American Studies. Dave Foreman is not your stereotypical treehugger. Wikipedia introduces him as follows:

The son of a US Air Force career officer, as a young man Foreman supported the Vietnam War. He received the highest honor of the Boy Scouts of America, the rank of Eagle Scout. Foreman first became involved in political activism as a college student, supporting Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964 and founding the New Mexico branch of the conservative youth organization Young Americans for Freedom. After graduating from college in 1968, and attending the Officers Candidate School of the US Marine Corps, Foreman’s radicalism began to take shape.

Nowadays environmentalism is so completely associated with the left that it surprises us to learn of Foreman’s conservative roots. But are environmentalism and conservatism really at odds? Which political philosophy — liberalism, conservatism, socialism, libertarianism, anarchism — seems most congenial to environmentalism? While we’re at it, which religion seems most congenial to environmentalism? Read more!

Senior Seminar. The concluding chapter of We gives us a chilling description of the interrogation of I-330 and other suspected members of the Mephi. Here’s the key passage:

In the evening of that day I sat at one table with Him, with the Benefactor (for the first time) in the famous Gas Room. They brought in that woman. In my presence she was supposed to give her testimony. This woman stubbornly said nothing and was smiling. I noticed that she had sharp and very white teeth and that this was beautiful.

Then they led her under the Bell Jar. Her face became very white and since her eyes were dark and big, this was very beautiful. When they started to pump air out from under the Bell Jar, she threw back her head, half-closed her eyes, and squeezed her lips — this reminded me of something. She was looking at me, strongly gripping the armrests of the chair and looking, until her eyes closed completely. Then they dragged her out, quickly brought her back to her senses with the help of electrodes, and then put her back under the Bell Jar. They repeated this three times and she still didn’t say a word. Others, who had been brought in together with this woman, turned out to be more honorable: many of them started to talk after the first time.

This description is not particularly graphic. What makes it so powerful? I would argue that its horror is deepened by the matter-of-fact tone in which it is described, which is to say, by the failure of the recently lobotomized narrator to recognize it for the torture that it is and to be revolted by it.

OK. You all know what an America-hating knee-jerk liberal I am, and you probably recognize the photo above as one taken at Abu Ghraib prison, so you can probably guess where I’m going with this. What horrifies and disgusts me most about my own country’s barbaric treatment of “enemy combatants” is not so much that it happened in the first place. It’s the ongoing strenuous refusal of so many influential Americans to acknowledge torture as torture — and beyond that the lack of outrage among Americans generally.

That waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” in fact constitute torture has been acknowledged by everyone from the International Red Cross to Republican Senator John McCain (see here), yet any number of influential talking heads still refuse to acknowledge that truth (see here). But so far only a few low-ranking soldiers (like Charles Graner and Lynddie England) have been prosecuted for torture. The high-ranking officials who authorized torture in the first place are still at large. One of the most important of these people, John Yoo, is now a law professor. Another, Jay Bybee, is a federal judge. As for Dick Cheney and George W. Bush — I’m not holding my breath. As Bob Dylan once reminded us, “All the criminals in their coats and their ties / are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise.”

Here let me quote the key concept from the work of David and Nanelle Barash, who define dystopia as the denial of a biologically-based human nature:

In justifying this nightmare society [of 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien...is wrong.

Well, is there “something called human nature” which is intrinsically outraged by what we do? Or has that something been hammered out of us? Is O’Brien right or wrong?

If we think of “the soul” in We as a kind of shorthand for all that makes us uniquely human — imagination, love — then is Zamyatin suggesting in the passage above that part of being human is the ability to recognize and be revolted by torture? If so, should we say that America has lost its soul?

I’ll give you my answer to this question after you’ve all replied.

P.S. For a recent essay likening torture at Guantanamo Bay to that in Nineteen Eighty Four, take a look at Scott Horton’s “Revealing the Secrets in Room 101.” Read more!

Senior Seminar. I’d like for you to keep Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921) in mind as we continue our screening and analysis of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Lang’s film is not an adaptation of Zamyatin’s novel, yet it seems to me to give visual expression to many of the novel’s dystopian ideas. Would you agree? If so, can you give examples?

In the illustration above, just for fun, I’ve juxtaposed Lang’s New Tower of Babel shot with a still depicting Blade Runner’s dystopian, film-noir vision of Los Angeles in the year 2019. Read more!

American Studies. Semester’s end is approaching fast, and it’s time to start thinking about your final paper/project. Whether presented as paper or project (e.g., PowerPoint presentation or poster display), your work should analyze one or more of the texts or authors we’ve read in class in a way that helps readers better understand both the text itself and its relation to environmentalism.

You might consider working with one or two of your classmates to examine how various authors and texts approach a single cultural-environmental theme, such as the discursive construction of nature, the gender politics of environmentalism, or the ethics of direct action.

If you do work with a group you might consider a division of intellectual labor, with one person synopsizing and situating the text, another summarizing its critical responses, and a third advancing a new argument about it.

What I’d like you to do in your replies to this post is to get started thinking about possible topics by going back over the syllabus and combining one critical essay and one primary text with one “real world” environmental issue, and then indicate briefly why the resulting combination might lead to a good paper/project.

Here’s an example of what I have in mind:

Critical essay: “The Social Siege of Nature”

Primary text: Ecotopia.

Real-world issue: Clear-cutting on La Sierra above San Luis.

More detailed guidelines for the paper/project are available here. Read more!

Comm Arts II: In class today we began analyzing the film Project X (1987). The basic idea here is to remember that films are usually very carefully constructed. Nothing is left to chance. Whatever appears in any given frame is there for a reason, and part of film analysis involves nothing more than observing what is there, and then asking and attempting to answer the question, Why it is there? (Or perhaps better, What is the effect on the viewer of it being there?)

Let’s put our collective minds to work on the image above, which depicts the researcher Teri (played by Helen Hunt) and her subject Virgil (played by Willie). What’s there? Why do you suppose the director put it there? (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Of course, there’s much more to analyzing film than scrutinizing still frames. But if we each contribute one or two key observations about the frame we can get a little practice and at least get started on our analysis.

For more about the film and the military research that inspired it, review pages 25-29 in Animal Liberation. For guidelines for Paper #4, click here. Read more!

American Lit II: In class today I argued that Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” sermon are jeremiads that can be understood as part of a literary-religious-cultural tradition extending back to ancient Israelite prophets like Hosea, Isaiah, and the Rev. Wright’s namesake, Jeremiah. The jeremiad, in the words of Mike Abrams, “attributed the calamities of Israel to its abandonment of the covenant with Jehovah and return to pagan idolatry” and “denounced with lurid and gloomy eloquence its religious and moral iniquities.” And isn’t that more or less what Ginsberg and Wright are doing — luridly denouncing their nation for its iniquities?

Here’s a sample of some biblical prophecy that doesn’t seem all that different from “Howl.” It’s from the Book of Hosea (4:11-14, from a Christian translation titled The Message):

Wine and whiskey leave my people in a stupor....

Drunk on sex, they can’t find their way home.*

They’ve replaced their God with their genitals....

Before you know it, your daughters are whores and the wives of your sons are sleeping around.

But I’m not going after your whoring daughters or the adulterous wives of your sons.

It’s the men who pick up the whores that I’m after, the men who worship at the holy whorehouses — a stupid people, ruined by whores!

Is Allen Ginsberg a 20th-century prophet? Is “Howl” a jeremiad?

*Bonus points if you recognized this line as similar in sentiment and effect to Steve Winwood’s line, “I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home,” from the song, “Can’t Find My Way Home.” Maybe Winwood is also a prophet. You can listen to him and Eric Clapton performing a version of this song here. And for a YouTube video of Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay,” which I believe shares some of the themes of “Howl,” click here. Read more!

American Studies. There are many ways to approach The Monkey Wrench Gang. You might treat it as a classic of environmental literature (and compare it to Ecotopia). You might treat it as a Western (and compare it to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), as a post-Vietnam novel (and compare it to Rambo or the novel First Blood), as a precursor of, and how-to manual for, the Earth First! movement, and so on.

Then again, you could focus solely on a single character — say, Hayduke, who could be compared to Will Weston, Butch Cassidy, John Rambo, and Dave Foreman respectively. Or you could focus on the use of a single element — such as theme or setting — in one or more of these works. Or you could do a men’s studies project, tossing Hayduke, Weston, and John Muir into the hopper and analyzing them as exemplars of different styles of masculinity.

The sky’s the limit. The intellectual world is all before you, where to choose.

The illustration above juxtaposes two iconic images: Hayduke and Rambo. In what ways are these two essentially the same character? Read more!