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Volume 34, N um ber 3 November 16, 2001

TheNewJournal FEATURES

Teachers For America? Yalies stand, deliver, and go to grad school. by Ruth OeGolia

Forward the Revolution How one email shook up the Political Science establishment. by Jacob Blecher

Blue Shadows on the Trail The University, the city, community activists, and squatters fight over a ditch. by Matthew Underwood

The Home Front Shots from Sarajevo Photos and text by Lejla H ad.zic

Cashed Out Welfare cuts send New Haven families and service providers scrambling. by Nadia Sussman

STANDARDS 4

Points of Departure

Essay: Hello, Mister Fireman by]. C. Reindl

The Critical Angle: Defining Moments by Anya Kamenetz reviewing Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-government by jed Rubenfold Endnote: Hard to Swallow by Matthew Patterson

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The New Journal would like to thank: Jessica Bulman Ruth Conniff Gary Haller Erin Lewis Andrea Panchok-Berry Alan Schoenfeld David Slifka

Photo & Design Contributors: David Barthwell Jessica Chang Santiago Mostyn

Return of the Black Panther To ARGUE WITH KATHLEEN CLEAvER is to realize your ignorance. She knows more than you. She will interrupt you, contradict you, and leave you tongue-tied. She will overwhelm you with her fiery eloquence. At 58, she has abandoned the Afro, leather boots, and miniskirts that she favored in her days as a Black Panther in the late 196os, but she is still strikingly beautiful. Her hair falls in skinny braids; chunky silver bracelets clink up .and down her wrists. Her confidence is palpable. She carries around books by her friends Noam Chomsky and Evelyn Williams, quoting them freely and often. She speaks clearly, in deep, warm tones, with precise t's and flickering l's. Cleaver has had time to perfect her speaking skills, having devoted her entire life to activism. She is best known as a leader of the Black Panther Party, a militant black power group that had its heyday in the 196os and 1970s. In an interview with The New journal in 1981, Cleaver described the Panthers' attitude at the height of the movement: "When people reach the point that they won't respect you, they won't give you what you want, and they won't be reasonable, then just shoot them. Then, you can talk to them. If you make it clear that you're not going to be pushed around any more, that anyone who tries will be shot, it changes the dialogue a loc." Initially, Cleaver was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a civil rights group, but she grew frustrated with the slow pace of the nonviolence movement and joined the Panthers. There she met her future husband Eldridge Cleaver, the Panthers' Minister of Information. After Eldridge was charged with

assault and attempted murder by the Oakland, CA, police, she fled with him to Algeria in 1969. She returned to the United States in 1975 with two children in ~ow, and continued to I work as a civil rights activist during the '7os. In 1981, she enrolled at Yale, earning her bachelor's degree in 1984 and her JD from the Law School in 1989. She currently teaches at Emory Law School. C leaver's extraordinary credentials and .reputation for radical opinions brought her ! back to Yale f~r the 2001 Black Solidarity 1 Conference. I hstened to her keynote speech that Saturday, and I was blown away. Hardly stopping to take a sip of water, she called on l students to reject the propaganda that white American institutions spout, to stay connected to each other and to black communities, and to remember the millions of historical atrocities comm itted against black people in the United States. She spoke forcefully and confidently, with a calm insistence that the audience take her seriously. Her words were not exactly hostile, but two or three times, I averted my eyes as one of the few white people in the room. An hour later, I was sitting in a sundrenched room in Linsly-Chinenden Hall, fumbling with my tape recorder and not sure what to expect from Cleaver. But Cleaver has an uncanny .ability to adapt her message to her audience. As soon as she came into the room, her manner was friendly, and she immediately had me talking about my reactions to her speech. Not quite demanding, not quite emotional, not quite urgent, her voice has been seasoned with 30 years of experience. At a

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time when most peoples' parents were settling into jobs and shrouding themselves in the idyllic comfort of the suburbs, she was going back to school to further arm herself with knowledge. She watched this country descend into what she sees as solidly entrenched conservatism; she watched as the , Black Panther Party, its members blacklisted, disintegrated, leaving political prisoners from the '6os still behind bars. She has seen drafr dodgers grow old and conservative, and she has seen a major shifr in the mindset of their I children. "During the '6os young people were more under the influence of the values of I their parents, their Sunday school, their Hebrew school," she told me. "They were shocked, absolutely shocked, by the assassination of the president, they were appalled by the violence and genocidal destructiveness of the Vietnam War. There was a sense that the violence against civil rights workers was horrendous. I think the recognition that you know what's right, that the government's doing what's wrong--that's all gone. Your generation is much more cynical and says, 'Ob, he's a crook. Oh, he's a hypocrite. So what else is new?' And there's this acceptance of this degenerate behavior on the part of the ' go¥unment." But despite her frustration that America is wallowing in political stagnation, she does not seem tired. At one point in our conversation she hinted slightly at burnout, but clearly, she has not given up or joined the Establishment. "What I do is try to gain the attention of people who will be operating within the system to make them understand certain legal processes that have this extraordinary degree of tyranny, to understand how

Oacm.mn 2001

the system can be abused. If you recognize that, you can act to challenge it-not to go in all starryeyed and think the law is for the people, 'cause it's not. The legal system operates on behalf of the established order to protect the material wealth of those who are in charge of the established order. If you are willing to go up against that, you spend an enormous amount of time and resources and effort defending the people who challenge the laws, and you need a whole lot more troops to do this." She addressed the issue of well-intentioned white liberals who aren't sure what to do to improve race relations on a campus like Yale's. "It's not black people who are racist-black people are the targets of racism. So there's been a whole movement built up to defend and to resist racism. People who di;agree with racism who are white tend to look to the recipients of the racism as a source of how to deal with it instead of looking to the source of the racism, which is in the leadership of white communities. Do the black people have to do all the work?" She called on college students to break out of their current complacency. "To me, that's what a person in a highly intellectual environment is supposed to do: ask questions, not just accept what you're told at face value. That's what you're told in your classrooms, right? So are you supposed to ask questions only of the material in the classroom? You can't ask questions of the material in the Nnu

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York Time?. I mean, come on." She had spoken about the evils of globalization, the capitalistic domination of the American government, and the lack of access to non-corporate media, but I still had questions about her history. She flatly denied the most common criticism of the Panthers, that "'The Black Panther Party advocated division.' No. The Black Panther Party is recognwng the causes of this division and advocating a means to work across it. That's a radical deparcure. The media and the government benefit from the division. So they see these Black Panthers and the anti-war protesters working together, and they say, 'Let's figure out how we can stop it."'

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I felt myself being sucked in by her rhetoric, but as I walked out of the interview, ·my initial burst of admiration gave way to my old cynical reflex. Looking back on our con,versation, I knew that plenty of analytical, 'arrogant Yalies would probably scoff at ··c leaver's calls to action. Maybe my cautionary voice is right, and her ideas are irrational and far-fetched. But I'm inclined to think her 'viewpoint is all the more imponant now. Cleaver has devoted 30-odd years to fighting for what she believes in, and she has adapted 'her strategy to a completely different era. 'Though the rest of the world might have ·given up, Cleaver's revolution continues. -Tori Truseheit

·1, Robot 'THIS IS YOUR BRAIN. This is your brain on computers. In ro~ghly 30 years, give or take, our brains will be uploaded onto computers, professor Nick Bostrom imagines. "You'll wake up and find yourself living in a vinual reality." From his cloistered office above the computer lab in Connecticut Hall, 28-year-old Bostrom is helping to speed up human evolution. Bostrom, a lecturer in the Yale philosophy department, is the co-founder of the World Transhurnanist Association (WTA). Transhumanism, a term coined by Aldous Huxley, describ~ the further evolution of

humanity through educational and psychological means. However, around 15 years ago, a disparate group of people who were interested in the use of all kinds of technologies to "evolve" human life-from cryonics and space travel to drugs--co-opted the term. Since childhood, Bostrom has beli~ed that sooner or later we would learn how to enhance human intelligence and develop machines that would be smarter than humans. Around five years ago, he learned there were others with the same ideas. Founded in 1998, the WTA attempts to bring together this varied group of people, to advance the acceptance ofTranshurnanism as an academic field, and to foster greater public and nerworking about awareness Transhumanist co·ncepts. Bostrom is determined to lead this movement out of the ivory tower; he proudly claims that over 1600 people have joined, from truck drivers to ftlm produce·rs to academics and engineers. In addition to producing journals and websites promulgating

Transhumanism, the WTA holds annual conferences to discuss developments. Last year's conference in London included lectures on topics such as "The Hedonistic Imperative" and "My Life as a Cyborg." According to Bostrom, the basic tenet is that "we can and should use technology to overcome some of the fundamental limitations of human nature." To Bostrom, the concept of a static human "nature" is passe. Transhumanists would enhance our intellectual abilities, abolish the aging process, and improve our emotional experiences through such technologies as artificial intelligence, molecular nanotechnology, and "uploading." Uploading would entail creating a 3-0 molecular map of the brain and then transferring this brain architecture onto a computer- a "source code of your mind." "Information processing can be done on silicon as well as

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biological neurons," Bostrom explains. "If computers can work one thousand times faster, so can your brain." Bostrom also encourages the development of "smart drugs" that would enhance cognitive performance--like steroids for the mind. He has no problem with self-medicating. Medicines should be like food, Bostrom says. "If a different substance is required to make a better life, the fact that it is unnatural shouldn't be an argument against it." Since much of this technology is still in development, the way to live in accordance with the Transhumanist ethos, according to Bostrom, is to exercise, eat healthfully, not smoke, avoid high-risk activities, use email, drink copious amounts of caffeine, and chew nicotine gum (it "increases concentration"). As Bostrom explains this, the robotic voice from Radiohead's "Fitter Happier" replays in my mind: "Fitter, Happier, More productive, Comfortable, Not drinking too much, Regular exercise at the gym .... " And, of course, as good Transhumanists, we should make sure that we are frozen in liquid nitrogen, instead of being cremated or buried, when we finally die. Not surprisingly, the prospect of increasing cognitive abilities through a variety of means has played well at Yale. "The feedback bas been extremely enthusiastic!" Bostrom exclaims. A Transhumanist working group comprised primarily of Yale researchers and faculty has been established, and Bostrom hopes to offer a class on Transhumanism next fall. "The reason I wanted to do the class was because of a lack of opportunity among undergraduates to think about the future of the species," Bostrom says. For Bostrom, an understanding of Transhumanism is crucial for students since, "Transhumanism will affect everything from institutions and economic systems to study techniques," and, after all, "the undergraduate may live to see these things happen."

-DavidLau

DECEMBER 2001

Jai and Dry ONLY 1WO TYPES OF FANS come tO a jai-alai match anymore: compulsive gamblers and the chronically bored. Sometimes they are both: young, sweaty men who scratch lottery tickets in between matches; ancient, transparent-skinned couples who clutch three-dollar bets and pass whole minutes staring above the action with unresponsive eyes. These miserable specimens- and few of them-are what I found at the self-proclaimed International

Championships of]ai-Alai on the weekend of November 2-4, in Milford, CT. But it hardly matters. The Milford Jai-Alai Fronron is the last professional venue for this sport in Connecticut, and it is closing in December. The immediate cause for the Fronron's demise is that the tribal casinos Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun have taken away its business. It might have been able to keep afloat, but Sports Haven, the off-track betting establishment by the New Haven Harbor, has refused to share its franchise. So at the Fronton long seams of grass crack through the empty parking lots, only three of the 50 betting windows remain open, and you can get a beer or a cheeseburger for 99 cents on Thursdays. The glory days of Milford JaiAlai, back before they closed the lounge, when high-rollers tipped valets and thousands packed the place, are long past. As soon as the casinos opened, the crowds and the money

left, not only because Milford Jai-Alai is a singularly unpleasant place; but also because the jai-alai played there is an awfully depressing game. Jai-alai resembles a racquet sport, although players catch and throw the ball with scoop-shaped baskets strapped to thei~ wrist. Once I realized this, and once I stopped listening to the butchered Basque affectations of the announcer, the game became easy to follow. Its dynamic and rules are more or less those of squash. What really makes jai-alai different is not that players propel the ball with sestas, or that they call their ball a pe/ota, but that the court is 140 feet long, and the ball can travel over 150 miles per hour. My program cheerily explained the origins of jai-alai as a version of handball played against the sides of Basque cathedrals. In its primal form, played by local rules, it demanded almost superhuman agility, endurance, and strategy. In America, jai-alai was introduced as a new diversion for fin de si~c/e crowds just becoming familiar with sluggish domestic sports and their beefy players: football, baseball, boxing. The 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis packed a 6ooo-seat stadium with an audience that had never imagined lithe, olive-skinned young men or the gymnastic potential of professional athletes. Throughout the 1930s, jai-alai was a major draw for Florida's emerging tourist industry. But its true glory days were in pre-Castro Havanathe capital city of exotic pleasure. Betting on jai-alai first became legal in those Florida frontons. Gambling did more than change the spectator's relationship with the sport, it changed the game itself. Like tennis or squash, jai-alai does not naturally make a good betting game. This is because the matches are long, two sides compete, and you either win or lose your bet. Bookies make team sports more interesting by giving gamblers the chance to call point spreads or wager on the performance of one player, but jai-alai is played to a point limit, with only two play-

ers-four when playing doubles. American ingenuity found a way to ftx jai-alai with the "Spectacular Seven" scoring system, which pits eight players against each other in a round robin. Player one serves to player two. Whoever wins serves to player three. After all eight have played a point, the scoring doubles. Games are played to seven. Anyone who has watched or played ten- . nis or squash knows that while a long rally is exciting, racquet sports are more about endurance and strategy than agility and power. A 15-second tennis spot on the eleven o'clock news is not interesting at all; a 45minute set can be riveting. The same is true with jai-alai, but "Spectacular Seven" ~cans that a match is made up of 30 or 40 fragments without the narrative of a continuous game to expose the players' strategy or to prove their athleticism. This mode of play makes it possible to bet in an astonishing number of ways, fits r6 games into an afternoon or evening, Âˇand it used to make real money for fronton

owners-Milford dragged in $87 million in 1988. But it also means that professional jaialai is phenomenally un-fun to watch. Jai-alai players are no more enthusiastic than the crowd. One or two points is not long enough to get into one's groove, so almost every player leaves the court kicking she wall and scowling. The new shape of the sport has also taken the need for endurance out of the game, and made power more importantserving aces is the way to win in "Spectacular Seven." This has reshaped the players in turn: Now they are sluggish and stocky, as unenthusiastic in their physiognomy as in their performance. A couple of them rallied for the big tournament, which pitched them against players from Spain and Florida for $2o,ooo in prizes-not chump change for someone who pulls in 40 or 50K a year, and who will be unemployed come December. But their .best moments wt;re only mediocre, and the place seemed only a little less drab when a Milford p layer named Wayne won me 16 bucks. Acrually, some of the doubles games -were pretty good. But if the international roster of players assembled for the tournament was any indication of the strength of the field, then there is not a man alive today who plays the whole court well. The New Haven Register reports that some players are moving to Florida or Rhode Island to keep playing; some of them will probably return home to Basque Spain. But my visits to Milford have proven to my satisfaction that jaialai has been a dead sport for decades, and that it is now a dying industry as well. The whole appeal of the game rests in a relationship between the audience and the spectacle which has been made irrelevant and impossible by our media culture and our shortening attention spans, even without "Spectacular Seven" thrown in the mix. Foxwoods may be a grim place itself, but at least there you can breathe the oxygen of real money, and of

real human drama. An old widower hitting the jackpot on quarter slots or a young family man cashing personal checks for more chips-this is entertainment with some blood in it.

-Blake Wilson

By Any Other Name OBITUARIES AND FOOTBALL SCORES graced its pages in the 18oos, and during the 1960s photographs of nude women appeared on its cover. And at the height of the Yak Literary Magazinls most unexpected incarnation in the late 1970s, Russian themes and ideas permeated the publication. During this era, the magazine, established in 1836 and bearing distinction as both the oldest existing publication at Yale and the oldest literary review in North America, almost lost its very name. Most students part with their extracurricular activities when they graduate, but this was not the case for one former editor of the Lit, Andrei Navrowv. After graduating in 1978, he began to publish a magazine to which be gave the inventive tide the Yak Literary Magazine. The new magazine, staffed by Navrozov and his compatriots, had a distinctly Russian focus, including Navrozov's own translations of poems by two Russian Nobel laureates, Joseph Brodsky and Boris Pasternak. Though Navrozov and the magazine remained in New Haven, Navrozov no longer had any official affiliation with the University, and the publication was produced entirely outside of Yale. The Yak Litmzry Magazine was no longer a Yale organization. Navrozov's "Yale Lit" managed to incur a $7o,ooo debt by 1980. He desperately searched for support and lit upon the American Literary Sociery in 1981. With the underwriting of the conservative organization, the circulation of the magazine rose to uooo and it gained an international readership. In 1982, the editorial board of

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Kaplan gets you in. Navrozov's magazine claimed "the Yak Literary Magazine is in its Golden Age." Indeed, the magazine enticed contributors such as Ezra Pound and William F. Buckley, · Jr., though it was Buckley himself who noted in an article published in Navrowv's magazine that "the Yak Literary Magazine has wandered as far away from the direct concerns of Yale University as Yale University has wandered from the concerns of the Congregationalist Church." Buckley was not the only one to notice the separation of the Yak Literary Magazine from Yale University. Yale rewrote its Undergraduate Regulations in 1982 to explicitly state for the first time that all University organizations using Yale's name had to be registered and controlled by currently enrolled undergraduate students. · Navrowv then took his most drastic step. He and the American Literary Society sued Yale for creating the new policy, claiming that the University had acted illegally and fraudulently by revising the regulations. The American Literary Society complained that the "rule-change had been brought about by a handful of jealous professors," according to the New Havm journal Courier. Defeated by the Connecticut Superior Court, Navrozov and the American Literary Society appealed, alleging that the revised rule violated anti-trust laws. "We're bloody, but unbowed at this point," said their lawyer. Vehemently claiming that h e had bought the rights to the name of the Yak Literary Magazine for $1.00 from the undergraduate organization that once controlled it, Navtozov argued that he deserved complete control over the name. And meanwhile, the American Literary Society filed an application with the us Patent and Trademark Office to register the trademark "Yale Literary Magazine." The application was denied. "Their claim of sham litigation is wholly unsubstantiated by anything in the record," stated the fed-up federal judge in 1987, afrer

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the case had dragged on for four years. In unusually strong terms, he chastised the techniques that Navrozov and the Society used in court: "[Their] complaint is rife with references to the University's history, its economic structure, the 'secret societies at Yale,' and a multitude of other allegations patently irrelevant to this action." He could not contain his amazement at Navrozov's persistence: "It is at best curious and at worst bizarre that plaintiffs fail to acknowledge the fact that the University prevailed in each of these proceedings." Again "unbowed" by the outcome of the trial, Andrei Navrozov continued in a literary career as a translator and journalist. In a recent review he wrote on Thomas Harris's Cannibal, he stated that he and his Russian friends, after years of discussions, have come to agree that "every man alive has more enemies than he has friends." The Russians did not succeed in taking over the the Lie-but another unexpected group would attempt to do just that. The magazine lay dormant during most of the trial, but in 1989, students who were officers

Party of the Right registered its own board under the name of the Yale Literary Magazine. Both groups demanded to be recognized as the editors of the new Lit. During deliberations by Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg, the Party of the Right pulled out a surprising document;. a letter from Andrei Navrozov, which declared that he had sold the name of the Yak Literary Magazine to the Party of the Right for $x.oo-the very name which the federal court had definitively established as belonging to the University, not Navrozov. After a bureaucratic scramble, the Parry of the Right lost its claim to the name and the literary board was allowed to re-register as an undergraduate organization in September 1989. Yet to this day; the Parry of the Right has a quote from ÂˇAndrei Navrozov prominently posted on their web page: "The Party of the Right i.s a group of people who prefer a bad paradox to a good cliche." The new board of the Lit requested $130.67 from the Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee to support the rebuilding and restructuring of the

current editors-in-chief Emily Weiss and Zach Weinman, the magazine fell into debt after last spring's issue. Four college 'masters donated $500 each to pay the debt. If the magazine goes over budget again, the cost will be bursar billed to the accounts of the editorsin-chief, who will nor be permitted to register for classes or graduate until the bill is paid. Thus seems to be the fate of the Lit- like Madame Ravensky in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, a noble name fallen upon hard times and beleaguered by crackpots. -Hekn Phillips

Two-Penny Prophet ONE AFTERNOON, DANNY SIEGEL (AKA "The Feeling Person's Thinker," AKA "The Pied Piper ofTzedakah," AKA "The Most Famous Unknown Jewish Poet in America") led Yale in its first ever "Mitzvah Walk." It was unusually warm for October, and Danny met our small group of six Yale students outside of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale wearing a baseball cap, tinted bifocals, a worn shirt, khaki shorts, and sneakers. Tucked under his right arm were several pamphlets and a glossy paperback copy of his latest book I + I = 3 and 37 Other Mitzvah Principks to Live By. (Mitzvah is the Hebrew word for commandment used by Siegel and many others to mean "good deed.") "What we're trying to find out," he explained, "is how local businesses could be useful co the people of the community. For instance, if a restaurant throws out all its leftover food at the end of the day, we need co find a way to get that food to people who need it. Basically, we're looking for people with certain 'expercises,' but not the kind of 'expertises' you'd think would be immediately useful. oK?" A round of head nods, a few uncertain smiles, and then Danny was off. walking slowly but talking a mile a minute

n .â&#x20AC;˘zed Both groups demanded to be recog . as the editors of the new Lit. of the Party of the Right and the Yak Free Press leapt into heavy competition with a board of students who wanted to publish a traditional literary magazine of poetry, fiecion, and art. (Dean Philip Greene speculates that perhaps the Party of the Right was interested in the publication so that the liberal literary magazine would not gain an important position on campus.) When the board that had formed with the intention of recreating a traditional literary magazine neglected to reregister as an undergraduate organization, the

magazine. The Committee gave the board $zr.88. Perhaps Yale felt that it had already invested enough time, energy, and money in the magazine bought and sold by Andrei Navrozov for $r.oo. The Yak Literary Magazine may be guaranteed its name and safety ftom the agressions of the Parry of the Right or other interlopers, but fmancial problems continue to plague it. One of its largest donors, Paul Mellon, died recently, depriving the Lit of an important source of funding. According to

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and in no coherent fashion-first it was mitv vahs, then New Haven, then his non-profit Ziv Tzedakah Fund, which somehow led to therapeutic horseback riding in Israel, whichÂˇ segued into the various charitable uses for hotel shampoo, followed by a long digression on the Lion's Club, used eyeglasses, and references to his poetry, and eventually returned to our New Haven "Mitzvah Walk." And all this before we got to the fiiSt stop. In his off-the-wall way, Danny Siegel has spent nearly 30 years trying tO get people to subscribe to a simple philosophy: "Whatever I want for myself, I want for other people." Since 1981 he has distributed over $4.5 million through the Ziv Tzedakah Fund, an organization that, according to its literature, claims to "receive contributions which [it] gives to insp iring individuals and programs," so that good people can carry on good deeds, or mitzvahs, through the generosiry of others. Most of Danny's 25-plus books promote tzedakah, the Hebrew word for "righteousness," which they translate as "doing the right thing," and the work of "Mitzvah heroes"people who, as he puts it, go out of their way "to fix the world." But he insists, "I don't fundraise. I'm not a fundraiser. I speak, and people send money. That's all." In fact Danny earns his living entirely though the sale of his books, which include several volumes of poetry (more than a few out of print), and th rough speaking engagements at synagogues, colleges, and various conferences. For $1500 Slifka got a Mitzvah Walk, a working dinner, and a formal talk, all of which were in tended, as Danny put it, "to raise awareness about doing good and becoming good people." Bur watching Danny Siegel take on the New Haven business communiry, one might wonder how he became such a sought-after lecturer. At our first stop, a local dry cleaners, the manager had been forewarned about Danny's visit, but still seemed flustered by his

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rapid-fire questions: "What do you do with clothes left for more than three months? What do you do with clothes you think no one will claim?" He drew closer to the already befuddled manager. "Is there a place where you could donate them?" he pressed. "Do you ever do alterations for free? Do you ever do cleanings for free for people who can't afford them?" As Danny explained later, this kind of approach is fairly typical. "It's a kind of free association," he said. "I am incapable of thinking linearly. So I can't give you a systematic explanation, only a free-associative one." Apparently the manager was a linear thinker. After a thoughtful pause, he replied that the cleaners usually returned clothes to their owners and that although people would sometimes leave their garments for extended · periods of time, they almost invariably claimed rhein. I could tell this was not exactly the answer .Danny was hoping for, but he still seemed optimistic and urged us on to our next business, a nearby coffee shop. But upon reaching the cafe, D anny seemed suddenly fatigued and ducked out for a few minutes to "clear his head," giving at least one of my fellow walkers a chance to speak freely. Micah Lapidus, the current Jewish Campus Service Corps (Jcsc) Fellow at Slifka, tried to explain his reasons for bringing Danny to Yale. Micah first heard Danny speak less than a year ago, while still a senior at Stanford, and asked him that very day to come speak at Yale the following year. "My motivation," he explained, as we waited for coffee on Slifka's tab, "was to let other people hear wh at he has to say. H e sees things in ways the rest of us would never think about." Micah paused for a moment, the expression on his face one of undisguised admiration and enthusiasm. "I don't know," he concluded. "His message is simple, but that doesn't diminish it in any way. H e's really a true paradigm." Unfortunately, Danny's zeal for good works did not prove universally infectious. Despite a friendly reception at the coffee shop, we received no guarantees about possible donations to local shelters, and after less

than five minutes at a New Haven copy store, Danny seemed to deduce that discount copies for charity would not be forthcoming, at least not from the unsmiling gentlemen behind the counter. The cosmetics store around the corner proved no more hopeful. When D anny asked a young saleswoman about free m anicures for battered women, she only looked up from her inventory long enough to inform us, "Nail polish isn't environmentally safe." Then again, it was probably obvious that Danny wasn't going "to hang around for a makeover. After only four businesses in just under two hours, we left the cosmetics store with about half our original walkers (the others lost to "class" or "section"), and Danny told us he needed a nap. Still, h e remained confident about the "Mitzvah Walk." H e turned to the remaining walkers and urged us to go back and follow up on his work. A couple nodded noncommittally, but at least one looked as though he had found his hero. "People ask me why the stuff we do is important when terrorists are flying planes into the World Trade Center," Danny told us. "But it is important. It's about human dignity. Every time I pass these pamphlets on to a new person , every time someone cuts their hair for a cancer victim, every time som eone drives leftover food to a shelter, it makes a difference." A few minutes later a heavyset woman carrying a shopping bag filled with paper-wrapped flowers approached Danny. "Would you like to buy a flower so I can stay at the shelter tonight?" she asked. Danny jumped at the opportunity. "I'd love to," he replied. H e bought five. -Katit Maiizi4

THE NEW joURNAL

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PARDO-MAURER IJI18nt Deputy Secretary of Defense NOvember30

DECEMBER 2.001

more Jonathan Lehrer is considering both TPA ' and a teaching career, he admits discussing ,the drawbacks of the profession with his parents. "My mother was concerned that it might not be intellectually fulfilling," he ~explained. Sophomore Maricor Santiago's parents flatly denied her permission to go -•,into teaching. :, Yale students considering TFA seem par, ticularly attracted to the idea of using their , own privileged educational background to . I "save" low-income children from deficient -· schools and bad teachers. At Kopp's Dwight Hall appearance, eager Yalies nodded their i;,heads in dismay and understanding as she 'cited statistics describing the plight of inner' city public school students. Although Kopp stressed that mef!lbers are encouraged to r approach their teaching assignments with humility, the program's effectiveness is based on the theory that its members can do as good a job or better than the sites' current teachers. However, sending thousands of inexperienced young people into the nation's most challenged classrooms may not be the best solution to these problems, according to Gillet. "To see Teach for America as a form of social justice is oxymoronic," he explained. "How can it be social justice to place uncertified teachers in needy schools?" He suggested instead that experienced, veteran teachers be sent to these under-performing schools, since they may be better equipped to confront the difficult problems facing public schools. Teach for America advocates counter that as long as teacher shortages exist, the need for TFA will remain. A student at Kopp's Dwight Hall session questioned whether putting first-time teachers into the hardest teaching positions simply contributes to the existing problems of high teacher turnover and poor classroom leadership. Kopp responded that, at the very least, TFA members are better than the substitutes that would normally fill teacher vacancies, and that principals would rather have "a total superstar who stays for two years than an average t teacher for six years." She also noted that 6o 1 percent ofTPA teachers continue in their positions for a third year.

Many TFA members, such as Wagner, found that their lack of teaching experience made their job much more difficult. "It takes an amazing, exceptional teacher that has been teaching for many years to teach a class of 34 kids and make sure everyone learns," said Wagner. Not only was Wagner's class large, it was also filled with what she called the school's "bad kids"-the children other teachers sought to exclude from theu classes because of emotional and behavioral problems and because they were academically behind. Even during her second year of teaching, when her class was more diverse, she estimated that three to four of her students read at grade level, one half read below grade level, and the rest could not read at all. Although she avoided saying that her lack of a teaching certificate left her less prepared to deal with these challenges, she admitted that she often resorted to library books to learn teaching techniques, and that she regretted missing out on the mentoring relationship developed during the teacher certification process, which includes classroom observation and work under the supervision of a veteran teacher. Wagner also found that some of her coworkers resented TFA for enabling its members to sidestep the teacher certification process. "The principal told us not to tell other teachers we were Teach for America because they'd be hostile that we got jobs over people with teaching credentials," she remembered. She said this resentment, which she only encountered among the least dedicated teachers, was frustrating, but the hostility seemed to go both ways. "The bureaucracy and quagmiie [new teachers] have to get through gives you the kind of person you don't want teaching. Smart people don't stand in that line waiting," she said. "Teachers don't like Teach for America because it deprofessionalizes [them]. Also, it throws college kids into areas that have the greatest needs. But, if I weren't there, then who would be?" -

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In addition to an intensive five-week training course, TPA encourages members to enroll in night or weekend alternative certification programs through local schools and colleges to increase their effectiveness in the classroom. This form of certification has become increasingly popular among public schools facing shortages in critical areas such as math, science, and bilingual education. New Haven public schools alone currently boast 30 teachers with durational shortage area permitS, meaning they can teach for no more than two years while in a planned period of study to receive the appropriate degrees. No TFA sites are currently located in Connecticut. Although TPA officials said many factors ace considered when choosing sites, Connecticut's relatively strict teachercertification standards make TFA placements difficult. Wagner seemed irritated that despite her two-year stint as a teacher in the Bronx, her lack of formal certification prevents her from teaching in New Haven. "Despite the fact that I'm smarter and have more education than most people, I can't teach in Connecticut," she said. But less rigorous alternative certification programs are unsatisfactory solutions to teacher shortage problems, according to Darrel Capwell, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) spokesman and a classmate of Kopp's at Princeton. "Alternative certification is not a good substitute for making sure teachers ace prepared and certified beforehand," he said. "The fact that we ace facing a tremendous shortage doesn't mean that it's OK to put people who aren't prepared into the classroom." Capwell emphasizes that the AFT, the largest teachers' union, officially supports TPA. Rather than encouraging elite college students to enter teaching through TPA, Gillet and other critics argue that teacher prepara· cion programs should be encouraged as part of the curriculum in competitive colleges. Currently, six Ivy League schools, including Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, boast such programs. Although the Yale community is large· ly receptive to the teacher's preparation program, some community members harbor a "second-tier" attitude toward teaching. He said some professors initially responded to the program's creation

~ Arneriam ~of~Pri!lidents..toa Feldman

--------------------------------·----------THE NEW JouRNAL

with the attitude, "This is a great program because we have some students who really aren't going to make it as scientists and really should be teachers." While at Yale, Wagner attended a panel on New Haven public schools featuring experts on teaching. She remembered, "[Gillet] asked the audience of 50 how many wanted to be a teacher and he said none [raised their hands] and that's the problem. H e said, 'You want to understand the problem intellectually, but you don't want to help solve the problem."' Although TPA alumni may not remain teachers much past their required rwo- or . three-year commitment, most stay in the field : of education. Wagner explained that one of TPAS main strengths is that it attracts students to teaching who might not have otherwise considered the profession. "If I hadn't done TPA I would have ended up studying children while I pursed a PHD, as my advisor wanted, rather than working with them," she said. "You think that you're doing [TPA] for only it." rwo years, but you

According to Kopp, 6o percent of all TFA alumni are now working in education and almost three-fourths of the remaining 40 percent are in some form of work with low income f.unilies. Johnston hopes to become a principal in his home state of Colorado after earning his law degree at Yale. Wagner founded All Our Kin, a local organization that trains former welfare recipients to provide high quality childcare for their own and others' children. Jessica Levin, another Yale grad, served in the TFA administration after completing her teaching commitment and is now Chief Knowledge Officer of The New Teacher Project, an organization that helps school districts and state departments of education hire and develop new teachers. Other alumni have used their experiences in TPA to become "social entrepreneurs" in other related fields. As long as teacher shortages exist, a need for new teachers will remain. Over the next ten years, the AFT estimates that we will need to recruit, train, hire, and retain rwo million teachteachers. If TPA can recruit

ers, then it may be able to play a significant role in addressing these problems. The current economic crisis may encourage more applicants to TFA and teaching positions in general. Students are more likely to consider teaching as a career when they fear the unstable job market. According to Capwell, the teacher shortage has worsened over the past ten years due to the strong economy. If the only way to attract Yalies to teaching is by convincing them they are missionaries and not professionals, then TPA does serve a purpose. "Yale is not a place that supports teaching," Wagner said. "When you tell people you want to be a teacher they look down on you. They used to ask me what I was going to do after I taught [through TFA]. Yale doesn't value teachers." Although Yale traditionally encourages public service among its students and grads, it looks down on the profession that is arguably most effective at addressing disparity and injustice. IIBI Ruth D~Golia, a sophomore in Branford Coileg~, is on th~ staffo[TNJ.

Yale Digital Media Center for the Arts invites artists to submit work for an exhibition in response to the events of September II

Artists Respond

Dacno:ea 2.001

I believe, as Lenin said, that this revolutionary chaos may yet crystallize into new forms oflife. -Mikhail Gorbachev

'Last fall, a guerrilla emailer targeted three Yale professors. In a near thousand-word I

"'Political Science Manifesto," he condemned "East Coast Brahmins" as "a few men ... who cannot for the life-of-me compete with a third grade Economics graduate student" and ;'baby-stuff models of political science" and demanded the swift overthrow of the political

,science establishment. "I hope this anonymous letter leads to a dismantling of the Orwellian system that we have in APSA [the American Political Science Association) and that we will ~ee a true Perestroika

in the discipline," the note thunderously concluded, alluding to Soviet

political reforms of the 1980s. The author signed his name simply, "Mr. Perestroika." 't:S

By Jacob Blechen Senior Yale political science professors James Scott, Rogers Smith (now at the University of Pennsylvania), and Ian Shapiro, as well as 14 other eminent scholars, reacted with a mix of bewilderment, curiosity, and commiseration. Scott, rather than deleting what might have been perceived as bombastic spam, replied. Smith and Shapiro were more suspicious, but as the manifesto began ro circulate on the internet they could not avoid the growing Perestroika buzz. "People who received [the message] forwarded it to others," Smith told me. "I didn't, but so many did that soon there were just hundreds of people talking about this letter around the country." To accommodate the flood of interest, Mr. Perestroika created a lisrserv on Yahoo.com, and before long academic heavyweights, including Harvard's Theda Skocpol, the University of Chicago's Susan Hoeber Rudolph and John Mearsheimer, and Yale's Scott, Smith, and Shapiro, were fulminating online about the state of political science. Mr. Perestroika, it seemed, had tapped a fount of academic angst. â&#x20AC;˘Even though none of us who received the letter would have agreed with every statement in ir," Smith admitted, "nonetheless it touched a nerve with a number of political scientists, including me, who were unhappy about the state of the profession." Mr. Perestroika bemoaned the rise in APSA of a "coterie" of scholars who use highly mathematical methods. The organization's quarterly journal, the Ammcan Political Scimc~ Review (APSR), has become OVerwhelmingly quantitative in recent years-75 percent of the articles fiom the last four years were either statistical or formal, according to the journal's editor-in contrast to the discipline's traditional emphasis on qualitative methods. Moreover, trendy formal methods, such as rational choice theory, which uses economic and mathematical models to derive universal political postulates, are gradually supplanting qualiJative techniques like fieldwork and case studies. Mr. Perestroika believed that the increasing emphasis on quantitative methods was diminishing the relevance of political science to the real world. Within days, communal anguish turned to collective action. In November, Smith sent a scathing letter with 125 signatures to APSA and ita 13000 members. "An anonymous scholar writing as 'Mr. Perestroika,' circulated to an extensive roster of political scientists a passionate memo asking many provocative, indeed painful, questions," Smith fumed. "Why docs the APSR and why do other prominent pro-

DircEMBER 2001

fessional fora seem so intensively focused on technical methods, at the expense of the great, substantive political questions that actually intrigue many APSA members, as well as broader intellectual audiences?" Decrying mathematical hegemony in the APSR, anti-democratic governance in APSA, and a general elimare of fear among graduate students and junior faculty members, he urged the political science community ro heed the charges. "We believe strongly," he concluded, "that the profession is in danger of alienating a larger and larger number of those who should be its active members, and contributing less and less to the kinds of understanding of politics that it is our responsibility to advance." For centuries, scholars of politics have studied social movements and upheavals. Now political science had begun a revolution of its own. ONG BEFORE MR. PERESTROIKA BEGAN HIS MOVEMENT, Ian Shapiro was crusading for many of the same principles. Ever since the intense mathematicization of political science in the 1970s, Shapiro had been wary of a growing faction of scholars who promoted rigorous quantitative methodologies--especially rational choice theory. In 1994, in response to an external review ofYale's political science department that censoriously noted the under-representation of quantitative methods, Shapiro and colleague Donald Green published a landmark book, Patho/ogUs ofRational Choic~ Th~ory, which angrily challenged the value of the theory on its own terms. Rational choice, they argued, postulates universal hypotheses about politics that often do not apply to the real world. Shapiro and Green worried that such method-driven approaches to political science could endanger the discipline. ' The publication of Pathologies of Rational Choic~ Th~ory brought the schism in political science into focus. In 1995-the year rational choice advocates at the APSA convention allegedly motioned with tom-

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ahawk chops while a speaker criticixd Green and Shapiro's book-the journal Critical Review published a double issue on the controversy, featuring voices from all sides. Meanwhile, Shapiro's campaign continued. He presented numerous conference papers on the ills of political science. Only months before Mr. Perestroika's call-to-arms, he took his arguments to the public in an article in the arts section of the New York Times titled "A Model that . Pretends to Explain Everything" calling for a more relevant, problem-driven study of politics. The stage was set for insurgency. Mr. Perestroika had spied a would-be vanguard and sent off his rabble-rousing email in the hopes that the "troika" of Shapiro, Scott, and Smith, along with their colleagues, could rescue and revive a profession they had worked so hard to shape. the conflagration had spread to graduate students. At Yale, in an uncanny repetition of the early Perestroika events, first-year political science student Tim Pachirat sent out an incensed email lamenting the heavily mathematical bent and oppressive atmosphere of Yale's department. "[The department) must equip its students with more than just a hammer, lest they go out into the world seeing every problem as a nail. We need saws! We need measuring rapes! We need drills! WE NEED MORE METHODOLOGICAL DIVERSITY IN OUR COURSE OFFERINGS!" While Scott, Smith, and Shapiro had become part of the national Perestroika movement, their own department seemed forgotten. Had the vanguard ignored the very people it aimed to help? "On the one hand, there was a very open, ecumenical rhetoric on the part of the department," Pachirat told me.

ITHIN MONTHS,

"But on the other hand, we really perceived that in terms of training and coursework, graduate students were being encouraged, pushed, driven to view a particular approach ... as more likely to lead to professional success." More than one professor has drawn correlation graphs on the blackboard illustrating the positive relationship between the number of statistics classes one takes and one's salary as a professor. Others have told students that the last 50 years of political science were a waste of time. Pachirat thinks that the department is caving in to professional pressures. "Yale is trying to keep up with what's going on in political science," Pachirat said, his voice filled with exaspera· tion, "and in some ways it's just trying to do its job by making sure its graduate students are in good positions to get jobs when they graduate." Ian Shapiro, chairman of the depart· ment, ddivered a p ublic lecture in early spring subtitled, "What's Wrong with Political Science and What to Do About It." Shortly after, Pachirat and a group of gradu· ate students began to organize for curricular reform. As their professors had done only months earlier, they drafted a letter signed by nearly 50 students and two professors, Scott and Steven Smith, which vented a number of familiar concerns and demanded new courses on qualitative methods. "As the Perestroika movement flourishes within and outside oUI university," the letter pleaded, "we hope oUI department will do what it can and should to earn and maintain its image as a paragon of methodological openness." The group presented the letter to Shapiro, who was supportive. But when the graduate students suggested that the depart· ment was not living up to its rhetoric, he W2S less persuad ed: "[Shapiro] said, 'Look at the dissertations in the last five or ten years--the THE NEW JoURNAl

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Why is Spector Eye Care majority of them are qualitative,'" Pachirat remembered. "What we wanted to stresS was, look, maybe that's true from your vantage point, but we're telling you as graduate students that the training you're giving us is definitely on the side of one approach over another." Pachirat even pointed me to a recent Perestroika-sanctioned study of major political science departments that placed Yale in the category of schools with the greatest emphasis on quantitative methods. Shapiro claims the graduate student viewpoint is skewed. "The trouble with the graduate student's perspective," he told me, "is that the student arrives in year x when professor y happens to be on leave, and the whole image of the department is formed by the year when they walk in the door." Nonetheless, he granted the students' request for more methodological diversity. Scott stepped forward to co-teach a course entitled "Creativity and Method in Comparative Research" this fall. Pachirat promulgated the good news on the Perestroika listserv, proclaiming "Attention Graduate Students Everywhere: COLLECTIVE ACTION WORKS!" liE QUANTITATIVE CAMP has SO far given little thought to the Perestroika movement. Yale professor Frances Rosenbluth, who is on the APSR editorial board and uses rational choice theory in her work, declared, "Perestroika is a non-issue for me." Former Yale professor Geoffrey Garrett and current professor John Roemer, who are both strong proponents of rational choice theory and other formal methods, also have little interest in the movement or in the possibility of counter-revolution. Yet even as Rosenbluth, Garrett, and Roemer dismissed the mutiny in their midst, APSA appeared to bend ro Perestroika pres-

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sure. In the months after Rogers Smith's open letter, the Perestroika listserv had been filled with agitating and strategizing, and its mem~ bers recommended Scott and others to the nominating committee. During the spring Executive Director of APSA Catherine Rudder called Scott and told him that he had been nominated to run for a seat on the APSA coun~ cil as a member of the official slate. Scott assumed that he had been nominated-basi~ cally elected, since slates are rarely 'opposedbecause of h is involvement in the movement, but Rudder assured him that it had "nothing to do with Perestroika, but rather with [his) qualifications." Scott was not convinced.

Straussians, deconstructionists, an4il- interna~ tiona! relations specialists), Smith and Shapiro are more restrained. Smith maintains that Perestroika is not a "cohesive cadre." Shapiro, who has distanced himself from the movement since the initial flurry of activity, now considers himself more of an interested "participant in conversations." He even referred to Perestroika as "a little bit para~ noid." But in his candidacy, Scott declared him~ self the "delegate from Perestroika" and out~ lined broad plans for Perestroika reforms. "I will pr~s on every possible occasion to make the APSA more plural and democratic," he

The APSA objected to Scott's tendentious statement, requesting that he reduce it to a simple biography. Scott refused. All the candidates' statements were held for months before the committee finally allowed Scott's to stand. Perestroika, it seemed, had secured a victory. Like the rebellious peasants he studies, Scott suddenly found himself pushed into the heart of the revolution. Y THE END OP SUMMER, the Perestroika movement had gained much ground. APSA had bowed to pressure and announced that it would publish a new journal and refund subscriptions to the

"[Yale] must equip its students with inore than just a hammer, lest they see every problem as a nail. We need saws! We need measuring tapes! We need drills!"

.. "Why else would I have, aU of a sudden, a warm corporate embrace from APSA," he asked, "which had never nominated me for anything in the course of a JO~year career?" Unsure of whether to accept the nomina~ cion- was APSA trying to co~opt the movement?-he e~mailed Perestroika headquarters and received a thumbs~up. "They said, 'We'll take what we can get,'" he remembers. "So I said 'What the hell?'" Although Scott talks about the Perestroika movement almost as if it were a revolutionary party (consisting of, as he p u t it, "people who would be at one another's throats in lots of other contexts," like

wrote. "I will do whatever I can to ensure that we create a professional climate where junior faculty and graduate students who believe that they represent dissenting intellectual era~ ditions will never again feel the need for the cover of anonymity to speak frankly ... The APSA has become, I believe, progressively more sectarian and oligarchic." He also vowed to make the APSR, which he claims most professors toss directly into the trash, more accessible to the rest of academia. "[The APSRJ is really a Rube Goldberg machinery designed to get people tenure and not have any relevance to the external world," he told me.

APSR, rumors of governance reforms in APSA had emerged, and Scott had infiltrated the council. But many wondered how much more the movement could accomplish. Genuine change in the profession, some wrote on the listserv, could only be achieved in "the trenches" of colleges and universities. Mr. Perestroika himself warned followers not to feel "elated at our miniscule victories." But the Perestroika movement had at least man路 aged to bring life to the decrepit, stodgy orga路 nization upon which it originally set its crici路 cal gaze and to the field itself Every political scientist in the country was talking about APSA, the APSR, or the condition of the disci路

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pline. As Mr. Perestroika wrote to me in an email, "Hopefully the wider academic community will wake up to the increasing irrelevance of political science to many 'real' political questions because of its strict adherence to methodological orthodoxy. Our movement seeks to make all of us more relevant and more critical." Scott, Smith, Shapiro, and others had all "woken up" to Mr. Perestroika's clarion call. In late August, the "Perestroikaniks," as James Scott calls his comrades, met for the first time in person, at the APSA annual conference in San Francisco. Prominent Perestroika names, junior faculty members, and graduate students, including some of Yale's crusaders, all convened to celebrate, discuss, and strategize. Wine glasses in hand, nearly 300 people attended a jubilant recep\tion, and hundreds more attended panels with tides like "Perestroika: Undisciplined, Unpunished," and "Shaking Things Up? Future Directions in Political Science." A larger crowd packed the Perestroika comingout party than the APSA President's reception nc:n door. Mr. Perestroika never revealed his, her, or their identities. But, with so much accomplished and so much more to do, it seemed as if no one really cared.

jacob Blecher, a sophomore in Davenport College, is research director for TNJ.

Branford College Presents

~~~

wwww www ww w A Master's Tea with

JOHN DESTEFANO, JR. Mayor of New Haven Tuesday, November 27, 4:00 PM Branford College Master's House 80 High Street

Dacu.usEa 2001

The Uni

S A GREETING, Joel

Zackin gave me pliers a wrench. He apologized for not having bolt cutters. I started unclasping a chain-link fence to open a pedestrian-sized gap so that people could access the quarter mile section of the Farmington Canal running through Science Park, the New Haven industrial complex where Zackin works as a research biologist. Others joined us, and were welcomed as I was: with threshers, loppers, hacksaws, or bow saws thrust into their hands. We set out through the gate to clear a trail along the abandoned railroad line from Henry Street to Division Street, hacking through roughly two blocks in two hours. We dipped and up-rooted the same plants Zackin and his friends had removed the year before: ankle-snagging tangles of wild roses; razor-edged grasses; black locust branches with skin-pricking thorns; shoots of -- J"~"'"<::::>" knot-weed; putrid and omnipresent new growths of Alanthus altissimus, deceitfully misnamed the Tree of Heaven. Occasiona!Jy, we came across a fiery-leaved red oak. But if it stood in the way, we felled that too. Âˇscraped and sore, we made our way back down new path. As he passed out cider and brioche, Zackin urged everyone to return the following Saturday. The group would be clearing a spot that had never been touched before, pushing closer to the Hamden town line, where they hoped their path would eventually be joined to another pan of a trail that begins in Northampton, MA, and stretches So miles south to New Haven Harbor and the Long Island Sound. In 1825, you could have lounged in your skiff as a donkey pulled you and your cargo down the newly excavated Farmington Canal towards the sea. Until 1983, trains still ran on the tracks that were built on the canal bed in 1847. By 1987, the canal was overgrown with the son of brush we had been

~and

cutting back all morning, and a group of activists from towns along the line started working to open --~l'r--1~1' the passage again, this time as a "linear park:" a continuous trail, landscaped, lighted, paved, and open to use by pedestrians, cyclists, and rollerbladers, other "non-motorized users." They would love to see the trail become pan of the larger East Coast Greenway project, "an urban alternative to the Appalachian Trail," linking northern Maine to southern Florida. But the Farmington Canal Rails-to-Trails Association (FCA), the trail advocacy group in New Haven, has encountered resistance every foot of the way. This is more complex than it sounds. Currendy the trail supponers, a monolithic dvil bureaucracy, an Ivy League university, a world-dass architect, and a cadre of drifters are among the parties fighting over what amounts to--let's be frank-a few hundred yards of 19th century ditch. And they've been at it for over a decade. To the Greenway supponers the f:ue of that ditch will mean the life or death of their project.

THE NEW JouRNAL

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rsity, the city, community activists, and squatters fight over a ditch ~ySMattnew~nderwood back in 1987, when the nascent FCA first learned of the railroad's abandonment by its owners two weeks before federal proceedings to approve the process were complete. Until then, the news had only appeared in the obscure hderai Registtr, and just a few state bureaucrats and the mayors of the towns affected had been officially notified. Mayors usually pass such lands out to developers who are political allies without the public ever knowing. Through lawsuits and a publicity blitz, however, the FCA managed to shame their municipal officials into dedicating the lands to a continuous, multi-use trail. In a 1988 Hamden mayoral election, the incumbent Ben DiNicola, who had promised the canal lands to a batch of campaign contributors, was defeated by John Ca.r usone, who ran on a pro-trail platform. Since the acquisition of federal transportation funds in the early 1990s, the cities of Hamden and New Haven have begun to develop their sections of the trail, but goals have changed over the years. The canal no longer leads to the New Haven Harbor. It was cut off by street redevelopment in the 1970s. HE TRAIL CRUSADE BEGAN

DECEMBER 2001

After the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the path was shortened again since it was prohibited from passing too near an FBI building downtown. If the trail is fully developed as planned, it will end near the city center, between the New Haven Green and the Audubon Street arts district. It will end there, that is, if the FCA can clear one final obstacle from their path: Yale University. After years ofsilence and periods of open hostility to the trail project, Yale now claims that it will not allow its section to be a "missing link" in the trail. The University preemptively purchased the three blocks of the railroad that ran through its campus before city officials could get their hands on them. Yale has always reserved the right to build on the land that it owns, and plans are underway to build a new engineering facility at the corner of Prospect and Trumbull Streets, directly adjacent to the canal. The property in question is currently a small parking lot upon which Yale's planners envision a soooo-squarefoot building. Despite Yale's professed intentions, canal activists are doubtful such a project can be completed. Joel Zackin points across the street from where we began our work today, to another weedy section of the trail that the city was supposed to begin developing this full. Beyond it lies the Yale campus and downtown New Haven. Zackin emphasizes the importance to the trail of the three blocks Yale owns. From where we stand, kids from the Dixwell neighborhood could reach the New Haven Free Public Library on their bikes and have to cross only one street. Were the trail to end at the Yale campus, the kids would be forced onto Prospect Street, and from there they would have to run a gauntlet of some of the busiest intersections in the city. "We just want to know if there's a tunnel or something incorporated into the building design so that the trail can pass through. We've already got runnels, and a tunnel is a tunnel. It's okay. It's no big deal. What we're saying to the university is, 'Just reassure us, tell us how."' But that reassurance is one thing that the university refuses to give.

~ N A SCRUBBY PIECE OF PROPElrrY near Canal and Lock ~ Streets, alongside the section of the trail Zackin pointed out Âˇ to me from Science Park, there is a hump of concrete and rubble covered in rnugwort that stands at least three times as tall as Hugh Eastwood, a recent graduate of Yale College who now works for Yale's Office of New Haven and State Affairs. "It's kind of hard to view from here," says Eastwood, pointing around the hump to an open ,

cavity in the Dixwell neighborhood, for. iner site of the notorious Elm Haven housing projects and the American Linen Supply Company, whose abandoned factory was recendy demolish ed. A small park still remains, and some kids who .

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probably in the pristine new middle-income housing development up the road are shooting hoops. Eastwood goes on with his vision ofwhat this neighborhood can become, gesturing widely with his hands. "You can kind of imagine what we'll do right here. The vision is to have a pedestrian center where you can walk down a canopy of trees right down to Canal and Lock. And you'd have houses over here, the new police station up there with a community center." He turns to the canal. "H ere you'd have a bunch of houses facing onto this pathway and houses facing onto the park and onto Lock Street ." Everything in sight would become housing that the University would develop and sell. Right now, it's all just a pile of junk. Climbing over a foothill to the rubble mountain is Mike Morand, the University's .Associate Vice President for New Haven and State Affairs. He describes how the friendly front porches facing the trail will guarantee the park's safety. "The best way to have safety have a lot of people around watching out themselves, good lighcing, and good pub. . ......-rv with University and community forces," he says. Both he and Eastwood that the canal and the surrounding though unsighdy, are not unsafe. even walk through it, I don't

â&#x20AC;˘

think," Eastwood says. "The vegetation is too dense. You don't really have people hanging out down there." The eyesore will soon be gone, Morand promises, as years of revitalization planning are brought to fruition. "We've been talking about this with the neighborhood for about 20 months now, and there's a strong common vision. It's one of those things that I think will be a strong win-winwin situation . . . The place is looking great. People are happy with it." On site, this is all hard to swallow. The mugwort is as ugly as its name suggests. Seeking a second professional opinion, I talked to David Barone at the C ity Plan Department. After all, the section of the canal that Eastwood and Morand were

pu r-

the surrounding though they cannot the dnal development, they come it. Barone looks like in his workshop: dressed in small-checked shirt, short and balding, with eyebrows that bush up from behind the frames of his spectacles. He mostly agrees with Eastwood and "The canal has been a tor -of debris, kind of an uncared-for strip of urban land, a long time." This section was the first the city would develop into a hiking trail precisely because of the work being done to revitalize the area. "It came together so naturally with the .Homes at Monterey [the new housing in the area) . . . Suddenly that srrip became the last piece of public infrastructure that wasn't developed." Moreove{, the two neighborhoods beside this stretch of the canal,

Dixwell and Newhallville, showed a particular need for such a space. Of all the neighborhoods in New H aven, these two have the worst access to recreational facil ities. As Eastwood, Morand, and I cross Prospect Street onro Trumbull Street and walk back to their office, they have less to say about plans for the University's section of the canal, which begins across Prospect Street and goes to Whimey Avenue. Morand will not say specifically how the trail will be integrated into the plans for the new Yale engineering center, which will occupy the small lot at Prospect and Trumbull. He does maintain, however, that somehow the trail will go through. "An architectural project has multiple phases to it. lr's an ongoing, iterative process," he says. He . directs me to the University Planner, but warns that there are as yet no fmished plans to share. Barone admits that, from his perspective, a Yale structure at Prospect Street that stopped the trail's progression would be "a serious detriment" to the project. "I tbinl that the connection through Yale ro downtown is one of the best features about thi$ project," he says. It provides a link bel:w~~!II!IIÂˇ>Jil seemingly distant areas. "Suddenly, it's you're

the

Just as Barone looks like a tinker, he

chinks like an architect, not an activist. He has a head for keeping straight the complex soliciting, analyses, contracts, processes, and reviews a project of this siu requires. If Yale says it will let the trail go through, he believes it will. Besides, although the Yale section is just across the street from the city's current project, it is years away in terms of execution. He has to build this trail one day, one mile, one dollar, at a time.

T PROSPECT STREET, where the

~trail crosses into the campus, there is a monument to the FCA's perseverance in the face of U niversity opposition: an expanse of wide open space. Were it not for Nancy Alderman, the space beneath the bridge we stand on would span nothing but rubble. A graduate of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and che President of the FCA, Alderman refers to the University as an ominous, impersonal "they." "What they would like to see, being big and us being small, is co have it stop right here," she claims. "That's what they've always wanted. That's why they wanted co fill in these bridges." It was Alderman who led the vanguard of a public relations blit2 to stop Yale from walling off the sections of the canal it owns beneath the bridges at Prospect Street, Temple Street, and Whitney Avenue, and filling the spaces with construction debris. Yale asked the Connecticut Department of Transportation to abandon a plan to install culverts, a rype of supporting pier, beneath the b ridges. This would have cyclists and allowed rollerbladers to pass through on a future trail. Instead, Yale wanted the spaces beneath the bridges filled and blocked from pedestrians. And they asked the state not to hold a

DECEMBER 2001

public hearing on the issue, Alderman says, which is required by law since state funds were being used for the project. Yale viewed the canal as ~ line of "very deep, narrow trenches which are not safe for joggers or bikers," and said it supported a trail path through campus, just not through the canal. This notion was anathema to trail activists, who are attracted to the Yale section precisely because of its topography: It is the last canal section in the city chat hasn't been filled in, and the only one that preserves the original architecture. And of course there is the larger goal of building an uninterrupted trail into downtown. Letters co the editor were penned; voices were raised. Eventually, Yale backed down. rather Now, chan concrete fill, the University may block the way with an entire building. The FCA has suffered this battle in uncharacteristic silence mostly because th eir hopes do not lie with the University. As ic happened, Yale chose Cesar Pelli & Associates to design the new building. Pelli, one of the most respected architects alive, is also a longtime supporter of the canal project. "We have a better chance with Cesar Pelli chan with any ocher person on earth," ~derman says. The Joe has enough room to park 20 automobiles; it is Pelli's task co fit 50000 square feet of new building into the same â&#x20AC;˘ roughly triangular space. "I don't think that the Universiry doesn't like this trail. T he question is going to be how much they do like it," Alderman says. "We're asking that they love it so much that they'll do anything to accommodate it . .. I

am caking the tack that they will do it if they can do it." Looking again ac the lot, she adds, "But Cesar Pelli is going co have to be smarter than God co figure out how it can be done."

~ HOUSANOS OF PEOPLE -

EVERY DAY

trample over the most valuable . antiques in New Haven without ever knowing ic. Nor do they notice when these architectural treasures are hacked co pieces by their elected officials, the remains discarded as worthless. At lease that's how Bill Brown sees it. Brown, director of the Eli Whitney Historical Museum in Hamden and a long-time member of the FCA, is passionate about canals, their architecture, and their symbolism. While we take a scroll down the Yale-owned portion of the canal, the portion of the canal the FCA is longing to save, Bill shows off the original 1825 bridge abutments. We make our way through the brush chat crowds the path, occasionally tripping on the bottles and refuse strewn about the homeless camps chat spring up from time to time under the bridges. Homeless people should not be an issue once the trail is developed, he says in an aside. "When you gee lighting and a critical mass of people, the homeless guys have to find someplace else. It's never something we should be comfortable with, chat some can't or don't want co use the shelters. But it's a problem to be solved. It doesn't diminish the canal." It is always easy co disregard the history of the canal in questions of development, Bill explains. The city has done just that in previous projects when original canal archiceccure was destroyed and replaced. "Some people view history as a nuisance and something they'd rather not have co deal with," he says. "For me, chat would be regretful here. Is all chis important? Well, it's an irreversible compromise. If you let this go down, ic can never be rescored. Even if you cannot correct everything that's here at the moment, future planners will wonder if this connection was here and was squandered." Bill explains chat canals are all about the need for connections. "Canals were the first public utility in America," he says. "This was the first moment when we discovered chat we've got co make connections between communities. This canal is an appropriate symbol of where we are today."

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THE NEW jOURNAL

Today, however, the trail remains overgrown and unsighdy. Bill Brown is just happy that it's not gone. We pass under one particularly long tunnel, the length of a city block, that the University wanted to fill in 1996. It is dark even in the midday sun. "Rather than

questions through a Yale representative, could not be reached for comment. Delphenich repeated, however, that the trail will somehow go through. T LEAST ONE MAN

will be happy if none of

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f/olllpat!L find this oppressive or frightening, I find it exciting," Bill says, beaming. At length, we emerge on the other side of Whitney Avenue, climb up the canal's ten-foot walls, and find ourselves among students from the Creative Arts Workshop and the Neighborhood Music School. We've successfully navigated from the Dixwell neighborhood to the Arts Center, but we're a filthy and disturbing sight to the elementary schoolers: Bill, a hefry six-feet-two with a pirate-like eye-patch, bends over panring, lamenting his lost youth. I brush the dirt from my jeans and notice my hands are scraped and bleeding. Recent developments indicate that the passage from Dixwell, let alone from Northampton, won't be getting easier anytime soon. A few days afrer my journey with Bill, the City of New Haven announced that, since no contractor could be found for its low bid, plans for the canal were being reconsidered to find ways of bringing down costs. The groundbreaking ceremony was postponed indefinitely, though David Barone said that they hope to begin work sometime in the spring. When I contacted Pam Delphenich, the university planner, she could not tell me how exactly Yale's new engineering complex will accommodate the trail, and Cesar Pelli & Associates, who instructed me to clear all

DECEMBER 2001

these thorny, bureaucratic obstades is ever removed and the canal stays how it is: overgrown, impassable, and virtually deserted. His name is Pete*, and I find him at Harmony Place, a community center for the homeless in New Haven housed in a Lutheran church on downtown Orange Street, two blocks from where the Farmington Canal trail will blend into city streets and extend to the waterfront, should its development ever pass through the Yale campus and down this far. Pete and some friends live beneath a bridge in a shantytown that I've noticed before. It's a spot that might not look out of place on the outskirts of Caracas or Peshawar. A tent stands amid strewn boxes, newspapers, food wrappers, botdes, cans, and stray articles of clothing. No trees grow beneath the bridge, due to the heavy shade, so it is a rare spot where the weeds are not overgrown and blocking the way. The pungent smell of urine fills the air. Born in Deuoit, Pete has lived in New Haven for 37 years, year-round in the canal for the past three. He has one or two friends who live there as well, though others occasionally join them. "They kick you out of those shelrers at the drop of a hat," he explains. "You blink and they'll kick you

out." Pete will usually take such cases in, but only if he knows that they won't make trouble. That way, the group gets no trouble in return. Their place is nice, Pete says-shady in summer and without a wind-chill in winter. And they're seldom bothered--occasionally by the police, but more ofren by drunken bar patrons. "They come down there to get laid," he says. "And we see 'em-just the shadows really, bouncing up and down on the walls." As for the animals, Pete explains, "We don't bother 'em." They see an opossum, a raccoon, and even occasionally a skunk, who is not welcome but is never chased away. "We did have an old owl down there too," he tells me. "We'd be as-ing all night, and h e wouldn't give a shit. He'd be sitting up there, and every now and again he'd glide through, and you'd just hear a squeak. He was there last year, but he ate all the rats and then left." Pete himself has no p lans for moving anytime soon; he is unf.ucd by the news that development on the canal may soon begin. He's heard it all before, he claims, and puts no stock in it. He even attended an FCA. meeting once, and left unimpressed. If it's Yale property he lives on, it'll be at least ten years, he reckons, before he'll have to move. He doesn't have much faith in the bureaucratic process. If he does have to move, however, he won't mind too much, so long as it's for a purpose. "But we don't want to move," he adds, "if they ain't never gonna finish it."

*Pete is a pseudonym.

Matthew Unduwood. a junior in Davmport College, is an associate editor for TNJ.

The Home FronÂˇt , Shots from Sarajevo Photos and text by Lejla Hadzic

T HE NEw JouRNAL

[ left Bosnia in 1992, when I was ten. War had broken out that year and would not end until 1996, at vvhich point the country was cut in two. My hometown Visegrad is now part of the autonomous Serbian Republic. Because I am a Bosnian-Muslim, I cannot return. I go to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital, instead. Displaced from my home, I returned last summer after spending half of my life in New York City. I took photographs throughout my four-month stay in Bosnia. Looking at the images when I returned to Yale, I was struck by how removed I am from them. I was an insider observing my country through an outsider's lens. No matter the subject of my photographs-shelled buildings, empty parks whose trees were cut down for fuel during the war, decrepit Communist housing projects-! observed from an uncomfortable distance. I could not divorce my view from my memories of the pre-war urban landscape of Sarajevo. I was looking at Bosnia trying to rebuild itself out of the shambles of war, still picking up pieces of the fallen Communist regime and facing a continued refugee crisis within its borders. These photographs reveal my separation from Bosnia; they also reflect my longing to return.

DECEMBER 2.00 1

THE N.sw JouRNAL __.1,

• !I

•

DECEMBER 2.001

THE NEW jOURNAL

Welfare cuts send New Haven families and service providers scrambling By Nadia Sussman

HE DEPARTMENT OF SociAL SERVICES (oss) on Basset Street is a no longer receive any welfare money. Another 39 were dropped from quiet place on a Friday afternoon. Agents behind a glass partition the welfare rolls on November I, and on the first of every month from call up patrons from the rows of plum-colored plastic chairs that fill the now on, dozens of families will lose cash benefits, often their only large, dimly-lit wanmg room ..,......,.---.!!"'--~-.-----~------- source of income. The oss estimates that before Individuals and parents with children the end of the year, 1000 Connecticut children will be affected by welfare reform. Another 690 trickle in and out, taking care of errands before the weekend. Today,, families will enter their final extension in the New Haven Connecticut people quickly get what they came for, same period. but on a busier day the line can take Oct. 1 112 230 With the economic bubble of the nineties hours. already a memory and unemployment on the A youngish mother, lips lined rise, nearly all Americans are preparing for lean76 with black pencil, lightened hair Nov. 1 39 er times, but for those exiting welfare, the future looks especially uncertain. Last August, pulled into a high ponytail, waits for her name to be called while her rwin Dec. 1 36 73 New Haven community organizations-homedaughters play. I cautiously approach less shelters, food banks, and advocacy groups-met for the first time to discuss the her, hoping to learn what welhre reform feels like from the inside. Jan. 1 61 137 impending exodus of welfare recipients. The While she declines to tell me her state had set the date of termination five years before, but hadn't taken the initiative to plan for hundreds of destitute name, she readily shares her story of I3 years in the system. Shortly after families. Now, shelters are full, funds are limited, resources are graduating from Wtlbur Cross High School, she gave birth to her first child, now nine years old. When things got rocky with the child's strapped, and no one knows where the families will go.

...

Families losing cash assistance

father, there was only one place to go-back to her mother. Together the three wandered from apartment to apartment, relying on welfare cash assistance for survival. Finally, the woman landed a job at the Fair Haven Super K.mart, but was soon pregnant with twins and out of work again. "Now, for me to get work, it's a lot harder because [the twins] take up a lot of my time," she explains. "It's hard to get daycare." Not long ago, she reentered the workforce, this time as a bus aide. But even with an income, welhre pays the bills. "I'm paying $6oo rent. That leaves me 39 dollars left to my name as far as cash goes. So I'm basically struggling." In 16 months, her welfare payments will stop forever. Welfare reform has arrived in New Haven. On October I , II2 New Haven families hit their lifetime limit for state cash assistance; they can

DECEMBER 2001

URING THE I992 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN, Bill Clinton famously vowed "to end welfare as we know it." Connecticut beat Clinton and Congress to the punch, instituting a statewide welfare-to-work program over a year before national reform. By January I996, Republican Governor John Rowland had reduced cash payments and instituted a time-limited benefit program. Eight months later, President Clinton signed the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act" into law. Commonly known as "welfare reform," the act ended the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, replacing it with federal block grants for stateadministered welfare-to-work programs. These block grants came with a stipulation: a five-year limit on welfare payments.

"There's a general feeling that if we-just give families a kick in the pants they•ll ge.t it together," says C.heri Quickmire, a New Ha,ven organizer for Christian Community ' Action. · Connecticut's convoluted ~etfare laws-some of the strictest in the co~try reflect that kick-in-the-pants · attitude. Families face an initial cutoff period of 21 months for cash benefits under Jobs Fi-est, the current welfare-to-work program. (If a recipient gets cash assistance for a single day of a calendar momh, that month counts toward the limit.) Those who attend the mandatory job training and make good-faith efforts to find work may apply for six-month extensions. Originally, the number of extensions was unlimited. However, effective October of this year, a maximum of three extensions was imposed, for a total of 39 months of cash assistance (freeing up between $17 and $28 million dollars for the state, depending on whom you ask). Those who can demonstrate two or more barriers to employment, like drug addiction or severe mental health problems, may extend

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their benefits for up to 6o months. A clinically depressed mother whose child has chronic asthma, for example, might qualify for an additional three extensions. Only one exception to the 6o-month rule exists: violent domestic abuse rendering an adult unemployable. Aside from that, families are on their own. "One of the biggest points is that people are being abandoned," says Quickmire. "The state calls them 'leavers' but a lot of these folks don't have any other choices." Those dropped from the rolls may still qualify for other benefits, such as food stamps, Medicaid, and child care. Families with federal housing subsidies keep their homes, and their rent fulls to zero if welfare payments were their only income. "But service providers and government officials still foresee a crisis in the near futur~ne with no easy solution.

o WHAT HAPPENS when cash benefits vanish? "The state made it clear that they weren't doing anything" to help the transition, says Quickmire. "There's no safety net

any longer." Families finishing their last month of cash assistance receive no direction from the state beyond a mandatory exit interview at the oss. In it, social workers tell them about other kinds of benefits for which they may still qualify and direct them to zuInfoline, a state-contracted referral service run by the United Way of Connecticut which distributes information about local service providers. _! lnfoline ~rvices have proven woefully inadequate. "So far the experience of the United Way is that they're getting very few calls," says Ellen Scalettar, a former state legislator who is now an advocacy coordinator for Connecticut Voices for Children, "and it's still unclear what the United Way can do when they do call." Quickmire questions the practicality of the referral service. "Infoline's not going to find people money. It's going to give them the number to our shelter and we're going to tell them it's already full." Most social service agencies have long been operating at or near capacity levels. Nevertheless, for many families, these non-

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;Jy unnoticed. No .Jgn it ., one of New Haveo's six transitional centers for bomdess youth. The blinds are usually shut and the lights almost always off. Standing on the sidewalk, I did not bear any voices coming from inside. Like the people it serves, it is almost invisible. Any resident of New Haven can tell you about their encounters with the city's homdess. Yet few can tdl of their experiences with the homeless population under 25-a population with which we might have the most in common. New Haven formally acknowledged the problem of bomdess youth a year and a half ago, when it formed a working committee to research the experiences of runaways from the city and its surrounding communities. The task bas been difficult. When Eric Ashton, a former employee of City Hall and a member of the committee, was asked how many runaways call the streets of New Haven home, his response was, "We don't know the numbers. I have no clue. They're a population that is invisible." As I walked into the shelter, the "invisible" youth no longer had the streets for camouftage. M Umoja House, teo young men live with a

THE NEW JouRNAL

governmental service agencies are the only resource left. The state of Connecticut is relying on established service organizations to handle the flood of new clients with their existing levels of staffing and funding. Few in New Haven think that organizations will be able to handle increasing demand. "Everyone knows it's not sufficient," says Bob Solomon, director of the New Haven Housing Authority. "The people in services in our community are highly competent and dedicated, but there isn't enough money." Money rations look lean for the shelters and pantries on the front lines this winter. Limited budgets and no additional state funding mean that service organizations won't be able to expand their operations. Moreover, the post-September II spirit of generosity that inspired so many donations to relief work and the American Red Cross may have inadvertently diverted d~nations away from smaller non-profits. According to Solomon, "there are reports that giving to agencies not connected with September n is suffering." At the state level, money will be

equally hard to come by: On October 1, Governor Rowland signed legislation cutting $88 million from the budget for the coming year. Much of this will come out of social services funding. Shelters are preparing for this winter's welfare cutoffs, but already, long before the first snow, there is little they can do. As early as August, local men's, women's, and family shelters were full, except Columbus House, which had a few open beds. Demand for beds stayed unusually high through the summer, when need normally lessens. In response, the New Haven Board of Aldermen made the unprecedented decision to keep open the emergency overflow shelter, a facility usually reserved for the colder months. One shelter worker, who wished to remain anonymous, lamented that even before cash assistance limits took effect, her shelter could not meet the needs of the community. "We turn so many people away all the time," she said. "Now it's

I know what I haft to ~ now. That's it. That's aU." didn't have to ask the ocbcb praent in the roc:;m if t6ey ..fiantea their scories-thet bepn 10 talk. as tb'ouab it wa.t their rum "I'm from North. Oltolina." olFen Andloa,. a 2.1-~ ft:lli• bas been homeleaa since he wu ~ fiom .,._,.. dueie He came to Ne\iv Hawn •because ~ is io the city. it's at. • serving time for dnag dealing. Anthony .tired: t.e "4lddt ·Dirwtten: to go but downtown." He spent his di.;s bee..._ the Xing on Chapel Smct md the New HaYen Ftee Ptsblic l:lbraty Street. "It was wein:l.l bad nice clothes. I bad POlo I'M8Ien that had bought fOr me in North Carolina. I had ~ be says, pointids 10 the black boots still on his feet. "'t htad • I just had nowbclc 10 sleep." ~IUW•uwo House opened ks doon to Anthony a)"!!U ........e .... ;pouagcSt resideot. •1 '*"' people ~ and tee aparaddlt:s aaicl ·and. oome back."' be a.ys of his time at the llbCk& And.ora;

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getting worse. People are staying longer and longer." Allison Cunningham, the Executive Director of Columbus House, blames a lack of affordable housing for the longer shelter stays. "We can't get people out of the shelters, because where are they going to go?" Cunningham's question remains unanswered for most families coming off welfare, but based on past experience, service workers can make some predictions. Families may not los·e their housing for some time after their benefits end; eviction takes time and some may have some money in the bank. When there is nothing left, families will likely turn to relatives, saving the shelters as a final resort. If the family shelters are full, parents will move in to single adult shelters, leaving their children with relatives or friends. In the most dire cases, entire families will simply end up on the sueet. Food pantries

day." Anthony questions whether the state would have thought any differently. He claims, "They wouldn't have given me welfue. I was only 20. • Eventually Anthony applied for food stamps on his own-they were taken away by the state after a few months. Uke Vladamir, Anthony plans to move on. "This place," he says, rderring to the shelter, "it isn't everything.• He srops to think and looks beyond my gaze. "But in a way, it was everything at one point." When I asked him what he thinks could hdp other homeless youth, Anthony responds unequivocally, "We need more places like this in New Haven, in North Carolina, all over." Anthony finishes his story by ra1king about members of his family who, like him, have no definite place to call home. "My uncle's locked up. My cousin-1 don't know where be's at. I haven't seen him since July." Stepping out of the refuge of Umoja House, I could only wonder if maybe I had.

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deeds of families already dependenc on monchly visits to local pantries to keep food on the table, supplies may dwindle, according to NataSha Ray, president of Mothers For Justice, an advocacy group for homeless women. "Unless there's more money that goes through the food bank, the food pantries are not going to have enough food to give the families in New Haven." Some pantries are already experiencing difficulties. I called 2.11Infoline to find out where a hungry person in New Haven could go for groceries. The social worker on the other end of the line treated me as she would any client, reading me a list of pantries, mostly run by churches in the Dixwell neighborhood. Glorified Deliverance Church. St. Luke's. Zion Church. Amazing Grace. A pause. The social worker corrected herself- Amazing Grace was depleted.

'M ALREADY SEEING MORE entire families walking in off the street waiting to see if there's housing," says Quickmire. These are grim rimes for New Haven's service workers. As the fallout from welfare reform becomes evident, service providers are frustrated by the tardiness and meagerness of the state's response. "They claim they are starting

to think about how this is going co affect them," a shelter worker remarked. "This should have been a long-term process." Despite state failure to provide a workable transition for families exiting welfare, local service providers maintain their efforts. They continue to deliver their services at maximum capacity. What's more, they are organizing to track families as they leave welfare, to prevent them from simply disappearing. An ad-hoc "collaborative" spear-headed by Quick.mire, Scalettar, and Barbara Tinney of New Haven Family Alliance emerged last

August. A main objective is to collect reliable data about families leaving welfare-Connecticut has failed to establish any comprehensive data collection project of its own. With new survey results in hand, the collaborative hopes to lobby the legislature to redirect funds towards social services. Christian Community Action has been circulating a petition statewide pointing out that without benefits many families will be living on poverty wages or nothing at all and calling on the state to use its "extraordinary resources and wealth to meet the basic needs of all Connecticut's children." Future advocacy goals are even more ambitious. "We're pushing for the restoration of cash assistance and the safety net," says Quickmire. Although the legislature ofren responds more favorably to the opinions of its suburban constituents than city-dwellers, the New Haven collaborative hopes they can change minds by putting a face to the blight created by welfare reform. They may be right. "The legislature ofren reacts to emergency situations," says Bob Solomon. "It's ofren reactive, not proactive." In the long run, the legislature may act to improve life for Connecticut's poor, but it can't be counted on for immediate assistance. "There's not going to be any option for cash this year," says Quickmire. New Haven city government knows that welfare reform and winter will test its "no freeze" policy of turning no one away from a shelÂˇ ter. Yet it remains committed to keeping people warm. Shelters cost money, and New Haven is one of the rare cities that spends cax dollars on the homeless. In faa, New Haven is one of the few local communities willing to provide services to the poor at all. Solomon says, "If you need emergency housing or food, New Haven is a place where you're more likely to get it." The same is true of eldercare and psychiatric serÂˇ vices. Many of the towns surrounding NeW Haven choose not to provide social services. hoping to discourage poor people from showÂˇ ing up in their municipalities. "The suburbs "e <emubbly <e<i"'"' w >ny kind

oil

THE. NEW JouRNAL

regional plans, especially when it comes to alleviating pressures on cities to provide services to poorer people," says Solomon. Therefore New Haven social services must ease the burden of poverty for people from across the region, not just in town. This is no accident. Anecdotes of from neighboring towns homeless people at the Green substantiated by the number of of-towners in local shelters. October, the New Havm reported that berween 27 and 31 cent of shelter residents come other parts of the state or even from other states. According to Phil Voigt, the alderman who heads Haven's finance committee, the contributes directly to the disproportionate burden on New Haven's shelters. "We have documentation that the state itself has sent people from the correctional agencies and literally dropped them off at New Haven's doorstep." Voigt's solution? Sue the state. "What we're looking for is that the surrounding state and towns pay their fair share," says Voigt. "We're sort of confident that this will work." Thomas Ude of the New Haven Corporation Counsel has been working with Voigt to develop a legal strategy that will ensure that the suit makes it to the higher courts. Ude hopes to have a working outline of the lawsuit by November 14. Voigt says he would like to issue the lawsuit as quickly as possible. "This welfare reform is not really welfare reform. It's just shifting the burden from federal governments and states onto the municipalities." If Voigt and the collaborative get their way, New Haven may increase its capacity to provide emergency services to welfare leavers. As a short-term objective, this is crucial. Still, everyone recognizes that truly curtailing poverry will require a much deeper commitment from the state than emergency relieÂŁ ÂˇThere's no investment in families who are low- or no-income on the part of the state, and I think it's criminal, frankly, in a time when we're the wealthiest per-capita state in the country," says Quickmire. Securing that kind of long-term invest~ ment in education, day-care and other services will require challenging the prevailing v wisdom about welfare reform and poverty. Says Solomon, "People think if you reduce welfare rolls, you've succeeded." Even involv6 iog those kicked off welf.ue in the public con,f l'ersation is no easy task. Quickmire knows

DEcEMBER 2001

this from experience. "[Welfare leavers] don't want to talk about it. There's tremendous stigma attached to being poor now. They're made to feel like they've done something wrong even if they've played by all the rules."

Malaysian ufusion" Âˇ

IF YOU SPEND ENOUGH TIME TALKING with service workers, you notice a persistent tension in their outlook. On the one hand, their rhetoric often takes on the character of doomsday prophecy. They grimly rattle off a laundry list of problems that will proliferate in the coming months. "I think the crime rate is going to go up [and we'll see an] increase in the drug community because these women are going to do whatever they need to do to feed their kids and put a roof over their heads," Ray p redicts. Another explained, "We're being trained to think we're going to have to deal with lots more depression. If you don't know how you're going to feed your kids the next day, you would be depressed too." But much of the time, service workers find themselves in the same position as their clients: powerless to look beyond the next da~

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Bv· J.C. COULD HAVE BEEN ANY THURSDAY NIGHT. J had just returned from my second Durfee's run for Swedish Fish, my Chaucer paper was still not writing itself, and my bare-walled single was feeling lonelier than ever. I was bored, and I had to do something about it. I needed distraction, something to take my thoughts off schoolwork. I was in the mood for the excitement you sometimes feel before a big night at a party or a bar filled with people, but I wanted to experience it without leaving my desk. As I clicked on "chat" and followed the computer screen to "northeast region," I began wondering how many other Yalies would also be online. And would I see anyone I knew? Perhaps all the rooms would already be full. As the dialogue box popped up and I selected "Connecticut 1," I asked what I was really looking for online

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description of their age, height, weight, hair and eye color, and often genital size. Once you find an "item" of interest, click to enter a oneon-one dialogue that could eventually lead to having that object rushed to your doorstep. My first time logging on I was surprised by how little talking goes on in the chat room itself, since most of the action is taking place in personal instant messages. Any time after JPM, one can find at least one other Yale student in the three Connecticut rooms, and Sunday through Thursday after midnight, there can be as many as eight Yalies at once. Since I first visited the site out of curiosity as a freshman in the fall of 1999, more and more Yalies have been logging onto Gay.com. Back in 1999 more graduate students than undergraduates seemed to inhab-

G~Y.COM IS ~ W£SSIT£ WIT+I INfORMATION ON N£~RLY £V£RY SUSJ£CT R£LAT£D TO +IOMOS£XU~UTY. tonight. While I typed "JordanzoY" in the "name" box, a flood of possibilities hit me: Within the next 30 minutes I could conceivably find myself with a new best friend, free psychological counseling, a summer position as a houseboy, or even undressed in a random Stiles single with someone I'd never met before. I pressed the "enter" button, and instantly a pea-green page filled the screen, along with a list of 50 names, among them "JasonCT29," "Yalecub_24,'' "oldnavyboyr9,'' "yaleboyzo," and, my favorite, "spankyCT5'6_18obighairychest." Five of the so had "Yale" or "Y" in their screen name. The top of the screen read •welcome to Gay.com." Gay.com is a website devoted to supplying information on nearly every subject related to homosexuality. One can use it to search for area suppott groups, sift through gay-related news headlines, shop for clothes, search the personals, or log on to local gay chat rooms. I use it mainly to find sex. Clicking on the "chat" function reveals a list of men's chat room headings with locations all over the world, with four different regional rooms for the United Scares. Each heading is divided into hundreds of individual rooms, ranging from "Hrv: Positive" to •College Jocks" to "New York City." Each room holds up to 50 chatters, who can create their own name and one-sentence descriptions. Some are quite tame: "Hey guys 19 y/o college boy with pic." Some are more suggestive: "Who wants to sneak into my house and not wake up my roommate?" Others seem to echo the thoughts of many Yalies who log on: "What's _up? Looking for friends, maybe more." Looking at everyone's description is like browsing through merchandise on eBay. Many users give their "stars," a quick physical DECEMBER 2001

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it the rooms, but lately the balance has been tipping toward undergraduates. I discovered Gay.com through friends, although many gay students first heard about it when the site was mentioned recently in a Rolling Swne article "To Be Gay At Yale." If someone is only interested in looking for sex partners and doesn't want to deal with corning our, all he needs is ten minutes, a pseudonym, a laprop, and a roommate back home for the weekend, and no one outside of his "hook-up" will ever know who he is and what he is doing. One graduate student told me that using Gay.com can "wipe the slate clear; you can play with the closet, and break down the boundaries between being in and out of the closet." The anonymity is also hugely important for closeted students, who can log on and create a fictitious name and identity for themselves. Students no longer have to our themselves by showing up to LesbianGay-Bisexual-Transgendered Co-op meetings in order to meet and talk to their first gay friends; they can log on and have over 50 gay people eager to talk to them without having to leave their room. Gay.com allows them to be a patt of a gay Yale community, without exposing themselves. I think this anonymity is positive-it allows people to explore their sexuality without being labeled as bisexual or gay. A person's newly discovered sexuality can be a big topic of conversation at Yale, and some people don't want to be talked about. Anonymity can be important for almost anybody, since having "Yalie looking for action NOW" in my description could become quite embarrassing on my way to Spanish the next morning if someone I knew were to ask if I got lucky last night.

On Gay.com, conventional dating they go online. This fear seems to come from description-6'2", 150 pounds, brown/blue, behavior does not apply. I don't feel the same six-pack, college athlete?" More often than a belief that in admitting that he meets peopressure to invite my hook-up to dinner or ple using a computer, someone is admitting not, people lie about their weight, their age, call him three days afterwards. One student that incompetence in real life has forced him or the time they spend at the gym, inflate told me he even prefers not to hook up with their "Hot-or-Not" rating by three points, to use computers to find friendship and sex. Yalies, and instead goes after people from and give measurements in centimeters but One Yale student becomes irate when people around New Haven to avoid any awkward associate his use of Gay.com with desperalabel them inches. It seems as though these campus confrontations. This is not at all tion. He emphasizes that the function of chat people believe that once they go through the uncommon- strippers, security officers, and trouble of showering, putting on the specialrooms for some people are not much different firemen have all wandered into Yale dorms occasion Abercrombie boxers, and inviting from what a bar provides for many others: a ' because of Gay. com. Since the computers you up to their room, you won't are all about directness, efficiency, and SI~C£ COMPUT£RS AR£ ALL A-BOUT care if the advertised six-pack is objectivity, it is fitting that hook-ups actually buried under an addiplanned by computer tend to get right to tional 35 pounds. It is common the point- the action-bypassing norfor people to ask, "u got a pic?" DIR£CT~SS, £ffiCI£~CY, AND mal barriers or social conventions. If you which should be a good way of are tired of having to meet people assessing compatibility But the through your circle of friends or extracur- O-BJ£CTIVITY, HOOK-UPS PLANN£0 pictures often are too good to be riculars, and then _having to make small true. My friends and I have talk or consume alcohol to get "in the received the exact same picture -BY COMPUT£R T£ND TO G£T RIGHT of mood" before the festivities begin, a well-built, bleached-blond Gay.com can be a utopia. teenage boy in his backyard from TO TH£ POit--ll--TH£ ACTION four different people. I myself have also fallen victim to the 111....1 EVERTHELESS, despite the raunchy ...... biographies and screen names, dreaded "Photoshop date," Gay.com is used for more then hooking up where someone made his double chins disapplace where people can meet new friends and with strangers in the middle of the night. Eric find someone to listen to them. He claims, pear with a mouseclick. Moga, a psychology department research But most disappointment on Gay.com is "It's a normal community. It's not about desassistant, told me he logged on to Gay.com a brought on by what I refer to as the "wishful peration." lot after arriving in New Haven this summer thinking fallacy". This is when we fill in the Although many gay students know not knowing anyone. Unfamiliar with the unknown details about the person we are about Gay.com, some refuse to go online. city, Moga said, "I used it to find where the talking to online to make him what we want This is tragic, because in Yale's gay scene the clubs were, and to meet new friends." But h e him to be. For example, if someone were to shelves can always use restocking. And while found mixed results over the summer: "It hastype "This New Haven winter makes me Gay.com has been a hit within the gay male n't worked for friends because the people were want to lie in bed all day and think of the community, there seems to be no use within either socially inept or closeted boys." Online beach," I would internally process this remark Yale's lesbian community. There are ten difchat rooms became a social support network as, "Come over and let's spoon under the covferent geographical room headings for men to ers all night, and the warmth will remind me for him because "If you have something on enter, but women are left with only one headyour mind, you'll definitely find someone to of my summer days surfing and lifeguarding ing: "worldwide women." Lauren Mangini, listen." One person I talked to finds that he at the beach, and oh, did I mention I just the coordinator for Yalesbians, says it has usually logs on "mainly from boredom," turned 17?" The excitement of creating such never occurred to her to explore Gay.com, though, when nature has its way, "Every so fantasies can keep one logged onto Gay.com "Even if Yale is a barren desert of a dating often for sex." Another undergraduate well after bedtime. The source of these fanscene, it's probably better than online--that describes how he logs on "Only when I'm tasies, what really keeps you online, is the seems kinda sketch." Mangini suggests that procrastinating from doing work--once a faint hope that the person you have spotted women value face-to-face interaction more week at most. I let myself sit in the chat room around campus, and dreamed about since when meeting people. Though I think men freshman year, whom you have always hoped and see who messages me. Sometimes it's 30are just more willing to have sex with somethings from off-campus who act all would someday rurn out to be gay, may perstrangers. sketchy. By the time it's a Yale student I'm too haps be the person hiding behind Despite all its possibilities, Gay.com has "Yalekid2o." busy to talk." brought more disappointment than satisfacWhen talking about Gay.com and other tion. After rwo years of using Gay.com, I f. C. &indl is a chat rooms with many gay students at Yale, I often find myself asking, "Am I the only perjunior in &rk~ky Co/leg~. sensed that people were ashamed to admit son on here who actually looks like his

I8J

THE NEW JouRNAL

Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government Jed Rubenfeld (Yale University Press, 2001) pp. 266

\\ y

By Anya Kamenetz

crack analyst for Action McNews in Tom Tomorrow's comic This Modern World. "The terrorists HATE FREEDOM." Very few explanations of our current situation have gone beyond this thickblack-line simplicity. When politicians or pundits talk about a threat to "American values" or "democratic freedoms" they're using code words, and assuming that everyone has the same decoder ring. That's why it's such a pleasure to read a carefully reasoned and gracefully written book interrogating these overused and illdefined phrases. If nothing else, Jed Rubenfeld's Frmiom and Tim~ is the product of a cooler head prevailing. Rubenfeld's project, as the title suggests, is no less than to redefine freedom, and then to re-reconcile constitutional government with democracy on the basis of this new understanding. Rubenfeld, Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School, was a philosophy major at Princeton. Hence the unusual composition of the book-at once a philosophical treatise, a piece of legal theory, and a work of cultural criticism. Part 1 begins with a discussion of the posrmodern predicament. We commonly take freedom to mean living in the present. In pursuit of this freedom, we reject the shackles of history, revere youth, fear death, and prostrate ourselves on the altar of instant gratification : "Obey your thirst." But this ideal is, in practice, both exhausting and profoundly boring. "'Nothing new under the sun' is a pre-modern sentiment," writes Rubenfeld . "Only in the modern era does being new itself become old, opening up an ennui unknown to prior times." This may sound like coffeehouse existentialism, and it more or less is. Does this dilemma have any bearing on our day-to-day existences? Rubenfeld is strongest on the subject of how wispy philosophical constructS and unexamined assumptions make their way into our daily lives in the form of laws. Our poll-driven political OU SEE, IT's UKE THIS," EXPLAINS WANDA,

DECEMBER 2001

life is based on the assumption, dating back to Rousseau, that the ultimate democratic act is an act of speech. The idea that self-government is or should be the "voice of the people," discussion, debate, dialogue, instandy expressed and instantaneously registered, is the political analogue to the ideal of life in the moment. Here, Rubenfeld enters into a debate in American legal theory raging back to Jefferson. The "speech-based" model of democracy opens up a contradicti~n between self-government and the cofistitution in its basic function: as a guarantee of civil rights and civic procedures against the vagaries of popular opinion. As long as "the voice of the people" is the ultimate justification for government, no written law, no matter how "fundamental," can stand in contradiction to popular will. Only a strong constitution can defend democracy, but it must withstand democracy as well. Rubenfeld dismisses prior attempts to resolve this contradiction with reference to "the voice of the people" past, present, or future. One can't logically uphold the Constitution against present popular will on the basis of present popular will. Nor can consitutional rights be justfied with reference to the "founding moment"-why should the will of the dead take precedence over that of the living? Nor yet can anti-majority rights be justified on the basis of future majority will-that way lies totalitarianism. Rubenfeld goes even further in his attack on the popular will, perhaps the most cherished truism in all of American politics. "Collective will is a fiction," Rubenfeld writes, "... a 'meaningless,'

' irrational,' 'self-contradictory' fiction. Hence we should stop thinking of democracy in terms of collective will and collective self-governance." He supports this idea with a complex piece of analytic philosophy called a "Condorcet paradox." In any election with three or more candidates where the public can register both a first and second choice (as in a primary and runoff, for example), there is a chance the results will be dose to the following: one third for Bush first and Gore second, one third for Gore first and Nader second, and one third for Nader first and Bush second. That means a solid two-thirds "majority will" simultaneously prefers each candidate to the two others. This formal analysis may strike some as chicanery, but it does point to a lamentable simplicity in our understanding of the term "voice of the people." Having undermined our form of government, Rubenfeld must find a new justification for constitutional democracy. In Part II of the book, Rubenfeld re-construes the relationship between constitutionalism and self-government. These sections of the book are where Rubenfeld's intelligent, economical writing style is most helpful, as he walks the reader calmly over rocky theoretical ground. By factoring in the dimension of time, he solves the apparent contradictions in the variables "self," "society," and "law." It takes time for a person to become a human being, it takes time for a people {what Rubenfeld calls a "popularity") to become a polity, and it takes time for an injunction to become a law. "Law is prophecy," he says, quoting Oliver Wendell Holmes. A law, proclaimed at time one, has no meaning until it is upheld at time two. A person's decisions, made at time one, have no import until they are acted upon at

Tm NEW JouRNAL

time two. Therefore the ultimate democratic Âˇ act is not speech at all but writing-an utterance deepened by time. Constitutional provisions are written commitments made by a people to itself, and in their fulfillment over time they make a people a people. Rubenfeld calls his constitutionalist philosophy "commitmentarian," and his definition of commitment needs some elucidation. He draws an important but subtle distinction between commitment and what he calls "precommitment," which also separates him from previous constitutional theorists. H e uses a literary reference that has become a trope of constitutional theory: Ulysses orders his sailors to tie him to the mast, knowing that his reason will abandon him when he hears the sirens calling. Rubenfeld says this is in fact a metaphor for pre-commitment: Because of what you do at time one, you have no choice but to obey at time two, no matter how you might wish to change your mind. This form of constitutionalism bears some relation to the Hobbesian social contract. Commitment, on the other hand, as Rubenfeld defines it, is a self-lawgiving. You may very well have external reasons to follow through on a commitment, but your most important reason is that you have an obligation to yourselÂŁ In a beautiful reversal of the Ulyssean image, Rubenfeld points out that constitutional commitments actually tend to be made, like marriage proposals, in the heat of passion, their strictures guaranteeing against the "seduction of ... everyday, cost-benefit, preference-maximizing rationality." Rubenfeld spends Part III of the book outlining how his "commirmentarian" philos-

ophy applies to matters of constitutional law like discrimination and the right to privacy. Here he shows himself to be a solid liberal, defending the constitutionality of affirmative action, for example: "Racial minorities are unequal to other minorities under current law ... Something has gone profoundly wrong in constitutional interpretation when t.he Fourteenth Amendment is read, as it is today,

because it was both devoid of bombast and intensely critical of our most central institutions and values: The Supreme Court. The Constitution. Liberty. Justice. Popular will. Rubenfeld points out the originality of the American idea: "Late-eighteenth-century America broke from [the] two-thousandyear-history [of Western political theory]. It made constitution-formation-constitutionwriting-a central component of democratic self-government itself." But he embodies in this work the one thing even moÂˇre valuable to Americans than our origins: the tradition of free and open inquiry, protected by our laws, a tradition we enrich and ennoble by realizing it every day of our lives.

Law is prophecy.

DECEMBER 2001

to make racial minorities virtually the only minorities in our entire legal system that cannot be singled out for favorable treatment." As the more partisan portions of the work, these chapters are marginally less persuasive, or maybe it's only that they are denser in legal jargon. Rubenfeld himself told me in an interview that this book, with its offbeat blend of philosophy and hard-nosed legal theory, "isn't going to be cited in any Supreme Court opinions." But that's exactly its appeal to the interested layperson. The ideas are startlingly original and the writing style clear, always sensitive to the multilayered meanings of words, even lyrical at times. "In the end, it doesn't matter what we say to ourselves," he writes in the chapter called "Popularity." "We have no more choice about the people into which we are born than we do about our famj]y or body: While we speak, and regardless of what we say, a people is writing itself into history, the land its palimpsest, and we ourselves its characters." Reading this book made me "proud to be an American" in the way the flag-waving of the last two months has nor. This is precisely

Anya Kammaz , a smior in Davmport Colkgt!, is t!ditor-in-chiifof TNJ.

rd T

I could have been watching television, h ooking up with the hot girl I m et the previous nigh t when I accidentally burnt a hole through her dress, or simply enjoying the peaceful tranquility of a Sunday evening. Instead I was four blocks east of Old Campus, down some alley, p ast a Dunkin Donuts, and inside the Tune Inn, where four scantily clad freaks led by art sch ool gross-out band GWAR's Slymenstra Hyman were preparing to bare all in The Girly Freak Show, a "liaison with the exotic and erotic." I tried to make myself at home among the belligerent drunks and the disturbingly friendly punks wh,o kept on encouraging me to roll. I stayed sober, calm, and eager. I thought anything headlined by "The Pain Proof Rubber Girl" had to be good. I was wrong. Billed as "exciting sexy shocking entertainment," the show would prove to be about as arousing as the eight questionable winos surrounding me who had showed up to gawk at ass. When my gaze first met Slymenstra's piercing eyes, I was transfixed, lost in a world in which she was the center and the creepy guy next to me didn't exist. She was Sly to her friends, Sly Hy on stage, and Hyman on the dotted line. But in my dreams she will always be Slymenstra. Sly was an absolute bitch on stage, discharging unprofessionalism by the gallon. In a sheer gol.d lame d ress cut just below the belly button, matching six-inch heels, and a curly pink wig, sh e was kitschy and egregiously rude. She started by attacking innocent audience members. At one point she mercilessly ridiculed an elderly man in a polka-dotted jacket and "Marine Corpse" hat who was giddily hopping up and down with a giant picture of Hyman as if he were a card girl at a title bout. He begged her for a hug, but Hyman refused: "You're way too fragile for me, old man." T he poor guy was dejected, the crowd was disheartened, and I was eager for the "Pussy Whipping Cowgirls" to take the···~~ stage. I refocused my energy. The opening act seemed promising. "The Pain Proof Rubber Girl," a snobbish chick who fastened flaming knives to her hands and danced in circles. She was outlandish yet enticing. But her act sucked. The audience EN PM.

by Matthew Patterson soon grew tired of her boring dancing, so she varied things a little by trampling on pieces of charred glass and eating them. My heart surged . I wanted to rush on stage and stop her. I could handle the bad dancing, but I couldn't bear the th ought of Rubber Girl's man gled body in front of me. T hen, I noticed a four-second delay between her move~ ments and the sou nd of the breaking glass. My concern turned to disillusionment. Slymenstra's second act was unsurprisingly weak. H er highly anticipated "pussy whipping" exhibition fell short of my expectations as she struggled to get her whip up. She hurled it toward the ceiling, preparing to punish th e Rubber Girl, but kept getting the thing stuck between a disco ball and an exposed water pipe. I looked over my shoulder to see the unusually quiet crowd's reaction. The inebriated old men and pill-popping yo~ngsters were disappointed by her impotence. Who wouldn't be? Sensing the need to relax and regroup, Hyman asked the audience for a cigarette. No one complied. We weren't about to give her nicotine until she gave us a decent show. Since she didn't have any cigarettes, Hyman ate worms instead. Or at least she pretended to. After closely inspecting the slimy creatures, I saw that they were about as real as Rubber Girls' 36cs. The polka-dot guy, stiH upset and hug-less, noticed this too. He mumbled something and drunkenly walked off. I couldn't have agreed more. After consuming the worms, Hyman took off her top and asked the audience to participate in a moment of silence for "Koochie Kamanda," a Freak Show regular who had injured her throat during a sword swallowing accident. Was I sympathetic? Hardly. Koochie had evaded this dreadful night. I would have traded places with her in a second, wounded esophagus and all. I left the Tune Inn ten dollars and one hour of my life poorer. But at least I met her. I am thinking of blazing flames, taSty worms, cracking whips, the refuge of art. This is the only immortality you and I may share, my Slymenstra. Ill]

Matthro; Patterson, a freshman in Davenport College, u on the staffojTNJ..

THE NEW JouRNAL

Democracy, Security, and Justice Perspectives on the Arnerican FlJture A Yale University Lecture and Discussion Series

)J!CEMBER 2001

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