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a short limp away
From Ray Wells ’94
As a former rugby player, I was saddened to hear of the closing of the Eastmoreland
hospital, so conveniently located a short limp from the rugby pitch. It always struck
me as a very appropriate location for an emergency room. On more than one occasion,
I remember teammates and opponents being carried down the hill (actually, I remember
limping down the hill myself). Now that Reed owns the property, I hope it makes good
use of it, including as much use of the existing buildings as possible. Considering
the increasing costs of rent in the neighborhood, it may make sense to convert wards
into dorms. The former emergency room might make a good location for a new and expanded
student wellness center. The building might also be used as new offices for community
safety. Others in the extended Reed community might have other, more creative suggestions.
skewed reporting
From Gerardo Nebbia ’72
I wish to express my outrage over the article “Seeing Mideast Democracy as More than ‘Pie
in the Sky,’” by Washington Post staff writer Peter Slevin,
in the May
2004 issue
of Reed. The article presents a generally a historical, simplistic,
and skewed version of the current war on Iraq. It reads as nothing more than
a State Department propaganda piece.
Revelations that Iraqi prisoners are routinely tortured and sexually assaulted
by U.S. and British troops signal that what is going on in Iraq is far from the
building of a democratic
society. Contrary to the protestations of the U.S. military and the White House,
there is plenty of evidence that proves that these acts are part of a deliberate
policy to force Iraqis
to submit to foreign domination. There is historical continuity that ties the
training of SAVAK, the Shah of Iran’s political police, by the CIA; the
savage torture developed by the French in Algeria; the Indonesian reign of terror
and death in 1965;the “tiger
cages” of Vietnam; the torture dungeons of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay;
the death squads of El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala; the farming out of
prisoners to regimes
that routinely practice torture and brutality—like that at the Guantanamo
Bay concentration camp—with the criminal interrogation methods used at
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Given the above facts, anyone who genuinely believes
that the aim of the United States intervention
in Iraq, Afghanistan, or, for that matter, in Haiti, has the most remote connection
with promoting democracy is either profoundly naive or has purposely set out
to manipulate and
deceive, with the intention of covering up and facilitating the work of war criminals.
In this regard, Mr. Craner is no Pollyanna. In the future, and as an alternative
to the propaganda
peddled by Mr. Craner and the State Department, Reed magazine could
help raise the level of discourse on this subject by promoting an understanding
of the historical roots of the
conflict in Iraq and the Middle East.
From Joshua Rahtz ’06
Two articles in the last issue of Reed,“Seeing
Mideast Democracy as More than Just a ‘Pie in the Sky,’” and“Life
in the Military, Days in Iraq,” were
extremely disappointing and problematic. It is unfortunate that while racist
speech acts committed on campus are swiftly condemned, racist policies of imperialism and
violence are tolerated
and apologized for, even lauded, in our official college magazine. Mr. Craner’s
wildly fanatical suggestions that the United States has “rebuilt El
Salvador,” that
it has guided the development of a “functioning democracy” in
Central Europe, that it seeks to “invest” [sic] in a project
to create democracy in the Middle East, are examples of a euphemistic treatment
of the illegal wars against the peoples of
those regions, and the truly anti-democratic endeavors that those projects
represent. The profile of Larry Doane, a former Reed student who left after
his junior year and now leads
a platoon in Mosul, likewise partakes in the mythology that U.S. forces are
occupying Iraq in order to promote a peaceful transition to democracy. But
the article’s jingoistic
and reflexive reportage of Mr. Doane’s efforts to “look for terrorists” is
even more bizarre and gratuitous. The article offers no explanation of the
reasons for “terrorism” in
Iraq—it seems to prefer that “terrorism” is merely a figment
of nature—nor
does it reflect on the right Iraqis have to attack U.S. soldiers who are
occupying (and, as we now know, terrorizing) their country. These two articles
remind us that racism and
violence are as much structural geopolitical phenomena as they are issues
of threatening graffiti. Reed should be a forum in which the college, as
an institution devoted to critical inquiry, voices critical perspectives—it
should not be a simulacrum of Time. Furthermore, there is nothing
more embarrassing than the shameful contradiction of the issue’s
title, “Rule of the People,” with the profiles contained within it—one
of an architect of colonial humanism, and another of a foot soldier carrying out that
colonialism through violence.
owen ulph’s legacy
From Robert C. Leonard ’52
Your obituary for Owen Ulph says that “his lectures occasionally strayed from the
subject at hand.” That’s about like saying it sometimes rains in Portland in
the winter. Ulph was a standout character among a cast of genuine characters. They were more
than teachers; they were inspiring
models. Readers might like the story of how he was fired from the University
of Nevada. He was on a talk radio program and a Nevada rancher called to ask: “Professor
Ulph, how can we stop socialism?” Ulph
replied: “If you mean we, the Nevada ranchers, we can’t. A year
ago we had the best hay crop in years, while other places dried up. We sold
our hay over in California for a nice profit. Then
last winter we had the worst blizzard in 40 years. Our cattle were starving.
So we got the U.S. government to fly over and drop hay to our cows. We can’t
stop socialism; we wan tit, but we want it just for ourselves.” He
was off the faculty the next day. He also told one story about how he got
fired
from Montana for telling a class that the Holy Ghost was, “The guy
who knocked up the Virgin Mary.” You may not want to print that one.
From Franz Friedrich ’50
I enjoyed Owen Ulph enormously as a teacher and was sorry to read of his death. I had two different
classes with him, a Hum conference and a class on European intellectual history. He led us in stimulating
discussions of ideas with insight and wit. The remark of his that I’ve not forgotten is that, “Civilization
is a thin veneer over human irrationality.” As for the career as a Nevada cowhand, I had no inkling.
The knowledge of it leaves me amused and bemused. Such romanticism. It would seem he led a full and
rounded life and one hopes to his heart’s satisfaction.
the inimitable lloyd reynolds
Lloyd Reynolds
From Martin White ’69
I am prompted to write in response to Willard
McCarty’s musings on Lloyd Reynolds. To me the
dichotomy Willard proposes, “Was Lloyd a guru or a scholar?” seems
unhelpful. When I took calligraphy from Lloyd in spring 1969, he
was ready to retire and was no longer teaching English
literature or art history, his academic subjects. At the time I saw
his class as a respite from the rigors of writing a history thesis.
In retrospect, I would say it had more effect on my thinking than
on my still lamentable handwriting. Lloyd saw calligraphy as grounded
in a certain intellectual tradition, that of William Blake, John
Ruskin, William Morris, Edward Johnston, and Eric Gill. In that same
academic
year, Lloyd made another important contribution to Reed. When the
Black
Studies controversy became a crisis with the occupation of
Eliot Hall, the community was polarized. Black students demanded
a
BSU-run college within a college. Conservative faculty insisted the
discussion must wait until stern justice had been meted out to anyone
in violation of the honor principle. Lloyd’s prestige on
campus made his appearance at a public forum a defining event. Ignoring
the terms in which the debate had hitherto been framed, Lloyd advanced
the propositions that Reed had room for a black studies program
and that creating one was the right thing to do. It seems simple
now, but at the time his voice was a beacon of common sense in a
sea of sophistry, obfuscation, and ideological frenzy. Lloyd said
that
to do good work you have to turn off the soap opera. It
is easier advice to follow now, when the hormones are less out of
control,
but is not dangerous at any age.
goodbye, eddie oshins
From Thomas Forstenzer ’65
Eddie Oshins ’66 died late last year, after a forty-year struggle with mental illness so severe
that it would have justified a life of treatment, hospitalization, and withdrawal in anyone less brilliant
and less courageous. In fact, Eddie is one of Reed’s greatest scientific achievers. In the late
seventies, Eddie cracked the mathematical/ physics formulae smuggled out of a Soviet Gulag. Writtenon
toilet paper in a virtually unreadable hand and notation, these were Yuri Orlov’s breakthrough
insights on “grey logic”: of what happens between the “0” and the “1” in
computer language: neither is not or is, but maybe. At the time of his death, Eddie was working on
the “quantum physics” of schizophrenia: something that fits in well with his own, brilliant
popularization of Orlov’s math as adding the Yin/Yang to cybernetics. Before Orlov, Eddie was
one of the few to “stand up” to the “current wisdom” that computers could “think.” Eddie,
I think now you can fly free from the fear that never paralyzed you for long and just laugh, as you
almost always could.
a very special symposium
From Joseph Bunnett ’42
Reed College won my heart early in my freshman year. In September 1938, classes probably started
on Monday, September 19. On Friday, September 30, at the infamous Munich Conference, the prime ministers
of France and Britain agreed to let Hitler annex those Czech territories that were predominantly German.
It was immediately foreseen that Hitler would soon invade and control all of Czechoslovakia. The Munich
Conference alarmed those who wanted to restrain Hitler, including many Reed faculty members. One day
soon after, the faculty cancelled all classes and presented a day-long symposium in the chapel in which
qualified professors discussed relevant aspects of the situation. Those were talks of a high scholarly
quality, obviously organized on short notice. I was impressed by the flexibility of the college in
organizing the event so quickly and by the deep concern of the faculty who recognized how grave the
Munich agreement was. To me, that was evidence that Reed was a superior institution, an opinion I still
hold.