Post-Modernism, Post-Colonialism, and Deconstruction:

Alternate Realities

These types of analytical measures and/or philosophical systems always intrigued and continue to intrigue me. Not only do these systems and philosophies offer me a new way to consider the world and the multiple ways in which it is constructed, it reveals intricate details about the society we occupy now by deconstructing it, tearing it apart, and attempting to get it root causalities, but more than that, to show how several factors, some that may not even be related to what is being deconstructed, affect the formation and construction of what we are analyzing. It simply tells us this world is complex, it tells us things cannot be labeled as easily as we label; it tells us things are not as they seem, it tells us social constructions are onions and layers can be peeled away without ever fully seeing the true nature of that social mechanism.

Mostly I like what these philosophies have to say about the self and meaning, but before I speak to that, perhaps we should define these terms? Again, I do not claim to know this 100 percent; however, I know enough that I’m not simply dangerous and careless with the knowledge. With that said, let’s begin:

Post-Modernism: a movement in literature, art, mathematics, sociology, and other academia progressing from the Modernist movement. It focuses on technology and production, viewing the world in Capitalist/Marxist terms: Colonial and Post-Colonial. It’s about disrupting order and power systems of control, even disrupting meaning itself, understanding that “meaning” has no meaning at all and is derived from referential things to shape and give it meaning. It’s about deconstructing. That’s natural enough right? Very linear. There are several tenants of this movement, but I only want to focus on a couple on for this blog, which focus on the literary-side of the house:

1) The idea that the self is fragmented and is continually fragmented, or has no self-identification. The self is NEVER whole and we are continually understanding things about our own nature as well as the others around us. That is an important idea because it allows alternate realities to emerge within history; essentially, there can be no “one voice” to which history is told and written.

2) The idea of self-reflection of narrator’s in our stories, ideas of subjectivity. Objectivity and omniscient narrator’s become to narrow and do not allow other histories to become infused with the telling of the story, the history. Something many readers take for granted is the idea that their narrator’s reflect on situations he/she/it are put in within the novel and are self-reflective about their own actions.

3) The idea of blurring and intermingling. This is used in blurring genres such as poetry and prose, which we find a great deal of in the 1950’s and 1960’s in literature, but is also used to blur social distinctions and boundaries. Again this is incredibly important because it questions those boundaries as real, which we all question at one point in our lives. Are there really boundaries of separation between social class, race, cultures?



All of this is said above to say the following: we cannot accept the world for what it is and how it functions without breaking it down. Of course there is blind faith in things, such as religion or love, but we can break those down as well into systems of power, why and how relationships between men and women are the way they are, why and how religion functions within society. And, perhaps, when you have gone far enough, come to a point, maybe where I am today, analyzed hundreds of relationships between Capitalism, Colonialism, Marxism, invention of the Middle-Class, sustaining of the Middle-Class, Political discourse, Feminism, Misogyny, war at what costs, peace at what costs, and realize that setting classifications, creating order where there really is none, is really pointless. It’s not that it has stopped me from creating order in certain ways, but I am careful about things, I am investigative, looking for relationships and factors and influences behind what I want to classify as “this” or “that” and why I am creating this certain relationship.

At the end of they day, Nature has order. Nature has its own systems ecologically, atomically, and you can take that to mean there will always be order and uniformity in some manner. It is the person who looks into nature’s order, attempting to access a system within a system, who will lose control, lose power. Go far enough, and nothing has order, nothing has meaning, which is exactly the point: all our social assumptions and interactions and classifications are invalid. If the self is always changing, always fragmented and searching for identity, then you cannot know yourself, ever. How can you define what structures there should be between people, between race, between class, between gender, between countries, between cultures? And, going further, how can there be only one reality, one history, tell the story and define what is real and what is not?

Something to think about today.

The Militarization of Children

Two weeks later and I find the time for another post, and this one has some flavor to it as well. Perhaps it will cross some generational lines: reaching the young, the adult, the mid-lifer, and the old. But on with the show: I found myself flipping through a magazine dedicated to the X-Box gaming system a few days ago at work, which is not unusual as I work at a technology company. I found several ads in the magazine for war simulation games: Tom Clancy's "Ghost Recon", Tom Clancy’s “Splinter Cell”, "Call to Duty 2", "Quake 4", which is Sci-Fi, but characters use military structure and the premise they are saving the world from some great evil, some new game called “Mass Effect”, which is also a Sci-Fi game based on military structure and saving the world from a terrible evil, and some game that I cannot remember the name of but was sponsored by the United States Army, claiming it was their official game, which I found incredibly scary.

It was quite disturbing to me to find these ads, to find them so numerous in one magazine, magazines which young adults and adults alike are reading. It brought me to the consensus that children, young adults, and adults are slowly being inundated to a military lifestyle, desensitized to war and the things that accompany it, and are being corralled into finding war heroic, necessary, and glamorous. It’s underhanded and slimy psychology: they are training children, probably as early as ages 8-10, to learn how to take orders, as I’m sure these games shout at the children that their company is being slaughtered on a distant hill by enemy mortar fire and things of that nature, or they are standing on a blown-out rooftop in some urban setting playing the role of the sniper, the scope trained on your target’s face, ready to watch it invert and turn into a gaping hole when you squeeze the trigger gently. So they learn to react to people shouting at them, commanding them to do things, they are not thinking for themselves on some level; they learn to accept killing someone, watching patiently for methodical killing. And as a quick digression, the hardest thing for a sniper to do is pull the trigger. Snipers see every minute detail on the target’s face, every bulge and detail on their target’s body, they track and wait for their target for days at a time, and they gather a sense of knowingness and kinship with their targets. Conversely, we are training our young children/young adults to deal with this in simulated scenarios, training their minds to kill without hesitation which takes snipers, even though they are psychologically tested and approved for these positions because of their willingness to forgo this hesitation, months to fully get over the feeling, and children can do this without so much as blinking, perhaps with a smile stretched across their small faces.

Here’s the caveat: they are thinking, as they have to maneuver their character, and possibly an entire squad, through the level to accomplish objectives, but they are moving and thinking from the game’s instructions, curving their thought processes to think a certain way and react in certain ways, like a soldier would. These children, possibly your children, are “little soldiers”. These are not necessarily teaching them what is right and what is wrong, their senses of justice and injustice, what means of force is necessary and unnecessary, but it is certainly imbedding itself in these children’s minds, affecting their decision making down the road. And, folks, that’s honest. You, the reader can deny this if you like, claim that parenting and nurturing skills can curb this, or even prevent this, but you are simply being foolish. I, myself, am not a parent, but I have taught young adults for several years and I have been witness to peer pressure, witness to what is going on “behind the curtain” where parental and authority figures have no insight: parental powers are no match for the world that surrounds them. The world teaches in real-time lessons; parents can only guide them to the right roads and hope their children make the most of it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is Ender’s Game. If you have not read the novel by Orson Scott Card, I suggest you do. The Department of Defense is reenacting this, especially when you have a game sponsored by the United States Army, my god, how clear does it have to be? Desensitized to war, to violence, to killing a fellow human being for grand objectives which are only illusions anyway, they are creating the next generation of soldiers. They are creating new enlistees with every player, with every little girl or boy who picks up their High-Definition Weapon, points it at the “bad guy”, and puts rounds down range into this person’s body. At this point, I wonder do I really have to say anymore? Does the reader understand where I have gone and where I am going with this? Maybe. But just so we are clear: STOP THE MILITARIZATION OF THE YOUTH.