The College Hill Independent Vol. 36 Issue 1

THE COLLEGE HILL A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY INDEPENDENT

36 • 01 02 FEB 2018

THE

INDY

COVER

Soil Texture Triangle Tiffany Bushka

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 36 / ISSUE 01 FEB 02 2018

NEWS

FEATURES

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Week in Review: Civil Disobedience Soraya Ferdman, Ella Comberg, Kayli Wren

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Dashed Hope Isabel DeBre and Chris Packs

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TECH

METRO 05

07

08

13

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Out to Dry Paige Parsons

METABOLICS

50 Shades of Blue Harry August

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Following Footsteps Erin West

Nutritional Yeastern Europe Jane Argodale

LITERARY

ARTS

Selling Out the Closet Paula Pachecho Soto

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Boy Oh Boy Anna Hundert

What's Craken?

Pia Struzzieri

EPHEMERA 12

Remembering Le Guin Eliza Chen

Strawberry Leaves Maya Bjornson

X FROM THE EDITORS

18

A power outage, a school closure, a highway ban, a government shutdown. Then a restoration—always accompanied with a creeping sense that something is being drawn out, drained. As authority stands as rigid as ever, somehow we’re left with a perpetual feeling of running on fumes—patchwork precarity. Gigging, fixing, rigging, cheating. And then from somewhere comes a belief, not exactly our own, that this is exactly the way it should be—the only way it can ever be. That to articulate that anything could be otherwise is more than impossible, it’s embarrassing.

Here the College Hill Independent offers no market-tested solutions, no five-point proposals, no cunning, no conning. In fact, we offer no prescriptions at all. Instead, each week, we write, illustrate, design, and read for a slight alternative.

— JKS

WEEK IN REVIEW Julia Rock NEWS Isabel DeBre Chris Packs METRO Harry August Jack Brook Saanya Jain Erin West ARTS Nora Gosselin Cate Turner Isabelle Rea FEATURES Sheena Raza Faisal Ruby Aiyo Gerber Neidin Hernandez Paula Pacheco Soto

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Eve Zelickson

LIST Jane Argodale Alexis Gordon

SCIENCE Liz Cory Tara Sharma

STAFF WRITERS Galadriel Brady Mica Chau Ella Comberg Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Liby Hays Anna Hundert Lillian Kirby Lucas Smolcic Larson Julia Petrini Mariela Pichardo Ivy Scott Marly Toledano Sara Van Horn Kayli Wren Kion You Wen Zhuang

TECH Paige Parsons Olivia Kan-Sperling OCCULT Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin EPHEMERA Maya Bjornson LITERARY Isabelle Doyle Fadwa Ahmed

The Independent is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

COPY EDITORS Shuchi Agrawal Grace Berg Benjamin Bienstock Seamus Flynn Sasha Raman Caiya Sanchez-Strauss ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Eve O’Shea Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN EDITOR Eliza Chen STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Kela Johnson Halle Krieger Sophia Meng Pia Mileaf-Patel

Fish Filet Zak Ziebell

MISSION STATEMENT 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.

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.

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.

Spring 2017

Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Ella Rosenblatt Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham DESIGNERS Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Laura Kenney Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon X Zak Ziebell

SENIOR EDITORS Jane Argodale Kelton Ellis Robin Manley Gabriel Matesanz Will Weatherly

SOCIAL MEDIA Fadwa Ahmed Pia Mileaf-Patel

BUSINESS MANAGER Maria Gonzalez

MANAGING EDITORS Jonah Max Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson

WEB MANAGER Alyssa McGillvery

ALUMNI RELATIONS Julia Tompkins

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE #CHRISTIESTILLHATESTRANSPORTATIONLAWSGATE Four years after #Bridgegate flooded Twitter, Chris Christie’s name is once again under fire over a gate scandal. Then, it was accusations of orchestrating traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge. Only days after the former New Jersey governor left office in January, CBS reported the fresh #GateGate scandal, exposing Christie’s attempt to bypass airport security.

Christie was stopped in Newark Liberty International Airport after heading straight for his old VIP access point. An airport police officer and a TSA officer gently led Christie to the proper security check line. Christie complied and waited his turn with all the normal people. When news of his embarrassing day at the airport broke, Christie turned to social media to assure the public that reports of the ordeal were “pure fiction.” According to Christie’s tweets, the ex-governor was actually led astray by a Port Authority officer. A Port Authority spokesperson disagreed.

What was Christie thinking while he strolled towards the restricted section of Terminal C? The Indy has a few theories.

Theory 1: Something along the lines of: “Muahahaha.” Maybe Christie is a rebel at heart, here to break rules and disrupt the status quo (as well as people’s morning commutes through Fort Lee) on purpose. This theory would explain Christie’s nonchalant behavior when he scoffed at his 15% approval ratings (the lowest of any New Jersey governor ever) six months before his term ended. Christie claimed, “I don’t care … when you’re not running for something, [poll numbers] don’t matter a bit.” Flawed logic for any politician who enjoys pleasing their constituents, but okay.

Theory 2: Moving on is hard. Perhaps Christie wanted to feel special for one more plane ride. Garden State laws allow governors to keep one taxpayer-funded state trooper by their side for six months after leaving office, but maybe the extra company isn’t enough to help Christie transition out of power. Can we really blame Christie for holding onto his routines just a little longer?

Theory 3: It’s the classic “Let’s give them something else to whisper about” tactic. For all we know, Christie could be really torn up about his legacy. Are people still muttering about forced lane closures on the George Washington bridge? What about his tanning session on a beach closed to the public during the state government shutdown? Or the general feeling of ditching his day job to pursue bigger and better things? Maybe Christie’s airport stunt was an attempt to replace more severe misdemeanors in the memories of his constituents.

Theory 4: The man genuinely forgot he wasn’t governor anymore. Kind of a stretch, considering he frequently forgot he was governor while running to be the nation’s president, but still a possibility.

We may never know the ins and outs of what transpired that morning in Terminal C. While New Jersey resident Bob Roseman concluded “who cares,” at least the incident brought a smile to the face of Joe Paulson of Washington State.

–KW

BY Ella Comberg, Soraya Ferdman & Kayli Wren ILLUSTRATION BY Carly Paul DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

CITY SLICKERS Philadelphia didn’t get the skincare memo.

The cold, dry winter all but forced northeastern coastal elites to drench themselves in thick coats of glossy liquids (moisturizers, serums, essential oils). Their western counterparts followed suit, applying various clays to their faces in hopes of exfoliation. The City of Brotherly love—maybe a few years behind the selfcare curve, or perhaps as innovative as its revolutionary founders would have hoped—covered itself in Crisco.

The Philadelphia Police Department descended on Broad Street early on Sunday, January 21, tubs of shortening in tow. They rubbed the substance (usually used as a butter substitute) onto the city’s light posts, garnering massive media coverage for their efforts (the New York Times even did a puff piece). Despite the Indy’s hunch that the city’s greasing efforts were meant to combat incessant winter dryness, the Crisco Cops continually claimed that their slathering of vertical infrastructure was a safety measure. The Eagles were scheduled to play in the NFC Championship later that day, and the Police Department hoped a coat of Crisco would keep notoriously rowdy fans—famous for pelting a Vikings fan dressed as Santa Claus with snowballs during a particularly brutal winter game in 1968—from triumphantly climbing the poles in the event of a win.

Win they did, and climb they did. For the boldest of the celebrating masses, the poles the police department had greased with Crisco that morning were not an ominous reminder that post-game disorderly conduct is grounds for arrest. Rather, they became a kind of challenge, similar to the Philadelphia Italian Market’s greased-pole-climbing competition hosted at their annual cultural festival—a sort of “feat of strength.” That pole—unlike those prepared by the police department as a post-game anti-climbing measure—is topped with gift cards and Italian meats (usually a veal cutlet).

For the contingent of Philadelphians who, for whatever reason, knew their way around a greased pole, Sunday’s slippery obstacles were surmountable.

Harnessing upper-body strength and perching themselves up high, they could see the joyous mayhem of an Eagles victory on the streets below. Thousands of fans donned plastic dog masks as a nod to the Eagles’ underdog status (and an eerie sight for those out of the loop), rode dune buggies up the famous Rocky Steps outside of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and ran aimlessly with traffic cones on their heads. The grease didn’t work.

If the Indy has any advice for the Philadelphia Police Department’s future endeavors—other than perhaps, massive reformation—it’s to apply lightly to the dry areas. Avoid slathering.

–EC

WINTER OLYMPICS SERVED HOT It’s a beautiful morning in Colorado, the filming location of yet another season of Top Chef. The chefs have just finished a quickfire challenge, where each chef was asked to prepare breakfast for a former Top Chef champion, using a few ingredients including a jar of nutella.

Bruce, a contestant who is undoubtedly a crowd favorite, is still energetic from news he received the night before: his surrogate mother successfully bore his first child.

Such is the way of Top Chef: 20 percent perspiration, 80 percent quality emotional content. But shh, Padma, one of the show’s four main judges, is about to explain the elimination challenge…

“In just a few weeks, the 2018 Winter Olympics will be held in Pyeongchang, South Korea,” begins Padma, before introducing three, perfectly postured Olympians: ice dancing gold medalist Meryl Davis, freeski slopestyle silver medalist Gus Kenworthy, and skeleton racer John Daly.

Top Chef is powerful. This incredibly popular show has already convinced much of the American population that cooking, previously thought of as a mundane activity, is a scintillating competitive sport. Perhaps because of this episode’s athletic guest stars, viewers will be pushed towards patriotic zeal, leading them to tune in to the Winter Olympics. In past years, not only have the Winter Games been less popular than their Summer counterparts, but the Olympics as an institution have come under fire for exacerbating poverty in host cities and being a venue for powerful countries to exert their dominance.

In its mission statement, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) resolves to contribute to building a more peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport. Though the Indy hopes you don’t actually believe this neoliberal propaganda, there is always the option of watching the Olympics for political theatrics.

For example, this is the first time in eleven years that North and South Korea will form a unified Olympic team.

Other political side plots include the IOC’s suspension of the Russian Winter Olympic team due to the country’s system of state-supported performance-enhancing drug use. Russian athletes who passed the IOC’s regulations will be allowed to compete under a generic Olympic flag.

Even if this Top Chef episode does not make you want to watch the Olympics, it will make you aware that something is happening this February. Consider, for example, watching Skeleton racing, the sport of the third guest judge, John Daly. It’s where a person throws themselves onto a sled, letting gravity guide them down a frozen track. Still not into it? It’s basically a grown man speeding down a water slide of ice, reaching speeds of 80mph, head first, tush clenched!

–SF

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

02

PRIMING THE CAPITAL It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single corporation in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of an HQ2. Amazon is rich and attractive––and seeking a new home. Last fall, the tech giant called on cities across North America to compete for the ultimate prize: its second headquarters (HQ2). Lured by the promise of 50,000 high-paying jobs and $5 billion in direct investment, 238 cities, including Providence, R.I., scrambled to assemble pitches highlighting their most attractive qualities.

Since America loves bidding wars, and The Bachelor, the media has successfully spun the story of this corporate headquarter search in such anthropomorphic terms—full of intrigue and romantic love. Cities are “throwing themselves” at Amazon, which is “counting its suitors,” the New York Times reports. “Dear Amazon: It’s not you, it’s us” says Little Rock, AR, in an October Washington Post advertisement, withdrawing its proposal after realizing its scale didn’t fit the bill. The love letter continued: “We’re happy knowing that many great companies find our natural good looks, coupled with our brains for business, irresistible.”

The media’s strangely special treatment of Amazon contributes to the larger social sense that Amazon is radically different than other companies. And in many ways, it is. No corporation Amazon’s size has ever grown so fast for so long. The more it fulfills our every need, the more its packages appear on our doorsteps every morning, the more we’re convinced that the curved golden arrow could be a smile. Its brand feeds, breathes, and evolves around us. If it’s human-like, the logic seems to go, it must be more humane.

But the sensationalist, anthropomorphic language surrounding Amazon and its soulmate search obscures the deeper and more disturbing reality of what lies beneath its unchecked power. Left-leaning news outlets, from the Guardian to n+1, have bemoaned Amazon’s “techno-capitalist takeover,” but this argument, while generating productive outrage, still neglects a central point: Amazon is not so different. Its scope may be larger, its growth may be faster, but the HQ2 competition is not a rupture. Rather, it represents another beat in the violent rhythm of corporate exploitation of American cities and suburbs––valuing tax incentives over social services, and displacing the country’s most vulnerable residents.

decayed in their wake. Detroit, the ‘car capital,’ was eviscerated. What New York Times columnist William Laas labeled “suburbitis” left urban tax bases decimated, resources sapped, and infrastructure tenuous. It is no coincidence that the Civil Rights Movement peaked at this point in urban life, as Black residents, finally considered equal to whites under the law, faced continued economic exclusion in underfunded, underdeveloped cities. The postwar ideology of the white middle class, coupled with very real discrimination, barred people of color from imagining futures beyond the bounds of a deteriorating urbanism.

But in the last 20 years, with the disaggregation of corporate services, the rise of telecommuting, and the savvy potential of ‘urban millennial workers,’ companies are returning to once-depleted cities with promises to revitalize real estate and infrastructure. In June, McDonald’s moved its headquarters from Oak Brook to Chicago. In May, General Electric relocated from the Connecticut suburbs to Boston. Over the summer of 2015, Johnson & Johnson moved from New Brunswick to Tampa. With them, these corporations brought highpaid (largely white) employees into poorer (largely POC and immigrant) communities, fracturing cities even

BY Isabel DeBre and Chris Packs ILLUSTRATION BY Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN BY Katherine Sang more sharply along racial lines. In addition to generating massive displacement, these corporations, like Amazon, called on cities across the country to advance competitive offers that would attract the companies––that is, tax incentives.

Local tax breaks, which first gained traction in the 1990s, save corporations more than $80 billion a year, the New York Times estimates. Despite pushback against corporate exploitation of struggling localities in the past two decades, the local tax incentives have resurged dramatically. The DC-based policy firm, Good Jobs First, reported that the largest ever local tax break was offered in 2013, when Washington State offered Boeing $8.7 billion to base its corporate activities in the state.

Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, a former venture capitalist, has prioritized tax incentives during her term to lure companies like GE, Johnson & Johnson, and Virgin Pulse. According to AP, the state Commerce Corporation has approved $30.7 million in incentives

+++ Amazon’s veneration of cities as hubs of “strong local and regional talent” signals a dramatic reversal in decadeslong corporate practice. In the early 20th century, it was typical for American corporations to base their operations in robust metropolises. But, in 1942, the Bell Labs division of AT&T broke from this trend by abandoning their Lower Manhattan headquarters. The AT&T unit envisioned a corporate campus that would be comfortable for its employees, as well as abundant free space to pursue research without the city’s electrical interference.

Purchasing 213 acres of land in rural New Jersey, it instigated a corporate flight that would persist for generations.

General Motors, General Electric, General Foods, Deere & Co., and others all abandoned cities for the suburbs–– bringing a massive white working class with them.

Suburban real estate boomed. CEOs built mansions near their sprawling corporate headquarters. Pastoral land became not only livable, but desirable.

Meanwhile, the cities, so dependent on industry,

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NEWS

FEBRUARY 02, 2018

Amazon’s bidding war and the allure of corporate takeover

since early 2016. As recently as fall 2017, Providence awarded $10 million to the IT firm Infosys. During the course of her term, Raimondo has successfully courted 22 companies, including Massachusetts-Based Vistaprint Corporate Solutions and the technology offices of Johnson & Johnson. Combined, the companies project they will generate $46 million in revenues for the state.

“Growing businesses, especially ones with such deep and storied history in our state, is essential to Rhode Island's comeback," said Governor Raimondo last year when A.T. Cross relocated to the Ocean State. "Our tools are working — we're ending the year on a roll, and we're not going to take our foot off the gas.” +++

The governor’s focus on corporate growth played directly into its decision to pursue Amazon’s HQ2, Rhode Island Commerce Corporation spokesman Matt Sheaff told the Indy. “Amazon was looking to make a big investment, and that’s the hallmark of this administration.” When Amazon announced to North American cities it would invest $5 billion in HQ2 construction, in addition to generating 50,000 jobs paying an average of $100,000, Rhode Island jumped at the chance to recover from its recent economic slide, dramatically expand its development, and compete with nearby financial hubs. One look at Amazon’s city wishlist (favoring scale, employment base, and public transportation system) theoretically disqualifies any Rhode Island city from the bidding battle, but that didn’t stop the state’s major stakeholders from scrambling in seven weeks to produce a proposal.

Partnership for R.I., a non-profit coalition of business and academic institutions based in Rhode Island, raised $150,000 to fund architectural mock-ups for HQ2 in a number of different sites, including the Jewelry District and Providence Station. In a video pitch to Amazon, Governor Raimondo describes Rhode Island as a “hidden gem,” recently discovered by other multinational corporations, and now primed for the “lively experiment” of Amazon’s investment. Another video in the state’s submission package, reminiscent of a peppy prescription drug commercial, depicts a man in a sport coat and khakis strolling through a picturesque meadow, touting Rhode Island’s James Beard Award-nominated restaurants, offshore wind farm, and job-hungry college graduates.

Only one city, San Antonio, has explicitly rejected the premise of the Amazon competition. In an open letter to Jeff Bezos, San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg and Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff refused to participate in the HQ2 games on ethical grounds, writing that, since no metropolitan area meets Amazon’s lofty and vague requirements, cities have been coerced into offering increasingly high incentive packages. The letter goes on to promise public investment into the San Antonio community in place of corporate subsidies––and, perhaps naively, appeals to Amazon to reject financial incentives and instead pledge to support the HQ2 city’s public spaces and social services.

Meanwhile, in stark contrast, dozens of cities have offered Amazon incentives that far exceed typical corporate handouts, setting a precedent for new and startling ways state governments may find themselves beholden to corporate interests. New Jersey has offered $7 billion in incentives to Amazon if it chooses to base its new HQ in Newark, exceeding the $5 billion Amazon promised

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

in revenue. Chicago promised in its proposal to compel HQ2 employees to pay back part of their salary to Amazon as an income tax, which would amount to a loss of $1.32 billion that might have otherwise been spent on city services. According to the Atlantic, Fresno went even further, proposing a joint county tax fund, which would give Amazon the power to designate and choose city projects––for example, a public park accompanied by the sign “This project is brought to you by Amazon.”

“The important question isn’t how cities are trying to get Amazon, but if Amazon is able to get away with this, what’s next?” wonders John Beacham, coordinator of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) coalition in Chicago. He told the Indy that while Chicago offered Boeing millions of dollars in incentives, the city never saw any tax revenue from the company over ten years. “Brown and Black communities are losing their schools and health clinics while our mayor offers $2.25 billion to the richest person in the world who just bought Whole Foods in cash. The money will not trickle down into schools or hospitals for poor communities of color that need them most. Endemic, explosive problems like poverty and racism will only get worse.” In the past weeks, ANSWER has organized protests and publicity campaigns to fight Chicago’s bid for the proposal.

prices and flip entire neighborhoods in the blink of an eye.” This trend of displacement and marginalization of low-income communities, especially communities of color, would have almost certainly have occurred in Providence if its bid was selected. Providence has undergone significant change in the past 50 years, as waves of economic revitalization have fueled wide-scale gentrification throughout the city. For example, since the “urban renewal” programs of the 1950s, Providence’s East Side—especially Fox Point and University Heights— has become almost entirely white (displacing former Cape Verdean and Black communities, among others), and is now the most affluent part of the city. Currently, the front-lines of gentrification in Providence are on the West End, Olneyville, and the South Side.. A number of local organizations, such as Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), have worked for decades to resist the incremental marginalization of low-income residents and communities of color in Providence—most recently opposing Mayor Elorza’s EveryHome program, which seeks to fill every vacant lot in Providence. Considering this violent history, no transparent public debate of the local consequences of a potential RI Amazon headquarters occurred prior to the state’s bid submission. +++

+++ As history has shown, Amazon’s promised $5 billion influx into the chosen city’s economy would not be evenly distributed across race and class lines. In Seattle, Amazon’s original HQ, the corporation has brought tech-centric wealth at the expense of rampant inequality, skyrocketing rent prices, and large-scale gentrification and eviction of communities of color, as the Seattle Times reports. Seattle is also grappling with a homeless crisis and declared a “state of emergency” last year. In other words, as the international corporate class dominates the city center, working class locals find themselves marginalized both economically and geographically. "Amazon offers really high-earning jobs and really low-paying jobs and there's not much in between," wrote Spencer Cox, a researcher on Amazon’s urban impact at the University of Minnesota. “If you look at Seattle ... the middle class has basically disappeared.” After all, the 50,000 jobs that Amazon promises are for the highest income bracket. The only jobs Amazon would provide working class residents are “low-wage, part-time, dangerous jobs,” Beacham said.

Amazon’s proposal thus represents the most stark example of a violent trend in major American cities: instead of suburban white flight, wealth is pouring back into financial centers and historically abandoned communities of color are coerced into moving aside once again.

“Corporations are transforming metropolitan centers into oases for most wealthy elites,” Beacham told the Indy.

“This is nothing new, but it’s an escalation of what has been underway––Black and Latinx people driven out of our cities while government and business collude and highly-paid employees drive up rent.” The claim that the very essence and future of urbanism is at stake is far from dramaticww.

The homelessness, overcrowding, gentrification, and marginalization now found in Seattle would likely be reproduced in any HQ2 host city, Reuters reports.

Unless the contest winner finds a way to smoothly absorb 50,000 new workers, HQ2 will “balloon housing

On January 18, Amazon announced that it had not selected Rhode Island for its shortlist of 20 finalists. Commerce Corporation spokesman Matt Sheaff admitted “it was a long shot,” but said “we’re glad we gave it a shot.” He told the Indy that the economic development organization is now enaged in talks with Amazon about future collaborative projects, although he would not specify what this would look like. “All I can say is that we are very interested in future opportunities and so we remain engaged.” He mentioned that Rhode Island’s university talent pipeline and high quality of life make it attractive to businesses, in addition to the state’s “competitive tax incentives,” which Commerce Secretary Stefan Pryor declined to disclose.

When asked about the the likely displacement of low-income communities and prioritization of tax incentives over social services (for which former RI Governor Lincoln Chafee has criticized Raimondo’s administration), Sheaff responded: “Any time a company relocates to the state, there’s not only the jobs initially created, but all the dry cleaners, restaurants, small shops that grow around the company, new jobs at various income levels.

It’s a rising tide.”

Community organizations staging anti-Amazon protests outside their city halls, however, see things differently. “People hear about the 50,000 jobs, that cities will be rebuilt, that other investors will come, and buy into the logic that everyone will benefit,” Beacham said. “But as we’ve seen time and time again, this couldn’t be further from the truth.”

ISABEL DEBRE B'18 & CHRIS PACKS B'20 are Amazon truthers.

NEWS

04

A DIFFERENT SHADE OF BLUE Inside the ‘big tent’ of Rhode Island's Democratic Party In Rhode Island, the label of “Democrat” doesn’t mean all that much. Despite its reputation for being as blue as the oceans, the state legislature has plenty of what critics call “DINOs,” or “Democrats in name only,” politicians who hold leadership positions in the Democratic Party but are more ideologically aligned with Republicans.

This reality can help explain how Rhode Island, a state with Democrats in every statewide elected position and 85% of its legislature’s seats, has recently slashed taxes for the wealthiest, passed a voter-ID law, and faces a $165 million cut to Medicaid in the new state budget.

Take, for example, Democratic Speaker of the House Nick Mattiello, one of the most powerful members of the Rhode Island state government, who has an “A+” rating from the National Rifle Association, is pro-life with regards to abortion, and said in 2017 that Rhode Island “should be supportive of [President Trump].” Also, five Democratic state representatives recently introduced a bill restricting women’s right to receive a specific type of abortion, known as a dilation and evacuation, promptly sparking criticism from the party’s progressive wing. This progressive wing includes state senators and representatives who advocate for policies more closely aligned with social democratic politics, such as single-payer health care, a $15 minimum wage, reproductive justice, and environmental protection.

Chairman of the Rhode Island Democratic Party Joe McNamara of Warwick told the College Hill Independent that the Party has an “extremely large tent,” because “people have to work together to achieve common goals.” McNamara cited, for instance, how a NRA-endorsed Democrat voted for progressive issues like banning conversion therapy and taking guns from domestic abusers. But to progressive Democrats, the prevalence of these conservative Democrats is misaligned with the actual values of the majority of Rhode Island voters. As evidence of this, Georgia Hollister Isman, state director of the Rhode Island Working Families Party, told the Indy that progressive policies are “overwhelming popular” in the state, citing poll that found 90% of Rhode Islanders support paid sick days for workers.

On state ballots, however, people in Rhode Island often just vote for the Democratic candidate on the ballot as a 'shortcut,' assuming the views of local candidates align with the national Democratic platform, Hollister Isman told the Indy. As a result, running conservative Democrats “is unfair to voters,” Sam Bell, a recent State Coordinator of the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats, told the Indy: “Especially in local elections where there is very little news coverage, if you are a Republican and you run as a Democrat, how are people supposed to know?” +++ “Rhode Island is ripe for organizing around progressive issues,” Hollister Isman told the Indy, because the state “is still governed to the right of where people’s values actually are,” despite the ubiquity of Democrats in the State House. That’s where the Rhode Island Working Families Party (WFP) steps in, said Hollister Isman, to mobilize the progressive base in Rhode Island and better represent the working people of the state. And while it is still a small player in a state dominated by the Democratic Party, the WFP has begun to rack up a series of legislative and electoral victories.

The Rhode Island WFP is the state chapter of the national Working Families Party, which was founded in 1998 by a coalition of progressive and labor groups in

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METRO

BY Harry August ILLUSTRATION AND DESIGN BY Gabriel Matesanz

New York and has now spread to about a dozen states.

The WFP is both a political and advocacy organization, one that endorses and supports progressive candidates— almost always Democrats—and also organizes around progressive legislation, such as universal healthcare, increased minimum wage, and environmental reform. In states where candidates can run as the nominee of multiple parties, the Working Families Party will endorse and nominate the Democrat on their ballot.

In Rhode Island, where candidates can only run as the nominee for a single party, the WFP has never endorsed or nominated its own candidate. Instead, Hollister Isman told the Indy, the party seeks out progressive candidates that share the party’s values and then “fulfill the role of the party for those candidates,” helping those candidates, many of them new to politics, win elections.

The support they provide depends on the candidate and their needs, Hollister Isman said, ranging from expert advice on campaign training and strategy, money from the WFP’s political action committee, or phone banking and canvassing neighborhoods. This makes the WFP strategically similar to the Tea Party (the libertarian political activist group formed in response to President Barack Obama’s election), although that is likely the only similarity between these ideologically opposed groups.

The Rhode Island chapter of the WFP was organized in 2015, when a coalition of community and organized labor groups formed to lobby for progressive policies, conduct grassroots organizing, and support candidates for local offices. The party continues to work closely with organizations, such as the Teamsters Local 251, Jobs with Justice, and healthcare workers unions, including on a recently announced campaign for a $15 minimum wage and equal pay legislation.

In the few years since its establishment, the chapter has been developing into a political force through both legislative and electoral victories. In 2016, the WFP-endorsed, first-time candidate, and progressive Democrat Marcia Ranglin-Vassel beat the House Majority Leader John DeSimone, an incumbent of 24 years, by 17 votes. A political analyst for Rhode Island Public Radio (RIPR), Scott MacKay, recently described this on-air as, “the biggest legislative upset we’ve seen in many a year,” and credited the WFP as being “crucial” to defeating DeSimone. Ranglin-Vassel was one of four WFP-endorsed progressive Democrats who beat more conservative Democratic challengers in that first election cycle.

After the election, the Working Families Party began to use their growing legislative power in coordination with their grassroots organizing to pass progressive legislation, most prominently a paid sick leave bill that was signed into law by Governor Raimondo this past September. The bill requires employers (of businesses with more than 18 employees) to provide their workers with five paid sick days by 2020; it looks similar to laws already passed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont. After initially proposing a bill that would require more paid sick days and also apply to smaller companies, the Working Families Party reached a compromise with business leaders who opposed some aspects of the bill, Hollister Isman said on RIPR. Even so, Hollister Isman told the Indy that it was the fastest a paid sick leave bill has been passed through a state legislature. RIPR Political Analyst MacKay told the Indy that the WFP deserves plenty of credit for passing such a bill, especially since the legislation was something that neither Speaker of the House Mattiello nor Senate President Ruggiero “gave a darn about.”

FEBRUARY 02, 2018

+++ As progressive Democrats continue to challenge conservative Democrats in the ‘big tent’ of the Democratic Party, there appears to be a growing amount of tension within the organization. And while this parallels the challenges that the national Democratic Party has faced since the 2016 election, the conflicts are fairly distinct.

At the national level, the Democratic Party has been unable to resolve the ideological conflicts between its moderates and progressives, the Hillary and the Bernie crowds. At the core of this debate seems to be the question of whether the Democratic Party, led predominantly by moderates, is willing to embrace a progressive wing with a growing list of electoral successes, often in states and counties where moderate Democrats have floundered.

Rhode Island, however, cannot really be seen as just a microcosm of this national conflict. In Rhode Island, Bell told the Indy, political centrists and moderate Democrats are fairly absent in the state’s legislature; instead, Bell says Rhode Island politics fully revolve around the fights between the ruling conservative Democrats, “who would be hard to be classified as anything but conservatives,” and Democratic reformers from the party’s left wing. Many Democrats in Rhode Island are much more conservative than the moderate Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton.

Chairman McNamara disagreed with this characterization in an interview with the Indy, emphasizing that the party has contained a wide range of ideologies for decades. However, tensions between the two sides have flared up recently in party leadership elections and another incident involving a recent skirmish with the Rhode Island Democratic Women’s Caucus and the Democratic Party’s leadership.

Lauren Niedel, a member of the RI Democratic Committee, outlined in a recent article on RIFuture.org (a progressive political blog) bluntly titled

“The RI Democratic Party isn’t very democratic,” how the Democratic Party has worked to exclude progressive voices from the party. She writes that “it’s unclear to me if the current executive committee of the Rhode Island Democratic Party was ever legitimately elected,” and outlines her challenges, as a voting member of the party, towards figuring out if, when, and where the “clandestine” elections for party leadership and superdelegates took place. Niedel’s piece points out the hypocrisy of Party Chair McNamara’s description of the party as a “big tent,” making it clear that the metaphor is applicable primarily for defending the right wing of the party while keeping progressive party members like Niedel at a distance.

Niedel is also a member of the Women’s Caucus, a group within the party created to encourage more female Democratic candidates to run for office. During a December 10, 2017 meeting at the party headquarters, the caucus was forced to relocate to a nearby sports bar after they refused to allow a Democratic staff member to sit in on the interviews the caucus was holding, according to coverage in the Providence Journal. The conflict quickly became a contentious issue for the party as people challenged its inclusivity of women and other historically underrepresented groups. While Chairman McNamara described it solely as a “dust up” caused by “growing pains,” Governor Gina Raimondo sided with the Women’s Caucus, telling RIPR that the way the caucus was treated was disrespectful and patronizing, and went as far as to offer meeting space in her own campaign headquarters. While not explicitly a conflict between progressive and conservative Democrats, this skirmish is indicative of a party that appears hesitant to open its doors, or tent flaps, to party members hoping to make the party more inclusive.

Beyond these recent conflicts, there is also the question of how long the the Democratic Party can sustain itself with such ideological divisions among its members.

Political Analyst MacKay told the Indy that no one really knows the answer to that question. One concern is that these fissures will weaken the party, distracting politicians and voters from key issues, but MacKay told the Indy that “the state Republican party is so weak that I don’t see [a lack of party unity] hurting statewide.”

McNamara reinforced this position to the Indy, saying that the party’s strategy acknowledges that “in order to get [Democrats] elected very often, they have to have a message … that resonates with their constituency, so that’s why we have a very wide tent.” From this perspective, it seems that the leaders of the Democratic Party are more interested in maintaining a stronghold on the state assembly than taking stances on issues and actually pushing for the policies supported by their

Democratic constituents. Furthermore, Hollister Isman told the Indy running progressive candidates is not a poor strategic decision: “We think the candidates that support bold progressive platforms have better chances of winning.” Given President Trump’s successes with low-income, less-educated white voters, exemplified by his victories in Johnston and Woonsocket, there is a compelling case to be made for a strong progressive labor movement that can re-engage voters disenfranchised from the Democratic Party.

Beyond electoral strategy, there’s also the question of when the Democratic Party should stand up and articulate a positive vision, such as during the upcoming legislative debate on abortion rights. Chairman McNamara said that while the party does have “core values,” such as healthcare for all citizens and support for organized labor, it does not have any litmus tests.

Accordingly, the party has yet to take a stand on the upcoming state battle over abortion rights, a decision that will inevitably alienate some of its members. To Bell, however, refusing to have a core set of policies is a fault of the state’s Democrats: “I think parties should stand for something; it is fundamentally dishonest for a Republican to run for office as a Democrat.” +++ In just a few years the WFP has had some successes, but the true test of progressive politics will come as they try to shift from a fringe party to a true political force. The party had a major legislative achievement in the paid sick leave bill, but to combat the conservative Democrats and the many regressive laws they have passed, the WFP will have to start leading more frequent campaigns on other contentious policies. As progressive democrat Bell told the Indy, “We are still losing. We’re still seeing a really awful set of policies, particularly with regards to health care.”

That said, Bell added that even in the past few years, progressive Democrats have shifted the topics of political debate in Rhode Island from extremely conservative policies to conversations about issues like poverty, gender equality, and reproductive justice. Furthermore, as MacKay told the Indy, while the Democrats have the fundraising strength, “the energy is on the progressive side—if you look at who is doing the work, who is getting out there and knocking on doors, who is doing the phone banks, the people who get out there are more often from the progressive side of the party.” Thus, with the 2017 legislative session and 2018 Democratic primaries looming, the Working Families Party and progressives throughout the state have a promising opportunity to use this surge in energy to extend their reach into the machine of the Democratic Party and reshape Rhode Island politics.

HARRY AUGUST B’19 wishes DINOs went extinct 65 million years ago.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

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BAREFOOT: HOW TO LIVE WELL IN HARD TIMES A tribute to Mark Baumer COMPILED BY Erin West ILLUSTRATION & DESIGNED BY Alex Hanesworth

The following are excerpts from Mark’s various work, pulled largely from his blog, Barefoot Across America.

1. Believe in the future: “One day everyone will be able to walk down the middle of the road free from all the violence this society has built.”

2. Actively construct that future: “Cut out your own heart. Fill it with tar. Staple it to the nearest racist.”

3. If 2 doesn’t work: “Grow an organism so large it drowns out anyone and everything who has ever tried to harm a living being.”

4. Consider nature: “A tree / does some / thoughts / and / thinks / it doesn’t / look good / for us”

5. Eat vegetables: “What I ate on day 100: Pinto beans, mangoes, dates, black eyed peas, salsa, mushrooms, kale, and blueberries.”

6. Say what you mean: “The language of this world has maybe died and been replaced with another hole that can only say things its own thoughts already believe.”

7. Say what you really mean: “Maybe I need to read a book about how to talk to people about real life without apologizing for talking about real life.”

8. Stay vulnerable: “It’s funny when someone asks what you’re thinking and you spew all your cluttered thoughts until you realize they probably only wanted the important stuff not every last drip in your thought ocean.”

9. Stay weird: “There is an emotional animal in all of us. It has three legs. The toe on its third leg does not look like a toe. It looks like a toy giraffe.”

Mark Baumer was a poet, activist, and beloved member of the Providence community. His energy, kindness, creativity, and deep commitment to building a better world touched many of those lucky enough to know him and many more of his fans, readers, and internet followers.

Baumer grew up in Durham, Maine. He moved to Providence to complete a master’s in fiction writing at Brown University, after which he remained in the city, working in the Brown libraries and writing prolifically — mainly poetry, zines, and short fiction. Baumer’s work and activism were deeply intertwined; Baumer advocated

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for labor rights as a union steward at Brown and became a central member of local Providence environmental justice organization, The FANG Collective. In October 2016, Baumer embarked on a journey to walk barefoot across the continental US The project was intended to raise awareness about climate change and collect funds for FANG. Along the way, Baumer uploaded daily videos and blog posts about his musings and encounters at notgoingtomakeit.com. The walk was emblematic of how Baumer moved through the world: wandering, but with purpose, and always with humor.

10. Stay awake: “We now officially have a president who does not believe in climate change. He wants the world to burn so he can profit.

We now have a president who hates women, who physically abuses women. We have a president who hates minorities, a president who wants to make minorities suffer. A president who hates disabled people. A president who does not want to help people when they are in need. All he wants to do is profit.

If you support this man, you do not support human life on this planet. Plain and simple. You do not support the future of Earth as a planet.”

11. Spread kindness: “What do you do when someone you politically disagree with is being kind to you?... The only answer I have right now is to thank people for their kindness and encourage them to keep spreading kindness throughout the world.”

12. Never give up: “SAVE THE WORLD WITH YOUR FEET! SAVE THE WORLD WITH YOUR HEART! SAVE THE WORLD WITH YOUR HANDS! SAVE THE WORLD WITH YOUR BRAIN! SAVE THE WORLD WITH EVERY PIECE OF YOUR BODY UNTIL YOU HAVE A BODY NO MORE!”

On January 21, 2017, Baumer was struck by a car.

He passed away on his 100th day of walking. At an event hosted by FANG earlier this month, his friends, parents, and other community members gathered to mark the anniversary of his death. “He was sent here to straighten us out,” said one friend, another: “He just seemed to give a damn about every person.” If you’d like to contribute to FANG in Baumer’s memory, visit thefangcollective.org. Read his work at thebaumer.com (Ada Books on Westminster carries some of his zines.)

FEBRUARY 02, 2018

BY Anna Hundert ILLUSTRATION BY Alex Hanesworth

SINGING A DIFFERENT TUNE

DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

Grad Party and the queer storytelling of “Pretty Boy”

As a genre, the love song has a fraught history of reinforcing particular frameworks within the heterosexual matrix. The male singer-songwriter, subject and owner of feelings, sings about the female figure of his desire. In this time-honored tradition, the female figure becomes at once a muse for inspiring artistic expression and a vessel for emotion—in other words, the object of the male gaze. Even more innocent-seeming love songs, like the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There,” explicitly center and are charged by the male gaze. But, of course, female and queer songwriters have always pushed back on this narrative, rewriting the terms of power in our own stories of intimacy. From Sappho to Frank Ocean, lyricists continue to find ways to restructure the gaze and what it can mean at the intersection of love-making and art-making. However, their structural inheritance is still defined by these power dynamics, to some extent. In Frank Ocean’s “Chanel,” he sings, “my guy pretty like a girl” and “can’t you see I am the big man,” positioning himself within this heteronormative framework even as he undermines it. +++ Many love stories begin with a glance across a crowded room, but some glances are riskier than others. The start of a queer love story is fraught with the politics of acceptance and coming out, even as new artists continue to expand the existing canon of queer love songs. Grad Party, first formed here in Providence last year, recently released a new single that explores these complicated aspects of queer romance within a simple narrative framework. “Pretty Boy” opens with an upbeat rhythm, but the lyrics feel hesitant as the speaker sets the scene: “Eyes across the room / you’re talking to her but I can’t help but think you sing a different tune / see I’m pretty sure that thing I felt, you felt it too…”

The question of being ‘out’ adds an extra layer to the song’s narrative almost immediately. This question of the other’s sexuality would be valid within a heterosexual dynamic, but it’s almost never asked. Straight love stories have the luxury of that assumption from the very beginning; the “glance across a crowded room” only has weight on the basis of individual judgment, and is unburdened by the question of sexuality. In this way, ‘straightness’ also underscores a privilege of straightforwardness. Grad Party, like Frank Ocean, subverts this tradition with lyrics that are at once straightforward and concerned with the unique vulnerabilities of queer romance.

Toward the end of “Pretty Boy,” vulnerability reenters the narrative. After a whole song about a mutual spark of attraction and keeping each other “warm at night,” a line of insecurity rises above the refrain: “I hope I’m right.” This vulnerability, a vulnerability inherent in the queer gaze, never quite goes away. Rather than resolving vulnerability, the song accepts vulnerability as a constitutive element of queer storytelling. +++ Grad Party made their start last winter in two rented rooms in a house on Power Street. Ian Bowers and Carlo Ladd, seniors at Brown at the time, wrote and recorded

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their first single, “Speak,” followed by their first EP. Now, having graduated, Bowers and Ladd are working together to pursue the project more seriously. Ladd told the College Hill Independent that he wrote “Pretty Boy” because he “wanted to write a poppy love song that was unmistakably gay.” Of course, the notion of queer representation in music is hardly new: Ladd sees Grad Party knowingly walking in the footsteps of artists such as SYD and Troye Sivan with this new single. However, he adds: “there still aren’t enough pop songs that communicate specifically queer romantic experiences.” Ladd explains: “I wanted to make my own contribution to that. The general public’s understanding of ‘gay’ music—and definitely my own, until I actively looked for queer pop—is often limited to empowerment anthems such as Macklemore’s ‘Same Love’ and Christina Aguilera’s ‘Beautiful,’ and while these are important, love songs normalizing gay romance are equally so.” Popular songs centering queerness tend to be more about asserting the right to exist than actual queer love. Lines like “born this way” come to mind, as well as “I can’t change even if I tried,” a sentiment centered in “Same Love.”

While the affirmation of identity is certainly valuable, there’s a lot more work to be done in telling actual narratives of queer love and attraction. Asserting humanity cannot and should not be the only acceptable goal for marginalized artists. That’s what makes “Pretty Boy” radical: it isn’t an anthem of empowerment, but a vulnerable expression of the hope for intimacy that at once occupies and subverts the traditional space of the love song. The song is primarily about a spark of attraction, a feeling of energy drawing two people together.

“It’s dark but I can see the spark that’s you and me / it’s threatening a fire but we’re right where we need to be”—these lyrics could be about anyone. But as the song continues, it’s clear that this love story doesn’t have the privilege of simplicity or security: “Pretty boy, don’t you care what they think / if they care, I’ll keep you safe.” The risk of not only judgment, but also of physical violence, from the recurring “they” casts a shadow

of realism over an otherwise lighthearted sentiment. The invocation of this omnipresent ‘they’ introduces a thirdparty gaze into what would otherwise be a dual space of the first-person speaker and the second-person “pretty boy.” As the song goes, before this ‘they’ encroaches, it “feels like just us around.” The imposition of societal judgment lingers somewhere in the background of every queer love story; we can’t fully escape the ‘they.’ This vulnerability is, as much queer pride, an integral part of the queer experience. +++ What does it mean to be unseen, or unheard? The phrase ‘unheard-of’ can refer to something rare in a positive way or, alternatively, to something so brazen as to be profane. But the importance of “Pretty Boy” is about more than queer representation in music. The problematic structure of the love song genre, where the male voice ‘woos’ a female object, cannot be entirely ignored, even in a same-gender setting. There is still the ‘I’ and the ‘you,’ the watcher and the watched. The vocal mirroring in “Pretty Boy” within the lines, “If you’ll be my boy tonight / I could be your boy tonight,” presents the potential for a mutual intimacy where neither partner is ‘objectified,’ and both have the subjective agency to want and be wanted at the same time.

And so the canon of love songs keeps expanding, charting many different courses of ways people can be close to each other. The traditional love song structure, after so many years of use, is mired in limited notions of what romance is. Queer artists reinvigorate this genre by using old tropes to new ends, embracing the challenge to represent expanding possibilities of what love can be.

ANNA HUNDERT B’18.5 thinks that Lorde was robbed at the Grammys.

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THIS IS DROUGHT The long view of water shortage in California

BY Paige Parsons ILLUSTRATION BY Sophia Meng DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

In the Kitchen Green vines grow up my backyard fence beyond my kitchen window, looking down over my neighbor’s fresh green lawn. My mom buys bottled water labeled “Arrowhead,” a lake an hour northeast from home, in the middle of the San Bernardino National Forest. She drinks it everywhere while cups sit in the pantry: on the couch, in the kitchen next to a cabinet of cups, on her nightstand. It comes in mega-cases from Costco Wholesale, the 36 bottles trumping your average case of 24.

Southern California has seemed dry ever since Euroamerican settlement imposed the flora and water-consumption habits of more temperate climates onto its desert. Between 2012 and 2016, the state suffered the largest sustained decrease in water levels in over a millennium. Still, many Californians live in groves, water pumped in and shipped in cases to sustain the sprawl of construction, agriculture, and human life. In 2013 we hit the lowest annual record of precipitation in over a century.

The state claims an average rainfall of around 23 inches.

Twice the average amount of rainfall would be needed in one season for the landscape to recover from the deficit in rainfall over four years. October 2015 El Niño storms brought relief, but the state continued to struggle. By April of 2017, the governor had declared that the drought was officially over.

Back when national news headlines reported California’s “State of Emergency,” sometimes people here on the East Coast would ask me how the drought affects my life there. I couldn’t really answer, because where I’m from we don’t feel it or talk about it. The drought was barely more than the punchline of a few jokes at my high school, where we ate lunch outdoors beside manicured school greens. In Orange County, nobody is rushing to replace their grass with rock gardens. In fact, I think such landscaping is banned in the bylaws of the homeowner’s association in my community. In LA, people began painting their lawns with ecologically friendly spray paint, and a whole sub-industry has grown out of drought landscaping: cosmetics for the green patch next to your sloped driveway and shiny cars. You wouldn’t want your neighbors to know about the drought.

The water district that bills our home water consumption sends us a newsletter informing us of an upcoming “water awareness festival.” I’m interested even if it seems mundane, but my mother is disinterested because the bill

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reads that we are well within our allotted water usage for the month. By some fluke, our five-person household is registered as a four-person household with the district, and even then our consumption is not over the restricted, drought-sized allotment. Our lawn is an exuberant shade of green, paint-free. Are other people taking hour-long showers, watering acres of lawns?

In the River In the summer, when the air is driest, I drive inland with my family to swim and ride around in boats in the Colorado River. My dog Charlie and I run off the hot sunbaked sand into the water. The two of us paddle to deeper waters and coast with the current, which takes us south, in the direction of home. Up beyond us, the concrete blocks of the dam hold back the water of the artificially created Lake Havasu. Massive pipes look like water slides, sloping into the river from the canyon's edge.

Engineers sit in the towers above and make decisions every day about how much water to release. Some days, they release so much that when we paddle upstream, we stay in one place, like we're on a water treadmill.

Other days, the water level recedes, and we can swim far upstream with ease.

Thirty percent of southern California's drinking water flows from the Colorado River. By car, I take the Palm Desert road home, cutting through the Coachella Valley and Riverside, the gems of the Inland Empire. I drive 75 through vast open dirt and shrubbery, with long undulations in the road creating mirages in the distance.

It looks like glistening water, but as I approach it, I see it's just a depression in the asphalt. I used to think mirages only came up in dehydrated imaginations, but now the sun creates these images as I sip bottled water in an air-conditioned car. I feel above the destitution of the desert. Comfortable with cruise control on, guided through the landscape like an automaton.

When water travels from the Colorado River to my house, it takes a more circuitous route, up farther north to a sanitation plant near Los Angeles. From there it heads down south, to flow out of my sink as potable water.

Some of it keeps flowing down to San Diego, and the circuit stop about two hours south of me, where Mexico begins. A friend who lives in San Diego tells me about how the city is testing out domestic use of recycled water.

This purification method is very expensive, but it is also

drought-resistant and, unlike outsourced supply, faces less risk of collapse by natural disaster. Proponents say water recycling is returning our water use to "how nature works."

Affluent communities are protesting it, calling it "toilet to sink" water. Nonetheless, the water district found a way to get the recycled water into people's faucets. Heavily discounted recycled water created guinea pigs out of low income communities. "These people are basically getting water for free!" a municipal politician remarked at a press conference.

This stigma of “dirtiness” attached to purified, recycled water is a challenge, but the prospect of wider usage of water recycling has great potential for increasing the abilities of southern California districts to decrease reliance on other parts of the state. The Orange County Water District is using treated wastewater for groundwater replenishment, landscape irrigation, industrial use, and power generation cooling. Localizing water supply would force the southern half of the state into greater self-reliance; costs are high for building up storm water captures, desalination, and water recycling infrastructure, but so are the costs of maintaining the current extended aqueduct network.

In an archaeology textbook, I read that “technology helps us avoid experiencing the world as it is,” a statement found in the middle of the centuries-long story of human manipulation of landscapes. In California, I was born into a network of resources that allows me to have no idea how this place would work as it is. Or maybe this is as it is. Two centuries of settler colonialism and subsequent re-engineering of water systems has naturalized networks of displaced water flows into our ways of seeing the land so much that we cannot begin to see it without them. The threat of the system's collapse seems impossible. And personal history has taught me that the system is infallible, as everything has always lined up right for me to be here, for clean water to flow into my mouth and sink and shower.

In the Valley In the summer of 2014, my friends and I camped in Julian, California, a mountainous area just east of San Diego. We bathed our feet every night in a stream by our site. In a rare conversation about the drought, one friend listed a trail of statistics, our eyes all widening as he claimed that domestic use only accounts for 10% of California water

FEBRUARY 02, 2018

usage (in reality urban and town usage totals around 10%, including both residential and commercial faucet flows). I felt both absolved and hopeless. “Do you know how much water it takes to grow an almond?” he asked incredulously.

Growing one almond requires an average of 1.1 gallons, but that summer inflated numbers circulated publications and conversations as the almond became the drought’s scapegoat. Journalists targeted the almond industry for essentially “exporting water” when they exported almonds, but the Almond Board of California defended their crop. It turns out that almonds take up 14% of irrigated agricultural land in the state and 9.5% of agricultural water supply, a favorably proportioned use of resources for one of the state’s most lucrative products. The outrage was a reminder that all food requires water to grow. California’s largest agricultural region, which stretches from Monterey to Santa Barbara and inland, faces the most severe level of drought. The state provides nearly half of U.S. fruits, nuts, and vegetables, including over 90% of all tomatoes, grapes, and strawberries. Almost a quarter of U.S. milk and cream also comes from California.

In the summer of 2015, I am driving through the Central Valley on the way home from Yosemite. I take note of billboard after billboard, simple black, all-caps words on white backgrounds, proclaiming the injustice of the drought on the agricultural industry. “Food Grows Where Water Flows,” is a catchy one. Others tell us sad tales about water legislation fights and the decline of the industry, the urgency of better water conservation and allocation. The more expensive and impossible meeting the irrigation demand becomes, the more crops recenter in the south and the midwest, where water is cheap and widely available. One-third of the Central Valley’s jobs are farm-related, causing a direct correlation between employment and water levels.

In 2015, the governor had mandated a 25% decrease from 2013 levels of urban water usage, and districts around the state complied. In the summer of 2016, I am only home briefly, and I mostly stay put in Orange County. I am driving my car south on the Interstate 5 in December of 2016 and cursing because the rain is so heavy that I can hardly see what is in front of me. I tell my friend that I’m angry because this is not what I want when I come home.

He laughs and says that I should be thanking the sky.

In June, due to the rain, the state loosened conservation requirements, and many suppliers dramatically slid back into previous usage levels. The state went from exceeding Governor Brown’s goal reduction, saving 27% in August 2015, to saving just 17.7% in August 2016. These drastic shifts demonstrate that Californians are capable of lessening their water consumption, yet this decrease is seen as a temporary measure. It is a way out of a mess, not a necessary aspect of life in an arid region.

Heavy rains continued, and while we were happy to receive rain, the cycle of downpour has made it difficult for the land to recover from its dry state, particularly in the hardest-hit central part of the state. Then, 2017 brought another exceptionally dry spell. In the fall of 2017, a series of wildfires ripped through the state,

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destroying hundreds of homes in Santa Barbara, Ventura, Sonoma and Orange County. Affluence may provide distance from water scarcity itself, but many wealthy residential areas rest on the tops of picturesque, spacious canyons covered in dry brush. Homes burned in Bel-Air; residents from Oprah Winfrey’s neighborhood in Santa Barbara were evacuated. When the heavy rains came back again, slopes that had lost most of their vegetation to fire were more vulnerable to mudslides. In some of the most destructive events, rain fails to become absorbed in the dry soils and instead immediately becomes runoff, flowing downhill and bringing the landscape with it.

In the Future In the spring of 2014, my local library and water district co-sponsored a reading by novelist Paolo Bacigupi for his new science fiction novel, The Water Knife. The librarian tells me the event had a great turnout, attendees ranging from young adults to senior citizens, culminating with a lively discussion. I’m not so sure about Mission Viejo’s lively literary scene, and in the photos I only see heads of gray and white hair, but maybe people do mobilize when someone speaks to their fears. The story takes place in a near-future version of the American Southwest. Britney Spears is still alive, and the region is overrun by chaos and strife over dwindling water resources. Wars are fought with greedy waterpark resorts while existing communities collapse. Everyone wants their piece of the Colorado River, and East Coast journalists are there to capture it all, making a major profit off of public fascination with the cataclysmic conditions.

Bacigupi’s imagination may not be far off, given the precarious dependency southern California has on three major aqueducts that all intersect with the San Andreas fault at least once. The largest of the three, the California Aqueduct, runs over 400 miles from the San JoaquinSacramento River Delta through a network of reservoirs, pipes, and pumping stations, into the Los Angeles Basin.

The aqueduct forms an integral link between the northern part of the state, where 75% of precipitation falls, and the southern part, where 75% of water is consumed.

Statistically, we are due for a large earthquake in the near future, and geologists at UCLA predict that an earthquake of a 7.8 magnitude could cause enough damage to the aqueduct system to disrupt water supply for up to 22 million Californians. Further, findings published in a 2014 issue of Nature propose that the groundwater depletion of the Central Valley may be altering the stresses of the San Andreas fault. The mountain ranges surrounding the San Joaquin Valley undergo gradual uplift based on variations in the water table, changing the seismic patterns of the region. As water continues to subside, the geologists warn, faults are more susceptible to failure.

In the fall of 2017, Governor Brown attempted to convince the 29 water agencies reliant on the California Aqueduct to finance his new “WaterFix” project, which seeks to reengineer the plumbing that routes water southbound from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The infrastructural update would fare better in a seismic event. Two massive tunnels would divert water

away from the delta, replacing the current system which pumps against the water’s flow, pulling endangered fish to their deaths. Because of the ecological harm caused by the existing pump, proponents of the new project are arguing that in replacing it, the environmental restrictions that limit southbound exports would ease. However, many Northern Californian residents have pushed back, arguing that the supposed decrease in harm to ecosystems is scientifically unsound, since diverting fresh water from the delta would create another set of problems for wildlife. Ongoing sea level rise puts the delta in flux as it is, making its reengineering an experiment with unknown variables. While environmental activists have made their opposition clear, it is funding that is ultimately blocking the project’s progress. In particular, districts which serve agricultural communities are against funding the project, arguing that growers can’t afford a more expensive water supply. The differential in costs has much higher stakes for irrigation than it does for residential use, of which 40% goes to landscaping.

Barring the further damage that a new tunnel system could have on wildlife, drought conditions have already caused harm to the Chinook salmon population south of the delta. Low water levels in the Klamath and Trinity Rivers pose risks to habitat health, threatening the survival of fish, which are central to the diets of the Hoopa Valley, Yurok, and Karuk tribes who live near the rivers. Karuk tribes have petitioned for more water to be released from dams during drought conditions, yet the state continues to prioritize the allocation of water to distant communities over the health of watersheds.

In addition to having more household water outages than California on average, Native Californians have little voice in state water management. Many tribes are forced to rely on deteriorating infrastructure and a lack of storage facilities, and their distance from municipal systems means no strong backup plan. The Indian Health Service, a federal agency responding to Native American water crises, is understaffed and only has about 10% of the funding it needs for full response. For intervention by state water agencies, tribes need to give up some measures of their sovereignty. In many communities, this idea is as insurmountable as the low water table itself; for others, there is no choice but to compromise with the state juridical system.

As the climate heats up while precipitation stays low, we will be living in a constant state of adaptation despite reprieves and the proclamation of the end of drought. Water shortage is not a temporary problem, making the distinction of whether it is a “drought” or not arbitrary. The label allows for policy makers to enforce restricted use, yet fails to address the longevity of the problem. Earthquake or not, every community will be at risk. Drought-resilient water providers like recycling plants may become the only option no longer thrust in the face of low-income communities, but fought over by everyone.

PAIGE PARSONS B’18 wants a rock garden.

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RAINBOW SAVIORS

content warning: homophobia, sexual assault.

The first accusation of sexual assault against Kevin Spacey surfaced on October 29, 2017 by actor Anthony Rapp. In a Buzzfeed article written by Adam Bary, it was reported that in 1986, 26-year-old Spacey sexually forced himself upon Rapp, who was 14 at the time. On the same night that the article surfaced, Spacey came forward to apologize through an official statement, in which he also came out as gay. “I have loved and had romantic encounters with men throughout my life, and I choose now to live as a gay man. I want to deal with this honestly and openly and that starts with examining my own behavior,” he said in the brief apology published on his Twitter account.

The second part of Spacey’s comment has been met with justified backlash from the gay community. Many have spoken out about fears that Spacey's coming out will be weaponized by anti-LGBTQ groups to correlate pedophilia with queerness. Still, this mediatized coming out gesture can also be read as Spacey’s desperate and misguided attempt to redeem himself—to be understood more as a queer man than a pedophile, maybe hoping that the media will celebrate his “bravery” and hence prevent the (rightful) ostracism that followed the now 15 accusations posed against him. This act of individual redemption ultimately comes at the expense of the whole LGBTQ community. While Spacey’s capitalization on coming out culture is a despicable act of violence towards the experiences of sexual assault survivors, his expectation to be protected by the congratulatory reactions of the media is not fully unfounded.

In many communities, the self-disclosure of one’s sexual identity has become a crucial rite of passage to be recognized and validated in one’s queer identity. More than the politicized act of coming out in the Stonewall era, in many liberal communities across the United States, the act of coming out provides a sort of social capital that resonates with notions of empowerment and bravery, while also allowing queers to enter mainstream gay subculture. On the other hand, lack of disclosure is often read as a consequence of internalized homophobia and “unjustified” anxiety around the implications of living an openly queer life.

The scrutiny over Tyler the Creator’s sexual identity is an example of pop culture’s fixation with the

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declaration and categorization of queer identities. With the release of "Flower Boy", the rapper’s latest album, previous questions regarding Tyler’s same-sex attraction resurfaced. Publications such as the Independent, Vox, Vice, the Guardian, to name a few, wrote extensive pieces on every clue Tyler has ever dropped regarding his sexual preferences; from his misleading comments on being “gay as fuck” in a Rolling Stone interview back in 2015, to his proclaimed love for young Leonardo Dicaprio.

As a public figure largely scrutinized for his political incorrectness (his use of homophobic slurs got him banned from the UK in 2015), the discussion surrounding Tyler’s sexual identity often portrays him as a closeted man hurting from anger and internalized homophobia. “Is this a young man’s earnest struggle to come to terms with his sexuality in a public forum, awkwardly using humor as a defense mechanism to protect himself from a potentially unforgiving rap community?” asked Benjamin Lee, East Coast Arts Editor for the Gaurdian, in his column. In the very same piece, Lee also refers to the contradictions of “being gay and a hip-hop fan,” in a gesture that aims— through policing and trying to make sense of Tyler’s inconsistencies—to make sense of his own contradictions. Ultimately, forcing labels that the rapper has openly rejected does not seem to be serving a higher purpose of constructing visibility. Rather, it has become an attempt to make him more legible and palpable to mass (particularly white) audiences. +++ The neoliberal transition of the 1970s and 1980s proposes, as put by anthropologist David Harvey, “that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” Hence neoliberalism, while an economic model, has mapped itself into the practices and social norms of the US and other societies. Neoliberal governments promote a model of ‘market citizen,’ allowing space for certain kinds of identity claims that are compatible with the economic project, while simultaneously silencing political perspectives and movements that challenge free-market premises. Such a model has turned queer subjects from figures

of death into notions of life and productivity—particularly after the legalization of same-sex marriage—but continues to be one that is not available to every queer member of society. The assimilation of queer subjects creates a model of ‘homonormativity’ that hinges on the individual’s “access to the institutions of domestic privacy, the ‘free’ market, and patriotism.” Instead of the early claims for queer ‘equality’ which defined it as freedom to be different, current neoliberal society has only gone so far as to allow equality as “sameness with normativity.”

The integration of a ‘normal gay subject’ into American neoliberal politics has come to shape the shallow and celebratory ideas that surround coming out as the ultimate promise to queer liberation based on individual freedom rather than communal uplift.

For many, being ‘out’ is an empty promise. The fundamental nature that mass media has given to coming out excludes a large part of the queer community, and speaks to the ways in which a specific model of queerness has become part of the neoliberal project of US empire.

Coming out promises liberation, and an opening to live a free, depoliticized life, but often proves to be the opposite.

In order to come out, one must have someone to come out to, and identifications of class, race, or migration status can deprive certain groups within the queer community to access the same narrative of liberation that mass media promises and celebrates. +++ There are plenty of examples of the fetishization and consumerism surrounding coming out. In 2014, actress Ellen Page came out to the public in a speech at the Human Rights Campaign Foundation Conference. As she declared during the speech, she felt the “personal and social responsibility” to do so. Later on, she discussed the experience with another queer icon, Ellen Degeneres. In the interview that aired on April 30 of the same year, both women discussed feelings of guilt associated with the closet and how, in Degeneres's words, “you are releasing shame” by openly disclosing your sexual identity to the public. While an empowering gesture for some, this sort of discourse carries the implication that those who choose to remain “in the closet” do so out of shame. The emancipatory coming out model is a racialized, class and documentation-based idea that incorporates a very specific

FEBRUARY 02, 2018

On the politics of ( not ) coming out

BY Paula Pacheco Soto ILLUSTRATION BY Eve O'Shea DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

queer model that fails to account for the barriers that other marginalized identities pose to the trendy image of creating an open forum of one’s sexual preference.

Not only does Page’s experience reflect the normalized audience’s enthusiasm for commodified narratives about coming out in US culture, but it also reveals the dichotomies that it entails, providing a certain kind of social capital to folks holding privileged identities within the queer community. Following her speech and emergence as an LGBTQ rights activist, Page scored the development and production of Viceland show, Gaycation. The series follows Ellen Page and friend Ian Daniel (who also identifies as queer), as they travel to several destinations to explore LGBTQ living. While Gaycation is meant to be a travel show, the show spends much of its screen time focusing on the struggles and suffering of queer people in foreign destinations. The show is based upon the rising LGBTQ imperialist rhetoric that divides the world into (first-world) LGBTQ-friendly countries, and (thirdworld) homophobic ones, based on a barometer of the same hurtful ritualization of coming out, as well as the institutionalization of same-sex marriage and other inclusive policies. This further erases the nuances previously discussed, and the ways in which certain queer communities continue to be excluded within this neoliberal LGBTQ model.

The show structurally operates on the notion of coming out as a pivotal moment of queer life, which Ellen Page has stood by in the past. Not only is there a fixation with exploiting queer narratives of oppression throughout the show—on a previous episode, they actually broadcast the coming out of a young Japanese queer man to his mother. Ellen discusses her own experience with leaving ‘the closet’, mentioning how loving someone openly was far more important to her than “being in movies” or “having someone dislike [her].” “Coming out was moving past the shame and discomfort,” she says almost in tears. The episode goes on into centering Page’s inspiring speech as the driving force of the revelation that will follow.

This is not to deny the benefits and empowering effect that coming out could have, but it ignores the privilege that frames narratives like this. As a famous actress, enjoying financial independence and living in a country that does not criminalize her on the basis of her sexual

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identity, Ellen Page benefits from a platform that many queer youth, particularly throughout the Third World, do not enjoy. Both the export of such a narrative into a foreign context, and its vain glory on a national platform, is unfair to those who cannot relate to other aspects of the actress’s identity.

‘Coming out’ and other LGBTQ-related terms are culturally specific concepts that not every community adheres to, and the imposition of US-based LGBTQ categories can be sometimes subtle for a national audience. For an episode of Gaycation’s second season, both queer figures travel to India. As they interview activists and members of the LGBTQ community in Bombay and some southern provinces, much of the interrogation centers on cultural differences. In Bombay, the two interview a community of Hijras, a third gender which is recognized in India and other South Asian countries. As Page interrogates Komal, a prominent Hijra who is also a member of the Hijra-only band Six Pack, regarding their community’s role in the LGBTQ activism in India, the answer is simple: “we are not part of the LGBTQ community.”

The fact that the Hijra community is still featured as a central part of this LGBTQ travel show—echoing Western media outlets' misguided categorization of the community as transgender—while clearly denying their self-identification, speaks of the predominance of Western models of queerness inherent in the show. It ignores, furthermore, the distinctiveness of this identity as one that, as opposed to common discourse of queer rights, makes claims to the state on the basis of tradition and religion. Hijra identity as a third gender is understood as a ‘gift from god’, and they continue to have religious and cultural significance in Hindu context given their association with Lord Shiva. The show is a clear platform for the internationalization of mainstream US queer culture and the perpetuation of US cultural assumptions in more complicated global contexts.

While there is nothing new about Western fascination with “discovering” and exotizicing foreign bodies, the deployment of queer rhetoric for such purposes is a relatively new phenomena, that ultimately seeks to perpetuate US moral exceptionalism through a lens of liberal thinking. As many other shows, Gaycation is just another platform for a crafted picture of the “foreign

other.” Only in this case, it is a queer one. +++ Coming out culture disregards the narrative that there can also be liberation in silence. “Queers are compelled to be talking subjects, those who are ‘out and proud’” says Brian Horton, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown’s Department of Anthropology. At last, the project of coming out began as a form to reclaim space for one’s identity among communities (particularly families) that have consistently denied it. Silence can be a matter of self-preservation, which in itself is an act of self-respect.

For marginalized groups within the queer community, coming out represents the dichotomy between defiance and survival. As a society, we must acknowledge that queer people are not just queer people and they all inhabit multiple identities. How can we then conciliate the visibility of their existence in repressive societies, allowing them to enjoy rights and greater quality of life, while not reducing their bodies to their sexual practices?

How do we disrupt the system of heteronormative tradition while neither reducing people’s identities to a single label, nor forcing minorities to further endanger themselves more than they already have to on a daily basis?

Ultimately, if coming out represents the act of taking ownership of one’s sexuality, the different means to express one’s identity should be respected and celebrated with the same fervor. Otherwise, our supposed inclusivity is purely buying into structures of white supremacy and US imperialism.

PAULA PACHECO SOTO B’20 loves/hates Ellen Page.

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URSULA, OH URSULA What do you do when your favorite person dies?

After the death of a great artist such as Ursula Le Guin, the inevitably lesser person writing the memoriam (in this case, me) typically begins by presenting their credentials as a superfan. It is proof of having cared, and cared a lot.

Here is what I have read, which is canon but not a lot besides: the five books of the Earthsea cycle, the three YA books ending in Powers, The Telling, The Lathe of Heaven, a few short stories with titles too long to list, and finally the bright, adjacent jewels of her oeuvre: The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.

Regular readers of her blog would know that UKL, as she would sign off on posts, had been in poor health since the end of 2016, generally housebound after chronic heart problems took a turn for the worse. I will admit a terrible thing, something I can say only at a distance— since she announced her condition that October, I have been waiting for her to die. And, knowing the end was near, I have been thinking with some desperation about how I would remember her and all the books that she gave us.

In particular, I have been trying to understand her 1969 sci-fi novel, The Left Hand of Darkness. Out of all of Le Guin's books, Left Hand is by far the most famous, and also the one which causes me the most distress. I was convinced, with an almost fervid optimism, that if I understood my thoughts on this book, somehow I could also discern my opinion of its author in general. I just wanted to have a clear and articulated feeling about her, to rid myself of this nameless unease.

At any rate, the premise: it is the future, and a research-emissary named Genly Ai has just been sent on a long-term mission by the Ekumen, a more-or-less benevolent interplanetary consortium preserving human civilization in the wake of some ambiguous, historically distant catastrophe. Genly Ai must visit a newly rediscovered planet and document its people, and as a corollary he must also try to convince its locals to join the Ekumen, and thus the macro-community of humans remaining in the universe. The planet, called Gethen, is very remote, very cold, and very strange. It is also inhabited by humans, but the people there are neither men nor women, because they exhibit “biological differentiation” and sexual urges only at a certain time of month—like periods, but for sex and its organs.

The action of the book is taken up with such various and exciting things as a failed coup, near-death labor camp experiences, and a perilous trek across an entire continent of ice. But the emotional center of the novel is, of all things, a love story. Not only a love story, but a highly conventional love story with aestheticized Romantic suffering at its heart, featuring a death scene

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wherein one character cradles another in his arms as the dying one bleeds out onto the snow. All of this happens under the open sky in a clearing framed by bare, black trees, the sunset turning to dusk.

This scene is at once poignant and unbelievably corny. I felt embarrassed reading it, but more importantly, I felt a certain anger. I had come to Left Hand expecting something completely new, some sort of liberation. The foundation of its imaginary society is one in which the most specious, colonial, and endlessly reiterated of binaries—male/female—is not only nonexistent but physiologically impossible. Such a premise is almost unimaginably radical, and even UKL’s narrator recognizes his shortcomings in reading the society and its characteristics. Genly Ai refers to everyone as “he,” saying that it seems to him the most neutral pronoun. This, in

combination with the love story, is for me the two-punch that snatches the complexity out of Left Hand’s lynchpin relationship. It is a disappointment. Why the sentimental, sacrificial love? Why the preservation of tropes, even without the preservation of supposed difference? In these moments, the spell of the premise shatters.

Perhaps I am being ruined by details. To say that the book hinges on these two points would be completely reductive. Compared to the muscular inertia created by the plot, these are only minor capitulations, minor tragedies, trips and lurches in our navigation of the trackless void towards the possibility of something better. Pronouns have only recently become more than optional—or rather, only recently have our institutions begun disciplining their representatives for not caring before—but pronouns were only ever symptoms of the collective understanding

FEBRUARY 02, 2018

BY Eliza Chen ILLUSTRATION BY Dorothy Windham DESIGN BY Bethany Hung

of gender. In Gethen’s varied population of “he’s,” the society shown is one in which the outward signs of gender are absent, but from which gender’s mechanics have not been abolished. UKL said that one of the reasons she wrote Left Hand was to see what it would be like if gender were taken out of the equation. But instead we get chapters that begin with “My landlady was a voluble man,” and assessments of the same character, reading: He was so feminine in his looks and manner that once I asked him how many children he had. He looked glum.

He had never borne any. He had, however, sired four. It was one of the little jolts I was always getting. Cultural shock was nothing much compared to the biological shock I suffered as a human male among human beings who were, five-sixths of the time, hermaphroditic neuters.

I read such a thing and feel whiplash. This new thing, which I thought was different, can only be rendered through the lens of comparative stereotypes. My hope for characterization not monopolized by gender is broken when, inexplicably, the character amounts to a rag doll of gendered tropes. The arena of possibility, it seems, is where the old forms are most strongly reiterated.

In some ways, this impulse reflects a certain honesty.

I am often disoriented when trying to reframe my own thoughts about justice. How do we imagine liberation when many of the frameworks that espouse it are themselves agents of oppression? To what extent have I completely internalized the logic of those bent on making me the Other? Audre Lorde suggests that we not dismantle the master’s house with his tools, but the enduring question remains: How? But Lorde’s question has answers. My “how” is not meant to suggest that her question does not have answers. But in UKL’s writing, there is sometimes a near-backward retreat into the kinds of thinking from which her fantastical work was imagined as a place of escape.

This kind of situation represents my greatest disappointment with the structure of UKL’s work. She has always professed an interest in the Dickensian social novel, and for all the ruckus that both fans and haters make about her speculative premises, the stories she creates are not as radical as their settings might imply.

Hers are old stories told in new places. In the Dickensian vein, her protagonists are often symbolic figures carried by plots with generally upward moral trajectories. At the structural level, maybe all stories are actually old stories, but for an overtly political writer like UKL to reproduce old structures, hurts, and oppressions in her decidedly new-presenting worlds—it seems both inevitable and

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inexplicable. I do not wish to make a tiresome program of this argument, but the alternatives that UKL offers in her books—things that I might expect to be visions of unbridled hope—are often presented as weird and conservative inversions. She would ask: Is the opposite of oppressive patriarchy oppressive matriarchy? (“The Matter of Seggri”). Is anarchy inevitably another kind of totalitarianism? (The Dispossessed). Or, can you find resolution with what haunts you only through confrontation and internalization? (A Wizard of Earthsea).

While these are complex questions, and the stories that carry them are masterfully executed, they are fundamentally questions that draw stark binary lines. Yes / No, Fight / Flee, on and on and on. The story performs its delightful plot acrobatics in the middle, and I believe that there is significant, underrated potential in the middle, but looming over it all is an ultimately dualistic choice. Good or evil? Love or hate? Men or women? The Dispossessed bears the subtitle of “An Ambiguous Utopia,” but I do not believe that UKL herself was particularly ambivalent on the topic. Abuse of power exists regardless of political systems, seems to me her definitive answer. It is, as the cliché goes, no surprise. But also: heroic individuals with clear vision have the ability, single-handedly, to speak truth to power. This is the rest of her answer. While I wish to believe in that optimism, UKL’s penchant for heroic individuals undermines the potency of her alternative worlds.

This sort of heroic idealism parallels the way UKL expressed her general philosophical inclinations. Fellow sci-fi author China Miéville once called her “that great dissident-utopian,” referring to the rigor and consistency with which she applied herself to imagining life in the disorganized throes of becoming better. Or, if not better, then at least disorientingly different. Her fiction, and more explicitly her essays, suggests that she believed in a universe circling around a fixed moral rightness, an idea borrowed from the Daoist thought she proclaimed to be her guiding dogma. Daoism, at its core, is not about immutable right or wrong, nor does it really care about the sovereignty of individual actors. But in addition to believing in the cosmic ambiguity of the Dao, UKL also believed that out of the swirl of consciousness, heroes could be identified, and that heroes ought to know good from evil. So while Daoism is not individualistic, UKL remained enamored by protagonists, who she characterized as moving through the great and painful gyre of existence with an absolute tendency toward the righteous.

This, to me, amounts to moralism. But people love moralism; in fact, I love moralism. Righteousness is an orienting and desirable feeling—one of the most comforting in the world. But in remembering UKL in

these days after her death, and in the future years of her endless post-death, wherein she will continue to accrue spectacular adoration, I wish we could be honest about her limits. While she may have had ideological ambitions for her fiction, and while her very ambition for ideology sets her apart, I do not think she was entirely successful in imagining how people might act in a different or more liberated world. But even if she did not, in my opinion, arrive at conclusions commensurate to the grand ambition of her starts, she was not afraid to show that her worlds had problems, and that answers could be found.

Her fiction, despite its shortcomings, was audacious in its efforts to describe, in detail, the space between thinking about life and actually living it.

Here at the end, there is one strong argument to be made in her favor. Le Guin never forgot that the speculative part of her work was, fundamentally, a kind of political engagement. Society was never without people, and people never acted without consequences. While this structure of one-two determinism was a disappointing weakness in her writing, Ursula always worked to follow through with her characters. They always tried to live in their world, no matter how strange, violent, or impossible it seemed.

ELIZA CHEN B/RISD'19 wishes China Miéville would speak so highly of her.

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KEBAB A ČÍNA Veganism, multiculturalism, and culinary tradition in the Czech Republic

BY Jane Argodale ILLUSTRATION BY Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

On a Saturday afternoon in the Czech city of Brno, my friend and I sat inside Forky’s, a vegan restaurant, shoveling Sriracha-drizzled pad thai into our mouths out of cardboard cups. I’d been to Brno many times over the years to visit family, but this was the first time I’d ever seen Sriracha’s rooster-embellished bottles anywhere in the city. This was also my first time eating pad thai in the Czech Republic.

I went back to Forky’s many times throughout the six weeks I spent in Brno last summer. The restaurant came to represent the exact opposite of everything I had learned about Czech attitudes towards food. When my grandmother was alive, I would come to her apartment on the city’s edge for lunch, and she would have a full traditional Czech meal prepared for me. The centerpiece of that meal was always a gigantic portion of meat. From crispy slabs of pork schnitzel, to španělský ptáček, a dish that consists of a hotdog wrapped in a baked chicken cutlet, traditional Czech cuisine is so centered on meat, that a meat-free dish doesn’t register as a meal at all. At many a traditional Czech pub, the one vegetarian Czech dish I know of, fried cheese, is listed on the menu as a “snack.”

This diet originates from Slavic cultural traditions and the climate of Central Europe. Like the cuisines of other Slavic countries, traditional Czech staple vegetables—including beets, cauliflower, and cabbage—are all hardy vegetables capable of withstanding long winters.

Vegetables are almost always incorporated into meals either pickled or otherwise preserved. In the summer, local fruit is sold in city markets. That is the extent to which fresh produce was a part of Czech cuisine for centuries.

The rise of vegetarian and vegan cuisine in the Czech Republic is particularly surprising because the same trend has not appeared in other Slavic countries.

For every million inhabitants in the Czech Republic, there are 11.1 vegetarian restaurants—over double that of Slovakia and nearly 16 times that of Ukraine. The Czech Republic even surpasses many Western European countries, including Sweden, Italy, and Belgium which have 9.7, 9.4, and 7.4 vegetarian restaurants per million inhabitants, respectively. In Brno, almond milk and yogurt, though far pricier than cow milk and yogurt, are available at every major supermarket. Restaurants throughout the city center advertise entirely vegetarian and vegan menus.

Most of these eateries’ menus rely on some degree of appropriation of foreign cuisines. It’s admittedly hard to imagine how a meatless take on the Czech national dish, vepřo-knedlo-zelo—a cut of roasted pork with sliced bread dumplings and butter-braised cabbage drowning in the juices—could possibly do justice to the original. Czech cuisine also lacks spice, a much needed enhancement in vegetarian eating—the most you’ll ever get is a generous helping of Hungarian paprika in the sauce for a guláš or a stick of salami. Hot sauce only started appearing as the country’s borders became more open, first with the end of communism in 1989 and then with European Union membership. The increased access to foods from outside of this small landlocked country is what makes appealing vegetarian and vegan cuisine even possible. This is how it came to be that at a vegan café in Brno, I ordered the “Indian burger,” with a chickpea and cumin patty, vegan

cheese, and spicy curry sauce.

Even Forky’s decor is a counterpoint to Czech tradition. A traditional hospoda is dimly-lit and wood-paneled; Forky’s has tall, bright white walls and is drenched in sunlight. By one wall, there are the stacks of informational pamphlets on the cruelty of the meat and dairy industries, and on another, the names of famous vegans and vegetarians, including Paul McCartney and Mahatma Gandhi.

Forky’s breaks from Czech tradition by appearing modern and cosmopolitan. It’s a strategy that’s working so far. This winter, Forky’s has opened new locations in Prague and Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.

The foreign influences at Forky’s range from the obvious, such as the inclusion of pad thai on the menu, to the more subtle, like the jalapeño peppers in their Spicy Burger. What’s most striking about their menu, however, are the vegan adaptations of foreign cuisines already common in the Czech Republic because of the country’s large immigrant communities. The Vietnamese community brought pho, the Turkish and Azeri communities brought döner kebabs, and Forky’s made them vegan.

Inside the restaurant, I could just as easily have been at a location of the popular American vegan chain by CHLOE., with its Instagram-ready lighting and decor.

The feeling that one could be at any hip eatery in the world, presented with the same random selection of foreign dishes, speaks to a sense of flatness and sameness, with the sheen of cosmopolitanism, that globalization creates in places that were once economically isolated.

There is no real presence of the various cultures that made Forky’s possible—the restaurant itself is owned by a white Czech man, but Czech culture isn’t present either. Amid the sterile decoration and knock-off cuisine, one is told, at a place like Forky’s with its motto “Respect for Life,” that they are in fact doing something ethical by choosing to eat here rather than at a street food stand run by an Azeri immigrant. +++ Every afternoon on my way to my Czech classes at Masaryk University, I walked by a wall on Veveří Street, with purple graffiti that read, 98% Čechů nechce MULTIKULTI: 98 percent of Czechs don’t want multiculturalism. Spray-painted over it in black, was a snarky response: ale kebab a čína nám chutná—‘but we like kebab and Chinese food.’ The businesses on the surrounding blocks of Veveří are proof of this: pubs serving traditional Czech food and kebab stands practically alternate along the long boulevard. Though decidedly glib and shallow, the graffiti retort challenges those Czech citizens who wish to pick and choose the elements of multiculturalism that they’re most comfortable with. It’s also clear that access to a greater variety of food is among the least of Czechs’ objections to multiculturalism and globalization, even as it marks an underlying hypocrisy.

The professor who taught my class quickly became infamous among my peers for her daily xenophobic tirades against the EU, that would erupt into heated arguments with her students, who were mostly young citizens of other EU member states. In her mind, it was the poor, embattled Czechs—perpetually the victims of more powerful nations and their tyrannical leaders— against Angela Merkel, whose name she would hiss out

like a curse.

A number of her rants centered around food imports.

One day, she said, “I am a simple person. I don’t need to see bananas and oranges in the supermarkets year round.”

Another day, she made the dubious claim that EU regulations had prevented the sale of Czech-grown poppy seeds in the Czech Republic, thus requiring the importation of lower-quality poppy seeds from Turkey. In all of her rants she would contrast this nonsensical modern state of affairs with her vision of the past, in which the country was fully self-sufficient and self-contained. “My grandmother always said that the healthiest food you can eat is grown within 50 kilometers of where you were born,” she told our class one day.

The Czech Republic, of course, has always been a multicultural region—a consequence of Europe’s geography and the country’s own history as a part of bilingual Czechoslovakia, a former Warsaw Pact country, and as part of the Habsburg empire. A century ago, half of Brno’s population was German-speaking. Czechs have not historically bristled against multiculturalism itself, but the erosion of Czech autonomy that comes alongside it. There are Czech people living today who remember the Munich Agreement, which handed the first piece of Czech land over to Nazi Germany on the basis of its large German population, and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, which ended a widely supported period of liberalization in Czechoslovakia. Many Czechs view the dictates of the EU as a continuation of a pattern of disregard for the self-determination they have long fought for.

Such rightful skepticism towards EU leadership has been co-opted by a xenophobic reactionary movement. In the October parliamentary elections, the ANO party, led by billionaire Andrej Babiš, won a majority of seats with a platform favoring limited immigration and limited integration into the EU. Last winter, speaking as the country’s finance minister, Babiš blamed Angela Merkel’s support of open-door refugee policies for the attack on Berlin’s Christmas market. The current president, Miloš Zeman, won his reelection last week as a result of his popular anti-refugee policies. A whole generation of children of Vietnamese immigrants—who were the first large wave of immigrants from outside of Europe starting three decades ago—have been born and raised in the Czech Republic, but aren’t Czech citizens as a result of the country’s citizenship laws, which are based on ancestry rather than birthplace.

The need for a critical look at the EU’s role in Europe—particularly the lack of citizen voting power and the dominance of its wealthiest member states in shaping policy—has been leveraged as a means of excluding and demonizing hopeful immigrants and existing Czech immigrant communities. A potential step in taking down the false dichotomy between unquestioning support for the EU and support of exclusionary policies is to question the two visions of multiculturalism they pit against one another. One is a flat-out racist and xenophobic myth of foreign encroachment, but the other is a bland dissolution of culture, a false push for sameness that simply hides the harm it does better. Czechs may love their kebab a čína, but have yet to reconcile their politics with their stomachs.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 is full of spicy takes.

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FEBRUARY 02, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

EPHEMERA

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BUCCANEERS

BY Pia Struzzieri ILLUSTRATION BY Alex Westfall DESIGN BY Mariel Solomon

“Tell me a story,” he says.

They’re sitting crouched in the corner of the room.

Amanda has upended a table so that the broad side of it hides them from view. If you were standing in the middle of the room, looking toward them, you’d only be able to see the top of her hair, the frizz of her curls.

Amanda shakes her head. She’s squeezing her teeth together so tightly that the line from her jaw is etched all the way up to her forehead. Her arms are braced against the table and his body is tucked in the hollow between her elbows and the floor.

“Please,” he says. His voice is barely a whisper.

Amanda’s spent a lot of time with kids—she knows how they whisper. This isn’t a child’s whisper, all sharp shh sounds, almost louder than a shout. It’s more adult than that. He bites into the consonants. It comes out like a rush of wind through trees.

“All right,” she says. She’s whispering too. The words rise from her gut and when they come out into the air they sound like they came from someone far away.

She doesn’t recognize the sound of her own voice when it’s this quiet. “What do you want to hear a story about?”

“Don’t you know any stories?” he asks. His voice is a little louder this time—accusatory. Everyone knows stories. “Aren’t you a teacher or something?”

“I know a lot of stories,” she says, trying to sound soothing, trying to use her ‘teacher voice.’ She tries to put melody into the quiet of her words, tries to make them a lullaby. “I’m just trying to decide which one to tell you.”

He scrunches up his face. He has a smear of dirt across his nose. The light coming in through the window is gray and grimy except where the window is broken.

The light paints patterns across his face, the one stripe of brightness cutting across his neck like a noose. “Do you know any stories about pirates?”

Amanda practices breathing a little before she answers. “Are you sure you want to talk about pirates right now?”

The little boy looks up at her. “Yeah. I like pirates.”

He has very long eyelashes. “They aren’t pirates.”

“Fair enough.” Something moves a little inside Amanda. Her breath comes softer and easier out of her nose. She relaxes a little, leans back against the wall behind her and takes her arms off the table. They’ve been braced there for so long that she can feel the shape of the table when she lowers them—she worries for a second she’ll never be able to sit normally again, that she’s somehow gotten stuck like this, but she’s able to push them down, cross them around her body as she settles onto the ground.

The boy leans against her shoulder a little.

“Hey,” she says. He looks up at her. “Are the pirates good guys or bad guys?”

“Good guys.” Definitively.

“All right.” She goes to clear her throat and stops herself just in time. So softly it’s barely more than a breath: “Once upon a time…”

Before it began she’d been looking at the sky and wondering whether it was going to rain. The clouds were gathering in gray clumps around the sun and the sky was darkening. The city was thick with humidity. She’d pulled her hair up into a bun and she could feel the hair sticking to the back of her neck.

The drumming in the distance could easily have been thunder.

“There was a group of pirates called the Fearless Buccaneers.”

“And they lived up to their name—everyone in the whole world said they weren’t afraid of anything. They spent their time on the ocean robbing ships with cargo that didn’t belong to them, and they spent their time on land–” What did pirates do on land? Amanda couldn’t think of anything savory. “What did they do on land?”

“They visited their families.”

“Right, right. They spent their time on land visiting

17

LITERARY

their families.”

She’d gotten a call from her mother. As she crossed the street she’d felt the vibration in her pocket and silenced it. She wasn’t in the mood. The ringing ended.

The phone displayed a ‘missed call’ notification. Then– Her mother called again.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?”

“Nice to hear from you too, ma, I’m– ” “I mean it, Amanda—where?”

“When the pirates were away at sea, they missed their families terribly. They spent long nights looking out over the water, counting the stars and wondering if their families saw the same stars.”

“They did,” says the boy.

“Sometimes,” says Amanda. “But sometimes you can be so far away from someone that the stars are actually different. You can see completely different constellations.”

“But they were still looking at the stars,” says the boy.

“Yeah,” says Amanda. “Yeah, I guess so.”

In the subway station the air felt even heavier.

Amanda felt like her head was pounding from the pressure. “I’m getting on the seven, ma—I can barely hear you, you’re breaking up.”

“You’re getting on the subway?” Her mother’s voice through the phone sounded small, frantic.

“Yes, I just said, getting on the subway right now— are you sure you’re okay?” For a long time, Amanda had suspected that her mother had not always been well.

She’d heard, from whispers from her aunts and incidentals that cropped up in stories about her dad, stories of her mother not leaving the house, of blockading herself inside with the television blaring, pieces of tape over the camera on her laptop, the microwave unplugged.

“Please don’t get on the subway, Amanda.”

Amanda swiped her card at the turnstile and stepped onto the platform.

“Mom, I’m going to lose service soon,” she said.

“Can I call you when I get home?”

The phone beeped in her ear. The call had been dropped.

The room where Amanda and the boy are hiding behind the table is a concert hall of some kind. The walls are papered with flyers and posters for bands she’s never heard of. A couple of them flap in the wind coming in through the broken window, through the door she regrets leaving open and can no longer see. Amanda shifts where she crouches. She’s becoming more aware of her thighs, of the need to ease the tension that has built in her joints.

Her body is exhausting itself past the point of fear.

The thought sends a wave of resolve through her once more.

“One night, when they were looking at the stars, their leader had a thought he’d never had before. His name was—what’s your name?”

The boy looked up at Amanda. “Darren,” he whispers.

For some reason hearing his name makes her feel wobbly. She blinks back sudden tears that sting at her eyes.

“That’s funny,” she says, “their leader was also named Darren.

“No he wasn’t,” says Darren, amazed at the coincidence.

“Yes, he was. And Darren was thinking something he thought he’d never think—he was thinking, ‘what’s so bad about being afraid?’”

“He’s a pirate,” says Darren.

“Yes,” says Amanda, “but pirates can get scared too.”

“What’s he afraid of?”

Amanda is making the story up as she goes along.

She’d been thinking of big, adult fears—intangible threats—but she realizes now that those kind of fears

wouldn’t suit Darren the Fearless Buccaneer.

“Oh,” she says, stalling for time, “you’ll see.”

The subway car was somehow even hotter than the platform. Amanda felt she was swimming in a sea of sweat and body odor. Under her breath, she cursed the summer.

Someone at the end of the car was crying. At first Amanda didn’t notice, but as the car rattled through the tunnel her crying grew louder, until it was more like wailing. People studied the ground to avoid looking at the crying woman. The man sitting next to her stood and stretched, to justify standing, and walked away to hold onto a railing.

The doors to the next station opened to an empty platform. Amanda checked her phone. Her mother had called twice more. Amanda resolved to talk to her about seeing someone, a ‘professional someone,’ who could help with these feelings, who could stop her from calling her daughter when she knew Amanda wouldn’t pick up. It was getting to be too much.

A few people got off at the platform.

Amanda looked back at her phone. She waited for the announcement—“We’re sorry, experiencing delays”—but it didn’t come. The crying woman was shaking and hugging her knees to her chest now.

The volume of her weeping had grown too extreme to comfortably ignore. People were staring in earnest now. Someone went to put his hand on the woman’s shoulder but snatched it back almost immediately when the woman’s teeth gnashed at his fingers.

A few more people got off the car, shaking their heads.

Amanda’s mother called again.

“Hello?”

“Amanda?”

“Who else would it be? Listen, mom, you have to–” “Where are you?”

“I’m on the subway. Listen–” “Get off the subway, Amanda.” And it was something about her mother’s voice that propelled Amanda forward, something about the absence of frantic energy over the phone. Amanda got off the subway, pushed through a turnstile, the phone cupped between her head and her shoulder.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?” That wasn’t the answer she’d been expecting. Amanda started climbing the stairs up to the street.

“I don’t know. Are you off the subway?”

“I’m off the subway.” A few droplets of rain landed on her head as she climbed. She thought she could hear thunder above her and she thought, Oh, good, maybe now the humidity will finally break. And then she saw it— The places the rain touched were in chaos.

“He’s afraid of the kraken,” says Darren.

“Okay,” says Amanda. “He’s afraid of the kraken.”

“Make them fight,” whispers Darren.

Amanda wonders, briefly, if that was a good idea, if maybe she should tell him a simpler story while they crouch here behind this bench. Then again, she figures, maybe he knows what’s best for him right now.

“Okay,” says Amanda. “They’re going to fight.”

This time, she does clear her throat.

The conclusion of this piece can be read at: http://www.theindy.org/feed?s=Literary

FEBRUARY 02, 2018

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

X

18

THE LIST

2.2 FRI Jamila Woods concert and Q&A, hosted by the BSU & Black Heritage Series.

Tickets are gone :-( but worth the standby line to see one of the biggest rising R&B stars (and recent Brown grad) sing & share for free. Sayles Hall, 6-9PM. Xango/suave, .2, EELI For $2-$5, a cool show, cool house, cool...bros. Proceeds go to touring band xango/sua xango/suave. 35 Bowen St, Providence, 9-12AM. 2.3 SAT Monday Management for Millennials, Equity National Title.

You can tell this is certainly not hosted by a millenial, seeing as they planned an early Saturday morning event at which presumably sad, broke, young people watch a bunch of CPAs (I don’t even know what that acronym means) give budgeting and investment tips. Free breakfast though. 317 Iron Horse Way, Suite 301, Providence, 9:30AM-1PM. BIRDd show Feat. Seatbelt, Cute Kitty Shindig, Cowboy Helmet, Troll 2 BIRDday Can’t say I’ve heard of any of these bands, but the Facebook event promises loud, folk-y tunes. Sounds pretty cool. AS220, Doors open @ 9PM, $7.

2.4 SUN Intro to Bee-Keeping This is a six-part workshop, taught by beekeeper Kevin England, and you’ll get a free copy of Kim Flottum’s The Backyard Beekeeper. We all know bees are dying at an alarming rate. See you there. Register by SAT 3PM. 1401 Hope St, Bristol, Audubon Society of Rhode Island, 2-5PM. Bzz bzz.

2.5 MON Whiteness in the Time of Trump.

Light of campus Tricia Rose will facillitate a onversation with University of Kansas Prof.

David Roediger, whose “longstanding work on the critical study of whiteness in US history positions him to address the extent to which Trump represents a new departure or a logical result of long processes.” A book signing and reception will follow., and, we all know, a lot of us should go to this. 85 Waterman St, 5-6:30PM. 2.6 TUES Yung Lean concert.

Come see the Swedish Tommy Cash perform right here in New England. I’ll be there, wearing the gothest outfit I can pull together on a Tuesday night. Royale Boston, doors open @ 7, show @ 8. Honestly don’t know the $ because who is actually going to this.

2.7 WED Memory of Slavery and the Problems of Reparations in Brazil, The Brazil Initiative, hosted by the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. Come learn about the history of the abolitionist movement, the memorialization of slavery, and calls for material reparations in Brazil. Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum, 12-1:30PM. 2.8 THURS Twin Foxes LP Release Show Emo-inspi Emo-inspired rock band Twin Foxes is releasing their first LP! See them live, here, in their hometown Thursday night. Maybe the only thing y’all will go to. AS220, 9PM, $6.

HOROSCOPE O ‘ THE WEEK: It’s been cold out, huh? Some of that is climate change; the rest of it is fucking Aquarius season! Sun, Venus, and Mercury are all in Aquarius this week—a sweet, sexy set of conjunctions, but in a cold, cold sign. The fact that Moon in Virgo opposes Neptune in its Pisces home only confuses things more; you want control, but the devil on your shoulder is tricking you into thinking you should trust anything (the Wrong Impulse, in this (aqu)air(ius)-y time). Activity of the week seems to be Intro to Bee-Keeping—compassionate, but no humans!