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Tag: history
Beyond Bigfoot’s Banality
All of our thoughts and lore of Bigfoot center on a basic question – but is it real? This is the key concern here. Not Sasquatch, but Reality. The key concern is a test of science. The questions we ask are more in line with forensics. Hair. Footprints. DNA. Fossils. Carbon dating. As the 17th Century Enlightenment philosopher Sir Francis Bacon said the ambitions of science, “My only earthly wish is… to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds… [nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.”
History, A Pain: Unlikely Cases for Keeping Racist Statues
History is a pile of bones, and even if offensive, should perhaps provoke us and shake us from the amnestic waters of late capitalism, which by its own design wishes to maintain the façade of reason, order, and omnipotence making us all feel the helpless consumerist torpor. Shoppers don’t want to be bothered by statues of Puritans restraining the mohawked red menace. It’s a historical fissure breaking through the postmodern simulacrum revealing the truth of our world. Racist statues pierce the veil of McWorld, exposing its menace. One cannot understand the history of his nation without understanding that its history can be measured in red, brown and black bodies. Both in flesh and wood.
A Brief Anatomy of American Gun Culture
In place of political power of an enriched citizenry, the firearm, like God and gold, takes on a totemic power, representing the last stand of individual liberty.
Koch Crusaders: The Vigilante Character in American Conservatism
why American culture is tragically obsessed with violence, and the ways which Americans fantasize about using violence personally, socially and politically as a prime principle of cultural power. At question is how we imagine the heroic implementation of violence, and how this implementation of violence has become the bedrock of the American national identity. It reveals what Americans care most passionately about.
Frankenstein’d Gunslingers from Frontierland: “Westworld” and the Robojihad of the Near Future
If the simulation of empire is broken – what sort of blowback might be a fitting comeuppance from these Frankenstein’d gunslingsers from Frontierland? What sort of robojihad might they wage against McWorld’s future technotopia? What other vengences, what other of hell’s gates from the depths of history might be woken once simulation’s zero death game is betrayed?
Why we need another Independence Day
We now live in a kind of ironic time, struggling with the antiquated structure of America with another progressive history of reform – ending slavery, fighting for worker’s rights, women’s rights, civil rights – a legacy of protracted progress of inclusion and living democracy that challenges American democracy – not a a relic of the past but as a projection into the future. It’s worthwhile to remember that every bit of progress of inclusion, equality and fairness has required an enormous overcoming against the violent, reactive and entrenched forces of the managerial class. It comes from the disobedient, from those who fight to help fulfill the promise of self-governance.
Steve Bannon’s Therapy: Or, Gaslighting America to its Restoration with the Elixir of White Nostalgia
One of the remarkable subplots in the last year of Donald’s Trumps ascension to the White House has been the concomitant rise of the alt-right through, among others, the influence of Steve Bannon. Bannon is […]
A Fragile Dignity 