It is official. Today at 8:57 a.m. it was empirically proven that there is no correlation between intelligence and the capital letters postdating one’s name. In the university setting and the world over, there is a gross assumption that an individual’s smarts can be equated with the prestige of his/her major, profession, or number of degrees held. The majority of the people who believe this have the Ms, Ds, PHs, Js, and BAs after their names and send their children to college, perpetuating a self-fulfilling societal farce that masks pedanticity as intelligence.  

My appointment is at 8:15 a.m. Blood pressure, no pain, a solid temperature, (and) I am ushered into the exam room. Crappy cologne first, then the doctor himself; sporting a navy blue polo shirt with vertical rows of sailing flags, a detective’s moustache, and high school county championship ring, he asks me if I am ready.

I am as ready as I am going to be.

He escorts me to another room where he confuses my right foot for my left foot several times, finally drooling iodine all over my ingrown toenail. Running before walking, he now puts on his exam gloves. Clumsily, he fills the syringe and proceeds to jab my foot six times, obviously unsure about what he is doing, like a toddler who struggles to play with a toy that is meant for a child three years older, a Looney Tunes character trying to blow out its tail.

His plastic hospital I.D. card shimmers on the counter: First Name, Last Name, M.D.

Twenty minutes and my toe is numb. Hunting for the scissors and gauze, he puts gloves on and does the procedure. At one point he yelps, “Wow! Look at all the pus,” the medical professional response to an infected wound. Gloves bloody, he pours through every cabinet in the room, wiping blood on all the handles and some of the cabinet doors. My toe hurts, but I pinch myself to make sure this is actually happening. A doctor wiping blood all over a room, surely unsanitary and surely an 11-year-old knows not to do that.

He can’t find the bottle of alcohol he is looking for, so he picks up a can that is lying around. Holding it upside down he flips it in the air, displaying that he’s still got his high school finesse, reads it, chuckles, proud of himself, and squirts some white soap on my foot.

No, not actually empirical, but telling. This man has being practicing medicine for decades. He told me so. He has those prestigious, awe-inspiring initials after his name, yet he is one of the least competent individuals I have ever met.

Coming off a week of orientation for incoming freshman where I met countless pre-med students, students who want to be lawyers and joint J.D./Ph.D.s, today was a harrowing experience that typifies a crippling lack of creativity within the adolescent/young professional mindset. Intellect, pursuit out of curiosity and not a teleological, career-obsessed, money-making impetus for learning, is lost. Students care about their grades but not their minds. The majority of undergraduates obsess over internships, jobs, grades, and graduate school before they ask questions that might make them better writers, thinkers, or more holistic young adults. Such is the climate of college campuses today, and it is blinding, rendering most students unable to function in non-traditional capacities and non-traditionally in professional careers. Able to pay for Kaplan and get into med school sure, but to think for themselves, take a risk, read a book that is not assigned or on Oprah’s book club list, no. Worst of all, this literally mind-numbing set of expectations has become the norm — the laudable norm, the revered doctor, the brilliant lawyer; you must be smart if you have a Ph.D.

My toe knows better.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

$419 billion: Requested budget allocation in 2006 for the Department of Defense.  This figure excludes funds requested for Homeland Security and other operations.

$230 million: Sum pledged by President Bush for aid to Lebanon, which was devastated during the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah. The newly promised aid, which will be used to reconstruct Lebanese infrastructure and homes, bolsters America’s previous meager offer of $50 million.

$50 billion: Money spent on rebuilding Lebanon — particularly its roads, power lines, medical facilities, airports, and sports locations — during the past ten years.  Lebanese infrastructure lay in ruins after the brutal 15-year-long civil war, which began in 1975, destroyed the former banking and mercantile hub of the Middle East. Lebanon is now again in ruins.

$2.5 billion: Lebanese government’s estimate of the cost of damage to the nation’s infrastructure after Israel’s most recent war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Mimi Hanaoka

The current situation in Iraq has been drawing comparisons to the Vietnam War for some time now, and one can’t really argue with the fact that there are similarities.  From the original goals of instilling new governments in unstable areas to the enemies’ reactions in the form of dangerous insurgencies that we don’t seem to have the will power to stop, the two wars have been taking similar courses since their inceptions.  

What’s slightly disappointing about the way Vietnam is often brought up is the context under which it’s being done.  People aren’t making this comparison to give our children a history lesson or to enlighten us as American citizens.  The word “Vietnam“ conjures up certain images and thoughts about the way the U.S. government handled a foreign war, the way our people responded to it domestically, and what happened when these two philosophies clashed.  

Comparing what’s going on now to a war without a resolution is ultimately meaningless and, more directly, useless.  Vietnam wasn’t a success and, if 30 years later we’re still making the same mistakes with no plausible recommendations or answers, then the left, the right, the center, and every other opinionated faction still hasn’t learned anything from the war in question.

Anybody can look back at past mistakes and point out that they’re mistakes.  It’s a weak argument.  OK, so it’s another Vietnam… What are you going to do about it?

By referring to “Our Vietnam” or “Bush’s Vietnam,” people are taking a good idea and turning it into an ineffective partisan issue.  The U.S.’s involvement in the Vietnam War ended over thirty years ago.  Maybe there are people out there searching for some vestige of this past era, but there’s no longer a purpose in making comparisons which at this point serve as little more than political rhetoric.  

In terms of the polarizing message people are trying to get across with a Vietnam comparison, this isn’t another Vietnam.  There’s no draft, and most young people out there don’t know what’s going on in Iraq and probably don’t care.  So as far as it being a culturally divisive issue on the home front, it’s not.  

The comparison is still an interesting one because another debacle is happening so soon after the original, but the fact that it was allowed to happen again is something nobody should be proud of.  Since we do live in the year 2006 and not 1968, some of our leaders might want to consider figuring out how to fix “Our Iraq” rather than making sure that we all understand it’s becoming another Vietnam.  

Finding a parallel in a war most people have since recognized to be a failure militarily, politically, and strategically is a good reminder of what can happen when foreign policy goes wrong, but without a solution to how that war or this war should be handled, its effects seem to be intended to produce wins at the polls, not on the battlefield.

M R

It is hard being back. Sensory overload would be a stab in the right direction but a phrase that comes painfully short of the confusion in my mind. Walking up 5th Avenue, exhausted, my mind doesn’t know what is going on as it undergoes a mental marathon, a grueling test of endurance and contrast. With each step, I get a second farther away from my work this summer, friends, a burgeoning slum with no end in sight, a place of eternal contradiction where smiles and destitution tango to the rhythm of 90s rap lyrics.

Fatigue is not the reason I stumble forward but rather a jet-lagged mental incompetence, no way of reconciling the disconnect between what I am living now and was living 48 hours ago.

Herein lies the problem, the true challenge to vitriolic blog postings, grand notions of social activism, and self congratulating college groups: how do I mend that gap, live in the U.S. knowing what I know? Slogan t-shirts are one thing, but consistent lifestyle is another, telling of a commitment to an idea that goes beyond the hip Urban Outfitters version of its commercialized self, somewhere uncomfortable at some point.

It is hard being back. I ask myself, well aware of the problems that face some people, one small community in a specific city, what am I going to do about it? Better yet, what am I going to live about it? Truthfully, I am a little afraid of the answer because I know it is a lot easier not to.

Aaron Charlop - Powers

Some of the more curious sites on the Internet are the websites and blogs of world leaders. Kim Jong-il, my favorite despot and premier of North Korea, has a website that is essentially devoted to him, and Iraq’s top Shia cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has a website, complete with a Q & A section with the cleric himself.  

The latest leader to jump on the bandwagon, despite the fact that his country attempts to ruthlessly censors its citizens’ access to the Internet (with not entirely successful results), is Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has started his own blog.  With solicitations to email the president and posts by Ahmadinejad, the blog appears to be an attempt to reach out to younger and more distant audiences that are prone to political dissent, particularly since such dissent often finds its way into the Internet, which is less successfully censored than the country’s print and broadcast media. However, given the president’s first post — a lengthy homage to himself — the blog might amount to little more than a transparent piece of propaganda.

Mimi Hanaoka

Not long before Johnny Cash died, he recorded a collection of songs that were to become the next segment in his American Recordings series.  Although Cash didn’t live to hear the final result, producer and friend Rick Rubin recruited a group of musicians and added acoustic guitars, strings, and keyboards to Cash’s baritone, creating the album American V: A Hundred Highways, a haunting meditation on death that embodies Cash’s sincerity at its finest.

Like much of his previous work, the album is an exercise in contradictions: resilience vs. defeat, humor vs. misery, permanence vs. transiency, love found vs. love lost, the secular vs. the religious.  Each song is another link on his cavalcade towards finality, and Cash’s knack for making other performers’ compositions his own is on full display here.  

The album begins with Cash singing, “Oh Lord, help me to walk another mile, just one more” and hints at the singer’s broken down, brokenhearted state while his voice, reduced to a near whisper, sounds so brittle it could crack.

As these words indicate, spirituality is one of the running themes on the album, and is best seen in the traditional “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” where Cash reflects on the universal notion of mortality through God’s eyes, although his own mortality clearly weighs on his mind.  A razor-like slide guitar cuts across Cash’s evangelical vocals as the backup band stomps its way through the song’s duration, pounding home the Biblical message.  

Two of the compositions were written by Cash himself, including “Like the 309,” the last he wrote before his death.  Here we see a defiant Cash staring down death with his confident swagger, reminding us that he’s not gone until his casket’s on the 309 (a little more poignantly now since he is in fact gone).

Almost directly paralleling “Like the 309” is Hank Williams’ “On the Evening Train,” the story of a man whose deceased spouse is being carried back home.  Given his physical state and his own wife’s death shortly before this recording, Cash turns in a remarkable performance containing arguably the strongest vocals on the album.  

Most of the other tracks continue along a similar vain, telling stories of love, death, and God.  The final cut, “I’m Free From the Chain Gang Now,” would have taken on a wholly different meaning at an earlier period of his life.   As the last song on this collection, its metaphorical connotations become quite apparent.  

While each person experiences death individually, most of us won’t know how we’ll react until our own fates are nearby.  As one of the few performers infused with the spirit of the American outlaw, Johnny Cash left us one last piece of music and a final lesson on our own mortality.  

M R

Graffiti is art. Graffiti is not art. Wherever your opinion lies, it’s probably black and white. There’s no gray, no Cherry Red, Regal Blue, or Castle Rock, for that matter. Graffiti is either a blight on the landscape, or a form of expression encompassing the socio-political dynamics of the day.

Either way you play it, graffiti is not going anywhere. With corporations from Sony, Nissan, and Nike to McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and the X-Games co-opting the form, graffiti is mainstream. Graffiti exhibitions have been shown in the bastions of “legitimate” art throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the Smithsonian.
But whether graffiti is vandalism or art, there is an interesting question underneath all of those letterings and colors, and that question is motivation. The young kids of the ‘70s who began the graffiti movement are older now, and when asked about what it all meant, their answers were wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and complex.

An article in a recent issue of New York Magazine spoke to the early graffiti creators (referred to as “writers”), many of whom sat on different sides of the fence when it came to defining graffiti.
For example, Ivor L. Miller, author of Aerosol Kingdom: Subway Painters of New York City, called graffiti, “a younger generation’s artistic response to the public protests of the Black Power and civil-rights movements.” Writer MICO backs this theory, explaining, “Graffiti is a term that The New York Times coined, and it denigrates the art because it was invented by youth of color. Had it been invented by the children of the rich or the influential, it would have been branded avant-garde Pop Art.” Author Jeff Chang also ties graffiti in with hip-hop, as art form and political expression.

Yet, other graffiti writers hesitate to put graffiti into a political context. Writer RATE claims, “Graffiti is vandalism. If it becomes too legitimate, it loses part of what it’s about in the first place.” And SHARP adds, “I think what people are doing today is really destructive. I don’t see any artistic value in etched windows.”

One point that cannot be argued, in my opinion, is that graffiti has been, and always will be, a form of expression. Whether it’s art or not, it has been a way for youth to express themselves, their worlds, and their vision. “I think these guys are doing what they are supposed to be doing. If you want to be a true writer, a true rebel, you have to make do with what you have,” says MICO.

Ultimately, as writer LEE says about graffiti, “This movement is about movement. It is about reinventing itself. And it’s about the streets.”

Desiree Aquino

…Deportations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender asylum-seekers to Iran would violate Dutch government’s obligations to people facing torture or execution in their country of origin. We are particularly concerned that Human Rights Watch’s findings in a particular case appear to have been used to make a sweeping, and inaccurate, analysis of the legal penalties for homosexual conduct in Iran in general…

—Scott Long of Human Rights Watch (HRW), writing to Minister Verdonk, Minister of Alien Affairs and Integration of the Netherlands, requesting that the Netherlands not deport Iranian homosexuals back to Iran.  HRW argues that the Dutch goverment is obligated, according to Article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to grant such people asylum on the basis that such individuals face torture or the death penalty in Iran.    

What, if anything, HRW’s letter had to do with a recent case in Stuttgart is unclear, but a 27-year-old Iranian lesbian has been granted asylum in Germany. She successfully argued that a forced return would sentence her to the death penalty, which is the punishment for certain homosexual acts in Iran.

The letter from HRW outlines Iranian policies on homosexuality.

Within the region, Iran is distinguished by the overt severity of the penalties it imposes on consensual, adult homosexual conduct. “Sodomy” or lavat—consummated sexual activity between males, whether penetrative or not—is punishable by execution, regardless of whether the partner is passive or active. (Article 111 of the Code of Islamic Punishments or Penal Code states that “Lavat is punishable by death so long as both the active and passive partners are mature, of sound mind, and have acted of free will.”) Tafkhiz (the rubbing together of thighs or buttocks or other forms of non-penetrative “foreplay” between men) is punishable by one hundred lashes for each partner, according to Articles 121-122 of the Penal Code. Recidivism is punishable by death on the fourth conviction. In addition, Article 123 of the Penal Code further provides that “If two men who are not related by blood lie naked under the same cover without any necessity,” each one will receive ninety-nine lashes. Articles 127 to 134 stipulate that the punishment for sexual intercourse between women is one hundred lashes and if the offence is repeated three times, the punishment is execution.

Mimi Hanaoka