the college hill inside:

Flood scenes| 4
Grunge again | 9
independent Flow chart fiction | 13
Coloring contest! | 17
the brown/ r i s d w e e k ly | a p r i l 1 5 , 2 0 1 0 | Vo l u m e X X i s s u e ix

“Turns out my daughter has confused her finger for a fucking chicken nugget...
that stupid hungry bitch.” –pg 17
 table o f c o n t e n t s f ro m t h e editors

news

2 Week in Rev iew Corrections: A profile of Dan La Botz in
Dead or alive the April 8 issue (“Socialist for Senate”) failed
BI-B, AS, LM, & JL to attribute a quote to the Cincinnati Beacon.
La Botz told the Beacon, “People want an alter-
native. [...] We can also see [discontent] in the
metro demonstrations for immigrant rights. We see it
in workers voting against contract concessions
3 Prob ation that give away wages and health plans. We see
Reformin’ RI it in the LGBTQ movement for gay and lesbian
Katie Lindstedt marriage rights.” He did not say this directly to
Simone Landon, the author of the piece.
4 clean-up scenes The article “Ticked Off,” also in the April 8
Vignettes on flooding in RI issue, stated that “On February 9 2010, Rhode
Juliana Friend Island State Representatives Gallison Martine,
Rice and Edwards introduced the Lyme Disease
Educational Act to increase awareness of the
international disease.” Representative Jackson also introduced
the bill.
5 South afric a
Boer murder ignites racial tension
Emily Gogolak
Coloring contest: Please find the second
annual Indy coloring contest on page 18, il-
lustrated by Samantha Ballardini. Complete
submissions should be scanned and sent to
theindy@gmail.com—or posted to us at PO
Box 1930, Brown University, 02912.
Ingredients: Enriched flour (wheat flour,
niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate [vi-
tamin b1], riboflavin [vitamin b2], folic acid),
soy bean and palm oil with tbhq for freshness,
skim milk cheese (skim milk, whey protein,
cheese cultures, salt, enzymes, annatto extract
for color), salt, contains 2% or less of paprika,
yeast, paprika oleoresin for color, soy lecithin.
Contains wheat, milk, and soy ingredients.

6 BOSNIA
A decade later, a half-hearted apology
Daniel Prinz

opinions Ephemera AS IF YOU CARE

7 press bias
No money, no problems
Jonathan Deffarges
Lil Wayne’s address in jail:
8 B ackground checks
On Supreme Court Justices Eric M. Taylor Center (EMTC)
George Warner
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10-10 Hazen Street
features East Elmhurst, NY 11370

9 Smells like selling out

Grunge nostalgia and revival
Becca Levinson

11 reintegración
For Colombian guerrilleros
Luisa Robledo

arts

12 Images of india
Fazal Sheikh at Bell Gallery
Ryan Wong

13 Robert swinston
on Merce Cunningham
Lizzie Feidelson g e t i n touch
sports Email: theindy@gmail.com
Blog: theindy.org/blog theindy.org
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14 Pawtucket red sox The College Hill Independent theindy.org
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literary
Managing Editors: Erin Schikowski, Mega Porn Star: Raphaela Lipinsky
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15 Body Paragraph News: Marisa Calleja, Beatrice Igne- Illustrations: Samantha Ballardini, Becca
Racy fiction Bianchi, Marguerite Preston Levinson, Emily Martin, Robert Sandler
Frannie Choi Metro: Rachel Levenson, Katie Lindstedt, Design: Robin Davis, Liat Werber, Yue Pang,
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Opinions: Jordan Carter, Eli Schmitt Web: Daniela Postigo, Adam Zethraeus
x Features: Alexandra Corrigan, Alice Hines, Katie New Media: Kate Welsh
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17 Arts: Ryan Wong, Erik Font Margo Irvin, Miguel Morales, Emily Segal
writey Staff Writers: Malcolm Burnley, Emily
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Varsity team Sports: Simon van Zuylen-Wood Staff Illustrators: Paola Eisner, Jessica Daly,
Food: Nick Werle Amanda Greenberg, Isabel Khoo
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See your work in the Indy! List: Lola Bates-Campbell, Margo Irvin MVP: James Hinton, Ryan Chan, Liat Werber
Samantha Ballardini

the college hill independent a p r i l 15, 2010

 w e e k i n r ev i e w
b y a s h t o n s t r a i t, l e a h m i c h a e l s , B e at r i c e I g n e - B i a n c h i & J u l i a L o n g o r i a
i l l u s t r at i o n b y e m i ly m a r t i n
R e - tox D e a d M a n
N a t i o n  F ly i n g
Several studies have shown that crime flourishes in times
of economic recession. Even so, for the past five years drug
dealers in the UK have been receiving their own govern-
ment stimulus package: the British prison system has kindly
instituted a program to renew their customer base.  The
system’s policy towards drug-addicted prisoners calls for
them to undergo a process called “retoxification,” where-
by those who kicked the habit in jail are treated with the
highly addictive synthetic opioid methadone before they
are released. Methadone is often used to treat heroin addic-
tion because it lessens the withdrawal symptoms from and
mimics the effects of heroin, morphine, and other opium-
derived drugs. In the UK prison system, methadone is
used on former-addicts of any illegal drug, not just heroin.
Proponents of the system insist that this treatment is used
to decrease the chances that the prisoners will have a fatal
overdose after they are released. After all, any self-respecting
dealer will tell you there’s nothing worse than having a cus-
tomer drop dead the first time they shoot up after serving
time. Prisoners are forcibly given one last taste of the good
stuff before they’re released back onto the streets, where the
real thing is in easy supply. Kathy Gyngell, of the British
Centre for Policy Studies, noted in an interview with the
UK Telegraph that, “[T]his doesn’t get people off drugs—
but captures them in the grip of methadone instead.”
The police have been in a tizzy about the program
since its inception five years ago. One officer told the
Telegraph, “it’s one of the craziest ideas from any govern-
ment.” Here’s to you, England. We’re still petitioning
American jails to give out dime bags as going-away presents. 
—AS
erect
text
In this era, sex is the only thing that sells (images of under-
age girls clad in daisy dukes, to be specific). But there is one
minority not reaping this visual titillation of the YouTube
generation: the blind. Finally, there’s an alternative—at least
when it comes to porn.
Earlier this week, the crafty Canadian Lisa Murphy
launched Tactile Minds, a pornographic magazine specifically
designed for the blind and visually impaired. As reported in
the Telegraph, Murphy said she created the book once she no-
ticed that “the blind have been left out in a culture saturated
with sexual images.”
Until now, the blind have relied on audio-pornography,
but sometimes that carnal impulse comes out and you just
want to grab hold of something, which is what makes Mur-
phy’s magazine special. In addition to sexy story lines written
in Braille, Tactile Minds includes seventeen different raised
images, including a woman with “perfect breasts,” another
naked woman in a “disco pose” (touching herself with one
hand in the air?), and a “male love robot” (this seems to be a
foreign concept to all five senses). Even the Vogue of pornog-
raphy, Playboy, printed issues in the ’70s and ’80s with text
in Braille, but not sexy images to satiate the sense of touch.
With children’s books like Pat the Bunny garnering so
much success and the trend of scratch-and-snuff stickers, it
was about time the blind had something to touch, read, and
moan about.
—BI-B
a p r i l 15, 2010
Watch out the next time you’re on an airplane,  because
the passenger sleeping on your shoulder may be resting
more peacefully than you think. He may  be dead, like
Curt Jarant was when his widow and stepdaughter tried to
check him in to board a flight  from England to Germany
on Saturday, April 3. Gitta Jarant and Anke Anusic put
Mr. Jarant in a wheelchair and placed sunglasses on his
face before riding in a taxi with him to John Lennon Airport
in Liverpool, where they attempted to book him a ticket
to Berlin. Unfortunately, their plans got derailed  when
airport staff  became suspicious and called the police.
The women claim they thought he was alive and just
asleep. Apparently sleeping people in Germany are cold, still,
and unresponsive. BBC News said that it is believed he died
on Friday, a full day before his big adventure.  Anusic was
shocked at the accusations against them, telling BBC report-
ers, “A dead person you cannot carry to Germany, there are
too many people checking and security. How can you bring
a dead person to Germany?” The same way you can bring a
dead person in a privately hired car to the airport, it seems.
Buying a passenger ticket is cheaper than paying the ex-
pensive cargo cost for a dead body (as per regulation), but
that doesn’t mean it’s okay to use your frequent flier miles for
the dearly departed. But the two were arrested on suspicion
of failing to give notice of a death, and not because they tried
to take someone sky-high who was already six feet under.
They have been released on bail until June 1 and are expected
to  get off without facing harsh punishment. It would’ve
been a real crime if they had given him the window seat.     
—LM     
Good House-
k e e   
ping
The “causes and cures” of homosexuality. That’s what the
state of California, judging by a real gem in its vast body
of state legislation, has been out to find.That’s right, a 1950
California state law still on the books classifies homosexuals
as “sexual deviants.” Last Tuesday, the California state legis-
lature came one step closer to repealing the law.
The 1950 law came in response to a series of sex offense
cases in Los Angeles in the ’50s, one of which included the
rape and murder of a six year-old girl. The legislature passed
a law seeking “methods of identifying potential sex offend-
ers.” No, the murderer was not gay.
Sex offenders—now there’s a legitimate concern that
needs addressing. But the law went on to call for scientific
research into “the causes and cures of sexual deviation, in-
cluding deviations conducive to sex crimes against children
and the causes and cures of homosexuality.” According to As-
semblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal—a Democrat from Long
Beach, California—hasn’t done any research on homosexu-
ality for decades, but the state did release reports on sub-
jects’ hormone levels, physical characteristics and parental
relationships. The issue for opponents like Mario Guerrero,
a director of the gay-rights group Equality California, is the
“bigotry against the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
community” the law institutes.
“For us to leave it there would be wrong,” Lowenthal said,
putting it mildly. “It’s absurd and it needs to go. Sixty years
is long enough.” Lowenthal sponsored the bill to repeal the
1950 law, which passed in a 4-0 vote in the Assembly Com-
mittee on Public Safety. One Democrat and two Republicans
abstained from voting, agreeing the bit about homosexuals
should be taken out, but wanting the state to continue re-
search on sex crimes.  
—JL
t h e i n dy. o r g
metro | 3
V IOLATION
V INDICATION
P r o b at i o n R e f o r m i n R h o d e I s l a n d
B y K at i e L i n d s t e d t
I l l u s t r at i o n B y r o b e rt s a n d l e r
M elanie Monroe was on probation when her ex-
husband’s girlfriend accused her of physical as-
sault. Louise Monroe, Melanie’s mother, called the
accusation a “[fabricated] story.”
“I had been with [Melanie] the entire time, and her at-
torney had been with her [the] entire time; we know this did
not happen,” Louise Monroe wrote in an email.
Melanie Monroe was arrested and sentenced to 90 days in
a Rhode Island prison for the probation violation—a charge
of disorderly conduct that was upheld at Monroe’s probation
violation hearing but ultimately dismissed at her criminal
trial. She still had to serve time in prison for violating the
terms of her probation. During her three months of incar-
ceration, Monroe, now 39 years old, lost her job and custody
of her child.
“Being exonerated at the time of trial means nothing
when attempting to rebuild a needlessly broken life,” Louise
Monroe wrote.
For the third year in a row, the Rhode Island General As-
sembly is trying to reform the loopholes in Rhode Island’s
probation system that resulted in Melanie Monroe’s incar-
ceration. The Justice and Innocence Bill would reform the
state’s probation laws, currently among the most regressive
in the country. The legislation, H7346 (sponsored by Rep-
resentative David Segal) and S2225 (sponsored by Senator
Rhoda Perry), would terminate the prison sentence of an
individual incarcerated for a probation violation if the new
charge is dismissed or the individual’s innocence is upheld at
a criminal trial.
Under current state law, when an individual on probation
is charged with a new crime, he or she can be imprisoned for
violating probation. Even if the new charge is dismissed or
the individual is acquitted of the new charge, he or she can
still be incarcerated for the probation violation.
The bill passed in 2008 and 2009 but was vetoed both
years by Governor Carcieri. Although the legislation—if
passed again—will go before the governor once more, its
proponents have reason for optimism. On April 6, former
Rhode Island Attorney General Jim O’Neil, who helped
implement the current probation rules, released a statement
in support of the bill.
***
Rhode Island’s lengthy probation sentences—which, at an
average of five years, are roughly twice as long as the national
average—have led to the current system in which one in
30 adults is on probation. Rhode Island’s probation rate is
the fifth highest in the nation, 40 percent higher than the
the college hill independent
national average.
“It means that individuals and families remain in these
sorts of limbos and can be removed from the family and from
work for arbitrary reasons,” Representative Segal said of the
state’s probation sentence lengths.
The combination of Rhode Island’s long probation sen-
tences and its high rate of adults on probation has created a
climate in which probation violations are responsible for 41
percent of the state’s prison sentences.
In the US, when an individual on probation is charged
with a new crime, the allegations are addressed in a proba-
tion violation hearing. Although the US Supreme Court has
set minimal due process requirements for violation hear-
ings, each state chooses how to interpret and implement
these standards. One distinction between states lies in the
standards of proof used at violation hearings. Rhode Island
is one of only three states that use the lowest standard of
proof possible—“reasonably satisfied”—which, in light of
the prevalence of probation violation hearings, means that
41 percent of the state’s prison sentences are determined by
a burden of proof lower than that of standard criminal trials.
In Rhode Island a violation hearing almost always oc-
curs before a trial. Nick Horton, Policy Researcher of
OpenDoors—a Rhode Island-based nonprofit that supports
formerly incarcerated individuals—said the timeframe of
violation hearings “ties into how Rhode Island’s system is
particularly regressive.”
Because violation hearings frequently precede criminal
trials, individuals on probation will often agree to a plea
bargain at the violation hearing and forego the trial—which
adheres to stricter due process requirements—altogether.
“If you frontload everything, you obviate the possibility
of even going to trial,” he said. “[Individuals on probation]
never get to negotiate the new crime as a new crime; they just
negotiate it as a probation violation.”
While the Justice and Innocence Bill would not augment
the burden of proof used at violation hearings or prevent
these hearings from preceding criminal trials, it would curb
the injustices afforded by these facets of the current system.
“It will decrease the power of prosecutors to compel peo-
ple to plea because those who are truly innocent will have an
ability to fight in a way that they hadn’t before,” Segal said.
“Under the current system, innocent people are compelled to
plead guilty at the violation hearing in exchange for a shorter
sentence. They do that because even if you know you’re in-
nocent, you’re most likely going to go to prison.”
While the bill remedies certain aspects of Rhode Island’s
probation system, it would not directly address the high
probation rate, Horton said.
“The current bill is a start, and the hope is that by ad-
dressing some of these issues it takes a crack at changing the
whole system,” he said.
***
Whereas some advocates of incarcerated individuals’ rights
hold that the legislation does not accomplish enough, op-
ponents of the bill fear it would too drastically transform the
current probation system. On April 6, Rhode Island Attorney
General Patrick Lynch wrote in a letter to Michael McCaf-
frey—Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee—that
the act would “[benefit] criminal offenders by allowing a
person who was found by a judge to have failed to keep the
peace […] to escape criminal responsibility for their actions.”
The debate centers on the role of probation violation hear-
ings, the power of which the bill would reduce. While Segal,
Horton, and many others view
the violation hearings—with
their low burden of proof—as
responsible for imprisoning the
innocent, Lynch sees the hear-
ings as an integral component
of Rhode Island’s criminal
justice system, a check that bal-
ances potential inefficiencies at
trials. He wrote, “Just because
the defendant is acquitted of
the new charge does not mean
the defendant is not a probation
violator. The reality is that there
are instances where the State
prevails at a violation hearing
and then may not prevail at
trial; still, in those scenarios, a
competent judge presiding over
the violation hearing found the defendant to be in violation
of their probation.”
The Attorney General’s letter upholds the position he
has taken in previous years, though, according to Segal, op-
position to the bill has been less aggressive this year. Segal
mentioned the support of legislators who previously voted
against the bill but have currently signed on as co-sponsors
as positive changes. He also noted Jim O’Neil’s support as an
additional factor that may have “mollified the opposition”
and helped the bill move forward faster.
In a statement released on April 6, O’Neil wrote, “It is my
firm belief that one should not be found to be a violator with
respect to a sentence earlier imposed if in fact the underlying
case which triggers the probation violation allegation results
in an acquittal or dismissal of the alleged charges.”
O’Neil is one of several individuals with law enforcement
experience who support the bill, including former Superior
Court Judge Stephen Fortunato, former police officer Repre-
sentative Joseph Almeida, and former police office Represen-
tative John Carnevale.
Still, the state legislature’s general bodies have yet to vote
on the bill, which, if passed, would then go before the gover-
nor. The hearing for the Senate version of the legislation was
held on April 6, a few weeks after the House hearing took
place. The Senate and House committees will send the bills
to the legislature’s respective general bodies at an as of yet
unspecified date. Segal estimates that the general bodies will
vote on the bill sometime in June. Until then, the legislation
remains—like the 28,000 Rhode Islanders on probation—in
a state of limbo.
____________________________________________________
Katie L indstedt B’11 down to violate.
A p r i l 15, 2010

u n d e r wat e r
s c e n e s o f f lo o d a n d f e m a
By Juliana Friend
Since the record-breaking flooding in March, the Federal Emer-
gency Management Agency has received just shy of 19,000 appli-
cations for financial assistance from home and business owners,
according to Providence Business News. As flood damage is not
covered by homeowner’s insurance, residents can register with
FEMA online or by phone to apply for aid. Over 800 residents
have also sought out FEMA representatives in person at the
agency’s “mobile disaster recovery centers” in front of Lowe’s in
Warwick, the parking lot of the Cranston Portuguese Club, and
now in two new locations. These recovery centers are designed to
provide residents with “‘the reassurance of face-to-face contact,’”
said FEMA spokesperson Suzanne Novak in an interview with
The Providence Journal.
A
ccording to Peter Adams, there are two types of
people in the world: doers and takers. “I’ve never
taken a damn thing in my life,” says the Warwick
resident. So to come to the parking lot of the Cranston Por-
tuguese Club and ask for federal money was no picnic. He
had been putting it off for weeks, and might not have come
at all if his wife hadn’t threatened to sleep in the guest room
until FEMA registration papers materialized on the coffee
table. The only thing worse than having the government on
your back is having the government and your wife on your
back, he says.
Adams is skeptical that FEMA will grant him any money
for the personal items he lost in the flood. But FEMA may
have learned something after Katrina, he says. This mobile
recovery center, at least, is well-staffed and efficient.
If he does get an envelope with a federal stamp, Adams
will find himself in that grey area between political convic-
tion and personal circumstance.
On the one hand, disaster relief for the poor is perhaps
the one time when government involvement may be called
for unequivocally. “We’re all humans. We’ve got to help each
other, he says. “I’d like the people who need money to get
some dough.”
On the other hand, Adams isn’t poor. He owns a printing
company and leases a Victorian house in Warwick in addition
to his home. He lost personal items, not floorboards. for another week or two weeks,” she says, eyeing the yellow
Still, after paying insurance for 35 years, he’s “afraid [he]
might be bitter enough to take the check.”
_____________
Just across the Pawtuxet river, where soda cans twinkle in
tree branches in a crude parody of Christmas ornaments, is
Heath Avenue. Boys in shirts and shorts whiz down the slop-
ing street on bikes. Neighbors smoke on porch stoops. And
a p r i l 15, 2010
| i l l u s t r at i o n s b y r o b e r t s a n d l e r
Cathy Stawans stands back to look at the home she’s owned
for 55 years.
Wearing a tan sweat-suit, she smiles as her son tosses
dismembered patio furniture into a communal dumpster.
Beneath the patio furniture are the shredded bits of her fam-
ily photographs.
“All your keepsakes aren’t worth roller pins,” she says, “I
don’t need to look at those pictures. I’m old but my memory’s
not that far gone.”
Stawans remembers the night of her high school prom
and her children’s graduation. She also remembers the day
after the flood when kids gathered on the sidewalks to cast
fishing poles into the street. She remembers when the 14
year-old boy—who hadn’t spoken more than ten words to
her before Easter—came over to help clear the wreckage
from her water-logged basement.
Yes, the workers at the recovery center in Cranston were
“sweet,” says Stawans, but it’s the residents, not FEMA, who
will restore Heath Avenue.
_____________
When it comes time for Elaina Kowalski to sell her Warwick
home—to escape the bad memories as much as the risk of
flooding—she will have her sales pitch ready. “It has a sea-
sonal water view,” she says with a grim wink.
But until she obtains a certificate declaring her house
“clean” and repairs the electricity and plumbing, the gutted
two-story house is hers.
On a windy Saturday afternoon, water seeps through her
sneakers as she rakes soggy leaves into a wheelbarrow. Then
she notices leaves edging the gutter all the way down the
block. She abandons the task. Kowalski walks through the
basement door, up through the sour-smelling cavern that
what was once the family room to her skeleton of a kitchen.
Empty beer bottles cover her kitchen counter almost to
the inch. “We’ve resorted to drinking heavily,” Kowalski
admits, “It’s like we’re back in college.” Besides the ice chest
and a couple of potted plants, some of the only other artifacts
of her life before the flood are a box of Ramen noodles and a
Halloween scarecrow bought at a discount store.
“You do stupid things when you panic,” she explains. In
the chaos of their first efforts to pump their basement, she
and her husband forgot to retrieve their family photos. “But
we got the Ramen and the scarecrow!” she jeers.
When asked about FEMA, Kowalski shrugs. An inspector
came to their home less than a week after she and her hus-
band requested an inspection, but Kowalski has confronted
metro | 4
her share of red tape. The settlement she received for the
damages to her home was a “pittance,” and she intended to
dispute the claim before she found out she wasn’t listed on
FEMA documents as co-owner of her house. She later dis-
covered that she needed to find the deed of her house before
applying for a Small Business Administration (SBA). “It’s
hard to put your hands on these things when you don’t have
a home,” she says.
After hours navigating automated voice message systems,
Kowalski wanted to see FEMA’s human face. She walked the
few blocks across the river to Cranston’s DRC van to check
the status of her claim. Though the FEMA representatives
were as sympathetic and friendly as their sleep-deprivation
allowed, they “didn’t do a thing” to resolve the house co-
ownership mix-up.
There is only so much a federal government agency can
do to bring you out of crisis, Kowalski concludes, gesturing
to a canvas bag of FEMA flyers that “aren’t worth the paper
they’re printed on.” She glances once more at the scarecrow
and reaches into the ice chest.
_____________
Being unemployed has its advantages, says Kerrie Barnes.
Thanks to the economic crisis, she can visit her Heath Av-
enue home every morning to feed her pets and pump her
basement.
Crouched on the front stoop, she takes a cigarette break
and marvels at how quickly routine can set in.
Each day of scrubbing, pumping and raking is easier than
the last, she says. And though they don’t offer any help that
hasn’t already been offered, the door-to-door visits of FEMA
“community relations specialists” provide welcome distrac-
tions. Barnes has even started to rebuild her photo collection.
“The water came up to my shoulder,” she says, dangling
the picture album almost with pride. “Here you can see the
entire neighborhood’s stuff in my backyard.”
The un-photographable moments are harder to face.
When she heard the water rushing through the sideboards
of her house, she thought of the Titanic, she says. Her hus-
band tried to screw the windows shut, but the water burst
them open with the sound and strength of a waterfall. It was
this sound—not the sight of the brown, murky water—that
did it. “I wanted to cry when I heard that sound,” she said.
She tucks the album into the front pocket of her sweatshirt
and prepares to get back to work. “We could be displaced
“restricted use” sign plastered to her door. “I don’t know how
long. I just don’t know.”
______________________________________________
Juliana Friend B’11took a stroll through north-
ern Warwick after being escorted off FEMA property by a
police officer.
t h e i n dy. o r g
i n t e r n at i o n a l | 5
O ew
ld
N
W lo
o o
B
un od
ds
,
S ixteen years after the end of segregated rule, South
Africa remains laden with the legacies of apartheid.
Racial tensions came to a head this month with the
murder of Eugène Terre’Blanche, a radical white supremacist
and rabble-rousing politician known for terrorizing South
Africa’s black population. His death sheds light on the na-
tion’s rampant crime—but also brings to the surface persist-
ing problems of poverty and racial inequality that plague
South Africa.
CRYING BLOODY MURDER
On April 3, Terre’Blanche was taking a nap on his farm near
Ventersdorp, North West Province, when two men blud-
geoned him to death with machetes. Natal Police Captain
Adele Myburgh reported that the perpetrators worked on
the farm and attacked Terre’Blanche after arguments over a
pay dispute. The workers, ages 15 and 21, were arrested and
charged with his murder on April 6. Terre’Blanche, 69, was
the founder of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging [Afrikaner
Resistance Movement], a far-right secessionist political or-
ganization with a history of staunch opposition to apartheid
reform. Claiming that the governing National Party—which
founded the apartheid state—was too soft, Terre’Blanche es-
tablished the AWB in 1973. To prevent blacks from gaining
voting rights, he called for public violence and summoned
the Boers, South Africa’s white population, to fight for
continued supremacy. His party adopted a flag that bears a
striking resemblance to the German swastika, and in 1979,
he went as far as to burst into a lecture hall at the University
of South Africa to tar and feather a history professor who had
denounced the Day of the Vow, a public holiday in celebra-
tion of the 1838 Battle of Blood River, in which the Boers
killed three thousand Zulus.
Terre’Blanche’s ideology was not only that blacks were
inferior, but that they posed an inherent threat to the white
minority; plenty of South Africans agreed. Thousands of
Terre’Blanche followers declared civil war and stormed the
streets in violent riots. When apartheid was crumbling in
1993, radical AWB members tried to revive it, shooting pe-
destrians at random and detonating bombs at polls for black
voters. Terre’Blanche’s heyday, however, was short lived.
After the 1994 multi-racial elections, he and his party soon
became an obscure fringe group.
The murder of a white farmer is hardly shocking. Police
report that 900 white farmers have been slain in South Africa
since 2001, though, according to the New York Times, many
insist that the number is even higher. Sixteen years after
apartheid’s end, the white population has retained a privi-
leged lifestyle, and a small black elite has risen to prominence
while millions of blacks remain mired in poverty. “Race still
matters very much in South Africa […], particularly the co-
incidence between race and inequality, race and poverty and
race and unemployment, with the black youth experiencing
all those disproportionately,” Justin Sylvester, a researcher at
the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, told the Associ-
ated Press.
What makes Terre’Blanche’s death so notable is the un-
usually tense national environment in which it transpired.
The recent trouble began in March, when members of the
ANC (African National Congress) chanted a controversial
the college hill independent
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song at a University of Johannesburg student rally. Julius
Malema, the radical president of the party’s youth league,
led the chorus: “Shoot the Boer … kill, kill, kill the Boer.”
Boer, the Afrikaans word for “farmer,” is sometimes used as
derogatory term for a white or Afrikaner person in South
Africa. Just how literally Malema intended the lyrics to be
taken is unclear.
RISE OF A TITAN
Malema, 28, has become a rising player on the South African
political scene. After Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa,
he is the second-most quoted person in the country, and has
a strong following among poor South Africans disillusioned
with the empty promises of multiracial rule. ‘’Voting is sup-
posed to change the lives of people who are disadvantaged,’’
a 27 year-old driver in a township near Cape Town told the
New York Times, “But after voting, what did people get? In
Soweto not much is changing.’’ In Malema’s populist poli-
tics, thousands of disenchanted South Africans hear a voice
for the voiceless, and a real change they can believe in.
For the Afrikaner minority, however, Malema and his
song ring too close to home. In separate hearings on March
26 and April 1, courts in Johannesburg and Pretoria banned
all performances of the song, declaring its lyrics hateful and
threatening. South Africans reacted strongly. Popularized by
the ANC in its fight against National Party rule, the song is
largely remembered in the anti-apartheid context. Malema,
as quoted by The Economist, said, “Apartheid took us to
prison for singing these songs. If I am to be sent to jail un-
der the new democratic order for singing them—then so be
it.” Complaining that the courts only considered the literal
meaning of the lyrics, the ANC also rejected the ban.
The “shoot the Boer” controversy returned with a ven-
geance after Terre’Blanche’s murder. After the hearing, Alana
Bailey, executive director of civil rights group AfriForum,
argued that the song was a direct threat to the Afrikaner
population. She told the South African Press Association
(SAPA), “The words must be understood, as I am sure they
were by the public, to be an instruction that white South
Africans should be shot.” Her words now seem prophetic as
some AWB members explicitly blame Malema’s song for the
crime. The SAPA quoted Andre Visagie, secretary general
of the AWB, who angrily remarked, “Our leader’s death is
directly linked to Julius Malema’s ‘shoot the Boer’ song.” Ac-
cording to The Guardian, he even added that the death “is a
declaration of war by the black community of South Africa.”
Addressing the public on April 3, President Zuma im-
mediately called for calm and condemned the crime “in the
strongest possible terms,” the SAPA reported. In the same
statement, he summoned South Africans to forbid “agents
provocateurs” to take advantage of the situation by fueling
racial hatred. After mounting pressure to crack down on
Malema, on April 6 the ANC took an even stronger posi-
tion and temporarily banned all party members from singing
controversial lyrics. Gwede Mantashe, secretary general of
the ANC, reported to Johannesburg Beeld, “I told Malema to
refrain from making inflammatory statements. He is also not
allowed to sing the song in its entirety.” Although Malema has
made no public comment, his organization agreed to respect
the ANC decision and abide by the temporary ban. South
a
k
la
Africa Times quoted ANCYL spokesman Paseka Letsatsi,
who said, “We are all members of the ANC and its decisions
should be respected.” Although the party did finally take a
public stand against Malema, it may be too little too late.
MESSIAH OR MENACE?
Malema stirred up trouble when he rubbed elbows with
Robert Mugabe on a visit to Zimbabwe earlier this month.
He praised the infamous 86 year-old autocrat “for stand-
ing firm against imperialists” and commended him for his
land appropriation policy. “In South Africa, we’re just start-
ing. Here in Zimbabwe you’re already very far,” he said to
crowds in Harare, the New York Times reported. Denounced
worldwide, Mugabe’s policy has sent Zimbabwe—once the
breadbasket of Africa—into an economic tailspin as thou-
sands of white farmers have been forcibly kicked off their
land without compensation. According to the BBC, because
of the policy over half the population is in need of food aid,
and inflation—at an estimated 10 sextillion percent in 2009,
and rising—has rendered its currency nearly worthless. Ac-
cording to the New York Times, Malema said, “We hear you
are now going straight for the mines. That’s what we are go-
ing to be doing in South Africa. Now it’s our turn to enjoy
from these minerals.”
Considering agriculture and mining are among the most
important sectors of the national economy—according
to the IMF, the largest in Africa—Malema’s comments are
particularly worrisome. South Africans fear Mugabe-style
appropriation policies and intensified political polarization
along racial lines. Furthermore, Malema seems to be cir-
cumventing his own party’s policies. The ANC is publically
opposed to mine nationalization and condemns the land
distribution. Despite Malema’s incendiary remarks, however,
the ANC has done little to hold him back, and many ques-
tion his future role in the party.
ANC politics has a notoriously short memory. In an
interview by telephone, Dr. Susan Cook, an anthropologist
working in North West Province and former professor at
Brown, said that it was hard to rule out Malema’s rise. “Be-
ing incredibly offensive is not a barrier to holding even the
highest office in South Africa,” she said, recalling that Zuma
was charged with rape before winning the presidency last
year. Others, however, doubt Malema’s long-term influence.
In an email, Dr. Jeffery Bloom, B’84, South African citizen
and longtime observer of its politics, wrote, “I don’t believe
that Julius Malema will significantly radicalize or destabilize
the ANC. As a spokesperson I anticipate that he’ll show a
bit more discretion and be less incendiary as Zuma advises.” 
With the World Cup just around the corner, the pressure
is on for Zuma to bring calm back to South Africa. But this
is no quick fix. Long-term stability will arise only from con-
centrated efforts to curb poverty and expand opportunities
for the nation’s disillusioned youth. All eyes will be watching,
and the global opinion of post-apartheid South Africa may
hang in the balance.
__________________________________________
Emily Gogolak B’12 led a section on “Ethnic
Conflict in Africa” for the current issue of the Brown Jour-
nal of World Affairs, on stands now.
a p r i l 15, 2010

O n ly
fifteen
years
ago
O n the last day of March, the Serbian parliament
narrowly passed a resolution: “The parliament of
Serbia strongly condemns the crime committed
against the Bosnian Muslim population of Srebrenica in July
1995.” This apology comes after fifteen years of denial; the
majority of Serbians have not been willing to face up to the
Srebrenica tragedy, in which 8,000 unarmed Bosnian Mus-
lims were massacred. The resolution formally condemns the
tragic events, an important step forward, but does not call for
any future action from Belgrade.
The apology could be a milestone on the country’s path
to membership in the EU, and as such it was welcomed by
politicians across the continent. In a joint statement, High
Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security
Policy Catherine Ashton and Enlargement Commissioner
Stefan Fuele said, “[T]his is an important step for the coun-
try in facing its recent past, a process which is difficult but es-
sential for Serbian society to go through.” However, without
a new attitude toward ethnic relations and a new outlook
toward preventing future violence, this mea culpa may prove
to be no more than good PR.
Even with an apology on official record, Serbia’s pro-EU
administration must overcome the political divisions within
Serbia before it can hope to gain EU membership. The Ser-
bian Radical Party, which with 57 seats is the second largest
single party in the 250-seat National Assembly, is lead by
Vojislav Šešelj, a politician who is currently on trial in The
Hague for alleged war crimes and possible crimes against
humanity. Such old and fundamental divisions within the
political realm still consume the area, and new political elites
have been slow to emerge.
Weak Words
The massacre at Srebenica was just one of many war crimes
committed by soldiers fighting for the Republic of Bosnia
and Herzegovina’s army in the 1990s. Those events of July
1995 were labeled a genocide by the International Criminal
Court (ICC) Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (a body set
up by the UN to investigate the human rights violations
committed during the Balkan Wars), yet the term remains
conspicuously absent from Serbia’s recent condemnation.
Serbia has been legally cleared of direct responsibility for the
massacre by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), but the
ICJ has ruled that Serbia bears responsibility for failing to
prevent Srebrenica.
Despite the Serbian radicals’ insistence that the killings at
Srebrenica didn’t happen, there is no denying the historical
a p r i l 15, 2010
Post-Post Socialism
in the Balkans
B y Da n i e l P r i n z
i l l u s t r at i o n b y s a m a n t h a b a l l a r d i n i
record, nor the fact that members of a specific religious and
ethnic group, the Bosniaks, were targeted on the basis of their
identity. This was the culmination of what the UN Security
Council described as “a slow-motion process of genocide.”
By downplaying the situation and failing to mention the
word “genocide,” the Serbian government’s resolution con-
tributes to the prevailing radical sentiment that the Srebenica
massacre up for interpretation.
Regional Repercussions pulled out of Somalia in March 1995, and the international
The Balkan war of the 1990s was a string of tragic episodes
that ended only when NATO forces bombed Yugoslavia,
after ten years of armed conflict in the region. The fighting
began with Slovenia’s secession from Yugoslavia (1991) but
was soon followed by the Croatian War of Independence
(1991 to 1995), the war in Bosnia, and the war in Kosovo.
On the map, all that fighting resulted in what was formerly
known as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia being
divided among Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herze-
govina, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Kosovo. Under-
lying these political divisions is a strong ethnic motivation:
Yugoslavia existed as a multi-ethnic, multilingual state, and
it was unable to accommodate the rising ethnic nationalism
of the 1990s.
In light of the atrocities committed during the Balkan
Wars and the current tensions in the region, it seems most
Eastern Europeans have long since lost faith in the experi-
ment with multiculturalism. The region is now made of self-
selected nation states, and minorities are often not tolerated.
“Balkanization” is a term that has been coined to describe
these processes: the fragmentation of states and the increasing
hostility of national and ethnic groups toward one another.
Add in the relative poverty of the region, and the political
scene becomes prone to the ethnic scapegoat rhetoric of the
radical parties now strong in the Balkans as well as Slovakia,
Hungary, and Poland.
Ethnic and political tension still permeates the wider
region, as seen in the race-motivated killings of Roma Hun-
garians, nationalist tensions between Slovakia and Hungary,
the recent elections in Ukraine, and the war in Georgia. Even
in this tense atmosphere, the events of Srebrenica still stir
up emotions in the region and around Europe. A Bosnian
living in Providence, Vanes Ibric B’13, says Srebrenica was
“undoubtedly a genocide, but I guess the Serbian political
elite is still not ready to deal with their history.” Ibric speaks
to this division and how it affects questions of identity: “I
personally consider myself as Yugoslavian or Slavic, rather
i n t e r n at i o n a l | 6
than explicitly Bosnian. If I was asked to choose between
Yugoslavia and Bosnia, I would decide for Yugoslavia.” Ibric,
while not emblematic of the entire region, demonstrates a
commitment to individual identity rather than ethnic divi-
sions.
International Engagement
Seen from a different angle, Srebrenica fits into a series of
failed UN peacekeeping actions in the 1990s. UN troops
forces watched the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Srebrenica
was the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II,
and it happened while 400 Dutch UN peacekeepers stood
over the ‘safe area,’ paralyzed by the UN’s hesitance to choose
sides.
While we could expect the international community to
reconsider what peacekeeping means, there is strong indica-
tion that another catastrophe is underway in Darfur. After
the UN’s failure to intervene at Srebrenica, we have to ask
ourselves whether impartial peacekeeping operations are pos-
sible or whether the international community must choose
sides to avoid standing by and watching genocide. (Even in
the Yugoslav Wars, though, those on the side of the killers at
Srebrenica were victimized in other tragedies, a victimhood
which fuels the rhetoric behind many Serbian politicians’
refusal to condemn the genocide.)
Eastern Europeans are certainly happy that Serbia has
taken a step toward sustainable cooperation in the Balkans
and the wider region of post-socialist countries, many
of which either hope to join the EU or have already been
accepted. Serbia may have to resolve its internal debates
before being allowed to join, but common membership in
the Union could become the ultimate resolution of conflicts
decades—or even centuries—old.
______________________________________________
Daniel Prinz B’13 is from Budapest, Hungary.
t h e i n dy. o r g
opinions | 7
“ I t ’ s J u s t N ot R i g h t ”
e n t e rta i n m e n t, i n f o r m at i o n , a n d t h e
h i s to ry o f Am e r i c a n m e d i a b i a s
B y J o n at h a n D e f f a r g e s
i l l u s t r at i o n b y i s a b e l k h o o
I n 2006, in a bid to become the first African American
senator from Tennessee, Harold E. Ford Jr. (D) led nar-
rowly in the polls against his Republican opponent, Bob
Corker. In October, the Republican National Committee
ran an advertisement against Ford so vile that it drew vocal
criticism from Republicans. The ad associated Ford with the
porn industry and showed a blond woman gushing sugges-
tively about how she met Ford “at the Playboy party.” She
then winked at the camera and, holding up her hand as if it
were a phone, said “Harold, call me.” Ending with the text:
“Harold Ford. He’s just not right,” the ad neither addressed
the issues nor was factually accurate.
One would have hoped that such an ad would prejudice
voters against the Corker campaign. Not so: after the ad
started running, Corker moved ahead in the polls, and won
the election. The ad appealed to the worst, basest sentiments
of the electorate. In the last few Presidential campaigns,
negative advertising (often based on lies, notably during
the “Swift Boat” campaign against John Kerry) was com-
monplace (often despite promises of “no negative ads”), and
politicians continue to misrepresent their opponents or the
issues. A news media concerned with informing the elector-
ate would alert its audience to the unscrupulous tactics used
by politicians. Instead, the news media helps finance them,
and worse, in attempting to report on the most controversial
advertisements, gives them more airtime than the advertisers
even paid for. A for-profit news media ultimately needs to
entertain (not inform) its audience in order to keep it, even
at the risk of preventing the electorate from making well-
informed choices at the ballot box.
Any yearning for a sort of “good old days” where politics
were gentle and based on the electorate’s understanding of
the issues would be misplaced. The tradition, established by
George Washington, that candidates were not to campaign
did not last long. In 1800, as soon as there was a competi-
tive election, unscrupulousness took over. In the 1800s, the
members of the Electoral College that elected the president
were on the ballot, not the presidential candidates them-
selves. So, in many strongly Republican states, the Federalists
renamed their party the “American Republican Ticket” and
chose candidates whose names were the same as Republican
candidates to confuse Republican voters into voting for Fed-
eralist candidates. Federalists also mocked their opponents
for alleged elitism and presented themselves as common men
(though the Federalists were inarguably an elitist party).
An independent news media would expose these tricks.
During these early years of the American electoral process,
according to historian Edward J. Larson (in A Magnificent
Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800), “[M]ost […]
newspapers were openly partisan,” with some including party
affiliation in their masthead. They often received money and
editorial content from party sources. Larson explains, “[A]s a
rule, newspapers did not then practice balanced reporting;”
instead, they appealed to each party’s base to sell papers.
the college hill independent
The press abandoned nominal party affiliation in the late
nineteenth century but was still far from honest. Newspaper
baron William Randolph Hearst overcame his competition
by making his newspaper more entertaining, with provoca-
tive headlines, lifelike illustrations and vicious editorial car-
toons, all aiming to shock and amuse. In the late 1890s, ten-
sions simmered between Spanish-ruled Cuba and the United
States. Famously, when Hearst’s field reporters told him that
things in Cuba were quiet and they doubted there would be a
war, he replied: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and
I’ll furnish the war.” When there weren’t stories to report, he
made them up. Hearst’s drive for profits misinformed the
American public, which then pushed its representatives to
declare war.
News outlets first became concerned with impartiality in
the 1950s. And yet, in their desire to gain a larger market
share than their competitors, they still ended up misinform-
ing the public. Joe McCarthy had become a star in the
Republican Party for his anti-Communist fervor. He used
unsubstantiated claims of Communist infiltration to help
the Republican Party to victory in Senate and Congressional
races, and, in 1952 (after calling Democratic President Harry
Truman a “son of a bitch” and his Secretary of State Dean
Acheson, “Red Dean”), the presidency. These accusations
worked: “[N]ewspapers turned McCarthy’s unsubstantiated
charges into sensational stories that shrieked from page one,”
says Rodger Streitmatter of American University. He ma-
nipulated newspapers “into publishing dozens of lies” to help
his political agenda and discredit his opponents. The next
day the newspapers would issue retractions, but the damage
was already done. Despite their objectivity, in their haste to
publish the story before competitors, journalists were com-
plicit in McCarthy’s reign of terror.
One of Joseph Pulitzer’s great realizations was that people
did not want to read about “events in their institutional con-
texts,” says Si Sheppard, a professor of Political Science at
Boston University. They wanted stories that would directly
appeal to their values and feelings. As Sheppard says, “[B]
ias, properly targeted, sells.” People enjoy being entertained
and having their beliefs reinforced, so they go to biased news
outlets.
In fact, it is often hard for unbiased journalism to be suc-
cessful. One of the most applauded journalists of all time,
Edward R. Murrow, brought down Joseph McCarthy by
running a program “‘mainly in McCarthy’s own words and
pictures,’” says Streitmatter, without any editorial or opinion
content. McCarthy’s hysteria and paranoia were evident for
all Americans to see. This moment is remembered as one of
the greatest in all of journalism history. And yet, Murrow
was fired soon after because his show wasn’t drawing a large
enough audience (his news report was replaced in its time
slot by a game-show).
Entertainment still trumps information. Myths about
‘death panels’ or Obama’s foreign birth and terrorist affilia-
tions are both subtly and overtly propagated by news outlets
attempting to grab the attention of an increasingly distracted
audience. Politicians (such as Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin)
are invited to have their own news programs, conflating pub-
lic party affiliations with authority in a ‘news’ outlet.
To avoid losing customers, media outlets shape “their
perspective on the news to satisfy this expectation of bias,”
says Sheppard. Politicians in power use this fact to their
advantage. For instance, George W. Bush, when he was in
office, fed information to friendly news sources while he ig-
nored others, held meetings with friendly talk show hosts to
“more effectively coordinate their message,” says Sheppard,
and cozied up to conservative blogger Matt Drudge. With
a Democratic president in office, the situation has reversed;
the White House Communications Director said that the
Obama administration will treat Fox News as “an opponent,”
reported the New York Times. According to the same article,
Fox’s senior vice president for programming, Bill Shine,
said that every time they get in a skirmish with the Obama
administration, their ratings go up. The bottom line is that
bias is good business, and consumers looking for fair and bal-
anced news are unlikely to ever get what they are looking for.
The solution to the misreporting of facts, then, is to make
news reporting a not-for-profit business. In such an environ-
ment, news outlets have no economic incentive to be biased.
Fund media outlets with trust funds, grants and donations.
Then, once news providers are no longer biased, it becomes
harder for politicians to pass off inaccuracies because they no
longer have shills who will echo their points. For example,
a study by the Program on International Policy at the Uni-
versity of Maryland revealed the advantages of a non-profit,
evenhanded news source. Many people incorrectly believed
that there were links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hus-
sein’s Iraq, that WMDs had been found in Iraq, and that
world public opinion favored the US going to war in Iraq.
Eighty percent of viewers who watched Fox News and 71
percent of viewers who watched CBS as their primary news
source believed one or more of these misconceptions. Only
23 percent of NPR listeners believed one or more of these
misconceptions. A non-profit, publicly and privately funded
news organization did a better job informing the public than
for-profit news outlets. It’s impossible to be fully impartial in
news; every individual brings his or her individual perspec-
tive to the news being reported. But we should try to prevent
politicians from abusing the credulity of the electorate.
____________________________________________________
Jonathan Deffarges B’13 watches only Fox
News.
a p r i l 15, 2010

some experience required
L ast Friday, Justice John Paul Stevens announced he
planned to retire at the end of the Court’s current
session. In his letter to President Obama, he said he
had concluded that his retirement “would be in the best
interest of the Court.” An ideological iconoclast, the son
of the owner of the world’s largest hotel, a man President
Gerald Ford called “the finest legal mind” he could find, the
fourth-longest serving justice in the Court’s history, and the
only Justice not to have gone to a law school named Harvard
or Yale—Justice Stevens was also a soldier in World War II,
working as an intelligence officer in the Pacific. He enlisted
in the Navy one day before Pearl Harbor.
His experience as a soldier, however, is not just another
biographical detail. Explicitly and implicitly behind many of
his most consequential Supreme Court opinions, it speaks
to a quality that the Supreme Court should strive to repre-
sent in all its justices: non-judicial experience. Non-judicial
experience has been lambasted by the right as not just an
extraneous qualification, but an outright detriment to being
an effective justice. Stevens’ career speaks to the fallacy of
this logic. It is not that our Justices should be able to remove
their experiences from the law; it’s that we should not want
them to.
Sotomayor
In Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings last sum-
mer, the debate centered on a comment Sotomayor made
during a speech at the University of California Berkeley. She
said, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the rich-
ness of her experiences would more often than not reach a
better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that
life.” Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, one of the
main opponents of her nomination, criticized her judicial
philosophy during the first day of confirmation hearings,
saying “[C]all it empathy, call it prejudice, but whatever it
is it is not law.”
Examined in context, Sotomayor’s “controversial” state-
ment challenges former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s
opinion that “a wise old man and wise old woman will reach
the same conclusion in deciding cases,” as paraphrased by So-
tomayor. Sotomayor argued, “there can never be a universal
definition of wise.” Without a universal wise, “the richness of
[one’s] experiences” is all we have left.
Sessions missed that point, asking in the confirmation
hearings, “Do I want a judge that allows his or her social,
political, or religious views to change the outcome? Or do I
want a judge that impartially applies to the facts, and fairly
rules on the merits, without bias or prejudice?”
Attacking Sotomayor, the first Hispanic Justice on
the court, for her ‘prejudice’ lies within a larger history of
embarrassing accusations levied by the Senate on minority
judicial nominees during confirmation hearing. During the
confirmation of Thurgood Marshall, the Court’s first African
American Justice, in the summer of 1967, Senate Judiciary
Committee Chairman James O. Eastland, Democratic sena-
tor from Mississippi, asked Marshall whether he was “preju-
diced against the white people of the South.” Absurd? Yes.
But Eastland’s question speaks to the unspoken conflation
of the white male subject with the universal and impartial.
Marshall—and Sotomayor—had to prove that his unwhite-
ness did not necessitate bias. But being denied admission to
University of Maryland School of Law because of segregation
a p r i l 15, 2010
w h at m a k e s a g o o d Su p r e m e
C o u rt ju s t i c e ?
B y G e o r g e Wa r n e r
i l l u s t r at i o n b y r o b e r t s a n d l e r
policy, and then successfully suing the school’s segregation
policy as a litigator years later is not bias or a lack of judicial
fitness; it is exactly the personal relationship to the power of
law that the American people should expect from its justices.
Stevens
The influence of Stevens’s experience in World War II—the
non-judicial experience of a white man—neuters the refrain
Sessions’ comments during Sotomayor’s hearings represent:
that to judge is to be impartial, to make decisions devoid of
life experience.
His use of World War II has appeared in many of his criti-
cal opinions during his tenure on the court; most recently
in his 90-page dissent in Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission—written in January, it is already considered
one of the pinnacle opinions of his career. In a landmark
decision (i.e. establishing new precedent), the five-member
majority established that corporations had the right to spend
unlimitedly in “electioneering communication” under the
First Amendment.
In the conclusion, Stevens correlated corporations with
‘Tokyo Rose,” a group of female, English-speaking Japanese
radio announcers who broadcast false newscasts in English
aimed at demoralizing the American troops. A clear example
of speech the US government had power and reason to
control, Stevens’ used the example to ridicule the majority’s
claim that that the “identity of a speaker has no relevance
to the Government’s ability to regulate political speech.” An
example esoteric to contemporary readers to be sure, but
the choice is demonstrative of the salience of experience in
Stevens’ judicial process.
References to World War II also appear in his earlier
opinions, including Texas v. Johnson, the 1989 landmark
case that upheld the legality of flag burning. In his dissenting
opinion, Stevens evoked the legacy of soldiers in the defense
of Bataan and on Omaha beach—alongside Abraham Lin-
coln, Booker T. Washington and Susan B. Anthony—to
highlight the “irresistible force” of liberty and equality. From
these figures, Stevens concluded “that if these ideas are worth
fighting for[…] it cannot be true that the flag that uniquely
symbolizes their power is itself worthy of protection from
unnecessary desecration.” While the flag’s symbolic power is
questionable, Stevens claimed the only effect of the ruling
was to make flag burning less symbolic. The explicit correla-
tion of World War II with American ideals and the larger
symbolic correlation of these ideals with struggle reveals the
power Stevens’ experience of war to influence his practice of
law.
One of Sevens’ lasting influences will come from the
check on executive power resulting from his terrorism-related
majority opinions, Rasul v. Bush and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.
Rasul v. Bush overturned the Bush Administration’s opinion
that the Judiciary had no authority over foreign nationals
in Guantanamo Bay; Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decided that the
military commissions at Guantanamo Bay violated “both
the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva
Conventions signed in 1949,” as written in Stevens’ majority
opinion.
Stevens’ did not directly reference his military experience
in either of these opinions. He did not have to; his author-
ship of both of these landmark cases speaks for itself. As the
most senior member of the majority in both cases, Stevens
opinions | 8
had the write to assign the majority’s opinion author. Choos-
ing to write them himself spoke to his confidence, and his
military experience provided his opinions an authority that
the rest of the court, without active military careers, simply
did not have.
His war experience had more direct bearing in Rasul v.
Bush. Stevens was able to establish precedence on Supreme
Court Justice Wiley B. Rutledge’s dissent of Ahrens v. Clark,
a 1948 decision where the D.C. government argued that
Ellis Island was outside jurisdiction of the District of the
Columbia in a case involving 120 German detainees—not
unlike Guantanamo.
One of Rutledge’s clerk at the time was Stevens, writing
to the Justice: “I think that even an alien enemy ought to be
entitled to a fair hearing on the question whether he is in
fact dangerous” in a memo, as recorded by Jeffery Toobin
in his recent New Yorker article on Stevens. He soon would
write the first draft of the dissent. Rasul v. Bush is intriguing
for the mere fact that Stevens referenced his own ideas over
50 years later, but it is also fair extrapolation to say that his
experience at war was pertinent in his experience of justice.
G insburg
When Stevens was nominated in 1975, a professor at
Columbia Law School co-wrote a op-ed in the New York
Times criticizing Stevens for implying that the Equal Rights
Amendment—which still needs three more states for ratifi-
cation—would not do much for women during his confir-
mation hearings. This was an opinion the co-author, future
Supreme Court Justice and colleague Ruth B. Ginsburg, said
would “bemuse lawyers who devote their time and energies
to equal-rights advocacy.”
While Stevens had already been confirmed by the time
Ginsburg’s op-ed was published, it would still be six years
until Justice O’Connor, the first female judge, would be seat-
ed on the court. Ginsburg’s comments on Stevens provide
an important condition to the power of one’s experience;
experience, while abstract like money, is valuable only in its
particularity. It is not transmutable. The essential individual-
ity of experience makes diversity on the Supreme Court more
than a representation of the American population at large,
but a central tenet to effective judicial reasoning.
Yet some commentators’ calls to have Stevens’s replace-
ment be another veteran misses the point. The quick transla-
tion of experience into constituency—a feature of politics
that does not seem likely to disappear in the near future—ef-
faces the value of experience as a personal characteristic, not
a demographic one. President Obama has room for only one
appointment in a court of nine, and in a court dominated
by white males of similar class, educational, and geographic
experience, Obama has no chance of balancing the court, or
making it representative of a larger public. Even if he could
choose all nine, representing a diverse population in nine
people is impossible. Instead, Obama and the public should
look toward experience, not necessarily as something that
distinguishes potential justices from a normative white male,
or marks them as representative of a broader constituency,
but rather as a value to be cherished in the work of a Supreme
Court Justice, judicial reasoning itself.
____________________________________________________
George Warner B ’10.5 did not want to be a Su-
preme Court Justice in 4th grade; he wanted to be Secretary
of State.
t h e i n dy. o r g
S ometime in the mid-1980s, three high school losers in
Montesano, Washington began playing Jimi Hendrix
covers after school. Buzz Osborne, Matt Lukin, and
Mike Dillard were loners. They kept their hair long and
dirty and wore baggy secondhand clothes and smoked pot
in the school parking lot. After school, they’d play a kind of
rock music that was weird and moving: harder than what
they heard on the radio, slower than the punk they grew up
with, heavy as they could lay it down. As they began booking
shows, they found a groupie in scrawny school friend Kurt
Cobain, who volunteered to help set up equipment at their
shows, though he was too nervous to play onstage himself.
The band played through the decade as the Melvins, and
after many incarnations, the Melvins’ new drummer formed
a side project with Cobain that recorded a ten-song EP in
Seattle under the name Nirvana in 1988.
That unshowered, strung-out angst clashes with with the
gleaming runways that, this spring, debuted contemporary
revivals of the same chunky combat boots, military coats,
and shredded shirts that adorned the Melvins twenty years
ago. Robert Pattinson, twice voted People magazine’s “Sexi-
est Man Alive”, also seems an unlikely representative of this
garage culture, yet he’s rumored to star as Kurt Cobain in
David Fincher’s All Apologies, a biopic currently in produc-
tion. This misplaced re-appropriation is the final stage of a
long process of the subculture’s marketing: our memory of
grunge is now reduced to an offbeat t-shirt, but the move-
ment left music long before it was seized by current trendset-
ters, or before it was even on 90s airwaves. The way that
grunge is remembered today can help us better understand
the way subcultures develop from grassroots to fashion to a
misremembered rebellion that never really happened.
To understand grunge’s rise one must look back to the
late 1960s, the hippie movement’s inception. In the minds
of 1980s teenagers, the hippies had broken from a previ-
ously unchallenged conformity in defense of real political
issues. As one high school student expressed it in sociologist
Michael Dennis’s More than Broken Glass, teenagers in the
late 1980s felt they had “missed out on something in the
Sixties.” As the ’90s approached, America’s economy grew
increasingly globalized and privatized, and the decade’s
youth found a culture that Dennis said was characterized by
its “consumer ethos that answered each call for meaning with
rewards for loyal shopping.” Unlike their ’60s predecessors,
Gen-X children of hippies-gone-yuppies seemed burnt out,
jaded. They showed their disenchantment not through “Give
Peace a Chance” musical doctrines, but through a seen-it-all,
fuck-it-all apathy that stung more subtly in lyrics like “find
my nest of salt/everything is my fault.” Teenagers espoused
a skepticism that diverged noticeably from their parents’
idealism or punk rock’s spitfire social criticism. Brand-name
clothing was pushed aside for tattered secondhand clothes:
purely functional t-shirts, jeans, and boots became the defin-
ing style of the teenage disenchanted.
Amid this disillusionment a new form of music was
developing: anchored in grinding bass lines that avoided
metal’s overt sexuality, it screeched with feedback but lacked
punk rock’s stylized haphazardness. Its sounds were slow, to
be taken in with the listener’s whole psyche, but its lyrics
also alluded sarcastically to the songs’ own melodrama. The
music did not support a concrete political cause—while a
considerable contingent of ’90s youth did advocate social
action, staple grunge acts spoke more to isolation and to
existential crises.
Seattle-based indie label Sub Pop Records, headed by
Bruce Pavitt and John Poneman, saw a marketing oppor-
tunity in these bands. The music’s angsty style was ripe for
“exploitation”—a word that Poneman himself used in an
interview with Spin magazine—so the two execs lured the
bands to partake in their tiny $20,000 enterprise that they
hoped would propel them to the forefront of the music
business. After a few small-scale releases, Sub Pop recorded
a gritty, three-album, 70-minute package of vinyls called
Sub Pop 200, a compilation that introduced Mudhoney,
Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Green River (whose offshoots
would later become Pearl Jam and Mother Love Bone) to the
1980’s rock vocabulary. SubPop’s foresight proved correct:
200 received so much attention that Pavitt claims to have
done daily interviews for a year after its release. The label
neatly bunched its compilation’s 20 bands under the heading
Grunge, though Poneman claimed the moniker was random,
telling the New York Times in 1992 that grunge could have
been called “sludge, grime, crud, any word like that.”
But Sub Pop aspired still higher for grunge. The label flew
a rep from British label Melody Maker into Seattle during
1989, whereupon grunge began receiving constant interna-
tional attention. Sup Pop’s chief acts began transferring to
larger labels like Geffen and A&M. As record sales increased,
teenagers adopted their new favorite singers’ styles, and the
music scene that began as a garage culture grew into a full-
fledged musical genre, complete with an archetypal haircut
and uniform. Grunge’s popularity exploded as the music
videos for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Alive” obtained
daily rotations on MTV and Steve Isaacs became grunge’s
official veejay. The fame became problematic for the move-
ment: bands that had formed on the basis of noncommercial
music-for-music’s-sake were now shaping the image of any
teenager with a sense of isolation and a TV.
Around the same time, across the country in New York
City, grunge rock resurfaced in an unlikely place: on the
Perry Ellis runway at 1992’s fall fashion week. In a line de-
signed by Marc Jacobs (then Perry Ellis’s creative director),
Seattle teens’ fuzzy outerwear was reimagined in silky plaids
and leather skirts, priced with two or three zeroes. The fash-
ion industry’s response was apoplectic. Jacobs’s line was not
the first interaction between subculture and high fashion, yet
in all previous instances, high fashion had influenced ‘lower’
culture or, at most, borrowed and re-interpreted aesthetics
from the street.
Jacobs didn’t reinvent a print or borrow cuts; he literally
copied grunge’s staple items with the most expensive ma-
terials available, and draped them over Kate Moss. British
Vogue’s November 1992 issue describes critics “sh[aking]
their heads in disbelief ” after Jacobs’ show; “you cannot,”
ordered Vogue’s writer, “charge $1200 for a dress that looks
like it was bought in a second-hand store.” Perry Ellis execu-
tives agreed and fired Jacobs from his position at the label for
his failure to relate to the popular consumer.
James Truman, editor of prominent grunge magazine
Details, decried the high-end adoption of flannels and Docs
as “ludicrous” in a 1992 interview with the New York Times.
Unlike punk, a self-consciously “anti-fashion” movement,
Truman believed grunge style was intentionally “not […] a
statement,” meant to convey the movement’s apathy toward
tastemakers exactly like Jacobs. Previously fashion-neutral la-
bels like Land’s End and Timberland also reacted; they were
less angered by Jacobs’ designs than they were “baffled” by
their sudden association with the avant-garde. In the univer-
sally acerbic reactions his line elicited, Jacobs became, ironi-
cally, the grunge era’s true nonconformist, subverting social
expectations more glaringly than the MTV flannel-heads.
In the two years following Jacobs’ collection, the grunge
scene found itself out-grunged by the very masses it had
aimed to defy. Having been effectively mainstreamed by
just about every media outlet available, grunge became self-
contradicting: bands that once defined themselves by their
divergence from rock-and-roll showmanship now dressed, as
one musician described, “more Seattle than Seattle.” Grun-
ge’s ideology now reeked of sell-out hypocrisy that drove out
the movement’s first constituents as poseur preteens moved
in. What cultural presence the movement had died in 1994
alongside Kurt Cobain, gun slung across his chest, shot in
the head, chicken-scratch suicide note on the floor of his
Seattle home.
Twenty years later, grunge is resurrected. Across runways
for 2011, the ’90s style will appear in the designs of numerous
fashion forerunners, whether in the poofy plaid maxiskirts of
Comme des Garçons, Just Cavalli’s Courtney Love-inspired
slips, or Richard Chai Love’s androgynous gray-brown layers,
to name only a few. Vogue noted, “Every indicator seems to
be pointing to a revival of grunge,” and the New York Times
and Style.com nodded along. The trickle-down from these
designers into the alternative mainstream is equally undeni-
able; any reader who has attended an indie rock show, picked
up an Urban Outfitters catalogue, or walked through the
campus of a liberal arts college in the past year can agree that
plaid is again the mother pattern of offbeat upper-middle
class liberals. Though few new musical acts themselves sound
“grungy”, concert festivals have recently headlined seminal
grunge bands like Alice in Chains and My Bloody Valentine,
and at this summer’s Lollapalooza, Soundgarden will be the
main event. Since July 2007, six books have been published
about grunge.
At the minimum, maybe we can explain our grunge infat-
uation with recent social, political, and economic conditions
that have set the stage for our collective disillusionment; at a
maximum, for a full-on social uprising. This time, though,
the grunge uniform seems a mode of escapism rather than
outcry. While ’90s teens became numb to their prospering
economy’s materialism, we recently watched many financial
institutions shut down, as well as reports saying the ’90s
prosperity has been irrecoverably lost in the wake of 2007’s
subprime mortgage crisis. A shifting job market ushered in
the 1990s, but current US unemployment rates are so dire
that the Washington Post described 2008’s layoffs as “a hem-
orrhaging in the job market.” Perhaps, then, we fetishize the
’90s as a means of self-delusion: in 2010, we can’t out-cool
the economy. Instead, we dress like teenagers who could 20
years ago.
But we haven’t seen any of the musical rebellion that sup-
posedly came of the grunge or punk or hippie movement.
What we see instead is A.P.C.’s fur-trimmed denim, or Alex-
ander Wang’s fringed-leather sandals, funneling a supposed
’90s radicalism into narrow fashion nostalgia that alludes to
an idea of rebellion without inciting it. Because grunge itself
quickly became a conventional rock movement, these styles
don’t refer to a rebellion that actually happened. Grunge is
different in fashion now than it was when Jacobs debuted his
line in 1992 because when Jacobs designed the Grunge Col-
lection, he did something that had never been done before.
If contemporary designs are intended instead to reference
grunge as a rebellion in political history, rather than one in
fashion history, the allusion is all the emptier: grunge’s con-
frontational image was as much the literal product of media
hawking as it was the product of a youth rebellion.
Fashion has repurposed subcultures’ styles to its own ends
many times before, whether in 2008’s bohemian headbands
and flowing skirts or punky studs and leather or the neon
raver spandex of 2006. Grunge, specifically, is appealing as
a remembered rebellion because it’s old enough to inspire
nostalgia but recent enough to feel connected to; it was co-
hesive in a way that hipsterdom, which has arguably taken
grunge’s place in defining alternative youth, can’t be since it’s
too self-hating to define itself as a movement. Reflecting on
grunge society’s solidarity, then, is comforting. The appeal
is compounded by grunge’s association with things that are
‘real’ and basic; its ties with pure, loud rock or unbranded
clothes or not taking showers are attractive, hands-on con-
trasts to our increasingly computerized affairs. But however
we remember the movement, our conception of grunge is
almost entirely mythic.
f e at u r e s | 11
a n ot h e r c h a n c e
colombia’s Attempt
to Reconcile With Its
violent history
b y L u i s a Ro b l e d o
i l l u s t r at i o n b y r o b e rt
sandler
R
icardo Pupo surrendered his AK-47 three years ago.
He abandoned the mountains, his home for the last
decade, and left behind a bloodstained past. It was
time to reintegrate into society, through the program of the
Office of the High Presidential Counselor for Reintegration
(ACR). For Pupo, it was the end of an era—part one of his
life.
It wasn’t a voluntary decision. Peace negotiations had
determined his fate and the dissolution of one of Colom-
bia’s most violent insurgent groups, the United Self-Defense
Forces (AUC). In 2003, after seven months of conversations
between the leaders of the AUC and President Alvaro Uribe,
the leaders agreed to gradually demobilize. Over the next
four years, the 30,000 members surrendered their weapons.
Farmers, landowners, and drug dealers, sick of feeling vul-
nerable, banded together in 1997 to create the AUC to pro-
tect themselves against guerilla groups like the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), National Liberation
Army (ELN), and the Popular Liberation Army (EPL). In
the last decade, these insurgent groups have kidnapped more
than 1,000 people and have forced over 250,000 to leave
their homes.
These guerrillas were grew up with communist ideologies
that proposed social reformations; they disliked the govern-
ment’s actions. Their stated purpose was to fight for the
people, thus achieving a fairer social structure that benefited
the lower classes. The groups’ rapid expansion drove them to
finance their growth illicitly through kidnapping, extortion,
and drug trafficking. They soon became a nightmare; no one
was safe, and nothing seemed to stop them. The AUC estab-
lished a counterattack that was equally violent and fought
the guerilla on the guerilla's terms.
“When we arrived, peasants felt protected,” Durlandis
Camargo, another former AUC patrolman, says. According
to Camargo, for a small fee, the presence of the AUC allowed
peasants to raise their crops without being threatened by the
guerilla.
Under the pretext that targets were informants for their
guerilla adversaries, members of the paramilitary group
caused the disappearance of more than 15,000 people and
killed thousands more. They wanted people to get the mes-
sage: if they sided with the guerillas, they were going to
die. By 1999, the AUC was committing a massacre every
other day using chainsaws and machetes to shred bodies into
pieces.
In 2006, it was Pupo’s and Camargo’s turn. After aban-
doning the mountains, they became members of ACR’s
reintegration program, and they began following a different
philosophy. Their new mission was to rejoin society.
A Second Chance
Away from the colonial Cartagena in the Manga neighbor-
hood, stands the small, white house with barred windows
where Pupo and Camargo have changed their lives. It’s a
humble residential street that has withstood urbanization. A
security guard, not a common sight in this neighborhood,
stands at the gate of Cartagena’s center of the ACR. Not
everyone can come in.
“The neighbors didn’t want this center here,” Pupo says,
lowering his gaze as he swallows hard. “They protested like
hell. But there hasn’t been a problem with any of us so far.”
With over 28 centers all over the country, the Office of
the High Presidential Counselor for Reintegration aims to
give former insurgents the tools to build a new beginning.
President Uribe established the program in 2006, and it
currently has 34,000 participants—mostly former mem-
bers from the AUC. They have also received over 15,000
the college hill independent
participants who have individually decided to demobilize
from guerilla groups. Currently, the program has a budget
of $87 million. Unlike other reintegration programs in the
world, Colombia’s takes place in the midst of active conflict.
Sometimes demobilized patrollers get lured back into a life
of delinquency because they seem to think that it’s their best
option to earn a living. As of today, only seven percent of the
program’s members have gone back to the mountains.
“We start with re-instituting their fundamental rights—
having access to healthcare and a proper nutrition,” says
Alvaro Gonzales, the center’s administrator.
According to Gonzales, the program is designed to ac-
tively assist members in rebuilding their lives—both personal
and professional—by giving them access to healthcare, edu-
cation, psychosocial therapy and community reintegration,
vocational training, and income generation workshops. It
also aims to prepare communities to welcome back former
AUC and guerrilla patrolmen.
For the first three months, members of the program
receive around $200 a month—$60 more than what Pupo
received in his construction job. This pay is meant to cover
their basic needs, while encouraging them to find a job that
can increase their income.
“But education must come first,” Gonzales states. Cur-
rently, 20 percent of participants don’t know how to read
or write when they arrive. As a result, the ACR has created
a series of workshops and opportunities to give these people
access to education. Along with other organizations, the
ACR pays 3/4 of a full tuition, and they cover the entire cost
of short technical courses.
Pupo has taken several of these courses, one of which al-
lowed him to rediscover craftwork. Now, after going through
the process and excelling in his courses, he wants to give back
to his community.
“I want to create a wood-carving workshop for children to
come [to] after school,” Pupo says. “You see, if you take care
of the kids who are vulnerable to getting corrupted by this
horrible, horrible reality, they’ll stay out of the streets. They
won’t join armed groups, and maybe, just maybe, this will all
end with peace.”
The center also offers to help some members start up
businesses by giving them the initial capital. Camargo is one
of the center’s 200 entrepreneurs. He has a small store called
“Pague Menos” (pay less). Everyone in his neighborhood
stops by to buy their groceries—and not all of them know
about his bloody past. “If they found out, they might change
their minds,” he says, struck. “But they already know me, so
hopefully they would still come.”
Cluttered with lemon chips and the orange wrappers of
Chocorramo, the store is Camargo’s tangible proof that he
has a new life. Everyday, he wakes up at 5AM and works 18
hours non-stop. “At least I can bring food to the table every
night,” he says, sighing in relief. He had grown up feeling
hungry most of the time.
Additionally, Camargo dreams of helping single mothers
who, like his own, are forced to work for more than 12 hours
each day. He wants to create a company that employs these
women and sells cleaning products. This way, they would
have a more stable source of income and would work for less
hours.
A solution with tangible results, a shot at forgiveness—
that’s what the ACR has created. “You see, our lives are
divided in three parts: we were victims, then were offenders,
and now we are demobilized patrolmen,” Camargo says.
 
S hattered Li ves
By 2001, the AUC group expanded to more than 30,000
men, funding their large-scale operations by trafficking drugs
internationally. This allowed them to increase their members’
paychecks, making it even more appealing to join.
“That’s why I went in,” Pupo says, who joined the AUC
in 1997, says. “Things were not going well for me.”
In 1991, Pupo joined Colombia’s National Army to fight
guerilla insurgence groups, where he quickly became a suc-
cessful soldier. Four years later, his military career took a hit.
Because of failed operations in which civilians got hurt, Pupo
deserted the army, thinking it was his best choice. “They
were looking for someone to blame,” he says, “and, I could
either go to jail or quit.”
He then found a job with an air conditioning service
company, which didn’t perform background checks on em-
ployees. He earned $60 per week, “a good deal for the kind
of work I did,” he says, and he lived with some relatives. It
wasn’t much, but it was enough.
Then, the company closed. Pupo began working in con-
struction, receiving $40 per week, minus the cost of trans-
portations and meals. “Tough, it was a tough, tough job,” he
says, pursing his lips.
At the time, he lived with his relatives, but, soon enough,
they made it clear that he was not welcome there. Pupo
wanted to leave, but, with his salary, there wasn’t much he
could do. So, he stayed. Until one afternoon, when he met a
friend—another former soldier from the National Army and
current member of the AUC. “He was wearing nice clothes,
pretty clothes,” Pupo remembers. “He was just doing so
much better than I was.”
Pupo received an official invitation to join the AUC. “Of
course, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,” he says,
scratching his forehead. “But it seemed like my only choice.”
As soon as he got to the farm where a branch of the AUC
was stationed at the time, he realized it wasn’t like military
boot camp. Taking a deep breath, he remembers his first
night. They woke up the man sleeping next to him and took
him away. Next morning, Pupo found the man’s dead body
lying under a truck.
“I couldn’t go back home,” he says. “That day, I under-
stood that here one mistake equaled your life.”
Camargo, on the other hand, didn’t want the money. He
wanted vengeance.
A guerilla had tried to murder his father. Fearing for his
life, his father went to Medellín, and his mother and siblings
went to Cartagena. They moved into a shack, where they
paid $2 for the rent, and his mother had to start working—
washing other people’s clothes—because they didn’t have
enough money to buy food. Despite her efforts, Camargo
was always hungry.
“It was the thought that everything would be different
if my father had been able to stay with us that killed me,”
he says, pursing his lips. “I wanted to get back at them for
having taken everything away from me.”
The years went by, and Camargo’s life was reduced to a
street stand, where he spent more than twelve hours a day
selling whatever he could find.
“I hated coming home after a long day to find my mother
exhausted and, on top of it, empty plates,” he says, scratching
his forehead. “That just wasn’t a life.”
Before turning eighteen, Camargo left his home, joined
the AUC, and didn’t look back.
 
Healing the Wounds
Laudis Torres, a professional psychosocial worker at Cartage-
na’s center of the ACR, has seen the effects that such violence
has on people. Her job is to conduct therapy sessions that
help members make peace with their pasts.
“[At first] I had no idea what this was about,” Torres says.
“I was scared of meeting these people, terrified.”
She had heard the stories; she had seen the evening news.
These were people that had pulled a gun’s trigger many times,
and now they were less than a foot away from her.
“But I slowly realized that they are not at all like people
depict them—aggressive monsters,” she continues.
Each meeting with Torres gets participants one step closer
to overcoming their traumas. She gives them a chance to
vent, to put their grievances into words. The stories are full
of suffering and unimaginable pain, but Torres listens. She
said she knows that what she is doing helps heal wounds that
have been open for too long.
After witnessing half a century of bloodshed, after losing
many lives, it’s hard for people to welcome demobilized pa-
trollers back into their communities. “Society itself,” Torres
says—people’s fears and skepticism—“is perhaps the tough-
est obstacle that they’ll have to overcome.”
Some question whether the government is doing the right
thing; others just want to know why, why should these people
get another chance?
“You know what?” she says, slightly smiling, “they are hu-
man beings too.”
____________________________________________________
Luisa Robledo B’12 covers all basic needs.
a p r i l 15, 2010

To P h oto g r a p h Pa i n
D uring the ’90s, Americans were inundated
with photographs and videos of the starving,
wounded, and afflicted people displaced through
violence in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Mozambique,
and Rwanda. Many responded by volunteering or giving
to charitable organizations, but some would say the general
public failed in its moral obligations—that indifference and
apathy took root where compassion and action should have.
Either way, Sub-Saharan Africa was cemented in the popular
American imagination as a place to be saved, or perhaps
beyond salvation.
Photographer Fazal Sheikh rose to prominence during
this period with his images of people displaced by those con-
flicts. In contrast to the brutal color photographs on front
pages and in commercials for humanitarian causes, Sheikh’s
photographs are in black and white, portraits of quiet com-
posure and reserved emotion.
He emphasizes patience in his method, asking not just
the UN—as photojournalists in refugee camps must—but
the village elders and individual subjects for permission to
photograph. His first book, A Sense of Common Ground, was
the product of three years of travels around refugee camps
and rural villages in Africa, where he would spend weeks get-
ting to know the people he photographed.
But Sheikh’s careful process does not resolve the tensions
wealthy first world viewers experience approaching his sub-
jects. The viewer feels a mixture of voyeurism and helpless-
ness when confronted with a portrait of distant suffering.
Sheikh’s images at their strongest spark a connection with
the subject, a recognition of common humanity—a sensa-
tion perhaps more frightening than distance.
Photojournalists have come against this discomfort since
the beginnings of the medium—take, for instance, James
BSR
TOP TEN
a p r i l 15, 2010
Fa z a l S h e i k h at t h e B e l l G a l l e ry
Agee’s hand-wringing lines concerning his writing and Walk-
er Evans’s photography as they traveled into Depression-era
south to “pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and
appallingly damaged group of human beings.”
Sheikh’s work inherits the activist spirit of the WPA and
Evans, from an era when a photograph was still thought to
convey some truth, and through that truth effect social change.  he takes to show more of their personality than a moment
_____________
The exhibition Beloved Daughters at the David Winton Bell
Gallery, part of Brown’s Year of India, speaks to a vital ques-
tion for that nation’s future: its treatment of women. The
photographs are all of women, taken from Sheikh’s two most
recent books: Moksha (“heaven”) and Ladli (“beloved daugh-
ters”). They provide a needed counterpoint to the dominant
images of India: both press images and sunny Bollywood, in
which the brilliant colors and glamorous actors make up a
different reality altogether.
A portrait of a woman named Renuka confronts the
viewer at the entrance to Moksha, the first section of the
exhibition. The wall label next to the portrait begins: “I
was at home alone one day when a neighbor forced himself
on me and raped me.” This sets the tone for the affecting
and passionate plea of the exhibition, in which the viewer is
guided through Sheikh’s refined portraits by bleak accompa-
nying texts. The story continues, detailing how her husband
threw her out of the house with only enough money to travel
to Vindarvakar, a town near New Delhi called the “City of
Widows” because it offers refuge to so many women thrown
from their homes—the city where Sheikh shot this series of
photographs.
The portraits have a shallow depth of field, so that all but
#) Artist—Album—Label—Genre
1) Bonobo—Black Sands—Ninja Tune—Trip-Hop
2) Erykah Badu—New Amerykah Part II (Return of the Ankh)—Universal/Motown—Neo-Soul
3) She & Him—Volume Two—Merge—Indie Pop
4) David Byrne & Fatboy Slim—Here Lies Love—Todomundo—An ode to Imelda Marcos, ex-First Lady of the Philippines
5) Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble—JCD Ensemble ii—De Stijl—Modern Classical/electroacoustic
6) Yeasayer—Odd Blood—Secretly Candian—Psych Rock
7) Morning Factory—Forgotten Moments—Yore—Deep House
8) Black Tambourine—s/t reissue—Slumberland—Early ‘90s Noise Pop
9) Minimorph—Real Place EP—Unfound—Tech House
10) Talk Break—Talk Break—s/r—Hip Hop
a rt s | 12
B y R ya n W o n g
i l l u s t r a t i o n b y j e s s i c a ya n 
the eyes and center of the face blur. The subjects’ subtle ex-
pressions carry the show: listless, defiant, questioning, chal-
lenging, expectant, despondent, often more than one of these
in the same portrait. We have come to expect a quick reading
from photographs of victims of tragedy; that Sheikh’s pho-
tographs defy this testifies to his working process, the time
of trauma. With Sheikh, the viewer can read the women’s
stories in the lines and scars of their faces, the heaviness of
their expressions, before turning to the wall text beside.
The Ladli section presents portraits of younger women
as brought to Sheikh’s attention by various orphanages and
humanitarian organizations. The texts here tell of trafficking
and forced prostitution, of husbands who beat their wives
for bearing girls instead of boys or drown their newborn
daughters.
One striking diptych is accompanied by a story of a
child flower-seller who wades in traffic to reach clients;
two years before, she was struck by a car and taken to the
hospital, but her wound has still not healed fully. The top
photograph shows a child’s outstretched arms offering a
handmade bouquet; the bottom, a child’s leg, where above
the ankle the scabbed folds of a gruesome wound echo the
ripples of the petals above. The pairing reveals Sheikh’s
eye for nuance, and illustrates the tension between the
beautiful and the horrific that runs throughout his work.
_____________
The brochure for the exhibition describes Sheikh as an
“artist-activist,” a title he resisted in his talk at Brown—but
the audience he addressed did not take his intentions at face
value and pressed him on his obligation to his subjects and
whether he worried about over-aestheticizing the suffering
he depicts.
It is curious that we hold photographers who aspire to
fulfill moral obligations closer to the fire than we do their de-
cidedly amoral (sometimes immoral) relatives: fashion, com-
mercial, celebrity. As if the latter were excused by its sheer
abandonment of social responsibility. But by challenging the
ambition of art like Sheikh’s, we interrogate the potentials of
art in effecting practical change.
He said in defense of his photographs’ beauty: “Some
from the photojournalistic tradition say you must render a
gritty reality in a gritty way. I never understood that. If you
care about your subject, you render it in a way that’s respect-
ful, that invites the viewer to want to know more about a
person.” This understated tone is also evident in the exhibi-
tion’s wall labels: short of listing aid organizations or calling
the viewer to action, the stated goal is to help these women
by “bringing their stories to a wider public.”
It seems that Sheikh subdues his message to assert the pho-
tographs as art, not just icons for humanitarian causes. This
forces us to consider whether, in fact, a photograph can do both
humanitarian and artistic work with equal force. Sheikh’s suc-
cess depends not just on how long the images stay with us—it
is certain they will for a sustained time—but what conversa-
tions, what actions are channeled through the altered visitor.
The exhibition Beloved Daughters: Photographs by Fazal
Sheikh will be on display at the David Winton Bell Gallery
through May 30.
______________________________________________
Ryan Wong B ’10 carries the images, sustained, in
his head.
t h e i n dy. o r g
ARTS | 13
move bigger
a n i n t e rv i e w w i t h R o b e rt s w i n s to n
During his tenure at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,
Robert Swinston served as assistant to the choreographer until
Merce’s death in July 2009. He is now acting as its director of
choreography. After a two-year world tour, the company will of-
ficially dissolve, as per Cunningham’s request.
Cunningham’s foundational contributions to modern dance
include the introduction of chance procedures into choreographic
process and the independence of dance from musical accompani-
ment. He collaborated with artists from Robert Rauschenberg
to Brian Eno to Thurston Moore to John Cage, his life part-
ner. Robert Swinston has dedicated his career to the study and
performance of Cunningham’s work. I spoke with him at the
Cunningham Studio in Greenwich Village, where the company
is based.
Do you have a good memory?
You learned a lot of dances—you’re full, you’re overflow-
ing, and there’s no room. You’ve learned so many differ-
ent movements that you tend to fall into ruts sometimes.
I’ve been able to stay rather young for my age, in terms of
dancing. I’m open. Most of the dancers in my generation
stopped dancing a long time ago, because Merce’s work got
so complicated at certain points—it got so complicated—it
was a headache, really. I have to go through my notes all the
time, over and over again. Every a couple of months I go
back again to remind myself. Eventually it gets in your body,
but still—it’s good to have those notes.
How do you notate dance?
Merce’s notation is like this: we call it the arrow system.
The outer arrow is the direction of the movement; the inner
arrow is the facing. You can’t notate what’s in between the
movements. You can just do the movements.
What was it like to see Merce setting movement on
people?
It was very mysterious. He wrote voraciously. He would
come in, always, with a piece of paper. I mean, at the end he
didn’t really have much. He was still flipping a die or a coin
or things like that. His process of creating was always myste-
rious. I’m sure he made decisions that weren’t always aligned
to the chance procedure, but it’s hard to tell. He was like the
Cheshire Cat. He liked to see a sense of awkwardness. He
liked to see the dancers struggle. That’s where he’d find some
real aliveness, when something you wouldn’t expect would
come out.
You’ve been able to read Merce’s notes since his death.
I found out looking at the notes from some of his dances
that there are images. He had a certain idea, of a quality. In
Squaregame he talks about goats all the time.
Goats? dancer when he was young. When people go and ask me,
“Goat” can mean a lot of different things—you can be a
goat—a fool. So there’s sort of a narrative, and imagery in
the work. In his notes, he talks about ceremonies, banquets,
scapegoat, resurrection, the fool.
But he never communicated any of these words to
anybody while he was alive.
No. But after you look at the notes you can see it in the
dance. He makes references to Dionysus, here. And one
section he calls the Volta. The Volta was a precursor of the
waltz. And he goes on in his notation, but then images, lots
of words, here, where he talks about comedy, he calls it Agon,
which is the precursor of the word agony, but Agon is also a
famous piece by Balanchine, right? I told the dancers about
this, while staging it.
Now that Merce has died, I hear former dancers talking
about how his work is in their bodies. Does that corporeal
knowledge come along with a critical understanding?
You have to understand, the point is that when you start
dancing, you allow yourself to be transformed. You allow
yourself to return to your animal self. This is the way Merce
danced. He was an animal. No matter how complicated or
cerebral some of the choreography was, the point was, when
you get on the stage, you basically stop thinking completely,
and dance. It’s about dancing. Dancing is different than
technique. You need one to do the other, but you’re not sup-
posed to forget about the dancing of it. In the process of
learning how to dance, sometimes you lose that for awhile,
because you’re so busy trying not to basically destroy your
the college hill independent
by Lizzie feidelson
body in the process of learning how to dance.
There are so many different ways to express how to
move. How do you?
You don’t even have to use a metaphor. There’s a certain
science to the body. There’s physics involved here. There’s
lines of movement and energy and gravity. How to find out
your inner rotation, and your legs, pelvis, and all that kind of
thing—it just takes time. It just takes doing. I mean I would
say it’s all just walking, really.
Everyone gets there differently, though—no single
identical muscle flexes in all of us when we gesture.
Well, in order to do a grande plié you have to have your
head over your pelvis over your arches and go straight down,
and as you’re going down you open the knees, all the way,
keeping opening up. To say all that’s one thing, but to actu-
ally do it is another thing. It requires a certain amount of
strength, holding, and pushing the body in different direc-
tions at the same time in order to find those counter-balanc-
es. You can see when it works for the dancer, because there’s
more ease and the movement gets bigger. The best teachers
get out of the way of the student. Everybody’s searching for
it. You know, it’s kind of a mystery, the whole thing.
Former Cunningham dancer Carolyn Brown has said
that no radical aesthetic break has ever been the work of
dance alone, that other mediums—music, usually—lead
the way into new artistic territory.
Dance is, as far as I can see, still the most conservative art many people stretching the boundaries.
form, and it’s still the one art form that’s had trouble getting How have you single-mindedly dedicated your life to
out of its past. someone else’s art?
Why has Merce Cunningham failed to become a I think it’s in my nature to stick with people. It seems
household name among the hip college set, who as a to be the way with me. I started doing the History Matters
group are typically so knowledgeable of his counterparts program because it came out that the reason Merce did cho-
in American avant-garde music and visual art? reography was to give himself a chance to dance. That was
It’s just always been that way. Why? When it’s the first art his basic motive. So I showed parts he had done, and pictures
form that ever was? I don’t know. I mean it’s odd. If you say of him as a younger dancer, or videos. I think he liked that,
the word “ballet” to somebody, they’re going to give you a to tell you the truth. I did it on purpose, so that it would
specific image, whether it’s a bun-head, or a tutu, or a nut- make him feel good. Getting old is very, very difficult for
cracker. Look how many men are dancing. It hasn’t changed somebody that loved to dance, who couldn’t anymore and
at all. was in a wheelchair and all that. So it was nice, I thought, for
Maybe dance is a lesser medium. people to see what he was.
Well, that’s true, I think—except for Merce. Merce is the That’s very kind.
only one who pushes the envelope. I’m mostly concerned about after me, in terms of keep-
So it’s not dance itself, but unadventurous dancers. ing training dancers. Who will help me, as I assisted Merce?
It takes a strong intellect to be able to makes dances with- They will help me, and I’ll be able to train them, and they
out any kind of narrative or musical support. I remember we can pass it along to the next generation. That interests me.
were in Paris performing and people screamed at us, “Send I think that’s important. I’ve been in this company for 30
the robots home!” years. I’ve been developing and deepening my understanding
Merce just happened to like to make steps. He was a tap of this work. Very few people stick with anyone this long.
Why have you?
“What does it mean?” I say, “When you go and see a tap I don’t know why. Well, there’s a lot to do. When I look at
performance, do you ask what it means?” It takes people time the movement, I still learn different things.
to look at dance and see a whole series of movements. It takes Merce, when he taught, even though he wrote “ara-
time for that language to add up to anything. Especially besque” in his notes, when he would deliver the movement
when you’re not dancing to a melody or a certain harmony. he wouldn’t use that word. He’d say, “You step forward and
So you would define dance as an accumulation of you lift your leg back.” He wouldn’t say the French word and
movements? that way it would become plain, so that you could regard
Phrases finish speaking at different times. And they speak the thing in a different way. He tried to stop himself from
in rhythmic variety, with their sense of time and how they go using that vocabulary because he didn’t just want to get what
through the space. a ballet dancer will do when they hear that word. Some use
Do you think the way that people comprehend certain qualitative words; Merced used quantitative words. Bigger,
art forms changes over time? slower, faster. That changes the whole tension in the body.
It takes time, seeing it, and seeing it again. I know when It doesn’t get personal in any way. And the dancer wouldn’t
I first saw it I didn’t understand it. I was from a different shrink getting the correction, because it wasn’t attached with
background. I was used to seeing something that I thought seeming judgment. Most of the time it was, “Move bigger.”
I understood. What I saw there I didn’t understand. I dis-
missed it, was bored, or confused. It took me seeing different ______________________________________________
pieces over time to gradually come to it. The more I came to LIZZIE feidelson b‘11 is an intern at Merce Cun-
it, the harder it is for me to see anything else. ningham Dance Company in New York City.
Do you enjoy any other choreography?
I do! It’s just that I find a lot of choreographers don’t re-
ally make movement. They’re making only a few movements.
They don’t make a personal vocabulary. It’s not that every-
body should be like Merce; they just don’t investigate deeply
enough to make it interesting. Merce’s work will change
somebody watching it. Even if they hate it or dismiss it, it’ll
change them. So I think there is a power in dance to change
the way people perceive things. It’s just that there aren’t that
a p r i l 15, 2010

MINORITY REPORT
O n the T hird B ase L ine in Pawtucket
By Marisa C alleja, Simone Landon, and Rachel Sanders
O
n a sunny Sunday, three Indy editors pile into a
borrowed car to see the Pawtucket Red Sox play
the Rochester Red Wings, both Triple-A minor
league teams. Not rookies to spectator baseball, none of your
correspondents are Susan-Sarandon-in-Bull-Durham quite
yet. Still, it is a semi-contentious outing: we have a Roches-
terian and a New Englander among our correspondents, and
a Lansing Lugnut (Class A, Michigan) along for impartiality.  High School, across the street, but we wouldn’t have gotten
 The Red Sox Triple-A affiliate has been in Pawtucket since
the 1973 season, when future Hall-of-Famer Jim Rice led
the team to a league championship. Today, pitcher Michael
Bowden and outfielder Josh Reddick are the likeliest PawSox
to scratch their way up to Fenway Park. In Reddick’s case,
however, there has been intense blogospheric anxiety of late.
As early as the first game in the Sox-Wings series, the author
of the self-proclaimed “Champion PawSox Blog”  Baseball
Heavy  lamented, “Reddick is a shell of himself,” citing the
player’s lack of hits. “All the fans are really worried about
this,” he continued, “looks like [Reddick’s] career may in fact
be over.”
Reddick has the rest of the season to pull out, though, and
a bevy of opponents to test his skills. There are 46 Triple A
teams in Minor League Baseball (MiLB) as well as 30 Double
A and 30 Class A teams.  Triple A alone has three leagues:
The International (which oddly includes no non-US teams),
the Mexican (Dorados de Chihuahua and the Tigres de
Quintana Roo, among others), and the Pacific Coast (which
stretches eastward to incorporate the Reno Aces and New
Orleans Zephyrs).
 As International Leaguers, the Red Wings and the Paw-
sox (as they’re abbreviatedly known) go head to head 16
times this season, ten of those games in the month of April.
We are here to witness Game Four.  Mittsy, who sadly couldn’t make it along for a double date
 
Inning 1
Defying Baseball Heavy’s jeers, Josh Reddick doubles in the
first at-bat of the game, but we miss the collective sigh of
relief. We are still at Walgreens, buying Gatorade, Cracker-
jack, and jerky, which we sneak into the stadium. Just walk
quickly.
 
Inning 2
$11 ticket (they go as low as $7, and half that on two-fer-
Tuesdays)
$2.75 hotdog
$4.25 beer
On the Red Sox fan message board Sons of Sam Horn,
poster Sille Skrub estimates the lowest possible cost of atten-
dance at Fenway Park (like us, he did the economical thing
and snuck in snacks):
“$23.00 - bleacher seat [which our Boston correspondent
notes is nearly impossible to come by]
$4.00 - subway (both ways)
$3.00 - parking at Wellington Station [in suburban Mal-
den]
a p r i l 15, 2010
$1.99 - bag of peanuts bought at Shaw’s before game
$7.00 - one beer (this is low because my friend also
bought me a beer. I owe her one next game.)
$1.00 - tip for said beer”
  All in all, this looks like a steal compared to compet-
ing attractions. For the same $18 we could have attended
a production of Thoroughly Modern Millie at Jenks Junior
any hotdogs. And Triple-A Budweiser doesn’t taste any worse
than it does at Fenway.
 
Inning 3
We crowd-watch. At the top of the third a family sits in front
of us; one of the teenage sons is wearing a Misfits t-shirt.  ster Dogs for $5.25, but the cashier informs us, “they’re just
 Our chaperone (not one of your correspondents) notes,
“I’m the only Asian person in this entire stadium.” The seats
are about half full. Notably absent is Lacey Wilson, Miss
Massachusetts USA 2010 and girlfriend of Pawsox first-
basemen Aaron Bates.  sing.
 We lament how long it has been since any of us did “the
wave.” Nobody starts one.  Inning 7
 A man sitting behind us wears a matching Wrestlemania
jersey and baseball cap, perhaps concerned that his Wrestle-
mania pendant necklace alone wouldn’t make enough of a
statement. Gold and red and white. The woman sitting next
to him brags loudly about being trashed at yesterday’s double
header.
 
Inning 4
We are impressed by the muscle tone on the feathered biceps
of the Red Wings mascot, Spikes the cardinal. But his leering
grin might be more fruitfully directed at his mascot girlfriend
with the PawSox’s own boy-girl polar bear duo, Paws and
Sox. Post-game, Spikes’s swagger takes on new connotations
when we learn that from 1908 to 1920, the Red Wings (the
longest-running minor league sports franchise in the US)
were named the “Rochester Hustlers.”
  As for the players, their names sound like Pokemon
characters, had Pokemon been around in the 1950s: Dusty,
Brock, and Tug. “At what point in his life did people start
calling him Tug?” your Rochesterian correspondent asks.
 Red Wing Left Fielder Brian Dinkleman bunts!
The little boy sitting next to us offers some sage advice:
“Hit the ball!” “Go Pawsox!”
 Among the typical ballpark ads for Taco Bell and Bud-
weiser, we get the local flavor of the Warwick Mall and Twin
River Casino. Taco Bell, as per usual, reminds us to “think
outside the bun.” The International Brotherhood of Electri-
cal Workers Local 99 declares: “It’s a ohm run!”  ______________________________________________
 
Inning 5
In the bottom of the fifth, Pawtucket’s Mark Wagner brings
in two runs on a homer. The Pawsox take the lead, 3-2.
  What happens in the half-empty Shaws Party Section?
s p o rt s | 14
Later in the game, the announcer directs our attention to
birthday parties supposedly occurring there, but we see no
balloons, no pointed hats. 
 Because they are a subsidiary of the Boston Red Sox, the
Pawsox would seem to demand the same die-hard fandom as
their big brothers to the North. Maybe they do. According
to their Twitter, “Pawsox.com received the most visitors last
year out of all the Minor League Baseball sites,” but nobody
at the game looks quite ready to shank a Yankee.
 So the Pawsox resort to gimmicks to promote fan loyalty.
Coming up! April 25 is Star Wars day at McCoy stadium! A
young boy sitting near us is two steps ahead of them, with
a Darth Vader t-shirt. Paws, the polar mascot, confirms the
engagement with a tweet: “Just saw Darth Vader and some
Storm Troopers in the ballpark, a sure sign Star Wars Day is
approaching...”
 In the trivia raffle you can win gift certificates for every-
thing, but specifically your very own bottle of “Rich’s Sweet
Heat” (a barbecue sauce produced in Coventry, RI). You can
also win a $100 gift certificate to a limo service—our new
designated driver.
Inning 6
Foam claws are available for sale. They look like Haus of
Gaga did the R-and-D.
    We buy normal hot dogs. We could have bought Mon-
really big hot dogs.”
    Between the sixth and seventh innings the loudspeakers
play “God Bless America” and the jumbotron shows pictures
of local soldiers in fatigues. Everyone stands and most people
 
 
Suddenly, we’re on the “Smile Cam,” waving and cheering
with everyone around us. And smiling. We all admit that
we’ve never once been on a jumbotron before. Except our
Boston correspondent who was, once, at a Women’s World
Cup game.
    Next up on the Smile Cam, a group of three friends in
white t-shirts printed in block letters: PA  WS  OX.
    A message to call FEMA for flood assistance usurps the
scoreboard. 
 
Inning 8
A gaggle of prepubescent girls in the stands starts shrieking
every time Rochester second baseman Luke Hughes takes a
swing. Poor sportsmanship, but judging from the eerie, wild-
eyed stare in his jumbotron photo, he was already pretty
rattled. Hughes strikes out swinging in this inning and the
next.
  The Pawsox see their lead evaporate in the top of the
eighth with a two-run homer by the Red Wings. The score-
board doesn’t budge through the end of the game.
 
Finale
In 1981, the Pawsox and the Red Wings played the longest
game in the history of professional baseball. The 32-inning
game started at McCoy on a Saturday night and dragged
on until 4:07 AM, when the commissioner of the league
postponed the rest of the game. The 19 remaining fans were
given season passes. By the ninth, we feel robbed. 
 
MARISA CALLEJA B’10, RACHEL SANDERS
B’10 & SIMONE LANDON B’10.5 are caught in
some kind of tri-lateral bro-sitch.  
t h e i n dy. o r g
O
n the night that Han-soo and Caroline Kang’s movie theater on the West Side
of Houston was burnt to the ground, the films playing were:
NEON YELLOW
Dir. M a l c o l m K i m
96 m i nu t e s
It’s t h e ye a r 2 1 0 9 , a n d Fi l i p i n o
Chin e s e c o m e d i a n T h e l o n i u s
Ong p i n (Jo h n C h o ) s u f fe r s a
horr i f i c a c c i d e n t t h a t fo rc e s
doc t o r s t o re p l a c e m o s t o f
his f a c e a n d b o d y w i t h ro b o t i c
par t s . I n t h e p ro c e s s , h oweve r,
he l o s e s a l m o s t a l l m a r ke r s
of h i s r a c e a n d s o o n b e c o m e s
enta n g l e d i n a n As i a n - l i b e r a t i o n
guer i l l a h a c ke r o r g a n i z a t i o n
calle d N e o n Ye l l ow. T h e l o n i u s
thus b e g i n s a j o u r n ey t o
graf t ye l l ow n e s s o n t o h i s
cybo r g b o d y a n d c o m b a t a n
incre a s i n g ly e r a c i s t m e d i a .
serious Asian American directors… to making porn?”
“Okay, first of all, they weren’t all Asian-directed,” said Han-soo as
he walked into the kitchen.
“Who’s that?” said Caroline, looking up from her crossword.
“A lot of times we just ended up screening some bullshit B-movie
because an Asian guy played the sidekick,” Han-soo continued. He dropped
an armful of grocery bags onto the table.
“Who are you talking to?” repeated Caroline.
“Second of all— It’s Young-soo— Second of all—”
“Tell him I say hi.”
A LOV E LIKE NAAN OTHER “Caroline says hi. Second of all, Asian American porn!”
D i r. V i c t oria H anover
“So? Every other video online is some fucking geisha-lady rape
1 2 8 m i nutes
fantasy.”
Yo u n g H arold Gibson ( R ober t “Exactly,” said Han-soo. “There are
Pa t t i n s o n), heir to a Sri Lankan
swe a t s h op, takes his first visit
t o t h e e xotic countr y. There , he
m e e t s t h e beautiful H inni , who
t e a c h e s him the ways of her
p e o p l e i n the span of about a
we e k . G ibson’s baby-blue eyes
a re o p e n ed, and he is forced to
c h o o s e b etween two worlds.
A l s o s t a r s Angelina Jolie
we a r i n g a sari while surrounded
by b row n children.

By the time they drove out to the theater, the building, along with the closet full of
rare film prints they had collected over the past seven years, was engulfed in an enormous
blaze. As they held each other and watched the bulbous black smoke rise, Han-soo
and Caroline could think only in titles. Chan Is Missing, gone. Better Luck Tomorrow,
obliterated. Ang Lee’s films all in one molten clump, Wedding Banquet dissolving into
Crouching Tiger.
They agreed that the man to blame was Sean McLendon, the hairy, loud-bellied man
who lived a few blocks down. This was on account of several pieces of evidence that
they had gathered:
Anyway, can we keep the kid at your place or not?”
After Han-soo hung up, he looked up to see Caroline holding the US
Weekly he’d just purchased.
“Catching up on your Lindsay gossip?” she said.
“It’s to cut letters out of,” he explained. “For, you know--”
“The ransom note? Oh, honey, that’s such a cliché.” Caroline poked
through the bags. “Is-- is this a ski mask? What are we, bank robbers in an
eighties comedy?”
“Christ, you know, we’d get this job done sooner if you weren’t
always bitching about how unfashionable our criminal activities were,” said
Han-soo.
Upon seeing the look on Caroline’s face, Han-soo realized that they were
four steps in towards one of their fights, which usually started when

This, however, didn’t quite cut it for the Houston Police Department, and, while the
insurance covered the destroyed building, the Kangs learned that there would be no way
to replace all the films, which prompted a series of arguments in which they said things
such as:
“But they were priceless artifacts of ethnic-American art history!”
“No, Idylls of the Deep South is a priceless artifact of ethnic-American art his-
tory.”
And:
“Those honky-ass cops aren’t going to help us out. We need to take shit into
our own hands.”
“Since when do you use the word ‘honky’?”
And:
“Amy Tan can go screw herself.”
“Exactly-- that’s why ‘The Joy Fuck Club’ is such a good name for a porno.”
Finally, they resorted to

“Let me get this straight,” said Han-soo’s brother Young-soo on the

phone. “You’re going from screening and archiving quality films made by
Plan c
Plan B
Apply for a grant to
Knock on Sean’s
door and get him to
replace the lost films
confess to burning
down the the theatre,
using tactics learned
from “Law and Order:
Criminal Intent.”
“I’m sorry,” said Han-soo. “That was an asshole thing to say.”
“It’s okay,” said Caroline. She fingered the hem of her shirt.
“Am I really being cliché?” said Han-soo.
Plan D
“Just a little.”
“Well, if it helps, I really did buy the magazine for the celeb gossip.”
Forget the films. Caroline smiled despite herself. “Did you know that Cameron Diaz was not
Instead, kidnap Sean’s
wearing makeup coming back from yoga?”
daughter and use the
ransom money (along Caroline laughed. Han-soo put his arms around her, and she kissed him.
“Hey,” he said, running his thumb along her jaw. “I have a surprise for you.”
with the insurance
“A surprise?” she said, a smile winking from the corner of her mouth. Han-soo
money) to move
to San Francisco rummaged through a bag on the table behind him, pulled something out, and turned
and start producing around.
Asian American “Holy fuck!” said Caroline, leaping back and throwing her hands in the air.
pornography. “You bought a gun? “
Han-soo weighed the gun limply in his hands. “You said we should do this
right…” “Jesus, why is that always the order?” said Han-soo, changing into the express
“I meant write out an itinerary, not buy a gun!” said Caroline, gawking at the
thing.
“It’ll help when we--”
“Do you know how to shoot it?”
“Yes! I mean, I’ve— yeah.”
“Where’s the safety?”
“Um—hold on.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“Okay, sweetie, we really need to move past the whole gun thing,” said Han-
soo, “Because, like, bottom line, we have a gun now.” He turned around and aimed it
at the fridge.
Caroline dropped to the floor, hands over her head.
Julie McLendon threw herself at the back window of Han-soo and Caroline’s sedan,
tearing at the locked door handle and wailing in a language that occasionally sounded
like English but seemed to consist mostly of wet vowels.
“Okay! Okay!” Caroline shouted, half to herself, from the passenger seat.
“Calm down!”
Julie turned up the volume on the hysterics and began to attack Han-soo’s face,
scratching with her dirty sugarplumsparkle-polished nails. The car swerved, just barely
missing a brick mailbox.
“Fucking-- fuck!” yelled Han-soo. It didn’t make sense, but it was the best
he could come up with, what with the ninety pounds of pre-pubescent fury that had
latched onto his face like a giant bat.
“Stop it!” said Caroline. The car swerved again, this time into the road. She
tore open the glovebox, pulled out the gun, and held it above her head as squarely as she
could. “OKAY. THAT’S ENOUGH.”
Julie released her grip on Han-soo, her face dirty with tears. Caroline gasped
heavily.
“Put on your seatbelt,” she managed to say.
Julie just sat, her legs tucked up under her, sobbing. Clumsily, she smoothed her hair
from her face and pressed herself into the corner of the car, against the thin line of chill
whipping past the crack of the door, willing herself to flatten and seep back out into her
neighborhood, into Julie as she had always been. She felt as if she’d been lifted out of a
trajectory:
“Who are you?” Julie demanded, still crying. “What are you going to do to
me?”
Han-soo and Caroline exchanged a glance. Han-soo removed his fake mus-
tache and sunglasses.
“We’re not going to hurt you, dear,” said Caroline, turning around in her seat.
“WHO ARE YOU?” Julie wailed. “HOO-AHH- HAHHH-HRR-HRRRR...”
“Oh, dear lord,” said Caroline, lowering the gun to massage her forehead. Julie
took the opportunity to launch herself back onto Han-soo’s face.
“FUCKING--” Han-soo yelled, riding up onto the curb. “씨팔!”
Over the next hour and a half,
Finally, with the car speeding west on a darkening highway toward Laredo, Julie
received the first answer to her almost continuous barage of questions.
“We’re kidnapping you,” said Caroline, “because your father destroyed every-
thing that’s important to us.”
“What’d he do to you?” said Julie.
“He burned down our theater,” said Han-soo.
“Oh, y’all the ones who own that Chinese movie place?”
“It’s an Asian and Asian American movie theater,” said Han-soo, “and we’re not
Chinese.”
“What are you, Japanese?”
“No.”
“Vietnamese?”
lane. “Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and what would have been your next guess?”
“I don’t know, Korean?” said Julie.
“Exactly,” said Han-soo. “Everyone guesses
Japanese?
chinese? KOrean?
because everyone’s
Vietnamese?
because all because of the
still playing the World because of the war
Asians are other war
War II Good Asian or
chinese
Bad Asian Game
“Jeez,” said Julie. “I was just curious.”
“Everyone’s fucking curious!” insisted Han-soo. “Everyone wants
to know what species I am!”
The three traveled on in silence for a while, each one’s head spinning with
the story they’d landed in. They thought about
A few hours later, a sign advertising the word “FOOD” rose up out of
the blue flatness ahead. Julie’s stomach growled, and Han-soo took this as a
sign to pull off the interstate. After the couple discussed strategy briefly in
hushed Korean, Caroline turned around in her seat to face Julie, gun back in
her hand
“Okay, sweetie,” she said. “Here’s what’s going to happen--”
“Listen, if you try anything really stupid, Caroline’s not afraid to use
that gun.” said Han-soo.
Caroline blanched. “Well,” she said.
“So if you don’t want anyone to get hurt--”
“No one’s going to get hurt, dear,” Caroline told Julie reassuringly.
“Honey,” Han-soo said to Caroline, low.
“Well, just behave yourself, and everything will be all right,” Caro-
line conceded. Julie rolled her eyes.
When they pulled up to the window, Julie tried to tell the cashier with her
eyes that she did not know these two strange yellow people, to notify the
police immediately. The cashier, for her part, didn’t look at Julie at all, just
passed Han-soo the bags of food with a sullen “Seventeen ninety-six.”
Caroline passed Julie her burger with a smile.
“Help!” she shouted, banging at the window. Han-soo and Caroline
froze. “I’ve been kidnapped! I’ve been kidnapped! My name is Julie McLen-
don and I live on 89--”
“HA! HA!” said Han-soo. “Julie-- honey-- don’t BOTHER the nice
LADY!”
The cashier eyed the family, finally interested.
“She’s adopted!” said Caroline, her voice pitched a little too high.
“She loves to JOKE!“ She tightened her grip on the gun under her jacket. The
cashier noticed and opened her mouth.
“그냥 가!” said Caroline. Han-soo gunned it, and they ripped out of
the parking lot, over the curb.
“씨팔! 씨팔!” Han-soo swore. He turned around dangerously to
look at Julie, his knuckles white-hot on the steering wheel. “What the hell is
wrong with you?! You could have gotten us all killed!”
Julie pressed her face against the window, gasping emptily at the restau-
rant as it shrank into the distance, the cashier still staring out at them. Her
hands on the glass were suddenly criminally heavy.
Caroline was crying messily, holding the gun in her fingers like a piece of
raw meat. “Oh-- god-- ” she said. “What are we doing?” She tried to shove
the gun out of sight, but her shaking hands sent a flurry of insurance papers
and emergency manuals flying out of the glove compartment.
“Han-soo--“ Caroline sobbed as all the just-in-cases drifted to the floor
around her. “Han-soo, what are we doing?”
X | 17

TE X TIMAGETE X TIMAGETE X T
BY EMILY SORG , MAN V IR SINGH , SOPHIE SPORTICHE , BECCA LE V INSON & SAM ALPER

W ent over to an old friend’s house last night, you know, to catch up,
drink some wine, eat some kind of fancy cheese. What’s with these
fancy cheeses? Always smelling like socks and shit. I don’t get it, but
hey, that’s classiness for ya. And I’m classy. So. No beer for me. Just stinky cheese
and red wine. Gotta drink the red wine ‘cuz it’s good for the heart, good for the…
ha! And yeah, everything’s going great, really great, I mean this old friend’s an old
flame of mine and the stuff between us is hot, we’re talkin’ burning-up. One more sip
and a grin and I’m about to go in for the kill but... no. I’ve got to be woken up by
my fat wife’s nudge, nudge, nudgenudgenudge. George, gettup. George. George! Turns
out my daughter has confused her finger for a fucking chicken nugget and I’ve got
to drive her to the hospital to have it sewn back on. I say leave it off. That stupid
hungry bitch.

“You’ve always loved bubbles” they tell me, “You’ve been loving bubbles since birth.”
When I was four, my parents once let me have a sip of beer. I was excited by the
profusion of bubbles, little circles of air rolling upwards so stealthily, so smoothly
against the glass into a layer of foam. My parents though this would be a lesson, a
good lesson that not all bubbles are good bubbles. But it failed, because I didn’t mind
the stuff’s bitterness in light of its kept promise of bubbles, of bubble heaven, like
a Fizzy Lifting Drink that came for me straight from the Bubble Room. My parents
quickly took the beer away, before “bubble trouble” ensued as a drunk four year old
grew increasingly drunk off of bubble delight.

I imagine our night together like a scene in a movie where suddenly they’re not speak-
ing English but there are no subtitles. So yeah we had sex. But how could I have known
you had a child? Ok I knew because of your Facebook status. But how could I have
let it matter until afterwards when I came down with the chills and knew I was being
punished. For giving you false hope or something. For like a new dad or something.
And oh god your stomach was wrecked. Like some dog had attacked you. I couldn’t
imagine you doing a sit-up. Or doing anything other than those little pirouettes by the
art-deco lamp while the speakers in the wall played “Killing Me Softly”. I mean there
were a few other songs they could have played. You know those songs.

You asked me what sign I was. When people ask me what sign I am I feel like we
are on opposite sides of a great ocean. I feel like they are a cactus and I am a lamp.

I mean if you hadn’t cared so much about signs I would have been nicer to you,
probably.

When I came down with the chills all my dreams were about videogames. I had to
get my father out of one. It was an amazing videogame. It looked just like everything.
Sometimes when I see a really blue sky I think this is so lovely, this is just like that
Japanese videogame.

Uh-oh.

When I was falling asleep you told me a fairytale about a woman who flies to
another planet. But I fell asleep before you told me what she found there. And when I
woke up an hour later you were asleep. And an hour after that too. I’m sure you were
awake when I wasn’t. I’m sure we were missing each other by half-hours all night like
that.

We stopped in the morning to visit your tarot card reader. Thank god she wasn’t
home. The sky was so blue and I would’ve played along. She could’ve said anything and
I said yes, of course, and then what happens?

the college hill independent APRIL 15, 2010

Coloring contest by Samantha Ballardini. Please send completed submissions to Brown University Box 1930 or, scanned, to theindy@gmail.com. The winner will be published on the back cover.
 the list
FRI 16
SAT 17
9AM-2PM Wheeler School Clothing
Sale @ 407 Brook St.
11:30AM-7PM 9th Annual Spring Pow-
wow @ Pembroke Field // free
4-5:30PM Tamora Pierce talks about
creating Strong Female Charac-
ters @ Starr Auditorium // free
7PM-2AM Freezepop, Plushgun, + Tri-
angle Forest @ Club Hell, 73 Rich-
mond St. // $10/12 adv/day-of
8-10:30PM Annual RISD/Brown Drag
Show + Sex Toy Raffle @ RISD Audito-
rium // $5 donation, raffle tix 2/$1
8PM Halloween in April: BSR’s (Belat-
ed) Annual Cover Bands show feat.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Muse, Mi-
nor Threat, + more @ RISD Tap Room //
free; free pizza!
9PM Chinese Stars, Nuclear Power
Pants, Height, + Deleted Arrows @
Building 16 // $donate
9PM Peter Glantz and The Imaginary
Company, CARTUNE XPREZ: 2010 Future
Television, In This Economy, Blevin
Blechtum Presents: The Preserving
Machine @ AS220, 115 Empire St. // $6
10PM-2AM Gala! Congrats to SLA for
actually getting them to change
the location to @ Andrews Dining
Hall & Terrace // $20
TUE 20
MON 19
6PM First Annual Grimshaw-Gude-
wicz Lecture: “Tiberius the Satirist”
with Rhiannon Ash of the University
of Oxford @ RI Hall 108 // free
7PM Scary Arabs, Sexy Hijabis—a con-
versation with Edina Lekovic of the
Muslim Public Affairs Council about
Muslims in the media @ List 120 // free
9PM Glowkid, The Coathangers and
3D Mystery @ AS220 // $6
9:ishPM United States + Single Lash @
RISD Tap Room // free as a bird
THU 22
5PM Adding Magic to Realism: Ale-
jo Carpentier and Gabriel García
Márquez—a talk by Carlos Fuent-
es @ John Carter Brown Library //
free + open to the public
8PM Tao Seeger + Paper Bird @ Nar-
rows Center for the Arts, 16
Anawan St., Fall River, Mass. // $12
9PM Brown Bird, A Weather, + Liz Is-
enberg @ AS220 //$6
10PM-1AM Frisky Business: Unoffi-
cial Spring Weekend Kickoff Cock-
tail Party @ Bravo // $15 each or $25
for 2
9AM-9PM Wheeler School Clothing
Sale @ 407 Brook St. // free admis-
sion, cheap stuff
7PM A Reading by Robert Snyder-
man, Christopher Sweeney, Lonely
Christopher, + Karen Lepri @ Ada
Books, 717 Westminster Street //
priceless + open to all
7PM “Hedwig & the Angry Inch” @
Perishable Theatre, 95 Empire St. //
$20
8PM Alice in Chains @ the Dunkin’
Donuts Center or Flogging Molly
@ Lupo’s—your choice!
SUN 18
3PM Providence Roller Derby Home
Season Opener vs. London Roller Girls
@ RI Convention Center, 1 Sabin St. // $13
7PM Alphabet Soles: Language as
Ground, a site-specific performance
@ India Point Park Bridge // allow the
sensory experience of language to
touch your soles and soul
8PM “Some Like It Hot”—Marilyn Mon-
roe on the big screen @ Lincoln Field //
bring a blanket
9:30PM “Wrestling Grounds,” part of
the Africana Film Festival @ the Cable
Car, 204 S. Main St. // $6/8 student/gen-
eral
NOON-2PM Google Recruitment Sesh @
the CDC // bring your resume
1-2:30PM Reenactment of the Battle
of Qadesh @ the Quiet Green // do the
Egyptian
5-7PM Noam Chomsky on the Middle
East @ Salomon 101 // free
5PM The Century of Independence:
Looking for Identity: Sarmiento
and Machado de Assis a talk by Car-
los Fuentes @ John Carter Brown Li-
brary // free + open to the public
9PM Third Eye Blind @ Lupo’s // $30
WED 21
5PM The Novel of the Mexican Revo-
lution: The Underdogs and Pedro
Páramo—a talk by Carlos Fuentes
@ John Carter Brown Library //
free + open to the public
6PM Gendering Power with Sin-
clair Sexmith. Is gender a fetish
or a kink? @ List 110
9PM The Low Anthem, Tallahassee, +
the ‘Mericans @ Lupo’s $15