In the midst of the recent inauguration of President Barack Obama, we have learned a lot about the shape of the current Republican Party. Obviously, there has been much guffawing from the republican side over the past couple of months, most notably the “tea parties” that took place in numerous locations around America. Many conservatives feel that Obama is a uniting influence within the party (uniting in opposition, anyway); however, I see a party that is in complete disarray.

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The United States of America faced one of its darkest and most somber moments on September 11, 2001. On that day, 3,000 Americans lost their lives in the largest domestic attack in the history of the United States. Understandably, people were (and still are) affected by the events of that day. The biggest question that was asked in the aftermath of the attack, in regards to those who attacked us is “Why did they do it?”

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Since the inauguration of President Barack Obama, there has been a lot of talk among Republican legislators, as well as conservative commentators, about the dangers of a large deficit. The main consensus amongst these figures is that the Obama administration is leading the nation down a path of fiscal irresponsibility that could bring us to the brink of disaster later on. No doubt, there may be some truth to all these concerns about the deficit. After all, someday, the United States will be called on to pay the piper (in this case, the Chinese) for all the debt that we have accumulated.

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The Tech Theatre Company will present A.R. Gurney’s The Dining Room nightly at 7:30 p.m. from Feb. 25-28 at McArdle Theatre in the Walker Arts and Humanities Center. The play will be directed by Chairman of the Department of Visual and Performing Arts Roger Held, and will feature “Dennis Kerwin, lecturer in the Theatre and Electronic Media Performance Class and a veteran of Hollywood films and television”(www.vpa.mtu.edu).
Gurney was an MIT Shakespeare professor who had written a number of relatively successful plays, but the widely-performed play The Dining Room would make his reputation.
“You can learn a lot about a culture from how it eats,” says Tony, a character in the play. Indeed, Gurney’s character uses the room of the title for a college slide show to document the “vanishing culture” of the New England WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants). Beginning in the 1930s and ending just before the Reagan administration, the 1981 play follows a family through many years of dinners and a wife’s temporary conversion of the room into a study.
During the early years of the Great Depression, said Held, the WASPs were “insulated from the social storm by their wealth.” They were anti-Roosevelt and against the New Deal. They believed in social Darwinism, in the survival of those who were “fittest” economically and socially. Isolated “in their emotionally restrained and dignified New England castles” without today’s television or mass media, they believed the storm would simply pass.
The play spans the period from the Depression and World War II, to the “reactionary forces [finding] a public disconcerted by the pace of change, longing to slow down and return to the good old days before the civil rights movement and women’s lib.” Held voiced some admiration for the characters’ “devotion to family, a commitment to community and purposeful work and an understanding of the essential need for beauty as wellspring of human renewal” while rejecting other parts of the author’s vision. But the play is not simply an elegy for times past. It treats its multiple characters with both sentimentality and sarcasm. We can see the petit bourgeoisie of New England with humor and with sadness.
Tickets are free for MTU students, $10 for the general public and $5 for children 18 and under. For tickets, call the Rozsa Box Office at 487-3200, the SDC Ticket Office at 487-2073 or go on-line at www.tickets.mtu.edu.

In case you have had your head buried in the sand for the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably heard about the woes that have been suffered on Wall Street. The once bullish American economy, due to a lack of oversight as well as many other factors, has come to a screeching halt, which has, in turn, caused many other national economies across the world to crash. Many Americans are left wondering what caused this whole mess and why the government should spend billions of dollars to bail out large American banking giants.

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On Thursday, Oct. 2, at the Board of Control’s regular meeting, Michigan Tech alumnus Dave House announced his $10 million donation to Michigan Tech’s national campaign.

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