Volume 37 - Issue 1

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PUBLISHER

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Michael Addison

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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Paige Austin

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MANAGING EDITORS

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Sarah Laskow, Flora Lichtman

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DESIGNER

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Brian W'llyda

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PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Eve Fairbanks

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PRODUCTION MANAGER

Adriane Quinlan

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CIRCULATION AND SuBsCRIPTIONs MANAGERS •

Ann Lane Rick, David Zax

I WEB EDITOR

Concha Mendoza

Mmzbm and Dirtctors Emily Bazelon • Joshua Civin • Peter B. Cooper Tom Griggs • Brooks Kelley • Danid Kurn-Phdan Jennifer Pins • Henry Schwab • Elizabeth Sledge David Slifka • Fred Strebeigb • Thomas Strong John Swansburg

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Advisors Richard Blow • Jay Carney • Richard Conniff Ruth Conniff • Elisha Cooper • Julia Preston Lauren Rabin • Steven Weisman • Daniel Yergin

Frimds Steve Ballou • Anson M. Beard, Jr. • Blaire Bennett Edward B. Bennett, Jr. • Edward B. Bennett III Paul S. Bennett • Richard Blow • Martha Brant Jay Carney • Daphne Chu • Josh Civin Jonathan M. Clark • Consrance Clement • Elisha Cooper Peter B. Cooper • Andy Coun • Masi Denison Albert]. Fox • Mrs. Howard Fox • David Freeman Geoffrey Fried • Sherwin Goldman • David Greenberg Tom Griggs • Stephen Hellman • Jane Kamensky Brooks Kelley • Roger Kirwood • Lewis E. Lehrman Jim Lowe • E. Nobles Lowe • Martha E. Neil Peter Neill • Howard H. Newman • Sean O'Brien Julie Peters • Lewis and Joan Platt • Josh Plaut Julia Preston • Lauren Rabin • Fairfax C. Randal Stuart Rohrer Arleen and Arthur Sager • Richard Shields W Hampton Sides • Lisa Silverman Elizabeth and William Sledge Adina Proposco and David Sulsman • Thomas Strong Elizabeth Tate • Daniel Yergin and Angda Stem Yergin

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THE NEW jOURNAL

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Volume 37, Number I September 2004

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Extreme Canvassers Liberal Yalies peddle patriotism door to door.

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During the Breaks

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American Idol draws out the story ofa New Haven woman.

by Z vika Krieger

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Points of Departure Essay: A Good Start by Elisabeth Houston •

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Shots in the Dark: A Store Gone By by Daniel Kluger

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The Critical Angle: Fighting Words by Paige Austin

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Endnote: Trading Places by Flora Lichtman

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THE NEW JouRNAL is published five times during the academic year by THE NEW JoURNAL at Yal~ lnc., P.O. Box 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT o652o. Office address: 29-45 Broadway. Phone: (203) 4321957· Email: mj@yale.edu. All contents copyright 2003 by THE NEw joURNAL at Yale, lnc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editor in chief is prohibi ted. While this maguine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible fo r irs contents. Seven thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed &ee to members of the Yale and New Haven community. Subscriptions are available to those outside the area. Rates: One year, s18. Two years, s32. THE NEw JouRNAL is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. THE NEW JouRNAL encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 3432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Allleuers for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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SEMPT EMBER 2004

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For readers outside the liberal college student world, the magnitude of 2004ward, the program described in .our cover story, may not be immediately clear. Joseph Lieberman made a similar trip to a distant state to register voters after graduating from Yale forty years ago, after all. But to those of us on campus today, witnessing the transformation of some of America's most strident young critics into foot soldiers championing the country's political system is nothing short of astonishing. As a magazine about Yale and New Haven, The New journal sometimes runs up against student disinterest in the events and people around us. Concerned with the · most profound world issues ·of the day, Yale students often miss the value of discovering the part of the world most accessible to us our own backyard. It is perhaps this tendency that leads this issue's Essay writer to call university communities "insular" and.bemoan their lack of alternative narratives .

Too grand in our designs, we forgo engagement in our community and action on its behal£ It takes exploring the relatively small world of Yale and New Haven to reveal the huge potential of these four years.

-The Editors •

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THE NEw JouRNAL

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End stitch THIS MONTH, the final needle will be threaded, the final yard of fabric cut, and the final Singer sewing machine sold at the landmark Horowitz Bros. store whose facade has dominated lower Chapel Street for 76 years.

Modernity has slowly hemmed in the business; over the next few weeks, the entire stock will be liquidated during a massive sale, in an attempt to have everything carried out by the few people in this city who still sew. The "everything must go" mindset is particularly traumatic for the Horowitz family. Unlike the goods, the customers and the employees seem unable to "go" to cope with Horowitz Bros. being cut from the cloth of downtown New Haven.

For Julia DiLullo, the closing marks the end. of an era. After 42 years working in the "always hectic" custom and drapery department, she knows that it's time to close. Her quiet tone divulges the truth behind her apparent reconciliation with this milestone.

She is an old woman, neatly dressed in muted khaki tones and wearing eyeglasses, sitting amongst prints in cottons, poplins and linens.

"I don't even take vacation that's how much I like to be with people," she says. "Every day here is special."

The store, managed by cousins Arthur and Leonard Horowitz, is divided into makeshift departments, each presided over by a cautious saleswoman with me eye of a loving mother. There are bundles of fabric in plaids, solids, stripes, holiday prints. You name it, Horowitz Bros. has it. The notions department has a colorful collection of trim in all styles and sizes. "I came as a baby," Rose, another saleswoman, laughs. Thirtyseven years later she still looks forward to coming to work here every day. :'The customers are crying. They don't want to see us go. A lot of my regulars have asked for my phone number." But even Rose admits that SEPTEMBER 2004

the industry has changed dramatically in the past few decades. The "buy it, sew it, wear it the next day" shopper simply doesn't exist anymore. Art Horowitz is keenly aware of the reasons his "home" has to close and knows he can not do anything to fight it. "It used to be very prestigious for young girls to sew prom dresses, back to school clothes," he says. "But the industry began to atrophy in the late 1970s."

Many of today's students can't even imagine a time when picking that savvy and stylish first-day-of-school outfit meant donning a beautifully hand-stitched original, not something bought on a recent trip to the mall. The closing of Horowitz Bros. is a symbolic farewell to the once wide-spread domestic pleasure of sewing, but also, to a generation that took pride in originality and "innovation in a way few Yale students today can understand. The store is closing, and the habit that kept it in business is disappearing.

In fact, this family-owned and -managed retail business is one of the last in its predominantly extinct sector. The original Horowitz brothers were Russian immigrants who left a life of peasantry to pursue their American dream. They first started peddling fabric on Grand Avenue in 1916. ~ Today, their legacy is carried on by cousins Leonard and Arthur Horowitz. Leonard's brother Phillip recently passed away. The trio had received accolades for its loyalty and personality by The New York Times and local papers • like The New Haven Register and The Advocate. Art Horowitz attributes their reputation for excellence to "perseverance." Yet, as a salesman, he's a self-proclaimed softie: ''I'm not a hard nose. I'm one of those who walks away," he says. Geraldine Marchitto laughs.

She managed the Hamden store and has been working at Horowitz Bros. since she was in high school more than three decades ago. She knows that his reputation and long-standing commitment to Art's work are proof that being a softie all these years has gotten the job

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While many of the employees plan to retire~ Maria Acampora, a smiling, middle aged woman, who has been working with Art for 30 years, will go job-hunting. As she descends slowly in the famous 125-year old elevator that is · a trademark of the store, she says with a sigh, "I don't think I'll find anyone as good to work for." Paul, the authorized Singer sewing machine dealer who has been behind the counter for 22 years overhears her extolling Art and calls out, "He's the man."

The departure of Horowitz Bros. will leave a gap in the patchwork of downtown New Haven. The famous storefront sign that passers-by say has been there "forever" deserves preservation in a local museum, as a · reminder that economic development should not bulldoze the past, but incorporate it into the future.

-Romy Drucker

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Virtually Friends ON AUGUST 7, one Yale freshman was faced with a serious problem, one that could only be solved by her closest friends: "I have the worst case of the hiccups right now ... I hiccuped in my living room and it actually echoed," she wrote desperately. "It's bad. I tried sugar, water, holding my breath ... I'm all out of ideas. Anyone know of any effective remedies for the hiccups?" Her plea did not come in the form of an urgent telegram or a nervous phone message.

Instead, she posted her urgent inquiry on an online "blog" community, LiveJournal, a forum reserved for Yale freshmen. The site can be accessed by anyone (http://www..

LiveJournal.com/ community/yale2008) and is currently used by ~37 devout members. A Yale acceptance letter is a prerequisite to join 5

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the forum, though anyone can post comments anonymously. But the majority of the thousands of entries, which date back to early April, are the product of a core of about thirty LiveJournalers. The website is a social

their upperclassmen peers.

For most Yalies there is a key rule of facebook etiquette: you only add people you know. That's

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for classes?" and of course, ''Anyone know of any effective remedies for the hiccups?"

With only 144 members representing a freshman class of about 1 ,300, the LiveJournal website only affects a small percentage of the '08 social scene. But even if freshmen aren't involved in the LiveJournal community, they may be members of Xanga a similarly formatted website that links 44 '08ers; and of course, there's thefacebook.com, a website connecting the perfected profiles of over 2800 Yale students and alums roughly 700 of which come from the class of 2008. There are more freshmen on the facebook than seniors, and the majority of the youngest class has far more "friends" than

it cards)." Though one may interpret Farago's . satire as protective of thefacebook.com tradi. tions, one sophomore agreed, noting how reckless friendadding had ruined ·. · :·c·-~>'o·.· .. ' m ·. ..·.. .·. . the "character" of the site, or at least damaged its purpose-to provide a real mapped out network of social groups and to '

forum in whfiilch . users post pro 1 es ·· why littered with accomplishments, share a few racy pictures (on one thread, a current freshman poses seminude in a genie costume), and "add" new friends to their biosthe freshman presence on thefacesoming social networks. book.com this summer was so shocking. As of August 3, one freshman had The freshman LiveJournal has practical . listed 142 friends, a stat that easily placed him uses as well. Journalers have asked their classwithin the top five percent ofYale's "popular" mates' advice on good summer reads, orgaelite. And the freshmen didn't just "add" nized a massive panlist for future students friends. They messaged. And they messaged who plan to stay sober, and sought out other people they didn't know. Frespmen with simhomosexual students to eliminate anxiety. ilar musical interests messaged me to comBut the majority of the site contains the outment on my taste, while more attractive pourings of angsty freshmen, who, unsure of friends of mine were messaged simply based what to expect in the fall, use the entries to on their good looks. Liz Carlin, a sophomore, raise the questions all of us surely confronted was messaged by before we packed off to school, such as: "How will I get my keys on movseveral freshmen life.journaJ"'com before they arrived ing in day?" or, "How do we register

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on campus. "It was nice but kind of weird because sometim~ they didn't even send me a note to say why they were asking to be my friend," she commented later.

This summer, in the '~bout Me" box of his thefacebook.com profile, Senior Jason Farago ranted against the freshman facebook presence: "Can somebody please explain to me why over two hundred 2008ers are already on this overloaded rickshaw of a website? And how do you all already have dozens of 'friends' have you met these people somewhere? And MAJORS? (And not just any old majors at least half of you seem to have been pre-approved for EP&E, as if Seyla Benhabib were doling out high-interest cred-

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helping students stay in contact with friends.

By "adding" people they had never met, freshmen weren't using thefacebook.com to cement relationships but to form them.

"Lots of freshmen seem to know each other already," observed Yusuf Samara, a Davenport freshman counselor, as he took a break moving boxes into Welch. Steven Abramowitz, another counselor, agreed, · adding that, "They used the facebook and the LiveJournal to ... arrange [their] suites."

Melissa Gonzalez MC '08, one of the most dependable members of the LiveJournal community, claims that her social life has already benefited from her Internet addiction, '~I just actually ran into a kid who I met on the journal," she gushed on her first day at Yale. "It's a lot less intimidating, even if you just talk on the Internet or the phone or something. At least it's something."

But even Gonzalez needs some face-to-face socialization.

That's why a group of LiveJo-u.rnalers ended up hanging out by the steps of Bingham on the night of August 27, by piles of torn up gift boxes and an enormous birthday cake. The party was for two LiveJournal members, both born on August 27, who had faced the prospect of a lonely birthday in a friendless town. "If it wasn't for LiveJournal, I'd be in my room, doing nothing," one of the attendees noted. Turning to a boy in a plaid shirt and glasses, a freshman girl noted sue-

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cinctly, "Hi, we're friends. We met on thefacebook.com, " and the two shook hands. . .

If anything describes the site's diverse members, it's pride. Many students are more than willing to share both their personal essays and their personal lives. One freshman wrote a chipper entry regarding online chatting, "I was up early doing homework one day, and usually my buddy list is empty because everyone else is asleep.... However, now that I've added all you Yalies, there's a couple of people online at 5 in the morning too. I've never seen anybody go online that early!" And in one entry, nearly the entire community posted their college essays. With 51 individual college essay posts, the brief skim through the enormous list would give anyone a warm pang of pity for college admissions officers, who are used to lines like, "His simmering poems bloom brilliantly within the shadows of the room as he sparked a revolution in my soul."

The website also provides a space to say things one probably wouldn't say in person ..

"What's so bad about elitism?" one boy wrote, "Elitism is just realizing that you are better than everyone else." A few days later, in a brief description, one freshman noted, ''I'm the greatest person in the world. Thank you."

In response to entries like these, one joU.rnaler wrote, "I wondered, 'if these kids are all going to Yale, then they must be smart... [but] some of the things that have been said here have been completely bullshit!!'" As Jonny Dach noted, "People are not the same in real life as they are on LiveJournal, where they can choose what facet of their personality to express, where they can exaggerate their merits and hide their flaws. So when they say they 'get to know' each other online, really they're getting to know these fake versions of each other."

The question is how this "faking" will affect students' social lives when they come to school. Do these students have more friends, or fewer real friends? Whatever the answer, SEPTEMBER 2004

whether this is a community of friends, or isolated individuals connected only by a fragile wire, they are certainly there to help each other: within eleven minutes of posting, one freshman's hiccups had been cured.

'Monday-Saturday 7-7 Sunday 7-2 603 Oranae Street 'lfew t]-{aven, err' 06511 (203) 787-5919

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Busted Stuff TOWARDS THE END OF EACH SEMESTER,

Yale students find their residential colleges . overrun with bulky blue bins. Outside every entryway door stands welcoming a sturdy round drum, with a note stuck to its belly that announcing: "Spring Salvage Donate Your Stuff!"

The SWAP Still Worth A Penny'-program bridges Yale with the New Haven charity and non-profit groups. This Yale Recycling program was developed to collect detritus and donate it to those in need. While this might seem akin to Dwight Hall charity work, reuse of household items, as a form of recycling, is overseen by Yale Recycling office.

The head of Yale Recycling, Cyril J. May (aka CJ), works out of a cluttered office in the basement of Welch Hall, where a huge poster declares "Saving The Planet Is Not An Option." Reflecting on the SWAP program, · he explains you have to consider people's psychology, as well as their physical ability. The challenge is to find convenient locations for students to drop off refuse so that doing so is not a chore, but a part of their routine.

In spring 2003, the Yale Recycling office approached the Residential College Masters to ask if they would permit collection boxes _ to be placed in front of every dorm entryway.

Silliman and Morse agreed. The experiment was a success, and the following year the idea was approved by the Council of Masters.

Students usually bring a variety of objects to the collection sites: clothing,

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books, CDs,- lamps, bookcases, .c liairs, couches, microwaves, telephones, computer accessories and printers. In May; 2003, Spring Salvage donations totaled 8.54 tons of material, most of it clothing, which was worth about $7,300. Beneficiaries included Coordinating Council for Children in Crisis, New Haven Catholic Youth Ministry, Yale Child Study Center, New Haven Christian Health Center Inc, and Hill Health Center.

The SWAP program also picks up used stuff from students, faculty ~d offices on and off campus and delivers it to local non-profit ' organiza~ions. In the year 2002-03, over 19.5 tons of cl&thing, furniture and other material . ' were excha.p.geq ·through , this. pragr~rn. The estimated. market value of thes~items· ( calcu.r lated using rates .for used-goods o.q ebay.com • or at Salvation Army and othet;·.thrift stores;amounted to nearly $17,600. ·..

•. · · Judging by the numbers~ sWA~ seems to be a success .. But some Yale stuqents...have gotten a different •mpression. While 4umping their 4onations · into bins, they 'have· been ' approached by homeless people asking for the objects· directly, explaining that in tWo days they would have to pay for the same goods at a store like The Salvation Army. May admits the problem exists; he explains that there are two reasons why people may not be able to . pick up the free stuff. First, he . cites campus security issues. Only Yale person~el and guests have access ~o residential college campuses, and outsiders are subject to potential arrest for trespassing. "That's an official Yale Police matter, and we have nothing to do · aboutjt;'' 5ays May. · The second problem is time constraints.

Yale is in the 'middle of the city~ the University has too much waste to send to the dumpsters, and May cites of pressure ~o get -" everything done instantly., There's such a rush, it's difficult to allow people to stop by and take a look at the stuff. They often want to go through an entire bag of clothes, May explains. His staff can't wait when they need to load the Yale Recycling van and move everything away.

After the end of spring term, Yale immediately begins preparation for commencement and reunions, including a clearing of all the residental college courtyards. Yale Recycling doesn't have the capacity to sort through and organize the tons of collected material and then offer direct services to the people. And May believes it's better left in the hands of The Salvation Army and other major charity organizations, which already have well-established facilities for dealing efficiently with large amounts of used goods.

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Of course, if people manage to get past campus security before the bins are cleared, they are free to take things. Besides, . May adds, this year "we donated ten bags of clothing directly to homeless shelters."

SWAP is brought to you by Yale Recycling's little truck and a dozen student employees and volunteers. In the future, Yale Recycling hopes to better coordinate with the Custodial Services and also find an: extra truck to move and deliver donated material.

They will try to place the bins out early enough during reading period to avoid the "insanity" of the last few days. To let everyone know that anyone may pick up what others leave, the bins will carry signs that say "Take · It Or Leave It., That means, if you want to · assure that your shoes go to a charity, perhaps you shouldn't throw them into a Yale Recycling collection bin. ·Ultimately, Yale Recycling is concerned with reuse, not with charity. Officially, only the University mandates recycling; Connecticut state law doesn't require it. But May feels strongly about his responsibility.

"It's really hard to throw away _all the good things, when there are so many groups New Haven that would benefit from it., •

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-Arafot Razzaque

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asked, her voice getting edgy.

"Oh shit, you know what it is?" I said.

"Clair Kwon is probably her American name.

That's why you can't find her email address."

"Riiiiight ... " Sunny said, nodding her head in approval. "So right." I felt a sort of pride for my brown, Jewish, multiracial mess of a mind; it had found the answer to a question that, ethnically, was not my own.

The phantom Clair Kwon was actually or perhaps was "also" Bo Jung Kwon.

"It's like, you tell people your name two thousand times and they don't understand it," Sunny told me, adding Clair's rightful name to the list. "You tell it to them again, and again, and they don't understand. And after awhile, you just don't want to bother. You want to be understood." · I couldn't help thinking of a PBS documentary about race-relations at UC Berkley where a chestnut colored woman put her hand over her heart as she told a Chinese American woman that it made her sad that the other woman introduced herself as Helen, and not by her Chinese name. .

I echoed to Sunny what the Berkley woman had said years earlier~ "But it is so complicated because it is also like assimilation. This loss of culture. But you know, you just want to live your life as a normal person not complaining about everything.'' don't know if this conversation happens in the white community. I don't know if it happens in all minority communities, or in black communities, or in mixed communities. But I ask myself these questions, and I wonder if there is something about my status as a racial and religious "minority," about being an outsider, that makes me understand the tension of being Clair and being Bo~ung; of being Sunny and being Suhn Hee; of being a part of America, and being outside of it.

During my time at Yale, I have encountered a normative Yale narrative. Like every community, Yale has exceptions to this narrative, students who understand and appreciate that others' experiences are different from their own. But we still live on a predominately white campus where the issues of race and THE NEw JouRNAL

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class seem to run parallel. In my freshmen suite of six, I represented one of two of the public high school graduates; the rest had attended prestigious and costly private schools like Phillips Andover and Horace Mann. An Arizona native in my class pointed out that there were more students in the class of 2007 from the Los Angeles private school Harvard-Westlake than there were from the entire state of Arizona. insularity of university education is part of a larger story about a closed culture. Many students at Yale come from · homogenous upper-middle class communities in which parents drive Volvos and listen to National Public Radio. In high school, students attend posh summer programs where they appropriate culture and pad their Yale application by traveling to underdeveloped Southeast Asian countries for a few weeks before heading to Europe for the rest of break. For many students, coming to Yale is a natural continuation of a privileged life.

Surrounded by the fragrant summer blossoms on the Cross Campus green, eating delicious organic foodin the Berkeley dining hall, there is an underlying assumption that this is normal, as if all people walk barefoot on luscious grass, or listen to John Kerry pontificatingtwenty feet away.

I too glide easily into this Yale narrative of privilege. Many of these anecdotes tell part of my story. When I was fifteen I traveled to Thailand for four thousand dollars to engage in a "cultural exchange program," which amounted to absorbing whatever culture filtered through the plexiglass windows of our air-conditioned van. My parents both drive Volvos and listen to National Public Radio.

I've been to Europe on family vacations. My father buys organic chicken. But I also deviate from the norm: my father is black, my mother is white and Jewish, and they have both taught me to seek out a world beyond my own.

The bourgeois bohemian lifestyle that defines "life" at Yale is not what all ofYale has experienced, however. It is certainly not what all .Cultural Connections participants have •

experienced. Their diversity coupled with a strong sense of community makes CC an important program especially in contrast to the more typical Yale experience. Cultural Connections challenges the concept of the "normal" Yalie who frequents Urban Outfitter's and lands her summer internship at CNN because of her mother's friend. n contrast, for the five days of CC, multiculturalism is the normative narrative on Old Campus. A Chinese-American freshman recounts a conversation that transpired during Cultural Connections the night before. "We were all sitting in LanmanWright courtyard,'' she explained. ''And it turned out that one girl's mother cooked lobster the same way my mom did with the entire lobster whole, eyes open and everything and she was Latina. And then this other girl came over, and she was Korean, and she was telling us how her parents cooked.

And it was kind of nice us all talking about how our parents cooked, even though we had different backgrounds.'' Later in the week I got to know two other CC participants, both Chicana, from poorer parts of Los Angeles, who attended public schools where students of color are a majority. " I went to a school that was not like a lot of what Yale is," Cinthia told me as we lounged on Hammonasset beach. "No one really took school seriously, everyone was sleeping -all the time, no one really cared." It is a testament to Yale, or at least CC, that Cinthia blended easily for those five days into the CC family, and · felt comfortable on a campus where women and minorities were once few and far between. .

I spent a long time talking to Celeste, another CC participant. She is a lanky, spunky, earnest girl from the Boston suburbs with a background is much like my ownshe grew up twenty minutes from my hometown. ."It was hard because it was mostly white, and I was the only black girl in most of my classes. And most of the black kids considered me white, and I always said, "No, I'm black,"" she explained. She continued, more optimistically. "But it's really great to come

here and be around so many minorities who care about learning. I've never stayed up all night talking with so many minorhies about all these different things, and not felt like a loser or felt white." sometimes worry that the CC freshmenthese brave, vulnerable kids will feel the isolation that I felt, and sometimes still feel, because I don't relate to clubby Yale, Yale of ·creamy white skin, pearl earrings, and private schools; Cinthia asked me one night during CC, "Is this what all ofYale is like?" I didn't know what to tell her, because most of Yale is not like Cultural Connections. "People will be nice, you have to put yourself out there, look beyond the surfaces," I told her, glossing . over Yale's gaping problems in an attempt to allay her fears. But I think, as simplistic as my answer was~ it rings true. Yale is not only its surface. It is ·not only a place where the Bushes and the Beineckes are educated, but also a place where a queer Chinese-American girl can wear a provocative t-shirt, where Cinthia can feel at home, and where honest conversations can abound.

Some names have been changed.

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293 IN MANCHESTER, ·· New Hampshire, Abi Vladeck and three other Yale students .pulled into a Sunoco . 'station and asked the attendant to put ·.twenty dollars on the meter. As Abi pumped, '·the attendant leaned against the station's wall · and told Abi casually, "You know,. Hess has ··. cheaper gas. I shouldn't tell you that, but gas . so expensive. . '' IS Abi thanked her, and the attendent con·tinued talking, complaining about the bad ·economy, the Bush administration and her general discontent with the state of the country.

As Abi finished pumping her gas, she ·asked the girl, "Are you registered to vote?"

When the attendant answered no, Abi ·sprung into action. She called for pink sheets and yellow sheets, hurling information at the surprised girl about when, where and how to •register, asking her to sign a card pledging to · · 'vote in the next election, and telling her that only by voting could she make her opinions count. Abi and her companions drove away satisfied. When they told me the story later, ·they called it a .. drive-by canvassing:· UST OFF HIGHWAY

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bi, Emily Friedrichs, Jared Malsin, • Alison Duffy, and I were spending the in New Hampshire registering · people whose votes we hoped would be cru·cial in the corning election. Abi, who graduated in May with a degree in Literaque, led our team. Emily and Jared, both New Hampshire natives, were also political veterans, who dedicate much of their time to teaching, writing and working for social change. Alison and I were less likely canvassers. Alison, a physics major, was about to head to France for the year to teach English.

And I, a self-proclaimed bookworm, had been galvanized into political action for the first time, determined to direct my disillusionment with my government into more than just another angry New Jersey ballot.

Emerging each morning from our head. quarters in Emily's basement, we would drive around the state west to Concord, up to the North Country, down to Nashua on the Massachusetts border to find our "turf": •

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neighborhoods targeted for their consistently low voter turn-out. We planted ourselves on the doorsteps of unregistered voters. As five students in a small New Englarid state, we hoped we could reach, at best, a few thousand people. But as one node in the 2004ward network which sent 150 college ·. students, over 55 of them Yalies, to 14 swing states this summer we hoped that we could significantly increase voter participation before November 2nd.

2004ward grew out of a daily Yale spectacle: broadly themed, half-serious conversations being tossed around the dining hall like salad. Most of these seedling ideas are swept into the trash with dinner's leftovers, but, unlike so many others, the conversation which bore 2004ward took root in the minds of three veteran activists.

2004ward's founders, Ana Mufioz, Ben Healey and Alek Felstiner, voted for the first time in 2000 and were freshman at Yale during the controversy following George W. Bush's election. Ana remembers thinking that the whole election was a fluke, but, when in 2002 Republicans flooded into the other branches of the government, she perceived the country coursing swiftly towards conser• vattsm.

Both the 2000 and the 2002 election saw record lows in voter turnout. For Ana and like-minded students, this mass of nonvoters almost half the country was a source of both frustration and hope. These students knew that the margins of conservative victory had been narrow, and if more people had voted, the results could have been different. In 2002, over brunch in Branford College, their conversation turned to combating apathy. Ana recalled, "We said, 'We · wish we could just go door to door and say, it's not about partisan politics, you're being fucked!"'

In their search for the most effective means of influencing the election, Ana, Ben and Alek returned in the fall of 2003 to the crux of their idea going door to door and talking politics with American voters. Their original goal was to fmd fifty Yale students to train in basic grassroots organizing, trans.

forming them into what Ana calls "conduits for better messaging." Enthusiastic college students could initiate "respectful one-onone interactions," informing non-voters, through canvassing and phonebanking, how their vote could influence their lives.

From the beginning, the founders of 2004ward looked beyond New Haven and Connecticut. Although their activist backgrounds taught them the ins and outs of the political Connecticut turf, they were tempted by unknown territory especially the swing states. Connecticut is, after all, a solidly Democratic state, and, as Alek explained, national progressive groups wanted to fund election work on embattled ground. As 2004ward expanded into a core group of experienced organizers, Alek, as the on-campus coordinator, started working on their first challenge: "to convince people that the most important· thing people of our generation could do right now was work on the election."

Students didn't need much convincing.

At the first 2004ward meeting before winter break, over fifty people showed up twice as many as expected. Alek and a few others met personally with everyone who expressed interest, finding out what motivated these recruits and trying to get them to commit.

Meanwhile, before winter break, Noah Do bin-Bernstein, the outreach coordinator, made a few phone calls to students at other schools. The response immediate and overwhelming took him by surprise. By spring term, he was spending three hours a day on the phone with students from over a dozen colleges, all of them clamoring to participate.

Many of the potential participants came to 2004ward with a single-min~dness of purpose: getting President Bush out of office.

And, originally, the recruitment efforts worked off the steam of anti-Bush anger.

Posters on bulletin boards around campus asked, "Do you want to defeat Bush in 2004?" and e-mails promised, "This summer dozens of Yalies will work in ~ng states to help take back our country." · "The initial frustration does come from seeing someone like Bush in office: corrupt,

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self-serving, dangerous," said Ana. "But when you start to speak about how that happens, it becomes so much broader. Democracy is such a precious thing; it could be so much more alive in America."

And in the search for national partners, Ben Healey decided that the project's focuswould be on democracy, not on Bush. At one time, Ben was talking to America Coming Together, . a George Soros-funded organization, which would have let students happity Bush-bash all summer. But in the end, the groups that he chose to work withUSAction, AssQciation of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and the Immigrant Workers Freedom Summer all focused on non-partisan voter • • regtstratton.

These three organizations could all provide the basics for 2004ward: $1500 stipends for each intern ($2500 for those on financial aid) and access to localized offices and staff.

Through these smaller affiliates, the students would settle in a specific location, learn about the region, and find out where to find progressive, unregistered voters. 2004ward's relationship with these organizations, especially USAction, allowed Ben to set up a bank account and goad each 2004ward-er iiuo fundraising. As summer approached, 160 students sent out letters to family friends, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and asked for money.

Donations accumulated, and, in addition to the $1500 stipend, 2004ward periodically sent out its own checks, helping its members pay for rent _a nd food.

The tight budget made finding housing difficult. In May, the Arizona team was still unsure of where they would be living, and in Missouri, three Columbia students ended up renting an apartment that also served as the office of a local dominatrix. Our New Hampshire team was lucky: 2004ward helped us rent a car our beloved "PimpMobile," a huge.white Chrysler and Emily's father generously offered us his basement.

By spring term exams, the conversation that Ana, Ben and Alek had over two years earlier had turned into an unending dialogue.

Logistics for the summer were being frantiSEPTEMBER

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cally worked out, fundraising letters were being hurriedly written and last-minute teams were being formed. Meanwhile, the three founders were scrambling to finish their senior theses. But at last, after the students' USAction training session one Sunday morning in May, the stage was set. The extreme canvassers were about to be released. e Abi, Jared, Alison, Emily and I, the 2004ward New Hampshire team worked for New Hampshire Citizens Alliance, a local affiliate of USAction. The Citizens Alliance, based across the street from the shiny gold dome of the New Hampshire capitol building in Concord, has fought for 25 years for "social, economic and political justice for all." Our team arrived on the brink of a new challenge a campaign to register 6,500 new voters in a state where the law makes voter registration nearly impossible. Unlike every other state, in New Hampshire, only a handful of people the city or town clerk, the supervisor of the checklist and a few volunteers are deputized to register voters. Anyone who wants to vote must visit these select few, who are usually only available from 8:30am to 4:30pm on weekdays: inconvenient times for the average unregistered voter, who works a low-income job with long hours. But we had aplan. .

"Hi," I would say, after knockin._g on a door. "My name is Sarah and I'm a volunteer with New Hampshire Citizen's Alliance.

We're a non-profit, non-partisan organization. I'm just going around your neighborhood because right now we're really concerned with fighting for health care in the state." One in ten New Hampshire residents has no health insurance, anc:J. many risk losing their current coverage as small businesses are pummeled by sky-rocketing rates. Every band of 2004warders had its local cause, and ours was health care.

The strategy for hunting down and bagging unregistered voters scripted a series of attacks, always focusing on issues rather than voting. To those who opened their doors, I fust presented a petition demanding accessi-

ble and cost-efficient health care from the local legislators. According to Carin, our • • • • • expert orgamzer, votmg 1s a very senslttve matter, especially for the guilty non-voter.

Asking people about voter registration directly was a sure way to get doors slammed in our faces. In neighborhoods filled with families dependent on the ever changing state health care system, most people eagerly grabbed our clipboards and signed. And as they were Hlling in their names and addresses, I introduced "the second part" of our petition a yellow voter pledge card. Always emphasizing the connection between politicians and issues, I would explain that the only way we (normal people) could influence them (politicians) was through voting.

I tensed up at this moment, poised to · launch into new arguments if refused, ready to smile and dig deeper if accepted. Fighting to keep one foot in the door or trying to make the thirty seconds while they signed as memorable as possible, I wanted to spark some passion for civic participation in the few minutes that I had. . Some would sign our cards without thinking. Some would preface their signature with a comment like "Well, I'm registered already, but I guess I'll sign." (These were usually lies. After every canvass, we would check our signatures against the voter rolls. Every time, sixty to eighty percent of the people to whom we had talked were unregistered.)

These c.ards asked nothing more than a commitment "to register and vote by November 2nd, 2004," but to us they were pure gold. We put the names of already registered voters aside, saving them for basic "get-out-the-vote" efforts in October. We focused instead on unregistered voters, calling to inform them of extended hours, surveys about issues important to them, and mailings with voter information. The voter registration plan demanded that we follow up with each unregistered voter five to seven times. We would stay in the Concord office until nine or ten at night, slowly making our way through lists of names and numbers, talking to each person for five or ten minutes •

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about their healthcare problems, their hatred of politicians or their loQ.g hours at work.

• Sometimes we coordinated other events: a vOlunteer-staffed phonebank, a presentation • at• a homeless shelter, a booth at a public hausing fair. When we ·got tired, we amused ourselves dreaming up extreme organizing challenges. Challenge #1: After being airdropped into a strange city, naked, you have thirty days to organize a popular revolt. Short of such adventures, we did propel a few people to their town hall to register because we had shown up on their doorsteps. true non-voters, those who have proudly avoided the polls and politics, tried to escape registering by a more direct route. They'd simply announce "I don't vote," mumble that they're not interested in politics and begin to close the door. At the b~inning of the summer, I would ask "Why not?" partially because I just wanted to • ·lll!derstand. They would offer excuses they di<:ln't know about the candidate's positions, nothing would change, they didn't have time and I would rebut with information.

But by the end of the summer, my friends • . ~d I had stopped asking why. Too many peopl~ just didn't want to cast a ballot or as one woman told Abi, before she slammed the door, "I don't vote vote." : NHCA employed organizers who were supposed to "cut turf" for canvasses, according to som~ formula involving voter turn-out, population density and first-hand experience.

But as we became more independent and the organizers busier, we strategically picked streets to walk by piling in a car and driving around looking for "our sort of people," who generally lived in small, multi-family houses, on crowded streets and in need of paint jobs.

We found some of the best streets this way, as well as a street that I walked for two hours to come up with only two signatures, one from a y.roman who was clearly registered and the other from a landlord who told me outright • he was going to vote for Bush. When summer and its heat set in, a certain malaise marked every canvass; apprehensive of a long, pointless canvass, we would loiter at the ubiquitous •

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Immigrant Workers Freedom Summer, orgaDunkin' Donuts (we measured out our lives nizers in Arizona would spend three days a

by Dunkin' Donuts drive-thrus) for fifteen minutes, half-an-hour, waiting for the sugar · · week registering voters, then part of the group would hike out into the desert, bringto propel us out into the sun. ing basic humanitarian aid food, water and The key to any good canvass was finding medical aid to illegal immigrants. one good conversation. We all loved talking At the beginning of August, voters in to felons. In New Hampshire, unlike many .

Missouri's primary, in addition to electing a other states, felons can vote, even if they're sheriff and state senator, could vote to amend still on parole and probation. Most felons the state constitution to ban gay marriage. aren't aware of this right. In Manchester, Jared _ Participation jumped from 22o/o the previous met "Dan from Ward 5," a coffee-addicted, year to 40% of eligible voters. The local guitar-playing felon from New Jersey, who 2004ward team, meanwhile, was working wanted to help us throw a block party in his with ACORN to organize around living-wage neighborhood to get people excited and issues and though most were less than involved in politics. The only trump to meetthrilled by Missouri's embrace of the anti-gay ing people like Dan was canvassing a whole marriage amendment, they would take civic group: Alison was invited into a house party; engagement where they could get it. a mother sat me down at her kitchen table 2004warder Mischa Byruck didn't worry too and convinced her son and his break-dancing much about his newly registered voters allyfriends to stop spinning around her living ing themselves with the President because of room and come talk to me; Jared, in his this issue. "Everyone says God bless you here. record-breaking canvass of 28 pledge cards in There are churches everywhere," he said. But three hours, would run into groups just sitin his experience, these religious beliefs do ting outside and enjoying the day, happy to not sway voters away from their Democratic hear what he had to say. In public housing, it leanings they would vote on the economy seemed that every single door would open to more than any other issue. a family who needed and wanted information In order to convincingly represent issues about health care, who hadn't made the conto people long-accustomed to dealing with nection between their lives and their politics them, the 2004ward teams had to get to but who understood and wanted to register. know the communities in which they were We had no way of knowing what effect living. Most participants chose to displace these encounters had. Though we spent every themselves from their home territory and day talking and thinking about voting and registering, each conversation was only two or tackle unfamiliar sections of the country, only three minutes long. The questions always to encounter, to their surprise, distinct culture shock. remained: did people understand how important it was that they vote? Would they regisAlthough Ana had migrated from "midter in the end and, if they did, would they Atlantic" Maryland to the Northeast for colvote the way we wanted? Despite our day jobs lege, she was not prepared for the difference as non-partisan advocates of civic participashe encountered in Arizona. "First of all," she tion, we still cared deeply about the outcome said, "every single building looks new. It's really hard to distinguish neighborhoods of the election. from each other, like you can in the Northeast. Everything is one level. Even more cross the country, other 2004warders ·wrestled with the blessings and curses surprising to her was the resonance of the local issue the Arizona 2004ward clan had .ot issues-based organizing. The issues taken up: immigration. "I don't think I ever varied, each one shaped by the local landscape. In Florida, students petitioned and colreally understood }:low the biggest problem in lected signatures to put an initiative for a liva place can permeate a society in an entire ing wage on the ballot. As part of the way. Everyone here has something to say

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about immigration."

The vaguely defined regionalism in America, it turns out, may actually mean something. "To be Midwestern," Mischa explains, "I think it means to have more of an understanding of the populist, rather than the intellectual history of America. Nature can kill you and there's this huge awareness of space. You never have trouble parking. It's amazing! You know why? There's lots of space. " If in New Hampshire we couldn't find parking, we could at least easily find cheap alcohol at the state-sponsored liquor stores along the border with the state's southern neighbor, "Taxachusetts." Just a short threehour drive from New Haven, New Hampshire is a world of its own there is a reason the Libertarians decided to migrate here. The state motto, "Live Free or Die," becomes a mantra, "free" meaning mostly "free from any tax increases." In the last election for the governorship, Craig Benson, widely known for his corruption, won by a landslide against an opponent who dared to propose a state-wide income tax.

At times, the confusion of being a stranger in one's own country brought on a sort of identity crisis. Ana was surprised to find that, instead of a Yale student or a member of the middle class, in Arizona she felt most like "a person from the Northeast."

"That stereotype on my part," she said, "makes me understand why we have red states and why we have blue states."

"I think these individuals will influence campus politics with great strength, an understating of direct action and organizing and the nuts and bolts of electoral work," said Healey, himself a New Haven alderman.

As the five New Hampshire 2004warders left our adopted state at the end of the summer, we promised NHCA that we would soon return, with reinforcements. And that no matter what, we would be there on election day, fighting to get every last progressive in New Hampshire into a voting booth. Back at Yale, the campus is already abounding with students asking each other how their summers went but, until November 2, we won't be able to fully answer that question.

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ince no overall numbers exist for how many new voters 2004ward volunteers registered this summer, their real contribution is difficult to measure. Many of the recent graduates will continue with their electoral work in some form until November, while some undergraduates intend to put their extreme canvassing skills to work on weekenqs. Though the 2004warders will probably never fmd themselves all in the same room, they now share a basic unity of skills, and the founders think they have achieved what the wanted. The effects, they hope, will be felt on campus as well as across the nation.

SEPTEMBER 2004

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one night when I told Lisa that her new hairstyle inade . her look like Fantasia, one of my favorites on .American Idol. Every week Lisa has a different hairstyle: sometimes it is cropped short in curls, other weeks it is parted down the middle with long extensions. That • day her hair was slicked back in a shiny wave just like Fantasia's. .• Lisa would not have it; she thought Fantasia sounded like Macy . Gray, and she hated Macy Gray. "La Toya is going to win, hands •·:::..· down," Lisa said as she scooped a spoonful of curried chicken onto my ·'""' dining hall tray. The long line of students behind me kept me from arguing with her we would have to settle it later.

The familiar orchestral crescendo of the American Idol theme music fills my entryway every Tuesday night at 8 pm, calling friends and passers-by to my common room. My friends and I make the same mistake every week of bringing our textbooks to the couch, pretending that we can cram in some reading during the commercials. The howling, cheering, and random exclamations from our common room audience prevent any work from getting done; those who live nearby but choose not to indulge in the weekly pop culture ritual know to retreat to the library during Idols weekly -slot. This. week, however, I forewent the sacred routine in order to catch a ride home with Lisa so I could watch the show with her.

"Oh .m y god. Yesterday I saw that cop that pulled me over a few nights ago for running two lights. I pulled right over when I saw him.

He was so. fine!

He said, 'You got some time for me?'

Damn straight I . . . got some time for you. I'll fucking make time. So I gave him my number. " The three guys laugh .

Lisa pulls up to the curb, and the guys get out. She yells after them .

"You got Barbershop, and you got Leprechaun 2, don't you? That's why I'm going to stop lending out my fucking movies. My memory is gone. I can't remember shit today from yesterday!"

A few blocks later, we pull up at Lisa's house. There are no lamps on the street, so I can't really see the rest of the block.

Inside, the living room seems out of proportion. The ceilings are low and slope downward. A big chunk of one of the fiberglass wall panels is missing. An oversized couch and an enormous big-screen TV take up the majority of the living room "Yeah, it's a big fucking TV for a small fucking house!"

Before I get to see much else, Lisa throws her purse on the floor, jumps on the couch, and turns on the television. I take a seat at the other end. In the few minutes we have before the show begins, Lisa half-jokingly mentions the allegations of racism being hurled at the show in light of Jennifer Hudson's recent defeat on the competition.

But before I have time to weigh-in on the issue, Lisa excitedly begins to extol the virtues of "sister" La Toya. Though she gets angry when I begin to advocate for Fantasia, we both agree that "white-boy" John Stevens is really annoying, and we can't wait for him to get kicked off the show. Satisfied, Lisa turns up the volume in time for the first performance of the evening. · During the commercial break, Lisa goes to the upstairs bathroom, and I take a look around. The entire house is decorated in muted shades of cream, maroon, and gray. Along the wall behind the couch is a long mirror in the shape of the New York City skyline. Next to the enormous television are two huge speakers stacked on top of one another. Beside those are endless piles of DVDs bootlegs, Lisa explains later. A crooked lamp in the corner casts an awkward shadow on the house plants, three hanging and two potted. Along the top of the television are prom pictures in plastic frames painted in...glitter.

When the American Idol theme music comes back on, Lisa sprints back down stairs. She jumps on to the couch beside me in time to catch the next song. It is forbidden to talk during performances, so I wait for the next commercial break to ask more about her life.

DISCOVERED OUR MUTUAL OBSESSION AT DINNER

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........ daughter of a retired fire fighter and a school teacher, Lisa Johnson was born in New Haven in 1961, the second of three sisters. They belonged to Mount Zion Seventh Day Adventist Church, and her parents ran a very strict household. "On Friday, when the sun went down, we went down," she recalls~ The way she explained -it to me, the partying started as Lisa and her sisters got older. Following the lead of her older sister, Lisa frequented the clubs of downtown New Haven, especially the trendy Blue Angel Cafe. She brags now that she was never carded because she always looked older. "Always."

Though Lisa did well in high school "I graduated with 3 As and 2 Bs" she decided to enroll in the SPACE program for students entering the workforce rather than college. She alternated between two weeks of school and two weeks of work as a salesperson at Macy's. "I was officially a floater, but I always ended up in the Men's department." ich, Zeus, and Carl all asked Lisa for rides home from the dining hall tonight. The music in the car is blaring, so I can't quite the conversation. Zeus got a restraining order on his exgirlfriend Shanice. Rich convinced Zeus to buy a car that he couldn't afford at a police auction. Rich was screwing around with Shanice.

Rich's wife lives in Brooklyn. And Carl is just laughing at both of them .the whole time. Lisa finally turns down the radio.

tevie Peters was "a bum." He lived in "one of those raggedy-ass apartments in the projects," where the "elevator didn't w.ork, the halls smelled like pee, and homeless were people sleeping in the halls." '· •

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"I always said I wouldn't talk to people from the projects," Lisa tells me. "I was dead wrong." After graduating from Hillhouse, Lisa worked at Circuit Wire, an electronics manufacturer on the corner of Whaley and Orchard. Stevie used to hang around the store while Lisa was working. "We started dating," Lisa says with a schoolgirlish grin.

Lisa moved in to Stevie's apartment after a few months; then she got pregnant. The baby, Angela, was always crying. When Lisa took her to the hospital, she discovered that Angela had a legation of the left coronary artery.

"And that's when all the drugs and alcohol came in to my life.

I thought it would take away all the pain. I was so stoned, I couldn't feel nothing ... I needed something to shield me. She was my first child, and the doctors kept repeating that it was a live-or-die • situation. That was a scary damn place to be at." · In the meantime, Lisa became pregnant again and gave birth to Stevie Jr. Though Stevie and Lisa initially argued over where the babies would live after Angela recovered, Stevie was soon arrested for larceny and sent to jail. "He quit his job because he wasn't making enough money for drugs. So he started boosting that's what we call stealing," she explains.

After living with her Grandma Ty for a short time:"she was a great babysitter" Lisa enlisted for welfare.

Together with her two children, she got her own apartment at 1440 Whaley Avenue. She stayed at home, "living off the state," taking care of her kids as they went to kindergarten. When the landlord sold Lisa's apartment, she moved in with her sister.

By that time, Stevie had been released from prison, but within a week, he was sent right back for another larceny. When Lisa heard this, she vowed, "That was the end of his ass." But when arguments between Lisa and her sister's husband forced Lisa to move out, Stevie was the only person she could turn to.

Since being released from jail for the second time, Stevie had moved . in with a new girlfriend, Katrina, with whom he had another son, also named Stevie Jr. After a

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brief stay with them, Lisa finally decided to register as homeless at the • city office.

After receiving emergency ninety-day housing at a hotel in Old Saybrook, Lisa qualified for the Rental Assistance Program (RAP) which helped her find an apartment. Two years later, she was able to move to a house on Winthrop Street. It was there that the selftitled "New Haven Drug. Factory" was established.

When some of Lisa's sister's friends came down from New York, she offered to put them up in her new house.

Bringing small quantities of drugs with them, they started "a nice little business" along with Lisa. Within a few weeks, it turned in to "an all-night, 24-hour a day, non-stop drug factory. I would have never made that amount of mqney in a lifetime."

At the same time, Lisa started dating a man named TJ; it was what Lisa describes as "the quickest relationship ever." She had seen him around New Haven. "New Haven is small, and you get to know everybody, especially from your age bracket." .LJ" soon became pregnant with TJ's baby, but two months after giving birth to their daughter Lauren, TJ died of cancer. "He was a good guy. Never drank, never did anything he could have been perfect."

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Meanwhile "the business got bigger and bigger." Pay-offs · to the police department gave them advance warning · of any raids, which became . more frequent as their operation grew. The high volume of police raids caused Lisa to lose her RAP enrollment, and in turn, her house. But by that point she had another boyfriend "The Asshole"with whom to move in. She continued her drug trade from a neighbor's house, though she was pregnant again.

It was almost two years after Quinn's birth when Lisa heard a knock on the door. Another .customer, Lisa assumed. She went into the bedroom to fetch her usual bags . of weed and . coke. As she approached the front of the house, the door burst open and twelve policemen rushed in, surrounding her with cocked guns. She dropped the drugs and threw her hands up in the air. She recognized one of the cops; she thought he must have been there before, undercover. She knew it was over: "They had me."

out late all night." When the money ran out, Lisa knew it was time to go back to ·New Haven.

After living with her sister for a month, Lisa moved in across the street frqm her parents. Lisa's father called in a favor from a childhoo[ friend who managed one of the dining halls at Yale. "I started i11 September 1998, no application, no nothing." When Lisa's aunt did in 2000, she left an empty house in New Haven. Lisa moved right i11, and tha is where we were sitting today. i

·n the next week, Lisa had a meeting with the Housing Authority.

"I've been waidng nine years for them to call," she tells me during the commercial break. But she says she won't accept. "I just want to hear them offer it to me, and I want to be able to turn it down in their face," she cackles. Last week, she went with Carl to "scope out" all the public housing facilities that the Housing Authority works with, like the apartments on Grand Avenue and in West Hills.

"They suck. Have you seen those projects? They're the ones with those guys hanging -around outside with their trunks open, blasting their music. I may live in the ghetto, but at least it's the quiet ghetto.

And since its mostly old folks around here, I never have no problems.'

But Lisa admits that all this talk of housing did convince her t~ look in to Yale's Homebuyers' program. "The ceilings in this place are too low. Everything is falling apart. With all the kids moving in and out and in and out, I need more rooms," she explains. "And I want t~ finally own my own place."

The phone rings. It's Stevie Jr., or "Steve-o" as Lisa refers to him He works at Stop N' Shop down in Milford he's calling because just got off work. Lisa has been trying to convince him to apply for job with the fire department. "I was even going to pay the hundred dollar application fee for him," she tells me. "But he just smokes weed all day."

Lisa excitedly reports that her oldest daughter Angela is applying to go to nursing school in Hamden. She is already a mother of two.

"I told Angela not to have kids yet," Lisa says ruefully. "I guess she has bad luck with men, too. I see it already. She's going through the same bullshit I went through. I just hope they don't go down the same path I went down. I try to push them in the right direction."

next time I go to Lisa's house, the radio is off and I sit in the front seat of the car. Carl is in the back talking about the "flat-ass hos" that Rich and Zeus took down to a club in Stamford last weekend. "No-ass-at-all," he explains.

Since John Stevens wasn't kicked off American Idol last week, we had agreed to watch the show together again this Tuesday to relish what was sure to be his pending departure.

As we drive through the campus, I point out a friend of mine walking on the sidewalk in front of us. She asks me his name. "Josh."

A wide smile spreads across her face.

"Call out his name when we pass him," I suggest. .

'Tm one step ahead of you," she says. She slows down next to · him, yells out his name, and waves. The confused look on his face throws her in to a fit of laughter as we speed down the street.

Though Carl lives only three blocks away from Lisa, it takes us a good ten minutes to get home after we drop him off because of all the one-way streets.

"You used to be able to zoom right down the street. But because of all the drive-bys and the drug busts, they changed up the streets, put in stop signs, traffic lights, dead-ends. Slow people down some."

The sun is still out when we arrive, so I can see the house .better now. It looks like a lunchbox with a roof- no porches, no balconies.

It is all white, with four square windows. Two cars, both with deflated tires, sit in the driveway beside the house. A cat greets us at the tattered screen door.

"Charlotte, I know you peed all over the rug. I can see it on your face."

The house seems a lot bigger than I had remembered it. I take my usual seat at the end of the couch.

ohn Stevens finally gets voted off the show that night. When hi! name is announced, Lisa and I begin to clap excitedly in unison. AJ the commercials start, we give each other a familiar look and laugh.

Some names and locations have been changed.

...

ail was just like a dorm, like college," Lisa offers without a smile.

"They even called them dorms over there." She had the key to her own room, and could wear her own clothes "six shirts, six pairs of pants, six of everything." Though sentenced to six years of prison, Lisa was released in just one to a Work Release program in Waterbury, Connecticut. She lived in a h01 1se run by Catholics and got a job doing housekeeping at the Marriott. Eight months later, she was on parole.

"I didn'-r know nobody in Waterbury, which is the way I liked it, so I couldn't get in no trouble." She moved her kids there, except for Quinn, who stayed with her father. After they moved in with a coworker named Wayne, Lisa quit her job and -began "going out, staying

Zvika Krieger is a junior in Silliman College.

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to conjure ominous images of popular affection and nostalgia for the USSR by describing tourists in Prague who enthusiastically bought up Soviet memorabilia, or a magazine editor who rejected an article of hers, calling it "too anti-Soviet." "Still, it is hard to imagine that contemporary Western readers are really all that keen on Stalin, the Gulag's greatest proponent, or nostalgic for the golden days of Soviet mastery. Genocide, Power's chosen subject matter, is even less controversial: ·the very word bespeaks moral repugnance and atrocity of the highest magnitude.

No student of 20th century history requires her fastidious accounts of torture, death and destruction in Germany, Cambodia or Rwanda to realize the horrifying nature of these incidents. Indeed, the remarkable pattern the two authors set is almost certain to be broken by next year's non-fiction Pulitzer winner simply because the century contains few other tragedies that could match these. .

Just because these events are well-known, however, does not mean that they are wellunderstood. Both authors amply demonstrate that general popular awareness does not do justice to the scope of these atrocities.

Though she hesitates to give aggregate numbers, Applebaum estimates that 28.7 million people pass~d through Soviet-forced labor camps, several million never to emerge.

Despite the obvious untold injury to their society, many people in the former Soviet Union are hesitant to galvanize widespread remembrance and recovery. A Russian author Applebaum quotes wrote in 1989, "And the killers? The killers live on ... " Power shines her light onto better known instances of genocide: Armenians in Turkey; Jews, Poles and others in the Holocaust; Cambodians by their own Khmer Rouge regime ~ Kurds in Iraq; Bosnian Muslims in Serbia; and Tutsis in Rwanda. Still, these tales of systematic killing that she shares are by no means fully assimilated into popular consciousness. Her book's most poignant claim for the necessity of memory comes from Adolf Hitler, who asked his military chiefs in 1939, "Who today still speaks of the massacre of the Armenians?"

After conceding the value of education, however, the authors diverge starkly in their .aims. Power, examining the response of the "United States to each large-scale atrocity, is .able to make specific recommendations for /uture policy and political response. :Applebaum, in contrast, deals with how peo·ple create and respond to terrible circumstances and with what that tells us about "the

darker side of our own human nature." She does not hope to deter future tragedy; rather, she writes, "This book was not written 'so that it will not happen again,' as the cliche would have it. This book was written because it almost certainly will happen again." Her approach, heavily reliant on memoirs and anecdotes, illuminates the human side of tragedy without making any promise of future improvement. f Applebaum's purpose is not exactly heartening, Power offers little better.

Though she celebrates the efforts of journalists, politicians, government officials and others who pressed for action in the face of unfolding genocide almost always to no avail Power suggests that a clear conclusion can be drawn from how rarely these advocates surfaced. The consistent failure of the US government to respond to genocide, she argues, is not a failure at all. It is the logical and deliberate outcome of present political value system, in which politicians and citizens share a common set of priorities: suffice it to say, "It's not genocide, stupid."

The magnitude of this inaction, Power shows, is as shocking as it is immoral. In part because she deals with better known cases of genocide than the Gulag, her readers may be most startled not by her descriptions of each tragedy but by her revelations of just how much US politicians and-policy-makers knew about each, and how little they did to respond.

Again and again, Power finds that those at the highest level of US government knew what was unfolding and failed to act.

President Jimmy Carter, remembered as one of the greatest proponents of human rights to occupy the White House, discounted Khmer Rouge atrocities because of the US's burgeoning alliance with China, a KR ally, and the desire to check the expansion of Soviet influence. The Iraqi government's use of chemical weapons against entire Kurdish villages in the late 1980s was overlooked because Saddam Hussein was simultaneously waging war · against Iran, a more established US political foe. In every case from the Armenian to the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides the US was hesitant to respond, eager to preserve its delicate neutrality, its freedom from moral implication and most important of all, its lack of involvement on the ground.

More sympathetically, Power explains, policy-makers, like many civilians, simply had trouble conceiving of torture, murder •

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and destruction taking place on such a large scale. Some even recognized this personal inability. Faced with testimony from a Polish diplomat who had seen both the Warsaw Ghetto and the Belzec death camp firsthand, US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter responded by telling him, "I don't believe you." When the young man protested, Franfurter explained, "I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you. " Given such incapacity, Power's narrative, crafted in careful detail and hundreds of footnotes, is invaluable.

The greatest strength of Power's argument is her suggestion of a litany of "soft responses" to genocide that do not require military intervention. Power argues for public denunciations, action in the UN, and suspension of a nation's "economic perks" with indignation and an enraged sense of what might have been.

This approach, however, is weakened by Power's overall conclusion: the US government from the president down to the congressional and State Department high brass:rarely wants to deal with the problem of unfolding genocide, unless massive public or . diplomatic pressure has made it impossible not to. The reason, Power declares, is not lack of information. As a State Department Middle East specialist during the Iraqi killing of Kurds recalls in the book, "The facts were available, but you don't get the full facts unless you want the full facts."

or, one realizes after reading Gulag, will the facts always be basis enough to stop unfolding terror. Because the Gulag spanned several decades and entangled countless government ministries, industries, and prison outposts, classifying it under the traditional rubric of international crimes is difficult and deterring it may well have been impossible. As the Supreme Court justice said, conceiving of killing on such a broad scale is almost beyond our capacity for imagination. The case of the Gulag, as Applebaum describes it, pushes one's sense of befuddlement almost to a breaking point. An off-color joke, a neighbor's baseless suspicion, or knowledge of a foreign language was enough to merit over a decade of hard labor in unbearable, if not intentionally murderous, conditions. Whole cities and industries were built on the backs of slave laborers. Yet ' at almost no point did the Soviet government operate death camps like those made infamous by the Nazis, images of which THE

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inevitably come to mind at the very mention of the word "genocide." The boundaries between intention and neglect, murder and mismanagement, are thus hard to delineate in this case. Applebaum is careful to point out . that in the USSR, many of the shortages and cruelties of camp life were merely amplifications of the reality in the so-called free world outside. Even the paradox of promoting love of country and party while working people to near death was merely an extension of the often "ludicrous" gap between Soviet propaganda and Soviet reality. The blatant disregard shown for human life within the Gulag, also., seems like an amplification of a broader Soviet phenomenon.

In the face of such diffuse and wellentrenched tragedy, perpetrated by one of the world's great superpowers, Power's soft solutions seem unlikely to have had much effect.

Applebaum thus faces a different sort of challenge not of corp.paring cases and making inferences, but of gleaning a lesson from a unique, harrowing, and complex saga.

At best, Applebaum's narrative admonishes her readers not to worsen the situationfor, though it seems unlikely, the Gulag's observers and inhabitants did indeed contribute. In 1945, with the Treaty of Yalta, both the US and British governments agreed to repatriate all Soviet citizens in territories under their control despite clear evidence of what would happen to them in their homeland. Those who protested were tricked into returning or deported by force. As a result, tens of thousands of men and women who might have escaped instead disappeared into the Gulag a chapter of the Soviet travesty that Applebaum says subsequent Western scholars have been hesitant to discuss.

Prisoners and civilians added to the Gulag's countless layers of sadness and irony, by shunning, robbing, torturing and degrading one another. Applebaum weaves these saddening anecdotes of these crimes with more heartening ones, contravening the toocommon retrospective tendency to cast all victims as innocents. Her story is less crisp, cohesive and constructive than Power's, with less indignation and fewer "what-ifs" to prevent her reader from drowning in the darkness of self-destruction permeating the entire 600-page work. Power, it seems, draws a road map towards improvement, while Applebaum offers no such plan. But then, even if a road did exist out of the Soviet Gulag, where could that knowledge be applied today?

pplebaum, for one, is not without a suggestion. Her most resonant appeal comparison is with present day North Korea. In the midst of the Gulag narrative, Applebaum writes that 400,000 people are estimated to have died in North Korean "punishment centers," which today hold an estimated 200,000 prisoners, many working as forced laborers. These centers, little noticed in the West, are eerily reminiscent of the Soviet Gulag. Power's study, in contrast, lends itself as a lens to a less diffuse present-day atrocity. When she spoke at Yale last April, Power warned her audience about the "text-book" case of genocide unfolding in Darfur, where the Sudanese government has armed Arab militias now responsible for the murder or displacement of over a million ethnically black Darfur residents.

Of the two authors, only Power makes clear what tools may be deployed in an effort to halt tragedies like those in Darfur and North Korea, the definitive histories of which cannot yet be written. Applebaum, instead, elucidates the humanity of the victims, strained, cracked and contorted by the inhumanity of their situation. The authors' voices meet again only in the plea that runs through both texts. They ask readers to wrestle with the sheer scope of these horrors that seem to defy belief: believe it, their books demand, believe it. ·

U N I V

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by Flora Lichtman .

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ove-in day always makes me nostalgic. I remember how I felt when 1 first passed through the blue pearly gates of Yale University. The mystifying sensation of walking into Commons, thinking, "Where am I? And how did I find myself a part of this 300-year-old brain club," is one I won't soon forget. When I decided to go abroad, I felt a similar sense of bafflement, but without the tacit reassurance that I had been admitted.

I took the semester off to go to Italy and found · myself in an equally foreign place, coping with a humbling cerebral downgrade.

Part of the problem was that when I absconded from New Haven, it hadn't occurred to me that I might want to study Italian before arriving on Italian soil. (.Though even if I had, I think Italy still • 'Yould have gotten the best of me.)

Instead, I would go to the bakery and walk out with six loaves of wheat bread when all I wanted was a muffin. I went to the pharmacy for decongestants and left · · with skin-lightening creams. My graver • • • • pronunctatton errors were even more mstructtve.

When I thought I was exalting a half pound of prosciutto crudo, a bunch of bananas, or a phone card from the local tobacco store as perfetto, I learned I had been saying something slightly different. Instead of telling the local shopkeepers that their products were perfect, I was telling everyone in my God-fearing town, from small children to old ladies, that each one was himself perfetto.

As my lingual slips pushed me closer and closer to the fringe of society, I began to do all I could to fade into the mosaic. It wasn't that I couldn't speak Italian (although I couldn't); it was that I was deeply afraid that someone might know I couldn't speak Italian. Even the deafmute persona was preferable which is why the bus ride from -my home to my job was usually the most angst-ridden 17 minutes of my day. There were a few tricks that I learned to avoid parlay-ance. First, s~cure the single seat up front, at all costs. Second, ~ways harbor headphones in case it looks like someone may want to talk; and third, the last resort, pretend to sleep if someone does ask a question. I practiced these measures religiously until I met Filippo. . He was exactly my age. He was slim and neat and there was something intense about him. I first saw him my second day on the bus. I remember thinking that it was surprising to find my husband-to-be so quickly but I knew we would be good together. Our friendship progressed slowly: I was terrified of ruining the fantasy I had created about him, and so I stifled coughs, swallowed sneezes, and avoided anything else that may have provoked conversation. Then one day he asked me

my name. And despite the fact that I barely knew how to answer, he kept at it. Strangely, . he seemed to only be marginally upset that I understood ·only a fraction of his loud, slow, Italian monologues. We sat next to each other every day, and he spoke to me with infinite patience as my Italian slowly improved.

It was difficult for me to speak to him, not least of all because our conversations were far from private. The other passengers seemed acutely aware of our interac·. tion and they were impossible to escape. . . . . ·-· The same old women boarded everyday, ' . . .,.. always traveling in packs, never paying, and frequently casting us quizzical looks.

The smoker with the old-w<?rld teeth, who got on near the Eurospin and exchanged a kiss with the old man up front, raised her eyebrow when she passed us. The high school girl seemed more disturbed by our conversation than by the comments from a man at the front, which seemed to me at least tonally lewd.

Filippo and I spoke daily for weeks. I learned that his favorite book is Harry Potter (which is also his favorite movie); he likes to make lasagne a! forno; he enjoys eating Neapolitan Pie, and he loves taking pictures. He learned that my favorite book is Portrait ofa Lady, I like to make quiche, eat gelato and go fishing. He was my first real friend in Italy, and I frequently wrote letters home describing what our children might look like.

But despite the Italian lessons, my obliviousness had not quite disappeared. The first time I saw Filippo outside the bus, he was wandering around the playground in town. He was wearing his pants very high. He had a multi-colored fanny pack slung sloppily around his waist. His arms were clenched at his sides. Suddenly, the curious stares I had received from the other passengers on the bus started to make more sense. His gymnastics class; his penchant for close talking perhaps these were not just cultural differences, as I had assumed. I realized that he was mentally handicapped. ....

Filippo saw me, waved and asked me what I was up to. "Avevo-io fotto andondo per una passeggiatta," I answered. "I have had done going for a walk."

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