iPod Indian

LAST WEEK, I WAS on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Northern Minnesota, and I came across this fantastic t-shirt. In San Francisco, as in most places around the country I'm sure, iPod billboards featuring the silhouetted hipster rocking out with the iPod in white relief are everywhere.

One of the things that's always interested me about these ads is there attention to but silence about race. It seems to me the artists of these ads often accentuate the ethnic markers (an afro, for instance) of the shadowed figures. It's a way of using semiotics to show that iPods connect cultures, cross cultures, and are consumed by cultures.

It is as rare to see an American Indian in a popular ad as it is common to see ads themselves. Name the last time you saw an Indian model for The Gap, Abercrombie and Fitch, Mercedes-Benz, Tag Heuer, Target, or Rolex. Also, think of the last time you saw any semiotic representation of an Indian using and enjoying technology.

Imagine my joy, then, when I came across this shirt. The woman I bought it from told me that at their last powwow, the sold more of these shirts than any other.

On one hand, I wonder about the decision to continue to indicate Indians through powwow and dance garb (fringes, head dress, feathers), but perhaps the entire image is a play on the power of icons, the ubiquity of racial and commercial semiotics.

Either way, I love the shirt.

The P-Word: Why Hillary and Barack Won't Say It--A Special Presidents Day Post

WHEN JOHN EDWARDS ENDED his candidacy for president, he called for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to pick up the mantle of poverty awareness that he had been carrying pretty much on his own for the past four years. Indeed, Edwards, who brought the issue to the fore in the previous campaign with his notion of "Two Americas," has made the topic of American poverty--especially in the South--his controlling metaphor, particularly through the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his One America Committee. For better or worse, no public figure has devoted more of his energy to addressing systemic causes of poverty than Edwards. That said, I would argue that one reason Edwards never got the traction his candidacy deserved is because he focused too heavily on class during his campaign--a topic that, ironically, America is more uneasy about than race or gender.

Based on the poverty-line calculations developed in the 60s and using the Consumer Price Index as a measuring stick, around 12% of Americans live in poverty or "below the poverty line." However, according to United Nations calculations, which look at people who make less than 50% of the median income, America has a poverty rate of 17%. Yet, when polled, most individual Americans identify as middle class. Few Americans admit to being poor, and even fewer like hearing wealthy people talk about poverty.

Indeed, poverty remains one of the most slippery areas of American social identification. How easy now to pass as not-poor and how critical to be able to do so. One of the most powerful narratives of American mythology is the possibility of wealth--rags to riches, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, the self-made man, Horatio Alger, Donald Trump, Ross Perot. After 200 years of Capitalism, a strong strain of class consciousness remains in the American social fabric: if you are poor, that's your choice.

While a person can't help what gender or ethnicity s/he is born into, one can do something about social class. At least, that is the standard line. What's more, if one does not improve his or her social class, there is still a painful aura of failure attached, a laziness label, what we might call the prejudice of the poor.

Writers like Curtis Sittenfeld, George Pelecanos, William Faulkner, Richard Russo, and Robert Pinsky have explored the deep prejudices of economic class in their fiction and poetry, but such conversations have yet to migrate with such complexity to the political realm. It is this profound problem that Edwards sought, like no other public figure, to address, and sadly, because we don't know how to have this conversation, it probably cost him the race.

Why? Americans don't like to be told they are poor, and most poor Americans refuse to publicly support candidates who make poverty such a key issue out of fear of being seen to need an economic safety net. To sign on with Edwards might be to admit to poverty, to confess one cannot acquire on one's own. This is why Obama and Clinton won't say the P-word. Some pundits have criticized both for letting Edwards' poverty message go the way of his candidacy, but both intuit that address poverty issues as "poverty issues" is a dead-end road.

Few White Americans want to be talked to about being poor by a well-off Black man; even more importantly, Obama knows that such a tack may make him come off as an angry Black Man, a better-coiffed Al Sharpton. And, to be truthful, how authoritative can Senator Clinton sound about poverty? She is not herself poor, she has never made poverty part of her senate work, and her husband stole any Clinton-based-poverty thunder years ago.

Obama does have a good record trying to improve impoverished conditions. Right out of Harvard law school, he went to work as a community organizer in one of Chicago's poorer neighborhood. Over the course of his campaign, I suspect he will address issues of poverty without using loaded terms. He will talk about solutions rather than problems, policies rather than poverty.

However, until the stigma of being poor is removed from American popular and social culture, it's hard to envision how a politician can really address the issue. Public perception is as important as law in solving social problems--and neither can tackle the nearly impenetrable mythos of American upward mobility.

There Will Be Blood: Acquisition, Ambition, and America

MOST REVIEWS OF THE new P. T. Anderson film, There Will Be Blood have, understandably, focused on the mesmerizing performance of Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, a scoundrel oil man and, to a lesser degree, Paul Dano, a self-important young evangelist preacher named Eli Sunday. With the exception of David Denby's smart reading of the film as an exploration of dueling frauds--entrepreneurism and evangelism--most have seen the movie as a character study of the ego-driven, misanthropic Plainview or as an allegory on America's consuming drive for oil. Each is a plausible, but I'd like to suggest an alternate.

The more precise drive that unites Plainview and Sunday--bitter rivals in the film--is their ambition, which gets plaid out through surprisingly similar needs for acquisition. In the case of Plainview, it's oil, which, naturally, leads to the vast acquisition of land. And acquiring land then leads to the accumulation of power through geographic surplus. The more land you own, the less land others own. Or, put another way, if you own a great deal of land, people have acquiesced, ceded. They lost; you won. They divulged; you acquired. Their loss; your gain.

Plainview collects parcels and mineral rights in much the same way Eli Sunday collects souls--as symbols of what can be taken. In his nearly WWF-like sermons, Sunday literally rips the devil out of an elderly woman, and in one of the best scenes in the film, he beats (or pretends to beat) sin out of Plainview. When potentially given money, he spends it on a larger church, not on the needs of his parishoners. His need to grandstand, to be the spewing derrick at the pulpit, is as overarching as Plainveiw's. For him, preaching is like drilling for oil. It is about drawing the commodity out of the vessel: the soul drilled from the sinner, the evil pumped dry.

For both men, identity is forged on the crucible of acquisition. It is how both arrive at power and how they keep it.

Denby is correct to see the film as a battle between capitalism and evangelism--two of the great shaping forces in American culture. The film does seem a kind of anti-morality play in which the forces of evil and evil pretend not to tussle and pretend not to be evil. Both capitalism and evangelism need acquisition to flourish. Neither does well with charity. Dramatizing the violent clashes of these forces underscores the intangible tensions that frame important institutions of American culture--social class and religious salvation.

Ultimately, the film asks to be read as a metaphor for Manifest Destiny, itself a twinning of acquisition and evangelism and the violence that ensues when both get out of hand.

We know what happens to the land when are too ambitious with one of the drives, but what happens to our collective soul when the ambitions of the other gets out of hand?