The College Hill Independent N.25 V.1

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT Brown & RISD Weekly | V. 25 N. 1 | 9.14.2012

from the editors Eight years ago, we returned to a world where houses don’t have roofs. The paper was delivered by 9am and the neighbors came to meet us. A mood ring, transmuted, both binary and geological, demanded endearment.

They shower, watch TV, order a pizza. Days are the same but the nights are short. The unemployed build gnomes. The healthy live for ninety days. They practice speeches in front of mirrors, “ghhaveu xouts, bamerr hurr dobqa.” Through them we learned control. There was no way to win.

From space, we watched them bicker even after we told them not to.

We wrung our hands. We used the microwave. Other days time went faster and we wondered if they were as bored as us. Save and quit. The tombstones are forever and astrology is not in the stars. — RB, RS, ES

ephemera

news

2

WEEK IN REVIEW taps, teats, and tabloids // barry elkinton, emily gogolak, kate van brocklin

the indy is MANAGING EDITORS Raillan Brooks, Robert Sandler, Erica Schwiegershausen NEWS Barry Elkinton, Emily Gogolak, Kate Van Brocklin METRO Joe De Jonge, Doreen St. Felix, Jonathan Storch FEATURES Sam Adler-Bell, Grace Dunham, Alex Ronan, Ellora Vilkin ARTS Ana Alvarez, Olivia-Jené Fagon, Christina McCausland, Claudia Norton SCIENCE Jehane Samaha FOOD Ashton Strait INTERVIEWS Drew Dickerson SPORTS Sam Rosen LITERARY Emma Janaskie, Michael Mount X Drew Foster LIST Allie Trionfetti BLOG Greg Nissan, David Scofield DESIGN Mary-Evelyn Farrior, Allie Trionfetti, Joanna Zhang ILLUSTRATIONS Diane Zhou PHOTO Annie Macdonald SENIOR EDITORS Belle Cushing, Mimi Dwyer MVP Allie Trionfetti COVER ART Robert Sandler

3

theindy@gmail.com twitter: maudelajoie /// theindy.org /// Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI press in Seekonk, MA. The Independent receives support from Campus Progress/Center for American Progress.

Campus Progress works to help young people make their voices heard on issues that matter. Learn more at CampusProgress.org

food policy dry heaves // barry elkinton

interviews

4

SAM I AM lipping with lip //

5 6

11 12

SCHOOL SUPPLIES

13 15

storch

16

features

7 9

RNC conventional wisdom // mary-evelyn farrior

STERILE cash for consent // ellora vilkin

tina mccausland

LI GANG and they’re off // claudia norton

BARTERING let’s make a deal // sam rosen

LANDING footsteps on mars // jehane samaha

food

felix

prescient primary // jonathan

throwing cats as protest // chris-

science

truant five-year-olds // doreen st.

SCHMEAR

PUSSY

sports

drew dickerson

metro

reachably yours College Hill Independent PO Box 1930 Brown University Providence RI 02912

HUSKS

arts

LARD ON STICKS getting your fair share // ashton strait

literary

17 18

SOCIAL MEDIA friday night // michael mount

x-page // drew foster

Week in Review Illustration by Robert Sandler

Udder Manna

by Kate Van Brocklin

Arid Cups

by Barry Elkinton On September 22, over 6.5 million people are expected to descend on Munich, Germany to attend Oktoberfest, a 16-day celebration of beer drinking and Bavarian culture.

This year, however, brewers and city officials are growing concerned that they won’t be able to keep the beer flowing all festival long. No, Germany isn’t running out of beer, but it might as well be—a severe shortage of kegs and bottles is threatening to prevent the beer from making it to the party.

In Germany, breweries typically clean and reuse old bottles and kegs, thereby making breweries dependent upon a steady stream of recycled containers. This summer, however, good weather and economic uncertainty has caused a sharp uptick in beer drinking, meaning that more bottles and kegs are out for consumption. As a result, brewers are finding themselves scrambling for kegs and bottles, and facing production stoppages unless more empty containers are returned. “Dear Munichers—please bring back your crates,” implored Heiner Müller, manager of the Paulaner brewery, in Munich’s TZ newspaper. “We need our empties!”

Even if the bottle and keg shortage is resolved, many Germans see another obstacle to a successful Oktoberfest party—high beer prices and skimpy serving sizes. Last year, the League Against Fraudulent Outpouring—a German beer-drinkers advocacy group with over 4,000 members— surveyed the price and portion size of a random sample of 100 beers served at Oktoberfest. According to the group’s survey, prices for the festival’s famed 1-liter mugs averaged €9.20, much higher than prices during the non-festival season. Even worse, not a single beer sampled by the group actually contained a full liter of beer—a finding that league president Jan-Ulrich Bittlinger called “sobering.”

To rectify this situation, the league has launched a massive signature campaign aimed at stopping what they say is a classic example of collusion in a captive market.

Before the party begins, the league hopes to get 30,000 to 40,000 signatures on a petition calling for a strict cap of €7.10 per liter of beer. According to Der Speigel, a petition with that many signatures would trigger an official referendum, potentially making beer prices a hot issue in the 2014 Munich mayoral elections. “Since the market can regulate itself at the Oktoberfest, some order needs to be imposed from the outside,” Bittlinger told Die Welt.

“Whoever thinks that the Oktoberfest even has a hint of fair market conditions, probably believes that North Korea is a democracy.”

SEPTEMBER 14 2012

The Algerian nomadic proverb, “Water is the soul, milk is the life,” may now carry weight to the rest of the world.

Recent studies show that camel’s milk reigns supreme in nutritional and medicinal value among all kinds of milk that humans typically consume. An series of studies led

by Dr. Rajendra Agrawal at the Diabetes Care & Research Centre in Bikaner, India revealed improved blood sugar levels in patients with type 2 diabetes who exclusively drank camel milk. According to Dr. Agrawal, camel’s milk is high in insulin and enters the bloodstream quickly because it has low rate of coagulation. This benefits patients who often have insufficient insulin secretions. The same studies also found that camel’s milk improves cell function of the pancreas, another advantage for diabetics.

Not only does camel milk take the cake in terms of benefits for diabetics, but, according to an analysis from the National Nutrition Institute in Cairo, its mineral content is significantly higher than than that of any milk you’ll find at the supermarket. The studies show that the rare substance has the most iron, zinc and copper of five milks tested, including human milk.

The list of camel milk’s benefits doesn’t stop there. The liquid contains three times as much vitamin C as cow’s milk, and also has ten times the amount of antibacterial and antiviral properties found in cow’s milk.

Eyal Lifshitz, manager of a camel’s milk research center and owner of Milk From Eden camel farm in Israel, says that patients who drank the milky elixir experienced relief from symptoms of inflammatory diseases such as arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Crohn’s disease, and colitis. Further studies indicate that people undergoing chemotherapy and those suffering from viral infections such as hepatitis may also benefit from camel’s milk.

If you’re trying to get your hands on some camel’s milk, you have your work cut out for you. The American Camel Coalition, a group of camel dairies, obtained permission to sell camel milk from the FDA in 2009, although the number of current American camel ranches is small compared to the vast camel herds in the deserts of Sudan and Somalia.

Scarcity also poses as a challenge, as camels give comparatively little milk: 13 pints to a cow’s 50 per day.

Camel’s milk drinkers in the West have options. In Great Britain, powdered camel’s milk is pending approval from the European Commission. Germans Malik Dakdaki and Martin Wilke and Moroccan Abdelkader Saoudi established Vitamol Camel Dairy and Products, and the three partners plan to invest $40 million in the project, according to ArabianBusiness.com. As laboratories begin to demonstrate what a magical cure-all camel’s milk is, there will be an increased demand in global commercial markets.

So what does camel’s milk taste like? Jack Epstein, owner of Epstein’s Covered Chocolate, a store in San Francisco that sells camel’s milk chocolate, described the taste to Restauranteers.com as “a little caramelly.”

Not So Maillot

by Emily Gogolak We have the French to thank for inventing tennis, binoculars, the crêpe, snobbish attitudes toward Americans, and the bikini. Popularized by Bridget Bardot in the 1956 erotic melodrama, And God Created Woman, the two-piece wonder quickly went from scandalous to mainstream and from France to worldwide. A bikini debacle, however, has made it back to its homeland.

Valérie Trierweiler, partner of French President François Hollande, sued three major French tabloids last week for breach of privacy after they published photos of her (bikini-clad) alongside le Président (swim-trunked) while the two were vacationing on the French Riviera.

Trierweiler, we think, is an eye-catcher. French media has called the tall beautiful brunette the President’s best asset; her out-of-wedlock relationship with Hollande is cause for some serious gossip across France. Her face has graced the covers of countless tabloids, but grin and bear her bum on the cover she won’t.

Bringing cheesy tabloid press to court isn’t rare in France. French law is the most protective in Europe of people’s right to privacy and A-listers are often awarded damages over the publication of photos. On top of thousands of euros in compensation, courts usually demand that the magazines publish the ruling on their front cover.

Trierweiler’s case against the magazines—Closer, Voici, and Public—comes just as a fourth magazine, VSD, was found guilty on Tuesday of breaching her privacy for similar photographs taken during her beach holiday and was fined €2,000. It wasn’t much of a win. According to Reuters, she requested 30,000 euros in her initial plea. So why go after the paparazzi again? “We decided to pursue magazines that published the photos on their covers and which tried to sell, to catch the reader’s eye with these photos,” Trierweiler’s lawyer told Europe 1 Radio.

Yet it seems that Trierweiler’s incentive for legal action may not be limited to generic privacy concerns. According to The Telegraph, she allegedly didn’t want the photos made public because she thinks they made her look ‘fat.’ Note to the reader: she’s no Carla Bruni, but she looks pretty damn good in a bikini for a nearly-50-year-old mother of three. Donc, relâche-toi, Valérie! Seriously, if First-Lady-era Hillary was cool being photographed strolling around in her swimsuit (albeit a one-piece), so should you.

NEWS // 02

The Corn Supremacy Drought Revives Food vs. Fuel Debate

by Barry Elkinton Illustration by Diane Zhou

on september 10, Congress returned from summer recess, and both parties began the typical campaign season ritual of political posturing and legislative inaction. But if serious discussion about the debt ceiling crisis and tax policy can be conveniently scheduled for after the election, one issue is so pressing that it is defying the election-year schedule— American agricultural policy. Though not normally a hotbutton political item, the worst drought in fifty years and the impending expiration of the Farm Bill has pushed food to the forefront of the political agenda.

While the spectacular wildfires that ravaged the western United States made headlines all summer, a quieter process of destruction has swept across American farmland.

So far, more than half of all US counties have been declared national disaster areas as a result of the drought, which scientists say is the worst in over fifty years. “You couldn’t choreograph worse weather conditions for pollination,” University of Illinois-Urbana biologist Fred Below told Bloomberg Businessweek. “It’s like farming in Hell.”

Unfortunately for American farmers, the breadbasket states that produce staples like corn, wheat, and soybeans have seen the most arid conditions. An estimated 87 percent of corn acreage lies in drought-affected areas, many of which saw only marginal relief from the rains of Hurricane Isaac. As a result, federal officials say they are expecting the lowest corn yields since 1995 and record-high corn prices of over $8 a bushel. The disappointing harvest will not only lead to higher prices at the supermarket, but may also have international humanitarian implications, since many of the world’s poorest areas depend upon cheap American grain for subsistence.

This sudden tightening of the corn market has breathed new life into the ever-lingering food vs. fuel debate over the wisdom of using corn to produce ethanol.

Especially controversial is the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the federal requirement that an annual quota of ethanol be added to gasoline fuel. Created under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and further expanded in 2007 the RFS sets increasing annual quotas for ethanol production through 2022. Passed with bipartisan support, lawmakers argued that the RFS would cut greenhouse gas emissions and reduce American dependence on foreign oil. For the upcoming year, the RFS requires 13 billion gallons of ethanol to be mixed with American gasoline—an amount that will require an estimated 40 percent of this year’s corn harvest.

But a growing group of lawmakers, industry groups, and NGOs are starting to question whether it makes sense to maintain such a rigid standard in a period of unprecedented drought. Specifically, these

03 // NEWS

groups are urging Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson – whose agency is responsible for implementing the RFS – to use her emergency powers to waive the standard for this year. On August 20, after eight governors, 33 senators and 156 members of Congress formally petitioned the agency, Jackson announced that the EPA would consider granting the waiver. Jackson subsequently opened up a 30-day public comment period, and announced that the agency will reach a decision within 90 days. the campaign to reduce ethanol production has united a group of strange bedfellows while leading to unusual division within the agricultural community. In Washington, the most influential opponents of the RFS are meat and poultry producers, who argue that ethanol quotas artificially tighten demand for corn, thereby making animal feed more expensive. “We do not stand for federal mandates picking winners and losers,” said JD Alexander, President of the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, in an interview on the association’s website. “This isn’t rocket science. Let the market work.”

Of course, there is a certain irony to any sector of the agribusiness industry –where government subsidies are the name of the game – calls for a return to free market conditions. After all, it was just a few weeks ago that the USDA announced it would effectively bail out the meat industry by purchasing 170 million dollars of animal products to help farmers cope with rising feed costs. Nonetheless, politicians in states with large meat and poultry operations have vocally supported an RFS waiver. “The RFS may have been a well-intentioned effort to move our country toward energy independence, but it has, predictably, done more harm than good,” wrote Texas Governor Rick Perry to the EPA. “Any government mandate that benefits one industry to the detriment of millions of consumers is bad policy.”

Predictably, the ethanol industry and the major corn growing states are opposing any change to the RFS, claiming that the it’s vital to ensuring energy independence and keeping down gas prices. “Now is not the time for changes,” said National Corn Growers Association President Gary Niemeyer in a statement. “It’s working. The RFS is revitalizing rural America, reducing our dependence on foreign fuel, and reducing the cost of gasoline.”

But if the meat industry and corn refineries are primarily concerned about their bottom lines, global health and international aid agencies see the waiver of the RFS as a matter of human principle. The United States is the largest exporter of grain in the world, so an

increase in domestic corn prices could have dramatic global implications. For these reasons, the World Bank, the United Nations and Oxfam have all called for a reconsideration of US ethanol policy. “This drought, combined with bad policies like ethanol mandates, has put the world’s poor on a collision course with a food crisis,” said Oxfam America Senior Policy Advisor Eric Muñoz in a statement. “Urgent actions, including waiving US mandates for ethanol, could calm markets and ensure that corn is available for food rather than fuel.”

In between all these claims is a murky web of facts and studies that both sides selectively draw upon to support their positions. The biofuels industry has touted an industry-funded study suggesting that ethanol lowered gas prices $1.09 per gallon in 2011, but a more recent MIT study found that ethanol’s effect was negligible. Regardless, Americans are paying a premium for ethanol through their tax dollars–$1.78 per gallon according to the Congressional Budget Office, though it should be noted that conventional gasoline receives its fair share of subsidies too.

Regarding food prices, there is some evidence that an RFS waiver would lead to decent reductions. A recent study

by Purdue University, for example, estimated that waiving the RFS might reduce the price of corn 20 percent by next year. But that depends on whether or not granting a waiver would even significantly reduce the demand for ethanol.

Almost one third of the country has local laws requiring ethanol-blended fuel, meaning that many oil companies might just continue adding ethanol anyways. Still, the vigorous protest of the corn and ethanol industry to a waiver suggests that the RFS remains vital to propping up the ethanol industry.

Ultimately, if one thing is clear, it’s that this problem isn’t going away. So far, 2012 has been the hottest year in America since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began keeping records in 1895, and scientists say massive droughts are more likely as climate change continues. Meanwhile, with oil reserves dwindling, many are looking towards biofuels as the next best option for fueling America’s vehicles. But as the relationship between global warming and this summer’s drought shows, it can’t be as simple as substituting one fuel for another. Rather, our ability to adapt to climate change will be heavily impacted by climate change itself. Whether this summer’s RFS waiver dispute will result in meaningful changes to ethanol and energy use policy remains unclear; either way, climate change will increasingly demand these kinds of national conversations.

BARRY ELKINTON B’13

farms in Hell.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

THE SUBJECT SAM A Conversation with Sam Lipsyte Interview by Drew Dickerson Illustration by Diane Zhou

i first encountered Sam Lipsyte (’90) a little over a year ago after picking up The Ask, his third and most recent novel. Upon reading the rest of the writer’s available material, I was floored by how consistently dark and funny he remains throughout his body of work. The Lipsyte setting is institutional. The Lipsyte protagonist is the slack-jawed everyman. His substance and style are inextricable and his sentences feel as though they couldn’t be syntactically otherwise. Since 2001 saw the publication of his first novel, The Subject Steve, he has worked at a steady and impressive clip: his bibliography now includes three novels and a book of short stories with another collection, The Fun Parts, forthcoming next March. In 2011, HBO announced interest in People City, a television comedy to be developed

by Lipsyte. Though the project’s future is murky at present, rumblings of all variety are ongoing. We corresponded by email about sentence structure and the future.

The Independent: I believe I read somewhere that you were a Semiotics concentrator at Brown, though the department later changed its name to Modern Culture and Media.

What do you think the value of a theory-oriented education is? Would you say that your work is at all theoretically concerned?

Sam Lipsyte: Actually I was an English concentrator, with honors in creative writing, but I took a bunch of Semiotics classes. Some of the discourse rattled me at the time, and I resisted in playful ways, but it was all of enormous value.

It gave me a fresh worldview that seemed to corroborate what I was beginning to think and feel. I just needed a better grip on the old regime at the start. But that wasn’t theory’s problem. I was a reasonably bright, silly kid from New Jersey. I didn’t know shit. Most of the stuff I read as an undergrad didn’t really open up for me until later. And it informs my work quite a bit, both as something a few of my characters might have experienced in their own intellectual lives and as a force that helped shape their perspectives (as it often has mine).

SEPTEMBER 14 2012

Indy: Is anything happening on the People City front?

SL: Well, it seemed to be a corpse for a while, but now there are some odd stirrings. Not for TV, necessarily, but for something potentially far more interesting. We’ll see.

Indy: One complaint that people have about writing MFA programs is that it creates a uniform aesthetic. The advent of these programs maps pretty well with the rise of Raymond Carver style minimalism in the ‘80s. Does an MFA aesthetic exist and, if so, do you think that it is as Carverbeholden as some would like to paint it?

SL: Jesus, I’m usually pleasantly surprised when students have read Raymond Carver. I read him as a kid, but I think those days of Carver-worship are long past. When I first started teaching at Columbia everybody wanted to be Sebald. Then it was Bolaño. They also have a great interest in my old teacher, Gordon Lish, who edited those Carver stories that dominated MFA programs in the old days, along with publishing and teaching many amazing writers. But where I teach there are so many grad students in fiction that a house style is impossible. This is a boon. People can come at things from very different angles.

Indy: I’ve heard that you have a short story collection coming out in the near future. What can we expect to see in The Fun Parts?

SL: You will see a lot of the stories I’ve written recently, and a few older ones that people might have missed.

Indy: It feels like you—with other contemporary writers like George Saunders and Ben Marcus—are often categorized as humorous writers. What is your relationship to comedy? Do you think humor precludes attention paid to the well-crafted sentence on the part of the writer and/or reader? Where does the distinction between humor writer

and humorous writer of literary fiction begin and end?

SL: Are we categorized that way? I always think of the humor section in a bookstore. You know what I mean? The autobiographies of comedians, the book tie-ins for John Stewart or Colbert or The Onion. But that’s not what you mean, is it? I guess I get that sometimes, the idea that I’m a humor guy who happens to write books, but that’s not how I think of it. I’m a fiction writer, and my relationship to comedy is connected to my relationship to tragedy. I have tragic elements in my work, or if not technically tragic in the Greek sense, serious, sad elements, and I also employ comic elements. My novels are comic novels, but all good comic novels are quite serious. Robert Coover, a giant of literature who just retired from Brown, has written some of the funniest prose I’ve ever read. Saunders is a brilliant writer who along with his other gifts can be insanely funny. This helps deliver some of the most dire and moving stories we have. Marcus has a dry and wicked sense of humor in his work, but again, it’s in the service of his serious and affecting innovations. Rather than preclude attention paid to the sentence, writing something funny demands far more attention to every morpheme of a sentence than anything I can think of. You can always cobble together some borrowed ideas about the ‘way we live now’ and pile on the clunky, ponderous prose until you’ve squeezed readers into glazed submission. Often they’ll give you a prize for it. But for the brave, smart and, yes, often very funny writers, it’s always about attention paid to the line.

INTERVIEWS // 04

FROM CRADLE TO CAREER A Proposal to Improve Grade-Level Education

by Doreen St. Félix Illustration by Robert Sandler on the morning of august 20, nine-year-old Jeilin Guzman was still excited to be at the annual Back to School Celebration in the lot of the United Way in Olneyville, despite the wait in the steady rain. “I feel excited because [the organizers] are trying to help me learn better,” said Guzman. Guzman was one of hundreds of Providence-area students—ranging from elementary to high school age— who came out for the free event.

Parents crouched under umbrellas and students sheltered paper tickets in their white ponchos. The tickets, which the event organizers called passports, allowed for each student to “travel” through the Celebration. On her journey, Guzman got candy, books and a backpack. The backpacks she and other students received were heavy with school supplies. “I got all the things I need for school and I feel great,” said Guzman. Organizers estimate that over 16,000 backpacks were distributed at the Back to School Celebration’s eleven event sites throughout Rhode Island that day. The event was part of a larger initiative supported by the Providence Children and Youth Cabinet (CYC), consisting of over 100 officials in nonprofit organizations, government positions and businesses. Convened by Mayor Angel Taveras in early 2010, the CYC and its campaigns have recently garnered significant national attention regarding the goal of improving early childhood education by targeting grade-level reading. The translation of policy to practice, however, remains to be seen.

THE WAKE UP CALL

“mayor taveras is truly an education mayor and one can see this through his dedication to forming support networks for early education,” says Professor Kenneth Wong, Chair of the Education Department at Brown University and member of the CYC. As a response to the state of public education in Providence, the cabinet and the programs associated with it were developed in the early months of the Taveras administration. Public education was and remains in a state of crisis. In June 2011, Mayor Taveras and School Superintendent Susan Follett Lusi convened one such subgroup, called the Education Opportunity Working Group (EOWG), to provide an initial assessment of the challenges facing the Providence education system.

Over the next five months, members of the EOWG collected quantitative and qualitative data that would inform their final recommendations to the Mayor’s Office. Data they considered included analysis of school-by-school performance, low-income trends and parent involvement.

In a panel discussion at the Veazie Street Public School the following November, the group released its findings as a report called Educate Providence.

They delivered a sobering set of numbers: During the 2010-2011 academic year, 37 percent of Providence school district students were chronically absent—missing at least 18 days throughout the school year. By grade, the rate

05 // METRO

reaches a staggering 66 percent amongst Providence ninth graders. Students in grades K-3 were chronically absent at a rate of 22 percent, making Providence’s chronic early absence rate the second highest in the state. Forty-six percent of Providence fourth graders scored at or above proficiency in reading on the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP).

“This was a huge wake up call,” Angela Romans, Senior Education Advisor to the Mayor’s Office, told Golocalprov. com at the time of the report’s findings. Nearly one year after the report’s release, Romans views chronic absenteeism, as well literacy readiness and summer learning loss, as critical barriers towards improving the success of Providence students. “The most important predictor of school success and high school graduation is grade-level reading by the end of third grade,” Romans told the Independent.

“Poor students who read below grade level at the end of third grade are six times more likely to drop out of school without a diploma than students who read at grade level.

Falling behind early has consequences for years,” she says.

According to this marker, nearly half of the Providence fourth graders who could not read at grade level in 2011 may not graduate high school.

The language in the Educate Providence report articulates the idea that early childhood literacy is the key to successfully educating Providence. It recommends city-wide initiatives to move the needle of K-3 literacy up to 70% in 2015. The goals focus on ensuring, that all students, especially those who fall into a low-income bracket, are supported intellectually and emotionally so that they graduate from high school ready for college and careers.

When addressing the present system of public education, however, the report is blunt: “The current system is not preparing all students for life and career choices.” Yet it closes with hopeful rhetoric: “The children and youth in the City of Providence shall have access to a coordinated, integrated system of education…that is accountable to key academic social outcomes from ‘cradle to career.’”

THE STRATEGY

over the past 10 months, the city has introduced holistic reforms based on the report’s conclusions. The CYC has become a platform through which organizations and agencies working with children and youth can create a network to support education reform. Representatives from local early childhood education organizations, including RI Kids Count, Providence Community Libraries, and BrightStars partner with city officials with the intention of creating systematic support programs that translate policy into practice.

“This means we have to address the issues behind the numbers,” says Michelle Novello, Program Coordinator at the Providence Community Library. Novello works on the Grade Level Reading (GLR) subcommittee of the CYC, which focuses on improving summer learning programs

available to low-income students. Her approach is rehabilitative, to fill in the cracks in the fractured institution of summer learning. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Why is it that students aren’t attending these programs?’ And there are a lot of answers to that question. But one is simply that low-income families don’t have the resources to send their children to summer programs that middle class families can afford. When you think like that, then you start to make real change.” Novello has been instrumental in adding early drop-off and late pick-up at some of these free summer programs.

Locally and nationally, it’s the proposals coming out of the CYC that are getting the most attention. This past July, the plan to improve grade-level reading by the end of third grade, called Providence Reads, was one of fourteen national plans to receive the All-America City Award from the National League. The Casey Foundation awarded the Mayor’s office with a $300,000 grant to finance a technical support pilot program called Evidence2Success. At the July press conference announcing the Casey Foundation grant, Mayor Taveras said these plans are “raising the bar on public education in Providence.”

THE IMPLEMENTATION

while wong lauds the education initiative for its hopeful vision and its innovative use of evidence-based data for addressing the education crisis, he is eager for the Mayor’s office to take the next step. “The question now, in earnest, is implementation. When trying to put people towards the common goal [of improving early childhood education], we must not lose the importance of timing. The Mayor’s office must focus on challenging teachers to grow professionally, capitalizing on Providence’s healthy non-profit sector and seeking critical parental engagement,” says Wong.

Jean Pally, a parent of a Providence third-grader, follows the press releases from the Mayor’s office about the plan and its sub-proposals. “The language sounds great and its message is hopeful,” he says. “But I find very little actual policy in any of the literature. Education is an old problem here and it needs a new solution.” While the plan clearly articulates that childhood literacy is the key to students’ transition from learning to read to reading to learn, Pally finds that it lacks specific objectives towards meeting that goal.

Novello, both a parent and a member of the CYC, echoes Wong’s suggestion of engaging and educating parents. “When I had my children, I had no idea that simply reading to them helped prepare them for school. If kids aren’t reading now, they can’t learn and they can’t graduate later. They can’t get jobs. Period.”

DOREEN ST. FELIX B’14

never won any awards.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

st District Free-for-All Cicilline Gears Up for Round Two

by Jonathan Storch

after an unusually nasty primary campaign that ended on Tuesday, incumbent Congressman David Cicilline (D) finished with a decisive upper hand over his chief rival, Mediapeel marketing company CEO Anthony Gemma.

Cicilline will face retired police superintendent Brendan Doherty (R) in the 1st district general election this November.

Announcing his candidacy in April amid gutter-level approval ratings for Cicilline, Gemma appeared to have a decent shot at the nomination. He mounted a maverick campaign—going soft on advertising expenditures, he attempted instead to court voters with a nontraditional jobs plan and, later, persistent attacks on Cicilline’s personal credibility. Observers criticized the jobs plan, which was centered around a proposal to create 10,000 jobs by making Rhode Island the capital of the US wellness industry (think fitness centers and nutritional supplements).

The touchstone of the personal attacks was Cicilline’s 2010 statement as Providence mayor that the city was in “excellent financial condition,” a statement contradicted in 2011 by Mayor Angel Taveras’s announcement of a formerly unacknowledged $110 million budget deficit.

After repeatedly denying responsibility for the shortfall, Cicilline apologized to the public this April, but his reputation remains seriously damaged.

In the month before the primary, Gemma ramped up the attacks on Cicilline, challenging his mayoral record and introducing new attention-grabbing accusations. At a press conference on August 22, Gemma told reporters that a private investigation undertaken by former state police had discovered that Cicilline’s campaigns have been buying off voters ever since he ran for mayor of Providence.

“Either David Cicilline, beginning in 2002 and continuing to this day, knowingly committed voter fraud on a massive scale, or David Cicilline is so incompetent a leader that he cannot recognize the massive levels of criminality taking place before his very eyes,” Gemma declaimed. But he failed to provide evidence to substantiate the sensational charges, which appeared to lack prima facie plausibility, given Cicilline’s general popularity in 2002 and 2006. At the same press conference, Gemma subsequently alleged the existence of people “hiding in their attics with weapons because they’re afraid” of Cicilline. The Cicilline campaign dismissed the charges as “bizarre, ridiculous and untrue”; Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven Paré told GoLocalProv that the city was not worried about anyone’s safety. In the next several days, things looked like they could get interesting—a woman who claimed to be hiding in her attic got anonymous airtime on local talk radio, a current Gemma volunteer said she gave out money for

SEPTEMBER 14 2012

Cicilline in 2002—but as of election day, the hard evidence that Gemma had promised failed to come through. with or without evidence, Gemma got ugly headlines for Cicilline, but at the price of contributing to his own campaign’s reputation for sleaze. On election day, Ursula R. recounted Gemma’s appearance at her assisted living center off Pitman Street. “He was telling the elder citizens these fibs,” she recalled, about a “bus full of impostors” that Cicilline had brought to polling places. Apparently, any potential credulity on part of the residents was diminished by someone’s recollection that Gemma’s family plumbing company had overcharged him for a sink. “We had a big discussion of it at each dining room table,” Ursula said.

“It sounded as though he was willing to rip off seniors.”

Although Gemma came as close as four percentage points away from Cicilline in a May poll by WPRI, he was trailing by 12 percent just before the voter fraud allegations—still much closer than the 62-30 percent margin by which he lost on Tuesday. (A third candidate, the extremist Catholic Christopher Young, received eight percent of the vote.

Young is perhaps best known for proposing to his girlfriend during a televised mayoral debate in 2010, the video of which received international air time.)

Gemma appears to have at least lost this race fairly.

Tuesday’s election was the first to take place under a new state anti-voter fraud law, which requires prospective voters to present valid identification at the polling place. Critics of the law argue that it discriminates against poor and immigrant voters, who are less likely to have ID. Whether or not the law did in fact discourage potential voters from getting there to begin with, polling workers at the Fox Point Salvation Army said they hadn’t run into any problems. “There are a few people who’ve been unhappy about it, but all of them have had IDs,” said one official who declined to be named. “I think the people who were unhappy about it mostly just thought it was mean-spirited,” an exit poller added.

For its part, the Cicilline campaign attempted to maintain focus on national issues—Medicare, oil subsidies, public schools—on which he and Gemma both maintained liberal positions, while also casting aspersions on Gemma’s dubious progressive bona fides. An online ad for Cicilline exhorted voters to “Make sure we aren’t represented by a Carcieri supporter,” drawing attention to Gemma’s 2006 contributions to the Republican governor, whom Gemma viewed as the pro-business candidate. Cicilline received endorsements from former Congressman Patrick Kennedy, as well as Governor Lincoln Chafee, Senators Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, and the rest of Rhode Island’s

delegation to the DNC. But none of the delegation would endorse Cicilline’s management of Providence toward the end of his second term as mayor, the Providence Journal reported on September 8. through the primary campaign, Doherty mostly lay low, choosing to let his prospective opponents do the work of tearing into one another for him. But on Tuesday night his campaign went on the offensive: in a statement released after the results were in, his political director contrasted the “true leader” Doherty with Cicilline, “a career politician who has proven his willingness to mislead the people of Rhode Island for his own political gain.” Although Cicilline has far greater party muscle in heavily democratic Rhode Island, he currently trails Doherty in polls as well as cash reserves after spending almost $1.5 million in the contest against Gemma. That gives Doherty a nice head start, but he may soon find himself in a double bind: the Republican National Committee is eager to pump cash into the race to win a seat it hasn’t held in 18 years, and Doherty will need the money, but in order to appeal to Rhode Island voters, he’ll need to distance himself from the national Republican Party. In a September 12 press conference, he attempted twice to evade the question of whether the RNC has contributed to his campaign, before acknowledging that it has. (He’s come out against the massive Medicare cuts proposed by Paul Ryan, but on most issues, he sticks reliably to the platform.)

In any case, Gemma’s status as the anti-Cicilline candidate bodes well for Doherty—according to a WPRI poll two weeks ago, more than half of Gemma’s supporters say they’ll vote for Doherty in November. One of those supporters will likely be Mike, a Vietnam veteran who lives in Wayland Square. “I’m definitely voting for Obama, so I want him to have as much of a Democratic Congress as possible, but I’m still not voting for Cicilline,” he said on election day. “He was just unfaithful to the community.”

Even if the first district’s disgruntled Democrats can’t bring themselves to vote for the candidate Cicilline associated on Tuesday with “Washington Republicans and their radical agenda that will move our country backward,” they still have the option of lodging a protest vote with progressive independent David Vogel—or of not voting at all. In the end, the result of the 1st district general election will likely depend on what will appear to many voters as a choice between the lesser of two evils: the Republican Party, or David Cicilline.

JONATHAN STORCH B’14

was telling the elder citizens

these fibs...

METRO // 06

PART Y CITY Convention Time In Tampa

by Mary-Evelyn Farrior Illustration by Diane Zhou

i sat with my mother at an unusually deserted Outback Steakhouse in Tampa, Florida on the final Monday of August. This is not any Outback, its is the original Outback and, accordingly, a local landmark. Though so few patrons would not typically have been an exceptional event, that evening the Republican National Convention was in town, and 50,000 visitors had just descended upon the city—a near 15 percent increase in the city’s population for this week alone.

Everyone expected the deluge of visitors to cover every corner of the city. Stores miles away from the convention put political paraphernalia and elephant statuettes in their front windows. Meanwhile, nearly 5,000 delegates and 15,000 media affiliates were locked down in the convention area in downtown Tampa, hardly ever straying from a barricaded six block area.

The City of Tampa had assured its citizens that the convention would be a boon for the city. A Tampa-based research team estimated that the convention would bring $153.6 million directly into city’s economy. Everyone anticipated booming businesses and packed restaurants.

Yet as the convention arrived, none of it happened even as millions of dollars were funneled towards crafting a secure and indulgent convention for the delegates, Tampa residents were left questioning the convention’s intent within the city.

THE HOSTESS WITH THE MOSTESS

political conventions began in 1831, with the AntiMasonic party wishing to include more people in the nominee selection process than just a few elite within the party. Delegates from all economic and geographical areas gathered to cast ballot after ballot until a nominee was selected. After the advent of presidential primaries in the 1960s, the intent of the presidential nominating conventions was lost. Although primaries made the process more egalitarian, they left the delegates and conventions stripped of nearly all their purpose and power.

07 // FEATURES

While intense days of voting have been substituted for long nights of political rallying and celebrities talking to inanimate objects, cities still furiously compete to host conventions and all the people that come with them. After selecting a handful of cities based on political symbolism, logistics, and economics, the Republican National Committee then ask these cities to bid to host the convention. At that point, the cities’ host committees fiercely battle to have the chance to play host.

After being considered and ultimately passed over to host the 2004 and 2008 conventions, the Tampa Bay Host Committee finally enticed the Site Selection Committee in 2010. Tampa became the official host of the 2012 convention, beating out Salt Lake City and Phoenix. “Ultimately Tampa Bay presented the best mix of transportation infrastructure, lodging and dining options, cultural diversity, and of course our beautiful Florida climate,” said Florida National Committeewoman Sharon Day in a press release from the Republican Party of Florida.

Florida, of course, is also one of the most important swing states in the nation, having played a notoriously crucial role in the 2000 election. In every presidential election since 1996, the winner of Florida’s 27 electoral votes has also been the winner of the presidential election.

Additionally, Florida is home both to large populations of elderly citizens and to Hispanic communities: two groups that Romney needs to woo. Yet while the GOP’s motivations for choosing Tampa are relatively transparent, the city’s incentive to host the convention is less clear.

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, Tampa was named one of the top cities of opportunity by sources like U.S. News & World Report. Despite the hype, nothing really happened in Tampa. The haphazardly developed city became a mess of urban sprawl. But one man, Al Austin, never forgot the city’s potential. One of the most important builders and developers in Tampa since the ‘50s, Austin has been one of the area’s most important Republican fundraisers and has been a delegate or alternate at every Republican

convention since 1972. After working for 10 years to bring the convention to Tampa, Austin, at the noble age of 83, served as the chairman for the successful 2012 Tampa Bay Host Committee. “The goal was to help bring jobs here.

It will take a while to find out for sure how we did. I am absolutely, absolutely, positively 100 percent convinced we succeeded. Absolutely,” Austin told The Tampa Tribune.

The members of the Tampa Bay Host Committee wanted the exposure and the economic boost of the convention, hoping to make Tampa the city it was always supposed to be. After committing to hosting the RNC, the Tampa Bay Host Committee, a non-partisan and nonprofit group, was responsible for coming up with the $55 million it cost to stage the RNC. The Committee hired national fundraisers, crossed party lines, and emphasized the corporate branding opportunity of the convention, and the Tampa Bay Host Committee managed to raise all the money before the last days of the convention.

The Democratic National Convention put self-imposed limits on their spending, intended to highlight Obama’s commitment to take money out of politics. As a result, the Charlotte Host Committee was responsible for raising only $36.7 million, a near $20-million difference from the 2008 convention in Denver. For both parties, this money comes in addition to the $18,248,300 in public grants that each received specifically for the conventions from the Federal Election Commission as part of the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, which comes from an optional $3 tax check off box on income forms. Neither party uses the over $500 million they each has raised for the campaign to subsidize their convention.

MAKING IT RAIN, OR THE LACK THEREOF

after the dribbles of rain that came when Hurricane Isaac passed over Florida, the weather was particularly humid that last week in August as the RNC took over downtown Tampa. The air, so dense after storms as to be palpable, worked in tandem with the sun, causing

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

temperatures in the 90s. This led many to believe that Tampa had been selected in part for its dreadful, hurricaneseason weather, perhaps as an effort to deter protests.

Expecting disastrous protests, many neighborhoods were left oddly quiet as many residents fled town, expecting disastrous protests and tourist-thronged streets. Instead they were all closed off in an area known as the “perimeter.”

The perimeter formed a closed circle that expanded roughly three blocks in every direction from the epicenter of the RNC, the Tampa Bay Time Forum and the Tampa Convention Center. The Secret Service lined the perimeter with miles of concrete, steel, eight-feet-high anti-scale, and thousands of police officers from all over Florida.

“When I first approached the perimeter, the first time, I thought I was in a war zone. So many police, National Guard, Secret Service, all in full combat gear. It was sort of eerie. This is the United States of America, and here we are in a lockdown,” said Rhode Island delegate John Robitaille. Both Tampa and Charlotte were given $50 million federal grants for convention security, with Tampa using the majority of its money to pay 3,500 police officers overtime. No one could get near the perimeter without the proper credentials and a clean pass through many security checkpoints, meaning Tampa residents had to run the gauntlet to participate in any RNC activities or events.

Once inside the perimeter, it was incredibly difficult to exit and reenter.

Ultimately, very few delegates actually ventured into Tampa proper. Businesses near the convention were bracing for packed restaurants and crowded streets, but instead found downtown deserted and difficult to access due to the perimeter’s road closures and security checkpoints.

Tampa spent $2.7 million in beautification projects for the RNC; although many projects had been placed on hold during the economic recession. Yet Tampa did not receive the airtime it anticipated—instead, all eyes were on the perimeter.

SEPTEMBER 14 2012

While millions were spent on the RNC, the money tended to go to national contracting companies rather than local businesses. “I went from 30,000 people walking by my store every day and having plenty of customers to basically having zero - except for law enforcement, curiosity seekers and a few actual conventioneers,” Robert Szasz, the manager of Tropical Smoothie Cafe, told The Associated Press. Many businesses in the downtown area, Tampa’s economic hub, chose to shut down for the week, expecting the tight security and closed roads to be too great a nuisance. “The biggest thing that no one talks about is the impact on law firms and banks and everything downtown like ours. We’re losing a week. It’s going to be a big cost to people in and around downtown,” said Tampa native Tom Gonzalez.

Many delegates, like those from Rhode Island, were staying close to 30 miles away from downtown Tampa and were bused in on nearly 400 charter buses. The buses would drop them off at the perimeter and then swiftly pick them up once the speeches were finished for the night.

The Rhode Island delegates ended up on the infamous lost bus; the driver took a wrong turn, and they ended up circling the perimeter for three hours. But others, like the Massachusetts delegates, stayed with Romney inside or near the perimeter, enjoying nightly concerts and parties. “I had a blast. There are times when you get to middle-age and where you think you will never have the time of your life and be out to 2am dancing. We got two hours of sleep last night! … Too much fun. We didn’t want it to end,” said Massachusetts alternate delegate Patricia Saint Aubin following the close of the convention.

With most of the keynote speeches ending far int the evening, the late night was when the delegates came alive, allowing one area of Tampa’s industries to thrive. Businesses from strip clubs to caterers saw an economic gain from the convention. Parties ranged from open-list to invite only— like the Back to Reagan ‘80s party hosted by Americans

for Tax Reform—to thousand-dollar-per-plate fundraising meals, many of which were put on by companies hoping to get some assistance from delegates in legislation. The hotspots for Tampa’s elite, places like the Tampa Yacht Club and Merrymakers Club, charged five figures to be rented out for the night. Many places downtown were rented out until 4 am, leaving those Tampa residents hoping to continue working for the week to go to work in the early hours of morning while the delegate were still sleeping off the night before.

CASHING OUT

the debt clock proudly displayed in the Tampa Bay Times Forum struck $8,539,526,393.07 at the end of the convention—the total national debt had increased by millions in the time of the convention alone. While the presidential nominees argue over ways to eliminate the debt, their campaigns—the most expensive in history—continue on. Tampa was enticed by the prospect of benefiting from this excessive political spending, but ultimately residents and business owners were left disappointed. By the end of the week, Tampa—which hosts an annual parade in which invading pirates are handed the keys to the city—was ready to reclaim its city. The pirates might make better guests than the Republican National Convention did.

MARY-EVELYN FARRIOR B’14 surrounds

herself with eight-

feet-tall, anti-scale fences

FEATURES // 08

by Ellora Vilkin illustration by Robert Sandler

PREGNANCY, ADDICTION, AND CHOICE

by Ellora Vilkin // Illustration by Robert Sandler

09 // FEATURES

the woman’s prerecorded voice sounds tired, slightly nasal. “Hello and thank you for caring enough to call Project Prevention. We hope this will be the first of many more responsible decisions you will soon be making,” she says.

“We pay for tubal ligations, Essure, Implanon, and IUDs for women, and only vasectomies for men.” She rattles off instructions: speak slowly spelling your name and address, wait for forms and instructions in the mail. As soon as your doctor or clinic verifies that you’ve undergone the procedure and submit arrest records proving past or current addiction, you will receive payment. Among the directives, a warning: “If you want to be paid cash, you do so at your own risk.”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

This is (888) 30-CRACK, the hotline for a North Carolina-based nonprofit that offers drug and alcohol addicts $300 to undergo sterilization or adopt long-term birth control. The tired voice belongs to Barbara Harris, 59, who founded the group in 1994 as Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (CRACK) after she adopted the first of four children from a crack-addicted Los Angeles mother.

Now called Project Prevention, the volunteer-run organization operates in major cities nationwide, posting flyers in homeless shelters, clinics, and what Harris calls “drug areas”—usually poor or minority neighborhoods.

One flyer, the kind often stapled to telephone poles, shows a close-up of a scrunchy-faced newborn under the words “She has her daddy’s eyes…and her mommy’s heroin addiction.” Another says, “Don’t let a pregnancy ruin your drug habit”; another, “Get Birth Control, Get Ca$h.”

Project Prevention’s controversial advertising has garnered plenty of press—Harris also drives around the country in an RV-cum-mobile billboard papered with pictures of dead infants, razor blades, and lines of crack—including features in Time, The Fix, and on CNN, among others.

Critics of the group have included the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW), the American Civil Liberties Union, and Planned Parenthood, along with bioethicists and others who claim that Project Prevention targets poor and minority communities. The group has been accused of racism, exploitation, and even of practicing eugenics. Harris brushes off the criticism. She told Time in 2010, “What makes a woman’s right to procreate more important than the right of a child to have a normal life?” project prevention offers its clients a choice of birth control—addicts can opt for Implanon, a hormonal contraceptive inserted beneath the skin of the upper arm, intra-uterine devices (IUD), or the Depo Provera shot, all of which are temporary. Until recently, the group paid clients only $200 for these procedures, as opposed to $300 for permanent forms of birth control: vasectomies for men and tubal ligations or Essure, a pair of rods inserted into the fallopian tubes, for women. Once the client has called Project Prevention, decided on a method of birth control with their doctor or clinic, and submitted proof of the procedure, they receive payment. Critics like the Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment (CWPE) say the money offer exploits vulnerable men and women and threatens their reproductive choices.

Asked why the group focused its advertising in lowerincome neighborhoods, a Chicago Project Prevention volunteer said that the cash “appeals more to the poor than it does to the rich,” making it “more practical to post fliers in areas where poor people live and congregate,” according to a CWPE report. As of last May, Project Prevention had sent checks to all 50 states, with a total of 4,097 paid addicts—1,507 of who had been sterilized. accusations of racism have dogged the group since its inception. To date, about 53 percent of Project Prevention’s clients have been white, 24 percent black, and 12 percent Hispanic—numbers that don’t seem to suggest racial targeting. But as NAPW Executive Director Lynn Paltrow pointed out in a 2002 critique, Project Prevention treats a larger proportion of men and women of color, who make up 47 percent of their clientele, than is reflected in the national population, where non-whites comprise about 28 percent, according to the 2010 census.

In response to these claims, Harris often points out that both her husband and four adopted children are black.

“If you hear about what we’re doing and just assume that only black women are calling, then that makes you a racist,” Harris told the Independent in a phone interview this week. Before starting Project Prevention, Harris says she maintained an organization for interracial families in the Los Angeles area.

In all, Harris has 10 kids ranging in age from 19 to 40. Harris’s adopted daughter Destiny, 22, has written in support of her mother’s work on the group’s website. Son Isaiah, 21, spent the summer travelling the Southern states

SEPTEMBER 14 2012

in the RV that serves as the group’s touring operation.

“If you’re a drug addict, we’re looking for you, and I don’t care what color you are,” Harris told The Fix last May. “We don’t even know what color your baby will be, because often these babies come out all different colors, you know what I mean? They’re mixed.”

“I think the racist claims are completely unfounded,” said Robert Pugsley, a professor of criminal law at Los Angeles’s Southwestern Law School, in a phone call to the Independent. “It’s the conduct of the person—the addict— not their racial, ethnic, or gender issues. It’s the conduct of the addict and their irresponsibly bringing a child into the world that they cannot care for.”

Yet a video released by NAPW last May suggests that pregnancy can be a positive motivator for addicts to get clean. Harris, however, is dismissive: “It doesn’t matter how many women I offer drug treatment to, if they’re not at that point in their life, they’re not going to do it. Of over 4,000 women, not one has taken me up on it.” though pugsley serves as one of several academics on the board of Project Prevention, he doesn’t agree with Harris on all counts. “I don’t believe in criminalizing somebody who is an addict and carrying a child,” said Pugsley. “Not every baby born to an addicted person is going to come out to be a three-headed monster.” In the early 1990s, Harris helped draft the Prenatal Neglect Act, legislation that would have made it a crime to give birth to a child with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or addiction. It was after that legislation failed that she started CRACK, hoping to fight the problem at its root.

“Those resources we do have are spent to prevent a problem for $300 rather than paying millions after it happens in cost to care for a potentially damaged child,” explains the Project Prevention website. The group’s mission is “to reduce the burden of this social problem on taxpayers, trim down social worker caseloads, and alleviate from our clients the burden of having children that will potentially be taken away.”

This rhetorical emphasis on reducing welfare costs harkens back to the Reagan era, when the rise of social conservatism made the dole a dirty word. “This image of dysfunctional poor families, particularly poor families of color, became a really crucial trope for the conservative anti-welfare movement,” explains historian and Brown Professor Robert Self. “The idea was that these were women who were addicted to crack and had no visible means of support.” Self explains. “I think that fit the larger conservative narrative of pathological women of color living off of the state.”

While Harris says her funding comes from all over the political spectrum, some of her biggest donors include Richard Mellon Scaife’s ultra-conservative Allegheny Foundation and former talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger. “I’ve never had to go and look for money. It’s found me,” said Harris. She says donors like giving to Project Prevention because they see tangible results. “If you donate to a homeless organization, they’re going to always be feeding the homeless. Most agencies that you donate to don’t prevent a problem, they’re just serving a problem. And with us, we take care of it—problem solved.” “of all the risks to future children, among the smallest numerically is the use of any illegal drug,” NAPW Executive Director Lynn Paltrow told The Fix in May. “Compared to poverty, lack of access to prenatal care, obesity, cigarette smoking, we’re talking relatively few women.”

Illicit drug use by pregnant women is lower at 5.2 percent than use of alcohol (11.6 percent) or tobacco (16.4 percent), according to the Department of Health and Human Services. And in 2009, the New York Times reported that while “cocaine is undoubtedly bad for the fetus,” its effects “are less severe than those of alcohol and are comparable to those of tobacco.”

Yet Project Prevention stresses the extreme harm done to children of addicts, paying far less attention to the treatment of struggling parents. “There nothing wrong with

facilitating people doing things they want to do,” Paltrow told CNN. “What’s wrong is stereotyping a whole group of people and saying…that there’s a class of people who are dangerous by procreating.”

Such critiques echo back to the early twentieth century, when eugenics gained popularity as the idea that certain populations, particularly the non-white and the poor, should not reproduce. Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger was one early supporter, endorsing a combination of breeding techniques and birth control to keep ‘illiterate’ and ‘degenerate’ populations low. “This was all bound up with a whole set of ideas from that era that the ‘lesser races’ were reproducing faster than the ‘superior races,’” explains Self.

From 1907 through the 1930s, 27 states passed compulsory sterilization laws. By 1980, more than 63,000 African Americans, Native Americans, poor, and mentally and physically disabled persons had been forcibly sterilized under official state programs, historian Mark Largent wrote in his 2008 book Breeding Contempt. Oregon was the last state to retire its Eugenics Board, in 1983, with the last forced sterilization occurring in 1981. This summer, North Carolina became the first state to indemnify victims of forced sterilization, offering each survivor $50,000.

Some of Harris’s own language is scarily reminiscent. She has famously compared the women she serves to animals, telling the Telegraph, “We don’t allow dogs to breed. We neuter them. We try to keep them from having unwanted puppies, and yet these women are literally having litters of children.” In a subsequent interview, Harris used the dog metaphor again. “It’s the truth—they don’t just have one and two babies, they have litters.”

For critics like Paltrow, it’s language like this that’s hard to come back from. “You label their kids as damaged—many of whom aren’t—and you label all people who have a variety of drug problems as people who shouldn’t have children,” she told CNN. The problem, Paltrow says, is “the information that [Harris] suggests, that drug users are all irresponsible, they all have damaged babies.”

But Harris’s own family counters that idea. “Most kids aren’t as fortunate as my four,” Harris says. “I have two, Destiny and Isaiah, who are doing great. And I have two who have issues, who are in therapy and on medication. It’s a gamble.” in 1974, the us district court in the District of Columbia ruled in Reif v. Weinberger that federally assisted sterilizations could only be performed voluntarily and with the full knowledge and consent of the individual. “Even a fully informed individual,” the court wrote in its decision, “cannot make a ‘voluntary’ decision concerning sterilization if he has been subjected to coercion.” Because so many of Project Prevention’s clients lack healthcare, the procedures are often covered by Medicaid. This means the group’s work is legal, so long as the addicts who contract with them make an informed, voluntary decision.

It’s here that Judith M. Scully, Associate Professor at the West Virginia University College of Law, takes issue with Project Prevention. “It is difficult to imagine,” she wrote in a 2000 publication for Hampshire College, “how anyone can honestly claim that informed consent exists in a sterilization scenario where cash incentives are being offered to low-income drug-addicted women.”

While one solution might be for Project Prevention to offer its services for free, Harris is skeptical. “Think about it,” Harris says. “Birth control is already free, so if [addicts] were all going and getting it, we wouldn’t have this problem….Yes, you have to bribe them, or whatever you want to call it, to get them to be responsible. But it’s a win-win for them as well.” For Harris, it comes down to the children. “People say, you know, that then they use their money to buy drugs. They’re going to buy drugs with or without us, and that’s their choice. But the babies don’t have a choice.”

ELLORA VILKIN B’14 fills in the gap.

FEATURES // 10

YOU DON’T GET PUSSY RIOT 11 // ARTS

How Pussy Riot’s Been Both Overblown and Underestimated

by Christina McCausland Illustration by Diane Zhou chloe sevigny reading an activist’s letters to a crowd of people who describe themselves as “secretaries by day, arts activists by night” at New York City’s Ace Hotel isn’t exactly the image of political radicalism. But this scene is typical of the approach to August’s media outrage following the arrest and subsequent trial of Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova for their 40-second “flash” lip-sync performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior in February. The incident’s appeal to the West was evident in everything from your friends’ Facebook statuses to Madonna’s August performance in Moscow. The singer performed with the words “Pussy Riot” written on her back after speaking briefly about her endorsement of the women, who on August 17th were sentenced to two years in prison by Russian authorities.

The nature of enthusiasm for this group deserves the critical backlash it has received—popular support for Pussy Riot means the watering down of a powerful political dissidence.

Aside from their feminism and demands for free speech, the group also identifies as anarchists and Trotskyists, hard left politics that are probably more radical than what the attendees at the Ace Hotel reading are interested in supporting. This problem of oversimplification arises from the primary misunderstanding that the group is primarily a punk band. Though their performances are musical acts, to identify Pussy Riot—perhaps best described as an activist art collective—as a “feminist punk band” is to severely understate their actions and mission. several of pussy riot’s members were once part of another Russian activist art collective called Voina, a group that since 2006 has been staging what, in the context of performance art, might be called interventions or interruptions—events through which the group seeks to disrupt everyday experience in order to make its injustices or habitualizations more recognizable. These terms recall the roots of performed activism, which has historically had elements of pranksterism and incendiary confrontation in equal measure. Well-worn examples include Abbie Hoffman, founder of the Youth International Party, a 1960’s anti-war group (“Yippies”), and author of Steal This Book. He famously led his group to the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, from which they threw both fake and real dollars onto the trading floor below, where some traders scrambled frantically to collect the money. The Situationists—a group of European revolutionaries that reached its peak in the late ‘60s—insisted on art’s power to make political statements and did so partly through their concept of détournement, which refers to turning the symbols of the system against itself, an act that is now familiar to us as culture jamming.

A group of feminist artists called the Guerrilla Girls, whom Pussy Riot has been continually compared to, makes and (often illegally) posts provocative posters, stickers, and billboards to communicate the injustice they see in the mainstream art world (most famously, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?”).

Voina’s stunts have ranged from street protests to vandalism, and they often tread into the realm of the absurd. In an early Voina act, group members celebrated 2007’s International Workers’ Day by throwing stray cats over the counter at a McDonald’s in Moscow. According to members of the group, the action was meant to be a literal interruption, a way to break up the monotony of the workers’ routine day. Voina is also responsible for the wellpublicized public orgy (“Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear!”) in

February 2008, wherein five couples—including Tolokonnikova and her husband—had sex in a Moscow biology museum on the eve of the election of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. The group’s actions tend to defy a single or clear interpretation; they insist on defining their acts as interruptions or events, as (usually) violent (not necessarily physically) confrontational moments for disrupting the day-to-day of Russian politics.

Pussy Riot, which formed in August 2011 after splitting from Voina, has taken on a narrower tactic, confining the form of their political action to unsanctioned and unannounced provocative punk performances, which are videotaped and later edited to for the Internet. In the last month, their videos have received a degree of critical attention incongruous with the seriousness of the music’s production. According to the Associated Press, critics and listeners have lambasted their six songs as “amateur, provocative, and obscene” while the A.V. club described them as an “excellent band.” Due to their punk rock sound and feminist identification, Western coverage often compares Pussy Riot to Riot grrrl, a musical debt the group acknowledges, though in an interview with Vice, group members added that their action occurs “in an absolutely different context and with an exaggerated political stance, which leads to all of the performances being illegal.” And, as Michael Idov, editor-in-chief of GQ Russia, pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, “judging [Pussy Riot’s music] on artistic merit would be like chiding the Yippies because Pigasus the Immortal, the pig they ran for president in 1968, was not a viable candidate.” the aesthetic elements of their act do, however, demand a reading inasmuch as they are closely united with the group’s rhetoric and appeal. Their name obviously recalls Riot grrrl, as well as a sort of feminist reappropriation of the term ‘pussy’—as one of the group’s members told Vice, “a female sex organ, which is supposed to be receiving and shapeless, suddenly starts a radical rebellion against the cultural order.” Their balaclava-assured anonymity means that their slogan, “We are all Pussy Riot,” feels plausible. And choosing to communicate through music with forthrightly political lyrics (there’s little mistaking the meaning behind a song titled “Holy Mother, Drive Putin Away”) means that their performances need no interpretation; unlike Voina’s absurd excess, Pussy Riot’s act gets right to the point. And it’s not as if the apparently easy appeal of Pussy Riot is necessarily a bad thing—indeed, worldwide attention is part of the desired effect of protest. The details that make them so easily digestible are bluntly measured to do so, and it’s difficult to argue against widespread support for them, even if it is based on a cursory understanding.

CHRISTINA MCCAUSLAND B’12.5

is amateur, provocative,

and obscene.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

me ltin

ad

he

is Li Gang!

T

M

yD

g

of Jin Sha s u ll n’s a h p

by C Illus laudia N tratio o n by rton Dian e Zh

ou

jin shan’s first show in the US consisted of a mock-up of the cosmos under which a silicone policeman dangled, periodically slamming into the floor. The exhibition, held at the Spencer Museum of Art of the University of Kansas, examined Chinese state authority and the Mandate of Heaven, a concept equivalent to the divine right of kings.

Apparently, a few days after the exhibition began, professors who worked underneath the gallery’s floor organized together in protest.

My Dad is Li Gang!, which will be shown in the Bell Gallery until November 4, is Jin Shan’s second show in the US. Born in Jiangsu, China, Jin Shan now lives and makes art in Shanghai. Jin is known for being playful, employing dark humor and satire rather than direct statements.

Jin thinks of himself as a court jester, a subject employed to amuse and criticize his master and his master’s actions.

Jin explained that because the heavy political climate in China isn’t going to shift anytime soon, he makes art to soften people’s emotions. As a politically minded artist, Jin at once brings light to social ills and makes light of them.

Jin, while speaking about his philosophy, had trouble translating this idea of “self-laugh” into English. “You must have a word for this,” he implored on stage at the opening reception of the exhibition last Friday. Laughter as catharsis is present in his previous work. With Desperate Pee (2005), Jin constructed a silicone cast of his own body and placed it in different settings, allowing the mannequin to urinate on and into various objects: a Venetian canal, school desks, bubble wrap.

Like his better-known contemporary Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist-dissident known for his run-ins with the Chinese authorities, Jin uses Chinese politics as the subject of his art. While Weiwei is a vocal human rights activist, Jin seems to fly under the radar of the Chinese government, or if he doesn’t, he wouldn’t admit it. When asked if My Dad is Li Gang! could be shown in China, he told the Independent that maybe he’d have to change the name of the piece. Such a blasé attitude toward the government’s censorship of his work likely comes from the fact that Jin Shan has not yet reached great renown. Also, while Jin critiques power and authority in his pieces, he was more tight-lipped about the subject in front of an audience at the opening last Friday, letting the art speak for itself.

The title of Jin’s piece at the Bell Gallery, My Dad is Li Gang! is a reference to a string of events that began at

SEPTEMBER 14 2012

Hebei University in Baoding, China. On October 16, 2010 22-year-old Li Qiming was intoxicated, late, and rushing to pick up his girlfriend in his car when he hit two women rollerblading down the street. Refusing to stay at the scene despite efforts from campus police, he sped off, stopping to shout “Go ahead, sue me if you dare; My dad is Li Gang!”

The next day, one of the women died. Li Qiming’s father was the deputy police chief in Beishi, Baoding. Following the incident, University students and the public at large rebuked Li Qiming for his shamelessness and expectations of impunity. Hebei University and communist party officials took steps to limit coverage of the accident, as exemption from consequences based on social or economic privilege isn’t exactly in keeping with communist standards.

Although the university implemented a gag order for witnesses and Chinese news networks refused to report the event, the story crept onto the Internet.

The Chinese Internet community attached strongly to the story, as it exemplified a lamentable trend in China’s socio-political sphere: corruption and the privileged class’s lack of accountability. So they fought back against the censorship, employing a technique known as ‘Human Flesh Search Engine,’ a crowd-sourced search for information about a person: a search by flesh, of/for flesh. Dubbing this particular campaign ‘Official Second-Generation,’ a reference to the offspring of the class of privileged officials, ‘the people’s’ search engine uncovered evidence of Li Gang’s corruption by revealing his ownership of five properties, assets whose values clearly exceeded the means of a man of his profession. The search engine also uncovered personal photos of Li Qiming that were later posted on the Internet.

On October 22, China Central Television aired the public apology of Li Qiming and Li Gang. Both men were shown crying. Instead of placating the public, the apology and its broadcast by a network known for its close ties with the communist party put off many Chinese who assumed the redress was insincere. Despite expectations that Li Qiming would not be held accountable for his mistake, he was arrested on October 24, sentenced the following January to six years in prison, and ordered to pay reparations. This event, while disconcerting due to Li Qiming’s blatant abuse of his familial power and authority to evade punishment for his crimes, also indicates a growing political efficacy facilitated by the Internet and crowdsourcing.

in my dad is li gang!, Jin Shan works with concepts of power and privilege, along with complications around national technological advance at the expense of the common worker. My Dad is Li Gang!, which will be shown in the Bell Gallery until November 4, is one extended work.

In the center of the gallery stands a mirror-clad replica of the Tiangong 1, or Heavenly Palace 1, launched in September 2011 as China’s first space station. The craft is wedged in a pile of ooze while the upper-most cylinder of the space station rotates clockwise underneath a replica of a three-wheeled bicycle, the type commonly ridden by the urban poor of China. Jin’s version of the bike is covered in melted glue. The bicycle is missing its two rear wheels, as if peddling would not propel the cyclist forward, but would power the space station instead. As the cylinder of the Tiangong 1 rotates, light refracts from its mirrors, suggesting, as Ian Russell, the curator of the Bell Gallery, puts it, a cosmic “socio-political disco party.” A series of burnt, wooden hands, cast from workers in Shanghai who typically ride the bicycles, grasp the handlebars and frame of the bike tightly. Around the centerpiece are four walls constructed from American lumber and dented plaster, beaten with casts of the hands of the bicycle-riding, working poor.

June of this year marked the first time a manned space capsule docked at Tiangong 1. This event holds significance for many Chinese, indicating China’s technological capabilities and its position in the space race. Jin’s pairing of the masculine, technological object with white and yellow goo indexes China’s ‘arrival.’ The high-tech craft garnering with national pride beneath the tool of the marginalized laborer forms a critique of power. While the bicycle consists of glue, the space station’s many mirrored surfaces pervert and shatter the images that reflect into it. Everything is falling apart. Despite this, burnt hands still grasp the tool with which they work.

CLAUDIA NORTON B’14

is disappointed by the way that lil’

Gang rose to stardom.

ARTS // 12

TRADING RACES Economics and Ethnicity in Professional Sports

by Sam Rosen Illustration by Diane Zhou

this summer, two transactions made history in their respective sports. In the MLB, the Los Angeles Dodgers acquired first baseman Adrian Gonzalez from the Boston Red Sox in unprecedented fashion, agreeing to take on two colossally overpaid, washed-up veterans in order to land the superstar slugger. All told, the deal cost the Dodgers— who sent Boston five young prospects in return— a quarter billion dollars. The Red Sox, mired in their worst season in decades and looking for a fresh start, jumped at the opportunity to unload their most cumbersome contracts, even if it meant losing Gonzalez. For the Dodgers, it was the largest trade in franchise history.

In the NBA, another big name switched teams, albeit in a very different way. After a dazzling season that saw him go from bench-warming Harvard alum to the toast of New York, Jeremy Lin seemed a lock to return to the Knicks. At the start of the off season, Knicks coach Mike Woodson told ESPN that Linsanity would “absolutely” be returning to Madison Square Garden. Five days later, Lin was a member of the Houston Rockets. Houston had offered Lin a sizeable, back-loaded contract that the Knicks felt overestimated Lin’s value, and New York refused to match the offer.

Both transactions will have significant impacts on the performance of all the teams involved, but their importance goes beyond Xs and Os. In trading for Gonzalez, Los Angeles brought the biggest Mexican-American ballplayer to the city with the most Mexican-Americans; by letting Lin walk, New York banished the first-ever Asian-American basketball star from the city with the most Asian-Americans. To understand (partly) why each decision was made, we have to look at the economic structures of the MLB and the NBA. Major League Baseball is the only major American sports league without a salary cap, which means that there is no limit on how much a team can spend annually on its roster. Instead of a cap, the MLB has a luxury tax system— each year the league sets an amount of money that teams can spend on players without having to pay a tax. If a team’s spending exceeds this number, it’s taxed a percentage of the excess amount. The luxury tax system is completely

ineffective when it comes to regulating spending—it’s the economic equivalent of ordering a Diet Coke with your two Baconators because you’re trying to watch your figure.

There are a handful of teams who spend outlandishly on the best talent, and the rest of the league is left with the dregs. This year, the Yankees will spend roughly $198 million on player salaries—the three next-best teams in their division will spend $220 million combined. The NBA, on the other hand, has a “soft” salary cap, which means that while there’s a limit on total payroll, there are many exceptions that allow teams to exceed the cap (often these exceptions exist to help small-market teams retain their stars).

The wealthiest teams still find ways to spend more than the competition, but pro basketball doesn’t have nearly the economic inequality of America’s pastime. in baseball, then, every dollar has a heightened value, because every bit of revenue a team takes in—from TV ads to jerseys to soft pretzels— can be used to improve the roster. This is true in the NBA to a much lesser extent.

When the Dodgers decided to take Boston’s bad contracts in exchange for Gonzalez, it was widely reported that they did so partly because they predicted that the economic jolt they could get from Mexican and Mexican-American fans would help them recoup the total cost of the deal.

Certainly, Los Angeles did not trade for Adrian Gonzalez just because he’s Mexican-American—he’s one of the best hitters in the game and just entering his prime. His ethnicity was, however, considered by the Dodgers to be a plus for reasons that were at least partly economic. In contrast to Gonzalez, Jeremy Lin’s Asian-ness does not directly help the Knicks acquire better players. Regardless of where he plays, Lin’s off-court earning potential is enormous because of what he means to many Asian and Asian-American fans.

The Rockets will almost certainly bring in more money with Lin than they did without him—but that won’t do anything to change the salary cap. At the end of last season, Lin was a restricted free agent, meaning that in order to retain him the Knicks simply had to match any contract offer made to Lin by another team. If Jeremy Lin had a baseball equivalent, the $25 million offer from Houston

that New York eventually balked at would be a tremendous act of lowballing—with the money he generates, you could overhaul an entire roster. The presence of the salary cap, then, greatly diminishes the importance of an athlete’s offcourt value, value that is often tied to ethnicity.1 Situations like those of Gonzalez and Lin are noteworthy, but they aren’t entirely unprecedented. For 12 years the Seattle Mariners benefitted from what was commonly referred to as the “Ichiro Effect,” the sizeable influx of Japanese and Japanese-Americans coming to Seattle to see Ichiro Suzuki, a superstar outfielder from Japan. When Ichiro, now in the twilight of his career, was recently traded to the Yankees, the Seattle Times reported that the city, which receives more tourists from Japan than any other country, could take a sizeable economic hit from his departure. Makoto Ogasawara, who runs a company that organizes tours of Seattle for Japanese visitors, is bracing for a major slump in business “now that his main draw is a Yankee.” The Ichiro trade is evidence that the economic importance of ethnicity has its limits even in the MLB. The Mariners traded Ichiro not because he no longer brings in fans, but because he simply isn’t that good anymore.

As Seattle was saying goodbye to its longtime icon, the Miami Marlins were hoping to add one of their own. The most recent baseball offseason revolved around one free agent: former St. Louis Cardinal Albert Pujols, who, in all likelihood, will end his career as one of the ten best players in the history of the game. Going into the offseason, St. Louis was considered a heavy favorite to re-sign its franchise player, and reaffirmed its commitment to Pujols, who is Dominican-American, by offering him a $200 million contract. Shortly afterwards, the Miami Marlins shocked the baseball world with a gargantuan offer that approached, after incentives, $300 million. In a purely baseball sense, this was considered a very risky move. Despite his undeniable greatness, Pujols is old in baseball years (he’ll turn 33 in January) and may have peaked already. The Marlins, however, were thinking big-picture. As CBS Miami reported, “the Marlins were wiling to go all in on Pujols not only for his baseball value, but for his marketing value to Latin America and Latin American companies based in 1. It’s important to remember that people rarely (if ever) buy sports franchises to generate income. Almost always, people who own teams care more about winning than making money off of the franchise.

13 // SPORTS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Miami.” Pujols eventually signed with the LA Angels, but Miami’s massive bid remains a prime example of the interplay between economics and ethnicity in the MLB. The NBA instituted a salary cap before the 1984-85 season. Only two years later, the new regulations may have contributed to a decision that would affect the league for years to come. The Indiana Pacers had the eleventh overall pick the 1987 NBA draft, and its fans had made it very clear whom they were supposed to select. Steve Alford had been a high school star in nearby New Castle, Indiana and had just led the Indiana University Hoosiers to the NCAA title, becoming the storied program’s all-time leading scorer in the process. He was white, clean-cut, and absolutely adored in the area. When the Pacers selected a lanky, black UCLA guard named Reggie Miller, fans in Indiana were apoplectic. Miller was greeted in his new city with boos and racial slurs. Eventually, though, the city came around: Alford started only three games throughout a disappointing career; Miller became, by far, the greatest Indiana Pacer ever and helped thrust the team into the league’s elite. Just this week he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

In a recent interview, then-Pacers General Manager Donnie Walsh listed all the reasons he chose Miller over Alford.

His account of the decision was full of small basketball details, but featured no mention of off-court value. It’s very

possible that had the NBA still been cap-free in 1987, the short-term economic advantages of selecting Alford would have made Miller a less attractive option.

If all of this sounds a little crass and bizarre, it’s because it kind of is. For one, the act of swapping one human being for another would be revolting in any other context. It’s easier to process the uprooted families and the lack of autonomy when we remember that these people get paid seven figures to play sports. Still, though, there’s a sterile quality to the way we talk about trades. The stories following a big deal are always about how the players will fit with their new teams or the trade’s impact on the playoff forecast. No one cares that Adrian Gonzalez’s kids had to change schools in the middle of August. Things get even messier when ethnicity is a factor. Is the Dodgers ownership’s excitement over its new Mexican-American star a creepy commodification of nationality, or just a situation where everyone—the team, Gonzalez, the fans—is better off?

The answer is probably a little of both. On one hand, these ethnicity-based economic calculations are a bit exploitative (and made more cringe-worthy by the fact that team owners are almost all white men). On the other hand, crafting teams with demographics in mind has produced franchises imbued with local flavor.2 During Ichiro’s stint

with the Mariners, sushi was sold at the park, and the team played annual exhibition games in Japan. The Miami Marlins sell Cuban food at their home games. In contrast, teams in the NBA, while usually embraced by locals, rarely reflect the cultures of their cities. This perhaps, is why it’s so exciting when an NBA team’s character aligns closely with that of the city it plays in. Yes, the Larry Bird/Magic Johnson rivalry was compelling because the two legends brought out the best in each other, but the appeal goes deeper than that. Bird and his scrappy, haggard Celtics teammates gave blue-collar Boston a team it could relate to. Ditto for the “Showtime” Lakers, who, led by Johnson and a cast of suave, flashy players, had charisma and panache that LA adored.

When such alignment happens in the NBA, it’s generally by chance. In baseball, it happens by design.

SAM ROSEN B’14

would gladly move to Houston for

$25 million.

2. Local flavor, of course, is not always desirable. The Red Sox reflected Boston’s racist underbelly by being the last MLB team to integrate.

SEPTEMBER 14 2012

SPORTS // 14

15 // SCIENCE

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

State Pride on a Stick Surviving a day at the Great Minnesota Get-Together

BY ASHTON STRAIT ILLUSTRATION BY DIANE ZHOU

Sample Menu // BREAKFAST ONE BATTERED AND FRIED SUNFISH FILLET

(the kind you can catch off the dock in any old lake in this land of 10,000; dainty, surprisingly delicious) straight from the fryer and shaken with cinnamon sugar

2 TOM THUMB MINI DONUTS

EXHAUST FUMES

from a Harley Davidson

demonstration PRONTO PUP

first of the day (a corn dog)

second of the day (they’ve got a one-bite half-life; make sure there are plenty of companions nearby to finish them) PRONTO PUP

TWO CUPS OF BLACK COFFEE & PART OF A FRUIT CUP from the Hamline United Methodist Church tent (where you can sit down at picnic tables feel like a civilized eater for the first and last time at the fair) WHY STOP THERE WHIFF OF PICKLE DOG (dill pickle smeared with cream cheese then wrapped in salami)

(a small cone to share with others, one can only hope) SWEET MARTHA’S COOKIES WITH MILK

PEPPERMINT BON-BON (Minnesota mint chocolate chip ice cream; to cool off) 6 INCHES OF A FOOT-LONG HOT DOG

with

grilled onions third of the day (technically a “poncho pup” this time­—there’s some minor difference in the batter) PRONTO PUP

(a stolen spoonful that is, from the dairy barn) STRAWBERRY SUNDAE

DEEP-FRIED CHEESE CURDS (you

can split a small container 4-ways and only make a small dent) ROASTED MINNESOTA SWEET CORN, one

ear

TERIYAKI-FLAVORED MEAT ROPE, one bite (#yolo-ers feel free avail yourself of all 3 feet)

SEPTEMBER 14 2012

the last thing you want to do with a bellyful of pronto pups is to watch a man lift an eight pound weight attached to metal fish hooks inserted in his eye sockets. This is what I saw when I ducked into a tent promising the strangest show on earth at the Minnesota State Fair. Spoiler alert: No one was blinded or maimed. And while self-torture wasn’t the most bizarre thing I saw that day, it was an appropriate metaphor for the experience of eating fair food: a little nauseating, yet thought provoking. Even if that thought is “why?” as in, “Why in God’s name would anyone want to deep fry a stick of butter?” Or better yet, “Why would anyone want to eat it?”

State fairs began in the United States in the Midwest as a celebration of the region’s agricultural bounty. Michigan claims the first in 1849. The Minnesota State Fair, now second only to Texas’s in size and attendance, began in 1859. It’s known as “the great Minnesota get-together” and with an average of 150,000 fairgoers a day during its 12 day run, it becomes clear the title isn’t hyperbolic—in total, nearly 1.8 million people attended this past year. The fair is run by the Minnesota State Agricultural Society, a public corporation established in the 1960s expressly for that purpose. Today it acts as a cogent reminder that agriculture is America’s largest industry, and the Midwest is the beating heart of that industry. Of Minnesota’s 54 million acres, nearly 27 million are devoted to farming, and the state is the third largest soybean producer in the nation.

In the past century and a half, state fairs have moved beyond their roots as agricultural competitions intended to promote and encourage the region’s farming industry. The largest now incorporate carnival rides and games, concert series, and technology exhibits. Amidst all this, what truly stands out while wandering the grounds is the sheer quantity of food.

In six square blocks of fairground there are 311 separate food vendors, 84 of which are of the on-a-stick variety.

It’s a deep-fried-food junkie’s paradise. Beyond snack staples twinkies, Oreos, and candy bars, there are stands selling pork chops on a stick, macaroni and cheese on a stick, alligator on a stick, and deep-fried tater tot casserole on a stick with a cream of mushroom dipping sauce. This year’s non-stick fare included camel burgers, poutine, and fried lamb testicles.

In addition to providing a variety of bizarre foods, fairs act as unequalled opportunities for agricultural lobbies to push their products on an enormous consumer market. The fair’s sponsors are a who’s who of Minnesota’s top agricultural products. The Minnesota Soybean Research and Promotion Council, the Minnesota Corn Growers Association and Corn Research & Promotion Council, and Christensen Farms (one of the top five pork producers in the United States) are three of the major funders. Chris-

tensen Farms sponsors the “Miracle of Birth Center” where fairgoers can see dozens of adorable newborn farm animals.

There is also a pig barn at the fair showcasing prize winners from all breeds. Agricultural companies will also often run children’s exhibits, where children can learn some corporate funded lessons about the region’s agriculture while participating in activities like fake-egg collecting. As for corn, one of the main attractions at the fair is the Corn Roast booth, which sells roughly 25 acres of roasted corn every year to hungry fairgoers. At least the cobs are composted.

Dairy’s also in on the fun. You can hardly tip a cow without hitting an outpost of the Midwest Dairy Association. In the Dairy Building, the only empty piece of floor among perpetual crowd is in a clear-sided rotating refrigerator in the middle of the building. Nevermind that it contains six ninety-pound butter sculpture busts of the Milky Way pageant contestants (all apple-cheeked girls from Minnesota dairy farms).

The dairy building sells soft serve, malts, sundaes, and fresh cheese curds. (If your arteries are feeling supple, you’d be better off getting your curds battered and fried, from one of the smaller stands throughout the fairgrounds.) The dairy association also runs an all-you-can-drink milk stand, $1 buys a cup and unlimited refills. It goes best with the warm chocolate chip cookies shoveled up by the cone or bucketful at a nearby stand.

Strict vegans will be able to find sustenance (amidst the sea of fried foods-on-a-stick there are several oases of beautiful summer produce), but may feel ostracized. For animal lovers should be sure to avail themselves of the livestock barns that showcase the best of all breeds.

One of the few escapes from the agribusiness theme is the agricultural building. A treat for those with a mind toward home-grown agriculture, it has plenty of throwbacks to the fair’s roots as a farming competition. Blue ribbon fruits and vegetables are arrayed proudly on white shelves along the walls. The prize pumpkin at this year’s fair was a pale orange monstrosity weighing in at nearly 1200 pounds (an average-sized person could crawl inside it and curl up comfortably). Rows of baked bread sit together behind different colored ribbons, and it would be hard to find a more perfect loaf than the blue ribbon winner. Even among the locally-grown, everything is bigger, shinier, more shapely cut, and seductively displayed. But it is the food that forwent the flyer that jogs a sugar-tossed memory about the homemade message these try to project, and so often overshout. It is these fruits and veggies, albeit somewhat smaller ones, that will spare the homecooked table, or at least after the stomach ache subsides.

ASHTON STRAIT B’13.5 could

be your partial fruit cup.

FOOD // 16

Hemingway’s Twitter

by Michael Mount Illustration by Robert Sandler

she arranged sloppily enough to suggest that she might have a trace of apathy in her personality, carefully curating the mountain of assignments in a shameless and scattered way so that some of the failing grades were showing in plain sight, because she did have a sense of humility, for god’s sake. She noticed that all of the glossy posters on the wall were still composed at right angles, but whatever, at least she had posters to cover up the frayed and piecemeal Providence room, succumbing to the heat and humidity of a tortuous summer. She was actually a really neat and orderly girl so it kind of hurt her to see her room messed up but this was worth the trouble.

Composure was essential and she was very careful to look in the mirror and breathe carefully and stretch out and touch her toes and recite all the Yoga crap that she had learned over the course of three precious years at this higher institution, which was probably the only club she actually cared about going to. Everyone was doing all those frivolous clubs like Underwater Basket Weaving or Celebrate Your Neighbors and she always felt guilty about just wanting do Yoga. Anyways she said all her namastes and chakras or whatever they were called and carefully disheveled her bangs so that a wispy strand of hair hung in front of those acidic green eyes. She really did have these laser eyes that could cut you in half.

She watched her watch as the brass piece swung around the quartz piece that measures time, ticking some inscrutable amount of hertz to a cadence of lust that was slowing down as her body aged, supposedly peaking around thirty.

Everyone said that women peaked around thirty and she was already two-thirds of the way there so she better hurry up. Oh well, she said, ten more minutes, but more like fifteen because no one is on time, especially for things like this. No one’s ever on time. So she took a casual relapse into the past, thumbing through the photo album beside her bed that she received senior year in high school when everything was glamorous and idyllic. Her friends in high school were convinced the were the new lost generation.

Everyone loved The Sun Also Rises.

“How are things going with Graham?” Ella had asked her.

“They’re going really well, actually,” she responded.

“We’ve been hooking up for a while now and I think we might, you know, like actually...”

“Oh really?” Ella’s eyes twinkled with that human tapetum lucidum called lust, showing off her vestigially white canines.

“He’s really nice and all and I think I really care about him.”

Which was true.

“Didn’t you have a serious boyfriend in high school?”

“Yeah. Andrew.”

And she looks at the glossy photographs of Andrew imprisoned in the laminated scrapbook, feeling that bizarre throat-compressing nostalgia that you get from listening to Bon Iver or Ruth Simmons speak. I swear if Ruth is the Gettysburg address of our generation I’m going to hang myself. Not that she’s bad or anything, but it always cracks

17 // LITERARY

me up to see all those parents and students just leaking tears every time she opens her mouth about social justice of the many rather than privilege of the few etc. That’s really great, let me just put on my money jacket and eat my money cereal and then go out into the world and dust off the old ladle at the soup kitchen.

Anyways, this whole revelation with Andrew got her real choked up and for a moment she even faltered with the preparations for the night because somehow that constellation in her memory had reignited and she was somehow in that awkward place of trying to convince herself that she’d done it. We did it, didn’t we? Didn’t we do it? She remembers the prom, wearing that saccharine smile and the salmon dress, and afterwards when she would have given anything to have his hand up there but she’s remembering it into existence, yes, we did it, didn’t we do it did we?

She even looks at the LED screen on her beautiful phone that some graduate in Cupertino designed, undoubtedly rolling around on his money mattress and coming to campus dance for the goddamn tenth time or whatever to show off what a courageous servant to the world he’s become. She’s in some entrepreneurship class where everyone and his grandma is pledging his soul to altruism and all she wants to do is get laid. “Be there soon,” reads the text.

But no Emojis. That’s a bummer. She’s a really thoughtful, sincere girl, and she loved the heart Emoji.

It’s too bad texting is like drafting the goddamn Marshall Plan these days. You use one extra punctuation mark or smiley face or silly little goddamn heart and your partner thinks you’re just gushing with lecherous intent. Everyone’s writing like Hemingway on Twitter these days, just stoic little constipated remarks like, “Whats up,” or “You up,” or “Lonely and cold.” Emojis are too soft and punctuation is too generous. None of that prize-writing that you used to do in English class where your teacher would swoon.

And she relapses into the nostalgic tearjerker again, deciding to open Facebook on the old Internet, so she could look at the mugshots of her beauty queen friends from Greenwich or wherever the hell she’s from so she could make some eloquent delivery about this occasion about to come into fruition. “Yeah, it was really good,” she would say with a wink, as if the goddamn sexual apotheosis had happened and she was doing them a favor by not telling them all the details. Like it would be too much to handle. She would be so coy about the whole thing it absolutely kills me.

Well now she’s got to go delete some of the history so that he won’t realize that she’s actually been stalking him on Facebook all along. That would be far too involved or emotional for the lifeless waif that college has conditioned her into becoming. World servant and American Apparel junkie. God, that killed me. Where do those Venn diagrams overlap? She goes back to her phone and checks the countdown, expecting him in less than five minutes. Her heart starts to flutter. And it starts to flutter harder.

Would a drink help her regain her composure? Well it’s a damn shame that the only stock she’s got in the pantry are warm, lite beer and cheap vodka that slithers in your throat.

Not exactly the Bordeaux that she hoped to consummate her deflowering with. Goddamn, then she notices that the pillows on the bed might be a little composed so she tactfully ruffles them up, because that will give the impression that either she is a careless and messy person or that the bed has this ethereal look of having been slept in by two people before, maybe at least once.

“And he’s on the swim team?” Ella asked.

“Yeah. I told him I’d go to his game this weekend. He’s supposed to be really good.”

“That’s so hot. All the guys on the swim team are hot.”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s he from?”

“Manhattan. The Upper West Side.”

“Oh nice. I bet he’s loaded.”

“Yeah.”

She’d actually met his parents once which, was kind of ironic because at the time they hadn’t even been romantically entangled or hooking up or however you call it. She’d been to graduation and his parents were alums so she actually saw them when they went through that whole elaborate alumni procession. All of the men in their fifties have this uniform haircut, where it’s kind of pushed up and backwards, wearing little reflective sunglasses and colorful ties.

They come back to Brown for a day and try to convince all their old friends that since graduation they’ve become a dignitary or CEO or anyone important, for God’s sake.

And all the women have this really pristine Connecticut look on their faces, smiling their teeth out and radiating every square inch of skin that they can muster, candied with layers of white scarves and pearls like grown-up dolls.

His parents fit right in.

She checks her nightstand drawer to make sure she has two condoms, discreetly placed beneath a whole trainwreck of sloppy paperwork and jewelry. Her phone buzzes on the desk and she waits a second to check the message so that he knows she won’t be too eager. Her heart beats harder and she checks it, reading one letter at a time and then reading it over again.

“Don’t think I’m gonna make it actually. There’s this party here. Sorry!”

Maybe she should have put in more effort. She feels that hot and heavy ball sliding back down her throat to the coldness of her gut, sitting down suddenly on the bedspread and reciting all of their recent interactions in her head. She scrolls through their recent texts, finding no hint that she had misspoken but every indication that she could have done a little bit more. Maybe she should have argued with him or at least sent a coy text. Losing your virginity these days can be so hard. It’s like you have to write a goddamn novel or nothing at all.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

SEPTEMBER 14 2012

METRO // 05

the list Week of September 14th–20th

friday 9.14 pronk! benefit 9pm // roots cafe // $ if you love rendition brass, cymbal revelry, sweaty dancing, or the color red & shade of black, be here! helps fund the october fest. a devised piece of nudity 10pm // t.f. green hall (brown) the second to last in a week-long series of events exploring nudity and performance. personal testimony, dancing, flesh. all bodies (nude or not) welcome. email nudityintheupspace@gmail for tickets. saturday 9.15 planetarium show 2pm // roger williams park // $3 35 minutes to see the stars. unless you are under 4 years of age. then it’s more like zero minutes. you see nothing. paul legault reading 4pm // mccormack theater (brown) the first installment of brown’s contemporary writers reading series. legault to read reworked emily dickinson texts. grand opening: exposé at 2ndlife

6pm // 204 westminster st. a storefront partnership between risd’s student-curated art space & student-run materials up-cycling center. music, eats & student art on display & for sale. tokimonsta and titus andronicus 7pm // simmons quadrangle (brown) // $12 dreams. energized. go to brownconcertagency.com for tickets. sunday 9.16 newport international boat show 10am // newport, ri // $18 one of the largest in-water (what?) boat shows in the country. ends at 5pm. merchandise, human beast, cottaging, russian tsarlag 10pm // dungeon c (olneyville) // $5 the thus far most anticipated sonic event of your lowly list maker’s 2012. post-hardcore wizards of slick-as-hell pop headline. the true treat: two of providence’s best acts. carlos the tsar/ina stands as the urperformer you’ve ever (never) seen. wow! monday 9.17 electronic violations? the evolution of

search and seizure 6:30pm // salomon 101 (brown) a janus constitution day lecture given by michael dreeben and jeffrey rosen on what the 4th amendment’s guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizure” means in light of the advances in investigative technology. tuesday 9.18 on anti-authoritarian approaches to leadership (led by chris dixon) 7pm // 250 broadway st. a workshop that addresses problems of and explores new approaches to antiauthoritarian organizing. led by a longtime anarchist organizer, writer & educator. hosted by libertalia.

kinky kraft night: pasties 7pm // 250 main st. (pawtucket) // $ hosted by the center for sexual pleasure and health. come celebrate that last ditch textile erotica. materials and pg-13 entertainment provided. libertalia weekly potluck 7pm // 250 broadway st. a time to bring food, get involved and make ties. anarchy as community as intellectual, emotional, nutritional grub. obviously. thursday 9.20 a woman in the crossfire: diaries of the syrian revolution 4pm // watson institute (111 thayer st.) a reading by syrian journalist and novelist samar yazbek.

wednesday 9.19 in the know? email listtheindy@gmail.com art opening & talk with meredith stern 5pm // sarah doyle women’s center (26 benevolent st.) an opening reception for “this is an emergency!: a reproductive rights and gender justice portfolio” & artist talk with meredith stern on contemporary patriarchy and subversive creation.

this w

eek in listery 1963 americ a’s first survivin quintu g plets a re born mary a t o nn fisch er.