FFP: Missouri Christmas Card: Czech Advertisement

How many of you have ever posted family pix on blog? Who hasn't?

We make these images public in order to share our lives with the few folks who might be interested enough to drop by from time to time.

And we certainly don't presume that anyone else will use them for commercial purposes, right? Well, don't tell that to the Smith Family! Check out this snip from the AP:

"When Danielle Smith and her family posed for their Christmas card photo last year, they knew they'd share it with family and friends. But the Missouri family wasn't expecting it to show up in the Czech Republic, splashed across a huge storefront advertisement."

This story was widely reported yesterday, but that's no reason not to feature it as today's Friday Fun Post.

Read the AP Story (yes with pix): http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31214408/

Of sheep pens and revolution

Students taking my version of Rhetoric and Public Life tackle Thomas More's (1516) Utopia, a book that sometimes frustrates them before (usually) becoming one of their most vivid memories of class. In preparation for that adventure, I occasionally reread More's classic survey of a good-place/not-place where European customs, practices, and collective ideas about justice are turned upside down. Invariably I'm amazed that while More could not contemplate a United States of America, his words offer insight, and a little bit of critique, for our own experiment in utopian exceptionalism.

Many students encountering Utopia for the first time find More's description of an ideal community to be quaint, even if a little saucy from time to time ("Really? They view prospective spouses in the nude before marriage? Weird."). Further, those unaware of More's personal story and the life-or-death struggles he faced (and to which he ultimately succumbed) can be forgiven for dismissing his little book as mere fancy.

Revisiting Utopia, however, I find myself all the more ensnared by More's ability to render a verdict on class distinctions that are naturalized by church and state even as they clearly benefit the artificially wealthy over the materially poor.

In Book One (of Turner's translation) More's Raphael castigates the English aristocrats who have seized public lands, enclosing them to raise sheep for their personal finery. Before, commoners could raise marginal crops and maintain a dignified (if meager) standard of living. Now, those same people are cast into the cities and left to fend for themselves against a vicious cauldron of greed and corruption. Readers may think, "Hmm, sheep? That's the problem, really? I don't get it." But More makes it plain that the larger issue has little to do with wool. The debate is about values set by increasingly artificial measures.

From that perspective, one cause of our current economic woes - the gathering of cheap and worthless mortgages into bundles, which were then packaged and split into commodities to be bought and sold by people with no sense of the land or its tenants, of the material outcomes of their maneuverings - seems hardly surprising. Thomas More (speaking as Raphael, a traveling philosopher who visited Utopia) saw the same thing in his day:

[I]t's almost entirely under the control of a few rich men, who don't need to sell unless they feel like it, and never do feel like it until they can get the price they want. This also accounts for the equally high prices of other types of livestock, especially in view of the shortage of breeders caused by the demolition of farms, and the general decline of agriculture. For the rich men I'm talking about never bother to breed either sheep or cattle themselves. They merely buy scraggy specimens cheap from someone else, fatten them up on their own pastures, and resell them at a large profit. I imagine that's why the full effects of the situation have not yet been felt. So far they've only inflated prices in the areas where they sell, but if they keep transferring animals from other districts faster than they can be replaced, stocks in the buying areas too will gradually be depleted, until eventually there'll be an acute shortage everywhere. (p. 48)

More's Utopia (in Book Two) proceeds to tour the island that reveals an alternative to this economic structure, proposing instead a place where people work six hours a day and otherwise enjoy lives of leisure, conversation, education, and - more often that contemporary readers may imagine - volunteerism. How can it be so? How can a society endure if its workers toil only six hours a day?

It's easy, says More, if everybody (with a handful of exceptions) works toward the common good rather than for personal gain. Imagine if all of today's professions that produce nothing materially useful to the common good were abolished, More wonders, if people farmed together, constructed handicrafts together, and concentrated their energies on only basic needs.

More imagines that the artificial pleasures of a society - gambling in his day, anesthesizing ourselves with television today - would become odd and mildly pathetic to a community in which all people attend to each others' functional needs. Returning to material labors and material pleasures would inspire us to cultivate our mental gardens with much finer stuff than that which passes for inspiration to the contemporary mind.

More's Utopia is wildly and unabashedly communistic, of course. There is no property, no money, no sense of personal initiative that competes with the public good. It is therefore impractical, laughable, improbable, so say its knee-jerk critics. As for myself, benefiting as I do from a contemporary system that makes room for such musings (remember, there would be far fewer teachers in Utopia, and none who study something as abstract as "rhetoric and public life"), I sympathize with the reasoning of those who mock More's excesses.

Still, I cannot help but understand his fury at an economic system that deprives its prime movers - those who work with their hands more than those who manipulate spreadsheets - of the dignity of a living wage and then calls for us to define such artificial misery as natural, inevitable, necessary. I leave this note once more with More's Raphael who reminds us how similar the rage of 1516 looks today if we merely consider our contemporary world as but one of many choices that have been made, one that may be unmade if we have the will to peer past the horizon of common sense.

People like aristocrats, goldsmiths, or money-lenders, who either do no work at all, or do work that's really not essential, are rewarded for their laziness or their unnecessary activities by a splendid life of luxury. But labourers [sic], coachmen, carpenters, and farmhands, who never stop working like cart-horses, at jobs so essential that, if they did stop working, they'd bring any country to a standstill within twelve months - what happens to them? They get so little to eat, and they have such a wrenched time, that they'd be almost better off if they were cart-horses. Then at least, they wouldn't work quite such long hours, their food wouldn't be very much worse, they'd enjoy it more, and they'd have no fears for the future. . . What's more, the wretched earnings of the poor are daily whittled away by the rich, not only through private dishonesty, but through public legislation. As if it weren't unjust enough already that the man who contributes most to society should get the least in return, they make it even worse, and then arrange for injustice to be legally described as justice. (pp. 129-130)

Read the book: More, T. (1516/1997). Utopia. New York, NY: Dover Thrift Edition. Another translation online: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Utopia

No fun for you, Mr. President. Not yours.

For no particular reason, The Obamas recently went on a date in NYC, grabbing a meal, seeing a show, that sort of thing. Predictably, a chorus of howls followed. How can this guy have a date with his wife amid all the crisis of our current days?

Give me a break.

Responding to the "No fun, Mr. President" tuts, Maureen Dowd offers a reply that I thought I'd repost:

"What a relief to have an urbane, cultivated, curious president who’s out and about, engaged in the world. Not dangerously detached, as W. was, or darkly stewing like Cheney. Not hanging with the Rat Pack like J.F.K. or getting bored and up to mischief like Bill Clinton."

Well said.

Yes, we expect our president to devote extraordinary hours to fixing the mess he inherited. And yes, it'd be unseemly if the only image we had of Obama was him flitting about from date night to date night when so many Americans are suffering the ravages of our broken economy.

But I agree with Dowd: It's nice to have a president who seems to be interested in the world outside of the White House. Let him take a break now and again; our problems will be there for him when he returns.

Read the entire essay: Can The One Have Fun?

66 in 96

Recently I found a set of prints from our first family roadtrip. It's always saddened me that we wrote so little about that initial adventure - and that I lost several pages of a recent attempt to summarize that trip to an accidental deletion of the only file I'd saved. A few memories from our first Route 66 trip can be found on a previous note on summer roadtrips, I offered some detail about the motels we visited in an early version of our Motel Americana website, and Jenny wrote some brief notes in her journal, but there are few photos from that time that contain our feelings from the trip. Thus it's pretty cool to have these images (a couple also found in other scattered locations) collected in one place. They help me collect my thoughts a bit.

As depicted in the above pic, Jenny, Vienna, and I visited Cadillac Ranch, which is slightly west of Amarillo, Texas. Tourists encountering this site often bring cans of spray paint to mark up the cars, a practice that is tacitly accepted by the folks who maintain this private art exhibit to the glory and folly of America's auto-centric civilization.

Below (the next day), we stood for a portrait from our "tepee" at Wigwam Village in Holbrook, Arizona. I remember using a payphone to make a reservation the previous night and then racing to arrive before the office closed, marveling at the deep red buttes that flew by while we roared toward the sunset. I'm fairly sure we snagged the last room. Incidentally, this is one of three remaining "Villages" based on a motel concept created by Frank A. Redford.

The next image (below), featuring Vienna atop a fiberglass rabbit, was taken at the Jack Rabbit Trading Post near Joseph City, Arizona (one of my favorite places). Vienna was six years old at the time - then as now, a real cutie. See that sombrero? For some reason, our daughter wanted one of those tourist trinkets more than anything. I couldn't begin to guess where that souvenir ended up.

No doubt, a highlight of our journey was an overnight excursion to the Grand Canyon. We made a print of the image below and sealed it in a postcard acetate that made its way to Jenny's grandmother. That print resides today in an album she keeps. I remember us entering the national park so late that the ticket booth wasn't staffed, which was a good thing. We had a tight budget - even more than we anticipated, for reasons noted below - and we needed to save every penny.

I vividly remember the hike partway into the canyon. Our daughter (again, fairly young at the time) understandably grew tired of the exertion, and we all suffered with each step upward. Even so, we loved the chance to watch the rock squirrels scamper and cavort. Signs made it plain that folks are not supposed to feed the creatures, and I've since come to understand the wisdom of these admonitions. But as the picture shows, I just couldn't resist sharing a tiny morsel.

By the way, see the tacky trucker's hat I'm wearing? That was Jenny's gift to me the morning after we'd been robbed by some loser who broke into our car as we played miniature golf in St. Louis. Right then, the first night of our trip, I seriously considered ditching the entire thing, just turning around and heading back. We felt so violated and vulnerable so far from home. Continuing onward just didn't seem worth the hassle. But the next morning, seeing that goofy-looking hat in Jenny's hand as she returned from calling the bank and switching our accounts, I had to smile. Perhaps we should continue on this trip after all, I figured. I'm so glad we did.

This final image (below), taken in an era when we didn't quite understand the need to avoid backlighting in outdoor settings, comes from some point near our western terminus.

On that trip back in '96, starting in Ohio, we drove to St. Louis and then navigated the Mother Road all the way to the California border, just past Needles. Completing that westward trek, we turned north for a visit to Vegas and southern Utah, whereupon we rolled east through the plains states before taking a quick jog northward to Chicago and finally back home to Ohio. None of us had ever traveled such distances by car; Jenny and I came from families for whom such tourism was a luxury. But we were hooked by the experience.

Today we take a serious roadtrip about once a year. Each trip has been memorable, and some are even recalled as exceeding the adventure of "66 in 96." But there's no trip like the first one.

Learn more: I developed a somewhat more detailed summary of my most recent trip along the Mother Road. Check it out: 66 in 08

(Photographs by Jenny Wood)

Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition

Rosemarie K. Bank's essay "Representing History: Performing the Columbian Exposition" provides a number of insights for students of Rhetoric and Public Life, particularly with her focus on the expo's construction of "The Other." In a broader sense, Bank does a solid job of weaving in a perspective relatively new to my home department of communication studies (but admirably enhanced by Matthew Spangler's many contributions to our community): the perspective of performance in the articulation of public life.

Bank focuses on the 1893 Columbian Exposition (the so-called "White City"), attending closely to Frederick Jackson Turner's use of that moment to introduce his "frontier thesis." She also explores Buffalo Bill's Wild West exhibit, an event that did much to crystallize a compelling narrative of how the West was "tamed."

Initial highlights of Bank's piece include her reference to simulacra and her use of Michel Foucault to identify strategies in which discursive practices contain overlapping performances and narratives (rather than merely one that dominates and one that is dominated). While Bank's piece focuses on representations of American Indians at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, she intends for her essay to reflect something of the experiences of many oppressed groups who found themselves positioned in various ways at the fair - and who are represented in contemporary settings that purport to be both touristic and educational.

Bank begins by observing how the White City phantasmagoria contained both utopian and dystopian images, each relying upon the other to come into being. To the author, this balancing of opposing images evokes Foucault's heterotopia: a counter-site whose tolerance for ambiguity enables the management of crisis or deviance [To learn more about heterotopia, I encourage you to read an online version of Jay Miskowiec's translation of Foucault's 1967 lecture on the topic]. In class, I often use examples of amusement parks and motels to illustrate omnitopia].

Thereafter, Bank outlines some of the 1893 fair's various ethnographic exhibits dedicated to highlighting both the identities and distinctions of various racial groups, a significant choice for an event seeking to define the expansion and barriers of civilization. One common theme of the various Native American exhibits, claims Bank, was a turn away from educational ambitions and toward the packaging and portrayal of more caricatured version of the past, often jumbling together historically incongruous styles and group relationships, particularly at the fair's Midway Plaisance.

Even so, Bank refutes charges made by more critical researchers (most notably Robert W. Rydell, whose works on the 1893 fair represent essential reading), that one may find a singular narrative of "cultural hegemony" in these sort of exhibits. She reminds us, "Performers complicate unitary readings and performance resists binary interpretations" (p. 598). [I would add that the notion that agency resides even within the most totatlizing environments animates much of my thinking about public life, as examined further in City Ubiquitous.]

From this analysis, Bank shifts to Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 presentation of his paper, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" [here's an online version of Turner's paper]. Once more, Bank employs Foucault's heterotopia to describe how Turner represented a shift from 18th century views of history-as-continuity to 19th century views of history-as-discontinuity. More intriguingly, Bank contrasts Turner's (nostalgic) frontier - a relatively peaceful and empty site where Europeans traded their urban ways for simpler, rougher, more human modes of life - with the Buffalo Bill Wild West show and its depiction of the frontier as a site of initial struggle and ultimate concord between Europeans and Native Americans.

Bank concludes her analysis by focusing on Buffalo Bill's show and its efforts to depict the "taming" of the frontier as both a struggle located in the past and as a collection of participants continuing into the present. Here Bank offers a response to the critics of these sorts of performance, noting that the Wild West show enabled more freedom and dignity for its Native participants than the presumably more sober and educational ethnographic exhibits offered by government and university sponsors.

Noting the presence of Native Americans in the show who, she claims, were able to perform their roles in a manner more closely aligned with their recollections and interests, Bank states, "This Wild West was a shared history and memory, a jointly occupied arena in which competing claims for authenticity could be presented and evaluated" (p. 605). In this argument, Bank reminds critical scholars to eschew their facile articulations of history, lest their efforts to uplift oppressed groups hold aloft merely their own idealized images.

Read the entire article: Bank. R.K. (2002). Representing history: Performing the Columbian Exposition. Theatre Journal, 54, 589-606.

Note: In summer 2004, I published an essay using Foucault's heterotopia to analyze the Woman's Building at the 1893 fair. I sent my essay off for review before I was able to read Bank's piece; otherwise, I would have happily cited her. If you'd like to see a PDF of my essay, "Managing the Lady Managers: The shaping of heterotopian spaces in the 1893 Chicago Exposition's Woman's Building," published in Southern Communication Journal, send an email to Andrew.Wood@sjsu.edu. Also, any difficulty finding Bank's essay? Let me know. I'm happy to help.

(Image from Legends of America)

Durable Ephemera

Perhaps my favorite course to teach is Rhetoric and Public Life, perhaps because it's the first class that I could design to reflect a singularly coherent vision. While other colleagues in my department teach the course as well, all of us addressing common objectives, each brings a unique spin to our respective versions of COMM 149. One unique theme of my class is the role of ephemera, the throw-away flotsam and jetsam of everyday life, in collecting discarded visions of futures past.

Typically we think of ephemera as being easily thrown away, stuff like paper, postcards, comics, and the like. But the industrial era has made possible a rise in more, shall we say, durable ephemera (it's Friday; I don't mind waxing paradoxical).

Recently, Wired offered a few interesting examples of durable ephemera. Some didn't quite speak to me, failing to whisper much more beyond their apparent depictions of junk. But a couple of them manage to evoke an eerie image of overlapping realities - the kinds of parallel worlds that we discuss in class. Check 'em out: Abandoned Technologies.

Thinking about David Carradine

David Carradine's death comes as a sad surprise to me. Though the actor was 72, I always see him as a young man, shorn of hair, home, and most possessions, wandering the American west as a Shaolin monk in the 70s television series, Kung Fu. I guess you could say that Kwai Chang Caine served as the yin to James Kirk's yang in my childhood understanding of how one responds to conflict.

As a kid, I identified with Caine's preference for non-violence, particularly as I was raised by my mother, a true child of the sixties, to regard pacifism as the only appropriate response to bullying. I wasn't strong and I had no taste for blood. It always confused me why some people truly seem to enjoy inflicting pain upon others.

I remember when my mom invited several kids who tormented me in middle school over to our apartment to share - I swear it - tea and biscuits. When one of them asked cheekily if he could bum a cigarette, she passed one over without blinking an eye. I don't recall having any further problems with those dudes afterward. I learned from her - and saw in Kwai Chang Caine - that kindness generally does turn back a cruel heart.

Of course I also learned - as did Caine and my mom - that sometimes one finds no other alternative than to fight. And there, David Carradine's character possessed such grace and composure, more than I ever did in my own petty school confrontations. If only real life could dissolved into hazy slow-motion poetry as Caine's did in Kung Fu!

I also remember those burning sunsets that served as backdrop for the wandering soul, tramping across an endless desert. I saw myself there too, and today I have a special place in my heart for desolate environs. Indeed, I think our family's tradition of "silent walks" (learn more) was born from watching Kung Fu.

I try to forget most of Carradine's later years: those awful spin-offs, those insipid commercials. Aside from his star turn in Bound for Glory, there seemed to be little magic left to his art. And then came the Kill Bill movies, with Carradine presenting such a subtle balance of kindness and malice that I had to think, there's so much more this guy has to offer.

Too soon, too little time later, he is gone.

I cannot judge his life or his ending, but I know that my regret for Carradine's death is also balanced somewhat by my appreciation for the characters he gave us. It's a rare job that allows you to help other people define who they are. David Carradine's Kwai Chang Caine did that for me.