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War on terrorism has its own dehumanizing name
New epithet being used by some soldiers to describe anyone from the Middle East or South Asia. The word has become evidence of the divide between cultures.
By JAY PRICE
Raleigh News & Observer
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- World War II had its "krauts," Vietnam had its "gooks," and now, the war on terrorism has its own dehumanizing name: "hajji."
That's what many U.S. troops across Iraq and in coalition bases in Kuwait now call anyone from the Middle East or South Asia. Soldiers who served in Afghanistan say it also is used there.
Among Muslims, the word is used mainly as a title of respect. It means "one who has made the hajj," the pilgrimage to Mecca.
But that's not how soldiers use it.
Some talk about "killing some hajjis" or "mowing down some hajjis." One soldier in Iraq inked "Hodgie Killer" onto his footlocker.
Iraqis, friend or foe, are called hajjis. Kuwaitis are called hajjis. Even people brought in by civilian contractors to work in mess halls or drive buses are hajjis - despite the fact that they might be from India, the Philippines or Pakistan, and might be Hindu or Christian.
The souvenir stands found on even the smallest U.S. bases in the Middle East and run by locals are called hajji shops. A cluster of small businesses inside a larger base is "Hajji Town."
The word has become the most obvious evidence of the deep gulf between the traditional cultures of the Middle East and Afghanistan and the young men and women of the U.S. military. Soldiers often have little knowledge of local culture beyond a 90-minute briefing they get before deployment.
"This is another reason that soldiers aren't good at winning the peace," said Samer Shehata of Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. "This doesn't bode well for the reconstruction."
A spokesman for U.S. Central Command in Baghdad said that the term was troubling but that there had been no official order to stop its use.
"This is more of a commonsense thing," he said. "It's like using any other derogatory word for a racial or ethnic group. Some may use it in a joking way, but it's derogatory, and I'm sure people have tried to stop it."
(Centcom has a new policy, the soldier said, of not allowing press spokesmen to identify themselves in the media.)
In Iraq, there is little interaction between U.S. soldiers and the people they arrived to liberate.
Soldiers in the most dangerous parts of Iraq, such as the Sunni Triangle west and north of Baghdad, seldom have contact with Iraqis except to train guns on them from passing Humvees as they scan for weapons.
Their officers say the situation makes it easy to view all Iraqis as a faceless, dangerous mass, even though many civilians are friendly, so they try hard to humanize Iraqis to reduce the likelihood of wrongful shootings.
Every war spawns epithets.
In World War II, the Americans became "Amis " to the Germans. To Americans, Germans were "krauts."
"Hajji," Shehata said, sounds like racist terms that U.S. soldiers used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, such as "towel-head."
The term brings back heavy memories for those who spent time in Vietnam during that war.
"That sounds familiar," said John Balaban, a North Carolina State University English professor and poet-in-residence who has written about Vietnam and the war. As a conscientious objector, Balaban did alternative service in Vietnam.
"There were several words - 'gook,' 'slope,' 'dink,' " he said. "Some of these were meaningless, but they were all working toward the same goal, of trivializing and depersonalizing the enemy.
"It makes it easier to kill these people and not feel bad about it."
Story distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.
Story produced by
Heather Leslie
Tubbythumping
THEY GET KNOCKED DOWN, THEY GET UP AGAIN. BUT NOT FOR LONG. LET THE TELETUBBIES BASHING BEGIN.
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BY JOYCE MILLMAN | You may not have heard of "Teletubbies" yet. Savor this blessed ignorance. On April 6, the mega-hit British children's TV show premieres on PBS stations in the United States and, soon, you will not be able to hide from the loathsome rat-baby visages of the four Tubbies: Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po.
Am I being cruel? Watch the show. "Teletubbies," which has been airing on the BBC for a year, is simultaneously vacuous and surreal. It's the first show specifically aimed at children as young as 1 year old, and it does so with an inane mix of goo-goo talk and hallucinatory imagery. The British media hates the show. Parents hate the show. Child development experts hate the show (Dorothy Singer of the Yale University Family TV Research and Consultation Center has come out against "Teletubbies" because the target audience is too young). PBS president Ervin Duggan hates the show, telling a national educational television conference last year, "I used to think 'Barney' would make me throw something at the television set. Wait till you see 'Teletubbies.'"
So why is PBS airing "Teletubbies"? Because it draws a regular viewership of 2 million in England. Because an estimated $80 million worth of Tubbies merchandise was sold worldwide last year (the show is also seen in, among other countries, Australia, South Africa, Israel, the Netherlands and Singapore). It's a creepy show, educationally suspect, yet here it is, helping PBS reach that last untapped kids' market. What's next -- programming for fetuses?
Actually, the Teletubbies do look an awful lot like fetuses, with their huge eyes, oversized upper lips and hairless, smooshy faces. They also look sort of like an infantilized version of the gray space alien. From an American perspective, the Teletubbies are a disturbing collision of two of the most pervasive cultural obsessions of our time, abortion and UFO's.
The Tubbies, played by four actors encased Barneylike in color-coded, big-bottomed felt suits, cavort in a green rolling meadow strewn with flowers and live bunnies -- it's like a trippy cross between a Sid and Marty Krofft puppetland and an Oasis video. The Tubbies live inside a breast-shaped grass mound, supervised only by a vacuum cleaner named Noo-Noo. Disembodied adult voices are heard through "voice trumpets," periscope-type thingies that pop up out of the ground to signal when it's time for exercise, naps or meals. In a sunny-side-up version of heinous parental neglect, the Tubbies eat machinery-dispensed food (Tubby Custard and Tubby Toast) and exhibit the stunted verbal development ("eh-oh" instead of "hello") you've read about in cases where a child is, say, locked in a closet for 10 years. The Tubbies' main activities are playing peek-a-boo, hugging, falling down and watching TV through the video screens embedded in their stomachs. Yes. They have TV's for tummies.
The Tubbies apparently receive incoming broadcasts from a mysterious spinning windmill; the transmission makes the antennae on top of their heads glow and then one of the Tubbies' tummy-screens will start playing a video clip of a very young human child doing something like riding a tricycle or taking care of a pet pony. After it's over the Tubbies cry, "Again, again!" and the tedious little film is replayed in its entirety, because babies like repetition, and if you parents have a problem with that, scold the ads PBS has taken out in magazines and newspapers to introduce the show, you need to slow down and "connect with your child on a whole different level. Theirs."
Of course, parents filled the need for repetition quite adequately in the prehistoric era before "Teletubbies." We read "Goodnight Moon," twice a night, 365 nights a year, and played pat-a-cake until our brains nearly imploded from boredom, and we liked it, by gum! Oh sure, Anne Wood, the British creator of "Teletubbies," may babble earnestly to the press about her great social mission of creating programming for babies who "are growing up in a technological world," but the pragmatic comments of Kenn Viselman, whose itsy bitsy Entertainment Company holds the lucrative U.S. merchandising rights to "Teletubbies," are a lot more believable. If parents are using TV as a baby sitter, he told the public broadcasting magazine Current, "they might as well have a good product." And speaking to Advertising Age, Viselman (whose bio touts him as the "genius behind the sales and marketing of 'Thomas the Tank Engine'") said that having "Teletubbies" running on PBS "is like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval."
Exactly. And that's why it's depressing to see PBS messing with the parental trust earned through years of conscientious programming like "Mister Rogers" and "Sesame Street." PBS's advertising for the show seems designed to assuage parental guilt over using "Teletubbies" as a baby sitter; the PBS Web site promises that the show will "nourish children's thinking skills, teach them to listen, help build their curiosity, expand their imagination and increase their confidence." But absent from that list is the lesson most important to Wood (whose company, Ragdoll Productions, has created scores of kids' shows), and to Viselman, and to the BBC and PBS: "Teletubbies" teaches toddlers how to be good little TV-watching soldiers.
"Teletubbies" is indoctrination so naked and pure it's almost farcical. On the show, a human baby's face inside a sunburst in the sky functions as a visual cue, telling little viewers how they should respond to what they're seeing. And the tummy-TVs blatantly internalize TV watching, making it a part of the Tubbies' selves, a part of their doughy couch potato bodies. "Teletubbies" links TV to all the good things baby loves -- custard and breasts and full tummies. How unfortunate (snicker, snicker) for PBS that it's launching "Teletubbies" only a couple of weeks after a widely publicized Harvard School of Public Health study documenting a correlation between childhood obesity and excessive TV watching.
But while "Teletubbies" may be bad for babies, the show's not-quite-hidden agenda and dazed and confused weirdness has inspired some mischievous Tubby deconstruction among grown-up viewers. A show like Comedy Central's scatological cartoon phenomenon "South Park," for instance, is its own graffiti (you can't possibly trash it better than the show trashes itself), but the bland, jolly fascism of "Teletubbies" practically invites you to take your best subtextual pot shot. So, to the BBC's dismay, gay groups in Britain hailed Tinky Winky (the purple one with the coat hanger coming out of his head) as the first queer hero of children's TV because he often carries around a big red purse. And on the Web, there are dozens of Tubby parodies, all of them more clever than the show.
The amusing Teletubbies Conspiracy Site places the Tubbies in an Orwellian scenario where they "spend most of their lives in abject fear, nervously awaiting the moment when the omnipresent windmill with its mind controlling red rays" will single one out to be "subjected to an ordeal of telly torture as an example to the others." The British humor webzine Palindrome offers a droll, Monty Pythonesque entry called Teletubbies: The True Story, which purports to be a natural history journal containing observations about the mysterious species "Tubbis tele" ("The actual act of Teletubby procreation has never been observed, although several mating rituals have been recorded. A common one involves two Teletubbies running towards each other, then colliding in mid-air ...").
The anti-Tubby jokes are so funny because they're grounded in truth -- "Teletubbies" is indoctrination, it is mind-control, it is a transparent attempt to institute brand-recognition and consumer craving in the youngest, most innocent viewers. "To be free to learn, children must be free to dream," gushes the manifesto for Viselman's itsy bitsy Entertainment Company.
Free to dream -- as long as they dream of Tubbies.
SALON | April 3, 1998
October 6, 2003
From a Cub to a Menace, and Now a Mystery
By LYDIA POLGREEN and JASON GEORGE
His obsession began innocently enough, with the puppies and broken-winged birds every little boy begs to bring home. Over the years, Antoine Yates's taste in animals grew ever more exotic, neighbors said, and his collection came to include reptiles, a monkey or two and, according to one neighbor, even a hyena.
He had a deep affection for living creatures in need of a home that he might have picked up from his mother, Martha Yates. She had raised dozens of foster children in her five-bedroom apartment in a public housing high-rise in Harlem, according to one of her foster sons.
In time, Mr. Yates's most exotic pet, a tiger that he named Ming, grew to more than 400 pounds, and that happy home disintegrated. Terrified, Ms. Yates, 67, packed up the last two of her foster children and moved to a suburb of Philadelphia earlier this year, neighbors said.
Mr. Yates, 37, hard pressed to control the tiger, apparently decamped, too, to a nearby apartment. He continued to feed the tiger by throwing raw chickens through a door opened just narrowly enough to keep a paw the size of a lunch plate from swiping through, neighbors said.
On Saturday, the police moved in, alerted by Mr. Yates's curious call in which he claimed to have been bitten by a pit bull. They discovered Ming and managed to remove him, but only after a sharpshooter rappelled down the side of the apartment building and shot it with tranquilizer darts. The mission created a swirl of excitement in the neighborhood and left a series of questions for an assortment of officials. The police are trying to determine where Mr. Yates got a tiger cub and how he managed to raise it from kitten to menace in a public housing project.
Officials at the city's Administration for Children's Services said they were trying to determine whether foster children had lived in the apartment while the tiger and other dangerous animals were there. Officials of the New York City Housing Authority were trying to determine how the tiger escaped the notice of workers at the complex. As was obvious on Saturday, his roar is ferocious.
People who live in the building in the Drew Hamilton Houses at 2430 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard said the tiger had lived among them for at least three years. His presence, while strange, was widely known and did not really alarm anyone, they said.
Jerome Applewhite, 43, who lives on the 18th floor, first encountered Ming about three years ago, when he stopped at the apartment for a visit and saw Mr. Yates sitting with the tiger cub cradled in his arms.
"He was feeding it with a bottle," Mr. Applewhite said. "He cared for his pets."
It did not surprise him much, he said, that an animal seen only in the East — or the north, if that includes the Bronx Zoo — should show up in a city apartment. "It was a house pet," Mr. Applewhite said. "To me that is cool."
City officials did not share his view. "Tigers are dangerous animals," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg told reporters yesterday at a news conference on Fifth Avenue before marching in the Pulaski Day Parade. "Clearly this tiger should not have been anyplace in New York City outside of a zoo."
Investigators from the New York Police Department were questioning Mr. Yates yesterday, who was placed under guard after he was located at a Philadelphia hospital. On Wednesday, he went to Harlem Hospital Center, where he gave skeptical doctors his account of being bitten by a pit bull. He checked out early Saturday, prompting an inquiry into his whereabouts.
Mr. Yates could be charged with reckless endangerment, the police said, and he will be returned to New York after he is released from the Philadelphia hospital, the police said.
Kathleen Carlson, a spokeswoman for the Administration for Children's Services, said the agency was "looking into our history, if any, at this address."
Howard Marder, a spokesman for the housing authority, which oversees public housing, said officials were trying to determine when the apartment was last inspected and how a tiger was not detected. He said authority records indicated that one complaint was received about the smell of urine coming from the apartment.
Public housing residents are permitted only one pet, and it must weigh no more than 40 pounds, Mr. Marder said. It was unclear exactly who was supposed to be living in the Yateses' apartment, he added. He said records indicated that Ms. Yates moved out in January, but neighbors said she was still living in the apartment as recently as June.
The tiger, along with a five-foot-long alligator-like reptile called a caiman that was also found in the apartment, was taken to a New York animal shelter, and the tiger has been sent to live in a wildlife preserve in Ohio, city officials said.
Residents of the Drew Hamilton Houses who knew Mr. Yates said yesterday that he was well known as an outsized character who, above all else, loved animals, but none of them were sure how he came to have a tiger cub.
"Every time I have ever seen him, he was talking about his exotic animals," said Wanda Tompkins, 26, whose family has lived in the apartment directly below Mr. Yates's for five years. "He was nice, but he was strange a bit."
Ms. Tompkins's mother, Valerie, said she had long known that a strange assortment of beasts lived upstairs. It was not a problem until this summer, when she tried to raise her windows and found the sills soaked with urine and an animal stench invading her apartment.
"I complained to housing, but they never responded," Valerie Tompkins said. "It does sound far fetched."
She had never seen the tiger, but her daughter Janaya had. Janaya, 11, was a friend of one of Ms. Yates's foster children, a girl named Dana, Janaya said.
"She asked me if I wanted to see the tiger," Janaya said. She told Dana, yes, she did want to see it, and she was led to one of the apartment's bedrooms. The tiger was lying inside a cage. Janaya said she was too terrified to pet it. "It was scary," she said.
Raven Eaton, who works at the nearby Associated Supermarket, said Mr. Yates would come into the store every afternoon to buy several bags of raw chicken.
"He said they were for his animals," Ms. Eaton said. He never said what kind of animals he had. "He was as normal as someone like Antoine could be."
Whatever his motives, city officials said, it is both unsafe and cruel to keep a tiger in an apartment. A police officer who answered the telephone in Mr. Yates's room at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center in Philadelphia said Mr. Yates did not wish to be interviewed.
Last night, a young woman who answered the door of Martha Yates's two-story house in Yeadon, Pa., just west of Philadelphia, identified herself as a daughter and said her mother would have no comment.
Mr. Yates's brother Aaron, 24, said Antoine Yates cared for his animals and never wanted to hurt them.
"His love for animals started when we were babies," he said. "He would nurse animals off the street. He got that from my mother."
"He was straight up," he added. "He raised a healthy tiger. They should find him a job with animals."