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Show HAVE Dart 8.31.2009 Plight of Utah's deaf students have we botched deaf education so badly? Back in March 1988, the deaf student Guest writer body of Gallaudet University (the nation's only post-secondary university geared entireAfter a corrective surgery, 6-year-old ly toward deaf and hard-of-hearing students) Adam's cochlear implant had broken. As an put their foot down when yet another hearing intern for the Utah Schools for the Deaf. I joined Adam on the rug for story time. When person was chosen to be the next president. The students rallied for days, demanding the teacher asked Adam in spoken English a deaf president. After much what color the turkey was, he ^^^™"™ media coverage and debate, 1. looked around confused before ^ " ^ ^ King Jordan was installed as looking to me. I signed "color, There are Gallaudet's first deaf president. which?" Adam sat up and excitseveral problems The world realized that there edly signed "yellow." I respondto an "oralistic" was a deaf community -- they ed "right," but when I looked approach to deaf were competent, successful and up, I saw that I was in trouble. education. It arembraced their deafness. The Apparently, I was forbidden to rogantly assumes new president told the world, sign with Adam. His Individual that deaf children "Deaf people can do anything, Education Plan stated he must want to b e like except hear." communicate using spoken Eng- hearing people, lish. His teacher kept him from However, political leaders that deaf children recess to teach him how to say learn the same misinterpreted the movement, yellow. She made Adam touch way hearing thinking deaf people were fighther throat as she said a slow people do... ing for the rights of the disabled. "yeellloooww" while his peers They failed to realize that the played outside for an hour. deaf community is a linguistic minority and not a disabled 1 was very concerned that community; they were fighting Adam was forced to learn a form of comfor autonomy from the disabled label, not munication that was foreign, obtrusive and to gain access to it. The Office of Special unsuccessful. His language was now legally Education and Rehabilitative Services have forbidden, leaving Adam in a state of isolaappointed hearing people who then labeled tion, bound by law. He should be in a bilindeaf students as disabled. As other language gual program playing and communicating with his friends at recess, not struggling with minorities made great strides in gaining a language to which he does not have access. rights, deaf education was heading backwards. As Adam's experience shows, the There are several problems to an "oralisadministrations have not valued ASL or the tic" approach to deaf education. It arrogantly deaf community. . assumes that deaf children want to be like As I reflect back on my internship I am hearing people, that deaf children learn the deeply saddened by the failure of deaf edusame way hearing people do and that deaf cation in Utah. • children have the capability of becoming Instead of accepting deaf students and hearing. None of these are true. their language, I watched our education Our deaf schools are mere speech clinsystem waste millions of dollars of resources ics; subjects like history, science and math trying to "normalize" deaf kids. are neglected. The agenda is to "normalize" Let's take a long-awaited step forward these children. Unfortunately, oral education with deaf education and deaf rights and stop is wasted on deaf children. Lip-reading has been proven unsuccessful. A study conducted subjecting deaf students to an inferior education and give them the same opportunities in the United Kingdom showed that after as their hearing counterparts. We must stop a decade of training, deaf people could not hiding behind ignorance and acknowledge «read lips, better than their hearing counter' parts. American deaf students generally grad- the plight of Utah's (and the nation's) deaf students. r uate with a fifth grade reading level. How REBECCA HALLS Rebecca Halls is one of many advocates for the deaf at UVU. Righteous fury: Gaypocalypse now Why we need Inglourious Basterds ANDY SHERWIN Opinions writer Warning: this article contains fairly widelyknown spoilers about the ending of Inglourious Basterds. Aug. 21 saw the release of Inglourious Basterds, the seventh film from art cinema's enfant terrible and provocateur extraordinaire Quentin Tarantino. The misleadingly marketed story of a Jewish fugitive hiding out in Nazioccupied France during the last years of World War II (and only tangentially the story of Brad Pitt's titular Nazi scalpers), the film is primarily a study of the power of cinema as revolution and works as both an intense, dialogue-driven thriller and a commentary on the nature of filmmaking and its potential as a sociopolitical force. For a Tarantino movie, it should come as no surprise that it has been met with great acclaim and a moderate amount of controversy, primarily related to both its portrayal of Jewish American soldiers, who do indeed scalp Nazis (when not carving swastikas into the foreheads of survivors), in addition to the film's ending, wherein Tarantino pulls a fast one and has the protagonists succeed at actually killing Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and the remainder of the Third Reich's i upper echelon, thereby ending World War II with a (literal) bang. Daniel Mendelsohn of Newsweek claims "Tarantino indulges this taste for vengeful violence by — well, by turning Jews into Nazis." Armond White, film critic for the New York Press, noted contrarian and all-around numbskull, says that Tarantino "manipulates WWII horror into hip pornography." Mendelsohn, along with a number of the rah-rah-rah-Go America audience members in both screenings I've so far attended, are clearly missing several fairly obvious points, the easiest being that war makes monsters of us all, in favor of a political sound bite. Why acknowledge shades of gray when your readers want a headline, byline, and two or three terribly clever witticisms that indicate not only your intellectual brilliance, but also your moral superiority? I will not play the antiSemitism card against these critics, as it's not nearly that simple, but there seems to be a strange standard regarding Jewish perception. When President Obama met with Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of the many criticisms leveled at the president was that he was sitting down with a man that adamantly denies that the Holocaust ever happened and believes that Israel should be "wiped off the map." While there are always the issues of political game-playing and grandstanding to remember, Obama's meeting with Ahmadinejad can ideally only be rationalized by Ahmadinejad's claims to nuclear power and his indications that Iran will soon be armed with weapons-grade plutonium. Why else would our president, in addition to the larger international body of governments, meet with someone that's essentially a shorter, far more powerful version of the KKK's David Duke? Obama graciously Trent Batea/UVU Review that dooms us to destruction. The very sweat of our brow contains the homosexHe who has ears to hear, uality that threatens us all. A casual handshake, some let him hear: Being gay is post-game chest-bumping, neither a choice nor a hereditary trait. It is a disease. or a whiff of b.o. can all irrevocably turn you gay. And These are uncertain times to be a man in Ameri- men are around other men all the time. ca. The loud guy Hence, we next door could God's bigbring about the be more upright gest concern end. Boy Scouts than you. Washis whether you will be on their ington put a man are safe from a masters like on the moon and Luke Skywalker now they want guy who likes on his sister. to send a rocket your legs. Congress will to Uranus. Even collapse into your morning wanton orgy. Pope and clerpostman might be checking gy will enmesh in sweaty the male. sin. Gold's Gym will beForget corrupt governcome as Sodom; Cabela's, ments, endangered dolphins, Gomorrah. (What about and that homeless guy near the women? Don't ask; that Wal-Mart: God's biggest knowledge is hidden right concern is whether you are now and will come forth at safe from a guy who likes a later time.) your legs. This natural evolution Now the devilish plague will come swiftly like a that besets our land, that thief in the night and infect horror known as homoall until males become zomsexuality, has swelled bosexuals and trudge down in strength. It weakens city streets, murmuring everything firm and studly, "THTOPIT!"astheynod and masculinity becomes less straightforward. Has all their heads to a new Eminem song sampling Katy machismo gone soft? InadPerry (which he'll perform equacy, thy name is man. live at the Grammys with But I cry out now like a prophet on the mountaintop Elton John). I have endured the earliin warning: The time is approaching when this disease est stages of this metamorphosis and I know that the will rise up and come for next stage is coming soon, you all. the stage when this horHow does it spread, you ror will spread rapidly and ask? Wherever the brawny without mercy throughout form of man is known to the planet. The onset of an congregate: gyms, locker epic Gaypocalypse is upon rooms and churches are all us, brothers, and we will at an especially .high risk. rue the day we believed Not even the video gamers homosexuality to be merely are safe, for it's our own genetic or simply a choice. natural, virile perspiration . and gently acknowledged the anti-Semitic authority that was taken at the barrel of a gun, and film critics like Mendelsohn and White, among others, would criticize Quentin Tarantino for turning the tables and providing an uberviolent revenge fantasy to one of history's most common and irrationallyblamed scapegoats? I wonder if they chafe while they spend so much time riding those high horses. It is certainly a simplistic reading of the situation, and there are, no doubt, shades of gray in both Tarantino's film and its real-world application. But portrayal of violence is not necessarily the same as endorsement of it; many of the scenes in Inglourious Basterds imply that sadistic violence in film holds a universal appeal to German, Jew, and American viewers. But the Nazis actually lived their cruel fantasies. Perhaps the Jews deserve to at least get a revisionist fairy tale to remind them not of what did happen, but what should've happened. Asst. Opinions editor |