This excerpt is from R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience:

“Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other’s freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other’s own existence or destiny.

We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.”

In composing/researching this thesis, I learned more about myself as a writer and thinker than through any other project I’ve ever undertaken. For those that don’t know, I wanted to figure out a way to discuss rhetoric, masculinities, and the environment within one central theme: I chose pickup truck advertising. There are still a lot of problems with it, I think. Though I’m going to work this semester to glean material from all of this to produce two solid scholarly journal articles: masculinities will be the focus of one, and environment (greenwashing, sustainability…etc.) will be the focus of the other.

With this project, I was able (hopefully) to illuminate the ways in which feminist and environmental activism are constrained and affected by the same power structures, the same issues of entitlement, control, and dominance. This year, I’m hoping to put some of this into action, forming coalitions between my work with The MARS Project (men against rape and sexism) with local environmental groups. If, for some reason, there is anyone who wants to read the whole thing (like 95 pages), I’d be happy to send it through email as long as all the copyright stuff is respected.

The entire thesis is called: Power Under the Hood: Pickup Truck Advertising, Hyper-Masculinities, and Denial in the Age of Ecological Apocalypse

Members of American culture would be hard pressed to imagine an advertisement for a pickup truck that didn’t display a rugged individual behind the wheel, navigating his new mud-splattered F-150 through towering canyons, his truck clawing its way over jagged boulders and rapid streams—spitting up water and gravel along the way—only for it to rest at an impossibly jagged cliff among the desolate, pristine wilderness that lays before him. The other dominant image depicted in these advertisements, of course, is a construction site. In this advertisement the viewer catches up with the same rugged individual as he finishes loading his new Silverado with 2 x 4’s; he hops into the cab, leaving the construction site in a cloud of dust, just in time for a catchy, masculine slogan to run across the screen such as “built Ford tough,” “size matters,” “like a rock,” or “high performance starts here.”

In this world, pickup trucks—and the men in them—are invincible. They are in the driver’s seat, paving their own destinies. They are in control, they are steadfast, they are confident. Such a man is just as much a part of the truck as the truck is a part of him. There is nothing a man and his truck cannot conquer in the world created by pickup truck advertising. It is a world not affected by the environmental impacts of combustion engines, or the destructive wake of heavy off-road tires. It is a world where men are fueled by aggression and sustained by power, control, and dominance over alternative masculinities, women, and the natural world.

Analyzing the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising reveals intersections between rhetoric, masculinity, and the way our relationship to the natural world is constructed. An analysis such as this is crucial in that it allows us to rediscover what it means to be authentic, autonomous, and fully human members of a culture outside of generic and confining gender roles. Once we sift through the negative effects of the cultural norms, deep-seated within the rhetoric of advertising, we can begin to uncover what it means to be fully human and, thus, interact with one another and the natural world in a way that is truly meaningful and reciprocal. In order for this to happen, a careful examination surrounding the discourse on sustainability and so-called “green” automobiles must be interrogated as well. If our culture is, indeed, in the process of a transformation to a sane and sustainable way of life, the disconnection between ideology and action must be united. The world illustrated in the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising gives members of American culture false and harmful representations of masculinity. By portraying the dominant masculine ideology as virtuous in the rhetoric of pickup truck advertising, a myth is further propagated that, through the implementation of domineering technology, man can transcend the needs of the natural world. In the narcissistic world of pickup truck advertising, violence, aggression, control, and domination are portrayed as innate, as natural and predictable as the setting sun.

Meanwhile, in the real world, nearly one-third of American woman will “report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some point during their lives” (Katz 21). Approximately one in four or one in five women will experience an attempted or completed rape in college (Katz 21). Over 99% of the perpetrators of rape are men (Katz 5). But men don’t just attack women; “Between 50 and 70 percent of men who abuse their female partners also abuse their children” (Katz 21). The dominance of patriarchy—and particularly a masculinist ideology— also fuels a strong sense of homophobia in our culture. In 2005, 13.8% of all reported hate crimes were motivated because of sexual orientation (FBI). Of the 1,213 victims targeted because of sexual orientation bias, 61.3 percent of the victims were homosexual men (FBI stats). Though the FBI doesn’t list statistics on how many of these crimes were perpetrated by men, “the Bureau of Justice Statistics say that over 85% of violent crimes in the U.S. are committed by men” (Katz 79).

We also live in a world where roughly three percent of old growth forests remain intact in the United States (San Francisco Chronicle). An average of 150 species of animals go extinct every single day (BBC News). According to the U.S. Geological Survey, there are carcinogens in every single stream in the United States (U.S.G.S.). Ninety percent of all the large fish in the sea are gone (National Geographic News). It is predicted that by 2030, a quarter of all the earth’s mammals will be gone, forever (Podger). There are, of course, many systematic and institutional reasons for these striking figures, but most of them can be summed up as due to increasing loss of habitat. This is particularly true if, in the definition of habitat, we include drinkable water, breathable air, and sustainable food sources. Much like the trucks described above, as our culture has extended its colonization of wild habitats, it has destroyed, in whole or in part, everything in its path.

In short, our culture is very violent. Statistics support the notion that this violence can, in part, be attributed to the dominant masculine ideology, which functions as a cycle from which narrow, and, indeed, harmful interpretations of what it means to be a man are encouraged throughout development, reproduced in the media—particularly through advertising—and ultimately rewarded in the capitalist society at large. Like a fish unaware of its own liquid environment, it is important to recognize the difficulty inherent in questioning the impact of one’s surroundings and how these surroundings influence behavior, world-views, and motivations. This project is particularly concerned with the role that advertising in the mainstream media plays in the construction of world views. Long after the marriage between production and promotion, products have been linked symbolically to the “world of social values,” whereby accepting the “selling message is to accept the values it presupposes” (Wernick 23). By looking critically at today’s advertising, we can begin to understand what is being “sold” or “promoted” beyond the product itself.

So why, one may ask, have I chosen pickup trucks and not, say, SUVs? I am deliberately omitting SUVs, insofar as I can, from my analysis and, instead, focusing specifically on pickup trucks for two main reasons. First, though many women do drive pickup trucks, advertising, by and large, is generally geared towards men. In fact, a Chevrolet marketing campaign from 2005 called, “Long Live the Truck,” was according to the marketing director, “aimed at men, who make up 87 percent of the full-sized pickup’s buyers” (Geist 1). Rob Schwartz, creative director for Nissan, specifically identified the full-sized truck market as a “male-dominated category” (Halliday 2). Further, SUVs are a relatively recent phenomenon while pickup trucks represent a long tradition of masculinity and men’s roles in American culture.

Before such a formal analysis of these commercials as cultural texts can take place, however, it is important to get a sense of the way advertising works and how the focus of advertising has shifted from logically-based appeals to those that attempt to exploit our deepest emotions. Further, it is crucial to understand how these appeals to emotion specifically reinforce, and thus promote, traditional gendered stereotypes and worldviews characterized by false and limiting dichotomies. This will lead into a demonstration of the way in which this mindset negatively affects men’s relationships with women and alternative masculinities. In addition, I shall examine how the consequences of this hegemonic gendered identity alongside the rhetoric of pickup truck advertisements converge in a manner that justifies the on-going destruction of the environment.

Remember last spring when Las Vegas tried to ban feeding the homeless in public places, like parks?

Orlando recently pulled the same crap: banning charitable groups from feeding homeless people in parks downtown, “arguing that transients who gather for weekly meals create safety and sanitary problems for businesses.”

Well….after a 14-month federal court battle, it was ruled that people can’t be prohibited from feeding the homeless in city of Las Vegas. Hopefully this helps to set a new precedent, whereby cities might put more effort into helping the homeless instead of pretending they don’t exist or pegging them all as dangerous drug addicts.

“I don’t want to go to jail just for feeding homeless people,” Sacco said.

She has never stopped feeding the homeless or the hungry, Sacco said.

The food is a way of reaching out to people and establishing trust, and once people are fed, they are open to accepting other forms of aid, such as finding permanent housing and jobs, she said.

“We aren’t doing this to be arrogant,” Sacco said. “We go where people are hungry. The food is a way to build a sense of community.”

High fives to Sale Kirkpatrick for writing this fantastic essay. It’s few years old, but pretty on point with my thoughts on the Live Earth fiasco (here and here. I found it when I was researching my thesis and meant to post it. Here is a great excerpt.

The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them. Take our crazy energy consumption. For the past 15 years the story has been the same every year: individual consumption – residential, by private car, and so on – is never more than about a quarter of all consumption; the vast majority is commercial, industrial, corporate, by agribusiness and government. So, even if we all took up cycling and wood stoves it would have a negligible impact on energy use, global warming and atmospheric pollution. I mean, sure, go ahead and live a responsible environmental life; recycle, compost, ride a push-bike; but do it because it is the right, moral thing to do – not because it’s going to save the planet.

If we really want to understand why this happened we have to ask ourselves another question: ‘Why is it that we seem willing to live with the threat of apocalypse rather than trying to seriously alter a world where consumption, of anything, is seen as unrelieved virtue, production, of anything, is regarded as a social and economic necessity, and more, of anything (like children or cars or chemicals or PhDs or golf courses or recycling centres), is unquestioningly accepted?’

The Ecologist is rad.

The story goes like this.

When I was 18, I hated English class. All through high school, Mrs. O’Conner did her best to stomp out any previous love of writing I may have had. When I was a senior, I took a creative writing class with someone else and discovered that I actually loved writing, but still hated my English class. This didn’t make sense.

At the time I was listening to a lot of classic rock, reggae, some occasional punk (or punkesque) like Pennywise, Blink (I don’t care what anyone says, everything through Dude Ranch was great), Less Than Jake, NOFX, Bad Religion, Social Distortion, Sublime (so much Sublime, in fact, one summer…pre-junior year, I believe, was dubbed, the “Sublime Summer”). Unfortunately, I also went though a big and ill-advised metal phase, involving the likes of Pantera, Sepultura, early Metallica (though when I sold a lot of my CD’s in college, I did hang onto “Ride the Lightning” and “Unjustice for All”), and many more that I’ll never admit to now.

My first college English teacher was unlike any teacher I had before. It wasn’t just the tattoos and piercings, and it was more than his combat boots and Green Bay Packers shirt that never matched his shorts. Eric let us write about whatever the hell we wanted to. He also helped us say and argue what we wanted rather than the way he thought the argument should be structured. It was a breath of fresh air. The most important thing I took from that class (both classes actually….I took 102 with him as well), both as a student and (now) as a teacher was one simple, but crucial message: English class doesn’t have to suck.

Later, Eric and I got to be pretty good friends (after I turned 21…). We talked a lot about English, grad school, and, of course, punk rock. I credit him with my introduction to Youth Brigade, which subsequently got me into Minor Threat and other early eighties gems. The “Someone Got Their Head Kicked In” comp remains one of my favorite records ever.

During this time, I also started regularly reading the fantastic punk zine, Razorcake, which Eric was involved with to some degree. As the years went by, I changed residences like 37 times and didn’t renew my subscription. I also lost contact with Eric.

When I moved into my new office, on campus, I found some old Razorcake issues tucked away in the back of my new desk. I took them home and decided to get a subscription. For some reason, I asked the mailorder guy if Eric still wrote for them. He emailed me the next day.

We had been emailing back and forth about punk, teaching, and shit. I guess he talked me up to Razorcake about writing reviews and stuff. To make an uninteresting story a bit more tactful, I’ve been offered a chance to write a column for Razorcake’s webzine. Topics are wide open and there is a strong possibility I’ll move up to the print zine eventually, most likely slogging through crappy bands for reviews and the like. No money, but that’s not really the point.

I’m gonna come up with a snappy pen name. Any ideas?

A bit early I know, but I’m going to be busy working on some other things this week, then I’m off to Taos, NM for a few days. So here it is. Enjoy.

On 7/7/07, more than 10 million people tuned in to watch Al Gore’s Live Earth™, “The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis.” In case you were in a coma that day, Live Earth was a 24-hour, 7 continent (including Antarctica—I’ve heard they’ve got a great music scene there) concert series that brought together more than 100 mainstream music artists and 2 billion people to “trigger a global movement to solve the climate crisis.”

I really tried not to be cynical about this thing because I do appreciate the increased awareness. Plus Al Gore and Madonna certainly have the power to reach populations of people that would never give me the time-a-day. Perhaps the millions of people who signed the Live Earth Pledge™ will act on their commitment and think critically about it. Or, maybe they just wanted to see their name appear on the Live Earth jumbo-tron.

On the surface, it would seem that any environmentalist would be doing back flips in their Chacos upon hearing word of a global concert that raises awareness about global warming. I mean, one couldn’t turn the television on that day without hearing the word “green,” and every other Myspace bulletin I received hyped up the event. So why did I think the whole thing was a sham?

Increased awareness is a good thing, don’t get me wrong. We need everyone on board if we are going to have a planet that will support life in the future. But what kind of awareness and “solutions” are being touted here?

Let’s take a look at the content of The Live Earth Pledge™ and we’ll see what Al Gore says will save the planet. “1. I will change four light bulbs to CFLs at my home.” “2. I will ride public transit or carpool one or more times per week.” 3. I will shop for the most energy efficient electronics and appliances.” “4. I will forward a Live Earth email message to 5 friends” (at this point, I have coffee coming out of my nose). “6. I will shut off my equipment and lights whenever I’m not using them.”

The list goes on. It does get a little better, but like these first 6 commitments, they all reinforce the notion that nothing fundamental about the way we live on this planet has to change. Perhaps most importantly, none of these things are solutions to global warming, and they should not be touted as such.

My pledge would be short and to the point: “I will do whatever it takes to stop industrial logging, stop industrial agriculture, stop the murder of the oceans, put an end to factory farms, remove dams to liberate rivers, and put an end to the destruction of communities, both foreign and domestic.”

Perhaps after all these CFL light bulbs burn out in 7 years and the toxic mercury contained in them seeps into our local environment, people will begin to look at things differently. Perhaps, at this point, our culture might finally realize that the environmental problems we face are much more complex, that real solutions are tied to the institutional foundations from which our civilization is based.

Last month, I interrogated the discourse on sustainability in the hopes that people might begin thinking about what sustainability really means and what sort of products, such as automobiles, will never characterize a sustainable future. In short, we’re not going to buy our way out of our environmental problems. Change will come when we look at our existence on this planet in a new way (which is actually a very old way).

We will have to give up a lot; that is simply the reality. I’m not in a position to say exactly how our transition to sustainability will unfold, but right now we have the choice to make this transition a voluntary one. In the near future, we won’t have that luxury. Part of this process, which thoughtfully interrogates and restructures the way we live on this planet, requires that we also think critically about our conceptualization of waste.

First of all, what does sustainability really mean? It is worth noting that there is currently no standard definition, from which standards are gauged, for sustainability. Maybe this is why we’re so confused. There is a little irony here. If one believes the stories of science, we’re the most intelligent beings on the planet, yet we’re the only animals that don’t know what it means to live sustainably.

We’re also the only animals on the planet that, simply by living here, do nothing to improve the land. We take and take and denude the landscape until there is nothing left. We’re the only ones, save perhaps cyclical locust invasions, that do this. Even in death, as we rot in caskets 6-feet under the ground, we block the land from using our bodies as we decompose.

I’ll take a stab at a reasonable definition, and I’m open to suggestions. A sustainable existence may be defined as any way of living that gives as much as it takes, thus supporting, respecting, and engaging in active relationships with those systems of live necessary to support ones own life. This means, if I eat elk, and rely on elk for my life, I am responsible for the continuation of the elk and its community—meaning everything that supports the life of the elk. If I don’t take responsibility, if I don’t engage in that relationship, there will be no more elk and my way of life will not last. And every animal knows this but us.

Live Earth taught me, if it taught me anything, that we are only capable of baby steps. I spoke on the phone with our local Sustainability Manager, Nicole Woodman. Part of her job, as is mine, is to engage the public and to help influence the way in which our city thinks about our impact on the land around us.

“When you talk about consumption, you need to also talk about education,” Nicole said. At this point, “we’re trying to instill a level of accountability.” It is hard to be accountable for problems that are largely invisible to the public. Flagstaff’s landfill, for example, is located over 10 miles northeast of town. Citizens don’t have to see the consequences of our way of life, which Nicole describes as “a throw away culture.”

“It’s way out there,” she said, “it’s hidden.” Just for kicks, I drove by it this afternoon. The wind was blowing hard, as monsoon rains were approaching. I have to say, the road leading up to the landfill is a beautiful one. Winding through dense forest to the right and spectacular views of the peaks through the prairie grasses to the left, the landfill is about two miles or less from 89 on “Landfill Road”. I was thinking about how vague the word “landfill” is. I mean when you say the world landfill, nobody asks what they’re filling the land with; everyone knows you’re talking about waste.

I often wonder, if aliens came down from outer space, what would they make of the artifacts of our civilization? I think our landfills would be the most telling. From where I’m looking, the garbage—which is constantly being moved, shuffled around, and buried—is mostly paper. Of whatever percentage is paper, roughly 20 to 30 percent of it is fast food remains. There is also a separate pile, towards the front, dedicated to broken televisions. To my left is “green trash,” which can only be described as a giant pile of grass clippings, dirt, and scattered weeds of all varieties.

Trucks drive in, dump, drive out. Trucks drive in, dump, drive out; day in and day out, 362 days out of the year—for-ev-er. The aliens would think we’re very weird indeed.

The first thing I noticed as I walked the fence, however, was the bags. Thousands of white plastic grocery bags flew through the air like a flock of seagulls. The wall seemed to be serving its purpose pretty well, in terms of containing most of the bags. Yet the surrounding area, trees, and shrubs were covered in bags, flapping violently in the cool summer wind.

I was the only one at the landfill in a car, which obviously makes sense. I was also the only one there taking pictures of the trash, which made me stick out even more. Nonetheless, everyone I ran into was very nice. As I walked along the back perimeter fence, careful to look where I was going, I had a clear perspective of the immensity of our landfill. It’s huge. It’s also well-managed, considering what they’re up against.

Nicole told me that Flagstaff currently spends tens of thousands of dollars on cleanup efforts, and bags are not very easy to get out of trees. The bags need to go. They, like many of the thoughtless consumables produced, should never have been made in the first place.

I thought of the ordinance that San Francisco recently passed, which places a ban on all plastic bags from grocery stores and pharmacies and Eugene, OR, which banned Styrofoam a few years back. San Francisco is now beginning to offer compostable bags made of cornstarch instead of oil.

I went home and called San Francisco. I was curious how such an ordinance was passed. I talked to Boris Delepine, the aide of Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who sponsored the ordinance. He said the idea is really catching on, that Seattle, Baltimore, and Annapolis are trying to pass similar legislation. “We went after the largest producers of bags,” said Delepine, “namely the grocery stores and pharmacies.”

Flagstaff has like 17 grocery stores, so I’m sure if such an ordinance was passed here, it would be similar. I got excited and asked Nicole if similar legislation could be passed here. “I’m researching our options at this point.” At first, I have to say, I thought she was just giving me lip service…as one who has interviewed many city officials during my writing career, I’m pretty used to it. Nicole, however, went on to explain the issue from a practical local level, which I really appreciated.

“The landscape of Flagstaff, Arizona is much different” than the land under and around San Francisco. San Francisco has a municipal compost service, so citizens can throw all their biodegradable material in one of these compostable bags and the city will pick it up. Flagstaff doesn’t have municipal compost due to the dry climate of the area. “While San Francisco can offer that service because it only takes the bags 10 to 45 days to compost, it would take roughly 2 years here.”

That makes sense, but it doesn’t stop the fact that the oil-dependent plastic bags should not exist in the first place. Plastic bags and Styrofoam are just the tip of the melting ice burg in terms of what needs to go. A thousand years after one takes their last sip of that nasty gas station coffee, the Styrofoam cup will remain. There is no excuse for that.

It’s 2007 and the Earth and all its life support systems are in crisis. Why do manufacturers continue to produce packaging that can only be used once? If it can’t be recycled and used again in one way or another, such as many plastics and specific papers, why do they still exist in the market?

I asked this question on my website and received the answer immediately from a friend of mine in Eugene. “Throwaway products continue to be produced because they are cheap, in the sense that many of their true costs are externalized and the cost to industry is minimal relative to alternatives,” he said.

In a culture that continues to put the needs of the economic system above the needs of the natural world, I can follow the attempt at logic. It’s still insane, however, and it still can’t last. Nicole touched on this subject as well. “We don’t look at the full cost of anything.” When we buy something and throw it out, it’s as if it disappeared. We’re privileged enough not to think about the fact that, like Styrofoam, our trash will outlive us.

Personally, I don’t want to pay the true cost of anything either. I don’t think you can put a price on a piece of trash that will continue to toxify the environment for a thousand years. Simply put, products that come with such extreme environmental consequences should not be manufactured. Period. And this list, of course, goes far beyond plastic bags and Styrofoam.

Nicole said it all comes back to making smart choices, but we have to be real with ourselves and make truly informed choices. And when no suitable choices exist, citizens need to demand alternatives.

“Contact City Council and express your concerns,” said Nicole. The Sustainability Commission meetings are held on the second Wednesday of every month. The next one is 4:30 P.M., August 8th, at City Hall. Nicole will bring the issue of plastic bags to the table. See you there!