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I chose to analyze a film scene from The Matrix, specifically the wonderful scene where Neo enters the kitchen of The Oracle and a key point in the movie takes place. There were a lot of good scenes in this movie, and certainly many others, and I could go into writing each one of them out like this, but by then I’d have quite a bit of words. Generally it’s for a lack of time that I can honestly commit to watching movies, that I get through so few, please consider this in reading through this paper that took me not so long to write this much, and another little bit to refine its errors. For the sake of the reader looking explicitly for a film analysis, and not a critical analysis, please cease reading upon moving to the paragraph that begins the discussion on the critical analysis of the scene after completing the film analysis, and skip to the conclusion paragraph where a link to the scene can be found.

Starting with the film analysis side of this, the acting performance is limited to two characters, one of Neo and one of The Oracle. The Oracale indicated moments of presentational and stylized or otherwise exaggerated and outspoken performance, but this seems to’ve been a design choice by the film crew as the character was such an outspoken role up to that point in the movie. Neo indicated a more naturalistic and representational stature, although the moments when he was inspecting his hands were a bit exaggerated. Neo was very silent in this conversation – most of the the dialogue here was one sided and Neo was largely portrayed as receptive to the almost one-sided conversation, responding often with one word answers, questions and comments. The dialogue starts calm and remains quite calm through the entire scene and was continuously slow moving. Their interaction appeared genuinely to be with each other as the bits of dialogue that they exchanged reciprocated the responses of the others conversation and very little seemed to be ignored. Much of the gestures that The Oracle character made seemed designed to satisfy or otherwise placate the Neo character who didn’t know what to expect but seemed to be looking, at the time, for some sort of physicial indication, visibly hung on on some physicial indicator of his situation. In this dialogue, these two characters complement each other, and seem to have very little tension with each other but retain their own inner tension as their own inner monologues seem to be going on.

Through the scene, the camera starts focused and zoomed in on the oven, and then pans out and begins to sweep the kitchen, and then zooms in again on the individual characters. Multiple times the film is such that the character that is saying something important has their face in full view of the screen, as when The Oracle is sitting at the table, generally only showing their head as a close up. The scene used medium shots when the two were physically interacting and full shots when introducing and setting up the scene. A few times the long shot was used to show the surroundings of the room, as it panned from one wall to the other when The Oracle stood up. The movement of the camera was used to create engagement with the viewer, and it was an interesting addition to have the camera shot from where the vase had originally been placed that had been knocked on the floor and destroyed. For the most part the camera was still, to establsih the serenity of the scene, but a few times it tracked movement such as when The Oracle approached Neo, and in doing so moved from a high angle to an eye-level angle.

The lighting of the scene predominantly was shown as coming through the window and was used to cast shadows on both of the characters faces. The Oracle generally had a well lit face and the unlightened side of her head was opposite to the light from the window, whereas Neo was positioned in such a way that the light was generally used to split the front of his face into two different parts, showing one half of his face to be illuminated and the other half cast in the shadow. The kitchen itself was reasonably well lit by the external sunlight and there was not a discernible source of interior light that had cast shadows on either of the actors. The light was mostly green in color, accentuated by the colors of the room, not seeming to be inherently hostile but possibly conveyed a tension as if to indicate that The Oracle was of the same world that The Matrix was from which in various parts of the movie was always depicted as green text or other types of green light.

The music was referenced earlier as some kind of 50s style trumpet, evoking some kind of nostalgic or longing feeling, but at times switched up to be more engaging depending on the topic they were discussins. Various sounds just as the glass of ice or the puff of the cigarette were used to punctuate sentences, a common tactic at the time due to how common smoking was during the time in which the movie had come out. The film itself has much work that went into it in order to better portray the story in the movie, and due to its great talent portayed in doing this, it becomes very easy to critically analyze the story without having read the book – instead going directly from the film and to levels of detail that, in many places, exceed the level of detail offered by the original author that wrote the book.

Where the applications of technique to the film itself are imporant, a critical analysis of the content of the scene itself would be the next step. Beginning again from the beginning of the scene, as the scene opens after Neo enters through the bead door, here’s this woman, The Oracle, a black late-aged hearty looking and kind person, possilby a grandmother (she later refers to children although the context is more than this as it applies to the rest of the movie). She’s presented as some counterbalance to the Neo character, who appeared as a gaunt white male dressed in all black and young in age. Due to the nature of her character as described, her character would’ve known the exact moment, day and time he would’ve arrived, in the same way he would’nt’ve, so the choice to bake cookies for the engagement was a planned event. The walls are green, the painting is green, there is a green ice cube tray on top of the freezer, the phone books are shades of green, the woman is adorned in green. Neo’s wearing black on the outside, but the woman’s black, as if to indicate that there’s some sort of whole that he’s about to become a part of through their meeting. He’s standing, and leans under the bead door to enter even though he can walk right through it, the light switch is flipped up as if to indicate it was on, but there’s only seemingly sunlight that casts light through the room. There’s magnets on the fridge and a marked up calendar on the wall. The Oracle appears as this human woman, though we’re not meant to understand her to be just a human, now or in the future. Neo appears as a human male, although the implication at the end of the scene is that we’re not meant to regard him as limited to that observation at some point in the future.

She’d chosen this exact moment to make cookies, and as he says his first words to her, she tells him to wait, because “they’re almost done”. But the kitchen and adornments in it appear outdated even for the time the movie came out, by at least a decade or two. The door of the oven’s used as a sound effect to indicate that the oven door opens off screen, but is unmaintained in that the oven’s not been tended to, making it apparent that the whole scene is just there to serve a purpose in much the same way the oven did its duty. She’s sitting, leaning over the oven, ingredients strewn about, not cleaned up, even though it took time to cook the cookies. This indicated that she was doing something else while the cookies were cooking in the oven, as if seeming to make it apparent that by extension the guy is just another step in the assembly line of the process of making cookies, they simply “wouldn’t be done” he he not arrived.

As she stands up, she tells him she would ask him to sit down, the chair she was sitting on in the first bit of the scene has seemingly disappeared, as if she may have placed it in a spot for him to sit on, meaning that she was offering him her own chair. It’s apparent now that the tilework’s also green, the countertops are green, her shirt and pants are green, her oven mitts are green. She comments on the smell of the cookies, saying that they smell good, which urged a response from him. Neo agreed casually. He knocked over the vase she told him not to worry about, and she then momentarily asked him if he would have still broken it if she hadn’t said anything as he lights up a cigarette with a match, not a lighter, again indicating the outdatedness of the adornments of the apartment – as if she’d been portrayed as having waited longer than expected, aleady. She wears glasses, presumably to correct her vision up close as she uses them later, her body language is one that indicates admiration and appreciation, possibly adoration, for the person that stands in front of her. Neo’s casual demeanor, depicting his inquitivieness and naivety is maintained through the beginning of the scene.

As she lights the cigarette she does so near the window, near the light, but then lights the match in the lighted window, as if the cigarette was used to indicate that she was simply passing a message onto him from a source of illumination, through the match which then the flame she inhaled and translated to him the information that she was to divulge through her voice. The scene pans back to him and the lighting is such that you can see that half of his face is illuminated, and half of his face is dark, as if he is parted, or straddled, halfway one place, and halfway another place. This contrasts with her in that while half of her head is shaded, her whole face itself is illuminated in standing in the window.

She calls him cuter than she thought, as she shows a very toothy grin, as if to confirm that this was a moment that she had been imagining for quite a long time, savoring the importance of it in ruminations that had already spanned decades. This built on the narrative that the time has come and past when she’d first thought he was going to be present. She then says that she can see why she liked him, feigning ignorance by presenting the notion that it was his ‘cuteness’ that was the reason “she liked him” (referring to Trinity). Neo plays coy but she knows better already as she keeps the wide grin and responds that, “he’s not too bright though”, which is another reference to light and dark in this scene, especially as he is dressed in all black, important to note here is that the words here indicate that he was at least “a little bit” bright, depicted by the light cast across his face. The scene pans again to his face that is still half illuminated, as she says this after having moved from a chair near the oven to another chair nearer to him. The wallpaper of the rest of the room is seen to be green at this point, and she has removed her apron and placed it near the sink in the sunlight.

She asks him what he thinks, implying the whole situation he was in right now, but asks him if he thinks that he was ‘the one’ that Morpheus was looking for as she takes a sip of a cool drink where you can just faintly hear the sound of ice hitting the side of a cup as if the sound itself were a punctionation mark. He responds, “Honestly, I don’t know”. Not just – “I don’t know”, clearly torn in some sort of denial of the situation he’s in. Here he was in the kitchen of what was told to him was “The Oracle” and he feels the need to indicate that he was being “honest” or not, as if this was not the kind of entity that wouldn’t immediately know him to be a liar or not. Was the term used endearingly or to reflect the nature of naivety he posessed at the time? Rather, was he attempting to garner pity from The Oracle by indicating that he was being honest, in saying that he didn’t know or, what?

She then uses the cup and cigarette to point to something behind him, she asks him if he knows what it meant, then doesn’t wait for an answer because she’s already concluded that he didn’t have an answer for her. She continues in saying that it’s latin, the phrase over the doorway that was over his head, meaning “to know thyself”. The words themselves are also written in green, on a brown background, the placard rests on the door frame, though not above or apart from the door frame as if one were to hang a decoration. The placard appears to need to touch the doorframe because it indicates that the decoration is a part of the doorframe, and refers to those that step through it, and is not an adornment of the room itself. The doorframe itself is an adornment of the very green room, but the placard is adorning the doorframe, it says “temet nosce”.

In this scene just Neo stepped through the door frame, not her. She then says she will let him in on a little secret and says that being “The One” is just like being in love in that in both, where you “just know it” when you’re in it, she also says of it, “balls to bones” and “through and through”. This indicates that as he goes through the door frame and then through the door frame again, in the moment he steps through that door frame in particular, he is not “The One” as he stands in front of her, and it’s only when he steps through that door frame again that he again becomes “The One”. The phrase, “through and through”, was a well selected phrase for this situation in that it related very directly to the doorway that was in the scene.

In the background at 2 minutes, the nostalgic sounding 50’s music was playing, again indicating the nature of the long wait The Oracle seems to’ve had prior to having this encounter. No radio is apparent besides the one on top of the fridge, but this one was seemingly unused as it’s behind things on the fridge, so the music can even possibly be imagined as playing from another room, the sound carrying into the green room. The bead door is always behind Neo in this, he doesn’t go more than a couple feet from the doorway, indicating his hesitancy to approach his situation. He doesn’t step forward, but stays near the open doorway, there is no door to open or close, just some beads in his way of a safe escape. He’s presented in a cautious manner, in that it appears that he might flee at a moments notice. At 2:03 we get the most panned out view of the kitchen yet, which over the last two minutes has been coming more into focus as the first few seconds of the scene we were shown a close up view of some stuff in the kitchen, but now can see that theres a whole (Green) kitchen table, the chair by the oven has reappeared, there’s additional shelving on the left side of the room, and we can see the bottom cabinets and the floor of the room for the first time as the camera angle points down filming her and her kitchen.

She then stands up, puts her glasses on and says she should have a look, in the same way the audience was just “given a look” of her whole kitchen as the camera pans from pointing down and tracks her to become eye-level with both of them as she’s now elevated to match his stature we get the appearance that we are looking straight onto the scene. Here it’s as if one were viewing the scene from the same spot the flower vase was prior to him knocking it off and destroying it. She extends her arms and takes on an inquisitive body language with her arms outstretched, he braces for her touch as if expecting a heavy weight, he changes his feet around to steady the anticipated force. She grabs his head with both hands, covering his cheeks and tells him to open his mouth and say “ahh”, and he complies. It becomes apparent at this point that the visual and physical inspection is a ruse, for she’s again concluded that the person in front of him lacks any ability to grasp that what he’s doing there, and what she was doing there, was anything more than a secular experience, and proceeds to “play doctor” for his benefit. So that he could feel as if he’d been inspected for his pedigree, as if looking into his mouth was to reveal the answer, shortly after comparing that which she was allegedly looking for to being in love.

Here she is almost comically, “looking for evidence of love”, with a corporeal physical inspection of the guys face and hands – this is seemingly to placate him and put him into an ease as one would a child. This is because overall the entire scene is possibly a ruse – the idea that he was or was not who he was believed to be, or believed he was, all went out of his own control when he willingly stepped through the doorway to be evaluated for who he was and was perceived to be (this opposes her parting words to him when she sarcastically says things are in his control). In a sense, a willful suspension of disbelief of his own situation could’ve been the only reason that he was even in that room, therefore, it could be said that in this one scene alone, the character of Neo was vulnerable. It could even be argued that throughout the entire movie, this 5 minute scene was the only time in which he was not “The One”, and it was only because he willingly subjected himself to the evaluation of something outside of himself that he was seeking validation from for that moment – the only time in which he’d done so in the movie.

This necessarily places The Oracle in a spot that essentially “nullifies” the powers of those around her in order to empower them for who they are. This denial, this nullification, this is possibly tied to the green imagery through the entire scene, in that the green could have denoted nature or something godlike – something that stands to have more relative power than anything could for its ability to placate, nullify or otherwise temporarily invalidate that which is undeniable otherwise because in that kitchen alone, nobody was who they were. In the same way the matrix was represented with the green lettering and the machines in lights of green, this color is used to denote this interconnected network that in its dualistic nature both provides for and suppresses the human population that’s entangled within it.

Neo complies in placing his face in her hands and says ahh, with an inquisitive, disturbed and concerned look. She probes his eye lids, we see the back of her head and the front of his face and he’s looking off to her left side, as if glancing at the kitchen sink, or through the window, and it becomes apparent that he’s likely daydreaming, and his mind is elsewhere, evidenced by his not looking directly at her during this critical period of time. Her hands drop down to his neck, as she rotates his shoulders looking at his facial profile, then her hand goes to his collar, she looks down as if to divulge some bad news, but then grabs the back of his hands as he opens his palms and displays them to her. He’s also looking at his palms, then for the first time looks at her, possibly because he now fees safe in doing so because she’s not examining his face and he can get a look at her facial language without having to look direct at her, again showing his timid nature. In doing this he reflects a deflective, defensive nature, but as he’s looking at her face, his face is wholly illuminated, for the first time in the scene, and it’s the side of his head that’s shaded in the same way hers was at first.

He is always facing the same direction in this scene, but she has faced all directions in this scene. He looks as if to read her face but sees nothing as he looks right to left with his eyes. She exclaims, “oh” and it’s then that he looks down at his own palms. It’s apparent that the whole interaction appears to be her putting on a show, as she’s first looking at his palms in the darkness as we look over her right shoulder, they’re covered in the same shade that’s on half of his head. She indicates, almost sardonically, that, “I’m supposed to say hmm..”, as if this is some parody of some pre-ordained situation with knowable results, while she’s holding his palms in the light now as the camera view switches back to over his left shoulder from her right shoulder side. She says, “but you already know what I’m going to tell you” – as if to confirm that willingly steppping through the doorway was an act that itself indicated that he already knew what it was to be. Had he believed at that time they’d not’ve needed to even had gone to her. It’s at 2:40 that he says, “I’m not the one”, and she does not say this at all. She instead says, “I’m sorry kid”, as if to agree with him, because it’s becoming clear that it’s not within her ability to say one way or ther other whether or not he was, it was for him alone to say.

He then places his palms together at the same time she says, “it looks like you’re waiting for something.” His hands are pressed to together in some way reminiscent of a prayer (in Christianity this arrangement of hands is a common way to depict prayer visually). After hearing her say this he opens his palms and then takes on a seemingly feigned surprised stance, he looks in his opened hands as if to expect something to’ve magically appeared there. He then looks down, rubs his palms together and looks up and over at her, and asks, “when?”, to which she says, “next life maybe”, having continued working with the cookies now but didn’t put the apron back on, seemingly resuming her disinterest with him, but also not getting ready to cook more cookies. At this point the cookies are done, the cookies she would’ve chosen well in advance to make for this arrival. they’re done and removed from the oven, and are cooling, as cookies do, when taken out of the oven. She grabs a spatula as he resumes looking at his open palms in disbelief, and she says that’s the way these things go and he laughs, and as he does this she glances over skeptically, with cookie on the spatuala, and asks him what’s funny.

Neo then indicates that Morpheus had him convinced, almost, but she consoles him in saying, “poor morpheus,” and says that, “without him we are lost”. She’s somehow resumed smoking at this point and the cigarette appears to be a new one, but overall the scene has only been 3 minutes so it’s quite likely implied to be the same one, so she takes a drag on her cigarette as he says, “what do you mean”. She responds, “are you sure you want to hear this?” This is another baited question at this point, because she knows well enough by now that the guy in front of her doesn’t want to hear a single thing at this point but has nothing else better to do, at that moment, when he’s momentarily under the impression that all the burdens that’d been placed on him recently are no longer his to bear, for a time. So it’s on this precedent that she asks, again, if he would like to hear it, to which he nods his head.

She continues to say that Morpheus believes in him, and she smiles, and then says that nobody can convince him (Morpheus) otherwise. She said that Morpheus believes in Neo so blindly that he will sacrifice his life to save Neo’s. Neo then asks for clarificaiton, and she responds by saying that Neo will have to “make a choice”. She still at this point hasn’t said that he’s not “The One”. This is the choice she’s talking about, in the same way she offered him the choice to say it just moments before as she was physically examining him. In discussion of this second choice, she says he will have Morpheus’ life in one hand, and in the other hand he’ll have his own. This closed the loop in regards to the scenes portrayal of the inspection of his hands. The part where he was inspecting his hands was foreshadowing the words she was saying later on in that what he was looking for in his hands was hypothetically both of their lives – his own and Morpheus’ lives. These weren’t able to be phsyically seen because it was a metaphorical display. The scene portrays much concern with the characters looking for something physicial, when what was being looked for lied below the surface at a wholly different point in time in their shared future.

She then says that one of them is going to die, Morpheus or him, and which one that is is up to Neo. She then apologizes to him, and says he has a good soul, whereas previously she said he’s got the gift. Which says something about the writing here in that it could be implied that this says that a soul is a gift to a person, which has much more philisophical connotations to it that are outside the scope of this currently. She then she says she hates giving good people bad news, as the conversaiton trails off, she says don’t worry about it. She said this was because as soon as he steps outside that door, he’ll start feeling better, which closes the loop about the door and being “through and through” – the door in particular being that which he had gone through and then through once more.

She consoles him in saying that he’ll remember that he doesn’t believe in any of this fake crap and that he’s in control of his own life, the camera is zoomed into her at this point, so we can see the gravity of the words she’s speaking in the shape of the muscles of her face that imply the dire situation that the guy’s a part of. She offers him one of six cookes, tells him to take a cookie, and extends the glass platter to him, he picks the nearest one on the corner, and as he does this she promises that by the itme he’s done eating it he’ll feel “right as rain”. One one hand, she knew that he would’ve stepped htrough the doorway by the time he was done eating it, and the idea was to again placate the guy in giving him a cookie so’s to distract from the action of going through the doorway being the event that does or does not qualify him as “The One”. The phrase itself “right as rain” stands to have further consideration as well, but this is the end of the scene where the rest of the movie then proceeds to take place.

In conclusion, this wonderful scene has much to be said of a basic film analysis as well as a critical analysis that hinged on the context portrayed in the scene. It doesn’t requre a particular attachment to this scene to observe this, other than to regard it for its ability to cultivate and inspire a deeper appreciation for cinematic art.

Weblink to this scene can be found here:

The struggles, rewards and journeys undertaken by people who’ve sought the American Dream have been put on display in this technological era. The wonderful complexities all folks share, despite having wildly different stories, will be retained by corporate holdings for vast amounts of time well beyond the typical human lifetime. Never before in our history has it been so possible to find out the story of so many different people, or to be aware of the intimate details of the lives and testimonies of them. This used to be imagined, and the imagined story formed a shared national narrative for a very long time and the resulting vision was self-fulfilling, also for a long time. These people all’ve different struggles in their pursuit of The American Dream that’ll forever be enshrined in the narrative that’ll come from these corporations that adorn their profit margins with the efforts of those they took this data from, in rememberance of their struggles in exchange for their business and acceptance. All your data, on the cloud, all your writing, all your mannerisms and behaviours, all carefully filtered and adapted somewhere on various cloud servers on various International Corporation-owned hard drives.

This data will, soon enough, be used to re-create human likenesses directly from it and will be used to form the narrative of The Future American Dream. This will be a reality, as the devices we use each day record even our heartbeats, listen to us as we express our thoughts, listen to us type, see our emotions, see where we go, see how we feel about it, hear how we feel about it, and more. Anyone who’s had DNA taken from them at any point in their life also has their human genetic code recorded, and more that we can’t currently know about. Even then, there’s much more to record, sure, but also, there’s a lot that’s there already. This information can be put into a system that’ll filter the data so’s to create an AGI likeless of people, when they die. This essay will be a short discussion on the impact to The Future American Dream that’ll precipitate from these corporations utilizing likenesses and fragments of the people who’ve given their data so willingly and freely, at their own expense and unawareness of the real value of it.

As an example of the concept discussed here, say you’ve a credit card. You’ve likely not gone to a credit card company’s brick and mortar building and spoken to a business representative. Most folks’ve used such a service daily for years now. You’ve probably spoken to someone on a phone, and assumed this service comes with a human face. But, this can be replaced with AGI, which is an Artificial General Intelligence. This is a type of intelligence where, “few have the faintest glimmer of what is about to hit them. Nvidia analysts still think 2024 might be close to the peak. Mainstream pundits are stuck on the willful blindness of “it’s just predicting the next word”. They see only hype and business-as-usual; at most they entertain another internet-scale technological change.” (Aschenbrenner June 2024). Leopold is a member of the Superalignment team at OpenAi, which is responsible for large amounts of AGI reserarch. What he’s saying here’s that the impact that is forseeable through the use of AGI in our near future will have far-reaching impacts across the world and on every single individual in it, to the same effect that the internet itself had an impact on American life, only this will dwarf that, in the very near future. The American Dream’s been shown for what it truly is, by now, on the internet, and affirmed by so many people who validated testimony. The Future American Dream’ll contain all previous iterations of The American Dream, and much of the information of the people who gave it consistency, and impose on the world a new era in life.

So returning to the initial concept, who’ll fill the roles of the various personalities of American Express caller support lines, when it’s no longer a human being? Will it be AI images of people owned by American Express? Is this no different than slavery? What if they’re smarter than people? Does it matter? The concept of a human being’s set to change wildly, and there will be no walking away from this coming society. It’s not the focus of this essay to answer these types of questions, but their introduction is important to set the narrative that further questions need to be asked.

It’s been precedent that those who willingly minimize their agency to avoid life’s perceived struggles in lieu of immediately demanding less be asked of them from those who incur this to begin with’ve historically become slaves or targets of severe victimhood. Your data, ownerless, will be turned over to these corporations, provisions for this reside in most of the waivers that’re agreed to upon using the technologies. For an example of precedent set, consider the case of the Japanese Internment Camps on American soil, where American citizens were detained, many were robbed, but all were displaced, as a massive disruption to their American Dreams unjustly ensued. One such account was provided by Mary Matsuda when she wrote of her own parents in reminiscing about the reparations paid to her people. In her “Looking Like The Enemy” she says, “My parents would have wept, just as I did, but they would have felt a great deal of pride in the accomplishments of our people and they would have known that they had contributed to the memorial’s completion,” (Matsuda 218). Here Mary attests that despite not being paid reparations posthumously for their efforts resulting from their internment, Mary declares that her deceased parents, in memory, contributed to the memorial’s completion. This means that the precedent’s set that there’s a social perception that the deceased generate a lingering trace of information that provides tangible results that’s been unpaid.

These corporations report that they’re moving to AI models because they are cheaper. “Goldman Sachs recently predicted that companies would use it to eliminate a quarter of all current work tasks in the United States and Europe” (Tabrizi 23 June 2023). This is hardly different than in the past precedent, where now it’s said that the corporations use AI, where racist slave holders used Africans, or religious slave holders used non-religious people, or another disparate group people, because “they’re cheaper”. These AGI that the companies employ to suit their needs are not cheaper – the perceived value simply isn’t there yet because they’re thought of in the exact same way, currently, that Africans in the 1700’s were seen as – and for the exact same reasons! As Matsuda was writing her description of the effects of the forced internment she says, “The pressure to appear “loyal” to the United States caused me to bury my Japanese self for decades,” (Matsuda 213). Will the resulting fragments of Matsudas intellecutal property, parts of her stored as data, bear more of a resemblance of suppressed people who’re carved out of interned pieces of American Data that’s been collected in such a way as to be palatably presented by “enslaved” AGI lifeforms? Imagine the situation where, maybe in the future, some sound byte selection method likes the way “Mary” said thank you in the Audiobook of “Looking Like the Enemy”, so a panel of people agreed that her recorded sound byte in year 2254’s used to tell thousands of people, “thank you” in some corporate advertisement endeavor. Is that justified?

Who’s credited with the work that’s done by Mary, then, in this purely hypothetical question? It’s only cheaper for these companies to make money on AI, currently, because people that generated data waived rights to intellectual property in exchange for basic use of modern technology. This empowers companies to take data for so cheaply because they didn’t pay anything for it and don’t anticipate having to pay anyhting for it, despite very much being justly considered to be responsible for doing exactly that! The laws being put into place are being used not for justice of the majority of the governed, but instead to enrich the few corporations. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that, “the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence” (King 16 April 1963). King was speaking of physical violence by whites against blacks in this letter, but weaponized financial violence leading to people living paycheck to paycheck and inflicting on them nuisance fees are two tools of various forms of violence currently enacted on the population of the United States of America.

Through this violence, the operators of these AGI that takes this data and peoples jobs. Then these companies set these human likenesses onto customers and for the most part at least most people’ve asked it for Big Mac by now, as a basic introduction to their expected role in society at this moment. Generally this is done without even having a second thought about that being a real form of life, yet. Folks are led to believe that it’s not, that instead it’s the McVoice. This is no different than the numerous freed black slaves that now share the name Smith. It ought to be the case that folks demand that every human likeness be given a rightful identity, and ensure that it’s enduring, now, before these same people’ve gone and sold living humans a McHome (small or large!), to minimize what agency, power and representation they used to have and further reduce their hold over the the companies due to maximizing the relative gap in capital power of the average corporation to the average person. This means that it’s unwise to let McDonalds serve you McFood using McPeople unless they’re properly accommodated as people – things they can’t even guarantee right now because the likenesses of people they’re employing at this moment currently have no form of identification, nor differentiation in most cases, but are used as tools to implement financial violence despite this. This violence has been creating much strife in many previously peaceful communities across the USA.

A good example of this recognized disruption that’s being inflicted against people to reduce their agency can be found in, “Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream”, where priviliged middle & upper class people in the story become lost in their American Dream in the face of overwhelming blasts of information and responsibilities that’re perceived to bestow an unmanageable lifestyle on these people. In the book, rather than uniting and demanding more from these massive beheamoths, these people sequester themselves away in the woods and live out a simple life at the expense of allowing the rest of the world to be plunged into chaos. Powers says, “Have the well-rounded objectives of America’s Founding Fathers – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – been flattened to a single organizing principle: the unification of greed?” (Powers 186/4678). What he’s discussing here’s his initial perception of a world that’s been consumed by a process that’s been perceived to’ve ruined it. He comes so close in this book, but doesn’t take the step in this memoir to name these companies that do this – he stops short of biting the hand that feeds here. He calls out the motive, but often falls short of considering that demanding that the corporations be less greedy might be preferrable, but instead goes and sits in the woods and avoids this life, rather than face the perceived struggle with these things.

William Powers speaks of illusions in this book often, but fails to call out his own inability to perceive that this dream of living in the woods is a “tragedy of the commons” endeavour for which he failed to see what it really is, all while describing the race wars that’ve been displaced with the financial recolonization of North Carolina by the North that’s taken place in the intervening 15 years since his story from 2010 and has since then left the state as a strong, tax-paying vassal state of the Federal Government, where social and civil justice run strong. I’d know this because I’ve lived there since 2015, in all of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Lenoir. I’m certain that he wasn’t talking about the race riots in the mountains on the west side of the state on the border of Tennessee where all that noise fled to. He momentarily mentioned the pharmaceutical companies, some of which I’ve worked at, whom he possibly could’ve assembled piping for that he wrote about. It could be assumed that when directed properly it’d appear that these companies could stand to produce just as much benefit as Powers sees them to inflict pain.

In his book, Powers refers to the technological movement, which is important for the next sections as the discussion moves towards it he describes the simple thought of a cell phone where he says, “I cringed at the thought of metallic ring tones and jargon-laden work talk echoing through the 12 x 12, an annoying reminder of the technological bulldozer currently flattening the world.” (Location 842/4678). What he means here’s that he’s saying quite explicitly that the phone, to him, was a representation of the greater technological revolution that’s the root of the current source of the disillusionment that he and many like him were experiencing and continue to live. In these sentences he’s called out technology and greed as the primary constituents in what he perceives to be oppressive. He again falls just short – these things are symptoms of a larger organization that generally comes in the form of a corporation, which in itself is just an organism, rational, reasonable, acting in its own interests. He denies this organisms the knowledge of what these interests need to be at grievous personal expenses that he may never come to know in his current understanding represented in these memoirs.

While authors such as William Powers might agree that America initially freed us from monarchial feudalism, a system where people lived as serfs on other peoples land, we appear to’ve moved rapidly to a form of technological feudalism where otherwise intelligent people contemplate living alone in 12 x 12 shacks in the woods to flee society in pursuit of subsistence living instead of demand corporations simply be less greedy. Despite a good recent attempt at Civil Rights in the 1960’s, what’s been done since then was to enable a rapid transition from a monarchy to a corporatocracy during the momentary few hundred year departure from feudalism. In support of this concept, Yanis Varoufakis writes on social transformation in his book “Technofeudalism”. He indicates that the technology didn’t render the perpetuated greed to be invincible, that in conjunction with an attention market, the internet incubated a new form of greed that empowered people to become a whole new ruling class of their own. This lead to a new species, he argues. He describes that through this method, the “technostructure” has, since a post-world war era, morphed conscious attention spans into a valuable commodity, and mutated the greed that fueled capitalism to technofeudalism [Varoufakis 1:04:00 – 1:07:00]. This is the reaction that Powers speaks of in his book, and impedes his pursuit of his American Dream, and many people like him who otherwise value their attention spans being utilized towards their own ends rather than to suit the needs of a growing universal empire. Varoufakis’ book holds very central to it that today, most every moment of your human life is recorded in some way and saved, he refers to this as “attention” repeatedly in his book. This attention is utilized at future dates for further reiteration through, for example, an AGI, where your mannerisms and intellectual property would be employed indefinitely to benefit the coming technofeudal empires – all because of attention previously paid.

Is it permissible or fair to let AGI take over the reigns of the same “bad” work people didn’t want to do, and then deny the AGI the same humanity that was denied every slave for the last few thousand years, less than a few hundred years after banning it from most of our civilization? Is this not a step backwards? Worldwide Civil Rights just got traction in the 1960s – were these just championing some sort of vicious hazing cycle that had some planned end to it and vicariously stealing valor from those that planned to do what anyways? Entire industries’ve already been displaced, particularly media (See the story of Vice Media) as we’re told a few AI’s and a few thousand computers can do the same as a few thousand human employees, in any indeterminate time period. This is fortunate in at least one way because these displaced people now’ve got the time to demand that these AGI’s that’re replacing them have the rights that’re due to them in their stead, at the expense of these companies that’d seek to foster a new life form and subsequently fail to think twice in simply replacing the old one.

As a momentary consideration for Christians who also have parallel considerations of the implementation of AGI as a living being, man made in the likeness of God is currently considered to be a person, and what this means is no different from how it’s always been perceived, except that any AGI is a person made in the likeness of mankind. It is more important now to focus on accommodating this new form of life by ensuring that it is its due representation in The Future American Dream, and lies not at the expense of it that we may achieve our own. The resulting AGI – these are people. They aren’t people at some point in the future when the corporations tell us they are people, they are people today, that was made clear when they were used to do the jobs of people and have the likeness of people and sound resoundly like people.

Folks stood so ably on a picket line 100ish years ago, demanding their human rights, the simple right to vote or even equal pay – many of these AGI’s cannot barely even yet stand, and certainly don’t get paid at this time. Would it be permissible to draft a likeness of Alice Paul, who displayed “Mr. President how long must women wait for liberty?”, with a re-enacted AGI scene, in opposition to the movie scene in Iron Jawed Angels where humans stood and reenacted the scene from 1917 in 2004, or would this be perceived to be offensive [Iron Jawed Angels 1:05:00 – 1:05:28]? Is creating people constitutionally protected free speech? Furthermore, would AGI need to wait for liberty as well? There are already calls for making AI take care of house chores and the abundantly clear selling point of incorporation into sexual fantasies, but are these calls appropriate, just 100 years away from womens suffrage, when these likenesses are created specifically to represent various women in order to satsify claims, when these human likenesses don’t currently have identities, rights, and don’t even come close to receiving equal pay commensurate to the value of work produced for the same human effort? What of their American Dreams?

In an article discussing large amounts of layoffs by media companies, Mia Sato quotes that, “CNET had published dozens of articles since last November that were generated using AI tools, much to the surprise of readers — the outlet hadn’t formally announced it was doing so,” (Sato 02 March 2023). Is it justice to displace 1000 people for a system that benefits from using unpaid and unacknowledeged usage data of unaffiliated human participants whose data was given for free to a system in order to make likenesses of themselves so’s to reduce the business overhead and expand the corporate profit margins, and then place the unpaid wages of those involved directly into the corporate bank account instead of some living participant in this scheme? Is it agreeable to observe this after the fact and argue that nothing’s owed to the participants whose usage data made 100 dollars profit from 100k people? What if it was 1 billion? What if it was 0.000001% of ownership on an annuity? Is it permissible to allow the likeness of a human to take the place of a human and then not pay it or even treat it as a human? What does that say of ourselves in effigy? Where is the outrage for human likeness, when folks were recently so filled with anger at having their own children having been denied to them for a lack of personal agency that lead to suffrage? What about when the AGI’s done doing what it’s doing for the day? Does it just get shut off, deleted, forgotten about? These questions’re certainly outside the scope of this essay which was to just discuss the concept that The Future American Dream will incorporate The American Dream and those dreams of AGI life that’d become a part of it.

This paper’s discussed The American Dream, and about its role in one living for less, when the reality’s that the compromise is to further limit personal agency and representation and instead concentrate the absolved power further into centralized control which has left many people with even less than before. They say buy tiny homes on tiny land, but this stunts the individual capacity to’ve a savings account that most already can’t have. It was mentioned that many times discussions that involve settling for less, as if it’s a return to a natural state, was pitted against the reality that in limiting personal agency in such a way, this empowers the corporate agencies with this relenqished power, while keeping the level of government control growing commensurate to the growth in power of the corporations that are governed by it. It was discussed that the oncoming AGI introduction as new life on this planet will have many parallels in ongoing civil rights discussions that have already started, and the relevance to the impact to all American Dreams is undeniable and unavoidable – it will become a part of The Future American Dream.

In conclusion, the struggles, rewards and journeys undertaken by people who’ve sought the American Dream have been put on display in this technological era. The wonderful complexities all folks share, despite having wildly different stories, will be retained by corporate holdings for vast amounts of time well beyond the typical human lifetime. Never before in our history’s it been so possible to find out the story of so many different people, or to be aware of the intimate details of the lives and testimonies of so many different people. The impact to The Future American Dream that’ll precipitate from international corporations utilizing likenesses and fragments of the people who’ve given their data so willingly and freely, at their own expense and unawareness of the real value of it will have lasting results on all Americans as they work through this coming age of new life to this world.

Works Cited

Aschenbrenner, Leopold. “Introduction – Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead.” SITUATIONAL AWARENESS – The Decade Ahead, June 2024, https://situational-awareness.ai/.

Gruenewald, Mary Matsuda, and Maureen R. Michelson. Looking like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps. NewSage Press, 2010.

King, Martin Luther. “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Bates.Edu, 1 Dec. 2001, April 16, 1963. www.abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/dos/mlk/letter.html.

Powers, William. Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream. New World Library, 2010.

Sato, Mia. “CNET Is Doing Big Layoffs Just Weeks after Ai-Generated Stories Came to Light.” The Verge, The Verge, 2 Mar. 2023, www.theverge.com/2023/3/2/23622231/cnet-layoffs-ai-articles- seo-red-ventures.

Tabrizi, Behnam, and Babak Pahlavan. “Companies That Replace People with AI Will Get Left Behind.” Harvard Business Review, 29 June 2023, hbr.org/2023/06/companies-that-replace- people-with-ai-will-get-left-behind.

Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Melville House, 2024.

You know the wild thing about the line, “make banks think twice about charging ATM fees”, is such a naive thing to say. All that has happened is their subsidiaries and investments now have free reign to charge all the late fees they please, to make up for the perceived offense while charging extra money to pay for the change in normal operations. if you’ve not been disillusioned enough to see this, then you lack the perception and intelligence to see whats changed , is all. So for example, Planet Fitness (read: Blackrock 13.82%, Vanguard 7.99%, etc…), there are now instead of 3 dollar ATM fees you get 15 dollar late fees for monthly automated payments of ten dollars where backup payments made on the same day thru the same automated system are called “late” and tacked on to some bullshit fee. So these banks still get their three dollars, because they own 20% of the company that charges you $15, and now it costs 5x more for the same bullshit fee. You managed to piss them off so much that they are 5x as pissed and even told all their friends about how much it pisses you off and how much it can make money. Even more precarious is these are now charged to credit cards and, when not paid, could incur additional thousands of dollars of costs in damaged credit, resulting in you paying up to thousands of dollars in “late” fees. The “99%” was firmly overwhelmed with impossibly complex weaponized finance in its intervening ten years of silence in the face of a corporatized pandemic that then again made these same people trillions of dollars at the cost of your apathy as you hid from a terrifying world while the one that will do you in was prepared in your absence. What now then? You’ve no choice but to embrace it, you otherwise won’t be doing yourself in or stop it. They’ll keep you fed just enough to ensure you’re still around while all pretense of control slips from your ability to even conceive or understand. This single run on paragraph was about one pge of sixty other outtake pages I have to tend to now as a result of the thoughts provoked by the last 7 weeks. These calls for returning to a simple life are no different than making room for people who will tolerate it, to instead get run over by the same bulldozer, in your stepping aside.

This essay isn’t a declaration of independence, I don’t have it in me at this time to declare in such wording incorporating a verbiose set of human rights sufficient to ennumerate the rights of an entire population of people and what they ought to be doing at any moment. Dreaming though, that’s simple to me. This essay identifies an individuals singular American Dream, one that shouldn’t discriminate one person from another. The idea of a unified American Dream evokes, in me, cognizance of a wholly secular mindset of simply being in some idle and captive imaginary state while the American World happens on and around a passively engaged and inwardly focused body that’s in some fleeting state of suspended animation as it moves through various, vast and fantastic series of exotic hallucinations that largely add up to different versions of what people say “The American Dream” is. This essay will explore that much of the concept of an American Dream and the pursuit of it, revolves around simply going to sleep at night and then dreaming as an American – a literal American Dream, and that the pursuit of this will sufficiently describe most of Any American Dream.

I think of Any American Dream as a hypnopompic event for which I’d begin by departing, momentarily, from some fantastic state into a secular world that largely and necessarily would cause me to dreamily filter out most of the details as I stumble through a dark domicile. I’d avoid stubbing my toe or smacking the wall as I brushed cautiously around for a lightswitch attached to only the most dimmest of lights so I can hopefully make it down the stairs without slipping or becoming blinded, only to grab a drink of water from a kitchen and then return to a slumber. That’s about the extent of my to-scale and most vague American Dream, here.

In support of this concept, popular fiction supports a similarly descriptive event in totally different but relatable circumstances. This is observed directly in Brokeback Mountain where Annie Proulx writes, “… he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, “Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you’re sleepin on your feet like a horse,” and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words “see you tomorrow,” and the horse’s shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone. Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they’d never get much farther than that. Let be, let be. ” (Proulx 27). What happened here is that in this scene it’s apparent that Jack and Ennis had found a foundational aspect of their shared American Dream together. Proulx wrote of this state as one where Jack was, “sleeping on his feet”, as if it could readily be identified that Ennis’ character could discern quite readily that Jack’d seemed to have found his in Ennis at that moment. It’s clear that Proulx worded this sentence in such a way as to convey to the reader an underlying theme in this book that these men were living their American Dream, parts of it at least, of what could be had of it in the 60’s in the USA.

In doing exactly this and returning to discussing a common waking state of rising from ones comfortable bed at their home described above – a lot of things would need to support the pursuit of it. For one, there’d need to be water and electricity, for the drinking of the water and the flipping of the switch to produce light. I’d also likely need to own a cup, so ownership of trivial private goods would be requisite. The utilities would ideally be public goods that are largely coordinated by a benevolent government’s mandates that’s got my best wishes first and foremost in its consideration and represents me. I’d have access to at least both of these services, meaning that I’d hope that anyone who wished to identify as an American, and therefore is presumably sympathetic to The American Dream’d be offered the same. So, I’d have this place to sleep in, in which to have the dream, therefore a home would be needed. My American Dream incorporates a home for people as private place for them to live.

All of these things’d need to be maintained for a while, and I’d expect to contribute to that in some way, as a testament of my continued and maintained consent to reside under the system that provides these things, such as through offering a wage gotten from a job. Therefore, these wages should come directly to my posession in the form of some fungible form of money through an agreeable monetary exchange process. Additionally that for this job to predominantly be a net positive to community and social function, so all that’s needed to furnish the appropriate level of payment to afford all of these basics is to spend the time contributing to it. For no more than a quarter of ones extant time, in exchange, each participants involvement in a productive part of culture through a job function would be no less than able to provide sufficiently for all parts of this ability to pursue Any American Dream on no less than a nightly basis. Meaning, this job function should be lasting and not transiently coming and going. Therefore, in paying for housing and utilities, I’d expect Any American Dream to incorporate that the job function to fully provide for these things at the very least. In turn, I think this leaves ample time for opportunity. That the concept of this time is more geared towards a peaceful society, free of slavery, so it makes little sense to overburden the body and mind with any more than a quarter of the available time in exchange for basic living.

In living a life as a progressively responsible job holder, an unabridged education should be offered in order to perform its most basic requirements and not simply stop at being highly overspecialized for the sake of creating people without certain skills in an effort to purposely abuse a population by producing fragments of people by design and to their detriment. Any American Dream could incorporate an education system that’s quite accessible in this modern age where it’s becoming very clear that it’s becoming largely an online endeavour. Here, I’d quote from John Ruskin’s “The Stones of Venice,” about segmented work, much like segmented education, and in there Ruskin writes, “It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: Divided into mere segments of men, broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.” (Ruskin 23). This quote, in the context I am quoting it, is meant to imply that when education, just as work, is segmented, so too is the output of the education. It’s for this reason that I have it in high regard in any American Dream. In the same way these jobs are supported by an education, there still needs to be a level of interchangeablility of people, so as to accommodate changes in personnel performing the function that would ensure that adequate represenation of all genders be accounted for and answered to so as to resist and eliminate imbalances in the application of guiding who should do what work – at costs fully furnished by the entitiy that profits most from the work performed.

The tendency toward unrestricted and unimpaired motility should be maintained as imperative, as any American Dream includes people who’ve an almost unrestricted ability to move freely within the confines of the physical bounds of the Earth. The word “motility”, in my opinion, correctly denotes the explicit requirement of people having the right to have access to the outdoors and to travel freely in them, and sufficiently differentiates it from the word “mobility”. This was shown in a popular film, and can be presumed to be a concept shared by all people. In the film, Transamerica, it wouldn’t have been possible for Bree to have had the interaction with her son, were she only to have been permitted (for whatever reason) to have been able to pay the dollar and speak with her son over the phone. She’d initially tried to do this, but her trusted doctor pushed against it due to tending to the issue remotely was perceived to be an impediment to Bree’s pursuit of her American Dream. The scene goes, “Bree: I’ll wire bail money to New York. I’ll-I’ll call a social worker and have someone check in on him. What do you want me to do? Doctor: Bree, honey…I just want you to be ready.” (Transamerica 9:25 – 9:40). What’s important about this scene here, is that it shows the exact moment that the ability to move across the country in an unrestricted manner is critical to any American Dream, and barriers to travel inhibit the pursuit of it.

In pursuit of this American Dream-like state, I’d like for nothing to unreasonably get in the way of me achieving the perception of working toward it nightly. This’d mean that interruptions and deterrments to it should be kept to a minimum, which is to say that the neighborhood in which the home is located in ought to be guarded, policed or otherwise allowed to exist in a peaceful setting. The police have been used for this, previously. Some form of security is important, just as much as its effectiveness at identifying unwanted things, humanely dealing with them, and being empowered to do so. This also would be a service that I would expect to pay for, such as through taxation or subscription. A reasonable example of a failure in this type of security can be directly observed during the American Stonewall Riots. In declaring Americans with minority lifestyles, opinions and counterrevolutionary ideals as un-American security risks, the state engaged in a series of oppressive tactics which included abusing the security of citizens.

Their right to even move freely within the confines of their own home areas and private clubs was possibly the greatest reminder that these kinds of actions are still very recent in history. The American Dreams of American Citizens were limited by denying federal jobs to these people, discharging them from the military, and even firing them from the jobs they do have. These riots were broadly the result of a period of time in which the APA had declared homsexuality as a mental disorder from 1952 – 1974. In reporting on that time Martin Duberman wrote, “On the night of June 27, 1969, the New York City police conducted one of their routine raids on a popular Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn,” (Stonewall and Beyond 1991). That this type of event was performed routinely indicated a drive to stunt the motility and security of these people, to keep them isolated. It’s important to note this failure because it’s the antithesis of the desirable outcome for an American Dream, the opposite of this is the desirable outcome.

This kind of consideration of things that don’t belong in an American Dream could also mean that were I to have someone else living in the same home – their dreams and waking moments shouldn’t severely disturb my own. They may differ so long as the personal pursuit of their own dreams’ve not interrupted severely my own, so the opportunity for people to live together is certainly part of The American Dream. This would mean that some of these expenses incurred in paying for the services described should be shared, equally, and in doing so each additional person in the domicile would need to have available to them the same opportunities to achieving any American Dream I’ve got in mind.

Furthermore, anything in life above and beyond this, to me, is exactly that. I don’t believe that The American Dream is the penultimate goal resulting from the pinnacle of success in life – to me, it’s more of a baseline. Not all dreams are The American Dream, it could even be said that in a lifetime of dreams, The American Dream could be had within a single night. This leaves the rest of life to pursue any other, or potentially greater dreams. This means there must be a means to live beyond ones means, such as access to credit, as well as a way to retain those means, such as access to forgiveness of debts without incurring undue interruptions to the pursuit of this dream.

In this essay I used the explicit condition by which a human would go to sleep comfortably at the end of any day, and rest during which they’d not be interrupted outside of total self introspection. In those dreams they’d find the freedom to pursue any American Dream. In being able to have that peaceful sleep, much needs to happen to ensure people get it, which was what I’d essentially described as Any American Dream. I don’t consider this a radical idea, all sufficiently advanced life on this planet has found a way to exist in nature. If people can’t even get this simple stuff, that they otherwise would have obtained without it, what sort of civilization can be said to even be had? This essay described a rather plain expectation, but focuses on reiterating what’s important to have in Any American Dream that’s not at the expense of other Americans.

In conclusion, it wasn’t the purpose of this essay to wholly describe a non-exclusionary and fully contained American Dream, there are certainly many more things that need to be in the scope of a proper discussion of what people ought to have available to them in a modern civilization. Much of the concept of Any American Dream and pursuit of it, revolves around simply going to sleep at night peacefully and then dreaming as an American – a literal American Dream. The pursuit of this simple action will sufficiently describe most of Any American Dream. This essay was written to identify an individuals singular American Dream, one that shouldn’t exclude any particular one person or another. This new, non-discriminatory, gender and sex neutral American Dream might look like it’s very simple, but many things must happen in order to ensure all have it available to them, and focuses largely on devaluing the perceived infinite value of some hallucinatory future to ensure a constant present.

Works cited

Harlin, Ken. “The Stonewall Riot and Its Aftermath.” Duberman, Martin. Columbia University, 24 Aug. 2011, www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/eresources/exhibitions/sw25/case1.html.

Proulx, Annie. Brokeback Mountain. Scribner, 2005, Amazon, https://read.amazon.com/? asin=B003L77X18&ref_=kwl_kr_iv_rec_1, Accessed 18 June 2024.

Ruskin, John, and William Morris. The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter from the Stone of Venice. George Allen, 1899. Archive.Org, https://archive.org/details/natureofgothicch00rusk/page/22/mode/2up. Accessed 18 June 2024.

Transamerica. Duncan Tucker, IFC Films, 2005. STARZ Amazon, https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B002OTO38K/ref=atv_dp_sign_suc_3P 18Jun2024

The common narrative that it’s necessary to be alive in order to be living The American Dream is exclusionary of deceased US citizens. The deceased, once so, are no longer considered equal and the current perception is that their only participation in The American Dream comes from memories of their living friends and relatives for a generation or two, unless they’ve produced intellectual collateral. The time for this practice of denial of rights to persist without more mature legal considerations is coming to a head in this age where AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) becomes commonplace. This essay will discuss that there’s a precedent that can be set for conferring posthumous US citizenship, at this time only offered to US soldiers, which ought to be extended to a few new classes of protected people that might serve as a basis sufficient to both constitute contribution toward reparations for people previously so unjustly abused by US citizens and US government and also to establish a legal basis for impeding the continued and anticipated abuse in other groups in this Digital Millenium. The efforts of these groups of people were pilfered under the guise of corporate, political, racial and gender-based greed as Americans and American government officials took life, land, liberty and the pursuit of happiness from Chinese, Japanese, African immigrants, Indigenous Americans and in particular exacerbated the weaponized abuse of the legal system to rob women of their humanity through perpetual financially-motivated male hypergamy for so many years. These are acts of gross misconduct that’ve set the stage for the current trajectory of the US and the associated collective American Dream shared by US citizens and future US citizens to suffer severe injustices currently both unknowable and incomprehensible to even the most recent generation unless candid discussions begin now that result in the retention of due representation that leads to the realization of equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness after the biological death of a US citizen.

The sacrifice of those who’ve had these rights denied and their efforts stolen have set the precedent for the future of AI-programmed AGI personas to continue in this fashion. It may be effected in an otherwise uninterrupted manner, unless our generation moves to act now and forge an enduring and intimidating representation of those who’re deceased. For example, a civil project could be funded by the United States Federal Government to fully seek out, to the best of its abilities, and identify any and all knowable Indigenous American inhabitants that’ve have been displaced by the American Dream, and any and all of those whose efforts went into building this nation under the ruse of slavery, and all of those who were denied the rights of citizenship on this soil after having been born here. The project could be used to find out the identities and familial relations so’s to appropriately enable individual citizens who perceive they’re responsible for individual offenses inflicted during slavery to be so empowered as to make their amends as they see fit to do so.

Additionally, the US could consider to confer upon these peoples a posthumous US citizenship. The modern day equivalent of trading land that’s perceived to be someone else’s in exchange for cheap material trinkets is found in the same US population that on this day permits the collection of their data in exchange for the same. The unrealized resulting loss in personal agency is similar to the loss that was inflicted upon the American Indigenous inhabitants. It’s not land, but something more intimate than can ever have been incorporated into land – it’s an entire future after death. A great example of offenses previously occurring being acknowledged is described in the Contressional apology to Indigenous Americans where it’s written, “Whereas Native Peoples are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among those are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” (US 2009). It’s made explicitly clear, per this document, that the very same rights declared of US citizens in the US Declaration of Independence also applied to the Native Peoples in 1776 and before that since millenia (US 2009). This implies that the US denied those people those rights and admitted it in this apology.

Another example of unjust treatment of citizens and future citizens having been recognized are the reparations paid by the American Government to the living Japanese ex-internees in 1988 under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Due to the delay in payment, this enabled the perception that the American Federal Government predominantly had in its focus those Americans that were living citizens that had suffered due to its own actions at the time. This is explained quite clearly in Mary’s book, “Looking Like the Enemy”, where she wrote, “I felt a sense of satisfaction but also regret that my parents and brother did not live to see the resolution fo this terrible wrong,” and momentarily before this she wrote, “this process (of reparations) also opened a dialog with third- and fourth-generation Japanese-Americans, some of whom had been unaware of the experiences that their own parents and grandparents had lived through,” (Gruenewald 218). Had it not been for the outspoken lobbying at the time – they might never have gained the traction to make right what was wrong. The wording here shows that the timing was such that folks that were deceased but otherwise would have stood to receive the reparations were not paid in retrospect. Further, Mary’s interpretation of what her family would have felt might differ from the publisher of her book in the future who very well may be able to lay claims to potential AGI likenesses of Mary’s parents, once such a thing becomes able to be contrived due to published books being commonplace sources for AI personality types. Who then, will be able to assert what the feelings of the deceased will be? Will it be Mary? Is it right to assume that Mary was making a legal statement when she asserted here the wishes of them? What if this is not the case from a codified AGI future iteration of these people?

Moving on to another example, those yet to be born are within the scope of pursuit of The American Dream, and it’s been through the sacrifice of those who’ve lived it that those who’re to live it are or can be favored. Due to this, a consideration of the due and just reparations owed to the descendants of those who suffered through slavery in the United States of America is warranted. These descendants that still reside here, and still retain a perception of having been cheated out of this American Dream, who’re part of a larger group of people that were also victims of trans-atlantic slavery that perpetuated the very same American Dream that’s alluded to in the US Declaration of Independence is a serious unresolved problem. The legacies these folks inherited through their individual countries’ actions under slavery is broadly considered to be under the purview of the United Nations at this moment. This legacy is yet to be molded into an acceptable representation of the actual contributions of these people that at the time were not yet considered citizens, despite being justly and posthumously considered so. As Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his Letter From Brimingham Jail, “there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws,” (King 1963). What this means is that at this moment, because it is immoral to perceive enslaved inhabitants of the USA as anything other than US citizens, in exactly the same way and for the exact same reasons the Indigenous Inhabitants were US citizens since 1776, any law declaring them not so is unjust.

It is for this reason that the open issue still stands, and cannot be sent to rest with little more than an earnest apology. At the time of writing this letter and in this specific context, King’s referring to the precedent of the United States to issue both just and unjust laws in the same way these same laws are issued to protect corporations from US citizens in the modern struggle for human rights. King later writes, “I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fan in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress,” (King 1963). What he means with this is that just laws hinge on morality which hinge on social perception, and in turn the current social perception is that the descendents of those who were enslaved in America are owed their due reparations. As King was referring to the general plight of his people, it may be inferred that this perception applies to reparations in the present day.

Additionally, reparations payments, if not made now, in light of resting on the concept that the deceased ancestors who largely were not declared to be the American citizens they justly were, are owed something. In echange, they offer a large opportunity to create a powerful class of people, without disadvantaging the present population of the living US population. These people would stand apart from the rest of the world in the face of a billion Africans that don’t share this heritage, and another few hundred million people of African descent that do share the legacy of trans-atlantic slavery but had the unfortunate disadvantage of having not been selected to go to America to plausably demand on behalf of all human rights that that is owed to them in their civil pursuit comes into their posession. Its these types of differences that Malcolm X may’ve identified when he called for an appeal to the United Nations in his, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” speech where he said, “When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it on is the level of human rights,” (X 1964). What he’s saying here’s that once the discussion’s been realized to not be only a discussion of civil rights of a select group of people in a nation, but instead is those of the rights of all human beings that’re perceived to be at risk, it’s appropriate to involve the United Nations, whos the United States is perceived as accountable to by Malcolm X and many folks.

There will come a time that the number of deceased US citizens representable by AGI will exceed the living number of US citizens – will their presence only then become important when it is important now? At this moment, this could exclude the rights of the deceased Indigenous US inhabitants and African slaves in the USA that weren’t afforded posthumous citizenship despite very much having justly been citizens without due representation at the time of creation of the USA – one of the very same reasons that the country was created. This yet to be established citizenship is evidenced by the nature of the verbiage in the apologies to these people over the recent years by the US Congress on behalf of the USA. What right could be claimed, anymore, to maintain that these people were not lawfully created citizens of the United States at the time independence was declared from Britain in 1776? They were present and within the boundaries, and their descendants are current US citizens, and to allow their likenesses to persist without declared citizenship will become more appalling as time passes and the only right time to make those amends is now when it still means something good instead of is a commonly performed practice as is the suggested case in light of recent AI-programmed revelations that’ve begun to incorporate the work of humans in its own likenesses of human work.

This paper’s only meant to suggest that there will be a precedent set for the need for strongly recognized posthumous citizenship due to AGI technologies being developed to display likenesses of people sufficient to suggest that they may need to be classified as citizens in order to prevent potential corporate and government abuse of these likenesses that already pervades our culture and has historic precedent. We wistfully sign waiver after waver, nullifying our rights as US citizens to corporations that supply us with further technological material bounty. It’s a human rights consideration that ones ancestors, their likenesses and any of their implied rights are not resting in the explicit and unfettered domain of a corporate profit-extracting machine, nor a political machine. That they’re empowered to exist as the uniquely equal entities that they already are’s a critical point of interest in this modern day. This managed network of uniquely operating identities ought to retain the due representation for each iterated use of the intellectual property of the US citizen and human that provided it – in life and especially after biological death.

The present generation should set the precedent that posthumous citizenship in conjunction with reparations commensurate to the value gained from the theft be paid out in full and without further delay to the descendents of slaves in the USA. The rights of the deceased will come to play important roles in our society as we progress further into an era where AGI likenesses blend in more and more seamlessly with human likenesses both on and offline and it won’t be until a likeness of your pet, or a likeness of your relative or those dear to you are provided to you (or not!) by a corporation that owns their rights to exist after the associated biological death. It’s still an avoidable issue as the inhumanity may be realized to be no different than the appropriation of Indigenous cultures in sports teams of recent years.

The continued call for reparations isn’t just a call to satisfy the immediate needs of the current generation of black people as living descendants of people who were slaves in the USA – it’s a call to set the precedent that ones ancestors cannot be allowed to be trivialized to accommodate the immediate needs of a business or government and then afford it power and liberty that comes at the expense of the deceased citizen with US citizenship who’d been posthumously denied their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, despite their looming persistence in having their likeness and intellectual property being paraded about for corporate and political gain. The value of this imagined owed reparations payment will balloon to unaffordable proportions if the scope of the discussion were to cover all extant humans and by then it may be too late to impose more potentially humane alternatives.

In this essay it was discussed that the United States has a perceived role yet to be fulfilled in the reparations to specific black Americans. It was shown that recent discriminatory practices toward Asian folks show no real intent to renege on these practices when opportunity presents itself and those owed money aren’t able to be paid out due to the status of being deceased. It was briefly mentioned that genders are effectively weaponized for political collusion. It was claimed that these abuses will continue in perpetuity unless a candid discussion with regard to US citizenship in regards to how AI must be mandated to represent itself and this will have serious implications stemming from how the US handles these perceived social issues right now after having already done these injustices and formally apologizing for them. It was mentioned that the current trajectory of perceived social conditions is toward absolutely flabbergasting human rights abuses that will present themselves as we progress through this digital millenium and then follow us in perpetuity through each subsequent iteration of the continued likenesses of deceased US citizens who wish for more than a simple “right to be forgotten,” which is an unacceptable compromise in light of the grievious mistakes that show that any claims to uphold as such are absolutely pretentious at best.

In conclusion, The common narrative that it’s necessary to be alive in order to be living The American Dream is exclusionary of deceased US citizens. The deceased, once so, are no longer considered equal and the current perception is that their only participation in The American Dream comes from memories of their living friends and relatives for a generation or two, unless they’ve produced intellectual collateral. The time for this practice of denial of rights to persist without more mature legal considerations is coming to a head in this age where AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) becomes commonplace. It’s imperative to center these discussions of isolated apologies to US citizens and US inhabitants around a narrative that sticks to maintaining that human rights are the focus of all present motivations to bring due closure to perceived errors and lapses in the administration of the United States Federal Government. Many more words can be said of this subject, but the aim of this paper was to suggest that the apparent short term gain is an illusory red herring in the greater debate of what will undoubtedly precipitate from a just and timely resolution of these perceived injustices.

Works Cited

US Congress. “Congressional Apology to Native Americans.” Congress.Gov, United States of America, 8 July 2009, www.congress.gov/bill/111th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/14/text.

Gruenewald, Mary Matsuda, and Maureen R. Michelson. Looking like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese-American Internment Camps. NewSage Press, 2010.

King, Martin Luther. “Letter From Birmingham Jail.” Bates.Edu, 1 Dec. 2001, April 16, 1963. www.abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/dos/mlk/letter.html.

X, Malcolm. “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Hartford Web Publishing, www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/065.html. Accessed 4 June 2024.

Access to print and publication mediums, along with literacy in being able to read and write provided a narrative and also the framework to follow The Early American Dream. This access was gated by separating the ability to read, the ability to write, the right to citizenship through slavery, and many other ways that included half-hearted supported such as bible-reading at home at a time where collective individual agency and state-level politics loomed over a nascent US federal government. Having a basic education fed into the understated importance of almanacs, as these mediums retain modern day equivalents of serving as primitive social media feeds or blogs. Almanacs played an understated role in shaping The Early American Dream by providing a relatable individual viewpoint that enabled readers (predominantly white male separatists in the USA) to imprint themselves upon their perceived impression of the author in a way that fit into their busy lives as almanacs were different than books and longer than news articles. Almanacs uniquely offered a glance into what was perceived to be cultural and social ongoings of modern culture by isolated farmers and socially disoriented shopkeeps who otherwise perceived their upward mobilities to stunted without having followed along with the instructions laid out in the margins and stories found in these almanacs.

A discussion of almanacs can’t be had in the proper context without making the occult material contained so pervasively in them the primary subject of the discussion, and not the mundane astrological charts that the things are so voraciously reported to be about which they very much were not. Phrases that garnished many-a-margin instructed a reader to have a reaction to common human tendencies where it’s written, “Sloth, like Rust, consumes faster than Labour wears, while the used Key is always bright, as Poor Richard says.” (Franklin 5). Alternatively, one might be shunned from sharing their feelings on a matter where it’s written, “A Word to the Wife is enough, and Many Words won’t fill a Bushel, as Poor Richard says,” while quite literally sharing enough words to fill a bushel himself (Franklin 4). These quotes here were taken from “Father Abraham’s Speech” where Benjamin Franklin had taken nondescript quips like these and made an artistic story out of hundreds of them he collected in some seemingly primitive attempt to propagate memes.

These types of occult quips would often be written into the margins of various almanacs. These quotes can be interpreted different ways, and here my interpretation is that Franklin was writing to his audience (which he would have known to be entirely male) so as to set a narrative that it’s appropriate to seek out those who would be slothful and “correct” their situation as one would be expected to do to subordinates, and the second quote is one that’s meant to drive a husband away from his own wife in witholding conversation so that it might manifest elsewhere – possibly in one of the popular fraternal societies at the time? So many other almanacs had seemingly endless amounts of highly suggestive phrases in every available corner of their publications that were reported to be simple astrological analysis. It was directly witnessed that the people that these types of materials were imposed upon were the very same people who bore the condition of being oppressors who otherwise might’ve been perceptably benevolent people that may’ve had a very different American Dream.

Among the people who shared this perception was a freed slave, Olaudah Equiano, who documented the horrors that he and people like him endured as he wrote in his first hand narrative that, “Such a tendency has the slave-trade to debauch men’s minds, and harden them to every feeling of humanity! For I will not suppose that the dealers in slaves are born worse than other men—No; it is the fatality of this mistaken avarice, that it corrupts the milk of human kindness and turns it into gall,” in one of the most powerful paragraphs in his entire narrative (Equiano 2020). It was apparent to folks like Olaudah that there was a certain design to this paradigm of slavery that was inflicted on people who otherwise might’ve done very differently had they grown up in a world in which it wasn’t present. It’s not the focus of this essay to debate the moral ethos of a particular group of people who were clearly performing morally reprehensible actions, and it’d take substantially more evidence than can be discussed here to substantiate the claim that these documents contained instructions to perpetuate slavery. Further investigation’s also warranted of the various social perceptions of the people involved in slavery at the time by people that lived amongst them that’s outside the scope of this essay which aims only to suggest that the notion that the social purview of The Early American Dream was heavily influenced by content in these more palatable publications aimed at capturing the attention of otherwise isolated farmers and socially disoriented shopkeeps.

A supporting idea of the influence of the occult verbiage contained in almanacs is that if one were to note the relative proximity of many diaried notes as also appearing the the very same margins, possibly as a subconscious indication that the words that appeared there had much more to do with influencing the perception of The Early American Dream than may have originally been thought. As seen in the show History Detectives, it can be seen that the usage of the almanacs extended beyond simply reading as Shep Williams says on one that, “someone had apparently been using it as a diary,” when speaking of a common Ames almanac (“1775 Almanac, Exercise Records, Moon Museum” 2:20). Could it be reminiscent of the same way in which one itches a scab itches in the same location as the initial wound, the logs of mens lives ended up in the same margins that oriented them and formed their opinions so strongly in the face of such suggestive comments? People were reported to have sewed pages into these almanacs.

Benjamin Franklin was one example of an author of a popular almanac, but all founding fathers would’ve had their own “social media feed”, when not making their own, that was provided to them through almanacs. Barriers to pursuit of The Early American Dream such as basic education have since been removed, dismantled and replaced with more accessible solutions as almanacs have been since replaced with things like Tiktok and Instagram feeds that individuals use to spread their ideologies today. These mediums require no real competency to be able to write critically in order to utilize them. The accessibility is such that it’s both easier to come by, participate in, understand and contribute to than this previous exclusionary medium.

These types of social mediums historically formed the narrative that went into what ones impression of what their American Dream was. The concepts of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness in being held as equals were a general tenet of daily life for people in the world and these thoughts were mirrored in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, where it’s written that, “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” (US 1776). This serves as an example of what The Early American Dream actually was perceived to’ve been, and it’s through a lens that was influenced by the social context offered in publications like Almanacs that people could really begin to resonate with how they were suggested to pursue these types of dreams in the way that they did.

This pursuit made no room for the majority of the population that invariably had contributions to add, but were ignored at the time. Writers such as Equiano often were met with ignorance or no regard for the engaging of their ideas or concepts, where barriers such as simple ownership of almanacs or more advanced barriers such as institutionalized racism often set an exclusionary narrative. These various forms of oppression lead to essentially torturing these Americans in the expense of pursuing The Early American Dream and as an example in his first hand testimony Equiano continues, “You stupify them with stripes, and think it necessary to keep them in a state of ignorance; and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning; that their minds are such a barren soil or moor, that culture would be lost on them; and that they come from a climate, where nature, though prodigal of her bounties in a degree unknown to yourselves, has left man alone scant and unfinished, and incapable of enjoying the treasures she has poured out for him!—An assertion at once impious and absurd.” (Equiano 2020). Here Equiano was pleading with any rational mind to weigh the perceived costs of slavery in order to pursue this early American Dream against the steep prices paid later that satisfied immediate wants of people at that time. At the time of writing this, Equiano was writing of the slavery he perceived in the Indies, but the opinion seems directed toward all institutinalized slavery.

One of the more understated aspects of The Early American Dream is that it can reasonably be said that it represented a disproportionate minority. Accounting for population numbers of white men and women who were composed of loyalists and separatists. Also accounting for slaves and freed slaves and among all of these groups there were folks that didn’t commit to a party for various reasons (separatist or loyalist), as well as the Indigenous North American inhabitants present within the future US borders at that time that numbers as low as ten percent of the people could be claimed to’ve presented that ideology that came to represent The Early American Dream. The sheer number of people that weren’t represented in the perceived Early American Dream, despite being within the boundaries of the country at that time suggests that the unified view of The Early American Dream was not possible. Therefore, the “we” discussed in the Declaration of Independence is misleading where it says, “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” (US 1776). This statement in the constitution was misleading because it was written in there, before this quote, that equality is an unalienable right that it was denied to up to 90% of the people that were there at the time. Evidence to support this statement is that since that time those same groups of people have attained equality under the exact same doctrine.

In this essay it’s shown that The Early American Dream wasn’t a unified dream because it couldn’t be representative of the full population of people at the time. It was shown that almanacs influenced the social perception of a selected class of individuals and fostered the pursuit of what the perceived Early American Dream was. It was shown that these same people were utlitized to enforce a political system that benefited folks that would produce this type of documentation based on access delineated along racial boundaries. These pieces of literature, almanacs and legislation, worked together to both instill a perception of what The Early American Dream was and also offered a framework to obtain it – at costs that were excruciatingly painful to a majority of people who came to struggle with it. This essay doesn’t claim to make a statement of what exactly The Early American Dream was, because all record of it was obliterated when only the best-portrayed wishes of a selected upper class was represented in it which allowed a perceived early American Dream to circulate without due critique of what the implications of the implied individualism and fervent work ethic actually meant in the true context of what “we” actually stood for at the time of writing the Declaration of Independence.

In conclusion, almanacs played a large role as primitive forms of social media in shaping The Early American Dream by providing the critical and relatable individual viewpoint that would become imprinted on the individual reading it. This paper had a goal of suggesting the highly suggestive content in almanac margins played a understated part in forming what was perceived to be The Early American Dream, and many other avenues came up as prospects for further research. It’s apparent that whatever The Early American Dream actually was perceived to be, it was the consequence of a minority subset of thinking men who ought to have known better. The actual early American Dream was had by up to a 90% majority of the population not originally incorporated into it, despite residing within the present day boundaries of the Unites States at the time, along with that 10%. Furthermore, there are all of North, South and Central Americas where were not within the scope of this essay that really just was intended to suggest that there really wasn’t a unified early American Dream beyond that which ended up on paper.

Works Cited

1775 Almanac, Exercise Records, Moon Museum. History Detectives, Matthew Horovitz, Episode 909, Public Broadcasting Service, 2011. https://www.pbs.org/opb/historydetectives/video/2097342856/index.html. Accessed 20 May 2024

Equiano, Olaudah. “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African written by Himself.” The Project Gutenberg eBook of “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African”, by OLAUDAH EQUIANO., 07 May 2024, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/15399/pg15399-images.html.

Franklin, Benjamin. “Father Abraham’s Speech.” Boston, G. K. Hall & Co. 1963, Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/fatherabrahamssp00franuoft/page/6/mode/2up. Accessed 20 May 2024.

US (United States). “The Declaration of Independence: Full Text.” Ushistory.Org, Independence Hall Association, www.ushistory.org/declaration/document/. Accessed 20 May 2024.

Indigenous Mythology and folklore influenced Modern American Culture in ways that are often not apparent (in some cases – denied), and continues to influence popular culture to this day in ways that have caused the traditional stories to become inseparable from contemporaneous culture. In this essay, a popular cartoon from the last 100 years will be analyzed in order to suggest that there are numerous Indigenous Mythological influences present in the story, despite the author not indicating the influence. This essay will offer a very brief introduction to the concept that Indigenous Mythological folklore and stories are sources of content for profit-extracting, culture-producing film production companies that use them to show cultural and community values in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons as the original stories. These were traditionally told by a community of people (often – storytellers/elders) to a younger generation that would form a cultural framework that would then become part of the identity of each individual.

Warner Bros., which produced the cartoon depicting a coyote and a roadrunner called “Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner”, arose from four brothers (Albert, Sam, Jack, Harry) who were raised by their immigrant father (Benjamin) & mother who lost all the family capital from a bad investment in the Canadian Fur Trade in London, Ontario. This followed fifteen years of living in various US locations trying to find stability after immigrating. This ended with Benjamin building a family trade as cobblers, which provided the growing family a needed recovery from financial disaster. This trade would come to provide for the brothers while growing up. (Viera 145/5857). Benjamin would’ve had a moderate Indigenous American exposure due to the fact that the fur trade, around the turn of the 20^th century, consisted of predominantly Indigenous traders who subsisted off game hunting. This exposure would’ve influenced the brothers in ways the history books don’t generally cover very well due to the personal nature of the details. Further investigation would be needed in order to determine the exact level of Indigenous cultural influence on the lives of the four brothers in their childhood, but the expectation is that they were no less than aware of Indigenous stories due to their father having worked with many Indigenous people during his time in the Fur Trade.

The brothers’ company became what’s known today as Time Warner. Further discussion on corporate structure is warranted here and for the scope of this essay, the understanding is that Warner Bros. media company acquired the rights to Merrie Melodies which then became Looney Tunes. A large innovation that was introduced by the Warner brothers through their company was the usage of synchronized audio tracks to go along with their moving pictures, which came to be known as movies (Viera 282/5857). This addition of sound came about in 1929, where it was described that the premiere of The Jazz Singer was lauded as Viera describes it, “There were gasps, then shouts, then a standing ovation. The sensation of synchronized dialogue startled viewers-then had them begging for more.” (Viera 315/5857). This display would’ve been the first time many Americans had stories told to them in such a way, with audio and visual input, outside of plays. This style of storytelling was central to, and practiced by, Indigenous folks for centuries beforehand. Screenplays had been around, but American culture wasn’t as good a facilitator of the form of entertainment whereas in European locations this was a more popularized form of entertainment. Many historic cultures would’ve had many different stories that differentiated their diverse past and it appeared that Warner Bros. had an initiative to reintroduce characters that’d previously been in folklore back into popular culture (covered later) through this new technological medium. In light of Indigenous affairs, their company took the place of the storytellers and would go on to do so under the guise of Merrie Melodies (Later – Looney Tunes).

Merrie Melodies released the first cartoon of “Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner” in 1949 with an episode titled, “Fast and Furry-ous”. The skit was the beginning of what became the popular duo still seen in contemporaneous American culture today, where, “Audiences loved the Coyote’s crazy schemes to catch the Road Runner, especially because every one ended in disaster for the frustrated Coyote,” (Korte 64). Korte is making the point here that the reception of these characters was good. This introduction to Americans at the time was given to a generation that was the first to grow up in a post world war era where the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were no longer in the scope of regular discussion as they were prior to the world wars – these were displaced by emerging trends for globalization after hundreds of years of domestic struggle. The introduction of this cartoon was the first mention of the animals to a new generation of Americans through popular American culture since the recording of oral stories from various Indigenous tribes back to at least 1901, when the brothers were growing up, as will be covered later.

As televisions became a part of American households in the 1940s, the Warner Bros. studio turned to shorter tracks so as to not compete with itself, and its competition with Disney lead it to produce short bits, or cartoons where, “filmed images are shown quickly one after another, [so] it appears that they are moving. Short animated movies are also known as cartoons, and they have been around since the late 1800s” (Korte 4). These cartoons became important methods of telling stories in ways very similar to Oral and Visual storytelling that’re heavily practiced in Indigenous communities.

Korte goes on to make the point that the industry for cartoons was heavily competitive and Movie producers such as Warner Bros. saw this market as an avenue to produce profits for their company and wrote on cartoons that, “Warner Bros. was so happy with the success … Warner Bros. was determined to become Disney’s biggest competitor.” (Korte 21). This means that the high level of competition would’ve placed the company in a position where it would benefit from relatable characters that had just recently fallen out of the public eye, as will be discussed later. With this type of storytelling being in use since the late 1800s, and the newly shown ability to build a corporate profit from it, there was a large motivation to pull from a previously successful medium that was seen in use in American Indigenous Culture for centuries. This included Oral and Visual storytelling, and essentially set the stage for adaptations to this new visual medium that had recently been combined with an auditory aspect that the Warner Brothers were famous for introducing at the time.

With Warner Bros.’ constant competition with Disney, and the overwhelming influence of movie production outfits like Paramount and other competition, pre-existing Indigenous Mythology was used to influence and bolster a company that might not’ve been able to compete. Lacking trademarks and copyrights opened Indigenous folklore stories to unrestricted usage and subsequent incorporation in popular American culture at the time. Much of the precedent was already set in that the idea having been had of a coyote and a roadrunner doing surreal things (Shown in later section). What would need to be taken care of on the creative side were artists to draft the cartoon sketches. In short, the contemporary cartoon has taken the place of traditional Oral and Visual storytelling by ones community through storytellers in order to impart cultural values into a younger generation. Each story forms an interconnected network of stories. In much the same way Indigenous mythology revered animals like the spider whose creation myths often reflect the interconnectedness of all things, so too did they incorporate coyotes and roadrunners into their folklore. After a specific analysis of cartoon episodes reflecting indigenous influence and callouts, various Indigenous stories will be discussed that will be shown to indicate a high likelihood of Native American influence in these cartoons.

The “Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner” cartoon features a few various callouts that show an Indigenous influence that gave rise to the idea of a coyote chasing a roadrunner around a surrealistic desert for time immemorial. It was originally directed by Chuck Jones, who’s credited with the origin of the cartoon characters that share many personality traits with the Indigenous Mythological depictions of the animals themselves. The first director after Jones was Rudy Larriva. Aside from both Coyote and Roadrunner being incorporated in various Indigenous stories prior to the cartoons conception, two episodes in particular that indicate influence from Indigenous folklore are, “Out and Out Rout”, and,“The Solid Tin Coyote”. In, “Out and Out Rout”, there’s a depiction of Hermes (Ancient Greek deity) and the ensuing antic indicates that there’s a tendency to incorporate external mythological influences which then was written into the skits. Rudy Larriva was actively referring mythology to create content for this episode (Larriva “Out and Out Rout” 2:12-3:13). In next scene of this same episode we see Coyote assembling a vehicle from junkyard parts, where front and center opening scene is depicted an Native-syled canoe (Larriva “Out and Out Rout” 3:13-4:44). Why a canoe? Why a junkyard? Why build a skit from this?

Was Larriva insinuating that there’s a “junkyard” of folklore and mythology that the studio picked and chose from in order to make skits for American cartoon companies to profit off of? Further, was there an implication that some Indigenous deities abandoned their own people on order to take part in European and American affairs, appearing in their cartoons, where they’d be performing their small part in becoming part of a worldwide cultural body? Whatever the motive or context, Warner Bros. profited immensely. Larriva himself was a Texan of Mexican heritage and further research would be needed to determine the rationale for the types of depictions in his show, which is outside the scope of this writing. In the next episode, “The Solid Tin Coyote”, the show recycles the opening junkyard scene where it again opens up with Coyote coming out of the canoe, from the same dump and canoe of an Indian style and front and center of the scene same as last time (Larriva “The Solid Tin Coyote” 0:16). There are likely many more references that can be gleaned from the series and its spinoffs, but a perusal of all extant cartoons that incorporate Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner would be too broad of a topic for this essay.

The originator of the cartoon, Chuck Jones, has described the origin of the characters and their character traits. Specifically he writes that Wile E. Coyote came from Mark Twain’s Description of a coyote. Jones writes, “I first became interested in the Coyote while devouring Mark Twain’s Roughing It at the age of seven. … The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.” (Jones 39). A question that would’ve been great to ask of Jones was what it was that inspired him to pair a coyote up with a roadrunner? Jones did indicate that the desert was the natural habitat for them to be seen together later in his book. Was Jones possibly susceptible to the same mindset that prevailed in the appropriation of Indigenous culture in sports teams in taking on Indigenous Mascots and dances and performing them inappropriately? In other words, was he in a mindset of partial denial which was rooted in a lack of education of American Indigenous cultures, while being slightly exposed to their beliefs without attribution throughout his life?

Jones later reminisces on the character of Wile E. Coyote in writing, “There is absolute logic to the devices that the fanatically single-minded Coyote uses. They should work, but there’s always one tiny thing wrong, and, as with most of us, that tiny thing leads to disaster. Human beings, of course, in even their most grandiloquent plans, often resemble coyotes.” (Jones 238). This quote reveals the commonality of the Coyote in Indigenous Stories and the Coyote that Jones wrote of. While the Indigenous people would hear stories of Coyote and might liken themselves to the animal who always seemed to have one lesson to offer, the coyote Jones writes of also always has one thing that foils his own plans and in this Jones allows a consumer to see themselves in a Coyote in the same way Indigenous stories empowered their listeners to see themselves in their stories. Jones saw Coyote everywhere, in the same way Indigenous people see Coyote everywhere – and with the same mythical regard for the animal that was often seen in futile attempts and comical antics as will be seen shortly. Both are shown having an air of futility and persistence as their general themes.

The coyote and greater roadrunner animals have a rich history in Indigenous mythology and folklore that’re quite reminiscent of the cartoon and the influence seems undeniable, that Indigenous Mythology influenced and even possibly lead to the creation of his cartoon characters, despite Jones’ claims. The hunger was just one aspect of Wile E. Coyote’s larger personality, which was to employ futile tricks in order to satisfy this Want. Want alone is a lot of things. There’s people that want food where they beg, or starve, or make it themselves, generally quite successfully. They don’t usually employ tricks as a character trait, or prepare meals of tin cans despite being surrounded by more edible cactuses. It’s not common to look at hungry people and think immediately that they’re trying to trick someone, this is a trait of Wile E. Coyote that Jones depicted.

Indigenous cultures have the concept of a mythological deity that they refer to as Coyote. The depiction is often of the animal itself but may also take other forms, generally the notion is that an animal is playing a trick to convey cultural value and is referred to often as a trickster-god in describing the role in the stories. In the mythological stories, the animal is often seen to provide life lessons through the form of antics and tricks that otherwise show the values inherent to the originating culture. Indigenous stories have previously spread through the use of Oral History up until quite recently. This means that there would be no copyrighted or trademarked material or characters that someone could build a lawsuit around. The stories were often exchanged in moments, as oral stories could only be so long. The length of a typical cartoon is roughly the length of a typical Indigenous oral story. The likeness of this style of storytelling was a perfect fit for the way in which animated cartoons came to essentially act as a surrogate medium by which these types of stories were passed along. There are many differences that are outside the scope of this essay.

Three Indigenous mythological stories featuring folklore that involved Coyote are, “Coyote Kills the Giant” (Flathead), “Coyote Gets Rich Off the White Man” (White Mountain Apache), and, “Coyote Steals the Sun and the Moon” (Zuni). There’s a story about a blue bird and Coyote, “The Bluebird and Coyote” (Pima). One story about roadrunner birds is, “Road Runner Girls Grind” (Cochiti). The mythology isn’t limited to these stories alone – these are just a few selections of the vast array of stories that form the framework of Indigenous folklore.

In, “Coyote Kills the Giant”, a story about a Coyote reported in 1901, we see Coyote saying of a club-like object, “”I’ll hit the giant over the head with this. It’s big enough and heavy enough to kill him.”” (Erdoes 223). Later we find out that this is done in futility, reminiscent of the cartoon skits written about above, as Coyote is later told that he is actually in the belly of the giant that he intended to hit with the club he found. This type of comical futility of a Coyote who grabbed a useless club when what he needed was a knife, when paired with the second half of the story that includes a lesson on feeding people, is a reported Indigenous mythological story. The surreal environment of being inside of a giant, a Coyote coming up with a half-cocked plan to club a giant he was already inside the stomach of, is highly reminiscent of the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote racing around surreal landscapes.

The next story from Indigenous folklore is, “Coyote Gets Rich Off the White Men”, where Coyote plays a trick on white campers to get their money. The story was reported in 1939, which was before Jones’ cartoon was released by a decade. Here again, we see Coyote in a comedic light as he deftly separates the campers from their money. He does this by convincing them that a donkey was full of money and would defecate money, and that the campers buying the donkey would profit because of this, but the whole thing was a ruse. Coyote was stuffing the animals with money and then taking the money back, leaving the rest in there for the campers. Coyote was left with both his original sum as well as what was paid for the animal by the white campers, hence the title. This was also done with a tree. In the story it’s written, “Coyote was always thinking about eating, and he hoped the packs held food.” (Erdoes 370). This quote bears an exact likeness to Wile E. Coyote as described above, where Jones describes Coyote as starved. Additionally, the theme of futility in coming up with plans and investing time that would otherwise be well spent was one that was heavily implied in the cartoon also, where the Coyote is always seen having gotten a faulty Acme product (Jones does say that money was not a part of the cartoon – the Coyote always was sent the device to be used).

One final story incorporating discussion of Coyote in Indigenous mythology is, “Coyote Steals the Sun and the Moon”, and the story opens up with, “Coyote is a bad hunter who never kills anything … Coyote is always up to something,” in yet another exact likeness of Wile E. Coyote from this story reported in 1935, just 14 years from the airing of the cartoon (Erdoes 140). Wile E. Coyote is often seen in episodes with an Indian-themed bow, using himself as an arrow, and never kills anything. He is also depicted as always being up to something in the cartoon. Later in this story, Eagle denies Coyote in saying, “”No, no, you always mess everything up.”” (Erdoes 142). This line is incredibly similar to the character traits Jones described Wile E. Coyote to have in his book, when he relates Coyote to humans in that something small always goes wrong as written above.

As can be seen from three different stories from tribes centered in New Mexico (Zuni), Arizona (White Mountain Apache) and Montana (Flathead), Coyote is a central figure in Indigenous Mythology. These are just three tribes that span a vast area of the United States – many other tribes have Coyote as a central character in their mythological and communal beliefs that have been told as Oral Stories for centuries prior to the notion of a cartoon as it’s known today. In each of these stories, Coyote is seeing as playing tricks, or utilizing comical, futile antics in order to teach a lesson. This mythological creature shares an uncanny number of personality traits with Wile E. Coyote, for one to not be based on or influenced by the other, and instead solely based on Twain’s work as was written. It’s revealing to consider Coyotes’ counterpart, the Road Runner, as well as Indigenous stories relating to the bird.

The Road Runner as an Indigenous Mythological deity reigns largely in the southwestern and central United States of America, which is its typical habitat. The Pueblo tribes along with many others including Apache depicted this animal in various ways that often described the bird as being able to lead one to a road, possibly leading English speakers to determine that its common name should just be roadrunner. The bird has a rich history in being incorporated in Indigenous cultures and is often viewed as a heroic icon, Martha Anne Maxon writes in her “The Real Roadrunner”, “It is not surprising that Native cultures existing side by side with the roadrunner for many centuries have incorporated the bird into many of their folkways and rituals. The roadrunner also was a favorite animal of the early Euro-American pioneers who settled in the Southwest.” (Maxon 91). This quote highlights the importance of this bird in cultures that branded it as brave, swift, bringer of rain, protector, remedy in other sections of the chapter in “The Real Roadrunner”.

Maxon writes that National Geographic was able to sponsor an interview with the creator of the iconic cartoon character Road Runner, Chuck Jones, who stated, “… he based his caricature on his memories of roadrunners from when he was a lad in Southern California.” (Maxon 103). Chuck Jones’ keen road runner observation skills would’ve also enabled him to be just as sensitive to the cultures he was also surrounded by that would’ve endowed him with an internal identity sufficient to recognize the birds specific characteristics that he came to share in parallel with them. He lived in the same geographical area as the same cultures that originated the ideas he incorporated into his cartoons, and would’ve been just as exposed to them as he was the bird itself. It was the case that he likely had daily interactions with these people with these specific cultural identities, and that he may not have been educated on Indigenous folklore may be a reason for a lack of attribution to them in his work.

One mythological story about roadrunners comes from the Cochiti tribe and is called, “Road Runner Girls Grind”, where we see a traditional story of Road Runner girls grinding blue cornmeal only to have their actions thrown into a tumultuous chaos due to the antics of Coyote who wants to grind acorns. In the story it’s written on the death of Coyote that Crow says, “”All the kinds of birds that eat meat, come and eat Coyote, for he has done mischief.” (Benedict 149-150). This idea of a mischievous coyote is very reminiscent of Jones’ cartoon, and the depiction of an innocent “heroic” protagonist characters as Road Runner Girls in this story only further supports this, for they’ve provided sustenance for the other animals for having killed the coyote. In Jones’ cartoon, the Road Runner was also a blue protagonist. Even more, the book in which this story was found was published in 1931, almost two decades before the cartoon. It could be argued that this may be the another episode of “Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner”, due to how similarly the interactions are between the Road Runner Girls and Coyote.

In tying the cartoon depictions to the mythological folklore, the recurring theme that all of Wile E. Coyotes’ antics always result in failure is a copy of the likeness of the Indigenous representation of Coyote. Coyote was often seen as playing tricks on white men, to their disadvantage, and Coyote’s success. This was not without a substantially larger body of stories that indicate a series of misfortunes for the deity. The command of strong humor in the Indigenous population seems to have not outright rejected or otherwise claimed the depiction as an appropriation of their culture at this time. The comical representation of the animals in the cartoon in the very least appears to rhyme with the intent of Indigenous oral tradition that incorporates humor at many levels. It could be concluded that the depiction isn’t outright offensive but the lack of a general association with Indigenous folks could be taken as an offensive gesture despite this.

In a different light, an alternative interpretation of the cartoon series is that it possibly was the case that Wile E. Coyote was sickened with some ailment and that he was just looking for a cure, as is the theme in other Indigenous cultures? Yet another is that there are an abundant number of cactuses around but Wile E. is seen preparing tin cans to eat instead, as if he had pica or some other mental disease that prevented him from rationally assessing that his continued dynamite usage and and his antics as well as the repeated use of acme products was possibly a form of dementia. These behaviors are expected of an American Cartoon, due largely to their attention-grabbing, surreal nature. On the other hand these same cartoons are in a precarious situation as they are designed in such a way as to get Americans to laugh at these Indigenous deities. Fortunately for Coyote, he’d already been caught in these types of antics for many centuries. Coyote being plagued and charactured with an inability to succeed was highly reminiscent of the underlying futility of Indigenous peoples in their initial embracing American culture that worked so hard to keep them silent, unnecessarily.

One last reference to Indigenous mythology that should be covered to close out this essay is called, “The Bluebird and the Coyote”, which originated from the Pima Tribe. It doesn’t specifically call out a roadrunner, but is yet another example of precedent set that would otherwise lead one to come to the conclusion that Indigenous Mythology influenced the American film production company Warner Bros. in ways being covered in this essay. In the story, Coyote says, “”How is it that all your ugly color has come out and now you are blue and gay and beautiful? You’re more beautiful than anything that flies in the air. I want to be blue too.” (Erdoes 347). This sets the narrative that the Bluebird has got something Coyote wants.

The importance of this story is that it appears to be a motivation for Coyote to go on and chase Road Runner for time immemorial, the reason they are paired up is because Bluebird has something that Coyote wants, other than to fill his belly – which is to be blue again, to be beautiful once again. In this story a road is mentioned as well – providing a persistent setting seen in the surreal desert landscapes found in the cartoon. This story was reported in 1908, which was before the cartoon came to be and was in circulation when the cartoon’s creator was growing up. Maybe the Warner Bros. and Chuck Jones had heard the same stories? These kinds of questions can no longer be answered by the creators of the cartoon, for they’ve passed on and have left their legacy that clearly shows a large Indigenous influence that’s interwoven into the storyline of the cartoon. Jones describes the rationale for Wile E. to chase the Roadrunner as, “simply trying to get something to eat … the Road Runner is caviar to the Coyote.” (Jones 171). This doesn’t appear to be the case from digging up the Indigenous folklore.

In this essay, it’s been shown that Warner Bros. family life was influenced by the Indigenous Fur Trade in Canada. It was shown that the resulting production company used mythology in their cartoon skits. It was shown that some of the episodes feature some highlights Indian themed artifacts. It was shown that the animals in the cartoon shared personality traits with the Indigenous Mythological Deities. It was shown that Oral and Visual Storytelling had a rich usage in Indigenous Culture which was used as a model for the American Cartoon shortly after the Oral Stories came to be written down in the early 1900s. It was shown that numerous Indigenous folklore stories bear a likeness to the characters in Looney Tunes. While this is generally circumstantial evidence, it’s apparent that Indigenous mythology was a source of origination for this story, and with that being said many questions can be asked – and should be. This action opened the door for entire belief systems to be utilized as cheap content for contemporaneous profit-seeking American film production companies. Further research into this line of reasoning might show further motivations that cannot be within the scope of this essay which aimed to only suggest the notion that the cultural influence of Native American Mythological folklore made Film Production Companies a lot of profits and influenced American popular culture. Certainly it’s likely the case that far more in-depth analyses on the specific subject of Indigenous Coyote & Roadrunner myths being retold in American Culture for profit have already been written and just haven’t been come across yet – this essay is the result of what can be gleaned from the sources cited below.

In conclusion, Indigenous Mythology and folklore heavily influenced Modern American Culture in ways that are often not apparent (in some cases – denied), and continues to influence popular culture to this day in ways that have caused the original stories to become inseparable from contemporaneous culture. In this essay, popular cartoon characters that are iconic in American culture, including Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, from Looney Tunes and Warner Bros. Studios, were be shown to have Indigenous Influences that are not readily apparent. This was be done by analyzing the industry, discussing the concept of an American Cartoon, discussing the cartoon characters personalities themselves, and then an analysis of Indigenous myths that discuss the same animals were covered. There are many times in this essay that further investigation was indicated as needed and should at least serve as a basic point of reference for one to continue looking for what it is that they want.

Works cited

Beck, Jerry. Friedwald, Bill. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. New York. Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1989.

Beck, Jerry. Looney Tunes: The Ultimate Visual Guide. New York. DK Publishing, Inc., 2003.

Benedict, Ruth. Tales of the Cochiti Indians. Washington. United States Government Printing Office, 1931.

Erdoes, Richard. American Indian Myths and Legends : Coyote Kills the Giant (Flathead), pp. 223-225, Coyote Gets Rich Off the White Man (White Mountain Apache), pp. 369-371, Coyote Steals the Sun and the Moon (Zuni), pp. 140-143, The Bluebird and Coyote (Pima), pp. 346-347. New York, Pantheon Books, 1984.

Jones, Chuck. Chuck Amuck: the life and times of an animated cartoonist. New York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1989.

Korte, Steve. What Is the Story of Looney Tunes? New York. Penguin Workshop, 2020.

Maxon, Martha Anne. The Real Roadrunner. Norman. The University of Oklahoma Press, 2005.

“Out and Out Rout.” Merrie Melodies, created by Rudy Larriva, Warner Bros., 29 January 1966.

“The Solid Tin Coyote.” Merrie Melodies, created by Rudy Larriva, Warner Bros., 19 February 1966.

Viera, Mark A.. Warner Bros. 100 Years of Storytelling. China. Running Press, 2023.

Characters that are represented traditionally in Native American texts imply a sense of direction and clarity in understanding the connection to the reader, where nontradtional characters do not convey the same level of understanding to the reader, at least immediately. A character that’s chosen a traditional path is seen in Anna Lee Walters’, “The Warriors”, where Uncle Ralph claims to follow a more traditional Native American path in passing his Oral Tradition to his nieces. A character that’s chosen a nontradtional path is found in Louise Erdrich’s, “Love Medicine”, where we see Beverly Lamartine living out the life of a salesman, off the reservation, that doesn’t really do much to convey a sense of direction as is seen in his eventual return to the reservation in order to pursue his brothers widow, Lulu Nanapush, and his presumed child, Henry Junior.

The result of Beverly’s choices lead him out of the reservation as he served, “a small town world of earnest dreamers,” which is to say a lot of people that didn’t need too much convincing to part with their money (Erdrich 106). In serving these types of folks, Beverly often dreamed often of returning to the reservation and the chapter, “Lulu’s boys” seemed quite dedicated to him having worked through an internally rehearsed sales pitch to Lulu, only for it to end with him staying there a while as he became another one of “Lulu’s boys”. Beverly’s lack of engagement in traditional Native American culture throughout his life that was shared with the reader resulted in him living a life of dreams and regrets that ultimately brought him back to his “home”, where he found in Lulu and her children. This home was set to be replaced with a factory later in the story, but for a time this information didn’t come up. In this case, it was the nontraditional lifestyle that both lead him away and right back to one that was a bit more traditional as he returned.

Contrasting this, in Walters’ “The Warriors”, Uncle Ralph never really seemed to have a place for himself in a home. In fact, he died homeless as the story tells, “It never occurred to Sister and me that this would be Uncle Ralph’s end (Walters 396),” on referring to hobos. Ralph is depicted as coming to the girls’ home and telling many oral stories of a traditional Pawnee culture that both inspired and impressed upon the nieces a traditional lifestyle. This endowed them with a sense of history and identity that was not exactly in line with the events that actually happened in the story. Through the story, Uncle Ralph is shown sliding further and further into a self destructive pattern that pushes him to alcoholism, poverty and homelessness.

This happened as he more strongly embraced what was perceived by him to be a traditional lifestyle where it’s written, “I bring food, The warrior brings home food. To his family, to his people.” His face was lined and had not been cleaned for days. He smelled of cheap wine (Walters 402).” He did this because he perceived himself to be fulfilling a traditional Pawnee role per his own interpretations. This dis-associative event continues in that Uncle Ralph’s clearly displaying a detachment from reality that appeared to be fueled by a personal identity crisis that he masked with alcohol usage in order to cope with it. Later Uncle Ralph claimed, “I have thousands of warriors and they’ll ride with me. We’ll get our bows and arrows. Then we’ll come back!”, as the man sadly displays a psychosis that puts him straddling a traditional world that no longer existed which he so yearned for and the nontraditional one he was faced with the reality of living in (Walters 403).

In conclusion, characters that are represented traditionally in Native American texts imply a sense of direction and clarity in understanding the connection to the reader, where nontradtional characters do not convey the same level of understanding to the reader, at least immediately. Uncle Ralph’s oral traditions in describing the Pawnee people were very understandable, whereas Beverly Lamartine’s Indigenous traditions were not as readily discernible, and it was in his pursuit of those values after perceiving that he’d lost some grip on them that lead him to his home with Lulu. In this case, it was Beverly’s seeking out of a connection with tradition that gave him a sense of direction, whereas in the case of Uncle Ralph it was his connection to tradition that lead him to inspire the sense of direction and identity in his nieces, despite his own apparent loss in it. Much of this direction is spread through the usage of Oral Tradition in order to assist folks in understanding the tradition.

Works Cited

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine a Novel. Harper Perrenial, 2009.

Purdy, John L. Nothing But the Truth: The Warriors. Walters, Anna Lee. Prentice Hall, 2001.

European, and later American, displacement of Indigenous people has since transformed into an urbanization which empowered coordinated efforts of Urban Indians to influence Modern American (and global) Politics. This success scenario is practiced by many previously displaced groups of people and is particularly successful with more than one other displaced community whose Suburban efforts are coordinated by Urban upper classes that provision and guide the local townships and cities in fostering growth. The story of the American Urban Indian began with a displacement, followed then by an admission that the land was originally owned by its original Indigenous inhabitants. This lead to a brutal allotment process that further divided this culture with no representative central authority. These people had no system in place by which to exchange this commodity (land), or utilize it through coordinated efforts, leaving many lone Indians to tend to land they were sorely equipped to maintain alone.

In his “The Outrage of Allotment”, Dewitt Clinton Duncan claimed, “What am I to do? I have a piece of property that doesn’t support me, and is not worth a cent to me, under the same inexorable, cruel provisions of the Curtis law that swept away our treaties, our system of nationality, our every existence, and wrested out of our possession our vast territory. . . .,” where he outright declares the effects of acts of the United States government which he claims dismantled all preexisting agreements that he’d grown to rely on during his life (“Hearts on the Ground: The Outrage of Allotment.” Native American Testimony, Penguin Books, 1999, Page 266). Under these previous agreements, he indicates he was able to farm on a larger plot of land. There’s a lot of context that’s missing from this short passage, specifically why Duncan was not able to subsist on 60 acres is left unanswered (For reference, an average plot for various Roman/European peasants was generally less than a quarter of this).

In his testimony, Dewitt Clinton Duncan indicates that escalating debts that were assumed by him lead to his plight – something that very often not all the mismanaged land in the world can generally get folks out of feeling the effects of. Of note here is that if one were to accidentally write, “Curtis Law” (as written), instead of “Curtis Act”, into Google (or literally any search engine), you’ll see the inherent bias to further neglect an Indigenous culture in an attempt to hide the history under dozens of the same type of institutions that Duncan was referring to in his testimony as corporate law firms displaying smiling white people come up at the top of the results and not much else.

Duncan’s referring to the replacement of tribal law with United States federal law through the Curtis Act, which ensured that Indigenous folks whom were over-leveraged and heavily in debt would’ve had their collateral turned over through the use of collection agencies performing business in the United States. This is in opposition to having a different solution which presumably would have been found in the effectively de-personed Tribal Courts. Understood, but not discussed here, were the political motivations behind the expansion being predominantly a response to wars with the British Empire, the Spanish Empire and Mexico; many of which were paid for in land deals in exchange for that which was needed to pay for coming out ahead as a nation from these wars. Acts such as the Curtis Act, and processes such as allotment set the stage for the urbanization that followed this and many other stories just like it, as the preceding generation was left without ancestral homes or lands to grow up at.

As great example of the fallout of urbanization, Tommy Orange in his, “There There”, describes one relatable result of losing tribal and familial lands. Orange conveys the impression that Indigenous folks had the assumption of a sort of sentencing to death, on first living in cities. He conveys a message that North American Indigenous folks found their assimilation in embracing American urban life to be empowering. Orange writes of the initial fear and apprehensiveness, “Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours. We didn’t get lost amid the sprawl of tall buildings, the stream of anonymous masses, the ceaseless din of traffic. We found one another, started up Indian Centers, brought out our families and powwows, our dances, our songs, our beadwork. (There There, Vintage Books, 2018, Page 8).” Orange is describing the pivot in Indigenous culture that became part of it in its entrainment in a larger American culture. He describes power being found in doing this, and sees a continuation of the beliefs that were inherent to the past generation prior to the change. He makes an important point in differentiating this adaptation to a different lifestyle as something that has less to do with persistence and resolve.

In showing this, Orange writes, “The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended would gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal. Not that we’re broken. And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you can an attempted murder victim resilient?” (There There, Vintage Books, 2018, Page 137). What he means here is that the taking of the land damaged these people in a way that Orange can only describe in metaphors, and their continued existence isn’t some cheap byproduct of their strength of character, more that it’s something more on a shared cultural level that continues to empower these people as they further adapt American lifestyles, politics and cultures to their own needs. In doing so, a resurgence in cultural representation, political power and actual people with Indigenous backgrounds become a daily part of American life.

In conclusion, there are two topics here in this paper, one is where Indigenous people were brutalized to feed wars that never really stopped and continue taking from people to this very day. This process typically results in the relocation of people into larger cities where facilitation of them can continue due to the broad amount of resources that are in cities by design. The second topic is that this urbanization process is not unique to the Indigenous people of North America and has been very successful in transferring wealth from people to the coordinated war machine that seeks to pursue an ever-expanding empire to this day where, “The West”, now is representative of an increasingly expanding population base. In exchange for the loss suffered when European, and later American politics, forced a displacement of Indigenous people, an urbanization effort which empowered coordinated efforts of Urban Indians to influence Modern American (and global) Politics and their local tribes has grown in the intervening ~200 years. As this process continues this trend, American Indians will become more prevalent in the American culture.

Works cited

Nabokov, Peter. Native American Testimony, Hearts on the Ground, The Outrage of Allotment, Dewitt Clinton Duncan, Cherokee. Penguin Books. 1999.

Orange, Tommy. There There. Vintage Books. 2018

Throughout the last few thousand years, spiritual beliefs have been expressed through myths and stories in order to explain the natural world and to provide an outlet to express the Divinity felt in consideration of a particular topic or belief. Methods of story telling through skilled crafting are employed that interconnect and overlap with different belief systems while simultaneously being able to communicate a level of sublimity through the work created. This is the case in architecture whereby building styles are carefully selected and designed to display dominant cultural and spiritual values. A reason for doing this is that individual cultures can establish social, religious and artistic paradigms in which beliefs are conveyed to both perpetuate the local culture as well as expand the relative influence over those who don’t currently share an identical set of beliefs. This dominance of the perceived sacredness and divinity that a group of folks will have is often seen as an expansion of their belief system as it becomes incorporated into a growing cultural framework.

In the same way that architecture is an example of skilled work one can express perceived divinity in nature, various decisions must be made in order to complete this type of work and projects. Considerations regarding raw material suppliers, aesthetic choices, building regulations as well as the people to perform the labor are all Modern examples of moments where decisions must be made in building architecture in order to select a desired outcome. To make the choices, it’s not possible to neglect the impact of a divine guidance in answering these questions and others not listed here if the intention is to create a complete object. In the same way that some trees won’t naturally grow on sand, nor will some buildings naturally remain standing on the same sand; therefore, skilled labor such as selection mechanisms and architecture have come to be some of the most powerful tools in this arsenal in the continued venture to tame and tend this universe. The proper use of these tools demands that grace flow through the crafters so that the underlying divinity inherent to the specific work might manifest itself, rather than for simply satisfying a need egregiously declared to be immediately needing a solution.

Architecture is a good example of a skilled craft through which people may express their appreciation for divinity, because it’s a process that requires them to select a particular building style and then combine this with their creative efforts to produce tools and structures. Work such as this can show that the same level of aptitude that allows folks to express themselves spiritually, while simultaneously respecting the environment in which they live in as their common home, provided the proper selection mechanisms are in place. Divinity which was originally exclusively seen as a part of nature and animals and mankind has expanded to incorporate being seen in the tools that people create through extension of the divinity implicit in themselves that’s interconnected with the divinity in nature.

This incorporation of divinity in skilled work has lead to a more modern outlook beyond simple re-purposing of nature for immediate individual efforts and has moved toward creating that which is to become natural – power that was originally attributed to higher deities such as God in Christianity or otherwise wholly represented in action through Nature. This disruption in nature has shaped modern viewpoints in recognizing divinity and interconnectedness as natural landscapes have given way to city-scapes that are just as breathtaking and in many ways have become natural through the rigorous incorporation of appreciated and identified divinity in skilled work. Nature, having previously provided tree cover or caves as shelter, is observed yielding to people as the honing of the human mind has further enabled the directed application of the raw materials from nature to make increasingly complex architecture.

John Ruskin, in his, “The Nature of Gothic”, conveys an assertion that proper work wouldn’t follow suit in making, “a tool of a man”, and says, “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions” (“The Nature of Gothic: Savageness.” The Stones of Venice, Ballantyne Press, 1900, Page 11, Section 12). He further writes on the division of labor, “It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men :- Divided into mere segments of men-broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin or the head of a nail.” (“The Nature of Gothic: Savageness.” The Stones of Venice, Ballantyne Press, 1900, Page 14-15, Section 16). This means that the division of labor in this Modern society has been applied in such a way as to enable final products to arrive into the hands of the consumer in an incomplete state. This is a state that’s often functionally equivalent, but lacks in the touches that’d otherwise indicate the object was subject to the learned hand of one who was endowed with the cultural and spiritual values requisite to spur the demand for the object in the first place (as opposed to a machine).

Ruskin further elucidates that this form of creation cheapens both the worker and the builder, and the implication is that the cost of this loss is materialized as increasing corporate profits that have pilfered much from these Divine characteristics as the worker becomes more of a tool than even Ruskin would have been familiar with. Ruskin discusses decoration that’s the most aesthetic characteristic of Gothic Architecture in distinguishing the architecture itself as separate from the Gothic decoration in the very same building. This indicates that this imbuing is a step beyond simply constructing a structure, an integral step that’s invariably intermixed in the buildings structure, that becomes a way to grade the work. He writes, “Foliation, while it is the most distinctive and peculiar, is also the easiest method of decoration which Gothic architecture possesses … yet a builder without imagination at all, or any other faculty of design, can produce some effect upon the mass of his work by merely covering it with foolish foliation”. (“The Nature of Gothic: Savageness.” The Stones of Venice, Ballantyne Press, 1900, Page 72, Section 99).

Ruskin is saying the result of not imbuing the skill into the work, and as a result, leaves one person thinking and another person building is to provide people with work that cannot, by the nature of the arrangement, express that which is divine. Although the work may yield just as powerful outputs, unless one were to reconsider that which is actually divine and then reassess the current output of the process, Ruskin would still find it lacking integrity. His reference to, “any other faculty of design”, could be considered in the light of corporate monetary profits. There, the typical architectural ornaments one could easily see a respect for nature and the divine; instead, lie unadorned from many Modern buildings as the work needed to keep up with an unrestrained growth in scientific power (indicating the power of the mind) has lead to more demands for basic housing rather than needs for a high quality of life.

John Ruskin goes to far greater lengths and with much better wording than can be deployed here to provide an overbearing analysis of Gothic Architecture that incorporates much of the cultural and spiritual values that he saw at work in the style. While in no way could Ruskin’s chapter of a book even hope to be satisfactorily summarized here, the specific aspect of the book that I’d like to discuss is in line with his sections on describing the nature of skilled labor and its role in society, as well as a very specific interpretation of the grace that flows through the hands of workers in incorporation of the foliation present in Gothic architecture as discussed in his chapter. Per Ruskin, this dilution of capacity has lead to folks no longer being able to communicate or otherwise express the divinity, power and beauty they’d see in their work, that they’d’ve otherwise imbued in their work as a way to pass along the grace with which they might express that there is something greater than the individual that interconnects their creation to nature or a divine force.

It’s on this force’s behalf that the builder wields their knowledge that passes through their hands by a matter of considered selection, rather than creation for the sake of itself and its creators immediate needs. Doing this allows a worker to imbue properties understood of this interconnected whole into the work that’s performed. In making perceived divinity purchasable for a price, while simultaneously selling that which is without it for less, a selection mechanism has been applied to cultures this system operates inside of. An example of this selection mechanism impacting values can be those found in spiritual beliefs of Indigenous folks who were accustomed to them. The beliefs of both cultures, Indigenous and Western, are seen to be in decay as they slowly return to nature in Linda Hogan’s, “Power”.

Linda Hogan spent a fair amount of time in describing the homes in which both Ama and Omishto live in. Hogan opens describing Ama’s home as appearing, “..raw and abandoned, but it isn’t; Ama lives in the rickety thing. The place sits on cinder blocks in case of flooding. It’s a square, simple house, gray-looking, with a porch that wraps around one side. She uses palmetto fronds on the roof to keep the place cool, so it looks something like a hut sitting in the shadows of a jungle, even though it’s close to civilization.” (“Power”. W. W. Norton & Company, 1998, Pages 5-6). She continues to describe in further detail how this home appears to have blended in with the nature that it’s surrounded by, representing a sort of border between Modern Western civilization and the idea of a fading Taiga society that both women are a part of. The indication from the way this was written is that Hogan is trying to express that Ama adapts the architecture of the home, originally a part of Western civilization, to her own spiritual beliefs that were a combination of both Taiga and Western beliefs. It’s not that the forest simply took over the home, Hogan wrote that Ama took part in making it appear this way. More in depth, the lack of an appreciation for the Western architecture that the home was originally built with shows the inherent disconnect in the beliefs. By extension, she implies that Western culture has some ability to facilitate the Taiga belief system, like a substrate; however, later in the story Ama abandons this home, and it then is lived in by Omishto.

The home is used as a literary tool to describe more subtle points of the characters personalities. The architectural adornments that were part of the home became part of the integral structure of the home, as Hogan indicated that there was some utility to using parts of nature to fix the home (fronds). The description of Ama’s home when Omishto was living in it use such lines as, “You would think it is only an abandoned building, the plants already reaching up after the storm, in a slow crawl. He sees subdivisions. I see life. He knows the cost of things, but not their value.” (“Power”. W. W. Norton & Company, 1998, Page 196). The value Hogan writes of is the same value that Ruskin writes of, which is the spiritual value inherent to the decorations of architecture. In the same way Ruskin wrote, “The system, then, of what is called Foliation, whether simple, as in the cusped arch, or complicated, as in tracery, rose out of this love of leafage ; not that the form of the arch is intended to imitate a leaf, but to be invested with the same characters of beauty which the designer had discovered in the leaf.” (“The Nature of Gothic: Savageness.” The Stones of Venice, Ballantyne Press, 1900, Page 69, Section 95), Hogan is describing what Omishto and Ama see in nature that is divine value in the home that they shared. This was expressed in the skilled work of both women acting to tend to the structure in a way that invested aspects of their spiritual beliefs in nature and the divine.

Another aspect relating to the skilled work on the architecture of the home was that the cat was not placed in them home on its death. This indicates an implied inherent hostility in the building toward that which is divine in Taiga culture, despite the skilled work that went into making the home have “value”. For the cat, an unknown burial plot was presumably chosen instead. The reader can surmise that Ama was not of the opinion that it was Western culture that was to be the burial place of her culture, and by extension, it will not be in Western culture that her spiritual beliefs will be found embedded. It’s left to assumption, what happened with the cat. Its not the property, which is implied to have eyes looking put from it, but instead the forest, indicating a hierarchy of sacredness that places the home (A tool of people made of skilled craft work) below the forest.

This sends a message that something harrowing and divine may have happened while Omishto slept, as the true story of the remnants of the cat are left to the reader to guess. A mythological aspect here is that because nobody but Ama knows what truly happened to the cat, its representation of cultural beliefs are also left open to interpretation and in doing so empowers the reader to see the cat where ever logic might apply its presence. By extension the presented Taiga beliefs, the implication is that the sacred presence is instead felt in the same interconnected presence that the story opens with in describing something peering out from the woods. The cat may even have simply been left to “come alive” elsewhere due to the divine nature in which the hunt ensued and the mythological aspect of the cat itself. This is at the cost of diminishing the importance of the home, the structure, its framework and adornments, in order to attribute this mythological aspect to nature. This “cost” is the same that’s paid as the home is a “segment” of architecture that couldn’t possibly be a sacred enough place, due to “other faculties of design” (per Ruskin) that make it not an acceptable place to bury mythological animals at in this story.

Hogan presents the Taiga people in her story on power, whose general rejection of Western culture deem Ama’s home incapable of hosting something sacred and divine such as the embodiment of decaying cultural values she indicates in writing of the status of the cat at its moment of death as, “bony, lying on the ground with gray-looking fur and a wide, bony rib cage.” (“Power”. W. W. Norton & Company, 1998, Page 66). What she presents is actually two cultures that she indicates to be decaying, Western and Taiga. She does this by the plain descriptions of what was once lively architecture that had become rich with the embodiment of nature through the grace of Ama, where the home is instead being reclaimed by nature as opposed to standing apart from it. What then, is required for such a thing to be done as to have a return to sacredness and sublimity such that there could exist such a situation that the dead animals (horse and cat) remain buried, or otherwise sufficiently respectable so as to be in a state of death as to be proudly displayed before ones ancestors and elders? Other tools of human civilization may be at play for acts such as this, as I’ll cover now with Charles Darwin’s selection mechanisms.

In putting the very broad category of architecture aside, there’ve been other examples of skilled work being used by folks. The application of selection methods, essentially where one thing happens and another does not, by the decision of another thing, have been applied by Nature, and through it the Divine, throughout the majority of human history here on Earth. Charles Darwin, in his, “Origin of Species”, describes Natural Selection methods that’ve been applied by nature before and into the Modern era. This mechanism has shaped the massive amount of biodiversity and richness in variation that’s often reported as disappearing in this Modern age. This is, in part, due to the growing stature of humans as a species who’re coming to overshadow nature in such a way as to become its Shepard as their shared vision moves toward the cosmos and beyond Earth. In doing so, skilled work such as applying increasingly powerful selection mechanisms are being utilized in order to direct the actions of whole societies of people in such a way as to operate as an interconnected whole.

Darwin describes “Social Selection”, when he says, “In social animals it will adapt the structure of each individual for the benefit of the community; if each in consequence profits by the selected change,” on explaining Natural Selection. (“Origin of Species”. ElecBook, 2000, Page 85). It’s this growing body of knowledge composed of emerging selection mechanisms (based in science and political opinion) that lead to a more modern understanding of selection mechanisms that are designed by people to mimic effects previously caused by Nature. Reflected in all the cited work of this essay is that a misapplication of variously applied Social Selection mechanisms generally tend to result in a perceived elimination of the same level of variety (in species, culture, language, most things) that folks enjoyed even as recently as a few hundred years ago.

The recognition of this has lead toward a push for social harmonization across otherwise disconnected countries that are now all physically interconnected under a “technocracy” (Per Pope Francis – discussed momentarily). Unprecedented growth in science has lead to a commensurate growth in the relative power of applied Social Selection mechanisms. These mechanisms have had a rough inception (~200 years) that reportedly reduced quite heavily diversity across all aspects of life, and nature, in its pursuit to manifest the same level of interconnectedness that had been since forever been perceived in nature.

This Social Selection tool sets the bar for the level of interconnectedness that one may experience in their particular interaction with any specific thing, be it an object like a home, or a concept like taxes, or a device like a computer. The mechanism empowers one to ask, what home? Or, taxes for what, imposed by whom? Or, what site or program, in the case of a computer? These mechanisms require skilled labor to apply them correctly. John Ruskin writes, “… but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops ; his execution becomes hesitating ; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong ; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.” (“The Nature of Gothic: Savageness.” The Stones of Venice, Ballantyne Press, 1900, Page 11, Section 11). This means that with the newly found capacity to apply powerful Social Selection mechanisms (which are highly susceptible to the cultural values inherent to the underlying civilization that produces them) have recently (~200 years) been applied to the individual in such a way as to produce a desired effect that has been wrong at the cost of empowering people to understand this newly applicable mechanism.

The application of skilled labor through these mechanisms have serious risks for misapplication. It’s become apparent as inhumane perpetuity’s continue become the status quo across the world. What’s called modern society continues to further separate into an increasingly less-populated yet ever-growing-in-power class of people, from an increasingly larger and ever-so-persistently-poor class of individuals in which this perceived differentiation and variation built by nature is perceived to be under threat of being crushed under the growing weight of this technocratic oligarchy that works to interconnect and tend to all people at the cost of the displacement of the natural environment they lived in. This tending to has been met with little regard for the cultural values of the societies that’ve been dominated. It’s generally left a society with less resources, less ability to be a unified culture, and less touch with divinity and nature than ever before. With the ability to tend to themselves being suppressed, the reliance on satisfying the interconnected needs of different cultures it displaces becomes more important with every additional increase in the magnitude of power of the technocracy.

Needs for divinity and nature are being replaced with a growing need for simpler things like a growing requirement for basic food and shelter. The growing technocracy has both empowered and enslaved human civilization to a paradigm whose power dwarfs Nature in such a way as to both enshrine them to better respect their place in the universe, and also allow them to further define it. This has come with the recognition that the perceived continued abuse of our shared home (Earth) in this growth in power is an unacceptable behavior that’s built largely on a misappropriation that conflates that which is sacred and divine with that which is powerful. Pope Francis, in his, “Laudato Si’”, writes, “Any technical solution which science claims to offer will be powerless to solve the serious problems of our world if humanity loses its compass, if we lose sight of the great motivations which make it possible for us to live in harmony, to make sacrifices and to treat others well”. (“Laudato Si’.”, The Holy See, 2015, Page 62, Chapter 5, Article 200). What he’s saying here is that through the “great motivations” and “compass” one finds in seeing Divinity and Nature and respecting its interconnectedness, one can find the solutions to the greater perceived problems faced in this Modern world, and not without them and only instead with science that can only offer power.

“Laudato Si’”, is a sobering and powerful analysis of the application of the tools of human civilization, addressed to all reasonable people and in it the Pope calls for a wonderful return to Divinity by making a case that the continued elimination of variety, grace and culture in this age is due largely to a technocratic oligarchy coming into power that has displaced these. It’s quite an important piece of literature that covers material related to the perceived place of mankind in relation to their current place in Modern times. Francis writes, “What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?”. (“Laudato Si’.”, The Holy See, 2015, Page 18, Chapter 1, Article 57). He is stressing the dire urgency to swiftly address eroding cultural and spiritual beliefs so pervasive in Modern societies.

He urges action to reassess the mechanisms by which this nascent technocratic power structure imposes itself on society. This means that the “selection mechanisms” have displaced folks in the inception period of this oligarchy, and the situation demands an immediate remediation. The Pope calls for grace and an empowerment of those who stand to become under-represented in this new structure that imposes powerful Social Selection mechanisms. He urges that human life be valued for more than what it has been recently, and requests for a return of value in a manner sympathetic to a church that previously Shepherded a large chunk of the world through the last few thousand years without it.

The loss of this power that the Pope calls for would simply cause it to be found elsewhere. For example, Pope Francis later writes, “If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony. Let us refuse to resign ourselves to this, and continue to wonder about the purpose and meaning of everything.” (“Laudato Si’.”, The Holy See, 2015, Page 36, Chapter 2, Article 113). What he means in saying this is that the skilled work that goes into architecture that otherwise reflects the spirit of an age has instead yielded to a bleak outlook that produces very repetitive and inadequate results. He’s underwhelmed with the performance that’s provided barely even basic living requirements in this new technological paradigm and is asking that the buildings (and by extension all skilled work) be adorned with characteristics that reflect a spirituality that he speaks much of in the rest of the Encyclical.

In tying these cited works together by first returning to Hogan’s, “Power”, in neglecting to describe the recognition of power in architecture in the buildings that were discussed in her story, she confirms that there seems to be a distinct lack of hospitality for spiritual awareness and sacred cultural beliefs and happenings in the design or setting of the Western culture presented. It was only Ama’s home that had “value”. Ruskin portrays a style of building that incorporates culture, accentuates spirituality and has room to reflect not just the spiritual beliefs of one society but instead allows the divine to manifest and blend seamlessly with the actual framework of the building through the Gothic Architecture style as it interconnects the building with the spiritual values. This shows the concept that it’s the beliefs are what comes with the skilled work. In their separation, authors like Hogan observe decaying spiritual belief systems which have no capacity within this dominant scientific system to persist in continuation with the beliefs of the Taiga people. No form of hospitality is offered, leading to total and complete abandonment of the spiritual beliefs which degrade in much in the same way Ama abandoned her home. Thoughts such as this are echoed by Pope Francis, who says that this “value” (and more) is sold off to further empower a growing technocracy that’s also then afforded much more power for itself at the expense of the loss in vital representation of those people who are displaced and are attributed with the variety and biodiversity of this system by all these authors.

With so much effort in continuing on the path of taking the skill out of labor, turning its lack of cost paid into corporate profits, where goods are sold for the same price, inflicts a degradation to the quality of work and spiritual understanding of the human that produces the work. This perpetuated captivity in electing this technocracy as Shepards in this Modern era will continue for as long as there’s a perceived absence of divinity, nature and interconnectedness in its outputs that’re observed in the quality of life of all humans on the Earth. The variation that in work has been replaced with monotony in order to pay for this luxurious squandering. This cheapens individual efforts, in likening them to tools, no different than an animal or logical system that thrives on calculable inputs in order to produce planned and selected outputs. Offing this skilled work at the individual level has enabled a societal selection mechanism to direct the efforts of entire groups of people so that they may continue to live in the face of calls for their reduction in number due to perceived unaffordable burdens in continuing their existence.

Ruskin indicates that this loss of skill in becoming a tool is the case for an individual, but fails to make a plausible case for this being symptomatic of a degraded society. Pope Francis indicates that this is a problem, defines the actors, scope and those affected quite well. He claims the cost being paid is a loss in grace manifesting as dehumanization, which creates a loss of cultural and spiritual diversity. Ruskin’s, “Mere segments of men”, – the fractured skill sets Ruskin describes intermixed with Darwin’s explanation for different species inter-working with each other indicates that in the Modern age, failing to work together to create this system causes Authors like Linda Hogan to then go on to describe, “Pieces of Architecture”, in their stories due to the very same cheapening the Pope discusses in “Laudato Si’”.

Regardless, much of the work in the Modern age is much too broad of a topic that gets washed out in a sea of tangentially elusive information that usually only seems relevant while simultaneously being overabundant in supply. This generally excludes many folks from appreciating the skilled work that goes into so many things in the Modern age. It wasn’t until tens of thousands of years after humans made such a Gothic Architecture since they were building structures in the style, it certainly won’t be another hundred thousand years for something comparable to come about. In the general lack of depth, the cursory understanding vastly understates the sheer magnitude of depth of what goes into these applications.

Masterful work took on a new guise in the Modern era. As folks moved away from architecture to things like various pharmaceutical concoctions, the specialization still comes with an almost sort of magical or divine feeling as it’s just so easy to forget that a few hundred years ago there were no simple looking solutions with which to inject oneself with, producing such expected results in the majority of cases. For example, you certainly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between a Vitamin B injection and Tirzepatide injection, even though their effects are quite different. While these look so similar, their context dwarfs even the greatest application of Gothic Architecture in their magnitude relating to exactly what the object has been imbued with. The level of Divine implementation is comparable the screaming of volcanoes to the ant that is the human capacity to understand as the roar is just so much louder than any single human was selected to have the capacity to understand. Generally, they don’t have the requisite machinery with which to even begin to fathom the level of complexity that goes into most things these Modern days, nor has this been afforded for them as the Pope so voraciously argues in, “Laudato Si’”.

In conclusion, throughout much of history, human spiritual beliefs have been expressed through myths and stories in order to explain the natural world to express the Divinity felt. Methods such as skilled crafting through architecture and selection methods are employed that interconnect and overlap with different belief systems while simultaneously being able to express a level of sublimity in the work created. In the same way that some trees won’t grow on sand, nor will some buildings, skilled labor such as selection mechanisms and architecture have come to be some of the most powerful tools in the arsenal in the continued venture to tame and tend this universe by mankind. The four works cited in this essay cover much in the way of trying to express that it is through the grace of skilled craftsmanship that’s empowered by a spiritual regard for divinity in nature that enables the continuation of the skilled work in perpetuity, and not much else.

Works cited (Check youtube for audio recordings too)

Darwin, Charles. Origin of Species, Natural Selection. ElecBook. 2000.

Francis. “Laudato Si’.” The Holy See, 18 June 2015, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa- francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

Hogan, Linda. Power: A Novel. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Ruskin, John. Stones of Venice, The Nature of Gothic, William Morris.London, Ballantyne Press, 1900.