Cover Of Time Magazine Research Articles

Indigenous suicide in cross-cultural context: An overview statement and selective bibliography of sources relevant to Indigenous suicide in Australia, North America, and the Pacific

Overview Over the past 15 years, there has been recurrent national and international media coverage of Australian Aboriginal self-injury and suicide. This has ranged from the cover of Time magazine, to Four Corners and 7:30 Report programming, to poignant coverage in the Australian, the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Bulletin, and a recent seven page expose in the London Sunday Times. Aboriginal suicide themes have provided a haunting leitmotif in many past and recent films and documentaries, from ‘Jedda’ and ‘Walkabout’ to ‘State of Shock,’ ‘The Fringe Dwellers,’ and ‘Dead Heart,’ and indigenous death by hanging has become a confronting and stock symbol of reactance, hopelessness, and oppression in Aboriginal posters, art, writing, and theatre (e.g., Dunnet, in Sutton, 1989). The media representation and coverage of the phenomenon has moved from watch-houses to prisons, from custody deaths to community ‘epidemics.’ In a number of regions of Australia, Indigenous suicide figures are as high as or higher than other comparison fourth world contexts in the world, and self injury and suicide have constituted a salient and distressing social problem in some Aboriginal communities since the 1960s. Increasingly, self-injury and suicide are becoming a very real and unprecedented problem in traditional Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. Despite this, there has been a remarkable absence of an informed and helpful discussion and review of the nature and parameters of this salient and critical problem.

New Monastery: Monk and the Jazz Avant-Garde

The musician who once terrified us all no longer seems to disturb soul. He has been tamed, classified, and given his niche in that eclectic Museum of Great Jazzmen which admits such variety of species, from Fats Domino to Stan Kenton. --Andre Hodeir on Thelonious Monk, circa 1959 A 1972 press release announcing the reissue of Thelonious Monk's Prestige recordings included the following observation: [I]n the early Sixties, with the emergence of and the appearance of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, Monk's music no longer seemed quite so strange. He was finally able to whittle away at the Mad tags that had been laid upon him by smug critics and listeners who had neither the equipment nor the desire to comprehend. There was even the introduction to polite society in the form of Time magazine cover story in 1964, and Monk finally and without compromise began to receive the widespread attention and adequate financial renumeration that was his due. (Thelonious 1972) Although hyperbole is unavoidable in any press release, there is kind of truth here. At the very moment that Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, and others were bringing about revolution in Monk's career finally began to soar. After enduring almost two decades of confused and often vicious criticisms from writers and musicians alike, by the early 1960s, Juilliard students were studying his compositions, Martin Williams (1963; 1964) had insisted that he was composer, and French critic Andre Hodeir (1986, 164) had hailed him as the first artist to have a feeling for specifically modern esthetic values (see also Kotlowitz 1961; Lapham 1964). By 1961, Monk had established more-or-less permanent quartet consisting of Charlie Rouse on tenor saxophone, John Ore (later Larry Gales) on bass, and Frankie Dunlop (later Ben Riley) on drums. He performed with his own big band at Town Hall, Lincoln Center, and the Monterey Jazz Festival, and the quartet toured Europe in 1961 and Japan in 1964. He left the Riverside label for more financially lucrative contract with Columbia Records in 1962, and by the mid-1960s, his quartet reportedly earned nearly $2,000 week for gig (see de Wilde 1997, 171-178; Gourse 1997, 153-211; Ponzio and Postif 1995, 201-267; Williams 1963; Williams 1964). The mainstreaming of Monk and the emergence of the avant-garde--or what has been called jazz or the New Thing--was not merely coincidental. In several respects, both musically and politically, these developments were interdependent if not mutually constitutive. The emergence of the avant-garde during the early 1960s did indeed change the field of reception for Monk as well as for other musician/composers (e.g., Charles Mingus) who only decade before were considered too far out and experimental. However, the shifting critical response to Monk's music vis-a-vis the avant-garde partly reflected the changing political landscape--one in which black nationalism, Third World solidarity, and even the more localized struggles against racism and exploitation in the music industry challenged Cold War liberalism. In this war of words, conservative and some liberal critics embraced Monk as foil against the free rebellion, while defenders of the avant-garde often sought to claim Monk as one of their own. Given Monk's complicated, often iconoclastic relationship to the history of modern jazz, it should not be surprising that all of these constituencies could legitimately lay claim to him. Whereas Monk, like most musicians of his generation, expressed disinterest if not outright hositility to free jazz, artists identified with the avant-garde found his music to be major source of ideas and inspiration. Indeed, as I demonstrate below, no matter how much Monk tried to distance himself from these new developments, he helped give birth to the avant-garde. …

Cyberporn and communication decency

On 1 February 1996, a US Government statute called the Communications Decency Act (CDA) was passed by Congress, with the intent of controlling Internet pornography and making the Net safe for children by banning ‘indecent’ content. A widely criticised Time magazine cover story on ‘cyberporn’, based on a paper published by the Georgetown Law Journal, had some influence on the preceding political debate, and presents an interesting case study of academic and commercial publishing and journalism. On 11 June 1996, a three-judge court, hearing cases by the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Library Association, decided that the CDA was unconstitutional under First Amendment protection of free speech. Non-legislative solutions to the problems of indecency and censorship are offered by software for filtering Internet content. A Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) standard has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium to include content ratings labels in documents, for identification by browsing and filtering software.

Second Coming: The Strategies of the New Christian Right

Since the election of a Republican majority in Congress in 1994, the Christian Right movement has attained an unprecedented degree of legitimacy and influence in American politics. GOP lawmakers eagerly seek to be pictured with Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, Jr., who unveiled the Contract with the American Family. Popular media portrayals, including a Time magazine cover story, refer to a Christian Right strategy of taking over American politics as working. These developments are remarkable when we consider the once declining stature of the Christian Right and the predictions of its demise as recently as the aftermath of the 1992 elections. Yet the success of the Christian Right was neither a sudden occurrence nor an accident of the GOP takeover of Congress. It was the result of a calculated, sophisticated strategy to build a disorganized social movement into a formidable party faction with a grassroots oriented network of activists. This article examines the factors that have contributed to the recent successes of the Christian Right.

Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness

You know the best sellingpaint got, the one that made this here business? he asked as helped him fill a vat with a smelly substance. No, don't. white, Optic White. Why white rather than the others? 'Cause started stressing it from the first. We make the best white paint in the world, don't give a damn what nobody says. Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you'd have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn't white clear through! ... Well, you might not believe it, but helped the Old Man make up that slogan. 'If It's Optic White, It's the Right White,' he quoted with upraised finger, like a preacher quoting holy writ. I got me a three-hundred-dollar bonus for helping to think that up. 'IfIt's Optic White, It's the Right White,' repeated and suddenly had to repress a laugh as a childhood jingle rang through my mind: If you're white, you're right,' said. [Ellison 190] Two media reports occurring within about a week of each other caught my attention as one seemed to comment on the other: one, a Time magazine cover story documenting with a certain unease what it called Browning of America; and the other, a National Public Radio news broadcast in which George Bush, a man whose family includes Mexican-American grandchildren, reassured Soviet leader Gorbachev that the US and the USSR share common interests because we are thus officially marginalizing the growing number of Americans whose heritage is other than European, as well as significant numbers of increasingly militant non-European Soviets. Bush's rhetoric is an apt demonstration of a floating signifier used in an attempt to heal a history of political antagonism through a not-quite-subliminal appeal to racial bonding. That the international appeal to a common racial heritage ignores racial diversity within political borders of the respective nations is not surprising, given the traditional orientation of the US in identifying itself as a white nation allied with other white nations in controlling and policing the globe, as minority populations are routinely controlled and policed within national borders. The President's insistence that Americans are Europeans, together with the report on America's browning, suggests to me an interesting connection with the genre of passing literature of which Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson is perhaps the most cynical example. While Bush's statement comments on the contemporary political function of racial identity on a global scale, Twain's problematic and frustrating novel, with all of its shortcomings, is a stinging indictment of a legal tradition that glorifies the freedom of the individual while founding and supporting a race-class-gender system that inexorably

Evaluating phase movement theory with the dramatis personae oftime:1923–1988

Parsons and Bales maintain that the temporal organization of a group's activities is characterized by a periodic swing between internal and external imperatives. The phase hypothesis holds that at the societal level phases characterized by an emphasis on solving external problems will be accompanied by economic prosperity. Temporal organization is also characterized by adaptive upgrading in response to environmental demands and a concomitant secular trend, or increasingly external focus. To test these hypotheses, 3,209 roles featured on the cover of Time magazine from 1923 to 1988 were classified as either internal (educators, mass media, entertainers, athletes, celebrities, private interest group leaders, religious leaders, and labor leaders) or external (politicians, public interest group leaders, military, administrators, scientists, and foreigners). A Phase Index was determined by the proportion of external roles. The level of business activity was established by the Cleveland Trust Company's “America...

In Another Life: The Refugee Phenomenon in Two Novels of the Nigerian Civil War

In Another Life:The Refugee Phenomenon in Two Novels of the Nigerian Civil War Maxine Sample (bio) During the latter part of the 1960's as America was preoccupied with Vietnam abroad and its own social revolution at home, the West African Republic of Nigeria was engaged in a bloody civil war in which the federal government fought the secession of the Eastern Region, an area declaring itself at the moment of its revolt, the Republic of Biafra. Some of us may remember Biafra in the context of the sunken eyes and bloated bellies of the starving children whose faces haunted us from the cover of Time magazine—others from the illogical admonitions of over-zealous parents who warned us to eat everything on our plates because children were starving in Biafra. The Nigerian Civil War was one in which hundreds of thousands of civilians, many of them children, perished in the thirty months of its duration. It was a war that neighboring African nations, with their own newly-won independence, were saddened to witness. It was a war in which non-African nations, protective of their own economic interests, plied the Nigerian federal government with weaponry to exact a quick, albeit brutal and genocidal end to what they perceived as simple tribal rivalries. Surely, we know from our own nation's history [End Page 445] that simplistic explanations for civil war are suspect, and such was the case with Nigeria.1 Nigeria, during its colonization by the British, was divided into four regions: the Northern Region, the Western Region, the Mid-West Region, and the Eastern Region. Three major ethnic groups dominated the country: the Hausas in the North, the Yorubas in the West, and the Ibos in the East. Some 200 other ethnic groups comprised the rest of the population. Colonial interests had resulted in the amalgamation of these African peoples solely for the benefit of that European power. These geopolitical lines continued to exist on January 15, 1966, when a bloody coup d'etat ushered in a military government. It ended the young civilian government that had been plagued by an assortment of abuses and a degree of corruption bemoaned by many Nigerians and chronicled in such fictional pieces as Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People. This prophetic novel aptly portrayed the cluster of political events that created the conditions for the military coup of January 1966. Any hope following the first coup was shortlived as the call for a unified Nigeria promulgated by Major Ironsi, the head of the new Federal Military government, led to another military coup and his death. What confronted the new military leader, Lt. Colonel Gowon, were the continued civil and military disturbances that existed. Rumors surrounding the first military coup alleged that the event had been an attempt by the Ibos of Eastern Nigeria to seize control of Nigeria. In response to the hysteria incited by such allegations, some 30,000 to 50,000 Ibos in the north were massacred, their homes looted and burned, their property confiscated.2 Even more appalling was the federal government's inability and/or its alleged unwillingness to protect the Ibos or compensate the families and dependents of the victims. In the Eastern Region, Lt. Colonel Ojukwu called Ibos home, and what proceeded was the exodus of some two million Ibos from the northern regions of the country. Gowon's intention to split the country into twelve states and the failure to assure the security of Ibo lives led to the secession of the Eastern Region on May 30, 1967, when it declared itself an independent republic. The revolt represented, according to Ojukwu, "the crystallization of the black man's search for independence and recognition" (200). [End Page 446] The response was a federal "police action" that lasted thirty months. With Nigeria receiving arms from Britain and Russia, one Biafran city after another fell: Enugu, its capital, Calabar, Onitsha, Port Harcourt, Aba, Umuahia, and Owerri, culminating in a blockade that threatened to starve the Biafran people into submission. The extent of the military hardware and the bombing of hundreds of civilians certainly would lead one to question the intentions of the federal government...

The Dilemmas of Democracy in Greece

Pasok's Eight Year-Old Socialist Administration, The first in Greek history, which followed its successive victories in 1981 and 1985, was due to undergo its third electoral test in mid-1989. In fact, the electoral campaign had started in the late summer of 1988 and was well under way at the beginning of the new year. Andreas Papandreou's charismatic leadership of PASOK, which in the past had been the principal explanation of his firm control of events, was already starting to fade, as he struggled to put a brave face on the resignations of respected ministers and party members in the wake of revelations of several scandals at the top of the pyramid. Foremost among these was the celebrated case of George Koskotas, the young owner of the Bank of Crete, who was in gaol in America after his escape from Greece, to avoid charges of embezzling more than £130 million in bank deposits. In mid-March, Time magazine's cover story showing Koskotas behind bars was entitled: ‘The Looting of Greece: a fallen tycoon charges Papandreou with stealing millions’. This caused the resignation of Agamemnon Koutsoyorgas, Papandreou's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice, when Koskotas claimed he had credited him with $2 million in a Swiss bank account. He also stated that Papandreou had authorized this payment and had himself been on the payroll.

HAZARDS AND CRISES: A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DROUGHT AND FAMINE IN NORTHERN NIGERIA*

During the early 1970s much of the Sahel and northern Sudanic savannas of West Africa was gripped by a devastating famine which had its origins in a run of drought years in the late 1960s. Prior to the exposure of widespread starvation and human suffering throughout Sahelia, both the academic and popular presses paid scant attention to the Sahel’s existence. Since 1974, however, the arid and semi-arid lands have assumed [some] popularity, if not notoriety, including an appearance on the cover of Time magazine under the dubious title of “creeping deserts.” In fact, the Sahel famine in particular has gained a sort of textbook notoriety and is usually invoked as an archetypical example of poor land use, desertification, local or global climatic change, [...] population pressure, or life boat ethics in practice. The Sahel has even entered the heady realms of high culture for John Updike’s witty novel, The Coup, based on the demise of the Kingdom of Kush − “land of delectable, delicate emptiness” − [and] clearly modeled after the Sahelian states. In addition there has been the commitment of a massive amount of foreign aid ($10 billion by the Club du Sahel); and political pressure from the Sahelian States themselves prompted the United Nations General Assembly to confront the global problem of desertification, from which emerged an International Conference convened in Nairobi during 1977. Yet, despite the resultant proliferation of Sahelian and Arid Lands Institutes, the profusion of rather ephemeral research organizations, multi-volume studies by USAID on long-

Spectral lines: Risk taking

“Nuclear Nightmare” was the headline on Time magazine's cover following the Three Mile Island accident: Both the Pennsylvania event and the reaction of the news media to it sharpened the public's concern about — and, perhaps, its sensitivity to — the realities of risk and risk taking.