JMW's · Journal

On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam

By Joyce Hoffman
 

Da Capo Press
 

 

Joyce Hoffman read a book about journalists who reported on American involvement in Vietnam in the sixties and wondered to herself, “Where are the women?” Considering that she holds a Ph.D. in American Studies, a job teaching journalism to college students, and pens a biweekly op-ed column about journalism accuracy and fairness issues, it was not unlikely that she would write the book that would answer that question. On Their Own offers a thoroughly researched account of fifteen women who played vital, if varying, roles in the reporting of the Vietnam War.
 

 

For myself, when I studied the media industry in college, I became so disenchanted with the corporate system of information dissemination in the United States that instead of packing the tailored black suit in my closet upon graduation, I grabbed a rucksack and waited tables for awhile. But journalism still fascinates me, and for that reason, I wish that I had read this book in school. Many of these women simply bought a plane ticket and showed up in Saigon, determined to find their own stories. They believed that if they did their job well, they would be published by many of the male editors who told them they couldn’t do it in the first place, as they indeed were.
 

 

As a pleasure read, On Their Own can be a bit dense with historical detail that sometimes stifles the narrative of each experience; however, this detail makes the book richer for any student of the history of journalism. I had a hard time getting started with it, but I soon realized that my difficulty was because the first 100 pages deal mainly with more socially conservative women who believed in the United State’s right to be in Vietnam and felt that the people there needed to be Westernized for their own good - talented and outspoken reporters, but not women I wanted to spend much time with. Once I got into chapter three, I found stories that were not only adventurous, but personally inspiring.
 

 

Frankie Fitzgerald’s story is one that any aspiring and socially conscious non-fiction writer should become acquainted with. Daughter of the CIA’s director of operations, she spent years in Vietnam, on her own, writing with a sense of purpose. Convinced that the war was immoral and wrong, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. “She once asked a Vietnamese associate what he thought would happen if the United States withdrew. He told her: ‘Don’t ask us that. It’s none of your business. We just want you to leave.’”

Reporting on a war requires much more than death tolls and fire fight descriptions. Today, it seems obvious that different perspectives on the impact of war on societies engaged in it add invaluable relevance to that body of journalism. We are still faced with government influence and spin. The more people are reporting on events, the better we can understand them and use that knowledge to avoid mistakes in the future. Right?
 

 

Review by Jennifer M. Wilson

So JMW.com is gone - that's fine... I changed my name anyway. The kids are almost three and a half, one potty trained, one pending... Sleeping in big beds, asking me a million questions that make me question my own judgement when I answer them honestly. But life is good. A writer's critique group here keeps me sane, my Ebay mama side biz keeps me in pocket change, and reviews help me find a place in the greater world beyond the windshield of the minivan. A brother is due to arrive later this month and an old friend is flying in for a visit. I watched Bourdain in Seattle last night after my writer's group met, and for the first time I didn't feel that ache of missing a place almost as much as you would miss a person. For the first time, I realized that I am exactly where I need to be, and that the next few years are going to really and truly determine the rest of my life. If I can pull off the hat trick I so desire, everything will work out just fine... and if not? Well, the sushi around here has improved 100% in the last three years, so I think I'll manage. Preschool starts next month. I can TASTE those hours of time... I am going to drop them off at school and take the laptop to the nearby coffee house and type for my life. It isn't much - those hours... but I have learned a lot in the last five years - about myself, my craft, life in general. And I am ready to do it without the net.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa

By Robert Paarlberg
Harvard University Press

As a mom who does what I can to buy organic food for my family, I completely understand the general distaste most of us have for genetically modified (GM) foods. The very thought of vegetables altered by scientists in labs seems creepy and somehow inherently wrong, doesn’t it? But when I read Starved for Science, I quickly realized that such a romanticized and emotional standpoint in such a critical debate as starvation is not only uninformed, it is just plain irresponsible. I also realized that, whether we like it or not, most of us are already eating GM foods on a daily basis.

In plain language and with plentiful sources to back up his positions, Paarlberg describes how in first world countries, where food is plentiful and obesity more of a problem than starvation, people can afford to pine for the days of small neighborhood farms - and can turn up their noses at the agribusiness and subsequent science that has allowed us to take for granted having not only enough to eat, but a wide choice in what and where we get our food. In Europe, the negative public opinion toward genetically modified organisms (GMO’s) has led to labeling and bans on imports suspected to be “contaminated” by genetically altered seeds. Greenpeace and many NGO’s are working actively to keep African farmers on small plots of land using techniques that date back thousands of years, but to the detriment and hardship of those very farmers.

Paarlberg describes how rich countries have come to fear and dislike GMO’s, stopping funding and support easily where food is in no shortage, and yet when it is convenient, still continue to fund their use in the pharmaceutical industry where a longevity benefit can be gained. And governments in African countries situated in urban areas that are highly influenced by European bias, both in cultural influence and monetary flow, follow suit. Therefore, they are not developing their own programs to find strains of seeds that could resist drought, and it isn’t worth enough money to anyone else to do so for them.

The majority of small farms in Africa are currently run by women, as men often leave to find other jobs in mines or more urban areas to supplement family incomes. Children stay out of school to help with the farming, and they do it all with wooden tools and poorly fed animal labor. Green movements in China and India have brought these countries to a position where starvation in no longer such a pressing issue; however, in Africa the problem is worse than ever.

Paarlberg admits to having kept his research a bit under wraps until now, knowing the reaction he would get from his own circle of friends and colleagues. It could be said that being ‘socially conscious’ has taken on certain assumptions (and presumptions) among the wealthier strata of our urban world with a borg-like uniformity, and in the case of poverty in Africa, maintaining a position of being purely organic could easily be likened to saying “let them eat cake.”

Review by Jennifer M. Wilson

Posted Dec. 11th,  in Feminist Review :

City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman's Account of War and Resistance

 

By Haifa Zangana
Seven Stories Press

The most startling thing to me about Haifa Zangana’s book, City of Widows, is not her assertion that the women of Iraq are suffering under the current occupation. What left me quaking was the power of internal perspective and history that she offers, and her informed explanations of both policy and practice that reveal the extent of the damage that the United States has done to Iraq and the people who live (or used to live) there.

Despite having been a prisoner of the Ba’ath regime, she does not blast the party with malice, nor does she paint Saddam Hussein as an evil icon. Instead, she covers the recent history of Iraq just as a U.S. citizen would explain our own century’s historical events: acknowledging past mistakes in leadership, yet maintaining a priority of concern for the country’s current well being.

She explains that, “The woman as a fighter looms large in the Arab world. For us teenagers, it was Jamilah,” (a young female fighter in the Algerian resistance who was imprisoned and tortured by the French in the early sixties), “not a pop singer or a supermodel, who served as our role model.” Feminist publications, prominent women of the arts influencing policy, and accessible higher education were strides already made by the women of Iraq prior to the economic collapse of the country after the first U.S. bombings and sanctions in the 1990s. More than ninety women in Iraq become widows each day now, and there are over one million widows nationwide as a result of this war, each struggling to raise their families in an atmosphere of instability and paranoia.

She gives a scathing account of government funded NGOs, like the WFFI (Women for a Free Iraq), launched publicly in 2003, whose primary role is to support the Bush Administration’s line on the war in Iraq. She criticizes that they chose “to present the human rights case for intervention in Iraq,” when the case for war was thin. Thus they chose to be the female face of the invasion, and came to be seen by most Iraqis as colonial feminists… who “spared little concern for their sisters who would suffer.” And, “while Baghdad was being shaken to its foundations by B52 bombings… members of the WFFI made more than 200 media appearances, including an interview with Barbara Walters to “offer their support to President Bush for his principled leadership.”

She writes of how on the eve of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, U.S. ambassador April Glaspie was summoned to Saddam’s office, and in that meeting, indicated that the U.S. would not oppose his plans for invasion. “In response to the invasion, the United States bombed Iraq for six weeks…Thirteen years of economic sanctions, or the 'siege' as Iraqis called it, was established by UN resolution 661 of August 6, 1990… In order to survive, Iraqis had to sell every material thing of value. By the mid-nineties, half a million children died, a crime considered by many to be genocide.” And yet the U.S. expected to be welcomed as saviors only a few years later after bombing the country once more.

She concludes with information about anti-occupation organizations now working to gather support and to unite against the forces (U.S. forces) that have ravaged their country. One of these is IWW (Iraqi Women’s Will), one of the few women’s organizations that existed prior to the invasion. And she explains that, “In refusing to take part in initiatives by the U.S.-led occupation or its Iraqi allies, which usually offer material and social advantages, women practice passive resistance.”

The final sentence of this book sums up what the compact and powerful pages reveal:
“But for Iraqis, the presence of occupation troops and the crimes they are committing is the main story, and the question is how to stop them.”

Review by Jennifer M. Wilson

Our new dryer broke. 
It is under warranty but the service tech couldn't come out until Friday, so a week's worth of laundry has piled up in baskets and corners, waiting. Laundry service around here is pretty continual. Averaging two loads a day, laundry figures heavily into the routine; from collection to sort to running through to final sort and distribution, it is a process I can never completely forget about, not even for a day. 
Then last night, I woke from a deep sleep to the cry of my daughter. I waited to hear if it was a nightmare that required action or just a sleep cry. 
"Maaaaaahmy!" 
Action required. 
I stumbled across piles of laundry to the kid's room where C. is sitting up in her crib, arms stretched out to show me what had happened. "Mommy, look! On my bah, on my pillow, on my blanket, mommy... oh no!"
And there spackled around the corners of each identified object was thick orange-colored vomit. 
"Oh, honey..."
"Mommy... what Tabbell doing mommy?" inquired Ev, standing up in his crib to investigate.
I scooped her up, assessed the damage and began to strip off her pajamas. I found replacements in a drawer and began to get her changed. "She's sick honey, it's ok."
"Mommy, I want to get up mommy."
"No honey, please stay there. I have to change these sheets." 
"I want to go downstairs," C. said. 
"I want to get up Mommy," Ev restated. 
Suddenly, I realized that I had no idea what time it was. I squinted at the clock and read eleven fifteen. I stripped bed and put the soiled stuff into another pile, and while I made up her crib I heard that coughing-hacking sound. 
"Maaaahmy. Oh no Mommy," C. said. 

Once the bed was made I took her, in her now spit up on pajamas, into the bathroom. She knew exactly what to do. She walked right up to the toilet and grabbed the rim with each hand, elbows pointed up to the ceiling, she stuck her head right in and began to vomit some more. Now there wasn't much left, but her body was just heaving so we sat there and I held her hair back and rubbed her shoulders. She didn't cry, she moaned a bit, but I was startled at how grown-up she looked, with her head in the  toilet, handling the experience with her usual efficiency and single-minded determination. 
"Do you need to throw up more?" I asked. 
"Yes."
And Evan called in, "Tabbell's sick? You all right Tabbell?" 
"I sick," she called back. 
"You sick?"
"Yes," she confirmed from the toilet bowl in her deep throaty voice made only more so by her current circumstance. 

When she seemed to have stabilized, I took her back to the room and changed her pajamas, yet again (we received a large supply of pajamas as hand-me-downs from various people over the years that all suddenly fit this winter thankfully, in case you were wondering). I put her back in bed and went to our room, where I always have stashed her rotational lamb blankie. She hasn't acted like she is aware that her blankie has a stunt double, but she has never been without a 'bah' and it certainly comes in handy at times like those. When I triumphantly returned with the smazing super fast cleaning bah, she had choked up some clear liquid onto the fresh sheet. I got a quilt and spread it over the damp sheet and laid her on top of it. I put a bowl next to her head and instructed her to use it if she needed to. We revisited the topic a few times an hour until somewhere in the 3 a.m. range, when we all slept soundly until Ev's wake up announcement at 5:50. When I went in to get them, he said to me, "Tabbell's sick?" 
"I sick," said C. 
"She was sick, yes," I said. 
"Tabbell sick and she drink out of the potty?" 
"I NOT drink out of the potty!" C. yelled. 
"You drink out of the potty you are sick?" He asked.
"I sick," she stated proudly. 
"I sick," Ev said. 
"You NOT sick. I sick!" she yelled. 

The dryer repairman came this morning. 
We'll get the new part in about 5 days.

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