Blog

The propaganda wars


The American war to win the hearts and minds of the citizens of Iraq has surely failed, but the American government has been extending its tentacular reach into the Middle East through the preferred medium of intellectual warfare: the media.

During the summer of 2003, America launched Hi, a lifestyle magazine targeted at the 18- to 35-year-old age bracket for both men and women. The magazine, sponsored by the United States State Department, is produced by a firm based in Washington D.C. called The Magazine Group. The magazine enjoys funding from a bill, supported by the House of Representatives in the summer of 2003, for a variety of foreign projects in the Middle East. The president of the firm, Jane Ottenberg, perkily stated:


With its vibrant editorial and eye-catching format, we hope the magazine can serve as a springboard for greater dialogue and understanding between young Arab readers and young Americans.

The United States also runs the Arabic language Al-Hurra — which means “the free one,” — television network, along with Radio Sawa.  

Among the chorus of criticism from the Middle Eastern and Arabic language media that greeted the launch of Al-Hurra was a particularly well articulated voice of concern from Egypt’s Al-Akhbar:

The objective might be legitimate in normal circumstances. But seeking to achieve such objectives at a time when the US administration’s declared policy is to change ruling regimes – by force, if necessary – and to reform and discipline people through promises or threats, means we can only view this network with suspicion.

While it is doubtful that the chirpily titled Hi magazine will be popular, or even widely read, it is certainly competing against the local media, which includes Hezbollah’s satellite television channel, al-Manar, the highly popular Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite TV station, and the Saudi-backed Al-Arabiyya channel which broadcasts news. This intellectual battle of the media is generally less bloody than conventional warfare, although given the cycle of violence that erupted after the Coalition Provisional Authority shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq, the dividing line between physical and propaganda warfare is becoming increasingly blurred.

—Mimi Hanaoka

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Reviews

Got books? We do!

Introducing ITF — Off the Shelf!


Last updated on November 27, 2005

Here at ITF we love to read, and our contributors and editors want to share some of their favorite books with you. Think of it as a book club in cyberspace — with a dash of identity and community, of course!

While we’ll make the book reviews available to all ITF readers, only those who register on our site (membership is free!) will have access to all the special features of Off the Shelf. Members get access to exclusive interviews with the authors of selected books. They can take part in online discussions with other ITF readers and editors about the books. And they can submit their own reviews of the Book of the Month for publication on our site. (Did we mention that membership is free?!)

If you have any questions about ITF — Off the Shelf, please email us.

Happy reading, writing, and discussing!

—The Editors

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Blog

When it rains, it pours


issue banner

April showers bring more than May flowers. They also bring gray days that make us want to curl up with a good book and mull over our relationships — though not necessarily at the same time.

In honor of this dreary season, InTheFray invites you to predict what the future holds for love in the midst of conflict. Please take a couple moments to complete Maureen Farrell’s relationship survey, which is sure to leave you laughing — and asking some questions of your own.

And don’t worry. We’ve got a place for you to take all of that inquisitive energy — Off the Shelf.

Off the bookshelf, that is. Beginning in May, our editors will share some of their favorite books with you. Think of it as a book club in cyberspace — with a dash of identity and community, of course!

As part of our special issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the first book we’ll feature will be Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth. The critique of this novel will be published next month on Monday, May 17. Once you finish reading Juneteenth, the intriguing books will keep on coming. Each month an ITF editor will review a book concerning identity and/or community. The featured works will be a mix of old and new, fiction and nonfiction.

We’ll keep our Bookshelf at Powells.com updated so that you can purchase the books we’ll be reviewing in subsequent months a month or more in advance. And don’t worry, if you prefer to shop at Amazon, just click here. You’ll be taken right to the Amazon site, where you can purchase those books and start reading. (Of course, if you already have a dog-eared copy of the book sitting on your bookshelf somewhere, more power to you.)

While we’ll make the book reviews available to all ITF readers, only those who register on our site (membership is free!) will have access to all the special features of Off the Shelf. Members get access to exclusive interviews with the authors of selected books. They can take part in online discussions with other ITF readers and editors about the books. And they can submit their own reviews of the Book of the Month for publication on our site. (Did we mention that membership is free?!)

So don’t just sit there — get your copy of Juneteenth now!  You can even stock up and save on other books we’ll be reviewing later this summer. But beware: there aren’t CliffsNotes for most of the books we’re reviewing. So it’s probably a good idea for you to get your hands on — and read — our featured books ahead of time.

Happy reading!

Laura Nathan
Managing Editor
Austin, Texas

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News

Healthy for whom?

President Bush's Healthy Marriage" initiative is great for traditional marriage proponents, but what will it do for the poor?


The wedge issue” is a time-tested election-year strategy, and the Bush administration is unusually fond of – and unusually good at – the practice. Oppose the reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance? You must be an atheist. Oppose the Patriot Act? You must hate America, or have something to hide, or both.

The controversy surrounding “Healthy Marriages” – President Bush’s plan to use welfare money to spread marital bliss – isn’t a spectacular battle like gay marriage or the “under God” business, but it’s as much about creating divisions and gaining leverage. It’s just less “shock and awe” and more stealth bomber, engineered to both look impressive and go unnoticed.

Bush first introduced Healthy Marriages in early 2002, with little accompanying fanfare. But with the flap over gay unions bringing the definition of family to the top of the national agenda, the media are taking a second look.  

Ostensibly, the program is about improving the lives of poor children, by fostering “stable families.” And it sounds good. It appeals to core constituents and seems innocuous – if not downright reasonable – to most everyone else. The few opponents are so ideologically diverse that their varied objections dissolve in a sea of “ifs,” “ands,” and “buts.” Best of all, it won’t cost taxpayers a thing – at least, not so much that they’ll notice.


In light of the war in Iraq and the stumbling economy, Healthy Marriages may be considered a “soft” issue, but poverty in America is a pervasive and immediate problem. Approximately 35 million Americans – one out of every 10 people and one out of every six children – live below the poverty line. The Bush administration says encouraging marriage will reduce those numbers.

There is some evidence suggesting they may be right. Social scientists have found that children in married families are less likely to be poor, addicted to drugs, and involved in crime, and more likely to finish high school and have healthy families of their own. Under the new plan, the Bush administration would put more money toward eliminating the disincentives to marriage that now exist in the welfare system, support existing marriages by teaching relationship skills, and educate the country on the value of the institution.

But the administration is touting one fact – children in married families are generally better off than those in single-parent families – while conveniently ignoring another: We have no idea how to promote marriage among the poor. In his “Fatherly Advice” column for the National Fatherhood Initiative website, child psychologist Wade Horn even admitted as much. “There is no evidence that any of this will work,” he wrote in 2000. That was before he was appointed as Bush’s healthy marriage pitchman.

Critics argue that it’s premature to put so much money into what amounts to a vast social experiment. The enthusiasm for the plan, they say, isn’t as much about reducing child poverty as it is about defending traditional marriage as a panacea for all of America’s social ills. Critics allege that for healthy marriage defenders – a diverse group of concerned citizens, beltway policy analysts, and “faith-based” organizers – Bush’s program is meant to initiate a widespread culture change that extends beyond the poor.


And there is evidence to support critics’ claims. The 1996 Welfare Reform Act, a bipartisan bill signed by President Clinton, already provides for all the “marriage promotion activities” included in the Bush plan. Under the 1996 law, states have recently begun experimenting with policies and initiatives to promote marriage. But as expert Theodora Ooms points out, “There certainly isn’t any evidence that they’re having much effect.” In fact, the potential implications of current state initiatives are so unknown, the administration won’t endorse any particular method of promoting marriage.

Bush is betting that the perceived softness of Healthy Marriages will carry it through Congress. The welfare reauthorization bill has been hung up in the Senate for months, but lately the sticking point has been minimum wage, not marriage promotion. If the bill passes while Bush is still in office – there’s a chance that the Senate might not consider it again until 2005 – Healthy Marriages will likely pass with it. So far, the administration has succeeded in presenting it as a common-sense plan. But hard questions remain unanswered.

Clinton’s compromising legacy

The idea of the federal government promoting marriage predates the Bush administration. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York Democrat, was pitching similar ideas to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Policy analysts at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think-tank, have been building the case for marriage promotion almost as long.

By 1992, when welfare dependence was at its peak, there was a widespread, bipartisan feeling that reform – including work requirements and family formation goals – was a legislative, if not moral, imperative. As a candidate for president, Clinton pledged to “end welfare as we know it” by imposing work requirements and time limits on benefits, and funding programs that would reduce out-of-wedlock births.

At the end of his first term, during his bid for re-election, Clinton signed the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. “A long time ago I concluded that the current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility and family,” Clinton said. “Today we have an historic opportunity to make welfare what it was meant to be: a second chance, not a way of life.” The new law effectively ended the New Deal guarantee of welfare for poor Americans.

Conservatives complained that their agenda had been coopted. Liberals cried treason. Two high-ranking Health and Human Services administrators, including long-time Clinton family friend Peter Edelman, resigned in disgust. Moynihan called the new law “the most brutal act of social policy since reconstruction,” predicting that the law’s backers would “take this disgrace to their graves.” But the plan was roundly regarded as a bipartisan success – it still is – and Clinton’s propensity for compromise helped deliver a landslide victory.

At the time, most critics were overwhelmed by the abandonment of the old welfare system and the sweeping changes of the new one. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the cornerstone of welfare for six decades, was replaced by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which gave states more discretion over the use of funds, limited the duration of assistance to five years, and established strict work requirements.

The new law was focused on encouraging recipients to get to work, but it was also explicitly aimed at influencing family formation. New Deal welfare programs contained implicit financial disincentives to marriage for single parents; often, a mother’s benefits would drop significantly or end altogether if she got married. Under TANF, states could eliminate those disincentives, but they were also directed to actively encourage marriage as a method for ending welfare dependence.

While there were deep concerns on the left about welfare reform generally, the family –based objectives weren’t that controversial. Little was made of the fact that states could theoretically use 100 percent of their welfare grants to promote marriage – and not just among the poor. Programs aimed at reducing out-of-wedlock births and encouraging two-parent families could be directed to the general population (see Box 2).  

Since it was unclear how, exactly, the goals were to be met, few states implemented explicit family formation policies. That is, until Bush became president.

How marriage will cure poverty and other tall tales

Shortly after taking office in 2001, Bush appointed one of the marriage movement’s most vocal leaders, former President of the National Fatherhood Initiative, Wade Horn, as Assistant Secretary in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. With one of their own heading ACF, the movement has more clout than ever. But critics worry that the administration is publicly “soft-pedaling” a vague and potentially dangerous – and extraordinarily well-funded –experiment. Since 2001, 35 states have adopted some form of marriage promotion. And many states are already using TANF money for “marriage promotion activities” aimed at whole populations.


Horn is careful to say in public that the government won’t be “playing cupid,” and that the emphasis is on healthy marriages, not marriage for its own sake, or marriage as the solution to poverty. “We’re focused on helping low-income couples build strong marriages and get equal access to marriage education services on a voluntary basis,” he told the Boston Globe last month. (Horn denied repeated phone and email requests to be interviewed for this article.)

When speaking for the president, Horn anticipates and neutralizes objections to the plan, but it is not clear that he takes them seriously. “Someday someone has to explain to me what the controversy is,” he said to The Weekly Standard in March 2002, “why it’s a terrible idea to help couples who’ve chosen marriage for themselves to develop a skill set which will allow them to have a healthy marriage.”

But Horn’s posturing obscures the real issue. Few object to the expressed goals of teaching relationship skills or fostering loving families. Rather, critics fear that the administration is putting a pretty face on a dubious ideology that holds up marriage as the answer to poverty and the welfare state. They point out that there are very few restriction on how the TANF money can be used. The language is vague enough that faith- and community-based organizations can easily go from endorsing healthy relationships to promoting marriage as the only possible healthy relationship (see Box 1).

“In the abstract, this is a great thing,” said Stephanie Coontz, co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families and history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She acknowledges, as most critics of the plan do, that a healthy marriage benefits both parents and children.

But she is uneasy about dispatching non-profits and religious groups – some with no training at all – to implement unproven programs. One marriage promotion method touted by the Bush administration, “Marriage Education,” can be taught by “para-professionals, lay leaders, teachers, clergy, or mental health professionals,” according to ACF literature. “Some courses require no training and are ready to teach out-of-the-box.”

Coontz is also suspicious of the intentions of the White House and its ideological backers. “The administration isn”t putting it forward as an anti-poverty measure “they’re soft-pedaling it as much as possible,” Coontz said. “Their biggest supporters are people who really do see this as an alternative to the welfare system.”

“The people at the Heritage Foundation clearly argue that getting people married is the way to stop poverty, and that that’s where the bulk of our efforts should go,” Coontz said.

She’s right. Heritage – the policy pipeline for the White House – is saying what the administration won’t. In a March 26 report, Heritage scholars Robert Rector and Melissa Pardue wrote, “the collapse of Marriage is the principle cause of child poverty in the United States.” It’s a convenient theory, but not one that is widely accepted outside Bush’s tight ideological circle.

Most experts on welfare, marriage, and social policy share a lot of common ground and mutual respect. If it weren’t for sectarian ideologies, they say, they might be able to hammer out a workable healthy marriage program that could satisfy everyone.

“People on both sides who are debating this issue believe that families need help and support and need to escape poverty,” said Dorian Solot, co-author of Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple. Solot is also Executive Director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, which she founded in 1998 to advocate for marriage-neutral social policy. “I do think, interestingly, that these groups share very similar values,” she said.

But Wade Horn doesn’t see it that way – at least he didn’t use to. Before joining the Bush administration, when he was still president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, he characterized his opponents as “the we-hate-marriage left.” The Heritage Foundation voices this adversarial divide: “We have two very different worldviews and two very different strategic goals, and they’re totally irreconcilable,” Heritage policy analyst Patrick Fagan said in a phone interview. Like Horn before he was initiated into Bush’s circle of trust, Fagan is quick to dismiss his opponents’ arguments. He sees his side of the debate as “the traditional, Judeo-Christian, orthodox, ortho-praxis community,” and critics as “the newer, sex-without-consequences-with-whomever-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-consensual” community.

But the majority of concerned researchers and scholars locate themselves somewhere between the ideological poles. To them, the debate isn’t as contentious as the media or the Heritage Foundation are making it appear. “I’m not sure where these people are who he’s making out to be his opponents,” Solot said of Fagan, “but I’ve never met them.”

Fuzzy numbers, clear disclaimers

Both camps in the marriage debate have research to supports their views. But analysts at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), widely acknowledged as a responsible, non-partisan think-tank, argue that we don’t yet have answers to a couple of important questions. States are expected to develop innovative programs to promote marriage, but whether they have the know-how remains to be seen.

Much of the research on the relationship between marriage and poverty is imperfect, inconclusive, or worse, purposely partisan. Politicians and advocates on all sides manipulate the numbers to suit their needs; sometimes they even cite the same numbers to make different points. If the trend supports one’s argument, the unwritten rule goes, cite the trend; if the trend casts doubt on one’s argument, cite an individual case. It’s this rhetorical calculus that gave us the “welfare queen” in the 1980’s, and gives us the average “healthy” family today.

In a recent report that synthesizes marriage and poverty research, Mary Parke, a CLASP policy analyst, concludes that there are no simple answers. “Findings from the research are often oversimplified, leading to exaggeration by proponents of marriage initiatives and to skepticism from critics,” she writes. “While it’s difficult to disentangle the effects of income and family structure, clearly the relationship operates in both directions: poverty is both cause and effect of single parenthood.” It’s a conclusion that undermines the Heritage Foundation’s premise that marriage is the main cause of child poverty. Despite evidence to the contrary, the Heritage Foundation continues to insist that the merits of the initiatives are beyond doubt. “This is an equation made in Hell,” Fagan said of the historical resistance to federal marriage promotion. “We know that marriage reduces poverty,” he said. “It’s been a known, open secret for a long time.”

In any case, states have begun experimenting with a variety of initiatives aimed at reducing divorce rates, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock births. Arizona has dispatched a 48-foot semi-trailer that carries marriage counselors to low-income areas. West Virginia is giving a $100 monthly bonus to poor couples that marry. Despite the flurry of new initiatives, the Administration of Children and Families acknowledges that most programs haven’t been properly evaluated, if they’ve been evaluated at all.

Theodora Ooms, a senior policy analyst at CLASP, regularly consults with federal, state, and local public officials on marriage promotion policies and strategies. She thinks federal marriage promotion is a good idea. But she has reservations about the plan as it stands. Since states have just begun implementing the programs, Ooms said in a phone interview, “it’s much too early” to know if they’ve been successful. “There certainly isn’t any evidence that they’re having much effect.”

At a Healthy Marriage conference sponsored by the ACF last year, the Director of the Division of Child and Family Development, Naomi Goldstein, acknowledged that states’ evaluation methods have been flawed. “They are too often based on small, non-representative samples and lack adequate experimental design or long-term follow-up,” she said. “They have not generally focused on low-income populations and/or unmarried parents, or included child-level outcome measurement.”

The ACF’s published list of approaches to promoting healthy marriages includes such initiatives as modification of no-fault divorce laws and television advertising campaigns extolling the virtues of marriage, none of which are directed exclusively at the poor. Four states have passed reductions in the cost of a marriage license for couples, poor or not, who take a marriage course. Florida, for example, has dropped its fee from $88 to $55.50 for such couples. But these programs’ inclusion, the document warns, “does not constitute or imply favoring or endorsement by ACF.”

Although they’re clear in disclaiming responsibility, Bush and Horn have still not answered the central question: If we don’t have any confidence in the current programs and we haven’t evaluated them, why are we expanding them?

Deploying the culture warriors

We may not know Bush’s true intent for “Healthy Marriages,” but it’s somewhere in between a sop for “family values” conservatives and a nefarious Orwellian plot. What’s clear is, there’s a vast middle ground, and he’s not reaching out for it. He’s not even looking out for it.

By design and by some chance, the plan has eluded widespread scrutiny. Bush has managed to sell it as a soft-and-fuzzy, “it’s all about the kids” plan. But he has had to be deceptive to pull it off. The administration maintains publicly that the interest is in promoting healthy marriages, but without enough information to endorse any marriage programs, they can have no real idea what the results of state-sponsored initiatives might be.

Even the staunchest critics of the Bush plan acknowledge that the government would be wise to promote healthy relationships among the poor. But instead of trying to pacify his critics, Bush and his strategists prefer to deploy the culture warriors. Oppose Healthy Marriages? You must be one of those “sex-without-consequences-with-whomever-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-consensual” types.

Scales photograph from istockphoto.com

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Heritage Foundation
URL: http://www.heritage.org

The National Fatherhood Initiative
URL: http://www.fatherhood.org

Center for Law and Public Policy (CLASP)
URL: http://www.clasp.org

Administration of Children and Families
URL: http://www.acf.hhs.gov

Council on Contemporary Families
URL: http://www.contemporaryfamilies.org

Alternatives to Marriage Project
URL: http://www.unmarried.org

TOPICS>

Understanding the President?s Healthy Marriage Initiative
Report by Heritage scholars Robert Rector and Melissa Pardue
March 26, 2004
URL: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Family/bg1741.cfm

ACF list of approaches to promoting healthy marriages
URL: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/region5/htm_pages/compendium.htm

Doing Something to Boost Marriage
Essay by Wade Horn
URL: http://www.fatherhood.org/articles/wh102500.htm

The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study
URL: http://crcw.princeton.edu/fragilefamilies/index.asp

“

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Blog

At least when I die, bury me standing


Hoping to regain the dignity that has been stripped, over the centuries, from the Roma community, the Gipsy Kings, a popular French folk band, have stated that they intend to “reclaim” the term gypsy. Given that the image of the Roma, or Gypsies, that has captured the popular imagination is that of a migrant herd of vagabonds, suspicious of outsiders and mired in poverty, the move by the Gypsy Kings — who sing in the Gypsy dialect of Gitane — to transform the term gypsy into something that is positive is both welcome and heartening, and comes at a time when individuals and governments are attempting to address the issue of anti-Roma prejudice.    

The Roma, a historically marginalized group, continue, in some regions, to live in abject poverty. In some regions of Slovakia, some Slovakian Roma communities have an unemployment rate of 100 percent.  

One of the recent attempts to refigure and rectify the popular understanding of the Roma is Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, a 1996 book by Isabel Fonseca, an American author who is now married to Martin Amis. The book concerns the Roma population of Eastern Europe and documents the four years Fonseca spent in Roma communities. The title of the book is taken from a Roma saying — At least when I die, bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all of my life.  

Popular literature may help to develop a more compassionate understanding of the Roma, but Hungary is now taking a more formal approach to the issue of anti-Roma prejudice. Hungary has implemented a three-year program, targeted towards the majority of the population, to increase their respect for the Roma minority. The program encourages the general population to increase their understanding of and interaction with the Roma community.  

Hopefully, it is through this multi-faceted approach of government initiatives, public awareness, literature, and music that the old saying — At least when I die, bury me standing, I’ve been on my knees all of my life — can begin to lose its relevance to contemporary Roma life.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

  

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Russian dolls revolt!


In the Western world, it is a truth universally acknowledged that beauty equals height, weight, and stunningly shiny hair.  When “plus-size” models are used, it’s usually an event that needs to be labeled, so as not to confuse innocent viewers.  In Russia, the same standards of beauty are also now the norm.  Accordingly, it rattled the Russian media when Alyona Pisklova, a normal looking 15-year-old, was entered in the Rambler Media Group beauty pageant by her friends and swept the contest with at least 40,000 votes.

Rambler organized the pageant as a preliminary round for the June Miss Universe contest in Ecuador, and enthusiastic Russians were able to vote via the Internet and cell phones for their favorite contestants. Rambler made a profit on the process — it cost 86 cents to submit a vote — and was no doubt shocked when the winner was a curly haired, average-sized 15-year-old girl without any makeup.  They disqualified her, requiring all contestants to show their passports and prove their single status. While Alyona is single, she is under 18.

Alyona supporters struck back with a web site called “Say No to Barbie Dolls.” The English language statement on the site says, “Alyona represents a catalyst to reveal problems of our society. People who vote for Alyona voted against not naturally looking beauties, who cannot be distinguished from each other … mass-media standards and the models it imposes; products of the same type and trademark, which are made into cult objects for specific layers of the populace …” Anti-globalization groups such as Globalynaya Alternativa also threw themselves into the protest: “In this spontaneous protest the denizens of the Russian Internet — bored office workers, secretaries fed up with work and sexual harassment, middle management with its permanent attitude problem, journalists sick to death of their own cynicism — have all come into their own.” While objecting to the anti-globalization press, Rambler media officials and pageant organizers called the contest a success based on the participation rates, and offered Alyona a booby prize “Viewer’s Choice Award.”

Initially, I was thrilled to see that people were not willing to silently accept Alyona’s disqualification. From the comments posted on the “Say No to Barbie Dolls” site, women around the world feel similarly. It’s rare that anyone challenges the beauty standard outside fringe media, and Alyona feels like a breath of fresh air. Despite this, I began to wonder where the 15-year-old girl in this story was. How would it feel to be a high school student and know that people around the world were touting you as an icon of normalcy, or to have friends submit your photo to the contest as a joke, supposedly disguising your identity with the last name of a boy you secretly crushed on?  At least in the English speaking press, Alyona’s voice has been lost while her image is everywhere. I suppose I’d rather examine images of an average-looking woman in a “Barbie No Pasaran” t-shirt over an airbrushed model, but really, I’d like to hear what both have to say.

—Laura Louison

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Scarred for life


Fierce, a magazine which I frequently write for, has been featuring a full-page advertisement that apparently has some readers in a tizzy to such an extent that many readers have cancelled their subscriptions to the magazine. But I can’t quite make sense of why some readers are up in arms. This isn’t another Details saga. This advertisement is more along the lines of art that would grace the pages of Adbusters. Not only is it a smart advertisement, but it’s one that speaks to issues that could potentially affect — and thus should concern — readers of this feminist publication.

At the top of the page, in large font of the same type used by Victoria’s Secret in their ads and catalogues, the advertisement reads, “IT’S NO SECRET.” Below that stands an attractive female model wearing fancy red lingerie. If you, like me, read the ad initially from top to bottom, you would probably think you were in fact looking at a Victoria’s Secret ad. That is, until your eyes get to the middle of the page, where you notice the model pulling down the top part of her bra to expose a scar — the result of a mastectomy.

The smaller print says it all: “Society is obsessed with breasts. But what are we doing about breast cancer? Instead of just thinking about breasts, you can help save them.” And then readers see the logo and URL for The Breast Cancer Fund at the bottom of the page.

So why are readers backlashing against this ad? Maybe they’re devout Victoria’s Secret shoppers, disappointed by the advertisement’s parody of Victoria’s Secret advertisements. Or maybe they’re not comfortable with frank discussions of the body in a public forum. Perhaps they’re in denial and just want to think about breasts in relation to sex and are turned off, even disgusted, by the sight of a young, attractive model exposing her physical imperfections (though Fierce never claims to be the female answer to Playboy by any means). Or maybe they’re in denial, preferring to play the game of “pretend the problem isn’t there, and it will disappear.” Whatever it is, it’s both disturbing and peculiar that a group of readers who are predominately female would be offended by an advertisement that spoke directly to a disease that affects women in particular.

To see a copy of the advertisement to decide for yourself, check out the inside cover of the spring issue of Fierce, now available at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble.

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Temporary cure for a nostalgia pandemic


Sometimes I feel like I’m licking at the crumbs of American regionalism. That instead of New Orleans, I get Bourbon St. gone wild; and in place of Seattle, I’m thrown a fish at Pikes Place Market. Beads round my neck and smoked trout on my toast, I resign myself to the fact that the Eisenhower Interstate System killed the back-roads and that sitcoms have reduced dialects to parodies. Every once in a while, however, I’m shaken from this nostalgia pandemic. I realize, yes, the geography of 19th-century America isn’t quite intact, and that’s OK because new regions have emerged and it’s our job to learn how to read them.

I arrived at this realization last night after seeing the second run of the play “Proof” — an introspective drama revolving around a recently deceased mathematician and his long-time daughter/caretaker — which in 2001 won both the Pulitzer and the Tony. The play is considered a quintessentially Chicago play because it captures something of the culture of the University of Chicago, which the playwright, David Auburn, attended and in which the play is set.

I was struck by the way the audience roared with applause whenever the actors hit on little Chicagoisms and how they hissed whenever the one character in town from New York City for the funeral championed the Big Apple over the Windy City. I found myself nodding and smiling, satisfied at these collective outbursts. It felt like an assertion of some new regional identity.

Often Chicago is given the honor of hosting a test run for future Broadway plays. They do a dry run in the Loop, tweak the production, and head East for the main event. The same thing happens with comedians, who learn their craft on the Second City stages and then head west, to the L.A. Studios. I don’t think that was the case with “Proof,” but even so, the play reminds me of the practice and brings to mind what I think of as one of the defining qualities of Chicago. There’s a certain advantage to being in the place where things are test-run. There’s a freedom in it, denied to those on the center stage. When I think of the so-called Chicagoland region, this is what comes to mind.                        

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Beyond gay marriages


During his first 100 days in office, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom made national headlines with his decision to allow gay marriages in the city (since halted by court order). But he now has to get down to the minutiae of running a city facing a huge budget deficit.

Newsom ran as a centrist liberal against Green Party progressive candidate Matt Gonzalez in the race for mayor. With his move on gay marriages and the attention he has paid to the city’s Bayview-Hunter’s Point district, Newsom has surprised many progressives and others.

Just after taking office, Newsom made unannounced visits to crime scenes in the Bayview, historically a low-income and predominately African American area of the city that has recently been hit by a wave of killings, including the shooting death of a police officer over the weekend.

The mayor also escorted a group of city department heads to the Bayview and pointed out problems with parks and other infrastructure. After the tour, repairs around the neighborhood began with earnest.

Other moves meeting with approval by many in the city include naming Heather Fong the new police chief, making her the first woman to head the department and one of the few women chiefs in the country. She’s also one of a handful of Asian Americans to be the top cop in a big city.

It’ll be interesting to see if Newsom can keep the left happy as he grapples with the budget and other everyday issues.

—Harry Mok

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Reinventing America one apple pie at a time


In a story I wrote recently, I revised the phrase “as American as apple pie and baseball.” To better reflect Americans’ lackluster sentiment about baseball and the most fashionable tenet of our contemporary political culture, I coined the phrase, “as American as apple pie and the war on terrorism.” But the MoveOn political action committee, which is supporting war on terrorism opponent John Kerry’s run for the White House, is attempting to change the face of America, and in the process, restore the old similes used to characterize American identity in this election year.

That is, MoveOn.org is sponsoring bake sales across the country this Saturday in an effort to distinguish the fundraising tactics of the Democrats (little money raised the old-fashioned way) and those of Republicans (big money). Sure, there is something a bit humorous about this fundraising strategy. I’ll admit that it reminds me a bit of the kids in student council holding bake sales to raise money for various projects in middle school. But why did we quit holding bake sales once we came of a certain age and develop more “sophisticated” fundraising strategies? Many, whose parents would no longer do the baking for them, didn’t have the time or interest to learn how to become Betty Crocker. But I suspect that much of the reason we outgrow bake sales as a fundraising strategy is the minimal amount of profit compared to the amount of time it takes to bake and stand around selling our products. That being said, you’re probably thinking, “and that’s exactly why this is a waste of time for raising funds to help Kerry defeat an extremely well-funded Bush campaign …”

But I’m not sure that that is the case. When I received the email about the MoveOn Bake Sale yesterday afternoon, I skeptically checked to see if there were any bake sales in my area. There were none. I then checked again a few minutes later and 10 bake sales within 10 miles of my zip code had been organized. Some of them already had close to 40 volunteers for baking and selling. Some are scheduled for individuals’ homes; one is scheduled to be held at a local grocery store; another is scheduled to be held at one of the largest and most popular book stores in the city; and one is scheduled to be held at a popular restaurant. And there will likely be hundreds more like these held across the country. At the end of the day when the profits are totaled, I suspect that these bake sales will raise more than those we held in middle school. But even if they don’t, I don’t think fundraising itself is actually the point.

Rather the purpose seems to be to restore a spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship to Americans regardless of whether they’re CEOs or people who are just barely getting by in today’s economy. And in the process, the bake sales serve to forge a sense of local community among bake sale volunteers and like-minded customers at any given bake sale. And by scheduling these bake sales to occur on the same day across the country, this project unifies Americans committed to unseating Bush and alters the sense of hopelessness that many have in the face of the corporate stronghold on the political process. Is this a winning strategy? Only time will tell with regard to the presidential election. But as a strategy to bring communities together and change the face of America one apple pie at a time, it seems like a promising project.

On a related note, I encourage you to check out the National Women’s Law Center report on the setbacks to women’s rights in the U.S. during the past three-and-a-half years. You may be aware of some of the setbacks, but due to a dearth of media coverage on the subject, some of the findings just might blow your mind (as they did mine).

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“Diversity, like gout, is a rich people’s problem.”


A facile understanding of the meaning of diversity is troubling, as is the oversimplification of the issue of equality into a stark dichotomy of race and wealth.  

Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, declares in The New York Times that in their quest to increase the wealth of “cultural identities” in their student bodies, colleges and universities obscure the question of socio-economic diversity. Michaels claims:

Diversity, like gout, is a rich people’s problem. And it is also a rich people’s solution. For as long as we’re committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don’t have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated.

Michaels does make a valid point that socio-economic diversity is vital to creating a vibrant, fair, and stimulating educational environment. However, framing the issue of diversity in such stark and, if we were to believe Michaels, mutually exclusive terms — race or wealth — is abysmally unproductive. We — and certainly Michaels — must expand our understanding of what constitutes diversity without compromising our commitment to furthering, in concrete terms, the wealth of diversity in institutions of higher education. Absent of diversity — in its physical manifestations, its socio-economic context, and in diversity of opinion – even the best-intentioned education can only create a myopic world view that leaves students ill-equipped to respond to the needs of an increasingly multicultural society. Whittling down the concept of diversity to one of either race or socio-economic status is at best an anemic understanding of diversity.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

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“How will the Americans explain to the world the joint Shiite-Sunni intifada?”


The United States is now embroiled in an escalating hell of its own making; hundreds of Iraqi civilians are reported dead in Fallujah, the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council is apparently livid that it was not consulted by the United States prior to the U.S. program to “pacify” Fallujah, and President Bush and the Coalition Provisional Authority have created a united front of resistance against the US-led occupation.  
  
While it is unclear whether the current cease-fire will produce a peaceful agreement, it is evident that Paul Bremer and the CPA instigated a disastrously violent chain of events when the CPA temporarily shut down al-Hawzah, a weekly newspaper run by Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric in Iraq. In choking off a legitimate forum for political discourse by shutting down al-Hawzah, the CPA further angered, frustrated, and insulted a large number of Iraqis; frustration led to protests which, in turn, led to the current orgy of violence.  

Abdel Hady Abu Taleb, a journalist, demanded in Egypt’s state-owned Al-Akhbar newspaper, “How will the Americans explain to the world the joint Shiite-Sunni intifada?” How indeed will President Bush and the Coalition Provisional Authority explain to the world and to the families of the dead how the alleged victory in Iraq has disintegrated into an angry bloodbath? And what is to become of Iraq, given that President Bush is adamantly insisting on June 30 as the date on which the CPA will hand over power to a local Iraqi government?  

Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan and author of Sacred Space and Holy War, which examines the history of Shiite Islam in Iraq, Iran, and the Persian Gulf, stated on April 10, 2004:

This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast.

Muqtada al-Sadr’s Friday prayers sermon, read by one of his aids at the Great Mosque of Kufa, sounds both increasingly prescient and like a clearly articulated battle-cry:

“I direct my words at my enemy, Bush … If your justification for the war on Iraq was Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, then these issues are past, and you are now making war on the entire Iraqi people. I advise you to withdraw immediately from Iraq, otherwise you will lose the elections for which you are now campaigning, and you will lose your own people, and other peoples, as well … America is not confronting a popular resistance, but rather a genuine revolution.”

President Bush and the CPA, though lethally allergic to the idea of an Islamic society, need to reconsider what the new Iraq will look like, and they must reconcile themselves to the fact that it may be clerics — unlike the secular Baathist regime — who become the leading voices in a new Iraq.  

—Mimi Hanaoka

  

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