This video from Wallstats demonstrates how a number that we glibly rattle off is far larger than we can even imagine. I mean, what can you do with 1,000,000,000,000? The animation is pretty cool, too.

This short video, made during the Educator’s Workshop at the Center for Digital Storytelling (Berkeley, CA), is a teaser/trailer for a paper on which I’m currently working. The paper is on Barack Obama’s rhetoric of “unity” as relying on an ironic sense of community and conflict in contemporary politics; it is also about the potential pitfalls and failures of such rhetoric, which we have seen strongly in the past couple of months in the most recent “debate” over health care reform.

With landscape as a visual and conceptual framework, this paper discusses the ideological implications of the film franchises The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings, and Terminator.  Through a discussion of landscape theory and its implications within a larger postmodern paradigm, it will examine how imagery and narrative construct visions of politics in the United States that deviate from their (often ostensibly progressive) surface-level messages.  As each trilogy is a landmark in popular and film culture, and as they attained considerable symbolic capital in both subculture and dominant culture, they are ideal entry points for a discussion of negotiated popular ideology.  Moreover, as the Terminator trilogy spans twenty years from its first to its third film, and changes considerably in its politics, it provides a useful counterpoint to the massive The Matrix and The Lord of the Ringsproductions.  By discussing all three through their visual rhetoric, it is possible to navigate the often perplexing worlds of United States ideology, and the increasingly blurred lines between progressive and reactionary agendas.

presented at the annual International Communications Association conference, San Francisco, May 2007

At a time when American politics has reached an almost uncanny level of absurdity in its self-contradictions, nationalistic appeals, and stunning disregard for large majorities of the population, it becomes increasingly necessary to look for clues as to why various forms of America speak and exist and how those interested in change can locate and infiltrate nodes of instability or change. Rhetoric surrounding the suburbs in high and popular culture provides such a framework, as it maps out areas of creation and consumption that have great appeal but are either logically incoherent or dangerously multiple. This article enters the discussion through Gregory Crewdson’s famous staged photographs before turning to traumatic identity in the films Pleasantville, American Beauty, and True Lies. The resulting dissonant political ambiguity in daily life suggests a new, flexible line of postmodern discourse in the post-9/11 public sphere.Presented at the annual Popular Culture Association Conference, April 2006Presented at the annual National Communications Association Conference, November 2006