Full Research Plan

After the trailer, my research has become more focused.

With suggestion from Professor Wesch, instead of South American contact and the injustices that have been done since/because of western influence (I can't tell you how difficult it was to try to put together a "story" that incorporated pre-South American mediation, because, well, they weren't mediated), I'm going to be focusing on the Chevron/Texico oil contamination in Ecuador.

More research into the topic will be needed, with a much-anticipated viewing of CRUDE, and delving into who the major players are. Not only lawyers, judges, indigenous people, and CEOs, but those in the Ecuadorian government who are, essentially, protecting Chevron, extending their reach and destruction by playing a meddling middle-man.

Chevron as well as Chevron-accusing sources, like ChevronToxico, will be investigated in order to gain both view points, and material for the two minute project.

We watched videos today in class in order to spark some kind of "big idea" of our own. I wasn't having one until Dr. Wesch defined the difference between Rebellion and Revolution. Rebellion is a regime change. Revolution is a total system change.

I couldn't help but think of 1776, John Adams, and William Daniels' line, "this is a revolution, dammit, we're going to have to offend SOMEBODY!"

This led me to the realization that Bob Dylan was right, you do have to serve somebody, no matter who you are.
And then to an idea, more of a question, really, Does anything ever change?
I know the idea's been had before. By many people. In many situations. But this one applies to something generally thought about as having a change.

Douglass Rushkoff, in his "Program or be Programmed" stated that new forms of media came about with new forms of thinking, but a generation behind. Writing brought about Islam, but instead of readers there were listeners to those who could read (people gathered in a square listening to a rabbi read scripture). The printing press brought about Protestantism, but instead of creating writers, people were reading. His "big idea" is, What is the digital age bringing about?

My answer? It doesn't matter because nothing really ever changes anyway. Before classifying me as an existential hack, hear me out.

Thousands of years between the development of writing and the evolution of the printing press, yet we're still focused on the existence of God; people fighting people about what they believe, how to act, and what's moral. The digital age only brings about a more efficient manner of getting at each others' throats.  Someone always wants to be in charge.
"I'm the leader, I'm the one that says when we go."
Gotta Serve Somebody.
Again, not a new idea because, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In "Twitter Revolution: Iran vs. USA", a concept DC Comics and Alan Moore, the soldiers at Lexington and Concord, and the prehistoric peoples at Hohokam and Chaco had thought of before Twitter was ever a twinkle in anyone's eye was put forth: governments should be afraid of their people, people shouldn't be afraid of their governments.
Building on these rebellions/revolutions through Twitter, I refined my idea. Things are different. At least on the surface, but nothing changes.

Evident from the news mash-up of Iranian and American ways of dealing with social networking in similar situations with similar reactions, things are not different. There is, however, the illusion of being different. If the United States didn't have that veil of "justice" hanging over its head, there'd be none. We wouldn't know what to define justice as. Unfortunately, when our government gets to define justice, it also defines the actions needing justice, ipso facto, only veiled. 

The modes of keeping subjects and followers of these two institutions may be different, but they are indistinguishable from one another at their core.

Jeremy Rifkin's "The Empathetic Civilization" backs up these ideas. Primates strive to be empathetic. People strive to be empathetic. It's embedded within us, right down to our dendrites and axons. But we only want to be empathetic to people who are like us. Not different from us.
This explains our inability or unwillingness (yes, the differences between those two could change a whole outlook, but it's practically impossible to differentiate between them when there's limited study on the subject) to empathize with those who we continually exploit in the third world. Exploiting their natural resources, their labor, and eventually taking their lives.
The same concept was used in WWI and WWII in nationalistic propaganda. The Germans were displayed as dark, ape-like creatures, and the Americans were the hero coming to save the damsel in distress.
If you make the "enemy" nonhuman, it makes him that much easier to hurt. Because he's not like you.
Rifkin argues that there have been stages to this dehumanization of "alien" peoples. First, people discriminated through blood ties; if you're not in my band or family, you're alien. Then, people discriminated through religious ties; if you don't believe in the same God or the same rules I do, you're alien. Finally, people now discriminate through national ties; if you're not from the same country I am with the same cultural practices, you're alien.
I argue we didn't change the way we discriminated, we only built upon the manner in which we did so. Structural racism exemplifies this human ability to integrate the ideas of blood ties, religious ties, and nationalistic ties seamlessly.


I sat in class silently fuming about this. It's not a big idea. But it's an idea and it's mine and it works into my views about how Chevron can mutilate Ecuador's environment leaving its people barren and diseased.


Stemming from that, this project is hypocritical. I realize the intentions and fully support them. However, undergraduates in a semester - now roughly rounded to about 5 weeks - are not going to put together the kind of thoughts "giants" could put together with a minimum of 10 years to think of these "great ideas". Dr. Wesch realizes this, a man as brilliant as he is doesn't let things like that slip past him, but the pressure is still there. And maybe that's the point. Maybe the first step is to realize you don't know anything. Then you can start the research in order to stand on the shoulders of giants.


GO KSTATE :3