Volume 35 - Issue 5

ewourna The magazine about Yale and New Haven

April 2003

PuBLISHER

Michatl Stibtl EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Kathryn Malizia MANAGING EDITORS

jacob Bkchtr, Clinton CarrolL DESIGNER

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Michatl Addison PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Paigt Atkimon

BRAZILIAN WAXING SPECIALISTS

AssoCIATE EDITORS

Fwra Lichtman, Victona Tntschtit SENIOR EDITOR Mat~~tHtrbm RESEARCH DIRECTOR

Paigt Austin WEB EDITOR

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AnaMufioz

Suff Erica Fnnkhn • Clurlon< Howard • Coco Krumm< In Oksman • Hd<n Philips • Pmick (''""'<>' Pim April Rabkin • Nadia Su<Sman • fJI<n Thompson

Mrmbm a1UI Dirrcum Emily Baulon • Joshw Civin • Pew 8. Cooper Tom Griggs • Danid Kurtz-PheJ.n • 8rools Kelley Jmnif<r PillS • Henry Schw.ab • Ehzab<th Sl<dg< David Slifka • Fr<d Sutb<igh • Thomas Srrong John Swansburg

Mt'tSlJTS

Riclwd 81"" • Jay Carney • RKhard Conniff Ruth Conniff • Elisha Coop<r • Julu Pr~ron

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2

THE NEW ]OUR:-IAL

Volume 35, Number 5

April2003

FEATURES

9

Beyond Good and Evil A power plant threatens to smother Fair Havens children, but who's to blame?

9

by Flora Lichtman

16

Manufacturing Dissent The unassuming man behind Yale's labor movement wants you to believe he's not the most powerful union kader in the country.

by Jacob Blecher

22

They Might Be Giants A student service organization gots national, but continues to struggk at home.

by Erica Franklin

••

STANDARDS 16

4

Points of Departure

14

Shots in the Dark: Through the Looki ng Glass by Lisa Rothman

24

Essay: Revolution for Sale by

28

The Critical Angle: Art After Auschwitz by Kathryn Malizia

30

Endnote: Snooper Trooper by Concha Mmdoza

Paig~ Austin

Tur N l'tr jon~u •• publ,.htd r.~ tlllln dunns th~~adcmic )Ul' by TK£ N..,.. )Ot:ll>OAL at Y.alc. loc.• PO. Boot J.4J1 Y.alc \.ar ''" ~.... Ha•cn. CT o61:o. Offace address: 19-41 Broadway. Phooc: (aoJ) 4J1• 1957. Email: tnj{!tya.k.tdu. AU conrnm copynghr 1001 by THE Nl'tr Jot:L'<AL at Yale. Inc. All Righa R<Kn-ed Rcproductoon «< rhcr on whole or an pan ,.;,hour •nrrm pcrmis.aon of the publi.bcr aDd tdotor 1ft chief u prohobo<td Whok thll m.apzonc u puhfuhtd by Yale Coli~ <rodmn. Y.alc Uni..,Yty is noc rc.poosoblc for ou content> ~en rhouurwl five hundrtd copa« of each u.uc an disuiburtd free ro mcmbcn of the Yale and l'cw Ha•..-n communoty. Subs..nptooru arc available ro ~~outside w area. Rarn: One yar. lll. Two yan. $)1 THr Nnr jot tl'U iJ prinrtd b) Turley Publiatioru. Palmer. WA: bool<ltttpon5 and billing JcrYocn arc pro>odtd by Colman Bookkttpon~ of !'cw Ha~. THE Nl'tr Jova." AL mcouraJ<S lcrr<n to the tduor and com menu on Yale and :>:«<W Haun t»U~. Wrirc ro Ednoriab. :HJl Yale <>rarion, New Haven, CT o6j10 Alll~ttn r..,, publoc.t(IOn mU>I ondudc address and $ignaturc. We .acne the nghr ro tdn all kucn ror publouuon.

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Out of Africa ON A WARM AuGuST EVENING IN 1999, when New Haven was quiet and slow, a pianist from Columbus, Ohio, rook his last request at Amalfi Grill and stepped outside for a break. He walked down Temple Street, past the Omni Hotel, around the shadowy Green, and made his way back for his second set. Except that just past the corner, something in a window of a newly opened restaurant caught his eye, a certain fabric hanging from a ceiling over faces that somehow looked familiar. He p~ered in, realized chat the fabric and the faces were Ethiopian, and opened the door to soft lights and lentils. With a smile, he walked up to the man who was standing by the menus, and greeted him in Amharic. Yonas Asfaw, the owner of the restaurant, Lalibella, was taken aback.

He had no idea chat this call man with a nice smile was none other than Charlie Sutton, the talented musician known in Ethiopia as the American who learned to play the one-stringed mesenge in Addis Ababa, the very man who first brought Ethiopian music to America nearly thirty-five years ago.

This chance meeting was a wondrous surprise for Sutton, a "flashback," as he puts ic, to his days as a Peace Corps volunteer in Addis Ababa in the 6os. In those days, Ethiopia and irs music were unknown co most Americans, a rime when Sutton was strumming his guitar in his dorm at Harvard, and everywhere the rhythm of the day was swinging and shifting. The young musician transferred out of Harvard for two years to study at the Berldee School of Music with Andres Segovia protege Sophocles Papas, all the while trying to decide what to do next. And then, the day after graduation, when the walls of academia come rumbling down for every college student:, the 23-year-old musician, with a guitar and accordion in hand, boarded a plane bound for a Peace Corps training center in Salt Lake City.

4

Sutton began to learn the Ethiopian , language of music even before he left Sale Lake City. He had been sitting out one evening, with his guitar and the Utah mountains for company, when his Amharic language teacher suddenly began to sing a popular Ethiopian harmony. It was the most haunci and beautiful melody

Charlie had ever heard. Months later, in a darkened auditorium in Haile Selaissie University, the school where he caught English, Sutton was again mesmerized by the unique beauty of Ethiopian melodies.

There before him on the stage, spinning these exotic melodies, was a band called Orchestra Erhiopia, made up of eleven musicians, each an expert at a particular traditional instrument. After the applause ended, Sutton approached one of the musicians, Gecamesay Abbebe, to ask if he would teach him to play the mesenge. And so, Sutton, a man who now carries an Ethiopian joke book in his right coat pocket, began co learn how to make music with one string.

Over the next five years, Sutton became a full-fledged member of Orchestra Ethiopia. Wearing traditional Ethiopian dress and carrying his second-hand mesenge, he and the band traveled throughout the Ethiopian provinces. They played together in Addis Ababa hotels, enterrained at festivals, and even performed for the Emperor Haile Selassie in his royal palace.

In some ways, you could say they helped keep traditional Ethiopian music alive. In 1969, when funding for the group ran short, Sutton came up with the idea of a tour beyond the provinces to a country that had never heard a one-stringed instrument.

And so that February, the Peace Corps volunteer who had set out with an accordion and little idea of what would happen next, returned to the United S"cares a master of the mesenge.

The group traveled to 20 cities, to Bronx college campuses, to town halls and high schools. And for three sweet minutes, Sutton and his band played their beautiful melodies on the Ed Sullivan Show for 40 million American viewers.

Sitting near the window of Lalibella, where he and his wife have made a habit of dining on Tuesday nights, Sutton remembers those days with a nostalgic smile. Sutton, who now calls Old Saybrook home, has three regular gigs now, and has just co-released a CD of piano jazz music. He still has the video of the Ed Sullivan show, and still sometimes plays the mesenge. And every Saturday night, Sutton sits at the upright piano at Lalibella and plays jazz standards, to an audience of diners that may not know that the man at the piano once played for an Emperor.

Comic Relief REcENTLY, I FOUND MYSELF SITTING in the multi-purpose room of the Madison Library, clenching a straw between my teeth. JoAnne Kacillas, founder of "Surfing the Stress Laughter Clubs," was leading one of her hour-long laughing sessions. My classmates were a group of old ladies who called themselves "The Empey Nesters," or "Nesters" for short. "Careful now, don't let your lips touch the straw," our reacher instructed us.

THE NEW joURNAL

Kacillas, a former corporate lawyer, runs just the local leg of a global laughter movement. In 1995, Dr. Madan Kataria founded the first laughter club in Mumbai, India to promote the physical and psychological health of Indians, whom he believed were suffering from laughter deficiency.

His classes, which allegedly reduce stress levels, benefit the immu ne system, and provide cardiovascular exercise, caught on quickly. Currently, there are over 800 Laughter Clubs worldwide, with new chapters opening in Budapest, Vietnam, and Iran in the near future. The laughter capital of America is Columbus, Ohio, where "Joyologist" Steve Wilson leads the "World Laughter Tour." Kacillas, who has a B.A. from Brown and a J.D. from Cornell, became a C.L.L. (Certified Laughter Leader) in 2002. Since th en, she has brought her "Surfing the Stress Laughter Clubs" to companies, h ospitals, and schools throughour Connecticut.

Though Wllson and Kataria are hardly household names, the laughter movement is receiving more and more publicity.

Over the past year, a handful of Connecticut newspapers, radio stations and even television programs have featured Kacillas. She has not, as of yet, led a laughter class at Yale, but perhaps she should.

Like other Yalies, I like to embrace my misery from time to time. I am a player, nay, master, of the "I-have-more-work-thanyou-and-haven't-slept-in-three-no-fourdays" contest. Bur Kacillas, who signs her emails "Together in Mirth, JoAnne," had encouraged me ro visit a class. As any C.L.L. will tell you, you don't have to be a natural giggler to benefit from a laughter club. Laughter Leaders don'r recommend telling jokes, arguing that few people find the same things funny. Instead of gags, they recommend a sequence of laughing exercises that can give the benefits of laughter ro anyone, even those of us with no sense of humor.

On my first Laughter C lub visit, I found myself the only non-Nester in the room, the youngesr student by about fifty

APRIL 2003

years. The women were very welcoming, and directed me to rhe rea rable w here muffins and cookies had been carefully arranged around an Easter centerpiece.

"Oh what a beautiful papier-mache rabbit," one lady raved to her friend, "Audrey, you're so ralenred." Afrer sampling a cookie, I took my seat in the communal c ircle with the mistress of papier-mache biting her straw to my left. Forcing your face inro the expression of a sm ile, we were informed, produces beta endorphins and gives your body the same benefits as a genuine grin. I let my endorphins go to work and surveyed the rest of the group. The Nester opposite me was a tiny woman wirh bright red hair, whose stick-like body and large head gave the general impression of a lollipop. Another woman held her straw with an easy smile. She was, I noted, rhe only one wearing a skirt, though she had surprisingly nice legs rhat she wasn't afraid to show off. My cheeks were getting tired.

T he smallest woman in rhe group, whose black orthopedics dangled several inches above rhe grey carpet, seemed to be feeling my pain. Clenching her straw dutifully, she raised her eyebrows in a desperate plea to our leader.

Finally, JoAnne instructed us to remove our srraws and proceeded to lead us through a sequence of exercises. "Laughing is like jogging for your insides," she informed us. First, we walked around the room, shook each other's hands, and laughed "just because." Then came the "bow and arrow exercise." As we pulled back our imaginary strings, we began with light, "ha ha ha's." Then, when we released the arrow (taking care, as our reacher had instructed us, not ro hir anyone), we raised our hands above our heads and emitted a peal of "hee bee bee's." "One minute of deep laughter is equal to ten minutes on a rowing machine," JoAnne reminded us.

We went on ro play the "Old Stony Face" game, in which one person tries to keep a straight face while her partner tries to make her laugh. Across the room, Legs raised her arms in a "praise be

hallelujah" sort of way, shaking her hands and asking the rhetorical quesrion "am-Ifunny-or-am-1-fwmy?" with bobbing eyebrows.

Next came the "lion laugh." With their eyes wide, fingers splayed, and tongues hanging loose, I could barely recognize les belles dames Lollipop and PapierMache. Luckily, we quickly moved on to rhe "remote control exercise," which involved walking through the group and clicking at each oth er. As Lollipop clicked at me, I found myself searching for new ways to laugh, th e "ho ho's," "hee bee's" and "ha ha's" seemed to be getting redundant. I am proud to say that in the course of the exercise I upgraded from three fuzzy channels to basic cable. I am particularly fond of my husky "huwaaah ha ha ha'' and ascending "hoaaeee hee hee hee."

As the class started to wind down, JoAnne spoke about the broader goals of laughter clubs. "The World Laughter Tour has as its mission inner peace and world peace." "Think globally, laugh locally," she advised, and gave us The Spirit ofLaughter; Sensible Living Guidelines.

On my way out, I asked some of my classmates wherher they liked the club. "It was fun to do once," one Nester replied, "but I wouldn't want to do it every week."

As for me, I've got a straw in m y reerh right now.

-Charlotte Howard

Brain Drain SrrnNG IN HIS NEUROSCIENCE LAB ar Yale, with its laser scanning microscopes, the small village where Nenad Sescan grew up seems very far away. His story began in Croatia where his intelligence helped him ger inro a top-notch high school in a neighboring rown . Despite his good grades, he. recalls char the reachers there made fun of his rural dialecr.

5

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Tatiana Jitkoff FROM

TheNewJournal The magazine about Yale and New Haven

6

While in high school, Sestan .:,.;as inspired by neuroscience, and decided to devote his life to research, enrolling in medical school in Zagreb, Croatia's capital.

He even knew which lab he wanted to work in. When the professor there rejected him, Sestan would not give up. He got himself hired as a "slave," as he puts it, to a postdoctoral student in the lab, washing piles of Erlenmeyer flasks in order to watch real science happen.

Ironically, luck came to Sestan in the form of the Yugoslavian civil war. The principal investigator of the lab became immersed in politics, the Serbian student who hired him fled, and Sestan himself escaped t~e draft, leaving him alone in the lab, to work with only occasional guidance.

When the war effort took away the lab's funding, Sestan looked frantically for other sources of money. He wrote to the Croatian community in the United States, asking its members to contribute to the war effort by supporting science. He got what he wanted. Equipped with new tools and chemicals, he spent all his waking hours in the lab. His diligence paid off. At the age of twenty-one, Sestan published his first paper.

With his new success, Sestan felt he had to go West. In Croatia, tenured academics srayed in their sears for decades, squeezing out young people, and there simply wasn't room for new scientists. The lack of resources also hindered research and students scrounged to find organs.

Pathologists were the only ones authorized to remove organs for examination. In order to have access to the human tissue needed to study neuroanatomy, "everyone wanted to have a pathologist as a friend," Sesran chuckles.

Today Sestan feels that he has achieved his dream at Yale: he has the resources and dynamic colleagues he always wanted.

Here, he says, "there is a constant flux of fresh young minds."

Sestan has devoted most of his life to the study of science, and continues to do so. His foil, so to speak, has always.been the medical professional-in Croatia, and in America. Back home, the village doctor enjoyed high social status. It was customary to honor--or, rather, to bribe-the doctor for better care. Villagers consulted him for advice on a range of topics, from winetasting to politics. Though academia was

THE NEW JouRNAL

also respectable, it did not convey the social currency of medicine, and many were seduced by that rival profession. In America, Sestan is also tempted by medicine because it promises financial prosperity. He describes the medical students he teaches at Yale as lazy and uninterested; it seems co him chat they prefer good grades-the key to the coveted high income-to learning nature's secrets.

This scientist-doctor dichotomy assumes a broad meaning for Sesran. He is troubled by the American lust for money; sometimes, he almost misses Communism.

"There is so much social pressure here co be rich," he says. He knows that he is doing unpopular work. "Here, people say, 'Why be an underpaid biology grad student for six years? People want to make money"'so they stay away from science. The social ambitions surrounding Sestan in Croatia have been replaced by financial ones here, leaving him once again a member of a dedicated minority.

In America, scientists come under a new kin d of pressure. They are pressured to compete, co publish, and to be first on every discovery. But Sestan's passion for science, cemented by years of hard work, has a special strength. "I love science, chat's what I want co do," Sestan says again and again, "and I am happy."

-Lea Oksman

Reel to Real A SLACK GIRL COMES HOME ro find her stepfather sitting on a couch surrounded by liquor bottles, cigarette butts, and blunt wraps. The rwo argue about why she's skipping school and getting bad grades. The stepfather pushes her against the wall and raises his belt. She cowers, covering her face. Outside, a police officer cuffs a loitering black teenager and pats him down. The cop gets in his face, and the boy shakes his head in fear. The camera curs again to the girl, who is running up to the officer. He blows her off with a skeptical remark, threatening co arrest her for interfering.

She walks away and sits down on the curb, holding her hands to her face.

In a later scene, the same police officer climbs out of bed in the morning and pulls

APRIL 2003

on his dark blue socks and shiny black combat boots. At the same time, in his own bedroom, a sixteen-year-old boy pulls on his beige Timberland boots. The officer puts on his blue uniform and his badge, while the boy ties a belt around baggy jeans and pins a button on his shirt with a photo of his dead uncle. Later, a group of students corner him at his locker and pressure him to cut class. The police officer's superiors pressure him to participate in a corruption scheme.

These scenes are part of a film shot by eight New Haven youths. The movie is half drama-written by the teens and scarring themselves and police academy cadetsand half documentary. Starting next year, the New Haven Police Academy wi II use the film to train graduating cadets to respect the youth population they will patrol.

Four groups collaborated on the film.

American Beat, a local documentary film company, is producing, New Haven high school students are writing, acting, and directing, the New Haven Police Academy cadets star. But the driving force behind the project has been Youth Rights Media (YRM}, a non-profit incorporated by Yale Law students in 2002.

Youth Rights Media is a group of twelve Yale law students who teach about a dozen students per year about their judicial rights. This year, the group has visited every freshman classroom in New Haven, giving ninety-minute presentations dealing with everything from Miranda rights to search-and-seizure laws to the consequences of resisting arrest. Now YRM has brought police into the solution, allowing them to act with rhe srudents to educate their Academy peers.

Most of the youths involved with the project have had bad experiences with the police or know of people who have. Shari Cabiness, a 17-year-old who attends Gateway Community college, remembers, " I was being harassed for loitering when there's no place to go but in the street.

[When cops see you) on the corners, they act like there's some place co go. You can't even be in your community without them chinking you're selling drugs or making trouble." The problems differ by genders.

"Males feel stigmatized by sight. Females are concerned abour nor being taken seriously when they need the police's help,

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THANI<S!

8

being thought of as hysterical," said Taylor.

The young filmmakers compiled these experiences to create the script for the film.

While the movie allows the students to act as teachers, they have also learned from production. In a classroom in the Latino Youth D'evelopment Center on the edge of the Hill neighborhood, Taylor, YRM's .

Laura McCarger, and six high school students plan the movie's audio, visual, and logistical details for six hours a week. Taylor stands next to a blackboard and challenges the group: "What's going to happen after the close-up on his face, Shari? What happens after a close-up of someone looking at something?" Meanwhile, in another room, set-director TaycheUe Gordino, 15, is typing rhe filming schedule for the students' spring br~k. As the set director, Gordino must get written permission from property owners to film in their buildings. Aside from learning the "nitry-gritry" of filmmaking, the students learn how to voice their message. "[They are] learning the value of tempering and refining their point of view.

They realize they can't just be reactionary and lash out at their audience because it's nor going to be effective," said Taylor.

One of the most important by-products of the project has been the personal connections forged between police and youth during interviews and production.

"They helped us chink about officers differently, because they're the same people we

are and had the same experiences we had," said Cabiness.

The m essage of Gordino is, "T he badge don't make you who you are. You make what the badge is to you." Ideally, says Cabiness, "I would wane [the police] to learn interaction and communication with the youth, understanding with the youth, how to approach them on a different level." It remains co be seen whether Gordino's message, spinning off the reels of American Beat, will make a difference in the real world.

-ApriL Rabkin

TH£ NEW JouRNAL

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E

NGLISH STATION WAS BUILT lN THE LATE 1940S on a small spit of land, just off the banks of the Mill River. The plant was designed co provide electricity from hydraulic energy and to burn oil. Bordered by Grand and Wolcott Streets, English Station lies near the heart of Fair Haven and has been a thorn in the sides of its owners for decades. In the 1980s, federal standards became more stringent for factory emissions. This meant char United Illuminating (Ul), the owner of the plant at the rime, was running a dinosaur that would have co be shut down or cleaned up. The obsolete boilers were designed to burn oil so crude it was essentially tar, at some temperatures thick enough to walk on. Clean-up would have cost several hundreds of millions of dollars. In addition to this, a new regulation, aimed at curbing monopolies on power, required companies to choose between being generators or distributors of energy. UI, owning several ocher power plants and also some power lines in New Haven, chose co cur its losses and abandon its plants.

United Illuminating managed to sell all of its plants e~cept for English Station, which stood deserted until 1998. Because the environmental liabilities and the cleanup necessary co restart the power plant were so significant, English Station rotted on the market for years before a tiny privately owned offshoot of UI, Quinnipiac Energy (QE) acquired it. UI handed QE a lump sum of $4¡5 million to take the plant off its hands. Scott DeGeeter, project manager for QE, makes no bones about the transaction: "It is public knowledge that we were paid to rake it. UI could have spent $15 million to tear the place to the ground or they could have paid us $4.5 million to rake the property and all the environmental liabilities and ongoing responsibilities of the property for one third the cost."

DeGeeter readily admits that the plant was unwanted: "As soon as you walk into an old station with environmental liabilities that are unknown, you need to be able to make a lor of money right away off of that piece of property to make ir attractive enough to take those liabilities. You could be buying tens of millions of dollars of clean-up costs." But Quinnipiac Energy was far from an unsuspecting buyer. Because QE was originally part of Ul, it was familiar with the plant and irs risks.

Despite the unusual terms of the transaction, rhe owners ofQE saw English Station as a profitable venture. Mark Minninberg, former front man for Qunnipiac Energy, tried ro sell the community on the purchase. He staged slideshows for Fair Haven and New Haven residents, oucling propositions that seemed too good to be true. And they were. Originally, QE claimed ir wanted to burn oil only until it could afford co convert to natural gas, which, incredbly, was projected to have a net clean air benefic. Yer when the company presented its final proposal, there was no mention of natural gas.

The proposal was immediately met with protesr in Fair Haven and across the state: Connecticur Fund for rhe Environment, New Haven Enviornmental Justice Coalition, and New Haven's Mayor

10

John DeStefano formally opposed the permit to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) during several public hearings.

Quinnipiac Energy won the first two rounds: The permit was recommended by the staff of the DEP and later by an appeal officer, Janice Deshais. On March 19, the opposition made a final attempt co get the permit denied in a hearing in front of the Commissioner of the DEP, Arc Roque.

A

THIS LITTLE BATTLE ESCAJ-ATEO, in another part of tOwn, Fair Haveners were celebrating a victory. The School Construction Project, an organization affiliated with the New Haven School Board, had been granted funding co build a new school in the community. The school would serve children in kindergarten through eighth grade-the first of its kind in the city. ''All our other buildings are renovations and additions, and we have a couple of new buildings to replace some older buildings, but this one is a complete start from scratch," said Susan Weisselberg, coordinator of the School Construction Project.

The new school is greatly needed. Like many low-income communities, Fair Haven is plagued by overcrowded schools and is forced to bus hundreds of students to other districts every day. In fact, it has been 30 years since Fair Haven built a new school. At s36.7 million, it is one of the most expensive education projects in Connecticut, and a high profile success story for the community.

Unfortunately, the school will sit just a few hundred yards from the plant. Weisselberg said the Board of Education looked at many different locations and finally decided on this one for several reasons: "This was a part of Fair Haven that was underserved by schools. Another aspect is that New Haven is quire developed and it is very difficult co find land for almost anything but particularly for new schools. We looked at almost anything ... residential properties, industrial properties, vacant lots." They could nor build on wetlands or park land, and they wanted the school to be on James Street, so the choices were limited. In a city nearly filled co capacity, there was simply no other space.

In other words, there was no lapse of judgment on the part of the School Construction Project. The Project was keenly aware of the nearness of the power plant; they just had roo little to work with. Weisselberg insists that the proximity of English Station was taken into account when designing the school. Models showed that the effects of the plant would be minimal. But Jay Brotman, the architect, was skeptical. So when designing the air conditio~ing system for the school, Brotman made sure to leave room for extra filters and scrubbers to purify the incoming air. In addition, the gym and the pool were placed on the plot ofland nearest the plant, while the main facility would be adjacent to it. But English Station was not the only industrial concern. Brotman was more worried about the Talmage Brothers oyster shell operation. "There is an at odor certain times of the year" -another reason why an internal air system is a necessity.

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THE NÂŁW jOURNAL

English Station seems to loom like a black cloud over the new school. But the power plant was initially not a concern of Fair Haveners. "To be honest with you, the concerns we have heard are: When will it be done, we can't wait to send our kids there," says Weisselberg. "We had a lot of support from the community to build something there, to put a school there. They were very excited about it because Fair Haven K-8 will have a swimming pool and a full sized gym."

Weisselberg also noted that if English Station refires, the particulates released will go beyond the school's boundaries.

Because most of the children who will be attending the school live in the area, they will already be dealing with pollution on every corner.

the risk out of the peak demand market for QE and also sets the prices for the transmitters, blurring the generator-distributor distinction and circumventing anti-monopoly regulation.

Ultimately the plant will provide only seven new jobs for Fair Haven and without question will add pollutants to the air.

On the other hand, it will generate over half a million dollars in tax revenue for the city of New Haven.

Quinnipiac Energy has even opted to use relatively clean fuel. According to DeGeeter, QE's fuel contains one-sixth the sulfur of the fuel used to heat homes. He equated the additional English Station emissions to adding four new transit buses to the city.

Bur whether English Station will be equivalent to four or four million new transit buses seems beside the point: Quinnipiac Energy is acting within the scope of the law. As DeGeeter emphatically stressed, "You cannot under law impose on me anything more stringent than if I meet the current regulations ... We exceed the current regulations, therefore there is really legally no way that they can deny you a permit. That's the basis of all the law in this country, right? You set a standard; you meet a standard; you can conduct your business." In March, the DEP agreed.

On those hot summer days w hen English Station is spewing particulates most intensely, Fair Haven residents will be opening their windows wide and breathing in even dirtier air.

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N A CITY WHERE AIR QUALITY already fails co meet standards, one more plant may be one too many. But QE has found a way around such objections.

Quinnipiac Energy's plan for operation is clever, perhaps even insidious, but ultimately legal. The o nly way QE could be granted a permit ro burn oil is if English Station operates as a "minor source" of pollution. To fall under this classification, the plant will have to adhere to strict emissions regulations. Emissions are regulated in cerms of tons of particulates released per year. Even low-sulfur diesel oil (relatively clean fuel) would be tightly monitoredonly 25 tons of nitrous oxide and 6. 5 tons of sulfur dioxides per year.

But the loophole is that these tons of particulates can be released any time, whether that be over one day or three hundred. To maximize profit, English Station will run as a "peaking plant," meaning ir will burn only 23 calendar days each year, for three to five hundred hours, but it will produce as many tons of particulates in this condensed period as a "minor source" is allowed to produce all year.

QE will sell the energy on high demand days, including the honest days of summer and coldest of winter, when air conditioning and hearing-use are at their peaks, allowing them co rurn a profit despite the immense carrying costs.

These short bursts of energy are usually sold on an electricity spot market, similar ro a stock market. On high demand days, transmission companies that exceed their allotment of contracted electricity must purchase extra power. Sellers with the lowest bids get picked; but sellers don't know what their competitors are offering, making the business quite a gamble. Shrewdly, QE has contracted with UI and Connecticut Light and Electricity. This takes

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HE DEP RECOMMENDED QuiNNIPIAC ENERGY be granted the permit because QE met the regulations. But for the interveners, there is still hope. There are a few sentences in the Connecticut Protection Act that give an agency the right to impose stricter standards than the law requires. Elizabeth Gilson, a lawyer representing the Mayor, summed up the argument: "In this case, there is one teeny-weenie footnote that we hang our hat on. In cases where it's an agency hearing, the agency has the expertise to look at where there's unreasonable pollution, regardless of the existence of the regs. And because this is a minor source that's blowing irs wad in 23 days, I'm going to argue that the regs don't apply so the Commissioner doesn't even have ro look at them." In other words, because there will be intense emissions over a short period of time, the agency has the right to step in. But Gilson faces an uphill battle since the DEP rejected this argument in the first two hearings.

In fact, the DEP has put a lor of time into this case over the last several years. Ric Pirolli, a representative from the DEP and head of Air Pollution Control, even made a presentation to the commissioner. "We're not on a side," Pirolli said. "We were just there ro present what we did and what actions we rook on the appli-

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cation, but we did propose to grant these permits." This raises the question of whether there is an argument compelling enough to justify the commissioner overruling his staff. Will Rocque really side-step the laws for the sake of a minor polluter?

But that is not to say an argument does not exist. The New Haven emergency room admissions for asthma are among the highest in the state. Asthma is exacerbated by particulates in the air, and particulates are exactly what English Station will be spewing. Or. Mark Mitchell, President of the Connecticut Coalition for the Environment, testified on this subject during each 1-),earing. "As a physician, I'm saying that these people are at risk-they are at risk for more asthma attacks, they are at risk for death from asthma, and because of the particulates in the air, they are at risk for sudden death from heart disease and respiratory disease. We would expect to see a significant increase in the deaths during the time this plant is operating." OeGeeter, unsurprisingly, does not see any cause for alarm. In fact, in the hearing before Deshais, QE brought in an expert to calm any nerves about possible health risks. The expert testified that the sulfides English Station will emit are as benign as those breathed in an asthma inhaler-an assertion Gibson considered "egregious."

Obviously sucking on a smokestack is not equivalent to puffing an inhaler, but even an increase in asthma rates, an issue that could legitimately tip the scales, is uncercain. Because of plants like English Station, which have been pumping our pollutants for decades, Fair Haven already has an unusually high number of asthmatic children. But asthma is not caused by a few exua particulates in the air; parciculates just worsen the condition . So although keeping English Station closed might prevent a few additional asthma attacks, it would not solve the asthma problem.

Asthma is just one component of what Dr. Mitchell identifies as the "English Station problem." English Station is an environmental justice issue because Fair Haven's ambient air quality affects poor blacks and Hispanics. Fair Haven is over 50 percent Hispanic and nearly 25 percent black. The irony of this debacle is that on those hot summer days when English Station is spewing its particulates most intensely, Fair Haven residents, most of

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whom do not have air conditioning, will be opening their windows wide and breathing in even dirtier air. Meanwhile, English Station's energy will be traveling on high speed power lines straight out of Fair Haven to Great Gatsby mansions on Long Island and country estates in Fairfield County. "It is clearly not fair by any stretch of the imagination," Mitchell said.

While it might be true that Fair Haven residents use less energy for air conditioning, to claim that English Station is subjecting the poor people of Fair Haven to harm for the sake of the rich seems arbitrary. In the end, English Station is no different than any of the other industries currently operating in Fair Haven. Residents will bear the brunt of the harm associated with plants that serve people elsewhere.

Art Rocque has two options. He can follow his job description and "well and faithfUlly enforce the law" or he can use discretion and invoke a footnote for the sake of the community. If Rocque simply enforces, QE will be granted its permit and start operating as construction begins on the neighboring school.

Could this little dinosaur of a power plant eclipse one of Fair Haven's greatest success stories in 30 years? Perhaps. But who would shoulder the blame? The DEP is enforcing the laws; the School Construction Project could not find a better spot; the rich people of Long Island are legitimate energy consumers. And Quinnipiac Energy, the obvious target, is just following the rules.

In memory of Robin W. Winks Master of Berkeley Co11ege 1977-1990

DAVENPORT COLLEGE MASTER'S TEA

Dana Fabe

Chief Justice ofthe Alaska Supreme Court

4:00P.M. MONDAY, APRIL 28 Davenport College Master's House 271 Park Street Flora Licht7TUln, a sophomore in Davmport Colkge, is Associate Editor for TNJ.

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S WORKERS AT YALE READIED FOR BATTLE against

the University late last February, a senior member of their team was conspicuously absent. John Wilhelm, the grizzled leader of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union (HEREIU) and a top negotiator for the Yale unions currently seeking a new contract, had slipped away to a resort hotel in southern Florida. He was there co address an urgent problem: the decay of America's national labor movement. As a result of the recent economic downturn, a strongly anti-union federal government, and an expanding global market, union membership across the country was in a downward spiral.

For more than a year, Wilhelm's own union's membership had diminished by as much as 40 percent, and the numbers for many other unions were worse. All of the big players in the American Federation of Labor and Congress oflndustrial Organi~tion (AFLCIO), the largest union al.liance in the country, had convened in Florida for the group's annual conference, where they scrambled for a solution to save the dying labor movement.

After the conference, Wilhelm returned to New Haven, where lie joined a raucous army of over 4,000 striking custodians, clerical workers, hospital workers, and graduate srudencs. They marched up Elm Street behind a stern-faced Jesse Jackson, who bellowed phrases of condemnation into the cold night air. For the next week, picketers protested oucside important Yale buildings in the mornings and attended motivational speeches and rallies in the afternoons.

AFL-CIO President John Sweeney made an appearance, as did Princeton professor Cornel West. It was a carefully orchestrated show, a calculated demonstration of hard-won union strength.

Then the news hit: At the conference in Florida, far from the limelight of the Yale strike, John Wilhelm and several other labor leaders were reported to have staged "something of a palace coup" at the AFL-CIO, according to Businm ~ek magazine. They had forged a "new governing body to run the federation"- a committee

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of 15 labor leaders who would meet every month in Washington, D.C. and advise President Sweeney. Business wt-ek strongly implied that Wilhelm was the brains behind the takeover. "Today's labor movement was invented in the 1950s and hasn't changed much since," Wilhelm declared. "We noed dramatic change." Wilhelm, it seemed, had much more on his mind than mere contracts for Yale's workers and recognition for ics graduate students as he marched alongside his comrades. The swirl of union activity at Yale was turning out to be something far more complicated than it seemed-and John Wilhelm was beginning to look like the possible key to an unfurling trade union revolution.

ILHELM DOESN'T LOOK LIKE A MAN EAGER TO SEIZE the reins of the national labor movement. His face and body are worn by years of service to his cause. At 58, he walks with a cane to support his newly-replaced hip. His gait is that of an elder statesman, one who has put in his time and now wanes simply to relax and enjoy his memories.

But there is a fighter beneath Wilhelm's weary facade. He is the quiet mastermind behind the last 35 years of Yale union activity, the organizer of thousands of workers, the overseer of nine contract negotiations, and the figurehead of seven acrimonious strikes. For as long as Yale's custodial and clerical workers have stood together against Yale, Wilhelm has been there. The story of the present labor strife is, in essence, the story of John Wilhelm's life.

Ironically, Wilhelm found his calling at the very University that he later made a career of tormenting. A member of the class of 1967, he graduated Magna Cum Laude from and was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa. For the most pan, he spent his time at Yale immersed in 6os radicalism. Trips to civil righcs and anti-war protests were supplemented by investigative journeys into the slums of New Haven and academic work focused on left-wing heroes.

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Wilhelm attributes his radical politics to his single mother, an uncommonly progressive woman from Virginia coal coumry who raised him on the twin doctrines of liberalism and traditional unionism. When the question of de-segregating the schools in Wilhelm's home county of Arlington made its way into federal coun in 1958, he remembers that she surprised him and his siblings by telling them to take the day off from school and go down to the courthouse. "She said, 'You'll learn a lot more in that courthouse than you will in any schoolroom today,"' he recalls.

But nothing jolted Wilhelm's political conscio usness like experiencing fir~t-hand one of the poorest cities in the country. Near the end of college, he joined a group called the American Independent Movement that was working to reinvigorate the dilapidated Hill neighborhood. His daily encounters with decaying neighborhoods and prosperous slumlords convinced him of a simple idea: poverty needs to be eradicated. "It seemed to me that virtually all the problems that people in the H ill neighborhood were wrestling with were, at bottom, because they were poor," he remembers. " You could fight about schools, housing, lots of things-but if people remained poor, it seemed to me they were going to remain powerless." Frusuated, he remained in New H aven after graduation, working to help the destitute and preaching the gospel of economic empowerment.

Then, one day in 1969, he came across a small want ad in the Nnu Hawn Rqjstn: "Labor leader trainee wanted. Long hours, low pay. Must be single." With the exception of the last stipulation, W Uhelm thought himself a good fit, and responded to the ad and arranged an interview. He landed the job and suddenly found himself at the head of a small N ew H aven service union, Local217, with little idea of what he was getting into.

As it turned out, the man who hired him, Vincent Sirabella, was kicking off a massive campaign to revamp union activity at

Yale. H e had recently become the first leader ofYale's o nly union, the custodial and dining hall workers' Local 35· When Sirabella came on board , Local 35 was in bad shape. A year earlier, Yale had defeated the leaderless and ineffective union in its first strike in two decades, and had recently hired two notoriously anti-union executives. The contracts of the sos and 6os were based on a ~ry informal, quidpro quo understanding between labor and managementlow but secure wages, in exchange for peace and stability. But now the University seemed to have strayed from its former path, and the unions were terrified.

In the ensuing struggle, which produced three strikes in the span of a single decade, WUhelm found not only a home. but a father. For ten years, he tagged alongside Sirabella as an apprentice.

For Wilhelm, Sirabella embodied the possibility of an enlightened unionism--one that could reconcile liberal ideas of respcc::t and inclusion with old-fashioned union muscle. •Vinny was an cctraordinary man," Wilhelm remembers. "He had an unusual theory: In order for the labor movement to revitalize and re-energize icsdf, it had to tap into the kind of energy typified by the civil rights moYement and the anti-war m~ment."

To many union leaders, Sirabella and Wdhdm musr have seemed eccentric and idealistic. At mat time, the trade union .IDOV'em ent was openly xenophobic and often very conservuiw. But something in Sirabella's vision captivated Walhdm. He tboupt that he could use it to bring about serious change at Yale and pollihly elsewhere. When Sirabdla left his ~t at Local3s in 1978, WDbelm gladly stepped up to replace him.

8os WAS THE TESTING G.OVMD for Wilhelm's idealism. It was clear that the University wu going to make life tough for the unions in at least the fOreseeable furure, and Local 35 was determined to preempt agression. Finally, HE YALE OF THE EAIU.Y

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a plan crystallized: Moum a campaign ro organize rhe University's mostly white, female, and middle-class clerical and technical workers. The logic was simple; if Local 35 could bring in these workers, they could create an alliance with a monopoly on the University's most essential workers.

So in 1980, Wilhelm enlisted the help and resources of Local 35's parent union, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union (HEREIU), to initiate a massive organizing campaign. Outside unions had tried to organize Yale's whitecollar set a number of times to no avail. But the HEREIU organizers were confident chat this time would be different. They had inside connections: Many of the Local 35 members had spouses and relatives who worked clerical and technical jobs at the University. The organizers quickly found hundreds of people interested in unionizing and filed for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election, the standard process for organizing a new union. In the meantime, workers and students went down to the NLRB hearings to agitate. In May of 1983, the hard work paid off: Yale's clerical and technical workers narrowly won the election, and Local 34 was born.

Bur the fight to establish Local 34 had just begun. The union's attempt to negotiate its fuse contract with the University stalled at the end of 1984. The cause of this breakdown was unclear, but union members suspected that the University was trying to break the fledgling local's back before it got off the ground. As Wilhelm put it, "The University basically dared them to go on strike." Indeed, a strike could mean good things for a University itching to get rwo unions off its back. The loose alliance formed ben.veen Locals 34

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and 35 dyring the organizing drive matched up rwo very different workforces-a set of mostly white women and a group of mostly working-class men, many of whom were minorities. For this reason, it stood to crumble far more easily than the average u11ion coalition.

After Local 34 officially went on strike in September of 1984, Yale told the members of Local 35 that they would be fi red if they supported che strikers. Even Wilhelm wasn't sure rhat the custodial and dining hall workers, whose contract didn't expire until the beginning of the next year, would stand up for their co-workers. But they did.

An estimated 90 percent ofLocal35 walked out the next day and lent their support to what turned out to be a ten and a half week strike. When I asked Wilhelm to explain how that seemingly miraculous turn transpired, his response was cryptic. He referred ro his old reacher: "Vinny always used ro say, ' If you told the workers the truth, if you gave them the facts they needed, they would figure out the right thing ro do."'

Ir takes more than the truth to organize workers, however. The campaign that Wilhelm engineered was a product of careful srraregizing and skillful politicking. He played a forceful role behind the scenes, cozying up to the union membership while still playing hardball with the University.

Several weeks into the strik~ Wilhelm urged workers to return to their jobs while students were away for the holid ay. The idea was not only that strikers would get a break from the picket lines, but that the unions would be in a position to strike again when students returned. The tactic, dubbed "Home for the Holidays," turned ou r ro be decisive. In January of 1985,

Nobody thought a week-long_strike would settle things bJ itself, but we thought it was necessarv to disprove all that bullshit.

Wilhelm negotiated a contract for Local 34 that increased wages by more than 20 percent for its traditionally underpaid female workforce. Later, Local 35 received a contract as well-one that Wilhelm considers the best in the union's history.

The organizers held a jubilant celebration in Center Church on the New Haven Green, where they praised Wilhelm's work.

The press heralded the settlement and overall organizing drive as a watershed moment in labor history, a time of unprecedented success for female and minority workers in the expanding service sector. One member of Local 34 raved to Th~ Ntw York Tim~ about Wtlhelm, "He's interested in everybody as a person, not just a number. I would trust him with the lives of my kids. That's how I feel about him." Wilhelm, for his part, down plays his leadership during the strike. "I certainly played a role in it," he told me, "and I'm proud of my role in it, but that was a victory of literally hundreds of people. You can't win something like that without a lot of people deciding, 'I'm going to be a leader."' He prefers instead to talk about what he got from it all: "That was a very, very wonderful learning experience for me-an inspirational experience." Indeed, Wilhelm was just getting started.

H.EN I MET WILHELM at a coffee shop several weeks after March's busy five-day strike, he casually tossed around the buzzwords that have made him famous in recent years: "respect," "partnership," "cooperation," "give and take." Since his promotion from leader of Local 35 to Western Regional Director of HEREIU and then to the

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Presidency of HEREIU he has broken the mold of union leaders who antagonize CEOs. Many, including Yale President Richard Levin, still paint Wilhelm's ideology as a front for more insidious interests.

But out West in the desert, where Wilhelm started working in 1987, he proved that it is more than just talk. In Las Vegas, where he helped initiate one of the biggest organizing campaigns of the 20TH century, he devised a novel strategy of enlisting prominent casino and hotel owners to fight other owners who were giving unions a hard time. He went straight to the big guys: Steve Wynn, the owner of the Bellagio, and Terri Lanni, CEO of the MGM Grand, were recruited to aid in two bitter, but successful strikes in the early 90s, one of which lasted over six years. In a 2002 speech, President Bush's Director of the Office of Personnel Management, Kay Cole James, praised WUhelm's approach, saying she wanted "everyone to see the incredible way this union leader and casino manager work together. It was just incredible. John Wilhelm . . . and Terry Lanni .... Both of these guys are tough. It was interesting to me that, in the midst of negotiations, when their issue and their industry came under attack, those guys locked arms."

Wilhelm has also sought alliances with political leaders, even those on the opposite side of the fence. He is reported to consort with a vast array of in.Buential figures, including New York Governor George Pataki, former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaiieda, and Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman (whose first state senate bid was co-organized by WUhelm's mentor, Vinny Sirabella). When pressed on how these relationships have helped his cause,

he demured, saying that sometimes political leaders can be valuable strategically, but that " there's no real political influence based on personal relationships with politicians.

Republican SenatOr John Ensign from Nevada tells a different story. In a speech given at the Teamsters Union 2001 Convention, he outlined how WUhelm once influenced his vote on an important UniOn ISSUeS: Initially, you know, my party was for the Paycheck Protection Act and most people in my party still are.

But ... John Wilhelm, because he had a relationship with me, he came and he talked to me about how this was really a states' rights issue. This should be left up to each state, and each state individually. So as a US Senator, we should not vote for any kind of paycheck protection. It was because of that relationship that he had with me that I sat down, he convinced me of it, and it was pretty easy to support him in that effort and the rest of the union movement in that effort.

In the early 90s, Wilhelm returned to negotiate another contentious contract with the tools he had sharpened in Las Vegas. But New Haven is not Las Vegas, and Wilhelm found it difficult to apply his tactics. The Yale administration, led by newly hired President Richard Levin, had little interest in working with the unions, or at least in working with them on their terms. Wilhelm calls this "fuck-you time, again" - a period marked by active disregard for honest bargaining on the part of the University. He does nor understand

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how a University so focused on intellectual debate could be so averse to treating its employees as equals worthy of collaboration. "Ironically, I couldn't ¡learn anything about genuine labor-management cooperation in the best interests of employers and workers at Yale," he told me. "But somehow I learned volumes about it in Las Vegas."

For its part, the University has in recent years adopted some of the catchphrases that WUhelrn champions as his own." . Last spring, President Levin announced, "We are eager to work with Locals 34 and 35 to find a new way of structuring our relationship, relying on day-today collaboration rather than periodic confrontation." But no action followed.

Despite using the S3.1Jle rhetoric, all that the unions and management have achieved at this point _is one expired contract and a week-long strike.

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closed, Wilhelm moved on to new strategies. He advocated fostering inclusion not only with employers, but within unions themselves. In the late 90s, he focused his efforts on an issue traditionally ignored in labor movement politics: the working rights of immigrants, both legal and illegal, and of minorities overall.

At the AFL-CIO convention of 1999, Wilhelm lobbied for the federation to recognize the rights of illegal immigrants to organize. The issue was tabled, but President John Sweeney appointed WUhelm chair of a new committee to explore the issue further. WUhelrn used the position to engineer another unexpected victory. After his committee voted unanimously to reject the AFL-CIO's hostile policy on illegal immigrants, the Federation's executive council did the same in 2000.

It was a stunning move by an organization that had historically viewed illegal immigrants as obstacles to its own membership's well-being. It was also a welcome PR move for HEREIU, which, despite having done a great deal of progressive organizing. was still considered one of the most corrupt and least visionary unions in the country. The union's largest local, in Las Vegas, had been in cahoots with the infamous gangster Bugsy Siegel in the 40s, while the founder of that local is said to

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have been shot to death and abandoned naked in the desert. The last president of HEREIU, Edward Hanley, was ushered out of office by allegations of ties to Chicago mobsters, and even when Wuhelm took over in 1998, the Justice Department kept close tabs on his administration.

With the Justice Department on their backs, progressive organizing was sweet relief for Wilhelm and the union. This highly pragmatic strategy was aimed both at bringing more bodies to the union and in fostering strong bonds among existing members. "When unions don't reach out, they are inherently unable to represent their members properly," he told me.

"When unions .look narrowly at a group of employees working for an employer, they don't think about the fact that those employees are not just workers-they're parts of communities, they belong to churches."

In the summer of 2001, Wilhelm took another step toward transforming the American labor movement. After traveling to Mexico to meet with Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda to discuss illegal workers in the United States, he persuaded Castafieda to speak at the HEREIU annual convention. It was the first time that an American union had conversed seriously with a foreign government about labor issues.

In this context, the recent union strife at Yale-already forgotten by many-has been decisive for Wilhelm's plan to change the labor movement. The partnership between Locals 34 and 35, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO), and the Yale-New Haven Hospital workers is a serious test of Wilhelm's unique brand of unionism. It represents the ultimate motley crew: loyal custodial, clerical, and technical workers; educated graduate students who will leave campus after seven years; and poor, unorganized hospital workers. So far, the alliance has held, but it hasn't yielded any substantive gains in terms of organizing or contracts. GESO and the hospital workers are still out in the cold, while Locals 34 and 35's contract negotiations have been some of the most unproductive in the history of the unions.

Wilhelm admits that the fight is as much about solidarity as it is about con-

crete gains. The strike, which strategically exhibited the racial, economic, and educational diversity of the coalition, was organized precisely to prove that the alliance is still strong. "The reason that we set upon that strike strategy for that week was we felt that it was necessary to demonstrate to everyone at the University and in the community that all of Yale's predictions were wrong." he told me. "Nobody thought a week-long strike would settle things by itself, but we thought it was necessary to disprove all the bullshit."

But according to Wilhelm, the strike was also organized to open a dialogue with the Uqjversity. The unions want the University to sit down with them and " bargain," as opposed to just making "pronouncements." They want "give and take," "discussion and debate," and " ompromise." The University, however, surely knows that to fall into that trap could allow for unprecedented union growth-something that it disagrees with not only on a theoretical level, with regard to the status of graduate students as employees, but on a practical level. Unlike most businesses, Yale does not have the luxury of relocating or selling itself. It cannot afford to be hamstrung by its workers, who, as any administrator will tell you, do nor supply the key products that attract customers to Yalereaching and scholarship. Wilhelm understands this. Still, he has hope: "We'll have to tty to persuade the University and put pressure on the University in whatever ways we can." The unions have little choice. If they don't take the long road, they face irrelevance-or, worse, extinction.

OHN WILHELM DENIES THE RUMORS

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about his designs on the AFL-CIO presidency. When I asked him pointblank whether he covets the office, he answered, "It's not a job I'm personally interested in." He would prefer someone younger, perhaps in the 40-to~o-year-old range, to ensure that his or her job would be a long-term post. That hasn't been the trend in recent AFL-CIO history-John Sweeney was 62 when elected, and Lane Kirkland, before him, was 57-but Wilhelm hopes that will change. The reports about the "palace coup," he claims, are greatly exaggerated. The way Wtlhelm

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sees it, the Federation's power structu re was reorganized to assist the president, and to help Sweeney and thus render the organization as a whole more relevant and effective.

Yet Wilhelm is no pushover. He wan ts the labor movement to change profoundly, and he remains the most vocal and most active force on this front in the country. In Wilhelm's ideal world, the labor movement will focus aJI of its efforts on organizing, politics, and growth. "I get impatient with the AFL-CIO as a whole," Wilhelm says."

It h as a h istory of trying to address aU the needs and concerns that exist in the labor movement . . . . My view is that if we don't pu t most of our resources into organizing and politics that supports organizing, then the labor movement, at least in its present institutional form, would be dead ." I asked him whether he thought he could make that happen. H is answer was yes, but he hinted om inously that it might require some kind of "upheaval" or "new structure."

Wilhelm doesn't see an end in sight for the tortuous contract negotiations between Yale and its unions. As the unions press even harder for collaboration, Yale seems to recoil even faster--desp ite its claim to want the very same thing. The University recently offered the unions an unprecedented ten-year contract, which was swiftly rejected by negotiators on the grounds that it failed to offer a plan for cooperation and forced workers into too rigid a situation, one that could hurt people down the road when economic conditions inevitably change. This fight may well turn out to be one of Wilhelm's most difficult. It is hard to predict whether this will be a good or bad chapter in Wilhelm's life, or whether his ideafism will ultimately be a blessing or a curse, but at the very least, it will be a learning process. "Every struggle you engage in in life either sets you back or improves you," Wilhelm says. "I like to think that these kinds of struggles improve both me and others."

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A student service organization goes national, but continues to struggle at home

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NE DAY LAST FALL, Charlie Johnson, a middle aged New Havener who had relied on the government for subsistence came to a realization: he simply couldn' t make it on welfare. He couldn't communicate with his casew<?rker and found the government bureaucracy so impersonal and slow-moving that it seemed more a hindrance than a benefit. "They' re always condemning you and saying you're not doing nothing to try to help yourself," he told me. "They're not really hearing you." Like hundreds of people in New Haven cut off from federal subsidies as a result of recent welfare reform, Johnson longed to pull himself our of destitution, but was unsure how.

After holding a string of fleeting, low-paying jobs, he found his way to the steps of 178 Temple Street on the advice of a flyer he noticed at a homeless shelter. Here, he thought, was a chance he might receive the help he needed. Inside the Temple Street office, he spied a few armchairs, a shelf full of books and papers, a fax machine, and a large sign on the wall: "Welcome to National Studenr Partnerships."

National Student Partnerships (NSP) is a Yale undergraduate organization with an uncommonly ambitious goal: to compensate for a governmenr welfare system that it perceives to be an utter failure. The group' s mission statemenr is "to ensure that all Americans have access to the services, opportunities and attention that they need in their pursuit of employment, self-sufficiency, and personal success." In theory, NSP acts as a medium, connecting clients with employers, housing authoriry, and healthcare providers that would normally be out of reach. In acrualiry, though, this process is far more complicated. NSP tries to improve people' s lives, but ultimately reveals the frustrations and paradoxes of trying to fix sociery &om the ground up.

National Student Partnerships was the brainchild of rwo intrepid Yale students, Kirsten Lodal and Brian Kreiter. Midway through their college careers, the rwo began to see their fellow students in a new light, as the potential work force of an efficient service organization. In November of 1998, they launched "NSP Kick

22.

Off" festivities, attracting 700 students and supporters, and raising almost $4,000 to offset start-up costs. NSP soon leased its first office in New Haven, which was staffed by student volunteers. In Lodal's eyes, altruistic Yalies seemed the perfect antidote to the ills of government bureaucracy.

Today, proceedings remain informal in the one-room office, whose carefully planned decor-from freshly painted blue walls to complimentary coffee--fosters an atmosphere of laid-back professionalism. The students who work at the office are given a great deal of autonomy and discretion when it comes to helping their clients; each is expected to learn the client' s background and to think creatively about how best to get him or her the necessary services. The work is meant to be as unstructured as possible--a perfect match for idealistic college students.

Success, NSP leaders say, is hard to define. Though the organization' s standards are high, student volunteers are obviously limited in their capacities to achieve substantive gains for clients.

NSP counters this by valuing even the most minor accomplishments, such as driving a person to a government office or consoling them emotionally, because that is often the kind of work college students are most qualified to do. As Business Outreach Coordinator Justin Loring put it, " The abiliry of a fresh perspective to find the answers to the problem or to motivate [a client] to keep going is success in itself."

Coming from an organization that has attained national prominence, this contentment with small victories is puzzling.

From September of 2.002. until February of this year-the months ha.r dest on the poor and homeless-NSP's success rate was dubious: of the 2.8 people who sent in requests for education and job training, only 13 people' s needs were met; of the 74 who applied for housing, only 6 were rewarded; and of the 150 who sought work, a paltry 14 had luck.

National Student Partnerships has a simple solution for its shortcomings, however: expansion. After college, Lodal and Kreiter worked vigorously to transform NSP into a national orga-

THÂŁ NEW JOURNAL

GIANTS

By Erica Franklin nizarion. They applied for hundreds of thousands of dollars in grams, developed chapters in cities across the country, and op ened a central office in Washington, D.C. They even hired professional social service workers to ensure consistent leadership in the organization.

The idea is that the national office of full-time employees will raise money (each chapter receives between $50,000 to $70,000) and rake care of administrative casks, leaving the local offices staffed almost entirely by students, who are free to work informally and creatively. Nor only is this plan intended to improve the quality of work done by NSP volunteers, it is also supposed to add a high-profile sheen to the organization as a whole. Lodal, the group' s "CEO" who works in the Washington office, says that professionalization on the national level "helps legitimize" what is clearly a "non-traditional organization providing non-traditional services."

But no one at NSP could explain to me how expansion will help the organization if its ultimate goal is to provide student workers with more freedom to concentrate on the tasks at hand.

Last year' s numbers suggest that student workers in New Haven did not seem to be having much success on their own. Larson insisted that the national office actually limits bureaucratic inefficiency, and allows for more individually tailored services at the local level. " The last thing a client wants co do in crisis is sir down and spend a half hour filling our papers," she explained.

It comes as little surprise that NSP has caught the anemion of many conservative politicians itching to debunk the federal welfare system. NSP~opk, the organization's newsletter, made its debut last September, featuring a photo of Lodal and President Bush on the cover. Last March, Lodal met with Bush to discuss a possible partnership between NSP and USA Freedom Corps, a service program the president initiated in January. It was not the first rime Lodal had been a poster child for the President' s service initiatives; in 1999, Bush invited NSP' s young founder to moderate the national "Welfare ro Work" conference.

APRIL 2003

National Student Partnerships has attracted more than the attention of politicians, however. Other non-profit organizations have looked to NSP as a source of potencial recruits for their own endeavors. In one sense, then, the organization has become a useful networking rool for Yalies interested in non-profit careers. As Larson explains, NSP works "very closely" with other service providers because "we really don't want to reinvent the wheel."

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HARLIE jOHNSON CERTAINLY SEEMS to have had a positive experience at NSP. Because there are no eligibility requirements, he qualified on the spot. "Everybody was just wonderful," he raves. " They walk with you through the process.

They actually went with me on a lot of interviews." Eventually, he found a job as a bus driver. But he is one of the lucky few in New Haven for whom NSP has brought material gains. For the others, motivational talks, emotional support, and basic information provides a hopeful first step. NSP' s attempt ro change attitudes and to instill values of entrepreneurship among New Haven's down-and-out is still a process in the making.

Erica Franklin is a sophomo" in Jonathan Edwards Co/kg~.

23

Revolution for Sale Yale Stude~ts pay a visit to Castro's Cuba of a Stern-faced Fidel Castro with his trademark beard and military fatigues has reminded any American of immi.nent military threat. But anyone who thinks the Cuban Revolution is a closed chapter in 20thcentury history books would find plenty to surprise them in contemporary Cuba, beginning with the billboards that greet visitors at Jose Marti International Airport in Havana. The slogans-"44 years of glory!" "With intelligence and perseverance, we will triumph!"

"In every neighborhood, Revolution!"-make a strong case chat the Revolution is alive and kicking in Cuba. And anyone who wants to understand what that means for the island's twelve million inhabitants has taken on a challenge that is mammoth, if not downright impossible.

The group of 16 Yalies with whom I traveled to Cuba this past spring break knew that we would have to face this challenge. For two months we had raised questions and qualms about the Cuban revolution-focusing on environmental studies, medicine, architecture, music, political science-in a student-designed anthropology seminar. Now, in a plane over the Atlantic, my curiosity was tucked neatly between the medical supplies and SPF-45 sunscreen in my suitcase. We were finally on our way co the island for a firsthand view of our class's nebulous subject matter But in order to get this far, we had to sign on as political tourists, to be shuttled between appointments with government agencies, health clinics, and cultural houses. A governmem agency with the suggestive title, "Cuban Institute for Friendship Among Peoples" had created an itinerary for us according to our hazily articulated interests, and a guide with a bus and driver awaited us on the other side of customs. We were not the only group of American college students spending their March vacation in Cuba: groups from Cornell, Princeton, and the University of Illinois were in Havana that week as well. Increased demand from the United States has meant flights filled weekly with students, conference attendees, and Cuban-Americans returning to visit family and friends.

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T HAS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE THE IMAGE

We stayed in the Vedado section of Havana, a luxurious neighborhood stretching north to the Malec6n, Havana's seaside highway, and west towards the myriad alleyways and colonial architecture of .Central and Old Havana. Vedado's quiet streets are lined with the decaying mansions of Cuba's pre-Revolutionary glitterati.

The window panes on the houses are mostly broken now, and their columns and balconies are crumbling, peeling, slowly relinquishing their old-world gallantry to the thick island heat. Children play in empty side streets off the main arteries of Lfnea and Paseo; old cars and motorbikes with sidecars pass in isolated precessions. As far as we could tell, traffic is almost unknown in today's gas-strapped Cuba.

Even before the Revolution, Cuba held an almost mythic appeal to American travelers. The opportunity to go there legally, under the auspices of a Yale-sponsored Cuban studies program, had brought to the surface my latent desire to explore untraditional places, particularly one as rich in contradictions as Cuba. I knew the limitations of what I could learn in a mere ten days: Still, I had litde sense of the profound ambiguity presented by a government both visionary and opportunistic-one that decries imperialism on the one hand and bends over backwards to accommodate foreign tourists on the other. Cuba today, we quickly learned, is a hall of mirrors, a place from which visiting students are likely to leave with little more than improved rhythm and a few boxes of Cuban cigars.

AVANA IS NOT AN EASY CITY TO GET TO KNOW. At times, it seemed the city's inhabitants were finishing 01lt the ninth inning of a long-decided baseball game, playing more out of habit than conviction. The neglected buildings collapse at a rate of more than one a day. Chalkboards listing ration allotments at neighborhood distribution centers always have empty spaces next to chicken, fish, and cigars. In the evenings, the exoticism of crowds standing idly along the Malec6n conceals the boredom on the faces of SO many young people. Without dollars, they cannot afford tO hang out anywhere else.

H

THE NEW JouRNAL

by Paige Austin

The Cuba of the 8os must have presented a starkly different picture. In those days, the island received almost five billion dollars a year in subsidies from the Soviet Union. It was only with the collapse of the Soviet bloc that the crisis Castro caJls the Special Period began, spawning an exodus of desperate Cubans, many of whom captured headlines in the world press by trying tO reach Florida in homemade rafts. In 1994, eager to redress its currency crisis, the government legalized the use of the US dollar and launched a major effon to attract tourists to the island. Today, the island's economy is divided berween Cubans with access to dollars (those who work in the tourist industry or receive remittances from relatives abroad) and those reliant on meager peso salaries, usually worth fewer than $15 a month. For those with dollars, life's great delicacies are available in stores throughout the island. But for everyone else, nice clothes or an evening at one of Havana's trendy nightclubs, restaurants, or hotels is far out of reach.

For a generation of Cubans weaned on the promise of equality, the new social order must look a lot like betrayal. "The whole country js for the tourists," a 22-year-old guide in the Museo de Ia Revoluci6n told me indignantly. But she probably didn't want us to leave, either. My four-dollar museum ticket helped pay her salary, and she admitted that hers was a good job given the present economy.

Still, our group was unavoidably implicated in the rransformative effect that tourists have had on contemporary Cuba. Despite our best efforts, it was proving impossible to conform to the tourist's mandate: take only photos, leave only foorprints. e University of Havana's campus is a regal grouping of pilared buildings and stone steps situated on the border of Vedado and Central Havana. Berween classes, srudents flood the walkways, strolling together berween departments or lounging in the shade of the central courtyard. On one side of the plaza, though, the tree branches are cut back. In their place, the original steel tank in which Fidel entered Havana sits with its gun cast for-

APRIL 2003

ever at the ready. A plaque nearby comat lightning speed. We were, after all, still advancing professionally and avoiding memorates the tank's historic role in the in their country; we just happened to be notice by the authorities-and how much triumph of the Revolution 44 years ago. able to pay the entrance fee. was well-reasoned and heartfelt. Even more Our visit to the University marked an The next day several members of our confusing was the frequent reminder from important juncture in our trip. While group bought University of Havana r-shirts government officials char, in face, criticism there, we heard a prominent professor of ar a score across the street from the school's of the Revolution is welcome, as long as it sociology explain life in . - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - . is con structive.

Cuba with greater _._ T Fidel himself set intellectual depth and the rule in a 1961 ease than anyone we speech: " Inside the had met. ("We are ericRevolution, there ical of the Revolution," is everything. she told us. "But we are Outside, nochcritical in ways that can in g." In theory, help make a better sociCubans can voice ety. ") My assumption any critique short that Cuba's acceptance of advocating the of the Revolution overthrow of the implied some measure government. But of willful ignorance chen, o ne doesn't was dealt a crippling need a Yale degree blow. to know that the Afterwards, I line between conbefriended some passstructive criticism ing students from the Children play among Hav<!.na's decaying colonial mansions. and complaints University's language '----------=---'----=---------..........;=----------- - - ----'that carry 20-year school, an especially popular department historic front steps. Noel and Alberto jail terms is not likely to be set in stone. since jobs in the English-language tourist laughed dryly at the irony. The Cuban The only people free ro straddle the divide Revolution had been a profound ideologiare the tourists. sector are among the most coveted in Cuba. Noel, Ali, Alberto, and James soon cal undertaking, intended co drive out the became our group's frequent companions. foreign mobsters and landowners, and They seemed co relish the chance to tell us complicit dictators who ran the country as O EXPERIENCE CONFUSED ME MORE than my visit to a Committee for about Cuba and to practice their English, though it were a giant casino. It was not though they could not afford to accompaintended to boost t-shirt sales. the Defense of rhe Revolution (CDR) in the picturesque provincial town ny us to fine restaurants or discos. They Revolutionary faithfuls justified this awkofVifiales. CDR's are the most basic units ward dichotomy by pointing out chat could not even meet us on the lawn at the of Cuba's complex system of governing Hotel Nacional, the city's most prominent tourism was necessary to pull the country bodies: since 1961, when the Bay of Pigs lodging, as most Cubans cannot approach through temporary economic woes, woes invasion and the collective anger of recent· the building unless accompanied by a forwhich, as they never failed co point out, eign tourist. None of us knew how co were exacerbated by the US blockade. As ly departed exiles appeared to threaten the revolmionary government each neighbor· respond to Noel and Ali's quiet indignation usual, I had little way of knowing whether at being barred from the hotel. Generously, the politicians actually believed what they hood in the country has been organized into a CDR. they did not ask us to. In fact, they apolocold us.

The director of the CDR in Vifiales gized for the social hindrance that they We spent most evenings at the guestwas an elderly woman in bright blue shores posed. On our second-co-last night, a few house, where we spoke continuously about and tank top. She energetically explained of us finally convinced Noel and Ali to let the credibility of the information we to us chat her CDR is mostly concerned us pay their way at a club. Inside, they received each day. At times, I wondered with block parties ana guard duf}'· shyly out-danced us and translated for us how much of the support for the Everyone who is able must patrol at least when a stand-up comedian rattled off jokes Revolution was contrived-a requisite for

N

Branford presents:

~~~ one night a month-women from n:oo PM to x:oo AM, men from I:oo to 5:00AM. "They look for people who aren't from here and ask them what they're doing," she explained, adding that in a small community like theirs spotting outsiders wasn't rough. Glancing around at our pale-faced group of Reef-clad Yalies, I decided that they must have turned off the alarm bells for the evening.

The festivities marking our visit began abruptly, but before joining in the revelry, I had a few more questions for the director.

She had said membership in the CDR was voluntary, but I wondered if there was anyone in the town who had opted not to join.

"No, everyone joins when they are 14,'' she explained with a kind smile.

She mentioned that elections for leadership of the CDR are held every three years, and anyone can be selected. "How long have you been the head?" I asked. She beamed proudly: "42 years!" "She is always re-elected by everyone," a lady standing nearby added. Finally catching on, I smiled obligingly.

dent journalists, economists, and alleged dissidents were rounded up from across the island by the authorities. The second week of April, several of them received sentences ranging from 20 to 27 years in prison, often preceded by trials of no more than a day.

The headlines reminded me of my friends at the University of H avana, and what they had told me about the difficulties faced by students who refuse to march in governmen t-organized demonstrations or join Communist youth organizations, and about their isolation as intellectual dissidents.

"You hear things from other students," Noel had rold us, "about small protests in outlying towns or the deaths of people who tried to escape through Guantanamo-but nothing is ever reported."

For myself as well, any lesson on modern day Cuba would be fragmentary at best. I was, after all, still in their country; I just happened to be able to pay the entrance fee.

Iris Chang author of

The Rape of Nanjing: the Forgotten Holocaust of WW/1 Branford Common Room

4:30 April 29

UBA HAS CONTINUED TO ELUDE ME

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even after my return to the US. Back in Miami, I visited the office of the Cuban-American National Foundation and wandered through Little Havana, Miami Cubans' capitalist reincarnation of the island they left behind. Here the vitriolic anti-Castro rhetoric, the signs condemning the Clinton administration for returning Elran Gonzalez, and the monument to the "martyrs" of the Bay of Pigs invasion struck a familiar chord. The numerous daily articles in the Nuevo Herald about human rights abuses and righteous exile efforts to stop them, cemented the argument I had often heard defensive Cubans spout: Americans don't have a lock on objectivity either.

Still, the news that emerged from Cuba in the following weeks stung. Within days of our departure, dozens of indepen-

APRIL 2003

Paige Austin, a freshman in Davenport College, is research director forTNJ.

27

Art After Auschwitz

By Kathryn Malizia N Areopagitica MILTON FAMOUSLY WROTE, "Who kills a man kills Catholic, ere. In this context, a personified text assumes an identity in keeping with our notions of group classification. Hungerford a reasonable creature, God' s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the perceives this way of thinking. and reading as peculiarly postrnodeye." These words, from the poet's invective against 17TH-century ern. She weighs its consequences in works as diverse as Sylvia Plath's England' s oppressive censorship laws, elevate books--or at least, poem "Daddy," Art Spiegelman's Maus and Philip Roth's The "good" books-to something far r------ - - - - - - - - - - - - -----, Human Stain, as well as in the theoretigrander than repositories of know!cal musings of critics such as Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Jacqueline edge, something with a "life-blood" and a pulse, something that, like us, Rose. Hungerford debunks the precan die. There is something appealing, sumed benefits of multiculturalism, even seductive, about the idea of a text namely, the assumption that a person's as a living being. It invites a kind of The Holocaust of Texts experience possesses value because of his identification between the reader and or her identification with a specific cuithe wrinen word chat holds all the ~u....ta,.. ..,..,.,...,.11iatm ""'YH...,-rd rural group-asserting that this mindser promise of a new life, a new person to is both absutd and restrictive. She discover. applies this thesis w ith penetrating In her book The Holocaust ofTexts: astuteness, despite occasional lapses into Genocide, Literature, and the dense and at times impenetrable Personification, Amy Hungerford, an ruminations that characterize so much assistant professor of English at Yale, posrmodern literary criticism. But if The explores the implications of texts as Holocaust of Texts is typical of contempersons, or, personified texts through porary literary theory in this respect, the the lens of post-World War II literaquestions it raises are anything but ordinary. ture, in particular, literature that deals with the legacy of the Holocaust. Over Hungerford demonstrates the disthe last three decades, Hungerford torting effect of personifYing texts most claims, critics and readers have begun effectively in her examination of critical to regard books as embodiments of reactions to Plath's "Daddy." The poem's individual lives and even entire cuispeaker, a n unidentified woman, cures. Viewed in these terms, the invokes Hider's persecution of Jews as destruction of a text becomes not sirnan analogy to her relationship with her tyrannical father, explicitly identifYing ply murder, but genocide.

Hungerford rejects this "conflaher suffering with thar of Holocaust viccion of text and person," but nonethetims. Sin ce "Daddy's" publication, readers and critics alike have decried Plath, who is neither Jewish nor a less acknowledges chat the personification of texts has shaped our contemporary understanding of identity, genocide, and the ability Holocaust survivor, for what they believe to be a shameless exploicaof language to represent these concepts adequately. Regardless of cion of a highly personal event. These critics demand a biographical whether a novel addresses these issues directly, how we perceive it is connection between Plath and her writing, one that effectively limits the scope of her poetry to the scope of her personal experiences. colored by our insistence on identifying people as members of specific racial or cultural groups-Jewish, black, female, Indian, Hungerford disagrees: With a nod to the New Critics, she rejects

I

THE NEW JoURNAL

I

The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification

by Amy Hungerford (University of Chicago Press, 2002) pp. 232. biographically influenced readings, eschewing the question "Who was Sylvia Plath?" in favor of "Who is Plath' s writing?" With the poem freed from the constraints of authorial biography, the text itself reveals answers to identity questions-it is "both a Jewish survivor and a woman" because its language identifies with both of these groups. The poem has been elevated to the status of personhood only to be constrained by the narrow categories of "Jewish" and "female." The poem' s personification invites the same restrictions that biographical critics imposed on Plath. As soon as it is perceived as a person, the poem loses its autonomy as a work of art independent of its author.

But if personification limits Plath' s poerry in undesirable ways, as Hungerford suggests, the consequences are even more dire when the text presents itself as non-fiction, as in the case of Art Spiegelman' s Maus. Maus, a Puliner Prize-winning comic, chronicles the survival story of Spiegelman' s father, using animal heads ro depict human characters, with mouse heads for Jews and cat heads for Nazis. For Hungerford, this kind of representation is predictably repellant. Nor only does it define individuals along cultural lines via animal heads, bur these cultural identities perperuate the legacy of the Holocaust. "All persons in the present," Hungerford writes, "are in effect identified in relation to the Holocaust ... rather than in relation to some other source of identity in the present." AU of Spiegelman's characters, regardless of their personal experiences, are portrayed in terms of a single historical event. The author depicts himself as a mouse, nor because he is Jewish, but because he is the descendent of a Jewish Holocaust survivor. The past permeates and defines Spiegelman's present, identifying characters with a kind of chilling determinism and suggesting that we will never step out of history's shadow. The story of Maus, then, becomes as much Spiegelman's as his father's. He, too, is a survivor, and the text of Maus is an embodiment of that survival.

Surprisingly, Hungerford finds support for her rejection of identity politics in the fiction of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Whereas critics have traditionally discussed these authors in terms of their status as Jewish Americans, Hungerford, in a radical reinterpretation, heralds them as champions ofliberated identity. In her view, their fiction breaks free of all constraints imposed by culture, family, tribe, religion, or history. To cite one example, in Hungerford' s reading of Roth' s novel Th~ Human Stain, Coleman

APRIL 2003

Silk, a black man who passes himself off as a white Jew, manages to "resist identity categorization in a very particular way." By concealing his culrural background, Silk maintains a vital separateness, making his identity "secret'' and "absolutely particular." Given the prevalence of Jewish protagonists and the emphasis on ethnicicy in Roth' s novels, Hungerford' s claim that Jewish ideptity, and in a larger sense, cultural identity, is secondary to "personal particularity" seems at best refreshing and at worst contrived. The notion that we are all at core dissimilar is appealling, but its presence in Roth' s fiction still seems somewhat dubious.

Ultimately, Hungerford argues convincingly against the seduction of the personified text. The quality that makes it so appealing-namely, the desire to experience another person, another iden- . tity, by experiencing the text-is exactly what constrains both postmodern literature and literacy theory. When the personal is b.ound by the restraints of multicultural categorization and the legacy of history, identity and capacity for creative thought suffer. By rejecting these narrow limitations we embrace a freer, albeit lonelier, conception of ourselves. We can never truly share the experience of another living being, whether that being is conceived as a person or a personified text, because in the end, we are unique, "particular all the way down." In exchange for relinquishing our fantasy of the living text, we are given back our imagination.

1111

Kathryn Malizia, a junior in Branford Co/leg~. is ~ditor-in-chiifo[TNJ.

29

"E

very game you play, every night you stay, I'll be watch ing you." Twen tyfo ur hours a day the police-the Connecticut State Police, that is-sends out a similar message to terrorists. Since July 2.001, the department's Bell 407 has patrolled the skies watching for terrorists while keeping an eye on civilian activity.

The helicopter is a monument of American strength, power, and extravagance. For the bargain price of $2..3 billion, Connecticut taxpayers have stocked up on terroriststomping technology in a single helicopter: Trooper One. But fear not New Haven, this one chopper show is equipped with some of the freshest gadgets in aviation technology.

Steve Sampson, a Trooper One pilotin-training, knows all the jewels hidden in this terror-fighting machine. Its wire strikers come in handy during drug busts. They are crucial for slashing those low-hanging copter-flipping wires strung over marijuana fields. The helicopter's two cameras offer a cure for the "It Wasn't Me" syndrome common to hit-and-run drivers. The craft's Forward-Looking Infrared (FUR) scanner once spotted a man standing half-submerged in a &eezing river, only a few hundred feet from where he had hidden a stolen (and subsequently totaled) car.

Sampson explained that with the help of a Global Positioning System, state police once tracked down the abode of an "intoxicated gentleman" who, in a modified game of whack-a-mole, would "pop out of his house and shoot off a couple of rounds," then disappear back inside. The helicopter, using its infrared scanner identified the man's fmal popping place, enabling ground police to promptly restrain hirn.

Armed with the necessary equipment, Trooper One is an eager watchdog with a sharp bite-but not always a good eye.

Shortly a&er September n, 2.001, the blue and yellow helicopter investigated a suspicious case, in which two men in a law office parking garage were spotted carrying "sniper rifles." W ith the help of a FLIR scarin~r and a Microwave Data Downlink system, Trooper One used the men's body heat to pinpoint their location. Troopers stormed the garage, startling two cameramen with tripods in their haJ?.ds.

Another red herring led Sampson to a "very suspicious" un-lit boat floati ng underneath Gold Star Bridge at midnight.

Sampson alerted the Coast Guard, who discovered that the boat's occupants were just a couple of guys out fishing. The helicopter has helped bring down suspicious aircra&s, intercepting six so far. Sampson explains that, similar to a highway patrol car, the helicopter signals for the offending era& to land, then follows them down to earth. Unfortunately, in every instance so far, the pilots have been unaware that they were flying in restricted areas. And one has to wonder: Do terrorists respond to hand signals?

With the inception of the war in Iraq and the heightened terror alert, the helicopter has turned its attention to hunting terrorists, and has given a back seat to the unrelated "flood of calls" received by the Aviation Unit. Everyday, Trooper One performs a routine infrastructure check. It zooms over power plants, the U.S. Navy submarine and military base, Pfizer's research facility in Groton, airports, major cities, and bridges, primarily the Gold Star Bridge in New London and the Pearl

Harbor Memorial Bridge in New Haven.

As a part of "Operation Liberty Shield," Five National Guard Black Hawk helicopters have joined up with Trooper One to patrol Connecticut skies twenty-fo~r hours a day.

Despite the helicopter's recent success in tracking down a drug dealer on the run and locating two lost nine-year-old girls via the signals from their toy store walkie talkies, the community has expressed some doubt as to whether the helicopter is an efficient use of state money. With extensive budget cuts, $1,000 per flight hour seems excessive, given the lack of terroist threats averted thus far.

However, many states look to Connecticut's aviation program as a prototype. Nevada has already purchased a helicopter similar to Trooper One, and the ¡ New York Police Department has also shown interest. Sampson welcomes to the station citizens who want to learn more about the mysterious helicopter they see flying around. He feels it is important to inform people about exactly what their money is buying. When someone gawks at its extremely high price, Sampson has a ready reply: "You can't put a price on life."

Though the unlucky cameraman who was mistaken as a sniper might not agree, the pilot has a good point. For the rest of us, when the terrorist war"'rung reaches super-bright bunter orange, we will be able to look into the sky and feel comforted to know that Trooper One is watching over us as we mow our lawns.

Concha Mmdoza is a freshman in Branford Colkgt.

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taxpayer.

Yale University Supports Downtown 'Yale is a major sponsor of the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Shubert Theater, Market New Haven, and Town Green Special Services District.

Yale students hwe tutored more than 500 Timothy Dwltht Elementary School students

lndudlna those pictured here. This n- add~ tlon to the school was deslaned by volunteers from the Yale Sdtool of Architecture.

11te annuallnwmational Festival ol Arts and ldeaslnN-Haven supported by Yale Unlwrslty brinp tens of thousands of NHawners toaether on thec.-tl.

11te rwtOVatlon by the HiR o.wlopment Corporation olthis prwvtously bliahted buildina is one of many neiahborftood projects Yale has supported.

Yale University: Contributing to a Strong New Haven www.yale.edu