The College Hill Independent Vol. 35 Issue 8

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A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

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NOV 10 2017

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COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

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COVER

INDY FROM THE EDITORS

NEWS

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 35 / ISSUE 08 NOV 10 2017

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Week in Review Harry August and Eve Zelickson

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Let's Talk About Sects Isabel DeBre

METRO

This time last year, we here at the Indy spent a frantic production day assembling a newspaper we’d never prepared to publish. Our one consolation, on the Wednesday after Election Day, was turning to our role models writing for newspapers and magazines on the left—to see how they were handling the newly visible crisis, negotiating a reluctance to believe it was true alongside a responsibility to report on it truthfully.

Astoundingly many of these outlets are gone now. Last week, we learned that Gothamist was shut down by its billionaire owner, Joe Ricketts, after its staff voted to unionize. In the past few months, the Village Voice and Teen Vogue have shuttered their print editions; the Los Angeles Times was briefly banned from Disney’s advanced screenings this week after publishing an investigative piece about Disney’s contentious relationship with the city of Anaheim; MTV News, in its so-called “pivot to video,” fired nearly its entire staff.

We know: journalism as we know it is undergoing a long slow death. We know: the current administration sows a dangerous distrust of news media, and relies on a tangling of fact and fiction that’s central to its platform. But that knowledge doesn’t mean we’re not terrified to see these trends coincide.

We’re hoping from the ashes of print media a sustainable model for local reporting rises, and we’re hoping that we can stay in print in the meantime.

Love Letter to River Phoenix Ivan Rios-Fetchko

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.

Break the Cycle Julia Rock

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Not Just Prayers Jack Brook

ARTS 13

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Subtly Flawed Middle-Aged Men Isabelle Rea Have a Nice Apocalypse Robin Manley

FEATURES 05 11

/r/NoFAP David Golden Puerto Rico en mi Corazón Soraya Ferdman

OCCULT 08

—WT, LB, & SK

MISSION STATEMENT

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Hearth and Home Lena Nygren

LITERARY

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EPHEMERA

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Green, How I Want You Green Tara Sharma

The Desert II/Twin Earth Adonis/Fadwa Ahmed

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Two Works in Progress William Samosir

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.

Fall 2017

MANAGING EDITORS

ARTS

Jane Argodale Will Weatherly Robin Manley

Maya Brauer Ruby Gerber Erin West

NEWS

FEATURES

Isabel DeBre Chris Packs WEEK IN REVIEW

Eve Zelickson METRO

Jack Brook Saanya Jain Katrina Northrop

Zack Kligler Gabriela Naigeborin Julia Tompkins METABOLICS

TECH

Jonah Max OCCULT

Sheena Raza Faisal Signe Swanson LITERARY

Fadwa Ahmed Isabelle Doyle

Dominique Pariso Neidin Hernandez

EPHEMERA

SCIENCE

X

Liz Cory Paige Parsons

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

Maya Bjornson Liby Hays

LIST

Lisa Borst Kelton Ellis Fadwa Ahmed STAFF WRITERS

Mara Dolan Soraya Ferdman Nora Gosselin Anna Hundert Mariela Pichardo Paula Pacheco Soto Marly Toledano Kion You

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR

Gabriel Matesanz

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS

Anzia Anderson Julie Benbassat Alexandra Hanesworth Kela Johnson Teri Minogue Pia Mileaf-Patel Isabelle Rea Ivan Ríos-Fetchko Claire Schlaikjer Kelly Wang Dorothy Windham Sophia Meng

COPY EDITORS

Miles Taylor Cate Turner

SOCIAL MEDIA

Fadwa Ahmed SENIOR EDITORS

DESIGN EDITOR

Eliza Chen

DESIGNERS

Amos Jackson Ashley Min WEB MANAGER

Alyssa McGillvery BUSINESS MANAGER

Maria Gonzalez

Lisa Borst Kelton Ellis Sophie Kasakove Will Tavlin MVP

Isabelle Rea THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG — @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN UNSOLVED CASES

BY Harry August and Eve Zelickson ILLUSTRATION BY Alex Hanesworth DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

Iditaroids The walls of my boyhood room, once decorated with Sports Illustrated Kids centerfolds of Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and the 2014 Russian Olympic Track and Field Team, have become a graveyard of tape fragments and sticky tack residue. Some of these athletes got creative with Erythropoietin, others just took old-school steroids, many had irregular levels of reticulocytes, and some (the Russians) preferred a “three-drug cocktail of banned substances mixed with liquor,” according to the New York Times. But they all shared the same fate, stripped of their medals, their posters left crumpled in the recycling bin.

Through these dark and doped times, one poster stood sober upon the wall: four time champion of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race Dallas Seavey and his pack of siberian huskies. Until, that is, October 23, when Iditarod officials announced that four of Seavey’s dogs tested positive for the opioid pain reliever Tramadol—the

Je ne crois pas qu’il n’y a plus de beurre Help! The French have lost their butter and no one knows what to do or exactly where it has gone. Slowly, stick-by-stick, it has disappeared from grocery store shelves. Croissants, the crème de la crème of French pastries, now taste drier, flakier, and baked. Frenchmen started noticing the trend in mid-October, and since then this problem has only become larger and blander. For a society built on butter, (it is said The Rouen Cathedral was built on butter fees) losing this dairy product has grave gastronomical implications. The French consume 18 lbs. of butter per capita per year according to statistics from the International Dairy Federation. This is three times the US’s reported amount, and we are number nine on the list (thank you Julia Child).

Amid a frightened population—the hashtag #BeurreGate, or butter shortage, was trending this week—French papers are trying to provide solutions, offering instructions for churning your own butter or suggesting people turn to butter substitutes. The latter suggestion set off another viral retort, with thousands of

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first time in the sport’s history a dog has tested positive for banned substances.

Seavey was quick to deny that he provided the drugs to the dogs, saying in a stoic, 18-minute long YouTube video, “I have done absolutely nothing wrong,” and claiming that the drugs were given to his dogs “maliciously.” As Seavey alludes to in the video, and as confirmed by Drugs.com, Tramadol is not the doping drug of choice: “common tramadol side effects may include: headache, dizziness, drowsiness, [or] tired feeling.” But who, if not Seavey, doped the dogs?

Perhaps the dogs were self-medicating. According to PETA’s 2017 clickbait, “You Won’t Believe What Happens to Dogs on the Iditarod Trail,” dogs die so commonly during the race that “Rule 42­—Expired Dog” of the Iditarod Official Rule Book describes that dog death “may be considered unpreventable.” One death that might be considered “preventable,” on the other hand, would be the 2016 death of a dog who died

after being “struck by a drunken snowmachiner near Nulato,” according to the Alaska Dispatch News. The Indy feels that it cannot rule out the possibility that the dogs purchased and consumed the tramadol to help them cope with pulling a human through 979 miles of Alaskan wilderness.

The biggest implication of this scandal, however, is how this news will trickle down to household pets around the world. With an absence of clean role models, will the Spots and Rovers of the world consider Canine Growth Hormones a viable option to ensure a few more years of fetch? Could blood-doping help Lassie ditch her cone?

Might anabolic steroids improve Air Bud’s vertical? At this time, the Indy can’t say for certain, but we encourage pet owners to take the necessary precautions; we must keep our medicine cabinets safe not just from our teenagers but also the wily paws of man’s best friend.

people tweeting “margarine is not the solution.” But the question remains, where has the butter gone? Theories echo down narrow Parisian streets, and circulate among local French newspapers. The Indy has presented them for you below.

Theory 1. Parisian Greta Morton enters Carrefour, a popular French supermarket, to find barren butter shelves, “I saw empty shelves in the cold section. There really was no butter, except for the butter you find in plastic containers that no-one ever buys.” Morton asks the checkout worker where the butter has gone. He responded that price indexes hadn’t favored it that week, and that globalization is a slippery, buttery slope.

Theory 2. Gérard Calbrix, the head of economic affairs at the Association of French Dairy Processors, told the Times, “Over the past year, from June of 2016 to this summer, milk production has fallen in Europe, at the same time, demand for butter has increased, on all world markets.” As some of butter’s unhealthy stigma has melted away, companies like McDonald’s are reinstating the product in their menu items, increasing demand.

Theory 3. Deathly disputes between farmers and large retailers who are unwilling to pay the increased market price for butter have left shelves empty and customers with lower cholesterol levels.

Theory 4. The French government has stepped in just in time to say shortage? What shortage? Stéphane Travert, France’s agriculture minister, acknowledged on Wednesday that pricing disagreements between producers and distributors were keeping butter out of some stores, but told France Inter Radio that “strictly speaking, there is no shortage.” Loosely speaking, however, your Christmas yule logs and New Year’s king cakes may taste especially bland this Holiday season.

The definite cause of the butter shortage is disputed, but what is not debated is the fact that butter is essential to ensure the health and longevity of a prosperous France. Butter must return to the marketplace before the French lose hope, close their supermarkets and bakeries, and retire to a life of centrist politics.

–HA

–EZ

WEEK IN REVIEW

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CRIMINAL TREATMENT

Rhode Island’s efforts to treat opioid-use disorders in its prison population

BY Julia Rock ILLUSTRATION BY Sophia Meng DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

Michael is set to leave the prison in two days, ending an 80 day sentence for possession of a controlled substance.

He wears the same navy blue jumpsuit that the other individuals in the Intake Facility here at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections wear. “In late 2014 I got addicted to opioids—percocet and oxycodone. I struggled with it for about a year. I came in and out of the correctional institution... every time I came in here I was going through withdrawals… anxiety, getting aggravated, [and going through] depression.” Michael explained the intense physical and emotional pain that he experienced each time he was admitted to the facility and went through withdrawal. “When you come in, the last thing you want to do is deal with everybody. You’re in cell block with 120 people and you’re withdrawing off a drug and that’s killing you inside—making you feel sick—and you’re dealing with 119 other inmates.”

When Michael was admitted to the facility at the beginning of last summer, he learned that the Department of Corrections had launched a program which would administer him a daily dose of Suboxone, one of the opioids used to treat opioid-use disorders. Unlike opioids such as percocet and fentanyl, Suboxone is not addictive and helps to reduce cravings and withdrawal symptoms for individuals struggling with addiction. Michael was administered a daily dose of Suboxone for the 45 days that he spent incarcerated at the facility. However, upon release, Michael found it difficult to visit a treatment facility every day: “I stopped going to it because I have three kids—a hectic schedule—you have to go there every morning. I didn’t have a license. So I stopped going.

Seven days later I returned to prison. Quickest I’ve ever returned to prison in my life.” Michael explained that the challenges he faced upon leaving prison made it difficult to pursue treatment, and that in an effort to make money for his family upon release, he dealt crack cocaine and was reincarcerated. The in-prison Suboxone treatment was insufficient to support Michael in the massive challenges that he faced upon leaving. Although the administration of Suboxone within the facility was a positive step towards treatment for Michael, the fact that he had been incarcerated posed massive barriers to his recovery that couldn’t be counteracted by medication treatment.

When Michael was incarcerated for possession of a controlled substance seven days later, he was again started on a treatment program with a daily dose of Suboxone.

“I have been able to do so much more stuff since I’ve been back... having the program within the facility itself allows inmates to not focus so much on how they feel on a day-to-day basis. When you come here, it’s the drug that put you here, for most of us.” While serving his current sentence, Michael has found that he is able to focus on things beyond the painful symptoms of withdrawal that he had previously experienced. To Michael’s point, a large

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proportion of inmates in the facility have been incarcerated due to their struggles with addiction: according to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, an estimated 65 percent of inmates in the United States have some form of substance use disorder. For an inmate like Michael, who wasn’t able to access treatment until he was arrested, the criminal justice system has become a replacement for comprehensive health care services.

The criminalization of substance abuse disorders was one of the main factors contributing to Michael’s incarceration. However, Michael’s ability to receive treatment was contingent upon the fact that he was incarcerated and received treatment in the prison.

Treatment for substance abuse within prisons isn’t an antidote for the violence and harm caused by the mass incarceration of individuals struggling with addiction. A reliance on the criminal justice system to address issues of substance abuse has left individuals like Michael struggling to seek treatment outside of prison, and stuck in a cycle of addiction and incarceration. Nonetheless, Michael is grateful that he had the opportunity to start treatment during his time at the prison. He thinks that his experience here has been more positive than it had been in previous times because he has been able to focus on recovering from addiction. He plans to visit an addiction treatment facility near his house every day when he leaves: the facility is three minutes from his house and he can receive the medication in the morning before he goes to work. +++ In 2016, 336 Rhode Islanders died from opioid overdoses; 12 percent of those individuals had been incarcerated at the ACI within the past year. Dr. Jennifer Clarke, the Medical Programs Director at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections (DOC), estimates that of the 12,000 individuals who move through the prison system in Rhode Island each year, 15 to 20 percent have an opioid use disorder. Dr. Clarke oversaw the launch of the Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) program in the Rhode Island DOC facilities, which was responsible for supplying the Suboxone that Michael received while he was incarcerated. Dr. Clarke is proud of the program’s success in helping inmates recover from addiction and reducing the probability that they will overdose or return to the facility. Dr. Clarke told the Independent: “I think we all know that incarceration is not the answer for mental health and addiction problems.” However, she still wants to do what she can to help incarcerated individuals struggling with addiction: “While I can’t change the criminal justice system, what I can be part of is providing and advocating for the services for those who are incarcerated.”

Before the current program was implemented, incarcerated people in Rhode Island who were using methadone as treatment before they were incarcerated were kept on methadone for seven days before being withdrawn from the drug. However, the spike in overdose deaths in Rhode Island and across the country has encouraged the state to invest more resources in addiction treatment. In August 2015, Governor Gina Raimondo signed an executive order stating that, “Rhode Island is in the midst of a public health crisis” due to opioid addiction and overdose, and set up a task force to investigate the crisis and make recommendations to the governor. Ashbel T. Wall II, the Director of the DOC, and Dr. Clarke were both appointed to the task force, and advocated for the expansion of the MAT program in correctional facilities.

Around the same time, Dr. Josiah Rich, a professor at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Dr. Clarke, and a group of their colleagues published a study which found that individuals who were administered methadone while they were incarcerated were more likely to continue treatment after leaving prison and less likely to overdose.

In the summer of 2016, the Governor announced that two million dollars would be allocated in the 2017 budget to set up the MAT program in Rhode Island’s correctional facilities. The program makes three drugs available to help treat opioid addiction: methadone, buprenorphine (Suboxone), and naltrexone (Vivitrol). Methadone and buprenorphine are opioid drugs used to treat addiction by easing withdrawal symptoms and preventing cravings; naltrexone is used to block opioid receptors so that individuals cannot experience the effects of opioids.

The program at the DOC is administered by a behavioral health nonprofit in Rhode Island called CODAC, which provides substance abuse and behavioral health services across the state. In the DOC, CODAC provides screening for individuals entering the facilities to assess whether they qualify for methadone or buprenorphine treatment.

The screening process typically involves an interview as well as bloodwork and other physical examinations.

CODAC administrators then establish a treatment plan for the individuals, depending on how long they will be staying at the facility.

Individuals like Michael, who were administered treatment drugs during their time in the ACI are encouraged to continue their treatment upon release. Individuals transitioning to care outside of the prison are allowed to begin treatment immediately, even if they do not have health insurance, and work with people in the clinic to get set up on a health insurance plan. All health insurance plans in the state are required to cover the treatment that CODAC provides. Dr. Clarke told the Independent that CODAC has been able to help almost every inmate transitioning out of the facility get health insurance, and that

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the few individuals who have been unable to pay for the treatment have been administered it anyways.

Rhode Island’s MAT program has been praised as a national model for providing quality rehabilitation services to inmates; in July of 2016, the White House Director of National Drug Control Policy Michael Botticelli visited the state’s correctional facilities and praised the program as a model for other states to replicate in fighting the opioid crisis. Administrators from prisons across the country have contacted Dr. Clarke and visited the Rhode Island facilities to learn about implementing similar programs in their jurisdictions. For Michael, if the program saves one life, the program has been successful: “That’s one life where they get to go home and take care of their kids. They get to go home and see their parents again.” +++ The median length of stay for an individual at the prison is four days, which means that the DOC has a small window of time to help an individual begin treatment. Dr. Clarke told the Independent, “A lot of people come in and out. We are a public safety agency too. So if we put effort into those thousands of people who come in and leave and spend very little time with us, [we can] hopefully get more and more people into treatment in the community.”

The prison sees a large number of Rhode Islanders who struggle with opioid use disorders, which has made it a useful point of intervention for helping individuals get started on treatment. According to Dr. Clarke, about 350 individuals access treatment each month through the program. However, there are evidently less violent ways to reach individuals in need of treatment for opioid use disorders. For example, in the Belltown and Skyway neighborhoods in Seattle, a privately funded program called Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) directs individuals arrested for low-level drug offenses and prostitution towards community-based services instead of processing them through the criminal justice system. Since the program was established in 2011, it has been found to reduce an individual’s odds of future arrest by 60 percent as compared to individuals who were

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processed through the criminal justice system.

The Rhode Island MAT program has been successful in reaching people because individuals struggling with addiction are targeted by law enforcement and the criminal justice system as engaging in criminal behavior.

However, the criminalization of addiction is neither a just nor effective method of treating substance abuse problems. Additionally, the criminalization of addiction problems falls disproportionately on minority communities. According to the Sentencing Project, black people in Rhode Island make up 28.9 percent of the prison population, but only 5.5 percent of the state’s population.

Hispanic people in Rhode Island make up 21.3 percent of the prison population, but 13.6 percent of the state’s population. The administration of the medications in the ACI involves high levels of security in order to insure that individuals are not “diverting” the medications, or saving them to give to other inmates. Dr. Clarke explained that the medical staff and the correctional officers have worked closely to monitor the process of administering the medications to reduce the risk of diversion in the facility.

The state has chosen to invest in the MAT program in order to help incarcerated people recover from substance abuse problems and avoid reincarceration.

This policy works within the state’s current framework of criminalizing substance abuse, while also enhancing its commitment to the fight against the opioid epidemic and improving the rights of incarcerated people. Catherine Rolfe, the Deputy Press Secretary for the office of Governor Raimondo, explained that the state has emphasized treatment for incarcerated individuals because a large percentage of inmates in Rhode Island have been incarcerated for drug-related crimes. Rolfe wrote in an email to the Independent, “By receiving medication-assisted treatment... incarcerated individuals are more likely to recover and less likely to end up back in prison. That’s good for Rhode Island, and is part of the Governor’s larger focus on Justice Reinvestment, which aims to improve Rhode Island's criminal justice system while reducing costs by promoting rehabilitation.” Rolfe’s statement points to the fact that even though the Governor’s office has emphasized the importance of rehabilitation within

the DOC, the office has not challenged the characterization of individuals struggling with substance abuse as criminals.

Outside of the facility where Michael has spent too many months of his adult life, an American flag and a Rhode Island flag fly on a tall flagpole, just enclosed in the coils of barbed wire which separate the prison from the outside world. In a perverse way, the flags seem to mark the prison, and its nearly 3,000 inmates, as important components of the state’s identity and institutions. As long as Rhode Island continues to bring people who struggle with addiction here, instead of to treatment facilities or recovery centers, the state’s efforts to fight the opioid epidemic will continue to clash with the state’s criminalization of addiction. Dr. Clarke is optimistic that Rhode Island’s program will soon be the national standard for addiction treatment for incarcerated people: “I believe that it’s going to be inevitable soon that all facilities will be providing treatment.”

Hopefully, an expansion of services for incarcerated people struggling with substance abuse will expand as Dr. Clarke anticipates. However, Rhode Island should be investing in making treatment more accessible and diverting individuals struggling with addiction to treatment services. Rhode Island should fly its flag in front of facilities where individuals can visit each day for treatment without wearing a jumpsuit or having a correctional officer watch as they take administered medications.

JULIA ROCK B'19 wants a freer path to recovery.

METRO

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GREATER WELFARE Since the Great Recession, proposals for a radical transformation of the American welfare state have appeared in think-tank proposals and newspapers op-ed pages from such ideologically diverse publications such as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Jacobin, and the Nation. These proposals advocate replacing, or augmenting, the current welfare state by sending a check to every American regardless of income, employment, or disability status. Usually called a Universal Basic Income (UBI), these potential policies are sold as a panacea for complex problems such as increasing joblessness created by automation, the inefficiency of the current patchwork welfare state, and poverty. Despite the shared language and mechanisms of UBIs, analyzing them as a group obscures their radically different effects on work and family life. In deciding what type of work and lifestyles are valuable, UBIs define citizenship.

The definition of ‘citizenship’ employed here is not the narrow definition of who is a legal member of a nationstate. Rather, it is citizenship in the more expansive sense of defining the beneficiaries of social rights all should be entitled to. This includes the services and standards of living which everyone has an intrinsic claim to as people or, in a narrower sense, as Americans; they do not have to be earned. Free K–12 education offers a contemporary example: it is seen as the right of all Americans and is not generally considered welfare or a “handout.” The debate over K–12 education is largely settled (notwithstanding proposals by charter and privatization advocates, which take issue with the delivery mechanism of schooling, and not its provision), but UBIs seek to redefine social rights in contested domains such as payment for household labor and the necessity of work. Historically, UBI programs like Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP) have been unable to build a coalition to support their vision of citizenship. The FAP’s attempts to maintain hierarchical and stereotypical roles for women and its potential to end the exploitation of people of color in agriculture and other low-wage industries engendered a backlash from both sides of the ideological spectrum. The FAP demonstrates that contemporary political discussions about the welfare state are contested on the basis of foundational questions about citizenship—including many of the same questions that precluded the FAP’s passage. Progressive attempts to redefine the welfare state, with or without UBI’s, must articulate a vision of citizenship which moves beyond its current white, male normative idealization in order to succeed as radical reform.

On August 8, 1969, President Richard Nixon, in an address to the nation, outlined a radical new welfare proposal designed to “build a foundation under the income of every American family with dependent children.” As

the name implied, the Family Assistance Plan would send checks to families rather than individual citizens. The proposal was typically outlined by its proponents in terms of a family of four, which would receive a guaranteed annual income of $1,600 regardless of the work-status of any members. The FAP was designed so beneficiaries would never be harmed by working and earning wages— the program’s benefits would be slowly-phased out as its beneficiaries’ incomes increased rather than immediately retracted with greater earnings. This was intended to incentivize work; the FAP included a weak work requirement, as it only affected men and had limited enforcement mechanisms. This weakness was concomitant with the gender hierarchy assumptions of the FAP. If women were not intended to enter the workforce, then the welfare state would need to continue fulfilling the role of providing for non-wage-earning women caretakers and children. +++ The FAP represented an attempt by Nixon and his team to reinforce a gendered model of citizenship that defined men as breadwinners and women as dependent caretakers. To understand Nixon’s proposal of the FAP and its eventual failure, historian Susan Pedersen, as laid out in her book Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State, viewed the development of welfare states in a theoretical framework integrating both “the structure of the labor market… [and] the patterns of family life, whether actual or ideal,” which policies “assumed and attempted to reinforce.” When Nixon proposed the FAP, the public associated welfare with means-tested programs for non-workers—mainly Aid to Families with Dependent Children (ADFC), which paid widows, single mothers, and other women who cared for children but who had no male supporter. The AFDC, which was passed as part of the New Deal, directly replaced the support of a male “breadwinner” with state support in order to allow women to fulfill the role of caretakers.

New Deal social insurance programs, like Social Security and Veteran’s benefits, which did not have an income or means-test, nearly exclusively applied to men and were not popularly associated with welfare. As Pedersen argues, this gendered division of welfare provision reflected a society which placed women “definitionally outside of citizenship” by creating two paths to citizenship—work and military service—neither of which were available to women. Women are rendered dependent members of society who gain rights in their relation to men, as wives or mothers, but not as individuals. The FAP can thus be described as a reconfiguration of AFDC

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that actively reinforced, rather than merely recognizing, male worker citizenship and female dependence.

Nixon’s motivation and rhetoric in proposing and advocating for the FAP demonstrates that reinforcing and supporting this gendered view of citizenship was his goal, rather than solving the AFDC’s growing fiscal crisis. As Marissa Chappell calculates in her book The War on Welfare, the FAP would include 13 million new individuals at a cost of four billion dollars. It did not constitute a response to welfare’s fiscal crisis as generally understood. However, Nixon and his advisors argued the FAP would shrink welfare costs over time by encouraging the formation of stable families with male breadwinners—especially Black families. In this sense, the FAP was part of Nixon’s response to the race riots, which he believed were the result of pathological Black family structures. Nixon failed to serve this group because his administration focused more on the racist pathologizing of Black people than fixing the underlying concerns of lack of economic opportunity and discrimination. This demonstrates his identification of the AFDC’s supposed structural incentives for fathers to abandon their families as caused by ‘the welfare crisis’ rather than fiscal issues.

Welfare reform, then and now, necessitates a debate over the structure of society—one which Nixon responded to by doubling-down on traditional gender hierarchies.

Under the FAP, despite Nixon’s “workfare rhetoric,” women would not be supported in entering the labor force. Married women were exempt from work requirements—an assistant secretary of labor for the Nixon administration argued that in a “normal family” the mother does not work. The FAP provided few resources for job training and re-placement for women and childcare provisions were underfunded and poorly planned.

The lack of a comprehensive childcare system, which would free mothers to work, was sold by the OEO director as a money-saving technique. This reflects what feminist welfare theorist Carol Pateman describes as “praise for loving care within families… [as] an attempt to obtain… unpaid welfare from (house)wives.” The FAP used women’s unpaid home labor to reduce costs and reinforce women’s role as caretakers, and arguably to move women away from jobs pathologized as ‘masculine.’ The FAP was explicitly designed to reinforce female dependence on men. It punished single mothers by reducing their benefits, thereby encouraging them to get (or stay) married. A gendered vision of normative citizenship would be subsidized and reinforced by the government.

Today’s UBI proposals, as well as arguments over tax benefits, government childcare, and paid leave, reflect the sway this gendered view of citizenship still holds over many lawmakers and Americans as well as the massive

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BY David Golden

DESIGN BY Eliza Chen

Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan and the contemporary debate over Universal Basic Incomes

gap between more feminist and anti-racist visions of citizenship and the status quo. +++

The FAP failed due to widespread disagreement about promoting and enforcing its version of citizenship.

Southern Democrats heavily opposed the FAP because their definition of citizenship included the right for white citizens to exploit black labor for cheap goods and services. As Georgia Representative Phillip Landrum said, “there’s not going to be anybody left to roll these wheelbarrows and press these shirts [if the FAP is passed].” A core of anti-welfare, free market conservatives and business leaders also opposed the FAP, despite supporting traditional gender roles, because they believed that the breadwinner/homemaker dynamic was a privilege of the hard work and moral behavior which they strove to protect. The FAP undermined the exclusivity of this entrenched form of gendered oppression by subsidizing and extending it to those who were deemed immoral and who were thought not to have “earned” it—a group that free-market conservatives defined as Black.

There was also immense pressure on the left against the FAP, especially in the milieu of newly strengthened welfare rights activists and an emerging feminist coalition in the early 1970s. The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), led by and mostly composed of Black women, organized welfare recipients to demand the rights they were legally entitled to and to ensure that the voice of those most affected by welfare reform would be heard in the legislative process. As Chappell writes, The National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) emphasized motherhood as a service, claiming mothers were “employed” by the government to raise “strong, healthy, active, productive, responsible citizens.” The NWRO sought to define women as active and independent citizens who fulfilled the critical duty of raising the next generation. The NWRO argued women deserved a meaningful choice between traditional work and raising their children—both of which were valuable and should be remunerated. A different feminist critique emerged from the National Organization of Women (NOW) and others who wished to accomplish full economic independence for women through full employment, antidiscrimination, and a large guaranteed income. In essence, NOW articulated a vision of a society in which there were no ‘proper’ roles for men and women. The distance between these two feminist-oriented visions of welfare reform points to contemporary difficulties in articulating and reaching agreement on a more expansive definition

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of citizenship—even among those who seek radical, progressive change. +++

During periods of intense economic strife, policymakers turn to UBIs as radical solutions to radical problems.

Yet, both then and now, exact policy prescriptions differ greatly as they promote radically different ideas of citizenship. Although often sold as a progressive idea, UBIs can just as easily be a reactionary tool intended to reinforce prevailing gender hierarchies, as Nixon’s FAP evidences.

Conservative UBI proposals promote the idea that the path to full citizenship is gainful employment. By failing to provide a job guarantee as well, conservative UBIs reinforce the failure to work as a personal moral failure while ignoring structural conditions that prevent many from getting a job or being paid enough to make working financially sustainable. Moreover, the focus on inflexible, traditional work reinforces a male-dominated conception of work and fails to recognize the value of household and domestic labor typically coded as female. Much like the FAP, conservative UBIs are radical programs in service of reactionary, conservative ends.

For UBI proponents on the left, making work optional is the reason why they enthusiastically support UBIs. The most radical UBI proposals, just as it was in the ’70s, come from the feminists on the left. In her New York Times article “It’s Payback Time for Women,” Judith Shulevitz calls for a UBI to “reimburse mothers and other caregivers” for their free labor. Echoing the NWRO, which claimed mothers should be treated as employees of the state tasked with raising the next generation, Shulevitz argues it is “time for something like reparations” for the “reproductive labor” mothers provide. She takes this argument further by making an argument for a UBI for all citizens, regardless of whether they have children, as a chance to move society towards gender-neutrality.

Criticizing feminists who focus only on the workplace, she argues that even if a UBI leads women to leave the workforce, it will create a society in which people do not have to “conform to traditionally male patterns of employment.” Shulevitz is calling for reconstituting citizenship to recognize the value of unpaid caretaker labor.

Further, she wants to separate caretaking labor from its female-gendered role assumptions by offering a universal payment which will encourage men and women equally to become the primary caregiver. Leftist UBI proposals are united in recognizing unpaid, caring labor as just as valuable as paid work.

The FAP’s failure yields lessons for articulating a

broader vision of citizenship and the potential pitfalls of radical reform. The debate between the mainly Black National Welfare Rights Organization and the mainly white National Organization of Women provides a microcosm of the debate among progressives on citizenship.

NOW, by arguing for the end of distinctions between men and women without proposing remuneration for work generally done by women such as household labor, might fail to fully challenge the normativity of a white, male ideal of citizenship. While these ideas provide a basis for an extension of workforce rights to women, this model promotes other inequities. As demonstrated by the Southern Democrats who opposed the FAP on grounds that it removed their access to cheap Black labor, that ideal of citizenship rests on a standard of living provided by exploitation of Black wage-labor and unpaid female labor. The NWRO, by including in its propsals a revaluation of labor historically coded as feminine, might provide much richer ground for contemporary progressives to follow in articulating a new ideal of citizenship with a view towards moving beyond already-existing social structures.

Yet, the NWRO focused on expanding utilization of current welfare programs and maintaining the benefits of the system as it was (mainly opposing the addition of work requirements that would prevent women from working primarily as caretakers). Despite their articulation of a radical vision, the NWRO’s focus on making practical and meaningful differences in the lives of their members as soon as possible demonstrates an admirable practicality that contemporary welfare reformers should draw from as well. Robert Greenstein, of the Center for Budget Priorities and Policies, has been one of the main proponents and analysts of policies meant to help low-income people. He warns of the dangers of adopting UBIs which would replace better-targeted programs as well as those which provide in-kind benefits that a cash transfer cannot easily replace (such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). Contemporary advocates should seek as an end-goal a vision of citizenship informed by the type of radical thinking promoted by the NWRO. But, they should also remember the NWRO’s practicality, and ensure that a focus on the end-goal of UBIs does not endanger programs that already provide critical assistance to those who might otherwise benefit from a more ideal welfare state.

DAVID GOLDEN B’ 19 wants to learn from the past.

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FEATURES

06

CALL AGAINST ARMS

A new RI law restricts gun ownership for domestic abusers

BY Jack Brook ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

content warning: suicide, murder, infanticide In 2013, a Providence woman, fearing for her life, applied for a final protective order against her partner, following his conviction of domestic abuse.

“He owns a gun,” she wrote in a letter to the judge, “and I’m afraid he will show up at my new house and kill me and the children… one time he took the gun to his head and threatened to kill himself.”

While the woman received a protective order against her partner, the judge did not order the man to turn in his guns—even though since 1996 federal law has prohibited those convicted of domestic abuse from purchasing or owning firearms.

According to an analysis by the gun violence awareness organization Everytown for Gun Safety, 28 percent of Rhode Island women killed by their intimate partners were shot to death. When someone calls the police to report a case of domestic abuse, the victim receives a temporary restraining order against the alleged perpetrator until the case can move through trial; afterwards, the victim can receive a “final protective order” that can last for years. Yet Everytown also stated that out of 1,600 final protective orders over a four year span, in only five percent of these cases were convicted abusers required by the court to turn in their guns.

“The majority of mass shootings are committed by someone who has a history of domestic violence and most women are killed by instances of domestic violence” representative Teresa Tanzi from Narragansett, South Kingstown told RI Future.

Tanzi, along with Senator Harold Metts, successfully passed a transformative new gun control law—Bill H5510—on October 30. The legislation requires anyone in Rhode Island convicted of domestic abuse charges, including a misdemeanor, to turn over their firearms within 24 hours of the conviction, and for the duration of final protective orders put in place against them.

Seventeen other states have enacted similar legislation, and, according to Everytown, 27 states across the nation have laws that restrict access to guns for people convicted of domestic abuse or under protective orders.

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METRO

As the November 5 mass shooting in Sutherland, Texas grimly illustrated, a significant amount of gun violence is linked to domestic abuse—the correlation between them is over 50 percent. The Sutherland shooter, Devin P. Kelley, was allegedly motivated by a desire to murder his mother-in-law when he opened fire on her church. As the New York Times reported, the shooter had also been charged with breaking the skull of his infant son in 2012, meaning that federal law should have prohibited him from owning a gun in the first place.

Omar Mateen, the shooter behind the Pulse night club massacre in Orlando that killed 49 people, also had a long history of domestic abuse against his wife—an instance of aggression that was never reported. The San Bernardino shooter, the Boston Marathon bomber, and the man who killed three people at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs last year all physically abused their partners.

In a less widely-covered shooting in Plano, Texas from September of this year, eight people died after an angered husband shot his wife and her friends at a party she was hosting. The shooter’s ex-wife had also been a victim of physical abuse, her mother later explained, but she had not reported the abuse to the police.

Restrictive gun laws can only work if victims come forward and report instances of abuse, but at least half of victims of domestic violence do not actually report their abuse, according to the Department of Justice. Shelters like the Eastman and Sojourner houses in Rhode Island are one important way to provide the transitional housing, emergency support, and helplines that can aid victims in taking action. +++ Domestic abuse is most often not a one-time event, but something that can recur over a period of several years.

At least a third of people who are convicted of domestic abuse will be charged again within a year of their release from jail, according to the Center for Court Innovation.

Allowing abusers to retain guns elevates the chance of a fatality, for as Everytown emphasizes, the presence of guns in domestic violence situations increases—by five times—the risk that a woman will be killed.

Another study by the Annals of Internal Medicine found that 50 percent of people murdered by their partners are killed with guns. And the Journal of Public Health revealed that, in California, at least two thirds of women in houses with guns had been threatened by their partners with a firearm.

The NRA remained the bill’s most vociferous

opponent, fearing the abuse in the seizure of guns from their owner. “The stakes could not be higher for the Rhode Island firearms community,” the NRA wrote in the weeks leading up to the passage of the bill. “Anti-gun groups have co-opted domestic violence organizations simply to notch a victory that they can use as momentum for their larger gun ban agenda.”

Still, the NRA remained a clear minority as polls conducted by Everytown in the past few years have all revealed that well over 60 percent of Rhode Islanders are in favor of further restrictions on gun ownership.

The new bill has a broad reach—those with misdemeanors for domestic abuse crimes from cyber-stalking to disorderly conduct are within its scope—but it only reaches back to convictions from after July 1. Additionally, the Sutherland incident indicates that simply having laws to prohibit ownership are not always effective in preventing potential shooters from gaining access to weapons, as the data used for background checks is not always updated. (Rhode Island is one of 19 states that requires universal background checks for all gun sales, even in unlicensed sales.)

Still, a recent study from Boston University’s School of Public Health strongly indicates that laws that remove or restrict guns from domestic abusers do, in fact, save lives. States that had these laws in place suffered lower rates of “intimate partner homicide.”

As Governor Gina Raimondo explained when signing the bill into law last week, people like to offer prayers following gun violence, but more is needed.

Bill 5510 offers a step towards the prevention of future tragedies.

JACK BROOK B’19 believes we need more than prayers to prevent mass shootings.

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

OUTCOMES

BY Lena Nygren ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Amos Jackson I am thinking of you every day. I love you. Do you remember when we planted a red gumball in the dry earth? We thought that it would grow to be a gumball tree. We were four and six years old, with the hope that something chemical could bloom into something organic. We waited out this imaginary gestation period by warping more typicalities: unraveling the film from VCR tapes, pouring orange juice on snow and eating it, playing tag with feral cats. The gumball tree never happened.

Whenever your birthday would approach, you would ask the person who’d give us presents for a knife or a gun. The person who’d give us presents was a socialist in 1989. She said no. Instead, you were gifted purple geodes to crack open with a sledgehammer. We must have cracked open your birthday present somewhere empty, where the ruptured smack of rock would not disturb our neighbors. Somewhere invisible and lightless like our decrepit garage, where resultant shards of crystal wouldn’t create a mess or shrapnel.

You’ve always been more fearless than me. You learned how to ride a bike first. We rode our bikes around the neighbor’s long driveway. You were not afraid that your body would fall into a pothole. I avoided potholes more intensely than I trusted myself to peddle, assuming that all potholes were systems of disappearance. The man who owned the driveway wore a thick goatee. His body was fleshless. His eyes were too yellow, and he lived in a rat trap—he was a piece of cigar smoke. “Keep up the good work,” this incidental father would cheer as we rode our bikes.

The person who’d give us presents thought that he was dangerous. She made us retreat from this learning center—we began to ride our bikes on the street.

I am thinking about our lives together because I miss you. Lately, I don’t see you much. You are at rehab in another state. You might be playing checkers or taking medicine. The last time you were sent to such a clinic, you were still in high school. You only lasted there for three days. Then you shot away—hopped the high iron fence of a clinic called Camelot—and I imagined you as a winged star, a fugitive, tripping your sneakers over potholes in a light-speed military shuffle—then you ran back home. You showed me your brand-new, unfortunate gills. You got stabbed twice in three days the last time you went to rehab: two slit-down stab wounds lined your chest. You said, “I had a horrible time.”

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At about the same time, I came home from a day at high school. My hands felt uncomfortable with graphite residue and I thought that it would be a good idea to wash them. But the bathroom was too chaotic with dying for me to wash my hands in its sink. Your friend was laid out in the bathtub speaking pig-latin—striated sunlight sank in through the window’s lace curtains, levitated over your friend as if light strands of the blue sky were pathways upwards to death. Two other boys were there too, splashing bathwater on his green face, making sure that he would not choke on his own vomit. You looked like thin-throat canaries struggling for their mother’s cud.

You looked hungover. You looked like your choking mother couldn’t feed you worms. (Two days prior, I had scrubbed the bathroom floor with white vinegar and lukewarm water. You have still never helped me with chores: in high school, I acquired the arm strength of the shell of a single mother. Your helpless friends were wearing shoes indoors.) “Get out of my fucking house!” I yelled at the bathtub, stress-eating a loaf of bread with my unwashed hands.

I can be callous when I make myself the victim of my life. In the above example, I am also a textbook banshee. Sorry. I rarely see you anymore, as new events take place in your life. I continue to imagine you. Here are some examples: You made friends with the Nicaraguan ambassador at his penthouse apartment. You once offered me $10,000 to marry a stranger from Iran, so that they could receive US citizenship. This would have yielded you a $5,000 commission payment. (We both laughed a lot at the absurdity of this proposition: yes, we want to be rich, but I am no bride.) You went on vacation to the beach, but you spent all your money on boardwalk games and wound up stranded in New Jersey with $17. (At the same time, I got stuck in Poland begging for a 36-zloty bedroom carrying only—you guessed it—17 zloty. When we found out how incredibly stupid we always are, we laughed for one billion years, at how two people could be so far away while making such congruent mistakes.) You might be involved with the Iranian mafia.

I have never been to the state of Georgia—but you drove there once at 4 AM, so I asked you to bring me back a peach. Allegedly, the fruit-stand cashier up-charged you for wearing a Yankee hat. But you brought me back a real Georgia peach anyway, and I ate it, and I told you it tasted unremarkable, and I gave you a hug and said, “you’re the best.”

+++ Our garage is a place my ex-boyfriend once described as “Serbia,” unfairly instrumentalizing the image of the entire war-torn ’90s Balkan Peninsula to criticize the shed’s haggard appearance. Would you be surprised if I told you that inhaling pathogens with you in that garage is my favorite hobby of all time?

Or that I think you have it hard. You are friends with too many dead people—you carry them with you in a jean pocket that’s a holster. I think that you might think that you live in your own back pocket, neighboring clipped cash, lint, and stray pills. You should stop distorting the scope of yourself.

But maybe this criticism is unfounded. I only suggest change because I know, not hope, that the life you live requires you to survive outcomes that you yourself cannot anticipate, are never exactly equipped for. I don’t experience hope anymore—would you believe that I’ve stopped yelling at inanimate objects?

That I am at peace when I love and accept what’s given? And that I love you. And I miss you.

It is always a starless night out when I imagine how you’re doing. Our garage has a roof, is thick with soot. When you come home, we will sit in it again.

We’ll kick our feet up, laugh about dying, where chainsaws and snow-shovels hang from the walls.

We’ll shiver in our winter coats as you prop up two beach chairs, one for each of us.

You will turn a cheap flashlight into a hearth of your own design.

LENA NYGREN B’19 is tired and falling asleep with her lamp still on.

OCCULT

08

THE POLITICS OF FRAGMENTATION Mobilizing for secularism in sectarian Lebanon

BY Isabel DeBre ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz DESIGN BY Ashley Min

On November 4, Saad Hariri resigned as Prime Minister of Lebanon, shocking the country. “I sensed what’s being woven in secret to target my life,” he said from an address in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, alluding to an assassination plot similar to what killed his father and blaming Iran for its interference in Lebanese politics. Hariri hasn’t returned to Beirut since, leading major newspapers to speculate that Saudi Arabia is holding him hostage. “No one has any idea what will happen next,” Lebanese political blogger Joey Ayoub told the Independent—a familiar sentiment in a country that has weathered multiple wars, foreign occupations, and massive refugee crises.

Many commentators deem Hariri’s resignation a disaster for domestic politics, which are already awash with religious tensions and regional rivalries. Since the Ta’if agreement of 1989, which marked the end of the country’s brutal civil war, sectarianism—the imposition of religious representation in politics—has characterized Lebanese government. Parliament has been split evenly between Christians and Muslims, each half distributed among 11 of Lebanon’s 18 official sects (for example, Sunni, Shiite, Druze, Alawite, Maronite, and Protestant, among others). A power-sharing compromise among former warlords dictates that Lebanon’s president must be a Maronite Christian, its prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and its speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim.

Each of Parliament’s 128 seats is reserved for members of specific sects. Even ordinary bureaucratic posts are filled according to intricate sectarian formulas under the Constitution. Consensus among these adversarial groups is always in short supply. The system entrenches the primacy of the religious and political elite, forecloses any possibility of a fledgling party electing candidates and holding sway, and often paralyzes the government, breeding violence.

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NEWS

The dramatic events of the past week have revealed Lebanon’s sectarianism as increasingly untenable. While mainstream talk of Lebanon’s future now revolves around leaders’ sects and Hezbollah stances, an alternative route toward political unity may emerge from the most unlikely of places: a student club. The Secular Club at the American University of Beirut (AUB), led by Nadine Barakat, aims to create space for social and political solutions free of the scourge of sectarianism. +++ Nadine may not remember Lebanon’s brutal 15-year civil war, but she’ll tell you how its legacy shaped her life. “Sectarianism in this country determines the laws, how much I pay to eat and go to school, whether, as a Christian, I can marry a Muslim or not,” she told the Independent.

Nadine grew up north of Beirut in a strict Christian family. Her father served as a high-level officer in the Lebanese Forces, one of the largest Christian parties in the country’s pro-Western coalition. She arrived at AUB, a university unaffiliated with the school of the same title in Washington DC, uninterested in her country’s messy politics, but her family urged her to participate in university elections as a representative of their Christian sect.

For American readers accustomed to student elections as an innocuous social endeavor, it is hard to grasp the stakes of Lebanese university politics. Especially at such a large and prestigious university as AUB, campus politics are viewed as a microcosm, and even a bellwether, for the country’s politics. At first glance, the names of campus political clubs may sound innocent, even corny— Leaders of Tomorrow, Students for Change, Campus Choice—but they are exact reflections of religious sects in government, split between Hezbollah and Amal (Shia support) and the Future Movement (Sunni support), with Christians dispersed among the two camps. Election results, published on the front pages of national newspapers, are viewed as indexes of a party’s overall popularity.

As Nadine told the Independent, “AUB elections are a really big deal. Political parties pour tons of resources into our elections—television advertising, money. It’s a huge indicator of support for the parties nation-wide.”

Nadine was prepared to join the Future Movement just to please her father. But during the school’s club fair, something strange caught her eye: “I remember seeing this sign that said Secular Club, and being totally confused,” she told the Independent. “At the table there was a guy wearing a cross next to a girl in a hijab. I went up to them and they told me about their frustrations with the political system—how, after suffering from sectarian violence and incompetence for so long, it was time to create a third space. Something different, something new.” The fact that these club-members were clearly religious clarified secularism for Nadine. They believed that confessionalism in state politics was the source of government corruption and stagnation. She was skeptical, but intrigued.

When the Independent interviewed Nadine this fall, three years after her first brush with this nascent club, she was racing around her campus collecting hundreds of signatures before election day on October 18. As current President of the AUB Secular Club, she has overseen the club’s massive growth into a formidable political force on campus, despite the dominance of established religious parties. In 2015, the Secular Club won four seats in the University Student Faculty Committee (USFC). In 2016, they won five. A few weeks ago, they won six, one in each of the AUB faculties—the same number as the March 14 Alliance (Future Movement and Lebanese Army) and the March 8 Alliance (Free Patriotic Movement, Hezbollah, and Amal) respectively. This year, they launched the largest campaign in AUB’s history. On November 7, they will elect their representatives to the AUB Cabinet.

Nadine’s trajectory from a political skeptic in a sectarian family to the leader of the country’s largest secular student movement provides a glimpse into recent currents of popular resistance to Lebanon’s sectarianism. +++ Scholars once touted Lebanon’s sect-based power-sharing system as a successful symbol of democracy and religious coexistence in a region plagued by authoritarianism. But the government’s profound weaknesses have unraveled such illusions, revealing chronic instability, inequality, and an inability to deliver the most basic public services such as water, electricity, and waste management. These crises have paralyzed political progress: Parliament has extended its term three times and even canceled its own elections in 2013 after opposing sects in the government failed to come to a consensus on the next president.

Recent polls by Information International indicate that public trust in the country’s precarious political system has taken a dramatic nosedive. In particular, Lebanon’s post-war millennials, disenfranchised and discontented, have begun to mobilize against the divisive and corrupt alliances and rivalries in government.

“My whole life I thought that politics was something that only my parents could talk about behind closed doors,” Nadine told the Independent. Given that no one under the age of 29 has ever participated in parliamentary elections (due to electoral postponement), disillusionment among Nadine’s demographic runs deep. “But then came the garbage crisis. It changed everything. For the first time, I could see the government’s mess up close and took to the streets to demand my rights.”

The gargantuan piles of garbage that engulfed Beirut streets in 2015 thrust the government’s corruption and negligence into the spotlight and spurred many like Nadine to action. An online campaign called “Tol3et Re7etkom” (Lebanese Arabic for “You Stink!”), along with other civil society groups transcending religious denominations, braved police violence to organize overnight protests and hunger strikes in Beirut’s central Riad al-Solh square. As Joey Ayoub, “You Stink!” organizer,

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

wrote in Al-Araby, “We are protesting on behalf of all those who struggle to breathe, eat, and drink under the filth of sectarian violence and clientelism, deeply institutionalized throughout Lebanese society.” After accomplishing a few of its short-term aims (including a proposed waste management plan), the campaign fizzled out. Still, its efforts came to symbolize what the Lebanese political scene has long lacked: popular mobilization untainted by sectarianism.

The youth movement’s calls for accountability, reform, and transparency have since moved from the radical fringes into mainstream politics, especially with the emergence of Beirut Madinati (Beirut My City), a volunteer-led political campaign that ran in Beirut’s municipal elections last year. Beirut Madinati, what Al-Araby called “an existential threat to the country’s sectarian political elite,” coalesced around environmental and civic concerns. In particular, it advocated for decent public transport, public parks, consistent electricity, waste management, and overall resistance to postwar privatization at the turn of the century. Because of what Nadine and others term “fraudulent shenanigans” by terrified sectarian elites, Beirut Madiniti failed to gain seats in the municipal council. Despite this interference, the party still managed to win one of three Beirut electoral districts, and garnered some 41 percent of the popular vote. “For me, the incredible thing about Beirut Madinati was that it showed a version of protest and contestation that wasn’t just opposition to the status-quo,” Nadine said. “It was an explicitly positive movement that said, look, here are our demands—they’re real, they’re feasible, and we’re prepared to make them happen.”

These small yet significant secular victories against the entrenched religious elite have produced fissures for more grassroots action to coalesce in. For instance, in April, the Beirut Union of Engineers elected Jad Tabet, an independent candidate backed by the civil society group Naqabati and Beirut Madinati, over Paul Najm, the Free Patriotic Movement candidate representing various powerful sects. Many called Tabet’s win “Beirut Madinati 2.0,” except this time, as Lebanese political blogger Gino Raidy wrote, “questionable tactics, voter fraud and bribery didn’t work because the Head of the Syndicate of Engineers is now an independent. This is unprecedented.” Lebanese syndicates, or unions that allow major labor forces to pressure politicians, hold sway over municipal decisions; anything related to urban planning in Beirut requires the approval of the Syndicate of Engineers’ director. Although Naqabati’s win was largely symbolic, it has practical implications: Tabet now has the capacity to halt politicians’ corrupt alliances with corporations.

As these social movements built on each other, expanding possibilities for youth participation, Nadine came to her own political awakening—not an epiphany, but a gradual reckoning with her own agency as a citizen.

“I thought about my father, who never talked about secularism, and yet suffered his whole life from the war and

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from sectarianism,” she told the Independent. “I thought about protests in which I saw this huge number of people, regardless of identity, sect, religion, come together under the same umbrella. I thought about the constitution, which actually demands that Lebanon create a committee to get out of sectarianism, a post-war fix which was never meant to be permanent... which still hasn’t happened.”

Energized by her experience protesting with “You Stink!”, Nadine reached out to the Secular Club, translating her frustrations and hopes for the Lebanese government into a concrete political vision for her university.

It occurred to her that even though the club had stood against unjust AUB policies—like arbitrary fee hikes— since its establishment in 2012, it had never stood in solidarity with marginalized social groups or articulated an actionable agenda. This fall, taking a hint from the language of Beirut Madinati, Nadine helped draft a concrete platform demanding the same sorts of changes she wants to see in her country: accessible transport, more student lounge and study spaces, expanded health insurance, funding for mental health services, increased financial aid, and support for initiatives aiming to counter racism and to advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. Although winning six seats in this year’s election in no way guarantees the Secular Club can bring these ambitious goals to fruition, setting them down in writing helps hold the administration accountable for its negligence, and creates a forum for students to voice their grievances and desires.

Within AUB’s tangle of party-sponsored campaigns and sectarian schemes to maximize votes, the Secular Club emerges as an alternative route, a “third space,” as Nadine called it, to disrupt the campus climate of complacency and articulate a different reality.

+++

desperate for better governance,” as Lebanese political expert Elias Muhanna wrote in the New Yorker this summer. Although many fear that a proportional system will destabilize the present precarious powersharing among religious minorities, recent polls by Information International indicate that independents may have a real chance to disrupt political stagnation: around 58 percent of people are in favor of abolishing, or at the very least reforming, Lebanon’s sectarian system. +++ After such positive momentum in civil society, Hariri’s resignation plunges the nation into uncertainty. As rumors swirl, panic mounts, and politicians scramble, Lebanon's new electoral law and rescheduled elections recede from the spotlight. But this moment of crisis, in revealing the impossibility of the status quo, could also create opportunities for Lebanese people to envision a different, functional and united government—representative of diversity, not fragmentation. As Lebanese writer Elias Khoury posted on Facebook (in Arabic) Tuesday: “Lebanon needs to be rewritten, to build new political meaning outside its current structures that render it vulnerable to foreign powers.”

“We’re tired and frustrated,” Nadine said. “It’s time to stop talking about our sectarian differences and start talking about our basic needs, our basic rights.”

ISABEL DEBRE B’18 tried not to write the words “at a crossroads.”

Discussions about the potential of independent secular movements to gain traction in Lebanese politics have climaxed in recent months. On June 16, Parliament ratified a new electoral law that will govern the upcoming national elections next year. The law will reorganize the country’s electoral system through proportional instead of majoritarian representation for the first time in Lebanese history. Parties will win seats according to the proportion of the vote they receive in a given district instead of competing in a winner-takes-all system. This radical change has the power to break up the hegemony of the political elite by facilitating the participation of independent candidates and fostering the emergence of non sectarian political parties—exactly what activists and civil society groups have demanded for the past election-less decade. The law also lowers the threshold for winning a seat, which may encourage reformers and those without traditional political backgrounds to test the waters with campaigns that cater to “a public that is

NEWS

10

A CONSTRUCTED DIVIDE There are few things more difficult to talk about, even fewer to be hopeful about, than the future of my island.

Puerto Rico, first hit by a crippling debt crisis that gutted its job market and public services, is now in its second month without electricity, water, or cell signal. Recovery will likely take years, if not decades.

The Puerto Rican exodus has been a topic of interest among American journalists since 2014 when the US Census Bureau reported over 200,000 islanders had migrated to the mainland between 2010 and 2013.

Hurricane Maria is bound to intensify this migration, with most Puerto Ricans looking to emigrate to Florida and Texas. In a statement on October 5, Florida governor Rick Scott announced, “Since October 3, more than 73,000 individuals arrived in Florida from Puerto Rico through Miami International Airport, Orlando International Airport, and Everglades Port.”

“A vast internal migration is upon us,” wrote José A. Cabranes and Félix López in an article for the Washington Post, “as tens of thousands of Puerto Ricans, possibly one million or more over time, choose to move to the US mainland.” Interestingly, the two kinds of conclusions drawn from this prediction either deal with the migration’s impact on US politics or its impact on the island’s economy. Neither thinks about this migration’s impact on the Puerto Rican people, a community that has for decades come to include populations outside the island’s geographical boundaries.

The Puerto Rican people—not only the 3.5 million people who live on the island, but also the 5.1 million people who are scattered across the mainland—have suffered in the wake of this hurricane. The media’s attention isn’t coincidental, and the pressure to cover the story isn’t foreign, but domestic. Puerto Ricans on the mainland are American citizens with real historical and material links to those in crisis. If most Americans still can’t remember that Puerto Rico is part of the US, it may be strategic to include the five million Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico’s national imaginary. However, expanding the definition of what it means to be Puerto Rican has had a complicated past. +++

In 1969, a group of Puerto Ricans in New York set piles of rotting trash on fire. The garbage had been left to decay in the community of El Barrio, even though the Sanitation Department was just up the block. The Young Lords, a group of young, passionate, and patriotic Nuyoricans (Puerto Ricans born or raised in New York City) dragged the trash that had been left in the summer sun into the middle of street so that it would block traffic on Third Avenue. The fire was an extra touch—if the Sanitation Department was so busy, maybe the NYPD or Fire Department could come. While they were at it, maybe they could investigate why government services were forgetting to pick up trash in Puerto Rican neighborhoods.

11

FEATURES

The New York City Young Lords Organization was founded by a group of mostly Puerto Rican students from SUNY-Old Westbury, Queens College, and Columbia University. Inspired by the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords branch in Chicago, the group grew out of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnamese War protests. Student unrest, a growing consciousness of labor movements, feminism, and Black power were all part of the political context within which the new Puerto Rican radicalism developed. From their insignia—an illustration of the island with the slogan Tengo Puerto Rico en mi Corazón, (‘I Have Puerto Rico in My Heart’)—to their educational programs on Puerto Rican history and culture, this Nuyorican-led movement preserved a sense of nationality in spite of islanders’ accusations. Unlike island-based political organizations, the Young Lords included migrant communities’ narratives in the struggle for Puerto Rican liberation.

In this way they stood apart from the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) and the Nationalist party, both of whom rarely addressed the injustices faced by Puerto Rican communities living in the United States.

Their exclusion of migrants, who were mostly of working class backgrounds, mirrored their inability to retain a mass following back on the island.

Historically, the struggle for independence was not represented by the bulk of the native ruling and working class, but rather was the political project of a radicalized sector of the middle-to-upper class. Local intellectuals— especially college professors, scholars, and writers— occupied a role disproportionate to their numbers in the construction of a nationalist discourse and thus helped to cement lower-to-middle-class resentment against a political faction it perceived as having an outsized influence over the country’s politics. Their focus was on the ways immigrants assimilated into American culture, rather than the ways migrants preserved their Puerto Rican identities. This tendency propagated negative perceptions of migrants, discouraged the study of diaspora experiences, and silenced the important work of US-based activists.

the administrators sought to repair the separate histories and forge stronger connections between island-based Puerto Ricans and migrants.

“It’s really interesting to watch how the students— having the BIP kids in the same classroom, they begin to notice and to think about how that other Puerto Rico is part of the Puerto Rican story… that the island of Puerto Rico can’t stop at Vieques and Culebra,” explained one of the program’s professors, Mariana Feliciano. At the core of a vision that was more expansive and inclusive in terms of who belonged as a Puerto Rican citizen, was an understanding that their differences should not be viewed as deficiencies. “There’s a misunderstanding of what the Puerto Rican entity is,” Julio Diaz, another professor, contextualized responsibilities to the diaspora, “for Puerto Ricans what happens ‘over there,’ what happens in and to the homeland or the diaspora, conditions what happens ‘here.’”

But the repercussions of years of scholarship that had excluded diaspora experience from Puerto Rican identity made the program’s efforts to include them a delicate and carefully negotiated task. The hybrid and flexible character of migrants’ nationality pushed against narrow notions of belonging to a geographically bounded nation-state. While most of the students who were part of the program had never doubted their identification as Puerto Rican while living in the States, once in Puerto Rico, some found that these identities were contested. For example, Adamary Muñiz explains, “Everyone swears I’m a Nuyorican. People are putting me in a category that I don’t belong in, just because of their assumptions. And they’re all amazed when they found out I was born here.

I’m like, ‘Does that make me more Puerto Rican to you?

What’s the difference?’” While the islander’s rejection of emigrants is expressed in the diffusion of negative stereotypes, the separation between the two peoples is further reinforced by the lack of formal study of the diaspora throughout the academic curriculum.

+++

+++

Today, networks of care between Puerto Rican communities on the mainland and island are most visible in the wake of Hurricane María. There was a lot of panic when the island’s cell service collapsed and people weren’t able to get in touch with their relatives. News outlets weren’t covering the hurricane’s aftermath with the level of specificity Puerto Rican mainlanders needed. Desperate to know who exactly was safe and what survivors needed most urgently, Puerto Ricans on the mainland took it upon themselves to gather and share this kind of information.

One such person is Patricia Pichardo, the founder of the Puerto Rico Maria Updates Facebook page, which even Univision News uses to provide municipality-by-municipality updates. In an interview with the Atlantic, Patricia Pichardo, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, but lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia, explained that she organized the page the morning after

Within the past two decades, some academics on the island have attempted to bridge this gap between the experiences of Puerto Ricans on the mainland and those on the island. Their efforts helped reshape islanders’ perception of Puerto Rican migration and the experience of migrants as they move back and forth between the island.

A program in this vein took place in 2003, when the University of Puerto Rico created a Bilingual Initiative Program (BIP) designed to prioritize diaspora processes and sensibilities and highlight the intersections of diaspora and citizenship belonging. One of the program’s objectives was to recruit and enroll Latinx students at the University of Puerto Rico and to include them in conversations of Puerto Rican culture and identity. By doing so,

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

Puerto Rican migrants and the future of a people

BY Soraya Ferdman ILLUSTRATION BY Teri Minogue DESIGN BY Ashley Min

the hurricane made landfall. “I said maybe if I can get enough friends and enough friends’ friends to join, then maybe I can reach a critical mass where I’m able to hear more inside news than just by browsing my newsfeed alone,” she said. At its most rapid growth rate, the page added 1,000 new members an hour, and generated hundreds of new posts and dozens of documents detailing logistics, supplies, and safe lists.

Other mainlanders have focused on gathering funds which will be crucial in the months to come. José Diego Torro, a current student at the University of Pennsylvania, used the networks of Puerto Rican communities in the US to set up a gofundme that raised more than $200,000 in one month. His Facebook group, Students for Puerto Rico, connects 850 Puerto Rican students across the US with updates on new fundraisers, benefits, and new projects. These crowdfunding and crowdsourcing projects rely on existing familial and community lines that have defined the Puerto Rican experience and its relationship to the US.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ Today, mainlanders are more likely to refer to themselves as Puerto Ricans in the Diaspora. The name better communicates our sustained relationship to the island and also helps us contextualize their efforts to channel US support. The colonial legacy has often necessitated the need for self-determination and has led to the production of fervent and essentialized notions of what it means to be Puerto Rican. A large part of this comes from the historically binary opposition between American and Puerto Rican culture—one English-speaking, the other Spanishspeaking; one Protestant, the other Catholic; one AngloSaxon in origin, the other Hispanic.

While national boundaries have practical implications for people’s daily lives as well as long-term political repercussions, especially in colonial settings, it may help to think about the future of Puerto Rico in terms of its people and not just its resources. In doing so, I don’t mean to relieve the US government of the burden to

care for an island it is legally bound to serve. I mean instead to highlight the work of the communities on the mainland, to recognize and legitimize their pain, and to suggest that we include them in future conversations about Puerto Rico—not as separate, assimilated communities, but as part of a larger community still healing from years of colonialism, economic exploitation, and most recently, a storm with a historic impact.

SORAYA FERDMAN ’18 is hoping to go back home this winter.

FEATURES

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MY CROMWELL On the fantasies of Wolf Hall

WRITTEN, ILLUSTRATED, AND DESIGNED BY Isabelle Rea

I’d seen the book around the house, collapsed on different surfaces. I had heard remnants of kingly names and dark adjectives spoken from the blue screen where my father was editing photos in his bedroom office. My mother would complain to her sister about the less adept members of her book club who thought Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s 2009 novel following the rise of Henry VIII’s right hand man, Thomas Cromwell (easily confused with later revolutionary Oliver), was too historical and too dense.

When I was 15, I liked history because of the easy gratification. Facts were like shiny artifacts that I could quickly accumulate as a way to escape the suburban rut I felt stuck in. I binged on costume dramas and got 100s on multiple choice history quizzes. I thought: my peers embrace whatever this impure contemporary ninth grade culture has come to be, why not find something more pure? And the Early Modern elite world might be a nice setting for an escapist day dream.

It was for these reasons I picked up Wolf Hall. The first page took three tries (my mother’s book club was not wrong). When I finally succumbed to using the audiobook and put in my headphones, the voice of a calm posh man entered my head. He seemed to already be in the middle of the storyline, but I had no intention to interrupt him or tell him to leave. I liked his voice—his gruff tone.

It was that of an English actor who played charming, yet subtly flawed, middle-aged men.

It became automatic, after sliding into my sheets, to pick up the heavy volume and press play on my Audible app. Sometimes I would wake up to the gruff voice still rolling through a halfway inserted earbud. There were weeks where I would have no energy to read for nights on end, but would start listening anyway, and fall asleep while trying to determine where I had dropped off the night before. I would end up hearing the same passages in a half-awake state for days. There were patterns of actions and words, considerations and intonations that I knew so well. During the day the fractions of story continued to play out. Cromwell’s words were harsh and confident, but revealed their humor and humanity in repetition.

I met Thomas Cromwell (the Cromwell I know) as a young lawyer for Cardinal Wolsey. Cromwell loved and admired this man more openly the more Wolsey fell from power. The King’s men took Wolsey as Cromwell struggled, not with his fists, but with his hands and mouth, writing and meeting and attempting to convince his countrymen. Cromwell was too late to help him, and Wolsey died in a cold and empty house that was not his own. After that, Cromwell had everything he needed to achieve his own power: an influential position earned from his former employer, the foundation of a Machiavellian technique, and a deep anger at the entire English court.

Cromwell’s home was warm wooden passageways that opened onto small rooms defined by their books and brown and red upholstery. There were dreams of Renaissance humanism threaded with edgy Protestant thought, and thinkers slinking in through the back door.

His wife with a candle at the table, two girls tucked in bed upstairs.

Cromwell followed Wolsey around and eventually people at court got used to him. He was a wriggler, a manipulator, a schemer, but really everyone just thought he was a really nice and interesting man! That was the trick he made look so simple. He was kind and he listened; he knew things and used those things to give advice. Even his enemies wanted to stop and chat. And these were all interactions which he could eventually spin to suit him best. He knew how to trigger vulnerability and butter it over. He could choose what to do next: indulge in

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confidences, put words in their mouths, blame someone else for the damage he had done. This plays out in a scene Mantel narrated so carefully: “He sits quietly, watching Henry, trying by stillness to defuse the situation; to wrap the king in a blanketing silence, so that he, Henry, can listen to himself.” He worked his way, up-and-up, straight into the palm of Henry VIII. Then he stepped out, picked up the king with his own thumb and finger and placed him in his own hand. By the end of his political career, Henry VIII was at Cromwell’s beck-and-call.

But surrounded by all of this was again, his home: the wooden passageways and red and candles. Home, although his wife and daughters were gone, dead of a fever plaguing London. So as much as Cromwell played with other people’s vulnerabilities, I, his confidant, knew that he had his own. This side of Cromwell made me cry: his memory of seeing the ghost of his wife on the stairs the morning of her death, the nagging regret that he did not do enough to save his beloved Wolsey. Inside his mind I could detect his tenderness, and was it... almost feminine? No, not at all. This was a man, a Renaissance man even! His craftiness, his progressive dealings, his inner connection with the poor he was born into. I had fallen for and inside of the mind of one of the greats, I believed.

I had tied myself to characters before, but Cromwell was real. I could point to decisions he made, read his speeches to Parliament and personal letters (although I never did), and far more than a few people knew the name when I muttered it aloud. +++ In a desk-chair in my first year of college, I watched my aloof English history professor, a Cambridge man then teaching in America, sporting a half-buttoned button down, with stubble and an accent like my father. Each time he reached a new man in his narrative of the years between 1524–1660, he walked to his computer to change the Powerpoint slide to the next portrait. On the day we got to Cromwell I sat in anticipation of the satisfaction at having my internal Thomas validated by the academic’s screen. Instead, from the Hans Holbein painting on the slide and the notes I had scraped as fast as possible as my professor glided on, I watched the birth of a completely new man. Cromwell was the ambitious councillor, but ‘ambitious’ in the lying, scheming, ruthless sense. He made enemies with his horridness, but he was smart—incredibly intelligent!—so he figured out how to control Henry. He found ways to take those who knew what he was doing to the tower, and in this way Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, and other superplayers faced their deaths. The news I least expected to hear was near the end. When my professor hinted at a fall from power and perhaps a subsequent end by hanging, I covered my ears.

The book hadn’t gotten this far.

For 10 pages I was encouraged to explore the question “Was Henry VIII a Tyrant?” while paying special consideration to Cromwell’s role. The history books reiterated my professor: Cromwell filled the 16th century political role of textbook villain—the oppressor who operates behind the scenes. Rebellions in the North had targeted Cromwell, not Henry, in their complaints about royal oppression. It was Cromwell’s hand that shooed out the monks from their monasteries, so that the monks went homeless and the buildings and art that was not pillaged by townsfolk were actively destroyed. And here I remember standing in a small town in the South of England in a structure so skeletal that it could be considered as sculpture. Cromwell cleared this monastery for

himself and even lived in it for a while. It was thick grey stone with only notions of doors and windows, the top half chopped off and the rest deteriorating into itself.

When he left, he systematically demolished the structure, making sure that no one would live, or even see, the place ever again.

In my professor’s office, I asked him about Mantel’s portrayal. But I tripped, gave into the fear that indulgent fiction had conned me and I phrased it like this: Is it harmful? That was where my anxiety lay. I fell for a man who seemed to be based on something wrong. But much of my frustration came from the fact that I did not know how to unravel the Cromwell in my head; My Cromwell, Thomas. I could not bring myself to accept that Mantel had picked the wrong side, or even worse, that she had lied to me. I had suffered a blow to what I had prided myself on and had gotten me to this classroom in the first place: that I had known the facts. For years it was Cromwell’s reality that enchanted me and here I was, my idol revealed to be a fairy-tale tyrant.

The professor told me that no, it is not harmful, but should be indulged warily. Mantel had filled in the blanks of a sparse history creatively, and anyone else could take the same facts and swing them a different way. “Wary indulgence” was the opposite of my 15-year-old technique. “Wary indulgence” as the opposite of indulgent and rich escapism.

My attention turned from who the real Cromwell really was, a question that it turned out I cared nothing about, to why I did not care. I went back to reread, but my library books had been returned. I only had the audiobook. And here I heard again the charm of the old posh white man speaking in my ear, reciting to me the story of this complex character who is at once knowledgable, caring, powerful, and truly just better than all the others.

I wondered if it was the book I had fallen in love with or the intoxicating tone resounding through my earbuds.

There’s this thing about white posh British middleaged male intellectuals, and the thing is that it’s pretty easy to love them. They have a tinge of little boy who still wets his pants, and thus they allow for our ability to mother them. And then there’s a healthy dose of manliness that attracts unwilling desire. I watched my father, using his accent, getting away with things that my American mother would not because of some goofy aging Britishness that the rest of the world liked too. Did I let another destructive man off the hook because I was charmed by the voice of another?

But was it not the woman’s rendering, the fluid artistry of her personal descriptions and scenes she constructed, that created my Cromwell? Her ideas and her prose that gave birth to a persona which shaped my own. What she saw between the lines of the institutional male historians had put beauty into something hateful. In the end, I could not accept a more accurate depiction of this character while Mantel’s words were so much more compelling at every turn.

Perhaps Mantel had given into Cromwell’s charms just like I had. We were willing to ignore what was wrong and attach ourselves to something golden. By loving my Cromwell I got warmth and fun and comfort and pleasure. But I was with Martel too—both of us women, searching in an Early Modern dreamland and finding a man alluring, cunning, and strange.

ISABELLE REA B’20 has a Machiavellian technique.

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

The Desert II/

by Adonis /Twin Earth half-translated by Fadwa Ahmed, half

by Fadwa Ahmed

3 Do I contradict myself ? That is correct

Do I Contradict Myself ? is what the first word says yes only one word don’t

ask me if i have read Whitman (i have) And I am now sun and shade/ And I am not a god that is not what we are doing here

II ‫الصحراء‬

‫أدونيس‬

3 ‫صحيح‬ ‫ض؟ هذا‬ ُ ‫أتنا َق‬ ٌ ‫وأنا اآلن جم ٌر وور ٌد‬ ِ ‫شمس‬ ‫وظ ٌّل‬ ‫وأنا اآلن‬ ٌ ‫لست َر ّب ًا‬ ُ ‫وأنا‬ ...‫صحيح‬ ‫ض؟ هذا‬ ُ ‫أتنا َق‬ ٌ

11 ١١ He wrote a poem, -،‫كتب القصيد َة‬ َ the verb for “wrote” here, in Arabic, indicates a masculine subject ّ ‫)كيف أقنع ُه‬ (‫صح راء؟‬ َ ‫بأن غدي‬

but there is no lone-standing pronoun (How can I convince it that my tomorrow is desert?)

-،‫كتب القصيد َة‬ َ he wrote a poem, (‫)من يزحزح صخرة الكلمات ع ّن ي؟‬

and, in arabic, flipping the gender of your addressee -،‫كتب القصيد َة‬ َ is a way of expressing endearment (ً‫أنت لم تقتل أخ ا‬ َ ‫ إن‬،‫)لست ِم ّن ا‬ َ (Who is moving the cliff of words around me?) he wrote a poem she wrote a poem they wrote a poem they wrote a poem they -،‫كتب القصيد َة‬ َ as if to say It doesn›t matter not here not now It cannot hold you ‫)هل سيقدر ذلك الفج ُر املش ّر ُد‬ (You are not of us if you have not killed a brother)(Will this homeless dawn be able to (‫شمس ُه؟‬ ‫أن يعا ِن َق‬ َ embrace its sun?) (Between sun’s face and the horizon’s confusion) -،‫كتب القصيد َة‬ َ They wrote a poem,- (so they will not die...) ِ‫)بني وجه الشمس واأل ُف ق‬ (‫التباس‬ but no one ever says it like that ٌ animals eat their families all the time and so do robots (‫ ) َف ْل َي ُم ْت‬-،‫كتب القصيد َة‬ َ

١ 1 if all tigers had robot teeth bones lungs would we still call them Tigers; an era of tiger skin explains: ... ‫ َل ْس َت ِم ّن ي‬:‫زمان ُي صارحني‬ ٍ ‫في‬ You are not of me tiger insides explain to tiger skin: ‫أفه م ْه‬ َ ‫لست‬ ُ :‫وأصارح ه‬ َ ‫ وأجهد أن‬،‫منك‬ ُ َ I am not of you / I am now a ghost / Displaced in my place / Hiding in a skull ٌ ‫وأنا اآلن‬ ‫طيف‬ (there is something very particular about his hand that ٍ‫َي تش ّر ُد في َم ْه َم ه‬ makes it feel like his face and makes me feel like i will never know what it is .‫و ُي خ ّي م في جمجم ْه‬

like to Scrape wellness out from under my fingernails)

٢٩ ‫ بال ٌد‬،‫خا ِل ٌق يأك ُل ه ا َخل ْل ُق‬ ‫في الدّم الدّا ِف قِ من أشالئها‬ ُ . ‫يبتدئ‬ ‫إنه ال َع ْص ُر الذي‬ 8 ٨ I expect death to come, a night

(i am tired) there is a world where my ‫ لي ًال‬،‫ملوت‬ ُ ‫أ َت و ّق ع أن يأتي ا‬ With his chest cushioning

tongue is not an hourglass filled with ‫أن ُي َو ّس د أحضا َن ُه‬ A flower

red hot glass-before-it-is-glass ‫ورد ٌة‬ I’ve grown tired of the sand cloaking the forehead of magic ّ ‫غبار ُي‬ I’ve grown tired of the human exhale. (i am tired) there is a world where ‫ح ْر‬ َ ‫غط ي جب‬ ْ ٍ ‫تعبت من‬ َ ‫الس‬ ّ ‫ني‬ plants growing out of my ribcage aren’t cliched َ ‫تعبت ِم ن زفير‬ ‫البش ْر‬ 28 there is a world where my second language is the one that is my first ٢٨ Everytime I said: These are my countries shrinking language in this world ‫بالدي تدنو‬ ‫ هذي‬:‫قلت‬ َ ُ ‫ك ّل ما‬ And bearing fruit in the Danish language and where my feet aren’t ‫وتُثمر في لغةٍ داني ْه‬ They threw me into another country calloused and i don’t even wear socks ‫آخر‬ ٍ ‫َق ذفتني إلى‬ A second language. all the time but there are no words that ٍ ‫بلد‬ consider those worlds (not in any language that is wrapped in my skin . ‫لغ ٌة ثاني ْه‬ 29 (if his hands grew from his neck would we still call them hands) The creator eats the creation, countries (and what if they grow around mine) In the warm blood of their hidden massacres,- (there is a world where the sidewalk ْ ُ ‫تخ َت ب‬ This is the era that is beginning. isn’t filled with body fluid and i do -،‫ِئ‬ grow old)

VISION MACHINES Apocalypse & virtual deterrence in Southland Tales

BY Robin Manley ILLUSTRATION BY Eliza Chen DESIGN BY Ashley Min

content warning: suicide The world never quite ends in Southland Tales. When a nuclear detonation interrupts an idyllic suburban afternoon in Texas, Cold War faith in deterrence shatters across the screen. In the short fade to black, viewers can’t help but see intercontinental ballistic missiles swirling the globe—cultural anxieties over nuclear war erupting from their carefully guarded silos. But rather than dwelling on this symbolic apocalypse, Southland Tales moves quickly onto the next—in 2008, three years after the detonation of the bomb, disaster is at hand again. Sitting atop a permanent military turret overlooking Santa Monica beach, surveying the crowds through the scope of his rifle, the narrator Pilot Abilene insists three times over: “This is the way the world ends.”

Released in 2006, Southland Tales is the second Hollywood film from Richard Kelly, director of the 2001 cult classic Donnie Darko. Southland Tales frantically blends science fiction, comedy, and thriller into a ‘pop-satire’ that defies easy comprehension or summary.

The world is embroiled in WWIII, driving a fuel crisis that has spawned the alternative-energy technology “Fluid Karma,” a sea platform that harvests seemingly unlimited energy from the motion of the waves but has slowed the rotation of the earth. A ‘neo-Marxist’ cell in Los Angeles wages war with the militarized American surveillance state—a battle the identical Taverner twins fight on opposite sides of. American film star Boxer Santaros has written an eerily prophetic screenplay, and has been caught in the political games of a presidential campaign.

The cast is equally jarring, bringing together WWE wrestler Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, American Pie star Seann Williams Scott, adult film actress Sarah Michelle Gellar, teen heartthrob Justin Timberlake, and Saturday Night Live comedian Amy Poehler. Amidst its chaos, however, the film remains invested in American politics; the US conflicts with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and North Korea parallel many of those from the early 2000s, and the film’s expanded domestic surveillance apparatus is a product of the infamous PATRIOT Act. Speaking with the Washington Post soon after the film’s release, Kelly claimed that he sought to grapple with “some of the biggest issues that I think we're facing right now, whether it's homeland security or alternative fuel or the increasing obsession with celebrity and how celebrity now intertwines with politics.” In spite of Kelly’s previous critical acclaim, the film’s far-reaching ambitions, and its ‘interactive release’ featuring six graphic novels and MySpace pages for many characters, Southland Tales tanked—receiving an overwhelmingly negative response at the Cannes Film Festival, and making under $400,000 on a $17 million dollar budget.

Shane Danielstein was not an outlier when, in a review for the Guardian, he claimed that this was the worst film he had ever seen.

Yet a decade later, in spite of its impressive failure, Southland Tales has recently seen a resurgence of attention. Sparked, in part, by a suggestion from Kelly in a March interview with Vulture that there may be an expanded re-release, critics have returned to the movie.

Over the past two years, writers for Vice, Motherboard,

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Washington Post, IndieWire, and Inverse Entertainment have returned to Kelly’s maligned work, wondering whether it might speak to our moment of celebrity-politicians and an ever-expanding security state. +++ If the first apocalypse in Southland Tales is a crisis of physical destruction, this second is one of metaphysical alienation. The Fluid Karma technology, billed as a perpetual motion machine and used to fuel the American war machine, has a major unforeseen consequence: by slowing the rotation of the Earth, it has created a tear in the fourth dimension—located in the Nevada desert.

Through the representation of a media-saturated post-deterrence world obsessed with prediction, combined with the metaphysical crisis of time that animates the plot, Southland Tales explores the consequences of the growing social importance of time and light.

In the eponymous final chapter of Paul Virilio’s The Vision Machine, the cultural theorist traces this general shift from the importance of space and matter to that of time and light: “After the nuclear disintegration of the space of matter, which lead to the implementation of a global deterrence strategy, the disintegration of the time of light is finally upon us… with deception finally defeating deterrence.” Though it is rarely referred to, the opening nuclear explosion reverberates throughout the whole film; the failure of traditional nuclear deterrence thematizes the transition to virtual warfare based on deception, prediction, and illumination. Virilio argues that war in the 21st century has transferred “from the actual to the virtual.”

He traces this shift through strategies of military deterrence. Warfare, for some time now, has not hinged upon the masterful strategies, unique tactics, or deft maneuvers of seasoned generals; the atomic bomb introduced the logic of deterrence, in which opponents accumulate sufficient weapons to guarantee the total destruction of the enemy in conflict. Today, “the chief tack of warfare… is the elimination of the appearance of the facts.” Instead of the proliferation of nuclear warheads, there is a profusion of images and sounds of weapons, a focus on secrecy, dissimulation, and deception. Stealth vehicles coated in radar-absorbent paint, missiles that deceive tracking systems, electronic projections of weapons systems—a new “arsenal of dissimulation” has “overshot deterrence,” producing a “definitive split between the real and the figurative.”

To say that war has been transferred to the virtual is to note that the relevant distinction is no longer between the true and the false—for images of weapons have their own reality—but between actual effects and virtual representations of them. As Virilio puts it, “This process is less to do with fake effects—once we accept the lie as given—than with the obliteration of the very principle of truth.” Success in the virtual war requires accurate perception and absolute knowledge. When “winning is simply a matter of not losing sight of the opposition,” total illumination becomes the strategic dream: “The will to see all, to know all, at every moment, everywhere, the will to universalized illumination: a scientific permutation on the eye of God which would forever rule out the

surprise, the accident, the irruption of the unforeseen.”

Paired, then, with the tactic of deception and dissimulation comes that of observation, prediction, and simulation—a total mapping that anticipates every situation.

The nuclear attack in Southland Tales demarcates this transition, depicting the sudden failure of the traditional logic of deterrence and staging the rest of the film within the logic of virtual war.

The real-time circulation of images and simulations of the near future in Southland Tales illustrate this logic of virtual warfare. A social logic of virtual power seems to motivate many central players in the film. For most of the film, the narrator—Pilot Abilene—sits atop a sniper turret overlooking Venice beach, accompanied by a computer display that provide him extensive bureaucratic and biological information about anyone in sight: names, birthdays, social security numbers, blood types, thumbprints, DNA sequences. Abilene not only surveils the activities of the beach but also taps into a seemingly vast

network of information about the individuals in his gaze.

His position draws an implicit equivalence between the transcendent, all-knowing status of the classical narrator and the watchful security apparatus: invoking the scientific permutation of the eye of God. This situation is paralleled by the position of Nana Mae Frost, the head of US-IDent—the newly centralized American surveillance agency—whose office chair faces a wall of monitors which display real-time video feeds from cameras throughout the city, live news broadcasts, television programming, police car dashboard cameras, cameraequipped glasses on agents, and, at one point, a live feed from the muzzle of a soldier's gun. Beyond Abilene’s position of oversight—which is ultimately limited to a single location and static position—Frost can jump between views and perspectives, occupying multiple simultaneously. The very premise of an integrated and all-powerful surveillance organization like US-IDent is that, through sheer quantity of information and processing, the government will know what is taking place before it does—a total simulation of the world.

While Abilene and Frost strive to fulfill the dream of total illumination, the neo-Marxist tactics of resistance operate on the basis of virtual weaponry. Their

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

plots revolve predominantly around the political power of incriminating videos—staging videos of Santaros with ex-pornstar Krysta Now, as well as of a racist police officer shooting a biracial couple, the neo-Marxists take advantage of a constant news environment that pervades the film. These virtual scenarios are indistinguishable from real events; the dissidents are convinced the first film could be “a marriage killer… maybe even an election killer” for a senator connected to Santaros. Rather than a traditional political logic concerned with evaluation and comparison of principled, factually grounded stances on policy issues, politics seems to have shifted to a logic more closely resembling advertising agencies or reality television competitions. Like the contemporary arsenal of dissimulation that has replaced nuclear deterrence, political personalities and brands have replaced stances and ideals. +++ The shift of deterrence and the primacy of the virtual in Southland Tales is bound up with the status of time, which is understood in terms of the division between real-time and delayed-time rather than a division between the past, present, and future. Virilio points to real-time telepresence technology—in which the image of an object captured by the camera corresponds to its virtual presence, available for engagement by a spectator—as an example of this new relationship to time. The future, through computational simulations, is folded into and extrapolated from the present, such that ‘real’ time contains not only the present but also the immediate future. This collapse of the future into the present is what enables the powerful technologies of simulation and prediction. ‘Real-time’ missile radars on military ships, for example, project the future of the missile by automatically calculating its trajectory and intervening factors—its explosive impact determined well before it takes place.

In an early scene, a news report can be heard from offscreen, explaining how claims that Liquid Karma is a perpetual motion machine are incompatible with the laws of thermodynamics. Indeed, such an eternal motion machine must escape entropy, existing outside the flow of time. Beyond simply slowing Earth’s rotation, the tear in spacetime produced by Liquid Karma might be a consequence of that violation of traditional, linear time. The film, it seems, explores this newly formed relationship of society to time, divided between real and delayed. Even before the tear in the fourth dimension is revealed, there is a connection between temporal rift and representational images. When Ronald Taverner—a member of the neo-Marxists—is first introduced, he has just discovered

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

that his reflection in the mirror has an eerie delay, miming his movements just a moment after he makes them. His image, or virtual double, is out of sync with his actual body. The lag in his reflection disturbs him enough that he pulls out his gun, places it to his head, and then points it at the mirror. He shoots, but not before redirecting his aim to just below the mirror—a tacit acknowledgment of this emerging, material danger of harming his own image.

Moreover, Liquid Karma’s existence outside of linear time conceptually parallels the logic of realtime. The skeptical news report is just one instance of the real-time news coverage that permeates the film, relaying events and plot developments to the viewer as they take place; at points, the news report stands in for a visual representation of developments to the viewer. Events are granted significance by their relay in real-time. Taverner’s delayed reflection points to the integral tie formed between images and time; the delayed-time of his reflection calls into question his actual material existence. By standing in for, replacing, or covering-over their material counterparts, real-time images take on their own reality in Southland Tales. Events take place through the manipulation of images, live.

The second model is a potentially fatal insistence on the real, represented by suicide threats or taking oneself hostage. The film is just as cavalier about suicide as it is with ostentatious brands and nuclear warfare—self-harm comes off as just another element in its characters’ wargames. The image of a character holding a gun to their own head repeats throughout the film: when Taverner notices his delayed reflection; when an unknown man receives a draft card; when a US-IDent worker, obsessed with Santaros’ screenplay and impersonating one of his characters, demands: “if you don’t let me suck your dick, I’m going to kill myself;” when Santaros interrupts a party in a Mega-Zeppelin; and when, in the final scene, Roland Taverner points the gun at his twin Ronald Taverner, and then himself, as their ice-cream truck levitates above Los Angeles.

Between these disparate scenes, the threat of shooting oneself functions as an act of reclamation, an exertion of the last power that one has available—one’s actual, material death. In this way, it forcibly retrieves power from one’s image; it insists on the agency of the individual; it refuses the total prediction and commodification of life.

This power of the threat—without ultimately pulling the trigger—might lend some obscure sense to the otherwise inexplicable final line of the film: “Pimps don’t commit suicide.”

ROBIN MANLEY B’18 is floating in an ice cream truck.

+++ If, in our age of real-time news, reality television politicians, and virtual deterrence, Southland Tales provides a useful language for analyzing politics— despite and perhaps due to its chaos—then we can rightly ask what models of political dissent it presents.

The first model, embodied by pornstar Krysta Now, is a total embrace of and investment in one’s own commodified image: curating one’s brand, existing always in front of a camera, exposing everything. Remember, the “one undeniable truth” of the film: “nobody rocks the cock like Krysta Now.” This strategy perfectly replicates—perhaps to the point of parody—the logic of time and light, and by excitedly fulfilling all of its demands, it may actually carve out a space outside of those demands. Carefully playing the role of the perfect, media-suffused subject who adores the camera, Krysta Now uses visibility as a disguise—actually shifting suspicious attention away from herself.

ARTS

16

EMBODY

BY Tara Sharma ILLUSTRATION BY Claire Schlaikjer DESIGN BY Amos Jackson

I spend the first week of May writing about bodies. I sit at library desks for two hours at a time and try to make sense of them. For some reason, I cannot stop caring. In these pieces I would like more than anything to understand the way that bodies fit together, make and emerge from each other. I look for the words, and finding the right ones is satisfying. I am making bodies outside of myself.

I print out the papers, staple them at their corners, and feel their weight in my hand for a moment. I think I would like them much more if they were single spaced, if their font was size 9, if they had no margins instead of inch-thick ones. I think they would make much more sense to me if the piece of paper could instead be a slice of splintering wood.

I-95 crosses Moose Hill Road at a T-section with a stillness and silence that has always reminded me of the split second between sleeping and waking. Moose Hill road is about two miles long with no streetlights so at night the space feels not quite like a road but rather a tunnel— cylindrical and plastic, like the kind you find in waterparks, or the pipes inside walls, holding air. The tunnel vacuums the wind. If you are paying close attention to texture and to weight you will feel the car attempting to sway over the asphalt lines for five whole minutes of driving. At night, if you play a certain kind of music, you may begin to feel as though the road is hypnotizing you, as though you are moving through time instead of with it, and this feeling will last until you notice your car slowing itself into the open spot of your garage, braking only when perfectly centered.

Pay close attention to this road and even though it is dark you will feel wide awake. It is easy to forget sensation in the numb light of the highway. Without the light on Moose Hill Road everything will slowly feel as though it is coming to life: the sound of tire pushing asphalt, the shape that high beam makes against trees, the outline of your own figure in the driver’s seat.

I am lying in a dark dorm room when the boy next to me in the bed tells me that he cannot quite commit to me because he only knows how to be with white girls. I sift through the dark space around me and reach my eyes to a bookshelf or a rug onto which I can fixate, but there is not enough light in the room for even that. I cannot see the space around me in shape or figures and so the words begin to take texture and color. The words are now thin green ribbons and they land neatly on the printed bedspread. One person of color he says but she was white passing. He says that attraction should be sustainable. He is looking for something that grows with time.

My body does not serve as a place where this attraction can take root and grow into my mind. Instead, his attraction for me reaches out and dissolves into empty space. There is nothing to hold on to. This is the most dark space of the bedroom. I look to my hands and feet and I cannot see them. I know too that he cannot see my face and so I can tighten the lines in my forehead as much as I want. I wonder if he is trying maybe to do the

17

LITERARY

same—trying to find his hands and feet when he talks, thinks. Now he is asking me if I am okay, if he did something or said something wrong, telling me that he did not mean to hurt me, that he takes back what he said. I am distracted and think only of the fact that there is another body in my bed, a body that is not mine and that I cannot see, a body that spews these scary ribbons. I close my eyes and imagine the outline of space that I am taking up on my bed. I try to imagine the space without my weight pressing down on it, a mass of dark, dense matter that I can see from above. How simple it would be, for this outline of space to be filled instead with silvery water. I picture it—like scales, reflecting white in the light. The dark is keeping me wide awake. I wonder if the things that exist in a dark space really matter. There is nothing I can do here to dissolve my own outlines, to turn from flesh to fish.

When I am sixteen I convince myself that I can learn the most if I pay close attention to the outlines of all things. I watch my teacher write in all capital letters on the blackboard. He can control the pressure of the chalk he imprints, making words of even spacing and opaque consistency. The letters seem to be resting on an invisible straight line. I know that I would like to write like this—have all of my words take up matter and space. I would like all my words to make themselves out of chalk.

When I write sentences, I would like for people to first pay attention to the shape of the letters before they see the meaning. I would like for them to react to the way I write before they react to the things I am writing about.

I begin the next month. It takes some time to work up to full speed. My hand lags the most when I take notes in class. But when I feel the habit of capital letters, my handwriting becomes neater, sharper. I think that I am trying hard to make my words into bodies, to make bodies out of anything I can find. I would like, ideally, to not have to look to letters, or to chalk, to find them. For some reason capital letters feel more like closed systems than lowercase ones. My lowercase letters tend to unravel lazily at their ends. There are a few inadvertent pen specks between my words, but my capital letters are neat, whole. They close in on themselves.

Embodiment lacks intention. You do not ingest knowledge when your body becomes it. Knowledge becomes flesh.

If the threads dissipate then maybe my body will stop interrupting itself, when I am in the middle of a sentence and I freeze on a word, or my voice breaks. It wasn’t the body’s turn—but it calls me out anyway.

This is how I know how to take up space—to wait until I’ve forgotten my body before I feel it all at once. I sit down at the ends of my days and stare down space until it unfocuses. I daydream until the daydream turns dull.

This is how I know to take up space: return, return, return to space until I’ve stripped the life from it, the lights from it.

The only way to fill this page with color is to say it, again and again: green, green, green, green, green, green. Do you see it yet?

I want to make this writing matter. I want to make this writing into matter. Matter is inside of this writing. I want to matter this writing. I want to use matter as an active verb—I want to use it and use it until it changes the form of the words around it. I want writing to matter other things. I would like to rub soil into these words until I cannot tell the difference between them. I would like to rub words into the soil until they compost themselves.

Last week I watched a friend sit in a patch of light. When he finishes his lunch he places his hands on his lap, his palms facing up. Something is blooming out of his hand.

A curved light is blooming out of his hand and making a shape. The hand is on his lap and the light is on the hand, and the light is thick, the light is tack. The tacky light is bending up and out of his hand. The light is leaning on his hand. He is closed, and the light is curving into him.

It tries to slip into his pockets. The light is moving and making shapes for him to touch.

I do not give any value to existing as flesh until years later, when I kneel in a vegetable garden burrowing my hands in cold soil, or when I am naked beside someone else and wish more than anything to expand this moment, of being seen in an outline of space. I wonder if the reason I like to feel like flesh is because maybe, in the end, I would like to embody everything I know. I imagine that this is how it was when I was young. There was nothing that floated outside of my hands and knees and toes. As I grew older it began to compress inside of my head. When I turned fifteen it began to give me headaches. I would like the single tightly wound cell of my mind to unravel and string together the rest of me.

NOVEMBER 10, 2017

THE

LIST!

FRIDAY 11 ∫ 10

SATURDAY 11 ∫ 11

ALTERNATIVE COMIC CON

ARMENIAN FEST

Olneyville Library 2 PM ————— Normal Comic Con is happening in Providence this weekend too, but if you join this List editor’s totally arbitrary opinion that that kind of thing is for nerds, maybe check out this event, hosted by a plethora of rad organizations including Providence CityArts, the Providence Comics Consortium, Providence Roller Derby, Dirt Palace, Motif Magazine, and Big Nazo.

TOTALLY ’90S: PROVIDENCE W/ KEL MITCHELL OF KENAN & KEL

Stout Irish Sports Pub 2 PM ————— To be fair, also maybe an event for nerds, albeit the ’90s teen-sitcom-loving variety.

Although I guess it is in a sports pub. And you get to meet Kel. You know you want to, nostalgia-fiends. I just hope they’ve got orange soda and good burgers, or else: it ain’t all that.

Rhodes on the Pawtuxet 12 PM ————— Bet you didn’t know that Southern New England has been a hub of ArmenianAmerican culture since the 19th century.

Stop by for some kebab, pastries, stuffed grape leaves, and traditional dances.

CHIEF KEEF

The Strand 9 PM ————— This is a drill! Of sorts. The drill-rap star, known for 2012’s bangin’ “I Don’t Like,” will be making a stop in Providence. Keep in mind that it’s $30 at the door, however.

SUNDAY 11 ∫ 12 WRITING SOUNDS LOUNGE

Ada Books 10:30 PM Suggested donation: $5 — $10 ————— Writing Sounds Lounge is a monthly dropin program that invites attendees to write while listening. This month’s musician is Asha Tamirisa, a founding member of OPENSIGNAL—a group of artists concerned with the state of gender and race within electronic/computer-based art practices.

OPENING OF THE 113TH ANNUAL LITTLE PICTURES SHOW & SALE

Providence Art Club 12 PM ————— 113 years is a lot of little pictures! This exhibition will feature over 600 works of art sized at 16” x 16” or less. They are also all apparently “less than $300!” lol.

MONDAY 10 ∫ 13 THE DISASTER IS COLONIALISM: A TEACH-IN RITES AND REASON THEATRE

Brown University 5 PM ————— The US profits off of its promotion of global insecurity. Don’t believe us? Join a group of scholars, filmmakers, and activists for a discussion about “how power frames the hurricane crises in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.” Organized by Brown’s Africana Studies Department with help from the Puerto Rican Association.

TUESDAY 11 ∫ 14

WEDNESDAY 11 ∫ 15

THURSDAY 11 ∫ 16

CRMC HEARINGS ON NATIONAL GRID’S PROPOSED LNG LIQUEFACTION PLANT

BACH AROUND TOWN

THIRD TUESDAY

One Capitol Hill 5 PM ————— The Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC), traditionally one of the state’s most powerful regulatory commissions, restricts coastal development when scientific evidence and public testimony demonstrate “likely” environmental harm. A fracked gas liquefaction facility in Providence is more than likely to do environmental harm. No LNG in PVD asks that you stand with them.

IT’S ELECTRIC! PROVIDENCE DSA NOVEMBER GENERAL MEETING

319 Broadway 7 PM ————— Speaking of National Grid being an evil monopoly! Join the DSA in their ongoing utilities justice campaign as they attempt to stop utilities shut-offs and achieve sustainable and affordable public utilities for all. Childcare available.

Campus Fine Wines 7:15 PM ————— Local org Community MusicWorks hosts an annual celebration of J.S. Bach that includes Bach Around Town, which features MusicWorks Collective musicians and CMW students in free pop-up concerts around Providence. Let this List writer know if you’re trying to buy anything from Campus Fine Wines while you bop among the booze—I’m trying to cash in on my Rewards program before I graduate!

RISD Museum 5 PM ————— The RISD Museum invites you to come watch demos, experiment with art-making materials, hear from artists about their work, and more. Plus a “night market” by local artist (and Ada Books clerk/general Nice Guy) Walker Mettling.

DRAG BINGO: THANKSGIVING FOOD DRIVE AND PIE-EATING CONTEST

Riviera Bingo (Cranston) 6 PM ————— Whew, lots going on here in this benefit for AIDS Care Ocean State. Sounds like there will be a cornucopia of awards for bingo victors, plus a cash prize for pie-eaters, PLUS drag?? Be thankful!

HOROSCOPE ∫ ARIES OK, let’s talk. Venus is in Scorpio (with Jupiter and Sun) AND your 8th house (of sex/death/regeneration [as if there hasn’t been enough flux for the last 7 years with Uranus in your sign]). I’m a triple fucking Scorpio and I’ll still be praying for myself, everyone else, and especially you—already pretty self-centered and “thirsty,” if you will. It will be sexy, but it will be fucked up. Embrace the caricature that you will be this week; take a trip to Mister Sister; get yourself a longer leash; tie yourself to something stable and balanced lmao!