D.C. Deserves Statehood

The Washington, D.C. Admission Act sponsored by Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton has gained considerable attention in the past year. It would establish statehood for the District of Columbia, which would allow residents voting representation in Congress for the first time. The Committee on Oversight and Reform voted 25-19 in favor of the bill on April 14, paving the way for a House floor vote in the coming weeks. H.R. 51 passed the House in the last Congress on a partisan vote of 232-180, but it died in the Republican-controlled Senate. A companion bill, S. 51, has been introduced in the Senate with support of Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, but is expected to be met with Republican opposition by filibuster.

 Washington, D.C.’s lack of statehood is harshly unrepresentative. Since its residents do not belong to any state, they have no representation (by voting members) in either house. But despite having no votes in Congress, the city’s residents pay federal taxes. This results in taxation without representation, since they have no say in how their tax dollars are used. In fact, D.C. residents pay the highest per-capita federal income taxes in the country, and collectively pay more in federal income tax than the residents of 22 other states.

 Providing statehood to the District would also be a large step for racial justice in the United States, since its population is 46 percent Black and 11 percent Hispanic. The Senate systematically overrepresents white voters and underrepresents voters of color, as states like Wyoming and Vermont, which are more than 90 percent white and have fewer people than D.C., both have two senators just like large states. If D.C. were to become a state, it would be the first with a plurality of Black residents, a considerable step toward giving people of color the representation they deserve in Congress. Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia in January made him the eleventh African-American to serve in the Senate in U.S. history. Currently, three senators are African American (Raphael Warnock, Cory Booker, and Tim Scott), and establishing statehood for D.C. could expand this group.

 Given the country’s partisan gridlock, the statehood efforts have been met with opposition from Republican politicians, who believe the Democratic Party is using the issue to help their party gain two more Senate seats. Republican leaders including Mitch McConnell view the idea of D.C. statehood not as a matter of representation, but as a partisan attempt by Democrats to change the rules of an established system to gain extra votes in the Senate. Considering the Senate’s current composition, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, making D.C. a state would very likely increase the Democrats’ chances of controlling the Senate in future years. With the critical importance of Senate majorities and the current and recent close partisan balances there, it is understandable why Republicans would be unwilling to expand the Senate.

However, I believe there is nothing partisan about giving American citizens federal representation; it is the right thing to do for people who live in the District. The political ideologies of D.C. voters are irrelevant to the principle that they deserve representation, since they are American citizens and pay federal taxes. Establishing D.C. statehood would be a major achievement for racial justice and equal representation in our democracy. While there are certainly political repercussions, any hesitation toward it should be secondary to the importance of federal representation for all citizens living in the United States.

The Harm of Excessive Safety

Throughout the pandemic, the American public experienced a new uproar in the culture of excessive safety. Safety is something to strive for, but excessive rules and regulations that diminish life are incredibly harmful, especially if they do little or no good. We take risks every day, and instead of pretending to eliminate them with what has been called “security theater,” we should inform people and let them make their own informed decisions. Consider speed limits on the highway. We could drastically reduce the fatality of car accidents, while cutting gas consumption and encouraging more people to take public transportation, by lowering the speed limit to 30 miles per hour. We do not implement such a law because it would drastically reduce the quality of life and would not be followed.

 We see a similar situation in the pandemic. There is a lot of inherent risk in communal housing, in-person classes, and socializing with our peers as these arbitrary rules that no one follows lord over us. Even something as simple as social distancing -- the most important rule for fighting the virus, and necessary in order for masking to be effective -- is not followed. Desks may be separated by six feet, and we may have dots littered on the floor to create a perfect Voronoi diagram. Yet we still pretend that everything is normal when we grab our food or party with our “cohorts.” We performatively police each other’s behaviors, while making exceptions for our own. Nobody truly follows the rules. The gain is slight, and those who are especially worried or vulnerable can feel free to take extra precautions and ask their friends to do the same.  Instead of pretending that we follow the guidelines, we should accept that the cost they impose on us is not worth the gain. If the cost were worth it, we would be following the guidelines and even taking extra measures. 

 Professors and high-risk individuals have now been vaccinated. People who get COVID-19 will experience very mild symptoms, and those who suspect they are high-risk can take extra precautions. We do not eliminate peanuts from the dining hall because a few have deadly allergies to them. We simply label the food, and the people with allergies carry around EpiPens. Because of our remarkable testing regime, we can quantify the level of COVID risk that each of us is exposing ourselves to and adjust appropriately. (Thankfully, it seems that the college administration understands this, because the violation they take most seriously is missing tests for the virus.) That means we could have full classes, a normal dining hall, and an end to the blue Adirondack chairs which supposedly decrease the spread significantly more than a table or regular furniture. We could end the semester without the isolation, and anxiety, that comes with the inconsistent enforcement of these rules.

The Economic Hostage Situation in Congress

Our legislative process calls for relatively slow development, so as not to risk fracturing the core of our democratic republic by attempts at rapid, unsustainable reform. Unfortunately, this healthy slowness seems to have disappeared as Democrats have taken control of the legislative and executive branches under the auspices of a worldwide pandemic.

COVID-19 relief policy is the most significant legislative battlefield early in this new session of Congress. It may not only determine the future political balance of power but also gravely threaten the economic underpinnings of the United States. The power of COVID-19 relief policy to shape the coming years is not yet fully recognized. After unconscionable numbers of Americans have been forced indoors and away from their jobs, stymieing economic growth, the Democratic leadership has increased its national influence by foisting upon the nation the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

The details of this act are unacceptable, at odds with our country’s fundamental principles. To begin with, it includes blatant reverse discrimination, promising over $1 billion to subsidize farmers based on their ethnicity. Meanwhile, social justice initiatives, city bailouts, and flawed public works projects are set for billions of federal tax dollars. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that one-third of its funds are not to be spent until fiscal year 2022, and another $140 billion is not to be used until fiscal 2024, more than two years from now. So much for “emergency” relief. 
And even in terms of spending levels alone, this package is an absurdity. Nonetheless, Americans who recognize the waste will have to overlook all of this in order to pocket much-needed relief checks.

While I was working in Washington two years ago, I briefly met Senator Rick Scott. He had just delivered remarks at the Heritage Foundation, at one point discussing how he funded public initiatives while governor of Florida. If a state project produced returns on investment, he continued its funding; otherwise, he attempted to adjust the program or cut it altogether. This core principle of financial management is missing not only in the politically unilateral American Rescue Plan Act, but also in many other appropriations bills. Instead, a mentality of throwing money at problems when legislating, and looking good because of it, dominates Washington. While this strategy may win re-election for some, it leaves the American people in a far worse position by rewarding flawed programs rather than making them or policy more productive. 

Now for a crash course on a word economists rarely wish to hear: inflation. With most Americans gaining at least $1,400 in their bank accounts, many are set to spend immediately. This will prompt price increases for various commodities, while devaluing the power of the dollar, on which the entire U.S. economy is based. Make no mistake: this freshly minted money will produce dire consequences for the country because what comes up must come down. When products eventually become out of reach for many Americans–thereby prompting a decrease in demand–their prices will fall. The potential end result: recession. Therefore, it is not an overreaction to say that Congress may have purchased our next 2008. If so, good luck landing that entry-level position at Morgan Stanley right out of college.

We likely have not seen the last COVID-19 relief bill enter the halls of Congress. Lockdowns still dominate the country one year into the pandemic, and vaccines have not restored our maskless way of life. But a new method of legislating has emerged: disguising bills as “COVID-19 relief” while taking billions out the back door. Our country is in an economic hostage situation, where $1,400 checks are provided in return for one political party’s further authority over our industry and communities. 

Step Down: Sexual Harassment Claims Against Cuomo

Over the past several weeks, Governor Andrew Cuomo has been accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, most of whom are current or former state employees. The allegations add to the growing list of scandals involving Cuomo and his administration, including understating the nursing home death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic by nearly half. The claims should increase awareness of the insidious problem of sexual exploitation that plagues our nation, a systemic one in which government has failed to properly hold assailants accountable. 

            The first woman to accuse Cuomo of sexual harassment was Lindsey Boylan, an administration aide from 2015 to 2018, who first spoke out on Twitter last December. In February, Boylan published an article detailing numerous instances in which Cuomo allegedly made sexual advances in the workplace. Among these, she said he had gone “out of his way to touch me on my lower back, arms and legs,” told her they should play strip poker during a flight, and gave her an unsolicited kiss at his Manhattan office.

            Charlotte Bennett, a 25-year-old former aide to the governor and a Hamilton College alumna, is the second woman to accuse the governor of sexual harassment. She reported that Cuomo, 63, inquired about her sex life and whether she was sexually interested in or experienced with older men. In another instance, he allegedly asked whether she thought age differences mattered in romantic relationships, a comment which she regarded as sexually insinuative. Bennett reported the interactions to Cuomo’s chief of staff and provided an in-depth statement to a special counsel, and was later transferred to a different job. She left her position last November. 

            Anna Ruch is the third woman to accuse Cuomo of inappropriate sexual behavior, in her case at a wedding they both attended in September 2019. During a conversation between them about a toast he had just made, she says, he unsolicitedly put his hand on her bare lower back, called her “aggressive” after she removed it, placed his hands on her cheeks, attempted to kiss her, and kept drawing closer as she continuously pulled away. 

            The fourth and fifth women to publicly accuse the governor of sexual harassment are Karen Hinton and Ana Liss. Hinton, a paid consultant to Cuomo when he was the federal Housing and Urban Development secretary, alleges that he gave her an unsolicited intimate embrace at a hotel room in 2000, repeating the motion a second time, which she again resisted. Liss, a former aide, said he made her uncomfortable after kissing her on the hand and asking intimate details about her romantic life. 

            The Times Union of Albany reported that one of Cuomo’s current aides, who remains anonymous, accused him of groping her in the Executive Mansion, after inviting her there to help him with a technical issue. On March 19, Alyssa McGrath, another current aide to the governor, confirmed her prior knowledge of the anonymous allegation before it was made public. She also alleged that Cuomo had gawked at her body and made sexually suggestive comments to her and the other aide.

            The most recent allegation to surface publicly is by Jessica Bakeman, a former Albany reporter who described multiple instances in which she said Cuomo was physically inappropriate or publicly demeaning toward her. 

            Governor Cuomo’s response to the multiple allegations has been embarrassing and inadequate. Although he has issued statements acknowledging and apologizing for any discomfort that his actions may have brought his victims, he still adamantly denies the allegations. On February 28, state Attorney General Letitia James announced that her office would begin a formal investigation into the sexual harassment claims that have been made so far. 

These brave survivors deserve not only to have their stories told, and heard, but even more importantly to have Cuomo held accountable. This issue is not one which can be met with silence or indifference; women have to, and continue to, overcome barriers of entry into politics, and the persistent issue of sexual misconduct at the hands of political leaders is a recurrent one which has gone improperly addressed for far too long. If Cuomo has any semblance of honesty left, he’ll resign with dignity before the state Assembly’s impeachment investigation potentially forces him to. 

The Tower and The Castle: Remarkable Modern Art

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, Western societies saw accelerated industrial advancement coupled with marked intellectual and social change. How was this revolution embodied in art? Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were the ‘reverberators,’ so to speak -- sent to explore what the upheaval meant through their paintings and collages.

Both artists, influenced by Cézanne, can be said to have invented a new movement. Picasso and Braque defied the laws of traditional painting with its apparent timelessness, stability, and classical perspective. They began painting abstract art – the non-figurative representation of an observed world in flux. The Cubism movement was their response to a world changed by shifting philosophical and scientific realities. 

Cubists translated the ideas of philosophers like Henri Bergson on memory, perception, duration of time, and space and altered their canvases to reflect this new platform or aesthetic. Perception and knowledge were believed to be ever-changing, altered by experience and accumulated memories. It was the artist’s task to capture this fluidity and this new way of looking at information. While Picasso and Braque were credited with inventing this unique visual language, such artists as Juan Gris, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Fernand Léger, and Marcel Duchamp stretched it. They were major examples of the Cubist movement in its Analytic and Synthetic varieties. 

Analytical Cubism’s imperatives were defined as: a diversity of perspectives, deconstruction of forms and fragmentation, the emphasis on two-dimensional construction, the blurring of lines between the object and the environment, and subdued coloration. Synthetic Cubism was a synthesis of invented forms using paper collages (papier collé) with bold coloration, patterns, and textures. 

Two lights of the Analytical Cubism movement were Robert Delaunay and one of Cubism’s founders, Georges Braque. Their proficiency in the fundamental aspects of this offshoot of Cubism was on display in their respective pieces, Red Eiffel Tower (1910-1911) and The Castle of La Roche-Guyon (1909). 

Delaunay and Braque attempted to glean the ethereal and changeable quality of human perspective and knowledge. They rejected the copying of nature by conventional methods, and sought to express diversity and complexity through fragmentation of objects and blurring boundaries between an object and the environment. Shapes were perceived as being in transition. Pictorial configuration was advanced, and a shallow, relief-like space was created to provide limited distance between objects and what appeared in the foreground and background. The gaze of the viewer was directed, but there was no imaginary distance to lead the eye toward an interior object. The whole canvas demanded study.

In Castle of La Roche-Guyon, Braque began to experiment in earnest with Analytical Cubism. He deconstructed a known piece of architecture, reconfiguring the castle into something entirely distinctive. He did not copy it as a static object, but gave it a fragmented appearance. Braque vertically arranged the space with geometric forms and faceted planes that appeared to sit precariously on the surface of a high elevation. The lines between the fractured vision of the castle and the surrounding foliage and trees were blurred, almost unrecognizable, as broad strokes of greens, browns, and grays. Two- and three-dimensional perspectives were made interchangeable, and the colors were hushed and hazy – gray, white, brown, and green. The green was iridescent. 

In Red Eiffel Tower by Delaunay, one can see that he embraced most of the rubrics of Analytical Cubism through his study of the iconic symbol of the Paris cityscape, the Eiffel Tower. In this painting, he captured the zip, mobility, and vibrancy of the new industrial age, the new century. The picture was far from static or homogeneous; it churned with fragmented shapes, planes, and facets of the tower and the surrounding buildings and sky. Two- and three-dimensional perspectives were made interchangeable. The space around the tower was shaded in blues, whites, and grays. The vertical tower was red, with its brilliant latticework ready to twist and soar. The picture was energetic and off-kilter, embracing modernity. Unlike those in the Braque work and other Analytical Cubist renderings, the colors were not understated; whites and blues infused the canvas with light, and red was a bold counterpoint. 

Political, social, technological, and intellectual shifts in the modern age laid the groundwork for Cubism’s seismic shift in the art world. The experimentation created a new movement with talented adherents. Cubism as a general movement both introduced and influenced Analytical Cubism. Braque created the prototype and Delaunay adopted these guiding principles. The fragmentation, interchangeable dimensions, blurring of perspective, and coloration reflected their grasp of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. Both artists produced models of this movement in their paintings, The Castle of La Roche-Guyon and Red Eiffel Tower. 

Cubist artists such as Braque and Delaunay opened the doors for future abstract artists, such as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, to explore new methods, new forms, and new ideas. Analytical Cubism showed artists a groundbreaking way forward. 

This essay is based on a paper written for an Art History class on Modernism here in 2017. Claire Kitz (Hamilton ‘19) was Editor-in-Chief for Enquiry in her senior year. She currently works at a consulting firm in Chicago.

Our Unsteady Gait In Pursuit of Truth

The false dichotomy between nurture and nature makes us presumptuously deny their synergistic, and inextricable, influences on our worldviews. I believe my musing interaction with religion resembles a process of scientific inquiry. Perhaps it is sacrilegious of me to believe that religion should be a means to an end instead of the end, a one-stop shop for truth. Leaving the irrational and self-defeating premise of altruism aside, I am an opportunistic scholar and what some may term “an effective altruist” spellbound by utilitarianism. The philosophical and social movement that emphasizes the efficiency which results from benefiting others has lulled me in with its enthusiasm for cold, hard rationality. I defer to human reasoning so much that it would be difficult to convince me to practice a single religion exclusively and use the prescribed truth as the sole source of my altruism. I can benefit from critically questioning all religions.

It may seem surprising that I have come to identify as an agnostic, considering that I was doused in a mix of religious traditions and felt the visceral pull of each. I grew up with a delightful blend of Buddhist dharma and Confucius’s virtues. After I moved to the United States, I was introduced to Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and many more. The plethora of monotheistic and pluralistic theologies intrigued me profoundly. Whether it was celebrating a bar mitzvah, tasting wine at Sunday mass, attending a Bible study group, feasting at Diwali, talking with my Syrian friend, or reading Roman and Greek philosophers in Latin, I actively strove to broaden my worldview and sought reconciliation between the various faiths’ disparate lessons on ethics, the ontology of the soul, and metaphysics. 

My burning curiosity for knowledge was appropriately channeled toward academia by my mentors, who taught me the fundamental value of critical thinking. As clichéd as the famous quote from Socrates may be, his valid criticism of the “unexamined life” prompts me to read abundantly, think deeply, and evaluate with a critical eye, all in the daring pursuit of truth and virtue. My initial conception of an all-encompassing, objective truth slowly eroded away as I familiarized myself with the immense intellectual difficulty in teasing out the unabridged, undoctored truth from the mere perception of truth, the difficulty in learning a pure truth free from nationalistic furies, impulsive biases, and corrosive rumors. I learned how inadequate our knowledge of certain civilizations is and how we can reconstruct only a silhouette of truth from the meager supply of their records. I learned how power has been used to suppress narratives, and in doing so has committed the injustice of silencing voices essential to the holistic truth. Studying political science in college has reinforced my reservations about adopting a single worldview. Economics, on the other hand, clarified the driving incentives and patterns of human behavior. Equally and perhaps more importantly, I started to slowly observe the economic arguments couched beneath ethnic, religious, and culturally relativistic terms.

Critical thinking serves as our guardian against our biological heuristics, especially in a world of clamor and uncertainty, of falsehood and hostility. My diverse exposure to historiography, biology, economics, computer science, anthropology, linguistics, and political science has taught me to value reasoning and logic instead of authority or tradition. To be clear, I do not aim to say that having a religious belief is misguided or useless. In fact, religious teaching is extremely useful for many, and it has been for me in times of darkness. Ancient wisdom can be a safe harbor that lends shelter to the wandering traveler. But it should be and remain pro tempore on the journey, lest the traveler immersed in comfort forget about his adventure ahead. In order to persuade me to adopt a single religion, one has to appeal to more than faith, piety, and duty. Studying philosophy has beaten into me the need for rigorous use of words and for vigilance in avoiding broad claims without qualifications. I should not assert that I have sufficient evidence, or impeccable reasoning, in rejecting the existence of an omnipotent being. I am always learning, and therefore I am agnostic, not an atheist. 

I needed, and still try, to figure out why one adopts one religion over another. In a Socratic manner, I often interrogate my religious friends, not with the intent to judge, but to learn. I listen to their adoption of, conversion to, and relationship with a religion, question them on their rationales and experiences. When I am at a loss for answers to questions about my own beliefs, I often study to inform myself and to formulate a system with which to defend them. I never try to dissuade people from religion. That is not my intention, nor will it ever be. I only attempt to put their beliefs through intellectual trials, because only after that experience can it be said that they truly “own” those beliefs, instead of borrowing words from a stranger’s mouth