the libertine

the whip sheet of the liberal party

issue five / 17.02.2002

zero	a message from the secretary This is a long issue. Enjoy. Here is a confession: I have a slight crush on Marie Reine le Gougne. For those of you who are out of the loop, M.R.l. Gougne is the stylish (Rob, you can tell everyone why I won’t say “chic”), fragile and French figure skating judge who was recently stripped of her accreditation for letting others influence her votes in the pairs figure skating competition at the Olympics. I’ve included the best picture I have of her at left. Just look at her. The icy stare hiding the brittle interior, the long red hair under the death-black headband, the ghetto-fabulous gold hoop earrings juxtaposed with the Cruella de Vil fur collar: it’s all enrapturing. And who knew what fabulous lives figure skating judges live? Apparently Ottavio Cinquanta is a multi-millionaire. Money and ice: rapper’s delight. Now, on to something important. If you are like most of the people on this list, you have never come to a Liberal Party event. This is a shame not only because (by dint of your presence on this list) you are at least somewhat interested in liberal politics, but much more pressingly because you have never met some of the very cool regulars at our meetings. Specifically, you have probably never met me. This is an even bigger shame. I am cool, charming, and frequently shod in green. At the very least you should come to a Lib event to get to know me better. Who knows: perhaps you will find me boring and fall for Gisèle or Clayton. Perhaps romance will blossom. Therefore I dare you—I will not double dare you until next week, and I do not think I have the courage to double dog dare you ever—to attend something this week. Everything we do, you might not know, is low pressure. Come to JBB tomorrow and meet the dean of the law school; join us to talk (we probably ought not say “debate”) on Wednesday. And tell ’em Jason sent you. –j.s.f.
one	goings on in the liberal party 18.02.2002 / Monday / 05.30 / JBB Dinner with Anthony Kronman Our first Jonathan Brewster Bingham dinner of the semester will feature Anthony Kronman, the dean of Yale Law School. We’ll have dinner in the Branford Pit—if you aren’t familiar, that’s the space behind the glass doors in the back of that college’s dining hall. Dean Kronman will speak to us, and we’ll have the opportunity to ask questions at the end. 19.02.2002 / Tuesday / 07.00 / Dr. Rev. David Lee at BSAY This is not actually a Lib event, but it’s important enough to me to merit a mention in section one. Here is some cut-and-pasted information: “Black Students at Yale present Reverend Dr. David Lee (DIV '93) of Varick Memorial AME Zion Church of New Haven, candidate for Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation this Tuesday, February 19 at 7pm at the African American Cultural House (211 Park St., right behind the YDN building.) Rev. Dr. Lee believes that Yale and New Haven should become true partners and he hopes to foster this partnership through a position on Yale's highest administrative body the Yale Corporation. As pastor of New Haven's oldest African-American church, Rev. Lee has witnessed first hand the symptoms of urban blight which plague this city including a double digit poverty rate, a public school crisis, high asthma, infant mortality, AIDS rates and the drugs and crime. He feels that Yale is more than merely the city's largest employer; it is instead an integral part of the cultural and moral fabric of the region. As a global leader, Yale should not forget its local responsibilities. Rev. Dr. Lee affirms that we should find a way for all God's children to grow and prosper together with no one left behind.” 20.02.2002 / Wednesday / 07.30 / YPU debate Tonight’s student debate will consider the resolution “Federal funding of the arts should be abolished.” Let me say that I was watching Sesame Street: Don’t Eat the Pictures this afternoon (if you haven’t seen it, you are not yet fully human), and the final credit read thus: “Special thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, without which this project would have been impossible.” If the thought of a world without DEtP terrifies you as deeply as it does me, then please come to the YPU tonight and save my world. 21.02.2002 / Thursday / 08.30 / Lib debate with special guest star Will Tanzman This week we have an exceptional debate planned. Will Tanzman, a sophomore who is working with New Haven unions in their negotiations with Yale, will visit our floor to discuss with us the resolution “Yale should form a social contract with its workers and with New Haven.” Millions of dollars, and the very dignity of Yale employees, are at stake in the upcoming negotiations between town and gown. We’ll have a special chance to talk to someone closely involved in the deliberations and to debate him on the issues. If you have any feelings whatsoever on this contentious matter, join us in the Davenport common room at the later-than-usual hour of 8:30. (Yes, yes, we have escaped the aesthetic horror of the Berkeley common room. Perhaps that’s the reason you haven’t been coming to meetings.)
two	the libertine online If you use Pine or Webmail to read your e-mail, or if for some other reason my whip sheets aren’t loading properly in your mail client, you can always see the Libertine just as we intended at our website, www.yale.edu/libs. (Well, almost always: I don’t update the website as often as I should.)
three	literacy advocate michael hirschhorn at dwight hall This Thursday, Dwight Hall will have its first tea of the semester, and its guest is Michael Hirschhorn. Here is some information from its organizer: “Dwight Hall presents a Dwight Hall Tea with literacy advocate Michael Hirschhorn this Thursday, February 21 at 4pm in the Dwight Hall Library. Michael Hirschhorn is a strategy consultant to non-profits and educational and philanthropic organizations.  Until recently, he served as executive director of the Literacy Assistance Center (LAC) in New York City. Michael joined the LAC in 1995 after five years as deputy director of Educators for Social Responsibility Metro. Michael holds an MBA and an MSW from Columbia University, and serves on the boards of several local and national non-profits and foundations. Formerly, he was director of the Center for Educational Change at Brooklyn College and an assistant to the Chancellor of the New York City Board of Education. Michael is currently a ‘visiting executive’ at the Yale School of Management, where he advises MBA students interested in non-profit, public, and non-traditional private sector management.”
four	hillel / muslim students association discussion Some of you might be interested in attending “Discrimination in America: Shaping Muslim and Jewish Identities,” which is the first event of Muslim Awareness Week at Yale. The discussion, which is being co-hosted by the two above organizations, will feature four speakers: Paula Hyman, professor of history and religious studies; Imam Zaid Shakir, religious leader of the New Haven mosque Masjid al-Islam; and two students, Ibrahim Smith and Nabilah Siddiquee. The event will take place Monday night at 7:00 in WLH 119.
five	artist of the left: sebastião salgado, photographer When the Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado traveled to the Sahel in Chad to document famine in the mid-1980s, he did something Annie Liebovitz or Karl Lagerfeld would probably never do in New York, let along in a third-world country: he took the bus. There was no other way for him to win the trust of his subjects, he said; if he went by a rented car “it’s a disaster. You are a guy with a car, a rich guy, and not with the people. You need to be accepted by reality.” In his decades-spanning career, Salgado has traveled to parts of the world that hypercapitalist governments and cold-blooded corporations have forgotten—or are trying to forget. His first major series of photographs, Outras Américas / Other Americas, took him around his home country and indeed the entire continent, where he discovered how large is the population slighted by expansion. In the years afterward he accumulated a huge cache of photographs, taken in Mozambique and in Mongolia, in Tajikstan and Turkmenistan (and, I should mention, in Afghanistan directly following the Taliban coup, long before anyone else cared), and compiled a group of shows under the heading The Majority World. His newest work, the stunning Migrations, documents “humanity in transition” in the form of refugees in Vietnam, starving Sudanese in search of food, landless peasants in Ecuador, and, most unsettlingly, millions of migrants from Mexico City to Bombay to Jakarta forced out of their home cities by the injustices of globalization. On this last issue Salgado has much to say: he was trained as an economist. His work, in one sense, is a reaction to the untenable heartlessness of a self-preserving corporate economy, and in his work—which, strangest of all, manages to make the most awful situations beautiful—one sees a man doing all he can do to get the Western world to listen. His final goal, he says, is to engage the spectator and bring about change: “Are we condemned to be largely spectators? Can we affect the course of events? Can we claim ‘compassion fatigue’ when we show no sign of consumption fatigue?”
six	a final thought, not unrelated to the fact that i am getting my terrible math 230 midterm back tomorrow morning Yeah, I failed math, but you bet I passed the E-Class. —Lil’ Kim