The College Hill Independent V.30 N.1

the college hill A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY JANUARY 30 2015 | V30 N1

independent

MANAGING EDITORS Rick Salamé, Stephanie Hayes, Zeve Sanderson NEWS Dash Elhauge, Elias Bresnick, Sebastian Clark METRO Cherise Morris, Sophie Kasakove ARTS Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz, Lisa Borst, Maya Sorabjee FEATURES Matt Marsico, Patrick McMenamin, Sara Winnick INTERVIEWS Mika Kligler SCIENCE Jamie Packs TECHNOLOGY Wilson Cusack SPORTS Sam Bresnick, Will Underwood LITERARY Kim Sarnoff EPHEMERA Mark Benz, Noah Beckwith X Layla Ehsan, Pierie Korostoff, Sara Khan LIST Polina Volfovich, Tristan Rodman DESIGN Alexa Terfloth, Ben Ross, Casey Friedman, Nikolas Bentel, Noah Beckwith COVER EDITOR Jade Donaldson SENIOR EDITORS Alex Sammon, Greg Nissan, Lili Rosenkranz, Tristan Rodman STAFF WRITERS Alexandra Ruiz, Athena Washburn, Camera Ford, Dominique Pariso, Eli Neumann-Hammond, Erin West, Jane Argodale, Malcolm Drenttel STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Caroline Brewer, Lee Bernstein, Natalie Kassirer, Polina Volfovich, Teri Minogue BUSINESS Haley Adams, Kyle Giddon COVER ART Rachel Himes MVP Casey Friedman

VOLUME 30 | ISSUE 1

NEWS 2 Week in Review

dash elhague & sebastian clark

SPORTS 11 Dragged thru the ring will underwood

3 Hurling Silver elias bresnick

METRO

SCIENCE

15 Meet yr alt meat jamie packs

5 Lost in Traducción sophie kasakove

EPHEMERA

12 iSpy

cherise morris

7 Phone-y Mitchel noah beckwith

ARTS 8 A Bigger Shed maya sorabjee

LIT

17 Kissy Kidz kim sarnoff

9 Berg-heinous eli pitegoff

FEATURES

FROM THE EDITOR S The ground freezes in winter and makes it hard to bury dead dogs and I think a new war will hit the Middle East before the snow melts and—sorry, I’m just telling you things. December is the season for things; this is the season for promises. Frozen to the cores of our appendixes, we grit our teeth and make pledges that we hope we’ll keep when the weather turns and we soften again and when it gets easy to sit on the stoop and when your neighbors and you get to talking and laughing at how seriously you took your shivering selves. But we don’t keep January promises, so screw ‘em.

Five years ago, blinded by the smoke of twenty tiny flames, the editors of the Indy made a promise to be loyal to fair Providence. These days we wouldn’t promise that, as much as we’d like to. We’re college students, class starts in half an hour, and we hate making promises we could never even keep.

This year will be our twenty-fifth so we’re arbitrarily putting in a moment of reflection. Nothing has stayed the same at the Independent in all these years. Our traditions always seem older in our minds. We think that sooner than we’re ready, nothing will be the same at the Indy we know now. So no promises from us, except this: we’re yours forever until further notice. We’re the climate change generation, after all. Welcome to Volume 30.—RS, SH & ZS

X 18 Netflickering

13 Art$ n’ Craft$ sara winnick

layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

Remembering Olivia Barker The College Hill Independent would like to salute the life and career of one of its most admired and beloved editors, Olivia Taylor Barker. She died on December 7 at the age of 40 after a fouryear battle with breast cancer. Olivia, while serving as managing editor for two semesters between 1995 and 1996, inspired countless classmates to pursue journalism on campus and in careers beyond. As a prolific writer for the Indy, she edified and entertained with her dogged reporting, sharp wit, and finely-wrought writing. Highlights included an expose of internecine strife in the Brown political science department and a midnight romp down the slopes of College Hill with RISD skateboarders. After graduating from Brown with a concentration in English in 1996, she earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, where she met her husband, Ben Court, who is now a senior editor at Men's Health magazine. Recruited by USA Today at the age of 26, Olivia became a national features writer, covering everything from shifting generational attitudes toward marriage to the psychological aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2002, she took on one of her all-time favorite assignments, competing in the Miss America pageant as a contestant while reporting on the experiences from the inside out, putting into vivid practice the sort of participatory journalism she admired most and had explored in her Brown honor’s thesis with Professor Emeritus of English George Landow. Toward the end of her career, Olivia once again shared personal experience with her readers in the pages of USA Today. Drawing a contrast with the headline-grabbing news of Angelina Jolie’s successful bilateral mastectomy, Olivia told the story of “the brave ones in the country's breast cancer conversation” who are “so quiet as to be all but ignored. They're the women with metastatic disease, especially the young women I get chemo alongside at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, the ones who really may not see their children graduate from kindergarten, let alone high school.” Olivia, who lived with courage, intensity, passion and a boundless spirit, is missed dearly by her friends, family, and the Brown community. She is survived by her husband and their son, Henry Barker Court, age five.

P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN SHELTER

By Dash Elhauge & Sebastian Clark illustration by Natalie Kassirer

There’s an App for That It’s been confirmed—that was a blizzard this past Tuesday.

That powdery shit wrapped around your knees? Yup, that was snow. Those trucks with shovels on the front? Snow plows.

Those punk kids (Brown students) tearing down hills? Sledders. Trust me; I’m as surprised as you are. And though the storm may have wavered for a few brief moments—Snapchat pulled its “Blizzard Apocalypse” filter for a couple hours, so you know things were starting to die down—it raged for over 24 hours, indeed earning its blizzard moniker.

My grandmother rang a few days before, reminding me to stockpile three days worth of food, gather a few warm blankets, and perhaps even find a special someone to hunker down with. Except for the special someone part, she was simply echoing an announcement made by Jessica Edmond of the Massachusetts Red Cross. But she forgot a few key points.

Classic Nana.

No matter how cold it gets, the announcement told New Englanders, you must resist the urge to army crawl your way through the blizzard and drag your grill back inside to fire up a couple franks. Carbon monoxide poisoning and enclosed flames are a big problem during weather emergencies. And, of course, Edmond instructed residents of Massachusetts to use the Red Cross Shelter Finder App in the case of an emergency.

That’s right. There’s now an app designed exclusively for the purpose of finding shelters in a storm. The American Red Cross encourages you to break out those frost-bitten fingers, endure the stinging in your eyes, and carefully pinch and spread your way to warmth. Apparently, there’s a Bear Grylls in us all. Describing the app, Craig Cooper of the American Red Cross, said, “In many ways, the cell phone has replaced the radio.” The app only supports iPhones, however, so Android users are going to have to wait for the next natural disaster to survive.—DE

January 30 2015

President Obama made moves this week to legally declare the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as ‘Wilderness.’ The key ramification of the ‘Wilderness’ designation for 12 million acres in northern Alaska is the prevention of oil drilling in the territory. It reawakens a longstanding battle between environmentalists and oil executives over the pristine, albeit sparse, landscape—so sparse that U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon felt confident in his claim that “there’s no wildlife” there. Tempers are flaring. “A stunning attack on our sovereignty,” cried Lisa Murkowski, the republican senator of Alaska and chairwoman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. She invoked the illustrious Sarah Palin who, a few years ago, and perhaps unwittingly, declared her home as “the sovereign state of Alaska.”

Befuddling for some, President Obama has simultaneously proposed that a vast stretch of the East Coast, from Virginia to Georgia, be opened up to Big Oil. “This is a balanced proposal that would make available nearly 80 percent of the undiscovered technically recoverable resources,” the Interior Secretary, Sally Jewell, said in a statement, “while protecting areas that are simply too special to develop.” BusinessWeek summed it up well in their headline “Obama to Oil Industry: Drill Here, Not There.”

Many have understood the maneuver as a sign that the White House does not care for Alaska’s economic wellbeing, and is instead invested in bringing the jobs oil drilling would create to states with more electoral votes. However, if we are to take Obama on his word, that climate change is anthropogenic and an issue to be tackled, these policies are perhaps those of an agent provocateur. In a post-Deep Water Horizon America, support for drilling in these critical swing states is unclear. Nimbyism, particularly in the South, holds strong, and any movement to prevent drilling is best articulated in environmentalist terms. This would leave the Republican party in a quandary: to let the Democrats capitalize on green sentiment might mean losing these states; on the other hand, to oppose the drilling, the Republican would have to alienate its Big Oil, and big money, support.

What should Obama do in his final years? Troll Congress, of course.—SC

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ALBANY, ALBANY

Shelly Silver and the Status Quo

by Elias Bresnick Illustration by Teri Minogue The events that culminated in the arrest this past Tuesday of long-standing New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver call to mind a kind of bastardized T. Rowe Price commercial. You know, those ads for the investment firm that claim to know how rice production in India affects rubber in Brazil and shipping in Norway? The plot that came to light last week follows a more sinister, perhaps more intricate, storyline. “How might a 78-year-old Columbia University medical expert specializing in asbestos exposure be linked to a big fish politician in Albany, and how might his ties to a small law firm in Manhattan implicate all three parties in an elaborate case of government corruption?” Where T. Rowe Price would leave its viewers guessing, a more detailed explanation emerged from the Silver case—an account of which follows below.

The charges against Silver are extensive. Mail and wire fraud, extortion, and receiving bribes comprise the key felonies with which U.S Attorney Preet Bharara has slapped the once formidable politician. In the few days after his arrest, Silver stated he would refuse to relinquish his position, opting instead to create a temporary team of five underlings to carry out his duties while the courts assess his culpability. But as the swirling cloud of confusion around his case has cleared, any chance of his regaining his seat as speaker seems to have evaporated. On Monday, Majority Leader Joseph D. Morelle will take up office as interim Speaker.

“Shelly” Silver, as he’s known in the Statehouse, is the third most powerful politician in New York, having held his job as Assembly Speaker for the past twenty years. Imagine John Boehner working with a Republican House majority as well as a Republican President, bump that arrangement down one from the federal to the state level, and you begin to understand the significance of Silver’s position. Historically, his position has given him the power to dictate what legislation does and does not make it to the floor. He wields so much influence that members of his staff are considered to have more authority than some elected officials.

At 71, Silver found himself for the first time on the opposite side of the law on Tuesday. Long suspected of shady underhanded dealings by colleagues, the once seemingly untouchable representative has come crashing down from his perch—one that sits just beneath Mayor De Blasio and Governor Cuomo—and his fall has not been graceful.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

The (alleged) facts of the case For years, Silver appeared to balance two jobs—one as a state legislator, and the other as a personal injury lawyer at a firm called Weitz and Luxenberg. But prosecutors now claim that his work for the firm was merely a way to mask $4 million in kickbacks that he amassed over ten years by illicitly funneling clients to the firm.

The story of underhand deals and hidden earnings began in the unlikely setting of a prestigious clinician’s office. Dr. Robert Taub, one of the foremost experts on a rare cancer strain called Mesolothemia, has been described by colleagues as having something of an obsession with curing his patients. In 2002, he launched one of the premier Mesolothemia research centers in the world, at Columbia University. The particular disease he treats is quite rare, affecting only 3,000 new patients nationwide per year and, thereby remaining low on the list of medical priorities for government. Because of its relatively limited scope, Taub has had to search for funding in all available outlets.

The most common victims of Mesolothemia are laborers who’ve been exposed to asbestos in the work place. These cases have the potential to be hugely remunerative in a court of law, with the average sum doled out to successful plaintiffs hovering around $2 million. It is, therefore, unsurprising that there should be considerable competition among lawyers to represent clients who suffer from these ailments.

Enter law firm Weitz and Luxenburg, where Silver has worked since 2002. The firm manages to handle nearly 50% of asbestos litigation cases in New York state, taking around a 30% cut in legal fees for its representation. So extensive is its appeal to asbestos claimants, that court cases in the state of New York are actually subdivided into “Weitz” and “non-Weitz.” The firm handles 500 new cases each year. But where, many wondered, were all of these ailing litigants coming from?

Apparently, Silver, who had the ability to appropriate taxpayer dollars to certain medical practices, shelled out $500,000 in state funds to Dr. Taub’s research organization between 2005 and 2006. In return for the money apportioned him by the state, Dr. Taub would then refer his patients to Weitz and Luxenberg. The firm, now with an ever-increasing stream of plaintiffs to profit off of, was only too happy to provide Silver with kickbacks to keep a steady flow of patients bouncing from Taub’s offices to their own. Over the past 11 years, Silver is said to have steered more than 100 patients to the firm.

Implications But the blight on New York politics may not end with its third man. Andrew Cuomo— who ran for re-election as governor on a platform of anticorruption and improved political ethics—plays an interesting role in the developments of Silver’s case. In 2013, governor Cuomo assembled a committee, the Moreland Commission, and tasked them with investigating state corruption.

According to the criminal complaint filed against Silver as well as sources on the commission, Silver repeatedly refused to comply with the commission’s requests to describe what exactly he did as a lawyer outside his government job. This refusal ultimately led to a subpoena of Silver’s law firm. In response, the state assembly (led by Silver) filed a court motion to deny the commission’s subpoenas that were related to legislator’s outside income.

Here’s where it gets sticky. Well before the Moreland commission completed its report on government corruption, and just as they were beginning to uncover the grime that caked Sheldon Silver’s record, Cuomo decided to disband the committee. Though he had originally called the commission “100 percent independent,” he later backtracked on this statement, asserting that the commission was his: “I can appoint it; I can disband it; I can appoint you; I can unappoint you tomorrow.”

It remains unclear just why Cuomo would so abruptly have called off the committee before its time. Though he has made vague excuses about the commission’s expense and about its having achieved its primary goal, U.S attorney Preet Bharara was unconvinced and almost instantly launched an investigation into its closure. If Silver reveals that Cuomo or any of his top aides knew about his criminal behavior and killed the commission before it got to him, the governor could become vulnerable to obstruction of justice charges.

What is viewed as acceptable in terms of the donor-politician relationship has become skewed for the precise reason that the motivation for donation from wealthy investors is often not borne out of support of the person’s policy, but instead functions on the basis of expected value. At the highest level, “donations” stop being donations at all and turn into investments.

Politicians have the power to influence which direction taxpayer dollars flow and, unsurprisingly, are susceptible to moving dollars in the direction of those who support them.

Perhaps the reason Silver’s case is so noteworthy is that, from a moral standpoint, it is not so inherently different from what goes on daily. Of course it is more pronounced, more overt in its disregard for law—infused with the smugness of that particular brand of politician who runs with the vaunted goal of upholding lawfulness while viewing himself as outside or above it. But we do ourselves a disservice in counting Sheldon Silver as an outlier. Silver is a darker cousin to the smiling poster child of American politics: a cosmetically spotless face atop a slowly rotting framework. We can dismiss Silver as a lawbreaker, or we can choose instead to view him as an unabashed, and therefore more authentic, upholder of politically bankrupt morality.

Of course I don’t mean to suggest that all politicians are corrupt or even above average in terms of immorality. What I do mean is that the dichotomy many press outlets have unwittingly created in their coverage—between ethical politicians and cheaters— is almost irrelevant when set alongside the larger issue at play here. Politicians that find themselves in thrall to money can’t help but act according to the definition of corruption expressed above— with their own interests set above their those who put them into office. The line between legal and illegal practice is blurred enough that one can almost take Silver’s claims of innocence seriously. Almost.

As Governor Cuomo said in a recent interview for the New York Daily News, “Obviously it’s bad for the speaker, but it’s also a bad reflection on government and adds to the negativity… It adds to the cynicism [that] ‘they’re all the same.’”

Elias Bresnick B’17 is an authentic upholder of a politically bankrupt morality.

Re-forming In the wake of these revelations, many have called for reform. Immediately after Mr. Silver’s arrest, good-government group Common Cause/NY called for an overhaul of ethics oversight, more extensive income disclosure, stricter regulation of lobbyists and campaignfinance reforms to diminish the role of money in state politics.

Under current law, campaign donations are illegal if there is an overt quid pro quo arrangement in place, and legal if there is not. But it’s no surprise that donations can be as bad as bribes in creating obligations between representative and the represented. The continuing rise of money politics (the average senate seat now costs $10.5 million, up from $8 million only 6 years ago) essentially ensures that politicians must kowtow to the ultra rich in order to get funding. This is not a new development, but it is one that’s becoming more significant. With ever-increasing urgency, each political hopeful strives to fundraise more than his rival in order to get an edge.

In a way, focusing only on the illegality of Silver’s actions misses the point. The case that has exploded in New York over what appears to be clear corruption is not so different than the kind of licit corruption that plagues American politics on a national level. “Corruption exists when institutions and officials charged with serving the people serve their own ends,” wrote Zephyr Teachout, who campaigned against Cuomo in the most recent election, in a recent OpEd for the New York Times; by that standard, it’s all too clear that nearly the entire country can’t escape the charge.

Statistics collected by Opensecrets.org suggest overwhelmingly that more money spent during a campaign equates to a better chance of winning a seat. In close races, the phenomenon is even more pronounced. Because of this, the relationship between politician and voter is no longer one of goodwill but one of near desperation. The system compels playing the game. If you refuse to fundraise, if you refuse to dole out favors to your biggest donors, it is nearly ensured that your political career will never make it off the ground.

JANUARY 30 2015

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THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE IN ENGLISH

by Sophie Kasakove Illustration by Caroline Brewer

Roberto Tijerina was eight years old when he was first asked by his aunts and uncles to accompany them to doctors’ visits as their interpreter. The first in his family to be born in the United States and speak both English and Spanish, Tijerina was soon brought to meetings at the bank to help the family pay their bills and to the Department of Human Services to help them negotiate their welfare checks.

In immigrant communities across America, the responsibility of interpretation frequently falls on whoever’s close by: a bilingual family member, friend, or neighbor. The burden placed on these default interpreters—most often children— is great. Tijerina remembers making difficult decisions as a child about what information to translate and what to withhold, such as whether he should relay a racist comment made by a lawyer about his family or translate a comment by a family member that may have revealed information best kept private.

As the immigrants’ rights movement has gained traction over the past ten years, organiza-

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tions and activists across the country have rallied around the project of multilingual justice, seeking to shift the burden of interpretation onto trained interpreters. The interpreters’ responsibilities in mediating between a speaker and an audience— rephrasing a speaker’s words, determining who gets to speak when, and at times, dictating the conversation’s trajectory— requires training and self-awareness.

Rejecting the Deficit Model A speaker at the Highlander Education and Research Center’s 75th anniversary celebration in 2007 began his speech by declaring: “The Revolution will not be just in English.” His words have reverberated through the organization and across social activist networks. Highlander, a social justice leadership training school and cultural center based in New Market, Tennessee, has been a pioneer in the multilingual justice movement, emphasizing language access within

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

social justice spaces as the crucial first step towards language equality in the US. With the influx of immigrants to the South—an almost 400 percent increase after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)— Highlander seeks to provide a space for activism in which Spanish-speakers can have a voice in their communities.

When Tijerina began working at Highlander in 2005 as the multilingual capacity building program coordinator, the Center had already developed a strong language-access model and multilingual capacity-building program. Rejecting the “deficit” model in which interpreting is seen as a service giving access to those who don’t speak the dominant language, Highlander’s vision instead views interpreting as a way to break down language barriers and create spaces that are equally accessible for everyone. “Interpreting is a tool of power: it can be used to either include people in conversations, processes, and decisions that impact their lives or exclude them from it,” Tijerina told the Independent. “Multilingual justice is about creating the mechanisms through which people who don’t speak the same language can communicate.”

Language is personal, visceral, and powerful; it is tied to our lands and to our bodies. Every time we open our mouths to speak in our accents and dialects, we identify ourselves and bring all these things with us. When we come together to have the hard conversations, it is important that we are able to express ourselves in the language that most fully conveys the depth and nuance of our hopes and our frustrations. – Highlander Research and Education Center Interpreting for Social Justice Curriculum In 2006, Tijerina developed Highlander’s multilingual justice program and principles into a workshop curriculum designed to help people who are already working as interpreters in their communities build their interpreting skillset and better understand the political dynamics and structures embedded in their work.

Since then, Tijerina has held over 150 workshops across the country, as well as scores of presentations and mini-workshops at conferences. Tijerina has presented the workshop to participants of varying ages, races, and genders—from farmers in the rural south to LGBT activists in NYC. The long-term goal of the curriculum is to expand multilingual capacity within social justice spaces—to create a norm of language access. Tijerina says that many organizations—even immigrants’ rights organizations—don’t have the infrastructure to bring in all of the people they claim to serve and facilitate dialogue between them. “A lot of organizations understand the principle of language justice and how it relates to democracy and autonomy,” says Tijerina. “But the actual practice lags far behind.” For many organizations, this gap between ideals and practice is a result of financial restrictions: the microphones, receivers, and transmitters necessary to provide simultaneous interpretation cost thousands of dollars. But, as Tijerina says, a budget is a political document: it reflects an organization’s priorities.

Miscommunications At the office of the Olneyville Neighborhood Association (ONA), posters, flyers, and articles hang on the walls in equal proportions of English and Spanish. Enough is enough. Conoce tus derechos. No human being is illegal. Ningún ser humano es ilegal. The message is clear: this space is for everyone.

Beginning informally in the 1990s in the basement of a local church, ONA now makes its home in the 150-year-old Atlantic Mills Building, a crumbling complex of mostly retail and manufacturing offices. ONA tackles issues affecting the communities of immigrants and people of color who inhabit the marginalized neighborhood, from housing and rent prices to police violence and immigration law. A bilingual but predominantly Spanish-speaking organization operating in a majority-Hispanic neighborhood, ONA has rallied around the multilingual justice movement, seeking to bridge the linguistic boundaries in Olneyville and Providence as a whole.

At ONA, multilingual justice takes many forms. At its organizing meetings, ONA strives to provide interpretation and translation whenever financially and logistically possible. The group holds occasional interpreting workshops based on Tijerina’s workshop to strengthen the interpreting skills of community members. The organization also holds weekly Spanish classes for mostly white and primary Englishspeaking college students or recent grads trying to get involved in the group’s organizing efforts. Adan Sales, a Guatemalan immigrant who worked as a Spanish teacher at ONA in 2012, says that these classes are crucial for building trust because they break down the linguistic hierarchies and boundaries in the community. After years of interpreting for his friends and co-workers at local restaurants, Sales participated in an interpreting workshop at ONA. Sales says that these workshops are equally important for building community: when people know that there are trained interpreters in the neighborhood, they feel more confident in their daily interactions with their neighbors and coworkers, as well as with the police and elected officials.

ONA has worked to implement language access not only through its internal organizing but through its negotiations with state and local legislators and law enforcement agencies. In 2011, as the newly sworn in attorney general, Peter Kilmarten signed Rhode Island onto the Secure Communities program, which required local law enforcement to forward fingerprints of all non-citizens to immigration enforcement, who would then investigate them for deportation. In response to the enactment of the program, ONA and other social activist groups held an accountability session with Kilmarten—conducted primarily in Spanish. “The goal in any accountability session is that the community holds the power in the room,” Will Lambek, a board member at ONA, told the Independent. “We want our target to feel

January 30 2015

that their back is against the wall.” Much of this power dynamic, as both Tijerina and Lambek described it to me, is determined by spatial factors: how the target, participants, and interpreters are positioned in the room. In this session, Kilmarten was seated in the corner of the stage, “tethered” to an interpreter and relying on Lambek to translate the proceedings of the room in real-time. The set-up ensured that Kilmarten would remain seated, that people asking questions stood in the center of the room, and that the dominant language in the space remained Spanish. “That’s how a non-linguistically dominant community can hold power in a space with an elected official,” explains Lambek.

This is what multilingual justice looks like in an ideal scenario. But language access is rarely so seamless. ONA’s multilingual capacity relies greatly on the willingness of others to cooperate—which they often don’t. Many of the accountability sessions and community forums where ONA does their primary advocacy are held in English, with local officials often refusing to use translation equipment. NonEnglish speakers are frequently the ones relying on interpreters and using interpretation equipment. These unbalanced environments often discourage non-English speakers from sharing their opinions. Mirjaam Parada, a 58-year-old employee at the Omni Hotel, now active in the Unite Here! Local 217 hotel and food service workers’ union said in a phone interview she was afraid to get involved in the union’s work when she first moved to Providence from Venezuela 16 years ago because she was worried her broken English would prevent people from taking her opinions seriously.

Both ONA and Unite Here! struggle to implement multilingual activism in their coalition work with predominantly English-speaking organizations in the community. Providence’s population is nearly 40 percent Hispanic, but many social justice organizations have yet to make themselves accessible to Spanish-speakers. ONA is one of the only primarily Spanish-speaking organizations in Rhode Island, along with Fuerza Laboral in Central Falls. “If we want to build our base of power across community we need to make coalition spaces multilingual and have people communicate across linguistic difference,” says Lambek. “To make our work sustainable, we have to increase the social justice interpreting network in the city.”

Organizers in Providence look to Boston as a model in the multilingual justice movement. The Boston Interpreters Collective was founded by a group of Boston activists after attending one of Tijerina’s workshops in 2008. The group holds monthly interpretation practice session and popular education workshops about multilingual capacity building. With an ever-growing network of over 500 interpreters in the Boston area, anyone planning a social justice-related event or meeting can easily find a trained interpreter using the group’s listserv.

Providence did have an interpreters’ collective several years ago (the Boston Interpreters Collective was, in fact, based on Providence’s group), but Providence’s small size made it difficult to sustain. There aren’t nearly as many interpreters in Providence as there are in Boston, and there are fewer social justice organizations to work with on language access projects. The Providence interpreters’ listserv has only 32 people, and, according to DARE member Keally Cieslik is a loose group of volunteers who can’t guarantee their time or availability. “The awareness is there among social justice organizations, but we just don’t have the capacity to take that next step to make it a movement,” says Lambek. “We have a long way to go before we could have something like the Boston network.”

Building the movement The multilingual justice movement requires a shifting of norms—within social justice organizations’ internal operations, in their coalition efforts, and in their engagement with institutions of power. There are many obstacles, but interpreters are hopeful that if more organizations facilitate communication across linguistic differences, this shift becomes possible. “We live in such an English-dominated society, it’s really hard for English-speakers to adjust to things like using interpretation equipment,” says Cieslik. “But if an organization makes a commitment to being a multilingual space, there are all kinds of systems and policies they can put in place. Some are simple, like sending the organization’s emails in all the languages of the community members. We can’t just sit back and wait for that culture shift to happen.”

Bottom-up efforts are no doubt crucial, but Tijerina has larger visions for the future of the movement. He and other activists have discussed creating an NGO devoted to multilingual justice, or housing the movement within an already-existing organization. There’s also been talk of developing the workshop curriculum into a university program. In whatever form the movement takes, it’s clear to Tijerina and others that this is an issue that demands a centralized, concerted effort among activists. The political will exists among organizers in minority communities across America, it just has to be tapped into. “This work is transformative,” says Tijerina. “I have been in countless multilingual spaces where non-English speaking people will come up to me after saying they didn’t know it could be like this. They’ll tell me how meaningful it was to have someone ask them questions directly rather than address them to an interpreter. They feel like they’ve just been heard, really heard, for the first time in their lives.”

If you’re bilingual and interested in getting involved in interpreting in Providence, email Keally Cieslik at keally.cieslik@gmail.com.

SOPHIE KASAKOVE B’17 has never needed a translator.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by Maya Sorabjee illustration by Pierie Korostoff

I was once given directions, drawn on a paper napkin, to a longstanding Bombay secret. It took me eight months before I finally followed them. It was on a random afternoon, when I realized I was in the area that the makeshift map indicated. In a simple arrangement of arrows and shapes, it read: turn left into the lane behind the National Gallery of Modern Art, then take another left.

On your right, there are two black water tanks. Next to the two tanks, there is a shed made of corrugated steel. There is a hole in the shed. Look into the hole. Like most days, the sun was bright and hot, making the shadows deeper and the air thicker. It took my eye a few seconds to adjust to the darkness of the shed, and then I saw it, much closer in distance than I had expected: a nose. +++ On February 28, 1948, the British left Bombay the way they came, at least symbolically. The last battalion marched through the Gateway of India, a monumental arch on the southern tip of the city that had emblematically opened the country to the Raj, laying it bare for centuries of colonial rule and plunder. An entry wound, if you will. As the troops marched through the Gateway and onto the waiting ships, the newly conceived Indian flag blew defiantly in the breeze, the first of many symbols that would be created to combat the enduring, painful legacy of imperialism.

In the last months of 2014, two state governments in India approved two massive memorial proposals: the Statue of Unity in Gujarat, a monumental sculpture of the country’s first home minister, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel; and the Shivaji memorial in Maharashtra, an equestrian statue of a Maratha warrior king. Both projects have planned heights that would dwarf the Statue of Liberty and both tell a story of India in images that diametrically oppose those of the Gateway of India or any colonial monument designed by the British. Both projects are necessarily ostentatious not because of the history they must tell, but the history they want to replace. +++ The nose is, of course, attached to a body. Though sculpted in black stone, it is the form of a white man, some British ruler whose carved likeness once graced a busy junction in Bombay, but is now shunned to a dusty shed in Mumbai, a city now rid of its colonial name and retitled after the Hindu goddess Mumbadevi. Behind this guy is a second, larger-than-life statue, also banished to the darkness. So the story goes: in the years following independence, local Indian activists went around the city rounding up the sculptures that paid homage to India’s still fresh relationship with the British. These statues—of generals, of King Edward VII, of Queen Victoria—were often exiled to the local zoo (where, today, they are the closest to living things on display after most of the zoo animals have died from neglect). What was the logic behind these sweeping expulsions of Bombay’s imperial statues?

In Milan Kundera’s Immortality, the protagonist, Paul, deliberates: “ideology belonged to history, while the reign of imagology begins where history ends.” Imagology, an invented word, is what turned Marxism from a set of principles, an ideology, into a series of symbols and slogans for the world to lap up: the sickle and hammer, Che, “Workers of the World, unite!” It is what one finds on the surface of political struggle; it is the propaganda machine churning out consumable simulations of history. It is undoubtedly easier to disseminate a complicated history through synecdoche, and often, these images detach themselves from the reality they were based on, taking on a life of their own.

The Statue of Unity is one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s many pet projects designed to boost the country’s image. Along with his “Make in India” campaign and the promise of a high-speed bullet train,

JANUARY 30 2015

Modi is eager to erect this expensive, bold instance of public art, once again in the laboratory that is his home state of Gujarat. It is designed, like many of his initiatives, to be a point of conversation, a shining example of a prosperous India impatient to grow economically and keep up with Asia’s speedy globalization. Affluent residents of India’s metropolises love to gush about Gujarat’s superior infrastructure, and Modi hopes that foreigners and Indians alike will hear words like “e-governance” and renew their faith in what had, before his election, become a faltering and corrupt central administration. To a large extent, it has worked.

Meanwhile in Bombay, every step is accompanied by the sight of something named after Shivaji. Chhatrapati (Emperor) Shivaji’s legacy stems from his conquests in the 17th century, against the Mughal and British Empires alike, and his committed devotion to Hinduism.

The Prince of Wales Museum? That’s now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Vastu Sangrahalaya. Victoria Terminus, that Gothic Revival embodiment of imperialism? Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus to you. Did you fly in through Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport? Probably.

These hollow acts of renaming are all carried out by political figures (particularly those of the Hindu nationalist variety) determined to undermine the civic achievements of colonialists and to retroactively prop up Shivaji as the freedom-fighting hero of the past. The proposed statue is the next step in this game of superficial cultural reclamation, and this context complicates the memorial’s intention. Is it an innocent celebration of Shivaji’s—and India’s—fight for independence, or does it index, and add to, the religious tension that has plagued the country since its inception?

Every country needs its share of memorials, its tourism, and its sources of pride. But one has to wonder: is the opportunity cost of the Statue of Unity or the Shivaji statue simply too high? The price of the Sardar Patel project, which has already begun construction, is INR 2989 crore (US $470 million); the Shivaji project, which has not yet broken ground, has been allocated INR 400 crore (US $64 million), a number that will have to treble in size in order to see the project to its completion. India struggles with most of the problems of a developing nation: abysmal education, healthcare, infrastructure, and women’s safety. Over half the country’s people do not have access to a toilet. If Indian politicians are concerned with image, devoting additional resources to these issues could be a more useful and meaningful way of establishing their own legacy, without having to contest those that preceded it.

to erase and abandon. A system of phased demolition, for instance, would drop the unconvincing pretense of permanence for contemporary architecture, built under different economic and material assumptions. It would reveal the tabula rasa beneath the thinning crust of our civilization — ready for liberation just as we (in the West) had given up on the idea.” The constant renaming of British monuments around India—and forceful swapping of them with local heroes—doesn’t erase history in the Orwellian way it intends to, as these relics of the past, and the past itself, still remain visible. If the new Indian memorials are intended as acts of obliteration, maybe the government should instead take a wrecking ball to the Gateway of India for their point to be taken more seriously. +++ The Shivaji Statue understandably became the subject of debate—the Union Environment Ministry has expressed concern about the environmental impact of the project, whose location on a manmade island in the Arabian Sea may not be able to sustain its massive scale. But recently, the same body of authority turned around to assist the project in a puzzling and quintessentially Indian way: if you can’t obey the law, change it. On January 22, the ministry issued an amendment to the coastal zone regulations to conveniently allow “reclamation for construction of memorials/monuments and allied facilities, only in exceptional cases, by the state government concerned, on a case to case basis.” This legal tweak will make it much easier to construct the Shivaji statue, and in doing so, spoil the view of the city’s back bay, and continue to tout the greatness of an emperor that has no relevance in most of the lives of Bombay’s diverse population. While it would be nice to trust in Indian bureaucracy to impede the progress of the memorial indefinitely, it is important—and terrifying—to remember that the red tape need not apply to those who control it. Bombay may soon have its own Colossus, boldly standing for a false fragment of its past.

MAYA SORABJEE B’16 was exiled to the local zoo.

+++ The tenth day of the Hindu festival Navratri is called Dussehra, and it celebrates the mythological tale of Lord Rama’s defeat of the ten-headed demon Ravana. The festival is celebrated through a performed act of erasure: the demon’s ten heads represent ten bad qualities, similar to Western mythology’s deadly sins, that must be removed from the Hindu household. This is done by prayer, or, in many parts around India, by communally burning a monumental effigy of Ravana. As Ravana goes up in flames once a year, its plumes of smoke fill the air, translating the straw monument from its impressive stature to a transient state, a memory. While people often build monuments for posterity, so that future generations can use them as indexes of pasts they weren’t alive to witness, the Ravana statue represents an ideology in the opposite way. It takes the antagonist of mythological history, and deals with it in a way that is cathartic, a moment of violent cleansing.

Architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas believes in the need for destruction, the burning of Ravana and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall. In a curatorial statement at the Venice Architecture Biennale, he said: “The march of preservation necessitates the development of a theory of its opposite: not what to keep, but what to give up, what

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HOOKING UP WITH HISTORY

by Eli Pitegoff It might read blasphemous to call today’s cult fixation with Berlin parochial. Yet, to enter the city’s most infamous club, according to an article that appeared in Rolling Stone last February entitled “Berghain: The Secretive, Sex-Fueled World of Techno’s Coolest Club,” is to have “a religious experience.”

Walking through the city’s major tourist thoroughfares, one passes the tedious racks of mass produced tote bags and sweatshirts—“I <3 New York” exchanged for the sentimental “Home is where Berghain is <3.” As the hype would have it, to discover for the very first time a sincere, if mdma mediated, love for Minimal Goth-Tech as it vibrates through the world’s most expensive sound-system, is to have the lauded Berlin experience. You may now depart, selective Instagram and Facebook documentation in virtual tow, tinder/grindr matches deleted to make room for the lucky new bachelor(ette)s during your five days in Amsterdam.

is doubtful that the political-historical implication of such hook-ups are on the mind of the participants in the act, their transgression from conventional hetero-normative boundaries (boundaries upheld and brutally enforced by the National Socialists) might be read as a potent form of subversion. That the city permits, promotes, and sells the image of these sexually liberated spaces (think “Home is where Berghain is <3” tote bags) might be read as a type of anti-fascist redemption.

But such interpretations of Berlin’s club culture can only take us so far. Whether or not places like Berghain foster certain forms of liberated behavior reminiscent of those seen in the city during the Weimar Republic, it is clear that the degree to which such a phenomenon truly engages the history of the city is limited. While this type of hedonistic behavior can be situated within the city’s cultural history, it seems that by its very nature a hook-up is not politically motivated—at least not purely and not in the moment. It seems that the participants of a boundary bending hook-up in the dark room of x-club engage with the past inadvertently, brought to the fore only by retrospective analysis that interprets these actions and situates them discursively within a historical and political context. When I referred to Berlin’s club culture as “parochial” earlier in the piece, I meant it in an absurd way. While the sexual liberation fostered within these clubs might have political and historical significance, those attracted to such spaces seem to be narrowly motivated by the desire for a good a time.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is blameworthy. Rather, it has become clear that this hedonistic attitude has extended far beyond the dungeon-like walls of Berlin’s favorite weekend destinations into some unlikely spaces. +++

This is not an article about Berlin’s nightlife per se. It aims, rather, to reveal a certain hedonistic vacuity promised to tourists, which has now run rampant in a city with a particularly grave past. Nor is this article a condemnation of the city’s nightlife. It aims, rather, to reveal one realm, outside of the “holy gates” of Berghain, where vacuity does not seem to belong—a realm in which thoughtlessness and the tourist’s selfie rear an ugly grin in the face of the city’s tortured past. +++ Let it first be said that the club culture in Berlin has in many ways complemented, if not ushered in, a cosmopolitanism reminiscent of the city in the decades of democracy preceding Germany’s totalitarian rule. Under the Weimer Republic, established in 1919 and dissolved by Hitler in 1933, Berlin thrived as a haven for intellectuals, artists, people of marginalized sexual orientations and religious affiliations, and radical political thinkers (many of whom identified with all of these classifications, at once). The predominant club culture in Berlin today seems, to those paying attention to the city’s history, a welcome return to an ethos of liberation comparable to that of a Berlin that Joseph Goebbels called a “sinkhole of iniquity” in his personal diary in 1926—a diverse and sensational Berlin, which embraced “homosexuality, avant-garde art, leftwing politics, jazz, and lascivious cabaret” as well as a huge influx of tourists eager to see the thriving and technologically advanced European metropolis.

Today, like the early half of the twentieth century, we see Berlin’s tourism industry growing at unprecedented rates.

Berlin’s Senator for Economics, Cornelia Yzer, recently went on record saying, “Berlin has been setting tourism records for ten years straight. The capital is one of the fastest growing destinations in the world. It’s firmly placed among the top three destinations in Europe…And tourism has become a key factor to Berlin’s economic success.” Tourists pour into Berlin, seeking the patented Berlin experience, often perceived as a no-holds-barred type of nightlife experience. They seek a place where conventional boundaries no longer exist—even if such liberation takes the form of debauched sexual encounters during a fetish night in the darkroom of one’s favorite club.

In some ways, though, what initially appears to be mindless hedonism also takes on a rhetorical significance. Each hook-up that occurs outside the invisible confines of heterosexual monogamy might be seen as the welcome de-sanitizing of the fascist’s “purification” policies in Berlin. Though it

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Nothing speaks to the inadvertent politicization of the hookup more than the recent infiltration of hook-up apps like Grindr and Tinder into the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in the heart of Berlin.

For a brief moment in November 2011, the newest thing to hit the blogosphere was a website called “Totem and Taboo: Grindr remembers the holocaust.” In its tongue-incheek “about” section, the blog asserts its raison d’etre: “In an age when ignorance is [sic] prevalent than ever, Grindr, the latest most addictive gay obsession, has wowed its members in relentlessly promoting the memory of the holocaust. While the gay community is under scrutiny for promoting hedonism and alienation, this tribute seems all the more compelling.”

Each month the blog posts screenshots of those Grindr profile pictures in which the backdrop is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Over the course of the last four years, the site has compiled nearly two hundred screen shots of men posing somewhere within the five-acre field of the 2,711 concrete slabs (called “stelae”), which constitute the memorial.

It should be noted that the blog blithely ignores the same trend in Grindr’s hetero-hook-up counterpart Tinder.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

that arose was to whom the site should be dedicated. Should it be a memorial to the murdered victims of the Third Reich?

Or should it be a memorial with a qualifier after the word murdered—like a memorial to the murdered Jews, Roma and Sinti, Communists, and/or gay victims of the holocaust? As is clear from the memorial’s name, the committee opted to dedicate the most expansive and centrally-located plot of land to the Jewish victims, while giving smaller, separate memorials to the Roma, Sinti, and queer victims of fascist persecution.

The Memorial Committee’s and German Parliament’s decision to divide the memorial based on category of victim received widespread criticism even outside of queer communities, essentially boiling down to the question: does such separation create a hierarchy of victimhood? In this sense the proliferation of Grindr photos taken at the Memorial might be seen as a form of protest—a rhetorical gesture, inserting not only the image of gay men, but also the implication of an act that

Indeed, in the process of swiping right and left within a fifty mile radius of the memorial, it is hard to ignore the abundance of profile pictures staged in between the the holocaust memorial’s concrete stelae.

Much the same in the case of the hook-up culture in Berlin’s clubs, it is possible to give a redeeming reading of the

signifies and expresses their sexual orientation, into the site of commemoration from which queer victims were excluded.

But like in the case of the gender-bending hook-up in the dark room of a club in Berlin, such analysis is retrospective and distant. What the Tinder users’ photographs possibly show us, given that they are unable to lay claim to such a political alibi, is that the memorial might simply be a compelling backdrop for an attractive photograph given its contemporary architectural character. To read into the political motivations of hook-up app users and assign their actions political significance is to offer a singular implication within a complicated network of meaning. On the one hand, the use of these photographs on social media proliferates the image of Berlin’s largest holocaust memorial, and sparks debate about the imperative to remember Germany’s past. On the other hand, the photographs indicate that visitors to the memorial are using it to document and advertise recent, personal histories, in a gesture that annihilates the history the site was intended to commemorate. Whatever the case, it seems clear that the hedonistic culture, given a home in Berlin’s clubs, has bled deep into the fabric of the city for better or for worse.

Grindr pictures that were taken in the memorial. Over the course of the decade-long debates over the specifications and design of a holocaust memorial for Berlin following the fall of the Berlin Wall, perhaps the most contentious question

january 30 2015

ELIAS PITEGOFF B’15 is often perceived as a no-holdsbarred type of nightlife experience.

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I DON'T FEEL LIKE DANCIN'

by Will Underwood illustration by Layla Ehsan

Playing 'Gay' in Providence Professional Wrestling The South Attleboro Knights of Columbus auditorium is an unassuming building. Small with brown faux-wood siding, it is dwarfed by its parking lot, at the end of which stands a sign advertising rental opportunities. The structure is typically home to Council 5876 of the eponymous Catholic community organization, but when four friends and I pull into the parking lot on Friday January 16, it is for something else.

“SHOWCASE PRO WRESTLING,” a wooden sign on the street proclaimed.

Showcase Pro Wrestling (SPW) is Rhode Island’s only independent pro wrestling promotion. The group hosts events and workshops at its training center in Woonsocket and assists with fundraisers for various groups. Most importantly Showcase fills cheap, community spaces like the Knights of Columbus auditorium almost biweekly for professional wrestling matches.

We walk in just after the first bell to the abrasive thwack of bodies slamming against a mat. Around the room, roughly a hundred people—mostly men, but also women and young children wearing their favorite pro wrestlers’ T-shirts—sit in black folding chairs. In the ring, a wrestler named Blackwolf disposes of two targets called only The Convicts, their faces covered by black masks and bodies by orange jumpsuits.

Billed at seven feet tall and 400 pounds, Blackwolf is clearly a fan favorite. The audience roars as he throws one convict against the first row of seats and parades around the ring.

After his match a line of children gathers at the ring to take pictures with him, at which point he tells my friend that he’s actually closer to 6'6", but still “really big.” The violence, the pageantry, the proximity: this is exactly what we’ve come for.

performance. Injury is inevitable, even as it indicates a lapse in execution, in part because the occurrence of injury proves the proximity of the act to what it imitates. The audience is implicated in pushing dangerously for a product that comes as near as possible to the image it projects without ever fully becoming that image, and so is responsible at least in part for what happens in the ring.

+++ Indie wrestling, a type of performance that incorporates choreographed violence and athletics with dramatic narrative, is a common fixture throughout the United States. As recently as 2008, there were three independent promotions in Rhode Island alone. Though Showcase is the only one left standing, a host of other companies exist in Southern New England across Connecticut and parts of Massachusetts. In contrast to the WWE—the most prominent professional wrestling organization—independent pro wrestling groups such as Showcase Pro Wrestling are relatively disorganized, unprofitable, and tenuous. Wrestlers make very little if any money for their physically strenuous and injury-prone performances, which are often shown in small spaces before intimate crowds. In order to sustain their wrestling careers, independent wrestlers must work full time without exception, often in occupations that offer health benefits and accommodating schedules.

We are reminded of the exacting nature of wrestling during one sobering moment in the night, when the “Boogie Down Brawler” Benny Blanco is thrown back over the head of his opponent Nicholas Night. From our seats, we can hear the duo coordinate the move—“one, two, three…”—and when Blanco hits the mat it is convincing. “No mercy!” one friend yells. But when Night gestures toward the staff, saying urgently, “This is real,” it is apparent that something has gone wrong.

One helper approaches and replies, “We’re not prepared for this.” It seems unconscionable that there is no medical staff on hand for a performance in which even the most practiced performers are often hurt, but when Nicholas Night takes the mic after Blanco’s removal his focus is different. “We’re all just out here trying to put food on the table,” he says, not quite in or out of character. “Though we have our differences in the ring, we’re all here for the same reason. I’d wrestle you again any day, brother.”

Night’s speech is well received by the crowd, which applauds thankfully. The accidental slippage of the match’s choreography into actual violence risked not only severe injury for Benny Blanco, but also damage to the integrity of the night’s performances. In addressing the seriousness of the incident while still incorporating it into the fiction of the match, Night deftly reconstructs the confusion between reality and performance that is so critical to the success of the event. The navigation of the divisions between performers and their characters—always uncertain in pro wrestling and not just at moments of injury—is much of what makes the genre so compelling for its audience. On the one hand, the unreality of the event is what makes it watchable; the performed fighting of pro wrestling would be barbaric otherwise. Yet the more the fiction of the match is obscured, the better the

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Nicholas Night’s speech comes just before the evening’s main event, when tag team duo Glamour Express enters the lowceilinged room through the blue curtains that separate the ring and audience from the backstage. Flanked by the American flag and ushered in by Scissor Sisters’ “I Don’t Feel Like Dancin',” they strut around the ring, courting the audience in pink and green tights, boas, and wig and bra for one member who is dressed in drag. The MC introduces the duo as “Pimp Daddy” Mike Paiva and his partner, “The Beautiful” Ramona Romano. I turn to the person next to me. “Is their gimmick that they’re gay?”

Professional wrestling maintains an uneasy relationship with homosexuality. One of wrestling’s most immediately striking characteristics is the type of masculinity it espouses.

Its heroes are hyper masculine, misogynistic, violent figures whose normative masculinity is endowed by their overwrought physicality. Yet the process of wrestling centers on behaviors that are completely at odds with this image. In his 2014 ethnography on indie wrestling, Fighting for Recognition, R. Tyson Smith notes, “The vanity, pageantry, and choreography of prop wrestling, plus its kinesthesia of intimacy and homoeroticism, flout the ideals of hard masculinity.” Even local wrestlers invest heavily in costume and bodily presentation—concerns that are stereotypically aligned with femininity and therefore dissonant with conceptions of an imposing, disinterested masculinity.

Aware of the troubled ideals of masculinity that unsurprisingly pervade pro wrestling at every level, I was eager to read subversion into Glamour Express’s performance. At the very least, I hoped, their roles could point explicitly to the tension between homophobia and homoeroticism in professional wrestling.

Early in Glamour Express’s match, an opponent named Matrix from the duo Refflers—wrestlers dressed as referee— looked in confusion to the audience on either side of the ring as Ramona Romano gyrated suggestively in the opposite corner. “Try it, you might like it!” shouted an audience member.

“What is it?” another called, referring to Romano. Homosexuality was clearly foreign to the audience at Showcase Pro

Wrestling Friday night­—the chants of “Juicy fruits” left little doubt. But even as the Refflers appealed to the homophobia of the crowd throughout the match, loudly questioning the manliness of their opponents and expressing their reticence to wrestle them, it was impossible to ignore that there were two duos of matching male partners in the ring. At its best, I hoped, Glamour Express could mirror professional wrestling’s self-conscious homophobia back to itself.

Of course, that’s not what happened. The stereotype of homosexuality that Glamour Express peddled around the auditorium in South Attleboro was simplistic, heteronormative, and mocking. By turning homosexuality into a gimmick for the performance, it catered to the worst, most ill-informed tendencies of a complicit audience while reinforcing wrestling’s problematic masculine prototype. Ramona Romano—who assumed the stereotypically female role in the Glamour Express partnership—was particularly guilty of this.

Romano pranced, squealed, and made passes at everyone in the ring. He embodied an effeminate, hypersexual mischaracterization of homosexuality, painting every gay man as an aspiring woman and enshrining the oiled, hairless body of the “straight” wrestler as the image of male strength.

Within the ring, Glamour Express proves to be a technically gifted duo. Their performance is crisp, displaying coordinated movements that adhere to character, such as when Romano playfully leapfrogs Mike Paiva to land on a Reffler’s back while Paiva holds him to the ground. But the entertainment value of their wrestling is always tied to their performed sexuality. “Pinkies up!” Mike Paiva shouts before delivering a People’s Elbow to a Reffler. The crowd lifts its pinkies in response. “Come on,” one audience member complains from the opposite side of the room, “It’s 2015.” It is 2015, and there are more than a dozen children in attendance, but the parody of homosexuality sold by Glamour Express nonetheless feels all too common. It is difficult to find space within professional wrestling for inclusive representations of masculinity (to say nothing of wrestling’s portrayal of women) given the genre’s total absence of subtlety and its audience’s willingness to laugh at stereotypes of homosexuality, but groups like Glamour Express, which have been part of wrestling promotions since their inception, occlude such progressive possibilities from even being imagined. It should go without saying that Glamour Express lost the match, “Five Star” Scott LeDeur pinning Mike Paiva while Romano squealed on the ropes after dropping onto his groin in an unsurprising moment of emasculation. In the world of professional wrestling, even the worst appropriations of non-normative sexuality are relegated to second place.

WILLIAM UNDERWOOD B'15 is a fan favorite.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ON CAMERA Surveilling Protest

by Cherise Morris illustration by Teri Minogue

December 5, 2014 – “Heads up. It’s supposed to pour.

So the protest may not last as long as you think.” A friend texted. I scoffed at her naiveté. Protests don’t work that way, or at least they’re not supposed to. Expressing political discontent shouldn’t be dependent on whether or not it rains.

There was constant, cold drizzle. Swarms of Providence patrol vehicles lined the roads as we walked to beat of our steady chant to Central High, the starting point of that evening’s protest organized by the grassroots collective End Police Brutality PVD. The alternating wheel of primary red and blue hues reflected in each droplet. A large part of what draws me to protesting—besides personal connections to the issues and political leanings—is the electricity of it all, how the feelings harnessed in a mass coordination can never be fully encapsulated or recounted beyond the initial moment.

Unbeknownst to me and many other demonstrators, the Providence Police Department was not only watching from motorcycles, patrol cars, and mounted horseback—they were also videotaping us. PPD was attempting to capture the uncapturable moment of resistance. +++ On Friday, January 23, the Rhode Island ACLU released a letter admonishing the Providence Police Department for videotaping the December protest. Steven Paré, Providence’s Public Safety Commissioner, admitted that the department has taken surveillance videos at two large demonstrations in the last year. According to the ACLU, which criticized this practice as both an intimidation scheme and one without procedural precedent, video recordings were taken on numerous cell phones and a video camera by officers at the November 25 and December 5 protests, both of which were “peaceful” assemblies in response to the non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases. The ACLU, in its letter, briefly mentions three other instances when police have covertly taped mass assemblies, including a 2013 press conference about a Racial Profiling Prevention Act. The second incident occurred merely two weeks after a crowdsourced video surfaced of a white policeman pinning down a Black male protester with a skateboard. The assault was captured in not one but two digital accounts—one from protestors and one from recording officers—however Robert Heaton, the assaulting officer, was cleared of excessive force accusations shortly after the incident. Meanwhile, reformers look to body cameras in the name of accountability, and, in these reactionary proposals, further validate those same cycles of violence and brutality.

January 30 2015

Paré has defended the department’s unsanctioned, undercover videotaping during public assemblies—which, according to the ACLU, was in at least one case done by ununiformed officers, as a cautionary safety measure, collecting potential evidence to aid hypothetical investigations in the event of undefined “disorder.” He has, furthermore, denied calls that recordings be outlined in procedural guidelines if law enforcement agencies continue to use such measures.

Contemporary protest is now faced with the double-crux of increasingly militarized local police forces and extensive networks of surveillance, as evidenced by recent examples from Oakland to Chicago to New York and now Providence.

Protestors are faced with the immediate fear of police agitators dressed in riot gear and heavily armed, and must increasingly worry about future legal prosecution of their actions. This has created a penetrating, totalizing state of fear. Both not only call into question First Amendment freedoms, but also raise issues of privilege and power when it comes to the mere act of publicly resisting and using one’s own voice and body as the mechanism through which one enacts calls for change. Who can afford to have the police monitoring their every action?

Who is more or less afraid of the blue uniforms? More or less afraid of the police’s perceptions of them and how those subjectivities dictate their life, their right to walk down the street without being harassed or brutalized?

As the act of eavesdropping becomes further sanctioned by the state, our world becomes more filled with cameras— whether they be police cameras, body cameras on police vests, traffic cameras, or cell-phone cameras in the hands of activists and citizen journalists. The cops are filming us. We are filming the cops. But the stakes of this digital dialectic are higher for some than others. +++ And so the concealed cameras interrogated the scene, casting us—the protestors—as suspicious characters, all of whom were worthy of circumspect observation. And as the cameras implicated us broadly as one aggregate untrustworthy disobedient, tensions weaved through the mass distinguishing one demonstrator from the next.

Several images from the night—while perhaps undistinguished from one grainy second of surveillance video to the next—are etched into my memory.

When I had been the only woman—and the only student—to hop the fence to the interstate at the Providence protest before cops swarmed in to push the seven or so of us

back over. When we came face to face with aggressive officers who were physically violating protestors, holding our cell phone cameras in their faces, and yelling out their badge numbers. “328, 328, 328.” The people at the forefront, the ones getting their collars jacked by officers, were all Providence community members; the overwhelming majority of student ‘allies’ straggled in the back away from the police, safe and assured in their socioeconomic and intellectual privileges. It was surreal to see a hoard of 50 or 60 predominantly white Ivy League students back away from the fence in step, because jumping over was too physically risky. The division in the crowd weakened the action. And the police exploited these divisions, forcibly escorting the seven or eight of us back over the fence. I looked at them and wondered why they were there. “Nice gesture, but if you’re not here to use your privilege to help shut shit down, why did you waste your time walking down the hill?” Amateurs, I thought, all of them— except my friends and me—looking for nothing more than self-affirmation of their liberalism.“Look at me, I care about social justice, I signed a petition on change.org and I have a Black friend,” I mocked them harshly, longing to distance myself and my actions from theirs. Despite my low-income background, my blackness, and my numerous experiences of racial profiling from police in Providence, I was implicated in that same student privilege I criticized. I had walked down the hill with the rest of them. So while I wanted to yell at them.

“Why are you just standing there, not chanting?” I had to, in the same breath, acknowledge my position of privilege.

Covert PPD cameras continued to record the scene, lumped all of us together, as the most important contours of the scene were lost by their videos. +++ The ACLU, in the letter to Paré, asserts, “the Providence Police Department viewed each of these individuals as potential criminals, and placed them under surveillance.” However, there remains an unseen plot that the cameras could not recount. Or could they?

Say a police officer is combing through the surveillance footage in the aftermath of a protest. Who is said officer more likely to zoom in and pause on? The shot of a group of several white 20-somethings huddled near the rear or an image of a young Black guy with the skateboard in the front of the crowd?

CHERISE MORRIS B’16 knows who’s watching who.

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CLASS AND THE AMERICAN MONTESSORI MOVEMENT

by Sara Winnick Illustration by Soyoon Kim

Providence, 2014 The foyer features a grand staircase and crown moldings. The mansion-turned-pre-school’s hallway is lined with offices that used to be living rooms. Hooks have been attached to the wall at approximately the height of my hip for Angel Care Montessori students to hang their coats. The three-year-old students know how to open and close the gate to retrieve their lunch boxes from the hallway, which they are allowed to do at any point during their morning work period. “The students retrieve their own lunch boxes,” founder of Angel Care and head-teacher Catherine Valenti tells me. “That’s the independence. At most preschools the teacher would lay out everything and the teacher would say when it’s time. But our students choose when they have snack, because they have the tools to be disciplined and make that decision.” Welcome to Montessori education.

Montessori educational philosophy views children as inherently curious. Montessori educators believe students learn and work better if left to their own devices, given adequate materials and appropriate adult oversight. In Montessori schools, teachers serve as guides, not instructors. Valenti, or “Miss Catherine” as she refers to herself in front of the students, founded Angel Care Montessori in 1995. She and her team have been implementing the century-old pedagogical philosophy of Dr. Maria Montessori in the quiet mansion on Waterman Street for nearly two decades.

I haven’t been in pre-school for seventeen years, but the layout of Angel Care Montessori feels both profoundly familiar and unique. I recognize the standard early childhood education equipment: small furniture suited to three-year-old bottoms, a miniature plastic version of a kitchen for playing house, a large rug for stories and songs. Academically, there is an oversized calendar on an easel with words like “day” and “week” on flashcards and tiny pictures of the weather with Velcro backs.

Beyond the materials, the ambiance of the room is different from any pre-school I’ve experienced. There are only eight students in the class, dispersed widely throughout the large playroom. Classical music, emanating from a stereo mounted on the far wall, makes whole-group direction difficult, but then again, no one is delivering whole-group directions.

When needed, teachers lower themselves to three-year-old eye level and speak to students face-to-face. Otherwise, students work independently on oversized jigsaw puzzles and undersized kitchen equipment. The largeness of the room is exaggerated by the smallness of the students; their quiet work absorbed by the Beethoven background. +++ Rome, 1906 A continent away, another Montessori classroom quietly thrives. Dr. Maria Montessori, inventor and namesake of the Montessori Method, was recruited for her work as a child

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psychologist at the University of Rome to run a school for poor children in tenement housing outside of Rome in 1907.

Montessori called the school Casa dei Bambini, or Children’s House. Dr. Montessori described an average classroom in Casa in The Montessori Method: “There are forty little beings—from three to seven years old, each one intent on his own work. One is going through the exercises for the senses; one is handling the letters… still another is dusting. Some are seated at tables, some on rugs on the floor. There are muffled sounds of objects lightly moving about, of children tiptoeing…. The teacher moves quietly about, goes to any child who calls her, supervision operates in such a way that anyone who needs her finds her at his elbow, and whoever does not need her is not reminded of her existence.”

The passage could easily be mistaken for a quotation from Angel Care Montessori’s website. Dr. Montessori’s student completing “the exercises for the senses” could be Valenti’s student working quietly on the puzzle, the child dusting in early twentieth century Italy is the child I saw baking pretend muffins in Providence. The classrooms both have miniature tables, sandpaper letters, wooden tools, and students sprawled on the floor on rugs. Neither set of teachers command the space. The biggest difference between a Montessori classroom in Rome at its conception and a Montessori classroom in Providence today, thus, is not the supplies, activities, or the ethos of the classroom. It is in the demographic of the students the materials are set up to serve.

The building in Rome housed forty children between the ages of two and seven years; on the morning of my visit, the mansion on Angel Street has eight between two and five. The 40 children in Dr. Montessori’s Casa were children living in poverty in the slums outside of Rome. Angel Care Montessori is located in the most affluent neighborhood in Providence.

When I ask Ms. Valenti how much it costs to attend Montessori schools, she tells me, “It varies. Certainly for us, we’re here on the east side and we’re competitive with the other private schools such as Moses Brown, Wheeler, Gordon.”

Valenti does not give a specific number and I cannot find a price on their website. However, I look up these other private schools Angel Care is “competitive” with. For pre-school, Moses Brown costs $14,660 a year. Wheeler charges $15,315.

Gordon is $15,800. +++ Montessori schools have gone through two major periods of proliferation in the United States, comprising the first and second wave of the Montessori Movement. First: the Progressive Era, when Dr. Montessori toured the United States explaining her philosophy and advocating its implementation.

Second: the Civil Rights Era, when another educator and advocate, Nancy McCormick Rambusch, helped re-publicize the values and practices of Montessori schooling. Ironically,

though both periods’ social justice zeitgeists enabled the Montessori philosophy to take hold, the class and racial identities of its advocates ensured its narrow implementation among the elite.

Maria Montessori’s name first appeared in American media in 1911, when McClure’s Magazine published a fifteen page spread on Casa entitled, “The Montessori Schools in Rome: The Revolutionary Educational Work of Maria Montessori as Carried Out in her Own Schools.” Less than a year later, McClure’s followed up on the article with “Information about the Montessori Method”; the magazine had allegedly received so many letters from readers about Montessori that it had become “impossible to reply to all these inquiries directly.” Americans, it seemed, were enchanted by the new education movement.

But which Americans fell in love with Montessori? At the time of the publication of “The Montessori Schools in Rome,” McClure’s Magazine had over 400,000 issues in circulation to primarily urban, upper class, white readers. Un-coincidentally its readers were those most likely to be advocates of the Progressive Movement.

The Progressive Movement of 1890 to 1920 directly rebelled against the corruption and big business trends of the Gilded Age that came before it. Cities were the subjects and sites of progressive reformers major campaigns: prohibition, anti-trust laws, services for immigrants. Largely white, educated, and upper class, reformers leveraged their leisure time, capital, and educations to advocate for societal reform.

Progressive reformers believed that the environment, rather than the individual, was responsible for inequality. Progressive reformers reasoned that if poverty was a product of circumstance, circumstance could ameliorate poverty. Education took on new societal importance.

The Montessori Movement took hold because a school for poor children resonated with Progressive values. Media portrayal, so integral to the success of any reform effort in the muckraking decades of the twentieth century, consistently highlighted the anti-poverty origins of the school.

Yet Montessori schools were rarely implemented for the same population in the United States. Chair-people of the Montessori Education Association, like Alexander Graham Bell and Margaret Woodrow Wilson, found the easiest implementation of the program to be in the homes of Progressives who were on board with the pedagogy. Whether they had plans to extend later to other demographics or considered the adoption of the pedagogy themselves Progressive enough is unclear. The only Montessori school in Washington, DC was housed in Mr. Bell’s estate. +++ The second wave of the Montessori Movement began in the 1960s, after the movement’s relative disappearance post-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Progressive Era. In a moment of democratic expansion, the social justice origins of Montessori again resonated. As in the Progressive Era, the Civil Rights Era was a moment when environmental—rather than personal or cultural—causes of poverty were emphasized. Brown v. Board of Education demonstrated that it was resources, rather than children (or children’s racial identities), that accounted for educational and societal disparities between blacks and whites.

Key to the resurgence of the Movement was the leadership of Nancy McCormick Rambusch, a Montessori educator who traveled to Rome to receive training from Dr. Montessori’s son, and returned home to found The American Montessori Society. Rambusch was white, Catholic, middle class; she motivated other white parents to revive the Montessori Movement. Rambusch emphasized the religious underpinnings of the first wave of the movement, which was written about in Jubilee, a Christian magazine that published “Learning Made Easy” in September of 1953.

Just as McClure’s pandered to a Progressive audience, Jubilee catered to a white, Catholic one.

Once again, the identities of the movement’s leadership enabled its narrow implementation, while its greater historical context allowed for Montessori schools’ reception and success. News coverage of the second wave of Montessori emphasized its anti-poverty origins. The New York Times reported, “In the first decade of this century an Italian woman physician tried out her ideas about education on 60 children in the slums of Rome. These undisciplined and untrained children learned to read and write.” The Boston Globe spoke of Hingham Montessori School in Cambridge, Massachusetts that took active measures to include children of all demographics. However, the school was bankrupt. The Globe reported, “Hingham has funding problems—Cambridge’s Montessori school is operating at a $25,000 deficit, yet it maintains 22 scholarships.” The Hingham school does not exist today.

In 1958, Rambusch helped open Whitby, the first Montessori school of the second wave, in conjunction with parents in Greenwich, an affluent Connecticut suburb. Eight hundred private Montessori schools opened in the next decade, the majority of which still exist today. To send your three-year-old to Whitby costs $21, 550 per year.

A recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics found there were 732 Montessori schools in the United States.

16 percent of students served by Montessori schools came from minority backgrounds. 100 percent paid tuition.

SARA WINNICK B’15 is absorbed by the Beethoven background.

+++ In 2014, Ms. Valenti tells me that Montessori pedagogy has the potential to “cross social economic borders,” despite the fact that “it’s gotten a lot of notice for those who can afford really good private education.” According to Valenti, the population differences stem from the locations of the school.

“It really just caters to the community that the school is in, whether its rich, poor, or educated” she says. Providence has three Montessori schools; all located on the east side—the most affluent and whitest neighborhood of the city.

Today, there is a growing association between Montessori schools and the San Francisco Bay Area tech-bubble.

Business Insider recently published “7 Tech Innovators Who Became Wildly Successful After Going To Montessori School,” which makes the argument that top tech executives received their inventive spirit from the self-directed, project based schooling of Montessori. Google CEO Larry Page told the Christian Science Monitor, “I think it was part of that training of not following rules and orders, and being self motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world and doing things a little bit differently” when asked about his Montessori education.

While tech giants praise their Montessori upbringings, Page and others in the field are helping pioneer technology that enable “flipped” classrooms, where students learn from computer programs instead of teachers. Used disproportionately in low-come classrooms with students of color, students in flipped classrooms sit in front of individual computer monitors and work their way through scripted multiple-choice curriculum made to look like computer games. Education scholar Melinda Fine critiqued flipped classrooms for denying high quality, individualized instruction to low-income students and undermining the importance of trained and adequately compensated teachers in a recent conversation with The Indy. According to Dr. Fine, flipped classrooms are the epitome of factory-model education—and the antithesis of the technology free Montessori classroom on Waterman Street and throughout the Bay area.

Montessori schools in 2014 continue to be places for the white liberal elite to educate their children. A look into past periods of Montessori expansion shows that this has always been the case, ironically in part because of the social justice origins of the philosophy that allowed the movement to take hold. Montessori, in its first two periods of popularity, resonated with a specific white, intellectual, urban, liberal, upper-middle class person interested in advancing social equality. This population, due to their political views and the political contexts of the time, thought they were combating social inequality by participating in the movement. They were more accurately contributing to it.

JANUARY 30 2015

FEATURES

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TASTES LIKE CHICKEN Sizing up Alternative Meats

byJamie Packs Illustration by Devyn Park

Although we live in a culture replete with red paint on fur coats, images of warehouses crammed with livestock, and non-stop chatter about global warming, we continue to eat meat. And enjoy it.

This is not a new conversation. The American diet has been scrutinized for years to no avail. Some are now pleading for even the smallest change. Journalist, author, and activist Michael Pollan once wrote that if Americans go meatless one day per week, it would have the same ecological effect as taking 30 to 40 million cars off the road for a year. Pollan’s assertion is a considerable step down from the aggressive heckling of certain animal rights organizations. He wasn’t suggesting a radical dietary shift or pushing an ethical agenda, but rather championing the possible benefits of even minor attempts to decrease our collective footprint. And while “meatless Mondays” were in vogue among certain circles for a time, nothing is really sticking— it seems that nothing can keep us away from our chicken fingers.

But meat doesn’t have to be so environmentally detrimental. There are animals out there that can help topple the dominion of beef, poultry, and pork, while having a lesser impact on the globe. Let’s meet them…

Bunny, Bunny Although rabbit was eaten out of necessity during World War II, it fell from public favor when food scarcity became less of an issue. It’s only in recent years that chefs and consumers alike have once again noted the environmental benefits, as well as the culinary potential, of eating rabbit.

One of the biggest advantages of rabbit meat is its feed conversion efficiency. According to Slow Food USA, the American rabbit produces six pounds of meat with the same amount of feed and water it takes for a cow to produce one pound. Their foods of choice—like alfalfa sprouts and leafy greens —are also less energy intensive to produce than those ingested by other animals. Add to this the fact that rabbits require less space to be reared, and the rabbits seem an ideal source of meat for city-dwellers seeking to eat locally. And while urban chickens are very du jour, rabbits are far less conspicuous and easier to slaughter than chickens. But we aren’t going to see rabbit nuggets on the menus of fast food chains any time soon.

The largest problem with the consumption of rabbit meat appears to be cultural.

Many Americans have grown up around images of fluffy, big-eyed bunnies that nibble on carrots, decorate the boxes of colorful cereals, and even deliver candy to children on certain religious holidays. In the ongoing hunger game between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, we always side with Bugs Bunny. We certainly wouldn’t want to see them die, much less demand their massacre by our consumption.

Thus, for the public to embrace rabbit meat as a more sustainable meat alternative to pork, beef, and poultry, rabbits will need to shift at least partly out of the domain of cultural icons and pets. Some people, however, are not on board with this. In August of 2014 a group of vocal protestors surrounded a Whole Foods Market in Union Square after the supermarket chain launched a rabbit meat pilot program earlier that year. The protestors carried signs reading “Whole Foods Market is now serving our pets” accompanied with an image of a fluffy white bunny flanked by a menacing fork and knife. While these protestors certainly do not speak for an entire country, they are emblematic of the level of discomfort many people have with the notion of eating an animal that we also feed, nurture, love. When it comes to the animal world we like our boundaries to be clear-cut: dogs are pets, cows are food. Yet these kinds of distinctions force us to overlook the environmental impacts of our eating habits. In reality, it is possible to love an animal that you know will eventually have to be killed. You can have your pet and eat it too.

Sorry Flopsy.

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Crickets are the new kale Our problems with eating insects appear to be almost the exact opposite of our problems with eating rabbits. In short, they repulse us. And so we swat, we slam our shoes against the wall, leaving nothing but the imprints of their gooey insides. But what if those very same gooey insides wound up on our plates?

The practice of eating bugs is, of course, nothing new. The Greeks did it. The Romans did it. John the Baptist did it. And many communities in Africa, Asia, and the Americas still harvest insects as a part of their diet. According to a report from the United Nations, insects are an important part of traditional diets for around two billion people, and more than 1,900 species of insects have been reportedly used as food. Nonetheless, there was a point when the practice of eating bugs in the United States moved out of the cultural norm and into the realm of the tantalizingly taboo. Bugs stopped populating our dinner plates and started making appearances on reality shows like Survivor or Fear Factor, solely for their shock value.

Yet the consumption of insects is slowly moving away from the abuses of reality television and general disgust. And entomophagy is much more prevalent than you may think. Bugs are even starting to squirm their way into high-class dining establishments in the United States and around the world. Noma, widely considered to be the best restaurant in the world, includes insects as a part of its menu. Hopefully, however, the consumption of insects will not be limited to high dining. Last year the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations wrote a report that elaborated the benefits of eating insects, urging us to do so in a world characterized by “rising cost of animal protein, food and feed insecurity, environmental pressures, population growth and increasing demand for protein among the middle classes.”

The environmental benefits of raising insects over more traditional forms of livestock are fairly simple to understand. Like rabbits, insects require far less land and water to thrive, and can even be raised on “organic side streams (including human and animal waste) [that] can help reduce environmental contamination,” according to the UN. In a world fretting over having enough land to feed our growing population, insects offer an appealing alternative. Additionally, insects are able to convert feed more efficiently than almost any other form of livestock. Every two kilograms of feed given to a cricket results in one kilogram of bodyweight gain. To put this in perspective it would require 20 kilograms of feed in order to produce the same amount of beef. Insects also release fewer greenhouse gasses (e.g. methane) and less ammonia than animals like cows or pigs. Add to this the fact that insects are often rich in protein, calcium, zinc, iron, and are a good source of fats and it is only a matter of time before the yoga moms catch wind of this.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Flying Ratatouille Though considered an urban nuisance, pigeons may also hold some of the answer to our problems around eating sustainably. Pigeons were originally brought to the United States as a source of food, a startling fact that is quite stunning considering that their only purpose now seems to be one of endless vexation. Nonetheless, pigeons hold vast potential for sustainable meat eating. For one, they are local (too local for most). They are able to thrive in a vast array of environmental conditions, they require very little food and water to rear, and their capacity to turn waste into useful product is a skill enviable by the most devout American capitalists.

The United States Department of Agriculture labels the pigeon as an invasive species, which they define as non-native species that is likely to cause harm to its ecosystem. A study by Cornell University on the environmental and economic costs associated with non-indigenous species in the United States asserts that the control cost of pigeons is around nine dollars per pigeon per year, or $1.1 billion total nationwide. Additionally, pigeons serve as “reservoirs and vectors for over 50 human and livestock diseases, including parrot fever, ornithosis, histoplasmosis, and encephalitis.” Thus, when considering pigeons as an invasive species, the consumption of their meat moves outside the realm of idiosyncratic dietary practice and into a perverse kind of environmental activism. By eating pigeon you are not only lessening your environmental footprint through a rejection of the factory farming system, but also aiding in the control of a species that has a very real impact on our urban environment.

Despite their problems, pigeons are the paragon of local eating, offering a logical alternative to our deeply ailing food system. And in case you feel inspired to hunt down the next pigeon that shits on your car, the pigeon’s status as an invasive species means they’re legal to hunt so long as the animal is treated humanely. Bon appétit.

Kanga-who?

Starting around 2010, the term kangatarianism was popularized to refer to a diet that excluded the consumption of all meat except for kangaroo. While this catchy neologism may seem rather silly, the diet is in fact built on deep environmental and ethical concerns. Unlike traditional livestock, Kangaroos roam freely, are killed humanely, are not given hormones, and eat a diet consisting mostly of grass. Kangaroos also have a type of bacteria in their stomach lining that allows them to digest food while emitting less methane than, say, cows or sheep. But perhaps the most considerable environmental allure of kangaroo is their status as a pest. Kangaroos are so overpopulated that they’re hunted by professional shooters according to a strict quota system. The consumption of kangaroo meat could therefore be crucial in maintaining the balance of the Australian ecosystem.

Despite the numerous ethical, environmental, and health (kangaroo is quite high in protein and low in fat) benefits of eating kangaroo meat, it remains a hard sell for the Australian population at large. Many locate the blame of this continued unpopularity in the question of nomenclature. While we call our pigs “pork” and our cattle “beef,” kangaroos lack any kind of commonplace culinary designation that is able to separate what we see on our plate from what we see in the fields. As a result, the requisite psychological distance from the item one might see on a menu doesn’t exist. In a 2005 competition spearheaded by Food Companion International Magazine, the name “australus” was chosen as the culinary name to resolve this issue, but as of now it hasn’t been recognized in any official capacity—menus and supermarkets continue to peddle “kangaroo steak.”

More importantly, many Australian people may seem to take issue with the idea of eating an animal that is such an important cultural symbol. The kangaroo appears on the Australian coat of arms and has hopped its way firmly into the national conscience.

The fact that Australia’s Aboriginal people have been eating kangaroo for over 60,000 years doesn’t appear to have altered these attitudes. Nonetheless, the environmental and ethical rationale for eating the animal is quite sound. And while some may interpret the act as offensive, the consumption of kangaroo meat is a sensible (and delicious) way to ameliorate the nation’s pest problems along with the environmental degradation associated with the production of other meats. Perhaps the Unites States could also adopt a similar mode of pest management. Cockroach anyone?

Jamie Packs B’17 for the record, is a vegetarian

JANUARY 30 2015

SCIENCE

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I rejected your kiss, kids – and time, who drowns for me as

salt mine

the lights kiss – I

drownyour with kiss, you and I rejected kids – and our time, who kiss, deaths drowns for me as kids! kiss – I the lights drown with you and our deaths kiss,

we run seawards –

kids!shoot us, and seawards, shot in

we run seawards – shoot us, and seawards, in–the the saltshot mine andsalt mine – and seaward, your

seaward, your kiss! the sea

kiss!drowns the sea drowns in flits, her corpse flits,inher corpse streams – cremate streams – cremate her – in her – in fire, the blood fire,swell the blood streams streams to the loam. swell through the loam.

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literary

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

It took some extensive web research to figure out what, exactly, broomball is. The images that come up look like photo-day portraits of hockey teams, and the action shots have players huddled around a goal. But one thing stands out: nobody, in broomball, wears skates. If you feel like slipping and sliding through the Kennedy Place ice, late at night, RSVP at alexandanicitycenter.com

Friday, January 30 Rhode Island Broomball Meetup 10PM - 11PM // Two Kennedy Plaza, Providence, RI 02903

Our mother never writes us in college, so will you?

ListtheIndy@gmail.com

It’s gonna be hot.

Friday, January 30 Free Bikram Yoga Class 4:30 PM // Ocean State Be Yoga, 560 Mineral Spring Ave, Pawtucket, RI 02860

Saturday, January 31 Doodlers

Another Tequila Sunrise: A Tribute to the Eagles 8PM // Stadium Theater, 28 Monument Square, Woonsocket, RI, 02895 // $21 - 26 There’s no reason why the musicians who wrote the parts actually play them best.

10:30 AM - 12PM // Roger Williams Park Zoo, Providence, RI 02907

This is the first day of the Arab Comics exhibition, which focuses on Arab children’s comics throughout the 20th century and the “Arabization” of comics like Mickey, Tintin, and Superman. The exhibit will be up for a month, including a half-day symposium on February 26th. Mark your calendars, and we’ll mark ours.

Sunday, February 1 Arab Comics: 90 Years of Popular Visual Culture All day // Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street, Providence, RI

Moderated by Professor Tricia Rose, this panel will feature a discussion between Chris Burbank, the commissioner of the Salt Lake City Police Department; Farhana Khera, the President and Executive Director of Muslim Advocates; and Heather Ann Thompson, a professor in History and African

A guest lecture from Kimberly Juanita Brown, a Visiting Scholar in Gender Studies at the Pembroke Center, Brown University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvard University. Her forthcoming book, The Repeating Body:

Monday, February 2 Slavery’s Visual Resonance in the Contemporary, focuses on Black imagery, both literary and visual, after the Civil Rights movement.

Police Profiling: Causes and Consequences 5PM - 6:30 PM // Building for Environmental Research & Teaching, Room 130, 85 Waterman St, Providence, RI 02912

Tuesday, February 3

American Studies at Temple University. The panel will focus on “police policies that have fueled extensive racial and other profiling, and the expansion of mass incarceration” Free & open to the generalpublic.

Handmade Pasta Class 6PM // the Cafe at Easy Entertaining, 166 Valley St. Providence, RI // $39 You could be rolling [in] dough.

Call 401-437-6090 for reservations.

Wednesday, February 4

Mushroom Hunting 6:30 PM // Rogers Free Library, 525 Hope St., Bristol, RI Rhode Island, apparently, has a robust mushroom history. Ryan Bouchard, author/photographer of Gourmet Mushrooms of Rhode Island will be joined

by Emily Schmidt, a mushroom enthusiast and nutritionist, for some free fungal fun.

Sure, the Super Bowl isn’t until Sunday, but the point of tailgating is to chill hard before the game, so there’s no reason why a Saturday morning doesn’t qualify. It’s free with zoo admission (which is half price in February), and sources say that the snow leopards and moon bears will be in on the day’s theme.

Super Bowl Tail-Gating Party

Adults are welcome too, I’m pretty sure. There will be “a variety of materials and drawing tools,” and a large collaborative mural. Color me.

12PM - 1:30 PM // Churchill House, 155 Angell Street, Providence, RI 02912

5 -7 PM // 705 Westminster St, Providence, Rhode Island 02903

Saturday, January 31

10 AM - 3 PM // Providence Childrens Museum, 100 South Street

Double Exposures: Slavery and Memory in the Contemporary

Mid-Year Makings at New Urban Arts

Saturday, January 31

New Urban Arts builds a vital community that empowers young people as artists and leaders to develop a creative practice they can sustain throughout their lives. Come celebrate the student’s midyear projects and enjoy some free candy to boot.

Monday, February 2

Friday, January 30

You’re gonna be sweaty. For some people, this is like, the most satisfying thing ever. A free class is a great way to get hooked … or decide it’s really, seriously not your thing. The class is free or donations, which will benefit Give Peace Scholarship, are accepted.

Thursday, February 5 Lil Duval 8PM // Comedy Connection, 39 Warren Ave, East Providence, RI 02914 // $22

Lil Duval is a comedian signed to T.I.’s record label, and Tip vouches pretty hard: “He’s someone who says what everyone else is thinking and scared to say. He talks about life’s most difficult and embarrassing moments. To take these things and find ways to make people laugh, especially when folks see fit to cry, is comedy at its finest.” Those are some sweet credentials.