A recent study has found no evidence of Gulf War Syndrome, but soldiers and specifically veterans of the first Gulf War still suffer from numerous debilitating medical problems. If there is no Gulf War Syndrome, what is it that these soldiers are suffering from?
A recent study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine researchers, based on a study of 40,000 former soldiers, finds no evidence for the existence of Gulf War Syndrome. As the BBC reports, the myriad problems that afflict the former soldiers — including “mood swings, memory loss, lack of concentration, night sweats, general fatigue and sexual problems,” — are particularly common for veterans of the first Gulf War, but inexplicably so. The study concludes that
“Gulf War veterans report significantly more symptoms of disease than non-Gulf War veterans in almost all ill-health categories examined, yet there is still no consistent explanation for this discrepancy.”
Even if we table the question of whether Gulf War Syndrome exists, this research does highlight a troubling but often neglected aspect of war: The psychological and physical damage that war inflicts on a solider. In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Dan Baum focuses on the psychological damage that killing inflicts on a solider, and he reports that the U.S. Army is shamefully unprepared to alleviate the suffering of soldiers traumatized by the killing they have done. According to Baum, the Army’s “Field Manual 22-51: Leaders’ Manual for Combat Stress Control” is completely mute on the issue of the stress created by killing an enemy solider. The individual soldier’s conscience, it seems, is his own domain, and it is the soldier’s lonely duty to resolve the deep trauma that results from killing.
This is not to suggest that what veterans — or more specifically, veterans of the first Gulf War — are suffering from is related to killing. Rather, Baum’s article and the recent study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine highlight the fact that those who are shipped off to battle and manage to return may be affected by devastating trauma. Some of the soldiers who return safely from their tour of duty bring their war home with them; the shame is that their suffering — and more importantly, the specific reasons for their suffering — are so seldom addressed honestly, directly, or productively.
From Judy Garland we learned “there’s no place like home.” If only we, like her fictional character in The Wizard of Oz, could just click our heels a few times and find ourselves at home.
But beyond the silver screen, navigating our way home is rarely that simple. Thanks to globalization, refugee flows, the dissolution of nation-states and the advent of new ones, and drastic cultural changes in the definition of family, it is increasingly difficult to locate and define home. As we partner up with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for this issue of InTheFray Magazine, we examine the complex meaning of “home” — for both those who have left one country to resettle in another and those who feel like outsiders in their country of origin.
We begin with three narratives about the immigrant experience, illuminating the multitude of ways in which assimilation — and the lack thereof — shapes notions of home and identity. In her photo essay, Open Wounds (which will be published on Monday, July 19), Lajla Hadzic documents the destruction of Sarajevo, Bosnia, nearly 10 years after civil war and genocide displaced 2.2 million people. Despite international reconstruction efforts, Hadzic reveals that bombed buildings, deforested parks, and ramshackle housing projects are the rule rather than the exception, leaving millions of Bosnians homeless — both literally and figuratively. San Diego Union-Tribune reporter and first-generation American Elena Gaona, meanwhile, shares her struggle to carve out a sense of belonging in the United States while her cultural traditions reside primarily in Mexico in This is my country. Rounding out this series of personal narratives, InTheFray contributing editor and Indian émigré Radhika Sharma describes the role that her senses of sound and taste play in shaping her post-emigration identity and how they help her gauge the extent of her Americanization in I liked tea.
Just north of the U.S. border in Canada, the struggle to retain a sense of self continues. As I suggest in Strangers in a strange land, my review of David Bezmozgis’ Natasha and Other Stories (this month’s selection from Off the Shelf), Soviet Jews, once persecuted for their religion, struggle to fit into the Canadian Jewish community as their more privileged brethren question — even belittle — their brand of Judaism. As Ayah-Victoria McKhail elucidates in Seduced by the Stars and Stripes?, cultural identity is also political. The narrow reelection of Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party last month may have jeopardized cross-border cooperation on President Bush’s National Missile Defense program — and Canada’s close alliance with its neighbor.
Back home in the United States, three authors meditate on our politics of exclusion. Richard Martin eloquently explores the double bind experienced by queer men in prison in his poem GAY LIT. ITF columnist Afi Scruggs in “I don’t care that it is not signed by a senator,” argues that introductory footage from Michael Moore’s acclaimed film Fahrenheit 911 illuminates the importance of electing black officials and of holding democracy accountable to its less privileged constituents. Finally, on Monday, July 19, InTheFray columnist and Managing Editor Henry P. Belanger will serve us a little of his home-style political wisdom as he questions whether the “revelations” in Robert Greenwald’s guerilla documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism are really all that groundbreaking in Confessions of a Fox News junkie.
Happy reading – and don’t forget to pick up your copy of The Working Poor, Off the Shelf’s featured book for August!
While the horrors that occur routinely in Africa — massacres in the Darfur region of Sudan, the AIDS crisis, absolute poverty — often seem callously but comfortably far away, it is bracing to remember that in the age of globalization, we cannot unsympathetically dismiss another country’s problems as irrelevant to us; we are, after all, very intimately connected.
Consider that in the city of Goma, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an average family of seven will spend approximately $63 a month. Accepting bribes, peddling goods on the street, and prostitution are some of the means of eking out a living. As Davan Maharaj reports in the Los Angeles Times, 37-year-old Goma resident Mama Rose turned to prostitution after her husband was robbed and killed by militiamen. As a mother with four children to support, she parlayed her gender into a dangerous and only marginally profitable profession: prostitution. As Mama Rose explains, “Every truth is not good to say … But let us face it. In Goma, everything has a price. And I don’t want to sell myself short.”
When Mama Rose’s clientele is, like herself, impoverished, she earns less than $25 a month. In the months when her clientele includes the United Nations soldiers who are stationed in the Democratic Republic of Congo — since the five-year long regional conflict that wreaked havoc in the DRC only ended in 2003 — her income may be somewhere in the region of $75 a month. According to the regional governor, 80 percent of Goma’s sex workers are infected with HIV or AIDS.
As the AIDS crisis increases its stranglehold on Africa, there is a brain drain occurring in the African health care sector as nurses are lured to practice their profession in more lucrative and less hellish conditions abroad. Celia W. Dugger reports in The New York Times:
In Malawi, a quarter of public health workers, including nurses, will be dead, mostly of AIDS and tuberculosis, by 2009, according to a study of worker death rates in 40 hospitals here.
The statistics are staggering and the prognosis bleak.
While the Bush Administration officially introduced its $15 billion emergency anti-AIDS program in February of 2004, the project has been criticized for lengthy funding delays. As an entire continent is destroyed by the AIDS epidemic, it should benefit everyone to keep in mind the sobering fact of the interconnectedness of all things.
Instead of getting into a debate about gay marriage, let’s take a moment to examine what the debate raging across America tells us about the status of gays and lesbians.
First, let’s make sure when we’re talking about gay marriage, we’re talking about the same thing. The NLGA primer defines it as … okay, just check out the primer. The highlights: “Advocates for the right to marry seek the legal rights and obligations of marriage, not a variation of it.” Gays and lesbians who want to marry want to be seen as equal participants in society – not variations.
On to the debate. Gay marriage was supposed to be ultra-divisive. Many on the left predicted it would jeopardize Democrats’ chance at the White House. A few on the right proposed a Constitutional amendment to ban the marriages, an amendment that’s about to come up for Congressional debate.
Back to my original question: What does the debate – in this case, opposition to gay marriage – say about American attitudes toward gays and lesbians? Does it mean Americans oppose equal participation and rights for members of the gay community? The same CNN/USAToday/Gallup survey that found increased support for the anti-gay marriage amendment in May also found “A modest increase in the number of Americans who support giving gay couples some (my emphasis) of the legal rights that heterosexual couples enjoy.”
Moderates are leaning toward granting gays and lesbians “some” as opposed to “all” rights. So many on the left hail gay marriage as a victory. They celebrated ceremonies in San Francisco and Cambridge even as Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney commandeered marriage licenses and threatened clerks. Yeah, yeah, it’s emotional, a triumph of visibility, especially for older couples who have endured decades of bigotry.
No one may respect them the morning after, but on their wedding day, they can be happy. Which is fine, if you belong to the school that says it doesn’t matter what the rest of the country thinks/says, or as The Village Voice newlywed Richard Goldstein says, “You can have your wedding cake and eat it, too. Marriage is what you make of it, not what it makes of you.”
But of course it matters. And that’s why I think this debate is so telling. Because gay marriage came out of the closet in 2004, 35 years after Stonewall, and America is shocked. America doesn’t know what to do. Unless gays and lesbians have money, look straight, and tread softly, they cannot live the good life. So far, the wedding debate only underlines how little we’ve changed. What Carl Wittman argued in his 1971 “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto” is still true: ”The system we’re under now is a direct oppression and it’s not a question of getting our share of the pie. The pie is rotten.”
In the stead of viable solutions, dismay has pervaded most media coverage of California’s juvenile justice system. The two most recent youth inmate suicides, combined with documented human rights violations occurring at California youth correctional facilities nicknamed “gladitorial schools”, have caught the eye and fired the imagination of the California public.
Fortunately, popular response to this coverage has been equally dramatic.
An article in the San Francisco Chronicle references a recent protest which compared Iraqi prisoner and youth offender abuse. Candid criticism voiced by former California youth inmates fuels the demands by California activists for the closure of the California Youth Authority (CYA). In the words of former San Francisco youth inmate Will Roy: “You can’t build something effective on top of something rotten.”
After months of awareness that the CYA must transform its “corrections model” currently at work, Californians are only just beginning to envision successful alternatives.
On July 1, Missouri’s youth prison program made the front page of the Los Angeles Times for its innovative, nurturing approach that yields results. Only 30 percent of detained youth return to prison in Missouri, while California is making headlines for its 90 percent recidivism rate. Jenifer Warren presents an angle in her Thursday article, “Spare the Rod, Save the Child,” as unusual as it is elegant, shifting the spotlight from what California is doing wrong toward what Missouri has done right. In Missouri,
“[I]nmates, referred to as ‘kids,’ live in dorms that feature beanbag chairs, potted plants, stuffed animals and bunk beds with smiley-face comforters. Guards – who are called ‘youth specialists’ and must have college degrees – go by their first names and don’t hesitate to offer hugs.”
The usual suspicions abound toward the application of Missouri’s program to California’s system. California’s Undersecretary of Youth and Adult Corrections, Kevin Carruth, is one such skeptic: “Everything I hear about Missouri tells me its program works great for the population they have, but our demographics are very different.”
The drama of the situation is compounded by potential financial threat looming on the horizon. Though gang-related homicides across the country have increased 50 percent over the last five years, proposed cutbacks in state and federal funding endanger California’s at-risk youth programs. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may terminate $134 million, two-thirds of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Family funding for juvenile prevention and probation, in the upcoming year. In addition, a recent White House proposal would cut 40 percent next year in the federal Juvenile Accountability Incentive Block Grant, from which California received $4.7 million in 2004. The grant would be eliminated entirely by 2005 if the proposal passes.
In the face of all these obstacles, Missouri’s Youth Penal System Chief Mark Steward’s words and presence must not be underestimated. They attest that a failing system can be completely overthrown and redesigned, with excellent results:
“The old corrections model was a failure; most kids left us worse off than when they came in. So we threw away that culture, and now we focus on treatment, on making connections with these guys and showing them another way. It works.”
As for Caruth’s doubts, Warren writes: “Steward said he believes that his state’s success can be replicated in California, despite the different mix of offenders.”
Time is of the essence; action is essential. The proven success of Missouri’s system may be the best tool California has to reshape a system that cannot be ignored. And thanks to alternative coverage presented by visionary journalists like Jenifer Warren, solutions emerge where only complaints existed before.
It is alleged that in the months leading up to the 1980 election between Ronald Reagan and incumbent Jimmy Carter that representatives of the Reagan campaign conspired to postpone the release of the hostages held by Iran until after the October election. This “October Surprise,” it is said, helped propel the so-called “Great Communicator” into the White House. Could it be that we’re in for another surprise this October?
The thought of our foreign policy being reduced to mere props in a domestic electoral play is deeply disturbing. But if an article in The New Republic holds water, that’s exactly what we’re looking at. It alleges that Pakistani security officials have been instructed by U.S. officials to deliver HVTs [high value targets] such as Osama bin Laden on specific days timed to coincide with the October election.
The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs [high value targets] by the election. According to one source in Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), “The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections.” Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations — according to a recently departed intelligence official, “no timetable[s]” were discussed in 2002 or 2003 — but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, “The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections.” (These sources insisted on remaining anonymous. Under Pakistan’s Official Secrets Act, an official leaking information to the press can be imprisoned for up to 10 years.)
A third source, an official who works under ISI’s director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed TNR that the Pakistanis “have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must.” What’s more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: “The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq’s] meetings in Washington.” Says McCormack: “I’m aware of no such comment.” But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July” — the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
It’s no secret that the Bush administration hasn’t been a friend to the economy — at least not to the people who occupy the lower rungs of the economy.
In light of Bush’s reign of poverty, John Kerry has proposed increasing the minimum wage — which has remained at $5.15/hour since 1997 — to $7/hour by 2007.
Many people working in low-wage jobs often can’t get 40 hours/week. But for those who do manage to get 40 hours/week for all 52 weeks of the year, this increase translates into a meager annual income of $13,680 before taxes. In many instances, that salary is not accompanied by health insurance. And just imagine if you were a single parent with children to support …
Pay close attention to Kerry’s suggestion that increasing the minimum wage to $7/hour “would provide a family with enough money to buy ten months of groceries or pay for eight months of rent.”
His statement is a good indicator of the need to put living wage laws at the top of the national agenda. As Kerry’s statement implies, working full-time for $7/hour doesn’t guarantee a year of groceries or rent. The fact is that about 60 percent of workers in the United States earn less than $14/hour — before taxes. Most of these people only get by if they team up with another breadwinner. So even with this seemingly drastic minimum wage increase, single mothers and others without a second wage earner would still be forced to choose between food and shelter and working multiple jobs. Either way, they and their families will be forced to endure emotional and physical stress that is unsustainable over the long-term.
In her critically acclaimed book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich terms this unenviable predicament “acute distress.” What might be minor inconveniences for some can put such low-wage workers out of some much-needed money — or even cost them their jobs. The result, sadly, is that many hardworking people have no choice but to eat one meager meal a day, toil in spite of illness, avoid going to the doctor when they have acute problems, work two or three jobs just to make ends meet — even sleep in their cars or on the street.
Unfortunately, increasing the minimum wage still won’t drastically alter the predicament faced by these people. While the proposed $1.85 increase is an important first step, it’s not enough. Not only is it important for low-wage workers to vote this year to ensure that they elect the man supporting the wage increase, but it’s also important for those who don’t have to sleep in their cars to push for a wage that allows for a sustainable lifestyle.
We’re not talking Armani suits here — just enough food for a year and enough to pay the rent and get health care as needed.
If we don’t push for more livable wages, two things are nearly certain: we’ll be paying exorbitant amounts as a nation (and as individual taxpayers) for welfare and Medicaid, and the poverty rate will continue to climb as the cost of living rises across the country.
Life would be much easier if I could add my parents to my health insurance benefits.
I’m not married. I don’t have children. When I get my insurance papers in the mail, I look wistfully at the section that asks if I have any dependents. I plan to be taking care of my parents eventually, if I’m lucky and they live long enough. If what I did during the day could contribute directly to the well-being of the most important people in my life, I would approach work from a completely different standpoint.
In the United States, married heterosexual couples receive many financial and legal benefits which are denied to other equally interdependent pair relationships. As American University law professor Nancy Polikoff points out in an article for The Washington Blade:
“…[M]arriage is the wrong dividing line for these benefits. A young man caring for the woman who raised him should be able to cover her on his health insurance; two older sisters who pool their economic resources should not fear that the death of one will require the other to sell their home to pay estate taxes.”
A week ago, Polikoff spoke on an NPR program supporting the validity of these alternate types of pair relationships. It wasn’t until I looked her up on the Internet that I understood how similar the issues being debated in the gay community are to my own concerns about federal recognition of benefit-sharing in care-giving relationships.
In his article “Marriage: Mend it, Don’t End it,” Dale Carpenter argues for marriage. “No other relationship can quite replicate that signal,” Carpenter writes; relationships sanctified by marriage have both history and tradition on their side. In addition, the inherent expectation of endurance of marriage relationships gives the state motive to invest in marriage, conferring the benefits that make life so much easier.
Carpenter would like alternative relationships to receive benefits, but his fears overshadow his hopes:
“Polikoff probably assumes that abolishing marriage means everyone would get its goodies. At last, health care for all! Don’t bet on it. The more likely outcome is that standard marital benefits would be eliminated or reduced to help pay for benefits accorded to the newly recognized relationships. The social investment in former marriages would decrease, diminishing the return we all get from that bygone institution.”
A February article in The Advocate, “Marriage vs. Civil Unions? There’s No Comparison,” argues that a 1996 federal ban preventing gay couples from receiving “hundreds of federal marriage benefits” has left the marriage institution as the only tool gays could use to challenge that ban.
Some argue that civil unions are an equivalent substitute for marriage and that “all the rights and benefits would apply.” Polikoff disagrees, pointing out that while marriages are recognized worldwide, civil unions are not internationally recognized as an equivalent union. She writes in her article, “An End to All Marriage”:
Gay marriage will move us in the wrong direction if it limits legal recognition to married couples only.
Lesbian and gay marriage-rights activists counter criticism of their efforts by saying that the right to marry will provide a choice to gay and lesbian couples: Those who embrace the institution will have the opportunity to enter it, while those like me who find fault with it can simply choose not to marry.
This choice-based rhetoric contains an enormous fallacy. When the state gives one type of relationship more benefits and legal support than others, there is inherently some coercion and free choice is impossible.
The website www.relationshipllc.com, which advocates limited liability companies as “the new marriage model,” cites Polikoff as arguing that “organizing society around sexually connected people is wrong; the more central units are dependents and their caretakers.” Alternatives to marriage are growing, thanks to supply and demand. I don’t know whether the law or the economy is to thank for it.
It’s sad on the one hand to find that the issue of sharing benefits affects a significant part of our population, but on the other, it’s heartening to know the momentum is building in different camps. Our rights today are the direct result of the responsibilities those before us have taken on and followed through, sometimes with the knowledge that they wouldn’t live to enjoy the results in their lifetime. They must have hoped to leave the world a better place than the one they found.
Whether or not the question is as simple as whether to marry or not, the bottom line is the freedom to do so and choice. As Americans, we enjoy more rights than many other people in the world, a few of those being the right to travel, to relocate, to develop and share personal opinions, and to investigate and challenge the system that previous generations have set up for us.
Michael Moore has recently been both pilloried and feted, and in all of the furor over Fahrenheit 9/11, a number of critics have glossed over one of the more beneficial aspects of the film — its power to spark reasoned and informed debate.
Writing in The New York Times, A.O. Scott states that Fahrenheit 9/11 “is many things: a partisan rallying cry, an angry polemic, a muckraking inquisition into the use and abuse of power. But one thing it is not is a fair and nuanced picture of the president and his policies.”
A.O. Scott is correct; Moore’s film certainly isn’t nuanced, nor is it meant to be. Fahrenheit 9/11 is more like an editorial than a documentary; it is clever, opinionated, researched, and affecting. It reminds us of the circus of the 2000 elections and the confused battle for Florida, highlights some of President Bush’s most offensively incompetent moments, and documents the human cost of the war in Iraq. Moore’s research and analysis is not exhaustive or comprehensive, but it is provocative.
While the factual and educational merit of the film is debatable, it would be a shame if Fahrenheit 9/11 served only as an anti-Bush film and a hollow and tired talking point for liberals and democrats. Fahrenheit 9/11 should act, at the very least, as a springboard for informed public debate about the American war in Iraq. Our understanding of the war in Iraq should not be limited to the sensationalized news flashes on CNN and Fox; to digest only those sound bites is to fail to see the larger historical context of America’s and George W. Bush’s relationship with the Muslim world and with the leaders in the region. While Fahrenheit 9/11’s box office earnings are impressive — the film grossed approximately $21.8 million in its first three days — let’s hope the film isn’t just preaching to the converted.
As impractical and as menacing as is seems, the Chinese government has issued regulations that allow the country’s mobile phone service providers to monitor all of the text messages sent and received in the country. Given that approximately 300 million Chinese mobile phone users sent over 220 billion text messages in 2003, Beijing’s latest edict is staggering both in its scope and in the damage it will do to the freedom of communication and the dissemination of news in China.
While these regulations are targeted towards identifying pornographic and the somewhat vague concept of “fraudulent content,” the Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders reports that a Chinese company involved in marketing one of the text message monitoring systems stated that “false political rumors” and “reactionary remarks,” will also be under observation.
According to Venus Info Tech, a company that sells the message monitoring software to Chinese mobile phone service and message providers, certain key words and combinations of those key words may generate an automatic alert, which will be sent to the police. China Mobile Corporation, which controls 65 percent of the Chinese mobile phone market, will implement the new and Orwellian regulations. During this past week, the government forced 20 message service providers to close shop as a punishment for insufficiently monitoring inappropriate messages.
As Beijing was gleefully stifling freedom of expression and the spread of information, the residents of Hong Kong staged an enormous pro-democracy protest. On Thursday, July 1, hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in Hong Kong to express their fury at Beijing’s recent decision that the citizens of Hong Kong will not be able to directly elect their leader next year. The protest was held on the seventh anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule; while Beijing called on the people of Hong Kong to take the opportunity to celebrate the anniversary of the handover, approximately 530,000 people — although estimates range anywhere from 200,000 to 680,000 people — marched peacefully in the 95 degree heat. The scope of the demonstration is made all the more impressive by the fact that the population of Hong Kong is a mere 6.8 million. Given that the new mobile phone regulations will target political dissent, it is precisely this kind of political demonstration and expression of discontent that is under threat.
China’s decision to police private text messages is troubling not only because it is anathema to the concept of a free and safe exchange of ideas, but also because text messaging has proven to be profoundly influential; when the Chinese authorities attempted to cover up the SARS outbreak in 2003, it was the millions of private text messages that were sent that alerted the populace to the outbreak and exposed the government’s cover-up of the epidemic. According to The New York Times, “Text messages have also generated popular outrage about corruption and abuse cases that had received little attention in the state-controlled media.” In a nation where the media is scrupulously monitored, these new mobile phone regulations are dangerously close to choking off the last and private outlet for the exchange of ideas and the dissemination of news.
I first met Marlon Brando in my 12th grade English class, when our teacher screened The Island of Dr. Moreau one afternoon for the whole grade. It was disastrous, the kind of movie meant to be screened solely for horny high school students more interested in the opportunity to turn off the lights than watch a film.
So, it’s not surprising that my relationship with Marlon got off to a rocky start. We didn’t meet again until college, when my housemate threw a Godfather marathon and somewhere around the same time, I watched A Streetcar Named Desire in film class. It’s hard to resist the combination of the two when viewed in close proximity: Brando’s iconic performances defined masculine sex and power for generations. If my high school English teacher had chosen carefully, he’d have had a much more attentive audience.
Brando passed away on Thursday at the age of 80. He leaves behind a legacy that separates screen acting from before Brando and after Brando, forever changing American cinema.
Like most American icons, we use Brando as malleable subject material, with infinite capacity to contain our myths and metaphors. David Thomson’s editorial in The New York Times today posits Brando as an ever-changing symbol of America’s identity confusion. It’s a tempting analogy — as Thomson writes:
At the end, he was huge, stranded, nearly alone, his life littered by the needs (or the appearance) of more and more children, and by what was reported as near penury.
Brando’s film career as simile for the ascent and plateau of the American empire isn’t a seamless fit, but it seems particularly timely as we celebrate our country’s heady birth and debate its current position (particularly if you too have seen The Island of Dr. Moreau, one of Brando’s later films). As Thomson suggests, we want our country to fulfill its potential and capitalize on its early triumphs. Even when we celebrate our nation’s diversity of opinion and voice, we sometimes wish it would stop being so argumentative and divisive, and start acting heroic.
On any given day, I receive at least one or two emails from the Democratic Party, John Kerry, Bill Clinton, James Carville, or some other democratic bigwhig. I’m not quite sure why I receive these, though I know I didn’t start receiving them more than a few months ago when the push for the 2004 election began. Much of the time, these emails concern fundraising for the Kerry campaign. Today the email I received concerned fundraising to stop the genocide occuring in the Sudan.
Is it wrong that I find that a bit peculiar? Do I want the genocide to continue? No. Do I think that we’re not doing enough to speak out about it and to intervene and end the violence? Yes. But is asking for money the answer? I’m not too sure about that. Sure, any peacekeeping operations that the United Nations send to the Sudan will require considerable funds, so money will be necessary. But have we accepted the “just click here to donate” trend reigning in our inboxes at the cost of actually acting? Is there a risk that donating money — whether it’s to stop the genocide in Iraq or to fund the Kerry campaign — is just another form of whitewashing, a means to a redeem ourselves, to suggest we’ve done our job and helped others?
It seems that while funding is necessary for most campaigns in today’s world, we have to figure out a way to help those suffering with something more than the swipe of a pen or the click of a computer key. After all, all of the money in the world won’t secure the political will necessary to stop the violence. With the suffering in the Sudan increasing by the day, we don’t have long to figure this one out.
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