Things I made this semester: A just barely 19 page long historiography paper. An accompanying 7 and a half page long research proposal with 22 page long annotated bibliography because I found too many interesting sources and had too much to say about them. An 8 page long paper about seditious speech that could have been a little shorter but I had too much to say about that, too. One data research analysis report (with accompanying fun bar graph). A basically functional, entirely responsive website with 7 individual pages (which I’m still putting the final touches on). In between all of this I recorded an eleven song album of nuclear reactor core folk ditties, all by my lonesome.
T’was a good semester.
I also changed my major. Again. This summer I’d declared a second major in history to go with my studies in emerging media and technology with a minor in web design. But I wasn’t too sure about the latter degree. Part of why I was clinging to EMAT was plain ol’ fear, to be completely honest. Not a crippling or conscious fear, but the oft-restated assumption lingering in the back of my head: it’ll make you marketable. If you get a bachelor of arts, you’ll either be out of a decent job or trapped in the stressful, low-paying world of education. Get that ~science~ certificate in your life and you’ll be rolling in that dough and not destute, unlike those silly B.A. kids.
Well, I don’t necessarily agree with that train of thought. Having had the concept of “STEM” shoved down my throat in even middle school, I’ve grown critical of the importance we place on those fields specifically. As vital as technology and science are, you also have to realize that the social sciences are just as useful to, well, society. Yet such fields are looked down upon. No wonder people nowadays are barely capable of critical thought, take everything (especially media) at face value, and barely know the basic facts about their own country’s past. It’s because we condition kids to doze off in their classes and not take education on any level seriously, especially not the subjects associated with boring, stuffy things like reading and interpreting and thinking. Too much hard work, let’s rah-rah the football team instead.
Learning history and connecting it to the present is one of the most important things you can do to become a more aware citizen, and it’s time we stop pushing this culture of self-consciousness over what people think of us because of our degrees or careers and actually work on ourselves to actually get some informed participation in society. As for the career part, my workplace on campus is proof enough to me that studying history can get you a fulfilling job that lets you utilize the skills you honed and information about the wider world you picked up in your studies. It helps you connect with people and their past experiences. It helps you contextualize the world you currently live in. And by studying things objectively, it helps you become a more logical person less swayed by disgusting propagandic appeals to emotion. It just helps you become a better person. Realizing that that is the path I want to take, as opposed to sticking with a major I just wasn’t fully jiving with in the name of some enigmatic ideal of making my chosen institution proud or something, is very freeing.
The web design minor is staying because I just genuinely love twiggling around with my little HTML and CSS files and applying my graphic design Skillz in that manner. On the other hand, I’ve picked up another minor: creative writing. I’ve always taken my writing abilities for granted; I’m a great writer, I’d say. But only now have I really felt empowered (to use a cheesy term for lack of a better one) to express it in a creative way – and not just in the songwriting department. I think I felt for a while that I had to suppress my “creative” side in order to appear serious to…I don’t even know who I was trying to appeal to. But my brain has been firing off in too many directions lately, and has been too inspired by the world around me and my various influences to let my individual perspective linger in the background. I gotta do me.
So I went from English while enrolling –> Journalism because I was under the assumption that all the English majors were going to be Swifties –> Public Relations for a few weeks because I had no idea what I was doing –> Emerging Media and Technology with web design concentration –> History + EMAT + web design –> History major + web design minor + creative writing minor. That’s a really weird and still incomplete circle, but it’s fun to think about.
They Might Call In The National Guard On Your Ass
November 14th, 2023I watched Punishment Park a few days ago. A cinema vérité pseudodocumentary from 1971(!), it takes place in an alternate United States where hippies, Commie sympathizers, and anti-war protestors who don’t want fifteen to twenty years in prison are shipped off to Punishment Park, where they have three days to run fifty three miles through the desert to an American flag. If they reach it in time, they get to walk free, or so they are told.
It’s a gritty, chilling, masterfully put together work of alternative history and it’s also kind of a misery fest. The absurdity of the concept leaves room for some degree of reaction to the extremity of it, and maybe in a different context I would be able to crack a smile at lanky seventies youths running towards nothing with awful posture through a desert in record-breaking heat. But you have to understand that I have been put through the ringer of having regurgitated radical politik parroted at me over and over and over. It gives certain people a thrill to wallow in that misery. But it just doesn’t thrill me to have people try to insert a microchip in my head repeating slogans of Everything is Awful and Will Never Get Better.
You would think I would relate to one of the girls who gets interrogated at the Punishment Park, who is blonde, 19, and writes (kind of awful) songs about the Pigs and Tricky Dick and all that. She talks about how she dropped out of college because after the Kent State massacre, she realized that it wouldn’t matter if she wore a stars-and-stripes cheerleader uniform and rah-rahed America all day; even if she was just a spectator, the National Guard would just shoot her anyway. She didn’t feel safe being out in the open.
This allure of the “underground” was in full swing during that era of the Weathermen and is even more common today where we long for a time when the revolution wasn’t televised. It seems people love this movie because of these tendencies. When your face is in the light, it’s scary. You retreat to the womb, or in this case the commune, and you feel safer but you also isolate yourself. You surround yourself with hardcore ideals that present plain fact but with no room for changing those facts substantially. You preach upheaval but get so caught up in the concept of it that you mentally can’t go about ever making it happen, because doing so would make you like the world better, and you can’t have that when you live off of the world being against you. It’s addicting. We need the truth, especially now, but we’re all individuals with our own individual lived experiences. The real world isn’t a colorless, lifeless desert plateau. There’s color and water and food and little creatures crawling in the ground.
Different strokes for different folks, but why did Ken Russell have to die before he could direct a hilarious and extremely Ken Russell remake or take of this? These are the thoughts that go through my bored, weird, college girl head.
Tags: film reviews, films, Punishment Park, those damn dirty hippies, why couldn't Ken Russell have directed every movie ever
Posted in Reviews & Commentaries | No Comments »