If film and television have a role to play in our society, if they are capable of helping important social change, if they have a part in the transformation of human society, then T.S. Bennett and Sally Erickson have fulfilled that purpose. What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire is the culmination of the “big social issue documentary” genre of Michael Moore’s films, or An Inconvenient Truth, and particularly of the “using ironic 50’s footage” sub-genre, such as The End of Suburbia. It deals with the same issues, but follows them deeper, all the way to the root of the problem in the Agricultural Revolution. Along the way, it hits all the important points: peak oil, mass extinction, climate change, overshoot, and the stories that keep us on the path to self-destruction.

The Spell of the Sensuous
By David Abram

Summarizing Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous is a difficult task. Not since Ishmael have my thoughts been so turned upside-down by a book. Abram fully understands the powerful magic of language, and uses it to full effect in this volume, as he uses it to show us that magic itself. Along the way, Abram offers a stunning and authoritative answer to Zerzan’s critique of language by showing us that language is not an arbitrary abstraction at all, but firmly rooted in our ecology. To begin a summary of Abram’s book, it may be easiest to work backwards from the starting point of Western philosophy, for as Alfred Whitehead (we’ve discussed one of his pithy aphorisms before) put it, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

Superman is gay! Superman is Jesus! Superman is a dick! SUPES ON A PLANE!!!

Yeah, I saw Superman Returns. I couldn’t avoid it: Jason and Mike hauled out two different Superman t-shirts (Mike in the traditional blue, red, and yellow, Jason in “Man in Black” silver) and talked about it almost nonstop. Before long, even I was excited about it. That’s a pretty impressive feat; Superman has always been kind of “iffy” to me. He always seemed bland, lacking in personality, cheesy, over-the-top. Even with no past interest in comics, I could get behind Batman, Spiderman, and the X-Men when their movies came out. But Superman remained a silly, nationalistic antique to be enjoyed on the same level as those old 50’s educational films at Prelinger Archives.

It was a bright, sunny day, as most days on Seahaven Island seemed to be. The storm had passed, leaving Truman Burbank near-dead but still alive. He was sailing farther out to sea than he had ever dared sail before; he was going to explore the lands that had previously been hidden from him.

And then… SMASH. There was nothing to crash into, and yet his sailboat had stopped. He stood and walked across the boat to see what had happened. All he saw was clear blue sky with white, puffy clouds. And he reached out and touched it.

Asa Earl Carter was a staunch segregationist, a Ku Klux Klan leader, and a speech writer for George Wallace. Forrest Carter was a half-white, half-Cherokee novelist lovingly raised by his native grandparents. What do these two men have in common? One is a fictitious creation of the other.

Many recognize Forrest Carter as the author of The Education of Little Tree, a long-beloved memoir eventually made into a movie. Most people who cherish this classic book have a hard time coming to terms with the fact that its author, rather than being an “official storyteller” for the Cherokee nation (as the biography on the back of his book originally claimed), was in fact a bigot who knew nothing about Cherokee culture. How did this happen? Let’s take a look at Carter’s situation around the time that the book was written.

One of the most common objections people pose against the anarcho-primitivist world view is that to adopt a hunter-gatherer way of life is to somehow “go back” to an inferior evolutionary stage that humans were supposed to have already gone through. This argument presupposes a number of inaccurate ideas about evolution in general and cultural evolution in particular. Biological evolution consists of adaptation to a given environment. When that environment changes, those best adapted to it die off. A popular example is the Neandertals, whose short, stout forms were extraordinarily well adapted to Ice Age Europe, but died off once the world began to warm. Neandertals were both physically more powerful than Homo sapiens sapiens and, despite popular belief, showed no signs of being any less intelligent. There is no evidence that this shows any kind of evolutionary “progress”; if anything, it might have been the opposite. Species do not “improve,” becoming more and more perfect over time. A successful adaptation to any environment can still kill a species off when that environment changes.