[Dryerase] The Alarm--Dis-Ease

[Alarm!Wires]

This is a wonderful column, called Dis-Ease, written by Leila Binder, 
who we will unfortunately be losing soon to the graduate creative 
writing program at NYU.  This issue was the first issue for which she 
was unable to get us a column in time for publication, but here are all 
of her other columns, which are not locally-specific and to a large 
degree are timeless.  They are ordered from newest to oldest.

7-5-02
Mega ports & spectacular portholes
By Leila Binder
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective
The Aleph was probably two or three inches in diameter, but universal 
space was contained inside it, with no diminution of size.  Each thing 
(the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because 
I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos.  I saw... endless 
eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as though in a mirror, 
saw all the mirrors on the planet (and none of them reflecting me)...
—Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph

In 1347, the Bubonic plague reached Genoese held Crimea when Mongolian 
invaders dumped infected corpses into the city to contaminate its 
inhabitants; it is likely that the plague then spread from this port 
city into Europe with the fleeing Genoese. Biological warfare, in other 
words, is as old as war itself, and continent-wide epidemics are as old 
as horseback invasions and caravans.  But long-range missiles are a lot 
faster than horses.  What is different from past centuries of empires 
and warfare is the extent of the present super-empire’s capacity for 
global bio-war induced epidemics, for global simultaneous warfare.
The Netherlands, France and Belgium are the first European governments 
to have joined the US Customs Service Container Security Initiative 
(CSI).  Under this initiative, US customs officers will soon coordinate 
with their Dutch, French and Belgian counterparts to screen container 
ships for weapons of mass destruction in Rotterdam, Antwerp and Le 
Havre.  Customs officials hope to eventually extend the system to 20 of 
the world’s ports that send the largest amount of cargo to the US.
US military and customs officials claim that terrorists are targeting 
the global trade system. One wonders what kind of high-level military 
intelligence this conclusion took (think, World Trade Center).  They say 
the global trade system is also a vehicle for terrorists and that, 
therefore, US Customs should be involved in security efforts in these 
mega ports abroad for the sake of US national security.  This is quite a 
breach of the sovereignty of these European nations; the US will now be 
involved in policing their ports, regulating the goods that pass through 
their countries.  US hegemony is becoming all the more total.
The control of ports has long meant the control of empires. In Brazil 
and Africa, the Portuguese centered their colonies around port-factory 
towns; cane would be brought to the port, processed and shipped out.  
They didn’t bother to venture inland to the same extent as the Spanish 
did, for instance.  In Brazil, colonial governors would be granted 
strips of land that extended from the coast to the line of Tordesillas, 
the line of demarcation between Portuguese and Spanish colonial 
domination.  This was often merely a line on the map; land was granted 
that had never been explored. What the Colonial administration most 
wanted was to transport sugar and other goods, and all they needed to 
achieve this was control of slave labor and the port cities.   The Dutch 
also created a worldwide colonial empire that was mostly based in port 
cities.  Many of the ships that conquered these cities originated in the 
port of Rotterdam, now the largest port in the world, which the US will 
soon be policing. The glory of the Portuguese and Dutch empires has long 
faded, and European governments are happily cooperating with the new 
empire by allowing it into its ports.
Today, shipments that pass through West coast ports make up seventy 
percent of the US gross domestic product.  Last Thursday, June 27, 
longshoremen rallied in Oakland, threatening to strike if the Pacific 
Maritime Association (PMA) did not compromise in negotiations over a new 
labor contract.  The 10,500 West Coast Longshoremen contracted by the 
PMA control the traffic of goods into 29 Pacific ports amounting to $260 
billion in cargo last year.  If there remains any doubt about the 
centrality of ports to colonial projects both past and present consider 
that Tom Ridge, director of the office for Homeland Security, asked them 
not to strike because it would affect national security.  Jack Heyman, 
the business agent for the San Francisco Longshore Union, said of 
Ridge, “He said that he didn’t think it would be a good idea if there 
was a disruption in trade.” Of course, the government doesn’t want the 
longshoremen to strike, and national security is the stock excuse of the 
day.
The global trade system and the nation that currently tries to dominate 
it incite anger in everyone from French cheese lovers, to 
window-breaking Seattle protestors, to Christian right wingers who 
believe that global trade will soon create a mark-of-the-beast that 
everyone will need to buy anything, to Islamic fundamentalists.  The WTC 
and Pentagon were obvious potential targets.  Yet, the global trade 
system and its accompanying high-speed transport and communications 
technologies are ironically also a means through which terrorist attacks 
can be launched at a distance or extended over great distances.
The present global system of trade is only possible due to the 
development of fast long distance transport and communications systems.  
As the writer Paul Virilio has noted, the limit speed of this system has 
been reached, that of electromagnetic waves. The instantaneity of 
television created the global spectacular event, such as the first 
landing of humans on the moon, or 9/11.
A friend of mine spent last fall in northwestern Colombia as an 
international human rights observer.  When the planes hit the towers of 
the World Trade Center, the priests in the town turned on the generator 
so that she could see what had happened in New York. They turned on the 
old TV and she saw three planes hitting six WTCs.  Nevertheless, in the 
middle of a war-torn jungle, she was part of the global event. 
Capitalism as a global system has expanded from ports with ships that 
carry silk, silver, pepper and casks of wine, to encompass the universal 
spectacular porthole, the windows through which nearly everything can be 
seen at once, like Borges’ Aleph but much less romantic.
Just as the speed of the airplane made 9/11 possible, the Internet 
creates the possibility for a widespread instantaneous attack, at least 
in our imaginations.  But, for now, “cyberterrorism” is more hype than a 
real threat to the global trade-power nexus.  Dorothy Denning of 
Georgetown University, “Those types of actions are a lot more difficult 
to engineer with a computer than they would be with a bomb—and whether 
they would work or not would be a lot less certain.”  While such a 
threat may be far off, the internet already provides the means for a 
universal simul-cast assault on our senses and minds, for now everywhere 
is a port.  Which terrorize us more: the old fashioned bombs of the 
publicly recognized terrorists or the constant bombardment of 
corporate-managed images and data?  Unlike the Genoese, we have nowhere 
to escape to.

 6-28-02
Carving up the Steppe
By Leila Binder
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective
During the 27 hour bumpy journey across the steppe back to Ulaan Baatar, 
Mongolia, in a van crammed with as many people, dead marmots and fresh 
sheepskins as it could fit, my friend Tungaa looked out the window and 
asked me, “Is there land like this in America, that isn’t owned?”
At first, the question struck me as absurd, but the more I thought about 
it, the more her question made sense and it was my answer that seemed 
absurd. “No, Tungaa,” I said, “there isn’t.”
Most of Mongolia’s land is unowned and most of its inhabitants are 
herders who still use methods that have been in existence for thousands 
of years.  The US government has decided that this should change.
The Gobi Initiative, a three million dollar program sponsored by the US 
Agency for International Development (USAID), aims to teach the 
principles of capitalism to Mongolian herders.  Veterinarian Amanda Fine 
of the USAID said, “People want to live in the Gobi as they always 
have.  If they can get access to the market, they can continue their way 
of life.”  But this program is in effect quickly putting an end to that 
very way of life.  It is purportedly a solution to the recent droughts 
and harsh winters, which are to a large extent a result of overgrazing 
and changing weather patterns due to global warming.   According to 
Lester Brown, of the Worldwatch institute, “[D]esertification is getting 
worse—and I think 80 percent is due to man-made causes.”
Before 1991, in Communist Mongolia, herding was organized collectively.  
These collectives (negdel), limited herd sizes with quotas.  The 
breaking up of the negdel and the introduction of a capitalist market 
for meat and dairy products in the 1990s introduced an incentive to 
increase production.  The zud, uncommonly short grazing grasses which 
have brought famine and the widespread deaths of cattle in the past few 
years, is the outcome of this new tendency to overgraze for profit, 
profit that was not a consideration in the era of the negdel.  Both 
global warming and the zud are a result of the capitalist system which, 
according to USAID, is supposed to cure the problems which that very 
system played a large role in creating.
The Gobi Initiative is part of a long- term US strategy.  Over the last 
couple of decades, the US, through its own agencies and various 
international institutions, has been pushing for the privatization of 
practically everything held in common around the world.  These “new 
enclosures”—to reference the enclosure of the English commons that 
helped create the conditions for capitalism centuries ago—limit people’s 
access to the means of subsistence, which had been maintained either 
through communal or non-alienable land tenure, or through pensions, 
welfare, and guaranteed employment.
On Wednesday, June 26, a bill was passed which allowed Russians to buy 
and sell farmland for the first time since the Revolution in 1917.  At 
the moment, individuals own less than 10 percent of Russia’s 1 billion 
acres, the rest is still owned by former collectives or the state.  This 
is part of Russia’s bid to join the WTO.  As Michael Moore, the general 
director of the WTO, said, before joining, Russia would need to first 
“perfect its legislation system, particularly its land laws.”
In Krasnaya Sloboda, Russia, Yuri Baimirov (interviewed for a June 20 
New York Times article) is one of the few who owns his own land.  Mr. 
Baimirov pointed out some drawbacks to the break up of the collectives, 
“The first year when I worked the land, I had the feeling that it really 
belonged to me.  But because I was no longer a part of the collective, I 
had no fertilizer. I had no equipment.”  When I lived in the former 
Soviet Republic of Moldova in 1994, this was a common complaint.  The 
equipment of the collectives in many villages was divided up among 
members, so that one family had the tractor, another the plow, rendering 
the entire community incapable of farming at all.
This story does not only concern post-Communist societies, nor does it 
always go smoothly.  Last week, President Alejandro Toledo, of Peru, 
decided to suspend the privatization of two electric companies in 
Southern Peru, Egasa and Egesur in the Arequipa and Tacna regions, 
because of protests that had spread throughout the country to as far 
away as Iquitos, Cuzco and Ullaca.  Highways and the road to the Tacna 
airport were blockaded—a method of protest that is circulating 
throughout Latin America.  Two protestors, Edgar Pinto Quintanilla and 
Rafael Talavera Soto, were killed after the police shot tear gas 
canisters at their heads.  At least one hundred protestors were injured.
These protests erupted because of the price hikes that would inevitably 
accompany privatization, in other words, because of simple financial 
pressures.  But the spread of the protests to regions of the country 
unaffected by this particular sale indicates a more fundamental and 
widespread opposition.  The protests cut across social classes to an 
unusual extent, even 108 provincial and district mayors in the Cuzco 
region went on a hunger strike to protest privatization.  It is 
certainly hard to imagine such protests by mayors in the United States.  
One reason for this is that even the American poor feel that it is 
normal, natural and inevitable to pay for everything, even the most 
basic necessities: things as essential to life as water, heat and land.
Here in the US, the media portrays privatization as necessary, a bitter 
pill that must be swallowed.  Supposedly there is no other way.  And to 
us in Santa Cruz this seems obvious.
Yet, although it is difficult for those of us who live in this touristy 
town (where people are willing to pay three dollars for a latté) to 
grasp, it is clear that the ownership of land and the principles of the 
capitalist market in general are conceptions and social relations that 
are not natural and haven’t spread or been accepted by everyone, 
everywhere.  At least not quite yet.  Even in the year 2002 on the 
Mongolian steppe, the USAID has to spend millions to send missionaries 
of capitalism to ensure that there is no piece of earth undivided by 
lines and fences, no minds unsocialized to market relations, and to 
ensure that my friend Tungaa’s simple question becomes obsolete.

 6-21-02
The Death of the Crowd: Mountains, Deserts and Invisible Walls
By Leila Binder
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective
Men with big mustaches smiled through their gold teeth.  Street workers 
sat on the curbs in the heat and fanned themselves with their derbies.  
Boys in knickers ran alongside the car with bulky loads of piecework on 
their shoulders....Nags in their yokes lifted their bowed necks to gaze 
at her.  Ragmen struggling with their great junk-loaded two wheeled 
carts, women selling breads from baskets in their arms: they all looked.
—a crowd in New York, early 1900s
E.L. Doctorow

[A] veritable commercial symphony of swarming consuming monads moving 
from one cash point to the other.
—the anti-crowd of Los Angeles, late 1900s
Mike Davis City of Quartz

On June 26–27, the G8 summit will be held in the resort town of 
Kananaskis, Alberta in the Rocky Mountains. This remote village with 
only 450 hotel rooms was chosen in order to prevent mass protests and 
disturbances. Although the mountains already make the amassing of large 
crowds almost impossible in the first place, protesters are also being 
denied permission to set up a solidarity village. Vehicles entering the 
area will be searched, and the airspace above the village will be closed 
and patrolled by jet fighters.
Meetings like those of the G8, WB/IMF and WTO can be held almost 
anywhere, and this isn’t the first time a remote location was chosen to 
prevent large protests. The  November, 2001 WTO meeting was held in 
Qatar, a desert country with strict visa requirements and a total ban on 
free assembly.  There have even been suggestions about holding meetings 
on ships (Genoa) or on the internet (instead of the canceled Barcelona 
June 2001 World Bank meeting).  The fact that the meeting organizers 
have to go to such lengths to hold their meetings appears to be a 
success on the part of protesters; however, these counter measures are 
quite effective. Most protesters of the G8 summit will not even try to 
go to Kananaskis, they will go to Ottawa instead.
Global meetings can be held virtually anywhere, in the most isolated 
places on the earth, or nowhere—retreat into cyberspace.  But the crowd 
that populates our day-to-day environment cannot be sent away to some 
desert or mountain top.  Law enforcement must, therefore, use other 
means of crowd control in cities. In many American cities, the crowd 
seems to have already disappeared; the streets are nearly empty of 
street hawkers, outdoor chess games, and children playing ball.  The 
more wealthy the neighborhood, the more surprising the sound of feet or 
street conversation or laughter.  These are precisely the neighborhoods 
which have the most cameras, rent-a-cops, and motion sensitive lighting.
In the 1850s in Paris, Haussmann replaced the small alleys that had been 
the setting of many barricades during two insurrections with wide 
boulevards. At the same time that he made the construction of barricades 
difficult, he destroyed entire neighborhoods of workers who were likely 
to rebel in the first place, displacing their residents to the suburbs.  
He had one strategy to pacify class struggle that was less violent: he 
built parks so that classes could mix, in hopes that this would lessen 
tensions.   Olmstead used a similar strategy in New York City when he 
planned Central Park in 1863 after the great Draft Riot.
Just as Keynesian economics served to pacify class struggle by offering 
aid to the dispossessed and consumer goods to workers, Olmstead and 
Haussmann aimed to lessen class hatred by offering the poor pleasant 
parks where classes would mingle.  This strategy is as passé as 
Keynesian economics: today the segregation of classes and fragmentation 
of the crowd is so complete as to be unnoticeable, executed through new 
technologies that make for the most efficient era of surveillance, 
stratification, and militarization of public space in history. Mike 
Davis wrote, “No need to clear fields of fire for cannon when you 
control the sky; less need to hire informers on every block when 
surveillance cameras are universal ornaments on every building.”  
However, the fact that new technologies of segregation exist 
(helicopters, a thousand and one forms of surveillance technologies) 
does not preclude the use of the good old standbys  (physical 
segregation and the building of walls).
In Quebec City in April 2001, the authorities built a four-mile-long 
twelve-foot-high concrete wall to keep protesters out of the conference 
area for the Summit of the Americas. And, in January, the Santa Cruz 
city council passed a plan to expand dining space around Sushi Now! and 
the Ali Baba falafel shop forcing out people who used to hang out in 
front of these businesses. So they built a small wall around Sushi Now! 
This is not meant to compare the magnitude of these two regulatory 
measures, but simply to demonstrate that the old methods are still 
employed on both a large and small scale.
There is widespread speculation that the UCSC campus (with its separate 
colleges) was in part designed in such a decentralized way to make it 
impossible for large groups of students to gather in one central 
square.  UCSC’s first Chancellor, McHenry, denied this but said, “We got 
started in a very turbulent time—there were open fights at Berkeley in 
the time that we opened…during that period we admitted a lot of students 
whose parents were concerned about the safety of their children.  There 
was a lot of heat around the University to provide a safe environment.”
In April, when tanks could not fit in the alleys of West Bank refugee 
camps, they promptly bulldozed them.  Now, in the West Bank, the Sharon 
Government is using every means of segregation possible; from that which 
kept invaders out in feudal times to that used to keep the poor out much 
of West Los Angeles: walls, fences, ditches, patrol roads and electronic 
surveillance devices.  The construction of a 217-mile fence along the 
old Israeli-Palestinian border and within the West Bank began this 
week.  Again, there seems to be an underlying theme to these disparate 
examples.  Whether it is the hard architecture that is manipulated to 
control the crowd, as was speculated about UCSC, or the more 
sophisticated micro-surveillance used by states, the regulation of 
public space remains a major state interest.
The camera is an electronic and invisible wall; surveillance 
technologies, like heat sensors in helicopters, are but the newest forms 
of Haussmanization: enemies of the racially and economically mixed, 
hawking, yelling, music playing, publicly drinking crowd.  As the crowd 
disappears under the tide of artificially scented odors and piped in 
muzak of the mall, and the early morning florescent lights and evening 
ID bracelet checks of jail become the new medium of our day-to-day lives.

 6-14-02
Chips are for Kids
by Leila Binder
The Alarm! Newspaper Collecitve
When he realized there was no reason to fear anyone looking back at him, 
his sense of guilt vanished at once, and the vista began to change 
before his eyes. He was vividly aware of the change in the relationship 
between himself and the scene, between himself and the world.
—Kobo Abe, The Box Man

It used to be that dogs were kept on leashes and children were held by 
their parents. Then several years ago I saw a child on a leash in an 
airport, drooling and licking the floor while the parents bought 
tickets. Things have ‘progressed’ since then. In the past few years 
millions of pets in the US have been implanted with computer chips so 
that they can be found if lost. And now—you guessed it—the digital leash 
is available for your children as well. This April, the FDA approved the 
use of computer ID chips that can be embedded under people’s skin, 
provided that it does not contain medical data. The VeriChip emits a 
radio signal and contains an identification number. These chips will 
likely be used to track prisoners, children and workers with top 
security clearances. Applied Digital Solutions, the company that 
designed the VeriChip, said the chip will only contain an identification 
number for now, but they hope to someday sell chips which also provide 
medical data. The same company also produces an implant called Digital 
Angel which combines a Global Positioning System (GPS) and monitoring 
system. This was designed for parolees, Alzheimer’s patients, and people 
in danger of being kidnapped. It is already for sale in three South 
American countries where kidnapping is common. GPS is already used to 
track people on parole in many cities in the US. Wherify, of Redwood 
Shores, California, has developed a similar technology specifically for 
children: a bracelet that allows parents to track their kid’s movement 
on a map on the internet. Playing hooky will soon be a thing of the past.
Do you ever feel like you’re being watched? While targeted groups of 
people are being literally transformed into cyborgs in order to be 
trackable, surveillance cameras are indiscriminately recording and thus 
tracking the movement of anyone who happens to pass by. These cameras 
are becoming increasingly common. After IRA bombings in London’s 
financial district in ‘93 and ‘94, John Major’s government decided to 
install a network of closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) on the 
eight official entry gates that control access to the city. Then, after 
the kidnapping and murder of a two-year-old by two ten-year-olds in ‘94, 
the government allocated three-quarters of its crime-prevention budget 
to encourage local police departments to develop CCTV networks. 
Presently, Britain has over 2 million CCTV cameras.
These cameras are now being combined with a new computer technology that 
matches the face of a passerby with photos entered into a database. 
Since facial recognition technology only requires a single photo to 
build its database, it falls through the crack of existing data 
protection laws in Britain, according to Phillip Bowe, of TSSI Biometric 
Specialist. Of course, privacy-advocacy groups disagree, but the fact is 
that this technology has already been widely used for eight years.
London CCTV cameras take pictures of every driver’s face that passes by, 
and cameras in London lead to more traffic citations and car theft 
arrests than anything else. Officer Parsons, a London police officer, 
said, “The technology here is geared to terrorism. The fact that we’re 
getting ordinary people—burglars stealing cars—as a result is sort of a 
bonus.” The technology, however, has never actually been used to catch a 
terrorist.
“Facial biometrics can help take away the monotony of CCTV monitoring,” 
said Bowe. But according to Jefferey Rosen of the New York Times, who 
investigated the CCTV networks in London, security guards who monitor 
these cameras actually spend a good proportion of their time trying to 
scope out events like consenting adults making out in cars, amusing 
their bored selves by watching a network of intimate images. In Britain 
they have even placed CCT
Vs in school bathrooms—though not in stalls—in order to deter student 
smokers. The US usually lags a few years behind Britain in its 
acceptance of surveillance technology. But now September 11 has mowed 
down American’s resistance to surveillance and intrusive laws. If things 
continue in the current direction, it will only be a matter of time 
until we too allow cameras to be placed in bathrooms.
September 11, like the IRA bombings of ‘93 and ‘94, has provided an 
excuse to begin to install similar CCTV and facial recognition 
technology here in the US. And, like in Britain, it so far has done 
little except violate our privacy and make us feel paranoid. The mere 
supposition that the glass eye is upon us has proven time and time again 
to be enough to deter inappropriate and illegal behavior. In fact, signs 
that advertise the presence of cameras may be just as much a deterrent 
as real cameras. “The deterrent value has far exceeded anything you can 
imagine,” said Officer Lack, of the London Police Department, about CCTV 
cameras. Like children who believe in Santa Claus, or people who fear a 
_one_ omnipotent and omniscient god, all we need to know is that we are 
_always_ being watched and we will fall in line, or at least feel guilty 
for our sins.
At the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida thousands of spectators had 
their faces scanned without their knowledge. Officials claimed that this 
was done so that terrorists could be identified; yet only 19 ticket 
scalpers and pickpockets were identified and no one was arrested.
Washington DC officials studied the British surveillance system before 
setting up a camera network in April 2000 to monitor protests of the IMF 
and World Bank. These cameras have been programmed to scan public 
places. This system does not yet make an automated match between a face 
and a “watch list” of international terrorists. The DC police spent 7 
million on a command center that was first used in September. This 
center has dozens of video stations from which cameras are monitored. 
“In the context of September 11, we have no choice but to accept greater 
use of this technology,” said Stephen Gaffigan, the head of the DC 
Police Department Project. Of course, these cameras didn’t stop a plane 
from ramming itself into the Pentagon. September 11 wasn’t the first 
time that surveillance cameras failed to do anything but violate our 
privacy, invade intimate moments and track our movement.
Since September 11, airports have been using cameras to link facial 
identification to databases of terrorist suspects. Joseph Arick, the CEO 
of Visionics, the company that produces FaceIt face recognition 
technology, testified before a special committee of the Department of 
Transportation recommending the development of a bio-metric camera 
network for vulnerable airports throughout the country. In an interview 
with the New York Times, he said authorities from throughout the country 
have contacted him and asked about the possibility of placing such 
cameras in subways, stadiums and near monuments. He dreams of _one_ 
all-encompassing biometric network of surveillance cameras throughout 
the country. God is no longer the only omniscient being that human 
beings have envisioned; now some dream of a giant network of glass, 
fiber and microchip eyes. “The Office of Homeland Security might be the 
overall umbrella that will coordinate with local police forces,” to 
create this network, he said. “How can we be alerted when someone is 
entering the subway? How can we be sure when someone is entering Madison 
Square Garden? How can we protect monuments? We need to create an 
invisible fence, an invisible shield.”
But not everyone is walking around paranoid. In protest against the 
ubiquity of surveillance cameras, the Surveillance Players have 
performed theater in front of cameras in New York City since 1996. They 
have performed a wide variety of plays and adaptations from books, from 
Orwell’s _1984_, Becket’s _Waiting for Godot_, Reich’s _The Mass 
Psychology of Fascism_, and Poe’s _Masque of Red Death_. They have also 
performed in front of several of the biometric surveillance cameras—now 
totaling over 100—that were placed in Times Square to scan the faces of 
passing pedestrians to catch suspected terrorists after September 11.
Web-cam protests were carried out in Arizona, Germany, England, Italy, 
Minneapolis and San Francisco on September 7, International 
Anti-Surveillance Camera Day. In Tempe, Arizona, Surveillance Players 
performed shows to protest local laws against skateboarding, cruising, 
loitering and the ever presence of surveillance cameras. According to 
participant Banaszewski, they wanted to protest “the fact that all they 
really want to encourage is shopping.” The Players perform not only for 
web-cams but to show people where cameras are and to draw passers-by 
into the show. There is a web-cam looking down Locust St. at Pacific in 
downtown Santa Cruz. Every time you pass, you are being watched. Don’t 
just allow them to just record your usual way of walking, biking or 
driving, get some friends together, write your own script, use your 
imagination.
 
6-7-02
The Functional Brain
by Leila Binder
The Alarm! Newsppaer Collective
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we 
tend to use the metaphor of heaviness.  We say that something has become 
a great burden to us.  We either bear the burden or fail and go down 
with it, win or lose.  And Sabina—what had come over her? Nothing….  Her 
drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness.  What fell to her 
lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.
—Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In the ‘90s doctors began to prescribe anti-depressants in unprecedented 
quantities to both children and adults. Many of these prescriptions were 
filled out by general practitioners, and, in most cases, not even the 
doctors claim that the people consuming the drugs have serious 
problems.  Before, people would have just had to deal and face life 
unmedicated.  Now, avoidance is rationed by physicians in precise doses, 
not nearly as pleasant as deciding for oneself to buy that extra pint.
The comfortable and insured middle and upper classes who can afford 
these drugs are overworked and overburdened with cars and houses and 
children; they seem to have everything they need. I am tempted to 
callously brush this aside since I’m just old enough, poor enough and 
East Coast enough to have grown up without ever knowing that 
anti-depressants existed. People seemed to do better without 
anti-depressants or psychobabble.  On the other hand, maybe things 
really are getting worse. People are spending more time working, 
watching TV and on the internet; no one has time to socialize. 
Depression among people who have so much can only come out of a lack, a 
lightness. We suffer from a lack of burdens, of relations, a general 
sense of meaninglessness.
If you ask just about anyone what the average sleep time is, they will 
answer eight hours. This is based on daily schedule which leaves eight 
hours for work, eight for re-creation (fun, and body and house 
maintenance) and eight for sleep.  I have been rushed out of bed by 
friends with the words: “You’ve had your eight hours, get up!”, more 
times than I can count.  The fact that I need nine or ten hours doesn’t 
matter. I wonder if many of those anti-depressant consumers who don’t 
even claim to have serious problems are just people with erratic 
energy.  Like the person who sleeps ten hours, they might simply get too 
enthusiastic or distracted or despondent—fill in the blank, to function.
The word functional, has evolved from meaning simply that one can get 
through the work day and do necessary tasks, to being an indicator of 
overall psychological health.  Salon.com writer Jenn Shreve described 
her own motivations for taking Prozac in college, “For the ‘60s 
generation, LSD was a tool: It opened the mind to extreme experiences, 
allowed one to flirt briefly (and sometimes not so briefly) with 
madness.  But we didn’t want to come within screaming distance of 
madness—it would limit possibilities, screw up our portfolios.  Sure, we 
needed to be creative, but above all we needed to produce.”
Apparently even sexual energy is too erratic; or at least, it is 
something many are willing to sacrifice in order to feel “normal”. As 
one patient of Derek Polansky of the Harvard Medical School described 
the effects of one anti-depressant, “I feel like I have a velvet glove 
around my clitoris.  My responses, my whole sexual self is muted.”
These drugs don’t only normalIZE people’s moods, they also transform the 
very chemical make-up of their brains.   And since they are prescribing 
these drugs to children at earlier and earlier stages of brain 
development, it is conceivable that these drugs are causing brains to 
develop in similar ways.  The scientists don’t even claim to understand 
the effects of these drugs on children, yet they are being prescribed to 
children as young as two.
They do know however, that television and video games slow and inhibit 
brain development. The repeated exposure to any stimulus sets up a 
particular circuitry in the brain and deprives the brain of other 
experiences. Many features of children’s television programming use 
tactics developed in for advertising purposes and purposely try to 
attract the brains attention involuntarily; they discourage the child 
from learning to use her brain independently. Also, the speed of video 
games and television is causing children to have shorter and shorter 
attention spans.
This is one reason that doctors give for the “upsurge” in ADD/ADHD 
cases, diseases that didn’t used to even have names.  The corresponding 
increase in Ritalin prescriptions could also be attributed to cuts in 
funding in public schools. Teachers have more students and are thus more 
overworked and impatient.  Another reason may be the fact that teachers 
are forced to center their lessons around standardized test 
performance.  The pressure for high test scores leaves teachers with 
little patience for inattentive children.  While I don’t doubt that 
television is decreasing children’s ability to pay attention, I wonder, 
was there ever a time when children were attentive and quiet?
Research is being done to isolate the genes that cause manic depression, 
and genes have already been found that are a factor in the development 
of schizophrenia. Dr. Jamison of the National Advisory Council for Human 
Genome Research fears that this knowledge will lead to selective 
abortion; the elimination of mental abnormalities from the gene pool. 
With selective abortion, the early prescription of anti-depressants, 
high doses of television and video games, and education that centers 
around standardized testing, our society could someday be full of humans 
whose normalized brains function all in the same way.
 
5-31-02
Sexy Salmon and Naked Chickens
by Leila Binder
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective
Of the streets that blur into the sunset
there must be one (which, I am not sure)
that I by now have walked for the last time
without guessing it, the pawn of that Someone
Who fixes in advance omnipotent laws
sets up a secret and unwavering scale
for all the shadows, dreams and forms
woven into the texture of this life
—Limits, Jorge Luis Borges
Last week Tony Blair gave a speech condemning “anti-science” culture and 
criticizing the growing movement against genetic engineering. The 
sabotage of genetically modified test crops occurs somewhere in Britain 
nearly every week. On May Day this year, 95 % of those polled in Weeley, 
Essex county voted against a planned test site in their area. The 
Independent described the feeling many Brits have about the science 
their government supports as a sense of unease.
Recently, the “culture of science” has found a new way to propagate 
itself; corporations are making arguments in cyberspace under the names 
of people and citizens’ groups that do not exist. The Bivings Group was 
contracted by Monsanto to conduct a PR campaign using “viral marketing.” 
Its web site, entitled “Viral Marketing: How to Infect the World” 
explains, “Once you are plugged into this world, it is possible to make 
postings to these outlets that present your position as an uninvolved 
third party…. Perhaps the greatest advantage of viral marketing is that 
your message is placed into a context where it is more likely to be 
taken seriously.”
Viral marketing even spurred the retraction of an article in Nature 
magazine that claimed that genetically modified pollen had infected 
native maize over a large area in Mexico. Hundreds of postings, claiming 
that the article was biased, eventually led to a petition. The first 
postings were signed by a “Mary Murphy” and “Andura Smetacek”, but these 
people and the “Center for Food and Agricultural Research” that Smetacek 
purportedly represents appear not to exist.
Blair asserts that protesting against genetically engineered food is “a 
retreat into the culture of unreason” and begs us to embrace the culture 
of science. So does Monsanto. They seem to think we should embrace 
corporate arguments made by puppet non-existent people and organizations 
on the internet. Apparently, reason is based on the arguments of the 
highest bidder. Blair’s “culture of reason” has long been spread by 
corporations for a price; viral marketing is just their newest 
propaganda device, infecting cyberspace so that it may infect gene pools.
Professor Philip Dale, from the John Innes Centre, said, “The recent 
destruction of field crop experiments, which were designed to generate 
knowledge on which sound decisions are made, has parallels with book 
burning in less enlightened times.” This is ironic since it is the 
corporations who wish to wipe out anti-genetic-engineering sentiment. 
However, genes aren’t simply texts, they are the foundations of life.
Blair said that science “can be used by evil people for evil ends.” 
Strange that he brings up this possibility, since the corporations that 
support him and his government use science to their ends. So, what are 
these illustrious ends? I will draw a sample exclusively from the last 
week of news.
The first mutant featherless chicken was designed here in California, at 
UC Davis in 1954. The only problem was that it was too small to be 
marketable. Now, Dr. Avigdor Canaher of Hebrew University in Israel has 
designed a large pre-plucked boiler that grows faster than your regular 
chicken. “Feathers are a waste. The chickens are using feed to produce 
something that has to be dumped and the farmers have to waste 
electricity to overcome the fact,” said Dr. Canaher. These mutant 
pre-plucked chickens are more tolerant of hotter climates than other 
chickens. Meanwhile, the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and 
Research in London just released a report that indicates that the earth 
is heating up at a higher rate than expected. In fifty years we may be 
blessed with a planet where only the mutant featherlesschickens survive.
As if pre-plucked chickens were not disturbing enough, they have also 
designed an extra-large super-sexy salmon. Some scientists claim that 
test areas are secure but others say that it is inevitable that these 
genetically engineered salmon would eventually escape. This salmon is 
more attractive to the opposite sex than wild salmon and thus would 
likely wipe out other species of salmon through sexual selection. Also, 
they were engineered to be bigger to provide more meat to sell in 
supermarkets but in the wild they would eat up all the smaller salmon.
Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that UCSF is conducting 
stem cell research applying cloning technology much like that used to 
create Dolly, the cloned sheep. Eventually humans will be engineered 
too. Not only is it frightening that “they” will fashion humans 
according to their fancy, but, because they do not understand what the 
potential effects of their experiments are, they do not even know what 
Frankenstein will look like. Will they make humans sexier like the 
salmon? And if so, according to whose liking? Will genetic engineering 
be a kind of plastic surgery prevention, with everyone looking like 
they’re from Beverly Hills, white with big breasts and no wrinkles?
The US military attempted to create completely isolated laboratories in 
the middle of the Pacific on ships and atolls; they repeatedly tested 
biological and chemical weapons on US soldiers between 1964 and 1986. 
Much like nuclear testing on atolls, these experiments could never be 
totally contained. Radiation and bio-pathogens will always disperse into 
the environment.
Just as the hermit who works on his computer from home and only eats 
take-out food is under the mistaken impression that he is separate from 
society—that his food appears miraculously, neither prepared by a cook 
or harvested from some field where it was grown—some scientists and 
businessmen are under the mistaken impression that DNA can be separated 
from the body or the species. Scientists admit that they do not know the 
effects of tampering with DNA and that such experiments cannot be 
contained in the first place—pollen blows in the wind and sexy salmon 
could escape their test sites and spawn their way through the gene pool: 
genetic engineering is a massive uncontrolled experiment.
DNA has become patented data, a commodity, treated as equivalent to all 
other DNA as if it were an easily-replaceable spare part for a machine. 
The propagators of the infectious twin cultures of reason and science 
are determined to isolate the coding of life and engineer in the image 
that the market dictates. The new evolutionary logic is: survival of the 
most profitable.
 
5-24-02
Work harder, don’t have sex
by Leila Binder
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective
It so happens that I get tired of my feet and my fingernails and my hair 
and my shadow.
It so happens that I get tired of being a man…

That’s why Monday burns like petroleum
when it sees me arrive with my jail face…
—Pablo Neruda, Walking Around

Last week, the House approved a welfare reform bill that would require 
welfare recipients to work more, and if they’re unmarried, encourage 
them to attend sexual abstinence education, in other words, discourage 
them from having sex.  The bill—which has yet to by approved by the 
Senate—would require 70% of welfare recipients to work 40 hours a week.  
The catch is that this program is more expensive to run than the old 
one, but they’re not giving it more funding.  And some Democrats are 
concerned that states will invent useless work to fill quotas.  Along 
similar lines, the Millennial Housing Commission’s final report will 
soon recommend to Congress that people who get federally subsidized 
housing be required to work to keep their homes.  In the name of family 
values, the government is willing to pay more to force the poor to work 
more—though there might not always be something useful for them to do—
and spend less time with their families.  At the same time, they’re not 
increasing funds for child care. Instead of child care, they’re 
proposing marriage and sexual abstinence programs.
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, under the 1996 welfare 
reform law, abstinence education “has as its exclusive purpose teaching 
the social, psychological and health gains to be realized by abstaining 
from sexual activity.”  The proposed law is based on the 1996 law, which 
did not define sexual activity.  This leaves the possibility open for 
“educators” to define sexual activity in the broadest way, including 
everything from sexual intercourse to masturbation. What if educators 
chose to extend their prohibitions to masturbation and kissing?  If 
these programs were successful, and they had access to unlimited 
funding, what would society look like?  I picture being a woman in such 
a society like never being able to leave the back of the women’s section 
of Pakistani bus, where you’re segregated—physically distant, but close 
enough to hear the incessant lewd chatter of the men’s section.  I can 
understand why most of those promoting this bill are men.  No woman in 
her right mind wants to endure living in a nation full of men even more 
sexually frustrated than they already are.
According to the logic of proposed Welfare Reform bill, unmarried poor 
people simply shouldn’t be having sex; instead, they should be out 
working.  Even stranger, there are those who think having a monthly 
period is simply too much of a bother for the busy working woman.  
According to the former logic, work is more important than sex; 
according to the latter, work is more important than natural biological 
cycles, or avoiding cancer.  Seasonale, a drug which reduces menstrual 
periods to four times a year, could go on the US market by 2003.  In a 
July 27, 2001 article in Wired.com, Dr. Anthony Dobson, a reproductive 
endocrinologist at UCSF said, “Many women believe that having a monthly 
period is necessary for their well being.  This belief dates back to the 
Dark Ages when people were bled for just about any ailment, and it 
should remain there. Women have a period to prepare themselves for 
pregnancy, nothing more.”  I’m not particularly fond of cramps and PMS 
but something doesn’t sound right here.  This pill contains the same 
hormones as the birth control pill, and “the pill” causes cancer.  
Higher levels of estrogen increase one’s risk of having a blood clot, 
stroke, or breast cancer.
Apparently, the pharmaceutical companies are willing to do anything to 
increase our capacity to work.  This is not surprising since many of the 
ailments that pharmaceutical companies try to cure are caused by 
work-related stress in the first place. Now, they are developing a 
“career pill” that prevents a woman’s ovaries from putting out eggs for 
decades at a time.  What they do not know is what shape the eggs would 
be in decades later.  Remember Dolly the sheep?  They cloned the sheep 
but the clone quickly became Dolly’s age.  What would these babies come 
out like?
This week, a new study by Management Recruiters International told us 
what we already know: people are working longer hours.  Sometimes there 
simply isn’t enough time in the day to finish all of this work.  It 
seems that some people have responded to this time compression by trying 
to stop time itself. An ad for Bo-tox—Botcholism toxin injected into 
one’s face so that wrinkles disappear—said,  “No surgery, No downtime.”  
This is an odd attempt to reverse time without taking up any time.  When 
will they find a pill that stops aging and death?  Sex, menstruation, 
childbirth…the body itself has become too much of an inconvenience, we 
are simply too busy.
 
5-17-02
New World Evil
by Leila Binder
The Alarm! Newspaper Collective
“I mean I ask you—how come the only people who ever say “Evil” anymore 
are southern cracker televangelists with radioactive blue eyeshadow?  
None of these bastards look like Hitler, they never will, not exactly, 
but I say as long as long as they’re playing in Mr. Hitler’s 
neighborhood we got no reason to relax.” Zilla in Tony Kushner’s play, A 
Bright Room called Day.
That was written in 1987. Times have changed. These days the word “Evil” 
is everywhere.  While Tammy Faye has been relegated to some dark corner 
of cable TV land, the televangelist mentality has gone mainstream. CNN 
is in every fancy hotel lobby in the world, and George W. sounds a lot 
like Jim Baker.  Remember your Sunday school teacher’s ranting about 
fire and brimstone, Good and Evil?  Now Bush tells us that “you’re 
either with us or against us” and if you’re not with us you’re on the 
side of “Evil.”
Evangelicals go to great lengths to bring those who have been led astray 
by forces of “Evil” over to their side.  There is an “ex-gay” Christian 
movement (I like to call it the compulsory heterosexuality club), an ex- 
Jewish Christian movement, then the one that every hitchhiker knows 
best, the I-used-to-be-a-speed-freak, crack-head, alcoholic-(fill in the 
blan
k)-until-I-found-Jesus-but-I-still-like-to-talk-for-3-hours-at-a-stretch 
club.
All over the world there are God fearing Americans on missions.  Once, I 
was sitting in Wencelas square in Prague when a herd of naive 
mid-western youth appeared and started to tell everyone about Jesus-in 
English of course.  Just behind them was an enormous old church with a 
big cross on the top.  Apparently no one had told them that the Czechs 
had heard of that guy Jesus before. There is even a Mormon temple in 
Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia and hundreds of Mongolian youth have been sent to 
Utah
This week a somewhat bizarre phrase has been plastered all over the 
news, “Christian Zionist.” After centuries of Jew hating, the 40 million 
strong Christian Right and its lobby is now the Zionist’s best friend.  
Every college campus has a chapter of “Jews for Jesus”; they must see 
tremendous opportunities for expansion these days.  I can see it now, a 
Christian Zionist nation in the Middle East, blue eyeshadow melting in 
the desert heat.
The Christian right and Ariel Sharon have more in common than one might 
think.  After all, Sharon sounds a bit like a televangelist lately too. 
His only problem is that he lacks the Southern accent and love of peanut 
butter sandwiches that give Dubya that touch of authenticity. Sharon, 
the “Man of Peace”, reportedly made up an odd guest list for a new 
regional peace conference to be held in Washington.  His list included 
leaders from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morrocco, Israel and the US 
and yet excluded Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority. Hassan 
Nafaa, a commentator for Al Ahram newspaper, explained the rationale of 
the desparity like this: “The logic behind the guest list for the 
regional conference is sufficiently simple that even Bush will 
understand.  For just as Bush has divided the world into the forces of 
good—championed by the US and its allies and embracing all who cooperate 
with it—and evil, so Sharon divided the Middle East into the good—Israel 
and all who agree with it—and the evil, i.e. those who do not agree.” 
(9-15 May). Sharon has fashioned his own Axis of Evil, with Mr. Arafat 
as the pivot.
Bush tells us that there’s a whole lot of “Evil” with a capital E out 
there. And this week, as if the odd juxtaposition of North Korea, Iraq 
and Iran in the old Axis of Evil weren’t confusing enough, there is a 
new and improved Axis of Evil. In his speech entitled “Beyond the Axis 
of Evil”, Undersecretary of State John Bolton announced a new member, 
Cuba.
Apparently, Cuba might have the capacity to make biological weapons, but 
no one is even pretending to have proof.  Bolton believes that Cuba “has 
at least a limited offensive biological warfare research and development 
effort.”  One has only to remember the recent wave of Anthrax deaths to 
know that the US produces biological weapons itself.  A May 10 Village 
Voice article reported that documents from the Marine Corps show that 
they have developed species of bacteria and fungi that can eat through 
vehicles, roads and weapons, and microbes that can corrode explosives 
and chemical weapons.  And the Navy has now produced a bio-agent that 
can destroy plastic and rocket fuel (and it’s not too gentle on your 
skin either). We all know little Cuba simply doesn’t have the resources 
to compete with our arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.  But that 
doesn’t seem to matter.  Although the term “Evil” is being used to 
construct a new geopolitical order, with the addition of Cuba to the 
ever-expanding Axis, this order is reminiscent of the old one.  Those 
commies are “Evil”; they need to find Capitalism as their personal 
savior.
 
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