Spring 2016
BSE
wn o r B n e Keridover Art C
" "Smokey
Title Of The Piece
Best Student Essays Vol. 28–No. 1 Spring 2016 Editor in Chief
Design Editor
Science Editor
Copy/Research Editors Business Manager
Kimberly Mitchell
Daniel Guardado
Neil Sparks
Quinci LeGardye Maria Oroyan
Jim Fisher
Best Student Essays is published biannually by the University of New Mexico Student Publications Board. All opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the UNM Student Publications Board or the Best Student Essays staff.
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Letter from the Editor Kimberly Mitchell We started this semester with a celebration—that is, the release party for the Fall 2015 magazine— dedicated to the fine work created by some of UNM’s best and brightest students. I like to think this magazine, the one you’re holding right now, ends the semester the same way. Every publication is part of a larger celebration of ideas and words. I’m proud to say this issue of Best Student Essays is a pretty good contribution to that celebration. As with any great endeavor, a lot of work went into bringing you this magazine. That means there are a lot of thanks to be given, a lot of dedicated people to be recognized. First off, I would like to thank all of our submitters and readers. We may be celebrating the fine achievements of scholars and writers, but what good is a celebration if you can’t share it with people who matter? Without you, this fine magazine wouldn’t be able to exist. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to have the conversations these essays are meant to inspire. That’s what magazines such as this one are about—to have a conversation from author to reader, from one person to the next. It’s a beautiful world we live in where people can share their ideas and thoughts on things they care about. It’s a beautiful world that, without you, wouldn’t be quite the same. Thank you. To my staff: You are some of the best people I’ve ever worked with, and there aren’t enough flowery words in the world to express how delightful it has been to work with you. Daniel, your talent for design is something that will continue to inspire and delight me forever. Neil, your thoughtful advice and careful attention to detail will take you far in this world. Quinci, your passion and eye for good writing are enviable and invaluable. Maria, your enthusiasm and dedication has been spectacular and heartwarming throughout this whole year. You are all truly amazing, and I’m so grateful for the chance to have worked with you. I can’t imagine having done this without any of you. This magazine wouldn’t be a tenth of what it is without all your hard work, so sit back and take a look at it for a minute. You made this. Be proud. I also want to thank the UNM Student Publications Board and Staff. This semester has been a joy, and that is due in part to how helpful and supportive you all have been. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to work with this wonderful publication. Working with the magazine has been an adventure I’m glad I took. This semester, like any excellent adventure, is drawing quickly to a close. But that just means it’s time to start the next one. So I invite you, dear reader, to take your next adventure with the essays in this magazine. Sit down, grab a cat and a cup of tea, and join us in celebrating another semester’s worth of thoughtful, creative, well-written work. Happy reading. —K
Table of Contents 06
Two Sides of a Divide: A Reflection on a Summer through Central America
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UNM Program Offers Relief to Refugees
12 16 21 24 26 31 33 37
Stephanie Kaylene Mladinich NOMINATED BY Chris
Duvall, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies
Lucas Winter
NOMINATED BY Stuart
S. Winter, MD, Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine
Mehet-Weret
Keriden Brown
NOMINATED BY Leslie
Donovan, Honors College
The Gilt is off the Gingerbread: An Examination of English Caricatures of Napoleon Laura Golobish
NOMINATED BY Susanne
Anderson-Riedel, Art and Art History Department
The Evolution of the Student Athlete Rachana Bhat NOMINATED BY
Paul David Fornell, Honors College
Waves of Air BEST ESSAY AWARD WINNER Bryan MacCosbe NOMINATED BY Dr.
Stephen Benz, English Department
The Green Rush: The Legalization of Recreational Marijuana Gabriel Gallegos NOMINATED BY Dr.
Renee Faubion, Honors College
He for (S)he
Jesse Yelvington
NOMINATED BY Nora
Hickey, Honors College
The Making of Madwomen: How Fefu and Her Friends’ Julia Developed From Hamlet’s Ophelia Kayla Tabuena
NOMINATED BY Maria
Szasz, Honors College
Meeting Magic Mushrooms; or, How it Feels to Chew 5 Grams Rio O’Neal
NOMINATED BY Andrew
Bourelle, English Department
Two Sides of a Divide: A Reflection on a Summer through Central America
E
by: Stephanie Kaylene Mladinich
xhaling a sigh of relaxation, I sank deeper into my hammock and even deeper into my thoughts. The sun was shining down on me and I could hear music in the streets. Life was pretty good in Nicaragua. As I lay there, soaking in the fresh air, I was hit straight in the head with a giant starfruit that had fallen from the tree I was hanging beneath. Although I was startled, I chuckled to myself, filled with such joy to have received what seemed like a gift from the heavens. I had just become conscious of the hunger growing deep in my belly and, as if the tree heard the grumbling, it sent a quick snack my way. I couldn’t help but think that sometimes the world just sends you exactly what you needed. Not even a full minute later, amid my pure bliss, I was hit again; but this time it wasn’t so delightful. A bird pooped on my head in the middle of my reminiscent awe with the world and its gifts. Although this surprise wasn’t as satisfying as the first, I still found myself chuckling. Two events occurred, both fortunate and unfortunate. I realized that I had the choice of whether to focus on my luck in receiving the fruit, or my misfortune of being pooped on. This brief encounter with fortune and misfortune was an abstract representation of the nature of my entire trip. Life confronts you with diverse situations. Along my trip, I learned how to shape my perceptions to deal with the curveballs that life throws. I left for my summer abroad hoping to learn about herbal medicine. I wrote a proposal for the International Studies Department explaining my plans to read herbal books and talk with herbalists throughout my trip from Mexico to Brazil, compiling a book of herbs and knowledge from the plants. My proposal was specific, and I began my trip with expectations of the information that I would learn. Traveling from Mexico to Brazil, I gathered a wealth of diverse and meaningful experiences. Along my journey, I encountered people, places, and situations that consistently hurled my body and my mind in an
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entirely new direction. Embarking on my journey alone, I promised myself to do all that it took to break free from any limitations or inhibitions that I had previously placed on myself. In “Learning Across Cultures,” Judith Martin cites Marshall Singer’s commentary that “individual’s perceptions are influenced more by their membership in involuntary groups than by memberships in voluntary groups,” (10). In the context of traveling abroad, I considered the involuntary groups of which I am a member. As an American female, I realized that some of my decisions during my trip would be influenced by these characteristics. While in America, I do not often consider the effect of these parts of my identity on the ways in which I behave or make decisions; traveling alone through Central America caused me to be more conscious. Every day throughout the course of my trip, I woke up in a new place. Although landscapes, climates, and even languages changed along the way, there were consistencies in people’s perceptions of me. Because I was a female traveling on my own, I often received concerned or surprised reactions. No matter the culture or the country, people had the opinion that it was unsafe for a female to travel on her own. Additionally, my American citizenship often drew preconceived notions. People often doubted my ability to speak Spanish or carry on informed conversations because of their stereotypes that Americans were stupid. Simply because of my membership to a group that I did not choose, I had to work through obstacles to convey my true identity. In “Becoming World Wise,” Richard Slimbach focuses on the gaps that exist within society to divide them. Gender inequalities, education discrepancies, and socioeconomic backgrounds create foundational differences between communities (Slimbach 18). He speaks of economic, social, and racial divides that cause disconnects within society. For example, the wealth gap that divides the rich and the poor in society has cultivated a new culture for either side of the divide. While I was in Brazil, I attended the World Cup. The World Cup is an event that draws
Best Student Essays people from a variety of different backgrounds to support a common love for soccer. While I was in Brazil, I made friends with people on different ends of the divisions that Slimbach explains within society. I spent my first week in Brazil with a group of boys from England and Australia. All of the boys only spoke English and had well-paid jobs in their home countries. They had all come to see the World Cup for vacation. My second week in Brazil, I met a group of Venezuelans. This group of boys were the same age as the group from England and Australia, but led entirely different lives. They did not speak English, only Spanish, and did not have jobs back home. They had traveled to the World Cup on minimal funds and worked selling art to support their trip. One night, I came back to my hostel from a game with the group of Venezuelans.
At first, the encounter was awkward. All that I could focus on was the division between the groups. We were met at the front lobby by the group of English and Australians. Since I spoke both languages and knew both groups, I functioned as an intermediary. I felt as though I straddled the divide between the two groups. At first, the encounter was awkward. All that I could focus on was the division between the groups. They came from completely different backgrounds, had varying values, and couldn’t even speak the same language. I grew nervous about facilitating the interaction, but my thoughts were interrupted by an eruption of cheers from both sides. The television was playing a soccer game and all of the boys’ eyes were focused on the goal that had just been scored. They all delighted in the beauty taking place on the screen and behaved as though they were the best of friends. I relished in the moment. In front of my eyes, all differences fell away. The divisions that Slimbach outlines in his article became invisible in the strength of commonalities (17). As a result of one common interest, the vastly different groups of people were able to connect. From this point forward, I began to focus on the similarities between people and places, rather than the differences. I concentrated on the things
that unified humanity and the places that I visited, rather than what divided them. During my time in Nicaragua, I stayed with a farming family that was active in the Sandinista Revolution. Living in a country damaged by environmental and political factors, the citizens of Nicaragua have cultivated a unified community filled with revolutionary passion and individual empowerment. From the holistic philosophy behind the Sandinista Revolution to the friendliness in their demeanors, Nicaraguans demonstrated to me the strength of community, openness, and empowerment in confronting the problems of a society deeply affected by pollution, poverty, and governmental oppression. The couple that I stayed with, Rogelio and Lucia, were part of the uprising that fought for equality across the divides of society. Rogelio was a revolutionary soldier and Lucia was an herbalist. Throughout the duration of my stay, the couple shared with me their stories about the organization of a resistance in their community. They spoke of the destruction of the community and the environment by the government, emphasizing the difficulties that it caused their family and friends. Stories of drought, destruction, and oppression filled the days, yet their hopeful spirits never appeared weak. I was greatly influenced by the family’s ability to heal themselves. In Milton J. Bennet’s chapter on “Paradigmatic Assumptions and A Developmental Approach to Intercultural Learning,” he uses scientific theories related to the physical world to create models for social sciences and experiences. Referring to Newton, Einstein, and Kuhn, Bennet builds a theory regarding intercultural experiences and a flow of the process and evolution of intercultural experiences (92). Bennet explains the importance of observation in constructing a personal reality. This view of man as a “producer of reality” (94) gives power to each individual in developing a subjective perspective of reality. While this explanation defines the “positivist” approach, the idea of perception is evident in the “relativist” approach, as well. The author uses the idea of a “frame of reference” (Bennet 97) to explain his adaptation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The frame of reference is the level of contextual understanding of a reality. The relativity of this perception implies subjectivity when perceiving reality. In the case of Rogelio and Lucia, they exercise control over their perceptions of reality to produce a positive worldview. Although the family had experienced horrible things, they did not stop believing in themselves. They were empowered by their struggle and proud of what they had been through.
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Two Sides of a Divide: A Reflection on a Summer through Central America Lucia’s strength and positivity inspired me. With the use of positivist and relativist approaches, as outlined by Bennet, Rogelio and Lucia liberated their minds from their experiences by taking action to control their reality. With a focus in biology and plant sciences, my perception of the world is framed by science. Throughout my experiences abroad, I often took note of the natural flow of social situations, in the context of the natural world. My references to biology as a model for society correlate with Bennet’s constructions of models from concepts evident in physics (Bennet 92). While Bennet chooses to focus on relativity with reference to shaping reality, I focused on the direct influence of nature in the healing process of Rogelio and Lucia. Lucia walked me through her garden and showed me the plants that she had used to heal the wounds of her husband during the war. These were treatments that she cultivated herself, channeling the power of the earth to heal her family. Rogelio and Lucia’s ability to have open hearts and hopeful minds, after years of suffering, demonstrated the human ability to adapt. The empowerment that they found in the Sandinista struggle nourished their minds and bettered their quality of life, in the same way that their garden and herbs nourished their bodies. Bennet states that “what we experience as reality is not fixed...much of what we experience as reality is the manifestation of an agreement to organize our perception in a certain way,” (99). This quote implies that an individual’s experience of reality is changeable. This perspective encourages people to take responsibility for their lives, decisions, and future. At the beginning of my trip abroad, my plans fell through. I had planned on spending a week with a group of herbalists in Mexico City learning about plants and their medicinal properties. One day after my arrival in Mexico City, I was notified that the group of women that I intended on studying with had decided to go for a vacation and would not be able to work with me. After receiving this information, I returned to my free hostel breakfast feeling dejected and disheartened. I had traveled all the way to Mexico to study with the medicine women, and now it seemed as if all of my plans had gone wrong. A young Norwegian girl sat across from me at the breakfast table and asked me about my plans for the day. When I told her about my cancelled plans and disappointment, I was surprised by her lack of sympathy. She simply looked at me and said, “So what are you going to do about it? Just because your plans fell through doesn’t mean that you should give up.” She encouraged me to
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seek out herbalists on my own and use the resources and opportunities that were available to me in a city as diverse as Mexico City. Her words urged me to start my own adventure. They challenged me to take advantage of whatever situations I encountered and flow with them, both bad and good.
"So what are you going to do about it? Just because your plans fell through doesn't mean that you should give up." When things went wrong, I evaluated my frame of reference and learned to move with grace. I took an active role in transforming my experiences into something meaningful. In Angela Passarelli’s writings in “Using Experiential Learning Theory to Promote Student Learning and Development in Programs of Education Abroad,” the concept of a “transformative learning” style is developed. The approach of transformative learning entails creating knowledge through the transformation of an experience. Making self-directed decisions based on the subjective interpretations of interactions empowers the individual to take charge of their own reality. The “holistic framework” asserts an integrative approach to learning and experiencing reality (Passarelli 145). The integrative learning consists of a cycle moving from a concrete experience to an internal reflection. While at times, it seemed that the world provided me with everything that I wanted and needed, other times felt as though I’d had the ground pulled out from underneath me. I had to learn to integrate both types of experiences. Using techniques of thought, reflection, and action, I was able to internalize the realities that I was faced with and grow from each experience (Passarelli 142). My ability to adapt and maintain a flexible approach to learning allowed me to make the most out of my experiences. When the evolution of reality is acknowledged, the individual moves from being an object acted upon, a sort of victim of their reality, to being the actor, the mover, and the leader of their own experiences. The decisions that we make within our lives are dynamic and define the paths that we follow (Passarelli 141). Empowerment
Best Student Essays in intercultural contexts allows for the experience, acceptance, and open-mindedness that give abroad experiences the power that they have to impact people long-term. According to Zogby’s “First Globals” article, the generation that I am a member of, often referred to as the “Millennials,” has inherited the history of a world with great achievements, is living in the presence of great innovation and curiosity, and is moving toward a future of uncertainty (3). The future that is approaching could be viewed through the lens of hope. We could look at the world around us in awe of the wireless telephones that fit in the palm of our hands. We can admire the methods of transportation we have created to traverse the earth by sky, by sea, and by land, or we can relish in the abundance of medications and treatments we have formulated to cure diseases. When I think of these achievements, I am impressed. I have feelings of hope and excitement of what will be discovered next. The past, present, and future feel as though they have worked and are working toward a common goal of betterment. While the view from one end of the scope can be highlighted by progress and innovation, the other end may provide another perspective that is not quite as impressive. Although the innovations of our time inspire hope, these feelings are easily diluted with the problems of our time. Communities around the world are deeply impoverished, the threatening destruction of pollution grows more dire each day, and conflict is flourishing at every level from local to international. The implications of these issues often overwhelm my hope with fear. With the increased access to global information, there is a news article, a documentary, or an outspoken blogger telling us what to think about each and every rise and fall of our society. Not only are there resources providing information about each and every topic, but furthermore, there are contradictory sources. Newscasters from CNN may refer to one side of a story, and when you change the channel, you can swear that the newscasters from FOX have said the exact opposite. In a world flooded with information, it is hard to know what to believe. As member of the “Millennial” generation, we can explore the world first hand. “They want more than just a job— they want a life-changing experience for themselves,” (Zogby 19) explains the lust that the generation feels to pursue and create meaningful experiences. Members of the Millennial generation do not want to be told what to do, nor do they desire to follow an easy path. Throughout the duration of my trip, I encountered travelers that
originated from Ireland to South Africa. Many times, the only thing that we had in common was our age and our membership to the same generation. Although the experiences that had led us to the places that we met were drastically different, we connected in the intent of our individual journeys. Each person had a unique interest in studying the region, the language, or the culture they were in. They had formulated questions of their own to discover the truths for themselves. While many tourist shuttles and resources were available to make their travels easier, they often opted for the cheaper option, inspired by a desire to experience life like a local. These experiences demonstrated the generalizations that Zogby refers to in his article. He characterizes the “First Globals” by an increased tolerance and interest in foreign cultures and languages, influenced by the interconnectedness of the world through information and the concept of a “community that happens to be worldwide,” (23). We don’t have to trust what the news tells us about Africa or Europe; we can simply pack up and see for ourselves. Our generation has been exposed to extensive air travel and developed study abroad programs and international communications that build the foundation for a global community. “We are storytellers. We are visionaries, humanitarians, artists, and entrepreneurs. We are individuals—part of a generation eager for change and willing to pursue it,” (Slimbach 27).
We don't have to trust what the news tells us about Africa or Europe; we can simply pack up and see for ourselves. While I was abroad, my identity underwent several transitions. I learned that while I may not be able to control the exact experiences that I encountered, I could always control the ways in which I internalized them. I could transform the meaning of each experience. In the end, what was originally a focus on herbalism became a focus on the ability of nature to heal. I found the healing benefits of herbalism stretched not only from the tiny plants but to the communities that maintained
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Two Sides of a Divide: A Reflection on a Summer through Central America these traditions. I found it evident in their struggles and revolutions, the way that they spoke, the values and beliefs that they had, and their openness and welcoming of new people and ideas. While my study and experience abroad did not focus specifically on herbs, I gathered experiences that embodied the concepts of herbalism. Herbalism has an integrative and holistic framework. It is a way to heal oneself and, through this self-healing, one is empowered. The combination of healing and empowerment with the plants that surround you can be directly transmitted to the lessons that I learned while abroad. Most importantly, I treated every experience, positive or negative, in a holistic way. I integrated the experience without judgement. Although the differences that characterize global cultures and peoples are vast, the similarities that exist between these populations have the ability to unify them. Using intercultural experiences to shape our own realities inspires a revolutionary global consciousness that has the power to create change.
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References
Bennett, Milton. “Paradigmatic Assumptions and a Developmental Approach to Intercultural Learning.” Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2012. Passarelli, Angela and David Kolb. “Using Experiential Learning to Promote Student Learning.” Student Learning Abroad. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2011. Richard Slimback, “Wise for the World”. Becoming World Wise: A Guide to Global Learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, 2010. Martin, J. N. “Intercultural Communication: A Unifying Concept for International Education”. In G. Althen (Ed.). Learning Across Cultures (pp. 9-30). Washington, D. C. NAFSA publication, 1994. Zogby, John, and Joan Snyder Kuhl. First globals: Understanding, Managing and Unleashing, The Potential of our Millennial Generation. 2013.
UNM Program Offers Relief to Refugees by: Lucas Winter
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nce in the United States, refugees face a wall of bureaucratic obstacles they must overcome, along with having to learn a new language and integrate into a new culture; furthermore, they must do all of this with the pressure of having to find a job within 180 days, before government assistance runs out. Nabil Ahmed and his family, refugees from Iraq, know the need for help and the struggles of creating a new life. “When we came here first, there are many difficulties we face. First of all is transportation; we don’t know the resources, places we can go and ask for help,” Ahmed said. Many refugee families become overwhelmed and are sucked into a cycle of poverty and social isolation. University of New Mexico professor Jessica Goodkind first noticed this isolation in Hmong refugees resettled in Michigan. She sought to help these people and fifteen years ago developed the Refugee Well-Being Project. Since then, the program transferred to UNM and has grown. “When I started again, actually in 2006 here in New Mexico, I was working with African refugees. As our project has grown over the years, our focus has continued to be on African countries of the Great Lakes region, as well as we now work with Iraqi refugees, Afghan refugees, and Syrian refugees,” Goodkind said. The project pairs refugee families with undergraduate students, who serve as advocates. Refugees gain a voice and support through the students, while students gain leadership and life skills. “One of the goals of this projects is to ensure that we welcome refugees here; that they have the chance to know Americans in a meaningful way, and also that the students engage in advocacy with the refugees,” Goodkind said. Every week the refugee families and the student advocates meet in learning circles, focused on cultural learning. The refugees and the students share cultural
differences and work together to solve the refugees’ needs. The program is able to improve the lives of refugees. “I think this program is very good for the refugee families. It helps them a lot,” Ahmed said. Hannah Groves, who was one of the student advocates for Ahmed and his family, says she gained more than just cultural knowledge: “I think you gain a lot of experience and you gain, I think, amazing and beautiful relationships.” Students advocate for the refugees every week, outside the learning circles, from helping them apply for jobs and government benefits to helping them enroll in English classes. Ahmed says he is grateful for the work his student advocate did for his daughters. “They love her, they ask me about Hannah most of the time, because she knew how to deal with them, how to treat them.” Goodkind says she hopes programs like hers will help people understand refugees and their situations better, which will then better our policies and the ways we deal with refugees in this country. “The Refugee Well-Being Project is an example of one way to think of how we can best support refugee resettlement and also build awareness in the communities…so we really increase the receptiveness of refugees in these communities,” Goodkind said. Goodkind says this is especially important right now, with the refugee crisis exceeding anything seen since World War II.
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Mehet-Weret by: Keriden Brown
I
would say one of the most awkward situations in life is remaining friends with your ex. When they still love you. When they actively tell you so. When you are so completely done with that bullshit and they just don’t understand the shut-downs. However, sometimes these awkward situations can transform into something less than that, or more than that, or better than that. It has been two years since I broke up with Morghan. He has dated one girl since I dumped him on his birthday. He decided I was it. There’s just nobody else in the world for me, he says. Too bad he fucked up. He tries so hard for me now; he asks me to go out and do all these things with him. I am definitely okay with hanging out from time to time, as we are still friends, so sometimes I am inclined to accept these invitations. One of the more recent endeavors Morghan had me tag along for is ballooning. He is attempting to earn his pilot’s license, so he has his own balloon, his own gear, and goes out whenever he likes, and that is pretty neat. I agreed to join him on this little adventure one day, completely unaware of how ballooning works, who does it, or anything else related to it aside from the commonly spouted fact that Albuquerque is home of the largest hot air balloon rally in the world. But we were not at Balloon Fiesta. I doubt very many balloonists in Albuquerque could tell you the history of hot air ballooning. Not for lack of knowledge, but because they just don’t care. History is stored on the ground in dusty books on shelves or in the balloon museum that nobody really visits, and neither of those things are given the same importance as being up in the air. The first official flight is rather entertaining, though. The first hot air balloon was sent up in France in 1783 by scientist Pilatre De Rozier. Effects of altitude on a living body was the intent of the experiment. Rozier’s balloon held a goat, a chicken, and a duck. Tethered to the
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ground, the contraption floated for about fifteen minutes before it “crashed” down. The only injury suffered: one broken wing (the goat stepped on the chicken). After the ordeal, these three animals lived the rest of their days comfortably commoditized as “the first flying animals” in the zoo of Marie Antoinette. Two years later, Rozier died in an attempt to cross the British Channel in a hot air balloon. Even though he died, his valiant effort earned him the title of the world’s first balloonist. But nobody cares about this. Nobody cares about a dead French guy or how the whole sport was birthed into existence. Nobody cares about who successfully crossed the British Channel after Rozier’s death. It is irrelevant that both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were crossed with nothing but warm air and physics. This archaic phenomenon continues to make a pressing comeback, and this is all that matters: ballooning’s current presence. The recently built Rust Medical Center was less than a mile away from the field and appeared to be the only building in sight, aside from the gas station I parked behind. It’s East Jesus Nowhere out here. Nothing but dirt lots and half paved roads. There are no familiar faces. I didn’t see Morghan and I thought I might be lost. There were muddy trucks everywhere and I was the only one with a small fourdoor sedan. Some guy saunters up to me with a coffee cup. He shakes my hand, introduces himself, and initiates small talk. It’s freezing. I can see his breath as he mentions just how cold it is. I must have looked pretty pathetic sitting in my open trunk, like a scared animal in search of shelter. Morghan rushes over. I can see his breath, too, puffing in large white bursts. I receive a hug, and the stranger whose name I can’t even remember awkwardly shuffles away, clearly noting I was not actually lost or lonely after all. Morghan and I then wander in the direction of a small group of people. I don’t remember anyone. There are these unspoken rules that everyone follows.
Best Student Essays Wait for orders. If you ask questions, you are an idiot, new or not. Review the weather report. Send up a pilot’s balloon, or pi-ball (which is basically a glorified helium-filled party balloon) to see which direction the wind blows at different altitudes. Then Morghan talks to everyone, and he doesn’t seem so idiotic as usual. He gives orders in sequence: Take the envelope from the trailer. Slide the basket out after that. Drop it (carefully) on its side. As Morghan directs the crew, he gives me asides to help me understand what each part of the balloon is. The envelope is the balloon part, the part that’s filled with air. When you lay down the basket, the front is on the ground. The front is the wider side with the dip at the top. “Always go around, don’t step over the envelope because you might trip, you could tear it, or if someone starts inflating it can get dangerous, or you could rip the fabric.” I imagine he meant if I was in the middle of stepping over the envelope as air was being forced into it for some reason, it would take me up to an unreasonable height from which I could fall, or, more importantly, damage the expensive fabric that he and I both knew he couldn’t afford to fix in the case of such an accident. Morghan continues to pull me along, explaining how to do the different jobs. “Crown” is the person holding the long nylon rope that leads to the balloon top to make sure it doesn’t catch wind or blow over. “Throat” is a two person job that consists of holding open the throat of the balloon for non-buoyant, cool air to be pumped in by a large gas-powered fan. And then there is “Fan” position where one person controls the speed and angle of the gas-powered fan that pumps the non-buoyant, cool air through the throat and into the envelope. All extra hands help the envelope unfurl from itself. Morghan’s job is to essentially be an overseer checking on the people, checking on the envelope, checking the burners. After explaining all this to me, Morghan drops me off on the left side of the basket, looking toward what would become the inside of the bright envelope, and wheels a rusty caged fan to me. “When I do this, turn the fan on.” He brings his hands from the waist upward, palms to the sky. “When I do this, turn the fan up.” Thumbs up, hitchhiking toward the clouds. “When I do this, turn it down.” Hand, palm down, waist high to mid-thigh. “This means cut it.” Flailing arms, mock neck-chop.
Fan is an uneventful job. I wait for the pilot to pop his head around the bulbous nylon pouch in front of me and decipher what hand signals he has for me, because they aren’t even close to what he showed me earlier...if he even has hand signals at all. I stand there, shivering as the morning air is sucked past me through the blades of the fan into its colorful trap. On the ground, the envelope gets larger and larger as it unfolds and spreads with the incoming breeze. When it’s about as big as it gets, Morghan steps between the burners and stands on the basket. He ignites the pilot light in each of the two gas burners. He pumps his arm from waist to knee with his palm down. Turn down the fan. As soon as the windy intake subsides by about half, Morghan pops the burners on. The heat is immense and there’s this rumbling, roaring sort of sound. It’s loud, but not as loud as I remember as a kid covering my ears at Fiesta, because it seemed deafening back then. My reminiscing is interrupted by flailing arms. I shut the fan off and roll it away from the basket just as it tips right-side-up with the rising balloon. Morghan stays artfully perpendicular to the ground through the process and is standing upright in the basket by the end of it. “Weight on!” Five or so of the crew members rush to Morghan as he yells and they jump onto the rim of the wicker bucket. I walk over completely unassuming, and then I realize had everyone walked as slowly as I did, Morghan would have floated away without his instructor, without the tie-off, pilot bag, check sheet, flight log, radio, without anything of importance.
Five or so of the crew members rush to Morghan as he yells and they jump onto the rim of the wicker bucket. Thankfully, though, my sluggishness was not a waste. The instructor’s son, who is about three, nearly got knocked by the two-hundred pound basket, and because I was farther away from the commotion I could see and save the small child from a potential concussion. I feel this is the only reason I didn’t get viewed as the unknowing idiot. Again. Morghan goes up, waves goodbye, we pile in the truck.
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Mehet-Weret Phase two: Chase. This can be interesting, but it’s usually pretty boring. You sit in a car full of strangers watching the surprisingly well-behaved kid you just saved from being mowed down by a floating bucket, and you are doing that stop-and-go thing you hate about traffic on a Monday morning. Watching and waiting. That’s what Chase is. Watch the balloon. Wait for a radio-in. Watch some more. Talk to the three-year-old. Move infrequently. Wait again. Shift to a comfortable position in the truck seat. Look at the sky. Slowly make your way to the colorful beacon’s desired landing point. The most boring hour of the morning. And finally we get to do something else. No more stop-and-go. Morghan and the instructor are coming in for the landing. We need to be there. We want to catch them.
We need to be there. We want to catch them. We zigzag through westside neighborhoods trying to find out what the fuck they think they are trying to aim for in a sea of two-story homes. They can’t help us because they don’t really even know where they are going. Take an unfamiliar street, and another, just one more, admit we are lost, turn around. Still lost. Eventually we end up at the only somewhat-open space in the neighborhood. Morghan and the instructor have touched down just behind the park on a walking path and pop back up to get closer to the grassy area. Running. Suddenly, we are all running. We jump and reach and stretch our bodies to the basket descending from the sky, groping for the handles or any other grip we can manage. The burners are off and the cooling air slowly drops the basket into our outstretched arms. The basket goes down, Crown gets the line and pulls the envelope to the ground on the front side of the basket. The deflation parachute at the top of the envelope is opened, and copious amounts of lukewarm air billows from the opening. It looks so sad deflating. The colors ripple into one another as the assembly presses down onto its side, almost crying at the loss of its flight and life. The deflated fabric lies in the grass as the crew pulls it in airy surges and folds the pattern over itself until it is a snaky, nylon conduit leaking air out the end. It’s heavy. We pick up the mass a few feet at a time and shove it into
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a depressing gray sack, hiding the colorful patterns until the next flight. It is upsetting to see such a beautifully crafted thing shoved away into something far less stunning or impressive. My name is called. “You’re coming out next weekend right?” It’s Morghan. “Absolutely!” I don’t think about my answer. “Cool. We’re going up earlier, so be here at six, okay?” “Yeah, I’ll be here.” Instant regret. I hadn’t really thought about how odd it was we had an afternoon flight that was only made possible by the cold weather. Two in the afternoon was a great time to leave the house, but the butt crack of dawn was a totally different story. And I already committed. Shit. It’s six a.m. and everyone is so awake. I had two rather large cups of coffee before arriving and my eyes still flutter with sleep. I sit in my trunk in the same manner as last weekend, trying to breathe in as much frigid air into my lungs as I can to help wake me up. This plan fails. I wish I had never got out of bed, question my friendships, and wonder if I am in fact crazy. Everything is set up the same. Different crew, but apparently that is common. Use who you can find. I’m on fan again. At least I already know how to do this job. Crown, anchored. Throat, open. Fan, as good as its operator (which isn’t saying much, but we didn’t die at least). Balloon stands up, weight on. “Okay, so when you get in or out of the basket, don’t touch the burners. They are always hot, and I am the only one who can touch them. You can hold here or here or pretty much anywhere for support except the burners and do not touch any of the knobs or flight equipment.” “Okay.” I’m trying really hard to be attentive, but it’s too fucking early. “If you ever feel like you need to hold something, same rules. Burners hot, no knobs, no equipment.” He spews more rules about keeping an eye out, watch for power lines and anything else hazardous. See something, say something. Multiple sets of eyes make flying safer. Other safety rules. Be safe. This is how you stay safe. “Got all that?” “Yup.” Lies. “Great. Get in.” “What?” “Get. In. You’re going up with me and Jess today.” Balloonists don’t pay their crew. Crew is generally
Best Student Essays friends and family who hate themselves enough to volunteer for heavy-lifting slave labor. Because there is no monetary appreciation, crew members usually go up on flights as payment. I had been out once. I don’t deserve to be paid so lavishly so soon. Not to mention the other crew who had been out more than I had. “Just go, don’t worry about it! Have a good time.” I’m being nudged and encouraged into the basket. I climb in. I’m terrified of heights. Morghan doesn’t know this. The instructor doesn’t know this. Luckily, the basket isn’t as rickety as I’d always imagined. It’s solid. You feel like you’re standing on a wooden board set firmly on the ground. The only thing giving it away is the ground getting smaller and farther from the standing block. We aren’t going up. The earth is shrinking away from us. The feeling of the earth leaving rather than the basket floating really changes the perspective of looking down. It’s bearable. My gaze shifts with my body to face east. The sun is pouring light over the mountain, sending it like a waterfall over the darkened granite face. The sky is illuminated with a sharp cerulean blue that fades into a pale water-washed sea-glass hanging above the desert landscape. It’s blinding. I can’t breathe easily anymore, and it isn’t from the height. The delicate scene in front of me cannot be disturbed by my rugged and chilly breath, so I hold it, breathe as shallow as possible. A balloon drifts idly through my sight creating a yellow solar eclipse. The hot air balloon blocking the sun and all its brilliance releases more vibrancy than before, and the world is born again in the yellow-hued shadow, life recreated in the solar crescent before my burning eyes. I drink it in in earnest. I ignore pretty much everything Morghan and Jess have to say during the flight unless it is vital to my survival. I look, wide-eyed, as we land for a moment in the river and soak our shoes, touch the muddy water with my bare hand. We drift up again and let the breeze push us north and west. The landing jostles me out of my weird trance. I have to brace myself to make sure I don’t flip out of the basket to the ground with the impact. We meet the crew on a dirt and gravel backroad. They all stretch up and reach for us like a descending god from the heavens demanding humanistic worship. We are the gods blessed with flight that the crew only wishes to touch. We have the envelope on the ground and deflated quickly after I am removed from my deity pedestal. It is
folded on itself, hiding the colored spears in the field of black fabric. The dark work lies on the ground with shards of color peeking through, begging not to be heaved back into the gray prison bag once again.
We are the gods blessed with flight that the crew only wishes to touch. Morghan tosses something into the back of the truck so carelessly that it is obviously not a part of the balloon assembly. Jess, the flight instructor, congratulates me on my first flight, says I did good, says she’s excited to have been my pilot. “Yeah, heh,” I respond nervously, unsure of how to react to her alarmingly quirky mood. She takes me to the truck bed and points inside. Broken and twisted lies green organic fiber and crumpled stipules. “You’re fucking kidding me.” I’m almost sad to see such beautiful fiber wrought into such a messy bundle, left to dry out and die without earth for root or water to bathe in. “I had Morghan take you up today to see how he does with distraction.” Jess smiles with the top row of her teeth and allows the tip of her tongue to protrude slightly over her lower lip, squinting her left eye. She is a thirty-yearold woman, and she giggles like a high school freshman listening to gossip. “He wanted to talk to you, but you were elsewhere in your head. And that’s totally fine!” She is incredibly cheery when she talks to me about this, like a child holding some huge secret, but she holds fast to the rather-obvious. “You’re fucking kidding me.” Disgusting. “Don’t worry about it. You know how he can be.” She laughs and asks me about the flight, how I liked it, generic questions. Generic answers. One month later. Confidently park the sensible car with the big-boy toys. I wait for no one to collect me for crew anymore. No more student pilots. My floating pedestal, ever changing. I drive forty-five minutes to the lot behind the gas station that is East Jesus Nowhere just to feel like the goddess that I am every weekend. Morghan still works for his license.
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The Gilt is off the Gingerbread: An Examination of English Caricatures of Napoleon
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by: Laura Golobish
n 1806 and 1814, James Gillray and George Cruikshank published caricatures featuring Napoleon Bonaparte in the role of Tiddy Doll, an eccentric English baker of gilt gingerbread. Tiddy Doll: The Great French Gingerbread Baker [Figure 1] and Broken Gingerbread [Figure 2], present Napoleon in the process of baking and selling pastries representing recently conquered European regions or plans for restaffing royal houses.1 Scholarship regarding these prints is scarce, but Stuart Semmel in Napoleon and the British has aligned the prints with a governmentled publishing effort designed to present Napoleon as a threat to British rule in order to distract citizens from domestic instability. Beginning with an invasion scare in 1803, this undertaking involved heavy circulation of broadsides, pamphlets, poetry, and other printed literature that presented the horrific consequences of a French invasion, and placed Britain as the only entity that could stand against French tyranny. Narrative elements within the prints do appear to support conclusions that they are part of this expansive media campaign. Such reading alone, however, ignores properties inherent to caricature and references to gilt gingerbread figurines. Caricature is a medium concerned with matching one surface to another, and also with using those surface descriptions to highlight concealed information. Tiddy Doll was a baker known for peddling goods of dubious quality. He used easily consumed decorative sugar surfaces on gingerbread in combination with dramatic performances to attract buyers to his meager pastries. In the caricatures, Napoleon takes on the role of Tiddy Doll who sells his wares to British viewers. Tiddy Doll’s gilt gingerbread figurines, as well as the medium of caricature, imply that additional layers of material or information sit beyond the surface. Parliament used
Napoleon as a tool to distract citizens from political problems at home, but also from resistance against imperial policies. Dissecting the political sub-layers of the figurines allows viewers to understand that Napoleon and this media campaign served as a distraction not only from domestic unrest as Semmel suggested, but in a larger framework they were used as a distraction from the discord and violence of an expanding Empire, even after Napoleon’s abdication. British national and imperial identity sustained a series of socio-political shifts during the late Georgian era. Near the turn of the nineteenth century, Britain struggled to recover from expenses related to the Seven Years War and the American Revolution, while compounding expenses for a war against revolutionary France. Overbearing taxes to support expenses, in conjunction with lasting public agitation related to the American Revolution and concern about the rights of British citizens at home and abroad, led to discontent with the reign of George III and Parliament. After the Irish Rebellion of 1798, the British Parliament formally dissolved the subordinate Irish Parliament with the Acts of Union of 1801 in order to enforce imperial rule. The French had aided the Irish rebels in their fight against English oppression of Catholics, and the British government used the guise of Irish sympathies to suggest that Napoleon had a gateway into the United Kingdom. Loyalists used fear and potential consequences of a French invasion to draw attention away from this fluctuation. British forces engaged with the French from February of 1793 until June of 1815.2 French armies never trespassed the confines of the British Isles during this time. Yet, Napoleon became a lens through which the English examined national politics and identity.
Thank you to the University of New Mexico’s Art Museum and Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections for making these materials available to me for this project and for inclusion in the museum’s exhibit The Changing Face of Portraiture in the Spring of 2015. 2 For further discussion of the publishing campaign see: Stuart Semmel, “National Character and National Anxiety,” and “The Imperial Sans culotte,” in Napoleon and the British (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 38-71; 107-146. 1
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Best Student Essays To George III and Parliament, it was imperative that British citizens believed that France was a threat. Britain was, by this point, a constitutional monarchy. George III feared that public dissatisfaction would push Parliament to take actions toward his removal. The members of Parliament feared that the general population might take a cue from the Irish Rebellion, and revolt against the government. They wished to redirect negative attentions, and Napoleon proved to be an ideal scapegoat. When war reopened after a period of peace in 1802, Loyalists in London unleashed a slew of printed ephemera aimed at Napoleon. The bulk of these materials consisted of typographic broadsides or broadside ballads posted in the neighborhoods of London. Publicly posted broadsides were key to the circulation of political concerns to a large audience.3 Periodicals were numerous, but sales were heavily restricted through taxes, which made them costly even for the middle classes.4 If a person were unable to afford to buy or access periodicals and political prints in subscription reading rooms or coffee houses, his or her exposure to political information could be limited to materials posted in public such as broadsides or prints posted in shop windows around London.5 The texts of broadsides took a variety of formats. Many utilized verse with suggestions for singing it to the tune of a popular folk song, which allowed their message to permeate more memorably beyond words on a page. The broadside verses of the early nineteenth century present a variety of tales, but often allude to Napoleon’s actions in Europe or the effects of a possible invasion for Britain. For example, the “New Song of Old sayings” presents Napoleon as a “bully” who will “seize all that we have then clap us in jail...and grind us to dust.” Other verses present Britain as the only possible savior of Europe, or even the world. “Bonaparte: a song” states: “ ‘Tis for Britons alone to keep Frenchmen in awe, To bring them to order, subjection, and law; To curb mad ambition, bid tyranny cease, And give to the world a firm, permanent PEACE.”6 Responding directly to the 3
propaganda and fortifying its message, Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, and members of the aristocracy constructed narratives that imagined Britain engaged in mortal combat with Napoleon. They posted Britain as the guard standing between Napoleon and his total domination of Europe. For example, in a speech given to the House of Lords in 1807, the Earl of Selkirk noted that Britain was “the only bar that stands between Napoleon and the empire of the world.”7 In other words, British power presented the only imaginable possibility of limiting and counterbalancing Napoleon’s imperial offensive.
Englishness, rather than strong artillery, is the most effective weapon against Napoleon. In interest of emphasizing that such a feat was possible, the broadsides commonly styled the French as weak in comparison to the sturdy moral character of the British. “Britons to Arms” notes that the British Navy will squash any attempt of invasion.8 Yet, this strength is not necessarily manifested through physical attributes; the verses suggest that internalized character traits serve as support against the impending onslaught of French troops. The text notes that virtue is Britain’s shield. Their souls breathe vengeance, fired by valor. Virtue becomes a solid protective barrier, and the soul takes on the capabilities of a corporeal body. The language of the broadsides encourages readers to add a layer to their appearance that projects their national identity, and thus their moral strength and superiority. Englishness, rather than strong artillery, is the most effective weapon against Napoleon.
Mark Hallet, Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven: Yale University
Press: 25-26. 4
Semmel,12-13. Sixpence per copy was the common tax at the turn of the 19th century, and it rose to seven pence per copy after 1815. Semmel, 40-41. For closer examination of specific handbills and broadsides, see: Stella Cottrell, “The Devil on Two Sticks: Franco-phobia in 1803,” in Raphael Samuel, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London: Routledge, 1989), 259-74. 6 “A New Song of Old Sayings,” (London, L. Pennington,1804) and “Buonaparte; a song,” (London:W. Dwyer, 1803) are available in the Bodleian Library collections “Curzon and John Johnson collections,” from Broadside Ballads Online. http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections (Accessed 1 April, 2015). 7 Earl of Selkirk, “Substance of the Speech of the Earl of Selkirk” in the House of Lords, Monday August 10, 1807 (London). 8 “Britons to Arms,” (London: J. Hatchard, 1803). Available in the Bodleian Library collections. “Curzon and John Johnson collections,” from Broadside Ballads Online. http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections (Accessed 1 April, 2015). 5
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The Gilt is off the Gingerbread: An Examination of English Caricatures of Napoleon The conflation of text and body is also significant for understanding caricature. The medium often employs physical distortions to highlight an individual’s character flaws. Making the subject’s body legible requires a degree of familiarity.9 In the case of Napoleon, this familiarity was achieved through heavy circulation of written and pictorial descriptions of his actions.10 Therefore, caricaturists could rely on a robust, wellknown vocabulary to introduce concepts of the French Emperor’s omnipresent threat and layer familiar tropes with other information in order to offer their own critiques. Caricatures often exaggerate Napoleon’s slight stature in comparison to a corpulent George III, as demonstrated by The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver (1803) and National Contrasts (1804). Gulliver was one of the more common cultural references in English caricature during the Napoleonic Wars. Gulliver was used as a commodity throughout Swift’s narrative, which was originally published in 1726, and was still popular at the turn of the century. In Swift’s story, the Lilliputians enslaved Gulliver. After he escaped, a Brobdingnag farmer captured Gulliver to use him as sideshow entertainment for financial gain. The Queen of Brobdingnag was so delighted by the show that she purchased Gulliver and used him for similar purposes at court. Gulliver was a material asset that entertained viewers. In The King of Brobdingnag and Gulliver, King George’s body language suggests that Gulliver-Napoleon is an asset to the British court. George closely scrutinizes the miniaturized Napoleon standing in his palm. Instead of crushing the petite figure, George examines him through a lens like a lapidary might examine a gemstone. While Napoleon may be an “odious reptile,” as the lettering notes, he is a valuable reptile. This observation suggests that Napoleon is an asset instead of a threat or hindrance to British political power. The gingerbread baker Tiddy Doll, like Gulliver, was known for his performances. He used elaborate mannerisms and costumes to advertise and sell his wares. During the reign of George II, he patrolled events such as the Southwark Fair to sell pastries. Numerous chapbooks 9
and block books describe his handsome manner of dress11 and note that he warbled tunes beckoning his customers to buy his wares. One section frequently repeated in block books notes that he sang: “...Here is your nice gingerbread, your spice gingerbread; it will melt in your mouth like a red-hot brickbat, and rumble in your inside like Punch and his wheelbarrow.”12 His wares sound far from appetizing. Pastry is being compared to a brickbat, a piece of brick used as a bludgeon, and the violent antics of the popular Punch and Judy puppet shows. While Tiddy Doll’s products were perhaps less than reputable, English tavern owners began capitalizing on the baker’s popularity by naming their establishments after him. He also became a popular disguise at costume parties.13 Tiddy Doll lacked the literary prestige of Gulliver, and his presence in caricatures was uncommon. Yet, he was certainly part of English popular culture.
The gingerbread baker Tiddy Doll, like Gulliver, was known for his performances. It is within this context that Gillray and Cruikshank appropriated Tiddy Doll and used him to present Napoleon as a maker and vendor of gilt-gingerbread monarchs. Gillray’s etching, much like the broadsides, does in fact allude to Napoleon’s European campaign. Napoleon shuffles a peale full of monarchs of Bavaria, Baden, and Württemberg out of the “New French Oven for Imperial Gingerbread.” They stand ready to be shipped to their new homes, where they would replace the leaders who had been removed as a result of the battle of Austerlitz in 1805. Below the oven sits the “Ash Hole for Broken Gingerbread,” which features the crumbled remains of Holland, Spain, and Italy. In the background,
McPhee, 3-5. Well-respected English authors such as Samuel Coleridge, John Ruskin, Sir Walter Scott, and William Wordsworth wrote works dedicated to Napoleon. 11 Anon. The Cries of London, As They Are Daily Exhibited in the Streets: With an Epigram in Verse, Adapted to Each ... to Which Is Prefixed, a Poetical Description of the Metropolis. London: J. Harris, 1804, 35. 12 Cited by Ashton, 264 f. 13 Lucy Inglis, Georgian London: Into the Streets,(London: Viking, 2013), 272-75. 10
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Best Student Essays Napoleon’s advisor, Lord Talleyrand, kneads dough that indicates plans for Turkey, Poland, and Hungary. To the right, a newly minted batch of “little dough viceroys” stands ready for the flames. A basket full of “True Corsican Kinglets for Home Consumption and Exportation,” sits on the floor, awaiting a new home. All of these figurines are gilt or decorative gingerbread with layers of pigment sitting atop the pastry. Württemberg, the center figure on the peale, had a direct connection to the House of Hanover. George III’s eldest daughter Princess Charlotte married Frederick I, Duke of Württemberg in 1798, and they were recognized as King and Queen after Frederick provided reinforcements to Napoleon during the Battle of Austerlitz. The title change would not much affect the relationship between Württemberg and Britain. Though it does suggest Britain’s tacit approval of Napoleon’s actions, and that the British Crown benefited from the expansion of the French Empire. Examination of other pastries supports a reading suggesting that decorative layers of pastry refer to multiple levels of political overtones. The “little dough viceroys” toward the right consist of members of Parliament. The first row alone includes Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Charles Fox, and Francis Rawdon. These men propagated George III’s replacement with his son, the Prince of Wales, as regent. This shift would increase Parliament’s executive leverage, and aid further expansion in South Asia. Gillray’s reference to Napoleon’s European campaign is thus an oblique way of conveying the expansionist interests of the British Parliament. Cruikshank’s reiteration of Napoleon as Tiddy Doll in Broken Gingerbread, which was published after the Emperor’s abdication in 1814, underscores the caricaturist’s use of Napoleon as a critique of British domestic and foreign policy. The title references a section of Gillray’s earlier print in which the fireplace full of crumbled figures was labeled “Ash Hole for Broken Gingerbread.” In Cruikshank’s print, Napoleon shares the fate of the monarchs he had crushed and replaced in the earlier print. Napoleon emerges from the “Tiddy Doll Gingerbread Bakery” wearing rags and a forlorn expression. He brandishes a tray of broken pastries representing various family members he had previously installed on European Thrones. He says: “Buy my image! My nice 14
little gingerbread Emperors & Kings! Retail and for exportation!” This pitiful figure is still trying to sell his empire of broken cookies! The French on the other side of the water celebrate his replacement under a banner stating: “Long live the Bourbons.”14 Napoleon appears to be finished. Yet, it is important to remember that Tiddy Doll’s
"Buy my image! My nice little gingerbread Emperors & Kings! Retail and for exportation!" primary tool was distraction. This distractive role is also what made Napoleon valuable to the British government. Parliament had announced and celebrated Napoleon’s abdication as an end to a monstrous threat. Circulation of this news, and consistent emphasis on British superiority, overshadowed news of war and border disputes in other parts of the world, particularly the expansionist military actions executed by the British East India Company in Nepal. By using the figure of Napoleon in the guise of Tiddy Doll, Cruikshank draws the viewer’s attention to the familiar threat of Napoleon’s omnipresent interest in imperial power, but also the British Imperialism concealed by a sugarcoated surface. Outlandish broadside verses, folk ballads and works by authors, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, entrenched Napoleon into British imaginations as a monstrous figure intent on destroying Britain. Loyalists construed Britain as the only hope to counteract French Imperial power, and to create a “permanent peace” for the world. This goal could be achieved through the construction of that virtuous shield of English character. Existing scholarship has suggested that caricatures of Napoleon align with that descriptive goal. However, to compare the surface of one entity to another is to ignore the subversive function of caricature. Texts did create a common vocabulary of nationalism and served caricaturists as iconographic references.
The shape of the diminutive profile near the banner is similar to the profile of Louis XVIII on a porcelain medallion produced by the Sèvres manufactory.
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The Gilt is off the Gingerbread: An Examination of English Caricatures of Napoleon Furthermore, caricaturists layered the familiar information with additional cultural and political references that permit the well-read viewer to understand critique that is directed at the British government through the figure of Napoleon. Napoleon’s figure stands in not only for the foreign threat, but he also represents British leadership itself. Caricaturists strip the sugar coating off the imperial gingerbread and critique the militarism of Britain’s expanding empire.
Figure 1
Figure 2
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The Evolution of the Student Athlete by: Rachana Bhat
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he “typical” college athlete has certainly changed over time. In previous generations, student athletes had different motivations for participating compared to student athletes today. Society’s interest in sports has increased, causing parents to raise their children differently. The parents of student athletes and often student athletes themselves are interested in college athletics more for the economic benefits than before, when college students were more motivated by the other benefits that college sports offers. Overall, college athletes today are much different compared to those in previous generations. Early on in the history of college athletics, the purpose was for boys to stay out of trouble, prove their manliness, and build character. Gymnasiums were opened for those unruly boys who needed something to do besides academics (Lewis). Engaging in sports was the outlet for a generation of men whose main purpose in school was to get a degree. Additionally, as Teddy Roosevelt eloquently stated, sports helped to develop “courage, resolution and endurance” along with “qualities [like] honesty... truthfulness...perseverance and self-reliance,” which is why it was encouraged by faculty and other adults who saw sports as a way to create well-rounded citizens (Roosevelt). Sports teach lessons like sportsmanship, focus, teamwork, etc. The reason football gained much popularity is because people liked how all of these components manifested through the sport, along with the extreme physical strain. These characteristics of mental and physical ability are what exceptional men posses. If an individual were able to get an education, which would teach them practical skills, then sports would provide the intangibles. What more could you want in a future citizen, or future employee? Athletes in the past were also more motivated to go to college to get an education rather than play a college sport. Parents played a big role in creating this mindset. Many parents during this time period grew up during difficult times in America and were unable to get high-
paying jobs due to a lack of education. Hence, their main goal was for their children to go to college and receive an education that could get them an occupation that would enable them to make a higher income and have a better quality of life. As Americans, this tends to be the mentality: There is always a higher paying or more fulfilling job to strive for. The end goal has always been to make money. As time goes on in the history of sports, this has not changed, but the tool that college students use to get there has. Receiving financial help by playing a sport was just an added bonus to the college experience. Because there was not a lot of funding going into college athletics earlier in its history, there was less of a push to get a scholarship for financial reasons. Most of the time, students played the sport simply for the love of the game. They also were attracted to college sports because it gave them a chance to represent their school and their families. Obviously winning in sports is great, but for a lot of students, playing the game was fun enough. Being a student athlete “provided… an opportunity to identify with a group” (Lewis), which at a college of thousands of boys, was a great prospect. Furthermore, a large majority of college athletes played “the sports which [proved] most beneficial bodily to a man” (Roosevelt), so health reasons were another important reason to play sports. Today, both males and females participate in college athletics, which has a major impact on the system. One purpose of athletics has remained the same from day one: building character. Whether it is intentionally for this purpose or the result of parents wanting to keep their kids busy, boys and girls are learning life skills through sports. The same values that athletics teaches people like sportsmanship, perseverance, and teamwork are now being learned by more of the population, which is a positive thing for society. Girls, who typically struggle with self-esteem and other societal issues as adolescents, are put into an environment that can help resolve these issues in a positive way.
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The Evolution of the Student Athlete Parents now realize that sports can be a solution to many children’s problems, such as low self-esteem and boredom. But another motivating factor for parents is the fact that athletics can provide a means of paying for one of their largest expenses: college. Several sports including football, women’s volleyball, and women’s tennis offer scholarships that provide a free education, while the other sports offer partial scholarships that reduce the costs of education. For a parent, this situation would be ideal. Their child would be in an environment where they are pushed athletically and academically every day, providing a unique and rewarding life experience, without having to pay for it out-of-pocket or through loans. Because of this incentive, parents now encourage sports in their child’s lives at a young age. Many parents start their children off playing several different sports, which is smart because it helps them develop multiple athletic skills. If this is the case, then the child is forced to make a decision several years before college to pick one sport to master in order to get to a level high enough to compete in collegiate athletics and receive a scholarship. For other parents, this approach is seen as unnecessary and their children begin playing a sport at a young age in hopes of using the advantage of increased time to practice and build the skill set that their sport requires. Today, parents are influenced by the increased media attention given to professional athletes. Professional athletics, which did not exist at such a big scale early in the history of college sports, is seen as a promising career. In some people’s perspective, it is viewed as a better profession than an academically-oriented one because of the power, fame, and fortune that come with it. Parents with this mentality start their children off specializing in one sport at a young age. For some, sports then become the priority over education. Some children will turn to homeschooling as a way to focus more attention on their sport, as it provides greater flexibility with time. The percentage of young athletes who are able to compete at the professional level and make a living, however, is very slim. Those who find that they are unable to become professional athletes turn to collegiate athletics, which provides them the opportunity to play their sport and, in many cases, get an athletic scholarship due to the fact that they have spent so much time dedicated to their sport. In my journey to becoming a Division I women’s tennis player, I spent a lot of time on the tennis court with the goal of achieving the highest level possible. Because my parents insisted on me performing well academically
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and athletically, not a lot of time was spent on much else besides school and tennis. I played so that I could further my education without my parents having to pay for it. Although I enjoyed the game at times and learned the life lessons as told by Teddy Roosevelt, my motivation was mostly economic, as is the case with many student athletes today.
I played so that I could further my education without my parents having to pay for it. It is not uncommon to be shocked at the amount of time, money, and energy girls have put into tennis to get to the level that is required to compete at Division I schools. Some girls that I know have sacrificed spending time with their families over holidays in order to compete in tournaments. Others have gone through homeschooling or enrolled in full-time tennis academies to train on the court more hours a day than they spend on schoolwork. Although some desire to become professional tennis players, the reality is that very few will make it and most become college athletes. Because so much of their time is spent on tennis, they struggle in the schools that have high academic standards. For these reasons, I would say that many tennis players are “athletes” before they are “students,” because they have a hard time focusing their attention on school. The theme of college athletes being athletes before students is illustrated in the book Fourth and Long: the Fight for the Soul of College Football. Although this book only covers one sport (football) in one conference (the Big Ten), two mentalities of college athletes are shown, one from Ohio State and one from Penn State. At Ohio State, “quarterback Cardale Jones tweeted” a message that shows how little academics meant to him: “Why should we come to play SCHOOL, classes are POINTLESS” (Bacon 210). At this school, winning is everything, a point made clear when people were unsatisfied with the incredible 11-1 record. At Penn State, the “defensive lineman out of Buffalo” John Urschel made the decision to join the school saying, “they have good academics
Best Student Essays here, and it’s paid for. I wanted to take that burden off my parents” (Bacon 165). While both schools are known for having great athletics and academics, it is clear that Jones and Urschel were motivated to be student athletes at their respective schools because they either wanted to focus all of their attention on their sport, or participate in order to get the financial benefits. This is typical for athletes today, who make decisions on where to attend college based on the athletic environment or the amount of scholarship money they will receive. In general, athletes today are more dedicated to their sport than academics. Because of the rising cost of living, obtaining athletic scholarships is a major incentive for students to participate in college sports. Those who devoted a lot of their time in pursuit of being a professional athlete become college athletes as a fallback plan. The popularity of college athletics is on the rise in society because of the increased media attention put on student athletes. It is also increasingly becoming a way for schools to generate revenue because of television contracts. Student athletes today have begun to wonder whether their participation in college athletics is really worth the price of education, or if they deserve more compensation. This question never would have been in the minds of student athletes of previous generations. If today we could create an environment in college athletics that encourages participation alongside academics instead of in front of it, student athletes would be able to better obtain the benefits of both worlds.
Works Cited
Bacon, John U. Fourth and Long: The Fight for the Soul of College Football. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Print. Lewis, Guy. “The Beginning of Organized Collegiate Sport.” American Quarterly Part 22.2 (1970): 222-29. JSTOR. Web. 30 Sept. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2711645>. Roosevelt, Theodore. “Professionalism in Sports.” The North Amercian Review (1890): n. pag. Theodore-Roosevelt.com. Almanac of Theodore Roosevelt. Web. 30 Sept. 2014. <http:// www.theodore-roosevelt.com/images/research/speeches/ trprosports.pdf>.
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Waves of Air by: Bryan MacCosbe
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can remember every single detail from her memorial ceremony like it’s a picture in a photo album I can flip through. The University’s red and silver banners lined the walls of an auditorium filled with family members, friends, sorority sisters and fraternity brothers, curious students, staff, and so on... and then there was me. It’s not like I even knew her that well. We had the same classes together from first grade to fifth grade, and we followed along a similar path of schools: Monte Vista Elementary, Jefferson Middle School, University of New Mexico. But we hadn’t talked in years. My closest connection to her was through one of her best friends, who happened to also be my best friend at the time. Her death affected me in a way I can only describe as unsettling and frightening. My reaction was probably compounded by the fact that earlier that year, 2014, another “close-ish” friend had died. He hanged himself one evening after a long battle with depression and drugs. I only discovered this through Facebook, same way I found out about her death. But his death didn’t affect me like hers. When she died, it was strange. It confused me. I had no right to be as upset as I was. Lines of sorority sisters and brothers trailed toward the podium, awaiting their turn to say a few words. We’ve lost a beloved sister, to the family of Briana, the sisters of Kappa Kappa Gamma offer their deepest condolences. Next group. The brothers of Sigma Alpha Epsilon offer their condolences to the families of the deceased. Next group, same sentence, different fraternity or sorority. But she’s not just a sorority girl, I thought. The girl I knew was the little fifth grader with short-cropped blonde hair and a stutter that hardly allowed her to read a paragraph without being met with the grumbles of annoyed little children. She was shy, and she was sweet and kind. Even unruly fifth graders couldn’t hold her stuttering against her because she was so nice. In the background of the podium, behind a white and purple lilac bouquet and the talking sororities, a PowerPoint slideshow rolled through images of Briana.
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In one photo she was smiling in Lobo Village where the sun shone brightly above a blue swimming pool. She was in a dark nightclub, beaming and hugging closely her sorority sisters. In a light Jeep Cherokee with a sideways smile, both hands gripping the steering wheel as a hidden character takes a surprise photo. In every image, Briana was smiling brightly as if she had never known sadness; or maybe sadness could no longer reach her. Her bright face splayed largely above the auditorium of somber faces was like an image of her in the afterlife, forever beaming as if to reassure her friends and family. Closer to the front of the auditorium, I spotted my best friend among Briana’s family and close friends. They were broken down and sobbing into each other’s arms. They had that right. But what right did I have, standing at the back of the auditorium, choking back tears. I looked around at all of the faces near me. Somber, but composed. Everybody around me seems to be fine, so what the fuck is my problem? I left the ceremony and walked outside into a frigid evening, sad and confused. I had this thought once that everybody becomes your friend after you’re dead. It’s the same thing I noticed when my first “close-ish” friend died, and it’s the same thing that I noticed with Briana’s death. On social media, in conversation, in writing about the dead in any way, people suddenly emerge from the woodwork to tell everyone about their loss, like it was their own. It felt dirty and I couldn’t do it. I hardly talked about her death to anyone, because it didn’t seem right to say I had known her, and have people say, I’m sorry. Questions were naturally flooding just after her death, and I felt slightly guilty for sharing my classmates’ curiosity, though I understood it was only human nature. It felt as though it was too soon to ask why she died; we should be mourning instead, right? Countless posts flooded Facebook with Briana’s pictures, and comments asking how she died. Omg what happened?? This can’t be true, how did she die?! All were met with silence, or more questions. Either nobody knew,
Best Student Essays or some people knew, but like me felt guilty for focusing on the details. Despite myself, I caved in to the curiosity and looked up the situation online. Nothing. Curiosity stirs. A few hours later I try again: “Crash Kills 2 UNM Students: Survivor Recalls Incident.” It was something so simple, and so quick. A group of college students preparing to go to a club on a Friday night. A couple of criminals in a stolen truck speeding away from the cops. What a random thing to happen. Hundreds of meteorites shoot past planet Earth every day, never making contact. Thousands more lurk in the void beyond Pluto. Waiting. Earth’s advantage is the immense chasm of space, and its inconsequential size in comparison to it. But what chasm do we hide ourselves in? They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Luck, or lack thereof. It only takes one sizeable meteorite. A couple of months after she passed, I took a walk outside on a clear winter night. I didn’t have any particular destination in mind; I was just walking. Bundled in a heavy winter coat and scarf, the night air still bit at my nose. The arc of the Milky Way spread like splashing milk across the sky. So very far away. I found myself at the Highland High School track field and clambered atop a storage unit to lay back and gaze at the stars. I counted the flickering dots, and with each flicker yet another dot was revealed. I focused on the faintest of dots. No more than the head of a pin on a black ocean. Is anybody even out there?
We are all on a ship. And that ship is traveling nowhere at a speed of infinity. I imagined fantastic civilizations, circling on planets around those faint stars, living at the exact moment as I do. Do they struggle with their own existence? Do they find it absurd, maddening, frightening, exhilarating? We are all on a ship. And that ship is traveling nowhere at the speed of infinity. Our feet stay strong to the ground. The trees bristle in the wind, and their leaves break and sail on waves of air to the grass. Planet Earth still turns long after we’re gone from it. And our mark? Is it that which we dedicate the most time and effort that we’re remembered for? Or our passions and accomplishments? Perhaps
these things are imposed on us after we die. Maybe making a mark on the world isn’t all that important after all. Yet, I can’t imagine that Briana’s friends and family weren’t upset that her memorial focused entirely on the sorority girl, rather than the deeper person she was. Though, I never asked my friend what she thought about the memorial. I guess I didn’t want to upset her. Everything went surprisingly quickly back to normal about two weeks after Briana’s death. We were joking again, and going out on the weekends. Normal. Yet every once in a while, I could see the sadness lurking there just beneath her eyes. A blink or a flinch when Briana’s name was mentioned, or a quick glance to the floor. Signs that, while life may apparently return to normal after the loss of a loved one, that sadness is never gone completely. A void is created, and with each painful loss or traumatic experience that void grows and we submerge ourselves in its comfortable darkness. How, then, does life ever return to normal? Every loss we suffer reminds us that life is brittle, like leaves in autumn. The most we can do is cope as best as possible and move forward: tough, persistent, and defiant. What I know now that I didn’t understand in that auditorium is why I was so sad, but I think I have a better understanding now that it has been close to two years. I wasn’t so much sad that I had lost someone who was at one point a friend of sorts; I was sad because of how it forced me to remember my own mortality, and the mortality of my close friends and family. It wasn’t just her death that I was so upset about, it was the thought of the inevitable deaths of everyone I love that struck home. Realizing the loss of all that she could have accomplished with her life forced me to take a look at my own life and how I would be remembered. People say, she had her whole life ahead of her, and it’s true. The love, passion, success, and knowledge gained from our failures are erased upon our deaths as though someone could so simply press the reset button. Yet through it all, we build a life for ourselves. Fighting back against our own mortality. It is easy for people to say they understand that they are going to die one day, their mother will die, and their father will die, their best friend, and so too their trusty dog will succumb to its own unstable entropy. The sun will implode, and the earth will bake and yield its body to the fiery destruction. It had always been easy for me to say I know these things, and maybe in my knowing, I even said I accepted it, but it was hard to say I understood it. What I do understand is our lives are not a measure of the pain we can endure, but the joy we can find in living through it all.
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The Green Rush: The Legalization of Recreational Marijuana by: Gabriel Gallegos
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Introduction rom powerful corporate executives to high school janitors, and from doctors to politicians, the use of marijuana is on the rise—something to the tune of over fourteen million active users in the United States (NORML, “About Marijuana”). This elusive substance seems to create a culture of its own, one that does not discriminate against any background, race, gender, or any other quality. In plain terms, people from all walks of life love their marijuana and will pay “through the nose” to get their hands on it. Facing harsh fines and jail time in forty-eight out of fifty states, marijuana users defy these risks to use the substance. But Colorado and Washington made a groundbreaking change in the last few years, becoming the first states to legalize the use of recreational marijuana and to gain tax revenue from its legal sale. The “guinea pigs” of the nation, the preliminary tax revenue numbers are already proving to have a positive impact on the economies of their respective states. Other states have chosen to reduce marijuana possession to a civil offense, reducing enforcement costs and refocusing police efforts to violent crimes and more dangerous substances. In this policy paper, I deconstruct both methods of marijuana policy. To be clear, this paper is neither about the morality nor the health effects of marijuana, both of which I feel are obstacles standing in the way of a productive conversation about legalizing recreational marijuana. Instead, this paper will focus on what I feel the argument should be focusing on: how we maximize the potential revenue that could be gained from legal marijuana sales to stimulate local economies in New Mexico—the effect of which could be felt in every corner of our state. Background We will begin at the focal point of the marijuana debate: its utter illegality. New Mexico law is clear concerning the possession and distribution of marijuana. It is currently a Schedule I illegal substance,
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and is unlawful to “use, possess, manufacture, distribute...” (NM Compilation Commission, “20-12-66. Wrongful use and possession of controlled substances”). Marijuana users face strict penalties if convicted of possession or distribution. The National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML) reports that first-time offenders that are caught with less than 1 oz. of marijuana can be punished with fifteen days of incarceration and/ or a one hundred dollar fine. For second offenders with the same amount, the penalties jump to one year of incarceration and/or a fine of one thousand dollars (NORML, “New Mexico Laws and Penalties”). Harsh penalties lead to high enforcement costs. A 1997 study done by NORML shows that nationally, “taxpayers spend between $7.5 billion and ten billion dollars arresting and prosecuting individuals for marijuana violations.” The study also notes that “90% of these arrests are for marijuana possession alone” (NORML, “Decriminalization Talking Points”). We will go further in-depth about the widespread effects of such enforcement in the “Policy Options” section. But even in the face of high consequences for any level of possession, the marijuana industry continues to flourish. The Rand Institute Drug Policy Research Center reports that in California, 400–500 tons of marijuana are consumed every year. And marijuana is not cheap—if we combine the consumption figures with an estimated rate of $300–$450 per oz. of marijuana (depending on the potency and THC content), we are looking at an industry that generates colossal revenues annually. But until recently, the marijuana business has been strictly a black market. In recent years, there have been several movements by various organizations and legislative attempts by several states to legalize the regulated retail sale of marijuana. I will address a number of these ventures and formulate my own conclusion as to how marijuana policies should be developed.
Best Student Essays Policy Options Within the marijuana debate, we find ourselves at a key crossroads where we need to decide how we will proceed. In this section, I will outline the two best options that I see concerning the legal and economic issues regarding the use and distribution of marijuana. To construct the specific facets of the two policies I am outlining, I draw from legislative attempts and drug policy expert opinions.
The first option I propose is the full legalization of recreational marijuana in New Mexico. The first option I propose is the full legalization of recreational marijuana in New Mexico. I suggest that voters in New Mexico pass legislation exactly like Colorado’s Amendment 64, “...permitting a person twenty-one years of age or older to consume or possess limited amounts of marijuana; providing for the licensing of cultivation facilities, product manufacturing facilities, testing facilities, and retail stores; permitting local governments to regulate or prohibit such facilities; requiring the general assembly to enact an excise tax to be levied upon wholesale sales of marijuana; requiring that the first forty million dollars in revenue raised annually by such tax be credited to the public school capital construction assistance fund; and requiring the general assembly to enact legislation governing the cultivation, processing, and sale of industrial hemp” (City of Fort Collins, “Amendment 64”). Colorado’s largest metropolitan area, Denver, allows residents over twenty-one to possess and purchase 1 oz. of marijuana at a time from licensed marijuana retailers. (City of Denver, “Retail Marijuana Use Within the City of Denver”). Colorado’s groundbreaking and unprecedented legislation presents a new economic opportunity for not only their state, but for every state that will follow in their footsteps in marijuana policy: maximize the amount of tax revenue gained from the taxation of legal marijuana distributors. With the advent of licensed marijuana retailers, a firm excise tax should be placed on all sales of marijuana. To do so, I refer to the Rand Institute on Drug
Policy’s suggestion of levying a fifty-dollars-per-ounce excise tax on marijuana. Although this is significantly higher than other excise taxes (alcohol, cigarettes, etc.), I suggest that similar operational procedures in the levying of those taxes be applied to the marijuana excise tax (Kilmer et al.). I propose that a portion (legislatureapproved) of the revenue gained from the legal sale of marijuana be invested into New Mexico public education, but the rest distributed to counties who will have the power to decide how to use the new funds. But since there are so many logistical facets to the mass sale and distribution of marijuana, I will go more in depth in the Policy Analysis section. The other policy I propose is the statewide decriminalization of the possession of marijuana. Decades of debating have yielded no official definition of decriminalization. But in simple terms, decriminalization is the reduction of criminal sanctions for possessing low amounts of marijuana. Possession is still a civil infraction with fines, but no longer carries jail time. The framework for this type of policy is already being built in New Mexico. In the 2014 midterm elections, voters in Bernalillo County approved a measure that would decriminalize possessing an ounce or less of marijuana. The maximum penalty would be a twenty-five dollar fine if caught with 1 oz. or less. I propose a statewide decriminalization of the same amount of marijuana, and giving individual counties the power to choose their own civil penalties for offenders. Both of these solutions would be groundbreaking moves for New Mexico, and both would make a positive economic impact on the state. In the next section, I will outline the benefits and drawbacks of each policy. Policy Analysis In this section, I will evaluate both policies concerning legalization and decriminalization. I will draw from experts that offer real, hard figures that could solve the many questions that remain unanswered about the debate. The economic impact that both policy options have the potential to create could re-shape the fiscal culture of New Mexico in a way like never before. But the wide margin of error that both policy options have is the key point in the debate. On the surface level, the estimates of potential tax revenues from the legalization option are quite astonishing. The Rand Institute cites a report from the California State Board of Equalization estimating that the levying of a fifty-dollars-per-ounce tax on marijuana
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The Green Rush: The Legalization of Recreational Marijuana would generate $1.4 billion annually for the state (Kilmer et al.) Although a realistic estimate for a state where almost four million residents consume marijuana annually, an even better image of the potential fiscal impact of legalization is in the actual tax revenues Colorado gained in the months after passing Amendment 64. An article from the Washington Post, citing from the Colorado Department of Revenue, reported that the Colorado government took in forty-five million dollars from both medical and recreational marijuana tax revenues in just eight months (Ingraham, “Colorado Marijuana Revenues Hit New High”) It cannot be fully expressed how much these funds could help New Mexico. We could invest the tax revenue from the legal sale of marijuana into a suffering education system, necessary capital outlay, and many other public entities all across the state. But one of the major issues of a full-scale, statewide legalization of marijuana is that it leaves so many unanswered questions: Who do we tax? How we do we tax? How will the legal retailers be able to compete with the black market that will still exist post-legalization? If we can answer these questions as effectively as possible, the results will no doubt be the ultimate jumpstart to a sluggish New Mexico economy. Many factors need to be considered when shaping the tax policy for recreational marijuana. In the policy that I propose, I suggest a flat fifty-dollars-per-ounce
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tax that consumers would take the burden of. But some would argue to tax on basis of the different potencies of the different strands and varieties of marijuana: Higher potency → higher quality strand → higher tax. Another issue is the question of who to tax. Although I suggest taxing the retailers, some believe that marijuana growers and cultivators should receive the greatest tax. An article from the Oregon Law Review says that “taxing further up the chain would be simpler since there would likely be fewer producers than stores, and production would be more rooted-literally-to a location” (Caulkins et al.). Positioning the growers to receive the highest tax would essentially make the entire process simpler. The article argues that taxing growers would eliminate the need to differentiate taxes between “edibles” (marijuana baked into food, a popular method of consumption) and “plain marijuana.” See the tables below generated by Oregon Law Review that provide a visual of the benefits and drawbacks of the various taxing methods. What the tables illustrate are potential formulas for maximizing the revenue that states can draw from marijuana sales. Since marijuana policy is still uncharted territory, these formulas are still complicated and will take years to develop and perfect. But the main issue I still have with a full-scale marijuana legalization is the possibility that legal marijuana distributors will not be able to compete with a black market that will
Best Student Essays inevitably still exist post-legalization. If we develop a faulty formula for a marijuana tax, taxing retailers or growers too high, consumers will simply purchase from black market distributors, which will defeat the entire purpose. Marijuana policy has to incentivize the legal market in a way that will introduce enough competition to keep marijuana prices down and create a tax rate that is reasonable to all parties. But supervising the market by regulating both legal and illicit marijuana distribution may not be cheap. The bottom line: If the costs of regulation and the potential financial failure of the legal distributors to beat the black market are greater than the actual revenue that legal marijuana will generate, this policy will be a fiasco. But where there is no risk, there is no reward. Even with all of the unanswered questions and the possible fiscal drawbacks of a full-scale recreational marijuana legalization, I still believe the potential revenue that this new industry could bring, especially to lowerincome states, makes this wager worth it. But perhaps a more cautionary route is my second proposal: the decriminalization of marijuana. The main difference between decriminalization and legalization is that legalization will create an entirely new market and industry, while decriminalization policy operates within the confines of the judicial system, eradicating the criminal penalties of marijuana possession. But the potential impact of decriminalization is not to be scoffed at. Fiscally, decriminalization makes sense. It is clear from the aforementioned costs of enforcement cited in the Background section of this paper that marijuana laws are expensive to enforce. But according to an article from the Journal of Public Health Policy, California’s decriminalization of marijuana in the 1970s reduced its marijuana enforcement costs from $17 million to $4.4 million in a matter of a year. In that same year, marijuana arrests went down 36%. The article also states “there is some evidence that law enforcement officers in ‘decriminalization’ states redirected efforts toward the detection and arrest of offenses concerning other illicit drugs. As a result of the new laws, there was a sharp decline in the incarceration of offenders and an increase in revenues from fines” (Single). Freeing up police resources, cutting down enforcement costs and reprioritizing drug enforcement are the focal reasons why decriminalization is an effective alternative policy to full-scale legalization.
The State of California is not alone in passing decriminalization policy. NORML reports that seventeen states have decriminalized marijuana, with a wide range of civil penalties for varied amounts of marijuana. For example, Maine’s penalty is a maximum fine of six hundred dollars for possessing less than 2.5 oz. of marijuana. But the less strict Massachusetts has a maximum fine of one hundred dollars for possessing less than 1oz. of marijuana (NORML, “State Info”). But I find an issue with many of the decriminalization policies that states have implemented because the fines are usually uniform across the state. As the adage goes, “one size does not fit all.” Therefore, the statewide decriminalization policy I am proposing gives the power to the people of individual counties to choose what the civil penalties will be. The fine in Bernalillo, the most populous county in the state, might not be appropriate for counties like Harding County, the least populous county. It is only fair that people have a voice in how their communities operate their marijuana policies.
It is only fair that people have a voice in how their communities operate their marijuana policies. The benefit of decriminalization is that in any form, states will not lose any money. Fines will still be implemented on those who are caught possessing marijuana, but fewer arrests will be made, which will result in less incarceration and prosecution fees on the taxpayer. On all levels, the system works. But it is very unlikely that decriminalization policies will be near the revenue engine that full-scale marijuana legalization would be. Recommendation The question of marijuana policy is not a simple one, so my policy recommendation will not be either. But after carefully evaluating both of the options I have laid out, I am still in full support of the full legalization of recreational marijuana in New Mexico. For a state that is struggling to find a solution to its economic problems, the tax revenue, job creation, and overall economic impact that legal marijuana could provide is what New Mexico
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The Green Rush: The Legalization of Recreational Marijuana desperately needs. Furthermore, times are changing. The social stigma of marijuana is fading away and the drug is becoming more accepted across all cultures and generations. Being such a diverse state, New Mexico is one that would be ready to integrate marijuana into its economy. Yet I have to remain realistic. Other states in the nation are not ready, socially or economically, to build effective marijuana policy. Decriminalization remains a very practical approach to decrease costs of enforcement all across the board, and can still operate as an effective bridge between full prohibition and full legalization.
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Works Cited
“Bernalillo County Marijuana Decriminalization Advisory Question, Measure 1 (November 2014).” Ballotpedia.org. The Lucy Institute, n.d. Web. 15 November 2014. Caulkins, Jonathan et al. “High Tax States: Options for Gleaning Revenue from Legal Cannabis.” 91 OR. L. REV (2012-2013): 1041-1067. Web. 29 Oct. 2014. Colorado. City of Fort Collins, Colorado. Amendment 64 – Use and regulation of marijuana. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Web. 15 November 2014. Colorado. City of Denver. Retail Marijuana Use Within the City of Denver. Denver: n.p., 2013. Web. 15 November 2014. Ingraham, Christopher. “Colorado Marijuana Revenues Hit a New High.” The Washington Post, 14 Oct. 2014. Web. 20 November 2014. Kilmer, Beau et al., Altered State? Assessing How Marijuana Legalization in California Could Influence Marijuana Consumption and Public Budgets. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Drug Policy Research Center, 2010. Web. 29 Oct. 2014. National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws. “State Info.” NORML.org. NORML, 2014. Web. 15 November 2014. “New Mexico Laws and Penalties.” NORML.org. NORML, 2014. Web. 15 November 2014. “Marijuana Decriminalization Talking Points.” NORML.org. NORML, 2014. Web. 15 November 2014. “About Marijuana.” NORML.org. NORML, 2014. Web. 15 November 2014. New Mexico. Compilations Commission. 20-12-66. Wrongful use and possession of controlled substances.N.p.: Compilations Commission, 1989. Web. 15 November 2014. Single, Eric. “The Impact of Marijuana Decriminalization: An Update.” Journal of Public Health Policy 10.4 (1989): 456-466. Web. 29 Oct. 2014.
He for (S)he by: Jesse Yelvington
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he autobiographical story of Marjane Satrapi’s journey through girlhood in Iran and adolescence as an Iranian in Vienna, Persepolis explores the history and plight of Iranian people in general, and women in particular. Nevertheless, Satrapi asserts that she is not a feminist. This interpretation is not shared by many readers and critics of Persepolis. Satrapi’s non-identification with the word “feminist” comes from a complicated array of influences, including the totalitarian regime she was subject to, anti-colonial and anti-Western sentiments, as well as the intense individualism through which she views the world. Marjane Satrapi does not view herself as a feminist, saying: You know, the feminists become very angry when I say I am not a feminist. I am a humanist. I believe in human beings. After what I have seen in the world, I don’t think women are better than the men (Tully). Contrary to this humanist identity, others do view Satrapi as a feminist, or at least view Persepolis as a feminist text. This is clear simply from the titles of many articles written about Persepolis, including: “Girls in Crisis: Rescue and Transnational Feminist Autobiographical Resistance,” and “Wartime Cosmopolitanism: Cosmofeminism in Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” The life presented by Satrapi in post-Islamic Revolution Iran is one controlled by a totalitarian regime; the Islamic rulers control what certain people can and cannot wear, do, say, or otherwise express, especially in public, but also importantly in their own homes. As Satrapi describes: “The regime had understood that one person...asking herself: Are my trousers long enough? Is my veil in place? Can my makeup be seen? Are they going to whip me? No longer asks herself: Where is my freedom of thought? Where is my freedom of speech? My life, is it livable? What’s going on in the political prisons?” (Satrapi 302). This totalitarianism is exposed to the reader
through “a series of oscillations between the child’s naïve patriotism and her disillusionment with her nation” (Friedman 36). The government limits people’s perception of their individualism in another way: by lumping women together into groups expected to behave and dress identically. While Satrapi’s main outlook is incredibly individualistic, she responds to this drastic separation between men and women in Iranian culture differently. In this case, she responds by advocating the similarities between all people. This is a large reason for her disinterest in classifying herself as a feminist. She thinks that the suppression faced by Iranian women can only be overcome by seeing and treating everyone as equal, rather than promoting policies or behaviors that acknowledge that men and women are different, even if only by nature of the way that society treats them (as feminism does). Though Satrapi does provide much historical background and information about the larger political changes and struggles happening in Iran, she provides it all from a very individualistic lens. The graphic novel medium allows the narrator to talk directly to the reader: we see her face and body as she breaks the fourth wall and describes her interpretations of current and past events (Satrapi 22). To another extent entirely, Persepolis is much more about Satrapi’s life and struggles than it is about Iran and the Islamic Revolution as a whole. This can be seen when she says, “My faith was not unshakable. The year of the revolution I had to take action. So I put my prophetic destiny on hold” (Satrapi 10). She frames the activities of the county around herself, rather than the other way around. Satrapi’s individualistic viewpoint also contrasts greatly with the visual representation she provides of life in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. She paints a picture of sameness, bleakness, a crowd of faces that all look the same, especially women wearing the veil (Satrapi 3, 5, 86). This is contrasted with the uniqueness of each person’s face in the second part of Persepolis when Satrapi is immersed in Western culture in a Western country (Satrapi 167).
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He for (S)he This individualism is another explanation for Satrapi’s lack of identification with a feminist label. Feminism is, at its core, the belief that people of all genders are equal and should be treated equally. Most historical and contemporary world societies do not enact these ideals; instead, life is structured by a patriarchy, a system in which men have more power than women. Because
Feminism is, at its core, the belief that people of all genders are equal and should be treated equally. of this, feminism usually deals with analyzing and deconstructing this patriarchal power systems. Satrapi clearly sees the ways the patriarchy affects her and other individual women living in Iran (repressively, from her viewpoint), but her individualistic lens fails to look beyond that to the actual power structures and how they affect all women and all men in Iranian society. Because of this, she does not see the need for feminism, or any other system-wide overhaul of society. Satrapi wrote Persepolis for a Western audience, largely in order to dispel myths and misunderstandings (to put it nicely) in how Westerners view Iran (Tully). Feminism is a Western concept, derived from Western enlightenment ideals and from mostly Western thinkers. As such, it is often criticized for its highly Euro- and American-centric ways of thinking. This is another contribution to Satrapi’s non-feminist identification. Western feminism often views non-Western struggles through a Western lens, and blindly advocates certain positions without understanding all sides of an issue (Gilmore and Marshall 680). This is somewhat true with regards to Islamic veiling, which some feminists claim to be highly oppressive. In fact, there are some situations in which veiling is actually a radical proclamation of anti-colonial sentiments, as well as a declaration of an individual’s freedom of expression. Satrapi now finds herself in the position of advocating for girl’s rights to veil themselves, against some feminists, and also to some extent against what she has advocated her entire life (Tully). Even more sinister, “this discourse of rescue in which Muslim girls and women were the objects of intervention justified military aggression and human
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rights violations initiated by the U.S. government” (Gilmore and Marshall 680). The many Middle Eastern engagements of American (and other Western) soldiers fighting the War on Terror have often been backed by claims of the need to liberate and democratize the people of the Middle East, especially women. Marjane Satrapi’s blatant statement against feminism raises important questions about the nature of the movement or, more accurately, the many different interpretations of the nature of feminism. If feminism is based entirely in the ideology that all human beings are equal, why don’t most people identify as feminists? How much does the interpretation of feminism as the belief that women are superior to men deter people from identifying with the cause? As a feminist, my answer to these questions would be to find where these messages are coming from. Looking at the situation from a sociological conflict perspective, there are several foundational questions to be asked: Whose power do these messages protect? Who is harmed by them? Some have rebranded feminism to be more along the lines of what Satrapi identifies as “Equalism.” UN Women Goodwill Ambassador Emma Watson, for example, presented her “He for She” speech, in which she pointed out some of the ways the patriarchy hurts men as well as women (Watson). Does this rebranding feminism as “just as much for men as for women” take away from the power of the movement, or contribute to it? Perhaps Satrapi is right, and feminists do tend to get angry when women (and men) state that they are not feminist, or that they oppose feminism. But don’t we have a good reason?
The Making of Madwomen: How Fefu and Her Friends’ Julia Developed from Hamlet’s Ophelia
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by: Kayla Tabuena
hat constitutes a madwoman seems fairly obvious; it is a term used for a mentally ill woman. But it is also an archetype that associates nonconformity with insanity, something deemed so undesirable that it ultimately leads to tragedy. It was the Victorian Era’s interpretations of Ophelia that not only created the standard for the madwomen archetypes, but also helped form the overarching role of women in Western society. This stems from poor knowledge of mental health in the past, in part due to interpretations of Hamlet’s Ophelia. Interestingly enough, Maria Irene Fornes’s character Julia from Fornes’s play Fefu and Her Friends (1977) deconstructs these archetypes, specifically one of the madwoman, by showing the contradictions within the female gender roles and the unromantic side of mental illness. This allows the audience to see what is fundamentally wrong not only with Julia, but with society as a whole. Fefu and Her Friends: A Summary Though the plot of Shakespeare’s ubiquitous Hamlet still permeates our culture’s literary canon, Fefu and Her Friends is lesser known. Julia’s arch within this play showcases the toll patriarchy can have on the mental health of women, without even having a single male character onstage. At the beginning of Fefu, one of the characters states that Julia used to be “afraid of nothing” (Fornes 587). But after a bizarre hunting accident in which she is not even shot, the Julia the audience sees is confined to a wheelchair. At first all that is shown is Julia’s meekness, though her friends talk about her mental state. It is only until Julia’s monologue in the bedroom scene of Part II that the audience realizes the extent of Julia’s trauma first hand, when she begins to hallucinate about what she refers to as “the judges,” an invisible patriarchy trying to force her to believe a “prayer” about the inferiority of women. Later, the titular character Fefu sees Julia “in slow motion, walking” (Fornes 597) without
her wheelchair. Fefu confronts Julia about this, leading to them fighting about how Julia has lost her sense of agency. The play ends with Fefu shooting a rabbit in the backyard and, in parallel to the hunting accident, visibly harming Julia as well. The last line of the play is Fefu saying, “I killed it...I just shot...and killed it...Julia...” (Fornes 599) after once again, Julia reacts as if she, as the rabbit, has been shot. The Ideal Woman Victorian society had a special obsession with Ophelia, where she saturates society’s art, theater, and even psychology (Rhodes 2). The Victorian Ophelia functioned as a template for “Victorian femininities that was malleable enough to shape-shift as conventions” (Rhodes 7), and thus became a “blank slate” to mold into the Victorian ideal woman. Many Victorians interpreted Ophelia solely as “‘affectionate,’ ‘delicate,’ and ‘pure,’ [which] echoes those [traits encouraged] by writers of advice books for girls and women during the same period” (Rhodes 37). This, however, did not include or often neglected many of Ophelia’s other, less desirable traits such as her sexuality and her madness. In order to de-emphasize her less desirable traits, such as her sexuality and her assertiveness, lines were censored from Hamlet. This includes “Ophelia’s songs which might be considered bawdy” (Glick 24) such as: By Gis and by Saint Charity, Alack, and fie for shame! Young men will do’t, if they come to’t; By Cock, they are to blame. (4.5.57-60) This helped give the audience a skewed but more socially acceptable view of Ophelia, helping her fit better into the Victorian mold. It focused more on a romanticized version of her, in which she is “defined by idealized beauty and virtue rather than complex and sensualized humanity” (Rhodes 5). By ignoring the more complex aspects of Ophelia’s personality, she became a more one-
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Making of Madwomen: How Fefu and her Friends’ Julia Developed from Hamlet’s Ophelia dimensional character in many interpretations. Much like how the Victorians shaped a new Ophelia, the judges within Fefu also try to mold Julia into a more ideal woman. Though these judges are never seen on stage, they have a profound impact upon Julia’s wellbeing. As Julia hallucinates alone in the bedroom scene, she reacts to the blows she describes in her monologue, unseen by the audience, such as when “her head moves as if slapped” (Fornes 592). One way the judges attempt to shape Julia is by suppressing her sexuality, though they did not ignore it entirely like censored versions of Hamlet did. As part of the prayer Julia learns from them, she states that: Women’s spirit is sexual. That is why after coitus they dwell in nefarious feelings. Because that is their natural habitat. That is why it is difficult for them to return to the human world. Their sexual feelings remain with them till they die. And they take those feelings with them to the afterlife where they corrupt the heavens, and they are sent to hell where through suffering they may shed those feelings and return to earth as man. (Fornes 592). For Julia, the ideal woman is not a woman at all, but in fact a man. This makes what the judges wish Julia to become, in fact, impossible. In Julia’s mind, which the judges force to mirror the society she lives in, the judges, or those who have shaped her society (i.e. an invisible patriarchy), are “teaching” her how to fit their ideal. In turn, Julia loses her mind as she slowly realizes that this ideal cannot be obtained. Unlike Ophelia, where edited Hamlet performances show the audience a woman as they wish her to be, attempting to put Julia in a box forcibly degrades her mind, and thus shows how unhealthy gender roles can become. The Madwoman With this emphasis on physical appearance and the corresponding downplay on her madness and sexuality, Ophelia’s portrayal “established female sexuality and feminine nature as the source of the female malady” (Showalter, Female 10). And as all women harbor these traits, or at least should as Ophelia encompasses the ideal woman, mental illness was normalized and even romanticized in Victorian culture. This, along with the belief that Shakespeare’s characters were “pearls of wisdom adaptable to the circumstances of any age” (Rhodes 9), led to the use of Ophelia to diagnose mentally ill women. So enamored by the madwoman archetype that Ophelia encompassed, “asylum superintendents with cameras imposed the conventional Ophelia costume,
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gesture, props, and expressions upon them” (Showalter, Female 92) as Hugh Diamond did in Fig. 1. This woman bears wildflowers in her hair to help emphasize her embodiment of Ophelia, who made “fantastic garlands/ Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples” (4.7.165-166) much like these. Such photos were used as “valid records of insanity” (Showalter, Female 86),
Figure 1. Diamond, Hugh. Ophelia (Patient from the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum)
despite the fact that the subjects were manipulated to fit a fictional stereotype. These photos were “copied for Victorian consumption” (Showalter, Representing 83) to the point that “even casual visitors to mental institutions could recognize an Ophelia in the wards” (Showalter, Female 90). This is how Ophelia became the archetype for the madwoman in reality, not just in fiction. Julia, in contrast to many of Ophelia’s Victorian portrayals, showcases the toll her mental strain inflicts upon madwomen. Fornes states in the stage directions that Julia portrays “behavior [that] should not be the usual behavior attributed to a mad person” (Fornes 591), unlike the archetypal Ophelia’s bawdy songs. The audience is horrified by what they see, especially in a stage as personal as ones used for Fefu, which was first performed in a house. Julia’s hallucination scene is even more personal, set in the “smaller, enclosed spaces of the scenes of Part II” (Austin 78), helping to show a raw view of Julia’s deteriorating mind. She is not objectified by emphasizing her looks, nor exploited for entertainment. Instead, her voice is only heard. With the censorship of
Best Student Essays many of Ophelia’s key lines, the insight into her mind is lost. But Julia speaks; her struggles develop vocally. Ophelia was not allowed to speak enough and, instead, her struggles become romanticized. Seeing and hearing Julia so up-close discomforts the audience, but also forces them to see the root of her problems: the invisible patriarchy attempting to force her to become their ideal. Contradictions of the Ideal and the Mad Uncensored or not, Ophelia embodies both ideal and undesirable femininity. This contradiction stems from Ophelia’s “volatile, paradoxical construction of Victorian femininities” (Rhodes 7), in which to be female is to be both the ideal and the fallen. The fallen woman was created in the Victorian Era “to remind women of the disgrace and demise of sexually transgressive women” (Rhodes 7). It stems from “double face of Victorian sexual morality” (Skultans 93) where women are thought of both as “ravaged by sexual desire [and] devoid of sexual feeling” (Skultans 89), stressing the unobtainable duality of women as both absolutely good and evil. Ophelia’s duality is only possible through her madness, enforcing the Victorian view of women as simultaneously perfect yet flawed, and thus mad.
Within Julia's mad prayer, she speaks of the paradoxes of female archetypes. Within Julia’s mad prayer, she speaks of the paradoxes of female archetypes. Women are “unpredictable; therefore wicked and gentle and evil and good which is evil” (Fornes 35), traits impossible to simultaneously achieve, yet all of which are expected of women. As well, the fact that women in themselves cannot become ideal within the terms the prayer describes makes appeasing the judges and thus society impossible. This again has roots in Victorian gender roles, with its contradicting traits. For Julia, it is not her madness that makes her encompass both the positive and negative female stereotypes. It is her trying to convince herself that being both is possible that eventually destroys her. In essence, it is Julia attempting to deal with the judges’ view on women that drives her mad, eventually leading to her death.
Madwomen and Nature Ophelia is heavily associated with nature throughout the play, but the description of Ophelia’s death contains the heaviest nature imagery. Ophelia is shown with disheveled, flowered hair and barefoot, signs of her closeness to nature and thus madness (Showalter, Representing 80-84). This represented “the ‘woman as
Figure 2. Millais, John Everett, Sir. Ophelia. 1852. Oil on canvas.
nature’ stereotype used to bind [Ophelia] to such role as childbearing and rearing” (Rhodes 12) and thus used nature to emphasize Ophelia’s femininity, and glorify her death. As seen in Millais’ Ophelia in Fig. 2, “the division of space between Ophelia and the natural details Millais had so painstakingly pursued reduces her to one more visual object; and the painting has such a hard surface, strangely flattened perspective, and brilliant light that it seems cruelly indifferent to the woman’s death” (Showalter, Representing 82). Such portrayals often contradict the text where it is said that “her garments, heavy with their drink/Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay/To muddy death” (4.7 178-180) as opposed to painting her floating in the brook, with her body on display. In Ophelia’s case, nature took away any empathy going toward her situation, sensationalizing her death. Julia has similar nature and death associations, but with animals. At the end of the play, when Fefu shoots a rabbit after fighting with one another, Julia “puts her hand on her forehead … there is blood” (Fornes 599) quite similar to her reaction to the shot deer in which “she had convulsions…like the deer” (Fornes 587) despite not having been shot herself. The first time she is shot, she realizes the rigid gender roles she faces, and it tears apart her mind. The audience does not get to see what happens the next time, as the last scene ends with “dropping the rabbit, Fefu walks to Julia and stands behind the chair as
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Making of Madwomen: How Fefu and her Friends’ Julia Developed from Hamlet’s Ophelia she looks at Julia…the lights fade” (Fornes 599). But it allows the audience to speculate on what happens next in the story, and how the characters move on from this point. Unlike Ophelia’s association of nature symbolizing her femininity, Julia’s link to animals shows the conflict within her own mind, as it signals the start of her hallucinations and thus the realization that femininity defined by the judges is a contradiction. But Julia’s tie to nature still stems from Ophelia’s. Ophelia’s nature motifs became absorbed into the madwoman trope through her pervasiveness in insane asylums, resulting in this association between nature and the insane. And as a deconstruction of a madwoman, Julia harbors traits of this trope but uses these traits in a way not to romanticize mental illness. How heavily the deaths of the animals affect Julia focuses on something deeper than relating pretty flowers to pretty women. Animals and nature symbolize how Julia came to realize the gender roles of society and in attempting to fit them, in all their contradictions, fell herself. Conclusion Despite many deviations from the madwoman trope built by Ophelia, Julia is still a madwoman. She has the nature association which signals the decline of her mental state, and struggles to even understand what encompasses the gender roles she must try to fit into, with all their contradictions, and is thus deemed mad, leading to her demise. This is in stark contrast to the Victorian impression of Ophelia, which romanticizes her in an effort to have her encompass the contradictions in women as a whole. It is being shaped into what others want them to be, an ideal, whether it be by an invisible or visible patriarchy, that makes both women considered mad by the societies they lived in. This also prevented real-life mentally ill women from getting proper treatment, as doctors would use Ophelia, a fictional character, as a basis for diagnosis. By not glamorizing mental illness, Fornes allows the audience to see the ugly truth of the distress Julia goes through. In doing so, Julia shows that it is the patriarchal molding women into archetypes, not their dissatisfaction with not fitting in, which causes this distress. Julia, in my opinion, is a powerful deconstruction of gender roles (specifically the mad ones) encompassed by Ophelia, allowing the audience to see the harm such roles have and continue to inflict upon women firsthand.
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Bibliography:
Austin, Gayle. “The Madwoman in the Spotlight: Plays of Maria Irene Fornes.” Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1989. 76-85. Print. Diamond, Hugh. Ophelia (Patient from the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum). 1850. Royal Society of Medicine, London. Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. 129. Print. Fornes, Maria Irene. Fefu and Her Friends. 1978. Modern and Contemporary Drama. Comp. Miriam Gilbert, Carl H. Klaus, and Bradford S. Field. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. 584-99. Print. Glick, Claris. “Hamlet in the English Theater--Acting Texts from Betterton (1676) to Olivier (1963).” Shakespeare Quarterly 20.1 (1969): 17-35. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 15 Nov. 2015. Millais, John Everett, Sir. Ophelia. 1852. Oil on canvas. Tate British, London. Rhodes, Kimberly. Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008. Print. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. New York: Barnes & Noble, 2007. Print. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Print. ---. “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism.” Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. London: Methuen, 1985. 77-94. WorldCat [OCLC]. Web. 12 Oct. 2015. Skultans, Vieda. English Madness: Ideas on Insanity, 1580-1890. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Print.
Meeting Magic Mushrooms; or, How it Feels to Chew 5 Grams
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by: Rio O’Neal
ou’re 19 years old and visiting Caveman and Kira—two pals who have a fancy for cultivating and experimenting with copious amounts of deadly-potent substances. Their home is pretty much a studio apartment, only there’s an extra bedroom upstairs where they hide their paraphernalia. Given their destructive lifestyles, the place is remarkably tidy. At this moment, Caveman is holding a large Ziploc® bag that appears to be overflowing with tapeworms and petrified tomatoes: tonight’s keynote speakers. They have you cup your hands, then pour them full with the otherworldly mixture. While smelling the bounty, your nostrils are greeted with the scent of mildew; like a moist, greasy dish towel that hasn’t been washed in a few days. You start having second thoughts, thinking about those stories of your schizophrenic aunt and how she was “normal” until she took some bad doses of LSD in college. “These will last about seven hours,” Kira says, “and you won’t be able to sleep until the effects wear off, so unless you want to be up all night, I suggest you take them now.” Well, that solves that. You open your mouth nice and wide, shove in the fungi, and start chewing. The sensation is best described as gnawing on a crusty gym sock with a hint of peanut flavoring; kind of chewy, kind of musky, and caking your mouth with a slimy film that’s very unpleasant indeed. Gagging, you desperately chug a bottle of water to wash down the foulness as quickly as possible. “Good job!” Kira says. “Now just wait about an hour. You might start feeling some nausea, but that’s normal.” “Are you or Caveman going to eat some too?” you ask. “Nope! How about some music while we wait?” The TV is tuned to a traditional Japanese music station on Pandora. It seems like the shamisen has been strumming randomly for about 45 minutes now. The album cover displayed on the TV depicts an ancient
Japanese warship amidst a harsh storm, the crashing waves rocking the ship about, reminding you of the toy boats from your bathtub so many years ago. You ask, “Hey guys, when did they come out with these moving album covers? They’re so futuristic.” They start snickering, but you don’t pay them much mind; you’re rather preoccupied playing with your hands. You don’t remember the last time they were this bulbous and clammy and fun to squish together. They remind you of a certain kind of organism—a popular pizza topping—but you can’t quite remember the name. “I’m going to put a movie on,” Caveman says, still chuckling. “Does that sound good to everyone?” You give a nod. “Let me just use the restroom first.” Staring in the mirror, you notice that the color in your eyes has been eclipsed with giant pupils: just shiny black disks floating amidst glazed pools of milky white. How banal of them to play Alice in Wonderland this isn’t even the good Disney one it’s the one with Johnny Depp I’ve never taken Adderall before but I’m pretty sure this is what it feels like my eyes are like magnifying glasses that can scrutinize everything in their path why the hell are we sitting in front of an electrified box watching a modern interpretation of some long-gone fellow’s story who would probably be really upset to see that people spent countless hours painstakingly rehearsing lines and redoing scenes and editing footage in dull rooms in front of other electrified boxes for a project that was solely created to distract people for profit people shouldn’t be wasting so much time on something manipulative and dangerous like TV it only exists to transmit these so-called “ideas” that are really just agendas and ulterior-motives bundled up like a sheep in wolves’ clothing there’s a reason they call it “programming” as a species we’re not meant to be inside and sheltered by plastic and the constant hum of electricity outside of these walls is a vast and expansive forest that’s calling my name I need to run I need to feel free and go out the door and never look back as I explore deeper and deeper into the unknown of God’s creation it’s really cold since it’s October but I don’t think I would mind right now. Alice recently fell through the rabbit hole and now
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Meeting Magic Mushrooms; or How it Feels to Chew 5 Grams she’s growing really, really tall. Kira turns to you and asks, “Hey, could you grab me a bottle of water from the fridge?” You stand from the couch and My God I’ve become Shaquille O’Neal. Kira and Caveman can’t seem to stop laughing as you trundle around the cramped kitchen, hunching and hunkering to avoid hitting your head on the light fixtures. Each grand step of your redwood legs makes you worry that you’ll crush the furniture or the unsuspecting dwarf friends below. Is it loud when I walk because of the increased sensitivity from these shrooms or because I’m stomping like a giant or both there isn’t mushroom right now. Caveman shouts, “Let’s go upstairs and check out the greenhouse!” While you sit cross-legged at the foot of the green Taj Mahal, your friends stare intently at you. They slowly unzip the front hood, and a formidable fog pours out that Reminds me of the beginning of movies where the camera’s soaring through the clouds with scores of different people’s names coming and going even though you don’t care about them and will never remember them only there’s not a fancy musical accompaniment this time.
While you sit cross-legged at the foot of the green Taj Mahal, your friends stare intently at you. Peering inside, different shelves are piled with hundreds upon hundreds of mushrooms, all of which appear to be breathing. It’s like something straight out of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun music video. Someone is trying to talk to you about them, but their words are just coming out as garbled grunts and vibrations that seem to be making the mushrooms breathe heavier. Your friends just made the mistake of having you watch some violent anime with dissonant music and lots of bleeding cartoon characters. This normally wouldn’t have been a problem, but for some reason the negativity and bad vibes are coming after you; a hot coal is smoldering in your chest while the rest of your body feels like it’s in freefall. “Turn this off,” you say. “It’s freaking me out.” Caveman looks a little confused. “It’s just a carto-” “I said turn it off.”
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They shut the laptop. This was such a bad idea what if I’m like this forever what if I’ll never be normal again and end up schizophrenic like my aunt I didn’t take LSD but still that doesn’t mean I’m safe. You clutch your chest and feel your heart rumbling in your palm. There’s a history of heart attack in my family oh shit what if I have a heart attack I’m only 19. Your voice unsteady, “Can someone rub my back please? It’ll help calm me down.” They both look at each other for a moment. With glaring uncertainty, Kira finally says, “Uhh… sure?” then starts rubbing your back. Having your back rubbed makes you feel like a kid again, and, as expected, it’s calming you down a little too. That is, until The sinking feeling is coming back I’m burdening these people just like my aunt burdens my family oh God why is this happening I don’t want to be a burden I need to feel my heart again. Caveman asks, “Would you like some milk? It’ll help you come down faster.” “Bring me all that you have. How long have I been tripping?” “About 3 hours.” Never again. “Okay, we’ll go get you the milk,” Kira says. “How about you go lay down?” You’re laying down on the couch. It’s dark, and the only light is the subdued purple of a black light—the surrounding psychedelic posters of Bob Marley and hookah-smoking caterpillars and Cheshire Cats and the Woodstock music festival have enveloped you in a sea of neon. Kira hands you a tall glass of milk, and you drink it as quickly as you can. “Can one of you come close to me and help me get through this?” It feels like my mind is in labor right now there’s no telling what kind of baby it’s about to give birth to. “Alright, scoot over,” Caveman says. Caveman has a sour musk about him that’s rather unpleasant, but he’s reassuring to be around since he’s experimented with more drugs than anyone you’ve ever met and survived all of them: nitrous oxide, spice, pot, LSD, DMT, Xanax, LSA, mushrooms, cocaine, heroin, steroids—you name it (except meth—he has standards). But wait what if he just survived them because he has good genes I don’t have very good genes just look at my schizophrenic aunt and my family’s history of heart attacks oh man I need to feel my heartbeat again. Caveman says, “The best way to get through this is not
Best Student Essays to fight—let the mushrooms take you where they want to take you.” You spend a few minutes clutching your chest and thinking about your aunt, but you’ve finally decided to lay down and relax and relinquish all control to the fungi. You become aware of your body as an organism and start feeling its infinitesimally small processes: the blood shooting through your veins with each pound of the heart; your epidermis shedding away one cell at a time; your hair growing nanometer by nanometer. You realize that your body is just a temporary vessel—a housing that will crumble into atoms and dissipate with the very
Let the mushrooms take you where they want to take you. universe that created it. The reason I’m suffering is because I’m trying too hard to retain my ego in order to get through this I must learn to let it go and liberate myself from the chains of worldly entrapment here I am so worried about being perceived as crazy when really there’s no such thing as a crazy person there’s just people who either conform to societal expectations or don’t what if the “crazy” ones are just the people who accepted these truths? A smile slowly forms on your face. Caveman looks at you and asks, “Now tell me—what do you need?” The tone of his voice makes it seem like he knows exactly what’s going on. “Nothing at all,” you say. “None of us need anything, actually. Need is an empty, selfish, worldly concept.” “That’s it! Now tell me, why do you think we are here?” You sit thinking, your head a cacophony of thoughts that can’t seem to find harmony: Like Shakespeare said All the World’s a Stage life is just one big play one giant system of societal norms and idiosyncrasies that enslave us so we unconsciously abide by them just so we can fit in and be accepted but why are we so worried about what other people will think of us when nobody will remember who we are one hundred years from now anyways if anything people should try to oppose systems and use their awareness of said systems for good and try to better the lives of those around them through liberation IT’S THE MACHINES MAN DOWN WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT THE HIPPIES FINALLY MAKE
SENSE NOW. You say, “We’re here to exist. Then once we die and cease to exist, our vessels revert back to the elements of which we were constructed: stardust.” “Not quite. Keep thinking.” “Can’t you just tell me?” “This is something you must find on your own. Search for it.” You close your eyes. Your mind has left the cozy couch and black lights and neon posters and is now ascending what could best be described as a mountain. As you run and climb—up, up, up—you feel the vessel slowly strip away from your soul as you watch it melt into an infinite number of swirling atoms and blend with the universe around it. The tip of the mountain is in sight. With every breath, your body tingles like a tongue on a battery—each one more intense than the last. The sensation grows greater and greater and overwhelms your consciousness with an overwhelming warmth and brightness. An image appears: a rising sun, about to reach the peak of the mountain. And as you realize that I AM THE RISING SUN, you reach the top of the mountain—the peak of your journey—the final destination—and a booming voice in the distance speaks into your mind a single word: the underlying purpose for all humanity. You’re feeling sober again, and you’re celebrating your narrow escape with a moist apricot ricotta cupcake that's bathed in cream cheese frosting—the greatest you've ever tasted
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Contributor Bios Bryan MacCosbe Bryan MacCosbe is a senior at the University of New Mexico, studying English with a minor in psychology. His writing tends to focus on deep reflection of life experiences that seek to understand a broader perspective about life and the nature of our existence. Bryan was born and raised by his mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Gabriel Gallegos Gabriel Gallegos is a sophomore attending the University of New Mexico. He is a strategic communications and political science major. Through his leadership experiences in ASUNM and the New Mexico Leadership Institute, he has had a number of opportunities to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds. He has won national awards for student journalism and educates high school students about New Mexico state government through the American Legionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Boys State program. During his time as an intern with U.S. Senator Tom Udallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s district office, he assisted with the communication of federal policy initiatives to constituents and gained a valuable perspective of how real issues on the ground transform into public policy.
Jesse Yelvington Jesse Yelvington is a queer, vegan, transmasculine Hufflepuff who adores cats and the smells of green chile and rain-soaked desert dirt. Jesse uses he/him/his/they/them/theirs pronouns and is a social justice activist, poet, and Gray Jedi, who believes in the uniting power of adventure.
Kayla Tabuena Kayla Tabuena is in her second year here at UNM. Despite her engineering major, she loves literature, and tries to read whatever she can get her hands on in her free time. Her greatest passions are chemistry and Shakespearean plays. She would like to thank Maria Szasz for all her help with this essay and for being a wonderful professor.
Keriden Brown Keriden Brown majors in English at the University of New Mexico to further elaborate her celestial exploits. She rather enjoys the comfort of cats and roaming her home without the shackled restriction of pants. Dark coffee, though, is her one true solace when it comes to stressful days working as a paralegal at a reputable, female-owned, civil defense office.
Laura Golobish Laura Golobish is a doctoral student in UNM's Department of Art and Art History. Her recent research considers the construction of Scots identity and the representation of British Empire in illustrated Romantic literature and radical political publications during the first half of the 19th century.
Lucas Winter Lucas Winter is a journalism student at the University of New Mexico. He has a passion for exploring the world and experiencing diverse cultures. This passion led him to become a student advocate in the Refugee Well-Being Project.
Rachana Bhat Rachana Bhat is a junior at UNM. As a student, she is studying business with a concentration in human resources. Athletically, she participates on the women's tennis team.
Rio Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Neal Rio O'Neal is a third-year English major. He spends his days slaving away for fancy pieces of paper, writing himself in and out of trouble, squishing his stress ball, and singing falsetto.
Stephanie Kaylene Mladinich Stephanie Mladinich is a native New Mexican and a Latin Americanist interested in conservation of biodiversity and cultural diversity. She is fascinated by the challenges that pollution, urbanization, deforestation, and development pose to the health and livelihoods of human communities and ecosystems. Her writing is inspired by the diversity of interests that she pursued during her time at the University of New Mexico, University of California Santa Cruz, and the Universidade de SĂŁo Paulo. Stephanieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s studies and experiences have provided a basis to develop an understanding and a model for conservation in Latin America, on both philosophical and practical levels. She has discovered that the best way to make somebody care about saving something is to make them fall in love with it.
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Best Student Essays The University of New Mexicoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Premiere Nonfiction Magazine