The Wake

Panicking through the fog of a dream, there is a frantic groan, “My god, the fear is nauseating.” The frigid aura of a dusty nightmare clings to a sea of sprinkling smoke over rusty blackness while the dark depths rise to the surface with a sick gleam in the eye, slinging mutilation and gore. Lightning cracks from the mystic horn of another time and place; you are the terror that permeates this modern moment. A latent smile sneaks around your cold and trembling mouth, troublingly satisfied. Perhaps this is the kind of frightful sensation we are all looking for when we go to see a scary movie. The horror genre has a certain sickness to it that has always been attractive for moviegoers, from the classic German expressionist to today’s gory thrillers. I can’t …

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The Minnesota Student Association will be holding elections to determine a new President and Vice President this coming April. These elections, to our dismay, are usually characterized by disinterest amongst the student population and low voter turnout. Michael Griffin and Vince Patti (running for President and Vice President, respectively) hope to reverse these trends by working to correct pressing issues that affect the student body at the University of Minnesota. In the eyes of these two candidates, nothing has been more misguided and needless than Operation NightCAP, perhaps better known as the “Party Patrol” consisting of police that shut down house parties with militaristic precision.“Operation NightCAP must end,” is the mantra of Griffin and Patti’s 2007 campaign. Since the program’s inception during Homecoming weekend of 2004, thousands of dollars in fines for underage consumption and …

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As academics and intellectuals, we tend to devote our time and studies to examining the subconscious meanings of our actions. Why does she wear tight jeans and green shoes? Why does he gel his hair into a faux-hawk every morning? What does your Members Only jacket say about your outlook on life? We spend so much time analyzing and getting lost in the maze of the subliminal that we fail to note the obvious. For example, what does wearing a shirt with the Confederate flag on it say about you? Does it mean that you support the confederacy and, thus, the institution of slavery? Does it mean you support a system that devalued humans for 200 years and defined their existence in terms of paltry sums of money? Does it mean that you support dispassionate, …

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Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Rosa Parks sat resolutely on the bus. Rock Hudson was a fine, gay actor. Cole Dennis changed history with his brilliant writing and chiseled pectorals. Anna Nicole Smith was a national joke.As you’ve all probably heard — and you’d better have because I would like to think of myself as having an informed readership — Anna Nicole Smith recently died. Everyone seems to think that this is hi-freaking-larious. I have not gone one day since then without overhearing someone joking and laughing about it.As I said, Anna Nicole Smith was a national joke. Maybe she deserved to be. She acted ridiculously both leading up to and during her nationally syndicated reality television show, which followed her around, watching how she spent her late husband’s hard-earned fortune. She was a …

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A pair of grand openings representing the cultures of celebrity and coffee has occurred at the University’s Wilson Library in the past two weeks. Though they are physically separated by three of Wilson’s six floors, these two unveilings are more closely related than they appear at first glance. The fourth floor of Wilson Library was radiating with warmth and energy on yet another cold evening last Friday during the debut of the most recent Gorman Rare Art Books exhibit, The Birth of Celebrity Culture in the City of Lights (1880-1900). The exhibition, which runs until April 27, showcases a vast diversity of images from periodicals and books within the Gorman collection, illuminating the role of the popular press in the creation and maintenance of the “celebrity” figure in late nineteenth century Paris.The curator of …

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What do I know about being a minority? I suppose that depends on your definition. What I do know however, through leftover cold war stigma and a childhood of being the ostracized Russian girl, is that you don’t have to have different colored skin to be, well, different. What I also know is that, in retrospect, difference is a good thing, even when it involves ESL classes and eating borsch.A few weeks ago a friend and classmate of mine, Ali Jaafar, wrote an article for this magazine in which he explained his belief that any classification based on race or religion is racist –and therefore unacceptable. Ali claimed that even positive stereotypes, such as Asians being good at math, are bad because they prevent us from viewing people as individuals. Although I value …

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You’ve seen them in restaurants, cocktail parties and at the grocery store. You’ve heard them talking in class, on the bus or at the coffee shop. You watch the skinny, unshaven guy lock up a ten-speed outside of Subway and listen to him order the veggie delight, and then it hits you. There are people that live and work in the real world that don’t eat meat. Somehow they don’t shrivel up and die and their bones don’t shatter from the impending force of gravity. They call themselves vegetarians.I’ve been a vegetarian for a while now, and if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that being a vegetarian today in America is like trying to swim up the Mississippi with lead water wings after eating a Chipotle burrito. In other words, it’s hard. It’s not hard …

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More couples break up on Valentine’s Day than any other day of year. Surprised? Given that everyone takes the frivolous festival way too seriously, this shouldn’t register as a shock. Just when you think you’re clear of another heavily commercialized holiday season, businesses and the media give you another excuse to splurge on worthless clutter. Never mind that your checkbook has yet to recover—now you’re obligated to buy flowers, cards, candies, jewelry, stuffed bears, little pink hearts and cupids for your sweetheart. What’s worse, the unattached are left out and made to look a fool. Valentine’s Day marks that special time of year when people are expected to either give in to those warm, squishy feelings or slide deeper into the despairs of sexual frustration. I, for one, see through the lies clouding the minds …

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The general belief among the American population today is that sexism is a thing of the past. When someone points out a sexist behavior or remark, the people around often write it off as hypersensitivity about being “politically correct.”The truth is that sexism is still extensive in our society, and the very fact that people believe sexism is nonexistent is symptomatic of the problem. One of the largest areas in which sexism is problematic is our language. Specifically, the word “girl” is often used to refer to an adult woman, whereas the word “boy” is almost never used in reference to an adult man, unless an insult is intended. When someone uses the word “boy,” the listener pictures a child, not past adolescence. But “girl” is universal for females of any age; many grown women …

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On November 8 of last year, President Bush sawed off a dead leg as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “resigned.” Americans insofar had sat quiet through the exodus of the neo-cons, the members of President Bush’s cabinet who are largely responsible for the war in Iraq and the Bush post-9/11 platform of war profiteering and expansive executive power. The timeliness of Rummy’s resignation carries with it a weight that the previous exits of Powell, Ashcroft, Card, Fleisher, McLellan, Tenet, Wolfowitz, Feith, O’Neill, Veneman, Thompson, Snow, Norton, Evans, Paige, Martinez, Mineta, Principi, and Ridge, (to name a few) didn’t. With Rumsfeld out and a slew of southpaws in congress, Dick Cheney is a sitting quail.Poor marksmanship is the least of Cheney’s problems these days. Remember in August of 2002 when he appeared on Meet the Press …

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By the time they smeared the warm oil across my forehead, buying the shred of a soul my mother insists I have, it was already too late. When I first lost my dignity, I was fourteen years old and dolled up in a suit at the front of the Basilica downtown with my fellow confirmation class byproducts. Slightly less than a decade and a half earlier my uncle was holding my gelatinous body and unformed skull while this dude, not the same person as the one with the oil, but close enough, poured water down my forehead. I imagine I cried at the time. But that second time, when I was fourteen, that’s when the tears should’ve come. Because if I’d known of what I was forsaking, I never would’ve gone. In the name of …

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When the U.S. Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934, it established the Federal Communications Commission, an independent federal agency responsible for regulating interstate and international communications of radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. The FCC regulated the rates of telephone companies, controlled business relationships between networks and their affiliates and limited the number and types of services a single person or corporation could own in a single market. It acted as a comprehensive government agency to protect Americans from being screwed by big market forces by encouraging options and competition.But on Dec. 29, 2006, the FCC approved the $85 billion mega buyout of BellSouth by AT&T, the biggest telecommunications deal in U.S. history. Out of the ominous shadow of the merger, Democratic commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein forced AT&T, through their holdout approval …

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The latest album from Neil Young, titled “Living with War,” is full of politically charged content coming from someone who is known for making bold statements on political and social issues. I can’t say I’ve listened to it much, but the name is certainly thought provoking. What does it mean to be living with war? Obviously the experience of war for those in the bloody streets of Baghdad is totally different from that of the American masses, whose far-detached understanding of the occupation and violence is constrained by the sneaky filters of the news media. We are encouraged to think about the war in heroic terms where we are the good guys, but for those of us who see beyond the many faces of wartime propaganda, these are frustrating and disappointing times. Perhaps the bitterest …

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Shortly after Christmas, my sister gave birth to her second baby girl. She and her husband are happy parents and very proud of their two girls, but they don’t plan to have any more children. That is, they will never be able to experience having a boy. If they had been given the chance, I imagine they would have gone for it. But wait, duh, it’s the 21st century. We can already do that. Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis, or PGD, allows prospective parents to screen their embryos for genetic diseases, choose the gender of the child and soon choose more characteristics, from stature to eye color to deafness (often a sought-after quality by deaf parents). Sweet! By the time most of us 20-something college students are ready to settle down and have a family, we’ll be …

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If you want to see what high school kids know about history, start judging debate rounds. If you want to see what college kids think about race relations, sit in on Journalism 1001. I was discussing the Danish cartoon fiasco in the aforementioned class when one of my classmates decided to point out that there is such a thing as a “Moderate Muslim,” a genteel creature who apparently never gets offended and welcomes all facets of American culture with open arms. Another student applauded Grey’s Anatomy for featuring a black man in a position of power. Some brave souls were even intrepid enough to claim that the media doesn’t perpetuate stereotypes. And everybody agreed that Crash was like the civil rights movement put to film and shown on a projector operated by Malcolm X. …

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