Disregarding the fact that 120,000 Zambians – out of a total population of a mere 10.8 million – die of AIDS every year, Andrew Mulenga, Zambia’s Education Minister, has banned the distribution of condoms in schools.  

Unsurprisingly, Mulenga’s rationale is that the distribution of condoms promotes immorality by encouraging young people to have premarital sex.  

Zambia has been devastated by AIDS, and the government is well aware of the fact. According to the BBC, the Zambian ministry of health cooperates with NGOs to promote awareness campaigns in which condoms are distributed to students in schools. Such campaigns are crucial in a country where the average annual income is a heart-breaking $320 U.S. dollars and where AIDS has destroyed much of the professional class.  

Mulenga’s directive, then, contradicts extant government programs to combat AIDS, and will further plunge the nation into AIDS-racked devastation. The life expectancy in Zambia is 33 years for men and 32 years for women — in contrast to America, where men can expect to live until they are 74 and women until they are 80 — and Mulenga’s ban on condoms will certainly worsen these numbers.

Mimi Hanaoka

In an interview appearing in the April 2004 issue of Playboy, 50 Cent made the following comment: ”I ain’t into faggots. I don’t like gay people around me, because I’m not comfortable with what their thoughts are. I’m not prejudiced. I just don’t go with gay people and kick it — we don’t have that much in common.“ — Except that you both breathe, have a pulse, take up space, have sex, and the list goes on. But I suppose those are just minor details …

Laura Nathan-Garner

Collateral Damages and The First 24 Hours, two documentaries about 9/11 playing as a double bill at Film Forum in New York City, offer a sober and eerily quiet portrait of the events that led us down the rabbit hole of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The First 24 Hours depicts the devastation at Ground Zero in the hours after the attacks, and Collateral Damages catalogues the psychological damage inflicted by the attacks through interviews, conducted over a year after the attacks, with firefighters from three companies.

Director Etienne Sauret was one of the first cameramen at Ground Zero, and yet in many of the shots, there is no pandemonium; the images of chaos and screaming rivers of people that I was fed on CNN and have come to associate with 9/11 are replaced by an uncomfortable silence. There is no musical score in either of these films, and the images of the rubble of the World Trade Center and the testimony of the firefighters appear all the more stark against the silent background.  

While many of the images — the enormous pile of rubble at Ground Zero, the thick grey cloud of smoke that settled on lower Manhattan, the endless teams of firefighters attempting to find people buried in the ruins of the WTC — are of the type that were broadcast by news networks in the days and weeks following 9/11. Sauret repeatedly turns to the less publicized and jarring shots from the Staten Island landfill where some of the WTC debris was dumped. Sauret’s handheld camera captures numerous scenes in which large machines in a Staten Island landfill disembowel the trucks, cars and ambulances that were damaged in the 9/11 attacks. Juxtaposed against the silence and the slow pace of work at Ground Zero — where firefighters attempt to dig out survivors by using handheld tools — the machinery at the landfill appears grotesque, monstrous and loud. The machines look like they are cannibalizing one another, and the images, while they involve only a few people, are disquieting.  

In addition to serving as a record of and meditation on the events of Sept. 11, 2001, these two films should be seen with a mind on the fact that President Bush has milked the events of 9/11 for all they are worth in his recent campaign ads. President Bush’s recent campaign ads feature images from the 9/11 attacks, and one of the ads shows firefighters carting out the flag-draped remains of a victim. Despite pressure from firefighters and the families of those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush said he “will continue to speak about the effects of 9/11 on our country and my presidency.”

Many are still mourning their losses from 9/11, and to manipulate this tragedy for electoral leverage is certainly reprehensible and deeply troubling. Political mud-slinging is fair game; manipulating the highly emotional images from 9/11 is cheap and vile.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Stories and images about celebrities in our culture, and few of us — even those of us who claim to be removed from pop culture — can claim our distance from the obesession with fame and stardom. Have you ever acquired an autograph or waited in line to get tickets to see a particular musician or hear a particular speaker? Case in point.

George Hickenlooper’s documentary The Mayor of Sunset Strip, which I had the privilege of viewing last night as part of the SXSW film festival, offers a brilliant psychological study of our collective obsession with fame. Using Los Angeles KROQ disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer as a case study/metaphor for American culture’s obsession with fame, the film suggests that this obsession grew out of the culture of the 1960s and has become a means of coping with the dissolution of the nuclear family as the defining structure in our lives. As we seek love and belonging to compensate for this lack, we look toward a dream that can almost never be achieved, but which seems to offer us the prospect of taking on importance and of belonging.

Featuring interviews with a long list of big names ranging from The Rolling Stones to No Doubt to The Sex Pistols, the documentary markets itself partially though celebrity praise. But as Hickenlooper told me, he was concerned that the long list of big names featured in the film would prove counterproductive, turning viewers off from seeing the film since images and interviews with those subjects are so pervasive in our culture. But as the second most successful documentary of all time — even before widescale release — this has proven to be anything but the case. Instead, as Hickenlooper suggested, viewers and film critics have been so attracted to The Mayor of Sunset Strip because it exposes a very visceral aspect of these subjects through their connection to the man who put them on the map. By characterizing celebrities in such human terms, Hickenlooper reveals that fame isn’t all that it is cracked up to be, but that it is also something that is almost universally desirable in Western culture.

I could go on and on. But I’ll spare you. See the film for yourself when it is released in theaters across the country at the end of March and April.

Whether you see the film for the interviews with some big names or to interrogate your connection to capitalist culture and the obsession with fame that it helps produce, you are sure to be impressed. And probably a bit disturbed.

Laura Nathan-Garner

After the Berlin Wall fell, tourists, eager to hold onto the last vestiges of the Cold War, bought pieces of the Wall. And when part of the Pentagon fell on Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld was eager to hold onto a piece of the plane that hit it. Literally.

According to an investigative report put together by the Justice Department, Rumsfeld and a high-ranking FBI agent kept ”souvenirs“ from the crime scenes at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, respectively. Is Rumsfeld worried others will forget what happened on Sept. 11? He certainly acts that way when he shows all visitors to his office that piece of the plan as a reminder of the events of that day.  While museums do this as a business, they do so at least partially to teach younger generations what happened before their time. My guess is Rumsfeld doesn’t have too many visitors to his office who were born in the short time that has passed since that fateful day, though.

American culture has long had an obsession with ”remembering“ certain events, particularly Sept. 11 and the Holocaust. Moves like Rumsfeld’s are meant to tell us both ”always remember to remember“ and ”never forget to remember,“ two sides of the same coin that remind us that all Americans lost part of themselves that day. Suffering and loss of individuals becomes the property of those like Rumsfeld that feel they need something to remember those events by since the memories in their heads and the footage shown on CNN apparently don’t suffice.

Sure, everyone wants to possess a little piece of history, but there is something peculiar and disturbing about this method of doing so. Not only is it extremely opportunistic for these men vested with significant federal authority to feel the need to take — and then show off — souvenirs from scenes where thousands of people died; it is also juvenile.

While 9/11 may have impacted the entire nation — indeed, the entire world — taking souvenirs such as parts of the plane suggests that these men, who were only affected by virtue of their citizenship and positions of authority, thought the memory itself wasn’t enough. They needed something tangible to show as evidence that part of them had been injured that day as well. With a little something to remember 9/11 by, they seem to wipe the blood off of their own hands for tragedies in other parts of the world that have killed hundreds of people and their failure to stop the events of 9/11 before they happened. And by possessing souvenirs of that history, they also elevate that event to a special status in the nation’s collective memory, whereby other crimes and acts of terrorism get forgotten — and actual suffering and loss experienced by families involved in those tragedies as well as 9/11 get kicked to the curb.

Laura Nathan-Garner

If you have never seen Douglas Rushkoff’s documentary, The Merchants of Cool, check it out online.  It’s hosted by PBS and was first broadcast on their show, Frontline.  I’ve been using it regularly in my college writing courses to explore the media’s role in the production of identity. Part of the appeal of the documentary is Rushkoff’s balanced, self-reflective questioning of his position and insights.  He is an ethnographer seeking to understand youth culture, media appropriations of these youth cultures, and youth subcultures’ attempts to resist the pervasive influence of mainstream media cultures.  His genius is that always he lets the subjects “speak” for themselves and never simply dismisses them.  If they come off as hopeful, predatory, intelligent, foolish or cool, it is because of their own acts or thoughts.

For a more predatory group of ethnographers (used very loosely) that exploit young people’s desires to voice their opinion and get their cultural efforts noticed, stop by the Look-Look web site.  They are featured in The Merchants of Cool, but to get the full sense of what they are about, you need to read their statements at their web site.  It isn’t just that they are charging corporations big bucks to find out what the next youth trend will be, it’s that they couch it in a pose of helping young people achieve a voice in society and to let their concerns be noticed.

Guillermo Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes, in their “Temple of Confessions” diorama performances, deconstruct this modern ethnographic gaze in order to expose its predatory nature.  They critique the dominate culture’s power to classify and regulate, by turning stereotypes inside-out, exploding cultural myths and, most importantly, allowing their audiences to reveal their own place in the national narratives.  For a detailed analysis of their deconstructive performances, visit my review of the “Temple of Confessions” performances in Bowling Green, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan.  Cultural performers like Gomez-Pena and Sifuentes are restor(y)ing the modernist practice of ethnography in order to reconstruct 21st-century (auto)ethnographic poetics.  As Norm Denzin reminds us in his latest book, Performative Ethnography (Sage, 2003), we all perform culture and this is not an innocent practice.  With this realization, the critical thinker develops a clear and honest statement of his/her position as a writer-producer of knowledge and re-cognizes their role in the production of ethnographic knowledge.

Moving to the forefront of the development of 21st-century autoethnographic poetics are new web sites rich with stories by the people who live these stories.  These autoethnographic documents speak for themselves, so I’ll leave you with three of my current favorites:

Zone Zero: Exposiciones

Home Project

21st Century Neighborhoods

While the world is continuing to speed along in a confusing, chaotic manner, there are those that are taking the time to provide us with glimpses of their particular realities.  Won’t you do the same? The world benefits from the free exchange of ideas and open dialogue!

thivai

After nearly a year of house-hunting in San Francisco, it’s become very apparent why SFGate.com runs a weekly column called “Surreal Estate”.

All those stories you hear about the crazy real estate market in San Francisco are true. My fiancée, Ramie, and I were outbid ten times during our search for a home until we let go of our preconceived notions about what a house should cost and went with the market.

We’ve been among a frenzy of more than 30 bids on some houses, and we’ve submitted offers that were more than $100,000 lower than the actual selling price. We had the highest offer on a couple of places, only to be turned away because minor details made close, competing offers more attractive.

We were about to give up when we bid more than we ever could have imagined a year ago for a modest, two-bedroom home in the Outer Sunset District. To our surprise, the bid was accepted. Escrow is scheduled to close on March 25.

Our search has given me new perspective on the housing imbalance in San Francisco. Owning a home in the city is difficult for professional people earning a moderate income. It’s nearly impossible for low-income wage earners, at least at market prices. It’s easy to see why San Francisco has one of the lowest home ownership rates of any city in the country.

Owning a home is one of the best investments you can make. For those who want to live in San Francisco, the high cost keeps many from enjoying the benefits of home ownership. Many people who want to buy are forced to move out of the city.

It’s unfortunate because San Francisco is such a wonderful place. In the future, hopefully everyone, not just the privileged few who can afford it, will be able enjoy the experience of being a San Francisco homeowner.

chinoloco

What is the first thought that pops into your head when you think of the year 1954?  A simpler time?  Rumblings of racial unrest? Or do you just say to yourself, “That’s ancient history?”

“Many people can’t imagine 1954. A postage stamp was three cents. The population of the United States was 163 million people, and the world series of baseball was broadcast in color for the very first time.”  

These were the opening remarks of Joe Madison, talk show personality for XM satellite radio and the moderator of “The Voices of Experience,” a community forum and panel discussion that is part of a larger program entitled, “In Pursuit of Freedom and Equality — Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas: The Legacy,” which came to Montgomery College, Rockville Campus, on Tuesday, Feb. 24.

Brown v. Board of Education is arguably one of the most important legal decisions handed down in the past 50 years in this country. In essence, it hailed the beginning of the end of segregation because the Supreme Court judges ruled 9-0 that separate is not, in fact, equal.

On Tuesday evening at the Montgomery College Theater Arts Arena, distinguished educational luminaries and authors who once attended Montgomery County Public Schools gathered and educated members of the local community about what it was like to teach, learn, and live in Montgomery County in the days leading up to and after the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Drawing on his own experiences in the post-Brown multi-cultural education (or lack thereof), Mr. Madison cut to the chase with his first question, “Where did all the white people go?”  

The first panelist to answer was Mrs. Doris Hackey, a native of Germantown and a lifetime educator in the area:

“I remember I didn’t see any white people going to Carver (one of the first ‘colored’ schools in the area).  We all went to their schools.  I’m not sure what happened,” she said.

“White people went to the suburbs as far as they could go after Brown. The opposition to integration was really scary. White people were angry, I mean really angry,” said Mrs. Nina Clark, a lifelong resident, educator, and the author of History of the Black Public Schools of Montgomery County, Maryland.

“The white people actually went and built their own school, and it is still standing to this day in Calvert County,” said Mr. Warrick Hill, author of Before Us Lies the Timber: The Segregated High Schools of Montgomery County, Maryland, 1927-1960.

It was enlightening when the panelists were asked whether “colored” schools were equal. The answer was a resounding no.  

The panelists weren’t all heavy-hearted and somber when talking about these things, however. Mrs. Hackey smiled and joked about how there was no playground equipment at the “colored” school, and how they were lucky if they got a ball.  

“I remember playing a lot of dodge ball. And if the ball went in the street and you lost it, no more ball game,” she said.

Some of the panelists recalled the drudgery of walking miles upon miles to school. However, Mr. James Offord, another distinguished panelist, saw it with a little irony. The white children got to ride the bus, but Offord had to walk to his “colored” school.  

“It was two-and-a-half miles to my school, one way. I guess one thing we had over the white kids was that it was excellent exercise. At colored schools you didn’t have many twisted or sprained ankles,” he said as he chuckled.

So how did this group of people manage to succeed  when the odds were so clearly stacked against them in terms of schoolbooks, buildings and other resources?  

“There was a lot of motivation on the part of the parents because they were denied an education,” said Mrs. Clarke. There wasn’t a “colored” high school in Montgomery County until 1927.

A large motivation for African American students after Brown was to show “I’m just as smart as you are,” said, Mr. Offord.  It also probably helped that all students, regardless of race, were entitled to the same quality books, teachers and facilities.  

“We learned more because of shared resources. We were doing things after Brown that we had never done before. Now we can. Brown instigated these things,” said Mrs. Clarke.

“We used adversity as a stepping stone to success,” said Mr. Hill.

In The Fray Contributor

George J. Tenet, head of the C.I.A., today stated to a Senate committee that he has, on several occasions, corrected faulty public statements on intelligence made by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney

Tenet’s motivation in making such statements could be to save his already damaged hide. Tenet has recently been under enormous scrutiny for his agency’s ability or lack thereof to gather, process and interpret intelligence. The 9/11 attacks produced in the collective American consciousness not only a sense of devastation and vulnerability but also a stunned horror at the intelligence community’s ability to prevent such attacks. I wondered if heads were going to roll, and if Tenet’s would be leading the pack.  

Tenet’s statements, which certainly could not have endeared him to Bush and Cheney, were nevertheless evasive.

Tenet was asked whether he had attempted to correct statements made by the Bush administration in the days leading up to the Iraq war, such as the claim that Iraq’s weapons stock included what could cause a “mushroom cloud.” In a particularly vapid statement, Tenet responded by claiming:  

“I’m not going to sit here today and tell you what my interaction was and what I did or what I didn’t do … You have the confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it. I don’t stand up in public and do it. I do my job the way I did it in two administrations.”

While it may be the case that Tenet is trying to salvage the bruised reputation of the intelligence community and particularly the C.I.A., it is at least heartening to see that the intelligence community is beginning to at least correct, if not censure, politicians who bandy about questionable or disputed intelligence to the public as if it were fact.  

Mimi Hanaoka

There’s this pretty girl I know. She lives on welfare with her grandmother. But project-bound, I see her sashaying down the block in pants designed by Versace. During summertime, she adorns herself with Chanel sunglasses. Here she stands out like a glamourous Sophia Loren against a backdrop of the harshness of the urban jungle. She cannot afford groceries for the next two weeks, but she says, “Damn, at least I look good.”

This is what pyschologists term “status anxiety.” In a time where there are more jobs offering titles than ever before, we are not satisfied unless we exhibit the materialistic ways that predominate the world. For New Yorkers, it’s the cab to work, the brownstone, and a Panamarian called ”Chu-chu.“ It’s the Brazilian and the three-week holiday in the Seychelles. It’s the Botox.

Unless you have the luxury of being heir to a multi-million dollar business empire, however, it’s hard graft. Nights with your brain networking and planning meetings for the morning. Caffeine injections. All of this because you still want more. Because you’re fed images of nothing but the new cell phone with a flip-top camera. The new diet. The fashionable lifestyle.

Of course, we all crave the finer things in life. Yet 33 percent of those in successful careers are also in the psychiarist’s chair seeking therapy. The sentence that seems to be echoed is “I still am not happy … ’til I have more.”

I still see that girl now and then around the projects. I smile. Given the richness of her heart, she is already successful.

In The Fray Contributor

Paul Richardson, the assistant bishop of Newcastle, recently criticized Mel Gibson’s controversial film, The Passion of the Christ, as a violent film that borders on pornography. Richardson went further and claimed that the Lord of the Rings had “stronger religious themes.”

While I am loathe to give Gibson’s film — which has been lambasted as both historically inaccurate and as rife with potentially anti-Semitic material — yet more publicity than it has already received, Richardson’s comment is important in that it underscores the fact that the film should be seen as a meditative piece born of director Mel Gibson’s own religious beliefs and not as an accurate portrayal of historical fact.

As Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, a distinguished historian of the early Christian period, stated:

“It’s important to remember that this is Lent, and meditations on the Passion of Christ are an important part of the cultural interpretation of human suffering. There’s a context for the movie in the history of art. When Christians read the Gospels as historical acts, they will say what Mel Gibson says: that this is the truth, this is our faith. But the important thing is that this film ignores the spin the gospel writers were pressured to put on their works, the distortions of facts they had to execute. Mel Gibson has no interest whatsoever in that.”

The Passion of the Christ is an expression of Gibson’s religious faith; it is neither history nor fact, and to risk misinterpreting it as such would further encourage anti-Semitism inspired by a feeble understanding of history.  

Mimi Hanaoka

As Christopher Allbritton of Back to Iraq and Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo have noted, Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, recently and happily admitted to manipulating the United States. Chalabi wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and with the appropriate “intel,” encouragement and war-mongering, America invaded Iraq.

As Josh Marshall documented in his blog:

“ ‘As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.’

Those were the words last week of Ahmed Chalabi, head of the INC, member of the IGC, and central player in a scandal the scope of which Americans are only now beginning to grasp.

The ‘what was said before’ that Chalabi is referring to, of course, are the numerous bogus claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction he peddled into American governmental channels over the last half dozen years and more.”

The weapons of mass destruction, which were the ostensible reason for America’s rushed entry into war with Iraq, have yet to be found. The upshot of all this is that President Bush got his war, Chalabi got rid of Hussein, and Halliburton began to joyously engage in war profiteering.

Halliburton’s war profiteering is a disgusting example of crony capitalism, but it is important to keep in mind that Iraq suffers from similar problems. Chalabi has his dirty little fingers in every dirty little pie. Crony capitalism is alive and well in Iraq, and Chalabi and his friends benefit from it.  

America helped plunge Iraq into its present chaos. One of America’s and Iraq’s goals must be to eliminate this sort of crony capitalism — both in America and on the ground in Iraq.

Mimi Hanaoka