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How an Amish missionary caused 2014's massive measles outbreak - Vox
Last year was terrible for measles in the United States: there were 644 cases — the highest annual caseload in two decades. Granola-crunching Californians, wealthy Oregonians, and Jenny McCarthy anti-vaccine acolytes have taken much of the blame for this spike. The Washington Post even pointed to Orange County — the location of the current Disneyland outbreak — as "Ground Zero in our current epidemic of anti-vaccine hysteria."
But that's wrong. The real story behind the 2014 outbreak isn't on the West Coast. It's in Ohio Amish country, where a missionary returning from the Philippines turned an otherwise unremarkable year for this virus into one of the worst in recent history.
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That's where Jacqueline Fletcher, the public health nursing director for Ohio's Knox County, got a terrible call from a pay phone last April.
A member of the local Amish community was on the line. There was a potential measles outbreak in the town, the woman said, and the public health department should know.
Fletcher's first thought was, "Oh, shit." For a health worker, this was a nightmare scenario. She couldn't just call the woman back or ring up other potential victims; they didn't have phone numbers. This Amish community, like others in the United States, eschews the conveniences of modern technology.
"We don't have any internet or computer. We don't have a car," Ivan Miller, an Amish furniture store owner in the community struck by measles, explained. "It's not that we feel a car is wrong. It's our choice because we feel if we had a car, it would bring us to a lot more temptations in the world."
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Read more:
9 things everyone should know about measles
At the time, this Amish population was generally against vaccination. This, however, wasn't a matter of religious principle but one of health concerns.
In the 1990s, Miller explained, two Ohio kids allegedly got sick after they took the MMR shot, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella. Rumors about vaccine safety spread through the Amish community like a virus. "That put a scare in us and we quit," Miller says. This made it incredibly easy for measles — the most contagious virus known to man — to move through this cluster of unvaccinated individuals.
Fletcher had been with the Knox health department for 29 years. And she'd never seen anything like what she found in some of the Amish households she visited, trying to get a sense of the outbreak's size — and stop its spread. "There was a household that had six adolescent teenage children with measles, all sitting in the dark," she says. They were covered in the spotty rash that's characteristic of the virus, miserable, and sick. It was a scene from the last century.
The outbreak that Fletcher spent months working to contain ultimately infected 382 Amish Ohioans by the time it was declared over in August of last year. Nobody died, but nine wound up in the hospital with more serious symptoms.
"We had never seen a case of measles before this," Fletcher says. "I just remember a man from the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] saying to me, 'You have got to get ahead of this.'"
Unvaccinated travelers drive measles outbreaks
Last summer, a team of researchers got together to try and understand an alarming trend: why had so many measles cases popped up recently?
In 2000, the federal government declared that the United States had eliminated the disease: enough people were immunized that outbreaks were uncommon, and deaths from measles were scarcely heard of.
But in the first half of 2014 alone, there were 288 cases. And nearly all of them, the CDC researchers wrote in findings published last June, stemmed from Americans traveling abroad and returning with the disease.
"Of the 288 cases, 280 (97 percent) were associated with importations from at least 18 countries," they wrote. Many of these travelers were coming back from the Philippines, which has been dealing with a massive outbreak since fall 2013.
"What we've seen — since the epidemic of measles was interrupted in 2000 — is that we are continually getting measles coming in from overseas," says Jane Seward, deputy director of the viral diseases division at the CDC. "More often than not, it's US residents who go overseas for a trip — to say, Europe, where they don't think they need to be vaccinated. They bring measles back."
"A perfect storm" in Ohio
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In the Ohio case, "patient zero" had traveled to the Philippines on a missionary trip. (In case you were wondering, he took a plane. Miller explained, "Some Amish fly. Some don't.") At the time, the Philippines happened to be facing a massive measles outbreak, with tens of thousands of cases.
When he returned to Ohio, and fell ill, a doctor misdiagnosed him with Dengue fever, so he continued to pass his disease along to friends and neighbors, many of whom had refused the vaccine out of those concerns over adverse effects.
Fletcher describes it as a "perfect storm:" an unimmunized traveler going to a place with an outbreak and bringing an infectious disease back to an unprotected community.
Measles is one of the most contagious viruses ever discovered. In most cases, it's not deadly, but it's almost always debilitating, bringing on a weeks-long fever, rash, and painful, watery eyes. Up to forty percent of people experience serious complications, such as pneumonia and encephalitis (or swelling of the brain). One or two children in 1,000 die.
The most remarkable thing about the virus, however, is that it's incredibly indestructible. A person with measles can cough in a room, leave, and — if you were unvaccinated — hours later, you can catch the virus from the droplets in the air that they left behind. No other virus can do that. It also lives on surfaces for hours, finding new hosts in the unimmunized.
"Measles is very contagious, so once [the Ohio missionary] felt better, he went to church, and the church was in somebody's house," Fletcher says. "The majority of those first cases, we linked back to him. They had all attended church in that house."
"There was a household with six adolescent teenagers with measles, all sitting in the dark."
Then, there were obstacles specific to tracing a disease through an Amish community. Trying to reach everyone who might have been exposed to the disease and get them into quarantine so they couldn't spread the infection further required a level of gumshoeing nearly reminiscent of searching out Ebola victims in rural West Africa.
"Because the Amish don't have phones, we had to go out to their homes," she says. "We're a small health department in a rural area. It was a lot of work."
Fletcher and her team patiently went door to door, collecting specimens, educating people about vaccines, making sure the vulnerable — pregnant women and small babies too young to get vaccinated — were safe from harm. CDC officials even flew in to support the effort.
An Amish man travels to the Philippines...
The actual story of the 2014 outbreak complicates the narrative that has developed in the wake of the new outbreak of measles at Disneyland in early 2015: that a growing number of parents, led by Jenny McCarthy, have begun to opt their kids out of vaccinations, letting the disease spread easily.
Federal data shows no drop off in vaccination rates over the past decade
In fact, it's only about two percent of the population that refuses vaccines outright. All 50 states have had school immunization requirements since the early 1980s, though some now allow medical and philosophical exemptions. Even so, there hasn't been a drop off in vaccination rates in the past decade, the National Immunization Survey shows. Coverage for the MMR vaccine stands at 92 percent.
It's not actually a rising anti-vaxx tide or naturopathic, private school mothers driving a return of vaccine-preventable disease here. It's not even low-income folks who wind up getting sick, and it's especially not undocumented migrants bringing in viruses, the CDC's Seward says: "The people getting measles are those that travel abroad, come back, and live in a community among people who weren't vaccinated."
Some years, we get 40 "importations." Last year, there were about 65. "This is more than normal," she added, "and it reflects travel patterns and where measles is active globally."
The travelers spark outbreaks when they hit geographic clusters of unvaccinated people, like the one in Ohio. These infectious disease powder kegs exist all across the US, waiting to be sparked. Their low rates of vaccine coverage are hidden in the statistics about national averages, and they are by no means guided by a singular ideology. They may be the hesitant Amish of Ohio, vaccine-opposing Christian Scientists, or simply worried parents who delay immunizing their kids.
Last year, the Amish outbreak in the United States mirrored an uptick in Canadian cases. A population of Christian Dutch Reformers in British Columbia, which had refused vaccines out of concerns over safety, drove an outbreak of more than 400 measles cases. According to the World Health Organization, there were only 512 cases in Canada in total last year.
Miller, the Ohio furniture-store owner, says the measles episode in Knox changed his mind about the MMR vaccine. His wife got a bad case, and so did his son-in-law. "On their worst days, we were wondering if they're going to make it," he says.
"We all took the vaccine after that. I had one shot, and I still took the other one and we had all our kids vaccinated, too. After people saw how sick people got, they changed their minds."
The Boys of Beaver Meadow: A Homosexual Community at 1920s Dartmouth College | Syrett | American Studies
hodadI live on Beaver Meadow Road. The juiciest details of this story aren’t in the article, which is too cursory to be interesting. Most notable are letters of correspondence between then Dartmouth President Hopkins and a psychiatrist, in which the president (for whom the campus arts center is named) wishes that more queer students had committed suicide.
One of the alumni who were vocally supportive of the “boys of Beaver Meadow” was 30-year New Yorker editor Clifford Orr.
Full Text:
PDFAmid measles outbreak, anti-vaccine doctor revels in his notoriety - The Washington Post
“Don’t be mad at me for speaking the truth about vaccines,” Wolfson said in a telephone interview with The Washington Post. “Be mad at yourself, because you’re, frankly, a bad mother. You didn’t ask once about those vaccines. You didn’t ask about the chemicals in them. You didn’t ask about all the harmful things in those vaccines…. People need to learn the facts.”
A Meat Processing Professional Reviews "Snowpiercer"
Previously: A Meat Processing Professional Reviews Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Snowpiercer is presented in a conventional 1.85:1 aspect ratio, the U.S. widescreen cinema standard, and runs for 126 minutes. Although the film has a laudable focus on issues of food security, I sadly cannot recommend it. I appreciate that many hands work on a film such as this, but ultimately I hold the director, Mr. Bong, responsible for the inconsistencies that he has allowed to appear in his product.
The first obvious area of interest is the protein block, the film’s primary on-screen food source. Early in the running time, the male lead discovers that these blocks are comprised of processed insect protein. I have no quarrel with this – in the conditions of the train, entomophagy is a highly sensible choice. Insects provide all nine essential amino acids, valuable fatty acids, and are high in calcium. They also grow very efficiently – insects will produce 12 times the amount of protein from their feed when compared to, say, a cow.
I am also pleased by the jelly-like appearance of the blocks – while I deal with the more traditional mammalian gelatin in my professional life, the gelling agent has also been successfully extracted from insect sources. I truly wish, dear reader, that I could leave it there, and congratulate Mr. Bong on his choice.
Sadly, the response to the revelation of his protein source leaves a lot to be desired. Curtis, the aforementioned male lead, reacts with immediate disgust. One might well expect somewhat less squeamishness from a character who is later revealed to have sought out and consumed human infants! I grant that babies are established to taste better, in the character’s own objective impression. But I would argue that the drive provided by taste is considerably reduced when one’s only options are to eat or die. Sadly, throughout the remainder of the film the protein blocks are continually disparaged, and a valuable opportunity to educate people on a new and sustainable food source is lost.
This loss becomes more pitiable when we learn that, before the protein blocks, the tail section’s main diet was human flesh. This food was, in the end, provided via a system of voluntary limb donation. I do not approve of this system. I have previously had cause to speak of the inefficiency of this “living larder” style of cannibalism, and do not wish to repeat myself. In the film’s defence, the inevitable post amputation deaths from sepsis and shock would indeed provide a source of fresh corpses, and yet more protein for the tail section to consume.
The inciting incident for the voluntary system is revealed to be an elderly man, Gilliam, performing self-amputation with a knife. This will not stand. Perhaps Mr. Bong believes that his own arm is as soft and boneless as a well-aged steak, but I should hope he knows better about the rest of humanity! The removal of limbs requires specialised tools, and a severing of bone and sinew. Without access to these, Mr. Gilliam is at a severe disadvantage. The removal of his limb would have been an extremely long and, presumably, painful process–nothing like the inspiring moment of high drama that is implied. Yet with a suitable axe or bone saw, the problem could have been solved. I would suggest that Mr. Bong does his research next time he talks about removing limbs!
This film created the opportunity for a truly relevant and interesting discussion on the allocation of scarce resources. While it has failed in this instance, I hope that Mr. Bong’s career will provide other opportunities to explore these topics, and to rise to the level which I believe he is capable of.
Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected from its original version. The meat processing professional lacked an understanding of international naming conventions; they wish to apologize and encourage you to eat more meat.
New #BlackLivesMatter class to cover race, violence | The Dartmouth
hodadMs. Dr. making waves with her new Ferguson course.
(She’s currently being interviewed by a reporter for USA Today, my mom’s favorite newspaper)
The geography department and African and African-American studies program are introducing a new course for the upcoming spring term called “10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter,” dedicated to considering race, structural inequality and violence in both a historical and modern context.
About 15 Dartmouth professors will teach separate sections of the class from different academic disciplines over the course of the term. Professors teaching this course come from over 10 academic departments and programs, including anthropology, history, women’s and gender studies, mathematics and English, among others.
Geography professor Abigail Neely said that the idea to create this course stemmed from a Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning workshop, which urged faculty to incorporate the 2014 events in Ferguson, Missouri, culminating in the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the unarmed shooting of Michael Brown, into their various courses.
“We just thought that it might be interesting and innovative and exciting to have a course that’s dedicated to this, whereas lots of other people are incorporating it into other courses,” Neely said.
English professor Aimee Bahng said when she was writing the syllabi for her winter term courses, she felt it was imperative that she incorporate the events into her curriculum.
Bahng said that by teaching the new course, the faculty hope to create a culture of learning that goes beyond the classroom and cultivate a discussion amongst scholars about questions of race in America.
The course will approach this and other social issues from a number of different disciplines, which will give students who take the course the opportunity to participate in interdisciplinary discussions firsthand, Bahng said.
Neely said that the course will break down barriers between different disciplines, a goal an institution like Dartmouth is designed to achieve.
She said that the faculty hope to not only place Ferguson in a temporal context, but also to highlight that it was not an isolated incident in the United States or around the world.
Bahng said they want to use Ferguson as a teaching opportunity.
“We hope students will be able to understand that Ferguson is not just an event in 2014, but something that’s tethered in time to a long history and still-emerging ideas about race in the U.S. and how policing works in an age of social media and distributed surveillance,” Bahng said.
Geography department chair Susanne Freidberg said that the interdisciplinary structure should have broad appeal and provide a way for students to approach an issue that might seem to be only sociological or political, and see that there are also things to be learned about it from other viewpoints, such as from a religious or geographical perspective.
“I hope that for the students it will provide an opportunity to learn and talk about things that might seem very far away from Dartmouth but affect a lot of people in the country, and to do so with a lot of different professors,” she said.
Anthropology professor Chelsey Kivland said this is an opportunity “to use Ferguson as a starting point for broadening the conversation about the national problems of inequality, race and violence.”
Kivland teaches the “Ethnography of Violence” course in the anthropology department and spends a week during the course discussing police brutality. She said she was motivated to participate in teaching the new course because this is material that she already teaches and feels is important.
History professor Annelise Orleck, who will also be teaching a section of the class, said that the professors involved saw the events in Ferguson as being important enough to require prolonged discussion.
Orleck said it is important that as the Black Lives Matters movement builds, classroom discussion be rooted in history. She will be working to create a sense of historical context and perspective on issues of urban inequality and policing, as well as the community response to these issues.
Kevin Gillespie ’15, the president of the Dartmouth chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said that the course seems to be exactly what the College needs in regard to raising awareness.
He said the course is relevant to issues the NAACP has been focused on recently.
“Courses like these are extremely important, and they get us all out of our comfort zones, whether you’re taking the course or not, because people will be talking about it,” Gillespie said.
The NAACP organized a “Black Lives Matter” protest and die-in in Baker-Berry Library on Jan. 15 that had about 40 participants. Over the winter interim period, Dartmouth students, faculty and community members led two separate demonstrations, one against police brutality on Hanover’s Main Street and the other as part of the National White Coat Die-in at the Geisel School of Medicine.
Language Log » Freedom Fries
On 1/23/2015, as part of a This American Life show on "What happens when the Internet turns on you?", Ira Glass took up an issue we've devoted a few posts to ("545: If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS — Act Two, Freedom Fries").
Recently, This American Life has been getting a lot of hate mail about the young women on our staff — listeners complain about their "vocal fry." […]
What's striking in the dozens of emails about vocal fry that we've gotten here at our radio show is how vehement people are. These are some of the angriest emails we ever get. They call these women's voices unbearable, excruciating, annoyingly adolescent, beyond annoying, difficult to pay attention, so severe as to cause discomfort, can't stand the pain, distractingly disgusting, could not get over how annoyed I was, I am so appalled, detracts from the credibility of the journalist, degrades the value of the reportage, it's a choice, very unprofessional.
Apparently vocal fry has taken over from uptalk and approximative like as the main way to complain about female voices on the air:
Stephanie Foo Lately, in the past year and a half maybe, every time I get together with female radio producers, it's just like comparing war stories.
Ira Glass That's Stephanie Foo, one of the younger producers here on our show.
Stephanie Foo It's just listing off, oh, somebody said this about me, my voice this week. Somebody said I sound like a stoner 13-year-old. Somebody said that my voice sounds like driving on gravel. Somebody said they wanted to kill themselves hearing my voice.
Ira Glass Listeners have always complained about young women reporting on our show. They used to complain about reporters using the word like and about upspeak, which is when you put a question mark at the end of a sentence and talk like this. But we don't get many emails like that anymore. People who don't like listening to young women on the radio have moved on to vocal fry.
The program quotes me on the alleged novelty of the phenomenon:
The Today Show story and other stories treat vocal fry as if it's a new phenomenon, on the rise, a fad, an epidemic. But as a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, Mark Liberman, has pointed out, there is still no evidence of that, pro or con– no evidence that it is more common now than it's always been.
And it quotes Penny Eckert on a perceptual generation gap:
Ira Glass A few years ago, a linguist named Penny Eckert from Stanford University heard a young woman on NPR and was surprised to hear somebody speaking in such a casual style with so much vocal fry about serious news. And she thought, well, she shouldn't be on NPR. She doesn't sound authoritative.
Penny Eckert When I played it for my students and asked them how they thought she sounded, they said she sounded great. And they thought she sounded authoritative. Then I knew that I was behind the curve.
Ira Glass So she did a little study– a preliminary study. She played clips of a Marketplace reporter named Sally Herships for 584 people, and she asked them to rate how authoritative the reporter sounded. The results, people under 40 heard it very differently than people over 40.
Penny Eckert The younger people found that quite authoritative, and the older people did not.
Ira Glass So if people are having a problem with these reporters on the radio, what it means is they're old.
Penny Eckert Yeah, I think old people tend to get cranky about this stuff anyway. But the media are just all over it. I mean, I'm constantly getting requests from media. And they want to talk about the crazy ways that young women are speaking. And the first thing they do is attribute it to young women, even though young men are doing it too. So it's a policing of young people, but I think most particularly young women.
Ira Glass She says the same thing happened with upspeak and with the word like. Reporters would call her about these things. They'd point to them as a problem with young women when young men do all that also.
She says people get worked up about this stuff, but it's just part of life. As we age, we fall out of touch with how younger people speak. Her advice to everybody, including herself– get over it.
Some earlier LLOG posts relevant to this issue:
"Vocal fry: 'creeping in' or 'still here'?", 12/12/2011
"More on 'vocal fry'", 12/18/2011
"Sexy baby vocal virus", 8/15/2013
"Biology, sex, culture, and pitch", 8/16/2013
"New vocal fry culprit", 6/18/2014
"Vocal fry probably doesn't harm your career prospects", 6/7/2014
"Real fry", 6/19/2014
By the way, see the Wikipedia article for the background of the title's "freedom fries" joke.
And see also, "You want fries with that?"
Nowheresville - The New Yorker
The Khan Shatyr Entertainment Center, in Astana, Kazakhstan—also known as the world’s tallest tensile structure, or tent—took four years and four hundred million dollars to build. It devoured a thousand truckloads of materials, which came from all over. The special ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, or ETFE, polymer that envelops the Khan Shatyr, and makes it look, at certain times of the day, like a terrible sea creature risen from the steppe, came from Germany and China. The sand lining the beach on the top floor came from the Maldives. The tropical plants came from Spain.
Is it hard to ship plants?
“Yes!” said Caner Demir, who was the head of on-site logistics for the final phase of the Khan Shatyr project. A genial, bearded Turk in his mid-thirties, Demir has limited English and chooses his words carefully. “You are shipping plants, in a truck. For eighteen, nineteen days. Live plants.”
Khan Shatyr is Kazakh for “King of the Tents.” It was designed by Foster and Partners, the firm of Norman Foster, who is known for his ability to put flesh (or, at least, ETFE) on the theoretical postulates of postmodern architecture. But Lord Foster does not drive trucks. The Turkish company Sembol did the construction, so most parts of the giant tent were routed through Turkey. The most direct overland route went through northern Iran and then Turkmenistan, but it had a drawback. “Drivers do not like going through Turkmenistan,” Demir said. “In Turkmenistan there are many regulations. But no rules.”
The government of Kazakhstan is not without its own rules and regulations, but as Nigel Dancey, of Foster and Partners, put it to me, “You’re presenting to the President, he shakes your hand, you make a decision, and the process is very quick.” To speed the construction of the other Foster building in Astana, the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, the President sent the Army. Khan Shatyr was built on a less exigent schedule, but it was still helped along: customs officials opened an office at the construction site in order to save time at the border; visas were expedited.
For Sembol, the trickiest part was lifting the three giant steel beams that hold up the Khan Shatyr. The beams had been assembled on the ground; now they weighed two thousand tons and had to be hoisted simultaneously and brought together at their highest points so that they could support one another. A whole separate structure had to be built to perform this feat; when it was done, an international squadron of mountaineers arrived to run hundreds of cables from the base of the tripod to the top, before hanging the ETFE on them. The Presidents of many countries, including countries that hate one another, came to the opening ceremony, last July 5th. It was a fitting present for Kazakhstan’s leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who turned seventy the next day, and who had constructed this entire city, ex nihilo, in the middle of the Kazakh steppe.
Astana is a government city, not a tourist city, but all you do is tour it. You tour it in the cab from the airport, passing the gleaming new English-language Nazarbayev University and then the new soccer stadium, speed-skating track, and ten-thousand-seat velodrome. (“It’s like a bug,” I ventured of the velodrome. “A giant, low-slung, predatory—” “It’s a bicycle helmet,” the taxi driver said, and, yes, this made more sense.) You tour the city from the observation deck of Bayterek, a weird white structure that resembles a giant badminton birdie, with a golden bird’s egg on top; you tour it from the seat of every bus that takes the long, circuitous way through town because there aren’t yet enough bus routes. You tour whether you want to or not.
My favorite tour of all was courtesy of a Kazakh friend I will call Marat, a lawyer. We had met while playing hockey at a small outdoor rink in the old, Soviet part of town, and then had gone to Marat’s place to eat horse meatballs and plov and drink endless cups of tea with his family. We discussed Kazakh democracy (developing), the geographical position of Kazakhstan on a map of the world (in the very center), and the contributions of the Kazakh people to world history (significant). Kazakhs are east-central Asian, meaning that they more or less resemble the inhabitants of Mongolia (and a dozen other nearby and not-so-nearby places, including, to some extent, Kyrgyzstan and Yakutia); they speak a Turkic language, mildly worship Allah, write in a modified Cyrillic, and drive Nissans. Recently, Genghis Khan, whose armies conquered this part of the world in the thirteenth century, has been enjoying a popular resurgence as a proto-Kazakh, and Marat spoke warmly of him. “The only reason he didn’t conquer the rest of Europe was he didn’t think it was good grazing land for his horses,” Marat said. And then we ate some more horse.
After dinner, Marat drove me back across the frozen Ishim River to the apartment I’d rented in the new part of town. Astana has been the capital of Kazakhstan only since 1997, three years after Nazarbayev told a stunned parliament that a prosperous, independent country like Kazakhstan ought to have its capital “in the center” of the country, rather than on the border. It seemed like a bad idea. Dubai had beaches; Brasília, which the Brazilian government built by fiat in the nineteen-fifties, had a sunny, gentle climate. Almaty, the old capital, was pleasantly situated in the foothills of the Tian Shan Mountain range, and was famous for its apple orchards. And Astana? It was six hundred miles to the north—that is to say, toward Russia—and bitterly cold. Kazakh nomads had grazed their flocks here, until they were annihilated by Stalin, after which the vast steppe turned into what one writer has bluntly called “Stalin’s dumping ground.” It was where he sent the “punished peoples”—the hundreds of thousands of Germans, Ingush, and Chechens deported en masse in the nineteen-thirties and forties. Was the parliament now a punished person? Stalin also sent hundreds of thousands of political prisoners to Kazakhstan. A few hours east of the proposed capital lay the town of Ekibastuz, where Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served a term in a labor camp. The old name of the proposed capital was Akmola, “the white graveyard.” This is where Nazarbayev was suggesting that everyone move from Almaty, which means “father of apples.”
Nonetheless, the move went forward. Marat joined the crowd of ambitious young people relocating to the new capital, where he took a job as a legal counsel for one of the large construction firms. The city grew up around him, especially on the west side of the river, which was rechristened the Left Bank.
Marat drove slowly. We passed the Astana Triumph apartment complex, built in the style of the seven skyscrapers raised in Moscow after the Second World War. (“We must be ready for an influx of foreign visitors,” Stalin had fretted. “What will happen if they walk around Moscow and find no skyscrapers?”) Left Bank Astana was beautiful at night, each building, it seemed, with its own nighttime color scheme, and the street lamps all going full blast. We arrived at the two-mile strip that houses the main government buildings and architectural wonders of the city. Marat took me past Foster’s Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a pyramid glowing a pale, ethereal yellow; the Presidential Palace, a big, blue-domed version of our White House; the central concert hall, by the Italian architect Manfredi Nicoletti, whose exterior consists of a series of inwardly slanting, non-contiguous, bright-aqua walls that resemble an unfolding flower, and which last year hosted the first annual Astana International Action Film Festival, organized by the Kazakh-born Timur Bekmambetov, the director of “Wanted,” the 2008 film in which Angelina Jolie is an assassin in the employ of a giant loom; the Beijing Palace, built in a Chinese style; and the St. Petersburg Shopping Center. Marat named each of the buildings in turn, lovingly, even the big white structure that housed the K.N.B., formerly the K.G.B. “Here is the Ministry of Defense,” he said, as we pulled up to an intersection in the very heart of the Astana government mall. “And, right across from it, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” To our left was Bayterek, the big badminton birdie, the symbolism of which was so involved that even Marat didn’t bother going into it. To our right, as he now pointed out, were some Kazakh girls—kazashki. Their car had pulled up beside ours and they were laughing. Handsome, married Marat gave them a dignified nod.
Finally, we arrived at the three blue-green glass skyscrapers that dominate the western part of the mall. They are called the Northern Lights, and there is a curve to their silhouettes, making them look like long cardboard boxes that have been bent out of shape. For eight thousand tenge a night (fifty-four dollars), I had rented an apartment on the fourteenth floor of the middle tower; it had a large modern living room with a segmented black-and-red leather couch, standing Hitachi surround-sound speakers, a flat-screen television of prodigious dimensions, and a bidet. In the evening, several spotlights are directed up at the Northern Lights from below to underscore their beauty, making it a little hard to sleep, but this was a small price to pay. I had a great view of the Khan Shatyr and of a fellow high-rise, the Ministry of Transportation—which, O.K., suddenly burst into flames a few years ago—and also of the Nur-Astana Mosque, one of the biggest in Central Asia, which shines a bright white in the evening and whose sixty-three-metre-tall minarets represent Muhammad’s age at the time of his death.
The Soviets didn’t just exile people to Kazakhstan. They also tested nuclear weapons here, launched spaceships, and, along the Caspian Sea basin, drilled for oil. In the nineteen-eighties, Kazakhstan became one of the places where the Soviet Union began to fall apart. The Kazakhs grew tired of the nuclear tests; when, in 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev appointed an ethnic Russian to head the republic, protests erupted and were violently suppressed. Most telling of all was an accident at the huge oil field at Tengiz, near the Caspian: in June, 1985, ten months before Chernobyl, there was a well blowout that sent a column of fire six hundred feet into the air, higher than the Northern Lights; it burned for more than a year, until a team of American specialists were called in to contain it. The lesson for anyone paying attention was that there was a lot of oil at Tengiz, and that the Soviets couldn’t handle it.
In 1989, Nazarbayev became the First Secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party. Some would say this was a lousy time to become First Secretary; others would kick themselves for becoming First Secretary any sooner. Nazarbayev must have felt a bit of both. He was born in rural southern Kazakhstan and had then been educated, employed, and taken up, for his obvious managerial talents and determination, by the Communist state, working in the metallurgical plants of Karaganda, built by Stalin’s prisoners, before rising in the Party, and he remained grateful to the U.S.S.R. In its waning years, he fought to save the Union in some form, even as he quietly prepared Kazakhstan for independence, and himself for the future. In 1991, he argued, nonsensically, that “a transition to a market economy is fully in line with Marxist theory.” Yet this doubletalk and, indeed, doublethink made him an attractive figure—according to one poll, the most popular politician in the empire before it collapsed. In December of 1991, he was easily elected President of the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan; a week later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
The President of a newly independent Kazakhstan—the ninth-largest country in the world, by landmass—had a number of problems. Many of them were related to Russians, of whom he had inherited more than six million, and to Russia, with which he now shared the world’s longest border. The most immediate problem with the Russians was that they were leaving, which meant that a great deal of education and expertise was being lost. The other problem was that they were staying: at its birth, Kazakhstan was the only post-Soviet republic where the titular nation was not in the majority. Certain cities near the border were almost entirely Russian; to this day, most media in Kazakhstan are either from Russia or in Russian. The process of Russification had progressed further here than just about anywhere else; nearly all Kazakhs spoke Russian, whereas a large number could not really use Kazakh in anything more than a domestic context.
Marat, who grew up in Ust-Kamenogorsk, a very Russian city, said that he spent his childhood in fistfights and his teen-age years trying to get some space to speak his native tongue. His father was an actor in the Kazakh national theatre, so Marat knew the language, but when he spoke it in public, he recalled, a Russian would often remark, “We can’t understand what you’re saying. Speak Russian.” There were also more insidious forms of Russification. As Marat and I were about to split a bottle of vodka, I asked him whether Kazakhs drank a lot. He considered, then answered, “Russians drink a lot.” And Kazakhs had been living with Russians for a long time.
None of this was lost on Russian politicians and thinkers after the Soviet collapse: the Duma deputy Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who was born in Almaty, called for Kazakhstan to become Russia’s “back yard” again; Edward Limonov, the poet turned politician, was arrested for plotting to invade Northern Kazakhstan and declare it an independent Russian republic. Even Solzhenitsyn, in his famous 1990 epistle on what Russia ought to do, argued for annexing Northern Kazakhstan. By 1992, there were Russian irredentist wars in Moldova and Georgia, an Armenian irredentist war in Azerbaijan, and an old-style clan-based civil war in nearby Tajikistan. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume that Kazakhstan would be next. That it wasn’t—that, in fact, Kazakhstan eventually emerged as a viable state, the most prosperous and seemingly stable in Central Asia—is in no small part a consequence of Nazarbayev’s tact, intelligence, and unerring political instincts. (“Anyone could have done what he did!” the talented young novelist and poet Erbol Zhumagulov told me. “Any decent, reasonable, diplomatic, educated person could have done it.” But how many such people were there at the top of the Soviet hierarchy in 1991?) The Russian political theorist Dmitry Furman has praised Nazarbayev’s subtlety: where Boris Yeltsin had to shell his parliament into submission in 1993, Nazarbayev managed to get his parliament to dissolve itself; where Yeltsin underwent a gruelling and ruinous election campaign in 1996, Nazarbayev appointed his most dangerous rival, the poet Olzhas Sulemeinov (“the Kazakh Yevtushenko”), to an ambassadorship in Rome.
Nazarbayev’s handling of an often drunk Yeltsin in those years was especially dexterous. As Nazarbayev relates in his memoirs, at a meeting in Moscow not long after independence Yeltsin asked why Nazarbayev wouldn’t give Tengiz to Russia. The Russians had discovered it, and how was Kazakhstan going to get all that oil out of the ground? “I looked at him and saw he wasn’t kidding,” Nazarbayev writes. A ticklish situation. He played it cool. “I said: ‘Only if you give us the Orenburg province. Orenburg used to be the capital of Kazakhstan.’ He said, ‘Do you have any territorial claims on Russia?’ I said, ‘Not really.’ He laughed. I laughed.” Another international crisis averted. Not long afterward, Nazarbayev announced a multiyear, multibillion-dollar contract with Chevron to develop Tengiz.
And then, after several seasons of guile, backroom dealing, and craft, Nazarbayev made his move. He took his government halfway across the country, so that the Russians could forget, once and for all, about Northern Kazakhstan. Having done this for geopolitical reasons, Nazarbayev decided, apparently, to make the most of it.
Astana is being built according to a general plan devised by the famed Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa. His design called for a city that proclaimed the Age of Life, to replace the Age of the Machine. What this appears to mean, in practice, is that the machines get to have a better life than the people: the Left Bank is laid out on a grid, for ease of automotive navigation, and the access roads to the several bridges across the Ishim are convenient and unclogged. Furthermore, for reasons of temperament and vigilant policing, Astana drivers are the best behaved of any I’ve seen in the post-Soviet world. There is talk of a light-rail system, but for the moment it’s all cars, bridges, and meandering buses.
New Astana is currently framed by the two Foster buildings—the Khan Shatyr at one end, and the Palace of Peace at the other. (Beyond them, the steppe.) For the Khan Shatyr, the client, President Nazarbayev, suggested a traditional Kazakh tent; for the Palace of Peace, he wanted a pyramid. If you are an architect, there are definite advantages to a place where the President is not just the President but the Leader of the Nation (El Basy, in Kazakh) and the co-author of the national anthem. When I spoke to Norman Foster in the Foster-designed Hearst Tower, in New York, he recalled the travails of Richard Rodgers, whose design for Heathrow’s Terminal 5 took twenty years to complete. In the meantime, Foster and Partners won the competition for Beijing Airport. “And Beijing Airport is probably about five times the size of Terminal 5,” Foster said. “We opened Beijing Airport in time for the Olympics”—which is to say, in four years. “Terminal 5 spent that long in a public inquiry.” In Astana, construction never gets hung up in a public inquiry.
The Palace of Peace is, just as Nazarbayev had hoped, a classic pyramid shape; inside, it is divided into three levels. The first is recognizable as the elegant black granite foyer of an opera house, which seats fifteen hundred. The second level, which is reached by a small elevator that travels at an angle, like elevators in dreams, is a magnificent high-ceilinged meeting hall, in white granite; and the third level is a skylit conference room, of the sort familiar to students of Foster’s other buildings—a space bathed in natural light interrupted only by the angled lattice of the building’s frame. In this room, the leaders of the world’s nations, whether old and powerful or new and a little shaky, can meet around a big round table to discuss whatever troubles them. The windows are decorated with a series of stained-glass portraits of white doves, commissioned specifically by President Nazarbayev. While I was in Astana, a ballet master from St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre staged a performance of “Giselle” in the opera hall. It was one of only a few performances to grace Astana’s concert spaces in many weeks, and tickets were impossible to come by. I had better luck getting a seat at the playoff series of the Astana KHL hockey team, though, sadly, it was overmatched by the Ak Bars of Kazan.
Between the pyramid and the Khan Shatyr are the government buildings and a dozen towers that seem to have been airlifted from midtown Manhattan. In Manhattan, the buildings get higher and higher because there is no room; in Astana, situated in one of the most sparsely populated areas on the planet, the buildings get higher and higher just because. Some signify their functions visually: the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Kazakhstan is housed in two twenty-five-story glass-and-steel buildings where the glass is colored gold. The building of the ministries, ten stories high and three-quarters of a mile long, includes two cavernous arches, which lead into the main square before the Presidential Palace, as if to say, “We guard the President, but you are welcome in.” The big KazMunaiGas building, at the other end of the mall, is in the same style, with an arch through which you can see Khan Shatyr, as if to say, “We dug up the gas, now let’s go shopping.” Many of the major office and government buildings seem to have been completed, but there are still many large apartment complexes on the way; some have been delayed by the ongoing financial crisis. The population of Astana has doubled in the past fifteen years, and is expected to double again in the next fifteen. For the moment, the massive scale of the city never seems designed to intimidate a person moving through it, the way Stalinist architecture did, in places like Moscow, Warsaw, and Bucharest. In Astana, it’s more as if an extravagant promise were being made, and clothing it in glass and steel and ETFE will somehow make it come closer to becoming true.
Still, erecting skyscrapers on a steppe is a tricky business. There was certainly something peculiar about the Northern Lights. For a set of three forty-story towers, there didn’t seem to be many people living there. The three buildings were connected by a long foyer or corridor, which included some small shops: two mini-groceries, a travel agency, a bank. One afternoon, I walked by a young woman in one of the stores who was engaged in what I thought was karaoke, until I read on the storefront that it was a production studio. The building, though occupied, was still under construction. “Press button for concierge,” a sign by the front door said, but there was no concierge, and in any case the door was unlocked. “Walking around the building during working hours is strictly forbidden,” another sign said, which struck me as unfriendly. Strangest of all was the wind howling through the elevator shafts. “Whooooo,” it said. “Whoooo-ooo-ooo.”
I woke up early each morning owing to a serious case of jet lag, yet, no matter how early it was, the workers at the construction site outside my window were already at it. They hadn’t built very much just yet—a few pilings, a foundation. What were they building? Several big yellow cranes with the Sembol logo loomed over the site.
The construction workers were the first outside; as the sun rose in the sky, they remained the only ones. Pedestrians would appear momentarily, then be swallowed up by a car or a bus. This was no country for walking men. The prisoners in Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” set not far away, spend a lot of time discussing the cold; when I arrived in Astana, in late February, it was colder. The temperature would rise to minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit during the day, then drop to minus thirty at night. Plus, there was the wind, which whipped in off the steppe. Nazarbayev has been planting trees on the outskirts of town, to keep the wind at bay, but so far there are too few trees and too much wind.
The wide, spacious sidewalks of the Left Bank and the long pedestrian mall running down the central axis were covered by a thin layer of ice, which, in turn, was covered by a thin layer of snow. It didn’t matter; there was so much room in every direction that one could just slide along at one’s leisure. It was dicier in the parking lots, which were entirely frozen over. S.U.V.s leaving the underground parking of the shopping mall next to the Northern Lights would jump out into the cold with great confidence and then start sliding around on the ice. The places with the surest footing were the areas that had not yet been built upon. There was always a nice, hard path that had been beaten through the snow by one’s fellow-Astanians, and you could walk on that.
The steppe is never very far away in Astana. It lurks on the edge of town, ready to reclaim the land as soon as the Astanians let down their guard. Residents of the city like to tell of the hardships they faced, or might have faced, when moving here. An American Embassy officer said he’d heard so much about the lack of basic amenities in the capital that he had a thousand pounds of food shipped to him from the States in advance of his posting, mostly Rice-A-Roni. It turned out that there was plenty of food, though the Embassy officer is still glad that he brought the Rice-A-Roni.
Over a plate of horse ham—it’s a little denser and darker than ham ham—a young woman who was born in the city told me that many men, arriving here alone from Almaty in the nineteen-nineties, had started keeping girls on the side. “And a lot of them are Russian,” she added, outlining the procedure: “A girl arrives from Omsk and starts working as a waitress at a night club. Then she’s no longer a waitress but still ‘working’ at the night club. Then she’s no longer working anywhere but has an apartment and drives a used luxury vehicle.” My friend Marat had recently quit his job at the construction firm to work for the city of Petropavlovsk, near the Russian border, and now has to drive the three hundred and fifty miles back to Astana in order to see his family. I asked him if he, too, was starting a second family, and he said no. “I am still trying to build the first family,” he told me. But he was sympathetic to the men who had two families. “There are too few Kazakhs,” he said. “We need to make more.”
There will be no shortage of room for them. A shiny poster of a future building hangs outside each construction fence. Even on the observation deck of the mighty Bayterek, the main attraction is a three-dimensional model of the city some years from now. A young tour guide stands beside the 3-D model, pointing out the buildings already visible from Bayterek, and those not yet built. Nearby, at the Palace of Independence, there is a much bigger model of Astana in 2030. Nigel Dancey, of Foster and Partners, says it’s the largest such model he’s ever seen.
Standing with me at the 3-D model in Bayterek was an older Kazakh man in a fur hat. It turned out that he was from Atyrau—Kazakh oil country. “That’s where they get the money to build all this!” he exclaimed. When asked if he was in town as a tourist, he said that, in fact, he wasn’t; the air in oil country is very bad, and he was here to have a doctor examine his heart.
“The city will develop in three directions,” the tour guide said. “South, toward the airport, and west, and east.”
“What about north?”
“There is already a city to the north.”
And there was. I could see it from my fourteenth-floor apartment. Across the frozen river lay a city that was dusty-gray and beige. It was not a city of ten different buildings that, after a week, one could name but a city of endless anonymous apartment blocks in which people actually lived.
I made it over a few days later. The old town wasn’t pickled in oil, exactly: the waterfront had seen a lot of construction in the past few years, including a Radisson (five hundred dollars a night for the basic room, broadband included) and three apartment towers that looked suspiciously like my own Northern Lights. But, if you took the bus a bit beyond the river, you were back in the U.S.S.R. The place had been developed at the whim of Nikita Khrushchev, as part of his Virgin Lands (Tseliny) project, practically his first initiative after Stalin’s death and, forever after, his pride and joy. Hoping to recapture the spirit of pioneering young Communism, Khrushchev announced a mobilization of the young to “virgin” Kazakhstan, which was to become the granary of the Soviet Union. The young people went, sowed wheat, wrote songs, didn’t know what they were doing, received Khrushchev a couple of times. “Please, send some girls,” the First Secretary later recalled one group telling him, for it consisted of many men and just one young woman. Amid the virgin fields was an old Russian fort called Akmola. In 1961, it was renamed Tselinograd; it couldn’t have hurt that this sounded a little like “Stalingrad.” In the post-independence years, it became Akmola again; then, after the move, Astana—which simply means “capital” in Kazakh.
Kazakhs are no longer in the minority in Kazakhstan; there are ten million of them, up from six and a half million at independence. Twenty years ago, they were less than forty per cent of the population; now they are sixty-three per cent. In that time, four million native Russian speakers left Kazakhstan; a little more than four million remain. Many of the ones still in Astana live in the distinctive long five-story buildings known as khrushchevki. You get a very different vibe from the Russians here than you do in Russia. They are outnumbered; those who have decided to stay have made their peace with this, but others are on their way out. Nazarbayev has kept ethnic tensions at a minimum, and still there have been incidents. More important, there is no way forward for Russians except through Kazakh, and many do not want to learn it. “My kids are not going to learn Kazakh,” one young Russian-German woman told me. “Let them learn English, let them learn French, but not a language that not even one whole country speaks.”
In a hockey shop, I met Andre. He was around forty. He said that he didn’t have a single friend left in Astana, that he spends all his time online, chatting with other music fans from Ukraine whom he’s never met. He is going to travel to Ukraine over the summer and scout it out for a possible move. “Things are O.K. here for now,” he said. “But, after Nazarbayev, who knows.” I heard that from a number of Russians. “There could even be a genocide,” a young man in Almaty named Dima told me. It’s possible the Russians were being paranoid; it’s also possible they had a guilty conscience. I picked out only two ethnic Kazakhs on the Astana hockey team, and when I asked Marat why there were so few he said that Russian coaches during the Soviet era did not encourage Kazakh kids. He was taking his older son, who was six, to his first hockey practice the next day.
Farther out, beyond Tselinograd, lies the former Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland, or Alzhir. The women interned there were the wives of men who had been imprisoned or shot during Stalin’s great purge; when N.K.V.D. officers showed up at their apartments, they asked if the women would like to see their husbands. The women said yes. A few weeks later, they found themselves in the middle of the Kazakh steppe.
Alzhir is just twenty miles from Astana, near the village of Malinovka. There are very few museums devoted to Stalinist terror in the former Soviet Union, but this is one. It consists of a red Odessa-made train car originally meant for cattle and used to transport political prisoners, an Astana-style statue of grief (it looked a bit like the velodrome), and a small but informative exhibition space, which includes displays about ethnic Kazakhs who were killed or imprisoned during the terror of 1937-38, as well as one devoted to the Alzhir camp, which ran from 1937 to 1953. After it closed, some of the women returned to their native cities; a small number remained in Kazakhstan. In 1989, during glasnost, the son of a former prisoner who had remained in the area tried to organize a reunion. Many of the women were no longer living, of course, but some came; others, according to the tour guide at the museum, believed it was another trick, like the one that lured them from their homes to begin with, and refused to return to Kazakhstan.
I was driven to Alzhir by a man named Chin, who was originally from Xinjiang Province, in western China, which borders Kazakhstan. He walked through the exhibit with me, exclaiming at one point that they had the same thing in China, though Mao, in a twisted form of sibling rivalry, always outdid Stalin. When we got out, Chin needed a cigarette. “Look at that,” he said, nodding toward the village of Malinovka, which consisted of a few five-story khrushchevki. At the museum, we had learned that Malinovka had grown over the ruins of the camp. “No one even knows what used to be here,” Chin said. “It was here, and now it’s gone.”
We drove back to the city in the late afternoon. As we approached it from the steppe, Astana looked somehow shabbier, more vulnerable. In the early nineteen-nineties, Chin told me, he had prospered for a time exporting rawhide to China, and was subject to the overtures of the criminal rackets, which were as active in Kazakhstan in those years as they were in Russia. Chin refused to pay them for protection. “I was young, so I wasn’t afraid,” he said. “Then I saw many things, and I became afraid.”
At the Northern Lights, things were growing even stranger. I started getting trapped in the elevator; the wind in the shafts was putting so much pressure on the doors that at times they couldn’t open. Then I found myself becoming envious of people living on higher floors. The fourteenth floor was fine, but there was also the twenty-fifth, the forty-first. “What’s it like up there?” I would ask in the elevator. “High up,” they would say. My neighbors were well-dressed Kazakhs and a smattering of foreigners, among them professors from Nazarbayev University. But when I asked, through a friend, to interview some of them I was told that their contracts prohibited it. A slight chill fell over relations among neighbors at the Northern Lights. Also, a new sign appeared: it asked residents to be coöperative with volunteers who might be coming around in connection with the upcoming Presidential elections.
That was a surprise. There wasn’t supposed to be another Presidential election until 2012, but the people of Kazakhstan had placed five million signatures on a petition proposing that a referendum be held to extend Nazarbayev’s term until 2020. Well, Nazarbayev said, this would be undemocratic—but he couldn’t simply ignore the desires of five million people. So in January of this year he came up with a compromise: the elections, instead of being cancelled, would be held a lot earlier, on April 3, 2011. The President said that he had asked Party officials not to hold any big rallies for him; he wanted, he said, to let the other candidates have an opportunity to “show themselves.” His chief political adviser predicted that Nazarbayev would win 95.9 per cent of the vote; soon, people started receiving text messages on their cell phones reminding them to make their voices heard in April.
Nazarbayev has become a dictator. Over the years, he has systematically sidelined, intimidated, and even jailed his opponents; newspapers that say too much are routinely subjected to lawsuits, raids, and closure; journalists have been beaten, and worse. In 2005 and 2006, the country was shocked by the murders, one not long after the other, of two outspoken oppositionists. One of the victims, who had been shot twice in the chest and once in the head, was declared a suicide.
For years, many Kazakhs have been expecting Nazarbayev to at least transfer power to a handpicked successor, as Yeltsin did with Vladimir Putin, but Nazarbayev has not yet done so. Part of the problem may be familial. Like King Lear, he has three daughters. None have emerged unscathed from the period of his rule. The youngest married the son of the President of Kyrgyzstan, a nice dynastic pairing, but three years later they divorced, and not long after that the ruling family of Kyrgyzstan was forced from power and fled to Moscow in disgrace. Nazarbayev’s oldest daughter married an ambitious young doctor; in 2008, Kazakhstani courts sentenced him, a middle-aged oligarch and media magnate by then, to forty years in prison for kidnapping and extortion. The sentence was issued in absentia, since he has most likely been living (and blogging) in Austria since 2007. The middle daughter has kept a lower profile, except when it comes to the Forbes billionaires list, where this year she was tied, at $1.3 billion, with her distinguished husband, Timur Kulibayev, who is part owner of one of the country’s largest banks and the chairman of KazMunaiGas. Last fall, prosecutors in Switzerland reportedly opened a money-laundering probe against Kulibayev. (He has denied the allegations.)
Nazarbayev’s disappointment is more than merely paternal. He is the father of the nation—and he has no children to entrust the nation to. Would he not leave if he could? But he can’t. Not yet. In the past few years, the President has undertaken several initiatives to demonstrate his stature on the world stage: in 2010, after considerable lobbying, he received the chairmanship of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe; in early 2011, he hosted the Asian Winter Games, at which Kazakhstan’s men’s hockey team defeated its rivals by an average score of 16–1. More substantively, he has taken a harder line with the Western oil majors, trying to adjust the terms of contracts that Kazakhstan signed from a position of weakness in the early nineteen-nineties. Nazarbayev is an international statesman, but his hold on power grows ever less secure. On April 3rd, he was reëlected to the Presidency with 95.5 per cent of the vote. No one was fooled. The result of his long tenure, and the stability that has accompanied it, has been paradoxical but predictable: the longer he remains, the more worried people become about what will happen when he finally leaves.
Toward the end of my stay in Astana, I finally learned what the construction workers outside my window were building: the Astana Media Center, which could house as many as ten television channels, and, perhaps, decrease Kazakhstan’s dependence on Russia in this sphere. It was a vital project, and the government wanted it done quickly. The workers came in shifts around the clock; this was why they always seemed to get up earlier than I did. Caner Demir, the man who did logistics for Khan Shatyr, was also running logistics for the media center, and he explained all this to me at the work site on a Saturday afternoon. He showed me some sketches of the upcoming building. “We have already ordered everything,” he said. “The glass, the materials for the roof, the plants. Everything is ready.”
Is it hard to ship glass?
“Yes!” Demir said. “You are shipping glass! In a truck!”
The other mystery outside my window remained the Khan Shatyr. I believed it was trying to tell me something. During the day, it was sullen, gray, and scaly, the ETFE like armor. Toward evening, though, the Khan Shatyr started to glow violet. Later at night, it became a light green. From where I stood, on the fourteenth floor, it looked like the image of Devils Tower, in Wyoming, that the aliens in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” implanted in the mind of Richard Dreyfuss, so that he would know to meet them there. Was I supposed to meet the aliens at Khan Shatyr? Or buy a pair of shoes?
You enter the Khan Shatyr through a severe, gray granite doorway slightly reminiscent of the Lenin mausoleum in Moscow. Inside, though, the resemblance fades. The dramatic central atrium is full of light. The white steel beams that Sembol lifted with such difficulty rise from a black granite floor and meet four hundred and fifty feet in the air at a kind of orb, from which, in turn, the cables that hold up the structure descend through the ETFE. Five levels of white balcony, small green plants spilling over the ledges, rise up toward the ceiling from the atrium, shops on the first two floors, restaurants and a cinema on the third, an arcade and a game room, mostly for kids, on the fourth, complete with a bumper-car track, and then, on the fifth, the beach. There was a sale at the Timberland store, but I could find nothing in my size; the Polo store seemed to carry mostly shirts with big embroidered designs; but the Gap was the Gap, large and spacious and staffed by fresh-faced Kazakh teens in Gap sweaters.
The mall wasn’t overrun by shoppers, but it was certainly much busier than the streets. The temperature rises the higher you go, so that, by the time I reached the fourth floor in the Arctic boots I had bought at Dave’s, in Manhattan, I had begun to feel a little uncomfortable. The beach is on the top floor of the Khan Shatyr. In addition to the yellow sand shipped in from the Maldives and heated to create that beachlike feel, it has comfortable beach chairs, a pool-size swimming area for adults and one for kids, and a small water slide. The twenty-seven-dollar entry free (thirty-eight on weekends) provides full-day access to the beach and the spa, which includes a fitness center, three saunas, and a Turkish bath. The weekend fee is fifteen times the hourly wage of an Astana construction worker, but no one said it would be cheap to reverse the course of nature. From where I stood, sweating, a few bathers were visible, wearing small post-Soviet swim trunks, in one of the coldest cities in the world. ♦
The Dichotomy of Good Men: An Analytical Approach Towards Understanding the Passivity of Men Within the Fraternity System — membership on hold
I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?
You live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us? Why aren’t you driven to the point of madness and action by the rape and humiliation of us?[1]
I originally posted this essay without the anecdotal introduction. It's graphic, personal, and opens my objective analysis up to loads of criticism. But after giving it some thought, I figured not including it was against everything I believe. So, if you want to skip the personal anecdote, skip the starred section.
Note: This did not happen at Alpha Delta, and has nothing to do with AD (apologies for using that picture previously)
* * *
About a year ago, one of my closest male friends attempted to rape me while on a drug and alcohol bender. I'm not ashamed of it. I blamed myself for a while but I am past that now; I am not going to worry about making others uncomfortable with my story. You can know, it's okay. So many women—myself included—talk about these things in the third person, in such a detached form that they themselves get confused as to what happened and what didn't. But why, why would I look at a case study based on other women's stories when there is so much insight to be had from my own? Maybe I would feel differently if his fraternity brother hadn't opened the door. Maybe I wouldn't have the courage to speak about it openly if the attack had succeeded. But it didn't. And I'm talking. And I'm uncomfortable. And you're probably uncomfortable. And the truth is, we probably should be.
I will, for now, simply call my ex-best friend Fred—a decision that makes me question my own actions and whether or not I, too, am enabling the code of silence. It also makes me question why I am protecting him. I will come back to this point. My story is relatively straight forward. Fred had been my best friend since freshman year. We had slept in the same bed, drank together countless times, been inseparable for the majority of college. In short, Fred was my brother.
On that night, Fred was drunk, and under the influence of extremely dangerous drugs, a fact I did not know at the time. He called me, saying that he had hit his head on his bed frame and wasn't sure if he should get it checked out—could I please stop by and help him out. I went. He had not hit his head. He pulled my hair and demanded that I get into his bed, telling me that I knew it was coming all along. He said it didn't make sense that we'd graduate without "hooking up," we were both "hot" and it was inevitable. He locked the door to his room and used his full force to push me against the wall. Fred is no small person. Long story short, I screamed at him and tried to push him away, until a fraternity brother of his heard me from the hallway, and busted open the door. I left.
The days following, I was conflicted, to say the least. I spoke with my closest friends and told them about what had happened; I told them to warn their female friends to avoid him in one-on-one situations. Then—be it right or wrong, it remains to be seen—I resolved to demand that he seek medical attention for what clearly constituted a drug problem, and that if he did not I would report him to the administration. He seemed rattled himself; completely confused about how it had come about and in conflict about how he had caused harm to someone he cared about. He obliged.
After a couple of weeks avoiding the fraternity where the incident occurred, I spoke with some brothers in the house. They asked why I had not been by. I told them.
Their reactions were strong; the emotions they expressed towards me were a combination of horror, disgust, shame, anger, regret, protectiveness, embarrassment and shock. They quickly wanted to come to a sense of resolve—to "fix" this problem that appeared in front of them. There was a lot of "I can't believe that happened in my house” and “I'm ashamed that he is in my house." However, over the following weeks, I observed their next steps. These boys knew, first hand, what had happened. I told them the details. They reacted strongly. Though those whom I talked to were never particularly close to Fred, they seemed to distance themselves from him. But they never spoke to him, or anyone else for that matter. They did nothing at all. They were angry, but silent. To be clear—I am not angry with them, nor am I blaming the bystanders for anything that happened. I simply aim to understand the progression and influences acting upon the men in our society. My impetus for writing this paper, then, is both personal and out of a strong intellectual curiosity. Why does this happen, and what is preventing men from speaking up?
* * *
In this paper, I hope to explore the common and complicated dichotomy of the "good man": the man who, despite witnessing or hearing about wrongdoings remains passive; the man who does not participate or act in the crime, but does not take a stand against what he knows to be wrong, either on the fraternity or administrative level. Through critical analysis, outside research and my own account of my personal experiences, I hope to present a couple theories for why this phenomenon is so prominent, in particular within fraternity life. These men are everywhere; they are our best friends, our lovers, our study buddies, our brothers. As Eve Ensler, quoted above, recently wrote in the Vagina Monologues, "you live with us, make love with us, father us, befriend us, brother us, get nurtured and mothered and eternally supported by us, so why aren’t you standing with us?" The problem is pervasive.
Part I. The Nature of the Beast: Exploring the Problem
When I think of the men in my life who know about my experience, I know that they are good people. Wonderful people. They are smart, fun, engaging, caring individuals who have bright futures ahead of them. They have been my friends for a long time and they claim to care about me; I believe them. This is perhaps the most troubling part of the equation. I know that they care, yet there is still something—something larger than the compassion and concern they have for women in general and me in particular—at work here. If given the situation in a hypothetical, most of the Dartmouth men I know would undoubtedly say that of course they would speak up.[2] Yet in practice, they do not.
There are numerous definitions of masculinity, yet they all seem to yield common themes: stoicism, logic, emotional distance, man as provider, and man as protector[3]. The Boy Code William Pollack describes in Real Boys defines men as the "sturdy oak" and the "big wheel," who must also adhere to the phrases "no sissy stuff," and "give 'em hell."[4] Using this method of thought as a framework, it seems as though standing up for a logical wrongdoing would fall under the category of masculine. Does exposing a crime in an emotionless, stable manner not assert moral dominance, while simultaneously expressing your role as protector and "giv[ing] hell" to those who have done wrong? The factor that seems to be missing here is that of male bonds—the Bro Code opposed to the Boy Code. The Boy Code, in my opinion, targets the individual, demanding certain behaviors on an individual level that in turn shall assert one's masculinity to his peers and to himself. The Bro Code runs parallel to this, however, demanding that certain moral compromises be made in the name of a larger brotherhood; in other words, while the Boy Code demands individual assertion, there also exists a Bro Code that loses full sight of the individual in the name of a group.
Michael Kimmel touches on some aspects of the idea of Bro Code in Guyland, where he focuses mainly on fraternity culture. Kimmel explains that American men "want to be positively evaluated by other men," and that "they risk everything—their friendships, their sense of self, maybe even their lives—if they fail to conform."[5] This conformist attitude fosters an environment in which the goals of the group overcome those of the individual; as described by Larry May in Masculinity & Morality, "motivations can be offset by other motivations and hence fail to result in actions."[6] Yet the questions remain, as every group is undoubtedly made up of a multitude of individuals, each with their own mind and ability to act: what are they so afraid of?
Part II. The Individual Dichotomy: Fear of Fear Itself
In an interview with my twelve-year-old brother about his relationships with his family and people at school, I posed a simple question: "what makes you mad?" My family is a large, extremely loving family; he is the youngest of five children. All in all, I would describe him as a normal, healthy, emotionally supported twelve-year-old boy. He said:
When [my sister] calls me a pussy. When anyone calls me a pussy, that just creeps under my skin. Just, ugh, UGH! I just want to like, punch something. I don't like to be called a pussy, cause you know, yeah... it means you're soft, weak, what's that word, that you seem out in the open and can't protect yourself, what's that word? Vulnerable. [...] It's bad, cause like, you could be like the laughing stock or something. I hate it. It's terrible.[7]
Jack (name changed) is only twelve, and he has demonstrated the very root of a problem that is prevalent throughout masculinity studies and literature. Starting at an early age, as early as elementary school, boys are socially encouraged to repress the feminine[8] in assertion of their own masculinity. As Jack states, boys do not want to be considered "soft," "weak," or "vulnerable." This would detract from their overall sense of masculinity, and in turn, their sense of self. Feeling emasculated often undercuts a strong basis for self-identity, ultimately leading to problems with confidence, depression, isolation, and self-worth.
We have established, then, that it is relatively safe to assume that generally speaking, men fear humiliation. But how does this relate back to silence? What is humiliating about speaking in the name of what you think is right?
My theory in response to these questions is twofold: there is the potential for male ridicule, and the potential for consequent expectations. I will begin with the former. For the sake of an example, let us take the case of Andrew Lohse, a controversial character on Dartmouth College campus who recently wrote an article in The Dartmouth about hazing and breaking the code of silence. While I am not privy to all the details of the Lohse case, it is clear that breaking the code of silence provokes significant backlash. Generally, the first reactions have been attacks on Lohse's character and prior mishaps. Whether the accusations made against him are true or untrue, one can see that breaking the code of silence has formidable repercussions for the transgressor. In exposing one's thoughts about a situation, one opens himself up to criticism. As Kimmel explains in Guyland, guys are “afraid of being outcast, marginalized, shunned. Or they’re afraid that the violence just might be turned against them if they voice their opposition too vehemently. So they learn to keep their mouths shut, even when what they’re seeing goes against everything they know to be good.”[9] In short, you must be ready, willing, and able to defend your case to its core. As was evident in the Lohse case and in many cases around campus, once someone speaks, the issues tend to take on a life of its own, and the man who speaks must be prepared to face fire.
In an interview with my father about male passivity, I asked why he thinks it is so prominent. He said, "if you call somebody out for doing an outlier act, there will be consequences and you will suffer the consequences. Because they won't think of themselves as the perpetrator, they will think of themselves as the wronged individual."[10] This view is directly reflected by Larry May: "many [men feel] guilty or at least angry for being put in the position of the heavy," and "people often feel anger toward those who have violated the norms."[11] Thus in speaking out you expose yourself to the harsh criticism of those who have not done so—returning back to the simple childhood fear, as stated by my brother, of being "vulnerable."
The latter of the two theories confronts consequent expectations. Many men struggle with the concept of “to what extent.” As David J. Kahane writes in his article Male Feminism as Oxymoron, “like many men who call themselves ‘feminist,’ ‘profeminist,’ or ‘anti-sexist,’ I feel considerable uncertainty about what living up to this commitment would mean, and doubt that I live up to it very adequately.”[12] What if he hears something second-hand, or third-hand—is he expected to act on this type of knowledge? How much involvement is enough involvement, once he has opened this particular Pandora’s box? How much is too much? Is there ever a situation when he shouldn’t get involved? And once he has stood up, will he ever again be able to sit down with the bros, crack open a brew, laugh at a sexist joke, talk about sexual escapades? Where is the line, and is it now up to him to draw it?
Furthermore, men often feel as though they are constantly on the defensive when it comes to feminist movements and supporting women’s rights. The number of times I, personally, have heard my close male (and female) friends say “I hate feminists” or “I don’t believe in feminism,” is fundamentally disturbing. Their reaction is that of defense at the mere thought of female activists. What they mean to say, I believe, is that they do not agree with radical feminism and the accusation of all men as perpetrators. It is worth considering their point: how can radical feminists expect men to help them if they accuse them of evil across the board? As Jackson Katz, gender equality activist and founder of the Mentors in Violence Prevention model, writes:
A more subtle force that keeps many men from becoming actively involved in the struggle against gender violence is the defensiveness many of us feel at the mere mention of the scope of the problem. When we hear women say they’re angry about all of the violence men do to women, some guys respond indignantly. ‘Hey, it’s not all guys. I’m not a rapist,’ we say, as if we’d been accused of being one. In this case, defensiveness is really a form of denial that allows us to avoid being personally implicated.[13]
I will go into more depth about the defensive response in the next section, but suffice it to say for now that the sense of blame associated with feminist teachings is yet another basis for the social humiliation of men.
Men tend to fear individual humiliation, and as result they avoid situations in which they might be exposed[14]. As Kimmel writes, "in one survey, women and men were asked what they were most afraid of. Women responded that they were most afraid of being raped and murdered. Men responded that they were most afraid of being laughed at."[15] Similarly, Katz writes that "there are a number of obvious and subtle forces at work to keep the nonviolent majority of men silent [...] includ[ing] policing mechanisms in male peer culture that stifle the voices of men who are uncomfortable with abuses perpetrated by their fellow men."[16] The potential for harmful outcomes on an individual level, stemming from fear of exposure and ostracization, in large part explains the “motivations [that offset] other motivations,”[17] as discussed by Larry May. This theory is further discussed in Kimmel’s Masculinity as Homophobia:
[Masculinity’s] overriding emotion is fear. […] Fear makes us ashamed, because the recognition of fear in ourselves is proof to ourselves that we are not as manly as we pretend, that we are, like the young man in a poem by Yeats, ‘one that ruffles in a manly pose for all his timid heart.’ Our fear is the fear of humiliation. We are ashamed to be afraid. Shame leads to silence—the silence that keeps other people believing that we actually approve of the things that are done to women […] Our fears are the sources of our silences, and men’s silence is what keeps the system running.[18]
This fear, as we have established, begins in the very early years of male childhood and remains through adulthood. Through this analysis, we can see that the act of speaking out against rape and sexual aggression, even within one’s own fraternity, can be thankless, and ultimately is more likely than not to result in the exposure, vulnerability, and humiliation of a man.
Part III. Group Think and The Responsibility Paradox
The other, more discrete but also more complicated theory I have about the passivity of good men revolves around group-think, or herd-mentality. Let me begin by posing a simply question. How many times, on campus, have you defined someone, heard someone define another person, or defined yourself as, “I’m a …”? I’m a insert Greek house here. Sure, it’s a quick way to identify where a person falls within the scope of a college campus. But, in my experience, it is more than that.
I can confidently say that almost every person I know has a friend who they “lost” to the Greek system; the guy-friend who turned bro and never really left his house again, or the girl-friend who became catty and seems only able to converse in terms of Greek letters and social events. For the moment and for the sake of this paper, I will focus on fraternities, in particular as a result of their rush process. In a fraternity, it would seem obvious that something attracts a man to the particular house where he “shakes out,” or commits. After pledge term, if all goes well and as planned, he feels a connection to his house and takes on the house as part of his own identity. I am not saying this is a bad thing. It is a commonality.
Now, what happens in the event that someone in your house, which in turn is part of your own identity, performs an act with which you disagree? Furthermore, what happens if this individual act then becomes associated with your house, which is in turn associated with your very self? Here, we can begin to sense a conflict.
In order to better understand this dichotomy, I will turn once again to Larry May’s Maculinity & Morality. In this work, May describes something called group-based harm, a situation in which someone who is “a member of a group is disadvantaged simply because he or she is a group member, there is a diminution of the status of the group that then adversely affects all of the members of the group.” He explains that for this reason, “a group has a non-trivial interest in preserving its status […] because the members of many groups derive much of their sense of identity from the identity of the group.”[19] Through this lens, we can see that a man who speaks out against his house is in fact partially speaking against himself, as the association he makes will not label the perpetrator alone.
There remains another aspect—an emotional aspect—of this problem that we have yet to face: guilt and responsibility. We have discussed what happens after a man speaks out against his house, but what about what happens before?
The bonds formed within fraternities are extremely strong, without a doubt. I myself cannot fully understand them, as I am both a woman and not affiliated, but it is clear to me from experiences with friends and family that men very much value the friendships acquired through their Greek houses. As Kimmel writes, “nowhere is the brotherhood more intense, the bonding more intimate and powerful, or the culture of protection more evident than among athletes and fraternity members.”[20] Because of the close-knit relationship with other members of the community, it is difficult for cases like sexual assault and rape not to be internalized to every individual within the house. Here, I am specifically thinking about the genuinely apologetic, “I’m so sorry this happened in my house” reaction of which I spoke earlier. Because of the association and close bond, it is difficult to avoid the sense of guilt that comes alongside realizing someone within your house has harmed another person, especially if the victim happens to be a friend.
As Larry May writes, “the key to men taking responsibility for their emotions is that they feel the need to do so from within. […] Taking responsibility is a matter of self-appraisal, and so it is not very often the case that a person takes responsibility for an action or its consequences and yet does not also feel responsible.”[21] Ipso facto, we cannot expect men who do not feel responsible for the actions to take responsibility for them.
Let us for a moment further examine the consequences of speaking out. May writes on this note that “in many cases it seems appropriate to think of morality on the model of what it makes sense to do, but in other cases such a conflation will not serve our intuitions.”[22] I could easily imagine a situation in which a man, logical and rational as he is, thinks about the pros and cons of speaking out in terms of “what makes sense” and what does not. Does it really make sense, in terms of the consequences, to compromise the bonds of brotherhood—or if dealt with publicly potentially destroy the reputation of a house in which most people are not sexual aggressors? Does it make sense to bring harm to an entire group at the expense of emotional harm towards only one woman? What if the result of speaking out is the abolishment of a house or Greek system entirely? What about the endless amount of good on both a social and individual level they provide? Is it really worth the risk? More importantly, is it even my place to speak in the first place? The conflict between morality and practicality weighs heavily on men put in this position.
A man who speaks out against sexual aggression assumes a certain amount of responsibility. He claims not only that something happened, but also that something happened in his house, which is part of his identity. It has gone from an external, disassociated problem to a crime for which the man himself is culpable. The problem, then, is clear: by speaking about wrongdoings in these situations, you assume responsibility.
Part IV. The Girl Problem—Where is the precedent?
In analyzing the actions and reactions of my male friends, it is impossible to distance myself from this equation. Am I not, through my own actions, complicit in perpetuating the silence? Am I expecting too much, expecting something I myself will not (or cannot, depending on point of view) do? Am I demonizing these cultures that so often give men the emotional outlets they need to grow and flourish? Perhaps. Probably.
Faced with the choice, I myself did not immediately report the incident. In a sense, I chose to preserve a bond that had been there previously, and yet here I sit, wondering why men do the same. I find myself in a predicament that is all too common among women; I am expecting a precedent that I am not helping set. I, not unlike the men I have outlined in this paper, do not want to be ostracized, or looked down upon. Many men, I’m certain, feel as though they would be overstepping boundaries of confidence by reporting something a girl did not. If I haven’t said anything, aren’t my male friends simply respecting my privacy by keeping my story to themselves?
While I make no excuses for the decision I made, be it good or bad, I cannot help but explore an element of this conversation that, in my opinion, remains under the carpet. For a woman, the emotional turmoil that comes alongside an incident such as mine goes far beyond a fear of humiliation—something that we cannot necessarily expect even the most empathetic of men to understand. I know that I, for one, fear that once I am identified as a victim, or almost-victim, I give men the opportunity to look at me through a lens of sexual violence. Even if most men want to help, the association between rape and myself has been made once I speak. I have stamped my own forehead, making myself not only vulnerable in an emotional and societal context, but in a very real, terrifyingly physical way.
The Greek system, in many ways, can empower both men and women on college campuses, and be a source of critically important emotional support during extremely formative years. In many ways, the Greek system promotes and allows for a type of bonding that might otherwise not be readily available to men in particular. The fraternity system, in my opinion, is a huge source of potential positivity in the lives of our society. We can see that the problem here lies within a groupthink and, simply put, the utter lack of a critical mass working towards a cultural shift to oppose sexual violence and to hold one another accountable.
I can admit that I have contributed to this predicament through my own silence, as I’m sure many women have as well. But the catch-22 remains. As long as men do not speak out against sexual violence, I will continue to fear self-labeling. And as long as I continue to fear self-labeling, I will not speak out. And as long as I do not speak out, I cannot expect men to do so. And on it goes.
Part V. The Consequent Inner Turmoil
There is a strange, deep, and ongoing conflict. On the one hand, men feel as though they must protect themselves against other men; they fear exposure and being revealed as anything less than manly[23]. On the other hand, there is a strong sense of loyalty towards these same men, stemming from an intense desire to foster intimate relationships and a sense of identity that comes from association with a house[24]. These men are, in short, torn between fear and desire, disgust and admiration, denial and responsibility.
So what happens?
As Kimmel explains in Guyland, “Most guys don’t participate in these activities most of the time. But virtually all of them know guys who have. And most guys don’t do anything about it. They are bystanders, and bystanders are complicit. Their silence implies support, or it’s taken as support or acquiescence. Doing nothing allows something to happen.”[25] Men are caught between a rock and a hard place. Action in either direction can result in the compromise of either personal values or intimate relationships—both with men and women. Thus, they resolve to be silent: the choice that involves no movement at all. Many choose to distance themselves from the individual, and act in a protective manner towards women they see around him: in essence, many attempt to “fix” the immediate problem, but rarely with confrontation, one-on-one or house-wide. Their desire to be good men and do the right thing conflicts directly with a mix of fear, loyalty, and guilt. The problem originates in the individual male’s psyche and is manifested as silence and inaction, both of which self-perpetuate until passivity is the rigid cultural norm.
Works Consulted
Adams, Rachel, and David Savran. The Masculinity Studies Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. Print.
Barnett, Rosalind C., and Caryl Rivers. Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs. New York: Basic, 2004. Print.
Brod, Harry. "To Be a Man, or Not to Be a Man--That Is the Feminist Question." Men Doing Feminism. By Tom Digby. New York: Routledge, 1998. 197-213. Print.
Dittes, James E. The Male Predicament: On Being a Man Today. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985. Print.
Easthope, Antony. What a Man's Gotta Do: The Masculine Myth in Popular Culture. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Print.
Ensler, Eve. "Over It." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 11 Nov. 2011. Web. 9 Mar. 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eve-ensler/over-it_b_1089013.html>.
Hopkins, Patrick D. "How Feminism Made a Man Out of Me: The Proper Subject of Feminism and the Problem of Men." Men Doing Feminism. By Tom Digby. New York: Routledge, 1998. 33-57. Print.
Jesser, Clinton J. Fierce and Tender Men: Sociological Aspects of the Men's Movement. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996. Print.
Kahane, David J. "Male Feminism as Oxymoron." Men Doing Feminism. By Tom Digby. New York: Routledge, 1998. 213-37. Print.
Katz, Jackson. "More Than a Few Good Men." The University of Massachusetts Daily Collegian 151.57 (1999). Jackson Katz. Web. 09 Mar. 2012. <http://www.jacksonkatz.com/pub_goodmen.html>.
Kimmel, Michael S. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2008. Print.
Kimmel, Michael S. "Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity." The Masculinities Reader. By Stephen Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001. 266-87. Print.
May, Larry. Masculinity & Morality. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998. Print.
Peabody, A. Douglas. "Perspectives Male Passivity Interview." Telephone interview. 08 Mar. 2012.
Peabody, James D. "Masculinity and Male Relationships Interview." Telephone interview. 9 Mar. 2012.
Peabody, Nicholas C. "Masculinity and Male Relationships Interview." E-mail interview. 08 Mar. 2012.
Pollack, William S. Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood. New York: Henry Holt &, 1999. Print.
Real, Terrence. I Don't Walk to Talk about It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression. New York: Fireside, Simon & Schuster, 1998. Print.
Schmitt, Richard. "Profeminist Men and Their Friends." Men Doing Feminism. By Tom Digby. New York: Routledge, 1998. 81-99. Print.
Schwalbe, Michael. Unlocking the Iron Cage: The Men's Movement, Gender Politics, and American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Print.
Seidler, Victor Jeleniewski. Man Enough: Embodying Masculinities. London: SAGE, 1997. Print.
[1] Excerpt from the 2012 Vagina Monologues, written by Eve Ensler
[2] Please note that I am not necessarily talking about administrative involvement (though neither am I saying there should be none); I am more curious for the sake of this paper about establishing zero-tolerance policies within the fraternities themselves, in which men hold other men accountable for their actions.
[3] Pollack: 23-24; Dittes: ix; Schmitt: 89; Hopkins: 43.
[4] Pollack: 23-24.
[5] Kimmel, Guyland: 47, 51.
[6] May: 145.
[7] Personal interview: James Peabody
[8] Pollack: 24.
[9] Kimmel, Guyland: 61.
[10] Personal interview: Doug Peabody, Dartmouth Class of 1974.
[11] May: 17, 15.
[12] Kahane: 213.
[13] Katz, More Than A Few Good Men
[14] I would like to note here that in no way am I implying this is not an issue for women as well—I believe it is.
[15] Kimmel, Masculinity as Homophobia: 280.
[16] Katz, More Than A Few Good Men
[17] May: 145.
[18] Kimmel, Masculinity as Homophobia: 278.
[19] May: 65.
[20] Kimmel, Guyland: 233.
[21] May: 22.
[22] May: 18.
[23] This argument was developed in Part I.
[24] This argument was developed in Part II.
[25] Kimmel, Guyland: 267.
Source: http://www.membershiponhold.com
Tagged: Gender, Gender Dynamics, Masculinity, Critical Essay, Fraternities, Dartmouth, Dartmouth College, Moving Dartmouth Forward, MDF, Sexual Assault, Sexual Violence, Gender Equality, Rape, Date Rape, Rape Culture, Feminism, Good Men, Men, Dichotomy of Good Men, Passivity, Passive Men
Walker Strikes "Truth" and Wisconsin Idea from UW Mission in Budget | PR Watch
Associate/Full Professor/Shell Oil Endowed Chair (Shell Oil Endowed Chair in Oceanography/Wetland Studies/Tenure-Track/Tenured) | Vitae
ASSOCIATE/FULL PROFESSOR/SHELL OIL ENDOWED CHAIR
(Shell Oil Endowed Chair in Oceanography/Wetland Studies/Tenure-Track/Tenured)
Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences
School of the Coast and Environment
Louisiana State University
The Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences at Louisiana State University (LSU) announces a search to fill an endowed oceanography/wetland studies chair position. Applications and nominations are being accepted for the position of Associate or Full Professor and this position will hold the Shell Endowed Chair in Oceanography/Wetland Studies. The Department has strong biological, physical, chemical, geological, fisheries, and wetland biogeochemistry programs in continental shelf, estuarine, and wetland environments.
Responsibilities include:
Develop and maintain a rigorous, externally funded research program with relevance to wetland science and restoration and the sustainable management of coastal ecosystems; collaborate in multidisciplinary projects with coastal/wetland scientists; teach courses in aquatic/wetland soil biogeochemistry that may include redox reactions, elemental cycling of trace metals, biogeochemistry of C, N and/or S, and gaseous exchange; mentor graduate students; and provide service/ advice to state and federal and agencies and the University.
Required Qualifications: Both Ranks: Ph. D. in biogeochemistry, ecology, oceanography or related fields. Associate Professor Rank: 6 years of related experience. Full Professor Rank: 10 years of related experience.
Salary is commensurate with qualifications and experience. An offer of employment is contingent on a satisfactory pre-employment background check. Application deadline is February 27, 2015 or until a candidate is selected. Apply online and view a more detailed ad at: www.lsusystemcareers.lsu.edu. Position #000465
LSU IS COMMITTED TO DIVERSITY AND IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/EQUAL ACCESS EMPLOYER
More About The Monster That Is Henry Kissinger - Esquire
Photo by Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Sometimes, the delicacy of the beat-sweetening in Tiger Beat On The Potomac is almost too adorable to bear. Here it is today, cuddling up to one of the most monstrous alleged humans of the century.
You're a Republican thinking of running for president. It's a dangerous world, and your foreign policy credentials are a little thin. Time to see Henry Kissinger. Scott Walker did it. So did Marco Rubio and Chris Christie. Rick Perry paid a visit in September - he even tweeted a photo to prove it. "It was an honor to speak with Dr. Kissinger today and hear his thoughts on America's foreign policy challenges," tweeted the then-Texas governor. Rubio has "met with Kissinger a couple of times in the past, and always appreciates his insights," says a spokesman for the Florida senator, adding that Rubio has been reading Kissinger's latest book, "World Order."
OK, so consorting with murderous war criminals has been a common go-to move for Republican candidates since Dick Cheney appointed himself vice-president and puppet master back in Aught-Aught. But even TBOTP has to admit there are certain large brown spots on the apple these guys are polishing. Watch how deftly these areas of rot get mentioned and then dismissed.
At 91 years old, the former secretary of state, national security adviser and intellectual-cum-celebrity has come to occupy a unique place in the foreign policy firmament. Though some historians blame him for countless deaths in places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Bangladesh, Kissinger is more revered than ever in Washington. He has become a Yoda-like figure, bestowing credibility and a statesman's aura to politicians of both parties, including ones who may not actually share his worldview.
Complete bullshit, this is.
Except in certain dead-assed precincts of the foreign policy establishment -- and in the mind of John McCain, but I repeat myself -- Kissinger hasn't been a "celebrity" since Studio 54 closed. (Whether he ever was an "intellectual" is at least up for debate.) And that "some historians blame him" dodge is priceless, but the list of Kissinger's depredations is incomplete. The writer forgot Chile, and East Timor, for starters. And it's not just "some historians," either. I guarantee you there are quite a few people in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Chile, East Timor, and dozens of other countries, who were on the business end of Kissinger's genius, who do not feel all that kindly towards him, either. And, yes, there are a lot of Democrats who go to this aging lycanthrope for policy advice, too, just as the story says. (The part about Kissinger and Samantha Power at the baseball game is just too cute for words. Of course, had Kissinger been a Rwandan, he'd have been on the radio directing the mobs, or at least advising the people who were. Power should be careful with whom she goes to the ballpark.) The idea that Henry Kissinger is still considered an influential thinker by influential people is prima facie evidence of the moral bankruptcy of American foreign policy in the second half of the last century, and the beginning of this one. Just to put the "real" back in realpolitik, here's the invaluable National Security Archives file on Kissinger's meddling in Chile after the election of Salvador Allende, which made possible the coup that resulted in the death and torture of at least 10,000 Chileans under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A taste:
At the height of Pinochet's repression in 1975, Secretary Kissinger met with the Chilean foreign minister, Admiral Patricio Carvajal. Instead of taking the opportunity to press the military regime to improve its human rights record, Kissinger opened the meeting by disparaging his own staff for putting the issue of human rights on the agenda. "I read the briefing paper for this meeting and it was nothing but Human Rights," he told Carvajal. "The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there are not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State."
An amoral sycophant with the instincts of a sociopath and the conscience of a thumbscrew. He should have rotted away his final decades in a cell somewhere. I don't expect a sense of history from TBOTP, where history is defined by yesterday's tweets. But, Jesus, people, even I know a criminal when I see one.
Bartender, a double Prestone, and see what the pundits in the back room will have.
Dartmouth to offer course on #BlackLivesMatter movement | USA TODAY College
billtronAimee is my partner. She and Abby really worked hard to make this happen, and I'm really proud of them.
hodadMs. Dr. on the USA Today blog.
#BlackLivesMatter demonstration at Dartmouth College (Photo by Zuff Idries)
#BlackLivesMatter will soon be more than just a Twitter hashtag for students at Dartmouth College.
The school will offer a course this spring titled “10 Weeks, 10 Professors: #BlackLivesMatter,” examining structural violence against communities of color. The lessons in the pilot course will be split into 15 sections that span more than 10 academic departments, including — but not limited to — anthropology, history, women’s and gender studies, mathematics and English, according to The Dartmouth.
Abigail Neely, a Dartmouth geography professor, says the course was inspired by a workshop led by Rev. Starsky Wilson, co-chair of the Ferguson Commission – a community-based think tank created by Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon. On Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Wilson led a two-hour seminar at the school and encouraged faculty to think about ways to integrate the events in Ferguson into an academic setting.
English professor Aimee Bahng says the objective of the course is to contextualize the systemic, extrajudicial killings in Ferguson and around the nation.
“We want to bring this moment into conversation with a historical trajectory,” says Bahng.
Bahng says that the course will also study structural forms of violence – including redlining, housing discrimination and the prison-industrial complex – and how they compound state violence against minorities.
Neely says the challenge and innovation of the course is its transgression of traditional department boundaries.
“The point really is to use the tools our disciplines offer us,” says Neely. “And to sort of offer up different ways of thinking about this really complicated and intractable problem that we’re living through in this moment, and to recognize that no single discipline is enough.”
While they will not lead their own sections, Bahng and Neely are working to coordinate the Ferguson Teaching Collective at Dartmouth.
Chelsey Kivland, a postdoctoral fellow in the anthropology department, is a member of that collective.
Kivland says she was contacted to lead a course section since she already teaches an “Ethnography of Violence” class, which spends a week analyzing police brutality and the ways in which various forms of violence – institutional, symbolic and physical – nourish each other.
“It’s something that all of us wake up with every day, so I’m really happy that this course is happening. This is exactly what this college needs.”
Kivland says she plans to expand on that curriculum and study how the media dehumanize men and women of color by drawing comparisons to animals, invoking discourses about respectability and cherry-picking images and videos of police brutality victims.
“One of the reasons I’m really motivated to teach this course at this time is to continue the conversation,” Kivland says. “I do feel that people are already starting to forget (about Ferguson), but these are really urgent matters that play out in people’s daily lives. Only occasionally are they punctuated by a mass movement.”
Kivland says the upcoming electoral season serves as another impetus to further the dialogue about state-sanctioned violence and potential policy reforms.
And students seem to be curious about the course.
Adria Brown, a senior Native American studies major, says she was excited to hear about the class but is concerned about student enrollment.
“I do wonder who will take the class – whether it’ll be kind of preaching to choir or if they’ll get different points of view,” says Brown. “But I still think – no matter what – that it’s worth having the class to really interrogate this topic.”
Brown also says it is inspiring to see contemporary social justice movements being translated to the classroom.
Kevin Gillespie, a senior English and government double major and president of Dartmouth’s NAACP chapter, says he’s hopeful that the interdisciplinary course will facilitate better understanding of racial oppression.
“As a black man, it’s incredibly hard to have this reality,” he says. “It’s something that all of us wake up with every day, so I’m really happy that this course is happening. This is exactly what this college needs.”
What if your joke made you a million dollars?
hodadThe class blog is live!
#onpoortaste
Although the title of the segment Jia Tolentino writes for thehairpin.com is called Music Appreciation, she is not shy from saying how much she does not appreciate Magic!’s new song, “Rude”. Despite its top rankings on the music charts, Jia Tolentino seems to highly disagree with the critics, calling it similar to a kids bob song – something an artist never wants to be compared to. Even though I don’t have a particular stance on this song (at least before I read this article), it seems to really separate listeners as to who loves it and sings it constantly and who can hardly stand it. Jia automatically assumes she has bad taste by not liking the song especially since the majority of people seem to like it judging by its ratings. Even her friend who’s a music critic loves the song, leaving Jia in disbelief.
When reading the article though, Jia seems to bring up some really good points, making me think that even though the majority seems to like the song, it may still be in poor taste. I mean really, they couldn’t produce a song that contained more than four chords of instrumentation? And who wears a beanie to a “wedding”? The song does seem like a pop boy band designed to attract pre-teen obsessive girls. Even their name makes it seem like they don’t want to be taken seriously. The band’s producer suggested that they change their original name of “Magic” because it was too generic so he sarcastically drew an exclamation point after it. Guess what the band’s response was? “Eh, looks good to us.” Really Magic!? You want to represent yourself by a name that was a joke suggestion? Come on.
Not only does Jia loathe the sound of the song, but she also burst out into laughter when watching the video because to her the whole thing seems like a joke. Jia breaks the music video down by scene and it really makes you question the band’s taste. This wasn’t a music video they had to make for class in high school. I think it’s apparent to everyone that they need a new director for their videos. The combination of the song and the video make it obvious to her that the band Magic! just has poor taste. With Jia’s breakdown of the video and lyrics of the song, it’s hard to disagree.
Christian's Recording open to christian Artist
Christian's Recording open to christian Artist (Rochester NY)
Blizzard of '78 remembered | ThisWeek Community News
hodadEvery year on my birthday my mom tells me the story of when she brought me home from the hospital and was hit with a big wave of post-partum depression just as this blizzard trapped her in the house for days on end, and how she will never forget looking into my cute little baby face and telling me it wasn’t going to work out.
This weekend marks the anniversary of the biggest winter storm so far in my life and probably yours as well. The "Great Blizzard of 1978" hit the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes Jan. 25-27. The storm dumped vast amounts of snow with near hurricane-strength wind gusts heaping snow into enormous drifts up to 15 feet tall. In the end, 70 people died during the storm -- 51 of them here in Ohio alone.
This severe blizzard was the result of a relatively rare merger of two distinct upper level waves (one over Texas and one over the Northern Plains) that caused an explosive intensification of a surface low pressure system moving north from the Gulf Coast into Ohio. The storm system produced some of the lowest pressure readings ever recorded in the United States mainland that were not associated with hurricanes. On Jan. 26, the barometric pressure dropped to 28.46 inches of mercury at Columbus, 28.68 inches at Dayton and 28.81 inches at Cincinnati. These readings set new records for the lowest sea-level pressures ever recorded at each station.
Even more impressive was Cleveland's record low pressure reading of 28.28 inches, which remains the lowest pressure ever recorded in Ohio and one of the lowest pressure readings on record within the mainland United States.
Legendary 10TV meteorologist Joe Holbrook was closely monitoring the storm in WBNS' weather office. In the age before the Internet, local television meteorologists would go outside to check the station's thermometer for temperature, anemometer for winds and barometer for pressure. Joe thought it was odd that the barometer reading had sunk close to 28 inches. He tapped on it thinking the needle was stuck. It did not move!
Visibilities were near zero for much of the storm. Temperatures rapidly plunged from the 30s to bitter-cold single digits in just a few hours. Wind gusts averaged 50 to 70 mph for much of the day on Jan. 26, reaching 69 mph at Dayton and Columbus and 82 mph in Cleveland. An ore carrier stranded in thick ice on Lake Erie just offshore from Sandusky reported sustained winds of 86 mph with gusts to 111 mph that morning!
Extremely cold wind chills about minus-50 degrees or lower continued throughout the day, making it especially dangerous to venture outside. While snowfall was difficult to measure due to the strong winds, official storm-total snowfall amounts from Jan. 25-27 ranged from 4.7 inches in Columbus to 6.9 inches in Cincinnati to 12.9 inches in Dayton.
I was 13 years old when the storm hit. I remember hearing the howling sound of the winds at night only to wake up and find one side of our house buried in snow. Growing up outside of Indianapolis, all the roads were closed. Like in Ohio, thousands of cars were stranded on Interstate 70.
I recall seeing National Guard tanks coming down the state highway in front of our house to open a single lane. The snow was so deep, it made it seem as if you were driving through a tunnel. To make matters worse, I was sick during the storm. A neighbor doctor diagnosed me with strep throat and my dad rode on a snowmobile with the Morgan County Sheriff to get medicine in the nearest town. Now that doesn't happen every day!
I'd love to hear your blizzard stories as well. I'll be posting about the Blizzard of '78 on my Facebook page and I encourage you to add your comments.
Instagram’s Graveyard Shift - NYTimes.com
hodadJeff’s really running with this Instagram thing
January 22, 2015
The photograph that Markisha McClenton posted on Instagram is a self-portrait, a close-up that is muted in dim light. She might be on her way to work. She might be coming home. Her workdays begin and end in the dark, and they are dark in between. She’s a lab technician in Jacksonville, Fla. Her specialty is blood. She has worked these dark hours since her son was 7. “Freedom,” she told me over the phone from her lab. That’s why she works these hours: The freedom to work at night and to raise her children during the days. To her, this is good fortune. She is smiling in this photo. But her eyes are midnight eyes, 3 a.m. eyes. Why take a photo at that hour? “People forget about us, the night shift,” she said. The #nightshift. That’s the hashtag she used. It’s how I found her.
I’ve been working at night myself for a long time now. Once it was out of choice, a preference for the quiet hours. More recently it was because I had no choice. Insomnia. One night, I was drinking my third cup of coffee — because when you can’t sleep, you might as well stop trying — and ignoring the deadline looming the next morning. Instead, I stared at the matrix on my phone, my own red eyes scanning a tiny sample of some 670,000 photographs under #nightshift. Most of them were people like me, awake when they didn’t want to be awake. And like me, they were looking at the screen in their hands, held up by the one in mine.
This is the ghost world of #graveyardshift (#nightshift’s sister hashtag), whose workers file into Instagram every evening. These pictures may be clever or maudlin, silly or harrowing or sad. “Desperate” is a word that comes to mind, but so does “resigned.” And even “resistance.” Sometimes it’s in the form of a gag, a ridiculous pose; sometimes it’s in the form of a gaze so steady that it seems to warm the fluorescent panels framing so many of these pictures. The hashtag itself is a form of solidarity.
There are the warehouse workers who snap themselves letting a wisp of marijuana smoke slip from between their lips, little Instagram rebellions. There are the soldiers and sailors pulling a night shift for no good reason other than orders, photographing themselves and their comrades on the verge of sleep or already under. Cops in noirish black and white, their pictures framed to show a bit of badge. And nurses. A lot of nurses. Close-up, arm’s length, forced smiles, dead eyes. Scroll through #nightshift, and you’ll see some saints among them and some whose hands you hope will be more alive in an emergency than their ashen faces.
The #nightshift hashtag is especially well populated by the armed professions and the healing ones. Sometimes they are almost one and the same, as in the case of @armedmedic3153, a.k.a. Marcelo Aguirre, a paramedic in Newark and suburban New Jersey. He owns an AR-15, a 9-millimeter and a shotgun, but the only thing he shoots on the night shift is his camera. He works nights so he can study days; he wants to be a doctor. Nights are good preparation for that: You get more serious cases. You learn on the job. A 12-hour course each night you’re on. Twenty-four hours if you take a double. After a while, the adrenaline that juices you when you’re new — when you’re still keeping a tally of the lives you’ve saved — disappears. You just do the job. “High speed and low drag,” Aguirre told me when I called. “Please ignore the siren,” he said. “We’re going to a call.” A stroke. Nothing to get excited about. Coffee sustains him. He stays clean. Some guys, he said, use Provigil, but that’s prescribed. “For shift-work disorder,” he said.
Markisha McClenton, the lab tech, told me that she no longer gets sleepy. “I program myself,” she said. She wouldn’t change her schedule now if she could. She likes working alone. There are nurses at the facility where she works, but they don’t often venture back to the lab. “They think it’s creepy,” she said. “At night.” Maybe it is: The long hours of the night shift are a reckoning with time.
“There’s people still struggling like I struggle,” a miner named Mike Tatum told me, explaining why he posts pictures and why he looks at them. “Working through the night, not sleeping next to your wife, missing your kids because they go to school before you get home.” Tatum likes to post pictures of the heavy machines used to dig coal from Wyoming strip mines. He drives a D-11 bulldozer. “I push dirt,” he said. Other machines dig the coal. Twelve hours of ‘dozing, four nights in a row. He came to this job — a good one, $30 an hour or more for as long as the coal lasts — after construction work dried up in California. “Nobody back home has really seen what we do out here,” he said. It’s a good job, he swears. He’s brought his 6-year-old boy out to see the machines. He’d be proud if his kids grew up to be miners. A good job. Rough on the back. But you’re just sitting. Driving the ‘dozer. Nobody bothers you. Hours without a word. “Pretty easy,” he said. Plenty of time to think. To make plans. Things he can do with his days, when he has days.
So far, this is enough to see him through the nights safely. “Quite a few fatalities the past year,” he observed. He heard about a man at another mine who drove a machine into the pit. “Maybe a suicide.” It didn’t seem like an accident; he had to drive through a couple of berms. “Splat,” Tatum said. “And a couple more like that.” He says other guys have died on the road, Highway 59. It’s a long drive out to the mines, and drug testing never stopped anyone from drinking, especially after the shift is over.
Pan out to take in some fraction of the 670,000 faces. Pay attention to the eyes, drooping or unnaturally wide. Is it fatigue? Or something more? Something less? Stay sane, and the night shift may seem like just another set of hours. Lose yourself to the loneliness, and the daylight leaks out of you. But something else can come in. A kind of calm. The kindness of dark hours.
When I was first drawn into this nighttime Instagram grid, I was looking for a distraction, for images to displace the thoughts that had agitated me to exhaustion. What I found instead was something that seemed descended from Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” his great prose poem of an essay that was really a proposal for a new kind of literature, a way of speaking, a way of seeing. We shouldn’t mistake Instagram’s squares for the public one. But neither should we miss the quiet dignity afforded by gathering under this hashtag: the solidarity of recognition, of being seen.
“Nightwalkers,” Pierre Bell calls the men and women who find their peace after-hours. He’s new to the night himself, working as a nurse’s aide on the behavior unit at an assisted-living home in Akron, Ohio. “What’s behavior?” I asked. “Combative,” he said. “Lockdown. Spit, kick, hit, bite.” Sounds terrible, I said. It’s not, he told me, especially at night, when the anger subsides, and when the alarm I can hear beeping in the background is an event rather than a constant song. The other aide will get that one. Bell, a 28-year-old father of a 9-month-old, was sitting with the nightwalkers. The strange ones, the restless ones, the storytellers. “Some were in wars,” he told me. “Some were teachers.” Sometimes they talk for hours. If they’re up, he’s up. It feels to him like a matter of courtesy. The behavior unit is his patients’ home. He’s only visiting. Trying out the night they live in.
And on his break, he can slip away. Take a snapshot, make a record of himself in this new country of the other hours, post it on Instagram as @piebell522. He took the one that caught my eye when he was in the bathroom. “I saw the dark behind me,” he said. “I thought it could be a picture.” A lovely one, as was the shot that followed hours later: Bell’s baby boy, the reason he works the night shift. Not for the money but for the days he can spend with his son, a handsome little guy with his father’s gentle eyes, but warmer in the golden sunlight of the morning.
Green Bay's Board-Game Obsession
billtronA few months ago my brother spend some time with the Green Bay offensive line recording some tracks for Pitch Perfect 2. He played more Settlers of Catan than anyone I knew a decade ago but quit cold turkey when he lost the game when his Somerville apartment burned down in 2005. He swears they never talked about the game during the recording session, but I have my doubts.
Prize for whoever can work the best "Settlers of Catan" reference into tweets during the NFC Championship Game.
Why Are Bagpipes a Part of Funerals?
Question: Why are bagpipes a part of funerals, especially firefighter and police funerals?
Answer: The history of funeral bagpipes is a fairly simple (though very sad) one. In traditional Celtic cultures, including both the Irish and Scottish cultures, bagpipes were an important part of a traditional funeral. After the Great Potato Famine of the mid-1840s, Irish immigrants came to the United States in huge numbers. Due primarily to racism and xenophobia, Irish people were often allowed to apply for only the most dangerous and difficult jobs, including the jobs of firefighter and police officer.
Work-related deaths for firemen and cops were not uncommon, and when one or more of these deaths would occur, the Irish community would hold a traditional Irish funeral, including the mournful bagpipes. Over the years, this tradition spread to firefighters and police officers who were not of Irish descent.
So if it's an Irish tradition, why are the Scottish bagpipes used?
In short, it's because the Scottish highland bagpipes are significantly louder than the traditional Irish uillean pipes. Though it's likely that either or both types of pipes were used at funerals in the 1800s, the Scottish highland pipes are now almost universally used.
Where do they find bagpipers to play at firefighter and police officer's funerals?
Fire and police departments in most major cities have a special brigade, usually as a division of an Irish fraternal group called The Emerald Society, who learn to play bagpipes and drums for the very purpose of honoring their fallen comrades. In some places, civilians may be members of the pipe and drum band, but generally, the members are active or retired firefighters and police officers.
I'd Love To Help My Wife, But I'm Trapped Under Something
Previously, from the same author.
When my employer called me into his office and granted me paternity leave on the birth of my first child, I had no idea what I was in for. Most of my male coworkers had already left the office at this point, having impregnated willing strangers in order to take twelve weeks’ paid time off in exchange for eighteen years of financial and personal responsibility.
“It’s twelve weeks’ time off,” Daniel shouted when he learned he’d successfully created a child with the head of the mechanics department. “I’m going to finally finish my heli-skiing novel!”
I simply wasn’t prepared for what all of this free time would do to me. I had planned, of course, to participate actively as a member of the household and as my wife’s partner — grease the dryer, dust the teakettle, rearrange the cat, and so on — but then, shortly after I walked in the door, I was tragically trapped under something heavy and have been unable to move from this spot in the living room. No one can move this burden from me, save the pure-hearted seventh son of a seventh son, and I do not believe that such a person exists.
It has been a difficult adjustment, to be sure. Once my wife asked me if I could help clean the floors as long as I was going to be down there anyway.
“I’m sorry, darling,” I had to tell her, “but without a job, I — like many men, including my grandfather before me, who was turned into a cinderblock wall after he retired — lack the psychic equilibrium to perform basic tasks. Also can you make me a michelada.”
My wife’s capacity and willingness to do everything necessary for the care and comfort of our child has flooded me with awe. In fact, I am so flooded with awe that I cannot move. It is all I can do to grin weakly at her, trapped as I am under a sea of my own admiration, as she struts powerfully by, dressing our son at several hundred nautical knots per hour while knitting his college application essay with her teeth.
I always thought that when the time came I would be able to be a fully present and engaged member of my family. I never dreamed I would be trapped under something so heavy.
I wonder what my son’s name is. Perhaps it is Jonathant.
How I wish I were capable of providing my son with the same kind of loving, careful attention as my wife is. But how can I compete? Her hands are made of dish scrubbers and teddy bears. Mine have been duct taped to these bottles of Hennessey and Old Crow, and I am too drunk to remember the difference between the wall and the floor. My wife has a diaper genie built into the back of her right calf. I have been forced by an evil wizard to watch the entire series run of Sons of Anarchy, through no fault of my own. Were I to lift my eyes from the Shakespearean machinations of a Californian biker and drug-smuggling family that loves as fiercely as they drug-smuggle for even a moment, I would surely turn to stone, and what good would I be to my child, or possibly children, then?
My wife is now more vacuum than human woman. Her attachments are many and efficient, but none of them can save me. I have asked her to bring me my novel, but I do not think that she can hear me, trapped as I am under this thing that has trapped me, preventing me from bathing or holding my son, which I would love so very much to do, instead of finishing this shandy.
Lessons from Vermont | Jacobin
Harris & Ewing / Library of Congress
Has the tide of health care justice turned — in the wrong direction? Last month, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin announced that he could no longer “responsibly support” a funding plan for his long-awaited “single-payer” plan for the state. It wasn’t long before some on the Right claimed a historic victory.
“As crises of faith go,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board gloated, “this is Mikhail Gorbachev circa 1991 territory.” After all, single-payer health care, according to the Journal, is not merely “the polite term for socialized medicine,” but nothing less than “the ultimate goal of the political left.”
Now, inapt historical analogies aside, it is fair to concede the Journal’s point that universal health care has long been on the left and progressive agenda, from the “[f]ree medical care, including midwifery and medicines” called for by the 1891 Erfurt Program onward.
But the meaning and roots of Vermont’s about-face are more complicated than the dominant narrative now emerging in the mainstream media — as is even characterizing the Vermont plan as “single-payer.” For those of us who see real universal health care as foundational to an egalitarian society, a deeper analysis of the still-evolving events in Vermont is critical. So what has happened in the Green Mountain state, what has changed, and where do we go from here?
To some extent, events in Vermont can be seen as yet another chapter in the long story of failed efforts at health care reform in this country. The “state-based” approach to reform is also nothing new: in the 1910s, Progressives sought to pass “compulsory health insurance” laws in several state legislatures, which would have created insurance systems restricted mainly to industrial workers.
This effort was ultimately defeated by the “convergence of economic and political power with the ideological force of the Red Scare,” as the historian Beatrix Hoffman puts it (analogous forces have arguably forestalled progress ever since).
Skipping ahead to 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed with much celebration (and apocalyptic groaning). However, as 2015 unfolds with the law largely in full force, a right to health care remains only an aspiration in America.
It’s not just the estimated thirty-one million who will be left uninsured by the ACA in coming decades — it’s the many, many more who face rising out-of-pocket health care costs (e.g. copays and deductibles), premium increases that are outpacing meager wage growth, and ever-looming “medical bankruptcy.” Such facts only amplify the calls for true universal health care, in Vermont and across the country.
A single-payer health program would accomplish this goal by replacing our current fragmented system with a public system of universal national health insurance, eliminating uninsurance together with out-of-pocket health care expenses. But the daunting political obstacles to enacting such a system at the federal level (including the potent insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies) have led many to work towards reform at the state level.
The Canadian road to single-payer is frequently invoked as a possible model in this regard: after the leftist Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) came to power in the province of Saskatchewan in 1944, it enacted a system of universal hospital insurance — “the first important step,” as political scientist Jacob Hacker calls it, to the nationwide, provincial-based Canadian single-payer system.
Elsewhere, change came differently: after the Labour Party took control of the British Parliament in the wake of World War II, it legislated the National Health Service into existence in one fell legislative swoop.
More recently, in Vermont, it was years of determined advocacy — from the single-payer organizing of physicians like Deborah Richter to the “tireless activism” of the Vermont Workers’ Center and some unions — that set the stage for serious state-level health care reform. In conjunction with the Vermont Progressive Party — which, according to historian Molly Worthen, “promised not to play spoiler [in the 2010 gubernatorial election] if the Democratic candidate supported single-payer health care” — such work helped contribute to the election of pro-single-payer Democrat Peter Shumlin in 2010, followed by the passage of Act 48 in 2011.
This legislation was supposed to put Vermont on the road to a “universal and unified,” publicly funded system. But it also left much undone, most notably a mechanism for financing.
Additionally, though “Green Mountain Care” could’ve been an improvement, it didn’t go nearly far enough: indeed, as has been noted for some years, the term “single-payer” itself was ultimately omitted from the final legislation. “Vermont’s public failure,” as Sarah Weaton recently put it in Politico, “is especially frustrating to single-payer advocates because, they note, the Shumlin framework… wasn’t really a true single-payer plan.”
Its shortcomings speak, in part, to the constraints imposed by our political structure, as well as the complexities of several federal laws. The potential “roadblocks” to state single-payer-like systems, as outlined in a 2013 report by Public Citizen, can briefly be summarized.
First, the ACA prevents single-payer experimentation on the state level, at least until 2017, when states may apply for waivers from the law (which might be used for good or evil). Similarly, Medicaid requires a waiver from a cooperative administration to be incorporated into a state single-payer system. Medicare, on the other hand, is not authorized to issue such grants, though several alternative approaches might permit some degree of incorporation into a state system.
Finally, the report discusses the difficulty of integrating federal health programs (like TRICARE for military families) into a state program, as well as the somewhat uncertain legal ramifications of the 1974 federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), which limits the ability of states to regulate health insurance offered by businesses.
Why does any of this matter? The Shumlin plan, for instance, didn’t integrate either Medicare or TRICARE into its “Green Mountain Care” plan, and was set to allow “ERISA employers” (big businesses that self-employ their workers) to continue providing private health insurance (albeit while still having to pay taxes for the public system, which they didn’t seem to like).
As a result, Vermont would have still had multiple insurers, or “payers,” and hence, it wouldn’t have “single-payer”; the plan would have additionally accommodated other private plans, like Medicare Advantage and “Part D” drug plans.
Unfortunately, this is a profound problem, for the administrative simplicity of single-payer plans is the crucial source of the large savings these systems can achieve. The Harvard School of Public Health study that put forth the original “public-private single-payer” reform proposal for Vermont, for instance, estimated some $580 million in savings from a Vermont single-payer-like system for 2015, savings which the Shumlin administration now asserts are not “practical to achieve.”
Additionally, a national single-payer program would reduce expenditures on pharmaceuticals by allowing direct negotiations over drug prices, a reform that would be highly problematic at the state level (Medicare, for instance, is currently prohibited by federal law from doing so). Separately, the Vermont plan would also have permitted out-of-pocket “cost sharing” (though reduced compared to the ACA) at the time of health care use.
And yet, the Vermont plan could still have constituted progress. So it came as a major shock to many when, on December 17, after multiple delays, Shumlin announced that his financing plan for the system was finally complete, that the necessary taxes were too high, and that he would be dropping it altogether. As the result of various reductions in expected revenue, he explained that his plan would require what he labeled an “enormous” 11.5% payroll tax, on top of an income tax that would range from 0 to 9.5%.
There seemed to be more at work than simply changed revenue estimates, however. In the wake of Shumlin’s decision, Richter criticized “vested interests,” including “institutions with a commercial interest in health care, out-of-state PAC money and large businesses too miserly to provide decent health care to their employees…”
Vermonters for Health Care Freedom, a conservative group with unclear financial backing, ran ads criticizing the Shumlin “scheme.” During a single-payer fight many years back (as the labor journalist Steve Early reported), some six thousand workers at a Vermont IBM plant were gathered together and warned that employers would have to exit the state if the bill was passed.
Another factor may have been the unpopularity of the ACA itself. Ironically, for conservatives who fear that the ACA is a “slippery slope” to single-payer, the seemingly refractory dysfunction of the ACA exchange website may have actually had the opposite effect in Vermont: as Shumlin described (according to his prepared remarks), “Vermonters have good reason to question the ability of state government to deliver on this [law] after the painful rollout of the exchange.”
And the increasingly recognized onslaught of out-of-pocket health care expenses faced by families across the country — trends accommodated by the ACA — may likewise be increasing the public’s skepticism of government health care initiatives.
At the same time, whatever the difficulties in achieving state-level reform, we shouldn’t be too quick to agree with those who’ve concluded from all this that funding single-payer through taxation is unattainable. Consider, for instance, some of the figures in the administration’s full fifty-seven-page financing report released last week: even with the new individual tax, and even despite the fact that the Vermont plan was not a single-payer plan, Vermont residents would “over time … have higher net family income on average” as a result of the system — the exception being those making more than $150,000:
| Income Class | Average Change in Net Family Income |
|---|---|
| <$10000 | 1,203 |
| $10k – $19,999 | 952 |
| $20k – $29,999 | 909 |
| $30k – $39,999 | 2,012 |
| $40k – $49,999 | 1,677 |
| $50k – $74,999 | 2,645 |
| $75k – $99,990 | 2,452 |
| $100k – $149,999 | 739 |
| $150k – $249,999 | -2,120 |
| >$250,000 | -5,841 |
Additionally, according to the report, this change in net income was expected to increase over time under the plan.
The new payroll tax would seem to increase the overall health expenditures of private employers. And yet, the report estimates that “[m]ost classes of firms that offer health insurance today would spend less” overall on health care under the plan, the exception being businesses with more than one thousand employees.
Small businesses that currently provide no health benefits would pay significantly more, and the report and Shumlin contended that this was a major problem from the financing perspective. But again, for a system that had some of the costs but basically none of the efficiencies of a single-payer system, none of this sounds particularly earth shattering.
In sum, the discourse that is now emerging in the media — that Vermont has proven that single-payer health care is impractical or unaffordable — must be fiercely countered. Complementary organizing for single-payer on both the state and the national level not only should continue, but can succeed — with the ultimate goal being a single, inclusive program for the country.
Such a system would not resolve all health injustices in the nation. But in its true and full form, it would wholly abolish uninsurance; it would facilitate the rational, equitable allocation of health care capital investments; it would turn back the tide against the ever-encroaching “medical-industrial complex” of corporate health care; and it would — critically — eradicate “underinsurance” by removing all financial barriers to care. In doing so, it would make for a far more just, happy, and equitable society.
For that very same reason, it will not easily be won. No one can precisely predict the pathway to success, but it is clear that progress is only possible if true universal health care remains a principal demand of labor and left political movements. Recent retreats notwithstanding, a national health program remains on the political horizon.
#onpoortaste snapchat question
I don’t understand snapchat enough to know if I could set up some sort of collective #onpoortaste story (the way snapchat does for music concerts, etc) so that my students could contribute and view. Is this a thing I can do? plz halp
N.H. lawmakers allow concealed weapons in House chambers - Politics - The Boston Globe
hodadLocal news #billibuster
Guns and other weapons were first banned from the House chambers in the early 1970s, and the restriction was later extended to include the entire legislative campus.
The ban was lifted in 2006 and then reinstated three years later.
In 2010, Republican leadership again removed gun restrictions in the State House and its adjacent buildings.
In 2012, newly elected Democratic leadership in the House instituted a partial ban on weapons, prohibiting lawmakers and others from carrying in parts of the building controlled by the House.
“This has been somewhat of a political football in recent years,” said Jim Rivers, communications director for the House speaker’s office. “We’ll wait until 2016 and see what happens.”
The rule change was proposed by Representative John Burt, a Republican from Goffstown who says he often carries a concealed weapon. He said he appreciates the work of the armed police officers who patrol the legislative campus, but worries they may sometimes need help handling threats.
“Where I have an issue is if a nut with a gun comes into this chamber,” he said. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, whether it is a state trooper or a fellow representative.”
The New Hampshire State House is a total mess - The Washington Post
hodadLocal news #billibuster
New Hampshire Republican Reps. Shawn Jasper, left, and Bill O’Brien. (AP; Reuters)
Update: An earlier version of this post mischaracterized the House Republican Alliance, which has been around for a few decades.
Twenty-four House Republicans voted against Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday, the largest defection suffered by an incumbent speaker since the Civil War. Was it a failed coup, the sign of a House — or a party — divided and ready to collapse on itself?
Not compared to New Hampshire, where Republicans are so divided over who will lead their party that one side has literally threatened to open up its own new set of offices in a completely different building. Things are so dysfunctional that, by comparison, the faction that voted against Boehner in Washington looks like a Kumbaya chorus.
We’ve chronicled the mayhem in Concord before, but here’s a brief recap: At 400 members, the New Hampshire state House is the second-largest legislative body in America, trailing only the U.S. House of Representatives. Republicans reclaimed control of the state House in November’s midterm elections, after a single term in the minority.
The speaker who lost his job when Democrats took over in 2012, Bill O’Brien (R), wanted his old gig back. He narrowly won a vote of the House Republican caucus, by a 116-112 margin, over former speaker Gene Chandler, apparently setting him up to win back the gavel when the full House voted a few weeks later.
But O’Brien’s reputation for confrontation made a lot of members wary. So on Dec. 3, a rump faction of about 36 Republicans joined the 159 Democrats in the House to elect Shawn Jasper, another Republican, as speaker. The Democratic candidate actually dropped out of the race to give Jasper a head-to-head shot at beating O’Brien.
Despite his defeat, O’Brien had no interest in accepting a rank-and-file role. He voted with a majority of the state Republican Party’s executive board to censure Jasper, and he heads the House Republican Alliance — a group composed of a majority of the Republican conference — that appointed its own majority leader a few days later. Spoiler alert: They picked O’Brien.
But Jasper has been busy installing his own partisans in top positions. House rules allow Jasper to appoint his own majority leader, a job he gave to state Rep. Jack Flanagan (R). He picked Chandler, the former speaker who lost to O’Brien in the initial leadership vote, as his deputy speaker, and he booted two prominent O’Brien supporters from their committee assignments.
He also appointed all nine members of the House Rules Committee, which voted to reject a proposed change that would have required Jasper to accept O’Brien as majority leader. State Rep. Steve Stepanek (R), an O’Brien ally, told the NH Journal’s John DiStaso that he hoped to force a vote of the full House overturning that rejection when the body meets for the first time Wednesday.
Stepanek also said the O’Brien faction has been actively fundraising, and that if the rule isn’t changed, the House Republican Alliance will open its own office across the street from the State House in Concord.
The vote on the rules change will be a critical moment for the Republicans who joined Democrats to elect Jasper over O’Brien. New Hampshire House rules permit a secret ballot, meaning no one knows for certain how the vote actually broke down (Hence, above, we say “about” 36 Republicans joined Democrats. It’s a fair assumption that all the Democrats voted against O’Brien.)
But a rules vote is a recorded vote, meaning members who got to vote for Jasper in secret will have to make their stands public: Will they stand with Jasper and vote down the new rule, inviting the wrath of party activists who back the more conservative O’Brien? Or will they vote with O’Brien and avoid the political backlash?
Awaiting the fallout is the Republican-controlled state Senate, where comity and congeniality are in far greater supply, and Gov. Maggie Hassan, a Democrat. Whether New Hampshire has any semblance of a third coherent legislating partner, or just two years of intra-party squabbling between the 180 or so Republicans who backed O’Brien and the 36 who joined Democrats to back Jasper, hinges on today’s vote.
By contrast, John Boehner runs a pretty tight ship.
MONTPELIER, Vt.: Vermont governor re-elected after failing to win majority | National Politics | The State
hodadLocal news #billibuster
I listened to the swearing-in ceremony live on VPR on my way to pick up Dara at school. It began with some mid-level bureaucrat singing every verse of “America the Beautiful,” and the high point was these protestors singing and holding up a banner while officials very civilly request that they hand it over and stop singing.
Protesters hold a banner in support of universal health care during Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin's inauguration speech on Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015, at the Statehouse in Montpelier, Vt. ANDY DUBACK — AP
Ms. Dr.'s facebook status update today
Asian American Lit is (as of today and at least for now) the highest enrolled course in the English department at Dartmouth this term, and the students seem amazing. After hearing doubts for five years about the future of Asian American Studies at Dartmouth due to low enrollments in AsAm classes, I hope this signals something to the institution that now, more than ever, students want and need these histories and critical frameworks in their education. We started the quarter reading David Eng and Lisa Lowe on the politics of canon formation and are building the syllabus collaboratively. The unit on Vincent Chin and cross-ethnic solidarities in the wake of Ferguson is at the top of the list.
Why We’re So Mad at de Blasio - NYTimes.com
ON Sunday, at the funeral of the slain New York City police officer Wenjian Liu, his grieving father described how his son would call him at the end of each day’s tour of duty, just to let him know he was O.K.
This sort of habit is familiar to many cops. When I was assigned to the Fugitive Division of the New York City Police Department, in the ’90s, I would get out of bed at 3 o’clock each morning, trying not to wake my wife. I would gently kiss her goodbye and leave for work. By 5 a.m. my team and I would be executing the first of several warrants assigned to us for the day. (Mornings are the best time to catch bad guys.) We were arresting the most wanted and dangerous criminals in the city, and the work was, to put it mildly, stressful. By 9 a.m. we would be back in our office processing our arrests, and I would call my wife without fail, in case she had overslept, and to let her know that I was O.K. and still in one piece.
Years later, during a tearful venting, my wife confided that those calls were seldom needed to wake her because she was usually lying in bed, tossing and turning and fearing that she would get another kind of call. She couldn’t rest until she had word that I was off the streets and safe for another day. I accepted the dangers of police work because I loved doing it and understood its value to society, but I sometimes regret having dragged her into the life with me.
The murders of Officer Liu and his partner, Officer Rafael Ramos, have hit me and my fellow officers especially hard, in ways that may be difficult for civilians, and certain politicians, to fully comprehend. During my 20 years on the job (I retired in 2003), I attended far too many funerals for cops killed in the line of duty. They were all sad and wrenching affairs. But this is different. Getting killed while, say, investigating an armed robbery — as almost happened on Monday to two New York City police officers in the Bronx — is something all cops know can occur, and we accept it. But the killing of Officers Liu and Ramos was a coldblooded assassination.
These brave men were shot without warning, sitting in their patrol car while looking for crime, something every cop on the street does every day. They were like two shepherds guarding their flock, and they were brutally murdered for it.
This act has unleashed a torrent of anger and grief among the members of the Police Department, who take these vile murders personally, and a heartening outpouring of sympathy from ordinary New Yorkers, who instinctively grasp what it has meant at a moment when the police feel demonized, demoralized and, at times, literally under assault. But not everyone is so understanding. The gestures of protest by many officers toward Mayor Bill de Blasio — including turning their backs to him when he appeared at both officers’ funerals — have been characterized in some quarters as squandering the credibility of the department and reeking of self-pity.
When I hear this sort of thing, my blood pressure goes through the roof. Mr. de Blasio is more than any other public figure in this city responsible for feelings of demoralization among the police. It did not help to tell the world about instructing his son, Dante, who is biracial, to be wary of the police, or to publicly signal support of anti-police protesters (for instance, by standing alongside the Rev. Al Sharpton, a staunch backer of the protests). If there is any self-pity involved, which I doubt, it is only because we lack respect from our elected officials and parts of the media. It has taken two dead cops for some people to take a step back and realize what a difficult job cops have.
Most cops I know feel tired of being pushed to do more and more, and then even more. More police productivity has meant far less crime, but at a certain point New York began to feel like, yes, a police state, and the police don’t like it any more than you do. Tremendous successes were achieved in battling crime and making this city a much better place to live and work in and visit. But the time has probably come for the Police Department to ease up on the low-level “broken-windows” stuff while re-evaluating the impact it may or may not have on real, serious crime. No one will welcome this more than the average cop on the beat, who has been pressed to find crime where so much less of it exists.
Unfortunately this will require a mayor with far more finesse and political savvy and credibility with law enforcement than Mr. de Blasio appears to have. His statement on Monday that the New York City Police Department is the greatest in the world came too late. He should have been acknowledging our accomplishments months ago, instead of aligning himself with grandstanding opportunists. His words and actions before the killings of Officers Liu and Ramos showed a contempt for the police all too common on the left, and it is this contempt that the officers who have turned their backs to him are responding to.
But New York City must be governed and its citizens protected, and that means that the Police Department and the mayor will have to find a way to get along. The divide between us is now vast and bitter. For the healing to begin, Mr. de Blasio must find a way to sound like he actually means it when he compliments us and to follow that up with concrete actions that demonstrate respect and true understanding.
Until then he’ll continue to be speaking to a lot of backs in blue.
Steve Osborne was a New York City police officer for 20 years, retiring as a lieutenant. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Job: True Tales From the Life of a New York City Cop.”
Why Pygmies Aren't Scared By The 'Psycho' Theme : Goats and Soda : NPR
Men from the Mbenzele Pygmy ethnic group listen to Western music for the first time while an anthropologist measures their vital signs, such as heart rate and skin perspiration. University of Montreal hide caption
Men from the Mbenzele Pygmy ethnic group listen to Western music for the first time while an anthropologist measures their vital signs, such as heart rate and skin perspiration.
University of MontrealIn many ways, music and emotion almost seem interchangeable.
Try listening to the Star Wars' Cantina Band song without smiling, or to the Psycho soundtrack without feeling a little tense.
But what if you had never heard Western music before. Would these songs still make you feel the same way?
Scientists at McGill University and the University of Montreal got the rare opportunity to answer that question. Their findings, published Wednesday in Frontiers in Psychology, suggest that music isn't always a universal language.
Deep in the rain forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a group of Pygmies lives in near isolation from Western culture. The Mbenzele Pygmies don't have electricity, radios or cellphones. Many have never heard a note of Brahms or the beat of Beyonce.
On a trip to Congo, anthropologist Nathalie Fernando of the University of Montreal played 11 excerpts of Western songs to 40 Pygmies. Some songs, such as "Cantina," trigger positive feelings in Westerners. Others, like the Psycho theme or Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, trigger negative or sad feelings in Westerners.
Men play a struck beau while women and children sing behind them at an Mbenzele Pygymy village. Nathalie Fernando/University of Montreal hide caption
Men play a struck beau while women and children sing behind them at an Mbenzele Pygymy village.
Nathalie Fernando/University of MontrealBut the Pygmies didn't hear the music that way.
The emotional cues in songs, which Westerners pick up on, didn't mean the same to the Pygmies: They didn't hear the shrieking strings of the Psycho theme as stressful or the minor chords in Wagner's Tristan as sad.
"The emotional response to this music was all over the map," says neuroscientist Stephen McAdams of McGill University, who co-authored the study with Fernando. "The idea of music being a universal language, I don't really buy it. Some aspects of the emotional response are very specific to that culture."
Anthropologist Nathalie Fernando of the University of Montreal records a Pygmy drummer while her interpreter looks on. Philippe Auzel/University of Montreal hide caption
Anthropologist Nathalie Fernando of the University of Montreal records a Pygmy drummer while her interpreter looks on.
Philippe Auzel/University of MontrealNext Fernando had the Pygmies rate their own culture's music for its emotional quality. Across the board, the Pygmies said all their songs made them feel good — even a song composed for a funeral.
"All of their music is generally upbeat, playful," says McAdams. The culture just doesn't have sad songs, he says.
"In the West, we expect to have negative emotions sometimes. We even seek them sometimes," McAdams says. "When I'm feeling sad, and I really want to enhance it, I'll put on some sad music."
But in the Pygmy culture, sad feelings aren't accepted. "They generally try to get rid of negative emotions by singing happy music," McAdams says. "One of the main roles of music in their culture is to evacuate bad feelings."
The Mbenzele Pygmies are known for their rich, complex music. Everyone in the community is a musician, McAdams says. They sing, dance and play instruments, starting at a young age.
"How they think about music is very different from how Westerners think about music," Fernando said in an email to Goats and Soda. "The Pygmies do not use music to express emotions. It's not sentimental."
As hunter-gatherers, the Pygmies depend on the forest for their livelihood. "They feel they have an unwavering relationship with the forest," Fernando says. "Music is the vital force that links them to the forest, like an umbilical cord."
That's why songs must be upbeat, joyful, she says: "Positive energy is used to maintain relations with the spirits that live in the forest. So music should inspire positive energy."
The Pygmies use music — and positive energy — to help accomplish tasks and overcome problems, Fernando says. "There's music for each of the daily activities: hunting, fishing, gathering, mourning," Fernando writes. If there's a disagreement in the community, music is brought in to fix it.
So are Pygmies always in a good mood?
"They can cry, but not while singing," Fernando says. "They sing to pass through the tears."
Judge rules against florist who refused services for gay couple’s wedding – LGBTQ Nation
hodadlolwut?
Stutzman’s lawyers say she declined not because of the couple’s sexual orientation, but because of her religious views on marriage.