The College Hill Independent Vol. 37 Issue 5

19 OCT 2018 VOL 37 ISSUE 05

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by Lorenzo Somaini [risd 19]

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

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24×48in All works made in 2017 w/ acrylic and molding paste on cut-out MDF board.

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SUBMIT TO THE INDY → THEINDY@GMAIL.COM MUST BE A CURRENT RISD OR BROWN UNDERGRAD.

1. Boyfriend, Crying 2. Gabe 3. Girlfriend, Crying Less 4. The End Game

FROM THE EDITORS Cover Art Lorenzo Somaini NEWS 02

Week in Stunts Matthew Mellea & Sara Van Horn

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#EleNão Gabriela Naigeborin METRO

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Locking Up Our Own Katrina Northrop ARTS

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Remembering the Legends Julian Fox FEATURES

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A Sunday Stroll Jesse Barber SCIENCE & TECH

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Round 'em Up Kayli Wren

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Have you heard our offer?

Jessica Dai BODY

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Highway Robbery Christine Huynh

As the seasons change, so must the music I spend my day with. Not every song has a season, but the most affecting ones are impossible for me to separate from particular times of year. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the weather—Kate Bush’s chilly “Wuthering Heights” is about as summer a song as it gets, with a soaring chorus made for July nights.

It can be obvious—the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” is platonic spring—but it isn’t always easy to figure out what season a song falls into. Is Ornette Coleman’s furtive, slick “Peace” the dead of winter or the very last days of May? It’s all subjective, but once I pin a song down, it becomes gospel truth and no one can tell me different. So while the fall air stings my face more and more every day, I’ll stay warm and let Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments” guide my way.

—BB

LITERARY 08

Feminism Marly Toledano

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Skeletons in the Closet Ben Bienstock

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.

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Reversals, Inversions Eliza Chen

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.

WEEK IN REVIEW Sara Van Horn NEWS Mara Dolan Lucas Smolcic Larson Paula Pacheco Soto METRO Jacob Alabab-Moser Harry August Ella Comberg

ARTS Isabelle Rea Marianne Verrone SCIENCE & TECH Mia Pattillo Julia Rock Eve Zelickson LITERARY Shuchi Agrawal Emma Kofman

FEATURES Tiara Sharma Wen Zhuang

EPHEMERA Nicole Cochary Claire Schlaikjer

BODY Pia Mileaf-Patel Cate Turner

X Maya Bjornson Maria Gerdyman

19 OCT 2018

VOL 37 ISSUE 05

LIST Alexis Gordon Signe Swanson Will Weatherly WRITERS Ben Bienstock Mica Chau Jessica Dai Eduardo Gutierrez-Peña Liby Hays Jorge Palacios Giacomo Sartorelli Ivy Scott Marly Toledano Kayli Wren COPY EDITORS Grace Berg Seamus Flynn Sarah Goldman Miles Guggenheim Matt Ishimaru Sojeong Lim

ILLUSTRATORS Natasha Brennan Natasha Boyko Julia Illana Jeff Katz Halle Krieger Katya Labowe-Stroll Sophia Meng Sandra Moore Rémy Poisson Katherine Sang Mariel Solomon Ella Rosenblatt Miranda Villanueva Alex Westfall ILLUSTRATION EDITORS Alex Hanesworth Eve O'Shea

DESIGNERS Pablo Herraiz Garcia de Guadiana Bethany Hung Amos Jackson Katherine Sang Ella Rosenblatt Christie Zhong DESIGN EDITOR Jack Halten Fahnestock BUSINESS Maria Gonzalez

SENIOR EDITORS Eliza Chen Katrina Northrop Signe Swanson Will Weatherly MANAGING EDITORS Olivia Kan-Sperling Chris Packs Erin West MVP Tiara Sharma & Wen Zhuang

WEB Ashley Kim

The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI Press in Seekonk, Massachusetts.

WWW.THEINDY.ORG

@THEINDY_TWEETS

BY Sara Van Horn, Matthew Mellea DESIGN Christie Zhong

ACCIDENTAL ALTERCATIONS In a dramatic reveal last Wednesday, Rhode Island’s very own Joe Trillo acknowledged that yes, okay, he may have been charged with simple assault for whacking the House Speaker with a caulking gun, but he’s the kind of guy that’s going to get involved. “I have a very strong personality,” said Trillo, “and that’s what you need to clean up the state.”

Trillo, an Independent running for governor this November, described the incident with Nicholas Mattiello as “no big deal.” The altercation, which took place in Cranston in the 1970s, occurred when Trillo overheard a disturbance and abandoned his yard work, caulking tool in hand, to find Mattiello among a group of kids trying to force his way into a neighboring house. In attempting to shoo the kids away, the former Republican state representative “inadvertently, accidently” struck the 12-year-old Mattiello: “I was waving my arms, flailing about, that’s how I talk,” said Trillo.

“I tapped him.”

With the media giggling and Trillo’s childlike denial, this newest scandal is strongly reminiscent of another inadvertent accident concerning the governor hopeful. This past July, Trillo’s 65-foot yacht crashed into rocks near a beach in Charlestown. Although Trillo assured the press that the crash was “a result of inaccurate NOAA charts,” witnesses maintain that the yacht motored into rocks clearly visible in the shallows.

Beach-goer Cheryl Burgess disputed Trillo’s version of events, saying, “Oh, no no no no. Oh no. Nope.” Despite so many corroborating witnesses, the Independent encourages its readers to rest assured in Trillo’s boating ability if not in his political promises. “It’s the first time after thousands of miles of navigation,” the candidate assured the press, “that I ever called the Coast Guard.”

Trillo, known for his poster-plastered tractor trailer, is running his gubernatorial campaign on promises of deregulation and increased school discipline.

Described by WPRO radio as a “rough-and-tumble guy,” Trillo has directed much of his political energy into verbal altercations with Republican gubernatorial candidate Allan Fung. Convinced Fung is behind this recent media attention, Trillo has called the publication of this story “one of [Fung’s] little dirty tricks.”

PERSONAL EFFECTS

Upon hearing a disturbance next door, Trillo speculated, Fung “would’ve ran and hid under a rock.”

Although it is hard to sympathize with Fung (who supports increased police presence in Rhode Island’s elementary schools), the seriousness of Trillo’s threats should not be easily laughed off. His similar promise to “put discipline back in the classroom” is a strong reminder that the violence in his rhetoric is clearly paralleled in his politics. Committed to “shedding the image of a sanctuary state” and “untying the hands of the police,” a successful gubernatorial bid for Trillo would bring more violence to Rhode Island than broken boats and free-wheeling caulking guns.

-SVH BANKSY IN THE CORPORATE WASTE BUCKET

creative work, the print plays up its own worth—amplifying its auction valuation among the art-buying-elite and its cultural intrigue to everyone else. Prepare for the furious reproduction of Girl with Balloon as a laptop decal and $8.99 print on AllPosters.com to be only intensified in its shredded configuration. Newly retitled as Love is in the Bin, the print will self-destruct on walls and Macbooks, as doodles and dorm-room tapestries. It has already been parodied by Ikea, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and more—co-opted into DIY wall art, french fry, and soda can ads. Thanks to Banksy, I can create my own riff off Love is in the Bin with only a pair of KVALIFICERA scissors and a VIRSERUM gold-plated frame.

Love is in the Bin is an awfully dismal retitling for something that’s been playfully rebranded into a digital stunt by multinational marketing firms. The new name suggests that the print aspires to capture a cultural current of hate and fear—where even love has been cut into pieces, thrown into the corporate waste bucket. But the painting itself is alive, mischievously undermining its bounded frame and static position on Sotheby’s wall. In conflict with its serious name, the print’s rebellion is quite hopeful—excited at the prospect of pissing off everyone at Sotheby's. But Love is in the Bin is not a condemnation of the art establishment, although it certainly took everyone by surprise. The auction house quickly refashioned Banksy's (re)-creation into the mainstream art tradition—as innovative art, but not subversive of art. In the words of Sotheby's senior director Alex Branczik, “The shredding is now part of the integral artwork.” The buyer, who decided to keep the painting, said, “I was at first shocked, but gradually I began to realize that I would end up with my own piece of art history.” From cubism to cut-into-ribbonism, Love is in the Bin doesn’t take art in much of a direction—it’s self-righteous about its radicalness and self-conscious of its corporate worth.

“Going, going, gone...” posted Banksy as his iconic painting, Girl with Balloon, shred itself into strips immediately after selling for $1.4 million at Sotheby’s London auction house on October 5. The painting, suspended half-whole and half-ripped in the jaws of the shredder secretly embedded in its frame, inspired collective astonishment at Banksy’s latest hyper-public stunt. But the famous street-artist’s caption was more than a punny nod to auction lingo and the artwork’s self-elimination—the supposed “self-destruction” of Girl with Balloon ends a previously-held assumption that art is oblivious to its own monetary value.

I was not the only one to recognize that shredding Girl with Balloon directly revised its sale price. As one Facebook friend wrote, “Now the shredded artwork and frame are going to be worth $10M. #brilliant.”

A New York Times report concurred: “Thanks to the publicity of this stunt, the painting could now be even more desirable as a piece of auction history.” While perhaps intended as a radical critique of the corporatization of art, Banksy’s work did just the opposite—it - MM snuggled right into Sotheby’s hallowed halls, begging to be “desirable as a piece of auction history.” Banksy’s painting is only innovative as a splashy performance to its audience of buyers (and onlookers). Rather than subverting the absurdity of trying to place value on

BY Liby Hays

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WEEK IN REVIEW

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A LIFE FOR A LIFE

who would be prosecuted under Kristin’s Law not as dangerous dealers but primarily as drug users who sell heroin to support themselves, often unaware it might contain fentanyl.

Kristen’s Law puts forward an overly simplistic solution to a devastating crisis—it is easier to vilify drug dealers than empathize with drug users and confront social issues that lead to overdose—but Hollins urges lawmakers to pursue a more holistic approach. Nuanced solutions to the opioid epidemic, such as education and treatment programs, are harder for the general public to rally behind, according to Diego Arene-Morley, a community engagement coordinator for RICARES, a grassroots organization which provides services and advocates for Rhode Islanders with substance abuse issues. As Arene-Morley told the Independent, “Kristen’s Law plays really well politically, but that obscures that fact that there is little evidence that it will work.” +++

On different days, in different Rhode Island towns, Sue Coutu and Anthony Hollins both picked up the phone to the news that their children had died from an overdose.

But their shared experience prompted vastly different reactions. Coutu firmly believes in punishing drug dealers and holding them accountable for what she considers their taking advantage of the opioid crisis, while Hollins sees overdoses as a complicated manifestation of educational, mental health, and economic issues that can’t be solved by imprisoning people. With Rhode Island’s recent passage of Kristen’s Law, which gives life sentences to people who sell drugs in cases of fatal overdoses and is named after Coutu’s deceased daughter, their differing solutions are at the center of a heated legislative debate about who is held responsible for the state’s opioid crisis.

Hollins’ son, Stephen Hatton, struggled with substance use for most of his life before enrolling in a rehab program in West Palm Beach, Florida. After only 30 days of being clean, he left the rehab center and immediately relapsed. On the night of his release, at 22 years old, Hatton overdosed and died from heroin laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is often fatal when mixed with heroin. A remarkably similar tragedy unfolded when Coutu’s daughter, Kristen Coutu, started using various drugs as a young adult after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. At 29 years old, she admitted herself into a Texas rehab center. After only 30 days in the program, her insurance coverage ran out and she was forced to return home to Rhode Island. She hadn’t even been home for 24 hours before she overdosed on pure fentanyl, which she had believed to be heroin.

These two deaths came as part of the national opioid epidemic, which claimed 72,000 American lives in 2017 and continues to pose a dire public health crisis.

Legislators and medical professionals alike are desperately searching for solutions, and Rhode Island is not alone in its push to pass a bill charging dealers with murder for overdoses—20 other states have similar laws on the books, and more states are considering implementing this legislation.

Coutu, who remembers her daughter as a feisty redhead with a passion for motorcycles, wanted Kristen’s drug dealer, Aaron Andrade, to be severely punished for her daughter’s death. Testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee and working with prosecutors in the Attorney General’s office, Coutu was a key figure in the legislative effort to pass Kristen’s Law. “When you lose a child, the grief never stops,” Coutu told the College Hill Independent. “These dealers should be charged with murder. That is only fair.”

Hollins, who always carries a small framed photo of his deceased son in his bag, advocated against the passage of Kristen’s Law and is very critical of the legislation’s carceral approach. “Of course I want justice for my son,” Hatton told the Independent, “but I don’t want a young kid to go to jail because he doesn’t know what drugs he is selling.” According to Hollins, Kristen’s Law ignores the root cause of overdose deaths. After overdosing himself and barely surviving, Hollins experienced “a huge wake-up call” and has been sober for three years. Hollins characterized the people

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METRO

The debate about who is responsible for the opioid epidemic, which Kristen’s Law attempts to finally settle by further criminalizing drug dealing, is particularly pressing in Rhode Island. Here, the rate of opioid-related deaths is among the top 10 in the country, and, in 2016, was twice the national rate. Over the past decade, as the number of overdose deaths in Rhode Island has increased by almost 90 percent, the locus of the epidemic has shifted from prescription to illegal drugs, such as heroin and fentanyl. In 2017, over 60 percent of overdose deaths involved fentanyl—the drug that killed both Stephen Hatton and Kristen Coutu. Over the past ten years, the healthcare system, encouraged by pharmaceutical companies, has supplied the market with huge amounts of prescription painkillers. Drug traffickers quickly attached themselves to this trend, flooding the market with illegal opioids from abroad, such as fentanyl, for people who ran out of their opioid prescriptions or wanted something more potent or cheaper. As Jim Baum, the prosecutor on Kristen’s case and the current Assistant Attorney General, told the Independent, “We have seen a disturbing trend over the past four years where there has been an uptick in fentanyl. So many people who were in the process of recovering from substance abuse problems had their life cut short by fentanyl.”

Prior to Kristen’s Law, Rhode Island policymakers spearheaded a variety of new legislation to prevent future overdoses. In 2015, Governor Gina Raimondo created the Overdose Prevention and Intervention Task Force to reduce overdose deaths by one-third in three years. Raimondo has also encouraged doctors to avoid prescribing opioids and attempted to track opioid prescriptions by entering patients receiving opioids into an electronic database. She has also attempted to increase access to Naloxone, a medication that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, by training first responders to use the drug and prescribing it alongside certain opioids. Lastly, Raimondo has made an effort to train doctors and fund centers that provide medication-assisted treatment (MAT), a method of reducing dependency by using counseling and medications, such as methadone. Rhode Island even made MAT accessible to inmates within correctional institutions, a step that reduced prisoners’ post-release overdose rate by 61 percent, but still remains controversial.

In many ways, the passage of Kristen’s Law is a break from the policies that Rhode Island has enacted over the past five years, which acknowledge the socioeconomic circumstances that often lead to drug abuse and ultimately prioritize wellness over criminalization.

The 2015 Task Force’s Action Plan says, “We cannot arrest our way out of this crisis, but we must build on partnerships with community organizations and law enforcement to reduce demand for heroin and other illicit drugs.” However, solving the opioid crisis through arrests is exactly what Kristen’s Law attempts to do.

Kristen’s Law, with its more aggressive approach, gained traction partly because the Task Force initiatives have been less effective at curbing overdose deaths than policy makers had expected. In the two years after the Task Force was created, overdose deaths continued to rise, from 290 deaths in 2015 to 323 deaths in 2017. As Assistant Attorney General Baum told the Independent, “We wholeheartedly believe in the role of education and rehabilitation and all of the work that the Task Force is doing, but we also believe that law enforcement has a role to play. Kristen’s Law sends the

message that we will not tolerate the selling of these drugs in Rhode Island.”

When Baum was handed Kristen’s case, he made the unusual decision of using the ‘felony murder rule’ to charge Andrade with murder for Kristen’s overdose.

This rule states that if an offender kills someone, regardless of their intent, while in the process of committing another felony, they can be charged with murder. The prosecution stated that Andrade killed Kristen while in the process of committing the felony of selling illicit drugs, and thus should be charged with murder.

They were successful, and in April 2017, Andrade was sentenced to 40 years in prison for murder—the first time in Rhode Island a drug dealer was charged with murder for an overdose death.

Following the success of Kristen’s case, Jim Baum realized that this approach could be a useful tool in prosecuting drug dealers for overdose deaths. But the ‘felony murder rule’ could not be used in every case due to a technicality: namely that people often die from overdoses hours or days after being sold drugs, so prosecutors sometimes struggle to claim that they died while the offender was in the process of selling illicit drugs. Because of this grey area, Baum decided to propose Kristen’s Law, a legal specification that made it much easier for prosecutors to charge drug dealers with murder for fatal overdoses.

The heated debate this summer surrounding the law resulted in a few changes to the language of the legislation. One included the addition of an ‘exchange of value’ clause, necessitating that some value be exchanged for the drug in order to ensure that prosecutors were not criminalizing the common sharing of drugs among drug users. In addition, a ‘Good Samaritan’ clause was added, providing legal immunity to those who seek help for overdose victims.

Despite these amendments, serious criticisms about the wording of the legislation remain. According to Annajane Yolken, the Executive Director of Protect Families First, a Rhode Island drug policy nonprofit, the ‘Good Samaritan’ clause will still leave people hesitant to seek help, and the ‘exchange of value’ clause is too vague to prevent prosecutors from criminalizing drug sharing. +++ On June 29, 2017, Kristen’s Law was finally passed in the Rhode Island House and signed by Governor Raimondo. It has not been used since it was passed this summer, and Baum said that he does not expect it to be used very often because it is usually difficult to definitively prove the identity of the drug dealer. As Yolken told the Independent, “Kristen’s Law is more symbolic than anything else. But the symbolism will have real effects.”

Yolken questions why Kristen’s particular case was able to attract so much attention, and wonders whether the particular racial dynamics of Kristen’s case are indicative of a broader bias in the law. As Yolken said of Kristen’s drug dealer, “He was a young Black man, and Kristen was white. Is that a coincidence?” Hollins, who is Caribbean-American, also questions the role of racial bias in Kristen’s Law and drug policy more generally.

“All this time, people from poor and minority communities have been dying everyday on Broad Street and throughout Rhode Island. But when the white girl died, that’s the only time the state did anything on this,” Hollins said. “I feel bad your daughter died,” referring to Coutu, “but what about my son?”

Describing the man who dealt her daughter fatal drugs, Coutu said, “They found a career drug dealer.

That’s what he did—he dealt drugs.” But Arene-Morley, of RICARES, warns against this certainty. “On the Black market, there is no distinction between those who use and sell. The people who are criminalized are those who are ill with substance abuse issues, and are suffering. Ultimately people don’t get well in prison.”

He went on to say, “It’s nice to imagine that you will be able to go after the top people who are dealing a lot of drugs, but there is very little reason to believe that will happen.”

Critics of the law say that depending on prosecutors’ and judges’ discretion to determine which cases fit within the purview of Kristen’s Law and who should receive life imprisonment for selling fatal drugs can also leave room for bias. Coutu asserts that it was obvious that Andrade, who sold Kristen fentanyl, was a “career drug dealer,” but Baum acknowledges that Kristen’s case was unusually simple for a fatal overdose

19 OCT 2018

Kristen’s Law and the pitfalls of criminalization

BY Katrina Northrop ILLUSTRATION Peter Lees DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

case. In more ambiguous cases, Yolken comments, discrimination could play a significant role in the decision to invoke Kristen’s Law. Kristen’s Law follows a national trend of drug offenders receiving increasingly harsh punishments.

From 1988 to 2012, the average prison sentence for a drug offense throughout the country rose 153 percent, and as of last month, 46 percent of inmates in American prisons were serving time for drug offenses. This increasingly harsh criminalization for drug offenses has targeted minority groups far more than white Americans. Currently, nearly 80 percent of people serving time for drug offenses in federal prisons are Black or Latinx, despite the fact that people of color are not more likely to use or sell drugs than their white counterparts. The history of drug sentencing and enforcement has long been characterized by racism, exemplified by the harsh criminalization of crack cocaine, a drug that is most widely-used among Black Americans, as compared to powder cocaine, which is more common among white Americans.

Despite the criminal justice system’s increasingly severe punishments for drug crimes, illegal drug use among Americans has only risen. As Michael Fine, the former director of Rhode Island Department of Health, told the Independent, “The past 50 years of drug criminalization hasn’t worked, so it is likely that Kristen’s Law isn’t going to work either.”

+++ Rhode Island has yet to implement policy interventions that have proven effective at preventing overdoses. Experts have encouraged Governor Raimondo’s administration to institute supervised injection sites, where drug users can use opioids with trained staff

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

on site. Although this model has yet to be officially implemented in the US, safe injection sites have been opened in Europe, Australia, and Canada. Some critics say that these sites would encourage illicit drug use, but RICARES coordinator Arene-Morley said “There is no evidence that giving a safe place for consumption of illicit substances increases consumption over time.”

Governor Raimondo has said that she will explore the possibility of these sites, but President Trump’s administration has threatened to prosecute these sites as violating federal law.

According to Hollins, another step to reducing the rate of overdoses would be to increase the use of fentanyl strips, which are a convenient and fast way to test if drugs contain fentanyl. “These little strips can save your life,” Hollins said. The strips have become more widespread since they were legalized in Rhode Island in June, but Hollins said that they should be more accessible.

Despite the necessity for these specific policy interventions, Fine, from the Department of Health, points to the importance of a broader, more nebulous goal of connecting communities. “It used to be that every town had a community center, but now we have so few,” said Fine. “Having a place where people can be together would prevent the continuation of the opioid crisis.”

Arene-Morley agrees, “In substance abuse circles, we often say that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety, it is connectedness.”

“Sometimes I ask myself, is it worth it to keep fighting?” Hollins said. But despite occasional doubts caused by setbacks like the passage of Kristen’s Law, he is confident that his advocacy works toward fostering a sense of connectedness among people with experience of substance abuse that Arene-Morley argues is so important. Not only can this community cultivate a

supportive space, it also can provide a key educational resource for people to learn from one another.

Solutions like safe injection sites and community building have not been implemented because they don’t seem to satisfy the emotional pleas of some people who have been impacted by the crisis. In the testimonies and media coverage surrounding Kristen’s Law, there is a sharp dichotomy between the emotional rhetoric used to support it compared to the evidenced-based arguments used to criticize it. As Fine said, “This is an emotional thing, because anyone who has lost someone wants to prevent more losses from happening.” It makes complete sense for grieving parents, like Sue Coutu, to want retribution for their children’s untimely deaths, and hearing stories like Kristen’s, it is difficult not to demand immediate action. But Fine warns that the emotional appeal of Kristen’s Law may obscure a more nuanced portrait of Rhode Island’s drug crisis.

Hollins, both a grieving parent and a drug user, understands that justice for his son does not necessarily mean sending his son’s drug dealer to jail for life. But what would that justice look like? For Hollins, it would be providing education and rehabilitation so that other young people are not caught up in the damaging net of addiction. And he sees his role as reminding others that criminalization is not the right solution. “I can never bring my son back,” Hollins says. “The only thing I can do is speak out.”

KATRINA NORTHROP B’19 doesn’t think we can arrest ourselves out of a crisis.

METRO

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THE FACE OF FASCISM Brazil’s presidential election heads for disaster

content warning: political violence, racism, classism, misogyny, sexual violence, homophobia, transphobia, death, torture

Public statements made by Jair Messias Bolsonaro, year’s presidential elections. These two moments are the frontrunner in this year’s presidential elections in set of the same thread, but represent distinct ruptures Brazil: with the democratic order established in 1985, at the end of the 21 year military dictatorship. If anything, “I had four sons, but then I had a moment of weak- the status of democracy has become even more ness, and the fifth was a girl.” fragile, and the collective feeling of defeat even more entrenched. My friend, in conversation, was trying to “I’m not going to rape you, because you’re very pinpoint the main differences between the crisis of ugly” – to a Congresswoman from the Workers’ Party. Dilma’s impeachment and Bolsonaro’s imminent election: “Well, the most obvious one is that now we are on “I’d rather have my son die in a car accident than the brink of electing a fascist. That was never the case. have him show up dating some guy.”

And it also feels personal when you know that people close to you will be concretely affected.”

“I’m pro-torture, and the people are too.”

In Brazil, the circles I found myself in were usually left-wing, privileged, and highly politicized. We tried “They don’t do anything. I don’t think they’re to speak against the incessant attacks on the couneven good for procreation anymore” – referring to try’s social and racial minorities, which had been the quilombolas, members of traditionally black communi- rule even before Brazil became Brazil, from the very ties descending from escaped enslaved Africans. moment, five centuries ago, that colonization ensued.

One of the main mechanisms through which the “If it’s up to me, every citizen will have a gun at Portuguese colonial project in Brazil operated consisted home. Not one centimetre will be demarcated for in keeping the racial “other” under control—through indigenous reserves or quilombolas.” genocide, enslavement and finally, the transition from mercantile into industrial and financial forms of capi“You won’t change anything in this country through talism. We struggled, in whatever capacity we could, voting—nothing, absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, for the removal of privileges from the white, wealthy you’ll only change things by having a civil war and elites that many of us belonged to, but we never quite doing the work the military regime didn’t do. Killing thought that we ourselves would ever feel unsafe—in 30,000, starting with FHC [former Brazilian president fact, the “trust” that we would be personally shielded Fernando Henrique Cardoso]. Killing. If a few innocent from right-wing backlashes makes our position of privpeople die, that’s alright.” ilege even more evident. Aware of the conservatism, racism, and classism intrinsic to Brazilian society, we +++ thought that race or social status would shield those of use who identified as women, LGBTQ+ or leftist from Brazil was already undergoing a political and economic conservative threats arising from political instability. crisis when I left for college in 2015. The national This no longer seems like the case, and this means currency was drastically devalued, dissident politicians two things: we are more vulnerable than we deemed were being prosecuted on corruption charges, and ourselves to be, and those minorities that we already the right and center-right were seriously flirting with knew to be oppressed are in even greater danger right the plan to impeach then center-left president Dilma now.

Rousseff.

More than three years have gone by, and today the +++ country in which I was born and raised, and where most of my family and friends still live, is in an even greater Dialogue among those on different ends of Brazil's political crisis. Jair Bolsonaro, a reserve captain in the polarized political scenario has always been close army with an inflamed far-right rhetoric and an insid- to unintelligible. Now, even conversations between ious political agenda, is the clear frontrunner of this third-party voters who, in the second round, will have

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NEWS

to choose between the two most voted candidates in the first round —Fernando Haddad, from the centerleft Workers’ Party (PT), and Jair Bolsonaro, from the extreme-right Social Liberal Party (PSL)—are reaching an impasse. What ultimately establishes whether someone will be voting for Haddad or Bolsonaro has to do with what they consider more dangerous: the corruption that some think Haddad’s party represents, or the fascism that Bolsonaro openly embodies. This is why the second round, and the limited options it presents the Brazilian society with, has become the stage on which our fundamental values are exposed and confronted against each other.

PT has made countless mistakes, not only in the present campaign—among which is the radicalization of their discourse towards the left, which further drove centrist prospective voters away—but also in the 14 years during which their party was in power. To some, these mistakes—which many point as a main force behind Brazil’s most recent economic collapse—are unforgivable. Like many of PT’s faithful supporters claim, the anti-PT discourse known as “antipetismo” is partly rooted in the Brazilian’s socioeconomic elites’ discontent with shifting class dynamics. Under PT, national social mobility levels went up: the Gini coefficient (which measures economic inequality) went from 58.1 in 2002, before Lula’s election, to 51.3 in 2015, when Dilma was removed from office. Further, poverty was drastically diminished: in 2002, 12.5 percent of Brazilians lived below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day, a number that dropped to 3.4 percent in 2015. It was also during PT’s government that historically marginalized voices finally started to reach a level of public recognition; racial, sexual and political minorities became increasingly organized, which prepared the terrain for more direct political confrontation that more conservative sectors of Brazilian society were not ready, or willing, to face.

On the other hand, the Workers’ Party was involved in corruption schemes on both the local and national levels, and the economic boom experienced during the earlier stages of PT’s government has been largely undone. It is on those grounds that the right-wing denounces the party, and that Bolsonaro’s electorate justifies their vote.

But the center-right’s impassioned denouncement of corruption glosses over the fact that, even in the present moment, corruption is not limited to the center-left. In 2015, the Movement Against Electoral Corruption (MCCE) in Brazil, a group in favor of the Carwash Operation, which lead to the imprisonment of many PT representatives, released a dossier revealing that PT only occupies the ninth position in the ranking of “most corrupt parties” in Brazil.

Attacks on PT also rest on the argument that the government should prioritize economic concerns over other public responsibilities such as education, healthcare and the protection of the socially vulnerable.

Advocates of former president Dilma Rousseff ’s 2016 impeachment process—which her supporters see as a constitutional coup—weaponized the tripod of widespread corruption, fiscal irresponsibility and economic collapse in the discourse weaved against her and PT. Besides, the party’s radicalism waned off as it grew accustomed to its power-bound establishment position. Even during the “golden years of PT,” torture and arbitrary police-enforced killings continued to be the rule for the country’s marginalized strata—namely for low-income and Black and brown Brazilians, and affecting women and LGBTQ+ folks at even more disproportionate rates. In 2016 alone, the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety registered 4,224 deaths due

19 OCT 2018

BY Gabriela Naigeborin ILLUSTRATION Alex Hanesworth

to police interventions in the country, an increase of 27 percent compared to the preceding year. Out of these victims, 99.3 percent were male, 82 percent were between 12 and 29 years old, and 76 percent were black.

According to the Gay Group of Bahia, an LGBT activist association, 445 members of the LGBTQ+ community in Brazil died as victims of homophobia in the country, an increase of 30 percent from the previous year.

Further, a Transrespect versus Transphobia Worldwide report rates Brazil as the most deadly country in the world for transgender people by far: in 2017 alone, Brazil reported 1,071 murders, which accounts for almost half of the world total (the US, which occupies the third position, reported 181 murders on the same year.)

The military dictatorship might have ended in 1985, but most fundamental aspects of democracy—equality before the law, safety, freedom of expression, political voice, education, transportation, and health services— never fully reached the peripheries of the cities or the deep corners of the countryside, where the country’s urban and rural poorest live in precarious conditions. +++

economic agenda. He implemented a series of longneeded social policies while ensuring that the industrial, financial, and rural elite of the country did not lose most of its privileges. The fact that some of the “reforms” he promoted were read as “revolutionary” should only point to the scarcity of radical change and creates an essential, desolate space in which change social mobility that Brazil had undergone in the years may take place. But expansion needs contraction, and preceding him. contraction takes time and effort. +++

+++

Paradoxically, one of the most powerful means of exposing the absurdity of a political creature such as Bolsonaro is to let him talk—which is perhaps the reason why he has been evading official presidential debates. Although Bolsonaro got over 46 percent of valid votes in the first round (Haddad, the forerunner and his match in the second round, had 29 percent), there is reason to believe that a significant number of the people voting for him in the second round are not active supporters of his cause. The center and southern parts of Brazil are traditionally the wealthiest and most politically conservative portions of the country, whereas the Northeast and chunks of the North, the poorest regions, are strongholds of the Workers’ Party.

Indeed, the demographics of Bolsonaro’s electoral base on the first round consisted largely of 25-to-35 year old middle-class, white, “southern” males. On the second round, this demographic demarcation is not as clear cut.

A number of people who voted for one of the other 11 candidates in the first round now argue that their vote will not be “pro-Bolsonaro, but anti-PT.” In the current state of affairs, a “protest vote” against a center-left party running against an extreme-right, ultra-conservative fascist shows a disregard for the costs and responsibilities that voting implies in a representative democracy. To vote for Bolsonaro is, in practice, to support him, regardless of the theoretical implications and personal explanations embedded in the vote.

Conversely, Haddad’s second round supporters, who previously voted for candidates from other parties, respond, “Don’t let your ‘antipetismo’ elect a fascist.”

Bolsonaro’s less staunch voters claim not to believe that the right-winger will do what as he claims, and are voting for him “so that Brazil does not become another Venezuela.” They are voting for a candidate that poses a palpable threat to an already-fragile democracy because they think he is “lying,” and refusing to take the only way out of electing a fascist due to the unfounded fear that Brazil might turn “communist” under PT.

There is little Bolsonaro could say that would make his rhetoric less overtly violent. It is with an attitude of frank disappointment, mixed in with some sort of primordial, outraged (albeit hopeless) desire to react, that I write this statement. Some have tried to console me by saying that history comes in cycles. It does, it is not going “upwards” or moving “beyond” anything.

We clearly are not better than we were thirty, fifty, a hundred years ago. And yet it is not in the argument that we should now be “better”—which we are not—or that this kind of phenomenon should be an “anomaly” in the 21st century—which it is not—that I find my will to write. I write not because we are or should be better, but because we could be, and I believe can be, if we reorient ourselves and start working towards another conception of the world, another understanding of politics, and another position towards history. And then, with justice, we might be able to heal as a nation.

Years ago, in the context of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi and SS lieutenant, following the atrocities of the Second World War, Jewish-German philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, in The Banality of Evil, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” At the crossroads we find ourselves in—in the context of Brazil, but also in the United States and elsewhere—most of my Brazilian Facebook friends want to announce their side, and their reasons for supporting whichever candidate they decided was the best (or “least worst”). I see the importance of understanding the causes of people’s political behavior, unearthing the roots and subterranean developments of disaffection towards establishment politics, making sense of the ideologies underlying their ideas, and undoing the narratives sustaining all of the above. Bolsonaro is, after all, only a vessel to a much more complicated history. However, at the current junction, it does not matter whether your vote for Bolsonaro is one of active support for Bolsonaro or active opposition to PT. As Arendt points out, the issue we should be worrying about is not how “adequately” the label of fascist applies to each of Bolsonaro’s electors individually, but rather how much evil will be caused by their voting for him. Even those who say they are just voting for him due to his promise of appeasing the market, or liberalizing the economy to lead Brazil out of our economic mayhem. Even those voting for him in a naive attempt at the redemption promised by a “messiah,” as his name falsely advertises. Even those who believe he will not have the institutional support (which he already does) to pass the laws and policies he is proposing, or the political strength to do what he says. Even them: because if he passes but a small fraction of what he promises in his statements, too much damage will be caused.

To vote for him is to have the privilege of doing so. Much harm has already been caused by what he represents, and by the discourse he embodies. Just this weekend, Moa do Catendê, a capoeira master in northeast Brazil, was murdered after disagreeing with one of Bolsonaro’s supporters. Now that people feel entitled to shout what they never quite stopped whispering, the mediocre “monster” that Arendt wrote about decades ago is back in sight. Hopefully, now that we can see the face of fascism, we might be able to stare it down.

In the years following the corruption schemes that lead to PT’s demise, a number of smaller, anti-establishment right-leaning parties began to arise. These anti-corruption voices, which initially lacked a more coherent political discourse, hurt more moderate forces in the center-right as well. The Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), PT’s sturdiest adversary in all elections following the return of the democratic regime, watched its numbers plunge in these year’s general elections: Geraldo Alckmin, former governor of the richest state in the country through PSDB, and one of the “bets” for this year’s race, obtained less than five percent of valid votes. In a country where voting is mandatory, this means less than five percent of the country. PSDB also lost a vast number of seats in Congress, which for the next four years will be dominated by PT and PSL, Bolsonaro’s party. While PT’s numbers in the Congress saw a moderate but meaningful fluctuation downwards (from 70 in 2014 to 56 this year), PSL’s numbers leaped from 1 in 2014, to an astonishing 52 in the current election.

Originally PSL's only representative in Congress, Bolsonaro was elected with the largest number of votes in 2014. His politics gained so much traction in the past few years, that a barely-known nationalist, ultra-conservative party became one of the chief forces in Congress within one electoral cycle. The “bancada BBB”, which stands for the front in Congress integrated by the “bullet,” “bull,” and “Bible” groups, has elected the largest number of Congressmen in Brazilian republican history. Because he is backed by the institutional support of his conservative base in Congress, his ascension to power marks an effective sway towards the +++ right. Bolsonaro is the product of a deep-rooted history of oppression, a deep-seated craving for fascism, and There comes a time when you can no PT’s inability to efficiently defy the dominant forces longer say: my God. and discourses at play.

A time of absolute purgation.

Originally aligned with the left, the strongest A time when you can no longer say: my love. periods of PT’s government were precisely those in Because love proved futile. which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s ex-president And the eyes don’t cry. and former union leader—who is currently in jail on And the hands do only rough work. accounts of corruption—made concessions to the And the heart is dry. economic elites of the country. Although many on the right see Lula as the personification of a Venezuelan—Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brazilian poet style “communist threat,” his success lays precisely in his ability to forge a compromise between socially-concerned politics and a centralized but liberal Have you noticed that you can only begin to understand why you are crying after the first crying fit has ended?

The first long breath you take before plunging back into tears is the body’s whisper that “this,” whatever it is, is not over. The realization that, for a moment, even your tears have deserted you, and that more tears will come,

GABRIELA NAIGEBORIN B’19 wants you to go to democracybrazil.org and sign the Brazil Initiative @ Brown’s petition defending democracy in Brazil.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

06

WEED IT AND WEEP Monsanto, herbicides, and the corporatization of US agriculture

BY Kayli Wren ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Amos Jackson “We’ve got to turn back 50, 60 years of the way we’re doing agriculture. But it can be done, and I think we have to,” Antonio DiTommaso, professor at the Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, told the Independent. DiTommaso was talking about weed management in the United States and the use of herbicides on large farms. In the past few decades, huge agricultural corporations like Monsanto have genetically engineered seeds to resist herbicides so that farmers can spray chemicals directly over their fields, kill the weeds, and leave the crops. This practice requires significantly less human labor than hand weeding or tilling a field, and it also decreases the erosion that results from disrupting soil to tear up weeds. Because of these environmental and efficiency benefits, DiTommaso recognizes herbicides as a valuable agricultural tool. But he believes they have been overused: “As a weed scientist, I do feel that there is a place for herbicides. But ideally it should be our last resort.”

DiTommaso calls the pattern of increased reliance on chemicals in farming “the pesticide treadmill.” Weeds adapt, and major weeds such as palmer amaranth and waterhemp are now resistant to major herbicides such as Roundup. The agricultural industry responds to these harder-to-kill weeds by developing new herbicides and genetically engineering crops to survive chemicals made in the last 50 years, such as Dicamba. DiTommaso thinks there is a better way to address weeds than this pattern of solving one problem with another. Using herbicides responsibly would mean using them in tandem with other, sustainable agricultural methods to create a more holistic system.

In DiTommaso’s vision, farmers would use an integrated system of crop rotation and increase diversity in their field by using cover crops, which are grown to enrich and protect the soil instead of yielding produce.

These techniques would keep weeds “off balance” and prevent them from adapting to a particular growing environment.

The issue with sustainable farming is time and money, DiTommaso says; it’s more expensive and requires more human labor to grow food without chemicals. In our current agricultural system, corporate giants like Monsanto create a cyclical dependence on herbicides and their own seed products. They use intellectual property law to squeeze out small farmers and further dominate an industry that already heavily favors them through economic policies like government subsidies. The resulting concentration of wealth and power exacerbates unsustainable agricultural practices with little regard for land or human health and pressures smaller-scale, environmentally conscious farmers to conform. These are some of the obstacles faced by people looking to turn back the clock to a sustainable and holistic vision of agricultural production. +++ When Monsanto invented and patented the Roundupresistant seed, they sold it at three times the price of normal seed and required that any buyers purchase new seeds each year. By 2010, 90 percent of soybeans and 70 percent of corn and cotton in the US contained the Roundup-resistant trait, meaning that the vast majority of these crops were coming from Monsanto and being sprayed with herbicides. Because the herbicides and genetically engineered seeds come as a package deal, there is a real danger for farmers who don’t buy in. Volatile herbicides such as Dicamba are

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prone to spreading on the wind, so if one farmer buys the expensive herbicide-resistant seeds, their neighbors risk losing any natural crops to airborne plant poison.

Two court cases over the last 15 years show how legal systems support huge corporations over small farmers and prop up harmful industrial monopolies.

In 1999, Monsanto sued Canadian canola farmer Percy Schmeiser for violating their seed patent. The Canadian court case found Schmeiser guilty for reusing Monsanto seed without paying the fee. The catch was that Schmeiser’s crop was only Roundupresistant because Roundup-resistant seeds blew into his fields from a neighbor’s farm. The case set the following precedent: If patented seeds cross-pollinate into a farmer’s field, that farmer must alert Monsanto to come remove the Roundup-resistant seeds instead of reusing the seed like normal. Monsanto has introduced a new product into the industry, and as a result, farmers must change their behavior or risk being sued by a corporate giant, a sure-fire path towards bankruptcy.

In a 2013 US Supreme Court case popularly dubbed “David vs. Goliath,” Monsanto sued 75-year-old Indiana farmer Hugh Bowman for using and reusing their Roundup-resistant seed without paying. Bowman had purchased those seeds from a local grain elevator and simply figured the multinational corporation wouldn’t care. “I couldn’t imagine that they’d give a rat’s behind,” he said. The Court declared Bowman guilty. David Snively, Monsanto’s executive vice president, celebrated the win as motivation for further inventions and for “allowing America to keep its competitive edge.” Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Food Safety, lamented the Court’s decision: “This decision is a setback for the nation’s farmers…

The Court chose to protect Monsanto over farmers.”

In these cases, the US legal system gave an already powerful company more power to squeeze out small farmers economically and dominate the industry. +++ Jessica Petrie and Lincoln Sawyer are two organic farmers for whom using herbicides is out of the question. Fifteen years ago, Sawyer and his wife left their jobs in New York and moved to a piece of family-owned land in Pennsylvania to practice what they believed in: responsible and sustainable agriculture. They now work a 40-acre farm in Western Massachusetts and sell produce at a farmers market. Sawyer’s aversion to herbicides is more intuitive than anything. “On a basic level, the idea of something that has a skull with an X through it on the container doesn’t seem like you should spread it where you’re going to grow food,” he told the Independent.

Petrie inherited her family’s land in Massachusetts when her father passed away four years ago. She decided to return to her childhood home, restore the gardens where she grew up, and revive her family’s dream of self-sufficiency. She sells produce to five nearby families and aims to make a career of farming.

“I believe in self sustenance and the symbiotic-ness of nature,” Petrie told the Independent. Petrie’s zucchini, pumpkin, and squash plants have been infested with stink bugs for three years, but she says using pesticides isn’t an option. There are too many negative implications for how it would affect the food, her water source down the hill, the soil, the bird population, and the surrounding duck ponds. Petrie even makes her own fertilizers from compost, worm castings, and bunny

poop. She says the safe and natural route is worth it, adding, “my customers learn to be grateful for what is available and have a greater respect for their food.”

Organic, locally grown food has a better chance of being both healthier for humans and more environmentally conscious than food grown on faraway farms. Transporting food long distances to supermarkets uses fossil fuels and allows the produce to lose nutrients. Local food grown without fertilizers or pesticides is generally fresher, produces less plastic waste, and doesn’t contaminate the soil with chemicals. Unfortunately, many people don’t have the option to radically change their lifestyles, purchase property, and live their values around food. And even for people like Petrie and Sawyer, who are able to, it is still financially difficult to make healthy and sustainable choices, such as going herbicide-free. In Petrie’s experience, it’s initially cheaper not to buy herbicides, but in the end, the alternatives (hand weeding and using hay as mulch) are more costly because they require so many more hours of labor. The major financial strain for Sawyer comes from corporate dominance in agriculture: ‘Normal’ market prices (in consumers’ minds) are dictated by huge corporations who have nothing to do with small-scale farming practices. Sawyer’s pork is $9 to $10 per pound, while the average supermarket price is under $5. “People are willing to pay more, but I’m still barely making money on that. It just doesn’t reflect the real cost of growing food,” Sawyer says. And of course, many people simply can’t pay more; healthy food is financially less accessible than unhealthy food, both to produce and to eat.

Federal subsidies exacerbate the difference in production cost for small and large farms by redistributing tax dollars to the wealthiest farmers. The US government subsidizes certain crops, like corn, wheat, rice, and cotton, which end up benefiting large agricultural producers with wealth and income higher than most US households. The wealthiest three percent of large farms in the US receive more than one-third of all commodity subsidies, and smaller, organic farmers don’t benefit. The rich farms get richer, and the poor farms don’t.

Sawyer looks at monoliths like Monsanto and sees a cyclical trap for farmers. “They put the gene in there that’s resistant to the herbicide they make. So you have to buy their whole lineup. People go in debt at the beginning of the season, oftentimes to the company itself, in order to buy what they need to grow the stuff, and they hope to pay it off by the end of the season. It’s a pretty dark system, and I think it exploits farmers,” Sawyer says. Subsidies and court decisions like the ones in 2004 and 2013 are part of this system, one that allows giant corporations to dominate whole fields of agriculture.

DiTommaso, Sawyer, and Petrie believe that more people should be involved in growing food (more than the current two percent of the national population).

Unfortunately, “We have inherited the idea that fewer farmers is better, that a step back from big, efficient farms would be silly and anti-growth,” Sawyer says.

But he argues that there’s a better way to conceptualize an efficient food system—one that doesn’t treat agriculture as just an industry and values healthy and environmentally sustainable food production.

KAYLI WREN B‘20 regrets to inform you that Bayer, a German multinational pharmaceutical and chemical company, bought Monsanto for $66 billion this year, but it doesn’t change any of this.

19 OCT 2018

BY Marly Toledano ILLUSTRATION Katya Labowe-Stoll DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt

Don’t sing love songs, you’ll wake my mother She’s sleeping here right by my side And in her right hand a silver dagger She says that I can’t be your bride (folk song adapted by Joan Baez) In the dream I had last night I thought they stopped making pencils.

Maybe I don’t know how to talk during the day. I have been spending every morning in the garden listening to Martin Luther King and thinking how even if you get into Harvard and Dartmouth, some people get to win the Nobel Prize and some have to keep on working the railroad. And how Alice in Wonderland sounds nice but also like a story about a girl who takes mushrooms with her rich New York friends and forgets for three years that the next fifty they will wake up, have a cup of coffee—or, after enlightenment, decaf tea—and go in to a white

MY PROFESSOR TOLD ME THAT SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME HUMANITY HAS BEEN CONCERNED ABOUT DAISY This Poem Has Been Written Before on october 2018 in the united states of america

This whole time I have been dying to kiss my best friend again, but I know we never will, because a woman’s life begins the first time she kisses a man and means it or at least that’s what F. Scott Fitzgerald told me when I turned fifteen in Charleston, South Carolina.

room to fill glasses with water only to spill it on the ground.

When I was a little girl, I had a china doll in a white lace dress, a white lace dress like the one I In the dream two nights ago, I learned from an instruc- bought last spring that my brother ruined when he told tion manual how to make a steel me it made me look like a dead baby and I named the cross to cover my body. That day, I thought I saw you in doll Caroline, she had jet black hair, and I didn’t like a pink t-shirt outside of CVS and I dolls very much as a little girl, but I did like Caroline so thought I got that old feeling or maybe I just got scared I dragged her from east coast to west coast to east coast or maybe I just remembered there’s a again and she’s probably in our basement now, in a dark purple wound like cancer inside mother, sister, box, and I’ll always wonder if she is broken or not, and inside you too maybe the man in my contemplative studies class who kept saying Daoism made no sense due to the bullshit But you don’t know that because you still think I’m Eve about the unexamined life, maybe he’s wondering too. in the garden or Mary with milk in my Breasts and you haven’t figured out that I’m Athena too. The other day I googled the name Caroline and I got the answer I needed and I almost called Someday I am going to tell my therapist to stop telling you to tell you that I’ll burn the bridge when I come to me to breathe slow and I’m going to: it, and I put on my fancy shoes, which I knew would make you laugh, but I knew you wouldn’t Scream like Mimi and I’m going to say the whole story pick up the phone and I thought about my but I will know that I do not really have a yellow roses and how I sent you one every week for a story, or rather that I’m telling the same story that the while, but then I realized they were going girl with greasy hair who sat next to me in in the wrong a Catholic Church somewhere in Panama City and then again in Leon and told me it does not Direction and I think in the future I’d like to maybe matter if God exists we have to keep on praying because keep the yellow roses to myself her Grandmother tried to run away from a man like you and he killed her and somewhere Or maybe I’ll send one to my friends: in my hometown in Tennessee someone’s mother is telling her daughter that she One for an environmental scientist in San Francisco, doesn’t have the strength to hold the door the one who slept with me in the same bed without ever open for herself and somewhere at Cornell or touching, and who loaned me a pencil with an eraser, Swarthmore or Williams a Professor is telling her student that the lesbian reading of the novel is an And one for the engineer in Los Angeles who got the over-simplification. fever this fall.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

LITERARY

08

A RECRUIT READS THE FINE PRINT

BY Jessica Dai ILLUSTRATION Colin Kent-Daggett DESIGN Katherine Sang content warning: ICE, policing

Job recruiting season at universities is a special circle of hell. Each fall, tech, finance, and consulting firms descend on elite institutions, preying upon the insecurity of ambitious undergraduates. They promise employment at a high-status, name-brand company; validation (or the perception thereof ) for high performance; and six figures (or five, for the summer) to boot.

In particular, tech companies sell the narrative that working at their company is meaningful, in multiple senses of the word. The technical problems are intellectually challenging; employees work with the smartest people in their field. Moreover, the end-goals of the company and its products are nothing short of worldchanging. On Facebook’s university recruiting website, for instance, the words “Do the Most Meaningful Work of Your Career” are splashed across the landing page in giant font. “At Facebook, we’re bringing the world closer together,” smaller text continues. Similarly, Twitter proclaims that “Twitter is a place you can help make something happen which is much bigger than you… to make a difference.” Google “creates the tools of the future.” Microsoft strives to “have the biggest impact on the world.”

The message is clear. Join us; change the world.

Yet when faced with criticism, most big tech companies present themselves as context- and content-'neutral' platforms or services, distancing themselves from their role as gatekeeper to the services their products provide, and therefore evading responsibility for the real-world implications of their technology.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter claim to be platforms, and just that. There’s no way, they say, that they can properly predict or regulate what users choose to put on their platforms, and, as a consequence, it took years before any company deplatformed harassers like Milo Yiannopoulos or Alex Jones. And there is no shortage of controversy among non-platform tech companies—Amazon’s racially biased facial recognition tool, Microsoft’s and Salesforce’s contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Google’s involvement in Project Maven (the development of computer vision tools for the Department of Defense) and, more recently, Dragonfly (the creation of a censored version of Google search for deployment in China)—all projects explained away as simple business decisions. By this logic, ICE or the DoD are customers just like anyone else, and tech companies are simply selling them software-as-a-service just as they would any other customer.

The obvious contradiction, then, is that certain large tech companies simultaneously sell the narrative that they change the world, when it’s convenient for them to do so; then, when criticized, they say something along the lines of 'we don’t do anything at all.' To contextualize, the high-level vision for these products are often actually revolutionary, and their marketing is at least partially grounded in truth; it would be disingenuous to claim that companies like Facebook, Google, or Microsoft actively seek to harm the world, or that their core business and product offering relies on fundamentally making the world worse. Rather, their vision

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SCIENCE & TECH

of world-changing centers around connecting the lives companies can work directly with the CS department of billions of people around the world, with little regard to gain extra access to students through what’s called for any side effects that may have. the Industry Partners Program (IPP). Depending on how much companies are willing to donate (i.e. pay) to +++ the department, partners are given permission to come to campus, hold info sessions, technical events, and Consider Palantir, a company not nearly as behemothic interview students in Brown’s CS department building. as Google or Microsoft, where the primary product Palantir’s privacy talk about how engineers could offering is the ability to analyze and draw insights from “fix” the problem of privacy was one of these paid massive quantities of data. According to their website, recruiting events. Typically, company-sponsored Palantir “build[s] products that make people better at talks are either led by engineers presenting technical their most important work—the kind of work you read problems the company has tackled, or by recruiters about on the front page of the newspaper.” Palantir’s providing general information on company positions work has indeed come up quite frequently in the news. and policies. Palantir’s talk, on the other hand, was led One recent Bloomberg headline reads: “Palantir knows by a lawyer, John Grant—whose official title is “Director everything about you,” in reference to how Palantir of Privacy and Civil Liberties Engineering”—and was products enable the compilation of detailed databases neither highly technical nor a Palantir-specific pitch. of mass surveillance of the general public, mapping Instead, the topics of Grant’s talk were much more relationships between individuals that are fully acces- general. He gave a brief history of what’s known in the sible without a warrant. Another headline, this time security/privacy community as “The Crypto Wars,” from the Intercept: “Palantir provides the engine for a back-and-forth between government agencies (e.g.

Donald Trump’s deportation machine,” and it’s not an NSA/FBI) and the tech industry and academics about exaggeration. According to publicly-available govern- the extent to which digital communication ought to be ment funding records, Palantir’s Investigative Case opaque to surveillance. This began in the 1990s with Management system is “mission critical” to ICE’s the rise of RSA, a public-key cryptography method to functioning, because it enables ICE agents to analyze ensure secure data transmission. Among other things, a vast trove of interconnected intelligence databases. the government asked tech companies and academics It provides agents with access to information about a to build in backdoors to all manufactured products so it subject’s education, employment, family and personal would be able to access information from those devices relationships, immigration history, criminal records, and programs at will; the backlash among the technical biometric records (such as fingerprints taken at the community was so strong that the government dropped border), and home and work addresses. Palantir has its case. also run predictive policing systems across the country, Grant pointed to this conflict as an example of engiincluding in Los Angeles and New Orleans, where, neers making principled ethical stands, and concluded according to the Verge, even city council members were with platitudes that anyone familiar with the ‘tech unaware that the predictive policing technology was ethics’ space has heard countless times: for computer being used—the “philanthropic” nature of the project science students to be ‘conscious,’ to study the humanas well as New Orleans’ governmental structure meant ities, for there to be a mandatory code of ethics or a that the contract never went through a regular public certification system like doctors’ Hippocratic oath or procurement process. Predictive policing, criticized lawyers’ oaths of attorney. This, of course, begs the even by some members of law enforcement as a tech- question of what constitutes a ‘conscious’ coder—and nology that infringes upon civil rights, is widely contro- whether they would work for Palantir. versial because it catches communities—generally At least twice, Grant mentioned how software low-income and of color—in positive feedback loops engineers are some of the “most powerful people in of escalating police contact. Unlike the larger compa- the world.” “The decisions you make are going to nies that advertise “changing the world,” therefore, reshape the powers of governments, corporations, Palantir’s core products directly target already margin- and individuals,” he said. “That’s why engineers need alized populations and actively inflict material harm. to be careful.” He’s not wrong about that—but the implicit message that working at Palantir would mean +++ reshaping those powers in a just or socially responsible way is a rhetorical flourish that obscures the very Imagine my surprise, therefore, when I received an real problematic uses of their tools to target and harm email from the Brown University Computer Science marginalized populations.

(CS) recruiting listserv about a lecture titled “The So, the talk wasn’t really about “the troubled future Troubled Future of Privacy... And How Engineers Can of privacy”—it was more of a history lesson about the Fix It,” hosted by Palantir. development of privacy in the context of tech. And it At a school like Brown, with a prestigious name was most definitely not about “how engineers can fix and a well-known CS department, many companies it”—no mention was made as to how individual engiput extra time and capital into their recruiting efforts in neers, or even Palantir as a corporation, are working to order to capture as much top talent as possible. In addi- shape this “troubled future.” It’s telling that the calcution to the university-sponsored general career fair, lations behind Palantir’s recruiting and marketing

19 OCT 2018

What does it mean to “change the world” in tech? decisions were formulated around the assumption that students would respond best not to technical content, and not to information about the company itself, but instead about the same techno-chauvinistic/optimistic attitude of “saving the world.”

The vacuousness of Grant’s ultimate recommendations also speaks to the vacuousness of Palantir’s “social good” branding in general. The Privacy and Civil Liberties (PCL) group at Palantir, which Grant heads, was created at least partially in response to the backlash over another Palantir headline: In 2010, the hacktivist group known as Anonymous exposed that Palantir pitched the US Chamber of Commerce on a way to secretly sabotage its opponents, suggesting strategies like infiltrating liberal groups with fake identities and planting false information. According to Grant, the PCL team is a 14-person team consisting of engineers, lawyers, and philosophers. It’s unclear how much leverage a team of fourteen can meaningfully have over a company of over 2,000 engineers where the core product is a “data analytics platform” and the primary customers are clandestine government agencies known to target low-income, immigrant, and non-white communities. +++ The irony is that Palantir’s products rely on and exacerbate blatant intrusions of privacy. Grant made a point of emphasizing that Palantir doesn’t buy and sell personal data—just constructs platforms for their customers to better understand the data they’ve already collected.

But when I pressed him about the distinction between buying and selling data directly, and incentivizing customers (e.g. police) to gather as much data as possible (e.g. make as many stops or arrests as possible), Grant sidestepped the question, hand-waving instead about how Palantir built in safeguards to make sure “only the right people” saw specific pieces of information. But isn’t it better for civil liberties that the information isn’t collected, aggregated, and made digestible in the first place?

At one point, some attendees began to ask about the impacts of biased datasets within law enforcement contexts, and how they might affect the outcomes of predictive algorithms—hinting, perhaps, at the policing programs that Palantir has caught flak for.

Grant provided three responses: one, that Palantir didn’t make machine learning algorithms, just a data analytics platform (just like how large tech companies sidestep critique by claiming status as an apolitical “platform”); two, that Palantir was aware of the problems in biased datasets; and three, that Palantir consulted with internal employee affinity groups like “Black @ Palantir” and “Latinx @ Palantir” about the

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

potential effects of their products. The third response is particularly damning. Embedded in that answer is not just a concession that even if their products were “data analytics platforms,” they still disproportionately and materially harm Black and Latinx populations—but also that the internal company attitude towards those problems is one of dismissal and tokenization.

As the session came to an end and attendees began to pack up, one of the Palantir engineers that had been sitting in on the session made his way over to me. Though he couldn’t reveal the specifics of the implementation, there were robust technical checks in place to protect the privacy of individuals, he assured me. I referenced the Bloomberg article (“Palantir knows everything about you”), which stated that law enforcement didn’t need warrants to scan the database. He responded, “There’s… a lot of inaccuracies in that piece,” and again referenced internal technological methodologies, as though technical jargon from one engineer to another would override the apparent inaccuracy in a piece of journalism accessible to the public. It seemed important to him that this point was conveyed to me in particular, but it’s unclear who exactly he was trying to convince, and why: in a room full of potential hires, there’s no reason Palantir would have needed or wanted my personal perception of the company to change. +++

to the department first, and the department has never sought out partners just for the purpose of securing more funding. At the same time, Clarke explained, the department has never declined partners for reasons other than their inability or unwillingness to pay: that is, every company that has been willing to pay has been accepted as a partner, and the department has never initiated the termination of a partnership, which suggests that the department is agnostic as to the substance of what companies actually do. Interestingly enough, this may be changing. Though I hadn’t asked, Clarke mentioned that they were considering terminating the relationship with one current partner in particular, based on their business practices and the involvement of their products in certain practices that didn’t align with Brown’s values. She declined to name the company to which she was referring.

The entire point of the IPP program is to connect students with career opportunities for summers and post-graduation, which brings us back to recruiting.

While tech companies like to parade their “worldchanging” missions in recruiting pitches, they also know that the students they’re pitching to are often desperate for offers. For students early in their CS career, the pressure to secure jobs or internships is immense—especially to find employers that have sufficient scale and infrastructure to provide mentorship and skill-development opportunities. What makes certain companies “prestigious” or “desirable” is not just the name or the salary; it’s also the extent to which individual interns or new-grad employees are able to learn from other employees at the company, and work on “cutting edge” tech. Ostensibly, this “cutting edge” tech is also the most impactful, exciting, and world-changing.

Mission-driven recruitment, then, is not just a way to assuage students’ concerns about the ability to do “meaningful” work—it’s also a reflection of the tech industry’s boundless techno-optimism and the assumption that the world can always be made better, if only one innovated hard enough. For years, Silicon Valley’s rallying cry has been move fast and break things—something it’s maybe done a little too well.

Tech undoubtedly changes the world—but as it’s doing so, it just might also be breaking the world.

Based on information publicly available on the Industry Partners Program website, the Brown CS department is receiving somewhere around $275,000 for the 2018-19 school year from these industry partners. There are a handful of different tiers of sponsorship—the higher the tier, the more the company pays—and the greater access they have to CS students at Brown. The vast majority of this money is re-invested in student programming: IPP funds initiatives like student and faculty travel to diversity conferences (like Richard Tapia, Grace Hopper, and Out4Undergrad); diversity initiatives like Women in CS and Mosaic+, for underrepresented minority students; the CS for Social Change group; Hack at Brown; the CS departmental undergrad group; and collaborations with other groups on campus, like the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship.

To its credit, IPP is not meant to be a money- JESSICA DAI B’21 is trying her best not to break things. making scheme. Lauren Clarke, the head of the IPP program, made it clear in an interview with the Independent that the vast majority of partners reach out

SCIENCE & TECH

10

Z

(DYS)TOPIA

I have been dreaming about seeing a Snow Leopard.

My infatuation with animals started before I was born, when my brother narrowly lost his campaign to make my first name “Dormouse.” I was that dinosaur kid, always with a plastic Stegosaurus action figure in my pocket. Every Saturday morning, I faced off against my mother in Dinosaur Monopoly Jr. As I grew older my interest in things wild and beast-like did not diminish, but I always drew the line at zoos. I had been faithful to this pledge since I was seven-years-old.

After thirteen years of boycotting, I somehow found myself at the entrance of the Roger Williams Park Zoo. It was a suspiciously warm Saturday afternoon in February. On the front of the admissions ticket to the park it says “Have a wild time!” Despite this, zoos might be the least wild places on earth. They house the fastest, deadliest, largest, and rarest animals on earth, and confine them to an exhibit for people to ogle at all day.

Electrified children run amok, dragging their parents to each exhibit in turn, taking a look, and promptly moving along. The physical space is riddled with signs in bright primary colors introducing the pronghorn (a funny-looking relative of the antelope) and the Watusi and directing visitors this way and that.

The park offers wonder, a day of interacting with the beings that rule the Himalayas, bathe in the Amazon, and reign the skies. Those creatures that live out our childhood dreams of running fast, climbing high, soaring among the clouds. +++ Teeming with childlike anticipation, I approach the Snow Leopard closure. At first, I think it is empty. The tempered light of the overcast sky, mucky remnants of the last snow dusting, accumulation of deciduous twigs and leaves, and the grey rock of the zoo’s

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FEATURES

enclosure make it a difficult scene to digest. Then, I see it—furry, white, and perched on the highest point of the rock formation. About the size of a German Shepherd, it is lying in a small nook where the rock swoops a little lower creating a small basin. Its peppered coat blends into the enclosure and its speckled tail hangs heavily off of the ledge like a red, velvet rope. After searching for a few seconds, I spot the second one, huddled on the lip of the greater bowl-shaped rock formation, squeezed between the black netting that sealed the containment from the top and the cold, grey rock. Its girthy tail flicks periodically. There is a pair of 20-something-year-olds standing next to me at the exhibit. One of them says with amazement, “These are the best animals in the entire zoo!” Indeed they are.

Here stands one of the most scarce and enigmatic creatures on earth. The 5,000 Snow Leopards left in the wild can leap six times their length, live in some the harshest habitats on earth, and roam across 1,000 square kilometers. And here are two, 7,500 miles away from their natural habitat, stuffed into an enclosure the size of a classroom, and forced to listen to a Steve Irwin-wannabe in a peacoat and Sperry topsiders.

Take a look at true wilderness! But instead of taking the detour to West Africa or Alaska, you can see it right off Exit 17 on I-95.

The zoo, trying to curate its exhibits, collects animals like stamps from all over the world and puts them together in a sampler of the animal kingdom. The cohabitation of the Radiated Tortoise that hails from the woodlands of Madagascar and the Huacaya Alpaca that can only be found in the grasslands of the Andes is oxymoronic. Forget wild, their close proximity is laughably artificial.

The animals’ enclosures mimic the animal’s habitat, giving the illusion that spectators are witnessing the wild. “We do not like to acknowledge that animals are enclosed, and so modern zoo exhibits are designed to disguise the enclosure using glass panels, moats and

other deceptions,” says Jason Michael Lukasik in his article “Is it Time to Break With the Colonial Legacy of Zoos?” All this elaborate decoration is so that the guy in the topsiders can focus on how cool the snow leopard is without noticing the manufactured rock and enclosed netting in which it is contained––a hilarious attempt to imitate the Himalayan mountains.

The animals themselves are stripped of their free will and have altered behavior patterns as a result of their captivity, so they do not act as they would in the wild. Animals at the Roger Williams Park Zoo are given names like Riley and Gigi. The signs describe the bison as “friendly!” and the Snow Leopard as having a “toasty tail” (whatever that means). Birthdays and gender reveals of animals are celebrated by the zookeepers. I was informed that Riley, a White-faced Saki, had cake at his party.

Ball is life for the red panda—or so the balls placed in their enclosures suggest. The balls are a shameless symbol of the zoo’s real purpose­—to curate imaginative scenes for onlookers to observe and fantasize, rather than be a place for people to observe “authentic wildness.” +++ The separation between wilderness and humanity that the zoo promotes is a controversial topic in environmental philosophy. In a 1996 paper entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” William Cronon argues that the division between humanity and wilderness is harmful to both parties. Cronon writes that if “wilderness leaves no place for human beings… then also by definition it can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us.” Thus, it is very unlikely that we will be able to realize the “ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like” when wilderness is thought to be seperate from

19 OCT 2018

BY Jesse Barber ILLUSTRATION Sophia Meng DESIGN Katherine Sang

A walk through the Roger Williams Zoo humanity, a dichotomy that is reinforced by the observer-subject relationship at the zoo. Cronon believes this is a crucial misunderstanding that may prevent humans, in industrial societies that create such divisions, from being able to conceptualize a sustainable future that includes a union between the human and natural worlds.

Furthermore, Cronon argues that by occupying our increasingly urbanized spaces, yet pretending that wilderness is our “real home,” we “evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead.” Cronan describes that wilderness is often thought of in a mystical, religious, or supreme light. It is seen as the true home of all living things. He posits that this thinking results in a lack of responsibility for all the places that are non-‘wilderness’––thereby justifying the destruction of the lands that we actually occupy.

Hence, visitors of the Roger Williams Park Zoo celebrate and glamorize the beauty of foreign wilderness while the Narragansett Bay is treated as a dumping ground and the New England Cottontail population plummets dangerously. +++ The culture of expropriating wilderness for the benefit of humans dates back millennia. From its earliest iterations, collecting animals has been a symbol of wealth, power, and conquest. The origin of the contemporary zoo is thought to be the royal menagerie, a private collection of exotic animals usually kept by wealthy rulers. In 2009, a 3,500 BCE menagerie was discovered by archaeologists in Hierakonpolis, Egypt. It held hippopotami, hartebeest, elephants, baboons, and wildcats. Rulers like King Solomon of the Kingdom of Israel and Judah and King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia kept animal collections. Alexander the Great sent animals from his conquests back to Greece, Roman emperors famously collected and made rare animals fight each other and humans for recreation, and Charlemagne kept an elephant named Abul-Abbas.

In the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, there was a diverse animal collection tended to by 600 men. 500 turkeys were needed daily to feed the animals in the collection.

To hold animals captive is to express dominance over them and their environment. When Alexander the Great captured animals, they became tokens of the lands that he conquered and the power he held over the animals, geographies, and peoples alike.

The first modern zoo was Tiergarten Schönbrunn in Vienna, Austria. First an imperial menagerie, it was made available to the public in 1765. In the next few decades of the Enlightenment Era in Europe, zoos in Madrid and Paris were also established mostly for scientific purposes. Similar to the museum, another institution established by European colonialism, the zoo functioned to display the curiosities of distant lands and classify other cultures in a European system of knowledge.

“The colonial project sought to bring the world under both physical and epistemological control,” says Lukasik, “Colonialism was, in large part, an educational

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project. Places, animals, and people were named and ordered through a Western lens.”

The connection between the colonial power that motivated royal menageries and the belief that animals exist for the entertainment and enjoyment of zoogoers that is held today is unmistakable. Zoos offer an opportunity for visitors to experience bite-sized “wildlife experiences,” feel closer to unfamiliar and fetishized lands, and vaunt their supremacy over nature, just as emperors celebrated tokens of their conquest. Visitors stroll through the “Fabric of Africa” section and grab a snack before bopping over to the Asian creatures in “Marco Polo’s Wild Journey” and checking out the “North America” section.

The animals of each exhibit must sit, entertain, and behave as objects as visitors gawk and are treated to the “exoticism” of the animals and the geographies from which they came. This obsession with the exotic is loaded with a racist and colonial logic, a history of orientalizing the unknown and usually non-white as a way of justifying white-european supremacy.

As Lukasik puts it, “Zoos engage visitors in an historic ritual of a Western ordering of the world, teaching them to “gaze” at creatures made to be exotic through our imagining wild and faraway places.”

for animals that do not require holding them captive.

Take it from a diehard Planet Earth fan, the possibility to observe, learn about, and appreciate animals digitally is abundant. You can watch the mesmerizing hunting style of the ping-pong-sized Golden Mole or the eccentric recreation of a Colorado Brown Bear, all in the comfort of your room. As virtual reality and technology becomes more and more accessible, it will become easier than it already is to observe and learn about animals digitally without forcing them into captivity.

Of course, it is not the same. The exhilaration of being so close to creatures of bizarre sizes and adaptations is unparalleled. And althought no children are begging their parents to go see a Barnacle Goose or the endlessly populated New York City subway rat, what if instead of touting the largest and rarest creatures from all over the planet, zoos did focus on educating visitors and conserving animals endemic to the area­—like the illustrious Barnacle Goose? Imagine a place that educates people on the animals in their backyards, how to identify them, what we can learn from them, and how to live with them.

+++

As I turn to leave, a red-tailed hawk sails into a nearby tree. Clutching a branch of a winter-stripped oak tree, it deliberately surveys the scene below. I cannot help but wonder what the hawk (and the rest of the not so scarce wildlife in the park) think of what is going on here. Do the ground finches that roam the park keep their distance from the three bald eagles that could shred them to bits if it were not for their injured and nonfunctional wings? Do they feel sorry for the captive animals? Are they jealous of the attention they get? Do they sit, like I do, and wonder how far the elephants have come and what wisdom they might share with us?

+++

A man in a long winter coat holds his daughter up to the glass of the Moon Bear (named for its black coat and white bib-like marking) exhibit and the five-year-old asks, “Daddy, could the bear smash through the glass if it wanted.” The father, robotically, says, “I am not sure sweetie, maybe.” The daughter chews her question for a few seconds before saying, “Yeah, I think it could,” and with that, she squirms out of her father’s arms and runs to another exhibit.

The girl commented on the bear’s ability to escape its confinement. Not the habitat or diet of the bear. Or if the moon bear’s conservation status is classified as threatened. Or if a Moon Bear is made up. It sure sounds JESSE BARBER B’19 asks, “Have you seen the bird on the Main Green.” like it is.

In 1847, the London Zoo, designed to be available for the regular Londoner, opened to the public. In 1860, the Central Park Zoo became the first public zoo in the United States. Contemporary zoos seek to explore and communicate the animal world to the common zoogoer. How common is learning and what do visitors learn?

Zoos vaunt their potential to generate an appreciation of animals and conservation. I learned about the jumping ability of the Tree Kangaroo, when born wallabies are about the size of grapes, and Harbor Seals can dive up to 1,500 feet!

However, the evidence is conflicting. A study surveying 2,800 children found that 62 percent conveyed no positive learning about animals by visiting zoos. It showed that overall, the children “did not feel empowered to believe that they can take ‘effective ameliorative action’ on matters relating to conservation after their zoo experience.”

There are other ways to cultivate an appreciation

FEATURES

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BY Christine Huynh ILLUSTRATION Ella Rosenblatt DESIGN Bethany Hung

content warning: graphic depictions of the body

Case Study #1: Pills for Stomach Aches It is almost six o’clock when Ms. A finds her heels dragging themselves lifelessly past the automatic doors and into a vestibule of champagne-colored tile.

Her forehead is plastered with matted hair, one hand applying continuous pressure against her abdomen, the other wrestling with the fingers of her child. Was it an intestinal blockage? For the past week, the tumorlike masses and sporadic cramps in her gut screamed affirmative.

Inside, the halls are bustling like mid-summer drones in feverish toil. Staff is lax, security easily penetrable.

One of the attendants who has paused from hurrying to and from the emergency room registers Ms. A in front of the admitting station1. Her teeth chew on the dialect of a foreign language until the tangle of words tumble out as unintelligible whispers. A makeshift translator, her daughter salvages the dialogue and refashions it to mention the days of unrelenting constipation, the receipts for laxatives and stool softeners and suppositories, the botched hemorrhoid surgery performed in her motherland2.

It takes 20 minutes for the triage nurse to escort the pair to examination room two and another 15 for him to sync up the cardiac monitor: 93 bpm, 132/85, 96 percent O2 saturation. Ms. A is alert, and in spite of a mildly inflated blood pressure, her vital signs are stable. Once the ER physician greets her, half an hour is gone.

He prods her backside, barely stretching the amateurishly stitched flesh before her hungry, exhausted eyes force shut, and she is drifting in and out of reality, jaw tetanic, lips squeezed thin. Facing a bundle of muscles that refuse to yield, tender, yet impossibly tense, he orders a CT scan.

1. In the United States, the uninsured disproportionately frequent EDs for issues able to be addressed in a primary care setting.

Because the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1986 (EMTALA) mandates screening and treatment for every patient regardless of ability to pay, 24-hour walk-in accessibility and wrongful assessment of the severity of injuries exacerbate the issue of overrunning hospital services. Fewer than half of visits necessitate emergency care.

2. Medical tourism turns a lucrative profit when comparing affordable care in foreign embassies to the States. Despite the low cost of procedures, when situated in a country rife with bribery and corruption, accreditation becomes much more nebulous than ubiquitous.

If something goes amiss, the same legal recourse is oftentimes not available. Unfortunately, the private practice that operated on Ms. A closed one week following the visit, and the most she ever received in compensation was missed phone calls and deleted voicemails.

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ON BEING HUMAN

Here, the receptionist enters to address payment— prim and proper, no doctor’s coat. No conflict arises regarding her type of provider or network copayment, but the out-of-pocket maximum remains high, easily more than a month’s salary, more than two months’ mortgage payments, more than three months’ expenses in food and groceries3. Ms. A waits an hour for the contrast dye; another hour passes, and the images come back negative4.

Pharmaceutical, and Bio-Tech Industries Don’t Want You to Know,” the front cover reads. His books sell for $30 each.

Case Study #2: Pills for Back Pain Biweekly meetings with him exceed pain management. The chiropractor has adapted to treatment The chiropractor of the clinic is more of a salesperson beyond repairing wiry frames or ossified bodies5: With than he is a practitioner. a merchant’s timbre, his character peddles the benefits Amongst lurid magazine faces advocating well- of an alkaline diet, extols the virtues of veganism, and ness, plaques framing obscure certifications and docu- praises stress management via detoxifying nutrition. mentaries haranguing cultish health claims, vitamins At her appointment time, V’s adjustments follow clutter the countertops. Beside this, powders line the routine practice: As she positions herself prone, the shelves; probiotics overwhelm the front desk. At the chiropractor breaks the tension from C1 to L5, twists other end, posters substitute as wallpaper with spon- the 15-degree curvature in her upper vertebrae, and sored pieces of medical propaganda. His authored bends the 20-degree distortion in her lower spine back paperbacks populate round coffee tables as the center- into alignment. piece, depicting a waistline crop of a tan visage and Secondary evaluations create a prismatic pressure graying hair: a man in his late 50s or early 60s—suited, chart. Yellows paint the inward rotations of knobby rugged. “America’s Health Care Crisis: What the Food, knees; oranges sketch out the irregular weight between

3. Referring to Ms. A as healthy reads a bit as a gross overstatement, but this informed her decision to enroll in a high-deductible health plan ($1850) to reap lower premium benefits ($68 monthly) after passage of the Affordable Care Act. These facts are emphasized here to ground two details: (1) Ms. A has been insured since 2014; and (2) she does not want to see a primary care physician.

4. After leaving with a prescription for painkillers and a referral to a general surgeon who agreed to schedule a meeting on her earliest availability (two weeks from the ED check-in), Ms. A’s follow-up care ended with one appointment. She opted to not get the additional operation to fix the maladroitly sewn tissue. The throbbing eventually lessened, and abdominal blockages subsided after incorporating a healthy serving of MiraLAX into her everyday diet.

5. While the dominant form of healing in the United States is founded on allopathic practices, complementary and alternative medicine has been popularized in mainstream media. Chiropractic

19 OCT 2018

Vignettes in

healthcare mismanagement

soles. A moody scarlet like theater curtains, the bases of her feet are most criminal.

The chiropractor does not marvel at the calcium wreckage. Her body is a graveyard, and he has robbed all of her skeletons. It is his mission to blame consumers for their own carelessness and rebrand it as patient-centered care. It is in his best interest to prompt purchase of sole inserts, one under his trademark, professionally endorsed, chiropractor-recommended.

She loves herself up until the moment he wrests back her brittle-bone wings and leaves her form flightless for refusing the transaction.

His orthotic supports sell for $380 each.

Case Study #3: Pills for Respiratory Arrest It is after lunch when his oxygen saturation plummets below 90 percent. It is not until the physical therapist notes the man to be unresponsive that the nurse calls a code blue.

This is the third time Mr. S has seen Death so close, first while comatose from a semi-truck hit-and-run back in 1996 and second on the operating table in 19996. It had no reaper’s cloak nor plague doctor’s mask, just fangs mottled with the red of bloodborne iron, a flesheater like Kronos, a seductress like a Siren.

A waterlogged heart hiccupping, beached lungs gasping, he is ghosting again, hearkening to deceased voices from 18 years prior, as the resuscitative team restarts chest compressions. With ventilation rate close to nonexistent, they intubate Mr. S and wheel him to intensive care. He regains consciousness on the fourth day and stays under surveillance for the next week: breathing treatments daily, kidney dialysis triweekly, a cocktail of antibiotics to fend off the pneumonia.

The tube eventually gets removed, and he is a fish, breathing through crude gills when the lungs shriveled and flower-pressed behind his sternum remain enervated by the cobwebs in their attic. While a family member is spooning thickened nectar into his mouth, Mr. S asks for a retelling of last month. It is almost recidivist in nature, a revolving door. He can only differentiate days with pain and days without pain, having eclipsed his sentience like the moon waning and waxing.

has evolved into such a craze that while it should revolve around managing chronic back or neck pain, some patients delegate overall health maintenance to chiropractic care—much to the delight of the chiropractic circle and much to the possible detriment of humanity.

6. Similar to Mr. S, a large portion of health spending in the States is allocated to high-need patients—people harboring chronic conditions and comorbidities. Cost shifting is not a matter of the wealthy financing the poor but the healthy subsidizing the sick. Those in the top 50th percentile account for 97 percent of costs.

7. Countless people are being prescribed drugs that don’t help, operations that will not make them better, and scans and tests that sometimes prove more hazardous than valuable. The United States is a country of three hundred million people who are submitted to fifteen million nuclear medicine scans, a hundred million CT and MRI scans, and almost ten billion laboratory tests annually. Hundreds of thousands more are being treated each year for

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

“This time, they’re keeping me here until they can remove the gallstones, image my stomach, and unblock the blocked artery.”

“Can your body handle this?”

It can’t. The lone invasive procedure done midway through his stay is an endoscopy, which accomplishes nothing more than snapping high-definition, stateof-the-art pictures of his six-year-old ulcers that have gone untreated7.

Five weeks of inpatient care and three weeks in rehabilitation, the bill totals more than $118,0008.

her fingers have been engorged with discharge. She does not cry because her brain is still wired from seeing her father hand over 60 green singles to the front desk when the woman rejected their Medicaid10. She does not cry because the snake-eyed physician is already starting to dress the messy wounds.

“All better.” It is not a question.

“All better,” she repeats.

Somewhere between the electricity in her hands flaring on the drive home and her father asking what she wants for dinner, she stifles a sob. In another universe, she is a 14-year old girl with soft hands and soft elbows and soft knees—no bruises, no scars. Instead, she is Case Study #4: Pills for Anxious Pickings wrapping and unwrapping, unwrapping and rewrapping the series of bandages, a stampede in her ears, AS THE SUN THROWS OUT its last flames at the splinters under her viscera, ready to detonate11. dawn of dusk, C and her father begin their excursion across town in an engine sputtering soured gas and doors creaking with oxidized hinges. Her mind subli- Final Case Study: Coda mates to the pus-scented vapors. She is worried less about any prospective amputation to separate diseased Firstly, consider why there is no food insurance. What appendage from hand9, more about the discomfort in if the milk spoils before its due date? What if the steak her own husk, a tenant outgrowing a chambered cell. is undercooked? Despite being necessary sustenance, How she wishes to molt and melt and everything in there is no heavy financial risk associated with food between. She wants to pack up her ribs, curl her back- purchase since the demand is stable and foreseeable. bone inward like a coiled nautilus, shrinking, spiraling Rather than a need for something, it is the possibility until all the potential makes her into a part-time demo- of a rare or unpredictable threat that makes insurance lition project, a full-time spring-loaded gun of a person. desirable.

Today, tingles alighting skin, she cannot feel her Secondly, ponder if health insurance is similar to fingers, but she knows the nails have been bitten to the any other existing indemnity plan. It is comparable in root, cuticles excoriated until they seeped wine. its use of rate estimations, but there is no such thing as “Mental illness is a luxury we can’t afford.” existing solely for catastrophic damage. Health insurMouths scream, but she is louder: “Dad, I can’t ance protects against most or all forms of its use, and help it.” because there is not foresight as to when care will be Today, it is different. Today, she continues to strip needed, when required, it is very, very expensive.12 away old skin, convinced she is unraveling herself like Light is both a particle and a wave. Health care is rolls of cellophane. Today, he sees the body teetering, governed similarly: It is not supposed to make sense. off-kilter, and soon, they’re coasting down the street at It is inherently paradoxical, spurring creation from 50 miles an hour. destruction, trading rebirth for death. The Ouroboros C looks to the doctor’s forehead and the sickly devours its own tail to sustain a life of cyclic renewal. white of his lab coat as he punctures the fluid-filled pocket with a medieval bloodletting instrument. He is CHRISTINE HUYNH B'21 goes to Cuba for healthcare. silver-tongued, ready to devour his prey whole. There is no trust here.

“Most people would have cried by now.”

She does not cry because this is the fourth time

diseases, yet only a miniscule reduction in death, if any, can be noticed.

8. I would like to say that Mr. S’ condition does not relapse, but it takes a mere two weeks before he gets hospitalized again: Whether the culprit was his blood pressure or blood sugar, something takes a dramatic plunge while he is idling in line at the bank. Nearby, someone phones the ambulance. Currently, he is in back-and-forth correspondence with an insurance company that demands recompense for transportation services. Larger cities like Los Angeles or Houston usually average over $1000 per ambulance ride. That is close to his monthly stipend.

9. Commonly related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, two to four percent of the population is affected with pathological skin picking.

It is not uncommon for these episodes to result in a felon—an abscess formation at the fingertip due to an acute bacterial infection.

10. Health insurance does not transfer across state lines.

11. There is no officially established mental health care system in the States. What does exist is an informal amalgam of four disjointed sectors. In the US, like many industrialized countries, severe mental illnesses remain undertreated, diagnosis unstandardized.

12. While the United States is often cited as spending exorbitantly— even ostentatiously—on medical care (nearly twice as much as other high-income countries at 17.8 percent of its GDP in 2016), its returns are consistently mediocre. Of the industrialized nations, it remains the sole proprietor without universal health care, instead financing the widespread presence of a system that imposes limitations on treatment for impoverished and suffering communities.

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TO BE A COMPOSER The life and music of Julius Eastman The last known recording of composer Julius Eastman is his performance in 1981 of an original song cycle entitled “Taking Refuge In The Two Principles.” His rich baritone emerges from the warped tape as he begins to softly shape the contours of the melody. Though there is no reference to a specific faith, the piece has the quality of a sacred hymn. Its religiosity instead extends from an intensity of tortured expression that is as beautiful as it is harrowing. At what seems to be Eastman at his most vulnerable, he sings: I take refuge under the umbrella of two principles Universality and Impartiality I place my friends around me I place them on my left side I place them on my right side Eastman, both African-American and gay, virtually without precedent in the nearly exclusively white and heterosexual field of classical music, achieved critical renown both for his compositional style and technical virtuosity throughout the 1960s and 70s.

However, soon after this performance, his rapid ascent into the highest echelons of avant-garde classical music buckled under the weight of financial difficulties and a mental illness which he was unable to treat. He stopped composing entirely, and, after self-exile from the classical scene, found himself in homeless shelters and psychiatric hospitals for his remaining years.

His hard-won reputation waned as he vanished from view. After his death at the age of 49, nearly a year passed before an obituary of Eastman appeared. Julius Eastman’s music was all but lost to history by the century’s end.

In recent years, due to the scrupulous research by former friends and colleagues, the life and music of Julius Eastman has been gradually, albeit incompletely, recovered. Eastman has proved as elusive in death as he was in life: he lived as a self-described “wandering monk,” kept neither scores nor recordings of his performances, and, as the result of his strange insistence of always keeping his door unlocked, had few possessions to his name. The few scores that have been salvaged are written in Eastman’s highly idiosyncratic form of musical notation; most copies consist of seismographic-like lines, prose-poetry, and unusual diagrams meant only to be interpreted by Eastman himself.

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Though much still remains to be discovered, Eastman’s life and music, brimming with a vibrant intensity, have been recalled to life.

Among the biographic revelations uncovered was the breadth of the obstacles Eastman encountered within the avant-garde classical world of the 1960s and 1970s. Much was denied to Eastman that was afforded to his white and hetereosexual contemporaries. His passion overflowed and uttered a demand of recognition within a social world antithetical to his identity and musical expression. Daring to integrate a brazen compositional style with defiant expressions of his identity as an African-American and gay man, Eastman fought against the exclusionary world of classical music. +++ All students who apply to the infamously selective Curtis Institute of Music are asked on the application form:

“What is your ultimate goal in studying music?”

Eastman wrote in response:

“To obtain wisdom.”

This intensity of expression, both in music and speech, borne on dual axes of spirituality and musicianship, would define the life of Julius Eastman.

Born in 1940 in Harlem Hospital to Frances and Julius Eastman Sr., Eastman spent his adolescence in the college town of Ithaca, New York. His mother recognized an early uncompromising attitude in Eastman; she recalls, “Even at two years old… If I told him to behave and sit down, he would stand rigidly erect with fists clenched and you would have to kill him and break his bones to make him sit down.” Eastman, beginning piano lessons at the age of seven, gained early recognition for his precocious talent by local composers and academics in Ithaca. After piano study with George Driscoll of Ithaca College and encouragement by Thomas Sokol of Cornell University, he applied and was admitted to the Curtis Institute of Music at the age of 19.

At Curtis, Eastman thrived in classes with Dr. A. Constant Vauclain, with whom he studied counterpoint and harmony. Vauclain’s method of composing harmonic systems, what he termed “syntonality,” would exert significant influence upon Eastman’s later compositions. His gregariousness and natural musicianship allowed him to form close friends and musical collaborators. However, at Curtis he exhibited the first signs of anxiety, with which he would increasingly struggle with later in life. His

IS academic record was filled with absences, and in the middle of his second year his health file indicated that he was severely underweight. Writing to a close friend, Eastman penned a complaint of his social anxiety and poor living conditions: “If I have to live [here] one more year I shall die a morbid death of claustrophobia. But even worse… is the fear and dread of having to call and knock at the door of strange people looking for a room.” Eastman seemed to have recovered in his final years, and again flourished in piano and compositional study with Mieczyslaw Horowski. His graduation performance consisted entirely of his own original compositions, for which he was awarded a diploma in composition in May 1963.

After college graduation, Eastman split his time between New York City, Ithaca, and Buffalo, performing as a vocalist or pianist in regional concerts and arranging new compositions. He received rave reviews and was described in local newspapers as “a young man to watch” and “one of the most intense— and rewarding—musicians we have seen.” His work attracted the attention of composers at the University of Buffalo, and Eastman was appointed as a fellow at the Creative Associates, an influential creative colony inside the university funded by the Rockefeller foundation. Eastman, now with steady income, spent much of his residency experimenting with minimalism, an avant-garde movement to reduce music to its bare essentials by focusing on pulsating and droning rhythms.

Eastman, however, was continually dissatisfied by the orthodoxies within avant-garde classical music. In an essay titled “The Composer as Weakling,” he wrote of the “puny state of the contemporary composer in the classical music world.” For Eastman, the composer had vanished from their performed work, “into the role of the unattended queen bee, constantly birthing music in his lonely room.” Instead, he argued the composer’s physical presence should actively affect the music performed: the composer must actively create, via improvisation, a unique version each time the piece was played. Eastman made it his mission to become what he termed a “total musician” for whom the distinctions between composition and improvisation collapsed into one in the form of non-reproducible performance art.

During his affiliation at University of Buffalo, Eastman wrote “Stay on It,” “Feminine,” and “Joy Boy,” all of which applied this principle. The conceptual basis of these works is undoubtedly minimalism, but Eastman extends the vocabulary by integrating jazz improvisation, pop harmonies, and looping melodic phrases. Stay on It pivots around around a syncopated, repeated vocal riff of the words “Stay on it.” The repetitions of the cadence are not merely for the purpose of a gradual process, but instead act as a kind of framing device. The vocal cry of “Stay on it” becomes a measuring block for the harmonic and rhythmic changes which rise and fall throughout the piece. By the end, the riff is a improvisation device for Eastman as he warps and modulates the phrase until its end. Similarly, “Feminine” and “Joy Boy” use fiery rhythms and arpeggios with which Eastman melds into his improvisation.

While a member of the Creative Associates, Eastman’s overt references to his sexual identity caused controversy in a performance the Creative Associates staged of composer John Cage’s experimental works.

In Cage’s Songbooks, the performers are given dadaist instructions to act out upon the stage. Eastman was given the instruction “perform a disciplined action, with any interruptions.” He proceeded to give a lecture on the erotic, eventually bringing a man on stage. Cage himself dismissed the performance, angrily shouting in a lecture the next day: “I don’t approve because the ego

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of Julius Eastman is closed in on the subject of homosexuality. And we know this because he has no other idea to express… he doesn’t know the first step to take.”

While “Stay On It,” “Feminine,” and “Joy Boy” proved to be moderate success among audiences and critics alike, during this time he was increasing criticized by members of the music faculty at Buffalo.

Eventually, the faculty board voted to not renew his contract. Eastman suspected ulterior motives for his sudden firing. His brother, Gerry Eastman, believed it to be an example of “Julius’ lifelong battle with white people in power.”

In 1976, Eastman relocated to New York City. The downtown avant-garde was brimming with experimentation and he soon found himself among like-minded musicians integrating traditional composition with new innovations in electronically-influenced drone music. Eastman found himself in new environment in the wake of both the Civil Rights Movement and the Stonewall Riot, and it is here where his compositions start taking a fiercely political edge. In the preface to a vocal composition entitled “The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc,” Eastman dedicates the piece “to those who think that they can destroy liberators by acts of treachery, malice, and murder… Even now in my own country, my own people, my own time, gross oppression and murder still continue.” These years constituted Eastman’s creative peak, as, in addition to the political underpinnings of his work, he began to stretch the conventions of minimalism to an unstable contradiction. He largely disposed of minimalism’s rigid devotion to reduction in favor of arabesques of sound and surges of atonal anarchy.

+++ Eastman’s New York years resulted in a three magnum opuses, a trilogy consisting of pieces entitled “Crazy N***r,” “Evil N***r,” and “Gay Guerrilla.” Eastman elaborated on his politics of composition titles in a pre-concert talk at Northwestern University in 1980.

“What I mean by ‘n***r’ is that thing which is fundamental,” Eastman remarked, “that kind of thing which attains himself or herself to the ground of anything.”

While avoiding any discussion on the racist history of the term, he alludes to ‘n***r’ in reference to the system of slavery which permitted what he calls “the basis of the American economic system.” To Eastman, ‘n***r’ refers to fundamental oppression embedded within

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

American and European civilizations. ‘Guerrilla,’ likewise had a different meaning for Eastman, defining it as “someone who is… sacrificing his life for a point of view.”

Throughout his life, Eastman viewed himself as unwittingly drafted in a war whose purpose was to invalidate his musical expression. “There is always somebody who is trying to crush you,” said Eastman in an interview with Buffalo Evening News, “I refuse to be afraid of my own comrades, of being castigated, thrown out or thought of badly.” He conceived composition as the highest form of rebellion against that which would deny him freedom. R. Nemo Hill, a poet who lived with Eastman in New York City, remarked that Eastman’s usage of racist and homophobic epithets “put him in the position of transgressing some sort of bourgeois status… He took aspects of his identity and foisted them on people in this provocative way.”

His radical attempts in his compositions’ titles to redefine terms of racial condemnation mirrors his ambitious efforts to revolutionize minimalism within them. Eastman described these final works as his attempt to create “organic music” in which “every section contains all the information of the previous section or else takes out information at a gradual and logical rate.” This form of composition is based on an additive process, in which new parts are added and subtracted proportionally as others continue, culminating in increasingly layered harmonies. Once each process reaches its conclusion, it resets to a single repeated note resulting in a corrugated pattern of tonal complexity.

Each work is scored for instruments of the same family which act in sequence in carrying out the processes. Throughout, Eastman upends the minimalist orthodoxy of reduction. “Crazy N***r” begins with a throbbing, syncopated pulse. Soon, pentatonic phrases seeth into a gathering unrest until it erupts in white rings of tumult. Similarly, “Gay Guerilla” slowly increases in intensity until the melodies begin to wheeze and thrash wildly into an unstable climax. As noted by music critic Alex Ross, “Classic minimalist works tend to introduce change by way of horizontal shifts.

Eastman’s music by contrast, is vertical.” Eastman vertically layers musical elements as rival rhythmic phrases usurp the very patterns upon which the piece is built. The result is a harmonic tide of sound whose internal contradictions rupture in ecstatic upheaval. In the closing minutes of “Crazy N***r,” whispers of rebellion grow into harmonic incantations. War is declared on the system.

piano, claiming it gave him better “traction.” Eastman began showing up late to rehearsals of his own compositions, and, in performances with his colleagues, he improvised his own parts. Battling an addiction, Eastman’s creative output waned and sputtered to a full stop. Eastman applied for faculty position in the Cornell Music Department in a last hope for financial stability. After funding for the position fell through, Eastman was bitterly disappointed and disappeared from the avant-garde classical music scene.

By 1984, Eastman was dividing his time between a midtown shelter and a homeless encampment in Tompkins Square Park. In a brief period of stability, Eastman lived on the Upper East Side while he worked in the classical music department at Tower Records on Fourth Street and Broadway. Then he disappeared once more.

In his unfinished “Symphony II,” Eastman inscribed the following, entitled ‘Parable’ on the title page: “On Tuesday, at Main and Chestnut, the Faithful Friend and his Beloved Friend decided to meet. On Monday the day before, Christ came, just as it was foretold. Some went up on the right, and some went down on the left. Trumpets did sound (a little sharp), and electric violins did play (a little flat). A most terrible sound. And in the twinkling of an eye the earth vanished and was no more.” Karl Singletary, an old friend of Eastman’s, provides the last known account of Eastman, bearing eerie echoes of Eastman’s ‘Parable.’

“There he was on Main and High Street. He was puny and not very healthy looking,” said Singletary. “I realized he must have been having financial problems. I didn’t have a lot of money either, but I know I gave him some—how much I can’t recall. He said he was staying in a shelter… we talked and we said goodbye there on Main Street.”

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Beginning in 1981, Eastman became increasingly distressed and diverted from his composing. In addition to a resurgence of his mental illness, Eastman began to accrue large debts. He had been cut off from traditional sources of revenue for composers: Despite his success, music publishers never pursued Eastman for record contracts, and he encountered difficulty in getting his compositions performed at concert halls. Gerry Eastman has attributed these struggles to racism: “My brother… was an accomplished and wellknown composer and could not get his stuff played with his credentials... Racism within the classical world prevented him from doing the things he was doing…

Julius is just another in the line of black geniuses who get squashed in this particular Hemisphere.”

After the death of his beloved grandmother, Eastman's behavior became increasingly unpredictable. Whether out of increasing strain, protest, or artistic interests is unclear. In a performance that year, he smeared dirt all over the ivory keys of a Steinberg

Julius Eastman died on May 28, 1990 at Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, New York. In recent years, due to the work of advocates who knew Eastman, a small commemoration of his music has turned into an outright revival. New World Records has released a three-disc set entitled Unjust Malaise and an additional set of recordings from Eastman’s concerts. The Kitchen, an art venue in New York City, presented a retrospective this year entitled “Julius Eastman: That Which is Fundamental” in a three-week festival of his music.

Most recently, publisher G. Schirmer announced it will restore, distribute, and promote Eastman’s music.

Today, Eastman’s work is known for prefiguring post-minimalist music, whose elements of vertical compositional design and emotional dynamics strongly resemble Eastman’s early compositions; his legacy of resistance has resonated with a new generation of diverse composers. Eastman’s commitment to foregrounding his identity and musical innovation imbued his works with an anarchic vigor poised to upend the world of classical music. For Eastman, being a composer was not enough.

JULIAN FOX B’20 will start a rebellion as soon as he gets the chance.

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I remember when I was Boy and mother was Mother Bells chimed at noontime on streets made asphalt sang songs it goes on and on your hearts are lined with parallel filament mine are jelly and melt I could fall and spring back up but sometimes I’d hide there I felt the heat of the day on my forehead when I lay on the floor and I heard the television and the static and I put my ear to the floor and I could only hear the static until I just felt the electricity I didn’t know Danger wasn’t Volcano and I heard thump thump in my sleep your bones made of plaster and glue mine styrofoam Movie theater heatwave on Saturday night wished to really hear on both sides run between rooms to catch the difference was in love with sound then your toenails unholy mine are easily deceived Skeletons could be funny sometimes Mother look hard at TV, you’ll see keep where you are that's it you’ll get it soon keep waiting I promise I told you it would come your mouth runs circles mine is void of shape I vibrated to a tuning fork of my brother’s volition I who wished to leap from my body and enter a neon sign bright and warm in the middle and never worry about early I who wanted nothing more than to be tape spooled and unwound and wound again until gave out and another from the store you who has fingers made of elastic and mine that are only there some of the time

BY Ben Bienstock ILLUSTRATION Pia Mileaf-Patel DESIGN Christie Zhong

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19 OCT 2018

LOOK IN UR GHOUL MIRROR, IT’S U KNOW, THE LIST FRIDAY 10.19

Providence Emo Dance Night // Fete Music Hall, 103 Dike Street // 9PM

The fact that this event lacks an end time is proof enough of the legendary power of emo music in creating a temporally dystopian affect. 18+ to enter, 21+ to drink.

SATURDAY 10.20

IMPULSE presents: Elements workshop with Megan and Stanley // 69 Brown Street // 2PM-4PM

Bear witness to Brown & Premier’s dance troupe as the squad introduces you to the following questions: ‘Always wanted to learn how to dance but didn’t know how to get started? Do you love to dance but don’t have the time to commit to a company?’ Either way, we got you.

SUNDAY 10.21

15 Year Anniversary Sale! // The Time Capsule (537 Pontiac Avenue, Cranston) // 11AM-7PM

65% off Back Issues comics in the boxes, 50% off all Records, Video Games, Cards and Toys, 35% off Wall Comics, Trade Papers, and Hardcovers. Now you know.

MONDAY 10.22

Fall Foliage Hike // Caratunk Wildlife Preserve (301 Brown Avenue, Seekonk, MA) // 10AM-12PM Take “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence,” but make it less green, make the fence a state border, and put on some hiking boots for this excursion into the Seekonk wilds!

TUESDAY 10.23

Selfie Halloween // Providence Place Mall // 1-9PM

And you thought the Mall’s spookiest photo booth was on a Mac at................................. the Genius Bar. The newly minted “SelfieStop” at Providence Place believes in “creating fun and encouraging interaction with art,” where the art is your face dimly lit by the afterglow of the Auntie Anne’s pretzel stand. You’ll look ghoulish, perhaps glam.

WEDNESDAY 10.24

Feminist & Queer Happy Hour PVD // Saint Monday (393 West Fountain Street) // 5:30PM

Self-advertised as a space for feminists and queer people who are interested in the same things, but who find networking “hard and weird.” They’re hoping there will be cats there, but the fruition of that is unclear at the time of writing.

Helen Molesworth: In Conversation // Granoff Center for the Arts (154 Angell Street) // 5:30-8:30PM Molesworth, the former chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, has made a name for herself with her support of under-recognized artists—and her takes on art world politics. This discussion of both should be interesting!

THURSDAY 10.25

Synthwave Night X // Freeplay Bar & Arcade (182 Pine Street) // 7PM-1AM

This LW has a friend with a “technoir 80s retro horror” playlist, but inexplicably, Bruce Springteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” is included. Perhaps they, and you, should mine the DJ set here to see if there’s anything spookier than New Jersey.

2018 Spooky State House // Rhode Island State House (62 Smith Street) // 5-7PM

Seems redundant—most of the General Assembly already haunts the State House dressed as Democrats! Har har. If you dress up as a certain spooky Speaker, take a picture and send it to listtheindy@ gmail.com! We’ll send you a treat for your trick.