Groucho Marx, one of my favorite comedians penned a great line when he wrote in the 1950s, “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” Seemingly a self-deprecating comment, Groucho Marx was responding to a club which had asked him why he wanted to cancel his membership with them. Though Marx seems to be making fun of himself, in reality it was a clever and disarming statement that put an end to any further inquiries. In his biography, Marx makes fun of the club on top of that he was well known for his sardonic sense of humor so it is more then likely the comment was meant to be ironic.

Last Friday marked the conclusion of this year’s Evening Sun edition of Progress Chenango. As has proudly been articulated by many of those involved in the process, Progress Chenango is among the best of its publication class in the state. This was my first year being involved in the project, and I found it to be an interesting experience. In the months leading up to Progress, the other affiliates of the newsroom spoke of Progress in hushed tones reminiscent Harry Potter’s cronies’ reluctance to say Lord Voldemort’s name out loud. In fact I had no clear idea of what Progress even was until it came time to sit down and discuss the journalistic endeavor as a conglomerate of writers, editor, and sales team. To this day I am not sure if the others really just weren’t trying to mess with me a bit to put the fear of Progress in me.

In truth I don’t really find Progress to be as overwhelming as I was led to believe it would be. Just as in school, as long as I stayed ahead of the deadline and didn’t procrastinate to a debilitating degree, I managed to avoid the sleepless nights and stressful crunching I had heard so much about. Not to say I didn’t have to clock in more time at the office than normal, but not to the degree where it felt as though Progress was eating me alive. Now that the dust has settled, I can look at the endeavour with pride, but also with an appreciation for how much more I have left to learn.  

Jan. 24, 2013: the United States government finally lifts its 1994 ban preventing U.S. female soldiers from assuming combat roles. An estimated 14 percent of the United States Armed Forces are women. “Today every American can be proud that our military will grown even stronger, with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love,” President Barack Obama said subsequent to the lifting of the ban.

Each and everyone of us is indoctrinated with the legend of Rosie the Riveter. In elementary school we are taught how she represented the growing equality between the sexes as well as symbolic of American women’s wartime contribution. Relatively unheard of in the west though, is the tale of Rosie the Riveter’s counterparts across the ocean and the role they played in the bloodiest conflict of all time.

Soviet female combatants died in droves along side their male counterparts fighting the Nazis in Eastern Front trenches, a theater of the war characterized for its staggering brutality. Female Soviet soldiers gained distinction specifically as proficient snipers and fighter pilots, but also fought the Germans manning machine guns and working in tank crews.

Historians have established a remarkable trend regarding the stark difference between the conduct of German soldiers on the Eastern and Western Fronts. Without receiving any known orders from the high command, German soldiers who were shipped between the two fronts, drastically changed the way they functioned. Historians have traced a multiplicity of individual soldiers who fought with a measure of civility on the Western Front. But when those same soldiers were shipped to the Eastern Front, they would cut loose, raping, pillaging, and enacting all manner of war crimes. Then the same soldiers would be freighted back to the Western Front and immediately revert to pseudo-civility. The most plausible explanation for this abrupt change is the indoctrination of German soldiers with the notion of Slovak people as subhuman, though even this general explanation still leaves one wanting. It was in this context of unimaginable brutality and revolting defilement that the Russian female soldier existed.

To this day, the most distinguished female sniper in the world was a member of the Red Army who spent her wartime days picking off soldiers brandishing the swastika. Lyudmila Mykhailivna Pavlichenko served, along with 2,000 other women, as a Soviet sniper during WWII, and by the end of the war she had 309 confirmed kills.

Before the Nazi war machine assailed their Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact cosigners, Pavlichenko had been an amateur markswomen and history student at the Kiev University.
In 1941, when the Soviet-German War broke out, Pavlichenko volunteered as an infantrymen and was assigned to the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division, which fought the Wehrmacht and the Romanian Armed Forces at Odessa and throughout the Crimean Peninsula.

Pavlichenko was later wounded in 1942 during the siege of Sevastopol, at which point she was pulled from active duty having already become a symbol of heroism for the Soviets. When Pavlichenko recovered she toured the United States and Canada, giving public speeches and was received by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, making her the first Soviet to be a presidental guest at the White House. While touring the United States, Pavlichenko made a speech in Chicago. In her speech Pavlichenko famously pointed out she, at the age of 25, had killed 309 fascists, and asked the men in the audience if they felt they had spent enough time hiding her shadow to clamorous applause.

During the war Pavlichenko became a major and received the Gold Star medal along with the tittle of Hero of the Soviet Union, the highest distinction in the Soviet Union. Pavlichenko’s face was also plastered all over Soviet postage stamps. She served the remainder of the war as a sniper instructor.

After the war ended, Pavlichenko completed her education and worked as a historian until she died at the age of 58 in 1974.

Another intriguing female Russian soldier who gained distinction during WWII, was a fighter pilot named Lydia Litvyak. Litvyak, also known as the “White Lily of Stalingrad,” flew on 66 combat missions and was awarded the most distinguished Soviet honors including the tittle of Hero of the Soviet Union and the Order of Lenin. Today Litvyak is still considered to be the world’s foremost female ace. By 1943 Litvyak had received the Order of the Red Star and was chosen to take part in an elite tactic of “free hunter.” Litvyak working with another Red Army pilot would track down and eliminate enemy fighters of on their own accord.

The object of Litvyak’s fate is still disputed. A first hand account form one of her fellow Red Army aviators was unable to verify whether or not she was shot down. What is certain is that Litvyak never returned to base after an Aug. 1, 1943, engagement with a German bomber and its escort. According to Litvyak’s comrade, while she was engaging the German bomber she failed to notice a detachment of fighters swoping around to attack her from above. Although she was able to survive the initial assault, Litvyak was forced to flee into nearby cloud cover, with Luftwaffe fighters hot on her heels. Litvyak’s comrade last saw her, through a gap in the clouds, pursued by eight German fighter planes, her plane trailing smoke.

After the war, a 39 year hunt was conducted to locate the White Lily of Stalingrad’s crash site. A body was discovered and authenticated as Litvyak’s, but only after a controversial and unverified autopsy. Some historians maintain Litvyak was captured alive and served time as a German POW. Years latter, a friend of Litvyak identified a woman on Swedish television as White Lily of Stalingrad.

Last week Shinzo Abe was elected as Japan’s new prime minister. Abe has promised to review Japan’s post-WWII constitutional security policies and no one seems even remotely concerned that the only national to have ever constitutionally rejected war, is on the path to rearmament. After WWII, Japanese policymakers made it unconstitutional to have a military, in an act of defiance to their American occupiers who were intent on rebuilding the defeated nation as an armed ally in the impending Cold War.

Since signing its new constitution, Japan has prospered economically, going from a nation leveled by firebombing and atomic weapons, to one of the strongest economies in the world. Not having to seep money into a bloated defense budget has been one of the attributes lending to Japan’s economic success, though there have been many other contributions.

Today Japanese WWII-era policy makers having passed from power, policy makers who understood firsthand the horrors of war after they had witnessed their friends and loved ones mutilated or burned to death. Since new generations, who cannot recollect the horrendous nature of war, have come to power in Japan there has been a concerted push to reinstate the military. Already Japan has developed a small military under the pretense of creating a defense force. Japan even committed a small symbolic detachment to the war in Iraq dispute, explicit warnings that the gesture would garner Japanese citizens negative and unnecessary attention from extremists.

Since 1966, a guerilla war has raged beyond the confines Sweden’s Scandinavian shoals. Authorities have battled each year to protect a majestic goat, constructed out of 3.6 tons of hay. The elephantine goat is erected every holiday season as a Scandinavian symbol of gift-giving, predating Santa Claus.

Over the past 56 years, only 12 of the goats have survived the onslaught of arsonist Swedes, who annually concoct schemes of goatly demise. This year, the goat hunters were able to evade security patrols, and set the mountain-high Scandinavian Yule symbol alight, even despite an icy coating designed as a flame retardant.

In years past the goat nimrods have utilized other means to dispose of the afront to grinchdom. In 1976 there was the famous high-velocity frontal assault with a car bumper. Then there was the confounded ploy of 2010, to swoop in low with a helicopter, and whisk the towering hay bail away to Stockholm.

Although the prodigious goat met its demise via inferno, the contest of wills shall resume once more next holiday season. With no end to the hostilities in sight, the Swedish goat wars may one day spell doom for giant symbolic goats across the world.

Today in the news there was a story about a Russian zoo director claiming vodka saved the lives of two elephants. When the elephant’s trailer caught on fire, they were forced to wait, exposed to the elements, in the deadly cold of a Siberian winter until back up was able to arrive. Despite spending hours in the frigid cold, the elephants only suffered minor frostbite on the tips of their ears.

How were they able to escape this potentially life threatening scenario virtually unscathed? By drinking 10 liters of vodka diluted with warm water, claims zoo director Rostislav Shilo. The ten liters of liquor, enough to kill a grown man and the mother that bore him, was reportedly not even enough to hamper the walking mountain’s ability to operate a motorized vehicle. Yet it was apparently enough to save them the pain of breaking off frostbitten extremities despite the fact that alcohol thins the blood and lowers the body’s core temperature.

What a stereotype though, Russians curing the cold with vodka, God forbid they tried using a blanket. Now what will the rest of the staff drink?

Turning on the news these days, it seems as though the only nations in the world are China, Israel, Palestine, and Syria. The fighting in the Middle East is at the heart of the media’s interest in the Outremer, which makes sense to me. What has really struck me as odd is the pervasive interest in China. For sometime now I have notice big stories about China are published daily, seemingly more so than for any other nation besides those situated in the Middle East. None of the stories about China have been even remotely positive in tone, either. The subject matter has ranged from: the increasing self-immolation of Tibetan laypeople in protest of Chinese oppression; to arresting a blind activist’s nephew in retaliation for the activist’s move to the U.S.; or even the recent maritime territorial dispute about China’s claim of sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea, despite claims from numerous other nations otherwise.

It’s hard to even keep track of all the negative stories perforating the news about China, along with the surprising variety of their unhappy content. It even seems as though the nation is collectively being blamed for things like international poaching, as Chinese high demand for endangered animal parts has been cited as the leading cause for such incident as the slaughter of elephants in Africa.

Such an outpouring of unfavorable media attention though makes me skeptical. Is China really all that bad, or is the nation purposefully getting a bad rap from the media? Maybe it’s just the conspiratorial side of me, but I find it peculiar when so much is being said in the same vein about a single subject by so many different people. I find if hard to believe that not one person, in a nation of billions, is doing anything nice to warrant international note.

One example of seemingly benign coverage which I find subtle transmits a negative message about China as a whole, surrounds Friday’s death sentence of Li Hao. A Chinese citizen, Li Hao held captive some six women for an estimated 21 months, prostituting them, videotaping them, raping them, and all sorts of nasty other things in his homemade dungeon. Though Li Hao is of course an irreparable villain, in few separate stories I read, all of the authors made sure to depict Chinese officials in an unfavorable light. From different tellings of the story, the Chinese police all ways come across as absurdly incompetent, have only discovering the dungeon after one of the prisoners escaped, even though; women were going missing; the dungeon was in an urban area; Li Hao’s clients were coming and going; he was posting videos online of some of the things he was going to the women; and the dungeon was in operation for almost two years. The real kicker of the story though was that a Chinese court had convicted three of the women to go to prison after they had just spent almost two years in captivity being brutalized and subjected to some of the worset forms of torture imaginable. During their captivity Li Hao had forced and coerced the three women to kill two of the other prisoners. Now of course this is horrible, but it seems like the human thing to do would have been to consider the special circumstances under which the killings were committed. Such lack of compassion seems to only add to the appearance of a China’s officials as coldhearted and compassionless. Sending the women to jail, after all they have suffered through, hardly seems like a fitting punishment to me.

Stories like this one are the only thing I hear of being reported on about China. I never hear any stories about Chinese humanitarian efforts and I wonder if this is because of a negative stigma in western media, or if there really just isn’t anything nice going in one of the world’s largest countries.

A few weeks ago I wrote a “thumbs up” for the seemingly endemic practice submersible shark punching. While I find stories about people escaping shark run-ins by punching the gilled monstrosities in the face harrowing and amusing, I have recently heard of a much more brutal tactic of dealing with sharks which I greatly disapprove of.

Shark fin soup is a delicacy beloved by the Chinese elite, with a pound of shark-fin selling anywhere up to $700. Recent growth of Chinese living standards has further increased the demand for the delicacy, giving willing fishermen the opportunity to line their pockets. Spurred on by the chance to make a quick buck, fishermen have been fervently hunting sharks, but while shark-fins are worth a lot, the sharks themselves are not. The fishermen have therefore been slicing the fins off living sharks and throwing them back into the sea, without even having the courtesy of putting them out of their misery.

Without its fin, a shark can not maneuvre through the water, and the de-finned sharks die slow deaths as they helplessly sink to the bottom of the sea. In many ways shark de-finning is even more despicable than the somewhat similar practice of rhino de-horning. While cruel and inhuman, cutting the valued horn off of rhinos at very least does not turn the rhino into a quadriplegic. Such contemptible and greed-driven actions represent one of the most shameful aspects of our species.

All hell will break loose, once the denizens of America with superbly spherical torsos, wade out of their couches, and waddle after whoever is held responsible for the impending disruption in Twinkies production. Friday, Hostess Brands, famous for its sponsorship of The Howdy Doody Show, implored a bankruptcy court to let them fold, citing an inability to survive a bakers’ strike currently inflicting the company.

Without the precious Twinkie, Americans will be forced to subsist on la cucaracha shish kabobs, in the post-December 21st apocalyptic world. Thursday night will witness the last shipment of Hostess products and if that doesn’t spell doom … I don’t know what does. A warning to the meek and innocent, do your grocery shopping Wednesday, because the Friday morning news will no doubt be overloaded with stampede related deaths, as Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Ding Dongs, Sno Balls, Ho Hos, Suzy Q’s, Dolly Madison Zingers, Drake’s Ring Dings, and Wonder Bread fly off convenience store shelves … for the last time.

The Twinkie has led an illustrious life since its inception in 1930, when baker James Dewar got the idea of stuffing sponge cake with cream. Among the Twinkie’s long list of exploits is the coining of the term “Twinkie defense” as a mocking description of a weak legal defense. The term was coined during the 1979 murder trial of San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Moscone. Defendant Dan White’s lawyer said the accused did it because he was suffering from a dietary-induced depression, exemplified by White’s massive Twinkie splurges. The argument actually worked and White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter instead of premeditated murder.

And for anyone foolish enough to think the Twinkie is not important, consider the following: In 1999, along with a piece of the Berlin Wall, Ray Charles’ sunglasses, a clip of Neil Armstrong trolling on the moon, and a photo of Rosa Parks (just to name a few), the Twinkie was approved for inclusion in the Millenium Time Capsule (though later it was taken out).

David Jimenez’s wife gets ovarian cancer. He goes to a St. Patrick’s Church in Newburgh, N.Y., and prays before a gigantic, 600-lb., crucifix for his wife’s speedy recovery. The wife makes it and Jimenez attributes his wife’s cancer-free status to the time he spent putting his palms together before the jumbo cross. To show his appreciation, he volunteered to clean the crucifix and in May, 2010, it fell on him. Jimenez’s leg had to be amputated and now he is suing the church for $3 million.

Didn’t he hear? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. It probably would have been safer to clean his wife’s doctor’s car instead. The church had been able to raise $7,000 to help Jimenez out before he filed the lawsuit. Where does he think the church is going to get $3 million anyway? The Catholics haven’t been making that kind of bank since the Renaissance. And what did Jimenez expect was going to happen when he scaled the crucifix to rub Jesus’ face with a soapy cloth? It’s doubtful that the artist who created the cross intended for it to be used as a ladder. It was a statue, not a jungle gym.