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Weekly Article

The Writers' Strike: Who's in the Right?

All of us college students writing articles at the Campus Word have a
few things in common. First, we're college students, so we enjoy
smart entertainment and hilarious satire, such as The Daily Show, The
Colbert Report, or other intelligently written TV shows. Second, we
write ourselves, so we know how much work goes into it and how sweet
and just it feels when we get paid for our work.

For those reasons, it should be easy to see why the Writers' Guild
strike is something we can all get behind. In case you're not
informed about what the strike is for, I'll let you in on it. In the
past couple of years, television studios have been making a bundle --
and I mean a bundle -- in ad money by syndicating their shows in new
formats, such as streaming on the internet, selling the shows on
iTunes, etc. It's a long-established rule that actors get paid
whenever their shows are syndicated in reruns on television. Jerry
Seinfeld gets paid every single time you watch that rerun of the close
talker on Fox. Writers also have been paid for reruns. However, in
the move to the internet, actors have continued to be paid for
syndication on the web, while writers are left out in the cold. Big
studio executives are raking it in, and the writers, as always, get
short-shrifted.

It's continually bemusing and frustrating to me to see how little
respect writers get, when they're the ones single-handedly pumping out
the majority of the entertainment we hold so dear. They're crucial,
even the most crucial, elements of television shows and movies.
Throughout the century, movie executives have thought they could do
without writers, but repeated box office flops keep showing them how
wrong they are. Even now, us college students are watching in
amusement while a few famous faces parade around with a lot more
unknown writers, holding picket signs, and we only express resentment
that new episodes of The Office aren't coming out. This is true
through the United States. On the whole, we don't have the good
opinion of unions and striking that we once did. It used to be noble,
heroic, the little man overcoming big business, but since the unions
in this country grew powerful, they stopped being the little man and
America stopped caring. Now we might associate union power with such
universally disliked countries as France, whose sanitation or airline
workers are constantly in an on-again, off-again state of striking.
It's important to remember that the Writers' Guild still is the
little man in this situation, because writers, lacking the visibility
and easy identifiability of actors, don't have a leg to stand on.
That's why they need our help.

What we should really be doing is supporting these writers, because
doubtless some writers for the Campus Word will end up as one of their
Guild. Boycott those internet streaming videos unless the writers are
getting a cut, or use the internet to express your consternation and
indignation at the writers' treatment. In recent years, the
entertainment industry has really started to take notice of internet
movements, so let's get on an imdb forum and start one. The spirit of
protest will live again, in technologically advanced form!

Originally posted at The Campus
Word.

Weekly Article

Degrading the Sacred: Should We Tiptoe Around Islam?

I'm going to go out on a limb and say something that's a little risky
in today's world: in some parts of the world, Islam takes itself too
seriously. There, I said it. I'm not talking about the actual
worship, or the practice of a beautiful religion. I'm not talking
about the Qur'an. I'm talking about the reverence that is reserved
for icons of Islam, taken to a fundamentalist level.

It all starts going overboard when a British teacher in the Sudan is
arrested for naming a teddy bear Muhammad. The elementary
school teacher asked her students what they would like to name their
new class mascot, a stuffed bear, and the children picked what is the
most common name on the planet -- Muhammad. She took photos of the
bear and had the children write stories about spending time with it.
For this, Sudanese authorites say she has fundamentally disrespected
their faith and culture and ought to be locked up. When did the
reverence for a peaceful and holy figure such as the prophet Muhammad
become so distorted?

The fact remains that all of the major prophets or other religion-
founding figures we know today never wanted to be Gods. In his
lifetime, Jesus never called himself anything but a teacher, an
enthusiastic reformer of Judaism. It was over a hundred years after
his death that a Christian summit voted to call him the son of God,
and consider every Gospel considering him human to be heretical.
Similarly, the books of Moses (comprising the Torah) weren't written
by Moses (There's other evidence, but one big clue is the frequent
references to Moses in the third person). The Buddha never called
himself a God; he only had experienced a deep realization, one he
believed any human being could achieve. When asked whether he was a
God or a man, Siddartha said simply, "I am awake." And Muhammad,
devoutly believing in Allah, did not consider himself the most blessed
man; he only considered himself grateful and a little lucky for having
received a message from God, and he encouraged everyone he could to
achieve the same connection to God that he had. All up, one can see a
disastrous human tendency to misinterpret what people are saying, and
to elevate to Godhead anything too mystical for them to understand.
Once a figure has achieved Godhead, he becomes untouchable, inhuman,
infallible -- and the ingroup of worshipers arises.

There's the real problem with forbidding inanimate objects to be named
Muhammad: the ingroup comes to think that only they are pure, worthy,
while the rest of the world is somehow "less than". Never mind that
millions of people around the world are named Muhammad, and never mind
that many of them could be soiling the name with hateful or unholy
actions. No, we have to be concerned when a stuffed bear has the
name, because that is somehow more disrespectful to the prophet than
slaughtering innocent people in his name. On the whole, Jesus has
been sufficiently humanized in the western world to bear being
represented in cartoons and the like, but we all know what happened
when Muhammad appeared in a cartoon. It is a joke to think that a
stuffed animal or a cartoon could possibly besmirch the name of a
prophet; it's simply not worth getting worked up about, but people
will insist on sweating the small stuff while blithely ignoring the
far larger sins.

Seeing how much chaos was brought down on the Netherlands' head by the
cartoons, it's not a wise idea to try that sort of antagonism. But it
is important to remember that all faiths have an equal stake in this
world, and all are screaming just as loudly that they're the only true
one. Making a cartoon or naming a bear by a prophet's name is not
disrespectful as long as we respect who Muhammad is to millions of
people and why he is the key figure of Islam. At least we live in
America, where we have the right to challenge ideas that in other
countries have become so set in stone that it is heretical to chip
away at them.

Originally posted at The Campus
Word.

Weekly Article

Liberal France is Getting a Makeover

Among their many quirks, American conservatives are pretty united in
their hatred of France. The country that refused to go into Iraq and
ended up being right just can't get any love from the U.S.; in fact,
most Americans think the French are rude socialist hippie unemployed
wine-guzzling artsy-film-watching constantly-on-strike losers.
President Nicolas Sarkozy is out to change that perception, though,
and forge a new friendship with the United States that may end up
sacrificing everything France is really about.

France has a long and proud history of being proud, especially when it
comes to Americans. It's tough to be a nation that always loses in
the military, and has to have its butt saved in two world wars, but
France has long given the world so much more in the realm of arts,
sciences, and literature. Where would we all be without Louis
Pasteur? What painter is more famous than Monet? And without Victor
Hugo, how could we have had that Disney movie about the hunchback of
Notre Dame? It's a sad sign of our own fixation on military success
that we hold a nation in contempt for being better in peacetime than
wartime. America, one of the nations that always rises to the
challenge of a war, has trouble understanding a nation at its best
when its very existence isn't being threatened. And so France proudly
withheld from the near-disaster that is the Iraq war, and won the
universal contempt of the United States. It would take an entire
regime change to alter that perception; or at least, that's what
Nicolas Sarkozy is hoping.

To start out with, Mr. Sarkozy has a background more like an American
maverick's than a French one's. In a hostage situation in which
terrorists with bombs had taken possession of a school, Sarkozy walked
into the building, talked to the terrorist and came out with the
children following him. He's fond of flying by the seat of his pants
and won't refrain from telling you when he doesn't like you, as when
he walked out on a 60 minutes interview, declaring that it was a waste
of time. Sarkozy has early on declared his love and admiration for
America. In a recent visit to congress, he cited heroes like Martin
Luther King and -- Elvis -- as great Americans, and received a
standing ovation. It sounds like things are looking up fro Franco-
American relations; but is it at the expense of France?

France has stood as a refuge for liberal-minded politics and
viewpoints for decades, if not centuries. That has its downsides, of
course, like the near-constant labor strikes that occur in France, but
it does still mean that at least one nation can be counted on not to
be jingoistic and gung-ho about the idea of war. If the Western world
is dominated only by countries who are eager for war rather than
reluctant for it, then costly conflicts with Iran or even North Korea
might become inevitable. Sarkozy's eagerness to befriend the United
States smacks of the fawning kind of submission that Tony Blair
exhibited in the UK, and we all know how that ended up. Does this
mean we'll see French troops keeping the peace in Iraq in the next
year?

Of course, all of this can be seen in a less pessimistic light.
France will remain determinedly independent as long as its people and
its culture stays proudly liberal. As Sarkozy said, “I want to be
your friend, your ally, your partner...but I wish to be a friend who
stands on his own two feet.” It would be useful to have one friend in
the world; it's tough being the bully in the playground and having no
one to talk to. Having a few intelligent, highly developed nations on
our side could mean nothing but good for our position in the world --
as long as the United States doesn't dominate and bully those nations
into submission.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/washington/07cnd-sarkozy.html?ex=1352091600&en=9f207240713036c7&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Weekly Article

Emergency Rule in Pakistan: One of Our Few Middle Eastern Allies Threatens to Collapse

General Musharraf, the president and on-again, off-again dictator of
Pakistan, has an uneasy relationship with the United States. On the
one hand, he had a gay old time chatting with Jon Stewart on the Daily
Show; but on the other hand, he hates our guts and is determined to
steer his country away from everything we hope it to be.

We've had tense relations with Pakistan going all the way back to
2001, when Osama bin Laden was hiding in the nation's caves. It took
a lot of wrangling to get past tight borders, and U.S. agents
continually felt that they were not being helped by the Pakistani
government, their supposed allies. Of course, Pakistan is not
interested in being the United States' lackey nation. In that part of
the world, it is a dangerous thing to be allied with the U.S., and the
increased factional violence in the nation over the past few years has
reflected this. If a host of other Muslim countries are condemning
the U.S.'s culture, society, and ethics, it's unwise to be supporting
them when you're a Muslim country surrounded by all the (very angry)
others. The U.S. government has always supported the democratically
elected leader of Pakistan, however, until recently.

After an increased number of suicide bombings in Pakistan, General
Musharraf flouted the guidance of several leading nations by
dissolving Pakistan's supreme courts and seizing emergency powers.
This same trick has been pulled by countless dictators in the past;
wait until a few political disasters, and play off the climate of
panic and desperation to grasp despotic power. Just like other
dictators, General Musharraf has promised that these emergency powers
will be relinquished once everything has blown over. He has now
assured the nation that elections will take place in January, but
we've also heard promises like this before; often, the delicious rush
of power is too much for a ruler to resist. The General marches under
the banner of anti-terrorism and his main reason for declaring an
emergency is to fight terrorism in Pakistan.

It's true that terrorists will always be able to move faster and
readjust their plans in response to changing situations much easier
than the lumbering bureaucratic beast of government. Some may say
that we should trust this president in a time of national emergency
and bear with him until the deadline of promised open elections next
year. If General Musharraf were serious about keeping his promises of
freedom to the citizens of Pakistan, however, he wouldn't have jerked
former prime minister Benazir Bhutto around so much. For all Bhutto's
problematic policies, such as her temporary support for the Taliban,
she is still an opposition leader outspoken in support of Pakistan's
right to democracy and power-sharing. She has also supported women's
rights and voiced concerns about rampant sexual discrimination. While
she may not be the leader Pakistan needs, she must still have the
freedom to voice her opinions against Musharraf, who has placed her
under house arrest up until just a day ago. What is the threat to
government that an opponent like Bhutto poses? Why would it damage
the war effort if her views were heard? And why is the Pakistani
Supreme court getting in the way? These are questions that Musharraf
isn't answering adequately. If the citizens of Pakistan are to trust
him with emergency powers, however, they are questions Pakistan
deserves answers to.

Pakistan and Turkey have stood as two potential models of democracy
and Islam co-existing in the Middle East. Both have their problems,
but as long as respect for religion and respect for democratic
freedoms existed, it felt like progress was being made. This latest
setback, however, is troubling not only for Pakistan but for the
example it presents to the region. The U.S. strongly discouraged
Musharraf from declaring emergency rule, but he went ahead and did it
anyway. We don't have the right to control our allies, but few
actions lately have shown that Pakistan is an ally at all to the
United States and its causes. With this disturbing new development on
its road to democracy, we may have to consider Pakistan as volatile an
environment as Afghanistan or other increasingly chaotic nations.

Originally published at The Campus
Word.

Weekly Article

Squandering International Respect: How the US Has Turned its Back on Human Rights

The UN, everyone's favorite cowardly organization that doesn't do
anything, is finally biting back, at least verbally. A UN spokesman
has released a statement seriously calling the United States' policies
into question, particularly when it comes to torture. So if we're the
land of the free, why do we keep on doing it?

Whether you like Michael Moore and his editorializing or not, he had a
point in Bowling for Columbine when he mentioned that US society had
been grounded in a culture of fear and defensiveness. The first
settlers fought for every inch of land they took from the Native
Americans, and that bloody, determined "screw 'em" mindset has held
through right up to the twentieth century, when the US refused to
enter both World Wars until they had been personally attacked, then
unleashed a massive army effort both times that succeeded in ending
the massive wars. We don't give much of a damn about the rest of the
world, but when our land, so hard-won, is threatened, we'll risk
everything, even our own code of morals, to protect it.

The fact remains, however, that we live in a different world than the
one of our ancestors or even of our grandparents. Our world has been
globalized in an unprecedented way; we have to think about humanity as
a whole, not humanity subdivided by race or nationality. We're
beginning to discover through science and modernization that we're all
more alike than we are different, and hurting others will only hurt us
in the long run. The fear and willingness to do anything to protect
our kin, however, still dominates. If torture is what it takes to get
crucial information out of someone, most Americans say hell yes, bring
on the waterboarding. At the same time, we can cry out "injustice!"
if one of our own is subjected to the same treatment. How is this
anything but hypocritical? How can we refuse to see a non-American,
non-Christian, or non-white as a human being?

Even worse, as the UN spokesman pointed out, our position of
unprecedented power in the world means that our choices stand as an
example for all other nations. We have tremendous influence, and are
trying to use it as a model for democracy and freedom of speech,
freedom of religion, and justice. If we really expect to spread the
positive image of democracy, then, why aren't we practicing what we
are preaching? President Bush keeps reiterating the idea that this is
a "different kind of war", this war on terror. He's right; this war
is not a clear us vs. them situation. But it is a chance to espouse
democratic values. The only way democracy will be spread to the
middle east is if the middle east wants democracy, and how could they
want it when we keep torturing people needlessly? Have we become a
nation that truly believes any means justify the ends? That is the
kind of ideology can be found elsewhere in the world, but only in the
beds of our most hated enemies. Must we become the enemy in order to
destroy him?

As the UN spokesperson said, "Certain human rights such as the
prohibition on torture are absolute." It's not rocket science to
imagine what the free world is thinking of us if we are resorting to
outright torture in order to achieve our goals. Losing the esteem of
the rest of the world is the first step on a very dark road, one where
the United States will be a friendless nation, one always having to
look over our shoulders. If we continue the way we're going, our
fears and defensiveness will be for real reasons.

Originally posted at The Campus
Word.

Weekly Article

Gray Rape: The Newer, Trendier Form of Date Rape

Cosmopolitan magazine is always trying to coin trendy new phrases for
relationship woes a la Sex and the City: manthrax and the like are
always a hit with readers. But this time they want to be serious and
consider a new kind of date rape: gray rape.

Kate White, editor in chief of Cosmo, wants to define the new term as
“sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial and is even more
confusing than date rape because often both parties are unsure of who
wanted what.” Basically, if one or more of the parties is too drunk
to have definitively said no, or if no one was quite sure whether no
was implied, White wants women's groups to consider it "gray rape"
rather than just straight-out date rape. It may be in the response
of the reputation-ruining allegations brought against Duke students
that women's groups are trying to bring out a clearer subcategory of
ambiguous sex.

If a woman isn't sure she said "no" clearly enough, does she have the
right to accuse her partner of rape? Needless to say, an accusation
of rape can change a person's life forever. To be expelled from
school or marked as a sex offender for life is a weighty burden and
the innocent until proven guilty clause of the American justice
system must hold as true in rape cases as it does in others. But how
many times will it have to go on the record books as legitimate
before people will accept the fact that no means no?

It is only in the past decade or so that women have finally begun
dispelling the terribly damaging, but prevailing notion, that '9 out
of 10 times it's the woman's fault.' (Thanks, Robert Heinlein, for
that gem). Classifying "gray rape" as a legitimate subcategory of
date rape will take us backwards again to the times when it was an
acceptable defense for someone to say "her words said no but her lips
said yes." Serial rapists routinely use the argument that their
victims wanted to be raped; sexual assaulters regularly argue that
intoxicated women wanted to have sex and did not resist, and yet
studies have shown that 1) women's sexual activity does not increase
with intoxication and 2) many rapes are not violent because women
will often not resist when merely threatened with violence.

As many women's health officials expressed at the discussion
sponsored by Cosmopolitan, establishing gray rape may lessen the
severity of punishment for perpetrators of violent sexual crimes. If
a defender can prove that his client wasn't one hundred percent sure
that a person was saying or implying no, and get an innocent verdict
for it, how many rape cases will go unpunished? The statistics
remain staggering -- 1 in 3 women will be a victim of sexual assault
-- not just harassment, but assault -- in their lifetime. One high-
profile bungling of a sexual assault (or not) case may have taken us
back decades, if we're willing to consider "gray rape" as a
legitimate category. How many times does it have to be said? No
means no and rape is rape.

Originally posted on The Campus
Word.

Weekly Article

Iranian Students Speak Out Against Their Own President

College students are the same the world around. They're young, passionate people who want to Be Involved and who hold sometimes naive ideals clenched in their upraised fists. Even if they're students in a dictator-run nation, like the students of Tehran University, they're willing to risk a lot to get their voices heard. Many of us read the startling book Reading Lolita in Tehran, about a women's book group that dared to read such challenging and explicitly banned books. Now the students of Tehran are joining the students of Columbia in protesting the practices of their own president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This holocaust-denier and choleric anti-Semite first angered the students in 2005 by replacing their university president with a "cleric" -- otherwise known as a man entirely in Ahmadinejad's pocket. Over the past two years, this puppet-president has ensured that a host of more liberal-leaning professors and publicly liberal students have been dismissed one by one. Since the revolution several decades ago, a once relatively liberal nation has been sinking backwards into a kind of civil degeneracy. This can be seen in particular by the treatment of women. While previously, women had opportunities unlike many Muslim countries, now they are forbidden to wear makeup, must be veiled in public, and do not have equal access to education, to name a few telling liberties that have been curtailed. Meanwhile, president Ahmadinejad continues to sit back comfortably and make outrageous statements of denial, such as claiming that there are no homosexuals in the entire country. And college students are supposed to be the naive ones. Similar to what recently happened at Columbia, Iranian university students started to protest when president Ahmadinejad appeared on campus to give a speech. Buttons started being pushed from the outset, when only "the most ardent supporters of the president" were allowed to attend the speech. For many of the rest, who are pro- democracy and protested during the speech, arrests or dismissals of the school were threatened. Several students continue to be detained with no hope of a trial or fair judgment because of their outspoken comments against the president. As American college students can attest, it's always the sign of a regime that has gone too far when a political leader tries to crack down on intellectual freedom. Colleges internationally stand as bastions of free knowledge and communication; while civil liberties continue to be curtailed in the United States, college students raise an outraged cry if similar measures are even approached on hallowed campuses. We see universities as above the petty lawmaking of transient administrations, enduring through their very versatility and openness to new ideas. It is on college campuses that most great scientific discoveries are made, as well as where great movements in humanities and politics begin. Therefore, Ahmadinejad may be able to get away with a lot -- and there is a certain amount of tiptoeing around him by many leading nations, in a fear of repeating the mistakes of Iraq -- but when he attacks his own universities, he's gone too far. Now for Iranian college students, it's personal. Tehran University has erupted in violent protests in the past weeks, resulting in the unjust imprisonment of several college students. It is outrageous that kids, the same age as you or me, have been held in prison since May for merely being outspoken about the crimes of their president. Like many dictatorships, Iran is in many ways a closed- off country, jealously guarding its borders and its people while oppression goes on quietly within the walls. As long as college students have a say in it, they will remain loud and defiant in the face of this treatment, but without a right as basic as the equivalent of our first amendment, they won't get the chance to open their mouths. It's amazing how basic and yet how necessary free speech is to lead a conscious and free life uncurtailed by the government. As a writer, I feel more keenly than most that all things flow from the freedom of words and communication. With it, college students like myself have a chance to fight back, stick it to the man. Without it, we're sunk. Only by keeping the public eye on the injustices of Iran, and not just the nuclear weapons, can we, a world away, hope to aid students like ourselves. Nuclear weapons are, undoubtedly, a serious threat, but waging a war the likes of Iraq would be disastrous. More helpful would be supporting the people of Iran in a revolution of their own. Revolutions and reform must always come from the inside to be successful; if forced from the outside, changes are nearly always rejected in violence and civil war. To keep Iran from backsliding into a country as nightmarishly oppressive as Saudi Arabia, where women are not even allowed to drive, we can only lend our support as the young people of Iran wrestle with the demons of their country the way our parents struggled to reform the United States a generation ago. Originally posted at The Campus Word.

Weekly Article

Crisis in Myanmar: When Monks Have Had Enough

Weekly Article

One Strike and You're Out: Hillary Clinton's Last Chance at Healthcare Reform

Even if we were too young to understand what was going on at the
time, we all know now of Hillary Clinton's massive blunder in
healthcare when her husband was president. Being an intelligent,
ambitious First Lady determined to overhaul an American system
desperately in need of reform, she took on health care. That was one
big elephant in the room that no one else was willing to tackle.
And, being a woman who presumed to peer into the shadows of a system
no one wanted to investigate, she was bound to stumble.

Senator Clinton's efforts, though never implemented and with no
harmful ramifications, were deemed disastrous; it is the largest
shadow she has to overcome in her presidential campaign. And yet
something about the whole affair seems unfair. Other presidential
candidates have similar black marks on their records, and equivalent
or larger mistakes that they refuse to own up to. Senator Clinton,
on the other hand, has just released a new, comprehensive proposal
for health care reform that would require all U.S. citizens to have
health care and would offer affordable insurance options. To all
intents and purposes, Clinton is meeting her mistakes head-on, freely
acknowledging them and showing that she is ten years wiser and ready
to try again. But why are people so resistant to her renewed attempt?

The answer might lie in the general, lingering attitude still
pervasive in the United States. As news anchors have been asking
repeatedly in recent weeks, is American ready for a woman president?
Or as one character in a Freaks and Geeks episode noted, one reason a
woman should never be president is that 5-7 day period once a month
when she couldn't be counted on to be rational. That sort of
attitude towards women may be more firmly held than we'd like to
think. As a First Lady attempting to reform health care, Senator
Clinton was scoffed at for daring to bull her way into big man
country. How dare she, was the general attitude at the time. How
dare a woman presume to shuffle the deck, to fix something that
didn't seem broke. At the time, health care seemed like a distant
threat, a storm cloud on the horizon. Now, of course, health care
has forced its way into the national awareness and is one of the
dominant issues candidates and president alike are being forced to
think about. Hillary Clinton's bid to reorganize the health care
system was premature, and therefore politically unacceptable; it
seems that we are laughed at if we bring issues to the forefront
before they have reached the absolute 11th hour of urgency.

Now, however, times are different. Americans need health care and
they need it badly. Presidential candidates are expected to have a
plan for reform ready along with their campaign slogans. But with
the black mark on her record, will Senator Clinton's new plan be
given fair criticism, or is the public already eager to see her
fail? Her announcement of a new plan was greeted with respectful
attention by some and snickers by others. What if she actually has
the plan that could pull the U.S. out of its crisis, and no one will
listen because she is a woman who has already struck out? We know
women in even a typical workplace have it tough. They are given
fewer opportunities than men to make the grade and are evaluated more
harshly for mistakes. In the political world, these biases are much
harsher and less forgiving. A woman who makes a mistake is somehow
proving that all women are more likely to make mistakes. A lot is
riding on Hillary's shoulders, but if she isn't given a fair shot and
evaluated on an even plane with the other candidates, women's
political opportunities could suffer.

Originally posted at The Campus
Word