Doomsday

President Truman established the Federal Civilian Defense Administration in 1951to prepare U.S. citizens for the possibility of an atomic attack. The program was based on a similar project developed during WWII. The very weapon that had ended the war became the greatest fear of the American public once the technology fell into the hands of its communist enemies.

This documentary explores the Civilian Defense Program through the eyes of those who experienced it. The beginning of the Cold War was fought in American classrooms. The 1958 National Defense Education Act provided funds for the expansion of science and math programs that would help the United States win the space race as well as the arms race. Richard Lebenson noted in his interview this educational push while he was in school and indicated that the launch of Sputnik was the catalyst. Continue Reading »

Some Fundamentalist Thoughts on the End is a documentary produced, filmed and edited by Jahneille Edwards. It is the result of spending five months of intense discussion, research and learning about the makings of apocalyptic theory and the application of such theory in everyday life. After being immersed in the language of theory I wanted to test in a sense the waters and pry into the thought processes of those that adhered to certain theories. Having entered the course with an uncertain definition of the “apocalypse” I have now gained a clearer understanding eschatological thought in its traditional, modern and post-modern sense and was eager to embark upon my own research. Continue Reading »

Hi everyone,

My project statement can be found on my participant page.

Can’t wait to see the videos from last week’s class. Thanks to Professor Quinby,  John, and of course everyone in the class for all the great discussions in class and on the blog.

-Ariana

THE REVELATION OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE! from Daniel Cowen on Vimeo.

Straight from the book and that’s the honest truth it is.

An expert on mood disorders from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the co-author of one of the most read textbooks in the field, Manic Depressive Illness, Kay Redfield Jamison, once detailed her experiences with and expertise in bipolar affective disorder (subtype I), and suicide in an interview with Charlie Rose. When asked about her suicide attempt, Jamison told Rose that in an episode of severe clinical depression, “the first thing that hits you is hopelessness.”
After having read many books about the personal experiences of those with psychiatric illnesses and suicidal tendencies, and having known many who have gone through spectrum of mood disorders, I wondered what a world without any hope—without even the hope of suicide for a dignified death—would look like for its inhabitants. A complete loss of hope in the absence of any real cause seemed like a very interesting Doomsday scenario. Continue Reading »

Last week, I wrote about dreams, and how the father denied himself the escape offered by good dreams, instead preferring nightmares, or better yet, reality. In this week’s reading I was again struck by the father’s refusal to let go of his chokehold on reality, this time by refusing to relive good memories.

The father in The Road strives not to remember. “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins…So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not” (McCarthy 131).

I think the father’s reluctance to remember is more than just concern for the origins of the memory. If he allows himself to be distracted by a memory, even for a second, it could be fatal.  This, I think, is why he leaves the mother’s picture in the road – to remember her would be to damage her even further, but more importantly, would damage himself.

In The Albertine Notes, the junkies are forever chasing good memories, looking for relief from life after the bomb. Either that, or they’re trying to jump into the future, desperately seeking to experience something, anything, other than the present. By using Albertine, they’re destroying their ability to remember, but they don’t care about the forgetting, the “brownout” in their brains caused by the drug (Moody 181-183).

The concept articulated by McCarthy, above, that remembering something inevitably causes the memory itself to change, is the basis of Moody’s ahistorical remembering phenomenon. If the act of recollection can change one’s experience of a memory (becoming numb to a painful experience, a first impression colored by the ensuing relationship, etc.) why stop there? Why not be able to change the very reality that created the memory in the first place?