WIR

Week in Review

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Illustration by Alyssa Xu
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BY BARBARA GALLETLY, SAM COCHRAN, AND ALEX ZEVIN

Food Fight

When an unhappy liberal student doused Pat Buchanan with a serving of salad dressing during his visit to Western Michigan State University last Thursday, CNN dismissed it as "off-beat news." We at the Indy are less quick to write it off as such. The incident, in fact, is indicative of a wave of aggressive behavior throughout the Midwest involving students using food to fight off the conservative scourge. Two days prior to this attack, another student tossed a pie at William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, during his speech at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana.

Both students could face grave consequences. Buchanan's assailant, a student at local Kalamazoo Valley Community College, was arrested on the spot, but later released on bail set at $100. He now faces a misdemeanor charge for disrupting the peace; had Buchanan pressed charges, he could have faced a felony, one authority told the Associated Press. Witnesses say that Buchanan's attacker shouted "Stop the bigotry!" at the über-conservative talking head to protest his presence on campus during the celebration of the birthday of Cesar Chavez, the late Mexican-American labor leader.

Kristol's attacker, meanwhile, faces expulsion.

Whereas Buchanan cut his appearance short, Kristol just wiped the pie off his face and continued to speak-cheered on by the largely Quaker, peace-loving student body. Conservatives, nonetheless, take notice: given this wave of attacks, it may be wise to stay at home.

-BG

Lunch Money

Students are having a really hard time this week. Three sixth-graders in West Seattle, Washington were suspended for five days last week for trying to use counterfeit money in the cafeteria. According to Reuters, the lunch lady reported the 12-year-old boy when he tried to use a fake dollar bill to buy beef jerky not once, but twice in two days. It was on the second day (the rascal got away with it the first time) that school officials nabbed him. To investigate the alleged forgery, school administrators enlisted the help of the big guys, the Seattle Police.

After a brief investigation, a police spokesman announced Monday morning that the little guys had used an aunt's computer to create and print out 20 dollars in one-dollar bills. They then, very generously at that, brought them to school to share with friends. While so far only eight of the original 20 bills have been tracked down, it is not suspected that any more are in circulation. Police remain unsure whether or not they will file charges against the middle-schoolers, but insist, "They should have known better."

-BG

Patience, Young Skywalkers

Nerds-is there anything they won't do for science fiction? Last week diehard Star Wars fans began lining up outside Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood to await the release of the final installment of the prequel trilogy, Revenge of the Sith, set to open May 19. Only, the movie isn't playing there-film producers opted instead to open the film at the ArcLight Theater, a mile away. Still, the fans aren't budging. Despite confirmations by theater owners and Star Wars producers of the contrary, line members insist that they are at the right place-or at least rightful. It was at the Chinese Theater that the original movie premiered in 1977. It was there that director George Lucas and cast members (C3PO and R2D2 included) left their prints in the cement court. It is there that Episode Three belongs. Thus it is there that fans will remain-for the next six weeks.

Don't these people have jobs? Many of them, in fact, do not. I even called to ask, using the number for the nearby payphone posted on www.liningup.net, the group's official website. At my request, Joe, 37, yelled to fellow fans to ask how many were unemployed; and what sounded like dozens of people cheered. Joe, however, is not. Like others, he comes when he can. Line organizers log the amount of time spent by each person to determine their number in line come opening day.

Given that the movie will show elsewhere, this would be a complete waste of time if they weren't doing it for charity. As of last week, these devoted, albeit slightly irrational, fans had raised over $8,100 for the Starlight Starbright Children's Foundation. For those so inclined, the New York contingent of the fundraiser will begin April 30 at the Ziegfield Theater on 54th Street.

That payphone number, by the way, is (323) 462-9609. Call them. They're bored.

-SC

Delay Terri-Schiavos His Political Career

Terri Schiavo died almost two weeks ago. The extraordinary fight to keep Terri Schiavo alive, however, continues to ripple through the American political landscape. And if the furor over her feeding-tube made no sense to somewhere close to 80 percent of the country, the fallout from Congress's intervention in the courts certainly does. One woman's body, heart-thumping in supine aphasia, simply cannot bear a whole nation's mortal angst. There is bound to be spillover, as was no doubt the intention of those who pushed so hard for Schiavo to continue breathing.

Foucault described modern society as panoptic-a prison in which the citizen or "the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at." Terri Schiavo really didn't know whether she was being looked at. But as a symbolic body, her message clearly is that other bodies-our bodies-may be watched and acted upon. Perhaps this message was too clear in the Schiavo case, which would explain the public ire that continues to mount this week against House Majority Leader Tom Delay. Even members of his own party have begun to question Delay's leadership with Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut) telling the Associated Press last Sunday, "Tom's conduct is hurting the Republican Party." Shays called for Delay to step down as Majority Leader.

The latest controversy over Delay began in the aftermath of his Schiavo campaign, when US courts on every level deferred to the lower Florida court ruling that Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed. Delay had this to say about the judges involved: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." Whether or not they should "answer for their behavior" in this life or the next, it is important to note that Delay's threat against them is deeply personal, implicitly bodily. Delay has since refused to back down, adding recently at a conference entitled "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," that it is time for Congress to "reassert our constitutional authority over the courts." Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) vividly elaborated on Delay's threats when he wondered aloud, and on the Senate floor, if recent attacks on judges weren't really the result of "judges making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public," which "builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence."

President Bush and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist have distanced themselves from comments such as these, saying they believe in an "independent judiciary." Whether or not Tom Delay-who is also being investigated by a grand jury for allegedly funneling illegal corporate donations to Republican House members in Texas-resigns in the coming weeks may be less interesting than the putative reasons for his censure. Will Delay fall for an ethics violation? Or will he be picked out from within by members of his own party, fearful about their chances in the midterm elections in 2006? One suspects that whatever the given reasons, it will not be for breaching the boundaries between legislative and judicial bodies, which practice in the name of powerless, vegetative bodies. There would be a certain justice in that.

-AZ

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