Turkish Coffee...
I have noticed that a lot of my posts lately have had to do with food. Or maybe it was just the other day when I posted the picture of pierogi. Here were two little cups of turkish coffee that Caitlin and I had tonight at Salaam. I took her out for a little appetizer/coffee because we were both feeling a little bit beat. The coffee was really tasty and it was a little zinger. I had some kind of chocolate mixed in with an espresso bean brew. It didn't taste like espresso though. We could taste the added spices that gave it a special character. The tastes swirled and billowed up inside like a chute of chimney smoke leaving a content feeling inside my head.
It's been a mostly nice day -- ups, downs, twists, turns, pangs, tickles, and all -- and it has slowly become apparent that I am leaving in just 2 and a half weeks. The weather today was great -- just about 50 degrees (nice!). Tomorrow it is supposed to get up to 64 or so. I can't wait for spring. Of course, the spring I am going to experience will be on and around the equator so it will be pretty different to what I am used to.
Today in my
Documentary Genres course we watched a film about
Operation Just Cause.
Operation Just Cause was the U.S. invasion of Panama in December of 1989, under the discretion and administration of George H.W. Bush. The footage itself was appalling. Vignettes of U.S. Marines unjustly killing and torturing innocent Panamanian civilians, collages of razed communities, and raw portraits of decaying bodies that had been thrown out into ditches were all very powerful and disturbing images to watch in the film. The souls of the victims seemed to be completely disregarded in this example of horrendous aggression. When the camera panned on the decomposed bodies, the corpses moved around like lumps of mud -- indecipherable from anything that once could have been identified with human life. It was horrible. If anyone is interested in this issue, I have a copy of the film. It's called
The Panama Deception and it was shot by Barbara Trent in 1992.
Subsequently, in my Spanish class today we also talked about the U.S. invasion of Panama. During this quarter, I have noticed that there is a lot of common ground between three of my courses. The three that have a lot of commonalities are
Documentary Genres, Spanish American Civilization and Culture, and
Personal Values in Media. All three discuss, in great detail, the practice of hegemony -- whether it be media, political, cultural, or all three -- and also deal a lot with historical narratives, cultural value-building, and representation. In my
Personal Values in Media course we have discussed at length the idea of community and communication. One of the continuum models we have discussed is the continuum between functional and encounter communication. On one end, we have
functional communication, which can be best represented by the practice and existence of advertising in mass media. This type of communication serves to sell a product or advertise a basic message in order to manipulate public consciousness.
Encounter communication, on the other hand, looks to connect on a nearly intimate level, build tradition, focuses on kinship, and tends to envelope a certain level of sacredness. Anyway, the idea of this model plays into how people see the world -- whether it adheres to a specific or a mix of doctrines. From there, these issues deal with culture-building -- something that has been central to the dialog in my
Spanish American Civilization and Culture course as well as my
Documentary Genres class too. The trajectory of both of these courses seems to overlap -- both, through the use of text or film, seem to show discourse aimed at generating a certain level of self-reflexivity toward any given subject of discussion. This self-reflexivity is important, I think, because it allows us to ponder on some of the ethical decisions or concerns that one could or should make. The Spanish Conquest, the Spanish American War, the invasion of Panama, the Vietnam War, -- all of these were phenomena that resulted from a series of (bad) ethical choices people of power have made. Frankly, we deserve better than the results we have attained from these poor decisions. I am glad that I have taken these classes this quarter and I feel like my consciousness has benefited from them.
Kindergarden...
