Villain

BUZZSAW Catch Me If You Can November 2014

Videogame Griefing pg.14

Walter White Sucks pg.23

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Upfront

Glossing Over Prevention pg.9

Buzzsaw presents...

EDITORS’ COMMENT

The Villain Issue Welcome to our lair.

From the sunless depths of the BuzzCave, we are pleased to present the Villain Issue.

Whether shrouded in a cloak, or sitting behind a Congressional desk, villains have proven to be a consistent, if not unfortunate, staple of society.

We welcome you to the dark underbelly of our world. Try not to take a wrong turn as you meander down the winding road of evil, fear and denial. Come on in. Embrace the darkness.

In light of the recent beheadings by Islamist extremist group, ISIS, misinformation and fear mongering have taken hold of the mainstream media. This has rejuvenated fears among the American public that colored political discussions during the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of modern media seems to be feeding political stigmatization that builds support for U.S. military intervention abroad (Lies, Propaganda & Racism, pg. 6).

Battling orcs, exploring dungeons and deciphering puzzles is hard enough on your own. With a group of friends, character sheets and 20-sided die, it can feel impossible. Tabletop RPGs require the perfect group dynamic in order to have a successful campaign, and one bad apple can prove disastrous (Playing With Your Enemies, pg. 13).

Politicians are controversial figures, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is no exception. His anti-corruption commission is under federal investigation for allegations of corruption. This scandal invites criticism of Cuomo’s administration (Actions Speak Louder, Seesaw).

BUZZSAW News & Views Upfront Ministry of Cool Prose & Cons Sawdust Layout Art Website Seesaw Social Media

Copy Editors Production

Taylor Barker Jessica Corbett Katelyn Harrop Kellen Beck Robert S. Hummel Rachel Maus Chelsea Hartman Lizzie Cox David Owens Lexie Farabaugh Jennifer Jordon John Jacobson

Jodi Silberstein Alexa Salvato Aidan Quigley Michael Tkaczevski

Advisor Jeff Cohen

Founders Abby Bertumen Kelly Burdick Bryan Chambala Sam Costello Thom Denick Cole Louison James Sigman

Buzzsaw is published with support from Generation Progress / Center for American Progress (online at GenProgress.org).

Buzzsaw is also funded by the Ithaca College Student Government Association and the Park School of Communications.

Vanguard Printing is our press. (Ithaca, N.Y.)

BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

Buzzsaw uses student-generated art and photography and royalty-free images.

Section dividers and Table of Contents photography by Mariah B. Boucher.

Mariah Boucher is a sophomore film, photography, and visual arts major. She often incorporates her own drawings into her work and has recently become interested in photographing architecture and landscapes. Boucher has done photography for Operation Military Camp and Ithaca College’s African Student Association, of which she is actively involved.

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Views expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editorial staff or of Ithaca College.

Feedback and contributions should be sent to buzzsawmag@gmail.com.

Front and back cover and center spread art by Lizzie Cox

Write Us Our magazine exists to inspire thoughtful debate and open up the channels through which information is shared. Your comments and feedback are all a part of this process. Reach the editors by email at: buzzsawmag@gmail.com

Table of Contents Seesaw ..........................................................4 Print media is dead, check out multimedia on the web.

Upfront .......................................................5 Selected dis-education of the month.

Ministry.of.Cool ........................................12 Arts, entertainment and other things cooler than us.

Prose & Cons ..............................................16 Short fiction, personal essay and other assorted lies.

Sawdust .......................................................20 Threatening the magazine’s credibility since 1856.

BUZZSAW Upfront

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Everyday Atrocities Great people don’t always do great things. Watch these reenactments of the mundane villainous acts that Ithaca College students commit.

www.buzzsawmag.org/seesaw/

Actions Speak Louder Politicians make promises. Politicians break promises. Governor Andrew Cuomo has taken broken promises to a new level. Only in New York State can a governor say he will clean up political corruption and then come under federal investigation because of corruption in his anti-corruption commission. Welcome to New York politics.

Mythological Villains Chimera A beast with the heads of a lion, goat and serpent that can breathe fire.

BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

buzzcuts

Cerberus A three-headed dog with a serpent tail who guards the gates of Hades.

Lernaean Hydra A creature with 100 serpent heads and tails who guards the subterranean passage to Hades.

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Upfront

UPFRONT. UPFRONT. UPFRON

Selected dis-education of the month.

Lies, Propaganda & Racism

Building support for war by villainizing Muslims

Max Ocean, Staff Writer

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he Rise of ISIS (also known as The Islamic State or ISIL) shocked America this summer as the group quickly took charge of vast swathes of Iraq, then Syria. An American public that just over a year ago had staunchly stood against attacking Syria quickly found a desire for military conflict in that country — which, in the plainly astute observation of journalist Glenn Greenwald became “the 7th predominantly Muslim country bombed by 2009 Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama” — as well as Iraq itself, the country they’d spent the last decade wanting to be out of.

This was all in the name of national security — an oft-misused justification that the American public had supposedly become quite savvy to — all supported by a multi-pronged media blitz based on coordinated leaks from unnamed government officials and the contents of ISIS’s own propaganda videos; and all producing a single, predictable result consistent with the United States’ history: an irrational fear of an attack on American soil accompanied by a renewed frenzy of Islamophobia.

BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

The beheadings: a catalyst for shifting public opinion According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from September, a staggering 94 percent of Americans said they had heard about the beheadings of American journalists by ISIS militants, a higher number than had heard of any news story in the previous five years. The same poll found 47 percent of Americans believed the U.S. to be less safe than before 9/11.

While U.S. media have made such a show of ISIS’s own propaganda videos (and how they exemplify a tech knowhow that far outpaces other terrorist organizations in both its sophistication and understanding of Western sensibilities) the very fact that such an overwhelming majority of Americans had heard of the beheadings says something about the manner in which those videos, and ISIS’s media postings more

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generally, were disseminated by the press.

Phyllis Bennis is a fellow at the independent Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Institute for Policy Studies whose expertise primarily lies in issues surrounding U.S. policy in the Middle East. The American news media, Bennis said, guided by the Pentagon and the White House, put an inordinate amount of emphasis on “particular atrocities, as if they were somehow different and more atrocious than other atrocities that have been going on for years, but not necessarily against Americans.”

The beheadings were unquestionably presented as a level of barbarism requiring outside intervention, despite the fact that they’re a common occurrence in much of the world, by both governments and rebel groups.

“Beheadings are unfortunately not that rare,” Bennis said. “Saudi Arabia uses it against nonviolent drug criminals,” and beheaded 19 people between the dates of August 4 and 26 alone. Additionally, the Free Syrian Army — the so-called “moderate rebels” that Sen. John McCain and others have been pushing for the U.S. to support since even before the Syrian chemical weapons allegations emerged — beheaded six opposition fighters “just days after the first U.S. journalist was killed.”

But in a nutshell, the problems with the media presentation of ISIS have more to do with framing issues in a fantasy context that then justifies a war morally than with convincing the public that military involvement will lead to increased security for the United States.

“The way the media depicted the killing” of the first two American journalists, Bennis said, was “as something completely different, completely unique in the context of the violence raging across the Middle East. So the message that emerges is: one, only ISIS is doing this; and two, only Americans are the victims of this. That can morph dangerously quickly into: ‘therefore we have to go to war against ISIS.’ The problem is none of those [earlier] assumptions are true; it isn’t unique to ISIS, and the victims are far more often

not Americans.”

The result of this framing has been a rapid escalation in public support for the U.S.’s continued involvement in the region, with the latest Pew Research survey showing that 57 percent of Americans support U.S. action against ISIS and 73 percent of Americans think the U.S. isn’t doing enough.

Khorasan: the ‘worse-than-ISIS’ threat Once a clear fear of ISIS had already been established, the possible existence of a worse threat became a shockingly easy myth to spread — something that happened in mid-September.

Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain of the Intercept described the media blitz in their exposé of Khorasan: “The unveiling of this new group was performed in a September 13 article by the Associated Press, who cited unnamed U.S. officials to warn of this new shadowy, worse-than-ISIS terror group.” CBS, The New York Times and other outlets of supposed repute all published similar stories in the following days, with the Times essentially transcribing the administration talking point that the until-then unheard of Khorasan group was “the most intent on hitting the United States or its installations overseas.”

While, as Greenwald and Hussain noted, “seemingly out of nowhere, a new terror group was created in media lore,” there was decidedly less notice of the story’s imperfections that began to come out, among others the finding that locals in the area had never even heard of a group called Khorasan.

An NPR Morning Edition story on Oct. 31 did address the lack of followthrough concerning the Khorasan strikes, and the fact that six weeks later there is “still no official assessment of whether the strike was a success,” but it was conspicuous in its mainstream isolation.

“We don’t hear the usual triumphalism,” Bennis said. “We don’t hear anything. You simply no longer hear of the group called Khorasan.”

Racism: a well-worn tactic of war

Fitting a historical blueprint

that take years to kind of germinate and take hold and become majority opinion can be reversed very quickly.”

Norman Solomon agrees, noting the widespread opposition to bombing Syria that existed the summer of 2013.

“When it gets reframed and the bloody shirt is waved, the beheadings happened” Solomon said, “things can drift pretty drastically, and they have.” Solomon said he sees the spin we’ve received in recent months as fitting into a much longer pattern of deception, which he details in his book, that’s really come into being since World War II. “Each historical incident [of lies being used to justify another U.S. war] is portrayed as an anomaly,” Solomon said — something he refers to as “the repetition compulsion disorder.” “It’s the repetition of themes or the lack of repetition of themes that has the most impact over time,” Solomon said. “Ultimately, mass media, if they’re critical of their own role, it’s way after the fact.”

Given the pattern, however, it is highly probable that the American public will once again become dissatisfied with the action it once supported, and will once again be characterized as ‘war-weary,’ at least providing the conflict is sustained and there’s no clear attainable triumph.

And those like Bennis, Murphy and Solomon have no real option other than continuing to put their arguments forward and waiting for public opinion to undergo its slow pendulum shift back to dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy.

“The war has to last long enough,” Solomon said. “If it’s too short or if the U.S. is perceived [to be winning] it’s very tough to turn public opinion — and the political opportunists who run the government — around.” _____________________________________ Max Ocean is a senior journalism major who doesn’t buy into the mainstream media’s bullshit. Email him at mocean1@ithaca.edu.

There’s one overarching takeaway from this summer’s successful warmongering, Bennis said.

“What we’ve seen is that public opinion is very fragile,” she said. “Ideas

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Upfront

Jim Murphy, a Vietnam veteran and Ithaca-area resident who has been a ceaseless advocate for social justice since his time in the service, said he was drilled with a simplistic and racist ideology from his first moments of military service.

“They weren’t Vietnamese people when I went through basic training,” Murphy said. “They were ‘gooks.’”

These days, Bennis said, Islamophobia had greatly increased both domestically and internationally.

“Islamophobia plays a huge role in making it easier for people to see things, for example, like the beheadings [as] something done to white Americans by Muslims. That becomes the frame; that becomes the basis of understanding,” Bennis said. “Therefore you have to be very careful about any Muslim, because any of them might do that.”

For Murphy, it took some close personal connections to fully reverse the mindset he’d been encouraged to use by his superiors.

“I advised Vietnamese marines and Army on communications and I realized they were people, and they were just like me –– different language, different customs, but they were just like me,” Murphy said. And Murphy doesn’t see the tactic of racializing the enemy as an anomaly.

“Basic training, Iraq and Afghanistan: Raghead, Towelhead, Sandnigger, Hajji” were the four terms used, Murphy said. “War is racism. War is the ultimate racism.”

Bennis agreed with Murphy’s perspective but offered a deeper analysis that goes back even earlier than Vietnam.

“You can go back to World War II,” she said, “when the Japanese enemy” was called racist names, but “the Germans were not — the Germans were just the enemy. They were white, they were European, so they were not subjected to the same kind of racialized attacks.”

While the four slurs mentioned by Murphy as having been used in Iraq and Afghanistan may not have been

very visible within U.S. society as a whole over the last 13 years, the mentality with which U.S. soldiers are encouraged to view their enemy abroad has without a doubt come home to roost. As John Tures, political science professor at LaGrange College, noted in a piece at The Huffington Post in September, back in March of 2002, in all the post-9/11 fervor, only 25 percent of Americans believed that followers of Islam were directly incited to enact extreme violence on others by their faith. During the Iraq War, that number rose. It subsided a bit after the withdrawal of U.S. troops, to 38 percent in February 2014, but by September of this year that number was up to 50 percent.

Since 9/11, the acceptance of this viewpoint that Islam directly urges its practitioners to commit violent acts — particularly on Westerners and/or Americans — has become so deeply entrenched within American society that it is no longer a particularly radical viewpoint.

In recent months, HBO’s Bill Maher — who in the lead-up to the Iraq War came under fire for controversial comments surrounding his critique of President George W. Bush’s statement that the terrorists had committed a cowardly act — has been one example of a voice perceived by many as rational giving legitimacy to this simplistic viewpoint that ignores the role of the U.S. in the region over the last 50 years or more.

Maher’s show was cancelled following those controversial comments 13 years ago, and “now he’s spewing this stuff himself,” media critic Norm Solomon said. Solomon is the author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death and is featured in a documentary of the same name. “Islamophobia has become so much more cronic now,” Solomon said.

Exploring Terrorism

U.S. foreign policy and terminology manipulation

Jake Ryan, Staff Writer

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BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

hy do so many Americans fear terrorism?

Many political experts argue it typically derives from fear of

the unknown.

The root of the word terrorism is taken from a Latin term that means, “fear.”

However, the term achieved its claim to fame later, when it was widely used to describe the bloody reign of French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre as part of the French government. It is from these roots that we find today’s use of “terrorism” — to describe violent acts against non-combatants with the explicit purpose of instilling fear.

The exact motivations are hard to pin down. Professor Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University, an expert on terrorism, said he typically prescribes to the idea that terrorists perform acts in the pursuit of power.

“Terrorism, in the most widely accepted contemporary usage of the term, is fundamentally and inherently political,” Hoffman said in his book Inside Terrorism. “It is also ineluctably about power: the pursuit of power, the acquisition of power, and the use of power to achieve political change.”

Hoffman also said terrorism, “is a word with intrinsically negative connotations that is generally applied to one’s enemies and opponents, or to those with whom one disagrees and would otherwise prefer to ignore.”

Massachusetts University Professor John Horgan, with expertise in terrorism and terrorist behavior, supports a different view on the stimuli of potential terrorists. “We don’t know, with evidence, why people become involved in terrorism and we are programmed to thinking there’s one specific reason or one main reason people become involved,” Horgan said. “There isn’t.”

In the article “What Terrorists Want” in The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann said that terrorists are not purely motivated by what they believe is their religious duty, but instead an aspiration to rid their homeland of U.S. military forces. He said the militant groups see U.S. forces as an invasive presence.

Order is no longer established through

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the ideas of locals, but influenced by the hand of western civilization.

Terror groups like al-Qaida came as a response to American presence in the Middle East during the Soviet War in Afghanistan. With the conclusion of World War II, the U.S. policy makers were determined to keep American interests at the forefront of global relations.

John Cooley, a former reporter for ABC, concluded in his novel, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, that one of the greatest driving factors for U.S. foreign policy was, and is, a reliable source of petroleum. The United States’ supply of oil before World War II was reliant on fostering new influence in Europe.

Eisenhower saw that U.S. hunger for oil would only continue to grow, and, should there be another war in the future, control of the world’s oil supply could guarantee victory.

Cooley claims analysts came to the conclusion that the greatest supply of oil could be found in the Middle East, or more specifically, the country currently known as Saudi Arabia. In order to implement control in the area, the U.S. needed to position supporting leaders in power. According to Michael Klare’s article “The Geopolitics of War” published by The Nation, with this end in mind, the U.S. launched covert support for militant groups in the area. Klare writes that the U.S. military agreed to arm and train these militants with their promise of access to oilfields.

However, access to oil was not enough for the U.S., which understood that unrest in the Middle East represented a threat to the new partnership between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

The CIA chose to fight fire with fire.

Money, troops and more arms were provided to the Saudis as a means of internal security. External security was achieved through further armament of Islamic extremist groups who fought surrounding moderate states.

Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, in his Wall Street Journal article “Undressing the Terror Threat,” discusses the idea that current U.S. policy on terrorism

is draining resources in an attempt to prevent inevitable failure. Campos compares U.S. policy toward terrorism to a hypothetical game of basketball with LeBron James. Campos writes: “The world’s greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball.”

According to Campos, “The first two rules of Terrorball are: one, the game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and two, if terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.”

Society’s incomplete understanding of the complexities of terrorism can be credited to a variety of domestic and international framing tactics. In Klare’s article, he writes that perceptions of terrorisms have been largely shaped by political framing, including, “a contest between Western liberalism and Eastern fanaticism, as suggested by many pundits in the United States; as a struggle between the defenders and the enemies of authentic Islam, as suggested by many in the Muslim world; and as a predictable backlash against American villainy abroad, as suggested by some on the left.” However, as Klare goes on to explain, terrorism cannot be limited by political theory.

In all aspects, terrorism is a product of contention and conflict. “These cultural and political analyses obscure a fundamental reality: that this war, like most of the wars that preceded it, is firmly rooted in geopolitical competition,” Klare said. _____________________________________ Jake Ryan is a junior history major who dabbles in political theory. Email him at jryan3@ithaca.edu.

Painting Over the Big Picture

Drug detecting nail polish glosses over prevention

Sage Daugherty, Contributing Writer

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ing problem of sexual assault on college campuses — the only thing that will do that, Heldman said, is if campus cultures shift.

“Fancy rape prevention tools like drugdetecting nail polish, consent apps, and anti-rape underwear focus time, money, and attention on the problem in an ineffective way,” she said. “Not only do these products place the responsibility for preventing this crime on the victims, these gadgets do not effectively address the larger problem of rape culture.”

Tracey E. Vitchers, chair of the Board for Students Active For Ending Rape, a national activism organization, said she thinks the nail polish is well intended but misguided.

“They are basically asking women to continue policing themselves and their surroundings in an effort to prevent themselves from being sexually assaulted, when really we need to be talking to young men about what they can do to prevent sexual assault, either as a bystander or by recognizing that their own behavior in some cases might be predatory or bordering on becoming an act of sexual assault,” Vitchers said.

Rachel Buckner, a senior at Occidental College, said she was excited about the nail polish and its ability to detect roofies, but also thought the polish is just a quick fix and doesn’t tackle systemic violence against women.

“It reinforces a negative conception of what it means to protect and … it places restrictions on women — make sure you put your nail in this drink, make sure you don’t wear this, make sure you walk home with someone else. It doesn’t look at the systemic issues,” Buckner said.

Outside of the three common drugs found in many sexual assault cases, other drugs like Ecstasy (MDMA) Valium and Ativan are also used in drug facilitated sexual assaults. Vitchers said the nail polish simply couldn’t cover the full spectrum of drugs that can be mixed with alcohol.

Heldman said students, and people in general, need to be educated about sexual assault and try to combat misconceptions of the crime.

“We live in a society where rape is not considered a “real crime” by many people, where rape survivors are stigma-

tized,” Heldman said.

In order to try and prevent sexual assault on college campuses, more bystander intervention and education is needed, Buckner said.

“We need to have programs and have trainings that are systemically and institutionally supported,” Buckner said.

“It’s [up to] women and men to look out for the signs. Most people don’t know about the strategies that rapists use in order to target people, so I think there needs to be better trainings and better institutional support to help produce understanding and give people signs on what these predators do in certain situations.”

Data from a 2007 study for the National Institute of Justice on drug-facilitated, incapacitated and forcible rape showed that only 0.6 percent of female undergraduate students were sexually assaulted while incapacitated by the use of date rape drugs. Vitchers said that the majority of sexual assault on college campuses involves large quantities of alcohol without the use of date rape drugs.

“That’s part of the important conversation that we should be having is that young men are using alcohol as a way to incapacitate young women and harm them,” she said.

Vitchers compared the nail polish’s role in trying to prevent sexual assault to putting a Band-Aid over a bullet wound, and said the issue of sexual assault on college campuses simply isn’t going to be addressed by young women wearing nail polish.

“Sexual assault is pervasive across all cultures [and] on all college campuses,” she said. “If we really want to stop sexual assault, then we need to start having a frank conversation about why it’s happening, who’s perpetrating it, and what kind of educational information we need to be equipping students with to protect themselves and to protect each other.” _______________________________________ Sage Daugherty is a junior journalism major who has made her minor in women’s and gender studies into a lifestyle.

You can contact her at sdaughe1@ithaca. edu.

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Upfront

long with anti-rape underwear, mace and rape whistles, women everywhere now have a new weapon in their sexual assault prevention arsenals — nail polish that can detect roofies.

Developed by four undergraduate students at North Carolina State University, the product, Undercover Colors, is a nail polish that changes colors when it comes in contact with common date rape drugs like Rohypnol, Xanax and GHB. According to the company’s Facebook page, the students, Ankesh Madan, Stephen Grey, Tasso Von Windheim and Tyler Confrey-Maloney, market themselves as “the first fashion company empowering women to prevent sexual assault.”

The company is currently raising money to refine its prototype and may start a Kickstarter campaign in the near future.

According to a statement on their Facebook page, the goal of Undercover Colors is to “invent technologies that empower women to protect themselves from this heinous and quietly pervasive crime.”

The company also said they hope to make potential perpetrators afraid to spike someone’s drink because of a risk of being caught.

In an interview with Higher Education Works, co-founder Ankesh Madan said the group came up with the idea because they all had known someone who had been sexually assaulted.

“As we were thinking about big problems in our society, the topic of drugfacilitated sexual assault came up,” Madan said. “We wanted to focus on preventive solutions, especially those that could be integrated into products that women already use.”

Although the product has been praised for its efforts to combat sexual assault, many believe that Undercover Colors fails to address the systemic and institutionalized issues of rape culture and violence against women.

Caroline Heldman, associate professor of politics at Occidental College, said the nail polish will not solve the grow-

Othering Development

Western savior complex as modern imperialism

Charlotte Robertson, Contributing Writer

BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

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housands of college students go abroad each year with the hopes of making a difference in underdeveloped countries.

They volunteer in schools, orphanages and health centers, working within foreign communities to try to better societal conditions. But what happens once they leave? What does it really mean to be a Westerner abroad?

The Western savior complex follows the assumption that the Western world knows how to best solve the problems of developing nations, or “third world countries,” Kathryn Mathers, a visiting assistant professor of global development at Duke University, said in her article “Why Won’t White Savior Complex Go Away” published on akepart.com.

The most intrinsic quality of the western savior complex, Mathers said, is the concept that Westerners are the solution to foreign problems, portraying the developing world as helpless.

Naeem Inayatullah, Department of Politics chair and professor at Ithaca College, specializes in international relations theory and global political economy/development studies. Inayatullah said the use of Western aid abroad is less of a solution than a fundamental flaw in the way Westerners perceive their own accountability.

“Providing international aid inherently assumes that you are not part of the problem,” Inayatullah said. “However, usually the Western world is part of the developing world’s problems; it’s contradictory.”

This damaging relationship between the Western world and developing nations is not new. It dates back to colonialism in the 15th century, Inayatullah said. Systematic oppression can be traced throughout history, as the Western world, the white world and the Christian world have forced other cultures to assimilate to their belief systems and values.

Inayatullah said he believes the way Western society structures its language regarding the international community has come to frame the Western world as superior. “Developed” versus “developing” or “underdeveloped;” “third world” versus “first world.” This terminology suggests dominance: That places such as the United States and Europe are doing development “right,” while much of the rest of the world is doing it “wrong.”

Allison Irby is the founder of Globally Grounded. Irby has also worked with the

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U.S. Department of State for the past six years on professional development projects. Western society has decided how the developing world should prosper, Irby said, without much regard to what a community might truly need.

“There has been a strong presence of us going in saying that we have the answers.

The white man is coming on a white horse to save the day and our way is the right way.

The way to financial success,” Irby said.

“We have decided that it’s an accurate assumption that for other countries to move forward, they need to be doing what we’ve been doing.”

History implies that what is now referred to as the “developing world” was once a prospering society, thrown into poverty through colonialist rule, Inayatullah said.

“The third world didn’t always exist,” he said. “Prior to the British invasion of India, it was a very capable society. However, over the next 200 to 300 years after the invasion, India turned into this underdeveloped society due to the social, economical and political policies put in place by the British.”

However, Inayatullah said he believes Western society has created a narrative that allows for portrayal not as the victim, but rather as the hero.

“This history of the harm of colonization is available to people in the West,” Inayatullah said, “but it’s not a history that they are happy about reading because it suggests that these attitudes of superiority and inferiority are actually constructed, that they are the functions of political economy.”

This privileged shaping of history has continued, according to the findings of Irby.

In 2007, Irby conducted research, including interviewing 100 people throughout the U.S., regarding why people from the U.S. don’t travel to Sub-Saharan Africa.

“I asked people what the first word was that came to mind when they thought of Africa. The most positive word was probably ‘safari,’” Irby said. “More common were words like death, AIDS, dirty and other words with negative connotations.”

Irby said this image of impoverished Africa is largely tied to Western media’s portrayal of the continent. She said she hopes to counteract this perception through her company Globally Grounded, an organization whose mission is to diversify global citizenship by engaging underrepresented young adults and mentors in cross-cultural living opportunities, and by exploring

countries that are less commonly visited by Westerners.

“The media is still showing commercials with children from Africa asking for 20 cents to support them a day, that they need handouts or they won’t be successful,” Irby said. “They don’t show what is beautiful about Africa. There are very few countries in Africa that are celebrated that aren’t stereotypes.”

Inayatullah said he thinks this misrepresentation of different societies allows for Western civilization to separate themselves from the developing world, further allowing Western culture and practices to be seen as better than the rest of the international community.

“Framing allows us to think of ourselves as almost a superior species. It allows us to ‘other’ them, and to not understand the process in which we are ‘othering,’” Inayatullah said. “This new age colonization is the first form of colonization based on helping others. In a way we are saying ‘We are going to take everything that you have, but this is for your own good; we are going to teach you to be civilized.’”

This framing can be seen in how American media continually bombards viewers with images of the developing world characterized by malnourished children, disease-ridden communities and war-ravaged villages. Often, these images of desolation include a white savior playing as the lead role. This savior character can be found in acclaimed books, such as Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson, and even in fictional movies, such as Avatar, where main character Jake Sully saves the Na’vi people.

Today, critics of Western development strategy believe that nonprofits, government agencies, politicians, celebrities and now even college students are all continuing to play the role of white savior to the international community.

Pippa Biddle is one such critic of development practices. Last year Biddle wrote “The Problem With Little White Girls, Boys and Volunteerism,” a Huffington Post blog that went viral across online international development forums. Biddle traveled extensively as a Youth Leadership Fellow for the Jane Goodall Institute.

Biddle talked about her own experiences as a voluntourist — a term commonly used to describe an international volunteer — including her first trip to Tanzania, where she and her classmates attempted to build a

Image by Adriana Del Grosso

while our assumed knowledge tells us to help? Though travelers may not know much about the countries they are going to, professionals like Irby and Inyatalluah believe that

Westerners have been bred through media messages and political policy to think that the privileged education and resources the western world holds has given the West a responsibility to “save” the rest of the world.

Robin Pendoley is the founder and CEO of Thinking Beyond Borders, a global gap year program that takes students to the developing world, while studying issues of social injustice.

Pendoley said he believes that Western new-age colonialism might not imply bad intent on behalf of American and European society and that, often, foreign aid is spurred by good intentions. However, Pendoley said a lack of understanding of culture and what a society actually needs may often make aid less effective.

“If colonialism implies malicious intent, the picture becomes murky,” Pendoley said.

“My belief is that the industries and trade practices that result in such systems often include those with positive social intent and those who participate in the system without truly understanding how it works or the impact they are having.”

With Thinking Beyond Borders, Pendoley said he hopes to create a powerful space for learning and growth that challenges and supports students while asking them to move beyond good intentions towards truly humanizing work.

Editorial note: The writer of this piece, Charlotte Robertson, participated in a 2013-2014 Thinking Beyond Borders Global Gap Year program in Inda, South Africa, Thailand, Cambodia, Ecuador and Peru.

11

Upfront

schoolhouse.

However, the infrastructure of the school was built so poorly that each night local men had to take it down and rebuild it.

“There are two motivations that are mixed together in aid work,” Inayatullah said. “On the one hand you have the desire to help and the other hand the desire to know.

These motives often are together, while they should be separate.”

Inayatullah has formed his own theory on what he refers to as “helper’s superiority assumptions.” This frame of mind assumes Westerners can help, that their experiences are of greater knowledge, greater wisdom or greater “something,” than that of those they are trying to help in the developing world.

“This is the belief that Westerners are not part of the problems of people abroad,” Inayatullah said. “It allows voluntourists and aid workers to feel like they know what’s best for others and that they are not part of the problem, but part of the solution.”

However, there is a second part to the theory, a travel hypothesis stating that young people travel because they feel small in the world. They travel because they don’t know how they fit in the world as a whole.

Travel theory is positive, an attempt to locate oneself. It’s about one’s own humility.

However, the two parts are contradictory.

How do we travel because we don’t know and volunteer because we do? How does our lack of knowledge entice us to explore,

“The development community is largely governed by a culture assuming good intentions are needed to create good outcomes.

History has proven this wrong many times,” Pendoley said. “Good intentions and technical skills must be matched with highly developed capacities for empathy, humble learning and critical consciousness of self if we expect development professionals to succeed.”

Good intentions, however, do not always lead to a positive impact in the developing world. American aid work and voluntourism are often criticized for their inability to involve people from the receiving community.

Biddle said she believed it would have been more economically efficient and more timely if the volunteer group she was working with had employed local people to construct the school.

“When the U.S. sends food abroad, it doesn’t teach people abroad necessary agricultural skills. It’s like the quote ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,’” Irby said. “When voluntourists help at schools abroad for a month, they often hope that there will be somebody to pick up where they left off; it is inconsistent and unsustainable.”

These short-term commitments by foreign volunteers are what Irby said she believes to be the major problem facing international development.

“A few months is not enough to engage a community or to form relationships in a way where a community will trust you or believe you,” Irby said. “There’s a reciprocity piece missing with voluntourism.”

It’s this reciprocity that seems to be so often ignored in Western interactions with the developing world. Though voluntourists and international aid organizations create a narrative of giving, the embodiment of the Western savior complex begs the questions, “What is the West truly giving?” and, perhaps more importantly, “Who is actually receiving?” _____________________________________ Charlotte Robertson is a freshman integrated marketing communications major who can be regularly found crashing globalization classes in the politics department. You can contact her at crobertson@ithaca.edu.

OL. MINISTRYofCOOL. MI BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

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Arts, entertainment and other things cooler than us.

Playing With Your Enemies

The intricate relationships in tabletop RPGs

By Will Uhl, Staff Writer

I

n my first flirtation with tabletop role-playing games, specifically 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I didn’t have to be some gallant hero or mustachetwirling villain — I could be whoever I wanted and do whatever I wanted! …

Right?

Characters Are Not Made in a Vacuum Our first meeting was for character creation, and my high school-aged brain was buzzing with excitement.

I had pre-planned my character: Nikolas Wright, the dwarven bard.

He was hedonistic, self-centered and painfully charismatic. Visions of lutestrumming and loot-pocketing danced in my head. I worked closely with the game master (GM), the storyteller behind the campaign, to ensure that I started with a garish, poofy outfit and a gold-decorated lute. I eagerly watched the others as they puzzled their characters out — a druid who spent most of his life as a hermit, a shy cleric and a rogue elven assassin who fit the alignment “chaotic evil” to a T. At the time, I was naively fine with all of this. Looking back, blaring alarms should have been going off. None of us had talked to each other about our character ideas, and it showed. How the hell was our party going to stand each other, much less stick together?

When our edgy-grimdark rogue wasn’t brooding in a corner, he’d probably be trying to steal candy from a baby — something literally everybody else in the group was opposed to. Even Nikolas, the greedy fatso he was, had a few principles. If we’d communicated as a group and thought about how our characters would interact, we might have had a scrap of cohesion, but at that point, it was up to the GM to keep us together.

Know thy GM

Actions Have Consequences Our characters were unceremoniously plopped down in a medieval city’s outskirts, a few feet outside a rather large business building. As the rest of the party hemmed and hawed about whether to enter or not, our rogue decided to climb the building.

“What? Climb the building?” “Yeah, I want to climb the building.” “W-why?” “’Cause I wanna.”

Begrudgingly, the GM rolled the dice, and the rogue managed to scale the building, which had a hatch at the top. As he dropped down, making some errant comment about “hoping it’s a brothel,” the rest of us walked through the doors into a waiting room. As the rogue fell in through a hatch in the ceiling, we found out that it was something of an open mercenary’s guild. In other words, it was a place where people could go to be told to do adventure-y things for money. The rogue immediately took out a dagger and tried to stick up the receptionist, who then transformed into a firebreathing demon and threatened to roast him alive. As we feigned dissociation, he put the knife away and begrudgingly accepted the party’s first hamfisted mission.

In improv, Never Say No As we set off to stop some nondescript evildoers, we chartered a boat to take us downstream to our destination. The GM made some offhanded comment about the helmsman’s unmoving stare forward, which provoked the interest of our henceforth-silent druid.

“I go up to the helmsman and ask him what his name is.” Behind his barricade of rulebooks and papers, everyone could see the GM freeze in panic. Pupils dilated, he stuttered for a few seconds. “M-my name is... Tellme.”

The table burst into laughter, except

for the druid, who continued. “Why did you become a helmsman, Tellme?”

This conversation continued for roughly half an hour and continued until the end of the session. Even if Tellme was never supposed to be anything more than scenery, quick thinking and willingness to deviate from the plan turned Tellme into one of the group’s favorite characters.

Fun Trumps Rules As we approached the generic bad guy camp, we prepared for battle. Our rogue drew his shurikens, our druid and cleric prepared their magic and I had a little chat with the GM. As we decided how we’d take turns in battle, I started furiously scribbling on a piece of paper under the table. Things began predictably: Our druid transformed into a bear, our cleric cast protective spells and our rogue tried to throw his shurikens as fast as his wiry wrists would let him. On the off chance one would hit, it would be about as damaging as wet bread.

My turn rolled around, and I announced I intended to attack with the spell Vicious Mockery, targeted on the same enemy the rogue failed to hurt. I turned to the GM and nodded, and he nodded back. At that, I produced a slip of paper and read aloud: “There once was an orc who was dumb. He was ugly and smelled of cheap rum. So disgusting and fat! It was so bad that You could conflate his face and his bum!”

It nearly doubled the damage of the spell and ended up killing him in one hit. Even though it was nowhere in the rules, the GM knew it would be fun to let me make up limericks to enhance the spell’s power. Because of that, I was able to emasculate the rogue and help the party significantly. _____________________________________ Will Uhl is a sophomore journalism major who always allocates his skill points into lute playing. Email him at wuhl1@ithaca.edu.

13

Ministry of Cool

It’s not necessarily bad to throw a handful of disparate characters at the GM with the expectation they’ll keep the players working together via narrative intrigue. Expecting that of a

first-timer, though, was not realistic.

As we were dropped into our first session, we were tied together by a tacit sense of “please don’t split up, guys” and mutual inexperience.

Misogynists, Trolls and Troublemakers

Rampant harassment creates a hostile videogame environment

By Evan Lauterborn, Contributing Writer

BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

F

or as long as multiplayer gaming has been around, there have always been 14-year-olds saying they fornicate with mothers, trolls shooting teammates and “griefers” destroying hours of hard work. These “villains” of online gaming take pleasure in making virtual lives hell, and are an unfortunate yet omnipresent force within the realm of today’s gaming scene.

Female gamers have been a topic of much-heated debate among many in the YouTube comment sections but have yet to be taken seriously by these groups of people. There are millions of girls logging on to games with multiplayer chat and being relentlessly harassed by the predominantly male population of online gaming. The privilege of anonymity is wasted on these vile, testosterone-fueled male gamers who use both voice and text chat to verbally and sexually harass females in the virtual world — largely due to their gender. In an interview with NPR about the subject, deputy editor of digital operations at The New York Times Amy O’Leary stated, “Some women either don’t use voice chat altogether and miss out on those features of gaming, or they find that these communities can be too hostile for them, and they stop playing in those communities altogether.”

This online female harassment has escalated to such a high degree that proud girl gamer Jenny Haniver felt obligated to start a website called notinthekitchenanymore.com where she posts obscene audio recordings directed at her during her online experiences.

Unsurprisingly, an overwhelming majority of her posts feature RMPs (random male players) making lewd sexual remarks and comments on the inadequacies of females as both gamers and people. A similar website called fatuglyorslutty. com posts user-submitted screenshots of the same behavior from videogames of all types.

The most recent example of rampant sexism and harassment from the “hardcore” gaming community came in the form of the relatively new Gamergate controversy. This internet-

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based struggle between pro-female/ feminist members of the gaming community and a conglomerate of angry misogynists, trolls and general internet troublemakers (as well as some well-meaning members who want to improve general journalism ethics) has been steadily escalating since August. The scandal started when the vengeful ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, developer of the interactive art game Depression Quest, accused her of sleeping with industry journalists in order to garner press coverage.

Opponents of social justice of all manners from sites such as Reddit, 4chan, 9gag and Twitter took up virtual arms against this supposed breach of ethics within their beloved industry. In response to the accusations, these malicious hackers proceeded to post Quinn’s personal information, including nude photos, onto their favorite internet forums.

The controversy surrounding the initial infidelity allegations proved to be unfounded; it was discovered that the journalists in question took no part in publishing any reviews about Depression Quest, and therefore could not be traced back to its designer. Other female journalists and designers who attempted to defend the DQ designer had their personal information leaked as well and received much harassment from the Gamergate crusaders.

Eventually the entire argument devolved into a slurry of journalism ethics, misrepresentation of females in videogames and the adamant defense of anti-women gamers. The fact that those who speak up against this wrongful gender discrimination can be so easily harassed in the same manner makes fighting this troubling issue quite difficult.

However, there is some hope. League of Legends, currently the most popular free online game in the world, is taking a stand against verbally abusive players whom they label as “toxic.”

LoL is a multiplayer online battle arena style game that relies heavily on player-to-player cooperation in which a single match could last more than an hour at a time. With so much time spent in each game, it becomes easy for players with ill-intent to ruin large

amounts of gameplay for the other nine “summoners” in the arena.

Riot Games, the publisher that developed LoL, has now instituted a system where players who commit offenses regarding racism, death threats or homophobia can be banned anywhere from 14 days to 486 years, no questions asked. Riot constantly advocates in-game that trash talking other players causes them to play even more poorly, and has instituted a tribunal system in which players (above a certain level requirement) can review less-severe toxicity cases of peers in order to dole out swift and appropriate punishment.

Call of Duty, probably known just as well for its juvenile and vulgar online community as its gameplay, has only just recently begun policing its ingame chat. Players who are reported in-game for aggressive, offensive, derogatory or bigoted language are instantly banned from online play for a set amount of time. Repeat offenders are subject to having their stats reset or even their online privileges taken away. Those caught hacking or with pirated versions of the game will instantly be banned. Although Call of Duty will probably always be filled with 10-year-olds bent on “destroying your filthy casual ass,” this system is expected to greatly reduce the number of players spouting particularly smelly sludge from their tiny mouths.

With gaming becoming such a large part of world culture, people everywhere are taking their online experiences more and more seriously.

In an ideal world, there would not be any anonymous harassment, but that future has yet to arrive. In the meantime, all we can hope to do is act like normal and civil humans both online and IRL, and hope that these cyber-harassers will be the ones eventually caught for using their ub3r hacks. _____________________________________ Evan Lauterborn is a sophomore politics major who doesn’t need to throw insults to prove he can wreck scrubs. Email him at elauter1@ithaca.edu.

Album Review Hristina Tasheva

Contributing Writer

Meatbodies

Julian Casablancas + The Voidz

Tyranny

Meatbodies Album Review Tylor Colby Staff Writer

and whispers and screams as guitars and synths play on and over each other. “Human Sadness” comes off less as a song, and more like an epic.

Like “Human Sadness,” the album is a little long-winded overall, which is good and bad. The best songs on the album tend to be the hard hitting ones like “Crunch Punch,” “Buisness Dog” and “M.utually A.ssured D.estruction.” Even a song like “Father Electricity” bodes well with its distorted, quick, dancy, latin-inspired beat.

However when the songs don’t work well, they drag their feet to the door like “Xerox,” where the repetitive beat sounds like a copier machine; or “Nintendo Blood,” where Casablanca’s distorted vocals don’t serve the song any benefit, and the instrumentals may cause some to gnash their teeth.

Casablancas sends the album off with “Off to War…,” a slow and calm song compared to others. Sounding like a lullaby or funeral song, this last tune brings the album to an eerie, quiet ending.

This album is not for the faint of heart or the impatient. It may take several listens to fully digest and even then it might not sit quite right, but that’s fine. For an experiment, it’s quite a success.

Chad Ubovich has already proven himself worthy in the West Coast garage rock community over the past few years, playing in the backing band for psych-rock virtuoso Ty Segall as well as with singer/ songwriter Mikal Cronin. However, with the self-titled debut of his own project, Meatbodies, Ubovich takes the opportunity to go beyond and shows off some of his own original material. With musical arrangements that range from slow, moody, psychedelic jams to hard hitting surf punk, Meatbodies proves Ubovich is more than a mere tagalong for Segall and his crew, but an often less ambitious and poppier side of the West Coast spectrum.

After a minute-long synth tone introduction, “Disorder” barrels in through a high-energy straightforward punk format, with layered rhythm guitars and fuzz bass all reminiscent of Ubovich’s scene. This represents only half of the album, but a very significant portion. Most of Meatbodies’ sound carries this formula, providing an easy foundation for Ubovich’s style of lead guitar shredding and wobbly high pitched vocals.

In classic Ramones-esque fashion, the lead vocals of faster songs are relatively clean and dry sounding, allowing the listener to discern the playfully simple yet dark lyrical content, just so long as he or she is able to catch it all in the songs’ fast tempos. In the super-fast tune “Off,”

Ubovich belts out: “I got nothin’ to get me off/ My face feels like there’s nothing there/ It’s all bent up and I’m not here,” exemplifying his swift punk delivery through immature lyrics with sobering undertones.

In the slower, more groove-based tracks, Ubovich and his band have more room to jam together, showing off more complex interlocking guitar parts. In “Tremmors,” the guitars work in a call and response with the stellar lead, a mix of blues punk and black metal, and the reverb and echoinduced vocals take up the rest of the space.

Meatbodies is clearly not interested in minimalism, filling in any gaps with guitar hooks, solos and sometimes synth tones to create a wall of sound, even in psychedelic ballads like “Dark Road.”

With the new album, Meatbodies has been touring alongside Cronin and Segall’s various side projects this past year. Perhaps the group will just be tossed around in the handful of other like-minded bands in the scene, being lumped into a genre of its own. But hopefully with his new material, and even more likely, Ubovich will take his darker sensibilities and his knack for dense songwriting further, creating a sound that is all his own.

15

Ministry of Cool

In 2001, Julian Casablancas revealed himself to the musical world with the release of The Strokes’ debut album Is This It. Julian Casablancas + The Voidz’s release of Tyranny marks the first time in five years that Casablancas has worked without The Strokes, and the first time ever making an album with another band, The Voidz.

Tyranny, like the title suggests, is a dark, sad album at heart that is protesting loudly. It is an experimental ball of sound and noise that is surprising, shocking and stimulating. Certainly some songs take a longer time to chew over and may require an acquired taste, however, nobody could accuse this album of being dull.

The first track, “Take Me in Your Army,” sets the mood of the album with a loud, clanging, background noise that sounds like a junkyard or like Thomas the Tank Engine gone wrong. Casablancas warns people “This isn’t for everybody/ This is for nobody.”

The album’s crowning jewel is “Human Sadness,” an 11-minute sprawling piece that takes the listener across the full spectrum of human emotion. Mozart’s “Requiem Mass in D minor” plays in the background of this lovely mess as Casablancas croons

Short fiction, personal essay and other assorted lies.

BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

NS. PROSE&CONS. PROSE&

16

Men molding me and making memories we loom over each other like masked insects reaching to prove ourselves bending to lie prone sticking the wounds we once knew swimming in a sea of honey Mend saluting me and binding these gashes we hold hands and slip away like springtime thunder holding me heroically releasing to stand fearlessly threadbare (we always are) running past the cobwebs of brokenness

MEMOIRES Gillian Wenzel

Many accurizing me and resting in elysian slumber we pass through romance like crisp pages stumbling into friendship surrendering to accord finding ease in esteemed stagnation feeling cords detangle my armor Man passing me and finding doors un-ajar we slip into futures of satin like feathered crystal gracing soft palms pulsing through the walls dancing to lush vulnerability friendship furnished this heart.

Dedicated to MB, JH, IVDM, RL, JS Inspired indirectly by the copy of Bly, Hillman, and Meade’s The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart that has been on my Dad’s dresser for years

17

Prose & Cons

GZRW 10:13pm 10/09/2014

Samantha Brodsky

I’m Not Religious, But She’s An Angel

BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

Her strength suits her skin in a metallic shine, A hard glaze like a valiant trophy But she’s no trophy wife; Her beauty scarfs itself around her Like ribbons of fine silk And she wears it as delicately As the winds are loud, Forever rumbling.

She kneads her fingers into the world and molds it Like it’s cold, damp clay So that in the canyons of her palms she holds Her own, Clasps it tight in rippled hands That are weathered with years of Shielding, as though tears from Eyes that have so profoundly Lived and longed, Squinted and seen, Widened and wandered, Glared and gleamed, All solidified their salty streams into a mass Of slippery armor like a glove of glistening glass Unseen to the human eye, Transparent with a parent’s passionate purpose To protect, to guard me from the same Rabid world she has learned to tame, Like a froth-mouthed dog To obey, And through beats of a once-fragmented Forever-healing heart, She deflects its jagged arrows With her promising palms, Her guarded, stonewall skin, Yet her touch remains smooth Somehow Soothing like a whisper, A faint murmur that tickles the ears Like simmering tea snaking Its way down the throat And cradling the belly.

She is the serum for my sorrows, The drive for my tomorrows.

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IS IT K A R MA O R I S I T F U N N Y ?

Train Schickele

I remember when I forced my friend to comfort me.

I was seven.

I had a friend named Noah.

I had a black cat named Athena.

I was wrestling with Noah when Athena escaped through the front door. I told Noah that She had never been outside. I lied. I knew She went out every day.

But I pulled Noah’s arm, gravely. “We have to catch her.” We prowled behind my black cat, Athena. I blamed Noah for leaving the door open — I left the door open.

I lunged for Athena. I fell on my elbows, scraping on the pavement as She scurried up the sidewalk. I watched her prance away like some scoffing horse. I slammed my knees into the cement and cried like an infant who just realized he had fallen. But I knew the black cat would return. I called my mother on the phone, my voice shaky with hot tears. “Athena goes out all the time, honey.”

I hung up and mumbled this news to my friend, very quietly, as to fatten his sympathy.

He turned on the Nintendo and we looked at the TV. He had his hand around my back.

He was a good friend.

I just had to fake it and see.

But Athena did not come back, After all.

Prose & Cons

19

UST. SAWDUST. SAWDUST BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

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Threatening the magazine’s credibility since 1856.

Pyongyang Style!

In celebration of the only man in North Korea over 150 pounds Will Uhl, Contributing Writer

D

Literary Honorable Recommenda- Leader’s Maxtions from ims to Live By Dear Leader • Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment - “Read it for the punishment.”

• George Orwell’s 1984 - “A masterful instruction manual.”

• Roland Lazenby’s The History of the Chicago Bulls - “Dad used to read it to me before bed.”

• James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake “Of course I read this. I did!”

• E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey - “Revel in the despicable, disgusting, and occasionally arousing filth the American pigs revel in!”

• An apple a week keeps the Western dogs weak.

• A bird in the hand is worth a month in the labor camp.

• Don’t count your chickens before they are taken for redistribution.

• You can judge a book by its cover. Do not question this.

• The bigger they are, the harder they fall in World War III.

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Sawdust

ear Comrades!

In celebration of the 88th anniversary of the Down-withImperialism Union (DIU), formed by Righteous Ascended Leader Kim Ilsung and the 2014th year since Kim Il-sung created the world, we must give our attention and respect to our Benevolent Guide, Kim Jong-un. Peace be upon him!

Out of his many awe-inducing qualities, his refined figure is the first to greet the eyes. His soft, puffy skin shows the tender care he feels for all of his citizens. His childlike smile reflects his unending youth, having drunk from the fountain of immortality. His chin reflects how well-rounded he is, and his second chin shows how doubly prepared he is.

But these are mere surface details!

His mind is truly the treasure of the nation. All his people swell with pride as we appreciate his impeccable ski resorts from afar. His clever tactics of disappearance and reappearance comfort the land, as if he is playing a fatherly game of peekaboo with his people. His keen eye for military might and strategy as we stand ever closer to war emboldens us all. Every week — no, every night, we close half the remaining distance to conquering our foes!

Perhaps his greatest quality of all is the mysterious, almost godlike essence he exudes. Indeed, he has an almost unnatural aura about him that simply makes the body shudder and quake.

No, it’s not the fear of taken away from your family. It’s not the physical toll of malnutrition and squalor. It’s not the fear of being thrust into a war which will undoubtedly result in wholesale destruction and instability. It’s a supernatural air to him that inspires undying honor, respect, and comfort — comfort that, no matter what happens, Dear Leader will steer the country to glory. _____________________________________ Will Uhl is a sophomore journalism major who is seriously hoping he won’t wake up in a North Korean prison camp after this is published. Email him at wuhl1@ithaca.edu.

Hail to the Chief QUEEF

HAHAHAHA WHY SO SERIOUS, OBAMA? Grace Rychwalski, Staff Writer

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ASHINGTON, D.C. – The Senate is under close review after several alleged accounts of what the White House is calling “shenanigans.” This tomfoolery has been described in a variety of ways, including: “dicking around while making bank,” “changing tiny things that actually end up having a shit-ton of repercussions,” and “just generally being asshats” (all quotes taken directly from Barack Obama’s most recent State of the Union Address).

Filibustering, a tactic used in the senate to cause reconsiderations of previous votes/opinions, has become what Vice President Joe Biden calls “a shit-show.”

“Those damn jackasses aren’t holding filibusters!” said the Scrantonraised VP. “They’re making someone

BUZZSAW: The Villain Issue

“Riddle me this, Obama: How many drunk senators does it take to destroy your administration? I guess we’ll have to find out, won’t we?” stand in the front and speak gibberish while they get paid to order pizza and get drunk! I suggested that years ago and nobody listened! They think they can just steal my ideas and expect me not to call them on it? Hell no!”

There is an ongoing investigation into who instigated these ragers, but there is one suspect being researched in particular following a note which appeared on the Commander-inChief’s desk this past week. It read: “Riddle me this, Obama: How many drunk senators does it take to destroy your administration? I guess we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?”

Although it was only signed “The Riddler,” the F.B.I. has concluded that the secret identity of the one who sent it is Senator John McCain, who evidently forgot to use paper that was not letter-headed, “From the desk of John McCain.” There is no word on his current whereabouts, although he was

22

seen recently in a Starbucks wearing a bright green suit covered in question marks.

One of the baristas who served him reported, “I just figured, ‘Hey. It’s John McCain. He’s a generally confused old man, right? That must be why there are question marks all over his suit.

Nothing unusual there.’ So I didn’t say anything to him at the time. I mean, he had a hard enough time ordering a drink. I didn’t want to fluster him even more than he already was.”

Another major finding is that the swearing-in oath has been changed considerably. The report has revealed that the original work has been replaced with the following: “I, [name here], do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Royal Knowles-Carter Family against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation because of Blue Ivy Carter’s flawless hair, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully just discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me, our Lord and Savior, Beyoncé.”

While some may say the oath is problematic, there is support from the public: “Yes, yes, good,” said Lex Luthor, infamous businessman and egotistical maniac. “All of the leaders of the world will be distracted by her bootylicious body, and I will finally be able to take over! Bwahahaha!”

Meanwhile, others were met with confusion: “Wait, that’s like… a real thing? I thought it was an article from The Onion or something. Damn,” remarked Aquaman who has time to sit around and read The Onion, because he isn’t a real superhero anyway.

No one is sure who is to blame for this, but signs are pointing to Catwoman, as the final draft of the oath had what the C.I.A. identified as “bits of hairball” on it. Although the identity of Catwoman is unknown, Maine Senator Susan Collins was seen leaving her house in a leather

jumpsuit this week, which has raised some suspicions.

In another turn of events, the Senate was also reported to have been yelling things like “nope,” “uh-uh, honey,” and “nooo, Gaga, nooo,” at deafening decibels whenever they disagreed with another senator’s statements.

While this kind of dissent is nothing out of the ordinary, the First Lady has spoken out against it, saying, “I can’t sleep at night with all their hootin’ and hollerin’. We can hear it from the White House! The girls have school in the morning! Also, don’t forget to vote, kids! #Turnoutforwhat.”

The senators have also been caught binging on Netflix during their meetings, watching such shows as 90210, Pretty Little Liars, and Gossip Girl, among many others. It has been reported that the senators then allegedly dedicate several hours to debates on which characters are “obviously gay and just don’t know it.”

They’ve also been accused of drawing explicit fanart of the actors and actresses and passing them around during these deliberations.

Some are speculating that the ring leader of these binge-a-thons is the psychotic Joker, whose twisted sense of humor allows him to find the pain of others amusing. However, it is assumed that he did not expect the Senators to take so kindly to these shows and has had his plan backfire on him.

The Joker’s associate and otherwise batshit crazy villain Harley Quinn has commented, saying, “Mistah J is doin’ so much more damage than he even meant to! The Senators may not be in pain, but the democracy of the United States is practically crumblin’ ‘cause of him! Ain’t my puddin’ so smart?”

Whoever the masterminds are behind all of this upheaval in Washington, I think we can all agree that a nation built upon the perfection of Beyoncé is destined to succeed, a Senate full of villains or not. _____________________________________ Grace Rychwalski is a sophomore writing major who thinks Harvey Dent would be a step up from John Bohner. #2face4speaker2k16 Email her at grychwa1@ithaca.edu

I am the danger-seriously.

?

Buzzsaw Asks Why...

Ithaca College

Walter White not the anti-hero we thought blatantly lied to Rachel Mucha, Staff Writer

W

arning: This article contains spoilers.

If you are one of the only people on earth who has not seen Breaking Bad, get your shit together immediately.

by Rachel Maus Let me answer my own question right now. It’s because they knew that if they told students they were even considering implementing a limit on free printing, shit would hit the fan and we would be on them as quick as we were on them about the new media policy last year. So, instead of having that happen, they tracked our printing last year by making us log into the print tracking system, GoPrint, and if you asked anyone if we were going to start getting charged for printing, they would insist we weren’t.

But that was a lie too. In fact, many student workers at the library or the printing labs knew that the college was going to, or were considering charging for printing, but were told by faculty to tell students that asked that tracking was simply for “research.”

The worst part is, Ithaca College acts like every department requires the same amount of papers to be printed. It doesn’t matter if you’re vocal performance or screenwriting, you get $10.00.

Hey, thanks for the crumb.

The college will tell you all about its new print management program, and how they’re doing it to be so environmentally friendly because Ithaca is gorges and whatnot. They’ll also tell you about the research they’ve done about how much paper students actually need on average, how sustainable this will make us and how you get a whole 142 double-sided pages!

Yeah well, I’ll remember your generosity as I’m pumping more money into my ID Express to pay for the 20 copixes of my 60page Bob’s Burgers fan-fiction … I mean script.

Personally, I think we pay enough to attend this college that we should be able to print whatever we damn well please.

By the way, if you’re feeling inclined to express your anger about this policy but don’t have an outlet like Buzzsaw to do so, may I suggest the comment box right here? http://www.ithaca.edu/its/general/ printmgmt/

23

Sawdust

Although award-winning show Breaking Bad ended over a year ago, people are still as obsessed with Walter White as ever. There are shrines in fans’ basements filled with posters, blue crystal bath salts and even action figures which were not purchased at Toys “R” Us because they were deemed very inappropriate.

Don’t worry, Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty are still sold there. The obsession came from the fact that Walter White was a total badass but so smart and unconventionally cool, and don’t get me wrong, I was basically the driver of the Heisenberg bandwagon.

I had posters of him hanging on my walls, causing my concerned mother to wonder why I had pictures of a 58-year-old bald guy in my room. I was so in love with the show I forced my roommate to watch it, who loved it as much as I did. I mean, we quoted the show like crazy, even trying to find situations that applied perfectly.

(We still are patiently waiting for the opportunity to shout, “Fuck you! And your eyebrows!”) Unfortunately, one day it dawned on me. Walter White was not some cool, misunderstood antihero ... he was just a big jerk!

Okay, so first of all Jesse is Walt’s partner, like he literally couldn’t have sold one ounce of meth without him because he had all the connections, yo. And yet, Walt is the biggest meanie ever to him. He constantly calls him a moron and a junkie idiot. On one of Jesse’s old tests, Walt had written, “Ridiculous! Apply yourself!” Okay, Walt, time out. This is bringing back flashbacks from 10th grade trig; I wasn’t doing too hot, obviously, because it’s trig. Anyway, my evil teacher wrote on my test, “Reminder: Help is available after school.” I was irate! Anyway, I showed her and got a B+, so she can suck it. Unhelpful comments like that are just rude and not constructive. It just fueled my hate

fire. Unfortunately for Jesse Pinkman, he did not have my ambition and had an affinity for pot, so he did not pull off a B+ in chemistry class. Anyway Walt, some people are just not naturally gifted at the sciences. You should encourage these students, not make them feel bad Mista White.

Moving on, Walt is also basically an egotist. In the last season when he’s meeting with that scary guy Declan instead of having a proper introduction like a normal person does, he demands that Declan says his name. When he guesses correctly, Walt’s all, “You’re goddamn right,” in a menacing voice.

Okay, calm down sir. You could’ve said please, or maybe have been a little more light-hearted, like, “Nice guess! I think this is the beginning of a wonderful friendship! We should go to Denny’s after this!”

Killing people: another jerky move.

Now, killing someone is almost never really justified, but the way Walt does it is particularly butthole-y. For example, he kills Lydia via her Stevia. This is a low blow to women EVERYWHERE. Lydia was trying to fight her way up in Madrigal, proving herself day in and day out to be a powerful asset, regardless of her gender. Excuse her for being calorie conscious in order to maintain a good figure to be taken seriously by the sexist men in the business world! And don’t even get me started on poor Tio. Wheelchair-bound and incapable of speech, his bell was the only way he could communicate, and Walt killed him using that ding, ding, ding. If I were to kill someone, say a teacher who was mean to me, I would do it in the kindest way possible.

Walter White is a jerk. Not an antihero. This one’s for Hank. _____________________________________ Rachel Mucha is a sophomore journalism major who still can’t believe they effing killed Hank. I mean seriously. Now he’s stuck under some dome. Thanks, Vince Gilligan. Email her at rmucha1@ithaca. edu

students about printing