Whitman, go to bed and get some sleep and don’t waste the day

When you get six hours of sleep (the average for most college students), you’re operating the next day as if under the influence of two beers. With less sleep, it’s even more. I learned this from a lecture given by Dr. Richard Simon (Whitman alumnus ’72 and director of St. Mary’s Sleep Disorders Center) during a session of my “Psychology of Everyday Life” class a few weeks ago.

That means many Whitties are walking around on Monday morning almost as drunk as they were Friday night.

These people are driving.

I would hope that no one at Whitman drinks and drives. We’re educated; we know it’s dumb. We’ve all seen those depressing documentaries that they were required to show us in driver’s ed. And it may not seem like getting little sleep has the same sort of effect as alcohol; Dr. Simon’s news surprised me, as I imagine it does you. But while inadequate sleep may not produce the pleasant buzz that alcohol does, it really is just as impairing. So now I urge you: Don’t drive unless you’ve had a full night’s sleep.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that “each year 100,000 crashes, which result in more than 1,500 fatalities and 71,000 injuries, are caused by drowsy driving.” That may not be as many as alcohol, but it should be enough to warrant some attention.

During the lecture, I learned that Whitman itself (not surprisingly) has sleep-related accidents at the end of every semester, when students make long, strenuous drives home, right after finals and often through snowy mountain passes. And even if you manage to avoid becoming a victim of drowsy driving, remember: Inadequate sleep ultimately isn’t helping your academics either.

I realize that pulling an all-nighter is necessary every once in a while to get by, but for many who are getting inadequate sleep, academics are not the cause.

I also realize that you’ve got to live your life; sleep can’t always take priority over your social life. There’s nothing wrong with occasionally staying up until 3 a.m. pulling pranks on your section-mates and throwing around glow-in-the-dark Frisbees on Ankeny.

What I really can’t stand are those kids who sit in their rooms through the wee hours of the morning watching YouTube videos on their laptops. Then they skip all their morning classes the next day sleeping in, and in the afternoon they brag to their friends about their late bedtimes.

Even for those who stay up late for sensible reasons: Realize that everything works better in the daytime. You’re going to have more fun with your friends, you’re going to get more schoolwork accomplished, things just look better in the morning.

Earlier this year I would frequently slack off during the day, wasting my time between classes and dawdling through the afternoon. Then I would work my butt off at night trying to finish all that put-off work. This sounds pretty typical of college students, right?

Then I started working in the morning because I had to. It was a crunch week, and I couldn’t get all my work done at night, so I tried the day. It was incredible; I can honestly say that I worked twice as fast as I did at night. That means that if, instead of slacking off, you actually worked between your 9:00 class and your 10:00 class, it would make the difference between a midnight bedtime and a 2:00 a.m. bedtime.

It seems like people usually don’t even realize how awake they are during the day; it’s prime time for working!
Let’s utilize this time and live during the day for a change. It’s time to put an end to our nocturnal habits. Get some sleep, Whitman.

Not a laughing matter: America’s sense of humor is becoming morbid

Some years ago I was watching the film “Braveheart” with a friend of mine. There is a prolonged battle sequence some ways in of sustained, awful gore. Men chop others’ heads off, arrows pierce legs, maces shatter people’s skulls. The scene begins drolly, with William Wallace’s Scottish troops mocking and mooning the British Army. It quickly becomes deeply unfunny.

The friend I was watching with laughed loudly at the mooning, as did I. Then arms started getting severed, and my friend kept laughing. He laughed all through the Battle of Stirling, louder with each shower of blood and each shattered leg. After a point I finally turned to him and said, “Dude—do you actually think this is funny?” He fell quiet and shot me a look as though I were a stranger in the room. “No, I don’t,” he said. “Just—leave me alone, man.” We watched the rest of the scene in silence.

Last Thursday, ASWC Films screened “Children of Men” in Kimball Theater. I cannot think of a more starkly serious and sincere film; the entire arc of its story is about a deeply cynical man evolving from detachment to caring. The movie is about being sincere.

Why then, was most of the audience—you, Whitties—laughing through the entire middle stretch of the film? What is funny about three people trying to escape being murdered in a car that won’t start? What is funny about someone seeing a human baby for the first time in 18 years and reacting with shock? What is funny about a refugee beating a man with a sledgehammer?

I first saw “Children of Men” while studying abroad, and in Mexico nobody laughed, except when the characters made jokes themselves. Could it be that other cultures just aren’t as accustomed as we are to laughing at people? Could it be that, being a generation that has never in our own country seen refugee camps, war, or for that matter very much honesty and decency, we have forgotten that such things are traditionally met with quiet, humble respect?

Or could it just be a strange, unhealthy coping mechanism? I noticed that no one was laughing much at Thursday’s screening until the film’s first brutal action scene, in which three people are shot at close range. After that a switch seemed to have been thrown, and everything was funny, as though out of desperation the audience had sought refuge in comedy that wasn’t there. Everything provoked snickers, from a baby being born to goofy stuff like a woman standing up and praying in order to save her friend from being dragged off a bus and shot. Yes, she looked kind of silly doing it, but have we all undergone some Pavlovian training whereby things that have historically appeared in comedies—recent, mean-spirited comedies, I might add—must always be funny, no matter the context? Goofy stuff indeed.

I’ve heard we are coming out of the Age of Irony, but to me irony still seems to have a stranglehold on young people’s appraisals of things. While “The Simpsons” are as popular as ever in theaters, and reality TV invites us to make fun of silly people, and most of us can’t say whether we were laughing with or laughing at Napoleon Dynamite, I have to wonder: If “Forrest Gump” came out today, would we laugh at him, too?

Next week I hope ASWC Films shows “Scary Movie” or “Pulp Fiction.” At least in those movies it’s clear: You don’t have to take anything seriously. That’s what everyone seems to want, anyway. And who can blame us? In our sealed, white-bread summer camp of a school, doesn’t everything “out there”—internment camps and desperation and genocide—just seem like one big, silly game?

Humanai Interna: Issue 7

Clarissa kicks Hannah Montana’s ass

Hannah Montana is not an actual person. She’s a Disney character who plays sub-par, ultra-short pop songs with tame titles like “Old Blue Jeans” and “True Friend.” She’s played by the admittedly charismatic Miley Cyrus (“Achey Breaky Heart”-throb Billy Ray Cyrus’s daughter), and her bubbly character has every tweenaged girl’s dream life: She’s a funny, pretty school girl by day; and a funky, fabulous pop-star by night. And something about her has absolutely hypnotized pretty much everyone between the ages 9 and 14.

Besides being able to call Dolly Parton her on-screen aunt, dating a hunky television star named Jake Ryan, and having the coolest wigs (which inexplicably make her unrecognizable to her classmates), Hannah Montana’s life isn’t really all that marvelous. Okay, okay: Marvelous, maybe. But unique? Definitely not.

Newspapers across the country are calling Disney Channel the uncontested godfather of the lucrative tween market (what the New York Times called “the underserved 9-to-14 age group”). And with Ms. Montana playing alongside the sugar-sweet cast of Disney Channel’s phenomenally popular “High School Musical” and “High School Musical 2” movies, it certainly seems like a plausible title.

But really, tweenaged television junkies of the ‘90s had it just as good – maybe even better. In 1991, Disney Channel’s now-rival station Nickelodeon aired three programs which completely revolutionized youth television culture: “Salute Your Shorts,” “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” and the original tweenage-girl-role-model-show, “Clarissa Explains It All.” Just two years later, the channel turned its most popular short sketch into what has now become a cult television legend: “Pete and Pete.”

Unlike the cartoons and wholesome family sitcoms that kids were expected to watch before them, these shows had fantastic depth and a certain inimitable weirdness that parents just didn’t understand.

Above all, these shows were intelligent. Clarissa, for instance, cleverly narrates her viewers through her complicated-but-fabulous world (she has a tiny pet alligator, a mom who obsessively cooks tofu for every meal, a best friend who only enters through the window, and a hub-cap collection before it was cool). She even builds her own computer games to help her through particularly hard times (a potentially horrific blind date in one episode, or a challenging poetry assignment in another). I’d like to see Hannah Montana do that.

“Pete and Pete,” for the record, was possibly the most brilliant thing to ever happen to cable television – or any television for that matter. Its plot lines were so perfectly twisted that they somehow made irrational sense. Obviously superheroes live down every kid’s street; everyone’s mom has a special plate in her head that can pick up radio signals; and oh yeah: It’s utter normalcy for the only two children in one family to have the exact same first name.

Maybe that’s why, in its three mind-blowing seasons “Pete and Pete” had countless guest stars, including Steve Buscemi, Debbie Harry, LL Cool J, Selma Blair, Janeane Garofalo, Art Donovan and Iggy Pop – just to name a few.

Yeah, Larry David was on an episode of “Hannah Montana” once, but that was only because Larry’s daughter begged him to do the show. So that doesn’t count.

Let’s face it: “Hannah Montana” and “High School Musical,” while hilarious in their unabashed awfulness, lack the flavor that ‘90s programming offered the same audience. So why the shift?

Because Disney isn’t marketing to kids anymore: They’re marketing to parents.

When Nickelodeon started showing live-action shows built for 9-to-14-year-olds in the early-to-mid-‘90s, they really had one goal: Make kids happy. If kids were happy, they’d watch the station; if kids watched the station, Nickelodeon could sell ads to cereal companies and toy producers and they’d make a nice little profit.

Disney’s amplified that idea to the absolute extreme: A quick Amazon.com search for “Hannah Montana” yields over 1000 results, with CDs, DVDs, Karaoke machines, bubble gum, an entire apparel line, toothbrushes, candy, video games, dolls, backpacks, and a 15-inch authentic Hannah Montana electric guitar. A search for “Clarissa Explains It All,” by the way, gives up only the first season of the television show on DVD.

“High School Musical,” likewise, has franchise agreements with Wal-Mart, Dannon yogurt, Major League Baseball and Sprint. Disney Channel is taking their unintelligent tweenaged drivel right to the bank and cashing in royally: In 2008, “High School Musical” is estimated to generate over $650 million in retail sales, according to The New York Times.

Parents really can’t complain: Their kids are watching television that’s promoting wholesome relationships with friends, schoolwork, and a healthy dose of extracurricular activity. So if they have to shell out the $246 it costs on average for a ticket to see Hannah Montana, they’ll do it, as long as their kid stays happy and their taste stays squeaky clean.

There’s nothing more depressing than a generation of kids who are growing up idolizing a boring, Aryan country singer wearing the latest outfits from the Limited Too; or an impossibly perfect basketball jock who can also wail out a decent show tune. Unfortunately, all that comes from that is a herd of ignorant clones whose idea of playing make-believe is dressing up in high heels and lipstick in front of the mirror while belting out the latest pop standards.

Disney’s profiting. But at what cost?

Let’s play: Woman, vegetable, or mineral (or maybe all three?)

I can’t make up my mind about feminist vegetarians. Which means I can’t make up my mind about myself. What I can’t decide is this: Are the two related? Am I one at least partially because I am the other? Why do so many women hate meat so much? Why does my mom have to lie to my stepdad and tell him he’s eating beef when he’s eating tofu? Have I hopped on too many bandwagons with my coexistent activisms?

There are, it seems to me, quite a few reasons for ladies to opt for chik’n instead of chicken. The meat industry is one of the worst for its female employees. Pregnancy and childbirth will get you fired, as will trying to report the sexual harassment you will have to prepare for. The freezing temperatures in packing factories increase menstrual cramps that then require women to miss work. That will get them fired, too.

Video games and TV bombard their audiences with comparisons between women and animals, both as domesticated pets and as pieces of meat. Do any of these sound familiar? Chick, chicken, beaver, kitty, pussy, bird, cow, bunny, fox, babe, bitch…some of these words get used so often to describe human females that hearing them in context as animals is more jarring to the senses.

Hustler magazine (all other criticism aside) once ran a cover with a women being run through a meat grinder. A KFC in Fort Worth, Texas, offers a Hillary [Clinton] Dinner: “Two fat thighs, two small breasts and one left wing.” Phrases like “nice breasts,” “great legs” and “hot chicks” get used all the time in meat advertising. So…are we all supposed to be cannibals? Are women the other white meat?

Not quite. The non-meat sector hasn’t quite gotten its beat down, either. Pamela Anderson poses with lettuce leaves as her bikini in an advert saying “Turn Over a New Leaf.” Way to convince us you deserve better than the meatloaf we’re sitting down to, Pam. A large part of advertising for meat substitutes is aimed at women ‘tricking’ their husbands into healthier vegetarian diets. (“Half the fun of eating your veggie burger is eating. The other half, tricking your husband.”)

I have no husband. I do not even really cook. And it would take a very small amount of lettuce to cover my breasts. Not very many people would want to wear lettuce because of me. So where do I fit in?

A protester throws a bucket of blood on a woman wearing a fur coat. Usually this protester is portrayed as an angry, ugly woman in popular media. I used to think this was great. Right up my angry alley. Now I hesitate. What is so different about attacking this woman and attacking one trying to walk into an abortion clinic? Both people are trying to live their lives based on their own choices. Someone else has deemed these choices immoral and disgusting and has invaded the privacy of the perpetrator to the point of harassment.

Putting this in writing, I can see this connection. In action I want activism to be in-your-face and upsetting and impossible to avoid. But I also see that radical action for any cause can go down a predictable, dangerous path that crucifies one person for supposedly representing all that is evil about their lifestyle. Essentially, I have yet to see a balance struck consistently by my fellow rabble-rousers in both the meatless camp and the vagina-loving camp. We haven’t figured out how to stop getting called bitches. Funny thing that so many feminists, perhaps disproportionately, have experience with that word.

Funny thing that I don’t buy into coincidence. If feminists are uber-women, we better be uber-compared to something domestic and controllable.

I’m not going to buy meat because it’s expensive. I have a heart condition, and animal products raise cholesterol and lead to heart disease. I don’t like the way meat tastes, and to me it all tastes vaguely like blood.

This has nothing to do with my feminism, except that I also hate the word “bitch.” I will make my choices and contribute to my causes for myself. I will never throw blood, and I will walk any girl through a crowd of screaming pro-lifers that needs it. My activism is to educate others but ultimately to do the (usually unrelated) things I think need doing.

Organic cotton as important as organic food

Organic food is beginning to infiltrate the mainstream. Safeway has its own line of organic products. Even Costco has brought in some organics. Although a majority of people still reject organics as overpriced, many average folks buy at least some organic groceries. According to the Organic Trade Organization, 39 percent of the U. S. population uses some amount of organic products. While my conservative grandparents thought “organic” was a meaningless money-making scam until a few years ago, even they are slowly coming to the point at which they might actually deign to eat something organic without feeling like they were supporting a conspiracy.

On the other hand, when someone compliments me on my sweatshirt and I tell them it’s made out of organic cotton, I usually get a certain look or comment that subtly expresses the sentiment of “Oh, good for you, miss goody two-shoes.” Perhaps because of organic clothing’s scarcity and high price, there is a sense that it is somehow pretentious and over-the-top.

But why should organic clothing be any different from organic food in terms of its respectability or importance? For some reason, food has gotten almost all of the attention in the organic movement. In the wave of counter-culture of the 1970s, the organic and health food movements took off together. Their conceptual interconnection has apparently never left us.
Perhaps the fact that food goes into our bodies and thus has the greatest ability to contaminate us has something to do with this. Maybe it comes down to the level of self-preservation again. Consumers just don’t want pesticides to go into their own bodies. Never mind the rest of creation. Perhaps the same value system explains why some of the most popular organic cotton products are underwear, bras, diapers and bedding. People don’t want pesticides next to their sensitive skin.

On the other hand, selfish consumers may not in fact be the reason that organic food is more popular than organic clothing. It may have more to do with the fact that cotton is extremely difficult for farmers to grow organically. It is highly susceptible to insect infestations, so yields often drop significantly when farmers switch over to organic. According to hemp-union.karoo.net, organic cotton is “just not as economically viable” and may leave 25 percent of the world’s textile needs unmet.

However, our needs cannot really be “met” by drugging the land and poisoning the insects. It will stop working eventually. And just because it is so susceptible to insects, cotton is one of the crops that is pushing the land most quickly toward collapse. According to the Organic Trade Association, cotton uses about 25 percent of the world’s insecticides. In the U.S. in 2003, cotton ranked lower than only corn and soybeans in amount of pesticides sprayed.

The threats to human and environmental health are horrendous. The Organic Trade Organization Web site states that, “the Organic Protection Agency considers seven of the top 15 pesticides used on cotton in 2000 in the United States as ‘possible,’ ‘likely,’ probable,’ or ‘known’ human carcinogens.” If these pesticides are dangerous to humans, they must be truly deadly to smaller forms of wildlife. And severe damage has, in fact, been recorded. Pesticide Action Network North America states, “In 1995, pesticide-contaminated runoff from cotton fields killed at least 240,000 fish in Alabama.” In another case, “a breeding colony of laughing gulls near Corpus Christi, Texas, was devastated when methyl parathion was applied to cotton three miles away.”

Thus, if anything, we as consumers should be more adamant about the sustainability of our clothing than that of our food. I have met a lot of people who are aware that particular foods like strawberries get sprayed more than others and therefore make it a point to buy at least those particular foods organic. But hardly anyone thinks of cotton.

It’s time to start asking the question “How was my sweater grown?” and placing as much importance on the answer as we do when we wonder about the origin of our bananas. Cotton can be grown organically. The only reason it isn’t yet economically viable is because it can’t compete with conventional. Change often begins with the consumer. As long as people are willing to pay the difference, the market will expand. The proof for this is the development of the organic food movement and also of the small organic cotton movement that has managed to establish itself. In order to support this movement and send it on its way, you can start ordering organic clothes from one of the many internet-based companies like Gaiam and Blue Canoe. The Sustainable Cotton Project (sustainablecotton.org) also invites you to start an organic cotton campaign in your community.

Doing a little bit of everything

As I got up on Tuesday morning, I briefly lamented the fact that I had gone to bed only 45 minutes before. Moving into the bathroom, I noticed that my hair perhaps didn’t look quite as hellish. “Is bad hair proportional to the amount of time spent in bed?” flashed through my mind as I stepped into the shower. I vaguely remember the realization that the act of showering takes away most of the residual “Why am I awake, much less alive?” sentiment after having pulled an all-nighter (excluding a 45 minute break to lie in bed awake, still hopped up on caffeine and terrified of sleeping through class to turn in the midterm I just finished). Unfortunately, the question “Why am I awake, much less alive?” came back about an hour and a half later as my first class finished. Of course, the moron factor comes into play here: Procrastinating a paper beyond what is reasonably recoverable for me is slightly moronic. Taking a heavy reading load with multiple history classes, not to mention two enormous papers (they’re enormous from my perspective, at least) at the end of the semester is also slightly moronic.

At the conclusion of each of four classes that day, it became progressively more difficult to persuade myself that attending class, learning and broadening horizons was more important than sleep. However, I did attend all classes, make poorly thought out comments in class and generally despise everyone. This is the really sickening part: Every day I interact with people that are taking more credits than I am. They are involved with everything, and they take every class, and then they go to work. I’m not ashamed to say that such interactions make me feel inadequate. I hate being asked how many credits I’m taking. Forgive me if I don’t respond, “Why, how many credits are you taking?” Because I just don’t want to know.
Perhaps you can see, then, why it becomes difficult for me to P-D-F a class and to ask for an extension on the midterm I haven’t started yet—it’s because everyone here is doing everything, and I am just trying to keep up. Then, after the day is finished and I just want to collapse into bed and not think or write or read, I wonder: How am I ever going to hold down a real job? How am I ever going to work real hours, cook for myself, and not be able to skip it or sleep through the morning a couple times?

Then it hits me: Our parents don’t have extra-curricular activities. They don’t have to compare how many hours they work with their friends. They don’t do three-hour rehearsals or student government meetings or staff meetings or discussion groups. It could be put another way: They aren’t so sure that they have to do everything. Which brings me to the “opinion” part of this random opinion in a college newspaper: Whitman needs to learn that we don’t have to do everything. I’m sure some of you are completely comfortable with your course loads and activities, but I’m also pretty sure that there are those of us who aren’t. And we get burnt out sometimes, and work gets pushed back, and we get B’s or C’s on midterms we procrastinated because in all honesty, we were doing something else.

I know for a fact that I’m not the only one for whom this situation comes up, because I’ve spoken to people that have this or worse—multiple, successive all-nighters. One who subscribes to the narrative reasoning outlined here has to conclude that at the root of the problem is the mentality that we have to do everything. I can’t do it anymore, and maybe this realization needs to happen for a lot of us. We can only wear so many hats before our proverbial head falls off. Additionally, beyond the fact that it’s mentally, physically and emotionally draining to be constantly engaged, it’s detrimental to our education. If my grades are slipping because I’m trying to take more credits than is reasonable, then I’m certainly not “getting my money’s worth” out of Whitman. I am, in fact, wasting my money. The long and the short of it is this: Overextension detracts from both my happiness and my education, and I think that’s worth considering for everyone. Of course everyone is different and of course everyone needs different levels of intellectual stimulation. All I’m saying is that the group mentality at Whitman seems to be that we need to do more, even if ‘more’ means too much. And that’s a bad thing.

The forgotten BRIC: Why Brazil might be the next world superpower

China and India are not the only two countries in the running for the “America’s Next Top Supersuccessor.” Brazil, the most booming democracy south of Texas, is a force to be reckoned with.

Unlike China and India, Brazil is primed to be a world superpower. This is because Brazil possesses something both Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs long for: a stable platform upon which to trade. The emphasis here is on the word “stable.”

During the last three years of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s tenure, which dates back to the year 2000, Brazil’s gross domestic product growth rate has skyrocketed from a passable one percent to an impressive nearly six percent. This increase might seem measly compared to China’s astonishing 10 percent average GDP growth rate since the end of the Cold War. And India’s increase from a little over two percent in the mid-‘80s to nearly eight percent today. The problem with India’s and China’s growth rates, however, is that the countries themselves are not nearly stable enough to support sustained high economic growth.

We often forget that China and India are still desperately poor countries. In spite of their growth, if we were to combine the populations of the two (roughly 2.3 billion people), a disconcerting 1.5 billion people would still be in extreme poverty, earning less than $2 a day according to the World Bank. Brazil, on the other hand, has reached deep into its back pocket and decreased its poverty rate 33 percent over the past three years from 52 percent, a number comparable to that of China’s and India’s poverty rates.

India, for one, is not yet a major player in today’s world trade market. Though it has an abundance of people, it contributes all but a fraction of a percent in world exports. The stereotype that India supplies hordes of wiz kids to top information technology companies is false. Though it is true that many of the world’s most intelligent, brilliant, academic and lauded people call it their homeland, India contributes not yet a million people to IT jobs globally. According to economist Pranab Bardham, chief editor of the Journal of Development Economics, “India is the largest single-country contributor to the pool of illiterate people in the world.”

China, though ahead of both India and Brazil on economic development, is falling behind on politics. Its Communist Party is only now beginning to open up the private sector to world markets. Its timeless tradition of homogenizing everything from high culture to language to bureaucracy has hampered its ability to develop its economic potential. And instead of opening its floodgates to foreign investment, China has sealed them tightly. The problem: The floodgates are just now beginning to overflow, a step behind both India and Brazil.

Perhaps the biggest problem both China and India face in becoming superpowers is the inequality between the urban and rural. Brazil has boldly dealt with this problem and is already reaping the benefits.

In Brazil, rural farmers have been employed by multinational private enterprises. And this is without destroying their priceless Amazon and bucolic backdrops. Plenitudes of social welfare programs in Brazil have been crucial in lifting millions of people out of poverty. But what has lifted the most people out of poverty in Brazil is its avant-garde “Pro-Alcohol Program.” In 1973 the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries turned off the exporting spigot of oil to countries in the “West.” Instead of following the U.S. route by filing a faux plan to become independent of Arab-supplied energy, Brazil took its own. Not only did they become independent of Arab-supplied energy, by the 1980s they became independent of oil altogether. By ’85, 75 percent of cars manufactured in Brazil were fueled by sugar-derived ethanol. Though this trend declined through the ‘90s owing to repeatedly poor harvests of sugar, Brazil has been picking it back up over the last three years. Now, one-fifth of the Brazilian fleet runs purely on ethanol, and Brazil is the sole frontrunner in the races for oil-independence and the green alternative to oil.

Free trade, an idea toyed with during the late 1990s, finally became a solidified certainty for the nation’s businesses. As a result, Brazil has invested heavily in sub-Saharan Africa as to both set an example to its fellow South American nations and reap the economic benefits of a diversified economy. An estimated 3,000 Brazilian firms either invest or trade with those across the Atlantic, over twice that of a decade ago. With respect to investment in Africa, Brazil has become a pioneer among its challengers, China and India. Whereas Brazil’s investment, both cultural and economical, was rooted back in the 16th century through Portuguese colonization, China’s investment in Africa only really dates back to the early post-Cold War era. Africans are very skeptical of China’s ambition, boding poorly for China and the rest of the Oriental world.

So far, it is a mystery why we haven’t included Brazil in the running to be one of the next world superpowers. Not only do they have the manpower, thriving economy and flourishing democracy to support such an influential role in the world, but they also boast of the cheapest mass-production-potential alternative energy source with which to replace oil. Brazil is a model, and the rest of the world should start taking some pictures.

Finding a religion that fits with modern life

Buddhism has become attractive to a certain type of American who would fit right in at Whitman. I would describe this type as liberal, peaceful and earthy. I think individuals who fit the type would describe themselves as “spiritual.”

In defining themselves as “spiritual,” these people are conspicuously avoiding being identified as “religious.” Yet, at the same time, they do not want to be or come across as cold, hard atheists. They want to gain access to the depth of that other mysterious realm. But they don’t want to do it in the “old” way.

In fact, these people are often strongly opposed to organized religion, and especially to fundamentalist Christians. In the hyper-PC environment of Whitman, people bash Christian fundamentalist ideals on a daily basis and feel just fine about it. “Who would wait to have sex until you’re married? That’s a horribly repressive practice that forces you into marriage way too young and starts you popping out babies. And what is worse than a house full of babies? Gross.”

Buddhism seems to offer just what they seek: spirituality without deism. Instead of worshipping a god who lays down all these oppressive rules, a Buddhist simply works on cultivating his own spirit and improving his way of life. There is no heaven or hell. The focus is on how one lives here and now in this world.

However, in terms of guidelines about how one should live one’s life, Buddhism is actually remarkably similar to fundamental Christianity. Both emphasize strictly controlling one’s passions and desires, to the point of nearly annihilating them. Romans 13:12-14 reads, “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” In Christianity, the desires of the body are seen as sinful things that should be kept under tight rein.

Buddhism does not conceive of lusts as sinful and leading to eternal punishment but rather as limiting and leading to suffering here on earth. However, the emphasis on tightly reining in or even altogether abolishing desire is essentially the same. One of the sacred Buddhist texts, the Ketokhila Sutta, reads, “Whatever brother, O Bhikkus, has got rid of the passion after a body, has got rid of the desire after a body, has got rid of the attraction after a body, has got rid of the thirst after a body, has got rid of the craving after a body, his mind does incline to zeal, exertion, perseverance and struggle.” These latter qualities related to self-control are part of the goal of Buddhist practice, and passions are seen as serious impediments that must be completely renounced. If anything, Buddhism is stricter than Christianity in that it encourages complete renunciation of desire in any form rather than merely control over it.

If the “spiritual” people are speaking with etymological awareness when they define themselves this way, then they are right to turn to Buddhism. Buddhism is in fact a religion of the spirit, not of the body. But I doubt that many of these people are really looking for the kind of self-discipline that Buddhism really demands.

I, by the way, am one of these liberal, peaceful, earthy Americans. I probably believe more strongly in self-discipline than most people of this type. But while some aspects of Buddhism do intrigue me, I definitely do not want to embrace its doctrine of the abolition of desire.

I want a religion that works with our nature as human beings instead of fighting against it. While we are not mere animals in that we can to some extent control our desires, we are still animals in that we have naturally have strong desires. These desires are what makes life so exhilarating. What would eating a salad be without hunger? Or kissing without the desire to be united with another being? Don’t tell me I should not eat for pleasure and should not kiss. These are the joys of living. And it is the desire involved in them that makes them so joyful. Even desiring to kiss without kissing is the loveliest feeling: thick with pain and pleasure like a complex, vaguely dissonant chord.

I would not consider myself “un-spiritual.” There is a vast difference between blindly letting your desires run wild and celebrating the appropriate ones with spirit. I want a religion that celebrates the compound of body and soul as a complex, lustful, self-disciplining and self-celebrating thing. And I think many aspiring “Buddhists” actually want this too.

Oppression: The true price of your chocolate

I love chocolate and human rights. Unfortunately, the two don’t overlap as much as you would think. Human rights abuses related to the chocolate industry are all too common, and more often than not involve children under the age of 14 that work in the industry.

Child labor is implicated in many international industries, but the chocolate industry is relatively unique in the number of these children who have been coerced, kidnapped or otherwise forced into this sort of backbreaking, dangerous work. The U.S. State Department estimates that 15,000 children under the age of 12 are “enslaved” on cocoa farms in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.

Most European and American candy companies are aware that much of the cocoa that they use in their confections is from farms that use child labor. The companies claim that they are not responsible for the child labor problems because they do not own the plantations on which the cocoa is grown.

The companies are certainly not free of blame though. European and American chocolate companies, by demanding large quantities at low prices, have made it nearly impossible for small cocoa farmers to stay in business without resorting to unfortunate practices. In fact, for a 60 cent chocolate bar the cocoa farmer will get less than one cent. Those sorts of prices do not leave a lot left over for paying wages to the people that work in the fields.

Of course, in a free market economy, we as the consumer are also complicit in this tragedy. The chocolate companies are certainly making a fantastic profit, but they are also providing us with a product at a low cost. A delicious product that many of us enjoy to a ridiculous degree that has comforted more than one person at the end of tough day and that makes café mochas possible. We have also grown accustomed to this luxurious product coming to us at a price that makes it not a luxury at all but rather something we might actually eat every day.

Fair trade chocolate and coffee are very popular right now, and I doubt there is a Whitman student who does not know at this point what fair trade is and that it is, for some reason, the right thing to buy (even if it is not how they choose to spend their money). Very few of us remember why it is the right thing, though, if we ever really knew at all.

Fair trade products allow, in the case of chocolate, cocoa farmers to be paid an amount for their product so that they can cover their costs and are able to afford to pay field workers an appropriate wage. The most often advertised way that fair trade companies do this is by cutting out traders and buyers in the middle. Farmers organize into cooperative groups so together they can sell large quantities of cocoa together without having to go through a buyer.

The less often advertised but equally true way that fair trade works is by charging a slightly higher price to the consumer. This is obviously not as great a selling point as the happy fair trade cooperatives funding schools and hospitals in impoverished villages, but it is what makes those things possible. Foods from far and away exotic places are luxury items, and somebody needs to pay the price. It can be Whitman students (and other Americans and Europeans) paying a few extra cents for chocolate ice cream or a child in Mali can pay for it with their small life after being sold to a farm in Cote d’Ivoire.

Boo! Ha ha, it’s just me.

by George Bridges
President

Hey there, “Whitties!” Halloween is coming in less than a week, and I’ll let you in a little secret: it’s my absolute FAVORITE holiday of the entire year. No kidding! What other holiday lets you buy five pounds of awesome Snickers bars from Safeway without the cashier giving you a sideways glance?

No, but seriously, as this year’s All Hallow’s Eve draws near, there are some important things for all of us to take under consideration. I hear tell that a good number of you like to spite your age and still go out Trick-or-Treating, and it’s important for Whitman’s public image that we all agree to follow some basic standards of behavior. When the Princeton Review’s special Halloween issue comes out, I want to see us at number one for both Tricking and Treating!

Rule No. 1: No compromise. I know there’s a good number of vegans and vegetarians out there who are going to try to trick you by giving you a carrot bar posing as a supposed “treat.” That is unacceptable, and it is your duty to give them the trickiest “trick” you can muster. But nothing causing bodily harm or long-term property damage, please – you can’t spell Halloween without “whee!” so keep things fun for everyone.

And Rule No. 2: You EARN your candy. There’s no excuse to try and justify swindling candy out of others when you’re dressed in your street clothes. It smacks of laziness and I find it very distasteful. I know you all like to dress up – there’s enough costume parties advertised on your listservs (and I am a member of EVERY SINGLE ONE, in case you were wondering) that you can’t very well play the apathy card. I recommend classic standbys such as ghosts and mummies, as well as maybe some more advanced get-ups such as vampires or mutants.

There you have it! Follow my advice and this Halloween is sure to be the best one yet. If you want a chance to practice, check this out: most of you are probably reading this on a Thursday afternoon, and I just happen to be hosting office hours downstairs in Reid today (I’ll be the Frankenstein monster, so I should be easy to spot). Come on over, and when I say, “So what’s on your mind?” You had better respond with “Trick-or-Treat!” or there is no way I’m giving you one of my cookies.

Answer my first question correctly, and I may test you a little bit – be prepared to account for what your costume is, or perform a minor trick if I try to slip you a piece of broccoli instead of something chocolately-chippy. I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve got, so don’t disappoint me!

Happy Halloween to all,

George Bridges (President) (Frankenstein’s monster)

Moshevich, Solomon place seventh in Division III doubles draw

There are several telltale signs of the strength of the men’s tennis team. Whitman has some of the best indoor facilities of any Division III school in the area and outdoor courts situated right by the center of campus. Also, many evenings in Jewett dining hall, the wall is lined with racket bags and a table is full of somewhere between 15 and 20 male college students in tennis garb eating ravenously.

So it may be no surprise to many students on campus that 12 of the top 16 players at the regional tennis tournament were from Whitman, and that Whitman’s top doubles team, Matt Solomon and Etienne Moshevich, placed seventh in the Div III men’s doubles draw at the ITA national tournament in Mobile, Ala.

Solomon and Moshevich earned the trip to Mobile after beating teammates Jasper Follows and Nadeem Kassam in the finals of the regional doubles draw. “The team’s really deep,” said Moshevich. “Anyone can beat anyone at any time within our top four.”

After winning the northwest regional draw, Whitman defeated the champion of the Texas section for a spot in the final draw of eight teams.

“[The Trinity match] was probably our best match,” said men’s tennis coach Jeff Northam. Whitman started out down a break but fought back to win the first set 6-4. “ I thought we were giving away too many free points,” said Northam. “I just told Matt and Etienne to focus on the first couple of shots, getting their first serves in and their returns. Doubles is a lot about momentum; you have to capitalize.”

After beating Trinity in straight sets, Whitman lost to the eventual champions, Middlebury, 6-2, 6-2.

“I definitely could have played better,” said Moshevich. “[Middlebury] was definitely a touch team, but I got tight. I missed a lot of first serves and returns.”

Although the Middlebury loss put Whitman out of running for the championship, Whitman still had a chance to place as high as fifth in the back draw. But their next opponent, Claremont, proved too much.

Moshevich said, “Coach said we could [beat Claremont], but they really played unbelievable tennis.”

That left Whitman in a playoff for seventh and eighth with Vassar. “It wasn’t our best tennis, but we elevated our game in the [third-set] tiebreaker,” said Moshevich. That focus paid off and Whitman defeated Vassar 10-3 in the tiebreaker to take the match, and the title of seventh in the nation.

Despite mixed results, Moshevich described the event as fun. “This was the biggest public tennis facility in the world. There were chair umpires for every match,” Moshevich said. The Copeland-Cox Tennis Center, where the event was held, has 60 courts.

“The event is the only one of its kind,” said Northam about the ITA Small College Championships. “Tennis is the only sport that I know of where a Division III or Junior College player can earn a berth into Division I nationals.” The top players from each Division play off, and the winner receives a spot in the Division I tournament.

Furthermore, the event provides a preview of national competition for men’s tennis. “It’s a shame that only two get to go,” said Solomon. “There’s a lot of myth around some of the other teams, and we’re not far behind.”

Solomon also won the regional ITA singles title, but failed to advance past Trinity to get into the singles draw.

Still, Solomon looks forward. “We have a lot of talent on the team. How we do will depend on how hard we work during the off-season,” said Solomon.

Northam also is ready for the upcoming season. Last year Whitman lost to PLU in the final of their regional and earned a wildcard to the national NCAA end-of-year tournament.

“It’ll be good for us to fly under the radar nationally,” said Northam. “Last year we lost our one, two and three players. This is supposed to be a rebuilding year for us.”

Netflix it: ‘Gia’

This was supposed to be my favorite movie. It was essentially made to be, in fact. Every single thing I usually love about movies was in “Gia.” Strong female characters, drug problems, pretty clothes, artsy shots, AIDS. (See also: RENT). And yet, I could barely make it through the whole thing. At two hours long, “Gia” overstays its welcome by about 45 minutes.

The movie tells the true story of Gia Carangi, the world’s first supermodel. She became a world-famous celebrity literally overnight at the age of 17 and was dead at 26 of AIDS acquired during her years-long addiction to heroin. Angelina Jolie, in her first high-profile role, takes on Gia like a crazy, lesbian second skin. If you miss crazy Angie with knives and blood and bisexual tendencies, Gia will be your tall drink of water. Bonus for readers of this column: You now know that her breasts and bum are exposed at least one million times. They are also smashed into a chain-link fence. Hot? Disturbing? Who knows.

Jolie clearly threw herself into this role. She can’t be blamed for the failings of the other actors. “Gia” is shot like a documentary, interviewing actors playing her nearest and dearest. Mercedes Ruehl, playing Gia’s mother, was going for Oscar gold with her portrayal, but, as always happens when actors pander to the Academy, loses big time. Faye Dunaway appears briefly and perfectly as Wilhemena, Gia’s first agent and the architect of her massive success.

The sex scenes play like porn, and the later, dirtier drug scenes play like medical footage. Very little about “Gia” is easy to stomach. I do think this movie captures how quickly heroin takes over and destroys Gia, I just wish everything else in the movie had moved at the same pace.

Whitman Rugby beats Vandals, muscles out of last year’s slump

Team responds to Head Coach McAlvey’s challenge: ‘Give me a reason to get back into it’

At the end of last year, the Whitman Rugby team’s commitment level was at its lowest in the past decade, which resulted in less accountability for each player. They were coming off of a 3-7-1 record, and morale was low.

“That was probably the first year that we took a step backwards,” said Head Coach Eric McAlvey.

With kids at home and other things to do besides coaching, McAlvey challenged his team to ignite his interest in coaching once again or he wasn’t going to come back.

“You’ve got to give me a reason to get back into it,” he said.

The team has stepped up to their coach’s challenge to the point where McAlvey called this year’s team Whitman’s best in the last 12 years. Their success continued on Saturday, Oct. 20, when they pulled out a win over the University of Idaho Vandals, a much bigger team and school. That win puts the team’s record at 6-1 for the year, which includes the club’s first win ever on international soil during a four day tour of Canada where the team bonded together as a group of men sacrificing themselves for one another.

“It’s a hell of a time to be playing rugby right now,” said senior-leader Luke Decker.

The excitement has even spread to some of the player’s parents. At the game against the Vandals, a team of moms sold concessions and team paraphernalia in order to support their son’s team in spite of their natural inclinations to worry for their children’s health.

“It’s not a mother’s sport,” said Mindy Ferrell, mother to another senior-leader, Jack Ferrell.

In order to generate interest in rugby at the beginning of the year, McAlvey joined his club at the Whitman Activities Fair for the first time ever, bringing in 12 to 13 new players on this year’s roster.

“Coming into it everybody just pulled me in as a family member,” said junior transfer Gabe Kiefel who is one of those new players and who has instantly become one of the team’s best players, according to coach McAlvey.

Zach Lough, another newcomer, regrets not coming out to play earlier in his time at Whitman. This is his first year playing rugby, but also, regrettably, his final year at Whitman.

Several players also stressed how much they enjoyed the social aspect of the sport and how they’ve formed a brotherhood with their fellow teammates.

“Rugby’s become almost a bit of a counter-culture at Whitman. Whereas the school itself is concerned with studying hard and political correctness and whatnot, rugby’s a place where you can go be yourself and have a hell of a lot of fun doing it,” said junior Nat Jacob.

There were also repeated mentions of the team’s ability to party like true brethren. So much so that the coach denied to comment on any specifics of what has occurred during some of these events.

“We know how to kick it,” said Decker with supreme confidence.

For anybody who is still interested in participating in rugby, it is not to late to join.

“We’d love to have anybody who is even slightly interested in rugby come out and play with us,” said Decker.

Practices are from 4-5:30 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Harper Joy Field.

‘Rendition’

Loosely based on the allegations made by Khaled el-Masri and Maher Arar, “Rendition,” raises the ethical question of torturing suspected terrorists. It attempts to show as many sides to this sensitive issue as possible by running nine stereotypical perspectives parallel and ultimately running them together.

Anwar El-Ibrahimi (Omar Metwally), an Egyptian-America, is falsely suspected of having ties to the terrorists. His record of ever having entered the U.S. is deleted, and the head of U.S. intelligence, Corrine Whitman (Meryl Streep), has him sent to an anonymous African country for further investigation.

This transfer of a suspected terrorist to another location is called extraordinary rendition. It was authorized by the Clinton administration for combating Islamic terrorists, but after Sept. 11 its use is more frequent and more talked about.

El-Ibrahimi is taken to a prison and subjected to what is known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding and electroshock. CIA analyst Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal) observes interrogation expert Abasi Fawal (Yigal Naor) at work and slowly realizes the immorality of the practice.

When Freeman reports his speculation that El-Ibrahimi is innocent, Whitman asks if this was his first experience in the field. “This is my first torture,” he responds. Whitman calmly replies, “The United States does not torture.”

Meanwhile, Fawal’s daughter, Fatima (Zineb Oukach), is secretly seeing a boy named Khalid (Mohammed Khouas) with terrorist ties.

Back in America, Isabella Fields El-Ibrahimi (Reese Witherspoon) is desperate to find her husband. She contacts her college boyfriend Alan Smith (Peter Sarsgaard) an aide to Senator Hawkins (Alan Arkin) for help.

“Rendition” maintains a clear anti-torture position, but it even-handedly illustrates and explains extraordinary rendition and torture. Whenever a film comes out that takes a stance on an issue it is immediately labeled “liberal propaganda.” However, I feel like I understand the issue more thoroughly after seeing the film. All the characters, just like their real-life counterparts, have perfectly logical, defensible explanations for what they are or are not doing.
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The senator doesn’t believe he can risk his credibility and ultimately his re-election for sticking his neck out by protecting a potential terrorist. Ice-queen Whitman justifies the use of the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” by imagining the 7,000 Londoners alive because of the information received from its use. Freeman witnesses its inhumanity first-hand.
You may still disagree with these explanations, but they’re much more satisfying than anything a terrorists-are-going-to-come-and-kill-your-families Bill O’Reilly lecture could tell you.

Arkin and Naor bring different but equally intense performances and Streep was wonderfully composed and strong, as usual. However, the younger talent in the piece fell behind. Witherspoon came off shrieky while Sarsgaard and Gyllenhaal were uncharacteristically dull.

Despite its strong statement and several remarkable performances, “Rendition” ultimately fell flat. All the bouncing back-and-forth between plot lines caused the movie to feel rushed and cluttered. If you’ve already made up your mind about torture and extraordinary rendition, you can skip it.

‘Michael Clayton’

At once a condemning-if-familiar polemic against corporate America’s treatment of the working man, “Michael Clayton” delves into the lives of the people who work for these monolithic entities and the ethical black hole they find themselves in. But “Clayton” also struggles under the weight of its self-importance throughout the nearly two-hour running time.

Screenwriter Tony Gilroy’s (The “Bourne” trilogy, “The Devil’s Advocate”) directorial debut is beautifully crafted as a slow-burn thriller, but it fails to provide new insight on a well-worn theme.

A corporate-fixer for a professional law firm, Michael (played here by a less-charismatic-than-usual George Clooney) can solve any problem plaguing the upper-echelons of the business world. The only problems he can’t solve are his own.

Beguiled by financial debts and disconnected from his relationship to his son, Michael is disillusioned with his work, referring to himself as a “janitor” who cleans up the messes of the rich and powerful so that they don’t have to face the consequences. Michael takes on his biggest gambit yet when he’s tasked to take care of Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson), a top litigator who suffers from a mental breakdown during a deposition for a multibillion dollar class-action lawsuit involving agriculture conglomerate U/North. Michael’s adventures in corporate wrangling exposes him to the possibility that U/North is–what else?–up to no good.

The premise of “Michael Clayton” is familiar, but Mr. Gilroy has decided to place it in a world that is dour and grim with ethical compromises being made left and right. Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton), the chief counsel for U/North, struggles to protect the company from Michael’s inquiries. She’s the stock villain – portrayed in androgynous tones and cut off from personal relationships to emphasize her cold-heartedness – but Swinton exposes her vulnerability to the audience beneath the glassy visage, the only glimpse of Karen’s humanity being when she nervously recites business speeches in front of the mirror. Karen is dedicated to her work, but she clearly makes mistakes.

Michael is constantly referred to as a “miracle worker,” but we never actually see him being the brilliant fixer that he’s supposed to be. After seventeen years of wading through the muck, he’s tired. Clooney’s character wrestles with his concepts of “right” and “wrong” as more evidence of U/North’s offenses pile up in front of him. Clayton presents a change from the Danny Ocean we saw earlier this summer. This is George Clooney with heavy bags under his eyes and deep wrinkles on his face. It’s George Clooney without the smug humor. Clooney’s been serious before, but as Clayton, he’s joyless.

If anything, it’s Tom Wilkinson’s character that feels out of place throughout the movie. Both Clooney and Gilroy have stated in interviews how much they admire Sidney Lumet’s “Network,” and Wilkinson’s Arthur Edens is essentially cut from the same cloth as crazed newscaster Howard Beale. The opening monologue of “Michael Clayton,” for example, is Wilkinson ranting in Chayefsky-mode about the downfall of corporate America. But “Network” is a satire, and “Clayton” is most far from being one. Wilkinson’s over-the-top antics as Edens, while well-acted, feel forced and devoid of context. Edens is supposed to be the character that we sympathize with and agree with, but at best, he’s a farce—too unhinged to believe and too cartoonish to relate to.

And perhaps this is the problem with Mr. Gilroy’s directorial debut. Despite it’s excellent acting and rapid-fire dialogue, the movie’s anti-corporatism is too apparent and incongruous with the setting that Mr. Gilroy has created. The twists and turns are all-too-predictable, and the finale that Mr. Gilroy settles on turns the movie into a very standard Hollywood affair. This is not to say that “Clayton” is bad per se—far from it—but it’s frustrating to see a filmmaker weave threads that challenge the audience only to unravel them at the last minute with been-there-done-that conventions.

Int’l Sweet Onion Film Festival Preview

The International Sweet Onion Film Festival starts tomorrow (Friday, Oct. 26) and will continue through the weekend. Tickets are free to Whitman and Walla Walla University students, although there is a suggested donation.

The awards ceremony will be on Sunday Oct. 28, from 7-9 p.m. at the Marcus Whitman Hotel. Three awards will be given in each category: Best Picture, Best Director and Audience Choice. Many of the films’ directors will attend. More information can be found at the festival’s Web site: sweetonionfilmfestival.org.

The following are some of the festival’s most promising films.

“Droomtijd (Dreamtime)”:
Oct. 27, 7-10 p.m. at the Marcus Whitman Hotel

The just-under-20-minute short film is by Belgian filmmaker Tom Van Avermaet. “A man lives contentedly in a dark, industrial world where clocks are treated as gods and give the beat. He appears punctually at his work every day, until a visit from the mysterious sandman changes everything….”

“Boletos Por Favor (Tickets Please)”:
Oct. 27, 7-10 p.m. at the Marcus Whitman Hotel

Festival Director Francesca Bush especially recommended this Spanish short by Lucas Figueroa. “A train, a pursuit, only one way to escape.”

“A Tale of Two Pizzas”:
Oct. 26, 7-10:30 p.m. at Seven Hills Winery

This feature length United States film by Vincent Sassone sounds like a rehashing of Romeo and Juliet centered around Pizza. “The Bianco and the Rossi families of Yonkers have been feuding for years over pizza! Those who prefer a tangy sauce go to Rossi’s; those who like their crust thin and crispy go to Bianco’s. When young Angela Rossi, armed with a newly minted associates degree in marketing from FIT, tries to help her father put the Biancos out of business, détente goes out the window. And when young doodle artist Tony Bianco agrees to help his father steal the secret of the Rossi’s sauce to win the neighborhood pizza contest, pizza war—and a little star-crossed loving follows.”

“Stomp! Shout! Scream”:
Oct. 26, 7-10:30 p.m. at Seven Hills Winery

This feature-length “beach party rock and roll monster movie” by Jay Wade Edwards looks promising, if ridiculous. It “features an all-girl garage rock band and the legend of the Skunk Age (the Florida Everglades version of Bigfoot).”

“Greetings From the Shore”:
Oct. 27, 2-5 p.m. at BLDG 270

“Still reeling from the death of her father, a young girl spends one last summer at Jersey Shore before heading off to college. But when her plans fall apart, the girl stumbles into a mysterious world of Russian sailors, high-stakes gambling, and unexpected love.”

“Committing Poetry in Times of War”:
Oct. 26, 7-11 p.m. at BLDG 270

“A poetic glace at one week in March 2003 that rocked Albuquerque, N. M., and defined the struggle of a nation at war abroad and with its people. When the Iraq war began, Youth Poetry Slam Team Coach, Bill Nevins was fired from his teaching job, and his outspoken Rio Rancho High School Poetry Slam Team was disbanded and silenced. Days after Nevins’s removal, hundreds of peaceful protestors demonstrating nearby were brutally assaulted by police. Free Speech Zones were enforced at gunpoint. The fabric of the Constitution appeared to be crumbling. Yet out of this fire arose a diverse community of artists, poets and musicians. They came together in a series of unifying events, which began in Albuquerque but spread across the country. Dubbed Poetic Justice, it defied the fear tactics of the day by modeling free speech and supporting Nevins’s quest for justice.”

“Storm of Emotions”:
Oct. 27, 7-11 p.m. at Walla Walla University (black box)

This 2006 short-listed Oscar nominee for best documentary promises to be one of the festival’s best. “The 1982 peace agreement with Egypt obliged thousands of people to leave their homes in the Sinai desert. From the options they were given by the Israeli government, many chose “Gush Katif” in the Gaza Strip as their new home. To progress the peace process, the Israeli government ordered the evacuation of the Gaza Strip in August 2005. This decision created political and social turmoil. The evacuation was the most complex and sensitive mission ever to be undertaken by the police forces. This movie is about emotions, beliefs, conscience and true brotherly love; it is a story of humanity in its finest hour.”

Students make statement with political art show

The Stevens Gallery in Reid Campus Center features student art, and this month there is a specific show displaying political art.

“The political art show was inspired by an idea from Andrea Ramirez, who is one of the Stevens Gallery’s advisors,” co-curator Margot Wielgus said. “She thought it would be interesting to have a show based on political posters. We would ask people to create posters presenting their views on candidates and issues, especially since there will be some elections and measures to be voted on in November.”

The show displays many pieces of art by students. The art covers topics from the war in Iraq to environment issues to other more ambiguous topics. Many different genres are represented in the art show.

“Some of the pieces presented definitely take different perspectives on issues we all know at least a little about. So, I think they will help people know issues from more perspectives. Some of the pieces are also enigmatic in meaning. And I hope this makes people think,” Wielgus said.

There are also posters hanging in the gallery for people to add comments and art of their own.

“Our goals for the show are to raise awareness and present viewpoints in an artistic fashion,” Wielgus said. “We also want to gain more community involvement, so we added some paper on the walls and poster-making materials that people could use to build upon the initial show.”

Students on campus have already shown some interest in the political issues surrounding this art show.

“Some ideas and responses to these have already been written on the paper on the walls, so I do think people are interested in conversation and dialogue surrounding issues,” Wielgus said. “And I think they are also participating.”

‘Phil-zombies’ populate assistant professor Hanrahan’s lecture

“But how can we be sure that we aren’t zombies?”

It’s a question that might not pop up in your everyday lectures, but students raised it immediately following Associate Professor of Psychology Rebecca Hanrahan’s presentation on “The Problem with Zombies” on Tuesday, Oct. 16.

And unlike most lectures, this one began with a clip from British comedy film “Shaun of the Dead.”

Hanrahan used the clip—which featured Shaun mistaking a zombie for a drunk person— to introduce the idea of the “best explanation,” which she said is a way people explain or rationalize events based upon prior experience or context.

A foundation of the lecture was the distinction and inherent contradiction between dualism and materialism.

Materialism, according to a handout from the lecture, says that “there is only one kind of stuff and/or property in this world and it is physical in nature…everything that exists, exists in space and time. Consequently, everything in this world, including us, can be fully accounted for by our scientists.”

Dualism, on the other hand, suggests that “this world is constituted by more than the physical…no purely physical explanation of this world could account for all that is in this world…to explain us, we need to posit another kind of stuff or property,” according to Hanrahan’s notes.

The talk centered on the concept of the “phil-zombie” raised by philosopher David Chalmers, who argues for dualism and against materialism based upon the conceivability of a world populated by our zombie twins, explained Hanrahan, who added that her twin would also be a big fan of chocolate chip cookies.

“Phil-zombies are creature who share our physiology and psychology but lack our phenomenology,” Hanrahan said, and thus do not actually experience any sensations, though they think they do. “They are not George Romero Hollywood zombies, who seem to get pleasure from eating flesh,” she added.

Hanrahan’s argument dealt with the way in which Chalmers’ argument suffers because of the variability of conceivability from person to person, and how this problem is impacted by the “best explanation.”

The talk was well-attended, with every seat filled and students sitting on the ground or standing in the back.

“It was a good talk, but I felt cheated because I thought it’d be about actual zombies. Flesh-eating killing machines are slightly more interesting than non-feeling reacting machines,” said senior Colin Malloy.

The lecture is part of a series offered by the philosophy department. This is one of four lectures this fall, with several more scheduled for the spring semester.

“Our hope is to foster the strength of the major by creating a new space for intellectual conversation and intellectual community” said Adjunct Instructor of Philosophy and General Studies Julia Davis in an e-mail.

Davis will give a lecture about Martin Heidegger on Nov. 27. The next lecture is scheduled for Nov. 6, when Professor Tom Davis will lecture on “Emersonian Perfectionism.”

The lectures serve as a bridge between faculty and students. “I feel that students have a great deal of interest in hearing what their professors are doing in their own research lives,” Julia Davis said. “This is something that bringing in an outside speaker doesn’t answer, and can strengthen the classroom dynamic by exposing students to other dimensions of what their professors are ‘about.’”

The lectures are also intended to be somewhat accessible to students from different backgrounds. “The talks are meant to be of general interest, but profile the philosophy faculty’s interests and current research,” Davis said. “We’re trying to split the difference between giving a technical talk and engaging students over other aspects of scholarly lives.”

Despite this, some students expressed confusion. “It was engaging,” said sophomore Katie Higgins, “but at the same time it was hard for me to follow.”

“I was hung up on the difference between feeling and believing,” Malloy said.

Students were, however, given the opportunity to ask questions, both in the lecture hall and in the Faculty Lounge soon afterwards, with coffee and desserts. Students took advantage of this, and many people mingled and discussed Hanrahan’s argument.

The subject matter was certainly an attraction for some attendees. “I came to this talk because it’s about zombies,” said Malloy.

“While I think it feels like a strange or unique topic to Whitman students, it is simply topical within analytic epistemology right now,” Davis said. “Topics are selected based on the professor’s current interests and projects, as well as the desire to expose students to those projects as a dimension of our lives as both scholars and teachers. We hope students come because these lectures are about the ‘life of the mind,’ and because they’re curious, rather than pandering to attendance.”

‘Isn’t It Romantic’ challenges players

Romance is not necessarily the central theme of “Isn’t It Romantic,” the play that was performed in the Harper Joy Theatre during Family Weekend. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein, “Isn’t It Romantic” tells the parallel stories of two female former classmates as they negotiate the post-college world in the 1980s.

According to Miriam Cook, who played the protagonist Janie Blumberg, “[The play] explores the struggle between wanting the ideal and staying true to yourself.”

Cook said that this struggle plays out between her character and her character’s friend, Harriet Cornwall. “Harriet begins by being very adamant about who she is and then gives it up to have this ideal life, whereas Janie thinks about having this ideal life with the Jewish doctor, but in the end she realizes she has to sacrifice her individuality in order to do that,” said Cook.

For Cook, one of the things that allowed her to get in character was learning a Brooklyn accent. “It helped me learn where [Janie] came from, what her strengths were,” said Cook. Cook also felt that learning about Wasserstein and what she struggled with was helpful because Janie is the “autobiographical character” in the play.

Grace Harnois played the role of Lillian Cornwall, Harriet’s mother. Lillian was a woman who had risen to the top in a business world that was dominated by men in the 1980s. Harnois stressed the complexity of her character. “Lillian is really interesting because on the surface she’s bitchy and kind of power-hungry and needing to be on top of everything all the time,” said Harnois. “But she does have a lot of regrets about things that she left behind.”

Harnois said that she had to play a balancing act with her character. She felt that the audience despises Lillian at the beginning of the play but warms up to her as the plot progresses. Harnois had to make sure that her character wasn’t too cold or unlikable.

Another challenge for Harnois was in the first scene when she is having a phone conversation. “[You have] to really put yourself in that situation and make up this whole other script that isn’t even written,” said Harnois.

Cook said that she was challenged because she is a shy person, so she had trouble figuring out when her character needed to be shy and when she needed to be more outgoing. “It was hard for me to figure out…where [Janie] really needed to come out and say things and get angry, because she does get angry. She gets angry a lot. But I’m not a person who gets angry.”

Harnois spoke about some of the challenges the audience faced in understanding the circumstances of the characters. “With Lillian, it’s so hard to imagine how she did get where she is. She’s in a man’s world and she had to do everything by male rules but she still made her way to the top.”

Whoopemup Café serves up Southern-inspired cuisine in small-town setting

The Whoopemup Hollow Café in Waitsburg serves as a Southern treasure in Walla Walla County. It has been featured in Sunset magazine and has gained a reputation among Whitman students as the perfect place for a Friday evening during Parent’s Weekend. Along with my parents, my sister and a few friends, I relished what may be the region’s finest restaurant.

We arrived, a few minutes late to our 6 p.m. reservation and were seated at a table covered with colorful checkered tablecloths. The restaurant consisted of a long room with seven or so booths and a small bar. What I imagine was a Southern ambiance was in the air.

The course began with a selection of cornbread. Some were shaped like little corns, some simply as muffins and some were formed into triangles or squares. This variation paled in comparison to the variation in flavor. Chives, jalapeño, butter, oregano and a cheese grit-like substance were all present.

The soup was a beef broche, which had a light flavor. The broche contained diced tomatoes, which added a fresh flavor and complemented the cornbread without weighing down the stomach.

While eating my soup I noticed the contour of my spoon varied from that of Western soupspoons—the spoon was long and contoured more softly, making it much easier to finish off the last bits of broche in the small bowl. “I enjoyed the underlying spicy flavor,” said my mom, Rosemary Otto. “It kept the broche alive.”

The restaurant provided limited vegetarian options; however, that did not hamper the delight of the three vegetarians present. The highlight of the evening was the macaroni and cheese. Created from a combination of four cheeses and the key ingredients of pesto and garlic, the macaroni and cheese was heavy on cheese flavor, not on bulk.

Dana Bialek enjoyed her goat cheese ravioli with red pepper cream sauce.

“The waitress told me I’d be scrapping the cream sauce off my plate and indeed I was,” said Bialek. Again, the cheese, with its strong flavor that disappeared into a tangy aftertaste, made the dish. Due to the importance of cheese in the available vegetarian options, vegan customers might find their choices even more limited.

This reliance on cheese did not exist for the meat options. True to its Southern roots, Whoopemup’s meat is full of flavor characteristic of slow roasting or frying. I ordered the special, butternut chicken dumplings. The soft flavor of the butternut squash complemented the homey texture of the dumplings, but the slow cooked chicken stew surrounding them paled in comparison to the dishes of other diners.

The catfish, famous through Walla Walla County, was the strongest meat option sampled. The crunchy batter and the moist catfish brought back memories of fishing in the swimming hole on lazy Sunday afternoons. Wait, I’m not from Alabama; I grew up in Spokane, and if I ate the fish I’d die of mercury poisoning.

Beyond the food, Whoopemup provides an experience to its diners. “The presentation here is excellent,” said Naomi Gibbs, who hails from San Francisco, Calif. “Everything’s beautiful. It’s hard to believe we’re in a place as small as Waitsburg.” Dishes were served in small frying pans or arranged seductively on plates. None so much as the “Aunt Luella’s Chocolate Coca-Cola Cake.” Three chocolate towers, underlined with chocolate lettering, beckoned me.

The dessert menu also contained a seasonal selection of fruit sorbet garnished with star fruit, red velvet cake and a tangy, sharp apple tart. The highlight was the “Beyond Banana Split,” which consisted of banana bread pudding with vanilla ice cream, which my mother described as “very homemade,” and a dense chocolate-banana terrine.

The restaurant deserved it reputation, providing a perfect refuge from the dining halls and cafés of campus. “This is really good,” said Gibbs. “For a while there I forgot I was a college student.”

Beechcraft Starship plane calls Walla Walla home

Walla Walla is the new home of the futuristic Beechcraft Starship. The craft is easily distinguished by its droning hum and its radically futuristic appearance and area residents have responded positively in Union-Bulletin editorials on Starship sightings. Surprised to behold the Spacecraft one morning while he brought in his paper, Steve Singleton wrote of his fascination and pride in a letter to Union-Bulletin calling the Spacecraft “another reason our town is unique.”

Singleton and other aviation enthusiasts have local businessman Eric Rindal to thank for introducing the airplane to Walla Walla’s skies. Rindal brought the Starship to a hanger at the Walla Walla airport in January. Since Rindal’s purchase, Washington’s Starship has remained one of only five of the 1986 originals still flying.

While not destined to enjoy commercial success, the Starship refined aviation technology with its unique composite fuselage, twin pusher-propellers and canard wing design. For many, the aircraft has become a kind of futuristic icon and is well represented by aviation shows, museums and Web sites. Its mythic quality is perhaps best represented by “The Starship Diaries,” Dallas Kachan’s 400-page account of leaving his home in the Silicon Valley behind in favor of a thrilling and solitary exploration of the world in one of the few remaining flyable Spacecrafts. Rindal, a pilot since his teens, sympathizes, telling Union-Bulletin reporter Andy Porter, “I’ve always dreamed of a Spacecraft.”

Whittie of the week: Curtis Reid

1. Full name: Curtis Reid

2. Age: 19

3. Best-known for?
Cross Country, SCHWA, plugging my radio show (Funk Me! 9 p.m. Mondays), my insane dance moves, being a rugged outdoorsman and repin’ Colorado, Go Rockies!!

4. What was the last dream you had?
It was really weird. I dreamt of someone I didn’t know getting surgery of some kind, strange, I know. Maybe it was influenced by the fact that a live in North Hall.

5. Have you ever broken the law?
Well, let’s just say when you grow up in a small farming town in eastern Colorado, illegal fireworks become a really good friend. Nothing serious though.

6. If you could do one thing to change the world, what would it be?
Eliminate the use of money.

7. What word makes you cringe when you hear it?
Broccoli

8. Ninjas or pirates?
Ninjas

9. If you were invisible for one day what would you do?
Well whatever I did, clothes would not be involved. Honestly, what’s the point?

10. What’s your spirit animal?
Spider Monkey

11. If you could be any celebrity woman who would you be and why?
Ellen DeGeneres, because she is hilarious! Dating Portia de Rossi would also be a plus.

12. What is the meaning of life?
It’s all about networking! Well, though networking is important, I think Dr. Seuss puts it in a good perspective: “Today You are You, that is Truer then True. There is no one alive that can be Youer then You.”

KC Masterpiece presents: Diamonds in the rough

Disclaimer: We are inordinately bitchy tonight. Caitlin’s uterus is pounding away at her soul, and Kaitlin is one second away from passing out from sheer exhaustion. We are creatively drained, physically tired and have had to entertain relatives all weekend and act happy. In short, we’re not in a good mood. Read at your own risk. We hold ourselves in no way responsible for anything we might say below.

Last Sunday, KC Masterpiece indulged in a trip to Sweet Basil and, upon finding the Patisserie closed, an emergency stop at Bright’s where we purchased a brick of fudge. Returning to Kaitlin’s abode, we consumed said brick and embarked on what might have been a two hour Facebook-a-thon. Before long, it naturally occurred to us to carefully examine our Whitman Facebook friends and compile a list of doable people, both in attraction and availability. Among Caitlin’s many friends, we came up with a grand total of five.

Five.

Trying to recall these few fellows, we can currently only remember three. This is sad, Whitman. This is sad.

True, we have exacting standards. True, there are cute guys that are unavailable, either because they are gay, taken or sloppy seconds. True, there are undoubtedly cute guys that we are not friends with and haven’t seen around campus. They probably lurk in the basements of frat houses, rotting away, only to emerge later with unrecognizably hideous hair and a beer belly.

However, this is no excuse. There is a fair percentage that we’re supposed to meet our spouse here, and so fair, prospects look horrifically dim. As far as we’ve encountered, these are the types of guys at Whitman that you date (warning: sweeping generalizations ahead).

1) Frat boy. Often has bad hair and extreme substance abuse problems. Might forget you exist. May or may not shower regularly.
2) Hippie. Often has bad hair and extreme substance abuse problems. Will call you, but only to sing you this totally cool song he just wrote. May or may not shower regularly.
3) Debater. Not worth it.
4) Theater kid. Sometimes unconventionally sexy, but can be shy. Also, possibly in the closet. Grinds with other men. Don’t get too attached.
5) Musician. As long as they know more than five chords on the guitar, they’ll probably be able to please you in bed. Can be a space cadet. Showering optional.
6) Normal guy in your sociology class. Actually is a cannibal.
7) Super-senior. An elusive breed. Might not be able to let go.
8) Guy with girlfriend back home. The sex will probably be good, just don’t expect commitment.
9) Townie. Expect people to judge your love.
10) Bon Appétit employee. It’s all fun and games until your snowmobile date literally goes off a cliff.

This is all Whitman offers, give or take a few options. There are good things about each group, granted, but the negative often outweighs the positive. This makes us extremely bitter, so bitter we write songs about it. Cut your hair, shower, emerge from the frat house or the library, and make yourselves available. Shyness is no excuse. The girls here want some loving. They’re begging for it. And each minute you wait, they slowly become re-virginized. Believe us, there is nothing hot about virgin sex.

However, embittered as we are, we have hope for the future. We believe there are a few diamonds in the rough we have not yet discovered. Anything’s possible.

So, to speed up the process, we officially present KC Masterpiece’s Hottie of the Week: a service to help unveil those diamonds. If you wish to nominate yourself or someone you know, write in. Each column, we will offer you a fabulous Whittie looking to get their groove on. Without further ado, here is our first official Hottie of the Week.

Name: Carol Schaeffer
Class Year: Sophomore
Major: English/Art History Double
Carol, so we’ve heard, is “insanely smart and absurdly hot” and self-admittedly arrogant. She enjoys punk rock, particularly the band Television, and her favorite movie is “Cool Hand Luke.” She likes taking pictures (wink wink) and plays history safari when she’s bored. She describes herself as a “bit of a prude,” but she’ll open up to the right man. She’s looking for a casual relationship with a man who doesn’t bore her and who’s well equipped. We can promise you, Carol is one Whittie you don’t want to overlook.

Shipwreck: Lies, lies, lies

I am a liar and always have been and always will be. Lies are the stuff of life: I cling to lies the way churchgoing folk cling to God, or my roommate clings to Taco Bell Crunch Wrap Gorditas Supreme. Without lies, even the most basic conversation would be completely out of my reach.

When speaking to classmates, professors or the people who live in my house and claim to share my lease, I lie. During mid-morning sacrifice, when our Right Honorable Priestess of the Moon calls us to confess each of our three sins, I lie. When I deliver important addresses to various governing bodies, I lie, and sometimes I curse a little to appear cool. In short, I lie to anyone who will listen and also to almost everyone else within earshot. You can only trust these words because they have been verified by a professional truth-checker, who the Pioneer has on a $300,000 retainer.

Lying has always been important to me. I was not raised to believe that life is worth living truthfully. My father, a gap-toothed fisherman from Crete, said to me: “I am lying.” He then left me in our granite fortress on Death Island to meditate on this paradox. Lies became like breathing to me: mostly unremarkable, sometimes carrying disease and extremely labored and noisy.

There are only two people who can tell when I lie: my siblings, Fan-Fan and the Gypsy. Fan-Fan is a terrible giant of a man who once wrestled the only remaining Ultra-Bear to the ground and then let it go free to die of shame. I hate him and he knows it, and the last time we spoke he made the Applebee’s waitress blush with his forward remarks. The Gypsy is no better: She claims to be a “lady-in-waiting to pain,” and dreams of constant strife. Behind her cold, dead eyes there is nothing but a dream of blood. Unless you are the mute man who fixes her bicycle, you should stay away from her.
Certainly, I am a master of seven other fields, each more useful than the last. But lies are my bread and butter, and my knowledge of lying serves to buttress my main hobbies, like collecting extremely gullible butterflies and getting people to arrive late to dinner parties. And so I will teach you how to tell several kinds of lies.

The Prancer: Do you need to abandon your plucky child sidekick in a train station? Use this lie. When your sidekick asks you where you’re going, simply ask him if he’d like something to eat or drink or smoke. Alternatively, strike a humorous tone of voice and say “I’m leaving you Tomasz, in this, the worst train station in Bucharest!” Then laugh, and get the boy to laugh as well. Then run hell for leather. This is sometimes referred to as “misleading,” instead of lying, because you don’t actually say anything contrary to the truth. I prefer to call it lying, and I will fight any of the unfortunate men whose job it is to name lies if they challenge me on this count.

The Breather: This is a good lie to use if you need to get out of some kind of obligation, or get someone to do magic tricks for many hours without pay. The trick is to try and pass over the words which are untrue with a light and quick tone of voice. For example: My employer, who happens to be a marsh mystic from the deep bayou, often asks me if I will take an article for the news section. I just say this, speedy as an arrow: “I have taken three articles already.” Then I bat my eyelashes and hope that I have remembered to apply eyeliner. If you do not wear eyeliner you can try a striptease or speaking in tongues.

The Gary: I am still working on this lie, and I have only managed to use it once. Here is the complete history. Our mutual acquaintance, Gary, asked me for a diplomat friend’s Internet number. Knowing that Gary was not the diplomat’s type and that Internet usage would only confuse him further, I consented. I told Gary that I would visit the embassy and find the diplomat and so get Gary a number worth dialing into his Internet machine. When I met the tall embassy guards who carried rifles, I spoke in a low and even and manly voice which never cracked: “Gary sends his regards.” Gary was sent for immediately, and he embarrassed himself when he met the diplomat and did not know her country’s only dance, the Electric Slide. And so I lied to Gary and got away with it.

The generation of quiet idealists?

Recently, Thomas Friedman, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, called our generation the “Q Generation.” By this, he meant that we are “Quiet Americans” who are more idealistic than we should be but less radical and politically engaged than we need to be.

So does this apply to Whitman? Undeniably there is a strong sense of idealism here almost to the point where many of us can sum up our future careers as “saving the world.” But at the same time, how many of us are actually doing something to create change while we’re still here at Whitman?

A lot of us volunteer. A lot of us are in clubs. A lot of us click on the link adding our name to a petition for Moveon.org or join a Facebook group that donates money to help starving children in Darfur.

I highly doubt Friedman would consider any of these actions radical. Nice, yes but radical, no. As Friedman said, “When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention.”

Friedman is wrong. We are paying attention. But in the words of many Whitman students: “I’m sorry, I just don’t have time.”
Everyone has the same number of hours in the day; it’s how you use them that matters. Yes, we are busy. But somehow that phrase is associated more often with activism than with other things. For example, how often do you hear “I want to go get drunk, but I don’t have time” or “I really want to go on Facebook, but I don’t have time”? We make time for things that we care about. So the next time you find yourself about to say you don’t have time for something, ask yourself if you really don’t or if it’s just easier to make excuses for something you don’t really care about.

Perhaps this sounds harsh. As columnist Connor Guy wrote last week, we are here at Whitman to get our money’s worth and to live our lives, i.e. to have fun. Taking to the streets protesting the Iraq War or urging Congress to cut carbon emissions doesn’t exactly fit into our schedules of class, studying, exercising, eating and getting drunk at the TKE house.

But then again, will activism ever really fit neatly into our daily planners? Are we really going to pretend that once we’re out of Whitman we’re suddenly going to have loads of free time? Sure, our responsibilities will be different, but graduate school, actual jobs and families will likely be even more time consuming.

One of my friends was recently complaining about certain professors who were trying to make him feel guilty for not being involved and caring about issues going on in the outside world. He told me he hated this because, quite frankly, he came here for the “Whitman Bubble.” He explained that right now, we can’t be effective activists, and if we try to, we will suffer academically. In his opinion, the best thing we can do right now is prepare ourselves so we have the expertise to actually doing something meaningful.

That’s not true. There are plenty of examples on this campus of people who are making a difference and getting good grades. Think about Whitman Direct Action; they built co-founded cooperatives in South America to run off of biodiesel and are now working for clean water in India. Or, closer to home, take the recently formed group Walla Walla Community Action working to make change in our community here. Or how about the new Outdoor Program for Youth that wants to give youth the chance to get outdoors?

I’m sure there are plenty of examples that I’m neglecting, but the point is that there is plenty that we can do to create real change while still being students and having fun. We’re involved in extracurriculars; that’s how we got to Whitman. Now we have to make sure those extracurriculars count.

Youth are the conscience of our society, and Whitman students should be at the forefront of political and social issues facing our society—this is a responsibility of people living in a democracy and the moral imperative of the educated. In other words, Whitties, it is time to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

Out of the woods: On having a child spirit

Everyone always wants to go back to being a child. I have to admit I envied the little girls who stole the show from the T-Tones at the Farmers’ Market last Saturday. Two imps sidled in front of adoring T-Tone parents and twirled around in long flowered dresses and winter boots. Completely oblivious of their audience, they swung and dipped and spun the length of the parking strip–leaving taller kindred spirits like me aching to join in.

As legend goes, children are unhampered, unspoiled, un-jaded and un-worried. Children can dance wherever they want to or jump up and down for no reason. College seniors feel the same of incoming freshmen classes. Jewett lunches, Anderson dance parties and Ankeny sunbathing inspire pangs of nostalgia.

But I do not want to be a child. I don’t even want to be a freshman again. What I want is for the “child spirit” to take form in the context of what my life is now.

A person can have a child spirit and be wise too. I asked a friend recently how she was doing, and she threw her hands into the air, saying, “I’m full of light.” The image stuck with me. She looked so simple, so like those little Farmer’s Market girls with sassy hands thrust skyward. What does that mean? A 22-year-old woman wearing a too-big orange sweatshirt stands up and proclaims such a thing. We spoke about how “full” we used to feel in the early years of life at Whitman College–full of Plato and hookups and late reading room nights and multifold answers to the simple question: “How are you?” I went through a phase when, refusing the complexity of that question, I would answer with a color, like, “Today I feel periwinkle.” Sometimes passion-fruit color, Delft blue or chartreuse.

Now, this friend says, she is full of something different. I think I understand what she means. As a young adult, you’re always boiling over with tensions and revelations.

Eventually you reach equilibrium. You learn to fill up without becoming heavy. Children are light because they’re literally less full. Those dancers weren’t thinking about whose view they would block or how people might react when they tangled their arms up and had to start over. But smart adults can think about those things and dance anyway. Even better than childish lightness is the awareness that helps you to relish it.

My birthday is quickly approaching. For a long time I was worrying what people would plan for me, just like when I was a kid. It dawned on me I could plan something myself. I could ask everyone to come over wearing exotic hats. I could ask them to go on a morning bike ride with streamers blowing behind us (I did.) A firecracker 75-year-old I know wanted everyone to write her a letter about their life goals when she had her big birthday. I think what people gain with age is knowing how they want to live: how they eat, how their living space is, and how they like to celebrate. I’m impressed with Mare Blocker’s story about the famous frilly dress she wears for artist talks and May Day : She walked into the Purple Parasol and told them, “I need to look like a princess.”

Rocky Barker brings light to Yellowstone fires

It may be a big claim to make, but Rocky Barker is prepared to argue that the Yellowstone fires of 1988 changed America.
Throughout the summer of 1988 fire scorched more than 1.2 million acres of Yellowstone National Park. However, according to Idaho environmental journalist Barker, who spoke on the subject on Oct. 15, more lasting than the charred landscape has been the effect the fires had on the American psyche.

“[The fire] made people more willing to challenge their views of what nature was,” said Barker. “The fires of 1988 forced us to see the power and fury of nature in a way nobody expected…it came at a time when we were beginning to deconstruct how we think of wilderness.”

Barker, whose book, “Scorched Earth: How the Fires of Yellowstone Changed America,” extensively examines the larger impact of the seemingly catastrophic Yellowstone fires, discussed the changes the fires have brought about in the Forest Service and the way Americans conceive of nature.

Barker said the vast majority of change in the Forest Service since its inception has taken place in the past 19 years since the massive fire. According to Barker, until 1988 the universal policy of suppressing fire at whatever cost went largely unquestioned. The fires were far bigger than any previous fires in the park.

While Barker and other forest and fire experts watched 36 percent of the park go up in flames $120 million was spent trying to contain a fire that was only slowed and eventually quenched by the fall snow.

Looking back at this waste of resources and unnecessary endangerment of thousands of lives, the Forest Service finally began to question their “archaic policy,” said Barker.

“[Out of the fires] grows the idea of bringing natural processes back into the park. …People started to realize we’ve gotta let nature back into nature.”

This change in philosophy has been characterized by the Forest Services’ increasing willingness to view fire as a potentially beneficial natural process.

While the idea of allowing fire to run its course still makes people uncomfortable, change is happening.

“Part of our policy today isn’t called ‘letting it burn’—it’s called ‘fire use,” said Barker. “At least we’ve got fire back on our minds.”

Greenbook uses latest activism technique to promote awareness

The widespread popularity of Facebook and other Internet sites within the past few years now not only provides instant communication but has become a means of spreading awareness of global causes. Greenbook, a recently created Facebook application, claims to offset CO2 emissions caused by computer and server use.

When Facebook users install the Greenbook application, money is generated through sponsorship: This month’s sponsor, The Experience Project, has donated enough to offset 104,369 pounds of CO2. According to Greenbook’s application Web site, the money is used to buy forward strips on Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SREC) from Sun Run Generation LLC. Greenbook was created by Brent Charbonneau, an 2006 alumnus of the University of Ottawa, who was unavailable for comment.

Many Facebook users see this as a good way to create change and spread awareness through a widely used medium.

“It’s a very clever idea,” said junior Kyle Cotler in an e-mail. “I’m a pretty lazy person, but I do care deeply for the environment. People need only add Greenbook to their profiles and they are inadvertently reducing CO2 emissions.”

Greenbook’s Web site includes many features, such as a link called “Green Ideas,” where users can post other tips for environmentally-friendly living which are voted on and receive percentages of daily amounts of CO2 removal. Users can find out how much CO2 offset they have generated by their participation in Greenbook, as well as which of their Facebook friends are most active in using Greenbook.

“I think the web is a wonderful resource for discovering new ways to be green,” said sophomore Emily Baker in an e-mail. “Do we necessarily have the time or take the time to look up policies and research ways to reduce our personal impacts on the earth? Probably not—but the tidbits provided by Greenbook (which of course we make time to check) keep us mindful of our action.”

Sophomore Camila Thorndike had a slightly different reaction to Greenbook and expressed her wish to be more actively involved in change.

“A Facebook group is not going to change the world,” said Thorndike. “Our generation was raised with e-communication, and we’ve developed a bit of a laissez-faire attitude because of this. Real and lasting change must involve direct action through political avenues and more traditional activist tactics. Greenbook should be the icing on the cake for the real work.”

Thorndike said she added the application because it is “some sort of positive action.” “My philosophy is that if it’s going to help, why not? It’s certainly not doing anything harmful or detrimental. I think Greenbook’s effect at the moment is negligible, but if everyone added it—who knows?”

Cotler, Baker and Thorndike all emphasized the simplicity and ease that Internet sites such as Greenbook afford.

“I think it’s a pretty useful utility because it’s simple, unobtrusive and rewarding,” said Cotler. “It speaks loudly for our generation and culture. Gone are the days of protests and chaining ourselves to trees. Now with a simple push of a button we are capable of doing nothing and something at the same time.”

Ethanol fuel not as green as people may think

Ethanol has been hailed as the “green fuel” that will solve—or at least greatly improve—our environmental problems. Unfortunately it may not be such a benign, new energy source as those in Washington, D.C., might want us to believe.

Ethanol is a fuel that can be used to run any engine that runs off of normal gasoline. It is made from green substances like grass, corn and wheat; however, it is primarily made with corn in the United States currently.

President George W. Bush included it in his plan to decrease the United State’s dependence on foreign oil. He declared that more ethanol would be put into circulation at gas stations around the nation.

Yet there are serious concerns associated with ethanol that have remained fairly unknown to the general populous. Ethanol is not a truly clean energy source and is not a renewable energy source, as has been suggested.

Ethanol is produced primarily from corn. This immediately causes several problems. Corn production uses more nitrogen-based fertilizer and more insecticide and herbicide than any other crops making it a major contributor to ground and river water pollution. Corn is also responsible for more total soil erosion than any other crop produced in the United States.

Both of these problems suggest that corn production in the United States is neither environmentally friendly, nor is it sustainable for the long-term future unless changes are made in cultivation techniques. Production of ethanol in the chemical plants raises more environmental concerns. There are major air and water pollution problems associated with these plants. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued several warnings to ethanol production plants in the past to either reduce their air pollution or be shut down.

For each gallon of ethanol created from corn there are 12 gallons of waste water produced. This waste water has a very high biological oxygen demand (BOD). The cost of processing waste water with that high a BOD is very draining on the economy.

Perhaps the most prevalent concern associated with ethanol is its contribution to air pollution after it has been grown and processed. Ethanol has a serious impact on the quality of air and the degradation of the ozone layer when used in automobiles.

Ethanol was praised when it came out for how it releases less carbon dioxide than regular gasoline. Carbon dioxide is the largest cause of ozone layer depletion leading to global warming. Ethanol does have less CO2 emissions than regular gasoline; but it puts off other harmful chemicals that do additional harm to the ozone.

Ethanol releases nitric oxides and volatile organic compounds that contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer. It may not be the CO2 that we know is harmful, but nitric oxides are just as bad for the ozone as CO2.

Ethanol is not as green as we were made to believe. Instead, ethanol contributes to environmental problems and global warming arguably as much as regular gasoline.

‘Global warming guy’ image renders presidency impossible for Gore

Al Gore has won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Huzzah. Break out the champagne, unveil the chocolate cake with “Gore for Pres. 2008” in red, white and blue cursive icing. Sure, Gore’s gained a few pounds in the last few years and lost a few hairs, not to mention he’s still bearing the bruise from being thoroughly politically willow-whomped in his presidential bid.

But he’s written a best seller, fronted one of the most influential and successful documentaries in history, won two Academy Awards and now the Nobel Peace Prize, all in the space of roughly one year. He has the experience, he has the down-to-earth good sense, and the collective yell of the Democratic party seems to be “Run, Gore, run!”

But does he really have our support? How many Democrats would actually vote for Al Gore? Gore’s platform has always been grounded in environmental issues. His foray into global warming should not come as a surprise; he’s been involved in pushing environmental issues since his days as a congressman. He has no doubt found a group of loyal and fierce supporters in the environmental lobby, which he has helped to galvanize more effectively than any single person in recent memory.

Environmentalists, though easily classified under that nicely packaged term, have any number of varying opinions on varying issues. “The Environment” is a unique issue in this way. One can be for or against school prayer, for or against gun control. Are you against the earth? No? Great! You’re an environmentalist!

The global warming epidemic has served as the issue around which these loosely-termed environmentalists can gather. Finally, most environmentalists can point to global warming as an issue that is pressing enough to get in a frenzy over, scientific enough to offer actual solutions to, and political enough to feel like action is, on this front, possible.

Gore’s determined crusade has made it impossible to think of him without thinking of global warming, and this is why he can’t be president. Global warming is a frighteningly real prospect of change on a scale I can’t even conceive. But I want my president to be as fierce on matters of foreign policy, health care and nuclear proliferation as on global warming. It’s not that Gore can’t live up to my ideal, it’s just that I don’t think he can change his firmly cemented image as Global Warming Guy, and I don’t think people would be receptive to any attempt to change that image.

The Democratic Party has plenty of presidential candidates, and some of them are pretty compelling. Al Gore should stay where he can be most effective—working toward a single issue, with all his might and grace. Let other people screw up the country.

Carbon trading goes bust

We all know that the U.S. refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty and then didn’t set anything up in its place domestically. But I bet you didn’t know the U.S. is trading carbon! Well, maybe you did if you’re from California, which has set up an emissions trading scheme, or if you’re from Chicago and you’ve heard of the Chicago Climate Exchange, which currently has 320 members. BusinessWeek did a story in September about how companies are trading carbon now to get ready for a possible national emissions trading scheme.

Why might carbon trading be good for the U.S.? As Kevin Baumert of the Global Policy Forum points out, the U.S. is much more energy inefficient than most other industrialized countries, and carbon trading allows polluters to buy credits rather than make actual reductions in emissions. Carbon trading on an international level could allow us to avoid reductions entirely by purchasing offsets from developing countries. Carbon trading is also attractive to private citizens because it doesn’t directly affect them as directly, as opposed to a carbon tax, which would affect nearly everyone.

But is this good for the environment? Does it actually reduce emissions? I asked Professor Phil Brick of the environmental studies department, and he sent me to YouTube to watch a video called “Cheat Neutral,” which I recommend that everyone watch.

It demonstrates how carbon offsetting not only doesn’t reduce emissions, it encourages people to continue by removing the moral imperative to not pollute. Go ahead and pollute; you can just pay somebody else not to.

Carbon offsetting might make sense if the entire world was already running on wind farms and we didn’t use fossil fuels in our everyday lives, but until we get there, we can’t afford to put off making actual reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). U.S. companies need to make themselves as energy efficient as possible and switch to using renewable energy. In short, once we have done everything technologically possible to be sustainable, then it would be permissible to offset any remaining unavoidable emissions.

Of course that’s just carbon offsets. What about carbon trading without offsets? Maybe. Carbon trading certainly does provide an incentive to reduce emissions for those who can do so easily. But so far they’re the only ones who have been doing so. The European Emissions Trading Scheme under the Kyoto treaty hasn’t seen any reduction in emissions so far because none of the participating countries wanted their businesses to be at a disadvantage, so they each allotted too many pollution credits. Some people made a lot of money, but nothing changed.

For some, emissions trading schemes work beautifully. Energy giant BP instituted an internal cap-and-trade system between business units in 100 different countries and were able to reduce their emissions to ten percent below 1990 levels with no net cost, according to Climatebiz.com, a business resource for climate management. The U.S. actually pioneered the first cap-and-trade systems for acid rain a few decades ago, and it was largely successful. But can it work for carbon, which everybody emits?

A lot of people don’t think so. The Wall Street Journal calls carbon trading a “charade,” asserting that people like it because they think they can make money off of it, when really, sufficiently stringent caps will have to mean economic hardship for some. Ken Shepherd of the Business and Media Institute pointed out that California’s utilities can buy power from surrounding states to get around the state system.

Poorer countries (and China) are worried that an international system would keep them from industrializing, and the U.S. refuses to lower its emissions until China promises to.

China will have to get greener, but so will we, and Europe is years ahead of us already in terms of efficiency, so it wouldn’t hurt us to get started now. As long as developing countries can point to the U.S. and say, well look how much they’re allowed to emit, we won’t be able to channel their growth in a green direction.

I think the truth about global warming is maybe a little more inconvenient than most Americans can actually deal with.
I’m worried that people and businesses are excited about carbon trading because they know we’re not willing to be as aggressive as we need to be about actual emissions reductions. I’m worried that we won’t be, that we will show our worst side when it comes to climate change and be the selfish, greedy superpower that the rest of the world loves to hate. I’m worried that we’ll continue to perpetuate gross injustices upon poorer countries with a refusal to shoulder the heavy burden that we’ve created for ourselves.

So while I could maybe see carbon trading as an alternative to nothing, I’m still worried.

Identity Project asks, ‘What are you?’

“I am the ray of light that trickles through the trees,” read one advertisement for the Whitman Identity Project. The project asks members of the Whitman community to respond to the question “What are you?” and then pairs their response with a photo. The completed project will be put up in the Stevens Gallery in Reid on Nov. 13.

The Whitman Identity Project was inspired by Kip Fulbeck’s Hapa Project. Becky Avila and Souk Thongdymanyvong, the two students spearheading the project, heard Fulbeck speak in a conference on race and ethnicity this past summer. The Whitman Identity Project is raising money to bring Fulbeck to speak on campus Nov. 29.

Fulbeck used the same format as the Whitman Identity Project, but his Hapa Project focused on race and particularly people of mixed race. The word “Hapa,” was originally a derogatory term for someone of mixed heritage, derived from the Hawaiian word for “half.”

As someone of mixed race, “[Fulbeck] just got annoyed with people asking him, ‘What are you?’ all the time,” said Thongdymanyvong. “He did this project to take back the word [Hapa] and have people feel more comfortable about being of mixed cultures.”

Avila said that she doesn’t want the Whitman Identity Project to be limited by race. “Whitman kind of does that [equates diversity with race], and we just didn’t want to make that connection anymore,” said Avila. She also expressed fear that focusing on race might “turn off certain people.”

The project reflects collaboration between the Asian Cultural Association (ACA) and the International Students and Friends Club (ISFC), “which is really cool because it’s the first time that the clubs have come together to collaborate on a piece,” Avila said.

First-year Esther Weathers, who is a member of both clubs and has helped table for the project, agreed with Avila’s opinions about race. According to Weathers, not focusing on race is good because “some people really don’t know what they are racially. [The project] lets people express themselves differently, [with] whatever they feel comfortable expressing themselves with.”

“I’ve only gotten positive reactions [to the project],” said Avila. “I think people are really excited about the fact that it’s not pertaining to race.”

Thongdymanyvong agreed, saying that not focusing on race “gives people an equal voice.”

But Neda Ansaari, who is a member of ISFC and has helped with the project, explained that it is hard for people to answer the question. ACA member Elle de la Cruz agreed: “It’s hard to sit down and just say, ‘Oh, I know who I am.’”

Thongdymanyvong has experienced a small number of negative responses to the project. She talked about how some people regard the question “What are you?” very cynically. “It was kind of disappointing that people would…have that kind of attitude towards it, because we really want this to be an inclusive project for the Whitman community to participate in,” said Thongdymanyvong.

Fulbeck photographed over 1,200 people from all walks of life for the Hapa Project, but due to space constraints in the Stevens Gallery, Avila and Thongdymanyvong hope to photograph between 100 and 150 people.

Avila and Thongdymanyvong are hoping to have professors and administrators participate in the project. They said that the majority of participants have been first-year students but that a number of professors have expressed interest in the project.
De la Cruz talked about what answering the question “What are you?” meant to her. “I started actually thinking about the different categories that people put themselves into, but those categories are so limited, so they don’t really necessarily address who you are,” said de la Cruz. “I thought this project was cool because it allowed people to explore a different side of themselves.”

For Weathers, the project was about expressing aspects of her heritage that one cannot see from her appearance. She said that although she appears predominantly white, she is also Korean and an “island girl” from Guam. “What you see isn’t what you just get,” said Weathers. “All this stuff is just written on my heart.”

“The responses that we’re getting are so beautiful. It makes me be like ‘Wow, these are the people that I go to school with, and now I really feel like I’m getting like a piece of their soul,’” said Avila.

Despite tolerant policy, Health Center forced to turn away student

On Friday, Oct. 12, the Welty Health Center experienced an unusually large influx of patients during the graveyard shift and was forced to turn away one student seeking overnight bedding. The student, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that he was brought to the Health Center that night because he was heavily intoxicated after a party.

The center was not filled to capacity at the time, but unique circumstances made accommodating an additional in-patient impossible. The nurse on duty that night was Dawn Chlipala.

Although there were two vacant beds, Chlipala could not offer them to the student. Since the student was male, he could not room with a female patient due to the center’s single sex policy. The only other available double room was occupied by a patient who was described by staff as “too ill to share a room with someone who might need to get up and down frequently.”

Chlipala’s professional evaluation was that the incoming student was not dangerously ill and would be able to recover on his own.

“I felt really bad about having to turn him away,” said Chlipala. “But after taking his vital signs and everything, I was confident that he was going to be okay.”

The student did not object to the Health Center’s decision.

“I’m actually kind of glad,” said the student. “My friends brought me back home, and I slept it off on the couch. I felt pretty okay in the morning.”

Health Center Director Ellen Collette said that it was just chance that so many students happened to come in at the same time that night.

“It’s like going to an emergency room,” said Collette. “I used to be an ER nurse back in the ‘70s. Some nights nobody comes in and other nights there are a whole bunch. Sometimes we have to prioritize decisions. It’s sad, and we’d love to take everyone in the world that came in. But we try our best, we really do.”

Collette said that although students have been turned away in the past due to a full house, such occasions are rare. According to Collette, Whitman is one of the best providers of on-campus health care among national colleges, boasting 12 in-patient beds and a 24/7 center. In contrast, Williams College, which has the highest endowment of any liberal arts institution, provides only daytime health service for its students and has no in-patient beds.

“I’ve been to a lot of colleges, and this is about as good as it gets,” said Collette.

Most college infirmaries don’t accept intoxicated patients because their presence often puts the staff at risk. The Welty Center does choose to extend care to intoxicated students, but violent incidents have broken out in the past, the most recent assault occurring within the past year.

“We’ve had nurses that have been slugged by intoxicated students,” said Collette. “Sometimes people bring in someone they can’t handle, and then they leave the nurse here all alone to take care of them.”

Although such incidents are rare, Collette encourages students bringing in agitated friends to stay with them until they calm down. When faced with a rowdy patient, the center relies on a panic button that summons campus security upon activation. Collette feels that the benefit of providing care to intoxicated students is worth the risk. She cited a recent tragedy at the University of Colorado in which a first-year student died from alcohol poisoning after a night of heavy drinking at a fraternity house.

According to the National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, college-age drinking results in an estimated 1,700 student deaths per year.

Patient confidentiality is of paramount concern to the staff of the Health Center. Collette said that except in rare cases, such as when a student’s life is at risk, the center will never betray a patient’s medical information to an unauthorized third party.
“The Health Center is kind of like Las Vegas,” said Collette with a chuckle. “What happens here stays here.”

“We love taking care of students,” said Collette. “That’s why we have nurses that have been here for 25 years. We want [the students] to let us know if there’s something we can offer that they think would be helpful. We want to hear from them. This is their health center.”

Annual Security Report reveals Whitman’s sexual misconduct statistics

Whitman’s 2006 Annual Security Report was released on Oct. 1, as required by the U.S. Department of Education. According to the Handbook for Crime Reporting, this report must be published and distributed by Oct. 1 every year. Whitman students were made aware of the report through the students’ listserv.

The report lays out in detail all of the various crimes reported on campus but also includes policies on sexual assault in particular. Sexual offenses fall into one of two categories. “Forcible” implies any sex act against another person, forcibly and/or against that person’s will. “Non-forcible” is defined as any sexual situation where the victim is incapable of giving consent.

In the last three years reported (2004, ’05 and ’06), there were no incidents on Whitman’s campus of non-forcible rape. This category is divided into statutory rape and incest.

The number of forced rapes this year was the highest, with six campus offenses and one off-campus offense. While this number is much lower than the number of actual offenses occurring, it’s actually higher than at many larger schools that may have a more complicated disclosure system.

“Pretty much all the numbers you’re going to see … are all statistics that come from our pink forms,” said Barbara Maxwell. Maxwell is Whitman’s sexual misconduct response coordinator. She is responsible for distribution of Sexual Misconduct Incident Report Forms or ‘pink forms,’ as they are known to students. These forms are an anonymous, confidential way for anyone to report incidents they have either experienced or have heard from a friend, student or other acquaintance Space is provided to describe the incident, and several resources for victims are listed including the Health Center, Walla Walla Police and the dean of students.

Maxwell stressed the importance of students knowing that disclosing on a pink form does not imply any action being taken by the College. “The pink forms do nothing,” she said. “I use them for two reasons: one, for the statistics. The other, it gives me a sense of who our students are confiding in.” One conclusion this has led to is that Residence Life members especially hear about incidents but very rarely fill out forms to report them. This fall Maxwell has spoken to residence directors about the importance of disclosing for statistical purposes.

Numbers from these forms are entered into the Security Report for the year they are reported, not necessarily the year they occur. When asked why victims may wait for up to several years before disclosing, Maxwell places a large emphasis on self-blame and the reactions of friends. She also points out that new students are more at risk than any other group on campus. “They’re in a new situation, testing their limits, and they’re more likely to blame a bad situation on themselves,” she said.

One female senior waited three years to report an incident from early her freshman year. “My friends thought it was no big deal when I described what happened. It upset me a lot. When I was still thinking about it three years later, I knew it was a big deal.”

This student spoke with Maxwell, who told her that what she experienced was attempted rape. “I’m glad I disclosed, because it made me realize I wasn’t wrong for feeling bad,” she said. She agrees with Maxwell that students need to know that reporting late does not change their options in terms of potential action.

After the Security Report was originally sent out on the listserv from Maxwell’s office, several students re-sent it to campus groups to make sure it was read. Gabriela Salvidea sent it to FACE, the feminist group on campus. “Just because Whitman feels like a womb does not mean we’re sheltered from the realities of sexual abuse,” she said in an e-mail. “Women are disproportionately affected by sexual crime, but it’s equally important that men and women know these statistics.”

Pink forms are available all over campus. Look for them in bathrooms, with RAs and RDs, in Maxwell’s office in Reid, with the dean of students and at the front desk of Reid.

Girl Talk concert raises admissions questions, concerns

When Girl Talk came to campus on Oct. 14, less than half of the student body was able to get tickets to see him perform.
Ellie Klein is the public events chair. As such, she decided where Girl Talk would play and how many tickets would be sold.

“The ballroom capacity is 600, so we made 600 tickets,” she said. “That’s where I think there was a lot of confusion. We really couldn’t make more than 600, on the chance that 600 people showed up, plus we had security and the sound and lights crew and Gregg Gillis, Girl Talk himself.”

Girl Talk tickets were given out every day for a week prior to the event. On the final day, Friday, tickets sold out at 12:30 p.m. Klein had planned to sell them until 1:30 p.m.

“It worked out pretty well because the line stopped as the tickets stopped,” Klein said.

Abby McCoy was one of the final students to receive a ticket. “Including us, there were three people there and three tickets left. They gave us the last tickets and said, ‘Alright, we’re done.’ I was so relieved.”

Nevertheless, many students were disappointed about not receiving Girl Talk tickets. Some even offered money on the listserv to anyone willing to give up a ticket.

Others were frustrated that only Whitman students could get tickets. Friends, boyfriends and girlfriends of Whitman students were among the many who wanted to see Girl Talk and listen to his music.

Klein explained, “There were a fair number of people who did pay their ASWC fees that could not get in. Of course people who paid tuition and go here should get priority. That’s why we didn’t open it up to the public at all, or alums.”

Nevertheless, Girl Talk fans without tickets or without a valid Whitman ID showed up at Reid on the night of the event.

Many people who do not attend Whitman had obtained tickets and borrowed IDs from students. Since these people were not allowed in, their tickets were wasted. Tom Bugert was among the students who checked tickets and identification at the door.

“I caught a couple of people who weren’t Whitman students who had somehow gotten Whitman IDs and tickets. A couple of people didn’t have tickets and were trying to get in. I also stopped a couple of Whitman alums.” Bugert says. “There was this one girl who wasn’t a Whitman student who tried to get in. When she handed me her ID, she was covering up the picture with her thumb. I was like, ‘I really need to see the whole card.’ The person in the photo had, like, a completely different face and hair color.”

Unfortunately, the door patrol did not catch everyone. Bugert said, “I know that a couple Whitman alums got past us, which is really frustrating. It’s just not fair to all the other people we had to turn away.”

Bugert said, “We can either do it in the ballroom, which only fits 600 but we can dance, or we can do in Cordiner, which can fit everyone but there’s no dancing. Girl Talk would not be nearly as much fun in Cordiner. I guess I would ask the people who were frustrated that they didn’t get tickets, ‘Why didn’t you get at the beginning of the week when there were a hundred of them?’ It’s kind of their own fault for putting it off ‘til Friday afternoon and then being surprised that there weren’t tickets.”

Alumnus speaks on ethics of medicine

For the vast majority of biotech companies, the head of research and design has to worry about stockholders, profit and all the other effects that come with a tradable company.

Dr. Steven G. Reed ‘73, founder, director and head of research and development for the Infectious Disease Research Institute, doesn’t have to worry about any of that while running IDRI—his institute is a non-profit.

On Thursday, Oct. 18, Reed spoke to an audience at Reid campus center about the IDRI’s work on vaccine development, their commitment to finding cures and treatments that still burden many in the developing world.

Reed’s organization, founded in 1993, focuses on diagnostics and development of vaccines for “neglected diseases” such as leishmaniasis, leprosy and chagas disease. The IDRI is also doing continuous research on vaccines for tuberculosis and malaria, having already created the first defined vaccine for tuberculosis along with biotech company Corixa/GSK.

The lecture, titled “A Non-profit Biotech Model for Global Health Solutions, or Developing Vaccines on a Shoestring,” also explained the IDRI’s unique funding model, a blend of federal and private grants (the most recent contribution a $32 million grant from the Gates foundation), licensing royalties from IDRI-developed products, industry investments and other sources, all of which goes toward research.

IDRI has been successful at least in part as a result of its collaboration with large pharmaceutical companies. According to Reed, IDRI has access to the world’s largest chemical compound library, largely thanks to contributions of normally closely kept information by Eli Lilly and Merck & Co. Reed also founded biotech company Corixa in 1994 to collaborate with IDRI in development activities.

“If you’re doing good science, [pharmaceutical companies] will want to work with you. You just have to learn how to do what you want without taking away their incentives,” Reed said.

Reed completed his undergraduate career at Whitman and is now a research professor of pathobiology at the University of Washington in addition to running IDRI.

According to Reed, the main challenge of a non-profit biotech company is meeting “real needs that don’t have real markets” in countries where IDRI’s vaccines could make a significant impact.

“The biggest problem is convincing these governments to take on these diseases of the poor,” Reed said. “Because the money is there.”

Reed’s lecture was presented by the Whitman Career Center and paid for by the Sava and Danica Andjelkovic endowment, a fund that brings distinguished alumni to Whitman to share information about their careers with current students.
According to Career Center Director Susan Buchanan, Reed was an ideal speaker for the series.

“Dr. Reed exemplifies ‘making a difference’ with his company’s research and the creative collaboration with for-profit health care companies enabling him to provide life-saving vaccines to the world’s poor,” Buchanan said.

First-year Rachel Sicheneder has not yet selected a major, much less a career, but said the lecture helped pique her interest in biology-related fields.

“I think biology lets you do research in a lot of different places and help the people who need it,” she said. “Medicines like Viagra get funding, but vaccines that need it, like those for tuberculosis and malaria, don’t.”

This week in ASWC: Oct. 25 – Nov. 1

ASWC senate met last Sunday to discuss recent committee activities and to approve new club and funding requests.

The senate approved three new clubs: Whitman Direct Action, the Firearms Appreciation Society and Students for Ron Paul.
The latter club, presented by club President and Senator Alex Potter, hopes to work on Whitman campus to promote Paul’s presidential campaign. Debate sprang up in the senate as to whether ASWC should sponsor and legitimize an organization devoted to a single political candidate, but the measure easily passed.

Potter was excited about the possibilities of a club devoted to this candidate. “I think the purpose of the club is to allow us to be an official club which lets us partner with other campus organizations,” Potter said during debate. “I would love to see Whitman Students for Ron Paul partner with Coalition against Homophobia to promote gay rights or the Whitman Peace Coalition to end the war in Iraq. I think it will serve a good purpose.”

The senate approved funding requests by the Campus Greens, who requested $880 from the newly created Travel and Conference Fund. They will use this money to send two members to the Power Shift Conference in Washington, D.C., where they will meet with other youths to discuss global issues. This conference is part of the Campus Climate Challenge the Campus Greens have been running this year.

The senate also approved giving $776 to Sentio magazine, which will provide a monthly news magazine for the Whitman Community. Galen Bernard, who brought the request before the senate, will head production.

“We are hoping to stimulate student dialogue, student interest,” said Bernard. “We feel a lot of students have a sense of disconnection here at college, and we want to provide people a reminder of what’s out there.”

Roman Goerss was appointed by President Jeff Wilson to head the Committee on ASWC Reform, which will study the workings of ASWC and the House of Clubs. Goerss hopes to provide a report with recommendations on reform by the end of the semester.

In other activities, senators from every class recently held their first senate forums of the year. Among issues discussed were the need for more on-campus spaces for bands to practice, this year’s Symposium, and the changes to Bon Appétit meal service this year.

Nominations Chair John Stewart plans to announce his seven nominations to the Diversity Committee at the Joint Session this upcoming Sunday. This committee will work with the student representatives on the committee planning the Symposium this year.

The student representatives on the planning committee will all sit on the Diversity Committee and will work with the representatives from the faculty and administrators to advocate student input.

Oversight Chair Jordan Clark also plans to nominate three students to his committee at Sunday’s Joint Session.

Stewart has also opened up applications for three positions on campus. Two of the seats available, one on the Student Technology Advisory Committee and one on the College Athletic Committee, will be open to all students. The final position, which is a seat on the council on student affairs, is limited to upperclassmen girls.

All applications are due Friday, Oct. 26.

Winterim Applications are now available online for all students interested in running a workshop. Members of the Nominations Committee will be tabling in Reid this week.

Whitman Celebrates Family Weekend

UN Day program showcases talents, represents several countries

Many visiting campus during Family Weekend did not expect an Albanian wedding dance to be among the activities that could entertain them.

But this dance was showcased as part of Whitman’s annual “UN Day” event, planned by different diversity clubs and hosted by the International Students and Friends Club (ISFC).

United Nations Day was officially declared in 1948 and honors the anniversary of the United Nations Charter. It is an internationally recognized observance, falling yearly on Oct. 24. Whitman’s celebration of the event always coincides with Family Weekend.

“The UN Day event is a showcasing of different talents from around the world performed by the student body. We try to incorporate anything; the point of it is to be all-inclusive,” said junior Leor Maizel, ISFC treasurer. Maizel was an MC for the event this year, along with senior Alan Waxman.

Maizel estimated that about 40 students were involved in planning and implementing the approximately hour-long event this year. Performances in the event ranged from musical pieces to dances and theater.

Sophomore Neda Ansaari, ISFC co-president with sophomore Ashma Basnyat, estimated that about nine to 10 different countries were represented during the event, specifically mentioning Zimbabwe, Romania, Burma and India.

“Our main goal was to make people aware of different cultures, but it’s kind of hard to do it in one hour,” Ansaari said.

In order to acknowledge more countries, different countries’ flags were hung along the ceiling of Reid Campus Center. These flags were either requested or donated by Whitman students or were provided by the Intercultural Center, Ansaari said, and represent different presences at Whitman.

“There was a really good turnout, and it was a lot of fun for the people participating,” said sophomore Ana Salazar-Walsh. Salazar-Walsh, the president of the Whitman dance club, participated in the Albanian wedding dance.

“Personally, I feel like it was really good but I was sort of disappointed with the number of people that actually came,” Ansaari said. “A lot of parents came, and I saw a lot of international students in the ballroom, but talking about American students, I only saw a couple of them.”

Ansaari recognized that the event overlapped with other activities taking place for the Family Weekend, including a soccer game, but hopes that future years will yield more student attendees.

Parents’ presence affects atmosphere on campus

Once each year Whitman College takes on a different feel for Family Weekend. It is a time for parents and other family members of current Whitman students to come and see their sons and daughters and the campus they call home.

“There are differences: Everyone is different when they are around their parents,” first-year Heather Nichols-Haining said. “I thought it was really interesting watching people with their parents, seeing people from class and from the dorm with their parents and saying ‘I know them.’”

The school scheduled many events for the visiting family members. Among the many activities were Theater Sports, a sampler concert, an alumni swim meet, a planetarium show and the play “Isn’t it Romantic.”

Theater Sports was among the more popular events and filled up quickly. This performance was presented for the parents and some Whitman students noticed a difference in the way the show was performed.

“I felt that the cast was obviously holding back a little and tailoring towards the adults in the audience, at least at first,” first-year Tristan Grau said.

The differences were evident in other parts of the campus as well. There were many more events all around campus. The dining halls served meals for the parents. And some people felt the residence halls had a different feel as well.

“Anderson is really different,” Nichols-Haining said. “I keep running into older people. It is either really vacated or really full.”
Parents were all around campus. They were wandering and seeing the campus, which many had never seen before. Students responded to this.

“It seems weird to say ‘nicer’ because Whitman students are nice all the time, but people are much more friendly to the parents,” first-year Johnny Zimmerman said. “Students are willing to answer questions more readily this weekend.”

Greek groups focus on philanthropy activities

Participants in the greek life program turned to volunteer work on Friday, Oct. 12, in a combined effort to clean up a two-mile stretch of Highway 12. The project brought together students from the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and the Sigma Chi fraternity. Spearheaded this year by Maryn Juergens and James Bevan-Lee, the philanthropy chairs for their respective organizations, highway clean up has become an annual event.

“With our sorority we have the ability to mobilize a group of 70 energetic and motivated young people to do good for the community,” said Juergens in an e-mail. “I believe that as a greek group we need to take advantage of that opportunity.”

According to Juergens, about 20 students spent two hours working on the strip of highway that the Sigma Chi fraternity has “adopted.”

“I think it’s important to represent greek life with something other than partying,” said Emily Ferrier, a first year student and Kappa Alpha Theta pledge.

Volunteering may not be the first image that many students associate with greek life, but students like Juergens are working hard to change that perception. “Our sorority is about so much more than ourselves,” Juergens said. “It is about being a citizen in our global community.”

“I’m glad that greek life promotes community service,” said Ferrier. “But I think in general they could organize community service opportunities more often.”

On a campus where the College Board reports nearly one in three female students join sororities and even higher numbers of male students, about 41 percent, join fraternities, commitment to volunteer work could have a big impact.

Juergens stressed the importance of environmental awareness and keeping the earth in good condition. She said that she considers community service activities like the highway clean-up project to be “one of the most important parts of greek life.”

Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize

Albert “Al” Gore, Jr. can add something else next to his Academy Award for the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”: the Nobel Peace Prize.

On Friday, Oct. 12, the former vice-president of the Clinton Administration and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shared the award for their work in raising awareness about global warming.

In their announcement, the Nobel Committee cited their reasoning for choosing Gore and the IPCC for the prize. “The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 is to be shared . . . between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

“I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize,” Gore said in a written statement after receiving the award, adding that the climate crisis was not a political issue but a moral and spiritual one.

Gore has promised to donate his half of the $1.5 million prize to his Alliance for Climate Protection, a United States organization that aims to change public perception about climate change in the U.S. and around the world.

Gore also said that he has no intention of running for the presidency in 2008. “I’m involved in a different kind of campaign, a global campaign to think about the climate crisis,” he said in a televised interview with Norwegian station NRK on Oct. 17.
That hasn’t stopped encouragement from various grassroots organizations. A group called Draftgore.org urged Gore to run for president by taking out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times on Oct. 10.

Reactions have differed among political pundits. The Wall Street Journal dedicated an Oct. 14 article to listing other people that should have won the award. The National Review Online’s Iain Murray poked fun at Gore’s win by implying that Gore should’ve shared the award with “well-known peace campaigner” Osama Bin Laden. Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote in an Oct. 15 column entitled “Gore Derangement Syndrome,” “What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?”

On the Whitman campus, reactions to Gore and the IPCC’s win have varied.

Senior Ben Stevens, also a member of the Young Democrats, felt that Gore’s win was deserved. “It’s a little soon, but he’s doing important work. Climate change has to be in the limelight as much as possible.”

Junior Jill Laney saw the award as a successful example of how global warming is becoming more culturally accepted. “I think it’s a good thing. The work they’ve done has been beneficial to educating people and motivating people to make changes toward global warming.”

“Al Gore is a joke, so is him winning the Nobel Peace Prize,” said junior Veronica Prout. “What does global warming have to do with peace anyway? . . . He’s a man with delusions of grandeur, so how can we trust his ‘Inconvenient Truth?’ He’s done nothing but lie about who he is and what he has done. It’s like finding out that Bozo the Clown won the Nobel Peace Prize. I can’t help but laugh.”

She later added in an e-mail, “The prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize just plummeted.”

First-year Samuel Nortz also felt that the “peace” aspect of the award was missing in the win. “The Nobel Peace Prize should be more in tune with humanity.”

“[Gore] hasn’t produced anything beneficial,” Nortz added. Nortz thought that Gore’s achievements were not as prestigious as portrayed in the media. “Most of what he knows or lectures about has been stolen from someone else.”

The Nobel Peace Prize will be formally awarded on Dec. 10 in Oslo, Norway of this year.

WDA provides sustainable solutions

Whitman Direct Action embodies all that Whitman promises to foster: creativity, leadership, intellectual vitality, service and global awareness. Despite this, the long-term future of WDA is uncertain and hinges on a few factors, the most important of which is administration support.

The mission of WDA is to help marginalized people internationally through student initiatives and sustainable solutions.
Last week WDA held an information session to garner support and expand membership. Up until recently the group consisted of a handful of students working independently. Now WDA has its sights set on securing a permanent place on Whitman’s campus and a distribution of responsibility.

“What they’ve done involves enormous personal sacrifices,” said sophomore Camilla Thorndike, who joined WDA recently.
In 2005 senior Joseph Bornstein and junior Curt Bowen founded WDA after they completed a Build-A-House Project in Nicaragua. Through the project a family, rendered destitute after a fishing accident, was provided with a home and a means of livelihood.

“While building the home, our crew was exposed to the devastating social implications of petroleum dependence seeing that within a single year, petroleum price spikes had caused the cost of goods to rise by 100 percent. Witnessing this painful reality sparked in us a strong desire to generate structural changes by aiding marginalized communities, helping them to become stronger and more autonomous,” said Bornstein in an e-mail.

WDA inaugurated its inception with the Central American Biodiesel Project. They hosted two biodiesel conferences and co-founded cooperatives and resource centers throughout Honduras and Nicaragua.

This year’s undertaking is the Sadhana Clean Water Project. WDA is hosting a conference and water fair in Mumbai, India in March and in partnership with Sadhana Village and United World College is coordinating an Appropriate Technology Study Group.

The culmination of the project will be the publication of a book illuminating not just the technological but also the political, cultural and economic hurdles and their solutions. It will also serve as a case study for NGOs. The book will be a collaborative effort including 10 organizations specializing in water development.

“What we’re doing right now as part of the Sadhana Clean Water Project is figuring out the best way to recognize and address the hurdles that we’ll inevitably come across. Those hurdles include religious, socioeconomic, regional-specific—basically, cultural barriers that would in many cases prohibit the use of certain appropriate water technologies.

“And after all, what the hell is the point of setting up appropriate technology that doesn’t even have a chance to begin?” said junior David Youngblood, member of WDA and head of fund raising.

It is fund raising, however, that is central to the project’s success.

“The logistical details of our project are well underway, yet funding for our conference and study group is seriously lacking. I am optimistic that we’ll get there, but it will be a challenge,” said Bornstein in an e-mail.

That is where the support of Whitman College comes in. Until now, WDA has functioned as an independent student venture. Now it is also an ASWC club, but the goal is to establish a program on par with the community service center and the study abroad program.

“The next step, and the long term of WDA, is not up to us entirely. It will, no matter what our best efforts are, be up to how important the administration feels it is to provide its students with the kind of learning that would make good on the promise of a liberal arts education,” said Youngblood.

WDA is unparalleled by any established Whitman program in that it is run entirely by students and it merges study abroad concepts with community service ones.

“The process that we’ve gone through is absolutely invaluable for what, ultimately, is creative thinking. Thinking creatively itself knows no bounds. What we’re doing is learning in the ideal form, in the sense that we have a one-on-one relationship with the obstacles we’re dealing with. We face the challenges of our mistakes and the good feelings of our successes. And that unmediated experience is vital. You’ll never be able to conceive of a form of learning that replaces actual experience,” said Youngblood.

WDA has given its participants not only marketable problem-solving and critical thinking experience, but also invaluable personal rewards.

“This kind of learning actually allows you, maybe for the first time in most undergraduates’ lives, to be a certain kind of person and that’s the much greater outcome that we all want from school, whether we think about it immediately. The kind of person you’d be proud to be is the kind who comes from dealing with problems that have no given answers and then finding the best answers on your own. It’s a certain kind of struggle, and that struggle is not replaceable by sitting in a classroom,” said Youngblood.

The obstacle for WDA, however, is not proving its value but overcoming institutional barriers and allocating resources.
“I know many of those hurdles and I recognize what some of the true difficulties of the administration doling out capital are. On the other hand, what the administration can and should do is make an effort that is equal to the effort on the part of its students, and the student effort is monumental,” said Youngblood.

Youngblood hopes that Whitman’s bureaucracy will not undermine the very imperatives that it is meant to uphold.
“If bureaucracy is its own greatest hurdle, which I’ve discovered it can be, all I can say is replacing the ability to jump on something special when it’s right before your eyes, with the need for that something special to walk a certain line before it can actually be considered, is unfortunate in a place where cultivating skills for creative and innovative learning is its number one objective,” said Youngblood.

WDA hopes to prove that it is not just a great program but one that is very different from anything Whitman currently offers, and that therein lies its value.

“Surely, you can think of the community service office as a type of experiential learning; undoubtedly, you might find certain experiential learning language in some of the study abroad programs. But are any of those primarily geared toward the kind of experiential learning that synthesizes community service with travel abroad concepts? No, absolutely not,” said Youngblood.

Support from the administration exists but it is not yet substantial enough to ensure WDA remains viable.

“Of course there’s support. Verbal support is very easy to come by. But stopping at a place of verbal recognition is like walking to the door of a soup kitchen and thinking you’ve done your part. And so everybody is wildly supportive in one sense but as long as that deluge of support exists only in the action of speaking, you’re forced to take it with a grain of salt,” said Youngblood.

Among students and faculty the support is more concrete.

“Faculty and students are overwhelmingly and genuinely supportive. As a matter of fact, if this present project succeeds, it will be because of the support of certain faculty, it’ll be because of students,” said Youngblood.

Students who are interested in becoming members should attend weekly meetings on Saturday at 1 p.m. WDA meets at the couches upstairs in Reid, then moves to a conference room.

This Friday, Oct. 19 at 7:00 p.m. WDA is hosting a silent auction and raffle in Young Ballroom to raise money for the Sadhana Clean Water Project.

Whitties give low-down on ‘hooking up’

Students across campus have spent the last month sharing intimate details about their sex lives, not with their best friends, but with the sociology department—all anonymously, of course, and for a constructive purpose. Alumna Paula England, who graduated from Whitman in 1971 and is now a sociology professor at Stanford University, created the survey, entitled “Hooking Up,” as a means of determining patterns of sexual activity in college students across the country.

“I had never heard of a ‘hook up’ until 2002 when a student appeared in my office asking if he could write an honors thesis about why students don’t go on dates much anymore,” said England in an e-mail. “I said, ‘They don’t?’…What intrigued me was the social change in norms about sexuality and how it might link to increasing age at marriage, more women planning graduate school and careers and other larger social forces.  I’m interested also in why some things haven’t changed so much—like the double standard where women seemed to get judged more harshly for being ‘easy’ than guys.”

Why Whitman? England started by distributing the survey to bigger universities but is now looking to incorporate different types of collegiate experiences. “Exactly the same survey is being administered at each school—just changing the college name in the appropriate place,” said England. “This way I can compare between schools on how the same question was answered. While there are some differences, pretty much the same ‘scene’ is taking place at most colleges and universities in my sample.”

Sociology Professor Michelle Janning has agreed to help England by distributing her survey to Whitman students by e-mail.
“I am helping her distribute the survey that she has written in an attempt to make more complete the descriptions she has of hooking up on college campuses. Also, it is just a fascinating subject,” said Janning.

Janning said the survey was relevant to classes she teaches, like Sociology 257: Sociology of the Family and Sociology 258: Gender and Society.

“This topic was just intrinsically interesting from a research point of view. … In my classes students are often doing research projects where they do surveys—just of each other—and I would say by far the most popular research topic among students… is dating, relationships and sex. I think it extends into a part of students’ lives that professors don’t necessarily know about, nor do they necessarily want to know about, but that certainly affect their entire experience at Whitman,” said Janning.
The survey includes questions like, “What is your sexual orientation?” “How many people have you asked out on dates since starting college (not counting fraternity, sorority, dorm events, or people you were already in a relationship with)?” “How many people have you hooked up with whom you didn’t know before that night?” and “Would you say that you have ever been in love with someone?”

“It would be problematic to ignore the non-academic components of students’ lives when we look at what they think about Whitman and what they will remember about Whitman when they graduate,” said Janning. “I suppose it is safe to say that one of the things we who have graduated from college remember is people we have dated, or people we didn’t date that we were interested in. And, as trivial as it may sound, dating and hooking up are still important parts of the big picture of what it means to be a college student.”

Student reactions to the survey have varied.

“Well, it was kind of funny because I was watching my friends take the test yesterday, I don’t know if I would have wanted to take it in front of other people,” said Kendra Johnson, whose name has been changed to respect her privacy. “A lot of the questions were stuff you don’t normally talk about…I kind of felt like a slut when I was taking the test.”

Sophomore Lisa Mattson said, “I felt exposed… a lot of things can’t be categorized.”

England is coupling the online survey with in-depth qualitative interviews, all of which are being conducted at Stanford University, with the exception of several Whitman students with whom England spoke last spring while she was on campus. “I only got to talk to a few, but it sounded fairly similar to the Stanford social scene,” said England.

England will be writing a series of articles on her findings for publication. “I also sometimes give talks at various universities on this material. I have a great graph showing how much more often men than women have orgasms on hook ups, but how men seem to often think their partners had orgasms when they didn’t on hook ups involving ‘sex.’  Students tend to find this funny.  But it is also telling us something about whose pleasure is prioritized,” said England.

Janning anticipates that she will be doing a presentation at Whitman on the results of the online survey towards the end of the semester.

If you haven’t done so, have your experience represented by taking the online survey, which takes about 15 minutes.  Your name will not be attached to any results. Go to: socialsurvey.stanford.edu/whitman and use “Whitman” as the password.  If you have any questions, contact Professor Janning at janninmy@whitman.edu.

Action Against Hate works to minimize, inform about hate crimes

From the outset of their college experience at Whitman, students are introduced to and familiarized with the college’s policies regarding sexual harassment and misconduct and academic honesty and plagiarism. Detailed descriptions of the policies are presented in the Student Handbook and in numerous information sessions.

Nothing of this sort, however, exists for hate crimes.

The Action Against Hate (AAH), a committee of students, faculty and staff that was formed in 2004, is trying to change this.
“The AAH was formed because we realized that there was no official way of handling hate or bias here at Whitman,” said current AAH advisor and Residential Director Elana Stone.

In 2004 the AAH created a Proposed Bias-Motivated Incident and Hate Crime Policy for Whitman College to be added to the Student Handbook, Staff Handbook and Faculty Handbook.

In order for their proposed policy to become part of the aforementioned handbooks, it must be first submitted to the Policy Committee. If the Policy Committee passes it, it moves on to the faculty who make the final decision as to whether or not the proposal will become part of the handbooks.

The AAH has submitted their proposal to the Policy Committee every year since 2004, only to have it continuously shut down by the Committee.

“Every year it’s rejected with a different set of concerns that we’ve then worked with and resubmitted only to have it rejected,” said Stone.

Along with the policy proposal, Stone also submitted a Summary of Action Against Hate Reports to last year’s Committee. The summary was a compilation of the findings from the hate crime reporting forms which are submitted anonymously by students online through the AAH’s Web site.

Since reporting of hate crimes began in September 2004, 42 incidents have been reported. Of these, 57 percent indicated a bias toward sexual orientation or gender, 50 percent indicated a bias toward social class, 12 percent indicated a bias toward social class and seven percent indicated a bias toward religious affiliation.

The AAH believes that these findings are under-representative of the actual number of hate crimes that occur at Whitman, a factor behind their push for the implementation of their proposal.

“It is our intention that a policy against hate and bias incidents at Whitman will not only send the message that Whitman College is taking a stand against hate but will also encourage more accurate reporting of hate and bias in our community,” said the AAH in the proposal.

Professor Doug Hundley chaired last year’s Policy Committee and made the final decision to reject the proposal last semester.

“I think if the proposal were only about hate crimes, there could have been a different outcome,” Hundley said. “There are significant issues wrapped up in the ‘bias-motivated incidents’ regarding freedom of speech, freedom of teach, and in terms of opening the College up to legal challenges, these were significant enough that I did not think it wise to pass the proposal as written.”

Hate crimes are illegal and federally legislated. They are defined in the State of Washington as “malicious harassment.” A person is guilty of “malicious harassment” if he or she causes physical injury to the victim, causes physical damage or destruction of the property of the victim or threatens a victim and places that person in reasonable fear of harm to person or property because of his or her perception of the victim’s race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation.

The problem arises in the inclusion of ‘bias-motivated incidents’ to the AAH’s proposal because, unlike hate crimes, they are not clearly defined.

“Similar to a hate crime, a bias-motivated incident is an intentional, malicious act motivated, in whole or in part, by the offender’s bias towards the status of perceived status of an individual or a group,” said the AAH in the proposal.

Although bias-motivated incidents cause as much physical and emotional harm as a hate crime, because they do not rise to the level of a crime, they are more difficult to prosecute. Stone gave the example of writing a racial slur on a whiteboard or shouting a homophobic slur from a car window as examples of bias-motivated incidents.

“One of the problems and concerns [with the proposal] that has been brought up is how do you define someone’s intent or motivation,” said Stone. “Again, I would say that we don’t go any further than the other college policies.”

Hundley’s concern for First Amendment liberties has been a common concern brought up by previous Policy Committee Chairs and was also a factor in previous Committees’ decisions to reject the AAH’s proposal.

“We had a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) look over the policy, and we worked with their concerns, so along those lines we feel confident that we aren’t encroaching on any freedom of speech, thought, expression or action,” said Stone. “We firmly believe that the policy is within the overall construct of policy here at Whitman and it doesn’t necessarily do anything above or beyond other types of policies.

“Our response to [‘opening the College up to legal challenges’] is that by knowing that hate and bias incidents and crimes are happening on campus and not doing anything to prevent them we are opening ourselves as well to liability,” said Stone. “I don’t see any reason why having a policy on hate or bias incidents would open us to legal action or liability issues, and it’s nothing that any of the lawyers who looked at the policy have brought up.”

Whitman is not the first institution to try to pass a policy to address the difference between a hate or bias-motivated incident and a hate crime, and similar policies to the AAH’s proposed policy exist at other colleges and universities nationwide.

“One of the reasons that we’re so frustrated is that we have tried to address all of the Policy Committee concerns every single time that it has been rejected, and they are still unwilling to pass it on to the faculty or to necessarily continue working with us making this a possibility,” said Stone.

“We would really like to see something happen.”

The AAH would like to resubmit the policy proposal to the Policy Committee later this year if the Committee is willing to revisit the topic.

Prospective students visit campus, learn about Whitman aspects

On Friday, Oct. 12, a new crop of prospective students attended Fall Visitors’ Day. The event started with a continental breakfast at 8 a.m. and closed with a sampling of the College’s a cappella groups at 3 p.m. Prospective students had an opportunity to hear various faculty and administrators speak about different aspects of Whitman, eat in the dining halls and attend classes.

“The school feels like a good blend of comfort and academia,” said Tashia Shupert, a high school senior from Montana. “Students were really friendly and the campus made me feel relaxed; it wasn’t intimidating.”

“The best part about the day was attending classes,” said Thomas Levin, a high school senior from Pasadena, Calif., who was impressed with the professors of both the general studies and physics classes he attended, as well as the majority of the discussions.

The classes were a highlight for many students. “The core class was cool,” said Marty Pellicano, a senior from the Portland area. “It was definitely unique to what I expected, sitting around a table talking. Everyone was really involved, like they wanted to be there.”

Students were attracted to Whitman for a variety of reasons. “I heard about it first through my dad’s friend who was an alumni,” said Logan Amsteader, a high school senior from Spokane, Wash. “I liked how small and close to home it was, and I just kept hearing more positive feedback about it.”

Shupert added Whitman as one of her top college choices after research. “It’s nice to see the campus for real and see how beautiful it is. Being here really affirms what I already thought,” Shupert said.

Erin Kanzig also found the campus striking. “There are no leaves like this in Sisters, Ore., where I’m from,” said Kanzig in reference to the changing colors of the various trees around campus. “I came here in summer, but it’s nice to come back when everyone’s here. I saw some people playing quidditch, that was really cool,” added the high school senior.

Ryanne Conrads, also from Sisters, Ore., particularly enjoyed lunch and the opening remarks from President Bridges. “It was important to listen to what the president had to say and then see it realized across campus,” said Conrads.

Amsteader summed up Visitors’ Day saying, “Overall, it was a good visitors day, informative, I got to attend classes and see what people do here. It was pretty awesome.”

Quick action by construction workers saves family from fire

Around 9 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 12, two construction workers laying down cement on Valencia Street smelled smoke and heard cries for help coming from a nearby house. They called 911 and then quickly ran over to the house.

Standing on top of the roof at 709 Valencia Street were the three people whose cries they had heard. Without thinking, the workers grabbed a ladder and guided them down to safety. The three told their rescuers that there were two more family members still in the house.

The construction workers rushed back into the house and found the grandmother at the top of the stairs, unable to find her way down through the smoke-filled air.

One of the workers, Allen Miranda, described the moment as a life or death situation. “She was frightened; she probably thought it was the end of her life,” said Miranda.

Miranda, along with the other worker, Chad Hays, also from H&N Construction, was able to get the woman down to safety. Also in the house, they found a man in a wheelchair trapped near the front door.

By the time the fire department arrived, Hays and Miranda had gotten everyone out of the house.

Miranda doesn’t consider their act to be heroic and said, “Hopefully anyone else would have done the same. We didn’t stop to think about, you can’t hesitate when lives are at stake.”

Hays and Miranda left when the fire department arrived, as Miranda said, “Getting back just in time to finish putting in the cement.”

The Walla Walla Fire Department arrived merely minutes after receiving the workers’ call. They found the grandmother in critical condition from inhaling large amounts of carbon monoxide and rushed her to the hospital in Spokane.

The four remaining family members were in a panic as they believed that there was still a young man trapped inside. The firefighters thoroughly searched the house but were unable to discover anyone inside. It was then that the family realized that the young man, who had gone to the house of a friend the night before, had decided to spend the night at his friend’s house.

The fire started in the basement and consumed one room before the firefighters were able to put it out. There is smoke and heat damage to the basement and the room, but the rest of the house escaped without severe damage. The cause of the fire is currently unknown.

The house had a smoke alarm, but it wasn’t functioning. The two construction workers were critical in rescuing the family.
“We’ve had a large number of fires this year, more than last year,” said Walla Walla Fire Department Lieutenant Nelson.

“There’s been a lot of accidental fires and a few that were set that the police department is currently looking into.”

Visiting lecturer raises questions about evolution of French

Last Thursday, Douglas Walker of the University of Calgary presented a public lecture entitled “French in the Canadian West” in Olin Hall. Walker is a professor of French and Linguistics at Calgary and was brought to speak at Whitman as part of the Visiting Educators Program.

The Visiting Educators Program is one the oldest series of lectures at Whitman. Every semester, all academic departments are invited to nominate a professor or educator outside Whitman to bring to campus. Once here, the lecturer will usually attend and speak in one of the classes in their field of expertise, after which they’ll deliver a public presentation on a topic of their choice.

Walker began his lecture with a brief history of the origins and development of the French language in Canada, with its first roots extending back to the French colonization of North America in the 17th century. After the preamble, Walker moved on the main focus of his lecture, the ways in which francophone culture and language were influenced by the arrival of English on the Canadian prairies.

According to Walker, the 18th century wars fought between England and France over the territories in the New World laid the groundwork for the establishment of the English language in Canada. After the English defeated the French in a decisive battle at Quebec City, English became the dominant language in the province of Quebec and has continued to exert a profound influence on French-Canadian culture ever since.

This trend continues to the modern day. Walker has studied its effects in a number of isolated Alberta communities. Citing statistics from the Canadian Census, Walker said that while 44 percent of families in Alberta identified French as the sole language spoken in the household back in 1981, the same survey in 2001 reported a figure of only 11 percent.

Walker is currently involved in three different research projects. The first is an international effort to track different varieties of French spoken around the globe. Walker contributes his expertise on Western Canadian French to this project. The second centers around the evolution of Canadian French as it moves from Quebec to the western prairies. The third is a language and culture project in Western Canada with an emphasis on language spoken in minority communities.

During his presentation, Walker played three audio tracks recorded from a series of interviews he conducted as part of his research. The interviewees were three generations of bilingual French and English speakers, all members of the same family. Using the recordings, Walker tracked the evolution of French as it moved through generations. As new generations appeared, French became less fluent in a particular family.

Walker was careful to note that this trend should be considered an evolution of the language rather than a deterioration, explaining that linguists are usually reluctant to make value judgments. He said that many factors contribute to the gradual integration of English into Canadian French, such as urbanization, mixed marriages and the influx of foreign cultures into the industries of Canada. According to Walker, this is a self-propagating trend. The greater the presence of English becomes in Canadian culture, the more citizens begin to speak English. The Canadian government has taken measures to preserve the francophone culture in the country, such as improving the education system and creating more government offices where a French vocabulary is required.

Professor Edith Liebrand from Walla Walla Community College attended the lecture.

“I loved the lecture,” said Liebrand. “It was fascinating to see how languages changes so rapidly from generation to generation. It is important to keep a record of those changes. Walker went there and tape-recorded that, so in a sense, he is freezing this French knowledge, this spoken French. … I thought that was very interesting.”

Students team up for Yahoo Whitman fantasy basketball league

It’s every man’s fantasy. No, not that one, but fantasy basketball. Some Whitties may have noticed a post on the students’ listserv about starting a league on Yahoo. First-year Zach Rosenberg sent out that e-mail.

“I just wanted to do a fantasy league, why not here?” said Rosenberg.

As of Saturday, Oct. 13, there were five teams in the league. For those who want to join, the league name is 69499 and the password is “missionaries.” The league’s online draft time is Thursday, Oct. 18 at 8 p.m.

For those who don’t know the rules of fantasy basketball, a league starts when the teams gather to pick NBA players from any team for a fixed amount of rounds and teams get one pick per round. After the players are selected, statistics such as points, assists, rebounds, steals and blocks are tallied throughout the week. Team owners must update their team daily so that players who are playing that day are in fixed positions and not left on the team’s bench.

This will be the third league that Rosenberg is in this year. He’s played fantasy for the last two years, and both years he has beaten his brother Ben. This year, his team is named “We Believe” after the slogan that came out last year in the playoffs during Golden State’s improbable upset of the Dallas Mavericks. Rosenberg, originally from the bay area in Los Gatos, Calif., follows the Warriors closely and has a t-shirt with the “We Believe” slogan emblazed on it.

According to Rosenberg, the role of a fantasy league is to help people watch the NBA more closely while harboring a competitive interest in those involved. It is also a great way for a section or a dorm to get involved with their neighbors.

There is always something to talk about when a fantasy league is going on.

Sophomore Andrew Spittle, winner of last year’s Jewett 3-East league, agreed.

“It fosters a friendly competitive environment,” said Spittle.

As far as draft strategy goes, there are varying philosophies.

“I usually just end up picking my favorite players,” said Rosenberg.

“My draft strategy is best by position available and who’s available,” said Spittle.

However, sophomore Kevin McCoy, creator of the Jewett 3-East league last year, warns participants of being tempted by the celebrity of a star player. In addition, McCoy is wary of the health of his players.

“Stay away from the perennially injured. They’re no good. I hate when my guys get injured,” said McCoy.

It’s also important to stay involved in the league so that the competition stays level.

“Don’t stop doing it half way because it’s not fun for everybody else,” said Rosenberg.

While people’s wildest fantasies usually don’t involve basketball, a school-wide league can be a terrific guilty pleasure for all those involved.

INTERESTED IN PARTICIPATING?
The Yahoo fantasy basketball league name is 69499, password “missionaries”

The online draft time is Thursday, Oct. 18 at 8 p.m.

Phillips brothers present different attributes on soccer field

Ever since the Phillips brothers were little, they’ve been playing soccer together.

According to Greg Phillips, he and his brother Steve have played hundreds of one-on-one games in their front yard and in the basement of their house as well as participating in countless games of pick-up soccer.

Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that the two feel they share a special connection when they take the field together for Whitman.

“I think we know how each other plays and what runs and decisions we usually make on the field,” said Greg. “Like in the Whitworth game, I just knew Steve would be lurking on the other side of the field.”

Both brothers are juniors at Whitman, though Greg is two years older, having spent two years abroad in Frankfurt, Germany while serving a mission for his church. Greg said returning as a sophomore and seeing most of his friends in their senior year was strange for him. However knowing that he would get to play with Steve for the remainder of his Whitman soccer career was a big bonus.

“Anyone playing with Steve will have their game enhanced because he has the ability to make others play better. I look forward to spending time with him in soccer, and I cherish it,” said Greg.

Their cooperation was evident when the two were reunited on the field last season. One of Greg’s two assists on the year was to his brother, coming in a 1-1 tie with Linfield.

As for more recent play, the two have already linked up for one goal this season. Greg found Steve on a long ball played across the field and Steve finished to provide the lone goal against league-leading Whitworth in a 2-1 loss.

The brothers, who are from Sandy, Utah, have a number of memorable soccer moments prior to their tenures at Whitman. In 2003 their high school team won the state championship in Utah’s 3A Division.

That year Greg was the senior team leader and Steve was a sophomore establishing his place on the team. Now, Steve is a team captain and Greg is one of key players in Whitman’s starting lineup. According to Steve, though, being captain over his older brother hasn’t changed their relationship.

“[My captaincy] really doesn’t matter. I feel like we are both leaders and that we each give each other advice. Greg really is good at keeping the team spirits up, staying positive and being an awesome leader that way,” said Steve.

Greg has no older-sibling reservations about his little brother being captain.

“Steve has the natural ability to be a leader. He is generally soft-spoken, but when he says something on the soccer field, his teammates listen,” said Greg.

Head Coach Mike Washington has certainly enjoyed having a pair of such talented brothers play under him.

“Having two brothers on the team could be difficult, but not in this case. They will be sadly missed on their graduation,” said Washington.

The brothers agree that competing with each other has made them better athletes over the years.

“I hate when he gets by me. When we were younger and played one vs. one we would get really physical and dirty and then get in fights that could last for a quite a while,” said Steve. “I don’t think that we have gotten in a fight for a really long time, but I know that he doesn’t want me to beat him and I definitely don’t want to get beat by him,” said Steve.

Fall migration brings birds

Charles Lindbergh once said, “I realized that if I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.” Noble of him, considering his claim to fame was taking the first solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic in 1927, and if it weren’t for airplanes he’d probably have died in total obscurity.

He also probably never supposed that 80 years after he made that statement, airplanes would be a far commoner sight in many American cities than most species of birds. Last June, the Audubon Society released a report detailing a major decline of several kinds of common sparrow, the Northern bobwhite, the Eastern meadowlark, the common grackle and the common tern. The average decline of these birds, according to the report, is 68 percent.

The cause for the decrease is entirely human: Population growth and urban sprawl have created an environment not conducive to the livelihood of even the birds we consider most robust.

In a New York Times editorial on these new statistics environmental journalist Verlyn Klinkenbord wrote, “We look around us, expecting the rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves.”

Despite this unfortunate decline, though, Walla Walla remains a haven for bird-watchers, mostly due to efforts by the Blue Mountain Audubon Society, whose goal is “to appreciate, preserve and enjoy birds and wildlife and the natural environment in the local area and beyond,” according to their Web site.

The group has been involved in educational and conservation efforts throughout the Walla Walla and Umatilla Counties.
Now is a particularly good time to get interested in the bird population of the Northwest, too, as fall bird migration is in full swing, especially near the Walla Walla River delta. Shorebirds like the sabines gull, parasitic jaeger and even the common tern have been sighted there within the last two weeks.

BIRDING HOTSPOTS IN AND AROUND WALLA WALLA:

• Coppei Creek: This is one of the only places in the entire country where you can see American redstarts—a tiny-but-beautiful warbler (the males are breathtakingly jet black with orange, red and yellow on their wings and tails). It is absolutely the spot to find rare wrens and even a flycatcher or two, as well as the always-gorgeous towhee.
GET THERE: Take Highway 12 east to Dixie. Turn right at the top of Minnick Hill and then turn left after crossing the railroad tracks. Follow the road to Coppei Creek.

• Mill Creek: Go up the bike paths toward Bennington Lake. The lake is a really beautiful place to see swallows, hummingbirds, flycatchers and any number of waterfowl depending on the season. Go at night and keep your eyes peeled for owls: Screech owl sightings are common.
GET THERE: Go to the end of Cambridge street off of Wilbur Avenue and follow it down to the lake.

• Blue Mountain backroads: This is the time of year to find hawks anywhere. If you’re lucky, you’ll even see one catching a mouse in the wheat stalks near the snow. There are plenty of red-tailed hawks, kestrels, and I’ve heard there are even prairie falcons up there. Go early: Breakfast time is good for hawks.

Report states that failure to control GHG emissions may reduce economic growth

Leaders from the top 17 greenhouse gas-emitting countries met on Sept. 27 and 28 in an American-hosted climate change summit. President George W. Bush acknowledged the seriousness of carbon emissions but refused to commit to an internationally-binding agreement to cut carbon.

Bush believes we must “think creatively” about this issue but holds that countries should make their own decisions about how to reduce carbon and has yet to announce any set goals for this reduction.

“[America] must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions,” said Bush, “and we must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people.”

How much would controlling pollution really effect the economic growth? Economics Professor Jan Crouter wrote in an e-mail that this depends on “the way in which controls are implemented, as well as by the severity of the target levels of emissions reductions.”

“The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change,” a report released for the British government on Oct. 30, 2006, by economist Nicholas Stern, estimated that if nothing is done to reduce greenhouse emissions, global gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to reduce an average of five percent per capita per year.

“Our failure to control emissions of greenhouse gasses will likely reduce the economic growth,” wrote Crouter, relying on “The Stern Review.”

“By contrast, the costs of controlling greenhouse gas emissions to a level of about 25 percent below current emissions levels by 2050 would require a sacrifice averaging about one percent of annual GDP per year,” wrote Crouter.

“The Stern Review” does predict a bigger reduction in economic growth if we don’t act to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases. However, it concluded that the ends justify the means. It also suggests international consensus on carbon cutting goals, something many countries, not just America, can agree on.

Crouter wrote that controlling emissions effectively will take honest effort from the rest of the world as well as the United States because a good policy in one country can be offset by another’s ineffective policy.

The countries represented at the summit included Australia, Britain, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. However, many sent only midlevel officials.

“Mr. Bush has accepted, at least rhetorically, the reality of climate change,” Politics Professor Phil Brick wrote in an e-mail.
“This is an important indicator of how the climate change debate has changed.  The old debate about climate change is over (whether it is happening or not; anthropogenic causes).”

However, Brick is not at all sure that change will come with Bush. “Mr. Bush and his cohort are not intellectually, ideologically or morally equipped to really address this issue,” he wrote.  “I’m not convinced that any of the likely presidential contenders are necessarily much better.  Real action on climate change should not wait for our ‘leaders.’”

Survey points to Whitties’ true level of ‘green’ living by assessing daily habits

Whitman has long enjoyed a reputation for “green” living. Student groups and organizations such as Campus Climate Challenge, the Outhouse and Campus Greens raise awareness on campus about green standards and environmentally sound practices. This green status is awarded to the campus community, however, as opposed to individual students. A survey conducted among 100 Whitman students addressed the question “How green is the average Whitman student really?”

The survey was comprised of nine multiple-choice questions and one comment question. The multiple-choice questions were designed to survey green habits of Whitman students, such as recycling and double-sided printing. The comment question asked for students’ assessments on green living on Whitman campus. Interest in this issue is high on campus: The 100-person quota for the online survey was filled within four hours.

In analyzing the results of the survey, the questions that showed a clear majority choosing one response were primarily on issues that the campus and the administration has explicitly addressed. For example, labeled recycling boxes are located in every dormitory and Outhouse residents pick up the materials, making recycling virtually effortless for students living in campus housing. Sixty-eight of the students surveyed said they recycled all the time, and no student said they didn’t recycle because they were confused about what materials are recyclable. Campus printers in Penrose Library and the Olin Hall computer lab have an option for double-sided printing, which 83 percent of surveyed students use.

Green practices that required more individual effort, however, were less widely practiced. Forty-eight percent of the survey participants take showers between eight and 15 minutes. Forty-six percent said they left appliances like laptops, TVs and cell phone and camera charges plugged in when they weren’t in use. The survey demonstrated that while Whitman students generally practice green living that is more community based, they take individual initiative less often.

The comments left at the end of the survey followed along the same lines as the multiple-choice responses. Most students thought that the student body as a whole is concerned about the environment, but green living is not always practiced as widely as it could be. One response read, “Just because we are environmentally aware doesn’t mean we implement green principles in our own lives all the time.”

Many comments named specific instances in which green living was actively rejected. One participant, after mentioning living in a fraternity, noted that green practices were especially shunned in the house. Another claimed to know someone who “throws away Bon Appétit bowls because it’s easier than returning them to the dining halls.”

Several survey participants suggested ways to address and improve environmental concerns on campus, such as composting, cutting back on consumption, submitting assignments via e-mail and heating campus buildings more efficiently. These suggestions ranged from personal habits to administrative changes.

The comments expressed varying opinions about the ease of green living at Whitman as opposed to students’ home towns. One responder asked coworkers in her home town to “stop ordering Styrofoam, which actually pissed some people off . . . Whitman is way more green than [my home town].”

Another student disagreed: “Green living on Whitman is not that easy. Our power isn’t from green sources, our food isn’t, etc.” One participant mentioned that the administration needs to provide more options towards green living, suggesting clotheslines instead of dryers and biodegradable takeout containers at Reid.

A common consensus was that “although [it is] definitely more ‘green’ than many other campuses, Whitman still needs to step it up.”

Diversity Coalition promotes respect

Since 1994 the Walla Walla Diversity Coalition has been working to encourage diversity and acceptance in the area. The coalition “seeks to prevent discrimination against, and promotes cooperation among all members of the human community, regardless of culture, color, religion, gender, sexual identity, national or ethnic origin, age, handicap, or other differences” according to its mission statement on its Web site.

“Small towns always have a tendency toward xenophobia,” said founding member Steve Rubin. “We just want people to respect people with differences.”

The majority of the Diversity Coalition’s public outreach takes place in October, which the coalition has deemed Freedom from Discrimination Month.
Rubin said that past speakers have included “Ghandi’s grandson talking about non-violence, the ambassador from the Arab states, Yolanda King, Edward James Olmos [and] Morris Dees—he’s the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

This past Sunday, Oct. 14, the Diversity Coalition brought Jose-Luis Orozco, celebrated Spanish children’s music artist to Cordiner Hall. The Diversity Coalition worked hard to get the word out to the Spanish-speaking community, getting Whitman’s Club Latino to go door-to-door promoting the event. “We thought that we would bring a family performer that would reach out to everyone—not just the intellectuals,” said Annie Capestany, the coalition treasurer who has been a member for 10 years.

Besides bringing speakers for Freedom from Discrimination Month, Rubin said that “the other thing [the Diversity Coalition does] is the multicultural arts fair—it really allows the community to come together.” The fair gets “a nice turnout” according to Capestany, and is held at Pioneer Park on the third Sunday in June and “features dance and music groups from a variety of cultures, along with food, craft, and information booths, and a variety of games,” according to the Diversity Coalition Web site.

The Diversity Coalition manages to bring such big-name speakers through generous private donations. They are supported by all three of the local colleges. “We are a small group, but we’ve been around, and we have strong financial support,” said Rubin.

The mission statement of the Diversity Coalition is to “promote communication, respect and understanding among all members of the human community,” which they do through events.

“We don’t do advocacy. The only advocacy we do is trying to let people know diversity is something to celebrate,” said Capestany. “I’m Cuban…[I have a] biracial family, so I want to make sure our community appreciates people like me and my family.”

“That’s why people go out of the country—they want to see something different,” said Rubin. “They don’t realize you can just go next door. That’s what we want to help with.”

The Walla Walla Diversity Coalition meets at noon on the first Monday of every month at the First Congregational Church. Meetings are open to everyone. For more information visit the Diversity Coalition Web site at promotediversity.org.

Republican National Convention

Controversial writer Rushdie to speak on ‘Culture Wars’ Nov. 7

World-renowned novelist Salman Rushdie will be delivering a lecture entitled “Culture Wars and the Importance of Free Speech” at Whitman next month. Rushdie, an Anglo-Indian novelist and essayist, is scheduled to speak at Cordiner Hall on Nov. 7 at 7:30 p.m. and will be offering a book signing directly following his speech at 8:30 p.m.

Whitman Public Speakers Chair Rachel Stein worked in conjunction with the Intercultural Center on campus to book Rushdie.

“[Rushdie] has a really interesting story to tell. … He offers something different and something of a multicultural nature as well,” said Stein.

“I was excited from the very beginning,” said Mukulu Mweu, director of the Intercultural Center on campus. Mweu heard that Rushdie would be in Yakima in November from a parent during opening week, which is how the process of bringing Rushdie to Whitman started. “I wasn’t sure if it would materialize for us…. He’s hard to get. Trying to get funding to make it happen was difficult,” said Mweu.

“He is definitely a different kind of voice…that is what we are really trying to push with programming this year,” said sophomore Nadim Damluji, who is the ASWC programming chair as well as an intern at the Intercultural Center on campus. “I think Rachel did a really good job of seeing that mission and being able to co-sponsor with the Intercultural Center and having that outlet open for the Intercultural Center to use is really great.”
Rushdie is perhaps most well known for his controversial novel “The Satanic Verses.” The book was banned in India, caused riots in Pakistan and infuriated the former Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa—or religious edict—on Rushdie in 1989. Rushdie went underground for nine years until the fatwa officially ended in 1998.

“The Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran has no intention, nor is it going to take any action whatsoever, to threaten the life of the author of ‘The Satanic Verses’ or anybody associated with his work, nor will it encourage or assist anybody to do so,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi to The New York Times in September 1998.

Rushdie still receives notes threatening his life on an annual basis, but, “It has reached a point where it’s a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat,” said Rushdie to The Hindu in February of this year.

When asked whether the controversial nature of Rushdie’s work might be problematic on campus, Mweu said, “Sometimes controversial issues really bring about a good exchange of ideas.”

Though his first book was “Grimus” (1975) Rushdie gained literary fame after publishing his second novel, “Midnight’s Children,” which won the Booker Prize in 1981. He then went on to claim the Booker of Booker’s award in 1993, distinguishing “Midnight’s Children” as the best book to have won the award in the award’s 25-year existence.

In June, Rushdie was knighted by the queen of England in honor of his services to literature.

“I think this is a real commitment to our initial goal in our programming committee,” said Damluji. The Programming Committee has sought to represent a diversity of perspectives and voices on campus throughout the course of the semester, including the showing of both “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “Fahrenhype 9/11” movies and, most recently, the band Girl Talk.

“Girl Talk is not just a typical indie rock band; it is more hip-hop, DJ kind of stuff, which we haven’t really had on campus before. So we are really trying to get a full spectrum of voices on campus this year,” said Damluji.

Students and faculty can purchase Rushdie’s work at the Whitman Bookstore. They will be carrying Rushdie’s “Grimus,” “Shame,” “Midnight’s Children,” “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and “The Satanic Verses.”

Visiting theater group chronicles life of ‘Albertine’ through flashbacks

Visiting theater group Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte performed an adapted version of the play “Albertine, en cinq temps,” or “Albertine, in five times,” by French-Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay on Thursday, Oct. 11, in Olin. Actress Francine Conley and director Henrik Borgstrom also conducted a workshop Thursday afternoon with Professor Sarah Hurlburt’s Introduction to French Literature course.

Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte was founded by four Ph.D. French graduates of the University of Wisconsin, according to their Web site, chandelleverte.com. Still only a six-person company today, it has been adapting and touring various French plays since 2001. Their mission statement says they are “committed to . . . promoting French-language theatre to university audiences nationwide.”

“They’re so devoted to French theater,” said French Professor Mary Anne O’Neil. “They show how to teach with theater. All their performances are adapted for American audiences of French learners.”

O’Neil said that Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte has performed twice before at Whitman, and that both times were “wonderful.”

“‘Albertine, en cinq temps’ is especially interesting because there are active Canadian studies here on campus,” said O’Neil. “Tremblay’s plays tend to focus on both political and sociological issues of French Canadians, particularly women.”

“Albertine, en cinq temps” follows Albertine at five stages of her life: at ages 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70. The play is arranged out of chronological order, beginning with Albertine entering a nursing home at the age of 70. Through the different flashbacks into her life, the audience sees the circumstances that have shaped her existence. In Théâtre de la Chandelle Verte’s adaptation, Albertine is played by one actress (Francine Conley) as a long series of monologues. Conley remained on the stage the entire performance, signaling new decades with small costume changes such as scarves and shoes.

The play is written in “joual,” a lower-class dialect of Québécois French. This in itself is a political statement, reflecting the marginalized society that Albertine moves in. The only time the audience sees Albertine happy is when, at the age of 50, she decides to “disobey” the rules she has been following all her life, to cut ties with her unmanageable children and unsupportive family and take a job at a restaurant.

“I really liked the play, because even though I had nothing in common with Albertine, her emotions were so raw and real that I could sympathize with her and understand her situation,” said sophomore Lauren Schneider.

In addition to attending the performance, Schneider is in Professor Hurlburt’s class and went to the workshop with Conley and Borgstrom.
“We read the script in class before the performance—I’m not sure I would’ve understood the spoken ‘joual’ without reading it first,” said Schneider. “The workshop focused less on the language and more on the theatrical aspect of their performance. They did practice some pronunciation of ‘joual’ with us—it’s hard!”

“‘Albertine’ covers many important subjects,” said O’Neil. “It’s a contemporary play written in a non-standard language. It deals with gender issues and marginalized society. As our neighbor, Canada is the most important Francophone country for U.S. residents.”

Gender balance skewed in activities: Females head clubs, males hold positions of leadership

At a school where 56 percent of the student body is female, it’s not surprising to see more female faces at club meetings and events. But at Whitman, it seems that a gender gap exists in campus involvement.

Junior Elliott Okantey, who serves as ASWC Finance Chair, has direct involvement with clubs and club heads. He reported that 39 clubs turned in recognition update forms this year to renew their ASWC club status. Of the 39, 26 clubs listed a female as a president or co-president, 19 listed a female as a budget manager/congressional contact and 24 listed a female as an alternate congressional contact.

The Center for Community Service has definitely noticed a growing gap between male and female participants in their programs.

Mentor Program intern Andrea Seymour said that in the first round of mentor applications this year, the office received 103 applications, of which fewer than 20 were from men. Seymour, who is a junior, said that this is a general trend the office has seen every year.

“We’d definitely like to see more males involved,” Seymour said. “There are tons of male mentees that really need a male role model. We end up having a lot of females mentor male mentees, and that’s kind of a hard thing.” Seymour said that many of the mentees don’t have a consistent male role model in their lives and that she believes they would benefit from having one.

Another campus service group, which asked not to be mentioned by name for fear of discouraging interested male participants, has 51 active women members and only 15 men.

“The ones that are involved are really involved and are happy to do it… we just don’t get that many of them,” said the club head.
Many students and club heads seem confused about why fewer men than women seem to be involved in clubs.

“You don’t put together an application to a place like Whitman if you don’t have initiative to really go after your interests,” Okantey said.
Okantey pointed out, however, that in terms of elected positions, men seem to overshadow women, and that this has held true for at least the past few years.

“I feel like maybe, maybe boys like positions of power, like in ASWC,” sophomore senator Hong-Nhi Do said. There are four senators for each class, and Do is currently the only female sophomore senator. She pointed out that there is also only one female first-year senator.

Do explained that currently the junior class senators are all men, but due to the running-mate nature of junior senators, next semester there will be three women. There are two female senior senators—the only class that Do described as “the best represented in terms of gender.”

In the eight-person executive council, there is also only one position-holding female. Last year, there were two in a council of six.

Gender studies director Melissa Wilcox cautioned against using terms like “trend” to describe the gap between male and female involvement, indicating that some years can just be flukes in terms of involvement. She did, however, offer some possible explanations for the current differences between men and women involvement at Whitman.

“It’s possible that getting involved has its own sort of gendered dynamic,” Wilcox said, comparing club participation to the “gendered value” that is often placed on traditionally more female activities like volunteering.

Wilcox also pointed out that “getting involved” may mean different things for men and women.

“There’s not a strong movement today of men’s involvement in clubs,” Wilcox said, referring to a national scope. “So getting involved for men may be more likely to mean elected offices.”

Wilcox theorized that it may be interesting to ask incoming first-year students right away what “getting involved” means to them, and how exactly they plan to do so. Seeing how answers vary between sexes might indicate how males and females view this concept differently.

“Some of the majors that draw significantly more men than women are pretty heavy-load majors, which would lessen one’s involvement,” Wilcox also pointed out.

Okantey for one believes that a higher level of pressure is being put on female youth today than in the past, in terms of academics, sports and other club involvement. He describes this as “a great breakthrough after centuries of stifling young women’s development” but worries that it comes at the price of lessening encouragement for young men.

“I really look forward to seeing if female extracurricular involvement will translate into more gender equality in the workplace as our generation ages,” Okantey said.

The Danger Zone: A few famous feuds

Whitman is, and always shall be, split by rivalry and vendetta. No day passes without being ruined by some knife fight or dance-off. The corpses of fallen partisans are displayed in Reid Ballroom before being carted off to Penrose Crematorium. We strike the names of the dead from our Facebook listings and erase their faces from our memories.

On Tuesday, I was accosted by seven different armed groups. The leader of one band was convinced that I was a member of “Sebastian’s Reds” and was prepared to shiv me to prove it. Another merely screamed “Noir! Noir! Noir!” and charged at me as I left Olin Hall. My turbo-cycle allowed me easy escape, but I was shaken. Where do these howling devils come from?

It would be simpler to number the stars than to account for every little turf war and afternoon siege. All I can do is try and record those hatreds which burned most brightly. Perhaps then we will know where the pain comes from.

First Feud: Seminarians versus Humanists (ca. 1859-1883). This place was established to train priests, hence our beloved mascot “Simeon the Heathen-Slayer.” It was not long before the Devil’s solicitor, Reason, came knocking on the doors of God-Towne. Humanists felt that the seminary’s curriculum of reading dense theological tomes could be restructured along rational lines. The student body would be much better served by a course of study focused on elitism, ancient languages, philosophy and hating poor people. The conflict came to a head in 1873 when an unnamed humanist and the school’s chaplain, a spry 48-year-old Dr. Ball, had a lengthy debate on Ankeny. The humanist alleged that the new curriculum would sharpen the students’ wits to the point where religious instruction was no longer necessary. The chaplain responded that the students would think themselves above any morality and would become new Lucifers. Last weekend, in celebration of the anniversary of the debate, a group of religion and philosophy students cashed a bowl on Ankeny Field and then went to the Beta house.

Second Feud: Jazz-Age Decadents versus Jazz-Age Degenerates (1925-1927). The publishing of “The Great Gatsby” in 1925 introduced the glamour of a new cultural revolution to the Pacific Northwest. Despite the fact that an uninterested F. Scott Fitzgerald had originally scribbled the entire text on a cocktail napkin while waiting to be admitted to a sleazier speakeasy, the book earned a cult following among students of Whitman. One group of fans, the Lyman Boys, became notorious for their “Gatsby”-inspired hijinks. In a memorable incident, the lads managed to steal a cask of illegal whiskey from the Spanish department’s distillery. After each member sampled the liquor and found it to be “rather ripping good stuff,” they staggered their way to Dayton and collapsed. Such antics aroused the ire of the other Gatsby fan club on campus, Jewett’s Gang. Guy Jewett, for whom our official school wrestling hold is named, vowed to “put those fops to rout like the Germans at the Somme.” Unfortunately, all members of both clubs were shot to death in swimming pools before the feud could actually develop.

Third Feud: Campus Greens versus Campus Light Manufacturing Concern (ongoing). Whitman prides itself on its high level of environmental consciousness. We’ve all participated in events hosted by the Outhouse, or manufactured our own methamphetamine, or hissed and thrown rocks at known polluters.
In the hierarchy of activism, the Campus Greens rank above the War Bonds Club but below the Sharia religious police. Against the Campus Greens stand a variety of groups, from Agency K.I.L.L to the Whitman Human Defense League to Fuck! Nature.

Of all these the Campus Light Manufacturing Concern is the most powerful. Staffed by the 11 sons and daughters of a Portland-area aluminum siding magnate, the cabal is the only group with both the means and the motivation to stand up to the Greens. Thanks to their efforts, no Green student can display their proud, intricate coat of arms without suffering furious assault.

The Green High Chapel, woven out of briars and thorns and the hopes of hundreds, was burned to the ground last week by an unknown arsonist. Despite the ferocity of the Manufacturers, the Greens have not given up.

Their nature-priests have ancient allies, rumored to be geology/environmental studies majors, ready to fight the foe. Sparrows, nightingales and other birds of carrion circle our skies. Even I cannot say who will win. But I will most definitely loot the bodies, and God help you if you doubt me on that count.

Girl Talk ‘a damn good time’

Top 5 things to do before you die:

1. See Girl Talk

2. See Girl Talk

3. See Girl Talk

4. See Girl Talk

5. See Girl Talk

Greg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, a native of Pittsburg, Pa., has been mixing music since he was in college and quit his day job as a biomedical engineer earlier this year in order to pursue his music career. He has developed a party/dance-obsessed cult following over the past few years. Prior to his most recent album and also what has proved to be his breakthrough, “Night Ripper,” he released two other albums, the first being “Secret Diary” and later “Unstoppable.” While his first two albums worked well, it was on “Night Ripper” that Gillis had undoubtedly mastered and refined his craft.

His craft is often poorly described as being “mashup” artistry. Girl Talk is far more than just mashups as a mashup usually only samples two or three songs, while a Girl Talk song samples between eight to 20 songs and does it much better than the average radio mashup. Gillis ruthlessly plunders the popular audio vocabulary, taking songs that everyone knows in a heartbeat and makes something entirely new. Although he does sometimes pull samples from more obscure gems, he mainly sticks to the top 40. All the while he links hits from all genres with a meticulous and deft hand, ultimately making viciously joyous dance music that is recognizable as well as truly unique.

Right from the start, Gillis’ ear is always finely tuned to the kind of songs that stay stuck in people’s minds. As I sang along to a ’90s rock song that was playing while Gillis was setting up, he instantly asked, “What music is this playing?” to which I confessed that I didn’t know, offering Fuel as the answer. To this he said he thought that it was Third Eye Blind, as Fuel had a rougher sound—the man knows his music.

Although his only instrument is his laptop, this most definitely does not detract from him being a performer. When asked about his experience performing at larger concerts, such as festivals like Bonnaroo and Virgin that took place this past summer, he confessed that he always prefers smaller venues.

“At music festivals like Bonnaroo and stuff, they always need you to be on stage, which I really don’t like,” said Gillis. “It’s always a really weird experience to me, being separated from the audience like that.”

At the beginning of his performance, he addressed the audience about his lack of a stage by saying, “Some people like to see a guy play his laptop, and hey, that’s cool, but I think we should just make this a party.”

His philosophy on interacting with the audience is a refreshing and somewhat necessary one. Although the music would be just as fun to dance to, being on a stage separate from the audience would turn Gillis into a kind of DJ, which he refuses to be called; just look at the t-shirts he sells, which explicitly say, “I am not a DJ.” On the contrary, Gillis is as much a performer as any musician. He gives a performance as he dances and sweats with the audience and occasionally does antics throughout his show. By the end of the night, he was half-naked and the table on which he performed was soaking with sweat and covered with hair.

Gillis offers a different kind of entertainment that is different from anything else in the current music scene. He sincerely cares about the enjoyment of his audience, as he politely asks how everyone is doing as the crowd drips in the sweat of dancing extremely hard. While most musicians perform on a stage, meant to be observed and appreciated separate from the audience, Gillis negates this as he is both the performer and a member of the crowd. The energy of the show is thus spectacular, and it sure proves to be a damn good time.

Autumn days at Whitman: A compilation of poems by Emma Wood

I just remembered something I did in grade school that convinces me that we grown-up college students aren’t too different from our 11-year-old selves. When I was a sixth grader, I decided to hold a poetry contest for Valentine’s Day. Kids from the whole school submitted poems on little scraps of wide-ruled paper. These poems are from autumns spent at Whitman. I’d like to hear your fall poems too, please.

E-mail emma.wood@whitmanpioneer.com.

Patter the rain
patinas leaf pretties
so firebird red of yesterday
like copper grown weary, fresh fall speckled brown
mud rust, on gold sidewalks rest footsteps brown spatter

**

a sudden jolt
and past me whisked a neon meteor of fate
cyclist’s gait
counterpoint click-clicking chainlink
a thunderbolt of lightning pace
by moment’s space
forward careening past my present

**

a dog to walk is just an excuse
for strolling round the streets at night
eyeing neighbors’ habitats and gliding past the windowlights

**

I think umbrellas are silly. for what’s the use,
really, in shying from stormcloud
when the world is wet?
why not succumb
as the soil has done~
powder relinquished to mud?

Whittie of the Week: Jazmin Lopez

FULL NAME: Jazmin Lidia Petra Ortiz Lopez

AGE: 19

BEST KNOWN FOR: Co-president of Club Latino, being a Twittie, speaking horrible Spanglish and having a very slow reaction to sexual innuendos.

WHAT’S THE WORST THING YOU HAVE EVER DONE?
I went 85 mph in a 70 mph zone but got away with it by telling the cop I was late for my uncle’s funeral.

IF YOU COULD DO ONE THING TO CHANGE THE WORLD, WHAT WOULD IT BE?
End world hunger, duh.

WHAT WORD MAKES YOU CRINGE WHEN YOU HEAR IT?
Pinche-Verga.

IF YOU WERE INVISIBLE FOR ONE DAY WHAT WOULD YOU DO?
I’d go to the cholo barrios and scare the shit out of them without worrying about getting shot.

WHAT’S YOUR POWER ANIMAL?
Elephant.

IF YOU COULD BE ANY CELEBRITY WHO WOULD YOU BE?
Mother Teresa, cause she’s cool like that.

WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?
Tamales and Champurrado.

Symposium needs input from students

In the past, I have lambasted the Bridges administration’s neglect of student input. My specific concerns were derived from the fact that they refused to consult students on the date of the symposium (in case you haven’t heard, this year’s symposium will be held on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in January). It was inconceivable to me that the administration would attempt to plan an event for students without consulting students about when they could or would attend.

Since that time, a planning committee with the goal of developing a symposium has met once, elected student, faculty and staff co-chairs, and begun the work of planning the symposium. One subject for the committee’s discussion was the date of the event. Some other students and I presented concerns like-mindedly: A three-day weekend like Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is not conducive to the symposium. This is for two major reasons: First, many students will go out of town to Portland or Seattle. Second, staff and faculty who would normally have the day off are now required to come to campus again on MLK Day if they want to participate.

Asked whether the faculty would be willing to cancel a day of classes, the committee heard a general consensus: “I doubt it.”

Melissa Wilcox agreed. “It would probably be challenging to get another class continuation,” she said. “For most of us, our classes build chronologically, and losing a class day can throw that out of whack.”

Regardless of whether or not the faculty should cancel classes for a symposium (which I didn’t discuss with Professor Wilcox), it appears as though it isn’t going to happen. As I understand it, then, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day may well be our best chance to invite students to attend a symposium.

The Bridges administration selected the date of the symposium without asking students. Additionally, they did so without consulting the faculty to see if it would be possible to cancel classes. However, it seems that there may be no alternative. How do we reconcile these standpoints? President Bridges didn’t get any input from anyone to decide when to hold the symposium, but it appears as though the decision he made was correct.

I’m of two minds on this issue: First, I’m upset because the students weren’t consulted. However, at the same time, if we had been consulted we likely would have suggested the policy that was eventually enacted. I don’t know about the rest of the student body, but outrage over not having suggested the correct decision (when it was eventually made anyway) makes me feel a little bit petty.

Regardless of whether or not we are right to be offended, I think that most of us can agree that this format should not be standard practice. We need to be consulted, and the symposium committee is making progress on that front. A critical mass of students sit on the Symposium Planning Committee, and it appears that they will have real input on what shape the event eventually takes. The symposium will be powerful if the students make it so.

Unfortunately, that’s not sufficient. “The Race Symposium was very powerful, but it’s not enough; it can’t be,” said Professor Wilcox. I couldn’t agree more. Last year, Professor Wilcox and I both met with the president’s Advisory Council on Diversity. It was at this meeting that then-student Ajay Abraham, in his infinite wisdom, distributed copies of CODA (the resolution calling for a student-run symposium planning committee) to everyone in the room. Students, faculty and staff talked to President Bridges and members of his staff not only about the symposium but also about other approaches to understanding diversity on campus. I didn’t support all of the suggestions offered in that meeting, but many students did. I would hate for the administration to leave them behind.

Cost of community survey sparks discourse on future of Walla Walla

Editors at the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin have wrapped up their Cost of Community Survey. The survey invited community members to rank five city projects they deemed the most urgent of Walla Walla’s needs. The results have invigorated the community, sparking dialogue between the community and its civic officials.

Ranking as the first priority among survey voters was, not surprisingly, traffic control and street repairs. In the last year, the City Council successfully levied a tax of 10 cents per $1,000 of property value for street repair, but city budgets were only increased by hundreds of thousands of dollars, not by the tens of millions necessary to fully renovate the streets. As Mayor Dominick Elia told Union-Bulletin reporter Terry McConn, “We’re doing the best we can with the additional dollars.”

City Council member Fred Mitchell agreed that voters will need to indicate this priority at the polls so the city can move forward with the project and pointed to the frustration of bond backers who are consistently defeated, always trying to adjust proposals to match voters’ desires.
“We’re aware of the outcry for better streets and an aquatic center, but when you’ve tried bonds and tried bonds, what do you do? Maybe [the survey results] will motivate Council to try again,” said Mitchell to the Union-Bulletin reporter.

Also among the top five were the proposed aquatic center, a new police dispatch center, a new high school and a homeless shelter. Among the several classes at Sager Middle School, Blue Ridge Elementary and Walla Walla High School that participated in the survey, these projects also received primary support, indicating certain priorities span many demographics, even those too young to actually cast a ballot. Corey Hobbs took the opportunity to teach a lesson in community and citizenship to his fifth graders at Blue Ridge, writing to Maria Gonzalez of the Union-Bulletin, “In a very short 7-8 years, my classroom will have the power to legally vote. My intention is to use series like Cost of Community to help them think deeply and critically about issues that impact them and be creative in how they will address them.”

This creative dialogue is just what the survey was intended to spark. For those who are of voting age, the survey, wrote city editor Alasdair Stewart, “is intended to be a measure of the top priorities for Valley residents…. The survey can’t predict how specific projects will fare at the polls.” Citing the controversial Green Park Elementary School’s hard-won success at the polls in the early 1990s and its three rejected bonds prior to 1993, Stewart understands the importance of gauging voter preferences. He emphasized that a certain project’s ranking in this survey has no absolute bearing on whether it will “sink or swim come election day.” The survey included projected costs but not their translation into individual property taxes.

City council members and bond backers are now trying to assess interest and with impressive participation in the survey, feedback is likely.
Of those seeking feedback, the Walla Walla School Board is especially curious considering the failed school bond last year. Several school projects ranked highly on the survey. At number four was the construction of a new public high school and at number seven were the renovations to Walla Walla High School. The renovations for the existing high school were among the features of last year’s rejected school bond. The board has assembled a task force to consider the most pressing needs of Walla Walla schools, the issues surrounding the construction and renovations, and the failed voter support last year.

School board member Mary Jo Geidi is “absolutely delighted” with the showing of community support and also eager to deepen the dialogue between the board and the community. She told McConn, “There’s an awful lot of discussion and information that needs to get out to the public to make a decision.” As with the road repair projects, specific awareness of community priority will help the board to more effectively appeal to taxpayers. “The survey provides a barometer of what people are thinking and that’s good for all of us to know,” said Geidi.

Judging by the community’s interest and the discussion already begun between civic leaders and their constituents, the Union-Bulletin editor seems to have achieved at the very least, an increased awareness of community needs. Of the 1,200 survey takers who made the conversation possible, Stewart is proud and grateful, saying, “I also hope local residents share my pride in our community for having taken this conversation so seriously and for taking the time to make themselves heard.”

The politics of grinding

I’ve often wondered what happened to structured couple dancing why we don’t do cool things like swing and lindy hop any more. Just 50 years ago, a high school dance involved actual moves and patterns. At a sock hop, kids actually had to know how to dance. Certain ways of moving could be considered “right” or “wrong,” or at least could be judged as “working” or “not working” based on the parameters of the relationship between the two dancers that made up the “couple.”

Now, just about anything goes. Individuals choreograph their own patterns that have no relationship to “right” or “wrong” because they are not dependent upon the patterns that others are creating.

Since I happen to be one of the weirdos who still has an antiquarian interest in the lost art of structured dancing, I spent part of my four-day at the 53rd Annual Richland Folk Dance Festival. The Norwegian-American professional folk dance instructor, Lee Ottorholt, unexpectedly gave me an insight into why we 21st century folk do free-form shaking and grinding instead of the structured kinds of dances he was teaching. It has even more to do with our political/cultural system than I would have thought.

European agricultural societies, he explained, tended to practice circle dances in which large groups of people linked together and traveled around the room following a circular path. One theory about this, he noted, is that agricultural societies were intimately connected with the cyclical patterns of winter and summer, planting and harvesting.

The dances also tended to have similar roles for men and women, which reflected the relative equality of the genders in terms of the tasks they were expected to complete as part of the agricultural system. The strong group mentality that was central to the survival of the farming village was reflected in the dances’ use of many homogenous individuals to make up a moving whole.

The industrial age brought on a drastic change in social dance trends. Especially in Western Europe, people stopped dancing in large groups and began dancing as male-female couples. Ottorholt suggested that this was because of the change to regarding the nuclear family instead of the village as the essential unit of society. He described the new dance form as conveying the idea “it’s just you and me, baby.”

In our post-industrial age, Ottorholt argues, we have discarded even the couple as the unit of society. In order to reinforce our extreme focus on the individual, we have adopted a new form of dance that leaves the individual free to do whatever he or she pleases. The dancer has no necessary relationship with those around her and need not follow any pattern or work within any prescribed framework. Thus, the single person, entirely free from the constraints of society or even couplehood, seems to be the basis of our modern society.

Once I started using our current dance form as a sort of mirror of the core values of our socioeconomic and sexual culture, other insights began to come to me. Women and men seem to have fairly equal roles on the post-industrial dance floor, neither of them fulfilling a significantly different role or being expected to do different movements. This corresponds well with the relatively equal employment rate between men and women and the attitude that men and women can do the same jobs, including firefighting and taking care of children.

As recently as 50 years ago, when the sock hops were taking place in high school gyms, women were expected to stay at home and keep house. These unequal or at least highly differentiated gender dynamics were reflected in the gendered roles involved in swing dance; men were the active leaders and women the passive followers on the dance floor.

I also began to think about the implications of the interactions that do take place on the post-industrial dance floor. Most of the time, I find that people are in their own little worlds, and I often try to seek out peoples’ eyes without any luck. However, people sometimes do seem to interact.

A large percentage of the times that a member of the opposite sex has actually approached me on the dance floor have involved an attempt at “grinding.” This might seem like quite an intimate interaction, but I have noticed that the people initiating it will not even establish eye contact. Perhaps grinding is just another manifestation of our post-industrial obsession with the individual. For these people, grinding is not about dancing with someone else; it is about a gratification of the self. I can hear the post-industrial mass of Whitties shouting, as they blindly grind their genitals together, “It’s all about me, baby!”

Feed the people before our cars

When I was in Tanzania I stayed in a schoolhouse with walls covered with bags of corn flour. On each bag of flour was an American flag and the words “from the American people” stamped in bright red and blue letters. Those bags of flour made me extremely nervous the first two days I was there. It was only after I had seen school children lining up for a midday meal of porridge that the bags stopped making me feel nervous.

Right now, 854 million people are hungry. We are not talking in a “Man-I-haven’t-eaten-since-breakfast-I-need-some-Fire-and-Spice” kind of hungry, we’re talking “I-haven’t-had-enough-food-for-months-and-my-cow-just-died” kind of hungry; the kind of hungry that most of us, thankfully, cannot imagine.

Say what you want about corn, but it is a staple crop for millions of people all over the world. And as more and more corn has gone to producing ethanol, food costs have gone up. You may not have noticed this, because if you are reading this column you are likely living in the United States and therefore enjoy the lowest food prices in the world. However, if you were living in a country like Mexico where the cost of corn flour, a major staple food, has gone up 400 percent, you would have probably taken notice.

It is, of course, true that there is more than enough food on the planet right now for everybody and that the major issue is that the hungry people don’t have access to it. In many cases, though, hunger is a price issue. There are places all over the world where food is available but people go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. Corn prices are much higher when the world’s top corn producer decides to turn two billion bushels of corn into gasoline.

Back in Elangata-Dapash, Tanzania, things are likely starting to get a little lean. It’s been about six months since the corn harvest and it wasn’t a particularly good one, just like the years before. For the past five years, in fact, that village has received food aid from the World Food Program, mostly in the form of bags of “yellow corn flour” from the United States. Almost every woman I talked to said that this food was extremely important in bringing her family through the lean parts of the year, and all of those women also said that it was never enough.

The World Food Program (WFP) is a UN agency that provides food aid to the people in the world with greatest need, and one of their major donors is the United States. The United States is in fact THE dominant food aid donor in the world, but this year they gave the least amount of food they have in a decade. In fact, the amount of food bought by American food programs in 2007 is less than half of that bought in 2000.

Which brings us right back to corn. Our government has not drastically changed the amount of money that it is putting towards buying food, but the price of food and shipping has changed. Filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires more than 450 pounds of corn, which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year. It is immoral for us to use food as fuel for Hummers that we drive to the mall as long as there are not enough bags of corn flour sent to Elangata-Dapash.

Sheehan’s three new exhibits feature work by professors, Los Angeles artist

A montage of three new exhibits now fills Sheehan Gallery. The featured exhibit, “not by everybody,” consists of porcelain pieces by Los Angeles artist Michael Minelli. Minelli spoke during the gallery opening last Friday about the work that led up to “not by everybody.”

Minelli’s work relies heavily on inspiration from culture. “Art isn’t made in a vacuum,” he said. “It’s all about a working process.” Minelli discussed the evolution of his work from “Natural Selection” in 1997 to “not by everybody.”

Accompanying Minelli’s work in Sheehan Gallery is work by Charles Timm Ballard, a member of Whitman’s studio art faculty, as well as a collection of ceramics curated by Ron Takemoto, Director of Whitman’s Asian Studies Program and Professor of Japanese Foreign Languages and Literatures. “Environment and location (physically, culturally and psychologically) play key roles not only in the display of objects, but also in artistic production. This response to environment and its shifts is a theme that permeates the three exhibits,” said gallery director Dawn Forbes in her introduction to the gallery talk.

“[Takemoto] has designed a space reflecting on the seasonal changes in the physical environment: the transition of fall into winter,” said Forbes. The ceramic pieces, part of Whitman’s larger collection, characterize the relationships between Takemoto and Japanese Ceramic artist Toyoda Mokugen, as well as Toyoda’s influence on many Whitman students.

Ballard’s work consists of a series of machines. The machines, “previously stored outside, brought in with [them] several forms of local wildlife,” said Forbes. The machines were inspired by both memories of the artist’s childhood, as well as the nature of the current political climate.
Minelli spoke about how his environment affected his work. “Sept. 11 changed the way I perceive the world. I felt traumatized. I didn’t want to do the same work,” said Minelli.

At the time the artist had been working on a series of composite sculptures for an art dealer. The statues were combinations of aspects of the artist’s life and pop culture. One statue was a composite of Snoop Dogg’s hat, the artist’s mother’s mouth and the torso of a lesser character from the Wizard of Oz.

“[After Sept. 11] all I could see myself doing was some really basic craft work,” said Minelli. From this inspiration came “Melancholy,” an urn on colored coils with a picture of Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump in the center. This work was meant to reflect Minelli’s belief that “art is made from culture in a way that signals a relationship to the place we live in.”

In his talk Minelli displayed a series of images that he thought about when he created “not by everybody.” Images of Abu Ghraib, the American invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and various artistic photographs were included.

Sylvia Imbrock, a senior art major, identified with Minelli’s artistic exploration of the events surrounding him. “Seeing the progression and the other pieces of his work [during the talk] gave me more of a context for the show,” said Imbrock.

America as a Christian nation

“The Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.” That’s what John McCain told Beliefnet.com in an interview last weekend. Are we a Christian nation? If so, what does that mean?

Well, 76.5 percent of Americans are some variety of Christian. But almost a quarter of the country isn’t. In fact, 14 percent of Americans don’t affiliate themselves with a religion at all. And that 14 percent tends to think that separation of church and state is a good thing. So they might want to reconsider voting for a Republican in the upcoming election.

As it turns out, most of the Republican candidates for president do not support the separation of church and state.

Mike Huckabee wants creationism to be taught in schools, and Rudy Guiliani believes that public school teachers should be allowed to put the Ten Commandments up in their classrooms. Ron Paul feels strongly that the government should be allowed to express Christianity. He wrote in a blog post, “The notion of a rigid separation between church and state has no basis in either the text of the Constitution or the writings of our Founding Fathers.”

Paul is upset that “the elitist, secular Left has managed to convince many in our nation that religion must be driven from public view. The justification is always that someone, somewhere, might possibly be offended or feel uncomfortable living in the midst of a largely Christian society, so all must yield to the fragile sensibilities of the few.” (Someone, somewhere? Does he mean the 24.5 percent of the country who isn’t Christian?)

Ron Paul is joined in his opinion by Sam Brownback, who says we should “stop driving God out of the public square,” and Fred Thompson, who is concerned that “many federal judges seem intent on eliminating God from the public schools and the public square in ways that would astound our founding fathers. … They ignore the fact that the founders were protecting the church from the state and not the other way around.”

What do the rest of Americans think about religion in government? A study by the Pew Center in 2006 found that all candidates’ favorability ratings were higher among those who thought them “very” or “somewhat” religious than those who thought them “not too” or “not at all” religious. Sixty-one percent of Americans say they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who does not believe in God, and 69 percent believe it is important for a candidate to have strong religious beliefs. Only 27 percent believe political leaders talk too much about their religious beliefs. The study is conclusive: Americans like religion and want it in their government.

So perhaps we are a Christian nation. Perhaps people like me, raised Jewish and now non-religious, should stop complaining about religion’s influence on American politics and law. But I can’t do that. Here’s why.

First, if we are to accept that there is no reason Christian doctrine shouldn’t be written into the law of the United States, we will have to throw the First Amendment out the window, that bit about “there shall be no establishment of religion.” We will also have to get rid of the “free practice of religion” part of it, because of course I am not free to practice my religion or lack of it if I also have to follow yours on pain of death or imprisonment. Okay. We will do that, because after all the United States is a republic, and most of us are Christians, so if we remove the First Amendment and write Christian doctrine into law we will still be representing the majority of people and what the majority of people think is best.

Then, we will have to concede that everything is only a belief: that there is no difference between “my god told me this is so” and stacks of sociological, psychological studies claiming that their evidence tells them it is so. Both are equally so, because I have to believe in sociology, psychology and science to accept their evidence, so both are simply beliefs of exactly the same variety.
Now we can indeed conclude that it is silly to argue that we should not pass laws based only on Christian beliefs.

But what are you doing to me, a non-Christian, when you throw these out the window? You’re silencing me. You’re doing to me what

I cannot talk about. Because I cannot argue with a belief. All conversation ends at a belief. If you say to me, homosexuality is wrong, and I say, why, and you say, well, because of this and this, and I say what about this, and you say, well, this, then we are having a dialogue and we are both having our say. But if you say to me, homosexuality is wrong, and I say, but why, and you say, it is my belief, my god told me so, then the conversation is over. I might say, well my god did not tell me so and it is not my belief, but if there are more of you, you will overpower me. And you might not be able to make me believe in your god, but you can certainly force your god’s rules upon me.

I maintain that this is wrong.

Tommy’s Restaurant

I actually liked everything about Tommy’s except the food. And I didn’t like the food because I actually watched the cook pour grease on it. This is a very bad idea. If you get to Tommy’s, do not sit at the counter under any circumstances. Wait for the booth.

Tommy’s, also called Tommy’s Dutch Lunch, is a hike to get to, so unless you are ambitious on a bike or have a car…you have a really long walk. But after the amount of calories you ingest, that’s not actually a terrible idea. It’s located off of Second Avenue, on Pine.

You can choose breakfast or lunch items (it closes at 2 p.m. every day), all of which are crunchy and oily and fairly delicious. I don’t know. I just wish I hadn’t watched the busboy fill bottles full of grease. And then pour them on my omelet. But! That same busboy was, according to the two other ladies in my presence, very cute. I had to stop looking in that direction, so…I can’t really say. He and the other servers were very friendly, though. Another problem with sitting at the counter is that you don’t really get served. Your food just appears from the counter below you.

I ordered a veggie omelet and my sister got a BLT so that we could cover the menu’s meal offerings. Her bacon was excessive. There is essentially nothing available for vegans. Maybe the juice, but then again I ordered a small juice and the glass was like the size of my fingernail. We both got way too much potato product with our food. My fridge is now full of fries and hashbrowns. It was really good hangover food, except none of us had a hangover. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t really get through it. I fixated on the slippery nature of my meal instead. It’s good diner food, if you like diner food. My sister and I tend to only like diner food at 3 a.m. and only when it’s pie. Neither one of those criteria were being met when we ate at Tommy’s, so something just wasn’t quite right.

It was easy to ignore the mediocre meals, however, when our attention was turned instead to the INCREDIBLE MUSIC playing the entire time we were there. I can’t remember all of it, but I know Edwin McCain’s “I’ll Be” played, along with “Imagine” by John Lennon, “I’m Like a Bird” by Nelly Furtado and many, many things by Queen. Just a spoonful of Freddie makes the home fries go down.

Other notes: Parking is minimal. When you’re inside, it feels like you’re in a mobile home. That’s generally a good thing. While we were there, we saw some sleepy-looking Whitties across from us. They probably would agree it is good hangover food.

It is almost a mile away from campus, but there is one great thing about the location of Tommy’s. It’s right across the street from the highway overpass, where there are murals of fruits and hot-air balloons. Another way I would recommend working off the grease is jumping around some innuendo-ridden pomegranates.

Recommended: Veggie Omelet, Pancakes. Expect to pay about $9.00 a person.

Secularism and religion equally reasonable beliefs

If you wanted to find some school of thought, some ideology that was as far from Whitman’s belief system as possible, you wouldn’t be far off to pick social conservatism. Considering what many on this campus think of Christianity in general, if you combed the whole campus I doubt you could find more than a few dozen Whitties who consider the movement anything less than bigoted.

The movement is certainly easy to hate. Some of its leaders are at the forefront of fighting against progressive causes like gay rights. I will not contest that some within the religious right have some very bigoted stances, and there are many issues on which we disagree, to put it mildly.

But in discussing the religious right with Whitties I’ve noticed a trend that troubles me. Too often Whitman students seem to think that people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson represent all Christians and all social conservatives. I’ve been told many times that people with religious beliefs should keep them out of politics and in some cases that the separation of church and state means that Christians should leave religion at the door when it comes to the political process.

The really wonderful thing about democracy is that it is doubtful. In contrast to authoritarian systems that claim to know the truth and strive to enforce it, democracy kicks back and says “do what you think is right.” It’s a system that recognizes the legitimacy of people taking what they believe is the correct way to do things and voting for it.

Now, a person’s beliefs about what is right and wrong are always going to proceed out of their value system and their set of personal beliefs. That’s human nature. Christians who are active in politics vote for what they believe is right based on a set of moral principles proceeding from religious beliefs, while an atheist who is active in politics votes for what they believe in proceeding out of a set of secular beliefs.

So there are two problems with telling Christians to divorce their religion from their politics. First, it’s impossible. A human being can’t sit down and make decisions as if the foundation of their belief system wasn’t there. A Christian’s conception of what is right and wrong is inextricably bound up with his or her belief system, and the only way to keep those beliefs out is to exclude Christians from politics, which is clearly undemocratic.

But the larger problem with this exclusion is that it prejudicially favors secularism over religion. A recent article in the Pioneer called religious belief “irrational” on the basis that it was founded upon an assertion (the existence of a god) which could not be logically proven. By this criterion, secularism is “irrational” because there is no logical way any of its assertions (that god does not exist or that the universe occurred by itself) can be proven or argued. Secularism is itself a belief system founded upon faith and assertions about the universe for which we have no evidence. There are simply too many big questions for any person to be able to state with certainty which explanation is correct.

But shouldn’t people be protected from having the beliefs of others imposed on them? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, we recognize that it is inconsistent with democratic principle to violate the mental integrity of citizens by forcing them to believe any particular way of thinking. I would argue that that is the purpose of the non-establishment clause of the Constitution.

On the other hand, democracy consists of a process by which individuals enact laws on the basis of what they believe is right. In a certain sense, every law that a citizen disagrees with is an imposition of someone else’s belief system. We tolerate the activism of others in support of such laws because we recognize that democracy requires a system whereby everyone is free to advocate their beliefs, even ones some consider irrational. It is just as illegitimate to exclude Christians as any other belief system.

Christians and social conservatives have the same right to campaign for their beliefs in politics as everyone else. As long as religion itself is not adopted by the state and the freedom of conscience of American citizens is respected, believing God exists is just as appropriate a political motivation as believing in secularism.

Examining the dangers of the line-item veto

The line-item veto has been sought by presidents since Ulysses S. Grant and has become a base for fiscal conservatism in recent years. Ronald Reagan was the first to introduce it as a conservative ideal and it has stuck. Now it has become a point of contention in the 2008 Presidential Campaign for the Republicans.

Mitt Romney and Rudolph Giuliani clashed last Tuesday on this issue in a debate held in Dearborn, Mich. They both represented different sides of the issue, so who was right?

The line-item veto has the advantage of giving the president the ability to choose certain pieces of a bill passed in Congress and veto only those parts which he does not like. But with great power comes great responsibility, and the line-item veto gives very great power to the president.

Giuliani has gone against the typical fiscal conservative path that he promotes by not agreeing with the line-item veto. When a bill was passed in 1996 that gave the president the power of line-item veto, Giuliani spearheaded the effort to declare the bill unconstitutional. In 1998 he got his wish when he won the Supreme Court case that declared the line-item veto bill unconstitutional.
Romney believes that the line-item veto is a necessary and important power for the president to have. He criticizes Romney for not supporting the line-item veto, because he considers it to be a critical issue for the Republican Party.

In today’s world the line-item veto is a scary and dangerous tool. Giuliani sees the power this could wield to do terrible, unconstitutional deeds. The presidency under George W. Bush has already gained powers not meant to be in the executive branch of the government. The line-item veto would only give the presidency much more power.

The problem with the line-item veto is the same reason why it is so sought after by every president, Republican and Democratic alike. In Washington, the president pushes certain bills through Congress by taking on extra legislation that senators want. This is common practice in Washington today. With the line-item veto the president could just veto that extra legislation that he doesn’t wants when it gets to his desk to sign.

Let us say that the president wants to get a bill passed in Congress that extends the War Powers Act to allow him to decide how long the army can be at war. He does not have enough support in Congress to get this bill passed, so senators add legislation to the bill that states that those troops must be used only in peacekeeping missions unless otherwise approved by Congress.

Now the bill has enough support, so it is passed in Congress and sent to the president. Right now the president has two choices: He can veto the bill or he can pass the bill as a whole, accepting all of the terms of the bill, even those added later.

If the president were given the power of line-item veto, he could select the added legislation that says he can only have power of the troops in peacekeeping situations and veto only that phrase. Now the president has gained the power to declare war and stay at war indefinitely despite Congress.
That is a scary concept.

Evaluating the ‘Fair Tax’: not so fair for working class

The U.S tax code, a continual source of posturing and conflict in the political sphere, is once again an important policy issue facing presidential candidates as they prepare for beginning of primary elections in January. The rhetoric has been especially strong among the Republican candidates, with the system being described as broken by the majority of the candidates. Senator Sam Brownback went so far as to call it manipulative, saying, “It’s Washington trying to direct people’s lives.”

Despite agreement on the problem, the G.O.P candidates differ on a possible solution. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani remained vague on the issue in the Oct. 9 Republican debate, sticking to the standard Republican mantra of free trade and lower taxes, without outlining any particular structural changes that he would propose. This could further the criticism of Giuliani that he is running on a platform based largely on national security and his role as mayor of New York during 9/11. Giuliani himself stated in the debate, “A president can’t be an economic forecaster… So the reality is, a president has to work on the fundamentals… Keep taxes low. Keep regulations moderate. Keep spending under control.”

Several candidates, however, have put their support behind economic policies of a much more radical nature. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is a strong proponent of what is currently known as the Fair Tax. First introduced as the Fair Tax Bill (H.R. 2525) by Rep. John Linder in 1999 (and every subsequent year), the bill would constitute a large reduction to the complexity of the existing tax code. Essentially, the existing code would be completely abandoned, and all forms of national taxes (income, estate, corporate, etc) would be replaced by a single national retail tax, and the I.R.S would cease to exist as a government body.

In the currently existing legislation, the tax rate would be 23 percent of the purchase price and would apply to nearly all expenditures: food, property, medical fees, legal fees, etc. Additionally, each household would receive a monthly rebate to cover basic expenses. The rebate would be based on family size and acts as an advanced rebate on all purchases made by the family up until the poverty level. Practically, this means that a family that expends at or below the poverty level would pay nothing in taxes, regardless of income.

The benefits attributed to the Fair Tax by its proponents are numerous and appeal to a wide range of current Republican concerns. As noted above, it would ideally streamline a tax code that has become a paradigm of governmental intrusion into private affairs.

Furthermore, Huckabee himself asserted in the debate that the Fair Tax would solve a growing problem in America; with the collapse of American industrial power, the working class has shifted to the lower-paying service industry, forcing many workers to take two or even three jobs. The premise, at least, seems logical; instead of excessive regulation of wages and expensive social programs, why not simply institute a tax code that allows the most modest of incomes to support a certain decent standard of living? As Governor Huckabee said, “I want to make sure people understand that for many people on this stage the economy’s doing terrifically well, but for a lot of Americans it’s not doing so well. The people who handle the bags and make the beds at our hotels and serve the food, many of them are having to work two jobs, and that’s barely paying the rent.”

Admittedly, there is something to be said about a simple approach: It increases transparency, closes loopholes, and generally streamlines the operation of the bureaucracy (always a worthwhile goal, to be sure). The problem Governor Huckabee outlined above is certainly real enough: I’m reminded of the 2001 expose “Nickel and Dimed,” in which journalist Barbara Ehrenreich endeavored to expose the unsustainable nature of a working class existence, multiple jobs, lack of any medical security, discrimination on housing, and countless other problems.

That being said, the possible failings of this plan are legion, and it smacks of a market so unregulated that the people it intends to stabilize will see very little change in quality of life while the wealthy continue to accumulate more and more capital. The U.S. economy is entirely dependant upon continuous consumption, and to eliminate estate and corporate taxes is to give capital the opportunity to accumulate in one place (the financial institutions) while slowly blurring the line between the middle and working classes. Proponents argue that by no longer taxing production, companies will be able to raise wages, further increasing productivity.

This would make economic sense circa 1950, however, the economy is no longer based on production per se. Globalization dictates outsourcing, and we must realize that the nature of the system that we have created is now coming back to bite us. Money in the U.S. is now controlled by the financial institutions, and to allow them to further hoard capital will only keep it out of circulation, while the rebate system will encourage the middle class to spend as little as possible in order to avoid the steep tax rate; consider that if medical expenses are taxed at this rate, a $20,000 medical bill would incur a further $4,600 in taxes. The possibility of such a situation could lead many lower-middle and working class families to avoid any frivolous expenses, further slowing our economy and ensuring its eventual collapse. The principle behind this bill is admirable; its faith in the free market, however, may be more than is warranted.

-All quotes were taken from the transcript of the Republican primary debate of Oct. 9, held in Dearborn, Mich. The transcript was posted by the New York Times on their Web site.

-Technical details of the Fair Tax bill were obtained from the Library of Congress.

Belgium’s government needs to unify to prevent civil war

In a matter of years, the country of Belgium may no longer exist. Yes, the country quintessentially known for its tasty beer, luscious chocolate and love for waffles may disband before long. The country that is the hub for both the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization may soon dichotomize right before your eyes. And, yes, the country that is home to the beautiful Ardennes and Audrey Hepburn may break at its seam 20 miles south of Brussels, its capital.

Just over 120 days after the general election on July 10, Belgians still have yet to form a government. The 2007 government formation period is now the second longest in history, only trailing that of Wilfred Martens’ back in 1987 when it took him 148 days. The differences between Martens’ social experiment then and the one taking place now are but measly in comparison with prior reforms: The demarcation of the Brussels-Capital Region and a few fruitless tweaks here and there to community matters between the Flemish and French, to name a few. The most important difference, however, is not one that can be measured by a political stick but one that can be measured with a watch.

Twenty years and two new governments later we find ourselves where we stand now. The Belgian people are growing weary of the efficacy of their political process. Frankly, governments, especially in first-world countries such as Belgium, should not be collapsing every 10 years. People, no matter how quarrelsome they may be, should not be at each others’ throats because of their own xenophobia. And a king should not be so powerless that he cannot restore order in his own country.

This is the case with Belgium. King Albert II has been that king. He only has the power to appoint ministers and check off whatever laws are churned and spit out of the Parliament. He has appointed four politicians, one after another, in hopes that each could solve this crisis. So far, not a single one has.

With respect to Belgium’s xenophobia, it is nothing new. It is the cause of all six government reforms in the past 40 years and, over time, has intensified. Whereas in the first reform “separatists” only called to be recognized through the establishment of regions and considered the idea of actually having their own country to govern a silly pipe-dream, nowadays separatists like the Flemish nationalist, extreme-right Vlaams Belang party believe this once-fantasy can become a feasible reality.

Some would argue that if Belgium’s intra-country struggles persist, why not let them just go their own way if that’s what they really want? The problem is not, per se, letting Belgium racially divide itself but letting other countries stomaching separatist movements follow suit. Moreover, Belgium, unlike Iraq and its Sunni, Shiite, Kurd trichotomy, was not an arbitrarily defined country. Like the United States Revolution, the Belgian Revolution sought to establish the Kingdom of Belgium as a neutral country separate from the United Kingdom of the Netherlands.

If Belgium divides into two countries, Wallonia (French) and Flanders (Dutch), it will create a domino effect throughout Europe. In Spain, the terrorist coup that has been detonating at random since 1959, ETA, in tandem with strong Basque nationalism could easily remove itself provided its entreaty came at an opportune time: the division of Belgium. In its wake, Catalonian nationalism, also in Spain, could fluidly prevail. In Italy, the Lega Nord, a political party focused on complete Lombard autonomy, has been on a roll since its inception in 1991 reaching a peak year in 1996 when it attained nearly 11 percent of the national vote (bearing in mind that Italy has nine national political parties which split the vote).

Finally, in Northern Ireland cessation feelings still linger from the pinnacle years of the Irish Republican Army. Though the Belfast Agreement, essentially ending the IRA’s road to Northern Irish independence from the United Kingdom, has come and gone, at thousands strong, it could easily resurface as a political force.

We must ensure that Belgium persists as a unified country and resolve to aid it in construction of its government. The implications of division are far too hazardous to the health of Europe as a whole. But if the sixth government reform is to be squandered at the feet of zealous nationalism and Flemish and Walloons alike decide to rule their own kingdoms, so be it. The result when Belgium takes Spain, Italy and Northern Ireland, among others, with it is but one: civil war. And as far as the yummy waffles, tasty beer and delicious chocolate go, you can pretty much give them up for good.

KC Masterpiece presents: Life is weird and wonderful

Life is weird and wonderful.

Currently, the K/Caitlins are sitting on Kaitlin’s amazingly comfortable and huge bed. Winnie-the-Pooh is splayed between Caitlin’s legs, no surprise there. Caitlin has just returned from Girl Talk, which she enjoyed, despite the fact that she threw out several body parts and will not be able to move tomorrow. Kyle Bain, dance diva, you held your own. Kaitlin just watched two hours of Christian Bale. We are both in very good moods. Life is good.

Yet, as you all must have noticed, life is very bizarre as well. For starters, Kaitlin just typed the word “bazaar.” Who ever types that word? Caitlin wore underwear today. That’s strange. It seems that of late, weird things have been happening in general. Maybe it’s the autumnal air, the crunchy leaves and scent of cider. Maybe it’s the beckoning of Halloween, ghouls and goblins and slutty costumes. Perhaps it’s the seasons changing, the slow realization that winter’s coming, we’re stuck here, finals will eventually come to destroy us all, and you haven’t actually studied for your writtens yet.

We have decided to (surprise, surprise) comprise a list of WTFs, chronicling the particularly peculiar and uncanny things that have happened as of late. It’s been too long since we’ve gotten down and listy.

1. Friends are having particularly petty and stupid fights. Where’s the love?

2. The health center apparently quite literally overflowed with drunkards last Friday night. Whether health center material or not, everyone seems to have been wasted, even that quiet girl in your politics class who has all the recycled folders.

3. It’s breakup season and the sex has gotten rotten.

4. People say startlingly stupid and awkward things.

5. Cigarettes are making a comeback. Before, everyone smoked in the dark at parties, bumming
cigarettes off the few people who were brave enough to smoke in the daylight. Now, people walk around campus, puffing away. Remember, it’s not cool if everyone does it.

6. Caitlin’s phone was broken in a mysterious way that may or may not have had to do with a brownie. Her neighbors also suddenly moved, taking the wireless with them. She has resorted to bursting into people’s houses unannounced. If this happens to you, stay calm. She’s just lonely.

7. Freshmen have radio shows where they flash their junk at guests.

8. Drunk 14-year-old townies attempt to maul said freshmen, upset that the song they requested for their girlfriend, dying of Chlamydia, was not played on said show.

9. Stealing is in vogue, whether it is laptops from frat houses or guitars from parked cars.

10. Walla Walla is burning to the fucking ground.

11. After two excruciatingly depressing weeks of clouds and rain, the sun has come out to frolic, teasing us one last time before it will undoubtedly blue-ball us for months. We have SAD, and we are not amused by the fickle antics of the wenchy sun.

12. Whitties are starting to dress like hipsters, or, in other words, L.A. two years ago. Given Whitman’s fashion history, this is somewhat of an improvement.

13. No one spends time in Reid. It is a barren wasteland of broken dreams, empty coffee cups and not a soul to say “Naked? Flex? Alright!”

14. Caitlin has actually crysturbated.

15. Columnists attack other columnists in the same newspaper. Not only that, but the titles of these articles are just streams of puns off of the food-like nature of the other column’s name. Kudos, Pio.

16. “Clitoris” is no longer a professional or technical term but something lewd and indecent.

17. People are offended when we are censored. That’s pretty weird and wonderful.

18. The squirrels keep multiplying and soon will mobilize against us.

19. In related news, the evil bugs are back. Kaitlin was walking back from Safeway, and one died upon her breast.

20. Someone in Lyman had sex for at least five minutes. At least, we hope so.

21. U.J. Sofia and Caitlin are now Facebook friends, and even have a wall-to-wall. She is now complete.

22. At Girl Talk, Caitlin closely witnessed what she calls the “Geek Grind,” an apathetic dance style with little attention paid to rhythm or dignity, often found in freshmen. Both members looked ecstatic.

23. We accidentally capitalized “freshmen,” but Spellcheck would have none of that. Ironically, Spellcheck doesn’t even recognize its own name.

24. We read an amazing tip from a sixties Cosmo—“To avoid getting dumped, tearfully tell your man that your other, secret lover broke up with you. His ego will be so shattered that he will hang on to see if you have another lover you haven’t told him about.” It also included this advice for throwing a party—“Don’t make the fatal mistake of inviting too many homosexuals.”

25. We’re getting paid to write this.

To all our loyal fans who took the time to write in—we love you. Much thanks.

Humanai Interna: Issue 6

College gender gap changes campus dynamics

From the happiness gap recently reported in The New York Times to the gender gap at colleges that has spawned alarmist articles, there seems to be a habit within the media of portraying male and female achievement as a zero-sum game.

Over the past few years, a national trend has emerged of women outnumbering men both in college applicant pools and on campus. Whitman is no exception.

Whitman College is predominantly female, with overall enrollment currently at 56.3 percent female and 43.7 percent male.

“It’s a national trend; it’s not unique to Whitman. It’s not really even sudden, it’s really been over maybe the last seven to 10 years. There are more women graduating from high school than men and certainly more matriculating to college,”� said Director of Admission Kevin Dyerly. “The national average right now as far as college enrollment is close to 60 percent women, 40 percent men.”�

While the first-year, sophomore and senior classes all conform to the higher female ratio trend, the junior class is actually only 46 percent female.

“Our admission rates between men and women are pretty consistent, there’s not a huge disparity in admission rates,”� said Dyerly. “It has to do with the applicant pool, and it also has to do with our yield, or matriculation. So if we admit 1,400 students to get 400, some years you’re just going to end up getting more men. You never know the factors that are going to contribute to making the decision,” said Dyerly.

Some are concerned that exceptionally qualified women are unfairly being rejected in an attempt to maintain gender balance. A recent Higher Education Chronicle article wonders why women, who are being “discriminated”� against, aren’t filing lawsuits en masse. It claims that less stellar male applicants are given preference over their more impressive female competitors.

At least at Whitman this specter of gender “affirmative action” is non-existent.

“The important message is that we want to make sure that any student who is admitted is qualified, and so while we’re building a diverse student body that we hope reflects not only higher education but society: sure, gender could be one of those factors, but there are so many factors that go into our decisions,”� said Dyerly.

There are too many variables involved in the admissions process for Whitman to effectively maintain an artificial gender balance, Dyerly pointed out.

“I don’t think you can boil it down to just male or female. It’s more sophisticated than that. Rarely ever would it come down to just two files sitting here and the only difference would be male or female. It’s at a more macro level than that. No single factor is ever going to necessarily be the determining one. It’s a holistic approach,”� said Dyerly.

According to Professor Melissa Wilcox, chair of the gender studies department, the language of affirmative action in this case might point less to a legitimate source of outrage for women than it does to implicitly racist attitudes about affirmative action itself.

“The same argument has been used for years to argue that Title IX disadvantages men and that affirmative action disadvantages whites, so this is kind of a backdoor way I think of using the case of women to prove that in fact affirmative action policies disadvantage the dominant group”� said Wilcox.

The central concern, however, is that this trend illuminates a need to address a problem with boys. Boys are being disenfranchised and measures need to be taken to help them.

“Often this problem is described as being traceable all the way back to elementary school, where boys’ academic potential is being limited because they have to sit in classrooms all day. The irony is that the education system has not really changed “men still had to sit in classrooms all day when they constituted the majority of college students,”� said senior gender studies major Nicole Pexton.

Dyerly echoed the popular boy problem dialogue but not with overwhelming concern.

“We do see a trend sometimes with male applicants where they might be a slower starter in high school. So sometimes we’ll see an applicant where we think, ‘This is a maturing male.’ I think that’s a national trend. Part of that, I think, is that men oftentimes mature or develop later in junior high or high school than women do. We don’t always assume that’s the case for a man, but oftentimes we’ll see that in letters of recommendation,” said Dyerly.

It is suggested that many of the skills valued in schools “for example, good behavior, organization and asking others for help� are “female”� skills.

According to one article in the Weekly Standard, these skills are “the touchy-feely stuff.” According to a study by Brian A. Jacob of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, they are “non-cognitive skills.”� In an ironic twist, the argument seems to say that boys are essentially being disadvantaged unfairly by their biology.

But it’s not clear that there have been significant changes in elementary or secondary education that would account for such a disadvantage.

“I’m inclined to say that we’re not just talking about women somehow having an advantage over men in college, which is, I think, the direction that a lot of these explanations want to go, and I’m not convinced by that. I don’t believe that we have primary and secondary classrooms that are somehow privileging girls in the way that classrooms used to privilege boys,”� said Wilcox.

What, then, might account for the lower number of men?

“It may be that we’re dealing with militarization, which is drawing middle class men too; we’re dealing with incarceration; we’re dealing with shifting images of ideal masculinity for middle class white men, where being smart is not cool,”� said Wilcox.

Wilcox noted that the gender gap is not consistent across race and class. Much of the gender gap dialogue obscures these significant factors and the issue is chalked up as simply one of gender.

“I would worry that when we start talking across the board about ‘the gender gap,’ that because we’re not talking specifically about race and class, we’re assuming that the people being disadvantaged are middle class white men. I’m not sure that’s really the case. And so, I think we need to ask some very hard questions about what role race is playing and what role class is playing here, and whether in fact what we’re seeing is an even stronger loss of men of color, and of working class and poor men, and that is probably where the outreach needs to go,”� said Wilcox.

Another concern that has cropped up is the social impact of a gender skew. How will it affect the dating scene on campuses? One of the dominant concerns is how women will find dates and husbands with fewer options. Whitman, however, is not overly concerned.

“As we continue to try to be a co-ed college and have as diverse a student body as possible, that gender balance could be considered one of those factors. We certainly don’t want to get skewed so far as 70/30. That could really impact the social scene, the academic life and character of the college if we got to 70/30 or whatnot,” said Dyerly.

In response to the dating anxiety, Wilcox said, “Well, isn’t that heterosexist?”

All the potential problems aside, the parameters of the popular dialogue surrounding the trend are themselves revealing. Lacking conspicuously in the gender gap discourse is the trend’s tremendously positive implications for women.

“The positive side of this trend is that it’s become increasingly thinkable in most subcultures in the U.S. for women to be intelligent and academically talented and to want to go to college,”� said Wilcox.

Rather than treating it at least in part as a victory for women, the focus of the media is with a perceived threat to dominant patriarchal and heterosexist paradigms. “It’s interesting that it’s receiving all this attention, it’s interesting that that’s the gender gap we’re talking about when we’ve still got glass ceilings for women all over the place in employment. Take a look at the science division of every school, take a look at the ranks of faculty: the gender gap, when you look at the picture overall, is still very, very much about men having more access, at least when you hold all other factors constant,”� said Wilcox.

“The opportunities for women in higher education have expanded dramatically; the social acceptability, which goes hand-in-hand with opportunities, has expanded dramatically; the willingness of teachers to treat girls from the very earliest ages as equally intelligent and equally capable as boys has expanded, although not to the extent that one might like. We can still have the [former] president of Harvard saying that women’s brains just aren’t quite as capable of science and math,”� said Wilcox.

According to Pexton, the framework of the dialogue itself should be questioned.

“There are certainly many underlying assumptions that aren’t being questioned in this so-called gender crisis in higher education. When there are more women attaining higher levels of education they can be perceived as a threat because they’ll start competing for higher-level, traditionally male-dominated occupations. This attention toward the gender gap seems to me to be thinly veiled anxiety about the changing structure of gendered societal power dynamics. Perhaps in a few years, when people become adjusted to a high concentration of women on campuses, they will cease to notice or even consider it an issue,” said Pexton.

Live free and die; the way of New Hampshire

I come from the only state in the U.S. without a seat belt law for adults. The New Hampshire state motto is “Live Free Or Die,” and we certainly live by it. Nobody or nothing is going to oppress us by making us wear seat belts. Now I hear you, Reason Magazine and libertarians everywhere. There are certainly more important laws we could enforce than making adults wear their seat belts. If they want to die in car accidents, that’s their prerogative. After all, they’re the only ones who have an interest, right?

Wrong. Because of the current insurance system. If everybody who got into a car crash and wasn’t wearing a seat belt died, then this problem wouldn’t come up. But happily, many of them don’t. Instead, they go on their merry way to the hospital, having sustained much greater injury most of the time than they would have had they been wearing a seat belt.

If they have insurance, their insurance company will pick up most of the cost of their treatment. The company loses some money on this, because they will spend more at the hospital than they recoup from this one customer’s fees. But the insurance company has lots of other customers who don’t get hurt most of the time, and they make a profit off of these healthy people. The more insurance company money goes to actually pay for health care for people who foolishly risk great injury, the smaller their profit, and the higher their rates for the rest of us.

Which brings me to my suggestion for New Hampshire and the rest of the country. It is silly to keep stupid adults from killing themselves in car accidents because they refuse to wear their seat belts. Don’t mess with the gene pool. Instead, let insurance companies work their system a little. Require people to declare that they don’t wear a seat belt as a prior risk when they apply for insurance and have them pay a little more. And if someone hasn’t disclosed that risk and they get injured in a car accident while not wearing a seat belt, let them pay a fine for undisclosed risk.

The larger point behind this is that greater liberty is usually better for society, but sometimes it may take a little tweaking. In this case, there may be no need to legislate, but changing insurance requirements will keep the stupidity of the few from placing a greater burden on the many.

Libertarianism is best salted with a little utilitarianism if it is actually to be the best system for the greatest number of people. Of course, you’d think die-hard live-free-or-diers would have better things to complain about than being forced to wear seat belts.

In fact, they do assert their freedom in other ways, like refusing to pay for schools. New Hampshire has the lowest tax burden in the nation, which is great in many ways. We tax the heck out of visitors with restaurant and hotel taxes, but we have no sales tax and no income tax. Thus, we have had a terrible time finding a fair way to provide money for schools, because property taxes vary so much between towns.

Students in Bedford, N.H. went to one high school in neighboring Manchester for years, along with all of the Manchester students, even though the school had to be closed for a while because dangerous mold was growing in the ancient ceilings. Bedford residents, largely wealthy retirees, just didn’t want to have to pay for other people’s children to go to school, and it was cheaper for Bedford if they didn’t have their own high school.

Because the legislature will never pass any bill calling for a broadbased tax, every year the governor tries to come up with some alternative way to fund schools. Cigarette tax? Gambling? You name it, we’ve tried it. We’re on slot machines right now. Of course we spend lots of money on schools, and our teachers are only paid slightly less than the national average. But we never know where we’re going to get that money.

The point is, those elderly Bedfordians need to suck it up and pay for a public good. The convenience for them of paying low taxes is probably offset by the dire necessity of public schooling for a thousand teenagers. New Hampshire likes to brag about its low taxes, about how we live free, but really? If your freedom is so important that it trumps education for the youth of your country, you’re just being selfish.

Why coke might replace kegs at Whitman parties

Lindsay, Paris, Britney, Nicole, Kate… they have all done it! So have these five so-called “hot” celebrities made cocaine cool in our contemporary society? Is it possible that “nose candy” has become the new socially acceptable drug of our time?

Let’s first look at a few basic facts about this drug. Cocaine is a white powder that comes from the coca plant. It increases the level of dopamine in the body, which augments one’s pleasure level and decreases their appetite. With these kinds of effects, who wouldn’t want to do a line?
But why then did so many people in the past want to keep their use of this drug a secret? In the ‘70s and early ‘80s, people transported cocaine from Colombia into the United States. The drug was huge among the upper class, as a few drug dealers monopolized the industry. However, during this time, use of cocaine was not highly publicized like it is today.

It wasn’t until the late ‘80s, when American dealers began to sell the drug, that the prices lowered and it became a drug for the masses. But even at that time, it was still not glamorized in various fashion and gossip magazines.

However, a few months ago, Jane magazine featured an article called “I’m sick of all my friends snorting their dinners.” The writer commented that she was upset that she had lost all of her friends because she refused to engage in their drug use. I was rather surprised to see this article in a popular magazine, as I thought any mentioning of cocaine was taboo.

However, with the presence of cocaine in various artifacts of recent popular culture, it is clear that it has become a more mainstream drug.
But has it become the marijuana of the new age? Or is cocaine still a social pariah?

As I explained earlier, the much-publicized use of this drug by well-known female celebrities, especially Kate Moss, has made cocaine cool recently. If Kate Moss, arguably one of the most attractive women in the world, does it, then what girl wouldn’t want to?

But it is not just image-crazed girls doing it either. In well-populated cities like New York, London and Los Angeles, use of this drug is rampant.
And no one seems to mind, either. Like marijuana, it has become a more socially acceptable drug, constantly a discussion topic in the media.

Cocaine’s ascent in today’s social and cultural scene might make this drug acceptable on Whitman someday in the near future. Who knows? In a few years, Whitties might be reaching for a line instead of a keg cup.

Stressing the importance of living life

There are two philosophies that Whitman students (and really all college students) live their lives by. Well, three, actually. We choose either to get our money’s worth or to live our lives. (Some opt for a third lifestyle: Perpetual partying and disregard for schoolwork, which squanders both one’s tuition and four years of one’s life.)

The first two are highly desirable and, unfortunately, in direct conflict. We’re constantly presented with choices that we heard about from that speaker during the first week of freshman year and from the Academic Resource Center after getting D-slips. Remember these? They’re choices like “frisbee golf or Psychology reading,” “exercising or studying for a quiz,” “writing a draft for that paper or taking a nap.”
Fundamentally, we’re choosing between the satisfaction of knowing that we’re milking Whitman College for all it’s worth and the satisfaction of living our lives.

A few weeks ago, on this page, Sophie Johnson proclaimed, “Stress is dead.” For the most part she was right; it is dead, but it comes back to life when we feel the pressure to get our $40,000’s worth out of Whitman. And that pressure is really there; going to an expensive liberal arts college like Whitman makes me feel overprivileged. To ward off such guilt, we try to get as much out of it as we can.

We take those challenging (but more interesting) classes, we take on more activities, join clubs, volunteer. We do all this because we want to have the quintessential college experience because by golly, we’re paying for it. We’re paying a lot.

But you’ve got to live your life, too. Right? Part of the reason we go to such an expensive liberal arts college is its potential to bring about personal growth and development. Studying cooped up in the library for four years isn’t going to help anyone to grow personally. Trying too hard effectively undermines our attempts to fully utilize Whitman.

Additionally, I don’t know if even a really stellar education from Whitman is worth four years of miserable, backbreaking work. Life is too short; four years is more than you think. If you make it to 80, four years is one twentieth of your life—that’s too much time to be pulling your hair out constantly.

Still, I struggle trying to reconcile both forces. I try to satisfy both my guilt for not studying enough and my need to spend a few hours per day outside the library.

For now, the part of me that wants to live my life has won. I’m writing this from Seattle, where I’ve come for the weekend despite the massive amount of work I should be accomplishing.

I’m neglecting the two midterms and two papers that I have next week. Next week will be my busiest of the entire semester, and I picked this weekend to come to Seattle. Why? To see the Seattle Symphony Orchestra play Mozart’s requiem. I almost didn’t come—and I love Mozart’s requiem. I came so close to letting such an opportunity get away from me because if I screw up this week, my GPA will suck, and if that happens,

I won’t be able to go to graduate school.

Now, I’m just as sick of listening to people whine about their uniquely frustrating academic problems as I probably made you just now. I’m not trying to impress you. My point is that I almost let a great opportunity slip away because it could have interfered with my academics.

Academics just aren’t that important. But it is hard to just say “no” to over stressing. Sometimes what it takes is a little daring, and a “things will
work themselves out” attitude.

I was inspired by the Testostertones’ performance in the library foyer last Wednesday night. At 11 p.m., the harmonic sounds of a cappella singing reached my ears through the silence of the reading room. It was like a revolution over studying. An entire library of students worrying and stressing was forced to stop. Forced. Forced to stop studying and to listen to really good a cappella music.

The crazy thing is that the whole time, I was just waiting for someone to stop them. I felt like some sort of authority figure would have to step in and speak for all the students who were annoyed because they couldn’t continue to work and stress out for those 20 minutes. No one did, and I was proud; we at Whitman seem to understand the importance of fun.

Rabbi Yedwab speaks to Congregation Beth Israel

On Saturday, Oct. 13, Rabbi Stanley Yedwab, visiting rabbi of Walla Walla’s Congregation Beth Israel, shared his experiences in the civil rights movement and other social causes and explained the role that Judaism played in his fight against prejudice and discrimination.

The speech, in which the congregation had tried to involve people outside of the Jewish community, was followed by a brief roundtable discussion between the rabbi and the congregation.

Rabbi Yedwab, who retired to the Seattle area after 39 years of serving in Lakewood, N.J., as Rabbi of Temple Beth Am Shalom, conducts religious services at Congregation Beth Israel several times a year.

During his speech, Rabbi Yedwab said that his inspiration for civil rights activism came from his own understanding of the books of the Bible.
Rabbi Yedwab led a Reform congregation in New Jersey but said that his early Jewish instruction tended to be more Orthodox and emphasized ritual and the ancient history of the Jewish people.

“I wasn’t as interested in the parts about rituals, the things that we had to do, or the history of Israel. It seemed to me that the Bible was about setting up a utopian society,” Yedwab said. “Do you know how many times the Bible says to welcome the stranger, or to take care of the widow? Forty-six.”

Rabbi Yedwab’s own interest came to focus on the books of the prophets, like Isaiah, which focused on the topic of how Jews ought to live their lives and treat others. His personal exploration of Reform Judaism, which lays more focus on the prophetic books, was another element of his beliefs regarding social justice.

A major responsibility for Reform Jews is “tikkun olam,” which translates to “repairing the world,” and Rabbi Yedwab tried to apply this belief to civil rights in America during the 1960s.

His beliefs led him to join the Congress on Racial Equality, or CORE, a civil rights organization which counted many Jewish leaders among its members. His first activity focused on northern racism in New York City. The organization performed sit-ins in New York hotels to fight discrimination until the hotels revised their policies to provide equal treatment of black and white patrons. While the New York movement was successful, Rabbi Yedwab continued his activities with the organization.

After a CORE-affiliated rabbi was beaten badly in Mississippi, Rabbi Yedwab said that “[his] heart was breaking” until Martin Luther King, Jr. announced his march from Selma to Montgomery.

Rabbi Yedwab flew with his wife Myra to Montgomery. Despite the energy among organizers and demonstrators like himself, Yedwab noticed that some black citizens of Montgomery were less enthusiastic.

“On the porches, older people were sitting. You could tell that something was turning in their lives. Instead of being exhilarated, there was fear,” Yedwab said. During his speech he interpreted this fear in the light of the Old Testament.

“When Moses led the Israelites across the Red Sea, what was the first thing that they said? ‘Let’s go back! We had fish and loaves in Egypt, for free,’” Yedwab said.

At the end of the march, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a speech in which he told the audience that “we’re on the move now.” Rabbi Yedwab said that this attitude was more thoughtful and useful than the one expressed by the marchers’ chant, “What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!” He said that the belief that victory was already at hand could be destructive.

“You can’t go into any work where you’re repairing the world with the belief that you’re already there, or else it will kill you. Not you, personally, but you, in spirit,” Yedwab said.

After the march in Alabama, Rabbi Yedwab returned to New Jersey, where he led an antipoverty initiative, Ocean, Inc. and helped to found the Lakewood Clergy Association, an interfaith organization. His family also helped settle a family of Vietnamese exiles and a Russian Jewish family.
Rabbi Yedwab said that there was still work to be done and that religion could help reach out to people. “Our real purpose in life is tikkun olam, to repair the world, not just live in it.”

Odd Fellows Home offers service opportunities close to campus

Walla Walla’s Odd Fellows retirement home feels like a college campus. Director of Admissions Joani Wicklund said, “People, when they come to visit here, are surprised at how cool the place is.”

The mission statement of Walla Walla’s Odd Fellow’s Home states, “The Washington Odd Fellows Home celebrates the dignity of life at each of its stages with joy, respect, kindness, and love. … We are sincerely committed to setting the standard in aging service. We value each member of our health care team.” In the first week of October the Odd Fellows Home started off with their annual celebration of Oktoberfest. On Monday, the celebration began with “Oddstock.”

The residents and staff had prepared for the event by tye-dying t-shirts accompanied by a live DJ. There was a fire pit and barbeque with an Oktoberfest theme of sausages, beer, hot spiced cider and giant German style pretzels. The Odd Fellows Home also hosted a troupe of German dancers and opened up the party to the public. The festivities continued all week, including events such as wine tasting and German themed presentations.

Wicklund said, “My role is to portray that we really do have life here…that those who come to live here are not giving up everything. They’re actually gaining. … Instead of relying on people—a common trend as we age—they can do things on their own, so they’re actually made independent.”

A few of these benefits include exercise classes (in their Wellness and Fitness Center), water aerobics in their pool, a café called Bistrol open daily for meals, a classy dining room open once a month for fine dining, a ceramics lab (“The Mud Hut”), a new bocce ball court and a golf putting green.
In terms of health care, in addition to the skilled nursing staff on campus for more dependent residents, the home boasts an on-site rehab center with an in-house therapy staff. The home also provides a chauffeur service for group outings and weekly shopping trips to amenities stores, the farmers’ market and other shopping facilities available in Walla Walla.

Visiting family members and guests are encouraged to go on these trips and to utilize the facilities right along with the residents. The home also has season tickets available to the residents and their families to the Little Theatre, Harper Joy Theatre, the Walla Walla Symphony and Walla Walla Community College Theater.

Whitman students have participated at the home in many ways. “The whole goal is to get the youth into the facility. … That’s when you can really feel the energy throughout the place,” said Kayla Kirk, director of resident life and activities chair. It doesn’t take much time, and the staff is open in terms of scheduling times and activities. “You don’t need to have a special talent, the most enduring relationships that people form happen when they are just sitting and talking,” said Kirk. For more information, call Kirk at (509) 526-6826.

Whitties reflect on value, presence of TV

“TV is so convenient. It’s always there; you just flip a switch, and…instant entertainment!” said Jordan Estes.

According to a 2006 Nielson study, college students watch an average of 24.3 hours of television per week. Although lower than the national average, this figure represents almost four hours a day.

At Whitman, some students expressed disbelief at the amount of television watched by the average college student. First-years in particular described having very little time to devote to TV. Many said they use television only in certain circumstances, rather than as an ever-present cure for boredom.

“I watch TV when I go to the gym,” said Allie Kussin-Shoptaw, a first-year. “In high school, my study breaks used to be like an hour for ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ but here, my study breaks are hanging out with friends. I just use TV to make sure I don’t feel the pain when I’m running.”
Other students, like Emily Allen, follow a single primetime serial.

“I watch one show—‘The Office’—every week. I’m committed; I’m in a serious relationship with that show,” Allen said.

Some first-year Whitman students say they watch less TV because it is less accessible in college. They also say that college life leaves little time for television.

“I watched the U.S. Open, but mostly, I’m busy doing other things,” said Estes. “There are plenty of better options [than TV] here.”

Estes said that he watched a fair amount of television at home, but that he doesn’t miss it. “It’s really nice not having to watch TV. I feel like my life has more of a purpose,” he said.

A few students report that they watch very little television both at home and at school.

“I think my [viewing habits in college and at home] are pretty much the same,” said Allen. “I’ve never really been one of those people that watches a lot of TV. So, both here and at home, I had one or two shows that I would watch for entertainment.”

“TV does have some positive aspects,” said Kussin-Shoptaw. “It can be educational, and it was time to spend with my mom at home.”

Allen agreed. “My mom and I used to watch ‘So You Think You Can Dance’—it was like bonding, and it was fun.” She adds, “Laughing is also good for you. But on the other hand, [TV] can distract you from what is really important in your own, real life. That applies to video games too, and books—really anything that’s fiction.”

Guess what: Giving birth is painful

Radical feminists have always had a problem with having babies. The “pregnant and barefoot” phenomenon (read: things women should be) has haunted us for as long as feminists have been radical. There are babies that need to be adopted, we say. It ruins a woman’s body and makes her sick and angry for nine months, we say.

Men totally get the long end of the stick in all pregnancy-related things, we shriek while burning our bras and snarfing birth control. Generally as I am growing up I find myself being more and more radical about most things, but I actually do think it’s OK for women to get pregnant under some circumstances.

First, they cannot be idiots. I qualify as an idiot any woman who has stopped her life to have a child, especially if her partner’s life is not being stopped as well. By “stopped her life,” I mean has stopped having ambitions and has fuzzed out the next 18 years for bringing up baby. Clearly it is all right to take time off from work. That’s not what I mean. I mean I would prefer, from my “I write a column” pedestal, that mothers have more to do with their time than breastfeed. The only problem is, maternity leave is not long enough and mothers (and fathers) miss crucial stages of development that the 17-year-old babysitters get to see instead. Another idiotic thing to do is to accept and/or continue working at a job that does not have at least six months paid maternity leave. That’s right. I said six months-plus. Having a baby hurts.

Second, they not be Britney Spears or Nicole Richie. Fuck that noise.

Third, they research their options for giving birth. The most popular trend of lying down while birthing is actually the most dangerous position for the mother to be in, as it hinders her ability to push and presses the baby against her kidneys and spine during labor. Squatting is better. Underwater (yes, underwater) birth is also a much healthier option, as the trauma of birth is lessened for the baby, and the water soothes mama’s muscles.

Speaking of trauma, not enough women think about giving birth at home. It cannot be understated how scary hospitals are.

I’m biased: I almost died in a hospital once, and the only people I have visited there died soon after. But I know I am not the only one who has sketch-ville hospital associations, and it is just not necessary to bring a child into that environment. Options, options, options.

Fourth and finally, they tell doctors to mind their own damn business. I cannot stand that the bond between a woman and the child she carries is not intimate anymore. As she gives birth, nurses can chart the pain she feels and rate it on a scale.

Everyone can hear the baby’s heartbeat and see it on a screen. The thing inside of her is not hers anymore. It belongs to an entire room that wants to lay claim to the creation she alone is bringing to term. The doctor guiding her through the most physically taxing experience she may ever have is statistically more likely to be a man. He will never know, however many births he attends, anything about what she feels. In fact, he may facilitate anesthesia so she won’t know what she feels either.

Women must have this moment. There is no other moment in life that will belong so truly to them. It cannot be taken away any longer.
I believe at this time I will adopt my children. But if I Jolie-Pitt it up and mix in some blonde hair and blue eyes, I know at least that my pregnancy will be mine. I will surround myself with women who KNOW, and I will bring someone new into the world that I understand better than anyone else.

And it will probably hurt.

A Special Parents’ Weekend Back Page by George Bridges (President)

Responding to ‘Grilling KC Masterpiece’: Damn, that sauce is good

I’ll be honest. I haven’t read every KC Masterpiece article, so I could have just missed the really bad ones. Forgive me if I continue, assuming I haven’t. McKay spends around a fifth of his article qualifying his argument with flowery compliments—most of this I will ignore. Instead, I will focus on his main assertions, tackled respective to their placement in his article:

(1) “‘KC Masterpiece’ is a deplorable exercise in narcissism.”

Ah, good ol’ ad hominem. Nowhere in the rest of the article is this point actually defended. It’s hinted at later on, but that’s about it. One could make the argument that the way Caitlin and Kaitlin go about writing their personal anecdotes is narcissistic, but the argument is very weak, and one could make the same argument for every single Opinion writer who uses personal anecdotes. Goodbye, Opinion section.

(2) “‘KC Masterpiece’ is lewd and unprofessional,” at least compared to The Economist and The Spokesman Review.

This is probably the most well-defended point McKay makes (the researched one, of course). KC Masterpiece is lewd and often unprofessional. I mean, look at all those bad words they use! And yet, every KC Masterpiece article I’ve read is no less professional than writing an article entirely focused on one’s disapproval of another writer’s weekly choice of content. In fact, it’s almost as unprofessional as publicly considering someone’s company to be “usually enjoyable,” or hastily writing an invective letter to the editor, but I digress.

There is a reason The Pioneer is not as family-friendly as The Economist, and it’s not just because The Economist doesn’t pay its writers in Monopoly money. College newspapers are supposed to have some light, lewd fun, so long as serious news still reigns. Of course, the Back Page is there for a reason, but humor spilling out into one little Opinion column won’t exactly destroy The Pioneer’s professionalism. Typos will do that.

(3) “The reason [McKay] doesn’t send copies of The Pioneer home to [his] parents so that they can read [him] in print is ‘KC Masterpiece.’”

Let’s talk about the Back Page again. I can’t speak for this week’s articles due to my lack of time travel capabilities, but last week, there was a pretty funny smallpox blanket joke. Am I to assume that Mr. and Mrs. McKay would be embarrassed by KC Masterpiece’s liberal use of the word ‘clitoris,’ but would give a hearty chuckle at the smallpox blankets joke? Or am I to assume that something magical happens when humor moves from Page 15 to Page 16? The only magical thing that happens from Page 15 to Page 16 is an increase in readership and an increase in angry responses if someone attacks an article in Page 16.

(4) “‘KC Masterpiece’ negatively impacts the overall effectiveness of The Pioneer.”

Apparently, if an article isn’t intellectually stimulating, its mere presence detracts from The Pioneer. Don’t mind me if I beat a dead horse using a blanket infected with smallpox when I say: But what about the Back Page? (Honestly, no offense is meant to Evan and Alex—a lot of good humor just doesn’t move the mind.) The obvious response to this is that we’re only talking about the rest of The Pioneer—that the Back Page is exempt from this rule. Why not exempt KC Masterpiece as well, then? Hell, I exempt a bunch of hilarious articles all over The Pioneer from having to be intellectually stimulating, and they’re not even trying to be funny.

(5) “Kaitlin and Caitlin also have the right (and [he] would assert the responsibility) to contribute to the integrity and impact of The Pioneer. They aren’t doing that.”

Kaitlin and Caitlin do not have any responsibility to conform to one reader’s standard of a good Opinion article, especially when it’s based on The Economist and The Spokesman Review. This is the exact sort of sentiment that spurred the complaints that pushed me away from writing my (much more lewd and unprofessional) column last semester. This sentiment qualifies itself beautifully (“Of course Kaitlin and Caitlin have the right to write their column”) while at the same time subtly attempting to eliminate what it doesn’t like to read.

(6) “Kaitlin and Caitlin don’t actually say anything. … [They should] get a point. … Make some real observations.”

McKay goes on to list examples of ‘real observations’ which are mainly covered by the posters found in first year dorms. Articles that aren’t composed entirely of assertions can be quite enjoyable. Sure, if Kaitlin and Caitlin write about their road trip with truckers and rest-stop bathroom jokes, they will have missed out on the opportunity to muse on the plight of the trucker in a way that could move us all. Instead, they stayed in their element and saved their intellectually-moving theses for much better venues than a weekly college newspaper column.

(7) “‘KC Masterpiece’ has the potential to reach an audience that the rest of The Pioneer ignores … [and they] have been squandering that opportunity.”

What McKay calls their lewd, unprofessional, pointless, narcissistic ways are the very reasons KC Masterpiece has that potential. They have squandered nothing. I mean, really. It’s some random Opinion article in a college newspaper. Who would waste their time bashing that?

-Alex Henke
Whitman ‘09

The implications of a swooning dollar

Over the past several years a tremendous amount of destruction has been wrought to the U.S. dollar. Since its peak in 2002, the dollar has lost more than one-third of its value. What’s more is that this decrease took place right under the noses of Americans with hardly more than a flinch from some ex-pats in Europe who have been especially hurt by the dollar’s weakness.

Having given up the goal of a balanced budget, every dollar the U.S. spends sends the country deeper into debt. The U.S. is perilously approaching the tipping point where its debt will be greater than its entire GDP. For those keeping track, the U.S. debt just surpassed $9 trillion, while last year’s GDP was $13.1 trillion. After this point is reached, there is a real danger of a loss of faith in the U.S. dollar. Since faith and faith alone is what supports the dollar, this poses a real problem.

We can already see the subtle undercurrents signaling that the U.S. dollar is losing its place as the world’s reserve currency. Chinese officials have expressed desires to cut their U.S. debt holdings and Iran has slowly boosted the percentage of non-U.S. currency it accepts for oil sales. While there are obviously political messages wrapped up in these moves, the basis of action when it comes to money is ultimately greed. It is this greed that reveals the developing unrest with the U.S. dollar.

Ironically, greed is currently keeping countries like China in check by preventing them from dumping their dollar denominated debt on the market. Chinese officials know just as well as everyone else that a collapse in the dollar would spell destruction for not just the U.S. economy but also that of the world.

The Federal Reserve is in a difficult position with the recent collapse of the subprime market and subsequent freezing of debt markets across all tranches of credit risk. Whereas the old refrain for the past four years while the Fed eased rates up to their pre-September cut level of 5.25 percent was “concern over inflation,” now the Fed has to realistically worry about a recession. Unfortunately, inflationary fears are not disappearing with the possibility of recession.

The current situation is eerily reminiscent of the course of events that led to the “stagflation” of the 1970s. The parallels are uncanny—recent end of a war (hopefully), price of oil skyrocketing (albeit for different reasons), soaring gold prices and the Fed trying to inflate away a recession.

Should these similarities worry us? Possibly, but I am not losing any sleep because of one simple difference. Everyone is talking about these parallels today. This means that the Fed and money managers are well aware of dangers and have positioned themselves accordingly. When everyone is ready for some impending doom, it usually does not materialize.

It’s much more likely that we will see a wave of inflation sweep the country in the next two or three years, while the credit markets work off the current conflagration with a healthy dose of cash from “Helicopter Ben.”

But inflating our way out of the subprime mess brings us back to the original problem of the weak dollar. The more we inflate, the weaker the dollar becomes and the more nervous foreigners become about holding debt.

What’s the solution, if there even is one? Without keeping the money spigots open, the world could easily suffer a liquidity crunch. Thus, as unfortunate as it seems, inflation is a necessary evil.

The U.S. must become fiscally responsible. We need to trim our expenses and restructure taxes to balance the budget.

Bush has added $5.7 trillion to the national debt since he took office. It’s time to stop spending like it has no consequence. It’s time to balance the budget. It’s time to show fiscal restraint today for the sake of tomorrow.

Animal rights statement evokes Jena 6 for some

“If I had to assign reason to this act, I would contend that it was a jarring provision to stop brains in their monotonous tracks—to shake the clean slate of the Whitman campus up a bit,” wrote alumna Merilee Nyland in an e-mail.

Nyland was commenting on a recent display next to Memorial Hall in which three stuffed animals with symbols ascribed to them had been hung from a tree.

Nyland felt that the installation opened student discussion on the issue of animal torture. “[T]he eyes and mind are free to explore means of animal torture that exist behind closed doors to sustain our lives of luxury every day. From what I could tell, these were not new ways of torture: filling bunny eyes with chemicals, wiring cat brains, caging monkeys, slitting throats, [or] abusing puppies. All for style, taste, entertainment, commodified beauty and more medicines prescribed by pharmaceutical companies that are only ‘necessary’ because corporations profit on selling us a slow demise. . . .”

Yet Nyland also felt that restricting the display to a “strict animal rights meaning” would compromise a deeper message. “After all, isn’t all of this industrialized pain and suffering the symptom of something greater? The symptom of a society that is run by profiteers? The profiteers that capitalize on the pain and suffering of both human and non-human animals?”

Dean of Students Chuck Cleveland felt that the display lacked a clear message. “It would’ve been nice to have a label for context.” For Cleveland, no clearly-identified message meant that the meaning and cause of the display was lost.

Although Cleveland had no problem with the content of the display, he did note that the nooses that the animals were being hung from could have been perceived differently from students and faculty members.

“I saw it as a commentary on Michael Vick [quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons who had been charged over the summer of 2007 for financing and participating in dog fights and executions] and the hanging of his three pit bulls, but the people that I had talked to had interpreted it as a racial epithet. In this case, it took on a different meaning than expected,” Cleveland said.

Cleveland also cautioned students who want to do such displays in the future to identify themselves and have a statement of cause. “People who are really involved with a cause can often be insensitive to other people’s thoughts and feelings because of their cause. . . . It reflects on the people who displayed it, and it reflects on the campus as a whole.”

Nyland thought that while the display used nooses to get its message across, it was not the intention of it to show a threat of lynching in relation to the current events in Jena, La.

“For some people . . . the presence of nooses may have reminded them of current events in Jena. . . . Are nooses not also a suicidal device? Were they not used to hang powerful women that society targeted as witches? I believe that there are a variety of ways to interpret a noose,” Nyland said.
No responsibility has been claimed for the display.

The display was also not affiliated with Action for Animals, a student-run organization on campus funded by ASWC.

Broders lecture on broad psychological impact of war

On Monday, Oct. 1, psychiatrists Judith and Donald Broder came to Olin Hall and spoke on the devastating, often unthought-of psychological impacts of war. Working out of L.A., the doctors have dealt firsthand with returning soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan and have spent the last several years documenting cases and symptoms in hopes of determining the best therapy regimens for veterans of modern war. Dr. Judith Broder has developed The Soldier’s Project, through which she and her colleagues can use what she and her husband have learned to provide free psychiatric treatment for soldiers and their families.

Beginning the presentation, Dr. Donald Broder spoke specifically of the poorly understood efforts of war on private Iraqi citizens. Determining an actual body count is difficult, but Broder cited the British Medical Journal’s Lancet report that provides a crude mortality rate of 655,000 excess deaths since the start of the invasion in 2001. Broder also noted a less rigorous study performed by the Opinion Research Business that places that number at 1.4 million and injured as somewhere near three times that number. With such shocking estimates, the psychiatrist pointed to the countless number of lives touched by each loss and expressed his concern of a lack of sensitivity for those left behind.

Forced to speculate on the incidence of psychiatric injury like post-traumatic stress disorder, Broder believes a life led under the constant threat of loss, in the midst of cholera epidemics and artillery fire, is precisely the high-anxiety existence to make PTSD nearly unavoidable.

Sharing these unstable environs, U.S. squadrons also operate under constantly heightened stress. Worries of personal injury, the loss of fellow squad members, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes and increasing threats of civil war put soldiers into an unsustainable state of hyperawareness. The very nature of this war, with unclear victories and largely unidentifiable enemies, Broder said, is psychologically exhausting. With some soldiers on their fifth or sixth deployments, coming home is no longer a sufficient reprieve to service men and women who now expect to be called at a moment’s notice to return to this high-stress atmosphere.

Dr. Judith Broder spoke specifically of these returning soldiers and their struggle to reintroduce themselves into families and workplaces, where standards of culture and conduct seem irreconcilable with those of war. In one disturbing anecdote, a returning soldier could not attend family barbecues because of strong associations with the smell of burning flesh. Others suffer unknowingly from traumatic brain injuries affecting the mind’s ability to learn new things and commit them to memory. Veterans often can’t understand their inability to advance in their former careers or readapt into former lives, and because symptoms are relatively subtle and sometimes shameful, many cases go undiagnosed and untreated.

Broder explained that the military psychology of proud self-sufficiency is in many ways antithetical to asking for help and that the high 35 percent of active duty soldiers accessing help is a testament to the considerable psychological damage of our military personnel deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. She shared one particular letter from a high-ranking officer begging the psychiatrists at The Soldier’s Project to help him overcome the numbness he feels towards his family upon his returns home. Ashamed, he wrote that as a military superior he shouldn’t be feeling this way anymore, but that he could not help but withdraw from his family.

Broder revealed this as a common problem for veterans reassuming roles of parents and spouses and cited the deep complexes of guilt and shame for what they’ve seen or done and the difficulty of regaining closeness with loved ones who can never understand the images and violence that haunt them.

Struggling to attract and maintain the 1,830 psychiatrists that must serve the psychological needs of some 23 million former and current military personnel and their families, the VA fears escalating suicides and undiagnosed depression. Hoping that recently expanded VA budgets coupled with efforts of outreach will alleviate this suffering, the Broders encouraged those attending their talk to spread awareness of and display sensitivity towards the difficulties that will continue to plague soldiers and their families long after the U.S. military pulls out of Iraq.

Students were deeply affected by the presentation. Senior Rachel Stein, moderator of the event, said she appreciated learning “the human side of the war, the part that is most important.”
Others were enraged at the increased death and psychological disruption of both U.S. troops and Iraqis. Introduced to more of this “dreadful reality,” senior James Most was left incredulous as to how “anyone could believe that the occupation is beneficial.”

Either way, the Broders’ message was clear: Veterans must be provided affordable, if not free, psychiatric care that is lifelong.

Burma reactions, dialogues continue at Whitman

Fear and heavy-handed military force has restored order to the streets of Rangoon, Myanmar, the country previously known as Burma. Just weeks after pro-democracy activists and thousands of local monks filled the streets of the city in protest, efforts to overthrow the oppressive military junta have, for now, been quelled. However, dialogue continues.

On Monday, Oct. 1, Whitman College’s Global Awareness House did something that most Burmese don’t have the luxury to do—they talked politics.

“The way of life in Burma is very different from here. Politics is just not something you talk about anywhere. This has been the same situation for a long time, the fear of a lot of the people,” said Burmese student Phyo Wai Aung, whose name has been changed to protect his identity.

The Global Awareness House held a special event entitled Eye on Burma as part of their regular News and Tea Monday night programming. Students from across campus read a set of articles compiled from The Economist, The New York Times, the BBC and The Washington Post before
commencing their discussion.

Global Awareness House Resident Assistance Leor Maizel, who helped to coordinate the event, said, “In terms of the News and Tea event itself I thought it was really successful, I was really happy with the discussions that went on during News and Tea because I thought a lot of people got a chance to discuss an issue that perhaps they didn’t know a lot about … it was a chance to be educated by people that know more about it.”

Sophomore Ian Jagel, who attended Eye on Burma, said, “It was my first News and Tea that I have been to. It was a good environment to talk openly and respectfully. There were multiple viewpoints.… The conversation focused mainly on how China is in the biggest position to do something about the military junta in Burma.”

When asked whether he thought Whitman had been made aware of what was happening in Burma, Maizel said, “The events in Burma seem to have touched a chord with the student body if you ask me.… It actually kind of made me proud of the student body in a way. I guess whether or not this leads to student action is questionable, but it is also questionable what action is possible.”

Jagel said, “I think it is kind of sad that there is one week of passionate interest in a topic and then the next week it is as if it didn’t happen. There was such good momentum going into the end of last week with the Red Shirt Campaign, and then the next week there was no follow-up. I was kind of disappointed.”

Aung has felt the support of Whitman students and faculty. So far, he has received about 20 donations from students, professors and other faculty members, totaling over $600. “There has been follow up from students and friends of mine,” said Aung.

Speaking to the conditions in Myanmar now, Aung said, “I get the feeling things are still kind of tense. It has kind of gone back to what it was before, people are afraid.”

Aung is happy that Internet connection is working again. He was able to communicate via e-mail with his parents, as well as a student he taught while he was living there. “I get the feeling things are still kind of tense.”

When asked how the events of the past several weeks have affected him, Aung said, “When the protests were there I felt frustrated. A lot of people back home were dying and facing hardships much worse than mine. I was able to get a much better education than these people.”

“For a while growing up there I lost faith in my people. ‘Why are they so hard?’ [I asked], ‘Why aren’t they taking action?’” Aung said. “I found that hard to understand. It was hard for me to grasp the concept of them fully, I really respected [the protests]. That people were willing to change and willing to stand up for [his or her] own right, it was something that restored my faith in my own country.”

Aung advised that students might learn more about the conflict and Burma’s history by reading “The River of Lost Footsteps” by Thant Myint-U or “Freedom from Fear” by Aung San Suu Ski, who was elected prime minister, representing the National League of Democracy in Burma in 1990. She was placed under house arrest by the military junta in power for 12 of the past 18 years, and prevented from ever successfully leading.

Aung is still accepting donations. He anticipates that he will do more to bring awareness to campus. “I would like to get DVDs on Burma for a public showing.”

“I feel like what has changed,” said Aung, “is a refreshing of memory that the government is quite brutal.”

Student brings 5 international films on democracy to campus

Our country is currently fighting a war in the name of democracy, spending money and losing lives. It seems like an especially appropriate time to ask: What is democracy? Why democracy? These are the questions the past week’s democracy film series aimed to inspire.

Over the span of four days beginning on Oct. 1, five films that explored the topic of democracy were shown in Olin.

Senior politics major Yukta Kumar spearheaded bringing the films to campus. Over the summer, she interned for Steps International, which commissioned the films in order to ignite a global conversation about democracy.

“Basically, the internship was building the global online space for the discussion to happen. They had the movies, they had everything, but there was no online space. They had a Web site but not an interactive one,” said Kumar.

A group of international students traveled to Africa to work on creating a forum for the project.
“So they had six interns come in from across the world—a girl from Denmark, a guy from Denmark, a guy from India, me, a girl from Sweden who was Greek and a girl from Nigeria that was also British. We all went down to South Africa, Cape Town, and basically lived and worked together in one house. We had nothing; we had a blank slate,” said Kumar.

Steps International partnered with broadcasters across the globe and coordinated worldwide screenings of 10 documentary films.

“Considering that we all were university students, we really wanted to get it out to our universities, and also to universities globally. So that’s how we organized this university screening before the global broadcast,” said Kumar.

The experience forced the interns to explore their conceptions of democracy, just as the films hoped to do for a global audience.

“Part of it was also coming to terms with democracy ourselves. We couldn’t really define democracy and started off trying to decide what we wanted from this. Do we just want to be able to define democracy, do we just want to get people talking about it? What is the end or what is the path that we envisioned? At the end of it we had so many debates and so many contradictions because we just had too many diverse views in one room,” said Kumar.

Whitman received five of the films for free, and Kumar approached ASWC Films Chair Teal Greyhavens about coordinating the screenings. With the help of ASWC and friends, Kumar was able to launch the screenings successfully.

“I feel like a lot of people take democracy for granted, and they don’t question beyond that. What does it take for democracy to be a success? Everyone talks about the Western paradigm of democracy and how it shouldn’t be imposed—and it shouldn’t, but I feel as though there’s still a distinction between what the crux of democracy is and why that is important, versus the additional complexities of it that become its own for a particular country or a particular type of people,” said sophomore Ashma Basnyat, who helped Kumar coordinate the screenings.

“I really just wanted people to start talking about democracy and politics, their notions and conceptions. Democracy is such an overused term that it kind of just washes over us. I don’t think we stop, think about it and question it,” said Kumar.

The first film was a Chinese documentary called “Please Vote For Me,” which follows a classroom of children who undertake their first election for class monitor. This is the children’s first hands-on experience with democracy and is a funny and poignant microcosm of the electoral process.
The second film, “Taxi to the Dark Side,” explores U.S. torture and abuse in the war on terror. It explores the case of an Afghani taxi driver who is taken prisoner and tortured to death by the U.S. military.

“Looking for the Revolution,” the third film, takes a closer look at the Bolivian revolution, and concludes that the system is as corrupt as ever, despite rhetoric to the contrary.

Then followed “Dinner with the President,” a look at the president of Pakistan, an ally of the U.S. The filmmaker sits down to dinner with President Parvez Musharraf and his mother. She then talks to a diverse sample of Pakistani citizens about democracy. The underlying question posed is what role a military dictatorship can have in fostering democracy.

The series ends on an inspiring note with “Iron Ladies of Liberia.” The film follows Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first female head of state in Africa, through her first year in office as she struggles to rebuild war-torn Liberia.

The event, however, is supposed to continue long after the movies are over.
“People need to go online and join the global debate, and that’s www.whydemocracy.net. And I think that’s really important. There’s so much going on in this world. We use this term discourse so much at Whitman, and it’s really about practicing it, too, and really getting into discussions and debates,” said Kumar.

Sweet Onion Film Festival to premiere in October

The first annual International Sweet Onion Film Festival will kick off in about two weeks, on Friday, Oct. 26, and run through the weekend. The event will bring the works of independent filmmakers from around the globe to Walla Walla. The films will be shown in venues all over town, including Seven Hills Winery, the Marcus Whitman Hotel and Walla Walla University.

According to Festival Director Francesca Bush, the festival’s goal is to “introduce independent films to the community of Walla Walla…and enlighten people to an alternative form of entertainment.”

But the festival won’t market itself exclusively to the community. Bush hopes that the wineries and quaint downtown area will assist in attracting an audience form outside the community.

“Walla Walla’s really become a destination,” she said.

The festival will also rely heavily on Walla Walla’s college students.

“We hope the community will come in force, but we anticipate more students, especially at Walla Walla University,” said Bush. Her hopes are especially high for Walla Walla University because two of the festival’s venues are there. “We wanted to have it at Whitman…but it didn’t work out,” said Bush.

Bush is confident the festival will succeed. “We’re expecting 40-50 percent of the filmmakers that were officially selected to show up…the independent film community has really embraced this film festival,” she said.

There have been 178 submissions so far this year—“Not bad for our first year,” said Bush. Although the festival is no longer accepting submissions from outside the Walla Walla community, they have left the door open to local filmmakers until Oct. 15 in hopes that student filmmakers returning to school will submit.

The festival will have five categories: narrative feature, narrative shorts, documentaries, animations and music videos. For each category there will be three prizes. Two are for best director and best of category.

For the third award, audiences will participate, voting after each screening on a five-point scale. They collectively will choose the winner of the Audience Choice Award.

On Saturday, Oct. 27, there will be a panel discussion at the Marcus Whitman Hotel featuring Jeffery Townsend, filmmaker, designer and image consultant, as well as Steve Allen, a cast member in the movie “Double Trouble.” They will speak about their experiences in filmmaking and take questions.

The awards ceremony will also be free. Bush is trying to get the improv comedy troops from both Whitman and Walla Walla University to perform at the ceremony, so it promises to be an entertaining event.

Most distributes re-worked bicycles to students, decreases carbon emissions

Last week senior James Most began giving away refurbished bicycles to fellow students. Most received the bikes from the Walla Walla Community Center for Youth. Previously, the Center had a program called the Bikery in which they taught youth how to fix up old, donated bikes. They then sold the bikes and used the profits to benefit the center.

Now that the center is moving, they no longer have space for all of their bikes. They had planned to simply send all 50 bikes to a landfill and they would have, until Most stepped in.

Most decided to give away the bikes on one condition: Students had to promise that the bike would remain a free bike in Walla Walla even after they graduated from Whitman.

“I think it’s great that he was able to save these bikes from destruction and recycle them in a way that is and will continue to benefit students,” said sophomore and bike recipient Alex Kerr.

As of last Tuesday, over 20 students had received free bikes. Most hopes that in giving out bikes, he will encourage students to decrease their reliance on cars.

“I like bikes because they are not an internal combustion based mode of transportation. Internal combustion engines are ultimately leading to the destruction of humanity as we know it,” said Most. “By giving away these bicycles I’m hoping to fight inCARceration.”

As a protest against what he refers to as “the age of automobile tyranny,” Most participates in Critical Mass. Critical Mass is a pro-cycling event that occurs the last Friday of every month. They meet downtown at 4 p.m. between First and Main Street.

The first Critical Mass was held in San Francisco in 1992 and was made up of a mere dozen cyclists. Now Critical Mass is held throughout the world and numbers of participates range in the thousands. For some, Critical Mass is a form of peaceful protest against cars, for others, it’s merely a celebration of bicycles.

Most describes Critical Mass as an “empowerment activity” where scores of cyclists “take back the streets of Walla Walla.” Cyclists wear the most colorful clothing possible and chant things such as “keep the fun between your legs” or “cars cause cancer.”

Most is one of the founding members of the Walla Walla Cetacean Society. Cetacean comes from the word cetus, which means whale in Latin. However, this society has nothing to do with whales.

“Free fun for all” is the mission of the Walla Walla Cetacean Society. Most said they are “hell-bent on liberating creativity from the evil clutches from normalcy.” They are a secret society but are not exclusive. Those wishing to join should prove that they are dedicated to fighting normalcy.

“The Walla Walla Cetacean Society is all about free fun and so are these bikes,” said Most.

Humanai Interna: Issue 5

Budget cuts, workforce decline forces Umatilla National Park to increase campsite, cabin rental fees

Over the past 10-15 years, the budget for Umatilla National Forest Management has been declining and the workforce is shrinking. Facilities such as toilets, picnic tables and cabins are aging, maintenance needs are growing, and Recreation Program Manager Larry Randall predicts “around two million dollars worth of backlog repairs that need to get taken care of.”Aiming to reverse these trends, Umatilla is considering a Five-year Proposed Program of Work, outlining the proposed management of 116 developed recreation sites, including campgrounds, trailheads and cabin rentals. This proposal could reduce annual operation costs on the forest 25-42 percent by implementing options such as adjusting campground operating seasons, repairing some facilities scheduled for replacement and changing the size of some campgrounds.A key component to meeting these objectives is an increase in fees at the 25 campgrounds and recreational cabin rentals where fees are currently charged. The forest is also considering phasing an additional 19 campgrounds, 13 trailheads and 2 cabins into the fee program over the next several years in order to help cover the costs of operations and maintenance.

“Because we currently have a program where use is going up and resources are going down, it’s time to focus our assets and resources to those sites that are most important,” Randall said.

Umatilla started looking at its data last winter and “it helped paint a picture of where we are and where we need to be,” Randall said.

Management staff came up with what’s called a “forest niche,” the setting the forest provides that makes it unique. Umatilla’s niche is kind of a rustic, self-reliant campground. “These spots which may seem plain to one person could be spots where families have been coming for years,” Randall said.

The proposed plan was based off of a ranking system which ranks each site on niche conformance, financial sustainability, environmental sustainability and community sustainability. “If this goes according to plan, sites will be maintained up to standard, and we will be able to take care of that backlog,” Randall said.

Umatilla hasn’t been receiving much feedback from the public. “I think it’s because people are getting used to paying fees. And the comments we have been getting have been understanding because the people who enjoy those campsites will hopefully see some tangible benefits,” Randall said.

Although this plan could affect frequent visitors to the modified campsites, this is a gradual process and a fairly modest change over the next few years.

Westmain Stage opens doors to Walla Walla public

This story begins with a brothel. The year was 1935 and men would come to the building late at night to court girls in seductive outfits and painted faces, slipping in through one of the three front doors facing the street, each leading to a different promise of delight. As the decades passed, the brothel was remodeled into a hearing aid shop, which was eventually converted into a church. Today, it is Westmain Stage, the newest live theater in town and the culmination of the sweat and efforts of Gregg Gilmore, a Walla Walla native who returned to his home town after 20 years to realize his creative vision of owning and managing his own private theater.

Westmain is an inconspicuous gray building located at the corner of 11th Avenue and West Main Street. The interior is not particularly spacious and accommodates only a limited audience, but the small size of the theater lends it a quality of intimacy and warmth that can be felt as soon as one walks through the front doors. The felt-padded seats are widely spaced with ample legroom for the comfort of audience members and aligned in a classic L-shaped arrangement around the stage, which is elevated about eight inches above the floor. The sheet metal wall layered like a freeway guard rail opposite the doors invokes a sense of gritty urbanism that complements the cozy feel of the theater and harkens back to the glory days of roadhouse entertainment.

Westmain opened its doors to the public last Friday night with its first show, a one-act, two-person play called “’night, Mother,” written by Marsha Norman and winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play unveils the story of a conversation between a mother and a daughter as the daughter explains to her mother why she must commit suicide. The daughter, Jessie Cates, is played by Jennifer Elkington, and her mother, Thelma Cates, is played by Phyllis Bonds. According to Gilmore, Westmain’s opening weekend was a success, with Saturday’s performance being especially well-attended.

Gilmore was born in Walla Walla in 1965 and has been interested in performance since an early age. Whitman’s then head of the drama department Jack Freimann noticed Gilmore during a production at the local community college and advised him to travel to New York City to study drama professionally. For the next seven years, Gilmore learned the intricacies of the art at a school of theater in Manhattan called the Neighborhood Playhouse, ran by the renowned acting master Sanford Meisner and the alma mater of such celebrities as Gregory Peck, Steve McQueen and Sandra Bullock.

“It opened my eyes to the world,” said Gilmore. “I’ve never really been out of Walla Walla … I was a little country kid.”

Eventually, Gilmore moved to Los Angeles to work behind the scenes producing music videos, DVDs and press kits for big-name artists like Madonna and Fleetwood Mac. During his stint at Hollywood, Gilmore also spent some time playing roles in popular television series such as “NYPD Blue” and “The Fugitive.”

“It all culminated in an experience that really touched me when I went to Jerusalem in 2006 and produced a DVD for Matisyahu,” said Gilmore, referring to the American Jewish reggae artist. “He’s amazing. To see a guy do something from his heart so much … I was moved.”

Gilmore returned to find Hollywood an empty, meaningless landscape compared to his powerful, inspirational experience in Israel. That’s when he decided to return to Walla Walla to buy a building and convert it into a live theater. He purchased 901 West Main Street, which was then still a church, and stripped it down to its concrete base to begin working anew, building his dream theater from the ground up. Donations came flooding in as the community lent its support to the project, sending in such things as unused seats which Gilmore installed as seating for the audience and blocks of glass which he made into windows.

“Emerson talked about how when you truly commit to something, opportunities come to you,” said Gilmore. “That’s what happened.”

The next step was to recruit actresses for the theater’s first play. Gilmore uses an unconventional method to scout out and hire talent, forgoing the traditional audition process altogether. Instead, he prefers to simply meet and talk to people, trying to get a sense of who they are as individuals and going with his instincts.

“If I feel that they’re right for it, then I trust that they’ll be right for it,” Gilmore said. “As an actor myself, I never enjoyed the audition process. It seems so unnatural. You come in, you do a monologue or something and people don’t really get to know who you are. If you trust your instincts and go with it, it’ll more than likely work. This cast is just that … they’re perfect.”

Gilmore’s vision for Westmain is for it to become a theater that communicates on the universally human level, where people who wouldn’t normally attend theater would want to go to, where “the President of Whitman would be sitting next to a construction worker.” He cited his greatest influence as Meisner, who he described as a “monolithic presence.” He looks forward to eventually teaching the Meisner technique at Westmain over the summer.

Westmain will continue to show “’night Mother” on Friday and Saturday nights throughout the month of October. Tickets cost $12 and can be purchased at local outlets like Hot Poop, Book & Game Company and Studio Opal. Next on the theater’s schedule is Sam Shepard’s “True West,” slated for January of 2008, a dark comedy about the relationship between two brothers, one a successful Hollywood screenwriter and the other a hobo thief.

Backpage Facebook stalks Columbus

So Monday was Columbus Day. What do you know about Christopher Columbus? Yeah, we don’t know much either. So what’s the best way to learn about someone, sometimes without their knowledge?

Whittie of the Week: Jeff Wilson

1. Full name?
Jeffrey Doerann “Q” Wilson

2. Age?
24

3. Best-known for?
T-sports, T-tones, Band Before time, student body president and for Jewett Room 330. The sickest freshman parties of all time were thrown there, and every class since then has gotten progressively worse at it. Take a look at the security report that just came out, then find 2004. It’s science.

4.What was the last dream you had?
ASWC paid Jenna Jameson to come speak on campus. That’s all I remember.

5. Have you ever broken the law? If not, what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done/prank you’ve ever pulled?
No. Though my senior “party” back in Montana did result in 45 MIPs. I went but didn’t get one. Somethin’ about my pertey mouth.
Also, there was that time that we set hobo spiders loose in Prentiss.

6. What word makes you cringe when you hear it?
Too, at the end of a sentence. e.g. “I want to go to the Beta House, TOO.” It sounds like you’re ending your sentence with a preposition. Apparently that’s allowed in the “vernacular” now, but I still don’t like it. I use “also” instead; you should use also, also.

7. Ninjas or pirates?
Pirates. Actually, a dream of mine was always to be a renegade pirate wizard (think Johnny Depp+Harry Potter) sailing the high seas in pursuit of plunderous booty.

8. What’s your spirit animal?
River otter.

9. If you could be any celebrity woman who would you be and why?
Jennifer Anniston –> duh! the hair!

10. What is the meaning of life?
Figuring out what you think is funny. And actively participating in a particular view of how the world works. Actually, never mind. It’s definitely prolonging life through science for absolutely as long as possible. Quantity over quality, as good ole Abe Lincoln used to say.

KC Masterpiece: Road Trippin’

With nothing terribly exciting to do over Four Day, no mounds of homework, no sexy parties beckoning, we took up a male friend’s offer to drive him to Seattle for a couple of days. This, we thought, could be no worse than sitting at home—might even be relaxing. Why not? At least we might see ponies on the drive out.

So we packed into Caitlin’s car, now almost glass free after a lump of concrete was hurled into it the previous weekend. We had our friend’s iPod full of musical theater, and we were ready to go.
Truck Stop #1: We ran into some fellow Whitties perusing the snack aisle. We chatted awkwardly while our semi-hungover male companion used the facilities. After getting some water and cough drops, we hit the road again.

Truck Stop #2: Caitlin declared she was about to burst, so we pulled into a gas station/Subway, where our male companion wolfed down a sandwich in under three minutes. We were suitably impressed, and drove off singing that one song from “Free Willy.”

Truck Stop #3: Keep in mind that this is only around a four hour trip, but once again Caitlin desperately turned into a gas station and ran for the restrooms. Kaitlin followed at a more sedate pace, mindful of the fact that if you turned down the chance to use a bathroom on a road trip, you would never be allowed to use one ever again in your entire life. She eventually came to a narrow hallway with two single restrooms, one male, one female. The hallway was occupied with three large, disgruntled truckers. Both rooms were in occupato, so she waited awkwardly with the truckers, not making eye contact. One of the larger ones mumbled something incoherently and tried to jiggle a door handle. Suddenly, the door to the male restroom burst open. From it emerged Caitlin. The truckers stared at her, but she merely shrugged and said in a petulant tone, “Sorry I’m not a man.”

This was unspeakably hilarious to Kaitlin, whose unbridled amusement was soon quashed as both a man and a woman came out of the female restroom, grinning. Cursing what was undoubtedly the result of road-head, Kaitlin tried not to touch anything.

Back in the car, we made our male companion fill the gas while we mused on his increasingly muscular physique and the possibilities of sushi in the future. Caitlin’s tongue had now turned yellow from cough drops.

Seattle—We ravenously devoured Indian food, the likes of which cannot be found in the remote town of Walla Walla. This pleased us.

Of that night, we cannot say much, except this: Caitlin narrowly avoided being eviscerated, and Kaitlin fucking deserves a pony. Also, Planet Earth is quite probably the most amazing thing known to man, though it can be dangerous.

Saturday, we ate some terrible pasta, slept, abandoned Caitlin to more sleep while Kaitlin and the male companion (black) were treated to some expensive and delicious steaks. Many pumpkins were then stolen.

Sunday, we began the trip back, the male companion driving this time. Persuaded by our hunger, we made the horrific mistake of eating at Burger King, to Caitlin’s disgust and shame.

Eventually, we arrived back in Walla Walla to find our houses empty and Caitlin’s cell phone broken. Also, along the way someone stole $10 from Kaitlin’s purse, which irked her to no small end.

Attempting to sum up our experiences this Four Day and Four Days Past (for this was Kaitlin’s last such break), we encountered many difficult questions. What is Four Day? Can it ever be truly all you wished it to be? Are you pregnant? Can something horrible ever be forgiven? How many pumpkins constitute petty theft? Will we ever be able to survive without Indian food? Is Seattle all it’s cracked up to be? How can you possibly screw up pasta?

We hope that in your travel—or, if you remained on campus, your obscene amounts of sleep and loneliness—you found some of these answers. We certainly have not.

Crytser’s Corner: When words become wise

We are worse than we know. Though our experiences strain our flesh and leave our minds shot through with fear and loathing, at least these corruptions are immediately obvious. Glance at the mildest group of sophomores, and already the angry mark of ruin is upon them. A brief conversation with the most chaste and reverent freshman reeks audibly of vice and undirected, mindless rage. These flaws are terrible, yes, but at least they are easily detected. Not all of our shortcomings are so casually spotted.

This God-forsaken country and this blasted plain oppress us with their rude, untaught idiocy. When we were young, in Spokane, our days were better spent. Even now, through the alcoholic haze, the memories come bounding to me like newborn fawns. When one of our classmates was hit accidentally by a sprinkler’s spray, they had been “zapped,” and no one was allowed to speak to them about anything besides their shameful wetness. In the spring, we shaved our heads and eagerly awaited the news of the almond crop, which would determine how many of our number would survive to the next semester. And, if it was a good year, that summer we would eat pickled almonds while planning a successful campaign for junior postmaster.

How glad were our hearts then! When the nitric fumes that we mistook for the musk of romance hung heavy in the air, we pawed at one another, even if it were a weekday and we were in Rifle Camp. Not even the baleful glares and gleaming aluminum switches of the headmaster could arrest our enthusiastic groping.

Compare this ardor with the average student on campus: instead of eagerly chasing a wild turkey for miles in order to provide their beloved with an honorable Flag Day corsage, many of us cannot even be troubled to redirect our vomit away from their physical person.

Passion, not intellect, is the true student and school of experience. What logic can verify today it can verify a thousand years from now, when all our bones will be sheltered in a million pathetic museums and, hopefully, reliquaries. The heat of our blood alone can testify to the reality of today. If we lose it, then there is no reason to continue in this lunatic charade. Against this terrific destruction, I offer the following suggestions, capable of generating passion in the coldest of breasts.

Are you speaking to someone without actually listening to them? Ordinarily, the mind wanders to questions of buying cheap green tea and other illegal stimulants, but now may be the best time to slap them for no reason. Alternatively, try to embrace them, and when they reject you, sputter (in French) that you “thought that two hearts had finally learned to beat as one.”

Have you just finished writing a worthless analytic or research paper, in which you push around prescribed phrases like so many watermelon seeds on a plastic plate? Does the thought of putting pen to paper disgust you like nothing else? It may be best to put such feelings to use, and write a 10,000-line epic poem in which you attack our spiritually-bankrupt society (here “society” refers to thinly veiled caricatures of your more patient friends and professors). Words are the second-most difficult artistic medium to work with, after Venetian pipe cleaners, and so they will absorb all of your most superficial and trite emotions with ease.

We all sometimes look up at the night sky, awash in starlight, and know that this hand and this eye are insignificant on a cosmic scale. Instead of taking this as a sanction for listlessness and the study of molecular biology, try turning the infinitesimal trifle that is life into a flying scarlet rage. Instead of greeting classmates with a “sup” or a “how’s it going,” try to insult as much of their background as possible with three words. Your infernal vocabulary will surprise you with the depths of its resources. When assigned a set of problems, cover a sheaf of paper with expired brine and lotus petals, and throw it in your professor’s face. Try to fistfight any man or woman willing for the privilege of stealing President Bridges’ bike. Anything to make the blood flow.

Cross country maintains strong record

Michela Corcorran paces herself on a training run around campus. On Saturday, Oct. 6, Whitman Cross Country finished second overall at the Pacific Lutheran Invitational. The team claimed first on Sept. 22 at the Wes Cook Bear Fete Invitational, first on Sept. 8 at the Lewis & Clark Invitational and second on Sept. 1 at the Whitman Invitational.

McCune’s XC energy ‘contagious’

It’s right before a race. What is sophomore Sara McCune doing? First she listens to her special pre-race play list. Then she stretches and warms up with her team. Soon after that, she separates herself from the group and warms up alone. Finally, the last thing she does before each race is to write “recycle” on her leg.

McCune admits to being scared to take out the recycling at home. Once she is done taking it out to the curb, she always sprints back inside, feeling very happy to be out of danger. The word association then helps her shake out of soreness and get reenergized.

Perhaps her tactics are abnormal, but nobody can argue with her success. Last year, as an incoming first-year, she earned all-NWC honors as well as all-NCAA Division III West Regional honors.
Her coach, Malcolm Dunn, went as far as to call her “a cross country superstar” in an e-mail.
This year, McCune looks to grow off of that success. Individually, McCune wants to go to nationals, but she lists a team trip to nationals as her number one goal.

“That is definitely the thing that’s the pie in the sky,” said McCune.

Last year, the team finished sixth in the West Regionals. Currently, the team is ranked third in addition to being ranked 32nd nationally.

What’s been the difference?

“We’re all more in tune with one another,” said McCune.

“We have all become a lot closer and better of friends. We understand each other better,” said sophomore teammate Michela Corcorran.

During all of this growth, McCune has continued to impress her coach.

“Her enthusiasm and energy are phenomenally positive and extremely contagious. Whenever you meet Sara or talk to her, you end up feeling lighter and happier. She is extremely supportive and caring of her teammates,” said Dunn in an e-mail. “In my mind, she exemplifies the type of athletes with whom I want to work: an athlete that gives so much of herself, works hard to improve and truly desires to be the best possible athlete she can be.”

Her teammates are also appreciative of all she does for them.

“She’s very supportive and so enthusiastic! She has a great energy that’s contagious and she’s always very positive,” said Corcorran, again in an e-mail.

McCune has also benefited from training with fellow sophomores Corcorran and Yasmeen Colis who can challenge her in practice. In high school, McCune would often spend most practices alone, just behind the men’s team and just ahead of the women’s team. It is a great relief for her to have someone to push her.

“We have some amazing workouts that have been so much fun,” said McCune.

Another reason for change this year as opposed to last is a change in her summer workout routines. Instead of running 40-45 miles a week, McCune worked on a farm for 12 hours a day and only ran about 35 miles a week. The result of this was a better full body fitness that she hadn’t had before.

Outside of cross country, McCune is volunteering for the first time with the Storytime Project at Whitman as well as continuing to attend the Trees and Landscaping Committee meetings. Next year, she is looking to spend her spring semester abroad at Costa Rica, where she will work toward her environmental studies major.

Barton scores lowest for men’s golf: Despite admitted lack of practice, first-year places 6th in tournament

First-year Brian Barton admits that he does not practice as much as he should for the men’s golf team. But despite this alleged lack of practice, Barton played well for Whitman during a dual-match against Whitworth.

On Saturday, Sept. 15, Whitman lost to Whitworth 348-303. Barton led Whitman’s team with the lowest score.

The match did not begin well for Barton. “It was off to a rough start. I could tell that I hadn’t practiced enough,” said Barton. “At point I realized that I needed to focus, so I did. I put together a few good shots, and I was able to put up a good score for the team,” said Barton.

Last weekend Barton played well in the Northwest Conference Northern Colleges Fall Tournament. He placed sixth overall.

Barton attended Pasco High School in Pasco, Wash., where he played varsity golf for four years. During his junior and senior years he went to the state championships.

Barton chose to attend Whitman so that he could focus on academics while continuing to play golf. “Division I schools have golf teams that are a lot more demanding,” said Barton.

Barton is still adjusting to playing college golf, not because the game has changed but because he has less time to practice. “I haven’t practiced as much as I should because I have to study a lot,” said Barton.

This semester Barton is in French 105. “French is really fun. Hopefully I can study in Paris my junior year while continuing with music,” said Barton.

Besides studying and golf, Barton also has to practice for jazz band. Barton has played the alto saxophone for the last 10 years. “I spend a lot of time in the music practice rooms,” said Barton. Before games and while practicing golf, Barton likes to listen to jazz. He said that he likes all types of music and has no favorite musicians.

Barton thinks he may double-major in music and economics. “I want to pursue a music career either in performance or teaching,” said Barton.

“I really love golf,” said Barton. His favorite part of golf is the short game. “I really enjoy the short game because it allows you to be creative. There are many different types of shots you can hit around the green,” said Barton.

This week’s rundown

Pakistani military fights al-Qaeda
The Pakistani military bombed and raided towns in Northern Waziristan in an attempt to combat al-Qaeda and Taliban strongholds in the region. Growing pressure from the U.S. government to suppress these groups and attacks on Pakistani troops by extremists prompted the action. An estimated 250 people have died in the fighting, including civilians.

Republicans debate
Republican presidential candidates debated in Michigan, with Fred Thompson participating for the first time. The debate was dominated by Giuliani and Romney sparring over their records on taxes and the line-item veto. The question of war powers was also debated, with only Ron Paul taking the position that the president must have congressional approval before going to war. Look to next week’s Pioneer for in-depth coverage of the line-item veto and fair tax, both of which were discussed by Republican candidates.

Michigan primary fiasco
In a continuing debate over the primary system that favors Iowa and New Hampshire, five Democratic candidates for president have withdrawn from the Michigan primary. Michigan moved its primary to Jan. 15 in an attempt to gain importance in the nomination process in contradiction to the DNC’s established rules governing primaries. Notably, Hillary Clinton declined to withdraw from the primary, drawing criticism from the other candidates.

International Middle Eastern violence escalates
Israel’s strike against a military target inside Syria has been confirmed by both countries. Though the target is still unknown, it is speculated that it may be related to nuclear development or supplies going to Hezbollah. Turkey declared that it is planning a strike against Kurdish militants in Iraq in response to a recent attack upon Turkish troops. These events create a dangerous situation since the possibility of broader Middle Eastern conflict looms as cross-border attacks increase.

YouTube debates cannot break the political restraints of the 2008 democratic presidential candidates

The CNN-sponsored YouTube debate, Democrat edition, began with famed anchorman Anderson Cooper casually talking to the audience about the uniqueness of this debate. He called it “untried” and stressed that neither he nor the candidates were “exactly sure how it’s gonna work.” Big screens upstage sported variations on the themes of red, white and blue in strategically mismatched splotches, some tilted in mock-carelessness. If this debate was a hairstyle, it would be the long, tousled wave—hours of preparation in order to fake spontaneity and effortlessness.

YouTube itself has gone a long way in exposing the truly spontaneous moments of candidates. In August 2006 Republican Sen. George Allen of Virginia laughingly referred to an opponent’s volunteer as a “macaca,” which is used as a racial slur. The video of Sen. Allen’s comment made it onto YouTube and was viewed over 500,000 times. Sen. Allen lost his seat to Democrat Jim Webb in the following election.

Incidents like these, which in pre-YouTube days might have made it through a few news cycles before being bumped by the next political misstep, are now available whenever you are and spread to an entire new demographic. How many young Virginian voters would have seen Sen. Allen’s comments on the evening news? Certainly not as many as viewed the video, with an immediate repeat option, on YouTube.

But YouTube is just as capable of capitalizing on political successes, and campaigns are overeager to tap into the YouTube demographic. Hence, the new age flashing lights, bright colors and fashionable chaos of the Democratic debate. After Cooper finishes telling the audience just how casual the event will be and just how geared toward finally answering the public’s questions, the debate begins.

The questions taped and submitted by viewers were, indeed, more heartfelt and humanoid than questions posed by moderators in traditional debates, but the questions themselves were just as carefully chosen. Out of over 3,000 entries, only a handful of video-questions were shown, and the questions were the same ones that would have been asked in any other format. Social security, the Iraq War, health care, Hurricane Katrina—these are all issues on which each candidate has a stock answer. The very words used in these answers have doubtless been tested and approved by campaign strategists. No amount of feeling in the question itself is capable of prying a candidate from his or her measured answer.

Even the principle that guides the YouTube debate, the principle that connecting candidates with the electorate will foster better communication and understanding, seems a moot point. When a Southern Baptist minister’s broader question about using the Bible as a tool to justify political goals gets reduced to Sen. John Edwards’ views of gay marriage, Cooper chivalrously tries to re-ask the question but runs out of time. No communication there and nothing more illuminating than a one-line policy viewpoint that could have been read straight from Edwards’ Web site.

The most interesting parts of the YouTube debates arise not from its unique forum but from the candidates themselves. Only when Sen. Mike Gravel takes on Sen. Barack Obama about campaign finance does the entertainment factor begin to kick in. This is what the YouTube debates want, isn’t it? The exchanging of ideas in a setting to reach out to young voters, those not likely to watch Jim Lehrer moderate debates on PBS. As soon as its starts, Cooper cuts off the exchange and moves on.

But for a brief moment, we are reminded: These are human beings, and of course they want to put forth their ideas in the most eloquent and understandable manner possible. But they are also political animals, and by that nature are not scared of a nitty-gritty debate, one in which candidates are allowed to challenge each other as well as nod politely during another’s sound bite. If we need more interaction between candidates and voters, we also need it between the candidates themselves.

A new era for political support: Youth and Internet politics

The 2008 election, still more than a year away, has already become one of the most televised presidential campaigns. The main targets for this election have been Democratic hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. One of the ways in which this campaign has reached out to the people—especially people in their late teens and early 20s—is through the Internet.

This new wave of Internet support for political campaigns is fairly new. Howard Dean began the trend by raising $50 million for his presidential election campaign over the Internet in 2004. John Kerry also raised significant funds in his 2004 election campaign.

Until this election, though, the Internet has not been used to gather support and promote the campaign for political election reasons. The targets of these Internet campaigns are the younger generation—our generation—which has been historically very negligent about voting.

In the 2004 election the U.S. Census Bureau reported that only 47 percent of the population between the ages 18 and 24, who are registered to vote, voted. There is also a big difference in the number of registered voters. For citizens over 55 years old 79 percent were registered to vote in 2004. This is compared to only 58 percent of citizens in the ages 18-24.

For these reasons the candidates in the 2008 elections have decided to move to the Internet for their source to the younger generation. All of the major candidates have put their names out to Facebook, Myspace and Bebo.

These sites are the infamous domains of college students who wish to do anything from make new friends, to plan their next meeting time for an activity, or now to support their favorite candidate in the 2008 election. There has been a large amount of enthusiasm surrounding the political campaign through online methods in the younger generation in this election.

This universal medium of college-age students has created a method for the younger generation to show their support for certain candidates. The numbers are surprisingly different from the national polls.

On Facebook, there are 365,705 members of the “Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)” group, whereas there are only 6,691 members of the “Hillary Clinton for President—One Milli