Volume 32 - Issue 3

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va lid once 11/19/99 - 11/26/ 99 only

2

THE NEw JoulU'IAl

Volume 32, Number 3 Novernberr9, 1999

TheNewJournal FEATURES 8

War a.nd Peace

by Jada Yuan

<.Apeace activist says Senator Lieberman spends too much time criticizing Hollywood violence and not enough time fighting the real thing.

12

Selling the Drama

by Alan Schoenfeld

7he tragic foil ofa Yale Drama School graduate.

14

The College Try ~w

18

by Sydney Leavens

Haven is a college town, but can its public high school students get in?

Breaking a Sweat

by Anya Kamenetz

Trying to change the world one college at a time-to Kathie Lee's chagrin.

22

Sub-Contract Killers

by Alexander Dworkowitz

'Branford students will be reunited with their college next year.

Will union workers return to their jobs?

24

When Viruses Attack

by Michael Gerber

Connecticut scientists have controlled an outbreak ofWest Nile Encephalitis-for now.

28

The Right Stuff by Daniel Brook Did Richard Levin jettison his radical beliefi on his meteoric rise to power?

32

Shots in the Dark: Music to the Eyes

38

Dueling Personalities

byWhimeyGrace

by John Swansburg

roo years after Borges's birth, do we remember facts or Ficciones?

STAN DAR OS 4

Points of Departure

42

Essay: Clean Sweep by Andr~w Youn

44

The Critical Angle: Hartman's Greatest Crits by Simon Hanft r~vi~wing A Critic's journey, Geoffrey Hartman Endnote: The Million-Dollar Men by Ian Bluhu

46

THE NEW JouRNAL i$ published five times during the acadtmic year by TH£ NEW jOURNAL at Yalt, Inc.• P.O. Box HJ1 Yalt Station, Ntw Haven, CT o6s10. Ofliet address: 112 Park Sr~. Phon<: (10J) 4J1•19S7· All contents copyright C 1999 by TH£ NEW JouRNAL ar Yalt, Inc. All Righrs Rcst:ved. Reproduction eithtr in whol< or in part without writtm permission of rh< publishtr and editor in chitf is prohibited.

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All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserv< rh< right to edit alllttt<rs fOr publication.

Test Anxiety Her voice negotiating a path between resolute politician and placating mother, Stare Senator Toni Harp assures me that a recent Connecticut law mandating HIV testing for newborns benefits born infants and rheir families. The law, as Harp explains it, prescribes routine and uniform HIV resting within 48 hours of birth and is primarily intended to limit HTV contraction by newborns. She elaborates with an impressive statistic-the 30 percent risk of an infant receiving Hrv from irs mother can be reduced ro 8 percent if rhe baby is treated within 48 hours. Harp labors through her endorsement of the law before accelerating co rehearsed sound bites: "Children deserve the right to have someone care for them knowing what mey're up against. Whar mother wouldn't want this?"

Her plea is convincing. Who would oppose a law seeking to combat HIV transmission co infants? Bur, as legal briefs challenging rhe law indicare, it's not that simple.

The 31 member hospitals of the Connecticut Hospital Association (CHA), in concert with oilier Connecticut medical facilities, have filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the srarure. Why would hospitals oppose scare legislation benefitting newborns? The answer to !his question lies ourside tl1e frame of public health in the murkier areas of privacy,

~

patient-doctor relations. Viewed in terms of these rights and privileges, the law no longer seems the boon co public welfare char Harp champions.

"It's a back-door way of testing the mother," Jennifer Jackson, general counsel for the CHA, crisply asserts. "Newborns do not create their own antibodies, so any test of the newborn's antibodies is acrually a test of the mother." The law, it turns out, is nor precisely what Harp has explained. HIV tests. are nor routinely administered to every newborn- only to chose whose mothers have refused testing during pregnancy. If the woman has not been tested earlier in her pregnancy, she is tested during active labor unless she objects in writing. Her objection is ultimately meaningless, however, because her child's antibodies-which are the mother's, not the child's own-are tested at birth, revealing the mother's HIV status. A positive test result does not indicate that the child has contracted HIV, but merely that the mother is HIV positive.

Senator Harp compares HIV testing to routine testing for other conditions, such as siclde-cell anemia. When I ask about the stigma associated with AIDS, Harp admits that women may be concerned. " People fear the test will get into the wrong hands and have a negative impacr"-she quickly glides back into politician mode-"bur the issues have changed. People are living with AIDS, not dying. We focus on how to support people while they live and work. We need to get the word our." Her enthusiasm is disconcertingly saccharine compared co Jackson's candid warning. "AIDS needs to be treated, prevented, and handled differently &om other diseases," she cautions. "The stigma associated with AIDS is a genuine threat."

The CHA argues that resting a woman's antibodies against her will, however circuitously, constitutes an unreasonable search forbidden by the Fourth Amendment.

The law also violates a woman's ~) right tO privacy, claims me CHA,

/ ' 4

~

bccauoe <he =ring ;nvad<> h"

body and is not confidential. At least one ocher person-the doctor-has access to the results.

Privacy and Fourth Amendment rights are legitimate concerns. For the CHA, they are also valuable weapons in winning a judicial battle. In me United Scares, where controversial political debates are often played our in the courtroom, it's best to be well armed with constitutional protections and court precedents. But for the medical professionals involved, legal considerations are secondary ro the health risks of compulsory HIV resting.

For one, the HIV test isn't infallible.

Wim a false positive rate of approximately one percent, the rest will incorrectly diagnose roughly 420 infants born in Connecticut per year, me CHA claims.

These infants are likely co be treated with powerful drugs such as AZT, the long-term effects of which are nor yet known, and the false diagnosis will also place unnecessary stress on the mother during the already stressful postpartum period.

More important to the CHA, however, is me burden placed on patient-doctor relations. "The law is in many ways counterproductive," insists Jackson. "When the mother is rested against her will, this violates the crust between her and her provider, and she may cease to seek health care." The law only mandates resting for HIV, nor treatment. If a woman feels that rhe system is working against rather than wim her, she may abandon courses of treatment and even avoid giving birth at the hospital.

The CHA, Jackson is quick to emphasize, does not oppose all resting bur mainrains that "a therapeutic, ramer man coercive, setting enhances the mother's trust in the medical community and prompts her to take appropriate health measures." Also, resting the child is far less effective than testing the mother during pregnancy, because most HIV transmission occurs during labor and delivery, and caesarean-seccion deliveries and proper drugs can reduce Hrv transmission rates to three percent.

The CHA boasts that the system it advo-

THE

New JouRNAL

cates-comprehensive prenatal counseling with testing strongly recommendedyields voluntary testing rates of approximately 99 percent of pregnant women.

U ltimately, then, the question is not whether testing is desirable. No one wanrs infanrs to be born with HIV, and all concur that testing is a necessary first step in preventing transmission of the virus. Who can disagree with Senator Harp that mothers should want to take all measures necessary to reduce the chances of passing HIV on to their children, including testing themselves and their infanrs?

But the controversy surrounding the new law extends f.u beyond blood testS, plucking insistently at the tensio n between government regulations and individual righrs, public welfare and personal privacy.

Is a guess at a child's HIV st~tus worth the risk of isolating the mother from the medical establishment? Is it wise to strong-arm the relatively few women who will not test voluntarily, or would it be wiser to mandate counseling that appeals to maternal concerns? Ultimately, the courts must decide which will dietate social policy: government paternalism or maternal righrs.

-]~ica

Bulman

Cleaning House When a two year-old has lived with a bottle for his entire life, getting him to give it up can be tricky. T here's a glue that binds him to the feel of the plastic nipple and the readily accessible juice. But that glue has to be broken, though the process can be painful. While this child is adjusting to milk from a sipper cup, just a few rooms away his mother is undergoing group therapy to overcome her own more destructive addiction. Located on Howe Street in downtown New Haven, Amethyst House is an organization that helps mothers overcome their drug addictions in a live-in program while providing intensive support and treatment for their young children.

Women enter the program on their OWn initiative. The program is essentially bee; the women pay with welfare checks to

NOVI!MBER 19, 1999

emphasize the role they play in their own recovery. Mothers may bring children five years old or younger. These condensed families live and work together in order to keep the program running. Daily chores are divided among the women receiving treatment, and a network of relationships builds quickly. Mothers take turns watching each other's children, soon developing attachments to those in their care. T he program provides the stability these kids have lacked for much of their lives.

"The issues are so out there with kids-neglect is here. It's a part of life," said Bernetta Witcher-Boeteng, program director. "But these kids love their mothers, and they want to be with them."

Children frequently enter with emotional issues, speech problems and, in some infants, body rigidity stemming from heroin damage in uuro. Amethyst does not treat severe phsysical problems but deals with the impact drug-addicted p arents have on their children.

"It is crucial to intervene while these kids are younger," said Witcher-Boeteng.

"Most of the impact is environmental. It is scabiliry versus insanity."

In therapeutic nursery school groups, kids begin to learn skills to help them interact with their peers. According to Wendy Cohn, the children in her care must learn how to express themselves verbally, emotionally, and artistically, and how to get along in a peaceful way with the others.

Along with developing social skills, the nursery school works in conjunction with therapy to reinforce progress. For example, young children with articulation problems may be taught a form of sign language that is used by the therapist, the mother, and the nursery school teacher. As language develops further, teachers begin to reinforce what the child vocalizes, and sign language becomes obsolete.

Amethyst does not stop at alleviating language and peer interaction problems.

Bill Mannie, parent educator and family clinician, works with mothers and children in a weekly session called Watch, Wait, and Wonder to repair mother/child relation-

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ships. Many children who enter the program are the victims of abuse and neglect, and have had to care for themselves and often younger siblings. "These sessions reestablish trust," said Cohn. "The kids are taught new coping strategies and skills along with their mothers in a safe and secure p lace."

Often, a stay at Amethyst House puts women back on their feet and in a position to take control of their lives, as well as the lives of their children. However, things do n ot always work as planned. Women relapse, leave withou t notice, miss sessions and bring in illegal substances, which often means the end of a stay at Amethyst for the wo men and their ch ildren. A lapse in recovery places kids with relatives or in foster care--as social workers and the courts decide--and the chances of the mother regaining custody are uncertain.

Such a transition tears at the stability Amethyst has worked to build.

For those kids still living in the smaJI family bedrooms across the hall ftom the nursery, life continues as usual. Ultimately, however, the goal is for Families to leave Amethyst. The p rogram is available to women for a year, after which t he staff hopes that families will be able to live on their own without further problems with drugs or alcohol. Ideally, Amethyst gives children the time to develop at a normal pace in a healthy setting, leaving them with skills that can be taken to public school and eventually out into their lives, ending the ab use and instability of their early childhood.

-Emily Br=nig

Fed Up "Fat acceptance." "Size rights." "Size diversity empowerment." "Size esteem." Over the past thirty years, fat activists have coined these and similar terms in a grassroots effon to fight size-based social and economic discri mination. The last of those terms, "size esteem," was coined by Richard Stimson, a size-righ ts and mental health activist and co-director of New H avenbased Largesse, the Network for Size Esteem. "Size esteem is a very imponant

6

component of your health," says Stimson, Richard's wife and the fou nder of Largesse.

"We're interested in peop le's health-mental, social, physical-in depen dently of weight loss. Everyone deserves to feel good about their body, as well as about themselves generaJiy." Karen Stimson became active in the size-righ ts movement shortly after its inception in 1969. Despite h er efforts to open discussion about the issue and to bring important size-rights even ts to New Haven, city residents have been relatively unresponsive. "It's a fairly conservative area," says Karen.

The size-rights movement began in 1969 with the founding of NAAPA, the National Association to Aid Fat Americans, now known as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. NAAFA originally

The definition of size esteem is "feeling acceptance of, respect for, and pride in one's body, whatever its size or shape" p romoted civil rights for fat people and helped to focus the movement, but made few substantial gains for fat acceptance.

During the 19705, a group of radical fat feminists broke away from the movement, publishing position papers, writing a Fat Liberation Manifesto, and generally shaping fat politics. Medical research of the late 1970s and early 1980s supported the fat underground's claims that diets do not work and that being fat is not a health hazard. This research, especially the work done

by Susan Wooley, an eating d isorders specialist at the University of Cincinnati, also gave the size-rights movem ent inroads into the academic community.

At the same time, growing grass-roots efforts to organize and discuss fat-rights issues in Boston, Atlanta and Min neapolis brought the message to a wider audience.

T he first Fat Feminist Active Working Meeting was held in New Haven in 1980 with 17 participants from around the country, including Karen Stimson. Five of those women were invited to form a keynote

panel at a women's health fair going on at the same time. This marked the first time the fem inist community acknowledged size-rights issues.

Around the time of the fat feminist convention, Karen was also involved in alternative radio and fat women's consciousness-raising in New Haven. In 1982, she founded a fat support group which grew into a broad er national network with the help of groups in several other states. In the late 1980s Largesse scarred publishing ..size-esteem bulletins and a newslener entitled "Nothing to Lose," in addition to selling legal in formation and size-empowerment kits. Largesse no longer distributes print material, b u t the Stimsons are currently trying to make their substantial arch ive of fat-rights information available at the new Largesse website. "We've evolved ftom a group to a publishing company to a resource network, and that's what we are now. By having stuff on the web, it's accessib le to everybody," says Karen.

The site currently provides a variety of resources-legal in formation, self-help literature, archives of the fat liberation movement, information about International No Diet D ay, and links to oth er groups and fat-acceptance websites. The open ing page displays two of Richard's contributions to the size rights movement: the definition of size esteem as "feeling acceptance of, respect for, and pride in one's b ody, whatever its size or shape," and his "Invocation for the Size Righ ts Movement," a poem about the struggle against size oppression. "Let the voices for size rights be heard," it begins, "From the highest mounrain to the deepest valley /In cities, towns, and villages I wherever humankind may dwell." Karen's writings are also featured prominendy on the site. Her "Fat Feminist Herstory, 1969-1993" details the history of the sizerights movement and her participation in it. T he Stimsons together composed a series of ten affirmations for size esteem, such as "I am strong, healthy and beautiful just the weigh I am right n ow."

Despite h er lengthy career as a sizerights activist, Karen does not see her role as a movement leader. "My style has always been to lead from the rear, which is to

T H E NEW JouRNAL

influence people," she says. "We're not really interested in putting ourselves out as leaders of the movement. We're more interested in helping individuals arfd providing links for people to other groups and information, whether that's weight-discrimination resources, finding an attorney, finding information for their kid." Personal responses to the Stimsons in the form of daily letters and emails, often from high school, college and graduate students, show that the information does indeed reach and affect people. Karen also has observed broader changes in American attitudes toward size rights during her career.

"There's been a real evolution in public perception about people of size and I think rhe size-rights movement has been largely responsible for that. In some ways we've made a lot of strides ahead. We've got a long way to go," she said.

But isn't being fat unhealthy? "You have to be careful about what I call the medical propaganda wing of the diet industry," Karen warns. According to her, medical standards for healthy body weights have been revised downward while people have been getting taller, and ·these factors combined tend to skew statistics.

Nonetheless, it is unclear whether this can account for the dramatic increases in weight shown in recent reports. The Centers for Disease Control reponed that 17.8 percent of Americans were considered obese in 1998, up from 12 percent in 1991.

Although New Haven activists have helped to promote the size-rights movement, size-rights activism has largely died our here. "New Haven doesn't have an active size-rights group at this point and hasn't for a while," says Karen. The closest NAAFA chapter, located in Milford, has little effect on the New Haven community. So while New Haven, specifically Largesse, remains the home of extensive archives documenting the emergence of the sizerights movement, its residents must cultivate size .esteem on their own. The Stimsons, meanwhile, will continue to make their archives available over the net, hoping, as Richard says in his "Invocation for the . Size Rights Movement," to "· .. plant in the hearts and I minds I Of every child, woman, and man I The seeds of size diversity I empowerment."

-Nadia Sussman NOVEMBER 19, 1999 ~

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2, 1999, WAS A TYPICAL first Friday ~:-~~!'ft·~~ Colville. He led a prayer meeting at 9 A.M~il·(i~ fruit and vegetables at the Caesar Jerez Catholic until 12:30 PM, and drove from New Haven to Hartford in time for the 3:30 vigil outside the office of Senator Joseph Lieberman. After reading aloud from a leaflet entitled, "Either Jesus is a liar, or war is never necessary," Colville and 12 of his friends gathered in a circle and held hands to gain strength for the action they believed had become necessary. They then chose four from their ranks to enter the building at One State Street. Colville was one of the four.

"We went there with a deep sense of urgency, knowing that we had a right and an obligation to be there--knowing what we know," Colville said at his trial on November 4· He was charged with the routine first-degree criminal trespass anyone might get for kneeling in the hallway outside the Senaror's private office and praying for him to stop u.s. bombings and sanctions on Iraq. Now Colville and rwo of the men who entered that haUway with him, Brian Kavanagh and Cal Robertson, are serving 30-day jail sentences that began on Wednesday, November 10. The fourth, Hillel Arnold, avoided jail time because it was his first offense.

Colville's three children don't mind having their father in jailthey gee to travel from place to place and stay with clifferent people when visiting him. But for Colville and his wife, Luz, the prospect is considerably less attractive. He's been down this road before.

Three years ago, on Ash Wednesday, Colville was arrested for what non-violent protesters term a "plowshares action." The name comes from Isaiah 2:4: " ... they shaU beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." Taking his cue from the prophet, Colville boarded the USS Sullivans nuclear submarine in Maine, carrying a household hammer on which h is children had painted the words, "Love thy enemies" and "Thou shalt not kill." Along with five other protesters he then pounded the missile hatches with his hammer and poured his own blood on the deck of the ship in a symbolic attempt to "turn a weapon of desuuccion into a cool for life." The protest, one of 6o or 70 performed in the u.s. since 1980, brought him a 13-month sentence from a federal court. He was released on parole three weeks short of a year. If his parole officer chooses co cite him for chis latest violation, Colville will face another nine months in a federal penitentiary.

Why would Colville, a Catholic Worker House resident who has dedicated his life to working with the poor in New Haven's Hill neighborhood, undertake an action chat might separate him from his family and his community for so long? What were the issues

J

ULY

8

posed such "imminent harm" that Colville to act? Why clid they target Senator do the demands of the "Lieberman Four"-as Lieberman.

Arnold jokingly calls them-have to do with the rest of us? The answers, Colville tells me, are all connected to his general activism against violence and the military-indusuial complex. Plowshares actions and sanctions protests, he says, are just the beginning of a larger fight for "fundamental institutional and social change" toward a peaceful society. And for Colville, who sees violence every day on the streets of his neighborhood and knows about auocities in Iraq from Luz's many relief trips, that fight begins at home. His opponents: a "hypocritical" senator who supports war while opposing violence in television and movies; and the national defense indusuy--one of the biggest revenue producers in the state of Connecticut. :.vuc~v<;u.,u

M

£NTION THE "Btc THREE" of the Connecticut defense industry and you'll hear rousing support and the catchphrase, "Connecticut is a winner," from nearly every congressional representative or senator in the state. Together, the state's largest defense corporations form a powerful conglomerate and a strong reason for the continued Bow of federal defense contracts into the state. Electric Boat is one of only two nuclear submarine manufacturers in the counuy; Sikorsky Aircrafrs is producing the newest and most advanced wave of arcack helicopters; and Pratt & Whitney, the state's largest corporate employer, is one of rwo u.s. companies that produce turbine jet engines capable of breaking the sound barrier. Accorcling to Frederick Downey, Lieberman's Assistant for Defense and Foreign Policy, these corporations 611 crucial roles in American defense capabilities and are vital to national security. The loss of Electric Boat, for instance, would leave the u.s. with only one facility for the manufacture of nuclear submarines.

The need to sustain these security capabilities has created in Connecticut what Mark Sullivan, Director of Communications and a second generation employee at Pratt & Whitney, terms the "Silicon Valley" effect: even if most people aren't officiaUy employed by the defense indusuy, they still work for it in some capacity.

While the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development lists only an estimated 6o,ooo employees in the defense sector, it lists five times as many in manufacturing as a whole. Accorcling to Sullivan, much of Conn~cticut's manufacturing sector relies in part on subconuacts from corporations like Pratt & Whimey, which produces less than half of the pares in the engines it assembles. Even without subcontracting, defense con-

TH£ N£W JouRNAL

<.Apeace activist says Senator Lieberman spends too much time criticizing Hollywood violenu and not enough time fighting the real thing.

by Jada Yuan tracts alone can significantly boost the state's economy. Not only do federal investments bring the state around sr.J billion in revenue a year, they also bring in jobs, which bring in employees, who bring in families, who bring caxable income to the state.

The benefits of these defense contracts, however, are deceiving. Federal defense spending in the decade since the end of the Cold War has decreased by 40 percent. This decrease has prompted an industry shift from production to high-tech research and development. With the shift to research and development has come a shift in the work force, from the highly-skilled machinists Connecticut has been breeding since the middle of the 19th century co the specialized engineers its universities don't yet produce. While the dollars in defense contracts remain high, they pay for fewer of the new, more advanced products and fewer of the new, more educated workers. Over the past ten years, Pratt & Whitney's employment base has fallen by ro,ooo people nacionwide--8,000 in Connecticut alone. Sikorsky also has plans to cut r,roo people from its Connecticut work force in the next year. In what seems to be an effort to soften the effects of downsizing, United Tech nologies-the Fortune 500 umbrella company that includes Prate & Whitney and Sikorsky-has recently announced the consolidation of its West Palm Beach, Florida, and Connecticut Facilities. The move promises to bring new jobs to Connecticut, bu t-since the plan also calls for the transfer of most Florida employees-not to Connecticut residents.

To supplement the loss of revenue from developing more sophisticated technologies, Sikorsky and Pratt & Whitney have been forced to seek out new marketplaces for the less sophisticated products they still make. In addition to developing their commercial airplane engine and helicopter lines, the two companies have begun to accrue lucrative contracts from foreign governments. Both Pratt & Whimey and Sikorsky's websites read like advertising campaigns, and the hardest sales pitches come in the descriptions of military products. The Sikorsky site labels the UH-6o Black Hawk, ~erica's Helicopter." Representative Jim Malone calls it "a big pick-up" for the deployment of troops and supplies. "Rock-steady ~ran of 20 years-and counting," the website goes on. " Black Hawk Oies wherever duty calls. Desert conditions. Arctic climates.

Hot and high. Carrying up to u troops, fully equipped." Together, dte two companies sell military products co approximately 27 coun-

NOVEMBER 19, 1999

tries, including Argentina, Colombia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Turkey, Korea, and China. The State Department strictly regulates such sales co foreign governments, but the recent state-approved decision to sell Black Hawks to Turkey has worried even Malone, a supporter of military sales to America's NATO allies. "There are gray cases that need to be carefully considered," he says. "We can't be blind co how Turkey, as an ally of ours, has conducted itself cowards Greece, another NATO ally, and to the Kurds." The decision of the companies anc'. the federal government co proceed with sales that are of questionable value to our national interests has little co do with either our protection from "the dangerous world in which we live"-the o t her catch-phrase of Connecticut congressmen-or the interests of Connecticut workers. It seems, instead, a rather poorly disguised :mempt to maintain a defense industry that Colville and ochers wo¡.1ld say has outlived its usefulness.

(( T

tiE GOVERNMENT IS NOT ONLY UNWILLI NG, but unable to disarm. It's powerless to stop building these weapons," ColviiJe tells me as we sit on his porch discussing his ideas about war and Connecticut's defense industry. "At best it comes to, ' How can I take apart a few token weapons and still save my ass?'"

Colville's strident and unremitting opinions come from his lonP commitment to social justice and his Faith in Jesus, "a non-vialen; God." His experiences have taught him to make connections between all acts of violence, including those he sees on the streets of r-.¡,ew H aven , those he knows about on the streets of Baghdad, and the "weapons of mass destruction" he believes perpetuate them 'ooth. The plowshares action against the building of nuclear submarines and the stand against sanctions that, according to Colville, have killed enough Iraqis to constitute war crimes, were not two separate protests with two separate goals. "In this line of work everything's connected," he says. "It's aU about [our government's] commitment to violence and war."

9

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Colville's active resistance to violence and war is something he began five years ago, when he and Luz decided co move to New Haven and form their own branch of the Catholic Worker's movement. The movement centers on che belief that you can only serve the poor by becoming one of the poor. "We take a vow of voluntary poverty," Colville says. "We live in solidarity with the poor, share all resources, and call nothing our own." T he New Haven house-which consists of Colville, his wife and children, and a rotating group of individual supporters who have either gone off to do work elsewhere or started houses of their own-volunteers its services to neighbors in need and survives on donations from Rachel's Table, a community food bank. Each day, they open their tiny house to the neighborhood for prayer, conversation, and a hoc meal.

Despite its name, the Catholic Worker's movement-at lease in Colville's assessment-is a rebellion against the Catholic "good works" practice of feeding the poor without ever attempting to understand their problems. His experiences living in an impoverished neighborhood, he says, have given him license and even a duty to question "the system [that] has always worked on my behalf." In his attempts to come to terms with the violence he encounters in his neighborhood each day, he has created a theory on the nature of empire, on what he believes to be the inherent desire of governments to dominate the weak and the poor. In adherence co this desire, he maintains, the United Stares supporced slavery and--once that was abolished-a system for economic oppression at home and military oppression abroad. By sitting back and quietly going about his work in the Hill neighborhood, Colvill.: believes he would be ignoring the roots of the problem and perpetuating that sysn~m. "If you're not standing against [government] policies in a concrete way," he explaim·, "then what are you doing feeding the hungry?"

Colville take.~ his stand against the "violent" government in actions ranging from breaking and .:ntering, destruction of property and trespass to tax evasion.

"Resisting is a holistic pursuit. It involves the whole person and every facer oflife," he says. "Resistance beg.\ns with refusal-1 refuse to kill. I refus,-: to participate in

killing. I refuse to pay for killing. I want to put my money towards life-giving pursuits."

"It's personal liberation," he goes on, speaking of the plowshares action. "In some way it takes my name off those weapons. It's important to me as a parent.

Ifl tell my kids I believe what I believe, I've got to do this."

Colville walks with a slouch and dresses in faded, sometimes dirty blue jeans or sweats, but on the witness stand or in the car, whenever he begins co talk about his beliefs, he gains an incredible authoritative

presence. Once you get past the huge scope of his complaints against United States imperialism-which he believes has echoes back to the Roman Empire-his arguments become lucid, even inspirational.

"Mark's incredible in court," says Steven Borla, the admiring 21-year-old founder of the Bridgeport Catholic Worker's house, who lived with Colville for two years.

Colville is 38, but he looks older. He's got the haggard face of someone who has seen roo much of the world. He jokes and laughs frequently, especially with his three children, Soledad, Keeley, and Justin, but his duty to his conscience and his faith clearly weigh heavily on his mind. "You're responsible for what you know," he says.

"You have a conscienct , you have a body, you have a voice. Now how are you going to use them?"

THE NEW JouRNAL

That's why he entered the office of Senator Joseph Lieberman on July 2.. For nearly two years, every first Friday of the month, Colville and others had held a vigil outside Lieberman's office. They had written letters and sat in the waiti!'g room of his office numerous times with no response. By July 2., Colville and the others believed that the situation in Iraq had gone from bad to worse and that the "imminent harm" to Iraqis posed by continued sanctions and bombings had to be stopped.

They went to the waiting area, then tried the door leading to the private offices, which for some reason had been left unlocked. They then knelt down in the hallway just inside the door, praying, reading from their leaflet, and ringing a bell every 12. minutes to toll the death of an Iraqi child.

Colville had been hearing horror stories about conditions in Iraq ever since che beginning of the Gulf War, when the United States and the United Nations first imposed sanctions. The sanctions were geared toward deposing Saddam Hussein and diminishing Iraqi capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, but nine years later, neither goal has been accomplished. The United States and the United Nations continue to deny the.lraqi people food, medicine, and monetary aid. Colville claims the sanctions have direcrly caused the deaths of half a million Iraq is-without food and medicine they cannot live and without monetary aid they cannot rebuild their bombed-out sewage, water treatment, and electric plants.

Colville's complaints against Lieberman include specific attacks on his pro-defense, pro-sanction, and pro-bombing stance. Lieberman, Colville claims, has not only given vocal support to continued bombings and sanctions in Iraq, but also recendy signed a letter to the President calling for stricter sanctions and more frequent bombings. Ironically, at the same time Lieberman has advocated war in Iraq and the build-up of Connecticut's defense industry, he has taken a public stand against violence in the media-<:onnecting movies like Scr~am with the shootings at Columbine High School. For Colville, opposition to violence in one arena cannot logically coexist with support for violence in another. One of his purposes in entering Lieberman's office was "to demand that

Senator Lieberman find his conscience with regard to the death of children outside this country... and that he acknowledge the hypocrisy in opposing media violence while supporting the real violence of sanctions in Iraq."

Back in the same Hartford courtroom where he had taken the stand to espouse his beliefs and watched the jury convict him in half an hour, Colville calmly refused to sign an agreement with the judge not to commit further crimes. "If we srop resisting," he explained to me four days earlier, "it means we've stopped making connections, or acknowledging that they exist. Iraq is the war du jour. When they stop the sanctions, we don't just fold up our signs and go home."

With three of their loudest critics firmly locked away, Lieberman, Connecticut, and the federal government can breathe a collective sigh of relief. It postpones the inevitable--a good hard look at a defense industry whose value to national, state, and human interests has become increasingly difficult to defend. To many, Colville's views seem radical, his methods unlikely to effect change. But recenrly his warnings of doom have begun to penetrate the consciences of even Connecticut's typically pro-defense congressmen. Two weeks ago, Malone, a defense moderate, and New Haven's Representative Rosa Delauro, a strong force behind continued defense allocations to Sikorsky, introduced to Congress the Food and Medicine for the World Act, which would lift u.s. unilateral sanctions on Iraq. For Colville, caught between the law of his God and the law of his land, the issue has become survival--one he intends to pursue regardless of the likelihood of actually affecting public policy.

"Connecticut is a real dump," he told me wistfully before being remanded to cusIll) tody. "I love living here."

Requected Oonot1on $10 ($8 s1udenls/--.lors)

The New Journal Thanks: Saurav Sarkar Christine Evans Quassi.m Cassaro Brian Leche

]ada Yuan, a smior in Branford Co/kg~. is on th~

staffofTNJ.

W. Bjorn Hans Gus

11

Qfla~, M.uGAaBi' Hou.otrAY HOPES TO PLAY MJ!.ov.. She wants tO .U. ofF rbc diny clothing she wears every day and .don the cle$.ba ofEuripides' aagic: queen. Far ftom the stoop in front of :wbimey Sucer Willoughby's whete she begs for money, she will out the impassioned I8F of a woman driven insane by jealousy. that clay is &r ofE And oddly, it is &rthcr off roday than it wu d-9- ,an ..,, when HoUoway was a fOrmidable talent in the Yak School of. Drama.

Koown by 11101t Yale students as ..the homdess black woman Who rec::ius Sh•kapea'l'e," HoUoway's life srory unfolds like a «<ek ~ in which the heroine's flaw is not pride or indecision. hue lmeocal ~ Her story is 10 intriguing. in &a, that a fixmer tf1111Da1C o( hers &om BeaniJ1aton College in Vermont spent two ~this sun;uner makins a doc:umentary about her life.

J;loUoway paduated from Bennington in 197o4 with a

f

:lachcller'a ~ in acting. She subsequently came to dte Yale

&:hoot Of Diama as a member of the acting class. But her time at ..... llrama School was short. About a month into her 6nt leiJlCS-, - . HoUoway auditioned for a production of fellow #Udca:t Christopher Durans's play Detlth ComG to Us AJJ. M119 Ap4 She was cast as a hypersexual maid who was sleeping with iocatuoul Olia boys. •r couldn't handle the casting.• Holloway saicL •1 wu :pt because they cast me as a maid, and because [during rchcanals] WM CWO boys had !heir hands aU over me, aU over my breascs aad up

lny dotbcs..

She complained in vain ro administrators in the Drama School

libout the c:asting. which she thought was un&ir and racially bi.ucd. ill tried to be profeaional, because the Drama School is a profcs.. place. But I really didn't want to play this pan.• sbe said. a few ~ Holloway had had enough. Sbc locked ha-mom in Helen Hadley Hall and rdUsed to co.me ~ Cw . :. -. .JrbouP • kacw that miaing so many~ 'WQUid &om the School Wlaen she .........~. ...._.,J:.-111* met Dea labert Bmvstein, wbb aa:epced "- l,tter qf

.dwi• . . . .,

w

. . . . . .):I. . . -

apelling her.

ThE ND JouRNAL

- -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - ---=-....

Holloway's story continues in a &sciand fantastic web of racism, vioand stalking. a story that i.s uodoubtinfluenced both by her dramatic flair her mental illness. According to 1uo,N2v. she was diagnosed with a mental called "tactile demoi&,'" which about halludnatiom in all five sen.constantly feels herself beina physiabuscd and, when I intervieM!d her, to stop in the midd.k of the ~ could inspect her juice, ~

.->.~ang

oranae

things swimm.iug in her food..

Holloway has been on me Sueai ot Haven for the last 19 ~· pcrfqa6-

Shakespeare, Chaucer an.d Eur;.~ change. She malca her horM-~ crawlspace that she renu for ...,_ a day, money supplied by a md1l of devoted fans. In the few minute. I to wait to interview Holloway, :au:~~tmy Woman'" caQle by, as she does Wednesday after work, to give 6ve dollars. Another regula.r her some juice. and eome paaer5her some cow and a fi:w d.ollan.

Perhaps Holloway's most imponant though, is Yale graduate Anne Oailcy, told her brother, Ridwd. abOut the Bennington graduate 1ftto was theater on the $UWCI OE New

Richard came UJ 9tait his._ July, he decided to find ~ a documentary 6lm about her and her fight against ....mat Jllness ~:mtlessJlless," he said. ""HI~>Uo!Wa1~·s version of I>a&T• decition the 6lm is &r more romant:Jc. aDd, to Dailey. shows •me JJCM* of 9Rl~n•auon." Acc;o(ding to HOlloway, was eating Chrisunas 1M diniief on the Champs Elys«. in Paris. ~ overbc:&Id some women ~ •a brilliant BennmgtOn Jpaciuare doina ~heater on the sueccs of ~..,rc:~a.'" she aid...He went ewer to asked them to ad him more.

1cnew it had ro be me. 'lU aune to .•. and looked fOr me 110dl we the movie in .August.• said his version of the story i1 one, but added, "'&mkl7. I W. bet• . Ooa't ~ J00 hiJd ID p • he adWcd me. -wileD ShalcapeaN. do ,_. care .bouc

JOWe

1D

mat sense? The iMf-don's audl, ana~.

For two weeks in August, Dailey fol-

lowed Holloway around New Haven with a hand-held camera. He is currendy editing the 6lm in Paris. " I am now trying to shape rhat material into something that tells Margaret's story and is wonhy of her per~· he said. "I am attempting with the material I have to expras Margaret's being. story; and what it is about her I feel ~ on a larger rnuh that touches us all, that is to say the power of the imagina.cien faced with an often bosti.le reality.

Malprct.lias aomething to teach us aD, and I &ad it bumbling and impirins in equal "MAAI''Ie..

ldcal,ly. Dailey would like to r:dease the film CODUilCidally mel pmer sufficient pioSa eo supply HoUoway wirh "a decent 100111 in a saC.= place with a private shower and three squares a day. a place where someone would make sure she took her meds but where she would also retain some of her freedom, • he said.

Holloway, on the other hand, is I~ optimistk. "Hopefully the movie is going to be a gm&t success, and I'm sure I'D make some money offof it: she said. "And that's fine, becaux I never wanted a career like Wboopi Goldberg or Meryl Streep. But I also never wanted to suffer like this.

Religious people tell me that Jesw' sufferius wu greater than anyone's and rhat suffering is a virtue. But I just don't underaand why God would do this to me or to anyone dse. • Hollow.ay never pzedicted that she -.,uld be making her living off theater in the way that she does now. But her Yale master's thesis eerily foreshadows how intertWined her life and the theater would cvenruaUy become. HoUoway wrote about the MOCSSity of a "theater of hunger,'" a 'rision of a theater in which the needs of

America's student leader for over 50 years

human beinp--rahging fiom •basic needs for food and shdter'..• [to the] need for fiudom of the mind. body and spirit"could be satiated.

While stage actOrs play out intensely personal but clearly fictional crises in very public spaces, Holloway liva out her own.

Ironically, in doing so, she comes closer to her ideal of a "theater of hunger" than she evw coulcl ~on

Sla&C·

&1J

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I opened the door to WLH 207 on Saturday, October 30, I felt like a high-schooler without a hall pass. Jenny Calixrer, a ¡unior in Pierson College, was writing a binomial equation on the chalkboard. He dusted the chalk off his hands as he approached me quizzically. I introduced myself, and he nodded and went back to his lesson. "So," he continued, "how would we factor this?"

Eight pairs of eyes looked up from their SAT review sheets ro stare at me as I tried to weave my way discreetly through the seats, only to knock over the binder of a girl who had left the room. As I scrambled to pick up the papers, Miguel Ramos, a boy with dark curly hair, dark eyes, and an earnest expression, leaned over co help me. He flashed me a sympathetic smile as I edged my way to a vacant seat.

As I sat through the class, biding my time until I could speak ro the students and their reacher, I was struck by how similar it was to the Kaplan course I had suffered through ar my suburban high school in western Massachusetts. The eight kids present, all students at New Haven public schools, were certainly no less ambitious than my peers had been. For three hours they listened co Jenny's math and verbal review, volunteering to work through math problems on the board and dutifully pulling out the sheets of vocabulary words they had written for homework. They were also no less, well, adolescent. As the last hour of class ticked by, they fidgeted. At 1:30, when Jenny asked the class for the time, they told him it was 2:00 in a desperate arrempt ar an early release.

This SAT review, however, was nor a S750 private course. These kids did nor have glossy Kaplan books or computer-generated Aash cards. Their course had been provided by LEAP, the non-profit organization char employs them as Junior Counselors. Once mandatory, the SAT program is now offered as an optional supplement ro

their job as Junior Counselors, which demands that they spend about 16 hours weekly working with kids ages 7-14. While LEAP currently employs 46 high school juniors and seniors as Junior Counselors, only 14 of them have chosen to take the course.

For the majority of those 14, rhe decision was their own. In many ways, theirs is a challenge faced by ambitious students throughout New Haven. They would like to go to college-they understand that college will open more career opportunities to them-but many do not have parents who help to push them through the process. This is not necessarily due ro a lack of parental support. More often, New Haveo parents lack information on the college application process themselves, and rhus cannot advise their children about application deadlines or financial aid forms.

In a 1997 Strategic School Profile, the New Haven School District reponed that, as of 1990, 26.7 percent of the city's adults did not have their high school diploma. For students whose parents did not attend college themselves-a situation common in many urban communities and certainly in New Haven-schools and programs such as LEAP play crucial roles in providing the information students need.

I spoke co Miguel Ramos briefly after the SAT session let out, and he agreed ro meet me for lunch in Wooster Square. H e had moved co Fair Haven from Passaic, New Jersey, with his mother and sister rwo years before, and, he told me sheepishly, he had not yet had a chance co explore the area. Unlike the other students in LEAP's SAT program, Miguel is not a Junior Counselor. His certification as a lifeguard scored him a job at the organization's basement pool three days a week.

A senior at Wilbur Cross, Miguel told me he began thinking about college when he decided he wanted to be an architect in the fifth grade. Since then, he has decided he would rather teach math, but his main dream-that of going to college-has never wavered.

Miguel said that his mother did little co point him towards college beyond making him do his homework when he was younger.

Luckily, Miguel received encouragement from an enthusiastic uncle instead. "My uncle pushed me when I was small to aim towards college," he ~lained. " He used ro say to me, 'Miguel, you need co take advantage of every situation."'

Miguel's mother, Maribel Morales, may nor be helping her son with his college search, bur even an impersonal telephone interview could not hide the pride in her voice when his name was mentioned. "I want him to go to college. I feel he has to go to college," she said marter-of-facrly. "He's a very smart kid and it would be a waste if he doesn't go." Maribel Morales has worked as a Program Assistant for LEAP ever since she moved with Miguel and his tenyear-old sister to New Haven. Her involvement in Miguel's college preparations has been lirrle more than telling him when applications arrive in the mail, but she claims he does nor require much parental nudging. "Miguel is so independent, by the time I tell him to do something he's already on it."

THE NEw JouRNAL

J

There is no doubt chat students like Miguel, who as a 10 yearold began to research schools chat offered strong architecture programs, have the desire and the will to go to college. But even the most determined students need guidance from someone who has been through the college process. They need to know what academic courses to take, how to wrif;e an applicat ion, and when ro take the SAT. If students' parents are unable to offer assistance, then the job rests in the hands of the public schools.

Cynthia Beaver, head of the New Haven Schools' Guidance Department, asserted chat each public school regards sending kids to college as its mission. She outlined a step-by-step plan, supposedly followed by all New Haven public schools, designed to introduce kids to the idea of going to college by the eighth grade.

According to Beaver, every middle-school student visits a college or vocational school through Project MOST {Marketing on Student Talents). Middle school guidance departments also hold conferences and workshops with parents to discuss how to make college affordable. "Project MOST gives the guidance and direction ro students that some parents are not able to give," she said.

According ro Beaver's plan, exposure ro college and vocational school options increases when the students reach high school.

Between the tenth and twelfth grades, all students visit at least one in-state college. Three hundred juniors and three hundred seniors also travel to various schools along the East Coast. In addition, Beaver added, the department pays for all interested juniors to take the I'SAT and for seniors to take the SAT, wirh the option of sending their results to up to five schools. With 45 guidance counselors employed by the city, Beaver estimates that each counselor works with approximately 175-250 students, a load she asserts is small enough to offer some indivi~ual attention. T here is no reason, Beaver said, why New Haven public school students interested in going to college should not be exposed to the options open to them.

But the majority of the students I spoke with gave a different view of the situation. Denise Thomas, a senior at Hillhouse High School, is ranked twentieth in a class of 183. She is currently working on applications to Columbia and Fairfield Universities.

Although neither of Denise's parents went to college, her stepmother tries to help her keep on top of deadlines. As for her school, Denise said, "They try, but they're not really that helpful. H illhouse never gave me suggestions about where to apply, and I'm not getting anything about financial aid until January." Part of the problem, she added, is that she has not had a guidance counselor since the beginning of October. Her former guidance counselor, Sharon King, left the school in October to work with younger kids at Roberto Clemente Middle School. So far, there is no replacement in sight. "(The school] broke us into groups for other counselors to help us, but those counselors help their own kids first," Denise pointed our. "Some kids get scholarship applications from their counselors, so it's hard for us to get them."

Carrie Hopes, a guidance counselor at Hillhouse, claimed that King's former students are taken care of well. "The head of the department, Mrs. Reed, is working with those young folks," she assured me. "She's more chan capable of helping them." And, even without King, the school's five guidance counselors handle about 200 students each, a number safely within Beaver's estimate. Hopes maintains that the school follows Beaver's guidance plan "pretty strictly. " Each student receives a version of"Guidance at a Glance," which offers a month-by-month schedule for applying to college.

The guidance department encourages students to take both the PSAT and the SAT by junior year. Also in accordance with Beaver's vision, all students participate in college fairs and most go on at least two college trips. "We have a meeting with the student, and if they express an interest in a particular college, especially [if that college is) in-state, we try to put them on that trip."

Bur Beaver's plan is not reaching all New Haven public school students. Anne Wtlliams, a former guidance counselor at a reputable New Haven magnet school, said she left her job because she felt that no matter how ha.r d she worked, she could not be effective.

Last year, she was left as the only guidance counselor in a school of over 6oo students when one co-worker fell ill and one position was never filled. "I felt helpless," she sighed. "I had too many responsibilities to students and parents." Unable to give time to all of her srudenrs, Wtlliams focused on the students she thought could bene6t most from her guidance. "I would have to shut my door sometimes during the day because [the school) was so busy and disorganized." Williams says the situation at the school has worsened since she left. While the school has increased its enrollment to 750 students, it still has only one guidance counselor.

When overburdened guidance counselors must choose which students ro help, those who do not actively seek advice on colleges, as well as those who wait until late in their high school careers to express their interest, are often left behind. Miguel admiued that initially he did nor rake high school seriously; college still seemed roo far in the furure. It was not until the end of his sophomore year, when he realized that he might not graduate high school with his class, that Miguel rook action. With the help of his school in New Jersey, he developed an intensive program that would not only qualify him for graduation, but also prepare him for college.

When he started his junior year in New Haven, however, he said counselors at Wilbur Cross pegged him as a remedial student because of his transcript. "Because I didn't have a good record, and the first two years I rook school as a -joke, they automatically thought I couldn't do the work and stuck me in the lowest classes possible." Last year, Miguel proved that he was able to cake college preparatory courses, but not without a cost. This year, Miguel is mostly enrolled in advanced classes meant for juniors, nor seniors, with the exception of one advanced senior English course. Now, Miguel said, his guidance counselor makes herself available to him,

New Haven is a college town, but can its public high school students get in?

NOVEMBER 19,

1999

15

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16

· rd like to go to a small school, perhaps an Ivy League College; said Kendria Vereen (right). but he added that only students who push for attention receive sufficient gu.idance.

Not all New Haven students feel their schools provide them with inadequate guidance. Kendria Vereen, a junior at High School in the Community (Hstc), speaks confidently about her college plans. ''I'd like to go to a small school, perhaps an Ivy League college," she informed me. "I need one-on-one attention, I don't want to be just another face to a professor in a huge class." Kendria described the extensive help her school's guidance office provides. Every Monday, students break up ro meet with a faculty advisor in small groups. In addition, lists of college trips and SAT dates are regularly posted outside of the gu.idance department. Kendria finds her classes--all college preparatory-exciting and challenging. She becomes particularly animated when discussing her Shakespeare acting course, in which she has performed scenes from Henry V. Haml~t, Macb~th, and Rom~o andjuli~t. to name a few. "I just love Hamkt," she declared.

But it seems HSIC is an exception, not the rule. A small magnet school with 350 students and two guidance counselors, it sends about 90 percent of its students ro college-88 percent to four-year colleges and two percent to two-year schools. In contrast, between 70 and So percent of all students in the New Haven public school system continue their education after graduation: 45 to 50 percent ar four-year schools and 25 to 30 percent ar two-year or vocational schools. The discrepancy is not due to a difference in natural ability. HSIC students are selected through a lottery system,

not by achievement.

Perhaps part of the secret co HSIC's success is the amount of attention and gu.idance that it gives its students. "High School in the Community is a college preparatory program," Perer Clark, the guidance counselor in charge of all of the school's juniors and seniors, explained. " It's the norm here tO calk about college for your four years."

HSIC nor only complies with Beaver's projected four-year college plan, it surpasses it.

Each student takes two school-organized overnight college trips, one junior year and one senior year. Twenty-five ro 30 college representatives visit the school ro talk to students during the first two months of their senior year.

Clark also claimed that he tries his best to involve parents in the college process.

Each year, he told me, he holds conferences with juniors and seniors and their parents to discuss their goals for the year. But KencL:ia's mother, Cheryl Brown, informed me that she has never met with C lark to discuss KencL:ia's education. " I have gotten one call to tell me that she is Ivy League material, but that was from a teacher, not a facilitator." Brown, who also has a daughter who is a senior at HSIC, said she has met with Clark and her older daughter ro discuss her credit and to narrow her college choices to ten. Although Brown is satisfied with Kendria's classes and finds the f.acilirators "very cooperative," she thinks they should be in touch with parents more often.

But compared ro parents of children in other schools, Brown is lucky to have received even one phone call. Maribel

THE New JouRNAL

Morales' voice took an angry tone when asked how often she hears about Miguel's progress at Wtlbur C ross. "The guidance department has never contacted me and they haven't had college sessions for parents," she said. "I hate how tbe system runs in that school. There's only o~e phone line, and it's always busy, and when I do get through, there's just a secretary with an attitude."

While many may not be able to turn to their parents or their schools for help, the majority of the students I talked with will probably make it to college. Their guidance comes from the LEAP program.

Lalena Garcia, a 1998 Yale graduate who heads LEAP's Junior Counselor Resource and Advisory program, said it is her job to help the program's young employees through the college selection and application process. "Ninety percent of my Junior Counselors definitely want to go to college, but don't really know how to get there," she observed. "Some schools don't begin to talk to students about colleges until they're juniors, and many high school SAT classes are limited to seniors."

Garcia provides these students with the attention that their schools' guidance departments cannot, or do not, provide.

She keeps a library of information on colleges for them, and writes to request applications. She runs workshops on how to fill o ut a financial aid form and how to write an application essay. She bugs them about deadlines and makes sure they take their SATs. But LEAP cannot employ all of the city's students.

New Haven is capable of improving resources for potentially college-bound students. The city's total expenditures per student amount to S9,013, compared to a state average of s8,530. Yet New Haven spends only S579 of that sum on pupil support services, in comparison to the S703 the average state school system spends. New Haven must attend better to its students' guidance and reach out to their parents if the ciry expects its ltids to go to college. ..:J

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17

S

cenes from the coming revolution: #I. On September 23, 1999, loyal viewers of Live With Regis and Kathie Lee were treated to a spectacle more dramatic than the usual coffeeklatSch banrer. According to The New l'Ork Daily News "during an impassioned IS-minute monologue" Kathie Lee Gifford "cast herself as a lone celebrity voice against swearshops and demanded that labor advocates stop picking on her. 'I get so fed up with these vicious personal attacks against my integrity and my character,' she says." Among Gifford's named vicious attackers? United Students Against Swearshops, an organization which counts Yale junior Jessica Champagne among irs leaders.

Scene #2. On a Tuesday night in October, about JOO studentS gathered in the Law School Auditorium. A six-foot-tall man with a paunch and steel-gray hair slicked back into a ponytail stepped up to the podium: it was Charles Kernaghan, the man who, with his National Labor Committee, had forever tarnished the name of Gifford's Wal-Mart clothing line in 1996 with his sweatShop expose.

He reeled off faces about the minimum wage in El Salvador, which a Princeton study has found meets only 28 percent of the cost of liv-

18

ing there; and where workers are paid two-tenths of one percent of the retail price of a Yale T-shirr. Kernaghan was there not just to preach to the converted, but to praise them; he called USAS "the strongest human and labor righrs movement in the country today."

This could be dismissed as a typical lobbyist's hyperbolic sound bite. Yet the sudden emergence of the sweatshop issue into both Yale's and the nation's conscience does demand explanation. There has been a radical shift in the nature and purpose of student activism all over the country since the iconic days of the I960s, and the rate of the movement has accelerated in just the last few years.

The anti-sweatshop movement, with irs national media attention, small-scale actions and successes, exemplifies this trend.

DISPARAGE R.EEBOK, read the T-shirrs in 1995. The University of Wisconsin at Madison had just signed a contract with Reebok for athletic apparel, which stipulated that no one connected with the university would be allowed to "disparage" the company-by questioning irs manufacturing conditions, for example. The first antisweatShop rallies on college campuses began at Wisconsin. Socially concerned student leaders had found not just an issue to rally

THE New jouRNAL

around, but a strategy: make your school put your money where your mouth is. "Basically, we were trying co use universities economically through their licensing fees, to change the dynamic of the industry," says Eric Brakken, a University of Wisconsin graduate and founder of the anti-sw~hop movement, who now works full rime for USAS. The classical model of student activism in America has been sos, the Weathermen, the takeover of Columbia: large numbers of students using dramatic tactics to lobby their government directly for widespread political and social transformation. But that picture has changed, at least since the anti-apartheid movement in the '8os, when a shantytown went up on Beinecke Plaza, not to influence the government but to convince Yale to divest from South Africa. "We have our roots in the apartheid struggles of the early '8os, the last spurt of this kind of activism," says Champagne. "We're using universities co make a statement and getting them to act as moral agentS. The only time they actuaJly act is when students make their voices heard."

The student voice that has caught the ear of universities in the last few years has spoken in remarkably measured tones. The imagery of sweatshop repression and abuse is stirring, but the platform is technical and legalistic, not revolutionary. Two of USAS's three key demands are regulatory: public disclosure of factory locations and monitoring of working conditions by independent human and labor-rights organizations. They seek no more than enforcement of existing anti-sweatshop provisions and countries' own labor laws. No one is trying to shut down faccories, mount boycotts, or foment a worker's coup.

On these limited terms, and with relatively small percentages of students involved, the m~vement has met with success ar many colleges. Last spring, sir-ins at Georgetown and Duke led the universities ro promise ro withdraw from a proposed code of conduct for apparel manufacture unless it is changed to include disclosure of factory locations. The University of Wisconsin at Madison, after a 97-hour student sir-in, secured a promise for full public disclosure, living wages, and reproductive rights for the mostly female swearshop workers. Brown and the University of Michigan have agreed to disclosure, independent monitoring, and the living wage.

At Yale, both the tactics and the successes have been more modest. Last spring, 1,400 students signed a petition calling for independent monitoring, full disclosure, and the living wage. There was one action, a "knit-in," with about 30 students attending. Bur no results were seen until the week of October 19, when Yale Students Against Sweatshops (vSAs) brought Kernaghan and two Salvadoran sweatshop workers ro speak and sraged a rally. That week the President's Office announced for the first time that they would require full disclosure of aJI factory locations where Yale apparel is made. Bur rhis decision will bear no fruit for over a year, until current licensing agreements are up for renewal. By then, many of the organization's current leaders wiU have graduated.

Why weren't there sir-ins here last spring? "The movement wasn't there yet," says Champagne. "The activistS at Yale rend ro be really over-analytical. It can be harder to move forward here because We have to wait until we've sat down and really thought everything through." Senior Saurav Sarkar, another organizer, says, "This issue is really a lor of minutiae and legalisms, and in order to organize people around that, first you have ro convince them that if they

NovEMBER 19, 1999

thought about it they would care about this." A lot of convincing is necessary on a topic like sweatshops, which involves complicated questions of international economics and is far removed from most students' daily experience. This contrasts, for example, with the large srudent movemenr in support of Local 34 and 35 strikers four years ago.

Meanwhile, university adminisrracors, industry representatives, and even the federal government, either accuse sweatshop activists of irresponsibly oversimplifYing the issue or maintain that there is no issue. Ann Gust, a Gap executive, was at a master's rea in Calhoun last month with her boyfriend, Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, and Champagne asked her why they wouldn't disclose factory locations. She responded that no one had ever asked them to.

In July 1998, Jean Sperling, the top economic advisor to President Clinton, met with leaders ofusAS ro ask them co stop protesting. In order ro address growing concerns, the Fair Labor Association (PLA) was formed as a coalition of religious, labor and corporate groups.

"They wanted co bring us into the process and make us feel good about what was going on," Brakken says. Bur the students refused, and most of the independent groups had withdrawn support from the PLA by November 1998, citing a weak, corporate-enforced code of conduct with no living wage or disclosure. Champagne calls it "a dummy organization." The FLA then turned to university administrations. "In February and March of 1999 the srudenr movement was starting to pick up and the FLA went behind our backs to ask universities to sign on," Brakken says. "This is the biggest rhrear to a genuine anti-sweatshop movement."

As an alternative to the FLA, usAS has helped develop the Worker's Rights Consortium (wRc), a group aimed at organizing workers to improve the conditions in their own factories. The WRC

Trying to change the world one college at a time-to Kathie lee's chagrin. relies on independent monitoring. "This is an alternate system for verifYing what's going on, involving workers themselves in the process. It's basically a lire-alarm system, a way to respond to worker complaints," says Champagne.

Few would disagree with the need for independent inspection of factories to prevent egregious abuses, such as 12-15 hour workdays, forced overcime, no clean drinking water, no bathroom breaks, intimidation and beatings by the factory managers. USAS's third demand, that companies pay a living wage rather than the country's minimum wage, is much more comroversial. Eva, one of the two Salvadoran factory workers who spoke at Yale in October, said through an interpreter in her speech, "We make these shirts for you with pleasure and we hope that you enjoy wearing them. We greatly need these jobs and we don't want to lose them. We just want to be treated with decency." Many argue that forcing companies to pay higher than the lowest wage the market will bear will simply cause them to move production elsewhere. Last February Th~ Yak Daily N~ws quoted Princeton economist Elizabeth Bogan: "I am concerned that if you put a high level of exactness [into the living wage code], the multinationals will write these countries

19

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and many other fine designers

off... If that is the response, the American student body will have done a terrible thing."

The living-wage controversy aside, some argue against the very premise of usAS: that universities should take a moral responsibility for productS that bear their names. ''I'm not in favor of people being forced tO work in sweatshops, but doesn't it strike you that this is a never-ending problem?" asks David DeRosa, a professor at the Yale School of Management, who writes a column on international trade and finance for Bloomberg. "Where did the shirts' fabric come from? Was the cotton grown on a prison farm in China? What about the dyes? There are only finite resources to this university, and a limited amount of moral capital. It should not be asked to get involved in production."

Despite these complexities, or perhaps because of them, the sweatshop issue has emerged as one of the poster causes of an entire movement for corporate change. "I have been an activist since I was a student," says Jason Ward, who is in Connecticut organizing for the Hotel and Restaurant Employees' Union. "I think now there's much broader student activism across the country. The sweatshop movement has

done a lot ro show that when students do work they can see things change for the better." Nationally publicized successes, such as the announcement by Nike on October 7 that it would reveal some of itS factory locations, have contributed to the popularity of the movement. "Most of the people in our group are freshmen," Sarkar says. "At the frosh bazaar, a lot of people were looking for sweatShop [organizations] because of the national press attention."

Ruth Caplan, director of the Washington-based Alliance for Democracy, says, "I've been speaking at campuses all around the country this fall, and I think there's a real student movement that has begun with the sweatshop movement.

StudentS are now looking at the larger context." This context is no smaller than capitalism across the globe. Increasingly, labor, feminist, human-rightS and environmental activistS have come together and designated a common enemy: multinational corporations as represented by the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The WTO is an organization of 134 countries founded during negotiations on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, on January I, 1995, to remove all barriers to commerce. Under its rules, envi-

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THE NEW

JouRNAL

ronmental and labor protection laws are considered technical barriers to trade, which can be attacked by imposing punitive measures on countries fhrough the WTO icself. According to literature published by the Canadian Federation of Srudenrs, the WTO has struck down laws protecting endangered sea turtles and small-scale banana farmers in the Caribbean, as well as parr of the u.s. Clean Air Act. On November 30, the WTO will meet in Seattle to discuss irs policy of privatization of health care, education and social services. Student and labor activiscs will be present in the tens of thousands to protest their governments' involvement in these negotiations. Corporations are not taking this threat lightly. Jeffrey Garren, the dean of the Yale School of Management, warned in an article in the November 8 Businm ~ek, "With the very real possibility that the trade talks will be derailed, the question is whether the strategy of Washington and the business community is as lame as it looks ... If Washington and Corporate America don't move decisively, NGOs [NonGovernmental Organziations].could dominate public opinio n on global trade and finance."

Garten, and Corporate America, think this would be a Very Bad Thing. But the chance to "dominate public opinion" has activists extremely excited. On the weekend of November 5, over 300 students &om 130 schools attended a conference planned

by Yale's Student Alliance to Reform Corporations (sTARe). STARC was founded here last year by currenc senior Terra lawson-Remer and now boasts chapters all over the country. Representatives &om different schools met at the conference to draft a platform for the movement, focusing on responsible investment policies for universities. There were smaller sessions on the wro's infringements on everything from the right of the European Union to ban u.s. hormone-fed beef, to the right of the state of MassachusettS to penalize trade with Burma. They also began to organize trips to Seattle and solidarity protestS all over the country, including New Haven.

The conference culminated in a small rally Sunday afternoon. Stridenc voices echoed off the stones of Beinecke Plaza as

NOVEMBER •9· 1999

demonstrators jumped up and down for warmth. "I believe we are in the beginning stages of the first-ever global revolution," Kevin Danaher, a founder of San Francisco's Global Exchange, called out to wild applause. "We have been presented with a historic opportunity to lay the foundations of a democratic global economy."

The muscular man with a shaved head and white beard waved his hand over the crowd. "I hereby deputize all of you to be lieutenantS in the global revolution."

The rhetoric is seductive, and so is the narrative. Very few people offer principled defenses of huge, rich corporations that pollute the land, CEOs who earn 326 rimes what their factory workers get, or undemocratic multinational organizations who overturn democratically-passed laws. It was easy to sympathize with Emma Jane Crate, a Cree Indian who spoke at the conference about the flooding of her sacred tribal lands and displacemenc of her people by Manitoba Hydro Company. But will these emotions be translated into action?

That depends in large part on the ability of activists to create the perception that there is a revolution. "This sweatshop movement sounds like something &om my generation," DeRosa says. "Only, we would have been much more aggressive. People were killed over these issues." No one is calling for a return to Kent State, to demonstrations broken up by jack-booted thugs with dogs and tear gas. But there is a limit to the number of people who can be engaged by polite, single-issue campaigns, and an experienced administration like Yale's finds it easy to pur them off with police, single-issue excuses and delays. The anti-apartheid struggle did not result in Yale's divestment from South Africa, bur in vague promises to use Yale's influence as a shareholder from within the country. It remains to be seen whether the spectre of "global capitalist domination" will be a cause big enough to rally the troops. 1111

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21

Sub¡Contract Killers , Branford students will be reunited with their college next year.

by Alexander Dworkowitz Will union workers return to their jobs?

FoR THE PAST FEW WEEKS, a group of 20 Branford students has met to discuss the future of the renovated Branford College. The group's goal is clear: to do everything it can to insure that members of Yale's custodial union, Local 35, return to maintain the renovated college next fall instead of allowing subcontracted employees of the Fusco Corporation to work there. According to member Adam Gordon, the Branford students opposes Fusco's work on four grounds: wages, working conditions, benefirs and the right to collective bargaining.

Most of these studenrs are stuck with the alternative this year.

The Fusco Corporation, a nation-wide development company, finished construction of Swing Space in 1998, and now continues co maintain it.

Swing Space is not Fusco's first job on campus. According to Joe Mullinix, Yale's Vice-President for Finance and Administration, Fusco worked on the renovation of Yale Field, the construction of the Harris building at the medical school, and the annex to Payne Whitney Gymnasium. Currendy, Fusco maintains both Swing Space and the renovated Linsley-Chittenden. Fusco is also being considered for other contracrs, including the renovation ofTimothy Dwight College.

Members of the Yale administration say they have been happy not only with the quality of Fusco's work but also with its commitment to New Haven. Kernel Dawkins, Vice-President of Facilities, said in a January issue of the Yak Daily News, "The Fusco Corporation is a highly regarded New Haven-based firm. Yale likes to do business with firms that have conuibuted to the New Haven community."

Dawkins, however, expressed his confidence in Fusco before questions of wrongdoing emerged this July. In a series of press conferences, Jim Newton, mayoral candidate and critic of Fusco's sroom illion contract to build the Long Wharf Mall, divulged details about Fusco's history. In 1987, the city lent Fusco s6.9 million for a consuuction project. By 1995, Fusco completed the project but had yet to begin loan paymentS. Due to a fault in the original contract, however, the ciry had little means to make Fusco pay. The city bargained. Fusco paid back $3.5 million of the loan on the spot and kept the remaining $3.4 million of raxpayer money. Four years and one mall contract later, Newton alleges that Fusco returned a fraction of the money to DeStefano in the form of a $4,500 campaign conuibution.

22

Newcon also revealed that Long Wharf is not Fusco's first mall project. After years of managing a Florida mall, competition drove out tenants. However, Fusco could not close the unprofitable mall because Peter Barak, a dentist, refused to move out. In response, Fusco severely cut back on its spending, neglecting upkeep and, according tO Barak, violating his lease. He sued Fusco, and the case is still in court.

"These people play hardball," says Barak. "They basically dishonored everything in the lease. They are very shrewd businessmen, and there is a fine line between being shrewd and being unethical."

These emerging facts, however, have not affected Yale's relationship with Fusco. "If you only dealt with contractors who never had any financial problems, you'd be severely limiting yourself," says Mullinix. Mullinix affirmed that once the facts of Fusco's history became public, no one in his department suggested rethinking Yale's relationship wirh Fusco. "No one came to me and said, 'Gee, these people are morally deficienr.' There is no evidence of any kind of wrongdoing. I think the Fuscos are very honorable, and I uust them."

Although he would not disclose the names of the companies, Dawkins says that Yale has in the past ended contracts with particular firms because they did not meet Yale's standards. Says Dawkins, "We always reserve the right to suspend contracts, and we often do that. I believe that we have very high standards."

Dawkins says these standards focus on performance, meaning both the quality of work provided and the state of the companies' finances. He does admit, though, that there are criteria for hiring companies that extend beyond performance. "If a company was found to have a continued background of fraudulence, we would review their contract."

The group of Branford students, though, is not concerned with Fusco's history. Instead, they are protesting the subcontracting of jobs that have belonged to Yale's Local 35 for decades. "The main problem," says Laurie Kennington, one of the founders of the group. "is that these are not Yale jobs."

The stOry of Local 35 dates back to 1993, when Richard Levin became pres idem and Dawkins a part of his administration. Levin and the n~v administration decided to investigate ways to improve the university's infrastrucurure. Thus, the deferred maintenance policy came to an end, and renovation of campus buildings and the

THÂŁ New JouRNAl.

confrontation between Yale and Local 35 began. Yale wanted to change the dining halls radically, so when Local 35's contract expired in 1996, they announced a plan to subcontract some dining halls to national chains such as Pizza Hut. Threatened with the loss of jobs, Local 35 went on strike.

Later that year, the two sidefreached a deal. Local 35 essentially agreed to a two-tiered wage system. Instead of paying all workers $12 per hour, Yale would pay a starting salary of $8.50, with increases in pay of 50 cents every 6 months. The situation was the same for custodial workers, only their pay would start at $10 per hour. In exchange for the drop in wages, Yale also promised to build a food court that would create more jobs for union workers. Yale agreed that it would allow subcontracting only if doing so did not require firing union workers. Three years later, the food court has not been built, Fusco may take over the maintenance of the renovated colleges, and a new dispute looms over what wili happen when the current contract ends in 2002.

"We should have never believed them," says Meg Riccio, Chief Steward of Local 35, referring to the promise of a food court. "Yale has proven that with all the labor struggles they find it difficult to support a union on campus."

Behind the question of subcontracting is the issue of wages.

New Haven mandates that all full-time government employees be paid a living wage of at least $7.50 per hour, and Yale has agreed to follow this policy. The contract between Yale and Fusco stipulates that all Fusco employees, as well as subcontracted employees, be paid this living wage.

According tO Dawkins, Fusco says irs subcontracted employees earn a starting wage between $8 and $8.25 per hour. Some of these employees work as much as 6o hours a week. For every hour of overtime (hours over 40 per week), Local 35 workers receive a pay 1.5 times as much as their standard salary.

Thus, a 6o-hour workweek for a Local 35 worker results in a wage of $700. Without such a policy, the subcontracted worker would earn $495¡ Over the course of a year, such a difference could result in as much as a $IO,ooo difference in salaries. In addition, subcontracted workers receive different benefitS than Local 35 employees.

It is the difference in salary that Kennington, Gordon, and Riccio see as the heart of the problem. Says Riccio, "What the union is doing is simply trying to make people earn a decent wage in New ¡Haven."

By definition, subcontracted workers are not Fusco employees.

Fusco hires separate companies to perform the maintenance, while the company

NOVEMBER

19, 1999

runs the management. According to Dawkins, the workers in Swing Space actually work for three companies besides Fusco: custodians work for OneSource, a second company is in charge of landscaping; and a third company maintains heating, air conditioning and plumbing.

Dawkins does not know the name of two of the three subcontracted companies that work at Swing Space, and this is no coincidence; Yale administratOrs only work with Fusco and have no contact with the companies that it subcontractS. Riccio claims that some of these employees are actually part of separate unions, but since Yale has no contact with these unions, so their wage policies are unknown. Thus, while Fusco itself passes Yale's performance standard, Yale has put its faith in Fusco that the subcontractors also meet Yale's wage standard.

"The honest thing," says Gordon, "is that no one knows what the wages are."

Riccio takes a more aggressive stance. "It seems that people are put into buildings who cannot speak English and no one can communicate with," she says. "What's Fusco afraid of?"

But Yale administrators do not have the same doubtS about wages, and they insist that wages and finance are not the main issue.

In its contract, Fusco agreed to have irs employees work longer hours in order to be available to studentS. Says Mullinix, "We are looking not so much at a dollar savings but a different package of services, particularly at Linsley-Chittenden. At the end of the day, I'm not sure we are saving money."

For Dawkins, the matter has changed little since 1996. While Yale could not subcontract the dirung halls to chains such as Pizza Hut, the university has managed to subcontract custodial work to Fusco. And just as Yale saw Pizza Hut as an improvement in food quality, they now see Fusco, its longer hours and irs newer vacuum cleaners as an improvement in maintenance. "Subcontracting is just a small part of the attempt to improve services all over campus," says Dawkins. "I think Local 35 is a good workforce. But times have changed."

IIIJ

Alexander Dworkowitz is a junior in Branford Co/kg~.

23

I

n Fairfield Counry, at the western end of Connecticut, a mosquito flies into a crap. Inside chis rypical Cukx pipims, a species common to most urban and suburban American environments, lives a very uncommon virus. The microscopic ball of nuclc:otides and proteins inside the mosquito waits for its host to seek another meal. Then the virus can enter another hose, then another, silently spreading across the state.

An hour drive up the coast, in New Haven, a group of brick buildings sits on a hill. Inside these ordinary buildings, common to academic communities like New Haven, scientistS prepare to analyze the latest batch of mosquitoes. When the specimens agive from across the state, investigators grind them and colleCt the resulting serum. They place the samples in cultures of monkey cells and incubate them. After a few days, the cultures will be te,Sted. Standard procedure at the Connecticut Agricultural Experirpent Station is to rest for six different viruses. Recent developments in nearby New York Ciry, though, call for a change from standard procedure.

W

ord of New York Ciry's encephalitis outbreak reached Dr. James Hadler on Labor Day weekend. Hadler, the Connecticut Department of Public Health's chief epidemiologist, received a phone caJI informing him that doctors in New York had attributed the outbreak to St. Louis Encephalitis, a rare condition caused by a mosquito-borne virus. He contacted Dr. Matthew Carner, coordinator of Connecticut's Epidemiology Program, and Or. John Anderson, Director of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. Connecticut already had an extensive program for mosquito control in place, but the mosquito traps were mostly in southeastern Connecticut-the usual site for outbreaks of Eastern Equine Encephalitis, the disease that prompted the original

creation of the Mosquito Management Program. In order to assess the spread of the St. Louis virus, more traps would be needed in Fairfield Counry, near the border with New York. On Sunday, one day after the phone conversation, Anderson himself placed the extra mosquito traps. Within a week, Connecticut officials would know if the disease had followed the path of countless commuters and crossed into Connecticut.

As researchers at the Experiment Station attempted to isolate the virus, others did the same at the u.s. Centers for Disease Control (coc) and the Universiry of California at Irvine, solicited

by New York officials to assist in the investigation. The same week, an both New York and Connecticut, unusual numbers of crows 1 were found dead. Birds often serve as a host for the St. Louis virus because they are a common blood-supply for mosquitoes; but in the past they had only hosted the virus, not shown symptoms.

Scientists studying the disease thought a connection between the human cases and the bird deaths was probable, and that connection had ominous implications: either the St. Louis virus had mutated co a more virulent form or the outbreak had been caused by another virus. A few days after the encephalitis outbreak became national news, the coc made an announcement that helped explain the unusual avian deaths.

Before the coc 's announcement, the Mosquito Management !

Program, led by Connecticut chief medical entomologist Or. Theodore Andreadis, isolated strains of the virus in its New Haven faciliry. While the various labs involved in the project cooperated, Connecticut's Experiment Station received ¡little credit in national coverage of the outbreak, despite being involved, according ro Andreadis, in each step of the investigation. "I believe we had the first isolation of the virus," says Andreadis. The Agricultural THE NEW JouRNAL

Connecticut s ci en tists have contr ol'l ed an outbreak of We s t Nile Encephal i t i s - for now.

by Michael Gerber Experiment Station scientists had isolated the vuus, but the bird

deaths still had them doubting whether the pathogen they had isolated

was the Sr. Louis strain. The coc confirmed their suspicions: the outbreak was not St. Louis fever, but a similar viral infection called West Nile fever--a virus with no previous documented appearance in the Western Hemisphere.

U

pon the announcement that a virus from Africa-bringing horrific images of Ebola to the puolic mind-had appeared on American soil, questions immediately arose: How dangerous is it? Are our kids safe outside? Should we let them go to school?

Hc:aJth departments' aavisorics to avoid mosquilOes contradicted reassurances from expens that the virus would not affect most of the population. Town officials in southwestern Connecticut met with scientists, who convinced them that the outbreak would nor be severe. These same scientists, however, faced a problem which they would rather have p~ented but nevertheless find exhilarating to fight. "It' an exotic virus and it's here," Andreadis explains. "For a scientist, it's very intriguing and very exciting."

Andreadis knows Connecticut's disca.sc-causing insects as well as anyone. Since 1978, he has srudied the state's six-legged residents at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. Now, he serves as head of the Soil and Water department, srudying the control of mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases. He works on the second floor of the Slate Building, the newest of the five buildings that make up the Station's headquarters on Huntington Street in northern New Haven.

T he oldest building is the Osborne Library. built in 1882 when the Experiment Station opened at its current site. Now, tucked behind a building So years its junior, Osborne serves as a reminder of the Station's humble beginnings. Just inside the front door sits a display describing some of the research that occurs on site.

Educational posters fill the laboralOry hallways. One of these posters, describing the Asian Cerarnbycid beetle that has recently appeared in the u.s., sits outside the office of Dr. Louis Magnarelli, vice-director of the experimental station. As Magnarelli proudly points out, the displays are just one example of the Station's goal to work with and educate the citizens of Connecticut.

"We're not an ivory tower here," Magnarclli says in die entomology library next to his office. The library holds some books that curators would gladly welcome at the Beinccke Rare Book Library.

Magnarclli opens up one textbook, finding the date. Ir turns out co be from 1945, and he puts it back. "That one's not that old." He finaJiy finds another, from 1877. Then, hidden on the bottom shelf,

NOVEMBER

19,

1999

a book nor quite as old catches the eye of the 54-year-old scientist.

He opens up the book, his voice revealing his excitement at finding the reports of WE. Britton, the first man to hold rhe position of chiefstate entomologist-the position Magnarelli now holds. These 98-year-old records shar rhe room with samples of various insects, impaled on pins and displayed in drawers on the far wall.

In the dusty libr:try. the research being conducted down the hall is easily forgotten. !"he educational displays, small brick buildings and garden plot obscure the significant discoveries being made-like the discovery of vitamin A by Station scientists in 1913 or the development of h} brid corn in 1922. The small garden, located next to the parking lot, might be part of the next major advancement to sprout from the Research Station. And now, researchers at the Station join those from rhe coc, University of Connecticut, Yale and elsewhere to search for answers in one of the most significant events in recent epidemiological and infectious disease history.

W

hile Epidemiologins understand that they cannot prevent every epidemic or vaccinate for every disease. "Are we surprised this happened? No,' says Dr. Carner, a 15-year veteran of Connecticut's Public Health Department. "Arc we surprised that it's West Nile fever? Yes. ' !"he significance of the appearance of the West Nile virus in th1s liemisphere overshadows the effect of the disease itself. The virus can only be held responsible for six deaths, all in New York-nor quire an epidemic. In Connecticut, the Oeparunenr of Public llealth is not aware of any infections in humans. Bur that doe~ not rule our the possibility that the virus may have infiltrated rhe human population. AJI six of the victims who died from West Nile Encephalitis were over the age of 65. In most healthy human hosts, the virus only causes mild Au-like symptoms-nor something chat sends most sufferers to the doctor's office. But if West Nile can spread this quickly-the virus was found in birds from Madison, Conn., to New Jersey and Long Island-then other. more virulent parasites can as well. Viruses from Ebola to Dengue fever spring to mind, as well as less exotic tropical diseases, like malaria (once a common problem in Connecticut). Malaria, like West Nile fever, is an arbovirus: a virus transmitted by mosquitoes. To prevent arboviruses from spreading in Connecticut, the Department of Public Health, the Department of Environmental Protection and the Agricultural Experiment Station work together co analyze and confront mosquito-borne illne~es.

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Dr. Theodore Andreadis runs Connecticut's Mosquito Management Program.

Soon after Andreadis confirmed that West Nile virus had entered Connecticut, communities in Fairfield and western New Haven counties looked for solutions. The state Department of Environmental Protection and the Governor, in consultation with Hadler and Carner at Public Health and Anderson and Andreadis at the Experiment Station, decided ro spray insecticides in likely mosquito breeding areas.

The insecticide, with the help of the cooling temperatures of fall, apparently halted the spread of the virus. But recent bird testing has shown that the virus spread farther than originally thought, and there is no way of knowing if it will return this spring, when the mosquito population begins to grow again and migrating birds return to the area.

Although no one can predict the virus's behavior, Andreadis does nor think Connecticut has seen the last of West Nile.

"It's probably going to persist," he explains, Ripping through the thick folder of West Nile-related papers on his desk. The virus could survive in a number of ways. An infected mosquito could hibernate, only to reinfecr the population afrer the spring thaw. Or, more likely, a bird could cake the virus south-maybe causing an outbreak there-and then bring the disease back upon its return.

A r:..

ndreadis stands up and heads for the map on his wall. The map shows the entire state, with numbered dots. Each dot represents a mosquito-trapping site. The map does not include the traps added in response ro Wesr Nile, so the dots are more

prevalent ro the east. When West Nile forced the Station to pur out more traps, the virus stretched the its limited resources.

Andreadis's lab pur ocher projects on the shelf in order to analyze the new pathogen and also to answer questions from local officials, the press, and worried Connecticut residents. "I get 30, 40 calls a day," says Andreadis, returning ro his sear behind his desk. "I have six weeks of work to catch up on."

Expanding Andreadis's Mosquito Management Program will be one of the items discussed at meetings this month.

Representatives of the state agencies involved in controlling West N ile will discuss plans for the winter and next spring.

While Andreadis and the Station's staff were able to work extra hours in response ro the outbreak this year, future surveillance will require an increase in the mosquito trapping and testing program, and therefore an increase in funding as well.

Whether that will happen is still undecided, but stare officials clearly recognize the important role the Station played in the response ro the unusual virus. "It was relatively easy to extend [the mosquito testing program)," says Carner, acknowledging the role that the Experimenc Station played in containing the virus. "In many ways, Connecticut is more fortunate than New York."

In his office, Andreadis closes the folder on his desk, agreeing with Carner. "We did a remarkably good job," he says, praising his program's response. But he knows that what they have done so far will not suffice, and that without further action a

THE NEw JouRNAL

larger outbreak could occur. Station scientists will continue to test mosquitoes and birds all winter. Other researchers will continue to study the virus itselÂŁ In order to prevent such outbreaks from occurring, scientists m ust understand ho~. they begin.

T he virus could have traveled to the u.s. via a human host, or perhaps in an exotic bird imported to an East Coast zoo. Researchers across the country, from the coc labs in Fort Collins to the Agricultural Experiment Station in New Haven, will spend the winter inside their labs, examining the virus and its life-cycle, determining the most effective way of fighting its return.

A DIVISIO N OF YALE UN IV ERS I TY. INFOR MAT ION TECHNOLOGY SE RVIC ES

REPROGRAPHICS

& IMAGING SERVICES

I

n Fairfield County, a mosquito bites a crow. Neither the mosq uito nor the crow realizes the presence of a third organism, which flows alongside red blood cells on its path from the bird into the body of the mosquito. The mosquito, satisfied with her meal, frees herself from her victim and flies away. Noticing the cooling temperatures, this typical Cukx pipims searches for a safe shelter. There, she will hibernate until spring, when warming weather signals the time to reemerge and lay her eggs. All this time, the insect remains unaware of the virus living inside her.

An hour drive up the c~ast, researchers and public health officials return to their regular work. Neither the scien tists nor the state officials can stop every insect or every disease that threatens Connecticut's citizens, but they discuss plans for controlling mosquitoes and the viruses they carry.

Physicians across the state receive packets of information, describing the signs of the disease, aski ng them to report any cases.

Local health departments are told what the risks are, and whether pesticide spraying might be necessary. Researchers at the Connect icut Agricultural Experiment Station now know to test for one more virus, but they don't know whether those tests will find anything this spring. Perhaps another, even more exotic, microscopic infectious agent is crossing the Adanric.

Scientists may have controlled the West Nile virus as efficiendy and effectively as possible, bu t they were also reminded just how linle control they really have.

II1J

Michu/ GubtT, a junior in Ezra Stiks Co/kg~. is EdiUJr-in-ChiifoJTNJ.

NOVEMBER 19, 1999

155 Whitney Avenue â&#x20AC;˘ 432-6560 FAX: 432-6274 http://www.yale.edu/ris 27

The

by Daniel Brook

28

THE NEW jOURNAL

Did Richard Levin jettison his radical beliefs on his meteoric rise to power?

0

N NOVEMBER 23, 1969, 1,500 DEMONSTRATORS GATHERED in front of the u.s. embassy in London. News of a massacre of South Viemamese civilians by American troops had just surfaced, and young people took to the streets. The protestors saluted embassy officials with the Nazi "Sieg Heil!" and burned an American flag while chanting "u.s. murderers!" The crowd then proceeded to the British Prime Minister's residence at 10 Downing Street, chanting "Lenin! Stalin! Mao Tse-tung!" as they marched.

Most of the demonstrators were British, but there were a few Americans among the crowd. One of them was Yale's current president, Richard C. Levin. Another was an acquaintance of Levin's and an organizer of the protest¡ named Bill Clinton. Clinton was at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; Levin, a runner-up for the Rhodes, was there as well, having received an English-Speaking Union fellowship.

Thiery years later, both men--:>nce such outspoken critics of the establishment-are at its helm. Clinton runs the country he once protested against; Levin leads one of its foremost educational institutions. Looking back today, Levin is sorry that his own ambition manifested itself much later than Clinton's: "His clear focus on elective politics as a future and his clear sense of direction at a time when so many of us were just testing out ideas of what we were going to do with our lives was really impressive." While Levin certainly developed into a man of ambition, he was still "just testing out ideas" when he arrived at Yale in the fall of 1970 as a graduate student in economics.

The ideas Levin was testing out were radical ones which had been strictly off limits to precocious minds like his until the Civil Rights and Free Speech movements of the early 196os began to challenge America's hard-line Cold War consensus. Levin's graduate class was the most radical in the history of the economics department. In the. words of classmate Ed Wolff, now a professor at NYU, "The Yale economics department ... admitted a large number of radical students in the fall of 1970. Whether that was done on purpose or not is another issue. [In either case] it was just a blip, a one-rime CVC:nt. The following year's class was much more traditional." Joel Mokyr, a mirthful Israeli who was described to me as "the rightwinger" of Levin's class, quipped, "anyone of sane mind would have been to the right of that class."

NOVEMBER 19, 1999

While the class's saniry was debatable, all agree that Levin's mind was one of its sharpest. H e was "one of the leading lights of [our] class," said Jack Wells, now a Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill. Richard Murnane, who now teaches at Harvard, remembers him as "a real smart guy that was open to a wide range of ideas. [He] knew a lot about history [and] had a penchant for theory." Levin apparently made a similar impression on his professors. He was selected as a T.A. for a section of the economic history course in only his second year, an honor unheard of at the time.

But in the early 1970s, the issues attracting student attention were outside the classroom, or more correctly, peripheral to it. "At a meeting of the new class, someone said 'whoever's interested in URPE come upstain,' and when we got upstairs, there were a lot of us," recalls classmate Laurie Nisonoff. The Union of Radical Political Economists, or URPE (pronounced "ER-pee"), was an organization ofleftist economics professors and graduate students. URPE saw itself as an alternative to the economics profession's mainstream professional organization, the American Economic Association.

URPE's academic aim was to expose students to the radical alternatives to the neo-classical economics they were being taught. The Yale graduate students' URPE chapter sponsored radical speakers and study groups, like one on Marx's Capital. "Richard Levin was actually a member of these [study] groups," Wolff remembers. "I thought he really knew his Marxism," recalls Marianne Hill, another member of his class.

But being knowledgeable about Marx and being a Marxist are two different things. Levin had studied the history of economic thought at Stanford and Oxford and narurally had spent time on Marx. While Mokyr referred to him as "a self-proclaimed Marxist" and a fellow member of the Marxist study group remembers him as "an eloquent and trenchant critic of capitalism," Wells disagreed.

"His acciviry was not so much an indication of political commitment as of intellectual curiosity. H e was open to new ideas." Levin himself said, "[I was) less of a critic than an eclectic"-a man' who studied many theories, but had no strong ideological attachments to any of them.

Regardless of his true beliefs, Levin's apparent openness to all sides aided him in his rise to the top. Levin's 6rst taste of power came when he was chosen by his economics classmates to represent

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them on a faculty comminee. URPE had been aghating for Yale's relatively mainstream department to hire a heterodox faculty member, hopefully a Marxist. The department acquiesced and created a committee with the student representation URPE had demanded. Levin was chosen to represent his class. "I think the reason some of the more ideologically oriented students were happy to see me serve on the faculty search comminee was that I was a pragmatist," Levin said. "I was not objectionable as an ideologue to anyone." The committee ultimately hired David Levine, a Marxist economist who was a year ahead of Levin and was just finishjng rus doctorate. David Levine had led some of the URPE srudy groups Levin had taken part in. Hill remembers that there was "some discussion as to whether Richard Levin would have been a good candidate." But Levin did not promote himself as a candidate before the committee, and he was not chosen. If Levin's ambition was beginning tO manifest itself at this point, he must have realized that Richard Levin, the non-ideological consensus builder, would go farther than Richard Levin, the critic of capitalism. In the words of Mokyr, "If you were a radical economist in [this] country, you wouldn't get tenure, or would get tenure at a lousy place." In hls estimation, Levin could not have received tenure, much less risen to become department chair, Graduate School Dean and finally, in 1993, University President, had he not distanced himself from radical thought. Though he assumed Levin had intellectual, not careerist, reasons for breaking with the Left, Mokyr put it blundy: "Had he stayed a Marxist, he would not be president of Yale."

Levin's classmates are divided on the question of whether the self-portrait he paints of a man without ideological attachments is simply a public persona or his real identity. In his thjrd and fourth years, Wolff recaJls, Levin "djssociated himself from the radicals and became involved almost exclusively with the mainstream economists." Wells ~grees, remembering that "around the rime that he became immersed in his dissertation, he began to pull away from the more radical graduate THE NEw JouRNAL

students in the ing the groundwork for thought-of professor i conservative economics fellow graduate student up Levin's retreat to Jes:s~lllllft~\'111~ saying, "The first couple classes with a lot of people, and then you're off doing your thesis research ... There's a process by which the class fragments. That happened to all of us [as] we all pursued our own research." While he had been interested in the history of economic thought, a politically-charged field, Levin said he "became a scholar in the field of industrial organization [and used] principally neo-classical economic tools." As he suggested, industrial organization is a traditional field based firmly in neo-classical, not radical, economics.

Perhaps the fairest assessment of Levin came from Wolff, who said, "One never wants to impute the intentions of one's colleagues. It may be because he truly felt that radical economics was wrong and mainstream economics was correct. Another possibility was that he might h~ve felt that the job prospects were better with mainstream economics than with radical economics, which showed to be the case. But one can only speculate."

It seems Levin split off from the leftists in his class as they became more active in political issues and protests replaced study groups. According to Nisonoff, now at Hampshire College, "Rick agreed with us [radicals] politically, though there was a wide range of positions among us, but I think he also was circumspect about some of the things he said or did in how directly confrontational he was with the faculty [or administration]." For example, when Local 35 wenr out on strike in 1973, many members of his class worked with them out on the picket line. Levin did not. "I never got involved in labor issues ... as a student," Levin said.

By 1973, URPE was getting more political, and Levin was not willing to go along for the ride. According to the URPE N~slater's history of the organization, "In the first stage, extending through 1970 or 1971, we focused primarily on a critique of

NOVEMBER 19, 1999

pattern, as the last two years," ued, "we have been entering a third stage.

Through much study, URPE people have begun to understand Marxian political economy and we believe that we can apply its insights to yield important implications for political action. More and more, we are turning outward, trying to apply our understanding toward a critique and transformation of the capitalist system." While many of his classmates took this turn, at least to some degree, by aiding the striking Local 35 workers and taking trips to Washington to protest the war, Levin did not.

IF LEVIN WAS

EVER A COMMITTED RADICAL,

his presidency at Yale has not reflected it.

Aside from his refusal to accept the Bass Grant, the major controversies of his administration have been over issues of economics. The Local 34 and 35 contract dispute of 1996, GESO's recognition fight, student pressure for Yale to divest from tobacco and efforts to prevent Yale clothes from being made in sweatshops-all are issues that pit left-wing economists against their more centrist opponents. And on all of these issues, Levin has sided with the centrists.

Levin's classmates have been particularly surprised by his handling of the union negotiations with Local 34 and 35¡ "I was very disappointed in Rick from what I heard and what the papers reported," said Nisonoff. Heidi Hartmann, class of 1973, the recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant and a Yale Graduate School Alumni Association Wilbur Cross Medal, said, "I suspect parts of his administration advised him [to fight the unions] but I wish he had followed his own judgement and taken a less confrontational seance." Wolff put it simply: "He was not very sympathetic ro the unions which of course, given his early

associ,Oon with URPE, is ironic." Nisonoff, Hartmann, and Wolff expected more of a cla.sstnate they remember as a fellow leftist.

Levin, who claims he was always a liberal but never a radical, says his administration has sdlected his convictions. He is pat.ticularly prouci 6f his New Haven initiatives like the University's Homebuyer Program, which provides incentives for Yale employees to live in the city, and his Public Service Fellowships which provide funding for students' community service projects. Levin maintains that, ''I've tried to move this institution in a very constructive direction which is consistent with a view I've had for my whole life about what constitutes ethical, sound, principled behavior.

I don't think I would have approached [these issues] very differently in 1970 than I approach [them] now." In this statement he sounds very much like Bill Clinton explaining that he had always seen himself as a centrist New Democrat, so he cannot understand why liberals are complaining he let them down. Yet despite these contentions, many people are lefr puzzled over how this radical generation could take the reigns of power but not significantly transform the ends for which that power is used.

Clinton and Levin stood together at the same protest in London thirty Novembers ago. While neither man is a leftist today, both flirted with radicalism in their younger days. In a 1977 book review published in the The journal of Economic History, Levin referred to Marx as a "towering prophet," and discussed "capitalism's capacity to contain internal contradictions through adaptation." If, as many of Levin's classmates insinuate, his move away from the left was motivated by his desire to advance his career, it was Levin who was being prophetic. If the price of the Yale presidency was Levin's political convictions, it would seem that one of the ways in which capitalism contains its internal contradictions is by silencing its most talented critics-not with secret police or sho'Y trials-but with six-figure incomes and pres1111 tigious tides.

Daniel Brook, a senior in Davenport Colkge, is a managing editor of TN].

31

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"Within each man there are many men or, perhaps, two m en."

- Borges, speaking at Yale, April 7• 1971 I 11 1-. HAD NOT Ol E O IN 1986, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges would have been 100 years old this year. In honor of the cenrennial of his birth, M exican writer Carlos Fuentes gave a lecrure in Ouober at New York City's 92nd Street Y entitled "Jorge Luis Borges at 100." At Yale University, Borges is being remembered {hrougho ut the fall semester by a lecture series, "Borges at Yale."

Both the Fuentes lecture and the Yale series remember Borges just as one m ight expect them co, celebrating his literary achievements.

But less than thirty years ago, Borges was not so universally acclaim ed. He visited both New Haven and New York in 1971.

While Yale hono red him then as it does now, his reception days earlier at New York's Columbia University was hostile. The crowd that came co hear Borges speak at Yale came to honor a famous author.

Certainly many in anendance at Columbia came to do the same, but others came with a different agenda entirely: to attack him for being a conservative, for not being active in politics-in short, for not sh.uing their own political views. ' l'he student body of Columbia was volatile in the early 1970s, and we might easily dismiss the protesters had Borges not criticized hi mself o n the same grounds:

I

I w~ always very nearsighted and wore glasses, and I was rather frail.

A' most of my people had b«n soldiers--even my F.ither's brother had hc:cn a na•-al officer-and I knew l nev~r would be, I fdr ashamed, quite arly. to be a bookish kind of person and nor a man of aetion.

I hroughout mf boyhood, I rhoughr that ro be loved would have .tmoumed to an injustice. I did not feel I deserved any panicular love.

Borges feared that love was an emotion reserved for men of action, fo r men who took part in the affairs of the world rather than hiding in the worlds of fictions. Anticipating his critics at Columbia, he q uestioned his dedication to scholarship in lieu of action. \ urely no one today would have encouraged Borges to read or write less: love of the author and his erudite fictions is what brings audiences to memorial lectures in 1999. So what happened to his attackers? What happened to the people who saw him as a man who succeeded in changing Latin American literature, but who failed in changing Latin American politics?

An unlikely clue lies in the September 27, 1999, Yak Bu/ktin, 1 1 the headline announcing the Borges lecture series: "Fall Lecture \cne\ commemorates Brazilian writer Jorge Luis Borges." Getting Rorge,\ home country (and thereby his native tongue) wrong is a

gaffe, but perhaps a significant one. What is remembered now is more his art than his nationality. It is as if Borges had in fact been two men, one a scholarly man and the other a sch olarly writer.

Indeed, in one of his most famou~and famously brief-srories, " Borges and I," he himself acknowledges the duality of his existence, identifying the rwo people within him: Borges the man and Borges the author. The person remembered in 1999, as the celebrations in New York and New Haven suggest, is Borges the author, not Borges the man. But when and how did one disappear into the other?

I

N 1971, BoRGES TRAVELLED TO CoLUMBIA UNrVERSlTY to receive an honorary doctorate and to take part in a conference entitled "Society and the Arts in Latin America." Almost instantly, he ignited the anger of his audience by using the inflammatory word "conservative." "Truly great artists," Th~ Vi/lag~ voiu reponed Borges as saying, "have concerned themselves with the past- Homer, for instance, sang of a war that took place long before his lifetime." In that sense, Borges said, he could be called a "conservative."

Nicanor Parra, a Chilean poet in attendance, was appalled at the use of that taboo word and began an attack on Borges that was co last for the remainder of the day: I was deeply disrurbed ro hear ... Borges say thar he is a conservative ... the very word is an obsc~niry. As a poet and lover of words, I have b«n wairing all morning to hear the mosr beautiful word in the hemisphere ...The word is 'revolution.'

Parra's attack was not just a quibble with Borges's use of the word "conservative"-ro him it was ridiculous that Borges was more concerned with the Trojan War than current political issues.

Borges, however, was unfazed by Parra's opening salvo, dismissing his impassioned words with the remark, "Forgive me; I know nothing of all that." But for Parra and those of the same mind, it was precisely the truth of this dismissal that angered them. Prepping voiu reporter Anna Mayo co interview Borges during his visit co New York, Norman di Giovanni, Borges's personal assistant and uanslaror, requested that she refrain &om asking questions about politics: "It is really better if you keep off politics. Borges is totally apolitical. He hasn't read a newspaper in years. He didn't even read them when he could see." To prove his point, di Giovanni cited an incident that occurred at a reading Borges gave at Harvard. A student asked him what he thought about "the war." Borges did not know which war the student was talking abour. When he was told that the student referred to the Viemam War, he responded that since it was American and approved by the President, it was most likely just and honorable. The business of explaining his unpopular stance then fell to di Giovanni: "For Borges this country still has mythic proportions, it's still the land of Emerson and Walt Whitman. [It is] impossible to explain to him that that America no longer exists. The best I've been able to do is to convince him that he doesn't know anything about politics. n

• D Ue I lug Personalities

by John Swansburg

100 years after Borges 's birth, do we r em ember facts or Ficcio nes ?

THE NEW jouRNAL

Parra clearly agreed, and he was not alone. A Cuban man continued Parra's line of attack, but with none of the Chilean poet's reverence, demanding of Borges: "Why is it that you are never seized to write about the masses? Why don't you write about us? Eh, Borges? Why not us?" Borges responded: "And why, why OIJ. earth should write about you?" The Cuban retorted, "Because we exist!" Borges was not impressed with the Cuban's reasoning: "Bur my dear fellow, is that your only argument? Consider f .-Shakespeare and Rudyard Kipling. They roo exist! And I think and write on them."

This answer did not sit well with the protestors in the Columbia crowd: Borges's comment only served to affirm their belief that he was a conservative. That he cited two English authors, one of whom had written so favorably about colonization, surely did not escape their notice. The result was a melee, with angry protesters heckling Borges. Emir Monegal, a biographer of Borges who was present at the Columbia conference, recalls a student so enraged with him that he insulted the author's mother. Borges, who lived with his mother until her death, stood up, his cane shaking in his hand, and challenged the young man to a duel. Di Giovanni fought through the crowd in an attempt to protect Borges while Columbia faculty members attempted to put an end to the event. It was Borges, though, who closc:d the proceedings. Before he would allow the crowd to d isperse for lunch, he demanded to respond to his attackers:

I['

I believe in revolution, and I am waiting for ic co come. In che revolution rhere will be no political leaders. There will be no propaganda and there will be no bantkras [Rags]. When they cell of some new revolution I always ask 'and do they have a Rag?' and when they say 'yes,' I know it is noc my revolution.

The echo of the day's unrest continued to ring, but his words had silenced the crowd. Borges, it seemed, was more complex than his opponents had thought.

J

ORGE LUIS BORGES WAS BORN in Buenos Aires in 1899. When writing about himself, Borges indulges in his family mythology, recounting stories of his ancesrors' European lineage and their contributions to the military history of Argentina. Before Borges or even his parents appear in his "Autobiographical Essay," Colonel Borges, the writer's grandfather, rides toward the enemy, where he is killed by two Remington bullets. Only after placing this event in its historical context-"This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine"--does Borges turn co the business of writing abou.c himselÂŁ His pride in his family, particularly in their European ancestry, did not always serve him well. The first barclefield was his elementary school. The school he attended was called the Thames School, named for. an Argentine general, not the English river. Nevertheless, Borges's father sent his son to school in the traditional uniform of English schoolboys, earning the already erudite Borges no points

NoVEMBER 19, 1999

with his less sophisticated classmates: "As I wore spectacles and dressed in an Eton collar and tie, I was jeered at and bullied by most of my schoolmates, who were amateur hooligans." Borges was attacked for his apparent conservatism and his bookishness the moment he entered public life.

But he was nor always apolitical and conservative.

In 1937, his father, whose eyesight had failed him years before, began to have heart trouble. Borges got a job-at age 38, his first full-time employment-at a library.

While Borges was descending the stairs co the library's basement co read the likes of Bernard Shaw and Gibb~n, Juan Domingo Per6n was rising to the top of the Argentine government. Notoriously ruthless, Per6n's regime murdered its opponents in its efforts co gain and maintain power, the death toll periodically growing as new mass graves of Per6n's victims are discovered.

Though he was holed up working and reading in the library, Borges was anything bur silent about Per6n's rise co power. By the 1930s, Borges had already established himself as an important writer in Argentina, publishing regularly in several publications. Borges used his section in the periodical EL Hogar to criticize Nazis in Europe and their sympathizers in Argentina. In his invectives against the Argentine regime, Borges sounds less like a poet and more like a political pundit.

Per6n rook power in Argentina in February of 1946 and

by August of that year he had also taken notice of Borges's public criticisms. In August, Borges was officially informed that he had been promoted from his position at the library to the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the market on C6rdoba Street. He immediately resigned from his new position. Per6n's "promotion" of Borges was perhaps even more h~miliating than Borges lets on.

Monegal notes that, "To promote one of the leading Argentine intellectuals to inspector of chickens and rabbits implied a linguistic pun. Chickens and rabbits are in Spanish ... synonymous with cowardice." In Borges's estimation, Per6n did not understand the power of language. Borges, however, did; in making a public statement after his resignation, his words were as potent as Per6n's wordplay was snide: DiCtatorships IOmenr oppression, dictatorships fomenr subservience, dicrarorships foment cruelty; even more abominable is the fact that they foment srupidicy [with thdr) buttons which babble slogans, images of leaders ...To fight against those sad monotonies is one of the many duties of writers.

During the Per6n years, Borges performed this duty-to a certain degree. His denunciation of Per6n proves, as his final speech at Columbia intimated, that he was not always apolitical; it does not, however, indicate a commitment to political action. Borges hated Per6n, at least in part, because he incorreccly considered h~ not merely a fascist, but a Nazi as well. Borges blamed the Nazis for destroying the German culture that had produced one of his heroes, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. But he would later accept a prize from Pinochet's Chile, a regime as fond of making enemies disappear as was Per6n's. Borges's detractors at Columbia were certainly

39

oven.ealous in their attacks on Borges, but their criticisms were not completely off the mark.

N 1961, BoRGES, along with Samuel Beckett, was awarded the Formentor Prize, earning him worldwide recognition.

This recognition allowed him to tour the United States in the early 1970s, the trip funded by the literary awards he received along the way. His visit ro Columbia was such a trip. It was there that Monegal, then the chair of Yale's Spanish and Portuguese department, asked Borges to speak at Yale.

On the day of the visit, a small invitation was offered to the Yale community in the Yak Daily Nnus, in a paragraph easily obscured by the thumb used to hold the paper open to page three. The message read, "Jorge Luis Borges will participate in a panel discussion in Room 102, LinsleyChiuenden Hall tonight at 7:30." Above the notice regarding Borges's visit, a similar notification, three times as long, announced a lecture entitled "Choosing Teachers for Inner City Schools," to be delivered by Chester Preyar, an administrator for the Cincinnati Public School System.

More publicity was not necessary.

Room 102 had approximately 200 sears.

When Borges arrived with his host Monegal, 500 people had already managed to fit into the lecrure hall. There was no room for Borges. Monegal was surprised but unfazed: "We decided to search for a larger room. Headed by Borges, a procession formed slowly and traversed the Yale campus." The image Monegal conjures of the blind Borges leading a vast group of followers across Yale is infused with the same sort of magic that moves Borges's fictions.

A Yale University Police Officer, however, didn't see the magic of the roving crowd.

Roberto Gonz.alez Echevarda, current head of Yale's Spanish department, remembers the officer stopping them and demanding to know what the demonstration was against. Given the events at Columbia only weeks before, the question was mordantly ironic: the crowd was not demonstratingit was venerating a literary hero. As Monegal recalls, "We were so obviously men of peace that the police let us continue our search."

The search was successful: Strathcona Hall, one of the largest on campus, was

I

free. The evening with Borges was no less successful, as Monegal fondly recalls: Borges began by answering. with the subtlest irony, questions put forth by writers and critics. That won them completely. He is one of us, they fdt.

When the Aoor was opened to ques¡ tions, people rushed to ask him about everything that passed through their minds. Borges answered with humor and simplicity, never talking down to them, always comic and gentle.

Borges's experience at Yale could not have been more different from his experience at Columbia. Monegal had feared otherwise, and was both overjoyed and relieved: "Borges could not see his listeners, but he sensed that a rapport existed between him and them; and because he knew it. .. he was serene while all of us, who could see, were afraid. He trusted his audience, and it in turn loved him." Echevarria states unequivocally, "He was celebrated." ~ JGHTEE.N NlNBTY-NINE,

as they say in ~ the wine business, was a good year.

Novelist Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899, as was poet Hart Crane. Borges, too, was born on the cusp of the century, a century whose literature he, Nabokov and Crane would immeasurably change.

Borges was a precocious reader, beginning his life of letters at age four. His father was an intellectual, an avid reader and an Anglophile. Borges inherited his father's love of reading and in particular of English literature just as he had inherited what would eventually keep him from it, his blindness. His father's vast library fed Borges's intellect. Borges once wrote, "If I were asked to name the chief event of roy life, I should say my father's library."

Given his eventual contributions to Larin American literature, it is strange to peruse the names of the authors Borges read as a child, the authors who would permanently shape him as a writer. An early poetic love was not Lope de Vega but rather Edgar Allen Poe; the first novel he ever read was nor Don Qui.xou but Hucltkbnry Finn.

The young Borges did indeed read Cervantes, but in English translation and this early reading experience was burned into the labyrinthine coils of his mind. He once wrote, "When I later read Don Qui:Jwu in the original, it sounded like a bad translation to me." Raised on a diet of G.K. Chesterton, H.G. Wells, and

Jonathan Edwards, Borges never really developed a taste for Spanish: "As an Argentine writer," he once said, "I have to cope with Spanish and so am only too aware of its shortcomings."

The reader of his prose, however, is never aware of these shortcomings. Borges never wrote a novel-he never wanted to.

He was a master of the short story. Calling American attention to the Argentine author in an article entitled "The Author as Librarian," John Updike writes of Borges's prose: "His driest paragraph is somehow compelling. His fables are wrirten from a lvight of intelligence less rare in philosophy and physics than in fiction ... For all his modesty of tone, he proposes some sort of essential revision in literature itself. " Protestors at Columbia in 1971 disdained Borges because he did not use the word "revolution." What they didn't see is that rhe way in which Borges manipulates words is revolutionary.

Perhaps they didn't see it because a Borges story is just as likely to take place in a labyrinth as it is in Argentina, just as likely to inhabit an imaginary library as Buenos Aires. Even Updike, writing in 1965, noted the exclusivity of Borges's fictions: "His ideas border on delusions; the dark hints ... that he so studiously develops are special to the corrupt light of libraries and might vanish, one fears, ourdoors." Delivering his lecture at the 92nd Street Y in October, Carlos Fuentes, however, proposed a new way of interpreting Borges's dark hints: "By giving a leading role to the mirror and the labyrinth, the book and the garden, time and space, [Borges) redefined what is real through literary and imaginary traditions." In this way, he argued, Borges liberated his work from the European tradition. Fuentes, who was himself influenced by Borges's work, has also wimessed the effects of Borges's fiction on Latin American literature.

Fuentes argues that Borges's literature was the first writing that seemed to be cruly Latin American. Rather than reconstructing a vanished past, Borges's fictions are allinclusive, and demonstrate a literary imagination that is open to all cultures. At the same rime these fictions are consummately Latin American, and in particular, Argentine, representing a culture that is the synthesis of both disparate European and native elements.

THE NEW JouRNAL

I

N "BoRGES AND I," BoRGES THE. MAN, the man anacked'at Columbia in 1971, struggles with Borges the author, the author celebrated at Yale just weeks later:

387-6799

Ir is Borges, the other one, tha,s things happen to ... Ir would be an e&ggeration to say that our relationship is hostile--! live, I allow m}'Klf to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literarure is my justification. I willingly admit that he has written some sound pages, but those pages will not save m~.

A century after the man was born, as Borges predicted, only the author still exists: the memory of the sometime conservative, apolitical Borges is almost extinguished-it is Borges the author we celebrate.

But perhaps Borges the author did more for Borges the man than he is willing to admit. During his life Borges created fictions that earned him the love of a world of readers. In one of his essays, Borges offers an all but parenthetical comment that m ight be the pinnacle of a lesser writer's o~uvr~. remarking nonchalantly that "to fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god." Borges the man was f.ill.ible, and his politics were not always admirable, but today it has cost him few adherents to the religion ofloving his work.

H is art rose above politics, the world of banderas and empty symbols. His fictions helped to bring worldwide attention to the literature of Argentina and all of Latin America and, more importantly, helped to shape those literatures.

As a child, Borges did not believe that he deserved the love of his family-he was a thinker, not a man of action. Bur perhaps in the act of writing, Borges ultimately found love. At least that is one way of reading his response to the last question asked of him at Yale in 1971, a question perhaps at once the most simple and the most complex of the evening. "Have you ever been in love?" a student asked. Borges's one-word response: "Yes."

TH E PLAC E T O M EET F O R DINNER OR DRINKS BEFO RE G O ING OUT AND ABOUT IN NEW HAV E N 220 COLLEG E STREET , NEW H AVE N 203 - 624- 1 SS3

~ GooD

FOOD

~FUN WINES

'¡ @SMOKE FREE

'

fohn Swansburg, a smior in Saybrook ~~ is associate ~ditor of TN).

NOVEMBER 19, 1999

41

I

eons HE STREET-SWEEPING MACHINES PASS EVERY NIGHT below my dorm window. Rumbling by, they tug powerfully at my subconscious, marking the time immediately before sleep. I always find the machines soothing, thinking, just before I nod off, about their lonely travels across the city.

So one night I make my way to an appointment outside New Haven Public Works, a sprawling concrete warehouse siruated in the middle of nowhere. There's nobody around, and I bike circles in the small asphalt sea surrounding the building, weaving around the dormant fleet of garbage trucks, pick-ups, and vans. I am scared, waiting alone, but excited to ride in a street sweeper.

After waiting outside for fifteen minutes, I peer timidly through a window and see a round man at a desk. Everything about him is round-his head, his body, his arms. I knock on the window and his head jerks up; he sees me and lets me in. I try to act like I wasn't scared waiting outside in the dark.

Lynwood Dorsey takes me into his office, a generic lowceilinged room with a linoleum floor and tired metal office furniture. Sitting back in chairs, we take turns looking at a television on one wall while he leisurely explains the basics of the street-sweeping business. Lynwood directs the operation from the office. Three street-sweeping machines go out into the city to clean the major roads. Whenever one fills up with debris, the driver waits for a dump truck, which then takes the trash to the city dump.

While we talk, a second man enters the room, and the night shifr slowly assembles. The men act disinterested at my presence, but it is easy to see that I change the atmosphere. More and more as the night wears on, I come to realize that these are men whose work interests no one. They hunger for recognition.

T

Domingo Rogers comes in lase, a lean black man who carries a certain immaturity-his breath is stale from sleep, and he seems uncomfortable with me around. He is my first ride of the night, and takes me down to the basement to retrieve his machine from an expanse of dump trucks and construction vehicles. He has been driving the sweeper for longer than anyone, eight years, and a dump truck for seven years before that. Almost like a child, he eagerly pours out all the pent-up details about his job, keeping up an unending dialogue on the minutiae of how to drive the street sweeper.

"Greasing the machine's real important. These machines operate 24-7, and if you don't grease them, something breaks. And when something breaks, they can tell, and you lose your job."

Explaining the hierarchy of drivers, he says: "The street sweeper, you have to be an Operator-3 to drive it. That water truck over there, you only have to be an Operator-2." And, proudly, "This thing is real fun to drive."

I raise my eyebrow. To demonstrate, he starts the engine, pulls out a linle, and, there in the garage, effortlessly swings the street sweeper in a quick 90 degree arc and back. "This is what I'm talkin' about, being able to handle tight quarters."

We pull out into the open. The engine whines, rising and falling with acceleration, and the flashing hazard lights lend our project a certain urgency. Underneath it all the curb brooms brush the street with a calming skksssh. As we watch, a second driver swings his machine out of the garage, barreling 6ackwards.

Domingo drives through the city at five miles per hour, always leaning sideways intently, to make sure the curb brooms on the right side are in alignment. H e is completely in his element and directs the machine expertly. He is so intent on his job that he has difficulty driving and talking at the same time, and pauses the sweeper often to talk to me.

We run red lights. Domingo explains that at five miles per hour, nobody can afford to wait for the lights to change. But deep inside we both know that nobody's going to mess with an ugly metal machine the size of a garbage truck with big flashing lights.

We can go where we please.

At two in the morning, we pass through the Hill neighborhood. Domingo is quieter now, and I look out the windows. It feels like the middle of a war zone as we pass by the dilapidated husks of houses, gray in the dark. Only a few teenagers are our at this hour.

Domingo ignores alJ this, running the sweeper over piles of leaves, spilled liquids, plastic bags, styrofoam cups, vodka bottles and roued vegetables. Where we've gone, there remain only three neat tracks of water on the scrubbed asphalt. Crisply directing the steering wheel, Domingo cleans out the Hill while nobody is looking. Either because of Domingo's competent driving, or because I always associate sleep with the machine's noises, I slowly nod off.

I'm awakened at 2:20 by the radio squawking. It's time for Domingo to unload his basket of trash. He stops the machine and waits. Minutes later, a dump truck rounds the corner and barrels past us, screeching on the brakes and parking sideways in the street.

After Domingo unloads his trash, I hitch a ride with Larry Williams in the dump truck. A friendly black man, he had seemed quieter sitting in the office. But he has another side: for a second now he is chatty. The first few hours for the dump truck operator are pretty boring until the sweepers start to fill up, and he's been cooped up watching television.

The bench is low-slung and comfortable, and Larry directs our course with ease, obviously taking pleasure in pushing his laboring vehicle as if it were a regular car. He talks a little bit, relaxed, and we listen ro the radio. He seems almost like a father figure to the night crew. Perhaps it is because he is the sole common thread in an otherwise lonely job, bringing the distanced street sweepers togethwhen he meets them.

We go down the streets of New Haven, and things become familiar as we pass through Yale's campus. We are going to up with another street sweeper, my second ride of the night.

Outside Ingalls Rink, a street sweeper waits on the corner with garbage basket already raised in the air. Larry pulls in neatly its side, and opens the door to watch. Herbie Ancrum, the operator, pulls forward and dumps the load softly into the of the dump truck-a sweet smell permeates the cab. Herbie

shakes the arms of the machine to loosen the clinging debris, and gives the dump truck a couple love taps for good measure.

Herbie has a different style of driving than Domingo. He leans casually over one arm as he directs the curb broom, wiggling the wheel left and right with his other arm. The Yale streets are relatively clean, mostly leaves, a whole different feeling than the Hill neighborhood. Herbie drives up Science Hill, removing the grit from the curbs. "You know these buildings?" he asks me, in a friendly way that makes it easy to say yes.

At 3 AM the machine needs water, and Herbie stops. We break open a fire hydrant outside of the Divinity School. It's nice to stop and be outside; it's comparatively quiet and there's a good breeze.

We talk. Herbie is the first person I've met tonight who is more interested in just chatting with another human being than explaining the mechanics of his job to an outsider.

Herbie works for the Community Action Agency part-time and drives meals to the elderly. He reUs me about his six-year-old daughter. I tell him about maybe wanting to teach, and we half-joke about me teaching her some day at Yale. Talking to Herbie, I gain a new perspective. I think to myself that while Domingo drives the street sweeper because the job fits him weU, Herbie drives the machine in resignation to the reality of providing for a family.

When the machine is done drinking, Herbie starts up again and we go through Science Park. All the lights are on and, unlike the HiiJ, it feels like everyone is out at a party and we're just going through cleaning house. We pass the quiet ranks of Albertus Magnus and swing back towards campus.

When Herbie's crash basket is full again-a bit faster than I had hoped-he calJs Larry in the dump truck to empty his basket out.

It's time for me to head back. Larry gives me a ride to Public Works.

A friend once said to me that people need something new to distinguish one day from the next. And it is clear from this night that street sweeping is, in essence, a duU and thankless Labor. So I am tempted to conclude that there is nothing truly interesting about these people and their after-hours work.

But I end the evening sitting in the dump truck in the middle of the parking lot at Public Works, charting over the radio. They are suddenly sentimental, these sweepers, cleaning the city at night when nobody is around to see. I finally realize, perhaps roo late, that what is interesting about this night is not the novelty of the street sweeping machines, but rather encounter with the men who operate them.

I say good-bye to Domingo and wish him the best. Lynwood comes on the radio to crack a couple jokes. Next to me, Larry leans against the far window of the cab, and casually directs me in proper radio protocol. Herbie jokes again about me teaching his daughter one day at Yale, and we both silently think that that would be nice. ~

Andrnq Youn, a smwr in Calhoun

Co/kg~.

is th~ photo ~ditor of TNJ.

43

I Hartman 's Greatest Crits A Yale Professor Takes an Introspective journey Through a Lifts WOrk.

by Simon Hanft

A Critic's Journey: uterary Reflections, 19158-1998 Geoffrey Hartman (Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 2.97

com-

G plexity in literature. He finds literary criticism no less artiStiC than fiction. ÂŁ0FFREY HARTMAN CHAMPIONS

h should come as no surprise, then, to find that deciphering Hartman's critical writings is at times as difficult a task as parsing a great poem. Indeed, understanding Hartman's works is a kinetic process that grows and modifies itself at every step; Hartman challenges us to color our obscure sense with the brilliance of a critical sublime. Once imbued with the possibility of such a pure form of literary truth, any selfaware reader cannot rest but must instead continue to seek out its implications, wrestling with knotty insights for their subtle meanings. This is quite a tall order for any reader, particularly today. So be it.

Hartman's criticism is so thoroughly informed and erudite that he is not for the faint of literary hearc. But for those who possess the ambition, Hartman's recently published collection of essays, A Critic's journey: Liurary &foctions, 1958-I998, provides a worthy and rewarding portal for readers engaging him for the first time, and for devotees who have faithfully followed his critical output over the years.

My fust handshake with Hartman's work was with his seminal study, Wordsworth's Po~try q87-18I4, a book that has permanently changed a generation's attitude towards the poet. The tonic insights and re-engineered readings of stock Wordsworthian tropes, such as his famous "spots of time" and the complex dialectic between imagination and nature, have become the stuff of the new Wordsworth critical canon. Wholly convinced by this study, I was naturally drawn

A C"rifics

to his other critical efforts.

Hartman's new collection affords the opportunity to catch up with the master through his own selection of pivotal essays fro m his career.

H artman divides the book into three sections: "Theory," "Cases," and "Speculations." These follow Hartman's reflections on his days as both srudent and teacher, a circling back which he calls "Polemical Memoir." It is in this "autobiographical self-reflection" that Hartman describes his arrival as a Yale graduate student in the fall of 1949 after receiving his undergraduate degree from Queens College in New York. For those who are interested in an affectionate, first-hand recollection of Yale's great literary tradition, Hartman's description of studying with Erich Auerbach and Rene Wellek proves indispensable, and his revealing discussion of the influence of these scholars on the development of his own critical ethos is helpful in locating his intellectual origins.

Adopting the literary humanism of Auerbach, which taught Hartman the value of being "probative without preacherly, and expansive without ever losing sight of the text," and idolizing the mind-boggling scholarship ofWellek, Hartman joined the Yale teaching faculty in 1955 with an eye towards going beyond formalism . Though pigeonholed as a deconstructionist due to his affiliation with the Yale English departm ent in its formative critical years, Hartman takes pains to align himself accurately both with respect to his colleagues and to the rapidly evolving schools of criti-

Ceoffrev H lou,,..., Z " art.....

9~8-1998

....

cism that flourished in his years as a Yale professor. "I could see as a doctrine ... or more than a way of expanding the range and depth of reading," Hartman remarks, a comment which recalls the Auerbachian expansion he so valued in his mentor. For Hartman, literary hermeneutics should never be an exercise that thrusts a final evaluation on a text; the critic, and by extension the reader, must accept the two-fold nature of meaning, deriving satisfaction from the ambiguities in a text. Concurring with Paul de Man, one of his colleagues at Yale, Hartman writes, "The encounter between text and commentary produces difference, not closure or a false equilibrium." He is, in short, far from one of Harold Bloom's "resentniks," who read literature solely through a political lens.

Though Hartman devotes much of his introductory piece to clarifying his own critical approach, I could not help but be swept up by his claims for the role and responsibility of criticism in toto: "Literary commentary should have its own standing: it was not servile but took its place within literature, rather than remaining on the outside looking in." Such a posture, echoing Matthew Arnold, is later reinforced by Hartman's assertion that critics must be able to remove the blindness preventing the visual epiphany that must accompany texrual appreciation. This piercing-through "revives" a "sense of the power of naming." and the critic is thus cast as an Adaro

The NEW JouRNAL

figure, who ultimately creates the importance of literature via his "gift of words."

In the "Theory" section of the book, the essay "Understanding Criticism" elaborates the theses of "Polemical Memoir" and offers the multiple pleasures ofHartman's critical scalpel at work. Here, he continues to support his earlier position, and in fact aggrandizes criticism to the point where "formal critical commentary is not very different from fiction itself." They share a "hermeneutic perplexity," and the urge to arrive at a meaning, whether in itself (as in the case of fiction) or in another work (as in the case of commentary). This is a controversial point, and I suspect that Hartman is making it as an argument builder rather than as something for which he would fall on his sword. Even the most soaring criticism is, at best, a reactive genre that lacks the imaginative fuel of fiction.

Nonetheless, Hartman's criticism is of the highest contemplative merit. His analysis of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" dazzles through its demonstration of how the rhetorical skill of the poet leads even the critic into an uncertain frame of reference, perplexed as to how to interpret the poem's central image. But it is this very perplexity, or "bewildermenr" as Hartman calls it earlier in the piece, that lies at the crux of the critical task; the critic must resist any "irritable reaching after fact and reason," as Keats put it, and thus subside in the unrnasterable complexities of the text. Any attempt to impose a definite answer through which the critic can approximate a deeper understanding would end the interpretive enterprise. Hartman possesses a critical generosity; the central formulation of the essay states, "contemporary criticism aims at a hermeneutics of indeterminancy.

It proposes a type of analysis that has renounced the ambition to master or demystify its subject."

In "The Philomela Project," Hartman cogently argues for the role criticism plays in shaping literary output, where "art does not have its axis of influence only in itself. a certain type of reading may have contributed to its formation, and certain habits of interpretation facilitate its reception." If this ragged and often bloody partnership is indeed the case, it follows that criticism must be aware of its expansive role and thus prepare to restore a "voice to inarticulate people," those underrepresented individu-

NOVEMBER 19, 1999

als in cultural history. Why is Hartman so intent on giving a voice to "the anonymous," particularly when such a project is quite visionary and utopian in nature?

Because out of this mission can emerge a criticism that is truer to irs intellectual, historical, and cultural roots. Hartman seeks a "reconstruction of the literary-critical field," and believes that this restoration can best be served by a chorus, if not a cacophony. "Literature grows from traditions rather than tradition, as the ballad collectors knew; and insofar as it helps honor such sources, literary criticism is restitutive," concludes Hartman. Rather than multiculturalism, Hartman argues for multi-criticalism, a plurality of traditions rather than a single one. In such a way, literary criticism can re-envision the text through a more multi-prismatic hermeneutical lens. If there is no single answer, as Hartman deeply believes, then the more voices the better. Indeed, the thrill of watching. hearing, and participating in the intellectual collisions of these voices is a large part of the debt we owe to literature itself.

The "Cases" section of the collection offers just what it suggests: examples of specific textual circumstances that are scrutinized by Hartman's critical eye. "Milton's Counterplot," written in 1970, and "Wordsworth's Touching Compulsion," composed in 1987, are rwo of Hartman's well known and precisely keen analyses. In these essays, we begin to get a feel for what Hartman values in literature, as opposed to wading through the strange seas of thought that characterize his theoretical musings.

"Milton's Counterplot" takes up a difficult question: How does Milton effectively balance man's free will with God's foreknowledge? Hartman values Milton's "ghostlier demarcations," as Wallace Stevens wrote, and thus resists undoing the textual knot of ambivalence. We are left, however, with Hartman's trenchant interpretation of many key similes and tropes, and with Hartman's reverence for Milton's calm authorial control over the supernatural events of the poem.

Indeed, "Cases" contains essays that reveal what Hartman values most in literature, judgments that are related to a theoretical backdrop but that are also largely the product of personal preference. This is where we get into the mind of a great eric-

ic, and begin to see his critical faculty in action. Nowhere is this more prominently figured than in Hartman's discussion of Wordsworth. In "Wordsworth's Touching Compulsion," Hartman is concerned with the "loss of an earlier relation, or of the primary love object (the mother, 'heaven')" which "is not easily compensated." He envisions much of Wordsworth's poetry as striving to replace the lost mother-object with Narure as a substitute love-object.

Touch becomes a transcendent force in the poems, liberating Wordsworth from the tyranny of the eye and bringing him closer to the "one dear Presence" which is the "object of Wordsworth's nature poems."

This quest for a presence th at transcends representation is an important aspect of Wordsworch's poetry, and o n e which Hartman greatly admires. For it is in this emphasis on crystallizing absences through symbolic representation, rather than bringing them into the poetry in the form of "gothic, ghostly, or surrealist fantasies, or animated spectres," where Wordsworth affirms his greatest poetical power.

Hartman writes, "under the words are ghostlier words, half-perceived figures or fragments that seem to be at once part of the lost object and more living than what is present." Keep the absent absent, Hartman is saying, and poetry then transcends its own language: we are swept up by the mystery of what lies beneath and muse on the limits of the visionary expanse.

A Critic's ]ou~ unites the various concerns, theories, and preoccupations of a literary life in one convenient location. We can join Hartman on his journey at our leisure, but we will invariably return out of breath, bewildered, and in need of reflection. Hartman describes the function of the critic in terms that reflect the difficulty of the literary excursion ahead of us: "The critic, then, is one who makes us formally aware of the bewildering character of fiction. Books are our second Fall, the reenactment of a seduction that is also a corning to knowledge. The innermost hope they inspire may be the one Henirich von Kleist expressed: 'onJy by caring a second time of the tree of knowledge will we regain paradise.'" Geoffrey Hartman, as such a literary critic, is another Adam for our generation.

II&IJ

Simon Hanft is a smior in Saybrook

Co/kg~.

45

The Million-Dollar Men IIV 111 Blecher THE WoRLD WRESTLING Federation's web sire, pinned under hor pix of fat, sweary men in Speedos and messages from such luminaries as Buh Buh and Droz, you can now 6nd "Investor Opportunities." And though the opportuniry to purchase a T-shirt reading "Layeth the Smacketh Down! [and on the back] On Your CANDYASS!" does seem titillating, it pales in comparison to the adventure of owning a piece of the action. When the WWF hit the Nasdaq on October 19 with an initial public offering of S17 per share, the Big Boss Men of American venture capital rumbled for 6nancial supremacy: by the afternoon, shares were going for S35¡ But here in our sleepy little hollow, this Wall Street chicanery hardly turned any heads (when did you last see Peter Lynch on payper-view?). At the Coliseum on October 31, no one was calking about business: it was all about the smackdown. The place was filled almost to capacity with a motley assortment of fans-as if a tornado had slammed a trailer park into downtown New H aven.

The woman next to me weighed nearly 300 pounds (or about as much as Sexual Chocolate Mark Henry). She had at least four kids with her, which meant she'd shelled out over SIOO for tickets (and which also meant that if she'd invested the money in WWP stock two weeks ago, the profits would have paid for the whole show}. While I was ogling the numerous cigarette burns that dappled her arms, the arena got dark and a guy in a tuxedo stepped into the spotlight. He thanked all the sponsors graciously, and mentioned some of the mountain of memorabilia for sale at the concession stands. Some fans a few rows back shouted, "I want to toss your salad," which a nearby spectator told me had something to do with anal play. By the end of his pitiful pitch, the whole crowd was shouting, "Ass ... hole! Ass ... hole!"

Then The Godfather came on the scene. He was dressed in fur and dripping with gold jewelry. In his hand, he held a cane-which really makes you wonder what he was doing wrestling-and on his arm, three lovely ladies. He rook the mike from the suit, and growled, "Is there any pimps in this house?" Apparently, there was many pimps in that house, because everyone cheered. To which The Godfather repHed, "Roll up a fatty I for this big daddy!" Wild applause. The guy behind me confided to his girlfriend: "Pimpin' sure ain't easy."

The Godfather was ruling the roost until who should appear but Midian, a giant of a man wearing nothing bur a custom pair of bikini underwear. Midian was apparently intent on making time with The Godfather's women. He cleared his throat and belted, ON

"You don't know how to treat these hos. If they was mine, they'd be on they knees blessin' me."

No one in the audience seemed to agree.

"Ass .. .hole! Ass ... hole!"

The stage was set: it was time to fight. They danced around the ring a little, jabbing and occasionally throwing each other. This was all sort of boring. actually. Neither offered any defense, and neither showed any skills che other didn't have. But in the end, Midian got pinned. He shuffled out of the ring quickly, with his rail between his legs; meanwhile, The Godfather had some tail of his own between his legs. With a Little funk music playing, he proceeded to parry suggestively with his three prostitutes. Soon, however, this triumfeminare, apparently a lirtle bored with their pimp, sauntered over ro the referee (!) and started dry-humping him.

It went on like this, one homo-erotic march after another-an eight-man rag-ream challenge, rhe European Championship between British Bulldog and Test, a g,rudgematch between Kane and X-pac. Until it was time for che Intercontinental Championship, between champion Chyna (a woman!} and challenger Y2J Chris Jericho. Y2.J spent a a few minutes absolutely kicking Chyna's ass, which was a little scary, considering the cigaretteburned woman next to me. In the end, Chyna pinned him after a brutal reverse.

The ruxedo guy then announced that Bob Backlund_, WWF wrescler-rurned congressional candidate, was soliciting campaign contributions in return for autographs in the lobby. There, I found a bright-eyed man in a T-shirt-tuxedo with a red bow-tie and red suspenders. What's your platform? "Get government out of rhe life of the American people." Okay ... how? "Get rid of the IRS. " What's your take on the proliferation of pro-wrestlers in government roday?

"Look, you're better off with a wrestler representing you than an attorney." I had to agree, but no, I didn't care ro make a concribuoon.

Back in the ring, The Rock was raking on HHH for the Championship, which is more important than the Intercontinental and the European combined. The Rock won after HHH was disqualified on a technicaliry (who says wrestlers are better than lawyers?). The audience practically stormed the ring. looking for an autograph. And when The Rock went to the showers, everyone wenr to the parking lot ro wait for his car, which they would have mobbed had the police not sealed off the area. Even the kid whose "666" shirt testified to his familiariry with let-downs seemed a little let down.

Whar's the big deal? you ask. Isn't it all fake? Let me refer that question to your Congressman. ¡ I8J

A roval rumble tor a piece ot The Rocl Ian Blecher, a senior in Davenport College, is a managing editor of TNJ THE NEw JouRNAL

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