Bunch of Times articles....
Jul. 13th, 2005 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on firehouse poles
In Firehouse, Fastest Way Down Is on Its Way Out
By MICHELLE O'DONNELL
Of all the tools associated with the dangerous but sometimes romantic world of firefighting, few capture the spirit of the job quite like the shiny firehouse pole, that simple brass delivery system that relies on little more than gravity to get a fireman to his truck a few seconds faster.
In New York City's firehouses, veterans have a deep affection, even a zealous sense of protection, for their poles. But now, the department has begun shrinking their number sharply as it builds new firehouses and remodels old ones to bring them up to current building codes. In many cases, ventilation systems have been installed where the poles and their surrounding holes used to be.
The trend is no different around the country, as cities build one-story firehouses and update older firehouses. "It certainly is without any question that firehouse poles are becoming, with each new firehouse, a thing of the past," said Harold A. Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters. "The new firehouse or station would be built with stairways and no poles."
It is an ignominious slide into obscurity for a century-old tool that has served a fire company perhaps as many as a dozen times a night. As the first daring step before any derring-do, the pole, with its 20-foot-or-so plunge, became a striking emblem of firefighting like the walrus mustache and the Dalmatian.
And while other tools like wooden ladders and horse-drawn engines have been updated and improved over the decades, the pole, true to form, remains the fastest way down.
A new firehouse in the Rockaways in Queens was built without any poles at all. A vast firehouse on Staten Island opened in the spring with a single cast aluminum pole tucked into a corner. (On a recent visit, firefighters, momentarily forgetting it was there, said they did not have one.)
Firehouses under renovation in Brooklyn and Manhattan have had many of their poles removed. And the fire academy stopped teaching new recruits to slide down poles some years ago.
The removal has also coincided with the department's heightened concerns about safety in recent years. Every firefighter seems to tell stories of pole-related broken ankles, sprains, blown-out knees, friction burns, concussions, twisted and broken backs. News accounts described one pole-related paralysis, in 1969, and one civilian death, in 1929.
For a department intensely loyal to tradition, even a gentle weaning - away from, say, four poles, positioned alongside the engine and truck, to one centrally situated pole - can seem like a seismic shift to veterans, who say they must recalibrate their well-honed exit maneuvers to include a more time-consuming jaunt down a flight or two of stairs. "It's the first thing I do when I work somewhere else: find out where the pole is," said Lt. Jeff Monsen of Engine Company 23 on West 58th Street in Manhattan.
At the Lower Manhattan quarters of Engine Company 10 and Ladder Company 10, where the poles were recently removed and holes sealed up so that ductwork could be installed for central air-conditioning, disappointed firefighters considered sawing through the first floor ceiling to reinstall them. "Now at 4 o'clock in the morning, you've got 11 guys going down the stairs," a veteran firefighter said glumly. "Stupidest thing I ever heard of."
Joseph Mastropietro, who as the assistant commissioner of facilities oversees the maintenance of the city's firehouses, said that the poles had been removed and their holes filled as firehouses were renovated and given new ventilation systems required by the city.
"We didn't see it as a major problem because they still had two means of egress," he said, referring to a single pole and stairs. "There was a lot of resistance at first, but I don't think they mind it too much now."
In 2000, the department briefly envisioned new houses built without poles and opened the quarters of Engine Company 265 in the Rockaways without any. But the department abandoned that plan when it became clear that the city lacked the space for sprawling houses to replace the narrow, multistory historic firehouses that it still used.
Since then, Mr. Mastropietro said, the department has backed a strategic placement of poles as the houses are remodeled, which has meant a selective removal.
The pole can seem more harrowing than some rescue missions. Marooned inside a 3-foot-wide moat of open space with a 21-foot drop to cold concrete, the pole is no plaything, generations of firefighters' best efforts to the contrary.
Climbing races and water fights are two unofficial but common uses of the pole and the hole. Another is luring a rookie firefighter into a rope maneuver and leaving him dangling indefinitely in the hole.
Some firefighters like to stop and talk at the base of the pole, one hand on its gleaming brass, while others make sure never to store their bunker gear too close to the pole for fear of being clipped by descending firefighters as they put it on.
"It's an expressway," said Firefighter Louis Trazino of Engine Company 33 in Greenwich Village, where the pole connecting the second and third floors spans a 28-foot drop, the longest of any in the city.
Keep in mind that before hopping on a fire truck and driving away in the middle of the night, a firefighter must leap into a dark hole with what seems like a two-story drop and slide. Descent requires as much bravado as a mastery of physical technique. There is no safety platform, no remedy for sweaty palms, and the constant danger of striking one's head on the perimeter of the hole or against the swinging doors that might enclose it.
"You know how many times that's happened?" asked Firefighter Dan Cintron of Engine 23 with a laugh as he launched into another terrifying demonstration, banging open the doors enclosing the pole and, without even glancing to prepare for his leap across the hole, grabbing the pole and spinning downward 20 feet to the ground. He reached it in two seconds.
Another firefighter at the house was known to stash pillowcases near every pole hole to grasp the pole and descend quicker. Old-timers were said to slide down head first. Firefighters can tell a novice by whether his skin whistles against the metal.
Lieutenant Monsen said he had had to train every new firefighter at the house the proper way to slide: legs crossed at the ankles with the pole resting between the outer ankle joints, chin tucked to chest, and hands firm, not clenched.
Mike DeSanctis, 24, who has been a firefighter at Engine 23 for four months, said that he and another probationary firefighter usually took the stairs when the alarm bells rang. To avoid the matter entirely, one has taken to sleeping downstairs.
In time, should the poles remain, the young firefighters might become part of one of the most extraordinary and underappreciated bits of choreography in town.
It happens after dinner when the firefighters have retired to their upstairs bunks, when the mayhem of the city is suspended in an odd calm.
Suddenly, the alarm wails, and, like a merry band summoned by a whistle in a forest, firefighters rain from the ceiling. They shoot down in rapid succession, full of bounce and grace. All the signature styles of descent whisk by: not only the ankle cross and the two-hand hold but the one-arm hook and the straight-legged-one-arm-hook combo.
It is over in about 10 seconds, and a visitor who did not think to look up could miss it without ever knowing.
One on attacks on Thai schools
Schools in Thailand Under Ethnic Siege
By SETH MYDANS
International Herald Tribune
YALA, Thailand - On the weekends now, the military firing range here is crowded with teachers - in shifts of 50 - trying out their pistols, an essential new accessory in a place where teaching school has become one of the most dangerous professions.
In an escalating campaign of violence here in the largely Muslim south of mostly Buddhist Thailand, government-run schools and the teachers who work in them have become particular targets of bombs and gunmen.
In the past year and a half, dozens of schools have been damaged or destroyed by arson. The local teachers union said 18 teachers had been killed in that period in the three most dangerous southern provinces, an average of one a month. Some give higher figures.
A long-simmering separatist movement in this former Malay sultanate lies at the heart of the violence, hand in hand with resentment at discrimination against Muslims and attempts at forced assimilation by the government.
In addition, military and police feuds, criminal syndicates, political vendettas, smugglers, drug runners and bandits all account for many killings in this untamed region.
A harsh, militarized approach by the government has generated its own spiraling dynamic of violence and revenge. Experts say that there is no evidence yet of direct involvement by foreign Islamist groups but that fertile ground is being created for them.
More than 700 people have died since the level of violence rose sharply in January 2004, including nearly 200 in two mass killings by the military that have caused widespread resentment here.
Teachers are the prize for gunmen, a symbol of the reach of the distant government in Thailand and the high-profile members of their communities.
Just 10 percent of Thailand's population of 63 million is Muslim, with most of them clustered here in the south, where they live side by side with Buddhists. The teachers who have been killed include people of both religions.
Hundreds of teachers, perhaps thousands, have asked for transfers out of the region, and school officials say it is increasingly difficult to find anyone willing to replace them, even with the offer of hazardous-duty pay. The government said recently that it would transfer any teachers who asked to leave and replace them with nonprofessional volunteers.
Duangporn Visinchai, 49, is the principal of Baan Trang School in the countryside just outside Yala, in one of the most dangerous areas in the south. She carries her pistol with her everywhere now, even inside her little schoolhouse, where her walkie-talkie crackles throughout the day with police chatter.
In the classrooms, the voices of children can be heard shouting out their lessons. Along the country roads outside, in the bright morning sunshine, soldiers with automatic weapons guard the entrances to schools.
"A bomb this morning in Narathiwat, 9 a.m., four soldiers hurt," said her son, Somtam, 23, who also teaches here at Baan Trang School, reading out a bulletin sent to his mobile telephone one recent morning.
Reports like this are coming more often now, and every time, there is a new jolt of fear. "It's every day," Ms. Duangporn said. "People die every day. This is the situation we live in." As a result, she said, "we are all living with weapons."
On the weekends, she too can be found at the firing range, getting the hang of her new .22-caliber pistol.
The Education Department said recently that it was buying used pistols and expediting permits so that teachers could arm themselves. [Free flak jackets are available to 3,000 teachers in the most dangerous areas, Reuters reported Tuesday.]
At the range, soldiers offer instructions in gun-handling and in the fundamentals of being a teacher in southern Thailand today.
"Pay attention to your surroundings, make it a habit," Ms. Duangporn quoted her instructor as saying. "When you are driving, keep looking around. If a motorcycle comes close to your car, speed up. If your instinct tells you something is wrong, turn your car into them, attack them before they attack you."
On school days, car pools gather at 8 a.m. at the old Esso station in Yala and then head out to join guarded convoys into the countryside. The teachers are in their track suits, loose clothes and sneakers, ready to run if they have to.
"This the teacher's life," Ms. Duangporn said, as she did several times through the day. "We don't go anywhere alone. If I have to leave school during the day, I can call a military officer to escort me."
Some teachers have been killed when they decided to run an errand without a military escort. Teachers and their escorts have been wounded together by roadside bombs.
When the school day is over at 3 p.m. and the military guards withdraw, nobody lingers, neither teachers nor children. Extracurricular activities have disappeared, along with much of the daily life of the south.
"When the sun sets, everything gets dark in the village and everyone shuts the doors and windows," said Prim Daengkeaw, another teacher at Baan Trang. "It's frightening just to go to the market. People around here are getting killed, just ordinary people, like workers going to and from work."
The whole rhythm of life is changing in the south, Ms. Duangporn said. "Everything happens in daylight," she said. "At night, everybody stays home." People have stopped inviting each other for dinner. Traditional evening funeral ceremonies have been moved to the afternoon.
The economy is collapsing as well. Wholesale buyers no longer come to the fruit and fish markets or buy fabric and clothing. The government is subsidizing part of the economy by buying local produce.
According to a local newspaper, as many as 10,000 workers could lose their jobs as the military shuts down rock quarry operations in order to prevent the theft of explosives.
As more schools are burned and more teachers are killed, as more receive death threats and more colleagues flee, teachers here say even their guarded classrooms no longer feel safe.
"Whenever someone we don't know comes to our school, parents or whoever, we keep our eye on them," said Wacharin Suthipithak, 50, who teaches at Baan Lahal Yamu School, just down the road from Ms. Duangporn's school. "We don't know who is who. I'm scared, I'm really scared. It's really too brutal. We used to have such a great life, a happy life."
At least seven people have been killed on the country road that passes the two schools, although none so far has been a teacher. This, too, as Ms. Duangporn might say, is part of a teacher's life.
When they see a body as they drive to school, she said, they stop for a moment to see whether it is someone they know, and then drive on.
An article on competitive dance
Budding Dancers Compete, Seriously
By ERIKA KINETZ
While Whitney Schmanski, wearing the shortest of shorts and a green bustier-style top, took the stage in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria on Tuesday night, her older sister, Tori, was having a tracheotomy done in Salt Lake City. On Father's Day, June 19, the car the girls were riding in flipped over into a pond. Whitney, 10, emerged unscathed, but Tori, 14, was knocked unconscious and remained underwater for about 15 minutes. She has been slipping in and out of a coma ever since.
And so it was that Whitney went on stage without her big sister to compete in the New York City Dance Alliance's national championship, which runs through Monday. Like her 30 teammates from the Dance Club in Orem, Utah, Whitney labored 20 and 30 hours a week in classes and rehearsals to prepare for this competition.
How did it feel to be dancing? "Great," she said, flashing a small, happy smile after she left the stage.
Such is the strong-willed world of competitive dance, which soared in popularity this summer, as ABC's surprise hit "Dancing With the Stars" made the carriage of the rib cage and the importance of line the stuff of primetime television. Fox, in preparation for "So You Think You Can Dance?," a dance-based "American Idol" spinoff that begins on July 20, has invited folks to vote on its Web site on the relative merits of Twyla Tharp, Justin Timberlake, Baryshnikov and Usher.
Dance in America is very much alive, and the competitive dance circuit - in which children as young as 6 strut their sequined stuff in jazz, hip-hop, tap and lyrical dance numbers at dozens of events across the nation - is among the most exhilarating and, some say, least artistic of its manifestations.
The proliferation of competitions, which were sparse 30 years ago but now draw tens of thousands of participants, most between the ages of 10 and 16, has helped to fuel the growth of private dance studios and to raise the caliber of dance teachers and students. Competitions serve another purpose, by exposing budding dancers to industry professionals; a few even manage to snag roles on Broadway.
But as dance competitions have become big business, questions about the appropriateness of having young children compete, especially in midriff-baring outfits, and about the virtues of forcing an art into a competitive framework in the first place have also grown.
Competition has long been a part of dance forms, from the cakewalk to krumping. But dance competitions infuse jazz, contemporary and ballet styles, all of which have traditionally prized art over adrenaline-filled victory.
"I played sports all my life, and I've never seen anyone work as hard as they do," said Dennis Spitzer, a physical therapist from Fresno, Calif., who had come with his wife to watch their 10-year-old daughter, Lindsay, compete at the Waldorf with the Dance Studio of Fresno. "They are going out there to win. If they don't win, they feel as badly as we do when we lose. It's not dance. It's a sport."
Those words are anathema to many in the dance world. "Dance is not a sport, it's an art," said Elsa Posey, a past president of the National Dance Education Organization, who has run a studio in Northport, N.Y., since 1953. "In art, the competition is within oneself."
The New York City Dance Alliance goes out of its way to emphasize education over competition. "It's not about the trophy here," said Joe Lanteri, the executive director. "It's about the journey."
Just under 1,500 of the 20,000 or so dancers who participated in the alliance's regional competitions made it to the national finals, but 64 of the 105 participating dance studios from the United States, Costa Rica, Brazil and Canada are not even competing. They came just for the classes and workshops, which cover everything from ballet and hip-hop to a partnering workshop with a dancer from "Movin' Out" and an audition workshop with the dance captain and casting agent from "Wicked."
Without doubt, competitiveness can be taken too far. "You see youngsters being hit and their hair being pulled and kids actually getting mad at themselves, slamming their heads on the ground," said Michael Valentic, who founded the Summer Dance Festival in 1970.
Such agonies of defeat - the exception, not the rule - come with the territory of competition, and they raise the issue of judging, which, in dance, is an inherently subjective process. In the 1990's, many competitions stopped offering first, second and third prizes and instead began to issue scores and offer medals to all contestants within a given point range, a shift that some call shameless, for-profit pandering.
"Parents are spending maybe $500 on entry fees alone, not counting costumes, plus the money to go to the studio all year," said Tom Ralabate, an associate professor of dance at the University of Buffalo and the national educational chairman of Dance Masters of America, which operates one of the oldest and largest competitions in the nation. "I think the organizers of these competitions are thinking: 'This is a business. The more we can spread the wealth out the happier we can make our clientele, and people will come back.' The market is saturated now."
At the New York City Dance Alliance's competition, top scorers get cash prizes and scholarships, but every participant receives an award. Mr. Lanteri maintains that his organization's record speaks for itself. Alumni can be found in American Ballet Theater, the Boston Ballet and numerous Broadway shows.
"This is the real deal," Mr. Lanteri said. "This is the closest thing they will get to the professional world. That's what keeps people coming back, not the fact that we give them an award."
Back in the Waldorf's temporary tangle of flesh-colored tights, rhinestones and tan lines, varying degrees of artistry were on display upward of 12 hours a day. Some dances bloomed with expressiveness. Others seemed to crack under the lights, so polished was the unison, so firm were the smiles and so superficial was the intent. Still others rode on the jarring sexuality of those too young to know yet what their long bare legs, thrashing skirts and steady, lowered gazes might mean.
The real appeal for those involved seemed to be the team spirit of it all, which filled the Waldorf ballrooms with the kind of undying girl-love that involves stickers, sleepovers and lots of hugs. All the members of the Orem Dance Club wrapped yellow cords around their wrists in honor of Tori. "We {sheart} you Tori!" read a big green poster they had tacked in a corner of the ballroom they were using as a dressing room. "We are always dancing for you!"
And despite the pain of her sister's absence, it was not Whitney who emerged red-faced and crying from the stage after a three-minute group number set to Bjork's "Triumph of a Heart." It was Forest Robey, 10. Her teacher, Kirra Cook, quickly wrapped Forest in a firm embrace. "You did good," she said. "You did awesome."
Forest remained inconsolable. Finally, she wiped the tears from beneath her false eyelashes. "I went on stage early, and I walked back off," she explained, her small face puffy with shame. "I feel bad for the team."
"A Bid for Harry Potter's Green Fans"
A Bid for Harry Potter's Green Fans
By SARAH KERSHAW
SEATTLE, July 6 - Subplot to the adventures of Harry Potter: Will the muggles boycott the United States edition of his newest book, due out next week, and buy the Canadian version, which is printed on recycled paper, instead?
As the muggles - in Potter parlance, people without magical powers - count the minutes until the springing of "Harry Potter and the Half- Blood Prince" on July 16, conservationists are seizing on the worldwide fervor over the boy wizard to pressure publishers, especially Scholastic Inc., the United States publisher of the Harry Potter series, to use more recycled paper in its books.
As part of a growing worldwide campaign that is prompting a shift in the publishing industry, environmental groups, including the National Wildlife Federation and Greenpeace, are asking Potter fans in the United States not to buy Scholastic's editions and instead to order the new title online from Canada, where the publisher, Raincoast Books, has printed the book on 100 percent recycled paper. Scholastic says it does use some recycled paper for its books, including the Potter series, but it would not divulge the amount.
Environmental groups have drawn a growing number of noted authors, including J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter's author; Alice Walker; Isabel Allende; Barbara Kingsolver; Margaret Atwood; Michael Ondaatje; and the Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro, into their crusade to promote greater use of recycled paper. Several organizations, including the Green Press Initiative, in Ann Arbor, Mich., are in talks with religious groups with licenses to publish versions of the Bible.
"If we get Harry Potter and the Bible, that pretty much covers the best sellers," said Nicole Rycroft, campaigns director of Markets Initiative, a conservation group in Vancouver, British Columbia, that is focused on the publishing industry.
Ms. Rycroft said Scholastic was the only major publisher environmental groups approached that rejected outright a universal policy of using more recycled paper.
"Scholastic has failed to really meaningfully step forward to have Harry printed on the most environmentally friendly paper that it can be," Ms. Rycroft said.
But Kyle Good, a spokeswoman for Scholastic, aware of the effort to have readers order the new Harry Potter book from Canada, said Scholastic had committed to using only paper that did not come from ancient or endangered forests.
"I think the fans who know Scholastic and the people who buy from Scholastic understand that we are an environmentally concerned company and we don't endanger forests ever with the paper we use," Ms. Good said.
It is not clear what effect, if any, a boycott would have on Scholastic, which is planning an initial print run of almost 11 million copies. Raincoast would not disclose the size of its print run, but it printed more than 900,000 copies of the previous installment, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," also with 100 percent recycled paper.
(The cost of ordering the book from Canada on Amazon.ca is about $2 more, not including potential extra shipping costs, than the cost on Amazon.com.)
Scholastic officials and Ms. Rowling's British agent declined to say whether the author had asked Scholastic to print her books in the United States on recycled paper, although Ms. Rowling has publicly lent her support to that effort in other countries. Ms. Rowling's agent, Neil Blair, of the Christopher Little Literary Agency, said the author would not be available to comment on the effort here to encourage readers to order the book from Canada.
In the introduction to the Canadian edition of "Order of the Phoenix," she wrote: "Because the Canadian editions are printed on ancient-forest friendly paper, the Harry Potter books are helping to save magnificent forests in the muggle world, forests that are home of magical animals such as orangutans, wolves and bears. It's a good idea to respect ancient trees, especially if they have a temper like the whomping willow."
Environmentalists say that forest-friendly paper, while the actual definition is being debated within the publishing industry, means that the books are printed with the maximum amount of recycled paper and that the pulp is not culled from the biologically diverse forests of the Southeastern United States or the old-growth Northern boreal forests of Canada, delicate woodlands that supply much of the paper to North American book publishers.
The environmental groups are also beginning to work with the magazine and newspaper industries. And officials with the National Council of Churches said they were "moving forward" to examine the possibility of publishing the New Revised Standard edition of the Bible, with six million copies printed since 1989, and another version, on partly recycled paper or paper that does not come from old-growth forests.
The forest-friendly publishing movement has gained much traction recently, with more than 85 small and medium-sized publishers in the United States having signed on to the effort so far, and a few major publishers poised to go in this direction, according to the Green Press Initiative. In Canada, 85 publishers have joined, 75 percent of that country's literary publishers, Ms. Rycroft said, including large houses there like Raincoast Books, as well as Random House and Doubleday in Canada.
But some larger publishers in the United States say they are concerned about a lack of supply of the forest-friendly paper, lower quality and higher costs of the paper, which conservation groups and publishers estimated at roughly 5 percent more than conventional paper, although its price has fallen in the last few years and the paper quality has improved, as more mills and printers have moved toward manufacturing and printing it, experts say.
Bible paper, which is wispier than most regular book paper, is especially difficult to produce using recycled waste, several publishers and paper mill executives said, and would probably be printed with a smaller percentage of recycled paper than are other books.
Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House Inc. in the United States, the biggest trade book publisher in the world, producing more than 3,000 new titles a year, said "quite a few" of its books were printed without using wood from ancient forests, but he could not say how many were printed on recycled paper.
"We're concerned about forest protection and we have no interest in contributing to the destruction of any endangered forest," Mr. Applebaum said. "The selection of the proper paper for us is a matter of availability as much as it is responsibility. There is not as a great a supply at a reasonable price to accommodate every book we publishers do. That's a real issue."
The program director of the Green Press Initiative, Tyson Miller, said Ms. Walker had worked with Random House to publish her last three books on recycled paper. Efforts to reach Ms. Walker through her assistant were not successful, but in a quotation she gave to the Green Press Initiative for its campaign, Ms. Walker said: "I have always felt a kinship with trees. It is a torture to know that they have died for my words to live."
As some large European and Canadian publishing houses have begun to change their policies, paper manufacturing companies like Domtar Inc., which operates 11 mills in Canada and the United States and says it is the third-largest producer of paper products in North America, are finding a great business opportunity in the largely untapped market for forest-friendly paper.
"We felt there was a trend and there was nobody out there," said William L. George, vice president of marketing for the company, which produces 2.7 million tons of paper annually and in April introduced a new line of forest-friendly products, called Earth Choice, featuring 13 types of paper with varying degrees of recycled content.
One of the highest-profile literary mascots in the forest-friendly publishing movement in North America is Ms. Munro.
In 2001, days before one of her most widely acclaimed books was to be published, Ms. Munro, who said she grew up wandering through the "wonderful" woods of rural southwestern Ontario, called her publisher with an urgent request. She had heard of the new environmentally friendly publishing movement in Canada from a close friend and environmental activist there, Melda Buchanan.
When Ms. Munro called her publisher, her book "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," was already on its way to print. But she told the house, McClelland and Stewart, which also publishes Ms. Atwood's books - now only on 100 percent recycled paper - to stop the presses, she said in a telephone interview.
The publisher agreed to print the entire run of roughly 70,000 books on 100 percent recycled paper, scrambling to find the supplies.
"I had no idea this was an unusual request," Ms. Munro said. "I had thought maybe a lot of people heard about it. It seemed so self-evidentially important to me, and then I found out most writers didn't know about it, and publishers maybe hadn't heard either."
She said that her demand of the publisher was "Melda speaking through me, because I'm a diddly sort of person."
"I was very firm about it," she said, "because I didn't dare go back to Melda and tell her that I failed. So I didn't fail."
Ms. Munro said she planned to ask her publisher in the United States, Random House, to print her books on recycled paper, saying, "It's the first time in my life that I've been so effective."
One on tiny ethnicities in NYC
Vegemite Toast and Other Slices of Home
By JOSEPH BERGER
In this city of dozens of convivial ethnic neighborhoods, there are some people who do not have one.
Australians, for example. Where do Australians go when they want a touch of home, to be called mate with a soothingly flattened and elongated vowel, to have a proper flat white coffee and Vegemite toast, to talk to someone who understands why Aussie beaches reign supreme and who knows how to relax?
Greeks have Astoria, Russians Brighton Beach and Guyanese Richmond Hill, but the New York area's roughly 15,000 Australians have had to make do in far-flung fashion. No worries, mate! They congregate at restaurants in Lower Manhattan like Eight Mile Creek and the Sunburnt Cow, particularly when rugby or cricket is on the telly, or at tiny Ruby's, which has the proper flat white (an almost frothless cappuccino). They head to Van Cortlandt Park for footy - a version of Gaelic football.
"You can talk in your own language and enjoy yourself and feel like you're back home," said Jim Ferguson, an administrator at Toys "R" Us who was enjoying a beer the other day at Eight Mile Creek as well as the dry, laconic humor of the Australian owner, bartenders and patrons. "You're with your mates."
New York can be a particularly lonely place for certain expatriates like Australians, British, Japanese and Norwegians who are without neighborhoods because, unlike true immigrants, so many are here for a limited run, either working for a few years for a native company or jump-starting a career in fashion, art or the news media. Many have left large families behind and some vacillate painfully between staying here permanently or returning. But when homesickness strikes, these nationals have patched together their own hodgepodge of haunts where they can nibble comfort food and hear congenial voices.
Many of the city's 4,000 Norwegians get a little piece of Norway at the Norwegian Seamen's Church on East 52nd Street, where they can attend a prayer service or read a book in the mother tongue, see some native art or maybe hear a work by the composer Edvard Grieg. (Except for some delis and an annual parade, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, pretty much stopped being a true Nordic neighborhood a generation ago as descendants of Norwegian immigrants either moved or married non-Norwegians.)
Anki King, a Norwegian-born painter who has lived in New York for 11 years, got to know compatriot artists by dropping in to sample the church cafe's daily offerings of fresh waffles with preserves and to read Norwegian newspapers. Now she relishes observing the world with friends through "our Norwegianness."
"There's our connection to nature," she said. "No matter where we go we see the colors. We sort of grew up with the darkness of the forest and the blue of the summer night."
For the 30,000 or so British-born immigrants in New York, the closest thing to Piccadilly Circus is a single block of Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich Village where, side by side, there is a shop that serves a proper afternoon tea with brewed leaves and a strainer as well as a zingy ginger cake bathed in Bird's Custard; a fish and chips parlor where the varieties include whiting, cod and haddock, and the clerks ask whether you want the order salted mild or heavy; and a British provisions store. British patrons are also a short walk from Myers of Keswick on Hudson Street, a museumlike grocery 20 years old where fresh bangers and steak and kidney pie are available, Heinz Baked Beanz are arranged in the window in a traditional terraced pyramid, and British chocolates like Flake, Aero and Crunchie are bountiful.
Nicky Perry of London opened her Greenwich Village tea shop in 1990 because she could not find a decent cup of tea. On some days, she says, 30 percent of her customers are British. Many are fashion hair stylists and photographers who live nearby.
"It's what they miss from home - the hankering," Ms. Perry said of her self-made British ghetto. "It has been referred to as an alternative British Embassy because we get calls from people who say, 'We called the British Embassy and they told us to call you.' "
Some of the 60,000 Japanese in the New York area find their way to St. Marks Place and East Ninth Street, a two-block enclave that has two Japanese markets, a half-dozen sushi restaurants, a karaoke bar, a spot for renting Japanese videos and Hoshi Coupe hair salon, where customers can specify the flourishes they want in Japanese and get a brief neck massage to boot.
Masako Hoshi, the owner, a small woman with blond-tinted hair and scarlet rectangular glasses, said she chose the location 14 years ago after realizing that thousands of Japanese lived below 14th Street.
"Our customers feel like they're in Japan when they're here," she said.
A second Japanese cluster has flowered on East 41st Street between Fifth and Madison around Book Off, a used book store that has three orderly aisles of pocket-size comic-book novels, as well as two floors of Japanese books, CD's and DVD's. Once Book Off settled on the block five years ago, travel agencies, a Japan Airlines office and an English-language school followed.
"We're making our own country community on 41st Street," said Emi Simeron, the secretary-treasurer of the American division of Book Off, which has 800 stores in Japan and four in the United States.
The other day, Yuki Kumagai, 25, was browsing among the adventure comics. He came here a year and half ago from a suburb of Tokyo to study economics at the College of Staten Island and for a chance to get some American business internships.
"I miss Japanese culture," he confided in halting English.
Of course, there are expatriates who have swallowed New York completely - perhaps by marrying an American or falling in love with the city's energy - and scrupulously avoid chauvinistic hangouts. Philip Hall, a 38-year-old artist from Sydney, Australia, who manages the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, said he pines for his native country's wide open spaces but not much else. He has discovered Australian freshness and genuineness among Midwesterners and his land's laid-back temperament among Californians.
"I didn't come here to be part of an Australian clique, and I don't need to hear Australian accents or be with someone wearing an Akubra," he said, referring to the bushman's hat.
Many Australians get their dose of national spirit in more simple fashion - by gathering in one another's homes for a barbie, which is even more of a national ritual than the American barbecue. "It's more the company than the actual place we go to," said Della Bass, a 34-year-old fashion photographer.
Some of the consulates work hard at keeping up the national esprit de corps, knowing many of these temporary Americans will return to their native land. The Australian Consulate rents space to Advance - Australian Professionals in America, an independent organization that brings together newer immigrants with successful Australian business people (Australians have either been chief executives or presidents of McDonald's, Coca-Cola and Kellogg's.)
"People love it here," said Elena Douglas, the chief executive of Advance. "We're well liked and integrate easily and people construct a really good life for themselves. But it doesn't mean that you don't have the regular shipments of Vegemite and Tim Tams."
An editorial on Judith Miller
Judith Miller Goes to Jail
This is a proud but awful moment for The New York Times and its employees. One of our reporters, Judith Miller, has decided to accept a jail sentence rather than testify before a grand jury about one of her confidential sources. Ms. Miller has taken a path that will be lonely and painful for her and her family and friends. We wish she did not have to choose it, but we are certain she did the right thing.
She is surrendering her liberty in defense of a greater liberty, granted to a free press by the founding fathers so journalists can work on behalf of the public without fear of regulation or retaliation from any branch of government.
The Press and the Law
Some people - including, sadly, some of our colleagues in the news media - have mistakenly assumed that a reporter and a news organization place themselves above the law by rejecting a court order to testify. Nothing could be further from the truth. When another Times reporter, M. A. Farber, went to jail in 1978 rather than release his confidential notes, he declared, "I have no such right and I seek none."
By accepting her sentence, Ms. Miller bowed to the authority of the court. But she acted in the great tradition of civil disobedience that began with this nation's founding, which holds that the common good is best served in some instances by private citizens who are willing to defy a legal, but unjust or unwise, order.
This tradition stretches from the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, to the Americans who defied the McCarthy inquisitions and to the civil rights movement. It has called forth ordinary citizens, like Rosa Parks; government officials, like Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt; and statesmen, like Martin Luther King. Frequently, it falls to news organizations to uphold this tradition. As Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1972, "The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring to fulfillment the public's right to know."
Critics point out that even presidents must bow to the Supreme Court. But presidents are agents of the government, sworn to enforce the law. Journalists are private citizens, and Ms. Miller's actions are faithful to the Constitution. She is defending the right of Americans to get vital information from news organizations that need not fear government retaliation - an imperative defended by the 49 states that recognize a reporter's right to protect sources.
A second reporter facing a possible jail term, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, agreed yesterday to testify before the grand jury. Last week, Time decided, over Mr. Cooper's protests, to release documents demanded by the judge that revealed his confidential sources. We were deeply disappointed by that decision.
We do not see how a newspaper, magazine or television station can support a reporter's decision to protect confidential sources even if the potential price is lost liberty, and then hand over the notes or documents that make the reporter's sacrifice meaningless. The point of this struggle is to make sure that people with critical information can feel confident that if they speak to a reporter on the condition of anonymity, their identities will be protected. No journalist's promise will be worth much if the employer that stands behind him or her is prepared to undercut such a vow of secrecy.
Protecting a Reporter's Sources
Most readers understand a reporter's need to guarantee confidentiality to a source. Before he went to jail, Mr. Farber told the court that if he gave up documents that revealed the names of the people he had promised anonymity, "I will have given notice that the nation's premier newspaper is no longer available to those men and women who would seek it out - or who would respond to it - to talk freely and without fear."
While The Times has gone to great lengths lately to make sure that the use of anonymous sources is limited, there is no way to eliminate them. The most important articles tend to be the ones that upset people in high places, and many could not be reported if those who risked their jobs or even their liberty to talk to reporters knew that they might be identified the next day. In the larger sense, revealing government wrongdoing advances the rule of law, especially at a time of increased government secrecy.
It is for these reasons that most states have shield laws that protect reporters' rights to conceal their sources. Those laws need to be reviewed and strengthened, even as members of Congress continue to work to pass a federal shield law. But at this moment, there is no statute that protects Judith Miller when she defies a federal trial judge's order to reveal who told her what about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as an undercover C.I.A. operative.
Ms. Miller understands this perfectly, and she accepts the consequences with full respect for the court. We hope that her sacrifice will alert the nation to the need to protect the basic tools reporters use in doing their most critical work.
To be frank, this is far from an ideal case. We would not have wanted our reporter to give up her liberty over a situation whose details are so complicated and muddy. But history is very seldom kind enough to provide the ideal venue for a principled stand. Ms. Miller is going to jail over an article that she never wrote, yet she has been unwavering in her determination to protect the people with whom she had spoken on the promise of confidentiality.
The Plame Story
The case involves an article by the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who revealed that Joseph Wilson, a retired career diplomat, was married to an undercover C.I.A. officer Mr. Novak identified by using her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Mr. Wilson had been asked by the C.I.A. to investigate whether Saddam Hussein in Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger that could be used for making nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson found no evidence of that, and he later wrote an Op-Ed article for The Times saying he believed that the Bush administration had misrepresented the facts.
It seemed very possible that someone at the White House had told Mr. Novak about Ms. Plame to undermine Mr. Wilson's credibility and send a chilling signal to other officials who might be inclined to speak out against the administration's Iraq policy. At the time, this page said that if those were indeed the circumstances, the leak had been "an egregious abuse of power." We urged the Justice Department to investigate. But we warned then that the inquiry should not degenerate into an attempt to compel journalists to reveal their sources.
We mainly had Mr. Novak in mind then, but Mr. Novak remains both free and mum about what he has or has not told the grand jury looking into the leak. Like almost everyone, we are baffled by his public posture. All we know now is that Mr. Novak - who early on expressed the opinion that no journalists who bowed to court pressure to betray sources could hold up their heads in Washington - has offered no public support to the colleague who is going to jail while he remains at liberty.
Ms. Miller did not write an article about Ms. Plame, but the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, wants to know whether anyone in government told her about Mr. Wilson's wife and her secret job. The inquiry has been conducted with such secrecy that it is hard to know exactly what Mr. Fitzgerald thinks Ms. Miller can tell him, or what argument he offered to convince the court that his need to hear her testimony outweighs the First Amendment.
What we do know is that if Ms. Miller testifies, it may be immeasurably harder in the future to persuade a frightened government employee to talk about malfeasance in high places, or a worried worker to reveal corporate crimes. The shroud of secrecy thrown over this case by the prosecutor and the judge, an egregious denial of due process, only makes it more urgent to take a stand.
Mr. Fitzgerald drove that point home chillingly when he said the authorities "can't have 50,000 journalists" making decisions about whether to reveal sources' names and that the government had a right to impose its judgment. But that's not what the founders had in mind in writing the First Amendment. In 1971, our colleague James Reston cited James Madison's admonition about a free press in explaining why The Times had first defied the Nixon administration's demand to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers and then fought a court's order to cease publication. "Among those principles deemed sacred in America," Madison wrote, "among those sacred rights considered as forming the bulwark of their liberty, which the government contemplates with awful reverence and would approach only with the most cautious circumspection, there is no one of which the importance is more deeply impressed on the public mind than the liberty of the press."
Mr. Fitzgerald's attempts to interfere with the rights of a free press while refusing to disclose his reasons for doing so, when he can't even say whether a crime has been committed, have exhibited neither reverence nor cautious circumspection. It would compound the tragedy if his actions emboldened more prosecutors to trample on a free press.
Our Bottom Line
Responsible journalists recognize that press freedoms are not absolute and must be exercised responsibly. This newspaper will not, for example, print the details of American troop movements in advance of a battle, because publication would endanger lives and national security. But these limits cannot be dictated by the whim of a branch of government, especially behind a screen of secrecy.
Indeed, the founders warned against any attempt to have the government set limits on a free press, under any conditions. "However desirable those measures might be which might correct without enslaving the press, they have never yet been devised in America," Madison wrote.
Journalists talk about these issues a great deal, and they can seem abstract. The test comes when a colleague is being marched off to jail for doing nothing more than the job our readers expected of her, and of the rest of us. The Times has been in these fights before, beginning in 1857, when a journalist named J. W. Simonton wrote an editorial about bribery in Congress and was held in contempt by the House of Representatives for 19 days when he refused to reveal his sources. In the end, Mr. Simonton kept faith, and the corrupt congressmen resigned. All of our battles have not had equally happy endings. But each time, whether we win or we lose, we remain convinced that the public wins in the long run and that what is at stake is nothing less than our society's perpetual bottom line: the citizens control the government in a democracy.
We stand with Ms. Miller and thank her for taking on that fight for the rest of us.
One on evangelical chaplains
Evangelicals Are a Growing Force in the Military Chaplain Corps
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
COLORADO SPRINGS - There were personal testimonies about Jesus from the stage, a comedian quoting Scripture and a five-piece band performing contemporary Christian praise songs. Then hundreds of Air Force chaplains stood and sang, many with palms upturned, in a service with a distinctively evangelical tone.
It was the opening ceremony of a four-day Spiritual Fitness Conference at a Hilton hotel here last month organized and paid for by the Air Force for many of its United States-based chaplains and their families, at a cost of $300,000. The chaplains, who pledge when they enter the military to minister to everyone, Methodist, Mormon or Muslim, attended workshops on "The Purpose Driven Life," the best seller by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, and on how to improve their worship services. In the hotel hallways, vendors from Focus on the Family and other evangelical organizations promoted materials for the chaplains to use in their work.
The event was just one indication of the extent to which evangelical Christians have become a growing force in the Air Force chaplain corps, a trend documented by military records and interviews with more than two dozen chaplains and other military officials.
Figures provided by the Air Force show that from 1994 to 2005 the number of chaplains from many evangelical and Pentecostal churches rose, some doubling. For example, chaplains from the Full Gospel Fellowship of Churches and Ministries International increased to 10 from none. The Church of the Nazarene rose to 12 from 6.
At the same time, the number of chaplains from the Roman Catholic Church declined to 94 from 167, and there were declines in more liberal, mainline Protestant churches: the United Church of Christ to 3 from 11, the United Methodist Church to 50 from 64.
Other branches of the military did not make available similar statistics, but officials say they are seeing the same trend.
The change mirrors the Air Force as a whole, where representation is rising from evangelical churches. But there are also increasing numbers of enlistees from minority religions as well as atheists. It has all created a complicated environment and caused tensions over tolerance and the role of the military chaplain.
Some conflicts have already become public. A Pentagon investigation into the religious climate at the Air Force Academy here found no overt discrimination, but it did find that officers and faculty members periodically used their positions to promote their Christian beliefs and failed to accommodate non-Christian cadets, for example refusing them time off for religious holidays.
Other conflicts have remained out of the public eye, like the 50 evangelical chaplains who have filed a class action suit against the Navy charging they were dismissed or denied promotions. One of the chaplains said that once while leading an evangelical style service at a base in Okinawa he was interrupted by an Episcopal chaplain who announced he was stepping in to lead "a proper Christian worship service."
There is also a former Marine who said that about half of the eight chaplains he came into contact with in his military career tried to convince him to abandon his Mormon faith, telling him it was "wicked" or "Satanic."
A Complex Religious Environment
Part of the struggle, chaplains and officials say, is the result of growing diversity. But part is from evangelicals following their church's teachings to make converts while serving in a military job where they are supposed to serve the spiritual needs of soldiers, fliers and sailors of every faith. Evangelical chaplains say they walk a fine line.
Brig. Gen. Cecil R. Richardson, the Air Force deputy chief of chaplains, said in an interview, "We will not proselytize, but we reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched." The distinction, he said, is that proselytizing is trying to convert someone in an aggressive way, while evangelizing is more gently sharing the gospel.
Certainly, the religious environment encountered by the chaplains is complex. Statistics on enlistees provided by the Air Force show there are now about 3,500 who say they are either Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, pagans, druids or shamans. There are 1,600 who say they are atheists and about 50,000 who say they have no religious preference, out of a total of 280,000. Roman Catholics number about 60,000.
There are also growing numbers of enlistees from evangelical churches. In 2005, there were 1,794 members of the Assemblies of God in the Air Force, 597 from the Church of the Nazarene and 108 from the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Because so many churches cannot be comfortably categorized as evangelical or nonevangelical, and because so many enlistees identify themselves simply as "Christian," it is difficult to ascertain cumulative numbers.
Military officials say the government is not promoting the change in the chaplain corps. Instead religious leaders who recruit for the military attribute it to factors including the general shortage of Catholic priests, the liberal denominations' discomfort with military interventions abroad, the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gay men and lesbians, and evangelicals' broad support for the military.
The military is trying to grapple with the fallout. Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, sent a personal message to commanders on June 28, warning them against promoting their religious beliefs, saying, "The expression of personal preferences to subordinates, especially in a professional setting or at mandatory events, is inappropriate."
"Our chaplains," General Jumper wrote, "should set the example for mutual respect among different faiths and beliefs."
'We Are Not Generic Chaplains'
Air Force officials contend that the Spiritual Fitness Conference was not evangelical, pointing to the participation of a Catholic band leader and a Mormon expert on families. There was also an interfaith worship service in which all the chaplains planned to recite a Hebrew prayer together. They said that 10 Jewish chaplains stayed in the same hotel and were bused to the Air Force Academy for a separate program each day.
"We are not generic chaplains," said Col. Bob V. Page, who helped organize the conference. "We say, 'cooperation without compromise.' I cannot compromise my faith."
Chaplains are the often unsung members of the clergy who pray, counsel and go to war alongside American troops. Whatever their church or creed, when they join the military they pledge to serve the spiritual needs of every faith.
The military recruits chaplains through endorsing agents who work for about 100 different churches or religious denominations. The agents select potential candidates and refer them to the military, a system created to avoid the constitutional problem of government endorsement of religion.
In the Air Force, chaplain candidates must be under 40 and have a college degree. They must also have several years of ministry experience and be able to pass a physical fitness test. They also must attend an Air Force training program for chaplains.
The churches that once supplied most of the chaplains say they are now having trouble recruiting for a variety of reasons. Many members of their clergy are now women, who are less likely to seek positions as military chaplains or who entered the ministry as a second career and are too old to qualify. The Catholic Church often does not have enough priests to serve its parishes, let alone send them to the military.
There are also political reasons. Anne C. Loveland, a retired professor of American history at Louisiana State University and the author of "American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942-1993," said the foundation for the change in the chaplaincy was laid during the Vietnam War.
"Evangelical denominations were very supportive of the war, and mainline liberal denominations were very much against it," Ms. Loveland said. "That cemented this growing relationship between the military and the evangelicals."
Chaplain Edward T. Brogan, director of the Presbyterian Council for Chaplains and Military Personnel, who recruits and recommends chaplain candidates for several Presbyterian churches, calls the change "a supply and demand issue."
"I regularly am contacted by military recruiters who would like to have more Presbyterians because they need baby baptizers," he said. Many evangelical ministers, according to their tradition, only baptize older children or adults.
The Presbyterian Church USA, a more liberal denomination, has had a 10-year drop in its Air Force chaplains from 30 in 1994 to 16 in 2005. For the same period, the Presbyterian Church in America, which is more conservative, has increased the numbers of its Air Force chaplains to 15 from 4.
The Air Force had a total of 611 chaplains at the start of 2005.
Though Chaplain Brogan has had problems finding chaplains to meet demands of the military, the Rev. Maurice J. Hart, the endorsing agent for the Full Gospel Fellowship of Churches and Ministers International, an evangelical church based in Irving, Tex., has not.
"It's been easy," Mr. Hart said. "They realize the men are really stressed out and in danger and harm's way, and they just feel like, 'that's my calling - I'd like to go and be a blessing.' "
In 1994, the Full Gospel Fellowship had no Air Force chaplains, but by 2005 it had 10 (and that with only 58 members on the Air Force rolls at that time). The number is impressive because many of the 100 denominations supply only a handful of chaplains each.
The evangelical chaplains are changing the concept of ministry in the military, said Kristen J. Leslie, an assistant professor of pastoral care and counseling at Yale Divinity School, who has observed chaplains at the Air Force Academy.
Evangelicals administer "Bible-centered care" in which "the notion is that the religious message is core, and you bring everybody to it and that's how you create healing," Ms. Leslie said. If someone is struggling with a supervisor, a spouse or depression, an evangelical chaplain urges them to turn their life over to Christ and look for answers in the Scriptures, she said.
That is fine for a church setting, Ms. Leslie said, but what is required in a diverse religious environment like the military is the "pastoral care" approach: "You walk with the person in the midst of their brokenness, using the resources of their faith to help heal them."
A Push for Inclusiveness
Still, many evangelical chaplains say they understand the distinct nature of their work for the military, recounting in interviews that they have helped arrange Seders, the ritual Passover supper, for Jewish sailors or solstice celebrations for Wiccan marines.
General Richardson, the deputy chief of chaplains, said that although his faith required him to evangelize, he would help accommodate the faiths of others. "I am an Assemblies of God, pound-the-pulpit preacher, but I'll go to the ropes for the Wiccan," he said, if that group wanted permission to celebrate a religious ritual.
In the Navy some evangelical chaplains say they are the ones discriminated against. Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt, of the Evangelical Episcopal Church, says he was warned by commanders that his approach to the ministry was not inclusive enough. When a Catholic sailor on his ship died, Lieutenant Klingenschmitt said he preached at a memorial service and emphasized that for those who did not accept Jesus, "God's wrath remains upon him."
After that and several other incidents, Lieutenant Klingenschmitt's commanding officer recommended that the Navy not renew his chaplain contract.
The lieutenant is fighting to remain in the military. "The Navy wants to impose its religion on me," he said. "Religious pluralism is a religion. It's a theology all by itself."
Lieut. Cmdr. David S. Wilder, a 20-year Navy chaplain who is a plaintiff in the class action suit against the Navy, said that his troubles began on Okinawa after the more senior Episcopal chaplain stepped in and interrupted his worship service. He says that that chaplain has blocked his promotion.
"There's a pecking order in the Navy chaplain corps," Commander Wilder said, "and at the very top is the Roman Catholics and just below them are the Episcopals and Lutherans. And if you're an evangelical non-liturgical Christian of some type you're down on the bottom."
A Navy spokeswoman said that many of the chaplains in the class action lawsuit were not promoted for reasons other than religious discrimination.
For the Mormon in the Marine Corps, interactions with chaplains made him decide to become one himself. A 29-year-old who left the service in the late 1990's, he is now applying to become a military chaplain with the intent, he said, of providing the troops a more "inclusive" form of pastoring. He insisted on anonymity so as not to undermine his application.
He said that his faith was frequently denigrated by fellow marines, and even by some of his commanders.
"What compounded it was when the chaplains would agree with them," he said. "That's what makes me want to become a military chaplain - not just that my faith and other minority faiths were underrepresented, but to make it a more spiritually accepting environment."
In Firehouse, Fastest Way Down Is on Its Way Out
By MICHELLE O'DONNELL
Of all the tools associated with the dangerous but sometimes romantic world of firefighting, few capture the spirit of the job quite like the shiny firehouse pole, that simple brass delivery system that relies on little more than gravity to get a fireman to his truck a few seconds faster.
In New York City's firehouses, veterans have a deep affection, even a zealous sense of protection, for their poles. But now, the department has begun shrinking their number sharply as it builds new firehouses and remodels old ones to bring them up to current building codes. In many cases, ventilation systems have been installed where the poles and their surrounding holes used to be.
The trend is no different around the country, as cities build one-story firehouses and update older firehouses. "It certainly is without any question that firehouse poles are becoming, with each new firehouse, a thing of the past," said Harold A. Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters. "The new firehouse or station would be built with stairways and no poles."
It is an ignominious slide into obscurity for a century-old tool that has served a fire company perhaps as many as a dozen times a night. As the first daring step before any derring-do, the pole, with its 20-foot-or-so plunge, became a striking emblem of firefighting like the walrus mustache and the Dalmatian.
And while other tools like wooden ladders and horse-drawn engines have been updated and improved over the decades, the pole, true to form, remains the fastest way down.
A new firehouse in the Rockaways in Queens was built without any poles at all. A vast firehouse on Staten Island opened in the spring with a single cast aluminum pole tucked into a corner. (On a recent visit, firefighters, momentarily forgetting it was there, said they did not have one.)
Firehouses under renovation in Brooklyn and Manhattan have had many of their poles removed. And the fire academy stopped teaching new recruits to slide down poles some years ago.
The removal has also coincided with the department's heightened concerns about safety in recent years. Every firefighter seems to tell stories of pole-related broken ankles, sprains, blown-out knees, friction burns, concussions, twisted and broken backs. News accounts described one pole-related paralysis, in 1969, and one civilian death, in 1929.
For a department intensely loyal to tradition, even a gentle weaning - away from, say, four poles, positioned alongside the engine and truck, to one centrally situated pole - can seem like a seismic shift to veterans, who say they must recalibrate their well-honed exit maneuvers to include a more time-consuming jaunt down a flight or two of stairs. "It's the first thing I do when I work somewhere else: find out where the pole is," said Lt. Jeff Monsen of Engine Company 23 on West 58th Street in Manhattan.
At the Lower Manhattan quarters of Engine Company 10 and Ladder Company 10, where the poles were recently removed and holes sealed up so that ductwork could be installed for central air-conditioning, disappointed firefighters considered sawing through the first floor ceiling to reinstall them. "Now at 4 o'clock in the morning, you've got 11 guys going down the stairs," a veteran firefighter said glumly. "Stupidest thing I ever heard of."
Joseph Mastropietro, who as the assistant commissioner of facilities oversees the maintenance of the city's firehouses, said that the poles had been removed and their holes filled as firehouses were renovated and given new ventilation systems required by the city.
"We didn't see it as a major problem because they still had two means of egress," he said, referring to a single pole and stairs. "There was a lot of resistance at first, but I don't think they mind it too much now."
In 2000, the department briefly envisioned new houses built without poles and opened the quarters of Engine Company 265 in the Rockaways without any. But the department abandoned that plan when it became clear that the city lacked the space for sprawling houses to replace the narrow, multistory historic firehouses that it still used.
Since then, Mr. Mastropietro said, the department has backed a strategic placement of poles as the houses are remodeled, which has meant a selective removal.
The pole can seem more harrowing than some rescue missions. Marooned inside a 3-foot-wide moat of open space with a 21-foot drop to cold concrete, the pole is no plaything, generations of firefighters' best efforts to the contrary.
Climbing races and water fights are two unofficial but common uses of the pole and the hole. Another is luring a rookie firefighter into a rope maneuver and leaving him dangling indefinitely in the hole.
Some firefighters like to stop and talk at the base of the pole, one hand on its gleaming brass, while others make sure never to store their bunker gear too close to the pole for fear of being clipped by descending firefighters as they put it on.
"It's an expressway," said Firefighter Louis Trazino of Engine Company 33 in Greenwich Village, where the pole connecting the second and third floors spans a 28-foot drop, the longest of any in the city.
Keep in mind that before hopping on a fire truck and driving away in the middle of the night, a firefighter must leap into a dark hole with what seems like a two-story drop and slide. Descent requires as much bravado as a mastery of physical technique. There is no safety platform, no remedy for sweaty palms, and the constant danger of striking one's head on the perimeter of the hole or against the swinging doors that might enclose it.
"You know how many times that's happened?" asked Firefighter Dan Cintron of Engine 23 with a laugh as he launched into another terrifying demonstration, banging open the doors enclosing the pole and, without even glancing to prepare for his leap across the hole, grabbing the pole and spinning downward 20 feet to the ground. He reached it in two seconds.
Another firefighter at the house was known to stash pillowcases near every pole hole to grasp the pole and descend quicker. Old-timers were said to slide down head first. Firefighters can tell a novice by whether his skin whistles against the metal.
Lieutenant Monsen said he had had to train every new firefighter at the house the proper way to slide: legs crossed at the ankles with the pole resting between the outer ankle joints, chin tucked to chest, and hands firm, not clenched.
Mike DeSanctis, 24, who has been a firefighter at Engine 23 for four months, said that he and another probationary firefighter usually took the stairs when the alarm bells rang. To avoid the matter entirely, one has taken to sleeping downstairs.
In time, should the poles remain, the young firefighters might become part of one of the most extraordinary and underappreciated bits of choreography in town.
It happens after dinner when the firefighters have retired to their upstairs bunks, when the mayhem of the city is suspended in an odd calm.
Suddenly, the alarm wails, and, like a merry band summoned by a whistle in a forest, firefighters rain from the ceiling. They shoot down in rapid succession, full of bounce and grace. All the signature styles of descent whisk by: not only the ankle cross and the two-hand hold but the one-arm hook and the straight-legged-one-arm-hook combo.
It is over in about 10 seconds, and a visitor who did not think to look up could miss it without ever knowing.
One on attacks on Thai schools
Schools in Thailand Under Ethnic Siege
By SETH MYDANS
International Herald Tribune
YALA, Thailand - On the weekends now, the military firing range here is crowded with teachers - in shifts of 50 - trying out their pistols, an essential new accessory in a place where teaching school has become one of the most dangerous professions.
In an escalating campaign of violence here in the largely Muslim south of mostly Buddhist Thailand, government-run schools and the teachers who work in them have become particular targets of bombs and gunmen.
In the past year and a half, dozens of schools have been damaged or destroyed by arson. The local teachers union said 18 teachers had been killed in that period in the three most dangerous southern provinces, an average of one a month. Some give higher figures.
A long-simmering separatist movement in this former Malay sultanate lies at the heart of the violence, hand in hand with resentment at discrimination against Muslims and attempts at forced assimilation by the government.
In addition, military and police feuds, criminal syndicates, political vendettas, smugglers, drug runners and bandits all account for many killings in this untamed region.
A harsh, militarized approach by the government has generated its own spiraling dynamic of violence and revenge. Experts say that there is no evidence yet of direct involvement by foreign Islamist groups but that fertile ground is being created for them.
More than 700 people have died since the level of violence rose sharply in January 2004, including nearly 200 in two mass killings by the military that have caused widespread resentment here.
Teachers are the prize for gunmen, a symbol of the reach of the distant government in Thailand and the high-profile members of their communities.
Just 10 percent of Thailand's population of 63 million is Muslim, with most of them clustered here in the south, where they live side by side with Buddhists. The teachers who have been killed include people of both religions.
Hundreds of teachers, perhaps thousands, have asked for transfers out of the region, and school officials say it is increasingly difficult to find anyone willing to replace them, even with the offer of hazardous-duty pay. The government said recently that it would transfer any teachers who asked to leave and replace them with nonprofessional volunteers.
Duangporn Visinchai, 49, is the principal of Baan Trang School in the countryside just outside Yala, in one of the most dangerous areas in the south. She carries her pistol with her everywhere now, even inside her little schoolhouse, where her walkie-talkie crackles throughout the day with police chatter.
In the classrooms, the voices of children can be heard shouting out their lessons. Along the country roads outside, in the bright morning sunshine, soldiers with automatic weapons guard the entrances to schools.
"A bomb this morning in Narathiwat, 9 a.m., four soldiers hurt," said her son, Somtam, 23, who also teaches here at Baan Trang School, reading out a bulletin sent to his mobile telephone one recent morning.
Reports like this are coming more often now, and every time, there is a new jolt of fear. "It's every day," Ms. Duangporn said. "People die every day. This is the situation we live in." As a result, she said, "we are all living with weapons."
On the weekends, she too can be found at the firing range, getting the hang of her new .22-caliber pistol.
The Education Department said recently that it was buying used pistols and expediting permits so that teachers could arm themselves. [Free flak jackets are available to 3,000 teachers in the most dangerous areas, Reuters reported Tuesday.]
At the range, soldiers offer instructions in gun-handling and in the fundamentals of being a teacher in southern Thailand today.
"Pay attention to your surroundings, make it a habit," Ms. Duangporn quoted her instructor as saying. "When you are driving, keep looking around. If a motorcycle comes close to your car, speed up. If your instinct tells you something is wrong, turn your car into them, attack them before they attack you."
On school days, car pools gather at 8 a.m. at the old Esso station in Yala and then head out to join guarded convoys into the countryside. The teachers are in their track suits, loose clothes and sneakers, ready to run if they have to.
"This the teacher's life," Ms. Duangporn said, as she did several times through the day. "We don't go anywhere alone. If I have to leave school during the day, I can call a military officer to escort me."
Some teachers have been killed when they decided to run an errand without a military escort. Teachers and their escorts have been wounded together by roadside bombs.
When the school day is over at 3 p.m. and the military guards withdraw, nobody lingers, neither teachers nor children. Extracurricular activities have disappeared, along with much of the daily life of the south.
"When the sun sets, everything gets dark in the village and everyone shuts the doors and windows," said Prim Daengkeaw, another teacher at Baan Trang. "It's frightening just to go to the market. People around here are getting killed, just ordinary people, like workers going to and from work."
The whole rhythm of life is changing in the south, Ms. Duangporn said. "Everything happens in daylight," she said. "At night, everybody stays home." People have stopped inviting each other for dinner. Traditional evening funeral ceremonies have been moved to the afternoon.
The economy is collapsing as well. Wholesale buyers no longer come to the fruit and fish markets or buy fabric and clothing. The government is subsidizing part of the economy by buying local produce.
According to a local newspaper, as many as 10,000 workers could lose their jobs as the military shuts down rock quarry operations in order to prevent the theft of explosives.
As more schools are burned and more teachers are killed, as more receive death threats and more colleagues flee, teachers here say even their guarded classrooms no longer feel safe.
"Whenever someone we don't know comes to our school, parents or whoever, we keep our eye on them," said Wacharin Suthipithak, 50, who teaches at Baan Lahal Yamu School, just down the road from Ms. Duangporn's school. "We don't know who is who. I'm scared, I'm really scared. It's really too brutal. We used to have such a great life, a happy life."
At least seven people have been killed on the country road that passes the two schools, although none so far has been a teacher. This, too, as Ms. Duangporn might say, is part of a teacher's life.
When they see a body as they drive to school, she said, they stop for a moment to see whether it is someone they know, and then drive on.
An article on competitive dance
Budding Dancers Compete, Seriously
By ERIKA KINETZ
While Whitney Schmanski, wearing the shortest of shorts and a green bustier-style top, took the stage in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria on Tuesday night, her older sister, Tori, was having a tracheotomy done in Salt Lake City. On Father's Day, June 19, the car the girls were riding in flipped over into a pond. Whitney, 10, emerged unscathed, but Tori, 14, was knocked unconscious and remained underwater for about 15 minutes. She has been slipping in and out of a coma ever since.
And so it was that Whitney went on stage without her big sister to compete in the New York City Dance Alliance's national championship, which runs through Monday. Like her 30 teammates from the Dance Club in Orem, Utah, Whitney labored 20 and 30 hours a week in classes and rehearsals to prepare for this competition.
How did it feel to be dancing? "Great," she said, flashing a small, happy smile after she left the stage.
Such is the strong-willed world of competitive dance, which soared in popularity this summer, as ABC's surprise hit "Dancing With the Stars" made the carriage of the rib cage and the importance of line the stuff of primetime television. Fox, in preparation for "So You Think You Can Dance?," a dance-based "American Idol" spinoff that begins on July 20, has invited folks to vote on its Web site on the relative merits of Twyla Tharp, Justin Timberlake, Baryshnikov and Usher.
Dance in America is very much alive, and the competitive dance circuit - in which children as young as 6 strut their sequined stuff in jazz, hip-hop, tap and lyrical dance numbers at dozens of events across the nation - is among the most exhilarating and, some say, least artistic of its manifestations.
The proliferation of competitions, which were sparse 30 years ago but now draw tens of thousands of participants, most between the ages of 10 and 16, has helped to fuel the growth of private dance studios and to raise the caliber of dance teachers and students. Competitions serve another purpose, by exposing budding dancers to industry professionals; a few even manage to snag roles on Broadway.
But as dance competitions have become big business, questions about the appropriateness of having young children compete, especially in midriff-baring outfits, and about the virtues of forcing an art into a competitive framework in the first place have also grown.
Competition has long been a part of dance forms, from the cakewalk to krumping. But dance competitions infuse jazz, contemporary and ballet styles, all of which have traditionally prized art over adrenaline-filled victory.
"I played sports all my life, and I've never seen anyone work as hard as they do," said Dennis Spitzer, a physical therapist from Fresno, Calif., who had come with his wife to watch their 10-year-old daughter, Lindsay, compete at the Waldorf with the Dance Studio of Fresno. "They are going out there to win. If they don't win, they feel as badly as we do when we lose. It's not dance. It's a sport."
Those words are anathema to many in the dance world. "Dance is not a sport, it's an art," said Elsa Posey, a past president of the National Dance Education Organization, who has run a studio in Northport, N.Y., since 1953. "In art, the competition is within oneself."
The New York City Dance Alliance goes out of its way to emphasize education over competition. "It's not about the trophy here," said Joe Lanteri, the executive director. "It's about the journey."
Just under 1,500 of the 20,000 or so dancers who participated in the alliance's regional competitions made it to the national finals, but 64 of the 105 participating dance studios from the United States, Costa Rica, Brazil and Canada are not even competing. They came just for the classes and workshops, which cover everything from ballet and hip-hop to a partnering workshop with a dancer from "Movin' Out" and an audition workshop with the dance captain and casting agent from "Wicked."
Without doubt, competitiveness can be taken too far. "You see youngsters being hit and their hair being pulled and kids actually getting mad at themselves, slamming their heads on the ground," said Michael Valentic, who founded the Summer Dance Festival in 1970.
Such agonies of defeat - the exception, not the rule - come with the territory of competition, and they raise the issue of judging, which, in dance, is an inherently subjective process. In the 1990's, many competitions stopped offering first, second and third prizes and instead began to issue scores and offer medals to all contestants within a given point range, a shift that some call shameless, for-profit pandering.
"Parents are spending maybe $500 on entry fees alone, not counting costumes, plus the money to go to the studio all year," said Tom Ralabate, an associate professor of dance at the University of Buffalo and the national educational chairman of Dance Masters of America, which operates one of the oldest and largest competitions in the nation. "I think the organizers of these competitions are thinking: 'This is a business. The more we can spread the wealth out the happier we can make our clientele, and people will come back.' The market is saturated now."
At the New York City Dance Alliance's competition, top scorers get cash prizes and scholarships, but every participant receives an award. Mr. Lanteri maintains that his organization's record speaks for itself. Alumni can be found in American Ballet Theater, the Boston Ballet and numerous Broadway shows.
"This is the real deal," Mr. Lanteri said. "This is the closest thing they will get to the professional world. That's what keeps people coming back, not the fact that we give them an award."
Back in the Waldorf's temporary tangle of flesh-colored tights, rhinestones and tan lines, varying degrees of artistry were on display upward of 12 hours a day. Some dances bloomed with expressiveness. Others seemed to crack under the lights, so polished was the unison, so firm were the smiles and so superficial was the intent. Still others rode on the jarring sexuality of those too young to know yet what their long bare legs, thrashing skirts and steady, lowered gazes might mean.
The real appeal for those involved seemed to be the team spirit of it all, which filled the Waldorf ballrooms with the kind of undying girl-love that involves stickers, sleepovers and lots of hugs. All the members of the Orem Dance Club wrapped yellow cords around their wrists in honor of Tori. "We {sheart} you Tori!" read a big green poster they had tacked in a corner of the ballroom they were using as a dressing room. "We are always dancing for you!"
And despite the pain of her sister's absence, it was not Whitney who emerged red-faced and crying from the stage after a three-minute group number set to Bjork's "Triumph of a Heart." It was Forest Robey, 10. Her teacher, Kirra Cook, quickly wrapped Forest in a firm embrace. "You did good," she said. "You did awesome."
Forest remained inconsolable. Finally, she wiped the tears from beneath her false eyelashes. "I went on stage early, and I walked back off," she explained, her small face puffy with shame. "I feel bad for the team."
"A Bid for Harry Potter's Green Fans"
A Bid for Harry Potter's Green Fans
By SARAH KERSHAW
SEATTLE, July 6 - Subplot to the adventures of Harry Potter: Will the muggles boycott the United States edition of his newest book, due out next week, and buy the Canadian version, which is printed on recycled paper, instead?
As the muggles - in Potter parlance, people without magical powers - count the minutes until the springing of "Harry Potter and the Half- Blood Prince" on July 16, conservationists are seizing on the worldwide fervor over the boy wizard to pressure publishers, especially Scholastic Inc., the United States publisher of the Harry Potter series, to use more recycled paper in its books.
As part of a growing worldwide campaign that is prompting a shift in the publishing industry, environmental groups, including the National Wildlife Federation and Greenpeace, are asking Potter fans in the United States not to buy Scholastic's editions and instead to order the new title online from Canada, where the publisher, Raincoast Books, has printed the book on 100 percent recycled paper. Scholastic says it does use some recycled paper for its books, including the Potter series, but it would not divulge the amount.
Environmental groups have drawn a growing number of noted authors, including J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter's author; Alice Walker; Isabel Allende; Barbara Kingsolver; Margaret Atwood; Michael Ondaatje; and the Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro, into their crusade to promote greater use of recycled paper. Several organizations, including the Green Press Initiative, in Ann Arbor, Mich., are in talks with religious groups with licenses to publish versions of the Bible.
"If we get Harry Potter and the Bible, that pretty much covers the best sellers," said Nicole Rycroft, campaigns director of Markets Initiative, a conservation group in Vancouver, British Columbia, that is focused on the publishing industry.
Ms. Rycroft said Scholastic was the only major publisher environmental groups approached that rejected outright a universal policy of using more recycled paper.
"Scholastic has failed to really meaningfully step forward to have Harry printed on the most environmentally friendly paper that it can be," Ms. Rycroft said.
But Kyle Good, a spokeswoman for Scholastic, aware of the effort to have readers order the new Harry Potter book from Canada, said Scholastic had committed to using only paper that did not come from ancient or endangered forests.
"I think the fans who know Scholastic and the people who buy from Scholastic understand that we are an environmentally concerned company and we don't endanger forests ever with the paper we use," Ms. Good said.
It is not clear what effect, if any, a boycott would have on Scholastic, which is planning an initial print run of almost 11 million copies. Raincoast would not disclose the size of its print run, but it printed more than 900,000 copies of the previous installment, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," also with 100 percent recycled paper.
(The cost of ordering the book from Canada on Amazon.ca is about $2 more, not including potential extra shipping costs, than the cost on Amazon.com.)
Scholastic officials and Ms. Rowling's British agent declined to say whether the author had asked Scholastic to print her books in the United States on recycled paper, although Ms. Rowling has publicly lent her support to that effort in other countries. Ms. Rowling's agent, Neil Blair, of the Christopher Little Literary Agency, said the author would not be available to comment on the effort here to encourage readers to order the book from Canada.
In the introduction to the Canadian edition of "Order of the Phoenix," she wrote: "Because the Canadian editions are printed on ancient-forest friendly paper, the Harry Potter books are helping to save magnificent forests in the muggle world, forests that are home of magical animals such as orangutans, wolves and bears. It's a good idea to respect ancient trees, especially if they have a temper like the whomping willow."
Environmentalists say that forest-friendly paper, while the actual definition is being debated within the publishing industry, means that the books are printed with the maximum amount of recycled paper and that the pulp is not culled from the biologically diverse forests of the Southeastern United States or the old-growth Northern boreal forests of Canada, delicate woodlands that supply much of the paper to North American book publishers.
The environmental groups are also beginning to work with the magazine and newspaper industries. And officials with the National Council of Churches said they were "moving forward" to examine the possibility of publishing the New Revised Standard edition of the Bible, with six million copies printed since 1989, and another version, on partly recycled paper or paper that does not come from old-growth forests.
The forest-friendly publishing movement has gained much traction recently, with more than 85 small and medium-sized publishers in the United States having signed on to the effort so far, and a few major publishers poised to go in this direction, according to the Green Press Initiative. In Canada, 85 publishers have joined, 75 percent of that country's literary publishers, Ms. Rycroft said, including large houses there like Raincoast Books, as well as Random House and Doubleday in Canada.
But some larger publishers in the United States say they are concerned about a lack of supply of the forest-friendly paper, lower quality and higher costs of the paper, which conservation groups and publishers estimated at roughly 5 percent more than conventional paper, although its price has fallen in the last few years and the paper quality has improved, as more mills and printers have moved toward manufacturing and printing it, experts say.
Bible paper, which is wispier than most regular book paper, is especially difficult to produce using recycled waste, several publishers and paper mill executives said, and would probably be printed with a smaller percentage of recycled paper than are other books.
Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House Inc. in the United States, the biggest trade book publisher in the world, producing more than 3,000 new titles a year, said "quite a few" of its books were printed without using wood from ancient forests, but he could not say how many were printed on recycled paper.
"We're concerned about forest protection and we have no interest in contributing to the destruction of any endangered forest," Mr. Applebaum said. "The selection of the proper paper for us is a matter of availability as much as it is responsibility. There is not as a great a supply at a reasonable price to accommodate every book we publishers do. That's a real issue."
The program director of the Green Press Initiative, Tyson Miller, said Ms. Walker had worked with Random House to publish her last three books on recycled paper. Efforts to reach Ms. Walker through her assistant were not successful, but in a quotation she gave to the Green Press Initiative for its campaign, Ms. Walker said: "I have always felt a kinship with trees. It is a torture to know that they have died for my words to live."
As some large European and Canadian publishing houses have begun to change their policies, paper manufacturing companies like Domtar Inc., which operates 11 mills in Canada and the United States and says it is the third-largest producer of paper products in North America, are finding a great business opportunity in the largely untapped market for forest-friendly paper.
"We felt there was a trend and there was nobody out there," said William L. George, vice president of marketing for the company, which produces 2.7 million tons of paper annually and in April introduced a new line of forest-friendly products, called Earth Choice, featuring 13 types of paper with varying degrees of recycled content.
One of the highest-profile literary mascots in the forest-friendly publishing movement in North America is Ms. Munro.
In 2001, days before one of her most widely acclaimed books was to be published, Ms. Munro, who said she grew up wandering through the "wonderful" woods of rural southwestern Ontario, called her publisher with an urgent request. She had heard of the new environmentally friendly publishing movement in Canada from a close friend and environmental activist there, Melda Buchanan.
When Ms. Munro called her publisher, her book "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage," was already on its way to print. But she told the house, McClelland and Stewart, which also publishes Ms. Atwood's books - now only on 100 percent recycled paper - to stop the presses, she said in a telephone interview.
The publisher agreed to print the entire run of roughly 70,000 books on 100 percent recycled paper, scrambling to find the supplies.
"I had no idea this was an unusual request," Ms. Munro said. "I had thought maybe a lot of people heard about it. It seemed so self-evidentially important to me, and then I found out most writers didn't know about it, and publishers maybe hadn't heard either."
She said that her demand of the publisher was "Melda speaking through me, because I'm a diddly sort of person."
"I was very firm about it," she said, "because I didn't dare go back to Melda and tell her that I failed. So I didn't fail."
Ms. Munro said she planned to ask her publisher in the United States, Random House, to print her books on recycled paper, saying, "It's the first time in my life that I've been so effective."
One on tiny ethnicities in NYC
Vegemite Toast and Other Slices of Home
By JOSEPH BERGER
In this city of dozens of convivial ethnic neighborhoods, there are some people who do not have one.
Australians, for example. Where do Australians go when they want a touch of home, to be called mate with a soothingly flattened and elongated vowel, to have a proper flat white coffee and Vegemite toast, to talk to someone who understands why Aussie beaches reign supreme and who knows how to relax?
Greeks have Astoria, Russians Brighton Beach and Guyanese Richmond Hill, but the New York area's roughly 15,000 Australians have had to make do in far-flung fashion. No worries, mate! They congregate at restaurants in Lower Manhattan like Eight Mile Creek and the Sunburnt Cow, particularly when rugby or cricket is on the telly, or at tiny Ruby's, which has the proper flat white (an almost frothless cappuccino). They head to Van Cortlandt Park for footy - a version of Gaelic football.
"You can talk in your own language and enjoy yourself and feel like you're back home," said Jim Ferguson, an administrator at Toys "R" Us who was enjoying a beer the other day at Eight Mile Creek as well as the dry, laconic humor of the Australian owner, bartenders and patrons. "You're with your mates."
New York can be a particularly lonely place for certain expatriates like Australians, British, Japanese and Norwegians who are without neighborhoods because, unlike true immigrants, so many are here for a limited run, either working for a few years for a native company or jump-starting a career in fashion, art or the news media. Many have left large families behind and some vacillate painfully between staying here permanently or returning. But when homesickness strikes, these nationals have patched together their own hodgepodge of haunts where they can nibble comfort food and hear congenial voices.
Many of the city's 4,000 Norwegians get a little piece of Norway at the Norwegian Seamen's Church on East 52nd Street, where they can attend a prayer service or read a book in the mother tongue, see some native art or maybe hear a work by the composer Edvard Grieg. (Except for some delis and an annual parade, Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, pretty much stopped being a true Nordic neighborhood a generation ago as descendants of Norwegian immigrants either moved or married non-Norwegians.)
Anki King, a Norwegian-born painter who has lived in New York for 11 years, got to know compatriot artists by dropping in to sample the church cafe's daily offerings of fresh waffles with preserves and to read Norwegian newspapers. Now she relishes observing the world with friends through "our Norwegianness."
"There's our connection to nature," she said. "No matter where we go we see the colors. We sort of grew up with the darkness of the forest and the blue of the summer night."
For the 30,000 or so British-born immigrants in New York, the closest thing to Piccadilly Circus is a single block of Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich Village where, side by side, there is a shop that serves a proper afternoon tea with brewed leaves and a strainer as well as a zingy ginger cake bathed in Bird's Custard; a fish and chips parlor where the varieties include whiting, cod and haddock, and the clerks ask whether you want the order salted mild or heavy; and a British provisions store. British patrons are also a short walk from Myers of Keswick on Hudson Street, a museumlike grocery 20 years old where fresh bangers and steak and kidney pie are available, Heinz Baked Beanz are arranged in the window in a traditional terraced pyramid, and British chocolates like Flake, Aero and Crunchie are bountiful.
Nicky Perry of London opened her Greenwich Village tea shop in 1990 because she could not find a decent cup of tea. On some days, she says, 30 percent of her customers are British. Many are fashion hair stylists and photographers who live nearby.
"It's what they miss from home - the hankering," Ms. Perry said of her self-made British ghetto. "It has been referred to as an alternative British Embassy because we get calls from people who say, 'We called the British Embassy and they told us to call you.' "
Some of the 60,000 Japanese in the New York area find their way to St. Marks Place and East Ninth Street, a two-block enclave that has two Japanese markets, a half-dozen sushi restaurants, a karaoke bar, a spot for renting Japanese videos and Hoshi Coupe hair salon, where customers can specify the flourishes they want in Japanese and get a brief neck massage to boot.
Masako Hoshi, the owner, a small woman with blond-tinted hair and scarlet rectangular glasses, said she chose the location 14 years ago after realizing that thousands of Japanese lived below 14th Street.
"Our customers feel like they're in Japan when they're here," she said.
A second Japanese cluster has flowered on East 41st Street between Fifth and Madison around Book Off, a used book store that has three orderly aisles of pocket-size comic-book novels, as well as two floors of Japanese books, CD's and DVD's. Once Book Off settled on the block five years ago, travel agencies, a Japan Airlines office and an English-language school followed.
"We're making our own country community on 41st Street," said Emi Simeron, the secretary-treasurer of the American division of Book Off, which has 800 stores in Japan and four in the United States.
The other day, Yuki Kumagai, 25, was browsing among the adventure comics. He came here a year and half ago from a suburb of Tokyo to study economics at the College of Staten Island and for a chance to get some American business internships.
"I miss Japanese culture," he confided in halting English.
Of course, there are expatriates who have swallowed New York completely - perhaps by marrying an American or falling in love with the city's energy - and scrupulously avoid chauvinistic hangouts. Philip Hall, a 38-year-old artist from Sydney, Australia, who manages the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, said he pines for his native country's wide open spaces but not much else. He has discovered Australian freshness and genuineness among Midwesterners and his land's laid-back temperament among Californians.
"I didn't come here to be part of an Australian clique, and I don't need to hear Australian accents or be with someone wearing an Akubra," he said, referring to the bushman's hat.
Many Australians get their dose of national spirit in more simple fashion - by gathering in one another's homes for a barbie, which is even more of a national ritual than the American barbecue. "It's more the company than the actual place we go to," said Della Bass, a 34-year-old fashion photographer.
Some of the consulates work hard at keeping up the national esprit de corps, knowing many of these temporary Americans will return to their native land. The Australian Consulate rents space to Advance - Australian Professionals in America, an independent organization that brings together newer immigrants with successful Australian business people (Australians have either been chief executives or presidents of McDonald's, Coca-Cola and Kellogg's.)
"People love it here," said Elena Douglas, the chief executive of Advance. "We're well liked and integrate easily and people construct a really good life for themselves. But it doesn't mean that you don't have the regular shipments of Vegemite and Tim Tams."
An editorial on Judith Miller
Judith Miller Goes to Jail
This is a proud but awful moment for The New York Times and its employees. One of our reporters, Judith Miller, has decided to accept a jail sentence rather than testify before a grand jury about one of her confidential sources. Ms. Miller has taken a path that will be lonely and painful for her and her family and friends. We wish she did not have to choose it, but we are certain she did the right thing.
She is surrendering her liberty in defense of a greater liberty, granted to a free press by the founding fathers so journalists can work on behalf of the public without fear of regulation or retaliation from any branch of government.
The Press and the Law
Some people - including, sadly, some of our colleagues in the news media - have mistakenly assumed that a reporter and a news organization place themselves above the law by rejecting a court order to testify. Nothing could be further from the truth. When another Times reporter, M. A. Farber, went to jail in 1978 rather than release his confidential notes, he declared, "I have no such right and I seek none."
By accepting her sentence, Ms. Miller bowed to the authority of the court. But she acted in the great tradition of civil disobedience that began with this nation's founding, which holds that the common good is best served in some instances by private citizens who are willing to defy a legal, but unjust or unwise, order.
This tradition stretches from the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, to the Americans who defied the McCarthy inquisitions and to the civil rights movement. It has called forth ordinary citizens, like Rosa Parks; government officials, like Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt; and statesmen, like Martin Luther King. Frequently, it falls to news organizations to uphold this tradition. As Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1972, "The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring to fulfillment the public's right to know."
Critics point out that even presidents must bow to the Supreme Court. But presidents are agents of the government, sworn to enforce the law. Journalists are private citizens, and Ms. Miller's actions are faithful to the Constitution. She is defending the right of Americans to get vital information from news organizations that need not fear government retaliation - an imperative defended by the 49 states that recognize a reporter's right to protect sources.
A second reporter facing a possible jail term, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, agreed yesterday to testify before the grand jury. Last week, Time decided, over Mr. Cooper's protests, to release documents demanded by the judge that revealed his confidential sources. We were deeply disappointed by that decision.
We do not see how a newspaper, magazine or television station can support a reporter's decision to protect confidential sources even if the potential price is lost liberty, and then hand over the notes or documents that make the reporter's sacrifice meaningless. The point of this struggle is to make sure that people with critical information can feel confident that if they speak to a reporter on the condition of anonymity, their identities will be protected. No journalist's promise will be worth much if the employer that stands behind him or her is prepared to undercut such a vow of secrecy.
Protecting a Reporter's Sources
Most readers understand a reporter's need to guarantee confidentiality to a source. Before he went to jail, Mr. Farber told the court that if he gave up documents that revealed the names of the people he had promised anonymity, "I will have given notice that the nation's premier newspaper is no longer available to those men and women who would seek it out - or who would respond to it - to talk freely and without fear."
While The Times has gone to great lengths lately to make sure that the use of anonymous sources is limited, there is no way to eliminate them. The most important articles tend to be the ones that upset people in high places, and many could not be reported if those who risked their jobs or even their liberty to talk to reporters knew that they might be identified the next day. In the larger sense, revealing government wrongdoing advances the rule of law, especially at a time of increased government secrecy.
It is for these reasons that most states have shield laws that protect reporters' rights to conceal their sources. Those laws need to be reviewed and strengthened, even as members of Congress continue to work to pass a federal shield law. But at this moment, there is no statute that protects Judith Miller when she defies a federal trial judge's order to reveal who told her what about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as an undercover C.I.A. operative.
Ms. Miller understands this perfectly, and she accepts the consequences with full respect for the court. We hope that her sacrifice will alert the nation to the need to protect the basic tools reporters use in doing their most critical work.
To be frank, this is far from an ideal case. We would not have wanted our reporter to give up her liberty over a situation whose details are so complicated and muddy. But history is very seldom kind enough to provide the ideal venue for a principled stand. Ms. Miller is going to jail over an article that she never wrote, yet she has been unwavering in her determination to protect the people with whom she had spoken on the promise of confidentiality.
The Plame Story
The case involves an article by the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who revealed that Joseph Wilson, a retired career diplomat, was married to an undercover C.I.A. officer Mr. Novak identified by using her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Mr. Wilson had been asked by the C.I.A. to investigate whether Saddam Hussein in Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger that could be used for making nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson found no evidence of that, and he later wrote an Op-Ed article for The Times saying he believed that the Bush administration had misrepresented the facts.
It seemed very possible that someone at the White House had told Mr. Novak about Ms. Plame to undermine Mr. Wilson's credibility and send a chilling signal to other officials who might be inclined to speak out against the administration's Iraq policy. At the time, this page said that if those were indeed the circumstances, the leak had been "an egregious abuse of power." We urged the Justice Department to investigate. But we warned then that the inquiry should not degenerate into an attempt to compel journalists to reveal their sources.
We mainly had Mr. Novak in mind then, but Mr. Novak remains both free and mum about what he has or has not told the grand jury looking into the leak. Like almost everyone, we are baffled by his public posture. All we know now is that Mr. Novak - who early on expressed the opinion that no journalists who bowed to court pressure to betray sources could hold up their heads in Washington - has offered no public support to the colleague who is going to jail while he remains at liberty.
Ms. Miller did not write an article about Ms. Plame, but the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, wants to know whether anyone in government told her about Mr. Wilson's wife and her secret job. The inquiry has been conducted with such secrecy that it is hard to know exactly what Mr. Fitzgerald thinks Ms. Miller can tell him, or what argument he offered to convince the court that his need to hear her testimony outweighs the First Amendment.
What we do know is that if Ms. Miller testifies, it may be immeasurably harder in the future to persuade a frightened government employee to talk about malfeasance in high places, or a worried worker to reveal corporate crimes. The shroud of secrecy thrown over this case by the prosecutor and the judge, an egregious denial of due process, only makes it more urgent to take a stand.
Mr. Fitzgerald drove that point home chillingly when he said the authorities "can't have 50,000 journalists" making decisions about whether to reveal sources' names and that the government had a right to impose its judgment. But that's not what the founders had in mind in writing the First Amendment. In 1971, our colleague James Reston cited James Madison's admonition about a free press in explaining why The Times had first defied the Nixon administration's demand to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers and then fought a court's order to cease publication. "Among those principles deemed sacred in America," Madison wrote, "among those sacred rights considered as forming the bulwark of their liberty, which the government contemplates with awful reverence and would approach only with the most cautious circumspection, there is no one of which the importance is more deeply impressed on the public mind than the liberty of the press."
Mr. Fitzgerald's attempts to interfere with the rights of a free press while refusing to disclose his reasons for doing so, when he can't even say whether a crime has been committed, have exhibited neither reverence nor cautious circumspection. It would compound the tragedy if his actions emboldened more prosecutors to trample on a free press.
Our Bottom Line
Responsible journalists recognize that press freedoms are not absolute and must be exercised responsibly. This newspaper will not, for example, print the details of American troop movements in advance of a battle, because publication would endanger lives and national security. But these limits cannot be dictated by the whim of a branch of government, especially behind a screen of secrecy.
Indeed, the founders warned against any attempt to have the government set limits on a free press, under any conditions. "However desirable those measures might be which might correct without enslaving the press, they have never yet been devised in America," Madison wrote.
Journalists talk about these issues a great deal, and they can seem abstract. The test comes when a colleague is being marched off to jail for doing nothing more than the job our readers expected of her, and of the rest of us. The Times has been in these fights before, beginning in 1857, when a journalist named J. W. Simonton wrote an editorial about bribery in Congress and was held in contempt by the House of Representatives for 19 days when he refused to reveal his sources. In the end, Mr. Simonton kept faith, and the corrupt congressmen resigned. All of our battles have not had equally happy endings. But each time, whether we win or we lose, we remain convinced that the public wins in the long run and that what is at stake is nothing less than our society's perpetual bottom line: the citizens control the government in a democracy.
We stand with Ms. Miller and thank her for taking on that fight for the rest of us.
One on evangelical chaplains
Evangelicals Are a Growing Force in the Military Chaplain Corps
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
COLORADO SPRINGS - There were personal testimonies about Jesus from the stage, a comedian quoting Scripture and a five-piece band performing contemporary Christian praise songs. Then hundreds of Air Force chaplains stood and sang, many with palms upturned, in a service with a distinctively evangelical tone.
It was the opening ceremony of a four-day Spiritual Fitness Conference at a Hilton hotel here last month organized and paid for by the Air Force for many of its United States-based chaplains and their families, at a cost of $300,000. The chaplains, who pledge when they enter the military to minister to everyone, Methodist, Mormon or Muslim, attended workshops on "The Purpose Driven Life," the best seller by the megachurch pastor Rick Warren, and on how to improve their worship services. In the hotel hallways, vendors from Focus on the Family and other evangelical organizations promoted materials for the chaplains to use in their work.
The event was just one indication of the extent to which evangelical Christians have become a growing force in the Air Force chaplain corps, a trend documented by military records and interviews with more than two dozen chaplains and other military officials.
Figures provided by the Air Force show that from 1994 to 2005 the number of chaplains from many evangelical and Pentecostal churches rose, some doubling. For example, chaplains from the Full Gospel Fellowship of Churches and Ministries International increased to 10 from none. The Church of the Nazarene rose to 12 from 6.
At the same time, the number of chaplains from the Roman Catholic Church declined to 94 from 167, and there were declines in more liberal, mainline Protestant churches: the United Church of Christ to 3 from 11, the United Methodist Church to 50 from 64.
Other branches of the military did not make available similar statistics, but officials say they are seeing the same trend.
The change mirrors the Air Force as a whole, where representation is rising from evangelical churches. But there are also increasing numbers of enlistees from minority religions as well as atheists. It has all created a complicated environment and caused tensions over tolerance and the role of the military chaplain.
Some conflicts have already become public. A Pentagon investigation into the religious climate at the Air Force Academy here found no overt discrimination, but it did find that officers and faculty members periodically used their positions to promote their Christian beliefs and failed to accommodate non-Christian cadets, for example refusing them time off for religious holidays.
Other conflicts have remained out of the public eye, like the 50 evangelical chaplains who have filed a class action suit against the Navy charging they were dismissed or denied promotions. One of the chaplains said that once while leading an evangelical style service at a base in Okinawa he was interrupted by an Episcopal chaplain who announced he was stepping in to lead "a proper Christian worship service."
There is also a former Marine who said that about half of the eight chaplains he came into contact with in his military career tried to convince him to abandon his Mormon faith, telling him it was "wicked" or "Satanic."
A Complex Religious Environment
Part of the struggle, chaplains and officials say, is the result of growing diversity. But part is from evangelicals following their church's teachings to make converts while serving in a military job where they are supposed to serve the spiritual needs of soldiers, fliers and sailors of every faith. Evangelical chaplains say they walk a fine line.
Brig. Gen. Cecil R. Richardson, the Air Force deputy chief of chaplains, said in an interview, "We will not proselytize, but we reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched." The distinction, he said, is that proselytizing is trying to convert someone in an aggressive way, while evangelizing is more gently sharing the gospel.
Certainly, the religious environment encountered by the chaplains is complex. Statistics on enlistees provided by the Air Force show there are now about 3,500 who say they are either Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, pagans, druids or shamans. There are 1,600 who say they are atheists and about 50,000 who say they have no religious preference, out of a total of 280,000. Roman Catholics number about 60,000.
There are also growing numbers of enlistees from evangelical churches. In 2005, there were 1,794 members of the Assemblies of God in the Air Force, 597 from the Church of the Nazarene and 108 from the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Because so many churches cannot be comfortably categorized as evangelical or nonevangelical, and because so many enlistees identify themselves simply as "Christian," it is difficult to ascertain cumulative numbers.
Military officials say the government is not promoting the change in the chaplain corps. Instead religious leaders who recruit for the military attribute it to factors including the general shortage of Catholic priests, the liberal denominations' discomfort with military interventions abroad, the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gay men and lesbians, and evangelicals' broad support for the military.
The military is trying to grapple with the fallout. Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, sent a personal message to commanders on June 28, warning them against promoting their religious beliefs, saying, "The expression of personal preferences to subordinates, especially in a professional setting or at mandatory events, is inappropriate."
"Our chaplains," General Jumper wrote, "should set the example for mutual respect among different faiths and beliefs."
'We Are Not Generic Chaplains'
Air Force officials contend that the Spiritual Fitness Conference was not evangelical, pointing to the participation of a Catholic band leader and a Mormon expert on families. There was also an interfaith worship service in which all the chaplains planned to recite a Hebrew prayer together. They said that 10 Jewish chaplains stayed in the same hotel and were bused to the Air Force Academy for a separate program each day.
"We are not generic chaplains," said Col. Bob V. Page, who helped organize the conference. "We say, 'cooperation without compromise.' I cannot compromise my faith."
Chaplains are the often unsung members of the clergy who pray, counsel and go to war alongside American troops. Whatever their church or creed, when they join the military they pledge to serve the spiritual needs of every faith.
The military recruits chaplains through endorsing agents who work for about 100 different churches or religious denominations. The agents select potential candidates and refer them to the military, a system created to avoid the constitutional problem of government endorsement of religion.
In the Air Force, chaplain candidates must be under 40 and have a college degree. They must also have several years of ministry experience and be able to pass a physical fitness test. They also must attend an Air Force training program for chaplains.
The churches that once supplied most of the chaplains say they are now having trouble recruiting for a variety of reasons. Many members of their clergy are now women, who are less likely to seek positions as military chaplains or who entered the ministry as a second career and are too old to qualify. The Catholic Church often does not have enough priests to serve its parishes, let alone send them to the military.
There are also political reasons. Anne C. Loveland, a retired professor of American history at Louisiana State University and the author of "American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942-1993," said the foundation for the change in the chaplaincy was laid during the Vietnam War.
"Evangelical denominations were very supportive of the war, and mainline liberal denominations were very much against it," Ms. Loveland said. "That cemented this growing relationship between the military and the evangelicals."
Chaplain Edward T. Brogan, director of the Presbyterian Council for Chaplains and Military Personnel, who recruits and recommends chaplain candidates for several Presbyterian churches, calls the change "a supply and demand issue."
"I regularly am contacted by military recruiters who would like to have more Presbyterians because they need baby baptizers," he said. Many evangelical ministers, according to their tradition, only baptize older children or adults.
The Presbyterian Church USA, a more liberal denomination, has had a 10-year drop in its Air Force chaplains from 30 in 1994 to 16 in 2005. For the same period, the Presbyterian Church in America, which is more conservative, has increased the numbers of its Air Force chaplains to 15 from 4.
The Air Force had a total of 611 chaplains at the start of 2005.
Though Chaplain Brogan has had problems finding chaplains to meet demands of the military, the Rev. Maurice J. Hart, the endorsing agent for the Full Gospel Fellowship of Churches and Ministers International, an evangelical church based in Irving, Tex., has not.
"It's been easy," Mr. Hart said. "They realize the men are really stressed out and in danger and harm's way, and they just feel like, 'that's my calling - I'd like to go and be a blessing.' "
In 1994, the Full Gospel Fellowship had no Air Force chaplains, but by 2005 it had 10 (and that with only 58 members on the Air Force rolls at that time). The number is impressive because many of the 100 denominations supply only a handful of chaplains each.
The evangelical chaplains are changing the concept of ministry in the military, said Kristen J. Leslie, an assistant professor of pastoral care and counseling at Yale Divinity School, who has observed chaplains at the Air Force Academy.
Evangelicals administer "Bible-centered care" in which "the notion is that the religious message is core, and you bring everybody to it and that's how you create healing," Ms. Leslie said. If someone is struggling with a supervisor, a spouse or depression, an evangelical chaplain urges them to turn their life over to Christ and look for answers in the Scriptures, she said.
That is fine for a church setting, Ms. Leslie said, but what is required in a diverse religious environment like the military is the "pastoral care" approach: "You walk with the person in the midst of their brokenness, using the resources of their faith to help heal them."
A Push for Inclusiveness
Still, many evangelical chaplains say they understand the distinct nature of their work for the military, recounting in interviews that they have helped arrange Seders, the ritual Passover supper, for Jewish sailors or solstice celebrations for Wiccan marines.
General Richardson, the deputy chief of chaplains, said that although his faith required him to evangelize, he would help accommodate the faiths of others. "I am an Assemblies of God, pound-the-pulpit preacher, but I'll go to the ropes for the Wiccan," he said, if that group wanted permission to celebrate a religious ritual.
In the Navy some evangelical chaplains say they are the ones discriminated against. Chaplain Gordon James Klingenschmitt, of the Evangelical Episcopal Church, says he was warned by commanders that his approach to the ministry was not inclusive enough. When a Catholic sailor on his ship died, Lieutenant Klingenschmitt said he preached at a memorial service and emphasized that for those who did not accept Jesus, "God's wrath remains upon him."
After that and several other incidents, Lieutenant Klingenschmitt's commanding officer recommended that the Navy not renew his chaplain contract.
The lieutenant is fighting to remain in the military. "The Navy wants to impose its religion on me," he said. "Religious pluralism is a religion. It's a theology all by itself."
Lieut. Cmdr. David S. Wilder, a 20-year Navy chaplain who is a plaintiff in the class action suit against the Navy, said that his troubles began on Okinawa after the more senior Episcopal chaplain stepped in and interrupted his worship service. He says that that chaplain has blocked his promotion.
"There's a pecking order in the Navy chaplain corps," Commander Wilder said, "and at the very top is the Roman Catholics and just below them are the Episcopals and Lutherans. And if you're an evangelical non-liturgical Christian of some type you're down on the bottom."
A Navy spokeswoman said that many of the chaplains in the class action lawsuit were not promoted for reasons other than religious discrimination.
For the Mormon in the Marine Corps, interactions with chaplains made him decide to become one himself. A 29-year-old who left the service in the late 1990's, he is now applying to become a military chaplain with the intent, he said, of providing the troops a more "inclusive" form of pastoring. He insisted on anonymity so as not to undermine his application.
He said that his faith was frequently denigrated by fellow marines, and even by some of his commanders.
"What compounded it was when the chaplains would agree with them," he said. "That's what makes me want to become a military chaplain - not just that my faith and other minority faiths were underrepresented, but to make it a more spiritually accepting environment."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 12:48 am (UTC)Now, I don't want to cut down old growth forest - that'd be bad. I want to have people grow trees for paper use, which I believe is how most paper use works. People keep plots of land, harvest it regularly and plant regularly. Much the way animal slaughtering works. You don't kill off your whole crop, you keep growing more, and you keep a steady supply.
It may not be nice to the trees, being killed so young. But I don't mind, because I don't think trees are all that sentient.
Now compare that to recycled paper. You take used paper from many different sources and burn gasoline to get them all to one place (you need to do transport for fresh lumber, but not as much as it's more centralized) and you dump lots of chemicals on it. Then you get sludge. You dump the chemicals into the environment. You use up a bunch of energy to turn it into paper that can now be used again.
This doesn't seem environmentally friendly. And now the new trees, fish, etc. have to deal with the chemical waste.
And nobody is allowed to be anti-paper recycling because it's taboo.
Note - I am in favor of recycling aluminum. I am in favor of recycling anything where careful studies have shown that it is better for the environment that we recycle the products. But all I see in favor of paper recycling are people who only think about one part of the process.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 09:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 10:32 am (UTC)So Karl Rove is a timid mouse whistleblower who risked his career to reveal the corruption of Valerie Plame?
*ahem*
FUCK THE NEW YORK TIMES! FUCK IT COMPLETELY! THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT BULLSHIT EDITORIAL SHOULD BE SKINNED ALIVE, SALTED, DRIVEN THROUGH THE STREETS BY MENTAL PATIENTS WITH SPIKED PLANKS, AND THEN USED AS A TOILET AND JIZZ-CATCHER BY VIAGRA-HOPPED BABOONS WITH IRRITABLE BOWEL SYNDROME! AT BEST!! AND THEN HIS RAPED, CASTRATED AND SHIT-STUFFED CORPSE SHOULD BE LEFT IN FRESH KILLS FOR NECROPHILES TO PLAY WITH!!! HEED MY HEAD BONES, AND HEED THE CHAIR-LEG OF TRUTH!!!!
That is all. Sorry to restate the obvious.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 08:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 12:48 am (UTC)Now, I don't want to cut down old growth forest - that'd be bad. I want to have people grow trees for paper use, which I believe is how most paper use works. People keep plots of land, harvest it regularly and plant regularly. Much the way animal slaughtering works. You don't kill off your whole crop, you keep growing more, and you keep a steady supply.
It may not be nice to the trees, being killed so young. But I don't mind, because I don't think trees are all that sentient.
Now compare that to recycled paper. You take used paper from many different sources and burn gasoline to get them all to one place (you need to do transport for fresh lumber, but not as much as it's more centralized) and you dump lots of chemicals on it. Then you get sludge. You dump the chemicals into the environment. You use up a bunch of energy to turn it into paper that can now be used again.
This doesn't seem environmentally friendly. And now the new trees, fish, etc. have to deal with the chemical waste.
And nobody is allowed to be anti-paper recycling because it's taboo.
Note - I am in favor of recycling aluminum. I am in favor of recycling anything where careful studies have shown that it is better for the environment that we recycle the products. But all I see in favor of paper recycling are people who only think about one part of the process.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 09:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 10:32 am (UTC)So Karl Rove is a timid mouse whistleblower who risked his career to reveal the corruption of Valerie Plame?
*ahem*
FUCK THE NEW YORK TIMES! FUCK IT COMPLETELY! THE PERSON RESPONSIBLE FOR THAT BULLSHIT EDITORIAL SHOULD BE SKINNED ALIVE, SALTED, DRIVEN THROUGH THE STREETS BY MENTAL PATIENTS WITH SPIKED PLANKS, AND THEN USED AS A TOILET AND JIZZ-CATCHER BY VIAGRA-HOPPED BABOONS WITH IRRITABLE BOWEL SYNDROME! AT BEST!! AND THEN HIS RAPED, CASTRATED AND SHIT-STUFFED CORPSE SHOULD BE LEFT IN FRESH KILLS FOR NECROPHILES TO PLAY WITH!!! HEED MY HEAD BONES, AND HEED THE CHAIR-LEG OF TRUTH!!!!
That is all. Sorry to restate the obvious.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-13 08:15 pm (UTC)