The College Hill Independent: 10 February 2012

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T HE COL L EGE HIL L IND EPEN D EN T NEWS

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WEEK IN REVIEW

ALEX RONAN, ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN, CAROLINE SOUSSLOFF

BORDERS

ALEX RONAN, ERICA SCHWIEGERSHAUSEN

METRO

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UNOCCUPIED JONATHAN STORCH

HOLY SPIRITS GRACE DUNHAM

RIPTA REENTRY SAM ADLER-BELL

OPINIONS

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FROM THE EDITORS On February 7, Anonymous hacked the email account of Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

The stunt came too easy: his password, like the access codes to our parents’ Earthlink accounts, was a simple string of characters, 1-2-3-4-5.

To increase password strength, you might consider: upper and lower case, symbols, never writing it down, making it so complicated you have to write it down, deep secrets, all of those things mashed together. ††††LaMpShAdE77aNorExiA might score high on a password-strength meter, for example. If someone guesses that, they deserve to see your Internet history. Certainly beats 12345, which, while good enough for Bashar, is no longer good enough for Hotmail, and certainly not good enough for you. You are 96cOmpLiCatEd*, and an obtuse password deepens your character by extension. Character count = character.

Besides: if you encrypt intimacy into your code words, you can use them to create a sense of “digital closeness” with your partner. The New York Times reports that young couples are sharing their online passwords as a show of intimacy, complete with comments from the author of Queen Bees and Wannabes. To maintain your “Queen Bee” status, you might consider sharing access to your digital life with your significant other this February 14th, even if your code derives from that thing that happened at Sadie Hawkins in seventh grade.

On second thought, fuck Valentine’s Day. xoxo CAC, DVD, BAC

EPHEMERA

SLOW CHANGE STEPHEN CARMODY

FEATURES

9 11 ARTS

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DRONE WARFARE

EMILY GOGOLAK

NSFW

JOSH SUNDERMAN

LAUGH RIOT JONAH WOLF

SPORTS

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FOOD

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EXAMINE YOUR ZIPLINE DAVID SCOFIELD

BUT I’M A FUN GUY ANNA ROTMAN

INTERVIEWS

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BUTT GLUE RACHEL BENOIT

LITERARY

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EROTICA 101

ABOUT MANAGING EDITORS Chris Cohen, Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer ∙ NEWS Alex Ronan, Erica Schwiegershausen, Caroline Soussloff ∙ METRO Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Jonathan Storch ∙ FEATURES Dave Adler, Emily Gogolak, Ellora Vilkin, Kate Welsh ∙ ARTS Olivia-Jené Fagon, Rachel Kay, Kate Van Brocklin, Jonah Wolf ∙ OPINIONS Tyler Bourgoise, Stephen Carmody ∙ INTERVIEWS Rachel Benoit ∙ SCIENCE Raillan Brooks ∙ FOOD Anna Rotman ∙ SPORTS David Scofield ∙ LITERARY Michael Mount, Scout Willis ∙ X PAGE Becca Levinson ∙ LIST Alex Corrigan, Dylan Trelevan, Allie Trionfetti ∙ BLOG Max Lubin, Christina McCausland, Dan Stump ∙ DESIGN EDITOR Mary-Evelyn Farrior ∙ DESIGN TEAM Abigail Cain ∙ CREATIVE CONSULTANTS Annika Finne, Robert Sandler ∙ ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Diane Zhou ∙ SENIOR EDITORS Gillian Brassil, Malcolm Burnley, Jordan Carter, Adrian Randall, Emma Whitford MVP: Allie Trionfetti Cover Art: Annika Finne THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT PO BOX 1930 BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE RI 02912 theindy@gmail.com twitter: maudelajoie theindy.org

MICHAEL MOUNT, SCOUT WILLIS Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The College Hill Independent is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA.

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BECCA LEVINSON

The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Prgress. Campus Progress works to help young people–advocates, activists, journalists, artists–makes their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

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WEEK IN REVIEW

By Alex Ronan, Erica Schwiegershausen, and Caroline Soussloff Illustration By Becca Levinson

BAD RO(BO)MANCE

THE PEOPLE HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW

GO ASK ALICE, SHE’S COMPLETELY SOBER

For a generation taught responsibility with Furbys and Tomagatchis, whose dating rituals are facilitated and structured by websites and devices, fulfilling our emotional needs with a robot lover is perhaps the logical next step.

Seizing upon this possibility, Hooman Samani, an Artificial Intelligence researcher affiliated with the National University of Singapore and Keio University of Japan, has recently introduced the world to the interdisciplinary study of “LOVOTICS = Love + Robotics,” as his website puts it. At present, Lovotics is restricted academia; Samani’s robots are not commercially available, and thus, I regret to inform you, do not make feasible Valentine’s Day gifts.

So far, the Lovotics team has created three robots. The first is the Kissenger, a tiny plastic orb with the stylized features of a pig. When attached to your computer via a USB cable, it can be used to transmit kisses to another Kissenger device. According to Samani’s infomercial, the lover cups the orb in the palm of his hands and presses his lips against the snout of their Kissenger. This activates the snout of the beloved’s Kissenger, plugged in at a remote desktop, which in response emits outward pressure and a snorting sound effect.

Kamani’s second invention is the MiniSurrogate, a robotized doll customized to resemble one’s long-distance love. It essentially performs the functions of a speakerphone, with a few additional mechanical gestures. The Lovotics website describes Mini-Surrogates as “small, cute, believable, and acceptable surrogates of humans for telecommunication” designed to create “the illusion of presence.”

The dolls are intended to provide comfort and companionship during a lover’s absence, but in the event of romantic turmoil, it is easy to imagine them being appropriate for use as voodoo dolls.

Thirdly, Kamani has been developing a robot that, rather than transmitting the inputs of another human being, will generate its own responses to human affection. The robot is programmed to cultivate romantic relationships with live subjects over time.

Indeed, Kamani’s researchers are working with artificial intelligence to replicate the cocktail of hormones—including dopamine, endorphin and oxytocin—that combine within the human system to create the feeling of being in love. Although similar in appearance and movement to a Roomba® vacuum cleaner outfitted in white fur, it engages in many of the well-worn behaviors of human flirtation, such as mirroring, and it can read and respond to affirming or discouraging social cues. It introduces some new romantic rituals as well, including a mating dance where it twirls and flashes its neon underbelly lights. As for the language of love, the robot conveys its feelings through permutations of six basic movements.

It may look like the decapitated head of a Yeti, but love is blind, right?

What do Namibia, Lithuania, Tanzania, Jamaica, Uruguay and El Salvador have in common? Along with forty other countries, they enjoy greater freedom of press than the United States, according to the 2011-2012 World Press Freedom Index released last week

by Reporters Without Borders. The Parisbased watchdog determined that the U.S. has the world’s 47th most free press, a ranking that takes into account media censorship as well as the number of journalists arrested, threatened, physically attacked or killed during 2011. As The Atlantic’s Max Fisher points out, “we are still ranked ahead of Latvia and Haiti,” but not by much.

According to the index, the U.S’s ranking dropped 27 spots from 20th in 2010, a decline attributed to a nationwide police crackdown on journalists covering mass gatherings, especially those associated with the Occupy movement.

The RWB report states: “Crackdown was the word of the year in 2011. Never has freedom of information been so closely associated with democracy…Never have acts of censorship and physical attacks on journalists seemed so numerous.” This year’s index has Finland and Norway at the top of the charts for the second year in a row, while China, Iran, North Korea, and Eritrea continue to make up the bottom of the list. Niger showed the most marked improvement, jumping 75 places from last year to 29th under a new administration.

The index, which uses a complex point system to track and compare journalistic freedom in countries around the world, revealed a somewhat simultaneous decline of press freedom in the U.S. and much of the Middle East, a correlation the report attributes to the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring, respectively. Syria, Bahrain, and Yemen received worst ever rankings due to relentless crackdown on pro-democracy movements, and the RWB report cites the arrests and occasional beatings of over 25 U.S. journalists covering Occupy movements as the reason for the U.S.’s drop, describing the police as “quick to issue indictments for inappropriate behavior, public nuisance, or even lack of accreditation.”

However, Politico’s Dylan Byers points out that “the United States ranking can appear somewhat fickle—and even extreme—when compared to countries like Canada and the United Kingdom.” Despite a questionable year for the British media with the News of the World scandal and the government’s proposal for social media bans and shutdowns in response to the London riots, the U.K. was ranked 28th. In 2010, Britain stood at 19th, followed immediately by the U.S. and Canada; this year, Canada rose to number 10 on the list.

New York Times Opinion columnist Andrew Rosenthal points out that this year’s report ranks Hungary (40th) ahead of the United States despite the country’s adoption of a law “giving the ruling party direct control over the media” last December. Rosenthal says that while he believes Reporters Without Borders does important work, the annual Press Freedom Index “gets a little ridiculous,” comparing the annual report to the US News & World Report college rankings.

“Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll,” the trite signifier of teen angst, might require a change.

Apparently “Sexting, Moderate Indulgence, and iTunes” paints a more accurate picture of current teenage behavior. According to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future (MTF) 2011 survey data released last week, today’s teens are significantly more traditional than generations past and indulge in less risky behavior. Polling 46,700 teenagers in 400 public and private schools across the nation, MTF reported declining rates of alcohol consumption, use of inhalants, cocaine, crack, Vicodin, Adderall, sedatives, tranquilizers, and over-the-counter cough and cold medicines teens purchase to “get high.”

Despite overall decreases in drug and alcohol consumption, marijuana is the primary exception, with use rising for the fourth year in a row. Nonetheless, according to multiple measures, today’s teens drink and smoke less than earlier generations. “There is a lot more media hype around the kids who are raising hell,” Dr. John Santelli, president-elect of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine told the New York Times. Most kids, by contrast, “are pretty responsible,” he said.

According to the latest statistics from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, today’s teens are also less likely to get caught “doing it,” since they’re hardly doing it at all.

In 1988, 50 percent of boys between the age of 15 and 17 had engaged in sex, by 2010 that number was down to 28 percent. Rates also fell among girls from 37.2 percent in 1988 to 27 percent today.

If today’s teens are models of moderation, their parents and grandparents could probably use a lesson or two. Rates of syphilis amongst 45- to 64-year-olds have more than doubled in the past decade and rates of chlamydia have tripled. Eli Coleman, director of the Program in Human Sexuality at the University of Minnesota Medical School, told ABC News that older people are often less informed than youth when it comes to safe sex. According to Coleman, adults reentering the dating world may not have used condoms “when they started out many years ago.” If frisky senior citizens still conceive of “their grandmother’s old-fashioned condoms,” as Coleman suggests, widespread reluctance is less of a surprise. A 2010 study of sexual health from Indiana University found the lowest rates of condom use were among people ages 45 and older. “There’s a sense of invulnerability and ignorance among older adults,” Coleman said. If today’s parents are going to talk to their teens about safe sex, it seems that instead of offering advice, they may just want to listen.

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10 february 2012

SHIFTING BORDERS

immigration politics and the hispanic-american experience

By Alex Ronan and Erica Schwiegershausen Illustration by Robert Sandler 100

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Anti-Hispanic Hate Crime Fraction1 Unemployment Rate 2

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1 Source: FBI Hate Crime Statistics 2 Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics Increasing levels of unemployment is the oft-sited reason for rising hate crimes directed at Hispanics. While hostility towards immigrants (and those who appear “foreign”) rose with unemployment, a post 9/11 climate increasingly intolerant of difference and the primacy of the immigration debate in American politics have also contributed to rising Hispanic-directed hate crimes.

Levels rose from 30% of all hate crimes in 2001 to 65% by 2010.

3,500: tacos received by Mayor Maturo after the incident.

5,800: Taco Bell locations in the United States.

2: times Taco Bell has attempted to enter the Mexican market.

0: Taco Bell locations currently in Mexico.

200: million transactions at Taco Bell locations across the United States, per week.

311.6: million residents in the United States.

50.5: million Hispanics* currently living in the United States.

132.9: million Hispanics projected to be residing in the United States by 2050.

SEMANTICS Fluidity between the terms “Hispanic” and “Latino” belays the underlying complexities of identity and representation. The English word “Hispanic” originally referred to people from Spain, currently the term encompasses people from Spanish speaking land or cultures.

Latino, by contrast, is a Spanish word, referring to those with origins in Latin America.

Despite the Eurocentric connotations of the term Hispanic, a 2008 Pew Hispanic Center survey found that 36% of respondents prefer the term “Hispanic,” while 21% prefer “Latino” and the rest lack preference. The U.S. Census makes no distinction between the two and they’re often used interchangeably. But these labels are not universally accepted. Another Pew Hispanic Center survey, conducted in 2006, found that 48% of Latino adults describe themselves initially by their country of origin; 26% use the terms Hispanic or Latino; and the remaining 24% call themselves American on first reference. According to Philip B. Corbett, a deputy news editor for the New York Times who oversees newsroom language issues, disparate individuals and interest groups have strong preferences about these terms. In a blog post, Corbett explained that Times writers and editors should at once “respect those preferences as much as possible,” but also remain cognizant of the fact that “references to ethnicity should be used only when they are pertinent.”

43: percent increase in the Hispanic population of the United States in the past decade.

1: country with a larger Hispanic population than the United States. (Mexico.)

25: states in which Hispanics are the largest minority group.

143: products one can purchase with the phrase “Why Do I Have to Press 1 for English?” emblazoned on it at therightshirts.com

11: million unauthorized immigrants currently residing in the United States.

3 in 4: Americans that support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants provided that they pay fines, pass background checks and are employed.

81: percent of unauthorized immigrants in the United States of Hispanic origin.

1.18: minutes before 88 “wetbacks” cross the border in the online game Border Patrol. (“There is one simple objective to this game: keep them out…at any cost!”)

3.7: percent of the nation’s population made up of unauthorized immigrants.

2: choices given to Juan Valera, a fifth generation American, before he was shot and killed (“Go back to Mexico or die!”)

by a neighbor.

7: teenagers who approached Marcelo Lucero as part of a hobby the teenagers described as “beaner-hop ping” or “Mexican-hopping.”

25: years Jeffery Conroy will serve for attacking and fatally stabbing Lucero.

4: words spoken by Brisenia Flores after anti-immigration vigilantes broke into the Flores home, wounded her mother and critically shot her father: “Please don’t shoot me.”

9: age of Brisenia Flores when she was shot in the face at point blank range.

9: years Brisenia was an American citizen. Both she and her father were born in the United States. * “Hispanic or Latino” refers to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race. - Definition of Hispanic or Latino Origin as Used in the 2010 Census.

Unemployment Rate (%)

Anti-Hispanic Hate Crime Fraction (%)

J

anuary, 2012. Tucson, Arizona.

Books were banned, classes were cancelled.

The books: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire. Critical Race Theory, by Richard Delgado. Chicano! The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement, by Arturo Rosales.

The Tempest, by William Shakespeare. Among others.

The classes: the Mexican-American studies program in Tucson’s largest public school district, where 60% of the students are of Mexican descent.

Clarification: “There is not a book ban,” Cara Rene, Communications Director for the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) told The Huffington Post. Additional clarification: books detailing the history of white oppression of Native Americans and Chicanos were seized in front of classrooms of students, packed up and shipped off to a book depository. The TUSD subsequently issued a statement saying that the books removed from the classrooms would still be available in the district library would be considered for possible use in the 2012-2013 school year.

According to Arizona HB 2281, school district programs in the state shall not: “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government; promote resentment toward a race or class of people; be designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group; advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” The TUSD governing board concluded this leaves no room for its Mexican American Studies program, despite the fact that the curriculum has succeeded in graduating 100 percent of its students from high school, 82 percent of whom gained college admission.

“I might have tacos when I go home.”

That’s what the mayor of East Haven, CT, Joseph Maturo Jr., told a WPIX reporter when asked what he was doing for the Latino community in light of indictments and accusations of harassment, illegal searches and seizures, and assaults on Latinos in the neighborhood.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

news

BARACK OBAMA

NEWT GINGRICH

During his 2008 campaign, Obama promised that immigration reform legalizing many of the unauthorized immigrants living in the United States would be a top priority during his first year.

“If you’ve been here for 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don’t think we’re going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out,” Gingrich said during the Heritage Foundation Debate last November.

“We’re not going to be able to deal with the 12 million people who are living in the shadows and give them a way of getting out of the shadows if we don’t also deal with the problem of this constant influx of undocumented workers. That’s why comprehensive reform is so important. Something that we can do immediately that is very important is to pass the Dream Act, which allows children who, through no fault of their own, are here but have essentially grown up as Americans, the opportunity for higher education. I do not want two classes of citizens in this country. I want everybody to prosper. That’s going to be a top priority,” Obama said during a debate at the University of Texas, Austin in February 2008.

Gingrich defends a proposal that would allow some undocumented immigrants to remain in the U.S. provided they have lived here for over 25 years and have a local sponsor. However, in the wake of accusations that he favors “amnesty,” Gingrich changed his tune, declaring a “national security crisis” and promising to fence the entire border as well as pledging support for laws in Georgia, Alabama, and other states that have sent undocumented immigrants fleeing.

MITT ROMNEY

Yet the Obama administration has led one of the toughest crackdowns on illegal immigration in U.S. history, removing 400,000 undocumented immigrants in the last fiscal year alone, setting a new record for deportations. At the same time, the DREAM Act, a bill that would allow undocumented immigrants who came here as children to attend college and become citizens, remains stalled in Congress.

“The answer is self-deportation, which is when people decide they can do better by going home because they can’t find work here because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. So we’re not going to round people up,” Romney said of his plan for immigration reform during last month’s NBC debate in Florida.

“We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now. But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away,” Obama said in his State of the Union Address last month.

In response to Gingrich’s proposal, which he deemed “amnesty,” Romney declared, “That will only encourage more people to do the same thing. People respond to incentives. If you could become a permanent resident of the United States by coming here illegally, you’ll do so.”

As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney vetoed legislation to allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition, fought against bilingual education in public schools, and opposed driver’s licenses for unauthorized immigrants.

Romney, Santorum, and Paul all oppose the Dream Act. Gingrich has backed a portion of the act, saying that he would grant a path to citizenship to undocumented youths who agree to serve in the U.S. military. Ron Paul seeks to repeal birthright citizenship.

RICK SANTORUM

RON PAUL

The son of Italian immigrants, Rick Santorum strongly opposes “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants.

“The one thing I have resisted and condemned: I do not believe that barbed-wire fences and guns on our border will solve any of our problems … I believe Hispanics have been used as scapegoats, to say, they’re the problem instead of being a symptom maybe of a problem with the welfare state. In Nazi Germany, they had to have scapegoats to blame, and they turned on the Jews,” Paul said a gathering organized by the Nevada “Hispanics in Politics” community group.

“What I would say is that first, we build the fence. Number two, we enforce the law, and that is that we don’t allow people who are in this country to work here illegally.

And when we do find people here illegally, we go through the process of deportation,” Santorum said in an interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News’ “On the Record.”

HOUSEHOLDS THAT HAVE NO ASSETS OTHER THAN A VEHICLE 24%

4

RISING WEALTH DISPARITY

24%

2005

2009

Drop in Household Wealth

Percent of Households

6%

6%

White

Black

Source: Pew Research Center

“W

Hispanic

Hispanic Black White Source: Pew Research Center

53% 66%

hat is frequently missing in the national dialogue surrounding Latinos is that their issues go beyond immigration. If you look at polling data and talk to Latinos in different communities, while immigration is certainly a very personal and salient issue for many Latino families, Latinos are also concerned by problems like an 11% unemployment rate when the national rate is two points lower and that they have the highest high school drop out rates in the country - and those are issues I don't see either party really playing to,” said Emily Farris, a Ph. D candidate in Political Science at Brown University.

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metro

10 february 2012

BEYOND BURNSIDE Occupy Providence Enters Phase Two

By Jonathan Storch

A

fter 106 nights of continuous encampment, Occupy Providence protesters spent Sunday, January 29 preparing for their official exit from Burnside Park. By mid-afternoon, the information booths along the park’s central pathways were still up, but most of the tents had already been taken down.

The sun was out, and portions of the ground were largely grassless (the protestors have promised to reseed in the spring). A group of about ten, led by several Episcopal ministers, celebrated communion next to the statue of Ambrose Burnside.

The protestors had spent the previous night dancing, at a celebration of the Friday opening of day services at Emmanuel House, a homeless shelter run by the Catholic Diocese of Providence. Emmanuel House’s expansion of services was the direct result of negotiations between city officials and the Occupy protestors, who voted in a December 21 General Assembly to decamp on the condition of the opening of a winter day shelter for members of Providence’s homeless community, many of whom had spent time living in the occupation.

Emmanuel House remained open 24 hours through the harshest portions of last winter, cutting back services when weather conditions improved, according to a January 2011 Providence Journal story. On January 23, 2012, the Providence Journal reported that the city does not plan to fund day operations at Emmanuel House, but it has committed to helping Occupy and the diocese secure the money necessary. As of February 7, however, the Associated Press reported that the money had not yet been obtained; although the center has been serving 20 to 33 people per day, the diocese and the city are still in the process of writing grants.

The agreement with the city was reached on January 23, after a process of court mediation. In a press release from City Hall, Mayor Angel Taveras credited Bishop of Providence Thomas Tobin, Public Safety Commissioner Steven Paré, and Solicitor Jeffrey Padwa for their roles in the negotiations, and praised the maintenance of peaceful relations between protestors and city authorities. Representatives from several homelessness advocacy organizations were also instrumental in the process

Illustration by Annika Finne

leading up to the agreement. The Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless is providing day staffing for Emmanuel House, according to a January 25 article in the Providence Journal. An announcement of the agreement posted on the Occupy Providence website describes it as a victory, and stresses that it represents “only the beginning” of the movement’s efforts.

On the afternoon of the 29th, emotions among the occupiers were mixed. All who talked to the Independent said that they regarded the agreement with the city as a victory, but many expressed reluctance at the change in the dynamic of the movement that the departure from Burnside Park would entail. “A very mixed and diverse group came together, and they formed a community,” a retired real estate businessman named Jim said. “A lot of these people probably aren’t going to see each other again.” Jason, a protestor who had earlier been involved in the occupation at Worcester, MA, said that “the spirit of this particular occupation . . . is something that fuels into itself.”

Leaving the camp, he said, “takes away a heavy amount of the meaning.” As for the day shelter, “it’s a small victory, but it’s only a token.”

Although occupations throughout the country have included significant numbers of homeless individuals, conditions for the homeless have been a specific and persistent concern of Occupy Providence. On December 10, the group partnered with the Rhode Island Homeless Advocacy Project and the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless to organize a march downtown and a rally at the State House, demanding a Homeless Bill of Rights, just cause foreclosure legislation, and a dedicated funding stream for affordable housing.

Miriam Weizenbaum, a lawyer who represented Occupy in mediation, stressed that the day shelter is not a token victory but “something that the homelessness advocacy community has been looking for for six years.”

Robert Malin, a member of the Occupy Providence media working group, said that the number of homeless people who had been living in Burnside Park during the occupation was relatively low. “I just think that there’s been

this whole blurry issue, that this was, you know, a respite for homeless people and not a movement, and I don’t think it was. I think it was mostly a movement.” Although many homeless individuals spent some time in the occupation, Malin said, the cold weather and the “constant political chatter” made the park a relatively undesirable place to live, and most moved to night shelters as winter progressed. Still, “a lot of the people that were there came into contact with the suffering that goes on in the streets of Providence firsthand that they didn’t know about,” an experience Malin credited for much of Occupy Providence’s attention to homeless advocacy. Following evictions earlier in the fall and winter, many other Occupy groups around the nation have turned their attention to the issue of home foreclosures. On February 6, Occupy Providence participants protested at the office of Attorney General Peter Kilmartin, who plans to make Rhode Island one of over 40 states to sign a major settlement with mortgage lenders over illegal trading practices, the Providence Journal reported on February 8.

As the second-longest continuing encampment in New England, Occupy Providence’s ability to use its physical presence as leverage toward the achievement of the day shelter distinguishes it among occupations across the country. (The last remaining encampment in the region, in Portland, ME, agreed to decamp

by February 10 without concessions from the city, according to a Portland Press Herald report on February 7.) Miriam Weizenbaum praised Occupy Providence’s good faith in negotiations, and said that the city had been “very respectful of [the protestors’] rights and has also conducted itself in good faith,” in contrast to the “violence in response to speech” undertaken by authorities in cities like New York and Oakland.

Riot squads cleared the original Wall Street encampment in the middle of the night on November 15; Occupy Oakland has been subject to numerous instances of brutality in raids and clashes with the police. In Providence, by contrast, Public Safety Commissioner Paré distributed eviction notices on Burnside’s

tents on the afternoon of October 27, but the city refrained from coercive action against the protestors when they refused to leave. An October 29 statement from Mayor Taveras declared that “Providence is taking a nonviolent approach to the occupation of Burnside Park.” At a City Council meeting attended by Occupy protestors on November 17, numerous council members even spoke in favor of a resolution introduced by Ward 10 councilman Luis Aponte that would express municipal support for the occupation. The mediation process that led to the ultimate agreement began early in December, according to the Providence Journal.

According to Malin, “safety concerns about people freezing to death” were instrumental in Occupy’s decision to accept the city’s proposal.

On February 8, no signs of the occupation were left in Burnside Park. “What we’re going through is a reorganization,” Malin said.

Like Occupy groups that have departed from their original locations in other cities, Occupy Providence continues to hold General Assemblies and working group meetings; a GA on February 4 drew 30 to 35 people, a higher number than had been attending during the coldest period of the Burnside occupation. In the past several weeks, Occupy participants’ actions have included an occupation of a struggling community house in Cumberland and a counter-protest of an anti-abortion rally at the State House. But although the group has said only that it intends to “temporarily suspend” occupation, and Weizenbaum has pledged continuing legal support, the protesters may encounter difficulties if they decide to move toward reoccupation in the spring. According to Commissioner Paré, on a January 27 interview on WJAR-TV: “Whatever their plans are, if it’s the same group, the city will deal with them, but it won’t be in the same way.”

JONATHAN STORCH B’14 tries not to commit acts of violence in response to speech.

METRO

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

6

OUR HEAVENLY FATHER Spirtual Crisis at Cranston West

By Grace Dunham

J

essica Ahlquist, the 16-year-old girl who won a federal lawsuit against Cranston High School West to remove a prayer banner from the wall of the school’s auditorium, is big news. After January 11th, when the court sided with Ahlquist and demanded the banner’s immediate removal, the story exploded.

Camera crews and atheist protestors turned up outside the school. Jessica blew up on Facebook and Twitter. Fox News spun the story one way; newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times spun it the other.

Cranston—at least in the eyes of the national news machine—descended into chaos.

A headline on the front page of the New York Times read, “Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against Prayer.” The article described Cranston as “throbbing with raw emotion.” A few news bites have stuck: Jessica received hate mail and death threats, leading to a cyber-bullying lawsuit and accompaniment to school by bodyguards; when an organization in Wisconsin tried to send her a bouquet of red roses, three Cranston florists refused to make the delivery; State Representative Peter J. Palumbo called Jessica “an evil little thing” on a popular Rhode Island talk radio show.

In his 40-page court decision, Judge Ronald Lagueux wrote that the School Committee’s open meeting about the banner last March “at times resembled a religious revival.”

Speakers talked about their commitment to Catholicism—about religion being a full-time, not part-time, job. One speaker at the meeting was quoted in the court report saying, “If you take the banner down, you are spitting in the face of Almighty God… If this banner is taken down… on Judgment Day, you will be judged because you stand before Almighty God.” A city of 80,000 just south of Providence, Cranston is a very Catholic town in the nation’s most Catholic state. 63% of Rhode Island identifies as Catholic, making it one of only two states (the other being Utah) where a majority of residents belong to one organized religion. These statistics, particularly in light of the apocalyptic events of the school board meeting, have been used frequently to illustrate a theory that has become the crux of the Jessica Ahlquist story: whatever people’s notions are about the religiosity of New England, Rhode Island is the exception to the rule.

SCHOOL SPIRIT Jamie Paola, Sarah Collins, and Sia and Elizabeth Grammas want the banner to stay up.

They attend Cranston West, where Jamie and Sia are seniors, Elizabeth is a junior, and Sarah is a sophomore. All four have lived in Cranston their whole lives. Jamie does Student Council and yearbook. Sia did band for two years. Most importantly, Sia and Elizabeth are Westernettes while Jamie and Sarah are Falconettes— or, as they call them, the ‘Ettes. The ‘Ettes are the school’s two flag twirling and kick line teams. At football games, they’re announced over the loudspeaker as “The Pride of Cranston West.” This spring, the ‘Ettes are going to Florida to perform at Disney World. Jamie, Sarah, Sia, and Elizabeth are proud to be ‘Ettes and they’re proud to go to West. “Sometimes,” Jamie said, “I guess I wish everybody had as much school spirit as some of us do.”

None of them had ever thought much about the banner before last year, when they heard rumors that a girl named Jessica Ahlquist, then a 10th grader, wanted to file a lawsuit. The banner was on the wall of the auditorium, which, according to the girls, was only used a couple times throughout the year, for a welcome back assembly and maybe a talent show or two. “To be honest,”

said Sia, “I didn’t even know it was there.”

Until last March, that is, when the Cranston School board decided in a 4-3 vote against the banner’s removal, and Jessica, backed by the ACLU, followed through with her lawsuit.

The Friday after the recent court decision, students tried to organize a protest. Hundreds of kids were in the hallways, en route to the auditorium which, following the court decision, had been chained shut. The administration threatened that any student caught in the hallway would be immediately suspended. At the end of the day, Elizabeth said, “It felt like we were leaving jail or something… There were teachers surrounding the entire building, and teachers at the end of every hallway.”

Apparently, the day after Ahlquist’s win, the principle sent out an email telling the faculty to forbid students from talking about her or anything related to the prayer banner.

The school administration denied this report in the Providence Journal, but all four girls recalled teachers telling students to be quiet and “totally shutting them down.” For the girls, that was the most upsetting part. “It felt like she was entitled to her opinion and we weren’t entitled to ours,” Elizabeth said. “And if we can’t protest, or say what we think, people are going do it in other ways. They’re going to do it on Facebook or on Twitter, and say really ridiculous stuff.”

Jessica has been taking time off of school, apparently because of safety concerns. People at West say that she isn’t coming back. Sia and Jamie heard that she’s transferring to Lasalle, a fancy Catholic school. If the rumor is true, they don’t like it. As Christians, the girls felt personally attacked by Jessica. They felt especially threatened by one post on her website, in which Jessica wrote a dialogue between “Christians” and the “Government.”

In Jessica’s rendering, “Christians” are cast as whiny siblings, who scream and cry when the “Government” refuses to let them eat another cookie. “NO! I WANT THE COOKIE!” the Christians say. When the Government asks if the Christians would be willing to split the cookie, the Christians refuse again: “NOOOO! I WANT THE WHOLE THING.” All four girls were raised in the church.

Jamie and Sarah are both Italian Catholics.

Sia and Elizabeth are Greek Orthodox. All are from big families. “Family is everything,” Jamie said.

“That’s it. You always have family,” Elizabeth added. “That’s just how we were brought up.”

For all of them, family means tradition.

Jamie talked about her seven-dish Christmas Eve dinner. Sarah talked about reunions every spring, when 60 relatives take over a restaurant or arcade. Sia and Elizabeth, since they can remember, have had a weekly schedule for their family dinners, which often exceed twenty people: Tuesday means pork; Thursday means chicken and macaroni; Saturday means steak.

“This is how we are and this is how we’re going do it with our kids, too,” said Elizabeth They talk about how long the banner’s been there, how sad they’d be if it changed, how they want students in the future—their own kids, even—to go to the same Cranston West that they went to. It’s not, they say, about religion.

“It’s called a prayer banner,” Jamie said, “but it’s not religious… I don’t look at this and think of it as something I’d say at Church. I see it as a hope or a wish, something that makes you strive to do your best.”

“It says Our Heavenly Father in the beginning; it says Amen at the end,” Sia said, “But Our Heavenly Father can be anybody.

Anybody you look up too. It doesn’t say God; it doesn’t say Buddha. It’s just motivation to work

hard and look up to your teachers.”

Nonetheless, they all agree that the banner—or, rather, its proposed removal—united the Christian community. Elizabeth and Sia’s priest gave a sermon about it. People at school who never used to talk to each other started talking. “This showed how religion can bring us together,” Sia said, “Because we all had a common belief.”

At a Western Hills Middle School board meeting after the court decision, a group of students made speeches about why they opposed the banner’s removal. They talked about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, about how those documents—and the founding of our country—were rooted in religion. Elizabeth and the rest of her friends see it the same way. “People came here for religion,” she says, “It’s always going be in our lives. It’s on money, it’s in the pledge of allegiance. I guess I don’t see how one little thing is going to change that.”

Bobby Bach, an ’87 graduate of Cranston West, is behind efforts to cut the prayer banner out of the auditorium’s concrete wall and display it at a nearby Catholic school. To raise money, he’s selling five-dollar prayer banner t-shirts at his business, Twigs Florist—not one of the three that refused to deliver to Ahlquist.

Bobby still lives in Cranston because he feels like it’s the kind of place where people live their lives according to the banner’s message.

“I think I have the benefit of age,” Bobby says, “I understand Jessica Ahlquist’s point, I really do, but I come from a different generation than she does. A friend of mine from high school is Jewish, and he said to me, you know, if I went home at that age and said something to my father about the school prayer my father would have slapped me in the face and said ignore it, it has nothing to do with it, if you don’t like it then look the other way. I hate it to say it, but the kids run the parents now. It’s a different world.”

RELIGION REVIVED Constitutionally speaking, the reasoning behind the court’s decision seems hard to dispute.

The banner depicts the Cranston West school prayer, written in 1960 by a then 7th grader one year after the school’s founding. The prayer was recited in homeroom over the loudspeaker system every morning until 1962, when Supreme Court decision Engel v. Vitale ruled prayer in public schools unconstitutional. Only two years later, West’s first graduating class gave a gift to the school: the school prayer in mural form.

GRACE DUNHAM B’14 will be judged.

7

METRO

10 february 2012

WHEN DO THEIR SENTENCES END? Reentering RIPTA

By Sam Adler-Bell

O

n November 17 of last year, WPRI Channel 12 “Target 12 Investigator” Tim White reported that Rhode Island Public Transport Authority (RIPTA) had hired two men with criminal records to drive buses for RIPTA’s RIde program, a service providing transportation for the elderly and disabled.

The four-and-a-half minute segment, craftily titled “Risky RIde,” is typical of local network news sensationalism: Law and Orderesque clanging sounds punctuate revelations about the two men’s criminal histories, while White types furiously away on his computer, hot on the trail of his Target 12 investigation.

In a bit of riveting “undercover video,” we see the blurred-out faces of one of the drivers behind the wheel as a list of his past felony convictions—the most recent a cocaine charge in 2003—scrolls down the screen. In another shot, a man, presumably though not obviously the other driver, is shown walking down the sidewalk. The words “60 days at the ACI [Adult Correctional Institute] for marijuana possession” flash across the screen.

These two blurry-faced men, Kevin Thomas and Larry Robertson, were, in fact, hired through a reentry program facilitated by a partnership between RIPTA, the Department of Labor and Training, and Open Doors—a community organization committed to supporting the formerly incarcerated. Both successfully underwent rigorous screening and training programs administered by Open Doors and RIPTA before being hired. And neither had a single complaint from a rider or an on-the-job supervisor in their three months of work. The story was melodramatic ratings fodder. But as any local news reporter worth his suit knows, fear sells. So they milked it.

Four days after the segment aired, Kevin Thomas and Larry Robertson were out of a job.

BUYING FEAR At a RIPTA Board meeting on November 21, community-members spoke out against the re-entry program. Lucy Bettencourt, a RIPTA bus operator, called the hiring of Thomas and Robertson “a personal affront to [her] integrity as a driver.” Paul Harrington, President of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU), which represents RIPTA’s drivers, called the Open Doors program “sad…an embarrassment to RIPTA and [union] members.” Thomas and Robertson were a few months shy of union

eligibility when they were laid off, although both were paying dues since day one.

Caroline Medeiros, director of the Alliance for Safe Communities—an organization that supports reinstating the death penalty and doing away with Good Time statutes, which allow inmates to earn time off their sentences for good behavior—chastised RIPTA’s leadership for endangering “some of [our] most Vulnerable Population” by putting two men with “excessive records” behind the wheel of RIde vehicles. She urged the Board to discontinue the program which jeopardized the safety of “the elderly, and developmentally disabled.”

RIPTA CEO Charles Odimgbe (pronounced “oh-dim-way”), who initiated the partnership with Open Doors, originally defended the re-entry program on Channel 12, saying, “somebody has to help [formerly incarcerated individuals] readjust into this community and if that person is going to be me, I’m willing to stick my neck out and do it.” But at the November 21 board meeting, he pulled his neck back in. “Due to public protest,” he announced, RIPTA would be “discontinuing” the program. Odimgbe took “full responsibility for any concern” the program had caused.

SECOND CHANCES In the following days, the story only gained momentum. On December 1, the RI Senate Committee on Housing and Municipal Government convened a hearing to explore the hiring of ex-felons at RIPTA. Senator Francis Maher said the program was “literally putting people at risk.” Senator John Tassoni tore into Odimgbe, calling the recent revelations “a black eye for the whole state.”

Only Senator Harold Metts of Providence offered unqualified support for the re-entry program. He defended the two fired drivers: “Once someone has paid their debt to society, served their time, repented and turned their lives around for the better, they deserve another chance.”

On the same day, members of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) took a no-confidence vote for RIPTA’s CEO. Union President Paul Harrington cited the revelations of the “Risky RIde” investigation as the “final straw” in a series of disappointments that pushed his members to register their gripes with Odimbge. Harrington claimed the CEO

never told the union about the program to hire ex-felons.

When I spoke to Odimgbe, however, he told me Harrington and the ATU had been fully informed of the Open Doors initiative well before it went into effect; he found their outraged surprise “kind of funny.” Odigmbe admitted that the choice to fire the drivers was his. “I have to balance every action that I take.

Riders started speaking up and complaining [after the story broke]. So I had to preempt any claim that we were exposing them to a liability.” Still, Odimgbe remained outspoken in his support for rehabilitative programs: “People deserve second chances. As a member of this community, I believe it is the least I could do for the less fortunate.” He added, “there is always redemption.”

Jesse Capece, head of the Employment Program at Open Doors, emphasized that RIde services are a diverse group. “There are people who’ve served time using RIde too. One of the main groups [Robertson and Thomas] serviced were people being taken to and from the methadone clinic.”

MORE THAN A RECORD On December 7, a group of community leaders and activists met at Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), a community organization on the Southside of Providence, to discuss how they should respond to the WPRI story and subsequent firings. DARE’s ‘Behind the Walls’ committee—composed of formerly incarcerated men and women, their families, friends, and allies—has been fighting discrimination against former inmates for two decades. They also invited Kevin Thomas and Larry Robertson to attend the meeting.

“They came through and shared their story and the committee to decided to get behind them,” said DARE organizer Jordan Seaberry.

On December 19, DARE and its community allies attended RIPTA’s monthly board meeting. Carrying banners and signs—“When does a sentence end?” “We’re more than a record!”—they demanded that the board rehire the two drivers. During public comment, DARE members, along with Ward 9 City Councilwoman Carmen Castillo, spoke in support of RIPTA’s re-entry program and the two drivers.

Larry Robertson told the board about his criminal past and the steps he’d taken to get his

life on track. He described the job at RIPTA as giving him a “sense of pride [he] had not felt in many years.” For the first time in his life he was able to support himself and his family and provide them with health benefits. He regretted he wouldn’t be able to provide them with a nice holiday. He “respectfully asked to be reinstated.”

Jordan Seaberry from DARE read a letter Kevin Thomas had prepared beforehand. In it, Thomas offered “thanks to all who have committed themselves to helping people who find themselves in difficult situations.” He said his words were “not only in defense of [himself ] but…for those who are behind me, and beside me, and for those to come after me.” He challenged the board and Odigmbe to stand by their stated commitments to reentry. “Every step toward the goal of justice,” Thomas’s letter read, “requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle.”

In closing, he reminded the board members that “the justice system was built upon two premises. One of punishment, the other…rehabilitation, but to nourish one half and starve the other” is to “commit judicial suicide…a death knell for the system itself.”

BARRIER AFTER BARRIER After the December board meeting, Odimbge started meeting privately with DARE to try to address their concerns. And they have made progress. “I believe in these two young men,” Odimbge said. “It would be difficult at this time to get them rehired at RIPTA, but I will put in a good word [for them] in a couple of other places.” He also claims that he and the board might revisit the program at some point in the future.

For DARE and its members, who fight against such discrimination on a daily basis, however, this after-the-fact sympathy is not enough. “It’s such a clear case,” Seaberry says, “of how society treats people with records as if they are just so fundamentally different and less worthy than those without.” For Seaberry, the underlying issues here are “criminalization, discrimination, and race.” Both Robertson and Thomas are black. “When folks finally get a break,” Seaberry added, “when someone wants to help them out, they still wind up facing barrier after barrier after barrier.”

SAM ADLER-BELL ‘12.5 is a black eye for the whole state.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

OPINIONS

8

ON THE BACK BURNER The Viability of Slow Change for America

By Stephen Carmody Illustration by Alexandra Corrigan

R

evolution and slow-change, as two opposing paradigms, describe how one can conceive of political change in the broadest senses. The desire for revolution— change that occurs outside and against the norms of power—develops out of a failure of those norms. Alternatively, a fear of disruptive reorientation around a new political ideal may inspire a desire for more systematic change. For Americans, whose exposure to foreign affairs is backwashed with news of revolutionary struggle, the question of dramatic upheaval rarely comes home. But it may raise questions about the degree to which people can recognize domestic problems and respond to them in a meaningful way.

The tents in Burnside Park came down at the end of January through a mediated agreement with the city of Providence that guaranteed the creation of a homeless day shelter. The Occupy encampment—which claimed a tenuous connection to the resistance movements in the Middle East—temporarily resolved itself back into normal politics. The tension wielded by Occupy Providence derived both from the illegality of inhabiting the park and from the protestors’ choice to seek a route to change alternative to the current representative government. To the degree that city officials, the public, and law enforcement allow, the Occupy movement gets political sway from not playing by the rules.

The tension of being outside the political system, acting as a stress to the norms of power, is not fostered by the normal political discourse in this country. Revolutionary thoughts grow out of dissatisfaction. The prospect of wholesale difference and change is a dream of idealists and those not making decisions, but this imagining may create some productive space.

One can spend a long time subsumed by a structural critique like Marxism; invariably one begins to see systems of economic power that lead to inequality and injustice. Inequality and injustice indicate a problem with the system, a product of our democratic sensibilities. But a structural critique is a double-edged sword; it both gives language to what is wrong, and overwhelms one’s ability to see the system any differently.

The overwhelming oppression in this country—economic, racial, and social injustice—brings on a sense of despair; this despair is part of the reason the American public might allow for a long-form protest like Occupy. Adam Gopnik recently wrote for The New Yorker an article, “The Caging Of America,” which expertly outlined the history of mass incarceration in America and the simultaneous history of critiques to this system. Partly, he set out to dispel the causal link between Reagan’s War On Drugs with the reduction of crime in New York City.

He stressed how small policy changes—the advent of cheap credit cards undermining New York mafia credit influence, or cell phones bringing drug dealing indoors and reducing violent crime—can lead to paradigmatic social shifts that someone despairing over inequality and injustice could not possibly imagine.

Oftentimes, the structural critiques overlook

the nitty-gritty elements of a situation that do not carry overarching causal links and clear intentions that revolutionary narratives rely on.

It’s not always clear how social change should balance the exigencies of the everyday and an overarching ideal. Social change calls for continual, commonsense struggle, often without a clear result. In the case of prison reform, part of this struggle means, for example, not accusing prison policy makers of active racism, even while the system suggests it. Part of it means divorcing from a discourse that makes the criminal the only moral agent responsible for crime. And then one aims to make the system more humane. But believing like oft-parroted MLK statement, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice” perhaps leads to satisfaction and inaction. This is frightening and unsatisfactory, especially when one is especially close to the oppression and injustice that can exist in this country.

In New York last fall, people loved pointing to the hypocrisies of the Occupy movement—the iPhones, the enormous costs to the city, and its inability to articulate demands. While Occupy may not be the right paradigm for political action, these detractions, instead of engaging in dialogue with the protest’s ideals, show the degree to which Americans are unwilling to engage with questions of injustice. The lives lost in the Vietnam War and the horrible violence in Syria certainly bring on a different sort of immediacy to the question of change. But an experience of oppression in part depends upon how much one chooses to look for it. This is crucial in an American context, where group solidarity is so often based on identity politics; that usually lessens feelings of responsibility to other Americans and the problems they face.

If people strive to expose themselves to injustice and oppression—either by talking about it constantly or committing themselves to oppressed communities—than a dialogue about change can develop. This exposure requires time to think outside the normal system and imagine something new on a large scale. But it also needs to be freed from overly moralizing resonances, which tend to roadblock the difficult balancing act between political ends and the small decisions that go into reaching that end. Rather, people should commit to a disposition of what Gopnik calls “humanity and common sense.” It takes a more active and deliberate will to keep this slowchange disposition.

STEPHEN CARMODY B’12 is a doubleedged sword.

10 february 2012

he ten people driving out of the small Pakistani town of Miramshah on January 23 probably heard a distant buzz before a deafening explosion sent their car tumbling off the side of the dirt road. The passengers, later described as suspected militants by the United States and Pakistan, were incinerated on impact, their remains left inside the charred vehicle.

Their fate was decided more than 7,000 miles away when two pilots sitting in a virtual cockpit at an Air Force base in Nevada spotted the car on their screens. A pilot pushed a button, a drone responded, and the Hellfire missile took out its target.

Drones, otherwise known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), are largely considered the next wave of contemporary warfare and have become a mainstay — and a major point of criticism — in the Obama administration’s ongoing War on Terror.

In addition to unarmed surveillance drones, the US operates two types of armed drone programs. The first is a publicly acknowledged operation led by the US military in declared warzones, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently Libya. The second is a covert campaign directed by the CIA primarily in Pakistan, an undeclared warzone.

Top Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders are known to have established strongholds in Pakistan’s tribal regions, where their followers

launch attacks on US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. But because these areas are rugged and isolated, it’s nearly impossible for ground troops to stop cross-border attacks. “If not for drones, we wouldn’t be conducting cross-border strikes in Pakistan: there’s no way we’d send in troops—risking their capture or deaths—to take out ordinary suspected terrorists,” said Dr. Patrick Lin, Director of the Ethics and Emerging Sciences at California Polytechnic State University. “Osama bin Laden, I think everyone sees, is a special case.”

Drone warfare is widely credited with disrupting al-Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan, but it has seriously strained the US relationship with Islamabad, a key ally in the peace process in Afghanistan. The dynamic is dicey: Pakistan’s government publicly condemns drone attacks, saying they undermine national sovereignty, but it shares intelligence with the United States. A report from Reuters this week quoted am unnamed security official who confirmed that Pakistani intelligence is continuing to cooperate with the US in its drone campaign against the tribal areas. The official called two recent US drone strikes, on January 10 and 12, “joint operations” carried out by U.S. UAVs with the help of Pakistani “spotters.”

He added that the intelligence agencies have a much better relationship with the US than do the political or military leadership.

But political tension has only increased

since the US commando raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in May of 2011. Soon after, members of Pakistan’s parliament made a similar statement in which they “condemned the unilateral action, which constitutes a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.” Seeing the US drone campaign as a symbol of this violation, civilians in May filled the streets of Pakistan’s cities holding signs with phrases like “No to US Drones. No to US Aid. We Can Stand By Ourselves.”

The civilian impact might be the greatest impact of drone warfare. But the question of carnage is a matter of heated debate: accounts of the strikes from official and unofficial sources are consistently contradictory. A recent study from the Brookings Institution suggests that drone strikes may kill “10 or so civilians” for every militant killed. In contrast, The New America Foundation estimates that 80 percent of those killed in attacks have been militants.

And the UK-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism says that between 391 and 780 civilians were killed out of between 1,658 and 2,597 in total, and that among these deaths, 160 were children.

However, all of these estimates are at odds with the CIA’s account of the toll. The debate reached new heights in June, when President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, said in reference to the drones program that “there hasn’t been a single collateral

death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

The debate took another unprecedented turn this week. During his hour-long “White House Hangout” chat, President Obama confirmed that unmanned vehicles regularly struck Pakistan’s tribal areas. “For the most part, they have been very precise precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates,’’ he said. “And we are very careful in terms of how it has been applied. I want to make sure that people understand that actually, drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.”

But even as the world debates the legal and social implications of unmanned combat, there continues to be little understanding of just how these mysterious weapons work. How does a UAV make it from Nevada to North Waziristan? Anyone involved in launching attack drones will tell you that these unmanned vehicles require much more manpower than their name would suggest.

“At the end, it’s always about people, no matter what,” said Asaf Gilboa, a former UAV operator for the Israeli Air Force and now the CEO of Themis Ltd., an international UAV consultant firm. There may be no pilot in the air, but from development and maintenance to navigation and battlefield management, there

features 10

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

a closer look at drone warfare

By Emily Gogolak Illustration by Julieta Cárdenas

are a lot of people manning the journey of the drone.

The drone itself consists of five or six parts that can be disassembled, packed into a container known as “the coffin,” and deployed anywhere in the world. But inside that container is an entire system, with satellite communication equipment, cameras, sensors, lasers, rangefinders, and moving target indicators.

Long before materials are packed and launched, a drone’s journey begins with production and testing, which the US military outsources to private contractors. According to USAspending.gov, an official federal finance tracking website, US government drone purchases rose from $588 to $1.3 billion over the past five years. “The military is like a rich kid with a trust-fund. It wants to buy the finished product, and its interest is more in maintenance and operation than in actual development. So it hands over the money to private companies,” said Ricardo Valerdi, a professor of engineering at University of Arizona who works with defense contractors on UAV development. Companies such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing or General Atomics—together capturing about 80 percent of the UAV market in the United States—build the drones from start to finish.

From here, the private contractors deliver the final product to the US military, where the drone is synced with the two other key

components of the operation: the cockpit on the ground and the data system that glues the whole mission together.

UAV pilots on the ground fly the drone as if it were any conventional aircraft, ready for takeoff with the joystick in their right hand.

“It’s the same as the environment of the typical cockpit, but the pilot is displaced,” Gilboa, the Israeli UAV consultant, said. So, when the vehicle takes off, instead of viewing the field through a windshield, the pilot sees a rolling image streamed from a camera on the drone’s nose, inside a virtual cockpit.

The information relayed from the drone is fed to not only the pilot in Nevada, but to a host of other people as well. UAV missions “are about the movement of data instead of people,” Gilboa said. This is exactly what makes them so appealing from an intelligence standpoint.

The pilot can be sitting anywhere, free from danger, and the images received in flight can be streamed anywhere—to legal advisors, to CIA personnel, to ground troops in Pakistan, and beyond. And thanks to this mobility of data, the decision-making process in UAV combat is much more complex than in traditional warfare.

“Pilots are looking at the screen, but they do not have ultimate decisions to do everything that they’re capable of. Other people looking may be people parked on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. Or it could be people at the

Pentagon who are making the real decisions,” Valerdi said. “Say we are going to send the drone with a bunch of weapons on it, and depending on how that looks, there will be a bunch of people involved in that decision — and all of the social and political risks that it comes with.”

The risks are manifold.

“It is a human controlling an autonomous robot,” Valerdi said. “By the nature of this autonomy, they have a lot of divergent behaviors.”

Pilots on the ground, for example, lack the same situational awareness and physical cues they would have in the cockpit of a jet. Instead of the pilots’ own senses, navigation relies on sensors. “A bunch of sensors are trying to find each other in an environment where there may be no GPS or no radio,” Valerdi said. If something abnormal happens in the air, hovering over Miramshah, there’s not much the pilots sitting on the ground can do about it.

As the U.S. drone campaign moves into the public spotlight, it’s unclear what shape the program will take in the future. With defense spending cuts, drones seem to be an increasingly enticing option: they are cheaper than boots on the ground. And as troop withdrawal looms in Afghanistan, the military will likely turn more and more to remote warfare in Pakistan to quell al-Qaeda along the border.

If anything is certain, it’s that the drone is changing the face of contemporary warfare. A pilot flying combat drones over a warzone can finish his shift and drive a few miles off base to home be in time for dinner with his family. Yet this pilot has no normal day job: he may have just manned an operation that killed suspected terrorists in tribal Pakistan.

Once the drone was in flight, the pilot would have watched live-streamed videos from the field. The target—a vehicle filled with suspected militants, say—would be identified on the ground. The pilot would have the go-ahead to fire. And with a distant buzz and a fiery explosion, a missile piloted from Nevada would hit its target in North Waziristan.

EMILY GOGOLAK B’12.5 has no normal day job.

11 features

10 february 2012

the end of the world at the end of the internet

By Josh Sunderman Illustration by Olivia Fialkow

A

t the end of the Internet, there is LUElinks. Don’t try to find it. It doesn’t exist. But if you somehow reached the home page, you’d find an Internet community in crisis. For nearly a decade, this secret collective has been building a vast infrastructure of Megaupload.com links, laying out a buffet of pirated goods—movies and books, games and software programs. Yet with the recent demise of Megaupload, the seemingly invincible behemoth of Internet piracy has revealed itself to be little more than a house of cards, crumbling under the weight of U.S. Copyright Law. MACULATE CONCEPTION In May 2004, LlamaGuy posted a link to “Goatse” on Internet gaming site GameFAQs. “Goatse” was an early Internet meme, which entailed a single image of an adult male providing a view of his entire anal cavity. The GameFAQs forum, in turn, froze LlamaGuy’s account for two weeks. Three hours before its reactivation, he whipped up some code for his own Internet forum called LUElinks—“Life, the Universe, and Everything,” a reference to the third book of the five-volume The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. LlamaGuy intended the site to serve as provocative offshoot of GameFAQs where lewd content could thrive and link sharing was encouraged. LUElinks exploded through the cybersphere, jumping quickly to more than 4,000 users before LlamaGuy cut membership off from the public. Yet while LUElinks membership has remained static, its reputation has continued to grow; rumors circulate constantly about high-profile members in politics and culture, and LUEsers are famously protective over their accounts. This is the logic behind LUElinks’s non-existence—those who are in are eager to

maintain secrecy; those who are not prefer to ignore it completely, refusing to indulge the LUElinks ego.

In this vein, real-world identities are never a topic of discussion on LUElinks. For one, the stakes of the linksharing communities like LUElinks are extremely high. For all the petty middle fingers that LUEsers exchange with the rest of the Internet, the risks of membership are real. After all, the site has been home to hundreds of thousands of links to pirated material, an act known as “deep linking,” a growing issue in courts worldwide. In December 2006, a Texas court ruled against Supercrosslive.com for linking to illegal material. The same year, courts in Australia and Denmark upheld copyright laws against deep linking, raiding homes, issuing massive fines, and filing injunctions.

LUEsers face threats from the inside, as well. LUEsers are very careful to monitor the content of their posts and profiles, as the community might not only ban users from the site, but also pursue their enemies in far more dangerous cyber capacities: hacking social media, finding credit card information, or anything available on the web (which is, for the tech-savvy, everything). When I contacted a LUElinks user for an interview, he insisted on anonymity, concerned that speaking about a site that “doesn’t actually exist” could get him in trouble—we’ll call him Z. “You’re going to call LUElinks by name?” he asked. “They will find you. If this is on the Internet, they will find you.”

Yet despite the cyber-badassery that LUElinks attempts to exude, the more accurate reason that LUEsers hide behind their Internet personas is that most of them have very little non-Internet life to speak of. “These are serious

nerds,” Z said. “You know, the real hardcore living-in-the-basement type nerds.” With this consideration, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish the more dangerous LUElinks threats from those that result from an inflated sense of power behind the cyber wall.

ALL YOU CAN EAT For all the secrecy surrounding LUElinks, the site’s appearance is remarkably unimpressive.

Where one might expect a community of programmers to create a site exploding with complex graphics and enchanting portals, there is only austerity: a simple grey header at the top of the page with links to forums written in blue Arial font on top of a plain black background.

The site is rife with vulgar content: “NSFW” tags litter the active threads; one quick glance at the opening page gives you the choice between viewing pictures of “underboobs,” “sideboobs,” or, if you’re a purist, just “boobs.” Other LUEsers opt for the “NLS” links—Not Life Safe—which, Z explains, “will fuck you up for life, like stuff I just can’t even or don’t even want to imagine.” Threads read like a chat room filled with fifth graders, brimming with vulgarity and ridicule.

Nonetheless, if you can make it past these turnoffs, the search capacity on LUElinks is simply astonishing. Because LUEsers have so much of their reputation invested in their online profile, they are eager to upload and post links constantly. Links undergo an extensive process of peer review, with low quality content immediately downgraded. When I spoke with W, another LUEser that also insisted on anonymity, he told me “when I first activated my account, I spent literally hours at a time downloading everything.” Photoshop, Ableton Live, Microsoft Office, Mac OS X. “I would

say 30 albums a week, that was like my going rate,” W said. The site went on like this— growing daily, every new release added to the library—for years.

THE CYBER FRONTIER On January 19, three separate countries launched a blitz against LUElinks’ primary host, file-sharing site Megaupload.com. In Hong Kong, the city that housed Megaupload’s headquarters, customs officials froze close to $40 million of company assets; in New Zealand, police raided Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s Auckland mansion; and on the web, the U.S. State Department confiscated the site, planting their seal on the site’s front page.

“Imagine the end of the world,” Z explains. “Asteroids hit the Earth; resources are lost. All that is left are a handful of refugees— that is how it felt to be on LUElinks.” LlamaGuy, in an act of diluvian cleansing, wiped the search engine clean. And for those first brief moments, the community was in shambles, and threads exploded with shrieks of terror. But, by the minute, the cyber grief began to unfold, as threads moved through denial, anger, blame, and only minutes later, acceptance. “Almost automatically,” Z says, “you start seeing different subgroups breaking away—some people pick up their stuff and leave; some start developing their new world together, and of course, some try to build it back up.”

W fell into the group of defectors: “I immediately stopped spending time on LUElinks,” he explained. “It wasn’t like I was going there to socialize on the forum. I was going to download music.” Other wayward LUElinks members flocked to new sites like “New Links,” which have been sprouting up all over the LUElinks forums. According to one

features 12

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

thread, there were six LUElinks spin-offs made on January 28 alone. Left hoping are a good number of LUEsers who await the miracle work of LlamaGuy himself—“our father,” as W described him. The search engine now reports (somewhat facetiously) that the site is undergoing “scheduled maintenance,” perhaps laying low until the Megaupload controversy blows over.

One thread that opened up recently asked, “How have you been dealing with the end of Megaupload?” Responses varied. One user reported that he had started paying for media in the past week, noting that he might not be able to make rent; another reported “chronic masturbation.” By far the most common response was that LUEsers were simply taking to other piracy sites. Mediafire, Filestube, Rapidshare.

There are so many options still available to online pirates that the State Department’s strategy seems nothing short of futile.

Perhaps, then, the recent postponement of the SOPA bill, legislation that sought to protect intellectual property rights through the prosecution of piracy sites, is a reflection of the impossibility of regulating the unregulatable.

“The sheer number of people that are behind piracy completely trumps the number of people who are against it,” W argues. “Within 48 hours, some 16-year-old hacker from Wisconsin will just make a new site.” This is the predominant view of Internet piracy, which imagines a gradual erosion of intellectual property rights in the Internet Age. As a former executive at Interscope Records explained to me, “Intellectual property is certainly important, but it’s about to become irrelevant.”

Yet for cyber security experts—oriented less toward piracy and more toward policy— the prediction is just the opposite. Dr. Chris Demchak, a Professor at the U.S. Naval War College and Co-Director of the Center for Cyber Conflict Studies, doubts the free-for-all future of the web. “No frontier lasts forever,” she writes in the Spring 2011 issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly. “No freely occupied and used commons extends endlessly where human societies are involved. Sooner or later, good fences are erected to control good neighbors and so it must be with cyberspace.” In our interview, she was eager to note that while she predicted regulation, she lamented its inevitability. “Imagine

you’re at a party with your friends. Drinking, dancing, having a good time. All it takes is a few guys to come along—swinging fists, hitting on someone’s girlfriend—and the whole party is over.” For Demchak, the emotionalism that surrounds the SOPA and PIPA bills is mere pettiness: “People don’t like having things taken away from them.” In reality, according to Demchak, there are real dangers in the Internet, some of which are sites just like LUElinks, which could provide a breeding ground for hackers with far more menacing motives. In response, then, there must be real cyberlaw.

Cyber security experts frequently compare the Internet to the advent of the automobile.

“When the automobile was first available, there were no rules of the road,” explained John Savage, An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. “Around 1900 it became clear that some order had to be introduced into driving and the stop sign was invented, making driving a lot safer… Eventually not only were rules of the road introduced, but auto safety requirements as well. On the information superhighway, the same types of problem arise.”

According to Savage, the Internet remains a

technology in its toddlerhood, and the government is just beginning to understand—and consequently regulate—its complex topography. In retrospect, the unregulated Internet of today will be nothing more than a nostalgic artifact.

In the meantime, though, LUEsers are working overtime to maintain the free spirit of the cybersphere. “Big booty grandma NWS,” “Why don’t submarines have detachable sonar ping systems? “Newlinks. Over 6500 registered users. Nearly 1000 links. Opened 2 weeks ago.”

These are the guardians of the piracy movement, the Dark Knights at the EndoftheInter. net JOSH SUNDERMAN B’14 doesn’t exist.

13 ARTS

10 february 2012

COMBATING GEORGE McFLY SYNDROME a conversation with Key & Peele writer Alex Rubens

By Jonah Wolf Illustrations by Annika Finne

L

ast Wednesday, 2.1 million viewers made Key & Peele the most watched television premiere on Comedy Central since 2009. No doubt many of them had already seen the show’s YouTube hit “Obama Loses His Sh*t,” wherein the president ( Jordan Peele) introduces Luther (Keegan-Michael Key), his official “anger translator.” (Obama: “To the governments of Iran and North Korea, we once again urge you to discontinue your uranium enrichment programs.” Luther: “Oh, Mahmoud? Kim Jong? I think I done damn told both y’all, eighty-six the shit, bitches, or I’m-a come over there and do it for y’all!”) In the pilot’s opening segment, Key explains how he and Peele, who each have one AfricanAmerican parent, “have to adjust our blackness,” a trick that helps them find humor in sketches about Obama, Lil’ Wayne, and Gordon Ramsay.

The Independent recently spoke with Key & Peele writer Alex Rubens, who, before moving to Los Angeles to work on comedy, taught English classes with titles like “Postmodern Literature” to middle and high school boys at Manhattan’s Collegiate School (where he also advised this writer’s senior project). He is the author of several blogs, one of which, “Movies I Don’t Remember,” the Guardian called “occasionally funny.”

Indy: What was the show’s writing schedule like?

AR: First, you would pitch sketch ideas to Jordan and Keegan, then all of the writers would get together with all of the executive producers and knock ideas around. By the end of that, each writer would have a sketch to work on based on how it had been modified by everybody in the room. And then basically the rest of the day you’re writing a new sketch and also revising old ones based on notes that you’re getting. I was doing all this work, which itself was really great work, in the context of a lot of people who were hilarious and brilliant and great to be around.

I used to be very anti-collaboration, and I’ve gotten to a place now where I’m, like, “It’s such a great way to work!” The stuff that I had the most hand in, I still feel like, would I have written it, or would I have written it as well, if it was just me sitting alone at home? And the answer is almost certainly “no.” I spent years trying to write in the novelist version of writing, spending months and months working on something that, when I’m done with it, maybe someone will want to pay me for. I started envying my friends who had shitty office jobs. [On Key & Peele,] we wrote faster than everyone expected.

It was a roughly three-month period of writing,

and about a month and a half in we had written several seasons’ worth of sketches.

Indy: Were there any issues with jokes’ timeliness?

AR: We almost went in the opposite direction.

Instead of trying to make really timely jokes, we tried to make timeless jokes. If we made a reference to The Grey, people right now would probably think that was funny, but people in five years or, who knows when they will remember that movie. Maybe that’s gonna be the main movie of our generation. But we aimed for stuff that wouldn’t be tied down to a particular time period. Obviously Obama is current, but he’s big enough, and relevant enough. People don’t talk about this that much, and we actually don’t talk about it on the show that much either, but Obama’s our—you know, we talk about him being our first black president, which is true, but he’s also our first biracial president, which is kind of an amazing thing for America. And [Key and Peele] are both biracial. I’m not sure that we ever talked about that.

Indy: During the campaign people complained about how difficult it would be for comedians to make fun of Obama. And now even the people who make fun of him still show respect for his intelligence.

AR: The blogger Andrew Breitbart accused the show of political cowardice ’cause it wasn’t adequately critical of the president. Frankly, I think most, maybe all, of us at the show like Obama, so our aim certainly isn’t to make fun of him. But we’re not in the business of political satire. The reason that there are sketches about Obama is that Jordan’s good at doing Obama and they had a good idea for a funny sketch about Obama. There definitely are one or two sketches that are, if you had to boil them down to their political essence, pro-Obama. But that’s not the essence of the sketch. They’re sketches meant to be funny, written by people who like Obama.

Indy: I hate to ask—but also kind of have to— about race. Because Key and Peele is so clearly about the two stars’ experiences as biracial, which they refer to explicitly, and from what I can see, you’re 100% Caucasian.

AR: Yeah, I was a little nervous about that, to be honest. When I was teaching, the middle school head asked me to run an elective on comedy and humor. And I said no. I felt like it was a conflict of interest. I felt like to teach comedy, you can’t

To teach comedy, you can’t say, “That’s not funny because it’s offensive.”

say, “That’s not funny because it’s offensive.”

Actually, in retrospect, maybe I could have used those as teaching moments. But when I had to write sample sketches to submit to this show, to show that I can write sketch comedy, I was worried, because to write really really funny stuff, I couldn’t worry about offending people.

But then on the other hand, as a white person in America, or at least my kind of white person in America, you’ve got a built-in, like, “Do not say something potentially offensive about race to someone of another race!” Or to anyone. At one point I remember remembering, “Oh yeah, well, Louis CK wrote for Chris Rock,” but then I’m thinking, “Oh, great, ok, so if one of the greatest comedians of all time can do it, then I can do it.

That’s not actually that reassuring.” I just had to make the leap of faith. I have confidence that the stuff that I come up with isn’t racist, but I just sort of had to have confidence that other people have that confidence too.

Indy: Why did you start blogging?

AR: The reason is what I call George McFly Syndrome. I don’t know how well you remember Back to the Future, but at the core of George McFly’s failure as a human being was his unwillingness to share his stuff. I wasn’t really comfortable sharing my writing with people, because what if they thought it was dumb? So I started, as almost a kind of therapy, writing what I wanted to write on this blog without really censoring myself. And people started to read it. It’s not like it was a huge hit or anything, but people I didn’t know liked the blog. And that really made a difference to me in terms of my confidence in myself as a writer but even

more important, in terms of my willingness to take risks and put what I was doing out there. It makes me a little nervous that, in my opinion, George McFly at the end of Back to the Future when he’s been corrected and now he’s confident and successful, he seems kind of like a douche to me. Because I don’t want to turn into corrected George McFly either. In a way, part of civilization has to be masking socially problematic feelings.

Indy: That’s why we need comedians.

AR: Yeah, I mean, I’ve become such a big fan of comedy. I always loved comedy but I never really thought of it as a legitimate art form. And I have gotten to a point now where I think of comedy as being a real thing.

Indy: I actually saw two Classics professors speak this week on uses of humor in Aristophanes, who was writing really intelligent comedies in the fifth century BC. AR: I’d be fascinated to see some of that stuff.

If you think there’s a translation that would do it any justice at all, I’d actually love to read some ancient comedy, I’m looking on Amazon right now, should I read the eleven comedies, or what should I read? Tell me! [Laughs.]

Indy: Frogs is probably the most famous.

AR: Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that, the Frogs. Huh. Oh man, I’m gonna buy this shit today.

JONAH WOLF B ’12 is still waiting for his hoverboard.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SPORTS

14

SUPER BOWL SCHISM host city has mixed feelings about the flashing lights

By David Scofield Illustration by Diane Zhou

T

The elite, the glitterati, and the Hoosiers who wanted to be at the center of the nation all flocked to downtown Indianapolis last weekend for Super Bowl XLVI. The Super Bowl Host Committee reconstructed three blocks of the downtown into an entertainment village to suit the needs of celebrities and the common man alike.

Inside the Super Bowl village were the ESPN studios, nightly pyrotechnic shows, football simulations for children, and two stages with performances every two hours. “We made the compactness of the city into a major advantage,” said Tamara Cypress, chairman of media relations for the Host Committee.

“Everyone is coming downtown. We set up Indy to be the host city.” The village exuded enough light that it seemed, for a moment, as though there would never be another shadow in Indianapolis.

For one week, the Super Bowl village even housed the longest temporary zipline in the world. Riders took an elevator up a 90-foot tower to the jump platform. Then they shot 800 feet down the zipline to a landing pad.

During the Super Bowl weekend there was an eight-hour wait to ride at most times of the day. Rumor had it that suspicious out-oftowners were prowling up and down the line offering thrill-seekers $500 for their spot. “It felt like Peyton Manning throwing you five hundred yards,” said talk show host Jimmy Fallon to the Indianapolis press corps. “Indy never looked better,” Al Roker reported to the Today Show as he unstrapped a head camera that was poised on his face during the ride.

“That’s how you fly.”

At night, artists such as LMFAO and Drake performed all around the city. Citizens whispered that Adam Levine, Mary J. Blige, and Katy Perry were prowling the streets.

“It was absolute goofiness,” reported Indiana University student Cole Star. “I was at this show and Wiz [Khalifa] comes out and does his thing in an outfit more suited for a Caribbean getaway. Then Snoop Dogg himself

comes out in a velour tracksuit and shuffles through the classics old and new.”

Marc Lotter, the Communications Director of the Mayor’s Office, claimed that the Super Bowl celebration displayed fiscal responsibility and care for citizens. “The Host Committee raised $25 million in private donations to put on the experience,” said Lotter. “No tax dollars went toward the Super Bowl village, and most of the funds for public safety are being reimbursed to the city. Then, the mayor was able to meet with hundreds of potential business contacts. We saw a level of energy in the city that we hadn’t anticipated. It was exciting beyond words watching the world discover Indianapolis.”

SUPER BUMMER But while Indianapolis collected international praise for its service as the host of the Super Bowl, it was in the middle of a hospitality crisis. To some, the city exemplified the pride and inclusive celebration present in every American town. Others thought the city acted like it knew how to take care of everyone but its own citizens.

An anonymous member of Occupy the Super Bowl told the Independent, “Indianapolis doesn’t have mountains. It doesn’t have oceans.

We thrive on a few things, and one of them is our hotel industry. Right now, the workers of the hotel industry are in peril.” Hoosiers are up in arms against Hospitality Staffing Solutions and the Hyatt hotel. Hotel workers throughout the city recently filed a lawsuit against HSS for wage and hour violations. Distancing themselves from the issue, the Hyatt cut relations with HSS and put in danger the jobs of many employees who have worked for five to nine years.

The National Football League took notice of the controversy. When hotel employees announced they were going to rally against the Hyatt’s other nasty policy of hiring outsourced labor, DeMaurice Smith, executive director of the NFL Player Association pledged support.

On February 3, two days before the big game,

Smith and hundreds more marched outside the Hyatt.

“Hyatt offices wouldn’t even open the door when we brought the lawsuit,” said Fernando Gomez, an employee of the Marriott hotel. “We are focusing on waste and exploitation. The Hyatt isn’t paying attention to how the prices of gas and milk are going up, but the wages of its employees aren’t. The city was very exciting this week, but it seems like Indiana is going in the wrong direction. I’m glad the NFL showed up. They knew it was right to speak for us.” ...AND YET In addition to protesting the hotel industry, citizens decried the ongoing budget issues.

“This is a grand diversion from what’s really going on in the city,” said the anonymous Occupy correspondent. “Everyone has been swooning about the NFL, but Indianapolis is scabbing itself.” The Occupy correspondent informed the Independent of an NFL program called Youth Education Town, or YET. The program builds facilities for schools in areas that need rejuvenation. YET offered Indianapolis high school Arsenal Tech five million dollars for a new sports complex. “Tech considered the offer for a while, but you know what they did? They turned it down because they knew they couldn’t afford to maintain the facilities in future years,” said the Occupy correspondent. “Instead Tech took an offer for a million toward unspecified school projects.

Their budget was that undercut by the state.”

Plans circulated within Occupy on how to complement the Hyatt picket and disrupt the events downtown. “We woke up at 3:30 a.m. today (Thursday, Feb 2) to wheatpaste fliers around the city,” said the Occupy correspondent. “Governor Mitch Daniels asked everyone not to make a political spectacle this weekend. We have a banner drop planned.” On the Friday and Saturday before the Super Bowl, the Occupy group unfurled informational banners from several buildings, including the parking lot for Banker’s Life Fieldhouse, the

arena where the Indianapolis Pacers play. One sign read, “There are nearly 2000 homeless in Indianapolis. 21% are children.”

IMMACULATE EXCEPTION Another group concerned with public welfare sang the virtues of the Host Committee’s determination to put on a good show. The zipline ran right by the front door of Saint John the Evangelist’s Church. “Over 1,300 people came to Sunday masses. A lot of people were from out of state or out of the country. It raised the visibility of the Catholic Church,” said Tom Nichols, administrative assistant and musical director at the church. “We put up a life-size cutout of the Pope. We gave guided tours of the church that explained the theology of different pieces of art.

Lots of donations came in for the restoration project on our spires.” When asked to comment on the zipline, Nichols replied, “We put up a sign outside that said, ‘If you thought the zipline was a thrill… come in and spend some time with Jesus!’”

The Occupy member balked at the buzz downtown and the mayoral optimism and said, “Homeless people have been shuffled out. We have no unions in our hotels. Indy will bend over backward for the Super Bowl or the Marriott hotel, but they never want to help those who need it.” Still, even the radical correspondent admitted that temporary fame had a few perks. “Has Madonna ever had a reason to come here? Has Leo ever had a reason to come here?”

DAVID SCOFIELD B’13 has mountains and oceans.

15

FOOD

10 february 2012

MUSTY

BEGINNINGS finding the beauty in the damp and dark

By Anna Rotman Illustration by Diane Zhou

B

asements are sites of dank carpets and unrecognizable storage boxes. Onceprized possessions dwell in limbo: damaged too much to fully enjoy, but not enough to warrant the trash. Fungi invade these spaces of urban decay; they grow without invitation and serve as a reminder of poor foresight or finicky landlords. And yet, as menacing as they seem, the colonies that sprout indoors can develop into a captivating—and appetizing—taste of the wild.

Emile Gluck-Thaler sees possibility where others see despair. He works at one of the two mushroom stores in North America.

There’s one in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the other, Mycoboutique, is in Montreal.

According to Gluck-Thaler, “there might also be one in France.” Both stores are devoted to all things mushroom with only a hint of rivalry—rumor has it that the Knoxville store, Everything Mushrooms, borrowed its name from Mycoboutique’s now defunct catchphrase. There are various dried samples, rare specimens, books, oils and essences, foraging paraphernalia, and grow-your-own kits. Gluck-Thaler stands behind the counter in his hiking boots, jeans, and a second-hand Art Deco patterned shirt. The native Montrealer has a big smile and an expressive face, even from under his oversized clear-rimmed glasses.

When not at school studying microbiology, he spends his days helping out customers and—in his downtime—translating recipes from French to English. “Twenty five percent of the people who walk in have no idea what it is, or think that we’re the enchilada place next door,” says Gluck-Thaler. “And five percent want to know how to grow drugs.”

The other seventy percent have a curiosity for the world of fungi. Mushrooms have been enchanting the human spirit for millennia.

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs show that commoners were not allowed to eat them; mushrooms were believed to be gifts from the sky delivered to the pharaohs on lighting bolts. Romans heading to battle were fed them because they were believed to imbue the

eater with god-like strength. Fungi inspired Timothy Leary’s supernatural experiments and have been associated with fairies and forest nymphs. The magical past of mushrooms is not surprising, but now, their versatility and subtle taste have landed these fantasy foods in unexpected places: the kitchens, bathrooms, and basements of urban foodies.

Customers at Mycoboutique scouring for the freshest eats but lacking the know-how to forage their own fungi soon learn that mushrooms are low-maintenance and easy to grow on a small scale. One of the best places to grow fungi for personal use, says GluckThaler, is right by your bathroom window: the humidity from the shower and the air circulation make for an optimal in-house patch. The mushrooms grow quickly; some produce over a pound in just ten days. If we think of mushrooms as trees, Gluck-Thaler explains, the items we buy in the store are like the fruits. That means that there can sometimes be more than one harvest per crop.

Grow-your-own kits act like decomposing logs in a forest, except that they look more like bags of dirt and smell less like rot. Because mushrooms feed off of decaying organic matter, these kits are essentially compost containers.

To control growth, cultivators pasteurize the compost, wiping it clean of any pre-existing fungi before introducing the spawn of the specific crop they wish to produce. The cost of the kit ends up being similar to store-bought mushrooms, claims Gluck-Thaler, and this way, owners get to experience the fungal lifecycle.

“It’s the added experience of witnessing it grow in front of your eyes. To watch it form,” he sighs, “is really amazing.”

Gluck-Thaler first found his passion for mushrooms in the teachings of Paul Stamets, a self-proclaimed alternative mycologist. With experience hunting, growing, and tripping on mushrooms, Stamets pushes the boundaries of

conventional mushroom use and has become one of the driving forces behind the fungus’s popularization. He argues that mushrooms can solve problems ranging from termite invasions to human bacterial illnesses, from soil erosion to oil spills. Although often framed as the work of an idiot savant by the conventional myco-world, Stamets’ findings have altered the ways in which scientists across disciplines are thinking about fungi.

One of his many nicknames for mushrooms, “the soil magicians,” points to their role as energy recyclers. As Gluck-Thaler explains, mushrooms are able to convert waste into a delicious edible. He has recently developed an interest in growing mushrooms from used coffee grounds. The steam from the infusion process pasteurizes the grounds, so that all that is needed is spawn. After receiving Stamets’ support and an endorsement from Alice Waters, two recent UC Berkeley grads have capitalized on this trend with the Back to the Roots mushroom kits. Their kits— which look more like lunch boxes than a fully productive ecosystem—divert organic waste and close up some of the gaps in our food cycle. All the coffee grounds are recovered from the Peet’s Coffee & Tea chain and repackaged, along with spawn, into portable fungi farms.

The process is magically easy: owners need to mist their patches twice daily. The kits even include the spray bottle. Within two weeks, gourmet oyster mushrooms burst out of the cardboard boxes. Although Mycoboutique and Everything Mushrooms source a variety of other kits, they don’t carry this product. The easiest way to find it is to visit the Back to the Roots website or a Whole Foods store. The Providence stores began sourcing the boxes as a trial only a few months ago and are quickly selling their stock.

Growing mushrooms in urban spaces is not a new practice. Despite being closely associated in our cultural imaginary with the feral spirits of the woods, mushrooms

have long been the beneficial companions of city-dwellers. Some of the first mushroom farms were in the abandoned plaster mines of Paris in the late nineteenth century. After discovering that fungi did not need light to survive, scientists began experimenting with transplanting cultures into the city’s ‘caves.’ These underground farms allowed for better control of temperature and humidity.

This symbiosis between the idle industrial setting and low-maintenance food production inspired contractor Gregg Wershoven to begin a fungi farm in the basement of an outof-use brass and copper mill in Connecticut.

His farm, Mountaintop Mushrooms, now supplies local restaurants with multicolored oyster mushrooms. Chef Nick Mancini, of Waterbury, CT’s La Tavola restaurant, sources three different kinds of “beautiful blue oysters,” which he selects for their quality, aroma, and taste. Buying from Wershoven, he says, ensures produce that is “as fresh as you can get.”

Because his purchases are farmed five minutes away, Mancini gets to play a role in deciding on the size of the mushrooms harvested, which in turn determines taste and texture.

Fresh specialty mushrooms are a rarity— farms like Wershoven’s are the exception.

Grocery stores tend to supply only a few varieties, the most common being crimini (the white button ones) and portabella. For the more cultivated palate, specialty stores as well as online suppliers distribute dried varieties.

Still, Mancini’s freshness is hard to come by outside of source-conscious restaurants. With mushrooms fresh from the bathroom, amateur fungi farmers need only cut and sauté—with the slightest bit of oil or butter—for an entirely new culinary experience. Cooked mushrooms add a twist to any sandwich, stir-fry, soup, or sauce. They may not hold the mystical qualities of the forest floor, but the magic here is in the damp and fusty detail.

ANNA ROTMAN B’14 eats mushrooms to imbue herself with godlike strength.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

INTERVIEWS

16

SWIMSUIT OR CASUAL Backstage at a New England beauty pageant

By Rachel Benoit Illustration by Robert Sandler

S

hielded from judgmental eyes, the NES Beauty Pageant takes place behind the windowless walls of Bradley Airport’s Sheraton Hotel. Girls in ball gowns float through the carpeted lobby, and rumors circulate that Dr. Phil is conducting a private interview with a contestant upstairs. The bathroom echoes with a 6-year-old’s sobs; tears streaming, lashes clotted with mascara, she cries over the makeup that has been “ruined!”, for the crown she would lose, for the judges who would scoff, and for the sleep she was deprived of the night before. Coaches run through, armed with fake boobs, chicken cutlets in pageant jargon, and butt glue (“butt glue is especially important,” emphasizes one contestant. “Keeps the suit from riding up or down. That’s how pageants got started; as a bathing suit contest!”)

For the pageant’s top competitors, everything from the glitter (“I love glitter. Glitter is my life!” professes the same contestant) to walk is a product of the work and skill of beauty pageant coach Margie Mooney and hair and makeup artist Michael Baca. They are the regional elite, the who’swho of New England pageantry. The Independent sat with Mooney (known to the in-the-know as the much sought-after ‘Miss Margie’), Baca, and a few contestants to hear about their experiences in New England’s often-unrecognized beauty pageant Industry.

THE COACH: Margie Mooney

THE HAIR AND MAKEUP ARTIST: Michael Baca

THE AGE 12 – 14 CONTESTANT: Marta

Indy: So, do you have favorites?

Inside his hotel room, Baca sits in front of a desk of supplies; his hands stacked on his knees, acrylic nails glistening.

Indy: Why do you do pageants?

MM: No. You pay me the same money honey, I don’t hold back. The thing that I do have a problem with is if I give you a routine, and you jacked it up on me, and you put some street moves in there cause you thought that was cool?

That’s not cool. Pageantry is not, like, whatever.

There are moves that are recognized. If you start doing stuff that’s off the wall, the judges will think your coach didn’t have a better idea, and it’s a reflection on me. I don’t like that. It’s personal pride.

Indy: Everyone says you are the hair and makeup guru. How did you start?

MB: I started when I was 13, helping my sister’s makeup artist. I later became a senior artist with MAC, and came back to pageants because it was where I started and it grounded me. I love the little girls so it pulled me back into it and I started doing this on the weekends.

Indy: Where are all the dads?

Indy: How is working with the ‘moms’?

MM: They sign the check. It’s a “mommy and me” weekend. It’s not as cutthroat as people think—sometimes it may be to an extent, but you never see it, because god forbid you get labeled The Drama Mom.

MB: The moms are... they have a lot invested.

They want them to perform well so it can get a little crazy. The moms that I work with are amazing. We realize it’s just a pageant.

Indy: How did you get started?

MM: My daughter did it. People were asking us to please help their kid so we started coaching just on the fluke. Now it’s $75 an hour.

Indy: Hair and makeup is a big part of pageantry.

Is that your responsibility?

MM: No, that’s Michael Baca. He’s six feet tall, gorgeous. He’s gay, but he’s gorgeous. Michael is one of the premiere hair and make up artists for pageantry, period. He does people like Janet Jackson, Paris Hilton. He’s just good people.

THE AGE 9 – 10 CONTESTANT: Mikaela Indy: How do you prepare?

M: I have a coach and she makes up my routines and I just have to remember them. She tells me how to sparkle and how to unlock all the beauty in my pretty feet, and how to pop my leg in swimsuit.

Indy: What is “sparkling”?

M: When you look at the judge and you blink your eyes really pretty.

Indy: Is your coach strict?

M: Sometimes when I’m doing swimsuit or casual I do hands on my hips and my hands go back and she calls it ‘chicken hands’.

Indy: You’ve been doing pageants since you were three. Do you remember your first one?

Indy: Have pageants changed since you started?

MB: I‘ve done pageants for over 20 years.

The competition’s harder; you have a lot more invested. I remember when a gown would cost $1,200 and now they’re $5,000. Back then pageants would offer $20,000 packages, now they’re offering $150,000.

Indy: The financial commitment that pageants demand…

MB: Is huge! If you want to be a top competitor, you have to invest, you’re coaching at least 3 times a week, you have a top hair and makeup artist— I go from $350 for a big national [pageant]. And then you have to have your pictures. A retouch print is $165, the shoot is $400, and then clothes, travel, hotel.

Indy: How is a Southern pageant different?

MB: Southern pageants are your true beauty pageant. We went to one at Dixieland and they gave away cars. I’ve had the past two car winners. It’s crazy to see a little girl walk away with a car.

Indy: What do you think of the show Toddlers and Tiaras?

M: I love the attention, hair and makeup, and wearing Cinderella gowns, just being the queen for a day. I have 10 or 12 sashes and 20 crowns.

Swimsuit is not my favorite but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Indy: What do your friends think?

MB: ‘T and T’ is great. I don’t think what you see on TV is the true case. It’s meant for entertainment. Pageants aren’t the negative everyone thinks. It’s not crazy moms and the girls aren’t forced to do something they don’t want to do. It’s just dress up.

M: I more or less don’t tell them. Girls my age get very jealous. I just say I do dance. I’m tap dancing for my talent.

Indy: How do people react when you say you do makeup for pageants?

M: It’s not as bad as they think. It’s not a bad thing; it’s just a hobby.

MB: Okay, honestly, I tend not to say that because I hate having to justify it, and I get very defensive with it because I truly feel passionate about it. I always hear, How can those moms do that to kids? It frustrates me because it’s uneducated of them to sit and judge something without having knowledge of it. These kids, they’re sitting around playing with dolls and having fun – they just happen to have on a $1200 dress and a lot of makeup.

Indy: What do you want to be when you’re older?

Indy: What do you want to tell those who don’t know much about pageants?

M: A dancer, or a special education teacher.

Indy: What’s your highest title?

M: Novice Grand Supreme, the fourth-highest title.

Indy: What’s the funniest location a pageant has taken you to?

MB: Tifton, GA, because it was a town of ten, and the biggest thing they had to do was go to the Applebee’s bar. There were 150 girls competing in that pageant, so the whole town went all out.

THE 5 – 6 CONTESTANT: Tatiana

M: It was at the mall and it was called Sunburst!

I just walked around and looked cute.

director, and a pageant judge. And I also want to be a fashion designer and a cheerleader.

Indy: What is the best part of being in the pageant?

Indy: What is your best memory from a pageant?

Indy: What do you think of Toddlers in Tiaras?

T: Going in the pool afterwards to get this spray tan off !

M: Definitely when my friend didn’t get as high of a title as she would have liked but she was really happy for me that I got a higher title.

Indy: What is your worst?

M: When I didn’t get supreme, I just got a trophy and a certificate.

Indy: What would you like to be when you’re older?

M: Well, I have lots of things that I would like to be, and some of them include an actress, a teacher, a gymnast, a pageant coach, a pageant

M: I love the show. Me and my mom watch it every Wednesday.

Indy: What do you think your mom’s favorite part of the pageant is?

M: Watching me up on stage smiling and rocking it, having all my sassiness.

Indy: Have you done an interview before? because you’re very good at this…

M: Yes I have, actually, some pageants have interviews.

17

Literary

10 february 2012

EROTICA 101

By Michael Mount and Scout Willis Illustration by Olivia Fialkow

Dear Eyes, There was the time when he decided to pull you away from the party, when his hand was hot and smooth inside of yours and the long walk home was dark and drunk and you fell on top of him like a sack of bricks. And you brooded for months that he did not ever talk to you or text you and you wrote a few brilliant poems from the fire in your chest and then you wrote a few hateful poems from the cold pulsing feeling that developed. You showed your friends the love poem, then the hate poem, and they said they liked the hate poem better, of course. But you still had tenderness for the love poem.

Anyways, you piled up a closet full of erotic poetry for each one of these hookups, becoming more skillful and adept. Your pen became like a scalpel, swifter than a circumcision. Your inner eye became sharper, more imaginative than even the most graphic pornography. And the best you could do is showing your suitemates, and the occasional enterprising Poetry I class, your masterpieces. They cringed at the word ejaculation and then laughed at all the wrong parts. So you shoved away your manuscripts and went back to writing about Melville and Hawthorne, dearly missing all the dicks.

And it’s so ironic, you say, slapping yourself in the forehead, since all you think about is sex. Sex, sex, sex. That girl in the library. That boy in the bookstore. But no one will give you the time of day if you say clitoris in a crowded space. Though you might not admit it, you are obsessed. There are some who would try and find reasons for this obsession: It’s the age, it’s college, it’s a gender difference thing, it’s the hyper-sexualized images on television. It’s Playboy, Elvis Presley, Jenna Jameson, Hustler, Lindsay Lohan and the Internet’s fault, naturally. It’s the generation, it’s growing up in big cities, it’s watching too many R-rated films, it’s all those fucking hormones, it’s growing up in small towns, it’s a lack of religion!

Sex is genuine: the sour taste of life. Sex is funny: eating chicken tacos on Thayer Street after fucking. Like all our endeavors, it has a literary outlet. But so often it’s silent, building up inside of us until we spill over.

Well, this is your chance to sparkle. The Indy is featuring EROTICA MONTH, an open submission period for literary content. Your poem or your story will be immortalized in print, broadcast for the erotic eyes on this campus. Be brave and be bold.

Send us your finest sexual episodes, and keep dreaming. And we most firmly believe that everyone who reads this article needs to go home, have a good wank, and find that secret folder hidden with your applications where you’ve jotted down some sweet erotic literature of your own. Send your secrets along to indyliterary@gmail.com.

Sincerely, Indy Lit

SCOUT WILLIS B’13 & MICHAEL MOUNT B’12.5 wrote this with one hand.