Put some pants on, ladies

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

COLUMBIA — Considering all the events of this year, and even in this week (Hello, attempted-to-blow-up-airplane-and-failed terrorist guy), it is a sad statement that the status of tights as pants in today’s sartorial climate must even be considered. And yet, here I am, dedicating an entire column to the subject.

I feel that I should blame the hot mess on Lindsay Lohan for pushing the pro-tights-as-pants agenda onto an unsophisticated public filled with young girls who don’t remember the early '90s. But Ms. Lohan has had enough trouble lately, so we must not point fingers. We, as a fashion- and image-conscious society, must take responsibility for our own actions.

I would like to be very clear: Tights are not pants. Those $10 black leggings found at Target are not pants. Lace footless tights are not pants. Jeggings (a combination of jeans and leggings, which also made it onto the New York Times list of 2009 buzzwords) are not pants. If the potential NotPants could be worn while playing Mercutio in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the NotPants are really not pants.

The Web site tightsarenotpants.com (which also has a press kit to spread the Gospel of Tights are not Pants) is dedicated to fighting the plague of NotPants. “Tights as pants leave nothing to the imagination. Tights as pants are the fashion equivalent of Too Much Information,” the manifesto says. “This gratuitous divulgence of assets repels where the tights-as-pants wearer presumably hopes to entice.”

As such, tights and other suspect leg coverings should not be worn without proper coverage. They cannot be worn with normal tops, because they do not qualify as pants. If you can’t wear the top without pants, you can’t wear it with just tights. You need to put on a skirt or, gee, I dunno, some real pants. Maybe even some trousers.

For example: Wear your tights under a dress that you could wear without tights and not be arrested for indecent exposure. They’re very functional for keeping legs warm in winter and hiding a shaving lapse.

Not to mention, except on the most perfect of female forms (read: no one), tights are just not flattering. They emphasize a woman’s shape in all the very wrong places. There is no figure forgiveness. There is an extremely high risk of VPN (visible panty line), and even higher risk of VW (visible wedgies). These are all things to be avoided.

Tights are even admissible as leg coverings in sport, or dance, and maybe (and I do mean maybe) even worn ironically to an '80s party. I wear tights to go jogging. They’re very practical for winter. And, I wear my leggings as pajamas. I get it, really: Leggings and tights are comfortable. They’re stretchy and soft and not constricting at all.

But, under no circumstances are they ever to be considered and worn as pants. Because they are not pants.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, December 30, 2009.

Tiger Woods' scandal proves he's human

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Celebrity culture made Tiger Woods. And now, celebrity culture has eaten Tiger Woods.

It’s a great opening line, isn’t it? Except that celebrity culture, that ravenous beast that has chewed up peons with even minuscule amounts of talent, had nothing to do with “making” Tiger Woods. Tiger Wood’s innate Olympian ability — his preternatural golfing skill — made him the absolute superstar he is now. And I mean Olympian in the ancient Greek sense — Tiger Woods is modernity’s answer to Heracles.

Heracles, better known by his Roman name Hercules, was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman. In myth, he’s an authentic hero and demigod who conquered snakes in the cradle and performed a dozen labors (one of them was cleaning stables — no joke) before achieving 100 percent god status and earning a place on Mount Olympus and a goddess wife.

We humans like these kinds of stories, especially when they become flesh in the form of multicultural golf prodigies. I don’t even have to cite Tiger Woods’ many golf accomplishments, which include 71 PGA tournament victories and being the youngest Masters champion ever at 21 years old and the first Asian or black winner of a major golf championship. Tiger Woods is also worth, and I believe this is the technical financial term, a bagazillion dollars.

It’s interesting that revelations of Tiger Woods’ marital indiscretions are making the public question the axiom that all publicity is good publicity. Of all the people in the world idolized by celebrity culture, I would argue that Tiger Woods is one of the very few who have made it on pure (and freakishly inhuman) talent. Tiger Woods would have been a superstar without a vapid and image-driven, publicity-obsessed public to satisfy.

And now, Tiger Woods (well, his reputation and image) are festering in the belly of the giant whale that is celebrity culture. He’s like Jonah now. There is no amount of money or genuine greatness to get him out of this one now that Tiger Woods has been revealed as a mere mortal whose impeccable public image was really one heck of a smokescreen and not a result of superior moral or ethical attributes. It’s a good thing Oprah is still on the air because if Jonah had to repent to God, I think we all know that Tiger Woods needs to repent to Oprah.

Intellectually, this Tiger Woods’ media debacle shouldn’t really affect anyone’s perception of his sporting accomplishments, which are the true source of his celebrity. Most of the people we call celebrities today are really just infamous — there is no merit to their "fame," just meaningless publicity which is translated by a media-anesthetized public as true distinction.

Tiger Woods is not that kind of celebrity.

By the standard of most great men, Tiger Woods is nothing special. Don’t they all seem to get caught stepping out on their marriages? Not that being extraordinary in some important realm excuses extramarital affairs or other moral failings, but it seems that everyone is so surprised that Tiger Woods is human. Despite the superhuman accomplishments, Heracles was part human, too.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, December 16, 2009.

Believe in Santa Claus

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

The way my mother tells it, I was extraordinarily upset to find out that Santa Claus is a well-intentioned myth.

I was four or five years old, and my parents allowed me to open all my presents on Christmas Eve, so that my father could work Christmas Day and earn time-and-a-half for the holiday. When I ran upstairs in the morning, thinking that Santa had come, I was (apparently) hysterical to find out that it was all a lie.

I don’t remember any of this. Clearly, it was a very traumatic experience.

Like most myths, Santa Claus is essentially a bribe for children to be good, by whatever standards the parents see fit. That said, no matter how many times my 9-year-old brother, whom I affectionately call JakeMonster, expresses his love by hitting me with whatever implement of destruction that is nearest, he has never received coal in his stocking (as he should, in my opinion).

The myth of Santa Claus is really a lovely one, though, if you are still innocent enough to believe. To believe that a jolly old man with a white beard who lives at the North Pole flies a sleigh full of toys on Christmas Eve and delivers obscene amounts of presents to all the children in the world who are good is to truly believe in the goodness of humanity. It requires a beautiful guilelessness and naiveté.

Being burdened by the intricacies and repetition of everyday life, as an adult, means frequently forgoing the delights of innocent wonder for more pragmatic pursuits. Utility bills and apartment rent and car repairs and work aren’t always the stuff of which dreams are made. But the holiday season, which at least around here is certainly the most dreary weather-wise, is a time to set aside those concerns and experience the world with fresh eyes of youthful awe.

The “spirit of Christmas” requires a childlike wonder. And we adults manufacture that spirit through the propagation of the Santa Claus myth to children. And then we go about creating a magical world filled with sparkly lights, shiny stars, snow, sleigh rides and evergreen trees.

I put my own little Christmas tree up before Thanksgiving, and yes, there are presents under it. Christmas is the ultimate rationalization of the shopping and consumer culture in which we all participate, and I love shopping. But it’s OK because it’s Christmas and I’m buying gifts for my family and friends.

Christmas spirit, or holiday spirit or whatever particular idioms you choose to describe the season, is set apart from religious observance. The Puritans even banned the celebration of Christmas for 22 years in the 17th century. Whatever you observe, whether in the birth of a God-sent savior or the lunar winter solstice, culturally, we put aside more prosaic affairs in order to make a leap of faith. Every year, I want to believe in Sana Claus because it means recapturing a less jaded version of myself.

Children are more perceptive than I think most give them credit for. My brother, the aforementioned JakeMonster, is often insightful enough to injure me with words even more than the stuffed animal attacks do. Even if he knows me and my parents are lying about Santa Claus, I know that he will be jumping on me at 6 a.m. Christmas morning begging me to get out of bed to open presents, because for those few precious moments every year, it doesn’t matter if Santa Claus is really real or just a myth. What matters is the faith that he could maybe possibly be real.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, December 9, 2009.

Past 10 years should be known as 'Snafu Decade'

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

It started with the doomsday predictions of Y2K. Why were we ever so stupid to think that our computers being set to the wrong date would lead to the fall of Western civilization?

And then came the never-ending presidential election. September 11, 2001. The Enron scandal. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The war on a noun (terrorism). The Indian Ocean tsunami. The Harry Potter phenomenon. Fox News. Global warming. Movies about the global warming-induced apocalypse. The stock market crash. The burst of the housing bubble. The demise of the journalism industry …

I could continue. Maybe it’s because the only other decade I’m old enough to remember in full was the '90s — in which the most controversial occurrence was the president's affair in the Oval Office with someone who was not his wife — but the happenings in the first decade of the 21st century seem surreal. We bombed the moon. Seriously.

Which leads to the dilemma at hand today: What do we call this hypnologic decade? I was reminded this weekend by The New York Times that we, as a culture, have yet to bestow this decade a moniker: “You know the rules — coin a pithy, reductive phrase that somehow encapsulates the multitude of events, trends, triumphs and calamities of the past 10 years,” the New York Times wrote. For example: The Roaring Twenties, which I think is the only decade where one name stuck.

I have a suggestion: the Snafu Decade. The word “snafu” is a military acronym, standing for "situation normal, all fouled up," and is said to have originated during World War II. That "snafu" is a military term is also really appropriate, since much of the political upheaval in this current decade has been about war and the military. Since 2001, we have lived in a constant state of war that has no foreseeable end.

Nowadays, in more common parlance, it means “a badly confused or ridiculously muddled situation,” which I think perfectly embodies the public mood of the past decade. Not to mention, all those strange goings on I listed at the top have been rather snafu-like.

Looking at the past 10 years has seemed like a very bizarre dream, using whatever amount of hindsight I can muster while technically inside in the decade. Or it's seemed like a Salvador Dali painting, where objects are placed so out of context and in defiance of many of the laws of physics that they transcend any concept of “normal.”

This is a surreal dichotomy, where perceptions of everyday life are colored by the insanity of events outside it. My life — going to school, working for the Missourian and seeing my family at Thanksgiving — is situation normal. It’s everything else that’s all fouled up.

Forty-three days until 2010. Long live the Snafu Decade!

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, November 18, 2009.

Health care reform compromises hinder women's access to elective abortions

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

There was cheering in the bar on Saturday night among my friends when word came via iPhone that health care reform had passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. I run with a predominantly liberal and young crowd, soon to be seeking media jobs that hardly exist anymore and even fewer with benefits. Health care reform is important.

“The bill that the House has produced will provide stability and security for Americans who have insurance; quality, affordable options for those who don't; and lower costs for American families and American businesses,” President Barack Obama said in the Rose Garden Saturday. “This bill is change that the American people urgently need.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Which is why I was so very disappointed to read about the “compromise” on abortion rights that made it in late Saturday: suddenly, the Hyde Amendment ban on using federal funds for abortion, a very legal medical procedure, was not enough to mollify “pro-life” politicians (Democrat and Republican) in the House.

For one thing, I take issue with the term “pro-life.”  It sets up the false dichotomy that if you are in favor of abortion rights for women, you are in some way “pro-death.” That’s ridiculous and unfair.

But I digress: the addition to H.R.3200, also called “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,” made Saturday would stop federal subsidies for health insurance plans that cover elective abortions. This goes much further than the intent of the Hyde Amendment, and would most likely have the most effect on low- and middle-income women.

Should America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 be signed into law with these provisions, it will put an even larger burden on women seeking abortions. Private health insurance companies, wanting their insurance plans to be eligible for the federal subsidies, will eliminate elective abortion coverage from their plans. The government-run insurance plans, to be created by the legislation, would not be able to cover elective abortions at all (even though people who purchase health insurance through the public option would be paying premiums just like in private insurance).

The supposed solution to this is that women will pay, out of pocket, for “riders” to specifically cover abortions. This is absurd. No woman expects to have an abortion; there is a reason it’s called an unplanned pregnancy. Even if such a rider becomes available from private insurance companies, I opine that it would be prohibitively expensive because so few women would actually purchase it. This supposed solution is essentially worthless.

I have written before that denying federal funds to help women pay for abortions is unfair — it penalizes women who are already economically vulnerable and denies them access to a medical procedure the Supreme Court has ruled they have every right to have. But the so-called compromises of  H.R.3200 are beyond the pale. They have the potential to limit not only women on Medicare’s access to abortion, but women who pay for their own insurance or are covered through their employers.

Obama is right: America needs health care reform. But this cost is unfair to women.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on November 11, 2009.

Why we sweat the small stuff

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

My mom frequently says that I was born to worry: She calls me a “stress monkey” every time I call to complain about school.

I think my mother enjoys telling people about my worrying ways. She recently said that one of her friends no longer inquires about my health but simply asks what I am freaking out about this week. It’s usually something to do with the next assignment that I just don’t think I can finish on time and still get a good grade and thus maintain course to graduation, etc.

I’m fairly certain that everyone has something to worry about, be it money, children, health, terrorism, global warming or the sun’s inevitable expansion and engulfment of the Earth.

And no matter what, it’s probably not all that good for you to worry. My constant worry about failing out of graduate school and ruining my life — which currently manifests itself as insomnia, forgetfulness and a pathological immunity to any deadline — is probably shaving years off my life.

And I am not the only one worrying: According to the National Institutes of Health, 40 million Americans over 18 will meet the criteria for an anxiety disorder each year.

So, why do humans worry?  Like most quirks of the brain, it goes back about 1.8 million years ago to the Pleistocene Epoch and our evolutionary ancestors — early members of the genus Homo — who began evolving bigger brains capable of more complex risk assessment and long-term planning. There’s a conflict in the brain’s priorities: automatically maintaining alertness in case of immediate danger versus thoughtfully analyzing risks. In everyday life, humans need both systems of risk assessment to survive. It’s the mundane version of the “fight or flight” response:  Should you run from danger or stand up and fight it?

By this standard, however, I should be much more terrified of, say, an immediate and physical danger such as getting into a fatal car accident than I am of more abstract dangers such as writing a terrible paper for class. But yes, it is the abstract that I worry about, no matter how bad a driver I really am.

Worry is the space between the unknown and the fear of not having the ability to deal or cope with the unknown.

"It is what humans do with simple fear once it reaches the part of their brain called the cerebral cortex. We make fear complex, adding anticipation, memory, imagination and emotion," Edward M. Hallowell wrote in a "Psychology Today" article titled "Fighting Life's 'What Ifs.'"

Thinking intently about fear doesn’t seem like such a good idea, and I am inclined to say that it is not. The wisdom of the ages certainly doesn’t think worry is positive.

“Worry gives a small thing a big shadow,” a Swedish proverb states.

Mark Twain said, “I’ve seen many troubles in my time, only half of which ever came true.”

And Benjamin Franklin said, “Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.”

“It is what it is,” my mother tells me over the phone.

And after 10 minutes of spewing my worries and insecurities and phobias about graduate school, I usually say, “What? Me? Worried? No way, Mom.”

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, November 4, 2009.

Halloween: Destroying post-feminism through costumes

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

The accepted norm of Halloween costumes is that they are an opportunity to be not yourself for an evening. That is all well and good but I can guarantee that there is not enough post-feminist theory in this world to justify the female skin parade that will be on full display this All-Hallows Eve.

Many women my age took the movie “Mean Girls” too seriously when it said: “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.”

Which is a really lovely sentiment, isn’t it? We’re so post-feminist that dressing to please the aesthetic sexual eye of men is acceptable again. Because I’m sure that all the girls running around in black tights, bustiers and bunny ears and tails will be thinking about Gloria Steinem and her investigative stint as a Playboy Bunny (in the cocktail club, not the magazine) in 1963 (see “I Was A Playboy Bunny” for details).

And do all the professions really need an injection of the erotic? There’s no such thing as being a doctor or police officer or zombie for Halloween anymore. Being those things requires showing lots of skin, as if Halloween will be a dress rehearsal for Spring Break.

This mentality about the acceptability of body-baring costumes on Halloween has trickled down to children.  Reports of young girls sexing it up on Oct. 31 may be slightly over-exaggerated, but I would certainly argue that ladybugs with short skirts and false eyelashes, or pirates in tube dresses and fishnets, or maybe just the devil, are sexualizing girls before they’re old enough to understand what it all means.

Maybe it’s because I am from Michigan, where the end of October is quite cold, but I keep thinking that it must be miserable wearing nothing but a theme bikini as a Halloween costume. Going to a bar or a house party to celebrate with copious amounts of apple cider inherently requires less cold-weather wear than trick-or-treating out in the elements. To maximize the candy grab, at 10-years-old, all Halloween costumes had to be worn over three layers of sweat suits and jackets for warmth, and with the exception of Dorothys with ruby slippers, boots in case of rain or snow.

Now, a Dorothy is more likely to be wearing four-inch spike ruby heels than ruby slippers. Where is the creativity? The scare-factor? Halloween costumes have their roots in the Celt’s fear of being recognized by spirits of the dead, and they wore masks so they would be mistaken for fellow spirits. Or maybe we should all be scared of the cleavage?

The display of too much female flesh on Halloween is merely a symptom of a larger problem. The reclamation of sexual images that previously upheld a patriarchal society’s impractical standard of beauty and a female’s role of servitude is a standard of post-feminism. But this has been perverted into a one-night-per-year display of sex that has no purpose except to please male party-goers. It’s hard to demand respect when a woman is dressed, even on Halloween, like she does not respect herself.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, October 28, 2009.

Women's fashion magazines are evil, yet impossible to resist

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Every once and again, I do something that I know I should not do. I buy glossy women’s fashion magazines. Yes, those very very pretty manifestations of marketing an unobtainable standard of physical beauty are the guiltiest of my guilty pleasures.

It’s really nice to pretend that with a few flicks of the page I can find the secrets to a perfect wardrobe, glowing clear skin and shiny hair. It’s also really nice to pretend that, on a grad student's salary, I can actually afford the $40 bottle of exfoliating face wash or the $2,000 designer skirt that is required for such easy perfection.

I mean, what exactly makes a skirt cost $2,000? And why do I now lust after it like I would normally lust after a gooey chocolate brownie (that could be achieved in an hour for under $10).

Gloria Steinem, a founding editor of the feminist magazine Ms., wrote in 1990 about the “complementary copy” quid pro quo demanded by advertisers in women’s magazines. Meaning: a lipstick ad should be next to an article about lipstick trends, and preferably the lipstick article should feature the advertised lipstick.

“If 'Time' and 'Newsweek' had to lavish praise on cars in general and credit General Motors in particular to get GM ads, there would be a scandal — maybe a criminal investigation,” Steinem wrote in an essay titled “Sex, Lies and Advertising." "When women's magazines from 'Seventeen' to 'Lear's' (now defunct) praise beauty products in general and credit Revlon in particular to get ads, it's just business as usual.”

Just paging through any of these magazines with glamorous women celebrities on the cover should tell you that not much has changed. And there is very little transparency from the magazines or the advertisers about the practice of “complimentary copy.” But then, there are the models.

Mega-design house Ralph Lauren recently fired a model for being too fat. The model, Filippia Hamilton, had been Photoshopped in an advertisement into a human lollipop — her head was bigger than her waist and hips. Hamilton is reportedly 5-feet-10-inches tall and weighs 120 pounds — she’s a size four and has a body mass index of 17.2, which is considered to be underweight.

And the Ralph Lauren advertisement is really just a case of an accepted practice taken to an obvious extreme. Every image in a woman’s glossy fashion magazine has been Photoshopped to high heaven for “aesthetic” purposes.  A few pounds shaved off here and there, maybe a blemish removed, it's all standard practice in the magazine industry. For the record, it is absolutely not standard practice at the Missourian.

The supposition that women want to see only beautiful and perfect representations of the models and products on the page so that they can aspire to that standard is downright condescending. I don’t know about you, but I have no desire to look like a human lollipop. In real life, and without the assistance of Photoshop, that lollipop look would probably involve the removal of some ribs, and possibly a limb or two. That would hurt.

But will I stop wasting my money on these rags? Probably not. Because I am hoping that one of them will tell me : first, why all the young women around here are laboring under the delusion that leggings are pants; and second, how I can be pretty and successful and make it look easy too.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on October 21, 2009.

If Obama gets a Nobel ... then maybe other dreams can come true, too

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

So, our young and new president, Barack Obama, just won a Nobel Peace Prize. That’s so nice, to be so recognized for being elected to the highest office of the United States and to not be George W. Bush. Actually, the Nobel Foundation recognized Mr. Obama "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," which sounds really nice, too.

Don’t get me wrong: My criticism is not of Obama. It’s not his fault he won, and he was a class act at his Friday press conference where he was charmingly self-deprecating and humble. “To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who've been honored by this prize — men and women who've inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace,” Obama said.

Nobel Foundation, or, to be more precise, the five committee members selected by Norwegian Parliament to pick the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, I’m talking to you. Barack Obama? Seriously? The timetable is absurd. He had to have been nominated before Feb. 1 (scant weeks after he took office, mind you) and then short-listed for the prize by March.

What “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” could Obama have actually put forth by March 2009? The news release from the Nobel Foundation says: “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future.”

I know I was pretty enamored with Obama in February, all swept up in the romance and hope of the first black president and a new mandate of change. But never did it cross my mind that all that was worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. Couldn’t the Nobel committee have waited a bit, so that there were more than two months of presidency under Obama’s belt? Or, you know, we could have found out if all this promise of hope and change actually amounts to something. It’s just premature.

Maybe Obama could have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature? After all, he won a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album, respectively, for each of his two memoirs.

I mean, if Obama is now a Nobel Laureate, then maybe I should win a Pulitzer for my columns. I think after 17 columns (this is number 18, dear reader), I could be honored for “distinguished commentary.”  Or, even better, the Missouri School of Journalism could just give me that Master of Arts degree now. After all, I am about a semester and a half away from really finishing. I would argue that I’ve already put “extraordinary efforts” for this master's degree already.

Considering the undertone of all the criticism of Obama’s candidacy for president was that he was more rock star than world leader, winning a Nobel Peace Prize for which he was nominated weeks after taking office is really not helping things. To be so unduly recognized unfortunately undermines Obama’s credibility.

So, Nobel Peace Prize committee, I’m really happy that you’re really happy about Obama. You know, we’re pretty excited about him on this side of the pond, too. But, wasn’t Bono due for one of these things about now?

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, October 14, 2009.

Dispatches from Missouri's Twin City

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

FESTUS, Mo. — Festus and Crystal City have histories so intertwined that a Walmart store happily sits on the border between them (and the cities share the sales tax). Crystal City, population 4,549, is nestled on the Mississippi River about 34 miles south of St. Louis. Festus is due west of Crystal City, essentially trapping the latter against the river on the east and the town of Herculaneum to the north. These two small towns share an identity as the Twin City, although the tension of “us versus them” remains.

I am here as a member of the digital darkroom crew of the Missouri Photo Workshop, a yearly, weeklong boot camp in documentary photography put on by the Missouri School of Journalism. This year 31 workshop participants, 13 faculty members and 20-some MU student-volunteers (that’s me) have descended upon Festus and Crystal City to document and hopefully shed photographic light on this place.

I find it an odd contradiction in journalism that those who hold the pen (or camera, in this case) are expected to explain another person’s truth in so little time. How can one-hundredth of a second, a click of the shutter, one photo (or maybe five or seven) be expected to tell the entire truth of someone’s story?

This is the rub: A documentary photo is not BIG TRUTH. It is the truth of the moment. Part of the workshop is learning to narrow the story the photos are telling so that the moments do tell the story. A photograph is a slice of time, made static. Or as author and critic Susan Sontag wrote, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

I think what we are really doing here in Festus is enabling a visual anthropology through documentary photography. We're trying to look at the world as it is today — to look at this town — and to find and preserve the one-hundredths of a second that will collectively reveal a sense of what is happening here now.

Workshop participants have been documenting small-town Missouri for 61 years.  At first the idea was to tell the big story of the town hosting the workshop, but it eventually found the form it uses today, for each photographer to tell a smaller, more personal story. The result is an emergence of understanding, a synergy of individual photos that make up individual stories that in turn create a portrait of the town that is greater than the sum of its parts.

“A great photograph poses more questions than it answers,” said David Rees, the workshop co-director, head of the MU photojournalism department and all-around Yoda. The process of making these photo stories is not really to present the meaning of life, but to challenge viewers to search for it.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and a current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism and is currently volunteering on the multimedia team for the 61st Missouri Photo Workshop in Festus and Crystal City.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, September 30, 2009.

Got a secret? Not on the Internet

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Everybody’s got a secret.

So, why do we need to share them on the Internet?  I speak specifically of PostSecret, a “community art project” in which one creates a postcard-size piece of artwork containing a confession and then sends it into Frank Warren, who then posts about 20 secrets every Sunday on the PostSecret blog (there have also been four PostSecret books and a fifth arriving in October). People send in secrets about everything from small social transgressions or oddities to the darkest recesses of depression and self-harm.

“My wife won’t brush her dog,” one person writes in, on top of a photo of a dog. “So I put the dog’s hair in her food.”

Another person writes: “I cheated on my eye exam to get the glasses I always wanted.” And another: “I religiously read the blogs of 2 women who have recently given birth to their first children. It distracts me from the fact that my husband doesn’t want to have children.”

All the secrets on PostSecret, confessions to the anonymous Internet gods, are carefully constructed by the confessor. Each secret’s presentation is "aesthetic-ized," through word choice and drawing and graphic design, like the confessor is trying to make their secrets (which are too ugly for their immediate social circle) beautiful for the entire world. This highlights the inherent tension between the artifice of the medium and the supposed honesty of the content.

But there are other sites like it. My personal favorite these days is Dear Old Love, where contributors send in “pithy, specific” notes directed to their former flames. It is a more literary pursuit, as opposed to the visual beauty of PostSecret, where writers are trying to outwit and out write each other on the subject of old, lost or future paramours.

“I taught you how to fold towels and properly iron shirts,” writes in one disappointed woman. “Didn’t you know you were in training to be my husband, not hers?”

They’re all only a few lines each — I doubt many are longer than the 140 characters of a tweet, and yet they all tell a story within them. It’s like the anonymous writer wants the intended recipient of the note to know, but be unable to confirm, that it was he or she who sent it.

It’s a little strange to turn our deepest secrets, the ones that would normally only be whispered to the most dear of confidantes after a few glasses of wine, into small spectacles for public viewing. But for generations of Americans forced to read “The Scarlet Letter” in high school (or college or both), secrets are seen as destroyers of personal psyches. Hester Prynne, at the very least, had her secret out in the open. She couldn’t hide it — her symbol of a child and the letter she was forced to wear were evidence of her sin, her secret. But Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester’s partner in adultery, was left unexposed and thus tortured himself as penance.

Dimmesdale’s brand of self-flagellation, I suspect, is not nearly as popular as anonymous truth telling. I think that the popularity of PostSecret and other incognito secret Web sites (SecretTweet, FMyLife, Txt Frm Lst Nght, Group Hug) has a lot to do with an open type of voyeurism. Finding amusement in the pain and humiliation of others is a lot more acceptable when the pain and humiliation is willingly packaged for public consumption — it takes the taboo out of looking in secret at secrets.

Looking at or reading the secrets is a cathartic experience. The human intricacies brought to light through self-examination invite the voyeur to identify with the secret. The writer/artist/confessor is seeking that affirmation from the reader: See me, hear me and love my secret.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, September 23, 2009.

Fallen Marine's photo shows a more human war

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

"Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised." – Susan Sontag

It is hard to believe that in this age of hyper-realistic violent imagery that a blurred photo of a mortally injured Marine can be so shocking. And yet, there was a national response to The Associated Press photo that ran in the Missourian and other papers across the world on Sept. 4.

Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, all of 21 years old, was the injured Marine in the photograph. The image was made soon after he was struck in the legs by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan. It depicts fellow Marines rushing to Bernard’s assistance. It is blurred, but there is an ominous pool of red amid the blur. Bernard died during surgery the night the photograph was made from a blood clot in his heart.

On Sept. 4, I picked up a copy of the Missourian and, after examining the front-page image of a Mizzou football player, turned to page 3A. The photo, by embedded AP photographer Julie Jacobson, ran three columns wide and was the newspaper equivalent of being pushed into Lake Michigan in December. I had to look, and look again and then again to be sure, but that blob of blood red on the page was undeniable.

The story, by Jacobson and AP reporter Alfred De Montesquiou, that accompanied the image was descriptive and in my mind as graphic as the photo: "Bernard lay on the ground, two Marines standing over him exposed, trying to help. A first tourniquet on Bernard's leg broke. A medic applied another.

'I can't breathe, I can't breathe,' Bernard said. Troops crawling under the bullets dragged him to the MRAP, the mine-resistant armored vehicle that accompanied the patrol."

And this is really what bothers me about the public reaction: The photo is unacceptable — even unpatriotic — to publish, but the words are not to be so censored. Bernard’s parents talked with reporters at their home in Maine and spoke of Bernard’s love of literature and his faith in God. But John Bernard found the image to be disrespectful of his son’s memory. Defense Secretary Robert Gates even asked the AP to hold the photo back.

War is ugly — about that there is no doubt. In the Missourian, you are far more likely to encounter images of press conferences, festivals and football games than images of war from far away. The photo of Bernard’s injuries is painful, breathtaking and, unlike so many other stories and photographs in the newspaper that day, it was stunningly immediate and emotionally real.

"Images transfix. Images anesthetize," critic and author Susan Sontag wrote in "On Photography." “An event known through photographs certainly becomes more real than it would have been if one had never seen the photographs.”

The AP released excerpts of Jacobson’s journal entries. In them, she wrote of the image: “Death is a part of life and most certainly a part of war. Isn't that why we're here? To document for now and for history the events of this war? We'd shot everything else thus far and even after, from feature images of a Marine talking on a SAT phone to his girlfriend, all the way to happy meetings between Marines and civilians.”

Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard is one of 807 Americans killed in Afghanistan since 2001. This is an agonizing statistic. Because the agony of Bernard’s death should really be felt 806 times over.  I saw the photo. I read the story. And I felt it.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on September 16, 2009.

Denying public money to fund abortion unfair

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

On the last day of August, my esteemed op-ed editor handed me a letter from Mr. James D. Miller of Fayette. “A story idea,” my editor said. I really love story ideas. Having something to write about (or photograph, as the case may be) is more than half the battle.

Mr. Miller had written the Missourian, confused about the reportage of a comment by Sen. Claire McCaskill at an Aug. 26 town hall meeting in Jefferson City about health care. Missourian reporter Michael Sewall wrote: “McCaskill also tried to dispel the rumor that abortion would be covered under the new health plan. She said that would be impossible unless an amendment was inserted to repeal the black-letter law, which prohibits the federal government from funding abortion.”

Thus, Mr. Miller wrote in his letter, “What is the ‘black letter law’? When I called Sen. McCaskill’s Washington, D.C., office … the staffer I talked to did not know what this ‘black letter law’ is.”

As far as I can tell, this is a case of jargon making it into a story without explanation. A “black letter law” is a law that is already on the books — a law that already exists and is generally well known. It turns out that Sen. McCaskill was really talking about the Hyde Amendment at the Aug. 26 town hall meeting. I called Sen. McCaskill's office in Washington, and a staffer confirmed that the black letter law she referred to was indeed the Hyde Amendment.

Congress first passed the Hyde Amendment in 1976 as a legislative response to Roe v. Wade, which was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973. Nestled into the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008 (the current incarnation), it forbids the federal government from funding abortions (with some exceptions for rape, incest and the mother's health). It’s long, but here are the important bits:

• SEC. 507 (a) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for any abortion.
• (b) None of the funds appropriated in this Act, and none of the funds in any trust fund to which funds are appropriated in this Act, shall be expended for health benefits coverage that includes coverage of abortion.

Which means, in effect, that neither Medicare nor health insurance for federal employees and military personnel paid for by the federal government can cover abortions. In 1993, the language was added to the law to allow funding of abortions in the case of rape, incest or when the mother’s health was at risk.

In 1980, the Supreme Court decided in Harris v. McRae that the ban on federal funding of abortions was constitutional. Justice Potter Stewart wrote: “It does not follow that a woman's freedom of choice carries with it a constitutional entitlement to the financial resources to avail herself of the full range of protected choices. … The Hyde Amendment … places no governmental obstacle in the path of a woman who chooses to terminate her pregnancy.”

Justice Stewart, I respectfully disagree.

First, think of other rights that we have under the Constitution: freedom of speech, for example. In 2007, the city of Columbia spent almost $40,000 on security to protect members of the National Socialist Movement (aka neo-Nazis) while they held a 45-minute rally downtown. That’s public, taxpayer money. Forty thousand dollars is an absurd amount of money spent to protect the speech of very few people with some ugly, vile views.

I hate what they say. But they have the right to say it, and I’ll pay to protect their rights to say whatever hateful poison they want to spew.

Roe v. Wade said women have the constitutional right to choose an abortion. It’s controversial, and it wasn’t as explicitly stated as freedom of speech, but it is unfair to deny public money to protect this right.

Furthermore, the Hyde Amendment punishes women who can’t afford to choose to terminate a pregnancy. The procedure in the first trimester can cost between $350 and $900, according to Planned Parenthood. This can be prohibitively expensive.

But, I defer to Justice Thurgood Marshall, who said it best in his Harris v. McRae dissent: “The Court's opinion studiously avoids recognizing the undeniable fact that for women eligible for Medicaid — poor women — denial of a Medicaid-funded abortion is equivalent to denial of legal abortion altogether. … If abortion is medically necessary and a funded abortion is unavailable, they must resort to back-alley butchers, attempt to induce an abortion themselves by crude and dangerous methods, or suffer the serious medical consequences of attempting to carry the fetus to term. … The Court's decision today marks a retreat from Roe v. Wade and represents a cruel blow to the most powerless members of our society. I dissent.”

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism, and a teaching assistant for the communications law class.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on September 9, 2009.

Reflections on last days of summer

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Classes at the MU started Monday. I’m sure you, dear reader, have noticed the influx of college students into Columbia last week. I’m from a college town, Ann Arbor, Mich., so the rhythms of the university are as natural to me as the seasons, and move-in weekend heralds the promise of the end of air so hot and humid you may as well be swimming in it.

Unfortunately, it also heralds the end of the quiet. I like Columbia in the summer, and not only because the yelling at 2 a.m. outside my apartment window is kept to a minimum. Without the sheer numbers of MU students crowding things up, a peace settles over the town. The kind of peace that means you can get a coffee without waiting 10 minutes in line or just sit in the park on a lunch break without having to overhear the gory details of someone else’s night out.

I’m a summer person. I thrive on beaches, swimming, reading and doing nothing in the sun.

Like the first real day of fall when the Missouri humidity breaks and the air just smells like the cooler seasons, it is always a bit of a shock to the senses to be living adjacent to a full campus again. But, it’s refreshing. All the heat and peace and quiet can start dulling the senses. The heat makes me want to lie in the sun reading a book. But fall is, like the coming of all new things, exciting.

I am supposedly entering my last year of formal education. Leaving the seasons of the school year is a little terrifying. Not defining life in terms of semesters and professors and homework seems nonsensical. Colleges, college towns and kids who grew up in these towns are intricately tied to these structures.

I may bitterly complain about the trappings of the new school year: the thousands of students; the noise; the lines; the workload of classes; the reliance on caffeine; the eyestrain from staring at a computer; even football Saturdays are causes for annoyance.  But the rigor, academic and otherwise, of the school year is really part of the appeal. After the lovely heat-induced stupor of summer, fall is fun.

So, going back to class doesn’t seem so very bad. My brother, Jake, who started fourth grade this month, is more prone to mourning the loss of video game time along with unilaterally refusing to do any homework in cursive handwriting. But I have mellowed in my opposition to the first day of school, maybe because I can type all my assignments. (Actually, it’s because I am no longer being required to memorize multiplication tables.)

It’s a scary thought, but I can see the end of this academic road. When you’re a fourth-grader like my brother, the end is INFINITY AWAY. Meanwhile, I scheduled graduate school commencement into my planner — by May 15, 2010, it’s over for me. I am excited about the possibilities of a life not so caught up in the college lifestyle. I think that I am ready to get out.

I do like summer, but autumn means that the school year is rebooting. I guess that other towns are not so tied to this heartbeat, but it's as good as any way of life that's out there. If you so choose to live in a college town, it is a nice lifestyle. It’s like school is always in session.

Erin K. O'Neill is a former assistant director of photography and current page designer for the Missourian. She is also a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on August 26, 2009.

Today's 20-somethings have reason to envy the '60s

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

We deny it, but I think my generation of 20-somethings is jealous of the kids who came of age in the 1960s.

This week, the third season premiere of "Mad Men," a cult TV hit about an advertising agency in this illustrious decade, coincided with the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock music festival. The virtual second coming of the Beatles in the form of a video game will be arriving in early September.

Coincidence? I think not.

The '60s have been thoroughly mythologized as a time of change and revolution — the good kind. Young people believed in their causes, and peaceful protest worked. The causes had an immediate moral weight, because they were so basic and just: civil rights, anti-war and the beginnings of the women's movement. They say that America was naive in the '60s, like it’s a good thing.

And maybe it was. The myth of the '60s, with free love and Martin Luther King Jr., walking on the moon and Jimi Hendrix playing the electric guitar with his teeth at Woodstock, is quite glorious. My feeling is that the young folk today (that means me, too) just can’t measure up. I mean, what are Youtube videos compared to the March on Washington? Or, the Internet compared to space travel?

Don’t get me wrong; the Internet is awesome: It’s practically made libraries go the way of outhouses. My mom thinks it’s funny that I think a newspaper on microfilm is fun and novel. But the material point is that the '60s are now 40 years in the past, and a new wave of nostalgia is rising.

Not that the '60s were all that great. The rampant sexism and racism must’ve been awful. The draft and thousands of Americans dying in Vietnam stunk. We chose to remember the “redeeming” qualities for a reason and forget that life was just as gritty then as it is now.

Generally, I think that my generation is jealous because of the sense of unified purpose, or unified outrage, our parents say they had. Even more, I think we’re jealous that the movements in the '60s had a measurable and memorable effect — not just at the time, but an effect that is still felt 40 years later.

I was 14 when Sept. 11 happened and the perception of our world changed. Many of us in college and straight out of high school can barely remember the pre-Sept. 11 world; taking our shoes off in airports is normal. The political consciousness of a generation was made during years in which fear of terrorism overwhelmed the country and the nation accepted, even applauded, massive curtailments of civil liberties.

This does not exactly foster a sense of faith in America among young folks.  

And this, I believe, is what we are most jealous of: that there was ever faith that the United States could rise above its current condition and live up to its ideals. And not just America, that we ourselves could be better. Sure, we got Barack Obama elected, but the president (even the first black president) is a symbol, not a movement of epic proportions that fundamentally changes the fabric of the county.

Despite the fun to be had playing Halo, this is something that has been lost.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, August 19, 2009.

A town without a newspaper

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

My hometown no longer has a newspaper.

Ann Arbor, Mich., is a town not unlike Columbia — the population hovers around 115,000, and the city is the home of a flagship public university. The main employers are the University of Michigan and two hospitals. Located about a 45-minute drive west of Detroit, Ann Arbor has seemed to weather the economic troubles that plague the rest of the state. Time described the town as Michigan’s “beauty queen.”

And yet, the Ann Arbor News published its last edition July 23.  The paper had a circulation of about 45,000. Two hundred seventy-two people lost their jobs.

While the Ann Arbor News was beset by the same problems that pretty much every paper in the industry is currently suffering, the shock is that Booth Newspapers, a subsidiary of Advance Publications, decided not to cut the number of print publications and furlough journalists to maintain profits, but to abolish the News altogether and start fresh.

And now, my beloved hometown of Ann Arbor, Mich., is the first major U.S. municipality to be completely without a newspaper.

In the News' place now exists AnnArbor.com — a site that deliberately feels more like Twitter than a traditional newspaper site.  There are now 32 journalists on staff, along with 22 staffers working the advertising side of the site.  To my personal dismay, only two people on the staff list are described as a photojournalists. AnnArbor.com also uses 70 community bloggers, who are mostly unpaid, to produce supplementary content.

In a letter to readers, Publisher Laurel Champion justified the switch to online with the Ann Arbor population’s high education and technology use rates: “92 percent of the community has the skills and technology set-up for online news. And we're committed to working with everyone in the community, especially those who have limited online access and familiarity,” Champion wrote. I think, perhaps, that the eight percent who don’t have the online news skills are those who need the news the most.

I’m sure the lower overhead costs of drastically reducing the workforce and eliminating printing were appealing as well.

But my cynicism about the motives for the destruction of a venerable paper with a 175-year history in Ann Arbor is tempered by the stark realization that for journalism to survive in America, a new business model must be found. The New York Times lost $74.5 million in the first quarter of 2009, and like it or not, that is America’s newspaper of record we are talking about. Advertising revenue and circulations are down across the board among newspapers, and between the demise of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, it has seemed like the Newspaper Apocalypse in the past year.

But Seattle and Denver, despite the catastrophic loss of a newspaper each, had other newspapers to keep the light alive. It has even been reported that the Seattle Times is benefiting from the end of the Post-Intelligencer by gaining its former rival’s market share.

I know it’s only a few weeks old, but AnnArbor.com seems like an experiment in buzzwords gone terribly wrong. The mix of professional journalism and amateur blogging is confusing, and any hierarchy of news value is completely abandoned in favor of the most recent post.

Until I moved to Columbia to attend the University of Missouri five years ago, I read the Ann Arbor News almost every day since I could read (along with every other publication I could get my hands on). My childhood friends almost all had their first job delivering the News after school. The News chronicled all my swim meets and water polo matches in high school — it was an accomplishment to have my time in the 500-yard freestyle listed in the results.  I adored the News' building on the corner of Huron and Division streets. Maybe it's misplaced nostalgia, but I lament the end of the Ann Arbor News.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism. She is a graduate of the Huron High School class of 2004 in Ann Arbor. Go River Rats!

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, August 12, 2009.

The problem with Facebook photos

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

I was an early adopter of Facebook.com. It became popular in 2004, my freshman year of college. This was before all the colleges and universities in the U.S. were able to register, and a few years before Facebook was open to everyone. So, most of my kind-of-adult social life has been influenced by the social networking culture that Facebook has spawned.

This means almost constant awareness of the danger of Facebook photos. Any photo taken of me (or you) in any condition, can be uploaded and shared with the world, regardless of my (or your) preference. Facebook, in its own way, encourages the proliferation of images, no matter how inane or embarrassing the images might be.

Most people I know who are not members of the photo nerd brigade upload as many photos as they can to Facebook — unlike other digital photo upload sites such as Flickr or Photobucket, Facebook does not have a limit. Some people literally upload every frame they take with their digital cameras, without restraint.

“Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing — which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art,” author and critic Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography.  “It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety and a tool of power.”

Facebook is the equivalent of being stuck in a friend’s vacation slideshow. Do I really need to see every photo someone took at a party, including images of one person with their arms around every single person in attendance? Or, every single frame of a friend’s vacation to Iowa City?

“Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had,” Sontag wrote. “Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation.” This is a shame.

Photography should not be a means through which a person experiences life. It takes a person out of the moment, and anesthetizes the life experience, putting distance between the person behind the camera lens and their life. I am in the business of providing photographic proof for this fine newspaper, the Missourian. I know aspiring professionals who live and breathe photography — and I know a few who can’t function without a camera in their hands and their eyes looking through the viewfinder.

Why do people need indisputable proof that they had a good time? And furthermore, why do people need 120 frames of said photographic proof?

“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted,” Sontag wrote. “Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies.” It is a socialized compulsion to photograph one’s life. There is a sense that if it is not photographed, it did not happen. Facebook plays into this insecurity — if the photos are not on Facebook, it must have been a boring evening.

But any serious documentary photographer knows that things happen outside of the camera’s gaze all the time. Photographers speak of capturing “the moment” or “the peak action” of an event — the best and most visual slice of time, with the most visceral visual emotion, the 1/125 of a second that tells the story. This is a hard task. It is more than having your friend say “cheese” or standing under the Gateway Arch. There are no do-overs, no posing. Photographers miss the moment all the time, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

So I ask for some discretion from the public. No one needs to see 200 photographs from the party last night. Take it easy, shutterbug. Pick, say, five images. Or better yet, leave the camera at home and have a good time without it.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism. She is a Facebook user, but posts photos to her blog.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, August 5, 2009.

Health care’s better Down Under

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

I have one overarching life philosophy: When in doubt, do as the Australians do.

The Aussies have fashioned themselves a very nice, if not perfect, health care system.  It merges the benefits of a government-run universal insurance and care scheme with the flexibility and choice of private insurance rather successfully.

The news media on this side of the Pacific Ocean have obsessed over the process of passing American health care reform through Congress but not the details of the actual bill. President Barack Obama’s remarks of late have been platitudes about lowering costs, giving everyone preventative care and stopping insurance discrimination for preexisting conditions. These are not things to which anyone objects. But how we are to accomplish these things is left unsaid in the debate.

So I propose we look to the Southern Hemisphere. According to World Health Organization statistics, the total Australian health care cost in 2006 was $3,316* per capita. Comparatively, the U.S. spent $6,714 per capita on health care in 2007. Meanwhile, Australia also enjoys a lower per capita government expenditure on health care: $2,227 in 2007, as compared with $3,074 in the U.S.

Medicare Australia is the government universal health insurance program.  Australians enjoy this lower expense through a network of public hospitals, which are free for all Aussies. Australian Medicare also subsidizes medical specialists, general practitioners, and prescriptions, dentists and participating optometrists. This is paid for by a 1.5 percent income-tax levy.

Australian Medicare also strongly encourages those who can afford it to buy their own private health insurance. Anyone who buys private health insurance is entitled to a 30 percent rebate from the government. And then there is the Medicare levy surcharge, to encourage better-off Aussies to buy private hospital insurance. So singles who make more than about $58,100 per year or families that make more than $124,500 per year can either buy enough private insurance or pay a 1 percent additional tax for Medicare.

Conversely, Australians with an income of less than $14,800 don’t have to pay the Medicare tax, and those under $17,400 pay a reduced tax. There are also reductions for seniors and pensioners. But everyone gets basic Medicare, regardless of income.

And because everyone gets Medicare, private health insurers need to stay competitive. The largest private health insurer, Medibank Private, is actually owned by the government but is subjected to the same regulations as non-government owned health insurance companies. A few health insurance providers in Australia, such as GHMBA and HCF, are even nonprofit.

The private and public health insurance systems working in tandem provide cheaper health care that avoids many of the common complaints about “socialized” universal health care. Because the wealthy are so strongly encouraged to have private health insurance, there are rarely wait times for procedures. And since all Australians are in Medicare, it’s good, efficient and cost-effective health care. While the government won’t cover everything — the basics are taken care of and subsidies keep patients' costs down — what isn’t covered isn’t all that costly.

I have lived in Australia and used its health care system. I had to buy international student health insurance through Medibank Private. I needed doctors to re-issue my American prescriptions, to update my tetanus vaccination and to fix a dislocated knee. The system works, in practice, much like the American system for those who have good health insurance. Only, instead of just working that way for the insured, it works that way for everyone.

It’s a good system. I suspect it’s such a good one because with the jellyfish, crocodiles, sharks, funnel web spiders, dingoes, six of the ten most poisonous snakes in the world and a giant hole in the ozone layer, Australia is hazardous to your health. But our fair American congressmen and congresswomen should take a lesson from the Lucky Country: Health care is better there, and America would do well to emulate it.

*All dollar amounts have been converted to U.S. dollars.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism. She has lived in Australia on two occasions, for a year as a Rotary Youth Exchange Student during high school and a semester abroad in college.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Saturday, August 1, 2009.

There will be never be another Walter Cronkite

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

Walter Cronkite, legendary news anchor for the CBS Evening News, died July 17. There will never be a figure in American journalism like him again. For 19 years, from 1962 to 1981, Cronkite was the news.

Since the rise of the Internet and cable news networks, the ability of one news network program to capture the attention of the majority of Americans has faltered.  The Pew Research Center for People & the Press found that as a source of presidential campaign news in the 2004 election, nightly network news was down 10 percent from 2000. Meanwhile, cable and Internet news were each up 4 percent, and comedy TV shows up 2 percent, and with people ages 18-25 this decline in traditional news usage was much more dramatic.

Pew Research hasn’t done a massive survey on media usage in the 2008 election, but I speculate that these trends have continued through the last election cycle. Considering the success of President Barack Obama’s online social networking campaign and fund raising strategy, I would say the flight to online information sources is staggering.

The trend toward fragmentation is not the only factor in the de-Cronkite-ization of the American news landscape. There is also the issue of a partisan press—a sea change in media behavior, as compared to the Cronkite ideal.

Cronkite was an authority on the news of the day, and he was a distinctly neutral one. There’s no way any news anchor on television today, regardless of network or show format, could sign off with, “And that’s the way it is.” Because cable news and blogs are much more likely to be supported by a political standpoint, their conclusions are much more likely to be biased.

In the 2004 Pew survey, 39 percent of Americans said, “news organizations are biased in favor of one of the two parties.” In 1987, only six years after Cronkite left the CBS Evening News, 62 percent of people surveyed found media coverage to be unbiased.

America is not unfamiliar with a politically biased press. Indeed, the first newspapers after the Revolution were sponsored by political parties and were considered mouthpieces. By 1789, the Federalist Party, the party of George Washington, had the Gazette of the United States on its side. Two years later, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison of the Democratic-Republican Party urged the formation of the National Gazette, to counter the Gazette of the United States' political influence.

But by the mid-1900s, Americans were no longer familiar with a deeply partisan media. The expectation of an unbiased media is deeply ingrained and is taught without question to young journalists. But Cronkite and his unbiased,trustworthy delivery of the news have not been maintained in the popular media landscape. Cronkite has given way to the likes of Bill O’Reilly, who champions a point of view like no other. And then there are the political leanings of Fox News and MSNBC, both cable news networks who decided to wear their respective biased political leanings on their sleeve and were rewarded with higher ratings.

Sure, CBS, ABC and NBC all have their daily national newscasts, and they’re admirable, but they are not the behemoth of journalistic influence that Cronkite was. The current newscasts lack the monolithic audience, the glow of public trust, which Cronkite enjoyed. Walter Cronkite was an emblem of integrity and honesty that will be missed in journalism.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, July 22, 2009.

Tehran Spring

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

It is a truth universally acknowledged that tyrants who allow any small freedoms to their oppressed masses would eventually be in want of an army of tanks.

On August 21, 1968, such an army of tanks from Warsaw Pact countries crossed into Czechoslovakia to clamp down on a burgeoning democratic movement now known as the Prague Spring.  The thawing of USSR-mandated oppressions meant the freedom of speech, the freedom to move across borders, the freedom to engage in open debate and an economy focused on the needs of consumers instead of the government, led by Alexander Dubček, head of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

But, Leonid Brezhnev (then leader of the USSR) knew that if you give oppressed people a hint of freedom, they’d take the lot if not violently run down. Under the guise of killing off bourgeois tendencies in Czechoslovakia under Dubček and under a policy eventually called the Brezhnev Doctrine, 200,000 troops and 2,100 tanks crossed the Czech border and dozens of people were killed in the invasion. Dubček was arrested, taken to Moscow and forced to take it all back.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei must have been taking notes, for Iran has been repeating some history. In certifying the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad almost four weeks ago, Khamenei galvanized discontent from his oppressed masses. If you give a people elections, they generally expect those election results to be carried out.

The Tehran Spring is the new Prague Spring: In this morality play, Khamenei is Brezhnev, an all-supreme power with a vested interest in maintaining the tyrannical status quo. Meanwhile, opposition party presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi is Dubček, a leader who promises greater freedom and reform.

(And no, it’s not a perfect analogy, but just let go of the minor details. The parallels hold true even though Khamenei is the domestic supreme ruler of Iran and not the ruler of a multi-republic superpower like Brezhnev was. And they hold true even though Moussavi has not been elected to office and delivered on promises of greater freedom like Dubček had in 1968.)

The Iranian government has been shutting down contact with the West, expelling journalists and trying to keep protesters off Twitter.  Meanwhile, the government has acted in the streets, detaining 302 Iranians to date, subsequently releasing 78, and the confirmed death toll stands at 35 according to a running total kept by The Guardian.

And while there had been a lull in protesting, Iranians took to the streets of Tehran on July 10 yet again.  It takes more than Basij militia with batons, tear gas and the threat of being crushed by the government to stop the protests. If only there were tanks.

If the drama in Tehran plays out like Czechoslovakia in 1968, the protesters will be overwhelmed by military might. Moussavi will concede the election to Ahmadinejad, and the accusations of election fraud will go uninvestigated. And even worse, Iran will backslide into an even more oppressive era with more truncated freedoms.

In revolutions, it seems that the determining factor is the use of tanks against the pro-democracy folks. People are willing to risk tear gas, batons and arrest, but not being trampled by a tracked-and-armored battling vehicle. But, evidence points to the Tehran protesters having staying power and defying the historical expectation of defeat set by the Prague Spring.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a graduate student at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, July 15, 2009.

A case for alien invasion

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

If flying saucers arrived on Earth tomorrow, we should all prepare to cheer. Well, unless the little green men are intent upon world domination, then we should triumphantly blow them up with our scrappy ingenuity. And then cheer.

An alien invasion would ultimately cause the world to unite, and after defeating the other race, our little Earth would likely become a peaceful, “Star Trek”-like utopia.  All the hate, the genocide, the wars, would be a page in a violent history of intra-human fighting.

Humans are rather notorious for liking and trusting people they know or have something in common with while disliking and distrusting people who are foreign to them. In evolutionary psychology, it’s called in-group favoritism, and it explains a lot of human behaviors.

Throughout human history, humans have identified with other humans who are like them, creating “in-groups.” In the Pleistocene Epoch 1.8 million years ago, when early members of the genus Homo appeared, an “in-group” was the hunter-gatherer tribe to which a cave person belonged while “out-groups” were rival tribes.

Human-style rivalry is remarkable in one major way: we help other humans in our in-group who are not our kin. Evolutionarily speaking, this means that a human can gain some kind of gene survival advantage through cooperation with other humans. As early humans started developing technology and later, agriculture, this ability to share resources and cooperate led to larger and larger in-groups. A human is still more likely to cooperate with their family, but we have the ability to create broader in-groups of our own definition.

Today, this manifests itself in the creation of nation states, xenophobia and even sporting culture. Humans bond with other humans who are from their hometowns, share a religion or a political leaning. It explains why MU athletics insists upon not capitalizing Kansas — MU is an in-group, while kU is our rival out-group. In one 2003 study, Harvard University researchers found that college students at two rival colleges rapidly constructed their own university fellows as an in-group and the rival university students as an out-group.*

In the Pleistocene Epoch, it simply would have been too risky for an early human to trust another human from a competing tribe, and we hold onto that psychological relic to be wary of the unknown.

So, what has all this got to do with aliens?

If little green men from Mars were to be discovered, or to invade Earth, “Independence Day”-style, humans would very likely become one big in-group. We Earthlings, all 6 billion of us, would have a common enemy, someone else to call “other.” They will look different from us, have a different language, different technology and beliefs.

And not to mention, they will be from an entirely different planet. To wit, Missourians are divided by a baseball team rivalry based on a geographical distance of 250 miles. Being from space, in many ways, is the ultimate unknown to us. All of the factors that can create in-groups and out-groups among the Earth-bound would be inevitably overridden by a race of sentient beings from another planet.

Thus, the majority of the infighting and conflict between nations and states would end on Earth. The threat of extra terrestrial life will take precedence over mere human squabbles. The larger out-group conflict will take priority over all in-group human clashes. After all, the saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” holds true.

The nations of Earth could start relating to each other much like states in the U.S. do: peaceful parts of a larger whole. The conflicts between different cultures, religions and races would also be de-prioritized as perceived out-group threats. Basically, humans wouldn’t fight so much. I don’t want to say that the ever-prophesized World Peace would come about, but maybe we’d give the United Nations more power and let go of petty differences that hinder useful diplomacy.

I think alien life is somewhere out there — to presume that Earth is the only planet in the vastness of the universe capable of sustaining life is a display of confounding conceit. When it is found, whether seen through a telescope we send through the galaxies or when it arrives here in flying saucers, humans will have some other intelligent species with which to contend and incentive to make Earth a peaceful place to live for us.

*The 2003 study, titled “Implicit Group Evaluation: Ingroup Preference, Outgroup Preference and the Rapid Creation of Implicit Attitudes,” by Kristin A. Lane, Jason P. Mitchell and Mahzarin R. Banaji of Harvard University can be found by request here.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, July 8, 2009.

A life in letters is history repeated

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

THE BEACH — I had every intention of tackling “Infinite Jest,” the 1,000-plus-page masterwork by novelist David Foster Wallace this summer. The novel is the ultimate postmodern challenge to the avid reader: it’s very long and very complex with very serious and precise language.  I’ve made it through about 10 pages. I just couldn’t face the brain workout – my first year of graduate school has given it enough exercise.

I thought a retread of “Little Women” would be more my speed this summer. I am nothing if not a 5-year-old when it comes to books: I read my favorites over and over again, without remorse or boredom. And I love them every time. I am still upset every time, after all these years, that Jo March does not marry Teddy.

Nelson Mandela very famously wrote, “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.” Now, Mandela was surely talking about things much more profound than my incessant need to reread my entire library, but there is something about going back to words and stories that are always the same. The books are unchanged, but I am altered.

And so, instead of venturing into the literary unknown, I am staying in deceptively safe and known waters. But just because the water is safe doesn’t mean there isn’t risk of drowning: I found myself more than upset to discover I couldn’t even finish Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye.” Holden Caulfield is a brat, and one who needs to take his meds, man up and learn to think in concise sentences.

And then, during a retreading of my all-time favorite book, “A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving, I was almost disinterested in its narrative drive (usually the appeal of all Irving’s books), which gave interminable focus to political ranting about the Reagan administration.

And most recently, I have been sucked into A.S. Byatt’s Booker Prize winning book “Possession: A Romance.” This is one experience where I was not as appalled by my reaction. A deep satire of academia wrapped in a literary mystery and topped with a nerdy love story, I have found “Possession” to be funnier than I did before I entered graduate school. I guess spending my days immersed in research has changed my outlook more than I thought. And I am much more appreciative of the long passages of fictional Romantic-era poetry, having been through courses on Byron, Wordsworth and Coleridge.

I suppose this is growing up. The way we experience stories through the years is bound to change and morph. And there are delights to be had in rereading books. The structure of sentences and the choice of words become more interesting when a reader can focus better on them. The foreshadowing becomes painfully and wonderfully apparent — it gives me chills to recognize small hints to the plot once I know what is going to happen.

And more than that, I am reminded of my former self. Although I experience the novels differently now that I am older, I can always remember why I so loved the book in the first place. It’s like time travel; I pick up “Anne of Green Gables” and I am again eight years old, tall and accident-prone. When lost in “The Joy Luck Club,” I am 15 and contemplating my family history. I read “The Lovely Bones,” and I am 17, making my own definitions of home.

And this is the real appeal of rereading my library until the covers fall off. It crystallizes my life experiences, makes growing up more comprehensible: my books are my biography.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, July 1, 2009.

Tweeting in Tehran

BY ERIN K. O'NEILL

I admit it. I tweet.

Which is to say, I am a member of the online social network Twitter, and I post “tweets” of 140 characters or less which are then read by all 39 of my “followers.” I’m sure all 39 of those people really care that my air conditioning unit is making alarming noises, or that I sunburned my scalp reading in the park. I joke that a Twitter habit validates one’s existence, but the underlying need is to constantly proclaim, “Hello, I’m here too!”

So, how did all this pointless drivel become so important that the US Department of State requested that Twitter delay critical network maintenance so that the flow of information in Tehran would remain uninterrupted?

The tweets say:

• Twitter revolution in a nutshell: Anne Frank's diary. Live. Multiplied by millions
• Set your location to Tehran/time zone to GMT +3.30. Iranian security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches
• The basijis attacked a couple in Shiraz/ Maali abad Blv.in their house and stabbed them badly.
• Good Morning Tehran. Mousavi says people should continue demo against "fraud and lies"
• Confirmed: Reports from Evin prison describe conditions as horrendous. People being tortured. Phone lines to prison are cut off.
• Please Do Not Respond/Follow New Twitters. Iran Secret Police Is Cracking Down.
• Road blocks controlling movement of people from North to South Tehran to stop ppl joining Sea of Green #Iranelection
• Strike, do not go to work, office, shop, bazaar, drive or school
• This is not your average day in the Twittersphere.

Advice, scoops, rumors, links, information and misinformation: it all flows through hashtag tracking. #IranElection, #Neda and #Tehran have all been “trending,” or amongst the most used phrases on Twitter. Twitter members of all nationalities are turning their icon photos green, to show solidarity with the Iranian protesters.

There is something thrilling to be sorting through the raw information, the feed of history in real time. But, there is as much real information as there is mis-information.

Even the news networks are in on it. In some cases, the story is not the protests in Iran but the protesters' method of communication with the world. Even though anchors on CNN constantly say that all of this information is unverifiable and unconfirmed, they sell the information like it’s true eyewitness accounts. Which some of it may truly be. But there is doubt. On June 13, one day after the contested elections, there were reports of fake Twitter accountstrapping genuine protesters and sending out false information to the West.

When the Iranian Culture Ministry cut off journalist’s access to the streets of Tehran on June 16, they forced the flow of information underground. So, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, flickr and other social networking, video and photo sharing websites have become the eyes of the revolution. They bear witness when others cannot.

Twitter has an advantage for protesters because it is more of an online tool than a fully structured and comprehensive social networking site. Users can connect to Twitter and post information 140 characters at a time via text message, the Web and desktop widgets. This makes it harder for the Iranian government to censor. To shut down the tweets, the government would have to cut off a lot more than block the site behind its internet firewall.

The raw Twitter feeds about Iran are more like an abstract painting than a photograph. They take the emotional temperature and give the reader a vague idea of what’s happening now in Tehran. But the flow of tweets out of Iran, constantly repeated by others, has become an emblem of the power of information.

Erin K. O'Neill is an assistant director of photography for the Missourian and a master's degree candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.

Published in the Columbia Missourian on Wednesday, June 24, 2009.