Linguistic Monuments

Never forget 'date of infamy' or language of war

In my opinion | Expel me

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 11/28/07

In just a few short days we'll be upon the 66th anniversary of an event that many believed would never be overlooked in this nation - December 7, 1941. It became known as "a date which will live in infamy" when President Franklin Roosevelt addressed congress and asked for a declaration of war.

The Japanese military had attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor; nearly 3,000 U.S. personnel were killed, and the United States used it as the opportunity to join a widening conflict that had been underway in Europe since September of 1939.

College-aged people, like us, would have made up a large part of the more than 16 million individuals who eventually served in the U.S. Armed Forces during our 45 months of involvement in that war. They would have been born in the early 1920s and would have been intimately familiar with the emotional and political power evoked by phrases such as "a date which will live in infamy" or "Pearl Harbor Day," or simply "Pearl Harbor." But now that generation is pushing into its late 80s, and the idea of commemorating December 7 is fading with them.

So as next Friday rolls around and we break from 11 weeks of grueling studying, that 1941 version of the date itself will be the furthest thing from our minds. And why shouldn't it? World War II is 60-some years into history and in another decade or two there will hardly be a soul around who actually took up arms in the conflict - so why shouldn't the war slogans of that era pass quietly along as well?

After all, we have new slogans and new conflicts. The United States was attacked, nearly 3,000 people - citizens, not combatants - were killed, and the U.S. used this as the opportunity to coalesce a response to a widening series of attacks that had been underway since at least 1993. Many even declared that the events of September 11, 2001 were "the new Pearl Harbor," and we have the slogans to prove it - Twin Towers, Ground Zero, September 11th, 9/11…



Some would like to believe the use of these terms is strictly positive and that they have real emotional meaning that sums up an event, evokes a pure patriotism, and serves as a linguistic monument that can unite a population towards a goal, whether that goal be peace, war, or peace through war. But intertwined with the humanistic purpose and effects of remembering such a traumatic event, these slogans are also political propaganda that serve a specific purpose for a specific time.

Eventually each slogan, as it and the population that coined it both age, loses much of its emotional and political currency. The phrases, however, remain with us, and these linguistic monuments, though stripped of much of their trauma, retain social meaning, even as they are displaced by the slogan that evokes the current traumatic event.

Though slogans such as these see the bulk of their use in wartime and political arenas, they are significant in a national and social context for a much longer time because each one retains with it not only a vague sense of the military conflict from which it came but also the often racial aspect that helped to inform that specific war.

As a nation we have become less comfortable with racializing our military conflicts - at least in the last decade - but it has not always been so, and this racial aspect of war propaganda has not been removed, only disavowed. As contemporary press and politicians attempt to deny that there is a racial undertone to the current wars, in the 1940s the ethnicities and races of those against whom the United States was fighting was actually brought to the fore.

Disney's propaganda films depicted stereotypes of Germans, Italians, and Japanese, going so far as to distort facial features and give Japanese characters yellow or even green skin, as in the 1943 production "Der Fuehrer's Face." And in the U.S. thousands of individuals of German, Italian, and especially Japanese origin were forced into internment camps.

We cannot dismiss the emotional significance of our current monumental terms, but we do have to view them in the larger context of the genre and thereby understand more about how they operate. They are never just innocuous phrases that unite individuals; they also always hold within them the racialized coding that defines the enemy, the threat.

Whether the given image or concept of an enemy is real, fictionalized, or a hybrid of these, this racial coding remains long after the emotional and political fervor subsides. So if you commemorate Pearl Harbor day, consider how your commemoration will not likely be used by a politician to make you want to view Japanese individuals as "the enemy" that threatens your safety. But also consider how once it was used in that manner, consider if "9/11" and its commemoration ever directs your fear toward a racialized enemy that threatens your freedom, and question the validity of that racialized appeal.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2007 Oregon Daily Emerald

A More Equal Sustainability Revolution

Spotlight might weaken environmental movement

In my opinion | Expel me

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 11/21/07

"You say you want a revolution/well you know/we all want to change the world." The Beatles gave people a soundtrack for social change in the summer of 1968, but the question of if we can change the world into a peaceful and healthful place is just as relevant now as ever, as the new "Sustainability Revolution" takes root in our media-fertilized consciousness.

Just stop for a moment to consider how the "environmental" language of the late 1980s and 1990s has exploded into a whole new lingo in the last couple years. A progression from "recyclable" and "biodegradable" to "greenhouse gas" and "climate change," to "global warming" and "environmentally friendly" has given way to an influx of pseudo-scientific jargon like organic, grass-fed, compost-able, zero waste, local, fair trade, hybrid, renewable, carbon emissions, carbon footprint, carbon neutral, carbon offset, carbon sequestration, green energy, green transportation, green housing, green farming, green economy, eco-friendly, eco-chic, and sustainable, sustainable, sustainable.

The currency of these terms in our discourse is evidence of both a progression towards thinking about life and death on our planet, and an example of the inevitable process of capitalist interests co-opting a "counter-culture" movement.

Knowing that people are talking and thinking in terms of how their lifestyles contribute to global extractive economies must be a dream come true for environmental conservationists, who have been arguing for decades that socio-industrial impacts upon our ecosystems are affecting changes that in turn negatively impact the quality of human life. At the same time, some likely worry about the real danger that proliferating these terms into the marketing subset of our socio-industrial structure will hollow out the intellectual content of the words until they have as much meaning as the "extreme" tag slapped onto so many products and fads in the 1990s.

This is the conundrum facing "sustainability" advocates. Is it possible to market "green, organic, and sustainable" products and movements so that their use, proliferation, and currency actually translate into ecological sustainability? Is it possible to prevent these same philosophical and marketing terms from being used by organizations whose eyes never shift from the bottom line?

No, in our current system it is not possible. A social movement of ecological sustainability is itself unsustainable because its proliferation depends upon and is a product of a capitalist exploitive economy that values the perception of sustainability over sustainability in fact.



Consumers are already being bombarded with conflations of what "green" and "sustainable" mean to eco-conservatives and what these same words mean in terms of global marketing and regulation. The idea of sustainable forests is a relevant example. Products and consumer identities are already being fabricated around the successful marketing of the "Sustainable Forestry Initiative."

The SFI certifies public and private forests as practicing, well, of course, sustainable forestry. However, the SFI bases its personalized certification process on the guidelines of the International Standards Organization Guide 66. This document spells out how a certification of an Environmental Management System "should" be conducted.

However, ISO Guide 66 is a procedural guideline only and does not specify any benchmarks or specific environmental concerns that must be considered. Instead it is left up to each "organization to define the criteria by which environmental aspects and their associated impacts are identified as significant."

Given the process of such guidelines, it is very likely that a forest of "Roundup® Ready" trees grown with pesticides and industrial fertilizers could be given SFI certification. The consumer, however, who looks for and buys based on the "sustainable" labeling may be buying that product based solely on a nostalgic idea of "sustainable" that may invoke pastoral images of quaint local businesses, community, and a warm sentimental feeling of quiet life. Keep your eye out for the advertisements of SFI-certified wood and paper products, then research the companies and the type of sustainability they are practicing.

This is the real danger that now faces the "green and sustainable" movement. Savvy marketing and catch-phrase piracy will give a new veneer to the same progression of industrial and bio-technology practices that eco-conservatives have been trying to work against for the last several decades. The marketing words will change, but the processes will stay just the same.

Think about this as Eugene continues down the road to the 2008 U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials, and consider if your purchase of a carbon offset credit or buying coffee in a compostable cup is really a revolutionary act, or if marketing this as a "green" event is just another tactic to get you excited about pouring your idealism and your money into a very large and very industrial socio-economic process that "green" labeling alone will not change.

You may want to wear something that goes a bit higher up your leg than a track shoe if you're going to wade through the green hype piling up around the Eugene '08 Track Trials.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2007 Oregon Daily Emerald

Check yourself: Love and STDs

Spread the love, not the STDs

Editorial

By: Emerald Editorial Board

Posted: 11/19/07

For most people sex is a private affair, and what happens between individuals stays between those individuals. Though this is often the view that people have, there is in fact an immense amount of sharing that takes place, beyond the emotional and physical act of making love, having sex, bumping uglies, or doing the nasty.

Each time you have sex there is another exchange, or potential exchange, that transforms this intimate personal activity into an issue of public health and public discourse - sexually transmitted diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released STD statistics that show the number of people diagnosed with chlamydia has reached an all-time high. The CDC reported that there were more than 1,030,000 cases of chlamydia reported in the United States last year alone. Other STDs, including AIDS, accounted for another 430,000 diagnosed new cases of diseases last year in the U.S.

Though the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases is completely preventable, it is clear from the statistics that this possibility for prevention does not translate into a fact of prevention. Some people argue that the most certain way to end all sexually transmitted disease sharing is to cut the moment of potential transmission out of the equation. However, advocating abstinence only as a method to prevent the spread of STDs, especially among young adults, is not a realistic solution.

The starting point to examining the reasons why there is such a high rate of STDs in the U.S. has to be an admission that people, especially college-aged individuals, are going to have sex, and are most likely going to have more than one sexual partner. Once people recognize that, we can begin to address real solutions that will look at adjusting both behaviors and perceptions so that we don't share more than passion and orgasms.

While many people will advocate that we address sexual behavior first and, again, try to have people reduce the number of partners that they have, this does not get at the root of the issue. The real place to start is open and honest dialogue about what STDs are and to dispel the myths and stigmas that accompany STDs.

First, anybody can get an STD. This does not mean that you or your partner(s) as individuals are "dirty," nor does it mean that your sexual identity or expression has somehow led to an infection. What it does mean is that because anybody can get an STD and can carry one without knowing it, everybody has the responsibility to have her or himself screened for STDs whenever there is a chance of having been infected, and before becoming intimate with a new partner. Also, we all have to take the extra step to use condoms and barriers that will also help stop the spread of STDs.

These are the realistic and mature behaviors that will stop the spread of these diseases. If talking about STDs with a new partner, going to an STD screening and using barriers sounds really un-sexy, think about how much of a turn-off it would be to share something potentially life-threatening with someone you care for. Try embracing the freedom of knowing you've been screened and treated and all you're going to share with your partner is some screaming hot love.

Screenings and more information about STDs are available from the University Health Center, the Lane County Public Health Department, and Planned Parenthood.

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© Copyright 2007 Oregon Daily Emerald

Living Situations

Being green is great, but how about being safe?

In my opinion | Expel me

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 11/14/07

Students are putting a lot of emphasis on the health and safety of their living environment these days. You have to try and eat organic, non-modified foods. You want to make sure that you're not being poisoned by lead paint in your apartment or by pesticides in your water. And you want to keep the devil nicotine out of your body and the public air that you breathe.

While all these issues are fairly safe and easy to talk about, there is another concern in the neighborhoods where University students live that is so close to invisible that very few people even think to think about it. If we could have Donald Rumsfeld expound on it, he would describe it as one of those unknown-unknowns, which University students have to become aware of and thereby change into a known-known.

The fact is that there are registered violent sex offenders, who are not students themselves, living among some of Eugene's most dense off-campus student populations. According to data analyzed by the InfoGraphics Laboratory in the University's geography department, these populations can hold as many as two hundred registered University students per block.

Of course, one could argue that we have to strive to be an egalitarian society and that these violent felons should be absorbed back into society upon completion of prison terms because they have been rehabilitated and are ready to be productive, valuable, integrated members of the community. One could also argue that a violent sexual offender who is registered with the Oregon State Police and under supervision by a probation officer is much less of a threat than the violent sexual offender who is much more invisible and much more dangerous because he has not been indicted or convicted.

But neither of these side discussions begins to address the propriety or reasoning that underlies a decision to allow these individuals to live so intimately with the very population groups that they have targeted.

One registered violent sexual offender, who lives just one block from campus, is described by the Oregon State Police online sex offender inquiry system as targeting adolescent and adult females, and is further characterized as a "power rapist" who uses "grabbing, threatening to kill, forcing/coercion" as methods to attack his victims. The listing for this individual goes on to describe him, in all capital letters, as an "EXTREME HIGH RISK DANGEROUS SEXUALLY VIOLENT OFFENDER." I think we all have to ask, again, why this individual is allowed to live in such proximity to such a concentration of the population group that he targets.

If the courts and the Oregon State Police view him as such a threat to these young women, why is he allowed to live within 300 feet of two sororities, not to mention that he is allowed to live somewhere that has direct line-of-sight into several windows of those same sororities?

Other registered violent sexual offenders living in the same neighborhood have targeted very young boys and girls in the past and they are restricted from contact with children or frequenting "places where minors are known to congregate," yet there is a school for pre-school-through-eighth-grade children just 300 feet away, and again with direct line-of-sight from where these individuals live.

But these individuals do not live in these places because nobody is paying attention. According to an Oregon State Police official, all sex offenders under supervision by a parole officer have to have their living situation and location approved by their parole officer. And each parole officer will have to determine if it is appropriate for the offender to live across from a school, or next to a sorority because there are no general "distance" requirements for how far away from a restricted population an offender must live. Generally speaking, few people would want to have a violent sex offender as a neighbor, but the official bureaucratic stance seems to be that because these individuals have to live somewhere, they may as well live anywhere that pleases them the most.

This is unacceptable. Violent sexual felons should have to live according to strict restrictions placed upon their behavior. There should be places where they can and cannot physically be because they are deemed by the legal system as constituting a continued risk to the public, and especially the population group that each felon has targeted in the past. To allow these violent sexual offenders to live next door to those whom they pose the greatest risk is irresponsible and dangerous, and University district residents should question the wisdom and reasoning of the parole system that would allow such arrangements.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2007 Oregon Daily Emerald

Veterans Day

Meaning of Veterans Day shifts after serving military duty

In my Opinion | Expel me

By: Josh Grenzsund

Posted: 11/7/07

Veterans Day used to be one of those holidays I could just as soon ignore as acknowledge. I, like most people, could not even tell you what month it fell in or even if it had a fixed date or was one of those floater holidays.

Sure, my grandparents and some of my parents' friends had served, but my father had not been drafted and in general the town I grew up in, in the 1980s, joined the nation in its ambivalence toward the latest wave of veterans. Whether or not you were a Vietnam veteran in Western Montana, at that time, spoke as much about you as your choice of Winchester or Savage, Husqvarna or Stihl, Chevy or Ford, trailer or a home with a foundation, but it was one topic few people actually did speak about.

That changed in 1991 when we invaded Iraq the first time. It became acceptable to be a veteran, and the community threw up yellow ribbons all over town for the young men and women in the military. I noted the change in the country, but vowed to never serve, unless my home state was invaded.

Six short years later I changed my mind, as I surveyed a future of peace and stability. I was sure nothing would happen in the next eight years that could make me question my choice to take Uncle Sugar's college money.

Of course, that changed too. By the time 2003 came to a close, I was preparing to go overseas. I've long since gone and come back, but I'm still learning a lot from what I learned being in Afghanistan, if that makes any sense. I'm still learning because part of the country, the experiences, the reasons, and the ramifications are lodged into my bones.



I think a lot of new veterans experience this same kind of learning. While veterans are all radically different individuals, it still means that we will interpret motivations, behaviors, and places differently than those who have not been stabbed with anthrax and smallpox, flown in a cargo plane to a sweltering, dusty runway and shown how to consider other humans' lives in terms of targets and a job well done.

Actually, if you can disregard the moral difficulties that accompany the sanctioned killing of people you don't know, military service these days does provide an extremely high level of job satisfaction. I don't mean that it is a satisfaction to know you've killed or helped kill people, but there is something about working long and hard to accomplish a goal, and on top of finishing each task you get the added benefit of being happy as hell that you're still alive and feeling like you played a personal part in that end.

But being a veteran of these current wars, and then coming to the University, means a lot more than that.

It means making some family members, friends, and classmates very uncomfortable with the apparent and real moral valence you have demonstrated.

It means feeling naked without the comfortable weight of your weapon slung over your shoulder, against your body.

It means judging distances by the range of your service weapon.

It means having a good idea what each campus building would look like if it had taken a barrage of small arms fire, 30mm cannon fire, a 500 pound bomb, or all of these.

It means sometimes feeling like you are dreaming or hallucinating when you walk quietly among dozens or hundreds of peaceful people on campus, wondering if they are ignorant of the dust, diesel fumes, heat, itching, diarrhea, sweat, blood, and fear that they could be walking through if only they were somewhere else or had made a different choice.

It means wondering if you have made the right choice, and wondering if you can actually manage this peace, manage putting your life's energy into something that oftentimes seems irrelevant or even trite when compared to working every day to help keep people you know and care about alive and not maimed.

It means wondering if you can manage the absence and invisibility of things that really matter and bring yourself down to worry about and concentrate on something seemingly as irrelevant and minuscule as a grade point average or as hypocritically abstract as discussing what philosophical theories may account for disavowal and reification of the objects, people and language that seem to form our consciousness and perceived reality. You wonder if you can do all this while consciously shutting out of the classroom the real noise from a severe foreign policy and a national ignorance of a series of wars that are in their sixth year, producing veterans and casualties on all sides, by the thousands.

Veterans Day, or as it was originally known, Armistice Day, was meant to honor those who had fought in the Great War, to show gratefulness for the victory, and to demonstrate a commitment to peace. I visited home this past summer, my name now on a yellow ribbon along the main street. A neighbor I never knew was a Vietnam veteran welcomed me home and for me, paradoxically, demonstrated the uncommon peace that veterans have learned how to understand.

We need to observe Veterans Day because we need to continually reconsider if our collective and individual actions or inactions, support or opposition, mean that we are actually going to live in a more peaceful world.

jgrenzsund@dailyemerald.com

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© Copyright 2007 Oregon Daily Emerald