Adventures of Mr. Chris

While it’s not a surprise to many of us, the latest international health study confirms what many of us have been saying for a long time–the only thing exceptional about American today is the glaring demise of the myth of so-called “American Exceptionalism.” About the only things the US is exceptional for today are its absurd levels of violence, imprisonment, corruption and inequality. And among these, the issues of health and violence stand heads and shoulders above the rest of the world in their absurdity, as confirmed in the latest National Academy Press publication U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health.

In essence, the new report says that America’s body politic is in abysmal shape–figuratively and literally. As the report states in the summary:

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. A growing body of research is calling attention to this problem, with a 2011 report by the National Research Council confirming a large and rising international “mortality gap” among adults age 50 and older. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people, since recent studies suggest that even highly advantaged Americans may be in worse health than their counterparts in other countries. Read More

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

Never one to shy away from a fight, especially one about guns in America, the National Rifle Association (NRA) on Friday called for the ultimate solution to violence in American schools, more guns. Yup, you read that right. Or to be more precise, the NRA suggested we need armed guards in every school. Here’s the logic from NRA President Wayne LaPierre:

“The media perpetuate the dangerous notion that one more gun ban — or one more law imposed on peaceful, lawful people — will protect us where 20,000 others have failed.” (Full text here) It’s clear LaPierre doesn’t live in a major urban metropolis like New York, or he would know that armed guards in public schools is about as common as falafel vendors on 5th Ave. In other words, they’re everywhere, yet school violence in New York was at near-record levels in the past year according to several source (see here, here and here for detailed data). Here’s what some NYC educators had to say about the NRA plan. And while I’m no fan of our major, his response to LAPierre was right on point.

“The NRA’s Washington leadership has long been out of step with its members, and never has that been so apparent as this morning. Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country. Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe. Leadership is about taking responsibility, especially in times of crisis. Today the NRA’s lobbyists blamed everyone but themselves for the crisis of gun violence.”

The long and short of it is that basically everyone other than the hopelessly pathological NRA gung wackos think this is the worst thing since As Seen on TV products hit the cornerstore.

And if the NRA idea wasn’t not bad enough, all we need to do is look at the slow but creeping Plan B responses to the continued lax attitude in American to social violence–armored backpacks for your kids! That’s right, armored school backpacks, they’re the new back to school rage.  According to at least one source, armored backpack sales have jumped 500% since the recent Sandy Hook school shooting in CT. And for those fashion conscious paranoid parents, Amendment 2 even sells bulletproof fabric by the square inch so you can make your own custom designs. Call me crazy, but I just don’t see bulletproof backpacks as the answer to the real problem here. It’s like blaming violent video games, it’s just a diversion from dealing with the actual deeper social problem that spawns this violence.

So what is this deeper social problem? I’d suggest the answer is deceptively simple–the long history of American exceptionalism and its political manifestation–American imperialism.

I know what you’re thinking, what the #$&% does American exceptionalism and empire have to do with gun violence in schools today? The answer is deceptively simple–we just need to look at American history. Put simply, American global hegemony was built, and continues to be maintained today, with massive amounts of normalized, structural violence. In other words, without violence as a social norm, American would not exist as we know it today. Consequently the lesson every young American learns today, whether consciously or unconsciously, is that in order to be the best of the best, you have to crack a few eggs. In fact, this logic of acceptable oppression is so pervasive that is is nearly invisible to the average person–it’s what German philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to as the “banality of evil” in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

Whether we are talking about the genocide of the native peoples during the early colonization period and still continuing today; the many and nefarious American imperial adventures over the past few centuries; or the ongoing violence waged in the name of the ‘War on Terrorism’ that was inaugurated by GW Bush and continues unabated today under President Obama, the lesson is the same–American get what it wants through the use of force.

The only real difference today is that we can now wage digital and economic warfare in such as way as to make it appear that overt American aggression is only to be found as a relic in the history books of the past, and not a continuing reality today. Nothing could be closer from the truth. And it is precisely this underlying structural violence which forms the seedbed from which social and cultural violence blossoms in American today. We have even developed an set of languistic practices to help in this process of normalization, as documented by Larry Ashley in his article “The Language of Violence“:

• collateral damage=murdering civilians
• acceptable risk=other people dying
• area denial munitions=land mines
• physical persuasion=torture
• security contractors=armed mercenaries
• shock and awe=indiscriminate destruction of civilian areas
• wet work=assassinations

So we can talk about banning assault rifles or high-capacity magazine or imposing more stringent background checks on gun sales, but at the end of the day none of these will address the real issue, which is this deeper structural violence that forms the very waff and weave of American society. And that is a discussion that even the most vocal anti-gun advocates are not likely to welcome, because that means taking a hard look at their own privileges and lifestyles, and not just pointing fingers at the latest big baddie in the news. A final thought worth considering–the top selling toy in 2012 on Amazon was Cards Against Humanity. (It was actually in the top 10 3 times, one for the game, and 2x for the expansion packs.) The Amazon description reads as follows:

“Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people. Unlike most of the party games you’ve played before, Cards Against Humanity is as despicable and awkward as you and your friends.”

Here’s a sample of some of the cards from the game.

Yup, that pretty much says it all folks…

Until next time…remember, when you point a finger at someone, four more are pointing right back at you.

###

{Revised 11/4} *Added more discussion on the energy policy-natural disasters link – thanks to BL-T.

Roger Pielke recently wrote a piece in the WSJ called ‘Hurricanes and Human Choice’ that discussed the relationship between increasing natural disaster impacts and human settlement and lifestyle choices. In that piece he argued against considering Hurricane Sandy as some sort of “new normal” event, a claim which I explored and largely supported in my last post here. Two points made by Pielke are worth meditating on: Read More

Meet my new country, the Borderlands of Catastrophism! No seriously, it is my new country, thanks to a fascinating online game called NationStates by Max Barry. In short, the game is an adaptation of his novel called Jennifer Government. Here’s how the general storyline goes:

“The world is run by American corporations; there are no taxes; employees take the last names of the companies they work for; the Police and the NRA are publicly-traded security firms; the government can only investigate crimes it can bill for.

Hack Nike is a Merchandising Officer who discovers an all-new way to sell sneakers. Buy Mitsui is a stockbroker with a death-wish. Billy NRA is finding out that life in a private army isn’t all snappy uniforms and code names. And Jennifer Government, a legendary agent with a barcode tattoo, is a consumer watchdog with a gun.” Read More

This is part 3 in a three-part post reflecting on the Anthropocene and some of my dissertation research. You can read parts 1 and 2 here.

So this last post is trying to wrestle with the idea of the Anthropocene and questions of faith. In my original project that this is a part of, I was using the idea of faith as a way to try and get at the underlying truth claims of different political views in relation to the Anthropocene. But after having spent some more time thinking and writing and meditating on this question, it seems to me that perhaps faith is not quite the right way to frame the question I am trying to explore. In the process of trying to develop this idea further in response to some questions from my dissertation committee, I worked up the following conceptual map diagram, which is one way that I can imaging trying to think about this question that I am interested in exploring in my research.

Q: Is there a point where truth moves from faith to reality? From Fact to fiction? From fantasy to reality? Read More

Ok, but as some have asked, what do the ideas of environmental risk or the Anthropocene have to do with zombies or monsters and popular culture? Here I will concede the links appear to be weaker. I want to move beyond any simplistic and uninteresting claims that zombies are dangerous and therefore a risk or that zombie pandemics often start as a virus and therefore can be seen as environmental issues. The link I want to develop has to do with the narratives being constructed within popular culture, especially tv and movies, about social collapse, future risk and the environment.

For example, in the past several years there have been an explosion of TV shows and movies which are set in some future world where a massive disruption has led to the collapse of the existing social order. In a majority of these shows there is no longer any working industrial infrastructure, especially power, and thus people have been reduced to something approximating late medieval or early frontier living. The concept of “foraging” becomes a central focus of daily living. People have return to quasi-tribal or gang lifestyles, and people are living in hastily constructed fortresses or makeshift compounds. The Colony, Revolution, Terra Nova, The Walking Dead, After Armageddon, Survivors, Apocalypse 2012: The World After Time Ends, The Apocalypse, 2012: Zombie Apocalypse, Resident Evil, Outcasts, Jericho, Life After People, and Apocalypse How are just a few examples of TV shows or movies that I have watched and documented in the past few months which all revolve around this basic theme. And this does not even begin to touch on the larger genre of survivalesque shows like Survivor, Lost, Survivorman, Medicine Men Go Wild, or Man vs Wild which dominates programming on places like The Discovery Channel. Read More

Just some random examples I ran across recently debunking the idea of a post-racial US…

Found while looking for inspiring political speeches on YouTube tonight.

Found on the sidewalk in Greenpoint, Brooklyn this fall.

[Updated 9/25/12 with extended fact checking of film at end of post]

This post offers a media analysis and political commentary on Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie 2016: Obama’s America. I had assigned both of my Intro to Politics classes at Fordham University to view the film as part of our study of the election and campaign politics. The film has done quite well, recently moving to #8 in box office sales. Although I am not a fan of Obama, neither am I a fan of D’Souza, having met him many years ago at a public talk at Ohio University, and having read his work on and off over the years. However, I went in with as open a mind as possible, wanting to get a better understanding of the internal mindset of people like D’Souza and the conservative, fundamentalist right politics that he represents, as a growing part of my dissertation research is looking at these contemporary fundamentalist manifestations.

I watched the movie at the Union Sq cinema, and there were about 20 people in the audience, including a young black couple, two Jews, a group of gay men, and several couples or individuals. I’d estimate the crowd was about 50/50 split by age, with half under 40 and half over 55. That’s about as much demographics as I could gather from basic observations, so it’s hard to know who came as a fan of D’Souza and who came out of curiosity or horror to see how Obama was being portrayed. Read More

Andrew Cline had a recent article in The Atlantic where he attacks Obama for a recent campaign speech where Obama made the following remark: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.” The article, called What ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Really Means—and Why Romney Can’t Explain It, claims to offer a critique of Obama’s comments as well as a political analysis of what a savvy Romney campaign should have done in response. The problems with Cline’s piece, and there are many, can be summed up with one simple phrase–historical ignorance fueled by blind American patriotism. Cline, who is editorial editor at the New Hampshire Union Leader, is no Obama fan to begin with, but it is his argument, rather than his party politics, that really stinks. But for some reason this piece, which has drawn a lively response on The Atlantic‘s web site, seems to stand out as unusually bad even for the Atlantic audience. As one particularly incensed commentator remarked in response to the article: “I’ve just decided to never, ever renew my subscription to the Atlantic.” “The writer of this article should be ashamed for pandering to pathetic propagandizing,” fumed another reader.

Read More

It appears we’re one more step closer to the long-held human dream–or nightmare–depending on your take, to more human-like robots, with the announcement by an Italian team of scientists at the University of Pisa who are developing the Facial Automation for Conveying Emotions, or FACE, project. Pictured below, the android is the latest prototype that the FACE team has developed. The project is an attempt to simulate human emotions in robots, and in this case, the robot face uses over 3o tiny motors and control software to mimic various types of human expressions, from fear and anger to surprise and disgust. Read More