The Vanderbilt Torch

Freedom of Safety

As was well reported by the Hustler, in September of this year, two gay men, a recent graduate and a current undergraduate, were the victims of an unprovoked assault by another student and his friend. According to several Vanderbilt Student Government members, VSG President Cara Bilotta “strongly encouraged” all VSG members to attend the Safe Zone program, a workshop sponsored by the GLBT Resource Office designed to educate and inform students about “cultural identity, values, and stereotypes” in the greater community.

Each attendee at the workshop was given a packet, since obtained by the Torch, containing a variety of terms, strategies, and exercises, which range from productive and thought provoking, to outdated and absurd.

Florida Flexes Its Mussels in Georgia Drought

In apparent retribution for last month’s loss to the Bulldogs, Florida has heightened its war with Georgia over use of regional federal reservoirs. The Peach State now finds itself facing a war on two fronts: already struggling to meet Alabama’s demands for increased water flow to power its new nuclear plant built alongside the Chattahoochee River, Georgia also bears the blame for the unacceptable standard of living of a certain species of federally protected mussel, which depends on water diverted from Georgia’s Lake Lanier to survive comfortably. With a dwindling eighty days of useable drinking water remaining in the lake, which provides water to most of north Georgia, the state faces its worst water crisis in recorded history.

Problems on the Picket Line

On November 5th 2007, the Writers Guild of America West and Writers Guild of America East stopped working and commenced striking across the nation. Guild members put down their pencils, closed their Macbooks and began picketing in front of production studios in Hollywood and in New York. For most Americans the impact of the strike has not quite been felt yet–save for the 100,000 crew members currently out of a job, the diehard fans of Cohen, SNL, Letterman and Leno, and anyone whose job relies on the daily production of television programming across America.

Looking at the Label

Picking up a recent issue of The Vanderbilt Hustler, you may have been surprised to learn a few things about yourself that you never knew before. 

For example, did you know that you “misunderstand” individual people and their stories in favor of large, fabricated stereotypes and generalizations? 

Did you know that you have “constructed walls” around yourself, presumably to isolate you from those other kinds of people who aren’t like you?

And I’ll bet you never guessed that instead of “getting to know each other,” you’d rather just take the easy route and apply a label to each one of your friends and acquaintances.

Sarkozy and His Big French Kiss

If Hillary ends up winning the presidential election, then at least we can all move to France. That is the idea that many Americans got during the visit from the French President in early November. President Nicolas Sarkozy, or “Sarko the American” as his French opponents like to call him, seemed to be more American pride than the majority of U.S. citizens.

2nd Amendment Shootout!

"On every occasion...[of Constitutional interpretation] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying [to force] what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, [instead let us] conform to the probable one in which it was passed." –Thomas Jefferson, June 12, 1823, Letter to William Johnson

For the first time in 60 years, the Supreme Court has decided to hear a case regarding the Second Amendment, and the ruling will impact future laws, current regulations, and possibly even the upcoming elections. The Court’s decision to hear the case was the result of legislative upheaval caused by a series of cases in the lower court systems, in which the D.C. gun bans forbidding private ownership of handguns were called into question.

Stems of New Hope

Buddhist teachings depict human life as flowing river, something that is constantly changing and never stagnant. Science, technology, and medicine can be observed from a similar vantage point. It seems as though new progress is always being made, and the scope of human knowledge is endlessly being pushed further by advancements in these fields.

CBS, Leave Those Kids Alone

Considering the quality of new television shows this fall season, the writers are the last people who should be on strike. If anyone needs to be picketing, it’s the viewers. These shows are so bad the writing could be outsourced to New Delhi and no one would notice a shift in quality for “Cavemen” or “Pushing Daises.” Who comes up with these plots? Manatees? Are we so desperate for new show ideas that we’re starting to surf the commercials between already bad shows? What ever happened to having a show about nothing?

Radically Healthy

Nowadays, when one hears the word ‘radical’ thrown about, one is less likely to imagine Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority than a stalwart Marxist professor in the sociology department. When ‘Republican’ is mentioned, one is more likely to imagine either a fat white Christian male flanked by his equally horizontally-challenged chums in a country club or an, again, marginally plump, poor fellow who says ‘y’all,’ talks about Jesus and gays, and is named ‘Bubba.’ Thus, one can deduce that the words ‘radical’ and ‘Republican’ are not necessarily harmonious in the minds of many. Given how the Republican Party is perceived through the eye of the media and history books, this is not surprising. It would come as a shock to the curious student of American politics, then, that the GOP was founded on the radical principle of freedom and that the party still retains that radicalism today.

Valerie Plame in: 'GoldenLie'

Enough has been said about the Valerie Plame controversy to warrant it a nice spot in the “Why Won’t This Story Die Already?” file. Indeed, after President Bush’s commutation of Scooter Libby’s jail sentence in June and the dismissal of Joseph and Valerie Wilson’s civil suit against Vice President Cheney, Karl Rove, Libby, and Richard Armitage (the revealed “outer”) in July, the story had all but completely faded from public discussion. Mrs. Wilson released her own account of the affair in a book titled Fair Game in October, but it was only through her publicity of the book that the issue was even raised again. Thus, the announcement by the Vanderbilt University Speakers Committee (VUSC) that Valerie Wilson would be coming to campus to speak about her experience appears misguided at best and sinister at worst.