While sitting in and listening to the lectures and the discussion revolving the film American Sniper, I had a few thought that I failed to share with the class. Since the topic closely relates to the paper I’m working on, and I’m interested in receiving some new ideas, I’m sharing them now.

Overall, there is a generally cynical view of Clint Eastwood and his film the American Sniper, this is not without reason. The movie was an oversimplification of the nature of the War in Iraq, and on the surface, it depicts the war as simply good versus evil. The problem then is obvious, and natural conclusion would be reached is that Clint Eastwood is simply another filmmaker looking to profit from the war film genre and cares little to none about the film’s implication and the real story behind the war. On the surface, this seems like a perfectly good verdict on the movie and its narrative, but I believe it actually does a disservice to Eastwood’s intention and to what the public reception to the film tells us.

In my understanding, Clint Eastwood was, in fact, attempting to construct an anti-war narrative with the movie. Eastwood’s Chris Kyle represents the US war effort in Iraq is a very intriguing way, and there are many parallels that can be seen throughout the movie. First, he joins the marine mainly as a response to the bombing of the US embassies overseas, but his personal life is also a catalyst for his decision. The first 10 minutes of the movie portrayed him as an average Texan cowboy, but a turning point came when he discovered his wife’s cheating. This is important since the Iraq War have been heavily criticized as an irrational and a heat of the moment decision. Then during his campaign in Iraq, the overall war effort was eventually concentrated on one man only, Mustafa, who killed one and fatally injured another of Kyle’s teammate. The war suddenly became a mission of anger and vengeance. Here we can see another parallel between Chris Kyle and the US war effort in Iraq, that in a war started out of irrationality and declared on a virtually unfightable enemy, an individual target was singled out to become the receiver of all the anger and revenge they had to offer. To even further clarify his position, in the movie, Eastwood had multiple instances of others near Chris Kyle questioning the fundamental purposes of the war, including his wife, his brother, and one of his teammate. In the face of these questions, Chris Kyle’s vision was not blurred for a bit and simply dismissed them as lost or unable to understand. By doing this, Eastwood also draws the question to the US effort itself, fundamentally doubting its very purposes and intentions.

This aspect of the movie went unnoticed by almost everyone, and for a good reason. The movie itself is a product of entertainment, it wasn’t meant to be closely analyzed, it was supposed to be shown once, and evoke emotions. As a result, due to the movie’s simplistic portrayal of the war and its flashy images, some messages were unavoidably lost in transmission, and Clint Eastwood is to be blamed for it. By failing to recognize the genre he is working with, his attempts in an anti-war narrative turned into a fuel that furthered the racism and hatred that is already brewing within the US, and ultimately served the opposite of his intentions

The recent exhibit Amazonia: the right of nature at the Museum of Anthropology has been inspiring some thinking for me. The exhibit’s focuses were on the Amazonian ecosystem and its relationship with human activities from the indigenous population and commercial activities. The exhibit provided me with insights on how some of mine classroom materials are related to real-world problems, especially in relation to some topics discussed in the Geography classroom.

One of the displayed items that caught my attention is a set of rubber figures. These figures were molded from the latex of trees in the rainforest. The exhibit explains that the indigenous population had a long tradition of molding these figures, but the figures displayed were molded by the settlers from the rubber booms. The rubber booms are periods when the extraction of latex from the trees became a profitable business. As a result of the blooming rubber economy, cities were constructed in the jungles of the rainforest. Prior to the industrialized rubber production, the indigenous population had a harmonious relationship with the rainforest. Although resources were also acquired to meet their needs, there was no conflict between nature and human activities.

The history behind these latex figures is an perfect evidence for the argument of capitalocene. Capitalocene and anthropocene are two different approaches to understanding our current geological epoch. The idea of capitalocene emphasize on the effect of capitalism on Earth’s geography, rather then presenting the entire humanity as a factor, which is the central idea of anthropocene. As demonstrated by the history of the latex figures, the extraction of latex by the indigenous people for their demand wasn’t enough to affect the ecosystem of Amazonia. The long-term impacts on the Amazonian rainforest became a fact only after the introduction of commercial extraction and exportation of rubber.

The exhibit continuously emphasizes on the harmony between the indigenous people and nature before industrialization took place in the Amazonian rainforest. Upon entrance, the first set of artifacts are some traditional garments for the indigenous people. The pieces are decorated with birds and bird feathers. To my mind, these artifacts symbolized the relation with nature, that although they take from nature, they remain part of the harmony by respecting it. The exhibit also emphasizes on the impact of industrialization, on the wall of the exhibit hall, statistics on deforestation and etc are listed in bold letters, contrasting the harmony presented by artifacts from the indigenous cultures.

The case of Amazonia isn’t along. Before industrialization and the global capitalist economy, human activity and nature’s relationship were harmonious for the most part. But as the idea of capitalocene has theorized, a fraction of humanity have exploited nature for economic growth. This has been seen in virtually every civilization on the face of the planet, physically changing the geography characteristics of Earth.

Recently our ASTU class was reading a book titled Obasan, the author of this book is a Vancouver local, Joy Kogawa. Obasan is a story about the Japanese persecution in Canada during WW2. The story is told from a child’s perspective, borrowing from the real-life experiences of Joy Kogawa. The novel gained historical importance in the Canadian society because the writing done by Kogawa reflected on the social condition at the time by telling the story of one family.
The story of the novel borrows events took place 30 years before its publication, during Kogawa’s childhood. For Joy Kogawa to write about such events, even as fiction, it required a tremendous amount of remembering and emotional burden. Having a better understanding of Joy Kogawa’s creative process would have allowed a better insight of the novel. Luckily, we had the chance.
Last week, the class took a trip to the RBSC(Rare book and special collection) branch of the UBC libraries. We were given difference folders containing materials related to the book. Contained in the folder assigned to our group is scripts and note of Joy Kogawa. The notes and the scripts are created during when she wrote the book and gave us a glimpse of her thought process.
One particular piece of script stood out to me. It was when Joy Kogawa struggled to put any words down; she writes “I can’t seem to get started, so I’m into vomit syndrome.”(Joy Kogawa) By vomit syndrome, Kogawa means simply typing down any thought that comes to her mind. Not only did she describe the difficulty of the creative process, but she also described the burdens of remembering the past in her book. She says “I’m frankly mind blown exhausted now by this remembering that is required of me.” This ties to one of the main themes of the book, silence, and remembering. In the book, the struggle is between Obasan and Aunt Emily, where Obasan chooses to endure her trauma by staying silent, unwilling to speak out, and Aunt Emily when facing injustice, will not bear to be silent. For Joy Kogawa, the act of speaking out and writing the book Obasan closely resembled the same, as she eventually tried to clear her thought process and to continue with the book, admitting that “There was no escape.”
The script demonstrated the experience with memory Joy Kogawa had while writing the book by providing a path to her mind. It showed how the childhood experiences of Joy Kogawa shaped her as a person, and as a writer. It showed us what Joy Kogawa believed about the importance of remembering.

Hi readers:

One of the things our ASTU class sometimes focused on is the genres. Professor Luger explained, that a genre can be any types of established way of speaking, writing, or just communicating. With that in mind, I started to observe and intentionally look for examples of genres. Eventually, one genre emerged from my news feed: being presidential. A phrase constantly used by the media, and a standard for impeachment.

The phrase “presidential” was thrown around for quite a bit during the 2016 election cycle, mostly when criticizing Donald Trump. Being presidential was never as important an issue as it is now, mainly because all the real contenders for the office of the president stayed within the previous boundaries of this genre by acting the same way their predecessors did. They avoided vulgarities, they remained calm even during the worst of times, providing the nation with a voice of sense and sanity, they did not go after any individual entities for the most part and had always kept a healthy distance from the media (news or entertainment). Even in the most casual settings, their humor was exclusively limited to “dad jokes”. This image was well maintained in public for most of, if not all, the times. This particular way of conducting themselves was a major part of a president’s identity, the presidential conduct was one of the few things that were agreed upon across party lines. Presidents before the emergence of Trump all choose to conduct themselves this way no matter democrat or republican.

This has all changed since the last election. Trump has defied, in almost an intentional way, all the expectations for a presidential candidate. During his rallies or in his tweets, he called out numerous individual private citizens by name, attacking their character, he provoked, even encouraged violence, he called his opponent degrading names, he let his sexual innuendoes fly, and etc, all in public. Every day, he occupies the news headlines by various kinds of outrageous remarks, for several months, and counterintuitively, by saying or tweeting these things, he is only gathering more and more support, rather than disqualifying himself. When he was inaugurated as president, he kept acting the same way he did during the campaign. By doing that, he changed how the presidential genre was understood and perceived, and consequently changed the meaning of being a president.

Donald Trump’s example showed us how one person can influence an entire genre. Since he was elected, more and more of this type of unconventional candidate started gaining traction, within his administration, outrages comments has somehow become a norm. A genre that helped establish the respect for the office of president has changed drastically to become a tool for attention and perhaps distractions. I believe this has created a toxic environment for constructive policy discussion and civil discourse, and that a clear boundary for the presidential genre needs to be drawn clearly to create a better political environment.

Hi, readers:

During the introduction to this course, one word, in particular, stood out to me the most, “Memory”. I believe in the importance of the collective memories of a society, I believe that the collective memories of a society defines its character, and keeps it from repeating its own mistakes. As a result, in every culture and society, there is always a mechanism for keeping the memories. That mechanism maybe books and movies, it can be monuments and museums, or it may even be verbally told from one generation to another, but no matter the format, memory always seem to find a way.

But sometimes we seem to forget, by conscious decisions. Societies, for the most part, love to cling on to its proudest moments, while tending to ignore the wrongdoings in its more recent past. This dangerous pattern allows history to repeat itself, stopping the process where the society learns from its own mistakes. While some communities like UBC choose to make its own wrongdoing one of the most important parts of its memory, others don’t seem to be as enlightened.

During my time in China, the events took place in Tiananmen Square was never really brought to my attention, all the knowledge I had of this event was that there was a protest of some sort. Of course, it was more than that. During Tiananmen protest of 1989, groups of student advocating free speech gathered at the Tiananmen Square, the symbol of Chinese government’s power and authority. At the height of the event, an estimated one million people gathered at the square. The event can to an abrupt end on June 4th, 1989. Around 300000 troops were mobilized into Beijing because the leader of CPC (Communist Party of China) considered the protests a threat to the party’s rule. In the aftermath of the event, several hundred were killed, with much more imprisoned or exiled. Before I learned about this, free speech was merely a concept, I even thought that no major damage can really be done by not letting people talk. But the knowledge of this protest changed the way I think, made me a firm believer in the freedom of speech, and allowed me to fully appreciate this right of expression. The memory of this event along with some other things is still systematic “forgotten” in China, creating generations with zero to none awareness in politics, and no respect for free speech.

This is not a singular case of forgetting, for example, the Japanese education system is choosing to forget about the atrocity Japan committed against countries in the Asia Pacific region during WWII, nowadays Americans tend to forget about the acts against the native Americans… What we can and should do to combat this is to remember and to spread these memories, so that they are not forgotten and will not be repeated.