Volume 35 - Issue 3

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PUBLISHER

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THE NEW JouRNAL

TheNewJournal

Volume 35, Number 3 November 2002

FEATURES

10

The Fat Trap Could a simple after-school program be the answer to a national epidemic?

by Jessica Cohen

16

Black and Blue How David Lee stands still to conquer.

by Matthew Underwood

24

Bonfire of the Vanities Two renegade aldermen clash with the Mayor over development while Fair Haven burns.

by Paige Austin

STANDARDS 4

Points of Departure

22

Shots in the Dark: Nightshift by Santiago Mostyn

31 34 36

Essay: Pedalling Politics by Billy Parish

38

Essay: A Separate Peace by Erika Franklin The Critical Angle: The Talking Cure by jacob Blecher reviewing The Claims of Culture by Sey/a Benhabib Endnote: Holey Wars by Tom Isler

., TIU Nw JouRNAL is pub!Uhed five times during the academic year by THt New JouRNAL at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box )4}1 Yale Station, N~ Haven, Cf o6po. Office addreu: 19-4S Broadway. Phone: (>o}) 4}1· 1 ~7- enuil: tnj@yale.edu. All contents copyright 1001 by TH£ N- }OUilNAL at Yale, Inc. All Righu Reserved. Reproduction other in whole or in part without wri11en permission of the publisher and editor-infive hundred copies of each issue are distributed free 10 members of the Yale and New Haven community. Subscriptions are available to those ouuide the area. Rates: One }-ear. so8. Two years. S}l. THE Nnr JouRNAL is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookl<eeping aod billing services are provided by Colm10 Bookkeeping of N~ Haven. THE N £Y ]OUkNAI. encoutages lenen to the editor and com menu on Yale and New Haven issues. Wrire to Edirorials, )4}1 Yale Station, New Haven, Cf o6s1o. Allleuen for publication must include address and signature. We rese~ the right to edit aU lenen for publication.

chief is prohibited. While this magazine is published by Yale CoUege nudenu. Yale Univenity is not responsible for iu comenu. Seven thousand

Framing Sacco and Vanzetti ONE PALL DAY IN 1971, Neil Thomas Proto

had an epiphany. It wasn't about God, or Vietnam, or flower power, or love. For the George Washington University law student, studying the execution of two ItalianAmerican shopkeepers for robbery and murder in a Boston prison on August 23, 1927, was an awakening. Proto recalls hearing a few conversations about the case in a class and going to see a recently released film on the subject (the one with the Joan Baez sound track, he fondly remembers these days). Then he just knew: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were about to change his life. When "Justice On Trial: Ben $ hahn's Case For Sacco And Vanzetti," a collection of the modernist painrer's gouaches and tempera paintings accompanied by historical photographs and film, o pened at the Yale Art Gallery on October 14 for a two month run, it was not only one of several events commemorating the 75TH anniversary of their deaths, but also the result of a one-man mission to bring Sacco and Vanz.etti to New Haven.

When you talk to Proto, who tends to get hysterical when addressing the subject, it is hard not to feel like those dim memories from the annals of high school history are going to change your life as well.

Though he now lives in Washington, DC, and works at a high profile law firm, Proto was born and raised in New Haven and still maintains a residence here. H e has devoted the better part of his life to reading, studying, and educating about the Sacco and Vanzetti case. In the process, he has constructed his own revisionist history of Sacco and Vanz.etti's story, become a collector of Sacco and Vanzetti-related folk music, and co-adapted an operetta-"The American Dream: The Story Of Sacco And Vanzerri"-which debuted at New Haven's own Shubert Theater this April.

After that fateful day in 1971 when he first realized the spiritual, philosophical, and historical significance of the case, Proto hit the books. For the next two years, it got "a little intense." He spent months studying the eight volumes of transcripts and reading every work he could find on the execution. Finally, in 1996, Proto began

4

his magnum opus, a manifesto published in Italian Am~rica, the magal.ine of the national Sons of Italy, o n the significance of the trial. But after publishing a second article in 1997 for the 70TH anniversary of Sacco and Vanzetti's execution, Proto had a second epiphany: that the message was not getting out. So, after 27 years of devotion, he redoubled his efforts. "Why was this not talked about?" he remembered. "And what does it mean that it wasn't talked about?"

Proto started talking to important people. He got on the phone with Mayor John DeStefano, Congresswoman Rosa DeLaura, and Yale Law School D ean Anthony Kronman to put together a symposium that was the first phase in a mission to bring Sacco and Vanzetti to New H aven.

He played on Yale's historic connections to the case--<:ountless articles in the Yak Law &vinu, petition drives by the YLS dean, and the advocacy of the Supreme Court Justice and then-Professor William L. Douglasand wasn't above drumming up a little Yale/Harvard rivalry over the issue either, like calling up the Mayor to suggest, "John, would you call the mayor of Boston to ask him what he is going to do to commemorate the anniversary of Sacco and Vanzetti?"

Slowly, he convened them to his idea of bringing Sacco and Vanz.etti to the city.

Proto's crusade paid off. "I was just tickled," he recalls, "it was great fun, a

merry experience." There were large turnouts at events like the gallery exhibit, the New Haven Colony Histo rical Society reading, and the "compose-your-own路 Sacco-and-Vanzetti-folksong" evening sponsored by the Eli Whitney Folk Festival.

Proto proudly remembers "a very bohemi路 an crowd." And, the o peretta played the Shubert to a sold-out crowd.

If the exhibit's coming to New Haven started with Proto's epiphany, it is only appropriare: The art itself was the product of a full-blown religious experience. The painter Ben Shahn (a Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States only two years before Sacco and Vanzetti) called his series of 32 modernist, distorted gouaches (8 of which are on display at che art gallery) and 2 tempera canvases "The Passion Of Sacco And Vanz.etti," in reference to the death of Jesus. Shahn explained his politi路 cal art with an epiphany of his own: "Ever since I could remember, I'd wished thac I'd been lucky enough co be alive at a great time--when something big was going on, like the Crucifixion. And suddenly I real路 ized I was. Here I was living through another Crucifixion. H ere was something co paint!"

For Proco, his own is as much a "great time" as that of Ben Shahn. "It's stunning how analogous it is to whac is going on today," he remarked. Although the

TH E NEW JouRNAL

anniversary celebration was planned years in advance, the themes of anti-immigrant sentiment and criminal justice seem especially pertinent-a connection which exhibit curator Robin Jaffee Frank did not hesitate to acknowledge. Perhaps the yearlong commemoration is unlikely co inspire miracles. But did it change Neil Proto's life? ¡~solucely."

-Sara Hirschhorn

Mussel Man ELM AND HoWE, in the huddle of establishments famous for their quick eats and cheap drinks, something has changed. There is a strange new glow around Rudy's Bar & Grill. It might be the new neon signs in the window. It might be the:: sunlight reflecting off the new sliver furniture outside. Ic might be the blinding whiteness of the "Belgian Frites" banner above the door against the crusty sienna bricks of the wall. One can't quite be sure.

The ineffable magnetism which surrounds the dimly lie and cozily grimy dive draws you in to press your nose and grubby fingers against the window and peer in with the wonderment of a child at the window of a toy store on Christmas Eve; or more poignantly, a college student at the window of a bar on a midweek afternoon.

You cannot have failed to realize last year's addition of Belgian frites to Rudy's menu. Even if you've never tasted them (for shame!) the legend of their succulence and superioricy to any fry you've ever tasted has surely wafted down Elm Street and piqued your interest and your appetite. You may even have heard of the man behind the myth, Orner Ipek, known to those less intimately acquainted with him as "the frites guy." Ipek, a Belgian native who came to the United States three years ago, started worlcing at Rudy's a year ago. No mere fry jockey, he trained as a chef at the Cuisine Beige Enseignement lnternationale in Brussels. (He also, conveniently, has a degree in Economics.) While worlcing in New York at "Belgian Fries" fast food chain, he met former Rudy's owner Thomas Henniger. As the two discussed AT Tl-IE CORNER OF

NO'VEMBER 2002

Henniger's business, Ipek says, "I cold him it was a good idea to add Belgian fries to his menu, because in a bar you drink beer, and fries go along very well with that." Orner lpek is a wise man with good taste.

He has imported from Belgium the most essential tool of his craft: the frites machine. "You can't find that lcind of machine here," he explains. Belgian frites friolators are more powerful than the machines typically used in fast food restaurants in the United States, and they are larger and have round frying baskets.

"With round baskets, the heat moves all around the sides of the basket, which cooks the potatoes faster and makes them crispier," Ipek says. The differences between Rudy's plump and juicy frites and McDonald's fries, parched and chewy by comparison, don't stop there. Ipek's fries are xoo% vegetarian, cooked in soybean oil, and his potatoes are carefully hand-picked and prepared. "I don't buy Idaho or some cheap potato. I try to get rhe right size: 70 count potatoes"-that is, 70 potatoes per 50 pounds of potatoes-"which have a better taste for fries than Idaho." Ipek handpeels rhe potatoes and soaks them overnight. Each day he dries them out before he "blanches" them in the fryer for several minutes at a low temperature. He sets them aside for at least half an hour before cooking them a second time at a higher temperature until they are ready to serve. lpek then presents each customer with a silver funnel overflowing with fries, gently glistening with soybean oil amidst the folds of wax paper and crowned by a tiny plastic spear, plunged whimsically into a frire. He offers his customers over 20 different sauces with which to eat their frices, including Belgian Mayonnaise, Curry Ketchup, Thai Peanut Butter, Andalouse, Americaine, and his personal favorite, Samurai. He imports their ingredients from a Belgian sauce company because, he says, "In Belgium they are very fancy about sauces." We're pretty damn fancy in New Haven roo: Rudy's now goes through 6oo pounds of potaroes a week.

Orner Ipek has certainly brought a great deal to this bar with his frites. Before

their advent, few people realized chat Rudy's even had a menu. Now, thanks co Ipek's European sensibility and talent in the kitchen, Rudy's is becoming known as a place for meals and snacks, as well as quality brews, good conversation, and loud punk music. But the mystique of the frites cannot wholly account for Rudy's new appeal. Those neon signs in the window are new. The stretched bunting set up outside when the weather is warm welcomes customers to "Rudy's Bar & Grill" and invites them to relax Parisian cafe-style in the outdoor furniture. Perhaps one should not be surprised to learn that Ipek himself is responsible: He is the new owner.

"When I came here, I started by working in the kitchen," he says. "Then I began to work behind the bar as well. Then it happened that Henniger and I made a business deal and now I am in charge of all this. I want to add mussels to the menu. In Belgium this is very famous. You serve mussels in a pot with fries on the side and you have your beer. It's very popular."

Expect the mussel premiere in three months. Ipek is also planning to renovate the equipment behind the bar and the kitchen, which he says is "good for the fries, but when you want to expand the menu you need more facilities."

So, with the imminent addition of mussels ro the menu and the decor taking a new vibrant turn, we can only expect more new facets to the once comfortably dingy face of Rudy's. Whatever comes out of the vision of the owner, patrons can rest assured that it will be as closely monitored and cared for as the frites. "When you own your own business," Ipek explains earnestly, "you have to be always here to check the quality of the food. You have to make sure your fries are different from other fries.

They have to have something special or no one would come to eat them." So far, Ipek has satisfied at least his own tastes with his creations. "I like them a lot," he says smiling. "I am crazy about potatoes!" And New Haven is crazy about Orner Ipek. After all, ' he's put the 'N' back in Rudy's Restaura_t.

-Muedith Angt:lson 5

A Fashionable Cause LE6N, NICARAGUA IS PERHAPS the last place you'd expect to find a¡ pair . of colorblock Mickey Mouse shorts or, for that matter, tapered corduroy slacks. But Le6n, Nicaragua, is no stranger to such anachronisms of taste and missteps of fashion.

Each year the city receives more than r8,ooo pounds of clothing and material aid from the residents of New Haven, all of it selected, sorted, packed, and shipped by members of the New Haven-Le6n Sister City Project.

Packing the clothing, which is donated by local consignment stores, into boxes is a monumental triannual affair: The latest session cakes place on a dreary Friday that threatens to dump a week's worth of t:ain on a New Haven back porch covered in clothing bound for Nicaragua. At its epicenter are five middle-aged women, all of them long-time Sister City volunteers. The packing is lively, punctuated at times with the conspiracy and subdued gossip of an afternoon bridge club or the negotiated push-and-pull of an urban flea market. Bur at its core it is governed by the supreme taste of five unabashed fashionistas. Patti, one of the quintet, holds up a brown flowered skirt and matching headband. "That's c ute!" another c:Xdaims. "But look, the headband is stained right here. It's insulting to send something dirty like that," someone else responds. A third asks: "We can't send the skirt without the headband. Can we?"

The ladies do not take lightly their roles as guardians of good fashion sense. A first round of inspection expels all dirty or torn items, as well as winter clothing: peacoats and J. Crew sweaters would elicit only laughter iÂŁ through some slight of judgment, they were to infiltrate the Central American heat. The second round is crucially important: Beyond the obvious rejects like stonewashed jeans and T-shirts bearing names of long-defunct sports teams, sorting through the heaps of clothing requires subtle discrimination. Should a wooly vest with short sleeves be sent? A size 14 white tennis dress? An unsightly pair of cargo shorts? Lingerie?

In Le6n, where the clothing is sold by local residents for a nominal price in order to fund community projects, another round of selection awaits the boxes marked

6

'ropa hombres' and 'ropa mujeres.' Many of the members of the Sister Cities have visited Nicaragua and report that the women of Le6n are not eager to suffer the beige and gray staples of a New England wardrobe.

Brenda recalls describing her cupcake Connecticut home to the women of Le6n: "They were astonished. They said, 'pink and blue! Why, those are the sad colors!'"

Someone tsks: "The 'sad colors' ... imagine!

When I was there, I went to a weaving workshop. They wanted to dye everything bright orange. They don't understand that no one here wants to buy a bright orange shirt."

Clashes of culture and cotton notwithstanding, the insatiable wheel of fashion keeps on turning: Garments made in Nicaraguan factories are peddled to trend setters by stores in the United States; rejected items eventually stagnate in consignment stores and charity trucks, then wax back to Nicaragua. The first material aid to reach Le6n arrived in the suitcases and knapsacks of a handful of New Haven residents, who carne with a 'Wimesses for Peace' group during the Contra War of the 1980s. Their purpose then was to assist the people of Nicaragua without caking sides in the conflict. Almost two decades later, the war is over, but the motivating principle remains unchanged and The Sister City project has grown to include a bicycle exchange, a sustainable agriculture program, frequent delegations to Nicaragua, and the establishment of a locally staffed office to manage the projects.

On the New Haven side, the Le6n venture has struggled to maintain significance in a decade without warfare. It is a question, as enunciated by director Jean

Silk, of making sure the project's purpose remains relevant and well-defined.

Purpose is indeed abundant at the box-packing session, and principled aid has by no means given way to arbitrary altruism. Silk compares how Austrians pick their sister cities-"by taking maps and drawing concentric circles from each capital city"-to New H aven's techniqueforming a connection based on similarities between the two cities and the relationships that visitors formed and subsequent visitors continue to nurture.

The story of the Sister Cities program is one of a group dedicated to a cause stripped of its political luster but rich in personal meaning. While other activists adopt sexy catch-phrases and campaigns for 'social justice' or 'an end to all war,' the Sister City project measures its success not by how loudly it raises its voice but with hard, material evidence: the number ofTshirts packed, wells built, bicycles shipped.

Many of the members have committed months or even years to establishing functional civic projects in Le6n. Theirs is a brute materialism taken to a philanthropic extreme.

The political statement endures without being gaudy, and the fashion statement is clear: New Haven is dressing the residents of its sister city, and dressing them well.

-Coco Krumme

Card Catalog Cartel STEVE BERNSTEIN, a cataloguer at Sterling Memorial Library, sees in his job a lofty purpose: "mapping the collective subcon-

THE NEW JouRNAL

scious of humanity." That includes, among other things, shelving full sets of Buffj th~ Vampire Slayer books and multitudes of vanity press publications. But nowhere is Bernstein's description of a librarian's work more accurate, and its implications more meaningful, than in the library's collections ofThird World literature.

For a librarian, every newspaper padding a garbage can is endangered literature. African collection curator Dorothy Woodson, for example, collects newspapers in over 500 African languages and puts on microfilm those too old to travel. With the steadfast goal of "preserving disappearing materials," she avidly collects what is known in the library world as ephemera.

This includes posters, albums of non-professional photos of South African and Zimbabwean ruins, stamps, pictures, and a rare treasure: a letter from Cecil Rhodes to his personal accountant. Africa's civil wars, with their way of tossing editors in and out of prison, make Woodson's work rather difficult. Yet she finds herself amazed at the "enormous amount of diverse scholarly materials." The books are thin and cheaply bound, made to be accessible to an often destitute readership--but, Woodson says, they are widely read nonetheless.

Rich Richie, curator for the Southeast Asia collection, encounters a rather different kind of ephemera. Aiming both to preserve Cambodian printed materials and to bring copies of them to the West, the Yale Center for International Studies has recently helped establish a Cambodian Center of Documentation in Phnom Penh. There, Richie supervises the task of microfll.ming records from the Khmer Rouge for Yale's collections-quite a job, considering that there are no microfilm cameras in Cambodia, and reliable electricity can only be obtained from an imported generator.

He describes the Center's Cambodian staff leafmg through records of Toulsleng, the regime's largest prison: Every so often someone would stumble upon the name of a family member, friend, or acquaintanc~cb a concise record of death by Starvation, unimaginable torture, or the brutal bareness of decade-long imprisonment. Richie also watches the documenters scanning the infamous "killing fields" for remnants of skeletons-a risky enterprise, since some of those places are still controlled by Communist zealots.

NOVEMBER

2002

Buying books can be just as interesting. Richie describes with gusto open-air markets, where books are sold next co vegetables and household items. In Cambodia, the curator's place to be is the central Phnom Penh marketplace; in Thailand, large modern bookstores are common; in Laos, curators go to the government publishing office, the only one in the country.

The books themselves are no less diverse.

From comics (an important tool of government propaganda) to modern reinterpretations of religious "literature and folktales, they tend to be published in tiny runstwenty-five copies is not rare-which can be taxing for the curator charged with keeping America's oldest collection of Southeast Asian literarure complete.

Sometimes books are not published at all. Following a wave of student uprisings over a decade ago, Burma's universities have been closed, and academic publishing prohibited. Richie resorts to collecting popular magazines published on newsprint, with black-and-white pictures. Occasionally he does get other texts at the out-of-print market; but in doing so, he risks accidentally buying materials stolen from the country's National Archives-"people need the money," as he puts it.

Cesar Rodriguez, curator for the library's Latin American collection, finds an "excellent" source of materials, particularly on economics and human rights, in non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Those sprang up, he says, like mushrooms after the rain following the political turmoil that plagued much of Latin America through the 1980s. But most NGOS are funded by us and European institutions looking to promote Western ideals, an affiliation which can become problematic.

Rodriguez, for example, "knew [he) was being followed" in Cuba while smuggling not-for-export books through the Swiss agency. Yet he managed to sneak out, on his person, flyers published by the Cuban statistics office containing figures on literacy and poverty rates-by hi_ding them in a volume of Fidel Castro's speeches.

-Lea Oksman

Stairway to Heaven ST. MARYs CHURCH TOWERS high above Hillhouse Avenue. Inside are vaulted ceil-

ings, pastel walls, and lifelike statues, but the church is most notable for being the only building on Hillhouse not owned by Yale. When it was built in 1874, however, St. Mary's was even more out of place: It was surrounded by extravagant private mansions, whose wealthy residents looked on in horror when the cash-strapped Roman Catholic Church ran out of funds as the building neared completion-leaving it without a steeple--and poo~ immigrants began to flock to the spireless edifice, " constructed of stone which gives it a cold and repulsive appearance." An 1879 article about Hillhouse Avenue-described

by Charles Dickens as the most beautiful street in America-in The New York Times carried the snide subtitle, "How an aristocratic avenue was blemished by a Roman Church edifice."

Fortunately for St. Mary's, this less than flattering coverage did not determine its resting place in history. Just a few years after its opening, one of the parish's young priests, Father Michael McGivney, founded an organization to unite the men of the parish. He hoped to offer an alternative to secret societies, a popular outlet for young, lonely immigrant males who found themselves in a hostile new environment.

Instead of mysterious rituals and secret handshakes, McGivney wanted to create a fraternal organization that combined this sense of belonging with the values and charitable mission of the Catholic Church.

In 1882, in the basement of St. Mary's, McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus, a "fraternal service organization of Catholic men."

Today the organization has over a milLion members in 13 countries. The support network that McGivney envisioned has expanded to even offer a life insurance plan to its members. The Knights of Columbus current headquarters-where the organization's 750 employees manage its insurance company and other worldly affairs-sits across town from St. Mary's. By espousing the doctrines of faith, fraternity, and life insurance, the Knights of Columbus seems to have access to both the pocketbooks and the willing volunceerism of its members: They claim to have donated nearly a billion dollars and 400 million hours of service to ' charity. They also proudly describe themselves as "the strong right arm of the Catholic Church," and their political views 7

.. always echo those of the Vatican.

One of the Knights' charitable causes was a renovation of the roof of St. Mary's.

In 1982, they set out to create "an architectural exclamation point between heaven and earth": a 179-foot steeple topped with an eleven-foot gold cross. The crown jewel of the Knights' New Haven empire, however, is the rwo-year-old Knights of Columbus museum, a block from the New Haven train station. On most afternoons, the concrete building is quiet inside, but the front desk attendant is more than happy to orient visitors and describe the temporary exhibitions-at the moment, a display of Russian icons and a 9/n memorial.

The bulk of the museum's content, of course, is dedicated to the fraternal order itself The trophy room displays awards donated by national Knights of Columbus councils, an article about Babe Ruth establishing that the slugger himself was a Knight, and a letter signed by current Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura proclaiming May 20, 2001, "Knights of Columbus Day." In the Christopher Columbus room, the Knights' patron is honored by displays ranging from a sugar bowl bearing his likeness to a late nineteenth century child's penny barxk upon which the explorer sits.

Father McGivney allegedly chose Columbus, a devout Catholic, as the Knights' patron with the intention of likening his Atlantic crossing co those of the organization's immigrant members.

Another exhibit explains why members are known as Knights-a dramatic flair that is the legacy of James T. Mullen, the order's first lay leader.

In the back of St. Mary's Church, behind the rows of wooden pews, stands a dark marble vault. The cop of the structure is formed into a crucifix, and a plaque on its side explains its contents: When the Knights of Columbus gave St. Mary's Church a steeple in 1982., they also encased the remains of their founder, Father McGivney, in the church. In 2.000, they also lobbied to nominate him for canonization, the first official step to sainthood in the Catholic Church. If the Vatican declares him a saint, the Knights can rest assured that the soul of their founder

8

resides in heaven. Apparently, the Knights of Columbus provide not only life insurance, but after-life insurance as well.

-Tara

OVonn~IL

Dance, Dance, Revolution ON Ow CAMPus, amidst a crowd of chanting, writhing students, a silver-haired octogenarian executes a series of martialarts kicks with the easy grace of a twentyfive-year-old. I stand entranced by the spectacle before me. The student at my side, noting the look of awe on my face, mouths one word: capoeira.

At the time, I thought that I had discovered a new art form, something I could only explain as a mix between Kung Fu and break-dancing. But soon it seemed that everywhere I turned, someone knew someone who did capoeira. And it seemed that everyone who did it knew my silver-haired octogenarian, Professor Robert Thompson, aka Master T. Later that week, I met Master T in the Timothy Dwight dining hall, where it soon became clear that, given the opportunity, he could calk endlessly, about almost anything. All I had to do was utter the word "capoeira" to send him on a cultural journey back to Brazil, where African slaves developed the martial art as a secret form of rebellion. The words tumbled from his

mouth so quickly that without the help of the TA eating next to me, I would have been completely lost. Not that Master T would have noticed. He seemed more intent on keeping himself entertained than helping me understand the popularity of capoeira at Yale.

In twenty whirlwind minutes, he described the appearance of capoeira in the 1980s in New York, when of culture-starved yuppies mixed with the 70,000 Brazilians newly immigrated to the city. "Centers just shot up," he explained and jumped out of his chair.. "Boom! Boom! Boom!"-the sound of capoeira exploding across New York City.

Despite capoeira's recent resurgence, Thompson admits that today's movement does not hold a candle to its peak of popularity in the 1980s when it inspired "some jerky a-movies.'' But, at least to him, its continued popularity is not surprising: "In what other activity can you defend yourself, dance, sing in a romance language, and be healthy? It's a total physical experience."

And without another word, he bounded out of the dining hall with theTA following close behind.

Still mystified by capoeira's mass appeal, I visited a class taught at a church near Olive Street. No one seemed to notice my presence as I studied the walls plastered in photos of capoeira mestres. Housewives, businessmen, and construction workers in various contortionist stretches were scat-

THE NEW jOURNAL

tered across the studio's hardwood floor.

Their loose white uniforms were reminiscent of karate, but more causal-a fitting characterization for capoeira in general.

The silent concentration of the students was broken by a belly laugh from behind the studio wall. Efraim Silva entered the room, greeting his flock with a warm smile and a sadistic call for even deeper stretches. Silva, the self-proclaimed "embodiment of capoeira" in New Haven, opened the city's first studio, Gina Brasileira Inc., eight years ago. Last year, he brought his class to Yale's Payne-Whitney Gym. "The first day of class, there were forty-one students," he recalled in a thick Brazilian accent. "We had to divide into two classes."

With the studio full, Silva paced the floor, watching his students begin to put their own personalities into the movement, straddling the gap between martial art and dance. Occasionally, he picked up a juglike instrument attached to the base of an archery bow, which he played with a pick made of bean-filled maracas.

As the class neared the rwo-hour mark, everyone gathered into a roda, or sparring circle. Here it all came together-the dancing and fighting united in a seamless synthesis of body and soul, rhythm and mind, as pair after pair faced off, at once partners and adversaries.

Back on campus, Yale capoeiristas have their own theories about the popularity of the martial art. Becca Falik sees it as a break from rigid classroom learning, a chance to experience "the wisdom of generations of capoeira sages that is passed down through the spiritual chain of master to student." Ja-Shukry says, "Yale students are just culture starved. All we really know is college culture, and in my opinion it wears thin and lacks true substance." Apparently, the intellectual stimulation and cultural diversity offered by one of the nation's top universities pales alongside the wisdom of sages. Never mind that this spiritually impoverished university offers courses in capoeira and has a faculty member who is an expert on the an.

-Zvilta Krieg"

NOVEMBER 2002.

7TH ON YALE Yale's First Entrepreneurship In Fashion Series

The Yale Entrepreneurial Society and Berkeley College present three extraordinary designers: Kay Unger. Kay Unger Designs Kay has emerged as an Industry leader possessing true symmetry with her customer, and Just last year was named one of the Leading Women Entrepreneurs of the World.

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Monday November 18, 4:30pm Berkeley College Master's House

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THE NEW JouRNAL

Could a simple after-school program be the anslNer to a national epide111ic?

By .Jessica Cohen

I U

uan Mendoza, a seventh grader at Fair Haven Middle School, used to be fat. Like most overweight kids in middle school, he endured his share of taunting. But as much as it bothered him, he didn't know how to change his situation. "I used to just eat and not really care. I didn't know why I was eating what I was eating," he remembered. At the end of the school day, having skipped lunch and breakfast, Juan would hit the vending machines and stuff himself with unhealthy treats. On the way home local convenience stores lured him in with the promise of his favorite snack: Doritos. At home Juan's family served him fried food; until last spring he had never even tried broccoli or cauliflower.

But in the fall of 2001, all of that changed.

For 16 weeks Juan and 20 of his peers participated in an after-school program designed by Dr. Margaret Grey, Assistant Dean of Research Affairs at Yale School of Nursing, and a team of colleagues. To Dr. Grey and her team, Juan is representative of a national "epidemic of obesity" that has hit low-income and minority populations disproportionately hard. Though all of America is getting heavier as a result of reduced physical activity and poorer nutritional habits, socio-economic factors often determine who is most affected. It is a fact that the poorest people in this country are also the most overweight.

In this regard, New Haven is a prototypical American city. Statistics highlight the gaping health discrepancies that exist nation-wide between upper- and middle-class citizens and inner-city dwellers. While approximately 16 percent of American youth are obese, in New Haven, where 85 percent of students in public

schools are either Mrican American or Hispanic, and the majority eat state-subsidized free lunches, the numbers hover between 45 and 50 percent. 41 students participated in the 16-week program at Fair Haven and Sheridan middle schools. All of them were considered clinically obese and all but one of them were either Mrican American or Hispanic.

Yale psychology professor and obesity expert Kelly Brownell likens the weight crisis to the early days of the HIVIAios epidemic.

"Obesity is somewhat like HIVIAIDS was in that it is a stigmatized problem and so despite its dire consequences the public is slower to respond," he explained. For the most part, poor people in America do not have access to healthy food, cannot afford physically active lifestyles, and live in communities where obesity is commonplace. More troublesome, however, is the fact that obesity is the number one cause of Type 2 diabetes, one of the fastest growing diseases in America. In a statement issued last winter calling for changes in school lunch policies and the fast-food inaustry, Surgeon General David Satcher lamented, "The nation's obesity epidemic has gotten so bad it soon may overtake tobacco as the leading cause of preventable deaths."

For Juan, the program presented an opportunity to improve his health, to stop being teased about his size, and to become an exception to the rule. A lot was at stake for Dr. Grey and her research team as well: If the program, one of the first of its kind, could reverse trend~ towards obesity and, more imponandy, Type 2 diabetes in Juan and his peers, despite

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NOVEMBER

2002

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''Hip-hop dance routines, forced acronytns, and worksheets see111 too si111ple to be a solution to a proble111 of such depth and scale."

their home and school environments, then it could be a viable answer to a national problem. But success will depend on the program's ability to counter problems deeply engrained in American society.

S

tatistically, Latino males between the ages of six and twelve like Juan have the highest incidence of childhood obesity-dinically defined by a ratio of height to weight above the 85th percentile.

Childhood obesity has been linked to low self-esteem, altered body image, decreased preferences for physical activity, and depression. The most alarming problem, however, and the one that Dr. Grey is most worried about, is the direct connection to the early onset ofType 2 diabetes, a condition that impairs the body's ability to use insulin. As a result, fats and sugars are less effectively digested, causing high blood sugar levels. This can lead to reduced energy, high blood pressure, heart disease, and kidney disease. In 1980, only 2 percent of Type 2 diabetes cases occurred in children between the ages of nine and 19. Now that figure has jumped to between 40 and 50 percent. The sharp rise in Type 2 diabetes in children is a troubling indicator of what is to come. "The problem here isn't only health related," explained Grey. "This health epidemic has huge societal implications. These kids will be suffering from complications in their 20s that we haven't generally seen until much later in life--and this doesn't have to be the case." But if the over-arching goals of Grey's course are of

12

national significance, its classroom goals are surprisingly basic: nutrition, exercise, and coping skills.

Juan remembers the beginning of the class as being extremely challenging.

"Almost everything I learned was new and it was ha:rd to change the kind of food I ate." At the second session of the class, 'students were asked to talk about the kinds of foods they consume and think of why they might choose those foods. While choosing foods based on taste, cost, and convenience¡ was familiar to the students, thinking about nutrition was not. High-sugar and high-fat foods are ubiquitous, regularly appearing in advertisements and promotions, while messages about nutrition are more obscure. According to Brownell, "the economics of food are the reverse of what they should be. Unhealthy food is easy, cheap, everywhere, and tastes good." The students' diets at the beginning of the course reflected this. "Their diets were high-fat, high-carb and low-protein. They were drinking close to a liter of soda a day and didn't know that it was a problem," said Diane Berry, one of the primary researchers.

During the first few weeks, the nutritionist for the course, Pamela Galasso, tried to give the students tools and information that they could use when making choices about food. "I had to present them with a new way of talking to get them thinking about and actively participating in more meals," said Galasso. The approach Galasso used was holistic. Rather than focus on diet and weight-loss, she tried to emphasize

small changes that students could make.

She presented them with "culturally competent" food guide pyramids that included foods that the students typically ate, such as rice and beans, and taught them some mnemonic devices to help them make decisions about food. Among the devices were phrases like "DIET: Deprived Individuals Eat Too much"-a reminder not to skip meals-and "soDA: Stop Options Decide Act"-encouraging careful decision making when choosing a beverage. Though these strategies may seem simple, for students who didn't know that "four tennis balls" of rice was too much, they were welcome tools. Each week Juan made goals for the next week's class based on what he had learned: "Sometimes it was to add more vegetables or to eat some breakfast. I would try to eat less high fat food." The course gave Juan clear messages about food and nutrition-messages that were not often reinforced at home or at school.

Unfortunately, processed, high-fat, and high-calorie food is just as prevalent in schools as it is in homes and stores.

Students on subsidized school lunch programs do not have many options when choosing what to eat. School lunches, though fmanced by the government and required to meet certain standards, are often high in fat and light on fruits and vegetables. "The government policies are confused," explained Grey. "There are rules and regulations regarding school lunches.

But in places like New Haven, where many of the meals are subsidized, the stuff they get free or cheap are the high fat choices."

THE NEW JouRNAL

In a recent study only 20 percent of schools met all the government's nutritional requirements. "Lots of times I didn't like the school lU.Qch," Juan said, "and so I would buy a soda or a candy bar or maybe both." Juan's decision to skip school meals and buy food from the vending machines was not unusual. "Lots of these kids are eating two meals a day at school. If the school lunch doesn't appeal to them, they turn to the vending machines. They have very limited healthy options," said Berry. Schools across the country have lined their hallways with candy-stocked vending machines and filled their cafeterias with a Ia caru fastfood chains as a way to make money.

Nationwide, vending machines account for approximately $750 million annually in extra funds for schools. The profits are substantial and help pay for additional programs and facilities, but they come at a high price.

Many students in the class come from families and communities where obesity and diabetes have become standard. In order to break the cycle of obesity and its related health problems, the class had to address the larger context in which these children were living. Though the program told the kids to eat more vegetables and more of "nature's candy"-fruitone look into a small inner-city grocery makes it clear that these things are not so easy for families to provide. "Many of the families have to take two buses to get to a good grocery store, and the stores nearby might have one or two sorry looking heads of iceberg lenuce to choose from," explained Grey. So one Sarurday morning Galasso gathered about a dozen students and mothers at a big grocery store nearby and showed them healthy and costeffective options. "I taught them how to use what was in season and showed them the nuts and bolts of reading food labels."

Halfway through the program, the researchers found that parents had altered their shopping co include more healthy choices, which was something the parents ~nributed to their children's participation m the program. Juan's family incorporated

NOVEMBER 2002

much of what he learned into their daily lives. "I would tell my family so that we could adjust what we were doing. My family has cut down on sweets and fats and instead of frying foods they steam them."

Everyone in his family lost weight, but Juan put it best when he said, "I think my family feels better."

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of American school children have daily opportunities to engage in structured physical activity. At Fair Haven Middle School, Juan has gym only twice a week. He doesn't play sports, and he couldn't say whether there is a football team or a basketball team at his school.

Inner city schools often lack the time and space for effective physical education.

Exercise was not part of the daily routine for many of the children enrolled in the after-school intervention program.

The physical activity training part of the program did not demand that the students engage in formal, rigorous exercise.

Instead, it was designed to help students change their lifestyles. Berry explained the snategy: "We spent a lot of time talking about sedentary and non-sedentary activities and brainstorming ways to cut down on time spent sitting in front of the TV or computer and thinking of other things to do." By reinforcing the value of any kind of physical activity-be it actual exercise or just active behavior-the teachers hoped to help the srudents modify their own environments.

Physical activity was Juan's favorite part of the program: "I liked it best when we played outside and danced for a long time in the music room." During one class, the students were told that they were on the new Survivor series "Getting Back to Basics in Activity" and that they had to use three random props to design and perform a ten- to fifteen-minute routine. The props were everyday household items-<:anned goods, towels, chairs, as well as affordable items such as tennis balls, jump ropes, and basketballs. Through this process, the students learned to create games and activities EWER THAN HALF

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for themselves. Most often during the physical activity portion of the class, how-. ever, the students were simply asked to do something active, whether it was dancing to hip-hop CDS (everyone's favorite) or simply taking a walk with one of the exercise teachers. Many of the children whose neighborhoods do not have big parks to play in or community sports teams to play on had long ago given up on physical activity. "They see things as skinny or fat, couch potato or marathon runner, so we tried to introduce a middle ground," Grey said.

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IP-H,OP DANCE ROUTINES, forced acronyms, and weekly worksheets seem too simple to be a viable solution to a national health problem of such depth and scale. But these simple solutions may, in fact, be a foundation upon which to build a national response. After twelve months, nearly all of the students in the program had stabilized their glucose tolerance, and their insulin metabolism had improved. In addition, students' behaviors changed dramatically: They consumed fewer calories, had greater dietary knowledge, became more active and, perhaps most surprisingly, helped their families change their patterns of behavior, suggesting a "trickle down" effect ftom the school into the entire community.

With the results confirmed, Dr. Grey and her research team have been approached by school systems across the country asking for advice and information abo'ut the program. While eager to share the information, Dr. Grey is also quick to explain that it was a pilot study and that the full-scale trial she is currently working on will provide more substantial and perhaps more accurate answers. The next study will take place in four New Haven middle schools and will be incorporated into the regular school day.

One of the driving beliefs behind the program is that schools are the perfect place to begin addressing problems that plague entire communities. One teacher quoted in the proposal for the study said, "We as teachers need to expand our knowledge base and understand rhe benefits of good nutrition and physical activity. We are in the perfect position to reach young people in our schools and promote healthy lifestyles." The hope is that this informa-

THE NEW JouRNAL

tion, provided at the most basic levels, will eventually change larger community patterns. "Dr. Grey's program is innovative in that it focuses on prevention at all," explained Brownell. "There is very little else currently being done to prevent this societal problem." Connecticut is among the few states starting to address actively the discrepancy in health that is prevalent among its citizens. Dr. Grey's program is at the forefront of research in the field, and politicians around the state have begun to take note. State Senator Toni Harp has incorporated the health concerns at hand into her political agenda. With Senator Harp's push, Connecticut is one of only six states whose efforts to promote nutrition and physical activity have been awarded funding by the national Centers for Disease Control. Harp founded and co-chairs the Coalition to Fight Childhood Obesity in New Haven and was a key promoter of a resolution passed last April by the Connecticut general assembly concerning nutrition in public schools. One of the most important reasons for adopting the resolution was "to assist in the reduction and prevention of obesity and non-insulinusing (Type 2) diabetes in children." On a small scale, these solutions look promising.

If Juan and his family were able to reverse the trends in their life, and if four New Haven schools adopt active prevention program, does this mean that the epidemic can be managed? The most significant obstacle in the way of large-scale change seems to be that Juan lives in a community where obesity is the most natural path. Solutions are presented to children who live in a fat-saturated world.

Brownell's hope, however, is that the sort of action demonstrated by Harp and Grey will be noticed. "Ultimately the people and the government are in a position to do something similar regarding obesity as they have recently done with tobacco." Juan's success could be evidence that the problem can be solved, but until the obesity-reinforcing infrastructure of society is torn down, Juan's will be an uphill march.

-

Juan MnukJza is a psroMnym.

]mica Cohm, a smior in Timothy D.wight Colieg~, is managing ~ditor for TNJ.

N~BER2002

Berkeley College Presents a Master's Tea with

Mark Singer, BK '72 ~~

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Citizen K· The Deeply Weird American Journey ofBrett Kimberlin, and Mr. Personality: Profiles and Talk Pieces

Dec.

2,

4pm Berkeley College Master's House

125

High 15

SERMON IS ON THE BURDEN of hopelessness. To begin, the Reverend W David Lee--pastor of New Haven's distinguished and most anciem black ..~;•• u·,~... Varick Memorial AME Zion

a seat on oo.r artort--atJotes not from psalms or but from the early hip-hop innoGrandmaster Flash. "It's like a jungle ·mes," he intones from the pulpit. like a jungle sometimes, it makes me I How I keep from going under."

IICKJnm.vJeGI!tng that not everyone in the J&U'"'"'u:: will recognize the reference to the Furious Five's 1982 chart-topper "The " a rumination on the despair of living, Lee assures them that they the sentiment from somewhere: "If don't know Grandmaster Flash, you Marvin Gaye said it too, and OMX is it today: Out there, 'It's like a jungle ....,,c:urn'"'" '" Echoing in the vast sanctuary the church, a tum-of-the-20TH-century in New Haven's rough Dixwell neighthe "Amens" and "Go-Ons" of congregation alternate with guffaws of ·cion. The popular preacher is just started.

Hopelessness might seem an unbcarburden here in the shadow of an Ivy university that often forgets residents when they stop sweepfloors and serving food and go home the night. "You all know those people, know they're out there," he reminds his IMl,tre,~tiion. "You know those people who it to the top and forget the folks who them there. Some of y'all got managers that. You think they'd understand your But don't you dare throw in the We know a God who will help you your faith."

Lee has made it his mission in life to those at the top of what they owe to who sustain them, and to see that jusis done. In an effort to link the discommunities of which he is a part-

Yale and the ghetto that surrounds it-the Dixwell pastor recently ran as a petition candidate for an alumni seat on the Yale Corporation-the University's governing board and ultimate authority, traditionally a bastion of wealth and national influence.

Despite showing early promise, he was trounced. Today's sermon comes roughly one year after he began in earnest the campaign that filled his community with the hope of finally being heard. But Lee's God, as he tells his congregation, is a God who curns weaknesses into strengths and mishaps into miracles. With the power of his God behind him, the thrashing Lee took at the hands of administrators and fellow alumni may well be a blessing in disguise-one which leads all of Dixwell out of the jungle and into the promised land.

THE PART OF ANsoNIA, Connecticut, I where Lee grew up was what Dixwell is today: a crossroads of poverty and privilege.

Lee was from "the wrong side of the tracks." The world of his childhood sounds much like the jungle described by Grandmaster Flash: His mother raised him and his six siblings in a four-room apartment. He had no contact with his father.

Family members used drugs. His family moved from the projects to the north end of town when Lee was ten, and he was given his frrst glimpse of life across the divide. He vividly remembers the first day of fifth grade. "Me and another girl were the only two blacks in the classroom. I was like, wow, my other school had been diverse, but this was something else altogether." He soon befriended a boy named Keith who lived in the whiter, wealthier Hilltop neighborhood. The two would hang out listening to Keith's father's Elvis Presley records; Lee was soon a die-hard &.n, borrowing LPs to listen to at home. He says of the time spent in Keith's house, "That was the first time I was ever in a white person's home, and he was my friend.

We were the same.... That's when I knew that there was another side to life. That made me say, 'This is what I want to be."'

Football, it became clear as he grew older, was one inroad to prosperity.

Knowing his mother could not pay for college, Lee set his sights on earning a football scholarship to anywhere that would take him. He admits that he was in the right place at the right time. "I was privileged to be part of a football tradition that was second to none in the state of Connecticut," Lee says of the football program at Ansonia High School. On the gridiron he found what he calls "an understanding of what I would like life to be like in the future.

Ansonia wasn't all black or all white; it was a mixture. On the field, the only skin that mattered was the pigskin. You had young men from all walks of life coming together to work toward a common goal."

When Lee talks about the children of Dixwell-his favorite topic when discussing Yale-New Haven relations-you get the sense that he sees in their lives the same hardships he endured, only with fewer opportunities to leave those hardships behind. They too come into contact everyday with a wealthy white kids' house up on the hill-Yale University. "Kids should be able to do more than just visit and walk through the halls of this great institution. They'll allow kids to sit and see all the prestige ofYale, but never have a fair fighting chance to attend it? That's criminal." So he calls for Yale not only to send student tutors into New Haven neighborhoods, but to tap into its $II billion endowment and give financial support to New Haven public schools. Lee says he too wanted to attend Yale. But when Syracuse offered him a full scholarship for football , he had to accept.

Lee lettered all four years at Syracuse as a defensive back. One game in particular stands out in his mind. In the early 1980s, Syracuse head coach Dick MacPherson was struggling to rebuild a failing program that the University was considering cutting altogether. The turning point that Lee credits with saving the program carne during his junior year, when Syracuse hosted top-ranked Nebraska at home on

17

September 17, 1983. The year before, Nebraska had shamed Syracuse in Lincoln, winning 63-7. This year, both teams were undefeated, though Syracuse was unranked. "We upset them 17-9,'' Lee says.

"And that was our greatest game. That game I'll never forget-because we shocked the world." Lee's preacher demeanor is gentle and conciliatory, but you are always aware of the potentially explosive power of the underdog beneath the veneer. You know he has told this story a thousand times. He loves the shock of it. He relishes the credibility earned in a scrappy, come-from-behind revenge victory. To hear him talk, you'd think he almost likes starting with one mark in the loss column: Having disarmed his opponents by lowering their expectations, he can hit them full force for a win even sweeter for the surprise.

I

EE PLAYED

HIS SENIOR

l.year with torn cartilage in his knee. Having always planned on playing professionally, he took a year off after college to have arthroscopic surgery, then arranged try-outs for the New England Patriots, the New York Giants, and the Dallas Cowboys. He was cut from both the Patriots' L-----= and the Giants' squads, and as he was about to fly to Dallas, his knee swelled up again.

In what he calls the most difficult decision of his life, he decided not to get on the plane and to give up his hopes for a professional career. Football, after all, offered no sure future. A photo above Lee's desk in his church office reminds him of this. It was taken after the best play he ever made, a blocked field goal he returned for a touchdown. Lee holds the ball triumphantly in the air, beaming, as teammates jump to congratulate him. This is not what Lee notices in the photo, however. He sees Wes Dove, a hulking lineman in the right side of the frame. "H e was a gentle giant," Lee says, "everybody's friend, and one hell of a football player." Dove tried out for the Miami Dolphins after graduation. When

18

he didn't make the cut, Lee recounts matter of facdy, he went home and put a bullet through his head.

Unlike Dove, Lee had never staked everything on a pro career. Even before he dreamed of playing football, Lee knew that his true vocation was the ministry. The call came when he was ten, in an event Lee labels "The Budweiser Experience." He and his friend Morgan Johnson, called MoJo, were walking across the projects one Saturday morning to the nightclub owned

had been making a good living for a few years, first by selling Fords and Subarus, then by selling insurance. He gave up his ' $40,000 salary and cook out loans to pay for school. "I decided that instead of just making money, I needed to pastor people and make a difference in people's lives," Lee says. His determination was reinforced during his last year of study for his Master ofTheology degree. Caught up in the incellectual engagement he found at YDS, Lee debated whether to continue his studies for ~-----w---, a PhD and pursue a career as an academic theologian, or to stop tllâ&#x20AC;˘lll with his master's and pastor a ch urch. As Lee and a group of friends confronting the same dilemma sat debating, Lee's 20-year-old cousin was shoe through the neck in a gang fight down the hill in Dixwell.

Lee .accompanied his aunt to the morgue to identify the body, and the event redirected the course of his life for good. He returned to YDS determined that his third year would be his lase. "I realized I couldn't sic up there and study all that theory if it didn't make any difference down below. I needed to do something practical, to help build a bridge between the Valley

by MoJo's father, whom they helped with clean-up chores for pocket money. Lee rold and the Hill." After graduating, Lee pascored numerous churches in New Jersey his friend then that he wanted to be a minand one in Meriden, Connecticut, before ister when he grew up, though he couldn't say why. Later, as they sat at MoJo's father's being transferred to Varick in 1998. Not long afterward, with labor negotiations bar sipping soda, MoJo called out with a laugh, "Hey Dad, you know what David looming on the horizon, the Yale administration began talking openly about wants to be when he grows up? A preacher!" "Nah, you don't want to be a preacher," strengthening the partnership between Yale and New Haven. To Lee, the time seemed Mr. Johnson replied-a sentence that was right to build a bridge. punctuated by the crash of a giant Budweiser mirror that had suddenly fallen from the wall behind him. "Son," Johnson 'i"HE OPPORTUNITY PRESENTED ITSELF I when Levin started talking about partsaid to Lee as he surveyed the damage, "you be whatever you want." "It scared the daynership, partnership, partnership," Lee says of Yale President Richard Levin's positive lights out of me," Lee says. That fear led rhetoric that led to his decision to run for him to keep his plans to himself. the board. "So I asked myself.. are they seriIn 1989, Lee finally enrolled in semious about partnership? I never fathomed nary at the Yale Divinity School. At 25, he

THE NEW JouRNAL

that it would cause the type of sensation that it did. I never dreamt that President Levin or the others would take it as an insult."

The idea for Lee's candidacy originated among local pastors active in the Connecticut Center for a New Economy (ccNE), a local union-affiliated research and advocacy group. Lee is vice president of its governing board. The Reverend Lillian Daniel, the CCNE board's president and a YDS classmate of Lee, claims that the idea was never centered around Lee or the organization specifically. "His candidacy came up out of friendships among the local clergy, not through our organization," she explains. The idea was that one of them ought to run for a corporation seat, testing Yale's commitment to partnership with the community. Lee sums up the reasoning: "When you only have these wealthy corporate interests on the board and never have input from the level of the constituency you're in a partnership with, there's no room for that constituency's self determination.

And that's essential for you to be received and respected in a host community where most people still live in poverty." Lee was chosen to run as the voice of that muted constituency. The Corporation controls Yale's endowmentthe $11 billion that Lee would like to see distributed in part back to the community.

A seat on the Corporation would hardly give him free access to the money. Lee knows that his would be only one of 18 votes in the board's decisions-not exactly a mandate for sweeping change.

Nevertheless, he contends, having that community input could bring some issues to light that others might never have considered.

Using the rarely-invoked process of nomination by petition, Lee got his name on the ballot for the 2002 election of an alumni fellow for the Corporation with over 5,ooo alumni signatures supporting his run. Most years, candidates for the vacant alumni seat are nominated by a selection committee chosen by the Association of Yale Alumni (AYA). This unorthodox method was not what generated the controversy, however. A number of alumni had used it in the past, including Wtlliam H orowitz, who became. the Board's first Jewish member in 1969. What

rankled some prominent alumni and current members of the Corporation were Lee's financial ties to Yale's labor unions, who had paid for his S30,ooo petitiondrive mailing. Lee jumps to justify accepting the donation: "How does a no-name pastor get a name out to all these alumni?" he asks in his own defense. ''I'm the pastor of a black congregation in New Haven, and I'm not personally wealthy, and so I had to go to those who would believe in this idea.

The unions felt, hey, let's try this. And it was no strings attached."

Others disagreed, seeing an aggressive adversary in Lee rather than a potential partner. Kurt L. Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore and the Corporation's first Mrican-Arnerican Senior Fellow labeled

staid process with his overt campaigning and failing to meet the high standards of achievement normally required for entry into the august governing board. In a rare public statement about the election, Levin said in an apparent dig at the young Dixwell preacher that "with an alumni body of I20,ooo, we should look for candidates who are extremely accomplished in their fields."

As the months wore on, the campaign that was ostensibly not about David Lee became more and more overtly personal.

The AYA launched a website to inform alumni about the two candidates. Printed side by side with comments from Lin about her enthusiasm to serve the Yale community were comments from Lee promising to "preserve the best interests of Yale University" as well as more adversarial soundbites. "Levin is probably laughing now, but he won't be laughing when we get there," read one.

Another declared that "Yale has met its Waterloo in the Federation of Hospital and University Employees.

It is indeed our time!" In May, an article in the Washington Post summed up the general feel of the campaign as it wound to a close: "There are those at Yale University who firmly believe that the Rev. W David Lee is a dangerous man .... privately, they belittle him as ambitious yet insignificant, a nobody and a spoiler, a puppet of dark forces bent on soiling their shining city on a hill."

By the time the ballots were finally cast, the AYA had spent $65,000 on mailings sent to clear ue the confusion of any Yale alumni who may have assumed that Lee had the group's endorsement. Chauncey's committee had spent $8o,ooo in a direct effort to defeat him. Lee's side, by contrast, had spent only $55,000, $30,ooo of which went towards the initial mailing. Despite the disproportionate spending, many thought David still had a good chance of slaying Goliath. The controversy had generated far more free publicity than he ever could have dreamed of receiving, and his campaign themes were thought likely to strike a sympathetic chord with alumni who had graduated in the last two decades, when New Haven's fortunes were ac their , lowest. Goliath, however, withstood the challenge: David Lee lose by a vote of 8,32.4 to 45,575.

To hear lee talk, vou'd think he likes starunu with one mark in the loss column.

NOVEMBER 2002

Lee's bid "a mirage campaign, initiated by national labor organizations intent on gaining ground on the campuses of private universities." University spokesman Helaine Klasky called Lee's tactics "unsavory," saying, "If you're collecting so much money from the unions, you must be promising these people something."

As the controversy brewed, the official AYA selection committee nominated only one candidate-architect Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington-to oppose Lee in a not-so-veiled effort at stacking the deck. (Normally a slate of three to five candidates is proposed.) An alumni committee led by former University Secretary Henry "Sam" Chauncey began to publicly protest the "special interest campaign," taking on Lee's supporters in a battle played out in special advertising sections . of the Yale Alumni Magazine and on the opinion page of the Yale Daily News. The campaign focused primarily on Lee rather than Lin, who stayed above the fray and did not talk to the press. Lee's supporters challenged the University to live up to its rhetoric. His detractors accused him of "corrupting" the

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When the final count carne in, Lee was already spinning his loss as a win on principle. He told his supporters, "Don't let anyone tell you we lost. We have won a big victory....We educated the world that there needs to be a better relationship between town and gown." Lee acknowledges that the victory carne at something of a personal cost, however. "To say I was nothing but a union flunky, I thought, wow, that was low," he says of the insinuation that he is beholden to union interests. "That was an attack on my integriry. But anyone will tell you that because of this pulpit, I have independence." At times his stances have alienated certain supporters: New Haven :Mayor John DeStefano's outspoken support for Lee's candidacy cooled as Lee's public criticism of ciry schools grew more intense.

Communiry reaction to the campaign and its outcome was largely positive, with support for Lee growing as events unfolded. Lee says his own congregation was fully in favor of the· idea and outraged by Yale's conduct during the campaign. When asked about how the election had turned out, one church member said bluntly, "It was a crime. He was robb~d." Others, however, saw the effort as flawed from the start, going so far ·as to suggest that Lee had sold out. Former New Haven alderman Anthony B. Dawson, a prominent black leader in the communiry, asked in a letter to the New Haven Register, "Why would Lee want to join Yale's stuffy board anyway?

Where was his sense of black pride? ... As I see it, the day of high-profile black preachers. in public matters must come to an end." In the end, though, Lee's conduct under fire seems to have had a greater impact on his reputation than any of the attacks directed against him. "Yale made it seem like the barbarians were storming the gates. They besmirched his character in an unfair way," says Daniel. "I think his standing went up in the communiry not because of Yale's tactics but because of the way he handled losing and being personally attacked. People really admired that the day after the election, he was still out there doing the work he had always done."

I

EE's THIRD SERMON of the day is still Lfocused on hopelessness. He has been invited as a guest preacher to the Mount Carmel Pentecostal Church on State Street, a storefront church that shares .a ciry block

THE NEW JouRNAL

with one other church, three abandoned buildings, a deli, and two pawnshops. The scripture lesson is from Exodus 14:13-14, when the Israelites see themselves trapped between the Red Sea and the rising tide of Pharaoh's advancing army: And Moses said unto the people, Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will show you today: for the Egyptians whom ye have seen today, ye shall see them again no more forever. The Lord shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace.

Lee sees in the passage a justification for undying hope. "The Israelites," he explains, "got so focused on the enemy, they forgot the power of God." Capitalizing on their experience, Lee offers the congregation two rules to live by when the odds seem stacked against them: "One, know your enemies but keep your eyes on the Lord. Two, remember that if God has got you in there, God will get you out." Lee knows his enemies, and the congregation no doubt also knows to whom he is referring: At a September revival meeting for Yale's unions sponsored by the Greater New Haven Interfaith Ministerial Alliance, a clergy group Lee founded this summer in the wake of his defeat, Lee explicitly referred to Richard Levin as "the Pharaoh."

As he finishes his sermon in a frenzy of sweat and shouts and gesticulations, the church ushers bring him towels, one of which he leaves draped around his neck as he leaves the pulpit, looking more like a prizefighter-robed, straight-backed, and soaking-than a preacher. "Now remember," Mount Carmel's pastor instructs the congregation, "Don't you all ever dare throw in the towel."

There's strategy as well as consolation in Lee's sermon. The struggles members of his congregation face in the dilapidated Dixwell jungle call to mind another, more famous, Rumble in the Jungle: the heavyweight tide bout fought between Muhammad AJi and George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974. Just as people today think of Lee's chances of ever gaining a seat on the Corporation, everyone then thought the underdog, AJi, was sure to lose; the odds were set officially at 4-1 that

NOVEMBER 2.002

Foreman, the defending champ who outweighed Ali at fight time, would hold off the challenge. With different advice coming at him from all sides, AJi entered the ring and pursued a strategy that no one expected, largely because it seemed suicidal: As the bell rung round after round, Ali dodged and danced a bit, then found the ropes, where, like Moses and the Israelites, he simply stood still, asking again and again, "Is that all you got?" as Foreman pummeled him with blow after blow to his ribs, kidneys, and head. After eight rounds of thrashing the challenger with everything he had (even as the unrelenting crowd still kept up the Lingala chant of "Ali boma ye!"-"Kill him Ali!"), a beleaguered Foreman found himself wearied to dizziness from the effort. Seeing him weak, AJi burst forth and felled the champion with a right-hand lead-perhaps the most elementary punch in boxing, one which any fighter worth his salt should be able to see and defend given the time it takes to throw it, and thus one which Foreman was never expecting. No one had thrown that punch at him in two years, in large part because you throw a right-hand lead at the heavyweight champion of the world only if you wish to insult him. Of course, from the moment that punch landed, Foreman was no longer the champ. Ali's radically unorthodox strategy of hanging on the ropes until the rime was right-he called it the rope-a-dope--is now taught to future MBAS: Take the beating until you can wear your opponent out, then strike hard when he's weak. Yale, however, seems to have failed to learn anything from Foreman.

David Lee insists that he is not fighting against the University he loves. But one can't help but hear something of a prizefighter's taunts in the declarations of his affection. Despite the bearing he took in his first bid for a seat at the Corporation table, Lee declares without being asked, "I'll do it all over again if I have to," suggesting that the bout is not yet over, only its fust round. "I'm thinking about it," he says when pressed on whether he: intends to run again, "but I hope it wouldn't have to be the way it was the fust rime."

And of course it won't be: Lee is now a big name thanks largely to the attention Yale drew to his cause, and his community support is growing by the day. He was painted as a powerful villain, and the first

aspect of the image seems to have stuck; Lee, who is 38, is only in his fifth year as Varick's pastor, but already the community and his fellow clergymen look to him as a leader. He is a common presence not only at Varick but at churches around the city.

He is seen as an advocate capable of making the community's interest heard and confident enough nor to back down. "He stimulated a lor of community leaders," said James West, co-chair ofVarick's Board ofTrustees. "He's not deterred in his mindset to be a true leader. He's not going to let anyone back him down."

"It shouldn't be a battle," Lee says of his continuing effort to forge an equal partnership between the city and the University. "It should be about welcoming a new perspective. That should be appreciated, not seen as a problem." Lee knows that he is seen as a problem, however, and that though he may be reluctant to wage war, it is clear that he will if necessary. One way or another, Lee is confident that his new perspective will be incorporated into the University's vision: "I think we could avoid a battle if we're serious about partnership. But if we're not serious about partnership, we may have to force our way into that room."

Matth~ Underwood, a snzior in Davnzport Co/kg~. is managing ~ditor for TNJ

2.1

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N OVEMBER 2002

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ing war for control of Fair Haven's future. It is no coincidence that • ..~ .s:. .... • • •~ . •• the targets of the attacks were two of Fair Haven's veteran repre'Jr.:. • • • •• , sentatives on New Haven's Board of Aldermen, R."lul Avila and EVIL's NIGHT EARNED ITS NAME in Fair Haven this year. Near Kevin Diaz.

The torched barn belonged to Avila, whose house midnight on October 30, an empty barn on Wolcott Street went front of it; the vandalized garage was Diaz's. And just to stands in up in flames. A few blocks away, an abandoned home on James Street make dear that the political connection between the events was no met the same fate. Across the neighborhood at a house on Lombard coincidence, the still anonymous vandals apparently targeted the Street, a car slammed into the garage door, reversed, and sped away.

James Street house because it was owned by the Fair Haven The car too was later found consumed by flames. When the sun rose Development Corporation (FHOC), a nonprofit housing agency on HalJoween, both buildings and the car had burned to rubble; no with close ties to the aldermen, who both sit on its governing trace of the fires' origins could be found in the smoking remains. board.

The destruction was a bitter irony for Fair Haven, where a recent The history behind the fires is long and bitter and has.,split economic upswing has ushered in a spate of development venrures Fair Haven into two camps, one allied with Avila and Diaz and the that have begun to rejuvenate an area once regarded as New Haven's other closely tied to the powerful administration of Mayor John' immigrant slum. The fires themselves are likely the result of longDeStefano. Avila and Diaz have long used their positions to exerstanding conflict over what course this development should take and, cise control over the neighborhood's development. Carping that · more importantly, who gets to control it. During the last several years, neighborhood improvement should always originate within the · · the neighborhood's predominantly Latino residents have pushed back community, they demand that any outside group that wants to the drug dealers and gang members who used to rule the streets. work in Fair Haven defer to their authority and operate through Family-owned businesses and freshly renovated houses have cropped the network of businesses and nonprofit development agencies that · up on almost every block. On Grand Avenue, fJ Charco imports the they control. But lately, DeStefano and his allies have charged rl}at makings for its traditional tacos all tbe way from Mexico. A fresh fruit Avila and Diaz have gone too far in their backroom manipulation stand crops up every morning in Dollar IGng. Local busiand strong-arm politics. Last summer, DeStefano backed rival laying out enthusiastic ness owners, residents, and Democrat Johnny Martinez against Avila for state representative-plans for its revival. But while a slap ih the face for a veteran Democrat like Avila. When Martinez how best to achieve it often died in a car crash in October, DeStefano switched his support to The Devil's Night fires m9' "1111~1o.'IIIIOtJler of Avila's rivals, Juan Candelaria, to make sure that Avila not ,set the job. Candelaria, with the critical backing of the qffice, easily prevailed. '('mayor's office claimed the mantle of good governance '

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and clean policies against Avila. With plenty of community discon ~ little to do with outcomes at the polls. ·~ ·,.;. .· ·. ; .:~ tent to marshal to its purposes, City Hall made a convincing case.

But the hands of the city administration and its allies stopped look~ AFAEL RAMos HAS A DRAWER FULL PoLAROIDS to show how ing so clean in late October, when t:Wo weil~known supporters of disgusting the Fair Haven buildings that he visited as a build~ the mayor were arrested for absentee ballot fraud in the elections for ing code inspector used to be. For Ramos, these photos show how Democratic ward chairmanships last March. That race pitted far the neighborhood has come thanks to the harp work and grow~ Menen Osorio~Fuentes, a staunch Avila~Diaz backer and president ing influence of the Mayor, even at the expense .,f local leadership. of the board of the FHDC, against the sister of Angelo Reyes, a The photos show condemned houses with sagging roofs, teenage staunch DeStefano supporter and one of the men later arrested for boys brandishing their shotguns, mammoth piles of trash, a base~ tampering with the ballots. Reyes's green pick~up truck, which is ment spotted with feces. One shows an apartment with a bar across often blazed with DeStefano For Mayor signs in campaign seasons, the door. "That's a drug house," Ramos explained, sitting in his is a common sight on the streets of Fair Haven, where he is a sue~ office at the Livable City Initiative (LCI), an urban improvement cessfUJ private developer and energetic community activist. He has agency begun by DeStefano in 1996 and housed in City Hall. "They ·. made no secret of his opposition to Diaz and Avila's policies or to do that with bars on the door." .the PHDC. Most of the pictures were taken in 1998 or earlier. Code viola~ 0 -·es and Yale senior Michael Montafio were' :·. tions still abound, said Ramos, but things are not nearly so bad ust hours after • • .....,.

•J J arrested for tampering with absentee ballots, the properties went up .. these days. "Do we still have violence and derelict houses? Yes, but in flames. So far, police and fire officials have offered no specific•.': not to the same magnitude," he explained, flipping through the answers. But the Avila~Diaz camp was quick to insinuate a direct ,'~; photographs ruefully. He, of course, gives much of the credit to connection between the events. They charged that Reyes, who was~ Mayor DeStefano's administration. Avila and Diaz, in contrast, once convicted of selling cocaine on the same streets where he now~:' scorn outsiders and intimidate residents into submission-a power builds new homes, was behind the vandalism-retribution Fair:",' play that, according to Ramos, only isolates a community in great need of help. "They are not establishing relationships with the • Haven style. .

Were the fires the result of arson? If so, were the culprits local; community. They're not leading by example," he said. thugs seeking revenge for the arrest of Reyes and Montafio? Or' When City Hall began its push for a change of could the attacks have been a sham perpetrated by supporters of Avila and Diaz in order to gain political sympathy and collect insur~ . .. f ~ ' . . .... .... . ( .. . ance money for the FHDC, as some others allege? The ...

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political leadership in Fair Haven, Ramos was among those to answer the call. "We haven't done it until now. We have new grassroots leadership in Fair Haven who can partner with the city and non-profits.

The momentum is there and it feels good," he said.

But Ora Lee Dortshe points out exactly where the momentum stops: in front of her house on Chapel Street, where a repaved sidewalk abruptly ends. She is among residents who dispute Ramos's claim that the Mayor's leadership has delivered widespread benefit to Fair Haven.

Starting there, the pavement is still filled with weeds and gaping holes. She thinks she knows why: It is "because of my big mouth," she says. Dortshe loudly opposed the Mayor's River Street development plan and the opening of a new restaurant across from her house. And she makes no secret of where her political sympathies lie-with her ;tlderman and neighbor, Raul Avila.

On a drive around her n~ighborhood, Dortshe points out other sidewalks that have not been redone and houses abandoned to che onslaught of winter and age. These disparities, she believes, are an effort by DeStefano's allies to punish those who have continued to support Avila--or, as Dortshe would puc it, stand up for local sovereignty.

People from outside of Fair Haven, according to Dortshe, do not understand what the neighborhood needs.

Development projects originate in City Hall, among city employees who hail from outside the neighborhood. Dortshe repeatedly demanded promises that local contractors would be used in the River Street project, that minority businesses would be brought in and neighborhood residents employed. "People want to own their own homes they can be proud of. They want to do what other people do," she said, driving up Wolcott Street. "All of a sudden everyone's coming into Fair Haven. This one wants it, that one wants it. Suddenly everyone's talking about Fair Haven on the news. What are they talking about? Are they talking about those kids down there?"

she asked, gesturing to a group of kids playing Halloween pranks down the block.

What city hall is doing, she notes, is holding political grudges against her alderman Raul Avila and making sure he cannot accomplish anything on behalf of his constituents, preferring to install outside interests instead.

But increasingly Dorcshe feels the futility of her opposition, and resignation has begun to creep in where vitriol and persistence once earned her enemies. "After a poinc you just say the hell with it," she said.

"They're going to do it ... They're going to do whatever they want."

N

OWHERE HAS THE CLASH between the Avila-Diaz camp and City Hall been more vicious than at 152 Lloyd Street, home of the Fair Haven Development Corporation. The FHDC, under the guidance of Avila, Diaz, and their allies and with the financial support of City Hall, is supposed co work on increasing home ownership in the neighborhood.

Recently, it completed the refurbishment of a one-family home down the street, at 182 Lloyd Sueec, with the help of a city grant. At the request of its future occupants, its kitchen was painted bright yellow.. But no one lives here yet. Standing on the living room's refurbished wood floor, FHDC executive director John Welter decried the political infighting, between Fair Haven's aldermen and City Hall agencies like LCI, that hinders the agency's work.

"The people who lose are the people who could live in a house like this and don't," he said.

According to Let's paper trail, though, there is no habitable house at 182 Lloyd Street- che FHDC, LCI claimed, never actually refurbished the sice, even though it was one of the few real projects they had undertaken in six years of operation. Welter was livid because a day before, a notice of "failure to commence construction" had been slapped on the FHDC by LCI. It was, curiously, signed by the acting director of the city's Livable Ciry Initiative; Andrew

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Rizzo--just like the occupancy agreement that had recently declared the house habitable. "This is pure harassment," said Welter angrily. "The ciry is trying to starve us to death."

Just about everyone else in New Haven politics feels that the PHDC is starving itself. The agency is currently under investigation for misuse of grant money it received from LCI. "It all stems from the fact that over a six-year period the ciry gave them money and they built one house," said Rizzo, who later said the notice for failure to commence construction notice at 182 Lloyd Street was a misprint. But his criticism still stands: Total grant money allocated to the FHDC has exceeded s6oo,ooo since its establishment in 1994· One of the houses the corporation rehabilitated was sold to the daughter of Fuentes, the president of the FHoc's board and a close ally of Diaz and Avila. A second house--the one torched in the early hours of October 31-was donated by another of Fuentes's daughters with a $4645 taX obligation that the corporation agreed to take on.

The FHDC, with good reason, is a frequent target of attack by Avila and Diaz's detractors. The leader of one rival nonprofit explained its continued existence in the face of gross ineptitude: "The only way anything could come into Fair Haven was if the Fair Haven Development Corporation got a piece of the action and some of the money." In other words, critics charge that Avila, Diaz, and their allies hold the city hostage in order to maintain control over the course of development.

When people try to bypass them, Diaz and Avila block funding, deny management team support, and delay Board of Aldermen votes on new proposals. Avila and Diaz argue that they promote the PHDC because home ownership is better for Fair Haven than the increased rental capacicy promised by rival housing agencies.

Welter admits that the PHDC failed to produce during its early years, but points at its successful completion of three houses in the last year for proof of a rejuvenated capacity. "The city has never been properly supponive of this organization," he said.

"At its core this is a political struggle. Raul has no formal decision-making power with respect to this organization. But certain members of the mayor's staff have told us

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that in their view this organization is Raul Avila.... They insist on viewing us as identical to their political .opponents. Because they want to oppose and destruct their political opponents, they are doing the same to us."

The FHDC relies on the city for the bulk of its funding, as well as for access to properties on which taxpayers have foreclosed. While its investigation is on going, LCI will not act on FHDC applications for property or funding. ''At this point, I can't see giving them anymore money," said Rizzo.

B

ecause aldermanic elections are often decided by just a few hundred voters, neighborhood political battles are invariably dose-fought, with neighbor pitted against neighbor and personal jabs circulated quickly through the community. Fair Haven is no exception: Avila and Diaz's supporters accuse their opponents of betraying the Puerto Rican community to an ItalianAmerican mayor and his henchmen. The aldermen's detractors, meanwhile, have spread rumors that the two men threaten to pull Section 8 housing subsidies from voters who do not support them. What is clear is that leaders on both sides of the political divide have tried to harness and redirect the passions that inspire political disenchantment in many Fair Havenites.

"There's a lot of uncertainty in people's lives and that translates into fear," explained Duffy Acevedo, Republican challenger for the 95TH district state senate seat and a past aldermanic opponent of Avila's. "They're dependent on government completely. For what purpose would they want to go out and take a chance at pissing someone off?"

The alleged ballot fraud in the last ward co-chair elections show just how vulnerable small-scale city elections are to illicit dealing. After the co-chair election, Avila and the candidates he supported, Menen Osorio-Fuentes and Elba Franklin, brought in affidavits signed by more than half a dozen voters who said they had not signed their own ballots. When the ballots were checked, the charges of tampering

appeared justified. "We are no handwriting experts," Town Clerk Sally Brown recalled later, "but a blind person could see they were different signatures." The office passed the case along to the State Election and Enforcement Commission (SEBC).

Around the same time, said SEEC Executive Director Jeff Garfield, the office received a complaint &om the United States Postal Service that "individuals were attempting to intercept absentee ballots." The SEEC launched an investigation last March in conjunction with the Chief State's Attorney Office and the Postal Service--yielding charges against DeStefano supporters Reyes and Montafio.

The ballot fraud and fires, regardless of whether or not they are actually pinned

Spanish-language weekly La WJz Hispana ran photos of the two men along with Menen Osorio-Fuentes, chair of the board of the FHDC and Avila's Wolcott Street neighbor, over the caption "La Trilog.(a del Mal"-or, "The Axis of Evil." "They are not the Taliban," the article conceded, "But their type of political action comes too close to fundamentalism."

The most important criticism, however, comes in the form of a question to Fair Haven residents: When was the last time you saw your alderman? "Raul had an opportunity to really change the neighborhood because he's Hispanic, because people believed what he said," said Angelo Reyes one afternoon, before his arrest. "They didn't provide. They did what they wanted."

Magda Natal, who ran against Osorio-Fuentes in the ward cochair elections last March, sees Avila's domination of her ¡ neighborhood waning. "I think a lot of people are starting to wake up to what he's done and what he hasn't done," she said.

Opponents say that Avila and Diaz are ~ but invisible except at election time. Their absence, detractors claim, is indicative of their group's insular nature and preoccupation with maintaining power, which translates into limiting access to positions of leadership and curtailing the flow of information into the community. But there is a problem with this approach. "Ultimately information cannot be controlled," said management team co-chair Lee Cruz. And ultimately, word of other strong-arm tactics gets out too. "They forget that for every one person you intimidate that's six people who are going to know about it-and that's exactly what happened," said Ramos.

Certainly, the Devil's Night attacks set rumors flying immediately. One political opponent said it would be impossible to identifY suspects by tracking Avila and Diaz's enemies because "half the town" fits that description. The aldermen's supporters are quick to point out that Reyes has served time in jail for a drug-dealing conviction, and they claim that he maintains ties with local street thugs.

Supporters of the aldermen claim that there are indeed signs of neglect-the neglect of City Hall and its loyalists. Mary

"This is Fair Haven , not a banana republic. Raul is not the ,big mob boss he thinks he is."

28

on the Mayor's supporters, are only the latest clash in a convoluted and contentious history. It has been a couple of years since critics began blaming Avila and Diaz for Fair Haven's stunted development. The accusations are manifold: Avila and Diaz have used their positions on city committees and the management team to block city funding for any organization they do not control. They threaten and intimidate Fair Haven residents who oppose them.

They work on behalf of a narrow constituency of family and friends whom they reward with political favors and promises of work and new houses. They use ethnocentric politics to demand allegiance &om the Puerto Rican community. The evidence, say the aldermen's detractors, is all around: in the blighted houses that could be refurbished homes, the drug deals still ¡ taking place on the corner, the streets filled with holes, the throngs of kids loitering on the sidewalk for want of any safe place to spend the afternoon. Last spring, the

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Desmond, who ran scare senator Martin Looney's mayoral campaign against Mayor DeStefano in Fair Haven last fall, found veins of resentment towards City Hall ran deeper than Avila and Diaz's complaints: "A lot of people felt disenfranchised by the mayor's administration just because of the neglect. You had a core group of people who live here knocking on people's doors eight to ten hours a day and asking, when was the last time you saw a sidewalk go in?"

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Avila and Diaz have clashed with other board members over the allocation of Community Development Block Grant money. In 2000, Avila, Diaz and Fair Haven's Ward-14 Alderman Robin Kroogman blocked a grant to a Fair Haven Housing Initiative project supported by City Hall, instead securing another grant for their own agency, the FHDC. The battle lines were drawn again last year, when the Mutual Housing Corporation applied to do a development project at a site on Ferry Street. Avila twice delayed action on the proposals.

When the issue came to a vote last May, Avila clashed angrily with Kroogman, leading her to try to have him ejected from the chambers. He has since sued her over the incident-a first in aldermanic history, according to board president Jorge Perez.

Avila's actions at the May ninth meeting were the primary motivation behind 18 aldermen's July request for an investigation into his conduct.

Avila and Diaz further angered City H all by voting against DeStefano's most recent budget, his first not to pass the aldermanic board with unanimous approval. Meanwhile, all three Fair Haven aldermen supported state representative Martin Looney in his primary campaign against the Mayor last fall. The Mayor's office in turn got behind Avila and Diaz's opponents in the last aldermanic race, and supported candidates running against their allies for control of the ward co-chairs and the management team. The 95TH district race provided an ideal opportunity to crush Avila and install a mayoral ally from across town and lay the groundwork for unseating Avila in the next aldermanic election.

But regardless of which side has dirtier hands, Avila and Diaz have sacrificed their capacity for effective leadership by becomWICE IN THE LAST TWO YEARS,

NOVEMBER 2002

WAITING TO BE KNOWN. -Carl Sagan

Gifts for the holidays & Everyday 1209 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT (between Park and Howe) Open Monday - Saturday I Iam-7pm Free parking in rear

203-787-4496

s t Q

c

y

.... a 29

ing so adversarial towards City Hall.

Community leaders who have worked with the aldermen say that a productive dialogue is difficult, if not impossible, in the face of their uncompromising opposition to integration into citywide deVelopment plans.

T

HE GRAND AvENUE VENDoR's Association (GAvA) is a prime example of the need for such a dialogue between City Hall and local leadership. At their last meeting, some of CAVA's 54 members expressed frustration with the drug dealers loitering on the corner of Poplar and Grand. As a result, co-founder Norma Franceschi set up a meeting with the chief of police. Franceschi says GAVA often gives business owners leverage against negligent landlords by enlisting LCI on their behalf.

The association's success in improving economic conditions on Grand Avenue is helping to attract businesses to Fair Haven, underscoring the benefits that can come from a working relationship with City Hall. Avila and Diaz say they agree that cooperation is important-but they want it on their own terms, a condition that GAVA clearly violates. Their bargaining position, unfortunately, is not too strong. As Desmond described the situation: "This is Fair Haven, not a banana republic. Raul is not the big mob boss he thinks he is."

The divisiveness of the insiders-only rhetoric used by some of Avila and Diaz's supporters was on display at the town council meeting called to elect Martinez's successor. Despite the overwhelming support for Candelaria indicated three days earlier in a straw poll convened by former 95TH District Representative Andrea Jackson-Brooks, Avila's supporters sharply rebuked those voting for the mayor's candidate. "Someone said you guys have to do what I say," Fuentes told the group. "This has to do with a vendetta by a certain elected official. Everyone should stand for themselves."

The next night, Jackson-Brooks shook her head at the show of acrimony. "They basically called everyone there a puppet," she said. "You don't make friends and influence people by calling them names." Bret Bissell, executive director of the Fair Haven Housing Initiative, says he and other developers quickly tired of playing Avila and Diaz's games. Their philosophy on nonprofit funding for Fair Haven is clear, he

30

said: "They would rather have it not come than not be in control of it."

Yet for all the talk of a spontaneous wave of community opposition to a corrupt and ineffectual leadership, the role of the mayor's office in catalyzing opposition is difficult to ignore. "The vote did not beat Raul. The machine beat Raul," Avila's Republican challenger Acevedo said before the election. "They chose to isolate Raul not because he's doing a bad job but because he won't work with them."

Isolation in city politics, where every proposal for funding or a new foundation has to go through a dozen layers of bureaucracy, is akin to political impotence. "If he is ineffective, why? Because the city is shutting him off," said Ward 14 co-chair Nancy Pascale, who was one of only five votes in support of Avila for the 95TH district nomination. "Why do I have to be a puppet to get what I want for my neighborhood?

That's not right."

I

N THEIR OWN DEFENSE, Avila and Diaz justify. their opposition to the mayor's development initiatives in the last four years as the result of a difference in philosophy, rather than mere obstructionism.

They claim that the mayor's proposals were drafted without the input of local officials and without the necessary understanding . of Fair Haven's needs. As the mayor's office demands stricter allegiance in exchange for its support, explained Diaz, aldermen have begun to forsake the long-standing tradition of deferring to the local politician on issues affecting his or her ward. Avila, Diaz and, until her recent change of political heart, Kroogman, have fiercely defended their turf.

"I support government spending that fosters self-sufficiency and allows people to build wealth within their own communities," Avila said in an email shortly before Election Day. "I have used my influence to negotiate better outcomes on those projects that do not fit that definition." A big part of the problem is that some Fair Haven residents, like Ora Lee Dorrshe, are deeply suspicious of outside efforts to develop their community. They see outside nonprofit organizations and Yale alumni as flyby-night reformers, interested in using Fair Haven as a guinea pig for their social development projects without truly understanding the community's complex social and

economic dynamics. "If you are the director of an agency, at 5 o'clock you get in your car and go back to your nice suburb.

We're the ones here hearing the gunshots and seeing the traffic and the overcrowding," said Diaz. It is easy to direct this distrust towards City Hall, especially given that three of the top officials in the mayor's current administration-Julio Gonzalez, Robert Smuts, and Henry Fernandez-are young Yale graduates.

C

ERTAINLY, IT IS NOT HARD to perceive a double standard in City Hall's decisions about when to blow the whistle. New Haven doles out over $7 million in development money annually; with a finite pool of political players and plenty of red tape to obscure the mechanisms by which funding is allocated, scandal can be found in almost any corner. "It all depends who has the power and who they decide to attack," Diaz said. He points out that other housing development agencies have been found guilty of much more egregious mismanagement; key mayoral supporters such as Johnny Martinez have been rewarded with top positions in City-run agencies; and many of City Hall's ground forces have been composed of people with questionable backgrounds.

It is City Hall's superior manpower, access to funding, and sway over local media that make renegade politics so untenable. Without the support of the mayoral administration and the agencies beneath its umbrella, development is all but impossible. Instead of assigning blame for the logjam, however, Fair Havenites would do well to concentrate on the best way to break through it-before any more of their neighborhood goes up in flames.

Paige Austin, a freshman in Davenport Colkge, is on the!ta.lfo[TNJ.

TH1! NEW JouRNAL

â&#x20AC;˘

Pedalling Polit ICS )

By Billy Parish

I

HAVE BUTTERFUES IN MY STOMACH," Charlie Pillsbury tells us, smiling hopefully as he guides his bicycle into the street. In spite of his silver beard, khaki shorts, and bike h elmet, he speaks to the cluscer of reporters and carries himself in a way that reminds me of Gregory Peck playing Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird. The four of us accompanying Charlie on the ride finish stretching, eager to begin. Swinging our legs over the bicycle frames and settling into our toe clips, we merge with the main street traffic on our way down the Connecticut coast.

It is a perfect fall day. We bike by small pastures and crumbling stone walls. The leaves on the maples .and oak trees are just beginning to turn, and the shade they provide has a mottled, rosy warmth to it. We bike for miles without word or rest. Lulled by my enjoy-

NoVEMBER 2002

ment of the soft hills and scenery, I almost forget we are riding for another purpose. With 25 days until the election, Charlie Pillsbury is campaigning to win a seat in Congress. A victory would make him the most powerful Green Party politician in the nation, and as a candidate, Charlie has a unique appeal. He has worked for 30 years in New Haven, the largest city of the congressional district, as an attorney, an advocate for the homeless, and the director of a community mediation center. He can even claim some degree of national name recognition: His great grandfather founded the Pillsbury Company, and college roommate Gary Trudeau modeled Mike Doonesbury, the lead character of the Doon~sbury comic strip, on Charlie. And yet, there is something curious about this campaign: Every one of us riding with C harlie knows he has no chance of winning.

Even for a candidate who is unknown, inexperienced, and outspent, there is one last-ditch populist ploy that can turn the tide: the campaign tour. After all, well-run campaign tours have been responsible for some of the biggest electoral upsets in American history. In the 1948 presidential election, every poll, every journalist, and even Harry Truman's own wife predicted that Thomas Dewey would beat him by a landslide. After a 22,ooo-mile whistlestop campaign tour with hundreds of speeches from the back of his train, Truman eked out a victory. In 1992, a relatively unknown governor from Arkansas upset a war-hero president after a media-frenzied bus tour across the country.

In this tradition, Charlie is setting qut on a 5-day, 16o-mile listening tour through all 25 towns in the district on his royal blue Schwinn 'Traveler' Io-speed bicycle. Seemingly unaware of how perfectly the tour fits most people's stereotype of the hopelessly nai"ve Green, Charlie proudly calls this his "good, Green Party idea."

He and his campaign team have planned a number of press events and meetings with community leaders along the way. But in American politics, it isn't easy being Green: In the 18 years since the party was founded, no Green Party candidate has ever won a seat in Congress on the national or even state level. Moreover, the incumbent, Rosa DeLauro, is the second-highest-ranking Democratic woman in the House of Representatives. Seeking her 7TH term in office, DeLauro has raised more than six times the campaign money Charlie has. So why did Charlie agree to enter a political race he almost surely couldn't win? What ¡w as the purpose of this seemingly quixotic tour? I wondered if the Green Party had a prayer of fulfilling their promise to, "regenerate grassroots democracy in America." The only one to respond to posters that Charlie had put up at Yale, I committed to join the tour for all five days to see if I could answer these questions.

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..

A

T THE END OP OUR EXHAUSTING 40-

and meetings. The most important stop of the day is at the Pratt & Whitney aircraft manufacruring plane in North Haven. The old brick building is a single massive room with row upon row of humming ceiling lamps. Below, heavy machinery lies in scatcered piles, and mountains of metal cabinets, workbenches, and chairs are arranged in rough aisles. The plant closed a year ago, and today is the first of a two-day liquidation sale. Anything that isn't sold will be dumped in a landfill, the sale manager tells me.

Charlie is here to meet with Kate ¡ Greco, the widow of a Pratt & Whitney employee who died two years ago of glioblastoma multiform, an aggressive brain tumor that strikes fewer than three in xoo,ooo people each year. In March,

mile first day, dominated by a trip co a local high school, Charlie changes his clothes and has a quick bite to eat before going co "candidate's forum night" at Notre Dame High School. Although he knows it is more productive to spend his time with people old enough to vote, Charlie can't rum down an opportunity to talk co kids.

"When you hit your mid sos, you begin to realize your days are numbered. I wane co pass on the ethic of political engagement my parents taught me," he says. The dining hall of this all-boys Catholic school bas been converted into a small lecture space, and local candidates are giving short speeches and answering questions from the 75 or so students in the room. Richter Elser, the Republican candidate, has shown up, but DeLauro is absent. Charlie ,....------::: begins his talk with a question, "Who was the last third party candidate to win the presidency of the United Stares?" "Roosevelt!" one boys yells. "Washington," says another. "No, nobody ever did that," a third boy responds.

"Abraham Lincoln," C harlie says, "When he was elected, the Republican Parry was a new third parry, after the Democrats and the Whigs. You've got to stare somewhere, right?" This last thought is a source of comfort for Green politicians, who happily point our that Ralph Nader received almost ,_..,;;......_ ___.

3 million votes in the controversial 2000 the Connecticut Department of Public presidential election-over 2 million more Health confirmed 41 cases of the tumor in than he had received 4 years earlier.

P&W employees in Connecticut (19 in the North Haven plant alone). Ms. Greco claims the total count is now at So cases statewide, and she has started an advocacy group called Worked to Death for the famHE DRIZZLE THAT BEGAN on the afterilies of the victims and employees of P&W. noon of the first day has kept up for As reporters from four Connecticut newsthe whole night and continues into the papers crowd to listen in on Charlie and morning of the second. The sky is slate gray Ms. Greco's conversation, Charlie says, "It is and the streets are spotted with puddles. impressive to me that Ms. Greco has rurned The rain is forecast co continue throughout her private grief into a public service. She's the day. Our hostess for the first overnight, a hero." "Thank you,"' she says quiedy, a 90-year-old woman who used co baby-sic keeping her eyes fixed on the ground in AJ Gore in Tennessee, shakes her head as we front of her. One reporter asks Charlie, "Are busde around the house. 'Td wait until next you going co take any sore of stand on this week," she says, "the only message that will issue? Is there anything you can do as a cangee sent today is that it is cold and wee." didate?" He looks pained for an instant We leave anyway and have our busiest before tactfully ducking the question by day of the whole tour, full of press events explaining instead what he would do if

T

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elected.

One of the central claims of the Green Parry is that, by virtue of its independence from corporate sponsorship, its candidates are more inclined to tackle local problems and protect individuals. And yet, with a few minor exceptions like Michael Feinstein, the mayor of Santa Monica, California, Green politicians have been unable co get into important offices. So, while getting four reporters to cover this story is a start, as a Green who almost certainly won't win the election, Charlie is as powerless to help as anyone else.

O

VER BREAKFAST ON THE THIRD MORN-

ING, we discuss the different methods we each used to dry our shoes the night before. In my exhaustion, I had forgotten to do anything, and C harlie is a little worried about my feet.

They are a translucent pale color and puffy from the full day in waterlogged tennis shoes and are now unhappily stuffed in the same soaking sneakers. Minutes later, though, we are all suffering equally: It is steadily raining again. No press conferences or meetings are scheduled for the third day. Paul and Dave, Charlie's staffers, explain that many labor and community groups won't meet with Charlie because they need to remain loyal to DeLauro and the Democratic Party. So Charlie plans to make stops wherever he can fmd a group of potential voters, a task made much more difficult by the rain.

Our first stop is at a behemoth shopping center outside of Waterbury. We spend a few minutes waiting outside of the electric doors of a Sears store, but the few customers not enjoying their Saturday morning dry and at home seem co live outside the district, so we move on. Several miles later, we stop to use the restrooms in Roller Magic, a roller rink in downtown Waterbury. Charlie introduces himself co a group of parents standing by th~ edge of the rink. watching their kids skate. He discovers that they are from Watertown, not Waterbury, and are thus just outside of the 3RD district. Across the room, Dave is changing dollars into quarters to play air hockey. "Come on, Dave," Charlie shouts with an edge to his voice I haven't heard

before. "Let's stay focused on this campaign." For the first time, I understand that Charlie is still holding out hope that he can pull off a miracle. As the day wears on, Charlie begins to yell, "Vote Pillsbury for Congress!" to each person we pass. A few people turn their heads, confused. Others trudge through the rain, oblivious to the small bicycle caravan passing through.

I

that is impressive, but the persistence of the downpour that greets us for the third day in a row. Incredibly, it is still raining on the afternoon of the fourth day of the tour when Mark Kurber, a tall man in a plaid shirt and work pants riding a dirt bike, joins us as we pass through Ansonia. Mark hesitates a moment and asks, "Isn't DeLauro a pretry liberal Democrat?"

Charlie doesn't miss a beat in responding, "Well, liberal on issues like labor and the environment, but not on war or universal healthcare. She voted well on Bush's resolution, but hasn't committed to preventing a war against Iraq. We need to keep pushing her on that." But despite Charlie's pat answer, Mark's question cuts to the heart of anti-Green sentiment in the liberal ranksa charge closely related to its reputation as a "spoiler parry," especially after Ralph Nader tipped the election away from the Democrat Al Gore in several key states in the 2000 election. In this case, the minimal support for the Republican candidate means that there's almost no chance Charlie would play the same role. But the question stands: Wouldn't progressive voters have more success in trying to influence the DemocFatic parry from within rather than trying to challenge it from without at the risk of throwing elections altogether?

Recently, Charlie's supporters have been giving him credit for DeLauro's decision to voce against President Bush's Iraq war resolution. Charlie himself has pointed out several times to reporters along the tour that he has gotten DeLauro to debate twice already even though she had only debated twice before in twelve years of office. Forcing the Democrats to the political left and raising neglected issues are valid objectives for a liberal third party, but for many left-of-center voters, these benefits come at too high a cost.

T IS NOT SO MUCH THE INTENSITY

E

ARLY IN THE MORNING ON THE LAST

DAY, we meet in front of the Audubon Sociery's Research Center on Milford Point. The rising sun reflects gold and green off the water and the tall grasses of the protected salt marsh surrounding the building. After three days of relentless rain, the sky is clear, and the roads are dry. It is still cold, but we are so glad to see the sun that no one complains.

After lunch, several more supporters join us, and we are 15 strong as we walk our bikes across the New Haven Green. Large tents are clustered on one side, and people are stretched out in the sun. This makeshift commune, called Tent Ciry, has been housing between 40 and 110 homeless people since the overflow shelter was closed a month ago.

Charlie walks up to a group of men standing by the tents and asks them what he can do to help. "We need water," the man says, "and some warm clothes. It's been raining for three days straight and there's a bunch of us that have gotten cold."

Charlie finds one of the men in charge of the communiry and gives him $20 to get water. He confers with the rest of the bikers and returns, promising to bring blankets and warm clothes at the end of the day.

I notice that Charlie hasn't introduced himself to the men, much less given them the stock greeting he used with virtually everyone else on the tour. Doing practical, hands-on work to help these people, the communiry mediator in Charlie has taken over, submerging his political aspirations. I have not seen him so at ease since he met with the students on the first day of the tour.

As we pull into the empry parking lot of the campaign headquarters, we ride in a wide circle before coming to a stop.

Standing by our bikes, we look silently at each other for a few seconds, and then everyone begins to smile and laugh. We exchange long hugs, in which, if only for a moment, we forget that Charlie won't win--or at least realize that winning was never really the point.

TheNewJournal would like to thank Ariel Bowman Maeve Herbert Anya Kamenetz

Elizabeth Meriwether Ana Muiioz Casey Pitts

David Slifka John Swansburg Blake Wtlson

On election day, Delauro took 66% of the vote, Elser 28%, and Pillsbury 5%.

THANK

.,

You!

BiUy Parish is junior in Morse Colkge.

NoVEMBER 2002

33

A SErARA~ PEACE A

FEW WEEKS AGO, I watched from a distance as an eclectic group of New Haven residents bearing homemade signs and banners gathered on the courthouse steps to file a war crimes indictment.

T heir list of alleged war criminals included George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, and they were pressing for prosecution.

A greying, unassuming man clad in stained and faded jeans and an old denim jacket addressed the crowd through a megaphone: "We are resisting and showing our protest to the ones in power!"

Standing in rows on the courthouse steps, the participants clutched their ami-war banners in silence, scaring straight ahead solemnly an d purposefully. Someone distributed copies of the indictment, with a list of the country's most powerful officials at the top and the Connecticut Peace Coalition of New Haven's email address on the bottom. In unison the group read the entire indictment aloud. Then a few representatives stepped into the courthouse to present the document to Connecticut's Attorney General. "Now we'll see what they have to say," someone remarked smugly.

There was applause and a hesitant chorus of"yays."

"Sorry people," muttered a passerby stopping to glance up at the protesters. I frowned at him, but I didn't wholly disagree.

Neither did I correct a friend who referred to them as "those crazies." But at the same time, their stance against attacking Iraq mirrored my own. As the drumbeat for war had intensified over the past few weeks, I hadn't been able to shake the guilry feeling that students like myself had a role to play. Hasn't it traditionally been up to students to tile the scales to the left, to keep the government's hawkish tendencies in line? And if the protest movement was in fact my inherited duty, didn't I share some common ground with the protesters on the courthouse steps?

A few days later, I took one of the white armbands that symbolized my disapproval of war on Iraq. I dangled the frayed scrip of cloth from a strap on my backpack, carefully positioning it where my stance against the war would be visible-but not too visible.

A

T ONE OF THE COALITIONS TRI-WEEKLY STREET-cORNER vigils, Joan Cavanagh had taken up her usual post, solemnly distributing copies of the group's latest anti-war leaflet as fellow members

34

stood behind her with a banner. A loose tweed coat dwarfed her slender frame; a red knit beret partly hid her shoulder-length grey hair. There was something resolute about her silhouette, as she extended her arm every time someone walked by. At forry-eight, Cavanagh is no stranger to the anti-war movement. She m ade her debut as a protester when she wa; active in her high school, then she dropped out of college after one semester to join a collective that was working against the war. She didn't go back to school until she was 29. "I actually have the pride of saying I was in prison on my 21ST birthday," she told me. "Most of my friends were pretry cool with it. By that time they weren't surprised," she explained . " I had already been arrested six or seven times and had done jail time for it. My m other wasn't too happy; what can you say?"

About twelve people constitute what Cavanagh termed t he "core group," those who regularly com e to the weekly coalition m eetings. There are about 50 m em bers who attend Coalition events, and the group's email list h as about 300 names. In four years, they haven't missed a Sunday on the corner of Broadway, Park, and Elm silently protesting sanctions, and now war, on Iraq. In the face of New England winters, hateful accusations and-perhaps worst of all-passersby who don't even look up, what sustains such dogged resistance vigil aft:er vigil, week aft:er week? "I can't associate with the US government. I have to actively dissociate myself," Cavanagh cold me. "Silence is complicity," she continued, likening present-day protesters to Germans who resisted Nazi authority. "If everyone had capitulated at that time, what kind of hope do we have of the human race?" I winced. That's the kind of comparison that leaves a bitter aft:er-taste, that makes. eyes narrow at the thought that someone really had the nerve to say such a thing. It's the kind of analysis I'm quick to reject.

One-by-one, Cavanagh handed out leaflets to anybody who would take one. She had already given out 100 leaflets in half an hour, she told me proudly. She knows many passersby do in fact read the flyers, she told me, because she often receives responses to them via email. Others clearly don't. A few people walked briskly by without looking up. "No thanks. Iraq. Hmmm ... See you guys

THE NEW JouRNAL

later," said a man wallcing by. I wonder if those who refused the leaflet were wary of what didn't come from The New York Times, too wedded to the mainstream to ponder the possibility of their own indoctrination. Maybe like me, they've learned to parrot the opinions of those with d1e highest credentials and to second-guess the chorus from the margins that seems to culminate in a simple refrain: IfThe Government is behind it, it's corrupt, no questions asked.

But my faith in the system is instinctive, not intellectual.

Rationally, I realize that those doth banners are about individual issues more than subversion for its own sake; I believed one of the coalition's members, when he vouched that he doesn't "pick a side ahead of time," and I respected his and fellow protesters' willingness to challenge what they read. But my fear of being a dissenter must die hard, for I secretly hoped no one I knew had seen me starlding beside Cavanagh, holding a piece of the anti-war harmer.

I

and 14 people had shown up to protest on the corner of Broadway, Park and Elm. Cavanagh stood a few feet away, distributing flyers. Just across the street, a man dressed in an American flag costume and fiercely waving an enormous flag danced across his strip of sidewalk shouting against the cacophony of honking cars. "Saddam Hussein! He is a poacher! Let's kill him now!" he cried, addressing the anti-war protesters.

"And you support him! USA!" The anti-war protesters glanced up at him every once in a while, but didn't budge.

"It's a matter of increasing numbers," Joan said to me. "As the numbers increase, the impact increases." So the government really notices? "They hear it," she said. "They know it's out there." When it comes to protesting, numbers make a dual statement, directed both at the government and at the people. "I feel there's a lot of people [who) unfortunately need reassurance that they're not the only ones who are against what George Bush is plarming," said a Coalition member named Paula, a freelance writer and poet. She hopes to provide that reassucar1ce, she explained, by "starlding out in the street corner with the signs and slogans they have in their hearts but they're not ready to show." A lot of people thank her for what she's doing, she told me. "I say, 'why don't you join?' They say, 'well I'm glad you're doing it.'" I shook my head in disapproval, at the same time fully recognizing that she'd described me to a T. I resolved to change.

T WAS A SUNDAY AFTERNOON,

down as I shouted with the crowd. "This is what democracy looks like! That is what hypocrisy looks like!" we cried gleefully, pointing from ourselves to the White House beside us. It was a celebration of the First Amendment. As far as you looked, all you could see were protesters and their signs. For a few hours, I believed we were a force to be reckoned with; I believed in "the power o' th' people" and "what democracy looks like." We were living it. Maybe that's how the coalition members felt when they delivered the indictment to the State Attorney General and sat back to wait for the trial to begin. I wondered how I'd once mocked the cardboard signs of the Connecticut Peace Coalition and marveled that it had taken me so long to truly comprehend the power and the imperative of resistance. "The people! United! Will never be defeated!" we shouted rhythmically, and I believed it. It was my job to put that truth into action. As the numbers increase, the impact increases. And silence is complicity.

In the middle of the day, swept up in the anti-war fervor, I removed my white armband from its inconspicuous position on my backpack and asked a friend to tie it around my arm.

But the magic was fleeting, and shortly after my return, the torn piece of cloth was relegated to my desk drawer with a promise to retie it that I have yet to fulfill. In fact, the protest at the capitol already feels like a distant memory. A Yale student and Coalition member I befriended on the bus to DC asked me afterward if it I would attend more large-scale protests like it. I didn't have to pause much to answer in the affirmative, and I haven't changed my mind.

I guess I have no trouble protesting when thousands of people around me are doing it too.

Yesterday, I attended one of the Coalition's street-corner vigils for what might have been the last time. That day's banner read "No us Military in Iraq." I couldn't agree more wholeheartedly. And I don't think they're a bunch of"crazies." I respect their conviction of their own accountability in us foreign policy, their courage in challenging the mainstream, and their determination to display their resistarlce to the people and the government person by person, week after week. I considered volunteermg to spend a few mirlutes holding up a corner of their worn, cloth banner. But after hanging around for a few mirlutes, I decided against it and lefr.

1111

T

HERE'S SOMETHING EXHILARATING ABOUT CROWDS, especially when they number in the hundreds of thousands like the one in Washington, oc, a few weeks after my initial encounter with the Coalition. "There's no power like the power o' th' people 'cause the power o' th' people don't stop, say what?" I was jumping up and

NoVEMBER 2002

Erica Franklin is a sophomore in Jonathan Edwards College.

35

liJ~ T.Jll.UING CU~~

By jacob Blecher

The Claims ofCulture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era

by Seyla Benhabib (Princeton 2002) pp. 216.

N THE EARLY FALL OF 1989, three girls in traditional Muslim headscarves entered a small public school in northern France.

Innocuous as the garments may have been, the school's headmaster forbade the girls to enter their classrooms until they removed the scarves. When they refused, he banished them to the school's library, citing infringement of France's venerated code of laicit~ radical separation of church and state. What ensued was more than half a decade of histrionics and political. conflict. The "Affair of the Scarf," as it became known, implicated everyone from then-President Francois Mitterand to public intellectuals like Regis Debray to the justices of the country's high court. In question was whether the presence of religious clothing such as the scarves·poses a threat to liberal democratic principles.

Mainstream feminists said yes, the scarves are symbols of oppression; centristS and rightwingers said yes, they represent a threat tO France's deep-seated secular values; only a few leftists disagreed, arguing that the girls had willfully decided to wear the headgear.

But no clear solution emerged: In 1994, the Minister of Education declared that French studentS could wear discreet religious symbols (such as yarmulkes), but not headscarves, essentially ending the controversy exactly where it had started.

This bitter episode occupies just a few pages of Seyla Benhabib's latest book, The Claims ofCulture, but it neatly representS the central problem of the work: How can liberal democracy and multiculturalism co-exist?

How can we maintain democratic principles of equality and inclusion, such as those which undergird public schools, when certain individuals and groups, like the three Muslim girls, actively demand to be recognized as different and excluded on cultural grounds? That may sound like the kind of question that only a political philosopher would ask-Benhabib is the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at Yale-but in the age of the so-called "clash of civilizations," Benhabib could hardly have picked a better time tO turn that issue over in her mind. The Claims ofCulture is a sobering assessment of contemporary cultural struggles and an inspiring, though ultimately unsatisfying, attempt to resolve a problem that afllictS democracies today.

I

Benhabib's motivation for asking the fundamental question of the book springs from a close look at reality. We live in a globalized world, she observes, in which democratic governments increasingly come into conflict with groups that demand recognition of their different ways of life and values, often at the expense of stability and peace. Cultural groups and s;paratiscs movementS alike make demands of democracies that often undermine democratic values.

"Reflecting a social dynamic we have hardly begun to comprehend," she writes, "global integration is proceeding alongside sociocultural disintegration, the resurgence of various separatisms, and international terrorism." The "Affair of the Scarf" · is one symptom of this new global condition, as are such disparate movements as the Tibetan independence struggle, Native American land claims, Taliban fundamentalism, and calls for cultural recognition on college campuses. To dismiss such struggles over identity politics outright, as some cultural conservatives do, or as an invention of elites, as some Marxists do, is "bad sociology."

Theorists of democracy, Benhabib warns, must confront issues of cultural struggle or risk being irrelevant.

Benhabib is a devoted liberal democrat foremost, and she cherishes the belief that human beings are moral and political equals. She believes that all people can communicate with one another and come to a consensus if they devote enough effort to the cask In today's political climate, however, this is a gutsy claim. One need only look to a democratic country like Spain, where Basque separatistS are waging a violent, seemingly unresolvable campaign for secession, for an example in which dialogue seems hopeless. For precisely this reason, Benhabib thinks that democracies must be willing to negotiate alien customs, beliefs, and moral frameworks. Otherwise, they cannot be true to the definition of democracy as she sees it: a state in which "decisions affecting the well-being of a collectivity can be viewed as the outcome of a procedure of free and reasoned deliberation" and in ·which "the institutions that claim obligatory power do so because their deci-

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sions represent [a] standpoint equally in the interests of all." To deny that it is possible to overcome cultural struggles is to forsake a key democratic tenet: that communication and deliberation are possible among all members of a state.

Conveniently, Benhabib's radical conception of culture conforms to this '~deliberative model" of democracy. Most people tend to consider cultures distinct, stable wholes. For instance, when we talk about the Pequot Indians, we refer to them as a group of people that share certain core practices and beliefs. But Benhabib takes issue with this idea and stresses the instability and fluidity of culture, the moments when cultures are themselves riddled with contradiction. She argues that cultures should be conceived of as unfolding processes, not static wholes. One can think of Judaism, with its myriad denominations, as an example of a culture that is driven by internal divisions. Jews not only argue with one another about their own customs and beliefs; they also consider themselves members of other cultural communities. In more philosophical terms, Benhabib says that the inherent fluidity of culture depends on two crucial factors: the human abilities to reason critically and to tell stories about oneself. Because we can critically evaluate cultures and identify ourselves through complex "narratives," Benhabib thinks that cultures continuously undergo transformations.

Appeals to cultural relativism mean little to Benhabib. \Ylhcther we admit it or not, human beings share a basic standard of communication. The "clash of civilizations" is just a myth, and theories popular among postmodernists of "untranslatability" and "incommensurability" between certain cultures are "impatient."

How else, she asks, can we explain the fact that other cultures are even intelligible to us? As long as two people sit down and try to communicate long enough, she argues, they can eventually succeed in having a meaningful conversation. This sounds a bit like what Benhabib is herself paid to do, so couldn't this just be a self-righteous philosopher myopically privileging her own profession as the basic mode of social interaction? No, she counters, "all moral beings capable of sentience, speech, and action are potential moral conversation partners." This leads Benhabib to sum up this process of universal human communication in one deliciously iconic piece of jargon: "pluralistically enlightened ethical universalism on a global scale."

With this complicated argument under her belt, Benhabib undertakes the central task of the book: to formulate an ideal conception of democracy in which identity politics have a place but do not undermine the integrity of the whole. Her tone here is not so much that of a didactic philosopher, but of a conversation parmer.

She casually weaves her model out of comparisons and contrasts with more than half a dozen other contemporary theories of democracy. According to Benhabib, there are three necessary conditions for her brand of multicultural democracy to take root: "egalitarian reciprocity," "volunracy self-ascription," and "freedom of exit and association." The first means that minority groups must possess the same civil, political, and economic rights as the majority; the second refers to an individual's right to assign his or her own identity; and the third indicates a person's right to enter or leave a cultural group at will. On their own, these "normative conditions" seem like common sense--who today does not subscribe to these beliefs?-but Benhabib radicalizes them by establishing them as

NOVEMBER 2002

basic rights of a democratic system that permits "maximum cultural contestation within the public sphere." In other words, she constructs a model of democracy in which all citizens can freely and continuously debate any kind of question-be it cultural, political, or economic-in public. The idea is that if it is possible for everyone to voice critical concerns and to participate equally in political and moral conversations, questions of multiculturalism can be resolved in such a way that leaves democratic principles of inclusion intact and also respects an individual's right to cultural distinctiveness-sort of a college campus built on a national scale.

Under Benhabib's system of democracy, the "Affair of the Scarf" would not have been an instance of "clash of civili:z:ations," but an opportunity for critical debate and exploration of "otherness." Her system would have allowed the three girls to participate in a continuous, free, and open conversation about the scarves and negotiate a solution to the problem beneficial to all. They could have expressed their reasons for wearing the headscarves and thus legitimated their cultural practices through democratic means.

Benhabib admits that there may be some extreme cases where consensus may be so difficult to reach that secession may be warranted, but those exceptions would be few and far between. In theory, ethnic wars and terrorism would be things of the past.

Benhabib is aware of the rosiness of her model. But, she contends, "The fact that a normative model does not correspond to reality is no reason to dismiss it:" Ideal models of governmenr can, at the very least, help us to evaluate our current circumstances more effectively. Yet Benhabib is ultimately unclear about why she has bothered to construct an ideal democratic model at all. Is it to serve merely as a critical tool? Or can it actually pave the way for concrete socio-political change? Near the end of the book, she hints that her model exists neither for criticism nor for socio-political change, but rather for the sake of transforming assumptions. As she writes, "A great deal of contemporary debate on these [cultural] issues has been bogged down by false epistemological assumptions.

Once these assumptions are rejected, new modalities of pluralist cultural coexistence can be reimagined."

I cannot help but conclude, however, that Benhabib's visioncommonsensical as it may seem--demands nothing short of all-out revolution. Her model of democracy requires a levelling of power in society, and that can only be accomplished by actively taking power away from those who have it. Yet what corporate CEO would agree to rational deliberation with protesters who believe that private companies have too much control over politics? What headmaster would willingly agree that 15-year-old girls should have just as much a say in the management of a school as he does? Benhabib, unfortunately, supplies no guidelines for actually bringing about her vision, despite prescribing it as normative--the way things should be. Would she support a revolution? It is hard to say, though it seems unlikely considering that the most famous revolutions¡ of the past century resulted in the utter disregard of culture and the deaths of millions. In this hesitation lies the most frustrating turn of The Claims ofCulture. Afrer grounding so much of her careful, and often illuminating, argumentation in the concrete realities of the world, Benhabib seeks the douds just when we need her ' most.

jacob Blecher; a junior in Davenport college, is associate editor for TNJ.

37

HOLEY

By Tom Isler

W

E'RE LOOKING AT A CLASSIC MATCH-

up here, folks, and the stakes couldn't be higher. Think Liston-Ciay but a whole lot sweeter-and glazier. On November 19, the Milford, Connecticut, donut world will change forever. A brand new Krispy Kreme on Boston Pose Road is sec co square off against perennial favorite--and Boston Pose Road neighbor-Dunkin' Donuts. The grand opening is part of Kreme's master plan to usurp Dunkin's worldwide donut hegemony.

Kreme first established itself as a major player on the Connecticut donut scene with an October 8 opening in Newington.

But with the Milford arrival, Krispy Kreme looks co cake one more geographical seep coward invading Dunkin's birthplace of Quincy, Massachusetts. Donut aficionados will be carefully watching the Milford battle. Ac stake is the eventual control of the New England Markee. I talked to a handful of nervous employees from the cwo franchises, and though both sides cried co downplay the significance of November 19, ic's clear: They're hungry for victory.

Krispy Kreme may have Southern charm on ics side, but Dunkin' Donuts has tradition-not to mention home-field

advantage. Connecticut is Dunkin's territory. And Bill Rosenberg is the president.

Rosenberg, Dunkin's founder, waS already peddling his casry dough on Boston Pose Road before Krispy Kreme even thought about selling its first donut in New Orleans in 1937. Dunkin' has been a New Haven mainstay for generations. Some of Rosenberg's first employees were Yale students, and there are 54 Dunkin' Donuts within a ten mile radius of campus. The global numbers are even more daunting: Dunkin' Donuts has more than 3,500 shops in the United Scates, and over 5,000 worldwide. Krispy Kreme doesn't even have that many employees.

Kreme may be the scaciscical underdog, but remember, Dunkin' had a big head start. It wasn't until the mid 1980s that Kreme expanded out of the Southeast.

Their fresh go-gee-'em swagger gives them an outside shoe at an upset. And chen there's che secret recipe. In 1937, culinary entrepreneur Vernon Rudolph convinced a gullible French chef co give him the blueprints for his deliciously addictive yeastraised donut. Today, we call this donut the Hoc Original Glazed. Just how good is ic?

Krispy Kreme annually sells about the same

number of doughnuts as its rival--even though it has 4,750 fewer locations. The things just taste beccer.

In cerms of raw power, both franchises have a loc co offer. Dunkin' Donuts has fifty-two varieties of deep-fried goodness, along wich some of che best coffee in town.

The coca! mass of Donuts coffee served in a given year is equal to more chan one million African elephants. The kids ac Kreme may lack this imposing poundage, but they're a lot caller. In cwo minutes, Krispy Kreme carf produce a stack of donuts as high as the Empire State Building.

Dunkin' Donuts has nothing chat compares to the Hoc Original Glazed. But Krispy Kreme isn't overconfident. In face, a lingering question remains as co whether or not the Kreme can compete with the Munchkins-Dunkin's donut holes. The Donut's donuts are made by hand, and for ¡ every round donut produced, the excess middle is sold as a Munchkin. Kreme donuts, meanwhile, are made by pneumatic machines chat mold the dough into the perfect donut shape-sans surplus.

Munchkins have been a versatile weapon for Dunkin' Donuts in che past, and there's no reason to chink this will change. In face, Kreme seems to have a major hole in its game-plan unless it can address che Munchkin issue.

Expect to see a poised Krispy Kreme coming out of the gates on November 19.

Ac the Grand Opening, there will be magicians and clowns-and what more can you ask for? A free giveaway? The fuse customer in line gets a year's supply of donuts; the first hundred get a c-shirc. But if Krispy Kreme wants to be successful in the long run, they'll have co convert legions of loyal Dunkin's patrons.

Tuesday isn't just another day. It's a battle becween the old and the n~w, the established and untried, the champ and the contender. On February 25, 1964: a 22year-old Cassius Clay became boxing's youngest heavyweight champion when he creamed the venerable Sonny Liston. On November 19, history just might repeat itself Tom Isler is a junior in Branford College.

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39

Y&tlc lJniversity ~ordially invites all New l¡laven students in grades 2 - (, lo join the Ben (~ arson Yale University Bool<. (:lub in partn~'rship with the New l¡laven Free Public Library.

Yale University Trustee, Or. Ben Carson meets with members of his book dub on Yale University's Cross Campus.

Yale University Trustee, Yale College graduate, and world-renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson attributes his rise as an academic achiever to his love for books and reading. The Ben Carson Yale University Book Club has been created to promote reading as an individual and family activity.

The Ben Carson Yale University Book Club is open to all New Haven students in grades 2-6. All Book Club members will receive a copy of the Dr. Ben Carson book, "Gifted Hands" and by reading books will earn points towards prizes each month.

Club members will also be invited to special Ben Carson Yale University Book Club events on the Yale University campw;.

Parents can sign up students as individual members. Schools, churches and community organizations running youth programs can also participate and sign up students up as group members.

Individual and group registration forms can be picked up at all branches of the New Haven Free Public Library or at The New Haven Reads Community Book Bank at '-52 Park Street. Completed forms can be returned to any New Haven Public Library branch during the current open enrollment period that ends January 1, 2003.

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