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Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, 123/179 (2017) by Tiff Bushka [Brown/RISD]. Woven hand-dyed cotton and flocking.
A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY
07 DEC 2018 VOL 37 ISSUE 10
FROM THE EDITORS
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Cover Art Tiff Bushka
On Wednesday, Black students at Brown walked out of class, joined by allies in the
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community, to commemorate and reassert the relevance of the 1968 student walkout
Week in Compassionate Capitalism Ben Bienstock & Sarah Clapp, Caroline Ribet
organized by Brown and Pembroke students. This week, we commemorate 50 years of the
Fuck the Guns Leslie Benavides
In a 1968 letter from the Afro-American Society to Brown President Ray L. Heffner, student-
Turn Off Channel Zero Alina Kulman
activists wrote: "We cannot afford to be quiet any longer. Brown is a stifling, frustrating,
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No New Power Plant Jack Brook
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Cruising the Coast Lucas Smolcic Larson
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Anxious Days Ahead Miles Guggenheim
promise by the University to increase the number of Black students in the entering class to 11 percent (the percentage of Black population in the US at the time), as well other student demands, remain unfulfilled. We acknowledge the obstacles that Black students, students of color, low-income students, disabled students, first-generation students, and
FEATURES
At the Indy, we are reminded that we too need to do better and continue working through
On Getting it Up Jesse Barber
our own complicity as a publication funded by Brown. Fifty years later, we are reminded
Expensive Gamers Parisa Thepmankorn LITERARY
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which professes to be a bulwark of American liberalism.” We acknowledge that the '68
diminished their contributions and left them behind.
Lyon-I Wen Zhuang
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degrading place for black students. This situation is especially intolerable in a university
other historically marginalized groups have faced at Brown—the University has historically
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grappling with the oppressive history of Brown as an institution.
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labor done by Black students, and Black women in particular, in building inclusivity and
Two Poems Athena Zeros
of the necessity to uplift the voices of our historically underrepresented staff and, more importantly, to build a platform that is intentional in the content it produces and the political purpose that it serves within the Brown and Providence community. MISSION STATEMENT
- PPS
The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown and RISD. We are committed to publishing politically engaged and accessible work. While the Indy is financed by Brown University, we hold ourselves accountable to our readers across the Providence community. The Indy rejects content that explicitly or implicitly perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, ableism and/or classism.
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Gen Z-mas Tree The Indy Staff
Though this list is not exhaustive, the Indy strives to address these systems of oppression by centering the voices, opinions, and efforts of marginalized people in Providence and beyond.
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Mug Shots Maya Bjornson, Liby Hays, Will Weatherly
WEEK IN REVIEW Sara Van Horn NEWS Mara Dolan Lucas Smolcic Larson Paula Pacheco Soto METRO Jacob Alabab-Moser Harry August Ella Comberg
SCIENCE & TECH Mia Pattillo Julia Rock Eve Zelickson LITERARY Shuchi Agrawal Emma Kofman EPHEMERA Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer
FEATURES Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang
X Maya Bjornson Maria Gerdyman
BODY Pia Mileaf-Patel Cate Turner
LIST Alexis Gordon Signe Swanson Will Weatherly
ARTS Isabelle Rea Marianne Verrone 07 DEC 2018
VOL 37 ISSUE 10
The Indy is constantly evolving: we are always working to make our staff and content more inclusive. Though our editing process provides an internal structure for accountability, we always welcome letters to the editor.
WRITERS Jesse Barber Ben Bienstock Mica Chau Jessica Dai Miles Guggenheim Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Liby Hays Alina Kulman Jorge Palacios Giacomo Sartorelli Ivy Scott Marly Toledano Kayli Wren COPY EDITORS Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim
ILLUSTRATORS Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Julia Illana Jeff Katz Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt Miranda Villanueva Alex Westfall ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Alex Hanesworth Eve O'Shea
DESIGNERS Pablo Herraiz García de Guadiana Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Katherine Sang Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong DESIGN EDITOR Jack Halten Fahnestock BUSINESS Maria Gonzalez
SENIOR EDITORS Eliza Chen Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson Will Weatherly MANAGING EDITORS Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Erin West MVP Will Weatherly
WEB Ashley Kim
The College Hill Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.
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WEEK IN COMPASSIONATE CAPITALISM BY Ben Bienstock, Sarah Clapp, Caroline Ribet DESIGN Christie Zhong
STEM or: HOW GIRL SCOUTS LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB content warning: military violence At last month’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Girl Scouts trumpeted their STEM education initiatives on their “Build a Better World” float, which even for a Macy’s float, looked too much like a tank. Even if the comically large telescope protruding from the front wasn’t a gun turret, the Girl Scouts’ investment in science programming cannot be separated from their initiation into the military-industrial complex: In July, they announced their partnership with arms manufacturer Raytheon for their “Think Like a Programmer” curriculum. A video promoting the collaboration reveals little about how the program works beyond showing tween girls wearing VR headsets and using glue. Scouts loiter around a large screen and pass numbered placards to one another, pretending to STEM, as Raytheon President of Global Business Services Rebecca Rhoads makes clear the sponsorship’s service to her business: “It’s the way for us to strategically contribute not just to the community, but to the future talent of this country.” What Rhoads fails to say is that Raytheon has strategically contributed to global bloodshed through the production of missiles, precision weapons, and electronic warfare devices. The United States has used Raytheon products in every war since World War II. In 2003, a US-dropped Raytheon bomb strategically contributed to the deaths of 62 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad. On March 11, 2011, the US and the UK launched 124 Raytheon Tomahawk missiles in the military campaign that strategically contributed to the destabilization of Libya. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia and the US have caused widespread famine and a cholera epidemic in Yemen through the use of Raytheon bombs that have strategically contributed to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, disproportionately affecting millions of Yemeni women and children. This is the feminist #WomenInSTEM platform that Raytheon and the Girl Scouts are foisting upon innocent cookie peddlers. All for the sake of mining the “large, untapped resource of girls in America,” according to Girl Scouts CEO Sylvia Acevedo, as she imagines a future techscape where Girl Scout alums put their Detonation Patches to good use. Girl Scouts have garnered sponsorships from a dozen other science organizations that haven’t committed war crimes, and yet they’ve chosen the one that “embraces the cyber warfighter” to fund their computer science program. Generating enthusiasm for programming and empowering women in technology are worthy goals, but can’t Brownies learn to code without cyberwarfare spoiling the fun? The Independent is impressed (and a little mystified) by any 5-year-old Daisy with a “Cybersecurity Badge,” but Girl Scouts deserve to hear that their skills and interests have applications beyond employment
at an exciting, fast-paced, war-profiteering company like Raytheon. The Girl Scouts organization, rightly believing girls can “build a better world” through activities even more rigorous than selling Thin Mints outside supermarkets, have really ramped up the stakes by expanding their mission to include Raytheon’s self-described vision of building “a safer world.” World safety through death and destruction seems ambitious, but Raytheon’s message for young girls on the Social Responsibility page of their website is more encouraging: “Hacking a drone shouldn’t be easy. But it can be fun.” -BB & SC
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in the center of America’s capitalist kingdom was one ironic and powerful way to go against norms and put a personal spin on a unique celebration. We think of Costco for its great deals, free samples, endless rows of aisles, and bulk household goods, but apparently Costco also managed to pull off the delicate elegance Julian and Margot desired, decorating the store with rose petals and a beautiful wedding arch to stand under. “The entire Costco staff was amazing,” Margot wrote in an email about her wedding story. “They went above and beyond to create an incredibly beautiful wedding area inside the store.” The manager opened up shop early so Margot and Julian could take pictures. They looked great. In one photo, they were standing near stacks of kids pajamas. In another, the bulk paper goods are visible in the background. In yet another, they are near the food court where they had their first date. Costco gave Margot and Julian ‘relationship established’ cards. It’s a whole new level of Costco dedication that Costco diehards can only aspire to. When I texted Margot (she’s actually my cousin) to ask how her wedding suited her, she texted me back right away. “Amazing,” she wrote. “Perfect in every way.”
Atypical marriage ceremonies might be increasingly common, but this one takes the proverbial cake. On November 29, Margot Schein and Julian Parris got married at the Mission Valley Costco in San Diego, California. Margot decided to message Julian on OKCupid when she noted that “going to Costco” was listed as one of his ideal dates.” On November 29, 2015, they -CR went out for the first time, eating lunch and shopping at the American multinational corporation known for being one of the world’s largest wholesale retailers. Three years later, the happy couple celebrated the anniversary of their first date with a Costco wedding ceremony. It was small; only a few friends and family members––and Costco employees––were present, and it was officiated by one of the bride’s best friends. Margot and Julian are committed to their values. Some people criticize big, expensive wedding ceremonies, saying they are a capitalist way for couples to show their dedication to a relationship. The grander the wedding, the grander the love. This small ceremony
PERSONAL EFFECTS BY Liby Hays
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WEEK IN REVIEW
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BY Alina Kulman ILLUSTRATION & DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
Last March, Frank Coletta and Alison Bologna, anchors at WJAR, the NBC affiliate station in Rhode Island, gave a speech on air decrying “false news” as a national threat. Meanwhile, people around the country—in Seattle, Baltimore, San Antonio, and many other cities—watched anchors make an identical statements. All of the anchors worked for stations owned by Sinclair, the largest television station operator in America (Sinclair purchased WJAR in 2014). Sinclair called the script an “anchor-delivered journalistic responsibility message,” and mandated that anchors at each station read the script on air. Sinclair management wrote a script telling the anchors to introduce themselves and then say they were “extremely proud of the quality, balanced journalism that [proper news brand name of local station] produces.” The speech then launched into criticism of the media, echoing comments from President Trump: “The sharing of biased and false news has become all too common on social media…Unfortunately, some members of the national media are using their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think.” In April, the sports-news blog Deadspin published a disorienting and eerie video that layered clips of dozens of local news anchors reading the same lines over each other—the only differences were in their emphasis and speech patterns. Coletta, who’s been at WJAR since 1978, gets a close-up at the end of the video. As the second-to-last anchor featured, he delivers the script’s final blow: “this [fake news] is extremely dangerous to our democracy.” The video set off a firestorm of criticism on social media. Nearly every major news outlet covered the video; former CBS News anchor Dan Rather called it
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“Orwellian” in a tweet. While discourse about “fake news” has been taken up by both liberals and conservatives, the Sinclair script’s focus on the “agenda” of the national media intensified existing accusations that Sinclair was using its authority to push conservative messaging through its local stations. Allied Progress, a media watchdog organization, used the video in an ad to encourage opposition to Sinclair’s proposed merger with Tribune Media, which would have meant that Sinclair stations would have reached three-quarters of television-watching Americans. (Ajit Pai, the current Federal Communications Commission Chairman, decided to block the proposed merger this past summer.) On the whole, Americans still trust and watch local news. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, about half of the country still gets most of their news from television. The Poynter Institute released a study this summer that found that 76 percent of Americans trust their local news stations. As the criticism of Sinclair’s influence on local journalism intensified this spring, Adam Bagni, who had worked at WJAR for six years—starting in 2011 as a sports reporter—decided to speak out. He wrote an op-ed in the Providence Journal in April, stating that Sinclair was “attempting to use its local stations like NBC 10 to advance its own political agenda.” The article was retweeted thousands of times, including by well-known journalists like Jake Tapper and Katy Tur. “People were telling me that I was really brave, some people were saying I was a hero, which is ridiculous,” Bagni told the College Hill Independent. After writing the op-ed, Bagni fielded dozens of interview requests from national and international outlets, including CNN and Fox. The media
conglomerate Tegna that owns the station where he currently works, KPNX in Phoenix, Arizona, asked him to decline those interviews to keep their organization out of the Sinclair debate. In November, Bagni said that to support student journalism in Rhode Island, he was willing to discuss his Sinclair experience at WJAR with the Independent. +++ When Bagni started at WJAR, the station had a fairly typical newsroom. “We reported the news in Southern New England, just kind of as we saw fit, put our newsroom together as we saw fit, and put our newscast together as we saw fit,” Bagni said. After a few years, things began to change. Media General, a Virginia-based company that owns dozens of local newspapers and television affiliates, had owned WJAR since 2006. In 2014, Media General announced a $1.6 billion dollar merger with LIN Media, which owned another 43 television stations around the country. LIN Media’s portfolio included two local stations in Rhode Island—the CBS and Fox affiliates. To comply with FCC regulations about market ownership, Media General decided to sell WJAR to the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair owns or operates nearly 200 stations in 100 media markets, and their newscasts reach some 40 percent of American households. Unlike other operators, Sinclair requires ‘must-run’ segments— national political commentary clips that are up to three minutes long, produced at the corporate headquarters in Maryland. The ‘must-runs’ have included monologues from conservative commentator Mark Hyman, in which he insinuated that the Affordable Care Act
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Sinclair and rising conservative influence in RI media was killing people, criticized anti-Trump media bias, and accused the New York Times of reverse racism. There are also daily updates from Sinclair’s “Terrorism Alert Desk,” which is often quick to associate ISIS with breaking news about bombs or attacks without confirmation, and runs regardless of whether there were any terrorist incidents that day. Lately, all Sinclair stations devote nine slots a week to “Bottom Line with Boris,” which features President Trump’s senior campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn. Sinclair’s executive chairman, David D. Smith, defended these segments to the New York Times, saying that they are clearly identified as opinion. Every local news station has an equivalent of ‘must-runs’ with various political stances, he said, citing late-night comedy as an example on other stations. It’s hard to consider Smith impartial on the subject, however. According to the New Yorker, during Donald Trump's campaign, Smith told the candidate, “We [Sinclair] are here to deliver your message. Period.” +++ On a typical weekday, WJAR airs about six hours of its own shows, covering typical local news—weather, traffic, politics, and crime. The ‘must-runs,’ along with Sinclair’s Sunday morning political news show hosted by Sharyl Attkisson (who left CBS in 2014, amidst accusations of conservative bias), represent a minority of WJAR programming. Bagni said he wasn’t sure what audience Sinclair was trying to target with their content in Rhode Island, which is consistently a blue state—there are nearly four registered Democrats for every registered Republican in the state. However, Bagni grew uncomfortable with the presence of the Sinclair-sponsored content, which he described as “clearly biased and right wing,” alongside what he saw as balanced reporting from him and his colleagues. He felt it was sowing distrust in the community by pushing conservative viewpoints onto viewers in Southern New England and could make the audience suspicious of the objectivity of WJAR’s coverage. As a fill-in anchor, he had to introduce these segments with promotional lines directly from Sinclair headquarters. “They didn’t allow us to change them. Corporate, we were told, did monitor that sort of stuff. So in one instance, I read it almost comically fast just to sort of rush through it and get onto the next thing,” Bagni told the Independent. Bagni was not the only person at WJAR disturbed by Sinclair’s ‘must-run’ segments, he told the Independent. He remembers the former news director scheduling them at 4:30 AM, before local programming even began, “so it would almost seem as though the commentary was outside of the broadcast.” To Bagni, the most upsetting part of Sinclair’s management of WJAR was that it damaged the reputation for fairness and impartiality that he and his colleagues had worked to develop. He and another reporter who remains at WJAR (and who agreed to be interviewed but requested anonymity) both emphasized that Sinclair had never asked them to change their story angles or influenced their news coverage in any way. But that did not shield the station from accusations of conservative bias, especially after the anchors appeared in the Deadpsin video. The reporter at WJAR said people on the street have occasionally shouted “fake news” or expletives at him once they realize he’s from the Sinclair-owned station. Bagni is one of few people working in television news who has publicly criticized Sinclair, and he said he may be the only one who is currently working as a broadcast journalist (certainly, the only one who has ever worked for WJAR). For current Sinclair employees, denouncing their employer would mean breaking their contracts, and would result in tens of thousands of dollars in fines owed to the corporation. For other broadcast journalists, speaking out might
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
alienate potential future employers, since Sinclair controls so much of the market. Bagni says he understands why colleagues have not made public statements: “I struggle to point fingers and stand on my high horse and say, ‘everybody should stand up against Sinclair,’ because a lot of these journalists, they have jobs that they need to feed their family. They don’t have a lot of other opportunities. If you don’t work for one television station in town, there’s only two other places you can work, unless you want to get up and move your entire family elsewhere. A lot of times, there just aren’t other opportunities for people.” +++
on WJAR, even though those journalists do not have control over who owns their station. +++ When asked about the ideal future for WJAR, Dr. Ricci from Turn Off 10 mentioned a potential benevolent philanthropist with “progressive values” who could buy the station from Sinclair. (It is not clear, though, if such a philanthropist actually exists, or would ever buy the station.) As long as Sinclair owns WJAR, the station has no choice but to air the ‘must-run’ segments. The anonymous reporter at WJAR said the station has done their best to find a “home” for these clips in evening broadcasts. As for the criticism the station faces, the reporter claimed to not think about it too much. “I just go out and try to do the job the way I’ve done it the whole time, and it’s worked for me so far,” the reporter told the Independent. Some people at WJAR may not feel like their coverage has been directly altered since Sinclair came in, but reporters at other stations have raised concerns. Jonathan Beaton, who had quit his job as a reporter at CBS12, a Sinclair-owned station in West Palm Beach, Florida, wrote in the Huffington Post about the conservatism that had descended on their newsroom. He was told that many of his stories had to have a religious tie-in and that he could not report on the LGBTQ community. In Rhode Island, WJAR is one of the largest and most influential news sources. Nielsen ratings show that WJAR is the most popular local news station in the state. Viewers consistently turn to Frank Coletta and Alison Bologna, over newscasts at stations like WLNE and WPRI. WJAR provides extensive coverage of local news while other outlets have been shrinking. GateHouse Media, one of the largest publishers of local newspapers, purchased the Providence Journal in 2014. Circulation of the ProJo continues to fall, and dozens of reporters have been laid off or offered buyouts. Other Rhode Island newspapers, like the Newport Daily News (also owned by GateHouse), have recently announced rounds of layoffs. As these news sources are passed around between media conglomerates, it becomes less clear who has a vested interest in preserving unbiased local coverage. Many of the journalists at WJAR started working there before Sinclair purchased the station, and the reporter there said that he feels he and his colleagues continue to be committed to providing objective coverage of local news. But the most troublesome aspect of Sinclair’s ownership is not limited to ‘must-runs’; it is instead the company’s potential to use their authority to control the content of local news. Adam Bagni says Sinclair’s control of WJAR potentially represents a slippery slope: “Every journalist should absolutely be worried about the company creeping closer to that line,” meaning that deep political bias could creep into local Rhode Island news, amplifying the conservative message in the ‘must-runs.’ There are no easy answers here. As WJAR continues to pursue extensive local coverage while other outlets dwindle, Rhode Islanders keep watching. Sinclair currently takes advantage of the station’s respected status to distribute its conservative commentary to a larger audience, and, in the future, could potentially use it to impose their chairman’s conservatism onto local coverage. Bagni told the Independent he hopes more people become aware of the risk Sinclair poses to WJAR’s impartiality: “This affects literally every person in the state of Rhode Island. This is where you get your news.”
Some in Rhode Island, however, are able to publicly denounce Sinclair. The Rhode Island ReSisters, a group of activists formed in the wake of the 2017 Women's March, are vocally opposing the company’s presence in the state. After focusing on various other causes like voter registration, they’ve recently decided to devote themselves to protesting Sinclair and Channel 10. They call their campaign “Turn Off 10,” referencing WJAR’s slogan “Turn to 10.” A dozen or so members (mostly older women) meet every other Tuesday night in the back room of the Main Street Café in East Greenwich. At last Tuesday’s gathering, they drank tea on leather couches and discussed the latest Sinclair ‘must-run’—Boris Epshteyn defending American authorities’ use of tear gas on migrant children at the US-Mexico border. (Sinclair has since released a statement that Epshteyn’s comments “do not reflect the views of Sinclair Broadcast Group.”) The Turn Off 10 campaigners weren’t necessarily activists before 2016; they say they occupied their time with careers and parenting. Now, with the luxury of resources and mostly grown children, they attend meetings of activist groups and take part in protests over issues like reproductive rights and immigration. They have chosen opposing Sinclair as their group’s main cause because it serves as a tangible local way to channel some of their anger towards the Trump Administration. “It’s horrible what [Sinclair is] feeding to local viewers. It’s part of the destruction of our democracy,” their unofficial spokeswoman, Dr. Patricia Ricci, told the Independent. Deb Cole, one of the group’s organizers, explained that since they can’t control who owns WJAR, they instead are targeting local businesses that advertise on the network. They hope to hurt the station economically and educate the public about Sinclair’s conservatism. Once every four to six weeks, the group has held protests outside businesses that advertise on WJAR. So far, the group has protested at Yorker Shoes in Johnston, local car dealerships (Speedcraft and Tasca), and furniture stores (Jordan’s Furniture and Cardi’s). “My goal is to have a furniture company drop Channel 10, so I can finally buy a bed,” joked Risa Kornwitz, a member of the group. Turn Off 10 has also traveled to WJAR headquarters in Cranston, holding up handwritten signs with slogans: “Balanced news not Sinclair views,” “WJAR shreds the truth,” “Think while it’s still legal.” So far, they have not convinced any advertisers to cancel deals with WJAR, but they say they are slowly changing the climate around local news in Rhode Island. “We know we’re ruffling feathers. For a small group, we’ve been able to spread the word quite a bit,” Cole told the Independent. Their next steps will include paying for a set of anti-Channel 10 signs on buses for at least a month— they’ve been saving money collected from group dues, and from sales of “Turn Off 10” bumper stickers and pens. Turn Off 10 hopes these signs can increase ALINA KULMAN B'21 is glad Brown didn’t interrupt awareness amongst Rhode Islanders of why they are this article with a ‘must-runs’ seeing conservative commentary peppered between local stories told by reporters and anchors they trust
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Governor Gina Raimondo has urged Rhode Island to “lead by example” in clean energy, and in many ways the state has done so. We have the nation’s first offshore wind farm, along with over 15,000 green jobs. And in 2014, Raimondo’s administration passed the Resilient Rhode Island Act, setting a series of benchmark goals for reducing the state’s carbon emissions below 1990 levels: 10 percent by 2020, 45 percent by 2035 and 80 percent by 2050. Yet despite all of Rhode Island’s progressive environmental talk, Raimondo and the state’s climate leadership are looking like hypocrites. A proposed $700 million, 900 Megawatt natural gas power plant in Burrillville—one of the largest development projects in New England—threatens to prevent Rhode Island from reaching its aspirational climate goals. Chicago-based firm Invenergy claims that its Clear River Energy Center power plant will provide Rhode Island with electricity using a clean and reliable “bridge” fuel— natural gas—as New England transitions away from burning dirty coal and oil towards renewable energy. Indeed, efficient natural gas power plants release 50 percent less carbon emissions than coal-based ones. Power plants like Invenergy’s nevertheless rely on fossil fuels and release greenhouse gasses, not to mention the alarming levels of unaccounted methane leakages that occur when extracting and transporting fracked natural gas. So will Invenergy’s power plant actually help Rhode Island meet its own carbon emissions benchmarks? “My answer to that question is a resounding and unequivocal no,” says J. Timmons Roberts, a Brown University professor specializing in climate change policy. “Rhode Island will be locked into a fossilfuel future if this plant were built, just as the world is shifting rapidly away from fossil fuels.” According to the Conservation Law Foundation, Invenergy’s power plant would pump seven billion pounds of carbon into the air annually, while producing 799 pounds of carbon emission per megawatt-hour, well above New England’s current average. Every single environmental group in Rhode Island has issued statements opposing Invenergy’s power plant and 32 towns and cities across the state have passed resolutions against it. However, the agency responsible for approving Invenergy’s power plant, the Energy Facility Siting Board (EFSB), is an unelected entity specifically designed to prevent local authorities from halting power plant construction. There are ultimately three factors the EFSB weighs in making its decision: the environmental and economic impacts of the project, and whether the power plant is actually needed. Each of these three issues has been bitterly contested in a legal battle between Invenergy and the Conservation Law Foundation, an environmental law group representing Burrillville. Power plants in New England are usually approved within months, but Invenergy has seen its project
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dragged through three years of hearings due to its own mistakes and strategic grassroots organizing efforts from the Burrillville community. The concerted resistance has delayed the project to the point where the original logic behind building a new natural gas power plant anywhere in New England may no longer hold up. “Everyone keeps talking about this day when we’re going to have much more renewable energy when the grid can go through this transformation,” says Tim Faulkner, executive editor of ecoRI News. “But that’s already happening.” At the moment, New England’s electrical grid is very much dependent on natural gas, which provides nearly 50 percent of the electricity for six states. Rhode Island is particularly embedded, with natural gas accounting for 92 percent of its electricity generation, according to the Energy Information Administration. Since Invenergy’s proposal in 2015, ISO New England— the nonprofit that manages the region’s electricity— has begun to shift more and more towards renewable energy and programs that focus on cutting energy consumption. Last year, no new large natural gas power plants received contracts to supply electricity for ISO New England. Instead, the ISO implemented measures to reduce energy demand by the equivalent of a large power plant. All New England states have mandates committing them to increase their renewable energy production, and Rhode Island has announced plans to receive ten times more electricity from renewables in 2020 than it did in 2016. In Burrillville’s corner of northwestern Rhode Island, climate science, business interests, community resistance and New England’s energy infrastructure have collided in a furious legal battle that will likely determine the next several decades of Rhode Island’s approach to climate change. At stake is a larger debate playing out across New England and the rest of the United States: Do we need to keep expanding natural gas infrastructure to meet our energy needs? And when confronting entrenched bureaucratic processes catering to the fossil fuel industry, how can communities engage in effective climate action? +++
protected their state’s environmental interests and the region’s beautiful and sensitive contiguous forest. After organizing a public meeting to hear his neighbors’ thoughts on the plant, Roselli was unsurprised to hear that the overwhelming majority were opposed to its construction. Burrillville already hosts the 560 megawatt Ocean State power plant, built in 1986. The Algonquin natural gas pipeline cuts across this corner of Rhode Island on its way to Connecticut, making Burrillville an ideal location for power plants to tap into existing natural gas infrastructure. How the Burrillville community feels about another power plant carries little weight in Invenergy’s approval process. The Energy Facility Siting Board (EFSB) is the sole authority tasked with reviewing all energy-related construction projects across the state, and it is comprised of just three people: the Chairman of the Public Utilities Commission, the Director of the Department of Environmental Management and the Associate Director of the Administration of Planning. From its inception, the EFSB has been a means to streamline the application process for power plant projects. Victoria Lederberg, the state legislator who proposed the creation of the EFSB in 1986, touted the board as “one-stop shopping” for developers. Prior to the EFSB, there was no single authority to oversee development projects, which were subject to regulation by a variety of overlapping agencies, according to Lederberg. Projects were also more vulnerable to cries of NIMBYism (“Not in my back yard!”) from local opposition. But multiple state Senators expressed concern that the siting board would override the authority of the Department of Environmental Management (DEM). The bill was nonetheless approved, with one major change. Initially Lederberg had stated that the General Assembly would have the opportunity to ratify or reverse the EFSB’s decision. “I believe...that the General Assembly, which represents the entire state, is the correct forum to render the final, statewide perspective in issuing a permit to a facility,” Lederberg wrote one year earlier in a 1985 Providence Journal editorial. And yet this provision—which could have provided a measure of public accountability—was removed from the bill on the grounds that “it was no longer needed,” according to Lederberg. “The EFSB was made to avoid the consequences of a democracy,” Steve Ahlquist, a local journalist for Uprise.com, told the Independent. “We should have democratic control over the way we produce our power.”
On August 4, 2015, when Invenergy’s CEO Michael Polsky announced his vision for the power plant alongside Governor Raimondo, many residents of Burrillville assumed there was nothing they could do. “At the time, I kind of shrugged my shoulders,” Paul Roselli, President of the Burrillville Land Trust, told the Independent. “I thought that since it had the Governor’s support it was a done deal.” Still, inspired by small initial protests from organi+++ zations like FANG (Fighting Against Natural Gas), Roselli decided he should do something too. A long- Determined to find Invenergy’s legal pressure points time Burrillville resident and documentary filmmaker, in spite of the EFSB, Roselli and other community Roselli wanted to make sure that his community activists like Burrillville Against Spectra Expansion
07 DEC 2018
BY Jack Brook ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN Bethany Hung
The last stand of RI's fossil fuel zombie identified what their town could do. Burrillville could refuse to offer Invenergy a tax break, deny Invenergy access to its water—power plants need thousands of gallons to cool off their turbines each day—and the Town Council could pass a resolution against the power plant. Though the town eventually negotiated a tax break (to pay for legal costs in litigation against the plant), Invenergy has still been struggling unsuccessfully to secure a long term water supply contract with another municipality. (A contract between Invenergy and the town of Johnston is caught in a lawsuit by the Conservation Law Foundation, with support from the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office.) The Burrillville community has made itself a presence at every EFSB meeting, with dozens of residents and supporters wearing t-shirts reading “We are not powerless” and holding the now infamous yellow “No new power plant” signs. For years, they have been refining their talking points during public comment opportunities at EFSB hearings. Roselli wanted to move the fight beyond Burrillville, spearheading a massive public awareness campaign across the state. In an attempt to raise concerns for the power plant’s health and environmental impacts, he provided dozens of “Learn the Facts” presentations across the state based on information from Invenergy’s own application, leading the vast majority of Rhode Island’s cities and towns to formally oppose the power plant. “The (message) that resonated really well was the loss of municipal control,” Roselli says. “Here’s a three-person state agency (the EFSB) that has complete control over where these things are located and permitted, and their authority is absolute.” +++ Both Connecticut and Massachusetts have ninemember siting boards that are significantly more democratic than Rhode Island’s. Connecticut’s siting council includes five members of the public, two of whom are expected to be experienced in ecology. Likewise, Massachusetts’ siting board contains three members of the public, with one person knowledgeable about environmental issues and another specializing in energy. Since 2016, there have been concerted efforts to revise the EFSB—earlier this year, the RI House of Representatives voted unanimously to expand the EFSB to include two members of the public, along with the director of the Department of Health and the state Fire Marshal. But the bill was dead on arrival at the state Senate, tabled and “held for further review.” The lack of reform is not surprising, because the EFSB has proven to be a convenient way for politicians to remove themselves from public accountability. For instance, one year after expressing support for Invenergy’s project, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse backpedaled and refused to take a position, saying that it would be up to the EFSB. “This is a very serious decision and I have trust in the process...and we have to let it play out,” he told WPRI in 2016. During the run up to her 2018 re-election campaign, incumbent Governor Raimondo received key endorsements and thousands of dollars in donations from construction unions who would stand to benefit from Invenergy’s power plant. The President of the Rhode Island Building and Construction Trades Council, Michael Sabitoni, has been one of the most vocal advocates of the Invenergy power plant because it will generate hundreds of short term construction jobs.
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
“We support everything that’s practical, anything that’s going to move the economy forward,” Sabitoni told the Independent. “We build everything, whatever it is we’ll build it all.” Since Raimondo’s re-election campaign began in 2014, the governor has received over $87,000 in donations from individuals living in Chicago—where Invenergy is based and where Raimondo has traveled to attend private fundraisers—according to the Providence Journal. The CEO of Invenergy has donated $1000 to Raimondo’s campaign each year. Raimondo, who initially championed Invenergy’s power plant, has recently taken a neutral stance and echoed Whitehouse in citing the importance of “trusting the process.” “Nobody can be against (the power plant), you’re either neutral or you’re for it,” Uprise’s Steve Ahlquist says. “Because otherwise that would be a betrayal of the billionaires that are building it.” +++ While community resistance has played an essential role in slowing the power plant’s approval process, what will ultimately stop the plant from being built is the fact that it appears no longer needed to support New England’s energy infrastructure. In 2015, ISO New England, which manages the region’s energy, expressed concerns over replacing the electricity generated by older power plants that would be shut down in the next few years. ISO gave Invenergy a contract to provide electricity starting in 2020, on the assumption that it would be up and running by then. However, given Invenergy’s repeated delays (it is clear that by no means will the project be complete in time), ISO received federal approval on Nov. 30th to cancel its contract with the company’s power plant. “This is the first time in the history of ISO that it has ever, ever involuntarily terminated a (contract) with a generator,” says Jerry Elmer, a lawyer for the Conservation Law Foundation. “The ISO is saying publicly, we don’t want Invenergy, we don’t need Invenergy, and we don’t anticipate wanting or needing Invenergy in the future.” From the start, Elmer has been an emphatic and relentless opponent of Invenergy. A longtime activist, Elmer came of age in the Vietnam War and not only publicly refused to participate in the draft but burglarized over a dozen draft boards for the War Resisters League (he would go on to become the only convicted felon to graduate from Harvard Law School in 1990). Elmer has since directed his tenacity towards dismantling the natural gas narrative that frames the need for a new power plant in Rhode Island in the first place. On October 31st, Elmer succeeded in convincing the EFSB to reject a key advisory opinion that Invenergy touted as evidence that it was needed to supply New England’s electrical grid. The advisory opinion, written by a single member of the Public Utilities Commission, told the state in 2016 that the power plant was necessary to meet clean energy goals. One EFSB called the agreement “stale” given the energy markets changes in the past two years. And yet the narrative of the need for more natural gas infrastructure persists on the grounds that it is clean and reliable. While cleaner than coal, natural gas emits a lot of carbon when it’s burned. Though Rhode Island’s Office of Energy Resources said in 2016 that the power plant “will not cause CO2 emissions across the region to increase,” that is because they are using a “consumption-based” accounting metric. Since Rhode Island only accounts for six percent of
electricity usage from New England’s collective grid, Invenergy counts “94 percent of (its) carbon emissions...as being from ‘out of state’ and those emissions then disappear from our ledgers,” climate policy expert J. Timmons Roberts testified against Invenergy. “In contrast, when you use production-based accounting, you have to account for the carbon emissions produced or created here in Rhode Island.” Invenergy’s claim to help reduce state emissions is really just an “accounting trick.” +++ In October, a Providence Journal editorial defended the Invenergy power plant on these grounds: “Zealots who claim we no longer need natural gas plants—in part because of more expensive renewable energy—are not living in the real world, experts note. We do not yet have the affordable means to store sufficient energy to supply the region’s needs when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. It may be decades before that happens.” It’s not that we immediately need to get rid of all natural gas power plants New England currently relies on—it’s that we don’t need any more of them. This is a fact underscored by the energy market itself. The ISO New England forecast earlier this year predicted that regional demand for electricity will decrease over the next ten years. Other studies, like a recent report by the nonpartisan Rocky Mountain Institute, found that renewable energy and other alternative approaches to fossil fuels can be just as reliable as natural gas, with zero harmful emissions. If natural gas is a bridge to renewables, “we should be exiting the bridge at this point,” says Erika Niedowski, director of the RI Acadia Center, a clean energy advocacy group. “The climate crisis isn’t getting less urgent, it’s getting more urgent.” Historically, there has been a bias in discussions around energy policy towards expanding our energy supply rather than reducing our demand, Niedowski says. We could start to think about how to use less electricity—saving money—and when we do use it to make sure we are being as efficient as possible. ISO New England is already doing this through successful “demand response” programs that pay industrial manufacturers and other major energy consumers in Vermont and Connecticut to use less electricity. Other states across New England are responding to the economic and environmental incentives of clean energy and acting accordingly. Last year, Connecticut Energy Siting Council rejected a large natural gas power plant proposal in Killingly—right across the border from Burrillville. Why? The Council said the power plant was “not necessary” for the state’s energy reliability. Rhode Island’s EFSB will likely be making its own decision regarding Invenergy’s proposed project in early 2019, as hearings continue through February on the merits of the so-called “bridge” fuel power plant. Elmer is confident that Invenergy’s power plant will be rejected. “Invenergy is a zombie,” he says. “It is as good as dead.” JACK BROOK B’19 is indebted to Steve Ahlquist for his excellent reporting covering Invenergy’s hearings for the past three years and encourages you to donate to his site, Upriseri.com.
CLIMATE
06
A (RI)SING TIDE
On a rainy day in November, I sat in Grover Fugate’s office at the Coastal Resources Management Council in Wakefield and watched Rhode Island flood. The rain pounded biblically at the window, but on the digital model in front of us, it was the sea that took Warwick, crashing through houses and across Highway 117. Next to walls adorned with faded pictures of Norwegian fjords and offshore wind turbines, Fugate’s laptop displayed a satellite image of Warwick, punctuated by almost 2,200 red and orange dots. These dots represented Warwick structures that would be critically damaged in Fugate’s model of a 100-year storm, a severe event statistically one percent likely in any given year, magnified by a projected seven feet of sea level rise. Fugate, the Council’s executive director since 1986, is in the business of predicting the future. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasts 10 feet of sea level rise in New England by 2100. But Rhode Island’s coastal planners know that this is just one part of the story. They've generated flood maps that factor in coastal erosion rates (doubling by 2100), saline intrusion into groundwater, and wave damage from storm surge—the cascading effects of runaway carbon emissions. “Our communities have an opportunity to see what might happen without having to experience the actual event,” Fugate told me of his models. “Now the question is what [they’re] going to do about it.” The Coastal Resources Management Council—scintillatingly self-described as a “management agency with regulatory functions”—is a state agency charged by federal law with preserving and protecting the 400 miles of shoreline that give the Ocean State its name. The Council undertakes this weighty task from within the Wakefield’s Oliver Stedman Government Center,
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a brutalist brick and concrete building also housing a DMV and and traffic tribunal. I made the 40-minute journey south from Providence along the Narragansett Bay, hoping to better understand the byzantine world of coastal planning, a dense combination of highly technical climate and geological science and local zoning policy that nonetheless holds sway over the fate of large swaths of vulnerable coastline, including 21 coastal communities. “Sea level rise is really a land use problem,” Fugate said when we sat down. And land use—regulated through zoning—is a the responsibility of municipalities, “the least prepared and least resourced entities in the United States for trying to deal with” sea level rise, according to Fugate. Zoning is by design hyper-local, but sea level rise is a broader problem, a mismatch for the capacities of local municipal governments. These bodies are limited by two-year election cycles that disincentive long-term planning from elected officials. They also can’t run deficits, like the federal government—even if towns wanted to put together an ambitious package of infrastructural reforms to ready themselves for a rising sea level and increasingly intense storms, the funding isn’t there. The Coastal Management Resources Council can’t solve this problem, but it fills a knowledge gap for local planning departments. In addition to developing its own management plans, Fugate’s Council, with a staff of scientists and engineers, helps Rhode Island’s cities and towns understand what their shorelines will look like in 100 years time, through detailed modelling. It’s essentially a state agency helping local governments make decisions where federal guidance comes up short. And, according to Fugate, it comes up very short. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) creates maps dictating eligibility for federal flood insurance, mandatory if you live in a FEMA-defined
flood plain (the US is the only country to provide this insurance on the government’s dime, and FEMA is in massive debt thanks to increasingly frequent catastrophic storms). But the FEMA method for modeling storm surge risk is a “mess,” said Fugate. The federal agency’s maps lack detail, and their creators lowballed offshore wind speeds. This means the federal flood zone estimates are off by up to eight feet: “the difference of whether you got a home or not” after a storm rolls through, said Fugate. In response to the lack of accurate federal modeling the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council developed the Coastal Environmental Risk Index (CERI) and STORMTOOLS maps that show local planners what sea level rise will do to their cities and towns in the coming decades. Developed over the past two years, the CERI maps—with their foreboding red dots—combine sea level rise, erosion, and storm surge data to produce building-by-building damage estimates for large storms coupled with rising waters. “We’re leading the nation in this,” says Fugate. A 2012 law in North Carolina banned its coastal planners from using any sea level rise predictions and other southern states prefer the language of “coastal hazards” over “climate change”—because realistic planning was deemed harmful for coastal housing markets. Unlike in North Carolina, Rhode Island’s coastal managers have chosen transparency over avoidance. Even so, high-tech modelling can’t force municipalities to act, says Fugate. “If I got up and started talking about recurrence level storms to municipalities, the [urban] planners sort of glaze over on me,” he said. Not all planners, it turns out. Fugate referred me to Chelsea Siefert, a career urban planner, who has been South Kingstown’s director of planning for two years, where she’s employed with
07 DEC 2018
BY Lucas Smolcic Larson ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN Amos Jackson
How coastal managers and local leaders are grappling with sea level rise in the Ocean State
the Council’s modeling. Siefert previously worked for the state Division of Planning, developing guidance for local governments on integrating the likelihood of future natural hazards into their comprehensive plans, which outline the “big picture, [or] what we care about,” according to Siefert. Local planning departments vary widely in staffing depending on a community’s size and tax base. “We’re lucky in South Kingstown,” said Siefert in a phone call last week. Her office has a staff of five people and benefits from “a generally Democratic and progressive town council who takes things like sea level rise and climate change seriously”—the ideal situation for a local planner whose priorities lie in addressing the effects of these coming changes. These effects are serious. A 100-year storm with seven feet of sea level rise will damage almost 20 percent of South Kingstown’s structures, according to the Coastal Resources Management Council’s modeling. “We feel like we have a good handle on what needs to happen,” Siefert said. “What we don’t have the capacity or funding for is actually making the changes that we identify.” She described unsuccessfully trying to fund a renovation of a critically exposed roadway (a $3.5 million project) for “years.” The work of raising bridges, redirecting roadways, and protecting critical infrastructure takes money and planning years in advance. Even in South Kingstown, a community with the highest bond rating, a large capital reserve (the best possible financial situation for a municipality), and the necessary political will, “we still just can’t make it work.” Siefert said the documents and information produced by Fugate’s council are critical, but they don’t tell municipalities how to overcome the structural limitations placed on the actions they would like to take. “I think that’s the municipal frustration,” she said, “We don’t feel a lot of support from the state.” And there’s another obstacle standing in the way of common sense sea level rise planning: property
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
rights. Siefert says she sees three approaches to coastal planning, given the rising waters. Protect (hardening buildings to ensure they aren’t damaged), adapt (build differently to mitigate impacts), and retreat (moving out of harm’s way). “For some places, retreat is the preferable option,” she said. But “we don’t really know if that is a legally viable thing for a municipality to do because we can’t take property rights away,” per the federal and state constitutions. There are exceptions to this rule—zoning should protect “health, safety, and welfare” of a community—but Siefert said she lacks guidance on when taking property rights is permissible. Fugate also said the property rights issue weighed on his mind. “If there’s takings [of property] found, particularly on our shoreline where we’re usually dealing with multiple millions [in property value],” regulators could expose themselves to lawsuits and completely undermine their authority.
to grapple seriously with the coming effects of global climate change. This permitting is also filed with the deed, meaning future buyers will know exactly the assumptions made by the original builders. Buyers are using the council’s modeling, says Fugate, to avoid houses in the path of rising seas and storms. Siefert is also trying to enforce future-thinking by amending South Kingstown’s zoning ordinance. “Sea level rise, because it’s so gradual, will never feel urgent,” she said. Both Fugate and Seifert hope to change this, buyer by buyer. Neither has illusions about what will happen as the ocean encroaches on its state. In the absence of structural fixes that allow municipalities to act in bold ways, the (inevitable) arrival of large storms will dictate how communities change. “There’s enough money in this country right now that there are people that will always be able to build on the shore without any mortgages, without any insurance,” said Fugate. “What we’re trying to do is get information in the hands of that second, third, fourth row back because they can’t afford losing their structures.” These people will bear the burden of a rising sea level. Without flood insurance and suffering major damage to their homes, they’ll have to leave, accepting the loss of their homes and the asset it represents—a situation that’s become increasingly common across the US. Rhode Island will be no different.
While Siefert and Fugate can’t simply tell Rhode Islanders to move out of the sea level rise and storm danger zone, they can require developers and homebuyers to think ahead, changing mindsets to force Rhode Islanders to grapple with the ongoing coastal changes. The Coastal Resources Management Council, unlike similar bodies in other states, is tasked with permitting all new construction along the shoreline. To go through the Council’s process, a developer or property owner must answer a simple question with radical consequences: “how long do you want your structure to last?” Based on this answer, the council tells the builder how it has to build based on its sea level rise and flood projections. Developers of the proposed LUCAS SMOLCIC LARSON B’19 has made the $29 million Hammett’s Wharf Hotel in Newport had to switch from Google Maps to STORMTOOLS. redesign “to accomodate an additional two feet of sea level rise,” said Fugate. Fugate called the permitting a “no regrets policy” because it forces property owners
CLIMATE
08
CHINGA LAS ARMAS SOA, Plan Merida, and how the US funds gun violence in Mexico
content warning: death, gun violence, police brutality December 10 marks the 12th year anniversary of the War on Drugs in Mexico. As of November 2018, 250,000 people are dead and 37,400 are missing. In 2008, two of my uncles were forcibly disappeared by the Mexican military. We still do not know where they are. On Easter day 2012, while making our way back to the United States, my family and I were stopped by a group of armed people in Mexico near the Nuevo Leon-Tamaulipas state border. A young boy—16 at the oldest—pointed a gun at me and my father. He asked a man on the other side of our vehicle, “Que les hacemos, jefe?” (“What do we do with them, boss?”) I remember, at 14, thinking that he was very frail. A thin boy, voice still prepubescent. I could probably fight him, I thought. Instead, looking at the not-so-frail, not-so-prepubescent firearm in his hand, I looked at him silently, ready to obey any order he gave me. “Dejalos ir.” “Que dios los bendiga.” (“Let them go.” “May God bless you all.”) I knew it was our US state license plates that gave us God’s blessings. In 2017, one of my cousins was disappeared. Days later, he was found blindfolded, several gunshots in his head, his back burned. All of these events, I now see, are connected. The violence and disappearances in Mexico exist and persist due to a bi-national legislative agreement of violence funded and supplied by the United States— bought by Mexico. In February of 2016, US President Trump threatened military intervention in Mexico: “You have a bunch of bad hombres down there. You aren’t doing enough to stop them. I think your military is scared. Our military isn’t, so I just might send them down to take care of it.” However, the reality is that US military influence is already in Mexico through the training the US provides in the School of the Americas and the arms we sell through the Merida Initiative. +++ The School of the Americas (SOA) is a US Army training facility for Latin American soldiers, cadets, and officers that was founded in 1946 in Fort Gulick on the Panama Canal Zone. The facility seeks to promote military professionalism and establish cooperation among Latin American and US military forces. Beginning in 1961, under the Kennedy administration, the facility was assigned an anti-communist agenda: military personnel of Latin American countries were given counterinsurgency training. In the 1980s, journalists and activists asked that the school be moved out of Panama, claiming it promoted repressive graduates—a Panamanian newspaper even called the school the “School of Coups.” In 1984, the SOA was relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia. Even after the move, many graduates of the SOA have been implicated in human rights violations in their countries. The SOA essentially graduates people who go back to Latin America to participate in repressive regimes. Reports in Panama claimed that the facility taught torture techniques practiced on the homeless people of Panama. These reports were echoed in the US and in 1996, human rights activism forced the Pentagon to release training manuals that were used at the school. According to
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the declassified documents, trainings advocated for “fear payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum” on insurgents. Students, refugees, priests, and people who claimed their government to be corrupt were considered “insurgents” and “guerillas.” Despite protests and public uproar, no independent investigation ever took place. In 1999, as a result of public pressure by activists in the US and elsewhere, as well as the actions of Representative Joseph Kennedy II, Congress supposedly stopped funding the SOA. But that same year, the Senate passed a version of the bill, which channeled the funding into the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), run by the United States Department of Defense. In an empty gesture towards reform, the SOA was merely renamed: the curriculum changed, but the teachers, the facility, and the human rights violations remain. Formerly known as the SOA, the Institute for Security Cooperation still exists today at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia. Since the establishment of SOA in 1946, more than 80,000 Latin American military and police officers have received training at the SOA and WHINSEC. Eleven Latin American dictators are among the list of graduates: Juan Melgar Castro, Policarpo Paz Garcia, Leopoldo Galtieri, Jose Efrain Rios Montt, Manuel Noriega, Guillermo Rodriguez, Hugo Banzer, Omar Torrijos, Roberto D’Aubuisson, and Juan Velasco Alvarado. Jose Efrain Rios Montt ordered the genocide of Ixil Indigenous peoples in Guatemala—wiping out 70-90% of the Ixil communities in Quiche. Roberto D’Aubuisson lead El Salvador’s death squads. Leopoldo Galtieri is responsible for disappearances in Argentina. On November 16, 1989, during the country’s civil war, Salvadoran Army soldiers killed eight civilians at the Jose Simeon Canas Central American University (UCA El Salvador): Elba Ramos, her 16-year old daughter Celina Ramos, and six Jesuit priests: Ignacio Ellacuria, Ignacio Martin Baro, Segundo Montes, Amando Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno, and Joaquin Lopez y Lopez. The Jesuits had endorsed a plan to end civil conflict and were suspected of collaborating with the rebel forces (and not the Salvadoran government). A US Congressional task force investigation reported that those responsible had been trained at the School of the Americas— known at the time as the “School of the Assassins” by journalists and activists. In 1990, Father Roy Bourgeois, a US veteran and priest who had previously worked in Bolivia under the repressive rule of dictator and SOA graduate Hugo Banzer, founded the organization SOA Watch to condemn the massacre and call for the closure of the SOA military facility. SOA Watch strives to “expose, denounce, and end US militarization, oppressive US policies and other forms of state violence in the Americas.” In 1990, a year after the massacres in El Salvador, the SOA watch held a vigil at the gates of the School of the Americas in Ft. Benning, Georgia. For 25 years, the SOA Watch continued to gather at the gates of Ft. Benning and to this day, it has stood against US-sponsored violence. In 2016, the annual gatherings moved to the ‘two Nogales,’ the border between Arizona and Mexico, to “denounce militarized US foreign policy as a principal root cause of migration,
as well as the devastating impact US security and immigration policy has on refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrant families, across all borders.” At this year’s Border Encuentro, which took place between November 16 and November 18, the SOA Watch demanded: An end to US economic, military, and political intervention in Latin America, and the closure of SOA/WHINSEC + An end to Plan Merida and the Alliance for Prosperity + Demilitarization and divestment of borders + An end to the racist systems of oppression that criminalize and kill migrants, refugees, and communities of color + Respect, dignity, justice, and the right to self-determination of communities.”
+
+++ I believe that the two last goals are not possible without the first two being accomplished. Both Plan Merida and the School of the Americas are racist systems of oppression that criminalize and kill migrants, refugees, and communities of color, depriving popular communities in Latin America from respect, dignity, justice, and the right to self-determination. In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched Mexico’s War on Drugs, a multi-year state effort to stop the trafficking of drugs within Mexico. In 2007, US President George W. Bush and President Calderon met in Merida, Mexico to sign the Merida Initiative. Plan Merida is a four pillar initiative: “1. Disrupt the Operational Capacity of Organized Crime 2. Institutionalize Reforms to Sustain the Rule of Law and Respect for Human Rights in Mexico 3. Create a 21st Century Border and 4. Build Strong and Resilient Communities.” The first pillar has enabled the selling of equipment to Mexico, the second has enabled the training of police officers, the third pillar has funded violence and xenophobia against Central American migrants at Mexico’s southern border, and the fourth pillar, aimed at supporting “at-risk-youth,” has been ignored and defunded for years. Really, the fourth pillar is a bullshit attempt at disguising the imperialistic other three pillars. Not a dime has been spent on drug rehabilitation, for example. Instead, funds have been largely allocated to the first and second pillar— the military received most of the funding in the form of equipment. In many ways, the Merida Initiative is a continuation of the School of the Americas: the US Department of Defense has led trainings for police and military in Mexico, as well as sent war equipment (including guns, over 20 military planes, and helicopters). Originally instituted in 2006 as a three-year program, Plan Merida continues today. In 2018, $145 million was appropriated from the US to the Merida Initiative—$60 million above the request. The trainings funded by Plan Merida do not violate human rights any less than the trainings by the School of the Americas: in 2008, two videos of Risk Incorporated, a US security contractor, training the police force of Guanajuato, Mexico, in torture interrogation techniques were released. Moreover, the
07 DEC 2018
BY Leslie Benavides ILLUSTRATION Julia Illana DESIGN Amos Jackson
Merida Initiative is as imperialistic as it sounds; the US offers military-grade artillery, surveillance equipment, combat tactical training, and intelligence and database sharing to Mexico. The US cited the Merida Initiative a success, citing the extradition of El Chapo and “Mexico’s apprehension of more than 400,000 Central American migrants from 2015 to 2017.” In this sense, it does not only institute imperialism through the heavy militarization of Mexico, but also affects people beyond Mexico’s southern border. Last summer, twelve members of Congress asked the US Department of Defense to “conduct a full and public evaluation of the Initiative, US security aid, and arms sales to Mexico to inform future funding decisions and ensure that US security aid and trade do not support further human rights violations and violence.” Despite this, and despite others—like Zapatistas, Indigenous peoples, and the parents of the 43 students whose 2014 disappearance was never accounted for by the Mexican government—asking for change in the Merida Initiative, Congress is considering the Trump Administration’s $76.3 million 2019 budget request for the Initiative. The War on Drugs and Plan Merida have cost both the US and Mexico billions of dollars. Since the first year of the Merida Initiative, the US has exported more than $40 million annually in firearms, ammunition, explosives, and gun parts to Mexico. Yet, largest has been the human cost. Between December 2006, when the Mexican War on Drugs began (followed quickly by Plan Merida) and June 2018, at least 37,435 people have been forcibly disappeared in Mexico, according to a report by the Stop US Arms to Mexico Project, a collaboration of Global Exchange in the US and the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights in Mexico. Since December 2006 through June 2018, the Stop US Arms to Mexico project reports 121,035 people murdered with firearms. Moreover, gun violence in Mexico reached a record-high in 2017 with 29,000 homicides—16,898 of which occurred with a gun. +++ Given these large numbers, it is no doubt Mexico has a gun problem. The US is the supplier of that crisis. There are more than 60,000 gun stores in the United States. In contrast, Mexico has only one gun store. In the entire country. One. The Mexican military is the only legal importer of firearms into Mexico. Moreover, only the Mexican army (SEDENA) can legally sell and distribute firearms in the country. The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reported that of the 104,850 guns confiscated for tracing between 2009-2014, 73,684 or them were unlawfully smuggled into Mexico. In that same period, the lone Mexico gun store sold only 52,147 firearms. As part of the initiative, the US pledged to address the illicit trafficking of firearms into Mexico. The Merida Initiative is largely one-sided: the US has not truly done this. On February 1, 2018, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson admitted to the lack of attention the US has paid to the border when guns are being trafficked into Mexico: “Regrettably, the cartels have become more powerful. They are extremely well
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
armed. Most of those arms are coming from the United States... Interestingly, for about every 10 trucks that we inspect coming north, because we’re worried about what’s coming to see us, we only inspect one truck going south….” The Mexican Constitution guarantees the right to keep arms. However, that right is very different from the second amendment in the US. In Mexico, arms may only be bared by those with a license to carry. The federal law determines the cases, conditions, requirements, and places of gun ownership. Mexico has very strict gun-buying laws, where only guns for home defense, hunting, target practice, shooting sport, and collection are permitted. To even apply to purchase a firearm and ammunition, civilians must provide: national military service card, a birth certificate or documentation of legal presence, proof of income, a criminal background check that shows NO convictions, proof of address, a government-issued photo ID, a birth certificate and a unique key of population registry. If weapons are for shooting to hunting, the civilian must submit a valid copy of their hunting or shooting club membership card. Often, SEDENA does not sell arms to civilians, since the process is so time-consuming. More than half SEDENA's firearms are sold and distributed to law enforcement officials, such as the police. Most types of large and military-like guns and calibers are reserved for military and law enforcement.Generally, civilians are restricted to semi-automatic handguns. And, even then, a civilian must justify the need to own more than two guns and can own up to ten guns. For context, the gunman in the Las Vegas shooting, who killed 58 people and wounded 489 others, had legally purchased at least 55 guns within 12 months. How can a country with only one gun store and strict gun laws have 16,898 homicides by arms in one year? The answer is in clear sight: the gun trade—legal and illegal. Through the Merida Initiative, the US has spent more than $2.5 billion in training and exporting arms to Mexico since 2007. According to a report by Stop US Arms to Mexico Project, 70 percent of guns recovered by Mexican law enforcement officials from 2011 to 2016 were originally purchased from legal gun dealers in the US. Many of the arms are trafficked into Mexico by US citizens. More than 20,000 firearms purchased by state and federal police have gone missing or been stolen since 2006. Government-owned guns, in this way, find themselves onto a black market. However, civilians with arms acquired unlawfully are not the only people committing homicides. Mexican drug cartels and Mexican military alike are receiving weapons from the United States—both legally and illegally—to create violence in the country. Firearms legally imported from the US have been used in some of Mexico’s worst human rights violations. According to documents in the judicial record, the local police, responsible for the disappearances of 43 Ayotzinapa students in September 2014, were armed with AR-15 6530 rifles. These rifles, a model variant of the AR-15, were legally supplied through licensed shipments from Colt, a US manufacturer based in West Hartford, CT. However, the militarization of Mexico goes beyond
guns. A couple of weeks ago, I was in Arizona for this year’s SOA Watch Border Encuentro. During the recent SOA Watch Border Encuentro, we protested Milkor USA, a grenade-launching manufacturing facility in Arizona. The grenade multi-launchers are used by the Mexican Army Special Forces Group (GFE), and effectively contribute to violence. Mexican special forces that use the weapons produced by Milkor have been implicated in the torture and forced disappearances of civilians, as well as in collusion with drug cartels. The Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the Stoneman Douglas Parkland shooter, and the Las Vegas shooter used a Colt AR-15 semi-automatic rifle (the same one used in the disappearing of 43 Ayotzinapa students and 15 death squad murders in Veracruz). The Sandy Hook shooter used a Bushmaster XM-15 (the same arm used to kill the Chihuahua Mayor by the state federal police and in the Veracruz death squad murders). When, in the US, we honor the deaths of those who have fallen to men with AR-15s and other firearms, we must include and honor the deaths of those who have fallen to men with AR-15s manufactured in the US. Blood is not only on the hands of the person who fires a gun, whether in the US or Mexico. Blood is on the hands of the US government, the Mexican military, the Mexican cartels, the US citizens who traffick guns into Mexico, the employees at Milkor and Colt and at the other US gun manufacturing plants, and US and Mexican presidents over the last decade. +++ December 10 marks the 12th year anniversary of the War on Drugs in Mexico. On Saturday, December 1, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) was inaugurated as the 58th President of Mexico. During his campaign, AMLO promised to end the War on Drugs. In an outlined plan, this would involve rewriting drug laws, offering reparations and support for drug war victims, and increasing social programs. Previously, AMLO has suggested taking the military off the streets in this plan. Unfortunately, during his inauguration he announced a new military-led law enforcement—the National Guard. I do not think that ending the War of Drugs begins with a militarized police force in cities and towns without real reform. Still, I am hopeful. Earlier this year, AMLO announced that, as Mexico’s president, he would cancel the purchase of Seahawk multi-mission military helicopters. Early November, the future Minister of Public Security (SSP) Alfonso Durazo announced the country will not acquire more arms, but will instead use the money to strengthen training and skills for security forces. On December 3, 2018, AMLO launched a Truth Commission to investigate the unsolved crime of the 43 missing Ayotzinapa students— something Peña Nieto previously and actively ignored. These are all steps in the right direction. However, there is a long road ahead: President AMLO must end Plan Merida and cease to send law enforcement leaders to the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. If he fails to do that, blood very well may, too, be on the hands of President Lopez Obrador. LESLIE BENAVIDES B’20 wants to scream.
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The reflexive and reflective photographs of Danny Lyon and the stakes of critical curation
FREEDOM FOR WHOM?
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Sit-In, Atlanta, 1963 Gelatin silver print, 11.75 x 8.5
Who’s the real Danny Lyon? The year was 1969 and Lyon was an attendee at one of Richard Avedon’s studio workshops on 58th Street in New York. The question was asked by Avedon not out of curiosity, but with repugnance. “It was one of these vicious Manhattan art scenes. They lacerated my work” recalls Lyon in a 2012 interview with BOMB magazine. Avedon was in his 40s, the lead photographer for Vogue at the time and would go on to produce several lauded books of photojournalism; Lyon was 27, from a middle-class GermanJewish household in Queens, and had just graduated from the University of Chicago. However, as Avedon’s question suggested: that was not the real Danny Lyon, or at least not all. By 1969, Lyon had already produced three significant bodies of work: one on the Civil Rights Movement as the Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) first and official photographer, one as a member of Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club (Freedom Riders), and another that documented a seven-acre site below Canal Street that was slated for demolition (The Destruction of Lower Manhattan). He would go on, in 1971, to photograph the daily life of Texas prisoners, (Conversations with the Dead) produced with permission from the Texas Department of Corrections.
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Within the span of four years, Lyon’s work examined (from every angle) America’s consistent if flawed appeal: freedom. The struggle for freedom, its embodiment, and the haunting consequences of no freedom at all. He treated all his subjects with the unapologetic, almost intemperate, approach of a journalist. However, due in part to the subjects Lyon chose to focus on, the work refused to fall under the notion that reportage photojournalism should be detached and objective. Lyon refused to let it, often getting deeply involved in the subject’s lives—in 1979, Lyon testified as a character witness at the trial of a man accused of murder with whom Lyon had become close while photographing in a Texas prison. To create these relationships, Lyon also managed to transform into various people — he shifted his politics, his ethics, and his approach. “I leave SNCC in late 1964 and within two years I’m a member of an Outlaw motorcycle group that goes on a picnic and has a ninefoot original Nazi flag marking the spot,” Lyon tells the Guardian in a rare 2012 interview. “I sure as hell didn't sit down with bikers over a beer and discuss Martin Luther King and the struggle for black equality.” It wasn’t just Avedon who was curious, everyone was trying to answer this question: who is the real Danny Lyon? The question’s impossibility lies not in its direction towards Lyon, but in its desire for the “real.” Conversations with the Dead earned Lyon fame in 1971, but he left for New Mexico shortly after, before anyone could answer the question of who he was. Living in near seclusion for the past 50 years, he’s turned his practice inward, focusing on his life and family. Similar to many of his contemporaries, he’s abandoned photography and has moved onto film. "Well, the digital age has seen a certain kind of meaningless photography spread like a malignancy,” he told the Guardian in 2014, “there were always too many photographs, but now there's a kind of visual pollution.” However, Lyon has not discarded his idealist activist roots. He runs an active blog, Bleak Beauty, that he updates often with press, recent writing,
and images he took at the 2011 Occupy LA rally. He’s careful to title it as blog and not as website; hosted on Wordpress, it’s unpretentious and lacks glamour. His well-known books are now collectibles but others can be bought through links Bleak Beauty. The bulk of his recent video work is uploaded through the popular streaming site Vimeo, and free for anyone on the site. Though a little over 70 now, and increasingly critical of the recent transformation of photography, there’s an evident drive in Lyon to stay current and accessible. Despite his humble approach to his work and his early shift away from the New York art spotlight, Lyon has received renewed interest in recent years, as those in the world of fine art try to contend with the nation’s current political climate. In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited the first retrospective of the artist’s’ work in 25 years. The following October, a smaller show opened in Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London. Both shows successfully positioned the political unrest of America in the ’60s—along with Lyon's focus on marginalized people —against the similar energy of Trump’s America today. However, what high-profile shows have often failed to do is catch up with Danny himself — he is no longer the same artist he was in the ’60s. The shows often feel complete and closed, but Lyon’s politics, methodologies, and current work continues to evolve. Lyon is often outspoken about the naiveté in his earlier projects, and has welcomed current political discourse into the discussion of his earlier work. At a 2012 awards ceremony at the Missouri School of Journalism, Lyon spoke with reproach about certain perceived "truths.” Pointing to the growing attack on Mexican immigrants, he warned of a "puritanical code [that] has eviscerated the US political system" and encouraged students to both strive for and question truth, emphasizing that good journalism is not about ideology. “What I hoped to break away from was how his work is normally shown, always so codified into the series,” reflects Allison Pappas, the curator of The Only Thing I Saw Worth Leaving, a show of Lyon’s photographs at the Brown University’s David Winton Bell Gallery that opened this November. “Part of what’s so strong about Lyon’s practice is when you see a certain dialogue happening across the different series.” The exhibition highlights a breadth of work similar to the Whitney show: images from Freedom Riders, Conversations with the Dead, his time with SNCC, Destruction of Lower Manhattan, and his continued work in New Mexico. Pappas, however, diverged from curatorial traditions and mixed the series together, organizing the show instead under five principles Lyon has referred to often in his writing: empathy, freedom, history, destruction, and narrative. The result is a refusal of cohesion and finality that not only honors the legacy of Lyon’s ’60s projects but work towards a way of examining the artist and his role as an observer within the current political context. While I toured the show with Pappas, she pointed towards two photographs in the “Freedom” section. One, (SNCC) Sit-In, Atlanta, 1963, shows a group of SNCC student organizers huddled at the bar of a diner — one is making eye contact with the
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BY WEN ZHUANG DESIGN Christie Zhong
camera, the others are in animated discussion, some are walking off the frame. It’s neighboring photo, Jack, Chicago, 1963-66, also photographed in a diner, is of the back of a lone bike-rider — his Chicago Outlaws skull patch highlighted by the hunch in his shoulders. What did freedom mean for Jack? And how did it differ for SNCC students? To itemize the the ouvre of Lyon’s work into series is to undermine the nuance of each demographic he observed. Lumping all his subjects under one them suggests one reception—such was the case at the Whitney. One review of the show lauded Lyon’s deep concern for the marginalized and the disenfranchised; however, the motorcycle outlaws, the black student organizers, and the Texas inmates were marginalized society members in vastly different ways. Discounting this fact in order to frame an artists’ career as a homogenous entity runs antithetical to the goal of the artist. Instead of having the events of the ’60s aid our examination of the current climate, the work is instead frozen in time. This critique of the Whitney’s curatorial decisions is potentially an unfair one, as Lyon, speaking specifically on leaving SNCC, often referred to his photographs with similar universalizing language and detached journalistic rigor. As tensions grew in the late ’60s, and SNCC’s actions drew more attention and violence, the group soon questioned whether white people should even be allowed in the committee. “The point is, I was a professional,” Lyon stated, “these people were subjects, and it was time to move on. I never looked back.”
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
Jack, Chicago, No. 21, 1963 Gelatin silver print, 8.5 x 11.75
Lyon’s work has had lasting political implications — he snuck into Leesburg Stockade and photographed a group of girls who had been jailed for their involvement with SNCC, a photo which later secured them justice — but Lyon himself rarely reflected on the nuances of each body of work, seeing himself as an observer capturing what others couldn't see. Lyon’s claim of “never looking back” after photographing his subjects proves not entirely true — he looks back often, and each time with a renewed sense of understanding. “He has talked about not liking things his subjects said, did, believed,” Pappas tells me, referring to a recent interview Lyon did, in which he mentions that as he aged and engaged in conversations with his wife and daughters, he recognized that his photographs of the bike-riders often display behavior that is problematic and misogynistic. “In that same interview, however," Pappas adds, "he expressed a need to keep discussion on a piece of work. To be self reflective always and to show the ugly with the good, as that was and still is part of the world. That’s the journalist part of him, you know?” It is a difficult task to show the work of a living artist who is still active in his practice, still generating opinions. Lyon’s is a particularly tricky endeavor: how can you preserve the truth of the events Lyon documented while leaving the potential for those depictions to be flawed, contradictory, and questioned? More broadly: how do museums and institutions justify unearthing the work of an artist, giving him renewed space in important museums, without forgetting the privileges afforded to him when he made the work? In the ’60s, Lyon had unprecedented freedom to make, to observe, and to enter various spaces. He was white, college-educated, came from well-respected parents—as is obvious, he had no stake in the events he recorded. He documented freedom without his ever being questioned. “He was able to go up to the police officers and they assumed he was on their side,” says Pappas. “And he worked that, he exploited it.” Hoping to move through some of these difficulties,
Pappas decided to have most of the text included in the show come largely from Lyon’s own writings. In these accompanying captions, we see Lyon questioning his role in the movements and spaces he entered. Under an image of James Baldwin, Lyon's text reads, “I feel very strongly that my pictures are not enough...time passes so closely,” and underneath an image from Ellis prison unit, “my limited endurance...I tried with whatever power I had to make a picture of imprisonment as distressing as I knew it to be…I never lived in prisons. I only visited them…” The artist himself is present in our examination of each photograph—the viewer is unable to consider the photographs without also considering who Lyon was. The world has seen half a century of Lyon now, and though 2016 awarded him resumed recognition, there’s an inherent irony in fitting Lyon into an institutional structure. “He thinks a lot about structures and keeping avenues of access open,” says Pappas. “He’s always wondered if getting shows and winning awards isn’t just a way to neutralize the work, to end what [the work] is doing.” Speaking at the Bell Gallery during the opening, Lyon spoke less about the work shown, but encouraged students to take up similar actions, to always keep an ear to the voices of the marginalized. The transformation of photography—with the induction of the camera phone and the selfie generation—has redefined identity politics and allowed anyone to accomplish what only a select demographic could do in the past. This is not to say that the work of these pioneering photographers should be stowed away, or that we should trade the important documents of a given era in an attempt to feature diverse representation. Rather, the curatorial decisions involved in resurrecting the work of an artist like Lyon should be done with care. In some ways, it seems this is what Lyon is vying for as well. His deeply, often vulnerable film explorations in recent years is a subtle acknowledgement that the important work can and should be done by others. In the same year as Lyon’s Whitney show, the Sculpture Center in Queens featured the contemporary photographer Leslie Hewitt’s series Untitled (Structures). In her work, Hewitt worked with archival imagery from the Civil Rights Era, including photographs by Lyon. Many who wrote about Hewitt’s show saw its strenths as twofold: it was both a timely reexamination of history as well as a reflection on her continued personal stakes in this history as a Black artist. Museums and institutions, when trying to define a body of work across history or mirror the energy of a time can no longer consider the artist with a level of anonymity—the events of US history have and continue to be intertwined with identity. The Only Thing I Saw Worth Leaving is up at the List Art Center's David Winton Bell Gallery until March 20th, 2019. Special thanks to Allison Pappas for her time and insight. All images from the David Winton Bell Gallery's permanent collection. WEN ZHUANG RISD '19 is wondering when a self-portrait ends and a selfie starts.
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BY Jesse Barber ILLUSTRATION Halle Krieger DESIGN Bethany Hung
Mark Barnes, Chief Property Manager of the Rhode Island Capitol Campus, might get the email from the Governor’s Office at 3:00 in the afternoon or when he arrives between 6:00 and 6:30 in the morning. Mark promptly directs his employee Ed Butler to lower the flags to half-staff. Ed retrieves the key to the roof of the Rhode Island State House and lowers the US and Rhode Island flags to half-staff. The matter of who and what the ritual honors is not in the purview of Mark and Ed. They do not make the policy; they execute it. Half-staff is the tradition of displaying a flag at half the height of its flag pole in commemoration of the death of a significant person or a tragedy. It attempts to establish a national ritual of community mourning. Yet its conception of community and who is “deserving” of remembrance invalidates its project altogether. Halfstaff and its authoritarian, top-down way of remembering people champions the lives of the political elite and law enforcement while ignoring the remembrance of almost everyone else. In its unwillingness to mourn those outside of state power structures, half-staff loses its supposed significance and becomes a hollow tradition. +++ According to The United States Flag code 4 USC § 7(m)(1), the logistics of half-staff, referred to as halfmast for flags at sea, are the following: “The flag, when flown at half-staff, should be first hoisted to the peak for an instant and then lowered to the half-staff position. The flag should be again raised to the peak before it is lowered for the day.” US flags are directed to halfstaff by proclamation of the President or Governor of the state in question. There are two scenarios in which the U.S. flag is flown at half-staff nationwide. First, certain occasions oblige the President to direct flags to half-staff for specific periods of time. For example, if a sitting or former President dies, the flag must fly at half-staff for 30 days (this was called into effect just a few days ago for George H.W. Bush); 10 days for the death for the Vice President and other senior officials on Capitol Hill. Notably, President Trump was criticized for prematurely restoring flags to full height following the death of Senator John McCain. Many accused the President for doing so because of his political disagreements with the Senator. The second scenario is—and here is where it gets interesting—that “in the event of the death of other officials or foreign dignitaries,” half-staff is at the President’s discretion as long as it is “in accordance with recognized customs or practices not inconsistent with law.” If that clause seems oddly vague—it is. In short, the flag can be ordered to half-staff whenever the President wants. In practice, the flag is generally flown at half-staff for three reasons; the death
TOP DOWN of a prominent figure (other than the cases already included in the explicit code), a fatal tragedy, or a national day of remembrance—think Memorial Day or Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. In 2018 so far, The US flag has been at half-staff on 11 separate occasions, totaling 40 days. Five of the 2018 occasions have been to honor the victims of mass shootings, four have been for public figures, and two have been days of national remembrance. However, many half-staff directions are up to the judgement of the President or Governor. On March 2, the President directed flags to half-staff in memory of Billy Graham, neither a public official or national tragedy. The code also explains that the Governor of each state can direct all US flags in the given state to half-staff for the death of current or former government official, the death of a member of the Armed Forces native to that state who dies while serving on active duty, or the death of a first responder who dies in the line of duty. +++ As most of the people honored by half-staff are political figures or first responders, it serves as a means for commemorating agents of the state. Other than occasions of mass killings, a majority of half-staff proclamations honor military or police holidays (like Police Officers Memorial Day and Patriot Day) and political leaders like George H.W. Bush or Nancy Reagan. As such, the tradition’s attempt to constitute collective mourning is nullified by its prescriptive and unrepresentative nature. The tradition of half-staff is a public memorial, much like a monument or a day of remembrance. Urban Historian Dolores Hayden, in her book The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, illustrates that a bottom-up approach to public monuments and collective memory is vital to commemorating representative histories of places and people, and thus creating inclusive and democratic spaces for all. To uphold a collective history and establish pride in one’s community, it is important for that community to have agency over the stories they tell and the people, places, or things they decide to remember. By the nature of its top-down procedure, half-staff determines who is deserving of remembrance without regard to the communities that it supposedly attempts to serve. In doing so, it fails to contribute to an authentic collective memory or meaningful process of mourning. Similar to other forms of national remembrance or public symbolism—in the form of statues, plaques, murals, street names, or memorials—flag-lowering rituals are forms of national remembrance that celebrate white men and their glorified accomplishments. Monuments to radical popular movements and subversive political action, especially that which is carried out by marginalized people, are blaringly absent because so often they stand in direct opposition to the power structures that get to decide who is commemorated. Furthermore, because of its reliance on the flag as a symbol, half-staff requires a belief in an American identity in order for individuals to participate. The question of flying a flag at half-mast becomes not about community mourning or collective history, but rather an arbitrary value judgment of the President or Governor prescribed upon the people for whom it supposedly serves.
An examination of the tradition of half-staff
Both locally and nationally, half-staff proclamations idolize law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty. It is customary for US flags to be lowered to half-staff in a locality for such an occasion. By drawing the distinction between the death of first-responders and the death of civilians, half-staff prioritizes the lives of first responders—a sentiment that is often weaponized to justify police violence. The death of civilians is only commemorated in the case of gruesome and publicized tragedies like the mass shootings in Pittsburgh, PA or Thousand Oaks, CA. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a non-profit organization that memorializes law enforcement officers, there have been 134 officers who have died in the line of duty in 2018, a smaller proportion of whom died in a non-accident. A Washington Post article reports that 876 civilians have been shot and killed by the police this year. On Thanksgiving night, a Black man named Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr. was shot and killed by police at a shopping mall in Hoover, Alabama. He was an Army Veteran; he was not honored publicly. To commemorate him would be to acknowledge the state violence that is primarily carried out against people of color, despite his veteran status. So, instead of commemorating Emantic Bradford Jr., the flag was just directed to half staff for 30 days for the death of former president George H.W. Bush. Even among civilian tragedies, half-staff is reserved for specific cases. Natural disasters—in the past several years—have not warranted half-staff directives. Yet, if a first responder dies in the rescue, localities may lower their flags in commemoration of them. What is the distinction between mass deaths during natural disasters and other tragedies like mass killings? The US flag recently was called to half-staff for the heartbreaking mass killings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA and Thousand Oaks, CA. It was even ordered down for tragedies in Paris and Brussels; however rarely, if ever, does it honor tragedies outside of the US or Western Europe. How many civilians must die to be remembered with half-staff? In what manner must they die? Who must die? When it comes down to it, the tradition of half-staff is not only unrepresentative, but also utterly arbitrary. While the supposed purpose of half-staff is to honor figures and histories important to the public, ironically, it generally excludes the public from the decision making process and of being commemorated themselves. It is a tradition that fails to contribute to a meaningful ritual of community mourning. +++ If the tradition of half-staff largely fails to fulfill its purpose and remains unnoticed by the majority of people, why does it endure? Half staff’s purpose is to uphold its own history—tradition for tradition’s sake. It attempts to galvanize a nationalistic remembrance, telling the public who is important and who it should remember. It contributes to an ethic that governmental service is the highest honor and contributes to the erasure of victims of state violence. Still, the nation’s flags will fly at half-staff for the next few weeks commemorating the 41st President of the United States. Much of the country, other than Mark, Ed, and countless others who are obliged to carry out the labor of this tradition, will not give it a second thought. JESSE BARBER B'19 wants to know who changes the flag on the Main Green
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SIMULATED BODIES How virtual physicalities are changing the landscape of medical education BY Parisa Thepmankorn ILLUSTRATION Eve O’Shea DESIGN Amos Jackson
Medicine is intimate. Beginning from our very first breath, most likely taken inside a hospital room under the watchful eye of an OB/GYN doctor, medical professionals are the recurring characters who oversee the bodily changes, conditions, and diseases we experience throughout our lives. The doctor-patient relationship is intrinsic to the practice of medicine, as doctors must simultaneously communicate and interact with their patients while they evaluate, diagnose, and treat. Effective physician-patient communication has been found to correlate with improved health outcomes, according to a 1995 literature review published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Since patients who trust their doctors are more likely to adhere to treatment plans, traits like empathy are critical in a doctor to build trust, effective communication, and high-quality patient care. Empathy is also a major contributing factor to physicians’ “heightened understanding and appreciation of the social context of the patient,” as described by Cheryl Kodojo in a paper published in Pediatrics in Review. Given the diversity of most patient populations, more empathetic physicians are able to better understand the influence of different races, backgrounds, cultures, religions, and socio-economic statuses on health. This helps them navigate sensitive conversations, recognize social determinants of health, and provide more individualized care. By viewing patients as people rather than vessels for diseases, physicians can help improve people’s health beyond simply treating symptoms. The question, then, is how can we train our physicians and other healthcare professionals to empathize, especially when working with diverse patient populations? Surely, it cannot be taught the same way one might teach human anatomy in a classroom. In fact, a 2008 paper published in Academic Medicine correlated attending medical school with a decrease in students’ empathy for patients. Perhaps one of the contributing factors to that finding is medical schools’ emphasis on the technical aspects of medicine and their lack of focus on its actual practice. To improve medical professionals’ understanding of various patient populations, some innovators have turned to simulations. +++ Life-like flesh, sculpted out of PVC. Entire organs with detailed anatomical parts, manufactured from plastic. Currently, hospitals and medical schools rely on physical simulators to educate and train staff in technical aspects of medicine. Mannequins and specific task trainers are used to teach clinicians how to react in different scenarios or perform certain procedures. Using these tools, practical skills can be taught and mistakes can be made without any of the ethical qualms that come with learning through firsthand patient experiences. Unlike the clothing mannequins one might see in storefronts, the realistic details in these generic, plastic bodies are often revealed only after closer examination. Low fidelity mannequins, which lack most lifelike features, are often used to teach basic skills such as CPR, while the more expensive high fidelity mannequins come closer to mimicking living patients. At over four thousand dollars, the high fidelity Noelle Maternal Care Patient Simulator simulates various obstetric care situations and includes features such a dilating cervix, a realistic uterus that can be massaged to lessen bleeding, and a placenta with detachable fragments. Due to the abundance of simulated bodies available for practice, the often-repeated mantra in medical education, “see one, do one, teach one,” has essentially evolved into “see one, practice many, do one.” However, the high cost of physical mannequins effectively eliminates the possibility for a diverse representation of patients. Because each one is generally THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
used to practice specific scenarios, most simulation centers prioritize the purchase of mannequins of different types or of higher fidelity over diverse ones. In fact, normative physical presentations are often the only option. For example, the Noelle Maternal Care Simulator is a thin, white, blonde woman, with no other ethnicities, races, or body types offered as options. If the goal of using medical mannequins is to mimic “real” patient care scenarios, how real can they actually be when they do not reflect diverse patient populations? The Noelle Simulator is not useful for teaching physicians effective communication techniques, nor how to handle nontraditional medical care scenarios. Even a technically successful delivery of a baby could be marred by poor communication, leaving the patient unhappy, frightened, and confused. +++ Luckily, new developments in technology have begun to advance simulation-based learning in order to provide more well-rounded medical training through no-risk simulations. Where physical mannequins fall short, virtual reality (VR) can be used to compensate–– at least in part. Simulated reality startup SimX is one such technology that offers users advanced levels of customizability. The company’s website boasts that “if it can be done in a modern video game, it can be done in the SimX case system.” Any imaginable scenario can be created, such as helping a pregnant AfricanAmerican woman who goes into labor while on a bus, or examining an elderly below-the-knee amputee during a check-up. After putting on the appropriate equipment, SimX users are immersed in an entirely different, entirely virtual world. They can ask questions aloud to learn about the patient’s medical history and receive actual audio responses, perform basic physical exams and diagnostic tests like ultrasounds, and analyze medically accurate results. VR reduces the inhibitory effects of monetary cost—besides the initial investment in software and equipment, the only cost is case development time. Now, educators can use software like SimX to affordably develop multiple medical patients and scenarios that reflect reality and help professionals improve their understanding of the effects of race, age, and other facets of a person’s identity on health. For example, scenarios could be written so users could learn to communicate with patients who are resistant to certain treatment plans for religious or cultural reasons. However, SimX is not a complete solution. Though it allows for the simultaneous training of both medical and patient care skills, it is still only a platform to begin addressing the need for diversity and communication training in medical education. As a new startup, SimX software has only just begun distribution among select institutions. There is no guarantee that this technology will result in anything but the simulation of normative virtual bodies in medically-focused scenarios, as the decision to integrate patient diversity is dependent on the scenario developers. How thoroughly those patient care skills might be taught and developed, however, still remains up in the air.
The Beatriz Lab is one narrative experience among a small selection offered by the startup. By donning a headset, the user virtually embodies Beatriz, a middle-aged Latina woman, and follows her progression through different stages of Alzheimer’s Disease. Looking at the world through her “eyes,” the user experiences her growing disorientation, family discussions about her future, and nursing care. Through physical hand controls and voice recognition, users are able to interact with the simulation prompts as needed. Such simulations move beyond the boundaries of mannequins and clinical settings. For Embodied Labs, the question is not how close technology can come to mimicking human bodies; rather, it is how close technology can bring us to mimicking the human condition. If empathy is the ability to understand and share other people’s feelings, then according to Embodied Labs, the best way to cultivate it is to simply experience them yourself. Of course, this immersive experience does not come without qualms. As a new company, Embodied Labs lacks scientific research that validates the effectiveness of their technology in cultivating understanding or empathy. And despite technological advances, these experiences might lull users into a false sense of understanding and overconfidence about their ability to empathize. After all, it is impossible to actually embody someone else’s identity, experiences, or perspectives and truly walk in a patient’s actual shoes––only their virtual ones. +++
The innovative work of SimX, Embodied Labs, and similar companies allow healthcare education to expand past its earlier confines. But how useful are these simulations, really? While much anecdotal evidence exists lauding VR technology, little quantitative research has been completed as to the actual efficacy of VR-based simulation training in medicine. Simulated bodies are not flesh and blood, and their usefulness in enabling skill acquisition varies. In an age of digitally-driven medical education, it is critical to approach technology with a degree of caution. A 2002 study published in Annals of Surgery found that VR-based training of a gallbladder excision procedure helped residents perform it with less errors than those who underwent conventional training. However, it is one of few studies on the the technology’s efficacy, and not all surgical procedures will benefit from the switch to VR-based training. There is also little existing research about its effects on non-surgical forms of healthcare and physicians’ communication skills. Further examination of the widespread effects of VR-based medical simulation training is still necessary. But it is worth acknowledging that, despite its novelty and potential limitations, simulation technologies are beginning to transform the landscape of medical education. By challenging gaps in diversity, empathy, and humanistic care, they remind us of the roots of medicine: the people, the intimacy, the ability of doctors to fundamentally change and improve people’s lives. In the face of scientifically advanced medicine, we must not forget that real bodies are more +++ than their biology. More than vessels for disease and Physicians, nursing home staffers, and family disorder, illness and disability. They contain what it members of patients alike can also learn under- truly means to be human, in all of their complex and standing and empathy about specific patient experi- varied forms. They are vessels for life. ences through virtually walking in a patient’s shoes via startup company Embodied Labs’ “Embodied VR PARISA THEPMANKORN B’20 is still obsessed with Experiences.” Unlike SimX, Embodied Labs immerses The Sims. users in videos taken from real life, involving scenes and people captured on film. Instead of immersive medical simulation, these experiences instead focus on immersive medical storytelling. SCIENCE & TECH
14
BY Miles Guggenheim ILLUSTRATION Claribel Wu DESIGN Bethany Hung
Climate change is an event: a natural disaster in progress. Of all the unsettling facts packed into the problem, the worst is that each of us individually contributes to it in some relative way. As participants in the electric, hyper–frenetic global economy that cements this impending ecological disaster, we step into the role of “harmless torturers.” In a philosophical thought experiment posed by Derek Parfit, these “harmless torturers” are anything but harmless. The experiment goes something like this: a subject sits in an isolated chamber facing 100 observation towers. In each observation tower a random individual is asked to press a button. This single interaction delivers an inconsequentially small, electric shock to the subject. But when all 100 individuals in their respective towers press down at the same time, the combined magnitude of this unified action delivers excruciating pain to the subject. Connect this to the problem of climate change, and it’s fairly easy to see that every day, in the name of sustaining ourselves as individuals, we press a similar button. Even if we are conscious or righteous enough to press it softly, being members of a collective global economy, we are the sole source of the problem. If you extend the metaphor to consider who represents the “subject,” the idea is even more ethically perverse. When we really unpack who suffers from and who contributes to climate change, there is a clear inequality between the populations that produce the most carbon emissions and the populations who actually suffer from its effect. We can clearly implicate the greater apparatus which drives us to these decisions as morally unsound. But what should we say of the individual users existing within it? How much should we hold ourselves responsible for the climate crisis? +++ According to Nathaniel Rich in “Losing Earth,” an in-depth history of how the international community failed to cut carbon emissions in the late 1980s, the only thing that stood between the world and avoiding ecological disaster was “ourselves.” Unlike other stories grappling with the scope and complexity of our climate crisis, “Losing Earth,” which ran in New York Times Magazine this August, is designed to absorb its audience emotionally. Rich writes a complex history of science, ecology, and politics as a character-driven plot his readers can identify with. The article stresses its connection to the present. Paired with images of our permanently altered world— melting glaciers, flooded cities, algae-infested lakes— we see the damaged landscape of our present causally linked to the dramatic human narative unfolding on the page. This connection between past and present founds the controversial thesis of “Losing Earth,” which instead of implicating specific politicians, economic factors, and corporations, takes aim at at a transcendent human psychology that links past characters to present readers. The effect Rich wants to have is clear: he wants his audience to not repeat the shortsighted mistakes of his characters. This is the age-old task of tragedy: to absorb its audience and implicate them in a painfully affective moral lesson.
+++ But to what extent should we take the blame—how far should we go in identifying ourselves with the tragic characters in Rich’s story? Many authors and thinkers disagree with Rich’s characterization of a universal 15
CLIMATE
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Individual accountability and collective reconciliation human responsibility. Responding to “Losing Earth” days later in the Intercept, Naomi Klein made a valuable intervention, asking: how can we simply blame human nature when these monumental decisions took place over a decade known for the resolute expansion of global capitalism? Klein argues that in the year the environmental initiative failed, the United States was in the process of stringing the world together into a single, unregulated, laissez-faire market. “The Berlin Wall was about to fall,” she writes, “an event that would be successfully seized upon by right-wing ideologues in the US as proof of ‘the end of history’ and taken as license to export the Reagan-Thatcher recipe of privatization, deregulation, and austerity to every corner of the globe.” At the present moment, America’s ability to confront global warming is blocked by the interlocking interests of the political establishment and and its corporate allies. In “Capitalism Killed our Climate Moment, Not Human Nature,” Klein attacks the American government at large for protecting the global economy. And while the ideology of deregulation and the spread of the free market may have been invented by conservatives, many Democrats have gone on to implement these ideals. Bill Clinton, succeeding H.W. Bush, signed NAFTA into effect. +++ As a member of the American consumer force— someone who pushes the torture button every now and then when he needs to charge his computer, or drive to the supermarket—I decided to interview Kate Schapira, a professor and environmental activist at Brown University who gives climate anxiety counseling in public spaces across New England. Unsurprisingly, my interview quickly turned into a therapy session. Kate Schapira: So, let’s say that you are a person who recognizes the damage that climate change has done, is doing, will do. And you’re like: something wrong is happening. And when something wrong is happening, it’s also wrong to not try and to stop it. What do you do? The College Hill Independent: Me? Oh—oh, what, I— about this? Schapira: Let’s say you felt the throb that you’re talking about—of attention, and instead of it passing you lived in it. You were like, ok I’m feeling that feeling, I know that it means something; I’m going to try and live in it until it provokes me to do something. the Indy: For me it’s very small things—it’s like—ok— what’s the most sustainable decision.
are things that affect only you…. I think it has a lot to do with certain aspects of American mythology that you rise and fall on your own merits; that you are not imbedded in other systems; that your success or failure is yours alone. Schapira’s point is that, too often, people respond to climate change in a way that isolates them. The existential crisis of climate change reveals to people a similar system to the supposedly-harmless torture apparatus Derek Parfit describes. In a sudden anxious moment of lucidity, they see how the immorality of the big picture funnels down to a micro-scale for millions of individuals. They envision a complex web of systems, networks, and economies converging on them, and suddenly invest moral significance in recycling their plastic or purchasing a hybrid car. Such individual-oriented decisions, however, reinforce the greater economic apparatus that perpetuates climate change. This is action in the face of anxiety, but it is not honest action, it isn’t the desperate and immediate response an apocalyptic future should inspire. We learn to push the harmless torture button a little lighter, but in doing so, we forget to look up from our control panels. We lose the bigger picture and fail to confront it. We do math, establish ourselves as insignificant, and once again retreat into the micro-world of individualism. In this way, to read the word “ourselves” in Rich’s thesis is dangerous. The ethical imperative climate change demands should only be thought of in terms of mass, collective action. The sooner we abandon our weight as individuals, the sooner we may begin restructuring our psychologies and the systems and networks that organize us as an unsustainable collective. In spite of this, “Losing Earth” is still a valuable piece of writing, insofar as it elicits an emotional response in its audience. The way “Losing Earth” shows its audience a more accessible history is the way in which we should work to document the climate crisis. The fact that New York Times Magazine put forward a tragic novel disguised as history, not only reveals the controversy behind Rich’s work, but shows how desperately we need to emotionally attach ourselves to the climate crisis. When counseling, Kate asks people to really sit with their anxiety and hopelessness. Day to day, we replace emotional reflection with meaningless individual decisions. When we sit and let ourselves sustain our despair and anxiety, we move outside ourselves and see the bigger picture. Only then can we more rationally act on our emotions, moving to confront and heal a global collective that is beyond our ego. In the history of storytelling, catharsis has always served to do just this, and for that reason we need more tragic history. We need more articles like “Losing Earth.”
MILES GUGGENHEIM B’20 buries his climate angst Schapira: Right, you and a lot of other people. And that at the bottom of a clearly marked bin. is, I believe, not an accident. I think that it is useful, in the sense that it [making “sustainable” consumer decisions] keeps reminding you that you are part of a system of beings and that living systems, economic systems, all converge on you. And so, when you make a move of some sort it reverberates along the spider web, but there also is a very strong idea of individual action, success, and failure which is also isolating: that the only things that you can do 07 DEC 2018
APOCRYPHA BY Athena Zeros ILLUSTRATION Sandra Moore DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
the ground breaks too so please tell me my name even if my fullmouth stings of feathers the loudest thing the red entrance between heaven and these doctorwalls well hush blood and it yells on a paper table interrupting the world to shoot for her with some animal shriek we knew nothing once WHERE are youmother whose silence i christendbroke with my bolted infant shout
it rains outside.
newborn lightning blaspheming already fuckhim and hissoapmouth now dripping with histories spat over alive onto this his concrete mistake but her beautiful like birds but an uncaught skybaby fell from
my
your
blessing, what a blessing.
then day broke instead of us so why is it that I still ask his name every new morning limping on stolen ground punched the rain now he abstracts my hurt hip to night ills later will suck her fingers of some beautiful hands, I’ll use that word for you first, your beautiful as such is afterbirth the names got covered with the names of the ones before us like his and his naming his his and hers his breast then hers, then the mouth circling in the shape of a bird w here were youwash after off your hands free with water almost free until somewhere were you then the glass bottle, liquid stand in at the sink are you the poison in this bed too later or was it then a baby bottle, what chest then, was it a glass bottle, then the bird crashing through air, unwinged time, then the wet dirt knows I’m no angel but hope aheavydelusion and his hands on the back of the head, like oh god then the red on babytoes, then the unhabited devotion, then the dead rabbit, then the uninhabited body, almost left you all for air, then the rage, then the storm, then unpaid lightning, break the night’s upset, then scratched voices, why though then then bodies flown memories of power returned to water in the downpour, then old words, baedl wrong dawnpinked trees blooming winter just like the loudest unfolding of unmeaning like wingspells- words through a faulted sky- who knows through reedy throats or stems- saying hear me through to an newborn end what a blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, blessing, bless
THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT
LITERARY
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A Farewell: u up? we made some edits ermmm pregame i suppose A Beth Comery apostle, a Pawsoligarch nemesis, rising up before Uprise, patron saint of Patreon, EW. Yet alas, having no sections left to edit, and with all her friends moving west for Minnesota Public Radio, Erin tucks her rave kit into a tote and hits the road! idk let me think on it DGMW--I agree EW brings a warmth and radiance to this paper so foundational that even in times of great Indy toil, late into copy and deep in her abbreviation-laden, stream of consciousness endnotes. When the Indy feels impersonal, Erin is there, for a mid semester GCB, a Conmag lunch, or even just an assurance that, yes, your piece will be fine (except for that one time, of course, she stood up Alex in Berlin). Hmmmm hm hm hm In her absence, we have to ask, who will be the one person on the Indy who makes us actually feel welcome and valued? Whose edits will we anxiously read after finishing our own in the hope that she agreed? Who will keep guard over the Rock printers? And, most importantly, what’s that in her Tupperware?? oh riiiite , k UGH ok rant over
The Indy Tree
FRIDAY 12.7 In Defense of Community—PrYSM’s 17th Anniversary // Portuguese Holy Ghost Society (11 Ventura Street) // 7-11PM // Youth 12-17 $25, 18+ $35 The Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM) does crucial work in supporting the city’s Southeast Asian youth, as well as mobilizing for greater justice and protection for people of color, especially with their recent work in helping to pass a version of the Community Safety Act. The price for this fundraising birthday bash might look steep, but they absolutely could use your support. Viento de Agua: A Puerto Rican Music Performance // Hope Artiste Village (1005 Main Street, Pawtucket) // 8-11PM Viento de Agua’s version of the Afro-Puerto Rican bomba and plena dance music, with full brass and percussion sections, has been nominated for a Grammy and was once raved about in the New York Times. Come to Pawtucket on Friday and maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of the Grey Lady getting down! SATURDAY 12.8
t h e
Deck the Trunks with Food Truck Follies // Frerichs Farm (43 Kinnicutt Avenue, Warren) // 9AM-5:30PM “The activity involves the open trunk of a car (or back of a truck), displaying holiday lights and decorations,” which sounds like a tailgate with a seasonal spin and, if you want to make a wreath, “fragrant roping.” Barbara Frerichs has even made some selections for you to peruse in her Holiday House! This sounds way cuter than the last tailgate this List Writer went to, which included spraying champagne on top of a Zipcar. An Evening of Dark Arts (Featuring BLACK PYRAMID) // AS220 (115 Empire Street) // 4PM-1AM There’s such a lack of holiday cheer in the advertising for this event that it sort of makes us sad. Somebody should bring some eggnog, or give everyone a nice sweater as a cushion in the mosh pit. There’s a lot of great Scandinavian black metal, but do you know what else is Scandinavian? Hygge, the great Swedish art of coziness! SUNDAY 12.9 Chriskindlmarkt—Christmas Market // German American Cultural Society of RI // 12-5PM When this LW was growing up, his parents made him perform the grueling, traditionally German task of searching for a pickle hidden on the Xmas tree before he could receive any presents. The task was bizarre, mostly because no one in his family was German. But then he would find the pickle, discover that it was plastic, made for reuse, and thus essentially inedible. He would thus realize his parents’ true gift: learning how to live with disappointment! He has treasured this ever since. MONDAY 12.10 Just Another Magic Monday // Great Northern BBQ Co. (9 Parade Street) // 7-10PM Despite the fact that Great Northern BBQ has presented their upcoming Magic: the Gathering/bbq extravaganza as ‘just another magic monday,’ you really won’t want to miss out on this event. Expect a perfect mix of two highly acne-prone demographics: meat-lovers and gamers! TUESDAY 12.11
s i l t
Bummer Club RI // AS220 (115 Empire Street) // 9-10:30PM An open mic night for your sob stories, rants, and general drags. No need to be self-effacing about being a bummer either; this is for people who are genuinely interested in sharing the sadder stuff, even if the event seems like it has a sense of humor about it. Also: for all those who thought the metalheads were crying crocodile tears on Saturday! 2018 Senator Claiborne Pell Lecture on Arts & Humanities // Southside Cultural Center (393 Broad Street) // 5-7:30PM Join Mayor Elorza in celebration of former RI Senator Claiborne Pell, remembered for the crucial role she played in establishing the Federal Pell Grant subsidy, which is (in fact) named in her honor. The Pell Lecture is an annual community forum centered on how the Arts and Humanities can learn from Pell’s vision of an accessible American higher education system; this year’s lecture will feature reps from community arts organizations including New Urban Arts, RI Black Storytellers, the Steel Yard, and others. WEDNESDAY 12.12 Tethered: A Youth-Curated Gallery // 159 Sutton Street // 5-8PM Sponsored by Youth in Action—an organization which supports young people hardest hit by structural inequality, with the belief that these young people can best organize against it—this show is curated by young people to represent their connection to identity, place, and stories. We guarantee this will be better than 90 percent of the shows talkin’ bout our generation in NYC, where people are still, like, tapping into their inner childhoods by drawing Trump in Microsoft Paint. THURSDAY 12.13 Iran and the US: The Legacy of Intervention // 99 Morris Avenue // 7-8:30PM Recent discussions of US sanctions on Iran should be contextualized within a much longer American imperialist project in the country and region. This presentation by Brown PhD student (and graduate of the University of Tehran) Babak Hemmatian will likely be a helpful rejoinder to a lack of a long-view of history in how we talk about US foreign policy. Hosted by the Rhode Island Anti-War Committee.
s ay s
b y e!