I Was Wrong Being “Right”

Danny Rangel

The moose looked at me like he might just want to devour my face. He wandered about, sniffing at the grass, staring at cars, ignoring the Dartmouth students crowding around—most of them, anyway. He kept glancing back in my direction, seemingly debating which of my limbs would be the most delicious. I kept my distance—this giant beast of a thing looked like it could do some damage—but the students smiled and giggled and laughed at the moose, searching for signs of a possible (and deadly) charge at the crowd. But the moose just sauntered about, paying attention to no one, lost in its own lack of concern, the kind of confidence brought about by years of being the baddest motherfucker in the New Hampshire wilderness.

I was thus introduced to Hanover, the pinnacle of civilization, the place where a moose can so casually take up space between the East Wheelock residential cluster and the gym. During my first two years at Dartmouth, I can’t quite say I was as comfortable in Hanover as the giant moose.

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ick Cheney was absolutely certain we were all going to die. Everybody. The terrorists were out there and ready to smother sleeping American babies, drown puppies in swimming pools, and burn every slice of apple pie in sight. America was going to die. Unless… unless we took it to the terrorists, made sure they got the message not to fuck with Liberty and Justice. And how did Dick Cheney think all this would happen? Well, we’d get Congress to grant the President unlimited war powers, invade Muslim countries across the Middle East, and torture the shit out of anyone unlucky enough to get captured.

After September 11, 2001, the world changed for Vice President Cheney. Terror plots seemed to spring from all directions—raw intelligence screamed out, ‘SECOND WAVE OF ATTACKS IMMINENT, WAKE THE FUCK UP!!!’ The National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department and the Office of the Vice President all drew up extensive doomsday scenarios in case terrorists launched chemical, biological or nuclear attacks.

When this was complete, Dick Cheney plotted in the dark expanses of his various “undisclosed locations.” As described in Jane Meyer’s thorough account of post 9/11 paranoia, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, national security became the paramount issue inside the Bush White House, trumping human rights and international law.

“Fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools,” said one former administration official, alluding to the abuses undertaken by the Bush administration to curb civil rights. By Mayer’s account, the White House undertook a comprehensive approach to screwing people out of their rights. “Whatever it takes” was a common slogan inside the White House Situation Room, where the President received the latest updates on terror operations at home and abroad.

President Bush said “whatever it takes,” and let loose the dogs of war. In the aftermath of the largest terrorist attack in American history, “the gloves came off,” said an intelligence official, referring to America’s new anti-terror approach. After 9/11, our government was more than willing to find Arabs, any Arab really, and make them pay for what the extremists in their culture had done.

And thus, the path was set for extraordinary rendition, prisoner abuse, outright torture and deliberate assassination of terror suspects, all under the auspices of protecting our country, our citizens and our interests at home and abroad.

Granted, the fear so pervasive within the citizenry of the United States was driving all of us towards a feverish dread of an impending attack. Remember terrorist poison pens? Those false alarms about biological attacks at Wal-Mart? Those concerned citizens of Harrison, Mississippi who were SURE the terrorists were specifically concerned with destroying their shitty little society? We were all pissing ourselves, that was for sure.

The problem is, even if a majority of the populace thirsted for blood and begged our government to eliminate every Arab at any cost, it may have been a good idea for the President and the entire government not to listen to us. It’s the responsibility of the government to, well, be responsible; to think logically when the populace has become a mad rabble. But President Bush and Vice President Cheney were more than willing to work “in the shadows” as Cheney suggested a few days after the attacks.

Unfortunately for all of us, that’s exactly what they did.

s the seas churned and the waves crested over the bow, spitting drops of saltwater across the deck, a man leaned over the railing as the ship split the ocean in front of him. The man drew deep breath, and the wind and the push of metal upon water made the air porous with the smell of salt. The sun bore down on the tiny vessel in the massive expanse of the Gulf of Aden, just north from the Horn of Africa. The sea drifted away in every direction, and the horizon settled in its cradle to the north, the south, the east and the west.

The horn blew. The man hesitated as he heard it, its long ring echoing through the sheets of metal lying on the deck. When it was over, the metal shook from the shock of it, and the man’s ears rung as he retrieved his rifle from the deck and made his way to the captain’s quarters. The thump of his boots on the deck grew fainter as he marched, and the gusts of wind grew more powerful with each step. The ship was moving faster. Already the waves were crashing against the hull with greater ferocity and more strength then they had a moment ago, already the ship rocked more violently as it pummeled the ocean surface with its ponderous weight.

The man imagined the ocean as a black coffin—the same churning ocean so beautiful amidst the streaming light of midsummer’s afternoon could just as easily consume a man in its moonless shadow. There was no predicting, only anticipation of the worst. My family is somewhere out there, he thought, wrecked and ruined amidst the tatters of a sunken freighter. My brother, my father, my mother, eclipsed by that blackness, lost in some ocean trench. And now I’m one of them—I’ve become my family’s murderers.

But choice was not the issue, was it? I had no choice. They came with their rifles and their smiles and their plots and their murderous rage. Could I have stopped them? No. They would have killed me too. And if I don’t pick up this rifle they will slit my throat. And if I do not follow the horn’s instructions they will strangle me in my sleep. And if I launch myself overboard, it will all be for naught. Watching my family die…at least they knew I would live. But what good is this life if I send more to their doom. What good is life if I save no one from this wretched fate?

Now the captain’s quarters was closer and closer still, and as the man approached the steel outline of the hatch, the door flew open. The stench of rotted fish enveloped the man for a brief moment. He stiffened and coughed and rubbed his eyes and stung and cursed. A dark whiskered face stared. Cigarette smoke permeated the room, and through the cloud of ash the man could see the captain watching over him, his newest recruit. The man hesitated. At first he thought he was alone with the captain, whose piercing eyes never left him as he scrambled into his quarters and sat on a metallic chest that lay in the middle of the room.

The men appeared around him, drifting through the smoke, drifting into the smoke. Men with charred faces, men with scarred and torn faces. Some smiled, as jackals do. Others grimaced and scowled, as thieves do. Their withered decency were displayed for all to see—the man was hardly blind to the banality of this kind of evil. Yet some looked far-off; some looked distant and grey. It was not excitement or fear or anticipation that dogged their mind. They were simply…withdrawn. Withdrawn from the cares and the worldly enterprises of the world. None of that would suffice now. Treasure was the operative word here, the image hounding at each man with a relentlessness not unlike the slits of pain a deep, longing hunger brings upon the mind and the body.

The captain stared.

“Who is this rat, who is this…maggot?” the Captain asked.

“He is the child, of course.” Someone said.

“The child?”

“From Bari. From the last port.”

“This is the man from Bari?”

“Yes.”

“He is a rat.”

The captain looked at the man as he shivered at his powerful gaze. The man looked away, trying not to catch the captain’s pale eyes, but to no avail.

“You are a rat, no?” the Captain asked.

“Sir?”

“You are a maggot, are you not? Are you a rat or are you not?”

“Captain—”

“Because a rat scampers away at the first sign of danger. Now, you wouldn’t want to be a rat. Not in my army.”

“No sir.”

“Well, that settles nothing. You are a child, you will be trained.”

“I am not a child. I wish to go home.”

“You are a child in the way you look like a man but know nothing of being one. We’ve taken you now. There is no home. Do you understand?”

The man said nothing.

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

“Yes, Captain.”

The captain broke his gaze from the man and reached behind him to close the hatch. The door slammed with a thunder that resonated throughout the room. It was enough to make the man jump. The other men observed this and laughed to themselves. The captain remained silent. It was only when the captain shot his men a look did silence capture the room. And then the man could hear it. At first it was as if the ship was aching, as if the years of misuse and mistreatment had taken the form of a chronic, degenerative illness of pain and torment. The man stopped and strained his senses. Crying. Not crying by any measure of a man crying. Crying…a child crying. Wailing, weeping, crying. Was it a child? Could it be a child? Here?

The captain grinned. He drifted into the smoke and disappeared, and the crying pierced through the room like the deafening horn had pierced his senses just a few moments ago. The wailing only grew louder, closer.

“He is American, do you see?” said the captain, but the man could only see the yellow grin and the pale eyes through the smokescreen. The man said nothing. The captain approached, and with him, nestled in a canary blanket, was a child not quite two months old, helpless and forlorn. The captain eyed it steadily, and then cast his furious gaze back at the recruit.

“Do you see?” the captain asked.

“Yes.”

“He is American. Do you see?”

There was nothing to tell where the child was from; only its pale skin betrayed its Western origins. But the man understood what they were to do with Americans. The Americans had declared war on the people in this room, and the vendetta had been returned in kind. The Americans had slaughtered their brothers in arms, and the captain and the crew thirsted for vengeance. Every American they found would die. Every American they found…would die.

“We do not know where this child is from, captain,” the man said.

“It does not matter where you think it’s from, rat.”

“We don’t know Captain.”

“He is American, Mr. Rat. HA. That’s what I will call you now, very respectful don’t you think? Don’t you think you need respect? Do you think this thing needs respect?”

The Captain laughed as he unraveled the child and held it out with one palm of his leathered, calloused hand. The child screamed—squealing in terror and pain and trembling fright.

“Throw it overboard, Mr. Rat. Do it now.”

“Captain—“

“Do it now or I’ll gut you right here and throw you in with him,” the Captain threatened, his yellow grin growing wider until it nearly foamed in anticipation.

“Throw it overboard, Mr. Rat.”

The men in the room said nothing.

“We are thieves, not murderers. The Americans and the French have killed. We do not kill. Not children.”

“There is no decency for pirates, Mr. Rat. We kill.”

“There is decency for children, Captain.”

The Captain looked back at his men. The chil
d was wrapped up once more, and the Captain laid it down on the chest. His back turned, he now began to walk away. It was over.

“Throw them both overboard. Make sure of it,” the Captain said.

And as the mist and the smoke swallowed the captain once again, the crew slowly descended upon him. They took their time. And as the shadows grew and the light turned into night and back into the cold, dark blackness of the churning ocean, the man whisked the child into his arms and waited…and waited still…for the sea would swallow two more souls tonight, two more souls churning in this dreadful of nights.

here’s something about watching a small bird sliced in half onstage that makes a play particularly compelling. In the case of Miss Julie—the Dartmouth Theater Department’s student production of the classic August Strindberg play—the winning potion includes a band of merry and musically inclined servants, a repugnant and bird-killing valet, and a maniacal and suicidal young lady of the house.

Miss Julie, an‘88 play by Swedish playwright August Strindberg, confronts issues of power in’th century aristocratic society. The title character, played by Sarah Laeuchli ’11, has a particularly awful relationship with her father’s valet, Jean, played by Harrison Davies ’09. Jean, an ambitious and particularly well-read, well-spoken servant, desperately wants to elevate his status in life.

Miss Julie, the emotionally unstable, borderline psychotic daughter of Jean’s employer, seeks enjoyment in life in order to eclipse the emotional trauma of her family’s tumultuous and unfortunate history. Ultimately, this is not a great idea. As Miss Julie and Jean spar, their relationship takes a sharp turn. An assertive male, unconcerned with aristocratic decorum, Jean slowly but surely picks apart Miss Julie’s vulnerabilities, manipulating her, insulting her and driving her closer and closer to insanity.

This show is not a comedy. If the audience laughs, it is not out of comedic pleasure, but rather in reaction to the shockingly abrasive behavior by Jean, who has mastered the art of douchebaggery (in fact, the audience quickly comes to the conclusion that this man is the biggest douchebag in the long, long history of douchebags). But don’t be deterred—the play draws its audience into the insular world of aristocratic’th century Sweden, following Miss Julie and her lover through the entirety of one single, fiery, crackling, emotionally powerful night.We wait, throughout, with almost morbid anticipation for a bitter end sure to come.

These two characters offer us a paradoxical relationship defined by its inevitable, almost elegant connection. On the surface, Miss Julie and Jean come together out of a lust neither can resist. Yet thanks to the artful subtlety of David Mavricos’s direction, we see two distinct social castes battling for control. Revulsion and irresistible attraction existbetween these characters, creating one of the most tortured relationships this reviewer has ever seen on stage. Both Miss Julie and Jean are deeply intrigued by the other’s lifestyle, yet utterly repelled by each other.

The performances are stellar, especially Laeuchli’s, whose character’s slow, winding shift toward madness confirms yet another paradox—this one played out among the audience. We find Miss Julie both compelling and repulsive, jocular yet supercilious. We laugh at her amusing pomposity and grimace at her increasingly caustic attacks.

This play is Strindberg through and through—fundamentally rooted in Naturalism, an uncompromisingly realistic approach to performance and theater. Knowing this, Dartmouth’s production of Miss Julie provides a series of powerful performances, a collection of masterful design elements, and a profound lesson in the perils of lust, rage, and the unfortunate nature of whatever it is that drives someone to so casually butcher a delightfully petite bird in front of us. Excellent.

Miss Julie will be performed May 8th at 8pm and May 9th at 2pm in the Bentley Theater. Do it.

n April 24, a woman walked up to a crowd of Iranian pilgrims on a street leading to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kadhim, Baghdad’s most revered Shiite holy site. The woman headed straight towards the Iranians and detonated the explosives strapped to her body, taking the lives of over two dozen people with her. Five minutes later, a man who walked into the aftermath did the same, killing another two dozen people with a round of explosives. The wounded totaled over 120. The confirmed dead: 60.

There were over 20 major attacks in Iraq during the month of April. A coalition of Sunni terrorist groups is largely responsible for the recent surge of violence in Iraq. Their goal: to upset whatever relative calm has settled over Iraq by staging more and more spectacular attacks in supposedly secured areas of the country. In Mosul, their present staging ground in the north of Iraq, the insurgents have done everything in their power to hold on to the last terrorist foothold in the country.

Meanwhile, the headlines have featured everything but Iraq. In mid-April, that Scottish singer on Britain’s Got Talent took the media spotlight away from… Obama’s new puppy. Meanwhile, the deadly string of attacks remained relatively ignored. What is it about these attacks that seem to dive under the radar back home? Are people beginning to forget that we’re in two simultaneous campaigns—two ongoing, seemingly never-ending conflicts to which we have committed billions of dollars of American treasure along with the lives and safety of over a million soldiers and American civilians? In Iraq, there are just as many Americans in danger as have been for the duration of the war. Have we forgotten?

One veteran is sure of it. “It’s easy to see the progression of thought,” remarked Oakland, California native Neil Smithe, a veteran of the war in Iraq and a participant in the second battle of Fallujah in the fall of 2004. “The war starts. Everyone gets excited and patriotic and all that. Then it starts to get a little bad. Then it gets really bad. Headlines, headlines everywhere, protest groups, whatever. Then comes the surge and the slow steady decline of violence. Then, all of a sudden, people stopped listening. Not all of them, no. But a lot.” Asked about the lack of attention on Iraq and Afghanistan, Smithe responds, “It affects me personally because I still know some guys over there. They haven’t forgotten any part of it, no matter how ‘calm’ people say it’s been. Violence is up in Afghanistan, remember? People need to wake up.”

The media has also failed to fulfill their responsibility to informing the public about Iraq. The nightly news programs on major networks offer little to no coverage of the war—not anymore, at least. The 24-hour news channels are more concerned with reporting the size of Michelle Obama’s biceps, Meghan McCain’s feud with Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin’s various unimportant and uninteresting breaches of state ethics laws. While the reporting done by the Baghdad Bureaus of the New York Times and the Washington Post are reliable, a story about Iraq hardly ever hits the front page. Are there bigger stories out there? Sure. Are there more sensational headlines available? Of course. But when two hundred Iraqi civilians and almost twenty American soldiers and sailors die in that faraway front line, the blip on the national radar shouldn’t be so miniscule, so seemingly unimportant to the top brass of Big Media. It should not just barely register in the national consciousness.

Almost a week after the bombing at the Musa al-Kadhim shrine, the United Kingdom made the final decision to get the hell out of Dodge. Six years of British combat operations in Iraq ended on April 30 and the multinational forces in Iraq shrunk by one more country. In fact, despite being labeled a “coalition,” the forces that invaded Iraq in March 2003 were made up overwhelmingly of American and British soldiers.

Now, six years later, we’re officially dissolving the partnership between the United Kingdom and the United States in this forever-disappointing conflict. Unfortunately, even as the British wrapped up and pulled out of Basra, their last outpost in the southern end of Iraq, the story of this rather important development was buried deep into the world news section of the New York Times. In many other media outlets, it was mentioned briskly, if at all.

Mauricio Jovel, a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and a native of Echo Park, California, puts the situation bluntly. “I look at civilians when I come back home and it’s hard not to judge them. I mean, I used to be a civilian, I used to walk around without all the knowledge. But we’ve got a million guys [in Iraq and Afghanistan] and nobody seems to remember anymore. We shut down all the insanity that happened in 2006, but the levels of violence are still high. The war’s not over, but people are acting like it is. I served, I did my duty, but not so that people back here can just forget about the guys I said goodbye to who are doing another tour. That kind of ignorance is not something I really anticipated, but I have to tell you, I’m not really shocked.”

As of May 1, the United States Department of Defense confirmed the death of another American service member in Iraq, bringing the total to 4,273 confirmed deaths since the invasion. Petty Officer Tyler J. Trahan of East Freetown Massachusetts is, as of this writing, the latest American serviceman to be killed in Iraq. Unfortunately, he most assuredly will not be the last. Although the Defense Department has not released their names and have thus not affected the official count of the war dead, three American servicemen were killed in Iraq on May 1st.

With the departure of President Wright at the end of the school year, we risk losing a great reminder of what veterans have done for us over the years and what they will continue to do for us in the future. A former Marine and a vigorous activist for people who wear the uniform, Wright has spent a significant amount of his tenure reminding the students of Dartmouth about sacrifices young people have made for this country and for its citizens. Wright has also reminded us of the contributions these young people have made as students at this campus and at other colleges across the country. So many aspects of Wright’s tenure will be missed, but this will be one of the most important of them.

With the economy in a tailspin and the relative success of new strategies in Iraq, the seemingly willful ignorance permeating the halls of this campus and the rest of the country almost make sense. Almost. Seniors are having a terrible time looking for jobs, and of course this is a priority. All around the country, people are losing their livelihoods and their savings. But in Iraq and in Afghanistan, the men and women who volunteered to serve so far away from home face dangers far beyond our looming post-graduation plans. “We forget about it,” Smithe continues. “We forget about it and we don’t even notice. Everyone’s got problems, that’s not supernatural, that’s a fact. It makes sense, if you’re looking for a job, you’re not going to be thinking about much else. But we’re in a real war, whether you want to believe it or not. And as much as it looks like it’s getting better at one end, there’s a leak that’s springing up at the other.”

But with so many of the veterans I’ve spoken to, no matter how hard their jobs are and no matter how many times they’ve cursed themselves about volunteering for this often lousy and ridiculously dangerous endeavor, at the end all they ask is that people not denounce, devalue or ignore what they’ve done.

That’s simple enough, isn’t it?

here’s nothing like an international financial crisis to spur a rich institution like Dartmouth to start pinching pennies in the most absurd ways. There’s no doubt that the economy is going through a blistering blitzkrieg of spiraling death. There’s no doubt that Dartmouth’s endowment went down the tubes and now the sophomores will have to sob quietly in a corner because the Hop and its Billy Bob Jr. will be suddenly unavailable this summer. Oh yeah, and seniors still won’t have jobs and will be sobbing themselves to sleep while shivering in their cardboard boxes in a few short months. Nevermind that despite the economic devastation, Dartmouth is still, you know, a multi-billion dollar institution that apparently has enough money to buy those new, stupid, overpriced cash registers at Food Court that don’t work as fast and are endlessly frustrating and slow and stupid and slow and super ridiculously expensive no doubt. And stupid.

In light of absurd decisions like these, it was endlessly confusing when the Office of Residential Life sent a letter to the Custodial and the Maintenance Staff this term, noting the following: “[The ORL office has] been receiving an increasing number of concerns from Community Directors that custodians are not submitting green slips for damage that is found, or for extraordinary clean ups. Some of you are very good about this, so this memo is intended to try to get everyone reporting under the same guidelines.” The implication here is clear: the Office of Residential Life would like to see custodians fine more students for more infractions. “Reporting damage is a job and a responsibility for you and is extremely important,” the letter goes on to say. Apparently, the administration felt something had to be done about the ongoing crisis of missing sofa cushions and overflowing trash bins.

How did the custodial staff react to this reminder to engage in its sacred damage-reporting duties? Not well. According to one of its members, who has asked to remain anonymous, “most ORL custodians do not wish to be manipulated by the ORL office in this manner, knowing that it is unfair to the majority of students, and prefer to keep on the good side of students living in their buildings.” The source goes on to say that “it appears that the ORL administration is trying to increase its billing of students to make up for the income lost due to the college budget cuts.” The ORL custodial staff is not happy with the administration thrusting the responsibility to increase revenue upon them, and has made as much clear. So why is ORL pursuing this change of policy?

It is a well-known fact that budget cuts have eliminated the jobs and the livelihoods of an increasingly large number of Dartmouth employees. The amount of money Dartmouth possesses has taken a nosedive, and this downturn has provoked the administration to suddenly search for less obvious forms of revenue enhancement: i.e. fining students more for the trivial and the ludicrous. As a result, students across campus have begun to notice an increased number of floor-wide or house-wide billings for damage or missing items. In Bildner Hall, students were billed $131.50 for a single missing spindle backed chair. Other pricy items include a $462 missing table, a $222 chair and other pieces of furniture that are also apparently worth their weight in gold. Trash cans seem to have become a collector’s item around campus recently, as many of these tantalizing luxury items have “gone missing,” prompting friendly reminders to pay exorbitant charges for replacements shortly after the abduction is reported.

The people forced to enforce these absurd charges are what’s important here, however. All in all, monetary penalties split between an entire house or dormitory floor do not have much of a financial impact on students (although the impact may feel much more real to some). We can certainly survive the administration’s clever new strategy to milk us for our evidently passionate desire to boost every trash can and pillow cushion we lay our hands on. But if nothing else, the response from the ORL custodial staff leaves little doubt of the discomfort created by the administration’s renewed request to inflict fines on the student populace. Given the wave of lay-offs that has hit Dartmouth’s employees, it seems a particularly unwise choice to go against the administration right now.

But the fact remains that the people the College has hired to do what so many of us would rather shove off to someone else, those people whose job it is to clean up after the chaos, disorder and complete mess that is a college student’s daily life, well, these are the people ORL’s policy is upsetting the most. What ORL has done is make the people who do the jobs so many of us have too much pride to consider doing pay a heavier price for cleaning up our trash and vomit. No custodian wants to get on the bad side of the students he or she regularly makes contact with, and no custodian wants to be pressured into finding trivial reasons to fine students. That’s all the new policy does, really—make custodians feel pressured into finding (or making up?) frivolous reasons to penalize students.

It should not be the responsibility of custodians to increase college revenue, especially during an economic downturn. Despite a supposedly “devastated” college endowment, vast inefficiencies continue to mar the daily operation of our college, from the workings of the dining halls (giant TV screens, anyone?) to the mismanagement of ORL, to the widespread waste and bloated budget of the Hanover Inn. In addition, as the college slices away jobs near the bottom of the pay scale, it continues to hold up the salaries of its highest earners. If a few members of the upper echelons of the administration were to take small pay cuts, we wouldn’t have to lay off so many people on the bottom rung—the people who have few alternatives once Dartmouth shutters them in the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed. Just a few dollars given up by the rich could do the poor so much good, but this is not something the administration is seriously considering.

Instead, the nature of the financial situation has compelled the powers that be at Dartmouth to dump unnecessary responsibilities into the hands of those who can least afford them. Is this really what is supposed to happen at a college that sells itself on openness and friendliness to people of all backgrounds? If the administration is serious about creating an environment in which students have the opportunity and education to reject outdated theories of classism, why is the College placing such a burden on those least deserving of it?

ight around the time a cast member jumped up and splashed into the onstage “stream,” well, that’s when I decided I’d never seen a show quite like the Dartmouth Theater Department’s production of The Grapes of Wrath. Then, a huge thunderstorm burst onto the stage, complete with booming thunder and crackling lightning. And before this, the audience saw a live band, a shanty “Hooverville” and a’30s jalopy of a car that spun around the stage holding the weight of close to a dozen cast members—all of it pretty overwhelming.

But the most striking part of this production of The Grapes of Wrath is its timeliness. The choice of The Grapes of Wrath was made about a year ago, and who would have thought the centerpiece of the Hopkins Center Class Divide Initiative would come amidst the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression?

So, when you sit down and watch the three-hour epic that is The Grapes of Wrath, not only do you appreciate the ridiculously impressive production values and the grand cast of familiar talents and newer, equally gifted thespians, you realize that this story truly resonates today, given the ongoing disaster that is the American and global economy.

Near the end of the show, Joe Kardon ’09, who plays Tom Joad—the unofficial leader of the Joad family—makes his famous speech about the overwhelming injustice he and his family have seen (“Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there…”). There’s something about that desperation, that frustration and quiet, barely-contained rage that strikes a familiar tone, if not a mirror image, of the kind of anger seeping into the American psyche in this renewed era of bailouts, selloffs, corporate corruption and massive exposure of greed.

Selfishness and greed bred the disaster we see now. The same was true in the’30s, although we are thankfully not quite near the gravity of that disaster. The Grapes of Wrath lets us return to the themes many of us learned from the original text: the amorphous nature of a corporate oppressor; the aimlessness and futility of the unemployed; the quiet desperation of the downtrodden and the forgotten. All over America people are wandering aimlessly yet again—when we hear about 100,000 jobs lost in a matter of days it actually means 100,000 people have just been stripped of their livelihood. What choice do they have? What choice did the Joads have?

Dartmouth’s production of The Grapes of Wrath gives us a clue as to what we as a campus must consistently explore. Stories about the marginalized members of society, especially when presented in such an exceptional production as this, need to be told, and told well. Peter Hackett, the director of The Grapes of Wrath, along with the production team and the entire cast deserve credit for giving us something that reminds us of what’s happening in America today, and what might happen if we do nothing to stop it.

woke up, and noticed my pants lying in a pile on the floor. Wait, those aren’t my pants. Size 27 waist? No way. Wait, there’s a pink shirt over there, way too small. What the hell? Then I remembered that I had that chick over last night. That girl who I thought was into me but just wanted to see a movie on my laptop. The one who I couldn’t even get to second base with because she’s “saving herself for marriage.” Goddamn, how did I get her naked? Where was she? Man, she was really hot for a kind of uptight fundamentalist Christian whatever. Did I tap that? No, I really don’t think so. That chick was mad uptight. So then why did she take off all her clothes and leave them here? Whoa, is that her underwear? What the fuck?

I couldn’t figure it out. So I picked up the phone and called my buddy Ryan. The phone rang for a beat. He picked up with a groan.

“What the fuck, man,” Ryan said. “It’s…Jesus, it’s not even noon. What the fuck are you calling me for?”

“Dude, did I hook up with that chick from last night?” I asked.

Ryan snorted.

“Wait, what? What?” I responded. “Did I not…?”

“Nah, man. Go back to sleep.”

“Wait a minute, how do you know?”

“Go back to sleep,” Ryan muttered. Then he hung up the phone.

What the hell was going on? God damn it, why did this kind of shit happen to me? Just me, always me, no one else woke up with a random girl’s clothes in their room and no memory of what happened. Now, if I could remember the sex, everything would have been perfectly fine. But this was fucked up. Maybe some people got into this kind of shit all the time, but not me. Not really.

So I got up and turned on the television. Strange—–there seemed to be a lot of news interruptions and those emergency broadcast system things they tested all the time but never actually used. Then I stopped. The television was set to CNN and Wolf Blitzer was…was he actually crying? I turned up the volume, and my jaw dropped as I heard the news.

I couldn’t quite believe it, but it all made sense now. I took a step outside and looked around. My hands were shaking. No, not with fear, with anticipation. With a burst of energy, I sprinted down my front lawn and dashed across the sidewalk and leapt over my neighbor’s white wooden fence. I made my way to the door and rang the buzzer incessantly. I waited. No answer. I looked through the window next to the door, the window that was partially blocked by a large sign saying simply: Jesus Shall Return. I hit the window pretty hard. Still no answer. Could it be? Were they gone? Their car was still in the driveway, the one with the bumper sticker reading: Jesus is God. Read the Bible. My gay-hating, Bible-thumping, Reagan deifying, fundamentalist Christian neighbors were gone! Holy shit, I could see the pile of clothes they had left behind! In the living room! That’s where it must have happened, that’s where they had been grabbed up and taken away! Man, Jesus must have taken that fundamentalist Christian girl I was talking to last night too. I fell asleep as she was talking about Jesus and it must have happened right after that. Oh man, I never get laid.

I started walking down the street, looking for the red bricks that lined the front of my Mormon neighbor’s house. I dashed across another front yard and rang the doorbell. The door actually opened. Jake, the patriarch of the little Christian family who lived here, lets me in.

“Hey, you’re still here, huh?” Jake asked as he held the door open.

“Wow,” I said, “I thought you’d be gone.”

“We did too,” Jake said, with a dead weight of disappointment.

“Do you think…?” I wondered aloud.

“I don’t know.”

“Your wife? Kids?”

“Still here.”

“Man, I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think…?”

“We voted Democrat last election.”

“All of you?”

“Those of us who could.”

“God doesn’t like that.”

“Nope.”

“That’s rough.”

“Yep.”

“I should go.”

“Yeah.”

With that, he closed the door. Shit man, I voted for Barack too. Was that why I wasn’t taken along with everyone else? I walked back home and switched on the TV again. Now it all made sense. People all over the world had disappeared, leaving their clothes and all the Godless people behind. But wait. Holy shit. HOLY SHIT. Bill O’Reilly was gone.! So was Rush Limbaugh, Tom Delay, James Dobson, Newt Gingrich, Lou Dobbs, and so, so many other assholes. OH MY GOD, THEY COULDN’T LOCATE GEORGE W. BUSH!!! They found a pile of clothes right next to some potato chips and a bottle of non-alcoholic beer! The entire Fox News reporting staff had been decimated! CNN took some losses, but MSNBC still had everybody except Joe Scarborough, who was an asshole anyway.

But somehow, somehow, the world still had doctors, lawyers, judges, government officials, and we still had Barack Obama, which I’m sure he was confused about but I wasn’t. Everyone knows God hates Democrats. There was no way we were going to go when the Rapture happened—I guess that wasn’t much of a surprise. In addition, it seemed that every scientist IN THE WORLD—with few exceptions—was still around, thank God for that. This Rapture thing may not be so bad, I thought. Only the people who made sense were still around. And people who made sense were cool.

My friend Ryan knocked on my door, and I let him in. We gave each other a look and said nothing. We smiled. We could both appreciate that the world had just gotten lighter, now that so many assholes (along with some good, decent people, I suppose) had just been taken away, far, far away. We would never have to listen to these douchebags again. We took a moment to appreciate the gravity of this, and then Ryan lay down on the couch, rested his head on his hands and smiled broadly.

“Okay, listen to this,” Ryan said. “One calm afternoon, a regular guy decides to switch on his television set and watch the news. So, CNN isn’t doing it for him, neither is local news. He wants to get angry, he’s in the mood for cursing. Sean Hannity appears, and the regular guy’s grimace does too. Hannity is doing a live show, and he’s counting down the days until the Republicans sweep the midterm elections, because if anyone can predict the future, it’s Sean Hannity. More talk about how Obama is raping America. More talk about how the terrorists are going to come and eat our children while they sleep. More talk about how Obama purportedly mutters praise be to Allah and death to America under his breath when no one is looking. Man, that was hitting the spot, I was getting quite pissed.”

“Not a surprise,” I said.

“Not at all, I suppose.” Ryan responded. “So…that’s when it happened.”

“What?” I asked.

“Hannity was in the middle of listing the reasons why Barack Obama is a closet terrorist. I was looking him right in the face as I took off my left shoe and prepared to chuck it at the TV, when Sean Hannity simply…disappeared. Well, that’s a weird trick I thought, why would they do that? Wait, Fox News didn’t do that, this is a live show. Holy SHIT! Did Sean Hannity learn how to teleport himself? No, that can’t be. Did the shoe I threw across the room do it? Had I thrown it that hard? No. Then what the hell? The fellow Hannity had been talking to was still there, looking around quizzically.”

“That sounds like a shit show,” I said.

“Yeah, this guy is freaking the fuck out. Where’s Sean? Where̵
7;d he go? Holy shit I’m going to shit my pants, where is SEAN HANNITY? Then they noticed that all the other anchors had disappeared. Jesus had come and taken them too.”

And that’s when we decided we’d really be all right. If Sean Hannity was gone, we’d be all right. And then we pulled some beers out of the fridge and microwaved some popcorn and pulled out the chips and salsa and sat and listened to the TV as they listed the names of every Republican member of Congress who’d been taken in the Rapture.

The Democrats have a complete, 100% majority, and we’re going to have national healthcare now.

Thank God.

uddling against strangers in the cold, we stood by the Washington Monument, perched on a mound from which we could see over the heads of the two million people filling the National Mall. Suddenly, a middle-aged black woman split the crowd in front of me, yelled “OBAMA!!!” at the top of her lungs, and lifted me off the ground in a giant bear hug. She let me down after a while, leaving me standing in shock—I’d always assumed strangers were not supposed to spontaneously embrace and lift you off the ground. But this was a different place, where strangers could be your friends in an instant, where everything teemed with excitement and everyone—everyone—seemed so happy. This was Washington D.C. during Inauguration 2009, and the entire city was filled to capacity with those who’d waited so long and traveled so far to be able to see Barack Obama sworn in as President.

It’s not too often that you can get a liberal, a real liberal, to be completely content. There’s always something that’s bothering him, something wrong in the world, some cause that has yet to be fully supported, some war in Africa no one seems to be paying attention to. Liberals are constantly searching for another Nixon to bring down, another Wall Street banker to indict, another bureaucracy to bloat. Why? Because we believe our government should be an active government; the power invested collectively in our leaders means they should actually do something with it, something that matters, something that changes people’s lives for the better. And when people in the upper echelons of society seem to be exploiting those below them, we spring up like madmen, raging and protesting and demanding change. We do all this, because ultimately we believe that there are things out there in the world that are very wrong, and that good government can do something about it. We want our government to expose corruption, to right the wrongs and to make things fair and unbiased. We are increasingly bitter when government fails us, or when government is made out to be a culprit and not a tool for bettering people’s lives.

But there was absolutely nothing to be bitter about at President Obama’s Inauguration. It was a liberal’s dream. Washington D.C. was the happiest place in the world; nowhere else in the world had such a monopoly on excited people. One man paced the crowd, punching his fist in the air above him as he yelled: “Yeah, Bush is getting his eviction notice TODAY!” Boy Scouts roamed through the crowd, handing out American flags and chanting, “Yes we can.” An elderly black man in a wheelchair wasn’t going to see a thing, but he just wanted to be there, cradling an American flag in one hand and grinning up at the sky. Every once in a while the giant TVs across the stretch of the Mall would briefly cut to a shot of Obama, and everyone would start to hoot and holler like maniacs. It was crowded, cold, cramped, and exhausting, but everyone everywhere would spontaneously smile when you shot them a look. On the metro, waiting in line for the entrance to the Mall, standing in the cold waiting for Obama’s speech, on the street, sitting in trees, sitting on top of Port-o-Potties trying to get a view of the Capitol Building—everywhere there were people smiling, just happy to be a part of this massive undertaking.

On the Metro, waiting an hour to get to Union Station, Carol Weingarten, a native of Brooklyn, New York, reflected on everything that had led up to January 20, 2009. “It doesn’t really seem real, what happened,” she said as she unsuccessfully tried to make space for even more incoming passengers. “These were eight long years, and for young people it seems like this has always been like this. But look around, look at all these people! Something is really happening, isn’t it; you can really feel it. Maybe it’s not real, maybe it’s just temporary, but we’re all pretty excited aren’t we? Well, we will be if we ever get off this train, right?”

“I came to give the guy my support, yeah,” said Anthony Holmes, a resident of Charleston, South Carolina and father of two. Anthony looked down at one of his sons and said he didn’t really mind his complaints about cold and cramped conditions because, “you’re gonna remember this for the rest of your life, boy, and I want you to remember the cold, all right? I want you to remember all these people, that way you’ll carry it with you. We went through all this madness so you could see this, so yeah, remember it all buddy.” The boy looked petulant and somewhat embarrassed, but it was pretty hard not to see how this little guy was going to remember all right, he was going to remember all this madness, even if he hated it. That’s something.

Through the mobs of people walking in the middle of the highway, through the hordes of cops and Secret Service and National Guard and serious-looking but unidentifiable well-dressed men carrying sub-machine guns under their suit jackets—through all of this we traveled, getting to our little corner of the audience, a few people amongst millions. The barricades almost kept us out; they’d shut down the last entrance to the Mall, but we managed to find an opening between two lines of policemen and did our best to hurl ourselves over a rather large concrete barrier. Though the scramble over the wall had its difficulties, we made it through. Thus, we stood there, my knuckles raw and my knee throbbing with pain but still miraculously, unbelievably…there. I thought I was going to fall asleep standing up. Wait, it was way too cold to fall asleep. It’s too early in the morning for this, I thought. Way too early. So many people. So many people.

“How far did you go to get here son?” an older man with massive bifocals asked me as I did my best not to fall flat on the floor with exhaustion. I told him about the 7 hour train ride. The train ride that got to Union Station an hour before Obama’s train arrived. I told him about being in Union Station when the president-elect got there. I told him about the spontaneous pandemonium that ensued when everyone realized he was HERE. Like some God descended from the heavens, people scrambled all across the station just to get a look, a glimpse, just anything so they could come home and say yes, I saw him, he was right there, he was right THERE. I told this stranger all this, and he smiled and nodded and laughed. He was from Wisconsin and his name was Peter Grenier. He’d come with his wife and child, and he was nice enough to give me a bottle of orange juice and a protein bar when I said I’d skipped breakfast that morning. “This should keep you from falling over,” he said. “I was a little worried about you there.”

I was awake by the time an announcer blared out an introduction for “the Honorable George Walker Bush.” And there he was, walking out as if everything was all right, like all these people were there for him. They were not. The crowd looked up and saw him, and suddenly, an automatic “BOO” traveled up and down the National Mall from the voices of almost two million people. I hesitated for a moment, feeling a little sympathy for this man that had done the country so much wrong. It must be tough to have that many people so clearly express their great dislike of you. But then I shrugged and I belted the loudest “BOOOOOO” I could muster. It felt pretty good.

As we waited in the cold for the final event, the swearing-in and the big speech, I noticed something incredible. To my left was a little boy, looming above eye-level. I was surprised briefly that he was invading my personal space and I hadn’t noticed. Well, everyone was invading my personal space, but this little boy especially. He could see over me because he sat on his father’s shoulders. He seemed pretty nervous,
concerned that he might fall, maybe because his father was bouncing up and down, trying to get a smile out of him but apparently producing the opposite effect.

The father and his son were both black, and as the father stopped bouncing, the son could look out over the crowd without concern of falling down. There was something that spoke to me as the kid looked towards the Capitol Building where Barack Obama would become the first black president in United States history. His curiosity was so stark, and I bet he couldn’t figure out what had brought so many people together. It occurred to me that this little boy would grow up to know a world where a black president was taken for granted. It would no longer be an impossible ceiling to break through—quite the opposite. It wouldn’t even come as a surprise. Of course a black man can become president, he’ll say. It’s silly to think anything else. And there it was right there, the most important part of that whole day. Not the crowds, not the cold, not even the actual ceremony at all. It’s the memory of this day and this place that will reach beyond any of us. And for that little boy, it’ll be the first of memories.

Barack Obama is only a man, and he will make mistakes. He will fail, and he might just fail all of us. But not this day. This day we simply wait for him. And when the deed is done and his words boom and finally fade across the city, we’ll go home and talk and write and think about this day, with comfort. And that iconic infectious, Inauguration Day 2009 smile will creep in yet again, and we’ll remember.

e have just elected the most liberal president in decades. The left wing of the Democratic Party should be ecstatic, and for the most part, we are. After all, we won. These past couple of years, we haven’t been able to say “we won” a whole lot. Sounds real nice, but what does it mean if the things we’d thought we’d won, the ideas we thought would be prioritized simply… faded away? What if students across the country fought so hard and so long to be able to get a real liberal in the White House only to witness a new spirit of moderation? Where did this suddenly prudent “moderate” approach come from? Obama ran a progressive campaign. He beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries through the strength of his most liberal supporters. So now why is Obama’s agenda getting pushed to the right? We won, didn’t we?

It certainly seemed that way on election night. People were so happy, especially the Dartmouth students who came out in droves and paraded their sweet, sweet joy across campus. It felt like we’d finally gotten one of our own, someone who really cared about young people, and especially—it seemed—young liberals. We were his best friends, we were on his speed dial, the works. The moderates who voted for Hillary were on the shit list. This was supposed to be our guy. This time, we’d truly been given the best possible leader in Barack Obama, someone truly galvanizing.

So why does it seem as if our incoming president is shedding a liberal approach to national policy? Robert Gates, Bush’s Defense Secretary is going to stick around. Hillary Clinton will oversee a large portion of our foreign policy. James Jones, another moderate, will be the new National Security Advisor. Timothy Geithner, the new Treasury Secretary, isn’t exactly a shining light for liberal economic policy. Most of all, throughout the process of announcing these cabinet appointments, Obama seems to be watering down the liberalism he promised us. Israel’s kicking the crap out of Gaza? Obama: Fuck it, that’s okay. Rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Republicans? Obama: Yeah, about that…we’re gonna put that on the shelf.

What’s this talk about moderation all about anyway? Damn it, George W. Bush was elected twice with nowhere close to Obama’s margin of victory and yet he governed mostly from the far right. Remember that? How come we can’t do that? Why can’t we come in, establish that the other guy has lost, and let them sit on the bench for the next four years? Logically, if the Republicans were nice enough to follow an election of such razor thin margins as the 2000 election with a blatant neoconservative turn of policy, why can’t a liberal president turn to the core of liberalism after an election that wasn’t even close?

Like any political issue of the day, opinions vary. “I think that President-Elect Obama understands that while America has chosen a new direction by voting for him, he also knows that, fundamentally, America is a centrist nation,” says College Democrats President David Imamura ‘09. “The Obama of Audacity of Hope is very much a man of moderation. Thus, while Obama is certainly the most progressive president we’ve had in awhile, his ‘move to the center,’ was not unexpected.”

Granted, the move to the center could have easily been anticipated. Every Democrat elected since Lyndon Johnson (a grand total of two) has tried to govern from the center, sometimes with a pretty obvious tilt to the right by President Bill Clinton. From what we can remember really, this type of moderation gave us welfare “reform,” the wonderful plan to kick those deadbeats off welfare and get them to work. Instead, poor single mothers were hurt the most. Also, that moderate foreign policy of the’90s didn’t really accomplish anything really memorable. We remember the foreign disasters that happened during that time, but not the foreign policy. This leads us to the question: Does a centrist policy actually lead to success?

“I don’t think Democrats do a whole lot when they try and be centrist,” Daniel Montes ’09 answers. “Sure it’s more politically viable. Bill Clinton was relatively successful because he tried not to rock either side of the boat, but ultimately what did we really get out of it? Maybe we should just put our ass out there and see what happens. If we get kicked in the balls and hit the floor hard and fast, at least we’ll know we have a pair.”

The problem with centrism is that it’s not bold enough. The most successful presidents are remembered for their bold, yet wise decisions. The words and policies of John F. Kennedy, FDR, and even Ronald Reagan aren’t exactly remembered as centrist. So is moving to the center really a recipe for success? We understand that Obama wants to bring everyone together in a union of centrist hope, but the “change” part of his mantra doesn’t exactly conform to this.

“Culturally speaking, I think we certainly live in a conservative country,” says Nathan Empsall ’09. “We like our traditions and our cookie-cutter families. Politically speaking, I don’t think we live in an easily labeled society. Voters don’t look for specific ideologies; they look for visionary leadership. They found it in FDR and Reagan; they didn’t find it in Hoover or Carter. Hopefully they will also find it in Obama, whose masterful campaign rhetoric gives him a solid head start.”

Visionary leadership is what it’s all about. From what we can gather, visionary leadership needs a little “vision” to get started, and the whole idea behind a “vision” in the frame of politics is the ability to organize a new and coherent plan on how to lead. If the new vision of an incoming Democratic administration consists of scaling back on the kind of change the country has desperately called out for, the vision will fail. If we wanted a centrist, a real centrist, we would have voted for John McCain. McCain, beyond his persona as a candidate, was near the political center, certainly much more so than many other Republicans. Despite all his calls for securing the border first, he couldn’t give a damn. Abortion? He wasn’t going to do anything to stop it. Sarah Palin? Man, does he regret having to placate the lousy conservative base that fucked him over in 2000, when he actually could have beaten his Democratic opponent.

But can you really say that Obama is authentically centrist? Nothing about him really points to the center of the political spectrum. Sure, he’s got a record of success after success in his attempts to unify people on opposite ends of liberal-conservative divide. From the Harvard Law Review to the United States Senate, Obama has a track record of being a dealmaker. But is the man who goes home every day a moderate? Unlikely. Despite what he says, Obama surely would like to legalize gay marriages everywhere. He’d like to tell Israel that not everything they do to the Arabs is God’s chosen path. He’d love to tell Dick Cheney to go fuck himself. Everything we’d like to scream at Bush’s face, I bet he wouldn’t mind saying. The guy’s a liberal, through and through, so why does he have to pretend he’s not?

Reid Albano, a junior at Berkeley, puts it best. “Young people were energized, that’s for sure. People were bouncing off the walls and having convulsions of Obama fever and all that. Just crazy, idiot hero worship,” Albano said. “Now look at them, so much of what they were told is not going to happen, and they’re going to be waiting by their mailboxes for all that hope and that change because it’s going to take a while to deliver on that. But Obama’s 100% liberal, no question about that. Maybe the most liberal guy they&#
8217;ve had since Johnson. Too bad he can’t act on all that. But hey, we’ll all find out, won’t we?”