It’s that time of year again, when the World’s literati make their annual migration to Boulder to discuss and debate the planet’s most pressing issues … and a bunch of other topics that are really fun and interesting. That’s right, it’s time for the Conference on World Affairs.
From civil rights to climate change, from pop culture to international relations, with dozens of panels spread across five days, there’s a topic somewhere in there that’s sure to engage any and everyone.
Once again, Boulder Weekly has chosen a few panels from the plethora and highlighted them here to give you an idea of just how fascinating this week of open-ended discussions will be. So close down the shop for an hour or two and join the conversation — we promise you won’t regret it.
JON STEWART AND THE END OF A COLB-ERA
Friday, April 10, 9 a.m. Macky Auditorium.
The beginning of the end came on April 10, 2014 when Stephen Colbert announced he would be leaving The Colbert Report to fill David Letterman’s shoes on The Late Show — but the other shoe had yet to drop.
Like a punch to the gut, like an ocean wave we didn’t brace for, America was knocked off its collective feet on Feb. 10 when Jon Stewart, host of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, announced he too would step down as host later this year after 16 years at the helm.
With these giants of political satire moving on to the next stage of their lives and careers, some might say it’s the end of an era — an era where fake news anchors gained our trust and taught us more about the world than many real journalists.
For those who want to discuss this brave new world, CWA has amassed a group of panelists to share their thoughts on “Jon Stewart and the End of a Colb-era.”
Tina Dupuy, a comedian and journalist in New York City, will add her insight to the panel.
“I think people have the wrong idea about what satire is,” she says. “In the mainstream media you hear people say, ‘Jon Stewart was being serious last night.’ Satire is never not serious — it’s whimsical at best,” Dupuy says.
In a column piece she wrote in 2009 about satire, Dupuy highlighted the court jester as an often-used example.
“… [T]he only guy who could tell the King the truth and keep his head,” she wrote. “The Babylonian Talmud says Elijah the Prophet told a man named Rabbi Beroka [that] of all the people in a marketplace, comedians are the only ones who are God’s servants.”
Fellow panelist David Bender, an activist, author and broadcaster, agrees that Stewart and Colbert were able to cut through the din of traditional news.
“One of the ironies now is that the news is so absurd, ridiculous and horrific that the only way to process is it to have a sense of humor about it, often dark humor,” Bender says. “But that’s where John Stewart and others have succeeded.
“The thing about this is it’s not a new tradition,” Bender adds. “There have been comics like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor who have used their humor as a vehicle for social commentary to reach people and make them laugh, sometimes cry, sometimes get angry. But they have used humor as one of the best vehicles for communicating truth and I think The Daily Show and Colbert Report have absolutely been part of that long tradition”
Other panelists on “Jon Stewart and the End of a Colb-era” include Robert A. George, associate editorial page editor for the New York Post (a friend of Dupuy’s, she says, “He’s like the token black Republican. I’m always the token funny woman. We end up being on token panels together.”), and Valerie Plame Wilson, a former career covert CIA operations officer. As usual with CWA panels, no one knows what might surface when the panel convenes and starts to chat.
As for Dupuy, she says we can’t mourn the loss of Jon Stewart, especially now that Trevor Noah has been named his replacement.
“The baton is being passed to someone who is absolutely brilliant,” she says. “We shouldn’t lament that Jon is gone.”
WHY MEN PULL OUT OF REPRODUCTIVE RESPONSIBILITY
Monday, April 6, 3 p.m. UMC Center Ballroom.
According to 2010 research by the Centers for Disease Control, the leading method of contraception in the United States between 2006 and 2008 was the oral contraceptive pill, used by 10.7 million women, followed by female sterilization, used by 10.3 million.
But when it comes to reproductive responsibility, where do men factor in?
Evelyn Resh, a practicing nursemidwife, sexuality counselor, writer and speaker, will join two other panelists at CWA to hash out “Why Men Pull Out of Reproductive Responsibility.”
“My experience has been, there are two primary factors that impact whether men are a part of the conversation,” Resh says. “One is, do we as practitioners have that expectation when we talk with patients, and do [our female patients] themselves expect this of their partner. And number two, there’s a certain degree of difference amongst different classes of people and levels of education. I customarily will see more involvement and initiative taken by people who are better educated, higher social class. However, I do think there’s a bias on part of practitioners themselves when we’re working with someone who is of a lower social class to not have the expectation that their partner will be part of it. And as sort of an unfortunate consequence, they’re not.”
Resh says when a female patient comes into her practice with her male partner, Resh will often ask the male if they’ve considered having a vasectomy. If they tell her no, she’ll ask why.
“My feeling is that we need to reinforce that sterilization means liberation for men from any potential burden of emotional attachment or financial responsibility to children,” she says. “If they’ve reached the point where they’ve assumed as much responsibility for that as they can, then they have an obligation unto themselves of considering having a procedure that’s simple, significantly safer and long-acting.”
Bringing an educator’s perspective to the table is Joaquin Muñoz, who has taught at multiple levels of schooling.
“Part of my background is I was a middle school teacher for several years,” Muñoz says. “I got a unique opportunity to observe a certain subsection of maleness, namely adolescent males. In observing adolescent males, seeing and trying to come to an understanding about what it means to be a man or male or to embody some form of maleness in that particular age range, the more I’ve come to see that the transition for young boys into mature adulthood, we don’t do a very good job of it in this country. We have lots of political parameters that delineate this, but beyond these political and biological parameters we don’t do a very good job at preparing young adolescents to become adults.”
And we certainly, Muñoz says, don’t teach children about sex.
“Often times we can’t even think about teaching any of that subject matter because it doesn’t come into our calculations about how well they will do on a standardized test,” he says. “Suddenly we are taking these young people that are getting ready to transition into adulthood and we’re, in a sense, dehumanizing them and not paying attention to all these different factors that are really building what this young person is going to be.”
Attorney Sarah Weddington will join Muñoz and Resh on the panel. Weddington is best known for arguing and winning 1973’s landmark Supreme Court case, Roe v. Wade.
HOW WE FEED OURSELVES
Monday, April 6, 9 a.m. Wolf Law Wittemyer Courtroom.
How we feed ourselves varies from person to person — whether we choose not to eat meat or only to purchase organic goods. Some of us must abstain from gluten and others can’t tolerate sugar. Some people struggle with disordered eating while others have never had such negative experiences with food.
There are a lot of ways to talk about how we feed ourselves, and each perspective sheds light on how food influences our existence and even who we are on a fundamental level.
Frank Thomas Cardenas is a freelance writer and digital media producer from Los Angeles, who will join three other panelists to discuss “How We Feed Ourselves.” For a time, Cardenas was a radio producer for the Internet radio station Progressive Voices, where he says he was able to learn a lot about food and agricultural practices, particularly about genetically modified organisms, which he says is “poison in the most insidious way.”
“But it’s not labeled,” Cardenas says. “Yet these things have been shown to increase rates of cancer, to destroy DNA, to inhibit concentration and brain function… yet the [Food and Drug Administration] is so in bed with Monsanto and so in bed with agribusiness companies, it discredits a lot of things and things get dismissed as conspiracy theories. I think this does a lot of detriment to our society. Even if you don’t agree with the science, until we know for sure what [GMOs do to our bodies and environment], they shouldn’t even be a consideration.”
Cardenas points out that the European Union states ban GMOs completely, as do Russia, China, Australia and Mexico.
“I think we’re just going step by step building a case to say, ‘No, we don’t want GMOs to exist.’ But we’re still a long way off from that,” Cardenas says.
Fellow panelist Joaquin Muñoz looks at the topic of how we feed ourselves from a more personal vantage point. Muñoz, an educator and current doctoral student at the University of Arizona, says he struggled with obesity in his youth.
“My thoughts about this are intensely personal. … I was thinking very deeply about what it means when we eat. What it means when we feed ourselves.” Muñoz says.
“It’s an interesting topic to me to think about what eating means and what it signifies in our society because often times, in a very unconscious way, eating is a method for validating ourselves. It’s a symbol for love, for appreciation, for acknowledgement for another human,” he says. “The problem is, we think if one of those is form of validation then five of those is five forms of validation, and then we tend to overeat. Then we become despondent. It’s all so complex and intricate that it’s hard to pinpoint how one caused the other, how the process of feeding ourselves suddenly transforms into a thought or an idea about loving ourselves.”
As a teacher, Muñoz also points to how we feed children.
“It’s really a question about am I attempting to feed a whole human being with emotional concern for their wellbeing, or am I feeding an organism that has certain nutrition requirements to biologically survive?” he says. “To an extent both of these are absolutely true, the question is, which one of these perspectives are we going to value? In our society we value the latter, a perspective of ‘this is a biological unit that needs a certain level of this calorie and that calorie and when put those things together will have a quote unquote nutritious meal.’”
Cardenas and Muñoz will be joined on the panel by Robert Egger, founder and president of L.A. Kitchen, and Michael Ibrahim Heins, a visual designer and digital artist.
THE NEW CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Tuesday, April 7, 9:30 a.m. UMC Center Ballroom.
The term ‘civil rights’ might bring up ideas of a bygone era, the lunch counter-sit ins, bus boycotts and marches of the 1960s, but for many Americans, everyday life still presents struggles for equality.
As a Native American, Joaquin Muñoz has a clear perspective on being part of a marginalized group of people. The teacher and doctoral student says his heritage creates “the underlying philosophies of any topic or any space of conversation” for him.
“Historically, the perspectives of Native Americans have always been marginalized,” Muñoz says. “One of the difficult conversations is the dominant perspective that Native Americans are a bygone era, something that happened in the past, way back then. Much in the same way when people talk about race or racism in this country, that was something that happened back in the ’60s or it was the Ku Klux Klan and that happened back in the in the 1800s and we’re beyond that, and it doesn’t really happen anymore. And to some extent that’s true, but the inaccuracy is thinking those things are completely gone. So in a similar way, when discussing issues around Native American rights, when discussing issues around Native American equality, most of the time the discussion is lost because people automatically go to this idea, ‘Well, they’re not here anymore. Nobody rides horses and lives in teepees anymore.’ There’s the perspective: That I can’t hear anything if you’re not there. One of the very first difficulties is sometimes even entering into the conversation.”
For Frank Thomas Cardenas, who will join Muñoz on the “New Civil Rights Movement” panel, a big part of the problem is a violation of police power in the nation.
“There are other countries in the world [whose police forces] don’t use firearms nearly as much, whose police forces result to escalation tactics and maybe a single shot, but the fact that police in most of these recent [U.S.] interactions have fired multiple times into victims that turn out to be unarmed, to me that brings up a question of training,” Cardenas says. “If this is the immediate response for many police officers, just multiple shots dead center, then what are we teaching them that isn’t working? I think anytime you have to resort to discharging your weapon as a police officer, there were other tactics that were not being pursued.”
Cardenas also points to the overpolicing of black and Latino communities leading to the perception that there is more crime happening in these communities.
But Cardenas is quick to point out that this new civil rights movement isn’t just about people of color.
“I think gay rights especially are very much at the top of people’s minds, because of the potential overturning of Prop 8 [in California] and [the possibility that the Supreme Court will] legalize gay marriage once and for all across the country and set that precedent once and for all. … I think the fact that we’re still having the discussion tells us how little progress we’ve made,” Cardenas says. “Gay rights aren’t just for gay people, they are humanizing people across race, across gender.
“I think civil rights [activists] need to come together and people need to fight together and show solidarity across struggles and that’s what’s going to start moving things forward,” he says.
SPOTLIGHT ON PANELIST DAVID BENDER
David Bender likens the Conference on World Affairs as summer camp for adults, making it no surprise that he’s back for his sixth visit.
“It’s one of the most unique gatherings I’ve ever participated in,” Bender says. “It’s an exchange of ideas between people who otherwise would have never communicated with each other — people who disagree on politics or have different expertise. People who never overlap come together.”
Bender’s background represents an intersection where politics meet entertainment. In his career he’s had his own show on Air America Radio, Politically Direct, where he’s interviewed big names like President Obama and Hillary Clinton. He’s been a political advisor to Rachel Maddow and has served as the Democratic National Committee’s liaison to the entertainment industry. He’s also worked on books and documentaries about activism in the music industry, the film Spartacus and the Hollywood Blacklist with people including David Crosby and Kirk Douglas.
This year, Bender returns to the Ebert Uninteruptus. Bender led it last year, with The Graduate, and says he feels honored to continue Roger Ebert’s tradition. This year’s film, selected by Bender, is 1957’s A Face in the Crowd by American director Elia Kazan. It follows a young backwoods hillbilly singer (Andy Griffiths) as he rises to fame and becomes a media sensation.
“It’s about the power of media to have an impact on people’s values,” Bender says. “It shows something we’ve come to expect as quite normal. This film was well ahead of its time.”
The themes in the film include how values are formed and how commercialism dictates what we see in our media. He says it shows how it’s important to be clear eyed, pay attention to people’s agendas and to not take things at face value.
Outside of the Uninteruptus, he’ll be on panels “Gays Saved Marriage,” “Democrat Comedy Hour,” Free Speech Comes with Responsibilities” and “Jon Stewart and the End of a Colb-era.”
Bender got interested in politics at age 12 for one simple reason: Robert Kennedy. Bender says he was a fan of Kennedy’s passion for helping people, his opposition to the Vietnam War and commitment to Civil Rights. But nowadays, Bender is focused more on the system itself.
“I’m less interested in politicians and more in finding a way to use the system for all of us. It has been badly broken by partisanship and by people who are not civil and who don’t find common ground,” he says.
The political system seems to be getting worse, he says, but he does see a glimmer of hope in the younger generation.
“Young people’s commitment to making change outside of the political system is strengthening,” he says. “The difference between when I started out and where we are today is we now have people who say if the system doesn’t work, we’ll fix it ourselves. Young people are the solution to everything. … New ideas and looking to the future comes from younger people. They’re the ones who have to live in it. Young people always represent the hope and all we can do is provide encouragement and sometimes just get out of the way.”
Bender says the overarching problem is the lack of mutual understanding between parties. Agreeing on fundamentals, like climate change and marriage equality, are factors that shouldn’t be up for argument. They should be guaranteed no matter what “side” you’re on.
“Issues like the environment are neither conservative or liberal, they’re simply rational. You can’t debate the reading on a thermometer. It’s not a matter of opinion,” he says. “[Basic human rights] should be based on the quality of people’s lives regardless of where they live or where they come from. We should all be able to agree to create a better life for ourselves and our children.”
