Hello there. Reading Dave Egger’s Zeitoun was a weird experience, to put it bluntly. The narrative feels like it is a fiction novel, told so intricately and reserved; yet there is a voice in the back of my head that keep telling me that this novel is a non-fiction book with descriptions of real people and real locations. I forgot whether someone said to me or I read it on somewhere, but I remember someone saying that Egger’s Zeitoun writes like a fiction book and uses that to take advantage of the limitations of being a non-fiction book. I’m not quite sure what that means, but after reading through the novel, I’m starting to see what that means. What I find most intriguing about the novel is how reserved the first part felt; nothing feels forced and everything flows so well. The call-and-response feel to the flashbacks of Zeitoun and his wife Kathy resembles the inevitable but slow coming of Hurricane Katrina, mirroring the gradually increasing category of Katrina and Kathy’s growing concern in the first part of the novel.

However, I’m not going to talk about Zeitoun in today’s blog post. I will be talking about the role of the media in America in general–but more specifically, in the New Orleans area. It is interesting to note that initially, reporters and journalists coming to report on the aftermath of the hurricane were the one of the channels of communication and information for the victims. As conditions started to become better for the victims, Hurricane Katrina became noted as one of the factors that forefronted online community journalism; and by online community journalism, I mean blogging about the event through NOLA.com, an online news website dedicated to New Orleans. The effects of the blogs written through NOLA.com were so great that Mark Glasser deemed it a “watershed moment in journalism.”

Sub-title: How America Is “Not Letting the Terrorists Win” Through Consumerism

I realized that I missed a couple of blog posts–and now I’m back with another blog post. Anyway, today’s topic is all about mayonnaise; more specifically, about how mayonnaise is an instrument.

Okay I lied, it’s not really about mayonnaise. Fun fact: the Spongebob episode from which the memorable quote “is mayonnaise an instrument?” originated aired four days before the September 11, 2001 attacks. It is a commonly held belief for Spongebob fans that Spongebob episodes airing post-2004 movie have been declining in quality, catering more towards a younger audience. Personally, I agree with the notion that Spongebob has decreased in quality when they decided to shift from witty humour to slapstick comedy. This is not a shift seen only in Spongebob, but also with American television as a whole. This argument as well might bleed over to other Western media cultures (such as the British and their overly exaggerated comedies and the cheesy Latin American soap operas), but for this particular blogpost I decided to focus on American television and how breaking the consumerism culture amounts to “letting the terrorists win.”

But first, let’s take a step back and figure out what “letting the terrorists win” is really about. The recent Sony hackings and the delay of the satirical (and somewhat tasteless) comedy The Interview have sparked new interest of the topic of letting terrorists win. Celebrities have criticized Sony about the alleged cancellation of The Interview. As the criticism grew heated and plenty, George Clooney himself couldn’t resist to join in on the bandwagon and decided to create a petition to release The Interview. Lo and behold, UBC’s very own Film Society is screening the movie The Interview from February 25th to March 1st.

However, some people (and by some people I mean mainly myself and journalist Jessica Goldstein) have pointed out that the Sony attacks are obviously not about terrorism. In her article, Goldstein noted that Sony has been hacked multiple times during the past years, and this new recent hacking is not really new–except to the general media. Goldstein said that “the movie industry is so afraid of risk, new ideas, and failure that barely anything but sequels, superheroes, and sequels about superheroes ever make it to our screens.” Thus, the exaggerated publicity could be concluded as a publicity stunt by Sony themselves due to the absence of confidence Sony has in this movie. To a degree, it worked. President Obama himself has said in an interview with ABC News that “for now, [his] recommendation would be that people go to the movies.” Regarding the speech, Goldstein has said that “Obama’s encouragement that we go about consuming entertainment as usual sounds a bit like an echo of George Bush’s post-9/11 rallying cry that everyday Americans fight terrorism by ‘shopping more.'”

So is it safe to say that to not let the terrorist win, we have to consume and consume? In regards to the cancellation of the 53rd Emmy Awards, media scholar Lynn Spiegel recites in her article what Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Chairman Bryce Zabel told viewers: “…cancelling the Emmys would have been an admission of defeat. Like baseball and Broadway, we are an American tradition,” (251) implying that Americans have been a consumerist culture and will always be. There is truth in Zabel’s words, and there is both positive and negative implications to his statement. As Spiegel writes in her article regarding the state of television culture post-9/11, “television was the medium hardest hit by this conflict between maintaining the image of “public servant” and the need to cater to the public taste (or at least to what advertisers think the public likes).” (236)

And television never recovered, and neither did the American entertainment industry as a whole. Television loves their prime-time dramas and their nationalistic pro-consumerism shows, while Hollywood loves their American pride and safe sequels and nationalistic pro-America superhero movies. Meanwhile, the cartoons of pre-9/11 have become something of a niche product–even The Simpsons have become a shadow of its former glory. I understand that not all American television shows and movies are full of nationalism and have been playing it safe (see The Interview and post-9/11 consumerism culture), however the general mainstream entertainment of America have been either promoting the culture of fear or distract the general viewers from the bigger issues at hand–I mean, who cares about conflicts in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe when debating about which movies should’ve won an Oscar are clearly more important?

As we move towards the latter half of the 2010s, it is becoming more apparent that American television and entertainment industry is dominating the whole world, bringing along its consumerist agendas and nationalistic superhero movies. However, as the world now acknowledges the East’s success in the Western markets, who knows? Maybe our grandchildren will forget all about the patriotism rising from the ashes of 9/11 and turn to the complacency of the pleasing choreography and exotic music of the East.

Funny story. I don’t lead a wonderful and spectacular life, but I’m lucky to have observed some who do. I recall this one time someone said to me that she has PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder, commonly found in soldiers). I was skeptical because I thought (or so I thought) PTSD only occurred to people who have experienced major psychological trauma and I know too well that she led a so-so privileged life. Since I was in disbelief, I asked her: “How did you ever receive such unfortunate disorder?” She said she was verbally oppressed by her peers; she’ll get triggered if anything insulting comes crashing her way.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a very serious condition, with “about 4 percent of teenage boys and 6 percent of teenage girls meet the clinical definition of PTSD.” The article continues by showing examples of children and teenagers suffering through a major psychological trauma such as being assaulted and having your dear mother murdered. The National Centre for PTSD in America lists a few causing factors of PTSD present in teenagers: 65% neglect, 18% physical abuse, 10% sexual abuse, and 7% psychological (mental) abuse.

Not too long ago after people celebrated boxes for a day, a transgender teenager by the name of Leelah Alcorn who underwent conversion therapy committed suicide due to (what I assume) is neglect and mental abuse. The article also mentions her battle with her parents due to them not accepting her gender identity. Trauma can arrive as sudden as the Monday sunrise—and on December 28 2014, trauma struck two birds with one suicide.

For people not familiar with conversion therapies, conversion therapies are essentially Christian therapies that convert “lost” souls back to the right teachings of Christianity.

Yes, everyone’s sympathetic over the Leelah Alcorn because her death is sign that conversion therapies should be regulated and even banned and that transgendered people should be given more attention due to their likelihood to commit suicide or receive PTSDs. Leelah Alcorn committed suicide by walking through a busy traffic. She died by vehicular impact—a truck crashed into her. But what about the truck driver Does the media not recognize the emotional impact of accidentally taking someone’s life?

There are always multiple sides to a story; Leelah’s story ended when she committed suicide, the effects of her death will cause a ripple become a story on its own and will tell a tale of how it changed how the public views the LGBT(Q) community, yet the driver’s story is yet to be heard. I wouldn’t know anything about accidentally taking someone’s life, but I am sure that I would experience nightmares and extreme depression. Nobody wants to wake up every morning and find that they ran over a 17 year-old teenager. Who knows, maybe the truck driver would eventually commit suicide.

“Events like these could be prevented by reaching out to oppressed people,” many would say, however the oppressed ones are usually the reserved ones or the loud ones—nothing would seem wrong. In the end, talking and discussing about trauma and suicide fruits in nothing; there is no definite and absolute solution. There are too many causes to factor in, and everyone prefers different treatments. Awareness is an appropriate but temporary solution to traumas and suicide.

Yesterday was UBC’s very own Suicide Awareness Day, we’re talking about trauma in ASTU, and we’re touching on gender inequality in Sociology. Aren’t coincidences fun?

Hello reader! I am sorry I have not been posting as regularly as I should, because of the blog post due dates and my adherence to complete such tasks on the week it is due is always in the way! But all is well because I am going to school you, reader, on why Joe Sacco’s book Safe Area Gorazde is a brilliant graphic documentary that reflects on the state of the international climate at that time and how every state representative involved embraces forgetting and denial! Doesn’t that sound fun, especially when the topic of memory bleeds into politics?

In a very brief summary that could never do Sacco’s book justice, Safe Area Gorazde is a documentary-like book in the style of a graphic narrative that tells the story of Sacco in the “UN-deemed safe area” of Gorazde, in the post-Yugoslavia country of Bosnia, observing the aftermath of the Bosnian War and the effect it had on the city of Gorazde. The book is told through Sacco’s personal moments with the people of Gorazde, through interviews with various people around Gorazde, through brief but very informative history lessons regarding the Bosnian War by Sacco himself, and through Sacco’s dialogue with his translator and confidant, Edin. In one of the history lesson segments, Sacco mentions the UN’s odd desire to stay neutral throughout the conflict, trying very very hard to not pick sides. Ironically, this odd desire is also found in the US, a country seen as the country to liberate the Gorazdans from the conflict. Sacco mentions the UN even goes as far as calling the Srebrenica massacre‘s casualty numbers “exaggerated,” proving that the UN was in the state of denial. Why, you might ask, were the UN would deny the massive amounts of casualties and still insist to have a neutral position in the war?

While doing my literature review for my Art Studies class, I came across an article by a scholar (whose name escapes me at this moment) that pointed out the world’s fascination with the Holocaust. He noticed Holocaust memorials and museums being built around the world and argues that this has been deeply ingrained in today’s society’s collective memory, much like how Santa Claus and consumerism is deeply ingrained in today’s society’s collective memory. The scholar calls this the Holocaust discourse, and explains that the UN’s denial regarding the Srebenica massacre and the UN’s desire to keep a neutral (ie. useless) stance in the war is all because of the Holocaust discourse. The article by the scholar, Andreas Huyssen, focused on the effects of the media has on politics and forgetting, and mainly focused on what he calls the “Americanization of the Holocaust memory” and the usage of the Holocaust as a universal trope for historical/collective trauma. However, according to Huyssen:

It is actually interesting to note how in the case of the organized massacres in Rwanda and Bosnia in the early 1990s, comparisons with the Holocaust were at first fiercely resisted by politicians, the media, […] because of a desire to resist intervention.

Since the United Nations serve to represent the whole world and its states, it is safe to assume that UN’s desire to maintain a neutral stance and let the Serbian nationalists do whatever they feel like doing was a desire shared by most of the world, for fear of another Holocaust. The adherence to remember an event that traumatized the whole world and left it scarred prevented it from preventing a similar occurrence from happening.

When I was first reading Sacco’s book, I had thought that the UN’s desire to maintain a neutral stance made sense and even if the UN-designated safe areas didn’t accomplish anything in the end, the UN reflected its position as a peacekeeper, to maintain peace amidst the chaos of war. But the UN’s denial on the amounts of casualties of the Srebenica massacre and their non-interventionist raises doubts on the UN’s effectiveness in acting as the world’s peacekeeper. Could one argue that during the Bosnian war the UN was simply representing other state’s desire to pursue self-interest and the non-interventionist nature of realism? How is it that the Bosnian war ended with the NATO bombings of Serbian nationalists, or in other words, ended in violence?

It is bizarre to think that there is no such thing as the present–we are always living in the past. Or the future. Each time someone mentions “now” they are referring to the point in time they said exactly point five seconds ago. The present is both in the past and the future. There is no such thing as the present. There is only the past and the future. The present is only a concept that is only present in our minds, which our mind presented to the whole world to understand the present concept of present. Following that syllogism, it is not odd to consider that most of us are living in past. “Memory” is defined as the act of recollecting something from the past; something remembered from the past. If this is the case, are we living in memories?

One could argue that 9/11 is just as significant the birth of the Lord, both marking a change how the world perceived itself. After the events of 9/11, the world was divided into two: pre-9/11, where the only culture of fear that existed was the culture of fear for getting not enough land; and post-9/11, a world where everything is full of fear: video game violence, “your next door neighbor might be a serial killer!”, overexposure of criminal activities and so-called tragedies in the media, and the ever so controversial rape culture. Granted, I have yet to taste and experience the world pre-9/11, but I’m sure from the portrayal of the carefree culture of the 90s and the crack culture of the 80s and the anarchist movement of the 70s and the psychedelic anti-war hippie movement of the 60s and the jazzy beatniks of the 50s that the only thing privileged Westerners had to worry about was losing their piece of land from the oppressive government and high taxes and the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. Whether people deny it or accept it, 9/11 was a critical point in the history of people as walking archives of memory.

Post-9/11, especially the early days, were grim times for people all around the world. Flights delayed, people panicking in front of their TV sets, journalists racing to create a sympathetic (keyword: pathetic) article regarding the horrible event that unraveled within a couple miles of their offices, and confused government officials who couldn’t decide between taking advantage of this situation and reinvent themselves or hold a conservative stance on the matter and start pointing fingers. Americans became traumatized and crazy over this new revelation that they were vulnerable to almost anything, from sunburn to drive-by shooting, from crazy neighbors to psychological disorders. Quoting a brilliant article by UK newspaper The Independent,

“In these 10 years America has lost much, […] Most of all, perhaps, it has lost its illusions. One, that its home territory was invulnerable, beyond the reach of hostile foreigners, vanished on that terrible Tuesday morning.”

(I recommend reading the full article, it’s a really good article about 9/11 and its aftermath!)

Since 9/11, America also lost the illusion that it would be the place of infinite opportunities and a guarantee in the seat of wealthiness. Psychologist Robert D. Stolorow suggests how “traumatized people [of the 9/11 events] fall prey to ‘resurrective ideologies’ that promise to restore the sheltering illusions that have been lost.” I believe that everyone is gullible when they are overcome with fear and is in a state of vulnerability. People would give up their basic needs if it meant freedom from fear and liberty from all no-good institutions. People will give up anything, even it means blaming video games for anti-social and violent behaviors instead of introspecting their selves because it’s always someone else’s fault, according to the government.

You might be asking yourself: “what the hell does all of this have to do with memory and how we are all living in our memories?” Obviously, we are not literally living in our own memories–that’s what dreams are for. We are living in the shadow of a memory that, as a collective, we created out of unbearable traumatic pain. The American Dream died, reborn under the oxymoronic promises of security and liberty. We are afraid, and we are very happy.