Picture this: you’re standing in line at customs in JFK International Airport, the duty free bottle of wine in your hands growing increasingly heavier, when a customs official walks up to you with a bar code scanner and says, “Okay, Ms. Louison, you can go ahead now.” As you walk through the gates and leave the other unlucky souls behind, you thank God and the State Department for the $8 computer chip in your passport.
According to The New York Times, the State Department will soon begin issuing a new style of passport — one that carries your facial measurements and identifying information in a computer chip embedded in its front cover and pages. Following in the steps of Australia, these new passports are meant to combat identity theft and passport fraud, but privacy watchdog groups like the The American Civil Liberties Union are concerned that the new technology will both violate individuals’ rights and leave American travelers open to potentially hostile electronic spying.
“This is like putting an invisible bull’s-eye on Americans that can be seen only by the terrorists,” said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program.
Laboratory tests, as yet substantiated in the field, indicate that the chips may be readable up to 30 feet. “Skimming” (electronic snooping) may be combated by carrying passports in a foil envelope or encrypting and password-protecting the data — but despite these measures, the ACLU sees the new technology as evidence of the United States’ increasing evolution into a surveillance society. The combination of ever smarter technology and post 9-11 security measures increasingly beg the question: when do our individual liberties outweigh our national security?
And, on a personal level, will my new passport put me in greater individual risk in order to protect our country? When I first moved to the Middle East, I was repeatedly warned not to show anyone my passport unless absolutely necessary — both to avoid being overcharged, but also to avoid being targeted as American. The possibility that someone could walk next to me in the street and identify me instantly is unsettling, to say the least. In our current climate of hostage-taking, unless the State Department can guarantee my anonymity, I’ll avoid replacing my passport for as long as possible.
Yet somehow, Ron Artest, NBA sideshow and professional thug managed to take barbarism to new heights. After leaping into the stands to choke a kid in the third-row bleachers and coldcocking a Pistons fan mouthing off to him, the Pacers forward made a conciliatory appearance on the Today show.
Or did he?
Matt Lauer, who seemed to be engaged more in heavyweight shadowboxing than anything, asked Artest what should be done about his reckless and violent behavior. It’s hard to imagine how this overpaid primadonna might respond. Luckily for everyone he cleared everything up: It’s the fans’ fault!
“It was the third time I had been hit with something in the crowd,” he said. “They should hold off. They shouldn’t have been throwing stuff.”
Phew! It’s a good thing he cleared that up. Rule 1: Fans should expect to be assaulted by any athlete that has paper cups thrown at him. This isn’t as ridiculous as it may seem; after all, it was self-defense.
“The cup almost hit me in the eye,” said Artest. And how exactly did a cup almost hit him in the eye? He was lying down on the scorers’ table. Rule 2: NBA players can lie down anywhere they please. This includes scorers’ tables, fans’ laps, and even the middle of the court.
But in moves that have even John Kerry scratching his head, Artest, despite the 24-hour replay of the videotape, says, “I’ve never hurt anybody, and I think that’s important.”
Among the other notable quotables that Artest flung around like dirty socks during the Today interview were:
“I’ve really tried to change the image of the league,” (which is true — the NBA used to be a place where world-class athletes and sportsmen like Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, and Magic Johnson met, and now it’s just another playground where tattooed hoods play streetball for big bucks).
“I respect David Stern’s decisions but I don’t think I should be out for the whole season. I really want to play this year.” And he shouldn’t be out for the rest of the season, he should be out of the league completely and in a jail cell. Only in America can you punch someone on camera and not be charged with a crime.
“Sometimes things happen … people go to war, but we don’t want to go to war; nobody wants to die you know, but things happen and you try to make everything positive.” Maybe Artest does know John Kerry. He has an interesting penchant for changing the subject and blaming other people for his failures, as well as aggrandizing his self-victimization. Artest is comparing his predicament to those now “forced” to fight in Iraq.
But Ron Artest is trying to stay positive. He’s got a new album coming out.
“My skin was rough like a snake’s and then it started peeling off. It was very painful, so I had to go to the hospital,” says Latifa Myinyikwale. While Latifa wasn’t bargaining for a chemical peel in her quest for beauty, that’s literally what she got — after two years of using skin-lightening creams, Latifa, a black Tanzanian, has scars, rashes, and blotches all over her body.
Black is not beautiful in Tanzania and in other African nations; many women seek to look and become whiter since, as a result of social conditioning and media imagery, whiteness is often perceived as the epitome of beauty. Latifa explains: “You hear that if you want to look beautiful, then you have to look like a white person and to look like a white person you have to use these creams. Of course it is natural that women want to be beautiful.”
Women like Latifa spend a significant amount of their meager income on skin-lightening creams. Products range between four and six American dollars, and with the gross national income at $290 per capita, the pursuit of beauty is costly, dangerous, and disfiguring. Women also suffer from fertility problems and cancers of the skin and liver as a result of the hazardous chemicals, such as mercury and hydroquinone, that may be in the skin-lightening products. The Tanzania Food and Drugs Authority successfully banned 83 of these skin-lightening creams in 2003, and they are now attempting to enforce that ban.
While Tanzania is taking a proactive approach to curb the use of hazardous skin-bleaching products, the practice is by no means confined to Tanzania — approximately half the women in Mali bleach their skin.
As much as ever before, there is now a sense of urgency to convince people that black is most definitely beautiful.
As 2004 grinds to a dismal halt, a spot of hope appears: a study of HIV positive children in Zambia reveals that pediatric deaths from AIDS can be halved by administering a readily available and inexpensive antibiotic.
The Guardian reports that a study conducted by the Medical Research Council found that administering co-trimoxazole (also known as Bactrim) cut AIDS-related deaths by 43 percent in children. While co-trimoxazole is a prophylactic and therefore cannot prevent HIV from developing into AIDS, it effectively deals with the secondary and tertiary infections, such as pneumonia or tuberculosis, that often result in AIDS-related deaths.
The World Health Organization and UNICEF have accordingly altered their policies regarding HIV and AIDS medical treatment for children. In a world where as many as 1,300 children die daily from AIDS, this is thrilling research. At last, there is some news worthy of celebration at your Thanksgiving table.
“If we need a special school for homosexuals, maybe we need a special school for little short fat kids, because they get picked on too.”
— Mike Long, chairman of the Conservative Party in New York, speaking about Harvey Milk High School, the first American high school created for “at-risk” youth and specifically lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning students. The school, located in New York City, is named after the first openly gay city supervisor of San Francisco who was assassinated in 1978, and it is an extension of a public school program established in 1985 by the Hetrick-Martin Institute.
The school has been tremendously beneficial for some of its students; children that were harassed and ostracized at their previous schools assert that they now have a safe haven in which they can focus on their studies. While little over half of public school students in New York graduate, 95 percent of the students at Harvey Milk successfully do so.
Yasser Arafat died last week, and I couldn’t be happier. I had been watching him slip deeper and deeper into a coma for nearly a week. And then he died. My initial feeling was sadness. This may come as a shock to many, but it shouldn’t. Yasser’s death was pitifully anti-climactic. The Palestinian leader didn’t die in battle, defending his people, or meet his end in a glorious uprising against Israel, known as the Zionist entity to many Palestinians and nearly all fanatical Muslims. No, although when his Ramallah compound was surrounded by Israeli tanks in 2002, Arafat cried out “Please God, give me a martyr’s death,” in the end he sank slowly into a peaceful sleep like an old man slipping into a warm bath.
And that’s fitting isn’t it? Arafat was the Davy Crockett of international terrorism and suicide bombing. Yet he made the journey into the next world riding a comfortable hospital bed in Paris while sitting on billions of dollars meant for the people of Palestine. Meanwhile, the people of Palestine ride trains in Haifa strapped with explosives with the hope that some insane despot will compensate their family with a token amount for the sacrifice. If Arafat and his ilk had been swallowed up into Egypt at the end of World War II, Yasser’s end would seem more like a pharaoh’s. It looks as if he’s trying to bring all his earthly treasures with him to the afterlife.
I was also sad because now there’s nothing to look forward to. Oops. There’s still the deaths of Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Ayman al-Zawarhi, Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein, so I guess it’s not all bad. But waiting for those too will be like waiting for the next Star Wars movie to come out … long and tiring and, in the end, very forgettable.
And that is what the death of Arafat will be in the long run, forgettable. The man was everything to his people, but worth nothing to humanity. He held the hopes and the dreams of his people in his hands and he stuffed them into his back pocket along with all their cash.
Arafat will probably go down in history as the one person who could’ve changed the world for the better, but couldn’t. The man was an illusionist and a survivor, but was politically impotent. He was a thief and a coward and turned down Israel’s offer of peace and land, brokered by President Clinton, because he was too weak to placate terrorist factions like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
But it’s hard to grasp what scum Arafat was when reading his obituaries and listening to the leaders of the world. What is it about death that makes horrible people seem decent? French President Jacques Chirac called Arafat “a man of courage and conviction who has incarnated, for 40 years, the fight of Palestinians for the recognition of their national rights.”
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said: “It is with great sorrow and profound sadness that we learned the news about the untimely demise of President Yasser Arafat, a leader of the Palestinian people and a hero to us all. He was the ultimate embodiment of decades of the just struggle of a nation for its undeniable rights to self-determination. A figure much loved and respected not only by Palestinians but also many in the world over, including Indonesia.”
Someone should explain to these two that calling on thousands of people to blow themselves up and to hijack planes is not the “ultimate embodiment” of heroism and that at 75, death isn’t all that “untimely.” The average age of death for a male is 73. However, these two clearly believe Arafat to be some sort of superhero. Arafat could’ve died at 105, after seven heart-attacks, a stroke, and kidney failure, and they would still register shock. It seems like the only international figure to comment on Arafat’s death with any coherence is Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who said, “This is the man who also pioneered international terrorism, the art of hijacking planes, ships, kidnapping, and seizing of hostages, and you name it, which gave birth, of course, to other terrorist groups who emulated him, including al Qaeda.”
The international community aren’t the only ones hopping on the Yasser love parade. The New York Times ran an obituary for Arafat, which began:
“Yasser Arafat, who died this morning in Paris, was the wily and enigmatic father of Palestinian nationalism who for almost 40 years symbolized his people’s longing for a distinct political identity and independent state. He was 75.
No other individual so embodied the Palestinians’ plight: their dispersal, their statelessness, their hunger for a return to a homeland lost to Israel. Mr. Arafat was once seen as a romantic hero and praised as a statesman, but his luster and reputation faded over time. A brilliant navigator of political currents in opposition, once in power he proved more tactician than strategist, and a leader who rejected crucial opportunities to achieve his declared goal.”
The piece mentioned his ties to terrorism, but seemed to excuse it as a function of Arafat’s resolve and unrelenting commitment to the interests of a future peace and return to Jerusalem for the Palestinian people. The headline should have run: “Arafat: The Loveable Terrorist,” or “Huggable Despot Loved Despite Murders,” or even “Ah, It Was Only a Few Planes and Some Cafés.”
Saddam Hussein must be relieved at the prospect of death. Even though he’s gassed the Iranians and the Kurds, murdered thousands of his own people and sired two brutal raping-torturers, at least he, and probably Osama bin Laden, can count on The New York Times to soften their images when they pass.
In two weeks, production is scheduled to start on a remake of the 1949 film, All the King’s Men. Chris Rose’s article in The Times-Picayune gives a background on the original film and novel which support his contention that the remake has a good chance of meeting, if not surpassing, its predecessors. The budget is high. The cast is A-list. That’s why it’s ironic that the studio behind such a big-budget movie about a politician nicknamed “Robin Hood” is in danger of becoming the Wal-Mart of the film industry.
Most studio movies hire union craftspeople. These unions are supposed to protect their members by drawing up work contracts with the studios. Unions negotiate the rates of pay, contributions to pension and welfare, and working rules for travel to and from the locations where films are shot. The language of these contracts is typical of any legal contract: its terms are complicated, almost illegible. Loopholes are inevitable, and where they exist, it’s up to the people in power to refrain from exploiting them. One such loophole exists in the union contract negotiated for the upcoming remake of All The King’s Men.
The discovery of this loophole has led to a decision made by Sony Pictures not to trigger a union agreement which pays for the healthcare and pension plans of union employees. In simple terms, this agreement dictates that a studio which produces a film outside of Los Angeles, in a different state, may avoid paying a residual payment to the West Coast union’s pension and welfare fund. To avoid this payment, the studio cannot hire more than one person from Los Angeles.
All the King’s Men is being shot on location in Louisiana. Despite the fact that several union workers from Los Angeles were requested to work on the film, Sony denied them the right to work because it would have required Sony to pay a small percentage of residual profits gleaned in the markets outside the United States to the union’s pension and healthcare plan.
As freelance workers, union employees depend on their unions for healthcare coverage and retirement. The money keeping the union’s pension and healthcare plan afloat comes directly from the contributions like those Sony is avoiding; without these residual profits, the pension and healthcare plan will disappear.
It seems odd that this loophole is being exploited on a project like All The King’s Men, considering that more than 99 percent of union films result in contributions made to union pension and healthcare plans. The loophole isn’t new; maybe union employees have been fortunate that 99 percent of the time, studio heads look the other way and pay these contributions.
After all, the film is about Huey Long, a man whose belief in spreading wealth among the common people earned him the reputation of a modern-day Robin Hood:
“[Huey Long] wanted the government to confiscate the wealth of the nation’s rich and privileged. He called his program Share Our Wealth. It called upon the federal government to guarantee every family in the nation an annual income of $5,000, so they could have the necessities of life, including a home, a job, a radio and an automobile … Everyone over age 60 would receive an old-age pension.”
It would seem the time is right for a remake about a man with these ideals. It’s unfortunate that the producers haven’t learned the moral of the story they’re telling.
In the game of political musical chairs that is the reshuffling of the Bush cabinet, President Bush has replaced Colin Powell, the outgoing secretary of state, with the current National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and in so doing, he’s effectively silenced the last of his critics and choked off the opposition. The outlook, it appears, is grim and hawkish.
The British publication the Guardian unabashedly claimed that the replacement of Secretary of State Colin Powell with Condoleezza Rice signals the end of the moderate political voice and the beginning of an unrelentingly conservative administration. The Guardian announced:
“The Bush administration was stripped of its last dissenting voice of moderation yesterday when the secretary of state, Colin Powell, resigned and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser who is known for her conservative instincts, was lined up to replace him.”
Sharing the Guardian’s unease with the appointment of Ms. Rice, Professor Juan Cole, an expert on Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan, argues that under the stewardship of Ms. Rice, American foreign policy with respect to the Middle East will be seriously compromised. Professor Cole explains:
“Rice seems to me to have two major drawbacks as Secretary of State beyond her inability to challenge Bush’s pet projects. One is that she is an old Soviet hand who still thinks in Cold War terms. She focuses on states and does not understand the threat of al-Qaeda, nor does she understand or empathize with Middle Easterners, about whom she appears to know nothing after all this time. The other drawback is that she is virtually a cheerleader for Ariel Sharon and will not be an honest broker between the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
The hawks are now all lined up, ready for the kill, and American foreign policy for the next four years will be increasingly rigidly aligned with President Bush’s vision.
Are you more likely to be divorced if you live in the Bible Belt than in the hotbed of gay marriage? According to the statistics, the answer is a resounding “yes.”
William V. D’Antonio, a professor emeritus from the University of Connecticut currently stationed at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., as a visiting research professor, reports in The Boston Globe:
The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that “the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people.” The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
As Mr. D’Antonio acknowledges, it is not merely ideological hypocrisy that contributes to the high divorce rate in the states that tout their “family values;” concrete factors, such as poverty, early marriage, and the comparatively low number of Catholics, all encourage higher divorce rates.
Mr. D’Antonio concludes: “For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry’s home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values.”
It is, however, problematic to aggressively state, as Mr. D’Antonio does, that the Bible Belt is rife with moral hypocrisy. It is true that the inhabitants of the Bible Belt have social practices that are inconsistent with their alleged family values, but it seems unproductive to demand that people fit into a neat dichotomy of red and blue, liberal and conservative. Since it is a fact that individuals vote in ways that contradict their social behavior, then we may benefit from taking a more nuanced and more honest view of political alliances. An approach that would better accommodate what may be different shades of red and shades of blue would more accurately measure the political pulse of America.
At the very least, America would benefit from interrogating what, indeed, is meant by the term “family values.” Do the values include stability of relationships with long-term couples and family units? And, if so, isn’t it time we refashioned our image of what appears to be a now bankrupt term?
“There’s a presumption out here — and pardon me, I hope it’s not one you embrace, because I’m gonna call it a stupid presumption — that any time you pass a law regulating conduct, you diminish freedom. I would ask people to think about the state of nature with no laws at all … and you decide to pass a law that says you cannot commit murder; you can’t kill somebody. Are you freer after the law was passed or before the law was passed?”
— Former Attorney General John Ashcroft to an Atlantic Monthly reporter.
Ashcroft’s departure comes as a positive relief to world citizens who recognized his sophistic arguments as mere covers for a power crusade. Who would agree that life without The Patriot Act boils down to lawlessness and Hobbesian destruction?
Now we may look forward, knowing that critical engagement — as always — is one measure we may take against paternalistic policies and misinformation.
In his piece for The Observer, “Divided We Stand,” Mark Honigsbaum draws attention to the claim that America is more divided than it is united. The problem is, it’s not as simple as blue states against red states, city against country, or north against south. The irony about the election Bush won under the auspices of “family values” is that the division hitting Americans the hardest is the one taking place within their families and within their homes. Honigsbaum pens:
“America has always been polarised along racial and geographic lines. What makes the 2004 presidential election campaign such depressing viewing is that the war of words between Republicans and Democrats is increasingly dividing families along generational and cultural lines. In New York this summer I heard countless stories of children who were no longer on speaking terms with their parents because, while they were holding up placards outside the Republican convention in Madison Square Garden that read ‘Somewhere in Texas a village is missing its idiot,’ their parents were back in Branson, Missouri, running Bush registration drives.”
He illustrates his observation with the variety of perspectives presented by his family members, which contain enough hot air to transform a family vacation into a World War I dogfight. Strangely enough, a substantial number of partisan arguments aren’t about abortion or taxation, he notes:
“[The] arguments are less about the policies than about their perceptions of the candidates. And when it comes to bedrock issues such as taxation, balancing the budget and healthcare, the differences between them rapidly shrink.”
Apparently, enough smoke is in the air that some academics question whether the claims that the United States is divided are false, created with the aim to sell more newspapers.
…‘In the past, it was more clear cut,’ says my father-in-law. ‘The Democrat candidate stood for this and the Republican for that. I think what we’re arguing about here more is what the facts are.’ ”
He writes, “Buddhism fills the vacuum created by the collapse of religious and political hopes. It is appropriate that it should find its home in California, a land fulfilling what Nietzsche specified as the preconditions of Buddhism: “ ‘a very mild climate, very gentle and liberal customs, no militarism; and … it is the higher and even learned classes in which the movement has its home.’ The oldest of the world religions has, by a curious irony, proved itself the most adaptable to the end of history.”
