THE MASTHEAD
Editor-in-Chief: Paul Lintilhac
Publisher: Ted Wojcik
Executive Editor: Zack De

Two nude men are featured in this three-panel photograph, entitled Daybooks (2009). Photo courtesy of David Hilliard.

David Hilliard is the current Artist in Residence here at Dartmouth, creating photographic polyptychs: multi-paneled art praising ordinary life. Hilliard grew up in rural Massachusetts, and now creates photographs that are detached and isolated, much like the landscape of New England, from which he draws inspiration. This week, I got the chance to sit down with Hilliard and ask him a few questions about his recent exhibition, Highway of Thought, which was on display in the Hop a couple of weeks ago.

DFP: So your exhibition is called Highway of Thought, which I found it to be an aptly named collection. How did you come up with the concept of Highway of Thought, and how did you end up naming it that?

DH: Well it’s named after one of the pieces in the show, which is a portrait of my father’s—I call it his journal, but it’s not really his journal—it’s a book of quotations that he keeps. My father’s a kind of atheistic historian, so there are different quotes and Highway of Thought came from one particular quote in that journal. The photograph is my father’s book open with this beautiful penmanship. He has this incredible handwriting that he tries to perfect. And then on either side—it’s a four-panel photograph—on either side are just his big hands, which are working class hands. My father was a factory worker, never went to college, but is enlightened and self-taught, so I was interested in this kind of juxtaposition of those hands that seemingly couldn’t have written those words. I like that disconnect between the two, and that’s where the title came from.

But in general, the exhibition, which I think is 15 photographs, is a kind of overview. It was an opportunity coming here to Dartmouth for me to look back at my work and choose a series of pictures that show different ways in which I create pictures formally, that touch upon different themes in my work.

But Highway of Thought seemed like an apt title because it was like an overarching theme—if this were a show in New York or at a gallery, it’d be work made within the past year and it would be much more thematically cohesive. This is a bit of a stretch; I like to think the show is comprised of various portraits of people engaged in a search—a kind of journey, a spiritual journey, a sexual journey, a search for identity, people longing to forge their way in the world. And I know that’s a big net to throw around work, but that’s a portrait of free thinkers. The pictures range from my mother sitting on the beach in southwest Florida reading the Bible, two men together in a Connecticut cabin reading art books, a couple engaged in a kiss on a bed, a pregnant teenager with her boyfriend. It’s all a journey that everybody’s trying to figure out as it goes along. It’s a little touchy feely, but I like it; it seemed cohesive in that way for me.

DFP: How do you explore the diptych or triptych form, which a lot of your work features. Do you ever branch off from that or do you like the way you’re able to talk about space and time?

DH: Although I studied cubism, really my roots are in performance theatre and film. And I love narrative and I love narrative writing and fiction. But for me it’s like storytelling and it’s a way to link photographs together with shifting focus that allowed me to kind of move through a space. So it is very much about cinema. Although I love the triptych form, it’s really just about gathering pictures. You could say, “Why can’t you do that in a single photograph?” Maybe, but I don’t think you could point in quite the same way. It’s a combination of photography meets cinema: the still image meets the moving image.

DFP: Are you influenced by a certain geographic area or some other kind of space?

DH: I’m interested in this thing. The official term is environmental portraiture, which is quite simply the figure of a space, and the figure informing the space and the space informing the figure, so the two are in dialogue with on another. I’m definitely interested in the New England landscape. I’m from New England. I love the kind of gentle nature of the New England landscape. It’s not particularly grand; there’s a lot of subtlety. It’s softer; the weather isn’t particularly dramatic for the most part. But its subtlety— I like that.

DFP: I noticed that many of your photographs feature raw sexuality. Part of what appeals to me about your work is its discussion of being gay, especially in Daybooks, where there’ s this physical and emotional distance between two men. Could you tell me more about that?

DH: In that same exhibition, on the other side, there’s a picture from way earlier (in 1994) where you have a blatant kind of sexual moment where one man is bending down kissing the other man. And there’s also nudity, there’re testicles, there’s kissing. So it’s not just sex, it’s also love. And I made that a while ago. And that was a different time. Not that I was an angrier artist, but I was, as far as my politics, maybe pushing a little bit harder to be in-your-face about it. And that photograph is totally voyeuristic. You’re in a doorway looking at something. So depending on your politics or your point of view you’ll either walk by that door, close that door, so it implicates the viewer.

And then years later, quite recently, I make Daybooks, which is still about love between two men. There’s a physical distance between them, maybe an emotional distance, but I like the idea that they’re two men, they’re both undressed, they’re in the same room by the fire so it’s highly unlikely that they’re arguing. They’re just in their own space. They’re together but they’re not together and that’s another beautiful part about being in a relationship. It’s not just about the sex and the kissing; it’s also about being together but in your own space.

And it’s not just that I identify myself as a gay man. Yes, I make queer art. I’m politically active. And you know, it’s funny that you talk about Daybooks. One person who came into the gallery said, albeit nicely, that I was perpetuating stereotypes. And I said, “Well, you know, I’m sorry you feel that way, but I would just say that for me it’s quite political. I’m just standing up and being counted. These moments happen.”

There’s something very political about making this fireside, almost Edwardian, photograph of two men together. I don’t see a many pictures like that. As a graduate student, I set out to make work righting that wrong. I want to make beautiful photographs of men together languishing in landscapes and kissing and holding and I want to fill all those voids that exist in the history of art where [gay men] were shamed and avoided. At the same time, I make other work. I don’t put the pressure on myself to address every major topic, but I think being a gay man and standing up and showing normal sides of a lifestyle is very political. And if someone sees that as perpetuating a stereotype, then that’s unfortunate.

DFP: But it’s interesting how, in Daybooks, the image of two men involved romantically is not just sexualized, but seems to be going something beyond that to something more taboo.

DH: Yeah, maybe it’s taboo. Well you’re a smart guy; you’re at Dartmouth. I’m going say something you probably already know: the reason it’s interesting for me to have the picture of two men kissing, and across from it is Hot Coffee, Soft Porn. It’s two photographs that represent two men each engaged in something that is decidedly personal, private, like two men in a bedroom kissing, making love, and then the other photograph—it’s two brothers eating crappy food and watching porn together. One isn’t better than the other. It’s a personal choice. At the end of the day, it’s the choices that we make and I could keep going. Many of my photographs dealt with that.

I had a whole body of work about that (and some of the pictures are in the show). I was making pictures down in Florida with my mother, who’s a born-again Christian, and she has her crazy lifestyle. It makes her happy, it keeps her going everyday. She gets out of bed and reads the Bible, I get out of bed and I do something else, and you get out of bed and you do something else. I love the idea, that in that picture, in those two photographs are men engaged in their own kind of personal choice and moment. Sometimes it’s funny to see who takes issue during First-Year Family Weekend; it’s funny to see who wouldn’t look at what, who got a chuckle. There are issues of taste in that show that are brought up.

DFP: It is very homoerotic. When I saw that picture, I thought about the possibility of this pseudo-incestuous relationship going on.

DH: Oh you mean the homoerotic between the two brothers? Wow (laughs), I love that.

DFP: It’s not quite like they’re together but then it is.

DH: That’s a very interesting read. It is intimate because it’s not a bunch of men. It’s two men watching porn and they’re sitting on a couch together. Whether it’s homoerotic or not, it’s definitely an intimate photograph; it’s more intimate than a lot of men would get with one another.

DFP: And I guess a lot of it goes back to defining masculinity, because I know much of your work also does that.

DH: There are definitely rites of passage. Of course, I’m a man; I’m a gay man. My world was decidedly masculine. I address the feminine in my work, but it’s very different, it’s somewhat distanced in a way. But men fascinate me. Straight, gay, old, young, boys becoming older boys, becoming teenagers, becoming young men, becoming middle-aged men, becoming old men. All of those phases of your life have their complications. You’re 20-something and I’m 40-something. At 19, I had very different issues than I have now and I love that.

There was a time, when I was 19, that I wasn’t making my artwork—but it was a time like the Kiss photograph. That’s me in that picture. I was young, that moment was real. And now in some of my photographs, it’s more like an older man looking back and remembering. It’s funny getting older as an artist. I make work in real time about being 40. And this is to answer your question about the rites of passage: the evolution of men is great. I love that there’s a subtext to my work on masculinity.

Sexy Spring has sprung. Photo courtesy of Robert S. Donovan, Flickr

Spring sex. There’s nothing like it. For some reason, every single animate being in the world just wants to fuck. It’s on the minds of everyone walking across the green, all those people shedding clothes and tousling hair. In the winter you only wanted someone in your bed to keep you warm, but now it’s spring and you… just… want… to… fuck.

It’s a new season, and new beginnings for relationships. Who doesn’t like new relationships? I recently had crème brûlée for the first time at Murphy’s with my new boyfriend, and it was delicious, just like him. Cracking through the hard sugar caramel to get to the creamy white insides seemed too coincidentally similar to a blowjob served on a dessert platter.

I hadn’t given a blowjob in a very long time.

I was kept off my knees from a general distaste of sweaty hair, tired tongue and jaw muscles, and the texture of semen. But people had started to notice, like my boyfriend, when he mentioned as a sidenote that I must not really like sucking cock. It also came up in a conversation with a gay friend, one of a few men who actually know the truth about BJ’s: it is better to receive than to give.

Well, it was time I added something new to my routine, in the spirit of spring: the blowjob. How would I incorporate it ? Is a blowjob something you do before sex? In the morning? The shower? Public locations? Just while chilling in the room? I was looking for the perfect moment to break it out.

The other new thing on my list to try this spring was the Dartmouth Seven. Since the closest I’d come to any of the Seven was the cemetery (which isn’t even one of the Seven), it was time to think about incorporating the Seven into my sex too. So there they were—the blowjob and the Seven. I hadn’t connected them consciously, but I would soon.

We sit in the 1902 room, which is, of course, the place with the most stress and spring horniness on this campus, creating a potent mixture of sexual tension. Therefore it feels very appropriate when the boyfriend slides over a piece of scrap paper: “I’m horny.”

“Quick,” I write, “before it’s 2 a.m.!” The truth dawns on him. Yes, yes my friend, we are going to have sex in the stacks. We saunter out of the room with the knowledge that we are about to get some heavy on our minds. Twenty disapproving glances at the loudness and disruptive quality of our footsteps come our way, but we don’t notice.

We descend into the stacks and find a dead-end dark row in the back of the second basement’s appendix. I step up onto the first set of shelves after he pulls my shorts off, my back leveraged against the wall, a perfect angle to fuck. But wait! We have no condom! He confesses that he might soon blow his load; it can’t go in me, and it can’t go on the books.

He comes in my mouth. Crème brûlée.

Cum—the elixir of spring, just as keystone light was the elixir of winter. It flows across campus and people are seen swimming through it on beautiful spring morning walks of shame. That’s another great, new feeling on campus—the idea that the weather might be warm enough to walk home disheveled at 7 a.m. Listen to the birds calling. Wasn’t that great sex last night right next to the open window and the flowering trees outside!? Fuck me!

Sexy spring will make you do crazy things, as my previously mentioned friend can attest to. After looking across the drunken haze of a basement, he spots a hot little piece of meat who was eyeing him too. A couple winks later, and feeling drunk off of spring lust, he marches straight up to the man and starts making out.
“It was intense,” he reports.

It’s strange to think that once, Dartmouth was a missionary school. By the time Dartmouth became a secular institution and religious affiliation was no more, it maintained a bastion of religion in the Tucker Foundation, created by President Tucker at the turn of the century. Today there are more than 25 religious groups on campus, ranging from the Quakers to the Hindu group Shanti. And now, there will be a religious group for the non-religious.

Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics (AHA) serves those who wish to question faith from a non-theistic perspective and discuss secular humanism and scientific inquiry. There has always been a significant non-theistic discourse at Dartmouth, especially in the classroom, where many people assume a secular viewpoint no matter their spiritual beliefs. Yet for years non-theistic people at Dartmouth have been discussing their beliefs outside of any organization, only engaging their beliefs with others whenever the topic comes up, such as when someone writes a fundamentalism-fueled rant against abortion or women’s rights on B@B. Those who define themselves as religious embrace group solidarity around loving the same gods. There needs to be a community for like-minded secular and non-theistic thinkers at Dartmouth, just as there are communities for religious and theistic thinkers

As a deist and humanist with a love of science and reason, I came to this school wondering why a group like AHA did not already exist in what seemed like such a liberal, progressive or at least moderate political environment. Upperclassmen attendants at AHA meetings report that there have been gatherings in the past but no organized community or discussion group under the Tucker Foundation. After all, where does a non-religious group fit into a religious institution? Directors of the Tucker Foundation have expressed positive feedback for making an official secular organization, and if AHA is any indication, the many voices of the non-theistic community have been waiting for such an outlet.
AHA meetings in Fahey McLane ground floor lounge are held every Tuesday at 8 p.m. This past meeting on May 4th, group founder Siyue Liu ‘13 led a discussion on the non-theistic view on death and the afterlife. The meeting started with an SMBC cartoon of the Ten Commandments, portraying God’s original commandment as simply: “Don’t be a dick.” Then the talk turned to whether the non-theistic view subscribes to an afterlife, and if a religious belief in an afterlife offers solace from the very human fear of death. Later, the discussion branched out to touch on how there is still a societal taboo surrounding the label “atheist,” whether there is an objective morality tied to any one religion or an innate morality built into humanity as a species and finally whether science is a “faith” or not.

I arranged to have an online chat with Siyue Liu ‘13 who has orchestrated this success.

SR: What inspired you to found AHA? How do you feel about starting the first atheist and agnostic religious group of its kind at Dartmouth?

SL: Before the establishment of AHA at Dartmouth, there were more than 25 religious organizations on campus, but none for students with explicitly non-theistic worldviews. I feel that it’s important for AHA to represent the non-theistic community on campus, as well as provide a voice to students without religious belief. We also hope to engage in interfaith-dialogue, while promoting greater understanding of worldviews of students without religious faith. Through constructive dialogue, we hope to encourage more open discussion concerning questions of religious faith and morality, while enabling the voices of non-theistic students as well. Ultimately, our community aims to provide a safe and civil ground to socialize with like-minded individuals, while engaging students in dialogue about faith and ethics from a non-theistic identity.

SR: I imagine religious freedom in all its forms is important to you. Would you like to say more to that effect?

SL: Of course. People are free to practice their own set of beliefs, and people who reject those beliefs should be free to do so as well. However, in many parts of the world (even more so in America), there still exists a negative stigma on the word “atheist,” and many people are still hesitant to “come out” to their religious friends and family about their non-theistic worldviews. Unfortunately, a lot of people have only vague ideas and misconceptions about what non-theists or humanists believe, so increased discussion would promote greater awareness understanding of the worldviews of students without religious faith.

I think that because Dartmouth is such an intellectual environment with its cultural roots in religious doctrines, we need to engage in more open and critical discussion of questions concerning faith. Despite the uncomfortable stigma surrounding these issues, religion is not immune to critical analysis, and both theists and non-theists should treat it as a subject for evaluation and multi-faceted dialogue (like politics).

Liu then related an anecdote about a question a fellow student had recently asked her on the nature of secular humanism. The student answered by noting that secular humanism is a popular stance for atheists to take. But said student found here a philosophical inconsistency: namely that you cannot be an atheist and still assert that people are good and should live moral lives.

After letting this sink in for a few seconds, Siyue started animatedly, “Of course you can be good without God!” Liu believes we do not need the threat of burning in hell for eternity to do good things. In fact, Liu insisted that she would question the sturdiness of someone’s beliefs if they felt like they need the idea of someone constantly watching and judging them, in order to live a life of decency and morality.

Liu argues that there is absolutely no basis on judging someone’s morality on the premise of whether they believe in a supernatural entity or not. Secular humanism is not a religion, but a life stance that specifically rejects supernatural and religious dogma as the basis of morality, while focusing on how human beings can lead good lives without an overseeing god. Ultimately, Liu concludes, we should love not God, but humanity and ourselves.

While planning future meetings of AHA, Liu is currently working on securing group recognition for AHA from the Tucker Foundation. She is confident that once a proposal is submitted, Dean of the Tucker Foundation and College Chaplain Richard Crocker will be willing to acknowledge the importance of discussions on spirituality and morality from a non-theistic perspective, relying on reason and experimental evidence that enhances, rather than taking away from human wonder in awe of a complex, beautiful universe.

Atheists come together in the Adopt-a-Highway program. Photo courtesy of Wha'ppen, Flickr

Recently, a new campus organization called Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics (AHA) has been working to get approval by the Tucker Foundation as an “affiliated religious group” as you will see in Sora Ryu’s article on the group this issue. Despite the large number of students at Dartmouth who self-identify as atheists, AHA would be the first non-theistic organization to be officially recognized by COSO in Dartmouth’s history. In a recent article in The Dartmouth entitled “AHA’s Moment”, the author, Brendan Woods, said that as a Christian, he believes that all people should be permitted to join in religious discourse, no matter their faith. I agree wholeheartedly with his position of acceptance, and I think the recognition of an atheist group on campus is long overdue.

To my surprise, many students at Dartmouth are of a different opinion. The most common response of Dartmouth students, when asked about the approval of a new non-theistic group on campus was “Why would anyone want to join that group?” The real question here is why would an atheist—a person who does not believe in miracles or fate—be impassioned by the absence of faith? What would they talk about?

We all know the stereotype of the disillusioned atheist who has become alienated from religion and regressed into apathy. Many people who hear phrases like “The First Atheist Church”—which does actually exist and has ordained 2523 ministers—would consider it an oxymoron and assume that no such thing would exist.

All stereotypes aside, there are still those impassioned atheists who may not believe in God but who nonetheless believe in some higher purpose, whether it be achieving enlightenment or protecting the health of the planet. They can change their beliefs no more easily than religious people can change theirs. Although atheism is not technically, a religion, the fact that the Tucker Foundation has already adopted 25 affiliated religious groups and yet has not included the non-theists in their debate seems incongruous with their stance on diversity. Why is it that we have overcome the days of shunning “non-believers” as with people of different faiths, but we have not yet overcome our fear of allowing theist and non-theists to sit down next to each other?

I remember when I was in third grade, I would argue with a girl in my class over the existence of God. My parents had not yet explained to me that the subject was “taboo,” especially coming from seven-year-old. I would ask her over and over, “why do you believe in God if you have never seen him, if you have no proof?” And she would simply respond, “At least I believe in God!” To say the least, the conversation didn’t get very far. After having turned this poor girl’s face beet red numerous times, she finally offered one justification that made some sense to me: she needed no proof, and that was why it would always be true. They were simply people of faith and I was not.

Alas, I discovered that as an immature atheist, conversing with a religious person about morals and religion was nearly inconceivable. There is simply no way to hold a worthwhile conversation about religion, I thought, when you are missing the key ingredient: faith. Soon however, as I met people who practiced religions other than Christianity and Judaism, such as Daoism in East Asia or Santeria in Cuba, I realized that despite vast cultural and geographical differences most religious people obey many of the same basic principles. Though every faith may believe in a slightly different version of our creator and the afterlife, we all face virtually the same consequences for our actions here on Earth such as guilt, physical harm, or imprisonment. As many atheists have argued before—and Siyue Liu ’13 reiterates in her interview inside—you don’t have to have faith in a certain deity in order to have morals or even to consider yourself “religious” by a loose definition. By now, I would hope that this fact has become widely accepted amongst educated people if not a platitude.

Yet the reason that so many people are uncomfortable talking about religion with non-theists is not that they see them as immoral, but rather precisely because they do not have faith, at least in the traditional sense of the word. So we are back to the old wall of faith (or lack thereof). Having an honest, level discussion with others about religious issues, especially if they do not subscribe to the same religion, takes some mutual understanding of faith, and what it means to defend your beliefs instead of merely rejecting the beliefs of others. But this has to work both ways, and ignoring the voice of non-theists is no different than dismissing the faith of religious groups.

The idea that atheism is about disagreement is a misconception that has stunted ethical and moral discourse at Dartmouth for years. Something tells me that the members of AHA are not merely out there to start arguments. If this were the case, then why would the members participate so enthusiastically for years without official recognition? Even non-theists have beliefs of their own. Ultimately we are all searching for answers to the same basic questions, and whether we choose to believe that the universe began 15 billion years ago or a few thousand years ago is irrelevant. What matters is that if there are people out there who share a common system of beliefs, they should be permitted to hold a civilized discussion with each other and bring their discussion to a public forum.

At 9:45 a.m. on April 20th, an explosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon, an offshore drilling rig owned by British Petroleum (BP) in the Gulf of Mexico. Survivors had mere minutes to escape the inferno as black, multi-story clouds of smoke rose into the sky. The captain of a rescue boat reported the fire as being so hot that it melted the paint off of his boat. One hundred and fifteen were evacuated, 17 of whom were injured. After burning for two days, the Deepwater Horizon sank at 10:21 a.m. on April 22nd. By that time the United States National Guard had already covered more than 1000 miles by sea and air in a massive rescue operation. The next day, the Guard called off the search for 11 missing persons who were probably incinerated on the spot and are now presumed dead. At a press conference on April 30th, BP still did not know the cause of the explosion. Interviews with rig workers conducted during BP’s internal investigation revealed that a bubble of flammable methane gas escaped from the oil well and shot up the drill column, expanding rapidly and bursting through several barriers before igniting and exploding in what is known as a blowout.

According to the most recent estimates, the oil spill emanating from the site of the sunken rig measures an area of at least 2,500 square miles and is viewable from space. Five to twenty-five thousand barrels, or between two hundred thousand and a million gallons, of crude oil from the Macondo Prospect deepwater oil field is being discharged into the Gulf daily. Efforts have been made to contain the spill, including the construction of a hundred ton steel-and-concrete box, and the controlled burning of sections of oil slick in open water. However, the spill will surely eclipse the 1989 Exxon Valdez as the worst US oil disaster in history. The oil slick has already reached the Gulf coast 48 miles away. On May 8th, blobs of tar appeared on Alabama’s white beaches. Like the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, also caused by a blowout of an Union Oil rig, this oil spill will undoubtedly cause black tides and the unnecessary deaths of endangered turtle and bird species. The spill will damage fishing and tourism industries in addition to destroying or disrupting hundreds of estuaries, deltas, ecosystems and habitats that house thousands of species. This is the Gulf Coast environment’s 9/11. Like the human version, this 9/11 is a call to arms, not against the Middle East, but the United States’ continued reliance on oil, coal and other fossil fuels, whether dredged from the Middle East or from off our shores.

Like the recession, the blowout wasn’t supposed to happen, and like bailout companies such as AIG and GM, Deepwater Horizon was “too big to fail.” Reminiscent of the Titanic, Deepwater was built to epic proportions. The ultra-deepwater, column-stabilized, semi-submersible mobile offshore drilling unit (MODU) or floating drill rig was completed for Transocean Ltd. by South Korean Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2001 and leased to BP until 2013. One of the largest of its kind and built to tap leftover oil beds once inaccessible due to ocean depth, Deepwater measured 396 by 256 feet, could operate in waters of eight thousand feet deep, and drill up to 30 thousand feet deep. BP churned out a lovely 52-page safety report in February 2009 to condone the necessity of drilling that deep, saying it was “unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities,” and that “due to the distance to shore and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected.” In fact, seven BP executives who were later injured but survived were celebrating Deepwater’s safety record when the blast occurred.

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, a lost race of dwarves unearthed a fiery demon while mining for precious metal. Likewise, BP “delved too greedily and too deep,” expressing an eagerness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22-25 thousand feet instead of the 18 thousand feet maximum depth allowed by its permit. Such eagerness and greed contributed to the calamity.

BP was named as the responsible party by the US government, and will be held accountable for all costs of the clean-up. The company has accepted responsibility but, anticipating multiple lawsuits, now argues that the accident was not entirely its fault because the rig was run by Transocean personnel. Adrian Rose, vice president of Transocean, has said that there was “no indication of any problems” just prior to the blowout. Workers were performing standard routines and the rig was drilling but was not in production. Rose then passed the buck to US oil company Halliburton, which had completed a delicate operation of reinforcing the drilling hole’s metal pipe casing with concrete only 20 hours before the blast. Pressured by Congress on May 1st, Halliburton confirmed that it cemented the Macondo Prospect oil well but never set a cement plug to properly cap the hole, claiming that “operations had not reached a stage where a final plug was needed.” Rose concluded that “undoubtedly abnormal pressure” accumulated in the drill column contributing to the massive destructive power of a single fiery methane bubble. Eighteen of the 39 oil rig blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico have been triggered by poorly-done concrete reinforcements of oil pipes. Meanwhile Haliburton, which has been associated with the Bush family and once had former Vice President Cheney as its CEO, is already under fire in Australia for an earlier catastrophic 2005 blowout in the Timor Sea caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.

Some politicians are still touting a “drill, baby, drill” approach to solving the nation’s up and coming oil crisis. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), for example, still supports offshore drilling and downplayed Deepwater, saying “accidents happen.” Some conservatives see this as an opportunity to criticize President Obama. On May 5th, former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin tweeted “learn from Alaska’s lesson w/foreign oil co’s: don’t naively trust.” Palin, however, seems to forget not only that a Valdez oil tanker leak in 1989 off the coast of Alaska was the fault of ExxonMobil, a U.S. company, but also that BP once employed her husband, Todd. Due to this oil spill’s proximity to New Orleans, right wing pundits have been quick to call Deepwater President Obama’s Katrina. But this comparison is a dangerous one for conservatives if they are trying to make Obama look bad. First, the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2007 was abysmally slow, while in less than a month the Obama Administration has assigned personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Interior Department, the Departments of Commerce and Defense, the EPA and NOAA to the task of investigating and cleaning up the spill. Second, long-term culpability for the disaster belongs to the Bush Administration for the utter corruption of the Minerals Management Service (MMS), an Interior Department oil drilling oversight agency.

Like the recession, Deepwater was another “accident” that was a long time in coming. Both problems can be linked to the Bush Administration’s rabid efforts to deregulate, whether it was Wall Street or “Big Oil.” Between January and March 2001, incoming Vice President Cheney sat down with more than a hundred oil industry officials in secret meetings that eventually drew up a “wish list” of industry demands to be implemented by the Big Oil-friendly administration. Cheney also packed the MMS with many of his oil-loving cronies, who lead the corrupted regulatory agency to go to bed with the industry– often literally. In 2009, the Inspector General conducted an investigation into the MMS that found that MMS officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.” Female employees and sexual favors were sent to industry big wigs in return for illegal oil contracts for agency workers. Agency workers were more likely to turn a blind eye to unsafe or unfair oil company policies if they could do things like get so drunk at a golf event sponsored by Shell that they had to stay in a hotel paid for by Shell. Lobbyists also paid out agency officials with personal contracts, concert tickets, golf, paintball or ski outings and other bribes.

This “culture of ethical failure” that pervaded the industry and its regulatory agency not only cost the American taxpayers millions but also went out of its way to produce bad science to justify unregulated offshore drilling in the tempting, never-before tapped oil prospects of the Gulf of Mexico. The comprised regulatory agency encouraged companies to take dangerous risks, such as BP’s failure to install a deep pipe shut-off valve. Also in 2003, the MMS released a study saying that “acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly.” An acoustic regulator or a remotely triggered “dead man’s” switch could have shut off Deepwater’s gushing pipe at the seafloor oil well opening when the manual switch failed or couldn’t have been reached. However, no such switch was installed on BP’s oilrig because President Bush’s 2005 energy bill dropped an earlier 2000 MMS requirement for such regulators, claiming that industry standards at oilrigs were “failsafe.” An “expensive” acoustic trigger costs $500,000 while the cost of Deepwater will be more than $14 billion.

However, in the wake of Deepwater, it looks like there could be political movement in a better direction. An energy bill in the works that sought to expand offshore drilling will no longer hold water with Democrats, especially those from Gulf Coast states. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) said such a bill was “dead on arrival.” Governors have also shown solidarity, most notably Arnold Schwarzenegger of California who said, “You turn on the television and see this enormous disaster, you say to yourself, ‘Why would we want to take on that kind of risk?’” Greenpeace is already out protesting in the capital. They also have an online petition touting clean energy, citing the dangers of not only Deepwater, but another, earlier methane gas explosion that took the lives of 29 West Virginian coal miners in April.

How many more will the U.S. sacrifice for our quest for fossil fuels? Even if Deepwater had not happened, the oil it would have ultimately pumped to the surface would have been later burned for fuel, releasing tons more carbon dioxide into the air. Forget offshore drilling; the U.S. is already scraping the bottom of the barrel with our aging on-shore oil wells and our dependency on OPEC’s volatile gas prices, which were more than four dollars a gallon before the recession. Worldwide, oil wells will only hold out at the current rate of consumption for 30-50 more years. What will we do when those wells run dry? How much more of the environment and the economy will we be willing to lift as a burnt offering to our faulty faith in high profit margins? Surely, the money can’t be worth what we are doing to our planet. Humanity’s funeral pyres of flaming rigs, scrubbed and un-scrubbed smokestacks, and avid coal mining in China are all a part of a fossil fuel complex that is trapping heat in the atmosphere. Doomsday preachers predict the world ending in fire, but their apocalyptic myths can’t be all that far from the reality of global warming.

Thankfully there’s hope on the horizon. By May 12th, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) hopes to unveil his long-awaited bi-partisan energy and climate bill, which aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. No longer will the Senate pander to the obstructions of Big Oil and special interests which perpetuate America’s addiction with dirty, unsafe fossil fuels. Capitol Hill will finally penalize pollution and push the car industry and the national grid into a new era of clean, safe energy. In January’s State of the Union Address, President Obama proposed a plan to combat fossil fuels and unemployment by offering funding to green start-ups that will provide the technology for alternate energies as well as a new wave of “green” jobs. President Obama knows that China, or any nation, that produces a viable industrial alternative to oil or coal will become the world’s future green giant and stands to benefit from the future jobs and capital flowing in from such a venture. President Obama rightfully wants the United States to be that nation. Not only will such a coupling of interests allow the U.S. to get back on its feet, but it will allow us to fulfill the disreputable BP’s early green moniker and finally move “Beyond Petroleum.”

Despite the green movement, even the most optimistic must fear that people tend to care a lot more about terrorism, immigration, abortion and gay rights than the future of the environment. The green revolution, worryingly, has become something of a fad—especially for commercial corporations trying to tap the media’s next great new hype. Terrorism and other topics are indeed very important, but only a few people seem to realize that a planet in peril is just as important and pressing. Somebody has to take green beyond the fad; somebody has to take it seriously. Green jobs must be, have to be, in America’s future. Between oil spills and oils wells drying up, the stakes are just too high for things to be otherwise. Our environment and our world cannot afford another Deepwater.

The basement scene has everything you might expect on a normal Friday night: rowdy behavior, loud music, kegs. However, this isn’t the basement of a house on Webster Ave, it’s the basement of Collis.

While it is often lamented that fraternities dominate Dartmouth’s social scene, many successful alternative events have emerged on campus. Usually something considered an “alternative” social space was considered lame and not fun. Previously, the presence of alcohol separated all “fun” and the “boring” social events. But now many events held in Collis serve different alcoholic beverages.

Friday Night Rock, a student group that showcases emerging rock bands, features live concerts on campus. The selection of artists, which has included Of Montreal and Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, reflects with surprising accuracy new and buzz-worthy artists. Many of the groups have appeared on Pitchfork.com’s annual “best-of” list, while others have played at large music festivals like South By Southwest (SXSW), the highly-popular Austin, TX music festival. Best Coast, a California band that visited Friday Night Rock in April, was featured on MTV2’s Subterranean two weeks after playing at Dartmouth.

The group, which charges no admission for its shows and supplies free alcohol to students over 21, has also held showcases for Dartmouth-based student bands. However, despite its ability to bring quality bands to campus, Friday Night Rock remains a relatively low-key venue. This status is probably due to the collective music taste of the Dartmouth community, which isn’t known for being geared towards indie rock music.

Meanwhile, Programming Board, another student-run group, has made attempts to provide alternative nightlife events at Collis with alcohol and flashing lights. On May 8th, Super Mash Bros, a mashup group that describes themselves as “Girl Talk’s hot cousin,” played a show that had the crowd flowing from the basement to the help desk. The event, promoted as “Klub Kollis,” featured two other campus DJs, DJ Hollisto and DJ Janski.

Although frat-hopping will probably still be preferred to cool concerts like these, I definitely welcome Friday Night Rock and Programming Board’s alternative social spaces. Let’s hope they keep these spaces open with awesome, jamming music.