“Look, we’ve seen this before,” opined Larry Tippits of Villisca, Iowa. “For all of the twentieth century white people were in control of politics, culture, and wealth. Hell, even “the first black president” was white! And that trend only continues today; there’s what, one African American senator? And that’s Roland Burris! No, we’ve had all we can take and we can’t take no more. We won’t be satisfied until people like me [Mr. Tippits self-identifies as "white, with some Cherokee from my great grandmother"] no longer dominate the halls of power and privilege.”

Mr. Tippit’s views appeared to be shared by the mono-chrome crowd who at one point heckled members of the House and Senate–speaking at the event on behalf of their re-election campaigns–with chants of “no taxation without representation!” When Senator Lamar Alexander broke from his rehearsed stump speech to point out that as an elected official he did, in fact, represent the people of Tennessee, he was met with shouts of “well I didn’t vote for you!”

Approached after the event, Senator Alexander threw up his arms and stated, “What the f@#$, don’t these people go to school? I’m in the middle of a stump speech talking to people who look exactly like me, and I have to stop and review the basics of a representative form of government? That’s a sure sign that f@#$ing white people have been in control of this government for far to long, and I won’t tolerate it!”

The event was not all verbal Caucasian on Caucasian violence, however. Lee Greenwood arrived to wow the crowd with a stirring rendition of the now-classic “I’m Proud to be an American.” As he left the stage he shouted to the gathered attendees, “Don’t let this be the end, make it the beginning! Take this crazy energy of yours and go out there and vote yourselves out of power! For the children!”

An official number of participants was unavailable as the park service no longer estimates crowd sizes at rallies held at the National Mall. However, one park ranger was overheard to say that there was a “whole bushel load of white folk” in attendance. Urbandictionary.com defines a “bushel load” as greater than a “shit load,” but less than a “full load.”

I’ve often said that the most cogent and accessible definition of postmodernism can be found in Umberto Eco’s postscript to The Name of the Rose titled “Postmodernism, Irony, The Enjoyable.” As the title might suggest, Eco’s take on postmodernism is thoughtful but not particularly bleak. Not so with the final essay in Simulacra and Simulation, “On Nihilism,” which likewise telegraphs its mood. Here’s a delightful sample:

I am a nihilist…
I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning.
…
The masses themselves are caught up in a gigantic process of inertia through acceleration. They are this excrescent, devouring, process that annihilates all growth and all surplus meaning. They are this circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality.
…
There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality–no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences.

I can only compare the pathos of reading “On Nihilism” to the feeling, or affect, of watching Brazil for the first time; the harrowing of the soul by the anti-cathartic ending leaves the viewer/reader simultaneously nauseous yet desperately wanting food, water, anything to fill the void carved out by the experience. (Don’t get me wrong, I love the film, but if you don’t come away from your first viewing fully gobsmacked, then you weren’t paying attention.) If, then, I recommend Eco to anyone wanting to understand what postmodernism is, then I recommend “On Nihilism” to anyone wanting to know why we would be well rid of it as the dominant philosophy. (Some would argue that we already are, but that is a different discussion.)

To understand what I mean, let’s first consider a few examples of representative geographies in Second Life.

Perhaps one of the most frequently visited places in Second Life is the recreation of the Eiffel Tower. What the designers tried to do was to recreate in a virtual environment a model or representation of the Eiffel Tower that would map directly to the physical monument that dominates the Paris skyline. Were you to log into Second Life and visit the representation of the Eiffel Tower, you would immediately recognize its iconic iron beams, its frame-like architecture, and the distinct upward sweep of its design.

Other representative geographies abound in second life and include anything from the Globe Theater in London to the Taj Mahal. These project are impressive in the artistry of their construction and carry the cultural value of these locations into the medium of virtual environments.

But what about this idea of “abstract geographies.” Unlike the recreations of the Eiffel Tower or Globe Theater, abstract geographies don’t take as their model anything that can be found in the physical world. Instead they are the product of the designer’s imagination. It is worth emphasizing here that all geographies in Second Life are constructed; they are meticulously designed (if you saw the film Inception, you might think of the role of the “architect” that Ellen Page plays). So, even the most representative geography is still a fabrication of the imagination, but the designer of an abstract geography moves beyond the need to rearticulate places found in the physical world to the places found only in the mind. William Gibson famously described cyberspace as a “collective hallucination.” If that is true, it is nowhere better articulated, in my view, than in non-representative geographies of Second Life because of their deliberate and conscious break with realism.

Almost by design such geographies are difficult to describe in text, so to give you a demonstration of what I mean, I’ve created a number of videos that take you on a tour of three abstract geographies: Immersiva, Two Fish, and Centus.

I should take a minute to explain the title of this post. “Invisible Islands” is a term I’m borrowing from a writer named Italo Calvino who, in the early 1970s, wrote a book titled Invisible Cities. Set in the 13th century palace of Kublai Khan, the book consists of a series of descriptions in which the traveler Marco Polo describes for Kublai Khan the various cities that comprise his empire. But as each city is described, it quickly becomes apparent that these cities are not to be found in the physical world, but rather in the shared, collective imaginations of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, with each city more abstract and fantastical than the last. These cities that Marco Polo describes are non-referential in that they don’t correspond to any city that actually exists outside of Marco Polo and Khan’s imaginations. They are therefore ‘invisible cities,’ because they can’t be seen with the usual visual tools, meaning the human eye; they can only be apprehended in the ephemeral space between Marco Polo’s oration and Khan’s hearing and imagination.

Likewise in Second Life we have invisible islands (the geography of Second Life as a whole is that of an archipelago, seen here: World Map of Second Life) that do not exist outside of imagination. Yes, we can see them with our eyes, but not without the mediating technologies of 3D graphics and the Second Life engine.

Check out the videos below and let me know what you think. (The first video is basically what you just read, so you can skip it if you’d like.)

During his lecture, Professor Olmert described The Life of Pi, quite rightly, as a “postmodern novel.” He then gave a brief definition of what postmodernism was and then moved on to other topics. Not surprisingly, one of the first questions my students asked during the discussion period was, “what exactly is postmodernism?” Given that I spend the better party of my undergraduate career trying to answer that same question, I demurred and told them I would prepare a short lecture on the topic for the following week.

As I considered how to make accessible this most unwieldy of terms, I decided that in order to understand postmodernism what one needs is a larger historical context, to understand why we use the word “post” in the term at all. To that end, I created a powerpoint presentation that traced the broad artistic movements in literature over the last 200 years and showed how they culminated in a postmodern aesthetic. I also built on art history discussions I’ve had with a visual artist friend of mine and paired the literary developments that lead to postmodernism to their counterparts in painting and visual art. I highly recommend this approach as the immediacy of the visual object makes apprehending the shifts in style and aesthetics over time much more accessible. Even given proper time for study, one can obviously view a number of paintings much more quickly than read, say, a series of short stories from various literary periods. This immediacy allows the viewer to more easily juxtapose the various styles against one another and see how they form a dialogue of sorts, one style building on/reacting to another.

This approach, and particularly my slides, may offend certain theoretical sensibilities, and is probably antithetical to the very project of postmodernism itself. After all, by creating a timeline of aesthetic theories, what am I doing other than re-inscribing the “grand narrative” of artistic development that postmodernist theory would have us interrogate? Such concerns are all well and good for the English major or graduate student, but keep in mind that this was a class for non-English majors who were encountering these terms for the first time. So, with apologies to the many artistic movements that get flattened out in my overly simplistic narrative of art and literary history, I give you: What is Postmodernism.

I would welcome any thoughts on either the slides themselves or the method of introducing students to the concept of postmodernism.

Thus: Intel, please contact me so we can discuss remunerations for your sponsorship. And please hurry, I’d like to make a deal for tomorrow today.

That said, I have had a chance to think a bit more about where I want to take my research after I’ve completed my orals. My focus over the summer was on modernism and religion–a topic which still interests me, especially as it pertains to the rise of atheism and Marxism in the colonized world, as well as the orientalist appropriation of eastern religious traditions by English authors (namely T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land). I have long felt that religion is often overlooked as one of the contested cultural sites of modernism, and that it deserves a place in the discussion right next to empire, politics (fascism/communism/capitalism), and urbanization.

In fact, even the most irreligious of the modernists still recognized the critical role religion played in shaping the modern subject and state. For example, Woolf’s character Louis in The Waves, whose father is “a banker from Brisbane,” seeks to overcome his status as a colonial and become a fully actualized Englishman by embracing Anglicanism. Ironically, the “true Englishman” characters in the book that Louis so longs to be like have long since rejected the church. This religious willo-the-wisp that Louis chases throughout the novel can be read as the paradoxical desire of the colonized subject to be fully synthesized into a colonialist culture that is constantly being redefined specifically to prevent such synthesis, thus maintaining the colonizer/colonized relationship.

Likewise, in Nostromo Conrad links religion, culture, politics, and capital together into a hydra of battlefields (both literal and figurative), and like the hydra of myth, none of these conflicts can be resolved until all of their intertwining companions are dealt with. While the contest between South American Catholicism and American Protestantism–both linked to their respective economic ideologies–is only one of the factors that lead the reader of Nostromo to feel that the cycle of rebellion and turmoil must continue on indefinitely, there is no denying that religion is a co-equal partner in this pantheon of forces that defy resolution.

But the problem with the above analysis is that it has likely been said somewhere already. To say that religion is important in the history and construction of English culture and politics, regardless of the period, is like saying that wheat is important when making bread. It’s not that there isn’t more to be said on the subject, just that one would have to dig for nuances that may have diminishing returns.

With the challenges facing any discussion of religion in modernism in mind, I decided to turn again to one of my original interests: the spaces and times of rebellion and/or conflict. On the one hand, this focus may be rather well trodden ground as well, especially if discussed in terms of “borderlands,” a compelling but now cliche idea in literary studies. But on the other hand, I think we live in a world where ideas and ideologies become ever increasingly fixed and rigid. Until there is a rupture of some kind that can force a society to not only imagine a different world but actually act on those possibilities, we are content to allow life to continue as usual. It’s true that artists “imagine” a different world all the time (thank you very little Mr. Lennon), but during times of rebellion and upheaval art and literature can serve as a reconstructing force as a nation or community tries to construct a new group-narrative that will resolve the injustices and cultural imbalances which caused the recent rupture. But rarely does one particular national myth rise up uncontested; multiple narratives must contend with each other before one can assume dominance. These points of contention, right before a national/cultural myth becomes fixed, are what I am interested in researching.

I read the experimentalism and themes of modernism, then, as just such a rupture, and I hope that linking the impulses and cultural products of that rupture with the subsequent political and cultural upheaval of the postcolonial world will allow me not only to bring in the questions of religion discussed above, but also help me say something about human subjectivity in periods of conflict and indeterminacy.

I have some good friends who are conservative, and as individuals I respect their opinion. But as a movement, I can’t help but think that the Fox News sponsored, corporate apologist, lily-white, near racist (see Joe Wilson again), history challenged, ideology conflating (look, pick either communism of fascism as your boogy man; using both makes you look selfish), marching-against-their-own-best-interest right-wingers need some quiet time and perhaps some breathing exercises. Once they can play nice with the rest of the kids, they can rejoin civil society.

I mean, what's the worst that could happen? ... Oh

A loaded question to be sure. But I personally have no problem with “forcing” people to buy health insurance. When I left my job a few years back to go to school full time, I tried to buy private insurance for myself and my family. I was denied because I was (still am, sadly) over weight. Diana was denied for a “pre-existing condition” (she had been treated for infertility… but we were applying for a plan that didn’t cover maternity). And Byron was denied because as a minor he couldn’t be the primary holder on a policy. I desperately WANTED to insure my family, but I couldn’t. I am convinced that the majority of the 45 million Americans who don’t have health insurance would gladly pay for it if they could find a policy which would cover them at a reasonable price.

But you’re right, there is a small minority out there who will take umbrage at the gov’ment taking away their God-given right to not do anything that they don’t want to do, not matter how socially responsible or reasonable. My brother-in-law, who I have the greatest affection for, is one of them. In fact, when we were in Colorado this summer he and I got to talking. He told me point blank that if a law were passed requiring him to insure himself, his wife and his five children, then he would revolt—and trust me, he has the firearms to stage his own personal Bull Run. (Ironically, he sells health insurance for a living.)

But then I asked him what he would do if one of his kids had a major illness and had to be hospitalized for an extended period of time. Wasn’t he worried that he would quickly roll up tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills that he couldn’t afford to pay? Yup, he said, but that was a risk he was willing to take. If that happened and he had to declare bankruptcy, then he felt he should be allowed to live with the consequences of his choice not to purchase health insurance.

I followed up (respectfully, since I’m pretty sure had a hand gun or two out in his car) by pointing out that it wasn’t he who would have to pay for his irresponsibility. If he filed bankruptcy, what did he think would happen to all those bills? Would they just drift away into the wind? Who would cover that doctor’s time? His kid’s medications? The hospital fees?

He laughed because as an insurance salesman he knew the answer better than I did: “Those of you who pay for insurance would.”

And if, I continued, heaven forbid it was one of his daughters who got sick and not him, then in fact she would be the one to suffer the consequences, not him; she would now have a “pre-existing condition,” preventing her from getting the long-term care she needed.

No one tells this guy what to do, but I could tell that he recognized that this wasn’t just an issue that affected him and his family. His responsibility, or lack thereof, directly affected everyone around him. “Personal responsibility” and “don’t tread on me” attitudes simply don’t apply in this case because the system is so interconnected. To misquote John Donne, “Do not ask for whom the bill comes, it comes for thee.”

Put in that context, I don’t have a problem with “forcing” everyone to get health insurance any more than I have a problem “forcing” drivers to insure their vehicles. Except, of course, unless there is no public option. Then it’s just a bonanza for the insurance companies who will gain 45 million captive customers with no one to tell them not to squeeze every penny they can out of the public teat.

I also draw no end of amusement from his ridiculous conspiracy theories. On a recent trip to Utah I was was watching TV with my brother. We were flipping through the channels and Eric turned on Fox News (he gets all the comedy stations I guess). Well Beck gets started and his first joke was great: he told his viewers that Obama plans to raise the minimum wage because he wants to run small businesses out of business, thereby taking much-needed jobs away from African-American young people. Why would the President of the United States want to systematically kill small business and take jobs away from young black men? The answer, Beck tells us while stifling a guffaw, is that Obama wants to FORCE young people into volunteer programs like AmeriCorps where they’ll be compelled to work FOR THE GOVERNMENT for FREE. I swear I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my chair. I mean, this was good stuff. I can just imagine it:
“Hey Marcus, you got a job this summer?”
“No man, I can’t find work cause the Federal Government raised minimum wage to $45 an hour, plus dental.”
“Ah, damn it! Why the Fed gotta be all up in KFC’s grill like that? Well, you wanna go hang out, maybe watch some TV, play some ball?”
“Naw, I’m gonna go sign up for AmeriCorps. I mean, what else am I going to do?”
“Word.”
I don’t think Eric got the joke, however, because he wasn’t laughing and he changed the channel.

Now look, I like to be entertained, and someone who can make me laugh like Beck doesn’t come along every day. But what I didn’t realize was that there’s a dark side to Beck’s humor. No, I’m not just talking about the man’s predilection for bursting into tears (he is SO good at that. I swear, every once in a while I think he’s being sincere). Rather, I guess some people out there are taking him seriously. One lady even Rambo’d a military base because she thought it was one of Beck’s “FEMA camps.” Ha ha, boy did she get fooled. I bet she was laughing all the way to the detention cell and saying to herself: “ah, that Beck. He’s such a kidder. He got me good.”

Even more alarming, however, is the news that some advertisers didn’t realize that when Glenn Beck called President Obama a racist, he was clearly just making a joke, and they’ve subsequently pulled their ads from his show. Come on, how hyper sensitive can you get? You think that a WHITE national TV personality would be so insensitive as to SERIOUSLY call the black President of the United States a racist? I mean, the irony is so think that it’s ridiculous. This kind of disrespectful and irreverent insensitivity happens on South Park and HBO stand-up specials all day long and I don’t see anyone pulling ads from those shows. I just don’t get it. Don’t they know that Glenn Beck is a joke? err, tells jokes?

But look, I don’t want to be selfish here. Yes, I would like to keep Beck around so that he can amuse me with his latest conspiracy theories, or shock me with his total disregard for reason, logic, common sense or tact. But I’m ready to sacrifice for my country. I am willing for Glenn Beck to be taken off the air if it means that people will stop taking him seriously and stop painting swastikas on African-American congressmen’s offices. I’m not so self-centered that I think my amusement is worth more than a civil society that is reasoned and informed by facts, not hyperbolic nuttery. I know, I know, I should strap on my Colt .45 and demand my right to laugh at Beck, but there comes a time when we all have to dig a little deeper, give a little more, and emulate those patriots who “more than self their country loved.” If what my country demands of me is that Beck get thrown off the air, then that’s a sacrifice I’m ready to make.