NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

Chris Hedges stitches together so much troubling truth about both the film American Sniper and the book it is based on. It is a sobering reflection on the film, the mythology of Chris Kyle and how those things relate to the soul of a nation. After reading this is does make you wonder, for all those people who feel patriotic or a swell of national pride after watching the film, what type of nation do you imagine you are a part of? The film is incredibly effective at focusing the viewer on the sentimentality and sacrifice of one character, much to the detriment of rest of the ideological universe of the film ultimately being unquestioned or unexamined. One is too busy tearing up or saluting the heroism of Chris Kyle, that few seem able to question the rest of the film and what it is hiding or proposing. People crave someone like Kyle as being the tip of their national spear, but don't think about what kind of nation would want that type of person there. That type of person represen

When I teach about colonialism I am always careful to stress that you should never define colonialism primarily by manifestations of "evil" or overt expressions of racism or violence. If you do, you run the risk of blurring your critical lens and making it so that situations which are clearly colonial don't merit analysis because they aren't gory enough. The late Joe Murphy for example pioneered a commonsensical way of not seeing Guam as a colony in this manner. When confronted with arguments about Guam's colonial status Murphy would usually make two discursive moves. First, he would argue that colonialism is a thing of the past as associated with the atrocities of Spanish priests long ago. That was colonization, it was violent, brutal and cruel, you certainly can't call what Guam experiences today colonialism if that was colonialism as well. Second, he would say that Guam benefits from the relationship with the United States and in colonial relationships

Check out this article below from KUAM. It deals with meetings that the Federated States of Micronesia Association of Guam had in order to draw up some plans on how to deal with violence and crimes that are being attributed to the Micronesian community of Guam, in particular the Chuukese. They even created an education plan with alot of ideas on how to alleviate the social problems within Micronesian communities and those which spill out into the general public. I don't want to speak to the specific issue of Micronesians in Guam, as the available language and ideas makes it almost impossible to have a productive conversation. The "Micronesian problem" is what it is usually referred to as, and it is a textbook example of how a class or group of people become associated, in a way which becomes too commonsensically and too natural, with the ills of the world. Every society has problems, and every ethnic group has problems or roles in creating those problems. The problem

The Korean peninsula has been in the news on Guam for the past few weeks after a North Korean attack killed two South Korean Marines and two civilians on the island of Yeonpyeong which both nations claim to be on their side of the border. I have found the coverage of the issue to be frustratingly simple and incomplete, following the predictable narrative of blaming North Korea for naked aggression despite the fact that the South Korean Government has admitted firing first. They claim they were not directed at North Korea, but just part of a training exercise which was simulating a possible attack on North Korea and involved 70,000 troops near the North-South border. I traveled to South Korea earlier this year on a research trip in order to interview different communities affected by US bases there and also activists working towards the reunification of the Koreas. My entire trip was completely overshadowed by an earlier incident on the Korean peninsula, the sinking of the South Kor

Conferences exists to bring together a large group of people who think and live on the same page, or who would at least like to try and do so. The conference is like a warm, safe blanket around which they can hopefully surround their thoughts, their identities, or at minimum at least something where they can trust the space as safe and will not threaten or antagonize them in certain expected, but unwanted ways. You could all have the same job, be of the same ethnicity or race, or have shared research, political or professional interests, but every conference tends to be a great big bubble. And in that bubble you can hang out, speak jargon, share the feeling of being in your own imagined community and feel safe and secure in the fact that this bubble exists to limit certain potential challenges or critiques. If you are at an Ethnic Studies conference, then it is unlikely that in the middle of your presentation, someone will stand up and defiantly call Ethnic Studies a useless pointless

Last week I taught my first classes ever. I've guest lectured and substituted for people before, but this was the first time that I had my own classes and that I was the one in charge. Thing went pretty well. I'm taking over four History of Guam classes for November, since the professor is off-island for medical purposes. At first I wasn't quite sure how to approach the classes, since I'll be the third teacher for them (their real professor, another sub and then me), and what I might want to do, will no doubt conflict with what the others have taught. Also, since I have a dissertation that still needs to be written and finished, I have to find a way to be creative and get my students thinking, without taking too much time away from my writing and research. For my first round of classes, things went pretty well. At least from my perspective. I gave some background on myself, gave a little lecture on what I see as being the importance of history, and also talked about

I just came home from watching The Dark Knight . I thoroughly enjoyed it. There were parts though that I felt were rushed. Where it seemed that a scene had been stripped to its bare minimum in order to keep things flowing and moving. So characters end up talking to each other in ways which are way too concise and compact, its as if (even if they are good actors) they nonetheless appear like robots speaking one after another. Its always a hurried mixture of surreality and unreality watching this sort of thing, because of the way it unintentionally might reveal that in our own lives, when we speak in ways which are perfectly witty, perfectly timed, is there some sort of matrix at work as well? Editing our lives to create that illusion of discourse moving smoothly along? Other than this sort of thing, which is understandable, since they were struggling to squeeze as many story elements from as many different Batman storylines as possible, and somehow make all of them fit into 2 1/2 hours.