COMMENTARY
Letters to the Editor
Follow Up to the Rat Story
Editor:
Although I have never felt the
intense desire to respond to an
article written in The Capital
Times, I felt the sudden and over
whelming urge to write in regard
to the article “Opening of New
Dorms Tied to Rat Problem in
Meade Heights.”
As a nontraditional student at
PSU, I have never had the oppor
tunity to experience the living
quarters at Penn State
Harrisburg’s excuse, er, rather,
concept of student housing.
However, I have known of
several students who either have,
or currently, reside there.
Needless to say, after reading
the article and discovering the
true conditions at Meade
Heights, I am aghast at the idea
of such deplorable living condi
tions in which these students are
expected to reside.
Rats the size of 'coons and
cats? Why, such a monstrosity is
simply too-overwhelming to
envision.
Although I am currently an
Applied Behavioral Science
major and not Biology, I suspect
that the enormous size of these
rodents could only have resulted
from the geographical location of
Meade Heights, and that of the
toxic waste dump site.
This also, would surely
explain the physical stature of
the human residents of Meade
Heights.
Although the rats are appar
ently intimidating due to their
size, one item which I did notice
absent in the article was an obvi
ous lack of aggression within the
rat population relat ig to the res
idents at Meade Heights.
The rats presence alone does
not necessarily indicate aggres
sive behavior. I suspect that the
rats are seeking acceptance from
those at Penn State, and actually
mean no harm.
As exhibited in the recent dis
play of communications regard
ing the Tamhelm “Submit” inci
dent, there exist those at Penn
State who could certainly learn
the philosophy of acceptance and
tolerance.
My only question is as such:
If the rats are so large in size, and
play such an important function
in the ecological environment at
Meade Heights, then when will
PSU administration decide to
make them pay a student fee, or
at the very least, a parking fee?
Respectfully,
Mary P. Hall
Applied Behavioral Sciences
March 30, 2000
Supporting Gore
Editor:
Recently I worked for the A 1
Gore campaign in New
Hampshire. I am writing to
encourage other students to join
me in supporting A 1 Gore for
President.
As a student, I am well aware
of the demands on time, howev
er, this coming presidential elec
tion is simply too important for
us to ignore.
Whether it be education, the
environment, civil rights, or eco
nomic growth, A 1 Gore has
proven himself a true fighter
with our best interests at heart.
He’s dedicated his life to public
service, and our lives are better
for his work.
As president, he will continue
to work towards a more afford
able and accessible education
system, a cleaner environment,
an end to racial profiling, protec
tion of a woman’s fundamental
right to choose, and economic
growth that leaves no one
behind.
He shares our vision of
America, and I encourage you to
work with us in making that
vision a reality. Your activism
now is invaluable to our future.
Penn State and America can’t
afford another Bush in office.
Vote for A 1 Gore in
November. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Joseph Werner
Public Policy
March 30, 2000
By Crispin Sartwell
Capital Times Advisor
Call it cyborg chic. In popular
music we are hearing the merger
of human being and machine.
My son Hayes is way into a
“band” called Eiffel 65, who
recorded the übiquitous hit
“Blue (Da Ba Dee).”
It is hard to tell whether the
lead instrument of that song is a
human voice or the digital simu
lation of a human voice. And
there are no instruments on the
record that people actually pick
or blow.
The first stirring of the latest
wave of cyborg chic on the pop
charts took place last year about
this time, with Cher’s song
“Believe.”
You couldn’t tell that the
voice was Cher’s; you couldn’t
even tell at times whether it was
male or female. And perhaps it
wasn’t either male or female,
because in part it was the voice
of an electronic device.
And Cher herself is something
like a cyborg: so altered by plas
tic surgery that she seems to have
transcended the organic. I won
der what her “hair” is made out
of.
Cher has overcome the condi
tions of mammalian life and now
floats freely through different
ages and genders and voices.
“Cher” the celebrity is some
thing more or less than human,
or something partially human, or
something that was once human.
But for just that reason, she is an
emblem of the current human
condition.
Throughout the 20th century,
people entered into a more and
more intimate relation to
machines
Think about your relation to
your car. It’s not merely a
machine you operate, it is an
extension of your body, more
and more so as the engineering
gets better and better.
Now the car will sense your
body and adjust itself to it, and
what rolls down the road is a
machine/human hybrid, mechan
ical, electronic and organic.
In the last 20 years of the
twentieth century, technology
became both much huger and
much smaller.
Telecommunications and the
internet cover the earth like a
system of silicon vines.
But the devices that we use to
connect to it are becoming tiny
/, Cher
bits of circuitry we carry on our
persons:pagers, cellular phones,
palm computers.
Soon it will be difficult to
imagine human life without elec
tronic connection to the
machine/human world of cyber
space.
Medical technologies advance
in the direction of a full organ
ic/technological merger.
Through the century we
developed devices to inject
things into people, or to surround
people and breathe for them and
keep them alive, and finally to
implant into people to replace
pieces of themselves.
Twentieth-century popular
entertainments betrayed our fas
cination and fear of the cyborg
we are all becoming: the 6
Million Dollar Man, Robocop,
Inspector Gadget.
But it seems to me that in this
new century we are in the
process of reconciling ourselves
to the machine.
The human voice seems
almost passe: what we find beau
tiful is the merger of the human
Editor’s Note
I’ll be brief: some stories in the March 29, 2000 edition of the
Cap Times were fakes. They were included in our annual April Fools
issue along side most stories that were real.
There are no raccoon or cat-sized rats in Meade Heights (at least
none that I’m aware of). That story was a joke, believable as it may
have been.
The Patrice Gaines story was intended to be a real story. It turned
out to appear to be a fake and we apologized to Ms. Gaines on the
front page for misrepresenting her life story.
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Advisor: Crispin Sartwell • Editor: Matthew McKeown
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Cathie McCormick Musser
voice with the machine voice in
which the distinction no longer
makes any sense.
In our merger with machines,
we can play with hybrid identi
ties the way Eiffel 65 plays with
the human voice.
For Hayes’s generation, which
never knew an environment
without the computer, the elec
tronic/organic merger seems not
only inevitable but unquestion
able, a baseline fact of life.
There are, of course, many
deep ethical and existential prob
lems that arise as we all become
cyborgs. But we are being led
into this global transformation of
and play with identities by popu
lar music
And
that’s appropriate,
because the question of when and
how to merge with a machine is,
Anally, an aesthetic question, a
question about how to make the
things we make and ourselves,
how to look and sound, and how,
as we achieve ever-greater con
trol of our bodies, to become.
Cher’s work of art isn't
“Believe,” it’s her self.