THE MASTHEAD
Editor-in-Chief: James H. Wang
Publisher: Amy Gu
Executive Editor: Paul Lintilhac
Managing Editor: Amanda R. McNally

Patronizing. Dismissive. Amused. These are attitudes that we generally take towards fringe commentators who spout nonsense and take untenable positions. Usually, we feel justified in judging them harshly. Yesterday, during a closed-door meeting in Parkhurst, the administration took this attitude towards students who met with its representatives to discuss staff layoffs. The administrators chuckled. I’m sure they felt they were justified too.

Let’s be clear. The efforts of the students and the local SEIU chapter, who collaborate in part but mostly plan their events independent of one another, have been disorganized, haphazard, and “unprofessional.” No one is going to praise their elegant prose, deft political maneuvers, or clever strategic planning. This process has been messy, slapped-together, and oftentimes impromptu—which is exactly what one would expect from a grassroots movement dealing with what is, to its members, an unfamiliar and novel problem. One can hardly fault it for not moving like a well-greased political machine. It isn’t one. The local union began this process scared and immediately dropped all of its cards on the table, including its willingness to absorb pay cuts in order to preserve jobs. Likewise, the student response has been organized largely through blitz, and lately run through a newly registered gmail account. One could hardly scream “novice” any louder.

This effort, so far, has consisted of concerned staff and students feeling their way through a difficult and frightening situation.

But what this movement lacks in sophistication, well-polished rhetoric, and on-message discipline it makes up for in earnest dedication and raw emotion. While national union organizers and speakers have appeared on campus every now and then to breathe fire and attempt to impose some sort of discipline on the chaos, they have ultimately been peripheral to the action. A majority of what you see happening on Dartmouth’s campus is a result of an outpouring of student and staff sentiment. It’s unscripted, disorganized, and chaotic. In other words, it’s real.

The administration’s shared amusement, eye-rolling, and patronizing dismissal of the students yesterday was understandable on a political and tactical level. The students, in their idealistic fervor, planned to storm the President’s Office and present a letter that highlighted their concern—but they told the administration about their plans and even sent the letter ahead of time. As a result, the administration instead invited twelve students to discuss the letter. The students accepted.

So, unprepared, idealistic, and having given up any semblance of an advantage they might have had, these students were confronted with President Kim and a phalanx of top administrators, each armed with prepared remarks and talking points. Faced with a group that included media savvy professionals and a President they all admired, the students present were barraged with legal technicalities and prepared rebuttals. Honest but unhedged words were savagely and efficiently ripped apart. President Kim demanded to know what this ragtag group was accusing him of. He freely interrupted and silenced students—and, understandably, the students were largely unwilling to “talk back” to a figure who had assumed the seemingly well-deserved status of campus idol. Kim’s team then briskly lectured the students on how “uninformed” they were of the situation’s technicalities.

Although the students did know the essentials of what was happening to staff and the questionable tactics being directed towards them (which, if not illegal, are at least unethical), students were contradicted and chided on their ignorance of specific detail. The students recognized their ignorance, of course. That ignorance was the product of the administration’s opacity in regards to budget cuts.

However, even outspoken Dartmouth students are reluctant to push back against top College officials. Thus, yesterday, four administrators, with decades of combined professional experience, effectively “schooled” twelve genuinely concerned undergraduates for an hour.

But to focus on the legal soundness of their remarks, or the effectiveness of their execution, or their rhetorical skill is to miss the point entirely. One would have hoped that the takeaway for these top College officials would not have been that their opponents are unseasoned politically, but instead that students have genuine concerns about the process—concerns serious enough to compel them to draft a letter, albeit an unprofessional one. Thursday’s meeting wasn’t supposed to be a brawl over public opinion or snappy technical points. Instead, it was supposed to be an airing of concerns, uncensored and utterly vulnerable. It wasn’t supposed to be a confrontation.

Did the administration think that the students it dealt with got their “talking points” from the union? Did they believe that they had been “subverted” and made into pawns? Anyone who has met Earl Sweet, the president of SEIU local, would know that he has all of the malice and scheming of a bowl of porridge. If any of the points students took from the staff were incorrect, that should be a sign to the administration that the College staff is irrationally scared or misinformed. It should have been an opportunity to open a campus dialogue that assuages fearful murmurings. It should not have been an opportunity to soundly thrash a group of concerned students—students looking out not for themselves but instead for Dartmouth’s employees.

Without a doubt, there are varying degrees of firmness in student opinion regarding potential layoffs. A few are staunchly against any layoffs. Some believe that layoffs should only be a last resort. Many more are in favor of a careful, open, and considered approach to budget cuts and staff layoffs. However, general student sentiment seems to hold that the administration should talk openly with the staff. It’s a simple notion—but even now I can see the obvious administration counter. Legally, formal negotiations—at least for unionized workers—are more complicated than that. Of course it is. But that’s not the point. The point is that perhaps a letter from the union requesting more administrative transparency should not be answered by just a press statement about the administration’s refusal to talk to the union—published in the Valley News. Which is exactly what the administration did. Technical dismissal of student and staff concerns do nothing to address underlying community sentiment.

And that is ultimately what is at stake in this debate—community. Why is this process new to the union, and why is the union’s response so unpolished? It’s simple. It’s because it has never faced anything like this before. The context in which union negotiations had previously existed at Dartmouth was relaxed, casual, and—truth-be-told—most likely lax in the legal niceties. Negotiations never needed to be airtight or rigorously professional because they were a friendly exchange between partners.

Many parties are pointing fingers, and assigning blame for our predicament, to this or that. Maybe the College overexpanded in a time of plenty and made investments that, in hindsight, were poorly considered. All this would mean is that the College’s endowment staff and administrators made roughly the same mistakes that seem to befall most human decision-makers from time to time. On the other hand, maybe it is the case, as is suggested in some quarters, that the union is used to being given too much too easily, and that College staff is, overall, inefficiently allocated. Even if these claims are true, this doesn’t mean that the people themselves should be dealt with as an enemy—or that they should be treated as mere “assets” to be shed.

Students and staff don’t have the specifics about this budget process down pat. That’s not what they came here to learn, nor is it what they’re paid to do. But they don’t require this mastery of detail in order to have a sense of the process, and they deserve to have more openness than has been given so far. President Kim has declared that he wants to see Dartmouth students become leaders in various fields all over the world. That process begins with treating his student partners as parties worthy of respect and consideration. It also begins with not dismissing or cynically disregarding the idealism of those who are concerned. President Kim has also publicly declared that Dartmouth has a unique community that he wants, or wanted, to preserve. If that’s so, perhaps he should start doing a bit more to understand it better rather than simply declaring, in College-produced publications, that he “intuitively” understands it.

This isn’t a matter of policy, or action, or layoffs. In the end, it’s a matter of tone and discourse. Even if layoffs—even significant ones—come to pass, what ultimately matters here is the humaneness of the process. With real economic hardship hanging over its head, the staff deserves advance notice and a general sense of where the College’s budget discussion is headed. Maybe this would result in a more disorganized, slower process. It would probably make things messier.

But that’s necessary. There may be few things that are black and white, but it is unacceptable to treat layoffs as something that should be decided with a swift, sudden blow. This way of conducting business may make things faster and more efficient, but it also makes them colder, more mechanical, and more exclusive. The Dartmouth community appreciates the professional efficiency of this new administration. But efficiency should not be bought with community, community built up through hundreds of years and dozens of generations—of students and staff alike. Among all of Dartmouth’s most cherished traditions, this is the most fundamental, and the one we must not let fail. If it does, regardless of what synergies, efficiencies, and precision we gain in the end, we will still have lost the Dartmouth we love. This is what is at stake. Not just this or that program. Not just this or that class size. And not even just jobs. It is the soul of Dartmouth itself.

Timothy Geithner’s been showered with criticism in light of the economic meltdown, but does it deserve it all? Photograph by Fresh Conservative on flickr.com.

Enter Timothy Geithner, the man of the hour, just last week paraded through the House in a small populist ceremony, a rite of exfoliating outrage. Wasn’t he the perfect whipping boy? Calm, assertive, with a hint of Robert McNamara’s steely assurance—Geithner might have been every man’s wolf in sheep’s clothing as he faced a battery of accusations surrounding his involvement in AIG’s titanic bailout.

Geithner, the onetime President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, now Secretary of the Treasury, now stares down the barrel of a host of charges that would place him at the ever-tense nexus of Wall Street power and Main Street outrage.

The obvious and common argument is that Geithner is guilty by implication. As the story now seems to go, Geithner’s hands were simply too close to some sordid doings—in shortest form, the Fed’s recommendation to AIG that it not reveal information about overvalued, politically suspect “counterparty” payments to other major banks with holdings in the company—despite his having resigned from the Fed and recused himself from its future doings. Issues like these, it need not be said, do not lend themselves to nuanced reasoning. Today, finance finds its alternate definition in guilt­—an irredeemable stain on the record of any politician unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of popular rage. Where the economy continues to falter, and where Wall Street connections loom in the background, Geithner will be an object of derision and distrust.

This, you could say, is where the dialogue loses its momentum, and when the political sharks begin to circle. It’s here, too, that the narrative arc of Geithner’s story freezes between two poles that depend on one another for their dramatic tension. In one corner, there’s populist fire and brimstone; Geithner, here, is a conduit for the survival of moneyed interests within a system whose excess was its undoing rather than an agent of an outraged people—the herald, as it were, of a morally bankrupt and ever-powerful status quo’s endurance into the future. In the other corner is the image of Geithner as multi-billion-dollar bearer of necessary evil, an inside man whose position was less a measure of his corruption than it was of his ability to do the necessary thing, whether right or popular. Which side do we pick, and where do we—as citizens—choose (or not choose) to draw the battle lines?

We’re inclined to believe that the answer to this question lies in the answer to another, much simpler one. Did Geithner behave in a way that was morally and ethically suspect, or did he not? At the end of the day, there has to be some factual truth at the bottom of this inherently necessary inquiry, and we might guess that it lies somewhere in the middle—Geithner the public servant and Geithner the inside man worked in tandem, each bound by what must have seemed like, in a time of crisis, suffocating institutional logic on public and private ends of the equation. Yet that truth is well beyond the scope of this column, and we might guess that it’ll be well beyond the public imagination for some time to come as well. For it’s rarely, if ever, the nature of events like these to disclose themselves until well after the worst is over. What we instead get are stories for our time—stories whose utility lies not in factual resolution but instead in a kind of popular therapy.

Why, after all, has Geithner’s skewering unfolded without his ousting, or without some fundamental policy shifts within the Obama administration? Geithner’s ordeal has been, it would seem, a lukewarm crucifixion capable of sustaining itself indefinitely. And this is its brilliance as a narrative device—Geithner has become at once a lightening rod and sponge for angry catharsis, capable of enduring pundits’ wrath without pushing the boundaries of political acceptability too far afield. If Obama is a fundamentally pragmatic president, as has seemed (despite soaring rhetoric and enthusiasm) to be the case so far, his willingness to retain Geithner speaks to a keen understanding of tortured compromise as both policy and presentation. Without throwing his treasury secretary, and his policy, to the wolves, Obama navigated more severe calculations of public right and private wrong by placing authority in the hands of a morally gray technocrat. But where are we left when, frustrated, jobless, and frenzied with betrayal, we abstract our anger and thereby sap it of propulsive force?

Maybe that’s a question we just don’t want to ask. Maybe the intimate details of some high-profile stories, for all our good intentions and furious energy, are sometimes condemned to history’s garbage pail, indefinitely obscured, psychologically and emotionally inaccessible. And maybe these details, the essential meat, the lifeblood, of political drama, are denied to us—lost as we are in the face of a system broken beyond our understanding—by our own willing. To expose them or to treat them too frankly would be, really, to take the taut, tortured entertainment out of those narratives necessary to sustain a country in need.

Progressive PR firm Murray Hill does a satirical campaign ad running for Congress in response to the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC. Screenshot from Murray Hill video on Youtube.

The politicians and media pundits who claim that the U.S. Supreme Court recently “handed our democracy over to corporations” are wrong. The truth is that corporations and other monied special interests have had illegitimate yet intimate access to the inner workings of our supposedly representative, democratic government for some time. This most recent Supreme Court ruling of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission didn’t change much. Corporations have enjoyed many of the rights of “natural persons” for the past century. Our own Dartmouth College was involved in one of the landmark cases, Dartmouth College v. Woodward, that helped establish the dubious precedent for corporate legal personhood.

This recent decision, which removed ineffective and arguably unconstitutional limits on corporate campaign financial support, came from a case originally about a right-wing anti-Hillary Clinton film that was funded by corporate interests.

That case was then expanded to address the broader question of corporate campaign funding and advertising. On this issue, the Bush-stacked court overturned years of precedent by ruling that corporations should have all the free speech rights of “natural persons.” To the Supreme Court, spending money to advertise for, or otherwise support, a political issue or candidate is equivalent to political speech. We can all thank the Supreme Court for cementing corporations and other powerful (read: financially well off) interests as the loudest political speakers in our “democracy.”

This decision brings about many questions. Are unions included in this new corporate freedom? Can foreign corporations with operations in the U.S. freely inject piles of cash into our politics? Are American corporations American citizens? Can corporations make unlimited direct donations to candidates’ campaigns? Can corporations run for public office? This issue has already come up in Maryland. These debates are far from over and will be big issues in the near future. Most central to the broader issue of corporate personhood, however, is the idea of the corporate person. This fantasy underlies the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to allow a new class of “people” more leverage in our political process.

In this case, Justice Anthony Kennedy spoke for the majority when he wrote, “Corporations and other associations, like individuals, contribute to the ‘discussion, debate, and the dissemination of information and ideas’ that the first amendment seeks to foster.”

In other words, corporations and other associations are good democratic citizens that help our democracy function properly. Legally barring them from spending money to alter the political process is a violation of free speech, and a stupid idea if you like democracy. Unfortunately for us, this view of the corporate person clashes with reality. History has proved that corporations, by their very nature, often have decidedly anti-democratic interests.

At its core, a corporation is designed to make a profit and increase in size and prestige. In the 2003 documentary The Corporation, corporate insider and “management guru” Peter Dunker says, “If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibility, fire him. Fast.”

William Niskanen, chair of the conservative think-tank the Cato Institute, echoed the same sentiment when he said he would not invest in a company that promoted corporate responsibility. These calculating investors stay away from responsible corporations because they think that social responsibility has a way of interfering with maximized profits. The basic idea here, according to investment manager Robert Monks, is that “the corporation is an externalizing machine in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. There isn’t any question of malevolence or will.

The enterprise, and shark within it, has those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it is designed.” Corporations are incredibly efficient at producing goods and making money precisely because they are designed to ignore, among other things, the democratic and social responsibilities that might limit their outputs and profits.

They will destroy environments and poison water supplies to avoid expensive but environmentally appropriate waste disposal costs—that is, if they can get away with it. Why pay for something themselves when they can get someone or something else to bear the cost? They will pay people unfair wages and lock-in their overnight employees. They will sell harmful, lethal, or addictive products while hiding the damning scientific evidence. They can do these things because, according to the CEO of the largest commercial carpet manufacturer in the world, they are specifically designed to “externalize any cost that an unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize.”

Far from democratic citizens that constructively contribute to the democratic process, corporations are profit-making machines that are rewarded for any behavior, no matter how anti-social or undemocratic, that increases their bottom line. And they are also frighteningly good at manipulating consumers not only to buy their products, but also to identify with their highly polished and misleading images. The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will unleash corporate marketing machines on a largely “unwary or uncaring” public, and their wealth will allow them to speak their mind on a scale that no private citizen can match.

Strengthening the paradigm of corporate personhood in this way clearly gives the “rich” special interests an even greater, ever more unfair advantage in the exchange of political ideas. It gives a certain minority group of entities with some similar interests that are often anti-democratic, anti-social, and non-transparent a megaphone to drown out dissenting viewpoints by supporting favorable political candidates and running political issue and campaign ads. Our electoral system already makes it nearly impossible to run a successful campaign without corporate support (unless you are a billionaire who can finance your own campaign), and this decision will only worsen the problem.

But the alternatives, like limiting the amount of money corporations can give to candidates and barring them from running political advertisements, do seem unfair or even unconstitutional. How can we, as a country that values free speech, arbitrarily deny certain interest groups the right to participate in the political process? It is clearly in our democratic interest to have a more level “playing field” of political discourse, but how do we achieve some semblance of fairness without being unfair in the process?

The Oregon Supreme Court faced this dilemma, and their clever solution is a hopeful sign in the ensuing struggle for parity.

A lobbyist for an Oregon-based corporate firm sued the state for limiting the amount of money a corporation could give a politician as a “gift” (a strange Orwellian term for bribe in our system of legalized bribery).

He argued that it was unfair of Oregon to put a “gifting” limit on corporations but not other organizations, and the state court agreed. They conceded that they could not, in good conscience, restrict the freedom for any particular group or person to give a “gift” to a public servant, but they could restrict the amount of money the public servant could accept from any one group or person. This ruling shows us that it is possible to have a fairer political system without trampling on individual or group rights. It is perfectly reasonable for the state to promote fairness in this way.

A better system of public financing for political campaigns would also make it easier for non-corporate candidates to compete with their privately funded counterparts. Policies and politicians have already become products (the “Obama brand” was wildly successful with consumers in 2008). And now corporations and other interest groups are free to spend as much money as they see fit to manipulate us into buying the political products that serve their interests. But the Federal Election Commission could regulate political messages by trying to eliminate the subversively persuasive marketing techniques that have and increasingly will become commonplace in politics.

The inevitable debate over Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission will predictably break down across political party and ideological lines and will unfortunately descend into all-or-nothing hyperbolic arguments: the complete corporate takeover of American politics thanks to the evil Supreme Court on one side, and the tyrannical federal government’s attempt to restrict our freedom on the other. This oversimplified and sensational debate will boost network TV ratings and might help a few candidates get elected, but it won’t help us.

Right now, we are stuck with a political system that has been heavily favoring those wealthy special interests for the past century. This reality has had a drastic, anti-democratic effect on the laws and political landscape of our country, and this decision only made it worse.

But the Oregon Supreme Court’s decision gives us hope for a fairer system. The Supreme Court decision doesn’t change much, which is a testament to how bad things already were, but it does bring an all-important issue to the forefront of people’s minds. It provides proponents of democracy an opportunity to search for novel ways to challenge the very real problem of corporate dominance in our political process. After all, it’s “We the People,” not “We the Incorporated.”

In a popularity contest, the most popular person tends to win, and to the extent that politics is a popularity contest, the Obama administration should be worried.
There is a growing popular backlash in this country, one that is neither expressly centrist nor liberal and composed of a diverse set of people. Though they differ on the best ways to fix our problems, all of them are angry at, and alienated by, a government that seems to lack ideas, ambition, and drive to reform a broken system.

The people who really hate Obama aren’t populists, because populists are currently in the majority and populists didn’t hate Obama to begin with. No one voted for Obama only to, post-election, deem him a dangerous, radical Nazi-communist who would take away his guns and freedoms. Such people voted against Obama to begin with, and they lost—badly. The people you saw at summer town hall rallies, and still see teabagging, are a fairly marginalized minority. They may claim to be “average Americans,” but they are not. The are a radical fringe that harbors an overly narrow, dangerously simplistic definition of what it means to be “American.”

Most Americans voted for Obama largely because they disapproved of the Bush Administration. The real intransigents on the right, meanwhile, are overwhelmingly white, mostly rural, and mostly southern. They are, literally, a dying breed. The average age of a Bill O’Reilly viewer is 71, and the average FOX viewer 65. It’s worth asking if FOX News is so highly rated because many, if not most, of its viewers are retired. The “teabaggers” can afford to go out and rally because they are also largely retired. Though this demographic must be factored into the political equation in the short run, with every passing election cycle more of it, callous though this may sound, dies off. It is a scared group, one that doesn’t know who to blame for its frantic anger. But these teabaggers are dying, and they are bound to diminish in political importance. On the other side of the demographic picture, 66% of people under the age of 29 voted for Obama. It would be suicide to run a national ticket on “traditional small town, small government values” today, let alone in fifteen years.

According to a variety of the most popular polls, populists—real populists—are independents and party members who vote across party lines. Independents, at this point in time, constitute approximately thirty percent of the American electorate. Most are religious and believe in fairness, hard work, and giving to the needy. They favor gun rights, although not fanatically, and are not inhospitable to current tax rates. Independents also support most government institutions—including Medicare, Social Security, the military, and public education. Most wanted a government-run health insurance option, and similarly favor a government that helps to create jobs.

But most don’t have any particular die-hard values—they’re susceptible to appeals to their self-interest, and they vote for candidates who they believe will improve their quality of life. Independents voted for Obama en masse because they thought he was smart, reasonable, calm, and would end the Republican-instigated economic nosedive. Now, however, Independents are turning against Obama. Why?

There are arguably three reasons for this shift. First, Obama isn’t doing a great job. Second, he seems a bit like the last guy. And third, he seems more loyal to “Wall Street” than to “Main Street.”

That’s right! Main Street. Obama goes to Akron, Ohio and Terre Haute, Indiana, and he talks to “regular folk.” They tell him: “Mr. President, we’re hurting, unemployment is over 10% and Wall Street got a big chunk of our money. Why is Wall Street being bailed out and why are we getting nothing?”

And Obama has unconvincing answers, especially given that he’s kept Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner on as top economic advisors. Independents are beginning to think that Obama is either sleazy or incompetent, while Progressives are angry because he hasn’t done anything progressive—in short, Obama hasn’t made any systematic changes. The Republicans have already turned their backs on their former laissez-faire economic policies through TARP, and the only thing Obama has done that they might not have is the “stimulus thing.” Many people can’t see how deficit spending might be necessary. Not enough of the money spent by the Obama administration has gone to train people or build schools, roads, dams, etc. The irony may be that Obama chose not to launch “direct” government projects out of the fear that the people would consider his agenda “socialist.”

And this has electoral significance. How did Scott Brown win in my home state, the progressive state of Massachusetts? A bunch of independents voted for him. Why?

Well, mostly because Martha Coakley is a jerk. She didn’t run a campaign until the last week of the election, imagining that it would cost too much money that she could have used after she won. Coakley demonstrated utter disdain for her electorate, at one point saying she didn’t need to shake peoples’ hands outside of Fenway because it was cold and she knew the Deputy Director of Education. As District Attorney, she voted not to parole the most likely wrongly convicted individuals caught up in the “satanic daycare abuse” witch hunt in the 80’s—they’re still languishing in jail thanks to her. She’s morally suspect, and “regular folks” identified that in the election.

Scott Brown, on the other hand, ran essentially as a pro-choice, moderate Republican—an Independent, for all intents and purposes—to people who already have a state government-run healthcare system they like, one previously supported by Brown. People don’t like Obama’s current healthcare plan because it is seems tainted by sleazy backroom deals, and appears convoluted, creepy, and incoherent. Simply put, Massachusetts voted for Scott Brown because he was “the other guy.”

Obama should know the following: he is not invincible, and must use government in a way that convinces the people of its utility. People still like Obama, and he would still crush most Republicans in a televised debate. After all, an angry electorate would yet recognize a cookie cutter, socially regressive, pro-Wall Street Republican as a Bush clone. People want results. But a smart, reasonable-seeming moderate Republican could easily defeat Obama unless the unemployment rate seriously drops and Wall Street is seriously regulated. Someone like Mitch Daniels, the Governor of Illinois, might be able to pull off such a defeat.

Washington Democrats need to identify the degree to which they’re misstepping by ignoring independent and progressive populism. After Scott Brown’s success, Republicans will find a way to get a moderate on their ticket. Unless things change, they may defeat Obama. And if he loses, he will go down in history as one of the most pathetic incompetents in American history: a fake “conciliator” with no agenda other than to maintain the status quo. In twenty, thirty years, when all the teabaggers are dead, and this country is primarily liberal and independent, we will look back at the Obama Administration as the last heyday of the American
conservative movement.

Precious is so hot right now. It’s our Obama-era Brokeback Mountain, the mainstream movie of the year that made mainstream audiences feel incredibly informed and liberal. Basically, Precious is Oscar bait. This awards season, the faces of director Lee Daniels and stars Mo’Nique and Gabourey Sidibe (all Oscar nominees for the film) are plastered all over our televisions and Crackberrys. But the accompanying articles seem not to concentrate on the stars’ performances, but rather on their physiques. Specifically, their bellies. And their leg hair. Wait, Mo’Nique doesn’t shave?! Stop the presses!

Based on the novel Push by Sapphire, the film Precious chronicles the life of the sixteen-year-old title character, an African-American girl growing up in 1980s Harlem. Precious can barely read or write. Her father has impregnated her twice. Her mother beats her regularly with a frying pan, forces her to cook pigs’ feet, and openly seethes at her daughter for “stealing” her husband by bearing his children.

Precious’ most miraculous attribute is her ability to craft an identity for herself and persevere despite great adversity. Surprisingly, the focus of this epic tale of human survival is not touted by the media as such. Why not? Because Precious is fat. Okay, Precious might be obese. But from the way the film is publicized, one would think that she explodes at the end or gets fatally trapped on a chair lift while skiing. In the movie, however, Precious’ weight is the least of her worries. Gabourey Sidibe, the actress who plays the titular character, had a brusque response to the media’s obsession with her character’s weight: “It’s like, she’s fat. Well fucking A. She’s already having a hard life. So what, if she was skinny, would this story be any the less heartfelt or daunting? That’s not the story. That’s not the point.”

The media’s focus on Precious’ weight, to the point of excluding the film’s primary themes of racism and sexism in our society, demonstrates its elitism—as if thinness, a characteristic prized by the white intelligentsia, could somehow have saved Precious from her trials. The media implies that obesity is a fate that is completely preventable under her circumstances, somehow implying that being fat is a completely different issue from race or class, and that Precious somehow contributed to her own suffering.

Members of the press often confuse Sidibe for her character. In interviews, reporters have remarked at how astonishingly confident and articulate the 26-year old actress is. You know, in real life. Implied is the assumption that Sidibe wouldn’t have any other personality than that of the rape and domestic abuse victim she portrayed in Precious. Sidibe, a Harlem native and former psychology major at The City College of New York, doesn’t have a lot of patience for this misunderstanding. She asserts, “They try to paint the picture that I was this downtrodden, ugly girl who was unpopular in school and in life, and then I got this role and now I’m awesome. But the truth is that I’ve been awesome, and then I got this role.”

When a makeup artist on a New York Magazine photo shoot gushed that Sidibe looked “totally opposite to [her] character,” Sidibe replied simply, “Thanks. I’m actually…not her.” And it’s true. Sidibe is SO not her. She professes to have multiple boyfriends and occasionally refers to herself in the third person. She’s a total diva. Yeah, newsflash: she’s an actress. Frankly, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows that movies aren’t real and that this woman is, in fact, acting. But does the press assume Sidibe should be inarticulate and meek because of her race? Surely, we’re past that as a country…Obama is Prez! No, it’s because Sidibe is actually Precious’ size. Do we as a society therefore believe that being fat is a shameful sin?

And then there’s Mo’Nique. Already a stand-up icon, the comic actress gave a transcendentally brutal performance as Precious’ abusive mother Mary. The woman could’ve schooled Stanislavski himself on method acting in this role. And yet, all anyone can talk about is Mo’Nique’s love of fried shrimp. And her ballsy demeanor. And the fact that she frequently parades her unshaven legs around red carpets. According to jezebel.com, Mo’Nique said on the View that “her unshaven legs are ‘real legs’ and the rest of us have just bought into some strange social convention that they aren’t attractive or that men won’t desire us if we don’t keep up with the Joneses.”

Mo’Nique’s point is valid and gives the rest of us pause to consider the lengths we go to in order to remove unwanted hair from our bodies. So why is an Oscar nominee discussing her leg hair on The View? Would Barbara Walters ask Tom Cruise if he wears lifts (he does) or Nicholas Cage if he wears hair plugs (he does) on national television? Dubious. Yet Mo’Nique’s leg hair is newsworthy. In fact, the New York Daily News devoted a 363-word article specifically to the topic. Reporters also seem to relish describing what Mo’Nique eats during the course of their interviews. Does the New York Times really need to relay that Mo’Nique requested “three orders of jumbo buffalo shrimp to go” at lunch? We get it. Mo’Nique is fat. But she is also a visionary who doesn’t subscribe to Hollywood by molding her career to satiate its desires. She lives in Atlanta where she films her talk show, “The Mo’Nique Show,” daily. She and her husband manage her career autonomously. She chose to do Precious as a means of raising awareness for victims of domestic abuse, a tragedy she has experienced herself.

Mo’Nique now plans to continue performing primarily stand-up because it makes her happy. And she isn’t planning on pimping herself out on carpets and talk shows this season to campaign for the Oscar. Mo’Nique thinks that her performance should speak for itself, saying, “President Barack Obama had to campaign because he had something to prove: that he could do it. Well, the performance is on the screen. So at what point am I still trying to prove something?” These are the words of a truly confident actress, one who knows that she absolutely deserves the award, and that she’ll probably get it. And she sure as hell won’t be nicking herself in the shower anytime soon.

In Precious, Mary internalizes what she reads as society’s hatred of her—white people oppress her, no one thinks she deserves an education, and her man loses sexual interest in her—and projects this hatred onto her only daughter. This is the great tragedy of the film, that Mary brings about Precious’ suffering because her own is so profound that she sees no hope of alleviating it. Precious is a story of black oppression, but, more universally, it is a story of female oppression.

Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique exude quite clearly that they love their physical beings and themselves, demonstrating that black women and overweight women in America have come to reject society’s prejudices. However, our media is lagging behind them. Yeah, they are saying, we are ready to appreciate racial minorities now. But we still have a long way to go before we can consider ourselves truly liberal in our judgments of individuals who may choose to shave, wax, or go native.

So far, we have been living blindly to the truth. In our comfortable lives, we have ignored the global holocaust occurring today—backed by the same motivations and underpinnings behind the first holocaust of the Nazis. In fact, it’s also Communist, of the Marx and Engels brand. It’s a global conspiracy.

It’s something that leads us to deny the worldwide eradication of humanity, also known as abortion. Yes, abortion. Did you know that abortionists drag babies—fully viable babies—and drown them in distilled water, crush their heads, and chop them up for parts to use in cosmetic surgery for women? This neo-Communist plot to destroy the world is known as radical feminism. This new world order is known as the Global Gynarchia. See the evil upon the unnaturally youthful faces of women, powered by baby guts.

Or at least that’s what FathersForLife.org would have us believe. Loading this website is like stepping into an alternate universe. Though obviously a pro-life website, it goes beyond simply talking about abortion (which is apparently thinning humanity and will eventually lead to our destruction, as the Communists wanted). It details a world where men are actually oppressed by the new elite, the feminist conspiracy. Children are beaten to death with impunity by their capricious overlord mothers.

And fathers are the last line of hope for humanity but the tendrils of the feminist movement are slowly leeching their vitality. In this world, it is a battle of good against evil—the patriarchy against the evil arachnid-like Gynarchia. Sadly, it is a battle we have already lost. Fathers For Life is meant as a time capsule for future generations. The Gynarchia has already won. Like a black widow spider, it has gobbled up good ‘ol patriarchy and fatherhood, with mayonnaise on the side.
Its absurdity makes this story told by Fathers For Life rather entertaining.

Uncharacteristically (though part of the narrative), the website also details the plight of the Jews and how the feminist and euthanasia movements are an extension of Nazism and Communism (putting aside, for a moment, that those philosophies aren’t on the best of terms with one another). Euthanasia and assisted suicide has, according to Fathers For Life, had a far more nefarious goal—to eradicate the Jews, since half of the 12 million individuals put down have been Jews. As much skepticism as these types of stories must instill in casual, mainstream readers, there is something that this website shares in common with many websites and books on any radical fringe, especially modern radical conservatism—a clever weave of truth and half-truth.

Within a strange mix of factually dubious article citations, we read the puzzling assertion that two-thirds of child abuse is committed by women. Men have an instinct to protect women and children, thus leaving the destructive abuse suffered by children to be committed by women. We also read that Margaret Sanger, one of the early champions of birth control, was actually a proponent of eugenics who drew the admiration of Hitler—damning, according to Fathers For Life, since her organization eventually became Planned Parenthood, which is perpetrating her legacy to this day.

Is Fathers For Life right? According to Medicine Net, a site referred by the National Institute of Health, women do commit 61% of child abuse. A quick historical check reveals that Margaret Sanger really was a proponent of eugenics!

Of course, the truth is always a bit more complicated than a short series of “gotchas.”

While 61% of recorded child abuse is in fact committed by women, the vast majority of that abuse is actually neglect (which is also technically classified under abuse). Most violent, physical abuse is still committed by men. And although neglect can easily be deadly in the case of children, it doesn’t quite paint the same picture of vindictive, violent mothers that Fathers for Life tries to convey.

Additionally, while Margaret Sanger was indeed a proponent of eugenics, there are more than a few differences between her and Hitler. Besides the fact that most Americans and Europeans at the time were actually in favor of eugenics to some extent, Sanger was quite vocal against violent extermination of individuals and was horrified by news of Nazi Germany’s actions—quite different from Sanger and Hitler supposedly becoming the best of friends and creating a strange lovechild of nazi-feminism. Sanger, despite having widely inappropriate views by today’s standards, actually had a somewhat compassionate vision in mind, considering that she saw birth control as helping poor women out of poverty—even if it was alongside a view that it might be able to prevent the mixing of the white race with inferior Asian and “other” races.

The truth behind Fathers For Life’s half-truths becomes quite apparent with the full context, but the danger is in an incomplete picture that incorporates a few germs of truth within a wider net of wild-eyed conspiracy. Although I doubt that more than a few would fully accept everything that the site proposes, I can see it as all-too-likely that some will. Upon realizing that these previously outlandish-sounding factoids are “true,” they will begin thinking about the validity of other assertions that the site also makes.

Maybe not the blip about feminists with baby guts as cosmetic injections, but perhaps some of the assertions that legal abortion is twenty-five times more dangerous than illegal abortion have some truth to them. Maybe there is something to the claim that abortion causes breast cancer. And maybe there is something to this view that we should stop abortions because they are morally reprehensible. But that slant shifts the issue away from the woman, even if the casual reader rejects the evil “redfem” picture the site paints.

Fathers For Life may not gain many converts anytime soon, but it does illustrate an increasing tendency of these sorts of websites and books to mix surprising true facts within their untruths, which may lead the uncritical observer to lend credence to a far wider body of twisted facts and straight up lies. And that ultimately is the danger, either with these extreme-fringe anti-feminist sites, or more commonly, the anti-evolution movement.

By seizing upon personal flaws of the founders of feminism, birth control, or evolution, these groups cast a sinister shadow on everything else these individuals touched. This includes a few cherrypicked shock factoids that may be construed as true, slowly breaking down readers’ skepticism and wedging a foot in the door for more radical sentiments.

Ultimately, these types of tactics have brought many of the myths about abortion (and again, the other popular target, evolution) from the minds of raving extremists into the mouths of the mainstream. And that, in the end, is what is terrifying about sites like Fathers For Life.

What exactly does the “Dartmouth Experience” mean? Over the past 18 months, we’ve learned that Dartmouth means many different things to everybody. Today, we students stand in an uncomfortable and uncertain situation. On the one hand, we are trapped between the staff and the Administration in a bitter fight, and, on the other hand, we are embroiled in a battle to save the individual pieces of our own Dartmouth Experiences.

Dartmouth is first and foremost an institution of higher learning. It also happens to be an institution that employs a large number of Upper Valley residents. But Dartmouth’s primary duty is to the College, not its facility. This is the angle from which I approach the Dartmouth Experience. Instead of focusing on the Dartmouth Experience, I propose we focus on the Dartmouth College Experience (I should clarify that I consider the professional schools part of the College in this sense).

This next notion seems to have been brushed aside in light of the pending staff cuts: intergenerational equity. Dartmouth has spent some of its endowment funds during this recession as a means of smoothing the operational deficits it currently faces. On this point, I must admit I am conflicted. A conscientious observer might wonder where this reactionary notion was when certain College administrators were playing Russian roulette with collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities. Suddenly, after almost $1 billion of our endowment just disappeared, we begin to talk about intergenerational equity. It is an enticing idea: It shows foresight that can serve as a long-term yardstick for the future and a productive mindset for the Administration as it begins to try to ensure that this kind of financial debacle does not reoccur, or least to this extent, in the future.

When the endowment began, it was a safety net. As endowments have grown over the years, colleges across the country (including Dartmouth) have done something risky: relying on their safety net for income. Akin to the United States, this College has lived beyond its means. As Warren Buffet said in his 2001 Chairman’s Letter for Berkshire Hathaway, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” Well, the College was swimming naked, and now it’s time to put on some clothes. This is not to say that we should stop spending from our endowment, which would be ridiculous. We just cannot afford to be dependent on our endowment in the future—it’s swimming naked. Those who spout doom and gloom about the future of our endowment need to take a step back and remember that alumni have not stopped giving to the College.

It seems like every week Dartmouth has a new cause du jour. During these evanescent fads of devotion, a select few whip the campus into a frenzy. This recurring theme lends some credence to the idea that many Dartmouth students have a need to be offended by something. Out of some misplaced need to serve the cause of social justice, Dartmouth students convince themselves that if they stay offended, they are paying into some big karmic pot.

I feel the same way about layoffs as I do about alimony or palimony. The College does not have an obligation to continue to treat employees to “the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed” past any time horizon previously contracted.
That is why we have contracts: to allow for future flexibility in the work force employed by the College.

Here’s the problem: the unions want to have their cake and eat it too. They want high wages and high employment. Who pays for that? Well…we do.

In addition to pandering to Dartmouth’s hypochondria for imbalances in social justice, those who speak for the staff held a candlelight vigil to promote awareness of the job cut situation. Now, I agree that some members of the staff are an undeniably positive part of the Dartmouth College Experience, but I find it very hard to believe that the individuals pictured in the posters plastered around campus are actually the best part of the student in the picture’s Dartmouth Experience. And call me old-fashioned, but I tend to want to reserve candlelight vigils for deaths and missing persons. I don’t mean to sound harsh or indifferent, but when the people who represent the workers act the way they have, I become less and less inclined to sympathize with them. We are talking about loss of jobs, not loss of life. The situation has been sensationalized to the point that it has begun to lose credibility.

It is clear that we have a problem. Moreover, it is obvious that there are several groups who have very strong opinions about trimming the College’s budget by $100 million. So, who should decide what happens? It is useful to consider the different groups in terms of shareholders and stakeholders. Throughout the budget process, I have heard very little respect given for the fact that students pay up to $50,000 a year to go here. That makes us shareholders. Faculty and staff, however, are stakeholders. While they definitely have a stake in this college and certainly contribute to the experience, their role is fundamentally different from that of the students. The alumni are somewhere in the middle on this. Many donate to the College and are in that sense shareholders, but they are also stakeholders in that their personal reputations depend in part on the current actions and present reputation of this College.

Just as Dartmouth’s endowment has become more integrated into the fate of the world economy, our administrative structure has followed a trend in the management style of corporations throughout the world. We have seen stakeholders with increasing control in the College’s operations. It’s not a stretch to say that many Dartmouth students do not believe that Parkhurst actually cares about the students’ opinion. I don’t want token student advisory boards. I don’t want token Student Budget Forums. These groups waste our time and resources, things we have little to spare.

We, the students, pay for a service, and if the changes to the Dartmouth College Experience change that service substantially, then we ought to be consulted, and our voices ought to carry significant weight. If the majority of the student population believes that limiting staff layoffs is the right thing, then so be it, but if the majority of us believe, as I do, that this school needs some restructuring and streamlining, then give the people what they want.

President Obama waves to his supporters. Can he win the support of independents and Republicans? Photograph by Jason Reed.

Last week, just days after a State of the Union address that was reassuringly reformative, President Obama was invited to speak at a Baltimore GOP retreat, where he pressed upon Republicans the necessity of closing the partisan gap in Congress. Although the hour of question-and-answer that followed may have been more controversial and certainly more entertaining than the address itself, Obama’s speech to House Republicans was more significant: it was the greatest triumph of the First Amendment since Stephen Colbert’s scathing routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2006.

But perhaps the Republican’s self-opposing stance that authorizing national media coverage as a “mistake” is only fair. Though it is true that Obama’s remarks were “chastising” and “confrontational”, these incivilities should not be allowed to preclude the point. What we should take away from this historical moment is not how well (or poorly) our politicians defend their rhetoric, but rather what Obama’s 20-minute “in-tele-promptu” offensive reveals about the success (or failure) of his presidency.

“These are serious times,” he declared after a brief introduction to the members of the Grand Ol’ Party. “What is required by all of us— Democrats and the Republicans — is to do what’s right for our country, even if it’s not always what’s best for our politics. I know it may be heresy for me to say this, but there are things more important than poll numbers, and on this, no one can accuse me of not living by my principles.”

Or can we? Just because Obama’s approval ratings have fallen to 47% in the past few months doesn’t mean this is a result of his political steadfastness, as this quote seems to suggest. Is Obama’s rhetoric of taking on the plight of bi-partisanship, ending war in Afghanistan (remember that?) and curbing the deficit reflective of reality, or is Obama really an ideologue, contrary to his denials?

Obama noted that he had already enlisted many of the Republicans standing before him to cross party lines. He mentioned working with Sen. McCain to make the largest increase in the Veteran’s Association budget in 30 years and dissolve state lines for insurance companies. He implemented Rep. Eric Cantor’s idea to make the website “Recovery.gov” and incorporated the ideas of Republicans Mike Enzy and Victoria Snow to create affordable “catastrophic insurance” for young people. This makes it hard to deny Obama’s willingness to work with lawmakers regardless of their political affiliation.

While Obama has followed through on his promises of bipartisanship, those on the left might argue that he is making too many compromises. Have his personal liberal views begun to gravitate towards centrist ones in order to achieve success as President? Perhaps. But while I, as a progressive, am aware of his diplomatic elasticity, I am also aware of the current state of our politics. Right now the most critical issue is not that our politicians lack good ideas; it is simply that we don’t trust them and they don’t trust each other – all with good reason.

Is Obama succeeding in using his position as President to its fullest capacity? Both his proposal to the GOP of a “modest fee on the nation’s banks and financial institutions to fully recover the taxpayers’ money” and his decree for all congressional earmarks to be made public before they came to a vote reinforced his seriousness in reigning in the national debt. Even after the senate rejected his idea just a day earlier for a “bi-partisan fiscal commission to confront the deficits in the long-term,” Obama made it clear that he would nonetheless establish such a commission by Executive Order. Having placed all his cards on the table, it seems rather obvious that Obama is not prepared to go on playing political games, and that he is indeed living by his principles.

It is interesting to note one of the many disarming claims made in his speech. Obama cited a recent CNN poll which stated that “while most Americans disapprove of the 2009 economic stimulus bill, they like each individual policy in it. When you break it down into its component parts, 80 percent approved of the tax cuts, 80 percent approved of the infrastructure, and 80 percent approved of assistance to the unemployed.” A more recent article on CNN clarified that while “Obama’s summary was largely correct,” the poll stated only 70% of Americans approved of the tax cuts.

Despite this interesting paradox, neither CNN nor Obama has offered a deconstruction or explanation. Obama’s economic stimulus package seems to be obscured by an air of blind disapproval—even distrust—despite the fact the individual policies are transparent, and most American citizens support specific mandates wholeheartedly. This suggests that the viability of the stimulus bill amounts to more than the total viability of its parts. We must imagine, then, that the American people are having some collective hallucination that up and vanishes upon closer inspection.

Obama may value principle over his popularity for the time being, but he will inevitably face re-election and be forced to worry about public opinion. Perhaps the best way for Obama to transform his stimulus bill from a failure to a success is to allow the American people to get closer to the political process. If they are exposed to and continue to see the political discourse inside Congressional chambers and witness the ideological crossfire, then perhaps the American public will be rid of this illusion. Obama successfully promoted transparency by airing the speech on national television last week. Subsequently, it should be no surprise that since the convention, Obama’s polls have begun climbing again for the first time in months.

Terry Tempest Williams speaks at Dartmouth on January 25. Photograph courtesy of the Dartmouth ENVS Department.

She had the impact of a car wreck, charging the moment with reality and stillness, grabbing us from the forward-moving current of life and turning us back on ourselves. She spoke with raw poetic beauty. And her words changed the outlook of at least one busy Dartmouth college student.

I almost didn’t go to Terry Tempest Williams’ January 25th lecture because I had work to do. Because it was raining and cold, and I was without an umbrella. Because it was in Cook Auditorium, which is far off my beaten path—the usual dorm-class-Collis-library route. Nevertheless, for the always compelling sake of procrastination and the hope that I would gain something—anything—from the lecture, I made my way through the pouring rain for Terry Tempest Williams.

With the recent budget crisis, along with the resulting movement of faculty and students to support staff in the face of lay-offs, there has lately been an adamant questioning of the “Dartmouth Experience” and its values. Williams did not speak about the budget crisis, but she did address values—ones we hold that become evident in our daily lives, our writing, and our voices.

Though crammed into an audience of 300 plus people, I felt like I was in an intimate conversation with Williams throughout her lecture. A semi-challenged, awkward writer myself who is still in her formative stages, I connected with Williams’ thoughts on the process of writing and what writing means to her, an author, environmentalist, and current Montgomery Fellow and professor at Dartmouth.

Williams dealt at length with the relationship between her work and sense of self, telling her audience that “there is no separation from the writing life and the life engaged, and it has everything to do with love.” An engaged life, according to Williams, is one that is aware—“awake, alert, and alive wherever we are.” Williams commented on the importance of finding one’s voice, an inherent, unique truth that each possesses, and how this voice is essential in delivering justice to those who are voiceless. Drawing on the phraseology of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she argued that “maladjusted men and women” are necessary in today’s world to be aware, to use their voices in both speech and writing, and to fight against the social and environmental injustices that envelop today’s world. Her points echoed the well-known aphorism of John Sloan Dickey: “The world’s troubles are your troubles.”

Terry Tempest William’s words have particular resonance at Dartmouth, where it’s easy to get caught up in a hyper-competitive environment in which each perpetually fights the other for that elusive citation, for that sought-after FSP, or for those scarce jobs offered during corporate recruiting. We are achievement-driven students. After all, we go to Dartmouth, where achievement is expected and institutionalized. We play hard on Webster Avenue, study hard in the 1902 room, and work hard in the endless stream of meetings, practices, lunch dates, and face time. Yet as Williams might have asked: Are we aware? Are we living our lives with purpose? Did we lose ourselves somewhere along the way?

Williams spoke, here, to the importance of mentally and emotionally “checking-in.” We come to a point in our day-to-day lives at which we need to, and we must, reassess where we are, where’ve come from, and where we’re going. As she put it, “if you know where we are, we know who we are.”

So, while Williams’ lecture may not have been a commentary on the Dartmouth lifestyle, what I left her lecture with was. Too often we find ourselves rushing from one place to the next, one day to the next. And before we realize it, we’re in the middle of winter term, suddenly aware of how much has happened and how little we’ve taken note of.