After Ronald Reagan died over the weekend, children who were too young to remember his presidency were seen placing flowers at makeshift memorials for him. Perhaps it is callous to wonder how people can become so saddened over a man they never knew personally. Certainly, the images we’re seeing (Nancy with her head on the flag-draped coffin, Reagan as a young actor in a bathing suit looking toned and tan) have their own emotional effect. But I’m a bit more interested in the words and the ideas.

Put aside for a moment the discomfort of speaking ill of the dead, and read two of the most anti-Reagan postings. These two pieces, from two authors and investigative journalists, Greg Palast and Christopher Hitchens, break from the tone of admiration many have felt they needed to use in writing about our former president. (Reagan-lovers, beware, these are not your usual eulogies.)

Policy wonks have turned to one of the most puzzling aspects of Reagan’s presidency: what has come to be called Reaganomics. Whether this ill-defined term actually translated into sound economic policy is being put aside to instead praise Reagan’s ability to inspire confidence. The importance of the policy’s end result should not be underestimated, for it is credited with introducing to the world the idea of a freer market. But, even now, the actual merits of the policy remain murky. Here’s the routine: Put aside the details. Let us consider the legacy.

The Economist writes that, again and again, Reagan wrote in his diaries, “I have a gut feeling.” The quote speaks to his appeal, to his ability to transmit a feeling of assurance without explaining the intricacies. Perhaps this is why so many praise him as a leader. Perhaps this is why people who only saw him on television will make a pilgrimage this week to his closed-casket services at both ends of the country. Skip the details, add some lovely photos, and you’re surprisingly close to the formula for a leader who will inspire confidence and admiration.

Vinnee Tong

In what should have been a routine circumcision, an eight-month-old boy had his entire penis burned off, thanks to a doctor’s error. After encouragement from a psychologist, the child’s parents agreed to have the child undergo an infant sex change and to raise the child as a girl. That boy was David Reimer, who for a period was called Brenda.

As John Colapinto — who wrote a book about David Reimer’s experiences in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised a Girl — writes in Slate magazine, Reimer’s sexual reassignment was traumatic. Brenda was teased at school for her masculinity, crossly refused to wear dresses, and expressed to the adults in her life that she felt like a boy. Under the instructions of the curiously named Dr. Money, who had encouraged Reimer’s parents to have their son undergo sexual reassignment, the adults lied to Reimer and asserted that such feelings were a passing phase. At age 14, however, Reimer discovered the truth, and he eventually decided upon a surgical return to the male sex. Reimer underwent a double mastectomy to rid himself of his breasts — a result of estrogen therapy — his synthetic vagina was replaced with a synthetic penis and testicles, and he underwent yet more hormone therapy.

This spring, David Reimer committed suicide at the age of 38. Two years ago, his identical twin, Brian, had died from overdosing on antidepressants.  

It would be presumptuous and reductive to hazard guesses as to why Reimer committed suicide, but his story should at least give us pause and force us to consider not only the roles of nature and nurture in formulating an individual’s identity as it relates to gender — as distinguished from biological and physiological sex — but it should also remind us of the human cost of asking such questions. This is not to question the scientific validity of research into gender and identity. Rather, we should remember that David Reimer was the subject of a medical study and, like a lab rat, he had no say in the matter. His identical twin brother provided the perfect control, and until the age of 14, Reimer was an unwitting participant in an experiment known in the 1960s and 1970s as the John/Joan case. According to The New York Times, Janet Reimer, David’s mother, believes that it was the emotional strain of the experiment of David Reimer’s life that led to his death.

Lest we reduce David Reimer’s fascinating and harrowing experiences to a medical and social curiosity, we should remind ourselves that, as fascinating as the scientific research may be, if the methodology destroys the human being in the process, it may only be morally responsible to table such research for the time being.

Mimi Hanaoka

What do we make of a president who renamed some months of the year after himself, built an enormous revolving statue of himself, held an international symposium on melons — although his country is largely desert — and who is now demanding that words from his book be inscribed next to verses of the Qur’an on a mosque? What, in short, do we make of Mr. Saparmyrat Atayevich Niyazov, president of Turkmenistan, who, as president for life, sits atop of a considerable amount of oil and the fifth largest reserves of natural gas in the world?  
  
In the competition for bizarre despots, Mr. Niyazov rivals Kim Jong-il, and in his most recent display of unchecked authority, he has decreed that the walls of a mosque currently under construction in the capital Ashgabat be inscribed not only with verses from the Qur’an but also with his own words of wisdom that he recorded in the Ruhnama (translated as The Book of the Soul), which was published in 2001 and is already required reading in schools in Turkmenistan. Even without Mr. Niyazov’s self-aggrandizing architectural flourishes, the mosque in Ashgabat will likely be a decadent affair — it may become the largest mosque in Asia, with a capacity for 10,000 faithful and a dome that staggers 50 meters tall, which has already been installed by helicopter.

Turkmenistan is tucked in the Central Asian region between Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, and gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The BBC reported in March of 2003 that the Central Asia division’s director of the International Crisis Group, Robert Templer, warned that Turkmenistan could “become the next Afghanistan — and it certainly could become a danger to the rest of the world.”

The government has an absolute stranglehold on all of the media in Turkmenistan. According to the International Freedom of Expression exchange forum, Turkmenistan can only boast of having “one of the worst media climates in the world.”

Determined to quash any independent religious voice, in addition to stifling all independent, secular outlets for discourse, in March of 2004, the Turkmen authorities imprisoned the chief Mufti, Nasrullah Ibn Ibadullah, who had been heading the board of Islamic scholars who lead the religious affairs of Turkmenistan. Nasrullah Ibn Ibadullah has been sentenced to over 20 years in prison, and yet the BBC reports that the Mufti’s crime and reason for arrest are still unclear.

When the leader of a government that is ostensibly not a theocracy begins to consolidate secular and religious authority in a curious but unquestionable move towards a contemporary, bizarre, and Islamic version of Ceasaropapism, all of those who advocate a coherent civil society should cast a wary gaze on Mr. Niyazov and his unchecked power in Turkmenistan.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Here’s the problem — I can’t decide whether I find Sí TV’s new reality show “Urban Jungle” revolting or delicious.  

The show extracts “nine suburban yuppies from their oh-so-comfortable lives” and drops them in East Los Angeles’ barrio to survive on low income wages. The teenagers are charged with adapting to their new life in the ‘hood, and are judged by three padrinos, who “evict” a cast member each episode.

At first I was appalled. The show panders to all of the simplest stereotypes: silly, rich, naïve white kids from Burbs vs. bad-ass, street-wise, and pragmatic residents of the inner city. You can predict the encounters between the visitors and the residents almost without watching. The presence of a TV camera reasonably guarantees that no serious danger will come to the show’s stars, but simultaneously ensures that people will act as they think they should — that is, that both the teenagers and the residents will play up the roles they know their audience is assuming they’ll fulfill.

Maybe I’m particularly sensitive to the perpetuation of these stereotypes because the neighborhood I’ve worked in the for the past several years lives with the same kind of experiment. West Philadelphia is home to a large, low-income African American community — and the University of Pennsylvania. It’s jarring to ride the bus to work and watch shirtless fraternity brothers playing drinking games on their porches alongside the falling down homes of my clients and the delis where you can buy a single cigarette for 50 cents. There’s an unsurprising tension within the community, and little is done to bridge the gaps of understanding between the disparate groups. No less jarring are the non-students in the neighborhood — kids living and squatting in communal houses and playing Frisbee in the parks. They’re almost more out of place because of their attempts to fit in: they shop at the cheaper supermarkets and visit the free health clinic.

Assimilation is a tricky business. I’ll go out on a limb and argue that we can’t even begin to address it within the confines of a reality TV show. Jeff Valdez, the show’s creator and founder of the network says:  

This is more than just a reality show, it’s a social experiment. We’re taking these kids, whose only window into the barrio is a crime story on the late night news, and immersing them into a brand new environment. This show will humanize the Latino barrio and hopefully teach these kids a thing or two about life on the other side of the tracks.

A social experiment? A simplistic one at best, because while playing at poverty isn’t very funny, playing at poverty for an audience ensconced in their arm chairs isn’t funny at all. But maybe I’d feel a little less sympathetic towards the show’s hapless stars if they were making their mistakes on a major cable network, instead of Sí TV. The network is the only English-language Latino network available on your remote — in itself, a grand experiment in assimilation. As The New York Times points out, the network caters towards the projected 33 million Latinos who will live in bilingual or English-speaking households by the year 2010.

So, I confess: When the show premieres this Sunday, I’ll be watching. I’m expecting something thrillingly awful from “Urban Jungle.” Part of that is the ironic glee with which I can’t help but view all reality TV. But part of it too is that I’m hoping that by exposing the blatant frustrations and mistakes of culture-bending, it’ll make it a little easier for us to talk about what assimilation and differences really look like.

llouison

A man apologizes for turning his back on true love. A woman apologizes for having an affair with a married man. Someone else apologizes for embezzlement. Yet another apologizes for ever being born.

From the sound of it, you might think these were the players in a group therapy session. Or maybe you’d think these were the stories of Jews on Yom Kippur, the Day of Repentance. But you would be mistaken.

These are the voices and stories of people who have left their apologizes on an answering machine to heal themselves. Started by a 20-year-old Vassar student, the apology hotline allows people with guilty consciences to experience some release and get the words out — words that they can’t say in person, words that they can’t say to any other human being when there’s a risk that the other person will speak, write, or call back.

Though some psychiatrists have praised the hotline for giving people who otherwise wouldn’t speak a chance to do so, there are, of course, skeptics. One can’t help but wonder how much closure one really gets by saying something that the person who should hear it never will. By virtue of calling a machine, the repentant’s words are not directed toward the person(s) they’ve hurt. They’re about healing oneself. And though healing oneself may be important — integral even — to moving on and regaining self-confidence, it seems like not saying those words to another human being, or not  writing them down, would preclude any genuine closure. That is, it may provide temporary closure with oneself, but by never confronting the other person, I imagine there would be remnants of repressed guilt potentially forever. For people with depression, that’s only likely to trigger a relapse of the illness.

Even if this isn’t the case, this hotline seems dangerous because it lures callers — people who are potentially suicidal or depressed or whose problems extend far beyond the one incident they’re apologizing for — to call and think, “Well, if I can get up the nerve to call the hotline, I’ll be redeemed for my actions and I won’t really have to confront my fears — i.e., fears that reside in interacting with other human beings.” Others may be suicidal — is it really helpful for them to call a hotline where they speak to a machine, or would it be more beneficial for them to call a hotline where the phone is answered by another person, albeit one the caller doesn’t know? How is the anonymity of the latter any different from the anonymity of the former? In my mind, they’re not all that different. But the person who listens to the apology is more likely to be able to open the caller up, however little, or get them help. The machine can’t do that.

Or can it? I can’t help but wonder about the student who started the hotline, the one who receives all of the messages. Does he listen to them? Apparently.

This poses a couple of problems. First, the fact that he does listen to them deceptively undermines the privacy and solitude of the answering machine. Would you feel more comfortable calling a machine about your failures in life, knowing that someone else was going to be listening to you silently, subconsciously judging you? I don’t think I would …

Second, by providing the false illusion that callers are really just speaking to a machine, what kind of precedent does this set for the way in which we define our relationships to other humans? Suddenly, we don’t have to express our emotions to other human beings. We can just replace them with machines, which serve as our intermediaries.

Third, let’s say the student listens to the messages and a caller says s/he is committing suicide. Given the euthanasia and suicide laws in the United States, does the student then become a conspirator in such a suicide?

This isn’t to degrade the difficulty many people have with apologizing and expressing their true feelings. It’s also not to condemn the innovative student who sought to give sad people a way to cope with their feelings when they’re lonely. But the hotline, it seems, is the easy way out, the quick fix that may not really be much of a fix at all.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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Dear Michael,

Thank you for the short fiction piece. It reads like Lord of the Rings on ’Shrooms, depending on how far you want to take the introspection. If this story is meant to serve as a metaphor for any real life situation, I guess it might reflect experiences backpacking in Asia. The plot might read as follows:

Frodo is on spring break from Vassar and decides to take a backpacking trip to Vietnam. Along the way, he stumbles along traveler cafes, mingling with other expats. He becomes engrossed in the lifestyle, decides to take a semester off from college and continue traveling. He feels estranged and struggles to be accepted by the locals. In order to assimilate, Frodo must adapt to the unfamiliar customs and foods. Taking it a step further, Frodo explores with drug use and becomes a fiend.  

He lives each day struggling to keep his habit alive. Having spent all of mommy and daddy’s funds, he takes up odd jobs dishwashing, whoring himself, and dabbling in the tourism industry to help other expats. He is taken under the wing of a local transvestite Madame, aka, “the ancient Moonshine Magi,” who provides Frodo with a roof, a mattress, and the occasional allowance to purchase yaa baa and hash from street corner hustlers, or “diggers” as you call them.

Feeling disillusioned, Frodo runs away from the Madame in confusion and disgust into the central highlands of Vietnam. There, he remains secluded, searching for money to buy a plane ticket back to the United States.

Pass the moonshine!

In The Fray Contributor

Greetings fellow traveler, I’m currently living with the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains, observing a praxis that may allow me to unlock the paradox of a philosophy centered around the mythical knowledge of sustainability.

For the first few months, manic giggling greeted me whenever I mentioned my desire for answers … the whispering behind my back almost broke my determination, but I hung in there until an elder Magi of the Clans began to take pity on this Lost Boy from the Western Lands. She claimed to have originally come from the City of the Red Night, where they teach their young that one cannnot seek “the” answer; instead they must expose themselves to the “multiplicity” of questions, for it is in the masking of “possible” questions that power rests upon, and the prying free of these nuggets from the earth’s moist grasp is the quest of the Clans of the Alphane Mountains.

The ancient Moonshine Magi cackled, swigged from her jug, and said, “This is where the neophytes can get in trouble.” She told me that when chasing these evasive questions the skillful seeker notices that the landscape shifts and reshapes each time a question is revealed. It seems that the Clans learned long ago that when one unearths a question revealing its essence, the disturbance of the surrounding landscape generally causes an accompanying re-veiling of surrounding questions. In fact, she warned that often eager groups of diggers, banded together for strength and safety, will bury smaller groups/individuals digging nearby. This is why the Diggers of the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains always stop and retrace their steps, reflecting on the pathway they are traveling, in order to re-cognize what disturbances their digging causes. The Magi seemed to derive much amusement from my comment that the Bushes that cover the western lands have long forbidden self-reflective contemplation in order to freeze traditional concepts and to fuel travel to the future-past.

I asked the Magi how the Diggers of the Moonshine Clans of the Alphane Mountains retain their reflective ability while unearthing large complex concepts and revealing troublesome questions. “How do they dream the impossible and imagine the unaskable?” The Magi leaned back and swigged from her jug and chuckled at my Western ignorance. She stared at me like an adder stares down a mouse and dared me to think upon it. After a long uncomfortable two days, I unkinked my frozen limbs. The emptying of my mind allowed me to recognize that the best way to build a hearty, enriching intellectual bouillabaise, is to blend it with (an)other body(ies) of knowledge. The Clans, following the wisdom of the Dispossessed, require all learners to travel to other realms (physical, spiritual, and mental) in order to experience different realities and to act as multi-conduit translators (within and without their clan)

It’s obvious that the Magi is still toying with me. Perhaps I still must quest for these answers on my own, perhaps I still must travel, perhaps I should look into the interstices of production for missing clues?

I screamed, “Please help me! What is a traveler to do when there is no map to guide me?” … The Magi just cackled, “Foolish Lost Boy of the western lands, when will you learn that the quest is the journey and that as soon as you pin down an answer, it only means that you have reveiled other healthy questions — questions that must be once again revealed.”

Shaking and confused, I picked up a large jug of Alphane moonshine and stumbled into the forest to look for questions …

thivai

Dear Mimi,

Thank you for touching upon the recent phenomenon of “gay as hip” in your article. The current fascination certainly raises questions of whether these shows have “stifled” serious conversation on this issue. However, instead of censuring FOX’s trashy and tasteless attempts, the program, “Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay,” might actually provide a message that absolves them from your charges: “homosexual behavior” is non-existent. A gay man can “act straight” a much as a straight man can “act gay.” Whether FOX or its viewers know it or not, the program derides stereotypes and proves that guessing one’s sexuality based on their behavior is completely ridiculous.  

To the extent that this television show exploits humanity as much as any other program, FOX is not demeaning gays in an exceptional way. The “gay coaches” are not enforcing negative portraits of gay men, they are simply playing off the exagerated and foolish socially contructed stereotypes in order to win a game … and money.  

We face a contradiction when analyzing TV programming — we clearly acknowledge its trashiness and absurdity, yet, at the same time, we expect them to be forums for real discussion on serious issues. In this specific case, we find that the measure of man cannot be based on TV-enhanced stereotypes.

In The Fray Contributor

Arts and crafts were always one of my favorite things when I was younger. I’m wondering, though, whether we made a mistake by not making arts and crafts mandatory for people throughout their lives, particularly people who hate each other, say, people in war-torn countries or people with different ideologies.

Though Bosnian Serb and Muslim women viewed each other as enemies not so long ago, hundreds of them have since linked up as business partners and knitting buddies. That is, a Tuzla-based non-governmental organization, known as The Bosnian Handicraft, hires women of diverse ethnicities — “mainly refugees who lost their men and homes during the 1992-95 war,” to use their hands to knit carpets, stockings, socks, and various other garments to sell to buyers abroad.

The Bosnian Handicraft was begun in 1995 to help Muslim women establish their economic independence after more than 7,000 men and boys were massacred in the eastern town of Srebrenca. Economically, the group has experienced quite a bit of success, selling over 3,000 pairs of socks to Robert Redford’s Sundance catalogue and to French fashion house Agnes B. The group is in negotiations with prospective British clients.

What the program’s creators weren’t expecting was just what a cathartic experience knitting could be, but numerous women insist that the program has saved their mental health. And by working alongside other women — many of whom they once saw as the enemy, once blamed for the loss of their loved ones — they’re learning how to not just live and work alongside the enemy but also to start to let go of the pain and hatred that defined their past. In the process, they’re starting to see these women as business partners and fellow knitters and creators, putting aside their differences to achieve a common goal of economic independence.

Reading things like this, it’s difficult not to think, “Yeah, right, as if knitting could save the day.” But I imagine that years and years of pain and suffering in which one loses her loved ones, her sense of home, and even a part of herself, fighting wouldn’t seem worth it anymore. I can imagine that if all one had left was her knitting, that might not seem to be much of a reason to keep struggling to survive. But if one was lucky enough to survive — if one had already suffered that much and made it that far, giving up might not seem like much of an option either, leaving coping as the best possible solution. And if it proves to be cathartic, then the struggle might not seem as pronounced.

But it’s difficult to imagine the tensions disappearing altogether or to imagine that economic incentives could make all of the difference. In other words, perhaps it’s a Bosnian form of detente (cooling for tensions), but it may take generations — even centuries — until the tensions cease to lie just below the surface.

Laura Nathan-Garner

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