Waking Up to Normalcy
This column was featured in the Green Key 2017 Special Issue: "Awakening."
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This column was featured in the Green Key 2017 Special Issue: "Awakening."
In the age of social media and of President Donald Trump’s administration, our bodies are out of our hands. Trump has already signed legislation intended to defund Planned Parenthood and other services providing abortions, placing self choice in the hands of the government. Police forces continue to brutalize communities, especially those of African-American men.
Many students choose Dartmouth because of the close relationships the school fosters between students and faculty. So, all peer mentors, trip leaders and other upperclassmen brimming with guidance will encourage freshmen to go to office hours — but what they don’t explain is how to actually go to them. As a freshman, office hours were to my academic experience what elusive secret menu items were to chain restaurants. To order Starbuck’s “Pink Drink” or In-N-Out’s “Animal Style” fries, you have to be aware of the item’s existence and confident enough to place the order. The actual fries or drink, regardless of taste, seemed to be a prize for attaining obscure knowledge and possessing self-confidence.
I never go on shopping sprees, but on a whim, I bought a black California Fleece sweatshirt and a grayish trench coat from American Apparel following the announcement of its closing. I will miss their black turtlenecks, thigh high socks and soft t-shirts; to some extent, I’ll even miss their controversial advertisements. Yet, when I lamented the death of American Apparel and expressed my ensuing urgency to buy more clothing before it closed, one of my friends said, “Clara, how could you?” Because of the sexual assault allegations against former American Apparel executive Dov Charney and the apparent sexism of American Apparel advertisements, I have been forced to call my American Apparel clothing “Problematic Faves.”
On Feb. 24, Chinese photographer Ren Hang died. Known for his minimalistic portraits which often combined human subjects with animals and various inanimate objects placed unexpectedly, Hang often highlighted the borderland between erotic and artistic, leading him to shoot photos for fashion brands like Maison Kitsune and face censorship in China. His photograph “We’ve Got Eyes Everywhere” for Milk Studios, for example, features a black-haired woman donning red lipstick and holding a peacock which partially covers her face. Despite the polarizing nature of his work, Hang denied that his work had a political message, sometimes claiming it had no meaning at all.
Following Adele’s Grammy win for Album of the Year this past weekend, my Facebook feed has been filled with long rants and links to pop culture websites about why Beyoncé should have won instead of Adele. Whether I prefer Adele or Beyoncé is irrelevant; it neither influences who I think should be the Grammy winner, nor is my opinion influenced by the results of the Grammy Awards. By overvaluing the opinion of large-scale, corporate institutions that support the arts, we come to have a narrow understanding of what the arts are and lose the chance to form more complex ideas about the arts through our peers and ourselves.
On Jan. 27, President Donald Trump issued an executive order banning the admission of refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries and announced that Syrian refugees be indefinitely blocked from entry into the United States. “We want to ensure that we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas,” Trump said during the signing. “We only want to admit those into our country who will support our country and love deeply our people.” The statement draws on a false narrative persistent through history that portrays the U.S. as a patron and refugees and immigrants as freeloaders or threats. Rather than believe this reductive narrative, we should remember the struggles of refugees relocated to the U.S.
Even before the impending presidency of Donald Trump, American culture has seen a trend of growing isolationism. With just a computer, one can live in a personalized (albeit lonely) virtual world. Facebook conveniently filters out alternative viewpoints, providing fake news to your liking. You can use Tinder and Friendsy to mechanically swipe through faces instead of meeting people in real life.
The clothing options on Hanover’s Main Street, like J. Crew and other aesthetically similar boutiques, epitomize the general fashion trends of our campus and town. This is why one of my first destinations upon returning to California for winter break was Fairfax Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles. It was a refreshing break from chinos and plaid. Regional fashion, of course, is not homogenous, but Los Angeles taste-makers err towards a deceptively casual aesthetic.
President Barack Obama has been praised for being up-to-date with popular culture. He appeared on the travel and food show “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” for example, sharing beer and bun cha with the show’s host. He enjoys rap, especially Kendrick Lamar, and has sung with B.B. King. Nevertheless, the president’s purview on art remains rather limited, focusing on the mainstream rather than the avant-garde. Rather than celebrate boundary-pushing innovation, politicians tend to treat art as a mere subset of education policy or as a tool to prove their own relevance, not as its own political domain. We often overlook the political influence of art, especially that which lies outside of the mainstream.
At Dartmouth, it is practically impossible to escape the Greek system. If you’re hard at work in the Class of 1902 Room, you notice when new sorority sisters run through dressed in flair. On your walk home from the Stacks, you notice when a large group of brothers walk down Webster Avenue. Greek houses affect all Dartmouth students, whether or not they are affiliated.
Donald Trump’s son recently faced criticism for a tweet that compared Syrian refugees to a bowl of Skittles. Accompanied by a graphic of a bowl filled with Skittles, Donald Trump Jr. wrote, “If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you just three would kill you. Would you take a handful?” Most of the American public found that this image was offensive, trivializing the hardships of refugees and demonstrating a lack of sympathy. After deleting the tweet, Trump Jr. called his post a metaphor for “risk and probability” — but this doesn’t make the image any less problematic.
To some Democrats, he’s the end of the world, the apocalypse or the sign of doomsday. To some Republicans, he’s change, a breath of fresh air or an outsider. To Vladimir Putin, he’s a “colorful” man. On both sides of the political aisle and even in other countries, the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump may appear to be a wild card.
Martha Rosler created a photomontage called “The Grey Drape” (1967-72). The piece shows a woman in a silky dress pulling open a window frame in her modern American home, smiling placidly despite the soldiers marching on a battlefield outside her window. This image appears in my head whenever I contemplate the collective attitude in New Hampshire toward the Black Lives Matter movement. Like the woman in her utopic home, Dartmouth and New Hampshire as a whole tend to evade the issue of police brutality due to a false perception that it doesn’t concern New Englanders, white people or students at the College. According to those with this mindset, race doesn’t matter in a state like ours.
“It is a small college, yet there are those who love it.”
In the last few weeks, four police-related shootings received national attention. In Texas, Micah Xavier Johnson killed five police officers at a Black Lives Matter protest. In Minnesota, police officer Jeronimo Yanez shot an African-American man, Philando Castile. Two police officers, Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II, shot an African-American man, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, LA. More recently, Gavin Long killed two white policemen. Jinsung Bach ‘17’s July 15 column “A Bloody Reputation,” highlighted the recent deaths of police officials and linked them to the Black Lives Matter movement. He posits that, because of the recent shootings of police officials, the entire Black Lives Matter movement has lost all credibility.
Artists are considered dreamers, idealists and romantics, but rarely are they considered intellectuals, hard-workers or pragmatists. And, more generally, dreaming is seen as akin to dwelling in nostalgia, and idealism to false hope. Romanticism is illogical. Art, one may conclude, is about lingering in a world of the past — taking one’s time to stop in nature and write a poem, capturing a landscape slowly with oil paints, playing a slow piano tune in a salon. Due to the ongoing technological boom, today everything is all about maximizing efficiency. No one has time for art anymore.
Despite being an English major, I am concerned about the lack of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. Statistics from the National Student Clearinghouse reveal not only that the number of women with bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering disciplines is low, but that it has in fact decreased since 2004. Most drastically, women received only 23 percent of computer science degrees in 2004, while in 2014 this number fell to 18 percent. Coincidentally, I happen to be taking a statistics class that involves a little bit of computer science, which allows me some personal insight as to why this problem exists. After all, why don’t women just major in science? There’s no legal or written boundary stopping them.
While reading a book for my class about the Vietnam War, I wondered what the typical combat attire looked like for those engaged in guerrilla warfare. To answer my question, I did a quick Google Image search. While I found many helpful images, I also came across one that was particularly disturbing. It wasn’t, however, disturbing because it was particularly violent. Unlike the other pictures, images of soldiers clad in black clothing armed with weapons, this one depicted similar figures with rice paddy hats — but they were animated. That’s because this image was from a video game. Confused, I continued my Google Search and discovered that there are video games about the Vietnam War, including “Battlefield Vietnam” and “Conflict Vietnam,” as well as a Vietnam level in the popular video game “Call of Duty: Black Ops.” But the Vietnam War is not the only real war depicted in video games. Many volumes of “Call of Duty” focus on World War II. To some, the idea of virtually shooting animated people is already disturbing. Their typical argument is that virtual warfare desensitizes us to the emotional impact of actual war. Given the literal devastation that occurs after wars like World War II and the Vietnam War, real-war video games heighten desensitization not only to general warfare, but may discourage understanding difficult times in history and empathizing with those who have suffered.
Replacing Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, along with placing women and civil rights activists on other bills, is a subtle way of creating sociopolitical change. Seeing new faces on our money won’t solve any big policy problems. Nevertheless, it redefines the way we think of our nation’s founders and, perhaps more importantly, symbolizes that the politics of race and gender have a place in our society.