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October 2000

Flee from Fleet!
Recent mergers harm consumers.
by Shai Sachs

The Death of Winter
Global warming: scarier than you thought.
by Julia Silvis

Napster Got My Gnuts
The mp3 debate gets out of hand.
by Brad Hershbein

Talkin' $acrifice
Americans don't appreciate public service.
by Nikhil Jaikumar

Feelin' Important!
PERSPECTIVE's voter registration guide for Election 2000.
by the PERSPECTIVE staff

Introspective
Starvation Chic
by Liz Thornberry

Salmagundi

Scraps

Backpage
Scooterdo's (and don'ts)
by Julia Silvis

THERE’S NOTHING ABOUT MARY: Of all that stinks about the Bush-Cheney ticket, nothing reeks more than the Cheneys’ attempt to conceal their daughter’s homosexuality. It has been public knowledge for some time that Mary Cheney—Dick and Lynne’s daughter—is gay; she and her partner jointly own an expensive home in Colorado. But recently the elder Cheneys have made a concerted effort to force their daughter back into the closet, at least for the duration of the presidential race.

Cheney’s willingness to sacrifice his daughter’s well-being for political purposes is, frankly, disgusting. In order to avoid both alienating the right wing and highlighting the Bush candidacy’s intolerance toward gays, Cheney has sacrificed his daughter’s self-identity. And, coming from a member of a political ticket that claims to be the prime defender of American family values, such posturing is not only sick but hypocritical. Even Jerry Falwell has suggested with regard to the Mary Cheney situation that "it is ludicrous to judge a man based on one errant but loved family member." Cheney, however, doesn’t seem so sure, a damning conclusion about both him and his constituents.

-Jeffrey Theodore

TO QUOTE OR NOT TO QUOTE: Yesterday I received an e-mail inviting me to an open house at my house’s Masters’ Residence. "Sweets for the sweet!" the e-vite exclaimed. I was appalled by the very morbid Shakespeare quotation. Shakespearean phrases have permeated our popular culture and common speech, as hundreds of us are reminded in Garber’s opening Lit & Arts lecture each autumn. I have no qualms with the occasional Slim Jim commercial set against a Romeo and Juliet background, but the misuse of the Bard’s words can be quite unsettling (yes, I hate it when people call him "the Bard," too, but this wouldn’t be as distinctively idiomatic if I didn’t throw that in, and then how could anthropologists date this fragment of prose centuries from now?). For example, the Signals company is selling a ring upon which is inscribed a quotation from that beautiful love scene wherein Richard Duke of Gloucester woos Lady Anne in Richard III. King Richard later kills his lovely wife, along with a batch of 6 bothersome nobles, including his own best friend and four of his own relatives by marriage; earlier, he kills his older brother. Richard is not quite the romantic stallion upon whose sweet words a lover’s wandering eye may wish to light, after all. Remember: for every cute catch-phrase there’s an entire play out there waiting to contextualize whatever sassy meaning you’ve assigned it right out of the sucker.

TOBACCO TORTURES: Believe it or not, there is a flourishing industry that kills as many Americans as it annually employs. The US Department of Agriculture estimates that tobacco directly supports roughly 500,000 American jobs, while the World Health Organization estimates that tobacco use killed 529,000 Americans in 1995. Each job is supported by one death per year.

Thats why I’m rooting for the lawyers to eviscerate the tobacco companies in the current lawsuits. The dream scenario is this: Lawsuits drive the companies into bankruptcy, allowing the government to take over the industry with the sole intention of supplying cigarettes to existing smokers until they quit. With the tobacco industry being run (inefficiently, but that’s okay) by people who don’t care about profit, the motivation for addicting more teenage smokers disappears. In a century, tobacco addicts are as rare as opium addicts are today.

Tobacco’s perceived economic benefit is a stupid defense. With this outrageous employment-to-death ratio, defending tobacco because it’s essential to some regional economies is like defending slavery for the same reason. (While slavery was much more evil, I’d venture that the evil was proportional to its greater degree of economic importance.) For the health of the nation, tobacco must be destroyed as quickly as possible.

-Neil Sinhababu

PAPER CHASE: Rain and paper don’t mix well. Especially paper taped to the ground, pummeled by hundreds of pairs of passing feet into pavement. This particular variety of paper frays and disbands in the rain, leaving a rectangle of masking tape around a disgusting mess of dyed tree pulp. Usually, though, some caring soul had the foresight to tape enough copies of the same announcement into a stunningly artistic pattern so as to ensure that by piecing together the bits of information still available on each flyer, it is vaguely possible to understand exactly when, and sometimes where, the "New Age Country Singers" or the "College Acronym Society of Harvard (CASH)" will be meeting this week. Coming from a school system where constant paper shortages ruled over the hierarchy of handouts and worksheets, the amount of paper used to advertise everything from the upcoming auditions for the "Young Men’s Frog Catching Society" to next Wednesday’s forum on "The Various Uses of the Egg Timer (free pizza will be served!)" demonstrate to me not only the incredible variety of events and clubs available to students here, but also the wastefulness of these organizations. Certainly, every group has the right to draw attention to itself, but is it really necessary to paper every telephone pole from here to the Mass. Ave. bridge in fluorescent splendor? I suppose its easy enough to make the argument, that due to the abuses of the competition, its necessary for every group that wants to attract the one or two Harvard students not already committed, a publication, multiple volunteer groups, and two varsity sports, to aggressively poster in order to somehow bring enough recruits together to eat through its weekly pizza supply, but wouldn’t it be easy enough to make some sort of good-neighborly pledge not to cover every flat surface in Harvard Yard with the same old same old? Couldn’t groups be restricted to one flyer per message board? Why couldn’t some sort of large, organized, central calendar be set up in the science center to help students figure out which clubs were meeting each night? Certainly, there’s no reason to call for a moratorium on groups using their own funds to advertise themselves, but it seems to me that many groups would be happy to lay down less of their hard earned cash at Kinko’s and a little more for free pizza. In the end, although these advertisements showcase the spirit of the student body, they also detract not only from our local environment (as if Canaday weren’t enough), but from the no longer endless supply of woodlands necessary to power the paper industry, as well. Please, think twice before posting.

-Stephen Milder

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu