope for a better future these contingencies are unable to stifle. Alguien camina por las noches hasta muy tarde, en la Universidad de Stanford. No es estudiante No es profesor, a veces lo encuentras adentro de un salón de clases o dentro de un auditorio no es un investigador tampoco es un científico. Otras veces lo puedes ver, dentro de un taller o dentro de un laboratorio pero, no es un doctor tampoco es un administrador también lo podrás ver dentro de algunas oficinas y no es personal de seguridad ni es personal de Staff ¿QUIÉN ES? es un janitor No lleva libros, ni cuadernos, usa un trapeador y un sacudidor, en vez de una computadora trabaja con una aspiradora. mantiene limpia la Universidad mientras todos duermen. mañana durante el día, en este prestigioso lugar se hablará de Economía y de Politica, o tal vez se invente una nueva fórmula Química o Física, quizás mañana, una vez más algún Doctor reciba un premio Nobel en Ciencias también, mañana, podrán los Magnates de la Economia los conocedores del Mercado, discutir las nuevas reglas de la globalización Economica mundial, todo esto podrá suceder el día de manana.
“You were so right! Academia is 60% about style.”
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Pero hoy a la una de la madrugada un janitor sueña despierto añorando un mejor futuro para sus hijos.
[the nation]
[the world]
Border Stories: I am Mr. Nobody
A Grain of Mustard
Our primary source on the national front is a selection of a transcript from the innovative documentary Border Stories. This groundbreaking film captures daily life on the border in twenty-two discontinuous installments. Below, an interview is excerpted from “Mr. Nobody,” a five-and-a-half minute segment examining migrant worker safe houses and the psychological effects associated with that lifestyle’s impermanence and obscurity.
The following is a selection from a post entitled “The Ordeal of Gaza…” written by Faiza Araji on her blog A Family in Baghdad in response to the recent Israeli strike on Gaza. Translated from the Arabic by her sons Raed, Khalid, and Majid, the blog is a testimony to the increasing opportunity for normal people to inject their voice into the public sphere through the Internet. The Araji family lives in Baghdad, far from the Gaza Strip.
Francisco Pellizari (Director of the Casa del Migrante safe house in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico): The migrant is a Mr. Nobody for society. If he disappears, dies, or gets kidnapped it’s one more, one less. When I talk with the migrants I tell them you are a member of the house. The house gives you a certain identity for society. But when you are in the street, nobody knows you. You disappear. We don’t know how many cross successfully. No one knows the percentage, and I don’t think anyone could calculate it. We think many of them have disappeared in the desert or the Rio Bravo, and their bodies haven’t been found. Samuel Mendes (Guatemalan migrant): My job was in the country. I had to grow corn. Unfortunately, it always floods there and you lose the harvest. A lot of times, you lose your house and you go broke. You say to yourself, okay where do I go? And then people come and say ‘‘the United States.’’ It’s a way out. I’ve been traveling for four months. Along the way we’ve run out of food. We’ve had to knock on doors and beg. Now there is a new law that’s called Zero Tolerance. These laws are terrible for us migrants. They caught me in the United States, locked me up, and then they returned me to Mexico. But we trust God that one day this law will end. We’re not doing any harm. We’re trying to see how we can make a living, how we can give a better life to our children. I left my wife (in Guatemala), and she’s taking care of our children there. It’s really hard us, to be far away and not know how the other is doing. Life is impossible like this. I know the situation is difficult in the United States too. And we understand the authorities. They tell us ‘‘we’re just doing our job, we’re the law, right?’’ But it’s miserable. If they knew everything that we suffer throughout the whole journey, I don’t they could bring themselves to stop us. Everyone is a migrant. We are all pilgrims. We are all passing through. One day life is over and the world will still be here. But since it’s the law of man, it has to be this way.
My heart is sad about what has been happening in Gaza and its people for two weeks now. I wonder about the lowliness of the world we are living in. There are cruel people and there are cowards; cruel people bomb by warplanes and kill the unarmed civilians with malice and a dead conscience. Cowards watch, condemn, and criticize with meaningless, empty words. And there are the millions of civilians around the world those rallying, marching, sitting-in in protest, burning flags and raising slogans, but who cares? And, the decision makers watch; their coldness, we cannot interpret, as keeping their nerves under control. It is cowardness, slackness, and a conspiracy against those poor people in Gaza, for they abandoned them, leaving them under the daily savage bombardment, the shortage of water and food supplies, besieged in their homes, which they cannot leave. These sites remind me of the Iraq war in 2003, what we suffered under the daily bombardment while we were besieged in our homes, waiting for the bombing to calm down so we could send our boys to the bakery to stand in the long line to get a few loafs of bread; we abandoned the notion of refrigerators in our houses when the electricity went out and had to buy the vegetables each day for immediate cooking only. We had to spend the night in the light of lanterns and the suffocating smell of kerosene. We listened to the news through a small battery-operated radio and hearing the world’s reaction to what was happening to us, we were angry and sad, because the world abandoned us and in our daily terror, we no longer felt taste of sleep or comfort. Those were pitch, black days. And now, poor Gaza is going through the same thing. In each prayer, we pray for them that God would give them some type of victory that their dead would be in heaven that the living among them should be patient until the catastrophe is ended. Then, we send money donations through professional organizations. We know this is not enough, but we believe in God and his justice. With God, nothing shall go astray in heaven or in earth, not even a grain of mustard. My heart is heavy with pain, but what good will words do?
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Ulysses in Tijuana
Filming the US-Mexico Border — a Mosaic Documentary by Alice Nam, ‘11
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hile other documentaries of the U.S.Mexican border can be faulted for their sentimentality, Border Stories cannot. Twenty-two interviews compose this online film, featuring a kaleidoscope of different personalities from the border. What makes Border Stories unique, however, is its narrative structure. These interviews, each running under six minutes, have been posted online as independent chapters – so, like the reader of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, audiences of Border Stories can choose the order in which they watch the videos. As the filmmakers note, with no beginning, middle, or end, the only linear aspect of this mosaic documentary is the border itself. And yet, underneath the objective-style journalism, the films evoke an eerily mythic quality. In one episode, an aging ferryman finds the bodies of visa-less immigrants bursting with maggots in the Rio Grande. In another, a one-eyed vigilante stands watch upon a hill like a modern-day Polyphemus, hunting for illegal immigrants in Campo, California. Meanwhile, to the west in Tijuana, lotus-eaters sleep inside the floodgates lining the border, succumbing to a chemical fruit called heroin. In this tale, however, it is public servants, not epic poets, who dictate the outcome of the story. An illegal immigrant called “Mr. Nobody” is the would-be Odysseus, but under the Zero Tolerance laws, he is jailed upon his arrival in the United States. Throughout all twenty-two installments, Border Stories emphasizes this uneasy relationship between government policy and personal stories to great effect. In the episode “Fence Jumpers,” Dr. Raul Coimbra of the UC San Diego Trauma Center, grieves over the lack of federal reimbursements; the emergency room, he explains, does not have the money to treat all the injuries that result from the border fence. José Rivera, in the episode “Born and Raised,” reveals that his mother brought him illegally to the country when
he was two years old. Had the 2007 “Dream Act” been passed, Rivera could have earned his citizenship by enrolling in college or enlisting. Instead, the bill was defeated by eight votes in the Senate. For the first time in twenty years, however, the story of undocumented workers may change under the new administration. Unlike his predecessor, President Obama has nominated reform-minded politicians to secretarial positions in his Cabinet. Hilda Solis of California comes to the Department of Labor with a steely reputation as advocate for workers’ rights. At her side, former governor of Arizona Janet Napolitano will now lead the Department of Homeland Security. Their arrival has been met for the most part with bipartisan approval. In spite of their differences, Republicans and Democrats agree that reform cannot be put off much longer. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates there were 11.5 to 12 million undocumented workers living in the United States in 2006. In 2009, this population is expected to be around 20 million. Of course, anecdotes like the ones found in Border Stories should never inform wise policy decisions. Nevertheless, Border Stories gently reminds us of the ties that bind personal stories to government policy. What to make of this relationship has continued to puzzle both journalists and public servants. But no one is complaining. It is this unresolved riddle that is one of the delights of working with primary sources.
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[in dialogue]
[in dialogue]
Murdering the Border
Beyond the Border Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, responds to Border Stories.
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t’s funny that I happened to watch three installments of the terrific project Border Stories just one day after I received the news that my family and I have become U.S. permanent residents. My family and I came to the United States almost half a decade ago on skilledworker visas. An American company paid for an immigration attorney and, over time, they even sponsored my green card. I didn’t have to hire a coyote or cross the border on my own. But even though my coming here was by plane and with an H1B visa in hand, I did exactly the same as those immigrants you saw on Mr. Nobody: an American company wanted me here because it needed me for the sake of its business. I crossed the border looking to fill a growing demand for my skills. It is true that the border has become a dangerous and hostile stop in the immigrants’ expedition, especially thanks to the increasing obsession with securing the U.S.-Mexico border. But it is also true that for a vast majority of the immigrant community crossing the border is only the first step in a risky, demanding journey toward their ultimate goal: providing their families with a better future. I have worked as a journalist with undocumented immigrants for more than ten years, but most of the stories that I have written have been reported away from the border. I have told stories of the impoverished Latin American regions that they unwillingly have to leave behind because there is no future for them there. I have also told stories of their struggles in America, where they have to jumpstart a life away from home, speaking no English and knowing nothing about the American system. And I’ve realized the only difference between us is I was lucky enough to cross the border holding a visa, and they weren’t. We need to “de-borderize” the immigration debate, for the border is not the immigrants’ final destination.
Clara Long , first-year student at Harvard Law School, reflects on her experience as a member of the four-person team behind BorderStories.
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rom along the hot pancake of asphalt that is Mexican Highway two you never lose sight of it. From the van window I watch as vehicle barriers, then fence, then 40-foot wall tattoo the border into Sonoran desert sand, over outcrops, westward. The ‘metroplex’ of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez loomed behind us and with it the halfway point of the trek from Brownsville to Tijuana. The call came. It was official. I was going to law school. Being a journalist had always made me feel deeply uncomfortable. At the Stanford J-School, I read Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer. Here is how her book starts: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” The journalist, Malcolm writes, “is a kind of confidence man...preying on people’s vanity, ignorance and loneliness.” It helps to be someone people want to confide in; it helps to offer long pauses that can be filled by hasty comments. Think about how hard it is to engage with the people who are portrayed in a typical television newscast. We don’t let them finish their sentences, we place sound bites in contrast with other sound bites in an endless game of he said, she said. You sort it out. With Border Stories we wanted to do something different. We wanted Border Stories to be artifacts, sounds and images of the line between the subject and object, the United States and Mexico, between the developed and the developing world. I met Samuel Mendes, 1,000 miles east of the Sonoran desert, in a safe house for migrants in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. It was awkward. Our film crew, headphones on, cameras blazing and men washing clothes, watching soccer, relaxing in what was surely a rare moment of repose on their journey northward. A trek, unlike ours, over a fortified line and
BorderStories
always in danger. Samuel, who recounts his story in Mr. Nobody, wanted to talk. He had clearly been doing some thinking about the meaning of his journey, about the three months he said he spent in a U.S. immigration detention facility the last time he tried to cross, about the flow of Central Americans he joined crossing into Mexico and hopping the train north. We spoke under a warm setting sun in a courtyard as other migrants looked on, nodding. He was telling a certain truth. I want to think that Samuel and our team were partners, that we were working together to tell a story that needs to be told. A story about how closely linked we are to each other. I also think Malcolm is right. You can’t escape the power struggle between those in front of and behind the camera just because you don’t cross-cut between subjects. That uneasy relationship surely persists in the legal advocacy work I hope to do for better immigration policy. There is a way in which we are all migrants, as Samuel says. But unless we can carve out space to understand and recognize the humanity of those who are different from us, there is a way in which we are not. As a lawyer-in-training, I carry Samuel’s voice with me.
february-march 2009
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From the Archives
Dispatches from the Culture War by Paul Craft, ‘09
America’s modern conservative movement, was uneasy with the rising influence of social conservatives in the GOP. His more libertarian ideology proved to be out of step with socially conservative groups like the Moral Majority, an evangelical Christian organization run by Reverend Jerry Falwell. This intra-party division came to a head after Ronald Reagan appointed the socially moderate Sandra Day O’Connor (Stanford, Class of 1950) for the Supreme Court in summer of 1981. The following is an exchange of letters between Senator Barry Goldwater and Reverend Jerry Falwell in July 1981 concerning comments each made to the press regarding the appointment of O’Connor.
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very January, Stanford Students for Life plant white crosses in the grass in White Plaza. The crosses, they say, represent the millions of victims of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion in January 1973. This ritual is an annual campus reminder of what pundits call the “the Culture War” - America’s deep political divisions over social issues. In this “war” the battle lines seem clear: social conservatives vote Republican and social liberals vote Democratic. But this division was not always so stark. In the early 1980s, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the patriarch of
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Pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church, Lychburg, Virginia. Born August 11th, 1933.
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Founded in 1757 by John Lynch, for whom the town was named.
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Goldwater’s Republican presidential bid against LBJ. He only won 6 states.
Goldwater faced a fierce battle for reelection in Arizona in 1980. He beat Democratic challenger Bill Schulz 49.46% to 48.38%. Goldwater is widely considered to one of the top conservative politicians of the 20th century. His effort in the 50s and 60s paved the way for conservative’s reign in the 80s and 90s. Time Magazine quoted Falwell: “Every good Christian should be concerned [with O’Connor]” The Moral Majority — primarily an organization of evangelical Christians — actively worked with pro-life Catholics and even Jews. Though Justice O’Connor “personally opposed” abortion, her judicial and legislative record is an ambiguous middle path. She did not support overturning Roe vs. Wade. Barry Goldwater’s son was a Republican representative from northern Los Angeles County, California from 1969 to 1983.
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Barry Goldwater is referring to his widely publicized quote, “I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.”
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Goldwater first went on record as a conservative in the 1930’s. His letter criticizing FDR was published in the Arizona Republic in 1938.
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A 2008 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reported that 26 percent of adult Americans - 54 million- are evangelical Protestants.
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Goldwater, an Arizona Senator and presidential candidate, echoes the rhetoric of his successor John McCain, whose 2008 GOP Convention was dubbed, “Country First.” Goldwater wrote and talked extensively about organized labor in the 1950s and 1960s. His fierce opposition to union was largely motivated by his libertarian, free-market values. His classic book The Conscience of a Conservative devoted an entire chapter to the matter.
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Opposition to “special interests” is a common tact of politicians, including current President Barack Obama. Goldwater, however, was fairly consistent in his opposition to them. He focused more on principles and ideas than the average politician.
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The late 1970s and early 1980s were an intense period in America’s so-called “culture war.” Social conservatives like the Moral Majority were well-organized and devoted political players. They exerted a tremendous amount of pressure on Reagan and Congress.
*Documents courtesy of the Arizaon Historical Foundation
Editor’s Note
Most of what we consider “history” is a narrative gradually shaped out of letters, telegrams, journals, poems, books, photos, and more. Sometimes, though, just a source or two can tell an entire story. The Claw Magazine’s “From the Archives . . .” feature will highlight such documents. It will include unabridged documents from campus and off-campus archives along with expert annotations. february-march 2009
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FICTION
P O LYA M S an excerpt from Bomb Shelter
by Justin St. Germain, Stegner Fellow
Claire Lorentzen
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A
few days later, on the couch, Victoria broached the idea of writing a personal ad. “What?” I said. College football was on TV; Arizona at Utah, the season opener. Arizona was losing. “Online,” she said. “We’ll start slow, meet for coffee. Maybe we’ll find someone we both like.” “A woman?” She paused. “Or a couple.” “A couple of women?” She tried to kick me in the balls but missed. We watched the rest of the game. My Wildcats lost by three. When it was over she walked across the living room and sat down at the computer. I stayed on the couch, flipped through the channels, watched her type. Her eyes batted back and forth in the gray glow of the monitor. Finally I went over and looked at what she’d written: MW4MW – Cute, curious couple seeks similar for coffee, more? About us: Young (he’s 33, she’s 27), cute, fit, unmarried professional couple. We’re new to this, so we’re looking to meet first, hopefully make a connection, and go from there. No pressure, no expectations, but also no limits. About you: be close in age, good-looking, secure, DDF, and like-minded.
“No limits,” I said. “What’s DDF?” “Drug and disease-free.” “You know the acronyms already?” She looked up at me. “I read a few examples. It’s not astrophysics.” I reread the words on the screen and tried to convince myself that they were only words and sentences, constructs of language subject to interpretation, insignificant in and of themselves. But I knew too well
the significance they’d take on the moment it was printed and put out for all to see. At work, on Friday nights waiting for stringers to call in the late high school football scores, Bruce and I skimmed through the personals and read the best ones out loud to each other. Now one of those ads would be ours, and a cold dread flitted through me at the notion. “Couldn’t we start with somebody we know?” I asked. Victoria continued to type, filling in the fields on the form. “Who?” I had a few ideas. One of the guys in Circulation had a wife, Marissa, who’d stolen the show at last year’s Examiner Holiday party with a low-cut white number that kept drifting south over the course of the night like a melting iceberg, revealing more and more of the brown landscape beneath. But her husband, Charlie, had a face like an anvil and tattoos on his neck; I didn’t want him getting hold of Victoria and prison-fucking her in front of me. “How about Jen?” I said. “News Jen or Copy Jen?” “Copy Jen,” I said, too quickly. “News Jen looks like a lizard.” Victoria’s eyes focused at a faroff point. “Copy Jen,” she repeated, slowly. “Maybe. What’s her deal?” I put a lot of effort into the shrug. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t really know her. It’s just an idea.” Copy Jen was twenty-four, brought her dinner to work in paper bags, missed the Midwest and its seasons, and wore a perfume that smelled like lilac. “Is she single?” “Yeah.” In the year she’d been at the paper, she’d dated a bartender at some joint near the stadium, a lawyer, and, briefly, a Brewers third baseman in town for Spring Training. But nothing stuck. My theory was that none of them
appreciated her. “I think she is.” Victoria was eyeing me. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind.” “Well, I’m sorry I’m not hip to the swinger protocol,” I said. “Don’t get bitchy about it.” I asked her what she did have in mind. Vic explained that she’d done some research online, and she thought we should draw up a contract. “Honesty is the key to an open relationship,” she said. So we sat down across the kitchen table from each other, beneath the green-shaded chandelier, and negotiated. She outlawyered me, spoke quickly and in euphemisms and didn’t wait for replies, and by the time she’d written out five stipulations and gotten up to transcribe and print it I felt like I’d already been fucked by a stranger. I sat listening to the printer click and squeak, trying to imagine how it was going to go. There was a place out by the airport I knew of, a squat cinderblock building called the Edgewood with a sign advertising parking in back, situated at the end of a string of strip clubs and boarded-up motels. Once, when the sports monkeys invited us along on their monthly Bunny Ranch outing, Bruce had mentioned, as we passed by in his car, that the Edgewood was a swinger’s club. Is that the kind of place we’d find these other people she wanted to see? Sitting under pink neon, listening to Cheap Trick, drinking well gin and smoking Swisher Sweets? What kind of people found sex partners through personal ads? Vic approached, smiling, with the contract in one hand and a pen in the other, and I had my answer: people like us.
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T
he next day we had about a hundred e-mails in response to the ad. Vic sorted through them and printed a list of fifteen, ranked in three groups of five: Very Promising, Promising, and Worth a Look. I read through hers and picked five, based mostly on the relative length and feasibility of the last names they gave. She narrowed to three and sent each one the same reply. The first couple never got back to us. The second wrote back in sixteen minutes with a brief bizarre note that sounded as if it had been translated by a computer from another language. They wanted to meet us at a steakhouse in Buckeye. The last line read: “Look for a man in red boots, and to be properly truthful with you, the pictures we sent were not precisely us.” The third couple responded with a small blurry photo and said they’d like to meet. Two more exchanges and it was settled: we’d meet the next morning for bagels at a place on Northern Avenue. §
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ic and I showed up early and sat at a patio table sipping coffee, watching a Mexican landscaper trim the edges of a lawn outside a bank. “It’s good that they live in Scottsdale,” Lauren said. “That way we won’t run into them in the supermarket.” “I still think it’s weird that we’re meeting for breakfast,” I said. It was ten-thirty in the morning on a Sunday, brunch, an odd time slot for adultery. I was raised Catholic, even if I hadn’t practiced in years. A gold Chrysler convertible turned into the parking lot and slowed as it passed by us. We stared at the couple inside until
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Tyrrhenian Sea Your eyelashes: there’s what I know about Anacapri. And spelling out time in flashes, a lighthouse. And the bright houses drowning down by the sea. We swam. We drank. We passed a bottle on the waves in the dark. In Pompeii, that was buried by fire, we ate smoke from a living tongue. Your skin, your skin. A cinder tree’s shade; a polyglot boy sold parasols, and there were dogs alive and dead. A threelegged mutt turning circles: no omen, no omen we knew. In Assisi, where broad and shallow steps crosscut and veered from street to street, we feared the holy orders. At Tivoli, we leaned on a balustrade. At Frascati, were cooled by a spigot. Why does the tourist mind always linger? It can’t do a lick of good. But you are my eyes’ temple, and I’ve adored you where you stood.
James Arthur
they parked outside the bank. “New rule,” I said. “You can’t fuck anybody in a convertible.” Vic smiled and nodded at a woman walking into Radio Shack. She was wearing all-white sneakers, slim-cut jeans, and a tragic floral cardigan. “Addendum,” Vic said. “You can’t fuck anybody in Mom jeans.” A green Honda whipped into a handicapped spot next to our table and a bottle blonde emerged pressing big black sunglasses to her face. A lean guy with horn-rimmeds and an unfanned Mohawk extracted himself from the driver’s seat and slammed his door. “Think that’s them?” Vic asked. The picture had been small, but the general colors and characteristics
matched. The people we were here to meet went to Arizona State, PhD students in literature or writing or some shit. These two were pale, hunched, rumpled and harried, and generally acted as if they were carrying some profound secret in those canvas satchels, a postmodernist novel or a picture of Pynchon. They looked like grad students to me. She spotted us and elbowed him in the ribs. He turned. They had a brief exchange and then approached. I leaned toward Vic and whispered: “Should I put the condom on now?” Beneath the table, she dug her boot heel into my toes. The couple reached our table. “Hi,” Victoria said, and we all focused on her. “Are you …”
“Yeah,” the girl said, surveying us. She wasn’t wearing makeup and looked young, unexpectedly innocent. “I’m Carla, this is James.” He raised a hand and waved it sharply. Vic pressed her hand against her chest as she introduced herself, then pointed at me and said my name. I looked at her when she said it, out of habit, watched her hand pressing against the exposed delicate skin over her sternum. James made his fingers into a gun and pointed it at me. “Tad?” he said. “Thad. With an h.” “Oh, like Thad Jones.” “Who?” “The jazz man.” “Sure.” Vic invited them to sit and they did. We commented on the day, how nice it was, shared our jobs and hometowns and educational backgrounds, all the information that would one day wind up in our obituaries. Carla and James had come here from California, the greater San Diego and Los Angeles areas, respectively. They were getting master’s degrees at ASU in creative writing. “They give degrees for that?” I asked. “Sort of,” James said. He removed his glasses and rubbed them with his shirt, revealing a pale and downy belly. “It’s not much of a degree.” “What do you write?” “I’m studying poetry.” “You’re a poet?” Vic asked blithely. “What kind of poems do you write?” “I don’t really call myself a poet,” he said, glancing at Carla, who dragged a long purple nail across the
table. “We’re students of poetry.” “Right,” I said. “So who’s your favorite poet?” Vic asked. I tried to catch her eye but she was watching him. He said a couple names I’d never heard of. “I like Billy Collins,” Vic said. Across the table, Carla bit her lip to keep from laughing. She had a small but expressive mouth, ringed in bright lipstick. “Yeah,” James said. “He’s grand.” “I like Dr. Seuss,” I said. “Do you like Dr. Seuss?” Vic gave me the fuck-you smile, I’m sure, but I was watching Carla, the way her cheeks flushed as she laughed. Her sunglasses hid her eyes and half of her face and I liked the mystery of that. She was small, sharp-featured, thick in interesting ways: she had swimmer’s shoulders and sinewy arms, muscular calves poking out of her black capris. As she bounced one leg atop the other I noticed a word written across her upper shin: feel. “Feel?” I asked, pointing at her leg. “So much for small talk,” James said. Carla said it was a tattoo, rolled her pantleg up above her knee, and lifted her leg onto the table. Sure enough, it stretched across the thin skin over her shinbone, just the one word, written in a typewriter font: feel. “We’re words,” she said, indicating she and James. “It’s a short story, written on bodies, one word at a time. A mortal work of art.” She explained that a writer had solicited volunteers, and that they’d both signed up. They went and got the tattoos the week before. Only the tattooed people – “words,” as they were known – got to read the story.
“Is it any good?” I asked. “We don’t know,” she said, and held her hands out, palm-up. “We haven’t gotten it yet.” “I hope so,” James said. “What’s your word?” Vic asked him. He smiled. “Maybe later.” His smile widened as Vic blushed. A vivid image of my wife fucking this guy came to me, and I wanted to grab her, drag her back to our house, or at least to the convertible guy, who was more our speed. We had no business being here, outside a Starbucks, negotiating a sexcapade with people who tattooed the words of a story they hadn’t yet read onto their bodies. “How long have you guys been in the lifestyle?” Carla asked. “Well…” Vic began. “What time is it now?” I said, checking my watch. “Ah,” James said. “Fresh meat.” He actually said that. He was about to get the word “Reebok” tattooed across his jaw.
Gabriel Benarros
february-march 2009
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VEGAS
What
Happened in
Some Notes on Barack Obama and Late-Night Blackjack as Paradigms for Certain Stuff about Existential Despair, the Search for Meaning, and the Recovery of the American Dream by Alex Romanczuk, ‘11
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“He seemed surprised. ‘You found the American Dream?’ he said. ‘In this town?’” -Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
don’t remember his name any more, but in my mind I call him Boss Dude. Reasonably skinny jeans. Reasonably tight t-shirt. A hipster-turned-hopester, if you will. I don’t know what he did before the campaign, or what he’ll do after, or what compelled him to do all this in the first place, or who he loves, or whether or not he believes in God, or even what he looks like with more than fifteen minutes of sleep in the past 48 hours. I don’t know anything about him, really.
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But from Nov 2 at eight-in-the-morning to Nov 4 at eight-in-the-evening, he runs my life. From a desk toward the back of Obama for America’s North Las Vegas headquarters (some rented space neatly tucked between a Pizza Hut and a sushi joint in a semi-abandoned shopping center near the edge of town) he gives instructions to flier bus stops and poster intersections and travel door to door to door again and again asking over and over Excuse me, ma’am, have you registered to vote, do you know where your polling location is, may I ask if you need a ride, we need your help, remember to tell your friends and family to vote as well, yes, he’s gonna win, yes, we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it...
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“North Vegas is where you go if you’re a hooker turning forty and the syndicate men on the Strip decide you’re no longer much good for business out there with the high rollers.”
’m not sure how much sleep I get, but it isn’t much. Sundaymondaytuesday we’re up at dawn, dragging ourselves through the North Vegas streets. One vote here, another there. No excuses, dear electorate. There are the sloppy hugs from drunken homeless men, and there are the red-faced yells out the windows of pickup trucks. There’s the guy who hasn’t voted for a Democrat since ‘61, and there’s the enormous African-American man who, when asked if he’s voted yet, says in a deep, angry voice, Yeah...for McCain, then after a few seconds of awkward silence starts laughing and yells, Bull-Shit! We’re on top of it, yes, ready for anything, yes – guided by Boss Dude in his Infinite Wisdom... The care, the calm, the power. A legal team ready to smother any troublemakers. But – careful careful careful: Screw up and you’re on Drudge in five minutes, Boss Dude tells us. CNN in an hour... The McCain folks don’t make much of a showing aside from a few sickly road signs and some jerks who tear down our handiwork (it goes right back up, of course, incorrigible youth that we are). Us presumptuous white middle-class outsiders are about in full force, though, imposing our San Francisco values on the residents of North Las Vegas, congregating in the corporate oasis of Starbucks, pausing for just a moment...then rushing back into Nevada sun to electioneer our hearts out. Sure, it’s hard work, but as one Obama aide says, there’s a difference between going all out in ways you didn’t even know you could do, and just working hard. And there’s something great in that. Something great in the Big Trick of this election: Obama’s appropriation of the theme of subsuming oneself to a cause greater than oneself. Because in no conventional sense is this weekend fun. We engage in dull, repetitive, individually meaningless tasks. But we’re constantly reminded of the context of those tasks, constantly reminded of our connection to a greater, smoothly functioning whole: Barack wants this, Barack wants that. Etc. Creepy, yes. Veering awful close to a cult of personality, yes. But it works. “If Charlie Manson checked into the Sahara tomorrow morning, nobody would hassle him as long as he tipped big.”
I
’m not sure whose bright idea it was to build a city in the middle of the desert, with no reliable water supply or natural resources of any kind, really. I’m nauseous for three days. Something to do with the indoor smoking, the ugly carpets, the general trashiness. My roommate literally vomits our first day here. I’m sad, too. In Vegas, you can go to bed feeling sorry for some poor bum at a slot machine, wake up the next morning, and on your way out the casino pass the exact same guy at the exact same slot machine. Who the hell would think that a city like this would actually be a good idea? Wikipedia tells me that the Mormons founded Las Vegas but abandoned it to the dogs in 1857. And the dogs have been at home here ever since... Howard Hughes, Don Corleone, Ashton Kutcher. This is a town bankrolled by an industry that subsists on customers simply handing over their money – no good or service aside from thrill and depression offered in return. In Vegas, people become their pocketbooks. The retired couple from Florida is only as valuable as the amount of money they can be convinced to waste. The casino employee is only as valuable as the amount of money she can extract from said couple. And those with nothing to offer? Those are the homeless on the streets of North Vegas. It’s hard to think of a better case study in the monetization of humanity, or the alienation of labor, or any of that stuff. Nevada, after all, is the only state with legalized prostitution... Wikipedia tells me that, seen from space, Las Vegas is the brightest place on Earth. And I believe it. After three nights my head feels disjointed, split, confused. Yes, that has something to do with the lack of sleep, but it also has a lot to do with the bright flashing signs everywhere you turn, the chorus of lights wreaking havoc on my animal senses. Everything has to flash, because everything else is flashing too. The signs must get a little brighter, the girls a little skankier, the casinos a little glitzier, the dons a little richer. In the libertarian paradise that is Nevada, you’re free to do as you choose. As long as no one else is freer than you, that is... (flash to dramatic split-panel contrasting deep verdure of rich Vegas with shabby desert of poor Vegas) Wikipedia tells me that Las Vegas has the highest suicide rate in the nation. Again, no surprise. Who the hell would do this? Who the hell would go traipsing off into the middle of the Mojave Desert and build a city? Who the hell would be brash enough, relentless enough, impetuous enough...to move into barren, unknown country and make something where there was nothing before, something newfangled and cocksure and grotesque, yes, but also, in its own way, mesmerizing? Who the hell would dare? An American, that’s who.
february-march 2009
37
Moritz Sudhof
“San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... “...So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
I 38
’m not sure why I didn’t stay in my dorm room and stare at the wall for the entire weekend. I’m not sure why we’re coming from San Francisco to Las Vegas all over again. Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Who’s to say that the presence of one of us or all of us will make a difference. Who’s to say that Obama will make a difference. Who’s to say that Obama’s any better than McCain... But somehow or other I’m here. I and the rest of my generation. We who were supposed to be too steeped in irony to care about anything. We who were supposed to avoid sincerity at all costs (if we even knew what sincerity was any more). We who were supposed to be lost in simulacra... Somehow or other, we’re all here.
the claw magazine
Cynical old me, fawning with the crowds? Are we searching for the sincere? Are we searching for the serious, the competent? Instead of a president who is just like us, do we now all of a sudden want a president who is indeed better than us? Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas... Welcome to the Desert of the Real... It’s Election Night 2008, folks And we’re running. Running one last time through the last apartment complex in the last minutes before the polls close at 7 p.m. Running to the car. Running from the car to the headquarters. All the while, state after state after state is being called: Obama, Obama, Obama. And at some point, it happens... A howl? Fine, yes, a howl. But this is not a bitter howl or a howl of despair. It is a howl of release and relief and joy... It starts in some rented space in a strip mall in North Vegas as we watch the TV tell us Ohio has been called, then spreads out to the rest of Vegas and to the Strip where people are running running running yelling Obama Obama Obama and they are all yelling and celebrating together because greater than fifty percent of the people in Nevada voted for Barack Hussein Obama yes we did it we did it we did it we turned Nevada blue,
ice-cold, deep river, water of life Blue (Had enough?) And there they all are at the Election Night party at the Rio, the Angelheaded hopesters, partying it up for Hope and Change and Redemption, burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night, yelling and screaming and dancing Because words have meaning again, Because we can’t believe this is really happening, Because we came here to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity and it turns out we all had a vision, Because while there are echoes of the 60’s (All You Need is Love, Victory Joints, Fellatio for Change) we actually this time won the election and are respectable members of society and are not destroyed by madness, Because we can for one brief moment glimpse the arc of history, Because while we haven’t done anything to cleanse the bitter memory of the assassinations and snarling dogs and Jim Crow Laws we have at least transmuted them into something greater something that by necessity came before this night and is now and forever a part of this night, Because we have for just a moment fully realized our power to remake our past and perhaps we have that same power to make a future, Because we can see the nascent spark in the eyes of the casino employees who remember that there is such a thing called life (How long, Lord? Not long),
Because we see clearly now how things in this Brash and Grotesque country of ours can over time become Beautiful, Because (as a great American once said) there has never been anything false about hope, Because maybe Barack Obama will actually be a better president than John McCain would have been, Because maybe he will be a good president, Because maybe he will be not just good but good enough to, yes, renew America’s promise, Because maybe, just maybe, Barack Hussein Obama actually can slow the rise of the oceans and heal our planet and save our lives and make everything all better and wonderful again and not just that but better than it ever was and we can always think to ourselves that we played some little part in making that happen (for tonight, at least, we can think that), Because maybe, just maybe, it will all work out, Because maybe, just maybe, we can all grow up to lead good, healthy, American lives, Because maybe, just maybe, we mean something.
february-march 2009
39
Grounds
“We’re not here for the trees.” by Charlie Mintz, ’10
T
he twin rows of Abelias – blandly pretty, pink and white flowering shrubs – out front of Keck Science Lab need trimming. It’s 12:43 on a Friday, and two men in Stanford Grounds shirts, work boots and gloves stand by their white pickup, dropping cones imprinted with the word SHAPE – short for Stanford Horticultural and Pruning Ensemble – around the perimeter of their vehicle. The acronym’s a gag, the taller, dark-haired, buzz-cut one, whose nametag says Gabriel, explains. “We like to keep the mood light,” Alvin, Gabe’s partner, adds. Gabe and Alvin unsheathe clippers and set to work on the Abelias. They are part of the crew responsible for shrubs and trees under fifteen feet. This afternoon’s work is a shaping job. They are supposed to snip off dead shoots and any living shoots that drag, trimming the bushes to their sleekest, roundest selves. “You gotta go in the plant and find a good cut,” Gabe, explains. “You gotta cut it deep down or it’ll be back in a few weeks.” They work quickly, bending to make a few snips and tossing the cuttings into trash bins. Because Stanford’s grounds are so large and Alvin and Gabe’s crew so small – just a dozen guys or so – they only get a few days at each location before moving on. An exception is the deer grass that sprouts near one of the medical school’s parking structures, which will require three weeks of eight-hour days to clear. “It’s fun,” Gabe says, “It’s menial, but it kind of becomes a routine.” Gabe makes three quick snips and moves down the row. In the past he had a job with something called Strategic Lending, but quit because of the atmosphere. He says he likes it better outdoors. More snipping, tossing. “It’s really fun, I like it,” he says again. “Shut up, Chachi,” says Alvin, jokingly. Chachi is one of Gabe’s nicknames. Others are Chachi Mariachi, Sebastian, Seabiscuit and Gaberaham Lincoln. Alvin, because his last name is Patiño, is Patiña Colada. “I see him more than I see my family,” Alvin says of Gabe. `Neither plans on working in landscaping his whole life. Gabe is taking some classes
40
the claw magazine
at Foothill, and says he could see himself in administration one day. Alvin buys and sells cars in Sacramento on the side and dreams of opening his own body shop. He is 21 years old. Gabe is 23. They move down the rows and finish off the last few bushes. The job takes less than a half hour to complete. The Abelias look about the same. “We get a lot of compliments after we’re done shearing,” Alvin says. “I thought no one noticed.” He admits it gives him pride to maintain Stanford’s famous grounds. “When someone asks you where you work you can be like, ‘I work at Stanford.’” He then mentions dropping off his cousin off at UC Santa Barbara whose campus he found “ugly.” “I’ve been to Harvard,” he says. “It’s not that pretty either.” Another white pickup, emblazoned Stanford Maintenance Crew, pulls up. Mike, my escort from Tree Crew, starts chatting with Gabe and Alvin about a colleague of theirs who fell from a ladder. I cross to the other side of the truck and hop in just in time to hear Mike say “I’m hoping he’ll be like Bruce Lee here – just jump back up after you hit him with a shovel.” Mike is an older guy, probably Alvin and Gabe’s age combined plus a decade or so. He wears wraparound sunglasses and sports vaguely rock-and-roll facial hair: thick overgrown mustache with longish tuft of hair under the chin. He is the lead man on Tree Crew, meaning he supervises the elevenman, mostly Hispanic team responsible for keeping the branches on Stanford’s 2000 acres of trees from blocking signs and stoplights or falling on people’s heads. “We’re not here for the trees,” he says. “We’re here to live under them.” We head across campus to a disposal job on Salvatierra Street, a picturesque neighborhood of historic houses built in the early 1900’s. Up and down Salvatierra the elm trees are dying from a fungal infection called Dutch elm disease and their withered branches and dead leaves have become an eyesore to residents. Now they are coming down. When we arrive, a man in a hardhat is taking a chainsaw to a Mini-Cooper-sized portion of tree lying in the street as his
colleagues look on. Nearby are a tractor, and, a little ways down, a giant ten-wheeler with mounted crane. Without the elms, the evennumbered side of the block is mostly bare, leaving the asphalt exposed to unfamiliar sunlight. According to Mike the elms have been sick awhile, probably more than twenty years of slow death. “We tried to save them. We managed to save half, five out of ten. It used to hurt, but I learned to deaden myself.” Across the street from us, like a reminder, stands a dismembered elm tree, fresh, brown saw-wounds up and down its trunk. Mike confesses to feeling a little bleak. He didn’t get a summer off this year, and job pressure is wearing him down. “Everybody is your boss here,” he says, “And you can’t make everybody happy.” We go down the street for a look at one of the oldest elms on the block. The tree is massive, alive, with glittery sunlight poking through its green canopy and the occasional wind-blown leaf dropping from above. While we stand there, Mike notices a woman watching his crew. He says she’s probably angry at him for some reason and walks back down the street over to her. I follow a bit later and catch the tail end of the conversation. They’re talking about the Jacaranda she planted in front of her house. Her Jacaranda is a mostly bare tree that will bloom brilliant purple in spring. A few days ago Mike’s crew came by and trimmed it, which bothered her until her gardener assured her it had been necessary. She and Mike chat a little about the disposal work and then she thanks Mike for finally taking down the diseased Elms to which Mike gives an I-do-what-I-can smile and nod. After Mike leaves to join his crew I stay and talk to the woman. She wears black shorts, orange Crocs, and a thin white jacket. A bike helmet strapped over grey hair. She tells me her name is Barbara and that she’s lived on this street since 1967. She’s delighted that the trees are coming down. In 1982, she tells me, there was a storm. One of the elm trees, weakened by rot, tipped over and fell on her house. She points to a slightly newer-looking patch of shingles on her roof. “When the elms came down we planted the Jacaranda,” she explains. “I planted them so when I’m old – I mean, I’m old now – but when I’m very old, and on my death bed I’ll have something to look out the window at.” She glances back toward her house, where I see the picture window she’s referring to, and adds “They’re beautiful trees.” The smell of cut wood lingers in the air.
Doodles pg. 2 • Hoover Tower • Liane Reed pg. 3 • Cafe • Irys Kornbluth pg. 3 • Betamax • Max McClure pg. 4 • Head • Gabriel Benarros pg. 4 • Hands • Gabriel Benarros pg. 5 • Monkey • Gabriel Benarros pg. 6 • Money Bags • Paul Craft pg. 7 • German • Max McClure pg. 8 • Donkey • Austin Zumbro pg. 9 • Banjo • Max McClure pg. 14 • Flamenco • Max McClure pg. 15 • Crabs • Max McClure pg. 18 • Bananas • Max McClure pg. 24 • Vote • Paul Craft pg. 26 • Academia • Paul Craft