Food as a Weapon in the Third-World War - Losing Food Sovereignty, Enclosing the Commons, and Losing our Way of Life in the Wake of Mother Culture and Her Civilization

In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, it’s suggested that “any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion” (1). In that book and its sequel, My Ishmael, Quinn refers to our “locking up the food” after the agricultural revolution. This same act went on to become Vandana Shiva’s “enclosure of the commons.” Essentially, civilization decided that man should not necessarily toil in the fields for his food but should work many varied jobs, fulfill many varied roles, and earn money to pay for his food instead. This results, as we will see, in starvation and poverty and death for those who should be making a living… or perhaps simply subsisting on their farming. This results in “food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries” (2). The market economy “proposes its own expansion as the solution to [this] ecological and social crisis it has engendered” (3); when this new system fails, the obvious solution: more of the same. This is only one aspect of what Quinn calls Mother Culture, a counter to Mother Nature that came with civilization, but it is in our modern age possibly one of the most dangerous. Nations do not simply go on expansionist, Imperialist military campaigns anymore, with overt violence, so the war on the Third-World (hereafter referred to as the Third-World War) is fought instead with neocolonial, globalist policies that bring monocultures and fatal agricultural and political policies. As Shiva puts it, “at a time when a quarter of the world’s population is threatened with starvation due to erosion of soil fertility, water, and genetic diversity, chasing the mirage of unending growth becomes a major source of genocide. Killing people through the destruction of nature is an invisible form of violence which threatens justice, peace, and survival” (4). She goes on to point out how editor and author Claude Alvares calls this destruction the Third-World War, “a war waged in peacetime, without comparison but involving the largest number of deaths and the largest number of soldiers without uniforms” (5). We have taken agriculture, fundamentally built on keeping us alive, responsible for growing the human population of the world almost exponentially, and today we use it to control the world, to control its people, to narrow the focus of power to a handful of corporations at the expense of livelihoods and lives, “those who die in the shadow of capital” (6). While Imperialism brought for the Imperialists “railways and roads, it brought new technology, and for some, it brought educational opportunities, for most people in the third-world, however, it brought oppression and poverty” (7). We control the use of seed and allow nature itself to be patented, we mandate the growing of monocultures at the expense of soil, at the expense of water, and when these things result in poverty and starvation, we ignore the Third-World individuals as long as we in the First-World have wondrous choice in the Grocery Store. Food, or the control of it, is a weapon in this new Third-World War, and Food Sovereignty, taking back the Commons, unlocking the food—that is the only way for the Third-World to have any victory.

The most obvious (lately) way we control the world’s food is not some overt action, like when Serb and Muslim sides in Bosnia would interfere with UN relief efforts to each other (8). Instead, what has become obvious—to those paying attention anyway—started quite subtly; farming gradually drifted into the hands of a small group of agribusinesses, agricultural giants pushed their way into Third-World countries—Dole and Chiquita suing their way into Jamaica’s banana market (9), for example—and some of those corporations, like Monsanto, were allowed to patent life (10), and take not only control but also ownership of seed itself. Daniel Quinn suggests that Mother Culture has taught us that “the world was made for us [so] it belongs to us, and we can do what we damn well please with it” (11). And so, when Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser’s canola crop was contaminated with Monsanto’s Round Up ready canola, it was not Schmeiser who sued the contaminator but the contaminator who sued Schmeiser, for “intellectual property theft” (12). Ultimately, Schmeiser was forced to destroy his stored seed on the chance it might all be contaminated with Monsanto’s. Shiva argues that this “robs us of our human right and human duty to be seed savers” (13). W. R. Grace claimed a patent on the use of the neem tree for controlling pests and diseases in agriculture, something that had been going on in India for over 2000 years. After a decade-long campaign, Shiva and more than 100,000 others involved, got the European Patent Office to revoke the patent (14). While this comes across as a success, the fact that it took a decade, the fact that W. R. Grace—and in other cases, Monsanto and others—could get the patent in the first place is key to understanding the trouble here. Humans managed for a long time without agriculture at all; we hunted and we gathered. Eventually, groups of us became more sedentary and started planting seeds for things we wanted to eat instead of just gathering what was around. And, with the agricultural revolution, we let farming be a specialty for some and we locked up the food, made the rest of us earn it through work. Or, as Shiva describes it—though she seems to be referring specifically to a more recent, more capitalist addition to this—we enclosed the commons; instead of letting the world be the world and our farms be our farms, we assigned ownership, we conquered the natural world just as we would conquer the political world in the form of various empires. We twisted the natural order around until we held godlike sway over the genetic makeup of seed and we patented it. But, that wasn’t enough. As with the Grace example above, we started allowing patents on seed varieties and methodologies that already existed. And, we made laws—in India, as Shiva describes repeatedly, in Earth Democracy, but many other places as well; for example, in Iraq, Bremer’s 100 Orders include, in Order 81, material that “deals specifically with Plant Variety Protection (PVP) because it is designed to protect the commercial interests of corporate seed companies” (15)—laws that leave the farmer in no position but to submit to agribusiness. Saving seed, a tradition older really than farming (i.e. organized agriculture) itself, has become illegal in places. In 1997, RiceTec was granted a patent on basmati rice lines and grains, which Shiva points out “has been grown for centuries on the subcontinent” (16). RiceTec’s patent included genes developed by farmers and “allowed RiceTec to collect royalties from farmers growing varieties developed by them and their forefathers” (17). This one took four years to overturn. In Ireland, seed potato growers were disallowed in the early 1990s from trading in reproductive material with other seed potato growers, merchants or farmers (18). In 1994, the Plant Variety Act here in America was amended to “eliminate farmers’ privilege to save and exchange seed and establish an absolute monarchy for the seed industry” (19). And the list goes on. We have made it illegal for farmers to save, store or even sell their own seed. And, Monsanto has even purchased the company—Delta & Pine Land—that developed the so-called “terminator” seed which will simply die after one generation, making farmers even more dependent on purchasing new seed time and time again (20). While some farmers fight—according to Shiva, some 5 million peasants in India have “taken a pledge to continue to save and exchange seed” regardless of any law that says they cannot, such as the Seed Act of 2004 (21)—in the meantime, there are further issues than just ownership.

Forcing farmers to grow certain crops (patented or not) results in monocultures, far from the variety there has been with traditional agriculture. Shiva uses the example of rice in India, how in the various climates of the subcontinent there have been many different strains of rice developed; “there are varieties to fit thousands of ecological niches all over the country, from the temperate high hills of the Himalayas to the tropical lowlands to deep-water and salt-water marshes of the sea coasts” (22). But, now, farmers are growing fewer strains and this lack of biodiversity, combined especially with no more intercropping, means less sustainability. While “genetic diversity provides security for the farmer against pests, disease, and unexpected climatic conditions” (23), this system demands that a farmer maintain a very specific, modern quality to his land to harvest his crops. This involves chemical fertilizers, the use of which “has led to the growing crisis of soil erosion and depleted soil quality” (24), and modern irrigation, both of which damage the land itself, ruining it for future generations of plants and people.

And, these chemical fertilizers cost money, as does modern irrigation, as do modern seeds. So farmers, who used to be able to save their own seeds and let nature (or intercropping) take care of much of the watering and fertilizing, are now paying out of pocket to maintain what should be a subsistence way of life. And, of course, it goes without saying, all this so they can produce far more than ever before, because this is not just subsistence farming but a support system for the whole First-World. These farmers are now producing not for themselves but for export, and putting more money into it than they ever had to before. And, so these farmers are put into debt, find themselves living impoverished lives, going hungry when they are the ones feeding the world. I deliberately have not mentioned NGOs like the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank, the organizations that often drive all of these new policies into these Third-World nations, because while they are the tools we and Mother Culture use to push new agendas, I would argue that they are not themselves the problem but yet another symptom, a self-promoting part of a destructive way of life that it is getting harder and harder to back down from. But, here I must reference the WTO in the case of Lee Kyung Hae. In 2003, the WTO held a meeting in Cancun. Lee and other farmers and peasants from around the world—Lee himself from Korea, where the WTO had forced the opening of “its rice markets to dumping by US agribusiness giants like Cargill and ConAgra” (25)—camped near the site of the meeting and marched upon it on the morning of its first day. They came to a barricade and Lee Kyung Hae, wearing a sign which read “WTO kills farmers,” climbed it and stabbed himself. He had a note with him that read, “I am taking my own life so others may live” (26). Sixteen thousand farmers in India committed suicide during 2004 alone, as “the policies of corporate-driven globalized and industrialized agriculture deliberately destroy small farms, dispossess small farmers, and render them disposable” (27).

Daniel Quinn argues that we “believe profoundly that, however bad things are now, they’re still infinitely preferable to what came before” (28). We have conquered the natural world, mandated that we work for our food, and we are consistently destroying the means by which we get it, but still, we take the Whiggish approach; this is what history has been leading us to, so it must be the right way of doing things. As long as we in the First-World can go to our local grocery store and find a great variety of choices, we don’t take the time to care whose lives were destroyed in getting those choices to us. Vandana Shiva argues that “patents on life and the rhetoric of the ‘ownership society’ in which everything—water, biodiversity, cells, genes, animals, plants—is property express a worldview in which life forms have no intrinsic worth, no integrity, and no subjecthood” (29). I would add humans to that list. This worldview devalues and essentially dehumanizes the Third-World individual, and small farmers, even here in the First-World, are losing the Third-World War. There are those who stand up against the patents, those who still trade seed (like Via Campesina, which states that “food sovereignty is the right of peoples to develop and maintain their own food systems” (30)) even where it has been made illegal, and there are those like the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (31) who are demanding their legal right to have land and have the use of it, without being dictated to by NGOs or agribusiness corporations. Shiva suggests that “liberation in our genocidal times is, first and foremost, the freedom to stay alive” (32). But, we cannot simply be content with ourselves being alive. We must support the Third-World in this war; when the MST marches onto a piece of land, chanting “Occupy! Resist! Produce!” the individuals must know that they have support around the world. When an Indian or a Korean or even an American farmer, impoverished by debt growing our food, is at the point where taking his own life seems like his only viable option, he needs to believe that we will make it better, that we can take back food sovereignty for farmers, that we can give the commons back to the people, that we will not let life itself be patented and owned by corporations who care more about the bottom line than the lives of billions of individuals the world over. We need to reject Mother Culture, reject the dark recesses dug into our world by globalization, as “the discussion on ‘food power’ consequently not an exception but a symptom of a general global situation” (33). We must demand sustainability over overconsumption, demand a right to sustenance, demand biodiversity, demand nourishment over destruction, peace and life over war and death, demand democracy over corporate greed.

(1) Quinn, Daniel, Ishmael, New York: Bantam, 1992, 138.
(2) Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham, New York: Monthly Review, 2000, 43.
(3) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 50.
(4) Ibid, 52.
(5) Ibid, citing Alvares’ “Deadly Development,” Development Forum 11:7 (1973), 3. Alvares and Shiva, of course, do not use my hyphenated “Third-World War.”
(6) Chatterjee, Piya, “Teas’s Fortunes and Famines: Global Capital, Women Workers, and Survival in Indian Plantation Country,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, edited by Amalia L. Cabexas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, Boulder: Paradigm, 2007, 58.
(7) Isbister, John, Promises Not Kept: Poverty and the Betrayal of Third World Development, 6th ed, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 99. The hyphen, again, is mine.
(8) Maass, Peter, “Bosnian Factions Using Food as a Weapon; Serb, Muslim Sides Interfere With U.N. Relief Deliveries but for Different Reasons,” The Washington Post 17 February 1993.
(9) Life and Debt, Stephanie Black, director, 2001.
(10) Interestingly, Monsanto points out on its own blog that, “in actuality the first patent on a living organism dates back to 1873 when Monsieur Louis Pasteur was awarded U.S. Patent #141,072 with a claim to yeast. This was actually one of the first food production related patents–the yeast was for beer production to reduce spoilage of the beer.” (http://www.monsantoblog.com/2009/06/19/seed-patent-history/)
(11) Quinn, 63.
(12) Shiva, 94. The Schmeiser case is also a big part of the documentary The Future of Food, Deborah Koons Garcia, director, 2004.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid, 146.
(15) Truong Sun Traveler, “Food as a Weapon – The Rape of Iraq,” Daily Kos 9 April 2008. Citing Global Research (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=1447).
(16) Shiva, 147.
(17) Ibid, 148.
(18) Shiva, 149.
(19) Ibid, 150.
(20) F. William Engdahl, “Monsanto buys ‘Terminator’ Seeds Company,” Geopolitics – Geoeconomics 27 August 2006. (http://www.oilgeopolitics.net/GMO/Monsanto/monsanto.html)
(21) Shiva, 151.
(22) Ibid, 98.
(23) Ibid, 100.
(24) Shiva, 100.
(25) Ibid, 77.
(26) Shiva, 76.
(27) Ibid, 120.
(28) Quinn, 221.
(29) Shiva, 3.
(30) Camila Montecinos, “The Seeds of Sovereignty,” New International September 2010, 13.
(31) Raiz Forte (Strong Roots), Global Exchange, producer, 2001.
(32) Shiva, 185.
(33) Peter Wallensteen, “Scarce Goods as Political Weapons: The Case of Food,” Journal of Peace Research 13:4 (1976), 277.

Her Very Distinctive Looks (1) - The Colonialization of Modeling

Caren Kaplan argues in “A World without Boundaries” that “the Safari ads, generated throughout the early ‘90s, are visually staged to evoke several different ‘imperial’ locations… playing on familiar cinematic and literary representations of wealthy white women in East Africa before formal decolonization” (2). Marie Claire’s safari ads, Jennifer Lynn Stoever suggests “are reminiscent of early anthropological photos and colonial travel shots from the British Empire, intended to illustrate racial superiority and extreme cultural difference” (3) and with them Marie Claire “actually reinscribes the oppressive colonialist mentality” portraying the colonial matriarch “under the guise of modern feminism” (4). Consider then the model Alek Wek, dark skinned, distinctly African, and appearing in the same issues of Marie Claire as these safari ads, but “not allowed to travel in her photo sequences” (5). Wek has only the “global” self the magazine has “constructed for her… fixed in place and marked with the cultural baggage that the West layers upon the Third World” (6). As Jennifer Lynn Stoever suggests in “Under the Western Eyes of Fashion: Marie Claire’s Construction of Global Feminism,” while these other, white, women are objects for fantasy for the women reading Marie Claire, allowing them to imagine they are these worldly women, travelling the globe, experiencing these far off places and far off cultures, Wek remains outside this fantasy. So, one must wonder why Marie Claire includes her at all, perhaps simply as a deliberate counterpoint. Marie Claire’s refusal to allow Wek to be photographed on safari is indicative of neocolonial ideals, specifically, the notion that Africa is still subject to the Western core and the notion that Wek represents some Modernizationist success, brought up from the Third World to be a part of the First.

Backing up, let’s take a look at who Alek Wek is and from whence she came. Alek was born a member of the Dinka tribe in the southern Sudan town of Wau, where, when Alek was still a young girl, civil war broke out. Under British colonialism, Sudan had been divided prior to 1946; the south, with oil and more fertile farmland, was similar to other east African countries (Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda) while the north was more like the Arabic-speaking Egypt. The south was dominated by Catholics and northern Arabs were kept out of positions of power and trade between the two regions was discouraged. In her memoir, Wek says her country “has always been split between the Islamic Arab north and animist and Christian south. They don’t ever seem to mix that well and the north has always seemed to dominate the south” (7). But, in 1946, this changed, when the two areas were merged and Arabic was made the official language, even in the south. The British justified this policy, claiming the south was not ready for exposure to the modern world. They closed the region to the world and a few Arabs who controlled the regions commerce and bureaucracy. The elite in the south, trained in English, were now the ones kept out of power, and those in the south had no control over their own resources but instead were subject to the north. Absent British rule, the northerners were supposed to adopt a federal system but did not, and in 1955 fighting broke out. For the next 17 years there would be much strife and division in Sudan, until finally, in 1972, the Addis Ababa Accord was signed. Ten years later, there would be violence again. Wek says it was “shocking to hear army trucks rumbling through the streets of my little town and to see men in green uniforms… Wau was not my simple home any longer; it was a military zone, with rebels on the outskirts, soldiers in town, and the lawless militias wreaking havoc everywhere” (8). Still, her mother would take the cows out to pasture—her mother, despite globalization, still was fulfilling her role, being productive, not displaced yet from a productive role in society, “rendered disposable” (9). There was also water to bring home from the pump. One day, Alek and her younger sister, Athieng, went with plastic water jugs on their heads went to fetch water. They were delayed, playing with some other children, and had to hurt home as the sun set, “the darkness always [making] the militias hungry for stealing and shooting” (10). After running past army trucks full of soldiers, Alek and Athieng made it home to the welcome sight of their mother’s cows and vegetables. Their parents were hunched over the radio listening to the illegal rebel station. “The announcer was saying that the conflict had spread to Wau” (11). It was war, again, after President Gaafar Nimeiry announced that the whole country would become an Arab Muslim land. Rebel leader John Garang formed the Sudan People’s Liberation Army to fight off northern troops. Hello Magazine describes the situation as it was for Alek Wek and her family in the end: “Along with millions of other Sudanese, her life was turned upside down by the outbreak of civil war in 1982. After their house came under fire from an unknown group, the Wek family fled. When they returned a month later, they found the village ravaged and its inhabitants living in the local school, without amenities or food” (12). The family fled by plane to London, where Alek’s older sister was living, having already applied for refugee status. Alek and Athieng went first, “but it was two years before they were joined by their mother and two more of their nine siblings. The remaining family members were finally given refuge by Australia and Canada” (13). In London, Alek was made fun of at school “for having such long legs, for having such dark skin and a round, African face and short, reddish hair” (14). She “lived the life of a refugee, struggling to make ends meet, cleaning toilets, and sweeping floors and learning a foreign language. She also struggled with psoriasis, a sometimes devastating skin disease that causes the skin to flake, bump or peel. At times, her mother was forced to use a sharp knife to cut flaking bits from her head to her toes” (15). She was discovered by a modeling talent scout at a street fair. She was wary of the talent scout (16) but thought, “I have all of these part-time jobs here and there. Why not get another part-time job that could turn out to be something that could finance my education and pay my rent?” (17). And, so it began. Alek entered the world of modeling, women, or images of them anyway, “commodities to be bought and sold, traded and consumed” (18). Early success was in music videos for Tina Turner and Janet Jackson, but “it was a 1997 Elle cover shoot that made the modeling world appreciate her uniqueness” (19).

That uniqueness is what separates Wek from the other Marie Claire models, a symbol set apart from the other models (20). Stoever describes how the same issues of Marie Claire that contain these safari ads also treat readers to “dozens of horrific accounts of baby rape, infant genocide, genital surgeries, rape, executions, forced prostitution, starvation, torture, domestic abuse, murder, and sex slavery, all taking place in Third World locations” (21). While “poverty itself is never addressed directly” but instead “used only to set the stage for the more treatable issues” (22), this negative portrayal of the Third World is not necessarily modernizationist; as Isbister says it, “the picture of traditional life painted by the modernizationists is not a negative one… however, it is a poor, subsistence life, a life that has no hope of accumulation, income, or wealth” (23). More befitting modernizationism, these same locations, contrary to this purported reality, seem much less dangerous in the ads. One ad in particular is worth noting: “Good Morning Ms. Anderson” from the “Wild at Heart” photo spread in the March 2003 issue of Marie Claire (24). Stoever describes this photo well, as a “fashionable blonde superwoman graciously taking time away from her safari to enlighten the young African children who gather excitedly at her feet” (25). Stoever suggests that this image and others like it “work to construct and consolidate the authority of the First World woman” (26), neocolonial positioning at work in a seemingly innocent fashion. Africa, despite its rapes and torture and executions is, in this photo, a place we have to go to teach the children, to raise them up out of their squalor, and in another photo, it’s a tourist destination, Ms. Anderson on safari, African natives around her but “never shown meeting the woman’s stare or gazing at her body” (27). These men are props just as the children are. They are Third World natives in need of our help, a thoroughly modernizationist notion; they are “placed in service roles that depict them as socially inferior to the white models” and these images “highlight their economic dependence on Western tourism” (28).

And, it is because of this modernizationist angle that Marie Claire takes that a model like Alek Wek cannot be photographed on these safaris. She represents the proof of the modernizationist view; she is the success story that proves just how much in need of our intervention these Africans are. Because of horrible events recounted in other parts of the magazine, these advertisements come across at first as horribly dishonest, but then the deliberateness becomes evident. When one looks at these two portrayals of Africa from the point of view of a modernizationist, then the two somewhat different views fall in line with one another. Africa is this horrible, backward place, where babies are raped and killed, where genocide and genital mutilation are everyday occurrences and girls like Alek Wek are just waiting to escape. In her recently published memoir, Wek describes her homeland like this: “Based on the stories my parents and grandparents told, it seems that Sudan has always been a violent land. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, slave traders came through this territory, capturing Dinkas and others and taking them north to be sold in Arab Countries” (29). Notice: the suggestion of violence goes hand in hand with the invasion of Westerners and the slave trade, something that Imperialism and Colonialism brought in. And, when girls like Alek do escape, they need (supposedly) the modernizationists of the First World to pluck them further out of adversity to walk the runways of fashion, at least in Wek’s case, where “her distinctive looks, so different from the usual catwalk fare, caused a stir in the world of fashion, and garnered a raft of awards” (30). And, she cannot go back there, at least not as a model. She cannot be in Africa, taking cows out to pasture like her mother, or fetching water like she used to do with her sister. Outside of modeling, Wek recently returned to her hometown, along with her mother, and she implies in her interview with Ebony Magazine that this return was a big inspiration or writing her recent memoir. But, as a model, it is necessary that she be portrayed as a part of the First World now, a success story to demonstrate the rightness of the Modernizationist view. If she is back on safari, or back in Africa helping the Africans—never mind that, in her life outside of modeling, Wek is dealing in humanitarian efforts (31)—then the romanticism is gone, the sureness that we in the West are doing things right and Africa is backward and in need of our assistance is gone. Marie Claire needs to keep Wek out of the safari ads, and needs to keep the white women in them, or the balance of the world—since they rarely connect “the struggle of poor women around the world… to larger global economic processes and never [link them] to the politics and consumptive practices of the First World” (32)—as they present it in their activist-oriented pieces would lose much of their fuel. It needs things this way to encourage “women to consider themselves feminists and activists without noticing how closely their fantasies resemble colonial exploitation” (33).

(1) This is what Alek Wek’s success in the industry comes from, according to Askmen.com. It also gets more specific: “These are characterized by her long, lean legs, her very dark skin, radiant smile, and closely cropped hair,” but points out that counter to much of the content of this paper, “At the peak of her modeling years, she refused assignments that specifically requested dark models, all in an effort to satisfy her wish to be treated equally and not differently.” Of course, this was after she was well known and could be more picky.
(2) Caren Kaplan, “A World without Boundaries,” With Other Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture, Lisa Bloom, ed. Minneapolis: U of MP, 1999. 140. This quotation specifically refers to Ralph Lauren’s advertisements for Safari perfume but I am deliberately misusing “safari” here because the Marie Claire ads discussed in Stoever are very much the same as those Ralph Lauren ads.
(3) Jennifer Lynn Stoever, “Under the Western Eyes of Fashion: Marie Claire’s Construction of Global Feminism,” The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women’s Poverty, Amalia L. Cabezas, Ellen Reese, and Marguerite Waller, eds. Boulder: Paradigm, 2007. 50.
(4) Ibid, 41.
(5) Ibid, 48.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Alek Wek, Alek: My Life from Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel, New York: Amistad, 2007, 7.
(8) Wek, 25.
(9) Shiva, Vandana, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Cambridge: South End, 2005, 130.
(10) Ibid, 26.
(11) Ibid, 27.
(12) Hello Magazine, “Alek Wek” Profile, http://www.hellomagazine.com/profiles/alek-wek/.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Wek, 134.
(15) Lynette R. Holloway, “Alek Wek from Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel,” Ebony (September 2007), http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1077/is_11_62/ai_n19480182/.
(16) This brings to mind Vandana Shiva’s suggestion that “the sex industry” (not to necessarily equate the sex industry with modeling, of course) “is often the only survival option left to women who are economic refugees in the globalized economy” (130).
(17) Holloway.
(18) Shiva, 130.
(19) Askmen.com, emphasis mine.
(20) This brings to mind Aimé Césaire’s assessment of colonization (or my use of colonialization instead) as being equal to “thingification” (42), or here vice versa, this objectification of Alek Wek as distinctly colonial in nature.
(21) Stoever, 51.
(22) Ibid, 45.
(23) John Isbister, Promises Not Kept, Bloomfield: Kumarian, 2003, 33.
(24) This photo can be seen on page 50 of Stoever’s chapter.
(25) Stoever, 48.
(26) Ibid, 50.
(27) Ibid.
(28) Ibid, 47.
(29) Wek, 7.
(30) Hello Magazine.
(31) Wek’s profile on fashionmodeldirectory.com says she “has done a variety of work for charitable causes including World Vision (for which she is the spokesperson), the U.S. Committee for Refugees, Fashion Targets Breast Cancer campaign, New York City Special Olympics, Sudanese relief through UNICEF, London Refugee Week, Roots (in Brooklyn) and DIFFA (Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS).” http://www.fashionmodeldirectory.com/models/Alek_Wek/
(32) Stoever, 45.
(33) Ibid, 53.

For Everyone Everything

“When did the Preamble or the Constitution include the government meeting the people’s needs for housing, transportation and health care?”So asks Mike Opelke on The Blaze (“Blaze Exclusive: Socialist Mantra Hidden in Grade School Chants” 2 March 2011). For those who don’t know, The Blaze is “a news, information and opinion site brought to you by Glenn Beck and a dedicated team of writers, journalists & video producers.” But, it doesn’t matter necessarily who, specifically, asked the question.

See, the problem, or rather one of the problems with the Right is that they think, apparently, that promoting the “general welfare” means raising an Army and heading off to wars abroad to "protect our freedoms" and all the bullshit that goes along with that... Nevermind that the founders didn't even want a standing army. Nevermind that such a thing, if these wars were even protecting us... at all, would fall under "common defense." One has to wonder what they think the “general welfare” is? They love to quote the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and all that, as if that defines what America is about… well, not that it doesn’t, but it’s the Constitution that defines our government, how it should work, what it should do for us. And, one of those things, right there in the preamble, is to “promote the general welfare.” It’s in there with “establish justice,” “insure domestic tranquility,” and “provide for the common defense.”

Anyway, Opelke’s issue (and that of other folks to the right of center) is that, supposedly, “school children around the country” are chanting—strangely, he doesn’t suggest they are being forced—a socialist mantra. That mantra: “The People’s basic needs must be met in a country. Needs for housing, education, transportation, and health care overseen by our government system.” Apparently the notion that people’s “basic needs” be met is a horrible idea.

How dare a grade school, or anyone for that matter, suggest that the general welfare might include housing or education or transportation, right? And God forbid anyone try to include healthcare... and that's just going on "general welfare." There's also "justice" and "domestic tranquility," but, of course, neither of those is served by people having homes or knowledge or a way to get to work or to even have work, or being able to see a doctor...

How about a new approach--call it socialist if you like, but then I might have to mention our roads and our water and our military for that matter, if you're so against socialism—an approach that actually values the individual instead of demanding that the individual pull himself up by his damn bootstraps and go be entrepreneurial or whatever and become a CEO, become rich, live the American Dream... or else. I mean, who do these poor people think they are, getting union jobs and demanding better pay? If you just went out like the American Dream told you to and made your own damn way, you wouldn't be needing to make demands because you'd be self-employed, self-sufficient... well maybe not self-sufficient; that wouldn't be very capitalist of you.

This new approach: the government exists to promote justice, i.e. to renounce, discredit and disallow racism and sexism and other forms of discrimination, to ensure that those who commit crimes (and not just those who can't afford good attorneys) pay the price as our society sees fit. Also, that housing access is equal, that access to education and jobs and transportation is equal, that access to healthcare is equal.

This new approach: the government exists to promote domestic tranquility, and what makes us more tranquil than having access to the necessities of not just life but now modern life, i.e. access to an education, access to housing, access to food and clean water, access to, again, healthcare?

This new approach: the government exists to promote the general welfare of all of its citizens, i.e. that, as Alexander Hamilton argued in his "Report on Manufactures," 5 December 1791, "the object to which an appropriation of money is to be made" or for which a law is to be passed (I would add), "be General and not local," that the government not promote, directly or indirectly, one portion of its peoples over another, be it certain corporations, be it certain races or creeds or religions.

This new approach, put simply in perhaps some very socialist terms: for everyone everything.

We've come to a point where I can understand the sentiment of some graffiti in 1968 Paris: “mankind will not live free until the last capitalist has been hanged with the entrails of the last bureaucrat.” You know, down with the capitalist pigs and whatnot.

Partisan politics, capitalist agendas, militaristic notions of protection... It's time to try something new, or maybe simply something closer to what the founders had in mind in that preamble.

It cannot simply be from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. We must look past even that Marxist slogan. Instead, in this modern age, with all of the advances we have achieved already, we should be able to make available everything to everyone.

For everyone everything.

Barry Soetoro (my "after-dinner-speech")

7:24pm, 4 August 1961, a grand conspiracy is put into effect. A child is born in Kenya, but his parents place the birth announcement, as noted journalist Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz put it on his Daily Show, 22 July 2010, “in one of our fringe states’ local newspapers… your Hawaiis, your Alaskas, your Pennsylvanias. You heard me. And then…” they wait… “until this baby is a middle-aged man. Now the trap is set. [They] just [sit] back and let that child go out and win the election for president of the United States.”

But, during the Presidential Primaries in 2008, rumors of the truth begin to circulate, subversive emails calling for us to stop this usurper from coming to power.

This usurper’s name: Barry Soetoro… you might know him better under his conspiratorial alias, Barack Hussein Obama II. A Los Angeles Times op-ed, “Behind the ‘Birther’ Blather,” this past Wednesday, 16 February 2011, cited a PPP poll that “found that 51% of likely Republican primary voters believe that Obama was born outside the United States.” And, 11 states’ legislatures have introduced “birther” bills to challenge Barry’s eligibility in 2012. But, despite even these official attacks on his citizenship, he is still our President.

Today, I will explain how this Kenyan boy has pulled the wool over our eyes, I will show you how we can join the Birther Movement in applying the constitution to get him out of office, and then I will show you the implications of all this.

First, an explanation:

Here is Barry’s real Birth Certificate:

Nevermind that Mombasa was part of Zanzibar at the time, not ceded to Kenya until December 1963. Nevermind that Kenya was not the “Republic of Kenya” until December 1964. And, nevermind, of course, that this document, submitted as evidence by Dr Orly Taitz—orlytaitzesq.com, the “World’s Leading Obama Eligibility Challenge Web Site”—was pronounced a forgery of this Australian document.

Oh, and nevermind the name, Barack Hussein II. As I’ll show you in a moment, his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro filled out an Indonesian school application with the boy’s real name.

But, first, here is Barry’s real Birth Certificate:

Again, ignore the name. And, ignore the fact that, yeah, Mombasa wasn’t part of the British Protectorate of Kenya for another two years. Look at the footprint—it’s black—this is clearly the Birth Certificate for our usurper President.

Now, if you saw the Associated Press’ article “Final Nail in Obama’s Lack of US Citizenship Coffin,” 1 April 2009 (which they conveniently emailed rather than bother publishing), you know that Americans for Freedom of Information released Barry’s transcripts from Occidental College, where he received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia. Americans for Freedom of Information’s website, amfoi.wordpress.com, points out that the organization “is a completely fake organization that recommends hypotheticality to anyone looking to avoid the IRS,” but, if it shows up in one’s inbox, it has to be true.

And, here’s all the proof we need:

Note the name at the top, Barry Soetoro… ignore, of course, the listed birthplace of Honolulu. The key here is we all know that filling out a school application has legal auhority over any… birth certificate, no matter how many birth certificates one has.

But, what does all this matter, as long as Barry won the election? Here’s the thing. In this country we have a Constitution. It’s this long boring document that lays out how our government works and what it takes to be President. Now, while it doesn’t specifically rule out Kenyan “slash” Indonesian boys who may or may not be Muslim (Hussein… really? It’s like they wanted us to suspect him of something.) and may or may not be black, depending on the racial math one uses, Article I does say that only a natural born citizen can be President. And, this is where the Birther Movement gains the higher ground…

See, according to attorney Mario Apuzzo—who because of similarities to a certain author’s name, I will hereafter call the Godfather—in his essay entitled, “The Framers Used Emer de Vattel to Define a Natural Born Citizen,” Before It’s News, 2 November 2010, the framers used Emer de Vattel to define a natural born citizen… the essay title kinda nailed it. Anyway, as the Godfather points out, de Vattel defined a natural born citizen as “those born in the country, of parents who are citizens” in the Law of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 19 Section 212. De Vattel further suggests that if one is born of a foreign father, then his birth country “will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.” He mentions only two paragraphs later, section 214 that “there are states, as, for instance, England”—where we got our common law, I would add—“where the single circumstance of being born in the country naturalizes the children of a foreigner.”

But, nevermind that last part. Since Vattel wrote that first part before the framers used the phrase natural born citizen, and an English translation of his French book was not available at the time, they had to have been copying him. Besides, if a law existed before our Constitution, we have to follow it. Why write a Constitution if not to ignore it whenever we find something that predates it?

So, let’s say, for argument’s sake, all these birth certificates are fake—well not this one:

For argument’s sake, let’s say Barry was born in Hawaii. His father was a British subject, born in Kenya, so by de Vattel’s standard, Barry might qualify as a 14th Amendment citizen of these United States, but not as a natural born citizen, so not Constitutionally eligible for the position he has usurped.

There are two obvious implications to all this:

First, we have a foreign president who has taken office without constitutional right to do so. And, this from a grand conspiracy to—if you listen to Glenn Beck, who did a whole week-long exposé on his hard-hitting news program this past November—destroy America from within… see George Soros and his Shadow Party are using the Cult of Obama to, achieve some sort of, um, socialist, Marxist, Jewish, fascist, communist, Muslim plot—the one started back in ’61 when Barry’s parents signed their newborn up for his future presidency and maybe even Antichrist-ed-ness… It’s a word.

As Joy Tiz put it in “George Soros: International Man of Misery,” Canada Free Press, 18 February 2009: “it’s important to understand that George Soros doesn’t want to ‘change’ America. He wants to destroy it.” A nefarious conspiracy by Kenyans, Indonesians, Muslims, Jews to take down America, begun with a simple newspaper announcement and compounded with fake birth certificate after fake birth certificate. Here, by the way, is the real one…

…nothing suspicious there.

Strangely, the second implication is even scarier. For you see, if Barry was born in Hawaii, if Soros isn’t trying to destroy America, then there is something wrong with all of us that allows for ideas like this to keep going. Brian Montopoli points out, in “Who Are the Birthers?,” CBS News, 23 July 2009: “conspiracy theories often flourish in the wake of traumatic or game-changing events—the September 11 attacks, the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination—and the election of America’s first black president has been no exception. Almost as soon as Barack Obama emerged as a serious candidate for the presidency, rumors about whether or not he is really an American began popping up online.”

The question we have to ask: does our kneejerk reaction stem from racism, from some Cold War remnant fear of socialism, or are we all simply so insane that when something happens we don’t like, there has to be a conspiracy? Montopoli quotes Michael Barkun, expert in conspiracy theories, saying, “there are people who firmly believe that the truth is always hidden, that whatever is presented as public knowledge is necessarily false.” He says, “conspiracy theories are [actually] comforting. They give us a feeling that we have secret knowledge, we know how the world really works.” Of course, they also make us believe some crazy stuff; according to an Onion poll, 22 September 2010, one in five Americans believe Barack Obama is a cactus.

Today, we’ve seen how the facts, or lies, of Obama’s birth have lingered, we’ve seen that the Godfather may have a point and there may legitimately be some constitutional issues involved, and we’ve seen the implications of this conspiracy… even if it is just a crazy theory. While even MSNBC’s Chris Matthews called for Obama’s birth certificate, 27 December 2010, Dr Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health confirmed in USA Today, 28 July 2009, that she has “seen the original vital records maintained on file… verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii.” Then again, Fukino’s last name, transliterated back into the original Hawaiian is… Fuck if I know.

The point is: no Kenyan boy can pull the wool over our eyes if we are onto his plan… unless, we are all so stressed by the economy, so damaged by the shadow of 9/11 and wars abroad, by Jersey Shore, by partisan politics throwing the blame around like a hot potato, that we don’t know how to see what’s real. Maybe we can only see, not what we want to see, but whatever illusion best fits a world so out of our control that it’s easier to believe that a socialist conspiracy has put a foreign usurper in the Oval Office than it is to accept that maybe America just isn’t on top anymore.

Pirahã - (my informative speech for this year)

Ti gi xahoaisoogabagai (tee gee ah-hoa-ees-oh-oh-ga-ba-guy-ee)

I want to talk to you.

In the words of John Lennon, imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but …the Pirahã (pee-duh-hon) are about 350 members strong, living in a handful of villages along the Maici and Marmelos Rivers in northwest Brazil. They are an endangered tribe with an endangered language according to Dr. Daniel Everett, in his book, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes. Despite contact with outsiders for over three centuries, the Pirahã have remained just who they are—hunter-gatherers who have no angst and no war. In fact, researchers from MIT called them the happiest people they had ever seen , and And, if one of these houses gets destroyed in a storm, a Pirahã laughs and moves into a new one.

Much of what makes them unique is evident in their language. So, today, we will first take a look at the utility of Pirahã language, then focus on two of their culturolingual ideas—xibipíio (ih-bi-pee-ee-oh) (experiential liminilality) and xahaigi (ah-ha-ee-gee)(brotherhood)—and then we will see what all this could mean for the rest of us.

First, let’s takes a look at the utility of Pirahã language.

Built around 11 phonemes, 8 consonants and 3 vowels, John Colapinto calls the Pirahã language one of the simplest sound systems known in The Interpreter, The New Yorker, 16 April 2007. Despite its simplicity, with changes in tone, stress or syllable length, Pirahã can sing, hum and even whistle conversations.

As far as vocabulary goes, they have no numbers, just words for small amount and larger amount. Celeste Biever suggests, in Language may shape human thought, New Scientist, 19 August 2004, under the hypothesis of linguistic determinism this would be just one example of how the Pirahã language would limit their way of thinking about the world.

They also have no color-specific terms, only relative phrases—blood-like for red—that are changeable, transient. They have no plurals, no quantifiers like all or some, no comparatives, no words for left or right—directions instead reference the nearby river, upriver, downriver, toward or away from the river.

They have no recursion—that is, the use of subordinate clauses, ideas within ideas—a notion that has created much controversy in the field of linguistics, as the lack thereof would violate one of Noam Chomsky’s key features of human language . According to Robert D Van Valin, Jr in Recursion and Human Thought, The Edge, June 2007, there must be recursion in the syntax for the expression of complex propositions to be possible .

They have no phatic communication—hello, goodbye, thank you, I’m sorry. Daniel Everett suggests these phrases don’t express or elicit new information about the world , and are thus hardly as useful as actions could be in expressing the same sentiment. The closest they have to what we might call a greeting translates as I have arrived. Thank you would be transaction acknowledged. They prefer action over words and experience over ideas… and this brings us to our second point, two concepts specific to the Pirahã, first xibipíio, experiential liminality. Translated roughly as going into or out of the limits of experience, xibipíio can be equally applied (as noun or verb) to a man going out of sight around a bend in the river or a candle flame going out. It is the reason they have no art and no fiction. Kate Douglas points out in A people lost for words, New Scientist, 18 March 2006, there is no creative storytelling and no oral history beyond two generations with the Pirahã. They define the value of information by that which matters here and now. Bruce Bower says in The Pirahã Challenge, Science News, 10 December 2005, that no Pirahã refers to abstract concepts or distant places and times. Life, for the Pirahã, is about the immediacy of experience, which is why they rejected Daniel Everett when he first came to them as a Christian missionary. In the aforementioned New Yorker article, The Interpreter, Everett describes for the author how he was asked by the Pirahã if he had met Christ. They wanted to know what he looked like. But, Everett hadn’t met him so they assumed his father had met Christ. When told that Christ had died 2000 years ago, they had no interest in hearing anymore about him.

They have no religion for themselves, though they do believe that animals and trees have something in them that translates roughly as spirits. They have no origin story for themselves or the world, and have no real concept of the universe, because such things would lie outside personal experience or the experience of, say, a parent or grandparent who could tell such tale. Their grammar and way of life is limited to experience seen or recounted as seen by a person alive at the time of telling , as Daniel Everett describes it in Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã, Current Anthropology, August-October 2005.

xibipíio defines everyday life for the Pirahã. When they have food, they eat it until it is gone. They hunt every day, but share the chore, no one person working more than 15 to 20 hours in a week. The men hunt, the women gather, working maybe 12 hours in a week for a typical Pirahã family of four. Rafaela von Bredow calls the Pirahã a carpe diem culture in Living without Numbers or Time, Spiegel, 3 May 2006. They do not have concern for the future. They do not store or dry food. And, they do not fear death, and find suicide to be such a foreign notion that they laughed when told about it. When a Pirahã does die, the body is buried for practical purposes… often buried in a sitting position as that involves less digging. There is no ritual to it. Ritual would imply—and result from—a more complex worldview.

That being said, the Pirahã worldview does include more than just themselves. They trade with Brazilians and other tribes living nearby. And, those who they deal with regularly get included under the title xahaigi, one of only a few kinship terms used by the Pirahã. And, this brings us to the Pirahã notion of brotherhood. Kate Douglas, in her aforementioned New Scientist article, calls the Pirahã kinship system the simplest yet recorded. They have baixi, for parent or grandparent or anyone to which you want to express submission. They have hoagi for son, kai for daughter, piihi for an orphan, stepchild, or favorite child. And, they have xahaigi, simply translated as sibling. But, the Pirahã do not use it to refer just to blood relatives. In fact, they do not use it to refer just to other Pirahã, but anyone with which they have peaceful relations (or, really, anyone with which they have relations, as war is unknown to them).

Everybody’s equal, even children by about 9 years old. And, before that, the children are, like the old adage, raised by the village. Well, they are raised by their parents, to an extent, but as the Pirahã do not have marriage as we know it, but a more open coupling system, it comes to everyone to look after a child… but, even in that, they aren’t as protective as we are in keeping kids out of trouble. They prefer children learn from their mistakes rather than be told what not to do. The Pirahã do not have Ten Commandments to follow; there is no strict set of laws, no mandated punishment. This brings us to our final point, except the Pirahã don’t have an implications section.

There IS something to be said for the Pirahã culture in what it means for the rest of us: a people with no need for an origin story, no need for ritual or religion… and resulting from this: no suicide, no angst, and no war. Anger is the cardinal sin among the Pirahã, says Daniel Everett in his book. But, even such a rarity would be responded to only by temporary disdain or, at most, ostracism.

In his aforementioned Current Anthropology article, Everett argues that this beautiful language and culture, fundamentally different from anything the Western world has produced, has much to teach us about linguistic theory, about culture, about human nature, about living for each day and letting the future take care of itself..

But, you don’t need it spelled out for you. You’re here reading this, you’re worried about the next round, about your grades, your job. The Pirahã have none of these things, none of these worries (they don’t even worry about their relationships; if a Pirahã wants out of a relationship, he simply leaves the village for a few days and returns without expectation of attachment).

Huston Smith, in his book, The World’s Religions, suggests that we might learn from them, for tribes may have retained insights and virtues that urbanized industrial civilization has allowed to fall to the wayside. While we are here, working a desk or retail for meager amounts of cash (or speaking in a classroom for trophies), a Pirahã might be playing tag with river dolphins, lazing about in the shade, or hunting and gathering for his next meal.

It would sound like some communal dream, going back to the garden, if it weren’t real. But, the Pirahã are real, and are still resistant to change, to the outside world, to much of what makes our modern reality the harsh one it is.

Now, I’m not suggesting we get rid of our art and our storytelling, but the Pirahã are pragmatic, utilitarian, and at peace, because they don’t have all the complications we have.

In my introduction, I wanted to translate a few lines of John Lennon’s Imagine. You know: Imagine all the people living for today—that’s the Pirahã. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too—them again. No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man—this is xahaigi. But, as you might figure by now, the Pirahã do not have a word for imagine.

Today, we have looked at the Pirahã language. We have focused on xibipíio (experiential liminality) and xahaigi (brotherhood). And, we have explored what Pirahã culture could mean for ours.

There are only a small number of Pirahã remaining, and they are in danger from the encroachment of modern society. Imagine all the people living for today if you want, or look at the ones who do.

Xigiai.

The story is over.

F--k the Birthers! (seriously, I've been reduced to such profanity)

I’ve been reading a lot about birthers lately… you know, the folks who can’t find it in their white conservative hearts to believe our black president could have possibly been born in this country. Oh, and of course there’s the small wing that accepts that sure he might possibly have maybe been born here but that doesn’t matter because by Emer de Vattel’s Law of Nations (which, even if it inspired our Constitution, does not dictate the terms of said Constitution until the Supreme Court says it does) says Obama still isn’t a “natural born citizen” because his father was not a US citizen. I’ve put together an ADS (after dinner speech) about the whole thing—and once I’ve run the thing at a few speech tournaments in the next couple months, I’m sure I’ll post the text of it here, but for now, a more angry rant

See, here’s the thing. Get past (or, literally, before) the whole mess of whether or not the Hawaiian governor can “find” Obama’s original birth certificate (the latest headline on the subject), get past military-involved court attacks like those filed by Orly Taitz, get past the kind of people who post stuff like the following: “I'll bet the only proof he was ever born sits in the mud hut of the VooDoo Doctor that conjured him.” That one just came up on a facebook group called Americans Who Are Sick and Tired of Obama (aka AWASATOO). Get past all that and see what Brian Montopoli mentiond in “Who Are the Birthers?” (CBS News): as soon as Obama seemed like a viable candidate for President (maybe even before that), rumors got going about him not being an American. There was no reason for these rumors. No Kenyan birth certificate had come out yet (and the two of those that have gotten around online are both fake (at least one of them (used by Orly Taitz, actually) has been proven a forgery)). His old grandmother hadn’t said in passing that she was there for his birth. Kenya hadn’t really started claiming him as one of their own. So, the only reason anyone had to distrust Obama’s Americanness was, well, racism, with maybe a little hint of Conservatives being insane bastards who get frightened if anyone drifts too far left. Obama was black

There was a fake dollar bill image going around with Obama on it a couple years back (during the campaign season) that had a bucket of chicken and watermelon on it, two staples of anti-black racist imagery (you can see the dollar here). Not sure of the exact quote, but what the person who made it said when questioned about it was that he just wanted to show how different looking Obama was from what was usually on our money… in other words, all those other money guys were old and white and Obama was not quite so old and, more importantly, black. Our first black president—obviously that would be a scary thought for racist right wingers. People hadn’t gotten started on him supposedly being a Muslim just yet—they were too busy commenting on his Christian minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, probably. But, what they could do was poke at his birth. His opponent, McCain was born in Panama, technically US soil at the time, so while his birth was maybe a little iffy compared to previous candidates, he was fine… plus, bonus, he was white. Gotta love that

But, Obama. He was born in one of our fringe states; actually, Hawaii wasn’t even officially a state yet, so that just makes it a little more suspicious. But, still, no fake Kenyan birth certificate had shown up yet. That Indonesian school application hadn’t even shown up yet, and already people were questioning whether or not Obama was born in America… or more importantly, if he was “American.” His ideology certainly had a hand here, as conservatives are so very afraid of socialists and communists and Marxist, so afraid that they can rarely tell the difference between the three. Here was this guy who didn’t look right for the job he was applying for, and who was sounding even more left than his fellow Democrats. Not to mention that name (a little too close to both Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein for comfort). What to do?

Lynching him was probably an option before he was running for President, but you lynch a Presidential candidate and the liberal authorities are sure to crack down and throw you in prison if they don’t just shoot you on sight, ‘cause we all know its liberal police that are the most triggerhappy

Anyway, no fake Kenyan birth certificate yet meant there was really only one fuel that would lead anyone to question Obama’s Americanness: hatred. Well, hatred and fear. And, we Americans are so good at fear. It’s driven numerous “scares” as new waves of immigrants came to our shores. It fueled the Cold War. It’s fueled the War on Terror. And, now it’s fueled the War on Obama

And, hatred is self perpetuating. You hate Obama then you hear a speech of his, all you hear is self-serving liberal bullshit; of course, on the other side, you like Obama and all you hear is hope and change and maybe some promise of release from the grips of the Right. After a while, if you’re able, you get sick of both sides and it’s a lot of the same rhetoric you hear from any President... well, any liberal President, anyway, plus the all-American extension of war, even if not to the proper cheerleading level. He wants to get healthcare to millions who don’t have it, when medical bills are said to be the biggest reason people go into debt and our economy’s shit, but it’s socialist and we ain’t havin any of that commie bullshit in this country, no sir

It’s pro guns, pro war, anti universal healthcare, anti abortion and all the other right wing extremes we’ve got in America or obviously YOU ARE NOT POSSIBLY AMERICAN

Well, here’s what I have to say to that: FUCK YOU, you ignorant, racist pigs. Get the fuck over your paranoia and move the fuck on

cultural artifact speech - "a fake, real tree"

Christmas season, 2007, Seattle resident Art Conrad, fed up with the commercialization of Christmas, erects Santa-on-the-cross in his yard to protest.

Ten years earlier, Robert Cenedella paints Santa on a crucifix. In Catholics decry crucified Santa, Bangor Daily News, 23 December 1997, Cenedella says, he was not responsible for replacing Christ with Santa Claus. You can point the finger at capitalism.

Afterall, Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big eastern syndicate, ya know, as Lucy Van Pelt says in the 1965 classic, A Charlie Brown Christmas.

In the special, Lucy gets Charlie, depressed by the commercialization of Christmas, to direct the school play. When it’s time to get a tree, Lucy suggests he get a great big shiny aluminum Christmas tree, the biggest aluminum tree you can find. He instead finds a pathetic, real tree, prompting Linus to ask, do they still make wooden Christmas trees?

Today I will be talking about that tree, what it was, what it has become, and why.

First, let’s look at that tree, and how the Christmas special was conceived.

As Robert Wilonsky recounts in Bless the Blockhead, Dallas Observer, 7 December 2000, given the task of making a Christmas special for Coca-Cola, Charles Schulz told his producer, I want this show to express what I think is the true meaning of Christmas.

According to Joseph B Perry in Merry Christmas! Celebrating America’s Greatest Holiday, Journal of Social History, Fall 2002, once a year, hegemonic American institutions, including church, state, the media, and commercial interests, line up to produce a discourse about what Christmas means.

Schulz thought about what was the opposite of the true meaning of Christmas and that was commercialism.

As Charlie Brown says, I won’t let all this commercialism ruin my Christmas. And neither would Schulz. He made something that decries commercialism, ultimately, in favor of a lesson about goodness, when the children get together, decorate Charlie’s sad little tree and dance around it.

Of course, a Herald Bulletin editorial, 9 December 2009, says in one of the great ironies, that year’s airing of the show was edited so ABC could fit in four blocks of advertising, which overcommercialized a show whose theme was overcommercialization.

This brings me to how that tree was transformed from an innocent symbol of something real to a commodity.

According to Squidoo.com’s History of the Christmas Tree, 1950s America saw the advent of the first artificial Christmas trees. This event, it says, was celebrated by Charles M. Schulz’ famous fable about the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Except, his fable didn’t celebrate the artificial tree. While Lucy wanted one, Charlie’s choice of a real tree instead is what is celebrated.

Perhaps the maker’s of this à are readers of Squidoo.

From the ad text: Want to celebrate the spirit of the Charlie Brown Christmas special? Now you can buy a replica of Charlie Brown’s forlorn little tree that’s machine calibrated to be imperfect.

slowchristmas.org’s review argues: the notion that you can celebrate the spirit of A Charlie Brown Christmas by buying a replica of the imperfect, non-commercial tree that Charlie rescues from the aluminum tree lot is, frankly, nuts. What about buying a cheap knockoff made to mimic the imperfections of the natural world says goodwill toward men and love for the rough majestic beauty of conifers in winter?

But, how did it come to this? According to Leonard Peikoff in Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial, Miami Herald, 23 December 1996, life requires reason, selfishness, capitalism; that is what Christmas should celebrate—and really, underneath all the pretense, that is what it does celebrate.

Annie Leonard says, in The Story of Stuff, we seek to meet our emotional and social needs through shopping, a nearly sacred rite in the United States. In fact, in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy President Bush told us to hang out ‘America is open for business’ signs and keep shopping.

Every year, Black Friday to Christmas, we do just that—we shop and we shop. As Christmas shopping season starts earlier and earlier, you can start to see what Art Conrad and Robert Cenedella were getting at. Christmas isn’t about Jesus anymore but about Santa Claus, about buying and getting gifts.

Today, we’ve taken a look at the conception of A Charlie Brown Christmas, we’ve looked at Charlie’s tree and how it turned into this. Finally, we’ve seen why.

The conflict between religion and commercialism goes on. As Joel Waldfogel describes in Scroogenomics: Pope Benedikt XVI chided the increased commercialism surrounding Christmas but Bill O’Reilly and the American Family Association have no quarrel with commercialism in Christmas. Their problem is that religion—Jesus in particular—is absent from the mall.

Godweb.org’s They Tried to Outlaw Christmas suggests that at its best the spirit of Christmas is a mirror in which we see reflected the very best that life can be. We see ourselves moved by generosity, inspired by hope.

We keep coming back to Charlie Brown. Afterall, as Charles Schulz says in Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography by David Michaels, there will always be a market for innocence in this country… regardless of how far down the capitalist rabbit hole we go—I would add—or perhaps because of it.