Well, with Farfetchings (my dissertation) done and sent off, I'm returning to this blog, and will soon be creating a new one, Axiomatix. While Axiomatix (first posting slated for March 29th, with a posting thereafter on every other prime day of the month) is to be devoted to investigating the axioms by which we live our lives, think our thoughts, and do our doings, this Sense of Wonder blog basically revolves around ecological ethics and everyday magic. Right now I've got something to say about discovery and sense of wonder, essentially inspired by a petition circulated on Facebook to boycott the Discovery Channel because of a proposal to create a show about discovering Alaska hosted by Sarah Palin. Now, I definitely approve of boycotts, for they are one of the few ways in a capitalist and consumerist society like ours that common people can have some say in what corporations get up to; I also approve of rejecting a nature show hosted by Sarah Palin, given her record of betraying just about every value any committed environmentalist stands for. At the same time, however, there is a deep irony in having Sarah Palin host such a show, and I'm a big fan of irony. I wonder if there isn't, in fact, something quite positive about this form of hypocrisy? It seems to me, for example, that without the deep exploitative practices represented by George W. Bush and his cronies we would not now have the articulate and hopeful leadership of Barack Obama, we would not now have a new health-care system, and we would not now have a leadership committed to developing alternative energy sources. In some ways, by hiding the yucky, selfish, exploitative axioms of our society, we only make them stronger. Isn't having Sarah Palin host her own nature show just about the best way to render those axioms explicit? To put it otherwise, a society which frames "nature" and "wildlife" as far away phenomena best experienced through a TV screen has very deep problems, and what better way to call attention to those problems than through explicit acts of hypocrisy like "Sarah Palin's Alaska"? What better way to call attention to global warming and the short-sighted politics of war for oil than George W. Bush?
On my view, anyone interested in discovering the wild world of ecological relations should turn off the TV and step outside. Whether you live in the city, in the country, or in that bizarre mix of the two known as suburbia, there is an amazing web of interactions between different beings happening all around you! What the Discovery Channel does is reinforce the modern division between "nature" and "culture", shoring up a perspective that turns the "city" into "culture", that ignores rats, pigeons, raccoons and cockroaches in favor of far-away charismatic megafauna like wolves and grizzlies. What the Discovery Channel does is help maintain the illusion that ecological relations are somewhere out there, somewhere over there, when in fact they are right here and now in every single widget and critter we buy, eat, see, smell and touch. Boycott the Discovery Channel? I say yes! Too bad it takes the explicit hypocrisy of hiring Sarah Palin to host nature shows to get well-meaning liberal humans to make this move in the first place. Indeed, too bad it takes polar bears going extinct to get humans to start paying attention to the ecological destruction - and ecological wonder - happening all around them.
5 comments:
what does 'common people' refer to?
Man, you took it to a whole 'nother level than I was thinking. Very impressed.
It does make sense though that she could be the catalyst for change (or at least provoking more thought), and that something good could come out of her 'terrible-ness'. Lol...
Oh, silly Anonymous! Picky picky - and this is the problem with writing blogs off the cuff, because then you have to contend with the not-so-generous reading of critically-minded folks. I usually use "people" to refer to a very large class of critters (and possibly widgets) - more on that in a later post! - but here I'm using "common people" in the very restricted sense of "any human in U.S. American society who is not a member of the plutocratic elite". Ergo, "common people" is a class that pretty much includes myself, you, and most other people who might read this blog. Like "nonhuman", "common people" is actually a non-category, defined against a category, that is: the rich humans and corporations, many of whom are not at all high profile, who basically run this capitalist republic so many mistake for a "democracy".
RE: John's comment and good coming from terrible-ness, well, to look at it pessimistically, in our current situation I'm not sure where we're gonna get "good" except from the terrible!
I agree with the assertion that good can come from the terrible. I think in the case of our leadership it is even a possibly planned dynamic. If I were a background leader I would play it like that. It sure seems like a great way to control the thinking of a populace, to keep them focused on the great theater of politics. Meanwhile alternating the push for more and more control to appear as in your face during a jerk/stupid leader's time on stage to behind the scenes during the lovable/smart leader's tenure. The real power is with the corporations, so I argue for more direct attention to their doings than to the whitehouse republicrat tag team. We should embrace them, bring their dealings out into the open, and join them, becoming shareholder citizens and then demand that more needs be met than the bottom line. I tend to feel that voting in politics is, for the most part, a total joke. Punching a ticket for the right to feel like an involved member of our communities. I recently found out that the our great Obama just allowed for the offshore alaskan oil drilling that Bush was never able to get through. Corporations have more power than any other social entities. I think the ugly way that they wield that power is based on a simple set of memes that are subject to change, and if changed would set them in whatever direction the new meme set propelled them. Voting as a critically minded populace of shareholders? Maybe that could grease the wheels of real change. If so, that would be a great ironic story of good coming from the terrible.
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