The Once-Black Beast

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The Boatyard, oil painting by Jean-Charles Cazin, c. 1875,
Cleveland Museum of Art

     Weaving their way down the rows and columns of stands cradling fiberglass and aluminum hulls in various states of disrepair, a pair of men made their way deeper into the heart of the yard. The slightly portly yard owner, dressed in an oil-stained t-shirt and cut-off shorts fraying at the bottom, both needing to be retired years ago, prattled on about a list of features: “… full radar GPS map with a multi-function display nearly brand new, reconditioned windless just last year, inflatable life raft still certified in the aft cockpit locker, 20 gallon water tank on the starboard side, ee-perbs...”

     The words floated past his ears barely registering the meaning, having spent too many hours pouring over long laundry lists of parts, gadgets, and gizmos owners use to try to nickel and dime the greatest price out of a boat. Snapping temporarily back to the present, the parched man interrupted, “I’m sorry, what was that last one?”

Fifteen Years

     The warm wet breeze of the noon-day rolled over the treetops and washed down upon the dock yard. The heavy scent of salt mixed with the acrid scent of rotting fish, beached kelp bleaching in the sun, and palm fronds rotting where they fell. As the tide of air ebbed for a moment, the smell of sealants, paints, and rust rushed up to fill the void, only to be overpowered by the sickly sweet fragrance of tropical flowers in full bloom. Beneath the strong overtones the slightest hint of yesterday’s frozen rum drink spilled across the nearly ceremonially small patch of grass, slightly overgrown, turned into a sugary mass of quickly blackening goo alive with hordes of ants desperately defending this once-in-a-short-lifetime find from the various less identifiable bugs intent on getting theirs before the getting was done. The unwashed dog, wet from a swim in the unnaturally green water of the marina, temporarily invaded the scene as it went sprinting past, toward the direction of his master just rousing from a drunken slumber upon the hard. Stale puddles of water dotting the slightly muddy ground, teemed with life of all minute descriptions, chief among them the clouds of mosquitoes that arose in response to a set of heavy footfalls approaching. With another crash of the wind wave in the tops of the swaying palms, the smells of land were washed over with dreams of the sea.

Silver Filigree Dog Tags by Lindsay Zike

Lindsay Zike, Collection of Service Dog Tags, Fine and Sterling Silver, 2015 (Private Collection). [Pin on Pinterest]

A simple piece of machine-pressed aluminum, nearly identical to millions of others. A practical solution to a grim problem; just before the turn of the last century it became apparent to the Quartermaster of Identification, Capt. Chaplain Charles C. Pierce, that the fighting in the Philippines had left the Army with too many unidentified fallen. His solution was to outfit each solider with an identity disk made of cheap pressed aluminum. A few years before the US entered the Great War the Army adopted this policy, and with a few minor design changes the modern dog tag came into existence.

Over the years the dog tag has become an icon of the military. In the movies the visual symbolism to indicate that a character was, at any time, associated with the service is the ever-present dog tags around their necks. Personally, a decade after my service ended, I still carry mine with me every day. So associated with the military, the dog tags have also became a symbol of bad-ass-ness; every wannabe, from Justin Bieber to the armchair commandos that answer the call of duty with a controller in their hands have a far nicer set than those in my pocket.

Aeneas The Hero?

          Aeneas, as the primary actor in the first book of Virgil's Aeneid, does not conform to the modern expectations of a hero, but he might also not conform to the expectations of a hero from earlier Greek poetry either. Virgil, writing at the time of Octavian, modeled The Aeneid after Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.¹ However, at such and advanced time in the history of Rome, it is doubtful that anything of the “original” tale survived, if there ever was, indeed, such a story from the Greek tradition. The Aeneid, instead of being an accurate retelling of some legend from time immemorial, is a motivated work of utter fiction that carried a political intention of an emperor and a poet, and as such, Aeneas is the hero that was hoped to bring the Roman Empire back to religion.² Aeneas is a refugee that brings an idealized view of his culture forward into the Rome Empire.

          In both Greek and modern heroic tales, the thing that marks the hero is that they are the primary agent that does, even though they have things that happen to them first, and along the way. Achilles goes to Troy with 50 ships, fights the Trojans, and calls out Hector in order to kill him; Hercules undertakes the twelve labors; Leonidas defends Thermopylae to his last. Likewise, in modern times we set up people, and, far more often, archetypes or professions as heroes based on their actions, real and fictionalized. Firefighters rush into burning buildings, doctors and EMTs save people, soldiers defend nations; specific people noted for their supererogatory actions serve as token examples of heroes, but always for what they do. In Book 1 Aeneas does next to nothing, but much happens to him.

Media Strategies: al-Qaeda and ISIS in Comparison

          On December 8, 2014 the media was abuzz with the news that top al-Qaeda commander Nasr bin Ali al-Ansi had denounced recent propaganda released by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The videos that al-Ansi was referring to graphically showed beheadings and other violent acts that quickly became associated with the relatively new independent group. Al-Ansi stated that the “[f]ilming and promoting of it [beheadings] among people in the name of Islam and Jihad is a big mistake and not acceptable whatever the justifications are… This is very barbaric.”¹ This was not the first time that al-Qaeda had publicly decried the actions of ISIS. Harith al-Nadhari, a Shariah law scholar with al-Qaeda in Yemen, condemned the discord ISIS had stirred up between jihadi groups in Syria, and their attempts to claim influence over other Middle Eastern and North African areas.² Both al-Ansi and al-Nadhari claimed al-Qaeda responsibility for the attack on Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, which left 12 dead.³ From an outsider's perspective, it seems odd, if not hypocritical, that al-Qaeda would call the violent actions of ISIS “barbaric” and less than a month later order an attack on an a satirical news magazine.

Al-Ansi and al-Nadhari

          It might be tempting to believe that their own twisted sense of justice and morality had blinded them to the brutality of their own actions, while allowing them a cognitive dissonance to condemn ISIS propaganda. That would ignore the long-time connection between the two organizations, as ISIS had been the “front group” for al-Qaeda in Iraq for some time, and had carried out numinous attacks, including suicide bombings of mosques, even before the US troop withdrawal at the end of 2011.⁴ The highly-coordinated sectarian violence that has plagued Iraq for years was instigated by ISIS under the command of al-Qaeda.⁵ The fact that al-Qaeda and their affiliated groups have been well-known for their violence makes it highly unlikely that al-Ansi and al-Nadhari's protests of ISIS are related to the ethics of using extreme brutality or generating strife in the Muslim world. Both tactics are expected from al-Qaeda.

          From an Historical perspective, the best possible way to understand the motivations of al-Qaeda and ISIS would be to analyze the internal communications of both groups, the conversations between them, and the personal recollections/oral histories and documents of key personnel. Unfortunately, given that they are both highly wanted, and downright hated by a number of world powers, this kind of insider perspective will likely never materialize. In many ways this is similar to the long-distant past, histories of commoners, and individuals living on the fringes of societies or collectives, as there is little in the way of surviving or recorded evidence. To assess this situation will require a bit of Copernican revolution, turning the evidence that is available on its head and compelling it to answer questions that it was not asked, and which it might be reluctant to answer, by following the “tracks” of people and events left in history.⁶ Since this investigation is one where direct evidence of the exact question will not be forthcoming, an alternative explanation might be found in the self-representations of the two groups. How do al-Qaeda and the Islamic State use media? What are the similarities and differences in their self-created narratives? How does the use of brutality factor into their self-image?

Troops in Transition

Project Statement

          Somewhat unsurprisingly, a comprehensive study of mental-health risks showed that members of the US Armed Forces have a significantly higher likelihood of developing mental illnesses than the general population, with some conditions, like post-traumatic stress disorder, appearing more than a full order of magnitude more often in military members.¹ A 2012 Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) study cautiously stated that 18-22 veterans commit suicide per day.² Although the report is often cited by a number of lawmakers and veterans advocacy groups, decontextualization places a significant portion of the interest on veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.³ This is further perpetuated by the younger veterans, of which “[o]ne in two veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan wars say they know a fellow service member who attempted or committed suicide.”⁴

          The average age of male veterans that committed suicide between 1999 and 2010 was 59.6 years old, much older than the overall civilian population, and well outside the average age of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.⁵ There is a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans that are veterans from age 55 on, peaking at ages 85-89 with 80 percent of surviving men having served as some point (women of all ages show between 1 to 3 percent).⁶ A lack of sufficient research and reliable statistics has made the topic of veteran suicide difficult to adequately analyze.⁷ The VA dedicated itself to supporting “the safety and well-being of our nation's Veterans of all eras,” and has increased their suicide risk assessments and prevention efforts.⁸ While that is not necessarily a change from previous policies, this is one of the first reports to both identify older veterans as having continuing serious mental health issues and to catch wide-spread attention. Lack of adequate contextualization has generated a narrative that focuses attention on the wrong generations.

          This comes at a time when long-standing Veterans Service Organizations, like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States of America, are finding the ever-widening generation gap too difficult to cross.⁹ Younger veterans are not joining the ranks of veterans 30-years their senior for a number of reasons, but central to them is a sense that VSOs are out of touch with the needs and desires of the post-9/11 servicemembers. Despite the foundational goals of these groups, to care for both present and future veterans and their families,¹⁰ the older VSOs may be lapsing into irrelevancy as “military personnel have largely been spared from budget cuts … because of the overwhelming public support for the troops.”¹¹

Survivor's Guilt: Problems of Oral Histories of Veterans

          There are cultural expectations shaped as much by mass consumption entertainment as they are by lived experience. The collectives that societies form normalize attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that are enforced, consciously or otherwise. People that live with the memories of something too far outside of those expectations can find themselves silenced either by trying to speak to ears that refuse to hear, to minds that can not understand, or sometimes with mouths that are unable to express themselves. Military veterans, by the very nature of service, might find themselves on the wrong side of cultural expectations.

          Three veterans returning from World War II gaze out of the nose of a bomber flying to their home town, the rolling countryside slowly becoming more familiar to them as they get closer to home. The Navy Petty Officer Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), demonstrates the use of the hooks that have replaced both of his hands by lighting the cigarettes of the Air Force Lieutenant Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), and Army Sergeant Al Stephenson (Fredric March).¹ After disembarking the three share a cab back to their old lives, or whatever they could make out of them; Homer not able to bring himself to embrace his sweetheart. Al Stephenson, unrecognized by the doorman at his own apartment, surprises his wife and children, but quickly finds out that his kids have grown up significantly, and his wife's social circles have changed. While dealing with mental traumas, Fred attempts to find the woman he married just before he departed, but when he does his marriage quickly sours as they party away the last of his savings. He is reduced to taking up his low paying pre-war job in a drug store, his military experience having no bearing on the civilian world. The film The Best Years of Our Lives might look a bit dated to a modern audience, as the acting and narratives of 1946 were more stylized than today's viewers are used to, but at the time it was praised for its realism.² The basic narrative of returning veterans trying to put their lives back together is made more poignant by the two-Oscar-winning portrayal of Homer by Army veteran Harold Russell (Best Supporting Actor, and a special award for “bringing aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures”).³

Conversations About Fear: The Bonus March of 1932

“WARSHIPS AT HAVANA”

“Their Assembling is Favorably Regarded Here.”

          These were headlines from the Evening Star, January 26, 1898.¹ The newspaper lays out the situation as relayed by Consul General Fitzhugh Lee: the United States Armored Cruiser (referred to as a battle ship) USS Maine (ACR-1) had arrived to Havana, Cuba, for a good-will port visit, and the city received them well. Lee anticipated that German, British, and French ships would soon be joining them in the Spanish city, from which he had returned observing no signs of disorder. The intent of the international force was to show the Spanish government, currently contending with Cuban nationalists, that the Maine's visit was well intended.

          Less than a month later the Evening Star would be trying to make sense of the explosion aboard the Maine that destroyed the ship. Headlines like “The Maine Blown Up” sat next to “Officers Puzzled,” and “The Cabinet Confer: Members Discuss the News With the President” that reported the buzz of activity at the White House following the arrival of telegrams.² Included in those were regrets from the Spanish government and assurances that they were not responsible for the explosion. War drums quickly drowned out whatever good will the Maine had intended to convey. One week after the explosion, well before official investigations were complete, newspapers began publishing telegrams and letters of support for war with Spain. In Oklahoma The Wichita Daily Eagle ran an entire column on their front page of offers to serve, requests to the governor for authorization to raise companies of troops, and pledges of armed support to the President.³ By March, Lehigh University students paraded through the town with the slogan “To hell with Spain.”⁴ The phrase, sometimes amended with “Remember the Maine,” morphed quickly into songs and stories (many about children) that appeared around the country.⁵

Memories of the Ancient World

Thucydides 

Herodotus

          Both Thucydides and Herodotus are active agents in the writing of their histories. Even if they had the intention to present the past exactly as it was, they are recording their memories of the past appended with the collected memories of others. What is remembered and what is forgotten in their histories is directly tied to who they are and how they understood events.

          The style of narratives and the overall form of their works differed because of the two authors' goals, and the temporal distance from themselves and the objects of their study. Both are working with memories—their own, and those of others. Herodotus sets out to record the events of the Persian War explicitly as a memory project, to stop the natural tendency where oral histories are forgotten in time.¹ Thucydides, having started his work convinced that the Peloponnesian War would be the most important conflict in history (up to his own time), began recording his understanding of the events as soon as it began.²

Research Proposal for Veterans in Translation: An Oral History of Peace and War

Discussion of the Topic:

          In 1999 the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) was on a regularly scheduled three-month-long deployment in the Pacific Ocean when a fire aboard the USS George Washington (CVN-73) prevented them from taking their rotation in the Persian Gulf in support of Operation Southern Watch. Kitty Hawk, a few weeks away from returning to its home port of Yokosuka, Japan, was tasked to immediately redeploy to cover the gap in the rotation. The crew, having only been trained for the anticipated threats of a cruise under Threat Condition Normal, was not ready to go into a hostile environment where there was a chance of unconventional warfare. Making all speed toward the Gulf, the officers and the Damage Control Training Team (DCTT, pronounced DE-set) stepped up every possible training program on the aging ship.

          September 11, 2001 was still a long ways away, and the 1991 Operation Desert Storm was a long time before. The only recent activity in the Gulf that had made international news was in 1998 when Iraq allowed weapons inspectors to enter the country. Before Saddam Hussein had struck an agreement, the 1MC (1 Main Circuit, a public address system) at Recruit Training Facility Great Lakes, Il., crackled to life in the middle of one of the many, nearly identical days I spent at Basic Training. After a short briefing on the situation in Iraq, all of us recruits looked at each other with confusion and foreboding. Before we could flood our Recruit Division Commander with questions, he departed the barracks, leaving us alone to grapple with the news we had just received.

          “Are we going to war?” asked a fellow recruit whose name I will never remember, but whose wavering voice and deeply concerned expression I will never forget.

The Study of History

The following is a statement of my personal understanding of the study of History, and how it relates to the past, relics, collective memories, and the meaning of the past.

1. History is the study of the past.
2. The past is a set of events that occurred previous to the present.
3. Events can leave evidence, which is known as relics.
4. Not all events create relics.
5. The relation that makes a relic historically significant is that it was affected by the past in a way that could bear meaning.
6. Human-created relics can bear meaning.
7. Relics act as symbols for bundles of meanings.
8. The relation between the bundles of meanings associated with relics and the past is determined by collectives of individuals.
9. The collectives normalize meaning amongst themselves via communication about the remembered past.
10. Collectives are determined by some aspect of commonality.
    1. Degrees of difference can remove individuals from identifiable collectives.
    2. Collectives are not necessarily inclusive or exclusive.
       

Book Review of "And a Time for Hope: Americans in the Great Depression" by James R. McGovern.

Book Review

And a Time for Hope: Americans in the Great Depression. By James R. McGovern. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2001, pp. 368. $35.00.

          James McGovern's book shows that the way we view the lives of Americans during the Depression is far from how they saw themselves. There is a well-understood narrative about the Great Depression built from photography, literature, and collective memories, which places the American people in the role of the victim, helplessly hobbled by economic forces they could do nothing about.¹ The Farm Security Administration's Historical Section produced photographs documenting small town life and the plight of the poor to demonstrate to the American people the problems the New Deal was meant to fix.² John Steinbeck's 1939 Grapes of Wrath and the 1940 film adaptation by John Ford adds to the FSA's photographs a story of poor Oklahoma farmers that migrated to California, but the characters' overwhelming victimization never allows them to become clear representations of the real “Okies”.³

          McGovern's attempt to break the reader away from the culturally approved narrative of the story was far from easy. The feelings images and stories create are notoriously difficult to shift. Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph, “Migrant Mother,” which shows Florence Thompson, deep worry lines etched into her face and three of her children clutching at her, produces an immediate emotional reaction.⁴ The effects of her photographs were intentionally aimed at lawmakers, according to Lange's private correspondence with another FSA photographer.⁵ To break the spell of the powerfully emotive pictures, McGovern had to turn away from them, and look at the photographers and the FSA to find their motivations and aims.

The Fog Of The Mind

     On the blank canvas of imagination I sat myself down in a comfortable antique wicker chair next to a large metal and wooden trunk, relics of my own family's past. The chair, my great grandmother's, restored time and again; the trunk her mother used to cross the Great Plains, and then left to collect dust, forgotten in an attic for generations. Although the poor condition of the wood leaves it little more than a display piece, carefully opening the lid shows it to be filled with treasures unbounded. It holds memories. Here it is a place where, from time to time, new old books, musty with age, are sorted, arranged, and conscientiously stored for some future time. Here, in a place of quite reflection, a cabin of the mind, a cozy crackling fire, a warm drink, and tomes enough to occupy a lifetime surrounds. Here is a space for all things to live again.

Through the frosty window a low bank of fog made its long procession across the valley, consuming each tree, building, and feature of the landscape. It was the time of year when this kind of weather was not uncommon. The echoes of long-distant actions roll along in the bank making it harder to distinguish just how far off they were. As I watched the last of trees slipping from view, the distance of here now, and there then was pulled behind the icy blanket. The wicker and the wood take their place in history, living in the past only to be shown in the present.

     Turning to family album, I leafed through the pages of dead-eyed portraits, slices of time without the slightest bit of context. Here a sailor, his white-hat cocked to the side, there a babe in the arms of a mother. They have no names, only the slightest hint of lives that were once theirs. The family album, long ago divided in two—one book of sepia photographs, and one of ink and pencil—separated from one another. The fog had reached the door.

Finding a Voice

In the 1970's the role of women in society was in a flux like it never had been before in recorded History; despite their clear presence and importance, women had been ignored, and cast into specific culturally defined roles.¹ Judy Chicago's massive multimedia sculpture, The Dinner Party, was her attempt to rectify and draw public attention to forgotten women, their roles, and the struggle to gain equal rights and recognition.² Like Cindy Sherman's use of herself as a model in her Untitled Film Stills series to focus attention on the way society looks at women, literally, Chicago used the dinner tables as a comment about how women were expected to fit into a domestic role, but she set the tables for women of note.³ Her original idea of “a feminist Last Supper” with 13 places gave way as her research showed that the number of important, but disregarded women was far larger than it might seem, which led her to include 39 settings and 999 tiles each representing one specific ignored woman.⁴ The repeated patterns of the triangular tiles in the triangular floor ringed by tables produces an effect not unlike Magdalena Abakanowicz's 80 Backs fiber sculpture, which symbolically depicts individuals being “lost in a crowd” and speaks to the marginalization of the women both individually and collectively.⁵

Bibliography

Abakanowicz, Magdalena. “80 Backs.” 1976-1980 (Museum of Modern Art, Dallas). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-26. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

Chicago, Judy. “The Dinner Party.” Multimedia, including ceramics and stitchery, 1979 (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-24. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

Kleiner, Fred. Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed. Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013.

1 Fred Kleiner, Gardner's Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), 438-9.

2 Ibid., 439.

3 Ibid., 439.

4 Ibid., 438-9.

5 Judy Chicago, “The Dinner Party,” multimedia, including ceramics and stitchery, 1979 (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-24. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), 438.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, “80 Backs,” 1976-1980 (Museum of Modern Art, Dallas). In Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, 3^rd ed., by Fred Kleiner, Figure 15-26. (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2013), 440.

Kleiner, 438-40.

Gears, Clocks, Pipes, and Urinals: Art as the Psyche

          The generation of artists that were making art during the beginning of the 20^th century saw many drastic changes in society. The machine-like nature of modern life led to the machine-like nature of the first World War. The basis of this new oil and blood-soaked life caused several strong reactions in the art and general academic worlds. New theories about what was, and what should be abounded. Among this furore of new ideas, two artistic movements captured aspects of modernity in completely novel ways. Dadaism and Surrealism, while aesthetically different, share many commonalities, and are rather similar, even in their differences.

          As if a magazine had exploded and cutout images and words had floated down onto a canvas, Hannah Hoch's Cut With the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany first appears to be an eclectic photomontage that defies everything that art had traditionally been.¹ Rational explanation seems to fail this work as the bits of this and that seem to share little obvious relationships. In the top center of the frame a large cog sits beneath a picture of a row of buildings, a dancing couple, two letters “nf”, a man's head pasted onto a woman in a checkered bag dress. The cog overlaps and is overlapped by bits of people, machinery, elephants and things less identifiable. One might stare at this work for ages, and without a complete mastery of the culture and people contemporary to that age, one might never be able to identify the objects that make up the composition. Even when one is able to name the object, like “artist Kathe Kollwitz's head float[ing] above a dancer's body”, no rational reason as to why the elements were so composed might ever be forthcoming.²

A Car Darkly

          A poster-sized framed ink-jet print of Charles Harbutt's 1971 photograph titled “Car in Alley, Leadville, CO” is being shown until June 1, 2014 as part of his “Departures and Arrivals” collection at the University of Arizona's Center for Creative Photography.ⁱ The black and white print is a wash of grays with only a few small patches of solid blacks and very little white.ⁱⁱ The effect is like tenebrism flipped on its head. Instead of strong contrasts between localized highlights in a generally dark composition, or chiaroscuro-like use of tonality to produce depth in the work, the grays of the print offer a neutral palette from which sparkling white highlights and deep blacks burst forth.ⁱⁱⁱ The effect is as equally dramatic as any of the classic masters' drama and tension achieved with the contrasty techniques, but the conflict is completely driven by the gray-tones.

          From the muted illumination, a portion of a chromed bumper and grill of a late-model Cadillac seems to creep out of a back alley. A brick wall obscures half of one of the headlights, most of the hood and the rest of the car. Just in the frame-within-the-framed print, the chromed windshield wiper, and driver-side mirror can barely be seen. The organic lines of the car's hood, accentuated by the chromed front fin, and the center-hood crease, draw the eye back to where the driver would be, but the wall, every so slightly in soft-focus, denies the viewer the ability to see the human implied by the photograph.

No Impact Challenge

As part of the University of Arizona's course, Our Human Footprint, the students were given the challenge of living for a week as close to having no impact on the environment as possible.  The inspiration for this challenge was from the movie, No Impact Man. (If you haven't seen it, the link is to Hulu, where you can watch it for free.)  This blog post is my report on my experiences during the No Impact Challenge and what it has inspired me to do.

I am choosing to do a blog post in a conversational, decidedly non-academic tone, because I am convinced that if we are going to make the changes necessary, we need big solutions, like already-familiar solar farms, innovative algae solutions for fuel production, and even the truly monumentally ambitious new projects on the horizon.  However, there is a good chance we're all going to die (not to put too fine a point on it) waiting for big, expensive solutions that require political and financial support.  So we're going to need a lot of small, personal solutions as well.  I think we get the best small solutions from tapping into the tinkering power of regular people.  To that end, I do not want to bury my own work behind the walls of an academic institution on something so important as fixing the environmental damage we've all done.  I am really writing this post, not as a fulfillment of a final assignment of a class, but as the first step in a long journey; this is more of a personal commencement charge than a report.  It is a necessary step that we're all going to have to take sooner or later.

So back to the challenge.  The idea wasn't necessarily to replicate the Beavan family's efforts, but to really examine our own daily lives and find what we do that has negative environmental impacts that we don't need to do.  The week was meant, as best as I understand it, to get a taste of what that life would be like to demonstrate that it isn't the end of the world or even particularly difficult if it is planned out right.  If the Beavan family, in the heart of New York city, can turn their electricity completely off, give up cars, hand-wash their clothing, compost all their scraps, stop using plastic containers, eat locally grown food, and find low to no impact solutions to household and daily needs for an entire year, then we could try it for a week.

Selfies: Oil on Canvas

          Standing in a lush chamber, surrounded by marbles, silks, and velvet of the highest quality, dripping with the trappings of wealth, power and luxury, Louis XIV gazes out of the frame of his portrait.¹ In a regal pose with his body turned partially away, hand resting on a golden cane, and white-clad legs on full display, the King of France seems to gaze down upon the world. The world his visage looks down on is all that he thought himself the ruler as the “Sun King”.² This noble portrait, captured by Hyacinthe Rigaud in the opening years of the 18^th century, is a continuation of a tradition of donor portraiture, but applied to and glorifying the head of state instead of a religious subject. It is but one shift in the tapestry of artistic representation of the world. While a certain amount of portraiture in the 1600s was for the idealization of rich elite nobles, the rise of self-portraits and group portraits shows that artists were beginning to democratize their works and capture a shift in the political and social structures of society. 

The Dissection Of Humanism: Opening Up Renaissance Art

          As both a product and part of culture, art acts as mirror to the society that created it. When culture changes, generally so does art. As the Byzantine Empire began to crumble in the late-14^th to early 15^th centuries, Italy became the home of classic Greek and Roman writings and the scholars that broke translational traditions that made the works difficult to understand.¹ Those works reignited a spark of learning that was captured by the artists' hands, a reflection frozen in time. In this paper I will argue that Renaissance artists used the humanist ideals of their day to radically depart the Medieval traditions of the art world. I will do this by first showing why it is necessary to limit the meaning the of now-fattened “humanism” term down to something closer to what was understood in the Renaissance. Then I will show that the narrowed definition is clearly visible in the art itself.

          The term “humanism” has gained various meanings over the years including many from different philosophic, ethical, political, secular, and religious schools of thought.² It is close to becoming an umbrella term that can contain notions that confuse the nature of the topic being discussed. By that I mean that what can be properly called “humanistic” might be human-centric, the study of the modern concepts of the humanities, or more simply classicism (the study of the art of ancient Greece and Rome).³ Lest ideas from modernity be improperly conveyed into topics to which they have no business being associated, before beginning a discussion about humanism in the art of antiquity and the Renaissance, it is necessary to separated the exact meaning intended by the use of “humanism” in this context.

Absolute Masters

“... arborum autem consectione omnique materia et culta et silvestri partiam ad calficiendum corpus igni adhibito et ad mitigandum cibum utimur, partim ad aedificandum ut tectis saepti frigora caloresque pellamus. magnos vero usus adfert ad navigia facienda, quorum cursibus subpeditantur omnes undique ad vitam copiae … Terrenorum item commodorum omnis est in homine dominatus.”¹

“We cut down trees, and use every kind of wild and cultivated timber, not only to make fire to warm us and dress our meat, but also for building, and that we may have houses to defend us from the heat and cold. With timber likewise we build ships, which bring us from all parts every commodity of life. ... We are the absolute masters of what the earth produces.”²

Cicero, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), (45 CE).

          The heavy ax balanced by the trunk of the maple tree. The craggy branches stretched out in all directions like the veins in the wood cutter's sweat-drenched hands. The cool spring air had given way to the hot Mediterranean summer; the ocean breeze and the shade of the tree the only respite from the mid-day sun. It was a shame that by the evening, one of those things would be gone, but this was the last of Appius' work for now.

Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Art

          Early Greek artwork lacks the refinement that is seen in the formal styles found in the later Classical Greek period, but themes begin to emerge that can be used to draw some conclusion about the daily lives of those that created it. The oldest pieces often employ an extremely stylized form to represent the world, and the simplistic figures are barely above the status of symbols, like one might expect to see in pictographs. In many ways, they can be viewed in linguistic terms and they can almost be read like a page.

          For example, the geometric krater from the Diphlon cemetery shows, in two horizontal registers not altogether different from Egyptian hieroglyphs, the story of the internment of a figure, starting in the lower register with a procession of soldiers and chariots.¹ The soldiers in the procession, traveling from left to right, are recognizable by the figure-of-eight shields and weapons. The upper register focuses to a central image of a frontal figure horizontally displayed above what is likely a bier.² The form of the figures are nearly identical, except that on the second register females a denoted by having two small dots on one side of their bodies, believed to be breasts, and the central horizontal figure, a thin line from his upper thigh that represented his penis.³ From this depiction, it may be concluded that the Athenians placed an importance on the death of this individual, but also that death was dealt with using what appears to be a fair amount of public ritual, having such a procession of soldiers in addition to the attending mourners. The most important cultural clue from this piece is that the artist took the time to individuate the sex of each figure even though the primitive style otherwise depicted them as identical. The roles that the sexes are shown in seem to be exclusive, women in morning, and men in procession. This is not the first work to display both sexes nearly identically, but separated by artistic convention and role.

Prelude to a Catholic Wedding

          This paper will offer a formal analysis of “The Visitation,” dated 1496-97, the oil on wood panel painting by the Master of the Retablo of the Reyes Catholicos (Master of the Catholic Kings).ⁱ Currently in the University of Arizona Museum of Art's collection, the painting is a vertical panel that stands 60.96 inches tall and is 37.48 inches wide.ⁱⁱ While the identity of the artist is unknown, the name is inspired by the overall eight-panel set, “The Altarpiece of the Catholic Kings,” of which this is one panel.ⁱⁱⁱ

          Surrounded the painting is a thick wooden frame in an architectural motif carved in low relief. The frame has hexagonal engaged columns, or maybe pilasters, with ornate sectional bases and reliefs of repeated Gothic arches pointing upward toward a twisting helical sectional shaft with flower embellishments. Those support smooth shafts bearing ornately decorated spire capitals topped with blossoming flowers. The entire piece is capped by an exaggerated Ionic architrave. Bridging the two columns is a lattice of repeating arches. The organically curved high vaults vary in size, but maintain a relative scale among them. The lattice is segmented into three equidistant sections by two additional floating spire capitals, which give the impression of a colonnade without intruding into the painting's space. The lattice is also embellished with leaves, some in the fleur-de-lis style, and some in a stylized rhomboid pattern, specifically those acting at the decorative tips of semicircle embellishments descending from the main arches.

Student Impact on the University of Arizona Recycling Program

(This was a report of a student "experiment", and the test group was altogether too small to make any serious conclusions. I don't mistake this for Science.)

Abstract

     In this study a test group's trash to recycling ratio is measured to evaluate the current reported efficiency of the University of Arizona's Recycling and Waste Management Program, and to test the estimated potential maximum recycling goal of the program. The experiment ran for one week, and included four students. The data was compared to one month of published waste management figures.

Water and Power

The price of the gas in your car, the electricity on the grid, and the water flowing through your pipes is not the result of a laissez-fair free market.  Each of those industries have massive ... I don't know what to call them, subsidies, welfare, hand-outs, entitlements, tax credits... They're all the same thing, tax payer's dollars in the hands of individuals/companies.  Yes, that does include money you own in taxes, but the government, for whatever reason, decides to not charge you, like the 47% of Americans that don't get charged any income taxes, and everyone that has a mortgage, low income families, elderly and disabled, people saving for retirement, people that have children, people that care for children, people that adopt children, people seeking higher education, people buying their first house, people that make their businesses and/or residences more energy efficient, businesses that use alternative fuel sources for their transportation fleets, businesses that donate (time, money, product, or other support) to disaster relief, businesses doing research, ....  Trying to list the number of ways that businesses can reduce their taxes would take a library.

Populations

I am going to express the unpopular position now.  The number one threat to continued human existence is the run-away population explosion that we have seen since the Industrial Revolution, and driven forward at an amazing rate since the Green Revolution.  We have been well aware of it since at least the 60s.  America's birth rate is still too high, and our life-expectancy continues to grow our numbers too quickly, but nothing as compared to the developing world.  There, you can not avoid seeing exactly what the population explosion is doing.  It is the main driving force behind our increase in resource consumption, green house gas emissions, and poverty levels.

More people are being born into a state of abject poverty from which they have no hope of ever getting out of than ever before in human history.  More people with the same or less resources = poverty for a vast majority, e.g. the US must create more than 300,000 new jobs every month just to employ all the people coming into the market, but we can't even manage half that amount.

Football and Child Abuse

A solid link has been made between brain injuries and football. It seems to be inherent in the game; if you play football, regardless of any possible safety equipment and perhaps because of the equipment (like with boxing and gloves), you risk serious, and potentially irreversible brain damage. Knowing this, every time I see anything about the game, it makes me a little sick.

The only thing that at all removes a bit of the disgust is that the people playing the sport choose to play it, and are generally very well paid. However, when I stop and think about what it means for fans to support the game, I am repulsed in a completely different way. It is one thing to do a dangerous job knowing that inevitably in the process you will be repeatedly injured in ways that will forever change you in negative ways.

Closing Pascal’s Box

          Nearly four centuries ago Blasie Pascal laid out his famous wager in an attempt to prove that it was rational to believe in God. The argument seems deceptively simple, either God exists or not, we have to “place a bet,” so to speak, and the only way we “win” the wager is if we bet for God, and God exists. Hidden in this attempt to justify theism is a rather complex use of probability and decision theories, voluntarism, pragmatism, and an often overlooked use of infinity.¹ This argument had implications far beyond the Philosophy of Religion, and set the stage for the continuing debate on epistemic justification, how it is rational for us to form and hold beliefs. In effect, he opened Pandora's box on this topic.

          In this paper I will show that some of the last openings for Pascal's mode of thinking have been closed off in recent years. While it is clear that there is a great number of things that can be said about his argument, I will focus on voluntarism, forming beliefs at will, and pragmatic justifications, basing beliefs on non-epistemic concerns. With these two features alone, we can remove any doubt that rational people can be epistemically justified in being convinced by the wager, and we can close Pascal's box.

Proposed Research Project

The following is a research proposal done as part of a class.  I may never do this project, and while my claims here are supported by the evidence that I found, this is far from a completed project, and so can't be taken as a solid argument.

Discussion of the Topic:

          The topic of this research project is the complex and seemingly contradictory histories of the Constitutionality of religious practices inside the United States Government. While the primary study will be on the federal level, some important state cases, like the 1927 Scopes trial, may also be examined. It may seem that until the latter half of the 20^th Century there is a tendency for government to endorse religious beliefs and practices (Lewis 2002, 78-80). While that is compounded by the ceremonial and patriotic governmental mentions of “God” (Newdow v. Rio Linda 2010, 3877), it is a mistake to believe that the Constitution allowed any level of government to endorse religion, or prefer religion over non-religious beliefs (Schauer 1996, 444).

Moral Pluralism and George's Job Search

          In this paper I will briefly lay out W. D. Ross' ethical theory, Moral Pluralism (MP), and apply it to Bernard Williams' “George the chemist” case in order to demonstrate how such a theory can resolve moral conflicts. Moral Pluralism differs from what could be called “moral monism” in that monism claims that there is a single principle that serves as an explanation of morality,¹ but pluralism claims there is a collection of principles where none of them are more basic or fundamental than the rest.² The major departure between pluralism and monism is that there is no single justification of morality, the parts of morality, or the plurality of the moral rules; the basic moral rules exist together, they cannot be derived from one another, and they are not grounded on some external principle.³

          This may seem less plausible than other theories because determinations in specific cases are usually deduced from a combination of the basic principle and the derived duties. Here, we have only a collection of duties with no principle to make use of in deciding cases. Ross did not find this problematic because he posited “prima facie” duties (PFD), a collection of basic moral duties, and what could be called “all-things-considered” duties (ATCD), the duties that are left after careful reflection on “one's duty proper … [or] one's actual duty.”⁴ Imagine a driver of a car on a snowy freeway. The driver has a large number of legal duties that apply to her at any given moment: the duty to keep the car in working order, to use turn signals before changing lanes, to drive safe speeds, and to keep her vehicle under her control in all weather conditions. Failing at any of one of these might count as being legally blameworthy. If an emergency vehicle should appear behind her with full lights and sirens, all the PFDs of driving are still there, but her ATCD becomes to move out of the way.

A Response to "Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World 1890-1940"

          George Chauncey's goal in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World 1890-1940, was to bring into the public consciousness a forgotten segment of American History, the history of a culture that was “not supposed to have existed”.¹ He confronts three widely held misconceptions of the homosexual culture in pre-World War II New York City, which form the modern conception until the latter half of the 20^th Century; homosexuals lived in isolation from one another, were invisible to the public sphere, and that they internalized a self-loathing and other negative attitudes from the mainstream culture.² His task is to show evidence that none of those were universally true.

          The means with which Chauncey sets about this task is to give the reader a glimpse into the “gay world” were modern readers might expect to find “the gay closet”.³ The gay world was a loosely connected web of social networks, each separable and distinct from one another,⁴ creating their own common folklore, unique linguistic style, and establishing their own (long running) cultural festivals.⁵ In drawing the map of the “sexual topography” of NYC, he leaves behind the familiar lines that now separate heterosexual from homosexual, by illustrating the extent, uses, and intermixed character of both the physical and social spaces at the time.⁶

Jim's Predicament

          This paper compares Rule Consequentialism (RC) and Kantian ethics by examining their application to Bernard Williams' “Jim the botanist” thought experiment, a difficult moral case. This is to explore the relative strengths and weaknesses of these theories. By briefly showing the key differences in the approaches, it should become evident that, although both are flawed, the two rule-based systems are not equally capable of producing moral determinations.

          Jim is a foreigner captured by a government that has issues with the natives protesting them. In an attempt to quell the protests, the government has rounded up 20 random natives they plan to execute. Since it is apparently rare that a foreigner would be there, Jim is given the opportunity to save 19 lives, but he must personally kill one. He has no reason to think that any of the natives are guilty of a capital offense, but not killing one of them will result in all 20 of them dying. This forced choice is meant to demonstrate that there may be times which we think that it is acceptable to violate an absolute prohibition in order to prevent additional violations.¹

Folk Moral Objectivism

The following paper is a response to "Folk Moral Relativism".

     The article “Folk Moral Relativism” attempts to use empirical means to show that previous studies, which concluded that most were moral objectivists, arrived at that conclusion by looking at the same culture as the respondents, and that by expanding the study to include other cultures they hoped to show that people hold a relativistic view of morality. However, while their studies may show that there is a common tendency to view that cultures hold different moral standards, the inequality of justifications of standards suggests objectivism is the folk norm.

     Before examining the article, it would be useful to understand the meaning of Moral Relativism (MR), and Moral Objectivism (MO) in this context. MR claims that the correctness of any given moral action needs to be evaluated in the context of a culture, sometimes resulting in contradictory conclusions being correct.¹ MO claims that there is only one truth about morality in a similar manner as there is only one truth about empirical claims.² If there are two competing notions of the rightness of a given action, one “is surely mistaken”.³

     Previous studies show that a majority of people hold MO to be correct, but this study set out to demonstrate that the findings were skewed by methodology, and that the truth was far more complicated.⁴ By pointing out that there are external facts which have a bearing on the truth of any claim, like the seasons being relative to the hemisphere, considering moral claims with reference to other cultures leads to relativistic conclusions; the more extreme the difference in cultures, the greater likelihood neither stance is viewed as wrong.⁵

     The first study demonstrated this by surveying students from Baruch College, New York City, on the moral correctness of two actions, killing a child based on appearance, and testing the sharpness of a knife by random stabbings. Conflicting opinions were reported of judges from wildly different cultures, two from their own culture (specifically one from their own immediate collective), one from an isolated warrior tribe, and one from an alien culture.⁶ The results showed that the closer to their own culture, the more likely the students would say at least one of the conflicting opinions was wrong, but that is less true as people think about different cultures.⁷