Seeing Things

Stephen Colbert reinvented the TV talk show, if only for one night

2026-07-27T13:17:46.821-07:00

When I saw Stephen Colbert hosting Only in Monroe the day after he said goodbye to The Late Show, I thought, "Is he reinventing the television talk show?"

I know that was unlikely, yet I was a bit excited with the possibility.

Only in Monroe has an audience of perhaps dozens of people in the town of 20,000 people in southeast Michigan, so its ability to reshape national television is limited -- even though Colbert's episode has increased awareness of the show: it has been viewed 1.8 million times on YouTube as I write this.

My thoughts about Colbert reinventing the talk show were not entirely out of line, since Colbert had replaced David Letterman on The Late Show, and Letterman has been credited with reinventing the form, first with Late Night with David Letterman on NBC (1982-1993) and then with The Late Show with David Letterman on CBS (1993-2015).

The claim that Letterman's reinvented the talk show is premised on his ironic approach to the format. His talk shows seemed to ask, "Aren't talk shows stupid? Why take any of this seriously?" I am sure Letterman and his staff worked diligently on the shows, but in their appearance the shows suggested no one was working very hard.

Of Letterman's show, Tim Grierson wrote, "There was nothing upscale or 'professional' about Late Night’s witty stupidity, which made it the polar opposite of the ingratiating, slightly sleepy Tonight Show."

Colbert's recent Only in Monroe had lots of silliness, but I found it surprisingly earnest. Colbert and his writers studied Monroe and its peculiarities to produce jokes and gags just as good as they did on The Late Show about national and international news. This was different to a degree from his first appearance on the show.

When Colbert first hosted Only in Monroe in 2015, he was fresh off The Colbert Report, in which he performed as "Stephen Colbert," a parody of a Fox News political pundit who was sometimes rather stupid. That character lingered during Colbert's interview with Michigan native Marshall Mathers (Eminem). Colbert pretended to be unaware of Mathers' success as a rapper and worked to irritate him in several ways during the segment. (How much Mathers was in on the joke is not clear.) This segment also was reminiscent of Colbert's time as a correspondent on The Daily Show.

In other words, Colbert had ironic moments during his initial Only in Monroe appearance. For much of the episode he is genuine and playful, but there also are moments when he is goofing on the idea of a cable access TV show, in some ways similar to how Letterman goofed on the idea of a network talk show.

I think that this ironic approach, which can seem smug or condescending, was missing from Colbert's return to Monroe 11 years later. The irony of The Colbert Report and of the Letterman influence was replaced with what seems to be a more genuine and humane spirit of fun, and that perhaps reflects more of who Colbert is as a person off the stage.

Oddly enough, this earnestness is evident when Colbert and the show's regular hosts huff helium while discussing one of the host's "cancer journey."

Why would they do that? Because when co-host Michelle Baumann was being treated for cancer, she shared video updates on social media that were recorded with a filter that distorted her face and made her voice cartoonishly high and squeaky. The helium gag reflected someone's careful attention to the people involved with Only in Monroe. Colbert's questions about her illness and recovery were sincere, and Baumann and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko Wilson discussed the experience candidly -- but with a sense of fun, as they were all mindful to take a fresh hit of helium before talking.

The careful attention to the show and to Monroe was reflected in other parts of the episode. All of it became material for jokes, but I did not find the humor condescending. The jokes were not making fun of Monroe for being a small town; the jokes were similar to those made about national events or the absurdities of life in New York City, where The Late Show was recorded. Colbert's staff paid attention to recent local events and created an entirely Monroe-centric show about it -- such as Colbert and volunteer musical director Jack White judging which rival hot dog stands had the better chili dogs: Monroe's Original Hot Dogs and Vince's West Elm Drive-In?

Early in the episode, I wondered if the whole thing was a set-up. Was there really a show called Only in Monroe? Were the hosts real or actors? Were local events invented for the sake of the jokes? I kept thinking of National Lampoon's Sunday Newspaper Parody in 1978. It created an entire Sunday edition of the Dacron, Ohio Republican-Democrat, with fake ads and news stories. It was an impressive, elaborate, and funny contrivance (I still have my copy, nearly 50 years later).

Had Colbert's crew pulled off something like that?

I almost wish they had, but I am happy to know they did not. Monroe Community Meida is a real non-profit organization in the southeast corner of Michigan, and Only in Monroe is a real show.

I had not been aware that Colbert hosted Only in Monroe in 2015. Nor had I been aware that this had apparently inspired several bits on The Late Show, which featured celebrities sharing "community calendar" events from their hometowns. You can find segments with John Oliver, Melissa McCarthy, and others on YouTube.

One of the staff at Monroe Community Media kind of stole the show, creating what I think is another interesting comparison with Letterman's show.

Larry "Bud" Melman, played by Calvert DeForest, vaulted to fame as a bumbling regular character on Letterman's show. He regularly flubbed his lines, missed his cues, and frequently did not seem to understand the premise of the skit he was performing. None of this was edited out. In fact, it became the central appeal of the character and his bits. Melman sometimes acted a foil to Letterman, keeping him from getting through the prepared material. The general failure of the bit was the point. More irony.

Melman's counterpart on Only in Monroe was Genevieve Benson, the creative director for Monroe Community Media. She was behind the scenes as a kind of all-purpose wrangler, providing props and relaying information to Colbert -- and keeping him in line. Benson's appearance lacked the irony of DeForest's; she was appearing as herself, not a character.

When she brings the chili dogs out to be taste-tested by Colbert and White, she quickly realizes she cannot recall which dog is from which restaurant, which defeats the purpose of the taste-test.

When Colbert washed the taste of the chili dogs from his mouth, he spit the water on the studio floor. When Benson came out later with a basket of ingredients for Jeff Daniels to make his famous peanut butter, potato chip, and barbecue sauce sandwich, she admonished Colbert, "No spitting. On the floor. No."

Later in that segment, Colbert called her out to ask whether the studio had a microwave oven. She bounded out and told him they did not -- and then, laughing, she said, "Wait. I'm sorry. We do. I was just ready to say no to you."

When Colbert asked for something to drink because Daniels's sandwiches were very dry, Benson brought him her own water bottle. "It smells a little weird, but don't be alarmed."

If Colbert has another show, he should bring Benson along to be his assistant/foil, in a dynamic perhaps similar to that between Conan O'Brien and Sona Movsesian. Colbert and Benson could recreate their Monroe magic in towns across the United States, presenting their quirks, charms, and chili dogs.

Do novels owe us happy endings?

2026-04-26T21:32:00.000-07:00

I conclude my class on 20th century American novels with students reflecting on the books we read during the semester. And I offer my own reflection:

Do novels owe us happy endings?

I imagine you answer that question quickly: “No.”

However, many of us gravitate toward works that end happily. This makes sense if we look to literature
for entertainment. Happy thoughts and experiences are more entertaining than sad thoughts and bad experiences. There is some entertainment value in the catharsis of tragedy, but even in our favorite sad stories we look for some signal that something was gained through a character’s pain or sacrifice.

Art, though, is different. When we think of novels as art or Literature (with a capital L), we may value “honesty” more than entertainment. We may want stories that represent the world to us as it actually is, not as we wish it were (Realism vs. Romance). We could say that The Sun Also Rises is Literature because it ends ambiguously. I do not sense that Brett is going to change. I think her unhealthy behavior will continue, and I think people are really like that. I do not know about Jake. I think his final line of the novel could hint that he is done with wishing for things between them to be different, although he cannot tell her this straight. Absalom, Absalom! is Literature if only because it is constructed and narrated in a way that makes the reader do much work; in terms of this discussion it could be Literature because Quentin Compson has found no satisfying answers to his real
question – Why is the South so messed up? – despite working through the saga of Thomas Sutpen yet one more time. Perhaps he does have his answer. Perhaps he knows why the South is so messed up: because of men like Thomas Sutpen and the South’s complicity in their crimes, but this answer does not help him. Coming closer to the truth about Thomas Sutpen – and, perhaps more importantly for Quentin, the truth about Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon – does not make him feel satisfied. Those answers do not reconcile him to his Southern heritage. I do not know that Kurt Vonnegut finds a satisfying solution to the problems he identifies in Breakfast of Champions. The novel ends with his own tear, after all.

This can be a major role for novels: articulating the problems of a generation or community. Another role could be imagining solutions to those problems. Ceremony does this. It imagines a solution to the problems created by U.S. colonialism for American Indian people: get in touch with your community’s pre-colonial culture and never forget your responsibilities to the land. Perhaps Beloved does this too for African American people: do not dwell in your trauma; live for your present and your future. The House on Mango Street may suggest to young Chicanas: do not let your community limit how you imagine your own life.

If we turn to novels to help imagine solutions to our society’s problems, we may feel frustrated because some of the solutions are not realistic. Sometimes they are not workable solutions because the problems have not been correctly or clearly articulated. That is the criticism of The House on Mango Street some students make. Some people feel Cisneros blames poverty for some of the problems faced by her characters, when instead she should ask who is responsible for that poverty. They may believe that the correct conclusion is not imagining an escape from the location of the poverty but imagining ways to fix the system that creates the poverty.

You could say that the less realistic those solutions are, the less likely a novel is to be classified as Literature (capital L). Emotionally rewarding but unrealistic solutions to big problems may classify a novel as “escapist” or “fantasy” or “mere entertainment.”

What led my thoughts down this path? In past semesters, I have sensed that some students are moved by The House on Mango Street in ways they are not moved by other books in this class. Even though Sethe learns in Beloved that she is “her own best thing” and that she needs to be present for her living daughter, and even though Ceremony ends with Tayo and the Laguna land healed, with an awareness of a transcendent connection among all living things, I sense that some students have been more moved by The House on Mango Street. It is a brief, beautiful book; I am not criticizing it, but this reaction got me thinking about what kinds of books we could or should be reading. It reminded me of a quote I had on my office door for a long time. The quote is about poetry, but it easily could apply to novels:

Let us remember that in the end we go to poetry for one reason: so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.

- Christian Wiman

I hope you keep reading and that you look for those works which help you more fully inhabit your life and your world. I hope you find writers who help you think in new ways and feel in new ways.

All Hat, No Cattle: AI, college essays, and Bloom's Taxonomy

2025-12-28T18:29:00.000-08:00

I have seen many discussions on the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom, especially lamentations from college instructors.

A frequent comment is about the theory that AI writing apps like to use em dashes, and the presence of multiple em dashes in a student's essay raises the instructor's suspicion. Many instructors say this makes them sad -- because they like to use em dashes too.

However, I have not seen that as a marker of AI use. More telling, to me, is the presence of clinical topic sentences on every paragraph. By clinical I mean the sentences are precise and concise, unlike other sentences in something produced by AI, which tend to be filled with adjectives and adverbs and other efforts to sound erudite.

Few undergraduates have mastered the topic sentence, especially when they are writing about narratives (I teach literature at the university level). Their sentences tend to be focused on the plot rather than the point of their analysis. I would venture to say that many professional academics have not mastered the topic sentence.

In my classes, I would say the biggest indicator of the influence of ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever is the substance of the essay rather than the style. Essays produced by AI seem like empty shells to me.

In my class, I emphasize this formula for essay writing: claim + evidence + explanation.

Added to this formula is the guideline: explanation should be longer than evidence. For instance, if you cite two sentences from a text, you need to write more than two sentences that explain their meaning and their significance to your claim; this needs to be true explanation and not simply summary or restatement.

AI writing tends to be big on claims and short on evidence. Sometimes it offers explanations, but without evidence those explanations are lacking. (This may be like the adage: All hat, no cattle.) Those claims are often sophisticated and heavy on adjectives and adverbs, as if the author is very familiar with the topic in a way that undergraduates rarely are. For instance, describing a story in laudatory terms can suggest the student is familiar with the author's work, the genre, or other the work of other writers to which this author can be compared.

During the fall semester, my encounters with AI-produced essays reminded me of Bloom's Taxonomy. It looks like this:

AI writing frequently demonstrates evaluative thinking without providing the analysis, application, or understanding that forms its foundation. If it provides analytical claims, it frequently does not support those with the application and understanding to support them.

For instance, in the last batch of papers for my class on the history of the American short story, I asked students to explain an element of fiction (understand) and then discuss how this element is found in two short stories we read (apply). They need to explain how this element is used to create an effect on the reader (analyze). I do not require them to say to what degree the element is effectively used (evaluate).

Essays that I suspected involved AI made big claims about the themes or effects of a story without providing a clear explanation of the element being used for analysis, without evidence from the text that demonstrates that element, and without explanation of how those textual moments support the claim of a particular theme.

(When evidence from the text is provided, it occasionally consists of fake quotes.)

A sign that suggests to me AI was involved (in the absence of fake quotes) is when an essay is heavy on analytical conclusions without the supporting application: claims without evidence and explanation. A big sign is the presence of sophisticated evaluative statements without corresponding analysis and application.

For instance, several essays this past semester discussed "grief" as a theme in Raymond Carver's "Why Don't You Dance?" Students made the claim that a character's actions were driven by grief without explaining what he might be grieving (the story famously never states this explicitly; little in that story is explicit). They claimed the character's odd actions were the product of grief without explaining how those could be related to some kind of sorrow. They did not question the discussion of grief in what AI provided for them possibly because they had not done their own thinking about the story.

It seems grief has been discussed in relation to Carver's story many times elsewhere, because if you ask ChatGPT or Gemini to write about "Why Don't You Dance?" you will get responses that discuss grief. AI mentions grief because it notes the frequency of that word in discussions of this story, and it is likely using that word will satisfy the prompt it has been given.

Academic writing is like math in a classroom: you need to show your work. AI writing provides answers, but it rarely shows how that answer was derived from the text being analyzed.

The Limits of FU Money: Some money can make you brave, but a lot of money can make you cowardly

2025-09-17T19:08:00.000-07:00

Seeing tech billionaires lining up to kiss Donald Trump's ring and seeing media corporations cave to pressure from a mad king unhappy about the jokes made by their late-night jesters makes me think of John Goodman.

In the 2014 film The Gambler, Goodman's character makes an internet-famous speech about money and the freedom it can bring. He says a person's goal should be to accumulate $2.5 million, buy a house free and clear, and create a "Fortress of Solitude." There the person can live with their family and not worry about pleasing anyone else. No one can tell them what to do, because they now have "fuck-you money."

He goes on, "A wise man's life is based around 'fuck you.' The United States of America is based on 'fuck you.' You're a king? You have an army? The greatest navy in the history of the world? Fuck you. Blow me."

Goodman's character today might tell a different story today, as the mega-wealthy fawn over the king and beg him to love them.

One would think that fuck-you status had been reached by billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, and Bill Gates. But there they were, on the Joni Mitchell Patio -- Trump paved the paradise of Jackie Kennedy's Rose Garden and put up a parking lot of white tables and chairs with golden umbrellas.

During Trump 1.0, some people referred to his Florida home as the Southern White House. In Trump 2.0, he is turning the White House into the Northern Mar-a-lago.

The tech bros yucked it up with Trump, and Gates, of all people, praised Trump's "leadership" in artificial intelligence policies -- despite Trump eliminating foreign aid, including food and medical supplies, to Africa. Gates has spent years working and millions of his own dollars to help African communities.

Weeks before the grotesque patio love-fest, Cook gave Trump a literal gold brick in the Oval Office.

Why are these men debasing themselves this way, when, surely, they have fuck-you money? Was Goodman's character lying?

When I thought of Goodman and his speech from The Gambler, I thought of a graph that would chart the relationship of money to freedom. The line would start low, go high, and then drop again. It would represent the Mountain of Freedom.

The x-axis would represent the amount of money you have. The amount increase as you move from left to right. The y-axis represents the amount of freedom you have. It starts low and climbs as the amount of your money increases. But at some point it begins to decline. Even though your wealth increases further, your freedom diminishes.

On the left side of the chart, where you have little money, you have little freedom. Because you need money to survive, you must perform tasks you do not want to do or pretend to believe things you do not believe or pretend to like people you do not like.

As the amount of money you have increases, you gain freedom from those undesirable activities. For most Americans, this does not come until retirement. That is when we have secured enough resources (through savings or pensions and through paying off our homes) that we can live in our Fortresses of Solitude.

However, if the money line keeps rising, ironically, you can lose freedom. Either from an irrational desire to gain even more money or from a pathological fear of losing the money you have, you resume performing tasks you do not want to do or pretending to like people you do not like or pretending to believe things you do not believe.

Or the money twists you, changes you, and you begin liking people you had disliked and betraying your previous beliefs.

Zuckerberg and Company do not need any more money. They have more money than they can spend in ten lifetimes. And yet there they were, flattering an ignorant buffoon at the White House. He is a man with a fraction of their intelligence, but since he possesses no shame or scruples, he is willing to abuse his power, enabling his greed, his petty resentments, and his delusions of grandeur. And because they love their wealth more than their dignity, the wealthy suck up to him.

Meanwhile, corporations worth billions of dollars run by CEOs worth millions curry favor with the minions Trump has appointed to various federal agencies. If they have a merger in the works that needs federal approval, they are willing to silence their employees (Stephen Colbert at CBS and Jimmy Kimmel at ABC) only because Trump does not like being criticized. Other corporations are willing to eliminate their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs to avoid the regime's disfavor. They will do anything to keep the money flowing. The company store has sold its soul.

On either side of the Mountain of Freedom are valleys of enslavement: the Valley of Poverty and the Valley of Obscene Wealth.

Regular people want enough. The Rich always want more.

It is hard to tell who owns whom. Do the wealthy own their fortunes, or do their fortunes own them?

Unfortunately, under the current administration, they may end up owning the rest of us.

Democratizing Capitalism Can Be A Trainwreck

2025-09-03T19:37:00.000-07:00

Currently, about 62 percent of Americans have money invested in individual stocks, mutual funds, or exchange-traded funds. That compares to about 25 percent when I started investing in 1990.

This is considered part of the democratization of capitalism. This means more people -- not just the wealthy -- can benefit from the mechanisms of capitalism. Some of them will be able to grow generational wealth (or at least plant the seeds for it). A lucky few will grow rich in their lifetime.

However, this democratization is limited. More people then ever have access to investing, but that does not mean they have gained much (if any) control over the levers of capitalism. Most of these people hand their money to someone who invests on their behalf. These average investors are participating in the system of capitalism, but they are not changing the system. They definitely are not controlling it.

Giving their money to investment managers and corporations to invest may increase the financial wealth of regular Americans, but those controllers of capital have goals that differ from those of regular Americans. In The Master's Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It), Michael McCarthy writes about how corporate capitalism, through lobbyists and campaign contributions, too often dominates how governments allocate resources and regulate day-to-day life for Americans.

"The political capacities these levers generate offer distinct ways for the masters of finance to remake formal political institutions in their image" (12).

Corporate America is dedicated only to maximizing profits, whereas regular people have multiple priorities, including their health and safety. McCarthy writes, "We know that finance capitalism underinvests in socially and ecologically needed goods and services" (13).

I tried to think of an example to illustrate this and the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, came to mind.

Thirty-eight cars of a freight train came off the tracks in the town. Poisonous chemicals were released, and everyone within a mile of the derailment was evacuated. I wondered how many people impacted by the derailment might own shares in the company that owned the train: Norfolk Southern Corporation.

Several industrial facilities were located near the crash site: U.S. Stoneware, Ceram Fab, Strohecker Inc. (according to Google Maps). I cannot find retirement plans for their employees on their web sites. However, the derailment impacted the whole town with clouds of chemicals and other disruptions, and I can find information about the retirement plans for teachers at East Palestine High School and East Palestine Elementary School, which are located within 2 miles of the crash site.

Employees there would be members of the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System. Their retirement account investments include ETFs for major stock indexes, such as the S&P 500 and the Russell 1000. Those indexes included Norfolk Southern in 2023. I assume some of the workers at the industrial sites mentioned above also had investments in these indexes and therefore in Norfolk Southern.

While those workers were trusting investment professionals with their money, Norfolk Southern was dissuading government officials and regulatory agencies from strengthening safety regulations. According to The Lever, an online publication:

Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.

Having a secure retirement would be one goal of workers in East Palestine, but they would have other priorities, such as living in a safe and healthy environment. If Norfolk Southern had asked them about their priorities -- as part owners of the company -- they probably would have said, "We want you to operate safely, especially since you pass through the heart of our town."

However, the people investing on behalf of those East Palestine workers had just one priority, and that was shared by the Norfolk Southern executives: maximize investment returns.

The workers were part owners of the means of production (the trains and their tracks), but they did not control the means of production, despite living near it.

The major owners of the means of production rarely live near them. Those things would be a lot safer and cleaner if they existed near mansions and country clubs.

A short video related to this question of the undemocratic nature of American capitalism was posted in March of this year. (Generic Art Dad on Facebook and @genericartdad on Instagram.) In it, he discusses how banks knowingly make loans to private equity firms who will use the money to acquire a company. The investors will then strip the company of assets and leave it holding the loans. The banks do not care if the loans go bad because once the acquired company goes under, they will have sold the loans to others -- including pension funds.

The demise of the acquired companies hurts their workers and the workers who participate in the pension funds that might have purchased the bad debt.

"The people who bear the brunt of this aren't exactly at the table to push back," says Generic Art Dad.

To truly democratize capitalism, workers and regular citizens need a voice on the boards of directors for companies, and their daily priorities would need to be reflected in the decisions of the investments professionals responsible for their money.

How to measure a civilization? By regular folks or ambitious boobies?

2025-07-05T21:18:00.000-07:00

Henry David Thoreau is most famous for a book he wrote about building a cabin near a pond in the woods. In fact, we just celebrated the 180^th anniversary of his move-in day: July 4, 1845.

However, he also had some things to say about bigger structures – the pyramids in Egypt – and the people who built them.

Thoreau's cabin: $28.12

Thoreau has been on my mind recently as I contemplated the iconic structures by which we remember civilizations. Pyramids. Towers. Statues. Cathedrals. Skyscrapers. Dams, Bridges. Etc. Things you would see in a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization.

For the United States in the 21^st century, I do not think of any grand structures. I do not think of ambitious public works. We do not seem to build those now. One could say the iconic works of this century are corporations rather than structures.

In 2018, Apple became the first corporation with a valuation of a trillion dollars. Now several companies surpass that amount, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla.

Some of these entities are involved in the lives of possibly every American, especially inside the technology that we use daily. As the Orange King says, “Everything is computer!” I will focus on Amazon, though. Not everyone shops on Amazon, but everyone knows its logo and sees its delivery trucks each day.

When people think of the United States in the 21^st century, they might think of these corporations as its greatest accomplishment, and the leaders of these corporations might be considered its leading citizens. In fact, several of them were on stage during the coronation of the Orange King. In a past era they would have been called “titans of industry.” Author Thomas Wolfe might have called them “Masters of the Universe,” which is phrase from his novel Bonfire of the Vanities; it is a name for the men who steer the nation’s money and influence the nation’s fate -- and who are known for their extravagant lifestyles.

Thoreau would be disappointed in this lionizing of wealth-hoarders and what they have built. Thoreau asked people to evaluate the greatness of a civilization by the standard of living for its regular people rather than the achievements of its elites.

One of Bezos's yachts: $400 million

I agree with him.

In the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau writes that the workers who built the pyramids “were not decently buried themselves.” He suggests a mason in another era who “finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut…” He writes, “It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish the generation are accomplished.”

Much of Thoreau’s first chapter is devoted to asking why people spend their lives working rather than living. He questions the lifestyles people choose (or have forced upon them) that require so much labor. Returning to the topic of pyramids, he suggests the laborers had better things to do with their lives – like living them. In fact, rather than ask how could people build such marvelous structures, he asks why would people build them at all? In the second chapter of Walden, he writes:

“As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

I suspect Bezos, an ambitious booby himself, would disagree with this sentiment. After all, he famously said he wanted his thousands of Amazon employees to “wake up every morning terrified” of not pleasing their customers. Bezos believes his company is worth the sacrifice of its workers’ lives and happiness.

Thoreau would judge American civilization not by the valuation of Amazon’s stock and Bezos’s wealth, but by whether his employees were treated well and felt their lives were being spent wisely.

Far from urging people to wake up terrified in sheets drenched in sweat, Thoreau urges his readers to be awakened by their “aspirations from within” rather than from without, by an alarm clock or “factory bells.” He urges us to awake in the morning “to a higher life than we fell asleep from.”

Again, I agree with him.

The populist president who works against the populous

2025-06-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

The motto of capitalism might be “Be careful what you wish for.”

It is an economic system that can generate great wealth, even widespread prosperity, but it also is prone to excesses and instability.

If capitalists manage to gain control of the political system as well as as the economic system, those excesses can get more extreme and more damaging. Capitalism also is prone to boom-and-bust cycles. If unchecked, capitalism can create bigger booms and bigger busts. With Trump in the White House, the bigger boom looks to be guaranteed only for the already-wealthy, and the bigger bust is for everyone else.

This is on my mind because I have been reading The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It) by Michael A. McCarthy. In the book, McCarthy describes the ways the U.S. system of governance serves the needs of capitalists more than workers, something we are seeing vividly demonstrated by the Trump Administration.

Until recently, mechanisms existed to curb some of capitalism’s excesses, and some of these mechanisms benefited workers directly — protecting them from exploitation or allowing them to share more of the wealth generated by their labor.

These mechanisms are called “flanking subsystems.” They are “state agencies, committees, programs (such as welfare), and quasi-governmental entities such as central banks, that actively intervene in relations of production, exchange, and investment” (35).

McCarthy writes, “… capitalist democracies pursue stabilizing interventions that overcome capitalism’s own anarchic and self-destructive tendencies” (35).

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal is perhaps the clearest example of “stabilizing interventions,” and we have many vestiges of it with us today (at least for now); for instance, Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (Social Security), which has saved millions of people from poverty, and the National Labor Relations Act, which encouraged collective bargaining and protected workers who sought to organize unions. Later interventions protected people from discrimination and injury at their jobs. Others benefited everyone, not just workers, by protecting clean air and clean water from the capitalist penchant for polluting landscapes. The Bureau of Consumer Protection is one. Medicare and Medicaid are popular interventions. The Affordable Care Act is another.

However, since his election, Trump has been removing (or attempting to remove) many of the guardrails that keep capitalism from producing the anarchy and self-destruction McCarthy discusses.

Although capitalist interests may dominate U.S. politics, they have been kept in check, to some degree, by other interests, since until recently, the United States had a functioning democracy. McCarthy says these checks ultimately make capitalism sustainable, saving it from itself. He writes:

Sometimes what capitalists want is not what they need. And therefore, to effectively stabilize capitalist social relations, capitalist states need to govern on behalf of capitalism [but] not necessarily at the behest of capitalists…. It must protect capitalist relations of exploitation and domination from the very conditions those relations produce while also ensuring capitalist relations remain dominant in the political economy (36).

Trump is throwing all of this out the window. In many ways, he is giving the capitalists what they want rather than what they need: diminishing workers’ rights to organize, reducing protections from injuries at the workplace, undermining protections from discrimination, removing environmental regulations to allow more pollution of the water and the air, etc.

Promising great wealth for everyone, Trump is setting the capitalists loose while providing nothing for workers. While claiming to be their champion, he is making them more vulnerable.

In addition to making workers physically, emotionally, and financially vulnerable, his policies make their lives more precarious by many of his other decisions — closing Job Corps, which provides vocational training; closing down the Federal Emergency Management Agency; limiting information on disease outbreaks and rationing vaccinations against deadly diseases, etc.

If McCarthy is right, this may result in a deep crisis. Capitalism creates “monsters that it cannot fully control,” and it is dependent upon bureaucratic and democratic governance to be kept in check. Those monsters “also have the capacity to harm the thing that brought them into existence — that is, capitalism itself” (36).

A healthy capitalist system cannot be sustained by a nation of disempowered, unemployed, stressed, poisoned, ill, or abused workers.

Zealotry is unAmerican

2025-05-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

I was born in 1961, and in the United States in which I grew up, people were suspicious of extremes. A “zealot” was something you did not want to be, religious or otherwise.

That is why the nation’s turn toward extremism in recent years seems surprising and dismaying.

Especially surprising and alarming is the combination of religious and political zealotry.

According to the article, this movement is on “a mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom [of God] as humanity barrels deeper into the End Times.” Anyone opposed to it is, by definition, opposed to God’s will, which makes them a heretic and invalidates their views (and perhaps their rights).

Its members see Donald Trump and MAGA as instruments for bringing about the kingdom. The feeling is mutual, according to the article. Trump (and Elon Musk) see them as instruments to attain their goal: acquiring political power to enrich themselves and avoid time in jail.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and I do not recall anyone saying that Jesus wanted to create the Kingdom of God as a literal government. I certainly never heard that coercing Christian beliefs and behaviors on other people was advisable. Freedom was a core value: people were free to believe or not, and only those who believed were obligated to follow God’s teachings.

However, the New Apostolic Reformation has other ideas and is intent on creating a theocracy: a government based on their particular version of Christianity. The article states the movement seeks “aggressive social and institutional transformation.”

This strikes me as inherently unAmerican. The article cites a study indicating up to 40 percent of American Christians are part of or approve of the New Apostolic Reformation’s goals. That means they have abandoned freedom.

If freedom is out, then so is democracy.

This situation reminds me of “What Is An American?” by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. This is the
title of a famous entry in his book Letters from an American Farmer, which was published in 1782. (I assume historian Heather Cox Richardson alludes to this book with the title of her newsletter, Letters from an American.)

Crevecoeur discussed religious fervor in “What is an American?” The American immigrant experience cooled it, and he found that to be a good thing.

One way America was better than Europe (a major topic for him) was “how the various Christian sects introduced wear out, and how religious indifference becomes prevalent.” He said intense religiosity was the source of conflict and division. See how many wars and oppression it had caused in Europe? He described how in a generation or two after immigrants arrived in the colonies, marriages between people of different denominations were common. What people believed was not the concern of others.

He wrote, “How does it concern the welfare of the country… what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all? He is a good farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good citizen…. This is the visible character, the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody’s business.”

Crevecoeur would be sadly surprised to see religious zeal burning again and to see the return of persecution of those who deviate from the beliefs and behaviors of self-appointed divine rulers – health professionals receiving permission to withhold treatment from others because of religious differences, county clerks refusing to process marriage certificates for people to whose lifestyles they object, books being removed from libraries, etc.

Making another person’s beliefs and lifestyle your business leads to trouble, and Crevecoeur celebrated the tolerance he found in America: “Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here; zeal in Europe is confined; here it evaporates….”

I wish that were true again.

Using American Meritocracy to Criticize Donald Trump

2024-12-14T18:28:00.000-08:00

I am conflicted about a recent op-ed that I saw in the Tampa Bay Times: "Don't erode what makes America great" by James Unnever.

On the plus side, I think he is speaking the language of right wingers, so they might be inclined to hear his criticism of Donald Trump. He says the United States is a meritocracy (I know, right?) and Trump's choices for his cabinet have not demonstrated any merit that warrants their nominations.

On the other hand, his speaking the language of the right wingers makes my head spin.

It starts when he suggests that "anyone can go from rags to riches" is a fundamental, common value among Americans. He might even believe it is foundational, that it was something the framers of the Constitution had in mind.

I think more Americans are challenging the concept of a meritocracy, because they realize the game is slanted toward the already-wealthy. Most Americans, I think, want enough to be healthy and happy, and not magnificent wealth.

The American Dream I grew up with was being able to buy a house and raise a family with comfort and security - not owning multiple yachts. When did that change?

Then he says, "Indeed, the Republican party's successful dismantling of affirmative action and its 'war on woke' are meant to reaffirm the United States is a meritocracy."

Some people (such as myself) would counter that the attacks on social justice were waged to keep safe the Myth of American Meritocracy. Republicans have targeted social justice efforts in government and education because those things threatened to reveal how the playing field is not even, and so the rewards are not distributed fairly. Many people of merit have been denied rewards because of their gender, their sexual orientation, the color of their skin, etc. What he sees as meritocracy is white privilege, patriarchy, and colonization for other people.

I was even more upset when I finished reading his column and saw in his biographical blurb that he is a "former professor of criminology." If anyone -- anyone -- knows about systemic inequities it should be a professor of criminology. Tell me you did not learn anything about your academic discipline without telling me you did not learn anything about your academic discipline.

Attacks on "woke" frequently include attacks on Critical Race Theory (those attacks also include misleading definitions of it). One of the truths revealed by CRT is how systems that are not explicitly racist can be racist in their results -- such as the criminal justice system in the United States. For instance, criminal laws may not target ethnic minorities in their language, but they do in their enforcement. The professor should know this.

People on the right would likely tune me out as soon as they saw the words "white privilege, patriarchy, and colonization," so perhaps someone like this guy is needed to make the criticism of Trump. He can appeal to their American illusions while disillusioning them about Trump's ability to govern.

OK, Boomer: Peggy Noonan needs to hear the rest of the story

2024-07-26T19:23:00.000-07:00

I am 62 years old, but even I am tempted to tell Peggy Noonan, “OK, Boomer.”

That is because she recently published a column titled “Teach Children to Love America,” and although she did not use the word “woke” in her complaint about the current state of grade-school education, I suspect her words were shaped by the political sentiment that justice, fairness, and compassion are somehow bad.

Noonan believes that the nation is not teaching its children to love their country. She says they are “instructed in 100 different ways through 100 different portals that America is and always was a dark and scheming place.” She offers no details about these different ways or portals, she says, because “we all know it” to be true.

She did not win many debate team contests with that strategy: assuming that everyone agrees with you. If they did, there would be no reason to make your claims.

When Noonan and other people voice similar complaints about how and what young people are taught about U.S. history, I believe they are listening to only half of the lesson. When the state of Florida, for instance, makes books about Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson difficult for young people to access, it seems to be hearing only the parts about oppression or racial prejudice; but those stories are told because Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson prevailed. They encountered an unjust situation, they fought against it, and they won – and America is a better place because of them.

However, Noonan and others do not hear the whole story. She complains in her editorial that children are taught America’s story is “the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice.” The stories children learn do not end there; the stories end with American society being changed, moved, if only a little, toward a wider scope of justice. America’s story is a history people fighting against being pushed around, fighting against being economically exploited by others, and trying to change the behavior of mean or selfish people.

Not long after her column appeared, the iconic baseball player Reggie Jackson attended a game that recognized the Negro Leagues. Speaking on Fox, he remarked on the racism he faced as a Black player in a predominantly White sport in the late 1960s and 1970s. He said, "The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled — fortunately I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn't wish it on anybody.”

Someone like Noonan may only hear the negative, the description of the nation's recent history of racism. If she did, she is missing the inspiring part of the story: Jackson persevered, and he did so with the help of his manager (white) and fellow players (mostly white). Jackson’s story, like so many stories, is about the hard work of making a nation a better place.

She ends her brief review of the bad stuff by stating another supposed lesson for today’s young people: “And we never meant it about the Declaration.”

Noonan does not state what “we” never meant; she makes her reader assume this. I would venture the guess she is referring to the passage about “all men are created equal.” I assume this because so many people who complain about “wokeness” are really complaining about other Americans fighting for equal rights; those Americans are fighting to have their “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” recognized. The people doing the oppressing – or at least objecting to the extension of rights to others – treat this request as somehow a denial of their own liberties.

Her mention of the Declaration of Independence reminded me of its famous reference to American Indians; they are described as “merciless Indian savages.” Noonan’s column appeared around the same time as the anniversary of the American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. One hundred years ago, the United States finally recognized the citizenship of Native people born within its borders. Until then, being born within the U.S. borders to families that had lived here before those borders existed did not automatically bestow citizenship – despite that being the case for everyone else.

Again, a story of progress. Although some American Indians have differing opinions about the Citizenship Act, from the perspective of the expanding civil rights, this is a story of change that Noonan might overlook. The United States still makes life difficult for American Indian communities, but the transition from “merciless Indian savages” to U.S. citizenship illustrates positive change.

Noonan says her Memorial Day sermon was inspired by her recent reading of an old book: A Manual of Patriotism, for use in the public schools of New York, written by Charles Rufus Skinner and published in 1900.

More pressing than the lessons of social justice, according to Noonan, are anodyne lessons about patriotism, including the legends of Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. I write “legends,” because the stories she wants students to learn are generally accepted as fabrications or embellishments. Regardless of whether Betsy Ross sewed the flag used in the American Revolution or whether Paul Revere’s ride happened as described in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, I doubt anyone will be offended by their stories. Also, I would not be surprised to learn these stories are repeated in today’s classrooms, or at least these stories are available to students in their school libraries. That is, the stories favored by Noonan are not being censored.

I looked at the book Noonan likes. It includes some aspirational words from George Washington (surely Noonan would approve!). In describing elements that are required for the success of the new country he led, he wrote the nation needed:

“The prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the people of the United States which will induce them to forget their local prejudices and politics; to make those mutual concessions which are requisite to the general prosperity; and, in some instances, to sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the community” (359).

Those opposed to “wokeness” seem to believe recognizing civil rights of people different from themselves somehow diminishes their own rights. Many of them resent being told they enjoy “white privilege” (a phrase the Heritage Foundation wants banished from all school texts), despite its obvious existence and influence – like Noonan says, “We all know it is true.” Washington’s words, if applied today, would be asking some people to “sacrifice their individual advantages,” such as white privilege, to benefit other people.

Washington has another interesting statement in Skinner’s book, another aspect he believed was essential to the nation’s existence and prosperity:

“A sacred regard to public justice” (359).

A scholar of Washington’s writings can correct me if I am wrong, but I interpret “public justice” to be something like “civil rights.” I assume a public justice is a right available to all members of the nation. That is definitely a worthy cause and something that young students should be taught to honor.

If it is sacred, we should treat it that way. Many sacred lessons, including those in the Bible, the importance of which Noonan professes early in her column, tell stories about an important value being violated and the consequences of that transgression; those lessons often are paired with examples of the value being honored and the benefits that follow. If we tell only the feel-good version of the story, we do not get the full lesson.

For instance, we should not ignore the fact that Washington wrote these compelling words while at the same time owning slaves. In his mind, some people did not deserve the public justice he claimed was sacred.

That does not mean we “cancel” Washington, but it gives us the opportunity to recognize our nation’s growth. We can separate the man from his words; we can see that the ideals he espoused were bigger than his own understanding of them.

A deep irony may be lost on those who oppose “wokeness” in the way Noonan and others do while espousing Christian values and traditions. Many times, they do not want any negative stories about American history to be taught, especially stories about injustices or suffering caused by white people. What would happen if they treated their sacred text in the same way? What if we eliminated from the Bible those stories that made humans look bad? What if we eliminated stories of misbehavior and transgression? What if people in church said those stories about human sinfulness made them feel bad about being human? There might not be much left of the Bible.

I grew up attending a Southern Baptist church, and we understood the Old Testament as being the story of God’s chosen people moving in and out of His favor, based on their behavior. I see this as analogous to the United States. Its history is one of forward and backward movement in the nation’s understanding of freedom and responsibility, of extending rights and recognition to an ever-widening circle of humanity. This expansion has been achieved with great difficulty and often with violent backlash. Yet we keep trying.

The Vanishing Indian in "True Detective: Night Country"

2024-02-20T19:59:00.000-08:00

The conclusion of the fourth season of True Detective on HBO was a mixed bag, at least from the perspective of whether it enacts decolonial or settler colonial agendas.

Indigenous Justice is Decolonial

On the one hand, the show depicts an Inupiaq population solving its problems rather than relying upon the colonial authorities. It also depicts representatives of that colonial authority (however rogue they may be) acquiescing to those Indigenous solutions.

In this sense, the resolution of True Detective: Night Country can be understood as decolonial, in as much as it deviates from the typical structure of narratives about Indian Country when they are created by the dominant culture in the United States. Despite the disapproval the show has received from some TV viewers and critics, we can at least say it depicts Indigenous Sovereignty in a way that is rarely seen in mainstream productions. In this way, we can think of the series as being decolonial.

A colonial narrative would have suggested Indigenous people are incapable of solving their own problems and they need the colonial (white) authorities for that. This suggests the Indigenous characters are inferior to the colonizers, and it suggests that colonization is good, since the colonizers can solve problems that plague the Indigenous community (even when those problems are created by colonization). A decolonial narrative breaks those rules.

The murder that sets everything in motion -- that of an Inupiaq woman who threatened to reveal the secrets of the mining company that is polluting the local water supply -- is solved by women who knew her. The same women are involved in the deaths of the men who killed her, and their deaths are the inciting event for the series. The Inupiaq community solves its own problems in its way.

The women let the land decide the fate of the guilty men. They do not kill the men; they send the men naked into the night to see if "she" will take them. No one explains who "she" is. Is it the spirit of the woman they killed? Is the spirit something in the ice that the scientists have uncovered? Is the woman they killed an embodiment of that spirit, a continuation of it? Whoever "she" is, she killed the men. They did not freeze to death, we are told; they died of fear or panic, which explains the "corpsicle" they form -- their bodies frozen in mid-scream, knotted together. Freezing to death, we are told, is like going to sleep, not like being tortured.

When Evangeline Navarro (Kail Reis), an Inupiaq state trooper, and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), the white police chief, accept this explanation and help cover it up, they are accepting Inupiaq justice for a crime against an Inupiaq woman and against the land. That is decolonial.

The Vanishing Indian is Settler Colonialism

On the other hand, the show's finale enacted a trope that is popular in settler colonial narratives: the Vanishing Indian. Despite finding answers to her motivating questions and conflicts, and despite offering some emotional solace to her fellow detective, Navarro walks toward the white horizon in what I assume is a suicidal death similar to her sister's earlier in the season, a surrender to the freezing environment of the Alaskan landscape. A common trope of settler colonial narratives is the Native character who dies or leaves at the end, some times after bestowing their blessing upon the white protagonist.

For my university classes, I provide a brief description of settler colonialism, which is foundational to much U.S. economic, political, and cultural practice: "Settler colonialism is the figurative and literal erasure of Native people and the erasure of the guilt for having done this."

The Vanishing Indian trope serves the purposes of settler colonialism: the Native person is removed from the land, leaving it available for the colonizer to possess. When the Vanishing Indian leaves voluntarily and, even better, gives their blessing to the white colonizers, settler guilt is alleviated. These stories mythologize and romanticize what were actually violent and contested removals.

Imagining actual co-existence between Indian and white communities, imagining settler society truly acknowledging Native rights to the land, requires upsetting the colonial world too much. Even when the stories were written by white authors sympathetic to American Indians, even in stories intended to persuade white Americans to stop abusing Native people, the authors could not imagine a true co-existence between the two groups. Their narrative logic required the departure of the Indian character. (For example, check out Catherine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, published in 1827. No, really. Check it out. Despite its Vanishing Indian trope, it is a fun novel.)

Navarro vanishes. The final scenes of the episode depict investigators questioning Danvers about the case we have watched unfold, in much the same way as the first season of True Detective involved the investigation of an investigation. They also are asking her about Navarro -- where did she go?

Navarro's death does not clear the land for possession by the colonizers -- in fact, she helps close the polluting mine before she leaves town by recording the confession of a scientist involved with manipulating pollution evidence. This is decolonial in that it imagines frustrating a primary goal of settler colonialism: extraction of resources from Native land.

However, her disappearance at the end left me unsettled. Among the three police officers we have followed throughout -- Navarro, Danvers, and Danvers's protege, Peter Prior (Finn Bennett)-- two have happy endings; only the Native protagonist is not given that.

The story ends happily for Danvers. In the final episode, she is told by Navarro that her dead stepson is watching over her, which gives her some closure. (The "Night Country" of the series title describes the ice caves where the mine's secrets are found and, the story suggests, the land of the dead. This is a land that Navarro has access to, because, you know, Indians are, like, spiritual.) The concluding montage includes Danvers happily sharing a sandwich with her young adult stepdaughter (also Inupiaq), with whom she has been at war for five episodes. The racial/cultural tensions between them seem to have disappeared. This is suggested by the presence of the stepdaughter’s chin tattoo (a “111”); earlier, Danvers had forced Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) to wash off the temporary tattoo she had applied.

We have watched Prior's marriage fall apart for five episodes because of his devotion to the case and his obedience to Danvers's requests. He even kills his own father, whom he learns is a bad cop working for the mining company and who is threatening to shoot Danvers. Despite all of this, in the final episode, his Inupiaq wife takes him back and he is last seen with his toddler son in bed.

Navarro, however, says goodbye to her close relationships and walks away. In her vacated home, she leaves a toy that had belonged to Danvers's stepson; she apparently had retrieved it after Danvers threw it away. At the home of her Inupiaq boyfriend, Navarro returns his SpongeBob toothbrush, a symbol of their connection and domestic possibilities. The potential for an Indigenous family -- Navarro and Qaavik and perhaps their children -- is not imagined. Why not?

One answer may be Issa Perez, the show’s creator, is operating with some settler colonial logic despite trying to imagine stories outside of that. Indian characters can be doomed to vanish because they bear the burden of symbolizing tragedy or spirituality. Perhaps as Perez gestured toward some grander significance in her story, a transcendence of some sort, she chose Navarro to signify that. Even writers attempting to critique settler colonialism (such as Sedgwick, whom I mentioned earlier) use their Native characters to signify that tragedy. Rarely do white characters sacrifice themselves; the Noble Savage does that. Rarely do the white characters depart the scene, vacating the land so its original occupants can continue their lives.

Some people suggest Navarro is not dead, that she did not kill herself in much the same way her younger sister did. However, if she leaves Ennis to be free of the bad memories there, she would probably do that in a car, not in a light jacket and walking across the snow toward the horizon.

The last image of Navarro is of her standing on the porch of what seems to be a vacation home Danvers is visiting in the spring. However, I think the arrangement of the shot suggests she is present but not actually there. Danvers and Navarro are divided in the shot: we see Danvers through the window and Navarro through the doorway. They do not interact significantly. This is consistent with other scenes wherein characters see the ghost or memory of people. Navarro is in the frame with another person, but she is still isolated, alone.

I don’t know.

I am still trying to understand the conclusion of Navarro’s story. That is why this blog entry is called a “hot take”: I might change my mind.

And my speculation here is not about whether I liked the series. I felt it was unsatisfying but for other reasons – not for the story it told but for the way it told the story. It was six episodes long, whereas the otherTrue Detective seasons had eight. Perhaps it needed two more; I think the characters could have been imagined more richly. The interiority and conflicted motivations of characters could have been made more visible. But those thoughts could be saved for a different post.

(This entry was originally published with the title "A Hot Take on True Detective: Night Country.")

Gangsters, Poems, and Reservation Dogs

2023-03-27T20:06:00.011-07:00

Recently, I saw a tweet from the author of a book about the history of residential schools for American Indian children. She said she had been contacted by the producers of Reservation Dogs, and they wanted to use some information from her book to inform an episode they were working on.

This tweet reminded me of when I first saw the pilot for Reservation Dogs and I wondered if they had consulted a different book, Sy Hoahwah's Velroy and the Madischie Mafia. In fact, I wondered if the writer of that book was involved with the show.

Superficially, figures from the book's cover and promotional pictures of the show's protagonists resemble characters from Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs poster.

This is the original 2009 cover of Hoahwah's book of interconnected poems. When I reviewed the book for Studies in American Indian Literatures, I called attention to the similarity between the images that echoed Tarantino's film poster, but depicted in the colors of the Comanche flag. The juxtaposition of the modern outlaws with the black-and-white photograph of aging Comanche men (perhaps warriors) suggested "themes of violence, resistance, and cultural synthesis." I noted that "Four of the five figures have what appear to be bullet holes where their heads should be." The bottom image "problematizes the effectiveness of this warrior mentality—the image suggests death as much as resistance."

Less gruesomely, the pilot of Reservation Dogs suggested similar themes, and both are set in Oklahoma. Velroy and the Madischie Mafia takes place in a Comanche community of Southwestern Oklahoma, and Reservation Dogs is set in a Muskogee Creek community of Southeastern Oklahoma.

I thought of Hoahwah's book while watching the pilot episode, "F*ckin' Rez Dogs." In it, the character Bear has a conversation with the spirit of William Knifeman, a warrior who died at the Battle of Little Bighorn. The spirit says his task is to find "lost souls" like Bear. He tells the young man, "Being a warrior is not always easy. You and your thuggy-ass friends -- what are you doing for your people? It's easy to be bad, but it is hard to be a warrior with dignity."

The first poem of Velroy introduces us to the members of the gang as they party in a dance club. It describes their bodies "as sunrise songs in reverse."

In a coming-of-age ceremony for young women in some Native communities in the Southweast, "sunrise songs" help a young woman transition from her childhood to adulthood. She is transformed, with the help of friends and family, from a child without responsibilities to an adult member of the community.

Hoahwah's first poem sets the tone for those that follow. A sunrise song in reverse would be an abdication of responsibility. Although the poems tell stories of lost innocence, they also tell stories of a refusal to grow up in a way that William Knifeman is encouraging Bear to do.

As the spirit warrior suggests to Bear, his friends are not real gang members. He dismisses them as "thuggy-ass" rather than actual thugs. The violence in the pilot is limited to a paint-ball drive-by from a rival gang, and in the second episode Bear get pummeled in an alley by the same enemies, but he survives with no lasting injuries.

Meanwhile, Hoahwah's characters live with and enact real violence. The narrator ends the first poem this way:

I killed a Lakota man,

he was a Rollin' 20.

It was with a shotgun.

It was powwow season.

I fancy danced.

Later poems describe other battles, including a shootout at Walmart and the narrator's eventual confession that he killed Velroy, the gang's leader.

Reservation Dogs also resonated with Velroy and the Madischie Mafia for me when the teenagers ask a "tradish" uncle to put a curse on the leader of their rival gang (in the wonderful "Uncle Brownie" episode). Velroy's gang also uses (or misuses) traditional medicine powers to harm their enemies or protect themselves.

For example, in the poem "White Clay," gang member Stoney is awarded bullet-dodging power after an encounter with a skeleton/ghost at a "haunted spot" in the woods. With that power, he is able to win a battle with a Mexican gang.

Eventually, Velroy's gang falls apart, and the narrator ends the book alone, waiting for the return of Comanche power on the Southern Plains. In an essay for the journal of the Western Literature Association, I suggest that Hoahwah's message is this Comanche resurgence will not come from the gangster-as-warrior mentality the narrator and his colleagues enact. The bullet-holes-for-heads on the cover suggest that route is a dead-end.

I think Reservation Dogs agrees with that perspective. The show's gang initially plans to use the proceeds of their various crimes to finance a move to Los Angeles, escaping their community, for which they blame the suicide of their friend. However, the narrative arc for the characters traces their personal and emotional growth away from that desire for escape, answering a question William Knifeman asks of Bear in the first episode: "What are you fighting for?"

Bear gets a job and helps his single mother with the bills. Cheese rescues an older woman from Indian
Health Services, and she becomes his adopted grandmother. Willie Jack decides her proper place is with her family (and her ancestors). Elora Danan holds on to the dream of escape the longest, but she begins to change after she assumes responsibilities, such as hosting the gathering of family and friends for her grandmother's final moments and inheriting the house. The gang travels to California at the end of the second season, but they do so to honor the memory of their dead friend, to fulfill the promise they had made to him to go there.

These arcs were represented by memes that I have seen on the show's Facebook page, such as this one for Willie Jack.

Velroy's gang members dance to sunrise songs in reverse, but the Rez Dogs dance to them in the right direction.

Although I do not believe Hoahwah was consulted in the creation of the TV series, I think inviting him to help write a Halloween episode would be nice. (They did have a spooky episode about Deer Woman in the first season.) In Velroy and his most recent collection, Ancestral Demon of Grieving Bride (2021), Hoahwah demonstrates an affection for the gruesome and the supernatural, which I have described elsewhere as "Comanche Gothic."

An example: owls.

In the "Uncle Brownie" episode, the kids go to Brownie's house and he has a plastic owl standing guard on his front porch. Elora Danan, Bear, Willie Jack, and Cheese all see it and immediately cover their eyes, knowing they should not look an owl (even a fake one) in the eyes. Bad medicine. The producers save the viewing audience from tempting fate by pixelating the owl's eyes. This move was much-remarked on by Native Twitter and perhaps puzzled non-Native viewers.

Meanwhile, in Velroy, the poems do not look away. "Spotted Owl" describes using owls "to converse with the dead," who then come visit. "Relatives and friends arrived,/ oozed their way up the driveway, and into the homes/ leaving a trail of rot and bile." The risen-dead crowd into the bathroom, where they look at their ruined selves in the mirror, "sobbing, giggling." In "Battle of Dirty Shame, OK," Velroy raises the dead himself by combining traditional and contemporary cultures: "With owl feathers, black handkerchief, and some Velvet/ Underground he summoned the Bradshaw kid/ who died six months before."

Whereas Reservation Dogs does a good job of depicting the everyday world of rural Oklahoma (a neighbor has a horse grazing in the front yard, fried catfish is popular, many residential streets do not have curbs), Velroy's regional color is a landscape filled with ghost stories, such as the headless farmer who haunts a county road, running alongside cars and tapping on their windows or jumping into the beds of pickup trucks.

If you have not seen Reservation Dogs, I encourage you to check it out.

If you have not read Hoahwah's poetry, I encourage you to check it out.

P.S. -- This is the new cover of Velroy and the Madischie Mafia:

You can order it from Bookshop.org here. You can order Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Widow from Bookshop.org as well (link).

Works Cited

Andrews, Scott. Review of Velroy and the Madischie Mafia by Sy Hoahwah in Studies in American Indian Literatures Vol. 24 No. 1 2012: pp 64-67.

---. "The Significance of the Frontier in Comanche Poetry." Western American Literature Vol 49 No. 1 (2014): pp. 9-28.

"F*ckin' Rez Dogs." Reservation Dogs, created by Sterling Harjo and Taika Waititi, season 1, episode 1, FX Productions, 2021.

Hoahwah, Sy. Ancestral Demon of a Grieving Bride. U of New Mexico P. 2021.

---. Velroy and the Medischie Mafia. U of New Mexico P. 2021. Originally published in 2009 by West End Press.

"Uncle Brownie." Reservation Dogs, created by Sterling Harjo and Taika Waititi, season 1, episode 3, FX Productions, 2021.

Bite the Power: The Gentle Satire of Rutherford Falls

2022-08-31T15:15:00.006-07:00

In an otherwise entertaining and insightful essay in The Atlantic about Sterlin Harjo and Reservation Dogs, David Treuer briefly compares the show with Rutherford Falls. He describes the latter as "toothless."

I think he is wrong.

Without getting into the topic of which show is better, I should acknowledge that the shows are very different -- despite sharing so many actors and writers. Reservation Dogs is more like an indie film, whereas Rutherford Falls is more like a mainstream comedy. (Treuer calls it a "feel-good sitcom," which is true.)

This makes sense when you consider the previous projects of their creators and the environments that produce them.

Harjo made several independent films (Barking Water, This May Be the Last Time), and he co-created the series with Taika Waititi, who has been launched from independent films (What We Do in the Shadows) to big studio movies (Thor: Ragnorak). Rutherford Falls was created by TV comedy veterans: Ed Helms (The Daily Show, The Office), Michael Shur (The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place), and Sierra Teller Ornelas (Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Happy Endings, Superstore).

Reservation Dogs emanates from FX Productions, which also produces It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Archer. Like those shows, it features irreverent topics and a great deal of cursing. The second season of Reservation Dogs seems to have the ambition of unseating The Sopranos for the most F-bombs per screen minute.

Rutherford Falls airs on Peacock (NBC's streaming service) alongside... surprise!... The Office, Parks and Recreation, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. And also Modern Family and Psych. Combined F-bomb score: 0.

I believe Treuer sees "teeth" in Reservation Dogs' realism. It focuses on tough issues, such as the grief the band of young protagonists feel about the suicide of their friend, which fuels their desire to escape their reservation community. The show takes place in a poor neighborhood in the Muskogee Creek Nation in Oklahoma. People hustle, whether selling their own CDs or meat pies outside the IHS clinic.The gang steals what they can to raise money for their escape. Etc. The show alternates between pathos and comedy.

Meanwhile, in Rutherford Falls, set on the land of the fictional Minishonka Nation, we see no poverty. I believe that is part of the show's message and one of its contributions to the popular awareness of Native people: Poverty does not define all of Indian Country. There is little pathos in the show. It concentrates on humor and satire.

Coincidentally, both shows are in their second season, and both shows this season feature episodes about the death a protagonist's female relative.

In Rutherford Falls, "Aunt Sue" is about the aftermath of the passing of a beloved family member. How to honor Aunt Sue in a memorial service at the tribal casino? (It will require "an insane amount of Buffalo Wild Wings" and "Bonny Rait at full volume.") Who inherits Aunt Sue's land -- the niece who works in the tribal cultural center or the nephew who is like a prodigal son? (The niece does not get the land, but she does get Aunt Sue's motorcycle.)

In Reservation Dogs, "Mabel" is about how the community comes together to help with the passing of a grandmother -- she is on her death bed, and her house is filled with friends, family, and food -- and how her granddaughter deals with the difficult emotion of saying goodbye to the woman who raised her after her mother's death. There is humor, but what I heard about most from the viewers I know were the tears. Good tears, but tears nonetheless. I do not think viewers were intended to cry about "Aunt Sue."

Reservation Dogs does not shy away from representing hardships in its Muskogee Creek community, but it does not devote much energy to the causes of those hardships. There are #LandBack signs and t-shirts sprinkled through episodes, but no one talks about how American Indian reservations are structured to keep Native populations in poverty. (You can read about some of those structures in "5 Ways the Government Keeps Native Americans in Poverty.")

Harjo's show has an indie film feel, whereas Rutherford Falls is more mainstream -- and, perhaps because of that or despite that, it engages with the dominant culture more explicitly, critiquing it (however gently).

Despite what Treuer writes, we could say Rutherford Falls shows some teeth when it engages with how museums represent Native people, how Native communities can use some tools of capitalism to fight the system that makes their lives difficult, or how Hollywood misrepresents Native culture and ritual.

From the first season, one of the Rutherford Falls moments that circulated on social media was a speech from Terry Thomas (Michael Greyeyes), who is the CEO of the tribe's casino. He tells NPR reporter Josh Carter (Dustin Milligan) that the tribe has always adapted to survive the challenges it has faced, and corporate capitalism is just the latest challenge. He says corporate capitalism is just one model, and tribal capitalism can operate to benefit the whole community rather than just a few shareholders. He concludes the speech by saying, "I won't rest until my nation gets every single thing that was taken from them."

You can watch the scene here.

Debbie Reese studies Native representations in children's literature and other media; she advises librarians and educators on how to select appropriate and accurate representations, and she recently tweeted to recommend content creators pay attention to Rutherford Falls.

She is referring to an episode about Rutherford Falls characters who become cultural advisors to Adirondack, a fictional drama that seems to spoof Yellowstone and Hollywood representations in general. The episode, "Adirondack S3," opens with a scene from that show, which, ironically, is popular in the Minishonka community of Rutherford Falls. In it, the white protagonist is helping defend the Native community from losing its land to a greedy corporation. As he speaks the line -- "Can't you see, after all we have done to erase these people, they are noble keepers of the land?" -- he steps in front of Chief Night Pipe, making him disappear.

Even those who think they are helping can be part of the problem.

The cultural advisors to Adirondack discover that the show's creators want Native imagery, but not true representation. Behind the scenes of the show within the show, the advisors discover the producers are making up "Indian culture" as they wish. In this, they echo a concept from Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor. In his book Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, he writes that representations of Native people from the dominant culture (museums, popular fiction, movies, advertising) are a "cultural concoction of bourgeois nostalgia." For Vizenor, these representations may look like Natives, but, in an irony lost on their creators, they signal the absence of any real Native rather than their presence.

The cultural advisors from the Minishonka Nation learn that the show's producers do not want accurate Native representation in their show, so they give the producers every cliche, exaggeration, and invention they can. Their goal is to make fools of the producers, who do not realize they are being tricked.

Rutherford Falls may not bear fangs -- it is too gentle for that -- but it does have some bite.

Welcome Home, Irene: A Reservation Dogs Multiverse?

2022-08-22T16:25:00.008-07:00

DC and Marvel have their universes. Some characters have their own multiple timelines, as they live out different destinies simultaneously.

Perhaps Sterlin Harjo has one too.

He is the co-creator of Reservation Dogs, which tells the story of four young Muskogee Creek friends as they cope with the obstacles of growing up on a reservation in Oklahoma -- and as they overcome the grief of their friend's suicide.

I thought of how some of Harjo's works might fit together -- ala DC and Marvel -- when I saw the second episode of the first season, "NDN Clinic." For me, the episode connected to two earlier Harjo films, the short Goodnight, Irene (2005) and the indie feature Barking Water (2009).

The three involve Indian Health Services, and they either complete a narrative arc for Irene or perhaps suggest parallel lives for her.

Casey Camp-Horinek plays Irene in two films, and she is listed as "Grandma" in the Reservation Dogs episode, but I like to think she is Irene there too. In that episode, she calls from her hospital room to Cheese (Lane Factor) as he walks by her door. She calls him "Grandson" and convinces him to take her out of the hospital.

Goodnight, Irene suggests this is the hospital where she dies. The short film's final shot is of Irene walking alone down a long hallway.

Perhaps in one timeline she does die there. Perhaps in another timeline, she is rescued by Cheese.

In the short film, Camp-Horinek plays an older woman who has come to the clinic for her last visit. What she suffers from is not named, but the film suggests she will not be going home. She spends the day with two men in the waiting room. They are not named -- IMDB indicates them as "Young Man" (Robert A. Guthrie) and "Middle-age Man" (Jon Proudstar). She tells them she was married to Pete Harjo, who was apparently a popular barber before he passed away.

In Barking Water, the tables are turned, and she rescues Frankie (Richard Ray Whitman) so he will not die in the same clinic. They were a couple, and despite Frankie's bad behavior then, Irene helps him escape to say goodbye to his daughter and granddaughter.

(Whitman also appears in Reservation Dogs, playing Old Man Fixico. He is not seen with Grandma.)

Although Goodnight, Irene was released before Barking Water, in my reconstruction, its events take place before. Perhaps Irene had an unhappy relationship with Frankie after Pete Harjo died, and then she rescues him from the IHS clinic before going there herself. (Or perhaps this is an alternate timeline in which she never meets Pete.)

Then in "NDN Clinic" she receives the reward she earned by helping Frankie when Cheese rescues her (and becomes her adopted grandson). The episode ends with Cheese and Grandma sitting outside the clinic, enjoying the outdoors, so it does not explicitly depict an escape, but in the final episode of the first season, "Satvrday," he visits Grandma in her home -- she clearly made it out alive.

There are even some call backs or Easter Eggs in "NDN Clinic" that suggest a connection to Goodnight, Irene. (According to IMDB, that is Harjo's first credit as a film director and he also wrote the script.) You can watch it on YouTube here. For instance, when "Middle-Aged Man" checks in at the front desk, he bleeds on the admission form. (The actor also signs his real name, Jon Proudstar.)

When Bear (D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) checks in at possibly the same desk in "NDN Clinic," he also bleeds on the form.

Three drops each time. Coincidence? I will let you decide.

Perhaps the biggest Easter Egg is that Middle-age Man tells Irene he has a three-year-old daughter. The same actor plays Leon in Reservation Dogs. He is the father of Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis). Does the little girl mentioned in Goodnight Irene grow up to be the inimitable, laconic, big-hearted Willie Jack?

I think so. At least she does in my SHU.

Addendum (09/08/2022): Theory Confirmed. In the seventh episode of the second season, "Stay Gold, Cheesy Boy," Cheese is lying in a foster care bunk bed and looking at his notebook. For a brief moment, we see this page:

Translating Rutherford Falls

2022-08-17T20:35:00.009-07:00

Twitter can be a scary pool to dip your toes into.

If you comment about a popular topic, use a trending hashtag, or tag someone famous, your tweet can get attention you may not have wanted.

For instance, earlier this year I made a snarky comment about the array of bad haircuts Jon Bernthal has sported in his various film and TV roles. I did not tag him, but he saw and liked the tweet. Soon that tweet had more than 15,000 impressions. (I commented on the tweet to make it clear I thought he was a fine actor.)

No one attacked me (or my own haircuts), but the number of impressions made me nervous. I was uncomfortable getting that much attention, especially for a comment that might be considered mean.

Even when there is no risk of generating bad karma, a bunch of impressions can scare me. In August 2021, when The Chair was popular on Netflix, I tweeted a pitch for a show about adjunct faculty members. It received more than 46,000 impressions and more than 400 likes.

These thoughts came to mind recently after I saw an episode of Rutherford Falls from its second season on Peacock (NBC's streaming service). In the season's second episode, Feather Day (Kaniehtiio Horn) walks into the office of tribal casino executive Terry Thomas (Michael Greyeyes) and speaks in Mohawk. Her comment is not translated on the screen, and the closed captioning states "speaking Mohawk." She and Terry then have a discussion in English, and she exits the meeting with another untranslated Mohawk comment.

This prompted me to ask on Twitter about the lack of translation.

Not long after that, showrunner Sierra Teller Ornelas replied.

This is where the "fog of Twitter" comes in. Ornelas does not know me. We were not having a conversation about this episode. She had little context in which to "hear" my tweet. Was she hearing a complaint? Was she hearing snark? Her reply seemed a little defensive to me, calling back to a 50-year-old film to explain the lack of translation. Perhaps defensive is not the right word. Resentful? Irritated? I do not know her. This was not part of a conversation we were having. I had little context in which to "hear" her reply.

Perhaps she had second thoughts about her response, because a few moments later she added another reply:

As the "likes" for her response surpassed the "likes" on my original post, I wondered if I was getting dunked on. Did the people who liked her response think I was a dunderhead?

As I say, she does not know me. She does not know that I teach American Indian literature and American Indian Studies. She does not know that I talk about Rutherford Falls in class as an example of Native self-representation, as an example of visual sovereignty.

My Twitter profile mentions my teaching and my citizenship in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, so perhaps Ornelas checked that out and decided my question was legit.

I understand the impulse to not translate the Mohawk language. This decision might be related to a concept I discuss with my students: ethnographic refusal.

This describes the refusal of a Native person to explain their experiences, beliefs or cultural practice to an outsider, such as an anthropologist. This refusal makes sense in light of how knowledge of Native people has been misused and misinterpreted by the dominant cultures of the United States and Canada. Audra Simpson discusses this concept in her book titled Mohawk Interruptus.

I have heard the term also applied to creative decisions by writers, artists, and filmmakers. They have a story to tell, and they know non-Native people will be in their audience, but they refuse to have characters or narrators explain everything for them. Since so many members of nearly any audience are non-Native, great pressure can be applied to Native creators to explain everything. Native creators may resist that pressure because having a character explain the significance of a symbol, statement, ritual, or belief does not feel right aesthetically. They also might resist because explaining would reveal to outsiders some important cultural element that a Native community would prefer be concealed.

When discussing this element in my classes, I talk about the "anthropological curiosity" or "anthropological voyeurism" that some non-Native audience members bring to a book or movie. Some people in the audience are more invested in learning the cultural secrets of American Indian communities than how the central conflict is resolved or whether the characters are well drawn. This kind of curiosity can be tiresome for the Native creator who is most interested in telling a good story.

From what Feather and Terry say in English just after she enters, I assume her Mohawk statement was some kind of dig at his fancy office. That does not seem like sensitive cultural information or insider knowledge. Other things in the show are not explained, such as the inside joke of characters saying "Skoden" and "Stoodis." These words are rez-speak for "Let's go then" and "Let's do this" -- especially as challenges to a fight. These are titles for two episodes of the first season, and characters say these things to each other, but no one explains what the words mean. If you know, you know.

However, the decision to not translate Feather's Mohawk dialog because "It's not there to be explained" seems odd for a show like Rutherford Falls, because it spends a lot of time explaining things to its audience. In fact, I think one way the show is valuable to the general audience is how much it explains. One of its central characters, Nathan Rutherford (Ed Helms), seems to be a stand-in for the non-Native audience members. His function is to learn from his Native friends and alter his behavior and beliefs according to what he learns.

An example of the show explaining things for the benefit of its audience occurs in the second-season episode titled "Land Back," when Nelson (Dallas Goldtooth) tells Reagan Wells (Jana Schmeiding) that the artifacts in the tribe's museum collection want to be handled and visited with rather than be stored away or handled only with gloves. He tells her, "They've been kept away for far too long. Each of these items has an energy. They want to breathe. They want to be held. This doll wants us to visit with them." During his remarks, she looks at him skeptically, but this is a concept Reagan should be familiar with. She has a master's degree in Museum Studies, and she is dedicated to decolonizing the curation and presentation of her tribal heritage. She would know what he is doing when she sees him talking to the items in the collection. However, many people in the audience probably are not familiar with that idea. He explains it to her for their benefit.

Part of the cultural work performed by Rutherford Falls is explaining contemporary Native life to a non-Native audience. When I use the phrase "cultural work," I am thinking of Jane Tompkins' book Sensational Designs, in which she discusses the ways literature can "redefine the social order." Television shows can be very effective at doing this, changing the way audiences think about people different from themselves. In this case, redefining how non-Native people think of American Indians. Shows like Rutherford Falls and Reservation Dogs, by placing so much of their production in the hands of Native directors, producers, writers, and actors, can alter the stereotypical impressions so many Americans have of Native people.

Too many Americans think of Native people as living in the past. They identify American Indians with signs of the 18th century, with tipis and headdresses, etc. Even when they know that Native people live contemporary lives, the role they expect for Native people in popular culture is the Noble Warrior or the Bloodthirsty Savage, etc. These two shows do the important work of representing Native people living thoroughly contemporary lives.

I thought not translating Feather's Mohawk comments was interesting because Hollywood has often treated Native languages as interchangeable or, worse, not worth translating. A famous example is John Ford's The Searchers. The American Indian characters in that film are supposed to be Comanches, but many of the actors were Navajo. They spoke their language, but the film pretended it was Comanche they were speaking. The non-Native audience would not know the difference, and it did not matter what the actors actually said, since the captions would state whatever Ford wanted them to.

Such events are depicted in Reel Injun, a documentary about Hollywood's representations of Native people. That film presents a clip from a Hollywood Western, A Distant Trumpet (1964), with accurate captions instead of the originals. The Native actors are insulting the white characters, calling them snakes who crawl through their own shit, but this is not what the film's captions state. The film crew had no idea what the Native actors were saying. They probably did not care. You can watch the scene here.

The worst example is when a film states simply [speaking in foreign language]. Languages are not foreign to everyone. They are not foreign to their speakers. Refusing to translate the dialog seems dismissive. "What these characters are saying does not matter."

I think all languages should be translated and captioned for film and television. Characters make statements for reasons, and their dialog communicates motivations and intentions -- even if no other characters on the screen can understand what is said.

Hollywood has a history of dismissing Native languages, and so I like to see them translated on the screen. I think translating and captioning Native languages acknowledges them as carriers of meaning, treats them as equal to other languages. I know Rutherford Falls means no disrespect to the Mohawk language by not translating it; this is just my personal preference.

Finally, one contribution to the Twitter conversation made an excellent point about captioning and translating Native languages. If someone is a Mohawk language speaker but is also hearing impaired, they would appreciate the captioning service, even if the dialog is untranslated. Excellent point!

Big laughs in little towns

2022-06-13T15:41:00.001-07:00

In the course of writing about Diné experiences of time and relationships to place, poet Jake Skeets relates a joke his father told about a town in the Navajo Nation. When I saw the joke in "The Other House: Musings on the Diné Perspective of Time" in Emergence Magazine, I was reminded of a similar joke about a place in Texas which also has a name that can be challenging for out-of-towners.

First, Skeets's joke:

There is a joke my father told me as a child. Language and culture loss continue to worry many Diné elders on our reservation; there are several revitalization efforts ongoing to address these losses. As a result, high school students can take Navajo language classes to fulfill foreign language requirements, and most universities and colleges now recognize Navajo as a foreign language, despite its millennia-long existence in the Southwest and its Athabascan relatives to the north and south. The joke my father told captures the politics of language and culture loss and revitalization within a singular punch line. The joke takes place in Chinle, Arizona, a small town located near the heart of the Navajo Nation. Its place name in Diné is Chʼínílį́. The joke is as follows: Two men are arguing over a meal about the correct pronunciation of Chinle. One says they are in Chinle, using the English pronunciation. The other says they are in Chʼínílį́, using the Diné pronunciation. To settle the dispute, one stops a restaurant worker and asks her, “Are we in Chinle or Chʼínílį́?” The worker replies, “Sir, you are in Burger King.” The joke acknowledges the existence of a Burger King near the heart of the Navajo Nation.

This joke reminded me of one told by the late, great Larry Jones. I worked with him in the 1980s at the University of North Texas, where he was the art director of the publications office and I was a writer in the media relations office. He was one of the funniest people I have ever known. He was one of those people who were funny whether or not they intended to be. He grew up in the small Texas city of Mexia. Pronouncing the city's name can be challenging for some people. This was Larry's joke:

Two men are eating together in a small town, and they are arguing about how to pronounce its name. One insists it is "Muh-hay-yu." The other insists it is "Mex-ee-ya." Finally, they call over their waitress to settle the dispute. One of the men asks the waitress, "You're a local. How do YOU pronounce the name of this place?" She looks at them a moment, and then she says, slowly, "Day-ree Kween."

The jokes are similar enough to make me wonder if Skeets's joke is being misremembered. I think the Mexia version works better. The set-up is stronger if the disputed names of the town are not mentioned to the restaurant employee. If the waitress does not understand their argument, she thinks they do not know how to pronounce the name of an iconic small-town restaurant. The Mexia punchline depends upon the apparent misunderstanding between the waitress and the disputing friends -- and upon her possible impression that these two men are not very bright.

I also wonder if the punchline to Skeets's joke is being influenced by the popular "Sir, this is an Arby's" meme. You can find it discussed at the Know Your Meme website. In this meme category, someone delivers a monologue that is deeply personal or controversial, and that is followed by "Sir, this is an Arby's," which suggests the comments are inappropriate or, at best, no one asked and no one cares.

However, I am not going to tell someone they do not correctly recall their father's joke. Perhaps Skeets's version is appreciated because it suggests the Burger King staff member does not care about the correct pronunciation of the town's name. Or perhaps it suggests the Burger King staff member does not know the correct pronunciation and avoids the question.

Reading Skeet's joke and recalling my friend's Mexia joke made me wonder if there is a punchline version of "klang association." That is when we cannot recall the correct word for something and our brain grabs a word or phrase that sounds right. For example, referring to varicose veins as "very close veins." Varicose is an unusual word. Most people do not know what it means nor why certain types of veins are called that; so their brains grab a combination of familiar words that sound like it might make sense: perhaps having veins that are too close together would cause problems?

We have heard so many jokes and seen so many memes, how can our brains keep them all straight? There may be some mixing and matching going on in our mental inventory of punchlines.

Regardless, Chinle and Mexia are fine towns; you should visit them. Skeets is a talented writer and poet; you should look for his stuff. And Larry was a hoot; I wish you could have met him.

Skeets's prize-winning collection of poems, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, is available from Milkweed Editions. He has another essay about Diné memory in Emergence Magazine, "The Memory Field: Musings on the Diné Perspective on Time, Memory, and Land."

Jouissance, Survivance, and Native Eroticism

2022-02-07T19:20:00.006-08:00

The following is essentially the script for my presentation at the American Indian Workshop conference in July 2021. The conference was titled "The Sovereign Erotic." The presentation repeats much of my previous post on Billy-Ray Belcourt's book A History of My Brief Body, but it continues playing with the combination of the terms "survivance." "resistance," and "jouissance" into a new word: jouissistance. I use Joshua Whitehead's novel Jonny Appleseed and Tenille Campbell's poetry collection #IndianLovePoems as examples for exploring the term's possibilities.

I wish to thank the AIW organizers, especially James Mackay, for their hard work, and I want to thank those who attended the panel on "Theorizing the Erotic" for their attendance, patience, and insightful comments. You can view the full program here.

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The word “Joy” appears in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body at least 19 times.

This is a word not commonly associated with First Nations/American Indian literature, but I wish it were. Belcourt insists it is part of the Native experience, that it must be.

Belcourt is a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation, and he does not deny the pain and grief that comes with living as a queer Indigenous person in a settler colonial state. Nor does he deny the anger and resentment. He discusses these topics in his collection of essays.

Joy is key to overcoming those things, and pleasure in its various expressions (physical, emotional, intellectual) is an important element of Native life. It always has been. It is part of a Native person’s inheritance from their ancestors, and it must continue to guarantee a Native future.

I did not count them, but the words “future,” “futurity,” and “utopia” also appear frequently in the book. They are made possible (or at least desirable) by joy.

I encountered the word so often as I read his book that I wanted a new word: jouissistance.

This would be a combination of the jouissance and resistance.

Why combine those words? Because the new word echoes “survivance,” which is a very popular word in American Indian Literary Studies. That word was introduced into our field by Anishinaabe theorist and writer Gerald Vizenor, and now it is ubiquitous.

Frequently, it is understood (perhaps misunderstood) as a combination of the words “survival” and “resistance.” The settler colonial cultures of the United States and Canada want Native people to disappear, and they expend great efforts to make that happen. Therefore, any act of survival is an act of resistance for Native people.

However, Vizenor means more than “survival + resistance” with the word. Survivance is originally a French word that is similar to the concept of inheritance, “the right of such succession in case of survival” (19). In a chapter titled “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice,” Vizenor describes examples of Native people claiming their cultural inheritances, evoking the presence of ancestors through their actions (telling old stories, speaking their language, etc.) and claiming their personal and Native sovereignty from colonizers.

A Native person’s act of survivance is not merely personal; by surviving they keep more than themselves alive; their survival is a continuance of their ancestors and their community.

For Billy-Ray Belcourt, feeling joy can be an act of survivance. Joy – and with it love, hope, and optimism -- is an inheritance, a birthright. He states this clearly in his preface, when he thanks his grandmother, his nôhkom, who taught him to be “a practitioner of the utopian.” He writes, “This book, then, is as much an ode to you as it is to the world-to-come” (3).

Thanks to her gifts he can write himself “into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race,” which he says stalks her and her family. He hopes she can see in his book his affection for her: “That affection is joy, and it started with you. Now, I see it everywhere” (6).

As for jouissance, this is a word used by theorists in several fields, but I am borrowing it from French feminist writer Hélène Cixous. She used the word to describe, among other things, female sexual and emotional pleasure, and it can be understood as pleasure that is excessive and ungovernable – and therefore transgressive in a male-dominated society that seeks to confine and control women and their sexuality.

Cixous writes about this in “Sorties,” which originally appeared in 1975 in French. Its English translation can be found in The Newly Born Woman (1986), and the glossary of that book defines jouissance as “sexual ecstasy.”

The glossary states, “At the simplest level of meaning – metaphorical – woman’s capacity for multiple orgasm indicates that she has the potential to attain something more than Total, something extra… Real and unrepresentable.” The glossary also states that the word can have “sexual, political, and economic overtones. Total access, total participation, as well as total ecstasy are implied” (165).

I find this concept of pleasure useful for discussing Belcourt’s book. Native pleasure subverts the settler colonial state that tries to make Native existence miserable and therefore untenable.

The settler states of Canada and the United States attack Native bodies quickly with violence and slowly with degraded living conditions. Celebrating and enlivening Native bodies with sexual pleasure resists that erasure.

Native jouissance resists the power of the state to observe and control Native bodies. Quite literally, some Native orgasms resist that erasure by producing more Native bodies.

At about the time I was preparing this presentation, this tweet appeared to make my point:

The queer Native body is targeted for erasure in multiple ways. The dominant culture targets the queer Native body for being brown and for being queer; so the pleasure of the queer Native body is overcoming a double-negation.

This negation can also come from within a Native community that has adopted the dominant culture’s prejudices against queerness (and other expressions of sexuality).

We could say some queer Native people must overcome yet another negation, a self-negation, since, as a result of society's disapproval, they may resent their body for its queerness.

Therefore, queer Native jouissance can be easily understood as subversive or transgressive, as it resists negation from without. It is sustaining because it resists negation from within.

This joy makes life more desirable, makes imagining a bright future more possible.

Jouissistance is useful for the futurity that Belcourt writes to create.

With A History of My Brief Body (2020), Belcourt seeks to “keep brown queer joy in the world… a world-to-come imbued with brown queer possibility” (126-127).

Understanding Native sexuality as resistance is not new. Back in 2000, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm wrote, “Indigenous erotica is political” (98). Writing for an issue of The Journal of Canadian Studies (35.3), she was describing the anthology project she would eventually publish as Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica (2003). She wrote about the repression of Native sexuality: “We were supposed to vanish, to die, not procreate, for God's sake!” (99). Although I may be coining a new word, jouissistance, I am not claiming to have a new idea. I simply find it particularly useful for thinking about a book I recently read and enjoyed.

My presentation thus far has been drawn from a blog entry written about my reaction to Belcourt’s book. What I would like to do with my remaining time is explore this concept of jouissistance further. I would like to try sharpening its definition, and I would like to see how it might help appreciate other texts.

What seems to be the fundamental elements of jouissistance?

Its appearance suggests the concept combines jouissance (joy) and resistance. I think that basic combination is useful both practically and aesthetically or critically.

Jouissance + Resistance = Jouissistance?

However, the definition of jouissance from Cixous’s book provides sexual associations for jouissance. Therefore, the concept of jouissistance might be most useful for referring to sexual pleasure as an act of resistance.

To better refine the concept I am test-driving here, I could ask: Is all consensual Native sex an act of resistance?

Can consensual sex with a non-Native partner be an act of resistance?

Is sexual sovereignty the same thing as jouissistance?

Finally, as I suggested above: does this concept of jouissistance include elements of survivance? Is survivance embedded in the neologism although it is not visible? Should the word be jouissivance?

To test-drive this concept, I looked at a couple of recent works by Native authors.

I looked at Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed (2018) and Tenille K. Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems (2017).

As I considered these texts, I noticed three distinctions among the sexual encounters narrated by Whitehead and Campbell.

1. Subversive sexual activity
2. Sexual sovereignty
3. Sexual survivance

These categories are inter-related. You can exercise your sexual sovereignty in order to subvert colonialism. You can be sexually subversive and yet not be fully sovereign in that action. Also, some acts could be perceived as sexually subversive, but in actuality they could be examples of false consciousness.

However, the fullest expression of the concept I am playing with – jouissistance – is the third: sexual joy that enacts continuity with one’s ancestors, one’s descendants, and, many times, the land.

The narrator of Whitehead’s novel enacts resistance through his sexuality by performing sex acts over the phone for money, and he occasionally meets his clients for in-person sex.

What makes these sexual encounters acts subversive rather than merely commodifications? This is an important question, since, during the brief time period of the novel’s events, all of his customers are non-Native.

The narrator views his sexual encounters as reversals of typical power dynamics. Much like those imagined in Kent Monkman’s parodic North American landscape paintings.

Daniel Boone's First View of Kentucky

Additionally, the money he is raising from these customers will be used to travel home to his reserve for his stepfather’s funeral. He does not care much about his stepfather, but he is eager to reconnect with his mother and grandmother.

In this sense, his sexual encounters help maintain his connections to home, family, and community. The dominant culture that fetishizes his Native body also seeks to destroy it, but he is exploiting that contradictory desire to maintain his Native self.

His narrator states: “I may be the sexual fantasy, but I’m also the one in the driver’s seat” (8).

But do these monetized sexual encounters count as “pleasure” in the way Belcourt discusses in A History of My Brief Body or as I suggest by discussing Cixous’s meaning of jouissance?

He enjoys having this sense of power over his customers, but I wonder if this counts as joy. Should all pleasure count as joy? I do not know.

An interesting aspect of sexual sovereignty, of sexual self-determination, is that it can be asserted within the Native community and not only against settler community.

Jonny describes sexual encounters with straight Native young men when he was in high school. Despite the public homophobia of his Native community, he enjoys the private gay encounters with the young men. He states, "… I found my own sustenance from making straight NDN boys love me like their pow wow trail hook ups” (81).

When I wrote about A History of My Brief Body, I described the negation of gay Native bodies by settler society and by Native communities that have assumed many settler values. That attempted negation of his queer Native self is countered several times in Jonny Appleseed. For instance, when describing those high school seductions, Jonny writes, “And I always left a red mark on their bodies somewhere, as if to say: I was here” (187).

His transactional encounters with non-Native clients are understood as acts of revenge, as a temporary reversal of conquest. However, his encounters with the straight Native men in high school are described as mutually beneficial, as healing for both parties.

He writes, “I loved seeing the blood throb in their veins, popping like earthworms on their forearms and wrists – blood that said I’m surviving and you can too” (81).

Their sexual pleasure were manifestations of Native survival and continuity.

For Jonny these are acts of sexual sovereignty within his Native community. For both parties they were acts of sexual subversion, as they resisted settler attempts to negate all Native bodies, queer and otherwise.

This dynamic of public heterosexuality and private homosexuality is manifested most clearly in Jonny’s relationship to Tias, a young man from his community.

With Tias he has an emotional rather than transactional relationship. Their bond is based on sexual attraction and shared experiences.

The narrator recalls their first physical encounter, when they surveyed each other’s naked bodies, observing wounds from their childhood on the Reserve. Jonny states, “I knew then that I loved him. Funny how an NDN 'love you' sounds more like, 'I’m in pain with you' " (88).

While Jonny’s clients provide income to sustain him, his relationship with Tias sustains him emotionally. Rather than fetishize Jonny’s body, Tias loves it; therefore, I think, their sexual relationship can more readily fit the notion of “joy” that my little neologism suggests.

However, Tias’ attraction to Jonny is conflicted because Tias is bisexual. When he gets his girlfriend pregnant, he feels he must choose her and his child over Jonny.

Vizenor describes survivance as “an active resistance and repudiation of dominance, obtrusive themes of tragedy, nihilism, and victimry.” I think it is easy to see how joy is a powerful counter to these things.

To illustrate this concept, Vizenor tells three stories of Native people telling stories that evoke the presence of ancestors, of relatives, or a community and its vitality. For me, this is a key concept to survivance. It is about not merely the presence or survival of a Native person but the active presence of ancestors with and through that Native person.

Therefore, my understanding of survivance involves an element of transcendence. That is, it involves something greater than an individual subjectivity. And it involves a kind of temporal transcendence: something considered to be “past” is demonstrated as “present.”

If we can think of survivance as a kind of transcendence, we can perhaps consider it an example of excess, of something that exceeds the limits of one person. As an act of resistance, we could think of it as exceeding settler control.

This notion of transcendence brings me to jouissance in the way I described it earlier from the glossary for Cixous’ book The Newly Born Woman. Recall that she associates jouissance with sexual ecstasy that is “more than Total, something extra.” Cixous is discussing female orgasms (in particular multiple orgasms) as exceeding patriarchal control and therefore threatening patriarchy.

I find it tempting to extend her notions of the transcendent, excessive, subversive qualities of female orgasms to Native orgasms, whether they are male, female, or otherwise. Straight, gay, or otherwise.

All of this is to say that jouissistance in its ultimate or maximum expression involves jouissance and survivance. This is illustrated in Whitehead’s novel in a dream sequence in which he is the bottom to a bear’s top.

While Jonny is ravished in the mud, he hears a round dance (a communal dance) and the presence of other non-human people, rabbit and beaver. His body and mind are penetrated in multiple ways. His body is penetrated in search for his “tapwewin,” which I believe means “truth” or “something that tells the truth” in Cree.

As the bear withdraws from Jonny’s body, the young man ejaculates into the mud. He writes, “… all this treaty land is filled with me” (71).

This scene illustrates a sexual ecstasy that exceeds Jonny’s body and mind. He surrenders to something stronger than himself, something older than himself. He becomes one with the land, which we can think of as the ultimate signifier of his Oji-Cree community, history, belief, life, etc. Jonny’s survival is more than his own presence; it is part of the presence of all those things.

To close, I will turn briefly to similar examples of jouissistance in Tenille Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems. In her short, sexy free verse poems, Campbell describes sexual pleasure as subversive sexual activity, sexual sovereignty, and sexual survivance.

Whitehead’s narrator describes sex with non-Natives as reversals of conquest. Campbell does the same. In #1608 the speaker describes her first intercourse with a white man, her “first john smith” who tries to claim “me and mine.” She ends the act on top of him, “gazing down at conquered goods” (46).

The speaker in #47 describes herself as Christopher Columbus claiming the body of a white man with “my lips and tongue and taste, claiming it as mine, mine, mine” (36). His skin is figured as a treaty signed with hickeys.

Like Jonny fulfilling the savage fantasies of settler customers, Campbell’s speaker plays to similar fantasies in order to gain temporary sexual pleasure, but without losing self-determination. In #782 the speaker tells of a white man’s desire to act upon his “white guilt and privilege” and encourage her to perform like an actress in a pornographic film. However, he never understands “that my power is beyond your control” (84).

Some of her poems also express acts of sexual sovereignty, sometimes as resistance against colonization and sometimes resisting definition or control by her Native community.

Poem #608 declares the speaker’s refusal to be defined by the desires or fantasies of her white lovers. She writes, “I define my sexuality/ I define my boundaries/ I decide/ who I take into my bed/ into my mouth/ into my body/ into my heart” (94).

Tribal traditions can be normative, and Native communities can be controlling. Campbell’s poems express a sexual sovereignty when the speaker refuses to be defined by “traditions,” even when those are described positively in other poems. Poem #96 acknowledges her Cree lover’s desire for her to believe in “his indigenizing dreams,” but “he’s the marrying kind… looking for forever kind of romance” and she’s “just looking for tonight’s feast” (53).

In several poems of the collection, we can find the third kind of sexual joy as resistance that I described above. We can find jouissance and survivance combined.

Finally, Campbell expresses the combination of jouissance and survivance in a few of the poems. In discussing survivance, Vizenor describes the evocation of ancestors through language, which Campbell does in #254. At the moment of climax, the speaker swallows the names of her ancestors “in the sweet rush of release” when she wants to “moan out loud/ my victory/ and his” (14).

Tanja Grubnic [who also presented at the conference] understood this swallowing the names of ancestors as an act of protection, keeping them from the male lover, whom Grubnic understood as white. One clue for the racial identity of the male lover for Grubnic was the poet saying that sometimes she forgets his name. This could be understood as an act of erasure (reversing the colonial power relationship that I have discussed earlier), and swallowing the names of her ancestors could be the speaker protecting them from the danger of erasure by the settlers.

That is an interesting reading, and I cannot say it is wrong. However, the poet also describes the desire to celebrate her “victory” – her orgasm – but his as well. The desire to celebrate the male lover’s victory could trouble the inference that he is a settler.

An imagistic or formal tension in the poem is the simultaneous swallowing and releasing. Regardless of one’s ultimate interpretation of the poem, we can acknowledge the presence of the speaker's ancestors in the moment of her sexual pleasure. In this moment of jouissance, the presence of ancestors and community is evoked.

In #2001, the speaker imagines her sexual pride and pleasure echoing experiences of her ancestors. The poem describes another kind of oral tradition, one that revives an indigenous language and instills indigenous joy: "broken Cree words/ whisper down my body/ between my legs/ into my universe/ where you tell me stories/ with tongue and lips/ and I take/ tradition into me/ until I burst." The speaker's pleasure helps her feel connected to previous generations: "this is what my ancestors/ must have felt like" (42).

In #903, while describing her lover “lapping up the sugar between my legs,” the speaker moans for “ancestral strength” as she “crested waves filled with visions/ of lust and love and/ pleasure” (98).

We could understand this call for ancestral strength to be satirical. Someone might make a similar call for strength to avoid the temptation of ordering dessert. It could be ironic humor.

But it is not necessarily that. Or necessarily only that. This moment fits a pattern in other poems of jouissance and survivance. For some, these moments may seem uncanny. It may seem like an odd juxtaposition: do many of us think of our grandparents while getting our groove on? For others, such as Belcourt, Whitehead, and Campbell, the connection is familiar.

In their work we can see the potential of sexuality to be a conduit of transcendent strength. Sexual pleasure can be understood as a method of evoking Native presence, of enabling resistance and continuity.

The Joy of Resistance

2020-11-16T15:16:00.006-08:00

“Joy” appears in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body at least 19 times.

This is a word not commonly associated with First Nations/American Indian literature, but I wish it were. Belcourt insists it is part of the Native experience, that it must be.

But joy is key to overcoming those things, and pleasure in its various expressions (physical, emotional, intellectual) is an important element of Native life. It always has been. It is part of a Native person’s inheritance from their ancestors, and it must continue to guarantee a Native future.

I did not count them, but the words “future,” “futurity,” and “utopia” also appear frequently in the book. They are made possible (or at least desirable) by joy.

Belcourt writes that with joy Native people can “breach the haze of suffering” inflicted on them by the Canadian government and the Canadian dominant culture. He states joy is an “ethics of resistance” (8).

I encountered the word so often as I read his new book that I wanted a new word: jouissistance.

This would be a combination of the jouissance and resistance.

Why combine those words? Because the new word echoes “survivance,” which is a very popular word in American Indian Literary Studies. That word was introduced into American Indian Studies by Anishinaabe theorist and writer Gerald Vizenor, and it commonly is understood as a combination of the words “survival” and “resistance.” The settler colonial cultures of the United States and Canada want Native people to disappear, and they expend great efforts to make that happen. So any act of survival is an act of resistance for Native people.

However, I believe Vizenor means more than that with the word. Survivance is originally a French word that is similar to the concept of inheritance, “the right of such succession in case of survival” (19). In a chapter titled “Aesthetics of Survivance,” Vizenor describes examples of Native people claiming their cultural inheritances, evoking the presence of ancestors through their actions (telling old stories, speaking their language, etc.) and claiming their personal and Native sovereignty from colonizers. A Native person’s act of survivance is not merely personal; by surviving they keep more than themselves alive; their survival is a continuance of their ancestors and their community.

For Belcourt, feeling joy can be, it seems, an act of survivance. Joy – and with it love, hope, and optimism -- is an inheritance, a birthright. He states this clearly in his preface, when he thanks his grandmother, his nôhkom, who taught him to be “a practitioner of the utopian.” He writes, “This book, then, is as much an ode to you as it is to the world-to-come” (3). Thanks to her gifts he can write himself “into a narrative of joy that troubles the horrid fiction of race,” which he says stalks her and her family. He hopes she can see in his book his affection for her: “That affection is joy, and it started with you. Now, I see it everywhere” (6).

As for jouissance – this is a word already in use by theorists in several fields, but I am borrowing it from French feminist writer Hélène Cixous. She used the word to describe, among other things, female sexual and emotional pleasure, and it can be understood as pleasure that is excessive and ungovernable – and therefore transgressive in a male-dominated society that seeks to confine and control women and their sexuality. Cixous writes about this in “Sorties,” which originally appeared in 1975 in French. Its English translation can be found in The Newly Born Woman (1986), and the glossary of that book defines jouissance as “sexual ecstasy.” The glossary states, “At the simplest level of meaning – metaphorical – woman’s capacity for multiple orgasm indicates that she has the potential to attain something more than Total, something extra… Real and unrepresentable.” The glossary also states that the word can have “sexual, political, and economic overtones. Total access, total participation, as well as total ecstasy are implied” (165).

I find this concept of pleasure useful for discussing Belcourt’s book. Native pleasure subverts the settler colonial state that tries to make Native existence miserable and therefore untenable. The settler states of Canada and the United States attack Native bodies (quickly with violence and slowly with degraded living conditions), so celebrating and enlivening Native bodies with sexual pleasure resists that erasure. Native jouissance resists the power of the state to observe and control Native bodies. Quite literally, some Native orgasms resist that erasure by producing more Native bodies.

The queer Native body is targeted for erasure in multiple ways. The dominant culture targets the queer Native body for being brown and for being queer; so the pleasure of the queer Native body is overcoming a double-negation. This negation can also come from within a Native community that has adopted the dominant culture’s prejudices against queerness (and other expressions of sexuality). We could say some queer Native people must overcome yet another negation, a self-negation, since they may resent their body for its queerness. Therefore, queer Native jouissance can be easily understood as subversive or transgressive. This joy makes life more desirable, makes imagining a bright future more possible. Jouissistance is necessary for the futurity that Belcourt writes to create.

With A History of My Brief Body, Belcourt seeks to “keep brown queer joy in the world… a world-to-come imbued with brown queer possibility” (126-127).

Yes.

+ + +

Understanding Native sexuality as resistance is not new. Back in 2000, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm wrote, “Indigenous erotica is political” (98). She was describing the anthology project she would eventually publish as Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica (2003). She wrote about the repression of Native sexuality: “We were supposed to vanish, to die, not procreate, for God's sake!” (99). Although I may be coining a new word, jouissistance, I am not claiming to have a new idea. I simply find it particularly useful for thinking about a book I recently read and enjoyed.

I imagine this response to A History of My Brief Body will continue to evolve, and I may develop it further and expand this short essay.

As for jouissistance, I can find just one reference to it online. It is used once in a French legal reference book from 1879.

Works Cited

Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri. “Without Reservation: Erotica, Indigenous Style.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 35, no. 3 (Fall 2000), pp. 97-104.

---. Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica. Kegedonce Press, 2003.

Belcourt, Billy-Ray. A History of My Brief Body. Two Dollar Radio, 2020.

Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Theory and History of Literature, Volume 24. University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Vizenor, Gerald. Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

America: Come for the Civil Disobedience, Stay for the Thunderdome

2020-07-09T23:12:00.037-07:00

During the early days of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, when police departments were freaking out and the White House was clearing a churchyard with smoke grenades and batons, I was reading a book about American Indian law, and I was struck by some unfortunate similarities between what I read on the page and what I saw on the screen.

On Twitter I shared this image with the caption, "America: Come for the Civil Disobedience, Stay for the Thunderdome." In retrospect, though, the image is perhaps more like a scene from the Roman Coliseum than a Mad Max movie. Demonstrators were more like Christians being thrown to the lions than they were like Mel Gibson fighting Tina Turner's goons.

Mad Max: Police Academy?

At the same time, I was reading about a Supreme Court case, United States v Sandoval (1913), in Walter Echo-Hawk's book titled In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided. With that case, and several that Echo-Hawk relates to it, the U.S. government claimed broad guardianship authority over American Indians, authority it did not claim over other Americans. He wrote:

Big Brother can and did "do things" to Indians as their "guardian" that it could never do to regular citizens (202).

That guardian authority included the imposition of some religious beliefs and the denial of others (Native religious practices were explicitly outlawed well into the 20th century); control of property and financial transactions; and unilateral law enforcement and judicial processes.

This guardianship was based on the false assumption that American Indians were inherently inferior to white Americans and needed their guidance, as if they were children. It was also based on the assumption that the guardians were free of any repercussions for harming their wards. (Echo-Hawk demonstrates how this guardianship authority was repeatedly used to abuse rather than protect American Indians.)

I thought of this as I saw police officers swinging batons like baseball bats against unarmed, non-violent demonstrators in downtown Los Angeles. And when I saw a police officer using his shield as if he were Captain America and a photojournalist were Thanos. I thought of it when I saw an armored personnel carrier rolling through a Philadelphia neighborhood.

@ryanvizzions

The militarized police response to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were very familiar to Indian

Country. In 2016, we all saw the response to water protectors trying to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on unceded land belonging to the Great Sioux Nation. South Dakota brought armored cavalry to confront unarmed civilians. The water protectors were attacked by dogs, doused with pepper spray, and blasted with a water cannon on a freezing night.

I do not know how much of the nation was outraged by the events at Standing Rock. President Obama delayed the construction of the pipeline, but he did not intervene in the violence, saying he would "let it play out for several more weeks," as if the opposing forces were equal in strength and legal justifications.

I think it was easy for many Americans to watch the events and remain unmoved. The events were happening on a fairly isolated reservation, so there were no traffic jams nor curfews to inconvenience people not directly involved. Many viewers may have been undisturbed also because this was a confrontation they were accustomed to: the Cavalry vs. the Indians. Even if their sympathies were with the Native people, they were accustomed, through national mythology, to understand Indians as potential enemies. That is the slippery slope in the guardian relationship between the federal government and Native communities: some times there was little difference between being a ward and being a prisoner of war.

But the violence at the Black Lives Matter demonstrations took place in the center of the nation's largest cities, not on the faraway Great Plains. I thought of this notion of abusive guardianship when I read about curfews that were declared 10 minutes before they were enforced, and when I read about groups of demonstrators who were not allowed to leave public spaces and who were then arrested for violating the curfew. Demonstrators were shot directly with rubber bullets (not how they were intended to be used) and hit with gas canisters. Limbs were broken. Eyes were damaged.

I asked at what point did the police gain such authority over U.S. citizens? When were they given the authority to injure people who were not violating a law and who were not threatening other people? Citizens are not given the authority to protect themselves against this violence. Would the police wield pepper spray with such nonchalance if they knew there was a good chance someone would spray them back? When were they given authority to swing their batons at people's legs simply for "crowd control"?

When did we surrender the right of self-protection?

How were people so easily transformed from citizens to enemies?

A legal scholar can probably tell me when this state of affairs evolved, and I assume it is involved with the concept of "qualified immunity," so perhaps my question is more "why?" or "how?" What is the legal reasoning behind the government declaring that demonstrators have surrendered their right to assemble, their freedom of speech, their freedom of movement, and their right to protect themselves?

And why should we let this continue?

To me, the assumption being made is similar to that articulated in Sandoval. People voicing their displeasure with the government are being considered (without legal or formal declaration) inferior to other citizens and surrender, like minors or children, many rights to their self-declared guardians.

Viewed in the light of an abusive guardian relationship -- the assumption of inferiority and the removal of Constitutional rights -- I think most Americans would agree that it is time to reconsider the authority that federal and state governments claim over their citizens.

+ + +

American Indian Studies has important lessons for all U.S. citizens because it considers some fundamental questions of interest to everyone. In this case, what does it mean to be a citizen? What is the right relationship between a person and their government? What responsibilities does the citizen have to their government and their government to them?

It is useful for them to study cases in which the government has for so long denied its obligations and disregarded the rights of individuals. It is useful for them to see how arbitrarily and self-servingly the federal government has conducted its relationship with Native nations, and for them to consider the possibility that their government could do the same with them.

A big reason people in Indian Country were so happy with this week's decision in McGirt v Oklahoma was that the Supreme Court simply followed the rules. It offered simple, clear interpretations of the law and honored a treaty the U.S. government had signed. Indian Country expected the usual contortions of legal and moral reasoning from the Supreme Court to justify the continued dispossession and abuse of Native people. When that did not happen, Native people were elated. The court decision was good news, but its reception is sad, really. It is a commentary on how rare "doing the right thing" can be.

America's Motto: Do Not Tell Me What To Do

2020-06-27T19:30:00.008-07:00

When I teach courses on American Literature, I talk with my students about fundamental beliefs or behaviors that we might find in the texts for the class. We search for important values -- positive and negative -- that shaped the history and cultures of the United States.

Frequently, I tell them a story about the American South. In the late 1600s, investors from England were given charters to colonize Carolina. They recruited people to travel there and develop specific allotments of land. Everything had been mapped out before their arrival, and they were intended to live and work in their assigned locations. But once they arrived, the settlers located themselves wherever they pleased, regardless of the promises they had made beforehand. Describing this in his book Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, Gary Nash writes, "In government, as in land affairs, they did what they pleased."

This is perhaps the most fundamental American value: Do not tell me what to do.

I need my Hot Pockets!

It definitely seems more true than the phrases found on our currency. More true than the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum (Out of many, one). More predictive of American behavior than In God We Trust.

Stop calling me Karen!

This American value of irrational individualism is evident each day with more videos of Olds and Karens refusing to wear their masks in public, despite the Coronavirus pandemic. Whether it is an older man trying to push his way into WalMart without a mask or a white woman incensed that she cannot shop bare-faced at Trader Joe's, we see a pattern of refusing to obey the rules.

Could wearing a mask help save their life?

It does not matter. Do not tell them what to do.

Could it save the life of another person?

That matters even less. They are not responsible for anyone but themselves. Oh, and do not tell them what to do.

I believe most people are sensible and considerate of others. I think most Americans who are not the President or Vice President of the United States wear masks. But we should not be surprised by the refusal to surrender one's minor freedoms for the good of others. This stubborness was present at the very beginning of the United States, and it may be responsible for hastening its end.

"Do unto others"? What does that mean?

P.S. -- I think we could easily say the attitude discussed here can be racially marked/defined; it is a white American value. Those people coming to Carolina and refusing to live where they had agreed to live? They were white, and some of them had slaves, especially those who were coming from Caribbean. The United States was founded by and for white people who resented being told what to do by an authority figure, but they seemed little bothered by telling other people what to do -- Africans and Natives, especially. A Karen, by definition is a white woman. And the olds I have seen vocally resisting the masks have been mostly white folks. The Coronavirus pandemic has coincided with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, and I wonder to what degree the hysteria against masks is driven by white people feeling threatened by demands for equality and justice. As the saying goes, "When you're privileged, equality feels like oppression."

Amerika: What does it mean?

2020-06-09T15:46:00.002-07:00

I saw this image recently and immediately thought, "Welcome to Amerika."

Then I quickly asked myself, "Why did Amerika flash through my mind rather than America? Why was that word so readily available to my brain's information-retrieval system? Why did that make instant sense?"

The photograph was taken by ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz, and she posted it on her Twitter account. It was taken during protest demonstrations in Washington, D.C. on June 2. These are U.S. soldiers on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. In front of them, and not seen in this image, are protesters demonstrating against police brutality and in support of Black Lives Matter.

Why did the image instantly evoke AMERIKA in my mind?

My first encounter with that spelling was on a poster I had in my bedroom is a kid. Thanks to the Internet, where it seems you can find EVERYTHING, I was able to find an image of that poster.

This poster apparently was created after a Bank of America branch was burned near the University of California Santa Cruz campus in 1970. (You can buy the poster at justseeds.org.) I was 9 years old in 1970. I doubt I bought it that year. But even if I got it several years later, when I had become a teenager, did I understand what AMERIKA meant then?

So after seeing Raddatz's photograph and recalling my burning-bank poster, I looked up the word for some clues about its meaning and history. This is a variant spelling of America for German and Russian sources. (Oddly enough, Adolph Hitler's personal train, a mobile fortress HQ, was called Amerika.) So even though those German and Soviet sources had been describing an enemy when they used the word "Amerika," in the late 1960s the word began to associate the United States with those repressive and fascist governments. For instance, Carl Wittman published "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto" in 1970, describing how San Francisco had become a center for people escaping homophobia. "Amerika" associates the United States with the repressive and militaristic regimes that traditionally have been considered its opponents. Rather than suggesting America as promoting freedom, Amerika suggests opposing freedom.

Jump ahead to 1987, and we find Amerika is the title of an ABC series starring Kris Kristofferson about the Soviet Union taking over the United States.The TV series is discussed briefly by K.E. Roberts and Michael Grasso in "Avenge Me!: American Catharsis in 1980s Soviet Invasion Fantasies" While works like Amerika and Red Dawn (1984) depicted paranoid fantasies about alien invasions, Grasso indicates the Soviet enemy in them was a projection of America's worst impulses rather than an authentic fear of communists: "When the US forces in Iraq undertook their operation to capture Saddam Hussein, they called it… Operation Red Dawn. The irony of using this name for an operation in which we were the invaders was apparently lost on the Pentagon. Americans, it seems, will always take extreme measures to make sure that they psychologically remain the underdogs, that they can still shout “Wolverines!” with that sense of righteous fury, even as American forces more closely resemble [John] Milius’s brutal Soviet soldiers. It turns out that we were the foreign invaders all along."

This irony deficiency continues today, as President Trump declared ANTIFA to be a terrorist organization, despite it being an idea rather than an organization -- and despite the United States having fought costly wars against fascist regimes. So strange to see jingoistic patriots who a few years back embraced small-government Tea Party fantasies now embracing Big Brother oppression of citizens exercising their rights to assemble and to speak freely and of other citizens (Black Lives Matter) who claim their rights to life and liberty. One might say that it is contradictory for a president who loves eliminating regulations to also claim to be the law-and-order president, but it only seems like a contradiction. He and his supporters want to eliminate the laws that restrict their behavior in terms of economic and environmental exploitation and they want to get rid of the limits on their ability to silence and punish dissent. Look, for example, at the several states that have attempted to pass legislation criminalizing protests against oil pipelines. They love freedom: their freedom, not the freedom of others.

When I see armored personnel carriers rolling through residential neighborhoods and police trussed up in so much armor they look like Cylons or a character from Fallout, I wonder to what degree TV shows and films like Amerika were unconsciously prophetic; the United States was taken over by a fascist regime, but from the inside.

Of Thee I Sing: A Semiotic Review

2020-01-26T23:03:00.000-08:00

I am reprinting this guest entry from Nov. 23, 2010 that originally appeared in The Weekly Rader. That was a blog by award-winning poet Dean Rader. He let me write an entry on occasion, and that is where my own blog got started. I am reprinting it because apparently Dean's blog has disappeared into the Internet ether. I am retrieving it from the Way Back Machine's Internet archives so it can live on, and so I can point my students toward it when needed.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Of Thee I Sing: A Semiotic Review by Scott Andrews

Scott Andrews has been so gracious so many times as a guest poster on The Weekly Rader, that we are considering renaming the blog The Bi-Weekly Andrews Or, perhaps, the Don't Dread Scott. We'll work on that and get back to you.

In our ongoing interest in the intersection of politics and early childhood education, we feature a particularly smart review of President Barack Obama's new children's book. In keeping with the focus of TWR, Andrews also considers the semiotics of this text.

President Barack Obama’s new book for children, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, made headlines lately – it is more accurate to say that the Fox News headline made headlines. His book briefly discusses several famous figures from American history, presenting them as heroes. Among those featured is Sitting Bull, the famous leader of the Lakota. Fox News caught a good round of criticism for its “fair and balanced” headline about the book: “Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Killed U.S. General.”

When it was pointed out that Sitting Bull did not kill General Custer, Fox News revised the headline to say “Obama Praises Indian Chief Who Defeated U.S. General.” Never mind that Sitting Bull was too old to participate in the Battle of Little Big Horn.

There was much snickering from the Left at the contortions Fox News is capable of in finding ways to criticize Obama. What I haven’t heard yet is discussion of the image accompanying the passage about Sitting Bull.

Illustrator Loren Long portrays Abraham Lincoln and Billie Holiday in a fashion reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton, in warm colors and with curved, stylized figures. We see Lincoln and Holiday among other humans, doing things they are famous for – speaking and singing. We see Jackie Robinson swinging a bat. We see Albert Einstein staring into the heavens. We see Cesar Chavez speaking to migrant workers.

However, Sitting Bull is literally the Earth itself. His cheeks and nose are hills. His eyes are two bison. His eyebrows are trees. His forehead is an orange sunset. Although Sitting Bull is described as healing the “broken hearts and broken promises” of his people, we do not see any Indians.

Seeing the image of Sitting Bull as Real Estate is surprising in this context. A book like Of Thee I Sing is intended to remind us of famous, admirable people from American history – to make them visible to us again. It is odd, then, that in this act of remembrance, Sitting Bull is not present. In the book’s time machine, we travel back to see Abraham Lincoln speaking to his fellow Americans. In the time machine of our imagination, the book takes us back to see Billie Holiday singing, perhaps in a night club, among musicians. It is unclear that we have entered the time machine to visit Sitting Bull. Are we looking at his spirit in today’s landscape? Or have we traveled back to the western Plains in the 1800s? If so, where is Sitting Bull? Where are the people he led and healed?

This image is created in the tradition of “The Vanishing Indian.” American mythology has been deeply conflicted about the original inhabitants of the continent since Day One of Contact. Americans have hated Indians and they have loved Indians. But, strangely, in both cases the Indian disappears from view.

The side of the American psyche that hated Indians wanted to clear them out of the way of westward expansion, even if that meant killing them all. Thus the Indian became, for many decades, the ubiquitous villain of American popular fiction and Hollywood Westerns. In contrast to the bloodthirsty savage, the American hero could look that much more heroic – and could be justified in killing Indians.

The side of the American psyche that loved Indians romanticized and envied them, and yet still imagined the Indians absent from the path of westward expansion. In American literature, sometimes the Indians disappeared voluntarily, because they did not want to live like their new neighbors. Sometimes the Indians disappeared tragically, perhaps from disease or even from hearts broken by the damage done to their communities. This passing was lamented by some Americans, and it was sometimes used to critique the American greed or violence or prejudice that so harassed Indians. But hardly ever in the American imagination did this critique result in the Indian not disappearing.

Sometimes what the American psyche hated about the Indian was also what it loved. The Indian Hater oftentimes justified his hatred by seeing the American as civilized and the Indian as savage. The task of transforming the landscape into European-style agricultural and urban landscapes was seen as a process of conquering nature. Since the original inhabitants of the land needed to be removed before the land could be transformed, the Haters equated Indians with the land or nature. Both needed to be conquered. They were not merely obstacles to expansion, but as “nature” they were the opposite of “civilization.” In his survey of Indians in American literature, Savagism and Civilization Roy Harvey Pearce says that the Indian became an important symbol “for what he showed civilized men they were not and must not be” (5).

Meantime, the Indian Lover also equated Indians with the land or nature, but this time that was seen as a good thing. Many times the Indian Lover had grown tired of his own society. Like the Hater, the Lover associated “civilization” with European-style society, but unlike the Hater he saw “civilization” as corrupt or decadent. Pearce describes this as a type of “primitivism -- the belief that other, simpler societies were somehow happier than one’s own” (136). The Indian Lover saw “nature” as the opposite of “civilization,” as pure and noble. He saw the Indian as the Noble Savage, and in so doing he also equated the Indian with nature.

However, despite his admiration for Indians, the Lover could not bring himself to live with them permanently or imagine a role for them in his society. Apparently, just because you love something doesn’t mean you want to live with it. And so even those writers who loved Indians rarely ever ended a story with the Indian characters still around – they either died or faded into the landscape, headed further West, making room for the tide of Americans.

I do not know Loren Long, but I imagine he really likes Indians, or at least the idea of Indians. And I bet he is a very nice man and a talented artist. But depicting Sitting Bull not as a human talking to other humans (like Lincoln) or singing with other musicians (like Holiday) has implications beyond the artist’s intent. It potentially relieves Long or his audience of depicting an uncomfortable truth – drawing the bodies of Indians whom we can guess will suffer and possibly die at the hands of American soldiers, who will become the victims of those “broken hearts and broken promises.” The words beneath the image beg the question: Broken by whom? As written and drawn, the audience gets to avoid uncomfortable answers.

Such an illustration also traps Sitting Bull in a non-human dimension. Unlike Lincoln or Holiday, Sitting Bull (and possibly by association every Indian) becomes a transcendent, supernatural being. Not a human.

Of course, it is better to have an Indian in the book than not. But it would be nice to have an Indian who lives on the ground like a human rather than in the ground like a specter or ghost.

Scott Andrews is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and he teaches American and American Indian literatures at California State University, Northridge.

How do you sell a relative? Native Communities, Capitalism, and Land

2019-07-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

Coulthard's essay can be found here.

A basic question in American Indian Studies is whether Native ways of being in the world are simply incompatible with those of the dominant American culture.

This is a difficult question to wrestle with. Answering it helps answer other questions. As students and teachers of American Indian Studies, are we trying to incorporate Native ways of being into the dominant culture? Are we trying to incorporate the dominant culture into Native ways of being? Are we working toward assimilation or resistance? Toward change or conservation? Toward cosmopolitanism or nationalism?

The answers depend upon who is asking, and many times the answer involves a complicated, ever-changing mix of the options I just mentioned. (And those are just a few of the options. There are many.)

I thought about this question of compatibility when I saw a passage from an essay by Glen Coulthard, "From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition: Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Dedendeh."

Although he is writing about Native communities in Canada, his point remains true south of their border. His essay discusses the ways First Nations people have tried to work with the Canadian government in securing their rights and protecting their homelands from appropriation and exploitation. It seems that working within the dominant culture's political and economic system can be a trap -- because of the difference between the fundamental assumptions of Native epistemologies and those of the dominant culture, specifically the dominant culture's practice of capitalism. If Native communities work for their rights within the dominant system, they can lose even when they think they are winning, because they then are subject to a system that operates under very different assumptions and expectations.

Coulthard later expanded on these ideas.

He writes that people from the dominant culture should not think that Native communities resist selling or losing their land simply because they "hold a strong attachment to their homelands." Many non-Native people hold such attachments, even in the dominant cultures of the United States and Canada. Instead, people should understand that land is part of a Native "ontological framework."

("Onto" is related to the Greek word for "being," and "logy" is related to the Greek word "logos" -- word. Ontology, then, would be the way we speak about being, or the study of being.)

As an example, Coulthard cites the word for "land" in his Native community's language. This word means not only the land (as a material object) but everything on it, "people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on." Not just passively on it; these things exist on it together in a web of dynamic relationships. He writes:

"Ethically, this meant that humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we have obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants, and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-being of all over time."

This is where I thought about that question of incompatibility, and it is where I thought about Karl Marx.

I thought about the fundamental difference between thinking of land as a relation (as an entity with which you have a reciprocal relationship) and thinking of land as a commodity (a thing that can be bought and sold). For Marx, humans have social relationships through commodities and money, but they do not have social relationships with the commodities. This assumption, which is at the heart of the social and economic systems dominant in the United States and Canada, seems irreconcilable with the Native ontological framework that Coulthard describes.

The dominant American ontological framework includes the assumption that people are free to do as they wish with the things they own. That includes land. The limitations placed on land-use relate not to the owner's responsibility to the land but to their responsibility to other people, such as neighboring land owners. A landowner can be sued by their neighbors not because they have harmed the land but because their use of the land has negatively impacted the lives of their neighbors or the value of their property.

The Native ontological framework that Coulthard describes has commodities, too. Objects have been traded, bought, and sold by Native people for centuries. But land is not a commodity. If you have social obligations to the land, just as you have social obligations to other people (such as your family), selling it becomes difficult. How can you sell it to someone who will value it differently? Someone who will not have a sense of obligation to it? Someone who will think of it as a commodity rather than a relative?

This is where I find another idea from Marx useful in my understanding the dilemma I mentioned at the beginning and that Coulthard considers in his essay. The concept of alienation is important to Marx's thinking about industrialization, socialism, and capitalism. There are several kinds of alienation that Marx writes about -- people being alienated from their own bodies or minds through the process of wage labor; people being alienated from the goods and services they produce (for instance, being paid to make objects you could never afford to buy on the wage you are paid to make them); and, perhaps most importantly for Marx, people being alienated from each other because of the class structure of their industrialized society.

I find the concept of alienation useful in understanding many aspects of modern life. I think about what the word means. To alienate means to make something alien, to make it a stranger, to place it outside regular social obligations. Marx apparently used the German word for "estrangement" in this sense. To make something strange. When I looked up alienation in the Oxford English Dictionary, I saw that in its Latin origins "alienate" meant to transfer ownership of something. That seems especially relevant for this discussion about land.

To sell something, then, means to separate it from you. In a sense, to make it a stranger to you. In American capitalism, it seems everything is for sale. Objects, animals, land, services, your time (in the form of your labor). All of these things can be purchased by another person. All of these things can be alienated from you. Even our own bodies can be sold, figuratively and literally. It may be illegal, but you can sell your organs. Everything can be alienated. Everything can be made a stranger for a price.

This ability to sell anything leads people to sell everything, to seek new things to sell, and always to sell them for as much as possible. American capitalism is built upon the desire for immediate maximized profit.

The notion that some of these commodities are due social obligations is, in a real sense, inconceivable to American capitalism. The idea that humans can and should have reciprocal relationships with these commodities seems impossible.

"Immediate maximized profit" and "mutual social obligations" seem incompatible to me.

Perhaps this can change. Wikipedia tells me there is a concept called "environmental personhood," This bestows legal rights onto elements of the environment, such as rivers. For example, the Yurok Nation in California recently recognized the legal rights of the Klamath River. (Rivers in other countries, such as India and New Zealand, have been awarded similar status.) The Yurok Tribal Council stated its desires for the Klamath River as an act of reciprocation, as Coulthard discussed: “This resolution provides another powerful tool to protect our river, which has sustained the Yurok people since time began."And the Council described its desires for the Klamath River in very human terms: "to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve."

That sounds kind of like "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," doesn't it?

I do not expect environmental personhood to become very popular in the United States any time soon -- although the personhood of corporations is the law of the land -- because that idea limits the ability of people to exploit something for profit, and that seems unAmerican.

As Native nations and the federal governments of the United States and Canada continue to work out their vexed relationships, I do not expect them to ever resolve their fundamentally different relationships to the lands they live on. I think everyone involved would be healthier if they worked toward the Native ontological framework that Coulthard discusses. In my classes I encourage students to at least understand this Native ontological framework, or perhaps even consider incorporating some of it to their ways of being in the world.

I like big books... sometimes

2018-08-25T16:38:00.005-07:00

I do not dislike long novels. By long I mean 400 pages and more.

Some of my favorite novels are long. For instance, China Mieville's The Scar is more than 600 pages long.

I dislike novels that are unnecessarily long, that could be just as good, if not better, if they lost some pages. For instance, China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is about 700 pages long, but it needs to be about half of that.

And it seems like many novels in recent years are too long. This is particularly frustrating for me because I teach literature courses at a university. I teach a course on 20th Century American novels, and I like to end the semester with a recent novel. Even though that means reading something NOT written in the 20th Century, I like to give students an impression of what is happening in American Letters now, so they can compare that with what came before it.

But sometimes finding a recent novel less than 400 pages can be hard. And many students cannot or will not read a novel of that length in one week -- plus, by the end of the semester academic fatigue has set in. Students have readings for other classes, and most of my students work part-time or even full-time. Many of them have families that require their time and attention. Good, shorter novels are very useful in this setting.

For instance, this semester I was hoping to find something with a protagonist about the age of my students, so I read The Idiot by Elif Batuman. It was a Pulitzer Prize finalist last year, and its narrator is a first-year college student facing the dilemmass they could easily relate to: living away from home for the first time; coping with kooky roommates; choosing college classes; searching for significance in all of the strange things authority figures tell her; discovering romance, etc.

I like the protagonist. I like her roommates. I like her observations about college life. She is funny. She is interesting. But does her story need to be 423 pages long? Do I need a third anecdote about her unspoken affections for Ivan? And a fourth? And a fifth? Do I need to know all of the details I am given about other events?

I find myself asking similar questions of many recent novels: Why are you telling me all of this?

One of the best American novels ever is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it manages its greatness in fewer than 200 pages. Some of its greatness probably is the result of that compression. In my American novels class I teach Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, which I also consider one of the greatest American novels, and she tells her story in fewer than 250 pages.

Can I not experience a young woman's first year of university in fewer than 300 pages -- and yet have more intensity and more enjoyment than the same experience narrated in more than 400 pages? Sometimes less is more.

I know epics are by definition big -- they contain many characters, many events, many locations. And the reader expects this. So again, I am not complaining that some novels are long. Some novels need to be long to create their full impact on the reader. But length alone is not a virtue. Only the inclusion of necessary elements is the virtue, and an epic happens to need that length.

However, having just said that about epics, when I see George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones novels, which are thick as bricks, I think to myself, "How good can they be? He hasn't made any choices."

I wonder if this impulse to include everything is similar to a phenomenon some of us know from creative writing workshops. Sometimes creative writing students tell their colleague that a story is too long, that some scenes do not have the desired effect, etc. That author will defend the story's current form by claiming it is based on actual experience. "But that's the way it happened!"

That does not matter. What matters is whether the story works as well as it can.

I think some writers make a similar defense of a story not based on actual events. In this instance, when told to cut something or re-arrange or compress events, they might say, "But this is the way I imagined it!"

That does not matter. Imagining a story is only the beginning of telling it. A novel is a work of art; it is an object, not an event. As an object, it must be shaped. It must be cut and altered. Its pieces must be arranged with the goal of their impact on the reader, not with their fealty to the imaginative experience of the writer.

Trump: The Bullshit Candidate

2016-03-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

I have decided the perfect emblem for Donald Trump's presidential campaign is a plastic bottle.

A bottle of Trump Ice Natural Spring Water.

The one small object captures the lies that characterize his general behavior and his campaign in particular.

According to a website for the Trump Organization, Trump Natural Spring Water "is one of the purest natural spring waters bottled in the world." The water is monitored constantly for purity, the site states.

That sounds good. Except if anyone is doing the monitoring, it isn't the Trump Organization. You see, the water is bottled by Village Springs Spring Water in Willington, Conn. Like so much of the Trump Empire, things that bear his name are made by others. The Trump promise of exclusive access to quality and status is merely a matter of branding rather than authentic quality or the product of his own efforts.

Perhaps the water from Village Springs is good, but this is nothing Trump was involved with, and it is nothing that is exclusive to him. In fact, anyone can have the same water bottled for their birthday party, bar mitzvah, or doggie wedding. Also, according to the Village Springs website, the company bottles water for private labels at convenience stores and grocery stores. Tres chic!

I have no reason to doubt that Village Springs water tastes fine and is healthy to drink. But the company's website offers no mention of their water being one of the purest in the world, and Trump offers no evidence for how this judgement was made.

Trump Ice Natural Spring Water, like so much in his presidential campaign, requires his audience to connect their vague associations of his name with quality and competence with the product being sold to them. It requires them to hear but not test the rhetoric. It requires them to forget that Trump is a marketer and not a maker; he will say whatever is required to sell something, regardless of the truth. And many times the promises have little relation to what is actually delivered (such as the "hand-picked" faculty members at Trump University).

Trump recently paraded his water bottles in a press conference. The presentation was an attempt to counter Mitt Romney's attempt to portray Trump as a business failure rather than a business success (transcript here). Romney cited his failed endeavors, such as Trump Magazine, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump Steaks, and Trump "University." (I was disappointed in Romney's takedown because it mostly rehashed points made better by John Oliver's Last Week Tonight on HBO.)

In order to refute Romney's claims, Trump brought out an array of merchandise, as if to suggest that the failures Romney cited were instead successes. But like so many of the claims in his campaign, his remarks consisted mostly of lies and misrepresentations (see Mashable's story). The steaks, it turned out, were not Trump Steaks at all, but were made by Bush Brothers. There was no Trump Vodka for him to show, so he showed Trump Wine -- which he doesn't bottle; his son does. The Trump Magazine he held up was an issue of a quarterly publication distributed at his resorts, not the monthly lifestyle magazine that failed in the 1990s. Romney did not mention bottled water, but he brought that, even though, as I have said, he does not make it and it is not in any way an exclusive product.

His display of "successful" products are like the promises he has made on the campaign. The wall he promises to build, the tariffs he promises to impose on products made in China (which would include his own line of clothing), the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants he promises... Trump cannot be trusted to deliver on anything that he says, because everything he is says consists, more rather than less, of bullshit.

This is why I am so perplexed by people who say they support him because of his honesty. For example, in a Salon article describing her turnaround on Trump's candidacy, Camille Paglia praised his "fearless candor."

Candor is another word for honesty, integrity, and truthfulness. How can someone whose every statement is steeped in lies, misrepresentations, and fabrications be praised for "candor"?

If he is being honest, then he must be stupid, since so many of his "facts" are wrong. So perhaps he does have "candor," just little common sense and less knowledge. For a list of recent lies and misrepresentations, check out this article from Politico, "Trump's Week of Errors, Exaggerations, and Flat-out Falsehoods."

I prefer to think of him as more dishonest than uninformed, though he may be both. A list such as Politico's is why I find the word that best applies to Trump is "bullshit."

In his slim volume On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt associates bullshit with an absence of knowledge on a subject. He writes, "Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic" (63). Review Trump's many errors of fact in the Politco article, and you can see Frankfurt's point illustrated. All numbers are exaggerated according to Trump's biases and his immediate rhetorical needs -- his poll numbers, the size of the trade deficit with China, etc.

In his book, Frankfurt tries to distinguish between regular lying and bullshitting. One distinction, he writes, is craft. The liar can be careful and nuanced; they practice sophistry with more skill and attention, so that the lies or misrepresentations are hard to discover (most presidential candidates are practiced at this). Meanwhile, bullshit is "produced in a careless or self-indulgent manner" (21). Carefully crafted lies and misrepresentations require discipline. "It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim" (22). Trump's remarks at his political rallies are famous for their rambling, unscripted nature, he seems unconcerned when he contradicts earlier statements, and he is reluctant to be held accountable for what he has said at any particular moment in the past.

Perhaps the most relevant quality of bullshit for my discussion is the attitude of the speaker. In many ways the bullshitter is more brazen than the liar, because the bullshitter is less concerned about the truth in the first place. The liar is concerned about being caught; hence the careful effort to disguise the lie as the truth. The bullshitter does not seem to care.

According to Frankfurt, the bullshitter "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are"(61).

This seems to describe Trump's press conference about his many successful products. The Bush Brothers label on the steaks he displayed was in clear view. He did not attempt to hide it. The liar would have. The bullshitter does not care. The magazine he held up was clearly NOT the Trump Magazine that had been ridiculed by Romney and Oliver. Trump Wine is not only not Trump Vodka, it isn't made by the same Trump. But he didn't care.

The bottle of Trump Ice Natural Spring Water? The liar would have failed to list the actual bottler. Instead, the truth behind Trump's bullshit is brazenly listed on the bottle itself. There is no attempt to hide the falsehood. Trump's presidential campaign is proving that the truth is irrelevant. The seductive quality of the bullshit is all that matters.