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On the problems of prenatal testing
The Problem With an Almost-Perfect Genetic World
By AMY HARMON
MIA PETERSON is not a fan of tests. Because she has Down syndrome, she says, she cannot always think as fast as she would like to and tests end up making her feel judged. A recent driving test, for instance, ended in frustration.
Ms. Peterson, 31, the chief of self-advocacy for the National Down Syndrome Society, prefers public speaking and travel. And her test aversion extends to the latest one designed to detect Down in a fetus. "I don't want to think like we're being judged against," Ms. Peterson said. "Not meeting their expectations."
Heralded in the Nov. 10 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, the new prenatal test provides earlier, more reliable results for all women than the current test, which is routinely offered to only older women who are at higher risk. But for people with Down syndrome and the cluster of other conditions subject to prenatal screening, the new test comes with a certain chill.
Because such tests often lead to abortions, people with conditions from mental disability to cystic fibrosis may find their numbers dwindling. As a result, some fear, their lives may become harder just as they are winning the fight for greater inclusion.
"We're trying to make a place for ourselves in society at a time when science is trying to remove at least some of us," said Andrew Imparato, president of the American Association of People With Disabilities, who suffers from bipolar disorder. "For me, it's very scary."
Some bioethicists envision a dystopia where parents who choose to forgo genetic testing are shunned, or their children are denied insurance. Parents and people with disabilities fear they may simply be more lonely. And less money may be devoted to cures and education.
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, for instance, does not endorse prenatal testing, which the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends offering during pregnancy.
"If you can terminate pregnancies with a condition, who is going to put research dollars into it?" said Nancy Press, a professor of medical anthropology at Oregon Health and Science University.
Indeed, the $15 million spent on the new test for Down by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development might have gone instead toward much-needed research on the biochemistry of people living with the condition, said Michael Bérubé, co-director of the disabilities studies program at Pennsylvania State University.
Mr. Bérubé, whose 14-year-old son has Down syndrome, worries that if fewer children are born with the condition, hard-won advances like including them in mainstream schools may lose support. "The more people who think the condition is grounds for termination of a pregnancy, the more likely it will be that you'll wind up with a society that doesn't welcome those people once they're here," he said. "It turns into a vicious cycle."
Anthony Shriver, founder of Best Buddies, a nonprofit organization that helps people with intellectual disabilities form friendships, said smaller numbers will mean even greater social isolation for the people his group serves.
"Loneliness is one of the most significant challenges they face," Mr. Shriver said. "And it would only become more acute as they became a smaller segment of the population."
Beyond the impact on the disabled, disabilities activists say, the implications of prenatal testing for diversity and democracy require more attention than they have so far received.
Lisa Hedley, whose 10-year-old daughter has dwarfism, said the condition is usually not detected prenatally. It is so rare that it has traditionally not been considered worth the expense of the genetic test. Soon, though, pregnant women may be offered a gene-chip technology that can perform hundreds of tests at once for a few hundred dollars.
"It's so complicated," said Ms. Hedley, president of the Children of Difference Foundation. "Would I choose to have my child have a disability? Oh my goodness, no. It's difficult for her. It's difficult for everyone. But difference is what makes the world go round."
Supporters of abortion are especially wary of wading into a discussion over the ethics of prenatal testing, lest they be seen as playing into the opposing side in the fraught national debate over abortion rights. But advocates for people with disabilities are troubled by how much faster the science of prenatal testing is advancing than the public discussion of how it ought to be used.
If no child is ever born again with the fatal childhood disease Tay-Sachs, many might see that as a medical triumph. But what about other conditions, including deafness, which some do not consider to be a disability, and Huntington's Disease, an adult-onset neurological disorder?
Among the difficult choices facing prospective parents in coming years, genetics researchers say, will be the ability to predict the degree of severity in chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome, which can cause mild to moderate retardation.
"Where do you draw the line?" said Mark A. Rothstein, director of the Bioethics Institute at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. "On the one hand we have to view this as a positive in terms of preventing disability and illness. But at what point are we engaging in eugenics and not accepting the normal diversity within a population?"
Abortion, Mr. Rothstein and others fear, could become a kind of "poor man's gene therapy," if cost-conscious health insurance companies see it as less expensive than treating a disabled child. Others argue that prenatal testing will be limited to those who can afford it, leaving the poor to grapple with genetic disability and disease.
Of course, as more conditions are diagnosed in utero, many parents may simply decline testing, or use the information to prepare themselves. But studies have shown that women are considerably more likely to terminate their pregnancies if they know of fetal anomalies.
One study of 53,000 women's choices, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2002, found that the termination rate ranged from about 1 percent for conditions that were classified as having no impact on the quality of life, to 50 percent for those considered to have a serious impact.
Women were far more likely to choose abortions for disabilities that have a high probability of affecting cognitive functioning. For conditions that have little or no impact on the quality of life but might require medical or surgical therapy, the abortion rate was 16 percent, but doubled for those likely to cause mental dysfunction.
As for Down syndrome, doctors estimate that about 80 percent of women who get positive test results choose abortion.
Still, some who work with Down syndrome children don't believe the future is that grim. Allen C. Crocker, director of the Down syndrome program at Children's Hospital Boston, believes that number of women who choose to continue their pregnancies will go up in the coming years.
Even as genetic tests appear to have lowered the number of Down syndrome births, he said, social conditions for people with the conditions have improved markedly.
"We're in the midst of a gentle social revolution," said Dr. Crocker, and, he believes, it may just outpace the scientific one.
On the Rockettes
The Sweat-Soaked Life of a Glamorous Rockette
By SUSAN DOMINUS
ONE after the other, like beautiful, glittering drones, the Rockettes spilled off an elevator onto the stage level at Radio City Music Hall. Dressed in sequined skating costume, their shoulders swaying, they sauntered down a narrow hallway and gathered off stage right, waiting to go on for the holiday show's opening night. All flashing the same red-lipstick smile, batting the same fake eyelashes, they flirted with crew members, adjusted their Statue of Liberty-style crowns or wished one another good luck.
One dancer told her friend she had to go to the bathroom, but was nervous that she didn't have enough time. "Just go," her friend reassured her, and with a clattering of her tap shoes, the worrier was off.
Amy Love Osgood, 26, a first-year Rockette, was going over a tricky part of the opening number. "Jump, shuffle, leap, toe," they repeated. Meanwhile huddled at the edge of the curtain, one young woman caught a glimpse of her parents, seated near the front, and clapped in delight.
Ordinarily, the dancers also would have been able to see the familiar faces of the 35 orchestra members. But two days before, the musicians had gone on strike, and after two preseason shows were canceled, the Rockettes, for the first time in the 73-year history of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, started the season performing to a digital recording. They miss the musicians, several say, not to mention the extra energy they get from the live music. And energy is something they dearly need.
This is high season for the Rockettes, three solid months of steady work, solid pay, grateful audiences and all the excitement of dancing in New York with a world-famous company. But it's also a time of gruelingly hard work, of seven dance numbers and six costume changes per show, as many as five shows in a 13-hour day, and as many as six days of work a week.
And then there are the crowds: the girls in red velvet and Mary Janes and the tourists with laminated folding maps, so determined to see the show that they line up first thing in the morning, some willing to pay as much as $250 for an orchestra seat. All in all, 1.2 million people came to see the show last year, bringing in $74 million in ticket sales over nine weeks. Even long before the peak of the season, a Rockette who finishes a 10 a.m. show must fight her way through a mob just to get a gulp of fresh air or a coffee around the corner. Looking toward the Christmas season, most people foresee a hectic time of year; for the Rockettes, it's like standing in front of an onrushing train.
The Rockettes are instantly recognizable symbols, but what they represent depends on who is doing the interpreting: to some they're Stepford dancers, objectified women reduced to nothing but legs and teeth; to others they're glamour personified, the last, cherished remnants of a "Guys and Dolls"-style nightlife; and to yet another part of the audience they're glorious kitsch, as amusing as they are entertaining. But one thing is constant: their sheer physical accomplishment. Even in a city full of sweating, striving talent, the Rockettes may well be the hardest-working women in show business.
In recent years their show has become increasingly athletic (and a hint sexier), with more kick lines and aerobic dance routines. Yet there is still charm in the organization's old-fashioned ways - the labels reading "Miss Love" in each of Ms. Love Osgood's costumes, the camaraderie among crew members and dancers, the protective watch the management keeps on its charges, monitoring every conversation they have with reporters.
A fair number of the performers spend the rest of the year working in musical theater, but for others this is their only time dancing onstage. Off season, Carrie Janell Hamner, 24, auditions for television pilots and does improv comedy; Jaime Lyn Windrow, 29, studies nutrition; and Meg Huggins, 33, models and works, as do so many others, as a Pilates instructor.
Rockettes tend to get asked back year after year, which makes it one of the steadiest gigs in the business - and one of the few gigs for jazz and tap-dancers who don't also sing. Radio City management would not comment on what Rockettes earn, but dancers say they typically get paid on par with Broadway dancers, a salary that breaks down to about $135 a show. But because they perform so many more times a day, and get overtime for the third, fourth and fifth shows, the season is about as lucrative as dancing jobs get. Year-round health benefits and solid friendships keep some dancers loyal to the job for upward of a decade, although most women walk away from its endurance challenge by the time they are in their mid-30's.
Paradoxically, dancing in this row of identical women is also a job with more of an identity than, say, performing in the chorus of a new Broadway show. "People used to say, 'What do you do?', and I'd say, 'Oh, I'm a dancer,' or 'Oh, I teach dance,' " Ms. Love Osgood said. "But as soon as you say, actually, I dance at Radio City Music Hall, people gasp." She seems to avoid introducing herself as an actual Rockette, as if that would be immodest.
A sweet-faced young woman with an endearing, goofy giggle, she grew up in a small town in Arizona, taking dance classes at what she calls "your average Dolly Dingle dance studio," just a run-of-the-mill local place. She moved to Los Angeles to dance when she was 18, but found only the sort of opportunities that would have required her to "put on a bikini and wiggle my hips for music videos." So she worked as an office assistant and started choreographing jazz pieces at the evangelical church she attended.
She married a man she met at church, and in 2003 they moved to New York, where she landed a few dancing parts, and then she had a baby. But along the way she met a friend who turned out to be a Rockette. "My grandfather, who was from Brooklyn, always used to say, 'Amy, are you going to grow up and be a Rockette?' And I'd be like, 'What's a Rockette?' " she said. "But he'd show me what they were when we watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
"When I watched the show, I used to think, how hard could it be to be a Rockette? Then I'd go to the auditions, and I saw it's actually really hard. I think the challenge of that made me want it even more." When her son was 7 months old, she tried out a fourth time. To her shock, she made it.
She and her husband couldn't afford child care, so to get in shape she took the baby jogging with her in Central Park. "People would stare at me - here's the baby in the jogging stroller, and here's the mom doing kicks," she laughed.
Until rehearsal starts, though, Rockettes agree there is no way to prepare for the 1,500 kicks they do during a five-show day. The adrenaline of an audience gets you through it, as does the thrill of seeing the pieces coming together, 72 legs kicking eye-high in perfect unison. "Even in rehearsal, when we did kick lines, I'd get teary," Ms. Love Osgood said. "The other dancers would tell me, wait till you get onstage - you'll get chills, and you'll want to start laughing and crying at the same time. It's a huge rush."
The next morning, however, it's a different story. One Sunday after the cast had performed its first five-show day, a group of dancers rushed to the ninth-floor physical therapy room, where Elaine Winslow, a former Rockette turned athletic trainer, keeps two large basins of water chilled to about 45 degrees. The dancers use them to ice down swollen feet and sore lower backs. Rockettes frequently suffer knee injuries, but neck injuries are also a concern ever since they started wearing a tight, heavy hat with reindeer antlers that light up. "We call it the vise," one dancer said.
Morning-Star Mosley, the Rockette who had encouraged Ms. Love Osgood to audition, submerged herself up to her waist. Chrischell White-Spraggins was trying hard to get all of her leg in, but kept gasping and flinching from the cold. "Keep it in," Ms. Mosley advised her. "Do not take it out. It makes it harder."
Samantha Berger, a first-year squeezing into the tub, flipped through Us magazine as she iced. "I woke up in so much pain, I felt like I was moving even when I wasn't," she said. "I'd known it would be tough, but I did not expect this. I really didn't."
Ms. Berger said that after the last show she couldn't even hobble to the subway, so she splurged on a cab to her Upper West Side sublet. But at least she had found an affordable home in Manhattan. Ms. White-Spraggins, however, had caught the R train back to Astoria. "And I didn't even get a seat," she added.
Alicia Luciano, a 22-year-old former Miss New Jersey, caught a ride with her father back to Staten Island, but they hit tunnel traffic, and she didn't get home until 2 a.m. - 20 hours after she had left that morning.
Ms. Love Osgood, who lives in Washington Heights, couldn't face the A train, which was running local, so she shelled out $25 for a car service. Too tired to celebrate the end of the weekend, she stared out the window until the George Washington Bridge and her exit came into view. "All I could think was, oooh, I have to do this again next weekend," she said.
With hours like that, Rockettes are forced to catch a bit of sleep whenever it's humanly possible. In the half-hour of downtime between shows, they frequently pull out a pillow and sleeping bag or favorite security blanket. And right there on the floor of their dressing rooms, piled head to toe, they fall dead to the world. But they're up again before their sweat-soaked costumes have even dried out from the last show. On the odd day off, some relax or get an inexpensive massage. Ms. Love Osgood prepares her family's meals for the coming week, roasting a chicken, making chili, and cooking baby food. "Once I get home, I can't really think about my body much," she said.
Eight days after opening night, for the fourth show of a five-show day, the cast was starting to show its fatigue. Behind the curtain, as the recording of the orchestra cued up, one woman adjusted her leotard to hide a tear in her stocking. Another actually crawled up the steps to the top platform. She was probably hamming it up - but not entirely.
Ninety minutes and 300 kicks later, wearing uncomfortably heavy robes from the Nativity scene, the women rushed off stage, back to their dressing rooms where their cellphones and PowerBars and blankets and oatmeal awaited them. Ms. Love Osgood, in Room 303, was using her breast pump discreetly near the shower. Two floors up, in Room 503, some of the most senior Rockettes were giddy with exhaustion and relief that the day would soon be over. Only partially dressed, Lora Anderson and Dani Parish Rubin started dancing around to Blondie.
Just then a dance captain came in to give the performers notes. "The Deets" - the nickname for the director of choreography, John Dietrich - "says the middle is slow on the kicks," she said, looking pointedly in Ms. Anderson's and Ms. Parish Rubin's direction.
"Oh yeah?" Ms. Anderson replied. "Well, then maybe they should turn up the music. Maybe they should turn up the orchestra. Bring back the orchestra! Bring back the orchestra!" she started chanting. "After all, it is Radio City Music Hall." And what about the little old harpist whom she always said hi to, she wondered aloud. "I mean, she's not going to have a job."
Blondie gave way to Duran Duran, and then to the song they always play to energize themselves for the day's last show: "The Final Countdown," by Europe, which Ms. Anderson and Ms. Parish Rubin danced to, Flashdance-style, then in a sped-up, robotic version of the opening number.
They brought the music with them as they headed down for the 9 p.m. show. As the doors of the crowded elevator closed, all the dancers, exhausted as they were, were laughing and singing along to the words, fingers pointing in the air: "It's the final countdown!"
No one would have known it to look at her, but Ms. Love Osgood wasn't feeling that energy. During the one number that she and a few other dancers sit out, she stole upstairs to call her husband on her cellphone. "I don't know if I can finish the show," she confided. Her body felt leaden; her mind had melted from sheer overstimulation and exhaustion. She was practically shaking. "I could start to cry right now," she said. He responded with the things husbands are expected to say in such situations - I know you can do it, you're almost done.
"I guess so," she said, and hung up.
She did, indeed, get through a high-spirited number dressed as a Ragdoll, and then the interminable Nativity scene. "Standing still in that heavy robe, you can feel yourself dripping sweat," she says. Finally, she took another car uptown, arriving home around 11:15. She heated up a frozen pizza, all there was in the fridge, and then the baby woke up. She'd have a four-show day the next day.
As demanding as it is, she said, it may be the only dancing job she will ever want. When she's not exhausted, she loves goofing and flopping around in the Ragdoll costume, the satisfaction of a perfectly timed fall during the Wooden Soldier routine, the little girls she sees dancing in the aisle and throwing their legs in the air. She hasn't decided if she will start auditioning for anything else after the season ends, but she is sure she wants to do the Rockette season again next year. "Every once in a while my husband text-messages me," she says. "All it says is, 'I can't believe you're a Rockette!'"
On fighting in Iraq (of course)
Sectarian Hatred Pulls Apart Iraq's Mixed Towns
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 19 - Abu Noor's town had become so hostile to Shiites that his wife had not left the house in a month, his family could no longer go to the medical clinic and mortar shells had been lobbed at the houses of two of his religious leaders.
"I couldn't open the door and stand in my yard," he said.
So when Abu Noor, a Shiite from Tarmiya, a heavily Sunni Arab town north of here, ran into an old friend, a Sunni who faced his own problems in a Shiite district in Baghdad, the two decided to switch houses. They even shared a moving van.
Two and a half years after the American invasion, deep divides that have long split Iraqi society have violently burst into full view. As the hatred between Sunni Arabs and Shiites hardens and the relentless toll of bombings and assassinations grows, families are leaving their mixed towns and cities for safer areas where they will not automatically be targets. In doing so, they are creating increasingly polarized enclaves and redrawing the sectarian map of Iraq, especially in Baghdad and the belt of cities around it.
The evidence is so far mostly anecdotal - the government is not tracking the moves. In a rough count, about 20 cities and towns around Baghdad are segregating, according to accounts by local sheiks, Iraqi nongovernmental organizations and military officials, and the families themselves.
Those areas are among the most mixed and the most violent in Iraq - according to the American military, 85 percent of attacks in the country are in four provinces including Baghdad, and two others to its north and west.
The volatile sectarian mix is a holdover from the rule of Saddam Hussein, who gave favors to Sunni Arab landowners in the lush farmland around Baghdad to reinforce loyalties and to protect against Shiites in the south. Shiites came to work the land, and sometimes to own it. Abu Noor moved to Tarmiya in 1987 after the government gave his father land.
"The most violent places are the towns and cities around Baghdad," said Sheik Jalal al-Dien al-Sagheer, a member of Parliament from a religious Shiite party. "It was a circle. It was invented. It did not exist before."
One result has been carnage on a serious scale. In Tarmiya, a close Shiite friend of Abu Noor who helped pack his furniture and drove it to Baghdad received a letter warning him to leave the town or be killed. Nineteen days later he was shot to death in his carpentry shop in front of his father and brother. In all, at least eight of Abu Noor's friends and close relatives, including a brother, have been killed since the beginning of 2004.
The motives for the attacks are often complicated. The complex webs of tribal affiliations and social status that rule everyday life in Iraq do not always line up as simply as Shiite against Sunni. But increasingly, despite the urging of some Shiite religious leaders and Sunni politicians, the attacks have been. A mostly Sunni Arab fringe is carrying out vicious attacks against civilians, often Shiites, while Shiite death squads are openly stalking Sunnis for revenge, and the Shiite-dominated government makes regular arrests in Sunni Arab neighborhoods.
Expressions of prejudice have been making their way onto walls and into leaflets, too.
In Tarmiya, writing was scrawled on the walls of the city's main streets: "Get out of here, Badr followers! Traitors! Spies!" it said, using a reference to an armed wing of a religious Shiite party. In Madaen, a mixed city south of Baghdad, a list of names appeared on the walls of several municipal buildings in a warning to leave. Many did.
In Samarra last fall, leaflets appeared warning in clumsy childish script that Samarra is a Sunni city.
"We thought at first that they were written by kids and that someone would discipline them," said Sheik Hadi al-Gharawi, an imam who left Samarra, north of Baghdad, a few months ago and now lives in Baghdad. "But later we found they were adults and they were serious."
His nephew, Ahmed Samir al-Gharawi, 15, who moved separately with his family in September, was one of two Shiites in his high school class in Samarra. In January, classmates were probing to see whether his family had voted in a national election. "They were joking to find the truth," he said. "I didn't tell them."
Samarra is a holy place in Shiite Islam with two sacred shrines, and Shiites have lived there for hundreds of years. Even so, in a pattern similar to that in Tarmiya, Shiite imams were attacked and businesses became targets, Sheik Gharawi said, and Shiites began to leave.
Emad Fadhel, a Shiite business owner who settled there 38 years ago, estimated that 200 to 260 Shiite families lived in the city before 2003, a figure he said he learned while delivering medicine to poor families. Of those, fewer than 20 remain, said Mr. Fadhel, who moved with his family last August, shortly after a hand grenade was thrown at his father.
The terror hit Ali Nasir Jabr, a 12-year-old with sad eyes, on Aug. 20, when four men with guns entered his family's house in Samarra and began remarking about the family's Shiite identity. Ali, who was feigning sleep on a mat on the floor, said he heard his mother answer that the family had been living in the city for more than 18 years.
Then the men shot to death his mother and father, two brothers and a sister. Ali ran to a neighbor's house to call for help, and he then returned alone to wait for rescue workers.
"I checked them, I kissed them, one by one," Ali said, sitting in a mosque in central Baghdad, his pants cinched tight with a small belt. "Maybe somebody was still alive."
Ali now lives in Kut in southern Iraq with his uncle. Requirements for autopsies, death certificates and funeral plans forced him to travel to three cities with the five bodies in the summer heat. He helped wrap and carry each one. At the funeral in a mixed area north of here, a dozen friends with guns stood guard, his uncle said.
Some Iraqis, despite years of mass killings of Kurds and Shiites during Mr. Hussein's rule, still argue that sectarian divides did not exist in Iraq before the American invasion. But scratching just beneath the surface turns up hurt in most Shiite homes. Abu Noor recalls asking a high school teacher in Tarmiya the meaning of the word shroogi, a derogatory term for Shiite. Shiites tried to hide their last names. The military had a glass ceiling.
These days, sectarian profiling on the part of the government, which is Shiite, runs in reverse, with some people buying fake national identity cards to hide last names that are obviously Sunni Arab.
For the people who have stayed in their mixed neighborhoods, life has become circumscribed. In Ur, a neighborhood in Baghdad that is 80 percent Shiite, Wasan Foad, 32, a Sunni Arab, grew finely tuned to the timing of suicide bombings. Mr. Foad recalled feeling people's eyes on him and hearing whispering in the market against Sunnis after a big bombing in Hilla this winter.
"We were like prisoners in our home," said Mr. Foad, who moved this summer with his wife and their three young sons to the majority Sunni neighborhood of Khudra.
Migration patterns are different for Sunni Arabs. Threats to them have come less often from anonymous letters than from large-scale arrests by the police and the Iraqi Army, largely Shiite, criticized by Sunnis as arbitrary and unfairly focused on Sunni neighborhoods. Sheik Hussein Ali Mansour al-Kharaouli, who is associated with the Iraqi Islamic Party, said Sunni families have been moving from Jibelah, Muhawail, Iskandariya and Haswa, all south of Baghdad, to escape arrests.
The net is wide, and the treatment can be rough. Thiab Ahmed, a Sunni Arab from Madaen, a town of severe sectarian strife south of Baghdad, said his brother, Khalid, died in custody in an Interior Ministry prison on Oct. 20, seven days after Iraqi police commandos arrested him.
Mr. Ahmed, speaking at a Sunni Arab rights organization, Freedom Voice, showed photographs of a man whose body was mutilated and riddled with drill holes, a method often used by Shiite interrogators.
"I found him in the morgue," Mr. Ahmed said, his face hard. "He was labeled 'unknown body.' "
Arrest warrants were the reason Abu Noor's Sunni friend wanted to leave Baghdad. Two of his brothers were wanted by the police, Abu Noor said, and the family thought it would be best to leave the area, a largely Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad called Huriya. The family had tribal roots in Abu Noor's town and felt safe there.
The families breathe easier in their new lives. A whole community of Shiites from Samarra, Tarmiya and other largely Sunni cities is living comfortably in modest houses along the narrow shop-lined streets of Huriya.
But there is bitterness. A former officers' club that Abu Noor helped turn into a makeshift mosque for Shiite prayer services in 2003 has been turned into a playground, he said. He struggles to keep hard feelings out of his relationship with his Sunni friend. Every month the man comes to collect the difference in rent: the Baghdad apartment is more expensive, and Abu Noor pays the $140 difference.
Last week, Abu Noor applied for a job in the new Iraqi Army. It is the way he can legally take revenge, he said.
Mr. Fadhel, the Shiite businessman from Samarra, now lives not far from Abu Noor. When asked if he would return to his old home, he told an Iraqi fable. In it, a father leaves his son to care for a dancing snake that gives golden coins. The greedy son tries to kill the snake to take all its gold and is fatally bitten, but not before he cuts off its tail. The father returns and finds his dead son and the wounded snake. He tries to make amends in vain.
The snake replied that the man would never forget his son and it would never forget its tail. " 'We can never be friends again,' " Mr. Fadhel said.
On people returning to New Orleans. Interesting article.
Seeing Life Outside New Orleans Alters Life Inside It
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
NEW ORLEANS
TALK to the people trickling back here, and it becomes apparent that before the hurricane, many had about as much experience living elsewhere as Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist in one of the seminal novels about New Orleans, "A Confederacy of Dunces," who had set foot outside this exceedingly rooted city only once (and rued doing so).
But after tasting life elsewhere, they are returning with tales of public schools that actually supply textbooks published after the Reagan era, of public housing developments that look like suburban enclaves, of government workers who are not routinely dragged off to prison after pocketing bribes.
Local leaders have realized for weeks that they must reckon with widespread anger over how they handled the relief effort. But it is dawning on them that they are also going to have to contend with demands from residents who grew accustomed, however briefly, to the virtues of other communities.
Many evacuees seem to be arriving with less tolerance for the failings of a city that under its glitzy makeup has long had an unsightly side. They do not want New Orleans to lose its distinctive character - after all, that is one reason they are back and vowing to rebuild. But they say their expectations have changed.
"What's wrong with our school system, and what's wrong with the people running our school board?" asked Tess Blanks, who had lived here all her life before fleeing with her husband, Horace, to the Houston area, where they discovered that the public schools for their two children were significantly better. "Our children fell right into the swing of things in Texas. So guess what? It isn't the children. It's the people running our school system."
It was not unusual before the hurricane to hear complaints about the New Orleans schools, which have long been among the nation's worst, but they never snowballed enough to produce sweeping change.
Same with public housing, which was managed so poorly that the federal government took it over a few years ago. And of course, the local graft, which seems to have become, like the gumbo, a local hallmark.
It may be that much of the population of New Orleans - one of the nation's poorest cities - was too preoccupied with making ends meet to band together to insist on improvements.
The city's easygoing nature and still-obvious charms could have contributed to the complacency. In "A Confederacy of Dunces," by John Kennedy Toole, the eccentric and wastrel Reilly spends much of his time wandering from job to job in the French Quarter, and he refers to the city as "a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation."
Or it could be that many residents, like Reilly, may not have known any better. Cities are often naturally transient. New Orleans before the hurricane was not.
Of 70 localities in the nation with populations of at least 250,000, New Orleans ranked second in the percentage of its American-born population born in the state - 83 percent, according to the census. (Santa Ana, Calif., was first; Las Vegas last.)
Consider the Lower Ninth Ward, a mostly poor, black neighborhood wiped out in the flooding. The census found that 54 percent of its residents had been in their homes for 10 years or more, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Nationally, the figure was 35 percent.
Terrence Fitzmorris, an associate dean and local historian at Tulane University in New Orleans, can trace his ties to the city back to the Civil War. He recalled that when he moved temporarily after the hurricane to Lafayette, La., 135 miles away, he considered himself something of a "neophyte" in the ways of other cities.
"My own experience was, well, this is pretty good," he said. "The city of Lafayette seems to be moving ahead, it seems to be building roads, picking up the garbage, educating its children. It seems to have jobs. There is a life different and perhaps better than you had been living before."
HE said he and his wife had mixed feelings about returning, though they concluded that their hearts were here. "You would hope that people's experiences would translate into actions, that we will not accept it any longer," he said.
The changing climate has not gone unnoticed by elected officials. Opening a special legislative session this month, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco hinted at it when she appealed to lawmakers to approve a state takeover of nearly all the New Orleans public schools. "Families returning with new education experiences will come home with higher expectations," she declared. The takeover was approved last week.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who had styled himself a reformer before the hurricane, also acknowledged the new perspective.
"New Orleanians are very territorial people," Mr. Nagin said. "Some people had never left town. So they had no perspective of what was better from the standpoint of quality. They are going to come back with a different perspective of what should be and what could be. And I think that is going to put pressure on all of us as elected officials."
That would be just fine for returning residents like Sebastian Taylor, who once looked favorably upon his children's education because he was sending them to what was considered one of the city's best public schools. Then he and his family ended up in Baton Rouge, a place not necessarily famed for its schools.
"They offered more aid to the children, as far as school supplies, time and attention," Mr. Taylor said. "The teachers and the staff were more willing to have meetings with the parents. If my kids are going to go back to public schools again, New Orleans is going to have to do better."
One Christian school is accusing a university of bias against it....
University Is Accused of Bias Against Christian Schools
By CAROLYN MARSHALL
Cody Young is an evangelical Christian who attends a religious high school in Southern California. With stellar grades, competitive test scores and an impressive list of extracurricular activities, Mr. Young has mapped a future that includes studying engineering at the University of California and a career in the aerospace industry, his lawyers have said.
But Mr. Young, his teachers and his family fear his beliefs may hurt his chance to attend the university. They say the public university system, which has 10 campuses, discriminates against students from evangelical Christian schools, especially faith-based ones like Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, where Mr. Young is a senior.
Mr. Young, five other Calvary students, the school and the Association of Christian Schools International, which represents 4,000 religious schools, sued the University of California in the summer, accusing it of "viewpoint discrimination" and unfair admission standards that violate the free speech and religious rights of evangelical Christians.
The suit, scheduled for a hearing on Dec. 12 in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, says many of Calvary's best students are at a disadvantage when they apply to the university because admissions officials have refused to certify several of the school's courses on literature, history, social studies and science that use curriculums and textbooks with a Christian viewpoint.
The lawyer for the school, Robert Tyler, said reviewing and approving the course content was an intrusion into private education that amounted to government censorship. "They are trying to secularize private Christian schools," Mr. Tyler said. "They have taken God out of public schools. Now they want to do it at Christian schools."
A lawyer for the university, Christopher M. Patti, called the suit baseless. Acknowledging the university does not accept some courses, Mr. Patti said that more than 43 courses were recognized and that university campuses had offered admission to at least 18 Calvary students since 2002. "Calvary students are perfectly free to take whatever courses they like," Mr. Patti said. "All we are saying is that unapproved courses cannot be submitted to satisfy the requirements for entry."
The suit is being closely watched by free speech advocates, other public universities and Christian education leaders. All see it as a possible harbinger for admissions policies at state universities nationally.
Charles C. Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center at the Freedom Forum, which studies press and religious freedom, said the university was sending a chilling message to religious schools. "If you have to clean up your religious act to get courses accepted, that's a problem," said Mr. Haynes, who has reviewed the long complaint.
Discussing the university, he said: "They certainly have a right to say the student needs to take foundational courses. That's fair. But when you get into the business of saying how a particular subject is taught or if it has too much of a religious overlay, then I think you are crossing a line."
The university maintains that under the state Constitution, the Board of Admissions and Relations With Schools, a faculty committee, has the authority to set academic standards for admissions. Ravi Poorsina, a spokeswoman for the university, said the goal was to ensure that entering students were well-prepared and competitive.
"This is not a viewpoint issue for us," Ms. Poorsina said. "Teach whatever you want. We don't want to be in the position of dictating what is taught. But we do have a right to set standards for admission, and ours are not unreasonable requirements."
A lawyer for the Association of Christian Schools International, Wendell Bird, said the Calvary concerns surfaced two years ago when the admissions board scrutinized more closely courses that emphasized Christianity. In the last year, the board has rejected courses like Christianity's Influence in American History, Special Provenance: Christianity and the American Republic, Christianity and Morality in American Literature and a biology course using textbooks from the Bob Jones University Press and A Beka Book, conservative Christian publishers.
The officials rejected the science courses because the curriculum differed from "empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community," the suit said. Calvary was told to submit a secular curriculum instead. Courses in other subjects were rejected because they were called too narrow or biased.
"What really lights the fire here," Mr. Tyler said, "is when you look at courses the U.C. has approved from other schools. In the titles alone, you can see the discrimination against us."
The university has approved courses on Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and gender and counterculture's effects on literature, he noted. Ms. Poorsina said many courses on Christianity had been accepted, as have Bob Jones science books.
For texts, Ms. Poorsina said, the university wants comprehensive and instructive overviews. A university fact sheet says publishers sometimes acknowledge their books are mainly to teach religion. The sheet has this excerpt from Bob Jones's "Biology for Christian Schools," used in unapproved courses, "The people who have prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second."
The Problem With an Almost-Perfect Genetic World
By AMY HARMON
MIA PETERSON is not a fan of tests. Because she has Down syndrome, she says, she cannot always think as fast as she would like to and tests end up making her feel judged. A recent driving test, for instance, ended in frustration.
Ms. Peterson, 31, the chief of self-advocacy for the National Down Syndrome Society, prefers public speaking and travel. And her test aversion extends to the latest one designed to detect Down in a fetus. "I don't want to think like we're being judged against," Ms. Peterson said. "Not meeting their expectations."
Heralded in the Nov. 10 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, the new prenatal test provides earlier, more reliable results for all women than the current test, which is routinely offered to only older women who are at higher risk. But for people with Down syndrome and the cluster of other conditions subject to prenatal screening, the new test comes with a certain chill.
Because such tests often lead to abortions, people with conditions from mental disability to cystic fibrosis may find their numbers dwindling. As a result, some fear, their lives may become harder just as they are winning the fight for greater inclusion.
"We're trying to make a place for ourselves in society at a time when science is trying to remove at least some of us," said Andrew Imparato, president of the American Association of People With Disabilities, who suffers from bipolar disorder. "For me, it's very scary."
Some bioethicists envision a dystopia where parents who choose to forgo genetic testing are shunned, or their children are denied insurance. Parents and people with disabilities fear they may simply be more lonely. And less money may be devoted to cures and education.
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, for instance, does not endorse prenatal testing, which the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends offering during pregnancy.
"If you can terminate pregnancies with a condition, who is going to put research dollars into it?" said Nancy Press, a professor of medical anthropology at Oregon Health and Science University.
Indeed, the $15 million spent on the new test for Down by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development might have gone instead toward much-needed research on the biochemistry of people living with the condition, said Michael Bérubé, co-director of the disabilities studies program at Pennsylvania State University.
Mr. Bérubé, whose 14-year-old son has Down syndrome, worries that if fewer children are born with the condition, hard-won advances like including them in mainstream schools may lose support. "The more people who think the condition is grounds for termination of a pregnancy, the more likely it will be that you'll wind up with a society that doesn't welcome those people once they're here," he said. "It turns into a vicious cycle."
Anthony Shriver, founder of Best Buddies, a nonprofit organization that helps people with intellectual disabilities form friendships, said smaller numbers will mean even greater social isolation for the people his group serves.
"Loneliness is one of the most significant challenges they face," Mr. Shriver said. "And it would only become more acute as they became a smaller segment of the population."
Beyond the impact on the disabled, disabilities activists say, the implications of prenatal testing for diversity and democracy require more attention than they have so far received.
Lisa Hedley, whose 10-year-old daughter has dwarfism, said the condition is usually not detected prenatally. It is so rare that it has traditionally not been considered worth the expense of the genetic test. Soon, though, pregnant women may be offered a gene-chip technology that can perform hundreds of tests at once for a few hundred dollars.
"It's so complicated," said Ms. Hedley, president of the Children of Difference Foundation. "Would I choose to have my child have a disability? Oh my goodness, no. It's difficult for her. It's difficult for everyone. But difference is what makes the world go round."
Supporters of abortion are especially wary of wading into a discussion over the ethics of prenatal testing, lest they be seen as playing into the opposing side in the fraught national debate over abortion rights. But advocates for people with disabilities are troubled by how much faster the science of prenatal testing is advancing than the public discussion of how it ought to be used.
If no child is ever born again with the fatal childhood disease Tay-Sachs, many might see that as a medical triumph. But what about other conditions, including deafness, which some do not consider to be a disability, and Huntington's Disease, an adult-onset neurological disorder?
Among the difficult choices facing prospective parents in coming years, genetics researchers say, will be the ability to predict the degree of severity in chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome, which can cause mild to moderate retardation.
"Where do you draw the line?" said Mark A. Rothstein, director of the Bioethics Institute at the University of Louisville School of Medicine. "On the one hand we have to view this as a positive in terms of preventing disability and illness. But at what point are we engaging in eugenics and not accepting the normal diversity within a population?"
Abortion, Mr. Rothstein and others fear, could become a kind of "poor man's gene therapy," if cost-conscious health insurance companies see it as less expensive than treating a disabled child. Others argue that prenatal testing will be limited to those who can afford it, leaving the poor to grapple with genetic disability and disease.
Of course, as more conditions are diagnosed in utero, many parents may simply decline testing, or use the information to prepare themselves. But studies have shown that women are considerably more likely to terminate their pregnancies if they know of fetal anomalies.
One study of 53,000 women's choices, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2002, found that the termination rate ranged from about 1 percent for conditions that were classified as having no impact on the quality of life, to 50 percent for those considered to have a serious impact.
Women were far more likely to choose abortions for disabilities that have a high probability of affecting cognitive functioning. For conditions that have little or no impact on the quality of life but might require medical or surgical therapy, the abortion rate was 16 percent, but doubled for those likely to cause mental dysfunction.
As for Down syndrome, doctors estimate that about 80 percent of women who get positive test results choose abortion.
Still, some who work with Down syndrome children don't believe the future is that grim. Allen C. Crocker, director of the Down syndrome program at Children's Hospital Boston, believes that number of women who choose to continue their pregnancies will go up in the coming years.
Even as genetic tests appear to have lowered the number of Down syndrome births, he said, social conditions for people with the conditions have improved markedly.
"We're in the midst of a gentle social revolution," said Dr. Crocker, and, he believes, it may just outpace the scientific one.
On the Rockettes
The Sweat-Soaked Life of a Glamorous Rockette
By SUSAN DOMINUS
ONE after the other, like beautiful, glittering drones, the Rockettes spilled off an elevator onto the stage level at Radio City Music Hall. Dressed in sequined skating costume, their shoulders swaying, they sauntered down a narrow hallway and gathered off stage right, waiting to go on for the holiday show's opening night. All flashing the same red-lipstick smile, batting the same fake eyelashes, they flirted with crew members, adjusted their Statue of Liberty-style crowns or wished one another good luck.
One dancer told her friend she had to go to the bathroom, but was nervous that she didn't have enough time. "Just go," her friend reassured her, and with a clattering of her tap shoes, the worrier was off.
Amy Love Osgood, 26, a first-year Rockette, was going over a tricky part of the opening number. "Jump, shuffle, leap, toe," they repeated. Meanwhile huddled at the edge of the curtain, one young woman caught a glimpse of her parents, seated near the front, and clapped in delight.
Ordinarily, the dancers also would have been able to see the familiar faces of the 35 orchestra members. But two days before, the musicians had gone on strike, and after two preseason shows were canceled, the Rockettes, for the first time in the 73-year history of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, started the season performing to a digital recording. They miss the musicians, several say, not to mention the extra energy they get from the live music. And energy is something they dearly need.
This is high season for the Rockettes, three solid months of steady work, solid pay, grateful audiences and all the excitement of dancing in New York with a world-famous company. But it's also a time of gruelingly hard work, of seven dance numbers and six costume changes per show, as many as five shows in a 13-hour day, and as many as six days of work a week.
And then there are the crowds: the girls in red velvet and Mary Janes and the tourists with laminated folding maps, so determined to see the show that they line up first thing in the morning, some willing to pay as much as $250 for an orchestra seat. All in all, 1.2 million people came to see the show last year, bringing in $74 million in ticket sales over nine weeks. Even long before the peak of the season, a Rockette who finishes a 10 a.m. show must fight her way through a mob just to get a gulp of fresh air or a coffee around the corner. Looking toward the Christmas season, most people foresee a hectic time of year; for the Rockettes, it's like standing in front of an onrushing train.
The Rockettes are instantly recognizable symbols, but what they represent depends on who is doing the interpreting: to some they're Stepford dancers, objectified women reduced to nothing but legs and teeth; to others they're glamour personified, the last, cherished remnants of a "Guys and Dolls"-style nightlife; and to yet another part of the audience they're glorious kitsch, as amusing as they are entertaining. But one thing is constant: their sheer physical accomplishment. Even in a city full of sweating, striving talent, the Rockettes may well be the hardest-working women in show business.
In recent years their show has become increasingly athletic (and a hint sexier), with more kick lines and aerobic dance routines. Yet there is still charm in the organization's old-fashioned ways - the labels reading "Miss Love" in each of Ms. Love Osgood's costumes, the camaraderie among crew members and dancers, the protective watch the management keeps on its charges, monitoring every conversation they have with reporters.
A fair number of the performers spend the rest of the year working in musical theater, but for others this is their only time dancing onstage. Off season, Carrie Janell Hamner, 24, auditions for television pilots and does improv comedy; Jaime Lyn Windrow, 29, studies nutrition; and Meg Huggins, 33, models and works, as do so many others, as a Pilates instructor.
Rockettes tend to get asked back year after year, which makes it one of the steadiest gigs in the business - and one of the few gigs for jazz and tap-dancers who don't also sing. Radio City management would not comment on what Rockettes earn, but dancers say they typically get paid on par with Broadway dancers, a salary that breaks down to about $135 a show. But because they perform so many more times a day, and get overtime for the third, fourth and fifth shows, the season is about as lucrative as dancing jobs get. Year-round health benefits and solid friendships keep some dancers loyal to the job for upward of a decade, although most women walk away from its endurance challenge by the time they are in their mid-30's.
Paradoxically, dancing in this row of identical women is also a job with more of an identity than, say, performing in the chorus of a new Broadway show. "People used to say, 'What do you do?', and I'd say, 'Oh, I'm a dancer,' or 'Oh, I teach dance,' " Ms. Love Osgood said. "But as soon as you say, actually, I dance at Radio City Music Hall, people gasp." She seems to avoid introducing herself as an actual Rockette, as if that would be immodest.
A sweet-faced young woman with an endearing, goofy giggle, she grew up in a small town in Arizona, taking dance classes at what she calls "your average Dolly Dingle dance studio," just a run-of-the-mill local place. She moved to Los Angeles to dance when she was 18, but found only the sort of opportunities that would have required her to "put on a bikini and wiggle my hips for music videos." So she worked as an office assistant and started choreographing jazz pieces at the evangelical church she attended.
She married a man she met at church, and in 2003 they moved to New York, where she landed a few dancing parts, and then she had a baby. But along the way she met a friend who turned out to be a Rockette. "My grandfather, who was from Brooklyn, always used to say, 'Amy, are you going to grow up and be a Rockette?' And I'd be like, 'What's a Rockette?' " she said. "But he'd show me what they were when we watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
"When I watched the show, I used to think, how hard could it be to be a Rockette? Then I'd go to the auditions, and I saw it's actually really hard. I think the challenge of that made me want it even more." When her son was 7 months old, she tried out a fourth time. To her shock, she made it.
She and her husband couldn't afford child care, so to get in shape she took the baby jogging with her in Central Park. "People would stare at me - here's the baby in the jogging stroller, and here's the mom doing kicks," she laughed.
Until rehearsal starts, though, Rockettes agree there is no way to prepare for the 1,500 kicks they do during a five-show day. The adrenaline of an audience gets you through it, as does the thrill of seeing the pieces coming together, 72 legs kicking eye-high in perfect unison. "Even in rehearsal, when we did kick lines, I'd get teary," Ms. Love Osgood said. "The other dancers would tell me, wait till you get onstage - you'll get chills, and you'll want to start laughing and crying at the same time. It's a huge rush."
The next morning, however, it's a different story. One Sunday after the cast had performed its first five-show day, a group of dancers rushed to the ninth-floor physical therapy room, where Elaine Winslow, a former Rockette turned athletic trainer, keeps two large basins of water chilled to about 45 degrees. The dancers use them to ice down swollen feet and sore lower backs. Rockettes frequently suffer knee injuries, but neck injuries are also a concern ever since they started wearing a tight, heavy hat with reindeer antlers that light up. "We call it the vise," one dancer said.
Morning-Star Mosley, the Rockette who had encouraged Ms. Love Osgood to audition, submerged herself up to her waist. Chrischell White-Spraggins was trying hard to get all of her leg in, but kept gasping and flinching from the cold. "Keep it in," Ms. Mosley advised her. "Do not take it out. It makes it harder."
Samantha Berger, a first-year squeezing into the tub, flipped through Us magazine as she iced. "I woke up in so much pain, I felt like I was moving even when I wasn't," she said. "I'd known it would be tough, but I did not expect this. I really didn't."
Ms. Berger said that after the last show she couldn't even hobble to the subway, so she splurged on a cab to her Upper West Side sublet. But at least she had found an affordable home in Manhattan. Ms. White-Spraggins, however, had caught the R train back to Astoria. "And I didn't even get a seat," she added.
Alicia Luciano, a 22-year-old former Miss New Jersey, caught a ride with her father back to Staten Island, but they hit tunnel traffic, and she didn't get home until 2 a.m. - 20 hours after she had left that morning.
Ms. Love Osgood, who lives in Washington Heights, couldn't face the A train, which was running local, so she shelled out $25 for a car service. Too tired to celebrate the end of the weekend, she stared out the window until the George Washington Bridge and her exit came into view. "All I could think was, oooh, I have to do this again next weekend," she said.
With hours like that, Rockettes are forced to catch a bit of sleep whenever it's humanly possible. In the half-hour of downtime between shows, they frequently pull out a pillow and sleeping bag or favorite security blanket. And right there on the floor of their dressing rooms, piled head to toe, they fall dead to the world. But they're up again before their sweat-soaked costumes have even dried out from the last show. On the odd day off, some relax or get an inexpensive massage. Ms. Love Osgood prepares her family's meals for the coming week, roasting a chicken, making chili, and cooking baby food. "Once I get home, I can't really think about my body much," she said.
Eight days after opening night, for the fourth show of a five-show day, the cast was starting to show its fatigue. Behind the curtain, as the recording of the orchestra cued up, one woman adjusted her leotard to hide a tear in her stocking. Another actually crawled up the steps to the top platform. She was probably hamming it up - but not entirely.
Ninety minutes and 300 kicks later, wearing uncomfortably heavy robes from the Nativity scene, the women rushed off stage, back to their dressing rooms where their cellphones and PowerBars and blankets and oatmeal awaited them. Ms. Love Osgood, in Room 303, was using her breast pump discreetly near the shower. Two floors up, in Room 503, some of the most senior Rockettes were giddy with exhaustion and relief that the day would soon be over. Only partially dressed, Lora Anderson and Dani Parish Rubin started dancing around to Blondie.
Just then a dance captain came in to give the performers notes. "The Deets" - the nickname for the director of choreography, John Dietrich - "says the middle is slow on the kicks," she said, looking pointedly in Ms. Anderson's and Ms. Parish Rubin's direction.
"Oh yeah?" Ms. Anderson replied. "Well, then maybe they should turn up the music. Maybe they should turn up the orchestra. Bring back the orchestra! Bring back the orchestra!" she started chanting. "After all, it is Radio City Music Hall." And what about the little old harpist whom she always said hi to, she wondered aloud. "I mean, she's not going to have a job."
Blondie gave way to Duran Duran, and then to the song they always play to energize themselves for the day's last show: "The Final Countdown," by Europe, which Ms. Anderson and Ms. Parish Rubin danced to, Flashdance-style, then in a sped-up, robotic version of the opening number.
They brought the music with them as they headed down for the 9 p.m. show. As the doors of the crowded elevator closed, all the dancers, exhausted as they were, were laughing and singing along to the words, fingers pointing in the air: "It's the final countdown!"
No one would have known it to look at her, but Ms. Love Osgood wasn't feeling that energy. During the one number that she and a few other dancers sit out, she stole upstairs to call her husband on her cellphone. "I don't know if I can finish the show," she confided. Her body felt leaden; her mind had melted from sheer overstimulation and exhaustion. She was practically shaking. "I could start to cry right now," she said. He responded with the things husbands are expected to say in such situations - I know you can do it, you're almost done.
"I guess so," she said, and hung up.
She did, indeed, get through a high-spirited number dressed as a Ragdoll, and then the interminable Nativity scene. "Standing still in that heavy robe, you can feel yourself dripping sweat," she says. Finally, she took another car uptown, arriving home around 11:15. She heated up a frozen pizza, all there was in the fridge, and then the baby woke up. She'd have a four-show day the next day.
As demanding as it is, she said, it may be the only dancing job she will ever want. When she's not exhausted, she loves goofing and flopping around in the Ragdoll costume, the satisfaction of a perfectly timed fall during the Wooden Soldier routine, the little girls she sees dancing in the aisle and throwing their legs in the air. She hasn't decided if she will start auditioning for anything else after the season ends, but she is sure she wants to do the Rockette season again next year. "Every once in a while my husband text-messages me," she says. "All it says is, 'I can't believe you're a Rockette!'"
On fighting in Iraq (of course)
Sectarian Hatred Pulls Apart Iraq's Mixed Towns
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 19 - Abu Noor's town had become so hostile to Shiites that his wife had not left the house in a month, his family could no longer go to the medical clinic and mortar shells had been lobbed at the houses of two of his religious leaders.
"I couldn't open the door and stand in my yard," he said.
So when Abu Noor, a Shiite from Tarmiya, a heavily Sunni Arab town north of here, ran into an old friend, a Sunni who faced his own problems in a Shiite district in Baghdad, the two decided to switch houses. They even shared a moving van.
Two and a half years after the American invasion, deep divides that have long split Iraqi society have violently burst into full view. As the hatred between Sunni Arabs and Shiites hardens and the relentless toll of bombings and assassinations grows, families are leaving their mixed towns and cities for safer areas where they will not automatically be targets. In doing so, they are creating increasingly polarized enclaves and redrawing the sectarian map of Iraq, especially in Baghdad and the belt of cities around it.
The evidence is so far mostly anecdotal - the government is not tracking the moves. In a rough count, about 20 cities and towns around Baghdad are segregating, according to accounts by local sheiks, Iraqi nongovernmental organizations and military officials, and the families themselves.
Those areas are among the most mixed and the most violent in Iraq - according to the American military, 85 percent of attacks in the country are in four provinces including Baghdad, and two others to its north and west.
The volatile sectarian mix is a holdover from the rule of Saddam Hussein, who gave favors to Sunni Arab landowners in the lush farmland around Baghdad to reinforce loyalties and to protect against Shiites in the south. Shiites came to work the land, and sometimes to own it. Abu Noor moved to Tarmiya in 1987 after the government gave his father land.
"The most violent places are the towns and cities around Baghdad," said Sheik Jalal al-Dien al-Sagheer, a member of Parliament from a religious Shiite party. "It was a circle. It was invented. It did not exist before."
One result has been carnage on a serious scale. In Tarmiya, a close Shiite friend of Abu Noor who helped pack his furniture and drove it to Baghdad received a letter warning him to leave the town or be killed. Nineteen days later he was shot to death in his carpentry shop in front of his father and brother. In all, at least eight of Abu Noor's friends and close relatives, including a brother, have been killed since the beginning of 2004.
The motives for the attacks are often complicated. The complex webs of tribal affiliations and social status that rule everyday life in Iraq do not always line up as simply as Shiite against Sunni. But increasingly, despite the urging of some Shiite religious leaders and Sunni politicians, the attacks have been. A mostly Sunni Arab fringe is carrying out vicious attacks against civilians, often Shiites, while Shiite death squads are openly stalking Sunnis for revenge, and the Shiite-dominated government makes regular arrests in Sunni Arab neighborhoods.
Expressions of prejudice have been making their way onto walls and into leaflets, too.
In Tarmiya, writing was scrawled on the walls of the city's main streets: "Get out of here, Badr followers! Traitors! Spies!" it said, using a reference to an armed wing of a religious Shiite party. In Madaen, a mixed city south of Baghdad, a list of names appeared on the walls of several municipal buildings in a warning to leave. Many did.
In Samarra last fall, leaflets appeared warning in clumsy childish script that Samarra is a Sunni city.
"We thought at first that they were written by kids and that someone would discipline them," said Sheik Hadi al-Gharawi, an imam who left Samarra, north of Baghdad, a few months ago and now lives in Baghdad. "But later we found they were adults and they were serious."
His nephew, Ahmed Samir al-Gharawi, 15, who moved separately with his family in September, was one of two Shiites in his high school class in Samarra. In January, classmates were probing to see whether his family had voted in a national election. "They were joking to find the truth," he said. "I didn't tell them."
Samarra is a holy place in Shiite Islam with two sacred shrines, and Shiites have lived there for hundreds of years. Even so, in a pattern similar to that in Tarmiya, Shiite imams were attacked and businesses became targets, Sheik Gharawi said, and Shiites began to leave.
Emad Fadhel, a Shiite business owner who settled there 38 years ago, estimated that 200 to 260 Shiite families lived in the city before 2003, a figure he said he learned while delivering medicine to poor families. Of those, fewer than 20 remain, said Mr. Fadhel, who moved with his family last August, shortly after a hand grenade was thrown at his father.
The terror hit Ali Nasir Jabr, a 12-year-old with sad eyes, on Aug. 20, when four men with guns entered his family's house in Samarra and began remarking about the family's Shiite identity. Ali, who was feigning sleep on a mat on the floor, said he heard his mother answer that the family had been living in the city for more than 18 years.
Then the men shot to death his mother and father, two brothers and a sister. Ali ran to a neighbor's house to call for help, and he then returned alone to wait for rescue workers.
"I checked them, I kissed them, one by one," Ali said, sitting in a mosque in central Baghdad, his pants cinched tight with a small belt. "Maybe somebody was still alive."
Ali now lives in Kut in southern Iraq with his uncle. Requirements for autopsies, death certificates and funeral plans forced him to travel to three cities with the five bodies in the summer heat. He helped wrap and carry each one. At the funeral in a mixed area north of here, a dozen friends with guns stood guard, his uncle said.
Some Iraqis, despite years of mass killings of Kurds and Shiites during Mr. Hussein's rule, still argue that sectarian divides did not exist in Iraq before the American invasion. But scratching just beneath the surface turns up hurt in most Shiite homes. Abu Noor recalls asking a high school teacher in Tarmiya the meaning of the word shroogi, a derogatory term for Shiite. Shiites tried to hide their last names. The military had a glass ceiling.
These days, sectarian profiling on the part of the government, which is Shiite, runs in reverse, with some people buying fake national identity cards to hide last names that are obviously Sunni Arab.
For the people who have stayed in their mixed neighborhoods, life has become circumscribed. In Ur, a neighborhood in Baghdad that is 80 percent Shiite, Wasan Foad, 32, a Sunni Arab, grew finely tuned to the timing of suicide bombings. Mr. Foad recalled feeling people's eyes on him and hearing whispering in the market against Sunnis after a big bombing in Hilla this winter.
"We were like prisoners in our home," said Mr. Foad, who moved this summer with his wife and their three young sons to the majority Sunni neighborhood of Khudra.
Migration patterns are different for Sunni Arabs. Threats to them have come less often from anonymous letters than from large-scale arrests by the police and the Iraqi Army, largely Shiite, criticized by Sunnis as arbitrary and unfairly focused on Sunni neighborhoods. Sheik Hussein Ali Mansour al-Kharaouli, who is associated with the Iraqi Islamic Party, said Sunni families have been moving from Jibelah, Muhawail, Iskandariya and Haswa, all south of Baghdad, to escape arrests.
The net is wide, and the treatment can be rough. Thiab Ahmed, a Sunni Arab from Madaen, a town of severe sectarian strife south of Baghdad, said his brother, Khalid, died in custody in an Interior Ministry prison on Oct. 20, seven days after Iraqi police commandos arrested him.
Mr. Ahmed, speaking at a Sunni Arab rights organization, Freedom Voice, showed photographs of a man whose body was mutilated and riddled with drill holes, a method often used by Shiite interrogators.
"I found him in the morgue," Mr. Ahmed said, his face hard. "He was labeled 'unknown body.' "
Arrest warrants were the reason Abu Noor's Sunni friend wanted to leave Baghdad. Two of his brothers were wanted by the police, Abu Noor said, and the family thought it would be best to leave the area, a largely Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad called Huriya. The family had tribal roots in Abu Noor's town and felt safe there.
The families breathe easier in their new lives. A whole community of Shiites from Samarra, Tarmiya and other largely Sunni cities is living comfortably in modest houses along the narrow shop-lined streets of Huriya.
But there is bitterness. A former officers' club that Abu Noor helped turn into a makeshift mosque for Shiite prayer services in 2003 has been turned into a playground, he said. He struggles to keep hard feelings out of his relationship with his Sunni friend. Every month the man comes to collect the difference in rent: the Baghdad apartment is more expensive, and Abu Noor pays the $140 difference.
Last week, Abu Noor applied for a job in the new Iraqi Army. It is the way he can legally take revenge, he said.
Mr. Fadhel, the Shiite businessman from Samarra, now lives not far from Abu Noor. When asked if he would return to his old home, he told an Iraqi fable. In it, a father leaves his son to care for a dancing snake that gives golden coins. The greedy son tries to kill the snake to take all its gold and is fatally bitten, but not before he cuts off its tail. The father returns and finds his dead son and the wounded snake. He tries to make amends in vain.
The snake replied that the man would never forget his son and it would never forget its tail. " 'We can never be friends again,' " Mr. Fadhel said.
On people returning to New Orleans. Interesting article.
Seeing Life Outside New Orleans Alters Life Inside It
By CLIFFORD J. LEVY
NEW ORLEANS
TALK to the people trickling back here, and it becomes apparent that before the hurricane, many had about as much experience living elsewhere as Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist in one of the seminal novels about New Orleans, "A Confederacy of Dunces," who had set foot outside this exceedingly rooted city only once (and rued doing so).
But after tasting life elsewhere, they are returning with tales of public schools that actually supply textbooks published after the Reagan era, of public housing developments that look like suburban enclaves, of government workers who are not routinely dragged off to prison after pocketing bribes.
Local leaders have realized for weeks that they must reckon with widespread anger over how they handled the relief effort. But it is dawning on them that they are also going to have to contend with demands from residents who grew accustomed, however briefly, to the virtues of other communities.
Many evacuees seem to be arriving with less tolerance for the failings of a city that under its glitzy makeup has long had an unsightly side. They do not want New Orleans to lose its distinctive character - after all, that is one reason they are back and vowing to rebuild. But they say their expectations have changed.
"What's wrong with our school system, and what's wrong with the people running our school board?" asked Tess Blanks, who had lived here all her life before fleeing with her husband, Horace, to the Houston area, where they discovered that the public schools for their two children were significantly better. "Our children fell right into the swing of things in Texas. So guess what? It isn't the children. It's the people running our school system."
It was not unusual before the hurricane to hear complaints about the New Orleans schools, which have long been among the nation's worst, but they never snowballed enough to produce sweeping change.
Same with public housing, which was managed so poorly that the federal government took it over a few years ago. And of course, the local graft, which seems to have become, like the gumbo, a local hallmark.
It may be that much of the population of New Orleans - one of the nation's poorest cities - was too preoccupied with making ends meet to band together to insist on improvements.
The city's easygoing nature and still-obvious charms could have contributed to the complacency. In "A Confederacy of Dunces," by John Kennedy Toole, the eccentric and wastrel Reilly spends much of his time wandering from job to job in the French Quarter, and he refers to the city as "a comfortable metropolis which has a certain apathy and stagnation."
Or it could be that many residents, like Reilly, may not have known any better. Cities are often naturally transient. New Orleans before the hurricane was not.
Of 70 localities in the nation with populations of at least 250,000, New Orleans ranked second in the percentage of its American-born population born in the state - 83 percent, according to the census. (Santa Ana, Calif., was first; Las Vegas last.)
Consider the Lower Ninth Ward, a mostly poor, black neighborhood wiped out in the flooding. The census found that 54 percent of its residents had been in their homes for 10 years or more, according to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center. Nationally, the figure was 35 percent.
Terrence Fitzmorris, an associate dean and local historian at Tulane University in New Orleans, can trace his ties to the city back to the Civil War. He recalled that when he moved temporarily after the hurricane to Lafayette, La., 135 miles away, he considered himself something of a "neophyte" in the ways of other cities.
"My own experience was, well, this is pretty good," he said. "The city of Lafayette seems to be moving ahead, it seems to be building roads, picking up the garbage, educating its children. It seems to have jobs. There is a life different and perhaps better than you had been living before."
HE said he and his wife had mixed feelings about returning, though they concluded that their hearts were here. "You would hope that people's experiences would translate into actions, that we will not accept it any longer," he said.
The changing climate has not gone unnoticed by elected officials. Opening a special legislative session this month, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco hinted at it when she appealed to lawmakers to approve a state takeover of nearly all the New Orleans public schools. "Families returning with new education experiences will come home with higher expectations," she declared. The takeover was approved last week.
Mayor C. Ray Nagin, who had styled himself a reformer before the hurricane, also acknowledged the new perspective.
"New Orleanians are very territorial people," Mr. Nagin said. "Some people had never left town. So they had no perspective of what was better from the standpoint of quality. They are going to come back with a different perspective of what should be and what could be. And I think that is going to put pressure on all of us as elected officials."
That would be just fine for returning residents like Sebastian Taylor, who once looked favorably upon his children's education because he was sending them to what was considered one of the city's best public schools. Then he and his family ended up in Baton Rouge, a place not necessarily famed for its schools.
"They offered more aid to the children, as far as school supplies, time and attention," Mr. Taylor said. "The teachers and the staff were more willing to have meetings with the parents. If my kids are going to go back to public schools again, New Orleans is going to have to do better."
One Christian school is accusing a university of bias against it....
University Is Accused of Bias Against Christian Schools
By CAROLYN MARSHALL
Cody Young is an evangelical Christian who attends a religious high school in Southern California. With stellar grades, competitive test scores and an impressive list of extracurricular activities, Mr. Young has mapped a future that includes studying engineering at the University of California and a career in the aerospace industry, his lawyers have said.
But Mr. Young, his teachers and his family fear his beliefs may hurt his chance to attend the university. They say the public university system, which has 10 campuses, discriminates against students from evangelical Christian schools, especially faith-based ones like Calvary Chapel Christian School in Murrieta, where Mr. Young is a senior.
Mr. Young, five other Calvary students, the school and the Association of Christian Schools International, which represents 4,000 religious schools, sued the University of California in the summer, accusing it of "viewpoint discrimination" and unfair admission standards that violate the free speech and religious rights of evangelical Christians.
The suit, scheduled for a hearing on Dec. 12 in Federal District Court in Los Angeles, says many of Calvary's best students are at a disadvantage when they apply to the university because admissions officials have refused to certify several of the school's courses on literature, history, social studies and science that use curriculums and textbooks with a Christian viewpoint.
The lawyer for the school, Robert Tyler, said reviewing and approving the course content was an intrusion into private education that amounted to government censorship. "They are trying to secularize private Christian schools," Mr. Tyler said. "They have taken God out of public schools. Now they want to do it at Christian schools."
A lawyer for the university, Christopher M. Patti, called the suit baseless. Acknowledging the university does not accept some courses, Mr. Patti said that more than 43 courses were recognized and that university campuses had offered admission to at least 18 Calvary students since 2002. "Calvary students are perfectly free to take whatever courses they like," Mr. Patti said. "All we are saying is that unapproved courses cannot be submitted to satisfy the requirements for entry."
The suit is being closely watched by free speech advocates, other public universities and Christian education leaders. All see it as a possible harbinger for admissions policies at state universities nationally.
Charles C. Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center at the Freedom Forum, which studies press and religious freedom, said the university was sending a chilling message to religious schools. "If you have to clean up your religious act to get courses accepted, that's a problem," said Mr. Haynes, who has reviewed the long complaint.
Discussing the university, he said: "They certainly have a right to say the student needs to take foundational courses. That's fair. But when you get into the business of saying how a particular subject is taught or if it has too much of a religious overlay, then I think you are crossing a line."
The university maintains that under the state Constitution, the Board of Admissions and Relations With Schools, a faculty committee, has the authority to set academic standards for admissions. Ravi Poorsina, a spokeswoman for the university, said the goal was to ensure that entering students were well-prepared and competitive.
"This is not a viewpoint issue for us," Ms. Poorsina said. "Teach whatever you want. We don't want to be in the position of dictating what is taught. But we do have a right to set standards for admission, and ours are not unreasonable requirements."
A lawyer for the Association of Christian Schools International, Wendell Bird, said the Calvary concerns surfaced two years ago when the admissions board scrutinized more closely courses that emphasized Christianity. In the last year, the board has rejected courses like Christianity's Influence in American History, Special Provenance: Christianity and the American Republic, Christianity and Morality in American Literature and a biology course using textbooks from the Bob Jones University Press and A Beka Book, conservative Christian publishers.
The officials rejected the science courses because the curriculum differed from "empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community," the suit said. Calvary was told to submit a secular curriculum instead. Courses in other subjects were rejected because they were called too narrow or biased.
"What really lights the fire here," Mr. Tyler said, "is when you look at courses the U.C. has approved from other schools. In the titles alone, you can see the discrimination against us."
The university has approved courses on Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and gender and counterculture's effects on literature, he noted. Ms. Poorsina said many courses on Christianity had been accepted, as have Bob Jones science books.
For texts, Ms. Poorsina said, the university wants comprehensive and instructive overviews. A university fact sheet says publishers sometimes acknowledge their books are mainly to teach religion. The sheet has this excerpt from Bob Jones's "Biology for Christian Schools," used in unapproved courses, "The people who have prepared this book have tried consistently to put the Word of God first and science second."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 05:50 am (UTC)...
I want to know if I can get into college if I took a science class taught with a textbook that teaches witchcraft and wizardry first and science second. 'Cause that would be awesome.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 05:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 06:05 am (UTC)If the parents can't handle the disorder/disease/defect, then they should be able to abort. End of story, pretty much. Handle means economically, emotionally, and temporally. Some people just don't have time to learn the proper ways to take care of kids with certain whatevers.
It may seem minor to some, but a single Down's kid in a already finantially-stretched family can be devastating. Not to mention unfair to the kids already there. Deafness in a totally hearing family can be equally devastating, both to the family and the kid. Mostly because, if the kid doesn't learn ASL while it's little, the language won't 'stick'. And if the parents are learning at the same time the kid is, it's all down the drain.
On the last article, about the discriminated christian school:
Much more easy to respond to. the Science classes need to be able to pass mustard with the general scientific community. History needs to pass with it's own community, although there is more leeway due to the nature of history. Math, I'd hope, doesn't have biases like this. So, yeah. If the school's classes aren't up to snuff, then the poor kid shouldn't get in.
...I'm being long and wordy. :7
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 10:14 am (UTC)And as for the story about the Christian schools? Well I don't care if they mention God as long as the rest is sound -- tell me what the heck the problem is especially with literature from a Christian viewpoint? That's ridiculous!
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 08:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 05:50 am (UTC)...
I want to know if I can get into college if I took a science class taught with a textbook that teaches witchcraft and wizardry first and science second. 'Cause that would be awesome.
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 05:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 06:05 am (UTC)If the parents can't handle the disorder/disease/defect, then they should be able to abort. End of story, pretty much. Handle means economically, emotionally, and temporally. Some people just don't have time to learn the proper ways to take care of kids with certain whatevers.
It may seem minor to some, but a single Down's kid in a already finantially-stretched family can be devastating. Not to mention unfair to the kids already there. Deafness in a totally hearing family can be equally devastating, both to the family and the kid. Mostly because, if the kid doesn't learn ASL while it's little, the language won't 'stick'. And if the parents are learning at the same time the kid is, it's all down the drain.
On the last article, about the discriminated christian school:
Much more easy to respond to. the Science classes need to be able to pass mustard with the general scientific community. History needs to pass with it's own community, although there is more leeway due to the nature of history. Math, I'd hope, doesn't have biases like this. So, yeah. If the school's classes aren't up to snuff, then the poor kid shouldn't get in.
...I'm being long and wordy. :7
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 10:14 am (UTC)And as for the story about the Christian schools? Well I don't care if they mention God as long as the rest is sound -- tell me what the heck the problem is especially with literature from a Christian viewpoint? That's ridiculous!
no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 08:46 am (UTC)